Jerzy Pilch - The Mighty Angel

“I have the feeling that so far I’m not especially enthralled by your quaking person. Of course, I liked the fact that you seemed enchanted by my poems, but even that may just have been drunken euphoria.”

“Let me ask you again: do you want to know the truth?”

“Yes, I do.”

“The truth?”

“Not only have I never met such an inveterate drunkard as you, I’ve also never met such a tiresome one.”

“Then listen, Ala-Alberta, to my shamefully true confession: my women ran individual drying-out facilities just for me. I treated my women like the managers of my own personal detox units. As a drunkard, I had a private network of drying-out facilities that were run by my successive or concurrent girlfriends. Whenever I needed to I’d call up and go there, and if I was in no state to do so alone, they’d come for me and take my corpse back to their place, and minister to it solicitously.

“The Seductive Movie Star ran a private drying-out facility for me, the Uruguayan Center Forward always had a fancy convalescent home for my exclusive use, and Joanna Scourge of the Asylum kept a similar institution for me, and Barb the Broker waited for me with a permanently available bed, and vitamins, and juice, and even an IV drip, and the Utterly Irresponsible Minx was also the director of my personal, extremely respectable detoxification center; I list only the most important names, for there was also a considerable number of short-lived temporary helpers.

“I also had she-angels who would fly down to me, or rather to my by now absolutely immovable cadaver, and would transform the room in which we presently find ourselves into an intensive care unit. It goes without saying that these unfortunate women possessed differing kinds of resources, from the sophisticated equipment, up-to-date medications, and practically unlimited financial reserves available to Barb the Broker, to the complete disorganization and lack of qualifications that marked Joanna Catastrophe, whom I have not yet mentioned in this regard.”

“You know what,” said Alberta, interrupting me just in time, “I’m wondering what is more terrible: the fact that you’re incapable of living normally, or the fact that you’re incapable of talking normally. I mean, your tongue is swollen from the booze and your throat is sore. You’re talking in this stilted way. Where did all those names come from? Talk normally, start to live normally why don’t you.”

“Where and when and by whom was it said”—a venomous note appeared in my voice and intensified—“where and when and by whom was it said, where and when and by whom was it written that I’m supposed to lead a normal life?”

“What sort of life are you supposed to lead? An abnormal one? An exceptional one? A brilliant one? A sick one?”

“Ala, I’m supposed to lead an exceptionally unhappy life.”

“Get a grip on yourself and start to live in moderation but happily.”

“In moderation but happily? That in itself is a contradiction in terms.”

“It’s not a contradiction in terms. When you understand that you’ll stop drinking.”

“Alberta-Ala, Alberta Lulaj, author of captivating poems, at first I thought you were the greatest love of my life, all the greater and more tragic because you disappeared for good round the corner of Jana Pawła and Pańska; then I thought you were a member of a band of mysterious gangsters, then, that you were an unworldly apparition; then during our conversation I thought you were the person closest to me in the whole world; but now I see you’re just the most ordinary inquisitive she-therapist, yes, you’re a she-wolf therapist, a chick therapist. .”

She looked at me a while in profound sorrow and said:

“I refuse to let you help in any way to get my poems published. I’ll manage on my own. I have an absolute inner certainty that I’ll manage on my own. And you, you poor wretch, all you need to do is have another drink.”

And Alberta poured me a full glass, and I knocked it back instantly in a single draft, because by now I was able to drink in single drafts again. I needed it. I was so infinitely empty and hollow that only infinite nothingness was capable of filling me up.

AFTER I HAD FILLED the bath with hot water, after I had put in the laundry and added an over-generous quantity of Omo-Color washing powder I would tidy up the newspapers. They would be lying around all over the place and the disorder they created, though superficial, was visually devastating. When in the course of a drinking bout I set off early in the morning for a new bottle, or two or three new bottles, or for a dozen new cans of beer, on the way I would always buy a considerable number of newspapers. When I was drunk or hung over, especially when the hangover had been mitigated by the first early morning shot, I bought considerably more newspapers than ordinarily. (Actually, I ought to say: than extra ordinarily, since ordinarily I was extraordinarily drunk, while I was sober extraordinarily rarely — once again the seductive beast of drunken rhetoric raises its head. Drinking is ghastly; writing about drinking is ghastly; drinking, writing, and battling with the beast of drunken rhetoric is ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.) I would buy every newspaper that appeared on a given day, I would buy tabloids filled with sordid special offers, I would buy weeklies, illustrated magazines, women’s journals (especially those devoted to fashion, makeup, and pressing questions of skin care), I would buy monthlies and literary quarterlies, and even certain specialist publications. Depending on my mood I would select a periodical devoted to hunting, or medicine, or astronomy. Then for several hours, till I completely lost consciousness, I would lie on the couch and peruse the press. Those were unforgettable moments of homeostasis between one loss of consciousness and the next. My mind was clear, my thinking quick, and I read everything from cover to cover. I read domestic and international wire reports, I read introductory articles and political commentaries. I studied financial tables indicating that Poland was the economic tiger of Eastern Europe, I examined sports tables indicating that Poland could defeat any opponent, I immersed myself in religious sections indicating that Poland could bring redemption for everyone. With helpless obstinacy I gazed at photographs of beautiful high school girls whose phenomenally slender arms stirred in me an obscure sense of unease, and in order to quell that unease at least a little I would drink a little, I would take one small sip.

Now. . Now — meaning when? After drinking the first half-liter that steadies a person, or after drinking the second half-liter that gives him wings? Now? After a feigned sobering-up? Now after getting out? after going in? after going down? Now — after three weeks, or maybe six, after forty or maybe one hundred and forty days.

Now, after returning from the alco ward, I would not remember a single one of the articles I read during the moments of homeostasis (between one loss of consciousness and the next); only occasionally would some vivid magazine cover, some photograph of a captivating anorexic in a denim dress seem vaguely familiar, as if I had seen it in a dream, or in a previous life.

Piles of faded newspapers would be lying everywhere, covered with a gritty dust. I would tidy them methodically, carefully forming bundles of the appropriate size, which I then took out to the trash chute. I might have said that I was removing the traces of my drunken excesses, that I was simply cleaning up my apartment, that I was getting rid of anything that recalled my drunken abasement, that I was wiping everything I could from my already sufficiently unreadable memory. I might have said this, but it would not have been the truth; in the language of drunkards even the simplest expression, for example “cleaning up the apartment,” can prove to be bombastic and duplicitous rhetoric. I was cleaning up the apartment, but I was not certain of what I was doing, I was not certain of where I was, I did not know what had happened to my home, if in fact it was my home.