Fandango and Other Stories

by Bryan Karetnyk

  We were so frightened that everyone cried out at once without understanding each other. Now there could be no doubt, even among the most skeptical, that all around the island, unseen by us, sea battles were raging and scouts were flying over us, reconnoitering the vicinity. A short while later, the sound of muffled hits or explosions came from the western horizon. Everyone rushed to the shore. At the line where the water met the sky, a great deal of smoke was curling up; from there, dulled by the distance, the slow, heavy sound of gunfire reached us, and the earth seemed to tremble beneath our feet. So it went on for an hour or more; then it all stopped.

  That evening, three of the Gonzálezes, who had gone to the forest to fetch firewood, came back out of breath. They had heard the clatter of many hooves, shouts, the clash of sabers, and moaning, though they had seen no one. Alain Scorrey, who had at that time been with his wife by the waterfall, returned a little later; they had seen on the cliff an armed rider looking in the direction of the forest, shading his eyes with his hand. Having spotted Scorrey, he gave a slight tug on the reins and disappeared.

  “There’s been a landing on the island,” Alain said after he had told his story and heard González’s. “We don’t know what kind of war this is; danger, perhaps death, is hanging over us. We’d better search the island.”

  Antonio González and I volunteered to do this. We spent half of the following day scouring Farfont. Though we failed to detect any traces, we did hear ringing and clattering noises accompanied by shouting. After we returned, we found the others greatly depressed. The women were crying. Our tale surprised and frightened them even further.

  “Perhaps,” said old man Ransom, shaking his head, “Perhaps, people have found a way to make themselves invisible. This is, they say, a time of wondrous inventions.”

  “What about the corpses?” I asked.

  But he did not answer me.

  “Look, look!” my sister then shouted, and, tracing the line of her horrified gaze, we observed that the entire sky was covered in mysterious, darting ships with strange riggings that none of us had ever before seen; they recalled sailing ships and had what appeared to be a reflection beneath them, in the air. A roaring and whistling came from them, as did percussive sounds and the ringing of bells, and soon everything was obscured in the smoke of gunfire, which echoed in our ears like a death sentence. Women fainted, ran indoors, and wept. We men stood there as if bound and powerless to move. Finally the last sterns of these monsters vanished beyond the cliffs, and after we had gathered together again, we were able to admit to one another, in fear and terror, our general despair. Nobody could explain what had happened. That night, only the children slept …

  A month and a further two weeks passed with the same incessant, oppressive, merciless, threatening phenomena, and ultimately we became half-crazed and utterly pitiful. We feared to stray far from our homes, lest we find ourselves alone; all work was abandoned; disturbing, oppressive dreams haunted those who threw themselves into bed seeking repose; the children, who were frightened most of all by the threat that had rent our quiet way of life, cried like their mothers, who had grown thin from the constant terror; we men, resolving to cast off the tyranny of these warring forces, made rounds of the island, in order to convince ourselves that we were its sole masters, and every time we convinced ourselves we fell prey to ever more acute despair. A dull rumbling resounded above our heads day and night; the sound of faraway explosions stopped people in their tracks, midsentence, and a groaning and howling, now quiet and plaintive, now loud and replete with rage and pain, filled the air. At night a powerful cannonade could be heard, as if an endless battle were being fought there: people who would go out to watch the ocean would see colossal dark ships of unknown nationality pursuing one another. We no longer knew any peace. What was happening to us? What was going on around us? We wearied of asking each other questions. Finally we assembled at the house of my second cousin, Alain Scorrey, one evening, and he told us that he saw no way out of our hopeless situation other than death: “We can neither stay awake nor sleep. We have fallen under the spell of some diabolical nightmare, or, rather, some horrific reality, which, by means unknown to us, has attained a perfect incomprehensibility. We are cut off from the world, knowing nothing, innocent, losing our reason, and soon we shall go mad and fill the air with savage howls. And why? We cannot know. I propose that we die voluntarily.”

