He would start with a frenzied Discourse on the Imbecility of Men. He would follow that with a prophetic (get Europe a Prophecy, the poem by Blake that Campbell mentioned the other day) Treatise on the Suicide of Nations, with an appendix that could be titled something like ‘Reference of Common Haunts of the National Idiot’. The purest expression of his irony would be poured into his Diatribe in Praise of Opium and Against Virgins. Finally, the work to which he would dedicate the greatest energy, the gem of his inspiration: Six Proposals in Praise of the Power of Beekeeping and a Mellifluent Hymn.
Suddenly, a hot, intense light, like sun rushing through the roof, hits Bonaparte with full force. The impact of the light leaves him paralysed. His head spins, his ideas jam in his mind like simple words do for a stutterer. And then, as the light goes out and the heat diminishes, the earth starts trembling beneath his feet. Bonaparte clings to his English desk. It’s impossible to move, seek help, keep being who he believes he is, N. At the peak of the quaking, when it seems an eternity of instances have passed, an enormous hand arrives and lifts him skyward, with his desk, everything, as if wanting to pluck him from the certainty of imminent destruction. Bonaparte slumps on the floor of the universe and lies there, face up, shaken by an irresistible dance.
27.
He awakens in a canopy bed, dressed in white culottes, riding boots, a green frockcoat with golden buttons. His right hand is partly hidden beneath the left lapel of the frockcoat, his index finger protruding. It seems to him that his body has swollen, his chest wants to send the frockcoat’s buttons flying. In his head, contradictory thoughts occur at great velocity. He feels an anxious urgency to do things, to order others to do things, to make events happen at his word, and for them to happen now, right away. For time to stop, or, on the contrary, for it to accelerate in ways never seen. At the same time, another apprehension, one that is little inclined to action, sends him messages from far-off lands, messages that confuse and disquiet him.
Surrounding him are faces he doesn’t recognise. But, if he focuses his gaze, he understands that he does know them. That’s Bertrand, and the other is Drouot, the one over there Marchand. He tries to sit up, but his limbs won’t respond as they should. He feels he is struggling against a ferocious hangover, he who has never been inebriated, despite what his enemies say.
‘You should rest now,’ Doctor Hubert gently presses his imperial shoulder.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he is heard to say in a high-pitched, authoritarian voice, a voice that must be his own, with the accent of an illustrious corsair.
That voice fortifies everyone. He gives clear, categorical orders. Something about a dispatch from Vienna, from Princess Charming, in code. Yes, it must have come from Russia. He hears it said that someone is working on that dispatch, deciphering it, although for the moment it doesn’t seem like a life-or-death task. Then he hears talk of Pasolini as if he were another, distinct from him. Yes, they tell him, we have taken care of this, of the beekeeper from Capoliveri.
‘When would Your Majesty like to visit the beehives?’
‘What do you mean, when? As soon as possible. There’s no time to lose. You’re all asleep on your feet!’
He likes that they maintain a guilty silence, like schoolchildren who haven’t done their homework.
Bertrand speaks.
‘With Your Majesty’s consent, right now it is two in the afternoon. Outside, the heat is suffocating. I have taken the liberty of postponing that visit until tomorrow…’
‘Tomorrow! The world might have ended tomorrow. Why didn’t you wake me at five in the morning?’
It was only natural to ask that rhetorical question, as if the answer weren’t as clear and vivid as the Elba light. He still likes ambiguity. Still likes that they hide from him the things that everyone knows, he included, out of delicacy.
The earth shakes again, but the others don’t seem to notice. Hubert draws closer, a hypodermic syringe in hand.
When the quaking has passed, they help him get up. Once on his somewhat unsteady feet, he shoots a derogatory look at the three doctors, who offer frowns of disapproval in unison. Drouot makes as if to speak, but he stops him with a wave.
He rides towards the beehives. He knows the way: you must head downhill, then up. When does one cease being oneself on the path to becoming another?
28.
Pasolini is Pasolini no longer, he has become someone else. The captain of Lamarck finds the beekeeper in the hold of his ship, sleeping off his bender. He is partly hidden among the bundles. He stinks of grappa, it’s as if he has bathed in it. His pulse is very weak. The mirror that the captain holds close to his mouth fogs.
‘Take him up on deck so he can get some air, else he’ll die on us, here in the bilge.’
Did he get there on his own two feet, even if it were involuntarily, following the dictates of the grappa? It seems incredible that a man who doesn’t respond to firm shaking, who even after a sailor throws a pail of sea water in his face still doesn’t show signs of life, could have been capable of covering the three-and-a-half metres of a gangplank stretched between the wharf and the stern of the vessel. And at a steep incline to boot.
