The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  “You who come from the pure abode, neither heaven nor earth, who in heaven are unknown and on earth are not understood—listen!

  “Whether you are a ghost that has come from the earth or one that lies dead in the desert, or one that lies dead in the desert uncovered with earth, or a ghost unburied, or a ghost that none cares for, or a ghost that has no children, or a ghost with none to pour libations, or a ghost that must look in the dregs of vessels, in the leavings of the feast, in the rubbish of the street for food: he that lies in a ditch, or he that fell into a river and was drowned and rolled away by the flood; he that was lost at sea, or one that perished of hunger and thirst in prison: whether you are the king’s son that lies in the desert, in the ruins, or the hero they slew with the sword, or those who died abandoned without smelling the smell of food, or those dead as virgins and bachelors, or women dead in travail, or with their babes yet at the breast: listen!

  “You who return by night and day, restlessly, to attach and torment those who ate with you, dressed with you or spoke with you during life: listen!

  “Brother’s ghost, ghost of twin, spirit of him unnamed, or with none that mourns for it, shade of him dead by fault of god or sin of king: you who return to torment those who looked upon your dead face; and all you evil spirits, demons and devils of every sort—

  “Whatever spirit you may be, until you are removed, until you are gone from man and earth, and hinder no more the coming of the lord, you shall have no food to eat, you shall have no water to drink: O, you dead folk, whose cities are heaps of earth, whose faces are sorrowful, why have you appeared to me? I will not come to Kurtha, the underworld, you are a crowd of ghosts, why do you try to cast your spells on me?

  “But you, myriads of angels who guide and instruct the prophets, angel of peace who went with Enoch, and Gabriel who took Enoch to God, Uriel who was sent to Ezra and angel who took Levi to see the secrets of heaven, Raphael come to heal Tobit’s blindness, and all angels who are pitiful and wept for the destruction of Zion, who comfort the good and chastise the wicked, all, all, except the dread nameless one who reigns over the kingdom of ghosts, come to my aid!

  “I was born ugly in face and graceless in manner: my talents flourished, and I made myself sick with learning: but my friends sit as if deaf in my house and my wife looks after all the young men: I am one heavy of heart, and yet I struggle more than any with the adversaries of God: if there is one angel among you who has an ugly face, whose eyes are blank with weeping the sorrows of men, let him come to me and help me overcome the dark myriads.”

  And thereupon he would begin his exorcisms.

  His madness increased. He began to throw stones through windows where spirits rise, and at mirrors where the devil is seen: he extinguished the fires of ovens, hearths and furnaces with water, for there spirits flourish in their natural element; and he sealed all the graves in the graveyard with seals bearing cabbalistic signs, to prevent the dead from rising; he set dishes of food and drink on each gravestone, and by the road, for marauding hungry spirits, and many holy and pitiable follies he committed before his insanity was spent.

  Then one summer day he fell to the ground in a long swoon. A boy stole his red shoes, and a friend who had pity on him took him to his house and hid him in a back room. He awakened after a long time, calm and hungry; he ate well and thereafter he saw no more angels or devils, but devoted himself to the practice of medicine, and in a short time became the house physician of the prince.

  IN this way ended the fifth day of the Tales.

  The Sixth Day

  WHEN they were assembling on the sixth day on the side of a hill in the Capuchin Wood, they heard voices echoing in the hollow where the well and clearing are, and where the miserable convent orphans play sometimes in the afternoons. The Schoolgirl peered through the bushes and saw below, walking up and down, the Banker and the Festival Director. The Festival Director was explaining his scheme for a great open-air public theatre, larger than the American stadiums, with gigantic effects, like the ruins of Baalbec or of the Acropolis, and with sound condensers and reflectors, with a company of actors supported by the State and directed by him. He had the idea of importing native choruses from the Russian villages and Spanish mountain fastnesses, entire, with their spontaneous harmonies untrained; for bringing down whole villages to act without instruction some tragedy that happened in the place. The Banker said to the Festival Director:

