Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, an Ordinary Life

by Karel Čapek

  I will tell you this: a story has to fall to pieces if you are to know of what it is composed. While it is whole and living you might be intoxicated with the work and swear: All this is pure nature and no deceit, sir. I am writing it out of mere instinct, I myself don’t know why; it is all imagination and intuition. Not until it has fallen to pieces will you discover how you aided her, how cunningly and secretly you pushed on your phantasy. God, what a conglomeration! but truly in every direction intellectual motives and intentional constructions stick out of it; what a little engine it is! Everything, almost everything, in some way is planned and surveyed, nothing but calculation and erection. I imagined that it all came of itself to me as if in a living dream, and, instead, it is a product of relentless engineering thought that tests and rejects, binds and predicts. When it is dead, and taken to pieces, all those wires, all that ingenuity, routine, and precision of intellectual work becomes visible. And I tell you that a broken machine is equally terrifying; it is the same chasm of emptiness like life in decomposition.

  But even regret for fruitless work is not equal to the sadness of a story in ruins. Don’t you know that a human life is buried in those ruins ? Why make a fuss, you will say, for that life was only a fiction; a tale invented to pass the time. Ah, it is strange; it is not quite certain that that life was merely invented: and when I look at it I should say that it was MY OWN life. It is me. I am the sea and that man, that kiss blown from the dark shadow of the mouth belongs to me; that man sat by the lighthouse on the Hoe, because I sat under the lighthouse on the Hoe; and if he lived in Barbados, or Barbuda, so thank God, praise be to God, at last I have been there. All that was me; I don’t invent anything, I only express what I am, and what is in me. And if I wrote of Hecuba, or of the Babylonian harlot, it would be myself; I should be the old woman who moans, and harrows her sagging and wrinkled breasts; I should be the woman crushed by lust in the hairy hands of the Assyrian, of a man with a greasy beard. Yes, man, woman, and child, to make it clear, it is me; I am the man who has not finished his flight.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  “So enough for the introduction, and now we can roam along the paths by which our story began to take shape. We know that the DATA was only a man who had not finished his flight, and his fall, as was explained, was a pathetic event arising from mere accident and necessity. The accident and necessity were data; since our knowledge does not reach further, let us make of them the start or trail, along which we are going to set out; we shall attempt to construct that definite life out of two fundamental elements, out of mere accident and necessity, so that the final crash will emerge from them logically and lawfully.

  Admit that the beginning holds out no little promise. Mere accident, which means freedom and adventure; a playful and unaccountable caprice, a germ of possibility and a magic carpet: what iridescent and ethereal material it is without weight or repetition, extensible, and gathered into mysterious folds, a material with which one can do anything; wings which will carry us anywhere; what is more poetical than chance ? And its opposite is necessity, a shady park, a permanent force, and unchangeable necessity, which is order and system, as fine as a collonade, and as certain as a law.

  And now it’s like this; yes, this is what I want, and for which I am longing. For a chance that would bear me somewhere, the hesitating stay-at-home anchored by his seat to the table; for a chance, adventurous and rash, for a panting daredevil that would make me dance. We are growing old, my friend, and we accept life like a boring habit. Yes, but what about the other, the unconditioned and the certain ? Would that my life had a meshwork of necessity, would that for once I could feel with certainty and without uneasiness that in everything I do an order is being fulfilled; praise be to God, I have not been doing anything but my task. Now see here, that man directed by necessity and chance will be myself; I shall be the one who will wander along the devious and inevitable road, and I shall pay for it with all the hardships that I can invent; for such a devious journey is no pleasure trip.

  Well, then, in the name of God, let’s begin; and when we do not know what is coming next let necessity or chance be our aid. How are we to begin ? What shall we write as the first word of the story of a man from the Antilles ? We will begin at the beginning: There was a boy who had no mother.

