Cosmos

by Witold Gombrowicz

  I hovered over it, I, who after leaving the other, there, in Warsaw, now became stuck in this, here, and I was beginning to . . . I hovered for one brief moment, but then Katasia left, Lena moved the ashtray to the center of the table—I lit a cigarette—someone turned on the radio—Mr. Wojtys drummed on the table with his fingertips and hummed a little tune, something like ti-ri-ri, but then broke off—drummed again, hummed again and broke off. It was cramped. The room was too small. Lena’s mouth closing and parting, its shyness . . . and that’s it, goodnight, we’re on our way upstairs.

  We were undressing, and Fuks, shirt in hand, resumed his complaints about his boss, Drozdowski, he moaned whitely and wanly, carrot-like, that Drozdowski, that at first they got along famously, then something or other went sour, one way or another, I began to get on his nerves, can you imagine, I get on his nerves, let me move a finger and I get on his nerves, do you understand that, to get on your boss’s nerves, seven hours a day, he can’t stand me, he obviously tries not to look at me for seven hours straight, and if he happens to look at me his eyeballs skip away as if he’d been scalded, for seven hours! I don’t know—Fuks went on, his eyes fixed on his shoes—sometimes I feel like falling on my knees and crying out: Forgive me, Mr. Drozdowski, forgive me! But forgive me for what? And it’s not even his fault, I really do irritate him, my friends at work tell me shush, stay out of his sight, but—Fuks ogled me sadly, fish-like, with melancholy—but how can I keep in or out of his sight when we’re together in the same room seven hours a day, if I clear my throat, move my hand, he breaks out in a rash. Maybe I stink? And in my mind I associated the lamentations of the rejected Fuks with my departure from Warsaw, resentful, disdaining, both of us, he and I, dispossessed . . . the resentment . . . and so we went on undressing in this rented, unfamiliar room, in a house found by a fluke, by accident, like two castaways, spurned. We talked some more about the Wojtyses, the family atmosphere, I fell asleep. I awoke. It was night. Dark. Buried under my sheets, a few minutes passed before I found myself again in the room with the wardrobe, the night table, the water pitcher, until I found my bearings in relation to the windows and the door—which I managed to do thanks to a persistent though silent cerebral effort. I vacillated for a long time, what should I do, go back to sleep or not . . . I didn’t feel like sleeping, I didn’t feel like getting up either, so I mulled it over: should I get up, or sleep, or lie here, finally I stuck out my leg and sat up on the bed, and when I sat up the white blotch of the curtained window loomed before my eyes and, stepping up to it barefoot, I drew the curtain aside: there, beyond the little garden, beyond the fence, beyond the road was the spot where the sparrow was hanging, hanged among the tangled branches, the black soil below it, where the bit of cardboard, the piece of sheet metal, the strips of lath, were lying about, where the tips of spruce were basking in the starlit night. I pulled the curtain back but I didn’t move away because it occurred to me that Fuks might be watching me.

  In fact, I couldn’t hear him breathing . . . and if he wasn’t asleep he must have seen that I was looking out the window, which in itself wouldn’t be anything perverse were it not for the night and the bird, the bird in the night, the bird with the night. Because my looking out the window must have had something to do with the bird . . . and this was embarrassing . . . but the silence had lasted far too long and was too absolute, bringing me to the certainty that he was not there, that he had not been there all along, that no one lay on his bed. I drew the curtain back again, and by the glow of the starry swarms I saw a vacant space where Fuks should have been. Where did he go?

