Blameless, p.7
Blameless, page 7
But when Vlado, after a few minutes, shows him the silhouette, he doesn’t recognize himself in that profile, he’s never seen himself in profile; that bumpy forehead, the nose that starts out aquiline and broadens into a blunt end, aren’t his face. They are the mask of a demon, an underworld god Anabson rising from the waters of the Pilcomayo to take revenge on the Chamacoco. Where is his face? He wants it back; if someone appropriates another man’s face he enslaves him, he can destroy him. I good model, he shouts out in Czech, he’s learned a few words; then he yells in Chamacoco, rushes at Vlado, knocks him to the ground and searches him, looking for his face, the face that the waters of the Paraguay, the Pilcomayo and even the Vltava, which he can see from the Charles Bridge when he goes to look at the stone Bearded Man, never took from him or disfigured, even though they flow away, because his face is always there, in the water that he looks into, a flattened moon that looks back at him with his own eyes. The moon is a friend of the Chamacoco, not like the wicked sun that parches and withers, but now he doesn’t see the moon; he can’t find his moon—his face—and he raises his ax against Vlado to make him produce it.
Others jump on him amid overturned chairs, they can’t take him down because he’s whirling the ax, but they are able to shove him out; with a stroke of the ax he slashes the sheet with the silhouette that someone is holding, but when he’s tossed out through the revolving door, for an instant he again glimpses—in the glass in front of him a moment ago and now beside him—that other sharp, cruel face gliding away confusedly. So they managed to hex him, to put another head on his neck, the one reflected in the hateful glass, the head of an evil spirit. He flies into a rage but can’t break that image, which has already vanished along with the glass as the door goes on revolving like a whirlpool in a river, though more slowly; he is between two glass walls, finally those pushing the door from behind eject him out onto the street.
He stumbles to the ground but gets up, runs off quickly, a guanaco disappearing among the narrow passages of the old imperial city. Before heading for home, he runs to the river and he is happy, the flowing water reflecting his face does not carry it away from him, his real face, broad and earthy and dark, Śakuruku, a virtuous nocturnal moon. I good model. This time it is Bohumil Kafka, the sculptor who helped Frič furnish his house with chests and hammocks, who pays for the damage to the Tumovka café and mollifies Šmolka by bringing him a couple of foreigners more than happy to have their silhouette done by him.
Cherwuish, leaning against a lamppost on Chotkova Street, stares at the wall. The large open door in the facade of the old flaking building is dark, the mouth of a river emerging from the earth’s murky bowels beneath trees that bend over it; a gilded angel projects from the frieze of a cornice. A streetlamp comes on in the dusk, the light reflects the branches of the dark forest. Some enter that mouth, others come out, dancers appear in the circle of light, step back into the night, passersby turn the corner. The forest is also full of traps; the trunk underfoot is a mouth that opens to reveal large fangs and a spotted shadow sinks its claws into your back, but they never leave you alone in the forest. There are always so many creatures around, eyes in the darkness, the flutter of mosquito wings on the skin. Everything is alive; it devours but it’s alive. That’s why there are masks, dances, magic words, to keep the claws of things good. But here everything is stony. Dead. Not death that happens, that pounces, that lives. Dead stone, uninterred body. The wall is tattooed with cracks, sneers and grimaces, the plaster flakes off like the cheek of a leper; maybe the wall too has the same ailment that gnaws his bowels.
Cherwuish looks at his arms, the skin blotchy and dry; he feels his stomach contract and crouches behind a small statue of a woman in a blue mantle, her hands joined, in a niche along the street. It’s not allowed, you shouldn’t, it’s forbidden, he knows it but he can’t hold it, besides others who are not Chamacoco occasionally do it too, he’s seen them. Two or three passersby look at him, someone says something, there, the plume of a gendarme appears from around the corner. He doesn’t want them to put those iron bracelets on him again, like they do when he chases the chimney sweeps on the rooftops—black, covered in black soot, like the Anabson demons—and take him to that big gloomy house which you can’t get out of by jumping from the window, like he always does from the house where he lives with Frič. He starts to run, not bothering to turn around to see if anyone is behind him. He runs, he doesn’t know how far. Still running, he looks up, above him there is a window; he clambers up the wall in which time and bad weather have carved out good handholds, reaches the window, breaks it, but the room is empty and closed, with no doors, at least he doesn’t see any, so he turns back, jumps down, it’s easy, the trees along the Pilcomayo are much taller. Down below are only some kids with something that looks like a mango peel on their heads; they’re shouting laughing repeating a word he doesn’t understand, something like oyila. Maybe they’ve mistaken him for a woman, for one of those slaves who have to collect water in an olla and who, when there’s no more water, are then killed, but it can’t be, he’s not a woman, maybe it’s his long hair that makes them think he’s a woman or maybe he doesn’t understand that word, oyila, oyile, oyilen, anyway he runs off as fast as he can.
