The son, standing, with his eyes staring above the lampshade, remembered exactly how his barber’s assistant, several weeks before, in Saenz Peña, had murmured into his ear: ‘Cómo me gustaría, sabe Usted señor don Gonzalo: … asentarme a tornar una copita de licor … por la tarde, en una mesa … ese … del Donisetti … – (that’s how he pronounced ‘Donizetti’, in the Spanish way) – … viendo pasear a las guapas en toda la calle … a los caballeros … a los coches … sabe Usted, ese benedictín … supongo que Usted – (he wanted to smile) – todos los dias … podrá permitirse este lujo … Permítame, señor ingeniero – (and he cut a hair, snip, clean from his nose) – ¿sabe Usted? como en aquella réclame que vemos en todas partes … Un gran artista la hizo, ¿no le parece? … con esa mano levantada … y la copita por adelante … y el cigarrillo … – ¿Quiere magnesia? … – … encendido …’
His ‘r’s vibrated, like guitar strings, in all their harsh violence: the wondrous turn of phrase, parecido a una luz, a una llama, emerged from the quiver, from the heat of his lips. His teeth brought to mind a ferocious, distant, purity, towards the snows of the Sierra. His melancholy eyes – (on the jars of all the ointments, there was sunset) – glistened with an extraordinary hope.
VII
No one knew the slow pallor of negation. Wet nurses with necklaces of filigree or amber, scarlet mother hens among the children: children’s eyes and curls in tranquil gardens. And loud chanting in the choir stalls, where the inlay is embellished with designs by Scamozzi or Panigarola, where the image is articulated into the story and has become poetry. And Saints of silver, mitred bishops on the pulvinar, drink in the rich cloud, the intoxicating density of glory. But time also carries these moments of denial towards locked souls, dark prompter of a law of darkness.
The hidalgo was in the room, before lamp and soup dish. He had washed his hands, had put away a few clothes, or a brush, in a drawer, upstairs.
His secret doubt and secret pride arose within the pattern of actions in a denial of worthless semblances. Worthless representations were to be denied and rejected, like false currency. And so the farmer and the shrewd gardener strip the healthy plant of its withered leaves, or pick off its fruit not yet ripe, that which has become diseased or blemished in contempt for surrounding nature.
To catch the false kiss of Semblance, to lay down with her on the straw, to breathe her breath, to drink down into one’s soul her belch and her whorish stench. Or to plunge her into rancour or disdain as if into a pool of excrement, to deny, deny: who is Lord and Prince in the garden of one’s own soul. Closed towers rise up against the wind. But the way into rancour is a sterile step: denying vain imaginings, most of the time, means denying oneself. To claim the sacred faculty of judgement, at times, means ripping up possibility: as one rips up a sullied sheet of paper on reading false words upon it.
The hidalgo, perhaps, was to negate himself: by claiming his own reasons for pain, the knowledge and truth of pain, nothing was left to possibility. Everything became exhausted by the fury of pain. Only the contempt for schemes and semblances remained intact, almost a tragic mask on the theatre frieze.
The mother approached him with indescribable tenderness, put a hand on his arm, her fleshless hand. (He was taller than his mother, who was already bent.) ‘You’re not eating, my dear?’ she said, almost imploring, in a murmur of love.
He then stirred; as if to break, all at once, the tired, useless web of actions: almost as though a secret grievance were preventing him from knowing the truest tenderness of all things, maternal succour. He moved away from his mother. Fond gratitude, from which all conscience sprouts, seemed to die in him. Did he need, perhaps, to reject even this? to go alone towards the night? He went out into the passageway: his mother heard him open one of the shutters, rummage about in the large bookcase.
Then he went upstairs to the bedrooms, perhaps to take or return some books. He came down again, handed his mother some newspapers he had bought for her, saying, in a voice respectful but opaque: ‘I’ve brought you the Gazeta, the Fray Mocho … El Mundo … if you wish; there are also the evening papers, the Razón …’ She took and examined the bundle of newspapers, her eyes clouded with deep-felt gratitude, happiness and grief: she lifted her thin face as though waiting for some gesture, a kiss, as though until that moment she had been prevented from being the mother! The son then grasped her, in despair: gave her a long kiss. An old silver brooch, with a garnet, flower of her maternal years, adorned (and then slipped off), the poor ornament of her old age.
