Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

by Italo Calvino

  At Ille supper was waiting for us; and what a supper! If the morning’s coarse jollity had shocked me, I was even more disgusted by the quips and jokes of which bride and bridegroom were the chief butts. The bridegroom, who had disappeared for a moment before sitting down to supper, was as pale and chilly as an iceberg. He kept drinking the old wine of Collioure, which is almost as strong as brandy. I was sitting beside him, and felt I ought to warn him:

  “Have a care. They say that wine …”

  I don’t know what nonsense I said to him to put myself in unison with the other guests.

  He nudged my knee and whispered:

  “When we get up from the table I have something to say to you.”

  His solemn tone surprised me. I looked at him more closely, and noticed a strange alteration in his features.

  “Do you feel ill?” I asked. “No.”

  And he started drinking again.

  In the meantime, in the midst of all the shouting and clapping of hands, a child of eleven, who had slipped under the table, showed the company a pretty white and pink ribbon which he had just taken from the bride’s ankle. They called it her garter. It was promptly cut and distributed among the young people, who decorated their buttonholes with it, in accordance with a very old custom which is still observed in a few patriarchal families. This made the bride blush to the whites of her eyes. But her confusion reached its height when Monsieur de Peyrehorade, after calling for silence, sang some Catalan verses to her, which he said were impromptu. This is the meaning, so far as I understand it.

  “What is the matter with me, my friends? Has the wine I have drunk made me see double? There are two Venuses here ….”

  The bridegroom turned round suddenly with a frightened expression, which set everybody laughing.

  “Yes,” continued Monsieur de Peyrehorade, “there are two Venuses under my roof. One I found in the earth, like a truffle; the other came down to us from the heavens to share her girdle with us.”

  He meant, of course, her garter.

  “My son chose between the Roman and the Catalan Venus. The rascal chooses the Catalan, the better part, for the Roman is black and the Catalan is white; the Roman is cold, and the Catalan sets on fire all who come near her.”

  This conclusion aroused such an uproar of noisy applause and loud laughter that I thought the roof would fall on our heads. There were only three grave faces at the table—those of the bridal couple and mine. I had a splitting headache; besides, I don’t know why, a wedding always makes me feel melancholy. This one disgusted me slightly too.

  The last couplets were sung by the deputy mayor, and, I must say, they were very broad; then we went into the drawing-room to witness the departure of the bride, who was soon to be conducted to her bedroom, as it was nearly midnight.

  Monsieur Alphonse drew me aside into the recess of a window, and, turning his eyes away, said to me:

  “You will laugh at me … but I don’t know what is the matter with me … I am bewitched, dammit!”

  My first thought was that he fancied he was threatened with some misfortune of the sort referred to by Montaigne and Madame de Sévigné: “The whole realm of love is full of tragic stories.”

  “I thought that this kind of mishap only happened to men of genius,” I said to myself.

  “You have drunk too much Collioure wine, my dear Monsieur Alphonse,” I said. “I did warn you.”

  “That may be. But this is something much worse.”

  His voice was broken, and I thought he was quite drunk.

  “You know my ring?” he continued, after a pause.

  “Yes. Has it been taken?”

  “No.”

  “In that case you have it?”

  “No—I—I could not get it off the finger of that confounded Venus.”

  “Nonsense! You didn’t pull hard enough.”

  “Yes, I did …. But the Venus … has clenched her finger.”

  He looked at me fixedly with a haggard expression, leaning against the window-latch to keep himself from falling.

  “What a ridiculous tale!” I said. “You pushed the ring too far. Tomorrow you must use pincers, only be careful not to injure the statue.”

  “No, I tell you. The Venus’s finger has contracted and bent up; she has closed her hand, do you hear? … She’s my wife, apparently, because I gave her my ring …. She won’t give it back.”

  I shivered suddenly, and for a moment my blood ran cold. Then a deep sigh he gave sent a breath of wine into my face and all my emotion disappeared.

  “The wretch is completely drunk,” I thought.

