Cosmos

by Witold Gombrowicz

  “Ten thousand years. It’s been calculated.”

  “Oh, Ludwik,” Leon said, “oh, Ludwik . . . Ludwik . . . ” He fell silent and sat bristling. It seemed that Ludwik’s word “configuration” was in some way tied to the “configurations” that had occurred to me, it seemed like a peculiar coincidence that he mentioned configurations of soldiers, just as I was drowning in so many configurations myself—wasn’t it almost like putting my own anxieties into words?—oh, the “almost,” how many times already had this “almost” made my life miserable—yet one also has to take into account the fact that I was struck by the story about the soldiers because it connected with my own anxieties, and therefore I singled it out from many other things which they also talked about. And so it was this coincidence that was partially (oh, only partially!) of my own doing—and that’s exactly what was so difficult, awful, misleading, I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me, oh, the criminal keeps returning to the scene of the crime! When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every moment of our existence . . . the swarm, the roar, the river . . . nothing is easier than to configure! Configure! For a split second this word took me by surprise like a wild beast in a dark forest, but it soon sank into the hurly-burly of the seven people sitting here, talking, eating, supper going on, Katasia handed Lena the ashtray . . .

  “We’ll have to explain everything, clarify, get to the bottom of it . . . ” but I didn’t think inspection of the little room would yield anything, our project for tomorrow would merely help us cope with the strange dependence of mouth on mouth, city on city, star on star . . . and, in the final analysis, what’s so strange about mouth returning to mouth, when all the time, unceasingly, one thing was returning me to another, one thing lurked behind another, behind Ludwik’s hand was Lena’s hand, behind a cup a glass, behind the streak on the ceiling an island, the world was indeed a kind of screen and did not manifest itself other than by passing me on and on—I was just the bouncing ball that objects played with!

  Suddenly something tapped.

  The sound of someone tapping a stick against a stick—a brief, dry sound. Not loud—even though it was a distinct sound, so distinct that it rose above all the other sounds. Did someone tap? Did something tap? I went numb. Something like “this is the beginning” flashed through my head, I was petrified, get on with it, you, the apparition, crawl out! . . . But the noise was lost in time, nothing happened, perhaps it was the creak of one of the chairs . . . nothing important . . .

  Nothing important. Next day, Sunday, introduced turmoil into the flow of our life, although today, like any other day, Katasia woke me and stood over me for a moment out of sheer friendliness, but it was Mrs. Wojtys herself who took care of cleaning our room and, while rolling around with her dustcloth, recounted how in Drohobycz they had a “lovely first floor in a villa, with amenities,” she used to rent rooms with board, or without, then six years in Pułtusk “in a comfortable apartment on the third floor,” but besides regular tenants she often had as many as six boarders “from the city” on her hands, usually older people, with assorted ailments, so, a soft pap for this one, soup for another, nothing acidic for yet another, until one day I told myself, no, no more of this, enough, I can’t do it, and I said this to my old fogies, you should have seen their despair, oh, dear lady, who will take care of us, so I replied: can’t you see, I put too much heart into this, I wear myself down to the bone, why do it, why should I be killing myself, and especially since I’ve had to look after Leon all my life, you have no idea, this and that, always something, I just don’t know how this man would have managed without me, coffee in bed all his life, all his life, fortunately that’s how I am, I hate to be idle, from morning ’til night, from night ’til morning, but also enjoying ourselves, visiting, entertaining guests, you know, Leon’s aunt is married to count Koziebrodzki, if you please, and when I married Leon his family stuck up their noses, even Leon himself was so scared of his auntie, the countess, that he didn’t introduce me to her for two years, so I say, Leon, don’t you be scared, I’ll show this auntie of yours a thing or two, and one day I read in the newspaper there’s a charity ball, and that the countess Koziebrodzka is on the organizing committee, I don’t tell Leon anything, I just say Leon, we’ll go to the ball, well, I tell you, for about two weeks I was secretly getting ready, two seamstresses, a hairdresser, massages, I even had a pedicure to give myself courage, I borrowed Tela’s jewelry, Leon was dumbstruck when he saw me, I’m calm, we walk into the ballroom, music, I take Leon under the arm and we head straight for the countess and, imagine, she turned her back on us! She insulted me! So I say to Leon, Leon your aunt is a fathead, and I spat on the floor, while he, you know, not a word, he’s like that, talk, talk, but when it comes to doing something, he does nothing, he beats around the bush, he wriggles out, but later, when we lived in Kielce, I made preserves, lots of neighbors visited us, they ordered my preserves months in advance, she fell silent, she went on dusting as if she hadn’t said anything, until Fuks asked:

