He made an ideal president. He understood facts and figures, being a man of means, and since he had no family life, he was free to give all his time to the affairs of the club. A curmudgeon with a heart of gold is what they all said about him. Sometimes they even said it to his face. Fuming, he was made to sit for his portrait, shortly before he died, at the age of eighty-four, of pneumonia. As so often happens, the portrait was a failure. There was a bleak look in the eyes that wasn’t at all like him, the members said, shaking their heads, and the one man who really understood him — who had never once tried to be his friend — was not there no contradict them.
8. A fable begotten of an echo of a line of verse by W. B. Yeats
ONCE upon a time there was an old man who made his living telling stories. In the middle of the afternoon he took his position on the steps of the monument to Unaging Intellect, in a somewhat out-of-the-way corner of the marketplace. And people who were not in a hurry would stop, and sometimes those who were in a hurry would hear a phrase that caught their attention, such as “in the moonlight” or “covered with blood,” and would pause for a second and then be spellbound. It was generally agreed that he was better than some storytellers and not as good as others. And his wife would wait for him to come home, because what they had for supper depended on what he brought home in his pockets. She couldn’t ask him to stop at this or that stall in the marketplace and buy what they needed. Being old, he was forgetful and would bring part of what she needed but not all. Standing on the marble steps of the monument, with his voice pitched so that it would carry over the shoulders of those who made a ring around him, he never forgot and he never repeated himself. That is to say, if it was a familiar story he was telling, he added new embellishments, new twists, and again it would be something he had never told before and didn’t himself know until the words came out of his mouth, so that he was as astonished as his listeners, but didn’t show it. He wanted them to believe what was in fact true, that the stories didn’t come from him but through him, were not memorized, and would never be told quite that same way again.
Forgetfulness is the shadow that lies across the path of all old men. The statesman delivering an oration from the steps of the Temple of Zeus at times hesitated because he didn’t know what came next. And the storyteller’s wife worried for fear that this would happen to him, and of course one day it did. Kneeling in front of the executioner’s block, the innocent prince traveling incognito waited for the charioteer who was going to force his way through the crowd and save him from the axe, and nothing happened. That is to say, there was a pause that grew longer and longer until the listeners shifted their feet, and the storyteller took up in a different part of the story, and then suddenly swooped back to the prince and saved him, but leaving the audience with the impression that something was not right, that there was something they had not been told. There was. But could the storyteller simply have said at that point, “I don’t remember what happened next”? They would have lost all faith in him and in his stories.
“I think you were just tired,” his wife said when he told her what had happened. “It could happen to anybody.” But in her heart she foresaw that it was going to happen again, and more seriously. “Once upon a time there was a younger son of the Prince of Syracuse who had one blue eye and one brown, and a charm of manner that made anyone who talked to him believe that —” This had to be left hanging because he who had always known everything about his characters, as God knows everything about human beings, didn’t know, and tried to pretend that he meant this to be left hanging; but of course the listeners knew, and word got around that his memory was failing, his stories were not as good as they used to be, and fewer and fewer people stopped to listen to him, and those who did had to be content with fragments of stories, more interesting sometimes than the perfectly told stories had been, but unsatisfactory and incomplete.
Knowing that this was going to happen, his wife had been putting a little by to tide them over in their old age, and so they didn’t starve. But he stayed home from the marketplace because it was an embarrassment to him that he couldn’t tell stories anymore, and sometimes he sat in the sun and sometimes he followed his wife around and while she was digging a spider out of a corner of the ceiling he would say, “Once upon a time there was a girl of such beauty and delicacy of feeling that she could not possibly have been the child of the hardworking but obtuse couple who raised her from infancy, and although they seemed not to realize this, she had an air of expectancy that —” Here he stopped, unable to go on, and although his wife would have given anything to know what it was that the girl was expecting and if it really came about and how, she said nothing, because, poor man, his head was like a pot with a hole in it. Sometimes when her work was done she sat in the sun with him, in silence. They had been together for a very long time and did not always need to be saying something. But she would have liked it if he knew how much she did for him; instead, he seemed to take it for granted that when he was hungry there would be food, and when he was tired there was the bed, with clean sheets on it smelling of sunshine. She realized mat it was not in his nature to be aware of small, ordinary things of this kind — that his mind trafficked in wonders and surprises. And it was something that she lived with the beginnings of so many wonderful stories she could think about as she went about her work: The story of the flute player’s daughter, who picked up his instrument one day and played — although she had never to his knowledge touched it before or been given any instruction in the fingering or in breathing across the hole — better than any flute player he had ever heard. When he asked her how she was able to do this, she said, “I don’t know. It just came to me that I knew how to do it.” And when he asked her to do it again she couldn’t, and this troubled her so much that she became melancholy and — and what? The storyteller didn’t know. The thread of invention had given way at that point.… The story of the African warrior who was turned into a black cat, who at night wanted to be outdoors so that he could search for the huge moon of Africa that he remembered — the only thing that he remembered — from before his transformation.… The story of the old woman with a secret supply of hummingbirds.… The story of the brother and sister who in some previous incarnation had been man and wife.… With all these unfinished stories to occupy her mind, the storyteller’s wife did not lack for things to think about. She wished that he could finish them for his sake, but she had come to prefer the fragments to the finished stories he used to tell. And in time she came to see that they couldn’t be finished because they were so interesting there was no way for the story to go on.
