Bacacay

by Witold Gombrowicz

  They argued for a long time. “It’s disgusting!”—“It’s blind, strange, mysterious, shameful and lovely!”—“Alice!” exclaimed Paul in the end, rubbing his eyes—“for the love of God ... —though I’m beginning to have doubts. What is this? Dream or waking? I don’t want to keep asking, heaven forbid, I’m not curious, but .... Are you perhaps joking, making fun of me, Alice? What’s happened here? The rock, you say? Is it possible—that rocks should be thrown and that out of this ... that this should result in some kind of unhealthy greed for bones? Surely that would be too wild, too—impure somehow; no, I respect your notions, but this—it’s no longer virginal instinct, but—made up off the top of your head.”

  “My head?” replied Alice—“But Paul, is my head not virginal? After all, you yourself said that one should close one’s eyes, unthinkingly and quietly, naïvely and purely and—oh, Paul, quick, look how the sun is gleaming, and that little insect is crawling so sleepily along the leaf, and I’m so scattered! I tell you, everyone does the same thing, we’re the only ones who don’t know about it! Oh, it seems to you that no one ever ... at anyone ... but I’m telling you that in the evenings the rocks whizz by like heavy rain, so much that one can’t even blink; and in the shade of the trees, bones and other refuse are gnawed out of hunger, half-nakedly! That is love—love.”

  “Ah! You’ve gone mad!”

  “Stop it!” she cried, tugging him by the sleeve. “Come on, let’s go to the bone!”

  “Not for anything! Not for anything!”

  And in his despair he might have struck her! But at that moment, on the other side of the wall, they heard something like a thud and a groan. They ran across and poked their heads through the climbing roses: There, on the street, beneath a tree, a young barefoot girl was pressing her lips against her own raised knee as she doubled up in pain.

  “What’s this?” whispered Paul.

  All at once a new rock cut through the air and hit the girl on the neck—she fell over, but leapt up right away and jumped behind the tree—and from somewhere in the distance there came a man’s roar:

  “I’ll show you what’s what! I’ll give you a good hiding! You’ll see! You thief!”

  The air caressed and scorched; a silence descended in nature, one of those trembling, fragrant engrossments ...

  “You see?” whispered Alice.

  “What’s that?”

  “They’re throwing at girls ... throwing rocks ... just for enjoyment, for pleasure ...”

  “No, no ... it’s not possible ...”

  “You saw it yourself. Come on, the bone’s waiting for us, let’s go to that bone! We’ll gnaw it together—do you want to?—together! Me with you, you with me! See, I already have it in my mouth! And now you! Now you!”

  Adventures

  1

  In 1930, in September, on a boat trip to Cairo, I fell into the Mediterranean Sea; I fell with a mighty splash, since at the time the sea was smooth, unruffled by any wave. Nevertheless, my fall was noticed only a minute later, after the ship had already sailed a kilometer and a half on—and when it was finally turned around and sent back in my direction, the agitated captain gave it too much speed and the immense vessel’s momentum carried it past the place where I was choking on salt water. One more time they turned and set course toward me—but this time too the ship sped past me like a freight train and stopped much too far away. This maneuver was repeated perhaps ten times, with uncommon persistence. In the meantime a private steam yacht sailed up and took me on board; on seeing this, my ship, the Orient, sailed away.

  The owner and captain of the yacht had me bound and thrown into a compartment below deck; this was because when he was changing his shoes in my presence I foolishly betrayed my surprise at the sight of his white foot. Though his face was white, I would have wagered good money that his foot would be black as pitch—and yet it was absolutely white! As a result of which he conceived an undying hatred for me. He realized that I had seen through his physiological secret, which no one in the entire world besides me had guessed—that is, that he was a white black man. (In fact, if the truth be told, that whole affair was merely a pretext.) For the following eight months he sailed without a break, always forward, ahead, across numerous seas, stopping only to take on fuel—and all the while he reveled in the boundless freedom of his will with regard to me, locked up as I was in the windowless compartment —and always at his disposition.

