Gogol's Wife

by Tommaso Landolfi

  And now the uprush of jadelike lymph becomes clearer. It does not bubble up, it flees. It flows irremediably and softly, it purifies, liberates, carries off life (life?), everything. The blood, the veins, the bones and bowels dissolve and flow away in lymph. Purification, liberation! Liberation and perhaps—yes, yes—life! The lymph melts, flows.

  It flows. Neither sadness nor joy, because neither of these is truly necessary. Necessary (because it is) is the melting of the lymph, the flowing. It flows and the beast is no longer there and Rosalba is once again alone, this time standing on the gray cement floor, naked and white with the purple shadow of her belly, and, lower down, her triangular shadow. But what about life? And now (perhaps some lymph rising up again?) now something pulling, at first faint, then sharp, inside, down there. But what, what is it? Blood, yes blood. A peaceful stream of blood which flows down from the purple hollow, flows and spreads and weaves a triangular film, transparent as a cascade. But if it is peaceful, there’s no need to be alarmed. Yet, yet . . . the blood is filling the entire room, the triangle narrows, narrows, disappearing in the rising lake with a calm, soft submergence of sound. Rosalba looks at herself—soon the triangle will be gone and the blood will have reached her hips. Oh, to be able to get up, to run away. Run away? The blood is a soothing, lovely bath. It is not hot, but cool. Liberation—it flows. But it keeps rising, that’s what’s wrong. A spasm in the entrails, the loins. And now, here beneath her chin, two slight but heavy globes of flesh with tender points like those of the dogesses. Spasm.

  And Rosalba wakes up with a start. As in a train, she abruptly resumes contact with reality. Reality is a warm dripping between her thighs. A jerk of the hand and her blanket is thrown off: blood, really blood. Broad bloodstains on the sheet. And still a hidden tingling of warm blood. Warm, not cool, black. Instinctively Rosalba leaps to her feet. She wants to call her papa, but something holds her back.

  Perhaps the reader does not know what “flowing” means. Perhaps he is unaware of the precise conditions under which the obscure force which compels a drop to fall, if nothing holds it back, unfolds in all its crystalline clarity. As always, a vaster law here expresses itself through the particular law. There exist a pure and an impure flowing. From no part of a man can something flow purely: a drop of mucous which drips from his nose will inevitably follow a broken line, that is, it must slide along an inclined surface before attaining its divine, arrowlike verticality, aimed at the heart of the earth. In him a pure flow can occur only from peripheral organs; something which starts from within, from his most profound substance, can never flow out of him purely (thus perhaps, man, to his misfortune, is not subject to monthly cathartic cleansings). At the most one can imagine a diffusion of blood from the tips of his fingers held open along his thighs. So let us hope that on some distant day a halo of flowing threads of blood may enmesh our legs: this is our dream.

  But for a woman it is another matter. From a woman, from her innermost precordia, the blood can flow logically and with stellar purity. Indeed, each thick, heavy drop of fearful blood which strikes the floor with a neat, dull sound is the direct projection of that woman’s center of gravity and it traces its ideal trajectory through the air. And if, drop falling on drop, there forms a tranquil, mercurial lake of lazy, convex, thick liquid with shining borders, the bewildered siren arising from that lake will be Rosalba herself, the center and fulcrum of that tide.

  Apparently calm, Rosalba contemplated that little lake, though a subtle thought kept nagging at the walls of her soul, like a horsefly in the spring. So this is love—the girl said to herself. And if she simply believed she knew, what else matters? It is enough to believe that one sees to see—insofar as it is true that nothing exists. And at this point the writer must beg the reader’s pardon for having yielded, for the sake of fidelity, to an excessive accuracy in depicting Rosalba’s state of being.

  4

  She has gone to others, the insomnia-nurse

  (Akhmatova)

  Certainly spring had come to maturity in a single night, and summer arrived bearing in its hands sheaves of frenzy and the insomnia-nurse: for that night So-and-So had also felt a boundless oppression and thirst. If that heavy semidrowsiness could have been incarnated in a thought and image, it would doubtlessly have been that of his ward Rosalba who, from behind a brilliant, purplish mist, like a naked swimmer seen from the bottom of the sea, flashed between his eyelids. A stroke of the arm and the sea’s bottom recedes, first slowly, then more swiftly, and in a moment our arms can embrace both the water’s surface and the swimming girl. So-and-So sat up; he was already awake.

  So-and-So knew that the two mouths seen so unknowingly close together in the dim lunar light would one day be united, paradisiacally or terrestrially (but he did not know that the major of the grenadiers had already smeared his ward’s virginal lips with an unreciprocated kiss; he did not know that that drool would froth and ferment around the curve of her mouth). Which is to say that one day Rosalba would refuse to take her daily bath in his presence, or would take it blushing and with effort, or simply because he ordered her to, thus ending his felicitous indecision and forcing him to assume a clear-cut attitude toward her. He had known this, but had always pushed away the thought with dread. But now the imminence of that moment seemed to him—who knows why?—strangely present and he felt that he must immediately concern himself with it.

