Auto-Da-Fé

by Elias Canetti

  Suddenly all was still. Another man would have rejoiced at once. Kien waited. He counted up to sixty. The stillness continued. He repeated a sermon of the Buddha, in the original Pali, not one of his longest dicta. But he omitted not a syllable and religiously declaimed all the repetitive phrases. Now let us half open our left eye, he said very softly, all is still, he who fears now is a coward. The right eye follows. Both gaze out into an empty closet. On the bed are strewn several plates, a tray and cutlery, on the floor a broken glass. A piece of beef is there, and his suit is smeared with spinach. He is wet to the skin with soup. It all smells normal and genuine. Who can have brought it? There was no one here. He goes to the door. It is locked. He rattles it, in vain. Who can have locked him in? The caretaker, when he left. The spinach is an illusion. He washes it away. The splinters of glass he gathers together. His grief cuts him. Blood flows. Is he to doubt the reality of his own blood? History tells us of the strangest errors. There should be a knife with the dinner things. To prove it, he carefully cuts off— although it is sharp and very painful — the little finger of his left hand. A great deal more blood begins to flow. He wraps his injured hand in a white handkerchief which is hanging down from the bed. The handkerchief turns out to be a napkin. In the corner he reads his own monogram. How did this get here? It seems as though someone had thrown into the room, through the roof, walls and locked door, a cooked dinner. The windows are unbroken. He tries the meat. It has the right taste. He feels ill, he feels hungry, he eats it all up. Holding his breath, stiff and quivering, he senses how each morsel finds its way down his alimentary tubes. Someone must have crept in while he was lying with closed eyes on the bed. He listens. So as to miss nothing, he lifts his finger. Then he looks under the bed and in the cupboard. He finds nobody. Someone has been here without speaking a word, and has gone away again: afraid. The canaries did not sing. Why do people keep these animals? He has done them no harm. Since he has ived here, he has let them alone. They have betrayed him. Flames flicker before his eyes. Suddenly the canaries start up. He threatens them with his bandaged fist. He looks at them: the birds are blue. They are mocking him. He pulls one after another out of the cage and presses their throats until they are strangled. Triumphant, he opens the window and throws the corpses into the street. His little finger, a fifth corpse, he tosses after them. Scarcely has he thus expelled everything blue from the room when the walls begin to dance. Their violent movement dissolves in blue spots. They are skirts, he whispers and creeps under the bed. He had begun to doubt his reason.

  CHAPTER III

  A MADHOUSE

  On an excitingly warm evening late in March the famous psychiatrist George Kien paced the rooms of his Paris Institute. The windows were open wide. Between the patients a stubborn contest was in progress for the limited space close to the bars. One head banged another. Abuse was bandied about. Almost all were suffering from the unfamiliar air which all day long they had been — some of them literally — gulping and swallowing in the garden. When the attendants had brought them back to the dormitories they were discontented. They wanted more air. Not one would admit to being tired. Until it was time for sleep they were still breathing at the window bars the last dregs of the evening. Here they felt themselves to be even closer to the air which filled their light, lofty rooms.

  Not even the Professor, whom they loved because he was beautiful and kind, distracted them at their occupation. At other times when it was rumoured he was coming, the greater number of the patients in a dormitory would run in a body to meet him. Usually they strove for some contact with him, either by touch or voice, just as to-day they strove for places at the window. The loadiing which so many of them felt for the Institute where they thought themselves confined, was never vented on the youthful Professor. It was only two years since he had become in name the director of the extensive Institute which he had in fact directed before, as the good angel of a diabolical superior. Those patients who thought that they had been detained by force, or who in fact had been, ascribed the blame to that all-powerful, although now dead, predecessor.

  This latter had embraced official psychiatry with the obstinacy of a madman. He took it for his real work in life, to use the vast material at his disposal to support the accepted terminology. Typical cases, in his sense of the word, robbed him of his sleep. He clung to the infallibility of the system and hated doubters. Human beings, especially nerve cases and criminals, were nothing to him. He allowed them a certain right to existence. They provided experiences which authorities could use to build up the science. He himself was an authority. On die value of such constructive mind he would — although a surly man of few words — make long and vehement speeches to which his assistant Georges Kien, under compulsion and burning with shame at his narrow-mindedness, must listen from beginning to end and from end to beginning, hour after hour, standing to attention. When a milder and a more severe opinion were in opposition, his predecessor would decide for the more severe. To patients who wearied him on his every round with the same old story, he would say: 'I know all that.' To his wife he complained bitterly of the professional necessity of having to deal with people not responsible for their actions. To her moreover he revealed his most secret thoughts about the essence of insanity, which he did not publish only because they were too simple and crude for the system and therefore dangerous. Madness, he said with great emphasis, and looked at his wife with penetrating and accusing gaze (she blushed), madness is the disease which attacks those very people who think only of themselves. Mental disease is the punishment of egoism. Thus asylums are always full of the scum of the earth. Prisons perform the same task, but science requires asylums for its experimental material. He had nothing else to say to his wife. She was thirty years younger than him and cast a glow over the evening of his life. His first wife had run away before he could shut her up — as he had done with his second — in his own institute; she was an incurable egoist. His third, against whom he had nothing save his own jealousy, loved George Kien.

