Imcomplete WCLS 1001 Reader

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Incomplete WCLS 1001

Reader Contents

Week 1- “Body Ritual of the Nacirema”

Week 2-“How Should One Read a Book?” & “Harrison Bergeron”

Week 3-“The Broken Wings”

Week 4-"Eva is Inside Her Cat”, "A very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale

For Children" & "The Solitude of Latin America: Nobel Address, 1982"

Week 5-None

Week 6-None

Week 7-“A Primer of Existentialism” & “The Wall”

Week 8-No Readings

Week 9-None

Week 10-None

Week 11-No Readings

Week 12-None

Week 13-“How the Soviet Robinson was Written”

Body Ritual among the Nacirema

The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in

which different people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be

surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically

possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the

world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet



undescribed tribe. The point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to

clan organization by Murdock[1] . In this light, the magical beliefs and

practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems

desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human

behavior can go.

Professor Linton[2] first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of

anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very

poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory

between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the

Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although

tradition states that they came from the east. According to Nacirema

mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is

otherwise known for two great feats of strength—the throwing of a piece of

wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac and the chopping down of a cherry tree

in which the Spirit of Truth resided.

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy

which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time

is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and

a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this

activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a

dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is

certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are

unique.

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the

human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.

Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these

characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has

one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals

in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence

of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it



possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine

rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the

rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.

While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it

are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally

only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are

being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish

sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the

rituals described to me.

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In

this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no

native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety

of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine

men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However,

the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but

decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an

ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine

men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in

the charmbox of the household shrine. As these magical materials are

specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are

many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are

so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use

them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only

assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their

presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will

in some way protect the worshiper.



Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family,

in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box,

mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief

rite of ablution[3]. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the

community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make theliquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in

prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as "holy-

mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and

fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a

supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals

of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed,

their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them.

They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral

characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for

children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.

The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite

the fact that these people are so punctilious[4] about care of the mouth, this

rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It

was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog

hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving

the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures[5].

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man

once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of

paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The

use of these items in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost

unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the

client's mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes

which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into

these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large



sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural

substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these

ministrations[6] is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred

and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives

return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teethcontinue to decay.

It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there

will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has

but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into

an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If

this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the

population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that

Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body

ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite includes scraping

and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special

women's rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but

what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this

ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The

theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly

masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.

The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community

of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick

patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not

only the thaumaturge[7] but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move

sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.

The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair

proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover. Small

children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist

attempts to take them to the temple because "that is where you go to die."

Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the



protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill

the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples

will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even

after one has gained and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not

permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.

The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes.

In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural

functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of

the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites.

Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost

upon entry into the latipso. A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an

excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden

while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort of

ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used

by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client's sickness.

Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to

the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men.

Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their

hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve

discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their

miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while

performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are

highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant's

mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing.

From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically

treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may

not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people's

faith in the medicine men.

There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a "listener." This

witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of



people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents

bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a

curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-

magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply

tells the "listener" all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliestdifficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in

these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the

patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a

few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of

their own birth.

In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their

base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the

natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin

and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to

make women's breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large.

General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the

ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women

afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so idolized

that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and

permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.

Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are

ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive

functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and

scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of

magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon.

Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to

hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or

relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.

Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a

magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to



exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves.

But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are

viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski[8] when he wrote:

“ Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed

civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But

without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his

practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the

higher stages of civilization.[9]

HARRISON BERGERON

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only

equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody

was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody

else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was

due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to

the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance,

still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy

month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old

son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard.

Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think

about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was

way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was

required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government

transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out



some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of

their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's

cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits

from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They

weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been,

anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and

their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture

or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying

with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he

didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his

thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.



Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask

George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said

George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said

Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel.

Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper

General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon

Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in

honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good

Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.



"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son

who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head

stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on

the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the

studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on

the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch."

She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag,

which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a

little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't

notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just

some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take

out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,"

said George. "I don't call that a bargain."



"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said

Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set

around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away

with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with

everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would

you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws,

what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George

couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?

"Who knows?" said George.



The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It

wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer,

like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a

minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies

and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing.

He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a

nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must

have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was

hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most

graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn

by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice

for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody.

"Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely

uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just

escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrowthe government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and

should be regarded as extremely dangerous."



A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside

down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture

showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet

and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had

ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-

G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental

handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with

thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half

blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry,

a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison

looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three

hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a

red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even

white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to

reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set.

The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again,

as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.



George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have

- for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune.

"My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an

automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was

gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio.

The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas,

technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him,

expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor!Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio

shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a

greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can

become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore

straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.



Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his

head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his

headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed

Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering

people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and

her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical

handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the

meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them

of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you

barons and dukes and earls."



The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison

snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he

sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their

chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened

gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the

weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the

laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers

nearer to it.



It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained

suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a

long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into

the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the

Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians

and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone

out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook

him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.



"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting

gun in his head.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."

How Should One Read a Book?

* A paper read at a school.



In the first place, I want to emphasise the note of interrogation at the end of

my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would

apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can

give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts,

to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreedbetween us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions

because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the

most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be

laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a

certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each

must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily

furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what

to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of

freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may

be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.

But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to

control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and

ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we

must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may

be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is “the veryspot”? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle

of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and

blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers,

races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays,

the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are

we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so

get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?

It is simple enough to say that since books have classes — fiction, biography,

poetry — we should separate them and take from each what it is right that

each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us.

Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of

fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it



shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we

could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an

admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his

fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at

first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value fromwhat you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs

and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the

first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any

other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will

find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far

more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel — if we consider how to

read a novel first — are an attempt to make something as formed and

controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading

is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest

way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but

to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of

words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you —

how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A

tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also

tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that

moment.

But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks

into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others

emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the

emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening

pages of some great novelist — Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be

better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the

presence of a different person — Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy — but

that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are

trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the

order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean

everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-

room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their

characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room



and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun round. The

moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the

mind is now exposed — the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not

the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people,

but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each isconsistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the laws of his

own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they will

never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two

different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great

novelist to another — from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope,

from Scott to Meredith — is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this

way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must

be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of

imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist — the great

artist — gives you.

But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you that

writers are very seldom “great artists”; far more often a book makes no claim

to be a work of art at all. These biographies and autobiographies, for

example, lives of great men, of men long dead and forgotten, that stand

cheek by jowl with the novels and poems, are we to refuse to read thembecause they are not “art”? Or shall we read them, but read them in a

different way, with a different aim? Shall we read them in the first place to

satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we

linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn,

and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in

being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people

— the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party,

the old woman at the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they,

what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures?

Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such

houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing,

succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die. And sometimes as we



watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we

are hunting, sailing, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are

taking part in great campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in

London, still the scene changes; the street narrows; the house becomes

small, cramped, diamond-paned, and malodorous. We see a poet, Donne,driven from such a house because the walls were so thin that when the

children cried their voices cut through them. We can follow him, through the

paths that lie in the pages of books, to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford’s Park,

a famous meeting-ground for nobles and poets; and then turn our steps to

Wilton, the great house under the downs, and hear Sidney read the Arcadia to

his sister; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very herons that

figure in that famous romance; and then again travel north with that other

Lady Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge into the city and

control our merriment at the sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit

arguing about poetry with Spenser. Nothing is more fascinating than to grope

and stumble in the alternate darkness and splendour of Elizabethan London.

But there is no staying there. The Temples and the Swifts, the Harleys and

the St. Johns beckon us on; hour upon hour can be spent disentangling their

quarrels and deciphering their characters; and when we tire of them we can

stroll on, past a lady in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and

Goldsmith and Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire

and Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and Twickenham — how certain places repeat themselves and certain names!— where Lady

Bedford had her Park once and Pope lived later, to Walpole’s home at

Strawberry Hill. But Walpole introduces us to such a swarm of new

acquaintances, there are so many houses to visit and bells to ring that we

may well hesitate for a moment, on the Miss Berrys’ doorstep, for example,

when behold, up comes Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom

Walpole loved; so that merely by going from friend to friend, from garden to

garden, from house to house, we have passed from one end of English

literature to another and wake to find ourselves here again in the present, if

we can so differentiate this moment from all that have gone before. This,

then, is one of the ways in which we can read these lives and letters; we can

make them light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous

dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and

can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem



that they have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence of

the author. But this again rouses other questions. How far, we must ask

ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life — how far is it safe to let

the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the

sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us — so sensitiveare words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions

that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them

for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the

preferences of others in a matter so personal.

But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on

literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and

exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open window on the right

hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out! How

stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual

movement — the colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at

the well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid

moan. The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such

fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature,

as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and

forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised,

indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast

out to moulder. It may be one letter — but what a vision it gives! It may be a

few sentences — but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole story will

come together with such beautiful humour and pathos and completeness

that it seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet it is only an old

actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange story of Captain Jones; it is

only a young subaltern serving under Arthur Wellesley and falling in love with

a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only Maria Allen letting fall her sewing in the

empty drawing-room and sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr. Burney’s

good advice and had never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value;

it is negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go

through the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses



buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while the colt gallops

round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well, and the donkey brays.

But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching for what is

needed to complete the half-truth which is all that the Wilkinsons, the

Bunburys, and the Maria Allens are able to offer us. They had not the artist’s

power of mastering and eliminating; they could not tell the whole truth even

about their own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have been so

shapely. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form

of fiction. Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements

and approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of

human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of

fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalised, unaware of detail,

but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is

poetry; and that is the time to read poetry . . . when we are almost able to

write it.

Western wind, when wilt thou blow?

The small rain down can rain.

Christ, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again!

The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no

other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit

then — how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is nothing here to

catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight. The illusion of fiction is

gradual; its effects are prepared; but who when they read these four lines

stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne’s house or

Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the

succession of generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being

for the moment is centred and constricted, as in any violent shock of



personal emotion. Afterwards, it is true, the sensation begins to spread in

wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to

sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The

intensity of poetry covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to

compare the force and directness of

I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,

Only remembering that I grieve,

with the wavering modulation of

Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands,

As by an hour glass; the span of time

Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;

An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home

At last, and ends in sorrow; but the life,

Weary of riot, numbers every sand,

Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,

So to conclude calamity in rest,

or place the meditative calm of

whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,

Is with infinitude, and only there;



With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be,

beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of

The moving Moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide:

Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside —

or the splendid fantasy of

And the woodland haunter

Shall not cease to saunter

When, far down some glade,

Of the great world’s burning,

One soft flame upturning

Seems, to his discerning,

Crocus in the shade,

to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once

actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into character as if it were a



glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power to condense, to widen, to state,

once and for ever.

“We have only to compare”— with those words the cat is out of the bag, and

the true complexity of reading is admitted. The first process, to receive

impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of

reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a

book, by another. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous

impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and

lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict

and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose,

or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature

undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float

to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from

the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves

into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pigsty,

or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare

building with building. But this act of comparison means that our attitude has

changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just

as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too

severe. Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time andsympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters,

defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with

decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare

each book with the greatest of its kind. There they hang in the mind the

shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have

passed on them — Robinson Crusoe, Emma, The Return of the Native.

Compare the novels with these — even the latest and least of novels has a

right to be judged with the best. And so with poetry — when the intoxication

of rhythm has died down and the splendour of words has faded, a visionary

shape will return to us and this must be compared with Lear, with Phèdre,

with The Prelude; or if not with these, with whatever is the best or seems to

us to be the best in its own kind. And we may be sure that the newness of

new poetry and fiction is its most superficial quality and that we have only to

alter slightly, not to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old.



It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge,

to compare, is as simple as the first — to open the mind wide to the fast

flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book

before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely

enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and

illuminating — that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to

say, “Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here

it succeeds; this is bad; that is good”. To carry out this part of a reader’s duty

needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any

one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find

more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be wiser, then,

to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furredauthorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value

for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try

to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise

wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who

whispers, “I hate, I love”, and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely

because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists

is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And

even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste,

the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant;

we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without

impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste;

perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and

lavishly upon books of all sorts — poetry, fiction, history, biography — and

has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the

incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is

not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin to bring us not merely

judgments on particular books, but it will tell us that there is a qualitycommon to certain books. Listen, it will say, what shall we call THIS? And it

will read us perhaps Lear and then perhaps the Agamemnon in order to bring

out that common quality. Thus, with our taste to guide us, we shall venture

beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together;

we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our



perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that

discrimination. But as a rule only lives when it is perpetually broken by

contact with the books themselves — nothing is easier and more stultifying

than to make rules which exist out of touch with facts, in a vacuum — now at

last, in order to steady ourselves in this difficult attempt, it may be well toturn to the very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as

an art. Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the

poets and novelists themselves in their considered sayings, are often

surprisingly revelant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that have

been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they are only able to help

us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in

the course of our own reading. They can do nothing for us if we herd

ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a

hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our

own and vanquishes it.

If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities

of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that

literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able,

even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its

criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory thatbelongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our

responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise

and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the

atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created

which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that

influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere,

might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when

books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and

the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may

well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls,

or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in

a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that

there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love

of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and



yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if

by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that

would be an end worth reaching.

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some

pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some

pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes

dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great

conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards —

their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable

marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain

envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these

need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved

reading.”

The Broken Wings

FOREWORD

I was eighteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays

and touched my spirit for the first time with its fiery fingers, and Selma

Karamy was the first woman who awakened my spirit with her beauty and

led me into the garden of high affection, where days pass like dreams and

nights like weddings.

Selma Karamy was the one who taught me to worship beauty by the example

of her own beauty and revealed to me the secret of love by her affection; se

was the one who first sang to me the poetry of real life.



Every young man remembers his first love and tries to recapture that strange

hour, the memory of which changes his deepest feeling and makes him so

happy in spite of all the bitterness of its mystery.

In every young man’s life there is a “Selma” who appears to him suddenly

while in the spring of life and transforms his solitude into happy moments

and fills the silence of his nights with music.

I was deeply engrossed in thought and contemplation and seeking to

understand the meaning of nature and the revelation of books and scriptures

when I heard LOVE whispered into my ears through Selma’s lips. My life was

a coma, empty like that of Adam’s in Paradise, when I saw Selma standing

before me like a column of light. She was the Eve of my heart who filled it

with secrets and wonders and made me understand the meaning of life.

The first Eve led Adam out of Paradise by her own will, while Selma made me

enter willingly into the paradise of pure love and virtue by her sweetness and

love; but what happened to the first man also happened to me, and the fiery

word which chased Adam out of Paradise was like the one which frightened

me by its glittering edge and forced me away from paradise of my love

without having disobeyed any order or tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Today, after many years have passed, I have nothing left out of that beautiful

dream except painful memories flapping like invisible wings around me,

filling the depths of my heart with sorrow, and bringing tears to my eyes; and

my beloved, beautiful Selma, is dead and nothing is left to commemorate her except my broken heart and tomb surrounded by cypress trees. That tomb

and this heart are all that is left to bear witness of Selma.



