Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Catalan Literature)

by Espriu, Salvador

  II

  And came the days of the Cerealia. And Cenchreis, mother of Myrrha, as is custom, left the palace to worship these days. And therefore, Myrrha, helped by the old nurse, could finally satisfy her passion.

  «Are you pleased?» the old nurse asked after the first night. «Extremely so, yes, I’m happy. Now I know the worth of what we call life. Approaching the bed I stumbled three times, but Cinyras’ arms made me forget the sinister omens. How handsome and strong Cinyras is, an inexhaustible hero!» «It is all for a good purpose, child. Nevertheless, the omens are sinister. We are trespassing the law, despite no blood having yet been spilled. May Magaera and the other two circle far from your head. And far from mine,» the old nurse said.

  III

  «And that scares you?» the eunuch asked the old nurse. «Here in our country it’s business as usual. The bond of love is strengthened by so many complex knots, and is so strong that not even the gods can destroy it.» The smeared black skin shone in the darkness. «But you don’t know how to guard a secret, old woman: you’re a chatterbox. Why have you come to blabber to me about this story? I have other things more important to do than listen to you.» He hushed for a moment, deep in thought, and then laughed. «And anyway, old woman, I fear that the anecdote isn’t really so over the top, not even when judged according to the laws of your own people. Don’t you recall, lady, that, just before becoming expectant with Myrrha, Cenchreis loved? And not, I believe, Cinyras; not at all.» A footstep was heard in the darkness. «Shh, it’s Myrrha!» the old nurse said, shocked.

  IV

  «How miserable, how miserable I am!» moaned Myrrha. «Is what the black said true?» she asked. «I’m not certain,» the old nurse responded, timidly. «But then again it was talked about, and someone was brave enough to make a mockery of Cinyras.» «Useless, doddering twit!» cried Myrrha. «And I had to give up my integrity, my shame? And here I was thinking I had violated the most severe law of the Silent Ones! Now I’ll be the laughing-stock of gods and men. All of this is your fault, old woman; but listen to me: if I die, you will have to go before me down the path to the Shadow.» «Certainly not!» shrieked the old nurse. «Myrrha, princess, what is it that you’re after? Forget the words of the slave, rumors. I will tell you, under oath, the true word: Cenchreis never knew another man but Cinyras.» «The handsome, strong, powerful Cinyras, the inexhaustible hero!» Myrrha exulted, already more calm. And the two women disappeared down the corridor toward the chamber. «And Ovid tells what happened next,» Efrem Pedagog, salivating, lectured. And he decided to continue the story. «Hey!» said Senyora Maria Castelló, cutting him off suddenly. And no one added a single word more.

  * * *

  6 “O, Mother,” she said, “how happy in your husband!”

  7 Nor think it some case of love frigtening away my old age, for your kindness and youth accuse you of being to blame.

  On Orthodoxy

  Upon entering the world, all of us respected the harmonic balance of these three axioms (or things that were considered as such until then): «The legitimacy of every individual’s paternal origin is luckily unverifiable.» «The lion is king of the jungle.» And «There is nothing new under the sun.» But Joan Vulgar asked himself one day: «Is there nothing, absolutely nothing new, under the sun?» His characteristic, vacillating speech made its way to the ears of Ecolampadi Miravitlles. «Everything is old,» assured Ecolampadi with sufficient resignation. «Everything?» Joan Vulgar asked with reticence. «Hmm! Well, it’s not altogether clear.» And he smiled. «You have a secret. I can feel it. Let it out,» ordered Ecolampadi Miravittles. «Who, me?» Joan Vulgar responded with shock. «Not that I’m aware of. Only . . . » «Ah, I get it; you’re brilliant!» Ecolampadi Miravittles cried out enthusiastically. «Joan Vulgar has just discovered that not everything is old under the sun.» And he hastened to evangelize his wife and friends. «Yes?» welcomed Ventura, his dignified wife. «Me, I’m happy, so very happy.» And so he went on, submerged in his little domestic arrangement. Friends reacted in another way. «This man, your acquaintance, must possess a splendid intelligence. I would like you to present him to me,» Efrem Pedagog insisted. «Joan Vulgar,» Ecolampadi Miravitlles began his introduction, «as you no doubt already know . . . Efrem Pedagog.» «Come closer, young man. There is absolutely nothing vulgar about what it is in your head. You shall go very far; and I shall take you under my wing.» And Efrem protectively patted Joan on the back. «So you say that not everything is old under the sun? Life, totalitarian.» «I don’t say all of that, sir,» Joan Vulgar modestly interjected. «I don’t affirm, I ask. A question mark, if that pleases you. It’s all otherwise. Only an insinuation, an insinuation, sir.» «False!» cried Ecolampadi Miravitlles. «Pay no attention to what he is saying to you, Efrem. He does not ask, he affirms. I am the most orthodox, the first to whom the new idea descended. Is this not true, Ventura?» «I don’t recall,» answered the wife. «I’m always doing the laundry.» «That does not matter,» Efrem Pedagog said curtly. «Young man, I free you from disorder, and I shelter you.» «Thank you,» Joan Vulgar, with reverence, said.