  “You are an antiquarian, Monsieur,” the bridegroom added in dismal tones; “you know all about such statues …. There may be some spring, some devilish trick, I don’t know about. If you would go and see ….”

  “Willingly,” I said. “Come with me.”

  “No, I would rather you went by yourself.”

  I left the drawing-room.

  The weather had changed during supper, and rain was beginning to fall heavily. I was going to ask for an umbrella, when I stopped short and reflected. “I should be a fool,” I said to myself, “to go and verify the tale of a man who is drunk. Besides, perhaps he intended to play some stupid trick on me to amuse these country people; and the least that could happen to me would be that I should get wet through and catch a bad cold.”

  I cast a glance at the dripping statue from the door, and went up to my room without returning to the drawing-room. I went to bed, but sleep was a long time coming. All the scenes that had occurred during the day returned to my mind. I thought of that beautiful, innocent young girl given up to a drunken brute. “What an odious thing,” I said to myself, “is a marriage of convenience! A mayor puts on a tricolour sash, and a priest a stole, and the most innocent of girls may be handed over to the Minotaur. What can two beings who do not love each other say at such a moment, a moment which lovers would buy at the price of life itself? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once seen behaving in a vulgar way? First impressions can never be obliterated, and I am certain Monsieur Alphonse will deserve to be hated.”

  During my monologue, which I have considerably abridged, I had heard much coming and going about the house, doors opening and shutting and carriages driving away; then I thought I could hear the light steps of several women on the stairs going towards the end of the passage opposite my room. It was probably the procession leading the bride to bed. Then they went downstairs again, and Madame de Peyrehorade’s door shut. “How unhappy and ill at ease that poor girl must feel!” I said to myself. I tossed about in my bed in a bad temper. A bachelor cuts a poor figure in a house where there is a wedding going on.

  Silence had reigned for some time when it was interrupted by heavy steps coming up the stairs. The wooden stairs creaked loudly.

  “What a clumsy lout!” I cried. “I bet he’ll fall downstairs.”

  Then all became quiet again. I took a book to change the course of my thoughts. It was a statistical report on the Department, embellished with a memoir by Monsieur de Peyrehorade on the druidical monuments in the Arrondissement of Prades. I dozed off at the third page.

  I slept badly and awoke several times. It must have been five in the morning, and I had been awake for over twenty minutes when the cock began to crow. Dawn was about to break. Then I distinctly heard the same heavy steps and the same creaking of the stairs that I had heard before I went to sleep. This struck me as very strange. I tried in the midst of my yawning to guess why Monsieur Alphonse should rise so early; I could not think of any likely reason. I was going to close my eyes again when my attention was aroused once more by a strange stamping noise which was soon mingled with the ringing of bells and the banging of doors, after which I distinguished some confused cries.

  “That drunkard must have set fire to the house!” I thought, jumping out of bed.

  I dressed rapidly and went into the corridor. Cries and wails were coming from the opposite end, and
one piercing cry sounded above all the others: “My son! My son!” Obviously some accident had happened to Monsieur Alphonse. I ran to the bridal-chamber; it was full of people. The first sight which met my eyes was the young man, half dressed, stretched across the bed, the wood of which was broken. He was livid and motionless, and his mother was weeping and crying by his side. Monsieur de Peyrehorade was busy rubbing his son’s temples with eau-de-Cologne and holding smelling salts under his nose. Alas, his son had been dead a long time. On a couch at the other end of the room, the bride was in the grip of terrible convulsions. She was uttering inarticulate cries, and two strapping servants were having the greatest difficulty in holding her down.

  “Good God!” I exclaimed. “What has happened?”

  I went to the bedside and raised the body of the unfortunate young man; he was already cold and stiff. His clenched teeth and blackened face denoted the most frightful pain. It was obvious that his death had been violent and his agony terrible. There was, however, no trace of blood on his clothes. I opened his shirt and found a livid mark on his breast which extended down his sides and over his back. It was as if he had been crushed in a band of iron. My foot stepped on something hard which was lying on the rug; I bent down and saw the diamond ring.

