Among the many scientific works undertaken by my father in his rare moments of calm and internal quiet, between the blows of the defeats and disasters in which that adventurous and stormy life abounded, nearest to his heart were studies of comparative meteorology, and especially of the specific climate of our province, full of unique curiosities. He it was in particular, my father, who laid the foundations for a skilful analysis of climatic formation. His ‘Outline of the General Systematics of Autumn’ explained once and for all the essence of that season of the year which in our provincial climate adopts that protracted, bifurcating, and parasitically exuberant form which, under the name of ‘Chinese Summer’, lasts far into the depths of our colourful winters. What is there to say? He first explained the secondary, derivative character of that late formation, being nothing other than a certain kind of poisoning of the climate by miasmas of the overripe and deteriorating baroque art crammed together in our museums. That museum art, decomposing in boredom and oblivion, hyperglycaemic, closed in with no outlet like old preserve, over-sugars our climate and is the reason for that beautiful malarial fever, those colourful deliriums in which that protracted autumn agonises. Beauty is like a disease, my father taught, it is a certain kind of shudder – of a mysterious infection, a dark announcement of decay rising up from the depths of excellence, to be greeted by excellence with a sigh of the deepest happiness.

At this point, let one or two factual considerations about our provincial museum be of service in the better understanding of the matter... Its origins go back to the 18th century and are connected to the admirable collector’s passion of the Basilian Order who bestowed that parasitic growth upon our town, burdening the municipal budget with an excessive and unproductive expense. Throughout a number of years the Treasury of the Republic, having bought the collections dirt-cheap from the impoverished order, magnanimously ruined itself by their patronage, worthy of some king’s residence. But the next generation of town fathers, now more practically oriented and not closing their eyes to economic necessities, and after unsuccessful negotiations with the commission of the archducal collections to which they had tried to sell the museum, closed it down and discharged the board of trustees, having put by a lifetime’s pension for the last custodian. During those negotiations it was ascertained beyond all doubt that the value of the collections had been grossly overestimated by local patriots. The kindly Fathers had in their praiseworthy fervour purchased not a few forgeries. The museum did not contain even one picture by a first-class master, whereas it held the entire third- and forth-rate collection, the entire provincial school known only to specialists, the forgotten, blind alleyways of the history of art.

A strange thing: the kindly monks had military tastes; the greatest part of the pictures consisted of battle-pieces. A scorched golden murkiness darkened on those canvases festering with age on which fleets of galleys and caravels, and old forgotten armadas mouldered in gulfs with no outlet, the majesty of long-ago-vanished republics rolling on their billowing sails. From under the smoky and darkened varnishes the barely perceptible outlines of mounted skirmishes loomed. Across the emptiness of a scorched Campania under a dark and tragic sky swirling cavalcades charged in ominous silence, framed on both sides by the swelling and eruptions of artillery fire.

On the pictures of the Neapolitan school a sultry and smoky afternoon ages perpetually as though seen through a dark bottle. The darkened sun appears to wither in one’s eyesight in those lost landscapes, as though on the eve of a cosmic disaster. And that is why the smiles and gestures of the golden fishermen’s wives are so inconsequential – the sellers with their manneristic charm of bundles of fishes to wandering fraudsters. That entire world was condemned long ago, became immemorial long ago. Hence that boundless sweetness of the last gesture which, quite alone, remains only to itself, distant and lost, repeated over and over again, unchangeable now.

And further still, deep inside that country inhabited by a carefree populace of jesters, harlequins, and bird fanciers with cages, inside that country with no dignity and no reality, little Turkish women, with their plump hands, are patting honey cakes arranged on boards; two boys in Neapolitan hats are carrying a basket full of noisy pigeons on a pole which bends slightly under that cooing, winged burden. And deeper still, on the very edge of the evening, on the last fragment of the earth where a withering tuft of acanthus is swaying on the dull yellow border of nothingness, a game of cards is still being played out continually – someone’s last resort before the great night which approaches.

That entire lumber-room of old beauty has been subjected to a painful distillation under the pressure of years full of boredom.

‘Are you able to understand,’ my father asked, ‘what the despair of that condemned beauty means – its days and nights? Over and over it endlessly rouses itself to fictional auctions; it enacts profitable sales, noisy and numerous exhibitions; it is thrilled by a wild venture, sells off its stocks in fear of a slump, scattering them with an extravagant gesture; it squanders its wealth only to realise on sobering up that it had all been futile, that it had not escaped the closed circle to which its own excellence has condemned it, and that it can not relieve the pain of its own excess. Nothing strange if in the end that impatience, that helplessness of beauty, had to become reflected in our sky, to flare up in a glow over our horizon and deteriorate in those atmospheric juggleries, those huge and fantastic cloud-enveloped arrangements which I call our other – our pseudo-autumn. That other autumn of our province is nothing other than an ailing Fata Morgana emanating as a magnified projection upon our sky from the moribund, incarcerated beauty of our museums. That autumn is a great wandering theatre of mendacious poetry, a huge colourful onion unpeeling itself skin after skin in a newer and newer panorama. Never to arrive at any core. Behind each coulisse, when it fades and curls up with a rustle, a new and radiant backdrop will appear for a lively and real moment, before expiring and showing no more sign of its paper constitution. And all of the perspectives are painted, and all of the panoramas are made of cardboard, and only the scent is real, the withering scent of the coulisses, a scent of great wardrobes full of lipstick and incense. And at dusk: that great disorder and tangle of scenery, that confusion of abandoned costumes among which one wades as though among rustling withered leaves. And there is a great mayhem, and everyone pulls at the curtain ropes, and the sky, the great autumnal sky, hangs in the shreds of backdrops and is filled with the creaking of pulleys. And: that hasty fever, that breathless and late carnival, that panic of early-dawn ballrooms and a Tower of Babel of masks which can not locate their own real vestments.

‘Autumn, autumn, the Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering up the all barren wisdom of the solar cycle’s three hundred and sixty-five days into its own huge libraries. Oh, those senile mornings, yellow as parchment and sweet with wisdom like late evenings! Those forenoons cunningly smiling like wise palimpsests, many-layered like old, yellow books! Ah, autumnal day, that old jester-librarian, clambering up ladders in his slipped-down dressing-gown and tasting in preserves all ages and cultures! Every landscape is the entrance to an old romance for him. How splendidly he plays, sending the heroes of old novels on a stroll under that smoky and honey-coloured sky, in that turbid and sad late sweetness of the light! Which of the new adventures will Don Quixote meet with in Soplicowo? How will Robinson Crusoe’s life turn out after he returns to his native Bolechów?’

On still and sultry evenings made golden by the glow Father read extracts from his manuscript to us. The ravishing flight of ideas allowed him momentarily to forget about the ominous presence of Adela.

The warm Moldavian winds arrived; that huge yellow monotone drew near – those sweet, barren draughts from the South. Autumn did not want to end. Like soap bubbles the days arose more and more beautiful and ethereal, and they all appeared so ennobled until their last thresholds that every moment of their duration was a miracle prolonged beyond measure and almost painful.

In the silence of those deep and beautiful days the fabric of the leaves altered imperceptibly until, on a certain day, the trees stood in a straw fire of quite dematerialised leaves, in light loveliness like an efflorescence of husks, like a coating of colourful confetti – splendid peacocks and phoenixes which need only to shake and flutter in order to shed those excellent, lighter-than-tissue-paper, moulted, and now unnecessary feathers.

Translated by John Curran Davis

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