The Street Of Crocodiles (14 page)

My father rose on his perch and, in a sudden glare of light, stretched out his hands, summoning n e birds with an old incantation. He recognized them with deep emotion. They were the distant, forgotten progeny of that generation of birds which at one time Adela had chased away to all four points of the sky. That brood of freaks, that malformed, wasted tribe of birds, was now returning degenerated or overgrown. Nonsensically large, stupidly developed, the birds were empty and lifeless inside. All their vitality went into their plumage, into external adornment. They were like exhibits of extinct species in a museum, the lumber room of a birds' paradise.

Some of them were flying on their backs, had heavy misshapen beaks like padlocks, were blind, or were covered with curiously colored lumps. How moved my father was by this unexpected return, how he marveled at the instinct of these birds, at their attachment to the Master, whom that expelled tribe had preserved in their soul like a legend, in order to return to their ancient motherland after numerous generations, on the last day before the extinction of the tribe.But these blind birds made of paper could not recognize my father. In vain did he call them with the old formulas, in the forgotten language of the birds—they did not hear him nor see him.All of a sudden, stones began to whistle through the air. The merrymakers, the stupid, thoughtless people had begun to throw them into the fantastic bird-filled sky.In vain did Father warn them, in vain did he entreat them with magical gestures—he was not heard, nor heeded. The birds began to fall. Hit by stones, they hung heavily and wilted while still in the air. Even before they crashed to the ground, they were a formless heap of feathers.In a moment, the plateau was strewn With strange, fantastic carrion. Before my father could reach the place of slaughter, the once-splendid birds were dead, scattered all over the rocks.

Only now, from nearby, did Father notice the wretchedness of that wasted generation, the nonsense of its second-rate anatomy. They had been nothing but enormous bunches of feathers, stuffed carelessly with old carrion. In many of them, one could not recognize where the heads had been, for that misshapen part of their bodies was unmarked by the presence of a soul. Some were covered with a curly matted fur, like bison, and stank horribly. Others reminded one of hunchbacked, bald, dead camels. Others still must have been made of a kind of Cardboard, empty inside but splendidly colored on the outside. Some of them proved at close quarters to be nothing more than large peacocks' tails, colorful fans, into which by some obscure process a semblance of life had been breathed.

I saw my father's unhappy return. The artificial day became slowly tinted with the colors of an ordinary morning. In the deserted shop, the highest shelves were bathed in the reflections of the morning sky. Amid the fragments of the extinct landscape, among the ruined background of scenery of the night, Father saw his shop assistants, awakening from sleep. They rose from among the bales of cloth and yawned toward the sun. In the kitchen, on the floor above, Adela, warm from sleep and with unkempt hair, was grinding coffee in a mill which she pressed to her white bosom, imparting her warmth to the broken beans. The cat was washing itself in the sunlight.

That year the end of the winter stood under the sign of particularly favorable astronomical aspects. The predictions in the calendar flourished in red in the snowy margins of the mornings. The brighter red of Sundays and holy days cast its reflection on half the week and these weekdays burned coldly, with a freak, rapid flame. Human hearts beat more quickly for a moment, misled and blinded by the redness, which, in fact, announced nothing—being merely a premature alert, a colorful lie of the calendar, painted in bright cinnabar on the jacket of the week. From Twelfth Night onward, we sat night after night over the white parade ground of the table gleaming with candlesticks and silver, and played endless games of patience. Every hour, the night beyond the windows became lighter, sugar-coated and shiny, filled with sprouting almonds and sweetmeats. The moon, that most inventive transmogrifier, wholly engrossed in her lunar practices, accomplished her successive phases and grew continually brighter and brighter. Already by day, the moon stood in the wings, prematurely ready for her cue, brassy and lusterless. Meanwhile whole flocks of feather clouds passed like sheep across her profile on their silent white extensive wandering, barely covering her with the shimmering mother-of-pearl scales into which the firmament froze toward the evening.

Later on, the pages of days turned emptily. The wind roared over the roofs, blew through the cold chimneys to the very hearths, built over the city imaginary scaffoldings and grandstands, and then destroyed these resounding air-filled structures with a clatter of planks and beams. Sometimes, a fire would start in a distant suburb. The chimney sweeps explored the city at roof level among the gables under a gaping verdigris sky. Climbing from one foothold to another, on the weather vanes and flagpoles, they dreamed that the wind would open for them for a moment the lids of roofs over the alcoves of young girls and close them again immediately on the great stormy book of the city—providing them with breath-taking reading matter for many days and nights.

