The Blind Owl By Sadeq Hedayat (Translated by Iraj Bashiri), Chapter 11

 

Chapter 11

 

I was growing inward incessantly; like the animals that hibernate during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples' voices with my ears and my own voice in my throat.

The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with dense, persistent, sticky darkness that waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams.

But I, this throat that I had turned into, was no more than an insane, absolute proof.

The force that, out of loneliness, brings two individuals together to procreate has its roots in this same insanity that exists in everyone and which is mingled with a sense of regret, tending gradually toward death…

Only death does not tell lies!

The presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary.

We are the offspring of death and it is that death delivers us from the tantalizing and fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life.

During the ages that we still do not understand language, when, at times, in the middle of playing we come to a halt, we do so to hear the call of death… throughout our lives, it is the finger of death that points at us.

Has it not happened for someone to suddenly and without a reason experience a moment of deep thought, so deep to lose his bearing in time and space and not know what he is thinking about?

Then, afterwards, he has to make an effort to become reacquainted with his situation and the real world?

This is the call of death.

In this damp bed that smelled of sweat, when my eyelids grew heavy and I was about to surrender to nonexistence and eternal night, all my lost memories and forgotten fears came to life: fear that the feathers in the pillow might turn to blades of daggers, that the button on my bed-clothes might grow as big as a millstone, that the piece of bread that falls to the floor might shatter like a piece of glass.

I was apprehensive that should I fall asleep, the oil in the tallow burner might spill over and cause the whole city to go up in flames. The compulsive thought that the paws of the dog in front of the butcher shop might echo like the sound of the hoofs of a horse.

Nagging fear that the odds-and-ends man sitting at his display might suddenly begin to laugh, to laugh so much that he could no longer control his laughter. Fear that the worm in the footpath of our pond might become an Indian serpent.

Fear that my quilt might turn into a tombstone with hinges that would slide and lock its marble teeth and bury me. I was afraid that I might lose my voice and no matter how much I screamed, nobody would come to my help. I wished to recall my childhood; but when my wish came true and I felt as I did in those days, it was as difficult and painful now as it had been then.

Coughs that resounded like the coughs of lean black packhorses in front of the butcher shop; spitting phlegm with the fear that there might be traces of blood in it.

Blood, that tepid, salty liquid, the essence of life that emerges from the depths of the body and must be vomited, and the constant threat of death that irrevocably tramples over all thought and passes on without any fear or trepidation.

Life, coolly and dispassionately, reveals to each person his own mask, as if everyone carried several faces with him!

Some constantly use only one of these masks. Naturally it becomes dirty and wrinkled. This group is the thrifty group.

The other group saves its masks for their children, and there are still others who constantly change their masks but as soon as they begin to age they realize that that had been their last mask and that, before long, it becomes used and useless. Then their real faces emerge from behind that last mask. I wonder what lethal influence permeated the walls of my room that poisoned my thoughts. I was certain that a condemned criminal, before he was put to death, a chained lunatic, had occupied this room.

Not only the walls of my room, but the view outside, the butcher, the odds-and-ends man, my nanny, that whore and all that I saw, including the bowl from which I ate my soup, and my clothes; all these had conspired to create these thoughts in my mind.

Several nights ago in the cloakroom of the bathhouse, when I took my clothes off, my thoughts took a different turn.

When the bath-attendant poured water on my head, I felt as though my black thoughts were washed away.

 In the bathchamber I saw my shadow on the steamy wall. I noticed myself to be delicate and brittle as I was ten years ago when I was a child. I recalled exactly that my shadow used to fall on the steamy wall just like that. I looked closely at my body. My thigh, my calf and the middle of my body; it was a disappointing, lustful sight.

Their shadows, too, were like they were ten years ago when I was a child. I felt that my entire life has passed me just like the aimless shadow, like flickering meaningless shadow, on the wall of a bathhouse.

But the others were sturdy, heavy and robust.

Perhaps they cast a bigger and denser shadow on the steamy wall of the bathhouse; a shadow that left a trace of its existence for a long time, while my shadow was erased very quickly.

In the cloakroom when I was dressing, my appearance and my thoughts, once again, changed. It was as though I had entered a new world; as if I were reborn in the very world that I hated.

In any event, I had acquired a second life because it was miraculous that I had not dissolved in the bathing pond, like a chunk of salt would.