Bacacay

by Witold Gombrowicz

  And then the defense lawyer, that hired prevaricator, will stand up and in a long speech, waving the sleeves of his gown, will set about proving that there has been a misunderstanding rooted in my own base way of thinking, that I have confused crime and mourning—for that which I took as a sign of a guilty conscience was only a sign of the timidity of feelings which retreat and contract at the cold touch of a stranger. And once again there will appear the exasperating, unbearable refrain—how could he possibly have been murdered when he was absolutely not murdered? Since there are not the slightest marks of asphyxiation on his body?

  This stumbling block so troubled me that at lunch—simply for myself, to quell my distress and bring relief to my nagging doubts, for no other reason—I began to explain that crime in its essence is not physical, but mental par excellence. I believe I am right in saying that apart from me, no one else spoke. Mr. Antoni did not say a word—I don’t know whether it was because he regarded me as unworthy, as he had the previous evening, or because he was afraid his voice might come out a little hoarse. The widowed mother sat pontifically, still mortally offended, it seemed, and her hands trembled, striving to secure immunity for themselves. Miss Cecylia was quietly swallowing the scalding liquids. While I, for the aforementioned inner motives, and oblivious to the faux pas I was committing, or of certain tensions in the air, discoursed eloquently and at great length. “Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, the physical shape of the act, the mistreated body, the disorder in the room, all the so-called evidence—these are entirely secondary details, a supplement, to be precise, to the real crime, a forensic formality, a tip of the hat by the criminal toward the authorities, nothing more. The real crime is always committed in the soul. The external details ... oh my Lord! Take for instance the following case: A charitable uncle is suddenly stabbed in the back—with an old-fashioned hat pin—by a nephew whom he has been showering with kindnesses for thirty years. And if you please!—such a huge mental crime and such a small, imperceptible physical sign, a tiny little hole from a pinprick. The nephew subsequently explains that he absentmindedly mistook his uncle’s back for his cousin’s hat. Who is going to believe him?

  “Yes indeed, physically speaking crime is a triviality; it is mentally that it is hard. Given the extreme fragility of the organism, it’s possible to murder by accident, like that nephew, by absent-mindedness—out of nowhere, all at once, bang, there’s a corpse.

  “One woman, the most upright person in the world, head over heels in love with her husband—this was right in their honeymoon period—notices on her husband’s plate of raspberries an elongated white worm—and you should know that her husband hated these revolting grubs more than anything else. Instead of warning him, she watches with a playful smile, and then says: ‘You ate a bug.’ ‘No!’ the horrified husband exclaims. ‘Oh yes,’ replies the wife, and describes it—it was like so, fat and white. Much laughter and banter; the husband, pretending to be angry, raises his hands in the air at his wife’s mischievousness. The matter is forgotten. Then, a week or two later, the wife is most surprised when the husband starts to lose weight and waste away; he rejects any kind of food, he’s repulsed by his own arms and legs, and (please excuse the expression) he spends all his time on his knees praying to the porcelain god. Progressive disgust at oneself—a terrible illness! And one day there’s great weeping and great moaning—he’s died suddenly—he threw himself up, only his head and throat remained, he expelled the rest into a bucket. The widow is in despair—only in the crossfire of questions does it come to light that in the most hidden depths of her being she felt an unnatural fondness for the large bulldog her husband had beaten shortly before eating the raspberries.

  “Or in one aristocratic family there was a son who murdered his mother by continually repeating the grating phrase: ‘Please sit down!’ At the hearing he acted innocent to the very end. Oh, crime is so easy it’s a wonder that so many people die of natural causes—especially if one throws in the heart, the heart—that mysterious link between people, that twisting underground passageway between you and me, that lift-and-force pump which knows so perfectly how to lift and so wonderfully forces ... It’s only later that there comes the mourning, the graveside faces, the dignity of grief, the majesty of death—ha, ha—and all for the purpose of ‘respecting’ suffering and not accidentally looking too closely into that heart, which has quietly, cruelly murdered!”

  They sat quiet as mice, not daring to interrupt!—Where was that pride from the previous evening? All of a sudden the widow threw down her napkin and, pale as death, her hands trembling twice as much, stood up from the table. I spread my hands apologetically. “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to offend. I’m merely speaking in general terms about the heart, about the heart sac, in which it’s so easy to hide a body.”

  “Despicable man!” she blurted out, her breast heaving. Her son and daughter jumped up from the table.

  “The door!” I exclaimed. “Very well—I’m despicable! But tell me please, why was the door locked that night?”

  There was a pause. All at once Cecylia burst out in nervous, plaintive sobs and said through her tears:

  “The door wasn’t Mama. I was the one who locked it. It was me!”

  “That’s not true, Cecylka—I was the one who ordered the door to be locked! Why are you humiliating yourself in front of this man?”

  “Mama ordered it, but I wanted to ... I wanted to ... I also wanted to lock the door and I locked it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “just a moment ... What’s this?” (After all, it was Antoni who had locked the pantry door.) “Which door are you talking about?”

  “The door ... the door to Daddy’s bedroom ... I locked it!”

  “No, I locked it ... I forbid you to talk like that, do you hear? I ordered it!”

  What was this?! So they had also locked a door? On the night when the father was to die, the son locked the pantry door and the mother and daughter locked his bedroom door!

  “And why did the two of you lock that door?” I asked abruptly, “Exceptionally, on that particular night? For what purpose?”

  Consternation! Silence! They did not know! They bowed their heads! A theatrical scene. Suddenly Antoni’s perturbed voice was heard:

  “Are you not embarrassed to explain yourselves? And to whom? Be quiet! Let’s go!”

  “Then perhaps you’ll tell me why on that night you locked the door of the pantry, cutting the servants off from the other rooms?”

  “Me? I locked it?”

  “What then? Perhaps you didn’t lock it? There are witnesses! It can be proved!”

  More silence! More consternation! The women looked up, terrified. Finally the son, as if remembering something that had happened long ago, declared in a whisper:

  “I locked it.”

  “And why was that? Why did you lock it? Was it perhaps to prevent drafts?”

  “That I am unable to explain,” he answered with indescribable haughtiness—and left the room.

  I spent the rest of the day in my bedroom. For a considerable time I walked to and fro, from wall to wall, without lighting a candle. Outside, the darkness was gathering—snowflakes could be seen increasingly bright in the falling shadows of night, while the house was surrounded on all sides by the tangled skeletons of the trees.—What a fine house this was! A house of murderers, a monstrous house where cold, dissembling, premeditated murder was on the prowl; a house of asphyxiators! The heart?! I had known right away what to expect from that well-fed heart, and what parricide it was capable of, swollen as it was with grease, butter, and familial warmth! I knew, but I did not wish to speak too soon! And they put on such airs! They demanded such homage! Feelings? Rather let them explain why they locked the doors.

  Yet why at that moment—when I already held all the threads in my hand and could point my finger at the criminal—did I needlessly waste time instead of acting? The stumbling block, the stumbling block—the white neck, untouched, resembling the sn
ow outside—the darker things were, the whiter it became. The corpse was evidently in league with the band of murderers. Once again I made an effort and attacked the corpse, head on this time, with raised visor—calling things by their names and clearly indicating the guilty party. It was just as if I had been wrestling with a chair. However I strained my imagination, my intuition, my logic, the neck remained a neck, and whiteness remained whiteness, with the obstinacy characteristic of lifeless objects. Nothing remained, then, but to play the part to the very end, to abide in my vengeful blindness and wait, and wait—counting naively on the notion that since the corpse was unwilling, perhaps—perhaps—the crime itself would rise to the surface like olive oil. Was I wasting time? Yes, but my steps sounded throughout the house; everyone could hear that I was constantly pacing, and they, downstairs, were probably not wasting time.

  Suppertime had passed. It was almost eleven o’clock, yet I had not stirred from my room, and went on cursing them all for villains and criminals, exulting, and at the same time hoping with my remaining strength that my stubbornness and persistence would be rewarded—that the situation could after all be won over by so many different facial expressions, made with so much passion, that in the end it would be unable to resist, that, intense, brought to extremities, it would have to resolve itself somehow, give birth to something, give birth to something no longer from the realm of fiction but something real. After all, we couldn’t go on like this forever—with me upstairs and them downstairs—someone had to call out “pass,” and everything depended on who would be the first to do so. It was quiet and still. I looked out into the hallway, but nothing could be heard from below. What could they be doing down there? Could they possibly be doing what they ought to be doing; if I was exulting here because of the locked doors, were they for their part sufficiently afraid, conferring among themselves, straining their ears to catch the sounds of my footsteps; were their souls not too lazy to work this out within themselves? Oh, I breathed a sigh of relief when around midnight I finally heard steps in the hallway and someone knocked. “Come in,” I called.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” said Antoni, sitting in a chair to which I gestured. He looked bad—sallow and pale—and it was clear that eloquent discourse would not be his strong point.—“Your behavior ... and lately—those words .... In a word—what does all this mean? Either leave ... and right away! ... or say what you have to say! This is extortion!” he exclaimed.

  “At last you’re asking,” I said. “It’s late! And even this you’re asking in a very general way. What am I in fact to say? But very well —since you ask: Your father was ...”

  “What? Was what?”

  “Was asphyxiated.”

  “Asphyxiated. Good. Asphyxiated.”—He tossed his head with a certain bizarre satisfaction.

  “You’re glad?”

  “I’m glad.”

  I waited a moment, then said:

  “Was there anything else you wished to ask?”

  He burst out:

  “But no one heard any cries or commotion!”

  “First of all, in the vicinity only your mother and your sister were sleeping, and they had shut their door for the night. Secondly, the criminal could quickly have throttled a victim who ...”

  “All right, all right,” he murmured, “all right. Fine. One more thing: Who in your opinion ... with this act, who do you ...”

  “Suspect, no? Who do I suspect? What do you think—in your opinion, could someone from outside have entered the house when it was locked up tight and guarded by a night watchman and by vigilant dogs? You’ll no doubt say that the dogs fell asleep along with the watchman, and out of forgetfulness the front door was left unlocked? Eh? A terrible series of coincidences?”

  “No one could have gotten in,” he replied proudly. He sat erect and it could plainly be seen that—motionless—he despised me, he despised me with all his soul.

  “No one,” I agreed with alacrity, reveling in advance at the sight of his pride. “Absolutely no one! And so there remains only the three of you and the three servants. But the servants too had their way blocked, since you ... for some unknown reason ... locked the door from the pantry. Or perhaps now you’ll claim that you did not lock it?”

  “I did!”

  “And why, for what purpose did you do so?”

  He jumped up from his chair. “Don’t play games!” I said, and with that short remark I put him firmly in his place. His anger was paralyzed and died away, breaking off in a squeak.

  “I locked it—I don’t know—without thinking,” he said with difficulty, and whispered twice: “Asphyxiated. Asphyxiated.”

  A nervous nature! They were, all of them, deep, nervous natures.

  “And since your mother and sister also ... unthinkingly locked the door of their bedroom (and besides, it’s hard to imagine, is it not?), then that leaves ... you know who that leaves. You were the only one with free access to your father that night. ‘The moon is up, the dogs asleep, and someone’s clapping in the wood.’”

  He burst out:

  “And so this is supposed to mean ... that I ... that I ... ha, ha, ha!”

  “And that laugh is supposed to mean that it wasn’t you,” I observed, and his laughter ended after a few attempts on a protracted false note.

  “It wasn’t you?—But in that case, young man,” I continued more quietly, “please explain to me—why did you not shed a single tear?”

