Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years

  There was a somewhat embarrassed pause in the conversation. Mme Kuckuck-da Cruz drummed lightly on the table with her finger-tips. Hurtado adjusted his glasses. I came to the rescue by saying:

  'We should probably all do well to profit by Mademoiselle Susanna's pedagogical gift. She was completely right in the first instance in saying it would be ridiculous to assume that her honoured father began his account of his trip by mentioning me. I'll wager he began by the success of his mission, the acquisition in Paris of certain skeletal remains of a very important but unfortunately long-extinct species of tapir that lived in the ancient Eocene.'

  'You are entirely right, marquis,' the senhora said. 'That was exactly what Don Antonio spoke of first of all, just as he seems to have spoken of it to you, and here you see someone who is especially pleased by this acquisition since it will mean employment for him. I introduced Monsieur Hurtado to you as my husband's professional colleague. He is, in fact, an admirable animal-sculptor. He has not only created all kinds of contemporary animals for our museum, but he is also able to re-create most convincingly, with the aid of fossils, creatures that have long since vanished.

  That's the reason for wearing his hair down to his coat collar, I thought. It isn't absolutely necessary. Aloud, I said: 'But, madame — but, Monsieur Hurtado — things couldn't have turned out better! In point of fact, the professor talked to me during the trip about your amazing abilities and now, as good luck will have it, I meet you on my first expedition into the city.'

  What did Miss Zouzou say to this? She had the presumption to say: 'How delightful! Why don't you fall on each other's necks? Your acquaintance with us presumably amounts to very little in comparison with this meeting you are rejoicing over. And yet, marquis, you don't look in the least as though you were especially interested in science. Your real interests probably lie more in ballet and horses.'

  One might well have disregarded these remarks. I replied, nevertheless:

  'Horses? In the first place, mademoiselle, the horse is really related, though at a distance, to the tapir of the Eocene. And even a ballet might prompt one to scientific reflection by awakening recollections of the primitive bony structure of the pretty legs one sees there. Pardon me for mentioning it, but it was you who brought the subject up. Moreover, you are at liberty to take me for an idler with the most banal interests and no feeling for higher things, for the cosmos or the three spontaneous generations or universal sympathy. That is your privilege, as I say, only it is possible you might be doing me an injustice.'

  'It's your duty, Zouzou,' her mother said, 'to explain that that was not your intention.'

  But Zouzou remained obstinately silent.

  Hurtado, on the other hand, was visibly flattered by my enthusiastic greeting and politely took up the conversation.

  'Mademoiselle,' he said by way of apology, 'is fond of teasing, monsieur le marquis. We men must put up with it, and which of us is not happy to do so? She teases me all the time, calls me the taxidermist because at the beginning that was indeed my occupation: I earned my daily bread by stuffing dead pets, canaries, parrots, and cats and providing them with bright glass eyes. From that, to be sure, I went on to higher things, to plastic reconstruction, from journeyman labour to art, and now I no longer need dead animals to create lifelike models. To do this requires more than manual skill; it requires long observation of nature and long study, that I will not deny. My own abilities in this field have, for a number of years, been at the service of our Natural History Museum — moreover, I am not alone, there are two other artists working in the same department of the Kuckuck Foundation. For the reconstruction of animals of another geological period — the reproduction of archaic life, that is — one naturally requires a sound anatomical basis from which the whole creature can be logically deduced, and it is for this reason that I am so pleased that the professor has succeeded in acquiring in Paris the requisite skeletal remains of this early ungulate. I will be able to proceed from what we have. The animal was no larger than a fox and certainly still had four well-developed toes on the front feet and three on the hind....'

  Hurtado had grown quite warm while talking. I congratulated him heartily on his magnificent assignment, only regretting that I should not be able to see the result of his labours because my ship sailed in a week's time, the ship to Buenos Aires. But I was determined to see as much as possible of his earlier work. Professor Kuckuck had most kindly offered to be my guide through the museum. I had it very much in mind to make an appointment.

  That could be done at once, Hurtado said. If I would come to the museum in the Rua da Prata, not far from here, next morning at eleven o'clock, the professor would be there as well as his unworthy self, who would consider it an honour to be allowed to take part in our tour of inspection.

