Fantastic Tales

by Italo Calvino

  By and by, Keawe came back, and would have her take a drive.

  “My husband, I am ill,” she said. “I am out of heart. Excuse me, I can take no pleasure.”

  Then was Keawe more wroth than ever. With her, because he thought she was brooding over the case of the old man; and with himself, because he thought she was right, and was ashamed to be so happy.

  “This is your truth,” cried he, “and this your affection! Your husband is just saved from eternal ruin, which he encountered for the love of you—and you can take no pleasure! Kokua, you have a disloyal heart.”

  He went forth again furious, and wandered in the town all day. He met friends, and drank with them; they hired a carriage and drove into the country, and there drank again. All the time Keawe was ill at ease, because he was taking this pastime while his wife was sad, and because he knew in his heart that she was more right than he; and the knowledge made him drink the deeper.

  Now, there was an old brutal Haole drinking with him, one that had been a boatswain of a whaler—a runaway, a digger in gold mines, a convict in prisons. He had a low mind and a foul mouth; he loved to drink and to see others drunken; and he pressed the glass upon Keawe. Soon there was no more money in the company.

  “Here, you!” says the boatswain, “you are rich, you have been always saying. You have a bottle or some foolishness.”

  “Yes,” says Keawe, “I am rich; I will go back and get some money from my wife, who keeps it.”

  “That’s a bad idea, mate,” said the boatswain. “Never you trust a petticoat with dollars. They’re all as false as water; you keep an eye on her.”

  Now, this word struck in Keawe’s mind; for he was muddled with what he had been drinking.

  “I should not wonder but she was false, indeed,” thought he. “Why else should she be so cast down at my release? But I will show her I am not the man to be fooled. I will catch her in the act.”

  Accordingly, when they were back in town, Keawe bade the boatswain wait for him at the corner, by the old calaboose, and went forward up the avenue alone to the door of his house. The night had come again; there was a light within, but never a sound; and Keawe crept about the corner, opened the back door softly, and looked in.

  There was Kokua on the floor, the lamp at her side; before her was a milk-white bottle, with a round belly and a long neck; and as she viewed it, Kokua wrung her hands.

  A long time Keawe stood and looked in the doorway. At first he was struck stupid; and then fear fell upon him that the bargain had been made amiss, and the bottle had come back to him as it came at San Francisco; and at that his knees were loosened, and the fumes of the wine departed from his head like mists off a river in the morning. And then he had another thought; and it was a strange one, that made his cheeks to burn.

  “I must make sure of this,” thought he.

  So he closed the door, and went softly round the corner again, and then came noisily in, as though he were but now returned. And, lo! by the time he opened the front door no bottle was to be seen; and Kokua sat in a chair and started up like one awakened out of sleep.

  “I have been drinking all day and making merry,” said Keawe. “I have been with good companions, and now I only come back for money, and return to drink and carouse with them again.”

  Both his face and voice were as stern as judgment, but Kokua was too troubled to observe.

  “You do well to use your own, my husband,” said she, and her words trembled.

  “Oh, I do well in all things,” said Keawe, and he went straight to the chest and took out money. But he looked besides in the corner where they kept the bottle, and there was no bottle there.

  At that the chest heaved upon the floor like a sea-billow, and the house span about him like a wreath of smoke, for he saw she was lost now, and there was no escape. “It is what I feared,” he thought. “It is she who has bought it.”

  And then he came to himself a little and rose up; but the sweat streamed on his face as thick as the rain and as cold as the well-water.

  “Kokua,” said he, “I said to you to-day what ill became me. Now I return to house with my jolly companions,” and at that he laughed a little quietly. “I will take more pleasure in the cup if you forgive me.”

  She clasped his knees in a moment; she kissed his knees with flowing tears.

  “Oh,” she cried, “I asked but a kind word!”

  “Let us never one think hardly of the other,” said Keawe, and was gone out of the house.

