Today I reached the belvedere from which you can glimpse, down below, a little stretch of beach, deserted, facing the gray sea. The wicker chairs with their high curved backs, like baskets, against the wind, arranged in a semicircle, seemed to suggest a world in which the human race has disappeared and things can do nothing but bespeak its absence. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.
I passed the belvedere again half an hour later. From one chair, its back to me, a little ribbon was flapping. I went down the steep promontory path, as far as a shelf from which the angle of vision changed. As I expected, seated in the chair, completely hidden by the wicker shields, there was Miss Zwida, in her white straw hat, her drawing pad open on her lap; she was copying a seashell. I was not pleased to see her; this morning’s negative signs dissuaded me from striking up a conversation; for about three weeks now I have been encountering her alone in my walks on the cliffs and the dunes, and I want nothing more than to address her—indeed, it is with this intention that I come down from my pension every day, but every day something deters me.
Miss Zwida is staying at the Hotel of the Sea Lily; I went there to ask the desk clerk her name. Perhaps she found out; holiday people at this season in Pëtkwo are very few; the young ones could be counted on your fingers. Encountering me so often, she is perhaps expecting me to address her one day.
The motives that constitute an obstacle to a possible meeting between the two of us are several. In the first place, Miss Zwida collects and draws seashells; I had a beautiful collection of shells, years ago, when I was a boy, but then I gave it up and have forgotten everything: classifications, morphology, geographical distribution of the various species. A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.
In addition there is the fact that this girl’s application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain; I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration. If I were to approach Miss Zwida, I would have to express some appreciation of her drawings—which are of highly refined quality, for that matter, as far as I have been able to see—and therefore, at least at first, I would have to pretend to agree with an aesthetic and moral ideal that I reject, or else declare my feelings at the very start, with the risk of wounding her.
Third obstacle: the condition of my health, which, though much improved thanks to this stay by the sea on doctors’ orders, affects my opportunities to go out and meet strangers; I am still subject to intermittent attacks, and especially to periodic worsening of a tiresome eczema, which discourages me from any notion of sociability.
Every now and then I exchange a few words with the meteorologist, Mr. Kauderer, when I meet him at the observatory. Mr. Kauderer always goes by at noon, to check the readings. He is a tall, thin man, with a gloomy face, a bit like an American Indian. He rides along on his bicycle, staring straight ahead, as if maintaining his balance on the seat demanded all his concentration. He props his bicycle against the shed, slips a bag from the handlebars, and takes from it a ledger with broad, short pages. He climbs the steps to the platform and marks down the figures recorded by the instruments, some in pencil, others with a thick fountain pen, never relaxing his concentration for a second. He wears knickerbockers under a long topcoat; all his clothing is gray, or black-and-white check, including his visored cap. It is only when he has concluded these operations that he notices me observing him and greets me cordially.
I have come to realize that Mr. Kauderer’s presence is important for me: that someone still evinces so much scrupulousness and methodical attention, though I know perfectly well it is all futile, has a reassuring effect on me, perhaps because it makes up for my vague way of living, about which—despite the conclusions I have reached—I continue to feel guilty. Therefore I stop and watch the meteorologist, and even converse with him, though it is not the conversation in itself that interests me. He talks to me about the weather, naturally, in detailed technical terms, and of the effects of the swings of pressure on the health, but also of the unsettled times in which we live, citing as example some episodes of local life or even news items he has read in the papers. At these moments he reveals a less reserved character than appears at first sight; indeed, he tends to warm to his subject and become verbose, especially in disapproving of the majority’s way of acting and thinking, because he is a man who tends to be dissatisfied.
Today Mr. Kauderer told me that, because he is planning to go away for a few days, he will have to find someone to take his place in recording the data, but he does not know anyone he can trust. In the course of the conversation he asked me if I would be interested in learning to read the meteorological instruments, in which case he would teach me. I did not answer yes or no, or at least I did not mean to give a precise answer, but I found myself beside him on the platform while he was explaining how to establish the maximum and the minimum, the progress of the pressure, the amount of precipitation, the velocity of the winds. In short, almost without my realizing it, he entrusted me with the job of replacing him for the next few days, starting tomorrow at noon. Though my acceptance was a bit forced, since I was given no time to reflect or to suggest that I could not make up my mind on the spot, this assignment does not displease me.