  “Then what?”

  So then she said that one of her tenants in Pułtusk was a consumptive and I had to serve him cream three times a day “to the point that it was disgusting” . . . and she left. What did it all mean? What was the sense of it? What was behind it? And the glass tumbler? Why did I notice the tumbler yesterday, in the living room, by the window, on the table, together with two spools of thread—why did I look at it as I passed by—was it worth the attention—should I go down, look again, check? Fuks too must have been checking up on things in secret, studying, looking around, pondering, he too was extremely scattered—stupidly scattered. Fuks, yes . . . but he didn’t have even one hundredth of the reasons I had . . .

  Lena was circulating like blood in this nonsense!

  I couldn’t resist the impression that Lena was behind it all, striving toward me, straining to force her way, shyly, secretly . . . I could almost see her: straying about the house, drawing on ceilings, setting up the whiffletree, hanging the stick, making figures out of objects, she darts along the walls, around corners . . . Lena . . . Lena . . . Forcing her way to me . . . maybe even pleading for help! Nonsense! Yes, nonsense, but on the other hand, couldn’t those two anomalies—that “union” of mouths and those signs—have anything in common? Nonsense! Yes, nonsense, but could something within me as intense as the contamination of Lena by Katasia’s lips be just my imagination? We had supper alone with Roly-Poly because Lena went with her husband to visit their acquaintances, Leon was out playing bridge, it was Sunday, Katasia’s day off, she had left right after lunch.

  Supper, seasoned with Roly-Poly’s incessant voice—when Leon wasn’t around, chattering beset her—on she went, that the tenants, that with the tenants, that her whole life, you gentlemen have no idea, a meal for this one, sheets for that one, enema for yet another, this one wants a space heater, goes on about a space heater . . . I hardly listened, something about “with whores” . . . “a bottle behind the bed, he’s almost dying, yet the bottles” . . . “I tell him, whims, whims, but you know where your scarf is” . . . “I fought tooth and nail, worked myself to the bone, I’m not made of stone” . . . “Oh, the rabble, so help me God” . . . “it’s a holy terror, that human filth, dear Jesus” . . . her beady eyes followed our food consumption, her bust resting on the table, and on her elbow the skin peeling off and passing into pink violet, just as on the ceiling where the pustulation of the central bay passed into a pale, yellowish rash . . . “If it weren’t for me, they’d all be dead” . . . “often in the night when he groaned” . . . “so they transferred Leon, and we rented” . . . She was like the ceiling, behind her ear she had what looked like a hardened blister, and then a forest began, her hair, first there seemed to be two or three rings of hair, then the forest, grayish-black, thick, rolling up, curled, here and there in locks, here and there in tufts, then smooth again, falling down, the skin on her nape suddenl
y very delicate, white, then nearby a scratch as if made by a fingernail, and a reddened area, then something like a blemish above her shoulder, while at the edge of the blouse a staleness began, an area of wear and tear that disappeared under the blouse, and there, under the blouse, continued farther down to various warts, adventures . . . She was like the ceiling . . . “When we lived in Drohobycz” . . . “tonsillitis, then rheumatism, stones in the liver” . . . She was, like the ceiling, beyond grasp, inexhaustible, infinite in its islands, archipelagos, lands . . . After supper we waited until she went to bed and, around ten o’clock, we went into action.

  What phenomena would be unleashed by our action?

  Forcing our way into Katasia’s room presented no difficulties, we knew she always left a key by her window that was overgrown with ivy. The difficulty was that we had no assurance that the person who was leading us by the nose—assuming that someone was leading us by the nose—did not lie in ambush spying on us from a hiding place . . . someone who could even raise hell for all we knew? We spent a lot of time wandering about near the kitchen to see if anyone was watching us—but the house, the windows, the little garden, lay peacefully in the night over which swept thick, tousled, clouds, and from behind them the crescent moon sailed out, racing. Dogs chased each other among the little trees. We were afraid of ridicule. Fuks showed me a small box that he held in his hand.

  “What is it?”

  “A frog. It’s alive. I caught it today.”

  “What’s that all about?”

  “If anyone catches us, we can say that we sneaked into her room to put the frog in her bed . . . As a joke!”

  His face, rebuffed by Drozdowski, was white-carroty-fish-like. He had a frog, all right, that was clever! And the frog, one had to admit, was not out of place, its slipperiness circling round Katasia’s slipperiness . . . I was astonished, even worried by his coming up with the frog . . . and even more so because the frog was not all that far removed from the sparrow—the sparrow and the frog—the frog and the sparrow—was something hiding behind this? Did it mean anything? Fuks said:

  “Let’s go and see what’s happening with the sparrow. We have to wait a while anyway.”

  We went. Out the door, in the bushes, we encountered the familiar darkness, the familiar smell, we approached the familiar place, but our gaze beat in vain against the blackness, or rather against a multitude of various blacknesses effacing everything—there were black caverns caving in, next to other holes, spheres, layers, poisoned by semi-existence, and this flowed together into a kind of concoction that had a restraining, opposing effect. I had a flashlight, but I wasn’t free to use it. The sparrow had to be ahead of us, by two paces, we knew where, but we couldn’t reach it with our gaze that was being devoured by something negating it, by darkness. Finally . . . the bird loomed as if it were the center of a configuration, a thickening no bigger than a pear . . . it hung . . .

  “Here it is.”

  In the silent darkness the frog in the box announced itself . . . not that it made a sound, yet its existence, excited by the sparrow’s existence, made itself known. We were with the frog . . . it was here, with us, in the presence of the sparrow, the sparrow was its crony in the frog-sparrow realm, and it brought the slippery lip slipaway to me . . . and the trio of sparrow-frog-our-little-Katasia pushed me into her mouth cavern, turning the black cavern of the bushes into her gaping mug, equipped with the affected frolic of her lip . . . leaping aside. Lust. Swinish business. I stood motionless, Fuks was already retreating from the bushes, “nothing new,” he whispered, and, when we came out onto the road, the night with its sky, its moon, with its plenitude of silver-edged clouds, blazed forth. To action! A frantic wish for action, for a cleansing wind, beat within me, I was ready to attack anything!

  Yet this action of ours was pitiful, God be merciful—two conspirators with a frog, following the line of a whiffletree. Once more we swept the scene with our gaze: the house and the faintly visible trunks of the little trees, white with lime, the huge trees growing densely in the thicket, the spreading expanse of the little garden—I felt for the key at the window, in the ivy, and after inserting it into the lock I gently lifted the door on its hinges so it wouldn’t creak. At this time the frog in the box ceased to be important, it moved to the background. Instead, when the door opened, the cavern of the small, low room that gave off a bitter, oppressive odor, like that of a laundry room, or bread, or herbs, that cavern of Katasia’s excited me, the botched-up mouth suckled all over me, sucking me, and I had to be careful not to let Fuks catch on to the agitation in my breathing.

  He went in with the flashlight and the frog, while I remained in the partly open door to stand watch.

