Pornografia

by Witold Gombrowicz

  Not until the following day (filled with preparations for the funeral) did I find out in some detail about the course of these disastrous events-—which were extremely complex, bizarre, eerie. Reconstruction of the facts was not easy, there were many distressing gaps—especially since the only witnesses, this Józek, Józek Skuziak, and the old servant woman, Waleria, were lost in the chaos inside their incompetent and uneducated heads. Everything indicated that Madame Amelia, having gone into the pantry, heard murmurs on the stairs leading to the kitchen and bumped into this Józek, who had slipped into the house to filch something. On hearing her steps, he threw himself into the first door he saw and ran into the small servant’s room, awakening Waleria from a deep sleep, whereupon she lit a match. The further course of events unfolded primarily from her garbled account. “When I lit a match, and when I saw that someone was standin’, I froze so I couldn’t even move, and the match was burnin’ down in my fingers, my whole finger got burned. And m’ ladyship is standin’ there across from him, by the door, and she ain’t movin’ either. The match went out on me. I couldn’t see nothin’, the window shade was down, I’m lyin’ there, lookin’, don’t see nothin’, it’s dark, wish at least the floor would creak, but nothin’, nothin’, like nobody’s there, I’m lyin’, just givin’ m’self to God, still nothin’, it’s quiet, so I look at the floor because that’s where the last of the flame of the match is glowin’ but lightin’ up nothin’, it burns out, nothin’, wish somebody would breathe or somethin’, but nothin’. All of a sudden …” (her account halted as if it came upon logs thrown crosswise) … “all of a sudden … somethin’s odd … it’s m’ ladyship that flings herself! On top o’ him! … Under his feet like … she must have thrown herself … So they fell down! … I don’t know nothin’, may God’s hand spare us, would at least one o’ them get to swearin’, but nothin’, nothin’, they just tussled on the floor like, I wanted to help ’em, but no way, I got faint, I hear a knife go deep into meat, once, twice, I hear agin knife into meat, then the two of them took to the door an’ that’s that! So I passed out totally! I passed out!”

  Vaclav heatedly commented “That’s impossible!” to her account. “It couldn’t have happened like that! I don’t believe mother would have … behaved that way! The hag must have mixed things up, muddled them up in her stupidity. Oh, I’d rather listen to a hen cackling, I’d rather,” he exclaimed, “a hen cackling!”

  He was moving his hand across his brow.

  But Skuziak’s deposition agreed with what Waleria was saying: her ladyship fell and “knocked him down,” because she fell “at his feet.” With a knife. And he showed not only his slashed side and thigh, but also clear marks of bites on his neck and hands. “She was bitin’,” he said. “I snatched the knife from her, so then she got stuck on the knife, so I jumped away and took off, but the farm manager came after me shootin’, my leg went soft, so I sat down. … They caught me.”

  Well, the fact that Amelia “got stuck” on the knife no one believed. “Lies,” Fryderyk said. “As to the bites, my God, fighting for one’s life, in a convulsive fight with an armed thug (because he was the one with the knife, not she) … well, nerves … One can’t be surprised. It’s an instinct, you know, a self-preservation instinct. …” That’s what he was saying. Nonetheless it was all strange, to say the least … and shocking … Madame Amelia biting someone … And as far as the knife was concerned, the matter wasn’t clear because, as it turned out, it was Waleria’s knife, a long, sharp kitchen knife that she used for cutting bread. So this knife lay on a small table beside her bed, exactly where Amelia had stood. Which would indicate that she, Amelia, feeling the knife in the dark with her fingers, threw herself with it onto …

  Amelia’s murderer was barefoot, had dark feet, and he sparkled with two rather ordinary colors—the gold of his curly hair falling over the black of his eyes imbued with glumness, like those of forest puddles. These colors were especially intensified by the elegant, clear shine of his teeth, whose whiteness connected him with …

