Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
We placed the prisoner in an empty pantry with a barred window. His wounds were superficial—he could have escaped. Tired beyond words, we fell into bed, I slept through the night and morning with a heavy sleep, and the next day I was besieged by intangible impressions, intrusive like a fly circling around my nose. I couldn’t catch this buzzing fly, escaping me constantly—what fly? This assailed me even before lunch when I began talking to Hipolit about some detail connected with our still-fresh experiences, but I could hear in his response an almost imperceptible change of tone—not that he treated me abrasively, but there was something like haughtiness, or contempt, or pride, as if he’d had enough, or as if he had more important troubles. Troubles more important than the murder? And then I caught something in Vaclav’s voice—I don’t know—something cold, marked as well by something like pride. Were they proud? Proud of what? The change in tone was as subtle as it was jarring, for how could Vaclav be putting on airs barely two days after her death?—and my sensitized nerves
suddenly dictated a suspicion that somewhere in our sky a new center of pressure had formed and some other wind was blowing—but what sort of wind? Something was transforming itself. Something seemed to be changing direction. Not until the evening did these misgivings assume a more distinct form, and that happened when I saw Hipolit crossing the dining room and saying, also whispering: “It’s a mess, by God, it’s a mess!” Suddenly he sat on a chair, dejected … then he rose, ordered the horses harnessed, and drove away. Now I knew that something new was forcing its way here, still, I didn’t want to ask, but in the evening, when I saw Fryderyk and Vaclav circling the yard, talking, I joined them in the hope of finding out what was squeaking in the grass. Nothing of the kind. They were again discussing the death from the day before yesterday—and in the same tone as before—it was a confidential chat, conducted in hushed voices. Fryderyk, his head bent, his gaze fixed on his shoes, was again poking into the murder, pondering this, considering that, analyzing, searching … until Vaclav, finally worn out, began defending himself, asking for a reprieve, letting it be known that this was tantamount to insensitivity! “What is?” Fryderyk asked. “How am I to understand this?” Vaclav begged for mercy. It’s too fresh, he wasn’t used to it yet, he couldn’t grasp it, he knows it without knowing, it’s all too sudden, it’s terrible! It was then that Fryderyk pounced on his soul like an eagle.
The comparison may be too high-flown. But one could clearly see that he was pouncing—and that he was pouncing
from on high. In what he was saying there was neither comfort nor mercy, on the contrary, there was a demand that the son drain the chalice of his mother’s death to the last drop. Just as Catholics live through Christ’s Golgotha minute by minute. He made it clear that he himself was not a Catholic. That he does not have even the so-called moral principles. That he is not virtuous. “So why, you’ll ask” (he was saying) “and in the name of what, am I demanding that you drain it to the limit? My reply is that it’s purely and simply in the name of evolution. Who is man? No one knows. Man is a puzzle (and this platitude appeared on his lips like something both embarrassing and sarcastic, like pain—both an angelic and a devilish abyss, more bottomless than a mirror). Yet we must (the “must” was intimate and dramatic), we must experience life more and more fully. This, you know, is inevitable. This is the necessity of our evolution. We are doomed to evolve. This law fulfills itself in the history of mankind as it does in the history of a single human being. Look at a child. A child is only the beginning, a child does not exist, a child is a child, namely, an introduction, a beginning. … And a young man (he almost spat out this word) … what does he know? What can he be conscious of … he … an embryo? While we?
“We?” He exclaimed. “We?!”
And then, as an aside:
“Your mother and I instantly and profoundly understood each other. Not because she was a Catholic. But because she
was subject to an inner compulsion toward seriousness … she was not at all … not at all … frivolous.…”
He looked into Vaclav’s eyes—something that until now had probably never happened, and it greatly confounded Vaclav—who, nonetheless, did not dare avert his gaze.
“She was reaching … into the heart of the matter.”
“What am I to do?” Vaclav exclaimed, raising his hands. “What am I to do?!”
If he had been talking with anyone else he would not have allowed himself to exclaim or to raise his hands. Fryderyk took him by the arm and moved forward, while with the finger of his other hand he pointed ahead. “One must rise to the magnitude of the task!” he said. “Do what you want. But let it be nothing less scrupulous in its … in its seriousness.”
