Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
Which will prevail? I had enough time for the question to run through my head, since they didn’t reply straight off. At the same time I saw clearly that, as they stood here before us, they continued to be unfriendly
toward each other,
without tenderness, harsh—and yet in spite of it they were so pinned down by the fact that they were ravishing us and that we expected to be intoxicated by them, that they were forced into submission. They could no longer go against the beauty we were discovering in them. And, deep down, this submission suited them—they were, after all, meant to submit. This was again one of those acts “done unto oneself,” so typical of youth, acts which define youth and which therefore intoxicate youth to such a degree that they almost lose their objective, external meaning. Not Siemian, not his death, was to them paramount—only themselves. (The girl) limited herself to replying:
“Why not? It can be done.”
Karol suddenly laughed a silly laugh.
“If it can be done, it will be done, if it can’t be done, it won’t be done.”
I sensed that he needed this silliness.
“Well, then. You’ll knock on the door, then get out of the way and I’ll bump him off. That’s how it’ll be, but we don’t know if he’ll open the door.”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, if I knock he’ll open.”
She was being rather silly herself now.
“Of course this is just between us,” Fryderyk said. “Don’t worry!”
The conversation ended here—such conversations shouldn’t be prolonged. I walked onto the verandah, from there into the garden. I wanted to breathe—everything was rushing on too swiftly. Light was waning. Colors lost the shine of their glassy coating, the greens and reds ceased to sting—a shadow-like relaxation of hues before nightfall. What does night conceal? Namely … the crushing of the worm—Siemian was the worm, not Vaclav. I wasn’t sure the whole thing hung together, a murky fire warmed and ignited me every now and then, yet I repeatedly grew disheartened, discouraged, even despairing, because it was all too fantastic, too unrestrained, too unreal—frolicking, yes, but on our part it was actually “playing with fire.” Finding myself all by myself, among shrubs, I totally lost the thread. … I suddenly saw Vaclav approaching. “I want to explain things to you! Please understand me! I wouldn’t have hit her, but it was swinish, I tell you, simply swinish!”
“What was?”
“It was swinish of her! Totally swinish, thinly veiled, but still … and it was not my imagination. … Thinly veiled swinishness, yet coarse! We were talking in the dining room. Enter—he. The lover. I sensed at once that she was talking to me but addressing him.”
“Addressing him?”
“Him, not with words but … with everything else. All of her. She seemed to be talking to me, yet at the same time she was accosting him and giving herself to him. In my presence. While talking to me. Would you believe it? It was something … I saw that she was talking to me while she was with him—and with him so … totally. As if I wasn’t even there. I hit her in the face. And now what am I to do? Tell me, what can I do now?”
“Can’t it be smoothed over?”
“But I hit her! Period. I hit her! Now everything is definitely settled and finalized. I hit her! I don’t know how I could have … Do you know what I think? If I had not let him be assigned to this … liquidation … I wouldn’t have hit her.”
“Why not?”
He looked at me sharply.
“Because I’m no longer in the right—with regard to him. I let him do my work for me. I lost my moral ground, that’s why I hit her. I hit her because my suffering no longer has any meaning. It’s not worthy of respect. It has lost its honor. That’s why I hit, hit, hit … I wouldn’t just hit him—I’d kill him!”
“What are you saying!?”
“I would kill him with no trouble at all. … That’s nothing! To kill … such a? Just like crushing a bug! A trifle! A trifle! Yet on the other hand killing such a … It’s scandalous! And shameful! It’s much harder than with a grown-up. It’s impossible! Killing should take place only between grownups. But
what if I cut her throat? … Just imagine! Don’t worry. I’m only joking. These are all little jokes! They’re making fun of me, so why shouldn’t I joke around a bit! Great God, save me from this joke I’ve fallen into! O God, my God, you’re my only succor! What was it I wanted to say? Ah yes, it’s Siemian that I should kill … that’s what I should do, there’s still time, I must hurry … there’s still time to take the murder away from this kid … because, as long as I’m using him I’m in the wrong, I’m in the wrong!”
He became lost in thought.
“It’s too late. You’ve talked me into a corner. How can I take the task away from him now? Now it’s obvious that I’m pushing myself into it not out of duty but merely not to give her to him—not to lose my moral advantage over her. All this morality of mine—merely to possess her!”
