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ADVENTURES IN THE IMMEDIATE UNREALITY(Romanian title: ÎNTÎMPLĂRI ÎN IREALITATEA IMEDIATĂ)

(1936)

By Max Blecher (1909-1938)Translated by Alina Savin

„I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire"

P. B. Shelley

When I glance for a long time at a precise point on the wall, I sometimes forget who

and where I am. At that particular moment my identity vanishes, and I feel, for a second, no

more, like a totally different person. This abstract character and my real self are fighting for

my awareness with equal forces.

But very soon after my identity recomposes itself, like in those stereoscopic views in

which sometimes the two images are being separated by mistake and the operator reunites

them, offering, all of a sudden, to the viewer’s eye, an illusive relief. My room appears in

those instants of a freshness never before existent. It regains its precedent consistency and the

objects flow wisely into their places, just like a clod of soil thrown into a glass of water lays

to its bottom in layers of different elements, well defined and of various colors. The room’s

elements stratify in their own contour and in the coloring of the old memory I have of them.

This feeling of remoteness and loneliness during the instants when my daily being is

dissolved into inconsistency is tremendously different from any other physical sensation.

When it lasts longer, it converts into the pure terror that I might never again regain myself,

and an insecure silhouette lingers in my brain, surrounded by a strong and profound, almost

tactile light, as certain distant objects seen in the fog.

The terrible question “Who am I?” lives by its own in me, like a totally new entity, a

mere excrescence from my body, made out of new and totally unknown skin and bones and

organs. Its solution is being asked for by a sort of clearness, more profound and more

essential than that of the brain’s. Everything capable of motion in me begins to stir, to move,

to struggle, to revolt, more strongly and elementary than in my daily life. Everything begs for

a rapid solution.I sometimes rediscover the chamber as it usually is and as I know it, just as if I simply

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closed and opened my eyes; and every time the space is clearer, just like a certain landscape

appears through the field glass, better and better organized, while, setting the distances, one’s

eye sails through all the veils of intermediary images.

I finally recognize myself and my room, and I feel a slight feeling of drunkenness. The

chamber is unexpectedly condensed in its inner matter, and I’m implacably back to the tactile

surface of things: the deepest the wave of obscure misunderstanding, the highest its peak; now

I have the clear certitude that every object must occupy its inherent place in the universe and

that I must be the one I truly am.

Thus my awkward struggle in the midst of uncertainty has lost all its denominations, it

becomes just an untainted regret that I had found nothing in the depths of my efforts. I am

only surprised by the fact that such a complete lack of meaning could ever have been attached

so profoundly to my intimate matter. Now that I found myself and I try to express my

feelings, these appear to me like totally impersonal, simple exaggerations of my identity,

grown up like a cancer from their own substance. Like a jelly fish’s tentacle, stretched

immeasurably, having desperately explored the waves’ entrails before returning safely under

the gelatinous sucker, I traversed all the certainties and uncertainties of my existence, in order

to come back, irrevocably and painfully, under the opaque shell of my solitude, which all of a

sudden becomes infinitely pure and pathetic...

The feeling of remoteness of the world is clear, and more intimate: a lucid and tender

melancholy, like a dream which comes back into one’s mind in the midst of the dark night.

Only this melancholy reminds me something of the mystery and the slightly

distressing charm of my childhood crises.

Only in this sudden vanishing of my identity can I revive the past fallings into cursed

spaces, and only in the seconds of immediate lucidity that follow the return to the surface does

the world appear to me in the light of its unusual inutility and desuetude, which grew around

me when my hallucinatory trances had overthrown me.My crises were always provoked in the very same places, a street, the house, some

garden. Every time I was overrunning their borders, I was overwhelmed by a state of swoon

and dizziness. Invisible traps placed at random through the town, differing in nothing from the

surrounding atmosphere, they were ferociously waiting for me to fall a prey to their special

substance. A step, one single step was enough to enter deep in one of these cursed spaces, and

the crisis was inevitable.

One such place was in the town’s central park, in a small clearing at the end of analley, where nobody was ever walking. The ring of bushes and wild roses and dwarfish

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acacias surrounding it opened tightly towards the desolating landscape of an empty field. In

the whole world there was definitely no other place so sad and so deserted. Silence was

setting down, opaque and condensed, on the dusty leaves, in the summer’s musty heat. From

time to time one could hear the echoes of the trumpets from distant regiments. Infinitely

poignant were those long callings from the desert… Far away, the air heated by the sun was

trembling, vaporous like the transparent steam flowing above the boiling water.

The place was wild and isolated, of an endless loneliness. There, the day’s heat was

infinitely more tiresome, and the air heavier by a long way. The yellowish dusty bushes were

burning in the sun, in a scenery of an absolute seclusion. A bizarre feeling of uselessness was

flowing above the clearing, which was living its own outlandish existence somewhere in the

world, where I had come without any purpose or reason, in a certain summer afternoon,

useless as well, an afternoon chaotically lost in the warmth, anchored through the bushes in

the tangential space. At that particular moment I was feeling, profoundly and painfully, that I

didn’t belong to this world, that I had nothing to do in it but wander through lost parks,

through their dusty, heated clearings, deserted and wild, wild and deserted. And this

wandering was finally breaking my heart to pieces.

Another cursed place was at the other side of the town, between the high and hollow

shores of the river in which I was bathing with my playmates.

The shore was sunken on a side. Up on the bank there was a sunflower-oil factory.

The seeds’ hulls were thrown between the edges of the sunken shore, and in time the pile

raised gradually, until it became a long slope of dry hulls, uniting the bottom of the coast to

the bank of the water. My playmates were descending towards the water on this slope,

carefully, holing their hands, stepping deep into the carpet of rotten vegetable fabric.

The walls of the high shore, on the two sides of the slope, were abrupt and

fantastically irregular. The rain had sculptured long stripes of delicate fissures and intricate

arabesques, but hideous like the badly scared wounds, true rags into the mud’s wet flesh,horrible and unwrapped cuts.

I had to descend as well amidst these walls which impressed me tremendously,

towards the river. When I was still far away, long before getting to the shore, my nostrils were

filled by the smell of the rotten hulls, which was preparing me for the crisis, as a short period

of incubation: this smell was unpleasant, and, at the same time, sophisticatedly suave.

Yes, my crises were all like this…

My olfactory sense was separated somewhere deep inside me in two different parts,and the effluviums of decomposed aroma were vibrating in different regions of my enflamed

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brain. The gelatinous smell of the decaying dirt was very distinct, emanating, at the same

time, a very pleasant, warm and domestic smell of grilled peanuts.

When this perfume touched my nostrils, it was transforming me in only some seconds,

circulating abundantly through all my inner fibers, dissolving and then replacing them with a

more airy and insecure matter. From that moment on I couldn’t avoid my natural impulses, as

my chest was filled with a pleasant and bewildering feeling of fainting which hurried my steps

towards the shore, the place of my final defeat.

I was descending towards the water in a madman’s rush, on the pile of hulls. The air

was opposing me its strong density, sharp as a knife’s blade, and the world’s chamber was

crumbling, chaotically, in an immense hole with unexpected forces of attraction. My

playmates were witnessing with fearful eyes my fanatical gallop. The gravel was very narrow,

and the slightest wrong step could have thrown me into the river, in a place where the bubbles

at the surface of the water confirmed the evidence of tremendous depths. Still, I knew very

well what I was doing. Upon arriving near the water, in that rush, I was avoiding the pile of

hulls and running further on the shore, towards a place where the coast was hollowed. There

was a small cave deep down there, a shadowy cavern, cool as a small room engraved in the

rock. I would enter it and fall down, sweaty, tired and trembling.

As I was finally regaining my spirits, I would find next to me the intimate and

immensely pleasant scenery of the cave, with its delicate spring flowing directly from the rock

on the ground, forming, in the middle of the floor, a basin of very clear water, over which I

was leaning to see the wonderful laces of the green moss on its bottom, the worms attached to

the pieces of wood, the fragments of old iron, covered with rust and mud, and other living

creatures and various things, fantastically beautiful.

Except for these two cursed places, the rest of the small town was lost in a paste of

shapeless banality, with anonymous houses, which could have replaced one another, with

trees unbearably immobile, with lazy dogs, vacant lands and dust, dust everywhere.Still, in closed spaces, the crises were coming more easily and more often. Usually, I

couldn’t stand being alone in an unfamiliar room. The mere fact of waiting would produce in

some seconds the suave and terrible faint. The whole space was repairing for it, a warm and

hospitable intimacy was filtered by the walls, flowing gently over the furniture and the

objects. All of a sudden, the room became sublime and I was feeling immensely happy. But

this was only a betrayal of the crisis, one of its delicate and tender perversities, because, in the

next second of my ecstasy, everything would fall down into tiny pieces, completely mingled. Iwas staring around me with eyes wide open, but the objects were gradually losing their

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common sense, and a new existence was surrounding them, as if they had been suddenly

uncovered by an unseen hand from under the multiple layers of thin and transparent papers

which had hidden them until then, and their appearance was suddenly ineffably new, destined

to a superior and mysterious utility, concealed to my modest understanding.

But this is not all: the objects were revived by a regular freedom frenzy, they were

becoming independent, not only isolated but also ecstatically exulted.

I was always touched by their enthusiasm to live in a new aura: I was tied to them by

powerful adherences and invisible anatomical cohesions, I was becoming part of the room,

like all the other objects, in the same way in which a new organ, grafted on the living flesh,

integrates to the foreign body, through subtle exchanges of fluids and substances.

Once, during a crisis, the sun had sent on the wall a tiny cascade of rays, as an unreal

water of marble and gold and shiny waves. I could see the corner of a large wooden bookcase

with thick volumes with leather covers protected by the glass windows, and these prosaic

details, perceived from the remoteness of my faint, finally anaesthetized and overthrew me,

like a last inhalation of chloroform.

I was regularly disturbed by the most common and known aspects of those objects.

The habit of seeing them so many times finally managed to dissolve their exterior skin, and

thus they seemed to me of an excoriated purple-red color, and alive, tremendously alive.

The supreme moment of the crisis was consumed in a floating beyond any world,

pleasant and painful in the same time. But if I heard steps on the corridor, the room was

reintegrated quickly in her old appearance. The walls were again condensed, the room was

imperceptibly diminishing its exaltation, and this fact was offering me the assurance that the

certitude in which we live is separated by the world of uncertainties by a very thin pellicle.

I would wake up in the far-too-familiar room, sweaty, tired and filled by the sensation

of the uselessness of the surrounding things. I could observe in them new details, just as if one

can discover a strange facet in an object which he had been using for years.The room preserved vaguely the memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of sulfur

after an explosion. I was looking at the books in the bookcase and I could notice, in their

immobility, in a strange way, a treacherous air of complicity and mystery. Actually the

objects around me never abandoned this secret attitude, ferociously hidden in their severe

stillness.

The common words loose their viability at certain depths of the soul; for example,

now I try to define exactly my crisis and I can only find images. The magic word expressingthem should borrow something from the essences of other sensitivities, dissolving from them

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as a new smell in a scholarly composition of perfumes.

In order to exist, it should contain a small piece of the stupor which overwhelms me

when I’m looking at a person in reality and then I am following his or her gestures in a mirror,

and then something from the disequilibrium of falls in a dream, with their whistling fear

which crosses my spine in an unforgettable second, or something like the fog and

transparency surrounding the bizarre landscapes in the crystal globes.

I envied the people around me, hermetically closed in their mysteries and isolated by

the tyranny of the objects. They were prisoners under their overcoats, but nothing coming

from outside could harm them, or terrorize them, or defeat them, nothing could infiltrate in

their magnificent prisons, while between me and the outer world there was no boundary, I was

invaded by everything surrounding me, as if my whole skin were pierced. The attention,

anyway very distracted, with which I was looking around me, was not a simple act of will.

The world was prolonging in me, naturally, all its tentacles, and all the long arms of the hydra

were crossing my entrails. I was facing with despair the conviction that I was living in the

world I was seeing. And I had no weapon to fight against this certitude.

The “crises” belonged in the same measure to me and to the places where they

occurred. Well, it’s undeniable that some of these places contained in their being a sort of

“personal” evil, but all the rest were already fallen into trance long before my arrival there,

such as certain chambers where I could feel that my crises are being crystallized from their

melancholic immobility and their infinite loneliness.

Reminiscent of a sort of equity between me and the world (an equity which was

deepening me irreparably into the uniformity of the unrefined matter), the conviction that the

objects could be inoffensive became equal to the terror which they were sometimes imposing

to me. Their harmlessness was produced by a universal lack of forces.

I vaguely felt that nothing in this world can be accomplished, that nothing can be

brought to perfection. The objects’ fierceness was being exhausted as well. In this way an ideagrew into my mind gradually, that of the imperfection of any manifestations in this world, be

they even supernatural.

In a perhaps endless interior dialogue, I was sometimes defying the evil forces around

me, in the same manner in which I was sometimes despicably eulogizing them. I was

practicing certain strange rituals, but far from useless. If, having left alone from home and

walking on different roads, I was always coming back to my initial trajectory, this happened

only because I never wanted to draw with my steps an invisible circle and close in it housesand trees; my walk resembled to a thin wire, and if I hadn’t closed it on the same road, after

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having declutched it, the objects assembled in the footsteps’ knot would have remained

forever and irremediably tied to me.

If, during the heavy rains, I was trying not to move the stones in the steams’ way, this

was only because I didn’t want to add any effort to the water’s action, and thus, to avoid

interceding with the displaying of its elementary forces.

Fire was purifying it all. I was always carrying in my pocket a box of matches. When I

was very sad I was lighting a match and passing my fingers through the very flame, first one,

then the others.

In all these actions there was hidden a certain melancholy of being, a sort of torment

organized in the limits of my childhood existence.

In time, some of the crises disappeared naturally, but still, their strong memory lingers

in my brain.

When I become a teenager, I had no more crises, but that crepuscular state which

preceded them and the feeling of the profound uselessness of the world which followed, all

these become gradually my natural condition.

The uselessness filled the hollows of the world, like a liquid diffused in all directions,

and the sky above me, always correct, absurd and indefinite, acquired the concrete color of

despair.

In this surrounding uselessness and under this everlastingly cursed sky do I still

wander, today and forever.

A doctor was consulted regarding my crises, and he pronounced a weird word:

“paludism”; I was very surprised that my most intimate and secret anxieties can have a name,

and, above all, such a peculiar name. The doctor prescribed me quinine: again I was

astonished; I couldn’t understand how the sick spaces, they , could be cured by the quinine

which I was supposed to take. But I was mostly bewildered by the doctor himself. Long timeafter the consultation he kept existing and wiggling in my memory, with tiny, automatic

gestures, and I was unable to stop their inexhaustible mechanism.

The doctor was a tiny little man, his head like an egg. The pointed extremity of the egg

elongated itself with a little black beard, in continuous stir. His small velvet eyes, his short

gestures and his ejected mouth made him look like a mouse. This impression was so powerful

from the first moment, that it seemed to me natural, when he began to talk, to hear him

prolonging the letter “r” in every word, lengthily and sonorously, as though, while speaking,he were crunching something hidden and delicious. Also, the quinine he gave me

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strengthened my conviction that the doctor had something mousey in his personality. I got the

confirmation of this certainty in the weirdest way, and it is so intimately connected to very

important occurrences from my childhood, that I must devote some individual lines to this

incident.

Close to our house was a shop of sewing machines, where I used to go every day, and

remain there for hours and hours. Its owner was a young man, Eugene, who, after having

recently accomplished his military service, came in our town to make a living and opened this

shop. He had a sister, Clara, one year younger than him. They were living together in a slum

somewhere, and during the day they were working in the shop; they had no relatives or

acquaintances in the town.

Well, the shop was just a simple private room, rented for the first time for trade, that’s

why the walls preserved the memory of the previous saloon painting, with violet garlands of

lilac and the rectangular and discolored traces on the places where paintings had been hanged,

and from the ceiling a bronze lamp was still suspended, with a shade of dark-red ceramic,

covered on the side with green faience leaves; it was a very remarkable collection of precious

ornaments, old and obsolete, but impressive, it reminded me of a royal funerary monument, or

of a retired general, wearing during the parades his old and elegant uniform.

The sewing machines were meticulously placed one near the other on three lines

separated by two large alleys. Every morning, Eugene was carefully drenching the floor, with

an old pierced sardine can. The trickle of water was very thin and Eugene was handling it

with adroitness, drawing on the floor spirals and scholarly eights. Sometimes he was even

signing himself, or was writing the date. The elegant painting on the walls evidently

reclaimed this kind of delicate craft.

At the back of the shop there was a sort of cabin, separated by the rest of the space by

a sort of screen of wooden boards, its entrance hidden by a green curtain. Eugene and Clara

were sitting there all the time, they were also eating lunch there, in order not to leave the shopduring the day. They called it “the artists’ cabin”, and one day I heard Eugene saying: “This is

indeed an artist’s cabin. What am I, if not an actor, when, for half an hour, I masterly try to

convince the client to buy a swing machine?”

And then he added, with a very erudite tone: “Well, life as a whole is but pure drama.”

Behind the curtain, Eugene was sometimes playing the violin. He was leaning over the

music papers on the table, patiently deciphering the notes, as if he was untangling a ball of

knotted thread, in order to take out of it only one single delicate purl, the music line. Thewhole afternoon a small gas lamp was burning on an old wooden bottom drawer, filling the

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and not touch it for the rest of the afternoon. But this was not the only possibility of

unfavorable occurrences. So many other things happened in that cabin… While Clara was

making her toilet, I was listening to the most inaudible sounds and I was observing the

slightest movements, because any of them could have ruined the afternoon. For example,

Eugene could vaguely cough, swallow a drop of saliva or say that he is thirsty and wants to go

to the confectioner’s to buy a cake; these minuscule facts, like this cursed cough, could ruin,

monstrously and enormously, full afternoons. The whole day was then losing its vital

substance, and during the night, in my bed, instead of thinking at leisure (and stopping for

some minutes on every detail in order to visualize it and remember it better) of the precise

moment when my knees touched Clara’s stockings (that is, to hollow, to sculpture, to

disembowel and to caress this beloved image), I was tossing and turning in my burning sheets,

unable to sleep and waiting anxiously for the next day.