They steer a course sou’-sou’-east. The coast of the peninsula around Santa Marinella seems like a fine russet cord that draws ever farther away. It’s more than half a day since Elba was lost from sight.
The captain calls the barber, who doubles as a sawbones. A smartly dressed, clean-shaven man appears with a small wooden box full of phials. He chooses one. He removes the glass stopper and a strong smell of perfumed ammonia spreads across the deck. Two sailors sneeze. Pasolini flinches, opens his eyes a moment, and turns sluggish again like a marionette that has lost its strings.
‘We have to bleed him,’ the barber says. ‘His veins are running with alcohol.’
‘Are you sure that won’t finish him off?’
‘Just a little, to get his blood circulating better. Then I’ll give him infusions and boiled water to cleanse his stomach and viscera.’
‘Don’t waste the water. We have plenty of miles to cover before we reach Rhodes.’
They carry Pasolini down to the barber’s cabin, which doubles as a sickbay. The inside of the Lamarck is expansive, a beam of six metres put to good use.
They undress him. The captain rummages inside the inner pockets of the beekeeper’s grey frockcoat. He has yet to decide what to do with him. He named an absurd price when the man asked yesterday afternoon if he would allow him to board as a passenger. And he didn’t even haggle.
He said he would come back with the money. Of course, the captain thought it impossible and forgot about him. Certainly, he has no space to spare; in Rhodes a retired sailor headed for Cochin is coming aboard.
They have a favourable wind that looks set to continue for the rest of the day and the day following. In all certainty, turning around for an Italian port and disembarking the stowaway would cost them a day. It would be something else besides if he went into an alcoholic coma. But the captain trusts François, the barber, more than any other surgeon he has met in his life at sea.
Yesterday afternoon he could clearly see that the man was desperate, that something was troubling him. He had summarised his life in a French that was more than acceptable, if a little moth-eaten. A beekeeper, head of the household. Because the captain didn’t offer up his arm to twist, and because he kept saying that his ship was for cargo, not passengers, at one stage the man clutched him by the arm and said: ‘I’m begging you. I can cook, scrub the deck. Keep the ship’s logs. Whatever you tell me to do. I must leave the island immediately. Elba isn’t large enough for the both of us, the Emperor and me.’
A few coins. Either he didn’t collect the money, or he stayed at the tavern all afternoon. Several folded sheets of paper. A letter. Those were the contents of his pockets. The captain goes up to the deck. The wind is stronger now and blowing aft. They have eased their sails right out. They must be travelling at fo
urteen knots. The sea is choppy. He confirms their course with the helmsman and heads for his berth. He unfolds the pages he found in Pasolini’s frockcoat. It looks like the letter was written in the tavern, as it smells of grappa and the lines are hazy. He reads with growing astonishment.
Mr Bonaparte:
I have decided to rid myself of you. Since I’m no murderer, I’m going away, and I’m leaving you the island. I also bequeath you my bees. I trust you will take good care of them, and that they will teach you something new. You will find the bee maps of your battles in the cellar. The key is beneath a stone at the foot of the fig tree. Montmirail and Austerlitz will appear in a whole new light to you now.
For my part, the conspiracy is over. I admit to having taken part in a Bonapartist plot, and at this point I’m unclear whether it is in your favour or not. Nowadays, everything changes so swiftly! And at the same time stays the same: the same bees, the same hives, identical court intrigues, tedium, the sea. To whom to devote oneself? In what to take refuge?
I was a humble pawn who was to show you a new path. I have deserted. Yet, I shall fulfil part of my obligation by way of this letter. Like so many others, thousands in all the world, your feats have held me in thrall for more than two decades. I made them my own, I identified with them, just as I identified with my bees. One day I saw they were the same thing. I saw your mind in a hive hanging from an oak branch. And I went into it and became you.
How I would have liked to warn you of the danger that was lying in wait for you in Russia and then in Fontainebleau! I extracted the combs full of bees and the deafening buzz spoke to me of N. Right now, you dream of returning to Paris, of governing Vienna, of reinstalling the Habsburgs, of defeating your adversaries (that fiendish island), of teaching those ingrates who sold you to the Bourbon a lesson. You dream of firing up the Gallic heart again, building on the bedrock of the Revolution. What you dream is a chimera.
But, if you were to rule over the bees, you could tackle a return with greater assurance. If you could manage the hives of Elba, success would be possible. What better calling right now than reconstructing the Roman Empire from its very cradle. Unifying Italy under the imperial seal of the bee.