  There was nobody who wanted or could bring himself to object. In the profound silence of those present, Alain prepared lots, equal in number to the men: whoever pulled out the shortest straw was to remain alive in order to bury the others. That misfortune fell to me. Thereupon my sister, the widow Alice Scorrey, said: “So be it, but I won’t take my Philip and Livia with me.” And so she entrusted them to my care, begging me to wait until a ship arrived and not to kill myself until an opportunity arose to take the children off the island.

  I resisted as much as I could but eventually had to yield to her pleadings; besides, there was a real necessity for someone to take care of the burials. I began to weep, however, once I had envisaged clearly the great burden of my future. Alone, full of dark memories, with two children on my hands, I had to bear and endure suffering worse than death by torture. Perhaps because my reason was clouded and I did not fully understand what was taking place, I agreed.

  At this point in his tale, Scorrey lost consciousness. When he revived, he was clearly hurrying to finish telling the remainder. Here the stenograph is muddled, disconnected, and brief.

  A veritable fever of impatience seized everyone. They wrote the note, then Alain brought the poison. I left, taking the children away and telling them that the others would soon follow. Not for all the world would I have returned there, to Alain’s house. I lay semiconscious. What happened there, I do not know. The sun was setting by the time I decided to open that fateful door.

  And I saw …

  Scorrey refused to tell how he buried these unfortunates. The rest of his testimony—a bleak tale of a sickly man with two young children, whom he had to feed and comfort by thinking up all sorts of stories to explain the general disappearance—may be found in the Ahuan Skap Monthly, a magazine that carried the most detailed account of the Farfont affair. Its author, quoting Miller, Quincey, and Ribot, advances the hypothesis of mass hallucination, and also “a fear of life”—a particular psychological aberration, which is the subject of a detailed study by Krafft.

  In conclusion, the author describes the island’s beautiful vegetation, its mild climate, and the unique enchantments of its unpretentious, harmless seclusion; he ends the article with the following observation:

  These were the happiest people on earth, killed by the echo of long-silenced salvoes that are unparalleled in history.

  THE HEART OF THE WILDERNESS

  I.

  The discovery of diamond deposits at Cordon Brun brought with it a taste for all things civilized. But the only discovery that interests us is that of a splendid café there. Among its miscellaneous patrons let us now single out three skeptical minds, three artistic temperaments, three lost souls—talented men, to be sure, but who could no longer perceive the kernel of things. In their various ways they had come to see only the shell.

  This outlook of theirs directed their talents toward the art of deception. They made of it both their vocation and their religion. And each in his own way achieved perfection in it. Thus, for instance, the legend of an eighteen-hundred-carat diamond (maliciously and subtly devised by them between glasses of champagne and arias from Jocelyn) had caused an almighty commotion, launching thousands of rogues in quest of a miracle, bound for the waterfall at Alpetri, where, it was said, the monstrous gem glittered in the rocks above the water. Et cetera, et cetera. Thanks to them, Stella Dijon was convinced that Harry Evans, who was hopelessly in love with her (which he was not), had married the O’Neal girl out of despair. Drama ensued, the shameful outcome of which did credit to no one: Evans got Stella on his mind and put a bullet th
rough his brain.

  Hart, Weber, and Conseil liked to amuse themselves. The visions they espied in the patterns of smoke rising up from their strong cigars governed their wily, carefree lives. One morning they were sitting in comfortable rocking chairs in the café, smiling silently like seers: pale despite the heat, affable and pensive, men without hearts or futures.

  Their yacht was still anchored at Cordon Rouge, and they were reluctant to leave, savoring as they were their impressions of the diamond fever amid all the filth and the avarice glittering in men’s eyes.

  The morning’s heat was already abating in the shade of the banana trees. Through the open doors of the café Congo, across the alleyway, dusty mounds of earth could be glimpsed, and every now and then a pickaxe would fly up into the air above them. Throughout the digs, cork helmets flashed white and straw hats showed red under the sun. A wagon was being drawn by buffaloes.

