Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
Madame Maria was tirelessly holding the cross because there was nothing else she could do—setting it aside would have been out of the question.
Amelia’s finger quivered and lifted and began to beckon … it beckoned and beckoned … toward Fryderyk, who approached
her slowly and cautiously. She also beckoned toward his head until he stooped over her, and then she said astonishingly loudly:
“Please don’t leave. You will see. I want you to see. Everything. To the end.”
Fryderyk bowed and stepped back.
Only then did she fix her eyes on the cross and, I imagine, prayed, if one were to judge by the quivering that from time to time appeared on her lips—and in the end it was as it should be, the cross, her prayer, our attention—and this lasted an exceedingly long time, and the passage of time was the only measure of the fervor of these unending prayers that could not tear themselves from the cross. And this immobile and almost dead yet vibrating concentration, mounting with time, was sanctifying her, in the meantime Vaclav, the Hipolits, Henia, the servants, attended her on bended knee. Fryderyk also knelt down. But in vain. Because in spite of everything, and even though she was so lost in the cross, her demand that he see it retained its power. Why did she need this? To convert him with her last dying effort? To show him how one dies the Catholic way? Whatever it was that she wanted it was Fryderyk, not Christ, who was her final court of appeal, even if she were praying to Christ, it was for Fryderyk, and it made no difference that he fell to his knees, it was he, not Christ, who became the highest judge and God, because the death throes were taking place for him. What a baffling situation—I wasn’t surprised that he hid his face in his hands. All the more since,
as the minutes were passing, we knew that with each minute her life was ebbing away—yet she was prolonging her prayer just so that it would stretch like a violin string, to the very limit. And again her finger appeared and began to beckon, this time toward her son. Vaclav approached, his arm around Henia. The finger directed itself straight at them, and Amelia said with haste:
“Swear to me immediately, now … Love and fidelity. Quick.”
They lowered their heads to her hands, Henia began to cry. But the finger rose again and beckoned, now in the other direction—to the corner, where in the corner lay … There was a commotion. He was lifted—and I saw that he was wounded, in the thigh I think—they carried him to her. She moved her lips, and I thought that I would finally find out what this was, why he was here with her, this (young one), also bleeding, what was between them. … But suddenly she gasped, once, twice, and went pale. Madame Maria raised the cross. Madame Amelia fixed her eyes on Fryderyk and died.
Fryderyk rose from his knees and stepped into the center of the room: “Pay her your respects!” he exclaimed. “Pay homage!” He took the roses from a vase and threw them toward the couch, then he reached out his hand to Vaclav. “A soul worthy of the heavenly choir! While for us there is nothing left but to bow our heads!” These words would have been theatrical on any of our lips, not to mention his gestures, but he pierced us with them imperiously, like a king to whom pathos is permitted—who lays down a different kind of naturalness, above the ordinary. A ruling king, master of ceremonies! Vaclav, swept away by the sovereignty of this pathos, rose from his knees and ardently clasped his hand. It seemed that Fryderyk aimed his intervention at erasing all the strange improprieties that had cast a shadow over the demise, to return it to its full splendor. He moved a few steps to the left, then to the right—this was a kind of agitation in our midst—and he approached the lying (boy). “Rise to your knees!” he commanded. “To your knees!” This command was, on the one
hand, the natural extension of the previous command, but, on the other hand, it created an awkwardness, because it was directed at the wounded man who was unable to rise, and the awkwardness increased when Vaclav, Hipolit, and Karol, terrorized by Fryderyk’s authority, rushed to raise (the boy) to the commanded position. Yes, this was going too far! As Karol’s hands took him under the arms, Fryderyk, thrown off track, fell silent, and his lights went out.
