Grugroul, who was no fool either, saw the dealer in curiosities was interested, intrigued.
“You’ll see,” he said. “This boy moves his body not only the way we do to walk or bathe or get into a cart, but in a special way: he puts it in an infinite number of positions, each lasting a few seconds or fractions of a second, and all the positions are different, or are repeated in long series. And he goes on doing it till he’s ordered to stop.”
Drondlann of the Wheels lost all interest. This dancing business sounded stupid. He plunged the dirty dish into the water bucket. This time, though he still didn’t know it, he had behaved stupidly. Grugroul clapped his hands. He cried, “Tattoot! Dance!”
Then the boy did what the salesman had described: he danced. He moved first without changing place, both feet as if fixed to the ground. He waved his arms, lifted them, held them out; he swayed, and he made circles with his body, twisting his waist, and with his head, that seemed to turn freely at the end of his long neck. Then he leapt, without ceasing to sway the rest of his body. He spun on one foot, on the other, bowed down, swept the ground with his hands, straightened up, ran two steps to one side, three to the other, his arms held high, his head fallen back. Grugroul had stepped aside and turned his back, looking out into the alley through the shop window. And the dealer? He had felt the world begin to spin quicker than it had ever done, more dizzily than when it was an incandescent lump of rock trailing gases and gathering dust under the attentive eye of God. The dealer had seen the dead risen from their graves, had smelled all the odors earth exhaled, from the deserts to the orchards, had seen a black army march across a petrified sea, had picked the flowers of childhood running barefoot, had ridden in golden armor across a golden field pursuing golden women, had been drunken with liquors distilled deep in hidden caves, and when the sky began to come collapsing down on his shoulders, the water dish dropped from his hands and smashed to bits, and the giant bat gave a croak.
“Enough!” Drondlann yelled.
Grugroul clapped his hands. The boy stood still. Only then did Grugroul turn round. “What do you think?” he said.
Caution abandoned the dealer of Eagle Alley. Master Bramaltariq was old, fat, hairy, soft, and weak. He had nine young wives. He had swollen veins in his legs, he had protruding eyes from labored breathing and sluggish digestion.
“How much?”
Till noon they sat haggling over the boy. At noon, exhausted, each torn between the conviction he’d been swindled and the hope he’d swindled the other, they parted. Grugroul went back to his inn and by evening was on his way south, and Drondlann found another water dish for the bat, cleaned the cages, swept up, and spent most of the afternoon thinking.
The water of the lake was black and very still. No fishermen or boatmen worked out that way. The dealer in curiosities arrived in his donkey-cart, and two servants carried him upstairs. They were getting to the top, only three steps to go, two, one, they were almost there, when in the distance the seventeen horses neighed. Drondlann’s hands clenched behind the servants’ necks and his whole body became tense and hard as he said to himself that he was an idiot, and in that moment between one step and the next he changed the plan that had brought him there.
“No, I won’t sell him to you,” he said to Master Bramaltariq after describing the boy. “I wouldn’t sell him for all the gold in the world. Never. He’s like my own flesh and blood. I’ve had him by my side since he was born and he’s like my own son now, and I love him as such. I swear by all that’s sacred that it destroys my soul to have to do this. But times are hard, misery is knocking at my door. I’ll rent him to you.”
“What’s that, have to see, how’s that,” muttered the old man, distrustful like all old men.
“I’ll rent him to you,” repeated Drondlann. “You’ll give me money, not to keep him, but to see him. I bring him one day, you watch him dance, I get my money, I take him away. Another day I bring him, you see him dance.”
“Who’ll feed him?” the master interrupted.
Drondlann was not looking at the women reclining on pillows and carpets. He tried to keep his eyes on the face of the old man, and saw him agitated, moving restlessly, his little sharp eyes shifting, his lips half open.
“I will,” he said.
The fat man thought the bargain was good and the dealer a fool. He accepted.
Five times after that the dealer in curiosities came from Eagle Alley to Master Bramaltariq’s stone house on the lake. The first time was at evening. The sky was red, the horses were silent, the water looked still and black as a sheet of cast iron.
“Dance, Tattoot!” he cried.
