Fantastic Tales

by Italo Calvino

  Sir Robert Redgauntlet, in the midst of a’ this fearful riot, cried, wi’ a voice like thunder, on Steenie Piper, to come to the board-head where he was sitting; his legs stretched out before him, and swathed up with flannel, with his holster pistols aside him, and the great broad-sword rested against his chair, just as my gudesire had seen him the last time upon earth—the very cushion for the jackanape was close to him, but the creature itsell was not there—it wasna its hour, it’s likely; for he heard them say as he came forward, “Is not the Major come yet?” And another answered, “The jackanape will be here betimes the morn.” And when my gudesire came forward, Sir Robert, or his ghaist, or the deevil in his likeness, said, “Weel, piper, hae ye settled wi’ my son for the year’s rent?”

  With much ado my father gat breath to say, that Sir John would not settle without his honour’s receipt.

  “Ye shall hae that for a tune of the pipes, Steenie,” said the appearance of Sir Robert—“Play us up ‘Weel hoddled, Luckie.’”

  Now this was a tune my gudesire learned frae a warlock, that heard it when they were worshipping Satan at their meetings; and my gudesire had sometimes played it at the ranting suppers in Redgauntlet Castle, but never very willingly; and now he grew cauld at the very name of it, and said, for excuse, he hadna his pipes wi’ him.

  “MacCallum, ye limb of Beelzebub,” said the fearfu’ Sir Robert, “bring Steenie the pipes that I am keeping for him!”

  MacCallum brought a pair of pipes might have served the piper of Donald of the Isles. But he gave my gudesire a nudge as he offered them; and looking secretly and closely, Steenie saw that the chanter was of steel, and heated to a white heat; so he had fair warning not to trust his fingers with it. So he excused himself again, and said, he was faint and frightened, and had not wind aneugh to fill the bag.

  “Then ye maun eat and drink, Steenie,” said the figure; “for we do little else here; and it’s ill speaking between a fou man and a fasting.”

  Now these were the very words that the bloody Earl of Douglas said to keep the King’s messenger in hand, while he cut the head off MacLellan of Bombie, at the Threave Castle; and that put Steenie mair and mair on his guard. So he spoke up like a man, and said he came neither to eat, or drink, or make minstrelsy; but simply for his ain—to ken what was come o’ the money he had paid, and to get a discharge for it; and he was so stout-hearted by this time, that he charged Sir Robert for conscience-sake—(he had no power to say the holy name)—and as he hoped for peace and rest, to spread no snares for him, but just to give him his ain.

  The appearance gnashed its teeth and laughed, but it took from a large pocket-book the receipt, and handed it to Steenie. “Here is your receipt, ye pitiful cur; and for the money, my dog-whelp of a son may go look for it in the Cat’s Cradle.”

  My gudesire uttered mony thanks, and was about to retire, when Sir Robert roared aloud, “Stop though, thou sack-doudling son of a whore! I am not done with thee. HERE we do nothing for nothing; and you must return on this very day twelvemonth, to pay your master the homage that you owe me for my protection.”

  My father’s tongue was loosed of a suddenty, and he said aloud, “I refer mysell to God’s pleasure, and not to yours.”

  He had no sooner uttered the word than all was dark around him; and he sunk on the earth with such a sudden shock, that he lost both breath and sense.

  How lang Steenie lay there, he could not tell; but when he came to himsell, he was lying in the auld kirkyard of Redgauntlet parishine, just at the door of the family aisle, and the scutcheon of the auld knight, Sir Robert, hanging over his head. There was a deep morning fog on grass and gravestone around him, and his horse was feeding quietly beside the minister’s twa cows. Steenie would have thought the whole was a dream, but he had the receipt in his hand, fairly written and signed by the auld Laird; only the last letters of his name were a little disorderly, written like one seized with sudden pain.

  Sorely troubled in his mind, he left that dreary place, rode through the mist to Redgauntlet Castle, and with much ado he got speech of the Laird. “Well, you dyvour bankrupt,” was the first word, “have you brought me my rent?”

  “No,” answered my gudesire, “I have not; but I have brought your honour Sir Robert’s receipt for it.”

  “How, sirrah?—Sir Robert’s receipt!—You told me he had not given you one.”

  “Will your honour please to see if that bit line is right?”

  Sir John looked at every line, and at every letter, with much attention; and at last, at the date, which my gudesire had not observed,—“From my appointed place,” he read, “this twenty-fifth of November.”—“What!—That is yesterday! Villain, thou must have gone to hell for this!”

  “I got it from your honour’s father—whether he be in heaven or hell, I know not,” said Steenie.

  “I will delate you for a warlock to the Privy Council!” said Sir John. “I will send you to your master, the devil, with the help of a tar-barrel and a torch!”

  “I intend to delate mysell to the Presbytery,” said Steenie, “and tell them all I have seen last night, whilk are things fitter for them to judge of than a borrel man like me.”

