On the other hand, since ignorance of how to play the violin does not exclude presence of mind and an ordinary quantity of wit, and since Gubart was a very good boy and had much of both, he quickly passed through many ranks, had a huge family that enjoyed the king’s favor, and lived happy and honored ever after.
This incident, despite its definite resemblance to those famous Arabian tales, is indisputably true and well known.
[1865]
A Spirit in a Raspberry
IN 1854, a prodigious event terrified and astonished the humble people who lived in a small village in Calabria.
I shall attempt to relate this amazing occurrence with the greatest possible exactness, although one must understand that exhibiting it in all its truth and with all its most interesting details is an extremely difficult task.
The young Baron B.—I regret that a solemn vow prohibits me from revealing his name—had recently inherited his paternal grandfather’s rich and extensive barony, situated in one of the most enchanting areas of Calabria. The young heir had never been away from those mountains, with their abundance of orchards and game. In the old ancestral manor, which was once a fortified feudal castle, the family tutor taught him the rudiments of writing and the titles of three or four Latin classics from which he could cite, as the need arose, several well-known distiches. Like all southern Italians, he had a passion for hunting, horses, and love—three passions that often seem to walk in unison, like three good post-horses—and he could satisfy them when he pleased, without ever giving them a second thought; nor did he ever imagine that beyond the jagged peaks of the Apennines might lie other lands, with different men, and different passions.
However, since knowledge is not one of the essential requisites for happiness—and in fact seems opposed to it—the young Baron B. felt himself completely happy with the simple store of his verses; and no less happy with him were his domestic servants, his women, his bloodhounds, and his twelve green-liveried footmen, who were charged with running before and after his luxurious carriage on formal occasions.
A few months before the period in which our narrative is set, a single, doleful event brought grief to a family employed in domestic service and altered the peaceful usages of the castle. One of the baron’s maids, a girl who was known to have had amorous intrigues with several servants, suddenly disappeared from the village; all the searches were in vain; and while not a few suspicions hung over one of the woodsmen—a young man with a violent temperament who had once taken a fancy to her, although without its being reciprocated—these suspicions were in reality so vague and unfounded that the young man’s calm and confident demeanor was more than sufficient to dispel them.
This mysterious disappearance, which seemed to suggest the idea of a crime, had deeply saddened the honorable Baron B. But gradually he forgot about it, distracting himself with love and hunting. Joy and tranquility returned to the castle; the green-liveried footmen resumed their pranks in the anterooms; and two months had not yet passed before neither the baron nor any of his servants recalled the girl’s disappearance.
It was now the month of November.
One morning, Baron B. awoke slightly troubled by a bad dream, jumped out of bed, threw open the window, and seeing that the sky was serene and his bloodhounds were sadly pacing the courtyard, pawing the door to go out, he said, “I want to go hunting, on my own. I notice several flocks of wild doves have gathered down there in the sown field; I shall see to it that they settle accounts with their wings.” Having made this resolution, he finished getting dressed, slipped into his waterproof boots, slung his rifle diagonally across his shoulders, dismissed the two footmen who usually accompanied him, and went out surrounded by all his dogs, who, shaking their heads and flapping their broad ears, repeatedly thrust themselves between his legs, caressing his boots with their long tails.
Baron B. headed straight for the place where he had seen the wild doves alight. It was in the sowing season, and one could no longer discern any shrubs or blades of grass in the freshly ploughed fields. The autumn rains had so softened the earth that he sank knee-deep in the furrows, and at every step he found himself in danger of losing a boot. In addition, the dogs, unaccustomed to that kind of hunting, undermined all the hunter’s strategies, and the doves had positioned their advanced guard at various points, exactly as an experienced regiment of the old imperial army would have done.
Enraged by this cunning, Baron B. nonetheless continued to harass them with greater fury, although they never once came within his range. He was feeling tired and overcome by thirst, when in a nearby furrow he saw a flourishing raspberry bush laden with ripe fruit.
“How strange!” said the baron. “A raspberry bush in this place…and how much fruit! How beautiful and ripe!”
Lowering the hammer of his rifle, he set it next to himself and sat down; then picking the berries one by one from the bush, their purple seeds making them appear prettily silvered with frost, he quenched as best he could the thirst that was beginning to torment him.
He remained seated thus for half an hour, at the end of which he noticed that some singular phenomena were occurring within him.
The sky, horizon, countryside no longer seemed the same to him; it was not that they seemed changed in some fundamental way, but that he no longer saw them with the same feelings as an hour ago. To make use of a more common figure of speech, he no longer saw them with the same eyes.
Among his dogs were several that he felt he had never seen before, and yet as he thought it over more carefully, he recognized them—except that he watched and caressed them all with greater respect than he usually did. Somehow it seemed to him that he was not their owner, and plagued by this doubt, he tried to call them, “Azor, Fido, Aloff!” The dogs who were called approached him readily, wagging their tails.
