Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  The doctor, who had been attending two men who had been wounded, came to the captain and, in a trembling voice, asked him to come to the improvised hospital. “Look,” he said. The wounded men were black with fleas—millions of fleas, attracted by the smell of fresh blood. They were coming in dense clouds, even rising out of the earth—countless trillions of fleas, which had their origins in a vast sewage-ditch which, for centuries, had received the filth of the town. They were mad with hunger; attacked everybody, swarming inches deep; drew points of blood from every man; killed the wounded, devitalized the rest, made eating impossible by pouring into the food as soon as it was uncovered, prevented sleep, made life intolerable. And nothing could be done. The Spaniards had the strictest orders to hold their position. A desperate dispatch was rushed to the general—General Sanjurjo, I believe—who sent a scathing reply. What kind of men were these, he wondered, who could let themselves be driven back by the commonest of vermin? So at last, when reinforcements arrived, there were only twelve men left, all wrecks. The Kabyles hadn’t attacked: they had stood by, enjoying the fun. The rest of the men had been eaten alive; nibbled to death.

  And I complained of the polite little insects in the bedrooms at Busto’s.

  THE APE AND THE MYSTERY

  While the young duke had been talking, the aged Leonardo had been drawing diagrams with a silver point on a yellow tablet. At last the duke said: “You have not been listening to me.”

  “I beg your pardon, Magnificence. There was no need. Everything is clear. Your water down there near Abruzzi is turbid and full of bad things, evil humors. Cleanse it, and this flux will pass.”

  “What,” said the duke, “I must wash my water?”

  “You must wash your water,” said Leonardo.

  The young duke stared at him, but he continued still drawing on his tablet: “You must wash your water. Tell your coopers to make a barrel, a vast barrel, as large as this hall, and as high. Now in this barrel you must lay first, clean sand to the height of a man. Then charcoal to the height of a man. Above this, to the height of a man, gravel. Then, to the top, small stones. Now down here, where the sand is, there must be a pipe. The bottom of this great cask will incline at a certain angle. The pipe will be about as large as a man’s arm, but a plate of copper, or brass, suitably perforated, will cover the end embedded in the sand and will be further protected by a perforated case so that it may be withdrawn, if choked with sand, and replaced without considerable loss of pure water.”

  “What pure water?” asked the young duke.

  “The pure water of Abruzzi, Magnificence. It will pour in foul at the top and come out clean at the bottom. These fluxes are born of the turbidity of the water.”

  “It is true that our water is far from clear.”

  “The purer the water, the smaller the flux. Now your water poured in at the top will purify itself in its downward descent. The greater pebbles will catch the larger particles floating in it. The smaller pebbles will take, in their closer cohesion, the lesser particles. The gravel will retain what the little pebbles let pass. The charcoal will arrest still tinier pollutions, so that at last the water—having completely purged itself in the lowest layer of sand—will come out pure and sweet. Oxen, or men (whichever you have most of) may pump the water by day and by night into my filter. Even your black pond water, poured in here, would come out clear as crystal.”

  “I will do that,” said the young duke, with enthusiasm. “The coopers shall go to work, the rogues. This moment!”

  “Not so fast, Magnificence. Let us consider. Where is the cooper that could make such a cask? Where is the tree that could yield such a stave for such a cask? Big pebbles, little pebbles, gravel, charcoal, sand. . . . Yes, reinforce it at the bottom and construct it in the form of a truncated cone. Still, it crushes itself and bursts itself asunder by its own weight. No, Magnificence. Stone is the word. This must be made of stone. And”—said Leonardo, smearing away a design on his tablet and replacing it with another—“between every layer, a grill. To every grill, certain doors. Bronze doors. The grills, also, should be of bronze. As for the pipes—they had better be bronze. A valve to control the flow of the water, a brass valve. Below, a tank. Yes, I have it! We erect this upon . . . let me see . . . fourteen stone columns twenty feet high, so that, since water must always run down to level itself, it would be necessary for your servants only to turn a screw, to open a spring of pure water, gushing out of a bronze pipe in twenty places at once in your palace, as long as the tank is full. I have also an excellent idea for a screw, designed to shut off the water entirely or let it in as you will, wherever you will, either in a torrent or in a jet no thicker than a hair’s breadth. In this case, of course, your Magnificence will need a more powerful pumping engine. . . .”

