Last Tales

  In the next dream he himself, silent and lurking, followed the wanderer on the mountain path and through the window. He had his knife in his hand, he leaped forward, and plunged it first in the man’s heart, then in hers, as they lay clasped in one another’s arms. But the sight of their blood, mingled, soaking into the sheet, like a red-hot iron, burned out his eyes. Half awake, once more sitting up, he thought, But I do not need to use the knife. I can strangle them with my hands.

  Thus passed the night.

  When the turnkey of the prison awakened him, it was light. “So you can sleep?” said the turnkey. “So you really trust the old fox? If you ask me, I should say he has played you a fine trick. The clock shows a quarter to six. When it strikes, the warden and the colonel will come in, and take whichever bird they find in the cage. The priest is coming later. But your old lion is never coming. Honestly—would you or I come, if we were in his shoes?”

  When Angelo succeeded in understanding the words of the turnkey, his heart filled with indescribable joy. There was nothing more to fear. God had granted him this way out: death. This happy, easy way out. Vaguely, through his aching head one thought ran: And it is for him that I die. But the thought sank away again, for he was not really thinking of Leonidas Allori, or of any person in the world round him. He felt only one thing: that he himself, within the last moment, had been pardoned.

  He got up, washed his face in a basin of water brought by his guard, and combed his hair back. He now felt the pain of the burn in his foot and again was filled with gratitude. Now he also remembered the master’s words about God’s faithfulness.

  The turnkey looked at him and said, “I took you for a young man yesterday.”

  After some time footsteps could be heard up the stone-paved passage, and a faint rattling. Angelo thought, Those are the soldiers with their carbines. The heavy door swung open, and between two gendarmes, who held his arms, entered Allori. In accordance with his words the evening before, he let himself be led forward with closed eyes by the warders. But he felt or perceived where Angelo was standing and took a step toward him. He stood silent before him, unhooked his cloak, lifted it from his own shoulders and laid it around the young man’s. In this movement the two were brought close, body to body, and Angelo said to himself, Perhaps, after all, he will not open his eyes and look at me. But whenever had Allori not kept a given word? The hand which—as it put the cloak round him—rested against Angelo’s neck forced his head a little forward, the large eyelids trembled and lifted, and the master looked into the eyes of the disciple. But the disciple could never afterward remember or recall the look. A moment later he felt Allori’s lips on his cheek.

  “Well, now!” cried the turnkey with surprise in his voice. “Welcome back! We were not expecting you. Now you must take potluck! And you,” he added, turning to Angelo, “you can go your way. There are still a few minutes to six o’clock. My lords are not coming till after it has struck. The priest is coming later. Things are done with precision here. And fair—as you know—is fair.”

  NIGHT WALK

  After Leonidas Allori’s death a sad misfortune came upon his disciple Angelo Santasilia: he could not sleep.

  Will the narrator be believed by such people as have themselves experience of sleeplessness, when he tells them that from the beginning this affliction was the victim’s own choice? Yet it was so. Angelo walked out through the prison gate, behind which he had for twelve hours been hostage for his condemned master, into a world which to him contained no direction whatsoever. He was totally isolated, an absolutely lonely figure in this world, and he felt that the man whose grief and shame—like his own—exceeded that of all others must at the same time be exempt from the laws which governed those others. He made up his mind not to sleep any more.

  On this day he had no feeling of time, and he took fright when he realized that darkness had fallen, and the day was over. He was aware that his friends, other pupils of the dead artist, were tonight keeping watch together, but on no account would he join them, for they would be talking of Leonidas Allori and would greet him as the chosen disciple, upon whom the eye of the master had last dwelt. Yes, he thought, and laughed, as if I were Elisha, the follower of the great prophet Elijah, on whom the passenger of the chariot of fire threw his mantle! So he betook himself to the taverns and inns of the town, where casually collected people roared and rioted and where the air was filled with strumming and song, and was heavy with vapors of wine and the smell of the clothes and sweat of strangers. But he would not drink like the others. He left one inn to proceed to another, and both in the taprooms and in the streets he told himself, All this does not concern me. I myself will not sleep any more.

