Bacacay

by Witold Gombrowicz

  The maid stops, looks—and something along the lines of a smile begins to appear, and some kind of fumbling begins underneath the wretched shawl, and with an embarrassed smile there emerges happiness—a soiled little hand, a mastodon’s little hand, not very far, just as much as decency permits. I take it, stroke it, and whisper:

  “I’ve taken a great fancy to you, Miss Marysia. I’ve been following you all the way from Marszalkowska Street.”

  The maid smiles, flattered:

  “Come off it ... What could of took your fancy?”

  My eyes lowered and my heart thumping, I reply:

  “Everything, Miss Marysia, everything!”—and I strive to speak as steadily, as naturally as possible, so as above all not to provoke her as yet thoroughly unaccustomed arousability.

  The maid laughs:

  “Mucky tricks!” she laughs. “Mucky tricks!” And immediately sets about poking at a rotten tooth with her finger.

  And she forgets about me, completely absorbed by the tooth, while I stand there waiting—and waiting. All at once she removes her finger, studies it, and then suddenly—something changes in her!

  “I don’t appreciate getting to know someone on the steps!”

  Some primitive pride has awakened in her. Then suddenly, sharply:

  “See him there; he’s took a fancy; who does he think he’s dealing with!”

  I bow my head and hunch my shoulders; I sense timidity, shyness, arousability stirring—once again, like so many times before, it will come to nothing! (And other maids have already noticed, they’re already peeping at us through half-open kitchen doors, and one after another they are leaning out onto the steps—there’s giggling everywhere and a crowd is forming.) All of a sudden my maid creases up in an attack of good humor—has something made her shake with laughter, does she wish to romp? She plonks her rear on the steps, stretches her pudgy legs in front of her and roars:

  “Hee hee hee, hey diddle diddle, hey diddle diddle!”

  “Quiet, quiet,” I whisper, afraid of the maids’ mistresses.

  For at any moment one of them might come outside. But the other maids, the ones loitering higher up on the steps, repeat in piercing voices:

  “Hee hee hee, hey diddle diddle, hey diddle diddle!”

  Hey diddle diddle? I wonder where this arousability comes from. There must be something in me that provokes, that acts like a red rag upon their organ of laughter. I must excite their comic sense in more or less the same way that they excite my sense of smell. Could my stylish overcoat act in this way? Or my cleanliness, the gleaming mirrors of my fingernails, just as dirt in turn is amusing to my wife? But above all it’s probably my fear of the mistresses —they sensed this fear and that was what made them laugh —yet now that the laughter has begun, I already know that everything is lost! And if, in an attempt to calm her and dispel the arousability, I should try to take her by the hand—God forfend! That just fans the flames! She’ll recoil, wrap herself in her shawl, and issue a scream heard up and down the steps:

  “What’s with the pinching!”

  I run quickly down the steps, my head bowed, an entire inferno released behind me.

  “See that bastard!”

  “Chuck him down the stairs, Mańka!”

  “What a sonofabitch!”

  “He needs his hide tanned!”

  “Pinching young ladies!”

  “Pinching young ladies,” “Tan his hide!” Yes, yes—yes, yes—it was all a little different than with the manicurists and the chorus girls—here everything was enormous, untamed, shameful, and terrible, like a kitchen jungle! Everything was this way! And of course it never came to anything improper. Ah, those forbidden, outdated memories—what an unreasonable creature is man; that is, how his feelings always get the better of his reason! Today, calmly surveying the irretrievable past, I know, just as I knew then, that it could never come to anything between me and the maids, and that this was because of the gaping natural chasm between us; but now too, just as then, I absolutely refuse to believe in that chasm, and my anger turns on the mistresses! Who knows? If it were not for them, if it were not for their hats, their gloves, their sour-tempered, sharp, dissatisfied expressions, if it were not for that paralyzing fear and shame that one of them might appear at any moment on the steps—and if they hadn’t deliberately inculcated that fear in their maids, disseminating various stuff and nonsense about thieves, rapists, and murderers .... Yes, those mistresses produced a terrible timidity and arousability with the help of those hats of theirs. Oh, how I hated those shrewish dames, dames of the courtyard, dames with one maid of all work; I ascribed the entire blame to them—and perhaps not without reason, for who knows if without them the maids would not by nature be more kindly disposed toward me.

