Ferdydurke (28 page)

12 The Child Runs Deep in Filibert

At the end of the eighteenth century a peasant in Paris had a child, and this child had a child, then this child had a child, which had a child; and this last child played a tennis match as the world champion on the court of the illustrious Paris Racing Club, in an atmosphere of great excitement and to the accompaniment of unceasing and thunderous applause. However (oh, how incredibly treacherous life can be!), a certain colonel of the
Zouaves,
sitting in the crowd on the side bleachers, suddenly became envious of the two champions' impeccable and thrilling game, and wishing to show off in front of the six thousand spectators (and especially in front of his fiancée, sitting next to him) unexpectedly fired his pistol and hit the ball in midair.
{10}
The ball burst and fell to the ground while the champions, so suddenly deprived of their object, continued to swing their rackets in empty space; however, realizing the nonsense of their movements now that the ball was gone, they pounced on each other with their claws. A thunderous applause rose from the spectators.

And this surely would have been the end. But something else happened—the colonel, in his excitement, forgot or did not take into consideration (oh, how careful one must be!) the spectators sitting on the other side of the court, on the so-called sunny side of the stands. He thought, God knows why, that the bullet, having punctured the ball, would have spent itself; however, in its further trajectory it unfortunately struck a ship owner in the neck. Blood spurted from a ruptured artery. The wife of the wounded man, on first impulse, wanted to pounce on the colonel and snatch the pistol from him, but since she couldn't (she was trapped in the crowd), she simply slapped the mug of her neighbor on her right. And she did it because she couldn't vent her agitation in any other way, and because, in the deepest recesses of her inner self and motivated by purely feminine logic she thought that, as a woman, she was at liberty to do so, and why not? Not so, as it turned out (oh, how unceasingly one must take everything into account), because the man was a latent epileptic who, due to the psychological shock of the slap in the face, went into a seizure and erupted like a geyser in jerks and convulsions. The hapless woman found herself between two men, one spurting blood, the other foam. A thunderous applause rose from the spectators.

Whereupon a gentleman sitting nearby suddenly panicked and jumped on the head of the lady seated below, she in turn took off and, carrying him on her back at full speed, bounded into the center of the court. A thunderous applause rose from the spectators. And this surely would have been the end. But something else happened (oh, how one must always anticipate everything!)—a modest pensioner from Toulouse, a man given to dreaming in secret, sat relaxing not far off, and, for a long time and at every public event, he had been dreaming of jumping onto the heads of people sitting below him, yet, by sheer willpower, he had thus far restrained himself. Now, carried away by the example, he instantly mounted a woman sitting below him, and she (a minor office clerk from Tangiers), surmising that these must be proper city manners and quite the thing to do—also carried him on her back, taking pains to make her movements appear totally relaxed.

Whereupon the more sophisticated sector of the public began to applaud tactfully so as to cover up the gaffe in front of the delegates from foreign consulates and embassies who had thronged to the match. But this led to yet another misunderstanding, because the less sophisticated sector mistook the applause for a sign of approval, and they too mounted their ladies. The foreigners showed increasing astonishment. So what could the more sophisticated sector of the company do? As if nothing had happened, they too mounted their ladies.

And this almost certainly would have been the end. But then a certain marquis de Filiberthe, sitting in the grandstand with his wife and her family, was suddenly roused by the gentleman within and stepped into the center of the court in his light-colored summer suit and, pale yet determined, he coolly asked if anyone, and if so who, wished to insult his wife, the marquise de Filiberthe? And he threw into the crowd a bunch of visiting cards inscribed: Phillipe Hertal de Filiberthe. (Oh, how terribly careful we must be! How difficult and treacherous life is, and how unpredictable!) Dead silence ensued.

And suddenly no fewer than thirty-six gentlemen began riding up at a slow canter, bareback on their elegantly and ornately dressed women—thoroughbred and slim at the fetlocks—to insult the marquise de Filiberthe and to feel themselves roused by the gentleman within, just as her husband the marquis himself had been roused by the gentleman within. Panic-stricken, the marquise miscarried—and a child's whimpering was heard at the marquis' feet and under the hooves of the trampling women. The marquis—so unexpectedly made aware of the child that ran deep in him, and realizing, just at that moment when he was acting singly and as a gentleman mature within himself, how sustained and replenished he had been by the child—was overcome with embarrassment and went home—while a thunderous applause rose from the spectators.