A pack of small dogs, ferocious and playful, press around him, not too close but still dangerously so. Not jaguars, only cats and kittens, but they too scratch and he doesn’t know what to do, because if they were a puma or one of those great big Tumraha chiefs with feathers on his head he’d slam them against the wall, but with cubs you can’t, you mustn’t, you have to protect them even if they don’t deserve it and are more evil than their fathers, they scramble between his legs like mice and he, killer of pumas and caimans, is a little afraid. Golem, there he is, golem they shout, laughing, let’s get the golem, kill the golem, let’s take his magic word. One of them puts a hand on Cherwuish’s forehead scratching at it as if to rip off something he doesn’t understand—life, perhaps, that throbs in all creatures, maybe even in figures of clay or iron or cloth that appear dead. He drives them off and flees, the small voracious pack at his heels, while an old man, he too with a peel on his head and curls almost as long as Cherwuish’s, says something in a language even stranger than the one that Frič speaks, though it’s clear he’s scolding those boys; he too repeats that word, golem, and Cherwuish senses that the word is about him, maybe in that language it means Chamacoco. Nevertheless he keeps running, turning the corner he ducks into a blind alley and hides; the kids pass him by and, running and shouting, scatter.
It must have been Karel Krejčić who fabricated the story about Cherwuish meeting Jizchak Löwy and other actors from the itinerant Yiddish theater at the Café Savoy. He—Karel—made a living writing for the Girotondo-giramondo, a newspaper in Brno, sketches of trips to distant countries, trips he never made, apparently he never even went to Slovakia; when he said he was leaving for Italy or Morocco, he simply didn’t show up around town, he stayed home. At an aunt’s house. He had never married. As it is living alone is too much, he said, let alone as a couple; after a while it’s like being children of incest, only the recessive traits add up and you become idiots, spiritually goitrous hypothyroids or frenetic hyperthyroids.
And why, after all, should he have had to leave Prague, to describe the world? Here in Prague there’s everything, the world and even something more, too much more. He would read about Italy or Morocco and then scribble something Neapolitanizing or Moroccanizing the clever quips of Woskovec and Werich or the Madonna of Loreto with her long mantle, Baby Jesus in her arms, who in his account became a Santa Carmela for the occasion, dwelling in a little chapel in Pozzuoli—he liked to pronounce that name, especially the second syllable, uòl, pursing and protruding his lips like a chicken’s behind. The opulently ornate monstrance, the glory of Prague weighing over twelve kilograms with its 6,222 diamonds from the legacy of Ludmilla Eva Franziska von Kolowrat, had given him the idea of placing a diadem on Santa Carmela’s head, no, a coronet with a couple of small diamonds, which, however, he said, were of unpolished though glittering glass, since the real diamonds, he declared, had been stolen by a painter whom the nuns called in to apply a coat of whitewash when damp patches caused by broken pipes appeared on the walls inside the church. Or else he would retouch some incident that had happened in Vinohrady, for example, the story of the pickpockets, which he set in a Café di Place Clichy instead, not far from the cemetery of Montmartre. As the years went by, he didn’t even stay at his aunt’s house; he went to Šmichov’s and between one beer and another wrote the article about crossing the Atlantic and sent it directly to Brno, maybe after reading a few pages aloud to the others, all a bit tipsy. Who knows if Frič too, he implied . . . all those Indian stories of his, his Indian uncle and the island with the snakes . . . Who knows where he got those tales, if it was he who came up with them . . .