  I was beginning to grow old. Gray hairs had appeared at my temples; I occupied a high-ranking position as undersecretary of state, and I was even more scrupulous about washing than my wife.

  “Spruceness,” I would say to her. “Spruceness is essential, spruceness first and foremost. Spruceness is boldness!”

  “Boldness?” my wife asked, raising her eyebrows indifferently. “What do you understand by boldness?”

  “Well, untidiness is a kind of bashfulness!”

  “I don’t really follow you, Filip.”

  “Cleanliness creates smoothness! Spruceness is refinement! Spruceness is the model! I can’t abide all these aberrations, these individualisms—they’re like a virgin forest, a primeval woods ‘where the boar and the hare roam free.’ I hate the naked primitive, recoiling with a squeal, a shriek .... It’s awful .... Oh, it’s awful!”

  “I don’t understand,” my wife said reservedly. “But that reminds me ... à propos of cleanliness .... Tell me, Filip, what do you get up to in the bathroom? When you bathe, the racket from in there can be heard throughout the apartment—splashes and noises, the occasional snort, gurgling sounds, coughs. Yesterday the postman overheard and asked what it was. I must confess that one should wash quietly; I see no reason to raise a racket.”

  “That’s true. You may well be right. But when I think of what goes on in the world—when I think about all the dirt that’s inundating us, that would inundate us if we didn’t wash. Oh, how I despise it! How I hate it! It’s disgusting! Listen! You despise it too, just as I do; say you despise it.”

  “I’m surprised you take it to heart so,” my wife said dispassionately. “I don’t despise it. I disregard it.”

  She looked at me.

  “Filip, in general I disregard a great deal.”

  I replied with alacrity:

  “So do I, my treasure.”

  Disregard? Very well, since she had said it, I had nothing against it; I too for years had been plunged in dull-witted disregard. But one night it transpired that my wife’s disregard had its limits after all, and there was very nearly a marital scene. I was woken by a rough tug on the shoulder. She was standing over me, having hurriedly thrown on her dressing gown; she was altered beyond recognition, shaking with anger and disgust:

  “Filip, wake up; stop it! You’re shouting something in your sleep! I can’t listen to it!”

  “Me, in my sleep? Really? What was I saying?”

  “Does Mrs. Kowalska live here?” she said with a shudder. “Does Mrs. Kowalska live here? And then you shouted—it was awful—about some sort of hey diddle diddle”—she barely touched these words with the tip of her tongue. “And then you groaned and began muttering something to the effect that you would strangle some sort of pale, cold, strangling moon, and you started repeating over and over, I hate. Filip! What are these moons?”

  “It’s nothing, my sweet. I have no idea what nonsense a person spouts when he’s asleep. Moons? Perhaps it was something to do with sleepwalking ...”

  “But you said that you’d strangle ... strangle ... and on top of that, there was a stream of coarse language!”

  “Perhaps it was some recollections from my youth. You know, I’m already growin
g old, and as one ages one recalls one’s youth, like soup one had once, thirty years ago.”

  She looked askance at me—quivered—and all at once, to my astonishment, after so many years of married life I realized that she was afraid. Oh, she was afraid, like a mouse afraid of a cat!

  “Filip,” she said anxiously, “the moons ...” (that was what frightened her the most) ... “the moons ...”

  “You’ve no reason to be alarmed, my sweet—I mean, you’re not lunar yourself.”

  “Lunar? What do you mean? Of course I’m not. What does ‘lunar’ mean anyway? Of course I’m not lunar. Filip!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I’ve not had a single peaceful night with you! You don’t know it, but you snore! I’ve never told you before, out of discretion, but for heaven’s sake get a grip, try to enter into yourself somehow and explain it all to yourself, because nothing good will come of it, you’ll see!”

  She moaned.

  “Not one night! How you toot, how you whistle, how you trumpet in the night! It’s just as if you were going out hunting. Oh, why did I marry you? I could have married Leon. And now, since you’ve started to age, it’s worse and worse—and in addition spring is on the way. Filip, explain those moons to yourself somehow or other.”

  “But I can’t explain them to myself if I don’t understand them, my sweet.”

  “Filip, you don’t want to understand them.” And she added further, drumming her fingers on the bedside table: “Filip, let me emphasize that I don’t know the meaning of these moons, this cursing and so on, but whatever should happen, remember that I’ve always been a good wife. I’ve always been well disposed toward you, Filip.”

  I was surprised to hear that I snore—and what did she mean?—and why was she taking this tone of voice with me? After all, I was a passionless, that’s it, a harmless, graying gentleman, rather jaded by life, regular at work and in the quiet of my home—it was only that, out of all this, I gradually began to ogle our nimble chambermaid. My wife noticed, dismissed her immediately and engaged another. I set about ogling her too. My wife gave her her notice also, but I began making sheep’s eyes at the new girl, till my wife had to discharge her in turn.

  “Filip!” she said. “C’est plus fort que moi.”

  “That’s too bad, my dear! I’m growing old, as you can see, and before I’m put out to grass I’d like to gambol a little. Besides, these nimble young things, so refined in their little caps—as you know, this is a dish of ambassadors, consumed at the very best tables!”

  Then my wife employed an older girl. But the same thing was repeated with her—ah!—and then my wife, thinking that it was just a passing whim of mine, some momentary obfuscation, finally took on a beshawled frowze by whom, she imagined, no one could be tempted.

  And I did in fact calm down. The indispensable trunk was carried into the servant’s quarters, and I didn’t so much as raise my eyes; and it was only during dinner that I saw an awful, fleshy finger; I saw the rough blackened skin of her forearm; I heard her steps, shaking the house; I breathed in the ghastly aroma of vinegar and onion; and, reading my newspaper, I discerned the shrillness, the clumsiness, the gawkishness of all the movements of her immense body. I heard her voice—that slightly hoarse voice, not quite either of the country or the city; at times a piercing giggle reached me from the kitchen. I heard without listening, I saw without looking, and my heart pounded, and once again I was bashful, apprehensive, like long ago on the kitchen steps—I ambled about the apartment, and at the same time I was calculating and planning. No—my wife’s anxieties were preposterous; what kind of insidious betrayal could threaten her from a quiet man whose days were coming to an end ... and who at most, before he departed, wished to draw into his breast a little of the former air, and watch a little, and listen a little ...

  And I closely observed the play of elements, the tragicomedy of life—how my wife acted upon the maid, and how the maid acted upon my wife, and how in this encounter both wife and maid manifested themselves to the full. To begin with my wife would say nothing more than: “Oh!” And I could see that at the thudding of the maid’s footsteps she quaked like a leaf; but on my account she was prepared to put up with a great deal. Along with her trunk the maid brought into our apartment her own affairs, in other words vermin, toothache, chills, picking her fingers, lots of crying, lots of laughing, lots of laundry; it all started to spread around the apartment, and my wife compressed her lips ever more, leaving only the tiniest crack. Of course, the process of instructing the maid commenced at once; to the side, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that this took on ever crueler forms and eventually became a kind of leveling of the terrain. The maid writhed as if burned by red-hot iron; she couldn’t take a single step that was in accordance with her own nature. And my wife was unremitting—deep within her grew the spirit of strangulation, of hatred, the more so because I too was slightly hateful off to the side, though I could not have explained why or to what purpose. And I watched with narrow-eyed amazement as before my wife there arose primitive powers, truly different than Majola soap, and a vicious and prehistoric battle raged.

  It turned out that among other things the maid had a rumbling stomach. My wife gave her medicine, but nothing helped: from her stomach a mysterious, chasmic growling emanated continuously; the dark chasm still called out. My wife ordered a restricted diet, forbidding her anything that could provoke such a din; in the end she shouted:

  “I’ll throw you out, Czesia, if you don’t stop this once and for all!”

