Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
Do you know what it feels like to be diminished within someone else? Oh, to be diminished within an aunt is unseemly enough, but to be diminished within a huge, commonplace prof is the peak of unseemly diminishment. And I noticed that the prof was like a cow grazing on my greenness. It's a strange feeling—to see a prof nibbling at the green of your meadow, which is actually your apartment, to see him sitting in your chair and reading—yet actually nibbling and grazing. Something terrible was happening to me, and, at the same time, I was surrounded by something stupid and brazenly unreal. "A spirit!" I exclaimed, "That's me, a spirit! Not a little author! A spirit!
A living spirit! That's me!" But he just went on sitting, sitting, and sitting, stuck to his seat—an act of sheer stupidity—yet incredibly powerful. He took his spectacles off his nose, wiped them with his handkerchief, and placed them back on his nose, the nose that had now become indomitable. It was a truly nasal nose, trite and inane, consisting of two parallel, finite tubes. And he said:
"What do you mean, a spirit?"
"My spirit!" I exclaimed. He then asked:
"You mean the spirit of your home, your country?"
"No, not of my country, my own spirit!"
"Your own?" he asked amiably, "we're talking about your spirit then? But are we at least familiar with the spirit of King Ladislas?"
What, King Ladislas? I felt like a train suddenly shunted to the siding of King Ladislas. Stopped in my tracks, my mouth open, I realized that I was not familiar with the spirit of King Ladislas.
"And are we familiar with the spirit of the times? How about the spirit of Hellenic civilization? And the Gallic, and the spirit of moderation and good taste? And the spirit of the sixteenth century bucolic writer, known only to myself, who was the first to use the word 'umbilicus'? And the spirit of language? Should one say 'use' or 'utilize'?"
His questions caught me by surprise. Ten thousand spirits suddenly smothered my spirit, I mumbled that I didn't know, he then pressed on: what did I know about the spirit of the poet Kasprowicz and his attitude toward the peasantry, he then asked about the historian Lelewel's first love. I cleared my throat and quickly glanced at my nails—they were blank, no crib notes there. I turned my head as if expecting someone to prompt me. But of course there was no one there. What a nightmare, for God's sake! What was happening? O God! I quickly turned my head back to its usual position and looked at him, but with a gaze that was no longer mine, it was the gaze of a schoolboy scowling childishly and filled with hatred. I was suddenly seized with an inappropriate and rather old-fashioned itch—to hit the prof with a spitball right on the nose. Realizing that I was losing it, I made a supreme effort to ask Pimko in a genial tone about recent events in town, but then, instead of my normal voice a broken, squeaky sound came out, as if my voice were changing back, so I fell silent; and Pimko asked about adverbs, told me to decline
mensa, mensae, mensae,
to conjugate
amo, amas, amat,
he then winced and said: "Well, yes, we'll have to work on it." He took out his notebook and gave me a bad grade, all the while sitting, and his sitting was absolute and final.
What? What's this? I wanted to scream "I'm not a schoolboy, it's all a mistake!" I tried to run for it, but something caught me in its claws from behind and riveted me to the spot—it was my puerile, infantile pupa.
{2}
I was unable to move because of my pupa while the prof, still seated, and while sitting, projected such perfect prof-authority that instead of screaming I raised my hand to speak, like boys do in school.
"Sit down, Kowalski. Not to the bathroom again?"
And so I sat through this surreal nonsense, gagged and steam-rolled by the prof, I sat on my childish little pupa while he, seated as if on the Acropolis, wrote something in his notebook. Finally he said:
"Well, let's go to school, Joey."
"To what school?"
"To Principal Piorkowski's school. A first-rate educational institution. There are still vacancies in the sixth grade. Your education has been sorely neglected, and first of all we must make up what is lacking."
"But to what school?!"
"To Mr. Piorkowski's school. Don't be scared, we teachers love you little chickies, chirp, chirp, chirp, you know: 'suffer the little ones to come unto me.' "
"But to what school?!!!"
"To Mr. Piorkowski's school. He asked me the other day to fill all the vacancies. The school must stay open. There would be no school without pupils, and no teachers without schools. To school! To school! They'll make a student out of you yet."
"But to what school?!!!"
