Cosmos

by Witold Gombrowicz

  After so much bubbling, spurting, and sputtering of words that had foamed in the violent cauldron of a cataract, the waters of our stay at the table, that river, humming, flowing, returned again to its channel, the cat was thrown out, again the table, the tablecloth, the lamp, glasses, Roly-Poly smoothes out some roughness in the tablecloth, Leon announces a forthcoming joke with his raised finger, Fuks stirs, the door opens, it’s Katasia, Roly-Poly says to Lena “pass me the salad bowl,” emptiness, eternity, nothingness, peace, I’m back to she loves him she hates him she’s disenchanted enchanted happy unhappy, yet she might be all those things at once, but most likely she wasn’t any of it for the simple reason that her little hand was too small, it was not a hand but a little hand, so what could she be with that little hand of hers, she couldn’t be nothing, she was . . . she was . . . powerful in her effect, yet within herself she was nothing . . . confusion . . . confusion . . . confusion . . . matches, spectacles, a latch, a basket, an onion, cookies . . . cookies . . . so I should just look sideways, aside, askance, where the hands are, the sleeves, the shoulder, the neck, always on the periphery, face to face from time to time only, once in a blue moon, if there happens to be a pretext to look, under such circumstances, what can one know, what can one see, but, if I could look to my heart’s content, not even then . . . ha, ha, ha, laughter, and I’m laughing, an anecdote, Leon’s anecdote, Roly-Poly squeaks, Fuks is twitching . . . Leon, his finger raised, shouts “on my word of honor” . . . she is also laughing, but no more than just so, to adorn the general laughter with her laughter, everything with her is no more than just so . . . to adorn . . . but, even if I could watch to my heart’s content I wouldn’t know, no, I wouldn’t know, because between them there might be everything . . .

  “I need a thread and a small stick.”

  Fuks addressed this to me. Now what?

  I replied: “What for?”

  “I forgot to bring a compass . . . damnit . . . and I have to draw a circle, I need it for my graph. If I had a thread and a small stick that would do it . . . A little stick and a piece of thread.”

  Ludwik said politely: “I have a compass upstairs, I’ll be glad to get it for you,” Fuks thanked him (the bottle and the cork, that piece of cork) yes, ah yes, I see, the slyboots, ah yes . . .

  This was to secretly inform the possible joker that we had noticed the arrow on our ceiling and had discovered the stick on the thread. This was just in case—if anyone had indeed been amusing himself by arousing our interest with signs, let him know that we had read them . . . that we’re awaiting further developments. A slim chance, but what did it cost him to drop these few words? I suddenly saw the family in the strange light of the following possibility—the perpetrator is among them—and at that moment the stick and the bird have emerged, the bird in the thicket and the stick at the far end of the garden, in its small grotto. Between the bird and the stick, I felt like I was suspended between the North and South Poles, and our whole gathering, at the table, under the lamp, appeared to me to be derived from that other configuration, “in relation to” the bird and the stick—which I was not against, because this eeriness paved the way for yet another eeriness that troubled me and yet fascinated me. O God! Considering the bird, considering the stick, perhaps finally I’ll also find out what it is with the mouths. (Why? How? What an absurdity!)

  Intensity of attention led to distraction . . . and yet I submitted to it, it allowed me to be both here and somewhere else at the same time, it provided release . . . I greeted the ascent of Katasia’s perversion, her circling here, there, closer, farther, above Lena, behind Lena, with a kind of dull internal “aach,” like someone who had choked. Again, and even more so, the barely discernible, incidental disfigurement of those slightly damaged lips linked in my mind—oh, how impudently—with the simple and seductive closing of my vis-à-vis’s little mouth, and this combination, weakening or intensifying, depending on the configuration, led to contradictions such as licentious virginity, brutal timidity, wide-open closing, shameless shame, icy fervor, sober drunkenness . . .

  “You don’t understand, father,” said Ludwik.

  “What don’t I understand? What?!”

  “Organization.”

  “To hell with organization! What organization?!”

  “The rational organization of society and of the world.”

  Leon attacked Ludwik across the table with his bald pate: “What do you want to organize? Organize how?”

  “Scientifically.”