One day, something particularly unusual happened; it all began with the halo of a

disaster and ended with an unforeseen surprise, but so abruptly and starting from such a

insignificant gesture, that my whole subsequent joy, relying on it, was like a scaffolding of

heteroclite objects held in a fragile equilibrium by a magician in a single immobile point.

With a single step, Clara changed entirely the content of my visits, giving them

another meaning and a new fever, like in that old chemical experiment, in which a small piece

of crystal, put into a goblet of red liquid, transformed it instantly into a startlingly green one.

I was sitting on the couch, in the same place, waiting with the same impatience as

usual, when suddenly the door opened and somebody entered the shop. Eugene left the cabin

immediately. Everything seemed lost. Clara continued to make her toilet, unconcerned, while

the conversation in the shop prolonged endlessly. I secretly hoped that Eugene came before

his sister finished dressing.

I was following the painful deployment of the two events, Clara’s toilet and the

conversation in the shop, thinking that they could continue to unfold independently until Claragot out of the shop, or, on the contrary, they could have met in the fix point of the cabin, like

in certain movies, when two steam engines come one towards the other with a crazy speed,

and they will smash or will pass one next to the other, depending if a mysterious hand

intervenes or not to change the switch, in those moments of febrile waiting I clearly felt that

the conversation is following its own way and, in parallel, Clara kept powdering her nose…

I desperately tried to correct the fatality by stretching my knees towards the table, so

that they could meet Clara’s feet. I was sitting exactly at the edge of the couch, in a position if not weird, then at least comic.

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I had the impression that, through the mirror, Clara was looking at me, smiling.

Soon she finished rounding with carmine the contour of her lips, and powdered her

cheeks for the last time. The perfume spread in the cabin dizzied me with despair and lust,

and, the moment she passed next to me, the thing I least expected happened: she touched her

legs to my knees, like every day (or maybe even intensively? But this was of course just a

physical illusion), with that air of indifference that between us nothing is going on.

There is a complicity of the vice deeper and more rapid than any understanding

through words. It sweeps instantly all your body, like an interior melody, and transforms

completely your thoughts, your flesh and your blood.

In the minuscule second when Clara’s feet touched me, new expectations and new

hopes were born in me, immense and incontrollable.

With Clara I understood everything from the first day, from the first moment; she was

my first complete and normal sexual experience. An adventure full of torments and

expectations, full of inconsistencies and anxieties and gritting of teeth, something that could

have been love if it weren’t just a simple continuity of a painful eagerness. Just as I was

impulsive and daring, Clara was calm and capricious; she had a violent manner of provoking

me, and felt a sort of doggish joy in seeing me suffering, a joy that always preceded the sexual

act, playing a tremendous part in its process.

The first time the thing I had been waiting for so long happened between us, her

challenge was so elementary and almost brutal I might say, that the poor phrase she uttered

then, and the anonymous verb she used, still preserves in my memory something from that

past initial virulence. It is enough to think a little longer of that phrase, and my present

indifference is corroded like by an acid, and her words become again violent as they were

back then.

Eugene was away in town. We were both sitting silent in the shop, Clara was wearingher regular afternoon dress and she was sitting cross-legged behind the screen, knitting

attentively.

Some weeks passed from the occurrence in the cabin, and between us grew suddenly a

sort of severe coldness, a secret tension manifested through an extreme indifference from her

part. We stayed one in front of the other for hours, without saying a word, and still, in this

silence one could feel the threat of a sudden explosion, a perfect secret understanding, I only

lacked the mysterious word that could have gone through the conventional layer; everyevening I was building dozens of projects, but the next day they were crushed by the most

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elementary obstacles: the knitting that could not be interrupted, the lack of a more favorable

light, the silence in the shop or the three lines of sewing machines, too correctly arranged in

order to permit any change in the shop, even a sentimental one. My jaws were always

clenched; the silence was terrible, locking in itself the evidence and the contour of a scream.

Clara interrupted it. She spoke almost in whispers, without raising her eyes from the

knitting: “If you had come today earlier we could have done it , Eugene left immediately after

lunch in town.”

Until then, never in our silences the shadow of a sexual allusion could have been

found, and all of a sudden, now, from only some words, between us sprang a new reality, so

miraculous and extraordinary, like an antique marble statue grown from the floor in the

middle of the shop, among the innumerable sewing machines…

In one second I was near Clara, I took her hand and begun to violently caress and kiss

it. She wrested it and said, irritated: “Leave me now, it’s too late.” “Please, Clara, come…”

“No, it’s too late, Eugene will come back, just leave me alone.” I was touching feverishly her

shoulders, her breasts, her legs. Clara kept protesting. “Come now, we still have time.” I was

imploring her. “Where?” “In the cabin… come on, it’s so good there…”

And when I pronounced the word “good”, my chest was filled by a warm hope, I

kissed her hand again and I forced her to rise from the chair. She let herself go, without

enthusiasm and trudging her feet on the floor.

From that day on, all the afternoons changed their “habits”: the scenery was the same,

Eugene, Clara and the same sonatas, but now I could hardly stand the sound of the violin, I

was waiting for Eugene to leave, tormented, in the cabin my unrests transformed into other

monsters, as if I was playing a new game on a paper with lines drawn for a game already

known.

When Eugene was leaving, the true expectancy begun: it was heavier and more

unbearable than the previous one; the silence of the shop turned into a block of ice.Clara was sitting at the window, knitting: this was our every day “prelude”, without it

our adventure could not take place. Sometimes Eugene was leaving while Clara was almost

naked in the cabin: at the beginning I thought that this detail could rush the course of the

events, but I was wrong, Clara did not permit any other prelude than the one in the shop. I had

to uselessly wait for her to dress and to go near the window so that I could open the fleshy

book of the afternoon at its first page, behind the window.

I was sitting in front of her on a stool and I was beginning to talk to her, to beg her, toask her, for a long time. I knew it was in vain, only rarely did Clara accept to come with me,

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and then she used one of her foxiness, only because she didn’t want to offer me her perfect

allowance: “I’m going in the cabin to take a pill, I have a horrible headache, please don’t

follow me.”

I would promise her not to do it, of course, and in one second I was following her, and

in the cabin one of these fabulous fights was starting, a fight during which Clara’s forces were

of course ready to give up. She was then falling on the couch, as if she had stumbled over

something. Then she put her hands under her head and closed her eyes as if she were sleeping;

it was impossible for me to change even with a centimeter the position of her body; I had to

wrest her dress from under her legs in order to touch her. Clara had no resistance to any of my

gestures, but didn’t help me either. She was immobile and indifferent like a piece of wood,

and only her intimate and secret warmth proved to me that she is attentive and that she

“knows”.

During this period the doctor who prescribed me the quinine was consulted. The

proofing of my impression that he had something mousey in himself was accomplished in the

cabin and, as I already said, in the most surprising way.

One day, while I was pasted to Clara and I was tearing her dress with hungry gestures,

I suddenly felt something strange moving in the cabin and –with the obscure but very sharp

instinct of the extreme pleasure towards which I was heading, and which couldn’t admit any

foreign presence around, and not with my real senses- I understood that some living being had

penetrated our intimacy and was looking at us.

I turned my head, scared, and I saw on the bottom drawer, behind the powder box, a

mouse. He stopped exactly near the mirror, on the drawer’s edge, and was looking at me with

its small black eyes, in which the light of the lamp was reflected in two shiny golden round

spots. For some seconds long as the eternity its gaze pierced my eyes and descended deep

down into my brain, and I felt in its silent meditation a heavy reproach towards my actions.

All of a sudden this mutual fascination dissolved and the mouse ran away, disappearingbehind the drawer. I was now positive that the doctor had come to spy us.

The same evening, at the moment when I had to take the quinine, my theory was

enforced by a perfectly illogical reasoning, but very plausible for me: the quinine was bitter,

and the doctor had seen in the cabin the pleasure which Clara was offering me; thus, in order

to establish an universal equilibrium, he prescribed me the most unpleasant medicine ever,

and I could almost hear him crunching his reasoning: “The biggerrrrrr the pleasurrrrre, the

bitterrrrr the rrrrrrrremedy.”Some months after the consultation, the doctor was found dead in the attic of his

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house; he had shot himself in the head.

My first question when I heard the news was:

“Were there any mice in that attic?”

For me, this piece of information was vital.

In order for the doctor to be truly dead, it was imperative that a wild herd of mice to

raid over the dead body, to hole it and to extract the entire mousey matter, borrowed by the

doctor during his lifetime, in order to be able to practice his illegal “human” existence.

I must have been twelve years old when I met Clara. No matter how deep I explore my

childhood memories, they are all related to the sexual awareness, which appears to me with

the same nostalgia and the same purity, like the adventures of the night, of the fear or of the

first friendships, different in nothing from the melancholies and the other hopes, for example,

the boring expectation to become an “adult”, which I was measuring concretely every time I

was shaking the hand of someone older, trying to determine the difference in weight and size

of my small hand, lost under the unrefined fingers, in the enormous palm of the one holding

mine.

At no single moment in my childhood did I ignore the difference between men and

women. Maybe at a certain point I confused all the living creatures in a unique clearness of

movements and stillness, but I have no exact memory of this period. The sexual secret was

always only apparent. It was a simple “secret”, but just as well it could have been an object,

like a table, or a chair.

When I examine attentively my most distant memories, their lack of actuality is being

revealed through the misunderstanding of the sexual act itself. My imagination distorted the

feminine organ and the carnal act itself, which for me was more pompous and eccentric than

what I subsequently discovered with Clara. Still, in these misinterpretations, which became in

time more and more accurate, there was a feeling of mystery and bitterness, which completedits consistency little by little, like a great artist’s painting, which started from a simple sketch

of shapeless forms.

I remember myself very small, in a long shirt touching the ground, crying in a

doorway, in a sunny yard, its gate opened towards a deserted market, an afternoon market,

warm and infinitely sad, with sleeping dogs and people sleeping in the shadows of their stalls

with fruits and vegetables. The air was filled with the smell of the rotten fruits, some huge

flies are buzzing around me, sucking my tears fallen on my hands; they are flying in franticspirals, in the yard’s dense and heated light. I rise, I begin to urinate, attentively, in the dust.

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The ground absorbs avidly the liquid, and on that place remains a dark spot, like the trace of

an inexistent object, I wipe my face with my shirt and I lick the tears gathered on the corners

of my mouth, feeling their flavor. I sit again in the doorway and I feel miserable. I was beaten.

Not long time ago, in the room, my father slapped me several times on the naked

buttocks, I don’t know too well why. I’m trying to think. I was lying in my bed, near a little

girl of about my age; we had been put there to sleep, while our parents were gone for a walk. I

didn’t hear them coming, I don’t remember what I was doing to the little girl under the

blanket. I only know that, the moment my father suddenly raised the blanket, the little girl had

already begun to accept my proposals. My father became red, got angry and beat me. This

was everything.

I sit in the doorway, in the sun, I cried and then wiped off my tears, now I draw with

my finger in the dust circles and lines, I change my place, I move at the shadow, I sit cross-

legged on a big rock and I feel better. A girl came in the yard to take some water, she whirls

the rusted wheel of the pump. I listen carefully the squeak of the old iron, I look at the water

springing in the pail, like a magnificent silver horse tail, I look at the girl’s big dirty legs, I

yawn because I didn’t sleep and from time to time I try to catch a fly. It’s the simple life that

starts again after tears. In the yard, the sun keeps pouring its overwhelming heat. It’s my first

sexual adventure and my oldest childhood memory.

From now on, obscure instincts swallow, grow and distort, entering in their natural

limits. What should have been an amplification and a continually growing fascination was for

me a long series of renouncements and dreadful reductions towards the ordinary; the

evolution from childhood to teenage meant for me a continuous diminishing of the world and,

as things organized themselves around me, their ineffable aspect disappeared gradually, like a

shiny surface covered steadily with vapors.

Ecstatic, miraculous, Walter’s shining figure still fascinates me.

When I met him he was sitting in the shadow of an acacia tree, on a trunk, and wasreading a number of Buffalo-Bill. The clear morning light was filtered by the green and thick

leaves, in a fizz of chilly shadows, and his clothes were far from ordinary: he was wearing a

dark-red tunic, with buttons sculptured in bone, deer-suede trousers and, on his naked feet,

sandals knitted from delicate strips of white suede. When I sometimes want to live again the

extraordinary sensation of this meeting, I stare for a long time at the yellowish cover of some

old number of Buffalo-Bill. Still, Walter’s real presence was beyond any description, no word

could possibly portray his red tunic in the greenish air at the shadow of the acacia.His first gesture was a sort of elastic jump, like an animal’s. We immediately became

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friends. We spoke a little and all of a sudden he made me a stupefying proposal: to eat acacia

flowers. It was the first time I ever met someone who ate flowers. In only a few seconds

Walter was up in the tree, and he gathered an enormous bouquet. He then got down and

showed me how the flower should be delicately detached from the corolla, and then suck only

its top. I tried as well; the flower crackled a bit under my teeth, with a very pleasant click, and

a suave and fresh perfume spread in my mouth, a new perfume, never tasted before.

For a while we ate acacia flowers, in complete silence. All of a sudden, he grabbed

my hand tight: “Would you like to see the headquarter of our gang?” His eyes were burning, I

was suddenly afraid. “Do you want to or not?” he asked me again. I hesitated for one second,

then I said “I want to”, with a voice which wasn’t mine anymore and with a desire of risk and

adventure exploded suddenly from in my inner depths and which I felt as not belonging to me.

Walter took my hand and we passed through the small gate at the far end of the

garden, and got to a deserted and vacant field. The grass and the wild herbs had covered the

soil. The nettles were burning my feet and we had to put aside with our hands the thick stalks

of hemlocks and burdocks. We finally got to the ruins of a wall; in front of it there were a

ditch and a deep pit. Walter jumped inside and called me after him; the pit opened directly

into the wall, and it is through there that we entered into an abandoned cellar.

The steps were broken and covered with moss; the walls were filtering moisture and

the darkness in front of us, impenetrable. Walter clenched my hand and dragged me after him.

We slowly descended about ten steps, and then we stopped.

“We have to stay here, he said, we cannot walk further, there at the back there are

some iron people, with iron hands and heads, grown from the floor. They stand still and if

they find us in the dark they will strangle us.”

I turned my head and I looked with despair towards the circle of light on top of us,

coming from a simple and clear world, where no iron people existed, and where one could see

from the distance the plants, the people and the houses. Walter brought from somewhere awooden board and we sat on it. We remained silent for some minutes. It was good and chilly

in that cellar, the air had a heavy smell of humidity and I could have remained there for hours

and hours, isolated, far away from the heated streets, form the boring and depressing little

provincial town. I felt good there, closed between the cold walls, under the earth which was

walloping in the heat. The useless hum of the afternoon could be heard like a distant echo,

through the opening of the cellar.

“We bring here the girls we catch”, Walter said. I vaguely understood what he wastalking about. The cellar become swiftly of an unprecedented appeal.

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“And what do you do with them?” Walter laughed.

“You mean you don’t know? We do what all men do with women, we sleep with them

and… with a feather…”

“With a feather? What kind of a feather? What do you do with them exactly?” Walter

laughed again.

“How old are you, little boy? You don’t know what men do with women? You don’t

have a feather? Here is mine.”

He got out of the pocket of his tunic a small bird’s feather.

In that split second I felt that one of my habitual crises was starting. Maybe if Walter

hadn’t got out of his pocket that feather, I would have continued to tolerate around me that air

of complete and desolating seclusion of the cavern, but all of a sudden this isolation got a new

and painful and deep meaning, only now did I realize how far away that cellar was from the

town and its dusty narrow streets. It was like I was withdrawing from myself, in the loneliness

of an underground depth, under some ordinary summer day. The black shiny feather which

Walter was showing me was the concrete proof that nothing more exists in my decipherable

universe. Everything was melted in a swoon where it was shining weirdly, in the middle of

that odd chamber with wet herbs, in that darkness which was inhaling the light like a cold,

hungry, wide open mouth.

“What’s wrong? Water asked. Let me tell you what we do with the feather…” The sky

outside, seen through the cellar’s opening, was becoming more and more white and vaporous

with every second.

His words were hitting the walls and were crossing my soft flesh as if I were a liquid

creature. Walter kept talking, but he was so far away from me, and so airy, that he seemed just

a simple clearness in the dark, a spot of fog wiggling in the shadow.

“You first caress the little girl with the feather, I could hear like in a dream, and then

you caress yourself… You must know these things…”All of a sudden, Walter came close to me and begun to shake me, as if he wanted to

wake me up. Slowly, slowly I began to regain my consciousness. When I opened my eyes,

Walter was bowed over my pubis, its mouth tightly stuck to my sex. I could not possibly

understand what was going on.

Walter rose in his feet.

“This did you good… The Indians during the war wake up the blessed like this, and

we in our gang, we know all the Indian charms and incantations and remedies…”I woke up smashed and tired. Walter ran away and disappeared. I climbed the stairs as

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well, very carefully.

During the next days I searched for him everywhere, but it was in vain, the last option

was to meet him in the cellar, but when I went there, the deserted field was completely

changed, everywhere there were piles of garbage, with corpses of animals and rotten rubbish,

smelling horribly in the sun. With Walter I hadn’t seen any of these things. I gave up going to

the cellar and so I never saw Walter again.

Soon after this I got a feather which I was keeping secretly in my pocket, wrapped in a

piece of newspaper. Sometimes I had the impression that I was the one who invented that

entire story with the feather, and that Walter never existed in reality. From time to time I was

unfolding the piece of newspaper and I was looking at the feather for a long time: its mystery

was unreachable, I was touching my cheek with its soft and silky shine and this caress was

shuddering me as if an invisible person, but still a real one, had touched my face with the top

of the fingers. The first time I used it was one beautiful evening, in quite unusual

circumstances.

I always liked to stay outside until late, and that evening a heavy and ponderous storm

had started. All the day’s heat was condensed in an overwhelming atmosphere, under a black

sky cut by lightings. I was sitting in a doorway and I was looking at the game of electric lights

on the walls of the narrow lane. The wind was sheering the bulb which illuminated the street

and the concentric circles of the globe, shadowed on the walls, were swerving like a liquid

agitated in a vase. Long ribbons of dust were raised on the road, rising in spirals.