Then the wind grew weary and blew itself out. The shop assistants dressed the shopwindow with spring fabrics and soon the air became milder from the soft colors of these woollens. It turned lavender blue, it flowered with pale reseda. The snow shrank, folded itself up into an infant fleece, evaporated dryly into the air, drunk by the cobalt breezes, and was absorbed again by the vast sunless and cloudless sky. Oleanders in pots began to flower here and there inside the houses, windows remained open for longer, and the thoughtless chirping of sparrows filled the room, dreaming in the dull blue day. Over the cleanly swept squares, tomtits and chaffinches clashed for a moment in violent skirmishes with an alarming twittering, and then scattered in all directions, blown away by the breeze, erased, annihilated in the empty azure. For a second, the eyes held the memory of colored speckles—a handful of confetti flung blindly into the air —then they dissolved in the fundus of the eye.The premature spring season began. The lawyers' apprentices twirled their mustaches, turning up the ends, wore high stiff collars and were paragons of elegance and fashion. On days hollowed out by winds as by a flood, when gales roared high above the city, the young lawyers greeted the ladies of their acquaintance from a distance, doffing their somber-colored bowler hats and leaning their backs against the wind so that their coattails opened wide. They then immediately averted their eyes, with a show of self-denial and delicacy so as not to expose their beloved to unnecessary gossip. The ladies momentarily lost the ground under their feet, exclaimed with alarm amidst their billowing skirts and, regaining their balance, returned the greeting with a smile.In the afternoon the wind would sometimes calm down. On the balcony Adela began to clean the large brass saucepans that clattered metallically under her touch. The sky stood immobile over the shingle roofs, stock-still, then folded itself into blue streaks. The shop assistants, sent over from the shop on errands, lingered endlessly by Adela on the threshold of the kitchen, propped against the balcony rails, drunk from the daylong wind, confused by the deafening twitter of sparrows. From the distance, the breeze brought the faint chorus of a barrel organ. One could not hear the soft words which the young men sang in undertones, with an innocent expression but which in fact were meant to shock Adela. Stung to the quick, she would react violently, and, most indignant, scold them angrily, while her face, gray and dulled from early-spring dreams, would flush with anger and amusement. The men lowered their eyes with assumed innocence and wicked satisfaction at having succeeded in upsetting her.

Days and afternoons came and went, everyday events streamed in confusion over the city seen from the level of our balcony, over the labyrinth of roofs and houses bathed in the opaque light of those gray weeks. The tinkers rushed around, shouting their wares. Sometimes Abraham's powerful sneeze gave comical emphasis to the distant, scattered tumult of the city. In a faraway square the mad Touya, driven to despair by the nagging of small boys, would dance her wild saraband, lifting high her skirt to the amusement of the crowd. A gust of wind smoothed down and leveled out these sounds, melted them into the monotonous, gray din, spreading uniformly over the sea of shingle roofs in the milky, smoky air of the afternoon. Adela, leaning against the balcony rails, bent over the distant, stormy roar of the city, caught from it all the louder accents and, with a smile, put together the lost syllables of a song, trying to join them, to read some sense into the rising and falling gray monotony of the day.