  Bad, and you can’t get any further that way. Case X, don’t you know, has no face, and no name, has no identity, he is Unknown. If we give him a home we shall know him, so to speak, from his childhood up; he will cease to be unknown, and will lose what is now his strongest and most peculiar characteristic. If he is to stay as himself, he will have to keep his incognito; let him be a man without an origin, and without any papers. Let us stick to facts, proceed from what is given; he fell from the sky, and that is surely very characteristic of him. In our story also he ought somehow to fall from the sky, so that he emerges all of a sudden from the devil knows where, created by accident, completely finished, and perfectly unknown.

  We have, then, a person and his arrival; the place where he emerges is decided for us beforehand; it is Cuba. It might be from any other of the Antilles, in fact it might be from any place in the world if only it were sufficiently remote. Distance is given us in that he flew, and that we do not know from what place; it is a far-away spot, and more or less exotic just because it is unknown to us. The money that you found in his pockets points to the Antilles; it is true that there is still another region where American, British, French, and Dutch colonies are all near together; that is along the sea-coast bounded by the Philippines, Annam, Singapore, and Sumatra, and I have found nothing that would exclude that possibility. I had to choose, and I decided on the Antilles from motives which are apparently purely personal; I told you that they have for me a particular charm. Briefly there somewhere is the goal of my ESCAPE; I may never get there, but it is the spot which exists for me more strongly than the countries in which I have been.

  These, then, are roughly the beginnings of our story, and it is left to us to determine the terminus ad quern. This, of course, is the crash of the man who had not ended his flight; but here an important point arises: Was he flying somewhere on a new project, or was he coming home ? I know only that he was in a tremendous hurry, for he was flying in a heavy storm. Generally we can expect that a man who is embarking upon something new, and in pursuit of things that are not familiar to him, would show a certain hesitation, an apprehension that would check his progress, while on the contrary, a man who is returning would be rather impatient; anticipating his goal he would undervalue the means that would bear him to it. I should say that that man was in such a haste because he was coming back, and I accept it as the most probable reality. Regardless of die fact that a man who flies is free to set off to any point of the compass, for infinite is the number of conceivable possibilities and objectives from which to choose; while, on the contrary, a man who is returning can only fly to one place, the only conceivable one of them all, in pursuit of an objective laid down from the beginning, determined and unchangeable. The way back is something exacdy mapped out. By this alone the end of our story is fixed, and we can begin at the beginning.

  The beginning is as confused and vague as chance. It was somewhere in Cuba, amidst the hedges of Bougainvillea; someone was being pursued, revolvers barked, and on a path that resembled the milky way an unknown man was left lying with a bleeding neck. The wound was inflicted with a knife with a broad blade that is used for cutting sugar-cane.”

  When the surgeon had read as far as this he snorted with disapproval, and threw the manuscript on the table. Nonsense. There’s no scar on the neck; there’s one just above the right breast, it couldn’t have been inflicted by a broad knife, but by a sharp-pointed instrument. A shallow wound that only went as far as the rib.

  CHAPTER XX

  “SOMEWHERE in Cuba amidst the hedges of Bougainvillea someone was being pursued, revolvers barked, and on a path that resembled the milky way an unknown man was left lying with a bleeding neck. The w
ound was inflicted with a knife with a broad blade that is used for cutting sugar-cane. About ten yards further on someone else was lying, with arms and legs splayed out; this one was dead.

  Cursing silently, three fellows bent over the one that had been stabbed; but he already began to raise himself and murmured: ‘What—what do you want after all? Don’t push me, Cavalier!’ He felt the back of his neck, screwed up his mouth, and looked in amazement at his hand covered with blood, and at the three men. Mother of God, he was drunk!

  ‘What business had that mule to get mixed up in this,’ burst out one of the three in an angry mood, scratching his head. ‘Que mierda! Take him to the house, chaps!’

  They snatched him up by his arms and legs, and shuffled along; they didn’t mind in the least that his backside was dragging along the road, leaving a trail in the dust like a sack of maize. They gasped and dragged that vagabond along the milky way. Let him bump his rump, the beast!