Tuesday. This morning I spoke for the first time with Miss Zwida. The job of recording the meteorological readings certainly had a part in helping me overcome my hesitation, in the sense that, for the first time during my days at Pëtkwo, there was something previously established that I could not avoid; so that, however our conversation might go, at a quarter to twelve I would say, “Ah, I almost forgot: I must rush along to the observatory, because it is time to record the readings.” And I would take my leave, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with relief, but in any event with the certainty that I could not do otherwise. I believe I already understood vaguely yesterday, when Mr. Kauderer made me the offer, that this assignment would encourage me to speak with Miss Zwida, but only now has the matter become clear to me—assuming that it is clear.
Miss Zwida was drawing a sea urchin. She was seated on a folding stool, on the pier. The sea urchin was lying on a rock, open; it contracted its prickles trying in vain to right itself. The girl’s drawing was a study of the mollusk’s soft pulp, as it dilated and contracted, rendered in chiaroscuro, and with thick, bristling cross-hatching all around. The speech I had in mind, on the form of seashells as a deceptive harmony, a container concealing the true substance of nature, was no longer apposite. The sight of both the sea urchin and the drawing transmitted unpleasant and cruel sensations, like viscera exposed to the gaze. I struck up a conversation by saying that there was nothing harder to draw than a sea urchin: whether the container of prickles was seen from above, or whether the mollusk was overturned, despite the radial symmetry of its structure, it offered few pretexts for a linear rendering. She answered that she was interested in drawing it because it was an image that recurred in her dreams, and she wanted to rid herself of it. Taking my leave, I asked if we could see each other tomorrow morning at the same place. She said that tomorrow she had other engagements, but that the day after tomorrow she would be going out again with her drawing pad and I might easily meet her.
As I was checking the barometers, two men approached the shed. I had never seen them: bundled in heavy coats, dressed all in black, their collars turned up. They asked me whether Mr. Kauderer was there, then where had he gone, did I
know his address, when he would be back. I answered that I didn’t know and asked who they were and why they asked.
“It’s not important,” they said, going away.
Wednesday. I went to the hotel to leave a bunch of violets for Miss Zwida. The desk clerk told me she had gone out early. I wandered around for a long time, hoping to run into her. In the yard before the fortress was the line of the prisoners’ relatives: this is visiting day at the prison. In the midst of the humble women with kerchiefs on their heads and the crying children I saw Miss Zwida. Her face was covered by a black veil under the brim of her hat, but her demeanor was unmistakable: she stood with her head high, her neck straight and somehow haughty.
In a corner of the yard, as if observing the line at the door of the prison, were the two men in black who had questioned me yesterday at the observatory.
The sea urchin, the little veil, the two strangers: the color black continues to appear to me in circumstances bound to attract my attention, messages that I interpret as a summons from the night. I realize that for a long time I have tended to reduce the presence of darkness in my life. The doctors’ prohibition of going out after sunset has confined me for months within the boundaries of the daytime world. But this is not all: the fact is that I find in the day’s light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s.
Wednesday evening. Every evening I spend the first hours of darkness penning these pages, which I do not know if anyone will ever read. The pâte de verre globe in my room at the Kudgiwa Pension illuminates the flow of my writing, perhaps too nervous for a future reader to decipher. Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some of the words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who, setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.
Thursday. Thanks to a special permit from the director’s office—Miss Zwida explained to me—she can enter the prison on visitors’ day and sit at the table in the parlor with her drawing pad and her charcoal. The simple humanity of the prisoners’ relatives offers some interesting subjects for studies from life.
I had asked her no question, but since she had realized that I saw her yesterday in the yard, she felt it her duty to explain her presence in that place. I would have preferred her to tell me nothing, because I feel no attraction toward drawings of human figures and I would not have known how to comment on them if she had shown them to me, an eventuality that, however, did not occur. I thought those drawings were perhaps kept in a special album, which she left in the prison office between times, since yesterday—I recalled clearly—she did not have with her the inseparable bound album or her pencil box.
“If I knew how to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects,” I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subject and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things.
