Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz Read Free Book Online Page A

life and real experience, and therefore nothing bothers them more than their innocence. Ha, ha, ha, let me suggest to them right now that they're innocent, box them up in this amiable concept, and you'll see how innocent they become!"
    With that he slipped behind the trunk of a huge oak tree growing to one side of the school yard, while the teacher took me by my little hand and, before I could explain or protest, led me to the other students. Having done so, he let go of my hand and left me in their midst.
    The students walked about. Some snapped their fingers or poked each other in the ribs, others, having blocked their ears with their fingers and stuck their heads in their books, crammed their lessons without a break, some played copycat or tripped one another, their vacant and dumb stares slid off me, not recognizing the thirty-year-old that I was. I stepped up to one of the students closest to me—I had no doubt that this cynical farce must soon come to an end.
    "Hello," I began, "you must surely realize I'm not..."
    But he yelled:
    "Look, fellahs! Novus colegus!"
    They surrounded me, one of them screamed:
    "And what perfidious whims and airs have perchance caused the person of my dear Sir to present himself so tardily at this dump of a s c h o o l?"
    Another one squeaked and laughed like an idiot:
    "Could it be that amours for a damsel have delayed our colegus venerabilis? Is this perchance why our presumptuous colegus so languidus est?"
    I fell silent at this grotesque talk as if someone had tied my tongue into knots, but they went on, unable to stop it seemed—the more atrocious their words, the greater their delight—and with a maniacal stubbornness they befouled themselves and everything around them. And they went on—the fair sex, damsel, wench, Phoebus, love-lust, gnome, professorus, lessonus polonicus, perfectus, sexus. Their movements were clumsy—their faces looked stuffed and bloated, their topics—sex organs in the younger group, sexual exploits in the older group, all of which, in conjunction with archaisms and Latin endings, created a singularly disgusting cocktail. They seemed stuck in something, ill-placed, off-track in space and time, furtively peeking at the teacher or at their mothers behind the fence, clutching their pupas, all the while aware of being watched, which made it rather difficult for them to eat lunch.
    I stood there flabbergasted by it all, unable to see the rhyme or reason, and I realized that the farce was not about to end. When those formalists noticed a strange man observing them closely and keenly from behind the oak tree, they became exceedingly nervous, and whispers spread that a school inspector had arrived and was snooping from behind the tree. "A school inspector!" some said, reaching for their books and ostentatiously approaching the oak. "A school inspector!" said others, walking away from the oak, but none of them could take their eyes off Pimko who, standing discretely behind the tree, was making notes with his pencil on a scrap of paper torn out of his writing pad. "He's taking notes," they whispered right and left, "he's writing down his observations." Suddenly Pimko tossed the scrap of paper into the air with a deft movement of his hand, as if the wind had blown it. The note said:
    On the basis of my observations conducted during lunch hour at school X, I came to the conclusion that our male youth is innocent! This is my deepest conviction. And my evidence: their mien, their innocent conversation, as well as their cute and innocent pupas.
    T. Pimko September 29, 193 ... Warsaw
    When the note reached the students the school swarmed like an anthill. "What? We're innocent? We, today's youth, innocent? We, who already screw women?" Laughter and tittering grew, impassioned yet secretive, and the air teemed with sarcasm. "Oh, what a naive fuddy-duddy! What naivete! Hey, what naivete!" I soon realized however, that the laughter had lasted far too long ... instead of abating