  The café was one of the few wooden structures in Cordon Brun. It had mirrors, a piano, and a mahogany bar.

  Hart, Weber, and Conseil were drinking when Emmanuel Steel strode in.

  II.

  The man who had just walked in brought a sharp contrast to these three African snobs: he was handsome, powerfully built, and possessed of a childlike faith, betrayed by his serious eyes, that no one would ever wish to do him any harm. He had great, heavy hands, the physique of a soldier, and the face of a simpleton. He had on a cheap cotton suit and splendid boots, and the butt of a revolver bulged beneath his shirt. His hat, which had a white kerchief sewn onto the wide brim at the back, looked like a tent fit for a giant. He said little and would nod in a charming manner, as though bowing his head along with all the world, which would mark his favor. In short, when Steel walked into a room, you made way.

  With a gentle nod, Conseil glanced at Hart’s weathered face with its evasive smile; Hart peered back at Conseil’s marble brow and his pale-blue eyes; then they both winked at the truculent, bilious, dark Weber, while Weber in turn shot them the sharpest of looks from behind his spectacles; whereupon they all struck up a conversation.

  Several days prior to this, Steel had been sitting with them, drinking and talking, and they came to know the man. The conversation, from beginning to end, had been replete with arid inner laughter—yet Steel had rather naively believed in everything that impressed him and captivated his attention, and never so much as suspected that the wool was being pulled over his eyes.

  “It’s him,” said Conseil.

  “The man from the fog,” Hart chimed in.

  “In a fog, you mean,” corrected Weber.

  “In search of a hidden spot.”

  “Or a fourth dimension.”

  “No, he’s a seeker of rarities,” declared Hart.

  “What was he saying about a jungle the other day?” asked Weber.

  Mimicking Steel, Conseil said in a rapid patter:

  “This enormous jungle that stretches out thousands of miles into the heart of the mainland must conceal King Solomon’s mines, the tales of Scheherazade, and thousands upon thousands of other things just waiting to be discovered.”

  “Let’s suppose,” said Hart as he doused a fly in cognac (it was already drunk in a little puddle of wine that had been spilled on the table). “Let’s suppose that he didn’t quite mean it like that. That he was just thinking aloud, distractedly. The heart of the matter is this: that somewhere in this ocean of jungle there’s a place that would produce the greatest, most astonishing effect on a man, an unending Himalaya of impressions scattered all over. And if he only knew how to find that summit, he’d set off there.”

  “That’s a strange sort of chap to find in Cordon Brun,” noted Conseil, “and rich pickings for a bit of sport. Shall we have a go?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’ve concocted a little plan—just as we’ve done many a time before. I think I can set it out in a fairly credible fashion. All you have to do is say ‘yes’ whenever the pickings gives you a questioning look.”

  “All right,” said Weber and Hart.

  “Steel! Well, I never …” drawled Conseil. “Come and join us.”

  Steel, who had been talking with the barman, turned around and made his way over to the group. They offered him a chair.

  III.

  The conversation was unremarkable at first, but later it turned to more interesting matters.

  “You’re idle, Steel,” said Conseil. “You’ve raked in thousands of pounds from a single pit and now you’re kicking your heels. Have you sold all your diamonds?”

  “Long ago,” Steel replied measuredly, “but I wouldn’t relish taking up anything like that again. I liked the mines because they were a novelty.”

  “So what now?”

  “I’m a novice in these parts. The land is beautiful and awe-inspiring. I’m waiting for something to take my fancy.”

