Adventures In Immediate Irreality Read Online Free PDF Page B

natural
state.
    Futility filled the hollows of the world like a liquid spreading in all directions,
and the sky above me—eternally correct, absurd, and obscure—turned its own color
of despair. Surrounded by that futility and beneath that sky, I wander eternally
cursed to this day.

Chapter Two
    The doctor I consulted about my crises pronounced a strange
word: “paludism.” I was amazed that my secret and intimate afflictions could have a
name, and a name so bizarre to boot. The doctor prescribed quinine—another
cause for amazement. I could not comprehend how an illness,
it
, could be
cured with quinine taken by a person,
me
. But what disturbed me most was
the doctor himself. Long after he examined me, he continued to exist and bustle
about my memory with those minute, automatic gestures I could not stop him from
making.
    He was a short man with an egg-shaped head, the pointed end of the egg lengthening
into a black beard continually in motion. His small velvet eyes, fitful gestures,
and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The impression was so immediate
and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that he should give his
r
’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching something in secret as
he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction there was something
mouse-like about him, and the confirmation of said conviction proved so strange and
touched on facts so central to my childhood that I believe the incident worthy of
recounting.
    Not far from our house there was a shop that sold
sewing machines. I spent hours there every day. The owner was a young man by the
name of Eugen who had just completed his military service and hoped to earn a living
from the shop. He had a sister, Clara, who was a year younger than he. They lived
together on the outskirts of town and spent all day in the shop, having neither
friends nor relatives.
    It was a rented room and had never served as a place of business. The walls had not
been repainted and were covered with garlands of violets and faded rectangles where
pictures had once hung. A bronze lamp, also left from before, hung from the middle
of the ceiling. It had a dark-red majolica lampshade decorated along the rim with
green porcelain acanthus leaves in relief. It was highly ornamented, old and
old-fashioned, but imposing. It looked something like a gravestone or a retired
general wearing his former uniform in a parade.
    The sewing machines stood in three rows separated by broad aisles running to the back
of the room. Every morning Eugen took pains to wet the floor with water using an old
tin he had made holes in. He deftly coaxed the dribble that emerged into clever
spirals and figure eights and occasionally signed his name or wrote out the date.
The paint on the wall clearly called for such finesse.
    At the far end of the room a wooden screen separated the shop proper from another,
smaller area, the entrance to which was covered by a green portière. Eugen and Clara
spent much of their time in this back room and always had lunch there so as not to
leave the shop unmanned. They called it “the green room,” and I once heard Eugen
say, “It really is like the room where actors await their entrances. When you go out
into the shop and spend a half hour selling a sewing machine, are you not
playacting?” Then, using a more learned inflection, he added, “Life as a whole is
pure theater.”
    Behind the portière Eugen would play the violin. He laid the music out on the table,
then bent over it, patiently deciphering the staves of complicated notes as if
trying to unravel a skein of knotty thread into one long, slender strand, the thread
of the melody. A small petroleum lamp on a trunk would burn all afternoon, filling
the room with a dull light and throwing the violinist’s distorted shadow on the
wall.
    I went there so often as to become part of the furniture, so to speak, a kind of
extension of the old oil-cloth sofa I would sit on,