The Human Comedy: Selected Stories Page 3

  Dropping my own habits, becoming another person through a kind of intoxication of my imaginative faculties, and playing the game at will—that was my delight. To what do I owe this gift? Is it some second sight? One of those talents whose overuse could lead to madness? I have never looked into the sources of this capacity—I have it and I use it, that’s all. I will say, though, that from that time on, I have gone on teasing apart the elements of the heterogeneous mass we call “the people,” analyzing and evaluating its good or bad features.

  Already back then I understood how useful this neighborhood could be, this seedbed of revolution, seething with heroes, inventors, skilled workmen, with rascals and scoundrels, with virtues and vices, all exacerbated by poverty, strangled by need, drowned in wine, ravaged by strong liquor. You cannot imagine how many ruined hopes, how many unknown dramas in that city of sorrow! How many horrible and beautiful things! Imagination could never touch the reality hidden there, a reality no one could ever uncover—one would have to burrow too deep to find these amazing scenes, tragic and comic, masterpieces born of chance. I don’t know how I’ve gone so long without telling this story: It is one of those strange tales left behind in the sack that memory randomly draws from, like lottery numbers. I have plenty more of them, all as singular as this one, just as thoroughly buried, though they will have their moment, believe me.

  One day my housekeeper, a workman’s wife, asked for the honor of my presence at the wedding of one of her sisters. To give you an idea of what such a wedding would be like, I will tell you that I paid forty sous a month to this poor creature, who came in every morning to make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and prepare my lunch; the rest of the day she spent turning the lever of some machine, and for that hard labor she earned another ten sous a day. Her husband, a cabinetmaker, earned four francs a day. But as the household also included three children, they could barely manage to put an honest loaf of bread on the table. I’ve never come across more earnest decency than I saw in this man and woman. When I moved away from the neighborhood, for the next five years this Mother Vaillant would visit me with birthday greetings, bearing a bouquet and oranges—this woman who never had ten sous to spare. Poverty had brought us close. I was never able to pay her more than ten francs, often borrowed for the occasion. This may explain why I promised to attend the wedding; I meant to nestle into the happiness of these poor folks.

  Both the ceremony and the festivities took place at the warehouse of a wine merchant on rue Charenton, one floor up in a large hall lit by tin reflector lamps; the walls were hung with filthy paper at table level and lined with wooden benches. Inside the room some eighty people gathered in their Sunday best, with flowers and ribbons all around, everyone soaring with the nightlife spirit of the dance halls at La Courtille; their faces flaming, they danced as if the world was about to end. The bride and groom hugged and kissed to the general satisfaction of the guests, cheered on by lewd teasing of “Hey hey, thataway! Haha!”—actually, less indecent than the bashful glances of well-bred young ladies. The whole crowd gave off an animal good humor that was somehow contagious.

  But neither the faces of this bunch, nor the wedding feast, nor anything of that world matters to my story. Just keep in mind the oddness of the setting, picture the cheap red-painted warehouse, smell the pungent odor of wine, listen to the shouts of hilarity, stay firmly in that neighborhood, among those workmen, those old-timers, those poor women throwing themselves into a night’s pleasure!

  The musical ensemble consisted of three blind men from the hospice for the blind—the Quinze-Vingts. One played violin, the second clarinet, the third the flageolet. The three together were paid seven francs for the night. At that price, of course, they offered no Rossini or Beethoven, they played what they wanted and what they could, and no one complained—sweet tact! Their music was such an assault on the eardrum that once I had scanned the crowd, I turned my attention to this trio of blind men and was immediately disposed to indulgence as I recognized their shelter hospice uniforms. The players were seated in a recess before a casement window; to make out their faces, one had to come in close. I didn’t approach right away, but when I did, that was it: The party and its music fell away. My curiosity was roused to the highest pitch, my soul crossed over into the body of the clarinetist. The violin and the flageolet players both had commonplace faces, the familiar face of the blind—wary, attentive, unsmiling—but the clarinetist’s was one of those phenomena that stop the artist and the philosopher in his tracks.

