Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (23 page)

Florio gave a sudden start when this curious character turned to him, of all those present, and welcomed him as an old acquaintance. Flabbergasted and racking his brains, Florio studied him from head to foot, as he could not for the life of him remember ever having seen him before. But the knight was uncommonly talkative and spoke a great deal about certain occurrences from Florio’s past. He was, moreover, so familiar with the character of Florio’s native clime, with the garden and
those homely haunts the young man still cherished from his childhood, that Florio soon came to terms with this dark soul.

But for the others, Donati – that was the knight’s name – did not seem to fit in. A strangely unsettling disturbance, the source of which no one could identify, seeped into the atmosphere. And since, in the meantime, night had finally fallen, the party soon broke up.

Then a wondrous play of shadows erupted outside, of carriages, horses, servants and high-hanging lanterns casting strange glimmers on the nearby water’s surface, between the trees and the tangle of fleeing figures. In this wild illumination Donati looked much more pale and ghostlike than before. The beautiful young girl with the wreath of flowers in her hair kept casting fearful, sidelong looks at him. And when he drew near and with chivalrous gallantry helped her out of the tent, she meekly recoiled, pressing back against Florio, who had stayed behind, and with a fast-beating heart lifted the lovely girl into her saddle. Now that everyone was ready to ride off, she flashed him another friendly look from her elegant perch, and soon the entire glittering gathering was gobbled up by the night.

Florio felt strange suddenly finding himself alone on that wide empty meadow with Donati and the singer. With his guitar under his arm, the latter walked back and forth before the tent at the water’s edge, and seemed to grow once again reflective, while he plucked a few notes that hung in the air, lulling the silent meadow to sleep. Then all of a sudden he stopped. A curious malaise seemed to spread over his otherwise open, friendly expression, and he impatiently made ready to leave.

Whereupon all three mounted their horses and rode together to the nearby city. Fortunato did not say a word along the way, while Donati gushed forth in a flood of all the more friendly, well-spoken and eloquent words; Florio rode silently like a dreaming girl between them, still taken by the lingering effects of love.

When they came to the city gate, Donati’s horse, which had already shied away from several passers-by, suddenly reared almost upright and refused to enter. A sputtering flash of anger almost twisted the rider’s expression, and a wild, half-muttered
curse passed from his fluttering lips, which made Florio start with surprise, for such ways did not accord in the least with the knight’s otherwise refined and sober respectability. But the knight soon composed himself again. ‘I wanted to accompany you to the inn,’ he said, turning to Florio with a smile and with his customary grace, ‘but my horse won’t have it, as you can see. I live in a villa just outside town, and hope to see you there very soon.’ Whereupon he bowed in the saddle, and the horse, hardly still manageable, consumed by an incomprehensible haste and fear, took off like lightning, dashing into the darkness, the wind whizzing behind it.

‘Thank God,’ cried Fortunato, ‘that the night gobbled him up again! He really did appear to me like one of those dun-coloured, misshapen night butterflies escaped from a frightful nightmare that swarm at dawn and with their long whiskers and ghastly big eyes look as if they had a face.’ Florio, who had already developed a feeling of friendship for Donati, expressed his surprise at such a harsh judgement. But, irritated all the more by this astounding gentleness, the singer kept on with his merry harangue, calling the knight, to Florio’s chagrin, a lunatic, a lovesick swain, a melancholy braggart.

Engaged in such chatter, they finally reached their lodgings and each one soon went off to his rooms.

Florio flung himself, fully dressed, in bed, but he could not fall asleep. His soul was still stirred up, still pulsing and resounding and humming with all the impressions of the day. Soon the sound of opening and closing doors subsided and only an occasional voice could still be heard, until finally, house, city and field sank into deep silence; then it seemed to him as if he were coasting with swan-white sails over a moonlit sea. The gentle ripples struck the side of his craft, sirens reared out of the deep, all of them resembling the lovely girl with the wreath of flowers. She sang such a wondrous, sad and never-ending song that he felt he was about to drown in wistfulness. The boat tipped further and further to the side, and slowly, unnoticeably, sank deeper and deeper. Then he awakened with a start.

