Authors: Witold Gombrowicz
And out of nothing evolved a monstrous configuration, a horridly poetic cast of characters: there under the window the could-not-care-less, modern schoolgirl, here on the sofa the fuddy-duddy professor bemoaning postwar barbarism, and I, between the two of them, hemmed in by the young-old poetry. God help me! What about my thirty-year-old?! I must leave, leave as fast as I can! But the world seemed to have collapsed and reorganized itself on new principles, the thirty-year-old grew pale again and out-of-date, while the modern one, there by the window, grew ever more alluring. And the accursed Pimko would not let up.
"Legs," he egged me on to modernity, "legs, I know you, I know your athletics, I know the ways of the new Americanized generation, you prefer legs to hands, legs are the most important thing to you, the calves of your legs! The finer, spiritual things in life mean nothing to you, your calves are the thing. Athletics! The calves of your legs, legs," he went on flattering me, fast and furious, "it's the calves of your legs, it's your calves, calves, calves!"
And just as he had earlier, during their lunch hour, insinuated the problem of innocence to the formalists—which had incensed them and boosted their immaturity a hundredfold—he was now making an issue of my modern legs. And there I was, listening and lapping it all up—his linking the calves of my legs with those of the new generation—and coming to feel the cruelty of youth toward old calves! And there was also a kind of leg camaraderie with the schoolgirl, plus a clandestine, voluptuous collusion of legs, plus leg patriotism, plus the impudence of young legs, plus leg poetry, plus young-blooded pride in the calf of the leg, and a cult of the calf of the leg. Oh, what a fiendish body part! I needn't add that all this was happening quietly behind the schoolgirl's back while she stood by the window on those contemporary legs of hers, picking at her skin, suspecting nothing.
I would have managed, nonetheless, to break free from those calves, but the door suddenly opened and someone new appeared in the room; and the entrance of this new and unfamiliar personage was my final undoing. It was Mrs. Youngblood, a rather obese woman, but intelligent and civic-minded, with a keen and alert expression, also a member of a committee for rescuing infants or perhaps for combating the scourge of child-beggary in the capital. Pimko quickly rose from the sofa, all smiles and refinement, as if nothing had been going on—the old-guard professor from the prewar Polish Galicia.
"Ah, my dear lady! Bless your heart—you're always overworked, always active, just back from a committee meeting, no doubt. Well, I've brought you my Joey, whom you have so graciously accepted under your care, here he is—this is Joey, this youth here—Joey, pay your respects to Madame, my child."
What's this? Pimko had switched again and resumed his indulgent and condescending tone. Pay my respects to the old woman, I, a juvenile again? And with all due reverence? I simply had to—the Youngblood woman extended her small, plump hand, and with fleeting surprise glanced at my face as it was swinging back and forth between thirty and seventeen.
"How old is the boy?" I heard her ask Pimko as she was taking him aside, and the professor good-naturedly replied:
"Seventeen, seventeen, my dear lady, he turned seventeen in April, looks older than his age, he may be posturing a bit, pretending to be an adult, but a heart of gold, hmm, hmm!"
"Ah, posturing, is he," the Youngblood woman said.
Instead of protesting I sat down again, I just sat on the sofa, riveted. The stupidity of this insinuation precluded any explanation. And I began to suffer terribly, because Pimko pulled Mrs. Youngblood to the window, right where the schoolgirl was standing, and the two of them proceeded to chat confidentially, from time to time glancing in my direction. Once in a while the trite prof would deliberately, yet as if by chance, project his voice. What torture! Because I heard him unite me with himself in relation to the Youngblood woman—as he had united me before with the schoolgirl against himself—he was now uniting me with himself. As if it weren't enough to present me as a poser who was pretending to be mature and blasé, he now emoted about my attachment to him, extolled the virtues of my mind and heart ("his only shortcoming is that he postures a bit—but it will pass"), and since he talked with a sort of senile tenderness and with the voice of an old-fashioned, typical prof, it followed that I too was old-fashioned and far from modern! And he contrived a devilish situation: here am I, sitting on the sofa, having to pretend that I haven't heard anything, and there is the schoolgirl standing by the window and hearing it all or not, I don't know which, and there is Pimko in a corner shaking his head, coughing now and then, and emoting about me, titillating the tastes and trends of the
avant-garde
Mrs. Engineer. Oh, only a person who fully appreciates what it's like to enter a relationship with a stranger you've just met, what an incredibly risky process that is, full of traps and treachery, can grasp my helplessness in relation to Pimko's accord with Mrs. Youngblood. He had led me into the Youngbloods' home under false pretenses, and, if that were not enough, he was now deliberately raising his voice so that I could hear how falsely he had led me there—oh, how treacherously he had led me into the Young-bloods', and the Youngbloods into me!
No wonder Mrs. Youngblood looked at me with pity and exasperation. Pimko-dimko's sickly-sweet prattling must have fed her annoyance, and besides, today's enterprising engineers' wives, fired up about group action and emancipation, despise any artificiality and affectation in young people, and they particularly can't stand their posing as adults. Progressive as they are, with all their energies geared toward the future, they hold a cult of youth more ardently than it has ever been held by anyone before, and nothing annoys them more than a boy messing up his tender years with posing. Worse still, not only do they dislike it, they actually like their dislike, because it gives them a sense of how progressive and modern they themselves are—they're always ready to give their dislikes a free rein. Mrs. Engineer didn't have to be told twice—this fat woman could have actually picked any other basis for her relationship with me, and not necessarily predicated it on the formula of modernity versus the old-fashioned, yet it was all contingent on the first chord—the first chord we choose ourselves, the rest is merely a consequence. But Pimko drew his old pedagogical bow across her modern string, and she took up the tune in no time.
"Oh, I don't like that," she said with a grimace, "not one bit! A young old man, blasé and probably not athletic either! I can't stand artificiality. That's what your outdated methods lead to, and what a contrast, my dear Professor, with my Zuta—she's frank, easygoing, natural."
When I heard this I lost any remaining confidence in the efficacy of protest, she wouldn't have believed that I was an adult anyway, because she now fancied herself and her daughter in relation to me— as an old-fashioned boy, brought up in the old ways. And when a mother fancies you with her daughter, that's it, you must be just what her daughter needs. I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't—I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and—no matter how difficult it would have been—made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have-yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy! That's all I felt like doing! I was furious that the schoolgirl had heard Pimko's prattling, and that she might form a negative opinion of me. This overshadowed the issue of my thirty-year-old, which now had paled! This is what burned me up now, what stung me, hurt me! I sat on the sofa unable to shout that he was deliberately lying—so, I make myself more comfortable, stretch my legs, try to sit modernly, look relaxed and daring, and I mutely cry out that it's all untrue, because I'm not like that, I'm quite different, oh, legs, calves, calves! I bend forward, I look bright and natural, with my whole posture I mutely belie everything—should the schoolgirl turn around, let her see me—but suddenly I hear the Youngblood woman say quietly to Pimko:
"You're right, such morbid mannerisms, just look at him—he's constantly striking poses."
I could not budge. If I changed my pose, it would be obvious that I had heard her, and she would perceive it as yet another mannerism, from now on everything I did would be a mannerism. Whereupon the schoolgirl turns from the window, looks me over as I sit there unable to revert to something more natural, and I see her unfriendly look, which makes it even more difficult to change my position. I also see the girl's cutting, young-blooded hostility welling up—a pure, whiplike hostility. And it wells up to such a degree that her mother feels obliged to interrupt her conversation and ask her daughter
en camarade,
buddy-buddy fashion:
"Why do you look at him like that, Zuta?"
The schoolgirl does not take her eyes off me, and, loyal to her mother—she's all loyalty now, she's loyal, frank, and direct—puckers her cute little lips and spits out:
"He's been eavesdropping all this time. He's heard everything."
Oh! That was razor-sharp! ... I wanted to protest, yet I couldn't. The Youngblood woman lowered her voice and, savoring the girl's outburst, said to the professor:
"Nowadays our girls are exceptionally sensitive about loyalty and naturalness—they're quite crazy on that point. That's the new generation. The morality of the Great War. We're all children of the Great War, we and our children." She was obviously relishing it all. "It's the new generation," she repeated.
"Look how her pretty little eyes darkened," the little old man said good-naturedly.
"Pretty little eyes? My daughter doesn't have 'pretty little eyes,' Professor, she has eyes. We all have—eyes. Zuta, keep your eyes still."