The silence that guards the tomb does not reveal God’s secret in the

obscurity of the coffin, and the rustling of the branches whose roots suck the

body’s elements do not tell the mysteries of the grave, by the agonized sighs

of my heart announce to the living the drama which love, beauty, and death

have performed.

Oh, friends of my youth who are scattered in the city of Beirut, when you

pass by the cemetery near the pine forest, enter it silently and walk slowly

so the tramping of your feet will not disturb the slumber of the dead, and stop

humbly by Selma’s tomb and greet the earth that encloses her corpse and

mention my name with deep sigh and say to yourself, “here, all the hopes of

Gibran, who is living as prisoner of love beyond the seas, were buried. On

this spot he lost his happiness, drained his tears, and forgot his smile.”

By that tomb grows Gibran’s sorrow together with the cypress trees, and

above the tomb his spirit flickers every night commemorating Selma, joining

the branches of the trees in sorrowful wailing, mourning and lamenting the

going of Selma, who, yesterday was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and

today is a silent secret in the bosom of the earth.

Oh, comrades of my youth! I appeal to you in the names of those virgins

whom your hearts have loved, to lay a wreath of flowers on the forsaken

tomb of my beloved, for the flowers you lay on Selma’s tomb are like falling

drops of dew for the eyes of dawn on the leaves of withering rose.

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CHAPTER ONE

SILENT SORROW

My neighbours, you remember the dawn of youth with pleasure and regret its

passing; but I remember it like a prisoner who recalls the bars and shackles

of his jail. You speak of those years between infancy and youth as a golden

era free from confinement and cares, but I call those years an era of silentsorrow which dropped as a seed into my heart and grew with it and could

find no outlet to the world of Knowledge and wisdom until love came and

opened the heart’s doors and lighted its corners. Love provided me with a

tongue and tears. You people remember the gardens and orchids and the

meeting places and street corners that witnessed your games and heard your

innocent whispering; and I remember, too, the beautiful spot in North

Lebanon. Every time I close my eyes I see those valleys full of magic and

dignity and those mountains covered with glory and greatness trying to reach

the sky. Every time I shut my ears to the clamour of the city I hear the

murmur of the rivulets and the rustling of the branches. All those beauties

which I speak of now and which I long to see, as a child longs for his

mother’s breast, wounded my spirit, imprisoned in the darkness of youth, as

a falcon suffers in its cage when it sees a flock of birds flying freely in the

spacious sky. Those valleys and hills fired my imagination, but bitter

thoughts wove round my heart a net of hopelessness.

Every time I went to the fields I returned disappointed, without

understanding the cause of my disappointment. Every time I looked at the

grey sky I felt my heart contract. Every time I heard the singing of the birds

and babbling of the spring I suffered without understanding the reason for my

suffering. It is said that unsophistication makes a man empty and that

emptiness makes him carefree. It may be true among those who were born



dead and who exist like frozen corpses; but the sensitive boy who feels much

and knows little is the most unfortunate creature under the sun, because he

is torn by two forces. the first force elevates him and shows him the beauty

of existence through a cloud of dreams; the second ties him down to the

earth and fills his eyes with dust and overpowers him with fears anddarkness.

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and

makes it ache with sorrow. Solitude is the ally of sorrow as well as a

companion of spiritual exaltation.

The boy’s soul undergoing the buffeting of sorrow is like a white lily just

unfolding. It trembles before the breeze and opens its heart to day break and

folds its leaves back when the shadow of night comes. If that boy does not

have diversion or friends or companions in his games his life will be like a

narrow prison in which he sees nothing but spider webs and hears nothing

but the crawling of insects.

That sorrow which obsessed me during my youth was not caused by lack of

amusement, because I could have had it; neither from lack of friends,

because I could have found them. That sorrow was caused by an inward

ailment which made me love solitude. It killed in me the inclination for

games and amusement. It removed from my shoulders the wings of youth and

made me like a pong of water between mountains which reflects in its calm

surface the shadows of ghosts and the colours of clouds and trees, but

cannot find an outlet by which to pass singing to the sea.

Thus was my life before I attained the age of eighteen. That year is like a

mountain peak in my life, for it awakened knowledge in me and made me

understand the vicissitudes of mankind. In that year I was reborn and unless

a person is born again his life will remain like a blank sheet in the book of

existence. In that year, I saw the angels of heaven looking at me through the



eyes of a beautiful woman. I also saw the devils of hell raging in the heart of

an evil man. He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and

malice of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty

of affection.

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CHAPTER TWO

THE HAND OF DESTINY

In the spring of the that wonderful year, I was in Beirut. The gardens were

full of Nisan flowers and the earth was carpeted with green grass, and like a

secret of earth revealed to Heaven. The orange trees and apple trees,

looking like houris or brides sent by nature to inspire poets and excite the

imagination, were wearing white garments of perfumed blossoms.

Spring is beautiful everywhere, but it is most beautiful in Lebanon. It is a

spirit that roams round the earth but hovers over Lebanon, conversing with

kings and prophets, singing with the rives the songs of Solomon, and

repeating with the Holy Cedars of Lebanon the memory of ancient glory.

Beirut, free from the mud of winter and the dust of summer, is like a bride in

the spring, or like a mermaid sitting by the side of a brook drying her smooth

skin in the rays of the sun.



One day, in the month of Nisan, I went to visit a friend whose home was at

some distance from the glamorous city. As we were conversing, a dignified

man of about sixty-five entered the house. As I rose to greet him, my friend

introduced him to me as Farris Effandi Karamy and then gave him my name

with flattering words. The old man looked at me a moment, touching his

forehead with the ends of his fingers as if he were trying to regain his

memory. Then he smilingly approached me saying, “ You are the son of a very

dear friend of mine, and I am happy to see that friend in your person.”

Much affected by his words, I was attracted to him like a bird whose instinct

leads him to his nest before the coming of the tempest. As we sat down, he

told us about his friendship with my father, recalling the time which they

spent together. An old man likes to return in memory to the days of his youth

like a stranger who longs to go back to his own country. He delights to tell

stories of the past like a poet who takes pleasure in reciting his best poem.

He lives spiritually in the past because the present passes swiftly, and the

future seems to him an approach to the oblivion of the grave. An hour full of

old memories passed like the shadows of the trees over the grass. When

Farris Effandi started to leave, he put his left hand on my shoulder and shook

my right hand, saying, “ I have not seen your father for twenty years. I hope

you will l take his place in frequent visits to my house.” I promised gratefully

to do my duty toward a dear friend of my father.

Then the old man left the house, I asked my friend to tell me more about him.

He said, “I do not know any other man in Beirut whose wealth has made him

kind and whose kindness has made him wealthy. He is one of the few who

come to this world and leave it without harming any one, but people of that

kind are usually miserable and oppressed because they are not clever

enough to save themselves from the crookedness of others. Farris Effandi

has one daughter whose character is similar to his and whose beauty and

gracefulness are beyond description, and she will also be miserable because

her father’s wealth is placing her already at the edge of a horrible precipice.”



As he uttered these words, I noticed that his face clouded. Then he

continued, “Farris Effandi is a good old man with a noble heart, but he lacks

will power. People lead him like a blind man. His daughter obeys him in spite

of her pride and intelligence, and this is the secret which lurks in the life of

father and daughter. This secret was discovered by an evil man who is a

bishop and whose wickedness hides in the shadow of his Gospel. He makes

the people believe that he is kind and noble. He is the head of religion in this

land of the religions. The people obey and worship him. he leads them like a

flock of lambs to the slaughter house. This bishop has a nephew who is full

of hatefulness and corruption. The day will come sooner or later when he will

place his nephew on his right and Farris Effandi’s daughter on this left, and,

holding with his evil hand the wreath of matrimony over their heads, will tie apure virgin to a filthy degenerate, placing the heart of the day in the bosom of

the night.

That is all I can tell you about Farris Effandi and his daughter, so do not ask

me any more questions.”

Saying this, he turned his head toward the window as if he were trying to

solve the problems of human existence by concentrating on the beauty of the

universe.

As I left the house I told my friend that I was going to visit Farris Effandi in a

few days for the purpose of fulfilling my promise and for the sake of the

friendship which had joined him and my father. He stared at me for a

moment, and I noticed a change in his expression as if my few simple words

had revealed to him a new idea. Then he looked straight through my eyes in a

strange manner, a look of love, mercy, and fear – the look of a prophet who

foresees what no one else can divine. Then his lips trembled a little, but he

said nothing when I started towards the door. That strange look followed me,

the meaning of which I could not understand until I grew up in the world of



experience, where hearts understand each other intuitively and where spirits

are mature with knowledge.

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CHAPTER THREE

ENTRANCE TO THE SHRINE

In a few days, loneliness overcame me; and I tired of the grim faces of books;

I hired a carriage and started for the house of Farris Effandi. As I reached the

pine woods where people went for picnics, the driver took a private way,

shaded with willow trees on each side. Passing through , we could see the

beauty of the green grass, the grapevines, and the many coloured flowers of

Nisan just blossoming.

In a few minutes the carriage stopped before a solitary house in the midst of

a beautiful garden. The scent of roses, gardenia, and jasmine filled the air. As

I dismounted and entered the spacious garden, I saw Farris Effandi coming to

meet me. He ushered me into his house with a hearty welcome and sat by

me, like a happy father when he sees his son, showering me with questions

on my life, future and education. I answered him, my voice full of ambition

and zeal; for I heard ringing in my ears the hymn of glory, and I was sailing

the calm sea of hopeful dreams. Just then a beautiful young woman, dressed



in a gorgeous white silk gown, appeared from behind the velvet curtains of

the door and walked toward me. Farris Effandi and I rose from our seats.

This is my daughter Selma,” said the old man. Then he introduced me to her,

saying, “Fate has brought back to me a dear old friend of mine in the person

of his son.” Selma stared at me a moment as if doubting that a visitor could

have entered their house. Her hand, when I touched it, was like a white lily,

and a strange pang pierced my heart.

We all sat silent as if Selma had brought into the room with her heavenly

spirit worthy of mute respect. As she felt the silence she smiled at me and

said,” Many a times my father has repeated to me the stories of his youth and

of the old days he and your father spent together. If your father spoke to you

in the same way, then this meeting is not the first one between us.”

The old man was delighted to hear his daughter talking in such a manner and

said, “Selma is very sentimental. She sees everything through the eyes of the

spirit.” Then he resumed his conversation with care and tact as if he had

found in me a magic which took him on the wings of memory to the days of

the past.

As I considered him, dreaming of my own later years, he looked upon me, as

a lofty old tree that has withstood storms and sunshine throws its shadow

upon a small sapling which shakes before the breeze of dawn.

But Selma was silent. Occasionally, she looked first at me and then at her

father as if reading the first and last chapters of life’s drama. The day passed

faster in that garden, and I could see through the window the ghostly yellow

kiss of sunset on the mountains of Lebanon. Farris Effandi continued to



recount his experiences and I listened entranced and responded with such

enthusiasm that his sorrow was changed to happiness.

Selma sat by the window, looking on with sorrowful eyes and not speaking,

although beauty has its own heavenly language, loftier than he voices of

tongues and lips. It is a timeless language, common to all humanity, a calm

lake that attracts the singing rivulets to its depth and makes them silent.

Only our spirits can understand beauty, or live and grow with it. It puzzles our

minds; we are unable to describe it in words; it is a sensation that our eyes

cannot see, derived from both the one who observes and the one who is

looked upon. Real beauty is a ray which emanates from the holy of holies of

the spirit, and illuminates the body, as life comes from the depths of the

earth and gives colour and scent to a flower.

Real beauty lies in the spiritual accord that is called love which can exist

between a man and a woman.

Did my spirit and Selma’s reach out to each other that day when we met, and

did that yearning make me see her as the most beautiful woman under the

sun? Or was I intoxicated with the wine of youth which made me fancy that

which never existed.?

Did my youth blind my natural eyes and make me imagine the brightness of

her eyes, the sweetness of her mouth, and the grace of her figure? Or was itthat her brightness, sweetness, and grace opened my eyes and showed me

the happiness and sorrow of love?



It is hard to answer these questions, but I say truly that in that hour I felt an

emotion that I had never felt before, a new affection resting calmly in my

heart, like the spirit hovering over the waters at the creation of the world,

and from that affection was born my happiness and my sorrow. Thus ended

the hour of my first meeting with Selma, and thus the will of Heaven freed mefrom the bondage of youth and solitude and let me walk in the procession of

love.

Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that

the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course.

As I rose from my seat to depart, Farris Effandi came close to me and said

soberly, “Now my son, since you know your way to this house, you should

come often and feel that you are coming to your father’s house. Consider me

as a father and Selma as a sister.” Saying this, he turned to Selma as if to

ask confirmation of his statement. She nodded her head positively and then

looked at me as one who has found an old acquaintance.

Those words uttered by Farris Effandi Karamy placed me side by side with

his daughter at the altar of love. Those words were a heavenly song which

started with exaltation and ended with sorrow; they raised our spirits to the

realm of light and searing flame; they were the cup from which we drank

happiness and bitterness.

I left the house. The old man accompanied me to the edge of the garden,

while my heart throbbed like the trembling lips of a thirsty man.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER FOUR

THE WHITE TORCH

The month of Nisan had nearly passed. I continued to visit the home of FarrisEffendi and to meet Selma in that beautiful garden, gazing upon her beauty,

marvelling at her intelligence, and hearing the stillness of sorrow. I felt an

invisible hand drawing me to her.

Every visit gave me a new meaning to her beauty and a new insight into her

sweet spirit, Until she became a book whose pages I could understand and

whose praises I could sing, but which I could never finish reading. A woman

whom Providence has provided with beauty of spirit and body is a truth, at

the same time both open and secret, which we can understand only by love,

and touch only by virtue; and when we attempt to describe such a woman

she disappears like vapour.

Selma Karamy had bodily and spiritual beauty, but how can I describe her to

one who never knew her? Can a dead man remember the singing of a

nightingale and the fragrance of a rose and the sigh of a brook? Can aprisoner who is heavily loaded with shackles follow the breeze of the dawn?

Is not silence more painful than death? Does pride prevent me from

describing Selma in plain words since I cannot draw her truthfully with

luminous colours? A hungry man in a desert will not refuse to eat dry bread if

Heaven does not shower him with manna and quails.



In her white silk dress, Selma was slender as a ray of moonlight coming

through the window. She walked gracefully and rhythmically. Her voice was

low and sweet; words fell from her lips like drops of dew falling from the

petals of flowers when they are disturbed by the wind.

But Selma’s face! No words can describe its expression, reflecting first great

internal suffering, then heavenly exaltation.

The beauty of Selma’s face was not classic; it was like a dream of revelation

which cannot be measured or bound or copied by the brush of a painter or

the chisel of a sculptor. Selma’s beauty was not in her golden hair, but in the

virtue of purity which surrounded it; not in her large eyes, but in the light

which emanated from them; not in her red lips, but in the sweetness of her

words; not in her ivory neck, but in its slight bow to the front. Nor was it in

her perfect figure, but in the nobility of her spirit, burning like a white torch

between earth and sky. her beauty was like a gift of poetry. But poets care

unhappy people, for, no matter how high their spirits reach, they will still be

enclosed in an envelope of tears.

Selma was deeply thoughtful rather than talkative, and her silence was a

kind of music that carried one to a world of dreams and made him listen to

the throbbing of his heart, and see the ghosts of his thoughts and feelings

standing before him, looking him in the eyes.

