Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

by Italo Calvino

  Observing his new wife more closely, he seemed to detect in her the traits of that mysterious being, but modified, somewhat softened. The young woman’s fingers were long and thin, her nails white and sharp; her hair reached to the floor. He remained as if abstracted in a fantasy; nevertheless, the neighbors told him the young woman’s family lived in the Highlands, that at the end of the wedding he’d suffered an extremely high fever, and that he shouldn’t be surprised that the memory of the ceremony had been erased from his mind, which was still convalescing, and that very soon he would behave better with the young woman, since she was charming, sweet, and a very good housewife.

  “But she has no eyelids!” exclaimed Muirland.

  The neighbors laughed at him and said he wasn’t over the fever yet. No one except the farmer noticed that strange characteristic.

  Night fell. For Muirland, it was his wedding night, since until that moment he’d been married in name only. His wife’s beauty had softened him, even if he did see her without eyelids. So he vowed again and again to overcome his fear and enjoy the singular gift heaven or hell had sent him.

  Now we ask the reader to allow us the advantages and tricks of the novel and the fable and permit us to omit the details of the first events of the evening. We will not tell how beautifully lovely Spellie (such was the bride’s name) was dressed for that night.

  Muirland woke up dreaming that the light of the sun was illuminating the room that held the nuptial bed. Dazzled by the burning rays, he jumped to his feet and saw the eyes of his wife fixed tenderly on him.

  “The Devil!” he thought. “Sleeping now is a real offense against her beauty.”

  So he put aside sleep and whispered tender phrases of love to Spellie, to which the young Highland girl responded the best she could.

  Spellie still hadn’t fallen asleep when morning came.

  “And how would she sleep,” Muirland asked himself, “when she has no eyelids?”

  And his poor mind again fell into an abyss of doubts and fears.

  The sun rose. Muirland was pale and dejected. Mrs. Muirland’s eyes were resplendent—as never before. They spent the morning strolling along the banks of the Doon. The young wife was so charming that the husband, despite the wonder of it all and the fever he still had, could not contemplate her without admiration.

  “Jock,” she said, “I love you just as you loved Tuilzie. All the girls round about envy me, so you’d better be on guard, my love, because I’ll be jealous and keep close watch on you.”

  Muirland’s kisses closed her mouth, but the nights passed, and in the deepest part of each one, Spellie’s radiant eyes pulled the farmer up out of his sleep: Muirland’s strength was declining.

  “But my love,” Jock asked his wife, “don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Sleep? Me?”

  “Yes, sleep. Ever since our wedding day, I don’t think you’ve slept a single instant.”

  “In my family, no one ever sleeps.”

  And her blue pupils seemed to shine even more.

  “She doesn’t sleep!” exclaimed Muirland in despair. “She doesn’t sleep!”

  And again he fell back on the pillow, exhausted and horrified.

  Poor Muirland! His wife’s beautiful eyes gave him no rest. They were, as the poet puts it, stars eternally burning to dazzle him. More than thirty ballads were written in the county to celebrate Spellie’s eyes. As for Muirland: one day he disappeared. Three months had passed; the torture he suffered had ruined his life and thinned his blood. He felt that Spellie’s gaze of fire would consume him. Whenever he came back from the fields, whenever he stayed at home, whenever he went to church, he was always at the mercy of that terrible, radiant beam of light that penetrated to the deepest part of his being and overwhelmed him with terror. Ultimately, he came to hate the sun and flee the day.

  The torture that had destroyed poor Tuilzie was now his own: the spiritual disquiet that had turned him into the executioner of his first young wife—what men call jealousy—had been transformed into the scrutinizing, inescapable eye that pursued him constantly. Always jealousy, but metamorphosed into that palpable image, into the prototype of suspicion.

