Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
"What can I do for you?"
I turned around and walked away, but my shoulders, in their retreat, must have annoyed her even more, because from behind the door I heard her say:
"What a clown!"
Rebuffed, shoved away, I sat on my little stool by the wall, totally exhausted.
"It's all over," I whispered, "she's ruined it all. But why? Something must have cut her to the quick—she'd rather ride roughshod over me than ride with me. Hello, my little stool, here by the wall, but it's high time to unpack my things, my suitcase is still in the center of the room, there are no towels."
I meekly sat on the stool, it was almost dark, I began folding my underwear and placing it in the drawer—I must do it now, school is tomorrow—I didn't turn on the light, it wasn't worth it really, just for me. I felt wretched and pitiful but that was all right, I only wished to move no more, to sit down and to keep sitting, to desire nothing, nothing ever.
But after a few minutes of sitting it became obvious that, regardless of all the exhaustion and wretchedness, I must become active again. "Is there no rest?" I wondered. Now, for the third time, I'd have to go into her room and be the clown again so that she would know that I had been clowning all along, and that it was I who was making fun of her and not the other way around.
Tout est perdu sauf l'honeur—
as Francis the First had said. Therefore, regardless of my wretchedness and fatigue, I got up and began to get ready. My preparations took a rather long time. Finally I half-opened the door, first inserting into her room only my head. What blinding intensity of light!—she had lit her lamp. I closed my eyes. An impatient remark reached my ears:
"Please don't come in without knocking."
Moving my head in the gap of the door, my eyes still closed, I replied:
"Your obedient servant, at your feet."
I opened the door fully and now entered
in toto,
ambling in, waggishly, oh, the ambling of a human wretch! Remembering the old maxim that anger detracts from beauty, I made up my mind to make her mad. I hoped she'd get exasperated while I, maintaining composure behind a clown's mask, would then have the upper hand. She exclaimed:
"Your manners are terrible!"
The words, coming as they did from those modern lips, surprised me, especially since they rang true—as if good manners were the ultimate court of appeal of the wild and unruly postwar schoolgirls. Those modern ones were masters at juggling in turn good and bad manners. I felt like a yokel. It was too late to retreat—the world goes on existing solely because it is always too late to retreat. I bowed and replied:
"At your feet, your ladyship."
She rose and turned toward the door. What disaster! If she goes out and leaves me, together with my crassness—all will be lost! I lunged forward and blocked her way. She stopped.
"What do you want?"
She looked worried.
And I, imprisoned be the consequence of my movement and unable to retreat, began bearing down on her. And onto her, like a madman, a clown, a poser, an ape, onto this young miss, I, a Baroque formalist and a prankster, with dumb arrogance—she retreats behind the table—I amble toward her, like an ape, and with my finger pointing which way she's supposed to go, I push on toward her, like a drunkard, like a fiendish cad, a bandit—she's at the wall, I follow her. But, damn it!—while I'm on her heels, hideously, like a monster, all a-goggle, I see that—confronted with this madman she loses none of her beauty—while I become inhuman, she—a slight figure by the wall, bent over, pale, her hands by her side, her arms slightly bent at the elbows, her pupils dilated, panting as if I had thrown her against the wall—she's extremely quiet, tense with danger, hostile, incredibly beautiful—like a film star—modern, poetic, artistic, and fear, instead of marring her beauty, adorns her even more! One moment more. I'm getting closer, and surely some resolution needs now to follow—it passes through my mind that this is the end, that I must catch her by that little face of hers—I am in love, in love! . . . when suddenly there's screaming in the hallway. It's Kneadus attacking the housemaid. We didn't hear the doorbell ring. He had come to visit me in my new quarters and, finding himself alone with the housemaid in the hallway, wanted to force himself on her.
Since his duel with Syphon, Kneadus could not be rid of his horrible face-pulling, he was so hellishly entangled that he couldn't contain his monstrous behavior. When he saw the housemaid he couldn't help behaving in the most coarse and brutal way possible. The girl raised hell. Kneadus kicked her in the belly and walked into the room, a half-bottle of vodka under his arm.
"Ah, so you're here!" he yelled. "Hi, Joey, old pal! I'm here to pay you a visit. I've brought some vodka and sausage! Ho, ho, ho, that's quite a mug you've got on! But don't worry, mine's no better!
