by Gerald Kersh
The dunes were drifting again. He was almost buried. He rose and went on. Then he saw a redness, and felt a whiff of sickly heat. It was the dawn. He watched it. The sun sailed up, swollen and blood-coloured. Below, under a sky blackened with floating dust, lay something that heaved. As he looked, the heaving thing cracked in a zigzag like a lightning-flash, and the red light of the dawn shone on the water. The man ran down, ploughing through the dunes; felt his feet sink into warm, wet mud; wallowed forward; touched the edge of the water, and, with a great sweep of his arms, drove aside the piled dust that floated upon it. He plunged his mouth into a wave; recoiled, coughing and gasping.
The water was bitter.
He sat down in the mud and looked over the grey, heaving waste. The crack slowly closed. The dust covered everything. He was dying. He knew that. But at the back of his head something seemed to seethe and struggle. Soon he would sleep, and let the dust cover him; and then there would be nothing but the lurid sun in the sky above, the bitter waters in the sea below, and the murmuring dunes in the wilderness of dust behind him. A strange madness came upon him. With his last strength he rose, stared up at the blank, tumid disc of the sun, filled his lungs, beat his chest with his skinny fists, and uttered one little croak of defiance and despair.
He was the last man.
Gomez
I got this story from Crump, who had it straight from the lips of Gomez. And very strange lips they must be—knocked out of shape; cracked here and there; divided in two places by old white scars.
Scars. If you could strip Gomez you would discover a complete history of violent accidents carved upon his knotty little body. Life has chiselled some queer hieroglyphics in the flesh of that abnormally tough Mexican.
Looking at him, you would say that he had got caught in the cogs of some monstrous machine. His skull is battered and dented like an old aluminium saucepan. His ears have been man-handled so that they resemble those bulbous red fungi that grow on old trees in dark forests.
One eye is darkened for ever; the other has the brightness of two. The butt of a rifle has made a sinister ruin of his nose. The line of his jaw has some peculiar lumps where it was broken and badly set. Yet, by some miracle of chance, he has never lost a tooth and flashes a great smile that seems to be made of peeled almonds set in coral.
He limps. His shoulders, under the white jacket, look as fragile as a coat-hanger. A bulge at the left armpit betrays the presence of a big revolver, worn in the American style. He talks gravely, and with punctilious observation of all the courtesies; drinks little, eats less, smokes much, and loiters to this day in the cafés of Mexico City.
There he sits, smoking black cigarette after black cigarette, and taking tiny sips of tequila—that desperate liquor which the Mexicans distil from the cactus and which rasps the throat like prickles and leaves an arid flavour of the desert. . . .
Gomez had a political education. That is to say, he was in a revolt or two in the good old days when bullets were dear and life was cheap and Pancho Villa steeped himself to the elbows in blood. Then, since Gomez was younger, and had both his eyes, he could shoot the pips out of the six of spades in six shots at twenty paces. (Now he can manage only five out of six.)
One day a company of soldiers surrounded the farmhouse in which Gomez and seven of his comrades were hiding. It was a lively little siege, while the cartridges lasted, and there seems to have been some very pretty hand-to-hand fighting in the last few minutes.
But in the end Gomez was captured. He was the sole survivor, and had been wounded during the battle. Nothing much: a ball in the lung. The enemy captain dragged him out, and slapped his face, and burnt him with a cigar-end for good measure, and told him to say his prayers.
Then Gomez was propped up against the white wall and shot. He counted the firing-squad: seven. His last thought was that he wished he had the Mannlicher rifle of the second man on the left.
These are the bare facts. Gomez was sentenced to death, executed, shot seven times in the chest, and has the scars to prove it. He fell. The captain gave him a finishing shot in the head, and the soldiers rode away leaving him to the vultures. Night fell. Day broke. A couple of peons passed, and saw a redness which seemed to move. It was Gomez. He was not dead. The captain’s bullet had passed between the skull and the brain; the soldiers’ bullets had punctured no immediately vital spot.
