latarnik/lighter

II

Hours, days and weeks began to flow ... The Majkos say that sometimes, when the sea is very rough, something is called by their names in the night and darkness. If the infinity of the sea can cry out like that, then perhaps when a man grows old he also calls upon him and another infinity, even darker and more mysterious, and the more tired he is with life, the more pleasing he is. But to listen to them, you need silence. Apart from that, old age likes to isolate itself, as if in the sense of a grave. The lighthouse was already such a grave for Skawiński. Nothing more uniform than a similar life on the tower. Young people, if they accept them, leave the service after a while. The lighthouse keeper is also usually a man who is not young, gloomy and closed in on himself. When he accidentally abandons his lantern and gets among people, he walks among them like a man awakened from a deep sleep. There are no small impressions on the tower that teach you how to apply everything to yourself in ordinary life. Everything the lighthouse keeper comes in contact with is enormous and devoid of compact, defined shapes. Heaven is one total, water is another, and among these infinities a lonely human soul! It is a life in which thought is rather constant reflection, and nothing of the lighthouse keeper awakens from this reflection, not even his occupation. Day by day it becomes like two beads in a rosary, and perhaps the changes in the weather are the only variety. Skawiński, however, felt as happy as he had never been in his life. He got up at dawn, took a meal, cleaned the lenses of the lantern, and then, sitting on the balcony, he stared into the distance of the sea, and his eyes could never be satisfied with the images before him. Usually against the enormous turquoise background there were flocks of blown sails, shining in the sunlight so brightly that their eyes narrowed under the excess glare; sometimes ships, taking advantage of the trade winds called trade winds, followed in extended lines one after the other, like a chain of gulls or albatrosses. The red barrels leading the way swayed on the wave with a light, gentle motion; a huge grayish plume of smoke appeared between the sails every day at noon. It was a New York steamer that carried travelers and goods to Aspinwall, trailing a long, foamy trail of foam behind it. On the other side of the balcony, Skawiński could clearly see Aspinwall and its busy port, with a forest of masts, boats and boats in it; and a little further the white houses and towers of the city. From the height of the lantern, the houses looked like gulls' nests, boats were beetle-like, and people moved like little points on a white stone boulevard. In the morning a light eastern breeze brought the confused buzz of human life, above which the whistling of the steamboats dominated. It was siesta time at noon. The traffic in the port was dying down; the seagulls hid in the cracks of the rock, the waves weakened and became somehow lazy, and then there was a moment of undisturbed silence on land, at sea, and at the lighthouse. The yellow sands from which the waves had rolled shone like shape gold spots on water areas; the tower pole was cut hard in the blue. Streams of sunlight poured from the sky over the water, on the sands and on the cliffs. Then the old man was overwhelmed by some kind of helplessness, full of sweetness. He felt that the rest he was using was delicious, and when he thought it would be permanent, he had no shortage of anything anymore. Skawiński dreamed about his own happiness, but that man easily gets used to a better fate, he gradually gained faith and trust, because he thought that if people were building houses for the disabled, why shouldn't God finally take in his disabled person? Time passed and he persisted in this conviction. The old man became familiar with the tower, with the lantern, with the cliff, with the sandbanks and with loneliness. He also became acquainted with the gulls that carried in the bends of the rocks, and in the evening they held rallies on the roof of the lanterns. Skawiński usually threw them the remnants of his food, and they soon assimilated them that when he did so later, he was surrounded by a real storm of white wings, while the old man walked among the birds like a shepherd among sheep. At low tide he would go to low sand shoals, where he collected tasty snails and beautiful pearl conchs of sailors, which the flowing wave deposited on the sand. At night, by the light of the moon and lanterns, he went fishing, which was swarming with rocks.After all, he fell in love with his rock and his treeless islet, covered only with tiny greasy plants oozing sticky resin. The poverty of the islet made up for his further views. In the midday hours, when the atmosphere was becoming very translucent, you could see the entire sea, all the way to the Pacific, covered with the most lush vegetation. At the time, Skawiński thought that he saw one enormous garden. The bunches of coconuts and giant muses were arranged in delicious, crested bouquets just outside the houses of Aspinwall. Further away, between Aspinwall and Panama, a huge forest was visible, over which every morning and into the night hung a reddish fume of fumes - a truly subtropical forest, flooded underneath with stagnant water, entwined with lianas, rustling with one wave of giant orchids, palm trees, dairy trees, iron trees and rubber.Through his watchtower, the old man could see not only the trees, not only the sprawling banana leaves, but even the clusters of monkeys, great marabou, and parrot flocks, sometimes soaring up like a rainbow cloud over the forest. Skawiński knew similar forests up close, because after crashing into the Amazon, he wandered for weeks among similar green vaults and thickets. He knew how many dangers and deaths were hidden beneath the lovely, laughing surface. Among the nights he spent there, he heard the grave voices of howlers up close and the roars of jaguars, he saw enormous snakes swinging like lianas in the trees; he knew those sleepy forest lakes, full of crumbs and teeming with crocodiles. He knew under what yoke man lived in those unfathomable forests where single leaves carried ten times its size, in which bloodthirsty mosquitoes, tree leeches and giant venomous spiders swarm. He experienced everything himself, he experienced everything himself, he suffered everything himself; and it was all the more delight for him now to look at these matos from above, to admire their beauty, and to be veiled from betrayal. His tower protected him from all evil. He also only left occasionally on a Sunday with wound. He then wore a navy blue guard with silver bumps, hung his crosses on his chest, and his milky head rose with a certain pride when he heard the Creoles say to each other, "We have a decent lighthouse keeper." - "And not a heretic, though Yankee!" However, he returned to the island immediately after the mass and returned happy, because he had always distrusted the mainland. On Sundays, he also read to himself the Spanish newspaper he bought in the city, or the New York Herald that he borrowed from Falconbridge - and searched eagerly for news from Europe. Poor old heart! In this watchtower and in the other hemisphere it was still beating for the country ... Sometimes also, when a boat bringing him food and water every day landed on the island, he would come down from the tower to chat with the guard Johns. But then it must have gone wild. He stopped going out to town, reading newspapers, and attending Johns' political debates. Weeks passed in such a way that neither he nor he saw anyone. The only sign that the old man was alive was the disappearance of the food left on the shore, and the lantern light was lit every evening as regularly as the sun rises from the water in those parts in the morning. Apparently the old man was indifferent to the world. The reason for this was not nostalgia, but precisely that it had even turned into resignation. The whole world has now started for old man and ended at his islet. He had grown comfortable with the idea that he would not leave the tower until he died, and he simply forgot that there was something else beyond it. He also became a mystic. His gentle blue eyes began to be like the eyes of a child, staring eternally and as if fixed on some distance. In constant isolation and in the presence of an extremely simple and great environment, the old man began to lose his sense of his own separateness, as if a person ceased to exist, and blended more and more with what was around him. He did not reason about it, he only felt it unconsciously, but in the end it seemed to him that the sky, the water, its rock, the tower and the golden sandbanks and the swollen sails and gulls, the ebb and the tides, were some great unity and one great mysterious soul; and he himself plunges into this mystery and feels that soul that lives and soothes. He sank, he rocked, he remembered - and in this limitation of his own separate existence, including half waking and half sleep, he found peace so great that it almost resembled a half-death.