But that was later, after Červiček had already gone—in 1909, to be exact; it was in 1909 that Frič brought him back to his Chamacoco, healed and ready to be killed shortly afterward, and not by duodenal worms. So the story about the Café Savoy is hogwash, like the one about Buffalo Bill coming to Prague with his circus, though he never did, and the only reason the rumor keeps circulating so insistently is because, through continual denials of that cock-and-bull story, the lie spread until it became true or was believed to be true by so many people. It makes little difference, because the rumor keeps going around, in short, a legend was born.
So then Frič brings Cherwuish to the Café Savoy. He looks around, the chairs are in the dark or almost, only in back is there a lit clearing and behind the clearing an even darker forest, from which people appear every so often making a racket, sometimes only one sometimes as many as three or four, then disappear again in the depths of the dark forest. When the two of them enter, men dressed in long ankle-length coats are already in the clearing, leaping about here and there, beneath a dark firmament. There the sky is still port nántik, the primordial blackish sky of the Chamacoco where there were not yet stars, there was not yet the yetït carhï, the starry sky. The great sea that Cherwuish crossed with Frič has therefore brought him further back in time than when he lived among his people; it has taken him back to the epoch when there were no gods either—or demons, it’s all the same—Anabson of the Gran Chaco.
Maybe that circular clearing, where those creatures are getting all worked up, is a portent, a sign of the yellow sky that is about to sweep over the world. That’s why those people are so happy, leaping, dancing, laughing. But they’re not laughing at him, he quickly realizes. It’s the first time, since he crossed the great sea, that no one is laughing at him, looking at him as peculiar. On the contrary, they’re not looking at him at all; they don’t give a hoot about him or all the others sitting next to him in the dark, who by contrast are looking at them. Until now, in this world to which his friend brought him, only dogs, cats and river gulls haven’t been taken aback by him, haven’t pointed a finger at him as if he were a god or a beast, anyway not one of them. To tell the truth, children don’t pay all that much attention to him either; sometimes they do, a little, but a cat or a ball soon distracts them. The jaguar who, in the forest, leaped on his friend now seated beside him wasn’t surprised that he was different from the tapirs or anteaters for whom he lay in wait. He leaped on Frič to eat him, as usual; if then it didn’t go well, so much the worse, it happens, not even that would surprise the jaguar. Those figures over there, with their leaping, don’t pay any attention to him because they know that he is one of them, everyone is one of them, everybody is part of everybody, when it comes to loving each other, eating each other, fighting, playing, and no one is a stranger anywhere. The men with the long coats leap and dance and sing repetitive chants like those of the Chamacoco, then they laugh. Sometimes the forest where he’s sitting is full of people laughing and clapping their hands. And sometimes there is almost no one, but those guys who are talking, singing, leaping and dancing don’t care; it’s obvious, children don’t care either whether anyone is watching them or not when they’re playing, they simply play, and the Chamacoco, when they dance to entreat Illa to rise up—the North Wind that aided the great Anabson Nemur—have no one to watch them in the darkness of the forest and don’t feel the need for anyone to watch and approve of them.
Here everyone does everything together. The two in the long coats clap their hands and leap on the walls; once the one who seems to be the leader, and often comes to sit beside his friend Frič and drink beer after beer with him, unintentionally yanks down a big dark curtain that falls on him, then you can see that there is no dark forest behind him, just a jumbled mess of things, chairs, chests, fabrics, worse than the clutter amid his friend’s hammocks, and next to him the others are watching, some try to raise the curtain that looks like the deep dark black of a forest, others jump on those who earlier were singing and dancing and throw them out of that dark space but they come back in as if nothing has happened and begin singing again or talking loudly, waving their arms, one of them pulls out a knife or something like it from his coat and plunges it into the back of another one who screams and seems to fall but doesn’t fall, he’s all bent backward as if he were falling but without falling, he talks and talks and talks and some close to him weep and others, a little further away, that is, here, beside him, beside him Červiček, laugh, and the man finally falls but then he gets up and disappears into the forest. He tries to do it without anyone seeing him, right away you can tell. Cherwuish knows all too well how the fox flees unnoticed, taking cover, a slight rustling of tall grasses that might be stirred by a breath of wind, that fellow too would succeed, he’s sprightly and nimble as a deer even though he has a big belly, but earlier, when they put that dense forest back up, well, that fallen curtain, they made a great big slash, a nice luminous hole through which you can see everything, even the dead man sneaking away, it’s not all that strange after all, the dead are never still, they roam through forests and curtains, sometimes you see them and sometimes you don’t.