I was bewildered, exhausted … so much was happening … but I had already taken his measure … and so I knew that he had once more taken up his game with us and with himself. … From the tension, created by the corpse, some action of his was evolving, leading to a goal rooted in his imagination. It had all been intentional, though the intention was perhaps not yet tangible even to himself, perhaps one should say that he knew only the preamble to the intention—but I would have been surprised if what he had in mind was homage to Amelia, no, this had to do with bringing to us the man who was lying, in all his drastic and humiliating sense, with “pulling him out,” enhancing him and “binding him” with Henia and Karol. What connection, however, could there be between them? This golden wildness surely fit in with our couple, if only because it was also a sixteen-year-old wildness, but beyond that I didn’t see any connection, and I think that Fryderyk did not see one either—he acted in the dark, prompted by a sense, as unclear as my own, that he, the lying man, is enhancing their power—turning
them into demons. … And thus Fryderyk was paving the lying man’s way to them.
Not until the following day (filled with preparations for the funeral) did I find out in some detail about the course of these disastrous events-—which were extremely complex, bizarre, eerie. Reconstruction of the facts was not easy, there were many distressing gaps—especially since the only witnesses, this Józek, Józek Skuziak, and the old servant woman, Waleria, were lost in the chaos inside their incompetent and uneducated heads. Everything indicated that Madame Amelia, having gone into the pantry, heard murmurs on the stairs leading to the kitchen and bumped into this Józek, who had slipped into the house to filch something. On hearing her steps, he threw himself into the first door he saw and ran into the small servant’s room, awakening Waleria from a deep sleep, whereupon she lit a match. The further course of events unfolded primarily from her garbled account. “When I lit a match, and when I saw that someone was standin’, I froze so I couldn’t even move, and the match was burnin’ down in my fingers, my whole finger got burned. And m’ ladyship is standin’ there across from him, by the door, and she ain’t movin’ either. The match went out on me. I couldn’t see nothin’, the window shade was down, I’m lyin’ there, lookin’, don’t see nothin’, it’s dark, wish at least the floor would creak, but nothin’, nothin’, like nobody’s there, I’m lyin’, just givin’ m’self to God, still nothin’, it’s quiet, so I look at the floor because that’s where the last of the flame of the match is glowin’ but lightin’ up
nothin’, it burns out, nothin’, wish somebody would breathe or somethin’, but nothin’. All of a sudden …” (her account halted as if it came upon logs thrown crosswise) … “all of a sudden … somethin’s odd … it’s m’ ladyship that flings herself! On top o’ him! … Under his feet like … she must have thrown herself … So they fell down! … I don’t know nothin’, may God’s hand spare us, would at least one o’ them get to swearin’, but nothin’, nothin’, they just tussled on the floor like, I wanted to help ’em, but no way, I got faint, I hear a knife go deep into meat, once, twice, I hear agin knife into meat, then the two of them took to the door an’ that’s that! So I passed out totally! I passed out!”
Vaclav heatedly commented “That’s impossible!” to her account. “It couldn’t have happened like that! I don’t believe mother would have … behaved that way! The hag must have mixed things up, muddled them up in her stupidity. Oh, I’d rather listen to a hen cackling, I’d rather,” he exclaimed, “a hen cackling!”
He was moving his hand across his brow.
But Skuziak’s deposition agreed with what Waleria was saying: her ladyship fell and “knocked him down,” because she fell “at his feet.” With a knife. And he showed not only his slashed side and thigh, but also clear marks of bites on his neck and hands. “She was bitin’,” he said. “I snatched the knife from her, so then she got stuck on the knife, so I jumped away and took off, but the farm manager came after me shootin’, my leg went soft, so I sat down. … They caught me.”