  To the bathroom? No, the hum of water from there was solitary. But in that case . . . what if he had gone to see the sparrow? I don’t know why I thought of it, but I knew right away that this was quite possible, he could have gone, he had been interested in the sparrow, he was in the bushes looking for an explanation, his carroty, phlegmatic mug was just the thing for such a search, it was just like him . . . to ponder, to scheme, who hanged it, why did he hang it . . . and, maybe he chose this house, among other things, because of the sparrow (this would be stretching it a bit, but the thought was there, additionally, in the background), anyway, he had awakened, or maybe he hadn’t gone to sleep at all, and, his curiosity piqued, he got up, maybe he went to check some detail and to look around in the night? . . . was he playing detective? . . . I was inclined to believe it. More and more I was inclined to believe it. His doing this did me no harm, on balance, but I would have preferred not to begin our stay at the Wojtyses’ with such nocturnal escapades and, furthermore, I was a bit irritated that the sparrow was emerging again, bothering us, and it seemed to fluff its feathers, put on airs and pretend to be more important than it really was—and if this moron had actually gone to it, the sparrow would become a personage accepting visitors! I smiled. What next? I didn’t know what to do, yet I didn’t feel like going back to bed, I put on my pants, opened the door to the hallway, stuck out my head. There was no one, it was cooler, in the wan darkness I was aware of a little window to the left at the top of the stairs, I listened but heard nothing . . . I went out into the hallway, but somehow I didn’t relish the idea that a short while ago he had silently gone out, and now I’m silently going out . . . in sum, our two exits were not quite so innocent . . . And when I left the room I re-created in my mind the floor plan of the house, the branching of the rooms, the arrangement of walls, alcoves, passages, furniture, and even people . . . all unfamiliar, I was barely becoming acquainted with it.

  But here I was in the hallway of a strange house, in the dead of night, in just my pants and shirt—this peeked at sensuality, it was like slithering toward Katasia with the same slipperiness as her lip . . . where was she sleeping? Sleeping? As soon as I asked myself that, I became someone walking toward her in the night, down the hallway, barefoot, in just my shirt and pants, the tiny, just-a-tad twirl-up of her lip, slippery and reptilian, together with my cold and disagreeable rejection and estrangement from those I had left behind in Warsaw, drove me coldly toward her swinish lust which, somewhere here, in this sleeping house . . .Where was she sleeping? I took a few steps, reached the stairs and looked out the little window, the only one in the hallway, it looked out from the other side of the house, the one opposite the road and the sparrow, onto a wide space surrounded by a wall and lit by swarms and multitudes of stars; here was a similar little garden with gravel footpaths and frail little trees, passing farther on into a vacant lot with a pile of bricks and a small shed . . . To the left, next to the house, was an addition, probably the kitchen, the laundry, maybe it was there that Katasia rocked to sleep the frolic of her little mouth . . .

  Moonless star-filled sky—stupendous—constellations emerged out of the swarms of stars, some I knew, the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, I was identifying them, but others, unfamiliar to me, were also lurking there, as if inscribed into the distribution of the major stars, I tried to fill in lines that might bind them into forms . . . and this deciphering, this charting, suddenly wearied me, I switched to the little garden, but here too the multiplicity of objects such as a chimney, a pipe, the angle of a gutter, the cornice of a wall, a small tree, as well as their more involved combinations like the turn and disappearance of the path, the rhythm of shadows, soon wearied me . . . yet I would begin anew, though reluctantly, to look for forms, patterns, I no longer felt like it, I was bored and impatient and cranky, until I realized that what riveted me to these objects, how shall I put it, what attracted me to the “behind,” the “beyond,” was the way that one object was “behind” the other, that the pipe was behind the chimney, the wall was behind the corner of the kitchen, just like . . . like . . . like . . . at supper when Katasia’s lips were behind Lena’s little mouth when Katasia moved the ashtray with the wire mesh while leaning over Lena, lowering her slithering lips close to . . . I was more surprised than I should have been, at this point I was inclined to exaggerate everything, and besides, the constellations, the Big Dipper, etc., am
ounted to something cerebral, exhausting, and I thought “what? mouths, together?” I was particularly astonished by the fact that both their mouths were now, in my imagination, in my memory, more closely linked together than then, at the table, I tried to clear my head by shaking it, but that made the connection of Lena’s lips with Katasia’s lips even more clear-cut, so I smirked, because truly, Katasia’s twirled-up lasciviousness, her slipping into swinish lust had nothing, absolutely nothing in common with the fresh parting and innocent closing of Lena’s lips, it’s just that one was “in relation to the other”—as on a map, where one city is in relation to another city—anyway, the idea of maps had entered my head, a map of the sky, or an ordinary map with cities, etc. The entire “connection” was not really a connection, merely one mouth considered in relation to another mouth, in the sense of distance, for example, of direction and position . . . nothing more . . . but, while I now estimated that Katasia’s mouth was most likely somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen (she slept thereabouts), in fact I wondered where, in what direction, and at what distance was it from Lena’s little mouth. And my coldly-lustful striving in the hallway toward Katasia underwent a dislocation because of Lena’s incidental intrusion.