  And his gospel triumphantly made its way around the world, and Joan Vulgar’s fame spread far enough to anger Efrem. «Well,» Pedagog began, rigorously, in thought, «Well, does Joan Vulgar make an affirmation or is he resigned to questioning? This point is vital, we shall clarify our positions.» And he wrote up a tract of twenty-two books, with the title: De universali ordine vel Nihil novum sub sole. «Efrem envies Joan Vulgar,» Ecolampadi Mirravitlles observed. «It’s reproachable to assure that he alone queries. What maliciousness! Joan Vulgar affirms.» «Do you think so?» insinuated the founder. «Quiet. What do you know about this?» Ecolampadi demanded. «Did I not feel before anyone else that I am not orthodox?» «Yes, but . . . » began Joan Vulgar. «Let it go. Your doctrine doesn’t keep me up at night!» the disciple said, cutting him off. And he wrote the voluminous De orthodoxia seu De fide Joannis Vulgaris disputatio. «Efrem Pedagog envies Joan Vulgar,» the public cried out. «Off to the Viuviuvescu to find the cause of it.» And thus the process went up to the plenary session. The Viuviuvescu, which in that era was staggering through a conflict over the regional nomenclature, studied the case with great care and found Pedagog guilty, sentencing him to silence. And thus increased the glory of Joan Vulgar.

  That is, until another from the school of Efrem, the eloquent Crisant Baptista Mestres took to stirring the ashes. «Ok, we have learned what Joan Vulgar affirms,» formulated Crisant. «And, in exchange, we ignore what is new under the sun, and that, gentlemen, seems to me more of the essence.» «Silence, I say,» flared Ecolampadi Miravitlles. «What is new under the sun? What’s new?» he sought. «Miravitlles, I fear I have thought up a new fuss,» said Joan Vulgar in that precise moment. «They say the lion is the king of the jungle. The king of the jungle? Who believes that?» «Do you believe that, my good fellow?» Ecolampadi asked Crisant in a preemptive tone. «I have not considered this problem, I am not a naturalist,» the eloquent Crisant confessed with uneasiness. «And you have the pretension to demand that those things new under the sun specify themselves to you, when you can’t answer doubts as to whether the lion is or is not the king of the jungle!» the orthodox Miravittles said, ridiculing him. «It is not,» Mrs. Verity Experimental said, as she arrived. «It is not: ibi non sunt leones. I’ve been there,» she assured. And Joan Vulgar figured it all out by pure speculative force. «Bless me,» Ecolampadi, as he kneeled down, requested. «Your sectarian fervor is paradigmatic, acolyte,» granted the god Joan Vulgar. «But refrain from sharing it with me now; I am worried. Tula wrote me from Havana to say that she awaits me and thinks so much about me. I have not seen her in well over a year. Will she deceive me? I’ll die, because I love her, I love her,» Joan Vulgar cried. «Everything is permitted you,» Ecolampadi said to calm him. «You are not a man. The laws of nature obey you, you can trespass them or transform them as you will. And when I visited Tula a couple of moths ago we talked . . . » «Don’t add an
y more,» interjected Joan Vulgar, the god. «You have lifted a weight from me. I just find it strange, a little strange.» And he moved away. «If I am not permitted this third indisputable proposition, which is the first!» murmured Ecolampadi Miravitlles with a worried air, and during an excusably jittery moment. And on the other hand, faith, including the most substantive theocentric beliefs—and the faith of Miravitlles, rock-solid, generative, Pauline, was certainly such—is a gift that no merit can buy or conquer, always as fragile as the finest crystal, thin as a cat’s ear at its most erect.