The old man felt differently. “I would like just once before I die,” he said to himself often, “to finish a story and see the look of thoughtfulness that a perfect story arouses in the faces of the people listening to me in the marketplace.” Now, when he took his stand on the steps of the monument, the passersby hesitated, remembered that there was no use listening to him, because he always lost the thread of the story, and so passed on, saying to one another, “What wonderful tales he used to tell!”
Some vandal had chipped off the nose and two fingers of the statue to Unaging Intellect, and it had never been much admired, but he had told so many stories with the recognition that the monument was at his back that he had come to have an affection for it. What he had no way of knowing was that the monument had come to have an affection for him. What would otherwise have been an eternity of marble monumentality was made bearable by his once-upon-a-times. But why all these princes and talking parrots, these three wishes that land the guesser into a royal palace which is more marble, and uninhabitable, these babies switched in their cradle for no reason but to make a strange story, these wonders that are so much less wonderful than the things that are close to home? And because it is part of the storyteller’s instinct to know what his audience wants to hear, one day when there was nobody around, the storyteller began: “Once upon a time there was an old man whose wits were slipping, a
nd although he knew he didn’t deserve it, he was well taken care of by his wife, who loved him. They had children but the children grew up and went away.” Here the statue took on a look of attentiveness which the old man did not see because his back was turned to it. “The old couple had only each other, but that was a lot because with every year of their lives they had a greater sense of the unbreakable connection that held them. It was a miracle and they knew it, but they were afraid to talk about it lest something happen. Lest they be separated …” On and on the story went, with the monument rooted to its place by interest in what the old man was saying. Monuments do not have anyone who loves them. They exist in solitude and are always lonely, especially at night when there is no one around. The thought that human beings could undress and get into bed and sleep all night side by side was more beautiful than the monument could bear. The fact that she cooked for him because he was hungry and that his hunger was for what she cooked because it was cooked with love. That he was under the impression that, old and scatterbrained as he was, he was the one who took care of her and that she would not be safe without him … When the storyteller said, “From living together they had come to look alike,” the monument said, “Oh, it’s too much!” For there is no loneliness like the loneliness of Unaging Intellect.
9. The blue finch of Arabia
ON the evening of the twenty-fourth of December, an old woman and an old man got off the train at a little wayside station on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and hurried across the snow to the only lighted shop in the village, which was a pet shop. In their excitement they left the door open, which annoyed the proprietor, who was deaf, and they had a hard time making him understand what they wanted. They had come from Venice, they said, on the strength of a rumor that he had a pair of blue finches. The proprietor shook his head. He had had one blue finch, not a pair, and he had sold it that morning.
“Tell us who you sold it to!” the old woman cried.
“We’ll give you a thousand dollars,” the old man said, “if you’ll just tell us his name.”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“But how could you not ask him his name?” the old man and the old woman cried.
“Did I ask yours when you came in just now and left the door wide open?” the proprietor said. “Besides, it was the common blue finch of Africa, and not the one you are looking for.”
“You know about the blue finch of Arabia?” the old man shouted.
“Certainly,” said the pet-shop proprietor.
“But I daresay you have never seen one?” said the old woman slyly, in a normal tone of voice, hoping to test the pet-shop proprietor’s hearing.
“A pair only,” the proprietor said, turning off his hearing aid. “Never just one.”
“We’ll give you two thousand dollars,” said the old man, dancing up and down, “if you’ll just tell us where you saw them.”
“Very well,” said the pet-shop proprietor. “Where is the two thousand?”
“What’s that?” asked the old man.
“I say where is the two thousand dollars?” the pet-shop proprietor shouted. “This is a very good hearing aid I am wearing. Here — try it, why don’t you?”
The old man looked at the old woman, who nodded, and then he reached in his pocket and took out his checkbook, and she opened her purse and took out her pen, and then he turned to the pet-shop proprietor. “Name?” he shouted.
“Make it out to cash,” the pet-shop proprietor said.
When the old man had finished writing out the check for two thousand dollars, he put it on the counter between the pet-shop proprietor and him, and he and the old woman leaned forward with their eyes bright and their mouths open and said, “Now, tell us where you saw them. They’re worth half a million dollars.”
“The pair of blue finches?”
“Are we talking about canaries?” asked the old man, drumming his nails on the counter.
“I saw them —” the pet-shop proprietor said, closing his eyes, “I saw them —” he repeated, looking tired and ill, and older than he had looked when they first came into the shop; “I saw them —” he said, suddenly opening his eyes and looking happier than the old man and the old woman had ever seen anybody look, “in a forest in Arabia.”
The old man shrieked with anger and disappointment, and the old woman reached for the check for two thousand dollars, which was already in the pet-shop proprietor’s wallet in his inside coat pocket, though nobody saw him pick it up, fold it, and put it there.
The old man and the old woman ran out into the deep snow, crying police, crying help, and leaving the door wide open behind them. As it happened, there were no police at that wayside station on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. They rattled the door of the railway station but it was locked. On the outside, the schedule of trains was posted, and they lit matches, which they shielded with their hands and then with the old man’s hat, trying to make out how long they would have to wait in the cold before another train came along that would take them back to Venice. When they did see, finally, they couldn’t believe it, and went on lighting more matches and looking at the timetable in despair. The next train going in either direction was due in nine days. In the end, since all the other houses were closed and dark, they had to go back to the pet shop, and this time the old man pulled the door to after him. The pet-shop proprietor, seeing that they were about to speak, adjusted his hearing aid; but though they opened their mouths again and again, no sound came out, and after shaking the apparatus several times, the pet-shop proprietor put it in his pocket and said in a normal tone of voice, “If you don’t mind the conversation of birds, and if fish don’t make you restless, and if you like cats and don’t have fleas, there is no reason why you can’t stay here until your train comes.”
SO they did. They stayed nine days, there in the pet shop, among the birds of every size and color, and the cats of all description, the monkeys and the dogs, the long-tailed goldfish, and the tame raccoons. At first they were restless, but they had promised not to be, and gradually, because whatever the pet-shop proprietor did was interesting and whatever he had in his shop was living and beautiful, they forgot about themselves, about the passing of time, about Venice, where they had a number of important appointments that it would cost them money not to keep, and even about the blue finch of Arabia, which they had never seen but only heard about. What they had heard was how rare and valuable it was, not that its song is more delicate than gold wire and its least movement like the reflections of water on a wall. The old woman helped the pet-shop proprietor clean out the cages, and the old man brushed and curried the cats, who soon grew very attached to him, and when the pet-shop proprietor said suddenly, “You have just time to walk from here to the railway station at a reasonable pace before your train pulls in,” they were shocked and horrified.
“But can’t we stay?” the old woman cried. “We’ve been so happy here these last nine days.”
The pet-shop proprietor shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all right with me if you want to spend the rest of your life in a wayside station on the Trans-Siberian Railroad,” he said, “but what about the appointments you have in Venice?”
The old woman looked at the old man, who nodded sadly.
“Before you go,” said the pet-shop proprietor, “I would like to present you with a souvenir of the establishment.” He opened a door just large enough to put his hand through, and reached into a huge cage that went all the way up to the ceiling and the whole length of the room and was full of birds of every size and color, and took out two small ones, both of them blue as the beginning of the night when there is deep snow on the ground. “Here,” he said, thrusting the birds into a little wire cage and closing the door on them.
“But won’t they get cold?” the old woman asked. “Won’t they die on that long train ride?”
“Why should they?” asked the pet-shop proprietor. “They came all the way from —”
At that moment they heard the train whistle
, the train that was taking them back to Venice, and so the old man rushed for the door, and the old woman picked up the cage with the blue birds in it and put it under her coat, and they floundered through the snow to the railway station, and the conductor pulled them up onto the train, which was already moving, and it was just as the pet-shop proprietor said: The birds stood the journey better than the old man and the old woman.
At the border the customs inspector boarded the train, and went through everybody’s luggage until he came to the old man and the old woman, who were dozing. He shook first one and then the other, and pointing to the bird cage he said, “What kind of birds are those?”
“Bluebirds,” the old man said, and shut his eyes.
“They look to me like the blue finch of Arabia,” the customs inspector said. “Are you sure they’re bluebirds?”
“Positive,” the old woman said. “A man who has a pet shop in a wayside station of the Trans-Siberian Railroad gave them to us, so we don’t have to pay duty on them. The week before, he sold somebody a blue finch, but it was the common blue finch of Africa.”
All the Days and Nights Page 42