  Wonderful! I at once shook hands with him in agreement, and the ladies countenanced the arrangement with varied degrees of good will. The senhora's smile was condescending, Zouzou's mocking. But even she joined with reasonable good grace in the short conversation that followed, although not without a trace of what Monsieur Hurtado had called teasing. I learned that 'Dom Miguel' had gone to meet the professor at the station and had accompanied him home and had taken luncheon with the family. Escorting the ladies afterward on their shopping-tour, he had finally brought them to this place for refreshment. Without male escort, they would not, according to the customs of the country, have been allowed to appear there. There was talk, too, of my projected trip, the year-long journey around the world to which my dear parents in Luxemburg were treating me — their only son, for whom they happened to have a weakness.

  'C'est le mot,' Zouzou could not refrain from interjecting. 'That certainly could be called a weakness.'

  'I see you are still worried about my modesty, mademoiselle.'

  'That would be a lost cause,' she replied.

  The mother reproved her: 'My dear child, a girl must learn to distinguish between propriety and prickliness.'

  And yet it was just this prickliness that gave me hope that one day — few though my days were — I would be able to kiss those charming, pouting lips.

  It was Mme Kuckuck herself who strengthened me in this hope by formally inviting me to lunch next day. Hurtado meanwhile launched into a consideration of the sights I must not fail to see during my limited stay. He recommended the exhilarating view of town and river from the public gardens in the Passeio da Estrella, spoke of an approaching bull-fight, praised in particular the cloister of Belem, a pearl of architectural art, and the castles in Sintra. I, on the other hand, admitted that the object of interest I had heard about that had attracted me most was the botanical garden, where there were said to be plants belonging to the Carboniferous period rather than to the present day, specifically the tree ferns. That interested me more than anything else, and must be my first objective after the Museum of Natural History.

  'A walk and nothing more,' the senhora declared. It would be pleasant to undertake it. The simplest thing would be for me to have lunch en famille after my visit to the museum in the Rua Joäo de Castilhos and to plan to make the botanical promenade in the afternoon either with or without Dom Antonio José.

  She made this proposal and issued this invitation majestically; it goes without saying that I accepted it with polite surprise and gratitude. Never, I said, had I looked forward with more joyful anticipation than to the next day's programme. After these arrangements had been made, we got up to go. Hurtado paid the waiter. Not only he, but Mme Kuckuck and Zouzou, too, gave me their hands. Everyone said: 'A demain, à demain', even Zouzou. But she added mockingly: 'Grâce à l'hospitalité de ma mère.' And then, dropping her eyes a little: 'I don't like to say what I'm told to say. That's why I postponed telling you that it was not my intention to be unfair to you.'

  I was so taken aback by this sudden migration of her prickliness that I called her Zaza by mistake.

  'Mais, Mademoiselle Zaza -'

  'Zaza!' she repeated, bursting into laug
hter, and turned her back on me.

  I had to call after her: 'Zouzou! Zouzou! Excusez ma bévue, je vous en prie!'

  While I made my way back to the hotel past the Moorish railway station and through the narrow Rua do Principe, which connects the Rossio with the Avenida de Liberdade, I scolded myself for that slip of the tongue. Zaza! She had been simply herself, companioned only by her beloved Loulou — not by a proud, ancient Iberian mother — and that, after all, made an enormous difference!

  CHAPTER 7

  THE Museum Ciências Naturäes of Lisbon, situated in the Rua da Prata, is only a few steps from the Rua Augusta. The façade of the building is unimpressive; there is neither gate nor staircase. One simply walks in, but even before passing through the turnstile next to the cashier's table with its array of photographs and picture postcards, one is amazed by the extent and depth of the entrance hall. The visitor is greeted from afar by a stirring scene from Nature. Approximately in the centre of the room stands a dais, grass-covered, with a background of dark forest thicket, partly painted, partly constructed of real leaves and bushes. On slender legs, hoofs close together, a white stag stands as though just emerging, crowned by antlers with magnificent points and palms. His aspect is both dignified and alert as he cocks his ears forward and surveys approaching visitors with wide-spaced eyes, gleaming, calm yet alert. The ceiling light in the hall fell directly on the grassy plot and the shimmering figure of the proud and wary animal. One feared that if one moved so much as a single step he would disappear at a bound into the darkness of the thicket. And so I lingered, rooted to the spot by the timidity of the lonely creature there, without at once being aware of Senhor Hurtado, who stood waiting at the foot of the dais, his hands behind his back. He came toward me, signalling to the cashier that I was to be admitted without charge, and manipulated the turn-stile himself, meanwhile expressing the heartiest welcome.

