Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  Through a half-open flap we entered a brightly lighted space. It was full of people. Groups of them in wet overcoats with upturned collars ambled in silence from place to place, stopping in attentive semicircles. Without difficulty I recognized among them those who belonged to this world only in appearance, who in reality led a separate, dignified, and embalmed life on pedestals, a life on show, festively empty. They stood in grim silence, clad in somber made-to-measure frock coats and morning suits of good-quality cloth, very pale, and on their cheeks the feverish flush of the illnesses from which they had died. They had not had a single thought in their heads for quite a time, only the habit of showing themselves from every angle, of exhibiting the emptiness of their existence. They should have been in their beds a long time before, tucked under their cold sheets, their dose of medicine administered. It was a presumption to keep them up so late on their narrow pedestals and in chairs on which they sat so stiffly, in tight patent-leather footwear, miles from their previous existence, with glazed eyes entirely deprived of memory.

  All of them had hanging from their lips, dead like the tongue of a strangled man, a last cry, uttered when they left the lunatic asylum where, taken for maniacs, they had spent some time in purgatory before entering this ultimate abode. No, they were not authentic Dreyfuses, Edisons, or Lucchenis; they were only pretenders. They may have been real madmen, caught red-handed at the precise moment a brilliant idée fixe had entered their heads; the moment of truth was skillfully distilled and became the crux of their new existence, pure as an element and unalterable. Ever since then, that one idea remained in their heads like an exclamation mark, and they clung to it, standing on one foot, suspended in midair, or stopped at half a gesture.

  Passing anxiously from group to group, I looked in the crowd for Maximilian. At last I found him, not in the splendid uniform of admiral of the Levant Squadron, in which he sailed from Toulon on the way to Mexico in the flagship Le Cid, nor in the green tail coat of a cavalry general he wore in his last days. He was in an ordinary suit of clothes, a frock coat with long, folding skirts and light-colored trousers, his chin resting on a high collar with a cravat. Rudolph and I stopped reverently in the group of people forming a semicircle in front of him. Suddenly, I froze. A few steps from us, in the first row of the onlookers, stood Bianca in a white dress, accompanied by her governess. She stood there and looked. Her small face had become paler in the last few days, and her eyes, darkly circled and full of shadow, wore an expression of profound sadness.

  She was standing immobile, with folded hands hidden in the pleats of her dress, looking from under her serious eyebrows with mournful eyes. My heart bled at the sight of her. Unconsciously I followed the direction of her gaze, and this is what I saw: Maximilian's features moved, as if awakened, the corner of his mouth curled up in a smile, his eyes shone and began to roll in their orbits, his breast covered with decorations heaved with a sigh. It was not a miracle, but a simple mechanical trick. Suitably wound up, the Archduke held court in accordance with the principles of his mechanism, graciously and ceremoniously as he had done when alive. He was now scanning the spectators, his eyes looking attentively at everybody in turn.

  His eyes rested on Bianca's for a moment. He winced, hesitated, swallowed hard, as if he wanted to say something; but a moment later, obedient to his mechanism, he continued to run his eyes over other faces with the same inviting and radiant smile. Had he become aware of Bianca's presence, had it reached his heart? Who could tell? He was not even fully himself, merely a distant double of his former being, much reduced and in a state of deep prostration. On the basis of mere fact, one must admit that in a way he was his own closest relative, perhaps he was even as much himself as possible under the circumstances, so many years after his death. In that waxen resurrection it must have been very difficult to become one's real self. Something quite new and frightening must have sneaked into his being; something foreign must have detached itself from the madness of the ingenious maniac who conceived him in his megalomania—and this now seemed to be filling Bianca with awe and horror. Even a very sick person changes and becomes detached from his own self, let alone someone so clumsily resuscitated. For how did he behave now toward his own flesh and blood? With an assumed gaiety and bravado he continued to play his clowning imperial comedy, magnificent and smiling. Had he much to conceal, or was he perhaps afraid of the attendants who were watching him while he was on exhibition in that hospital of wax figures where he and the others stayed under hospital regulations? Distilled laboriously from somebody's madness; clean, cured, and saved at last—didn't he have to tremble at the possibility of being returned to chaos and turmoil?