"Oh, stop fussing! To school! To school!"
He called the maid and told her to bring my coat, but the girl could not understand why this strange gentleman was about to take me away, and she broke into wails, so Pimko pinched her—there was no way for a pinched servant girl to continue her wailing, so she bared her teeth and burst out laughing like a pinched servant would—he then took me by the hand and led me out of the house, and in the street houses stood as usual and people walked about!
Help! Police! This was ridiculous! Too ridiculous to be real! Incredible because it was so ridiculous! Too ridiculous even to fight back ... I couldn't anyway—against this inane prof, this trivial prof. Just as you can't when someone asks you an inane and trivial question—so I couldn't either. My idiotic, infantile pupa had paralyzed me, taking away all my ability to resist; trotting by the side of this colossus who was bounding ahead with huge steps, I could hardly keep up because of my pupa. Farewell, O Spirit, farewell my
oeuvre
only just begun, farewell genuine form, my very own, and hail, hail, oh terrible and infantile form, so callow and green! Tritely proffed by him, I ran in mincing steps by the side of the giant prof who muttered on: "Chirp, chirp, little chickie ... The sniffling little nose ... I love, ee, ee . . . Little fellow, little, little man, ee, ee, ee, chirp, chirp, chickadee, Joey, Joey, little Joey, tiny Joey, tinier and tinier, chirp, chirp, tiny, tiny little, little pupa ..." Ahead of us a refined lady was walking her little pinscher on a leash, the dog growled, pounced on Pimko, ripped his trouser leg, Pimko yelled, expressed a unfavorable opinion of the dog and its owner, pinned his trouser leg with a safety pin, and we walked on.
2 Imprisonment and Further Belittlement
And now before us—no, I don't believe my eyes—is a low building, a school, and Pimko drags me there by my little hand despite my tears and protestations, then pushes me in through a wicket gate. We arrived during lunch hour, and we saw in the school yard human beings of that transitional age between ten and twenty walking in circles and eating lunch, which consisted of bread and butter or bread and cheese. There were cracks in the fence surrounding the school yard through which mothers and aunts, never tiring of their little darlings, were peeking. Pimko, relishing the school aroma, breathed it in through his thoroughbred nasal tubes.
"Chirp, chirp, chirp, little fellow," he called out, "little, little fellow..."
At the same time an intelligent-looking man with a limp, a teacher on lunch-hour duty, no doubt, approached and greeted us, with all due servility to Pimko.
"My dear colleague," said Pimko, "here's little Joey whom I would like to enroll into the ranks of your sixth-grade students, Joey, say 'hello' to the professor. In a moment I'll have a chat with Piorkowski, but in the meantime I'll leave him with you, break him in to school life." I wanted to protest, but instead I scraped the ground with my foot, a light breeze came up, branches of trees moved slightly and with them a tuft of Pimko's hair. "I hope he'll be on his best behavior," said the old pedagogue, patting me on my little head. "How are the youngsters doing?" Pimko asked, lowering his voice. "I see they're walking in circles—that's very good. They're walking about, chatting, while their mothers are snooping—very good. There's nothing better for a school-age boy than having his mother close by, behind the fence. No one can bring out that fresh baby pupa better than a mother, well placed behind a fence."
"Even so, they are still not naive enough," the teacher complained sourly, "they just refuse to take on that new-potato look. We set their mothers on them, but even that's not enough. We're just not able to bring out that youthful freshness and naivete. You won't believe, my dear colleague, how stubborn they are and reluctant to comply in this respect. They simply don't want to."
"That's because you're amiss in your pedagogical skills," Pimko sternly chastised him. "What? They don't want to? But they have to! I'll show you how to bring about naivete. I bet that in half-an-hour their naivete will be doubled. My plan is as follows: I'll start by watching the students, and I'll show them in the most naive manner possible that I think they are naive and innocent. This will infuriate them of course, they'll want to show me that they are not naive, and you'll see how this will plunge them into genuine naivete and innocence, so sweet to us pedagogues!"
"Don't you think, though," asked the teacher, "that instilling naivete in the students is a somewhat outdated, antiquated pedagogical trick?"
