Читать книгу Dr. Sax - Jack Kerouac - Страница 16

ONE GRAY AFTERNOON in Centralville when I was probably 1,2 or 3 years old, I saw in my child self dream-seeing voids a cluttered dark French Canadian shoe repair shop all lost in gray bleak wings infolded on the shelf and clatter of the thing. Later on the porch of Rose Paquette’s tenement (big fat woman friend of my mother’s, with children) I realized the brokendown rainy dream shoeshop was just downstairs … a thing I knew about the block. It was the day I learned to say door in English … door, door, porte, porte–this shoe repair shop is lost in the rain of my first memories and’s connected to the Great Bathrobe Vision.

I’m sitting in my mother’s arms in a brown aura of gloom sent up by her bathrobe–it has cords hanging, like the cords in movies, bellrope for Catherine Empress, but brown, hanging around the bathrobe belt–the bathrobe of the family, I saw it for 15 or 20 years–that people were sick in–old Christmas morning bathrobe with conventional diamonds or squares design, but the brown of the color of life, the color of the brain, the gray brown brain, and the first color I noticed after the rainy grays of my first views of the world in the spectrum from the crib so dumb. I’m in my mother’s arms but somehow the chair is not on the floor, it’s up in the air suspended in the voids of sawdust smelling mist blowing from Lajoie’s wood yard, suspended over yard of grass at corner of West Sixth and Boisvert– that daguerreotype gray is all over, but my mother’s robe sends auras of warm brown (the brown of my family)—so now when I bundle my chin in a warm scarf in a wet gale—I think on that comfort in the brown bathrobe–or as when a kitchen door is opened to winter allowing fresh ices of air to interfere with the warm billowy curtain of fragrant heat of cooking stove … say a vanilla pudding … I am the pudding, winter is the gray mist. A shudder of joy ran through me-when I read of Proust’s teacup–all those saucers in a crumb–all of History by thumb–all of a city in a tasty crumb–I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove. It’s exactly like cold milk on hot bread pudding, the meeting of hot and cold is a hollow hole between memories of childhood.

The brown that I saw in the bathrobe dream, and the gray in the shoeshop day, are connected with the browns and grays of Pawtucketville-the black of Doctor Sax came later.