The dealer knew the boy never repeated the patterns he made with his body; he knew it because he had watched him secretly in the house in Eagle Alley, making him dance once and again. But here, in the stone house on the lake, he did not watch him. He knew that if he himself fell into the trap, he’d lose everything. So the blond boy danced in the high salon and Drondlann kept his eyes on Master Bramaltariq and the women. The plump white women tried to stand up, opened their mouths, wept, moved their heads, stretched out their hands, groaned, screamed. But none of this affected fat Master Bramaltariq: he was rigid, desperate, staring at the boy. His face seemed to swell, the features trembling and melting like those of a corpse hanged a long time ago. And the arms and legs of the boy went on filling the room with flights, ciphers, dreams, memories, guilt, hunger, fever. Two of the women were crawling on the floor, another fell back on the cushions with her eyes closed and her tongue hanging out. Master Bramaltariq was apoplectic. The dealer clapped his hands, motioned to the boy to follow him, and left.
The second time he insisted that the women not be present.
“They take half your pleasure from you,” he said to Master Bramaltariq. “They breathe it in from you, drink it, devour it. You’ll watch better alone.”
The fat man assented, quickly, anxiously. He had the wives shut up in the next room, and they snivelled and scrabbled at the door in vain all evening. Drondlann clapped his hands and gave the command. The boy danced.
Dance: a word easily spoken. At that time an unknown word, which the dealer in curiosities thought Grugroul had invented, for the art of dancing had been lost; a word which to him, since he had heard it and learned to say it in secret, seemed to slide off his lips almost without the need to use his mouth. That is what the boy did: dance, dance. And Drondlann did not watch him, and outside it was already night. On the other hand Master Bramaltariq, who despite his wives, cloaks, wealth, and horses was a fool, followed with staring, reddened eyes every movement of that body passing and repassing through the air of the room. The veins of his neck and temples stood out like stretched cords; he breathed with increasing difficulty and made senseless gestures as if trying to restrain the dancer, or help him, or kill him. But the master of the dance was the other man, the merchant, who was not a fool. The fat master of the stone house fell back in his chair. Drondlann clapped his hands. The boy stood still. The owner of the lands, waters, farms, and souls of Bramaltariquenländ had his eyes open and was still trying to wave his hands: the fingers stretched and contracted, buried in the fur of the blue bearskin cloak. Drondlann smiled at him, spoke to him the way merchants and priests speak, promising marvels, and helped him to sit up.
“Tomorrow,” the fat old man managed to say.
The other frowned and proposed a day of rest.
“Tomorrow,” the old man insisted. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow.”
The dealer said certainly, of course, tomorrow. And the next day he went again with the boy and met Master Bramaltariq full of impatience. Drondlann thought it a pity that the fat man was too foolish even to realize he was near death, for he would have enjoyed seeing terror in those piggy eyes buried in the fat face. Nobody else was in the room and no women whimpered behind the closed doors. It was possible that death would not yet enter through one of those doors: that depended on his skill.
It was stormy, a
nd the boy smiled; he liked rain and lightning. There was a thunderclap, and without waiting for the handclap the boy began to dance. The dealer had to make a great effort to keep from watching him: he heard the galloping of the golden steeds, he longed for the deserts and the fiery liquors and the petrified seas and his childhood. But he got hold of himself and made himself think about his shop in Eagle Alley, the cages, the sharp stink, the visits by buyers and sellers, the shadows, the dim windows that looked on the street. He hated it, but he was going to miss it.
And at another thunderclap Master Bramaltariq got up from his chair. The dealer watched him stand there, trembling, bloated, unsteady; he saw him reach out his arm as if he wanted to touch the dancer. Then that short, fat arm in its bejeweled, gold-fringed silk sleeve began to move, up, down, right, left, and the other arm was moving too, and the round head was swaying. He made two steps heavy enough to collapse the floor of the room and lifted one leg. Drondlann realized that the fat man was trying to dance, and broke out laughing. The shopkeeper of Eagle Alley roared with laughter at Master Bramaltariq, and the thunder boomed outdoors, and indoors the boy moved swiftly through the room taking various poses, and the dying old man sweated in his heavy clothing trying to imitate that white shape that intoxicated his blood and senses. But no one heard, no one knew anything. Drondlann clapped his hands and stopped the dance and left. Master Bramaltariq did not notice: he was in the middle of the room turning slowly about with one hand on his breast and the other held up towards the stormclouds.
