Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
“Well, how’s it going? Is it peaceful over your way?”
And I heard him say:
“It’s peaceful for the moment. There are gangs in the forests. … But nothing special lately. …”
The face invisible, the voice the same—yet not the same. In front of me only his back—and I was about to lean forward to look into the eyes of his back, but I stopped short … because Fryderyk … was indeed here, next to me. And he was immensely silent. With him next to me, I preferred not to look anyone in the face … because I suddenly realized that this something sitting next to me is radical in its silence, radical to the point of frenzy! Yes, he was an extremist! Reckless in
the extreme! No, this was not an ordinary being but something more rapacious, strained by an extremity about which thus far I had no idea! So I preferred not to look in the face—of anyone, not even the coachman’s, whose back weighed me down like a mountain, while the invisible earth rocked the carriage, shook it, and the surrounding darkness, sparkling with stars, sucked out all vision. The remainder of the journey passed without a word. We finally rolled into an avenue, the horses moved more briskly—then the gate, the caretaker, and the dogs—the locked house and the heavy grating of its unlocking—Hipolit with a lamp …
“Well, thank God you’re here!”
Was it he or not? The bloated redness of his cheeks, bursting, struck me and repelled me. … He seemed to be generally bursting with edema, which made everything in him expand enormously and grow in all directions, the awful blubber of his body was like a volcano disgorging flesh … in knee boots, he stretched out his apocalyptic paws, and his eyes peeped from his body as if through a porthole. Yet he wanted to be close to me, he hugged me. He whispered bashfully:
“I’m all bloated … devil only knows … I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”
And looking at his thick fingers he repeated with boundless anguish, more softly, to himself:
“I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”
Then he bellowed:
“And this is my wife!”
Then he muttered for his own benefit:
“And this is my wife.”
Then he screamed:
“And this is my Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”
Then he repeated, to himself, barely audibly:
“And this is Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”
He turned to us, hospitably, his manner refined: “How good of you to come, but please, Witold, introduce me to your friend …” He stopped, closed his eyes, and kept repeating … his lips moved. Fryderyk, courteous in the extreme, kissed the hand of the hostess, whose melancholy was embellished with a faraway smile, whose litheness fluttered lightly … and the whirl of connecting, introducing us into the house, sitting, conversing, drew us in—after that journey without end—the light of the lamp induced a dreamy mood. Supper, served by a butler. We were overcome with sleep. Vodka. Struggling against sleep, we tried to listen, to grasp, there was talk of aggravation by the Underground Army on the one hand, by the Germans on the other, by gangs, by the administration, by the Polish police, and seizures—talk of rampant fears and rapes … to which the shutters, secured with additional iron bars, bore witness, as did the blockading of side doors … the locking and bunging up with iron. “They burned down Sieniechów, they broke the legs of the overseer of the farm laborers in Rudniki, I had people here who were displaced from the Pozna
ń
region, what’s worse, we know nothing of what’s happening in Ostrowiec, in Bodzechów with its factory
settlements, everybody’s just waiting, ears to the ground, for the time being it’s quiet, but everything will come crashing down when the front comes closer … Crashing down! Well, sir, there will be carnage, an eruption, ugly business! It will be an ugly business!” he bellowed and then muttered to himself, absorbed in thought:
“An ugly business.”
And he bellowed:
“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”
And he whispered:
“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”
But here’s the lamp. Supper. Sleepiness. Hipolit’s enormousness besmeared with a thick sauce of sleep, the lady of the house is here as well, dissolving in her remoteness, and Fryderyk, and moths hitting the lamp, moths inside the lamp, moths around the lamp, and the stairs winding upward, a candle, I fall onto my bed, I’m falling asleep. The following day there’s a triangle of sunlight on the wall. Someone’s voice outside the window. I rose from my bed and opened the shutters. Morning.
