The Blind Owl and Other Stories Read online

  I had many times reflected on the fact of death and on the decomposition of the component parts of my body, so that this idea had ceased to frighten me. On the contrary, I genuinely longed to pass into oblivion and non-being. The only thing I feared was that the atoms of my body should later go to make up the bodies of rabble-men. This thought was unbearable to me. There were times when I wished I could be endowed after death with large hands with long, sensitive fingers: I would carefully collect together all the atoms of my body and hold them tightly in my hands to prevent them, my property, from passing into the bodies of rabble-men.

  Sometimes I imagined that the visions I saw were those which appeared to everyone who was at the point of death. All anxiety, awe, fear and will to live had subsided within me and my renunciation of the religious beliefs which had been inculcated into me in my childhood had given me an extraordinary inner tranquillity. What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death. The thought of an afterlife frightened and fatigued me. I had never been able to adapt myself to the world in which I was now living. Of what use would another world be to me? I felt that this world had not been made for me but for a tribe of brazen, money-grubbing, blustering louts, sellers of conscience, hungry of eye and heart – for people, in fact, who had been created in its own likeness and who fawned and grovelled before the mighty of earth and heaven as the hungry dog outside the butcher’s shop wagged his tail in the hope of receiving a fragment of offal. The thought of an afterlife frightened and fatigued me. No, I had no desire to see all these loathsome worlds peopled with repulsive faces. Was God such a parvenu that He insisted on my looking over His collection of worlds? I must speak as I think. If I had to go through another life, then I hoped that my mind and senses would be numb. In that event I could exist with effort and weariness. I would live my life in the shadow of the columns of some lingam temple. I would retire into some corner where the light of the sun would never strike my eyes and the words of men and the noise of life never grate upon my ears.

  I retired as deep as I could into the depths of my own being like an animal that hides itself in a cave in the wintertime. I heard other people’s voices with my ears; my own I heard in my throat. The solitude that surrounded me was like the deep, dense night of eternity, that night of dense, clinging, contagious darkness which awaits the moment when it will descend upon silent cities full of dreams of lust and rancour. From the viewpoint of this throat with which I had identified myself I was nothing more than an insane abstract mathematical demonstration. The pressure which, in the act of procreation, holds together two people who are striving to escape from their solitude is the result of this same streak of madness which exists in every person, mingled with regret at the thought that he is slowly sliding towards the abyss of death…

  Only death does not lie.

  The presence of death annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of death and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life. In the midst of life he calls us and summons us to him. At an age when we have not yet learnt the language of men, if at times we pause in our play it is that we may listen to the voice of death… Throughout our life death is beckoning to us. Has it not happened to everyone suddenly, without reason, to be plunged into thought and to remain immersed so deeply in it as to lose consciousness of time and place and the working of his own mind? At such times one has to make an effort in order to perceive and recognize again the phenomenal world in which men live. One has been listening to the voice of death.

  Lying in this damp, sweaty bed, as my eyelids grew heavy and I longed to surrender myself to non-being and everlasting night, I felt that my lost memories and forgotten fears were all coming to life again: fear lest the feathers in my pillow should turn into dagger blades or the buttons on my coat expand to the size of millstones; fear lest the breadcrumbs that fell to the floor should shatter into fragments like pieces of glass; apprehension lest the oil in the lamp should spill during my sleep and set fire to the whole city; anxiety lest the paws of the dog outside the butcher’s shop should ring like horses’ hoofs as they struck the ground; dread lest the old odds-and-ends man sitting behind his wares should burst into laughter and be unable to stop; fear lest the worms in the foot bath by the tank in our courtyard should turn into Indian serpents; fear lest my bedclothes should turn into a hinged gravestone above me and the marble teeth should lock, preventing me from ever escaping; panic fear lest I should suddenly lose the faculty of speech and, however much I might try to call out, nobody should ever come to my aid…

  I used to try to recall the days of my childhood but when I succeeded in doing so and experienced that time again it was as grim and painful as the present.

  Other things which brought their contribution of anxiety and fear were my coughing, which sounded like that of the gaunt, black horses in front of the butcher’s shop; my spitting, and the fear lest the phlegm should some day reveal a streak of blood, the tepid, salty liquid which rises from the depths of the body, the juice of life, which we must vomit up in the end; and the continuous menace of death, which smashes for ever the fabric of the mind and passes on.

  Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realize one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears.

  The walls of my room must have contained some virus that poisoned all my thoughts. I felt sure that before me some murderer, some diseased madman, had lived in it. Not only the walls of the room itself, but the view from the window, the butcher, the old odds-and-ends man, my nurse, the bitch and everyone whom I used to see, even the bowl from which I ate my barley broth and the clothes that I wore – all these had conspired together to engender such thoughts in my brain.

