Kalpa Imperial (14 page)

“But when he was dying (she said), he wasn’t fat any more. He was a grey skeleton lying in the rags on the wagon. He wasn’t drunk any more because the tumors that were growing all over inside him were in his throat too and he couldn’t drink alcohol or anything else. He wasn’t lascivious any more, he didn’t have the strength to move his eyes even to look at a woman let alone jump on her, and he had only the shadow of the thing he’d used so often to get wine without paying for it from the women in the bars, and to rape me in the half-ruined houses the flood had left empty, and to keep warm with smuggled liquor in a brothel, winter nights. It wasn’t because I was generous that I wanted him to die in bed not in a ditch. Just the opposite. If the old man died in the street I’d be taken up, no matter what, being so young, and the police would have free use of me till some bureaucrat stuck a seal on a paper saying that the old man died from natural causes and they could dump the half-rotten body into the ditch. Then they’d let me go again, onto the streets, without the wagon, without anything, worse than before. So I drove the wagon around with the old man on it, dying. He couldn’t sing his dirty song they’d nicknamed him for any more, ‘Du-du mama, du-du baby,’ but I sang at the top of my voice:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is love,

so sweet it makes you quiver,

like wind, it can blow you apart

and send shivers up your liver,

but it soothes your heaaaaaaart!

“I had three possibilities in mind (she went on), but I confess that I never really expected that the trader would be the one to look after me in the end. Thank goodness he decided to wait for me, at night, hidden in the gap between two houses, and asked me what my song meant, proposed that I come with him, and listened to my conditions, which were so modest that he had to smile. Thank goodness, because the other two, an ex-servant who sold herbs and syrups on the street and a tinsmith, were both married, and their wives would have made my life impossible for sure. All three had houses, which is why they interested me, but the trader’s was the best. It had two whole windows. His name was Boroimar. He used to stick an apostrophe in front of the last syllable to make it look like he came from a noble family, and he told a lot of stories about past grandeurs that nobody believed, or maybe some people did, but not me.

“Old Dudu was fat, Boroimar was skinny; the beggar was a drunk, the trader never drank anything but fruit juice or milk; the old goat would sleep with any woman anyhow anywhere, but the other one was scared to death of women and the only thing he wanted of them was to look and look and look till he got up courage enough to do a little pawing. The old guy who died had had something fairly efficient between his legs, but the man with the house with two windows—who was dying too—had a shapeless sort of object that couldn’t stand up for anything. The old guy, in his day, assaulted and exploited and enjoyed, but this one hesitated and held back and was never satisfied. He’d look, and sniff, and touch, and slobber, and wet himself and sob, and five minutes later he’d start all over. I’d been through a lot of physical pain from the old guy and I didn’t feel like learning a whole new range of tortures. The old guy died in a soft bed with sheets and blankets, his head on a pillow, trying to hum
du-du mama, du-du baby,
with a real doctor looking after him, not some filthy witch-doctor, and we buried him in a hole in the ground under a stone with his real name on it. The trader stayed alive for a while, and I smiled and did everything he asked, thinking about the solid walls of his house, the wood floors, the windows looking out on the street, dreaming that I’d get hold of it all and wouldn’t ever have to live in the street again. I smiled, I sang to him, I brought him his food, I even washed him, perfumed him, stroked his head, which was getting bald. And I dreamed so hard that I convinced him my indifference was kindness, and he had a public scribe draw up a document saying that, having no children or wife or brothers, he left me everything he had. And a week later he died of food poisoning. No, I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him because it didn’t occur to me. If it had, who knows? Now that I’d had a taste of house, shelter, bed, hot soup every day, I might have killed him. But he went off to have dinner with a little fellow who came every so often to sell him goods, probably stolen, since it was all done in secret and the stuff was stored a long time before it was put up for sale, and they ate baked fish in an eating-house by the river and next morning they were dead, both of them and a lot of other people who’d eaten there. The police rounded up the restaurant owner and his employees and didn’t bother with me, as they hadn’t bothered with me when old Dudu died. When I’d got Boroimar buried, I took over his business. I was fifteen.

“When I was seventeen I was living with a lieutenant who’d come to my place to sell a ring to pay a gambling debt, so he said. I gave him a lot less than the ring was worth and a lot less than he needed, because I was already good at doing business and knew when a man wanted more than he said he wanted. And I knew that men don’t think. No, don’t laugh. They don’t think. Now and then one of them thinks, sure, and says what he thought, or writes it down, and that’s so unusual that nobody forgets it. People stick these bits that other men have thought together as best they can, sometimes in appropriate ways and sometimes in really silly ways, they repeat a set of other people’s disconnected thoughts for one situation and another set just as disconnected for another situation and believe they’re thinking. The man who can remember the most thoughts somebody else thought and twist them around to adapt to the most situations passes for the most intelligent, and the others all admire him. Somebody else shows up who can think, and speaks or writes, and people say he’s crazy, and they may even stone him, but his ideas remain and the nonthinkers eventually get hold of them. And so other people’s ideas, which get used like handkerchiefs or scarves, keep getting more numerous, and this is called progress. I was seventeen, I couldn’t read or write, I didn’t know mineralogy or chemistry or geography or theology; but I made the lieutenant into a captain and the captain into a colonel by the simple process of rejecting what people said they thought, and trying to find a new idea. I found two. One of them turns on the second one, a very old one, that says that we’re all made of the same clay. We’ll talk about the first one later.

“The colonel got married, because I told him he ought to. His wife was very rich and had a large, well-connected family. He used to meet me in a stone house in the woods, on beyond the country houses of the nobles and the magistrates. I’d sold the business for a good sum, not out of need, having in mind that idea about the clay we’re all made of, telling a couple of gossips that I wasn’t thinking of selling, sacrificing a few things so that the buyers I had my eye on would think I was inexperienced and didn’t know the value of the stuff I had there; and here I was now, living in a stone house with six windows and a balcony on the upper floor and six windows and a double door on the lower floor. I was getting bored, and so I had time to find a second idea. I thought:
I can
.

“You realize that’s a new idea, right? It’s something that comes a little, a very little, from outside, but mostly from inside. Maybe the words and the order they’re said in are old; that’s true enough; I’d almost say it’s a good thing. New words in a new order can be alarming, since mostly they just hide frivolity or nothingness. But if the old words name another way of seeing, then you’ve thought of a new idea, and that’s not something easy to do, believe me. I did it. I thought: I can. And when I’d thought it, I joined it to the other idea, and looked around me, and saw all the other people not thinking. I didn’t go on and discover another thought, but I decided something. So I pressured the colonel a bit. The poor guy was getting tired of me, or maybe not, maybe it was just that I was an inconvenience to him in his new position with his new responsibilities: but since he wasn’t a bad fellow, he felt grateful to me and wasn’t going to drop me. I used what he thought were ideas he’d thought, and we parted in tears. I assure you his tears were real. I left that house among the trees with a coach-load of clothes, tableware, jewels, perfumes, linens, furs, and money.

“Those were hard times. But I ask you, what times aren’t hard? They suited me: people coming and going, the social classes mixing together, no questions asked, everybody preoccupied with something or other. Anybody could say her family papers had been lost, or talk about treason, catastrophes, ruin, or say she’d come from a long way off. I paid bottom price for a very fine house in an elegant neighborhood. It had belonged to a merchant who went bankrupt. I furnished it and fancied it up, making sure that the facade and the gardens stayed as impressive as they’d been when the merchant lived there and his wife gave parties and his sons put on hunts and excursions thanks to the stupidity of those who’ll pay a thousand for stuff not worth ten which the merchant, count on it, had bought for two. I wore black. I hired servants. Very little was left of the money I’d had from the sale of the business and from the colonel. So what did I do? Did I go out looking for money and security? No, no, of course not. Just the opposite. Within a few days all the rich men that lived in that rich neighborhood had been told by their servants, who’d been told by my servants, that a young widow was living in that house there, who wouldn’t go out, or receive company, or see anyone . . .”

Yes, said the storyteller, she herself told me the story we all know, which goes on changing and gets embellished little by little; and long years from now, when not her children but her grandchildren’s grandchildren rule, it will have become something as untrue and incoherent as the false history of Ervolgerd the Dead or the false tales about the empresses from beyond the desert. And so storytellers will have to sit in their tents to tell the truth, and if anybody still trusts them, somebody will believe them.

Now, I was no longer a humble boy telling stories in the squares. I was a young man for whom special tents were set up so he could sit in them to speak and people could come to listen from far away. At the time, I thought I’d achieved wisdom: I lived in the same little house in the same poor neighborhood, and had only added a few things to it, stoves to keep me warm in winter, dishes, a carpet for the spare room, lamps in every room. I still had few friends, pretty much the same ones as before; I didn’t travel by coach but on foot, as before, as I still did until just recently, when rheumatism, not vanity, has obliged me to use a sedan chair instead of my legs. And I went on going to the palace in secret, to the room that looked out on a garden, where I told the Great Empress the lives of the Lords of the Empire. She listened, attentive, serious, taking in everything I said in silence except for an occasional question. They weren’t the stupid, shrill questions idle women ask, but thoughtful and concrete, like the questions humble women ask softly and timidly. The Great Empress asked them with an imperative curiosity, as if they mattered, and not only to her, which they did. And now and then it was she who talked. Always for a reason, and never in arrogance, which she had none of. Something I’d mentioned would remind her of a person or an event in her life, and then she’d talk. Or perhaps she needed someone to listen to her when her solitude filled her with words. It was thus that I learned the story of the tricobezoar. Plenty of foolish, banal tales are told about this event; I want to tell how it happened that the wife of Mr. Ereddam’Ghcen, who after all was a mere rich man, a very rich man to be sure but not a nobleman, merely the master of immense plantations of rice and innumerable mills, was able to approach the emperor. The truth is, the emperor approached her. He called her to his side, inaugurating with a simple message of politeness one of the most peaceful eras the Empire ever enjoyed, and luckily still enjoys.

Do you know what a tricobezoar is? Animals are shorthaired or longhaired. All female animals lick their young, and most animals lick themselves or their herdmates. And at certain times of the year they shed. Some of them swallow a good deal of hair during their long or short lives, and this hair is indigestible and difficult to eliminate; it gets deposited in a nook or cranny of the stomach, where food and digestive acids work on it, forming a ball that gets bigger and harder as time goes on. It doesn’t kill the animal, but when people butcher a dead animal, occasionally, rarely, they come on a tricobezoar, or bezoar-stone. And you can bet they fight fiercely for the possession of this gut-grown jewel, because it’s supposed to have curative and magical powers. Maybe it does, maybe; even I don’t know. The emperor’s physician, in any case, said that he did know, and the emperor believed him.

Idraüsse IV was on the throne. A lot of you lived under his rule and know what kind of emperor he was—a good man, an unhappy man, too mild, too easily influenced. It might have been a good period for the people, but they were chaotic, contradictory years. Idraüsse trusted everything and everyone, believing everyone around him had good intentions and wanted what he wanted, the well-being of his subjects. But those closest to an emperor aren’t always honest men; if they were they’d be doing honest work and wouldn’t have time to machinate and conspire to get the protection of power or commit the iniquities they commit to get the throne to listen to them. What’s more, the emperor was a sick man. Anything made him bleed, even the rubbing of heavy clothing; his knees, his ankles, his elbows would swell up with huge blood-blisters that had to be pierced to keep him from howling in pain and becoming a complete invalid, and then he’d bleed and bleed no matter what they did; his legs and arms were twisted up in grotesque positions, and although his face was quite beautiful, his body could inspire disgust and horror. The doctors straightened his limbs with gentle exercises and tended his sores, but then there’d be a new attack and they’d have to begin all over again. He’d married a beautiful young noblewoman, strong and healthy, the Empress Kremmennah, in order to give the Empire a healthy heir, not a bleeder like himself. We know how cruel the destiny of men and countries can be. His illness allowed him to approach the empress only twice, and neither time bore fruit; and then, one night, the strong, healthy young empress caught her foot in the hem of a dress, fell down a marble staircase, and broke her neck. Idraüsse wept for her and interpreted her death as a sign: the dynasty of the Elkerides would die with him. He was, as it happened, wrong.