  To her he owed his rapid rise. He was tall, strong, fiery, and sure of himself; in his features there was something ofthat gentleness which women need before they can feel at home with a man. Those who saw him compared him to Michelangelo's Adam. He understood very well how intelligence and elegance could be combined. His brilliant gifts had been brought to fruitful effectiveness by the policy of his beloved. When she was sure that no one would follow her husband as the head of the institute but George himself, the director suddenly died without provoking any comment. George was at once nominated his successor and married her as a reward for her earlier services; of her last one he had no suspicion.

  In the hard school of his predecessor he had developed quickly into his exact opposite. He treated his patients as if they were human beings. Faithfully he would listen to stories he had heard a thousand times before, and would express spontaneous surprise and amazement at the stalest dangers and anxieties. He laughed and cried with the patient he had in front of him. The division of his days was significant: three times — as soon as he got up, early in the afternoon, and late in the evening — he would make his rounds, so that on no single day did he ever miss one of the eight hundred odd inhabitants. A rapid glance was enough. When he saw the slightest alteration, a mere crack which offered a possibility of sliding into the other's soul, he would act at once and move the patient in question into his own private house. Instead of taking him to an ante-room, which did not exist, he would lead him, with cleverly interjected words of courtesy, into his study and offer him the best place. There he would easily win, if he did not enjoy it already, the confidence of the man who, towards anyone else, would hide behind the screen of his insanity. Kings he addressed reverently as Your Majesty; with Gods he would fall on his knees and fold his hands. Thus even the most sublime eminences stooped to him and went into particulars. He became their sole confidant, whom, from the moment he had recognized them, they would keep informed of the changes in their own spheres and s
eek his advice. He advised them with crystal cleverness, as though their wishes were his own, cautiously keeping their aims and their beliefs before his eyes, cautiously shifting ground, expressing doubts in his ability, never authoritative in his dealings with men, so diffident that many smilingly encouraged him; was he not after all their chief minister, their prophet or their apostle, occasionally even their chamberlain?

  In time he developed into a remarkable actor. The muscles of his face, of exceptional mobility, would fit themselves in the course of a day to the most various situations. Since he would daily invite at least three patients, in spite of his thoroughness sometimes even more, he must play at least so many parts; not to count the fugitive but significant hints and words thrown out in the course of his rounds, which ran into hundreds. The scientific world argued vigorously over his treatment of a few chosen cases of alternating personalities. If a patient, for instance, imagined himself to be two people who had nothing in common or who were in conflict with each other, George Kien adopted a method which had at first seemed very dangerous even to him: he made friends with both parties. A fanatical pertinacity was the postulate for this ruse. So as to discover the true inwardness of both characters, he would support each with arguments from whose effects he would draw his own conclusions. He built up the conclusions into hypotheses and thought of delicate experiments to prove them. Then he would proceed to the cure. In his own consciousness he would gradually draw the separate halves of the patient — as he embodied them — closer to each other, and thus gradually would rejoin them. He sensed the points of contact between them, and directed the attention of the separate personalities by striking and impressive images always back to these points until they remained there and of their own accord grew together. Sudden crises, violent partings, just when a final unanimity seemed to be achieved, happened often and were inevitable. But no less often did the cure succeed. Failures he ascribed to his own superficiality. He must have overlooked some hidden element, he was a botcher, he didn't take his work seriously enough, he was sacrificing living creatures to his own dead convictions, he was no better than his predecessor — then he would begin all over again, with a store of new curatives and experiments. For he believed in the soundness of his method.

  Thus he lived simultaneously in numberless different worlds. Among the mentally diseased he grew into one of the most comprehensive intellects of his time. Hé learnt more from them than he gave them. They enriched him with their unique experiences; he merely simplified them in order to make them healthy. What powers of mind and wit did he not find in many! They were the only true personalities, of perfect single-mindedness, real characters, of a concentration and force of will which Napoleon might have envied them. He knew inspired satirists among them, more gifted than all the poets; their ideas were never reduced to paper, they flowed from a heart which beat outside realities, on which they feu like alien conquerors. Privateers know the straightest way to the El Dorados of this world.