  “Frankly, the perfection of television would eliminate the need for such a theatre: you could act in Athens, or in your mountain village. The time is past for such great theatres. The Romans had them so that they would know what the plebs was doing on holidays, and they did not attempt to elevate the mob, they brutalised it; they satisfied its sporting instincts. We have the football-ring, the Sunday supplement, the pictures, Coney Islands, Channel swims and cross-continent bike-races—what more do we want? That’s old tack, Director, after you, no-one will care for it at all. You don’t want to educate the people: they know too much now. They don’t understand what it’s all about, but they are discontented; everyone wants to win the Irish sweepstake, or, in America, make a million dollars. It’s not human nature to want freedom; freedom means loafing to them. Don’t give them theatres in the air: give them cinemas, where it’s dark, and they can cuddle.”

  The Banker said this in such a gay, cocksure voice, running all his ideas together, fighting by instinct against the vast schemes of the Festival Director, and at the same time so obviously trying to stop the Director from running into what he thought unremunerative expense, that the company concealed on the ledge of the hill began to laugh aloud, and their laughter flew up into the trees like the cries of a flock of parrots suddenly startled. The Banker looking up, waved his hand, and called out:

  “Are you up there, you gabblers: the Master of the Day certainly takes his title seriously: does he rout you out at daylight?”

  The Viennese Conductor called to the Festival Director to come up the hill and tell the guests about the theatre he projected. He came slowly up the hill with the Banker, and greeted the company, but he sat so long quiet that the Viennese Conductor was afraid his pride had been wounded, and he hastened to say:

  “Tell us some short tale, Director: the guests have put their shoulders to the wheel, our caravan has jogged along. Give it a little colour and dash!”

  “No, no,” murmured the Director: “the curious thing about me is that I can imagine settings by the thousand, but not stories so easily, for I linger too long musing over the properties.”

  “I saw you yesterday at evening leaning over the parapet, in the fortress,” said the Frenchwoman: “your glance was lost in the distance, and you were smiling slightly as if recollecting a series of incidents. Perhaps that was a tale you can tell us.”

  The Director laughed. “Well, to tell the truth, what was uppermost in my thoughts then, remembering two youths I had seen, was Antinoüs!”

  “Antinoüs,” said the Schoolteacher, “the statue?”

  “I know,” said the Banker: “I have a statue of him in my entry. A chap sold him to me, telling me it was something out of the way. I looked him up in the ‘Britannica’: wasn’t he the most famous fairy in history?”

  “Until a year or so ago,” agreed the Director.

  “A fairy?” said the Schoolteacher, dubiously, in surprise. The Festival Director began to tell his tale.

  The Festival Director’s Tale

  ANTINOÜS

  HOLM-OAKS spring by the rich fishy gulf, and the medusan wave, that many a day hissed like serpents, hangs its dissolving scarves on the black shore. The sun in the Pompeian fuller’s house seems yesterday to have done dyeing Hadrian’s cloak, and the yew-trees are pens of Pliny, hastily deserted. The naked symbol of life starts potent from the ruin amidst irrepressible gardens.

  Into this immortal garden I went three years ago with Flavian, the Aquinas of poets, I, for amusement, he, for estrangement: the early fame he got made him fe
ar the pontificate, and because he had a mistress, good, gentle and consoling, he said, “I am in too comfortable a heart.”

  In the museum at Naples we came upon the bronze of Antinoüs, the beloved of Hadrian. I left Flavian lost in thought before this face, slumbrous, pensive and lovely without pride, and made a complete inspection of the galleries. I even stayed a very long time before the unique statue of Diana of the Ephesians, exquisite in beauty, and reproached myself for keeping Flavian waiting. But when I returned he was still on the same spot, as if transfixed. Three sculptors with their figurines were at his coat-tails, talking into his ear, trying to sell him copies of the statue. I drove away these artists and waited for my friend to come to himself. Presently he began to speak, saying:

  “Do you see him yet, surrounded by desires floating like clouds of cherubs in the antique serene, and dissolving? His brow cinctured with gold, broad like the Bosphorus, and the dispute of love and discontent making a pool of scarlet in the tawny arena of his cheek; curls curling like the sea, and limbs like Jupiter’s columns, the eye the lofty thunderous beam on a summer morning, the sinuous rare smile as flag-lilies raising their leaves in the shining desert breeze, the groins, arches and hollows redolent like the gardens of Lydia, the whole wrapped in the regretful languor of an effete being: the voice fluted, the hands glowing with gems, the lips taking meat and drink from gold, and the broad shoulders swinging with princely vanity the flattering purples and white: the arm bound with a silver bracelet whose interior thorns secretly pierce the flesh, awaken the senses, punish subdued manhood and refresh the soul.

  “Despair descends like a cloud on his dissipated and delicate heart, germinating nightmares. He looks some day, as he rides past, at a statue of himself in the street, personating Bacchus, Apollo or some other beautiful god, and the immense boredom of his life surprises him. He thinks of the mysterious deaths and suicides now common among his friends and enemies, the dissolute, patrician youths and the old cynical bachelors, and wonders what is wrong with his world; is it sick? Will it die? Will he see the end, night close over the amphitheatre, the games ended and the people gone? He looks thoughtfully at himself in marble: thus will the statue stand on some other day, reposeful and full of natural grandeur, in mourning, and under it Hadrian prostrate, the old man, weeping: to augment the beauty of marble by tears and blood and the corrupt waters of death, which wear it not but make it rather shine, and ornament with mossy shadow the inner parts, that will be his end.

  “And so, my friend,” said Flavian, “in Egypt one day with the brasses of the legions flaming in the desert and the noon pouring over him its tangled hyacinthine hair, following some too, too boring tête-à-tête with Hadrian, he plunges into the Nile and dies.”

  So he said; and I found on the flyleaf of a book of verses, two days later, a drawing of the statue, the head especially human, the eyes swimming with luminous melancholy. Flavian went with me to Rome, and, in the galleries of the Vatican, again we found, though in coarser stone, the fatal Bithynian youth.

  My Flavian became solitary, and I left him to walk through the decayed villas, the weed-tangled chambers and half-excavated pleasure-gardens of the past, and the damp pavements and marshy floor of the forum where the boys still play ancient games. Flavian began to complain of headaches and burned with fever. He wanted to stay at home all day now without eating, trembling and passionate, and acridly spitting out his work: he said he had found what he came for, inspiration and desperation: but I imagined he had malaria, and took him away from Rome. He would only return to Naples.

  He walked about the country from Amalfi to Baiae, visited the islands, the caves, the secret shores; and hung, in clear water as in air, over the submerged tombs and sunken palaces of Pausilypon, where the murenae dart their heads from urns and amphorae. He pursued late at night, without regard for the fierce farm-dogs and the occasional thief’s knife, through starlight, moonlight and rain, the traces of the dead whose sullied tides swelled and ebbed on this same shore. This same air blew through the curls of Antinoüs when fresh from the Euxine shore he first looked at the Roman world with eager eyes, it scattered dirt from the swallows’ nests in the capitals of the forum during the games, brought in the galleys with news from Egypt, and fluttered the flags of festivals held in his honour at his deification: it blew through Athens and Eleusis and to all the corrupt cities of the empire the seductive dream of youth suiciding before dishonour and decay, drew tears from changing hearts for the death of a human god, and stimulated with his anarchic seed the romantic vision of the dissolving empire.

  Flavian explained this to me. I asked him one day, nevertheless, “What are you looking for?” “Antinoüs!” he said in a thoughtful tone: “It came to me one night when I followed deceptive enchanting shadow and illusive light from thicket to shore, amid the knife-play of moonbeams and the ambush of the garrotting branches, amid the crepitation of underfoot leaves and the harsh voices of the shingle, that I will find on this shore his wanton, unwarmed shade.”

  “Why has Antinoüs this effect on you?” I asked him, surprised.

  “I only know that when I first looked on him,” he replied, “I saw him move and breathe, wrapped in a calm and tender atmosphere, not Naples’, not Rome’s, but his own. His downcast face entered my heart sharply like a thorn. Since then, his face has been before me. I have known him, his slow resolutions, his sensuality, the sparkle of his angry eye, his brooding petulance, the smoothness of gems in the palm of his hand, the bustle of camps and courts in his ear. I have heard the passion and languorous discontent rise in floods in the cockles of his heart: I have dived as a swimmer swimming under-water in the flood-tides at full moon, to the silver bottoms and weedy beds of his soul, and come up shining and phosphorescent: I have lived in the full moon of his lusty season, fished by the light of his lantern and caught fish in the grottoes of his shore. I have taken my evening way through the naked welkin even as the black swans flying in an arrow towards their nests among the marsh-waters, and have drunk deep and slept in the brackish wells of his love. I have clothed myself in his effete imagination, and stripped myself, even as he, of natural life, the better to ferment the insobriety of the furiously fertile soul.

  “The shadow of beauty, the unshattering crystal of perfection which casts its image on a brow in passion or dilemma, the shudder which shakes the body like a snake, in pain, the cold blast of terror, the sound which the blood has, humming like a contrebass at the onset of delight, I have sometimes known, but now have always present to me looking at the image of this youth. To this madness I must devote myself for a short time, and travel in the regions Antinoüs travelled in, and steep myself in those antique civilisations that he saw, even if I go on foot, poor or hungry. It is even as if he were able to come to life again in me, as if I conceived him the first moment I saw him and now must tread again in every particular the path he trod before.”

  Flavian left me in a few days, and travelled in Asia Minor, Greece and Egypt. He went last to Egypt, and in Egypt died, some say, but I would not be surprised to see him turn up again some day with a tale of strange peregrinations.

  THE guests were silent. The penetrating voice of the Italian Singer said:

  “I know a tale, too, of that shore divine where death cannot die but is clothed in immortality: if not in an immortal name, then through the immortal regeneration of the soil, and the fertility of the sun.”

  “If you know a tale, tell it,” said the Master: “and if you can sing, sing to us sometimes in the tale: that will be something none of us has heard before.”

  “I will sing now, if you wish it, the song that comes into my tale,” said the Singer. A single strain rose through the wood, meditative, without refrain; there was silence everywhere. At the end the Italian Singer, in a low voice, began his tale.

  The Italian Singer’s Tale

  TO THE MOUNTAIN

  I WAS born in the north of Italy, but each year in spring I go south, and even into Sicily and Cala
bria, to hear the sonorous accent of their primitive fountains of song.

  Three years ago, in early winter, I put down my bag at the Hotel of the Siren, in Torre del Greco, on the Neapolitan shore. The tranquil sun of antiquity lay over all the unkempt orchards, the villas were closed, and the Vesuvian cloud rolled out towards Capri. In the early morning I arose and went out about the sleepy villages. Presently I came to the Villa Ginevra, once made famous by an Italian poet. There was no sign of life there. The green shutters were closed: but fowls cackled loudly, and the orange trees in the gardens, bearing a hundred little suns, rejoiced my heart in villeggiatura. I walked round the property, plucked a full-blown rose from the fence, and went down to the sea to watch fishermen hauling on the black beach.

  I returned that way two hours later, warbling among the market gardens. For a long way two Aphrodite butterflies preceded me, dancing round each other, and they both darted into a myrtle tree of the Villa Ginevra. It was about ten o’clock; I felt hungry, so I sat down under the tree to eat and drink. I started from a daydream to know that music had just begun. An organ was playing in the villa, the shutters were wide open and the fowls were pecking. I looked through the fence, covered with clematis. A dark, slender young man came to one of the windows, whistling the air played by the organ, and began to scrape a chisel over the grass. The foolish fowls rushed up, and retired, confused that they could not eat plaster. The organ presently stopped, and the youth spoke to the player. There came and stood on the doorstep a fair woman dressed in a blue gown, with falling lace at the wrists and bosom, an Opera Lucia or Elsa. The youth moved behind the woman and put his arms round her: she leaned her head backwards on his breast, and they kissed solemnly, less with ardour than as a rite, without a glance to heaven or earth. As she leaned backwards, a river of brilliants, hitherto concealed by a fold of the dress, flashed into my eye.