  Then what? Then how? Then it would seem that Madame Amelia, finding herself in the dark little room with this (boy) and in the claws of intensifying anticipation, broke down and … and … She felt for the knife with her fingers. And having felt it, she went wild. She threw herself onto him to kill, and when they both fell, she bit him like a madwoman wherever she could. She? With her sanctity? At her age? She, such an exemplar, with her moral code? Wasn’t this rather a fantasy born in the cook’s and the farmhand’s dull-witted pates, a wild tale to their measure, created by a transformation of what had played out in the dark, which was actually intangible? The darkness of the little room was doubled by the darkness of their imagination—and Vaclav, besieged by these darknesses that were knocking him off his feet, didn’t know what to do, this was for him, more than the knife, what was killing his mother, poisoning her for him and disfiguring her—he didn’t know how to rescue her for himself from this fury inscribed on the sixteen-year-old body with her teeth, with the knife with which she cut him. Such death tore her life into shreds for him. Fryderyk tried, as much as he could, to support him in spirit. “One can’t rely on their testimony,” he said. “First of all, they didn’t see anything because it was dark. Second, it’s totally unlike your mother, it doesn’t fit—there is only one thing we can say, and this we can say with absolute certainty, that it couldn’t have happened the way they’re describing it, it must have happened some other way, in that darkness as inaccessible to them as it is to us … it’s the truth, no doubt about it … though of course, if in the darkness, then …” (“Then what? Then what?” Vaclav kept asking, sensing that Fryderyk faltered.) “Then … well … well, the darkness, mind you … darkness is something … that throws one off from … One must remember that man lives in the world. In the dark the world disappears. There is nothing around, you know, one is just with oneself. Of course you know that. We are naturally accustomed to the fact that each time we turn off a lamp, it becomes dark, this doesn’t however rule out the fact that in certain instances darkness can blind us through and through, you understand … and yet Madame Amelia would have, even in this darkness, remained Madame Amelia, isn’t that so? Though in this case the darkness held something within it … (“What?” Vaclav asked. “Tell me!”) “Nothing, nothing, it’s idiotic, it’s nonsense … (“What is?”) “Oh nothing, yet … this young fellow, from the village, maybe an illiterate …” (“So what if he’s an illiterate?”) “Nothing, nothing, I just want to say that in this case the darkness held youth within itself … it held a barefooted young fellow … and it’s easier to commit something like this on someone young than on someone … I mean, if it were someone more grown-up, then …” (“Then what?!) I mean to say that it’s easier with a young person, yes, easier—in the dark—it’s easier to commit something like this against a young one rather than against an old one, and …

  “Oh, stop pumping me, Vaclav!” he suddenly exclaimed, truly frightened, sweat on his brow. “That’s just … theoretically speaking … Yet your mother … oh, no, it’s absurd, impossible, it’s nonsense! Isn’t it, Karol? Karol, what do you think?”

  Why was Fryderyk turning to Karol? If he was scared—why was he buttonholing Karol as well? He belonged, however, to those who call the wolf out of the forest because they do not want to call it out—the fear itself luring it, magnifying it, creating it. But having called out the wolf, he could not desist from teasing it, running wild with it. Consequently his consciousness was so reckless and tormenting that he himself knew it not as light but as darkness—it was, for him, a blind elemental force as much as an instinct, he didn’t trust it, he felt he was in its power, and he didn’t know where it was leading him. He was not a good psychologist, because he had too much intelligence and imagination—in his wide view of man there was room for everything—so he could just as well imagine Madame Amelia in any situation. In the afternoon Vaclav left to “arrange matters with the police,” namely to
cool their investigative attempts with a sizable bribe—because, if the authorities tried to figure things out, who knows where it would end. The funeral took place the following morning—shortened, clearly speeded up. The next day we went back to Poworna and Vaclav came with us, leaving the house in God’s mercy. This didn’t surprise me—I understood that at this time he didn’t want to part with Henia. The carriage in which the ladies, with Hipolit and Vaclav, were traveling, went first, behind it the britzka driven by Karol, and in it myself and Fryderyk, and someone else: Józek.