He spread his arms.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid there is nothing I can do.”
He said a few more things worth noting:
“I’m naked! I feel so naked! My God! They’ve really stripped me! At my age I shouldn’t be naked! Nudity is—for the young!”
And further:
“She’s not only unfaithful to me. She’s unfaithful to masculinity. Masculinity in general. Because she’s unfaithful to me not with a grown man. Is she a woman then? No, I tell you, she’s taking advantage of the fact that she’s not yet a woman.
“They are taking advantage of some kind of separateness of theirs, something very pe-cu-liar, something that, until now, I never knew existed. …”
Further:
“But, I ask, how did it occur to them? I repeat what I’ve already said: they couldn’t have contrived it by themselves. That thing on the island. What they are doing to me now … those provocations … It’s too clever. I hope you understand me: they couldn’t have thought it up, because it’s too clever. So where did they get it? From books? I don’t know!”
A thickening sauce was spilling below, obscuring vision, and though the crowns of trees were still basking in the feathery, cheerful sky, their trunks were already indistinct, pushing away one’s gaze. I looked under the brick. A letter.
Please talk to Siemian.
Tell him that tonight you and Henia will escort him to the fields where Karol will be waiting with a britzka. Say that Henia will knock on his door tonight to escort him out. He’ll believe it. He knows that Karol is his, and that Henia is Karol’s! He’ll believe it eagerly! This is the best way to get him to open the door when she knocks. This is important. Please do not fail to do it!
Please remember: there is no retreat. The only way to retreat is into
swinishness.
Skuziak—what? What about him? I’m racking my brains. He cant be left out, all three of them should participate … but how?
Be careful! Don’t force it. Better delicately and tactfully so as not to inflame the situation and risk failure needlessly, so far, knock on wood, luck has been on our side—it’s all a matter of not ruining it. Take heed. Be careful!
I went to Siemian.
I knocked on his door—when he learned it was me, he opened the door, then immediately fell back onto his bed. How long had he been lying like that? In his socks—his boots, perfectly polished, were shining on the floor amid a pile of cigarette butts. He was smoking one cigarette after another. His hand, slim at the wrist, long, with a ring on his finger. He showed no inclination to talk. Lying supine, he watched the ceiling. I said I had come to warn him: have no illusions. Hipolit won’t give him horses.
He didn’t respond.
“Neither tomorrow, nor the day after. What’s more, your concerns that they won’t let you go alive are valid.”
Silence.
“In which case I want to suggest to you … a plan of escape.”
Silence.
“I want to help you.”
He didn’t respond.
He lay like a log. I thought he was afraid—but this was anger rather than fear. Spiteful anger. He lay and he was spitefully angry—nothing more. He was vicious. Because (I thought) I was privy to his weakness. I knew his weakness, that’s why it had turned into anger.
I lay the plan before him. I alerted him that Henia would knock on his door, and that we would take him to the fields.
“Fuck it.”
“Do you have any money?”
“I do.”
“That’s good. Be ready—a bit after midnight.”
“Fuck it.”
“This little expression won’t help you much.”
“Fuck it.”
“Don’t be so vulgar. We might lose interest.”
“Fuck it.”
I left him with that. He was accepting our help, letting us rescue him—but he wasn’t thanking us. Having thrown himself on the bed, at full length, vigorous, he continued to present a predatory and authoritarian demeanor—the lord, the one in command—but he could no longer exert force on anything. His brute force had come to an end. And he knew that I knew it. Until recently he could threaten and impose power, he didn’t need to ask anyone’s favor, but now he was lying before me in his aggressive, furious masculinity that had been deprived of claws and was forced to seek sympathy …
and he knew that he was unlikable, unpleasant, in this masculinity of his … and so he scratched his thigh with his stocking-clad foot … he lifted his leg and moved his toes, this was a perfectly egoistic gesture, he had had it up to his ass whether I liked him or not … he didn’t like me … he was drowning in oceans of aversion, he wanted to puke … I did too. I left. His particular masculine cynicism was poisoning me, like cigarettes. In the dining room I came upon Hipolit and it threw me, I was a hair’s breadth from vomiting, yes, a hair’s breadth, one of those little hairs that grew on my hands and theirs! At this moment I couldn’t stand the Grown Man!
