Last Tales (8 page)

“And I have come to understand that she would be in the right. For in the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect. And thus,” he finished, “the river runs beneath my life.”

Pino remained silent for a while, glanced at his friend and then gazed at the mountains. “And how goes it?” he asked. “Can you sleep now?”

“Sleep?” Angelo repeated, as before, as if from its sound he was repeating a word from another language, “Aye, do you remember when I could not sleep? Yes, thanks, now I can sleep.”

Again there was a silence.

“No,” Pino said suddenly, “you are mistaken, and things are not as you imagine. I happen to know. A person who—because of you—did have this matter at heart, might—for your sake—ask Lucrezia, ‘What happened the night your lover pledged his life for your husband? Did the great artist then get to know that you two, whom he had held dearest of all, and whose hearts and fates he had directed as by strings on his fingers, had betrayed him? Did the blow then break his great heart? Or did he stand up to it, even if staggering, trusting to the law of the golden section?’ She would then look up at the inquirer, her eyes so clear that he would be ashamed to doubt even for a moment the truth of her words, and answer him, ‘I am very sorry that I cannot tell you. But I do not remember. I have forgotten.’ ”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Angelo asked in a low voice, “that you have asked her?”

“I have seen your wife for the first time today,” answered Pino. “But you forget that I have once written marionette plays. I had then a lovely puppet, the
jeune première
of my theater, with rosy cheeks and white bosom, and with eyes of clear dark glass, who resembled Lucrezia.”

When after a pause the old man again looked at Angelo, he noticed that he was smiling a little. “What are you thinking of, Angelo?” he asked.

“I was thinking of those small instruments that we call words, and by which we have to manage in this life of ours. I was thinking of how, by interchanging two everyday words in an everyday sentence, we alter our world. For when you had spoken, I first thought, ‘Is that possible?’—then secondly, after a moment, ‘That is possible.’ ”

They now for some time talked of other things, and to give Giuseppino pleasure, Angelo made him tell of his marionette theater. But from time to time the smile left the face of the old theater director, and he sank back into melancholy.

“But listen now, Pino,” said his friend. “Today your
heaven is seven years nearer to you than when we last met. There you will see again both your puppets and your milady. For I take it that you are still Demas, the thief on the cross who had Paradise promised him?”

“Well, Angelo,” said Pizzuti, scratching his head with his two fingers, “there you bring up something to which I have been giving a good deal of thought. I certainly still do believe that I am that great sinner to whom hope was given. But how, now, did things really go with this thief on the cross?

“ ‘This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,’ the Saviour said to him. But when on the evening of Good Friday Demas presented himself at the gate of Paradise, Christ was not there, and as you know, forty days passed before He came home in all His splendor. Very likely the young King of Heaven, in those days of great events, gave not much thought to an invitation. But I myself—better than most people—will know with what confusion and anxiety the poorly dressed guest did approach the gate.

“And I have pondered,” Pino went on, “who will really have been present behind the gate at which Demas was staring, with the authority to let a thief into Paradise? The Rock of the Church, the great Fisherman Peter, at this dark hour crouched at the back of the high priest’s house, farther away from Paradise than ever before or after. Saint Mary Magdalene, whom Demas knew from Jerusalem, was sobbing into her long hair and had not yet made up her mind to go to the grave. Those friendly saints with whom we are now familiar—Francis, Anthony and sweet Catherine—came upon the heavenly stage only many centuries later. The gentle Blessed Virgin, had she by that time been Queen of Heaven, would have understood all that was going on in Demas’ heart, and so would have come to the gate herself, with her crown on and her retinue of angels—but even her strong heart could not hold or bear any more on that Friday night. Yet after a long time, I have imagined, the little children whom King Herod
had had put to death in Bethlehem came running along to throng around the newcomer. No doubt they laughed at the sorry figure collapsed in a small heap over his sundered bones, perhaps they did even point their little fingers at him, as children will do at a ragged cripple. But in the end two of them ran in to fetch Saint Anne, Christ’s blessed grandmother. And as this worthy woman now appeared at the gate and spoke to him, Demas suddenly realized how everything is explained and made clear to the blessed in heaven, for even after the happenings of Good Friday, she was mild and bright as a lighted candle.