13 The Farmhand, or Captive Again

And so we're off, Kneadus and I, in search of the farmhand. The villa had disappeared around the corner with what-ever remained of the Youngbloods tumbling and rolling about as we had left them, and ahead of us lay the long stretch of Filtrowa Street, a shining ribbon. The sun rose, a yellow ball, we're eating breakfast at a drugstore, the city is awakening, it's eight o'clock, we move on, I with my small suitcase, Kneadus with a walking stick. Little birds chirp on trees. Onward, onward! Kneadus stomps briskly, hope carries him into the future, his hope heartens me, his captive! "Let's go to the outskirts of the city, to the outskirts," he keeps repeating. "We'll find ourselves a swell farmhand there, that's where we'll find him!" The farmhand paints the morning in bright and pleasant colors, it's nice, it's great fun to walk through the city in search of a farmhand! What will become of me? What will they do with me? Under what circumstances? I know nothing, I stomp briskly behind Kneadus, my lord and master, I can't torture myself nor be sad because I'm in a good mood! In this neighborhood the entrances to buildings are few and far between, and the air in them reeks of janitors and their families. Kneadus peeks into each doorway, but a janitor is a far cry from a farmhand, isn't a janitor just a peasant in a flowerpot? Here and there we run into a janitor's son, but Kneadus is not satisfied, because isn't a janitor's son actually a farmhand in a cage, a farmhand caged in a stairwell? "There's no wind here," he declares. "In these doorways there are only drafts, and I don't fancy a farmhand in drafts, for me a farmhand lives where the wind blows free."