Bouquets of trees forming graceful curving and curling paths, the garden was rolling gently beyond the linden trees where one could sense the hidden surface of a pond—oh, the greenery in the dappled, sun-sparkled dew! However, when we went out after breakfast into the courtyard—the white house, two-storied with dormer windows, framed by spruce trees and firs and arborvitae, footpaths and flowerbeds—the house overwhelmed us like an unspoiled vision from the now distant, prewar time … and in its untouched bygone state it seemed more real than our present time … while at the same moment the awareness that there was no truth to it, that it was inconsistent with reality, turned it into something akin to a stage set … so then this house, the park, the sky and the fields became both theater and truth. But here comes the lord of the manor, powerful, edematous, in a green jacket over his close-to-bursting body, and indeed he arrives as in the days gone by, greeting us from afar with his hand and he’s asking if we slept well? Chatting lazily, without haste, we went
through the gate, onto a field, and with a wide sweep of our eyes we took in the swelling and undulating land, all the while Hipolit prattling to Fryderyk about something, about the harvest, about the good crops, while crushing clods of dirt with his boot. We were now walking in the direction of the house. Madame Maria appeared on the porch and called out: good morning, while a little brat ran across the lawn, perhaps the cook’s son? And so we moved about that morning—yet it was not so simple … because a kind of debility was creeping into the landscape, and again it seemed to me that everything, though still the same, was entirely different. What a disorienting thought, what an unpleasant, masked thought! Fryderyk walked next to me, in the light of this bright day, his body so real that one could count the hairs sticking out of his ears and all the flakes of his skin as pale as if he lived in a cellar—Fryderyk, I repeat, hunched, sickly, with sunken chest, with pince-nez, with the mouth of an excitable man, hands in his pockets—a typical city intellectual in a robust countryside … yet in this disparity the countryside was not the winner, the trees lost their self-confidence, the sky was blurry, the cow was not duly recalcitrant, the age-long past of the countryside was disconcerted, unsure of itself, as if tripped up … and Fryderyk was perhaps more real than the grass. More real? An irksome thought, disturbing, sordid, a bit hysterical, even provocative, insistent, destructive … and I didn’t know whether it came from him, this thought, from Fryderyk, or was it the result of war, revolution, enemy occupation … perhaps
one as well as the other, perhaps both together? But he was behaving impeccably when asking about the farm, conversing in the way one would have expected, and suddenly we saw Henia coming toward us across the lawn. The sun burned our skin. Our eyes were dry, our lips chapped. She said:
“Mother is ready. I ordered the horses harnessed.”
“To church, to Mass, because it’s Sunday,” Hipolit explained. And he said softly to himself: “To church, to Mass.”
He announced:
“If you gentlemen would like to come with us, you are most welcome, no pressure, merely broad-mindedness, ha, right?! I’m going because as long as I’m here, I’ll go! While there is a church I’ll go to church! And with the wife, the daughter, in the carriage—because I don’t need to hide from anyone. Let them look at me. Let them gawk—as if I’m on camera … let them take photos!”
And he whispered: “Let them take photos!”
Fryderyk was already most obligingly offering our readiness to take part in the holy service. We are riding in the carriage whose wheels, sinking into the sandy tracks, are groaning dully—and when we ascended a hill, the expanse of the land appeared gradually, spreading low at its very bottom, below the tremendous heights of the sky, and it became solidified in immobile undulation. There, far away, was the railroad. I wanted to laugh. The carriage, horses, coachman, the hot aroma of leather and lacquer, the dust, the sun, the tiresome fly at my face and the groan of the rubber tires grinding into
the sand—ah yes, familiar from time immemorial, and nothing, nothing at all has changed! But when we found ourselves at the top of the hill and felt the breath of the expanse at whose perimeter loomed the Swiętokrzyskie Mountains, this journey’s duplicity almost struck me in the chest—because we appeared as if in a lithograph—like a lifeless photograph from an old family album—where a long-dead vehicle could be seen on this hill even from the farthest limits—and, as a result, the land became maliciously derisive, heartlessly disdainful. Thus the duplicity of this lifeless journey spread to the black-and-blue topography, passing us by almost imperceptibly under the influence and pressure of this very journey of ours. On the backseat next to Madame Maria, Fryderyk looked around and admired the colors, riding to church as if he were actually riding to church—he’s probably never been so sociable and courteous! We drove down into the Grocholicki ravine where the village begins, where it’s always muddy …
I remember (and this is not insignificant in terms of the events to be told later) that my dominant feeling was futility—and again, just as on the previous night, I would have leaned to look the coachman in the face, but this was not the proper thing to do … so we both stayed behind his inscrutable back, and our journey continued behind his back. We drove into the village of Grocholice, a little river on the left, while on the right, still sparsely set, were peasants’ cottages and fences, a hen and a goose, a trough and a mud hole, a dog, a peasant or an old woman decked out for Sunday, strutting
along a footpath to the church … the calm and sleepiness of this village … But it was as if our death was bending over a sheet of water, evoking its own image, our entry’s past was reflecting itself in this eternal village and rumbling with frenzy—a frenzy that was merely a mask—that only served to hide something else … But what? Whatever the meaning … of war, of revolution, violence, debauchery, degradation, despair, hope, struggle, fury, screaming, murder, slavery, disgrace, lousy dying, of cursing or of blessing … whatever was the meaning, I say, it was too weak to break through the crystal of this idyll, and this little scene, long after its time, remained untouched, it was only a facade. … Fryderyk chatted with Madame Maria most courteously—or was he keeping up the conversation so as not to say
anything else?