  A few nights ago when I took off my clothes in a cubicle at the bathhouse my thoughts took a new direction. As the attendant poured water over my head I felt as though my black thoughts were being washed away. I observed my shadow on the steamy wall of the bathhouse. I saw that I was as frail and thin as I had been ten years earlier, when I was a child. I remembered distinctly that my shadow had fallen then in just the same way on the wet wall of the bathhouse. I looked down at my body. There was something lascivious and yet hopeless in the look of my thighs, calves and loins. Their shadow too had not changed since ten years before, when I was only a child. I felt that my whole life had passed without purpose or meaning like the flickering shadows on the bathhouse wall. Other people were massive, solid, thick-necked. Doubtless the shadows they cast on the steamy wall of the bathhouse were bigger and denser and left their imprint for some moments after they had gone, whereas mine was effaced instantaneously. When I had finished dressing after the bath my gestures and thoughts seemed to change again. It was as though I had entered a different world, as though I had been born again in the old world that I detested. At all events I could say that I had acquired a new life, for it seemed a miracle to me that I had not dissolved in the bath like a lump of salt.

  My life appeared to me just as strange, as unnatural, as in­explicable, as the picture on the pen case that I am using this moment as I write. I feel that the design on the lid of this pen case must have been drawn by an artist in the grip of some mad obsession. Often when my eye lights on this picture it strikes me as somehow familiar. Perhaps this picture is the reason why… Perhaps it is this picture that impels me to write. It represent a cypress tree at the foot of which is squatting a bent old man like an Indian fakir. He has a long cloak wrapped about him and he is wearing a turban on his head. The index finger of his left hand is
pressed to his lips in a gesture of surprise. Before him a girl in a long black dress is dancing. Her movements are not those of ordinary people – she could be Bugam Dasi. She is holding a flower of morning glory in her hand. Between them runs a little stream.

  I was sitting beside my opium brazier. All my dark thoughts had dissolved and vanished in the subtle heavenly smoke. My body was meditating, my body was dreaming and gliding through space. It seemed to have been released from the burden and contamination of the lower air and to be soaring in an unknown world of strange colours and shapes. The opium had breathed its vegetable soul, its sluggish, vegetable soul, into my frame, and I lived and moved in a world of vegetable existence. But as, with my cloak over my shoulders, I drowsed beside the leather ground sheet on which my brazier stood, the thought of the old odds-and-ends man for some reason came to my mind. He used to sit huddled up beside his wares in the same posture as I was then in. The thought struck me with horror. I rose, threw off the cloak and stood in front of the mirror. My cheeks were inflamed to the colour of the meat that hangs in front of butchers’ shops. My beard was dishevelled. And yet there was something immaterial, something fascinating, in the reflection I saw. The eyes wore an expression of weariness and suffering like those of a sick child. It was as though everything that was heavy, earthy and human in me had melted away. I was pleased with my face. I inspired in myself a certain voluptuous satisfaction. As I looked into the mirror I said to myself, “Your pain is so profound that it has settled in the depths of your eyes… and, if you weep, the tears will come from the very depths of your eyes or they will not come at all.” Then I said, “You are a fool. Why don’t you put an end to yourself here and now? What are you waiting for? What have you to hope for now? Have you forgotten the bottle of wine in the closet? One gulp, and there’s an end of everything… Fool!… You are a fool!… Here I am, talking to the air!”

  The thoughts which came into my mind were unrelated to one another. I could hear my voice in my throat but I could not grasp the meaning of the words. The sounds were mingled in my brain with other sounds. My fingers seemed bigger than normal, as always when the fever was on me. My eyelids felt heavy, my lips had grown thick. I turned round and saw my nurse standing in the doorway. I burst out laughing. My nurse’s face was motionless. Her lustreless eyes were fixed on me but they were empty of surprise, irritation or sadness. Generally speaking, it is ordinary stupid conduct that makes one laugh, but this laughter of mine arose from a deeper cause. The vast stupidity that I saw before me was part of the general inability of mankind to unravel the central problems of existence and that thing which for her was shrouded in impenetrable darkness was a gesture of death itself.

  She took the brazier and walked with deliberation out of the room. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. My hands were covered with white flecks. I leant against the wall, pressing my head to the bricks, and began to feel better. After a little I murmured the words of a song which I had heard somewhere or other:

  Come, let us go and drink wine;

  Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey.

  If we do not drink now, when should we drink?

  When the crisis was coming upon me I could always feel its approach in advance and was filled with an extraordinary uneasiness and depression as though a cord had been tied tightly around my heart. My mood was like the weather before the storm breaks. At such times the real world receded from me and I lived in a radiant world incalculably remote from that of earth.