  Now, the money that Keawe had taken was only some of that store of centime pieces they had laid in at their arrival. It was very sure he had no mind to be drinking. His wife had given her soul for him, now he must give his for hers; no other thought was in the world with him.

  At the corner, by the old calaboose, there was the boatswain waiting.

  “My wife has the bottle,” said Keawe, “and, unless you help me to recover it, there can be no more money and no more liquor to-night.”

  “You do not mean to say you are serious about that bottle?” cried the boatswain.

  “There is the lamp,” said Keawe. “Do I look as if I was jesting?”

  “That is so,” said the boatswain. “You look as serious as a ghost.”

  “Well, then,” said Keawe, “here are two centimes; you must go to my wife in the house, and offer her these for the bottle, which (if I am not much mistaken) she will give you instantly. Bring it to me here, and I will buy it back from you for one; for that is the law with this bottle, that it still must be sold for a less sum. But whatever you do, never breathe a word to her that you have come from me.”

  “Mate, I wonder are you making a fool of me?” asked the boatswain.

  “It will do you no harm if I am,” returned Keawe.

  “That is so, mate,” said the boatswain.

  “And if you doubt me,” added Keawe, “you can try. As soon as you are clear of the house, wish to have your pocket full of money, or a bottle of the best rum, or what you please, and you will see the virtue of the thing.”

  “Very well, Kanaka,” says the boatswain. “I will try; but if you are having your fun out of me, I will take my fun out of you with a belaying-pin.”

  So the whaler-man went off up the avenue; and Keawe stood and waited. It was near the same spot where Kokua had waited the night before; but Keawe was more resolved, and never faltered in his purpose; only his soul was bitter with despair.

  It seemed a long time he had to wait before he heard a voice singing in the darkness of the avenue. He knew the voice to be the boatswain’s; but it was strange how drunken it appeared upon a sudden.

  Next the man himself came stumbling into the light of the lamp. He had the devil’s bottle buttoned in his coat; another bottle was in his hand; and even as he came in view he raised it to his mouth and drank.

  “You have it,” said Keawe. “I see that.”

  “Hands off!” cried the boatswain, jumping back. “Take a step near me, and I’ll smash your mouth. You thought you could make a cat’s paw of me, did you?”

  “What do you mean?” cried Keawe.

  “Mean?” cried the boatswain. “This is a pretty good bottle, this is; that’s what I mean. How I got it for two centimes I can’t make out; but I am sure you sha’n’t have it for one.”

  “You mean you won’t sell?” gasped Keawe.

  “No, sir,” cried the boatswain. “But I’ll give you a drink of the rum, if you like.”

  “I tell you,” said Keawe, “the man who has that bottle goes to hell.”

  “I reckon I’m going anyway,” returned the sailor; “and this bottle’s the best thing to go with I’ve struck yet. No, sir!” he cried again, “this is my bottle now, and you can go and fish for another.”

  “Can this be true?” Keawe cried. “For your own sake, I beseech you, sell it me!”

  “I don’t value any of your talk,” replied the boatswain. “You thought I was a flat, now you see I’m not; and there’s an end. If you
won’t have a swallow of the rum, I’ll have one myself. Here’s your health, and good-night to you!”

  So off he went down the avenue toward town, and there goes the bottle out of the story.

  But Keawe ran to Kokua light as the wind; and great was their joy that night; and great, since then, has been the peace of all their days in the Bright House.