She wore a cloak of deep sorrow through her life, which increased her

strange beauty and dignity, as a tree in blossom is more lovely when seen

through the mist of dawn.



Sorrow linked her spirit and mine, as if each saw in the other’s face what the

heart was feeling and heard the echo of a hidden voice. God had made two

bodies in one, and separation could be nothing but agony.

The sorrowful spirit finds rest when united with a similar one. They join

affectionately, as a stranger is cheered when he sees another stranger in a

strange land. Hearts that are united through the medium of sorrow will not be

separated by the glory of happiness. Love that is cleansed by tears will

remain externally pure and beautiful.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER FIVE

THE TEMPEST

One day Farris Effandi invited me to dinner at his home. I accepted, my spirit

hungry for the divine bread which Heaven placed in the hands of Selma, the

spiritual bread which makes our hearts hungrier the more we eat of it. It was

this bread which Kais, the Arabian poet, Dante, and Sappho tasted and which

set their hearts afar; the bread which the Goddess prepares with the

sweetness of kisses and the bitterness of tears.



As I reached the home of Farris Effandi, I saw Selma sitting on a bench in the

garden resting her head against a tree and looking like a bride in her white

silk dress, or like a sentinel guarding that place.

Silently and reverently I approached and sat by her. I could not talk; so I

resorted to silence, the only language of the heart, but I felt that Selma was

listening to my wordless call and watching the ghost of my soul in my eyes.

In a few minutes the old man came out and greeted me as usual. When he

stretched his hand toward me, I felt as if he were blessing the secrets that

united me and his daughter. Then he said, “Dinner is ready, my children; let

us eat. “We rose and followed him, and Selma’s eyes brightened; for a new

sentiment had been added to her love by her father’s calling us his children.

We sat at the table enjoying the food and sipping the old wine, but our souls

were living in a world far away. We were dreaming of the future and its

hardships.

Three persons were separated in thoughts, but united in love; three innocent

people with much feeling but little knowledge; a drama was being performed

by an old man who loved his daughter and cared for her happiness, a young

woman of twenty looking into the future with anxiety, and a young man,

dreaming and worrying, who had tasted neither the wine of life nor its

vinegar, and trying to reach the height of love and knowledge but unable to

life himself up. We three sitting in twilight were eating and drinking in that

solitary home, guarded by Heaven’s eyes, but at the bottoms of our glasseswere hidden bitterness and anguish.

As we finished eating, one of the maids announced the presence of a man at

the door who wished to see Farris Effandi. “Who is he?” asked the old man.



“The Bishop’s messenger,” said the maid. There was a moment of silence

during which Farris Effandi stared at his daughter like a prophet who gazes

at Heaven to divine its secret. Then he said to the maid, “Let the man in.”

As the maid left, a man, dressed in oriental uniform and with big moustache

curled at the ends, entered and greeted the old man, saying “His Grace, the

Bishop, has sent me for you with his private carriage; he wishes to discuss

important business with you.” The old man’s face clouded and his smile

disappeared. After a moment of deep thought he came close to me and said

in a friendly voice, “I hope to find you here when I come back, for Selma will

enjoy your company in this solitary place.”

Saying this, he turned to Selma and, smiling, asked if she agreed. She nodded

her head, but her cheeks became red, and with a voice sweeter than the

music of the lyre she said, “I will do my best, Father, to make our guest

happy.”

Selma watched the carriage that had taken her father and the Bishop’s

messenger until it disappeared. Then she came and sat opposite me on a

divan covered with green silk. She looked like a lily bent to the carpet of

green grass by the breeze of dawn. It was the will of Heaven that I should be

with Selma alone, at night, in her beautiful home surrounded by trees, where

silence, love, beauty and virtue dwelt together.

We were both silent, each waiting for the other to speak, but speech is not

the only means of understanding between two souls. It is not the syllablesthat come from the lips and tongues that bring hearts together.

There is something greater and purer than what the mouth utters. Silence

illuminates our souls, whispers to our hearts, and brings them together.



Silence separates us from ourselves, makes us sail the firmament of spirit,

and brings us closer to Heaven; it makes us feel that bodies are no more than

prisons and that this world is only a place of exile.

Selma looked at me and her eyes revealed the secret of her heart. Then she

quietly said, “Let us go to the garden and sit under the trees and watch the

moon come up behind the mountains.” Obediently I rose from my seat, but I

hesitated.

Don’t you think we had better stay here until the moon has risen and

illuminates the garden?” And I continued, “The darkness hides the trees and

flowers. We can see nothing.”

Then she said, “If darkness hides the trees and flowers from our eyes, it will

not hide love from our hearts.”

Uttering these words in a strange tone, she turned her eyes and looked

through the window. I remained silent, pondering her words, weighing the

true meaning of each syllable. Then she looked at me as if she regretted

what she had said and tried to take away those words from my ears by the

magic of her eyes. But those eyes, instead of making me forget what she had

said, repeated through the depths of my heart more clearly and effectively

the sweet words which had already become graven in my memory for

eternity.

Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or

emotion inside a man. Every thing we see today, made by past generation,

was, before its appearance, a thought in the mind of a man or an impulse in

the heart of a woman. The revolutions that shed so much blood and turned

men’s minds toward liberty were the idea of one man who lived in the midst



of thousands of men. The devastating wars which destroyed empires were a

thought that existed in the mind of an individual. The supreme teachings that

changed the course of humanity were the ideas of a man whose genius

separated him from his environment. A single thought build the Pyramids,

founded the glory of Islam, and caused the burning of the library atAlexandria.

One thought will come to you at night which will elevate you to glory or lead

you to asylum. One look from a woman’s eye makes you the happiest man in

the world. One word from a man’s lips will make you rich or poor.

That word which Selma uttered that night arrested me between my past and

future, as a boat which is anchored in the midst of the ocean. That word

awakened me from the slumber of youth and solitude and set me on the

stage where life and death play their parts.

The scent of flowers mingled with the breeze as we came into the garden

and sat silently on a bench near a jasmine tree, listening to the breathing of

sleeping nature, while in the blue sky the eyes of heaven witnessed our

drama.

The moon came out from behind Mount Sunnin and shone over the coast,

hills, and mountains; and we could see the villages fringing the valley like

apparitions which have suddenly been conjured from nothing. We could see

the beauty of Lebanon under the silver rays of the moon.

Poets of the West think of Lebanon as a legendary place, forgotten since the

passing of David and Solomon and the Prophets, as the Garden of Eden

became lost after the fall of Adam and Eve. To those Western poets, the word

“Lebanon” is a poetical expression associated with a mountain whose sides



are drenched with the incense of the Holy Cedars. It reminds them of the

temples of copper and marble standing stern and impregnable and of a herd

of deer feeding in the valleys. That night I saw Lebanon dream-like with the

eyes of a poet.

Thus, the appearance of things changes according to the emotions, and thus

we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in

ourselves.

As the rays of the moon shone on the face, neck, and arms of Selma, she

looked like a statue of ivory sculptured by the fingers of some worshiper of

Ishtar, goddess of beauty and love. As she looked at me, she said, “Why are

you silent? Why do you not tell me something about your past?” As I gazed at

her, my muteness vanished, and I opened my lips and said, “Did you not hear

what I said when we came to this orchard? The spirit that hears the

whispering of flowers and the singing of silence can also hear the shrieking

of my soul and the clamour of my heart.”

She covered her face with her hands and said in a trembling voice, “Yes, I

heard you – I heard a voice coming from the bosom of night and a clamour

raging in the heart of the day.”

Forgetting my past, my very existence – everything but Selma – I answered

her, saying, “And I heard you, too, Selma. I heard exhilarating music pulsing

in the air and causing the whole universe to tremble.”

Upon hearing these words, she closed her eyes and her lips I saw a smile of

pleasure mingled with sadness. She whispered softly, “Now I know that there

is something higher than heaven and deeper than the ocean and stranger

than life and death and time. I know now what I did not know before.”



At that moment Selma became dearer than a friend and closer than a sister

and more beloved than a sweetheart. She became a supreme thought, a

beautiful, an overpowering emotion living in my spirit.

It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and

persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless

that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created in years or even

generations.

Then Selma raised her head and gazed at the horizon where Mount Sunnin

meets the sky, and said, “Yesterday you were like a brother to me, with

whom I lived and by whom I sat calmly under my father’s care. Now, I feel

the presence of something stranger and sweeter than brotherly affection, an

unfamiliar commingling of love and fear that fills my heart with sorrow and

happiness.”

I responded, “This emotion which we fear and which shakes us when itpasses through our hearts is the law of nature that guides the moon around

the earth and the sun around the God.”

She put her hand on my head and wove her fingers through my hair. Her face

brightened and tears came out of her eyes like drops of dew on the leaves of

a lily, and she said, “Who would believe our story – who would believe that in

this hour we have surmounted the obstacles of doubt? Who would believe

that the month of Nisan which brought us together for the first time, is the

month that halted us in the Holy of Holies of life?”



Her hand was still on my head as she spoke, and I would not have preferred a

royal crown or a wreath of glory to that beautiful smooth hand whose fingers

were twined in my hair.

Then I answered her: “People will not believe our story because they do not

know what love is the only flower that grows and blossoms without the aid of

seasons, but was it Nisan that brought us together for the first time, and is it

this hour that has arrested us in the Holy of Holies of life? Is it not the hand

of God that brought our souls close together before birth and made us

prisoners of each other for all the days and nights? Man’s life does not

commence in the womb and never ends in the grave; and this firmament, full

of moonlight and stars, is not deserted by loving souls and intuitive spirits.”

As she drew her hand away from my head, I felt a kind of electrical vibration

at the roots of my hair mingled with the night breeze. Like a devoted

worshiper who receives his blessing by kissing the altar in a shrine, I took

Selma’s hand, placed my burning lips on it, and gave it a long kiss, the

memory of which melts my heart and awakens by its sweetness all the virtue

of my spirit.

An hour passed, every minute of which was a year of love. The silence of the

night, moonlight, flowers, and trees made us forget all reality except love,

when suddenly we heard the galloping of horses and rattling of carriage

wheels. Awakened from our pleasant swoon and plunged from the world of

dreams into the world of perplexity and misery, we found that the old man

had returned from his mission. We rose and walked through the orchard to

meet him.

Then the carriage reached the entrance of the garden, Farris Effandi

dismounted and slowly walked towards us, bending forward slightly as if he

were carrying a heavy load. He approached Selma and placed both of his

hands on her shoulders and stared at her. Tears coursed down his wrinkled



cheeks and his lips trembled with sorrowful smile. In a choking voice, he

said, “My beloved Selma, very soon you will be taken away from the arms of

your father to the arms of another man. Very soon fate will carry you from

this lonely home to the world’s spacious court, and this garden will miss the

pressure of your footsteps, and your father will become a stranger to you. Allis done; may God bless you.”

Hearing these words, Selma’s face clouded and her eyes froze as if she felt a

premonition of death. Then she screamed, like a bird shot down, suffering,

and trembling, and in a choked voice said, “What do you say? What do you

mean? Where are you sending me?”

Then she looked at him searchingly, trying to discover his secret. In a

moment she said, “I understand. I understand everything. The Bishop has

demanded me from you and has prepared a cage for this bird with broken

wings. Is this your will, Father?”

His answer was a deep sigh. Tenderly he led Selma into the house while I

remained standing in the garden, waves of perplexity beating upon me like a

tempest upon autumn leaves. Then I followed them into the living room, and

to avoid embarrassment, shook the old man’s hand, looked at Selma, my

beautiful star, and left the house.

As I reached the end of the garden I heard the old man calling me and turned

to meet him. Apologetically he took my hand and said, “Forgive me, my son. I

have ruined your evening with the shedding of tears, but please come to seeme when my house is deserted and I am lonely and desperate. Youth, my

dear son, does not combine with senility, as morning does not have meet the

night; but you will come to me and call to my memory the youthful days

which I spent with your father, and you will tell me the news of life which

does not count me as among its sons any longer. Will you not visit me when

Selma leaves and I am left here in loneliness?”



While he said these sorrowful words and I silently shook his hand, I felt the

warm tears falling from his eyes upon my hand. Trembling with sorrow and

filial affection. I felt as if my heart were choked with grief. When I raised my

head and he saw the tears in my eyes, he bent toward me and touched my

forehead with his lips. “Good-bye, son, Good-bye.”

In old man’s tear is more potent than that of a young man because it is the

residuum of life in his weakening body. A young man’s tear is like a drop of

dew on the leaf of a rose, while that of an old man is like a yellow leaf which

falls with the wind at the approach of winter.

As I left the house of Farris Effandi Karamy, Selma’s voice still rang in my

ears, her beauty followed me like a wraith, and her father’s tears dried slowly

on my hand.

My departure was like Adam’s exodus from Paradise, but the Eve of my heart

was not with me to make the whole world an Eden. That night, in which I hadbeen born again, I felt that I saw death’s face for the first time.

Thus the sun enlivens and kills the fields with its heat.

Eva Is Inside Her Cat

Eva is Inside Her Cat

ALL OF A SUDDEN SHE NOTICED that her beauty had fallen all apart on her,

that it had begun to pain her physically like a tumor or a cancer. She still



remembered the weight of the privilege she had borne over her body during

adolescence, which she had dropped now--who knows where?--with the

weariness of resignation, with the final gesture of a declining creature. It

was impossible to bear that burden any longer. She had to drop that useless

attribute of her personality somewhere; as she turned a corner, somewherein the outskirts. Or leave it behind on the coatrack of a second-rate

restaurant like some old useless coat. She was tired of being the center of

attention, of being under siege from men's long looks. At night, when

insomnia stuck its pins into her eyes, she would have liked to be an ordinary

woman, without any special attraction. Everything was hostile to her within

the four walls of her room. Desperate, she could feel her vigil spreading out

under her skin, into her head, pushing the fever upward toward the roots of

her hair. It was as if her arteries had become peopled with hot, tiny insects

who, with the approach of dawn, awoke each day and ran about on their

moving feet in a rending subcutaneous adventure in that place of clay made

fruit where her anatomical beauty had found its home. In vain she struggled

to chase those terrible creatures away. She couldn't. They were part of her

own organism. They'd been there, alive, since much before her physical

existence. They came from the heart of her father, who had fed them

painfully during his nights of desperate solitude. Or maybe they had poured

into her arteries through the cord that linked her to her mother ever since the

beginning of the world. There was no doubt that those insects had not beenborn spontaneously inside her body. She knew that they came from back

there, that all who bore her surname had to bear them, had to suffer them as

she did when insomnia held unconquerable sway until dawn. It was those

very insects who painted that bitter expression, that unconsolable sadness

on the faces of her forebears. She had seen them looking out of their

extinguished existence, out of their ancient portraits, victims of that same

anguish. She still remembered the disquieting face of the greatgrandmother

who, from her aged canvas, begged for a minute of rest, a second of peace

from those insects who there, in the channels of her blood, kept on

martyrizing her, pitilessly beautifying her. No. Those insects didn't belong to

her. They came, transmitted from generation to generation, sustaining with

their tiny armor all the prestige of a select caste, a painfully select group.