  Of course, all hatred soon had to vanish in the vastness of that freedom; and if despite this fact he condemned me to a cruel death, it was not so much for my suffering as for his own gratification. He thought for a long time about how, with me as an intermediary, he could enjoy experiences that he would never have dared to try on his own—just like the Englishwoman who placed a bug in a matchbox and threw it over Niagara Falls. And when I was finally brought up on deck, besides fear I also experienced the emotions of nostalgia, sorrow, and gratitude—for I had to confess the kind of death he had contrived for me was almost the same kind that I had once imagined, or dreamed about, once before, in my early childhood.—With the aid of specially procured devices which I shall refrain from describing, an extraordinarily difficult task was accomplished—as a result of which I found myself inside a glass bubble in the shape of a large egg, large enough that I could move my arms and legs freely, and too small for me to shift from a lying position.

  The glass was about three centimeters thick. On its entire surface there was not a single blemish or seam—in one place only a small opening had been drilled to let in air. Take a huge egg and prick it with a pin—that was the egg in which I found myself, and I had as much room as a chicken embryo has.

  Then the black man showed me a chart of the Atlantic Ocean and indicated the position of our boat; we were more or less in the middle of the ocean, between Spain and northern Mexico. In this place there flows the powerful Gulf Stream from America toward the English Channel and the northern shores of Britain and Scandinavia. Yet the map clearly indicated how at a distance of a thousand miles from Europe the Gulf Stream splits, and its southern branch turns south, to the right, and becomes the Canary Current. After which, somewhere around Senegambia the Canary Current turns right once again (or rather, left on the map) as the Equatorial Current; and the Equatorial Current then swings right—or upward—to become the Antilles Channel, named for the islands —and the Antilles Channel, once more turning right, joins with the Gulf Stream to begin everything all over again. In this manner the currents form a closed circle with a diameter of between fifteen hundred and two thousand kilometers. If you had thrown a piece of wood from the deck of our boat into the ocean—you could be sure that in half a year or one year, or perhaps three years, the frothing waters would bring it from the west back to the same place whence it had floated eastward.

  “We’ll throw you into the water in the glass bubble”—the black man’s words could be summarized thus. “No storm will drown you—you have with you a packet of three thousand bouillon cubes, in other words, if you suck one cube a day, you have provisions for ten years; you also have a small but reliable device for filtering water ... Besides, you’ll never run short of water; you’ll have quite enough of it as you bob constantly on the waves and below the waves, involuntarily, round and round, for a decade; and later, when you die from the lack of bouillon cubes, your corpse will continue to circulate on its designated route, around and around and around.”

  They threw me into the ocean. At first the egg sank down deep —after which it floated up .... An approaching wave (and the day was windy and sunless, the surface of the water deeply furrowed, in constant, intense movement) seized me on its olive-colored crest and for a moment bore me heavily along—then, having lifted me before it, with a roar and a splash it cast me down into the swirling waters. Below the surface things were calm and green. But I had barely managed to notice once again the murky and blurred sky when, like the finger of God above me, a vertical column of water thrust me into a whirling cha
sm, this time for at least a minute. A third wave bore the bubble along gently for some time—it ran before me, I slipped down its retreating slope and found some peace in a dip. Then there came a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth wave. And what happened during a storm was something else again! Stooping giants, hunchbacked monsters lifted me up to raging heights, only to hurl me down to the very bottom of the precipice!—while naturally, there could be no question that they might drown me. The black man’s boat followed behind me for two weeks or so—in the end, apparently tired and sated, he sailed away.

  In accordance with the instructions I had received, I sucked on one bouillon cube a day, washing it down with filtered water which I drew in through a rubber pipe. In this way I had the privilege of satisfying the longing felt by all those who have looked upon the sea from the several-storied heights of steamships, unable to participate in it. And I was never able to determine any sequence whatsoever in my perpetual motion; I was never able to predict whether the water would carry me, or thrust me down, or merely jostle me and toss me aside, whether it would turn me face up or face down to the sky; nor could I ever discern any forward movement—though I knew I was going in an easterly direction. Nothing else was there but peaks and valleys, roaring and plashing, little geysers, chance gurglings, rushing, billowing, vertical walls, inclined slopes, masses that disappeared—goodness knows how—beneath me, great swells, sudden drops, retreating crests that loomed up, the view from the top and the view from below, peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys, the work of the Ocean. And in the end I gave up. Only once did I observe a solitary log, which for many days had accompanied me at a distance of a few kilometers, gradually moving farther away and vanishing in the murky space steeped in salt and mist. At that time I wanted to shout out in my egg, because I realized that the log was being carried toward the shores of Europe, while I was turning with the southern branch of the current toward the Canary Islands, in order to remain forever in a closed circuit—around and around and around—the black man had calculated it well! But instead of shouting I began to sing, because the element of the sea disposed me to singing.

  A ship of the French Chargeurs Réunis Society collided with me, breaking the glass, and fished me out of the water. In such a way these wanderings of mine came to an end. But this happened only after a few years. Set down in the port of Valparaiso, I immediately began to flee from the black man, because I knew he would pursue me.

  2

  That the black man would pursue me was as obvious as the stars in the sky, for this reason: that anyone who has once experienced someone the way he had experienced me—or to put it even more plainly: anyone who has once experienced the fun that he experienced with me—can never let go again, like a tiger who has had a taste of human flesh. In human flesh there is without a doubt an element that you cannot find anywhere else. And so I fled across the entire continent of America and farther to the west—and of all the places on earth it seemed to me that the safest would be Iceland. But as bad luck would have it, I lacked the strength to withstand the stare of the customs officer in Reykjavik, and I confessed. I have never smuggled anything in my life, and I have always looked customs officers right in the eye and opened my suitcases of my own accord. Every time I would walk away having earned their praise. Consequently, this time my unclean conscience did not endure the mute reproach in the official gaze and I confessed —that though my luggage contained nothing in contravention of the regulations, nevertheless not all was in order with me, for I was smuggling myself. The officer did not make any difficulties—but he must have informed the appropriate person, for less than two days later the black man appeared and imprisoned me on his boat.

  And once again I found myself in the compartment below deck, appeasing through my captivity the black man’s domineering unboundedness; he steered the ship forward at full speed, sparing neither coal nor steam, while he himself was constantly scheming and debating with himself—which fate of the infinite number of fates, and which point of the infinite number of points on the map, he should make mine. As for me, I accepted this completely naturally, as if I had been destined for precisely this since birth. Besides, I knew how it would end—certainly not with something that was entirely new and unknown to me, but with something I was familiar with, something I knew, for which perhaps I had long been yearning. When finally, after months of stifling confinement, I felt the refreshing sea air, I saw that the deck in the stern was sagging under the weight of a steel sphere (or rather, a steel cone) whose shape was somewhat reminiscent of an artillery shell.

  For this pleasure he must have laid out a good few million. I realized at once that the sphere must be hollow inside, for otherwise—where was I supposed to go? And indeed, when a hatch on the side was unscrewed and I looked inside, I saw a little room the size of an ordinary little room. This steel room without ornaments or additions I greeted as my room. Yet—despite the fact that the walls of the sphere were extraordinarily thick—I still did not entirely understand the black man’s intentions, and it was only when he told me that we were located on the Pacific Ocean at the point where the deepest trench in the world is found, dropping to a depth of seventeen thousand meters, that I got it ... and though I felt terror in my neck and in my fingertips, I still gave an enigmatic smile with the corners of my mouth, greeting what was long known, long familiar, long mine.