I know that the reports from your agents in Paris are encouraging. And in the next few months they may well become more promising if the royals keep destroying themselves like suicidal queens in the grotesque congress of Vienna. Undoing Fontainebleau is impossible. Consider the alternative that Italy offers. Now you have the bees, a palace of amber full of queens prepared to do their all for the good of the species. You know our queens are the best in the world, that the Italian race is the hardiest and most prolific of Europe. You could move the queens at will. I advise you to transfer them to Livorno and leave a third part in Bologna. From there we would reach the north and occupy Turin and Trieste, restoring the Cisalpine Republic. We would gather our strength in Naples, from where we would launch our queens for the conquest of Rome, this time from the south.
We will rebuild Rome if necessary. In the same way that domestic bees sweep the hive, eliminating the drones’ excrement, we will sweep from the face of Rome the papal states, the putrid corruption of the Vatican. Then we will send the rest of the swarm to Palermo. Once the Two Sicilies’ armada is rebuilt, we will take Malta, and soon we will be capable of taking the fight to all the corners of the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to the Bosporus.
What to do afterwards? I mean to say, once the Great Republic of Italy has been built? Once borders, duchies and princedoms, and the republics sowing seeds of discord, are supressed? Once a constitution is approved and chancelleries are modernised, new civil and penal laws are passed, the main cities and markets are connected, and specialisation and large-scale works are undertaken, as per the bees’ example, to stimulate the economy?
You know the answer better than I. If the Italian peninsula can be unified thanks to practical reason and the spirit of the beehive, why not do the same with the rest of Europe? Think of the experiment that is North America, Eugène Lucet’s account of which I have read, a beautiful eulogy that is no help to characters such as Talleyrand. In North America there exists a utilitarian class without inferiority complexes, a trade unencumbered by British greed, a freedom of movement of people, a natural intermingling.
Bees gather a small hoard of nectar and pollen, like men. They live and die by and for the hive, not the queen. After all, do they not flee in the thousands from the perfect city to found another out of nothing, far from the one they have so abruptly abandoned? In their uprooting there is intelligence, certainty. In the world of bees, ambition for the future of the race trumps everything else.
29.
Bonaparte dismounts his horse and looks around. The landscape seems familiar even though he has never been here. The gravel road flanked by two rows of irregular and dusty cypresses. In the background, behind the houses, he sees a pile of grey crags, one on top of the other, and, at the summit, a remarkable construction devoid of symmetry, which sprouts skyward as if it’s an outcrop of the rock itself. From a rooftop terrace the washing flapping in the wind delivers an out-of-time greeting. On the other side, the soft succession of terraces stops at the very the edge of the cliff. Beyond that, the valley stretches out, chequered, in distinct tones of green, ochre and dark red, and then there is the sea.
He grows aware of the dull, omnipresent buzz, which on dismounting he took to be the hiss of silence. The bees aren’t in view. He takes note of the grey boxes, some of them bearing the remains of blue or white paint. There are a few on the narrow terraces, others are fitted into the clefts of the rock. Bonaparte heads towards them, the gravel crunching beneath his boots. Dozens of hives with gabled roofing are attached to the wall of rock. Through a round hole a multitude of bees are coming and going without bothering one another. The heat of the afternoon doesn’t arrest their bustle of activity.
Removing his hat, Bonaparte lowers his face to one of the hives. The low light of the sun lets him see inside it. A real panic seems to animate the virgins’ movements, like inhabitants of a besieged citadel about to fall to an attack.
What makes them work to the death? Why don’t they ever rest? Who gives them their orders?
There, inside, in the interstices between the combs, he sees all his battles, as if through a camera obscura: Austerlitz, Eckmühl, Essling, Eylau, Friedland, Jena. Lützen, Montmirail, Marengo, Moscow, Smolensk, Ulm. He also sees the last one, which still may never happen if…The bees, he doesn’t know why, remind him of his Mamluks of the Nile.
Then he sees, emerging from the circular aperture, a bee that is much larger than the rest. It is almost three times the size of one of the workers. A vast entourage hurries after it in hot pursuit. A flagging bee falls to the foot of the hive as if wounded. He picks it up between thumb and forefinger, places it on the palm of his hand and blows on it to encourage it to fly. When it lifts, propelled forward, following in its companions’ wake, it looks to be coated in gold. Bonaparte mounts his chestnut stallion. He digs in his spurs and gallops towards the valley.
The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.
This book has been published with the support of the Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics.
Napoleon's Beekeeper Page 7