It was the age of electricity and mechanics and a whole swarm of inventions was showered on the world by the resourcefulness of human genius. In middle-class homes cigar sets appeared equipped with an electric lighter: you pressed a switch and a sheaf of electric sparks lit a wick soaked in gasoline. The inventions gave rise to exaggerated hopes. A musical box in the shape of a Chinese pagoda would, when wound, begin to play a little rondo while turning like a merry-go-round. Bells tinkled at intervals, the doors flapped wide to show thç turning barrel playing a snuff-box triolet. In every house electric bells were installed. Domestic life stood under the sign of galvanism. A spool of insulated wire became the symbol of the times. Young dandies demonstrated Galvani's invention in living rooms and were rewarded with radiant looks from the ladies. An electric conductor opened the way to women's hearts. After an experiment had succeeded, the heroes of the day blew kisses all round, amid the applause of the living rooms.It was not long before the city filled with velocipedes of various sizes and shapes. An outlook based on philosophy became obligatory. Whoever admitted to a belief in progress had to draw the logical conclusion and ride a velocipede. The first to do so were of course the lawyers' apprentices, that vanguard of new ideas, with their waxed mustaches and their bowler hats, the hope and flower of youth. Pushing through the noisy mob, they rode through the traffic on enormous bicycles and tricycles which displayed their wire spokes. Placing their hands on wide handlebars, they maneuvered from the high saddle the enormous hoop of the wheel and cut into the amused mob in a wavy line. Some of them succumbed to apostolic zeal. Lifting themselves on their moving pedals, as if on stirrups, they addressed the crowd from on high, forecasting a new happy era for mankind—salvation through the bicycle. . . . And they rode on amid the applause of the public, bowing in all directions.And yet there was something grievously embarrassing in those splendid and triumphal rides, something painful and unpleasant which even at the summit of their success threatened to disintegrate into parody. They must have felt it themselves when, hanging like spiders among the delicate machinery, straddled on their pedals like great jumping frogs, they performed ducklike movements above the wide turning wheels. Only a step divided them from ridicule and they took it with despair, leaning over the handlebars and redoubling the speed of their ride, in a tangle of violent head-over-heels gymnastics. Can one wonder? Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody. The cyclists rode on among elemental outbursts of laughter—miserable victors, martyrs to their genius—so great was the comic appeal of these wonders of technology.

When my brother brought an electromagnet for the first time home from school, when with a shiver we all sensed by touch the vibrations of the mysterious life enclosed in an electric circuit, my father smiled a superior smile. A long-range idea was maturing in his mind; there merged and forged a chain of ideas he had had for a long time. Why did Father smile to himself, why did his eyes turn up, misty, in a parody of mock admiration? Who can tell? Did he foresee the coarse trick, the vulgar intrigue, the transparent machinations behind the amazing manifestations of the secret force? Yet that moment marked a turning point: it was then that Father began his laboratory experiments.

Father's laboratory equipment was simple: a few spools of wire, a few bottles of acid, zinc, lead, and carbon— these constituted the workshop of that very strange esot-erist. “Matter,” he said, modestly lowering his eyes and stifling a cough, “Matter, gentlemen—” He did not finish his sentence, he left his listeners guessing that he was about to expose a big swindle, that all we who sat there were being taken for a ride. With downcast eyes my father quietly sneered at that age-long fetish. “Panta rei!” he exclaimed, and indicated with a movement of his hands the eternal circling of substance. For a long time he had wanted to mobilize the forces hidden in it, to make its stififness melt, to pave its way to universal penetration, to transfusion, to universal circulation in accordance with its true nature.

“Principium individuationis—my foot,” he used to say, thus expressing his limitless contempt for that guiding human principle. He threw out these words in passing, while running from wire to wire. He half-closed his eyes and touched delicately various points of the circuit, feeling for the slight differences in potential. He made incisions in the wire, leaned over it, listening, and immediately moved ten steps farther, to repeat the same gestures at another point of the circuit. He seemed to have a dozen hands and twenty senses. His brittle attention wandered to a hundred places at once. No point in space was free from his suspicions. He leaned over to pierce the wire at some place and then, with a sudden jump backward, he pounced at another like a cat on its prey and, missing, became confused. “I am sorry,” he would say, addressing himself unexpectedly to the astonished onlooker. “I am sorry, I am concerned with that section of space which you are filling. Couldn't you move a little to one side for a minute?” And he quickly made some lightning measurements, agile and nimble as a canary twitching efficiently under the impulses of its sympathetic system.The metals dipped in acid solutions, salty and rusting in that painful bath, began to conduct in darkness. Awakened from their stiff lifelessness, they hummed monotonously, sang metallically, shone molecularly in the incessant dusk of those mournful and late days. Invisible charges rose in the poles and swamped them, escaping into the circling darkness. An imperceptible tickling, a blind prickly current traversed the space polarized into concentric lines of energy, into circles and spirals of a magnetic field. Here and there an awakened apparatus would give out signals, another would reply a moment later, out of turn, in hopeless monosyllables, dash-dot-dash in the intervals of a dull lethargy. My father stood among those wandering currents, a smile of suffering on his face, impressed by that stammering articulation, by the misery, shut in once and for all, irrevocably, which was monotonously signaling in crippled half-syllables from the unliberated depths.