Gogol's Wife

by Tommaso Landolfi

  But with the falling of the sun the evening approaches and, with the evening, the shadows, the carriers of voluptuous terrors. But not only the shadows, the friends, too; the friends who gather each evening in So-and-So’s house. So-and-So was well aware that these encounters could be dangerous for Rosalba (and in fact, while recounting his prodigious adventures, he did not lose sight of her for a moment): yet he had permitted them to take place out of inertia or necessity, or perhaps because he also feared solitude as the worst of all the dangers facing his ward.

  For this task—namely, to describe such desolate and exciting small-town family gatherings—one needs instead the somber colors which are surely available to certain great prose writers of our time. In his inadequacy, the writer sees himself compelled to pass up another fine opportunity and, although his position threatens to become untenable, to decline this chore as well.

  To these gatherings came a lawyer, indeed the lawyer, with his twenty-eight-year-old son (black mustaches), the pharmacist, the local magistrate, and who else? Well, the mayor, the councilmen and various officials with their respective wives; and, whether they listened in a semicircle to accounts of So-and-So’s crocodile hunts or, let us say, the phonograph, whether they tripped about to the ritual dance tunes or played the most decrepit parlor games, they always enjoyed themselves quite properly and respectably.

  Creola

  Dalla bruna aureola

  Per pietà sorridimi

  Che l’amor m’assal.

  But that evening Rosalba—it is hard to say why—became inexplicably irritated during a game of “wireless” by the whisperings of the person next to her (the drooling magistrate), and walked out on the terrace to get some air. Strange! the sensation of that warm breath persisted on her ear and cheek and that murmur, which had been hissed out with a chesty effort and had moreover been incomprehensible, still buzzed within her and gave no sign of going away—both the breath and the murmur seemed to be endowed with all the attributes of a gross physical presence. After a while, curiously enough, the lawyer’s son came after her. But So-and-So had noticed the maneuver and managed to find a pretext to join them. Coming out, he saw them close together beneath a tuft of greenery: the young man was talking rapidly and Rosalba was caught full in the face by a sodden moon: her eyes were darkened by it. The girl listened, her eyebrows slightly raised and her delicate mouth pursed in a heartshape, as small children do. An impalpable breath seemed to come from that mouth, a sharp odor of verbena (that clod who was talking to her obviously felt it); and the moon thrust a keen, cold blade between her teeth into the dark hollow of her mouth.

  Then all the guests left, lingering for a long time in the hallway, saying good-bye, in those very last moments recovering all their wit, and like newfledged phoenixes, from their yawning languor the most vital subjects were reborn: “So, it seems that they’re going to add another trip to the bus schedule. . . .”

  And so to bed.

  3

  In solchen Naechten waechst mein Schwesterlein . . .

  (Rilke)

  But that night Rosalba could not sleep. She couldn’t because there were too many problems to solve. For some time now there had been an obscure menace in all things. First of all, what did those moist and sticky looks of the lawyer’s mustachioed son mean, when he called in the evening? Looks drowned in a force greater than himself and thus imploring, not imperious, not insistent. And what did it mean that her father now sometimes gnawed at his lips, or turned away his glance as from an unhappy sight, during her baths? And now he almost never gave her any advice, nor did he help her—the curve of her loins frequently remained untouched by the sponge.

  It was that which one had to discover. And then, that disconsolate weeping over the sunsets and the old house, when she saw it, from some far corner of the garden, livid in the late sunset, that weeping over the buds and the green of the trees, that inner weeping which produced tears which were rare but big and slow and heavy, when she felt them run down her cheeks, tears which were pried loose with difficulty from the calm eye socket. . . . It is perhaps right that a sunset should cause tears, certainly, but one must absolutely know why this happens, owing to which precise element. In order to be able to conclude: Yes, that’s it, I understand, it’s the red that upsets me!—But no, one weeps and one does not know why, there is a tranquil threat in everything; or rather, a widening of one’s eyes as of children before something sad and unfamiliar—like the dead, swollen with sorrow, staring down from their portraits in the chapels. And worse yet, the sponge’s coarseness is now almost pleasant and thrilling on the arch of her loins, her breath is heavy with a weight that forces her to heave a sigh every five minutes. That’s it, yes, perhaps that’s it—one is sad not because one is sad but because, when one sighs, one’s soul must find a reason for that sighing. In any case, at the bottom of that weight lies the promise of a new, hidden pleasure. A pleasure: but what, may I ask? Perhaps it is necessary to free oneself from that weight with a deeper, deeper sigh, an unimaginable sigh—it is only a moment, one ascends, ascends even more inside, even deeper, to the point of vertigo, to the point of snatching the ultimate tuft of breath which is knotted up in the depths (but the depths of what?) and then one is freed. But perhaps not: perhaps that weight must increase indefinitely without respite, until the blood erupts in a furious roar, beating, beating at the temples, the throat, the wrists, the armpits, the sounding fingertips. It is necessary that the weight be crushed, yes crushed.