“I have now imagined the following conversation to take place between the two of them.

“ ‘Come in,’ the lady says, ‘come in, my good man, you are expected. But my grandson has been delayed, for He has found it necessary to descend into hell.’

“ ‘O Lady,’ Demas answers, much ashamed, ‘there will have been some mistake, just as I expected, and it is down there that I am to see Him once more. May I make so bold as to ask the way, for I want nothing better than to be where He is.’

“ ‘Certainly not,’ said Saint Anne. ‘You must do as you are told. And I myself very much want to speak with one who has seen Him so recently.’

“ ‘O Lady,’ says Demas again, ‘how can one such as I discourse with you on that which no man on earth can describe?’

“ ‘I know, I know,’ says the holy grandmother. ‘Who would know better than I? My good man, you did not see Him when He first learned to walk. I myself held one of His little hands, and His mother held the other—never have I seen a child so like his mother! No, it is as you say—it is indescribable!’

“And led by Lady Saint Anne’s hand—that same hand of which she had spoken—Demas stepped across the threshold of Paradise.”

Angelo laughed at his friend’s story.

“Aye, if I had still got my theater,” said Pizzuti, carried away by his own eloquence, “I should have played this scene on the stage. Might it not have been sublime and thrilling, dear Angelo? Now it must content itself to become reality someday.

“And you yourself now,” he said after a minute. “Are you going to Paradise? And shall we meet and talk together there, as we do here now?”

Angelo for a long time found no answer. He took up one of his small clay figures and set it on the balustrade, a little to the left.

“A man is more than one man,” he said slowly. “And the life of a man is more than one life. The young man who was Leonidas Allori’s chosen disciple, who felt that at his hand he would become the greatest artist of his age, and who loved his master’s wife—he will not go to heaven. He was too light of weight to mount so high.”

He set up another figure on the balustrade, at some distance from the first and to the right of it.

“And this famous sculptor, Angelo Santasilia,” he went on, “whom princes and cardinals beseech to work for them, this good husband and father—he will not go to heaven either. And do you know why? Because he is not at all eager to go there.”

He placed his last figure in between the two others, farther back on the balustrade.

“Do you see, Pino?” he said softly. “These three tiny toy figures are placed to mark three corners of a rectangle, in which the width is to the length as the length to the sum of the two. These, you know, are the proportions of the golden section.”

He let his skilled hands fall to rest in his lap.

“But,” he finished very slowly, “the young man whom you met at the inn of Mariana-the-Rat—the good home of thieves and smugglers down by the harbor—the young man with whom you talked there at night, Pino—he will go to heaven.”

TALES OF
TWO OLD GENTLEMEN

T
wo old gentlemen, both of them widowers, played piquet in a small salon next to a ballroom. When they had finished their game, they had their chairs turned round, so that through the open doors they could watch the dancers. They sat on contentedly, sipping their wine, their delicate noses turned up a little and taking in, with the melancholic superiority of age, the fragrance of youth before them. They first talked of ancient scandals in high society—for they had known each other as boys and young men—and of the sad fate of common friends, then of political and dynastic matters, and at last of the complexity of the universe in general. When they got there, there was a pause.

“My grandfather,” the one old gentleman said at the end of it, “who was a very happy man and particularly happy in
his married life, had built up a philosophy of his own, which in the course of my life from time to time has been brought back to me.”

“I remember your grandfather quite well, my good Matteo,” said the other, “a highly corpulent, but still graceful figure, with a smooth, rosy face. He did not speak much.”