  Muirland abandoned the farm and his land, crossed the sea, and immersed himself in the forests of America, where many of his compatriots had founded towns and built welcoming homes. He was sure the prairies of Ohio would provide him with a safe asylum. He preferred poverty, the settler’s life, the snakes hidden in the thick underbrush, simple and uncertain food, to his Scottish domicile, where the jealous, perpetually open eye shone only for the sake of tormenting him. After spending a year in that solitude, he finally blessed his luck: at least he’d found rest in the bosom of that fertile nature. He had no correspondence with anyone in Great Britain out of fear of hearing news about his wife. Sometimes, in dreams, he still saw those eyes without eyelids and would wake up with a start. He would carefully make sure those terribly vigilant eyes were nowhere near him, that they weren’t piercing him and devouring him with their unbearable light. Then he would fall back to sleep, happy.

  The Narragansetts, a tribe that lived in the area, had chosen for their sachem, or chief, one Massasoit, a sickly old man of a peaceful character. Early on, Muirland had won his affection by making him a present of some whiskey, which he knew how to distill. Massasoit fell sick one day, and his friend Muirland paid him a visit in his tent.

  Imagine an Indian wigwam, a kind of conical structure with an opening at the top to let the smoke out. At the center of this humble palace, a fire was burning; on some buffalo skins, stretched out on the floor, lay the sick old chief. Around him, the men of the tribe whooped, shouted, and wept, making such a din that not only did they not cure the sick man but they would have made a healthy man ill. A powam, or medicine man, led the lugubrious chorus and dance. The echo reverberated with the noise of that strange ceremony: it was public prayer offered to the local divinity.

  Six young women were massaging the naked and cold members of the old man’s body: one of them, barely sixteen years old, was weeping. Muirland’s common sense made him understand that the only result of all that medical hocus-pocus would be the death of Massasoit. Because he was a white European, everyone thought he was a born doctor. So, taking advantage of the authority that title conferred on him, he ordered all the men who were shouting out of the tent. Then he approached the sachem:

  “Who is that coming to me?” asked the old man.

  “Jock the White Man.”

  “Oh!” answered the sachem, extending his rough hand, “we won’t be seeing each other any more, Jock.”

  Jock, though he knew precious little about medicine, quickly came to the conclusion that the sachem was simply suffering from indigestion. Muirland took personal care of him and prepared an excellent Scottish soup for him which the old man wolfed down as if it were medicine. In three days, Massasoit had come back to life: now the whoops of our savages expressed gratitude and joy. Massasoit had Jock seated next to him, gave him his calumet to smoke, and introduced him to his daughter Anauket, the youngest and most beautiful girl of all those Muirland had seen in the tent.

  “You have no squaw,” said the old warrior. “Take my daughter and honor my gray hair.”

  Jock trembled. He remembered Tuilzie and Spellie: matrimony had never brought him happiness. But on the other hand, the young squaw was sweet, naive, and obedient. Moreover, a marriage in those solitary lands involves very little solemnity and has no great value to a European. Jock accepted, and the beautiful Anauket never gave him any reason to repent his decision.

  One day, the eighth since their union, they were paddling along the Ohio River on a beautiful fall morning. Jock carried his hunting rifle. Anauket, used to these expeditions typical of life in the forests, helped and served her husband. The weather was magnificent. The shores of the river presented delightful landscapes to the lovers. Jock had a good day’s hunting, but suddenly a pheasant with splendid wings caught his eye. He aimed, w
ounded it, and the bird, mortally wounded, fell to earth screeching in the underbrush. Muirland did not want to lose such a magnificent object. He anchored the canoe and ran in search of the wounded bird. He beat his way through thicket after thicket—in vain, but his Scottish obstinacy constantly pushed him toward the heart of the forest. Very soon, he found himself in one of those natural green clearings that are to be found in the forests of America, all surrounded by trees of great height. Suddenly, a flash traversed the foliage and reached him. Muirland’s heart sank: the ray was burning him. That unbearable light forced him to lower his eyes.

  The eye without an eyelid was there, eternally vigilant.

  Spellie had crossed the ocean, had found her husband’s trail, and had dogged his footsteps. She’d kept her word, and her terrible jealousy was crushing Muirland with its just reproaches. The man ran toward the river followed by the gaze of the eye with no lid. He saw the clear, pure waters of the Ohio and dove in, impelled by terror.

  That was the end of Jock Muirland, just as it’s told in a Scottish legend the old women tell in their way. It’s an allegory, so they say, and the eye with no lid is the ever-vigilant eye of the jealous woman, the most horrifying torture of all.

  ∗skelpies: water imps

  †spirits.

  ∗This practice is still quite common in Scotland.

  GÉRARD DE NERVAL

  The Enchanted Hand

  (La main enchantée, 1832)

  Gerard de Nerval (1808–1855) created a new genre within Romantic fantastic narrative: the lyrical-amorous evocation suspended between dream and memory. His most characteristic texts of this kind, Aurélia and Sylvie, are difficult to anthologize, but Nerval is also the author of a classic in the more familiar fantastic: “The Enchanted Hand,” a story based on an effective and heavily exploited theme—the hand that lives its own life separate from the body.

  In addition to the moral symbolism that the enchanted hand assumes with persuasive clarity—the aggressive violence each of us carries within—we find here also a minute reconstruction of seventeenth-century Paris. A tailor, obliged to fight a duel with a soldier, resorts to the aid of a gypsy alchemist who puts a charm on his right hand. The tailor kills the swordsman in the duel. Hunted by the police, he seeks the protection of a magistrate, but his enchanted hand, contrary to his own will, attacks the jurist. While the tailor is in prison, condemned to hang, the gypsy comes to see him: the hand of a hanged man is an extraordinary talisman for thieves because it will open any door. The gypsy demands the hand, and when the executioner, on the gallows, cuts it off the dead man, we see it move, flee, and open a path through the crowd to make its way to the gypsy.

  I. LA PLACE DAUPHINE

  There is nothing more beautiful than the seventeenth-century houses majestically grouped in the Place Royale. When we contemplate their brick façades, interrupted and framed by moldings and stone corners, and their tall windows ablaze with the splendid rays of the afternoon sun, we feel the same awe we would feel standing before a tribunal of magistrates dressed in red, ermine-lined robes. And, if the comparison weren’t puerile, one might say that the long, green table around which those fearsome magistrates sit, forming a square, in some ways resembles the chain of linden trees that lines the four sides of Place Royale, completing its grave harmony.

  There is another plaza in Paris that is no less agreeable, for its regularity and style, than the Place Royale, though triangular in form while the other is square. It was constructed during the reign of Henri le Grand, who named it Place Dauphine. At the time, people were surprised at how little time it took for buildings to cover the Ile Gourdaine. The invasion of that area was a cruel shock to the clerics who would go there to amuse themselves noisily, as well as for the lawyers who used to meditate there on their pleadings—a green and flower-filled place to promenade after leaving the tainted Palace law courts … !

  No sooner had those three rows of houses arisen over their heavy porticos, themselves burdened and pierced by salients and partitions, no sooner were they faced with brick, their windows opened with balusters and their roofs covered with heavy slates, than that same lineage of men of law invaded the entire plaza, each one occupying a floor whose elevation betrayed, in inverse proportion, the status and means of its occupant. The entire place turned into a kind of multilevel court of beggars, an underworld of privileged thieves, a den of pettifogging lawyers built of brick and stone where others were made of mud and timber.

  During the last years of the reign of Henri le Grand, there lived in one of those houses that made up the Place Dauphine a rather important personage by the name of Godinot Chevassut, magistrate of the provost of Paris, an office both laborious and lucrative in an age when thieves were much more numerous than they are nowadays—how honesty has declined in our France since those days!—and when the number of women of easy virtue was much more considerable—so far have our customs declined! Since humanity changes not a whit, we can say, along with an ancient author, that no matter how many rogues are serving in the galleys, there are many more who are not.

  We would also have to say that the thieves of that era were less ignoble than those of today, and that this miserable profession was in those days a kind of art, such that sons of good family did not disdain to practice it. Many fine abilities that would have been wasted in a society of barriers and privileges developed to a considerable extent in that way—enemies rather more dangerous to ordinary citizens than to the state, whose machinery would perhaps have exploded without this safety valve. Also, most certainly, justice in those times treated distinguished thieves with much more respect, and no one exercised that tolerance with more pleasure than our magistrate from the Place Dauphine, and for reasons that will soon be made known to you. By the same token, no one was more severe with the clumsy: they paid for the others and “crowded the gallows that cast their shadow over the Paris of that age,” to borrow an expression from d’Aubigné, to the great delight of the bourgeoisie, who in those days were merely robbed better, and with the perfection of the art of fraud.