Drondlann let several days pass, waiting till the master summoned him. Again it was evening, but the sky was clear. He wondered if there were black, quiet fish in that lake. The boy danced.
The shopkeeper of Eagle Alley had seen madness and death. Years ago, many years ago, astride a horse, hearing laughing trumpets blow the call to arms and the charge, he had seen men around him go mad and die. He himself had gone into madness and death and had returned to life: he had brandished a sword, raised a shield, borne a severed head aloft on a lance. And what was his life, now, in the shop in the alley?
He stopped the dance one moment before Master Bramaltariq plunged into delirium. He went to him and talked to him slowly, softly, gently. He told him that this dance had been the last. Yes, the last unless . . . But the precautions, the circumlocutions, were useless. The old gentleman did not hear him. So Drondlann took from his pocket the document and the stiletto, pricked the old man’s right index finger, and had him sign the bottom of the page in blood. That was all, and the sky was still bright when the servants carried him down the staircase.
That night he hid the document under a loose board in the floor of the shop, and could not sleep.
Next day he took it from its hiding place and went with the boy to the house on the lake. Master Bramaltariq was no longer speaking, he who had given commands, issued judgments, ordered punishments. He was so mute that Drondlann thought he could take him back to the shop in Eagle Alley and sell him cheap. He clapped his hands.
He had no more than looked at the old man when he had the pleasure of seeing him die. He did not die like a warrior. He was no longer powerful, no longer imposing, not even fat. His reddish face had turned grey and the knotted veins were dark and swollen. He was not sweating: he was dried up, withered, feeble. But he wanted to go on watching the boy’s mobile body, go on watching till death. And he died mad, gasping like one of the black lake fish, sprawled across what had been his treasures and luxuries.
Drondlann clapped his hands and the boy stopped dancing. He called the servants and the wives, he joined them in the funeral laments, howled, struck his clenched fists on his breast, bowed down to earth keening.
And after what he thought a decent interval, after the fat man was buried and the stupefaction of death had passed, when everybody was asking what would become of those vast properties and immense riches, the dealer in curiosities called for a lawyer and showed him the document.
It was beautiful, that house of stone and wood in the middle of the lake, so beautiful that he never once went back to the shop in Eagle Alley. When the stink there became insupportable the neighbors dragged off the corpses of the curiosities, shared out the cages and furniture, sealed up the doors and windows. The ex-dealer remained quite untroubled and went on living peacefully, never clapping his hands. The blond boy got fat: he ate too much and lazed through the days, looked after by the wives and servants. Sometimes thunder made him start. Drondlann had twenty-three stallions, eleven wives, three short cloaks of green, purple, and blue bearskin; he was no longer Drondlann but Master Bramaltariq, and sometimes he dreamed of a white form that moved dancing through the rooms of the house on the lake, in the years of the reign of Emperor Horhórides III, of the dynasty of the Jénningses.
“Down There in the South”
Vast is the Empire, said the storyteller, so vast that a man can’t cross it in his lifetime. You might be born in Lyumba-Lavior and start traveling and never stop and when death came, however long in coming, you might not even have reached Gim-Ghimlassa. Life can be lived anywhere, an ancient poet is said to have said, and if you meditate on that you’ll see it’s a noble thought. You can live in the great, handsome cities of the North, the white capitals with sonorous names or the grey fortress-cities or the beach-side resort towns full of music. You can live in tents in the desert following the oases that shift with the seasons. You can live on the rivers in houseboats, fishing, doing laundry, scrubbing the deck, watching people and houses and fields go by, making love in a hammock and bargaining with different people every day. You can live in a log cabin near the mountain peaks, in a marble palace, in a fetid slum, a convent, a school, a tower, a brothel. And also you can live in the South.