  Tonight all the noises do not sleep, do not die out after their desperate appeal, and every near and far-off sound dances a dangerous saraband. A threatening one. The shrill grinding of a wagon on the distant moonlit road grows and swells with the same rhythm as the blood in her head—a terrible rhythm, not fast, but pressing, mounting—it swells with an obscure and frightening menace: wa-gon, wa-gon. It swells, it is just about to burst wide open. Oh Lord, this time it did not burst, this time it passed by and is collapsing like a breaker. But the next wave, what will it be, what will it be? It is indeed a sea with huge stormy blades and among the blades a huge, square-headed monster with the body of a snake. The monster tries to reach out with its dreadful head, but the backwash pulls it away. But the wash also brings it closer, and, in time with the beating of the waves, every so often (at each surge!) the monster rears up, shrieks, rears up on the incoming breaker, and as it rears up it shrieks with an all-encompassing, deafening voice, and when it is at the highest point, when its head has covered the horizon and its body the sea, precisely then its shriek reaches its intensest pitch and completely fills the air. There is no escape: the air is a shriek, the sea is a body, the horizon is its head. The breaker topples over and the monster with it; yet again the breaker surges up and this time, who can tell? perhaps this time the monster will seize its prey. It has not seized it; the monster has been grazed by its breath, but there are still as many breakers as there are seconds in eternity . . . One more leap, but again it slithers down, then again it leaps up to seize us . . . but it cannot: the waves are as numerous as the pulse-beats of time, but they are not all breakers and if the wash does not push forward the monster’s leap, how will it be able to catch up with us? The breakers are calmed, the sea is calmed, grumbling the monster leaves. There is a clap of thunder. It is over. But now the tranquil sea is pitch, the sky is lead, monstrous, tawny shrimp graze us with their long feelers, their eyes hornlike and hard, pitiless eyes. Yet their spiteful slowness is so marmoreal that they will not have us. Oh Lord, when will the sun shine again over the sea, when will the water be as radiant as flowing gold? Flowing: that is the answer—flowing, crushed. Oh look, at last a little sun. All you have to do is repeat any word, turning it over in your head, for it to be emptied of its everyday meaning. It’s funny, really funny. That’s not all: binoculars: I don’t know where it comes from, but binoculars! It’s not beautiful, just funny. Laughing laughing! Bottles, champagne, women, the lawyer’s son. . . .

