Last Tales. Isak Dinesen

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      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 or 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.

      Old Mariana looked at him for a while. “Well, well, Angelo, pretty death’s-head,” she said. “We Christian people should bear one another no grudge, and I forgive you, today, that you did reject my fond love, and kept thinking of another woman, when I wanted you. I shall help you. Now listen well, and afterwards do exactly as I tell you. Walk from the broadest street of the town into a narrower one, and from this narrow street into one still narrower, and go on like that. If from your narrowest alley you can find your way into a tighter passage, enter it, and follow it, and draw your breath lightly once or twice. And at that you will have fallen asleep.”

      Angelo thanked Mariana for her advice, and pushed it down to the bottom of his mind. Only when it was quite dark did he make up his mind to test it.

      His own room was in an out-of-the-way alley. He had to proceed into the broadest and best lighted of the boulevards. For a long time he had not been in this part of the town, and he was surprised to see how many people there were in the world. They walked faster than he, they were intent on their errands, and as far as he could judge an equal number were walking in each direction.

      How, he asked himself, has it become necessary for all people who live east of the boulevard to come west, as well as to all who live west to come east? It might make one feel that the world was badly managed. The whole city of Naples is now set up as a big loom, men and women are the shuttles to it, and the weaver is busy tonight. Yet this great pattern, he reflected as he walked on, is no concern of mine—others will have to look after it. I myself will keep my thoughts carefully collected on what I have got to do.

      At this he turned from the Via di Toledo into a smaller street, and from that into one still narrower. It is not impossible, he thought, hope strangely dawning in his heart, that this time I have been well advised.

      After a while he found himself in a lane so narrow that, looking up, he saw above him only a handbreadth of evening sky a little lighter than the eaves. The paving was here very rough, and there were no lamps; he had to place his hand on the wall of a house to walk on. The contact with solid matter did him good; he felt grateful toward this wall. It suddenly vanished under his palm. There was a doorway here, and the door was open. It gave into an exceedingly narrow passage. I am in luck tonight, he thought, I am lucky to have come upon such an exceedingly narrow passage. He proceeded until he came to a small door. Underneath this door a faint light shone.

      Now for a while he stood perfectly still. In there sleep awaited him, and with the certitude of sleep memory came back to him. He felt, in the dark, his hard, drawn face smoothening, his eyelids lowering a little like the eyelids of a happy, sleeping person. This moment was a return and a beginning. He stretched out his hand, took care to draw his breath lightly twice, and opened the door.

      By a table in a little, faintly lit room a red-haired man was counting his money.

      The sudden entrance of a stranger did not seem to surprise the host of the room, he looked up casually and then sank back into his former occupation. But his guest felt the moment to be formidable.

      The man by the table was ugly, and had nothing kind about him. Yet in the fact that even while counting his money he left his door unlocked, to be entered by a stranger, there was a kind of friendliness which might hold great possibilities. But what am I to say to him? Angelo thought.

      After a while he said, “I cannot sleep.”

      The red-haired man waited a moment, then he looked up. “I never sleep,” he declared with extreme arrogance.

      After this short interruption he resumed his work. He carefully arranged his coins in piles of two, scattered them with his big hands and re-collected them in piles of five—to scatter these once more, and build up, absorbed in the task, new piles of six, of ten and fifteen, and at last of three. In the end he stopped, and without taking his hands off the silver leaned back in the chair. He gazed straight before him and repeated, with deep scorn, “I never sleep.

      “Only dolts and drudges sleep,” he took up his theme after a while. “Fishermen, peasants and artisans must have their hours of snoring at any cost. Their heavy natures cry out for sleep even in the greatest hour of life. Drowsiness СКАЧАТЬ