  And this was accompanied by increasing distraction. Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us. And I, gazing at the little garden, at the sky, at the “beyond” duality of the two mouths, I knew, I knew that something was eluding me . . . something important . . . Fuks! Where was Fuks? Was he “playing detective”? I hoped this wouldn’t end in a big mess! I was disgruntled about having rented a room with this fish-like Fuks whom I hardly knew . . . but there, ahead of me was the little garden, the trees, the footpaths passing into a field with a pile of bricks and all the way on to a wall that was incredibly white, but this time it all appeared as a visible sign of something that I could not see, namely the other side of the house, where there also was a bit of a garden, then the fence, the road, and beyond it the thicket . . . and within me the tension of starlight merged with the tension of the hanged bird. Was Fuks there, by the sparrow?

  The sparrow! The sparrow! Actually neither Fuks nor the sparrow was of much interest to me, it was the mouth, quite plainly, that really intrigued me . . . or so I thought in my distraction . . . and as I let go of the sparrow to concentrate on the mouth, a tiresome game of tennis evolved, for the sparrow sent me to the mouth, the mouth back to the sparrow, and I found myself between the sparrow and the mouth, one hiding behind the other, and, as soon as I caught up with the mouth, eagerly, as if I had lost it, I already knew that beyond this side of the house was the other side, that beyond the mouth was the sparrow hanging all alone . . . But worst of all, the sparrow could not be placed on the same map as the mouth, it was totally beyond, in another realm, it was here quite by chance, ridiculous actually, so why was it cropping up, it had no right! . . . Oh, oh, it had no right! Had no right? The less justification it had the more strongly it inflicted itself upon me and became more intrusive and more difficult for me to shake off—if it had no right, then the fact that it was pestering me was all the more significant!

  I stood a while longer in the hallway, between the sparrow and the mouth. I returned to my room, lay down, and fell asleep faster than one would have expected.

  The next day we took out our books and papers and went to work—I didn’t ask him what he had done during the night—I felt reluctant to recall my own adventures in the hallway, I was like someone who had succumbed to fanciful extravagances and now feels awkward, yes, I felt awkward, but Fuks looked sheepish too and mutely turned to his calculations, which were laborious, on numerous scraps of paper, he even used logarithms, his goal being to develop a method at roulette, a method that would be, without the slightest doubt—and he knew it—humbug, tommyrot, but on which he focused all his energies because he had nothing better to do, nothing to keep him busy, his situation was hopeless, his vacation would be over in two weeks, he would then return to his office and to Drozdowski who would make superhuman efforts not to look at him, but there was no way around it because, even if he were to carry out his duties diligently, this too would be unbearable to Drozdowski . . . Exuding yawns, his eyes turned into tiny slits, he even stopped complaining, he was the way he was, who cares, all he could do now was to taunt me about my aggravation with my family, that’s it, see, everyone’s got his troubles, they’re bugging you too, shit, I tell you, it’s horrible, it’s all a sham!

  In the afternoon we went by bus to Krupówki, did some shopping. Suppertime came, I had been waiting for it impatiently because I wanted to see Lena and Katasia, Katasia with Lena, after last night. In the meantime, I restrained myself from thinking about them, first, let me see them again, then think.

  But what an unexpected upset of the apple cart!