  Godinot Chevassut was a plump little man whose hair was beginning to turn gray. And he was delighted about it, the opposite of what normally occurs with old people, because when his hair finally turned white it would lose the fiery color it had since his birth and which won him the disagreeable nickname “Rousseau,” which those who knew him freely employed as it was easier to pronounce and remember than his own name. Also, his eyes were crossed and very shrewd, though they were generally half closed beneath his thick brows. His mouth was wrinkled, like the mouths of people who laugh a lot. Nevertheless, even though his features almost always had an air of malice to them, he was never heard to laugh out loud, or, as some say, to show his back teeth. But when he said something amusing would he accentuate it at the end with an Ah! or an Oh! that came from the depths of his lungs, and with a singular effect. And this occurred quite often, because our magistrate loved to pepper his conversation with witty remarks, double entendres, and roguish remarks, even in the tribunal. In any case, that was the custom among the jurists of that age, one that today survives almost nowhere but in the provinces.

  To finish his portrait, we would have to hang in its usual place a rather long nose, squared off at the tip. Then his ears, quite small and smooth, and a sense of hearing so sharp that he could pick out the jingle of a quarter-escudo a quarter-league away, and the sound of a doubloon from still further off. Which is why when on one occasion a certain litigant sought to know if the magistrate had some friend whose influence might aid his case, he was told that, yes, Rousseau did have some friends to whom he paid close attention, and that they were, among others, Monsieur Doubloon, Maestro Ducat, and even Don Escudo, and that, moreover, it was necessary to set several of them to work at the same time, and in this way the gentleman could be sure he would be fervently attended.

  II. A FIXED IDEA

  There are people who feel more strongly about one quality or another, or about on
e virtue or another.

  Some hold the grandeur and valor of the warrior in the highest esteem and are satisfied only with tales of heroic martial deeds; others put above all things the genius and inventions of the arts, letters, and sciences. Others feel moved by generosity and virtuous deeds aimed at helping our fellow man and dedicate themselves to his salvation with no prompting. But the personal inclination of Godinot Chevassut was the same as that of the wise Charles IX, namely, that no virtue exists superior to that of wit and skill, and that those who possess those qualities are the only ones worthy of admiration and honor in this world. In no other place did our magistrate find those qualities shining more brightly, or developed more highly, than in the great society of thieves, confidence men, scoundrels, and vagrants, whose noble life and singular tricks appeared daily before his eyes, and with inexhaustible variety.

  His favorite hero was Master François Villon, a Parisian as celebrated in the art of poetry as he was in those of fraud and theft. He most certainly would have traded the Iliad and the Aeneid, as well as the no less admirable novel Huon de Bordeaux, for the poem of the gluttonous housewives, and even for the Légende de maître Faifeu, that rhymed epic of the underworld! Du Bellay’s Illustrations, the Aristotle Peripoliticon, and the Cymbalum Mundi seemed very weak to him next to the Jargon, Followed by the States General of the Kingdom of Argot and of the Dialogues of the Rogue and the Scamp Written by a Simpleton and Printed in Tours by Authorization of the King of Thunes, Fiacre the Packer, Tours, 1603.

  Naturally, those in possession of a virtue profoundly disdain the contrary defect, so for Godinot there was nothing more odious than simple souls, people of torpid intelligence and uncomplicated minds. This reached such an extreme in him that he wanted to change the distribution of justice completely, such that when some serious theft were discovered, it would not be the robber who was hanged but the victim. It was an idea; it was his idea. He thought he saw in it the only way to accelerate intellectual emancipation and to make the men of his age attain a supreme progress in wit, skill, and inventiveness, which, as he was in the habit of saying, were the true crown of humanity and the perfection that most pleased God.