Those insects had been born in the womb of the first woman who had had a

beautiful daughter. But it was necessary, urgent, to put a stop to that



heritage. Someone must renounce the eternal transmission of that artificial

beauty. It was no good for women of her breed to admire themselves as they

came back from their mirrors if during the night those creatures did their

slow, effective, ceaseless work with a constancy of centuries. It was no

longer beauty, it was a sickness that had to be halted, that had to be cut off in some bold and radical way.

She still remembered the endless hours spent on that bed sown with hot

needles. Those nights when she tried to speed time along so that with the

arrival of daylight the beasts would stop hurting her. What good was beauty

like that? Night after night, sunken in her desperation, she thought it would

have been better for her to have been an ordinary woman, or a man. But that

useless virtue was denied her, fed by insects of remote origin who were

hastening the irrevocable arrival of her death. Maybe she would have beenhappy if she had had the same lack of grace, that same desolate ugliness, as

her Czechoslovakian friend who had a dog's name. She would have been

better off ugly, so that she could sleep peacefully like any other Christian.

She cursed her ancestors. They were to blame for her insomnia. They had

transmitted that exact, invariable beauty, as if after death mothers shook

and renewed their heads in order to graft them onto the trunks of their

daughters. It was as if the same head, a single head, had been continuously

transmitted, with the same ears, the same nose, the identical mouth, with its

weighty intelligence, to all the women who were to receive it irremediably

like a painful inheritance of beauty. It was there, in the transmission of the

head, that the eternal microbe that came through across generations had

been accentuated, had taken on personality, strength, until it became an

invincible being, an incurable illness, which upon reaching her, after having

passed through a complicated process of judgment, could no longer be borne

and was bitter and painful . . . just like a tumor or a cancer.

It was during those hours of wakefulness that she remembered the things

disagreeable to her fine sensibility. She remembered the objects that made

up the sentimental universe where, as in a chemical stew, those microbes of



despair had been cultivated. During those nights, with her big round eves

open and frightened, she bore the weight of the darkness that fell upon her

temples like molten lead. Everything was asleep around her. And from her

corner, in order to bring on sleep, she tried to go back over her childhood

memories.

But that remembering always ended with a terror of the unknown. Always,

after wandering through the dark corners of the house, her thoughts would

find themselves face to face with fear. Then the struggle would begin. The

real struggle against three unmovable enemies. She would never--no, she

would never--be able to shake the fear from her head. She would have to bear

it as it clutched at her throat. And all just to live in that ancient mansion, to

sleep alone in that corner, away from the rest of the world.

Her thoughts always went down along the damp, dark passageways, shaking

the dry cobweb-covered dust off the portraits. That disturbing and fearsome

dust that fell from above, from the place where the bones of her ancestors

were falling apart. Invariably she remembered the "boy." She imagined him

there, sleepwalking under the grass in the courtyard beside the orange tree,

a handful of wet earth in his mouth. She seemed to see him in his clay

depths, digging upward with his nails, his teeth, fleeing the cold that bit into

his back, looking for the exit into the courtyard through that small tunnel

where they had placed him along with the snails. In winter she would hear

him weeping with his tiny sob, mud-covered, drenched with rain. She

imagined him intact. Just as they had left him five years before in that water-

filled hole. She couldn't think of him as having decomposed. On the contrary,

he was probably most handsome sailing along in that thick water as on a

voyage with no escape. Or she saw him alive but frightened, afraid of feeling

himself alone, buried in such a somber courtyard. She herself had been

against their leaving him there, under the orange tree, so close to the house.

She was afraid of him. She knew that on nights when insomnia hounded her

he would sense it. He would come back along the wide corridors to ask her

to stay with him, ask her to defend him against those other insects, who

were eating at the roots of his violets. He would come back to have her let



him sleep beside her as he did when he was alive. She was afraid of feeling

him beside her again after he had leaped over the wall of death. She was

afraid of stealing those hands that the "boy" would always keep closed to

warm up his little piece of ice. She wished, after she saw him turned into

cement, like the statue of fear fallen in the mud, she wished that they wouldtake him far away so that she wouldn't remember him at night. And yet they

had left him there, where he was imperturbable now, wretched, feeding his

blood with the mud of earthworms. And she had to resign herself to seeing

him return from the depths of his shadows. Because always, invariably, when

she lay awake she began to think about the "boy," who must be calling her

from his piece of earth to help him flee that absurd death.

But now, in her new life, temporal and spaceless, she was more tranquil. She

knew that outside her world there, everything would keep going on with the

same rhythm as before; that her room would still be sunken in early-morning

darkness, and her things, her furniture, her thirteen favorite books, all in

place. And that on her unoccupied bed, the body aroma that filled the void of

what had been a whole woman was only now beginning to evaporate. But

how could "that" happen? How could she, after being a beautiful woman, her

blood peopled by insects, pursued by the fear of the total night, have the

immense, wakeful nightmare now of entering a strange, unknown worldwhere all dimensions had been eliminated? She remembered. That night--the

night of her passage--had been colder than usual and she was alone in the

house, martyrized by insomnia. No one disturbed the silence, and the smell

that came from the garden was a smell of fear. Sweat broke out on her body

as if the blood in her arteries were pouring out its cargo of insects. She

wanted someone to pass by on the street, someone who would shout, would

shatter that halted atmosphere. For something to move in nature, for the

earth to move around the sun again. But it was useless.

There was no waking up even for those imbecilic men who had fallen asleep

under her ear, inside the pillow. She, too, was motionless. The walls gave off

a strong smell of fresh paint, that thick, grand smell that you don't smell with

your nose but with your stomach. And on the table the single clock, pounding



on the silence with its mortal machinery. "Time . . . oh, time!" she sighed,

remembering death. And there in the courtyard, under the orange tree, the

"boy" was still weeping with his tiny sob from the other world.

She took refuge in all her beliefs. Why didn't it dawn right then and there or

why didn't she die once and for all? She had never thought that beauty would

cost her so many sacrifices. At that moment--as usual--it still pained her on

top of her fear. And underneath her fear those implacable insects were still

martyrizing her. Death had squeezed her into life like a spider, biting her in a

rage, ready to make her succumb. But the final moment was taking its time.

Her hands, those hands that men squeezed like imbeciles with manifest

animal nervousness, were motionless, paralyzed by fear, by that irrational

terror that came from within, with no motive, just from knowing that she was

abandoned in that ancient house. She tried to react and couldn't. Fear had

absorbed her completely and remained there, fixed, tenacious, almost

corporeal, as if it were some invisible person who had made up his mind not

to leave her room. And the most upsetting part was that the fear had no

justification at all, that it was a unique fear, without any reason, a fear just

because.

The saliva had grown thick on her tongue. That hard gum that stuck to her

palate and flowed because she was unable to contain it was bothersome

between her teeth. It was a desire that was quite different from thirst. A

superior desire that she was feeling for the first time in her life. For a

moment she forgot about her beauty, her insomnia, and her irrational fear.

She didn't recognize herself. For an instant she thought that the microbes

had left her body. She felt that they'd come out stuck to her saliva. Yes, that

was all very fine. It was fine that the insects no longer occupied her and that

she could sleep now, but she had to find a way to dissolve that resin that

dulled her tongue. If she could only get to the pantry and . . . But what was

she thinking about? She gave a start of surprise. She'd never felt "that

desire." The urgency of the acidity had debilitated her, rendering useless the

discipline that she had faithfully followed for so many years ever since the

day they had buried the "boy." It was foolish, but she felt revulsion about



eating an orange. She knew that the "boy" had climbed up to the orange

blossoms and that the fruit of next autumn would be swollen with his flesh,

cooled by the coolness of his death. No. She couldn't eat them. She knew

that under every orange tree in the world there was a boy buried, sweetening

the fruit with the lime of his bones. Nevertheless, she had to eat an orangenow. It was the only thing for that gum that was smothering her. It was the

foolishness to think that the "boy" was inside a fruit. She would take

advantage of that moment in which beauty had stopped paining her to get to

the pantry. But wasn't that strange? It was the first time in her life that she'd

felt a real urge to eat an orange. She became happy, happy. Oh, what

pleasure! Eating an orange. She didn't know why, but she'd never had such a

demanding desire. She would get up, happy to be a normal woman again,

singing merrily until she got to the pantry, singing merrily like a new woman,

newborn. She would,even get to the courtyard and . . .

Her memory was suddenly cut off. She remembered that she had tried to get

up and that she was no longer in her bed, that her body had disappeared, that

her thirteen favorite books were no longer there, that she was no longer she,

now that she was bodiless, floating, drifting over an absolute nothingness,

changed into an amorphous dot, tiny, lacking direction. She was unable to

pinpoint what had happened. She was confused. She just had the sensationthat someone had pushed her into space from the top of a precipice. She felt

changed into an abstract, imaginary being. She felt changed into an in

corporeal woman, something like her suddenly having entered that high and

unknown world of pure spirits.

She was afraid again. But it was a different fear from what she had felt a

moment before. It was no longer the fear of the "boy" 's weeping. It was a

terror of the strange, of what was mysterious and unknown in her new world.

And to think that all of it had happened so innocently, with so much naivete

on her part. What would she tell her mother when she told her what had

happened when she got home? She began to think about how alarmed the

neighbors would be when they opened the door to her bedroom and

discovered that the bed was empty, that the locks had not been touched,



that no one had been able to enter or to leave, and that, nonetheless, she

wasn't there. She imagined her mother's desperate movements as she

searched through the room, conjecturing, wondering "what could have

become of that girl?" The scene was clear to her. The neighbors would arrive

and begin to weave comments together--some of them malicious--concerningher disappearance. Each would think according to his own and particular

way of thinking. Each would try to offer the most logical explanation, the

most acceptable, at least, while her mother would run along all the corridors

in the big house, desperate, calling her by name.

And there she would be. She would contemplate the moment, detail by detail,

from a corner, from the ceiling, from the chinks in the wall, from anywhere;

from the best angle, shielded by her bodiless state, in her spacelessness. It

bothered her, thinking about it. Now she realized her mistake. She wouldn't

be able to give any explanation, clear anything up, console anybody. No

living being could be informed of her transformation. Now--perhaps the only

time that she needed them--she wouldn't have a mouth, arms, so that

everybody could know that she was there, in her corner, separated from the

three-dimensional world by an unbridgeable distance. In her new life she was

isolated, completely prevented from grasping emotions. But at every moment

something was vibrating in her, a shudder that ran through her,overwhelming her, making her aware of that other physical universe that

moved outside her world. She couldn't hear, she couldn't see, but she knew

about that sound and that sight. And there, in the heights of her superior

world, she began to know that an environment of anguish surrounded her.

Just a moment before--according to our temporal world-she had made the

passage, so that only now was she beginning to know the peculiarities, the

characteristics, of her new world. Around her an absolute, radical darkness

spun. How long would that darkness last? Would she have to get used to it

for eternity? Her anguish grew from her concentration as she saw herself

sunken in that thick impenetrable fog: could she be in limbo? She shuddered.

She remembered everything she had heard about limbo. If she really was

there, floating beside her were other pure spirits, those of children who had



died without baptism, who had been dying for a thousand years. In the

darkness she tried to find next to her those beings who must have been

much purer, ever so much simpler, than she. Completely isolated from the

physical world, condemned to a sleepwalking and eternal life. Maybe the

"boy" was there looking for an exit that would lead him to his body.

But no. Why should she be in limbo? Had she died, perhaps? No. It was

simply a change in state, a normal passage from the physical world to an

easier, uncomplicated world, where all dimensions had been eliminated.

Now she would not have to bear those subterranean insects. Her beauty had

collapsed on her. Now, in that elemental situation, she could be happy.

Although--oh!--not completely happy, because now her greatest desire, the

desire to eat an orange, had become impossible. It was the only thing that

might have caused her still to want to be in her first life. To be able to satisfy

the urgency of the acidity that still persisted after the passage. She tried to

orient herself so as to reach the pantry and feel, if nothing else, the cool and

sour company of the oranges. It was then that she discovered a new

characteristic of her world: she was everywhere in the house, in the

courtyard, on the roof, even in the "boy" 's orange tree. She was in the whole

physical world there beyond. And yet she was nowhere. She became upset

again. She had lost control over herself. Now she was under a superior will,

she was a useless being, absurd, good for nothing. Without knowing why, she

began to feel sad. She almost began to feel nostalgia for her beauty: for the

beauty that had foolishly ruined her.

But one supreme idea reanimated her. Hadn't she heard, perhaps, that pure

spirits can penetrate any body at will? After all, what harm was there in

trying? She attempted to remember what inhabitant of the house could be

put to the proof. If she could fulfill her aim she would be satisfied: she could

eat the orange. She remembered. At that time the servants were usually not

there. Her mother still hadn't arrived. But the need to eat an orange, joined

now to the curiosity of seeing herself incarnate in a body different from her



own, obliged her to act at once. And yet there was no one there in whom she

could incarnate herself. It was a desolating bit of reason: there was nobody

in the house. She would have to live eternally isolated from the outside

world, in her undimensional world, unable to eat the first orange. And all

because of a foolish thing. It would have been better to go on bearing up for a few more years under that hostile beauty and not wipe herself out forever,

making herself useless, like a conquered beast. But it was too late.

She was going to withdraw, disappointed, into a distant region of the

universe, to a place where she could forget all her earthly desires. But

something made her suddenly hold back. The promise of a better future had

opened up in her unknown region. Yes, there was someone in the house in

whom she could reincarnate herself: the cat! Then she hesitated. It was

difficult to resign herself to live inside an animal. She would have soft, white

fur, and a great energy for a leap would probably be concentrated in her

muscles. And she would feel her eyes glow in the dark like two green coals.

And she would have white, sharp teeth to smile at her mother from her feline

heart with a broad and good animal smile. But no! It couldn't be. She

imagined herself quickly inside the body of the cat, running through the

corridors of the house once more, managing four uncomfortable legs, and

that tail would move on its own, without rhythm, alien to her will. What wouldlife look like through those green and luminous eyes? At night she would go

to mew at the sky so that it would not pour its moonlit cement down on the

face of the "boy," who would be on his back drinking in the dew. Maybe in her

status as a cat she would also feel fear. And maybe in the end, she would be

unable to eat the orange with that carnivorous mouth. A coldness that came

from right then and there, born of the very roots of her spirit quivered in her

memory. No. It was impossible to incarnate herself in the cat. She was afraid

of one day feeling in her palate in her throat in all her quadruped organism,

the irrevocable desire to eat a mouse. Probably when her spirit began to

inhabit the cat s body she would no longer feel any desire to eat an orange

but the repugnant and urgent desire to eat a mouse. She shuddered on

thinking about it, caught between her teeth after the chase. She felt it

struggling in its last attempts at escape, trying to free itself to get back to its



hole again. No. Anything but that. It was preferable to stay there for eternity

in that distant and mysterious world of pure spirits.

But it was difficult to resign herself to live forgotten forever. Why did she

have to feel the desire to eat a mouse? Who would rule in that synthesis of

woman and cat? Would the primitive animal instinct of the body rule, or the

pure will of the woman? The answer was crystal clear. There was no reason

to be afraid. She would incarnate herself in the cat and would eat her desired

orange. Besides, she would be a strange being, a cat with the intelligence of

a beautiful woman. She would be the center of all attention. . . . It was then,

for the first time, that she understood that above all her virtues what was in

command was the vanity of a metaphysical woman.