All of a sudden, in a wrapping of wind, I had the impression that a white marble statue

is rising in the air. At that moment I could guess an incontrollable certitude, like every

certitude. The block of white stone was moving up fast and edgeways, like a balloon escaped

from a child’s hand. In only a few seconds the statue became a simple white spot in the sky,

the size of my fist. I could now see distinctly two white persons, holding hands and sliding in

the sky like two skiers.In that precise moment, a little girl stopped in front of me. I must have had my mouth

and my eyes wide open, looking amazed at the sky, because she asked me, astonished, what I

was seeing up there.

“Look, a flying statue… look quickly… it will soon disappear…”

The little girl looked up attentively, knitting her brows, but told me that she could see

nothing. She was my neighbor, a fattish creature with red cheeks like the rubber and hands

always wet. Until that night I had only seldom spoken to her. Now, in front of me, shesuddenly began to laugh:

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“I know why you tricked me, she said, I know what you really want…”

She began to move away from me jumping in one leg. I rised and ran after her; I called

her in an obscure passage and she came without any resistance. There, I raised her dress. She

let herself be handled, submissive, holding my shoulders. Maybe she was more surprised by

what was going on, than aware of the indecency of the action itself.

The most surprising sequel of this adventure came some days after, in the middle of

some market. Some masons were slaking lime in a container. I was looking at the lime boiling

when suddenly I heard someone calling my name and someone said aloud: “Aha, with the

feather… you like to do it with the feather…” He was a young man of about twenty years old,

a big reddish boy, a horrible and unbearable creature. I think he was living in some house

inside the dark passage, I only saw him screaming at me for one second no more, on the other

side of the container, emerging like a phantom from the lime steams like an infernal

apparition speaking in the middle of the fire and of the thunders. Maybe he told me something

completely different, and my inflamed imagination gave to his words a new meaning, one of

which I was preoccupied during those days, I cannot believe he could have seen something in

the compact darkness of that passage. Still, thinking more about it, I finally concluded that

maybe the passage wasn’t as obscure as I thought it was, and everything was visible, and

maybe we even stood in the very light… All these presumptions strengthened my conviction

that, during the sexual act, I was possessed by a sort of dream, which was blurring my sight

and my whole senses, and finally I imposed to myself to be more cautious next time. Who

knows to what sort of aberrations my inflamed body and spirit could force me to accomplish:

in full day, under the weight of the excitation and possessed by it like by a heavy sleep in

which I was moving unconsciously?

In deep, almost organic connection with the memory of the feather there is another

one, with a small black book, extremely bewildering. I once found it on a table and looked in

it with a lot of interest. It was an ordinary novel, “Frida”, by Andre Theuriet, in an editionillustrated with many drawings. In every one of these drawings appeared the image of a blond

little boy, with curly hair and velvet clothes, and of a fattish little girl, with a dress with

furbelows and frills. The little boy looked exactly like Walter. The children appeared in the

drawings sometimes together, sometimes separately: it was obvious that they mainly met in

the hidings of a park and in the shadow of the ruined walls. What were they doing together?

This is what I wanted to know. Did the little boy have a feather, like me, and kept it hidden in

his pocket? You could not see it in the images and I didn’t have time to read the book. Somedays after, the little book disappeared without traces. I begun to look for it everywhere, I

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asked of it in all the bookshops, but nobody ever heard of it. It was probably full of secrets

and hidden truths if one couldn’t find it anywhere.

One day I dared to enter in the building of a public library. A tall, pale man, with

slightly trembling glasses, was sitting in the back of the hall, on a tall chair, and looked at me

coming timidly. There was no way back. I was bound to go to his table, and there, to

pronounce the sensational word “Fri-da”, like a confession, in front of the shortsighted man,

of all my hidden vices. I got very close to his desk and murmured with a feeble voice the

infamous title. The librarian’s glasses begun to tremble more evidently on his nose, he closed

his eyes as if he was searching for something in his memory and then told me distinctly that

he “never heard” of it. But still, for me, the trembling of his glasses was the proof of some

interior trouble; I now had the concrete proof that “Frida” contained the most veiled and most

thrilling revelations.

Many years after this I found the book again, on the shelf of some forgotten bookshop.

It was not my small book dressed in black fabric, but a humble and miserable brochure, with

yellowish covers. For a second no more I wanted to buy it, but I changed my mind and put it

back again. The image of a small black book is still intact in my memory, in it is enclosed

something from the bitter and authentic perfume of my childhood.

In the minuscule and unimportant objects: a black bird’s feather, an ordinary book,

and old photograph with fragile and obsolescent characters, who seemed to suffer from some

serious internal disease, a tender ashtray of green faience sculptured like an oak leaf, always

smelling of old ash, in the simple and elementary remembering of Samuel Weber’s glasses

with thick lentils: in these tiny ornaments and domestic things can I find the whole

melancholy of my childhood, and that essential nostalgia of the world’s futility, which

surrounded me from everywhere like a water with mineral waves. The raw matter -with its

profound and heavy masses of soil, rocks, sky and waters, or with its most far fromunderstanding forms, the paper flowers, the mirrors, the small glass spheres with their

enigmatic interior spirals, or the colored statues- always kept me prisoner, and this state of

slavery was always hitting painfully my inner walls, perpetuating in me, meaninglessly, the

weir adventure of being a man.

Anywhere my reason was heading towards, it always met objects and immobilities,

like some sort of walls in front of which it had to kneel.

I was thinking, terrorized by their diversity, of the infinite forms of the matter, and Iwas tormenting myself during the endless nights, stirred by the series of objects continuously

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aligned in my remembrance, like a mechanical stair unfolded in thousands and thousands of

steps.

Sometimes, in order to stop the wave of things and colors which was flooding my

brain, I would imagine the evolution of a single contour, or of a distinct object. I was

imagining, for example –and this, like a correct repertoire of the world- the succession of all

the shadows on the earth, the outlandish and fantastic grey world that sleeps at the bottom of

the so-called real life.

I imagine, in my solitude:

The black man, lying like a veil on the grass, with his thin legs slopped like water,

with arms of dark iron, then walking between horizontal trees, with diaphanous branches.

The shadows of the ships fleeing on the sea, unstable and aquatic like the common

sadness which comes and goes, sliding on the scum.

The shadows of the birds flying, like black birds born from the black dust, or from a

gloomy aquarium.

And then the solitary shadow, lost somewhere in the space of our round planet.

I was also thinking of the caves and the grottos and the unbearably deep precipices in

the mountains, of them, but also of that elastic and warm and ineffable cavern, the sexual

cavern… I don’t remember from where I got a small electric lantern and, during the night, in

my bed, maddened by the lack of sleep and by the objects in the room that were continuously

changing their place, I was hiding under the blanket and observing, with strained attention, in

an intimate and aimless study, the folds of the sheet and the minuscule valleys between them.

I needed such a precise and minuscule occupation to calm down. My father found me once, at

midnight, exploring with the lantern the unknown under the blanket, and took it from me. But

he didn’t scold me, I think that for him this discovery was so strange, that he couldn’t find in

his common vocabulary the words and the morality which one could have applied to such an

action.Some years later I saw in an anatomy book a photograph with a wax casting of the

ear’s interior. All the channels, all the sinuses and all the holes were made of full matter,

representing their positive image. I was tremendously impressed by this photograph, I almost

fainted, all of a sudden I realized that the world could exist in a more authentic reality, in a

positive structure of its caverns, so that all that is empty could become full, and the present

relief could simply become a void of an identical form, without any content, like those

delicate fossils which reproduce in the rock the traces of some prehistoric shell of leaf, whichmacerated during the time-consuming epochs, leaving behind only the delicate prints of their

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shape.

In such a world, people would stop being only these fleshy and colored excrescences,

full of complicated organs and bound to rotten, but pure voids, floating, like the air bubbles in

the water, through the humid and supple substance of the full universe. It was exactly like the

intimate and painful sensation which I often felt during the endless teenage wanderings, when

all of a sudden I would wake up in the core of a terrible isolation, as if all the people and the

houses around me had pasted up in a compact and shapeless mucilage, in which I was just a

simple void, sadly wandering around, purposeless.

Seen as a whole, the objects formed different settings. The impression of spectacular

reality was always inside me, and I had the feeling that everything evolves in the middle of a

sad and fictional show. When I sometimes managed to get rid of the boring, uniform vision of

a colorless world, its theatrical, emphatic and obsolete aspect appeared hideous in front of my

eyes.

Within the framework of this general show, certain amazing performances were

particularly drawing my attention, because their artificiality and insincerity and the actors who

played in them seemed to have understood completely the world’s sense of mystification.

They were the only ones to know that, in a spectacular and decorative universe, the real life

had to be played falsely and artificially. Two of these incredible shows were the cinema and

the panopticon, with its carnival sideshow.

Oh! The cinema hall, long and dark like a sunken submarine! Its entrance doors were

covered with crystal mirrors, in which a part of the street was reflected: thus, there was a free

show even from the entrance, before the one inside the cinema, an amazing screen in which

the street appeared in a dream-like greenish light, with somnambular people and cotton

carriages, moving softly in its waters.

In the hall itself the atmosphere was hot, moldy, sour and acid like in a public bath.The floor was cemented and the chair’s creaks sounded like some short and desperate

screams; in the first rows, in the very front of the screen, a full crowd of shop-boys and

tramps were eating sun-flower seeds and commenting the movie aloud. The titles were

syllabified by some dozens of mouths in the same time, like the texts for an adult school.

Exactly under the screen the orchestra was playing, composed of a woman piano player, a

violin player and an old Jew, precipitately playing the contrabass. This old man also had the

mission to utter different sounds according to the actions on the screen. He was screamingcock-a-doodle-doo when, at the beginning of the movie, appeared on the screen the cock of

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the cinematographic house, and once, I remember, when the life of Jesus was presented, at the

moment of the resurrection, he started to hit frenetically with the bow in his contrabass’ box,

in order to imitate the celestial thunders.

I was living the episodes in the movie with an extraordinary intensity, integrating

myself into the action like a true character of the drama. It sometimes happened that the film

absorbed my attention to such an extent that all of a sudden I had the impression that I was

walking in the parks on the screen, or that I am leaning on the balustrade of the Italian terraces

on which Francisca Bertini was acting pathetically, with disheveled hair and arms agitating as

through transparent veils.

And anyway there is no clear difference between our real person and our different

imaginary interior personages. When light was turned on during the breaks, the hall seemed

like coming back from very far away. There was something precarious and artificial in this

atmosphere, much more uncertain and ephemeral than the action on the screen, I would close

my eyes and wait until de mechanical grind of the equipment announced me that the movie

continued; then I was finding again the hall submerged in darkness, and all the persons around

me, illuminated directly by the screen, pale and transfigured like a gallery of marble statues,

in a museum illuminated by the moon at midnight.

Once, the cinema took fire. The strip of celluloid had broken and took fire

immediately, so that, for a few seconds, the flames appeared on the screen, like an honest

premonition that the cinema is burning down and, at the same time, a sort of logical

continuation of the function of the projector to present the “latest news” and whose mission

thus made it, through an excess of perfectionism, to present the last and the most thrilling

information, that of its own fire. From everywhere burst screams and short shouts, “Fire!

Fire!”, resembling some revolver shots; in only one second the hall was filled with so much

noise that it seemed that the watchers, silent and obscured until then, had been gathering in

themselves only howls and rumble, like a sort of calm and inoffensive batteries which explodewhen their capacity of recharging was violently exceeded.

In only few minutes and even before half of the watchers had been evacuated, the

“tremendous fire” was extinguished, but still they kept screaming, as if they had to consume a

certain quantity of energy in themselves. A young lady, with her face powdered like plaster,

was screaming stridently looking straight into my eyes, without making any step towards the

exit. A muscled pretzels-seller, convinced of the usefulness of his physical power in this kind

of situations, but still not knowing how to use it, was raising one by one the wooden chairsand was throwing them towards the screen. Suddenly an ample and very sonorous boom was

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heard: one of the chairs had hit the old musician’s contrabass. The cinema was always full of

surprises.

In the summer I was entering at the matinee and getting out in the evening, when it

was almost dark. The light outside had changed; the ending day was dying slowly. Therefore I

could see that during my absence the world had experienced an immense and essential

transformation, a sort of sad obligation to continue endlessly its regular flow, for example

towards the night, its diaphanous and spectacular flow on the way to the unknown. I was

entering then in the middle of a complete certitude which, through its daily rigor, appeared to

me of an endless melancholy, in a world subjected to the most theatrical effects and obliged

every evening to perform a correct sunset, while the people around me appeared like some

poor beings, pitiful for the seriousness with which they were consuming their modest lives

and for the naivety of their occupations. Only one human being in the whole city could

understand these things, and I admired her without any boundaries: she was the town’s fool.

She alone in the midst of these rigid persons, all just a package of prejudices and conventions,

had kept intact her freedom to scream and to dance in the street whenever she felt like. She

wandered on the streets all ragged and dirty and toothless and crazily-raveled-red-haired,

holding close in her arms, with a motherhood tenderness, an old little wooden coffer filled

with dry bread and various objects gathered from the rubbish.

She was showing her sex to the passers-by, with a gesture which, having been

employed with another purpose, could have been qualified as “stylish and elegant”. Oh, what

a sublime and splendid thing, to be a fool! I was thinking, and unfortunately I had to confess

to myself, infinitely sad, that I was separated by he extreme freedom of a lunatic’s existence

by a whole chain of strong and stupid familiar habits and a strong and crushing rational

education. I think that someone who never had this feeling is condemned to forever ignore the

true amplitude of the surrounding world.

This general and elementary impression of spectacular was becoming a real terror assoon as I entered a panopticon with wax figures. It was one of those fears intermingled with a

drop of vague pleasure and somehow with that weird feeling that any one of us has that he

already lived in a certain place. I think that if once the instinct of having a goal in life will

flourish in me, and if this impulse will be related to something really profound, essential and

irremediable in my true being, then my body should become a wax statue in a panopticon and

my life, a simple and endless contemplation of the exhibitions from the panorama.

In the somber light of the carbide lamps I was feeling like truly living my own destiny,unique and impossible to imitate. All of my daily actions could be mixed like a pack of

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playing cards, I didn’t care for any of them; the people’s irresponsibility towards their actions,

even the most conscientious ones, was of an undeniable evidence. It didn’t matter that it was

me or another person who was committing them, the world’s diversity was swallowing them

in the same shapeless monotony. In the panopticon, and only there, there was no contradiction

between what I was doing and what was going on. The wax characters were the only true

thing in the whole universe; they were the only ones to falsify the life in the purest and

evident manner, belonging, through their strange and artificial immobility, to the world’s true

matter. The uniform holed by bullets and stained with blood of a certain Austrian archduke,

with a yellow and sad figure, was infinitely more tragic than any real death; in a crystal box

was lying a woman dressed in black laces, her face shiny and pale, with an incredibly red rose

between her breast, and a blonde wig which had begun to peel off at the edge of the forehead,

while on her nostrils the red color of the powder was still palpitating. Her blue eyes, limpid as

only glass can be, were staring at me, immobile. It was out of the question for that woman not

to have a deep, troublesome significance, undiscovered until then. The more I contemplated

her, the clearer her true meaning appeared to me, persisting somewhere deep inside me like a

word which I would have wanted to remember, but which only lingered in me like a very

distant rhythm.

I have always been fascinated by women’s uncontrollable appetite for the artificial

objects, cheaply ornamented. A friend of mine was collecting the most diverse things he could

find, for example, in a mahogany box, he kept a strip of black silk, adorned with infinitely

delicate lace on the borders and sewed with some shiny sequins. It had been obviously torn

from some old ball dress; the silk was moldy in some places. Just to let me see it he would ask

me stamps and even money. After the payment he would introduce me in a small old-

fashioned saloon, while his parents were sleeping, and he let me see it. I would stay like this,

holding the delicate strip of silk, bewildered of stupefaction and pleasure. My friend was

standing in the doorway, and was attentive to see if someone was coming; he would comeback after some minutes, take the strip from my hands and put it back into the mahogany box

and say to me: “Your time is over, you must go now”, just as Clara used to do sometimes in

the cabin.

Another object which perturbed me immeasurably when I first saw it was a gipsy ring.

It was definitely the most fantastic ring which a man could ever invent to adorn a woman’s

hand.

The birds’, flowers’ and animals’ extraordinary ornaments, all having a very precisesexual role, the ultramodern and ultra stylised tails of the birds of paradise, the oxidized

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feathers of the pea-cock, the hysterical lace of the petunias’ petals, the improbable blue color

of the monkeys’ intimate parts are only pale attempts towards sexual ornamentation

comparing to the dazzling gipsy ring. It was a superb, elusive, grotesque and hideous article,

made of cheap metal, attacking love in its most darkened regions, at its very basement, a

veritable sexual scream. I am sure that the artist who made it had been inspired by the same

visions in the panopticon. The ring’s stone, actually a simple piece of glass melted until it got

to a lentil’s thickness, looked exactly like the fights in the panoramas through which I was

looking at the magnified sunk ships, at the combats with the Turks or at the royal

assassinations. In the ring I could see a bouquet of flowers chiseled in the cheap metal and

painted with the aggressive colors of the panopticon: the violet of the corpses dead by

asphyxiation, near the pornographic red of the women’s garters, the livid pallor of the

infuriated waves in the core of a macabre light, or the semi-obscurity of the glass sepulchers.

All this microscopic landscape was surrounded by small Titian leaves and other mysterious

signs. Hallucinating…

Everything that is imitated makes a deep impression on me, especially the artificial

flowers and the funeral garlands, especially these, forgotten and dusty in their oval glass

boxes in the cemetery’s church, surrounding with an obsolete delicateness anonymous old

names, forgotten in an eternity without echoes.

I’m also impressed by the cut-out images with which the children play and the cheap

statues in the fairs. In time these statues lose their heads or some limb and their owner, in

order to repair them, delicately surrounds the head with white gypsum jewels. The bronze of

the rest of the statue gets then the tragic significance of a noble suffering. I also like the

natural-sized statues of Jesus in the catholic churches. The stained glass throws in the altar the

last reflections of the red sunset, while the lilies at the Christ’s feet exhale at this exact hour of

the day the plenitude of their heavy, lugubrious perfume, and in this atmosphere filled with

airy blood and odorizing faint, a pale young man plays at the organ the last notes of adesperate melody.