  The Heart of the Town

  «I demand a bed to die in,» the bitter man cried out. «A bed, gentlemen. It’s not much. On the other hand, I’m within my rights.» The fever had him in a fog and he took, suddenly, to singing enormities made up of the aftertaste of bitter extremism. «Grab that subversive!» the people protested. «A bed, what pretensions! And what does he want one for? Before dying, without a doubt, for his indiscretions. This is intolerable. Detain him!» At that moment, the defeated man fell silent, and suddenly, without warning, vomited a profuse red substance. «Wine dregs,» opined Ròmul Serafí Catarneu. «Blood, no: he’d be complaining again. The guy in the bed is running a scam. I see what he’s up to. There’s still not a person around who can fool me, daughter. So much making a scene and spinning around in circles, no one can make me look bad.» «You rascal!» Anneta Quintana said, censuring him. «Inveterate! Can’t you see the poor man is dying of hunger?» And she disappeared. She returned in no time at all, eagerly, with a glass of milk. «Drink it, you have to make good use of it,» she offered it, maternally, to him. «Good expenditure,» verified Senyora Magdalena Blasi, who was passing by. «My goodness! A glass of milk, not even watered down, equivalent to a certain financial sacrifice.» «And I’m nothing more than a poor embroiderer,» stressed the sweet altruist. «Nevertheless, I add my soul.» «You hath chosen wisely: Jew for Jew, God. He will pay thee for it, and for many years,» wished Senyora Magdalena Blasi, as she moved on. «My Jesus, in Thee I confide,» Anneta Quintana, crying out, said. «Now that he has revived and the vomit’s dried up, perhaps the just thing to do is detain him,» some passersby decided. And in one dense group they carried him to the Commissar. «His offense? Your name?» asked that honorable man. «My information is unimportant,» breathed the vagabond. «Procedure,» the honorable man, enunciating precisely, said. «He demanded a bed to die in. He said insolent things,» the witnesses revealed. «A bed? You’re being ridiculous,» the Commissar said, puzzled. «Ha, ha, ha, our chief gets it, this man is ridiculous,» the subordinates laughed, all of them, down to the last one. «More absurd than criminal,» the Commissar said, free, by his judgment, to ironize. «Yes, more absurd than criminal,» the subordinates unanimously agreed. «Then won’t you grant me a bed?» the pale beggar asked. The honorable man turned furious. «Indeed not!» he yelled. «It’s just as well you’ve been detained for causing a commotion in public.» «Put me away,» urged the idler. «In order to maintain you, serve you, free of cost, I imagine? Out!» the honorable man bellowed. The hall had been emptying. Salom approached the unhappy man. «Where will you go now?» he half-sympathized with him. «Are you with the press?» the misfortunate man asked. «They say that the press is organizing a campaign for cases like mine.» «I’m a publicist. No one, however, reads my work,» Salom sighed. «Charity-should-become-a-state-service,» he quickly added to attenuate his hardly flattering declaration. «I admire the originality of the concept,» the beggar said, «but I’m not thinking of swindling it from you; you can rest at ease.» «Well, what would you like me to tell you,» Salom said. «Charity has to be statized, to be statized.» And he repeated, with that innocence of his, this verb, hardly academic these days. «I believe in the heart of the town. Personal initiative doesn’t naturally arrive everywhere. The State . . . » «And in the meantime?» the one man, interrupting the other, asked. «You’re talking about a hypothesis, like in a book. And in the meantime, I ask you?» «And in the meantime, perhaps you’re right,» Salom meditatively said. «In the meantime you’re not left with anything more than the drama of the street. And what if you scattered your lungs into pieces across the most sumptuous parts of Lavínia? When all is said and done, you waste them with coughing fits. Take care of them.» «Stupid solutions of a romantic writer: squash flies with a sledgehammer, charge giants with a frying pan. The opulence of Lavínia, from the pulse of an unalterable rhythm, from an unstaggering solidity of the gut and liver, manipulates diverse measuring sticks that with tactical precision accommodate and change its inviolable interests. And it’s changed them all behind my back with so much dialectical rigor that they’ve pierced me to the marrow of the bone of my conviction. What has never been measured nor needs be measured, not even with the most sordid meanness, is the value, always null and void by my reckoning, of my lungs. And less so when I already no longer have it,» the sick man responded. And he choked, spit out his last morsel, and gave his life in testimony to his truth. «Exemplary punishment for a culprit of anthrophobia,» Salom, scandalized and offended, said. «To the memory of my deceased. Five pesetas for the bed of the penniless patient. Coloma Marés, widow of Cal·licó,» filtered out of an archaic radio in a corner. «The heart of the town has to be trusted,» Salom said optimistically. And he looked at the wasted away body and left. He couldn’t be delayed, and he didn’t deserve to freeze to death either.

  Hildebrand

  That disastrous-looking man said:

  «You want to know my past? Here’s to not breaking up this illustrious gathering: I am a new murderer of shadow, and my shadow was named Hildebrand. I met him in the French Legion, where I ended up due to romantic circumstances. One wretched afternoon, in Le Houga, in the middle of the desert, he set out to find me. We were fifty lost souls, depression was driving us mad; we hardly had water. I’d never paid attention to him before. At least not in any particular way, and he emerged suddenly, as if he were arriving in the capacity of my protector. He offered me his ration of liquid, and the blues and gratitude made me accept it. Great evil that he was, he knew the power of an opportunely compassionate attitude. He dominated me, he enslaved me, he turned me into an automaton. He mocked me; he took pleasure in irritating me so that I’d feel my impotence. I hated him and I couldn’t free myself from him. He dragged me beyond the bounds of the law, and under his orders I had to commit low crimes, repugnant offenses. At times I ask myself why he chose me as his victim. Did he suppose I was weak? I don’t know, but he tortured me with refinement. He made me learn in a year and a half—by heart and in Chinese—without my understanding a word of it, Li-Ping’s The Abridged Commentaries of Lao-Tse, a work of a mere forty-seven volumes, and he obliged me to recite it whenever he had insomnia. On another occasion, at a cannibal festival, he demanded I devour the gall bladder and rib of a leprous old sorcerer from a tribe of the Balolo, dead from the bite of a bluebottle fly. I can’t look at turtles, they make me nauseous: Hildebrand amused himself, for two months, with the contemplation of the trembling provoked in me each day—once I’d been tied up so that I couldn’t move—by the slow stroll of the most abominable exemplar of that species across my exposed belly. Why tell of my horrors? He hypnotized me, he enslaved me, and he was slight in build, while I, as you can see, am quite corpulent. We wandered the streets, for years and years, an eternity. He was the devil, my shadow, a blue nightmare. Until I murdered him in Lavínia, at the doors of Santa Maria Liberal.»

  He paused to breathe and to smoke. The man continued:

  «Hildebrand, or the spirit of contradiction: connoisseur of antithings. If I affirmed any historical date, because I’m college-educated, he would correct me, hunkered down in voguish German research, and he would underline an error to me for ten hours. If I exalted Caesar or Alexander, he would bring up the existence of a tremendous (and of course unmatched) Incan, Sioux, or Macanese-Portuguese captain. He restrained my enthusiasm for a grand literary figure with the bitterness of his precise erudition: the grand figure
plagiarized an obscure author who was the legitimate star. He corrected me, he shamed me, he knew the last secret and the latest discovery of the latest school of thought. He understood wines, watches, philosophy, cacti, jurisprudence, medicine and the music of Bach, Buddhist eudaimonia, and fifty thousand other things. He was a competent orator, the future of Humanity, past tense of the animal branch itself, passing for stylistic French distinction and joie de vivre, and the feminine heart. With his experience he would have been a really sharp film critic. My God, how he counter-asserted! In Syracuse, in the catacombs of S. Giovanni, he and a friar who was accompanying us argued about the name of the bones of the martyrs that were buried there. Naturally, the conversation degenerated into an examination of the dates conserved regarding the coming of Saint Paul to Rome and the analysis of the scientific solvency of the evidence traditionally presented to this end. An hour from Lassa, he argued with Jetsunma Neel about the properties of a few syntactical varieties of “Kyapdo.” Jetsunma, from drowsiness, was about to cross the benedictions of Nub-dewa-Tsxen. In Debra Libanos he lost himself with the Abun Iasú in an endless digression on the wonders of Saint Tekla Haimanot. The Abun wanted to have him burned, and it’s a shame that he escaped it. In Kairouan, in the Mosque of the Sabers, he couldn’t manage to agree with Ishaq ibn Mansur, snake charmer, from the Mālikī school. They spoke of the meanings of “adl” within the general “Sahadic” system. Ishaq defended Ibn Arafah’s definition as correct. Hildebrand opposed him with Ad-Dardir. Ishaq accused him of “hawarig.” They reconciled at the end of the neutral, limitative camp of the four Kaba’ir.»