Fantastic Tales

by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti

  She was sleeping. I woke her roughly and said, “Ulrica, renounce your name, the detestable U in your name!”

  My wife stared at me in silence.

  “Renounce it,” I repeated in a terrible voice. “Renounce that U…Renounce your abhorrent name!!”

  She still stared at me and was silent!

  Her silence, her refusal put me beside myself; I hurled myself on her and beat her with my stick.

  I was arrested and brought to trial for this act of violence.

  The judges, although their verdict was acquittal, sentenced me to a more terrible punishment—detention in a mental hospital.

  I, mad! The bastards! Mad! Because I had discovered the secret of their destinies! Their adverse destinies! Because I had endeavored to improve them?…Ingrates!

  Yes, I feel that this ingratitude will kill me—left alone here, defenseless! Face to face with my enemy, with this detested U that I see every hour, every moment, asleep, awake, in every object that surrounds me, I feel that I will finally have to succumb.

  So be it.

  I do not fear death; I hasten it as the only end to my woes.

  I would have been happy if I could have benefited humanity, persuading men to suppress that vowel—or if it had never existed, or if I had not fathomed its mysteries.

  It has been decided otherwise! Perhaps my misfortune will prove a useful lesson to men; perhaps my example will spur them to imitate me…

  I can only hope so!

  May my death precede by a few days the epoch of their great emancipation, their emancipation from U, from this terrible vowel!!!

  * * *

  —

  The unhappy man who wrote these lines died in the insane asylum of Milan on 11 September 1865.

  [1869]

  The Fated

  DO THERE REALLY exist beings destined to exercise a malign influence over men and the things that surround them? This is a truth that we witness every day, but our coolly practical reason, trained to accept only those facts that fall under the sway of our senses, is always loathe to admit it.

  If we examine all our actions carefully, even the most ordinary and inconsequential, we shall nonetheless see that they do not include any which dissuades us from this belief, or whose performance has not in some manner provoked it. This superstition enters every event in our lives.

  Many people believe that they can shield themselves from it by maintaining, precisely, that it is no more than superstition. Yet they do not perceive that they thus reduce it to a simple question of words. This reduction would not undermine the belief, since superstition also requires faith.

  We cannot fail to recognize that in the spiritual world as in its physical counterpart, everything that happens, happens and changes through certain laws of influence whose secrets we remain unable to divine entirely. We observe the effects, and we continue to be stupefied and ignorant before the causes. We see the influence of things over things, of intelligences over intelligences, of the former over the latter, and vice versa; we see all these influences intersect, exchange, work on one another, reuniting in a single center of action these two very disparate worlds, the world of spirit and the world of matter.

  We have borne our faith as far as human discernment has penetrated; the secret of physical phenomena is partly violated; science has analyzed nature; nearly every natural process, law, and influence is known to us. Yet science has come to a standstill before psychological phenomena and before the relationships that join them to nature. It has not been able to advance any further and has restrained our beliefs at the threshold of this unexplored kingdom. We can admit general theses and complex truths in the order of facts, but not in the order of ideas.

  Where facts are uncertain, ideas are confused. Facts occur that do not present a fixed, perceptible, well-defined character, and that our calculating reason is doubtful whether to deny or admit. As a result, there are fragmentary, obscure, unstable ideas, which can never present themselves unequivocally, and which we are uncertain whether to accept or reject. This uncertainty of facts, this fragmentation of ideas, this vague state between a firm and a wavering faith perhaps constitute what we call superstition—the point of departure for all great truths, the first embryonic concept of all great beliefs.

  If I see a superstition seize the spirit of the masses, I say that deep within it resides a truth, since we do not have ideas without facts, and this superstition can issue only from a fact. If the fact has not yet been replicated and generalized to confirm the superstition, the reason is that the path of humanity stretches far and wide—more so than that of things—and no one can determine the time and circumstances which would make possible such a replication. Men have adopted a facile, logical system as regards conventions—they admit what they see, deny what they do not see—but until now this system has not prevented them from later admitting quite a few truths they initially denied. Scientific progress bears witness to it. However that may be, there is no person whose belief in the influences that men and things can exercise over us has not been more or less strengthened, illuminated and confirmed by his own experience. At the most it is a question not of denying this belief—since its existence is indisputable—but of learning its raison d’etre and the extent to which it must be accepted.

  I find proof of it everywhere. For me, antipathy is only a tacit awareness of the fatal influence that one person can exercise over another. In the ignorant masses, this awareness has created the “evil eye”; in the educated masses, prejudice, mistrust, suspicion.

  There is nothing more common than hearing exclamations like “I do not like that man; I would not want to meet him on the street; he frightens me; in his presence I turn into a nonentity; whenever I run into that man, some misfortune befalls me.” Nor is this belief, which presents itself under so many guises, which we nearly fail to notice, which is virtually innate in us like all the defensive instincts nature has given us, held exclusively by a small group of people—it is, in greater or lesser proportions, everyone’s natural inheritance.

