The Street Of Crocodiles (3 page)

Touya's mother Maria hired herself to housewives to scrub floors. She was a small saffron-yellow woman, and it was with saffron that she wiped the floors, the deal tables, the benches, and the banisters which she had scrubbed in the homes of the poor.

Once Adela took me to the old woman's house. It was early in the morning when we entered the small blue-walled room, with its mud floor, lying in a patch of bright yellow sunlight in the still of the morning broken only by the frighteningly loud ticking of a cottage clock on the wall. In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monologue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria's time—the time imprisoned in her soul—had left her and—terribly real— filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen.

In one of those cottages, surrounded by brown railings and submerged in the lush green of its garden, lived Aunt Agatha. Coming through the garden to visit her, we passed numerous colored glass balls stuck on flimsy poles. In these pink, green, and violet balls were enclosed bright shining worlds, like the ideally happy pictures contained in the peerless perfection of soap bubbles.In the gloom of the hall, with its old lithographs, rotten with mildew and blind with age, we rediscovered a well-known smell. In that old familiar smell was contained a marvelously simple synthesis of the life of those people, the distillation of their race, the quality of their blood, and the secret of their fate, imperceptibly mixed day by day with the passage of their own, private, time. The old, wise door, the silent witness of the entries and exits of mother, daughters, sons, whose dark sighs accompanied the comings and goings of those people, now opened noiselessly like the door of a wardrobe, and we stepped into their life. They were sitting as if in the shadow of their own destiny and did not fight against it; with their first, clumsy gestures they revealed their secret to us. Besides, were we not related to them by blood and by fate?

The room was dark and velvety from the royal blue wallpaper with its gold pattern, but even here the echo of the flaming day shimmered brassily on the picture frames, on door knobs and gilded borders, although it came through the filter of the dense greenery of the garden. From her chair against the wall, Aunt Agatha rose to greet us, tall and ample, her round white flesh blotchy with the rust of freckles. We sat down beside them, as on the verge of their lives, rather embarrassed by their defenseless surrender to us, and we drank water with rose syrup, a wonderful drink in which I found the deepest essence of that hot Saturday.

My aunt was complaining. It was the principal burden of her conversation, the voice of that white and fertile flesh, floating as it were outside the boundaries of her person, held only loosely in the fetters of individual form, and, despite those fetters, ready to multiply, to scatter, branch out, and divide into a family. It was an almost self-propagating fertility, a femininity without rein, morbidly expansive.It seemed as if the very whiff of masculinity, the smell of tobacco smoke, or a bachelor's joke, would spark off this feverish feminity and entice it to a lascivious virgin birth. And in fact, all her complaints about her husband or her servants, all her worries about the children were only the caprices of her incompletely satisfied fertility, a logical extension of the rude, angry, lachrymose coquetry with which, to no purpose, she plagued her husband. Uncle Mark, small and hunched, with a face fallow of sex, sat in his gray bankruptcy, reconciled to his fate, in the shadow of a limitless contempt in which he seemed only to relax. His gray eyes reflected the distant glow of the garden, spreading in the window.

Sometimes he tried with a feeble gesture to raise an objection, to resist, but the wave of self-sufficient femininity hurled aside that unimportant gesture, triumphantly passed him by, and drowned the feeble stirrings of male assertiveness under its broad flood.

There was something tragic in that immoderate fertility; the misery of a creature fighting on the borders of nothingness and-death, the heroism of womanhood triumphing by fertility over the shortcomings of nature, over the insufficiency of the male. But their offspring showed justification for that panic of maternity, of a passion for childbearing which became exhausted in ill-starred pregnancies, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or face.Lucy, the second eldest, now entered the room, her head overdeveloped for her childlike, plump body, her flesh white and delicate. She stretched out to me a small doll-like hand, a hand in bud, and blushed all over her face like a peony. Unhappy because of her blushes, which shamelessly revealed the secrets of menstruation, she closed her eyes and reddened even more deeply under the touch of the most indifferent question, for she saw in each a secret allusion to her most sensitive maidenhood.

Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair mustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.

His elegant, expensive clothes bore the imprint of the exotic countries he had visited. His pale flabby face seemed from day to day to lose its outline, to become a white blank wall with a pale network of veins, like lines on an old map occasionally stirred by the fading memories of a stormy and wasted life.He was a master of card tricks, he smoked long, noble pipes, and he smelled strangely of distant lands. With his gaze wandering over old memories, he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.My eyes followed him nostalgically, and I wished he would notice me and liberate me from the tortures of boredom. And indeed, it seemed as if he gave me a wink before going into an adjoining room and I followed him there, He was sitting on a small low sofa, his crossed knees almost level with his head, which was bald like a billiard ball. It seemed as if it were only his clothes that had been thrown, crumpled and empty, over à chair. His face seemed like the breath of a face—a smudge which an unknown passer-by had left in the air. In his white, blue-enameled hands he was holding a wallet and looking at something in it.

From the mist of his face, the protruding white of a pale eye emerged with difficulty, enticing me with a wink. I felt an irresistible sympathy for Emil.

He took me between his knees and, shuffling some photographs in front of my eyes as if they were a pack of cards, he showed me naked women and boys in strange positions. I stood leaning against him looking at those delicate human bodies with distant, unseeing eyes, when all of a sudden the fluid of an obscure excitement with which the air seemed charged, reached me and pierced me with a shiver of uneasiness, a wave of sudden comprehension. But meanwhile that ghost of a smile which had appeared under Emil's soft and beautiful mustache, the seed of desire which had shown in a pulsating vein on his temple, the tenseness which for a moment had kept his features concentrated, all fell away again and his face receded into indifference and became absent and finally faded away altogether.

