Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
Uncle Karol
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, my uncle—Karol, a grass widower—set off on foot for a resort that lay an hour or so from town, to visit his wife and children, who had gone there for a holiday.
Since the time of his wife’s departure, the apartment had not been cleaned. Not once had the bed been made. Karol would come home late at night, battered and ravaged by the nocturnal carousals that those sweltering and empty days dragged him through. At such times, those crumpled, cool bedclothes, flung wildly around, were like some blissful harbour to him, an island of refuge onto which he fell with the last of his strength, like a castaway tossed by a tempestuous sea for many days and nights.
Gropingly in the darkness, he collapsed somewhere between whitish clouds, strands and layers of cool feathers; and thus he slept in an indeterminate direction, upside down, his head at the foot of the bed, driven by the darkness into the downy pulp of the bedclothes, as if he wanted to penetrate them in his sleep, to meander throughout those heaps of comforters, enormous and growing with the night. He fought with those bedclothes in his sleep like a swimmer against the tide. He plied and churned them with his body like some enormous kneading-trough of dough that he had fallen into. And he awoke in the grey dawn, breathless and bathed in sweat, cast out to the fringes of that pile of bedding that he had failed to overpower by his strenuous nocturnal wrestling. And so, cast halfway out of the depths of sleep, he hung for a moment on the very edge of night-time, oblivious and grasping lungfuls of air, whilst the bedclothes grew around him, swelled, and set, covering him once more with a layer of heavy white dough.
He slept like this until late morning, while his pillows settled into a great, flat and white plain, over which his serene dream wandered. Along those white highways, he returned slowly to himself, to the day, and to consciousness; and at last he opened his eyes, like a sleeping passenger as his train pulls into the station.
Mellow duskiness and the sediment of many days of solitude and silence pervaded the room, although the window was effervescent with a morning swarm of flies, and the curtains glowed brightly. Karol yawned the remains of the previous day out of his body, out of the depths of his bodily cavities—his yawning seized him as convulsively as if it wanted to turn him inside-out. Thus he shook off that sand, those burdens, the undigested leftovers of a day gone by.
Having eased himself in this way, and freer now, he began entering his expenses in a notebook. He listed the figures, added them up, and dreamed. Then he lay for a long time unmoving, his glassy eyes bulging and moist, with the colour of water. In the watery half-light of the room, flickering with a reflex of the sweltering day beyond the curtains, his eyes mirrored like tiny looking-glasses every gleaming object—the white smears of sunshine in the chinks of the window, the golden rectangle of the curtains. Like drops of water, they replicated the whole room, in the silence of its mats and empty chairs.
Meanwhile, the day beyond the curtains resounded ever more fierily with the buzzing of sun-crazed flies. The window could not contain that white fire, and the curtains languished in bright waves.
He dragged himself out of his bedclothes, and sat for a while longer on the bed, groaning involuntarily. His thirty-or-so years old body had begun to succumb to corpulence. In that constitution, distended with fat, worn out by sexual abuses and yet surging with a fertile, rising sap, his future fate now appeared to slowly ripen in that silence.
As he sat in his befuddled, vegetative astonishment, all transformed into a mass of circulation, respiration, and a pulsation of juices deep within his body, perspiring and covered in various places with hair, some unknown and unformulated future seemed to burgeon—like a monstrous excrescence, sprouting fantastically into unknown dimensions. He had no dread of it, for he had already begun to identify himself with that inscrutability, that enormity which must be. And he grew along with it, unresisting, in strange compliance, numbed by calm terror at foreseeing—in those colossal efflorescences, those fantastic accruals ripening before his inner gaze—his future self.
One of his eyes then revolved cautiously toward the outside world, as if straying into another reality.
Then, from those mindless delusions, those lost distances, he returned once more to himself and to the moment. He could see his feet on the carpet, as plump and delicate as a woman’s, and he slowly unhooked the gold cufflinks from the cuffs of his day shirt. Then he went to the kitchen, where he found a little bucket of water in a shaded corner, the disc of a quiet, vigilant mirror that had been waiting for him, the only living and sentient being in that empty apartment. He poured the water into a basin, and tested its sweet and mellow, inchoate wetness on his skin.
He dressed carefully and lingeringly, unhurriedly, inserting pauses between his individual movements. The empty and neglected apartment did not acknowledge him. The furniture and the walls followed his movements with taciturn criticism. Entering their silence, he felt like an intruder in that sunken, undersea kingdom where some other, unconnected time flowed.
Opening his own drawers, he felt like a thief, and he went about instinctively on tiptoe, afraid to rouse any severe and raucous echo that might be lying touchily in wait for the least excuse to explode.
And when at last, going softly from wardrobe to wardrobe, he had found piece by piece everything he needed, and had finished dressing amid that furniture that tolerated him in silence, with an air of aloofness, and when at last he was ready, standing ready to leave, hat in hand, he felt disconcerted that even now, at the last moment, he could find no word to dissolve that hostile silence. And so he made his way slowly to the door, his head bowed in resignation, whilst at the same time, deep inside the mirror, someone whose back was turned for ever went unhurriedly out in the opposite direction—through an empty enfilade of rooms that did not exist.