Seriousness is the highest and most unrelenting requirement for maturity—no letup—nothing that even for a moment would ease the intensity of a gaze searching stubbornly for the heart of the matter. … Vaclav didn’t know how to defend himself against this severity—for it was indeed severity. In its absence, he would have doubted the seriousness of such behavior and the sincerity of such gesturing that conveyed some kind of agitation … but this theater was happening in the name of a stern summons to undertake and fulfill the highest duty of full awareness—and this, in Vaclav’s eyes, made Fryderyk irrefutable. Vaclav’s Catholicism could not be reconciled with the wildness of atheism—to a believer atheism is wild—and Fryderyk’s world was for him a chaos deprived of
a ruler, and therefore of law, peopled solely by man’s arbitrariness … and yet, a Catholic could not fail to respect a moral imperative, even though it surfaced on such wild lips. And besides, Vaclav shuddered to think that for him his mother’s death might come to nothing—that he would not be equal to the drama, or to his love and veneration—and he was more afraid of his own mediocrity, which turned him into a decent lawyer “with a fine-tooth comb,” than he was afraid of Fryderyk’s godlessness. He was therefore clinging to Fryderyk’s firm superiority, seeking its support, oh, no matter how, no matter with whom, anything to experience that death. To live through it! To extract everything from it! For that he needed a wild yet fixed gaze into the heart of the matter, and that special, terrible obstinacy of living through it.
“But what am I to do with this Skuziak?” he exclaimed. “Who is to be his judge, I ask you? Who is to sentence him? Do we have the right to lock him up? Well and good, we didn’t hand him over to the police, that would have been impossible—but we can’t hold him in the pantry for ever!”
He broached the subject with Hipolit the next day but got only a wave of his hand: “No point worrying about it! Not worth bothering one’s head with it! Hold him in the pantry, hand him over to the police, or whip him and release him, let him go. It’s all the same to me!” But when Vaclav tried to explain that Skuziak was his mother’s killer, Hipolit got annoyed: “A killer? A shit-head kid, not a killer! Do what you want with him, leave me alone, I have other things on my
mind.” He simply didn’t want to hear about it, one had the impression that the murder was important to him from one end—Amelia’s corpse—but trivial from the other, the murderer. And besides, he was clearly preoccupied with another worry. Suddenly something occurred to Fryderyk, who was standing by the heating stove, he moved as if to speak, but he only murmured: “Ohooo! …” He didn’t say it aloud. He murmured it. And since we were not prepared for a murmur it resounded more than if Fryderyk had spoken with a full voice—and thus murmuring he stood there with his murmur while we waited for him to say something more. He said nothing. Then Vaclav, who had already learned to follow the slightest change in Fryderyk, asked: “What is it, what do you mean?” The accosted man looked around the room.
“Well, yes, it doesn’t matter about
that one
… we can do whatever we want … whatever anyone wants to.…”
“With which one?” Hipolit exclaimed, with inexplicable anger. “With which one?”
Fryderyk tried to explain himself, somewhat disconcerted.
“With the one, well, it’s obvious which one! With him—it doesn’t matter. Whatever one wants to. Whatever one feels like.”
“Wait. Wait a minute. You said the same thing about my mother,” Vaclav suddenly interjected. “That my mother could actually have … with a knife … because …” He fumbled over his words. To which Fryderyk said, with obvious embarrassment: “Nothing, nothing, I just … Let’s not talk about it!”