Let a mug hit a mug in the mug! That's our fate! That's our fate! Hit your mug in the teeth, Lest you hang from a tree!
What a mess—did that Syphon make you look like this?! Hey, who's that slip by the wall? Greetings, ma'am!" "I've fallen in love, Kneadus, I've fallen in love ..." To which Kneadus replied with the wisdom of a drunkard: "So that's why you've got this mug for a face? That's my buddy, Joey! Well, that's quite a mug your beloved has stuck on you. If you could only see yourself. But never mind, never mind, mine's quite a sight too. That's my buddy! But let's go, let's go, don't even bother with her, show me your 'suite,' bring some bread so we can have it with the sausage—I've brought a bottle to drown our sorrows! Stop fretting, Joey! Let's have a drink, buddy, let's shoot the breeze, shoot our mugs off about whatever, it'll do us good! This is my third bottle today. It'll do us good. Greetings, your ladyship . . .
bon jour... au revoir...
Good evening!
Allons, allons!"
Once again I turned to the modern one. I wanted to say something, to explain—to say the one word that would save me—but there was no such word, then Kneadus caught me by the arm and we headed toward my room, reeling, drunk not with alcohol but with those mugs of ours. I burst into tears and told him everything, absolutely everything about the schoolgirl. He heard me out tenderly, like a father, and then intoned:
Hey the mug On a tree Like a chickadee!
Drink, drink up, why aren't you drinking? Wet your whistle! Kiss that little bottle, give it a smooch!"
His face looked terrible, horribly coarse and vulgar, and he ate the sausage from a greasy piece of paper, shoving it into his gaping mouth.
"Kneadus," I exclaimed, "I want to be free! Free!"
"Free of your mug? Shit."
"No, free of the schoolgirl! After all, Kneadus, I'm thirty years old, not a day younger! Thirty!"
He looked at me in surprise, my words must have conveyed real pain. But then he burst out laughing.
"Hey, what drivel! Thirty years old! What an idiot, you're off your rocker, what a moron (and he used a few expressions that I won't repeat). Thirty! Hey, know what?" he took another swig from the bottle and spat, "I know this doll of yours from somewhere. I know her by sight. Kopyrda's after her."
"Who's after her?"
"Kopyrda. The one from our class. He's taken a fancy to her because he's also—modern. Tell you what, if she's truly modern it's a bummer, you won't get anywhere with her! This modern one will take up only with other modern ones, only with her own kind. Well, well, if this modern one stuck this mug on you, you won't get back on your feet that easily. That's worse than Syphon. Never mind, old boy, everyone has some kind of an ideal that's stuck to his person, like a block of wood on Ash Wednesday
{7}
Drink up, drink up, have a swig! Do you think I'm free? I've turned my mug into a dishrag, and the farmhand still plagues me."
"But you've raped Syphon, haven't you?"
"So what? I've raped him, but my mug is still the same. Look," he said in disbelief, "we're quite a pair, me with my farmhand and you with your schoolgirl. Have another swig of vodka! Hey, hey, oh, the farmhand," he suddenly waxed sentimental, "hey, hey, the farmhand! Joey, oh, how I want to run to my farmhand. Hey-ho to the meadows, hey-ho to the fields, oh, let's run away, let's run," he kept muttering, "to the farmhand... to the farmhand ..."
But I was not in the least concerned with his farmhand. The modern one was the only one on my mind! All at once I was seized with jealousy—oh, so Kopyrda is after her! But if he's "after her," and not "with her," it may mean that they don't even know each other ... I did not dare ask. And so we sat with our mugs, on two separate tracks, each with his own thoughts, taking a swig from the bottle now and then. Kneadus rose unsteadily.
"I have to go," he said under his breath, "the old woman might come back any minute. I'll go through the kitchen," he mumbled. "I'll look in on the housemaid. You've got yourself quite a housemaid there, not bad, not bad at all... Still, it's not the same as a farmhand, but at least she's lower class. Maybe she has a farmhand for a brother. Ech, old boy—a farmhand... a farmhand..."
He left. And I was left with the schoolgirl. The moon cast a pale light on flecks of dust that filled the air in great multitudes, swaying to and fro.
