Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
Pan
IN A CORNER between the back walls of sheds and outbuildings was a backyard alley, a furthest, final turning, shut in between a hut, a privy, and the back wall of a chicken coop—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.
From under its mossy boards, a rivulet of stinking black water oozed out, a vein of festering, greasy mud, never drying up—the one road that led out beyond the border of the fence and into the world. But the desperation of that fetid alley kept on driving it headlong into that dam for so long that it loosened one of the huge horizontal planks. We boys did the rest, prised the heavy, moss-grown plank from its place. Thus we made a breach, opened a window to the sun. Stepping onto the plank, thrown across the puddle to make a bridge, a prisoner of the yard could 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 here in huge, scattered 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. Coarse meadow grass was there, with feathery tufts of flower spikes, and 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 canopied by all the azure geography of the clouds, their drifting continents, and to inhale the whole immense map of the heavens. From that 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, giving 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, puffed up with air, now discharged only air from its empty shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by the breeze and softly pervading the azure silence.
The garden was immense; it branched with numerous pathways; it had different zones and climates. On one side it was open, full of the milk of the sky and the air, and there it spread 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 by the back wall of a disused soda water factory, the more gruff and nonchalant it became, running wildly and unkemptly to seed, rampant with nettles, bristling with musk thistles and scabbed over with weeds of all kinds, 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, of 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 huge skirts in broad daylight, casting them off skirt after skirt until that whole quarrelsome bastard tribe was buried under its own swollen and rustling, torn and crazily patched rags. Those voracious skirts swelled up and stretched, forming a great pile, one on top of the other in effusive layers, growing as one in a bulging heap of leafy metal, up to the low eaves of a barn.
That was where I glimpsed him, the first and 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 onward with a scream, cutting 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, a 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 and 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 that burdock patch, not daring to plunge into that silent hollow.
And I suddenly caught sight of him.
He was crouching before me, immersed shoulder high in burdocks.
I saw his broad shoulders in a dirty shirt and a grubby shred of an overcoat. He sat lurking as if ready to pounce, 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, although 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 tensed his features to splitting point. His black eyes bored into me with an 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, straining to splitting point, some terrible grimace buckled, twisted by suffering. And that grimace grew; it took upon 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 saw how he drew himself up slowly from his haunches, bellowing with laughter from his powerful breast, and fled, hunched like a gorilla, his hands deep in his sagging rags of trousers, 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- >