“He did not speak much, my good Taddeo,” Matteo agreed, “for he did, in accordance with his philosophy, admit the futility of argumentation. It is from my brilliant grandmother, his wife, that I have inherited my taste for a discussion. Yet one evening, while I was still quite a young boy, he benignly condescended to develop his theory to me. It happened, I remember, at a ball like this, and I myself was all the time longing to get away from the lecture. But my grandfather, his mind once opened upon the matter, did not dismiss his youthful listener till he had set forth to him his entire train of ideas. He said:

“ ‘We suffer much. We go through many dark hours of doubt, dread and despair, because we cannot reconcile our idea of divinity with the state of things in the universe round us. I myself as a young man brooded a good deal over the problem. Later on I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.

“ ‘We speak about Providence and announce: The Lord is my shepherd, He will provide. But in our hearts we know that we should demand from our own shepherds—’

“—for my grandfather,” the narrator here interrupted himself, “drew most of his wealth from his vast sheep farms in the province of Marche.

“ ‘—a providential care of our sheep very different from the one to which we are ourselves submitted, and which appears mainly to provide us with blood and tears.

“ ‘But say instead, of Providence: “She is my shepherdess”—
and you will at once realize in what way you may expect to be provided for.

“ ‘For to a shepherdess tears are convenient and precious, like rain—as in the old song
il pleut, il pleut, bergère
—like pearls, or like falling stars running over the firmament—all phenomena in themselves divine, and symbolic of the highest and the deepest spheres of human knowledge. And as to the shedding of blood, this to our shepherdess—as to any lady—is a high privilege and is inseparably united with the sublimest moments of existence, with promotion and beatification. What little girl will not joyously shed her blood in order to become a virgin, what bride not hers in order to become a wife, what young wife not hers to become a mother?

“ ‘Man, troubled and perplexed about the relation between divinity and humanity, is ever striving to find a foothold in the matter by drawing on his own normal experience. He will view it in the light of relations between tutor and pupil, or of commander and soldier, and he will lose breath—and heart—in search and investigation. The ladies, whose nature is nearer to the nature of the deity, take no such trouble; they see the relation between the Cosmos and the Creator quite plainly as a love affair. And in a love affair search and investigation is an absurdity, and unseemly. There are, thus, no genuine female atheists. If a lady tells you that she is an atheist, she is either, still, an adorable person, and it is coquetry, or she is a depraved creature, and it is a lie. Woman even wonders at man’s perseverance in questioning, for they are aware that he will never get any other kind of answer than the kind which King Alexander the Great got from the Sibylla of Babylon. You may have forgotten the tale, I shall recount it to you.

“ ‘King Alexander, on his triumphant return from the Indies, in Babylon heard of a young Sibylla who was able to foretell the future, and had her brought before him. When the
black-eyed woman demanded a price to part with her knowledge, he let a soldier bring up a box filled with precious stones which had been collected over half the world. The Sibylla rummaged in the box and picked out two emeralds and a pearl; then she gave in to the King’s wish and promised to tell him what till now she had told nobody.

“ ‘Very slowly and conscientiously, all the time holding up one finger and begging him—since she must never speak any word of hers over again—to give his utmost attention to her words, she explained to him with what rare woods to build up the sacred pile, with what incantations to kindle it, and what parts of a cat and a crocodile to place upon it. After that she was silent for a long time. “Now, King Alexander,” she at last said, “I am coming to the core of my secret. But I shall not speak one more word unless you give me the big ruby which, before your soldier brought up the box, you told him to lay aside.” Alexander was loath to part with the ruby, for he had meant to give it to his mistress Thaïs at home, but by this time he felt that he could not live without having been told the final part of the spell, so had it brought and handed over to her.

“ ‘ “Listen then, Alexander,” the woman said, laying her finger on the King’s lips. “At the moment when you gaze into the smoke, you must not think of the left eye of a camel. To think of its right eye is dangerous enough. But to think of the left is perdition.” ’

“So much for my grandfather’s philosophy,” said Matteo.