  “Scientifically!” with his eyes, spectacles, wrinkles, with his skull, Leon fired a round of pity at him, he lowered his voice to a whisper: “My good man,” he asked confidentially, “have you ever put on your thinkie-cap? Organize! You’re dreaming, cooking it up, you think you’ll catch it all in your grip just like that dum dee dum, eh?”And he danced his predatory, clawing fingers in front of Ludwik, then he spread them and blew into them: “Fie! Paf! It’s gone. Fy-eeee, pum, pum, pum, papapa, eeee . . . you understand . . . pua, pua, and what can you do,what’s it to you, to someone like you, to you . . . It’s gone.Run through your fingers. Gone.”

  He gazed at the salad bowl.

  “I can’t discuss this with you, father.”

  “No? Look at him! Why not?”

  “Because you lack the background, father.”

  “What background?”

  “Scientific.”

  “Scientifi-fic,” Leon said slowly, “confide, if you please, confide to my snow-white virgin bosom how you are going to, with this scientific background of yours, or-ga-nize, how on earth, I ask you, how will you with this that there, in what manner, I ask you, with what and what for and whither and where, how will you, I ask you, with this and that, hither and thither, perchance to what end, how . . . ” he got stuck, he stared, speechless, Ludwik put some potatoes on his plate, and this yanked Leon out of his dumbness? “What do you know?!” he burst out bitterly, “Studies! Studies! Me, I haven’t studied, but for years I’ve thought . . . I’m still thinking and thinking . . . since I left the bank I do nothing but think, my head is bursting from thinking, and you, what’s it to you, why should you bother . . . Let it go, let it go! . . . ” But Ludwik was eating a piece of lettuce, Leon slumped, calm ensued, Katasia closed the cupboard, Fuks asked how many degrees is it, oh, it’s hot, Roly-Poly pushed the dishes toward Katasia, the king of Sweden, the Scandinavian peninsula, then on to tuberculosis, injections. The table was now more spacious, just cups with coffee or tea, bread in a basket, and a few napkins already folded away—only one, Leon’s, remained spread out. I drank tea, no one stirred, lethargy, everyone relaxed, their chairs slightly pushed back from the table, Ludwik reached for the newspaper, Roly-Poly froze. There were times when she would freeze, expressionless, in a state of total emptiness, a state that would end with a sudden awakening, like the splash of a stone thrown in the water. Leon had a wart on his hand with a few hairs sticking out, he watched it, picked up a toothpick and twiddled the tiny hairs—watched again—then sprinkled a little salt from the tablecloth in between the hairs and looked. He smiled. Ti-ri-ri.

  Lena’s palm appeared on the tablecloth, next to her teacup. A great palaver of events, unending factoids such as the croaking of frogs in the pond, mosquitoes swarming, a swarming of stars, a cloud enclosing me, obliterating me, drifting with me, the ceiling with the archipelago and the peninsulas, with dots and damp patches all the way to the boring whiteness of the window shade . . . an abundance of details, which may have related to Fuks’s and my clods of dirt, our little sticks, etc. . . . and maybe it was all somehow connected with Leon’s trivialities . . . I don’t know, perhaps I only thought like that because I was inclined to trivialities . . . fragmented . . . oh, I was so fragmented! . . .

  Katasia moved the ashtray toward Lena.

  Something hit me in the mouth sliding out cold shapeless smack into mouth get out beat it the wire mesh with the leg twisted contorted and silence dead silence cavern nothing . . . and out of
chaos, out of all the churning (after Katasia had left) the mouth constellation appears, shining irrepressibly, glittering. And beyond all doubt: mouth is relating to mouth!

  I lowered my eyes, again I saw only the little hand on the tablecloth, doubly-mouthed doubly-lipped one way or the other twofold innocently defiled pure slippery I stared at the little hand and waited, suddenly the table swarmed with hands, what’s happening, Leon’s little hand, Fuks’s little hand, Roly-Poly’s hands, Ludwik’s hands, so many hands in the air . . . it’s a wasp! A wasp flew into the room. Flew out. The hands calmed down. Again—a wave receding, calm returns, I’m wondering about those hands, what’s this, Leon addressed Lena: “Oh, my manifold adventure.”