  But the laughter is
macabre; wait, it comes from the small alcove at the top of the stairs, the alcove enclosed by the three walls of the old courtyard. Or is it us? Is it I? Why yes, I am floating in the air and looking at that laughter. Floating in the air, but now we dive into an enormous funnel of air and lead. Only the laughter. Farewell, flights over the Serra Capriola, farewell, free fluttering of arms over the mountain valleys! No more, gentlemen, we are falling! The laughter again. That is, it was there. And now? We search for this blessed laughter, macabre of course but at bottom quite friendly, which amuses itself by running away through the closed door like a will-o’-the-wisp. The house! It is in the house. But the other house is off our path. The other house! What does it mean? It means that we cross the rooms in between, those clustered around the inside staircase, but we do not search through all the halls on the second floor. No, obviously we must descend the wooden, winding stairway that leads to the kitchen. Downstairs it is best to look first into the pantry on the right; in fact it is certain that the laughter has taken refuge there. Silly thing, it may be behind the greasy door, which doesn’t open all the way and leaves a space next to the wall. It must be behind the door and perhaps once it is discovered it will shout “ha-ha,” gaily. The pantry. No, there is no laughter here. Oh, what a bore—where did it go? Perhaps it is still off to the right, perhaps it went through the lumber room and is out in the courtyard again. Of course. But why doesn’t it rest a while? Here’s the wooden bushel, so let’s sit down. Oh, how clear everything is, mercifully distinct and gray-colored! How distinctly one sees everything! Behind my back the game pouch, I don’t even have to turn to know it is there; beyond the fly screen, a piece of salted cheese, thick blue spaghetti paper (and what is that doing here?) and . . . but what is that? Oh, it’s a partridge. In the corner the skewers, on this side the pots, a row of pots arranged by size on a shelf, on the other side the pot covers held up against the wall with a wire, also in order of size. The mouth of the cistern. The coil of the chain hanging on a nail, a basket filled with leaves and three plates (but why, I should like to know, is it called the pantry!) and across the way stands the sink, though of course the water isn’t running: they wash the dishes there and there’s a hole for the water to flow away, that’s why they call it a sink. What else? Dark yellow, dirty, worm-eaten beams. A bacon rind. Ha-ha, the rind. But there is absolutely nothing to say about the rind. Rind, and that’s all. Rind: this is funny too. Potatoes on the floor! Sprouting. Potatoes, as we know, are animals. They lift a strange head with a long neck from their warty bodies. The neck and head green, the body earth-colored. Strange animals. Too fresh a head for that decrepit body. Like . . . like what? Come, what a silly idea . . . but after all, from the body of dogs there sometimes sprouts a thin pinkish flesh, retractile and sensitive as the horns of a snail. Yes . . . dogs are strange animals too. But how frightening all this is! In any case, let us call the potatoes . . . “dogesses.” Now there’s a pretty word: “Peel the dogesses and slice them thin.” Sounds good. Surely there is something mysterious in these tender potato heads, that is, these dogesses. Mysterious—it is no longer something to be laughed or joked about, not even something to be talked about to oneself. One must withdraw to the darkest depths of one’s soul to study, no, to hope to be penetrated by the revelation. The revelation of the tender heads. My goodness, we’re no longer gay. Dismay is all that’s left. Numbness, sadness. But let’s try the usual system: hole. No, hole doesn’t work—a hole is a hole. But why did I say hole? Ah yes, because right in front of me there is a large hole, not the hole in the sink but the one in the floor, in the gray concrete pavement stained with greasy water—a hole for the water to drain down and flow away.

  Now everything disappears. The black hole cannot be seen anymore. It fills the horizon all by itself, just like the sea monster. But it does not shriek, it keeps silent. It really isn’t accurate to say that it fills the horizon: those are just words. It is still there, at the usual distance, on the edge of the gray, grease-stained concrete floor. But suppose a strange beast, a beast never seen before, suddenly rose out of that hole! Oh my goodness! starting from that hole the beast could wander all over the house, cautiously, softly slither in everywhere, nestle under the pillows, huddle in the armpits of those who are sleeping—oh why didn’t I think of this before! And what has love got to do with it? Love: here too it doesn’t work. Hole and love are refractory.

  And then Rosalba stiffens with horror. Horror does not close her eyes, it holds them wide open and rigid, shining and immobile like gray pools. Rosalba’s eyes take in the entire universe, and at the center of the universe there is the black hole. Out of the black hole something is pushing with a certain effort, though with the soft suppleness of cats when they slip through a door that is slightly ajar. A gray, slimy form sticks out its head, its neck, its body. Yet, though it is so gray and slimy that it cannot be distinguished against the floor and wall, gradually, as it advances, one can discern its head, neck and body. But what am I saying, “discern”! The truth is, one can see or sense that the form has a head, a neck, a body. Anyway (and if the description isn’t clear, it doesn’t matter) it is a beast. In fact it is the beast. One of those things which, animate or not, strike us like a bolt of lightning, one of those things which fill us with careful, meticulous horror, one of those enormous, unspeakable things, and it isn’t true that one can observe all of its minute particulars.2 Exactly how the beast is formed cannot be said. However, it has hard, corneous, clotted eyes, like those of animals that do not see, opaque and veiled like the eyes of walruses. A soft, viscid muzzle, very long, thin, sensitive whiskers shivering at the air’s touch. Observing it more closely one can see that the muzzle shivers more than a rabbit’s, indeed all the skin of its face shivers. There is no other way of describing it because the beast’s head, rearing erect on its high neck where the slime was marked by furrows, had something human about it. Its eyes looked straight ahead, not to the side or shiftily. Its body . . . its body, well, it’s hard to say. But it was easy to sense its general shape. The beast was a head, like certain men are a nose. A monstrous head, delicate and sensitive like . . . I’ve found it! . . . like the head of the dogesses! The blind beast was tensely stretched forward. Toward what? Oh, from the very first moment Rosalba understood that it was stretched toward her. There is nothing we understand better than the intentions of our kin (and why not call it one of our kin?) when they are completely unexpressed. If someone says “I want to kill you,” perhaps he is implying something else, but if someone wants to kill us and does not say so, how quickly we understand it!