Meanwhile, clomping in, came the poverty and stench of a peon. He was carrying two bits of wood for the fireplace, and a sheaf of dry banzavóis stalks. The storm had chilled the fields, held now by the night. They lay silent, stretched out along the measures of darkness, under gloomy sapphires. The peon groped about, his head inside the mouth of the fireplace, then stood up: it seemed as though his trousers would fall at any moment, so low were they belted around his hips. His person and his trousers gave off a benign odour (as tradition would have it), but an odour it certainly was, thoroughly Serruchonese, just like ‘hey, Giuseppe, how’s it going?’, unbathed for years. And quite right too. No Diocletian had built baths in the lonely countryside.
The hidalgo, even in the widening shadows of neurosis, expected no special ablutions from the peasants of the Serruchón: for them, after the demise of Caracalla, the Holy Baptism seemed a sufficient purification. He merely noted the odoriferous occurrence with a certain consternation, and at times with anger. In this particular case, then, he knew that the peasant could have kept himself a little more tidily. The insipient delirium of anger enabled him to identify in that coarseness a premeditated ostentation of poverty, a demonstration of trade unionism: suggesting some further expectation of generosity from his masters to alleviate that same poverty. For some time, the peon had said and repeated to the mother, and had implied to him, that the earnings (meagre) from the scant countryside, lashed almost every year by hailstones, should rightly be supplemented by a wage, perhaps even sanctioned by law: considering that he, the peon, wasn’t even a sharecropper, given that he didn’t just work the land, beat nuts from trees, reap, harvest, cut wood and collect grapes; but his very presence on the property, and around a private villa, for the convenience of his masters, and not his own, constituted the economic and legal figure of ‘caretaker of the villa’. Even in bed, at night, with his wife, he snored and wived in his guise as caretaker. Or so he claimed: and he went on chortling, cavilling (with the mother), in a whirl of so-I-believes and I-mean-to-says.
Now, a caretaker is entitled to some payment. The laws demand it too: there were strict regulations.
This suspicion had the effect of sending the hidalgo into a rage: a black fury that boiled away inside him, in the cauldron of avarice. To be required by law to hand over a share of one’s own earnings in honour of someone who goes around beating nuts from trees! The idea sent him into a rage never before seen in the long history of his tantrums. He was afflicted, though, by natural shyness, and held back perhaps more by the fear of bureaucratic complications, a swarm of yellow post-free envelopes and summonses before the state surveillant at the tobacconist shop, which were the predictable repercussions of any refusal.
Six million Maradagalese bureaucrats terrorized his alien spirit from their desks like an ocean of fire embers might terrorize the cautious prudence of the snake. He didn’t like the triplicate register of the Palaeologoi. His orderly approach to necessary matters (which were not therefore semblances, or false substitutes for Pragma) gave him a horror for pettifogging detail and all the procedures of inanity. But is contributing towards the bread of the poor a kind of inanity? His Germanic, or Hun, blood served him as a very convenient pretext for firm denials.
Those trousers and those clogs certainly led him to despair about his own leniency. His mother, of course, was indulgent to the rustic’s claim, as usual: all that was born out of the Villa, or out of the Villa-Idea, was a manifes
tation and manner of Being, a sacred pimple on the neck of the Animal-Being. Even the smell.