"Precisely!" replied Pimko, "give me more of those antiquated tricks! The more antiquated the better! There is nothing better than a truly antiquated pedagogical trick! The little cuties, educated by us in this perfectly unreal atmosphere, yearn for life and real experience, and therefore nothing bothers them more than their innocence. Ha, ha, ha, let me suggest to them right now that they're innocent, box them up in this amiable concept, and you'll see how innocent they become!"
With that he slipped behind the trunk of a huge oak tree growing to one side of the school yard, while the teacher took me by my little hand and, before I could explain or protest, led me to the other students. Having done so, he let go of my hand and left me in their midst.
The students walked about. Some snapped their fingers or poked each other in the ribs, others, having blocked their ears with their fingers and stuck their heads in their books, crammed their lessons without a break, some played copycat or tripped one another, their vacant and dumb stares slid off me, not recognizing the thirty-year-old that I was. I stepped up to one of the students closest to me—I had no doubt that this cynical farce must soon come to an end.
"Hello," I began, "you must surely realize I'm not..."
But he yelled:
"Look, fellahs! Novus colegus!"
They surrounded me, one of them screamed:
"And what perfidious whims and airs have perchance caused the person of my dear Sir to present himself so tardily at this dump of a s c h o o l?"
Another one squeaked and laughed like an idiot:
"Could it be that amours for a damsel have delayed our colegus venerabilis? Is this perchance why our presumptuous colegus so languidus est?"
I fell silent at this grotesque talk as if someone had tied my tongue into knots, but they went on, unable to stop it seemed—the more atrocious their words, the greater their delight—and with a maniacal stubbornness they befouled themselves and everything around them. And they went on—the fair sex, damsel, wench, Phoebus, love-lust, gnome, professorus, lessonus polonicus, perfectus, sexus. Their movements were clumsy—their faces looked stuffed and bloated, their topics—sex organs in the younger group, sexual exploits in the older group, all of which, in conjunction with archaisms and Latin endings, created a singularly disgusting cocktail. They seemed stuck in something, ill-placed, off-track in space and time, furtively peeking at the teacher or at their mothers behind the fence, clutching their pupas, all the while aware of being watched, which made it rather difficult for them to eat lunch.
I stood there flabbergasted by it all, unable to see the rhyme or reason, and I realized that the farce was not about to end. When those formalists noticed a strange man observing them closely and keenly from behind the oak tree, they became exceedingly nervous, and whispers spread that a school inspector had arrived and was snooping from behind the tree. "A school inspector!" some said, reaching for their books and ostentatiously approaching the oak. "A school inspector!" said others, walking away from the oak, but none of them could take their eyes off Pimko who, standing discretely behind the tree, was making notes with his pencil on a scrap of paper torn out of his writing pad. "He's taking notes," they whispered right and left, "he's writing down his observations." Suddenly Pimko tossed the scrap of paper into the air with a deft movement of his hand, as if the wind had blown it. The note said:
On the basis of my observations conducted during lunch hour at school X, I came to the conclusion that our male youth is innocent! This is my deepest conviction. And my evidence: their mien, their innocent conversation, as well as their cute and innocent pupas.
T. Pimko September 29, 193 ... Warsaw
When the note reached the students the school swarmed like an anthill. "What? We're innocent? We, today's youth, innocent? We, who already screw women?" Laughter and tittering grew, impassioned yet secretive, and the air teemed with sarcasm. "Oh, what a naive fuddy-duddy! What naivete! Hey, what naivete!" I soon realized however, that the laughter had lasted far too long ... instead of abating it became louder, and, while asserting itself, it seemed unduly contrived in its fury. What was happening? Why was the laughter not subsiding? Not until later did I realize the kind of poison that the satanic and Machiavellian Pimko had injected into them. Because, in truth, those puppy dogs, confined to school and distanced from life—were indeed innocent. Yes, they were innocent, and yet they were not innocent! They were innocent in their desire not to be innocent. Innocent when they held a woman in their arms! Innocent when they struggled and fought. Innocent when they recited poetry, and innocent when they played billiards. Innocent when they ate and slept. Innocent when they behaved innocently. Ever threatened by a sacrosanct naivete, even as they spilled blood, tortured, raped, or cursed—they did everything to avoid falling into innocence!