Cosmos

by Witold Gombrowicz

  Did one of the windowpanes look at me with a human eye? People were still having their afternoon naps—judging by the silence—but it was quite possible that someone watched us from behind a windowpane—Leon? Roly-Poly? Katasia?—and it was conceivable that the one watching us was the same person who sneaked into our room, most likely during the morning hours, and gouged the line that created the arrow—what for? To poke fun at us? For a lark? To tell us something? No, it didn’t make sense! Well alright, indeed, yet irrationality is a stick that has two ends, and Fuks and I at the other end of this irrationality moved and acted quite rationally—and I, engaged in such laborious maneuvers, had to bear in mind (if I didn’t want to betray my action) the possibility of a gaze lurking behind the painfully glistening and blinding windowpanes.

  So I did bear it in mind. And Fuks’s gaze, looking from above, was helpful to me. I moved about cautiously so as not to arouse suspicion, I raked the grass here and there, dropped the rake as if worn out by the heat, then imperceptibly moved it with my foot in the desired direction. These precautions increased the intensity of my collaboration with Fuks more than I had intended, I moved about almost like his slave. We finally determined the direction of the arrow—the line led all the way past the tool shed by the wall where the lot, partially littered with rubble and bricks, ended as an extension of the little garden. We moved slowly in that direction, diverging here and there as if busy studying flowers and herbs, talking, gesticulating from time to time, and carefully looking for something significant. From furrow to furrow, from twig to pebble, our gaze lowered, we were absorbed by the ground that unfolded before us—gray, yellowish, rusty-dark, boring, complex, sleepy, monotonous, barren, and hard. I wiped the sweat off my face. It was all a waste of time!

  We came close to the wall . . . but here we stopped, helpless . . . it seemed quite difficult to conquer the remaining ten steps, we were too exposed! So far, our march through the little garden under the gaze of the windowpanes has been relatively easy—about fifty yards across level ground—and yet it became difficult because of a concealed difficulty that turned it almost into a climb—and now this same difficulty, brought about by the progressively steeper and more dizzying climb, increased sharply, as if we were reaching a summit. What an altitude! He squatted, pretending to look at a bug, and so, hunkering down and moving as though following the bug, he reached the wall; I veered to the side, meandering here and there in order to join him in a roundabout way. We were by the wall, at the far end, in the corner made by the shed.

  The heat. Grasses, some rather luxuriant and swaying in the breeze, a beetle marches on the ground, bird droppings by the wall—the heat, yet now somehow different, and a different odor, of urine perhaps, I daydreamed of remoteness, it was all remote as if we had wandered for months, a place thousands of miles away, at the ends of the earth—suddenly a whiff of warm decay, there was a pile of garbage nearby, rains had created a seepage by the wall—stalks, stems, rubble—clods of dirt, pebbles—yellowish stuff . . . The heat again, yet different, unfamiliar . . . yes, yes . . . our reaching this corner that lived apart, referred us to that other, the darkly-cool thicket with its little pieces of cardboard and sheet metal—with the sparrow—as if by the power of distance, the one echoed back to the other—and our searching here seemed to come to life.

  An onerous task . . . because, even if something were hiding here, to which the arrow, on the ceiling, in our room, was pointing, how would we find it in this entanglement, among weeds, among bits and pieces, in the litter, surpassing in number everything that could be happening on walls, on ceilings? An overwhelming abundance of connections, associations . . .How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet? How many meanings can one glean from hundreds of weeds, clods of dirt, and other trifles? Heaps and multitudes gushed also from the boards of the shed, from the wall. I got bored. I straightened up and looked at the house and the garden—these huge, synthesized shapes, these enormous mastodons of the world of reality, were restoring order—I rested. Let’s go back. I was about to say this to Fuks but his face, stuck to one spot, stopped me short.

  Slightly above our heads the cracked wall formed a recess consisting of what looked like three caves diminishing in size—inside one of the caves something was hanging. A stick. A small stick, about an inch long. It hung on a white thread, not much longer. It was hitched over a jagged brick.

  Nothing more. We searched through everything in the area once again. Nothing. I turned around and looked at the house, glistening with its windowpanes. A whiff of freshness announced the evening, a breath that released leaves and grasses from their torpor in the heat. The leaves trembled on the young trees standing in a row, whitewashed and propped up with stakes.