  Imagine Dante’s plaster death mask, lit by the red glow of the oil lamp and topped by a thicket of silver-white hair. The bitter, sorrowful expression of that magnificent face was heightened by blindness, for the dead eyes were alive with the mind’s energy; it shone through like a burning beam of light, generated by some unique unceasing desire, writ firmly on the domed brow crossed by deep creases like the brick courses in an old wall.

  The old fellow was blowing randomly into his clarinet without the slightest concern for rhythm or melody; his fingers lifted and lowered, pressed the ancient keys with mechanical habit. He was not at all disturbed at producing what musicians call “sour notes,” the dancers noticed them no more than did the two colleagues of my Italian fellow—for I had been hoping he was an Italian, and he was Italian. There was something grand and despotic in this old Homer, who harbored within himself an Odyssey consigned to oblivion. It was a greatness so authentic that it even triumphed over his abject condition, a despotism so lively that it prevailed over poverty. Not one of the violent passions that lead a man to good or to evil, that make a convict or a hero, was lacking in that nobly carved face, lividly Italian, hooded by graying eyebrows that threw their shadow over deep hollows where one feared to see reappear the glow of thought, as one fears to see emerge from a cave’s mouth some bandits armed with torches and daggers. There lived a lion within that fleshly cage, a lion whose rage had been vainly spent against the iron of the bars. The flame of despair had guttered out in the cinders, the lava had gone cold, but the gullies, the crags, a wisp of smoke, still bore witness to the violence of the eruption, the ravages of the fire. These ideas, awakened by the sight of that man, were as hot in my soul as they were cold on his face.

  Between contra dances, the violin and the flute players, utterly intent on their glass and bottle, would hook their instruments to the buttons of their reddish redingotes, stretch a hand to a small table set within the window recess where their refreshment stood, and regularly offer the Italian a full glass. He could not reach it himself, for the table was set behind his chair, and each time the clarinetist would thank them with a friendly nod of the head. Their actions were executed with the precision always amazing in blind men from the Quinze-Vingts, which seems to imply they can see.

  I drew closer to the three blind men to listen to their conversation, but when I neared they must have recognized a non-laborer type and fell silent.

  “What country are you from, you playing the clarinet?”

  “From Venice,” the blind man answered with a faint Italian accent.

  “Were you born blind, or are you blind from—”

  “Blind from an accident,” he answered brusquely, “from a case of the damned gutta serena.”

  “Venice is a beautiful city, I have always dreamed of going there.”

  The old man’s face brightened, his creases shifted, he grew violently excited. “If I went there with you, it would be worth your time,” he told me.

  “Don’t talk to him about Venice,” said the violinist, “or this doge of ours will start up his rant, on top of the fact that he’s already got two bottles’ worth in his belly, the prince does!”

  “All right now, let’s begin, Papa Canard,” said the flutist.

  The three of them set to playing again, but all the while they performed the four contra dances, the Venetian sniffed me out, sensing my unusual interest in him. His face dropped its chilly expression of sorrow; some sort of hopef
ulness flushed his features and flowed like a blue flame along his wrinkles; he smiled, and he mopped his brow, that bold formidable brow; in time he became jolly like a man climbing onto his hobbyhorse.

  “How old are you?” I asked him.

  “Eighty-two!”

  “How long have you been blind?”

  “Fifty years now,” he answered, with a tone that implied that his regrets had to do not only with the loss of his sight but with some great power that had been stripped from him.

  “Why do they call you the doge?” I asked him.

  “Ah, it’s a joke,” he said. “I am a patrician of Venice, and I might have become doge as readily as anyone else.”

  “What is your name, then?”

  “Here, I’m called Old Man Canet. My name can never be registered any other way on the public records, but in Italian it is Marco Facino Cane, Prince of Varese.”

  “What! You’re descended from the famous condottiere Facino Cane, whose conquests were inherited by the dukes of Milan?”

  “É vero,” he said. “Back then, to avoid being killed by the Viscontis, Cane’s son fled to Venice and got himself registered in the Golden Book. But now there are no more Canes and no more book.” He made a frightening gesture—of patriotism long dead and of disgust for human affairs.