Miss Zwida proved at once to be in agreement: the object she would have drawn most willingly, she said, was one of those little anchors with four flukes, known as “grapnels,” which the fishing boats use. She pointed some out to me as we passed the boats tied up at the dock, and she explained to me the difficulty that the four barbs represented for anyone wanting to draw them in their various angles and perspectives. I understood that the object contained a message for me, and I should decipher it: the anchor, an exhortation to attach myself, to cling, to delve, to end my fluctuating condition, my remaining on the surface. But such an interpretation left room for doubts: this could also be an invitation to cast off, to set forth toward the open sea. Something in the grapnel’s form, the four hooked teeth, the four iron arms worn by the scraping against the rock of the seabed, warned me that no decision would preclude laceration and suffering. Still, I could be relieved that it was not a heavy, ocean-going anchor, but a light little anchor: I was not therefore being asked to renounce the open-mindedness of youth, but only to linger for a moment, to reflect, to sound out the darkness of myself. “To be able to draw this object at my leisure from every point of view,” Zwida said, “I should have one that I could keep with me and become familiar with. Do you think I could buy one from a fisherman?”
“We can ask,” I said.
“Why do you not try to purchase one? I dare not do it myself, because a young lady from the city who shows interest in a crude fishermen’s implement would arouse some wonder.”
I saw myself in the act of presenting her with the iron grapnel as if it were a bunch of flowers: the image in its incongruity had a strident, fierce quality. Certainly a meaning was hidden there that eluded me; and, vowing to meditate on it calmly, I answered yes.
“I would like the grapnel with its hawser attached,” Zwida specified. “I can spend hours drawing a heap of coiled rope. So ask for a very long rope: ten—no, twelve—meters.”
Thursday evening. The doctors have given me permission to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation. To celebrate the news, at sunset I entered the tavern, The Star of Sweden, to have a cup of hot rum. At the bar there were fishermen, customs agents, day laborers. Over all their voices rang out the voice of one elderly man in the uniform of a prison guard, who was boasting drunkenly through the sea of chatter. “And every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady’s perfume in his jailbird’s suit. And I’m left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.”
“Life and also death, you might say,” interjected another drunk, whose profession, as I learned at once, was gravedigger. “With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.”
I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration.
Friday. The fisherman had become suspicious all of a sudden: “What do you need it for? What use do you have for a grapnel?”
These were indiscreet questions; I should have answered, To draw it,” but I knew Miss Zwida’s shyness about revealing her artistic activity in an environment incapable of appreciating it; besides, the right answer, on my part, would have been, To think about it,” so just imagine whether I would have been understood.
“That is my business,” I answered. We had started out conversing amiably, since we had met the night before at the tavern, but all of a sudden our dialogue had turned curt.
“Go to a ship’s chandler,” the fisherman said, brusquely. “I do not sell my belongings.”
With the shopkeeper the same thing happened: as soon as I asked my question, his face turned grim. “We can’t sell such things to foreigners,” he said. “We want no trouble with the police. And with a rope twelve meters long into the bargain ... Not that I suspect you, but it would
not be the first time somebody threw a grapnel up to the bars of the prison, to help a prisoner escape....”
“Escape” is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations. The search for the anchor in which I am engaged seems to indicate to me an avenue of escape, perhaps of a metamorphosis, a resurrection. With a shudder I dismiss the thought that the prison is my mortal body and the escape that awaits me the separation of the soul, the beginning of a life beyond this earth.
Saturday. It was my first outing at night after many months, and this caused me no little apprehension, especially because of the head colds to which I am subject; so before going out, I put on a balaclava helmet and over it a wool cap and, over that, a felt hat. Bundled up like this, and moreover with a scarf around my neck and another around my waist, a woolen jacket, a fur jacket, a leather coat, and lined boots, I could recover a certain security. The night, as I was then able to ascertain, was mild and serene. But I still failed to understand why Mr. Kauderer felt impelled to make an appointment with me at the cemetery, in the heart of the night, through a mysterious note delivered to me in great secrecy. If he had come back, why could we not meet as we had every day? And if he had not come back, whom was I on my way to meet at the cemetery?
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Page 6