  When I turned to Bianca again, I saw that she had covered her face with a handkerchief. The governess put an arm around her, gazing inanely at her with her enamel blue eyes. I could not look any longer at Bianca's suffering and felt like sobbing. I pulled Rudolph's sleeve and we walked toward the exit.

  Behind our backs, that made-up ancestor, that grandfather in the prime of life, continued to bestow on all and sundry his radiant imperial salutes: in an excess of zeal he even lifted his hand and was almost blowing kisses to us in the immobile silence, amid the hissing of acetylene lamps and the quiet dripping of rain on the canvas of the tent; he rose on tiptoe with the last remnants of his strength, mortally ill like the rest of them and longing for the death shroud.

  In the vestibule the made-up torso of the lady cashier said something to us while her diamonds and gold teeth glittered against the black background of magic draperies. We went out into a dewy night, warm from rain. The roofs shone with water, the gutter pipes gurgled monotonously. We ran through the downpour, lighted by street lamps, jingling under the rain.

  XXXII

  Oh abysmal human peversity, truly infernal intrigue! In whose mind could have arisen that venomous and devilish idea, bolder than the most elaborate flights of fancy? The deeper I penetrate its malevolence, the greater my wonder at the perfidy, the flash of evil genius, in that monstrous idea.

  So my intuition has not led me astray. Here, at hand, in the midst of an apparent legality, in time of peace guaranteed by treaties, a crime was being committed that made one's hair stand on end. A somber drama was being enacted in complete silence, a drama so shrouded in secrecy that nobody could guess at it and detect it during the innocent aspects of that spring. Who could suspect that between that gagged, mute wax figure rolling its eyes and the delicate, carefully raised, and beautifully mannered Bianca a family tragedy was being enacted? Who really was Bianca? Are we to reveal the secret at last? What if she was not descended either from the legitimate empress of Mexico or even from the morganatic wife, Izabella d'Orgaz, who, from the stage of a touring opera, conquered Archduke Maximilian by her beauty?

  What if her mother was the little Creole girl whom he called Conchita and who under that name has entered history through the back door as it were. Information about her that I have been able to collect with the help of the stamp album can be summarized in a few words.

  After the Emperor's fall, Conchita left with her small daughter for Paris, where she lived on a widow's pension, keeping unbroken faith with the memory of her imperial lover. There, history lost track of that touching figure, giving way to hearsay and reconstruction. Nothing is known about the daughter's marriage and her subsequent fate. Instead, in 1900, a certain Mme. de V., a lady of extraordinary and exotic beauty, left France with her small daughter and her husband on false passports and proceeded to Austria. At Salzburg, on the Austro-Bavarian frontier, when changing trains for Vienna, the family was stopped by the Austrian gendarmerie and arrested. It was remarkable that, after his false papers had been examined, M. de V. was freed but did not try to get his wife and daughter released. He returned the same day to France, and all trace of him has since been lost. Thereafter the story becomes very entangled. I was therefore very thrilled when the stamp album helped me to find the fugitives' trace. The discovery was entirely mine. I succeeded in
identifying the said M. de V. as a highly suspect individual who appeared in a different country under a completely different name. But hush! . . . Nothing more can be said about it yet. Suffice it to say that Bianca's genealogy has been established beyond any doubt.