  “But if you were a senator of Venice, you must have been rich. How did you lose your wealth?”

  At my question he lifted his head toward me, as if to consider me with a movement that was truly tragic, and he replied, “Through a number of misfortunes . . .”

  He had no further interest in drinking; with a gesture he waved away the wineglass the old flageolet player held out to him, and then he lowered his head. These details were not likely to quench my curiosity. During the contra dance the three fellows played next, I contemplated the old Venetian nobleman with feelings that devour a man of twenty. I could see Venice and the Adriatic, I could see its ruins on that withered face. I walked that city so cherished by its inhabitants, I went from the Rialto to the Grand Canal, from the Schiavoni wharf to the Lido, I returned to the San Marco Basilica, so outlandishly sublime; I gazed at the Cà d’Oro’s windows, each with its different ornamentation; I contemplated those richly marbled old palaces—in short, all those marvels a scholar loves, and loves all the more for coloring them himself as he wishes, refusing to allow the spectacle of reality to de-poeticize them.

  I thought back along the life course of this scion of the greatest condottiere, seeking the traces of his troubles and the causes of his profound physical and moral degradation—a degradation that rendered all the lovelier the glints of grandeur and nobility now reawakened. Our thoughts might have been alike, for I believe that blindness makes mental communications swifter by keeping attention from scattering over external objects. Evidence of our common thinking was quick to arrive. Facino Cane quit playing, rose, came to me, and said, “Let’s leave!” which hit me like an electric shower. I gave him my arm and we left the place.

  When we reached the street, he said, “Will you take me to Venice? Will you lead me there? Will you put your faith in me? You will be richer than the ten richest houses in Amsterdam or London, richer than the Rothschilds, yes, rich as The Thousand and One Nights.”

  I thought the man was mad, but there was in his tone a power that I obeyed. I let myself be directed and he led me to the moat around the Bastille as if he had eyes. He sat down on a stone in a very isolated spot where they have since built a bridge that connects the Canal Saint-Martin to the Seine. I took a seat on another stone facing the old man, whose white hair shone in the moonlight like silver threads. The silence, barely disturbed by the stormy noise from the distant boulevards, the purity of the night—everything contributed to make this scene truly fantastic.

  “You mention millions to a young man, and you think he would hesitate to brave a thousand obstacles to collect them! Are you making fun of me?”

  “May I die unconfessed,” he answered violently, “if what I am about to tell you is untrue.

  “I was twenty, like you are now; I was rich, I was handsome, I was a nobleman, I started out with the greatest folly of all—with love. I loved as no one loves any longer these days—to the point of closing myself into a chest and taking the risk of being stabbed in it for just the promise of a kiss. To die for her seemed to me worth life itself. In 1760, I fell in love with a woman of the Vendramin family, eighteen years old, married to a Sagredo, one of the richest senators, thirty years old and mad about his wife. My mistress and I were innocent as a couple of cherubs when one day the husband caught us talking of love. I was unarmed. He aimed and missed me. I leapt on him. I strangled him with my bare hands, twisting his neck like a hen’s. I was ready to run off with Bianca but she refused to come. That’s women for you! I left by myself. I was convicted, my wealth was impounded for my heirs. But I did carry off my diamonds, five Titian canvases rolled up, and all my gold. I went to Milan, where no one bothered me; my adventure held no interest for that state . . .

  “One small remark before I continue,” he said after a pause, “is whether or not a woman’s fantasies during pregnancy or conception might affect her child. It is a known fact that while she was pregnant my mother had a craving for gold. Gold is for me an obsession; satisfying it is so necessary to my life that, no matter what my situation, I am never without gold on my person. I am constantly handling gold—as a youth I always wore jewels and always carried two or three hundred gold ducats.”

  As he spoke these words, he drew two ducats from his pocket and showed them to me.