  “I noticed this quirk of yours the last time we spoke,” said Conseil. “Incidentally, the very next day I happened to talk to Pelegrin, the hunter. He picked up a lot of ivory across the river, about five hundred miles from here, in the jungles that so captivate your soul. He told me of a curious phenomenon. Deep in the jungle there’s small plateau with a charming human settlement, which you happen upon quite unexpectedly; the jungle, in all its sumptuous twilight, is suddenly broken by high log walls that form the rear of a building, the exterior facades of which give onto a lush inner garden, full of flowers. He spent a day there after he came across this little colony just before evening. He thought he heard the sounds of a guitar. Amazed—for nothing but jungle, only jungle, stretched out in every direction, and there wasn’t a single native village within less than a fortnight’s journey on foot—Pelegrin followed the sound and was given a warm welcome. There were seven families living there, bound by the same tastes and a love for the flourishing remoteness of their surroundings. And it’s true, you know, it is difficult to imagine anywhere more remote than this almost inaccessible heartland. The livelihood of these Robinsons of the wilderness presented an interesting contrast to their completely civilized mode of living: they were hunters. They lived on hunting alone, sending off what they caught by boat to Tankos, where the manufacturers’ agents are, and trading it for everything they required, right down to electric lightbulbs.

  “How they wound up there, how they had established and sustained themselves, Pelegrin never found out. A single day is little more than a magnesium flare above a wreck—but perhaps it’s enough to understand and forget what’s essential. But the labor had been immense: beautiful carved balconies, a winding tangle of flowers around the windows with blue and violet awnings, a lion’s skin, a piano with a rifle propped up beside it, swarthy, carefree children with the fearless eyes of fairy tale heroes, beautiful, slender girls with revolvers in their pockets and books by their bedsides, and hunters as sharp-sighted as an eagle. What more could you ask for? The people seemed to have got together to sing. Pelegrin remembered his first impression particularly vividly, like some outlandish drawing: a narrow passage between two log walls, to his left a little hand beckoning him from a balcony, ahead of him sunlight and paradise.

  “You will, of course, have spent a night with a strange family. Their life goes on around you, appearing to you as a fragment, full of charm, torn from the pages of some unknown book. You glimpse the face of a young girl or an old woman, which never again appears amid the evening’s scene; you hear snatches of conversation concerning some private matter you don’t understand; you surrender your senses to all manner of things, and all you know is that these people have given you shelter; you haven’t stepped into their lives, and that’s why it remains steeped in a strange poetry. That’s how it was with Pelegrin.”

  Steel listened closely, looking Conseil straight in the eye.

  “I can see it all,” he said simply. “Quite something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Weber. “Yes.”

  “Yes,” affirmed Hart.

  “Words can’t exp
ress how you’d feel,” Steel continued thoughtfully and full of emotion, “but how right I was! Where’s Pelegrin now?”

  “Oh, he left with the caravan for Ogo.”

  Steel drew a straight line on the table with his finger, gingerly at first but then quickly, as though brushing something aside.

  “What was the name of this place?” he asked. “How did Pelegrin find it?”

  “The Heart of the Wilderness,” said Conseil. “He came across it somewhere directly between Cordon Brun and Lake Ban. Isn’t that right, Hart?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “There was another detail,” said Weber, chewing his lips. “Pelegrin mentioned the approach: there was a steep slope running north, covered in trees, that cut diagonally across his path. He came across one of the hunters, who was looking for his own kind. (They believed him to be dead, while in actual fact he had just been knocked senseless by a falling tree.) He had been heading in the opposite direction the whole time.”

  “Does the slope lead up to the plateau?” asked Steel, turning his whole body toward Weber.

  Weber proceeded to list several topographical details, so specific that Conseil shot him an admonishing glance, whistling ‘Whither do you rush, my beauty, the sun is not yet risen …’ But Steel was none the wiser.

  Nodding with characteristic warmth throughout, Steel listened to all that Weber had to say. He then got to his feet with sudden haste, and, as he bid the men farewell, the look in his eyes was that of a man who has just woken up. He failed to mark how attentively the six piercing eyes of these cold men were taking in his every move. Then again, it was hard to tell his thoughts by looking at him—this was a man of dynamic complexity.

  “How is it,” Conseil asked Weber, “that you’re so sure of the unknown? How did you come by this knowledge of the region?”