  Sir John paused, composed himsell, and desired to hear the full history; and my gudesire told it him from point to point, as I have told it you—word for word, neither more nor less.

  Sir John was silent again for a long time, and at last he said, very composedly, “Steenie, this story of yours concerns the honour of many a noble family besides mine; and if it be a leasing-making, to keep yourself out of my danger, the least you can expect is to have a red-hot iron driven through your tongue, and that will be as bad as scauding your fingers wi’ a red-hot chanter. But yet it may be true, Steenie; and if the money cast up, I will not know what to think of it.—But where shall we find the Cat’s Cradle? There are cats enough about the old house, but I think they kitten without the ceremony of bed or cradle.”

  “We were best ask Hutcheon,” said my gudesire; “he kens a’ the odd corners about as weel as—another serving-man that is now gane, and that I wad not like to name.”

  Aweel, Hutcheon, when he was asked, told them, that a ruinous turret, lang disused, next to the clock-house, only accessible by a ladder, for the opening was on the outside, and far above the battlements, was called of old the Cat’s Cradle.

  “There will I go immediately,” said Sir John; and he took (with what purpose, Heaven kens) one of his father’s pistols from the hall table, where they had lain since the night he died, and hastened to the battlements.

  It was a dangerous place to climb, for the ladder was auld and frail, and wanted ane or twa rounds. However, up got Sir John, and entered at the turret door, where his body stopped the only little light that was in the bit turret. Something flees at him wi’ a vengeance, maist dang him back ower—bang gaed the knight’s pistol, and Hutcheon, that held the ladder, and my gudesire that stood beside him, hears a loud skelloch. A minute after, Sir John flings the body of the jackanape down to them, and cries that the siller is fund, and that they should come up and help him. And there was the bag of siller sure aneugh, and mony orra things besides, that had been missing for mony a day. And Sir John, when he had riped the turret weel, led my gudesire into the dining-parlour, and took him by the hand, and spoke kindly to him, and said he was sorry he should have doubted his word, and that he would hereafter be a good master to him, to make amends.

  “And now, Steenie,” said Sir John, “although this vision of yours tends, on the whole, to my father’s credit, as an honest man, that he should, even after his death, desire to see justice done to a poor man like you, yet you are sensible that ill-dispositioned men might make bad constructions upon it, concerning his soul’s health. So, I think, we had better lay the hail dirdum on that ill-deedie creature, Major Weir, and say naething about your dream in the wood of Pitmurkie. You had taken ower mickle brandy to be very certain about onything; and, Steenie, this receipt (his hand shook while
he held it out)—it’s but a queer kind of document, and we will do best, I think, to put it quietly in the fire.”

  “Od, but for as queer as it is, it’s a’ the voucher I have for my rent,” said my gudesire, who was afraid, it may be, of losing the benefit of Sir Robert’s discharge.

  “I will bear the contents to your credit in the rental-book, and give you a discharge under my own hand,” said Sir John, “and that on the spot. And, Steenie, if you can hold your tongue about this matter, you shall sit, from this term downward, at an easier rent.”

  “Mony thanks to your honour,” said Steenie, who saw easily in what corner the wind sat; “doubtless I will be conformable to all your honour’s commands; only I would willingly speak wi’ some powerful minister on the subject, for I do not like the sort of soumons of appointment whilk your honour’s father—”

  “Do not call the phantom my father!” said Sir John, interrupting him.

  “Weel, then, the thing that was so like him,”—said my gudesire; “he spoke of my coming back to him this time twelvemonth, and it’s a weight on my conscience.”

  “Aweel, then,” said Sir John, “if you be so much distressed in mind, you may speak to our minister of the parish; he is a douce man, regards the honour of our family, and the mair that he may look for some patronage from me.”

  Wi’ that, my father readily agreed that the receipt should be burnt, and the Laird threw it into the chimney with his ain hand. Burn it would not for them, though; but away it flew up the lumm, wi’a lang train of sparks at its tail, and a hissing noise like a squib.

  My gudesire gaed down to the Manse, and the minister, when he had heard the story, said, it was his real opinion, that though my gudesire had gaen very far in tampering with dangerous matters, yet, as he had refused the devil’s arles, (for such was the offer of meat and drink), and had refused to do homage by piping at his bidding, he hoped, that if he held a circumspect walk hereafter, Satan could take little advantage by what was come and gane. And, indeed, my gudesire, of his ain accord, lang forswore baith the pipes and brandy—it was not even till the year was out, and the fatal day passed, that he would so much as take the fiddle, or drink usquebaugh or tippenny.