  The dimmed light of the flashlight, muted by a handkerchief, slid over the bed, the wardrobe, the little table, the wastepaper basket, the shelf, revealing in turn other places, corners, fragments, undergarments, odds and ends of clothes, a broken comb, a small mirror, a plate with coins, gray soap, objects and objects emerging one after another, as in a movie, while outside clouds followed clouds—at the door I was between the two processions: of objects and of clouds. And even though each one of the objects in the little room was hers, Katasia’s, they acquired the ability to express her only when taken as a whole, creating a substitute for her presence, a second presence that I was violating through Fuks—with his flashlight—while I was standing to one side, on watch. Violating slowly. The spot of light moving, jumping aside, stopped momentarily on something, as if in meditation, to then rummage again, ferret, grope in stubborn search for swinishness—that’s what we looked for, that’s what we sniffed for. Oh, swinish, swinish business! Meanwhile the frog was in the box on the table where he had left it.

  Servile inferiority, born of a dirty and jagged comb, of a greasy mirror, of a threadbare, damp towel—a servant’s chattels, already urban, yet still a villager’s, simple in nature, we pawed through them to gain access to the slippery, twirled-up sinfulness that was lurking here, in this mouth-like cavern, yet hiding its every trace . . .We groped for depravity, perversity, for villainy. It had to be here somewhere! Suddenly the flashlight came upon a large photograph in a corner past the wardrobe, and out of the frame emerged Katasia . . . with her mouth unblemished! Imagine that!

  Pure guileless mouth, good-hearted country mouth!

  On a much younger, rounder face! Katasia, all decked out, with a festive décolletage, on a bench under a palm tree behind which one could see the bow of a boat, a stout foreman with a mustache in a stiff collar holding Katasia by her little hand . . . Katasia smiling pleasantly . . .

  When, waking at night, we could swear that the window is on the right, the door behind our head, one single orienting sign, such as the light from the window or the murmur of the clock, is enough for everything to fall into place in our heads, all at once and in a definitive way, just so. What now? Reality intruded with lightning speed—everything returned to normal, as if called to order. Katasia: a respectable housekeeper who had injured her lip in a car accident; we: a couple of lunatics . . .

  Dejected, I looked at Fuks. In spite of this he kept on searching, the flashlight ferreted again, bills on the table, stockings, holy pictures, Christ and the Mother of God with a bouquet—but what of this search? He was merely making the best of it.

  “Get ready,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”

  All possibility of swinish lust vanished from the illuminated objects, and instead, the illuminating itself became swinish—the groping, the sniffing around, took on a suicidal character—the two of us in this little room were like two lascivious apes. He reciprocated my gaze with a haggard smile and continued to wander over the room with the flashlight, it was obvious that his head was totally empty, nothing there, nothing, nothing, like someone who realizes that he has lost everything he was carrying, and yet continues on his way . . . and his failure with Drozdowski chummed up with this failure, it all flowed together into one big flop . . . with an obscene, whorehouse smile
he peeped into Katasia’s ribbons, cotton-wool, dirty stockings, shelves, her little curtains, from the shadow where I stood I saw how he did it . . . just for revenge and for the hell of it, with his own lasciviousness retaliating for the fact that she had ceased to be lascivious. Pawing around, the spot of light dancing round a comb, the heel of a shoe . . . But all for nothing! In vain! All this made no sense any more, it slowly fell apart like a parcel after the string is cut, objects grew indifferent, our sensuality was dying. And the threatening moment approached when one wouldn’t know what to do.

  Then I noticed something.

  This something could have been nothing, but it also might not be nothing. Most likely not important . . . but in any case . . .

  As a matter of fact, he shone the light on a needle that was peculiar because it was driven into the tabletop.

  This would not have been worthy of attention were it not that I had already noticed something even stranger, namely the nib of a pen driven into a lemon rind. So, after he fingered the needle that had been driven in, I took his hand and led the flashlight to the nib—the sole purpose being to restore to our presence here the semblance of an investigation.