All these things emigrated in the real life from the panopticon. In the fair’s panorama I

can find the common place of all these nostalgias scattered in the world, which, gathered in

the same place, form its deepest essence. I have only one single supreme desire in life: to

assist to the burning of a panopticon, to see the slow and scabrous melting of the wax statues,

to witness, speechless, how the yellow beautiful feet of the young bride in the glass box curl

in the air, while the untouchable sex between them is consumed by a real, devouring flame.Except for the panopticon, the August fair was every time bringing with it the same

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sadness and exaltation. Its oversized performance was swelling like a real symphony, starting

from the prelude of the isolated panoramas, which were coming long before everything else,

and were indicating the general rhythm of the festival, like the secluded and prolonged sounds

which announce, at the beginning of a concert, the theme of the whole composition, which

lasts until the heroic ending, exploding of screams, thumps and fanfares, like at the Judgment

Day, followed by the immense silence of the deserted field.

The few panoramas which were coming earlier basically enclosed in themselves the

whole fair, presenting it in its most minuscule detail. It was enough for the first to be installed,

soon after all the colors, all the glitters and the full smell of carbide of the complete fair had

already filled the town, like foam. In the multitude of the everyday noises one could suddenly

hear a slight sharp sound, but not the chirp of a tinned spoon on a ceramic plate, nor the

distant tinkling of a set of keys, not the jingle of an engine, it was the easily recognizable

clatter of the “Wheel of Fortune”.

In the obscurity of the boulevard, all of a sudden, in the evening, a circle of colored

flamboyances was suddenly inflamed, like a very primordial constellation. Soon, others were

following, and the boulevard was becoming an enlightened corridor, through which I would

pass bewildered, just like a young boy of my age whom I saw in an illustrated edition of a

Jules Verne novel, who was incumbent to a submarine’s window, looking at the mysterious

marine phosphorescence, floating in the deep ocean’s darkness.

In only a few days the fair was completely settled. The halo of barracks was finally

organized, complete and definitive.

Well established sectors sectioned it into regions of shadows and lights, the very same

every year. Firstly, the area of the restaurants, with its dozens of necklaces of tinted lamps,

the district composed of the panoramas of monstrousness, the façade bewildered with light of

the circus and finally the obscure and humble barracks of the photographers. The visitors were

walking in circles, passing from the highest luminosity to the deepest darkness, like the moonin my geography book, which was passing alternatively through different typographic spheres

of white and black.

We usually entered some small and badly illuminated panorama, with few artists,

which didn’t even have a roof, where my father could bargain at the entrance, with the

director, a collective and reduced price for our numerous family.

There, inside, the performance had an improvised and clumsy aspect. The chilly night

winds were wafting above the viewers’ heads and far away up there the cold stars wereshining glassily. We were lost in a fair barrack, gone astray through the night’s chaos, on the

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infinitesimal point of a lonesome planet. In that precise point of that planet, men and dogs

were acting on an offhand stage, men throwing in the air different objects and then catching

them again, dogs jumping through circles of fire and walking on two paws. Where exactly

was all this happening? The immensity of the sky above us seemed even more

immeasurable…

Once, in one of these poor barracks, an artist promised in front of the public to offer a

prize of five thousand lei to the person able to imitate the sensational and extremely easy

number which he would perform. We were only few of us sitting on the low benches. A very

fat man, known in town to be of an extreme avarice, bewildered by this unprecedented

possibility to gain an enormous amount of money in that meager panorama, suddenly changed

his place, getting closer with some benches to the stage, decided to observe carefully the

artist’s slightest gesture, in order to reproduce it later and take the prize.

Some moments of terrible silence followed.

The artist got close to the footlights: “Gentlemen, he said with a profoundly raucous

voice, it is all about expiring from the neck the smoke of a cigarette.” He lit a cigarette,

inhaled deeply and then, taking his hand from his collar, where he had kept it up until then,

released a delicate trickle of blue smoke, through the orifice of an artificial larynx, which he

probably got after some surgery. That fat man from the first rows remained for some seconds

speechless and bewildered; he became all red and, while going back to his initial place, he

was murmuring quite aloud: “Well, sure, of course he can do it, I’m not surprised, he has a

devilish machine in his neck!”

Imperturbable, the artist on the stage answered him: “Please, please, come and try”,

and maybe he was honestly willing to give a prize to this unknown fellow in suffering…

In these barracks, in order to earn a living, pale and skinny old men were swallowing

in front of their public stones and soap, young girls were twisting their fragile bodies and

anemic and skeletal children, leaving aside the salty boiled corn they had eaten up until then,were going up on the stage and were dancing with small bells tied to their trousers.

During the day, immediately after lunch, in the heated stuffiness, the fair’s desolation

was limitless. The immobility of the wooden horses, with their goggled eyes and their tanned

crests, acquired suddenly an unexplainable melancholy of paralyzed life. A warm and familiar

smell of food was coming from the barracks, while a solitary barrel organ, somewhere far, far

away, insisted in elapsing its asthmatic waltz, whose chaos, from time to time, was gushing a

metallic whistling note, like a sudden spout, high and strait, liberated from the mass of a poolof water.

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What I liked most of all was to sit for hours in front of the photographers’ barracks,

contemplating the unknown persons, in groups or alone, turned into stone and smiling, in

front of the grey landscapes with cascades and distant mountains. All these people, integrated

to the same landscape, looked like the members of the same family, gone on a trip in the same

picturesque place, were they were taken into photograph one after the other.

Once I saw my own photo in the window one of these itinerant studios, and this

sudden meeting with myself, immobilized in a fix attitude, there, on the outskirts of the fair,

had on me a somehow depressing effect.

Before getting back to my town, it had surely traveled in other places as well,

unknown to me. For one second I had the feeling that the real me was the one in the photo.

But anyway, I was experiencing very often this reversal of the mental positions, in the most

different occasions. It would come stealthily and change all of a sudden my interior body. For

example, stopping near a street accident, for a few minutes I was looking at the whole scene

like any other observant near me, but, all of a sudden, the whole perspective was changing

and –exactly like in that game consisting in seeing in the walls’ painting some sort of a weird

animal, which we cannot reconstruct again the next day, because we see in its place, and

formed by the same decorative elements, a statue, a naked woman or a landscape- even

though everything had stayed intact, I could suddenly see the whole scenery of the street

accident from the point of view of the blessed person, as if it was me and not another lying on

the street and looking up to the surrounding world, from the center to the periphery, and I had

the distinct feeling that the blood is flowing out from me. In the same way, without any effort

and as a logical sequel of the simple fact that I was staying on my chair looking at the screen,

I was imagining myself living in the intimacy of the scenes of the movie. It was from this

perspective that I saw myself, in front of the unknown photographer’s barrack, in the place of

the motionless boy staring at me from the cardboard.

My whole life, the life of the little person of flesh and blood and staying on the otherside of the show case, appeared to the boy in the photograph, all of a sudden, indifferent and

meaningless, just as the living me found absurd the wanderings through unknown regions of

the other me, the nomadic image. In the same way in which the photograph representing me

was rambling from place to place, contemplating through that dirty and dusty window

ceaselessly new perspectives, I, the truly existing me, was walking my own character in

totally different places, always looking at the world with different eyes and with the same

eyes at different places, and never understanding a thing from what was going on. The factthat I was moving, that I was alive, was just a simple coincidence, a meaningless one,

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because, just as if it was possible for me to exist on the other side of the window, I could also

exist here, in this world, having the same pale face, the same eyes, the same colorless hair,

and all these traces were composing in the mirror a rapid and weird figure, hardly

understandable.

I was always receiving from the exterior different warnings which tried to immobilize

and estrange me from the usual comprehension. They were bewildering me, stopping me and

resuming, all of a sudden, the entire world’s uselessness.

In that precise second, everything appeared to me chaotic, just like, when I was

listening to a fanfare and suddenly covered my ears, as I removed my fingers for one second,

the music was nothing but pure noise.

I was wandering through the fair the whole day, but even more on the surrounding

fields, where the artists and the monsters from the barracks, gathered around the huge boiler

with hot polenta, disheveled and dirty, were lowering their foreheads from the beautiful

settings and their nocturnal existence of acrobats, bodiless women and sirens, in the common

paste and in the sad filth of their irremediable humanity. What looked admirable, free and

even luxurious in front of the barracks, there, behind them, in full day light, was transformed

into an irrelevant and uninteresting familiarity, which actually became the one of the entire

world.

One day I participated in the funeral of the child of one of the strolling photographers.

The doors of the panorama were wide open and inside, in front of the photographic

background, the uncovered coffin was laying on two chairs. The background image was

printed on cheap fabric, representing a splendid park with Italian terraces and marble

columns. In this dream-like scenery, the little body, with its hands crossed on his chest,

dressed in his best clothes, with bracelets of silver tinsel around his thin wrists, seemed

immersed in an ineffable state of bliss.

The child’s parents and some other women were crying desperately around the coffin,while outside the fanfare of the big circus, borrowed for free from its director, gravely intoned

a serenade from “Intermezzo”, the saddest piece in the whole program. In those moments, the

dead boy was surely extremely happy and tranquil, in the intimacy of his profound peace and

the limitless silence of that park with old and aristocratic plane trees.

But soon after he was wrested from that solemnity and put into a cart, in order to be

taken to the cemetery, in the humid and cold grave destined to him. The park remained behind

him, desolated and deserted; I realized that death itself was borrowing from the fair’simplausible and nostalgic backgrounds, as if that reality was something completely different,

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destined to prove the infinite melancholy of the artificial ornaments, from the beginning of

life itself till its end, with the living example of certain pale existences, consumed in the

dreary light of the panopticon, or in that chamber with one infinite wall, lost in surreal

beauties and in the photographers’ unbelievable panoramas.

Thus the fair was becoming for me a deserted island, invaded by the desolating

aureoles, looking exactly like the mysterious and still very clear world in which I was

transported by my childhood crises.

The upper floor of the Weber family’s house, where I would go quite often after the

death of the old Etla Weber, looked like a real panopticon. The whole afternoons the rooms

were sunny, and the dust and the heat were flowing in front of the old china-closets, filled

with obsolescent things, thrown one on top of the other on the shelves. The beds had been

moved to the first floor, and the rooms were now uninhabited. The old Samuel Weber (agent

& commissioner) together with his two sons, Paul and Ozy, was living downstairs.

The first room, facing the street, still served as an office. It had a moldy smell, filled

with registers and big envelopes containing samples of cereals, upholstered with old

advertisements, stained by the flies. Some of these, having stayed on the walls for years, were

completely integrated in the family life. Above the money safe, the advertisement of some

mineral water was representing a tall and thin woman, dressed in diaphanous veils, spilling

the healing liquid to the crippled crushed at her feet. I am sure that in the mysterious hours of

the deep night, Ozy Weber was coming as well to drink from the miraculous source, with his

thin arms like flutes and the hunch of his chest visible under the clothes like the turkey’s

swollen sternum.

The other familiar advertisement was that of a transport company, which, with its ship

flowing over the elegant waves, completed the person of Samuel Weber with a mariner’s trait,

together with his captain’s cap and his glasses with thick lentils. When the old man wasclosing a register and gripping it in the pressing machine, spinning the iron wheel, he looked

like manipulating a real ship’s rudder on the unknown seas. The pink cotton filling his ears

was hanging in long plies and was surely a very wise measure of safety against the sea’s

currents.

In the second room, Ozy was spending his life reading popular novels, sunk into the

depths of a leather armchair, rising up the volume in order to place it in the thin light coming

from the street, through the office. In the darkness of a corner, a metal spittoon in the form of a huge cat was shining monumentally, and on a wall, a mirror was strangely reflecting a

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square of grey light, a sort of ghostlike memory of the outside light.

I would come to see Ozy, just like the dogs which enter the unknown yards just

because they see an open door and nobody chases them away. I was mostly attracted by a sort

of strange game, which I don’t even remember by whom it was invented, and under what

circumstances. The game consisted of an imaginary dialogue, performed with the deepest

seriousness. We had to remain somber until the end, and not to reveal the inexistence of the

things we were talking about.

I was entering, and Ozy was telling me with a terribly dry voice, without raising his

yes from the book: “The head pill I took last night to make me sweat made me cough terribly.

Until the morning I tossed in my sheets, but well, some moments ago Matilda came (there

was no Matilda) and gave me a massage.”

The absurdity and the stupidity of the things told by Ozy were hitting my forehead like

hammers. Maybe I should have got out of the room immediately, but, with a minuscule

voluptuousness to descend at his lever of inferiority, I was answering to him in the same

manner. I think this was the main secret of our game.

“I have a cold as well, I told him (even though we were in plain July), and doctor

Caramfil (he existed for real) prescribed me some medicine. It’s a true pity that the doctor…

you know, he was arrested this morning…”

Ozy raised his eyes from the book: “Well, I told you that he is making false money…”

“Well sure, I added, otherwise from where to spend so much with the dancers in the

music hall?”

First of all, in these words I felt first of all the disgusting pleasure of surrounding

myself in the dialogue’s mediocrity and, in the same time, a vague impression of freedom. I

could calumniate freely the poor doctor, who was living nearby and about whom I knew with

certainty to go to sleep every night at 9 o’clock. We could speak about basically anything,

mingling the real things with the imaginary ones, until the whole conversation was becomingof a sort of airy independence, floating detached from us in the room’s heights, like a curious

bird, and we wouldn’t have been amazed by its exterior existence, if the bird had truly

appeared before our eyes, more than by the fact that our words had nothing to do with

ourselves.

When I was getting out in the street again, I had the feeling that I just woke up from a

very deep sleep. But the dream continued, and I was looking in deep amazement at the people

on the street, speaking with each other very solemnly. Didn’t they know that it is possible tospeak seriously about anything?

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Sometimes Ozy didn’t feel like talking and then he was taking me upstairs, to

rummage between the old things. In those years since it had been deserted and because of old

Weber’s habit to send there all the useless objects, that space had become a true menagerie of

the most diverse and extraordinary things and inventions. In the rooms, a hot sun was entering

through the dusty windows without curtains. Their glass was slightly trembling when I would

walk on the old floors; between the rooms, a curtain of pearls served as a door.

I was coming from downstairs a little bit dizzy by the day’s heat. The complete

wilderness of the room was troubling me, I felt like living in a world which I had known for a

long time, but of which I had no memory, my body was strangely detached from this

existence. This feeling was more profound when I had to pass from one room to another,

through the curtain of pearls.

I searched in the drawers especially for old letters, in order to detach the stamps. From

the yellowish papers would fall aged dust and odd insects, which were quickly trying to hide

between the sheets. Some letter was falling aside, opening and revealing an out-of-fashion and

complicated calligraphy, written with discolored ink. There was something sad and resigned

in it, a sort of tired conclusion of the passage of time since when it was written and a quiet

sleep into the eternity, like the mortuary garlands.

I could also find old photographs with ladies dressed in crinolines and meditative

gentlemen with one finger pressed to their foreheads, smiling anemically, and in the lower

part of the image, two angels carrying a basket with fruits and flowers, under it being written

porte visite or souvenir . Between the photographs and the objects on the shelves –the elegant

fruit dish of pink glass with beclouded margins, the velvet purses which did not contain

anything else than the silk eaten by the moths, different objects with unknown monograms,

between all these there was an air of perfect understanding, as if they had their own

independent life, identical to the past one, when for example the photographs corresponded to

the people existing and moving in this world, when the letters were written by real warmhands, but this was a life reduced to a smaller scale, in a narrowed space, in the limit of the

paper and of the photographs, like in a theatre’s scenery, which is being looked at through he

thickest lentils of a pair of opera glasses, a scenery which remained the same one in all its

components, but still is incredibly minuscule and distant.

In the evening, when we were descending, we often met Paul Weber on the stairs; his

wardrobe was upstairs, in the first room, and he was going up to change his clothes. He was a

reddish boy, with big hands and bristling hair. He had big, thick lips and a clown’s nose, andin his eyes shone an incredibly calm and resting candor. Everything Paul was doing had,

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because of this innocent look, a very detached and indifferent air.

I loved him very much, but secretly, and my heart was beating faster when I would

meet him on the stairs, I liked the simplicity of his speech and the smile he had on his face, as

if our conversation had, except for its basic meaning, another one, more distant and

ephemeral, and this smile of his persisted even in the most serious conversations, and even

when he was talking business with his old father. I mostly loved Paul for the secret life he was

leading outside his daily occupations, and about which I only knew from the distant echoes

whispered with stupefaction by the adults around me. Paul was spending all his money with

the artists of the music hall. There was in his debauchery a sort of fatality against which old

Weber’s will was running without any power. Once the whole town rumored that Paul had

unhorsed all the horses at the carriages in the central market place and had taken them inside

the music hall, where he improvised a sort of circus, to which the most eminent drunkards of

our town participated. Another time I heard that he bathed with a woman in champagne. But

what wasn’t rumored about him?

I am incapable of defining my sympathy for Paul. I could very well notice the

mediocrity of the grown-ups around me, the uselessness and the boredom which were

consuming their lives, and then, the young girls in the garden laughing stupidly, the merchants

with cunning and immodest eyes, my father’s theatrical necessity to play his role of father,

the awful tiredness of the beggars sleeping in the dirty corners; all these things were melting

and then combining together in a general and trivial aspect, as if the world, having been

waiting for too long inside me, and already having a definitive form, didn’t allow me more

than to verify its obsolete content in my deepest self.

All things were simple, only Paul was outside them, in the middle of a density of

compact life, completely inaccessible and obscured to my understanding. I was keeping deep

inside me all his gestures and his most minuscule attitudes, but not like a memory, but rather

like a double existence. Very often I tried to walk like him, I was studying intensely one of hisgestures and I was repeating it in front of the mirror, until I thought I could reproduce it

perfectly.