The girl switched off her facial expression and shrugged her shoulders in repudiation of her mother. Pimko was shocked, and remarked to Mrs. Youngblood as an aside:
"Do you consider this to be proper behavior? ... In my time a young person wouldn't dare shrug her shoulders . . . and at her mother too!"
But the Youngblood woman was ready for him, this was up her alley, and she let him have it with vigor:
"It's the era, Professor, the era! You don't know the contemporary generation. Profound changes are afoot. A great revolution in customs and traditions, this is a wind that demolishes, these are subterranean upheavals and we're riding upon them. It's the era! We have to build anew! Demolish everything that's old in this country of ours, leave only the new, demolish Krakow!"
"Krakow?!" Pimko exclaimed.
Whereupon the schoolgirl, who thus far had been rather contemptuously listening to the dispute of the old folk, chose an opportune moment to kick me, from the side, she gave me a quick, concise kick in the leg, on the sly, with impudence and hatred, not changing her bodily stance or facial expression one bit. Having kicked me she withdrew her leg and continued to stand impassively, indifferent to what Pimko and Mrs. Youngblood were talking about. While the mother was constantly at her daughter, the daughter was avoiding her mother—with an air of superiority, just because she was the younger of the two.
"She kicked him!" the professor exclaimed. "Did you see that, Mrs. Youngblood. We're just chatting here, while she's kicking him. What wildness, what audacity, what nerve of the unbridled postwar generation. She kicked him with that leg of hers!"
"Zuta, keep your legs still! Don't worry, Professor, it's nothing," she laughed, "it won't do your Joey any harm. Worse things happened at the front during the Great War. Even I, as a nurse in the trenches, have been kicked by common soldiers many times."
She lit a cigarette.
"In my time," Pimko said, "young ladies . . . and what would Norwid say to this?"
"Who's Norwid?" the schoolgirl asked.
She did it perfectly—she asked the question with the sporty ignorance of the young generation, with the amazement of the Era, matter-of-factly and without unduly involving herself in the question, and that's that, just to give him a taste of her sporty ignorance.
"She has not heard of Norwid!" he exclaimed.
The Youngblood woman smiled.
"It's the era, Professor, the era!"
The atmosphere became very pleasant indeed. The schoolgirl tossed her ignorance of Norwid to Pimko, Pimko tossed his shock at her ignorance of Norwid back to the schoolgirl, and the mother laughed within the Era. I alone sat there, excluded from the company, and I could not—I could not speak up, nor comprehend how the roles had been reversed, how this old relic, with legs a thousandfold worse than mine, was now in cahoots with the modern one against me, and how I had become a counterpoint to their melody. Oh, Pimko, you devil incarnate! As I sat there silently, kicked, I must have looked angry and sullen, because Pimko said to me in a kindly voice:
"Why are you so quiet, Joey? When in company, one ought to say something... are you cross with Miss Zuta by any chance?"
"Ha, he's miffed!" the sportsgirl jeered.
"Zuta, apologize to the young man," Mrs. Engineer said forcefully. "You've offended him, but you young man, don't be cross with my daughter, you shouldn't be so touchy. Zuta will apologize, of course, but on the other hand we're posturing a bit, aren't we, and that's the truth. Be more natural, look lively, just watch me and Zuta—well, we'll break this young man of his habits, rest assured, Professor. We'll teach him a lesson."
"I think that in this respect his stay here will do him good. Well, Joey, uncloud your little brow."
And so each one of these pronouncements finally and—it seemed— irrevocably determined the order of things, defined and settled them. Pimko and Mrs. Youngblood briefly discussed the financial arrangements, then Pimko kissed me on the forehead.
"Good luck, my boy, goodbye, Joey. Be good now, don't cry, don't cry, I'll visit you here every Sunday, and at school I won't let you out of my sight either. Greetings, my dear lady, goodbye, goodbye, Miss Zuta, shame, you be good to Joey!"
He left, but one could still hear him from the stairs, coughing now and then, clearing his throat: "Ough, ough, hem, hem, ough, ough! Eh, eh, eh!" I set off to protest and explain. But Mrs. Youngblood steered me to a small, modern, cheerless cubbyhole just off the parlor, the parlor that (as it turned out) also served as Miss Young-blood's room.