We arrived at a wall surrounding the church and we began to dismount … but I no longer know what’s what, what’s it like … are the steps that we’re climbing to the square at the front of the church ordinary steps or are they perhaps … ? Fryderyk gave Madame Maria his arm and, taking off his hat, he led her to the church entrance as people watched—but perhaps he did this so as not to do anything else?—while Hipolit rolled behind him and pushed forward with his big body, unwavering, steadfast, knowing full well that tomorrow they might slaughter him like a pig—he pushed with all his force, in spite of all their hatred, grim and resigned. The lord of the manor! However, was he, he too, the lord of the manor in order not to be something else?
But when the semidarkness, pierced with burning candles, engulfed us, the semidarkness that was filled with the stuffy air of a chant, plaintive, murmuring and resounding with this body of peasants, unleavened and stooping … then the lurking multiplicity of meanings vanished—as if a hand, more powerful than we were, had reestablished the dominant order of the holy service. Hipolit, until now the lord of the manor with his concealed rage and vehemence, anything but
to give in,
now soothed and noble, sat down in the patrons’ bench and with a nod of his head greeted the land steward’s family from Ikan sitting across from him. This was the moment before the Mass, people without their priest, the populace left to itself with its mawkish chanting, humble, thin, and awkward, yet holding itself in check—and so it was like a mongrel on a leash, harmless. What restraint, what soothing effect, what blissful relief, here, in this bygone era turned to stone, when a peasant became a peasant again, the lord—a lord, the Mass—a Mass, a stone—a stone, and everything was becoming itself again!
However, Fryderyk, who had seated himself next to Hipolit in the patrons’ bench, slid to his knees … and this spoiled my peace somewhat, because he was perhaps exaggerating it a bit … and it was hard for me not to think that perhaps he slid onto his knees so as not to commit something that would not be sliding onto his knees. … But now the bells, the priest comes out with the chalice and, placing it on the altar, executes a bow. Bells. Suddenly a decisive element struck my being with
such a force that I—exhausted, semiconscious—knelt down, this was a close call and—in my wild abandon—I would have prayed … But Fryderyk! I thought, I suspected, that Fryderyk, who after all had also knelt, would also be “praying”—I was even sure that, yes, knowing his terrors, he was not pretending but really “praying”—in the sense that he wanted not only to deceive others but to deceive himself as well. He was “praying” in relation to others and in relation to himself, but his prayer was only a screen covering up the immensity of his non-prayer … so this was an ejecting, an “eccentric” act that was taking him outside the church, into the boundless territory of total nonbelief—a refutation to the very core. So what was going on? What was about to happen? I had never experienced anything like it. I would never have believed that anything like this was possible. But—what happened? In fact—nothing. What actually happened was that a hand had removed all the content, all the meaning from the Mass—and here was the priest moving, genuflecting, walking from one end of the altar to the other, while the altar boys were hitting the bells and the smoke of the incense was rising, but the meaning was escaping from it all like gas from a balloon, and the Mass was collapsing in a terrible impotence … it was flagging … no longer capable of begetting life! And this loss of meaning was a murder committed on the periphery, outside ourselves, outside the Mass, by way of a voiceless yet lethal commentary delivered by someone looking on from the side. And the Mass could not defend itself against it, because it
happened owing to some tangential interpretation, in fact no one in this church opposed the Mass, even Fryderyk connected with it most correctly … but if he was killing it, it was, so to speak, from the other side of the medal. His incidental commentary, his killing
glossa,
was a work of cruelty—the work of a harsh consciousness, cold, utterly penetrating, relentless … and I realized that introducing this man into the church was sheer madness, one should have kept him away from it all, for God’s sake! The church was the most terrible place for him to be!