  HENRY JAMES

  The Friends of the Friends

  (1896)

  In the ghost stories of Henry James (1843–1916), the supernatural is invisible (the presence of the evil beyond all imagination, as in his famous The Turn of the Screw) or almost invisible (the imperceptible doubling that takes place in “The Jolly Corner”). In any case, it is not the visible image of the ghost that matters but the knot of human relationships because of which the ghost is evoked or which the specter helps to establish. A story of impalpable, mundane relationships, as in “The Friends of the Friends” (or perhaps better put: “The Friends of Friends”), is charged with vibrations: all living beings project phantoms; the border between the persons of flesh and blood and the psychic emanations is porous. The “parapsychological” point of departure duplicates itself and multiplies. As often happens in James, the neutral-seeming character who stands behind the “voice of the narrator” has a decisive role precisely because of what he does not say: here, as in The Turn of the Screw, it is the voice of a woman who this time does not hide her dominant passion—jealousy—and her proclivity for intrigue.

  I FIND, AS you prophesied, much that’s interesting, but little that hlelps the delicate question—the possibility of publication. Her dliaries are less systematic than I hoped; she only had a blessed habit of noting and narrating. She summarised, she saved; she appears seldom indeed to have let a good story pass without catching it on the wing. I allude of course not so much to things she heard as to things she saw and felt. She writes sometimes of herself, sometimes of others, sometimes of the combination. It’s under this last rubric that she’s usually most vivid. But it’s not, you will understand, when she’s most vivid that she’s always most publishable. To tell the truth she’s fearfully indiscreet, or has at least all the material for making me so. Take as an instance the fragment I send you, after dividing it for your convenience into several small chapters. It is the contents of a thin blank-book which I have had copied out and which has the merit of being nearly enough a rounded thing, an intelligible whole. These pages evidently date from years ago. I’ve read with the liveliest wonder the statement they so circumstantially make and done my best to swallow the prodigy they leave to be inferred. These things would be striking, wouldn’t they? to any reader; but can you imagine for a moment my placing such a document before the world, even though, as if she herself had desired the world should have the benefit of it, she has given her friends neither name nor initials? Have you any sort of clue to their identity? I leave her the floor.

  I

  I know perfectly of course that I brought it upon myself; but that doesn’t make it any better. I was the first to speak of her to him—he had never even heard her mentioned. Even if I had happened not to speak some one else would have made up for it: I tried afterwards to find comfort in that reflection. But the comfort of reflections is thin: the only comfort that counts in life is not to have been a fool. That’s a beatitude I shall doubtless never enjoy. “Why, you ought to meet her and talk it over,” is what I immediately said. “Birds of a feather flock together.” I told him who she was and that they were birds of a feather because if he had had in youth a strange adventure she had had about the same time just such another. It was well known to her friends—an incident she was constantly called on to describe. She was charming, clever, pretty, unhappy; but it was none the less the thing to which she had originally owed her reputation.

  Being at the age of eighteen somewhere abroad with an aunt she had had a vision of one of her parents at the moment of death. The parent was in England, hundreds of miles away and so far as she knew neither dying nor dead. It was by day, in the museum of some great foreign town. She had passed alone, in advance of her companions, into a small room containing some famous work of art and occupied at that moment by two other persons. One of these was an old custodian; the second, before observing him, she took for a stranger, a tourist. She was merely conscious that he was bareheaded and seated on a bench. The instant her eyes rested on him however she beheld to her amazement her father, who, as if he had long waited for her, looked at her in singular distress, with an impatience that was akin to reproach. She rushed to him with a bewildered cry, “Papa, what is it?” but this was followed by an exhibition of still livelier feeling when on her movement he simply vanished, leaving the custodian and her relations, who were at her heels, to gather round her in dismay. These persons, the official, the aunt, the cousins were therefore in a manner witnesses of the fact—the fact at least of the impression made on her; and there was the further testimony of a doctor who was attending one of the party and to whom it was immediately afterwards communicated. He gave her a remedy for hysterics but said to the aunt privately: “Wait and see if something doesn’t happen at home.” Something had happened—the poor father, suddenly and violently seized, had died that morning. The aunt, the mother’s sister, received before the day was out a telegram announcing the event and requesting her to prepare her niece for it. Her niece was already prepared, and the girl’s sense of this visitation remained of course indelible. We had all as her friends had it conveyed to us and had conveyed it creepily to each other. Twelve years had elapsed and as a woman who had made an unhappy marriage and lived apart from her husband she had become interesting from other sources; but since the name she now bore was a name frequently borne, and since moreover her judicial separation, as things were going, could hardly count as a distinction, it was usual to qualify her as “the one, you know, who saw her father’s ghost.”

  As for him, dear man, he had seen his mother’s. I had never heard of that till this occasion on which our closer, our pleasanter acquaintance led him, through some turn of the subject of our talk, to mention it and to inspire me in so doing with the impulse to let him know that he had a rival in the field—a person with whom he could compare notes. Later on his story became for him, perhaps because of my unduly repeating it, likewise a convenient worldly label; but it had not a year before been the ground on which he was introduced to me. He had other merits, just as she, poor thing! had others. I can honestly say that I was quite aware of them from the first—I discovered them sooner than he discovered mine. I remember how it struck me even at the time that his sense of mine was quickened by my having been able to match, though not indeed straight from my own experience, his curious anecdote. It dated, this anecdote, as hers did, from some dozen years before—a year in which, at Oxford, he had for some reason of his own been staying on into the “Long.” He had been in the August afternoon on the river. Coming back into his room while it was still distinct daylight he found his mother standing there as if her eyes had been fixed on the door. He had had a letter from her that morning out of Wales, where she was staying with her father. At the sight of him she smiled with extraordinary radiance and extended her arms to him, and then as he sprang forward and joyfully opened his own she vanished from the place. He wrote to her that night, telling her what had happened; the letter had been carefully preserved. The next morning he heard of her death. He was through this chance of our talk extremely struck with the little prodigy I was able to produce for him. He had never encountered another case. Certainly they ought to meet, my friend and he; certainly they would have something in common. I would arrange this, wouldn’t I?—if she didn’t mind; for himself he didn’t mind in the least. I had promised to speak to her of the matter as soon as possible, and within the week I was able to do so. She “minded” as little as he; she was perfectly willing to see him. And yet no meeting was to occur—as meetings are commonly understood.

  II

  That’s just half my tale—the extrao
rdinary way it was hindered. This was the fault of a series of accidents; but the accidents continued for years and became, for me and for others, a subject of hilarity with either party. They were droll enough at first; then they grew rather a bore. The odd thing was that both parties were amenable: it wasn’t a case of their being indifferent, much less of their being indisposed. It was one of the caprices of chance, aided I suppose by some opposition of their interests and habits. His were centred in his office, his eternal inspectorship, which left him small leisure, constantly calling him away and making him break engagements. He liked society, but he found it everywhere and took it at a run. I never knew at a given moment where he was, and there were times when for months together I never saw him. She was on her side practically suburban: she lived at Richmond and never went “out.” She was a woman of distinction, but not of fashion, and felt, as people said, her situation. Decidedly proud and rather whimsical she lived her life as she had planned it. There were things one could do with her, but one couldn’t make her come to one’s parties. One went indeed a little more than seemed quite convenient to hers, which consisted of her cousin, a cup of tea and the view. The tea was good; but the view was familiar, though perhaps not, like the cousin—a disagreeable old maid who had been of the group at the museum and with whom she now lived—offensively so. This connection with an inferior relative, which had partly an economical motive—she proclaimed her companion a marvellous manager—was one of the little perversities we had to forgive her. Another was her estimate of the proprieties created by her rupture with her husband. That was extreme—many persons called it even morbid. She made no advances; she cultivated scruples; she suspected, or I should perhaps rather say she remembered slights: she was one of the few women I have known whom that particular predicament had rendered modest rather than bold. Dear thing! she had some delicacy. Especially marked were the limits she had set to possible attentions from men: it was always her thought that her husband was waiting to pounce on her. She discouraged if she didn’t forbid the visits of male persons not senile: she said she could never be too careful.