The peons bandaged him up. He recovered and went on his way. A year or two later he joined the forces of law and order and became a policeman, married, settled down, begot daughters. There were little incidents, of course. Once a criminal broke his skull with a hammer. He recovered.
Another time he was shot in the back. The bullet missed his spine by a sixteenth of an inch, scraped his heart, perforated a lung and came out at his armpit, just grazing the great artery. He got better. Two men threw him from the roof of a four-storey building, through a glass fanlight. He lay with eleven broken bones for a whole night before he was found. But everything healed up quite nicely.
Then the authorities sent him after a bandit—some desperado who had shot a cashier in a restaurant and taken to the hills. Gomez loaded his guns and set out. But the word went before him and the bandit was waiting. He had a very particular desire to kill Gomez, just because no man had ever done so before. He was a methodical fellow, this bandit. Having notched the noses of six big bullets, he sat behind a rock until Gomez came within point-blank range, then opened fire.
Two of his bullets hit Gomez in the abdomen, the rest struck higher up. Gomez found time to fire one shot, which killed the bandit, and then fell flat.
An ambulance picked them up next morning. It was impossible that Gomez could still be alive. They took him fifty miles up the bumpy road and put him on a slab in the mortuary refrigerator. The good wife of Gomez came to look at him. She screamed: “My husband! He lives! He moves!” And so he did. He was not quite dead. The cold of the refrigerator had kept away peritonitis: the miracle was that he had escaped pneumonia—quite apart from the extraordinary gravity of his wounds.
After a few months in hospital, Gomez walked again, and went about his business. He still covered the underworld. Black-browed assassins found a new hobby: trying to kill Gomez. It became a craze, a foible, like Squaring the Circle or Perpetual Motion.
He was shot again, twice. Then somebody decided that the knife was surer: you knew what you were doing when you had a blade in your fist. So the doctors of Mexico City were confronted with new freaks of human survival. Gomez was cut to ribbons. He lived on. He survived stabs in the liver, the stomach, the throat. He is one of the few people whose hearts have been stitched, and who live to boast of it.
He touched nothing without getting hurt. Once he was thrown through the windscreen of a car. Once he was in a lorry with four other men. The lorry went over a precipice. The four men were killed. Gomez was unhurt, except for a broken leg. And as late as 1938 he was attacked in a café by three bad men, and stabbed seventeen times. He was sewn up: the men were buried.
So you still see him, sitting placidly over a little glass of tequila, politely acknowledging the salutes of the awestruck customers: always refusing three times before accepting a drink, in accordance with the dictates of Mexican etiquette; smoking tobacco strong enough to choke the devil, and exchanging light conversation.
And he is afraid. That is the extraordinary thing—the really incredible thing. At the back of his mind there is one little nagging fear.
“I fear,” he says, “that God is preserving me for something terrible.”
The Ruined Wall
You would have longed for rain to wash and night to bandage the sore eye of the sun. There was a tenseness. The world felt like a time-bomb. It was the heat—that and the dust, together with a certain electricity in the air which made every hair feel as if it ought to be standing on end, and sent imaginary insects crawling from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade. The horizon, beyond those abominable plains, was vague. It vacillated. A queer, w
eaving shadow flitted across it. The Rumanians have a legend about that trick of the dying sunlight: it is Larra the Deathless, running alone and desolate, worn down to nothing but a shadow. He hunts for death, but he cannot die: nothing can kill Larra. He was too proud—the son of a princess and an eagle. He became a murderer, and so he wanders for ever in the twilight and the dust. Such is his destiny. One day God may forgive him; but not yet. So he runs: a devil, a poor devil.
I stopped at a cottage and asked for a drink. A very old woman, brown and wrinkled as a tobacco-leaf, said: “Ah, but . . .” She looked at my clothes, and said: “A drink of what?” You may rest assured that I slapped my pocket and let a jingle be heard before I replied: “Of anything that flows.” Some travellers swear by South French hospitality. But some claim to have seen the Indian Rope Trick.
“It is going to thunder,” I said.
“Perhaps,” said the old woman. She was giving nothing away; not even an opinion.