Now they’re singing and dancing and laughing there in the middle, but not about him, Cherwuish, like the people on the street many times. They’re not laughing at anyone in particular, but at everyone and everything, even themselves, so they can also laugh at him, he isn’t offended, children laugh too, but well-meaningly, delightedly. Someone shouts out, they all shout, the one drinking a huge tankard of beer shouts something and his friend repeats Hupp Cossack! as those standing around dance even more wildly, chasing one of the men, it’s a hunt, that’s the way the Chamacoco hunt Pïtínno, the anteater bear. Hupp Cossack! Hupp Cossack! and then Červiček joins the fray, it’s not fair, so many against one, even with animals one fights according to the rules, like his friend with the jaguar. He snatches a spear from one of them, a knife from another, he even knocks someone to the ground and ends up on the ground as well, and everyone laughs but contentedly, happily, like friends, even the bear laughs, then the big man carrying the tankard of beer around gets into it too and grabs one of the hunters by the coat, turns his pockets inside out and collects a fistful of coins, the Chamacoco don’t have coins and that’s why they don’t swindle anyone.
The bear, exhausted, sits down and takes off his fur coat, the hunters sit down next to him, almost all of them, two or three remain in the lit clearing and now more arrive, there is also a woman, they’re holding a belt, one end in her hand and the other held by a man, it must be a wedding ceremony, very similar to that of the Chamacoco. It’s logical, given that marriage is the same all over and no matter where you go, you end up doing the same things that men, women, gods and even the animals in the forest like so much.
Červiček, excited, jumps back into things again; he’s happy about the dust, the smell of sweaty armpits, the bare feet. Bodies have a good smell, it doesn’t matter much whether you rub them with scented guaiacum powder or papyrus oil or uruciú red or nothing at all, skin and life and leaping around are all it takes to give off the strong, intoxicating smell of a damp forest. The woman is beautiful, two papayas spill out from a white shirt which is held closed by a button, one of those buttons that he is so good at filching from people’s clothing without them noticing, but the pale face with its prominent cheekbones and pronounced lips could be the moon so propitious to the Chamacoco, a moon not quite full due to the dark hat concealing her hair. Women here are not allowed to show their hair, how ridiculous, but during the dance, at a certain point, the hat falls off and nobody cares, her long loose hair tumbles over her cheeks and down her neck, a light mist obscures part of the moon, between the veiled cheeks the prominent mouth is an ardent, eager smile, even Cherwuish grabs the belt and circles round and round.
Far from what was written by the learned professor, whom Karel sneers at proclaiming: “Dramatic encounter-clash between different cultures, the man—who? Červiček? or any Praguer who sees him on the street?—loses his identity and his place in life because elements and values which are foreign to him are introduced into his worldview.” Who is foreign to whom? Each of us to each of us, of course, that’s life, what can you do, it’s not as if we invented it, but this also holds true for two people who were both born on Via Židovská and attended the same cheder, or two people who were married in the cathedral of San Vito or in Town Hall, it depends, each of us has his own witch doctor whom he prefers when he needs a benediction.
Among the people dancing, one of them—he must be the tribe’s medicine man—has placed a bottle on his head, the others do the same as they go on dancing, crouching nearly to the ground and kicking out their legs. The bottles fall with a clatter, each shattering amid the applause and drawn out singing of the one who was just balancing it. Červiček feels as if he is among the Chamacoco. There is only a small commotion when he sticks his hand into the dancer’s neckline and deftly undoes the button. This too is a fabrication on the part of Karel, who was well aware of Cherwuish’s mania for collecting buttons, deftly removing them with a knife or with his hands. There is the famous incident with the general, in fact, from whose full dress uniform he had snatched a gold button without him even noticing, and it’s true that misunderstandings sometimes arose when he went to rip the buttons off a woman’s blouse or skirt. In any case not with the lady of that evening, the famous Tschissik, because she, according to Karel, had taken it off herself, giving it to Cherwuish. Regardless . . .