  Oppression, thirst . . . and now, at last, a specific desire: to drink. So-and-So got up cautiously; his little son was sleeping in the next room, and he was such a nervous, fragile child that interrupting his sleep would be unforgivable. Without knowing quite how, he found himself in front of the mirror and, with an habitual gesture, stuck out his coated tongue. Seen from the corner of his eye, the open scissors on the chest of drawers looked like a big spider which had lost four of its legs in a battle. Yet So-and-So, already accustomed to this arachnomorphosis, was not startled. The hairs on his chest inside the neck of his light pajamas were graying; gray hairs, and so abundant, were also on his temples; wrinkles on his brow, at the corners of his eyes—crow’s-feet, the women call them. “You’ll soon be sixty, old boy!” And, almost naturally, he repeated a very old gesture which he thought he had buried forever: he uncovered himself. Torso: gray hairs, his breasts marked by a billow of fat and the usual, ridiculous race of neatly arranged hairs down to his navel. He uncovered himself further: lower down the nearly pointed swelling out of his belly, traversed by that neat race of hairs (Mountain Climber’s Day; that one there, forging ahead of all of them, darker, isn’t he the Flea of the Pyrenees?). Farther down, flabby flesh, grown inescapably flabby, and gray there too. That’s what’s serious about it! “Well, it’s nothing new, and who gives a good God damn,” he said, perhaps aloud, and covered himself. The bath, the bath: how could he continue to preserve the girl’s incredible unawareness? Yes, her curves are filling out, it is inevitable that she will go through the white world like a butterfly.4 There’s nothing to be done. What had he been thinking about? Oh yes, a glass of water. So-and-So noiselessly opened the door. Now he had to cross the boy’s room: the child was sleeping and from his half-opened lips, his sweat-beaded forehead, fumed something feverish and morbid. Just look at him, So-and-So said to himself, walking past the bed without touching it (his thoughts had quickly taken another turn)—it’s lucky that he has his eyes closed. Some father I am, by God, I haven’t even managed to decide what color his eyes are!—but here too, there was nothing to be done, he had studied it for a long time and had never succeeded in getting anywhere. Yet, considering the matter carefully, when he had to compare the color of those eyes with that of other known objects, So-and-So felt his whole being revolt, as though seized by terror. His reason and memory refused to function properly, as if they feared every deeper probe might produce a frightful revelation. That’s just what happened now, and So-and-So, who had finally reached the door of the kitchen, managed to distract himself from this thought. His sharp desire for water
maintained his balance: a frail desire, somewhat like the pine branch one clings to while crawling from one mountain ledge to another above a gorge in which a boraciferous fumarole or a bubbling of sulphurous waters fills the air with fire and smoke. At last, the water; two green glass bottles which had survived all cataclysms, such as are often used to preserve tomatoes. They stand in the copper basin, cool. Now, where is a glass? No, better to drink straight from the bottle. His thirst is momentarily quenched. So the balance is upset. So-and-So himself is aware of it, for he feels that again he is dangling above the fumarole and tries to fool himself into thinking that he is still thirsty. Oh, thank God, a fleabite. These abominable fleas, you can’t remain a minute with bared legs without their attacking you and trying to suck out your soul! There are plenty of them and everywhere in this house. Is it the dog? (Anyway, this is good, we can think about the fleas.) The itch becomes stronger, stable and stinging. It’s a nuisance to catch the flea and crush it at once between your fingertips—otherwise, as soon as it touches the floor and before you know it, it bounds away and vanishes. Then you have to wash your fingers. Oh, what a bore! Alas, you have to.

  And So-and-So bent over resentfully to catch the flea—ah there it is, on the anklebone (he was only wearing slippers and pajamas). Caught and already stunned, rolled between thumb and index finger, all I can do now is let it fall and then let’s hope I can see it on this gray, wrinkly floor. The flea falls, but something gray, diaphanous and impalpable as a shadow, something threadlike and tenuous, as though borne by the air, enters So-and-So’s field of vision. He was not quite sure that he had seen it, like those things which barely flash by at the extreme bounds of our vision and which (illusion, reality?) we bring back into focus with a certain amazement; yet his heart—the heart which is never wrong—had already warned him of the danger and seemed to freeze in his breast. In that corner of the large kitchen the light of the tipsy bulb fought against the shadow which, along the wall, encircled and swallowed it. The yellowish, already feeble light thinned out on the gray floor and grew gray itself. Little more than a shadow. It was the middle of the night and a stonelike silence bore down, an impenetrable silence with stern, tight-drawn lips. In that light and silence, a spider, neither large nor small due to that diaphanous grayness, was crawling across the kitchen.