With a certain ostentation I took a cigarette out of a silver case. She said: “Wine is dear, but water is almost dearer. Please come in.”
“What a charming little house,” I said.
She replied, as one who stated a simple reason: “I have lived here seventy-two years.”
“So long, madame?”
“I was born here.”
“Is it true?”
“I assure you,” she said, “that it is true.”
I drank, and said: “I should not have believed you to be more than forty-seven or at the most forty-eight.”
“All the same, I am seventy-two,” she said. “My father was born here, too.”
“Not possible!”
She smiled. “But yes. I left here only once, to stay with my sister at Arles. Only once, for a month. Never again. Never, never, never again in my life.”
“You don’t like Arles?”
“Oh . . . for that I don’t say yes or no.”
“Then why never again?”
“Look,” she said, and pointed. One of the flat white walls was hideously smeared. The plaster had been scraped and lime-washed. But under a chalky film, there were visible scars; deep scratches and raised cicatrices. Her voice was angry as she muttered: “Félix promised to plaster it over. But that was thirty years ago, and it is still as you see it.”
“What happened, then?”
“Miserable sinner that I am,” she said, “I went to Arles because my sister wanted me to go, because her husband was dead and she was alone. I always was too generous and silly like that, me; that is my character; I am like that; it is stronger than me, so what can one do then? So I went to Arles. My judgment said: ‘Do not go.’ But my heart, my stupid soft heart said: ‘Go for a little while.’ Besides, my sister’s husband had been an ironmonger in a comfortable way of business. Even so I might not have gone, but she said: ‘You are all I have in the world, sister; and be sure that I shall see you don’t lose by coming to see me. I have fifteen thousand francs,’ she said. Eh, well! Blood is thicker than water. I went. Fool that I was! She married again five years afterwards, and much I saw of those fifteen thousand francs. She gave me two hundred for coming to stay with her, and even then I had to fight to get it. She wanted to give me a hundred, but I sat down on the doorstep of the shop and said: ‘Two hundred or I don’t budge.’ Oh, no, no, no—never again do I leave this house of mine.
“Now before I left there came along a woman from the village. I have never spoken to her from that day to this. She said: ‘Marthe, for how long do you stay away?’ And I said: ‘Three weeks, four weeks perhaps.’ She said: ‘Jacques Tubois is looking after the chickens, I hear.’ I said it was so, Tubois and I had an arrangement: he owed me a good turn because seven years before I had done him a good turn. I am like that: it is my character, sir. I sat up all one night with his mother who was dying, and took no payment for it.”
“Madame, you are too good.”
“I have a tender heart. I can’t help it. It is stronger than I, my heart. So; this woman said: ‘There is a rich fool from Paris who is looking for a place to stay; an artist, a painter. He wants to live here for two weeks. He would pay well, I think.’
“So I see this fellow: a fool, skinny and dirty. I hate dirtiness, me. It is stronger than I am. I love cleanliness. I have, safely put away, copper pans which I have never even used, and also linen. You may examine this house, sir, through a glass, and not find a speck of dirt. He was dirty and little and foolish, what is more. Wrong up here, sir; he wept as he talked and looked at me in a funny way. He talked about religion, in a blasphemous way. He picked up my hands and said: ‘Jesus liked hands like this. They are beautiful.’ I said to him: ‘I am not here to be insulted, or to be cursed and sworn at. Language like that brings bad luck. If you want to stay in my house it will cost you thirty francs for the month.’ I would have been glad to take twenty, for I am weak and silly; but he pulled out his money. He only had forty francs altogether. He put the thirty francs in my hand, and another five. He was mad, mad, sir, fada.