  Since he had belonged to them and given himself wholly to their constructions, he no longer cared for polite literature. In novels you always found the same thing. Earlier he had read with passion, and had taken great pleasure in new turns given to old phrases which he had thought to be unchangeable, colourless, worn out and without meaning. Then words had meant little to him. He asked only academic correctness; the best novels were those in which the people spoke in the most cultured way. He who could express himself in the same way as all writers had done before him, was their legitimate successor. The task of such a writer was to reduce the angular, painful, biting multifariousness of life as it was all around one, to the smooth surface of a sheet of paper, on which it could pleasantly and swiftly be read off. Reading was fondling, was another form of love, was for ladies and ladies' doctors, to whose profession a delicate understanding of lecture intime properly belonged. No baffling turns of plot, no unusual words, the more often was the same track traversed, the subder was the pleasure to be derived from the journey. All fiction — a textbook of good manners. Well-read men are obsessed with politeness. Their participation in the lives of others exhausts itself in congratulations and condolences. George Kien had started as a gynaecologist. His youth and good looks brought patients in crowds. At that period, which did not last long, he gave himself up to French novels; they played a considerable part in assuring his success. Involuntarily he behaved to women as if he loved them. Each in turn approved lus taste and accepted the consequences. Among the little monkeys a fashion for being ill spread. He took what fell into his lap and had difficulty in keeping up with his conquests. Surrounded and spoilt by innumerable women, all ready to serve him, he lived like Prince Gautama before he became Buddha. No anxious father and prince had cut him off from the miseries of the world, but he saw old age, death and beggars in such abundance that he no longer noticed them. Yet he was indeed cut off, by the books he read, the sentences he spoke, the women who were ranged round him in a greedy close-built wall.

  He found the way to the wilderness in his twenty-eighth year. On a visit which he had bestowed on the wealthy and persistent wife of a banker who was ill whenever her husband was away, he met the banker's brother, a harmless lunatic whom the family kept at home for reasons of prestige; even a sanatorium would have seemed to the banker to undermine his credit. Two rooms in his absurd villa were reserved for the use of his brother, who lorded it in them over his nurse, a round widow thrice over betrayed and sold to him. She was not to eave him alone, she was to submit to him in everything, and she was to announce herself to the world as his secretary, for he was given out to be an artist and an eccentric, who had little attention left for the human race, but was secretly working on a gigantic opus. Just this was known to George Kien as the doctor attending on the lady of the house.

  To protect himself from her slobbering courtesies, he asked her to show him over the art treasures of the villa. Heavy and consenting, she got up off her sofa. The pictures of nude beautiful women — her husband collected only these — would form, she hoped, a bridge to him. She raved over Rubens and Renoir. 'In these women,' she repeated her husband's favourite phrase, 'pulses the orient dye.' He had once dealt in carpets. For just such an effect of the orient he took every kind of opulence in art. Madame observed Dr. George full of sympathy. She called him by his Christian name because he might nave een 'her little brother'. Wherever his eyes rested, there too rested hers. Soon she thought she had discovered what he wanted. 'How you suffer!' she said, as they do on the stage, and glanced down at her bosom. Dr. George would not understand. He had such sensitive feelings. 'The clou of the whole collection is in my brother-in-law's room! He is quite harmless.' She promised herself better results from that really shameless picture. Since educated people had taken to coming to the house, her husband had been compelled — while bellowing that he was master in his own house — to banish to his sick brother's apartments the real picture of his heart and the first that he had succeeded in buying cheap (on principle he only bought cheap and for ready money). Dr. Kien showed no great inclination to meet the lunatic. He thought he would find an imbecile version of the banker himself. Madame assured him that the picture there was more valuable than all the others taken together; she meant artistic value but in her mouth that word had the one meaning, which, like all else, was acquired from her husband. In the end she offered herself his arm, he obeyed and followed. Familiarities while walking seemed to him less dangerous than while standing.

  The doors which led to her brother-in-law's rooms were locked. Dr. George rang the bell. They heard a heavy dragging step. Then-all grew still. Behind a peep-hole appeared a black eye. Madame put her finger to her lip and grinned tenderly. The eye stayed there, motionless. The two waited patiently. The doctor was regretting his politeness and the serious waste of his time. Suddenly the door swung silently open. A gorilla in human clothes stepped out, stretched forth its long arms, laid them on the shoulders of the doctor and greeted him in a foreign language. He took no
notice of the woman. His guests followed him in. He offered them seats at a round table. His gestures were crude, but comprehensible and inviting. The doctor racked his brains to follow his language. It seemed on the whole to recall an African dialect. The gorilla fetched his secretary. She was scantily dressed and evidently embarrassed. When she had seated herself her master pointed to a picture on the wall and clapped her on the back. She nestled up against him, unashamed. Her timidity disappeared. The picture represented the marriage of two ape-like creatures. Madame rose to her feet and looked at it from different angles and from all sides. The gorilla kept tight hold of his male visitor; he evidently had much to say to him. To George every word was strange. He grasped only one thing: the couple seated at the table were in some way closely connected with the couple in the picture. The secretary understood her master. She answered him in a similar language. He spoke louder, in a deeper voice, behind his tones there seemed to be passion. Occasionally she threw in a word in French, perhaps to indicate what was really meant. 'Don't you speak French? George asked. 'Naturally, monsieur!' she countered emphatically, 'what do you take me for? I am a Parisian!' She flooded him with a hasty gush of words, badly pronounced and even worse strung together, as though she had already half forgotten the language. The gorilla bellowed at her, and she was quiet at once. His eyes shone. She put her arm across his chest. He cried like a child. 'He hates the French language,' she whispered to the visitor. 'He's been working for years on one of his own. It's not quite finished yet.'