If he, the son, were to offer any words of reproach at that odorous exhibition of Serruchonese valerianites, formates and caprylates,fn1 God forbid! the peon’s reflexes could be easily predicted: first of all a gesticular and facial expression of a decidedly hebephrenic nature, accompanied by the stomach rumblings of a palaeo-Celtic ventriloquist, interspersed with wild-sounding guttural outbursts: then, on the pilot-spout of the Celtic cataract, appropriately stirred by the restive paddles of a kind of Parkinsonian disorder, at this point the no less horrifying request would spurt forth, in the darkness of the room, for the payment of a wage. Now, it had been agreed by ancient practice that the peasant could harvest ‘pro domo sua’ all the crops of the land: (with the exception of almonds and butirro pears, of which the latter softened up on their own account, without any further aid, with the sole assistance of St Carlo of Arona):fn2 and that it was left for him, the master and marquis, to deal with the Tax Office, and with the individual Taxes: in other words, with all the taxes: local, provincial and state, as well as others that gradually presented themselves at the door, according to time and providence. A situation not altogether improbable. From the first to the last centavo. Excluding then the gathering of fruit from several trees closer to the house: cherries, certain medlars, a few Amarena cherries: and the aforesaid almonds, which the peon, an early riser, would beat down with a pole or rod during the night, bemoaning and blaming the hail, little of course, and passing quickly, but just enough each time; enough to cause the ruin of each drupe. The peasant also had use of the lodgings with luminous windows looking out on to the countryside: good accommodation; which the marquis, the father, had incorporated into the Villa, and had protected with a single and egalitarian Roof, equalizing in principle, and fact, the accommodation of the peasants with that of their owners, marquises and masters. He, the son, but more so the mother, then rewarded the peon with special gratuities for special services: and always quite generously, compared to the recalcitrant parsimony of Lukonese landowners, some of them badly cheated by the blight of the years, others able businessmen and blessed with half a good nose, but tight-fisted all the same when it came to their own backyard, and fierce protectors of their own interests: they never then stopped celloing and fluting away, full of dunderheaded enthusiasm, about the wholesomeness, the tranquillity, the fresh air, the low cost of that blissful resort, about those hills that sloped gently up to their respective Villa Enrichetta, or Maria Giuseppa, from the sky-blue waters of the lakes.
The peon went out, came back in, clomped about like a lunatic between corridor and kitchen. He, the son, used to give him suits he no longer wore, one or two a year, cast-off underwear, shoes. Which were clothes or rations all the same, and still valid for cancelling out the Franciscan purity of that picture, (if rations meant clothing, which it didn’t):
the peasant, his rations running short
Such indeed, he thought, is the social function of the hidalgo, and more so of the marquis, in whose name the ownership of a Serruchonese villa is recorded in the Maradagalese land registers: to bundle the peasant’s pudenda into his own ex-trousers, paying taxes on his behalf, after having intensely loved, profoundly respected, sweetly cherished, feted, scented, celebrated his odorous virtue in Pastrufazian gatherings, and emitting a suitable quantity of erotic drool on sensing the pungent smell, the stench of his feet and armpits, and of something else.
Clomping about, his feet clacking almost like castanets, leaving everywhere wafers of dry dung that flaked from beneath his clogs, the good man went and came back several times, for some matches; which then he couldn’t light, though he tried to strike them more or less everywhere, cursing, on his thighs, on his backside: and even on the floor, on the wall. And in the meantime he swore at the Compañía de Fósforos. (This holds the Maradagalese monopoly on sulphur matches, safety matches, wax vestas.) The flame, ignited by his blasphemies, at last began to crackle in the twigs, in the stingy bundle of thorns and in those few dried stalks of the previous year’s banzavóis. The victor then burst into several violently emphatic amplifying exclamations in syncopation. At each eruption of sound, his Adam’s apple could be seen going up and down his neck, as fast as an elevator in a Manhattan hotel. Lapsing into a tremulous agitation of his shoulders and head, he rejoiced at his fire-lighting proficiency, complained about the damage from the merciless storm, and the dampness, and September, and how expensive wood is these days, and how a fine fire (sic) is good for the bones, etc. etc. Comments that the mother received with indulgence, almost pleased by such valid reasoning. Nothing indeed so sweetens our phlegm, and improves our disposition, as the good sense of humble folk and the sound wisdom that sometimes emerges from their logos and works its way into the labyrinth of their utterances.
Poor mother! She too would have helped in developing the subject, on a footing of naval parity and grand cordiality (which was a characteristic of the Pirobutirro family), if she hadn’t sensed in time that her son’s mood was about to change once more. That lout in clogs was making it seem as if he were the benefactor and superintendent of the situation. The son watched him, seized by a blind anger.