  This superstition accompanies humanity from childhood and is diffused through all peoples. Men of genius, those who have suffered much, have put greater faith in it than others. The number of persons who have believed that they were persecuted by a fatal being is infinite; it is equal to the number of persons who have believed that they themselves were fatal beings: Hoffmann, who was kind and loving, was tortured his entire life by this thought.

  There is no point in dwelling on it, since history is full of such examples, and each of us can find evidence for this almost instinctive belief in our private lives.

  I do not want to demonstrate its absurdity or its truth. I believe that no one can do either with authoritative arguments. I limit myself to recounting facts that pertain to this superstition.

  * * *

  —

  During carnival in 1866 I found myself in Milan. It was Shrove Tuesday, and the procession of maskers had grown very animated. I must, however, draw a distinction—animated with spectators, not with maskers. The charge of unworthy renown, so frequent and so just in art, can also be applied to popular festivals, and the carnival of Milan would undoubtedly deserve it. These festivals are nothing more than a mystification, and they have every reason to be, since the thousands of foreigners who annually attend them are not any less convinced that they are having an enjoyable experience. Everyone instills in themselves the conviction that carnival in Milan is the most comical, witty, diverting thing in the world. Once this belief is introduced, facts are no longer necessary to confirm it—the goal of diversion is attained.

  Carnival in 1866 was not any less animated than at other times, and in the first hours of nightfall on this last Tuesday before Lent, people poured into the streets in torrents. The crowd packed the thoroughfares so tightly that at several points movement was impossible, and near the intersection of Via San Paolo
, where I was, we were literally crushed.

  The honest Milanese mingled with the foreigners in a brotherly way and were intoxicated with the pleasure of looking into the whites of one another’s eyes—which constitutes the sole but sublime diversion of this celebrated carnival.

  I do not know how long I had been standing there, amid that great throng, in a most uncomfortable position, when turning about to see if there were some exit, I observed an extremely curious spectacle near me.

  The crowd had not thinned out but condensed so as to create a rather large circular space in its midst. At the center of this miraculous circle stood a young man who seemed not more than eighteen years old, but who, when examined more carefully, could have been taken for twenty-five, so sickly did his face appear, so deeply etched with the traces of a long and troubled life. He was blond and very handsome, excessively thin, but not so much that the beauty of his features was diminished. He had large blue eyes, and his lower lip slightly protruded, although it was more expressive of sadness than rancor. His entire appearance possessed something feminine, delicate, ineffably graceful—a quality that the French call souple, and that I could not express any better with a different word from our language. The purity and harmony of his lines were amazing; he was dressed with extreme elegance; and he was looking about with a melancholy, distracted air, sometimes at the crowd, sometimes at the maskers, as if he were there against his will and more interested in himself than in the less attractive spectacle he found before his gaze.

  But what struck me as most remarkable was that he seemed not to notice the circle that formed around him, nor did any of the people who formed it. There was nothing truly extraordinary about it; yet the existence of a space so vast in the midst of a crowd so dense, in the midst of a multitude that moved, trembled, undulated like a single body, without ever filling the void formed at that point, seemed to me worthy of attention. It could be said that the young man emitted a repulsive fluid, a mysterious power capable of distancing everything that surrounded him.

  At the moment when I was looking at him, as he was being showered with some sugared almonds, quite a lot of them catching in the folds of the cloak he kept draped over his arm, a little boy broke away from the circle and approached him as if to ask about the sweets, since the young man had neither brushed them away nor shaken his cloak to make them fall.

  He looked at the boy affectionately, gathered the almonds, gave them to him, and before the boy left, the man ran a hand through the boy’s hair in a tender gesture imbued with gentleness and melancholy.

  He put so much affection into that gesture that even if nature had not endowed him with such a sweet and sympathetic face, he would have been immediately judged kind and courteous.

  The fact is that the face is the mirror of the soul. It is impossible to know whether nature herself gives a good expression to the good and an evil one to the evil, or whether human goodness and evil can so work on our countenance as to alter it and stamp it with their seal. It is most certain, however, that the heart shines through our features, even through those whose beauty seems to hide a base soul or whose ugliness an honest one.

  I would have never tired of looking at him. I do not know whether the affections of other men are governed by the law of sympathies and antipathies—sudden, forceful, inexorable—to which mine are subject; for me, falling in love with a man or woman, entertaining an irresistible fondness or aversion for any creature has never taken more than a few minutes to happen. Thus, I recall that so tender was the expression on his face, so directly had that language spoken to my heart, that I would have embraced him there on the street without giving reason the opportunity to debate it.

  I did not move from that spot until he too moved. The festival began to slacken, the crowd was dispersing, and twilight enfolded the entire scene in a heavy gray light. We were a few steps from a café, and he entered it with the air of a man who does not know how to spend his time, who feels the weight of his arms, his legs, his whole body, and would like to rid himself of it, throwing it on a divan like an annoying, useless bundle. I was in the same situation, I did not have a thing to do, and I followed him.

