Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)
Uncle Karol
ONE SATURDAY afternoon my uncle Karol, a grass widower, was making ready to hike to a holiday resort an hour or so from town, to visit his wife and children, who were holidaying there.
Since his wife’s departure, the apartment had not been cleaned; no one had even made the bed. Karol came home late at night, battered and ravaged by the nocturnal carousals that those sweltering and empty days dragged him through. Those crumpled, cool bedclothes, flung wildly around, were a kind of blissful harbour to him then, an island of refuge on to which he fell with the last of his strength, like a castaway tossed by a tempestuous sea for many days and nights.
Groping in the darkness, he collapsed somewhere amid whitish clouds, strands and layers of cool feathers, and there he slept in an indeterminate direction, upside down, his head at the foot of the bed, the darkness pushing him on into the downy pulp of the bedclothes as if he wanted to penetrate them in his sleep, to wander throughout those heaps of eiderdowns, enormous and growing with the night. He fought in his sleep with those bedclothes like a swimmer against the tide; he kneaded and churned them with his body like some enormous kneading-trough of dough 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 he had failed to overpower by his strenuous nocturnal wrestling. And so, cast halfway out of the depths of sleep, he hung oblivious for a moment on the verge of night-time, grasping lungfuls of air, while 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 the pillows settled into a great, flat, white plain, over which his serene dream wandered. Along those white highways he slowly returned to himself, to the day and to consciousness, and finally 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 held sway in the room, although the window was effervescing with its 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 bygone day.
Having eased himself in this way, and freer now, he entered his expenses in a notebook — he listed the figures, added them up, and dreamed. Then he lay for a long time unmoving, his bulging and moist glassy eyes the colour of water. In the room’s watery half-light, lit by a reflection 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 — and, like drops of water, replicated the whole room, the silence of its mats and empty chairs.
Meanwhile, the day beyond the curtains resounded ever more fierily with the buzzing of flies crazed by the sun. The window could not contain that white fire; the curtains languished in bright waves.
Then he dragged himself out of his bedclothes and sat 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 yet still surging with fertile juices, his future fate now appeared to slowly ripen in that silence.
As he sat there in mindless vegetative astonishment, all transmuted into circulation, respiration and a pulsation of juices deep inside his body — perspiring and covered in various places with hair — some unknown, unformulated future began to grow, looming like a monstrous excrescence and sprouting fantastically into an unknown dimension. He had no dread of it, for he had already begun to identify himself with that inscrutability and enormousness that must be. And without resistance, in strange compliance, he grew along with it, numbed by calm terror and foreseeing his own future in those colossal efflorescences, those fantastic accruals ripening before his inner gaze. Then one of his eyes cautiously revolved toward the outside world, as if straying into another reality.
Then, from those mindless delusions, those lost distances, he returned to himself again and to the moment. He saw 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 and found there in a shaded corner a little bucket of water, the circle of a quiet, vigilant mirror, which lay in wait for him, the only living and sentient being in that empty apartment. He poured the water into a basin and tested its mellow and inchoate, sweet wetness on his skin.
He dressed carefully and lingeringly, not hurrying, inserting pauses between his separate movements.
The empty and neglected apartment did not acknowledge him; the furniture and the walls watched him with taciturn criticism.
Entering their silence, he felt like an intruder in that undersea, sunken 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 waiting touchily for the least excuse to explode.
And when he had finally found everything he needed, piece by piece, going quietly from wardrobe to wardrobe, when he had finished dressing amid that furniture, tolerating him silently with an air of aloofness, and at last he was ready and about to leave, hat in hand — he felt disconcerted that, even now, at the last moment, he could find no word that might dissolve that hostile silence, and he made his way slowly to the door, his head bowed in resignation — while someone else, deep inside the mirror, was unhurriedly leaving in the opposite direction — someone whose back was turned forever — through an empty enfilade of rooms that did not exist.