Like an insect on the alert which raises its antennae, she put her energy to

work throughout the house in search of the cat. It must still be on top of the

stove at that time, dreaming that it would wake up with a sprig of heliotrope

between its teeth. But it wasn't there. She looked for it again, but she could

no longer find the stove. The kitchen wasn't the same. The corners of the

house were strange to her; they were no longer those dark corners full of

cobwebs. The cat was nowhere to be found. She looked on the roof, in the

trees, in the drains, under the bed, in the pantry. She found everything

confused. Where she expected to find the portraits of her ancestors again,

she found only a bottle of arsenic. From there on she found arsenic all

through the house, but the cat had disappeared. The house was no longer the

same as before. What had happened to her things? Why were her thirteen

favorite books now covered with a thick coat of arsenic? She remembered

the orange tree in the courtyard. She looked for it, and tried to find the "boy"

again in his pit of water. But the orange tree wasn't in its place and the "boy"

was nothing now but a handful of arsenic mixed with ashes underneath a

heavy concrete platform. Now she really was going to sleep. Everything was

different. And the house had a strong smell of arsenic that beat on her

nostrils as if from the depths of a pharmacy.



Only then did she understand that three thousand years had passed since the

day she had had a desire to eat the first orange.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that

Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea,

because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it

was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky

were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March

nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten

shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back

to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it

was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go

very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in

the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by

his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who

was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the

courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was

dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald

skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched

great-grandfather took away and sense of grandeur he might have had. Hishuge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the

mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very

soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they

dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a

strong sailor's voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of



the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway

from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a

neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and

all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

"He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the

child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down."

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was

held captive in Pelayo's house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor

woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a

spiritual conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo

watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff's

club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him

up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when

the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time

afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then

they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh

water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high

seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn,

they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun

with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat

through the openings in the wire as if weren't a supernatural creature but a

circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o'clock, alarmed at the strange

news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already

arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the



captive's future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named

mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to

the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped

that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged

wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, beforebecoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he

reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so

that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a

huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner

drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast

leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of

the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his

dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good

morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an

imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or

know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was

much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side

of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been

mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the

proud dignity of angels. The he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief

sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He

reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnivaltricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the

essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an

airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless,

he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his

primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get

the final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel

spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle

of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to

disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her



spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the

idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the

angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a

flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any

attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather,

those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in

search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her

heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep

because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at

night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less

serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth

tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a

week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims

waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent

his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the

hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed

along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which,

according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food

prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the

papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out

whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that

in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue

seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens

pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his

wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts

with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to

rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in



arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers,

for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead.

He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his

eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a

whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did notseem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not

been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy

him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a her

taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd's frivolity with formulas of

maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the

nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency.

They spent their time finding out in the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect

had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head

of a pin, or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager

letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event

had not put and end to the priest's tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival

attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who

had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The

admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel,

but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her

absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever

doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram

and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however,

was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she

recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had

sneaked out of her parents' house to go to a dance, and while she was

coming back through the woods after having danced all night without



permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in tow and through the crack

came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only

nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss

into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with

such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of ahaughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few

miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the

blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the

paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper

whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were

more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel's reputation when the

woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely.

That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and

Pelayo's courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had

rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they

saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high

netting so that crabs wouldn't get in during the winter, and with iron bars on

the windows so that angels wouldn't get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit

warren close to town and have up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda

bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent

silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times.

The chicken coop was the only thing that didn't receive any attention. If they

washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so

often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap

stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new

house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they werecareful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to

lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his

second teeth he'd gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires

were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the

other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the



patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the

chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn't

resist the temptation to listen to the angel's heart, and he found so much

whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed

impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was thelogic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human

organism that he couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and

rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging

himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him

out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen.

He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think

that he'd be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the

house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful

living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian

eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he

had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket

over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and

only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was

delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the

few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not

even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with

dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved

with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the

farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the

beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings,

the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of

decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he



was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear

the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning

Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that

seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to

the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were soclumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he

was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that

slipped on the light and couldn't get a grip on the air. But he did manage to

gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when

she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way

with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when

she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no

longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an

annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

The Solitude of Latin America

Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first

voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southernlands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a

venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on

their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their

mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like

spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and

ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse.

He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted

with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror

of his own image.



This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our

present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our

reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others.

Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps

for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in

a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of

whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many

unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each

loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the

ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in

colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised

on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One

founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a

German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic

railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was

feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was

scarce in the region, but of gold.

Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reachof madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of

Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-

called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen

years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the

presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of

medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of

El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage

massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had

streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The

statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of

Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse

of second-hand sculptures.



Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of

our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans

of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with

ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless

realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blursinto legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president,

entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two

suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of

another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had

revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen

military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in

God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime,

twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than

have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression

number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could

account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while

pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the

whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent

to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to

change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women

have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost

their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America:Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United

States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred

thousand violent deaths in four years.

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality -

that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half

million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized

country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil

war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes.

The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of

Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.



I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary

expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of

Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines

each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of

insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving andnostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and

beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of

that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our

crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives

believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is

understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in

the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves

without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on

measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that

the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own

identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The

interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to

make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable

Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past.If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city

wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in

a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored

it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their

mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune,

as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance,

twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and

devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of

uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three

years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted

Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland,



could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity

with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not

translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that

assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the

world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will

of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence

and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the

navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our

Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural

remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so

mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think

that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own

countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for

dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history

are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a

conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many

European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-

timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were

impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two greatmasters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with

life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal

wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent

advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every

year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient

number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York

sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources -

including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most

prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction

such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings



that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that

have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept

the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his,

if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize

thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of

humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this

awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human

time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to

believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite

utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to

decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be

possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude

will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

A Primer of Existentialism

For some years, I fought the word by irritably looking the other way

whenever I stumbled across it, hoping that like Dadaism and some of the

other “isms” of the French avant garde it would go away if I ignored it. But

existentialism was apparently more than the picture it evoked of uncombed

beards, smoky basement cafes, and French beatniks regaling one another

between sips of absinthe with brilliant variations on the theme of despair. It

turned out to be of major importance to literature and the arts, to philosophy

and theology, and of increasing importance to the social sciences. To learn

more about it, I read several of the self-styled introductions to the subject

with the baffled sensation of a man who reads a critical introduction to a

novel only to find that he must read the novel before he can understand the

introduction. Therefore, I should like to provide here something most

discussions of existentialism take for granted, a simple statement of its

basic characteristics. This is a reckless thing to do because there are



several kinds of existentialism and what one says of one kind may not be

true of another, but there is an area of agreement, and it is this common

ground that I should like to set forth here. We should not run into trouble so

long as we understand from the outset that the six major themes outlined

below will apply in varying degrees to particular existentialists. A reader should be able to go from here to the existentialists themselves, to the more

specialized critiques of them, or be able to recognize an existentialist theme

or coloration in literature when he sees it.

A word about the kinds of existentialism. Like transcendentalism of the

last century, there are almost as many varieties of this ism as there are

individual writers to whom the word is applied (not all of them claim it). But

without being facetious we might group them into two main kinds, the

ungodly and the godly. To take the ungodly or atheistic first, we would list

as the chief spokesmen, among many others, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert

Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. Several of this important group of French

writers had rigorous and significant experience in the French resistance

during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Out of the despair

which came with the collapse of their nation during those terrible years they

found unexpected strength in the single indomitable human spirit which even

under severe torture could maintain the spirit of resistance, theunextinguishable ability to say “no.” From this irrecucible core in the human

spirit, they erected after the war a philosophy which was a twentieth-century

variation of the philosophy of Descartes. But instead of saying “I think,

therefore I am,” they said “I can say no, therefore I exist.” As we shall

presently see, the use of the word “exist” is of prime significance. This

group is chiefly responsible for giving existentialism its status in the popular

mind as a literary-philosophical cult.

Of the godly or theistic existentialists we should mention first mid-

nineteenth-century Danish writer, Soren Kierkegaard; two contemporary

French Roman Catholics, Gabriel Marcel and Jacques Maritain; two

Protestant theologians, Paul Tillich and Nicholas Berdyaev; and Martin

Buber, an important contemporary Jewish theologian. Taken together, their



writings constitute one of the most significant developments in modern

theology. Behind both groups of existentialists stand other important

figures, chiefly philosophers, who exert powerful influence upon the

movement-Elaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin

Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, among others. Several literary figures, notablyTolstoy and Dostoevsky, are frequently cited because existentialist attitudes

and themes are prominent in their writings. The eclectic nature of this

movement should already be sufficiently clear and the danger of applying too

rigidly to any particular figure the general characteristics of the movement

which I now make bold to describe.

I. Existence before Essence

Existentialism gets its name from an insistence that human life is

understandable only in terms of an individual man’s existence, his particular

experience of life. It says that a man lives (has existence) rather than is (has

being or essence), and that every man’s experience is unique, radically

different from everyone else’s and can be understood truly only in terms of

his involvement in life or commitment to it. It strenuously shuns the view

which assumes an ideal of man or Mankind, a universal of human nature of

which each man is only one example. It eschews the question of Greek

philosophy, “What is mankind?” which suggests that man can be defined if heis ranged in his proper place in the order of nature; it asks instead the

question of Job and St. Augustine, “Who am I?” with its suggestion of the

uniqueness and mystery of each human life and its emphasis upon the

subjective or impersonal. From the outside a man appears to be just another

natural creature; from the inside he is an entire universe, the center of



infinity. The existentialist insists upon this latter radically subjective view,

and from this grows much of the rest of existentialism.

II. Reason is impotent to deal with the depths of human life.

There are two parts to this proposition-first, that human reason is relatively

weak and imperfect, and second, that there are dark places in human life

which are “non-reason” and to which reason scarcely penetrates. Since

Plato, Western civilization has usually assumed a separation of reason from

the rest of the human psyche, and has glorified reason as suited to command

the rational part. The classical statement of this separation appears in the

Phaedrus, where Plato describes the psyche in the myth of the chariot which

is drawn by the white steeds of the emotions and the black unruly steeds of

the appetites. The driver of the chariot is he who holds the reins which

control the horses and the whip to subdue the surging black steeds of

passion. Only the driver, the rational nature, is given human form; the rest of

the psyche, the nonrational part, is given a lower, animal form. “This

separation and exaltation of reason is carried further in the allegory of the

cave in The Republic. You recall the somber picture of human life with which

the story begins: men are chained in the dark in a cave, with their backs to

flickering firelight, able to see only confused echoes of sounds. One of the

men, breaking free from his chains, is able to turn and look upon the objectsthemselves and the light which casts the shadows; even, at last, he is able

to work his way entirely out of the cave into the sunlight beyond. Allthis he

is able to do through his reason; he escapes from the bondage of error, from

time and change, from death itself, into the realm of changeless eternal

ideas or Truth, and the lower nature which had chained him in darkness is

left behind.



Existentialists in our time, and this is one of its most important

characteristics, insist upon reuniting the “lower” or irrational parts of the

psyche with the “higher.” It insists that man must be taken in his wholeness

and not in some divided state, that whole man contains not only intellect but

also anxiety, guilt, and the will to power which modify and sometimes

overwhelm reason. A man seen in this light is fundamentally ambiguous, if

not mysterious, full of contradictions and tensions which cannot be dissolved

simply by taking thought. “Human life,” said Berdyaev, “is permeated by

underground streams.” One is reminded of D.H. Lawrence’s outburst against

Franklin and his rational attempt to achieve moral perfection; “The

Perfectability of Man!.... The perfectability of which man? I am many men.

Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanicalcontrivance…. It’s a queer thing is a man’s soul. It is the whole of him.

Which means it is the unknown as well as the known…. The soul of man is a

dark vast forest, with wild life in it.” The emphasis in existentialism is not on

ideas but upon the thinker who has the idea. It accepts not only his power of

thought, but his contingency and fallibility, his frailty, his body, blood, and

bones, and above all his death. Kierkegaard emphasized the distinction

between subjective truth (what a person is) and objective truth (what the

person knows), and said that we encounter the true self not in the

detachment of thought but in the involvement and agony of choice and in the

pathos of commitment to our choice. This distrust of rational systems helps

to explain why many existential writers in their own expression are

paradoxical or prophetic or Gnostic, why their works often belong more to

literature than to philosophy.

III. Alienation or Estrangement



One major result of the dissociation of reason from the rest of the psyche has

been the growth of science, which has become one of the hallmarks of

Western civilization, and an ever-increasing rational ordering of men in

society. As the existentialists view them, the main forces of history since

the Renaissance have progressively separated man from concrete earthly

existence, have forced him to live at ever higher levels of abstraction, have

collectivized individual man out of existence, have driven God from the

heavens, or what is the same thing, from the hearts of men. They are

convinced that modern man lives in a fourfold condition of alienation from

God, from nature, from other men, from his own true self.

The estrangement from God is most shockingly expressed by Nietzsche’s

anguished cry, “God is dead,” a cry which has continuously echoes though

the writings of the existentialists, particularly the French. This theme of

spiritual barenness is a commonplace in literature of this century from Eliot’s

“Hollow Man” to the novels of Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It

often appears in writers not commonly associated with the existentialists as

in this remarkable passage from “a Story-Teller’s Story,” where Sherwood

Anderson describes his own awakening to his spiritual emptiness. He tells of

walking alone late at night along a moonlit road when,

“I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming, a ridiculous desire to abase

myself before something not human and so stepping into the moonlit road, I

knelt in the dust, having no God, the gods having been taken from me by the

life about me, as a personal God has been taken from all modern men by a

force within that man himself does not understand but that is called the

intellect, I kept smiling at the figure I cut in my open eyes as I knelt in the

road….



There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself

that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the dust in

silence and no words came to my lips.”

In another passage Anderson wondered if the giving of life itself by an entire

generation to mechanical things was not really making all men important, if

the desire for a greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, was not

a sign of growing impotence. He felt that Puritanism and the industrialism

which was its offspring had sterilized modern life, and proposed that man

return to a healthful animal vigor by renewed contact with simple things of

the earth, among them untrammeled sexual expression,. One is reminded of

the unkempt and delectable raffishness of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row or of

D.H. Lawrence’s quasi-religious doctrine of sex, “blood consciousness” and

the “divine otherness” of animal existence.

Man’s estrangement from nature has been a major theme in literature at

least since Rousseau and the Romantic movement, and can hardly be said to

be the property of existentialists. But this group nevertheless adds its own

insistence that one of modern man’s most urgent dangers is that he builds

ever higher the brick and steel walls of technology which shut him away from

a health-giving life according to “nature.” Their treatment of this theme is

most commonly expressed as part of a broader insistence that modern man

needs to shun abstraction and return to “concreteness” or “wholeness.”