At the upper floor of the Weber house, Paul was the most enigmatic and delicate wax

figure, and soon after he brought inside the element lacking from the whole picture, a pale

woman with gestures and steps of silent mechanism… thus the upper floor completed the

gallery in the panopticon, starting with the old ship captain Samuel Weber and ending with

the delicate and mangled and infantile phenomenon named Ozy Weber.

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I could also find old and melancholic things on another upper floor, the one in my

grandfather’s house. Here the walls were covered with strange paintings, with thick frames of

golden wood or in thinner frames of red plush. There were also certain frames made from

juxtaposed small shells, worked with a fanatical attention for the detail, which made me

contemplate them for hours and hours. Who had glued the shells? To whom belonged the

hand which performed the tiny living gestures in order to unite them? In these kind of defunct

and minor works of art I could suddenly perceive entire lives, lost in the shadows of time like

the images in two parallel mirrors, hidden in the greenish depths of the dream.

In a corner rested the noble gramophone, its funnel overturned, beautifully painted

with yellow and crimson stripes, like an enormous portion of vanilla and rose ice-cream, and

on the table were different stamps, two of them representing the King Charles I and Queen

Elisabeth.

A long time these paintings intrigued me. I honestly thought that the artist was very

talented, because their traits were very delicate and firm, but I could not understand why he

used an ash-like painting, grayish, discolored as if the paper had been kept for a long time in

water.

But one day I made an amazing discovery: what I had thought to be a fainted color

was actually an amass of minuscule letters, only decipherable under the magnifying glass. In

the whole drawing there was not even one single trait made with the pencil or the brush;

everything was made of words describing the lives of the king and of the queen.

My stupefaction converted, all of a sudden, the misunderstanding with which I had

been looking at the drawings and the distrust in the anonymous artist’s mastery into a limitless

admiration, intermingled with the spite of not having observed before that essential secret as

well as with a growing mistrust into my modest perceptions: if for so many years I had

contemplated the drawing without even suspecting their true matter, wasn’t it possible,

because of an equal short-sightedness, to misunderstand the meaning of all the things aroundme and their significance inscribed in their very tissue, just as clearly as the words composing

the two images with the royal couple? Around me, the world’s surfaces suddenly got weird

sheens and uncertain opacities like the curtains’, opacities which suddenly become transparent

and show us the profoundness of a room, when a light is being turned on behind them.

But behind the objects which intrigued me no light had ever been turned on, and they

remained forever hermetically enclosed in their volumes and sizes, even though sometimes

their surface seemed to become thinner and almost translucent, revealing to the deprivedhuman understanding their true meaning.

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The floor had many more other curiosities, belonging only to itself, for example, the

aspect of the street as seen through the front windows. The walls being very thick, the

windows entered deep in their flesh, forming some sort of caves in which one could sit very

comfortably. I was entering one of them like I would a small glass chamber, and I would open

the windows towards the street. The intimacy of the cave combined with the pleasure of

gazing at the street from a comfortable position had given me the idea of a vehicle similar in

size and smoothness, with soft cushions on which to lie on, with tiny windows through which

one could to look at the different cities and unknown landscapes, while crossing the world.

Once, while my father was recounting for me some of his childhood memories, I asked him

which was in that epoch his most secret and burning desire, and he answered that he had

wanted deeply to have a miraculous vehicle, in which to lie on while crossing the whole

world. I knew that in his childhood he was sleeping in the upper room, and so I asked him if

he used to hide in the windows’ caves, to look down at the street. He answered, all

bewildered, that indeed, every night before going to sleep, he entered in one of those warm

caverns and stayed there for hours and hours, and sometimes even fell asleep there. He

probably had his dream of the magic vehicle in the same place and in the same circumstances

as me.

I understood then that in the world there were also, besides the cursed spaces secreting

vertigos and faints, more benevolent places, from whose walls pleasant images were flowing.

The walls of my cave were filtering the fragile reverie of a vehicle crossing the world and the

person lying in that exact place was slowly impregnated by this idea like by a wobbly hashish

smoke…

The upper floor also had two attics, one of them opening through a little aperture

towards the roof. I was climbing through there to the roof. The whole town unfolded at my

feet, grey and amorphous, till far away to the fields, where the minuscule trains were crossing

the brittle bridge like mechanic toys.My secret wish was to reach a state of equilibrium equal with the one I had down there

on the ground. I wanted to lead my “normal” life on the roof and only there, to move in the

subtle and sharp air of the heights, fearless and without any particular fear of the void. I was

thinking that if I managed to do this, I would have felt inside my body weights more elastic

and more vaporous, which would have finally transformed me into a sort of man-bird.

I was convinced that only the care not to fall was the heaviest thing in me, and the

thought that I am at a big height was rowing over me like a pain which I would have liked towrest from its deepest roots. In order to avoid up there the feeling of out-of-commonness, I

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and begun to wash the body with soap for linen and wisps of straws.

While rubbing, he was crying and –as if my grandfather heard what he was saying-

was talking to him in whispers, sobbing bitterly: “Look what I’ve become… look where my

black days brought me… you’re dead now and I’m washing you… poor me… why did I have

to live so long… until this miserable moment…”

With his coat’s sleeve he was wiping his cheeks, and his beard wet with tears and then

washed the body even more zealously.

The two old men, amazingly similar, one dead and the other one washing him, were

forming a quite hallucinating image. The workers in the cemetery, who were usually doing

this job, receiving for this tips from the whole family, were sitting in a corner, looking with

rancor at this intruder, who was taking away their job. They were talking between them in

whispers, smoking and spitting on the floor, in all directions. After about one hour my

grandfather’s brother finished.

The body was on the table, turned upside down.

“Did you finish?” asked someone from the group, a little man with a reddish goatee,

netting nervously and mischievously from his fingers.

“Yes, I finished, answered the dead man’s brother. Now let’s dress him…”

“Aha! You think you finished, said the little man again, ironically. You really think

you finished? You think this is how a dead man should be buried? In this state of filth?”

The poor old man remained bewildered in the middle of the room, with a wisp of

straws in his hand, looking at every one of us and begging us with his eyes to defend him. He

knew how carefully he had washed the body, and knew that he didn’t deserve any insult.

“Now I will learn you to mind your own business”, continued impudently the little

man and, wresting the wisp of straws from the old uncle’s hand, went to the table, introduced

it with a rapid move in the dead body’s anus and got out on it a bit piece of excrement…

“You see you have no idea how a dead body should be washed? said he. You wantedto bury him with this dirt inside him?”

My grandfather’s brother was shaken by a violent shiver and burst into heavy tears…

The funeral took place during a very hot summer day: nothing sadder and more

impressive than a funeral in full warmth and sunshine, when people and things seem a little

bit bigger, in the vapors of the heat, as seen through a magnifying glass. What else could

people do in such a day other than burry their dead? In the heat and the torpor of the air, their

gestures were the same as hundreds of years ago, then and now, and always. The wet graveaspired the dead man in its coolness and its darkness, and he probably sunk happily in it…The

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clods fell heavy on the wooden boards, while the people in dusty clothes, sweaty and tired,

kept leading on the surface of the earth their imperious lives.

Paul Weber got married some days after the funeral.

He was a little tired during the wedding, but he had his usual smile; a sad, forced

smile, at the beginning of a sort of devotion.

Under the rigid collar, opened in the front, his red and hairless neck was moving

strangely; his trousers seemed longer and narrower than usual; the tails of his dress coat were

hanging grotesquely, as on a clown. Paul had concentrated in his person the whole grave

ridiculousness of the ceremony. I was containing its most secret and most intimate

ridiculousness. I was the small clown, unnoticed and insignificant.

At the back of the dark saloon, on a platform, the bride was waiting on her large

armchair. Her face was covered with white veils and only when she came back from under the

canopy did she raise them, and I saw Edda for the first time…

The tables for the guests were arranged one near the other, white, in the yard, on a

single line; all the town’s beggars and vagabonds were gathered in front of the gate; the sky

had an indefinite color of yellow clay; the pale young misses in dresses of blue and pink silk

were offering small silver candies to everyone. This was the wedding. The musicians were

creaking an old, sad waltz; from time to time, its rhythm was swallowing and growing and

seemed to cheer up, but then the tempo was becoming frail again, more and more, until it

dissolved into the unique metallic wire of the lonely flute.

It was a horribly long day; a whole day is too much for a wedding. At the back of the

yard nobody was coming, there were the hotel’s stables and a mound from where I was

looking towards far away, while around me some hens were pecking grains in the grass; from

the yard came the breeze of the sad waltz, mingled with the fresh smell of the wet hay in the

stable: there I saw Paul doing something extraordinary, he was talking with Ozy and it wasobvious he was saying something funny, maybe a joke, who knows, because the cripple begun

to laugh and he became violet, almost suffocating under the curved front of his starched shirt.

Finally, night came. The few trees in the yard became dark like Japanese silhouettes,

hollowing in the obscurity a mysterious and invisible park.

In the badly-illuminated hall, the bride was sitting always on the platform, near Paul,

tilting her head towards him when she wanted to whisper him something, leaving her soft arm

between his fingers and thus caressing him on the full length of his white glove.Some wedding cakes were brought on the table. There was an especially monumental

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one, with a petrified castle, with crenels and thousands of miniature buttresses of pink cream.

The petals of the sugar flowers covering it had a frosted and oily shine. The knife was thrust

deep in its core and a rose creaked with a soft sound under the cut, exploding like glass in

dozens of pieces. Old ladies were walking majestically in their remarkable velvet dresses,

with innumerable jewels on their chests and fingers, advancing slowly and solemnly, like

small itinerant church altars, richly ornamented.

Slowly, slowly, my sight grew blurred, everything in front of my eyes were growingly

vague and absurd… I fell asleep while looking at my red and hot hands.

The room in which I woke up smelled like morose smoke; in a mirror in front of me,

the window was reflecting the morning light, gradually growing, like a square of blue velvet. I

was lying on a rummaged bed, covered with pillows. A tiny noise was echoing in my ears,

like inside a shell; in the room, the thin smoke was flowing in multiple layers. I tried to wake

up and my hand got into the bed’s wooden sculptures; some of them filled my hands and

others were moving away from the bed, growing in the room’ pale light and ramifying in

thousands of crenels, holes and laced mildew; in only few seconds - no more - the room was

immaterially filled with all kinds of volutes, through which I had to squeeze to the door. I felt

my head still tingling, and all the air’s caverns kept repeating this murmur, in the corridor the

white light washed my cheeks and I woke up completely. I met on my way a gentleman in

long floss-silk night shirt, who looked at me with very upset eyes, as if reproaching me to be

dressed up so early in the morning.

I met nobody else. Down in the yard were still the tables for the guests, with

uncovered pine boards. The dawns were gloomy and cold. The wind had scattered all around

the yard the candies’ colored tinfoil wraps. How did the bride keep her head? How did she

bow it on Paul’s shoulder? In some panopticons, the wax woman had inside a strange

mechanism, which made her bow her head and close her eyes.

The town’s streets had lost all their meaning; he coldness entered under my coat; I wascold and still sleepy. When I was closing my eyes, the wind was putting his wintry cheek on

mine; over my eyelids I could feel it like a mask inside which it was shady and cold like

inside a real metal mask. Which house on my way was about to explode? Which street lamp

would contort like a rubber stick, laughing at me? Nowhere in the world, and under no

circumstance, was something happening.

When I got in the market place, some men were discharging fresh meat for the

butcher’s booths. They were carrying in their arms halves of cows, red and dark blue, wetwith blood, tall and splendid like dead princesses; in the air floated a warm smell of

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unblemished flesh and urine; the butchers were hanging all beasts with their heads down, their

globular and black eyes turned towards the floor. They were aligned now in front of the white

porcelain walls like red sculptures cut in the most various and delicate matter, having the

watery and rainbow-hued reflection of the oriental silk and the milky and turbid limpidity of

the gelatin; at the edge of their opened bellies hanged the muscles’ lace and the heavy

necklaces of the pearls of animal lard. The butchers were wedging their large hands inside

that rippled crimson velvet and were then getting out the precious entrails, putting them on the

table: round, broad, elastic and warm objects of flesh and blood. The fresh meat was shining

smoothly like the petals of some monstrous and hypertrophied roses.

The downs were now blue like the vinegar; the freezing morning was singing with an

organ’s profound echo.

The harnessed horses were looking at people with their eyes always in tears; a mare

released on the pavement a hot stream of urine; in the newly-formed puddle, partly foamy,

partly clear, the sky was mirroring itself, black and bottomless.

Everything became distant and desolated. It was early in the morning, people were

discharging meat, wind was entering under my clothes, I was shivering of cold and

sleeplessness, in what kind of world was I living?

I began to run like crazy on the streets. The sun appeared again, huge and red, at the

margins of the roofs, but on the narrow streets with tall houses it was still dark, and only at the

crossroads light was bursting, wild and shimmering, like through some open doors along a

deserted corridor.

I passed through the back of the Weber house, the heavy shutters at the first floor were

closed, everything was sad and forsaken, the wedding was over.

The upper floor of the Weber house was illuminated by Edda’s arrival with shadows

and coolness, just like certain clearings in the deep forests become further lighted by a green

brightness filtered by the leaves.First, Edda covered the windows with curtains and put on the floors soft carpets, in

which all the deserted echoes of the upper floor lost their voice.

Every morning I would be up on the terrace, inventorying the multitude of contorted

and artificial objects from the dusty shelves of the china-closets.

Together with Ozy, I was cleaning them conscientiously, and then throwing them one

by one in the garbage bin.

Edda was coming and going to the terrace, dressed in a blue gown, wearing a pair of high-heeled slippers, which were banging at every step. Sometimes I remained for a long time

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leaned on the banister, half closing the eyelids and looking through the narrow opening at the

pearly sky.

The upper floor got an ineffable perfume which changed its content like a heavy

essence combined with alcohol.

Thus all events destined to appear in my life gradually and all of a sudden, out of my

power of understanding, isolated in their contour from any possible past. Edda became

another object in my personal menagerie, a simple object whose existence was torturing and

annoying me, like a word endlessly repeated, which becomes increasingly obscure as its

understanding becomes more and more necessary. The world’s perfection was about to

emerge from somewhere like a flower bud which still needs to pierce its last peel in order to

get to the light.

During the summer mornings, on the upper floor’s terrace, something was going on,

and my whole body struggled to understand what.

I was armed to meet Edda with all the grieves, all the humiliations and all the ridicule

necessary in a new adventure.

She kept the curtain of pearls between the two rooms, she adorned the china-closets

with white cloths with big bows of colored ribbons, and the Weber house changed

completely. Around Edda began a pantomimic ballet with four participants: Paul became

grave and faithful; old Weber bought a new cap and gold framed glasses; Ozy was waiting all

the time gasping with thrill for Edda to call him upstairs and I was staying on the terrace

staring into vacancy.

Every Saturday afternoon we were gathering in the front room transformed into

saloon, where the gramophone was playing oriental arias from “Kismet, and Edda was serving

us sweet/bitter cookies baked with honey and almonds. In a fruit bowl there were peanuts,

eaten mainly by the old Samuel Weber, who was chewing them rarely and firmly, and this

made his Adam’s apple dance like an elastic doll. He was sitting cross-legged, whichconstituted a resting position out of his business with cereals, looking like an artist on the

theater stage, and, while he was speaking, he was shooting out his lips in order to hide his

gold teeth.

He was afraid to touch any object and while passing through the curtain of pearls, he

was turning around to unite the two halves, so that his passage would be inaudible.

All of Ozy’s deformities sharpened and curved in a position of intense concentration.

His hunch grew even more, as if it, too, tried to take notice of Edda’s slightest word andgesture and meet them one second before.

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Paul was the only one stepping on the carpets calm and sure of himself. He had full

gestures, to which there was nothing to add, and when he was hugging Edda, we were finally

all of us three happy that he does it better than any of us.

As for me, I have no idea what was happening those days.

In one of those afternoons, being comfortably engrossed in an armchair, I pushed my

head into the plush, without any particular reason. The small pricks entered my cheek’s skin,

which made me feel a quite vivid pain. In only one second grew in me, ridiculous and

splendid, an imperative desire to be heroic; it was one of those numerous absurd thoughts

which can only be produced on a Saturday afternoon, on the boring music of a gramophone.

I begun to push even more strongly my head into the plush and as my pain grew more

and more violent, my will to endure it became increasingly tenacious.

Maybe inside us there are hidden a hunger and thirst other than the organic ones, and

something inside me needed in that precise instant to satisfy a simple and keen pain. I was

pushing my head deeper and deeper in the sharp pricks, being tortured by a suffering which

was rending me inside.

All of a sudden Edda remained still with a gramophone record in her hand, looking at

me in deep stupefaction. Around me grew an embarrassing silence. “What happened to him?”

asked Edda. I saw myself in a mirror, I was utterly ridiculous. On my cheek I had a violet spot

oozing with drops of blood from place to place.

With eyes wide open and bleeding cheek, looking at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t

stop thinking that I was the incarnated allegory of the front cover of a very fashionable novel,

which presented the Russian tsar bleeding and covering his jaw with one hand, after an

attempt to his life.

More than the pain in my cheek, I was tortured now by the miserable destiny of my

heroism, which ended by incarnating an episode from “The Court of Petrograd”.

Edda dipped a handkerchief in alcohol and wiped my cheek, I felt a vivid pain on myskin, which was burned like by a flame.

I descended the stairs dizzily; the greedy streets received me again in their dust and

monotony.

The summer had swollen chaotically the park, the trees and the air, like in a madman’s

drawing. All her burning and abundant breath had exploded monstrously in an abundant,

luxurios, fleshy vegetation. The park had overflown like lava; the stones were burning; myhands were always red and heavy.

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In that soft and warm wilderness, all I could do was to carry Edda’s image inside me,

sometimes multiplied in tens of copies, in hundreds, in thousands of Eddas, one near the other

under the summer’s heat, statuary, identical and obsessive.

There was in all this a cruel and lucid despair, propagated in all I could see or feel.

Simultaneously with my straightforward and undemanding life, other intimacies were

growing apace in me, warm, beloved and secret, like a terrible and fantastic inner leprosy.

