Rich Text Document (draft of January 2010)

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 tawny fumes and mists of dawn, the day would lurch at once into a meagre, amber afternoon; and for a moment it was transparent and golden, like dark ale — only to sink beneath the multifariously segmented and fantastic vaults of vast and coloured nights.
    We lived on the market square, in one of those gloomy houses with blank, empty façades — so difficult to tell apart.
    This gave rise to endless mistakes. For once having stepped into the wrong hallway, and onto the wrong stairway, one usually found oneself in a veritable labyrinth of strange apartments, porches, and unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, and entirely forgot why one had set out at all, to remember only many days later — amid pangs of conscience, returning on some grey dawn from detours of strange and tangled adventures — the family home.
    Full of huge wardrobes, plush sofas, murky mirrors and cheap artificial palms, our apartment was falling into an ever worse state of dereliction — deserted by my mother, who kept at all hours to the shop, and untended by negligent, slim-legged Adela, who, with no one to keep an eye on her, spent her days languidly dressing in front of looking-glasses, leaving her traces everywhere in the shape of combs, strewn hairs, discarded slippers, and corsets.
    This apartment had no specific number of rooms, since no one could recall how many of them had been rented to strange tenants. Every so often, one of those forgotten rooms would be opened by chance and found to be empty; its occupant had moved out long ago, and in drawers left untouched for months there were surprising discoveries to be made.
    The shop assistants lived in the lower rooms, and we were often awoken by their groans in the night, 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 with his candle, held out before him, herds of shadows that fled to either side, across the floor and the walls — he went to rouse those noisy snorers from their fathoms deep slumber.
    By the light of his candle, which he left there, they would wriggle lazily out of their bedclothes. Sitting barefoot and ugly-legged on their beds, holding their socks in their hands, they surrendered themselves for one last moment to the pleasure of yawning — yawning drawn out to the point of voluptuousness, an aching contraction of the palate, like forceful retching.
    Huge cockroaches sat unmoving in the corners, made enormous by their own shadows, which the flickering candle had encumbered each of them with, and which never left them, even should one of those flat and headless trunks suddenly begin to run, with eerie spiderlike 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 ledgers that were brought up to him from the office. A bitter scent of disease had settled at the bottom of his room, where the wallpaper congealed 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 that once, awoken in the middle of the night, I caught a glimpse of my father, and how, barefoot and wearing only his nightshirt, he ran 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, straying deep into the labyrinths of intricate calculations.
    I picture him in the glow of smoking lamps, crouching amid his pillows, beneath his great sculptured headboard and the enormous shadow of his head on the wall, nodding in silent meditation.
    He would occasionally 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 he had lost something.
    Often at such times, he would scurry in silence from his bed, to one corner of the room, to the wall where a trusted instrument hung. This was a kind of hourglass or great glass retort, marked in ounces and filled with dark fluid. By means of a long, flexible tube — a kind of awful, winding umbilical cord — my father attached himself to this instrument. And thus connected to the wretched device, he held himself still in concentration. Then his eyes grew dark, and to his pallid face there came an expression of suffering — or of some illicit pleasure.
    Then once more came days of quiet and composed work, interleaved with his remote monologues. But as he sat in the light of a 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, solicitous and knowing eyelids, uncoiling amid flowers of ear auricles that listened, and dark lips that smiled.
    At such times, to outward appearances, he would be even more deeply engrossed in his work. While tallying and totalling, he was afraid to give vent to the anger rising in him, fighting the urge to spin blindly around and, with a sudden scream, seize whole handfuls of those spiralling arabesques, those tufts of eyes and ears that 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 when, at the ebbing of the night, the wallpaper sagged and curled up, dropping its leaves and flowers, and thinned autumnally, letting in the distant sunrise.
    Then, amid the twittering of wallpaper birds in the yellow winter dawn, 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, and rejected as absurdity, those claims and propositions that were pressing on him.
    In the daytime these came in the form of negotiations and persuasions, long, monotonous cogitations conducted in hushed tones, full of witty interludes and playful repartees. But at night those voices were raised more vehemently. A demand returned ever more emphatically and portentously; and we heard him disputing with God — pleading, as it seemed, and refusing something that was demanded with urgency and insistence.
    One particular night, that voice rose up menacingly and irresistibly, demanding that he submit his deposition, both in words and with his very entrails. And we could hear the spirit entering him; we could hear how, elongated and swelling with prophetic anger, he rose up from his bed, choked up with strident words, which 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 urinal and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions, over which his voice rose still 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 in the fissures — the face of Jehovah loomed, 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 was pressing his enormous face to the upper panes of the window, onto 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, mingling with my father’s outbursts of entreaty, lamentation and threat.
    At times, their voices were hushed, and snarled as quietly as the prattling of the wind in the night-time chimney, or else they would 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 underclothes, and how, with a terrible curse and a powerful swish through the window, he tossed the contents of his chamber pot out into the night, which roared as if in a seashell.

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