“So I went to Arles, but not before I had quarrelled with the woman from the village, who asked for five francs for sending me that little man. Well, the end of it was, I gave her the five francs on condition that she kept the place clean every day. Of course, I hid away all my little valuables; my copper pots and my linen, and a silver spoon more than a hundred years old, and a printed picture of the Virgin Mary that had cost me sixty sous and was as good as a photograph. I said to the artist: ‘What is there here for you to paint?’ And he said: ‘Why, all that,’ and pointed out of the window there, to—nothing at all! Some trees, some sky, some hills! So I said: ‘That is your affair,’ and went to see my sister, and things happened as I told you. She died ten years ago, leaving fifty thousand francs in money, and a business, all to her sons. And to me five hundred francs. She was no sister of mine, and I’m glad I had nothing more to do with her after that trip. You know Arles? A Sodom and Gomorrah. Men and women drink in cafés. At nine o’clock at night people are still prowling about the streets. Filthiness!
“I stayed nearly a month. And then something—a voice inside me, here—told me to go home. I had a feeling of danger. God told me to return, and I did, and ah, God was right!
“As soon as I set foot inside here I felt that something was wrong. The painter was gone. The place was empty. It had been swept and cleaned, yes. But my wall! You see for yourself, that wall. And after forty-five years it is still dirty. The stuff soaked into the plaster, deep. It has been scraped a hundred times. Ah, the tears I have shed over that unhappy wall. Judge, sir, my horror and anger! The painter had painted pictures all over there. I am an old woman and may tell you frankly what he had painted. A woman without clothes on—only a skirt, working in a field among men stark naked except for shoes and trousers, with all kinds of vegetables and trees growing. It was a mad picture. There was a thing with wheels and clouds of smoke, too, and men with pickaxes on their shoulders, all black, and half-naked too. And worst of all—there were three or four filthy urchins with dirty noses and muddy faces playing with some pebbles, and standing by them, almost joining in, was . . . no, it was too strong! The Lord, smiling like a schoolboy.
“Tubois said he knew nothing of it; also the accursed woman. But I believe she put him up to it, that dirty little artist. I scraped the picture off, but I could not get the wall clean. And plastering is dear, sir, and I am poor. I complained to the police. ‘Find him and bring him back, the malefactor,’ I said. ‘A little slice of a man with a carroty head and blue eyes, smelling of tobacco and wine,’ I said. ‘Some kind of a Prussian; Von Gugg, Vincent Von Gork. A spy, no doubt,’ I said. ‘Van Gogh, yes, that’s it. Where is the law, where is the justice in the world if men like this can go about the earth wrecking houses with their filthiness and their swinishnesses?’
“But they never found him, and nobody has heard anything of him from that day to this, though somebody is supposed to have seen him in Arles. And my beautiful clean wall! A
h, I have suffered, sir, I have suffered . . . and I am a poor, lonely woman . . . imposed upon by all the world. . . .”
The Dungeon
“The dungeons are down here,” said the jailer. “Take care how you go. The steps are worn. We are below the level of the moat. It is very damp. Don’t touch the walls. A sort of mushroomy thing grows all over the stone. It won’t hurt you, it won’t hurt a bit; only it soils the clothes. . . . Yes, the dungeons are empty now. I hear they built a new prison, what they call a hygienic, up-to-date prison, over at Kalvarea. What I say is, a prison should be a prison. Good men don’t go to prison; so why should a prison be just so? . . . As long as they can’t get out of it. . . . Now this place is eight hundred years old, and as good as new. It was built, gentlemen, by Count Manolescu in the twelfth century. And until ten years ago it was in constant use. Do you want to see the dungeons, or would you rather go straight on to the torture-chamber? The dungeons. Very well, only there isn’t much to see . . .”
The jailer pushed open a heavy iron door, and held his lantern as high above his head as his rheumatic right hand could reach. The dungeon was a dreadful place; ten feet square, ten feet high, stinking of dampness, sickeningly oppressive, cold as death, hopeless.
One of our party said: “Bring that lamp over here. I seem to see some carving on this wall.”
“Carving, sir?” said the jailer. “God bless you, all four walls are covered with it. Here, sir, the light falls better this way . . .”
We crowded about the sprawling rectangle of yellow light that fell on the North wall. Somebody had carved the stone in a crowded and elaborate bas-relief, representing scenes from the life of Christ. Here was the Crucifixion. The artist had made the stone writhe. There was something terribly poignant in the patient suffering carved into the face of the Jesus.