  “Tear?”

  “Yes, tear. That’s what your mother whispered to me, right at the beginning, yesterday, on the stairs. It’s normal for mothers to compromise and betray their own children. And now, just a moment ago—you laughed. You declared that you were glad about your father’s death!” I said with such triumphant obtuseness, catching him in his words, that he wilted and looked at me as if I were an instrument of torture.

  Yet, sensing that the matter was becoming serious, he exerted all his powers of will and attempted to stoop to an explanation—in the form of an avis au lecteur, a footnote, which he could barely spit out.

  “That was .... It was irony .... You understand? . . . The opposite ... on purpose.”

  “Being ironic about your father’s death?”

  He was silent, and then I whispered confidentially, almost in his ear:

  “Why are you so embarrassed? Surely there’s nothing embarrassing about one’s father’s death.”

  Looking back on this moment I’m glad I came through uninjured—though he did not move a muscle.

  “Or perhaps you’re embarrassed because you loved him? Perhaps you really did love him?”

  He stammered with difficulty—with abhorrence—with despair:

  “Very well. If you absolutely must ... if ... then yes, so be it ... I loved him.”

  And throwing something on the table, he cried:

  “Here! This is his hair!”

  It was indeed a lock of hair. “All right,” I said, “now take it away.”

  “I don’t want to! You can take it away! I’m giving it to you!”

  “Why these outbursts? Fine—you loved him—agreed. Just one more question (because, as you see, I don’t understand a thing about these romances of yours). I admit you almost had me convinced with the lock of hair, but—you see—above all there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

  Here again I lowered my voice and whispered in his ear.

  “You loved him, very good, but why was there so much shame, so much scorn in that love?”

  He turned pale and said nothing.

  “So much cruelty, so much disgust? Why do you conceal it like a criminal concealing a crime? You don’t answer? You don’t know? Perhaps I will know for you.

  “You did love him—yes indeed—but when your father fell ill ... you mentioned to your mother the need for fresh air. Your mother —who incidentally also loved him—listens and nods. That’s right, that’s right, good air won’t hurt, and so she moves next door to her daughter’s room—‘I’ll still be close
enough to come whenever the sick man calls.’ Or perhaps that wasn’t how it was? Perhaps you’ll set the record straight?”

  “That’s how it was!”

  “Exactly! I know a thing or two, as you see. A week passes. One evening your mother and sister lock the bedroom door. Why? God alone knows! Does one need to deliberate about every turn of a key in a lock? They just turned it, without thinking, then one two three they’re in their beds. Yes, and at the same time you lock the pantry door downstairs. Why? Can every trivial action of that kind be justified? One might just as well demand an explanation for why at this particular moment you’re sitting and not standing.”

  He leapt to his feet, then sat down again and said:

  “Yes, that’s how it was! It was just the way you said!”

  “Then it occurs to you that—your father may need something. And maybe—you think—your mother and sister have fallen asleep, and your father needs something. And so quietly, so as not to wake up those who are sleeping, quietly you go to your father’s room up the creaking stairs. And then, when you’re already in his room—the rest requires no commentary—then, without thinking now—full steam ahead.”

  He listened, unable to believe his own ears, but suddenly—it was as if he roused himself and groaned with a note of desperate frankness that only great fear is capable of inspiring:

  “But I wasn’t there at all! I was downstairs in my room the whole time! I didn’t only lock the pantry door, I also locked my own door —I also locked myself in my room ... There’s been some mistake!”

  I exclaimed:

  “What?—so you locked yourself in too?—so everyone was locked in? ... Then in that case who on earth ...?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he replied aghast, rubbing his forehead. “It’s only now that I’m beginning to understand—that perhaps we were expecting something—perhaps we were waiting for something—perhaps we had an inkling of something and—out of fear, out of shame”—he burst out vehemently all of a sudden —“everyone was locked in their room ... because we wanted father, we wanted father—to take care of it by himself!”