  “Oh, my manifold adventure, give your daddy igniting phosphorus” (matches). “Oh, my manifold adventure,” he sometimes called her, or “bambi-pambi,” or “oh, rapture-go-slowly,” or something else again. Roly-Poly brews herb tea, Ludwik reads, Fuks finishes his tea, Ludwik folds the newspaper, Leon gazes, I thought, how so, how is it, did the hands swarm, rise in an uproar, because of the wasp, or because of the hand on the table . . . because, strictly speaking, there was no doubt that the hands had swarmed on account of the wasp . . . but who could guarantee that the wasp was not merely a pretext for the hands rising in connection with her little hand . . . A double meaning . . . and this doubling was perhaps connected (who could tell?) with the Katasia-Lena doubling of mouths . . . with the sparrow-stick doubling . . . I wandered about. I strolled on the periphery. In the light of the lamp there was the darkness of the bushes beyond the road. To sleep. The cork on the bottle. The piece of cork stuck to the neck of the bottle, it emerges and suggests . . .

  chapter 4

  The next fine day arrived distracted, dry and glistening, shimmering, it was impossible to concentrate, out of the blueness of the sky rolled little round clouds, plump and immaculate. I immersed myself in my manuscript because, after yesterday’s excesses, an inner austerity had taken hold of me, asceticism, a distaste for quirkiness. Should I go to the stick? To see if something new has happened, especially after Fuks’s discrete hint last night at supper that we had discovered the stick and the thread?. . . But distaste for this affair, grotesque like an aborted fetus, held me back. I ground away at my work, my head between my hands, anyway I knew that Fuks would go to the stick in my stead, even though he made no attempt to speak to me about it—we had exhausted the topic—yet I knew that, out of his inner emptiness, he’d go there, to the wall. I concentrated on my manuscript while he wandered about the room, finally he left. And he came back, we ate breakfast in our room as usual (Katasia brought it to us), but he said nothing . . . after napping until almost four in the afternoon, he finally spoke from his bed: “Come, I’ll show you something.”

  I didn’t answer—I wanted to humiliate him—no response was the most painful response. Humiliated, he kept quiet, he didn’t dare to insist, but minutes passed, I began to shave, finally I asked: “Is there anything new?”He replied: “Yes and no.”When I finished shaving he said: “So, come on, I’ll show you.”We went out, taking the usual precautions in relation to the house with its windowpanes watching, and we reached the stick. There was a waft of air from the heated wall and the smell of urine or apples, there was a drain nearby, yellow blades of grass . . . distance, extreme reaches, a separate life in hot silence, a buzzing. The stick was there, as we had left it, it hung on the thread.

  “Look closely at this,” he pointed toward a pile of garbage in the open door of the shed, “do you see anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Absolutely nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  He stood in front of me, a tedium to us both.

  “Look at this whiffletree.”

  “What?”

  “Did you notice it yesterday?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Was it lying in exactly the same position? Hasn’t that changed since yesterday?”

  He was tiresome—and he knew it, no illusions—he emanated the fatalism of a man who is bound to be a bore, he stood by the wall, all this was hollow in the extreme, futile. He insisted: “Try to remember . . . ” but I knew that he insisted out of boredom, and this bored me as well. A yellow ant marched along the broken whiffletree. On top of the wall the stems of weeds were outlined clearly against the sky, I didn’t remember it, how was I to remember, maybe the whiffletree had changed its position, maybe it hadn’t changed its position . . . A yellow flower.

  He would not accept defeat. He stood over me. It was unpleasant because in this remote place the emptiness of our boredom met with the emptiness of these supposed signs, with evidence that wasn’t evidence, with this total nonsense—two emptinesses and the two of us caught between them. I yawned. He said:

  “Look closely, where is the whiffletree pointing?”

  “Where?”

  “To Katasia’s little room.”

  Yes. The whiffletree aimed straight at her little room by the kitchen, in the addition, next to the house.

  “Aa . . .”

  “Exactly. If the whiffletree has not been touched, then it’s nothing, then it has no meaning. But if it has been touched, it’s in order to direct us to Katasia . . . It’s someone, mind you, who got wise to it when I hinted at the stick and the thread yesterday at supper, and realizing that we were on the trail, comes here at night and points the whiffletree to Katasia’s room. It’s like a new arrow. He knew that we’d come again to see if there’s a new sign.”

  “But how do you know that the whiffletree was touched?”