  XXXIII

  So much for canonical history. But the official history remains incomplete. There are in it intentional gaps, long pauses that spring fills swiftly with its fantasies. One needs a lot of patience to find a grain of truth in the tangle of springtime vagaries. This might be achieved by a careful, grammatical analysis of the phrases and sentences of spring. Who? Whose? What? One must eliminate the seductive cross talk of birds—their pointed adverbs and prepositions, their skittish pronouns—and work oneself slowly to a healthy grain of sense. The stamp album serves as a compass in my search. Stupid, indiscriminating spring! It covers everything with growth, mingles sense with nonsense, cracking jokes, light-hearted to a degree. Could it be that it, too, is in league with Franz Joseph, that it is tied to him by a bond of common conspiracy? Every ounce of sense breaking through is at once covered up by a hundred lies, by an avalanche of nonsense. The birds obliterate all evidence, obscure all traces by their faulty punctuation. Truth is cornered by the luxuriance that immediately fills each empty plot, each crevice, with its spreading foliage. Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps, which in direct line are derived from stamp albums?

  XXXIV

  After many sunny weeks came a period of hot and overcast days. The sky darkened as on old frescoes, and in the oppressive silence banks of clouds loomed like tragic battlefields in paintings of the Neapolitan school. Against the background of these leaden, ashen cumuli, the chalky whiteness of houses shone brightly, accentuated by the sharp shadows of cornices and pilasters. People walked with heads bowed, their mood dark and tense as before a storm charged with static electricity.

  Bianca had not been seen again in the park. She was obviously closely supervised and not allowed out. They must have smelled danger.

  I saw in town a group of gentlemen in black morning coats and top hats walking through the market square with the measured steps of diplomats. Their white shirt fronts glared in the leaden air. They looked in silence at the houses, as if valuing them, and walked with slow, rhythmic steps. They had coal black mustaches on carefully shaven faces with shining expressive eyes, which turned in their orbits smoothly, as if oiled. From time to time they doffed their hats and wiped their brows. They were all slim, tall, and middle-aged, and they had the sultry faces of gangsters.

  XXXV

  The days became dark, cloudy, and gray. A distant, potential storm lay in wait day and night over the horizon, not discharging itself in a downpour. In the great silence, a breath of ozone would pass at times through the steely air, with the smell of rain and a moist, fresh breeze.

  Afterward the gardens filled the air with enormous sighs and grew their leaves hastily, doing overtime by day and by night. All flags hung down heavy and darkened, helplessly pouring out the last streaks of color into the dense aura. Sometimes at the opening of a street someone turned to the sky half a face, like a dark cut-out with one frightened and shining eye, and listened to the rumble of space, to the electric silence of passing clouds while the air was cut by the flight of trembling, pointed, arrow-sharp, black and white swallows.

  Ecuador and Columbia are mobilizing. In the ominous silence lines of infantry in white trousers, white straps crossed on their breasts, are crowding the quays. The Chilean unicorn is rearing. One can see it in the evening outlined against the sky, a pathetic animal, immobile with terror, its hooves in the air.

  XXXVI

  The days are sinking ever deeper into shadow and melancholy. The sky has blocked itself and hangs low, swelled with a dark, threatening storm. The earth, parched and motley, is holding its breath; only the gardens, crazy and drunken, continue to grow, to sprout leaves and fill all their free spaces with a cool greenery. (The fat buds were sticky like an itchy rash, painful and festering; now they are healing with cool foilage, forming leafy scars, gaining green health, multiplied beyond measure and without count. They have already stifled under their greenness the forlorn call of the cuckoo, and its distant voice now rises faintly from deep thickets, dulled by the happy flood of leaves.)

  Why are the houses shining so bright in that dusky landscape? As the rustling parks become darker, the whitewash on houses sharpens and glows in the sunless air with the hot reflection of burnt earth, as if it were to be spattered in a moment by the feverish spots of an infectious disease.

  Dogs run dizzily, their noses in the air. Crazed and excited, they sniff among the fluffy greenness. Something revealing and enormous prepares to spring forth from the closeness of these overcast days.

  I am trying to guess what event could match the negative sum of expectations contained in this enormous load of electricity; what could equal this catastrophic barometrical low.

  The thing that is preparing nature for a trough that the gardens cannot fill although they are equipped with the most enchanting smell of lilac.