He leapt out of bed and opened the window. The inn was located on the outskirts of the town, and his gaze took in a
wide, silent swath of hills, gardens and valleys all bathed in moonlight. Outside too, everywhere he turned, the sway of the trees and the rush of the streams still seemed to preserve lingering and echoing traces of last night’s atmosphere, as though the entire region sang out softly, like the sirens he’d heard in his slumber. He could not withstand the temptation. He grabbed the guitar that Fortunato had left behind, walked out of his room and stepped quietly through the silent house. The downstairs door was just leant shut; a servant lay asleep on the doorstep. So he managed to slip out, unnoticed, and ambled cheerfully through wine gardens, down empty alleys and past cottages, whose inhabitants were all fast asleep, ever further out into the country.

Looking out between the neighbouring tracts of land, he saw the river running through the valley; many glimmering white castles clustered here and there sat like sleeping swans in the sea of silence. Then he sang with a merry voice:

Come let us take a night-time stroll,

A trusty zither in hand!

And strumming, first the hills extol,

Then hail the heavens and the silent land.

The night world is a different place

From the valley where I whiled away the day in bliss.

And in the woods, the moon now shows its face

Through the treetops, blowing its cool kisses.

The vineyard’s deserted, the vintner gone.

The river’s ripple is all we hear,

And all the lusty goings-on

Forgotten, but for a silver tear.

And nightingales that nest in dreams

Awaken, trilling, in the breeze.

A whispering, or so it seems,

Stirs memory in the towering trees.

But joy can’t just evaporate.

And of the day’s delirious fest

All memory did not abate,

There’s still a secret singing in my breast.

And gladly do I strum these strings

For you, dear girl, across the stream,

The distant ear for whom I sing,

Who knows the dreamer and his dream.

He had to laugh at himself, since by the end of his song he had no idea whom he was serenading. It wasn’t the charming girl with the wreath of flowers in her hair. The music outside the tents, the dream in his room, and his heart still infused with the charmed notes – the dream and the girl’s graceful features had imperceptibly and wondrously metamorphosed her image into something far more beautiful, bigger and more resplendent, the like of which he’d never seen before.

Lost in thought, he wandered on until he came unexpectedly on a large fish pond ringed by tall trees. The moon that just rose over the tops of the trees shed a sharp light on a marble statue of Venus set there on a stone pedestal at the shore, as though the goddess had just stepped out of the waves, and gazed back in enchantment at the reflection of her own loveliness that the drunken glimmer of the water’s surface flashed back amidst the silently blossoming light of the stars rising from the deep. Several swans quietly traced their monotonous circles round the divine image, and a soft rustling emanated from the trees round about.

Florio stood stock still, as if riveted by his gaze, for the sight of the statue appeared to him like a sudden encounter with the beloved he’d long pined after, like a magical flower sprung from the twilight of his childhood and the dreamy silence of the first days of his youth. The longer he looked the more it seemed to him as if the statue had just then slowly shut its soulful eyes, as if her lips wished to part in a greeting, as though life wafted forth like a sweet warming song from her lovely limbs. He held his eyes shut for a long time, blinded by longing and rapture.

When he looked up again everything all at once seemed different. The moon hung strangely from behind a cluster of clouds, a brisk wind whipped up dark waves in the pond, and the sculpture of Venus, now so terribly white and motionless, peered at him almost fearfully from the stone hollows of its eyes out of the boundless silence. The young man was overcome by a sense of horror he had never felt before. He rushed off and, walking as fast as he could, without stopping to catch his breath, hastened through gardens and vineyards back towards the silent city; for even the rustle of the trees now sounded to him like a clearly audible whisper, and the tall poplars seemed to be close on his heels with their far-reaching shadows.

So he returned, visibly shaken, to the inn. The servant still lay asleep on the threshold and jumped up with a start as Florio stepped over him. But Florio slammed the front door shut behind him and only breathed a sigh of relief once he’d reached his room, where he kept walking back and forth a long while before calming down. Then he flung himself back in bed and finally fell asleep, dreaming the strangest dreams.

