Auto-da-fé (63 page)
Authors: Elias Canetti
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Literary Criticism, #German, #Novel, #European, #German fiction
George did not hear the answer to this question until he was in the next room. A bachelor was showing the others how he had been caught
in flagranti delicto
with his own wife. 'I pull offher fleas from her, only she wasn't wearing any. Then her father-in-law poked his head through the key-hole and asked for his grandchild back.' "Where? Where?' giggled the spectators. They were all busy at the same thing; they got on very well. The warders did not mind listening. An assistant, who was also a journalist, made a note of the atmosphere of the evening in significant words. George noticed it without looking; in his own thoughts he was doing the same thing. He was a walking wax tablet on which words and gestures made their impression. Instead of working over things or going to meet them, he received them mechanically. But the wax tablet was melting. 'My wife bores me,' he thought. The patients seemed foreign to him. Those secret doors which led into their strongly walled citadels, those doors which were usually ajar, whose passage was trusted to him alone, remained to-day fast locked. Break them open? Why? Best break off for to-night, to-morrow unfortunately always comes. I shall find each one of them in the right room, all my life I shall always find eight hundred patients. Perhaps my fame will make the institute even bigger. In time we may have two to ten thousand. Pilgrimages from every land will fill my cup of happiness. A commonwealth of all the world is to be expected in about thirty years. I shall be People's Commissar for Lunatics.
Travels over all the inhabited earth. Inspections and reviews of an army of a million deranged minds. The mentally defective on the left, the over gifted on the right. Foundation of research laboratories for exceptionally gifted animals. Breeding of deranged animals into men. Imbeciles who recover will be discharged from my army with shame and disgrace. My friends are closer to me than my supporters. Petty supporters are called important. How petty my wife is. Why don't I go home? Because my wife's there. She wants love. Everyone to-day wants love.
The wax tablet weighed heavy. The things impressed on it were weighty. In the penultimate room, his wife appeared suddenly. She had run.
'A telegram!' she called and laughed in his face.
'Is that why you hurried so?' Politeness had grown on him like a second skin. Often he wished he could cast it; this was the height of his rudeness. He opened it and read: 'Am completely crackers. Your brother.' Of all possible news, this was what he had expected least of all. A bad joke? A mystery? No. One word disproved these possibilities: 'crackers'! Such expressions his brother never used. If he used such a word, something must be wrong. He blessed the telegram. A journey was essential. He could justify himself. He could not have wished more for anything.
His wife read it. "Who is this, your brother?'
'Haven't I ever told you about him? The greatest living sinologist. On my desk you'll find some of his latest works. It's twelve years since I saw him.'
"What will you do?'
'Take the next express.'
'To-morrow morning!'
'No, to-night.'
Her face fell.
'Yes, yes,' he said thoughtfully, 'it's a question of my brother's welfare. He must be in the wrong hands. How could he otherwise have sent off a telegram like this?'
She tore the telegram into little pieces. Why hadn't she torn it up at once? The patients scrambled for the fragments. They all loved her, they all wanted a souvenir of her; some of them ate the bits of paper. Most put them next their hearts or up their trousers. Plato the philosopher watched with dignity. He bowed and said: 'Madame, we live in the world!'
CHAPTER IV
ROUNDABOUT WAYS
George had slept for a long time; suddenly the train stopped. He looked up; numbers of people were getting in. His compartment, with the Winds drawn, remained empty. At the last moment — the train had started — a couple asked him if there were seats. He moved politely to one side. The man collided with him and did not apologize. George, who found the least sharpness in a society of well-bred monkeys refreshing, contemplated him in surprise. The woman misinterpreted his look and, they had hardly sat down before she apologized in her husband's stead: he was blind. 'I would not have thought it,' said George, 'he moves with astonishing assurance. I must explain, I am a doctor and have many blind patients.' The man bowed. He was tall and spare. "Will it disturb you if I read aloud to him?' asked the woman. The timid devotion on her face had charm, doubtless she lived for this blind man alone. 'On the contrary! But you must not take offence either if I should fall asleep.' Instead of the sharpness he had longed for, courtesies fluttered to and fro. She took a novel out of her travelling bag and read aloud in a deep, flattered voice.