  They put him down behind a door, an old hag flashed a light on his face, and cried to all the saints, and the master of the house, something of a bigwig if we are to go by his fierce blue mug, and evil eyebrows, bent down above it all and inquired why they had taken such a brute there.

  The one who scratched his head blinked with all his might at the gentleman with knitted brows. ‘So that he won’t run away, your Grace. When that cavalier went away from here, we heard shooting outside; we ran to look and found this dago lying with this revolver in his hand. A few yards further on lies that unfortunate gentleman. He is dead, may God have mercy on him!’

  The other two listened with open mouths as if they wanted to raise some objection; and the gentleman regarded them with inquiring eyes. ‘Do you know for certain that he’s dead?’

  The tall peon crossed himself. ‘Like a calf, your Grace. He must have got at least three bullets in the back of his head. He had a knife in his hand … Most likely he tried to defend himself with the knife when this bandit came across him. This cut-throat here wanted to run away, but we put a stop to that. You agree with me, don’t you, boys ? Well, then, moo you oxes!’

  Only now did the other two grasp his meaning, and they began to grin broadly. ‘As God is above us, your Grace, that’s how it was, just like that, holy truth; he tried to do a bunk after he had shot that cavalier. And he had a pistol in his hand.’

  ‘We ought to ask the police to take care of him,’ observed the tall one, looking round for corroboration.

  The gentleman stroked his blue chin, and frowned darkly as he meditated, ‘No, Pedro (or Salvador—names hadn’t been decided on), not that. If the police were after him-’ he shrugged his shoulders. ‘But I shall not do it without due reason. That wouldn’t be fair. Lock him up somewhere in a room and give him a drink.’

  The lanky one raised his hands. ‘Your Grace, he’s not in a state to worry about himself.’

  ‘Give him a drink,’ repeated the gentleman impatiendy. ‘And while you’re about it, don’t cackle about him any more than you need, do you understand?”

  ‘We understand, your Grace, and we wish you good night. Pour some rum down his throat, so that he doesn’t know which way up he is; what business has a tramp like that near the master’s house, pushing his nose into other people’s business ? He doesn’t look like a half-breed, but they’re all the same, who knows what Hollander, or damned Yankee, to judge by the mess he’s in. Slop, slop, there’s still a little bit of room in him, let him have a pull so that we can knock out of him the last bit of his memory.’

  It was delirium that came out of it, it shook the man worse than a fever; and the hag who had held the light brought water in an unglazed jug, and damped the bandages on the forehead and cheeks of the unconscious man. (The theme of unconsciousness at the beginning just as at the end; the circle closes.) She was a half-Indian from somewhere in Mexico; she had a dry and long face like a mare, and sad eyes which blinked anxiously and kindly. ‘Poor fellow!’ she said, wrapping that heavy head in cooling rags. She squatted on the floor and blinked her eyes, clap, clap, clap, like water dripping on a brick floor.

  His unconsciousness or stupor lasted for thirty-six hours; the fellow was lying with his head wrapped in wet rags, and was not aware of himself. From time to time that lanky one came in and kicked him. ‘Hi, get up, you damned corpse of a dog! We ought to take him somewhere in the night, sir, and leave him there. Let the devils, God pardon me, take him where they like.’

  The master shook his head. ‘That would be something. The police will get him, and wait till he can speak. No, no. When he wakes I’ll have a talk with him myself, and then I’ll see. Then I’ll see.’

  At last the hand moved, and tried to rub the’forehead; he still had those rags on it, and when they slipped off something foreign and strange remained that could not be wiped away. The man sat up and rubbed his forehead hard. Tell master to come, master wants to talk to him.

  Master, with thick eyebrows (according to all appearances, an important gentleman), carefully sized up that ragamuffin. No, he couldn’t be a Spaniard, or he’d take more care of his shoes, even if, say, he’d only one sleeve to his shirt, his shoes would shine like an orange.

  ‘Come va?’ said the gentleman.

  ‘Muchas gracias, señor.’

  ‘Yankee.’

  ‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’

  ‘What’s your name ?’