  We brought him along because we didn’t know what else to do with him. Let him go? He was a murderer. And besides, Vaclav wouldn’t let him go under any conditions, because the death had, as yet, not been dealt with, so things couldn’t be left just like that … and, above all, he hoped to draw a different version of the death from him, more seemly and less scandalous. And so, at the foot of the front seat of our britzka, on straw, lay the blond juvenile murderer, and Karol, who was driving, had him under his feet—therefore, sitting sideways, he was resting his feet on the wedge-shaped front of the britzka. Fryderyk and I were—in the back. The britzka went up, it went down along the immobile undulation of the ground, the terrain opened up and closed in, the horses trotted in the hot smell of grain and in the dust. While Fryderyk, sitting in back, had in front of him the two of them together, in this and in no other configuration—while the four of us, in the britzka that rolled from one hill onto the next, also formed a fairly good configuration, a meaningful formula, a strange arrangement … and, as the silent journey progressed, the figure that we formed became more intrusive. Immense was Karol’s diffidence, his boyishness knocked off balance, he grew haggard under the blows of those tragic events, and he was as quiet as could be, and also kindly and docile … he even contrived a black tie for himself. Yet the two of them were there, right in front of Fryderyk and in front of me, by half a meter, on the front seat of the britzka. We went on. The horses trotted. Fryderyk’s face was by necessity turned toward them—so what did he perceive in them? The two forms of the same age were as if a single form, that’s how tightly the brotherly bond of their age united them. Yet Karol sat there above the lying fellow, with his reins, with the whip, shod in boots, his pants pulled up high—there was neither sympathy nor understanding between them. Rather, it was the harshness of a boy toward a boy, the unfriendly and even hostile brutality that they are apt to feel toward each other, deep down, one toward the other. And one could see that Karol belonged to us, to Fryderyk and to me, he was with us, with people of his own class and against a colleague from the rabble over whom he stood guard. Yet we had them in front of us, and over the many hours of sandy road (which sometimes widened into a highway, soon to bore into limestone walls), they were both in front of us and this was somehow affecting them, creating something, determining something. … While there, farther on, appeared on the hills the carriage in which she was riding—the fiancée. The carriage appeared and disappeared, not letting us forget it, sometimes it wasn’t there for a long time but then it would reappear—while the oblique squares of the fields and the ribbons of meadows threaded onto our journey, wound and unwound—and in this geometry, boring, trotting, sluggish, drowned in vistas, drooped Fryderyk’s face, his profile close to mine. What was he thinking? What was he thinking? We were traveling behind the carriage, we were chasing the carriage. Karol, with the other dark-eyed man under his feet, cornflower-blue and golden, barefoot and unwashed, was as if undergoing a chemical change, though he was following the carriage as a star follows a star, but by now he was with a colleague—in a collegial fashion—clasped from below, he with the other, almost as if handcuffed, united by the boy within him with the other boy to such an extent that if they had begun to eat cherries together, or apples, I would have not been at all surprised. We moved on. The horses trotted. Yes, that’s what Fryderyk must have been imagining—or this is what he imagined that I was imagining—his profile was close to mine, and I didn’t know which one of us had initiated this. Nonetheless, after many, many hours of moving through the countryside we reached Poworna, the two buddies were already “together with regard to Henia,” united with reference to her, solidified in this by the many hours of travel behind her and in front of us.

  We placed the prisoner in an empty pantry with a barred window. His wounds were superficial—he could have escaped. Tired beyond words, we fell into bed, I slept through the night and morning with a heavy sleep, and the next day I was besieged by intangible impressions, intrusive like a fly circling around my nose. I couldn’t catch this buzzing fly, escaping me constantly—what fly? This assailed me even before lunch when I began talking to Hipolit about some detail connected with our still-fresh experiences, but I could hear in his response an almost imperceptible change of tone—not that he treated me abrasively, but there was something like haughtiness, or contempt, or pride, as if he’d had enough, or as if he had more important troubles. Troubles more important than the murder? And then I caught something in Vaclav’s voice—I don’t know—something cold, marked as well by something like pride. Were they proud? Proud of what? The change in tone was as subtle as it was jarring, for how could Vaclav be putting on airs barely two days after her death?—and my sensitized nerves suddenly dictated a suspicion that somewhere in our sky a new center of pressure had formed and some other wind was blowing—but what sort of wind? Something was transforming itself. Something seemed to be changing direction. Not until the evening did these misgivings assume a more distinct form, and that happened when I saw Hipolit crossing the dining room and saying, also whispering: “It’s a mess, by God, it’s a mess!” Suddenly he sat on a chair, dejected … then he rose, ordered the horses harnessed, and drove away. Now I knew that something new was forcing its way here, still, I didn’t want to ask, but in the evening, when I saw Fryderyk and Vaclav circling the yard, talking, I joined them in the hope of finding out what was squeaking in the grass. Nothing of the kind. They were again discussing the death from the day before yesterday—and in the same tone as before—it was a confidential chat, conducted in hushed voices. Fryderyk, his head bent, his gaze fixed on his shoes, was again poking into the murder, pondering this, considering that, analyzing, searching … until Vaclav, finally worn out, began defending himself, asking for a reprieve, letting it be known that this was tantamount to insensitivity! “What is?” Fryderyk asked. “How am I to understand this?” Vaclav begged for mercy. It’s too fresh, he wasn’t used to it yet, he couldn’t grasp it, he knows it without knowing, it’s all too sudden, it’s terrible! It was then that Fryderyk pounced on his soul like an eagle.

