August

I

In July, my father left to take the waters, abandoning my mother, my older brother, and me as prey to the dazzling summer days that were white with heat. Dazed by the light, we browsed the great book of vacation, whose every page was on fire from the radiance and which contained in its depths the languorous sweet flesh of golden pears.

Adela would come back on those luminous mornings like Pomona from the fire of the blazing day, pouring from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun — the glistening sweet cherries, full of water beneath their transparent skin; the mysterious dark sour cherries, whose aroma far exceeded their flavor; apricots whose golden flesh held the core of long afternoons; and next to this pure poetry of fruit she would unload racks of flesh with their keyboards of veal ribs, swollen with energy and nourishment; seaweeds of vegetables that resembled slaughtered cephalopods and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner with a taste as yet unformed and bland, the vegetative, telluric ingredients of dinner with a smell both wild and redolent of the field.

Every day, the great summer passed in its entirety through the dark apartment on the second floor of the apartment house on the market square: the silence of shimmering rings of air, squares of radiance dreaming their passionate dreams on the floor, the melody of a barrel organ drawn from the day's deepest golden vein, two or three measures of a refrain played over and over again on a piano somewhere, fainting away in the sunshine on the white sidewalks, lost in the fiery depths of the day. The housework done, Adela would draw the linen drapes, releasing shade into the room. Then the colors dropped an octave lower, the room filled with shade as if submerged in the light of ocean depths and was reflected even more dimly in the green mirrors, and all the sweltering heat of the day was breathing on the drapes, which were billowing gently with noon-hour dreams.

On Saturday afternoons Mother and I would go for a walk. From the semidarkness of the vestibule one stepped immediately into the sunny bath of the day. The people walking past, wading in gold, had their eyes half closed from the heat, as if glued together with honey, and their retracted upper lips exposed their gums and teeth. And everyone wading in this golden day had that grimace of scorching heat as if the sun had placed upon its followers one and the same mask — the golden mask of the sunshine brotherhood; and all who walked along the streets today, who met one another and passed by, old men and youths, children and women, exchanged greetings in passing with that mask painted in thick golden paint on their face, grinned that Bacchic grimace at one another — the barbaric mask of a pagan cult.

The market square was empty and yellow from the heat, swept clean of dust by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias that had grown out of the golden square's emptiness were seething above it with their bright foliage, bouquets of nobly articulated green filigrees, like the trees in old Gobelins tapestries. The trees appeared to be commanding a gale, theatrically agitating their crowns to demonstrate in their pathetic contortions the elegance of their leafy fans with their silvery underbellies like the furs of noble foxes. The old houses, polished by the winds of many days, took on the reflected colors of the great atmosphere, the echoes and memories of hues diffused in the depths of the colorful weather. It seemed that entire generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers chipping off the mildew of plaster from old facades) were hammering away at the deceitful glaze, extracting from one day to the next the ever more clearly authentic countenance of the houses, the physiognomy of the fate and life that formed them from inside. Now the windows, blinded by the radiance of the empty square, were sleeping; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; the open vestibules smelled of coolness and wine.

A throng of urchins who had survived the fiery broom of sweltering heat in a corner of the market square besieged a section of a wall, throwing buttons and coins at it to test it, as if it were possible to read from the horoscope of those metal disks the true secret of a wall etched with the hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks. In any event, the market square was empty. One expected the Good Samaritan's donkey, led by the bridle, to arrive under the shade of the swaying acacias at the vaulted entranceway with its wine merchant's barrels and two servants to cautiously lower the sick man from the burning saddle in order to carry him carefully up the cool stairs to the floor above, fragrant with the Sabbath.

So, Mother and I strolled down the two sunny sides of the market square, leading our broken shadows across all the houses as if across piano keys. The pavement squares passed slowly under our soft, flat steps — some of them pale pink, like human skin, others golden and dark blue, all of them flat, warm, and velvety in the sunshine like the faces of sundials trampled by feet until they are unrecognizable, unto blissful nothingness.

Until finally, at the corner of Stryjska Street, we entered the shade of the apothecary shop. A large show globe with raspberry juice in the broad apothecary window symbolized the coolness of the balms with which all suffering could be soothed there. A couple of houses more and the street could no longer maintain its urban decorum, like a fellow who, returning to his native village, sheds his city elegance along the way, slowly changing into a ragged peasant the closer he gets to his village.

The bungalows on the city's outskirts were subsiding along with their windows, sunken in the luxuriant, jumbled blooming of their small gardens. Forgotten by the great day, all the herbs, flowers, and weeds multiplied luxuriantly and silently, gladdened by this pause that they could sleep through outside the margin of time, on the borders of the endless day. An immense sunflower, held up on a powerful stem and sick with elephantiasis, awaited in yellow mourning dress the final, sad days of its life, sagging beneath the excess growth of its monstrous corpulence. But the naive suburban bluebells and the modest little muslin flowers stood there helpless in their starched pink and white little shirts, with no understanding of the sunflower's great tragedy.

II

The tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, wild plants, and...