Peter must look rather like this blind man by now, rigid and gnawed. What could have got into Peter's calm mind? He lived alone and without a care; he had not the least contact with any individual. That he should have become distracted by the impact of the world on him — it sometimes happened with sensitive minds — was not to be thought of in his case; his world was his library. He was distinguished by a colossal memory. Weaker heads might come to ruin through too much reading; but with him each syllable that he acquired remained clear-cut from the next. He was the opposite of an actor, always himself, only himself. Instead of dividing himself among others, he measured them from the outside against himself, and he knew himself only from the outside and through his head. In tliis way he had escaped the very great dangers which must undeniably arise from preoccupation with the culture of the east, pursued in solitude and over many years. Peter was safe from Lao Tse and all the Indians. Out of his own austerity he leaned towards the moral philosophers. He would have found his Confucius in one place or another. What then could have come over him, a creature almost sexless?
'Once again, you drive me to suicide!' George was listening to the novel with half an ear, the reading voice sounded pleasant, he understood its inflexions; but at this absurd statement of the hero in person, he could not help laughing out loud. 'You would not laugh, sir, if you were blind!' an angry voice came at him. The blind man had spoken; his first words were rude. 'I'm sorry,' said George, 'but I don't believe in that kind of love.' 'Then don't interrupt a serious person's pleasures ! I understand love better than you. I'm blind. That's no business of yours!' 'You misunderstand me,' George began. Then he noticed the woman; she was gesticulating vehemently, alternately she put her finger to her lips and folded her hands, he must for God's sake say no more; he said no more. Her lips thanked him. The blind man had already raised his arm. To defend himself? To attack? He let it fall and ordered: 'Go on!' The woman read on, her voice trembled. With fear? With joy at having met a man of such delicate feeling?
Blind, blind, a dark and very distant memory clutched at his mind. Dim and insistent; it gnawed far into his consciousness. There was a room and another next door. In one there stood a small white bed. A little boy lay in it, red all over. He was afraid. A voice he didn't know was sobbing: 'I'm blind! I'm blind!' and whimpering over and over again: 'I want to read!' His mother went to and fro. She went through the door into the next room, where the voice was crying. It was dark in there, but it was light in here. The child wanted to ask: 'Who's that crying?' He was afraid. He thought, that voice'll get in here and cut out my tongue with a penknife. So he began to sing, all the songs he knew, over and over again. He sang loud, he yelled, his head nearly burst with the sound. 'I'm red all over,' he sang. The door flew open. 'Be quiet!' said his mother. 'You've got a temperature. What are you thinking of?' Then in a great gasp came that awful voice and screamed: 'I'm blind! I'm blind!' Little George came trembling out of bed and scrambled wailing to his mother. He clutched at her knees. 'What is it then, what is it?' 'That man! That man!' 'What man?' 'In that dark room there's a man screaming! A man!' 'But that's Peter, your brother Peter.' 'No, no!' little George raved, 'leave that man, you must stay with me!' 'But George, my clever little boy, that's Peter. He's got measles like you. He can t see any thing just now. So he's crying a little. He'll be well again in the morning. Come along, let's go and see him.' 'No ! No!' he resisted her. 'It is Peter,' he thought, 'but another Peter', and he whimpered softly as long as his mother was in the room. As soon as she went back to the 'man' he hid his head under the clothes. When he heard the voice he howled loud again. It went on a long time, longer than he had ever cried before. The picture was blurred by his tears.