“Thank goodness,” said the baron, “my dogs still seem to be actually my dogs…But this sensation I feel in my head, this weight, is peculiar…And what are these strange desires I feel, this will I have never had, this species of confusion and doubleness I feel in all my senses? Am I going mad?…Let us see, let us reorganize our thoughts…Our thoughts?! Yes, of course…because I feel as if these ideas are not all mine. Yet…reorganizing them is sooner said than done! It is impossible; in other words, I feel something disorganized in my brain…I shall be more precise…it is organized differently than before…there is something superfluous, overflowing, something that aims to make room for itself in my head. It is not harmful, but it nonetheless pushes, knocks very painfully against the walls of my skull…I feel as if I am a double man. A double! How strange! And yet…yes, there is no doubt…at this moment I understand how one can be double.
“I would like to know why these anemone, still sopping wet from the rains, flowers to which I have never in my life paid much attention, now seem to me so beautiful and charming…What vivid colors, what a simple and graceful shape! Let us make a nosegay of them.”
And the baron, stretching out his hand without rising, gathered three or four of them, which—how singular!—he then put in his breast as women do. But as he removed his hand, he felt an even stranger sensation: he wanted to draw back his hand and at the same time stretch it out again; his arm, seemingly moved by two conflicting but equally powerful wills, remained in that position as if paralyzed.
“My God!” said the baron; and making a violent effort, he came out of that state of rigidity and at once looked closely at his hand as if to see whether something were broken or damaged.
Then he observed, for the first time, how small and shapely his hands were, how long and slender the fingers, how perfect the ellipses described by his nails; and he examined them with unusual satisfaction. He looked at his feet and, seeing that they were small and narrow, notwithstanding the rather clumsy appearance of his boots, he found that he liked them and smiled.
At that moment, a flock of doves rose from a nearby field
and were passing in front of him, within shooting range. The baron was quick to stoop down, seize his gun, bend back the hammer, and yet…what a prodigious thing! In that instant, he noticed that he was frightened by his own gun, and the roar of the shot would have terrified him. He hesitated and let the weapon fall from his hand, as an inner voice was saying to him, “How beautiful those birds are! What beautiful feathers they have in their wings!…They look like wild doves to me…”
“Blast it!” exclaimed the baron, raising his hands to his head. “I do not understand a thing about myself anymore…Am I still me, or not? Or am I me and someone else at the same time? When have I ever been afraid to fire my rifle? When have I ever had so much compassion for these damned doves that ravage my sown fields? My fields! But…truly, they do not seem to belong to me any longer…That does it, enough, let us return to the castle; it is probably the effect of some fever that will pass when I jump into bed.”
And he made a motion to stand up. At that moment, however, the other will that seemed to exist within him forced him to remain in his initial position, as if it wanted to tell him, “No, let us stay seated a little while longer.”
The baron felt that he was gladly assenting to this will when, at a bend in the road flanking the field, a crew of young workers appeared on their way back to the village. He gazed at them with a peculiar feeling of interest and desire that he could not understand. He observed that several of them were quite handsome. When they passed by and greeted him, he responded to their greeting by bowing his head with much embarrassment, and he realized he was blushing like a young girl. Then he felt as if he could rise without any more difficulty, and he stood up. When he got to his feet, he felt lighter than he ordinarily did: at times his legs seemed stiff, at others more limber; his movements were more graceful than usual, although in reality they were the same movements he had always made, and he appeared to be walking, gesturing, swaying as he always had in the past.
He started to sling his rifle across his shoulders but felt that same fear again and decided to carry it on his arm, although kept a little away from his body, as a timid boy would have done.
When he arrived at a point where the road branched off, he was uncertain about which of the two directions he should choose to bring him back to the castle. Both led there, but as a rule he always traveled the same one; now he wanted to take both of them simultaneously. He tried to move but again experienced the same phenomenon he had just gone through: the two wills that seemed to dominate him, working on him with the same forces, were mutually paralyzing, their action rendered useless, and he remained fixed in the road as if petrified, as if struck by catalepsy. After a few moments, he noticed that the state of rigidity abated, his indecision vanished, and he turned to the road he usually traveled.
He had not taken a hundred steps when he encountered the magistrate’s wife, who greeted him courteously.
“Since when,” wondered Baron B., “have I accustomed to receiving greetings from the magistrate’s wife?” Then he recalled that he was Baron B., the signora was an intimate acquaintance of his, and he was amazed that he had asked himself this question.
A little farther on he met an old woman who was rummaging through several bundles of dry branches along the hedge.
“Good day, Caterina,” he said, embracing her and kissing her cheeks. “How are you? Have you received any news from your father-in-law?”
“Oh! Your Excellency…how gracious you are,” exclaimed the old woman, nearly frightened by the baron’s unusual familiarity. “I shall tell you—”
But the baron interrupted her, saying, “Please, look at me carefully, tell me: am I still myself? Am I still Baron B.?”