What an actor! One could clearly see the seams of his game, he wasn’t hiding them. But it was also noticeable how much it cost him, how he
truly
paled and trembled in its clutches. To me at least, it was obvious that he was trying to impart to the murder and the murderer the most drastic character—but perhaps he wasn’t trying, perhaps this was a necessity stronger than he was, to which he was succumbing in pallor and fear. It was, of course, a game—but it was a game that was creating him and also creating the situation. As a result everyone felt awkward somehow. Hipolit turned and left. Vaclav fell silent. Yet the blows struck by the player reached them just the same, Józek in the pantry was becoming more and more difficult, and the atmosphere in general was as if poisoned with a particular yet obscure intention. (I knew to whom it pertained, at whom it was aimed …) Every evening Józek’s wounds had to be washed, and Fryderyk, who knew something about first aid, did this—with Karol’s assistance, while little Henia held the lamp. This was, again, an intervention as significant as it was degrading, the three of them bending over him, each with something in hand, which justified the bending over—Fryderyk held the cotton wool, Karol a bowl and a bottle with alcohol, and Henia held the lamp—but the bending of the three of them over the wounded thigh was somehow tearing itself free from the objects they were holding, it was simply bending over him, while the lamp shone. Afterward Vaclav would lock himself up with the boy and question him—in a conciliatory way or by threatening him—but
the boy’s inferiority and his darkness, together with his country origins, made him behave like an automaton, he kept repeating the same thing, that she threw herself on him, that she bit him, so what was he supposed to do? And, having become used to the questions, he felt at home with the answers.
“Her ladyship was bitin’ me. Here are the marks, can’t y’ see?”
When Vaclav would return from the interrogations, exhausted like after an illness, Henia would sit next to him and stay with him quietly, faithfully … keeping him company … while Karol set the table or looked at the pictures in some old magazine … and as I looked at her, trying to see her “with Karol,” I rubbed my eyes, unable to find those thrills that were no longer thrilling me—I was renouncing my frenzy. There was nothing between them, nothing, nothing! She’s only with Vaclav! But in that case, oh, how insatiable she was! What an appetite! What an awful craving! How greedily she was trying to take him in hand, like a man a young woman! Forgive me, I don’t have anything bad in mind, I just want to say that she was after his spirit with an unrestrained lasciviousness—she desired his conscience—his honor, his moral accountability, his dignity and all the suffering connected with it were the object of her craving, she was a glutton for all of his seniority to the point that even his baldness was more alluring to her than his little mustache! But all this was, of course, in a passive way peculiar to her—she merely absorbed his seniority, cuddled up to him, kept him company. And she would
surrender to the caress of his masculine hand, nervous and refined, already matured, she—the one who was also seeking seriousness in relation to the dramatic death that went beyond her young, corporal ineptness which was clinging to someone else’s maturity! Accursed one! So, instead of being splendid with Karol (which she was capable of), she preferred to be a slut and to whore about with the attorney, cuddling up to his pampered ugliness! Whereas the attorney, in his gratitude, was quietly stroking her, while the lamp was shining. Thus a few days passed. One afternoon Hipolit informed us that a new person is expected, a Mr. Siemian, who will come for a visit. … And he murmured, looking at his fingernail: “He’ll come for a visit.”
And he closed his eyes.
We took note of this information, not asking any unnecessary questions. The glum resignation in his voice did not attempt to hide that behind the “visit” lurks a net that is enveloping us all, tying us together, and at the same time turning us into strangers to each other—a conspiracy. Everyone could say only as much as was permissible—the rest was a painful, brooding silence, and insinuations. But, in any case, for the past few days a palpable though distant threat was already disturbing the uniformity of our emotions after the tragic events in Ruda, while a heaviness, the heaviness that had been crushing us, shifted from the recent past to an immediate future that was dangerous. In the evening, in the rain, the kind that changes from fine to gusty and lashing and then
into an all-night slosh, a cabriolet arrived, and, in the hallway door inadvertently left ajar, a tall gentleman loomed in an overcoat, hat in hand, he stepped forward, preceded by Hipolit with a lamp, and headed for the stairs to the second floor, where lodgings had been prepared for him. A sudden gust of air nearly knocked the lamp out of Hipolit’s hands, a door slammed. I recognized him. Yes, I already knew this man by sight, though he didn’t know me—and I suddenly felt in this house as if in a trap. I happened to know that this guy was now a big shot in the underground movement, a leader who had on his record more than one instance of breakneck bravery, and that he was wanted by the Germans. … Yes, this was him, and, if it was so, his entry into this house was the entry of recklessness, why, we were at the mercy of his good or bad graces, his bravery was not only his personal business, by endangering himself he was also endangering us, he could pull us in and entangle us—and indeed, if he were to demand anything we would be unable to refuse. Because the nation was uniting us, we were comrades and brothers—but this brotherhood was as cold as ice, here everyone was the tool of everyone else, and one was allowed to use everyone else most ruthlessly, for the common goal.