George suddenly saw the danger with which Peter imagined himself threatened: he was afraid of going blind! Perhaps his eyes were bad. Perhaps he had to give up reading now and again. What could have worried him more? A single hour which did not fit in with his daily plan, was enough to fill him with strange thoughts. Everything was strange to Peter which had to do with nimself. As long as his head was busied with selected facts, information, theories, weaving them together, tabulating them and relating them to each other, he was certain of the usefulness of his solitude. Really solitary, alone with himself, he had never been. After all, this was what made the learned man: being alone so as to be with as many things as possible simultaneously. As if in these conditions a man could himself truly
be
even with one thing alone. Probably Peter's eyes had been overstrained. Who could say whether he was careful to read in a good light? Perhaps, contrary to his custom, and his contemptuous attitude, he had been to a doctor who had recommended unconditional rest and quiet. This very quiet, extended over several days, might have brought on his final
quietus
. Instead of indemnifying the illness of his eyes by the soundness of his ears, instead of listening to music and people (what is richer than the intonations of men?) he must surely have paced up and down before his books, doubted the goodwill of his own eyes, implored them, cursed them, recollected with terror that one day's blindness of his childhood, been struck with horror lest he should again become blind, and for a long time, he must have raged, despaired and — because he was the proudest and harshest of men —called his brother to him before he approached a neighbour or an acquaintance for the least helpful word. I'll get rid ofthat blindness, George decided. I never saw an easier cure in prospect. Three things for me to do: a thorough examination of his eyes, a careful test of the lighting arrangements in his flat, and a cautious and loving talk which will convince him of the meaninglessness of his fears, always supposing that they had no real foundation.
He glanced with friendship at the rude blind man opposite and thanked him in silence for his presence. He had shown him the right interpretation of the telegram. A sensitive mind derives either advantage or injury from every contact, because each will awaken thoughts and recollections. The indolent are wandering institutions, nothing flows into them, nothing makes them overflow, frozen and isolated,
they drift through the world. Why should they move? What moves them? Accidentally they belong to the animal kingdom, but in fact they are vegetables. You could nip their heads off and they'd go on living, they have their roots. The stoic philosophy is suited to vegetables, it is high treason to animals. Let us be animals! He who has roots, let him uproot himself. George was glad to know why the train was carrying him so fast on his way. He had got into it blindly. Blindly he had had that dream of his childhood. A blind man had got in. Then suddenly the train found its direction: to the healing of a blind brother. For whether Peter really was blind, or only feared it, was for a psychiatrist one and the same thing. Now he could sleep. Animals >ursue their desires to their climax and then break off. Most of all they ove the frequent changes of their tempo. They eat to completion and ove to satiation. Their rest they deepen into sleep. Soon he too slept.
The reading woman, between the Unes, caressed the beautiful hand on which he had supported his head. She thought he was listening to her voice. Now and again she emphasized a word; he was to understand how unhappy she was. She would never forget this journey; soon she must get out. She would leave the book behind, as a souvenir, and — she implored — might she not have one look? She got out at the next station. Her husband she propelled in front of her, usually she drew him along behind her. In the door she held her breath. Without looking round —she was afraid of her husband, her movements aroused his anger — she said, daring much: 'Good-bye!' For how many years had she waited to speak in such a tone. He could make no answer. She was happy. Weeping softly, a little intoxicated with her own beauty, she helped the blind man out of the train. She mastered herself and cast no glance back towards the window of his compartment, where in her mind's eye she saw him. He must have seen her tears, and she was ashamed. She had left the novel with him. He was asleep.
In the morning he washed. In the evening he reached his destination. He put up at a modest hotel. At a better known one his arrival would have been a sensation, since he was one of those half dozen scientists whom the newspapers faithfully expose to public adulation at the expense of all their colleagues. He put off his visit to his brother to the following day so as not to disturb his night's rest. Because his impatience tormented him, he went to the opera. Listening to Mozart he felt pleasantly secure.
That night he dreamt of two cocks. The larger was red and scraggy, the smaller well-clipped and cunning. Their fighting lasted long, it was so exciting that one forgot to think. You see, said a spectator, what men are coming to! Men? crowed the little cock. What men? We're cocks. Fighting cocks. None of your iokes! The spectator withdrew. He grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly it was clear that he too was only a cock. But a cowardly one, said the red cock, it's time to get up. The small cock agreed. He had won and flew away. The red cock stayed. He grew larger and larger. His colour grew with his body. It hurt the eyes to look at him. They opened themselves. À huge sun bulged over the window-sill.