Bacacay Page 8

  “No,” said the toothless marchioness, chewing the vegetable with her gums, “no, this isn’t the taste of meat. Mmm, mmm . . . this isn’t the taste of meat; rather—comment dirais-je—it ’s exceptionally refreshing—it must contain a great number of vitamins.”

  “There’s something peppery,” declared the baron, discreetly taking a second helping. “Something delicately peppery—mmm, mmm—but meatless,” he added hurriedly, “decidedly vegetarian, peppery and cauliflowerish. One can rely on my palate, countess; in questions of taste I am a second Pythia!”

  But the countess did not calm herself till the cook appeared—a long, skinny, ruddy individual with a cross-eyed gaze—and swore on the shade of his late wife that the cauliflower was pure and spotless.

  “All cooks are like that!” I said sympathetically, and also took more of the popular dish (though I still could not see anything exceptional in it). “Oh, cooks have to be watched!” (I don’t know if remarks of this kind were sufficiently tactful, but I was overcome by a euphoria light as champagne bubbles.) “The cook in that hat of his and his white apron!”

  “Philip looks so good-hearted,” said the countess with a faint note of bitterness and mute resentment, reaching for the melted butter.

  “Good-hearted, good-hearted—no doubt,” I said, sticking to my ground with perhaps too much stubbornness. “Nevertheless, a cook . . . . A cook, ladies and gentlemen, is a man of the common people, homo vulgaris, whose task is to prepare elegant, refined dishes—in this there lies a dangerous paradox. Elegance being prepared by boorishness—what can that mean?”

  “The aroma is exceptional!” said the countess, breathing in the smell of the cauliflower through flared nostrils (I could not smell it), and not letting the fork out of her hand, but instead continuing to wield it briskly.

  “Exceptional!” repeated the banker, and, so as not to spill butter on himself, he fastened his napkin over his shirt front. “A little more, if I might ask, countess. I’m reviving after that . . . um . . . soup, mmm, mmm . . . Indeed, cooks cannot be trusted. I had a cook who made Italian pasta like no one else—I would simply stuff myself! And imagine if you please, I go into the kitchen one day and in the pot I see my pasta, and it ’s crawling—simply crawling! —and it was worms—mmm, mmm—worms from my garden, which the villain was serving up as pasta! Since then—mmm, mmm—I’ve stopped looking into pots!”

  “Just so,” I said. “Exactly!” And I spoke further about cooks, saying that they were butchers, small-time murderers, that it was all the same to them what and how, all that mattered was adding pepper, adding seasoning, making meals—comments that were not entirely appropriate and rather crass, but I had gotten carried away.—“You, countess, who would never touch his head, in the soup—you are ingesting his hair!” I would have continued in the same vein, since I had suddenly been seized by an access of treacherous eloquence, but all of a sudden—I broke off, for no one was listening to me! The extraordinary sight of the countess, that dogaressa, that patroness, eating in silence and so rapaciously that her ears trembled, terrified and astonished me. The baron accompanied her gallantly, bent over his plate, slurping and smacking his lips with all his might—and the old marchioness did her best to keep up, chewing and swallowing huge mouthfuls, evidently worried that they would take her plate away before she had eaten the best morsels!

  This extraordinary, sudden image of guzzling—I cannot put it otherwise—of such guzzling, in such a house, this awful transition, this diminished seventh chord, shook the foundations of my being to such an extent that I was unable to restrain myself and I sneezed—and since I had left my handkerchief in the pocket of my overcoat, I was obliged to rise from the table and excuse myself. In the hall, falling motionless onto a chair, I attempted to bring my scattered thoughts to equilibrium. Only a person who, like me, had long known the countess, the marchioness, and the baron for their refined gestures, the delicacy, moderation, and subtlety of all their functions, and especially the function of eating, the incomparable nobility of their features—only such a person could appreciate the horrible impression I had received. At the same time I happened to cast a glance at the copy of the Red Herald sticking out of my overcoat pocket, and I noticed a sensational headline:MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF CAULIFLOWER

  along with the subtitle:CAULIFLOWER IN DANGER OF FREEZING

  and an article containing the following text:Stable hand Valentine Cauliflower of the village of Rudka (belonging to the estate of the renowned Countess Pavahoke) reported to the police that his son Bolek, aged 8, has run away from home. According to the police the boy, described as having a snub nose and flaxen hair, ran away because his father was drunk and walloping him with a belt, and his mother was starving him (a common phenomenon, alas, in the current crisis). There is concern that the boy could freeze to death wandering about the fields during the autumn rains.

  “Tsk, tsk,” I tutted, “tsk, tsk . . .” I glanced through the window at the fields, veiled by a thin curtain of rain. And I returned to the dining room, where the huge silver platter contained nothing but the remains of the cauliflower. The countess’ stomach, on the other hand, looked as if she was in her seventh month—the baron’s organ of consumption was virtually dangling in his plate—while the old marchioness was chewing and chewing indefatigably, moving her jaws—truly, I must say it—like a cow! “Divine, marvelous,” they all kept repeating, “delightful, incomparable!” Utterly disconcerted, I carefully and attentively tasted the cauliflower one more time, but I sought in vain for something that would even partially justify the company’s unprecedented demeanor.