  “I smell gold. Blind as I am, I pull up short when I pass a jeweler’s shop. This passion ruined me; I became a gambler to gamble for gold. I was not a swindler, I was swindled, I drove myself to ruin. When I no longer had any fortune left, I was gripped by a frenzy to see Bianca. I returned secretly to Venice and found her again. I was happy for six months, hidden in her house and fed by her; I expected delightedly to live out my life that way. She was being courted by the provveditore; the man sensed there was a rival, in Italy they have a feel for that sort of thing; he spied on us, caught us in bed, the coward! Imagine our terrific struggle! I didn’t kill him, but I wounded him seriously. The adventure put an end to my happy life.

  “From that day on I have never found another Bianca. I have had great pleasures, I have lived at Louis XV’s court among the most renowned ladies, but never, anywhere, have I found the qualities, the charms, the love I knew with my darling Venetian.

  “The provveditore called out his men and the palace was surrounded, invaded; I defended myself, hoping to die before the eyes of Bianca, who was helping me kill the provveditore. In earlier days the woman had refused to flee with me, but now, after those six months of happiness together, now she wanted to die along with me, and she suffered several wounds herself. Someone threw a greatcoat over me; I was caught in it, rolled up, and carried off in a gondola to a dungeon cell, one of the pozzi beneath the Doge’s Palace. I was twenty-two years old.

  “I was still gripping the pommel of my sword so hard that to take it from me would have required cutting off my fist. By a curious chance—or rather, inspired by some idea of precaution—I hid that iron stub in a corner of my cell, as if it might someday be useful. I was treated; my wounds were not fatal. At twenty-two, a person gets over everything. I was sentenced to be decapitated; I played the invalid to gain time. I calculated that my dungeon cell lay alongside the canal, and my plan was to escape by digging through the wall and swimming across the canal, at the risk of drowning. You see the kind of reasoning on which my hopes depended. Whenever the jailer brought me food, I would study the words that had been scratched onto the walls, such as ‘palace side,’ ‘canal side,’ ‘basement side,’ and I eventually worked out a map whose orientation was a bit puzzling but which could be explained by the still-unfinished state of the ducal palace.

  “With the ingenuity that arises from the appetite for freedom, by fingering the surface of a s
tone I managed to decipher an inscription in Arabic. An early prisoner had alerted those who followed to stones he had loosened along the bottom edge of the wall, with eleven feet of tunnel behind it. To continue the man’s work would mean depositing the rubble of excavated stone and mortar on the cell floor. But even if the guards and the Inquisitors had not been confident that the building’s construction demanded only exterior surveillance, the dungeon floor lay a few steps below grade, which would allow any gradual rise in level to go unnoticed by the jailers.

  “This enormous labor had been useless, at least to the man who had begun it—its unfinished state meant that the unknown prisoner must have died. In order that his devoted labors should not be forever wasted, some later prisoner must know Arabic—but I had studied Eastern languages at the Armenian convent! A line inscribed into the rear of the stone told the fate of this unfortunate fellow: He died a victim of his immense wealth, which the state of Venice had coveted and seized.

  “It took me a month to achieve visible results. As I worked, and especially in those moments when I was undone by fatigue, I heard the chink of gold, I saw gold before me, I was dazzled by diamonds. Oh, but wait: One night, my blunted steel hit wood; I sharpened the sword butt and bored a hole into the wood.

  “To manage the work, I squirmed on my belly like a serpent. I stripped bare and advanced like a mole, thrusting my hands ahead of me and pressing against the stone itself to force my way forward. Two nights before I was to appear before my judges, I determined to make a last effort—I pierced the wood, and my steel tool encountered nothing beyond it. Imagine my amazement when I set my eyes to the hole! I was in the wall panel of a cellar where by a faint light I could make out a mound of gold. The doge and one of the Council of Ten were there in the vault, I could hear their voices. From their talk I understood that this was the republic’s secret treasury, the repository of gifts to the doges and stores of booty, known as the ‘denier de Venise’—taxes levied on the plunder from expeditions. I was saved! When the jailer entered my cell, I proposed that he should facilitate my escape and leave with me, carrying all we could manage. With no reason to hesitate, he accepted.