  She was a married woman! Her husband showed up after we had started eating, and now he was bringing his longish nose to his plate, while I watched this erotic mate of hers with a distasteful curiosity. What confusion—not that I was jealous, it’s just that now she seemed different, totally changed by this man who was so alien to me, yet privy to the most secret closings of her little mouth—it was obvious that they were only married recently, he covered her hand with his hand and looked into her eyes. What was he like? Quite a big man, well built, on the heavy side, intelligent enough, an architect working on the construction of a hotel. He spoke little, reached for a radish now and then—but what was he like? What was he like? And how were they with each other when alone, how was he with her, she with him, the two of them together? . . . ugh, to bump into a man at the side of a woman who turns us on, that’s no fun . . . worse still, such a man, a total stranger, suddenly becomes the object of our—compulsory—curiosity, and we have to keep guessing his personal likes and dislikes . . . even though it disgusts us . . . we have to experience him through the woman. I don’t know which I would prefer: alluring as she is, that she should now turn out to be repulsive because of him, or that she also become enticing because of the man she has chosen—awful possibilities either way!

  Were they in love? Passionate love? Sensible? Romantic? Easy? Difficult? Not in love at all? Here, at the table, in the presence of her family, it was just the casual tenderness of a young couple that one could not, after all, watch at will, but only by stealing glances, by applying a whole system of maneuvers “on the border,” that would not transgress the demarcation line . . . I couldn’t very well stare him in the face, my inquiry, ardent yet somewhat disgusting, had to be limited to his hand as it lay on the table in front of me, near her palm, I looked at this hand, big, clean, fingers not unpleasant, nails clipped . . . I continued watching it, and I became more and more infuriated that I had to penetrate the erotic possibilities of this hand (as if I were her, Lena). I found out nothing. Actually, the hand looked decent enough, but what of it, everything depends on the touch (I thought), on how he touches her, and I could perfectly well imagine their touching each other to be decent, or indecent, or dissolute, wild, mad, or simply conjugal—and nothing, nothing is known, nothing, because why couldn’t shapely hands touch each other grotesquely, even astraddle, what assurance was there? Yet it was hard to imagine that a hand, so healthy and decent, would indulge in such excesses. Really, but suppose that it “nevertheless” did, then this “nevertheless” would become yet one more depravity. And if I could not have any certainty about their hands, what about their persons, in the background, where I hardly dared to look? And I knew that a single, clandestine, barely visible hooking of his finger round her finger would be enough for their persons to become infinitely licentious, even though he, Ludwik, was just at that moment saying that he had brought the photos, and that they had come out very well, he’ll show them after supper . . .

  “What a comical phenomenon,” Fuks was finishing his account of finding the spa
rrow in the bushes on our way here. “A hanged sparrow! Who would ever think of hanging a sparrow? It’s like flavoring borscht with two mushrooms instead of just one—it’s too much!”

  “Two mushrooms, two mushrooms indeed!” Mr. Leon politely assented, happy to agree. “Two mushrooms, now you figuree that, if you please, fiddle-de-dee, but what sadism!”

  “Hooligans,” opined Mrs. Roly-Poly curtly and picked a thread off his cuff, while he instantly and happily agreed: “Hooligans.”To which Roly-Poly replied:

  “You always have to contradict!”

  “But Marysweetie, I say yes, hooligans!”

  “But I say, hooligans!” she exclaimed, as if he had said something different.

  “That’s right, hooligans, I say, hooligans . . . ”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  She straightened the border of the handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket.

  Katasia emerged from the pantry to clear the plates, and her twirled-up, slippery, darting lip appeared near the mouth that was across the table from me—I had been anxiously awaiting this moment while at the same time restraining myself, turning away from it so as not to influence anything, or interfere . . . so that the experiment would come off objectively. Mouth immediately began to “relate to” mouth . . . and I saw that just then her husband was saying something to her, and Leon was butting in, and Katasia was busy walking around, and all the while mouth was relating to mouth, like a star to a star, and this mouth constellation corroborated my nocturnal escapades which I’d rather be done with . . . yet mouth with mouth, that slithering away disgusting twirled-up lip slipping away with that soft and pure mouth closing-and-parting . . . as if they really had something in common! I lapsed into something like a trembling incredulity over two mouths having nothing in common yet having something in common, this fact overwhelmed me and actually plunged me even deeper into unbelievable distraction—and it was all suffused with the night, as if steeped in yesterday, murky.