  The comparison may be too high-flown. But one could clearly see that he was pouncing—and that he was pouncing from on high. In what he was saying there was neither comfort nor mercy, on the contrary, there was a demand that the son drain the chalice of his mother’s death to the last drop. Just as Catholics live through Christ’s Golgotha minute by minute. He made it clear that he himself was not a Catholic. That he does not have even the so-called moral principles. That he is not virtuous. “So why, you’ll ask” (he was saying) “and in the name of what, am I demanding that you drain it to the limit? My reply is that it’s purely and simply in the name of evolution. Who is man? No one knows. Man is a puzzle (and this platitude appeared on his lips like something both embarrassing and sarcastic, like pain—both an angelic and a devilish abyss, more bottomless than a mirror). Yet we must (the “must” was intimate and dramatic), we must experience life more and more fully. This, you know, is inevitable. This is the necessity of our evolution. We are doomed to evolve. This law fulfills itself in the history of mankind as it does in the history of a single human being. Look at a child. A child is only the beginning, a child does not exist, a child is a child, namely, an introduction, a beginning. … And a young man (he almost spat out this word) … what does he know? What can he be conscious of … he … an embryo? While we?

  “We?” He exclaimed. “We?!”

/>   And then, as an aside:

  “Your mother and I instantly and profoundly understood each other. Not because she was a Catholic. But because she was subject to an inner compulsion toward seriousness … she was not at all … not at all … frivolous.…”

  He looked into Vaclav’s eyes—something that until now had probably never happened, and it greatly confounded Vaclav—who, nonetheless, did not dare avert his gaze.

  “She was reaching … into the heart of the matter.”

  “What am I to do?” Vaclav exclaimed, raising his hands. “What am I to do?!”

  If he had been talking with anyone else he would not have allowed himself to exclaim or to raise his hands. Fryderyk took him by the arm and moved forward, while with the finger of his other hand he pointed ahead. “One must rise to the magnitude of the task!” he said. “Do what you want. But let it be nothing less scrupulous in its … in its seriousness.”

  Seriousness is the highest and most unrelenting requirement for maturity—no letup—nothing that even for a moment would ease the intensity of a gaze searching stubbornly for the heart of the matter. … Vaclav didn’t know how to defend himself against this severity—for it was indeed severity. In its absence, he would have doubted the seriousness of such behavior and the sincerity of such gesturing that conveyed some kind of agitation … but this theater was happening in the name of a stern summons to undertake and fulfill the highest duty of full awareness—and this, in Vaclav’s eyes, made Fryderyk irrefutable. Vaclav’s Catholicism could not be reconciled with the wildness of atheism—to a believer atheism is wild—and Fryderyk’s world was for him a chaos deprived of a ruler, and therefore of law, peopled solely by man’s arbitrariness … and yet, a Catholic could not fail to respect a moral imperative, even though it surfaced on such wild lips. And besides, Vaclav shuddered to think that for him his mother’s death might come to nothing—that he would not be equal to the drama, or to his love and veneration—and he was more afraid of his own mediocrity, which turned him into a decent lawyer “with a fine-tooth comb,” than he was afraid of Fryderyk’s godlessness. He was therefore clinging to Fryderyk’s firm superiority, seeking its support, oh, no matter how, no matter with whom, anything to experience that death. To live through it! To extract everything from it! For that he needed a wild yet fixed gaze into the heart of the matter, and that special, terrible obstinacy of living through it.