  “What is it that you see in this?” I coughed timidly, somewhat abashed.

  “Ha ha ha, he’s asking!” cried the baron loudly, gorging himself and in a capital humor.

  “Can you really not taste it . . . young man?” asked the marchioness, without interrupting her consumption even for a moment.

  “You’re not a gastronome,” declared the baron, as if with a hint of polite sympathy, “whereas I . . . Et moi, je ne suis pas gastronome—je suis gastrosophe!” And did my ears deceive me—or was it the case that as he pronounced that French platitude, something swelled within him, so that he threw out the last word “gastrosophe” from bulging cheeks with an exceptional exaltation he had never shown before?

  “It’s well seasoned, no doubt . . . very tasty, yes, very . . . but . . .” I mumbled.

  “But? . . . But what? So you truly cannot taste it? This delicate freshness, this . . . mmm . . . indefinable firmness, this . . . characteristic pepperiness . . . this scent, this alcohol? But my deah sir” (this was the first time since we had known each other that I had been addressed in the aristocratic manner as ‘deah sir’) “surely you are pretending? Surely you are meahly attempting to alahm us?”

  “Don’t talk to him!” the countess interrupted flirtatiously, convulsed with laughter. “Don’t talk to him! After all, he’ll never understand!”

  “Style, young man, is imbibed with one’s mother’s milk,” the marchioness lisped benevolently, reminding me, it seemed, that my mother’s maiden name was Turky—may she rest in peace!

  And everyone abandoned the continuation of the dinner and dragged their full stomachs into the gilded Louis XVI boudoir, where they sprawled in the softest armchairs they could find and began laughing—and there was no doubt whatsoever it was me they were laughing at, just as if I had given them cause for especial merriment. I had long rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy at tea parties and benefit concerts—but, by my word of honor, I had never seen such behavior, nor such an abrupt change, such a transformation unmotivated by anything at all. Not knowing whether to sit or stand, whether to be serious or rather faire bonne mine à mauvais jeu and give a foolish smile, I tried vaguely and timidly to return to Arcadia, that is, to the pumpkin soup:

  Returning to the matter of Beauty . . .

  “Enough, enough!” exclaimed Baron de Apfelbaum, holding his hands over his ears. “W
hat a tedious fellow! Now it’s time to have fun! S’encanailler! I’ll sing you something better! From an operetta!”This greenhorn is a funny bird!

  He doesn’t understand a word!

  I’ll teach him to know the things he should:

  What’s beautiful’s not what’s beautiful, what’s beautiful is what

  tastes good.

  Taste! Taste! Good taste!

  That’s where Beauty’s based!

  “Bravo!” cried the countess, and the marchioness chimed in, baring her gums in a old woman’s giggle: “Bravo! Cocasse! Charmant! ”

  “But it seems to me . . . that this . . . that this is not right . . .” I stuttered, yet my stupefied gaze was thoroughly out of keeping with my formal attire.

  “We aristocrats”—the marchioness leaned over to me good-naturedly —“in our innermost circle profess a great freedom of manners; at such times, as you have heard, we occasionally even use coarse expressions and we can be frivolous, often even vulgar in our own way. But there is no need to be appalled! You must get used to us!”

  “We’re not so feahful,” added the baron patronizingly, “though our vulgahness is hahder to come to terms with than our refinement!”

  “No, we are not fearful!” squealed the countess. “We won’t eat anyone alive!”

  “We won’t eat anyone, apart from . . .”

  “Apaht from . . . !”

  “Fi donc, ha ha ha,” they burst out laughing, throwing their embroidered cushions in the air, and the countess sang:It must be faced—

  Everything’s a matter of taste!

  Everything’s a matter of style!

  For a lobster to be good you have to torture it,

  For a turkey to be fat it has to hurt a bit.

  D’you know the taste of my lips awhile?

  Whose taste from ours diverges thus

  Will never be on first-name terms with us!

  “Oh, but”—I whispered—“Countess . . . green peas, carrots, celery, cabbage . . .”

  “Cauliflower!” added the baron, seized by a suspicious cough.

  “Exactly!” I said in total confusion. “Exactly! . . . Cauliflower! . . . Cauliflower ... fasting . . . vegetarian vegetables . . .”

  “Well, what about the cauliflower—did you like it? Eh? Was it good? Eh? I expect you eventually understood the taste of the cauliflower?” What a tone of voice! The condescension, the barely audible but menacing lordly impatience in that tone! I began to stammer—I didn’t know what to reply—how on earth could I deny it—yet how could I confirm it?—and then (oh, I would never have believed that noble, humanitarian individual, that poetical brother was so capable of giving one to understand that lordly favors are fickle)—then, leaning back in his armchair and stroking his long, slim leg, inherited from Duchess Pstryczyńska, he said to the ladies in a tone that literally destroyed me: “Really, my deah countess, it’s hahdly worthwhile inviting to dinnah individuals whose taste has nevah risen beyond the uttahly primitive!”