  The man rubbed his forehead, ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  The Cuban wheezed with annoyance. ‘And how did you get here?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I was drunk, wasn’t I ?’

  ‘They found a revolver on you,’ the gentleman challenged.

  The man shook his head. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything.

  I can’t remember anything-’ His face was screwed up with effort and uneasiness; he got up and made a few steps. ‘No, I’m not drunk; I’ve only … like an iron band round my head.’ He searched for something in his pockets; the Cuban offered him a cigarette. He only nodded his head, gracias; as if it were understood. No, this is no rat from a ship; say what you like, but he bears the signs of a gentleman. For instance, his hands; they’re so dirty that they’re a disgrace, but as he holds that cigarette—in short, a caballero. The Cuban knitted his brows. With a tramp it would be easier, and if it came to court what judge would believe a tramp?

  The man eagerly smoked his cigarette, and tried to think. ‘I can’t remember anything,’ he said, beginning to grin. ‘It’s a queer feeling, I tell you, to have a clear head, and yet empty at the same time. Like a whitewashed room into which someone is going to move.”

  ‘Perhaps you know at any rate what you used to be,’ suggested the Cuban.

  The man looked at his hands and clothes. ‘I don’t know, sir; but according to what I look like-’ With the smoke from his cigarette he made a kind of zero. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said lightly. ‘Nothing, nothing wants to come into my mind. Perhaps later I shall remember—’

  The Cuban looked at him closely and suspiciously. The man’s face was indifferent and slightly swollen, with an expression of amusement, and something like relief.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  “YES, you’re right; another case of loss of memory, another case of literary amnesia, to which we owe so many romantic and touching stories. I shrug my shoulders with you over this already familiar plot, but I can’t help it; if our hero is to remain Unknown we must abolish his identity, take away his papers, unpick the monograms, and especially, sir, remove his memory, for memory is the stuff out of which is woven our own identity. Root out your memory, and you will be the man who fell from the sky, who comes from nowhere, and doesn’t know where he wants to go; you will be Case X. The man who lost his memory resembles a man who has lost his conscience; even if his brains remained clear and normal, it is as if he had lost the basis of reality, and lived outside it; without memory you see, there would be no reality for us either.

  Certainly as a doctor you appreciated the fact that our case of loss
of memory is the result of acute alcoholic poisoning, and of a physical shock caused by that nocturnal adventure. He fell down on the ground and hurt his head, and here we are; from a medical standpoint there can be no objections if he suffered mental injury; we have the factor of chance on which we cannot count; but the incident is too important to be left to chance, and to satisfy us it must occur is a matter of course and logically. Case X sustained a mental injury and lost, had to lose, his memory, for reasons which were in him; for him it was the only possible way, the only exit to get away from himself; it was something like an escape into another life. How it was in actual fact you will find further on; at this stage I only wished to remind you that there are deeper reasons, and more legitimate than chance.

  But it is possible that even escape from one’s own identity is in the nature of a normal human desire. To lose one’s memory must indeed be like beginning everything again; to stop being what we are is, my friend, like a deliverance. Sometime, perhaps, you have had the experience of finding yourself in a foreign world in which you could not make yourself understood either by speech or money. It is true that you did not lose your identity, but that was of no avail; your education, social standing, name, and the other things that make up the ordinary I were of no use; you were merely an unknown man in the streets of a foreign town. Perhaps you will remember that in such circumstances you apprehended everything with a strange and almost dreamlike intensity; deprived of all accessories you were only a man, a being, an inner man, only eyes, and heart, only amazement, helplessness, and resignation. Nothing is more lyrical than to lose oneself. Case X, who lost himself so thoroughly that he doesn’t even know who he is, will be such an astonished man; life for him will pass like a hallucination, all people unknown, all things new; but at the same time everything will be seen as if through a veil of remembering that he knows it already, and that it has passed at some time through his life, but where was it, my God, when was it ? He will be as if in a dream whatever he does, in vain will he fish out pieces of reality from the eternal stream of phenomena; strange how the world becomes unsubstantial if memory is wiped away.