The dry stalks, the thorns gripped by a furious radiance, had gradually taken light and burned down in two minutes, between the two firedogs, crackling and spluttering shots of sparks on to the floor, as if the vain spirit of a pumpkin were celebrating its transit in that slight, ephemeral flame. It gave a low, yellow light, to the legs of the chairs and the table, of a soft transience, almost stirred by a flabellum of mystery: dusty half-shadows occupied the inhuman unhappiness of the ceiling.
There was no increase in the temperature of the room, in front of that so-called working machine with zero heat yield, namely the stupid and absolutely hopeless fireplace. To resort to such a wretched notion required antiquity, and hills covered with beech woods, instead of humps of bald sierra or the splintered mountains of Terepáttola.
The man in clogs started all over again. Gonzalo paused to study those perilous trousers:
‘I’ve already told you I don’t want any chatter. You can spare us your attentions … and your chatter … You make too much noise, for a couple of twigs!’ The mother began to fret: there was anguish once again on her face.
The peasant turned pale, but he carried on: it is well known that gentlemen, in order to feel important, prefer people to talk quietly in a room, like in the confessional box.
‘You have to leave this house, once and for all: get out! …’ The other man looked at him. ‘Get out: you understand? … go away … and be sure you don’t come back …’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked the other, bewildered: but he immediately knitted his eyebrows. ‘Gonzalo!’ begged the mother, her face pale in its wrinkles, like behind bars of finished time. She clasped one hand in the other.
‘There’s nothing to say’, added the son. ‘Leave us alone …’
‘Oh!’ chuckled the firelighter. ‘Maybe it’s not something you can decide just like that … on the spot …’
‘Get out of here!’ shouted Gonzalo with a sudden violence: and he opened a door, as if to make the injunction clearer.
The peasant walked out after several attempts to speak: which ended up as jerks of the (Adam’s) apple, and a brief flurry of indistinct croaks, as from a dumb man who had been trying to protest.
Gonzalo, then, sat down at the table: and began lifting the spoon to his mouth, so that the intake of liquid would not break the gentle form of the silence.
The peon was almost never drunk: and this gave him a certain superiority over his predecessor, who though he went under the same name of Giuseppe, and the nickname Estrella, each day used to fall prey to the demon: that demon whose abode, it seems, lies two or three inches below the neck of every flask.
Normally incapable of a gaze that wasn’t the sideways look of distrustful greed, from time to time, but as rarely as possi
ble, he brought an egg for the Señora: and using a few sacred and at the same time bestial tones, he extolled its rarity and its extreme quality, in times most difficult for the hens. Sometimes he added a few rough leaves of a kind of hairy chicory like a nettle, or half a wilting lettuce.
Gonzalo carried on swallowing his soup. His mother’s subsequent attempt to introduce dear Giuseppe into the antechamber of clemency had no effect whatsoever. Gonzalo then poured himself a glass of water, stood up, opened the window and went out on to the terrace.
With his hands in his jacket pockets, he looked up, as if to gaze at some stars. But he didn’t even see them (in the same way that words too often repeated remain unheard) in the superfluous banality of the sky.
After several clear, radiant days, the mother seemed calm. On seeing him, her tired face would contract into a smile, but the light of that smile vanished in an instant, as if on the sudden collapse of an exertion. With the passing of the week, the lights of autumn came nearer, enveloping the hills, the villas. In that region of Maradagàl, so similar, in many respects, to our lost Brianza, they seemed to be the lights of the Brianza lakes. A delicate, golden veil of sadness along the line of the hillside, from the plane tree to the elm: when a sparrow flutters out, flying off: and the boughs of the ancient trees, pensive consolers, in front of the gates of the deserted villas, shed their tired leaf.
Gonzalo had gone and reappeared several times. With his small leatherette-coloured cardboard suitcase, enamel cufflinks, costing cuarenta centavos. For the last year or two he had promised to buy himself a watch: but he hadn’t found the moral strength required for the purchase. He really hoped somebody would give it to him as a present. Who? He hadn’t the slightest idea; who indeed?
The Experience of Pain Page 16