  “I’m not sure. But that’s how it seems to me. There is a track where the wood scraps have been moved, as if the whiffletree lay in a different position before . . . And look at the three pebbles . . . and the three sticks . . . and the three blades of grass that are pulled out . . . and the three buttons, from a saddle probably . . . Don’t you see anything?”

  “See what?”

  “They seem to form triangles pointing at the whiffletree, as if someone had wanted to draw our attention to the whiffletree . . . they seem to create, don’t you think, a kind of rhyme directed at the whiffletree. It’s . . . perhaps . . . what do you think?”

  I took my eyes off the yellow ant that appeared on and off between the leather straps, rushing to the left, to the right, back and forth, I hardly listened to Fuks, in one ear and out the other, how idiotic, misery, abject misery, humiliation, this bilious state of ours, the nasty taste of it, the nonsense, all floating above the pile of rubble and other odds and ends, by the wall, as well as his carroty mug, bug-eyed and disdained. I again started to explain—“who would bother, who would make up such insignificant signs, almost invisible, who would figure that we’d catch on to the change in the whiffletree’s direction . . . no one with all his marbles . . . ” But he interrupted me: “Who says it’s someone with all his marbles? Another thing: how do you know how many signs he’s making up? Perhaps we’ve discovered only one of many . . . ”With a wave of his arm he encompassed the garden and the house: “Perhaps the place is swarming with signs . . . ”

  We stood there—a clod of dirt, a cobweb—and we knew that we wouldn’t leave this alone. What else did we have going? I took a piece of brick in my hand, I looked at it, set it back and said: “Well then? Shall we follow the line of the whiffletree?”

  He laughed self-consciously.

  “Can’t be helped. You understand, don’t you. For the sake of peace. Tomorrow is Sunday. It’s her day off. We’ll have to inspect her room, we’ll see if there is anything to be seen . . . And if not, it will be the end of all this bother!”

  I fixed my eyes on the rubble, so did he—as if I wanted to read from it a slight but swinish, sulky slipaway of a lip and, indeed, it seemed that the rubble, the whiffletree of the cart, the leather straps, the garbage began to pulsate with an atmosphere of roving slipperiness, with a profile of disfigurement . . . together with th
e ashtray, with the wire net of the bed, with the closing and parting of lips . . . and it all vibrated, seethed, reaching Lena, which terrified me because, I wondered, how on earth were we going to act again and, by acting, bring about . . . we’ll bring this whiffletree into action, then I’ll get at the mouth by way of the rubble—which thrilled me—because, I thought, aha, now we’ll begin to act, and by our action we’ll penetrate this riddle, indeed, yes, yes, let’s work our way into Katasia’s little room and search it, look, check on it! Check! Oh, an all-clarifying action! And, oh, an obscuring action, in the dead of night, leading into a chimera!

  And so, in spite of everything, I felt better—our return along the gravel path was like the return of two detectives—working on our detailed plans allowed me to survive with honor until the next day. Supper passed peacefully, my field of vision was increasingly confined to the tablecloth, I found it increasingly difficult to look at people, I watched the tablecloth where Lena’s little hand lay . . . quieter today, without obvious quivering, (yet this could have actually been proof that she was the one who had set up the whiffletree!) . . . and the other hands, Leon’s hand for instance, sluggish, or Ludwik’s erotic-nonerotic hand, and Roly-Poly’s hand like a potato atop a beetroot, her little fist sticking out of her patulous old crone’s arm and shoulder, evoking a silently mounting unpleasantness . . . becoming even more unpleasant in the vicinity of the elbow, where a chapped redness eventually continued as bluish-gray and violet bays, leading into other recesses. Complex, wearisome configurations of hands, similar to the configurations on the ceiling, on the walls . . . everywhere . . . Leon’s hand stopped drumming, he lifted a finger of his left hand with two fingers of his right hand and held it thus, looking at it with attention that froze into a dreamy smile. The conversation of course, high above, above the hands, went on unceasingly, but only this and that reached me, they touched on various subjects, and at one point Ludwik asked what do you think, father, imagine, ten soldiers marching Indian file, what do you think, father, how long would it take to exhaust all the possible configurations of the soldiers in file by moving, for example, the third man to the place of the first, and so on . . . assuming that we make one change each day? Leon pondered: three monthies? Ludwik said: