Last Tales (6 page)

The word “unfaithful” was now flung on him from all angles, like a shower of flints on the man who is being stoned, and he met it on his knees, with hanging arms, like a man stoned. But when at last the shower slackened, and after a silence the words “the golden section” rose and echoed, subdued and significant, he raised his hands and pressed them against his ears.

And unfaithful
, he thought after a time,
for the sake of a woman. What is a woman? She does not exist until we create her, and she has no life except through us. She is nothing but body, but she is not body, even, if we do not look at her. She claims to be brought to life, and requires our soul as a mirror, in which she can see that she is beautiful. Men must burn, tremble and perish, in order that she may know that she exists and is beautiful. When we weep, she weeps, too, but with happiness—for now she has proof that she is beautiful. Our anguish must be kept alive every how, or she is no longer alive
.

All my creative power
, his thoughts went on,
if things had gone as she wished, would have been used up in the task of creating her, and of keeping her alive. Never, never again would I have produced a great work of art. And when I grieved over my misfortune, she would not understand, but would declare, “Why, but you have me!” While with him—with him, I was a great artist!

Yet he was not really thinking of Lucrezia, for to him there was in the world no other human being than the father whom he had betrayed.

Did I ever believe
, Angelo thought,
that I was, or that I might become, a great artist, a creator of glorious statues? I am no artist, and I shall never create a glorious statue. For I know now that my eyes are gone—I am blind!

After a further lapse of time his thoughts slowly turned away from eternity and back to the present.

His master, he thought, would walk up the path and stop near the house, among the vines. He would pick up a pebble from the ground and throw it against the windowpane, and then she would open the window. She would call to the man in the violet cloak, such as she was wont to do at their meetings, “Angelo!” And the great master, the unfailing friend, the immortal man, the man sentenced to death, would understand that his disciple had betrayed him.

During the previous day and night Angelo had walked far and slept but little, and the whole of the last day he had not eaten. He now felt that he was tired unto death. His master’s command: “You are to sleep tonight,” came back to him. Leonidas’ commands, when he had obeyed them, had always led him right. He slowly rose to his feet and fumbled his way to the pallet where his master had lain. He fell asleep almost immediately.

But as he slept, he dreamed.

He saw once more, and more clearly than before, the big figure in the cloak walk up the mountain path, stop and bend down for the pebble and throw it against the pane. But in the dream he followed him farther, and he saw the woman in the man’s arms—Lucrezia! And he awoke.

He sat up on the bed. Nothing sublime or sacred was any
longer to be found in the world, but the deadly pain of physsical jealousy stopped his breath and ran through him like fire. Gone was the disciple’s reverence for his master, the great artist; in the darkness the son ground his teeth at his father. The past had vanished, there was no future to come, all the young man’s thoughts ran to one single point—the embrace there, a few miles away.

He came to a sort of consciousness, and resolved not to fall asleep again.

But he did fall asleep again, and dreamed the same, but now more vividly and with a multitude of details, which he himself disowned, which his imagination could only have engendered when in his sleep he no longer had control of it.

As after this dream he was once more wide awake, a cold sweat broke out over his limbs. From the pallet he noticed some glowing embers on the fireplace; he now got up, set his naked foot upon them and kept it there. But the embers were almost dead, and went out under his foot.

In the next dream he himself, silent and lurking, followed the wanderer on the mountain path and through the window. He had his knife in his hand, he leaped forward, and plunged it first in the man’s heart, then in hers, as they lay clasped in one another’s arms. But the sight of their blood, mingled, soaking into the sheet, like a red-hot iron, burned out his eyes. Half awake, once more sitting up, he thought,
But I do not need to use the knife. I can strangle them with my hands
.

Thus passed the night.

When the turnkey of the prison awakened him, it was light. “So you can sleep?” said the turnkey. “So you really trust the old fox? If you ask me, I should say he has played you a fine trick. The clock shows a quarter to six. When it strikes, the warden and the colonel will come in, and take whichever bird they find in the cage. The priest is coming later. But your old lion is never coming. Honestly—would you or I come, if we were in his shoes?”

When Angelo succeeded in understanding the words of the turnkey, his heart filled with indescribable joy. There was nothing more to fear. God had granted him this way out: death. This happy, easy way out. Vaguely, through his aching head one thought ran:
And it is for him that I die
. But the thought sank away again, for he was not really thinking of Leonidas Allori, or of any person in the world round him. He felt only one thing: that he himself, within the last moment, had been pardoned.

He got up, washed his face in a basin of water brought by his guard, and combed his hair back. He now felt the pain of the burn in his foot and again was filled with gratitude. Now he also remembered the master’s words about God’s faithfulness.

The turnkey looked at him and said, “I took you for a young man yesterday.”

After some time footsteps could be heard up the stone-paved passage, and a faint rattling. Angelo thought,
Those are the soldiers with their carbines
. The heavy door swung open, and between two gendarmes, who held his arms, entered Allori. In accordance with his words the evening before, he let himself be led forward with closed eyes by the warders. But he felt or perceived where Angelo was standing and took a step toward him. He stood silent before him, unhooked his cloak, lifted it from his own shoulders and laid it around the young man’s. In this movement the two were brought close, body to body, and Angelo said to himself,
Perhaps, after all, he will not open his eyes and look at me
. But whenever had Allori not kept a given word? The hand which—as it put the cloak round him—rested against Angelo’s neck forced his head a little forward, the large eyelids trembled and lifted, and the master looked into the eyes of the disciple. But the disciple could never afterward remember or recall the look. A moment later he felt Allori’s lips on his cheek.

“Well, now!” cried the turnkey with surprise in his voice.
“Welcome back! We were not expecting you. Now you must take potluck! And you,” he added, turning to Angelo, “you can go your way. There are still a few minutes to six o’clock. My lords are not coming till after it has struck. The priest is coming later. Things are done with precision here. And fair—as you know—is fair.”

NIGHT WALK

A
fter Leonidas Allori’s death a sad misfortune came upon his disciple Angelo Santasilia: he could not sleep.

Will the narrator be believed by such people as have themselves experience of sleeplessness, when he tells them that from the beginning this affliction was the victim’s own choice? Yet it was so. Angelo walked out through the prison gate, behind which he had for twelve hours been hostage for his condemned master, into a world which to him contained no direction whatsoever. He was totally isolated, an absolutely lonely figure in this world, and he felt that the man whose grief and shame—like his own—exceeded that of all others must at the same time be exempt from the laws which governed those others. He made up his mind not to sleep any more.

On this day he had no feeling of time, and he took fright when he realized that darkness had fallen, and the day was over. He was aware that his friends, other pupils of the dead artist, were tonight keeping watch together, but on no account would he join them, for they would be talking of Leonidas Allori and would greet him as the chosen disciple, upon whom the eye of the master had last dwelt.
Yes
, he thought, and laughed,
as if I were Elisha, the follower of the great prophet Elijah, on whom the passenger of the chariot of fire threw his mantle!
So he betook himself to the taverns and inns of the town, where casually collected people roared and rioted and where the air was filled with strumming and song, and was heavy with vapors of wine and the smell of the clothes and sweat of strangers. But he would not drink like the others. He left one inn to proceed to another, and both in the taprooms and in the streets he told himself,
All this does not concern me. I myself will not sleep any more
.

In such a tavern, on the night between Monday and Tuesday, he met Giuseppino, or Pino, Pizzuti, the philosopher, a small man shrunken and dark of hue as if he had been hung up in a chimney to be smoked. Pizzuti had once, many years ago, owned the noblest marionette theater in Naples, but later on his luck had left him. In prison, and in chains, three fingers of his right hand had withered, so that he could no longer maneuver his puppets. He now wandered from place to place, the poorest of the poor, but luminous, as if phosphorescent, with love of humanity in general and with a knowing and mellifluous compassion for the one human being with whom he just happend to be talking. In this man’s company Angelo passed the next day and night, and while he looked at him and listened to him he had no difficulty in keeping awake.