8 Fruit Compote
And next morning there's school again, and Syphon, Kneadus, Hopek, Mizdral, Galkiewicz and
accusativus cum infinitivo,
Ashface, bards, and the daily general impotence— boring, boring, boring! And the same grind again! And the bard bards again, the teacher—to earn his keep—babbles about the bard, the students suffer prostrate under their desks, the toe in one's shoe keeps twirling like a top, and Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, and Peter Piper pickled a peck of peppers, and Bard the Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, boring, boring! And again boredom oppresses us, and under the pressure of the boredom, the bard, and the teacher, that which is real slowly turns into a world of ideals, oh, let me dream, let me—no one knows anymore what is real and what doesn't even exist, what is truth and what is illusion, what one feels or doesn't feel, what is natural behavior and what is affectation or make-believe, and, what should b e becomes confused with what inexorably i s, one disqualifying the other, one depriving the other of all
raison d'etre,
oh, what a great schooling in unreality! And so I too dreamt about my ideal, for live solid hours a day, my mug expanding in this emptiness like a balloon, without impediment—because, in this unreal, imaginary world, there was nothing that could return it to normal. I too had my unreality—the modern schoolgirl. I was in love. I had my daydream, the doleful lover and aspirant that I was. After my unsuccessful attempts to win my beloved—such as by jeering at her—a great sorrow came over me, I knew all was lost.
Like rosary beads, a string of monotonous days ensued. I was trapped. What can I say about those days—all identical images of one another? In the morning I went to school, and after school I returned to the Youngbloods' for dinner. I was no longer interested in running away, nor in explaining anything, nor in protesting—on the contrary, I took pleasure in becoming a schoolboy because, as a schoolboy, I would, after all, be closer to the schoolgirl than as an independent young man. Hey, hey! I almost forgot about my erstwhile "thirty-year-old." The teachers grew to like me, Principal Piôrkowski patted my pupa, and during ideological debates I too shouted, my cheeks flushed: "Modernity! Hooray for the modern boy! Hooray for the modern girl!" Which made Kopyrda laugh. Remember Kopyrda—the one and only modern boy in the entire school? I wanted to be in league with him, I tried to befriend him and to extract from him the secret of his relationship with the Youngblood girl—but he brushed me off, treating me with even greater disdain than he treated the others, as if sensing that I had been rebuffed by his sister-in-kind, the modern schoolgirl. On the whole, the ruthless-ness with which the students persecuted any species of youth other than their own was amazing, sticklers for cleanliness hated the unclean, modern ones were repulsed by the old-fashioned, and so on. And so on and on! And on!
What else can I say? Syphon died. Raped through the ears, he could not recover, he could not by any manner or means rid himself of those hostile elements which had been forced into his ears. He agonized in vain, he tried for hours on end to forget those words of initiation that had been forced upon him. He felt nothing but disgust for his tainted self and walked around with a foul taste, growing more and more pale each day, burping constantly, spitting, choking, wheezing, coughing, unable to do anything, until finally, one afternoon, feeling totally worthless, he hanged himself from a coat rack. This caused a great uproar, there were even press releases. Nonetheless, it was of little use to Kneadus, Syphon's death didn't improve the condition of his mug one bit. Syphon died, so what? The faces that Kneadus had pulled during the duel still stuck to him—it's not easy to be rid of a grimace, a face is not made of rubber, once it is distorted it does not easily return to its former shape. And so he walked around with a face so ugly that even his friends, Hopek and Mizdral, avoided him whenever they could. And the more monstrous he looked, the more—of course—he panted after the farmhand; and the more he panted, the more hideous—of course—his mug became. Misery brought us closer, he was panting for the farmhand, I for the schoolgirl, and so time passed slowly in this joint panting, and, as if a rash were covering our faces, reality became unattainable and inaccessible to us. He told me that he stood a chance of seducing the Youngbloods' housemaid—the other night, while soused, he forced a kiss on her as he was going out through the kitchen, but this did not satisfy him in the least.
"It's not the same thing," he kept saying, "not the same. To steal a kiss from a hussy? It's true the hussy's a bare-footed country girl and, as I found out, she does have a farmhand for a brother, but so what, shit, damn, crap (and other expressions which I won't repeat), a sister is not the same as a brother, a housemaid is not a farmhand. I go to her in the evenings when that Mrs. Youngblood of yours is at her committee meetings, I wag my tongue, I shoot off my mouth, I even talk like a peasant, but still she won't take me for one of her own."