  Tensed and hard but not hurrying, the beast advanced with the calm of beings sure of themselves. The livid eyes had no look in them, yet were greedily fixed on their prey. Eyes whose power could not be escaped: eyes which had no expression and were not human. Blind eyes in the service of an inflexible, secret light. Slow and sure, the beast came. But if it was blind, it did not see with its eyes. Then how could one try to escape them? It would be the same as wanting to escape from a lion simply because it is blind, while one feels continually seen and hounded by its sense of smell. So one must endure, endure it, but oh my God, let the torment be brief! We stand stockstill, yet may it come and catch us if we are in its power! The beast, however, is taking its time. There is plenty of time to look into the hard, hornlike eyes, the eyes which do not move; yes, they can be looked at, Rosalba can look at them at her ease. No more terror now—a peaceful, pursuing stare. So this is the beast which can wander all over the house and enter everywhere, nestle under a sleeper’s pillow, in the hollow of one’s armpits, between one’s . . . yes, between one’s warm thighs. Poor beast which lives in the holes of sinks in a perpetual wetness, greasy with dirty water, it wishes the warmth. Oh, is that a pain . . . between the thighs? No. An itch? No, it is a fire and a sharp tightening, as though by tightening but one nerve, all the body’s nerves responded. That was before, but now one must fill this fixity, one cannot await the first contact of the beas
t’s head with a blank mind. Love: no, that doesn’t work. It’s useless. We’ve seen that already. But now let’s try something else. “The dog suffers if his master eats and does not give him anything” (one of papa’s sayings). Yes, this is the truth. All people feed their dogs when they eat themselves. At last, a sure standard. One knows exactly what to think of the sadness of dogs when they watch us eat and can’t manage to get anything—simply because the meaning of this sadness has been clearly expressed, once and for all. But other things which only we can discover, even though more satisfying, are not at all satisfying and never certain. Thus, perhaps more pleasant.3 Anyway, how does all this fit in? It comes in because of love . . . therefore its meaning is never certain.

  There’s no point in trying to make head or tail of such reasoning—these thoughts have now that accelerated, false rhythm when the mind does not follow them, because it is elsewhere, fragmented among the appearances of things. Then the mind is not a mind, it is utterly molten and flowing (and it takes on the color of fire)—farther down, farther up, who knows where? to the mouth of the stomach, to the roots of the hair, prickling. This is the true mind. It is fear, no, not fear at all: fixity. Prick-ling, prick-ling, preeck.

  Preeck—but the beast has not understood anything of all this. Silent, it is now a handsbreadth from Rosalba, on the floor: it reaches no higher than halfway up her shin. It wants her legs to open slowly. So let’s slowly open the legs. It doesn’t want her to be wearing a nightgown or anything. But she didn’t have one on. Come to think of it, the iron rim of the bushel feels cold on her behind. So: Rosalba is seated on the bushel, her legs tenderly open. The beast is on the floor, a handsbreadth from her body, between her legs. And now, with the unerringness of a goat which instantly chooses the softest cluster of grapes, the beast, with a small silent leap, takes possession of Rosalba. It lunges to bite off her most tender bud, which its blind sense of smell had immediately revealed to it: Should she struggle? She knows that is impossible. The bush-el is cold, the bush-el is co-o-old (to the tune of “Bandolino stanco”). Softness with softness, that’s how it should be. But the beast hasn’t torn off anything, it hasn’t torn off her most tender bud, there in the crevice of her thighs, in order to eat it. The beast wants to suck her all over. Very well, let it. Pain? But what are you saying, milady? No, there’s not the slightest pain. The beast simply hangs there, sucking. Let it suck, there’s no pain. Rosalba merely gazes at a little pottery vase, so pretty with its arms on its hips. And when is the pain going to come? Perhaps it isn’t ever supposed to come. Poor little beast, blind and dreadful, gray and slimy, what are you doing? But I don’t mind—go on, go on. But now, suddenly, this seriousness. There’s no point, though, in fighting against this either. Pain, pain? No, joy. No, not that either, but the small vase begins to move, making a wide circle, a circle so wide that if it goes on like that it will certainly be carried way out behind the stars. Good-bye, lovely little vase. And the cement floor and the sink and the walls and the dirty yellow beams, first in a whirl, then pulling back, all vanish. Look: on that pearly gray, the color of the void, the rind floats again. Silence. Yet nothing is left and that nothing is flecked by a silent uprush of lymph, by a pouring of emptiness into emptiness, by hyacinth skies pouring into skies, by peach-colored universes pouring into universes. Silence and an earsplitting noise.