Well, the fact that Amelia “got stuck” on the knife no one believed. “Lies,” Fryderyk said. “As to the bites, my God, fighting for one’s life, in a convulsive fight with an armed thug (because he was the one with the knife, not she) … well, nerves … One can’t be surprised. It’s an instinct, you know, a self-preservation instinct. …” That’s what he was saying. Nonetheless it was all strange, to say the least … and shocking … Madame Amelia biting someone … And as far as the knife was concerned, the matter wasn’t clear because, as it turned out, it was Waleria’s knife, a long, sharp kitchen knife that she used for cutting bread. So this knife lay on a small table beside her bed, exactly where Amelia had stood. Which would indicate that she, Amelia, feeling the knife in the dark with her fingers, threw herself with it onto …
Amelia’s murderer was barefoot, had dark feet, and he sparkled with two rather ordinary colors—the gold of his curly hair falling over the black of his eyes imbued with glumness, like those of forest puddles. These colors were especially intensified by the elegant, clear shine of his teeth, whose whiteness connected him with …
Then what? Then how? Then it would seem that Madame Amelia, finding herself in the dark little room with this (boy) and in the claws of intensifying anticipation, broke down and … and … She felt for the knife with her fingers. And having felt it, she went wild. She threw herself onto him to kill, and when they both fell, she bit him like a madwoman wherever she could. She? With her sanctity? At her age? She,
such an exemplar, with her moral code? Wasn’t this rather a fantasy born in the cook’s and the farmhand’s dull-witted pates, a wild tale to their measure, created by a transformation of what had played out in the dark, which was actually intangible? The darkness of the little room was doubled by the darkness of their imagination—and Vaclav, besieged by these darknesses that were knocking him off his feet, didn’t know what to do, this was for him, more than the knife, what was killing his mother, poisoning her for him and disfiguring her—he didn’t know how to rescue her for himself from this fury inscribed on the sixteen-year-old body with her teeth, with the knife with which she cut him. Such death tore her life into shreds for him. Fryderyk tried, as much as he could, to support him in spirit. “One can’t rely on their testimony,” he said. “First of all, they didn’t see anything because it was dark. Second, it’s totally unlike your mother, it doesn’t fit—there is only one thing we can say, and this we can say with absolute certainty, that it couldn’t have happened the way they’re describing it, it must have happened some other way, in that darkness as inaccessible to them as it is to us … it’s the truth, no doubt about it … though of course, if in the darkness, then …” (“Then what? Then what?” Vaclav kept asking, sensing that Fryderyk faltered.) “Then … well … well, the darkness, mind you … darkness is something … that throws one off from … One must remember that man lives in the world. In the dark the world disappears. There is nothing around, you know, one is just with oneself. Of course
you know that. We are naturally accustomed to the fact that each time we turn off a lamp, it becomes dark, this doesn’t however rule out the fact that in certain instances darkness can blind us through and through, you understand … and yet Madame Amelia would have, even in this darkness, remained Madame Amelia, isn’t that so? Though in this case the darkness held something within it … (“What?” Vaclav asked. “Tell me!”) “Nothing, nothing, it’s idiotic, it’s nonsense … (“What is?”) “Oh nothing, yet … this young fellow, from the village, maybe an illiterate …” (“So what if he’s an illiterate?”) “Nothing, nothing, I just want to say that in this case the darkness held youth within itself … it held a barefooted young fellow … and it’s easier to commit something like this on someone young than on someone … I mean, if it were someone more grown-up, then …” (“Then what?!) I mean to say that it’s easier with a young person, yes, easier—in the dark—it’s easier to commit something like this against a young one rather than against an old one, and …
“Oh, stop pumping me, Vaclav!” he suddenly exclaimed, truly frightened, sweat on his brow. “That’s just … theoretically speaking … Yet your mother … oh, no, it’s absurd, impossible, it’s nonsense! Isn’t it, Karol? Karol, what do you think?”
Why was Fryderyk turning to Karol? If he was scared—why was he buttonholing Karol as well? He belonged, however, to those who call the wolf out of the forest because they do not want to call it out—the fear itself luring it, magnifying it,
creating it. But having called out the wolf, he could not desist from teasing it, running wild with it. Consequently his consciousness was so reckless and tormenting that he himself knew it not as light but as darkness—it was, for him, a blind elemental force as much as an instinct, he didn’t trust it, he felt he was in its power, and he didn’t know where it was leading him. He was not a good psychologist, because he had too much intelligence and imagination—in his wide view of man there was room for everything—so he could just as well imagine Madame Amelia in any situation. In the afternoon Vaclav left to “arrange matters with the police,” namely to cool their investigative attempts with a sizable bribe—because, if the authorities tried to figure things out, who knows where it would end. The funeral took place the following morning—shortened, clearly speeded up. The next day we went back to Poworna and Vaclav came with us, leaving the house in God’s mercy. This didn’t surprise me—I understood that at this time he didn’t want to part with Henia. The carriage in which the ladies, with Hipolit and Vaclav, were traveling, went first, behind it the
britzka
driven by Karol, and in it myself and Fryderyk, and someone else: Józek.
