Phantoms of the Evening

What is it that makes the evening more provoking to imagination, to forebodings, and to feeling? Why do the buildings and trees grow taller in it until they almost touch the clouds, why do the lines and shadows stretch out, and the senses grow keener, and thoughts turn half-fevered?

I propped my head upon my hand and assumed the posture of one tasting rest after the day's toil. But how can there be rest, when burdens have settled upon my head under whose weight I keep sinking? Here I am closing my eyes — but how am I to sleep with these phantasms clinging to my mind, insisting on appearing and forcing me to review them... The bitter memories that prick my soul like needles and float, one after another, upon the page of my memory... In vain I try to push them aside. They squat there like wailing-women, look at me with two frozen eyes, and draw from their breast a book whose pages they read one by one. How many are these pages... a piece of music without end... the music of hope and disappointment, struggle and pain, love and aversion, envy and hatred, injustice and selfishness; and there pass before me faces laughing, scowling, mocking, dissembling, carrying in their folds a thousand meanings and speaking with a thousand tongues.

And there rings in my ear a sharp voice with an affected, graceless tone that enters the ear like spears. I turn my eyes to the owner of the voice: smiles have so wrung her face that the eyes have drowned in it, the nose has shrunk, the cheeks have bunched up, and cross-lines run over it from side to side.

The owner of the face is smiling at a group of women gathered in a circle around the food, and it seems to me she has turned entirely into a smile: she watches for their needs so as to anticipate them, anticipates their words so as to agree with them, is at a loss how to win their favor, so she stutters and stammers; then inspiration comes to her, and she tosses out a joke — or what she supposes is a joke — and laughs while they do not laugh. Before them she feels lowly and small despite the greatness of her bulk; she shrinks into an attitude of submissiveness, gripped by anxiety and the fear that she may have angered them. But the great lady among them eyes her from on high with a look of patronage and approval, and her merriment returns, and a greedy glitter spreads in her eyes... Where have I seen the like of these two greedy eyes?... I remembered. They are the eyes of the driver who piled the passengers into his car as into a tin of sardines — fifteen of them instead of eight — glancing right and left like one wary of a policeman's signal; then his car shoots off at a mad speed and his mouth breaks into a broad, wide laugh, expressing his delight at fortune's help and his satisfaction with the cleverness and heroism he is displaying.

And another face looks in upon me. Not the face wrung by artificial smiles, nor the one convulsed by greedy laughter. It is a face over which a cloud of melancholy has passed; the eyes stand out in it in a kind of half-doze behind which sickly dreams lie hidden — a half-doze that deceives the beholder into thinking its owner lowers her eyes in modesty, or averts her gaze in gentleness and softness. But were he to watch her stretching her glances out stealthily from behind the curtain of the lids, he would read in her pale face deceit and guile, and glimpse in her sunken eyes the flame of malice and cunning.

Is that another face looking in from the window? I must flee from this atmosphere... I am nearly suffocating. I rise suddenly, push the door with my hand, and hurry out into the open... There is no rest but in the bosom of nature. There I shall find forgetfulness. There the faces will leave me. I stand on the balcony and open my mouth, my breast, and my heart to the evening breeze and the coolness of the twilight hour, and move my gaze between the glitter of the stars and the blaze of the electric lights. And I sink into a moment of relief and oblivion. But... what is this monotonous sound piercing the veil of night? A discordant, jarring note that wakens all the painful sensations I try to bury under the membranes of forgetfulness... the voice of a night beggar who has occupied the opposite sidewalk and made it the seat of his trade. He has glued himself to the wall, his arm outstretched, frozen like a mummy before the movement of the passers-by returning to their homes or making their way to their amusements. His tongue runs on in ceaseless motion, repeating a phrase in which are gathered servility, abjectness, flattery, greed, and voracity; and through his face the faces came back to me — scowling, laughing, mocking, dissembling, expressing a thousand meanings and speaking without any tongue.

And I fled from the balcony and found in my room a refuge in which to bury the phantoms of the evening. But when my face sank between the pillows and the covers, one voice rose up from among the voices. The voice rose, feminine, reproachful, sarcastic. What is the use? Are you not one of them? Are you not among those who live by flattery and appeasement, by feigned contentment, by keeping silent about injustice, by bearing servitude and bowing beneath its yoke? What difference is there between the wronger and the wronged? Is not shutting one's eyes to evil like falling into it?