  I led Monsieur de Peyrehorade and his wife away into their room; then I had the bride carried there.

  “You have a daughter left,” I said to them; “you must give all your care to her.” Then I left them to themselves.

  There seemed to me to be no doubt that Monsieur Alphonse had been the victim of a murder, and that the murderers had found some means of entering the bride’s room during the night. Those bruises, however, on the chest and their circular direction puzzled me greatly, for neither a stick nor an iron bar could have produced them. Suddenly I remembered having heard that in Valence hired assassins used long leather bags full of fine sand to crush the people whom they had been paid to kill. I immediately recalled the muleteer from Aragon and his threat, though I found it hard to believe that he could have taken such a terrible revenge for a light jest.

  I went round the house, looking everywhere for traces of someone having broken in, but I found none whatever. I went down into the garden to see if the murderers had got in from there, but I could not find any definite clue. The previous night’s rain had, moreover, so soaked the ground that it could not have retained a clear imprint. But I noticed several deep footmarks in the earth; they were in two contrary directions, but in the same line, beginning at the corner of the hedge next to the tennis court and ending at the front door of the house. These might have been the footmarks made by Monsieur Alphonse when he had gone to get his ring from the statue’s finger. Moreover, the hedge at that spot was not as thick as it was elsewhere, and it must have been there that the murderers had got through it. Passing to and fro in front of the statue, I stopped for a moment to look at it. I must admit that I could not look at its expression of ironical malice without fear, and my head was so full of the ghastly scenes I had just witnessed that I felt as if I were looking at an infernal divinity gloating over the misfortune which had befallen the house.

  I went back to my room and remained there until noon. Then I went down and asked for news of my host and hostess. They were a little calmer. Mademoiselle de Puygarrig—or rather Monsieur Alphonse’s widow—had regained consciousness; she had even spoken to the public attorney of Perpignan, then at Ille on an official visit, and this magistrate had taken down her statement. He asked me for mine. I told him what I knew, and did not conceal my suspicions regarding the muleteer from Aragon. He gave orders for him to be arrested immediately.

  “Have you learnt anything from Madame Alphonse?” I asked the magistrate, when my statement had been taken down and signed.

  “That unfortunate young lady has gone mad,” he said, with a sad smile. “Mad, completely mad. This is what she told me:

  “She had been in bed, she said, for a few minutes with the curtains drawn, when the bedroom door opened and someone came in. Madame Alphonse was lying on the inside of the bed, with her face turned to the wall. She did not stir, convinced that it was her husband. A moment later the bed creaked as though it were burdened with an enormous weight. She was terribly frightened, but did not dare to turn round. Five minutes, or perhaps ten—she could not tell how long—passed. Then she made an involuntary movement, or else the other person in the bed made one, and she felt the touch of something as cold as ice—those are her very words. She pressed herself to the wall, trembling in every limb. Shortly after, the door opened again, and someone entered, who said: ‘Good evening, my little wife,’ and a little later the curtains were drawn. She heard a stifled cry. The person who was in bed beside her sat up, and seemed to stretch out both arms in front. Then she turned her head … and saw, so she says, her husband on his knees by the bed, with his head on a level with the pillow, in the arms of a sort of greenish giant who was embracing him with all its might. She said—and she repeated it to me over and over again, poor woman!—she said that she recognized … can you guess? The bronze Venus, Monsieur de Peyrehorade’s statue …. Since it was found here, everybody has been dreaming about it. But to go on with the story of the poor mad girl, she lost consciousness at this sight, and probably she had lost her reason a little earlier. She cannot say how long she remained in a faint. When she came to, she saw the phantom again—or the statue, as she persists in calling it—motionless, its legs and the lower half of its body on the bed, the bust and arms stretched out before it, and in its arms her lifeless husband. A cock crew, and then the statue got out of the bed, dropped the dead body, and went out. Madame Alphonse tugged at the bell, and you know the rest.”

