Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)

A Visitation

1

OUR TOWN was now sinking further and further into the chronic greyness of dusk; it sprouted at the edges with a lichen of shadow, downy mould, and moss with the colour of iron.
    Barely having emerged from the brown fumes and mists of dawn, the day lurched all at once into a meagre, amber afternoon, and for a moment became as transparent and golden as dark ale, only to sink beneath the multifariously segmented and fantastic vaults of vast and coloured nights.
    We were living on the market square, in one of those gloomy houses with empty and blank façades, which are so difficult to tell apart.
    This gave rise to endless mistakes. For, having once stepped into the wrong hallway and on to the wrong stairway, one usually found oneself in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments, porches, and unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, having completely forgotten the original purpose of the expedition, returning only days later from the detours of strange and tangled adventures, to remember on some grey morning, amid pangs of conscience, the family home.
    Full of huge wardrobes, plush sofas, murky mirrors and cheap artificial palms, our apartment was sinking into an ever worsening state of neglect, deserted by my mother, who kept at all hours to the shop, and untended by negligent, slim-legged Adela, who spent her days languidly dressing in front of looking-glasses with no one to keep an eye on her, leaving her traces everywhere in the shape of combs, strewn hairs, discarded slippers, and corsets.
    This apartment had an indeterminate number of rooms, since no one could remember how many of them had been rented to strange tenants. Sometimes one of those forgotten rooms was opened by chance and found to be empty; its occupant had moved out long ago, and surprising discoveries were to be made in drawers left untouched for months.
    The shop assistants lived in the lower rooms, and often at night we were awoken by their groans, stirred by their nightmares. In winter, it would still be hushed night-time outdoors when Father went down to those cold and dark rooms, frightening away herds of shadows with his candle, which fled to either side, across the floor and the walls — he went to rouse those noisy snorers from their fathoms deep slumber.
    Lazily, in the light of the candle he left, they would wriggle out of their bedclothes. They got up, sitting barefoot and ugly-legged on their beds; and for one last moment, with their socks in their hands, they surrendered themselves to the pleasure of yawning — yawning drawn out to the point of voluptuousness, an aching contraction of the palate, as if with forceful retching.
    Huge cockroaches sat unmoving in the corners, made enormous by their shadows, which the flickering candle imposed on each of them, and which never left them, even should one of those flat and headless trunks suddenly begin to run with eerie, spider-like steps.
    In those days my father’s health had begun to decline. Already in the first weeks of that early winter he would be confined to his bed for days on end, surrounded by medicine bottles, pills, and the ledgers brought up to him from the office. A bitter scent of disease settled at the bottom of his room, where the wallpaper thickened into a darker entanglement of its arabesques.
    Often in the evenings, when Mother came up from the shop, he would be agitated and disposed to quarrelling; he reproached her for errors in her management of the accounts — his cheeks flushed and he flared up to madness. I remember once, awoken in the middle of the night, I caught a glimpse of him, barefoot and in his nightshirt, running back and forth across the leather sofa, attesting in this way to his irritation before my helpless mother.
    On other days he might be calm and composed, thoroughly engrossed in his books, far astray in the labyrinths of intricate calculations.
    I picture him crouching amid his pillows, in the glow of smoking lamps, beneath his great sculptured headboard and the enormous shadow of his head on the wall, nodding in silent meditation.
    Occasionally he would raise his head from those calculations, as if for a breath of air; he opened his mouth and, with distaste, clicked his tongue, which was dry and bitter, and he looked helplessly around as if searching for something.
    Often at such times he would scurry in silence from his bed to a corner of the room, to the wall where his trusted instrument hung. This was a kind of water-glass or great retort, marked out in ounces and filled with dark fluid. By means of a long, flexible tube, a kind of winding, painful umbilical cord, my father attached himself to this instrument, and, thus connected to the wretched device, he held himself still in concentration, while his eyes grew dark and there came to his pallid face an expression of suffering, or of some illicit pleasure.
    Then the days of quiet and composed work would return, interleaved with his remote monologues. But as he sat in the light of his table lamp, amid the pillows of his great bed, and as the room grew enormous above him in the shadow of the lampshade, which united it with the great element of the municipal night beyond the window, he felt, without looking, that an expanse was growing above him in the pulsating thicket of the wallpaper, full of whispers, hisses and lisps. He heard, without looking, that conspiracy of fluttering eyelids, solicitous and knowing, uncoiling amid flowers of ear auricles that listened and dark lips that smiled.
    At such times, to all appearances, he became even more deeply engrossed in his work — tallying and totalling, afraid to betray the anger rising inside him, fighting the urge to fling himself blindly around and, with a sudden scream, seize whole handfuls of those spiralling arabesques, those tufts of eyes and ears the night had dreamed up out of itself, which sprouted and grew multifariously, dreaming up ever newer shoots and branches from the maternal umbilicus of the darkness. And he was placated only with the ebbing of the night, as the wallpaper sagged and curled up, dropping its leaves and flowers, and thinned autumnally, letting in the distant sunrise.
    Then, in the yellow winter dawn, amid a twittering of wallpaper birds, he succumbed to a few hours of deep, dense slumber.
    For days, for weeks, while he had seemed to be engrossed in complicated running accounts, his mind had been venturing in secret into the labyrinths of his own entrails. He held his breath and listened intently; and when his gaze, faded and hazy, returned from those depths, he placated it with a smile. He did not yet believe, he rejected as absurdity, those claims and propositions pressing upon him.
    By day something akin to negotiations and persuasions would take place — long, monotonous deliberations conducted in an undertone, full of witty interludes and playful repartees. But at night those voices resounded more vehemently. A demand returned ever more emphatically and portentously, and we could hear him disputing with God — pleading, and seeming to refuse something urgently demanded and insisted upon.
    One particular night that voice rose menacingly and irresistibly, demanding he submit to it a deposition, both in words and with his very entrails. And we could hear the spirit entering him; we could hear him as he rose up from his bed, elongated and swelling with prophetic anger, choked up with raucous words that he spluttered out like a machine gun. We heard the clamour of the struggle, and Father’s groans, the groans of a Titan with a broken hip, who goes on cursing.
    I have never seen the Old Testament prophets, but at the sight of that man floored by divine anger, widely straddling his enormous porcelain chamber pot and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions over which his voice rose even higher, alien and hard, I understood the divine anger of holy men.
    It was a dialogue as menacing as the speech of thunderbolts. The contortions of his hands rent the heavens to pieces, and the face of Jehovah loomed in the fissures, swelling with anger and spitting curses. Without looking, I saw him, the menacing Demiurge, lying on the shadows as if upon Sinai — with his powerful hands resting on the wooden pelmet he pressed his enormous face to the upper panes of the window, on which his monstrous fleshy nose was flattened.
    I heard his voice in the pauses between my father’s prophetic tirades; I heard those powerful snarls from his swollen lips, rattling the window panes and mingling with my father’s outbursts of entreaties, lamentations and threats.
    At times their voices were hushed, and snarled as quietly as the prattling of the wind in the night-time chimney, or else they burst forth in a great tumultuous din, a storm of confused sobs and curses. Suddenly my window opened with a dark yawn, and a sheet of darkness drifted across the room.
    In a flash of lightning I caught a glimpse of my father in his billowing underwear, as he tossed — with a terrible curse and a powerful swish into the casement — the contents of his chamber pot out into the night, which roared as if in a seashell.

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