  And so I was to be the only living creature who would experience the gentle thud of the sphere against the ocean bed beneath us, the only being who would squirm in the place where there are not even any crustaceans. The only one who would know absolute darkness, deadness, and despair. In a word, it was a thoroughly unique fate. And as for the black man, it was clear he was burning with curiosity (nor was he alone in this) to know what was down there—and he was tormented by the thought that that realm was forever inaccessible to him, that the cold, rocky region was foreign to his embraces, and while he sailed on the surface, it was there in the depths—thoroughly there. So it was not at all surprising that he wanted to find out, and that tomorrow at this time ... tomorrow he really would know, through seventeen kilometers of water, that I was squirming on the ocean bed, and without showing it outwardly, he would possess the secret of the depths—having lowered me as a probe to the very bottom.

  And yet, just as I was about to enter my tomb, it emerged that an error had been committed in the calculations and that despite the thickness of the walls the specific gravity of the sphere was insufficient—it would not sink beneath the water. In light of this the black man gave the order to fasten a huge hook to the sphere, to attach a chain to the hook, and on the chain to hang ballast that was to pull me after itself—ballast so calculated as not to unduly shorten the time of the descent.

  For the last time the black man showed me the map—it was very important to him that, as I perished, I should have before my eyes the point with which I was to be united for all time. I was screwed into the sphere. The final darkness came; I felt a rough jolt—I had been thrown into the sea and had begun to drop down. But I must say that what I experienced then was quite different from what I had expected. Namely, I had expected a certain relation to reality at this moment—yet in fact the darkness and the thickness of the sphere’s walls meant that I lost all mental sense of what was happening, and I knew only that I was descending, that I was falling, being submerged, that I was moving downward. Curled up on the steel floor, I breathed shallowly. On the other hand, there was only a slight bump at the conclusion of my two-hour journey! A bump that announced I had already come to rest! I saw with my penetrating brain how first the ballast touched down on the ocean floor, and then the sphere’s impetus caused it to knock against the ballast and then how in turn it rose upward slightly, stretching the chain. And so here I was finally—I was at the very bottom, in the most secret place of the Atlantic—I was here—and I was alive!—leg touching leg! And up above, directly over me, at a distance of seventeen kilometers was the black man, the black man reveling in the thought
that he now knew what happens down on that unattainable ocean floor, that he had imposed his will on it, that he had sent down a probe, that he had warmed and possessed that cold and alien floor by means of my torture.

  But the torture gradually intensified to the point that I began to worry it might render suffering and possession impossible, turning everything, including myself, into nothing but a dance of madmen. I began to fear that the torture would end up becoming something insufficiently human for the black man to draw any benefit from it. I will spare you the details. I will mention only that immediately after the sphere settled for good, the darkness, which, as I already indicated, was from the very beginning at its greatest, increased even more, to the point that I had to hide my face in my hands and, having done so, was quite unable to tear them away again even for a second—they stuck to my face. Furthermore, my consciousness could not tolerate the terrible pressure, the fearful crushing and pushing, and I began to choke—since the air was still relatively good, I was choking imaginarily—I was choking prematurely, as I was still breathing, which is possibly the most dreadful form of asphyxiation. And what was worse, my convulsive movements, the movements of an insect, seemed to me here, in seclusion, to be so monstrous in their subjectlessness that I was overcome by fear of myself and could not stand the fact that I was moving. My individuality peeped out from that awful underwater abyss so differently from what it had been like in the light of day, or even (I may use this term here) by the light of night up there, above —how monstrous it had become! My pallor, which the perfect darkness seemed to have deprived of hue and expression—my pallor, crammed inside, blinded, mute, gagged—was something that in its essence was different from any pallor, even the most ghostly, but which could be seen—and also my hair standing on end, here, in the steel, under the water, was almost as terrible as a terrible cry would have been in this situation—a cry from which I forcibly restrained myself, since immediately after it I would have had to go mad—and that was something I did not wish.