The philosopher at once realized that he had a desperate man before him. To give the boy confidence he for a time spoke about himself. He described his puppets one by one, faithfully and with enthusiasm, as if they had been real
friends and fellow artists, and with tears in his eyes, because they were now lost to him. “Alas, the beloved ones,” he moaned, “they were devoted to me and they trusted me. But they are dispersed now, limp of arms and legs, with moldering strings; they are thrown away from the stage to the uttermost parts of the sea. For my hand could no longer lead them, nor my right hand hold them!” But presently—as ever in the vicissitudes of his existence—he turned his mind toward life everlasting. “That is not a matter for grief,” he said. “In Paradise I shall once more meet and embrace them all. In Paradise I shall be given ten fingers to each hand.”

Later on, after midnight, Pino led the conversation to Angelo’s own circumstances, felt his way in them, and soon had them all at his seven fingers’ ends.

In this way it happened that next night Angelo told him his whole story, as he would not have been able to tell it to any person in the world other than this crippled vagabond. At that the old man’s face lit up in high, solemn harmony. “That is not a matter for grief,” he said. “It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings? We would have to fear that the Saviour might even come to think with disgust of His heroic achievement! For exactly this reason, as you will know, in the very hour of the Cross, care was taken that He had thieves by Him, one to each side, and could turn His eyes from the one to the other. At this moment He may look from you to me, and mightily recognize and repeat to Himself, ‘Aye, verily it was needed!’ ”

After a while Pino added, “And I myself am the crucified thief Demas, to whom Paradise was promised.”

But early on Thursday morning Pizzuti quite suddenly vanished, like a rat into a gutter hole. He left the room on a necessary errand and did not return, and not till seven years later did Angelo again see this excellent man. And as the
silence behind him grew deep and, as it were, conclusive, the outcast man realized that he no longer needed to hold on to a decision. It would not happen to him again to fall asleep.

For some time he walked among people, still absolutely lonely, like an unproved but ambitious young ascetic with a hair shirt next to his skin. So as not to meet his friends of the past he changed his lodgings, and found for himself a small closet high up under the roof in the opposite quarter of the town. During the first time he was surprised at the fact that his sleepless nights did not appear long, but that time simply seemed to have been abolished—night came, and then again morning, and to him it meant nothing.

But, just as unexpectedly, his body rose in rebellion against his mind and his will. The moment came in which he gave up his pride and prayed the great powers of the universe: “Despise me, cast me away, but allow me to be like the others, allow me to sleep.”

He now bought himself opium, but it did not help him. He also purchased another strong sleeping draught, but it only conveyed to him a row of novel, quite confused sensations of distance, so that objects and times which were far away were felt by him as quite near, while such objects as he knew to be within reach—his own hands and feet and the stone steps of the stairs—were infinitely far off.

His brain by this time was working extremely slowly. One day in the street he saw Lucrezia, who had returned to the town and was living with her mother. But only late at night, when the church towers had rung out midnight, did he tell himself,
I saw a woman in the street today, it was Lucrezia
. And after another while,
I once promised to come to her. But I did not come
. For a long time he sat very still, handling this thought, and at last he smiled, like a very old man.

It was shortly after this day that he began to turn to other people and to look to them for help. But when he begged their advice, he was in such deadly earnest that he made the
persons he addressed smile, and they answered him in jest ox altogether dismissed his questions.

One morning he bethought himself of Mariana, the old woman in whose tavern he had met Pizzuti. She had, he knew, given friends of his good advice—it was not impossible that she might be able to help him. But the lack of seriousness in his counselors till now had frightened him out of asking straightaway, and he searched for a pretext for going to her house, until he remembered that he had left there his purple cloak with the brown embroidery. At that he went straight to her house.