  The maid took fright and from that moment rumbled twice as loud from fear—while my wife, pallid and exasperated, and seeing that nothing could be done, pretended that she couldn’t hear. She was given away only by a slight trembling of her eyelids.

  “Czesia,” my wife declared, “I demand that you bathe once a week, on Saturdays; and Czesia, you need to scrub well with brush and soap!”

  A few weeks later my wife crept up on tiptoe and peeped quietly through the keyhole. Czesia was standing fully clothed by the bathtub, splashing the water about with a thermometer, while the soap and brush lay to one side, untouched and dry. And once again there was shouting. And the constant vexation imperceptibly turned my wife into one of those sour, implacable mistresses from the courtyards—it was enough to scare me—she shouted like a furious magpie at the boyfriend who came to see the maid in the evenings, and asked:

  “What are you after? Be off with you! You’re not needed here! I won’t allow anyone to sit here! Off you go! This minute! And don’t come back!” She was exactly, exactly like one of those strict mistresses from the courtyards!

  I watched everything, all these bizarre transformations, in what was in fact a cataleptic state, drawing patterns with my fork on the tablecloth for hours on end. What could be done—there was no turning back now; I could only sum things up, settle accounts—and perhaps listen one last time to the sweet, sinful whisper of youth. Ancient, long-forgotten stories, ancient shame and ancient hatred tapped at me the way a woodpecker hammers at frozen, leafless trees in wintertime; they beckoned to me from around the corner with a fleshy, unsightly finger. Oh, how impoverished I was at present, how washed into gravel by constant streams of water; what on earth had become of the fear, the apprehension, the shame and the embarrassment ? Just a moment—I broke off these painful questions—could it be that I had wasted my life? Was only sin, only dirt profound? Did profundity lie beneath a dirty fingernail? And I wrote absently with my finger on the window pane: “Woe betide those who abandon their own dirt for the cleanliness of others; dirt is always one’s own, cleanliness always another’s.”

  And I thought perfunctorily of hazy matters: that a maid of all work is made up of a certain amount of ugliness and dirt; that if this dirt and ugliness were taken away, she would no longer be a maid of all work. But every maid has a boyfriend, and if that boyfriend loves her, then he passionately loves the whole, including the beauty and the ugliness, and so it’s possible to say of the ugliness that it
too is loved. And if it’s loved, then why should it be combated? And I thought further that if someone loves only beauty and cleanliness, then they love only half of a being. And then I began to daydream unconnectedly—it mustn’t be forgotten that my mind was deteriorating—I dreamed of little birds, lace, nuts, and a huge derisive moon rising over the earth. Boldness pokes fun at abject bashfulness—a fine, beautiful, triumphant leg ridicules a lugubrious, antediluvian leg. Someone once said that life is boldness. No: Boldness is slow death, whereas life is apprehensive bashfulness. Whoever loves a monstrous maid is alive; whereas he who favors a traditional beauty will gradually wither away.

  “Czesia,” I said one day to the maid, “the mistress says that you’re awfully shrill. The mistress says it gives her a migraine.”

  The maid groaned:

  “The mistress doesn’t think a maid is a human being!”

  Then I asked:

  “Czesia, is it true what the mistress says, that when you cross a room the Dresden china on the shelves rattles as if it were about to shatter?”

  Czesia said gloomily:

  “Everything bothers the mistress.”

  I replied:

  “The mistress is opposed to maids! She’s against you, Czesia, and also against the others in our courtyard. The mistress thinks they’re too loud, that their chattering and prattling is too vulgar—it makes her ears ache—and on top of that they spread all kinds of diseases. And another thing the mistress doesn’t like is that every maid is a thief—that gives the mistress a migraine. And according to the mistress the boyfriends also steal things and spread various diseases.”

  Once I had said this I fell silent, as if I’d said nothing at all—and, as always when I came home from the ministry, I read the papers. Before long my wife came to speak to me about dismissing the maid.

  “Of late,” she said, “she’s grown impudent; she scowls, and furthermore she’s always out on the steps jabbering with the other maids. Once, when I went in the kitchen there were as many as four of them sitting there. In the courtyard she stands and gossips with the concierge. I believe it’s high time to let her go.”