There were—those men—five of them in the house. Hipolit, Siemian, Vaclav, Fryderyk, and I. Brrr … There is nothing in the animal kingdom that reaches such awfulness—is there a horse, a dog that can rival such looseness of form, such cynicism of form? Alas! Alas! After the age of thirty humanity steps into awfulness.
All beauty was on the other, the young, side.
I, a grown man, could not seek shelter among my colleagues, among grown men, because they were pushing me away. And they were pushing me into that other!
Madame Maria was standing on the verandah.
“Where is everybody?” she asked. “They’ve disappeared?”
“I don’t know. … I was upstairs.”
“And Henia? Did you see Henia?”
“Perhaps she’s in the greenhouse.”
She fluttered her fingers. “Don’t you have the impression that … ? Vaclav seemed anxious to me. Despondent somehow. Is there something not quite right between them? Something seems to have gone wrong. I’m beginning to dislike this. I must have a chat with Vaclav … or perhaps with Henia. … I don’t know. … O dear God!”
She was worried.
“I don’t know anything. The fact that he’s despondent … well, he lost his mother.”
“Do you think that it’s because of his mother?”
“Certainly. A mother is a mother!”
“You think so? I too think it’s because of his mother. He lost his mother! Even Henia can’t replace her! A mother is a mother! A mother!” She moved her fingers delicately. And this calmed her down completely, as if the word “mother” were so powerful that it took the meaning away even from the word “Henia,” as if it were the highest sanctity! … Mother! Indeed, she too had been a mother. She had not actually been anything but a mother! Her former existence, having been exclusively a mother, looked at me with a withered, pluperfect gaze, it then withdrew, together with its veneration of mother—I knew there was no need to fear that she would thwart our plans—she, as a mother, wouldn’t be able to affect anything at the present time. Her former, receding appeal came into play.
As night was approaching, along with whatever was announcing its arrival—the lighting of lamps, closing of shutters, setting
the table for supper—I felt progressively worse, and I wandered about, unable to find a place for myself. The essence of my and Fryderyk’s betrayal stood out with greater and greater sharpness: we had betrayed masculinity with (boy plus girl). Walking thus around the house I looked into the living room, where it was somewhat dark, and I saw Vaclav sitting on the couch. I went in and sat on an armchair, far from him, by the opposite wall. Muddied were my intentions. Fuzzy. A desperate test—to see if I could, with great effort, overcome my repugnance toward him and unite with him in masculinity. However, my repugnance has now grown sky high, aroused by my arrival and the placing of my body in the vicinity of his body—a repugnance awash with his animosity toward me … animosity that, making me disgusting, made my disgust toward him disgusting. And vice versa. I knew that under these conditions there was no question of either of us brightening up with that magnificence, which was, in spite of everything, accessible to us—I have in mind the magnificence of virtue, of wisdom, of sacrifice, of heroism that was embedded within us
in potentia
—but the disgust was all-powerful. Nonetheless, couldn’t we overcome it with brute force? Brute force! Brute force! What were we men for? A man is someone who is aggressive, who overpowers by force. Man is the one who reigns! A man does not ask if anyone likes it, he cares only for his own pleasure, it’s his taste that decides what is beautiful, what is ugly—for him, and for him alone! A man is just for himself, for no one else!
It was this aggressiveness that I was probably trying to kindle in us. … As far as matters stood at present, both he and I were impotent because we were not ourselves, nor were we there for each other, we were for the other, younger, way of feeling—and this was plunging us into ugliness. Yet, what if I had been able, in this living room, to be for him, for Vaclav, even for one moment—and he for me—what if we were able to be a man for a man! Wouldn’t that have built up our masculinity? Wouldn’t one man have forced his masculinity with masculinity on the other man? These were my calculations, created by what remained of my despairing and frantic hope. Because the brute force that is man must first be born of masculinity, between men … if only my mere presence with him could enclose us in a hermetic ring … I ascribed great meaning to the fact that darkness was further weakening what was already our Achilles’ heel, namely our body. I thought that by taking advantage of the weakness of the body we would be able to unite and multiply, we would become men who were powerful enough so as not to be repulsive to ourselves—because, after all, no one is repulsive to oneself—because it’s enough to be oneself in order not to be repulsive to oneself. These were my desperate enough intentions. But he remained motionless. … I did too.… We were unable to begin with each other, we lacked a beginning, we did not know how to begin. …