All the Days and Nights (51 page)

As one would expect, that indefatigable traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu spent a considerable time in this interesting country before she settled down in Venice, and so did William Beckford. Lady Mary’s letters about it were destroyed by her daughter after her death, because they happened to contain assertions of a shocking nature, for which proof was lacking, about a contemporary figure who would have relished a prosecution for libel. For Beckford’s experiences, see his
Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents
(Leipzig, 1832).

One might have supposed that in a country where death was out of the question, morbidity would be unknown. This was true for I have no idea how many centuries and then something very strange happened. The young, until this moment entirely docile and unimaginative, began having scandalous parties at which they pretended that they were holding a funeral. They even went so far as to put together a makeshift pine coffin, and took turns lying in it, with their eyes closed and their hands crossed, and a lighted candle at the head and foot. This occurred during Beckford’s stay, and it is just possible that he had something to do with it. Though he could be very amusing, he was a natural mischief-maker and an extremely morbid man.

The mock funerals were the first thing that happened. The second was the trial,
in absentia
, of a gypsy woman who was accused of taking money with intent to defraud. This was not an instance of a poor foolish widow’s being persuaded to bring her husband’s savings to a fortune-teller in order to have the money doubled. In the first place, there were no widows, and the victim was a young man.

The plaintiff — just turned twenty-one, Beckford says, and exceedingly handsome — stated under oath that he had consulted the gypsy woman in the hope of learning from her the secret of how to commit suicide. For it seems that in this country as everywhere else gypsies were a race apart and a law unto themselves. They did not choose to live forever, so they didn’t. When one of them decided that life had no further interest for him, he did something. What, nobody knew. It was assumed that the gypsy bent on terminating his existence sat down under a tree or by a riverbank, some nice quiet place where he wouldn’t be disturbed, and in a little while the other gypsies came and disposed of the body.

The plaintiff testified that the gypsy woman studied his hand, and then she looked in her crystal ball, and then she excused herself in order to get something on the other side of a curtain. That was the last anybody had seen of her or of the satchel full of money which the plaintiff had brought with him.

The idea that a personable young man, on the very threshold of life, had actually wanted to die caused a tremendous stir. The public was barred from the trial, but Beckford was on excellent terms with the wife of the Lord Chief Justice and managed to attend the hearing in the guise of a court stenographer. The story is to be found in the Leipzig edition of his book and no other, which suggests that he perhaps did have something to do with the events he describes, and that from feelings of remorse, or shame, wrote about them and then afterward wished to suppress what he had written. At all events we have his very interesting account. The jury found for the plaintiff and against the gypsy woman. After the verdict was read aloud in the court, the attorney for the defense made an impassioned and — in the light of what happened afterward — heartbreaking speech. If only it had been taken seriously! He asked that the verdict stand, but that no effort be made to find his client, and that no other gypsy be questioned or molested in any way by the police. The court saw the matter in a different light, and during the next few days the police set about rounding up every single gypsy in the country. The particular gypsy woman who had victimized the young man with a bent for self-destruction was never found. The others were subjected to the most detailed questioning. When that produced no information, the rack and the thumbscrew were applied, to no purpose. You might as well try to squeeze kindness out of a stone as torture a secret out of a gypsy. But there was living with the gypsies at that time a middle-aged man who had been stolen by them as a child and who had spent his life among them. When he was brought into the courtroom between two bailiffs, the attorney
for the defense lowered his head and covered his eyes with his hand. The man was put on the witness stand and, pale and drawn after a night of torture, gave his testimony. Shortly after this, the gravestone, the wreath, the arm band, and the smiling undertaker, so familiar everywhere else in the world, made their appearance here also, and the country was no longer unique.

O
NCE
upon a time there was a poor fisherman who had no one to go out in his boat with him. The man he started going out with when he was still a boy was now crippled with rheumatism and sat all day by the fire. The other fishermen were all paired off, and there was nobody for him. Out on the water, without a soul to talk to, the hours between daybreak and late afternoon were very long, and to pass the time he sang. He sang the songs that other people sang, whatever he had heard, and this was of course a good deal in the way of music, because in the olden times people sang more than they do now. But eventually he came to the end of all the songs he knew or had ever heard and wanted to learn some new songs. He knew that they were written down and published, but this was no help to him because he had never been to school and didn’t know how to read words, let alone the musical staff. You might as well have presented him with a clay tablet of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But there were ways, and he took advantage of them. At a certain time, on certain days of the week, the children in the schoolhouse had singing, and he managed to be in the vicinity. He brought his boat in earlier those days, on one pretext or another, and stood outside the school building. At first the teacher was mystified, but he saw that the poor fisherman always went away as soon as the singing lesson was over, and putting two and two together he realized why the man was there. So, one day, he went to the door and invited the fisherman in. The fisherman backed away, and then he turned and hurried off down the road to the beach. But the next time they had singing, there he was. The schoolteacher opened a window so the fisherman could hear better and went on with the lesson. While the children were singing “There were three sisters fair and bright,” the door opened slowly. The teacher pointed to a desk in the back row, and the
fisherman squeezed himself into it, though it was a child’s desk and much too small for him. The children waved their hands in the air and asked silly questions and giggled, but, never having been to school, the fisherman thought this was customary and did not realize that he was creating a disturbance. He came again and again.

People manage to believe in magic — of one kind or another. And ghosts. And the influence of the stars. And reincarnation. And a life everlasting. But not enough room is allowed for strangeness: that birds and animals know the way home; that a blind man, having sensed the presence of a wall, knows as well where to walk as you or I; that there have been many recorded instances of conversations between two persons who did not speak the same language but, each speaking his own, nevertheless understood each other perfectly. When the teacher passed out the songbooks, he gave one to the fisherman, well aware that his only contact with the printed page was through his huge, calloused hands. And time after time the fisherman knew, before the children opened their mouths and began to sing, what the first phrase would be, and where the song would go from there.