A third estrangement has occurred at the social level and its sign is a

growing dismay at man’s helplessness before the great machinelike colossus

of industrialized society. This is another major theme of Western literature,

and here again, though they hardly discovered the danger or began the

protest, that existentialists in our time renew the protest against any pattern

or force which would stifle the unique and spontaneous in individual life. The



crowding of man into cities, the subdivision of labor which submerges the

man in his economic function, the burgeoning of centralized government, the

growth of advertising, propaganda, and mass media of entertainment and

communication—all the things which force men into Riesman’s “Lonely

Crowd”—these same things drive men asunder by destroying their individuality and making them live on the surface of life, content to deal with

things rather than people. “Exteriorization,” says Berdyaev, “is the source of

slavery, whereas freedom is interiorization. Slavery always indicates

alienation, the ejection of human nature onto the external.” This kind of

alienation is exemplified by Zero, in Elmer Rice’s play “The Adding Machine.”

Zero’s twenty-five years as a bookkeeper in a department store have dried

up his humanity, making him incapable of love, of friendship, of any deeply

felt, freely expressed emotion. Such estrangement is often given as the

reason for man’s inhumanity to man, the explanation for injustice in modern

society. In Camus’ short novel, aptly called The Stranger, a young man is

convicted by a court of murder. This is a homicide which he has actually

committed under extenuating circumstances. But the court never listens to

any of the relevant evidence, seems never to hear anything that pertains to

the crime itself, it convicts the young man on wholly irrelevant grounds—

because he had behaved in an unconventional way at his mother’s funeral

the day before the homicide. In this book one feels the same dream-like

distortion of reality as in the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland, a suffocationsense of being enclosed by events which are irrational or absurd but also

inexorable. Most disturbing of all is the young man’s aloneness, the

impermeable membrane of estrangement which surrounds him and prevents

anyone else from penetrating to his experience of life or sympathizing with it.

The fourth kind of alienation, man’s estrangement from his own true self,

especially as his nature is distorted by an exaltation of reason, is another

theme having an extensive history as a major part of the Romantic revolt. Of

the many writers who trust the theme, Hawthorne comes particularly close

to the emphasis of contemporary existentialists. His Ethan Brand, Dr.

Rappacine, and Roger Chillingworth are a recurrent figure who represents

the dislocation in human nature which results when an overdeveloped or

misapplied intellect severs the “magnetic chain of human sympathy.”



Hawthorne is thoroughly existential in his concern for the sanctity of the

individual soul, as well as in his preoccupation with sin and the dark side of

human nature, which must be seen in part as his attempt to build back some

fullness to the flattened image of man bequeathed to him by the

Enlightenment. Whitman was trying to do this when he added flesh and boneand a sexual nature to the spiritualized image of man he inherited from

Emerson, though his image remains diffused and attenuated by the same

cosmic optimism. Many of the nineteenth-century depictions of man

represent him as a figure of power or of potential power, sometimes as

daimonic, like Melville’s Ahab, but after World War I the power is gone; man

is not merely distorted or truncated, he is hollow, powerless, faceless. At

the time when his command over natural forces seems to be unlimited, man

is pictured as weak, ridden with nameless dread. And this brings us to

another of the major themes of existentialism.

IV. “Fear and Trembling,” Anxiety

At Stockholm when he accepted the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner said that

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained

by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit.

There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” The optimistic vision

of the Enlightenment which saw man, through reason and its extensions inscience, conquering all nature and solving all social and political problems in

a continuous upward spiral of Progress, cracked open like a melon the rock

of World War I. The theories which held such high hopes died in that

sickening and unimaginable butchery. Here was a concrete fact of human

nature and society which the theories could not contain. The Great

Depression and World War II deepened the sense of dismay which the loss of



these ideals brought, but only with the atomic bomb did this become an

unbearable terror, a threat of instant annihilation which confronted all men,

even those most insulated by the thick crust of material goods and services.

Now the most unthinking person could sense that each advance in

mechanical technique carried not only a chromium and plush promise of comfort but a threat as well.

Sartre. Following Kierkegaard, speaks of another kind of anxiety which

oppresses modern man—“the anguish of Abraham”—the necessity which is

laid upon him to make moral choices on his own responsibility. A military

officer in wartime knows the agony of choice which forces him to sacrifice

part of his army to preserve the rest, as does a man in high political office,

who must make decisions affecting the lives of millions. The existentialists

claim that each of us must make moreal decisions in our own lives which

involve the anguish. Kierkegaard finds that this necessity is one thing which

makes each life unique, which makes it impossible to speculate or generalize

about human life, because each man’s case is irretrievably his own,

something in which he is personally and passionately involved. His book

Fear and Trembling is an elaborate and fascinating commentary on the Old

Testament story of Abraham, who was commanded by God to sacrifice his

beloved son Isaac. Abraham thus becomes the emblem of man who mustmake a harrowing choice, in this case between love for his son and love for

God, between the universal moral law which says categorically, “thou shalt

not kill,” and the unique inner demand of his religious faith. Abraham’s

decision, which is to violate the abstract and collective moral law, has to be

made not in arrogance but in fear and trembling, one of the inferences being

that sometimes one must make an exception to the general law because he

is (existentially) an exception, a concrete being whose existence can never

be completely subsumed under any universal.

V. The Encounter with Nothingness



For the man alienated from God, from nature, from his fellow man and from

himself, what is left at last but Nothingness? The testimony of the

existentialists is that this is where modern man now finds himself, not on the

highway of upward Progress toward a radiant Utopia but on the brink of a

catastrophic precipice, below which yawns the absolute void, and

uncompromising black Nothingness. In one sense this is Eliot’s Wasteland

inhabited by his Hollow Man, who is:

Shape without form, shade without color

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.

This is what moves E.A. Robinson’s Richard Cory, the man who is everything

that might make us wish that we were in his place, to go home one calmsummer night and put a bullet through his head.

One of the most convincing statements of the encounter with

Nothingness is made by Leo Tolstoy in “My Confession.” He tells how in

good health, in the prime of his life, when he had everything that a man could

desire—wealth, fame, aristocratic social position, a beautiful wife and

children, a brilliant mind and great artistic talent in the height of their

powers, he nevertheless was seized with growing uneasiness, a nameless

discontent which he could not shake or alleviate. His experience was like

that of a man who falls sick, with symptoms which he disregards as

insignificant; but the symptoms return again until they merge in a continuous

suffering. And the patient suddenly is confronted with the overwhelming fact

that what he took for mere indisposition is more important to him than



anything else on earth, that it is death! “I felt the ground on which I stood

was crumbling, that there was nothing for me to stand on, that what I had

been living for was nothing, that I had no reason for living…. To stop was

impossible, to go back was impossible; and it was impossible to shut my

eyes so as to see that there was nothing before me but suffering and actualdeath, absolute annihilation.” This is the “Sickness Unto Death” of

Kierkegaard, the despair in which one wishes to die but cannot.

Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” gives an

unforgettable expression of this theme. At the end of the story, the old

waiter climbs in bed late at night saying to himself, “What did he fear? It

was not fear or dread. It was a nothing which he knew too well. It was all a

nothing and a man was nothing too…. Nada Y pues nada, y nada y pues

nada.” And then because he has experienced the death of God he goes on to

recite the Lord’s Prayer in blasphemous despair: “Our Nothing who art in

Nothing, nothing be thy nothing….” And then the Ave Maria, “Hail Nothing,

full of nothing….” This is stark, even for Hemingway, but the old waiter does

no more than name the void felt by most people in the early Hemingway

novels, a hunger they seek to assuage with alcohol, sex, and violence in an

aimless progress from bar to bed to bull-ring. It goes without saying that

much of the despair and pessimism in other contemporary authors springs

from a similar sense of the void in modern life.

VI. Freedom

Sooner or later, as a theme that includes all the others, the existentialist

writings bear upon freedom. The themes we have outlined above describe

either some loss of man’s freedom or some threat to it, and all existentialists

of whatever sort are concerned to enlarge the range of human freedom.



For the avowed atheists like Sartre, freedom means human autonomy. In

a purposeless universe man is condemned to freedom because he is the only

creature who is “self-surpassing,” who can become something other than he

is. Precisely because there is no God to give purpose to the universe, each

man must accept individual responsibility for his own becoming, a burden

made heavier by the fact that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men

“the image of man as he ought to be.” A man is the sum total of the acts that

make up his life—no more, no less—and though the coward has made himself

cowardly, it is always possible for him to change and make himself heroic.

In Sartre’s novel The Age of Reason, one of the least likable of the

characters, almost overwhelmed by despair and self-disgust at his

homosexual tendencies, is on the point of solving his problem my mutilatinghimself with a razor, when in an effort of will he throws the instrument down,

and we are given to understand that from this moment he will have mastery

over his aberrant drive. Thus in the daily course of ordinary life men must

shape their becoming in Sartre’s world.

The religious existentialists interpret man’s freedom differently. They

use much of the same language as Sartre, develop the same themes

concerning the predicament of man, but always include God as a radical

factor. They stress the man of faith rather than the man of will. They

interpret man’s existential condition as a state of alienation from his

essential nature which is God-like, the problem of his life being to heal the

chasm between the two, that is, to find salvation. The mystery and

ambiguity of man’s existence they attribute to his being the intersection of

two realms. “Man bears within himself,” writes Berdyaev, “The image which

is both the image of man and the image of God, and is the image of man as

far as the image of God is actualized.” Tillich describes salvation as “the actin which the cleavage between the essential being and the existential

situation is overcome.” Freedom here, as for Sartre, involves an acceptance

of responsibility for choice and a commitment to one’s choice. This is the

meaning of faith, a faith like Abraham’s, the commitment which is an



agonizing sacrifice of one’s own desire and will and dearest treasure to God’s

will.

A final word. Just as one should not expect to find in a particular writer

all of the characteristics of existentialism as we have described them, he

should also be aware that some of the most striking expressions of

existentialism in literature and the arts come to us by indirection, often

through symbols or through innovations in conventional form. Take the

preoccupation of contemporary writers with time. In The Sound and the

Fury, Faulkner both collapses and expands normal clock time, or by

juxtapositions of past and present blurs time into a single amorphous pool.

He does this by using various forms of “stream of consciousness” or other

techniques which see like in terms of unique, subjective experience—that is,

existentially. The conventional view of externalized life, a rational orderly

progression cut into uniform segments by the hands of a clock, he rejects in

favor of a view which sees life as opaque, ambiguous, and irrational—that is,

as the existentialist sees it. Graham Greene does something like this in The

Power and the Glory. He creates a scene isolated in time and cut off from

the rest of the world, steamy and suffocating as if a bell jar had been placed

over it. Through this atmosphere fetid with impending death and human

suffering, stumbles the whiskey priest, lonely and confused, pursued by apolice lieutenant who has experienced the void and the death of God.

Such expressions in literature do not mean necessarily that the authors

are conscious existentialist theorizers, or even that they know the writings

of such theorizers. Faulkner may never have read Heidegger—or St.

Augustine—both of whom attempt to demonstrate that time is more within a

man and subject to his unique experience of it than it is outside him. But it

is legitimate to call Faulkner’s views of time and life “existential” in this

novel because in recent years existentialist theorizers have given such views

a local habitation and a name. One of the attractions, and one of the

dangers, of existential themes is that they become like Sir Thomas Browne’s

quincounx: once one begins to look for them, he sees them everywhere. But

if one applies restraint and discrimination, he will find that they illuminate



much of contemporary literature and sometimes the literature of the past as

well.

The Wall

They pushed us into a big white room and I began to blink because the light

hurt my eyes. Then I saw a table and four men behind the table, civilians,

looking over the papers. They had bunched another group of prisoners in the

back and we had to cross the whole room to join them. There were several I

knew and some others who must have been foreigners. The two in front of

me were blond with round skulls: they looked alike. I supposed they were

French. The smaller one kept hitching up his pants: nerves.

It lasted about three hours: I was dizzy and my head was empty; but the room

was well heated and I found that pleasant enough: for the past 24 hours we

hadn't stopped shivering. The guards brought the prisoners up to the table,

one after the other. The four men asked each one his name and occupation.

Most of the time they didn't go any further--or they would simply ask aquestion here and there: "Did you have anything to do with the sabotage of

munitions?" Or "Where were you the morning of the 9th and what were you

doing?" They didn't listen to the answers or at least didn't seem to. They

were quiet for a moment and then looking straight in front of them began to

write. They asked Tom if it were true he was in the International Brigade:

Tom couldn't tell them otherwise because of the papers they found in his

coat. They didn't ask Juan anything but they wrote for a long time after he

told them his name.

"My brother Jose is the anarchist," Juan said "You know he isn't here any

more. I don't belong to any party. I never had anything to do with politics."



They didn't answer. Juan went on, "I haven't done anything. I don't want to

pay for somebody else."

His lips trembled. A guard shut him up and took him away. It was my turn.

"Your name is Pablo Ibbieta?"

"Yes."

The man looked at the papers and asked me "Where's Ramon Gris?"

"I don't know."

"You hid him in your house from the 6th to the 19th."

"No."

They wrote for a minute and then the guards took me out. In the corridor Tom

and Juan were waiting between two guards. We started walking. Tom asked

one of the guards, "So?"

"So what?" the guard said.

"Was that the cross-examination or the sentence?"



"Sentence" the guard said.

"What are they going to do with us?"

The guard answered dryly, "Sentence will be read in your cell."

As a matter of fact, our cell was one of the hospital cellars. It was terrifically

cold there because of the drafts. We shivered all night and it wasn't much

better during the day. I had spent the previous five days in a cell in a

monastery, a sort of hole in the wall that must have dated from the middle

ages: since there were a lot of prisoners and not much room, they locked us

up anywhere. I didn't miss my cell; I hadn't suffered too much from the cold

but I was alone; after a long time it gets irritating. In the cellar I had

company. Juan hardly ever spoke: he was afraid and he was too young to

have anything to say. But Tom was a good talker and he knew Spanish well.

There was a bench in the cellar and four mats. When they took us back we

sat and waited in silence. After a long moment, Tom said, "We're screwed."

"l think so too," I said, "but I don't think they'll do any thing to the kid.".

"They don't have a thing against him," said Tom. "He's the brother of a

militiaman and that's all."

I looked at Juan: he didn't seem to hear. Tom went on, "You know what they

do in Saragossa? They lay the men down on the road and run over them with



trucks. A Moroccan deserter told us that. They said it was to save

ammunition."

"It doesn't save gas." I said.

I was annoyed at Tom: he shouldn't have said that.

"Then there's officers walking along the road," he went on, "supervising it all.

They stick their hands in their pockets and smoke cigarettes. You think they

finish off the guys? Hell no. They let them scream. Sometimes for an hour.The Moroccan said he damned near puked the first time."

"I don't believe they'll do that here," I said. "Unless they're really short on

ammunition."

Day was coming in through four air holes and a round opening they had made

in the ceiling on the left, and you could see the sky through it. Through this

hole, usually closed by a trap, they unloaded coal into the cellar. Just below

the hole there was a big pile of coal dust: it had been used to heat the

hospital, but since the beginning of the war the patients were evacuated and

the coal stayed there, unused; sometimes it even got rained on because they

had forgotten to close the trap.

Tom began to shiver. "Good Jesus Christ, I'm cold," he said. "Here it goesagain."

He got up and began to do exercises. At each movement his shirt opened on

his chest, white and hairy. He lay on his back, raised his legs in the air and



bicycled. I saw his great rump trembling. Tom was husky but he had too

much fat. I thought how riffle bullets or the sharp points of bayonets would

soon be sunk into this mass of tender flesh as in a lump of butter. It wouldn't

have made me feel like that if he'd been thin.