  'I see, monsieur le marquis,' he said, 'you are captivated by our receptionist, the white stag. Quite understandable. A good piece. No, I didn't create him. That was done by someone before my time here. The professor is expecting you, May I take the liberty -'

  But he had to give me smiling leave to go over to the magnificent animal, which fortunately could not flee, and examine it from close at hand.

  'No fallow buck,' Hurtado explained. 'He belongs to the class of noble red deer, which at times are white. However, I am probably talking to an expert. You are a hunter, I assume?'

  'Only occasionally, only when it is socially necessary. Here, nothing is further from my thoughts. I believe I would not be able to raise a gun against him. There's something legendary about him. And yet — I am right, am I not, Senhor Hurtado — and yet the deer is a ruminant? '

  'Certainly, monsieur le marquis. Like his cousins, the reindeer and the elk.'

  'And like the ox and cow. You know, one can see it. There is something legendary about him, but one can see it. He is white, by exception, his antlers give him the look of a king of the forest, and his gait is delicate, but his body betrays the family — against which there is nothing to be said. If one examines the rump and hindquarters carefully and thinks about a horse — the horse is nervier, although one knows he is descended from the tapir — then the stag strikes one as a crowned cow.'

  'You are a critical observer, monsieur le marquis.'

  'Critical? Not at all. I have a feeling for the forms and representations of life and Nature, that's all. A feeling for them. A certain enthusiasm. The ruminants have, after all, as I understand it, very remarkable stomachs. There are various compartments in them, and from one they regurgitate what they have eaten. Then they lie and thoroughly chew their cuds once more. You might say it is strange for anyone with such odd family customs to be crowned king of the forest, but I honour Nature in all her inventions and I can quite well put myself in the position of a ruminant! After all, there is such a thing as universal sympathy.'

  'No doubt,' Hurtado said, taken aback. He was actually somewhat embarrassed by my exalted manner of speech — as though there were any less exalted way of saying 'universal sympathy'. Because he was stiff and nonplussed from embarrassment, I hastened to remind him that the master of the establishment was waiting for us.

  'Very true, marquis. I would be wrong to keep you here any longer. To the left, if you please Kuckuck's office opened off the long corridor. He got up from his desk as we entered, and removed his working-glasses from his star-like eyes, which I recognized as though I had first seen them in a dream. His greeting was cordial. He expressed his pleasure at the accident which had already brought me and his ladies together, and at the arrangements we had made. We sat around his desk for a few minutes while he inquired about my lodgings and my first impressions of Lisbon. Then he said: 'Shall we make our tour of inspection now, marquis?'

  This we did. Outside, in front of the stag, there now stood a school-class of ten-year-olds to whom the teacher was lecturing about the animal. They glanced from it to him with equal respect. Then they were led off to inspect the glass cases along the walls which contained collections of beetles and butterflies. We did not linger over them, but at once turned to the right into a series of large and small rooms opening into one another and providing food enough and to spare for anyone with a taste for representations of life such as I had boasted of possessing. Everywhere in room and hall the receptive eye was caught by forms that had poured uninterruptedly from Nature's womb. Next to the awkward first experiments were the most elaborately evolved, the most perfect of their kind. Behind a glass window was the replica of a patch of sea bottom where the earliest forms of organic life teemed in a kind of furious untidiness of design. Right beside it one saw cross-sections of shells from the lowest strata — of such minute workmanship inside that one could not but wonder at the meticulous artistry Nature had attained in that far bygone day. The soft, headless creatures whose homes these shells had been had mouldered away millions of years ago.