  XXXVII

  Negroes, crowds of Negroes, were in the city! People had seen them here and there, in many places at once. They were running in the streets in a noisy, ragged gang, rushing into grocery shops, and stealing food. They joked, nudged one another, laughed, rolled the whites of their eyes, chattered gutturally, and bared their white, shining teeth. Before the militia could be mobilized, they disappeared into thin air.

  I have felt it coming; it was unavoidable. It was the natural consequence of meterological tension. Only now do I realize what I have felt all along: that the spring was announcing the Negroes' arrival. Where had they come from? Why did the hordes of black men in striped cotton pajamas suddenly appear here? Was it the great Barnum who had opened his circus in the neighborhood, having traveled with an endless train of people, animals, and demons? Had his wagons, crowded with an endless chatter of beasts and acrobats, stopped anywhere near us? Not at all. Barnum was far away. I have my suspicions, but I won't breathe a word. For you, Bianca, I'll remain silent, and no torture will extract any confession from me.

  XXXVIII

  On that day I dressed slowly and with great care. Finally, in front of the mirror, I composed my face into an expression of calm and relentless determination. I carefully loaded my pistol, before slipping it in the back pocket of my trousers. I glanced into the mirror once more and with my hand patted the breastpocket of my jacket where I had hidden some documents. I was ready to face the man.

  I felt completely calm and determined. Bianca's future was at stake, and for her I was prepared to do anything! I decided not to confide in Rudolph. The better I knew him, the stronger I felt that he was a prosaic fellow, unable to rise above triviality. I have had enough of his face, alternatively freezing in consternation and growing pale with envy at each of my new revelations.

  Deep in thought, I quickly walked the short distance. When the great iron gates clanged shut behind me with suppressed vibrations, I at once entered a different climate, different currents of air, the cool and unfamiliar region of a great year. The black branches of trees pointed to another, abstract time; their bare forked tops were outlined against the white sky of another, foreign zone; the avenues closed in. The voices of birds, muted in the vast spaces of the sky, cut the silence, a silence heavy and loaded that spread into gray meditation, into a great, unsteady paleness without end or goal.

  With my head raised, cool and self-possessed, I asked to be announced. I was admitted to a darkened hall that exuded an aura of quiet luxury. Through a high open window the garden air flowed in gentle, balmy waves. These soft influxes, penetrating across the gentle filter of billowing curtains, made objects become alive; furtive chords resounded along rows of Venetian tumblers in a glass-fronted cabinet, and the leaves on the wallpaper rustled, silvery and scared.


  It is strange how old interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by the fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings. Silence, vitiated and demoralized, ferments into recriminations. Why hide it? The excessive excitements and paroxysms of fever have had to be soothed here, night after night by injections of secret drugs, and the wallpapers have provided imagined visions of gentle landscapes and of distant mirrored waters.

  I heard a rustle. Preceded by a valet, a man was coming down the stairs, short but well-built, economic of gesture, blinded by the light reflected on his large horn-rimmed spectacles. For the first time I faced him closely. He was inscrutable, but I noticed, not without satisfaction, that after my first words two furrows of worry and bitterness appeared on his face. While behind his spectacles he was composing his face into a mask of magnificent haughtiness, I could see panic slowly getting hold of him. As he gradually became more interested, it was obvious from his concentrated attention that at last he was beginning to take me seriously. He invited me into his study next door. When we entered it, a woman in a white dress leapt away from the door, as if she had been listening, and disappeared inside the house. Was it Bianca's governess? When I entered the room, I felt as if I were entering a jungle. The opaque greenish twilight was striped by the watery shadows of Venetian blinds drawn over the windows. The walls were hung with botanical prints; small colorful birds fluttered in large cages. Probably wishing to gain time, the man showed me specimens of primitive arms—jereeds, boomerangs, and tomahawks—which were displayed on the walls. My acute sense of smell detected the smell of curare. While he was handling a sort of primitive halberd, I suggested that he should be careful, and supported by warning by producing my pistol. He smiled wryly, a little put out, and put the weapon back in its place.