  They brought in the Spaniard; he was calm, and defended himself with great coolness and presence of mind. He did not attempt to deny the remark I had heard; he explained it by maintaining that he meant nothing by it, but that on the following day, when he had had a rest, he would have won a game of tennis against his victor. I remember that he added:

  “A native of Aragon, when he is insulted, does not wait for the next day to take his revenge. If I had thought that Monsieur Alphonse meant to insult me, I would have immediately stabbed him with my knife.”

  His shoes were compared with the marks in the garden; but they were much larger than the footprints.

  Finally, the innkeeper with whom the man was staying asserted that he had spent the whole night rubbing and doctoring one of his sick mules.

  Moreover, this man from Aragon was highly respected and well known in the district, to which he came annually to do business. He was therefore released with many apologies.

  I had nearly forgotten the deposition of a servant who had been the last person to see Monsieur Alphonse alive. It had been just as he was going upstairs to his wife, and he had called the man and asked him in an anxious manner if he knew where I was. The servant had replied that he had not seen me. Then Monsieur Alphonse had heaved a sigh, and stood there for a moment in silence. Then he had said:

  “Well, the devil must have carried him off too!”

  I asked this man if Monsieur Alphonse had had his diamond ring on when he had spoken to him. The servant hesitated before he replied; then he said that he thought not, that at all events he had not paid any attention.

  “If he had been wearing that ring,” he added, correcting himself, “I should certainly have noticed it, because I thought that he had given it to Madame Alphonse.”

  While I was questioning this man I felt a little of the superstitious terror that Madame Alphonse’s deposition had spread throughout the house. The magistrate looked at me and smiled, and I refrained from pressing the point.

  A few hours after Monsieur Alphonse’s funeral, I prepared to leave Ille. Monsieur de Peyrehorade’s carriage was to take me to Perpignan. In spite of his feeble condition the poor old man insisted on accompanying me to the gate of his garden. We crossed the garden in silence, with him hardly able to drag himself along even with th
e help of my arm. Just as we were parting, I cast a last glance at the Venus. I could see that my host, although he did not share the terror and hatred which it inspired in the rest of his family, would want to get rid of an object which would otherwise be a constant reminder of a frightful misfortune. I intended to try and persuade him to give it to a museum. I was wondering how to broach the subject when Monsieur de Peyrehorade automatically turned his head in the direction in which he saw me gazing. He saw the statue, and immediately burst into tears. I embraced him and, without daring to say a single word, I got into the carriage.

  Since my departure I have not heard of any fresh discovery being made to throw light on that mysterious catastrophe.

  Monsieur de Peyrehorade died a few months after his son. In his will he bequeathed me his manuscripts, which some day I may publish. But I have not been able to find among them the treatise relating to the inscription on the Venus.

  P.S. MY FRIEND MONSIEUR de P. has just written to me from Perpignan to tell me that the statue no longer exists. After her husband’s death, the first thing Madame de Peyrehorade did was to have it melted down and made into a bell, and in this new form it is used in the church at Ille. But, adds Monsieur de P., it would seem that an evil fate pursues those who possess that piece of bronze. Since that bell began to ring in Ille, the vines have twice been frost-bitten.

  1“You’ll pay for this.”

  JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU

  The Ghost and the Bonesetter

  (1838)

  Written by the most famous author of ghost stories in Victorian English fiction, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Dublin, 1814–1873), an Irish Protestant descended from French Huguenots, this is an early tale, probably the first he ever published. “The Ghost and the Bonesetter” is halfway between the fantastic story of the Gothic school and the transcription of a legend from local folklore. The man “without fear” who spends the night in a castle dominated by a ghost is an old theme in folk literature from every land. In Le Fanu’s narrative, an Irish tradition is added to the theme: the most recently buried person in a cemetery must fetch water for the older dead, who suffer from thirst because of the flames in purgatory. As a result of this belief, if two funerals take place at the same time, there is a race between the two deceased and the loser must take on the laborious task. (Guido Almansi, using this episode as an example, recalls the high-speed funeral in Rene Clair’s film Entr’acte.)