Already for some time our town had been sinking into the perpetual grayness of dusk, had become affected at the edges by a rash of shadows, by fluffy mildew, and by moss the dull color of iron.

Hardly was it freed from the brown smoke and the mists of the morning, than the day turned into a lowering amber afternoon, became for a brief moment transparent, taking the golden color of ale, only to ascend under the multiple fantastic domes of vast, color-filled nights.

We lived on Market Square, in one of those dark houses with empty blind looks, so difficult to distinguish one from the other.

This gave endless possibilities for mistakes. For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find yourself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the gray light of dawn.

Full of large wardrobes, vast sofas, faded mirrors, and cheap artificial palms, our apartment sank deeper and deeper into a state of neglect owing to the indolence of my mother, who spent most of her time in the shop, and the carelessness of slim-legged Adela, who, without anyone to supervise her, spent her days in front of a mirror, endlessly making up and leaving everywhere tufts of combed-out hair, brushes, odd slippers, and discarded corsets.

No one ever knew exactly how many rooms we had in our apartment, because no one ever remembered how many of them were let to strangers. Often one would by chance open the door to one of these forgotten rooms and find it empty; the lodger had moved out a long time ago. In the drawers, untouched for months, one would make unexpected discoveries.In the downstairs rooms lived the shop assistants and sometimes during the night we were awakened by their nightmares. In winter it would be still deep night when Father went down to these cold and dark rooms, the light of his candle scattering flocks of shadows so that they fled sideways along the floor and up the walls; his task to wake the snoring men from their stone-hard sleep.In the light of the candle, which Father left with them, they unwound themselves lazily from the dirty bedding, then, sitting on the edge of their beds, stuck out their bare and ugly feet and, with socks in their hands, abandoned themselves for a moment to the delights of yawning—a yawning crossing the borders of sensuous pleasure, leading to a painful cramp of the palate, almost to nausea.In the corners, large cockroaches sat immobile, hideously enlarged by their own shadows which the burning candle imposed on them and which remained attached to their flat, headless bodies when they suddenly ran off with weird, spiderlike movements.At that time, my father's health began to fail. Even in the first weeks of this early winter, he would spend whole days in bed, surrounded by bottles of medicine and boxes of pills, and ledgers brought up to him from the shop. The bitter smell of illness settled like a rug in the room and the arabesques on the wallpaper loomed darker.In the evenings, when Mother returned from the shop, Father was often excited and inclined to argue.As he reproached her for inaccuracies in the accounts his cheeks became flushed and he became almost insane with anger. I remember more than once waking in the middle of the night to see him in his nightshirt, running in his bare feet up and down the leather sofa to demonstrate his irritation to my baffled mother.

On other days he was calm and composed, completely absorbed in the account books, lost in a maze of complicated calculations.

I can still see him in the light of the smoking lamp, crouched among his pillows under the large carved headboard of the bed, swaying backward and forward in silent meditation, his head making an enormous shadow on the wall.

From time to time, he raised his eyes from the ledgers as if to come up for air, opened his mouth, smacked his lips with distaste as if his tongue were dry and bitter, and looked around helplessly, as if searching for something.

It then sometimes happened that he quietly got out of bed and ran to the corner of the room where an intimate instrument hung on the wall. It was a kind of hourglass-

shaped water jar marked in ounces and filled with a dark fluid. My father attached himself to it with a long rubber hose as if with a gnarled, aching navel cord, and thus connected with the miserable apparatus, he became tense with concentration, his eyes darkened, and an expression of suffering, or perhaps of forbidden pleasure, spread over his pale face.

Then again came days of quiet, concentrated work, interrupted by lonely monologues. While he sat there in the light of the lamp among the pillows of the large bed, and the room grew enormous as the shadows above the lampshade merged with the deep city night beyond the windows, he felt, without looking, how the pullulating jungle of wallpaper, filled with whispers, lisping and hissing, closed in around him. He heard, without looking, a conspiracy of knowingly winking hidden eyes, of alert ears opening up among the flowers on the wall, of dark, smiling mouths.

He then pretended to become even more engrossed in his work, adding and calculating, trying not to betray the anger which rose in him and overcoming the temptation to throw himself blindly forward with a sudden shout to grab fistfuls of those curly arabesques, or of those sheaves of eyes and ears which swarmed out from the night and grew and multiplied, sprouting, with ever-new ghostlike shoots and branches, from the womb of darkness. And he calmed down only when, in the morning with the ebb of night, the wallpaper wilted, shed its leaves and petals and thinned down autumnally, letting in the distant dawn.

Then, among the twittering of wallpaper birds in the yellow wintry dawn, he would fall, for a few hours, into a heavy black sleep.

For days, even for weeks, while he seemed to be engrossed in the complicated current accounts—his thoughts had been secretly plumbing the depths of his own entrails. He would hold his breath and listen. And when his gaze returned, pale and troubled, from that labyrinth, he calmed it with a smile. He did not wish to believe those assumptions and suggestions which oppressed him, and rejected them as absurd.

In daytime, these were more like arguments and persuasions; long monotonous reasonings, conducted half-aloud and with humorous interludes of teasing and banter. But at night these voices rose with greater passion. The demands were made more clearly and more loudly, and we heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders.

Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly, demanding that he should bear witness to it with his mouth and with his entrails. And we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger, choking with brash words that he emitted like a machine gun. We heard the din of battle and Father's groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath.