by Karel Čapek
There were flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth, he was terrible to look at as he grew gaunt with excitement. “Well, well,” growled the specialist, taking out his watch. “And now, my little friend, he down for five minutes and keep your chops shut. Close your eyes and breathe deeply and slowly.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE clairvoyant opened his eyes, and breathed deeply. “Can I say something more ? It’s true that these things get on one’s nerves.” He rubbed his face. “Well, then, with regard to that man who fell from the sky—What shall I call him?”
“We call him Case X,” observed the surgeon.
The clairvoyant sat up. “Case X, yes. If you are expecting me to tell you his name, who he really is, and what place he comes from, I must tell you in advance that I don’t know. These are details which do not matter very much. For most of his life he didn’t stick to what from time to time was his occupation. I have a feeling of tremendous life dimensions; in that man there is much space, much sea, but he was not a traveller. Understand that the life space of a traveller is measurable; but here—an objective is lacking here; there is no fixed point from which it would be possible to fix distances and directions.”
The clairvoyant halted, silent and dissatisfied. “No, no, I must begin in a different way. In fact, I ought to begin with his death which is yet to be, and proceed backwards like a man spinning a rope. The life of Caesar began when a Caesar was born, and not a baby wrinkled and crying. We ought to begin at the last breath of the man to understand what was his life form, and what meaning pertains to anything he has experienced. Only with death is the youth and birth of a man complete.” He shook his head. “But I can’t, can’t. How wretched is our conception in time!”
“For instance,” he began again after a time. “If I tell you that he did not know his mother, it sounds like the beginning of a chronicle. But for me it was not a beginning but the end of a long strenuous line further back. He lies unconscious, and knows nothing any longer; but even under this unconsciousness, at the bottom of that darkness—deep, deep in him is solitude, and over his unconsciousness no one’s shadow is falling. Where, and from what does this inner solitude continually spring ? You must go back to the very beginning of things, back through the whole of his life to the source of his loneliness. He was the only child, and he did not know his mother. There was never a hand of which he could take hold, nobody said to him: ‘That’s nothing, I shall kiss it, and the pain’s already gone.’ Strange how this was missing in his life. The voice that assured him: ‘That’s nothing, that will pass; don’t cry, don’t fret about, go on playing. Here’s my hand, hold it fast.’ There never was a hand like that; and therefore never, understand, never could he clasp—” The clairvoyant made a helpless movement. “He was strong, but not patient. He had nothing to hold on to.”
“Solitude,” he said afterwards. “He sought out solitude so that there should not be such a discrepancy between himself and his surroundings. He tried to melt his inner destitution like a piece of ice in the immense solitude of the sea, or of foreign countries. He always had to forsake something to give an outward reason for his destination. Everywhere and always it was going on with him—” He frowned. “And where was the family ? Why didn’t his father make up for the mother’s hand ? We shall have to ask him about that. We must try to find out what was so irritable and touchy in him. He did not get on with people, and at once he sought out means of coming into conflict with them; he always had a feeling that he must defend himself, all the time he was up in arms. To turn back. To turn back to the child that had no mother, and who towards his father maintained a fierce and silent antagonism. The two could not understand each other. The widower wanted to wield the power and influence of two, he duplicated his authority, and overdid it in a petty and touchy manner with pedantic fussiness; inevitably the child became obstinate, and opposition grew in him like a permanent moral kink. For the whole of his life he has not been able to get rid of that conflict with society, order, discipline, constraint, and such like; until the time of his death he has continued to oppose his father.” The clairvoyant was fretful and talked with clenched fists as if that relentless fight were taking place inside him. “Strange how these two opposite forces—loneliness, antagonism—have contended with each other during the whole life of this man. Solitude effaced the conflict, the conflict effaced the solitude; neither one nor the other ever attained fulfilment; with all his solitude he never became a* hermit, he gained no victory from all his encounters and excitements; for always the feeling of loneliness overcame him. He was melancholy and quarrelsome, violent and perplexed; you might say inconsistent, but this inconstancy was an emotional balance of two forces set against each other.
Add together all that falls on the side that I have called solitude. Dreaming and desire for rest, resignation, indifference, lack of will, laziness and melancholy, aimlessness, passivity and dullness, enervation, yes. And now on the side of conflict: discontent, enterprise, a feverish and inventive spirit, vanity, obstinacy and pig-headedness, waywardness, acerbity, and so on. When you are building up a man out of qualities, well, put these two sides together somehow! A man may be either lazy or enterprising, or perhaps partly both, alternately one and the other, isn’t that so ? You can never understand a man if you keep on describing his qualities. It is not the qualities, it is the forces, forces which oppose each other, upset and check; and the man himself, living only in the present, is not aware that the small action which he is performing is the resultant of forces which run like lightning through the whole of his life, amounting to the tension between birth and death.
Imagine a man who wanders from place to place, from island to island, where God allows and chance directs; he does so out of laziness, and indolence, aimlessly seeking solitude and a refuge for his hazy dreams. But he could do the same from impatience, stamping his foot like a stallion in the stall; just to be somewhere else, try something else, and again let it drop and dash along after another goal. This map and the other may coincide exactly; but they are two different worlds, two different universes; different is the world of a man who fells trees, builds huts, and founds plantations from that of the loafer who gapes into the crowns of the trees, experiencing the delight and the nostalgia of his solitude. And I, who have been tracing backwards the footsteps of Case X, have found two worlds which do not resemble each other; they only come in like episodes in a dream. Through the one world, through the world in which one is busy building and getting into shape, the face of the other gazed at me, a sad and weak face which had discovered the vanity of all things; and again through it the first face forced its way in which one shouts, hurries and builds, argues and plans, God knows why, the devil knows what, and for what purpose. That—that was not reality,” sighed the clairvoyant, “that was a nightmare, that was a grin; one reality a man can experience, but two he can only dream; and he who wanders through two worlds at the same time has no foundation under his feet, and he falls through a void in which there is nothing by which to measure his fall; for the stars fall too when a man is falling. Listen,” he burst out, “that man was not quite real, and he lived most of his life in a dream.”
CHAPTER XV
THE clairvoyant was silent, looking disconcerted and squinting at the tips of his fingers.
“Where did he live?” asked the surgeon.
“The tropics,” mumbled the clairvoyant. “Islands. A dark brown feeling, something like roast coffee, asphalt, vanilla, or negroes’ skin.”
“Where was he born?”
“Here, somewhere here,” indicated the clairvoyant indefinitely. “With us, in Europe.”
“And what was he?”
“Surveyor, no? A man who shouts at people.” He knitted his brows as if he were thinking. “But originally he was a chemist.”
“Where?”
“In a sugar factory, of course/’ said the clairvoyant, as if it upset him to be asked something so obvious. “That’s in keeping, isn’t it ?
Those two incongruous worlds. In winter the campaign, busde, shouting—and in summer, silence, the factory idle, and only in the laboratory a man working. Or dreaming.” With his finger he drew a hexagon in the air. “You know, of course, how formulae are written in chemistry ? Like a hexagonal figure, from the corners of which letters are sticking out. Or like lines which form a cross with branches—”
“Those are structural formulae,” explained the specialist. “It is called stereochemistry. Those diagrams you know represent the arrangement of the atoms in the molecules.”
The clairvoyant nodded with almost nothing but his nose. Yes. Imagine that those diagrams of his make a kind of network. He looks into the air to see how they combine and intercept, fit on to the next, and even intercross. He scribbles it down on paper, and breaks into a fury when anyone disturbs him. Not in winter, in winter it is activity, busde, and impatience; but in summer—in a factory laboratory like that, with a roasting sun, and a sugary smell like candy. Here he sits with an open mouth and gapes into the void at those diagrams; they look like a honeycomb in which one diagram links up with another to make a single system. But it’s not in a plane, it’s in a space of three, four dimensions; all the time it eludes him when he tries to draw it on a flat piece of paper. And the heat—even the buzzing of a fly can be heard against the window-pane.
The clairvoyant blinked thoughtfully with his head bent to one side. “That isn’t just one moment, it’s weeks and months—I don’t know how many years. All the time he is constructing that chemical space made up of formulae, which become complete and link up with each other. They are no longer real known compounds, but possible and imaginary; non-existent and new combinations to fill up the empty gaps in chemical space; new and unknown isomers and polymers,” he burst out uncertainly, “polymerization and multivalency, which lead him on to unsuspected combinations of atoms. He dreams of those imaginary compounds and their possible properties. They are drugs, rainbow colours, unknown scents, explosives, materials with which the face of the world might be changed. He covers one notebook after the other with formulae of aromatic compounds, acids, polysaccharides, and salts, which so far do not exist, but which will take their place in that crystallized space of chemical formulae. The longer he works the more he is led to believe that it is possible to imagine and work out unknown molecules of compounds, just as Mendeleeff worked out unknown atoms of elements. At the same time he is moved with pleasure because he is discrediting and breaking down current scientific ideas—always that motive of conflict and revolt. He begins on laboratory experiments with this or that supposed combination of matter; but the experiments are not successful, the factory laboratory is not sufficient for them. He chooses one or two formulae which seem to him quite obvious, they only need to be put into effect, and he travels in search of the international luminary of chemical science to present them to him, and to persuade that arch-priest that they deserve an exhaustive experimental trial.”
The clairvoyant shrugged his angular shoulders. “Of course, it was shattering. In a few words the luminary of science reduced the suppositions of the young chemist to smithereens. Nonsense, impossible. Evidently you haven’t seen the work of so-and-so, read this and that. And at the end a rare benignity: Besides, you can stay with me; I’ll find some sort of a job for you, perhaps trim the lamps, or watch the filters. If you are patient, and when you have learned to work scientifically … Only Case X was not patient, and didn’t want to learn to work scientifically; he went away stammering, and fled from the ruins of his chemical space in such a panic that—that he didn’t halt till on the edge of the shadows, where good-naturedly and unscientifically the broad teeth of negroes glistened at him.”
The clairvoyant raised his finger. “To make it quite clear: that scientific bonze did the right and honest thing, for he defended science against an intruder. He would have been willing to accept a verified fact, but on principle he rejected a hypothesis which at the beginning would create more disorder and uncertainty than anything else. HE HAD to crush Case X; in the totality of life, things you know, don’t occur accidentally and at random, but are directed by necessity.”
It was clear that the surgeon was becoming afraid that the clairvoyant was turning again to abstract things, and therefore he hurriedly inquired: “Then he wasn’t a chemist any longer?”
“No, he wasn’t a chemist any longer. There was no voice in him to tell him: ‘That’s nothing, that will pass, go on playing.’ Each of his shipwrecks was final and couldn’t be undone. When with a few words his chemical edifice collapsed, that innate feeling of solitude and destitution welled up in him with great force—understand, almost a satisfaction that it was in such ruins, such dreadful rubble. He put away his notebooks without looking at them again, and went away even from the sugar factory to make the mess greater; he himself was almost horrified by that feeling of vanity and nothingness, and still more because he really felt at home in that debacle, and he took to flight.”
“He was a young man,” objected the surgeon. “Well, was there nobody—”
“There was.”
“A girl, was it?”
“Yes.”
“Did he like her?”
“He did.”
There was silence. The clairvoyant, clasping his knees, kept his eyes down, and breathed through his teeth. “Surely I needn’t tell you everything,” he said in a thin voice at last. “I am no chronicler. For it’s certain that in his love there was solitude, and obstinacy, and he certainly destroyed her as he destroyed everything—out of sheer obstinacy, and because he was going into solitude. What devastation! Now he can sit down and see how everything can be reduced to bits. As a child he used to crawl into the lumber-room; nobody found him there, he was alone, and his obstinacy melted in his solitude. Always the same manuscript of life.” He outlined something in the air. “Obstinacy moved him and solitude released him. He would have liked to He quiet, but revolt pricked him. Out of obstinacy he would have liked to stay settled, but soHtude asked him what was the good, what was the good. It was only left for him to wander.”
The clairvoyant raised his head. “Perhaps he was a chemist full of genius. Perhaps his ideas would have upset the world. But do you imagine that a man of his upbringing had the patience step by step, experiment by experiment, at the price of lousy mistakes and failures, scientifically to ferret out and verify his system of chemical ordinates ? He stood at the threshold of something big, but the scientific drudgery that would have taken him an inch further terrified him. He was to be broken. That was his inner destiny, in fact something like a flight from a task which was beyond his strength. If he had remained a chemist, he would also have only wandered from one thing to another among experiments and phantasies, without an aim, losing himself in a space too large for him. He had to wander over the seas and islands so that the deep restlessness of his spirit was represented by it. You,” he said, stabbing at the specialist with his finger, “you spoke of the interchange of ideas. You must realize that there is also a transference of fate, and that sometimes external events stand for a far deeper theme that is written inside us.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE clairvoyant reached for a cigarette; the surgeon held up the burner and offered him a light. “Muchissimas gracias,” mumbled the clairvoyant, bowing deeply; he didn’t notice that the surgeon was watching the reaction of his pupils. “Strange,” he said, sputtering away the shreds of tobacco. “Strange, how his surroundings stick to a man, well, what is called the outer world. Outside surroundings relate to his inner self much more strongly than as a sum of agents which condition his actions. Rather,” he said hesitatingly, “as if these surroundings were flowing out from his inner self, or were conditioned by his life; as if they were simply … an unwinding of the fate that is in him. Yes, right, it is like that, if we take the life of a man as a whole, and not as a series of episodes.”
“Let’s take … Case X. An impression of unusual space; in him there is much sea, and ma
ny places—understand, purely extensively and numerically, a large amount of solitude, departures, and of that restlessness which mirrors itself in flitting from place to place. A man whose soul is complex lives in a complex and strange milieu. That factory laboratory, scorched by the sun, in which he wandered among his diagrams and visions, was a premonition of the scorching countries in which he was to wander, accompanied by the scent of roasted sugar. Where was he ? I have a perfectly definite impression, peculiar and olfactory. Heat trembling over a brown field, a deep, eternal buzzing, cracking sound, gutteral bubbling, and shrieks like laughter, and vomiting. Countries made of lethargy, and feverish excitement. And always the sea, the sea, restless and phosphorescent; ships smelling of hot wood, tar, and chocolate. Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Trinidad.”
“What do you say?” burst out the surgeon.
“What?” asked the clairvoyant distractedly.
“You said Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Trinidad.”
“I?” exclaimed the clairvoyant. “I hardly know, I wasn’t thinking of any names.” He knitted his brows. “Strange that I said that. Hasn’t it ever happened to you that you have become conscious of something only by saying it ? It must be like that. Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Porto Rico,” he enumerated like a schoolboy. “Martinque, Barbados, the Antilles, and B-Bahama Islands,” he ran on happily with relief. “God, for how many years haven’t I recalled those names,” he rejoiced. “I used to like so much those exotic words. Antilles, antelopes, mantillas—” Suddenly he stopped, “Mantillas, mantillas, wait—Spanish ladies, Cuba. He must have been some time in Cuba,” he gasped. “I’ve a kind of… Spanish feeling, I don’t know how to express it; it’s like a romance.”
“A moment ago you said muchissimas gracias,” reminded the surgeon.