“Oh, sir!” she said.
He did not linger for another reply but proceeded down the road, running his fingers through his hair, exclaiming, “I have gone mad, mad!”
Along the road he stopped often to contemplate objects or people who had never before stirred the slightest interest in him, viewing them from a perspective entirely different from the one he had previously adopted. The beautiful farm girls hoeing in the fields with their skirts hiked up above the knee no longer held any attraction for him: they appeared coarse, untidy, vulgar. Casting a random glance on his bloodhounds walking before him, their noses low, tails dangling, he said, “Look at this! Visir who was only two months old now seems to be over eight; he has even forced his way among the first-rate dogs.”
Only a short distance remained before reaching the castle when he met several of his domestic servants walking along the road, chattering away, and—how unusual!—he saw them double: he experienced the same optical phenomenon that occurs when both pupils converge toward the same central point so as to cross the line of vision. He realized, however, that the causes of the phenomenon he was experiencing were in fact different from this optical illusion; he saw double images, but they did not completely resemble one another in their doubleness. He saw them as if he contained two people who looked through the same eyes.
And from that moment on the strange doubleness spread to all his senses; he saw double, heard double, touched double, and—what was even more surprising—he thought double. That is to say, the same sensation provoked in him two ideas, and these two ideas were developed by two different faculties of reason and judged by two different consciences. In a word, he seemed to be living two lives, yet they were conflicting, segregated, by nature different; they could not be fused together, and they struggled in competition for dominance over his senses—hence the doubleness of his sensations.
It was for this reason that when he saw his servants, he certainly recognized them as his servants, but yielding to a stronger impulse, he could not help approaching one of the men, embracing him with transports of delight, and saying to him, “Oh! Dear Francesco, I joy to see you again. How are you? How is our baron?”—and he knew very well that he was the baron—“Tell him he will see me again at the castle before long.”
The servants went away, astonished. The one who had been embraced said to himself, “I would rack my brains to know whether or not it was really the baron who spoke to me. I have heard those words before…I cannot say…but that exclamation…that appearance…that embrace…it certainly wasn’t the first time I was embraced like that. And yet…my worthy employer has never honored me with so much familiarity.”
A few steps farther ahead, Baron B. saw a trellis that rested on one corner of a garden fence, so that when it was covered with leaves, it created a bower inaccessible to the eyes of the curious. He could not repress the desire to enter there, although he was aware of another will that urged him to hasten toward the castle. He yielded to the first impulse, and as soon as he was seated in the bower, he felt himself undergoing a psychological phenomenon that was even more unusual.
A new consciousness was forming in him: the entire canvas of a past he had never known stretched out before his eyes; pure, gentle memories whose growth he could never have nurtured brought a pleasant disturbance to his spirit. There were memories of a first love, and a first sin; but a love more kind and lofty than he had ever felt, and a sin more sweet and generous than he had ever committed. His mind ranged through an unknown world of emotions, traveled through regions never seen, conjured up delights never experienced.
All the same, this ensemble of remembrances, this new existence added to his, was not upsetting and did not confuse memories specific to his own life. An imperceptible line separated the two subjectivities.
Baron B. spent some time in the bower, after which he felt the desire to hasten toward the village. Then, with the two wills working on him in concert, he suffered an impulse so powerful that he could not maintain his usual pace and was forced to break into a headlong dash.
From that instant, the two wills began to control each other and him with equal power. If they worked in concert, his bodily movements were precipitate, convulsive, violent; if one will fel
l silent, they were normal; if the two wills were opposed, his movements were hindered and gave way to a paralysis that continued until the more powerful one prevailed.
While he was running toward the castle in this fashion, one of his servants saw him, and, fearing some misfortune, called him by name. The baron wanted to stop, but could not; he slowed down his pace and rather paused for a few moments, but this was followed by a paroxysm, a hopping, a fitful advance and withdrawal, so that he seemed possessed and was compelled to continue his dash toward the village.
The village no longer seemed the same to him; he felt as if he had been away for many months. He saw that the campanile of the parish church had recently been repaired, and although he already knew about this change, it still felt as if he had not known.
Along the street he encountered many people who, surprised by his running, stared at him with expressions of amazement. He took off his hat to all of them, although he was aware that this was unnecessary; and they responded by removing their caps, marveling at so much courtesy. But what seemed even more strange was that all those people considered his running and greetings almost natural, and they felt as if they had glimpsed, intuited, grasped something in his actions, but without knowing precisely what it might be. It did, however, make them frightened and concerned.
When he reached the castle, he stopped, entered the anterooms, kissed each of his maids, shook hands with his green-liveried footmen, and threw his arms around the neck of one, whom he caressed with much tenderness as he spoke words of passion and affection.
At this sight, the maids and footmen fled and ran shouting to lock themselves in their rooms.
Fantastic Tales Page 3