  It was a spider of the most common species, of a family without a name, the kind with very long, thin legs, like hairs, and with a pepper-grain body. It proceeded jauntily, according to its custom, but without haste: without the least creak it hobbled along on its impossible legs, which seemed to adhere stickily to the floor, pulling them in with small tugs which should have seriously upset its equilibrium if many other legs of the same sort hadn’t immediately re-established it on the other side. The minute grain of its body, as if in the throes of an astral storm, tottered wildly on the airy pattern of its supports and, from time to time, when the shadow overflowed and devoured the pattern, seemed to float on the mere air in a monstrously rhythmic saraband. That’s how it went forward, and yet in that being there was something silent and solemn, like the advance of destiny, something which we clearly discern during our sleepless nights. So-and-So, though his legs were bare and the spider passed two feet from his face (the most intimate point of the body), did not begin jumping frenetically, as on that other occasion. He didn’t even try to move. Perhaps because he hadn’t foreseen the danger in time and suddenly found himself too close, he didn’t alter his position in the slightest and, struck to the heart, remained just like that, bent over, fascinated and immobile. The flea, everything in the world apart from the floor and the spider, were outside his perception. Under normal conditions a certain exasperated, clearly tactile sensitivity in his fingertips would have told him that he had not yet cleansed them of the filthy contact with the flea. But the feeling had vanished just as it was about to declare itself.

  That other being, the spider, was also following a precise direction: So-and-So knew instantly that its implacable course would bring it to pass an inch, perhaps less, from the tip of his slipper (worn, the rounded toe jutting out). But he did not pull back his foot. He knew that he could not: now the spider was too close and he was caught in its sphere of immobile horror. So little is needed—So-and-So knew—to alarm a spider of that sort. All one had to do was breathe on it and it would, depending on the nearness of the enemy and his position, flatten itself against the floor, an immovable nailhead crowned by the billowing of its eight halo threads as by the thinnest jets of a fountain; or it would abandon itself as though dead with its threads in a cross and its belly (though where is the belly of that brown speck?) in the air, motionless and limp; or propped firmly on its threads (obviously equipped with suction cups), dangling from a wall or a web, it would begin a saraband with its hapless pepper-grain—an infernal, menacing whirl. Yet that spider gave no sign of being aware of So-and-So’s presence, of his gaze and the breath he was holding, and, not at all alarmed, continued its fateful walk. It passed a half an inch away from So-and-So’s toe, went forward and then disappeared in the direction of the deepest shadow and, perhaps, delirium. It was then that So-and-So roused himself and straightened up. His mind was empty now, and he only felt a slightly feverish faintness, he didn’t actually feel sick. Maimed, broken inside. He started back to bed, but as he turned to go his true nature reawakened and he felt as always the absolute need to go back in his mind over his relations with the spider race, as though to fence off in space and time the danger which those terrible enemies meant for him. In his mind he pictured spiders of all sorts and sizes: from those devourers of birds seen in books of natural history (not dangerous, distant and unreal) to those miniscule spiders with quivering palps which catch flies on window sills (nor were they dangerous either: non-spiders).

  There are many species of real spiders. There are the huge old spiders, black as pitch, with a flat head and a heart-shaped body; they live in old rooms and bear a large cross on their bodies, have great stumpy, hairy legs and take frightful leaps. Squat, corky spiders which, when one seizes them, contract their claws around the clutching fingers. They live in gardens and do not possess too furtive, conclusively swift and slippery a personality. Then the spiders which are always seen as though through a veil of mist, installed in holes at the end of a funnel of thick web. Hearth crickets, which are very much like spiders (those which So-and-So as a child used to call cricket-spiders). Medium-sized, yellowish spiders without any definite characteristics, strangely proportioned in their body and legs, neither squat nor lithe. . . . “Yes,” So-and-So said to himself at this point, following a sudden thought, “but to catalogue them like this does not mean to understand them. The flesh of spiders, the gloomy mystery of spiderish flesh, is still denied us. Who can penetrate it, who can know what it is really made of? So, one ought to study,” he went on, “those yellow spiders with legs too weak to support their distended bodies; which are nothing but a small blister of purulent matter: a small blister of sanies—bursting it, one sees a yellowish, thick liquid ooze out. As a matter of fact, the blister itself is not yellow, it is only transparent and colored by its contents. This is perhaps the essence of the spiders. That blister is like the skin of a very taut boil, a boil which absolutely must be pierced to make sure that the pus does not spread to the rest of the body. . . .” But here a flash ran through So-and-So’s brain, heart and veins. As usual, only an instant later did he know what it was. The deadly agitation increased, reached the maximum bearable intensity, gave signs of diminishing and then began to assume the form of a thought, was embodied in a comparison. Another turn of the screw and then, fixed in all of its horror, the image. So-and-So understood. He understood now, suddenly, unexpectedly, the color of his son’s eyes: the color of those spiders’ bodies.

  Here a strong stimulus called So-and-So to the place of his most recent glory and again he tried that supreme remedy. He ran to the toilet and, sitting down with dignity, declared: “I have called you here, sirs . . .” but his v
oice died out languidly and the contact with the imaginary audience was not established. The very stimulus proved to be fictitious: even So-and-So’s body could no longer meet the situation: for it to be so refractory some essential harmony must have been disturbed.