Pilgrim

by Timothy Findley

He waited.

  Then he said: “holding…”

  The wind blew. It rattled the windows.

  Someone wants in, Pilgrim thought.

  Jung deliberately fluttered the piece of paper in his hand.

  “It’s only a drawing,” he said. “Not a real hand.” He maintained the easy tone already established. None of this, it implied, is of any real importance. I simply thought it would amuse you

  .Pilgrim’s eyes began to open in the fashion of a dozing cat whose slitted eyes feign sleep.

  Jung waved the paper to and fro.

  “Are you afraid of paper, Mister Pilgrim? Pages? Notebooks? Sketches?” Jung took up other sheets of paper and shook them all together the way he might have shaken out a piece of cloth to rid it of dust. “Are you frightened? And if so—why?”

  He set all the pages aside but one.

  Pilgrim lowered his chin and gazed at his hands, resting in his lap.

  “In this drawing, Mister Pilgrim,” Jung said, “the artist must have had some reason to choose this particular hand as his subject. What do you think that reason might be?”

  The hand is beautiful.

  “Do you recall that I said the hand was curving inward, holding…?”

  Curving inward. Holding.

  Pilgrim opened his mouth, shaping his lips as if to frame a word—but he made no sound.

  Jung stood up and closed the distance between himself, the Bath chair and its passenger.

  Pilgrim could see the doctor’s shoes, the bottoms of his trousers and the white, unbuttoned skirts of his smock. Pressed against these skirts, a piece of paper. Blank. Quite blank.

  There is nothing there.

  He’s lying.

  No hand, and therefore nothing in it.

  Nothing holds nothing.

  Jung began to reverse the page and to hold it out.

  The gesture began so slowly, Pilgrim barely realized it was being made. A breeze had entered the room—a draught—and the paper shimmered—blinding him.

  He flung his arm across his face.

  “Mister Pilgrim?”

  Jung stepped further forward and, taking Pilgrim’s raised arm in his hand, he lowered it.

  All of these gestures might have been choreographed—the Doctor and his patient as dancers moving to numbers.

  Jung placed the piece of paper in Pilgrim’s hand.

  “Look at it,” he said, but gently. “Don’t be afraid. Just look.”

  Pilgrim slowly lowered his head. He lifted the page and brought it into focus.

  For a moment he stared at the image without expression.

  Then he bowed his head entirely and wept.

  Jung waited before he spoke and then he said: “you see? You had no need to be afraid, Mister Pilgrim. All is well.”

  Reaching in, he retrieved the page and returned with it to the far side of the table, where he sat down.

  The drawing, taken from Leonardo’s notebooks, was titled: Study of a woman’s hands. 1499.

  Pace.

  One hand, curving inward, held the other.

  7

  DREAM: Still the smoke. Still the fires. Fire, it seems, everywhere. Now, it was in the room.

  Strazzi crouched beside the fireplace, warming his hands. Gherardini by the window, looking out at the windblown Piazza. The pilgrim gone and the boy gone with him—torch and all. The dog remained, prostrate, its ears laid back against its skull, its paws supporting its long grey jaw, the wind in its ruff and tail. Gherardini closed his eyes but went on seeing. Shadows played across his lids: arms perhaps, waving. Someone is waving—what?—goodbye?

  Gherardini raised his right hand until his fingers found the panes of glass. They were cold.

  Wave back.

  Strazzi turned and spoke: “it’s all right. It’s all right. Say goodbye.”

  Goodbye.

  The dog’s head lolled to one side. It died.

  Jung had struggled through his long day of work in order to reach this moment—the moment when he could read further into Pilgrim’s journal.

  But what, by definition, was he reading? What had appeared to be real in the passages preceding this was now called a DREAM.

  A DREAM.

  A dream in which, so it now appeared, two men had witnessed the murderous scene in the Piazza. And one of them was identified by the name Lady Quarter-maine had given to the young man whose figure had been sketched in Pilgrim’s sleep-dictation: Angelo Gherardini.