  The young duke asked: “What do you want all those bronze doors for?”

  Leonardo said: “Magnificence, you have seen the pebbles in a stream.”

  “Naturally.”

  “You have seen them, and you have touched them no doubt?”

  “Well?”

  “They are slimy, are they not? They are covered with little green plants, you will have observed?”

  “Well, well?”

  “So will be the big pebbles, little pebbles, gravel, charcoal and above all the sand in your Magnificence’s filter. Slime and green stuff will choke it, or make it a source of even more noxious water than ever before. Hence, the bronze doors. Every month the stones, charcoal, sand and so forth, are raked out and the empty places refilled with fresh stuff.”

  The young duke did not know what to say. He was uneasy. Turning an enormous seal on the forefinger of his right hand he muttered: “This is all very well. I have the greatest respect for your knowledge, and all that. But . . . stone, bronze doors, bronze gratings . . . I mean to say, bronze pipes, and God-knows-what made out of brass. You know all about these things, of course. But seriously, I really think we’d better let it drop. . . .”

  “If you liked the pipes could be simply lead. The gratings would have to be copper, of course, but in about thirty or forty years . . .”

  “Thirty or forty years!”

  “What is thirty or forty years?” asked Leonardo, with a smile, combing his great beard with his fingers. “If you build, build for ever. Long after you are dead, Magnificence, by what will you be remembered? The fight you fought with Colonna? The bad portrait of you which you hired poor little Ercole to paint? Oho, no, no, no! Your descendants will say: ‘Ah, that was the duke who washed the water here in Abruzzi and cured his people of their belly-aches.’ Therefore I say stone of the hardest and bronze of the toughest. I know, Magnificence; I know.”

  “You know everything, Leonardo.”

  “I know a little of everything, and not much of anything—with the possible exception of the art of painting. Of that I know something. Yes, I know a certain something about painting pictures. But what is that worth? Little, Magnificence—so little! Your wall, upon which I smear my blood and tears, will fall. The bit of wood that I give my life to cover with pigments will warp, Magnificence, crack and rot. I grind my colors and I refine and refine my oils, and hope and hope for a few years more of life, as Leonardo da Vinci, when I have gone where I belong. But mark my words! One cup of sweet water out of your river down at Abruzzi—one cup of water, pure water, in the belly of a grateful ploughman—will make you immortal, and you will be remembered long after my colors fade. Simply because of a cup of clean water, Magnificence! So I talk in terms of hewn stone and mighty bronze, thinking of that cup of good water.”

  The duke found his opportunity to change this subject. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Now that you mention it. Speaking of colors, and what not. You are the man who painted that picture of the Madonna Lisa, are you not? I mean the wife of Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo—that one. Yes, of course you are.�
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  “Yes,” said Leonardo.

  The duke said: “Remarkable man that you are! Today you make drains. Tomorrow you cast cannon. The day before yesterday you make a sort of Icarus machine, so that a man can fly like a bird. Ah . . . can you? Did it?”

  “No, Magnificence, not yet.”

  “It would not surprise me if you could transmute metals. They say that you are something of an alchemist. Can you turn base metals into gold, Leonardo?”

  “I have never tried.”

  “Try! try! Who knows? They tell me that the Valentinois has a learned doctor from the Lowlands who——”

  “The tank,” said Leonardo, making a diagram, “could be of copper, lined with——”

  The duke said: “Yes, yes, yes, of course. Mona Lisa was a Neapolitan, or at least she was from the south. Yes, she was a Gherardini. Do you happen to know whether she was related to the Florentine family of that name?”

  “No,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “I know only that she married del Giocondo—he bought a picture of Saint Francis from Puligo. I have seen worse pictures. He is something of a connoisseur, Giocondo.”