I was composing the details of the imaginary scenes with the most punctilious

accuracy. I could see myself in sordid hotel rooms, with Edda sleeping near me, while the

light of the crepuscule was coming into the room through the thick curtains, and their delicate

shadow was impregnating on her tranquil face. I could see the model of the carpet on which

were thrown her shoes and her bag opened on the table, the corner of a handkerchief was

going out of it. Also, the big wardrobe with mirror doors in which was reflected half of the

bed and the painting with flowers on the walls…

Quite a bitter taste lingered after these thoughts…

I was following unknown women in the garden, walking on their steps until they got at

their homes, and I was remaining in front of their doors, crushed, desperate.

One evening I walked a woman until the gateway of her dwelling.

The house had a small garden in front, illuminated by an electric light.

With a swift impetuousness, unsuspected in me, I opened the small gate and sneaked

inside the yard, after the woman, while she entered her house without noticing me, and I

remained alone on the alley. A strange idea came suddenly to me…

In the middle of the garden was a round of flowers, in only one second I was in its

middle, I kneeled and, with my hand to the heart, bare-headed, took a position of prayer. I

wanted to stay like this as long as possible, immobile, turned to stone in the middle of the

round of flowers. I had been tormented for a long time by this desire to commit an absurd act

in a totally unknown place, and now I had the possibility to fulfill it, spontaneously, withoutany effort, almost like a joy. The evening was vibrating, warm, around me, and in the first

seconds I felt enormously grateful towards myself, for the courage to have taken this decision.

I decided to remain completely motionless even though nobody would have chased me and I

should have remained like this until the following morning. Slowly, slowly, my hands and my

feet became rigid, and my position got an interior shell of limitless calm and immobility.

For how long did I stay like this? All of a sudden I heard voices inside the house and

the light in the garden was turned off.In the dark I felt better the night breeze and my isolation, in the garden of some

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unknown house.

Some minutes later the light was turned on and then again turned off. Somebody

inside the house was turning it on and off in order to see what effect it had on me.

I continued to stay immobile, decided to face experiences more serious than this game

with the light. I kept my hand on my heart and my knee on the ground.

The door opened and somebody got out in the garden, while a deep voice inside

shouted: “ Leave him alone, just let me, he will leave by himself.” The woman I had followed

came near me. She was now wearing a dressing gown and slippers, and her hair was

disheveled. She looked deep into my eyes and didn’t say a word for a time. We both kept

silent, and she finally put her hand on my shoulder and said, tenderly: “Come on… it’s over

now”, as if she wanted to make me understand that she had understood my gesture and had

kept silent for a while just to make it become accomplished in its own way.

I was disarmed by this sudden understanding. I got up and wiped off the dust on my

knee. “Don’t your feet ache? She asked. I could have not remained immobile for so long…” I

wanted to say something, but I only managed to murmur a poor “Good night” and left in a

rush.

All my despairs were painfully screaming again in me.

I was a tall, slim, pale boy, with a thin neck getting out boldly from the large tunic

collar. My too long hands were hanging out of the sleeves like animals freshly skinned. My

pockets were exploding with papers and different objects. I could hardly find at their bottom

my handkerchief, to wipe off the dust on my shoes, when coming back from the streets in the

“centre” of the town.

The simple and elementary facts of life were evaluating around me according to their

own laws. A pig was scratching of a fence and I was stopping for whole minutes to look at it.

Nothing was more perfect than the squeak of the harsh hairs on the wood; I could find in itsomething immensely satisfying and an appeasing assurance that the world still exists…

On a street on the town’s outskirts there was a studio of folk sculpture, where I was

also spending a lot of time.

Inside the studio were thousands of white, smooth things, in the middle of the

chubby wooden stripes which were falling from the scraper and filling the room with their

rigid foam, smelling like resin.

Under the scraper, the wood piece was becoming more delicate, more silky,more pale, and her small veins appeared clear and well written, like under a woman’s skin.

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Near by, on a table, the wooden balls were lying, the calm and heavy balls which filled my

hand on all the skin’s surface, with a sleek, ineffable weight.

And then, the chess men, smelling like fresh varnish, and a whole wall covered

with flowers and angels.

Delirious eczemas with tatting suppurations, painted or sculptured, came out

from the matter’s flesh.

During the winter they grew from the cold ice fringes in the delimited forms of the

heavy water, and during the summer the numerous flowers sprang in small explosions, with

red, blue, orange petals of blaze.

During the whole year the sculptor, his glasses missing a lentil, was extracting from

the wood smoke wreaths and Indian arrows, shells and ferns, peacock feathers and human

ears.

In vain was I attentive to his slow wok in order to intercept the exact moment when

the ragged and wet piece of wood was expired in a stoned rose.

In vain did I try to accomplish the miracle as well. Of course, I was holding in my

hands the shaggy, hairy and solid pine, and all of a sudden the scraper’s scratch was leaving

behind an elusive and slippery trace, like a faint.

Maybe that, the moment when I was beginning to caress the wooden board, I was

filled with a deep sleep, and extraordinary powers were growing like tentacles from my

hands, then spread in the air, entered the wood and produced the cataclysm.

Maybe that the world was stopping its motion in those moments and nobody knew

how munch time had elapsed, and the master had sculptured all the lilies on the walls and all

the violins with spirals in a very deep sleep.

When I was waking up, the board was showing me the intimate lines of its age, just

like the lines of fate in an opened palm.

I was holding one object after another and I was amazed by their diversity, in vain wasI using the file, sliding my fingers on its surface and touching my cheek with it, I was rotating

it and then letting it roll… in vain, in vain, there was nothing understandable in its mere

existence.

Around me, the tough and immobile matter surrounded me from all parts, here in front

of wooden balls and sculptures, on the street in the form of trees, houses, stones, it sorrounded

me from every possible direction, immense and futile, closing me in itself, starting with the

clothes I was wearing and ending with the springs in the forests passing through walls,through trees, through rocks, through glass…

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In the tiniest corner, the matter’s lava had gone out of the earth, transfixing in the

empty air, in the form of houses with windows, of trees with tall branches stinging the void,

of flowers which were filling, softly and colorfully, small curved volumes in the space, of

churches with domes growing higher and higher and stopping at the thin cross on the very top,

where the matter had stopped its flowing into the heights, unable to climb further.

It had infested the air everywhere, irrupting into it, filling it with the closed abscesses

of the rocks, with the wounded hollows of the old trees…

I was wandering around, maddened by the things I had seen, bound to be their slave

forever.

But sometimes I could find some isolated place where my head could rest for a while.

There, for an instant, all the vertigos were quiet, and I was feeling better.

Once I found refuge in one of the strangest and most unsuspected places in town.

It was indeed so outlandish, that not even myself could have imagined that it might

turn up to be such a lonely and admirable burrow.

I believe that only that burning desire to fill the void of my days, anyhow and

anywhere, had pushed me towards this new exploit.

…One day, when passing in front of the town’s music hall, I finally dared to enter.

It was a calm, shiny afternoon. I crossed a dirty yard with many closed doors, I found

one open at the back, then followed some stairs.

In the vestibule a woman was doing laundry. The corridor smelled like lye. I got up

the stairs, the woman didn’t tell me anything at first, then, when I got at the middle of the

stairs, she turned her head towards me and murmured, more for herself: “Oh… you finally

came!”, probably taking me for someone she already knew.

Long time after this unbelievable voyage I remembered this apparently

inconsequential detail, and I didn’t find her words that innocent anymore: maybe it was

hidden in them the announcement of the fatality of my struggles and the washerwoman was just trying to show me that the places of my adventures were established in advance, that I

was bound to fall in them like in well-disguised fox-traps. “Oh, you finally came, said my

destiny’s voice, you came because you had to come, because you couldn’t possibly escape…”

I got to a long corridor, heated by the sun that entered through all the windows facing

the yard. All the doors were open; no noise could be heard; in a corner, a faucet was dripping

unceasingly. The corridor was balmy and deserted, and the canal’s aperture sucked up every

drop of water, as if it were sipping too cold a liquid.At the end of the corridor there was a door opening towards an attic, where clothes

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were drying on ropes. I crossed the attic and got to a small hall with clean little rooms, freshly

painted, in every one of them there was only one chest and one mirror; these were probably

the cabinets of the music hall artists.

On one side, a staircase was going down towards the theater’s stage. I descended it

and all of a sudden I found myself on the empty stage, in front of the deserted auditorium. My

steps had an outlandish sonority. All chairs and tables were arranged correctly, as for a show.

I was alone on the stage, in front of them, in the middle of the theatrical scenery of a forest.

I wanted to open my mouth, feeling that I should say something out loud, but I was

petrified by that deep silence. Then I saw the blower’s cage. I bowed and looked inside.

In the first few seconds I couldn’t distinguish anything, then gradually I began to see

the under stage, full with broken chairs and old property objects.

Very cautiously I got into the cage and descended down there. There were thick layers

of dust everywhere. On the one side there was a pile of golden pasteboard stars and crowns,

which had surely served for some sort of a fairy play, and on the other side, a piece of Rococo

furniture, a table and some chairs with broken legs, and in the middle, a solemn and huge

armchair, resembling a royal throne. I let myself fall into it, crushed, I was finally in a neutral

space, where nobody knew about my presence. I put my arms on the golden ones of the throne

and let myself be jiggled by the most pleasant feeling of solitude.

The darkness around me dissolved a little bit as the daylight begun to enter, dirty and

dusty, through the double windows. I was far from the world, from its hot and exasperating

streets, hidden in a shady and secret cell, under the surface of the earth. The silence was

flowing in the air, old and moldy.

Who could have guessed where I was? It was the most unexpected place in the whole

town, I felt a calm joy knowing myself there.

Around me there were broken chairs, dusty boards, abandoned objects: the place of all

my dreams incarnated in that very spot.

I remained like this for some hours, quiet, in perfect ecstasy.

Finally I left my hideout, following back the same itinerary. Strangely enough, I didn’t

meet anyone this time neither.

The corridor seemed enflamed by the sunset’s blaze. The canal’s aperture kept sucking

up the water with tiny, regular sips.

Back on the street, I had for one moment the impression that none of these things had

really happened. But my trousers were covered with dust, and I let them like this, as a proof of the distant and admirable intimacy which I had left under that stage.

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The following day, at about the same afternoon hour, I was suddenly invaded by the

nostalgia of the isolated basement. I was absolutely certain that this time I would meet

someone, on the corridor or in the hall. For a while I tried to ignore the temptation to return

there, but I was too tired and too heated by the day’s warmth, and no possible risk could

frighten me. I had to go back there no matter what.

I entered through the same door in the yard and I ascended the same staircase. The

corridor was equally deserted and nobody was in the attic or under the stage. In only few

minutes I was back at my place, in the theatrical throne, surrounded by my delicious

loneliness. My heart was beating fast, I was extremely thrilled by the astonishing triumph of

my exploit.

I began to caress in yawning elation the throne’s golden arms. I would have wanted to

be infiltrated as deeply as possible by this heavenly situation, to be burdened and touched by

it in the most invisible cell, so that I could feel it real.

I stayed there for a long time, and didn’t meet anyone…

I began to come back there regularly, every afternoon.

The corridors were always empty. I was falling in my throne, crushed by bliss.

Through the dirty windows, the same blue and breezy cavern light would enter. The

atmosphere there was impregnated by a complete and secret solitude, and I couldn’t possibly

have enough of it.

These daily expeditions in the music hall’s basement ended one afternoon as strangely

as they started.

When I got out on the corridor, at dusk, a woman was taking water from the faucet.

I passed quietly near her, facing the risk to be asked what I was doing there. But she

continued her occupation, with that indifferent and defensive air which women display when

they suspect that a stranger wants to talk to them.

I stopped at the bottom of the staircase, willing to talk to her. My hesitation was facing

her scowling certitude that I would talk to her. The water’s gurgle from the faucet was

splitting the cold silence in two very well delimited and distinct domains.

I turned back and got close to her. I asked her if she didn’t know some person who

could be my model for some drawings. I pronounced the word “person” with a perfectly

natural voice, so that it wouldn’t let guess the trivial desire to see a naked woman, but only

the purely artistic and abstract preoccupation to draw a human body.

Some days before, a student, in order to impress me of course, had told me that in thecapital, where he was studying, he would bring home with him young girls with the pretext of

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drawing them, and then sleep with them. I was sure that not a word was true, because I could

feel in his narration the obvious clumsiness of the appropriating and the re-telling of a story

he had heard before. Still, it had inlayed deep into my memory, and now it was a good

occasion to use it. This occurrence of an unknown stranger, after it had passed through the

infertile ground of some other narrator, was now mature enough to fall again into reality.

The woman did not seem to understand, or she simply pretended not to understand,

even though I had tried to be as clear as possible.

While I was talking a door opened and another woman came.

They begun to whisper, and then one of them said: “Let’s take him to Elvira then, she

has nothing to do anyway”.

They walked me into a low, dark chamber, which I had never noticed, near the attic.

Inside, instead of a window, there was a hole in the wall, through which a cold air current

entered. It was the cinematographic cabin, from which movies were projected in the summer,

in the garden of the music hall. On the ground were still visible the traces of the pedestal on

which the projector had been placed. In a corner, a woman was lying on a bed, completely

covered with a blanket, chattering her teeth. The other women left and let me alone in the

middle of the room.

I got close to the bed. The sick woman got a hand out from the blanket and pushed it

towards me. It was a long, delicate, icy hand, I told her in few words that it had been a

confusion, that I was brought to her by mistake. I tried to apologize, telling her vaguely what

was all about: some drawing for an artistic competition.

From everything I said she only retained the word “competition”, and answered with

extinct voice: “Sure… sure… I will let you compete… when I’ll be healthy again… now I

have nothing… nothing…”

She probably understood that I needed some sort of a financial help, and for some

seconds I felt bewildered and embarrassed, not knowing how to escape from there. Duringthis time she begun to lament with a very natural voice, as if she wanted to apologize for not

giving me anything: “You see, I have ice on my belly… I’m hot… I’m sick…”

I left sad, very sad, and never came back there.

Autumn came, with its red sun and steamy mornings. The little houses in the slums,

clustered in the light, smelled like fresh lime. The days were dull and colorless and the sky

cloudy like a dirty canvas. The rain was pelting infinitely in the solitary park. The heavycurtains of water were agitated by the wind on the alleys, like in an immense empty hall. I

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would walk in the wet grass, and the water poured on my hands and hair.

On the dirty lanes at the outskirts of the town, when the rain stopped, the doors were

opened and the houses inhaled the fresh air into their humble interiors filled with wooden

cupboards, bouquets of artificial roses carefully arranged on the drawers, their small statues of

bronzed plaster and their photographs from America. Lives totally unknown to me, lost in the

slightly moldy rooms with low ceilings, sublime in their resigned indifference.

I would have liked to live in one of those houses, to become impregnated by their

intimacy, letting all my dreams and all my sorrows dissolve in them like in a strong acid.

I would have given anything just to be allowed to enter certain rooms, stepping with

familiarity and letting myself fall on the old sofa, between the feminine pillows covered with

flourished fabric. To gain there a new interior intimacy, to breathe another air and to become

another person… Lying on my sofa, I could contemplate the street on which I was walking

just now, from inside the house and through the curtains (and I very honestly tried to imagine

the street’s aspect seen from the sofa, through the opened door), to be able to find in me, all of

a sudden, memories of things I had never experienced, memories foreign to the life I was

always carrying in myself, over and over again, memories belonging to the intimacy of the

bronzed statue and to the old lamp globe, with blue and violet butterflies.

I would have felt so protected at the limit of that cheap and indifferent background,

which completely ignored my existence…

In front of me, the dirty street was stretching its muddy paste. The houses were

displayed like an oriental fan, some white like huge blocks of sugar, others undersized, with

roofs covering their eyes, and clenching their teeth like immobile boxers. I would meet in my

way ordinary wagons with hay, or, all of a sudden, extraordinary things: a man walking in the

rain, carrying on his back a chandelier with crystal ornaments, a magnificent glass work

sounding like bells on the man’s shoulders, while heavy drops of water were breaking on the

multiple shiny facets… What was the secret of the world’s magnitude, and where was ithiding?

The rain washed in the garden the withered flowers and plants. The autumn was

lighting in them scarlet, ruby and purplish-blue fires, like small blazes shining more

powerfully in the seconds before burning out. In the market place, the water and the mud were

flowing disheveled from the enormous piles of vegetables. In the beetroots’ cut could be seen,

all of a sudden, the earth’s dark red blood; at one side lingered the kind-hearted, mild

potatoes, near the heaps of the decapitated heads of engorged cabbages; somewhere else wasthe pile of exasperating beauty of the swollen and hideous pumpkins, their stretched rinds

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exploding from the plenitude of the light they drank the whole summer.

In the middle of the sky the clouds were grouping and then scattering around, leaving

between them rare spaces, like narrow corridors lost in the infinity, or, on the contrary,

immense empty spaces, much more beautiful than the devastating void floating all the time

above the town.

Rain was falling from afar, from a distant and limitless sky, and I liked the changed

color of the wet wood and the rusty lattice surrounding the domestic and wise little gardens,

through which the wind was passing wildly, mingled with streams of water, like the immense

mane of a fantastic horse.

Sometime I would have liked to be a dog, to look at that wet world from the animals’

oblique perspective, from down up and slightly inclining my head, to walk closer to the earth,

with my eyes fixed on its surface covered with livid mud…

This odd desire hidden deep inside me slithered frenetically into the reality on an

autumn day, on the waste ground…

On that day I had walked purposelessly till the town’s margins, in the field of the

cattle market, now soaked by the rain and transformed into an immense mud slop. The dung

was exhaling an acid smell of animal urine. The sun was setting above, in an embellishment

of ragged gold and purple; in front of me the warm, tender mud was stretching to the

horizons. What else could have filled my heart with such and unbearable joy, than this clean

and sublime mass of filth?

I hesitated for some seconds, inside me were fighting, with forces of moribund

gladiator, the last traces of education, but in one second they were sunk in an opaque

obscurity, and I knew nothing of myself.

I entered the mud first with one leg, then with the other. My boots slithered pleasantly

in the elastic, sticky leaven. Now I was grown from the mud and a part of it, as if I had

spouted from it.Now I was sure that trees also were nothing but curdled mud, grown from the earth’s

crust. Their color was the sufficient proof. But only the trees? What about the houses, or the

people? Especially the people. All the people. Of course, I’m not referring to that dull legend

“from earth you came unto earth you’ll return”, this was a too vague thing, too abstract, too

inconsistent in front of that field of mud. All people and things had sprung from this very

dung and urine in which I was dishing a pair of very concrete boots.