  Had it all been a dream? All of it? Or was it that Pilgrim—if truly a medium—sometimes recovered his voices in what he called dreams? Calling them dreams, but meaning something else. Meaning conjurings—gleanings—messages. Disturbances. Other voices, not his own, intruding on his own reality. This was certainly the way of some schizophrenics—to overhear, as from a hiding place, the conversation of intruders. Like a house invaded by marauders, while the owner—helpless, watches and listens.

  Now, all at once, what is seen and heard is recalled—no longer in the present tense.

  And so—to the dream:

  Wood smoke—more than mere lamp oil. More than the incense drifting from the candled mouth of Santa Maria Novella. More than the charcoal winking in the braziers. Wood smoke. Resin. Wax. Gherardini thought of the woods on the Florentine Hills above the city and the rolling forests of umbrella pines behind him to the south. Burning—everything burning…everything inside his eyes on fire.

  A door opened. A draught flooded over him. An air of presence—a perfumed air.

  Strazzi said: “welcome. You were not expected.”

  Gherardini opened his eyes. In the glass, he could see the reflection of the torchlit gallery beyond the doorway—blazing orange with golden tongues. A shadow, not a silhouette, slowly extinguished these lights, moving forward until the open doorway was obliterated.

  He wanted to turn, but could not. Don’t. Had someone come to kill them?

  Don’t.

  He reached for the knife kept hidden in the belted pouch of his doublet.

  When Strazzi spoke again, his voice was distant, almost clouded—muffled: “I have made a fire.”

  The shadow now returned to the door and shut it. The sound said: I am here now.

  Gherardini felt the swirl of a cloak being removed. The rush of it licked his shoulders.

  Wine was poured. Someone drank. The glass was returned to its place and filled again.

  “I have not seen you for some time.” The voice was thick with barely swallowed wine.

  Look at him. You must.

  Gherardini turned. In the firelight from the Piazza beyond the windows, a veil had been lifted from the room and a dreadful clarity—why dreadful?—gave what had been lost in shadow sudden light and substance.

  A man stood before him, wearing a purple lucco, the collar standing upright, embroidered and open, revealing a pleated shirt beneath a wine-coloured doublet. Every detail of the stitching was of shining silver.

  It was the pilgrim. Leonardo.

  Stepping forward, he set his notebook on the window sill—the book lying open, showing the dead woman’s hand and her dying dog. It lay in such a way that Gherardini could see the image clearly, drawn in the swift, clean lines of a master draughtsman. Gherardini closed his eyes. One look set all this in place forever.

  Now, stepping even closer, Leonardo leaned in, smiling and gazing into Gherardini’s eyes. The wine-free hand—enormous, so it seemed—reached out and laid its fingers on Gherardini’s cheeks—first one and then the other.

  Strazzi stood some way off, watching as one might watch an eagle stooping to its prey—fearful, yet elated by the sight of the eagle’s certainty.

  Leonardo, his hand still on Gherardini’s right cheek, its fingers grazing the boy’s damp curls, tilted his head very slightly to one side and kissed him full on the lips.

  “I thought I was never going to see you again. How long has it been? A year? A year and a half?”

  Gherardini could not answer.

&
nbsp; Leonardo’s hair and beard were perfumed. Iris root, rosemary, something…He placed two fingers on Gherardini’s lips. His body pressed in close, then closer—his right thigh breaking free of the lucco, on the verge of Gherardini’s groin—the way the flank of a grazing animal parts the grasses where it feeds.

  Gherardini quivered and tried to slide away but the casement at his back prevented him.

  Leonardo parted the boy’s lips and inserted his fingers.

  To the boy they tasted of conté dust and perfumed gloves.

  “Remember how we used to play the game of mother and child and how you used to suck my fingers while I stroked your hair…”

  He shed the lucco and moved to the great chest of drawers in which his books and sketches were scattered.

  Strazzi looked at Gherardini, shrugged and turned away.

  Leonardo rummaged in the drawers, opening and closing them with increasing frustration.

  In the fireplace, two new logs of pine had been set ablaze in that way dreams have of shifting through time and motion without reference to how things occur. If Strazzi had fed the fire, then when?

  From the Piazza came the sound yet again of horses. Because of Carnival, the Watch was being augmented by a mounted troop of soldiers from the Palazzo Vecchio. Their colours were subdued. Savonarola. No more the gold and scarlet of the Medicis, but drab olive tunics and monk’s grey cloaks. Their armour was unpolished steel. All it reflected was a hint of the moon.

  She, too, had come from nowhere.

  The wind must have brought her, blowing off the clouds—the clouds all piled like grey stone castles and…

  “Here. I’ve found you.”

  Leonardo swept a tabletop clear of its ornaments and, bringing lamps, laid down a notebook long as a yardstick, covered in leather. Turning the heavy pages, he muttered: “these you will know and remember—these, where I taught you the art of seduction…finger by finger, hair by hair. Eh? Yes? You will remember them.”

  Strazzi, embarrassed, shifted his stance by the fire.

  Gherardini moved closer and watched as Leonardo’s hands flashed over the pages. How many boys and youths and men lay buried in his chalks and crayons, his inks, his colours…And Strazzi amongst them—dozens and dozens of others, all entombed between these covers—every line informed by Leonardo’s passionate quest for perfection, his passionate pursuit of detail. Draw it from nature. Draw the thing itself. Forget all teachers. The only teacher is reality.

  “Here. See here. Here you are. Oh, look. Look. Look. The most beautiful boy I have ever seen.”

  Gherardini stared. His own head in profile, eyes lowered. His back from shoulder to buttock. Naked. His feet. His arms. His mouth. His fingers.

  And seated, one leg extended, one hand resting on his breast—his genitals exposed—his eyes half closed, his head atilt, his hair grazing his shoulder, his lips in the very act of breathing—as though at any moment he might sleep.

  Leonardo took a deep breath and gave a long sigh. He had turned another page, over which he waved his open hand as if to lift some veil or shadow from the path of his gaze—his eyes, Gherardini saw, now bright with tears.

  Gherardini shifted his own gaze to the page. He reached and with his fingers touched the contours of the figure drawn there—as if they might be warm.

  There was a breath of air. The candles flickered. A door was opened—and closed. Strazzi had left them. Gherardini was alone with the image of his brother—and the hand that had conjured it was resting on his shoulder.

  Jung closed his eyes.

  The image of his brother…

  All right. This was not Angelo, after all—but his brother. Fine. This story, this fantasy, this dream—whatever it might be—was taking yet one more twist.

  And I will follow it, wherever it goes.

  But what about the mind that had conjured these scenes? How could one enter such a mind—Pilgrim’s mind. How could he be helped to deal with all this—with fantasies whose reality was great enough to have taken over true reality. The “real world” of here and now. The world from which Pilgrim had retreated into silence, and the world from which he wished to retreat into death.

  In other words, Jung thought as he closed the book, how am I to proceed from here when here is the last place Pilgrim wants to be? As for now—to judge from his writing, it seems that now, for Pilgrim, lives entirely in the past. Well, he thought, and stood up, that’s my job. My job, yes. But how do I do it?

  8

  Last Christmas, Emma Jung had bought her husband a camera—a toy, as she called it. Every child should have at least one toy for Christmas, she had written on the card, and this is for my youngest and most beloved child.

  That was her view of him. Not that he was not possessed of genius—but the same could be said of Mozart at eight. In fact, she had told Frau Emmenthal when they were shelling peas one day the previous summer, it is the child in Carl Gustav that proclaims his genius. He sees and dreams and wonders as only a child will do—without a hint of doubt. What he knows, he knows. What he does not know, he knows he does not know. This is a sure sign of genius: not to be afraid of your own ignorance.

  The camera was a Kodak of the kind that opens like an accordion. My squeeze-box camera, Jung called it. Shall I play you a tune?

  On the 8th of May, 1912, which happened to fall on a Wednesday, Jung looked out the window at breakfast time and saw a daffodil in the garden.

  “There’s a daffodil in the garden,” he told Emma. “As soon as I’ve finished eating, I’m going to go out and take its picture.”

  “Don’t be fooled by a daffodil, Carl. Put on your galoshes and wear your scarf before you go. You haven’t time to be ill and I haven’t time to nurse you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jung smiled at his wife and squeezed her hand.

  “Ma’am?” Emma said. “Ma-am? What’s that?”

  “The English say it. Term of respect for an older and wiser woman. Contraction of madam, which the English spell without an e to differentiate it from the French, whom they detest. Or pretend they do. The English steal all their words and change them in subtle ways that, in fact—if you want to know the truth—are subtle as a fist shoved under your nose. They keep the spellings and mispronounce the words—or keep the pronunciation and misspell the words. Sometimes both. As in madam. Maa-dum. Hah! Sounds like a lost sheep. Madame is too, too French! Too, too frightfully foreign! Too, too frightfully pretentious! Then they turn around and use a word like ambuscade, which they pronounce in fluting, Frenchified tones—but spell with an a instead of an e.”

  “All very interesting, Carl. And thank you for the lecture.” Emma set down her coffee cup and wiped her lips. “Why did you choose ambuscade?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why did you choose ambuscade as your example?”

  “First word that came into my mind, I suppose. I don’t know.”

  “If I were you, I should give it a little thought. In fact, if I were you, I should worry.”

  “Worry? Why on earth worry? It’s only a word.”

  “It isn’t only a word. It’s a minatory statement. A warning. An indication of your state of mind. Or perhaps an indication of your concern for that poor daffodil out there in the snow. Here you sit, plotting your route into the garden, all so you can shoot the unsuspecting thing. Isn’t that what the Americans call a photograph? A shot? Carl Gustav shot a daffodil this morning! My, my, my—what shall we do?”

  Emma was smiling and Jung smiled with her. But when she sobered, his smile remained.

  “On the other hand,” Emma said—and handed him his matches, “it just might be that somewhere in your mind you’re afraid that something or someone is hiding in the shadows waiting to get you. Think about it. Now, while I get busy with your Savonarola research—go and shoot your daffodil.”

  Once in the garden, his open galoshes filling with snow, Jung spoke to the daffodil, telling it he only wanted to take its picture—not that he
wanted to cut it for display inside the house. “Be at peace,” he said aloud.

  Emma, watching from the window, could see his lips moving. He’s doing it again, she thought. He’s talking to things. And then—with a smile: another sure sign of genius.

  At the Clinic, Jung found Lady Quartermaine walking in the garden.

  Damn. Mister Pilgrim is with her. Now I can’t ask her about the journal.

  The couple wandered seemingly at loose ends along the shovelled paths towards the pine grove, past the statue of Psyche and the bust of Auguste Forel on its pedestal. Doctor Forel had brought the Burghölzli Clinic to the world’s attention. His reputation was monumental—but, in Jung’s opinion, he was a man past his usefulness who nonetheless refused to go away. He paid endless visits—always unannounced—and had, so it seemed, an insatiable appetite for interference. Do you not realize this-that-or-the-other, he would pontificate. Do you not understand? Do you not see what this-that-or-the-other treatment will lead to? Disaster! Then you would have to spend hours defending your methods. He was maddening.

  Lady Quartermaine was leading Pilgrim across the sloping, buried lawn towards the portico beneath which her motor car waited. She might have been his mother, given her demeanour. Watching them, Jung concluded they could also just as well have been lovers.

  Pilgrim was wrapped from neck to toe in his greatcoat, trailing the tails of what appeared to be countless scarves, his long face shadowed by the brim of a tinted trilby pulled to one side and held there by one raised hand. The other hand clung to Lady Quartermaine’s arm as if he was afraid of falling.

  Jung caught up with them by Psyche.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Sybil had no smile for him today. “If you wish,” she said. She looked as though she had not slept in weeks. Her colour was off. Beneath her careful powdering, blue shadows lingered. Her eyes, like an animal’s, were haunted by a fear of daylight.

  “Good morning, Mister Pilgrim,” Jung persisted. “Out for our constitutional? Isn’t that what you English call it?”