Naturally, he did not catch as many fish as he had when he was attending to his proper work, and sometimes there was nothing in the house to eat. His wife could not complain, because she was a deaf-mute. She was not ugly, but no one else would have her. Though she had never heard the sound of her own voice, or indeed any sound whatever, she could have made him feel her dissatisfaction, but she saw that what he was doing was important to him, and did not interfere. What the fisherman would have liked would have been to sing with the children when they sang, but his voice was so deep there was no possibility of its blending unnoticeably with theirs, so he sat in silence, and only when he was out in his boat did the songs burst forth from his throat. What with the wind and the seabirds’ crying, he had to sing openly or he would not have known he was singing at all. If he had been on shore, in a quiet room, the sound would have seemed tremendous. Out under the sky, it merely seemed like a man singing.

He often thought that if there had only been a child in the house he could have sung the child to sleep, and that would have been pleasant. He would have sung to his wife if she could have heard him, and he did try, on his fingers, to convey the sound of music — the way the sounds fell together, the rising and descending, the sudden changes in tempo, and the pleasure of expecting to hear this note and hearing, instead, a different one, but she only smiled at him uncomprehendingly.

The schoolteacher knew that if it had been curiosity alone that drew the fisherman to the schoolhouse at the time of singing lessons, he would have stopped coming as soon as his curiosity was satisfied, and he didn’t stop coming, which must mean that there was a possibility that he was innately musical. So he stopped the fisherman one day when they met by accident, and asked him to sing the scale. The fisherman opened his mouth and no sound came. He and the schoolteacher looked at each other, and then the fisherman colored, and hung his head. The schoolteacher clapped him on the shoulder and walked on, satisfied that what there was here was the love of music rather than a talent for it, and even that seemed to him something hardly short of a miracle.

I
N
those islands, storms were not uncommon and they were full of peril. Even large sailing ships were washed on the rocks and broken to pieces. As for the little boats the fishermen went out in, one moment they would be bobbing on the waves like a cork, now on the crest and now out of sight in a trough, and then suddenly there wasn’t any boat. The sea would have swallowed it, and the men in it, in the blinking of an eye. It was a terrible fact that the islanders had learned to live with. If they had not been fishermen, they would have starved, so they continued to go out in their boats, and to read the sky for warnings, which were usually dependable, but every now and then a storm — and usually the very worst kind — would come up without any warning, or with only a short time between the first alarming change in the odor of the air, the first wisps of storm clouds, and the sudden lashing of the waters. When this happened, the women gathered on the shore and prayed. Sometimes they waited all night, and sometimes they waited in vain.

One evening, the fisherman didn’t come home at the usual time. His wife could not hear the wind or the shutters banging, but when the wind blew puffs of smoke down the chimney, she knew that a storm had come up. She put on her cloak, and wrapped a heavy scarf around her head, and started for the strand, to see if the boats were drawn up there. Instead, she found the other women waiting with their faces all stamped with the same frightened look. Usually the seabirds circled above the beach, waiting for the fishing boats to come in and the fishermen to cut open their fish and throw them the guts, but this evening there were no gulls or cormorants. The air was empty. The wind had blown them all inland, just as, by a freak, it had blown the boats all together, out on the water, so close that it took great skill to keep them from knocking against each
other and capsizing in the dark. The fishermen called back and forth for a time, and then they fell silent. The wind had grown higher and higher, and the words were blown right out of their mouths, and they could not even hear themselves what they were saying. The wind was so high and the sound so loud that it was like a silence, and out of this silence, suddenly, came the sound of singing. Being poor ignorant fishermen, they did the first thing that occurred to them — they fell on their knees and prayed. The singing went on and on, in a voice that none of them had ever heard, and so powerful and rich and deep it seemed to come from the same place that the storm came from. A flash of lightning revealed that it was not an angel, as they thought, but the fisherman who was married to the deaf-mute. He was standing in his boat, with his head bared, singing, and in their minds this was no stranger or less miraculous than an angel would have been. They crossed themselves and went on praying, and the fisherman went on singing, and in a little while the waves began to grow smaller and the wind to abate, and the storm, which should have taken days to blow itself out, suddenly turned into an intense calm. As suddenly as it had begun, the singing stopped. The boats drew apart as in one boat after another the men took up their oars again, and in a silvery brightness, all in a cluster, the fishing fleet came safely in to shore.

T
HE
two women were well along in years, and one lived in a castle and one lived in the largest house in the village that was at the foot of the castle rock. Though picturesque, the castle had bathrooms and central heating, and it would not for very long have withstood a siege, no matter how antiquated the weapons employed. The village was also picturesque, being made up of a single street of thatched Elizabethan cottages. The two women were friends, and if one had weekend guests it was understood that the other would stand by, ready to entertain them. When the conversation threatened to run out, guests at Cleeve Castle were taken to Cleeve House and offered tea and hot buttered scones, under a canopy of apple blossoms or in front of a roaring fire, according to the season. The largest house in the village had been made by joining three of the oldest cottages together, and the catalogue of its inconveniences often made visitors wipe tears of amusement from their eyes. The inconveniences were mostly felt by the servants, who had to carry cans of hot water and breakfast trays up the treacherous stairs, and who, when they were in a hurry, tripped over the uneven doorsills and bumped their heads on low beams. Guests at Cleeve House were taken to the castle and plied with gin and ghost stories.