  Sir John made up his story about the jackanape as he liked himsell; and some believe till this day there was no more in the matter than the filching nature of the brute. Indeed ye’ll no hinder some to threap, that it was nane o’ the Auld Enemy that Dougal and my gudesire saw in the Laird’s room, but only that wanchancy creature, the Major, capering on the coffin; and that, as to the blawing on the Laird’s whistle that was heard after he was dead, the filthy brute could do that as weel as the Laird himsell, if no better. But Heaven kens the truth, whilk first came out by the minister’s wife, after Sir John and her ain gudeman were baith in the moulds. And then my gudesire, wha was failed in his limbs, but not in his judgement or memory—at least nothing to speak of—was obliged to tell the real narrative to his friends, for the credit of his gude name. He might else have been charged for a warlock.

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  The Elixir of Life

  (L’élixir de longue vie, 1830)

  If Balzac’s glory rests on The Human Comedy, the great fresco of French society during his time, it is no less true that fantastic works occupy a significant place within his production, especially his first period, when he was more influenced by Swedenborg’s occultism. A fantastic novel, Peau de chagrin (“The wild ass’s skin) (1831), is one of his best books. But even in the novels usually considered “realist,” there is a strong component of the fantastic transfiguration that constitutes an essential element of his art.

  When Balzac undertook the project of The Human Comedy, he left at the margin of his production the fantastic writing of his youth. “L’élixir de longue vie,” first published in a magazine in 1830, was printed again among his Études Philosophiques, preceded by a head-note that presented the story as a moral study of heirs who impatiently wait for the death of their parents. I have not included that clever addition and present the text in its primitive version.

  The satantic aspect of a learned nature is an ancient medieval and Renaissance theme (e.g., Faust, the legends of the alchemists) that the nineteenth century, first the Romantics and later the Symbolists, took full advantage of (just think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a work not included in this anthology because of its length) and then passed on to science fiction.

  We are in sixteenth-century Ferrara. A rich old man has acquired an oriental unguent that revives the dead. Balzac has many ideas, perhaps too many: Renaissance Italy, both papal and pagan; pious and penitential Spain, the alchemical challenge to the laws of nature; the damnation of Don Juan (with the curious variation that it is Don Juan who turns into the stone dinner guest); and a spectacular ending replete with great ecclesiastical pomp as well as blasphemous sarcasm. But the story is successful because of the macabre effect of the body parts that live on their own: an eye, an arm, and even a head that, separating itself from the dead body, bites the skull of a living person, like Count Ugolino in Dante’s Inferno.

  TO THE READER

  AT THE VERY outset of the writer’s literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he found the same story in a collection published about the beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann of Berlin; probably it appeared in some German almanac, and was omitted in the published editions of his collected works. The Comédie Humaine is sufficiently rich in original creations for the author to own to this innocent piece of plagiarism; when, like the worthy La Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, and after his own fashion, a tale already related by another. This is not one of the hoaxes in vogue in the year 1830, when every author wrote his “tale of horror” for the amusement of young ladies. When you have read the account of Don Juan’s decorous parricide, try to picture to yourself the part which would be played under very similar circumstances by honest folk who, in this nineteenth century, will take a man’s money and undertake to pay him a life annuity on the faith of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for the term of her natural life. Would they be for resuscitating their clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences to consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan and fathers who marry their children to great expectations. Does humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is making progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men’s shoes as a step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are people who rely entirely on an expected demise; who brood over it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves again for their pillow at night. To this class belong bishops’ coadjutors, cardinals’ supernumeraries, tontiniers, and the like. Add to the list many delicately scrupulous persons eager to buy landed property beyond their means, who calculate with dry logic and in cold blood the probable duration of the life of a father or of a stepmother, some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to themselves, “I shall be sure to come in for it in three years’ time, and then—” A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life. Then what must it be to live when every moment of your life is tainted with murder? And have we not just admitted that a host of human creatures in our midst are led by our laws, customs, and usages to dwell without ceasing on a fellow-creature’s death? There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistible charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a “Good-night, father!” Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes that they would fain clo
se for ever, eyes that still open each morning to the light, like Belvidero’s in this Study. God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought. Picture to yourself the state of mind of a man who must pay a life annuity to some old woman whom he scarcely knows; both live in the country with a brook between them, both sides are free to hate cordially, without offending against the social conventions that require two brothers to wear a mask if the older will succeed to the entail, and the other to the fortune of a younger son. The whole civilization of Europe turns upon the principle of hereditary succession as upon a pivot; it would be madness to subvert the principle; but could we not, in an age that prides itself upon its mechanical inventions, perfect this essential portion of the social machinery?

  If the author has preserved the old-fashioned style of address To the Reader before a work wherein he endeavors to represent all literary forms, it is for the purpose of making a remark that applies to several of the Studies, and very specially to this. Every one of his compositions has been based upon ideas more or less novel, which, as it seemed to him, needed literary expression; he can claim priority for certain forms and for certain ideas which have since passed into the domain of literature, and have there, in some instances, become common property; so that the date of the first publication of each Study cannot be a matter of indifference to those of his readers who would fain do him justice.