In vain had the people covered themselves in silky white skin, and dressed in stylishsuits, in vain, in vain… the mud was hidden inside them, implacable, authoritative and

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elementary, fat, warm and lethargic… Another evidence was the stupidity with which they

were filling their boring lives. I was a special creation of the mud as well, a missionary sent

by it in this world. I could very well feel in those moments how its memory comes back to

me and I remembered my past long nights of struggle and hot darkness, when my essential

mud was uselessly remounting to the surface; I was then closing my eyes and it continued to

boil in abstruse mutterings…

Around me the muddy field was stretching, this was my real body, stripped by its

clothes, its skin and its muscles, till its very flesh.

Its elastic humidity and its unripe smell were receiving me in their depths, because I

had belonged to them since forever. Some apparent and purely accidental features, like, for

example, the few gestures I was capable of doing, my delicate hair, and my dark glassy eyes

were separating me from its immemorial serenity and dirt. It was not enough in front of the

immense majesty of the mud…

I walked around, in all possible directions. My feet sunk in the mud to my ankles. It

was raining slowly, and far away, the sun was setting behind the curtain of bloody and

purulent clouds.

Suddenly I bowed and I thrust my hands in the dung. I wanted to scream: Why not?

Why not? That paste was warm and tender; my hands were wandering through it easily. When

I would clench my fists, the mud would get out through my fingers in beautiful black, shiny

slices.

What had my hands done until then? Where had they lost their time and energy? I was

moving them hither and thither, at their will’s sake. What had they been until then but poor

prisoner birds, tied with a terrible chain to the skin and to the muscles and to the shoulders.

Poor birds destined to fly only at the length of some stupid gestures of good education,

learned by heart and repeated religiously.

Slowly, slowly, they became wild again and regained their ancient freedom. Now theywere rolling their head in the dug, were prattling like a dove, were spreading their wings in

complete happiness…

I began, delighted, to flutter them in the air, making them fly again. Heavy drops of

mud were falling on my face and on my clothes. Why should have I cleaned myself? Why?

This was only the beginning, no severe consequence followed my actions, no trembling of the

skies, no terrific earthquake… I touched my cheeks with my dirty hands, and I was

overwhelmed by an immense joy, it was a long time since I had last been so happy, I began torub with my dirty hands my cheeks, my neck, my hair.

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All of a sudden, the rain became thicker and sharper. The sun was still illuminating the

field, like an immense lamp from the back of a room of ashy marble. It was raining in the

sun’s light, a golden rain smelling like clean laundry.

The waste ground was deserted. Here and there ware piles of well-seasoned corn, from

which the cattle had eaten. I took one corn stem in my hands and began to open it carefully. I

was shivering from the cold and my hands were dirty of mud, but I was absorbed with the

unwrapping of the corn leaves. Much was to be seen in a dry corn stem. Far away there was a

shack with thatch roof. I ran to it and hid under its eaves. The roof was so low that the top of

my head was hitting it. The ground near the wall was completely dry. I lied down, I leaned my

head on some old gunnies and, cross-legged, I could now continue my meticulous

examination of the stem.

I was glad in this mundane occupation of mine, really glad. The canals and the holes

in the stem filled me with real enthusiasm, thus I pricked it with my teeth and found inside it a

soft, sweet fluff, a very unexpected and wonderful lining for a plant; if people’s arteries were

also sheathed with mellow ruffle, I’m sure that the darkness inside them would be infinitely

easier to live with.

I was looking at the stem and the silence in me was smiling calmly, as if inside me

someone was continuously making soapsuds.

It was raining but sunny, and far away, in the fog, the town was fuming like a mound

of garbage. Some roofs and church towers were shining weirdly in that humid crepuscule. I

was so happy that I did not know what absurd action to perform first: to analyze the corn

stem, to stretch my bones or to look at the distant town…

A little bit further from my feet soles, where the mud’s territory was starting, a small

frog suddenly began to jump, first she came close to me but then changed its mind and headed

towards the fields. “Farewell, my little frog, I cried after it, farewell…” My heart was broken

by its sudden departure. “Farewell, my beauty…” I began to improvise a long hymn for thelittle frog, and when I finished, I threw towards it the disintegrated stem, to hit the

ungrateful…

Finally, after a long gazing at the locust beams above me, I closed my eyes and a deep

sleep entered deep into my bone marrow.

…I dreamed that I was wandering on the streets of a dusty town, with white houses

shining under a heavy sun, maybe an oriental town. Near me walked a woman dressed in

black mourning veils, strangely, she didn’t have a head. The veils were very well arranged inthe place where her head should have been, but instead of it was an open hole, an empty

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sphere… We were both in a hurry, following a cart with a sanitary cross on it, in which lied

the dead body of the woman’s husband.

I understood that it was during the war, and soon we arrived at a railway station and

descended some stairs to a basement vaguely illuminated by an electric bulb. A convoy of

wounded had just arrived, and the nurses were bustling in great agitation on the platform,

holding in their hands small baskets full with cherries and pretzel, which they were offering to

the wounded in the train.

From a first class coach descended a fat man, well dressed, with a decoration at his

tab; he was wearing monocle and white leather shoes. His baldness was hidden under some

silver hairs, in his arms he was holding a small white Pekinese dog, his eyes were like two

agates floating on oil. For a few seconds he walked around, searching for something. He

finally found it, it was the flower seller. He chose from her basket some small bouquets of red

carnations and paid for them, taking his money from an elegant wallet, with a silver

monogram. He then went up in his coach again; a few seconds after I could see how he put

the dog on the table near the window and began to give feed to it, one by one, the red

carnations, which the animal would swallow with an obvious pleasure…

I was awoken by an awful quiver.

Now it was raining really hard, the huge drops were pelting near me and I had to draw

myself near the wall. The sky was now black and I could no longer see the town.

I was cold and still my cheeks were burning. I could very well feel their heat under the

scab of curdled mud. I wanted to rise but an electric drift fulminated in my legs. They were

completely numb and I had to unfold them very carefully, fist one, then the other. My socks

were cold and wet.

I thought about searching refuge in that miserable kennel, but its door was closed and,

instead of a window, the small house only had a hole in its wooden wall. The wind was

cluttering the rain and I could not stay away from it.It was almost evening, very soon after the field was dark. At its very margin, in the

direction where I had come from, a pub turned its lights on. In only one second I was there. I

would have liked to enter, to drink something, to stay at warmth, surrounded by people and by

the alcohol fetidness. I fumbled in my pockets for money but I couldn’t find any. In front of

the pub, the rain was falling merrily, through a curtain of smoke and steams egressing from

inside.

I had to decide something, anything, for example, to go home, but how?It was impossible to do it, dirty as I was, and, at the same time, I didn’t want to give

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up my filth. My soul was enveloped in a thick sadness, like when one realizes that in front of

him there is nothing but emptiness and purposelessness, and nothing left to live and nothing

left to achieve.

I began to run in the streets, in the dark, jumping over slops and sometimes sinking to

my knees in them. Despair grew in me, massive and excruciating, and made me feel an urgent

need to scream and to hit my head on the trees and on the walls, but then it writhed in a

tranquil, tender thought. I knew what I had to do: because I couldn’t go any further, all I had

to do was to finish with everything, in that exact moment and place. What was I leaving

behind? Just a humid, ugly world, in which it was raining softly…

I entered the house on the back door. I sneaked through the rooms, avoiding looking in

the mirrors. I was searching for something efficacious and quick which could have thrown in

the dark everything I was feeling and seeing, just as a wagon of rocks when one discards its

bottom plank.

I began to search all the drawers for some violent poison, devoid of any thought

except for the one that all this must finish as soon as possible. It was a duty like any other one.

I found all sorts of objects which couldn’t have served me for anything: buttons,

twine, colored thread, little prayer books with a weighty smell of naphthalene. None of these

useless things could help a man die. This is what the world contained in its most tragic

moments: buttons, twine, colored thread, little prayer books…

At the bottom of a drawer I found a box with white pills, they could have been a

poison or just an inoffensive medicine, but I thought that anyway, in a big quantity, they

should certainly be poisoning.

I put one on my tongue, my whole mouth was filled with a vaguely salty and fade

taste. I crushed it between my teeth and its dust absorbed all my saliva. My mouth became

dry. There were many tablets in the little box, more than thirty. I went to the faucet in the yard

and I begun to swallow them, one by one, steadily and patiently.I would drink some water with every pill, I needed a lot of time to finish them all. The

last ones couldn’t slither down my neck, which felt like swollen.

It was completely dark in the yard. I sat on a step and I waited. In my stomach began a

terrifying boiling, but I was filling good in the rest of my body, and the rain was now my

intimate friend, understanding my state and surrounding me with its care.

The yard became a sort of saloon, and I was filling more and more feathery in it. All

things were desperately trying not be to drawn in the deep obscurity. All of a sudden Irealized I was sweating terribly. I put my hand under my skirt, I was all wet. Around me the

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void was growing vertiginously. I entered the house and fell on a bed, completely wet...

It was a beautiful head, extraordinarily beautiful.

Maybe three times bigger than a human head, spinning slowly on a brass axis which

was sweeping it from the top, through the neck.

First I could only see its nape. Out of what was it built? It had a pale shine of old

faience, with tusk glitters. All of its surface was printed with small blue drawings, all sorts of

filigrees repeated geometrically, like on a carpet. From afar they looked like a delicate writing

on an ivory paper; it was incredibly beautiful.

All of a sudden, the head begun to move, spinning on its axis, and I was overwhelmed

by a deep vertigo. I knew that in some seconds would appear, in front of the skull, the

frightening, horrible face.

It was a well-formed face, with all its normal human sets: dished eyes, very prominent

chin, and two excavated triangles under every cheekbone, like in a thin person.

But its skin was fantastic: formed out of delicate spangles of delicate flesh, one near

the other, like the brownish foils on the back of the mushrooms.

There were so many foils, and so tight, that, if you were looking at that head by

closing the eyelids for a bit, nothing seemed abnormal, and the minuscule lines looked like the

hachured shadows of some copper engraving.

Sometimes, during the summer, looking far away at the chestnut trees, charged with

leaves, they looked like enormous heads stuck in trunks, with the cheeks holed in depth, like

my own head.

When the wind was blowing through the leaves, this face would undulate like a field

of wheat. In the same way was quivering the head, when the pedestal was moving.

In order to discover that the head was made out of spangles, it was enough to dish my

finger a little in its flesh: it would enter without any resistance, like in a humid, soft paste.When I took it out, the spangles were returning to their original position, and no trace was left

behind.

Once, in my childhood, I was present during the exhumation and inhumation of the

body of a girl who had died very young, and had been buried dressed in a white wedding

dress.

The silk bodice had disentangled in long, dirty strips, and from place to place, the

traces of embroidery had mingled with soil. Only her face looked intact, and had kept entirelyits traces. Its color was dark-blue, so that the head seemed made out of humid pasteboard.

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When the coffin was taken out, someone passed his hand over the dead girl’s face, and

we all had a terrible surprise: what we had thought to be a very well preserved cheek was only

a two-fingers thick layer of moldiness, which had replaced the skin’s depth and forms.

Underneath this illusion was the empty skull.

My head was exactly like this, but instead of moldiness it was covered with layers of

flesh, but I could traverse them to the bones with my finger.

The head, although hideous, was a secure refuge against the air.

Why against the air? In my room the air was in continuous movement, viscous, sticky,

heavy, flowing from everywhere and trying to curdle in ugly, black stalactites.

In this air appeared the head for the first time, and around it began to grow gradually a

void, like an aureole.

I was so happy and pleased with its apparition that I felt like laughing. But how was it

possible to laugh in the middle of the night, in the dark?

I began to love the head passionately. It was my most precious and intimate

possession. It had come to me from the mysterious world of darkness, from where only an

inaudible buzz would arrive to me, like a continuous boil under my skull. What other things

could be found there? I’d open my eyes wide open and I scrutinize in vain the obscurity but,

except for the ivory head, nothing else came.

I wondered with some sort of fear if this head would not become in my future life the

centre of all my preoccupations, replacing them all, one by one, so that at he end I would only

remain with it and with the darkness. Life appeared at that moment in a precise, true light. For

a very short instant, it had grown in the air like a complete, matured fruit. The head was my

rest and my felicity, uniquely my possession. Maybe if it had belonged to the whole world, a

terrible catastrophe would have taken place. Only one moment of full happiness could have

petrified the world forever.

Against the power of the head fought continuously, more and more powerless, theair’s dirty flow. Sometimes near it appeared my father, vague and indirect, like a mass of

whitish steams. I knew he would put his hand on my forehead; his hand was cold. I would try

to explain to him the useless fight between the head and the air, while he was unbuttoning my

shirt and sliding under the thermometer my armpit, like a thin glass lizard.

Around the head would begin a troublesome movement, like a flag’s flutter.

It was impossible to stop it, the flag was fluttering evermore.

I remembered the day when, at tea time, upstairs, in the Weber family, Paul had let hishand hang down the chair, and Edda, from the bed, raising her shoe a little, began to scratch

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his palm, as a joke. In time, her gesture reached an unusual virulence. When I thought about

about it, the shoe was scratching Paul’s palm with an incredible virulence, until it produced a

small wound, and than a deep hole in his flesh. The show never stopped its annoying

mechanism: it was continually holing the wounded hand, and then the whole arm, and then

the whole body… In the same way began the movement of the flag. It could have destroyed

everything, and then devour me…

I screamed in great pain and despair, all sweaty.

“How much?” asked a voice in the shadow.

“39”, answered my father, leaving me prey to the storm growing inside me.

The convalescence announced itself one morning as an extreme fragility of the world,

in the room in which I was sleeping; it was entering through the window on the roof, and the

room’s volume diminished gradually its density. The things’ clearness was lighter now, and,

no matter how deeply I would breathe, a wide void remained in my chest, like the

disappearance of an important quantity of myself. In the warm sheets, the crumbs of bread

were sliding from under my legs. My leg was searching the bed’s metal and the metal was

stabbing it with a cold knife.

I tried to get down from the bed. Everything was just as I suspected: the too

inconsistent air could not sustain me. I was walking through it abruptly and without any

coordination, as if I was trying to cross a vaporous and warm river.

I sat on a chair, under the window on the roof, around me the light was relegating the

things’ exactitude as if it were washing them thoroughly, in order to deprive them of their

glitter.

The bed, in a corner of the room, was dipped in darkness. How did I manage, in that

obscurity, to distinguish, during the fever, every grain of lime?

I began to get dressed; my clothes were lighter than usual, hanging on my body like

blotting paper, and smelling as lye after having been ironed.Flowing in gradually rare waters, I got out into the street. I was instantly stunned by

the sun. Immense stains of yellow and greenish brilliancies were partly covering the houses

and the passers-by. The street itself looked thin and fresh, like having surpassed the fever of a

serious disease.

The carriage horses, grey and loose, had abnormal movements, now they were

walking very slowly, with difficulty, and the next moment they were running wildly,

breathing powerfully on their nostrils so that they would not fall too weak on the asphalt.The long corridor of houses was slightly rocking under the wind’s blow. From afar

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step. Bewildered by the perfection of his gestures, he got in only few seconds to the top. But

there something strange happened: all of a sudden he became aware of the fragility of his

position, as well as of his extraordinary bravery. Trembling and sweating with fear, he asked,

with a low voice, for a ladder, and recommended many times to the others to hold it tight and

not to move it. The audacious amateur descended with infinite prudence, step by step, all

sweaty and frightened, disorientated by the senseless idea he just had and angry with himself.

My position now in the garden was similar to the one on the top of the fragile

pyramid. I could feel in me the circulation of the strong pith, but I had to make efforts not to

fall from the height of my admirable certitudes.

A thought passed through my head, that this was the state in which I should

meet Edda, calm, sure of myself, illuminated; I hadn’t visited her in a long time…

I wanted to appear in front of someone, once in my life, comprehensive and

unflinching, silent and superb as a tree.

Yes, a tree, so I filled my chest with air and, lying comfortably on my back, I greeted

warmly the branches above me. There was something rough and simple in that tree,

organically and wonderfully related to my new forces. I caressed the trunk as if it were an old

friend. “My friend, my fellow tree!”…

The more I was looking at the infinitely spread wreath of branches, the more I felt my

flesh dividing itself and air circulating alive through its gaps. My blood was flowing in me

majestically and rich, foamy of the simple life’s bubbling.

I stood up. For a moment my knees bent, as if they wanted to compare in a single

hesitation all my force and all my feebleness. With large steps I headed towards Edda’s house.

The heavy wooden door facing the terrace was closed. I was bewildered by its

immobility. All my thoughts disappeared. I pushed the door handle. “Courage!” I said to

myself, but then I stopped to correct myself. Why courage? Only shy people need courage in

order to achieve something, the normal, strong ones don’t feel courage or cowardice, they justopen doors…

The fresh darkness of the first room received me with a calm, blissful air, as if it had

waited for me for long.

This time, the curtain of pearls, when uniting after me, had a strange tinkling, which

made me feel alone in a deserted house, at the edge of the world. Was this the sensation of

extreme equilibrium in the top of the pyramid of chairs?

I knocked violently at Edda’s door.She answered with a frightened voice to come in. Why were my steps so soft?

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“Did I step softly?” I felt that the presence of a person like me or, better said, of a tree,

must have been felt from afar.

But no wonder awakened in the room, no fever, not the slightest emotion.

For some seconds my thought preceded me in an ideal manner, with a great perfection

and sobriety of my gestures. I saw myself stepping forward natural and sure of myself and

taking a seat at Edda’s feet, on the bed where she was lying. But my real person remained

somewhere behind all these beautiful projects, like a villain and broken trailer.

Edda asked to sit down and I sat on a chair, at a large distance from her.

The clock was ticking between us its very sonorous, annoying seconds. Strangely, the

tick-tock was growing and decreasing like the sea’s ebb and high tide, advancing in waves

towards Edda, until I could hardly hear it, and then coming back to me, swollen and violent…

“Edda, I told her, interrupting our silence, allow me to tell you something very

simple…”

She did not answer.