The following morning Florio and Fortunato sat at breakfast under the sun-drenched trees in front of the inn. Florio looked paler than usual in the pleasant pall of shade. ‘The morning,’ said Fortunato merrily, ‘is a dashing fellow in the flush of good health, shouting out with joy from the high mountain tops to the sleeping world below, wiping the tears from the flowers and trees, surging, raging and singing. He doesn’t give a hoot for delicate feelings, but gruffly grabs hold of your every limb and laughs in your face if you come out looking pallid, as if you’re still bathed in moonbeams.’ Though he had originally intended to tell the singer about the lovely Venus sculpture, Florio, ashamed of himself, sat there in awkward silence. His night-time stroll had, however, been noticed by the servant, and word of it was probably made public. Laughing, Fortunato continued: ‘Well, if you don’t believe me, just try it for yourself, stand up and say, for instance: oh lovely, precious soul, oh moonlight, you pollen of delicate hearts, etc., and see if that doesn’t make you a laughing stock! And yet I bet you babbled
some such stuff more than once last night and no doubt with a straight face.’

Florio, who until now had always imagined Fortunato as kind and gentle-hearted, was sorely taken aback by the beloved singer’s flippant sport at his expense. He responded abruptly, the tears welling up in his pained eyes: ‘Surely your words don’t bespeak what you feel in your heart, and I ask you never to do that again. But I won’t let you rile me, there are some gentle and lofty feelings that may well need to be veiled, but are surely not shameful, and there is a quiet contentment that must seal itself off from the brash daylight, and only opens its holy calyx to the starry firmament like the night-blossoming flower bed of an angel.’

Fortunato gazed at the youth in amazement. ‘Then, by God, you must be head over heels in love!’

Fortunato, who wanted to take a ride, had, in the meantime, ordered his horse to be brought to him. He lovingly stroked the bent neck of his elegantly decked-out steed, which snorted with high-spirited impatience. Then he turned back to Florio and, smiling, reached out his hand. ‘I feel bad for you, my friend,’ he said. ‘There are far too many sensitive, love-struck, good young lads like yourself in this world hell-bent on being miserable. Forget about melancholy, moonbeams and all that poppycock; and if ever you’re feeling really down, then ride out into the wide open fields of God’s good morning and shake it off in heartfelt prayer – things would really have to be pretty bad if that didn’t restore your spirits!’ With these words he swung himself into the saddle and rode past hilltop vineyards and flowery gardens out into the colourful echoing distance, himself as bright and brilliant as the morning that lay before him.

Florio peered after him a long while, till the dust clouds dissolved on the distant sea of the horizon. Then he abruptly turned and paced back and forth beneath the trees. The things he saw last night left a deep, uncertain longing in his soul. On the other hand, Fortunato’s words of admonition had made him strangely moody and confused. Like a sleepwalker roused at the sound of his name, he himself no longer knew what he wanted. Lost in thought, he often paused before the wondrous
spectacle of nature, as though he wanted to seek counsel with the merry majesty of it all. But, filtered through the foliage, the flickers of early morning sunlight only occasionally pierced the walls of his feverish breast, which was still in the thrall of another power. For in his heart the stars still cast their magic spell, in the glimmer of which the unspeakably lovely marble sculpture peered back at him again with irresistible force.

So at last he resolved to seek out the pond again, and struck out in the same direction in which he’d wandered the night before.

But how altogether different everything looked there now! Cheerful people made their busy way through the vineyards and gardens and up and down the alleys; children played quietly on the sunny lawns in front of cottages, which same structures, metamorphosed into sleeping sphinxes nestled beneath the dream spectres of the trees, had terrified him the night before; the moon hung pale and distant in the clear sky; and countless birds twittered and flitted about in the woods. It was inconceivable to him how he could possibly have been struck by such a strange terror in this placid place.

Meanwhile, lost in thought, he noticed that he had wandered far afield. He looked carefully all around him, now doubling back, now ambling forward again, but to no avail; the more attentive his gaze, the more unknown and altogether different everything appeared.