Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [73]
A zone of special privilege was created around Dodo for his own protection, a no-man's-land unaffected by the pressures of life. Everyone outside it was subjected to the buffeting of events, waded in them noisily, let himself be carried away, absorbed, and engrossed; within the zone there was calm and stillness, a caesura in the general tumult.
Thus Dodo lived and grew, and his exceptional destiny grew together with him, taken for granted, without protest from anyone.
Dodo was never given a new suit; he always wore the cast-off clothes of his elder brother. While the life of his peers was divided into phases and periods, marked by notable events, sublime and symbolic moments—birthdays, exams, engagements, promotions—his life passed in a level monotony, undisturbed by anything pleasant or painful, and his future, too, appeared as a completely straight, smooth path without surprises.
It would be wrong to think that Dodo protested inwardly against such a state of affairs. He accepted it with simplicity and without astonishment as a life that was suited to him. He managed his existence and arranged details of it within the confines of that eventless monotony with sober and dignified optimism.
Every morning he went for a walk along three streets and, having come to the end of the third, he returned the same way. Clad in an elegantly cut but rather shabby suit passed on by his brother, he proceeded with unhurried dignity, holding his walking stick behind his back. He might have been a gentleman walking about the city for pleasure. This lack of haste, of any direction or purpose, sometimes became quite embarrassing, for Dodo was inclined to stand gaping in front of shops, outside workshops where people were hard at work, and even joined groups of people engaged in conversation.
His face matured early, and, strange to say, while experience and the trials of living spared the empty inviolability, the strange margin-ality of his life, his features reflected experiences that had passed him by, elements in a biography never to be fulfilled; these experiences, although completely illusory, modeled and sculpted his face into the mask of a great tragedian, which expressed the wisdom and sadness of existence. His eyebrows were arched magnificently, shadowing his large, sad, darkly circled eyes. On both sides of his nose two furrows, marks of spurious suffering and wisdom, ran toward the corners of his lips. The small full mouth was shut tight in pain, and a coquettishly pointed beard on a protruding Bourbon chin gave him the appearance of an elderly bon viveur.
It was inevitable that Dodo's privileged strangeness should be detected by the lurking and always hungry malice of the human race.
Thus, with increased frequency, Dodo would get company on his morning walks: one of the penalties of not being an ordinary person was that these companions were of a special kind, and not colleagues sharing communal interests. They were individuals of much younger years who clung to the dignified and serious Dodo; the conversations they conducted were in a gay and bantering tone that might have been agreeable to Dodo.
As he walked, towering by a head over that merry and carefree gang, he looked like a peripatetic philosopher surrounded by his disciples, and his face, under its mask of seriousness and sadness, broke into frivolous smiles that fought against its usually tragic expression.
Dodo now began to return late from his morning walks, to come home with tousled hair, his clothes in some disarray, but animated and inclined to tease Caroline, a poor cousin given a home by Aunt Retitia.
Fully aware of the fact that the company he was keeping was perhaps of no great consequence, Dodo maintained at home a complete silence on the subject.
Very occasionally, events occurred in his monotonous life that stood out by their importance. Once, having left in the morning, Dodo did not return to lunch. Nor did he return to supper, nor to lunch the following day. Aunt Retitia was in despair. But in the evening of the second day he