Yes, yes, my good people, I do believe it: you can live in the South. And die there. And can get born, grow, learn, kill, suffer in the South. Do you know the South? Have you been to that forbidden, tempting land? Have you gone to that paradise of monsters, cave of the assassins, realm of barbarity? Do you know the people of the South? Have you bedded their women, got drunk with their men, listened to their old people? It’s cold here now in the North; for months now the cold hasn’t let up, and this morning we got up in the dark and blew on our fingers and froze our feet on the floor and lighted the hearthfire and the stoves. Poor folk knocked the ashes off yesterday’s embers and rich folk ordered servants to stoke the furnace fires in the basements of their great houses. We’ve drunk hot chocolate and wrapped up warm and at midmorning we’ve gone into a bar for a hot punch. Some vagabonds have died in the snowy fields and no bird sings and the ice thaws on windows and drips from the stone rosettes of balconies, and tonight there will be stars in a clear sky, and tomorrow we’ll be colder than we were today.
And it’s warm, now, down South. The days are long and pitiless. A white sun breeds clouds of mist on the lagoons in the marshland. People walk barefoot on the ground and the grass, half naked; they wake early, very early; they sleep through the midday and get up again when the sun sinks purple behind the tops of the huge trees. That’s how it is down there in the South, green, suffocating, humid, full of violence and somnolence. Men and women don’t gather around a fire but under palm trees that shoot up tall to escape the ferns that fasten on their trunks. And they don’t listen to storytellers tell the deeds of the Empire, because the South refuses to admit that it’s part of the Empire. They listen, sure enough, but they listen to something different: something that I’ve thought might be a treasure as great as the history of the greatest, most powerful empire known to man, or might be that same story told differently: they listen to the voices of the damp, warm earth, the sounds of the wind, the song of rivers, and what the leaves, the air, the animals are saying.
Yes, and it’s always been that way, always. There’ve been emperors who dreamed of subjugating the South. There’ve been emperors who tried it, and some thought they’d done it. But with what? I ask, with what? With power, weapons, armies, fire, terror? Useless
, all that, completely useless: all power can do is silence people, keep them from singing, arguing, dancing, talking, brawling, making speeches and composing music. That’s all. That’s a lot, you may say, but I tell you it’s not enough. For what power can keep the earth from speaking to people? What weapons can keep water from running and stones from rolling? What artillery can keep a storm from crouching on the horizon, ready to burst? That’s something no emperor has managed yet. On the contrary, not seldom, when they wanted silence, quiet, submission from the South, what they got was the tumult of war and rebellion.
It was thus, trying to subdue the South, that the Emperor Sebbredel IV died, eleventh ruler of the House of the Bbredasoës, mediocre rulers all of them, all forgotten but two: the founder of the dynasty, Babbabed the Silent, and the last, Sebbredel IV, famed and remembered not for his own merits but for those of a fugitive, an adventurer, on whom fate played a dirty trick.
Who was Liel-Andranassder, are we going to find out? Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say, and even if you’re right, and I tell you that you’re right, yet I also tell you that you’re wrong. A life, like a story, has many parts, and each part is made of other ever smaller parts; for, however small and banal it may be, part of a story is a story, and part of a life is a life. You’re going to tell me about the man who changed an Empire and altered the course of history, and that’s the truth. And I’m going to tell you, and it’s the truth too, about a young man, son of a bankrupt noble family, who’d lived surrounded by luxury and every amenity, and couldn’t resign himself to poverty when it came. His parents took him with them to the modest country house which was all they had left, but at twenty Liel-Andranassder left that life, which he considered contemptible and despicable, and came to the capital. I won’t tell you all he did for eight long years, but I can tell you that he went through real humiliation and shame, that he endured the unendurable, lost what innocence he’d had, got fat, turned lazy, lascivious, and fawning. But he also got what he wanted: a lot of money. Easy money, that ran quickly through his pale hands in a senseless, hopeless chase after respectability and honor, though he didn’t then know the meaning of those words. And when he got to the end of the money he’d go back to the gaming houses, to usury, to sycophancy, and for a while he’d have plenty again. Until one night he killed a man who accused him of rigging the game.
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