The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [228]
Sometimes, running over the objects seen in his mind—from the Palace of Exhibitions, two kilometres in circumference, to the pearl in the Bourbon crown, no bigger than a pea—he asked: what is it that I want? And it emerged that he wanted nothing. Nothing gripped his attention, nothing quickened the beating of his heart, or prompted him to action. If, for the price of a walking trip from the cemetery of Montmartre to that of Montparnasse, he was offered the whole of Paris with the condition that it should absorb and stimulate him, he would not have gone those five kilometres. But he walked tens of them daily, only in order to deaden his memories.
Sometimes it seemed to him he was a being which had been born by a strange chapter of accidents, a few days ago, here on the pavements of Paris, and that everything which came into his mind was only an illusion, a dream from some earlier existence which had never really existed. Then he told himself that he was perfectly happy; he rode from one end of Paris to the other and scattered handfuls of louis d’or like a madman. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ he muttered. If only it weren’t for that particle of grief, so minute yet so bitter!
Sometimes, against the background of grey days, when it seemed to him that the whole world of palaces, fountains, sculptures, pictures and machinery was collapsing about him, an incident occurred to remind him he was not an illusion, but a real man, sick of a cancer in his soul. He was once in the Théâtre de Varietés, in the rue Montmartre, a few hundred yards from his hotel. Three farces were to be performed, with an operetta as entr’acte. He went there to stun himself with buffoonery, but almost as soon as the curtain rose, he heard a phrase from the stage, uttered in a tearful voice: ‘A lover can forgive his mistress anything, except another lover…’
‘Sometimes a man has to forgive three or four!’ cried a Frenchman sitting next to him, laughing.
Wokulski felt stifled; the earth seemed to be giving way, the ceiling coming down upon him. He could not stay in the theatre. He rose from his seat which, unfortunately, was in the centre of a row, and drenched in a cold sweat, treading on his neighbours’ toes, he fled from the performance.
He hastened in the direction of the hotel, then went into the first pavement café. He did not recall what he was asked, nor what he replied. All he knew was that he was served with coffee and a carafe of brandy marked with little lines which indicated the contents of a glass. Wokulski drank and thought: ‘Starski is the second lover, Ochocki the third…And Rossi? Rossi, for whom I arranged the claque, and to whom I took that present at the theatre. What was he? You fool—she’s Messalina, if not physically, then morally…And I? I am supposed to be insane about her…I!’
He felt his own rage steadying him: when it was time for the bill, he realised the carafe was empty. ‘All the same, brandy helps…’ he thought. From then on, whenever he was reminded of Warsaw or met a woman with something special in her gestures, dress or looks, he would go into a café and drink a carafe of brandy. Only then did he venture to recall Izabela, and would feel surprised that a man like him should love a woman like that. ‘Yet surely I deserve to be the first and the last,’ he thought. The brandy carafe emptied, he leaned his head in his hand and dozed, to the great amusement of the waiters and customers.
Then he would again visit the Exhibition, the museums, the artesian wells, schools and theatres, for days at a time, not to learn anything, but to deaden his memories.
Slowly, against the background of dull and ill-defined sufferings, a question began to take hold of him: was there some kind of order in the construction of Paris? Was there one object with which it could be compared, a system according to which it could be regulated?