I wasn't exactly cold, but I couldn't feel my arms and shoulders any more.

Sometimes I had the impression I was missing something and began to look

around for my coat and then suddenly remembered they hadn't given me a

coat. It was rather uncomfortable. They took our clothes and gave them to

their soldiers leaving us only our shirts--and those canvas pants that hospital

patients wear in the middle of summer. After a while Tom got up and sat next

to me, breathing heavily.

"Warmer?"

"Good Christ, no. But I'm out of wind."

Around eight o'clock in the evening a major came in with two falangistas. He

had a sheet of paper in his hand. He asked the guard, "What are the names of

those three?"

"Steinbock, Ibbieta and Mirbal," the guard said.

The major put on his eyeglasses and scanned the list:"Steinbock...Steinbock...Oh yes...You are sentenced to death. You will be

shot tomorrow morning." He went on looking. "The other two as well."



"That's not possible," Juan said. "Not me." The major looked at him amazed.

"What's your name?"

"Juan Mirbal" he said.

"Well your name is there," said the major. "You're sentenced."

"I didn't do anything," Juan said.

The major shrugged his shoulders and turned to Tom and me.

"You're Basque?"

"Nobody is Basque."

He looked annoyed. "They told me there were three Basques. I'm not going to

waste my time running after them. Then naturally you don't want a priest?"

We didn't even answer.

He said, "A Belgian doctor is coming shortly. He is authorized to spend the

night with you." He made a military salute and left.

"What did I tell you," Tom said. "We get it."



"Yes, I said, "it's a rotten deal for the kid."

I said that to be decent but I didn't like the kid. His face was too thin and

fear and suffering had disfigured it, twisting all his features. Three days

before he was a smart sort of kid, not too bad; but now he looked like an old

fairy and I thought how he'd never be young again, even if they were to let

him go. It wouldn't have been too hard to have a little pity for him but pity

disgusts me, or rather it horrifies me. He hadn't said anything more but he

had turned grey; his face and hands were both grey. He sat down again and

looked at the ground with round eyes. Tom was good hearted, he wanted to

take his arm, but the kid tore himself away violently and made a face.

"Let him alone," I said in a low voice, "you can see he's going to blubber."

Tom obeyed regretfully: he would have liked to comfort the kid, it would have

passed his time and he wouldn't have been tempted to think about himself.

But it annoyed me: I'd never thought about death because I never had anyreason to, but now the reason was here and there was nothing to do but

think about it.

Tom began to talk. "So you think you've knocked guys off, do you?" he asked

me. I didn't answer. He began explaining to me that he had knocked off six

since the beginning of August; he didn't realize the situation and I could tell

he didn't want to realize it. I hadn't quite realized it myself, I wondered if it

hurt much, I thought of bullets, I imagined their burning hail through my body.

All that was beside the real question; but I was calm: we had all night to

understand. After a while Tom stopped talking and I watched him out of the

corner of my eye; I saw he too had turned grey and he looked rotten; I told

myself "Now it starts." It was almost dark, a dim glow filtered through the air

holes and the pile of coal and made a big stain beneath the spot of sky; I



could already see a star through the hole in the ceiling: the night would be

pure and icy.

The door opened and two guards came in, followed by a blonde man in a tan

uniform. He saluted us. "I am the doctor," he said. "I have authorization to

help you in these trying hours."

He had an agreeable and distinguished voice. I said, "What do you want

here?"

"I am at your disposal. I shall do all I can to make your last moments less

difficult."

"What did you come here for? There are others, the hospital's full of them."

"I was sent here," he answered with a vague look. "Ah! Would you like to

smoke?" he added hurriedly, "I have cigarettes and even cigars."

He offered us English cigarettes and puros, but we refused. I looked him in

the eyes and he seemed irritated. I said to him, "You aren't here on an errand

of mercy. Besides, I know you. I saw you with the fascists in the barracks

yard the day I was arrested."

I was going to continue, but something surprising suddenly happened to me;

the presence of this doctor no longer interested me. Generally when I'm on

somebody I don't let go. But the desire to talk left me completely; I shrugged

and turned my eyes away. A little later I raised my head; he was watching me

curiously. The guards were sitting on a mat. Pedro, the tall thin one, was



twiddling his thumbs, the other shook his head from time to time to keep

from falling asleep.

"Do you want a light?" Pedro suddenly asked the doctor. The other nodded

"Yes": I think he was about as smart as a log, but he surely wasn't bad.

Looking in his cold blue eyes it seemed to me that his only sin was lack of

imagination. Pedro went out and came back with an oil lamp which he set on

the corner of the bench. It gave a bad light but it was better than nothing:

they had left us in the dark the night before. For a long time I watched the

circle of light the lamp made on the ceiling. I was fascinated. Then suddenly

I woke up, the circle of light disappeared and I felt myself crushed under an

enormous weight. It was not the thought of death, or fear; it was nameless.

My cheeks burned and my head ached.

I shook myself and looked at my two friends. Tom had hidden his face in his

hands. I could only see the fat white nape of his neck. Little Juan was the

worst, his mouth was open and his nostrils trembled. The doctor went to him

and put his hand on his shoulder to comfort him: but his eyes stayed cold.

Then I saw the Belgian's hand drop stealthily along Juan's arm, down to the

wrist. Juan paid no attention. The Belgian took his wrist between three

fingers, distractedly, the same time drawing back a little and turning his

back to me. But I leaned backward and saw him take a watch from his

pocket and look at it for a moment, never letting go of the wrist. After a

minute he let the hand fall inert and went and leaned his back against the

wall, then, as if he suddenly remembered something very important which

had to be jotted down on the spot, he took a notebook from his pocket and

wrote a few lines. "Bastard," I thought angrily, "let him come and take my

pulse. I'll shove my fist in his rotten face."

He didn't come but I felt him watching me. I raised my head and returned his

look. Impersonally, he said to me "Doesn't it seem cold to you here?" He

looked cold, he was blue.



I'm not cold," I told him.

He never took his hard eyes off me. Suddenly I understood and my hands

went to my face: I was drenched in sweat. In this cellar, in the midst of

winter, in the midst of drafts, I was sweating. I ran my hands through my

hair, gummed together with perspiration: at the same time I saw my shirt

was damp and sticking to my skin: I had been dripping for an hour and hadn't

felt it. But that swine of a Belgian hadn't missed a thing; he had seen the

drops rolling down my cheeks and thought: this is the manifestation of an

almost pathological state of terror; and he had felt normal and proud of being

alive because he was cold. I wanted to stand up and smash his face but no

sooner had I made the slightest gesture than my rage and shame were wiped

out; I fell back on the bench with indifference.

I satisfied myself by rubbing my neck with my handkerchief because now I

felt the sweat dropping from my hair onto my neck and it was unpleasant. I

soon gave up rubbing, it was useless; my handkerchief was already soaked

and I was still sweating. My buttocks were sweating too and my damp

trousers were glued to the bench.

Suddenly Juan spoke. "You're a doctor?"

"Yes," the Belgian said.

"Does it hurt... very long?"

"Huh? When... ? Oh, no" the Belgian said paternally "Not at all. It's over

quickly." He acted as though he were calming a cash customer.





Tom began speaking in a low voice. He had to talk, without that he wouldn't

have been able no recognize himself in his own mind. I thought he was

talking to me but he wasn't looking at me. He was undoubtedly afraid to see

me as I was, grey and sweating: we were alike and worse than mirrors of

each other. He watched the Belgian, the living.

"Do you understand?" he said. "I don't understand."

I began to speak in a low voice too. I watched the Belgian. "Why? What's the

matter?"

"Something is going to happen to us than I can't understand."

There was a strange smell about Tom. It seemed to me I was more sensitive

than usual to odors. I grinned. "You'll understand in a while."

"It isn't clear," he said obstinately. "I want to be brave but first I have to

know. . . .Listen, they're going to take us into the courtyard. Good. They're

going to stand up in front of us. How many?"

"l don't know. Five or eight. Not more."

"All right. There'll be eight. Someone'll holler 'aim!' and I'll see eight rifles

looking at me. I'll think how I'd like to get inside the wall, I'll push against it

with my back. . . . with every ounce of strength I have, but the wall will stay,

like in a nightmare. I can imagine all that. If you only knew how well I can

imagine it."



"All right, all right!" I said. "I can imagine it too."

"lt must hurt like hell. You know they aim at the eyes and the mouth to

disfigure you," he added mechanically. "I can feel the wounds already. I've

had pains in my head and in my neck for the past hour. Not real pains. Worse.

This is what I'm going to feel tomorrow morning. And then what?"

I well understood what he meant but I didn't want to act as if I did. I had

pains too, pains in my body like a crowd of tiny scars. I couldn't get used to

it. But I was like him. I attached no importance to it. "After," I said. "you'll be

pushing up daisies."

He began to talk to himself: he never stopped watching the Belgian. The

Belgian didn't seem to be listening. I knew what he had come to do; he

wasn't interested in what we thought; he came to watch our bodies, bodies

dying in agony while yet alive.

"It's like a nightmare," Tom was saying. "You want to think something, you

always have the impression that it's all right, that you're going to understand

and then it slips, it escapes you and fades away. I tell myself there will be

nothing afterwards. But I don't understand what it means. Sometimes I

almost can.... and then it fades away and I start thinking about the pains

again, bullets, explosions. I'm a materialist, I swear it to you; I'm not going

crazy. But something's the matter. I see my corpse; that's not hard but I'm

the one who sees it, with my eyes. I've got to think... think that I won't see

anything anymore and the world will go on for the others. We aren't made tothink that, Pablo. Believe me: I've already stayed up a whole night waiting for

something. But this isn't the same: this will creep up behind us, Pablo, and

we won't be able to prepare for it."



"Shut up," I said, "Do you want me to call a priest?"

He didn't answer. I had already noticed he had the tendency to act like a

prophet and call me Pablo, speaking in a toneless voice. I didn't like that: but

it seems all the Irish are that way. I had the vague impression he smelled of

urine. Fundamentally, I hadn't much sympathy for Tom and I didn't see why,

under the pretext of dying together, I should have any more. It would have

been different with some others. With Ramon Gris, for example. But I felt

alone between Tom and Juan. I liked that better, anyhow: with Ramon I

might have been more deeply moved. But I was terribly hard just then and I

wanted to stay hard.

He kept on chewing his words, with something like distraction. He certainly

talked to keep himself from thinking. He smelled of urine like an old prostate

case. Naturally, I agreed with him. I could have said everything he said: it

isn't natural to die. And since I was going to die, nothing seemed natural to

me, not this pile of coal dust, or the bench, or Pedro's ugly face. Only it didn't

please me to think the same things as Tom. And I knew that, all through the

night, every five minutes, we would keep on thinking things at the same time.

I looked at him sideways and for the first time he seemed strange to me: he

wore death on his face. My pride was wounded: for the past 24 hours I had

lived next to Tom, I had listened to him. I had spoken to him and I knew we

had nothing in common. And now we looked as much alike as twin brothers,

simply because we were going to die together. Tom took my hand without

looking at me.

"Pablo. I wonder... I wonder if it's really true that everything ends."

I took my hand away and said, "Look between your feet, you pig."



There was a big puddle between his feet and drops fell from his pants-leg.

"What is it," he asked, frightened.

"You're pissing in your pants," I told him.

"lt isn't true," he said furiously. "I'm not pissing. I

don't feel anything."

The Belgian approached us. He asked with false solicitude. "Do you feel ill?"

Tom did not answer. The Belgian looked at the puddle and said nothing.

"I don't know what it is," Tom said ferociously. "But I'm not afraid. I swear

I'm not afraid."

The Belgian did not answer. Tom got up and went to piss in a corner. He

came back buttoning his fly, and sat down without a word. The Belgian was

taking notes.

All three of us watched him because he was alive. He had the motions of a

living human being, the cares of a living human being; he shivered in the

cellar the way the living are supposed to shiver; he had an obedient, well-fed

body. The rest of us hardly felt ours--not in the same way anyhow. I wanted

to feel my pants between my legs but I didn't dare; I watched the Belgian,



balancing on his legs, master of his muscles, someone who could think about

tomorrow. There we were, three bloodless shadows; we watched him and we

sucked his life like vampires.

Finally he went over to little Juan. Did he want to feel his neck for some

professional motive or was he obeying an impulse of charity? If he was

acting by charity it was the only time during the whole night.

He caressed Juan's head and neck. The kid let himself be handled, his eyes

never leaving him, then suddenly he seized the hand and looked at it

strangely. He held the Belgian's hand between his own two hands and there

was nothing pleasant about them, two grey pincers gripping this fat and

reddish hand. I suspected what was going to happen and Tom must have

suspected it too: but the Belgian didn't see a thing, he smiled paternally.

After a moment the kid brought the fat red hand to his mouth and tried to bite

it. The Belgian pulled away quickly and stumbled back against the wall. For a

second he looked at us with horror, he must have suddenly understood that

we were not men like him. I began to laugh and one of the guards jumped up.

The other was asleep, his wide open eyes were blank.

I felt relaxed and over-excited at the same time. I didn't want to think any

more about what would happen at dawn, at death. It made no sense. I only

found words or emptiness. But as soon as I tried to think of anything else I

saw rifle barrels pointing at me. Perhaps I lived through my execution twenty

times; once I even thought it was for good: I must have slept a minute. They

were dragging me to the wall and I was struggling; I was asking for mercy. I

woke up with a start and looked at the Belgian: I was afraid I might have

cried out in my sleep. But he was stroking his moustache, he hadn't noticed

anything. If I had wanted to, I think I could have slept a while; I had been

awake for 48 hours. I was at the end of my rope. But I didn't want to lose two

hours of life; they would come to wake me up at dawn. I would follow them,

stupefied with sleep and I would have croaked without so much as an "Oof!";

I didn't want that. I didn't want to die like an animal, I wanted to understand.



Then I was afraid of having nightmares. I got up, walked back and forth, and,

to change my ideas, I began to think about my past life. A crowd of memories

came back to me pell-mell. There were good and bad ones--or at least I

called them that before. There were faces and incidents. I saw the face of a

little novillero who was gored tn Valencia during the Feria, the face of one of my uncles, the face of Ramon Gris. I remembered my whole life: how I was

out of work for three months in 1926, how I almost starved to death. I

remembered a night I spent on a bench in Granada: I hadn't eaten for three

days. I was angry, I didn't want to die. That made me smile. How madly I ran

after happiness, after women, after liberty. Why? I wanted to free Spain, I

admired Pi y Margall, I joined the anarchist movement, I spoke in public

meetings: I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.

At that moment I felt that I had my whole life in front of me and I thought,

"It's a damned lie." It was worth nothing because it was finished. I wondered

how I'd been able to walk, to laugh with the girls: I wouldn't have moved so

much as my little finger if I had only imagined I would die like this. My life

was in front of me, shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was

unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a

beautiful life. But I couldn't pass judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I had

spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing. I missednothing: there were so many things I could have missed, the taste of

manzanilla or the baths I took in summer in a little creek near Cadiz; but

death had disenchanted everything.

The Belgian suddenly had a bright idea. "My friends," he told us, "I will

undertake--if the military administration will allow it--to send a message for

you, a souvenir to those who love you. . . ."

Tom mumbled, "I don't have anybody."



I said nothing. Tom waited an instant then looked at me with curiosity. "You

don't have anything to say to Concha?"

