Endless Things (19 page)

There are kind masters and cruel masters but no good masters; what's good is to have no master. The Ass soon learned that there was no one in the world who was not his master, no one who did not have the right to strike him, goad him, insult him, injure him, withhold his rough feed, work him to exhaustion. His wit all went toward avoiding the worst, and it was easy to see what that was: in the clay yard a little mill stood, a
mola asinaria
(the Ass found he knew the Latin name), turned now by an old blind (or blinded) horse; a long bar was bound to his back and breast, and his hooves trod the circle, and the heavy stones ground together. The horse, swag bellied and otherwise thin as a bunch of sticks, seemed unlikely to continue in that labor for much longer. Each day the Ass observed him, to see if he might be faltering; each night he woke from horrid dreams to find that he himself was not, thank the gods, bound to the wheel after all—and to find, also, that he was still an ass.

So he scampered and kicked and tossed his big head like a frisky puppy, hoping to seem unsuited to the wheel; loaded with heavy panniers or heaped with fagots that pierced his hide, he tried to be patient and mild, for no burden could be greater than that blind journey to nowhere; he thought of the name Sisyphus but couldn't for a long time remember who that was.

He couldn't remember. His gigantic memory, the endless corridors and towers where who did what when to whom with what for what reason, on and on in ordered ranks, could simply not unfold into the small ass brain where it was now housed; the strong ass-heart could not fire it up or light its lengths and breadths. More than once in the first days of his escape, the Ass, unable to remember a thing or a name or a place or a picture that he had once needed only to raise a forefinger to find (he had no forefinger now), had thought of suicide: thought to fling himself down some ravine, leap into the river, eat poison—anything but fire, anything but that. There was no ravine along the way of his daily labors, though, and the river was far, and nothing he ate seemed even to disagree with him. What the Holy Office had not been able to do he would not be able to do for himself.

Days and months went by, seasons turned, he tried to keep an inward calendar, marking full moons with an imagined white stone, but when he went to look at it again he found the stones scattered. He put aside each night a wisp from his feed, but he trampled them inadvertently or ate them absentmindedly.

Thus a year passed, another, another. Once upon a time he had praised
asinitá
, the patience of asses, their willingness, their refusals and their truculence too; praised them as possessing a divine wisdom that ought to be enthroned in heaven. But that was a game, a play, a
ludus
or a
ludibrium
, written without this experience, which it seemed would last forever, until his poor soul was freed to feed at last upon the deathless grasses of Elysium. He began to pray that he might in the idiocy of daily labor forget that he was a man, or bore a man's spirit, and instead know nothing, nothing at all. Then, just as he was surrendering to despair, his fortunes altered.

The peasant who had first found him had fallen out with his son, and one day as the animals looked on in incomprehension (all but one of them) the two men, more bestial by far than those who observed them, went for each other with knives; son killed father, and then was taken away himself to be hanged. The lord of the manor pulled down the house and gave the land to the church, grisly ghosts and all; receivers came and put up for sale whatever of worth was movable. The Ass was driven with the other beasts to the fair and was there sold to a merchant to carry his goods.

Haberdashery, raw silks, the little ribbons or
zagarelle
that boys give to girls, gold and silver thread, combs, Spanish caps from Spanish Naples, the merchant carried his load from fair to fair: when one closed and its stalls were dismantled he knew of another one opening a day's walk away. He might acquire a large load of some commodity at one, cheeses or almonds or skins, taking a chance that he could make a profit on it at the next, and sometimes he bought a mule or two to carry it, and then sold them too. He was a busy round cheerful fretful man who could add and subtract and multiply on his fingers up to hundreds of
soldi
, and in his head turn the weights and measures of one region—of lead, silk cloth, pepper—into the measures of the next he came to.

His new little ass he kept, loading him to the withers and as high as his own head while whistling tunelessly and happily. And much as the Ass hated each morning, the new prospect, the new road, still he was not walking in a circle, and he could not despise his new master. When he stood to sleep beside him in the noontide, or alone in the innyard at night, he bent his mind to remember, remember; he worked his thick coarse tongue and the strong jaw that Samson had used for a weapon, so unsuited to what he needed it now to do. Walking the roads and highways from the fairs of Recanati and Sinigaglia in the Papal States across the mountains to the fairs authorized by the Republic of Venice at Bergamo and Brescia, he hawed and sighed and moaned in the back of his throat until his master struck him smartly in impatience, but it was quite suddenly and without forethought, on a rocky mountain road in a hurry to make town before nightfall, that at last he managed it:

—My load is unbalanced, he said. If you don't shift it you will lame me.

We are less surprised than perhaps we suppose we will be to hear our beasts talk. After all, they do in our dreams, and even awake we seem to hear their thoughts well enough. In scripture, when Balaam's little ass suddenly appealed to him, saying
What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?
Balaam evinced no surprise at it. He simply answered:
Because you mocked me.

So the merchant, after looking around himself a moment and realizing no one else could have spoken but the beast looking up at him in supplication, proceeded to repack the baggage on his back.

—Better? he asked then mockingly, as though daring the ass to speak again. But the Ass kept silent, amazed and suddenly cautious. The two of them went on.

That night, though, when the buying and selling were done, and the merchant had prepared his bed on the grounds where the fair had been held, as he sometimes did when the night was fine and warm and his goods were heavy, the Ass told him, or tried to tell him, how speech had become possible for him, without at the same time revealing that he hadn't always been what he now seemed, which might be dangerous.

For who was he, truly? To be called an Ass is simply to be recognized as an instance of the universal singularity, nothing but an example of a suffering and acting thing. Of which all other things are also perfect examples. “The ideal Ass is the productive, formative, and supranaturally perfecting principle of the asinine species, which, however much it is distinguished in the capacious bosom of nature from other species, nonetheless—and this is of the greatest importance—is, in the First Mind, not other than the type of all intelligences, dæmons, gods, worlds, and the universe; the type from which not only asses but men, stars, worlds, and beings all depend: in it there is no difference of subject or form, of thing or things; it is simple and one.” He had written that, once. So the surprise was not (he told the merchant) that he could speak, but that so few other asses (or dogs or stars or stones or roses) ever did; at least not when human hearers were by.

Which in logic was actually an Equivocation, as he had been taught long ago, but the merchant only lay with his hands crossed over his breast and listened thoughtfully.

—Well, you are a true philosopher, he said then. I am only a man with a living to get. And hard as it may seem to require so well-spoken a creature as yourself to carry, the work still needs doing.

—Fair enough, said the Ass. If you will grant my poor self the general honor due to a being capable of speech, therefore reason, I will go on doing the work my shape suits me for. It's the best I could hope for, I suppose.

—That's fine then, said the merchant sleepily.

They didn't know their conversation was overheard.

Late in the night, before he could fully awaken and perceive what was happening to him, the Ass felt a bag slipped suddenly over his head.

—There is, said a voice, a pistol pointed at your head. It were best you be still.

And indeed the beast felt the prod of it behind his left ear.

—Come along, said the voice, and it will be to your advantage. Don't cry out.

The Ass understood immediately that the one, or ones, who were around him knew he was possessed not only of language but reason, if they could speak thus to him. He wondered if they also knew that his asinine nature wouldn't permit him to take even a step with his eyes blind. They must have, for after a moment the bag was drawn down enough for him to see; and—his heart huge to know his life and his adventure weren't to end, whether to grow worse or better—he went along with them. There were three, and they hurried him through the darkened grounds and the crowd of sleeping or unsleeping merchants, farmers, Gypsies, whores, out onto the highway, thence after a long walk (the Ass kept prudently silent) to the stable yard of a low inn, where more of their gang was gathered, who whistled and cheered softly to see their fellows bring in the prize, himself.

Who were they? Thieves? The pistol held to his head, he could perceive now, was only a stick of wood. What did they intend? And why, above all, did they speak to him, and to one another, in English?

—Masters, he said, in their own tongue—which caused a noise of delight or awe among them—masters, what do you want with me? Why have you abducted me?

—Because, said the largest of them, red cheeked and black whiskered and grinning with a set of cheerful gleaming white teeth, because you will make our fortune. And your own. We have, he said, a proposition.

They weren't thieves, or not usually thieves; they were a troupe of actors, traveling as the Ass and his (former) master did from fair to fair and town to town, as many English companies did. They weren't one of the great troupes with noble patrons that would entertain the Prince and Princess Palatine in Heidelberg, and then make progress through the courts and cities of Europe; they had a few bags filled with costumes, masks, crowns and foils, a set of moth-holed curtains, a drum, and a pipe. The six or eight of them played many parts in every play, changing behind the curtain from lord's cape and sword to swain's jerkin and bottle and rushing on stage again. They had been about to pack all their properties and go home again, no richer than they had come. Then this.

—Join our troop, they said. You'll never carry again, or carry no more than any of us. You'll be a comedian, you'll make us rich, and yourself as well, for we share and share alike, even the asses among us, ha ha.

It was an easy decision to make. The short summer night was past; dawn had come, and a ray of the all-giving sun now fell into that little stable yard. What
rich
might mean to one like himself he couldn't say, but if ease, and scope, and intellectual delight were all he got, it was more than the Ass he was could have aspired to, and ought to be enough for the man.

—What play shall we play? he said.

They laughed, they cheered, and their chief, or anyway the largest among them, pulled from his pack a greasy and leaf-curled book without a cover, and as everyone laughed some more, he proffered it and the Ass noticed, on the third finger of the man's hand, a ring: a ring cut with a curious figure that he was sure he remembered, or had once imagined, or in future might conceive. The player splayed open the pages and put the book before the Ass, who looked upon it, found he could read it, and trembled in amazement, for the story was his own:

Once as I grazed vpon the Lippe of steepe and stoney Rauine, conceiving the Desire to chew vpon a louely Cardoon or Thistle, growing some little way downe the Precipice, and Satisfyed that I coulde Stretch my longe Necke so farre without Perill, defying the pricks alike of Conscience and naturall Reason, I leaned out, and farther out, ‘til I could no longer lean; and I fell from that Cliffy Height; and thereupon my Master knew, that he had bought mee but for Crow's-meate.

Freed from the Prison of my Flesshe, I became a wandering Spirit, without Members; and I saw that, as to my Substance Spirituall, I was in no different case than all other Spirits, who vpon the dissoluing of their Animal or compound Bodies, begin straightaway to Transmigrate. For (as I saw) Fate not only remoueth all distinctioun (as regards their Corporality) between the Ass's flesshe and Man's, likewise between the Brute and the wholly Inanimate: also it remoueth all Distinctioun between the Asinine and the Human Soul, indeed betweene those souls and the soul that is found in all things.

It was his own story, that is, his own work—it was the
Cabala del Caballo Pegaseo,
which he had written long years before, here translated from the Italian into English by his friend and follower Alexander Dicson, who missed him dreadfully after his departure from England, and who earned not a penny from the little book on whose title page his name stood beneath the author's, with his Oxford degree appended, and the date (1599). In surprise and pity the Ass studied the book, holding its pages down with an unhandy forefoot and tempted to eat the leaves rather than reading them. How had it come into the hands of this company? How was the Ass able to read it with his ass's poor eyes, and recognize it? How did Tom the grinning principal player come by the ring on his finger, just that ring with just that figure? And why did the Ass, as the players pointed out, bear the same figure on his own back, where all other asses bear the cross of Christ? How come? Because without these wonders, and all the others like them preceding and to come, there wouldn't be a story to tell, and without a story no one would come to hear—as every player knows.

For a year the company (they now called themselves I Giordanisti after the Ass had told them his tale, as much of it as he could remember) went up and down High Germany, playing the play of
The Transformations of Ass Onorius, the Cabalistical Steed
, partly in German, partly Italian, partly English, mostly in the universal language. In university towns they played the scenes of Onorius's metempsychosis into Aristotle, Pythagoras, a Grammarian, a Schoolman, as the students howled encouragement, an easy audience. They also played
Lucius, or the Life and Adventures of the Golden Ass
, from the book of Apuleius; performances might or might not, depending, include the scene of poor Lucius inveigled into the Matron's bed, but always included the final Transformation, of Lucius the Ass into Lucius the Man, by the sweet power of all-seeing Isis, clothed in the sky and the stars.