  “I saw your picture,” said the duke. “Between ourselves, it’s not at all bad. La Gioconda is by no means a bad-looking woman. She’s his third wife, you know.”

  “I know. Her predecessors were Camilla di Mariotto Ruccelai, and Tommasa di Mariotto Villana. They both died within four years.”

  “Ah, yes. There are some queer stories about that,” said the duke.

  “But to return to the tank, Magnificence.”

  “To the devil with the damned tank! Tell me, Leonardo—what was she always grinning about?”

  “Madonna Lisa? She never grinned, Magnificence. She smiled, yes. Grinned, no.”

  “You must have been alone with her for a long time.”

  “Never for a moment,” said Leonardo. “Never for one little moment. There were always waiting-women, secretaries, musicians, dress-makers, and frequently the lady’s husband.”

  “A jealous man, that,” said the duke.

  “Yes. He is going the way to hell, as I nearly did, trying to find the bottom of a bottomless pit.”

  “She always struck me as deep,” said the duke, “ever so deep—deep as the sea. D’you know what? She isn’t by any means what you could call a beautiful woman. But, the few times I met her, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I am not,” he said, curling the point of his red-blond beard between two fingers, “I am not altogether undesirable as far as women are concerned, and in any case . . . well, I should have . . . however, there was something about that woman that froze me. In a way, she frightened me. She never said anything. You know, I suppose, that if I want to be amusing—if I go out of my way to be sprightly and entertaining—I could make St. Bartholomew roar with laughter at the stake. Well, d’you know what? With the Madonna Lisa I had no success whatever. I believe you must have heard that I tell a tolerably good story. I told her three of the raciest and best I ever knew. There was never anything but that strange little pinched-up smile. You caught it perfectly, Leonardo. God knows how you did it, but you caught it. I stood and looked at the picture for nearly five minutes, and I said to myself: ‘Aha—he has caught it. There is the smile. There she is. There is la Gioconda to the life. What is she smiling at? She might be the Mother of God or she might be the devil’s wife.’ And a sort of cold shiver went up and down my spine. Fortunately, at that time I was . . . anyway it was lucky for me that I had a certain other distraction just then. But one or two gentlemen I know completely lost their heads over her. Yet I am of the opinion—tell me what you think, Leonardo, because you have seen all the beautiful women in the world and know everything—in my opinion the Madonna Lisa is not beautiful.”

  “No.”

  “When you say ‘no’ Leonardo, do you mean ‘no, she is not beautiful’ or ‘no, I disagree with you, she is beautiful’?”

  “She is not beautiful,” said Leonardo.

  “It seemed to me that her hands were coarse and bony, but you painted them as if they had no bones in them. But she must have been an easy person to paint, because she moved less than anyone else I ever met in my life.”

  “Yes, nothing but the blinking of her eyes told you that she was alive,” said Leonardo. “But sometimes she moved her hands. Occasionally she took her right hand from the back of her left hand, and loosely locked her fingers together. But generally she let her hands fall into her lap, where they lay relaxed, with the palms upwards. You see such a disposition of the hands in good old women who have done their work and are content to sit and look at their grandchildren. I have seen hands like hers on deathbeds—the deathbeds of women who have lived contentedly and died in peace with all their sins forgiven.”

  “Yes, she must have been easy to draw,” said the duke. “She kept so still. Now if you were drawing me, Leonardo, that would be quite a different matter, because I can’t keep still. I pick something up, I put something down, I walk here, I walk there, I take hold of a curtain or a piece of tapestry. . . .”

  “On the contrary, Magnificence, that would make you all the easier to portray.”

  The duke, putting forward his right hand, said: “And what do you think of my hand?”

  “It is a perfectly good hand,” said Leonardo, without enthusiasm. “It will do everything you want it to do. I see by the third and fourth fingers that you are a horseman. The first and second fingers, and the thumb, tell me that you are a swordsman, and the tendons of your wrist tell the same story.”

  The duke said: “Her hands really were a little too large and hard. What made you draw them so round and soft?”

  Leonardo replied: “I softened them to make a symbol of terrible strength.”

  “I saw no terrible strength,” said the duke, “only pretty hands—pretty, soft, yielding hands.”