“Edda, do you know what I am?”

“What?”

“A tree, Edda, a tree…”

Of course, this short conversation took place entirely inside me, no word had been

uttered.

Edda snuggled on the bed, gripping her knees and covering them with the blanket.

Then she put her hands under her head and looked at me attentively. I would have given

anything for her to look anywhere else.

All of a sudden I saw on a shelf a big bunch of flowers in a vase. This saved me.

How come that I hadn’t seen them before? I kept looking in that direction since I had

entered there. In order to verify their sudden apparition I looked for a second somewhere else

and then glanced back at them. They were there, real, big, red, immobile… How come that Ihadn’t seen them? I began to doubt my certitude of being a tree. An object appeared in the

room, out of nothing, I wondered if my sight was always clear, maybe in my body there were

still some traces of impotence and darkness, which were circulating through my new

luminosity like clouds on a shiny sky, covering my sight when mingling with my eyes’ fluids,

just like the clouds cover the sun and sink in darkness a part of the landscape.

“How beautiful are those flowers, Edda…”

“What flowers?”“Those on the shelf…”

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“What flowers?”

“Those rod, big dahlias…”

“What dahlias?”

“What do you mean? Those dahlias…”

I got up and ran to the shelf. On a pile of books there was a red scarf, and the moment

I touched it I understood it was really a scarf, but something was still hesitating in me, like the

wavering of the amateur acrobat’s courage on the top of the pyramid, between genius

equilibrium and pure dilettantism. I had got to my limit, to my highest point… Now all I

could do was to go back and sit on the chair. What could I do or say next?

For some moments I was so bewildered by this problem that I was incapable of doing

the slightest movement. Like the very big speed of a motor’s propeller, which makes it look

immobile, my profoundly desperate hesitation imposed on me a statue’s noble rigidity. The

tick-tock was stronger with every second, fastening me with tiny audible nails. I wrested from

my immobility with difficulty.

Edda was in the same position on the bed, looking at me with the same calm wonder; I

had the impression that a mean and perfidious power was making things glitter in their most

common aspect, in order to confuse me.

This is what was implacably fighting against me: the common aspect of all things.

In a world so accurate, any initiative was ineffectual, or even unattainable.

And what was driving me crazy was the fact that Edda couldn’t have been different

from this woman with perfect hairdo, with blue-violet eyes and an imperceptible smile at the

corner of her delicate mouth. What could I do against such a bitter exactitude? How could I

make her understand that I was a tree? This could only be transmitted through immaterial,

uniform words, through the air, like a wreath of branches and leaves, superb and enormous,

just as I felt it growing inside me. How could I possibly do this?

I got close to the bed and leaned upon the wooden elbow rest. In my hands irradiated asort of certitude, as if in them descended, all of a sudden, the core of my uneasiness. And

now? Between me and Edda was still lingering that petrified transparent air, untouchable and

apparently inconsistent, in which had accumulated all my forces unable to achieve anything.

Heavy hesitations, elongated silences, troubles and vertigos of flesh and blood, all these

things could enter that miserable space without the appearance of the black color and the

sticky matter containing them, and in the world the distances were not just those which could

be covered with the eyes, infinitesimal and permeable, but also the invisible ones, populatedwith monsters of shyness, of fantastic projects and sudden gestures… If all these would had

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coagulated all of a sudden in the matter towards which they were heading to be composed of,

they would have transformed the world’s aspect in a horrifying cataclysm, in an astonishing

chaos of atrocious misfortunes and ecstatic beatitudes.

In that moment, looking at Edda, the materialization of my thought could have

resulted in that simple gesture screaming in my head: to take the press-paper from the table (I

was looking at it with the corner of my eye, it was a noble medieval treasury pressing the

papers), and throw it towards Edda, and then be the witness of its immediate result, a

formidable spring of blood from her chest, vigorous like the steam flowing from a broken

faucet, filling gradually the room, until I would have felt my feet lapping in the clammy,

warm liquid, then my knees and then, like in those American sensational movies in which one

character is condemned to remain in an hermetically-closed room in which water is gradually

raising, to feel the blood touching my lips, and then to be drowned in its salty, pleasant

taste…

I begun to move my lips and swallow my saliva.

“Are you hungry?” Edda asked me.

“Look, Edda, I said out of the blue, it is something very simple, maybe too simple…

I’m sorry to tell it to you, but I…

I wanted to add “I am a tree”, but this phrase had no value at all, since I had that desire

to drink blood, and was loitering, pale and faded, at the bottom of my soul, and I wondered

that it had once been so important… I tried to speak again.

“Edda, I felt sick, I felt weak and lost, but I am always healed by your presence, only

seeing you makes me feel healthy again… does this upset you?”

“No, not at all”, she answered, and then begun to laugh.

Now I was definitely ready to commit something absurd and bloody, so I took quickly

my hat, uttered “I must leave now”, and in only one second I was downstairs.

Now I had the certitude that the world was stoned in its common aspect and that I hadfallen in it by pure mistake, and that I would never become a tree, I would never kill anyone,

and the blood would never spring in waves.

All objects and all people were closed in their sad obligation to remain accurate,

nothing else but accurate, in vain would I see dahlias in a vase, when in reality on that shelf

was only a red scarf… the world didn’t have the power to change, it was so niggardly closed

in its exactitude that it could not allow itself to see scarves instead of flowers.

For the first time in my life I felt my head powerfully enclosed in my head’s skeleton,in a terribly painful captivity…

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That autumn, Edda got sick and died. All the previous days, all my aimless

wanderings, all my tiresome and painful questions gathered themselves in the pain and the

trouble of a single week, like in those liquids where the mixture of more substances condenses

suddenly the violence of a deadly poison.

At the first floor, the silence became even deeper. Paul found, in some wardrobe, an

old topcoat and a stale tie, which he knotted around his neck like a rope. His skin was now

dark-blue, like covered with the delicate gloomy veil the sleepless nights envelop the cheeks

in.

“She suffered all night, he said. I asked the doctor yesterday what he thinks and he

told me the whole truth. It was like an explosion in her kidneys, the doctor said. Very rarely

does this disease manifest itself so brutally, and so swiftly. Usually it appears slowly, and

shows different symptoms long before it gets serious. An explosion in her kidneys, an

explosion, yes, an explosion in her kidneys…

Paul was talking quickly, but with long interruptions, as if between the words he

wanted to allow the heavy pain inside him to swarm and to mature.

In the office downstairs it was now dark like in a cave; the old Weber, his head sunk in

a register, gave the impression of being busy…

Every morning the doctor was coming, and, with quiet steps, was gathering the three

Webers. I was going after them, speaking with Ozy. We hadn’t played in a long time our

imaginary game, and now it was a wonderful occasion to start again. It would have been so

good to be able to speak about Edda’s disease, as if nothing ever happened! Climbing the

stairs, I was thinking of the extraordinary possibility to belong to a game coordinated by Ozy,

to which the doctor, Paul and the old man could have also participated … Once in his lifetime,

the unfortunate hunchback could have conducted an imaginary, inexistent play. The more we

climbed, the more urgent was in me the desire to yell: “It’s enough now, it’s over, you allplayed magnificently, Paul’s mask was really impressive, it was obvious that old Weber was

in big pain, but now it’s enough, it’s over, please, Ozy, tell them to give up the rest…” But

everything was too well set to finish on the stairs…

While the doctor entered Edda’s room, we remained in the room, old Weber, Ozy and

me. It was maybe the first time in his life when old Weber tried to choke back an unbearable

pain. With his head leaned on the armchair, he was looking somewhere outside, his gaze

impersonal and vague, as if he didn’t know and didn’t expect anything, and in the end, as thebig actors who bring to perfection their role with an astonishing detail, he raised and got

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closer to a painting on the wall, to see it better. But just as a big actor whose voice, thickened

to its limit in order to sustain a tragic monologue, turns into a ridiculous scream provoking

heavy laughers in the audience, old Weber, trying to play his role too calmly, mistook its

effect: while he was standing and watching the painting, his irritated fingers were rapping into

a chair…

Paul took my hand:

“Edda wants to see you, come with me.”

On the bed with white sheets was lying Edda, her head turned towards the window.

Her hair was rummaged on the pillows, blonder and frailer as usual, as a result of her

disease’s subtlety and refinement. In the room the things were whitely decomposing in the too

powerful light, and Edda’s face was melting in it, inconsistent.

Suddenly she turned her head towards me.

It was true… That moment something happened in me, something indistinct, clear and

surprising, as an evident truth received from outside… I realized that Edda’s head was exactly

like the ivory head appearing in my feverish nights. This evidence was so overwhelming that I

almost thought that I had invented in that exact moment the exact form of the old faience

head, with the dreams’ surprising speed of composition, which form an entire episode the

moment one hears a gun’s shot.

I was now sure that something violent and bad will happen to Edda soon. Maybe later

I imagined this as well; as for Edda, I don’t distinguish now what was the true her.

She tried to look deep in my eyes, but had to close her eyelids, tired. Her hair was

distinguishing her yellow forehead like a wax block. I was again hermetically closed in

Edda’s presence, in what she was now and in my delirious nights, during none of my

wanderings and none of my meetings had I thought seriously of someone else except for

myself, it was impossible for me to imagine a foreign interior pain, or simply someone else’s

existence. The persons around me were just as decorative, ephemeral and material like anyother object, like the houses, or the trees, only in front of Edda, for the first time in my life,

did I feel that my question can evade, and, resonating with another profoundness and another

form of existence, come back to me in enigmatic and troubling echoes.

Who was Edda? What was Edda? I could see myself for the first time from the

exterior, and, in her presence, these questions were the true meaning of my life. In the

moment of her death did she shake me most profoundly and most authentically; her death was

also my death, and in everything I did ever since and in everything I lived, was projected theimmobility of my future death, cold and obscure, as I had seen on Edda’s face.

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At that day’s dawn I woke up heavy and rigid, disturbed by a foreign presence on my

bed.

It was my father, who had waited in silence for me to wake up. When I opened my

eyes, he made some steps in the room and brought me a white wash-bowl and a cup of water

for me to rinse my hands.

With a painful convulsion, which pricked my heart, I understood what that meant.

“Wash your hands, said my father, Edda has died.”

Outside it was raining softly, and it kept raining for three whole days.

The day of the funeral, the mud was dirtier and more aggressive than ever, the wind

was blowing in waves of water in the roof and in the windows. All night a window was lit

upstairs in the Weber house, in the room where candles were burning.

In old Weber’s office everything was put aside to let the coffin pass; mud entered the

rooms; I could very well see it, triumphant and insinuating, like a hydra with numerous

protoplasmic prolongations, stretching on the walls, going up on the people and on the stairs

and trying to climb the coffin.

The wooden floor appeared downstairs, in the office, from under the oil cloth covering

it, and which was thrown away: long lines of dirt appeared, like the black lines deepened in

Samuel Weber’s old face.

Around his shoes ascended the mud, slowly but tenaciously, penetrating his skin and

going up to his heart, dirty, heavy, sticky. It was mud and nothing else, it was the floor and

nothing else, candles and nothing else, “My funeral will be a string of objects”, Edda once

told me…

Something in me was struggling somewhere far away, as if wanting to prove to me the

existence of a truth superior to all this mud, something different from it, something useless…

My identity had become true long time before and now, in a very normal way, it was only

verifying itself: in the world nothing exists except the mud. What I thought to be pain in mewas only its weak boiling, a protoplasmic prolongation modeled in words and reasons.

In Paul drops were falling like in a bottomless recipient. Clothes were flowing on him

and on his hands, hanging heavily and bowing his back. His tears were flowing down his

cheeks, dirty and elongated, like water on the windows.

Slowly, balancing on the people’s shoulders, the coffin passed near Samuel Weber’s

boat, near the old registers and the dozens of little bottles of ink and medicines, discovered

during the whole operation of cleaning the office, because her funeral was just a long line of objects…

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Some other details happened, beyond life itself: in the cemetery, when the body was

taken out from the coffin, coated in white sheets, on these could be seen a large stain of blood.

It was the last and the most insignificant detail before descending in the cemetery’s

warm, moldy basement, filled with bodies soft as jelly, yellow, purulent…

From time to time I am thinking of these things, trying to combine them into

something I could call my true person; when I remember them, old Weber’s office becomes

suddenly the room in which I feel the smell of old registers and mould, but then it disappears

and it becomes the real place I’m in, and I am again put in front of the same painful question,

that is, how do people spend their lives, making use of, for example, rooms, and feeling that

inside them grows a strange body, ramified like a fern and inconsistent like a smoke, a strange

smell, like the profoundly enigmatic odor of the mould; when the events and the people open

and close inside me like fans; when my hand tried to describe this weird and mysterious

simplicity, then I feel, for a second no more, like a convict who realizes in just one second

that death is approaching (and would like his struggle to be different from all the other

struggles in the world, thus liberating him), and I hope that, from all these adventures, a new

and authentic event will appear, warm and intimate, which could sound in me clear and

unique as a name, a name never heard before, the true meaning of my life, its true

understanding…

For this purpose, and not another, there still persists in me that intimate -and so hostile

in the same time- fluid, so close but still so rebellious in its catching, which transforms by

itself, in Edda’s vision, or in Paul Weber’s bowed shoulders, or in the excessively precise

detail of the water faucet, in the corridor of an anonymous hotel.

Why does the memory of Edda’s last days come back to me, so clear? Why, asking in

another sense (and questions can grow chaotically in thousands of different directions, like in

that childhood game when I was folding a paper stained with ink and I was pressing it so that

the ink to effuse as much as possible, revealing, when I was unfurling the paper, the mostfantastic and most unexpected contortions of a bizarre drawing) this memory and not another

comes into my mind?

With every misunderstood and exact memory, I must realize, once more, -like a sick

person’s violent pain, which shadows all his others pinches, like, for example, the bad

position of the pillows, or the bitterness of the last medicine- that all my other troublesome

and niggardly memories are unique, in the poorest sense of this term, and they had their exact

place in my linear life, contributing towards one single exactitude, unalterable from its ownprecision.

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“Your life was like this and not different”, she says, and in this phrase can be felt the

immense nostalgia of a world closed in its hermetical lights and colors, in which nothing is

permitted to any individual destiny, but to extract from itself the aspect of an exact

commonplace.

Here, in this inimitable and arid world, can the melancholy of being unique and

limited be found.

Sometimes during the night I wake up from a horrible nightmare, my most simple and

most frightening dream. I dream that I am sleeping in the same bed where I lied in the

evening. Around me is the same room and it’s exactly the same time of the night which

should be. If, for example, my nightmare begins in the middle of the night, it places me with

exactitude in the darkness of that hour. I can feel the position in which I am, and I can also

see, I know exactly in what room and in what bed am I sleeping, my dream fits closely, like a

delicate skin, over my real position and over my sleep, so one might say that I am in a way

awake: well, I am awake, but I’m dreaming, and I’m dreaming of me being awake. I am

dreaming about my sleep in that precise moment.

Suddenly I feel that my sleep becomes deeper and heavier, and carries me after it.

I want to wake up, but my sleep weighs heavy on my eyelids and on my hands. I

dream that I am stirring, that I move my hands, but my sleep is more powerful than me, and

after a second of struggle, it holds me even more ferociously, and I begin to scream, I want to

resist the sleep, I want to be awaken, I want somebody to slap my face violently, I am afraid

that my sleep will sink me deeper and deeper, to a place from where I will never be able to

come back, I am begging for someone to help me, I want to be shaken…

Then comes my last scream, the most powerful, which wakes me up in my real room,

identical to that in the dream, in the position in which I was dreaming myself to be, at the hour

when I was struggling in my nightmare.

What I see now around me differs very little from what I was seeing a second before,but it is enveloped in some sordid air of authenticity, flowing through objects and through my

being, like a sudden coldness in the winter, which enlarges all sonorities…

What is the real sense of my reality?

Around me grew the life I will lead until the next dream. Memories and present pains

will weigh heavy in me, and I want to resist, I don’t want to fall into their sleep, from where I

will never come back…

Now I struggle in this reality, I scream, I beg to be awaken, awaken to another life, tomy real life. It’s clear it’s daylight, I know where I am and what I live, but something is

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missing from all this scenery, like in my terrible nightmare.

I struggle, I scream, I fret. Who will wake me up?

All around me, the exact reality carries me down, trying to sink me forever.

Who will wake me up?

It has always been like this, always, always, always…

Translated by Alina Savin

Long time ignored by the literary critique because of his minority status and his

unconventional prose, the Romanian Jewish writer Max Blecher (1909–1938) was recently discovered

by a new generation of enthusiastic readers and researchers. One of the ambassadors of the European

surrealist in the Romanian literature, Max Blecher belongs to the so-called golden generation of this

country’s culture, together with Eugene Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, Tristan Tzara or Benjamin

Fundoianu.

Compared with Brunos Schulz or Franz Kafka, Max Blecher, is a unique phenomenon in the

Romanian literature, trying to describe the coherence of a fantastic and yet prosaic world, the one of

the shtetl, of the provincial town somewhere at the margins of the reality and of the civilization,

functioning on its own masochist rules and under the continuous terror of a brutal, painful death.

Born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Botosani, Romania, Max Blecher contracted tuberculosis of the

spine at the age of 19 and spent the rest of his life in hospitals and sanatoria. Before his death at 29 he

wrote two novels, Adventures in the Immediate Unreality (1936), to which Eugene Ionesco refers to as

being a masterpiece, and which is now translated for the first time into English, and Scarred Hearts

(1939), which narrates the life of Emmanuel, a young man with spinal tuberculosis and confined to a

sanatorium outside Paris, where he and his fellow patients attempt to live life to the fullest as their

bodies slowly atrophy and die.

Adventures in the Immediate Unreality is an exceptional novel, highly personal and, in the

same time, universal, describing the fall into maturity of a young man with exacerbated sensibility.

The small, insignificant town is the scenery of incredible encounters with different characters, who

populate a world far away from the natural rules of the universe. The discovery of the sexuality has in

itself the power of the primitive initiations, but also the perversity of the surrealist paintings. The laws

f f i d hi l h i f h b il d h ld i h i

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