  And, paying me no more heed, they began to banter amongst themselves, their glasses in their hands, in such a way that I immediately became a quantité négligeable,—about “Alice” and her caprices, about “Gabie” and “Bubie,” about princess “Mary,” about some “Pheasants” or other, about one fellow who is awful and another woman who is vraiment impossible. They exchanged anecdotes and gossip, in a few words, in a higher language, with the aid of expressions such as “crazy,” “fantastic,” “mahvelous,” “fahcical,” and even frequently resorting to crude curses such as “bothah!” or “buggah!” till it appeared that this sort of conversation represented the apogee of human ability, while I with my Beauty, my humanity and all the topics of the thinking reed had in some inexplicable fashion been pushed aside like a useless piece of furniture, and had no reason to open my mouth. They were also telling in a few words some aristocratic jokes that caused extraordinary jollity, but at which I—who did not know their genealogy —could barely force myself to smile. Dear Lord, what could have happened?! What a cruel and sudden transformation! Why were they one way over the pumpkin soup, and now completely different? Was it really with them that not so long ago I had been disseminating humanitarian brilliance in the utmost harmony—moments before, over the pumpkin soup? So where had it come from so suddenly and without any visible cause—all this disastrous ingredient, all this alienness and iciness, this ironic humor, this incomprehensible inclination to painful mockery of appearance itself, this distance, this remoteness, rendering them quite unapproachable! I was unable to explain such a metamorphosis—and the marchioness’ mention of “our circle” brought to my mind all those awful things that were said in my own middle-class sphere and to which I never lent any credence—about the double face of the aristocracy and its inner life, locked away from undesirable eyes.

  No longer able to tolerate my own silence—which with every moment was thrusting me deeper into a terrible abyss—I finally said to the countess out of the blue, like a defunct echo of the past:

  “I’m sorry to interrupt . . . Countess, you promised that you would dedicate to me your triolets: ‘Musings of my Soul.’”

  “How ’s that?” she asked, not having heard me, and in high spirits. “What was that? You said something?”

  “I’m terribly sorry—you promised, Countess, that you would dedicate to me your work entitled ‘Musings of my Soul.’”

  “Ah, yes, that’s right,” replied the countess absently, but with her usual courtesy (her usual courtesy? Or was it a different kind? Was it a new kind, to the extent that my cheek, truly without my conscious participation, flushed red)—and taking a small whitebound volume from a side table, she carelessly wrote a few courteous words on the title page and signed herself:

  Countess Havapoke.

  “But Countess,” I cried, pained to see her historic name distorted so—“it’s Pavahoke.”

  “How absentminded of me!” exclaimed the countess amid the general jollity. “How absentminded of me!” Yet I did not feel like laughing. “Tsk, tsk,” I almost tutted again. The countess was laughing loudly and proudly—but at the same time her slim, well-bred leg was describing flourishes on the carpet in an exceptionally titillating and seductive manner, as if relishing the slenderness of its own fetlock—first to the left, then to the right, or in a circle; the baron was leaning forward in his armchair and looked as if he were on the point of uttering some noteworthy bon mot—but his little ear, characteristic of the Pstryczyński dukes, was even littler than usual, while his fingers slipped a single grape between his lips. The marchioness was sitting with her customary elegance—but her long, thin grande dame’s neck seemed to have become even more elongated, and with its slightly withered surface seemed to be squinting in my direction. And I must add a not insignificant detail: outside, the rain was being carried by the wind and kept lashing against the window panes like tiny whips.

  It may have been that I took my own rapid and undeserved downfall too much to heart—it may also have been that under its influence I yielded to the kind of persecution complex suffered by an individual of the lower spheres admitted to society; in addition, certain chance relations, certain, let us say, analogies stimulated my sensitivities—I have no wish to deny it, this may have been . . . . But suddenly something utterly extraordinary had drifted from them in my direction! And I do not deny that the refinement, subtlety, courtesy, and elegance continued to be refined, subtle, courteous, and elegant, as much as could be, without a doubt—but at the same time they were so strangulating I was tempted to believe that all those excellent and humanitarian qualities had become enraged, as if a bumblebee had stung them! What was more, it suddenly seemed to me (this was undeniably the effect of the slim leg, the little ear, and the neck) that in not looking, in their lordly disregard, they nevertheless saw my confusion and could not get enough of it! And at the same time I was struck by the suspicion that Havapoke . . . that Havapoke was not necessarily a mere lapsus linguae, that in a word
, if I am expressing myself clearly, Havapoke meant have a poke! Have a poke? Have a poke in the countess? Yes, yes, the gleaming toes of her patent-leather shoes confirmed me even more in this terrifying conviction!—it seemed they were still surreptitiously splitting their sides at the fact that I had been unable to grasp the taste of the cauliflower—that for me the cauliflower had been an ordinary vegetable—they were surreptitiously splitting their sides at this, and they were preparing to do so aloud the moment I gave voice to the emotions that were agitating me. Yes, yes—they were disregarding, not noticing, and at the same time, on the side, with various aristocratic parts of the body, a slim leg, an ear, a thin neck, they were provoking and tempting one to break the seal of the secret.