  Then I was afraid of myself and of everyone else. I suppose this condition of mine was due to my illness, which had sapped my mental strength. The sight of the old odds-and-ends man and the butcher through the window filled me with fear. There was something frightening in their gestures and in their faces. My nurse told me a frightful thing. She swore by all the prophets that she had seen the odds-and-ends man come to my wife’s room during the night and that from behind the door she had heard the bitch say to him, “Take your scarf off.” It does not bear thinking of. Two or three days ago when I shrieked out and my wife came and stood in the doorway, I saw, I saw with my own eyes, that her lips bore the imprint of the old man’s dirty, yellow, decayed teeth, between which he used to recite the Arabic verses of the Koran. And, now I came to think of it, why was it this man had been hanging about outside our house ever since I had got married? Was he one of the bitch’s lovers? I remember I went over that same day to where the old man was sitting beside his wares and asked him how much he wanted for his jar. He looked at me over the folds of the scarf that muffled his face. Two decayed teeth emerged from under the harelip and he burst into laughter. It was a grating, hollow laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one’s body stand on end. He said, “Do you usually buy things without looking at them? This jar’s not worth bothering about. Take it, young man. Hope it brings you luck.” I put my hand into my pocket and took out two dirhems and four peshiz* which I laid on the corner of the canvas sheet. He burst into laughter again. It was a grating laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one’s body stand on end. I could have sunk into the ground with shame. I covered my face with my hands and walked back to the house.

  From all the articles laid out before him came a rusty smell as of dirty discarded objects which life had rejected. Perhaps his aim was to show people the discarded things of life and to draw attention to them. After all, was he not old and discarded himself? All the articles in his collection were dead, dirty and unserviceable. But what a stubborn life was in them and what significance there was in their forms! These dead objects left a far deeper imprint upon my mind than living people could ever have done.

  But Nanny had told me this story about him and had passed it on to everyone else… With a dirty beggar! My nurse told me that my wife’s bed had become infested with lice and she had gone to the baths. I wonder how her shadow looked on the steamy wall of the bathhouse. No doubt it was a voluptuous shadow with plenty of self-confidence. All things considered, my wife’s taste in men did not offend me this time. The old odds-and-ends man was not a commonplace, flat, insipid creature like the stud males that stupid randy women usually fall for. The old man with his ailments, with the rind of misfortune that encrusted him, and the misery that emanated from him was, probably without realizing it himself, a kind of small-scale exhibition organized by God for the edification of mankind. As he sat there with his squalid collection of wares on the ground in front of him, he was a sample and a personification of the whole creation.

  Yes, I had seen on my wife’s face the mark of the two dirty, decayed teeth between which he used to recite the Arabic verses of the Koran. This was the same wife who would not let me come near her, who scorned me, and whom I loved in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that she had never once allowed me to kiss her on the lips.

  The sun was setting. From somewhere came the high-pitched, plaintive sound of a kettle drum. It was a sound expressive of entreaty and supplication, which awoke in me all my ancestral superstitions and, with them, my fear of the dark. The crisis, the approach of which I had felt in advance and which I was expecting from moment to moment, came upon me. My whole body was filled with burning heat and I felt that I was suffocating. I collapsed onto my bed and shut my eyes. It seemed to me in my feverish condition that everything had expanded and had lost all distinctness of outline. The ceiling, instead of sinking, had risen. I felt oppressed by the weight of my clothes. For no reason I stood up and sat down again upon my bed, murmuring to myself, “The thing has reached the limit… This is beyond endurance…” Then I stopped abruptly. After a little I began again slowly and distinctly, in an ironical tone of voice: “The thing has…” I stopped, and added, “I am a fool.” I paid no attention to the meaning of the words I uttered. I was merely amusing myself with the vibration of my voice in the air. Perhaps I was talking to my shadow in order to dispel my loneliness.

  And then I saw an incredible thing. The door opened and the bitch came into the
room. So then, she used to think of me at times and in spite of everything I still had reason to feel grateful to her. She knew that I was still alive, that I was suffering, that I was slowly dying. In spite of everything I still had reason to feel grateful to her. I only wondered whether she knew that I was dying because of her. If she did know that I would die perfectly happy. At that moment I was the happiest man on the face of the earth. Merely by coming into the room the bitch had driven away all my evil thoughts. Some sort of radiation emanated from her, from her movements, and brought me relief. On this occasion she was in better health than when I had last seen her. She was plump and comfortable-looking. She had on a cloak of Tus material. Her eyebrows were plucked and were stained with indigo. She was wearing a beauty spot and her face was made up with rouge, ceruse and kohl. In a word she was turned out to perfection. She appeared to be well pleased with life. She was unconsciously holding the index finger of her left hand to her lips. Was this the same graceful creature, was this the slim, ethereal girl who, in a black pleated dress, had played hide-and-seek with me on the bank of the Suran, the unconstrained, childlike, frail girl whose ankles, appearing from under her skirt, had so excited me? Until this moment, when I had looked at her I had not seen her as she really was. Now it was as though a veil had fallen from my eyes. For some reason the thought of the sheep hanging by the door of the butcher’s shop occurred to me. She had become for me the equivalent of a lump of butcher’s meat. Her old enchantment had gone. She had become a comfortable, solid woman with a head full of commonplace, practical ideas – a genuine woman. I realized with affright that my wife was now a grown-up while I had remained a child. I actually felt ashamed in her presence, under her gaze. This woman who yielded her body to everyone but me while I consoled myself with fanciful memories of her childhood, when her face was simple and innocent and wore a dreamy, fleeting expression, this woman whose face still bore the tooth-marks of the old odds-and-ends man in the square – no, this was not the same person as I had known.