Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)
Pan
IN A CORNER between the back walls of sheds and outbuildings was a backyard alley, a furthest, final turning enclosed between a hut, a privy and the back wall of a chicken run — a deaf cove, from which there was no exit.
It was the furthest outcrop, the Gibraltar of that yard, desperately beating its head against a blank fence of horizontal planks, the enclosing and final wall of that world.
A rivulet of stinking black water oozed out from under its mossy boards, a vein of festering, greasy mud, never drying up — the one road leading out beyond the border of the fence and into the world. But the fetid alley had, in its desperation, beaten its head against that dam for so long that it had loosened one of the huge horizontal planks. We boys did the rest, prised away and removed the heavy, moss grown plank from its place. Thus we made a breach and opened a window to the sun. Stepping on to the plank, thrown like a bridge across the puddle, a prisoner of the yard might squeeze horizontally through the slit and be released into a new, airy and immense world. A great, savage old garden was there. Tall pear trees and spreading apple trees grew in huge clusters, sprinkled with a silver rustle, a frothing net of whitish sparkles. A downy sheepskin of lush and disorderly uncut grass was spread over the undulating terrain. There was coarse meadow grass with feathery tufts of flower spikes, delicate filigrees of wild parsley and carrot, tiny wrinkled and coarse leaves of ground ivy, blind nettles scented with mint, and fibrous, shiny plantains sprinkled with rust, erupting in sprays of thick, red gruel. All of this, tangled and downy, was impregnated by the gentle air, tossed by the azure wind and saturated by the night. To lie down in that grass was to be covered by an entire azure geography of clouds and drifting continents, to inhale the whole immense map of the sky. And, from this communion with the air, delicate hairs had spread over the leaves and shoots, a soft deposit of down and a coarse bristling of hooks, as if for seizing and holding currents of oxygen. That delicate and whitish deposit wedded the leaves to the atmosphere, gave them a silvery grey sparkle of aerial waves, shadowy musings between two flashes of sunshine. And one of those plants, yellow and full of milky juice in pale stems, now puffed up only with air, discharged only air from its empty shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by the breeze and quietly pervading the azure silence.
The garden was immense; it branched with several pathways and had different zones and climates. On one side it was open, full of the milk of the sky and the air, and it spread there before the sky the softest, most delicate, downiest green of all. But the further it sank down a long pathway, the more emphatically dark it grew until it was immersed in shadow at the back wall of a disused soda water factory, and the more gruff and nonchalant it became, going wildly and unkemptly to seed, running rampant with nettles, bristling with musk thistles and scabbed over with all manner of weed, until at last, in a wide rectangular recess between the walls, it lost all restraint whatsoever and flew into a frenzy. There, it was no longer an orchard, merely a paroxysm of frenziedness, an outburst of rage, cynical shamelessness and licentiousness. There, vacant and savage cabbage heads of burdocks held sway, bestial and giving rein to their passion, enormous witches divesting themselves of their wide skirts in broad daylight, casting them off skirt after skirt until that whole quarrelsome and bastard tribe was buried under its own swollen and rustling, torn and crazily patched rags. And still those voracious skirts swelled and jostled, were heaped up upon one another, distended and overlain one atop the next, growing together in a bulging heap of leafy metal, up to the low eaves of a barn.
That was where I glimpsed him, the only time in my life, at a midday hour frantic in the heat. It was a moment when time, crazy and wild, breaks loose from the daily round of events and flies with a scream, cross-country across the fields, like a fugitive vagrant. Then the summer, out of control, grows without measure or reckoning upon all of space, grows at all points with a wild impetus, twofold, threefold, into some other, degenerate time, into an unknown dimension, into madness.
At that hour of the day I was seized by an urge to catch butterflies, an whim to chase those flitting smears, those erratic white patches shivering in listless zigzags in the blazing air. Some of those glaring smears began to fall apart in mid-flight, into two then into three, and that shimmering, blindingly white triangle led me like a will-o’-the wisp through a frenzy of thistles burning in the sunshine.
I halted only upon reaching the edge of a burdock patch, not daring to plunge into that silent hollow.
Then I suddenly glimpsed him.
He was crouching before me, immersed up to his armpits in burdocks.
I saw his broad shoulders in a dirty shirt and an unkempt shred of an overcoat. He lurked as if ready to leap, his shoulders hunched as if by a great weight. His body heaved with exertion and sweat poured from his cupreous face, shiny in the sunshine. Unmoving, he appeared to be hard at work, wrestling on the spot with some enormous burden.
I stood transfixed by his gaze, which held me in its grip.
It was the face of a vagrant or a drunkard. Wisps of dirty locks fell dishevelled over his forehead, high and rounded like a protuberance of stone shaped by a river. But that forehead was twisted into deep furrows. I couldn’t tell whether it was pain, the burning heat of the sun, or his superhuman effort that was so riveted into that face, and which tensed his features until they seemed about to split open. His black eyes bored into me with exertion of the most extreme despair or agony. Those eyes looked at me and did not look — saw me and did not see at all. They were bursting eyeballs, straining in the supreme exultation of pain, or the wild elation of inspiration.
And suddenly, from those features strained to splitting point, some terrible grimace buckled, twisted by suffering, and that grimace grew and took into itself some unheard of craze and revelation, and heaved with it, buckled more and more until it broke free in a hoarse, roaring coughing fit of laughter.
Deeply shocked, I watched him slowly draw himself up from his haunches, bellowing with laughter from his powerful breast, and, hunched like a gorilla, his hands deep in his sagging rags of trousers, he fled, splashing with great bounds through the flapping metal sheets of the burdocks — Pan without a flute, fleeing in panic to his native woods.
> -Uncle Karol- >