  We returned to our room.

  Fuks collapsed on his bed.

  “Say what you will, but the arrow has led us to something,” he said warily, and I, no less warily, muttered: “Like what?”

  Yet it was hard to pretend that one didn’t know: a hanged sparrow—a hanged stick—the hanging of the stick from the wall repeating the hanging in the thicket—a grotesque result that suddenly increased the sparrow’s intensity (revealing the extent to which the sparrow had lodged within us, regardless of any pretense of our forgetting it). The stick and the sparrow, the sparrow reinforced by the stick! It was hard not to think that someone had led us to the stick to make us see the connection with the sparrow . . . but why? What for? As a joke? A prank? Someone had played a trick on us, made fools of us, to amuse himself . . . I felt uneasy, Fuks felt it too, and this prompted caution.

  “I wouldn’t bet three cents that somebody isn’t pulling our leg.”

  “Who?”

  “One of them . . . someone who was there when I talked about the sparrow and how we identified the arrow on the ceiling in the dining room. The same person gouged the arrow in our room that leads to what? To the stick on the thread. A practical joke. A hoax.”

  Yet it didn’t make sense. Who would want to play such elaborate jokes? What for? Who could have known that we’d discover the arrow and take such a deep interest in it? No—this concurrence, however small, between the stick on the thread and the sparrow on the wire—was pure chance. Granted, a stick on a thread, one doesn’t see this every day . . . yet the stick could have been hanging there for a thousand reasons unrelated to the sparrow, we had exaggerated its importance because it turned up at the end point of our search, as its outcome—when in fact it wasn’t any outcome at all, it was just a stick hanging on a thread . . . Pure chance then? Indeed . . . and yet one could sense in this series of events a propensity for congruity, something hazily linking them together—the hanged sparrow—the hanged chicken—the arrow in the dining room—the arrow in our room—the stick hanging on a thread—something was trying to break through and press toward meaning, as in charades, when letters begin to make their way toward forming a word. What word? Indeed, it seemed that everything wanted to act in the name of an idea . . .What idea?

  What idea? Whose idea? If there was an idea, someone must have been behind it—but who? Who would have wanted to bother? But what if . . . what if Fuks had played a trick on me, I don’t know, out of boredom maybe . . . but no, why on earth Fuks . . . so much effort into a stupid caper . . . no, this didn’t make sense either. Pure chance then? I might have finally conceded that it was pure chance were it not for another abnormality that somehow had the tendency to hook onto this abnormality . . . were it not for the strangeness of the stick backed by another strangeness that I preferred not to tell Fuks.

  “Katasia.”

  Obviously he too had thought of at least one of the faces of the Sphinx—he sat on his bed, head bowed, slowly swinging his dangling legs.

  “What?” I asked.

  “When someone has such an affected little beak . . . ” he mused and added cunningly: “Go to your own for whatever turns you on!”* He liked that and repeated with conviction: “I tell you, believe me, go
to your own for whatever turns you on.”

  Indeed . . . the lip and the stick appeared to be roughly related, if only because the lip was so eerie . . . but what then? Accept that Katasia was amusing herself with such subtle intrigues? Nonsense. And yet there was a kinship . . . the kinship, the associations opened before me like a dark cavern, dark yet pulling me in, sucking me in, because behind Katasia’s lip loomed Lena’s lips parting-and-closing, and I even felt a hot shock because the stick, in relating, after all, to the sparrow in the bushes, was as if the first sign (but oh, how pale and indistinct) in the objective world that confirmed, as it were, my hallucinations about Lena’s mouth “relating to” Katasia’s mouth—a faint, fantastic analogy but, after all, this same “relating to” came into play here, somehow establishing a pattern. Did Fuks know anything about this mouth connection or the association between Lena and Katasia—had he imagined such a thing—or was it solely and entirely my own? . . . Not for the world would I ask him . . . And not just because it was embarrassing. Not for the world would I entrust this whole affair to his say or to his ogling eyes that had unnerved Drozdowski, his having problems with Drozdowski, just as I had mine with my parents, weakened me, stifled and tortured me—I didn’t want him as a confidant or a buddy! No to that—“no” was generally the key word in our relationship. No and no. And yet, I became excited when he said “Katasia”—I was almost happy that someone else, not just I, had spotted the possibility that her lip had some connection with the stick and the bird.

  “Katasia,” he said slowly, reflecting, “Katasia . . . ” But I could already see, after a brief euphoria, the whitish pallor of his gaze return, Drozdowski appeared on the horizon and, just for the sake of killing time, Fuks went on spinning his inept reasoning: “The minute I saw her . . . the problem with her mouth seemed . . . but . . . it could be either way . . . this way or that . . .What do you think?”

  *In English in text.

  *Adapted from a Polish expression, to which, in later chapters, Gombrowicz gives onanistic implications.

  chapter 3

  The evanescence, the intangibility of it all forced us to retreat, we returned to our work, I to my manuscript, he to his notes, but my distraction did not leave me, it mounted as the evening wore on, and the deepening darkness of those places, beyond the road, at the far end of the garden, penetrated the brightness of our lamp. Now another possibility occurred to us. Who could guarantee that, in addition to the arrow we had discovered, there weren’t other signs hidden on the walls or elsewhere, in the combination of the stain above the sink and the peg that lay on top of the cupboard, for example, or in the scratches on the floor . . . For every sign deciphered by accident how many might go unnoticed, buried in the natural order of things? From time to time my gaze tore away from my papers and penetrated into the depths of the room (unbeknownst to Fuks, whose eyes also probably darted there). But I didn’t worry about it very much, the fantastic volatility of the affair of the stick, constantly dispersing, would not tolerate anything that was not, just like it, ephemeral.

  In any case, it was as if the surrounding reality was already contaminated by the possibility of meanings, and this pulled me away, constantly pulled me away, from everything else, yet it seemed comical that something like a stick could affect me to such a degree. Supper, as unavoidable as the moon—and again I had Lena across from me. Before going down for supper Fuks remarked, “It’s not worth telling them about this,” and he was right, discretion was advisable if we didn’t want to be taken for a couple of blockheads, lunatics. Supper then. Leon, eating his radishes, told us how years ago director Krysiński, his boss at the bank, taught him the art which the boss called “the knack” or “the reverse” that—according to him—any self-respecting aspirant to a high-ranking position in the civil service should have at his fingertips.

  He imitated the deceased director Krysiński’s guttural, subdued voice: “Leon, take what I’m telling you to heart, remember, it’s all a matter of the knack, don’t you see? Take the situation where you must reprimand an office clerk, what should you do at the same time? Well, of course, my good man, pull out your cigarette case and treat him to a cigarette. That’s the reverse, mind you, the knack. If you need to be harsh or unpleasant to your client, smile, if not at him, then at least at his secretary. If you don’t have the knack he’ll close up on you too much and grow stiff. On the other hand, when you’re all sweetness with your client, slip in a crude word from time to time to jerk his leash and keep him from possibly stiffening up, because if he hardens and grows stiff on you, what then?” “Well, my dear fellows,” Leon recounted, a napkin tucked under his chin, his finger in the air, “one day the president of the bank breezes in for an inspection, I was already a division manager, I entertain him with respect and all due honors, but during dinner I stumble and spill half a carafe of red wine on him. So he says: ‘I see you’re from director Krysiński’s school!’”

  Leon had a good laugh while he was cutting his radish, buttering it, salting it . . . he contemplated it for a moment before putting it in his mouth.“Hey! Oh! Oh, that bank, I could go on about it for a whole year, it’s hard to express, to disentangle it, as I let my thoughts run on I don’t know what to latch on to, there’s so much, so much, so many days, hours. O God, O my God, O holy God, so many months, years, seconds, the director’s secretary and I quarreled and fought like cat and dog, she was stupid, so help me merciful God, and a tattletale, once she ran to the director to tell him I had spat in the wastepaper basket, so I said to her, have you gone daft? . . . but what’s the use, lots could be said, the why and wherefore of that spit, how, and what, as well as the way the conflict grew over months, years . . . who would remember it? What’s the sense of babble-chattum replicatum, mmme! . . . ” He sank deep in thought, then added in a whisper: “And what blouse was she wearing at the time? Can’t remember for the life of me . . . which one . . . The embroidered one? . . . ” He interrupted his reverie and exclaimed vigorously to Roly-Poly: “Sweetie-pie, whatever it was, whatever happened, peek-a-boo Roly-coo!” “Your collar is crooked,” Roly-Poly said, she set a jar aside and proceeded to fix his collar.“Thirty-seven years of conjugal life, if you please gentlemen,” he continued, “take it or leave it, either way, sweetie pie, me and you, Roly-coo, on the River Vistula, on the blue Vistulie, once in the rain, oh boy, oh boy, well now, how many years has it been, hard candy candycoo, I bought some hard candy, then that janitor, the janitor, and the roof leaked, hey, hey, hey-ho, mommy-dearie, how many years has it been, in a little café, and what a café, where, gone into thin air, gone-zo, bye-bye . . . I can’t put it together again . . . Thirty-seven years! What of it . . . Hey, ho!” he brightened, then lapsed into silence, retreated into himself, stretched out his hand, reached for the bread and slowly rolled a little pellet, watched it, fell silent, hummed ti-ri-ri.

  He sliced a piece of bread, cut off the edge to make it square, buttered it, spread the butter evenly, patted it with his knife, salted it, and pushed it into his mouth—he ate it. And he seemed to make sure he ate it. I looked at the arrow that had spread, spilled onto the ceiling, what kind of an arrow was that, how could we have perceived it as an arrow?! I also looked at the table, at the tablecloth, one must admit there is a limit to what can be seen—so then, on the tablecloth, Lena’s hand resting, relaxed, small, coffee-colored, warmly-cool, growing by way of the wrist from the more distant whiteness of her shoulder (which I merely guessed at because I didn’t venture that far with my gaze), and so, the hand was quiet and idle, but looking more closely one noticed a trembling, it was, for example, the trembling of the skin at the base of the ring finger, or the touching of two fingers, the middle and the ring finger—more like embryos of movement, yet sometimes becoming a real movement, the touching of the tablecloth with an index finger, the brushing of a fingernail against a fold . . . it was so far removed from Lena herself that I experienced it as a huge country full of internal movements, uncontrolled, subject no doubt
to the laws of statistics . . . and among these movements there was one, a slow coiling of her palm, a lazy contracting of her fingers into her palm, a shy, snuggling movement . . . it had caught my eye earlier . . . and yet, was it so entirely unrelated to me? Who could know, but isn’t it curious, that it generally happened at the very moment she lowered her eyes (I hardly saw those), this time she did not raise them even once. Her husband’s hand, that disgusting, eroto-noneroto-erotic-nonerotic abomination, that oddity burdened by obligatory eroticism “because of her,” in connection with her little hand, yet his hand, after all, was decent, presentable . . . it was also here, on the tablecloth, nearby . . . And, of course, the coilings of her hand might be relating to his hand, but they also might have had an ever so faintly-slight connection with my watching from beneath downcast eyelids, although, one must admit, the likelihood of it was almost nil, one in a million, but the hypothesis, in all its frailty, was explosive, an igniting spark, like the breath that generates a tornado! . . . Because, who knows, she might actually hate this man whom I didn’t want to observe closely because I was afraid, on whose periphery I was straying constantly and who was also unknowable, just as much as she was, after all . . . because, if it turned out, for instance, that she, by her husband’s side, gives herself over to coilings under my gaze, so what, she might be like that, her little sin could be hitched to her innocence and meekness, which (the innocence and the meekness) would in this case become a higher-grade perversion. Oh, the wild power of feeble thought! Oh, the exploding breath! Supper went on in full swing, Ludwik remembered something, took out his notebook, Fuks prattled on, saying to Leon “she was a real shrew,” or “so many years at the bank, good Lord!” and Leon, his brows knit, his face like a bespectacled bald-head, recounted in detail, what and how, and why “well, fancy that” . . . “no, because she didn’t use the tissue-paper” . . . “there was a table-top” . . . and Fuks listened to avoid thinking about Drozdowski. I thought “and what if the coiling is for my sake,” and I knew it was a useless thought, but, what’s this, a twist, a jolt, a cataclysm, and with a sudden rush of her corpulence Roly-Poly dives under the table, she’s under the table, for a moment both the table and Roly-Poly go into a frenzy . . . what is it? It was the cat. She pulled it out from under the table, a mouse in its jaws.