We brought him along because we didn’t know what else to do with him. Let him go? He was a murderer. And besides, Vaclav wouldn’t let him go under any conditions, because the death had, as yet, not been dealt with, so things couldn’t be left just like that … and, above all, he hoped to draw a different version of the death from him, more seemly and less
scandalous. And so, at the foot of the front seat of our
britzka,
on straw, lay the blond juvenile murderer, and Karol, who was driving, had him under his feet—therefore, sitting sideways, he was resting his feet on the wedge-shaped front of the
britzka.
Fryderyk and I were—in the back. The
britzka
went up, it went down along the immobile undulation of the ground, the terrain opened up and closed in, the horses trotted in the hot smell of grain and in the dust. While Fryderyk, sitting in back, had in front of him the two of them together, in this and in no other configuration—while the four of us, in the
britzka
that rolled from one hill onto the next, also formed a fairly good configuration, a meaningful formula, a strange arrangement … and, as the silent journey progressed, the figure that we formed became more intrusive. Immense was Karol’s diffidence, his boyishness knocked off balance, he grew haggard under the blows of those tragic events, and he was as quiet as could be, and also kindly and docile … he even contrived a black tie for himself. Yet the two of them were there, right in front of Fryderyk and in front of me, by half a meter, on the front seat of the
britzka.
We went on. The horses trotted. Fryderyk’s face was by necessity turned toward them—so what did he perceive in them? The two forms of the same age were as if a single form, that’s how tightly the brotherly bond of their age united them. Yet Karol sat there above the lying fellow, with his reins, with the whip, shod in boots, his pants pulled up high—there was neither sympathy nor understanding between them. Rather, it was the harshness
of a boy toward a boy, the unfriendly and even hostile brutality that they are apt to feel toward each other, deep down, one toward the other. And one could see that Karol belonged to us, to Fryderyk and to me, he was with us, with people of his own class and against a colleague from the rabble over whom he stood guard. Yet we had them in front of us, and over the many hours of sandy road (which sometimes widened into a highway, soon to bore into limestone walls), they were both in front of us and this was somehow affecting them, creating something, determining something. … While there, farther on, appeared on the hills the carriage in which she was riding—the fiancée. The carriage appeared and disappeared, not letting us forget it, sometimes it wasn’t there for a long time but then it would reappear—while the oblique squares of the fields and the ribbons of meadows threaded onto our journey, wound and unwound—and in this geometry, boring, trotting, sluggish, drowned in vistas, drooped Fryderyk’s face, his profile close to mine. What was he thinking? What was he thinking? We were traveling behind the carriage, we were chasing the carriage. Karol, with the other dark-eyed man under his feet, cornflower-blue and golden, barefoot and unwashed, was as if undergoing a chemical change, though he was following the carriage as a star follows a star, but by now he was with a colleague—in a collegial fashion—clasped from below, he with the other, almost as if handcuffed, united by the boy within him with the other boy to such an extent that if they had begun to eat cherries together, or apples, I
would have not been at all surprised. We moved on. The horses trotted. Yes, that’s what Fryderyk must have been imagining—or this is what he imagined that I was imagining—his profile was close to mine, and I didn’t know which one of us had initiated this. Nonetheless, after many, many hours of moving through the countryside we reached Poworna, the two buddies were already “together with regard to Henia,” united with reference to her, solidified in this by the many hours of travel behind her and in front of us.