I loved him dearly, though in secret, and my heart would pound whenever I met him on the stairs. I liked the simplicity with which he spoke to me, smiling all the while, as if whatever words we might exchange had an esoteric, ephemeral meaning behind them. He retained his smile even in the most serious of conversations, even when talking business with old man Weber.
I also loved him for the secret life he led outside the rounds of daily life, a life whose echoes came to me only as the scandalized whispers of grownups: Paul spent all the money he earned at the music hall, on women. There was something incurably fatalistic about his debauchery. Old man Weber was powerless to oppose it. At one point the whole town was buzzing about his having unharnessed the horses from the hackneys in the main square and taken them to the music-hall, where with the help of the town’s most eminent drunkards he had improvised a kind of circus. Then there was the rumor about his bathing in champagne with a woman. And that was only scratching the surface.
I found it impossible to define my feelings for Paul. All around me I saw people wasting their lives in tedious pursuits — young girls in the park grinning inanely; businessmen casting wily, self-important glances; my father hamming up his role as father; beggars, half-dead with fatigue, sleeping in filthy nooks and crannies — merging one and all in their banality. It was as if the world as definitively constituted had lain waiting inside me forever and all I did from day to day was to verify its obsolete contents. Only Paul stood outside it all in a life so tightly-knit as to be absolutely inaccessible to my understanding. I would preserve every movement he made, every gesture, not so much to fix them in my memory as to grant them a double existence. I would force myself to walk the way he did, study the way he used his hands and rehearse the pattern in front of the mirror until I could reproduce it precisely.
Paul was the most sophisticated, most enigmatic figure in the Webers’ upstairs gallery waxworks, which till then had consisted of ship’s captain Samuel Weber and the delicate, sickly infant Ozy in addition to himself. And then he brought in the woman it had lacked: with her pale face and mechanical gait she made the waxworks complete.
Chapter Seven
We could find additional melancholy antiques in another abandoned upstairs room, this one in my grandfather’s house. Its walls were lined with strange paintings in large gilt wooden frames or smaller pink plush ones. There were also frames made of tiny seashells assembled with meticulous care. I could gaze on them for hours. Who had pasted the shells? Who had made the tiny, agile movements that brought them together? Dead works like these gave instant rebirth to whole existences lost in the mists of time like images in parallel mirrors sunken in the greenish depths of dream.
In one corner there was a gramophone — its horn twisted upward and painted in beautiful pink and yellow stripes like an enormous portion of ice-cream and roses — and a table strewed with prints including one of Karol 1 and his queen Elizabeta. These had long since caught my fancy. I thought the artist highly gifted because he had a good, sure stroke, though I could not understand why he had used a grayish, faded paint that made the paper look as if it had been soaked in water.
One day I made an amazing discovery: what I had taken for watered-down paint was nothing other than an accumulation of miniscule letters decipherable only with the aid of a magnifying glass. There was not a single pencil- or brushstroke; it was a string of words telling the story of the King and Queen. Now that the misunderstanding about the paint was cleared up, my admiration for the artist’s skill was boundless. Indeed, I was embarrassed at having missed the work’s essential quality the first time round and began to harbor grave doubts as to my ability to see anything at all. Having contemplated the drawings for years without discerning the very material from which they were wrought, was I not prey to so great a myopia as to misapprehend everything around me, misapprehend meanings inscribed in things perhaps every bit as clearly as the letters that constituted the drawings?
All at once the surfaces of things surrounding me took to shimmering strangely or turning vaguely opaque like curtains, which when lit from behind go from opaque to transparent and give a room a sudden depth. But there was nothing to light these objects from behind, and they remained sealed by their density, which only rarely dissipated enough to let their true meaning shine through.
The upstairs room had other peculiarities of its own. The view it gave of the street, for instance. The walls of the house were very thick and the windows were deeply embedded in them, forming a series of alcoves spacious enough to stand in. I would settle into one, making believe I was in a tiny glass chamber, and open the window. The intimacy of the alcove and the pleasure of viewing the street from so delightful a vantage point gave me the idea of traveling the world in a carriage of similar proportions with soft pillows to lean back on while gazing through the windows at new cities and landscapes.
Once, when Father was reminiscing about his childhood, I asked him what his most fervent secret wish had been and he told me that what he had longed for most of all was a miraculous carriage that would take him around the world. I knew that as a child he had slept in one of the upstairs rooms, and I asked him whether he ever settled into an alcove, opened the window, and looked down into the street. Amazed, he told me that in fact every evening when he went up to bed he would spend hours in an alcove, often falling asleep there. His carriage dream most likely came to him in the same place and under the same conditions as mine came to me.
Beyond bedeviled places teeming with fits and vertigo, therefore, the earth has its benevolent places, places whose walls are lined with lovely images. The walls of my alcove would seem to have harbored the dream of a carriage roaming the world, and whosoever took refuge there was eventually impregnated with it as with so many fumes of hashish. .
Above the room there were two garrets, one of which gave access to the roof via a small window. I often climbed through it and stood on top of the house. The entire city spread out before me, amorphous and gray, and beyond it the fields, where miniature toylike trains crossed a fragile bridge. What I wanted most of all was to feel free of vertigo, as stable as if my feet were planted on the ground; I wanted to lead my “normal” life on the roof, to move about in the fresh, bracing air of the heights without fear or awareness of the void. I felt that if I succeeded I would make my body lighter and more supple and, thus transformed, I would have turned into a kind of bird-man.
I was convinced that only the fear of falling weighed me down, and the niggling thought that I was high off the ground ran through me like a pain I wished to pluck out by the roots. To make everything up there seem natural, I would force myself to do something banal but precise: read, eat, sleep. For example, I would climb onto the roof with the cherries and bread my grandfather gave me, dividing each cherry in four and eating each piece in turn to make my “normal” activity last as long as possible. Each time I finished one, I would throw the pit into the street, aiming at a large pot that stood in front of a shop.
The moment I came down I would run and see how many points I had scored. There were always three or four pits in the pot, but I was terribly disappointed by the fact that I could only find three or four more in the vicinity. I had thus eaten very few cherries, yet I thought I had spent hours on the roof. When I checked the time on the green porcelain dial of the clock in Grandfather’s room, I saw that in fact only a few minutes had passed since I had gone upstairs. I concluded that time grew more concentrated the higher it “went on.” There was nothing I could do to draw it out and stay longer. Each time I came down, I had to admit I had spent less time on the roof than I had imagined, and that reinforced the strange sensation of being indefinite and incomplete that I had on the ground. Down here time was looser than in reality; it contained less matter than in the heights and hence took part in the fragility of things, which seemed so concentrated around me yet at the same time so unstable, ready at any moment to shed their meanings and temporary outlines and appear in the exact form of their existence. .