"No."

I hated this tender complicity: it was my own fault, I had talked about

Concha the night before. I should have controlled myself. I was with her for a

year. Last night I would have given an arm to see her again for five minutes.

That was why I talked about her, it was stronger than I was. Now I had no

more desire to see her, I had nothing more to say to her. I would not even

have wanted to hold her in my arms: my body filled me with horror because it

was grey and sweating--and I wasn't sure that her body didn't fill me with

horror. Concha would cry when she found out I was dead, she would have no

taste for life for months afterward. But I was still the one who was going to

die. I thought of her soft, beautiful eyes. When she looked at me something

passed from her to me. But I knew it was over: if she looked at me now the

look would stay in her eyes, it wouldn't reach me. I was alone.

Tom was alone too but not in the same way. Sitting cross-legged, he had

begun to stare at the bench with a sort of smile, he looked amazed. He put

out his hand and touched the wood cautiously as if he were afraid of

breaking something, then drew back his hand quickly and shuddered. If I had

been Tom I wouldn't have amused myself by touching the bench; this was

some more Irish nonsense, but I too found that objects had a funny look: they

were more obliterated, less dense than usual. It was enough for me to look at

the bench, the lamp, the pile of coal dust, to feel that I was going to die.

Naturally I couldn't think clearly about my death but I saw it everywhere, on

things, in the way things fell back and kept their distance, discreetly, as

people who speak quietly at the bedside of a dying man. It was his death

which Tom had just touched on the bench.



In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home

quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold:

several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost

the illusion of being eternal. I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it

was a horrible calm--because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, Iheard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by

itself and I didn't recognize it any more. I had to touch it and look at it to find

out what was happening, as if it were the body of someone else. At times I

could still feel it, I felt sinkings, and fallings, as when you're in a plane taking

a nose dive, or I felt my heart beating. But that didn't reassure me.

Everything that came from my body was all cockeyed. Most of the time it

was quiet and I felt no more than a sort of weight, a filthy presence against

me; I had the impression of being tied to an enormous vermin. Once I felt my

pants and I felt they were damp; I didn't know whether it was sweat or urine,

but I went to piss on the coal pile as a precaution.

The Belgian took out his watch, looked at it. He said, "It is three-thirty."

Bastard! He must have done it on purpose. Tom jumped; we hadn't noticed

time was running out; night surrounded us like a shapeless, somber mass. I

couldn't even remember that it had begun.

Little Juan began to cry. He wrung his hands, pleaded, "I don't want to die. I

don't want to die."

He ran across the whole cellar waving his arms in the air then fell sobbing onone of the mats. Tom watched him with mournful eyes, without the slightest

desire to console him. Because it wasn't worth the trouble: the kid made

more noise than we did, but he was less touched: he was like a sick man

who defends himself against his illness by fever. It's much more serious

when there isn't any fever.



He wept: I could clearly see he was pitying himself; he wasn't thinking about

death. For one second, one single second, I wanted to weep myself, to weep

with pity for myself. But the opposite happened: I glanced at the kid, I saw

his thin sobbing shoulders and I felt inhuman: I could pity neither the others

nor myself. I said to myself, "I want to die cleanly."

Tom had gotten up, he placed himself just under the round opening and

began to watch for daylight. I was determined to die cleanly and I only

thought of that. But ever since the doctor told us the time, I felt time flying,

flowing away drop by drop.

It was still dark when I heard Tom's voice: "Do you hear them?"

Men were marching in the courtyard.

"Yes."

"What the hell are they doing? They can't shoot in the dark."

After a while we heard no more. I said to Tom, "It's day."

Pedro got up, yawning, and came to blow out the lamp. He said to his buddy,

"Cold as hell."

The cellar was all grey. We heard shots in the distance.



"It's starting," I told Tom. "They must do it in the court in the rear."

Tom asked the doctor for a cigarette. I didn't want one; I didn't want

cigarettes or alcohol. From that moment on they didn't stop firing.

"Do you realize what's happening," Tom said.

He wanted to add something but kept quiet, watching the door. The door

opened and a lieutenant came in with four soldiers. Tom dropped his

cigarette.

"Steinbock?"

Tom didn't answer. Pedro pointed him out.

"Juan Mirbal?"

"On the mat."

"Get up," the lieutenant said.

Juan did not move. Two soldiers took him under the arms and set him on his

feet. But he fell as soon as they released him.



The soldiers hesitated.

"He's not the first sick one," said the lieutenant. "You two carry him: they'll

fix it up down there."

He turned to Tom. "Let's go."

Tom went out between two soldiers. Two others followed, carrying the kid by

the armpits. He hadn't fainted; his eyes were wide open and tears ran down

his cheeks. When I wanted to go out the lieutenant stopped me.

"You Ibbieta?"

"Yes."

"You wait here: they'll come for you later."

They left. The Belgian and the two jailers left too, I was alone. I did not

understand what was happening to me but I would have liked it better if they

had gotten it over with right away. I heard shots at almost regular intervals; I

shook with each one of them. I wanted to scream and tear out my hair. But I

gritted my teeth and pushed my hands in my pockets because I wanted to

stay clean.

After an hour they came to get me and led me to the first floor, to a small

room that smelt of cigars and where the heat was stifling. There were two

officers sitting smoking in the armchairs, papers on their knees.



"You're Ibbieta?"

"Yes."

"Where is Ramon Gris?"

"l don't know."

The one questioning me was short and fat. His eyes were hard behind his

glasses. He said to me, "Come here."

I went to him. He got up and took my arms, staring at me with a look that

should have pushed me into the earth. At the same time he pinched my

biceps with all his might. It wasn't to hurt me, it was only a game: he wanted

to dominate me. He also thought he had to blow his stinking breath square inmy face. We stayed for a moment like that, and I almost felt like laughing. It

takes a lot to intimidate a man who is going to die; it didn't work. He pushed

me back violently and sat down again. He said, "It's his life against yours.

You can have yours if you tell us where he is."

These men dolled up with their riding crops and boots were still going to die.

A little later than I, but not too much. They busied themselves looking for

names in their crumpled papers, they ran after other men to imprison or

suppress them: they had opinions on the future of Spain and on other

subjects. Their little activities seemed shocking and burlesqued to me; I

couldn't put myself in their place. I thought they were insane. The little man

was still looking at me, whipping his boots with the riding crop. All his

gestures were calculated to give him the look of a live and ferocious beast.



"So? You understand?"

I don't know where Gris is," I answered. "I thought he was in Madrid."

The other officer raised his pale hand indolently. This indolence was also

calculated. I saw through all their little schemes and I was stupefied to find

there were men who amused themselves that way.

"You have a quarter of an hour to think it over," he said slowly. "Take him to

the laundry, bring him back in fifteen minutes. If he still refuses he will he

executed on the spot."

They knew what they were doing: I had passed the night in waiting; then they

had made me wait an hour in the cellar while they shot Tom and Juan and

now they were locking me up in the laundry; they must have prepared their

game the night before. They told themselves that nerves eventually wear outand they hoped to get me that way.

They were badly mistaken. In the laundry I sat on a stool because I felt very

weak and I began to think. But not about their proposition. Of course I knew

where Gris was; he was hiding with his cousins, four kilometers from the

city. I also knew that I would not reveal his hiding place unless they tortured

me (but they didn't seem to be thinking about that). All that was perfectly

regulated, definite and in no way interested me. Only I would have liked to

understand the reasons for my conduct. I would rather die than give up Gris.

Why? I didn't like Ramon Gris any more. My friendship for him had died a little

while before dawn at the same time as my love for Concha, at the same time

as my desire to live. Undoubtedly I thought highly of him: he was tough. But it

was not for this reason that I consented to die in his place; his life had no





They jumped to their feet. "Let's go. Molés, go get fifteen men from

Lieutenant Lopez. You," the fat man said, "I'll let you off if you're telling the

truth, but it'll cost you plenty if you're making monkeys out of us."

"They left in a great clatter and I waited peacefully under the guard of

falangistas. From time to time I smiled, thinking about the spectacle they

would make. I felt stunned and malicious. I imagined them lifting up

tombstones, opening the doors of the vaults one by one. I represented this

situation to myself as if I had been someone else: this prisoner obstinately

playing the hero, these grim falangistas with their moustaches and their men

in uniform running among the graves; it was irresistibly funny. After half an

hour the little fat man came back alone. I thought he had come to give the

orders to execute me. The others must have stayed in the cemetery.

The officer looked at me. He didn't look at all sheepish. "Take him into the

big courtyard with the others," he said. "After the military operations a

regular court will decide what happens to him."

"Then they're not... not going to shoot me?..."

"Not now, anyway. What happens afterwards is none of my business."

I still didn't understand. I asked, "But why...?"

He shrugged his shoulders without answering and the soldiers took me away.

In the big courtyard there were about a hundred prisoners, women, children

and a few old men. I began walking around the central grass plot, I was

stupefied. At noon they let us eat in the mess hall. Two or three people



questioned me. I must have known them, but I didn't answer: I didn't even

know where I was.

Around evening they pushed about ten new prisoners into the court. I

recognized Garcia, the baker. He said, "What damned luck you have! I didn't

think I'd see you alive."

"They sentenced me to death," I said, "and then they changed their minds. I

don't know why."

"They arrested me at two o'clock," Garcia said.

"Why?" Garcia had nothing to do with politics.

"I don't know," he said. "They arrest everybody who doesn't think the way

they do." He lowered his voice. "They got Gris."

I began to tremble. "When?"

"This morning. He messed it up. He left his cousin's on Tuesday because they

had an argument. There were plenty of people to hide him but he didn't want

to owe anything to anybody. He said, ' I'd go and hide in Ibbieta's place, but

they got him, so I'll go hide in the cemetery.'"

"In the cemetery?"



"Yes. What a fool. Of course they went by there this morning, that was sure

to happen. They found him in the gravediggers' shack. He shot at them and

they got him."

"In the cemetery!"

Everything began to spin and I found myself sitting on the ground: I laughed

so hard I cried.

How The Soviet Robinson Was Written

In the editorial office of the illustrated three-weekly journal Adventure there

was a shortage of “literary” material, and in particular of stories that would

be of interest to the young reader.

There were stories enough but nothing really suitable. There was far too

much heavy-handed seriousness in them. To tell the truth, they tended to

depress the young reader and not excite him in the least. But the editor

really wished to arouse excitement.

At last it was decided to order a novel which would be issued in serial parts.

The editorial runner hastened with a note to the writer Moldavantsev, and the

next day Moldavantsev sat on a businesslike sofa in the editor’s office.



—You understand, emphasised the editor, this must be gripping, fresh,

crammed with exciting incidents. In fact, it should be a sort of soviet

Robinson Crusoe. So that the reader would not lose sympathy with the hero.

—Robinson Crusoe – that’s possible, said the writer briefly.

—But not just any Robinson Crusoe – but a soviet Robinson Crusoe.

—But of course! Certainly a Rumanian Robinson Crusoe would not do.

The writer said no more. It could be perceived at once he was a man of

action.

And indeed work on the novel proceeded to its stipulated length.

Moldavantsev did not deviate greatly from the original. Robinson Crusoe the

editor had said – so it would be Robinson Crusoe ...

The soviet hero endured the shipwreck. He was carried by a wave to an

uninhabited island. He was alone, defenceless, in the face of all-powerful

nature. Dangers surrounded him: wild beasts, lianas, an imminent monsoon.

But the soviet Robinson, full of energy, overcame all dangers, even those

which had seemed insuperable. And after three years a soviet expedition

found him, found him in the prime of his manhood. He had overcome nature,

built a house, surrounded it with a green ring of gardens, raised rabbits,

sewed himself a shirt from the tails of monkeys and taught a parrot to wake

him in the mornings with the words: “Attention! Off with your blanket! Off

with your blanket! Time for morning exercises!”





—Indeed, that is correct. It is uninhabited. But there must be a local trade

union committee. I am not a literary artist myself, but if I were in your place I

would accept advice in the soviet manner.

—But surely the whole story depends on the fact that the island is uninhab ...

Then Moldavantsev happened to glance at the editor’s eyes and felt more

afraid. The eyes were so bright with a March sky emptiness streaked with

blue that he decided to enter into immediate compromise.

—But of course you’re right, he said, raising a finger. Of course. Why didn’t I

think of this at first. Two people are saved from the wreck: our Robinson and

a representative of the local trade union committee.

—As well as two general members, coldly added the editor.

—Oh, groaned Moldavantsev.

—No “oh” about it. Two general members and one active member, a female

collector of membership dues.

—But why also a dues-collector? Whose subscription will she collect?

—Robinson’s, of course.





—An axe, a rifle, a compass, a small flask of rum and a bottle containing an

anti-scurvy preparation, solemnly commented the author.

—Forget about the rum, quickly added the editor, and what’s this bottle of

anti-scurvy preparation for? Who is that necessary for? Better to have a

bottle of ink! And of course a fireproof safe.

Why on earth a safe? The subscriptions from the members of the local trade

union committee could be carefully kept in the hollow of a coconut. Who

would steal them from there?

—Who? Why Robinson? The chairman of the local trade union committee?

The general members? The collector herself?

—Surely it was the collector who put the money there? Moldavantsev asked

with a growing sense of his own cowardice.

—She did.

There was a long silence.

—Perhaps a table at which to hold committee meetings might be washed

ashore too, asked the author in a malicious mood.



—In-dis-pens-able! It is necessary to create for people the right conditions for

work. Let me see, there should be a tumbler of water, a small bell and a

tablecloth. Let the wave throw up any sort of tablecloth you like. It could be

red or green. I have no wish to cramp you in your literary work. But, my dear

friend, what must be done first is to give leadership to the masses—the vastmasses of the workers.

—The wave can’t throw up working masses, Moldavantsev interposed. That is

contrary to the plot. Think a moment! Suddenly a wave throws on the shore

several tens of thousands of people. That would make even a fly laugh!

—Not at all; a small amount of healthy, honest, life-loving laughter, stated the

editor, is never amiss.

—No, a wave just can’t do this.

—Why must it be a wave? quickly asked the editor.

—And how else would a crowd of people land on the island? Isn’t the island

uninhabited?!

—Who said it was uninhabited? You confuse me. Ah! Now everything is clear.

There is an island – or better a peninsula. All is peaceful. Then there occurs a

series of fantastic, new, fascinating incidents. Trade union work is organised

but there is a shortage of responsible leadership. The active member reveals

a number of defects – perhaps in the province at large while collecting

members’ dues. The masses of workers come to her assistance. The

chairman upbraids all those at fault. Towards the end you can have a general



meeting. This has very good effect especially on cultural relations. And so,

that’s it – finished.

—And what about Robinson, stammered Moldavantsev.

—Oh, yes. It’s good you reminded me. Robinson worries me a bit. Get rid of

him altogether. Ridiculous, culpable, pessimistic character.

—Now I understand, said Moldavantsev in a mournful voice. It will be ready

to-morrow.

—Good. That’s all then. Write it your own way. Incidentally, at the beginning

of the novel you have a shipwreck. You know a shipwreck is not really

necessary. It would be better without a shipwreck. It would be more

entertaining, would it not? Excellent. Well, good-day to you.

Alone once more the editor smiled contentedly.

—At last, he said, I shall have a really exciting adventure story, and besides a

genuine literary work of art.



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