  We sat facing one another, with me watching him reading. Yet he seemed so little interested in his reading that even if he had grasped the newspaper upside down, I believe he would not have noticed. His eyes were fixed on the columns of newsprint, but they seemed to look within rather than out, seemed to concentrate all their visual power in themselves, and were concerned only with what was happening in the young man’s soul.

  No sooner had I made this observation than I noticed another throng of people at the café window and heard what sounded like women screaming. I was about to rise as the door opened, and a boy was carried inside, unconscious: he had been run down by a carriage and suffered a broken leg. I was painfully shocked to recognize that this was the very boy whom the unknown man had caressed in the middle of that circle and to whom he had given the sweets that fell on his cloak.

  I instinctively turned my gaze toward the man and glimpsed him in the instant that he hurried from the room. His face, reflected in a mirror hanging before me, seemed very pale.

  I quit the café not much later, prey to sad thoughts.

  On that very evening an extraordinary performance was to take place at La Scala.

  The opera scheduled was La Sonnambula, and people flocked to hear that divine music, so rich, so complex in its simplicity, so tender. L’Africaine had been performed a little while ago—from Meyerbeer to Bellini, the difference, if not the distance, was very great. The theater was brightly lit, the orchestra densely packed with listeners, and there remained only five or six empty boxes, all situated in the same place. I noticed, much to my surprise, that one of them contained the young man I had just seen viewing the procession of the maskers.

  He was alone and no longer looked sad or pensive to me. He wore a very elegant black suit, but without appearing as if he usually took great care with his appearance. I do not know whether it was my delusion, or hallucination, or something else, but he seemed to me extraordinarily handsome, much more so than a few hours earlier.

  His face had a radiant quality, one resembling the intense transparency, however much cloudy or veiled, that characterizes alabaster. He did indeed have the same pallor; without looking into his eyes, without examining the wonderful liveliness of his features, one might have thought he was dead or petrified. His hair still retained that fineness, that pliancy and sheen, that simple, natural curl found in children’s hair; it was a marvelous blond and shone like golden threads with the reflection of the flames from the candelabra. He was leaning his elbow on the railing, his cheek in his hand; with his head inclined in this fashion, he seemed even more beautiful. He had the sort of beauty women have: it derives a mysterious, fascinating authority from the light. To behold him from the orchestra—whence the rest of his body could not be seen—one would have thought the head, so diaphanous and white, belonged to a boy, a fragile, delicate creature, perhaps a supernatural being.

  I alone remarked the strange relationship between this scene and my previous observation at the procession of the maskers—I mean my discovery of him so isolated, surrounded by five or six empty boxes, while it was impossible to find a single unoccupied box anywhere else in the theater; for one to feel amazement before this fact, it is necessary to have first observed the phenomenon of the circle. The audience was unanimous, however, in noticing and admiring his beauty, and it did not take me long to realize that the ladies were especially struck by it and vied in aiming their opera glasses in his direction.

  Among the girls who more readily succeeded in attracting the young man’s attention was one who was also quite beautiful, occupying a box not very far away from his. As always happens with girls who are truly ingenuous—not with that conventional ingenuousness they must assume like a role in a comedy until a husband authorizes them to play a different rol
e, but with that true ingenuousness which has its roots in virginity of the mind and heart—she was immediately and deeply affected by him. She was too young to know how to feign it, really, and I believe I was not alone in noticing her agitation and excitement.

  For a short time I witnessed the mysterious rapport that was established between them, and like an intruder, I thrust myself into the magnetic current formed by their gazes. Then, as if feeling ashamed of my spying, of my winking at their happiness, like a beggar who attends a banquet from the threshold of the dining room and can only enjoy the smells of the sauces and viands, I withdrew into myself and managed to turn my complete attention to the performance of the opera.

  I say that I felt ashamed, but only for myself. If there is anything in the world before which I can neither sneer with disdain nor weep with pity, it is the sight of two people who love each other. Often at night I have strolled down public paths, through a thicket of linden trees, purposely to meet some enamored couples; and I have never passed by one without feeling myself seized by one without feeling myself seized by a sentiment of profound respect. I confess that those have been the only moments in my life when my fellows seemed to me less sad than usual.

  I had gradually succeeded in devoting myself entirely to the performance and no longer raised my eyes toward that unknown man’s box when, perceiving a sudden movement in the audience and noticing the crowd thronging toward the door, I too moved and reached the lobby with difficulty. There I saw two gentlemen bearing away a girl who had fainted, transporting her to one of the rooms in the theater.

  I will not mention my astonishment in recognizing her as the same girl who had looked at my unknown man with so much affection and persistence. Everything that happened could have been no more than a freak of chance; yet it was the second time within a period of two hours that I had seen a person he regarded with fondness suddenly struck down by some misfortune.