  In such a tavern, on the night between Monday and Tuesday, he met Giuseppino, or Pino, Pizzuti, the philosopher, a small man shrunken and dark of hue as if he had been hung up in a chimney to be smoked. Pizzuti had once, many years ago, owned the noblest marionette theater in Naples, but later on his luck had left him. In prison, and in chains, three fingers of his right hand had withered, so that he could no longer maneuver his puppets. He now wandered from place to place, the poorest of the poor, but luminous, as if phosphorescent, with love of humanity in general and with a knowing and mellifluous compassion for the one human being with whom he just happend to be talking. In this man’s company Angelo passed the next day and night, and while he looked at him and listened to him he had no difficulty in keeping awake.

  The philosopher at once realized that he had a desperate man before him. To give the boy confidence he for a time spoke about himself. He described his puppets one by one, faithfully and with enthusiasm, as if they had been real friends and fellow artists, and with tears in his eyes, because they were now lost to him. “Alas, the beloved ones,” he moaned, “they were devoted to me and they trusted me. But they are dispersed now, limp of arms and legs, with moldering strings; they are thrown away from the stage to the uttermost parts of the sea. For my hand could no longer lead them, nor my right hand hold them!” But presently—as ever in the vicissitudes of his existence—he turned his mind toward life everlasting. “That is not a matter for grief,” he said. “In Paradise I shall once more meet and embrace them all. In Paradise I shall be given ten fingers to each hand.”

  Later on, after midnight, Pino led the conversation to Angelo’s own circumstances, felt his way in them, and soon had them all at his seven fingers’ ends.

  In this way it happened that next night Angelo told him his whole story, as he would not have been able to tell it to any person in the world other than this crippled vagabond. At that the old man’s face lit up in high, solemn harmony. “That is not a matter for grief,” he said. “It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings? We would have to fear that the Saviour might even come to think with disgust of His heroic achievement! For exactly this reason, as you will know, in the very hour of the Cross, care was taken that He had thieves by Him, one to each side, and could turn His eyes from the one to the other. At this moment He may look from you to me, and mightily recognize and repeat to Himself, ‘Aye, verily it was needed!’ ”

  After a while Pino added, “And I myself am the crucified thief Demas, to whom Paradise was promised.”

  But early on Thursday morning Pizzuti quite suddenly vanished, like a rat into a gutter hole. He left the room on a necessary errand and did not return, and not till seven years later did Angelo again see this excellent man. And as the silence behind him grew deep and, as it were, conclusive, the outcast man realized that he no longer needed to hold on to a decision. It would not happen to him again to fall asleep.

  For some time he walked among people, still absolutely lonely, like an unproved but ambitious young ascetic with a hair shirt next to his skin. So as not to meet his friends of the past he changed his lodgings, and found for himself a small closet high up under the roof in the opposite quarter of the town.
During the first time he was surprised at the fact that his sleepless nights did not appear long, but that time simply seemed to have been abolished—night came, and then again morning, and to him it meant nothing.

  But, just as unexpectedly, his body rose in rebellion against his mind and his will. The moment came in which he gave up his pride and prayed the great powers of the universe: “Despise me, cast me away, but allow me to be like the others, allow me to sleep.”

  He now bought himself opium, but it did not help him. He also purchased another strong sleeping draught, but it only conveyed to him a row of novel, quite confused sensations of distance, so that objects and times which were far away were felt by him as quite near, while such objects as he knew to be within reach—his own hands and feet and the stone steps of the stairs—were infinitely far off.