  We encountered individual visitors, who had certainly had to pay the modest entrance fee, and were unescorted since their social position gave them no claim to special attention. They were obliged to garner their information from the labels attached to the exhibits which were, of course, written in the language of the country. They gazed at our little group with curiosity, no doubt taking me for a visiting prince for whom the management was doing the honours of the establishment. I will not deny I found this pleasant; and there was the added charm of the contrast between my own fineness and elegance and the primitive crudity of many of the uncanny-looking fossils, the primeval crustaceans, cephalopods, brachiopods, tremendously ancient sponges, and entrail-less lily-stars — Nature's experiments, whose acquaintance I was briefly making.

  All this inspired in me the moving reflection that these first beginnings, however absurd and lacking in dignity and usefulness, were preliminary moves in the direction of me — that is, of Man; and it was this that prompted my attitude of courteous self-possession as I was introduced to a marine saurian, a bare-skinned, sharp-jawed creature, represented by a five-metre-long model floating in a glass tank. This friend, who could have attained proportions much greater than those shown, was a reptile but had the shape of a fish and resembled a dolphin, which, however, is a mammal. Hovering thus between the glasses, it ogled at me from the side while my own eyes, even as Kuckuck was speaking, wandered ahead to farther distances where there appeared to be a life-sized dinosaur, extending through several rooms and protected by a red velvet cord. That is how it is in museums: they offer too much; the quiet contemplation of one or a few of the objects from their store would certainly be more profitable for mind and soul; as soon as one steps in front of one, his glance is lured on to another whose attractiveness distracts the attention, and so it goes through the whole series of exhibits. I speak, however, from a single experience, for later I hardly ever visited such places of instruction.

  As for the immoderate creature which Nature had abandoned and which was faithfully reproduced he
re on the basis of fossil remains, no single room in the building could have contained him — he was all in all, God save the mark, forty metres long — and although two rooms connected by an open archway had been set aside for him, it was only through skilful arrangement of his limbs that these met his requirements. We went through one room past the monstrous coils of his tail, his leathery hind legs, and part of his bulging rump; near his upper body, however, a tree trunk — or was it a short stone column? — had been erected and on this the poor creature supported himself with one foot, not without a kind of monstrous grace, while his endless neck and trivial head were bent down toward this foot in troubled meditation — or is meditation possible with a sparrow brain?

  I was much touched by the appearance of the dinosaur and addressed it in my mind: 'Don't be sad! It's true you have been cast out and cashiered for lack of moderation, but as you see, we have built a statue to you and we remember you.' And yet not even this, the museum's most famous exhibit, completely held my attention, which was diverted by a simultaneous attraction. Hanging from the ceiling, its leathery wings outspread, was a flying saurian, the primordial bird with reptilian tail and claws on its wing tips. Near by were egg-laying mammals with pouches for their young, and, a little farther on, stupid-looking giant armadillos, whom Nature had considerately protected with a heavy armour of bony plates on back and flanks. But Nature had been just as solicitous of their ravenous boarders, the sabre-tooth tigers, and had provided them with such powerful jaws and rending teeth that they could handle the bony armour and tear great slices of no doubt tasty flesh from the armadillos' bodies. The larger and more heavily armoured the unwilling host became, the more monstrous grew the jaws and teeth of the guest who joyfully leaped upon him at meal-time. One day, however, Kuckuck informed us, climate and vegetation played a prank on the giant armadillos by depriving them of their innocent nourishment, and they became extinct. And there sat the sabre-tooth tiger, after that mighty contest, there he sat with his jaws and his armour-rending teeth and fell rapidly into despondency and gave up the ghost. He had done everything out of regard for the growing armadillo so as not to be left behind but to go on being able to crunch its bones. The latter, in turn, would never have grown so large or so heavily armoured if it had not been for that connoisseur of his flesh. But if Nature wanted to defend him by constantly increasing his coat of mail, why had she, at the same time, steadily strengthened the jaws and sabre-teeth of his enemy? She had been on both sides — and so, of course, on neither — had only been playing with them, and when she had brought them to the pinnacle of their capacities she deserted them. What is Nature thinking of? She is thinking of nothing at all, nor can Man ascribe thoughts to her; he can only admire her busy impartiality when he strolls, as an honoured guest, among the multiplicity of her manifestations, of which such beautiful reproductions, in part the creation of Senhor Hurtado, filled the halls of Kuckuck's museum.