She looked at me a while in profound sorrow and said:
“I refuse to let you help in any way to get my poems published. I’ll manage on my own. I have an absolute inner certainty that I’ll manage on my own. And you, you poor wretch, all you need to do is have another drink.”
And Alberta poured me a full glass, and I knocked it back instantly in a single draft, because by now I was able to drink in single drafts again. I needed it. I was so infinitely empty and hollow that only infinite nothingness was capable of filling me up.
Chapter 15. Pale Blue Weasels
AFTER I HAD FILLED the bath with hot water, after I had put in the laundry and added an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder I would tidy up the newspapers. They would be lying around all over the place and the disorder they created, though superficial, was visually devastating. When in the course of a drinking bout I set off early in the morning for a new bottle, or two or three new bottles, or for a dozen new cans of beer, on the way I would always buy a considerable number of newspapers. When I was drunk or hung over, especially when the hangover had been mitigated by the first early morning shot, I bought considerably more newspapers than ordinarily. (Actually, I ought to say: than extraordinarily, since ordinarily I was extraordinarily drunk, while I was sober extraordinarily rarely — once again the seductive beast of drunken rhetoric raises its head. Drinking is ghastly; writing about drinking is ghastly; drinking, writing, and battling with the beast of drunken rhetoric is ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.) I would buy every newspaper that appeared on a given day, I would buy tabloids filled with sordid special offers, I would buy weeklies, illustrated magazines, women’s journals (especially those devoted to fashion, makeup, and pressing questions of skin care), I would buy monthlies and literary quarterlies, and even certain specialist publications. Depending on my mood I would select a periodical devoted to hunting, or medicine, or astronomy. Then for several hours, till I completely lost consciousness, I would lie on the couch and peruse the press. Those were unforgettable moments of homeostasis between one loss of consciousness and the next. My mind was clear, my thinking quick, and I read everything from cover to cover. I read domestic and international wire reports, I read introductory articles and political commentaries. I studied financial tables indicating that Poland was the economic tiger of Eastern Europe, I examined sports tables indicating that Poland could defeat any opponent, I immersed myself in religious sections indicating that Poland could bring redemption for everyone. With helpless obstinacy I gazed at photographs of beautiful high school girls whose phenomenally slender arms stirred in me an obscure sense of unease, and in order to quell that unease at least a little I would drink a little, I would take one small sip.
Now. . Now — meaning when? After drinking the first half-liter that steadies a person, or after drinking the second half-liter that gives him wings? Now? After a feigned sobering-up? Now after getting out? after going in? after going down? Now — after three weeks, or maybe six, after forty or maybe one hundred and forty days.
Now, after returning from the alco ward, I would not remember a single one of the articles I read during the moments of homeostasis (between one loss of consciousness and the next); only occasionally would some vivid magazine cover, some photograph of a captivating anorexic in a denim dress seem vaguely familiar, as if I had seen it in a dream, or in a previous life.
Piles of faded newspapers would be lying everywhere, covered with a gritty dust. I would tidy them methodically, carefully forming bundles of the appropriate size, which I then took out to the trash chute. I might have said that I was removing the traces of my drunken excesses, that I was simply cleaning up my apartment, that I was getting rid of anything that recalled my drunken abasement, that I was wiping everything I could from my already sufficiently unreadable memory. I might have said this, but it would not have been the truth; in the language of drunkards even the simplest expression, for example “cleaning up the apartment,” can prove to be bombastic and duplicitous rhetoric. I was cleaning up the apartment, but I was not certain of what I was doing, I was not certain of where I was, I did not know what had happened to my home, if in fact it was my home.
After six weeks I would leave the alco ward, I would take a cab, I would enter and leave the pub called “The Mighty Angel,” I would enter and leave the store, take the elevator, open the door, and for the longest time I would stand dumbstruck on the threshold. Who had been here during my absence? Who on earth had been staying in the place while the owner was away? Who had been twisting and turning in fearful agonies in my bedding? Who had sweated urine-colored perspiration? Who had left a filthy bed sheet behind? Who had been reading The Magic Mountain and gotten to page 27, since it was lying open at that page on the floor? What speckled rats, what pale blue weasels must have made their nest here? Who had been reading newspapers? Who had been smoking cigarettes and leaving piles of butts all over? Who had slept in the armchair? Who had thrown towels on the bathroom floor? Who had left a tiger-striped headband in the hallway? What individuals, what ghosts had been at large? That’s right, rats and weasels must have made their nests here, and during their nocturnal tangles and hunting trips they must have upset everything and scattered it all from one corner to the other.
And where did the stifling atmosphere of debauchery come from, and the body lotion, and the lone hair on the pillow, and all the objects that had been moved from place to place by a woman’s hand? Often, as I lay in my damp bedding, I had had the impression that shades were moving around the empty rooms. Shades of skinny high school girls and shades of my ex-wives were leaning over me, seduced teenagers were opening the windows, novice nuns were making a hearty soup in the kitchen, sisters of mercy were holding up my forehead and uttering gentle words of succor as I engaged in the pious labor of puking my guts out. Women photographers, beautiful as a dream, were taking my picture, ambitious women reporters conducted in-depth interviews with me, and it was among them that I’d find my last love before death. I would stretch out my hands and encounter darkness. Someone was walking around the room, someone was lying in my bed and howling, howling in a lifeless voice.
I pressed the bottle to not-my mouth; at first the vodka wouldn’t flow, then it flowed, it flowed in a burning, sulfurous stream through parched lips and down the throat. It whirled in its fieriness, it murmured like a creek suddenly swelling after midsummer rains. The clear surface of the liquid was like a scalpel; it flowed through the innards and cut them open, and the stream of molten lava crossed a dead land, searching for a secret place, searching for the bay of tranquility.
•
Somewhere in my innards, between diaphragm, heart, and lungs, between the respiratory system and the circulatory system, between the lungs and the spinal column, there was a negative chakra, an anatomical hole, an inter-muscular or perhaps intercostal cavity shaped like a spindle and half a liter in capacity. I was like one of those heavy old Kalwaria wardrobes with a secret compartment; I would take the key, which was as silver as the screw top of a bottle, open the dark little door inside myself, and beneath my wooden heart I would place a half liter of Żołądkowa Gorzka. My heart would begin to pump blood and my lungs would fill with oxygen; daybreak would come, the dense fog would lift from the bay of tranquility, I would be light as a cloud and happy as a cured man, I would take one more well-calculated sip, rest my head on the pillow, and allow my gaze to stray idly across the ceiling. And my gaze would pass through the ceiling, and it would pass through all the ceilings above my ceiling, and through the roof of the building, and it would pass through the dark sky over Kraków or Warsaw, and it would traverse the stratum of low clouds and the stratum of high clouds, and it would pass through the light blue sky and the dark blue sky, and it would reach the black regions, and, in a firmament as black as Smirnoff Black or as Johnny Walker Black Label, I would see the constellations. Once again I would see the comet over Czantoria Mountain and once again I would see the constellation of the Mighty Angel.