Word Document (draft of June 2008)
Pan
IN A CORNER between the back walls of sheds and outbuildings was a back yard alley, a furthest, final turning enclosed between a hut, a privy and the back wall of a chicken run, a silent recess beyond which there was no egress.
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 past the border of the fence and into the world. But the desperation of the fetid alley had beaten end p.54 its head against that dam for so long that it had loosened one of the huge horizontal planks. We boys did the rest; we prised away and removed the heavy, moss grown plank from its place. Thus we made a breach and opened a window to the sun. By stepping on the plank, thrown across the puddle like a bridge, a prisoner of the yard might squeeze in a horizontal manner through the slit, which released him 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 there, 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 common meadow grass with feathery tufts of flower spikes, delicate filigrees of wild parsley and wild carrot, wrinkled and coarse little 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, had been impregnated by the gentle air, tossed by the azure wind and saturated by the night. As it lay down in the grass it was covered by an entire azure geography of clouds and drifting continents; it inhaled the whole immense map of the sky. From this communion with the air, delicate hairs 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, end p.55 most delicate, downiest green of all. But the further it sank down a long pathway, the more emphatically it grew dark, until it was immersed in shadow at the back wall of a disused soda water factory, the more it became gruff and nonchalant, and went wildly and unkemptly to seed, ran rampant with nettles, bristled with musk thistles and was scabbed over with all manner of weed, until at last, in a wide rectangular recess between 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. The vacant and savage cabbage heads of burdocks held sway there, bestial and giving rein to their passion, enormous witches divesting themselves of their wide skirts in broad daylight, throwing them off, skirt after skirt, until their swollen, rustling, torn rags with crazy patches had buried that quarrelsome bastard tribe beneath them. And the voracious skirts swelled and jostled, were heaped up one upon the other, were distended and overlain one upon 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 from the heat. It was at a moment when time breaks loose, crazy and wild, from the daily round of events, and like a fugitive vagrant, flies with a scream, cross-country across the fields. 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.
I was seized at that hour of the day 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 end p.56 to fall apart in mid-flight, into two, 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 caught sight of 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 about to leap, his shoulders hunched as if by a great weight. His body heaved with exertion; 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 nailed to the spot by his gaze, which held me as if in pincers.
It was the face of a vagrant or 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. Who could tell whether it was pain, the burning heat of the sun, or his superhuman effort that was so riveted into that face, which tensed his features to splitting point. His black eyes bored into me with an exertion of the most extreme despair or pain. 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 the point of splitting, some terrible grimace buckled, twisted by suffering, and that grimace grew, took into itself some unheard of craze and revelation, and heaved with it, buckled more and more until it broke free in a roaring, hoarse coughing fit of laughter.
Deeply shocked, I saw how he slowly drew himself up from his haunches, hunched like a gorilla, bellowing with laughter from his powerful breast, his hands deep in his sagging rags of trousers, and fled, splashing end p.57 in great bounds through the flapping metal sheets of the burdocks — Pan without a flute, fleeing in panic to his native woods.
> -Uncle Karol- >