  His brain by this time was working extremely slowly. One day in the street he saw Lucrezia, who had returned to the town and was living with her mother. But only late at night, when the church towers had rung out midnight, did he tell himself, I saw a woman in the street today, it was Lucrezia. And after another while, I once promised to come to her. But I did not come. For a long time he sat very still, handling this thought, and at last he smiled, like a very old man.

  It was shortly after this day that he began to turn to other people and to look to them for help. But when he begged their advice, he was in such deadly earnest that he made the persons he addressed smile, and they answered him in jest ox altogether dismissed his questions.

  One morning he bethought himself of Mariana, the old woman in whose tavern he had met Pizzuti. She had, he knew, given friends of his good advice—it was not impossible that she might be able to help him. But the lack of seriousness in his counselors till now had frightened him out of asking straightaway, and he searched for a pretext for going to her house, until he remembered that he had left there his purple cloak with the brown embroidery. At that he went straight to her house.

  Old Mariana looked at him for a while. “Well, well, Angelo, pretty death’s-head,” she said. “We Christian people should bear one another no grudge, and I forgive you, today, that you did reject my fond love, and kept thinking of another woman, when I wanted you. I shall help you. Now listen well, and afterwards do exactly as I tell you. Walk from the broadest street of the town into a narrower one, and from this narrow street into one still narrower, and go on like that. If from your narrowest alley you can find your way into a tighter passage, enter it, and follow it, and draw your breath lightly once or twice. And at that you will have fallen asleep.”

  Angelo thanked Mariana for her advice, and pushed it down to the bottom of his mind. Only when it was quite dark did he make up his mind to test it.

  His own room was in an out-of-the-way alley. He had to proceed into the broadest and best lighted of the boulevards. For a long time he had not been in this part of the town, and he was surprised to see how many people there were in the world. They walked faster than he, they were intent on their errands, and as far as he could judge an equal number were walking in each direction.

  How, he asked himself, has it become necessary for all people who live east of the boulevard to come west, as well as to all who live west to come east? It might make one feel that the world was badly managed. The whole city of Naples is now set up as a big loom, men and women are the shuttles to it, and the weaver is busy tonight. Yet this great pattern, he reflected as he walked on, is no concern of mine—others will have to look after it. I myself will keep my thoughts carefully collected on what I have got to do.

  At this he turned from the Via di Toledo into a smaller street, and from that into one still narrower. It is not impossible, he thought, hope strangely dawning in his heart, that this time I have been well advised.

  After a while he found himself in a lane so narrow that, looking up, he saw above him only a handbreadth of evening sky a little lighter than the eaves. The paving was here very rough, and there were no lamps; he had to place his hand on the wall of a house to walk on. The contact with solid matter did him good; he felt grateful toward this wall. It suddenly vanished under his palm. There was a doorway here, and the door was open. It gave into an exceedingly narrow passage. I am in luck tonight, he thought, I am lucky to have come upon such an exceedingly narrow passage. He proceeded until he came to a small door. Underneath this door a faint light shone.

  Now for a while he stood perfectly still. In there sleep awaited him, and with the certitude of sleep memory came back to him. He felt, in the dark, his hard, drawn face smoothening, his eyelids lowering a little like the eyelids of a happy, sleeping person. This moment was a return and a beginning. He stretched out his hand, took care to draw his breath lightly twice, and opened the door.

  By a table in a little, faintly lit room a red-haired man was counting his money.

  The sudden entrance of a stranger did not seem to surprise the host of the room, he looked up casually and then sank back into his former occupation. But his guest felt the moment to be formidable.

  The man by the table was ugly, and had nothing kind about him. Yet in the fact that even while counting his money he left his door unlocked, to be entered by a stranger, there was a kind of friendliness which might hold great possibilities. But what am I to say to him? Angelo thought.

  After a while he said, “I cannot sleep.”

  The red-haired man waited a moment, then he looked up. “I never sleep,” he declared with extreme arrogance.

  After this short interruption he resumed his work. He carefully arranged his coins in piles of two, scattered them with his big hands and re-collected them in piles of five—to scatter these once more, and build up, absorbed in the task, new piles of six, of ten and fifteen, and at last of three. In the end he stopped, and without taking his hands off the silver leaned back in the chair. He gazed straight before him and repeated, with deep scorn, “I never sleep.

  “Only dolts and drudges sleep,” he took up his theme after a while. “Fishermen, peasants and artisans must have their hours of snoring at any cost. Their heavy natures cry out for sleep even in the greatest hour of life. Drowsiness settles on their eyelids. Divine agony sweats blood at a stone’s throw, but they cannot keep awake, and the whizzing of an angel’s wings will not wake them up. Those living dead will never know what happened, or what was said, while they themselves lay huddled and gaping. I alone know. For I never sleep.”

  Suddenly he turned in his chair toward his guest. “He said so Himself,” he remarked, “and had He not been so hard driven, with what high disdain would He not have spoken! Now it was a moan, like the sea breaking against the shore for the very last time before doomsday. He Himself told them so, the fools: ‘What, could ye not watch with me one hour?’ ”

  For a minute he looked Angelo straight in the face.

  “But no one,” he concluded slowly, in indescribable pride, “no one in the world could ever seriously believe that I myself did sleep—on that Thursday night in the garden.”

  OF HIDDEN THOUGHTS

  AND OF HEAVEN

  It was a lovely spring day, and the almond trees were blossoming, delicately pink and coral like flamingo feathers, down the slope in front of the white villa. From the terrace at the top there was a wide view over the landscape, and all shapes and colors within it—the far-off, air-blue mountains, the greenish-gray olive groves on the nearer slopes; the serpentine, dust-gray road through the valley below; the free, fleeting groups of big clouds; and the noble, mathematically straight, darker blue line of the sea on the horizon—in the cool of the evening were as beautifully harmonious as if an angel had stood behind the shoulder of the observer and poured out it all from his flute.

  Angelo Santasilia, the famous sculptor who owned the villa, was sitting on the terrace, shaping tiny figures in clay. His long workday was over, and he was satisfied with his work. But his three children—two fair-limbed little boys and a little girl with a skin as transparent as an almond blossom and big, childish
ly unfathomable dark eyes—before consenting to go to bed had demanded that these three equestrian statues should be ready by the next morning. No one horseman was to be superior to another, yet they all were to be so different that each of the children could immediately pick out its own from among them. The task had gripped the artist’s imagination, so that he was now deeply engrossed in it. His wife, Lucrezia, wrapped in a crimson shawl, sat a little behind him, and smiled at her husband’s gravity.

  A nightingale sang in a distant thicket, and all of a sudden another struck up, enraptured, quite close by.

  Angelo was still in his working smock. His great beauty since we last saw him had become richer, almost blooming like that of a woman.

  A small man came from the house down toward husband and wife. He did not carry his hat in his hand, for he had no hat, but his attitude was as dignified and deferential as if he had been sweeping the ground with the panache of one. Lucrezia first caught sight of him, and drew her husband’s attention to him—but Angelo, who was just about to shape a rearing horse, did not want to be interrupted. Still when he turned his head, and recognized in the approaching figure the wanderer, Giuseppino Pizzuti, a friend of old times, he waved his hand to him.

  Giuseppino greeted his host as if their parting had taken place that very morning. All the same, the years had not passed over him without leaving their mark. He was even leaner than before and more poorly dressed. His eyebrows were raised high on his forehead, as if a permanent deep amazement had placed them there. He seemed to be without weight, like a withered, rolled-up leaf.

  At first he seemed quite unaffected by the changed circumstances of his old companion in misfortune; indeed, he hardly seemed to notice them at all. But when he was introduced to Lucrezia and saw what a lovely wife Angelo had, he was so deeply impressed that he styled him “Signor Santasilia” and “Maestro.”