  Leonardo repeated: “Terrible strength. Soft and yielding. What is softer and more yielding than quicksand or a quagmire? And what is stronger? What is more terrible? In the sea, what is stronger and more terrible than those soft, yielding things that lie still in the dark and lay their pliable fingers, or tentacles, upon the diver?”

  “I don’t quite follow you,” said the duke, “but, as I was saying, I could have fallen in love with that woman. I couldn’t get to the bottom of her.”

  “You had better thank God that you did not fall in love with her, Magnificence,” said Leonardo, “and as for getting to the bottom of her, that is impossible.”

  “Yes, as I said, the Madonna Lisa is deeper than the sea.”

  “No. She has no depth to which you could dive and no height to which you could climb. She is nothing at all. Del Giocondo will have discovered that much by now. She is, as you might say, God’s judgment upon him, that poor devourer of women. He loves her insanely—and she smiles. He bites his fingers, beats his head against the wall, and goads himself into madness in his hopeless endeavor to find something in her that is tangible—something upon which he may lay his hand and say: ‘At last I have found you.’ And all the time she smiles, and is silent. He may fall on his knees and weep on her feet. She will smile. He may lock her in her chamber and starve her: she will smile. He may humiliate her, beat her with sticks, strike her before the servants . . . she will continue to smile. This I say with authority, because I have seen it all. And he knows that if he cut her throat, she would smile that enigmatic smile even in death . . . and he is exhausted, defeated. He is exasperated and worn out (just as I might have been) by his effort to know her.”

  “But you know her, Leonardo?”

  “By the grace of God and an ape.”

  “How, an ape?”

  Leonardo was tired of it all. He made a gesture like a man who is shaking water off his fingertips, and said: “Oh . . . like del Giocondo, like you, like a dozen others, I
lost sleep thinking of her. The smile, the smile, the smile. I have seen every face in the world, from the throne to the gutter. I can read faces as your secretary can read a book. As a cut key fits the wards of a lock, so the shape of a face falls into position in a keyhole in my mind. Very good, this one baffled me,” said Leonardo, laughing grimly. “I saw the agony of del Giocondo and the calm of the Madonna Lisa, and I wanted to know. I talked to her, watched her, employed ten thousand artifices to get her off her guard. And still she smiled. That smile came between me and my sleep. I hated her bitterly because she was too much with me. Then, to be brief, when the portrait was finished and my brushes put away, God sent the ape.”

  “What ape?”

  Leonardo said: “Del Giocondo filled his house with musicians, tumblers, dancers, and all that, in order to amuse his wife. There was a choir of little boys that sang. There was a man who made me laugh—even me. Madonna sat with folded hands, quietly smiling. I finished the portrait. Then something happened. Del Giocondo had several large hounds. One of them, a buff-colored dog almost as big as a donkey, used to lie at her feet. This gigantic hound had hanging jowls and an expression of indescribable melancholy. When I showed the Madonna Lisa the finished picture, she nodded and said, through a pin-hole in her compressed mouth: “That is good.” At this, the great dog, whose ears had caught some warmth in her voice, came forward lashing about with his great tail which disturbed a little sleepy ape no bigger than your two hands.”

  The duke looked at his hands.

  Leonardo continued: “This absurd ape, enraged as little things are enraged, leapt upon the dog’s back and pulled his ears, grimacing and chattering. The patient dog looked up with such absurd melancholy that it was impossible not to laugh. There was this gigantic dog, which might have killed a leopard,” said Leonardo, half laughing at the memory of it, “and there was this preposterous ape chattering and chattering with ape-like anger while the dog feebly gesticulated with his tail, one friendly touch of which had been sufficient to knock his assailant head-over-heels. I laughed. Mona Lisa laughed—and then, by God, in the bursting of a bubble everything was clear. Then, Magnificence, I was a happy man, because I had uncovered a trivial truth, so that a thousand unconnected pieces fell together and made sense. La Gioconda threw back her head and opened her mouth and laughed, and then I knew why she had always smiled that strange quiet smile.”