Jerzy Pilch - My First Suicide

II

Half a year ago, I was abandoned by the last in a series of women with whom I had intended to live in a house eternally buried in snow, watch films on HBO in the evenings, drink tea with raspberry juice, etc. I will answer the question whether that was the fledgling singer in a lizard-green dress with a warning: never get involved with fledgling artists. If they begin to develop — art will, perhaps, be a winner, but life (especially yours) will be the loser. And if they don’t begin to develop — well, forget about it.

However this may be, feeling an ever more painful void and despair, I plunged once again into the whirlwind of casual comforts. Each time, the desperation of such doings was greater, and their effect — ever more pathetic. I tried to pick up waitresses in bars, saleswomen in stores, I sought out girls sitting alone in movie theaters. With lonely female swimmers on the brain, I began to go to the pool. In a search of rash manicurists, I became a regular client of beauty salons. Since it is much easier to find a vegetarian on her own than a carnivorous single, I forced myself to eat the grassy fodder, and I started frequenting vegan bars. I responded to even the riskiest of invitations, and I wandered around what were often completely hopeless vernissages, launchings, and premières. I went to shopping centers. It has long been well known that, in the heat of shopping, some young ladies grow weak and bare their souls in risqué fashion. Almost every day, I spent some time at Central Station, and, in the shoals of female travelers ceaselessly swimming through the underground passageways, I sought out those who quite obviously were not in any special hurry . By some miracle, I refrained from the street pick-up, but I considered completely seriously listing a matrimonial classified in the newspaper.

I placed great hopes in Empik bookstores and music shops. For a guy past fifty, who is afflicted with mental deconcentration, these were not bad spots. After all, I was unlikely to penetrate discotheques, cult bars, or enthusiastically engage in clubbing . And it wasn’t a matter of my old gray head, which could arouse panic and embarrassment in such company. I could handle that with ease. I’ve gotten through much greater moments of shame in my life. For me, for motor reasons, there can be no question of any form whatsoever of late-evening, to say nothing of night life. In the evening — I’ll say something shocking now — I’m often sleepy. After watching “The Facts” and the main broadcast of “The Evening News,” my day is basically done. I’ll look the newspaper over once again in the armchair, glance again at the book I’ve been reading for a week, but my head is getting heavy, my eyelids are drooping. In that sense, the bookstores or other newsstands that are open until 10 p.m. are night clubs as far as I am concerned, and at that late hour I didn’t even go there.

I would drop by in the early afternoons and make a solemn inspection of the candidates. Only those who sat in the armchairs and read serious literature came into question, or who listened to classical music with cosmic headphones perched on their heads. Readers of magazines and those listening to rock I eliminated a priori —this is, by the nature of things, a shaky selection pool. I put my bets on connoisseurs of Beethoven and Tolstoy: communing with the classics usually guarantees quite decent perversions. Besides, it is clear that if they sit for a long time — reading carefully or listening at the store — they’ve got time. What is more, since they read and listen at the store, they quite clearly don’t have a penny to their names. They clearly don’t have enough cash to buy a book or a CD and take it home with them. Poverty is never especially required, but in this case it isn’t bad. It is always easier to persuade, and to lure into harlotry, a poor one than a wealthy one. Finally, spying on what they are just then reading or listening to facilitates striking up the conversation remarkably.

But the matter is, I never did strike up a conversation. In practically none of the places mentioned did I once successfully strike up a conversation. I managed a few futile wheezings, but let’s pull the curtains on all that. My agony was intense. I chased after them like a madman, and I set off like a lunatic, but I had no certainty, and the uncertainty weakened the beauty of the madness and the impertinence of the lunacy. Sensing that I didn’t have a chance anyway with the conspicuous super babes, I placed my bets on the middling ones. But before I could approach the middling-gal I had singled out, I was seized by embarrassment over taking the easy way out, and I gave it up. Falling from one extreme into another, I now raised the bar to the maximum, and I desperately swore that from now on I would penetrate nothing but masterpieces. But whenever any miracle of nature appeared, I lacked reflexes and courage. As a result, the one and the other, and basically all of them, slipped by right under my nose. I would return home, and the mistakes I had made, the capitulations and the bad estimations, made my head burst. Suddenly, I became starkly aware what treasures had slipped through my fingers that afternoon. In my imagination, I replayed all the episodes one more time, corrected the mistakes, I was quick and decisive; now everything was a success, everything came true, the specter of the beauty seen an hour before took me by the arm, set her hair and her shoulder strap in order, and the pain was unbearable.

At the same time, I tried to keep a tight rein on myself. I didn’t spend entire days searching for the next woman of my life. In the mornings, I worked as before, although somewhat more nervously. Toward evening, as usual, I would drop by Yellow Dream for a grapefruit juice. Every two or three weeks, I would make the trip to watch Cracovia matches. Somehow I got by. Somehow, with the greatest difficulty, I continued to breathe.

III

I don’t rule out the possibility that I traveled to Cracovia matches in order to liberate myself, even briefly, from apparitions. While I was still on the express train to Krakow, I would check to see what sort of female travel companions were sitting in the adjoining compartments — but just as a matter of habit and reflex, without translation to reality. Whoever travels knows that there are always at least a few intriguing female travelers in every express train between Krakow and Warsaw. But the fact that I left them alone was not a question of choice. By getting on the train at Central Station, in a certain sense I was abandoning myself. I left my Warsaw solitude, which was unbearable and without which I couldn’t live, and, together with that solitude, I left the despair of warding it off.

I hope this is clear. Although it is entirely clear only to those who wake up alone, turn on the radio, take a shower, and are not even in the worst of moods. Who knows? Maybe they will meet somebody today.

It is completely clear only for those who eat their dinner alone in an almost empty café and lose their sense of taste. Even when they daringly order the most expensive frutti di mare , their sense of taste is gone — the whole time, it seems to them that, besides them, no one eats alone. Besides them, no one ever eats alone — the entire city sees this, and everybody is staring at them. How many times can you look at your watch and let the audience know that you have dropped by just in order to have a bite as quickly as possible, since in a moment — thank you very much! — you have an incredible date, perhaps it will last until the crack of dawn. So how are you supposed to perform the bite as quickly as possible , when you feel like sitting a bit, even with a leaden heart; and everyone knows that it was only after leaving that the lead would become all consuming.