We pass nannies and nursemaids pushing infants in squeaking baby carriages. Wearing their mistresses' discarded dresses, they walk on heels bent out of shape, giving us the glad eye. Two gold teeth, wheeling someone else's child, in tatters, Rudolph Valentino in their heads. We pass executives, office workers with briefcases under their arms hurrying to their daily tasks, but they're all
of papier mâché,
very Slavic and bureaucratic, their cuffs and cufflinks like emblems of their egos, each has his own watch chain, these husbands of wives and employers of nursemaids. Above them the great Sky. We pass young la-di-das wearing coats in Warsaw chic, some skinny and swift, others sluggish and soft, their heads stuck into their very own hats, and, without much to differentiate them, they catch up and pass one another, Kneadus won't even deign to look, and I'm thoroughly bored, I begin to yawn. "To the outskirts," he exclaims, "there we'll find a farmhand, nothing doing here, it's all so cheap, they're a dime a dozen, intelligentsia cows and horses, attorneys' wives and nannies, their husbands are like cab horses. Damn them all, cows and mules! Look how educated and yet how stupid they are! All overdressed, damn it, and so vulgar! It's the pupa, the damn pupa again!" At the end of Wawelska Street we see some municipal buildings planned on a grander scale, their formidable appearance passes as nourishment for the masses of hungry and exhausted employees. The buildings remind us of school, so we quicken our pace. On Narutowicz Square, where the students' dormitory is located, we run into bands of students, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, their trousers frayed, their hair unkempt, hurrying to a lecture or waiting for a streetcar. Their noses in their lecture notes, they eat hard-boiled eggs, shove the eggshells into their pockets, and breathe the dust of the big city. "Pah, these are ex-farmhands!" he exclaimed. "They're all sons of peasants studying to become intelligentsia! To hell with ex-farmhands! I hate ex-farmhands! They still wipe their noses with their fingers, and already they're studying their lecture notes! Learning in a peasant! A peasant turned lawyer or physician! Just look how their heads are swollen with Latin terms, look at their stubby fingers! How unfortunate," fumed Kneadus, "that's just as bad as if they'd become monks! Oh, so many good, first-rate farmhands, but nothing doing, they've changed their garb, they've been murdered, killed! To the outskirts of the city, to the outskirts, there's wind there, the air blows free!" We turn into Grojecka Street, dust, soot, noise, and stench, no more brownstone buildings, only tenement houses and preposterous carts with Jewish goods and chattels, carts full of vegetables, goose down, milk, cabbage, grain, hay, scrap metal, and debris, they fill the street with their jingling, clanging, and banging. On top of every cart sits a peasant or a Jew, wobbling—either a city peasant or a country Jew—I don't know which is better. We actually venture farther into the inferior regions, the immature outskirts of the city, and there are more decayed teeth, more ears stuffed with wads of cotton wool, fingers bound in rags, hair smeared with grease, hiccups, blackheads, cabbage, and a pervasive musty stench. Diapers dry in the windows. Radios rattle on without a break, educational talk whirrs, and numerous Pimkos, with a voice that's either artificially naive and warm, or gruff or cheery, educate the soul of drugstore owners, lecturing them on their responsibilities and teaching them to love Kosciuszko. Grocers relish reading tabloids that describe the life of the upper classes, and their wives, scratching themselves on the back, relive their previous night with Marlene Dietrich. Pedagogical activity is in full swing, innumerable female delegates bustle among the populace, teaching and lecturing, persuading and developing, awakening and generating civic-mindedness with an
ad hoc
simplicity pasted on their faces. Here a group of streetcar conductors' wives dances in a circle, singing and smiling and promoting joy of life under the direction of a person delegated for this purpose, an especially cheerful wag from the intelligentsia, there horse-cab drivers sing canticles, thus creating a strange sense of innocence. Somewhere else, ex-farmgirls are learning to discover the beauty of a sunset. And tens of concep-tualists, dogmatists, demagogues, and agitators shape and reshape people, sowing their ideas, opinions, doctrines, concepts—all specially prepared and simplified for the "little ones." "The mug, the mug everywhere," said Kneadus abruptly, "just like in school! No wonder disease eats them alive, poverty chokes them, no wonder this motley crew is being choked and eaten alive. Who the devil fixed them like this—I'm sure if someone hadn't put them up to it, they wouldn't have spawned all this ugliness, abomination, and filth, it sticks out a mile, why doesn't it stick out of a peasant, even though he never washes himself! Who, I ask, has turned this good and respectable proletariat into such a factory? Who has taught them this filth and quirkiness? Oh, Sodom and Gomorrah—we'll never find a farmhand here. Let's go on, on. When will the wind finally blow?" But there is no wind, only stagnation, human beings wallowing in their humanity like fish in a pond. The stench hits the sky, and still the farmhand is nowhere to be seen. Lonely seamstresses get skinny, petty hairdressers grow plump in cheap luxury, minor craftsmen's stomachs growl, unemployed female servants on their short, fat legs spout vile language, artificial phrases, pretentious accents, and the pharmacist's wife—her stomach growling—lords it over the washerwoman, the washerwoman preens herself on spiked heels. Feet that are actually bare yet shod in dainty shoes, feet that seem odd when clad in shoes, likewise their heads in hats, bodies from the country or some village in gents' and ladies' outfits. "What a mug," said Kneadus, "nothing sincere, nothing natural, everything copied, trashy, fake, bogus." And the farmhand is still nowhere to be seen. Finally we come upon a journeyman, not bad, a nice, fair-haired, well-proportioned man, but unfortunately already enlightened about social class and echoing Marx. "What a mug," said Kneadus, "what a philosopher!" Yet another one—a typical rogue, knife between his teeth, a smart aleck from these seedy outskirts—seemed for a moment to be the longed-for farmhand, but unfortunately he wore a bowler hat. Another type we approached on a street corner seemed to suit Kneadus to a "T," but, alas, he used the expression "whereas." "Yet another mug," Kneadus whispered furiously, "he's no good. Onward, onward," he repeated feverishly, "all this is trash. Just like in our school. The outskirts are taking lessons from the city. Damn it, the lower classes are actually at grade-school level. These fellows are just entry-level pupils, that's probably why their noses are still dripping. Devil take all that mangy, scabby lot, will we ever escape school? Nothing but the mug. Oh, the mug, mug, mug! Onward, onward!" We move on, on, small wooden houses, mothers delousing their daughters, daughters—their mothers, children wading in gutters, workers returning from work, the great one and only word resounds from on high and from below, the entire street is full of it by now, it's transforming itself into a real hymn of the proletariat, it resounds with challenge and arrogance, it is hurled with passion into space and provides at least an illusion of life and power. "Look at them!" Kneadus marveled, "look how they puff themselves up, just like we do in school. That won't cure the pupa, that great and classical pupa, which has been stuck on these sniveling brats. It's terrible that there's no one nowadays who isn't still at the age of immaturity. Onward—there's no farmhand here!" And just as he finished saying these words a breeze blew gently on our cheeks, there were no more houses, streets, gutters, sewers, hairdressers, windows, workers, wives, mothers and daughters, vermin, cabbage, stuffy air, cramped spaces, dust, proprietors, artisans, shoes, blouses, hats, heels, streetcars, shops, vegetables, smart alecks, shop signs, blackheads, stuff, glances, hair, eyebrows, lips, sidewalks, bellies, tools, organs, hiccups, knees, elbows, windowpanes, shouts, sniveling, spitting, throat clearing, conversations, children, clatter. We came to the city limits. Ahead of us—fields, forests. A highway. Kneadus started singing: