Auto-Da-Fé

by Elias Canetti

  Madame was for ever gazing at the picture. Geoige was grateful to her for this. One word from her would have broken down his politeness at last. He himself could find no words. If only the gorilla would speak again! Before this single wish all his thoughts of time-wasting, duties, women, success had vanished, as if from the day of his birth he had only been seeking for that man, or that gorilla, who had made up his own language. His crying interested him less. Suddenly he stood up and bowed low and reverently to the gorilla. He avoided French sounds, but his face expressed the greatest respect. The secretary accepted this recognition of her lord with a friendly nod. Then the gorilla stopped crying, fell back to his talking and permitted himself his oiiginal vehement gestures. Each syllable which he uttered corresponded to a special gesture. The words for objects seemed to change. He meant the picture a hundred times and called it each time something different; the names seemed to depend on the gesture with which he demonstrated them. Expressed and accompanied by his whole body no sound appeared indifferent. When he laughed he spread his arms out wide. He seemed to have a forehead at the back of his head. His hair had been rubbed away there as though, in the hours of his creative labour, he was for ever passing his hands over it.

  Suddenly he sprang up and threw himself with passion on the floor. George noticed that it was strewn with earth, probably a thick layer. The secretary caught at his clothes as he lay there, but he was too heavy for her. Imploringly, she asked the visitor to help. She was jealous, she said, so very jealous! Together they raised the gorilla. Hardly was he seated again when he began to recount his experiences down below. From a few powerful words, hurled into the room like living tree trunks, George guessed at some mythical talc of passion, which shattered him with fearful doubts of himself. He saw himself as an insect in the presence of a man. He asked himself, how could he understand things which came from depths a thousand feet deeper than any he had ever dared to plumb. How could he measure himself, sitting at the same table with a creature such as this, he a creature of custom, of favours, with every pore of his soul stopped with fat, every day more fat, a half-man in all practical uses, without the courage to be, since to be in our world means to be different, a plaster cast, a tailor's dummy, set in motion or put to rest by gracious chance, entirely dependent on chance, without the slightest influence over it, without a spark of power, strumming always the same empty phrases, always understood at the same safe distance. For where is there a normal man, a man who determines, alters and forms his neighbour; The women, who had stormed George with love and who would give their lives for him, especially when he was making love to them, were afterwards just die same as they had been before, smoothly groomed skin-worshippers, busied about cosmetics or men. But this secretary, in her origin doubtless an ordinary woman, just the same as any other, had grown under the powerful will of the gorilla into an original creature, stronger, more passionate, more devoted. While he was singing his adventures with the earth, she grew restive. She threw jealous glances and words into the midst of his story, fidgeted helplessly hither and thither on her chair, pinched him, smiled, put out her tongue; he took no notice.

  Madame was no longer finding enough pleasure in the picture. She forced George to stand up. To her astonishment he said good-bye to her brother-in-law as if he were Croesus, and to the secretary as if she had Croesus' marriage lines in her pocket. 'My husband supports him!' she said when they were outside; she objected to false impressions, but she said nothing about the appropriated share of the inheritance. The sympathetic doctor asked if he might not, out of scientific interest, treat the lunatic for his private pleasure; her husband would naturally be charged nothing. She misunderstood him at once and agreed, with one stipulation, that she should be present at the treatments. Since she heard footsteps — perhaps her husband had come back —she said quickly: 'The plans you have for him, doctor, fill me with curiosity!' George had to include her in the bargain. He carried her forward into his new life, a remnant of his old.

  For some months he came every day. His admiration for the gorilla grew from visit to visit. With infinite pains he learnt his language. The secretary did not help much; if she dropped back too often into her native French, she felt discarded. For her treachery to the man, to whom she clung without reservations, she deserved punishment. To keep the gorilla in a good temper George renounced the short cut of learning through any other language. He learnt like a child, who is being taught by words the relation of things to each other. Here their relation was the essential; the two rooms and their contents were dissolved in a magnetic field of passions. Objects — in this his first impressions had been correct — had no special names. They were called according to the mood in which they floated. Their faces altered for the gorilla, who lived a wild, tense, stormy life. His life communicated itself to them, they had an active part in it. He had peopled two rooms with a whole world. He created what he wanted, and after the six days of creation, on the seventh took up his abode therein. Instead of resting, he gave his creation speech. All that was round him proceeded from him. For the furniture which he had found here and the rubbish which little by little had been passed on to him, had long since carried the marks of his activities. The foreigner, who had suddenly descended on to his planet, he treated with patience. He could forgive back-slidings of his guest into the language of a worn-out and faded past, because he had himself once been a man. And he noticed clearly the progress the stranger was making. At first little more than his shadow, he grew in time to be his equal and friend.

  George was learned enough to publish a thesis on the speech of this madman. A new light was thrown on the psychology of sounds. Vigorously disputed problems of learning were solved by a gorilla. His friendship with him brought fame to the young doctor who had known hitherto only success. Out of gratitude he left him in the condition which made him happy. He renounced any attempt at a cure. He believed indeed, since he had learnt his language, that he had the skill to change him back from a gorilla into the disinherited brother of a banker. But he resisted the temptation to commit a crime, a temptation provoked alone by the sense of a power which he had gained over night, and instead became a psychiatrist out of admiration for the greatness of the distracted to whom his friend was so closely akin, and with the firm principle that he would learn from them but would heal none. He hacf had enough of polite literature.

  Later, when he was working his way through hundreds of experiences, he learnt to distinguish between madmen and madmen. In general his enthusiasm remained alive. A burning sympathy for those men who had so far separated themselves from others as to pass for mad, overcame him with every new patient. Many of them offended his sensitive love, particularly those weak natures who, struggling from attack to attack, pined for the lucid intervals —Jews yearning for the flesh pots of Egypt. He did them the service, and led them back into Egypt. The ways he had found to do so were no less wonderful than those of the Lord when he set free his people. Against his will, methods of approach which he had intended for particular cases were employed also in others, others which he — full of respect and gratitude to his gorilla — would never have meddled with. What he suggested, spread. The director of the institute in which he worked rejoiced at the noise which his school was still making in the world. People had got used to regarding his life-work as finished. And now how it flowered again with his pupil!

  When Georges walked along the streets of Paris it sometimes happened that he met one of his cures. He would be embraced and almost knocked down, like the master of some enormous dog coming home after a long absence. Under his friendly questions he concealed a timid hope. He spoke of general health, profession, plans for the future and waited for just one such little comment as 'Then it was nicer !' or 'How empty and stupid my life is now!' 'I wish I were ill again!' 'Why did you cure me?' 'People don't realize what wonderful things there are in their heads!' 'Being sane is a kind of retarded development!' 'You ought to be put out of business! You've robbed me of my most pric
eless possession!' 'I value you as my friend. But your profession is a crime against humanity.' 'Be ashamed, you cobbler of souls!' 'Give me back my madness!' 'I'll have the law on you!' 'Sane rhymes with bane!'

  Instead, compliments and invitations rained on him. His ex-patients looked plump, well and common. Their speech was in no way different from that of any passer-by. They were in trade or served behind a counter. At best they minded machines. But when they had still been his friends and guests, they were troubled with some gigantic guilt, which they carried for all, or with their littleness which stood in such ridiculous contrast to the hugeness of ordinary men, or with the idea of conquering the world, or with death — a thing which they now felt to be quite ordinary. Their riddles had flickered out; earlier they lived for riddles; now for things long ago solved. George was ashamed of himself, without anyone having-suggested that he should be. The relations of his patients idolized him; they counted on miracles. Even when physical deficiencies had been proved, they knew he would manage a cure somehow. His colleagues admired and envied him. They pounced at once on his ideas, they were simple and illuminating, like all great ideas. How was it no one had thought of them before! They hastened to break offlittle fragments of his fame, by proclaiming indebtedness to him and applying his methods to the most different cases. He was bound to get the Nobel Prize. He had long been in the running for if, on account of his youth it seemed better to wait a few years.

  So he had been outwitted by his new profession. He had begun from his own feeling of impoverishment, begun with the utmost reverence for the gulfs and precipices which he was to investigate. And in a little while he was a saviour, surrounded by eight hundred friends, and what friends, the residents of the institute; adored by thousands whose nearest and dearest had been reborn through him. For without the existence of nearest and dearest — to be tormented and loved — nobody feels that life is worth living.

  Three times a day when he went on his rounds through the rooms he received an ovation. He had grown accustomed to it; the more enthusiastically they ran to greet him, the more violently they crowded about him, the more certainly did he find the words and actions which he needed. The sick were his public. Before he came into the first room he was listening for the familiar hum of voices. Scarcely had one of them seen him from the window than the noise gained direction and order. He waited for this revolution. It was as if they had all begun to applaud. Involuntarily he smiled. Countless parts had become second nature to him. His spirit hungered for rapid transformations. A round dozen assistants followed him, to learn. Some were older, most of them had been in the profession longer than he. They regarded psychiatry as a special field of medicine, and themselves as the administrators of the mentally diseased. Whatever touched on their subject they had acquired with industry and hope. Sometimes they even pretended to agree with the crazy ideas of the patients, just as it said they should in the text books from which they drew their knowledge. One and all they hated the young director, who impressed on them daily that they were the servants and not the beneficiaries of the patients.

  'You see, gentlemen,' he would say to them when they were alone together, 'what miserable single-track creatures, what pitiful and inarticulate bourgeois we are, compared with the genius of this paranoiac. We possess, but he is possessed; we take our experiences at second hand, he makes his own. He moves in total solitude, like the earth itself, through his own space. He has a right to be afraid. He applies more acumen to the explanation and defence of his way of life, than all of us together do to ours. He believes in the images his senses conjure up for him. We mistrust our own healthy senses. Those few among us who have faith still cling to experiences which were lived for them by others thousands of years ago. We need visions, revelations, voices — lightning proximities to things and men — and when we cannot find them in ourselves we fetch them out of tradition. We have to have faith because of our own poverty. Odiers, still poorer, renounce even that. But look at him! He is Allah, prophet, and Moslem in one. Isa miracle any the less a miracle because we have labelled it Paranoia chronica? We sit on our dück-headed sanity like a vulture on a pile of gold. Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding. If there is a life purely of the mind, it is this madman who is leading it!'

  With feigned interest die assistants listened to him. When their promotion was at stake they were not above play-acting. Far more important to them than his general reflections, about which diey had their own private jokes, were his specialized methods. They noted down every word which, on the happy inspiration of the moment, he threw out to a patient, and vied with each other in the use of it, in the firm conviction that they were achieving just the same with it.

  An old man who had lived for nine years in the institute, a village blacksmith, had been ruined in his home district by the coming of motor cars. His wife, after a few weeks of acute poverty, could no longer endure her life with him and ran off with a sergeant. One morning when, as soon as he woke, he was beginning to lament their ill-fortune, she had no answer for him: she had gone. He looked for her through all the village. Twenty-three years he had lived with her; as a child she had come to his house, in the first bloom of her youth he had married her. He looked for her in the neighbouring town. On his neighbours' advice he asked at the barracks for Sergeant Delbocuf, whom he had never seen. He had disappeared three days ago, they told him; gone abroad for sure because he'd be for it as a deserter if they got him. Nowhere did the blacksmith find his wife. He stayed the night in the town. His neighbours had lent him money. He went into every café, poked his head under every table and whimpered: 'Jeanne, are you there?' She wasn't even under the benches. When he leant over the bar people screamed: 'He's after the cash box!' and drove him away. From a child up everyone had known he was an honest man. Since he had married her, he hadn't thrashed her once. She had her joke at him, because he squinted with his right eye. He didn't mind. All he said was: 'As true as my name's Jean, I'll show you who's master!' That was how he treated her.

  In the town he told everyone his misfortune. They all gave him good advice. A dirty cobbler said some people didn't know when they were lucky. He nearly killed him. Later he met a butcher. He helped him to look, because he liked walking about at night; he was a very fat man. They gave the alarm to the police and sniffed the river to see if there was a corpse in it. Towards morning they found a woman's, but she belonged to some other man. There was a thick fog and Jean the blacksmith wept when he saw it wasn't his. The butcher cried too and was sick into the river. Early in the morning he took Jean to the shambles. Here everyone knew and greeted him. The calves lowed, there was a smell of pigs' blood, the pigs squealed, Jean wailed even louder: 'Jeanne, are you there?' and the butcher bellowed —no one could hear the calves any more — 'The blacksmith's my friend! His wife's been brought here. Where is she?' The men shook their heads. So his wife's lost, raged the butcher, you've slaughtered her by mistake. He looked among the pigs who were hung up in a long row. 'Here's the old sow!' he bellowed. Jean looked at her from all sides, he smelt at her, he hadn't tasted a blood sausage in years, he loved them better than anything. When he had smelled his fill, he said: 'But this isn't my wife. ' Then the butcher lost his temper and swore : ' Go to hell, you fool ! '

  Jean limped to the station, his wife was his lame leg, his money was all gone. He whimpered: 'How shall I get home?' and lay down on the railway lines. Instead of a railway engine a good Samaritan came along, who found him and gave him a railway ticket on account of his wife. In the train the ticket was bad. 'But he gave it to me!'said Jean, 'My wife's left me!' He hadn't a penny in his pocket and at the next station the police took him. 'Is she there? Where is she?' sobbed Jean and threw his arms round the policeman's neck. 'Here she is,' said the policeman, pointed to himself and took him away. He was locked up in a cell, where he raged several days, and his wife was lost for good. He would have found her, surely.

  All of a sudden they let him go home. Maybe she's come back, he thou
ght. The bed had gone, the table had gone, the chair: had gone, everything had gone. His wife would never come home to an empty house.

  "Why's my house empty?' he asked the neighbours.

  'You owe us money, Jean.'

  'Where's my wife to sleep when she comes home?' asked Jean.

  'Your wife won't come. She's gone with that young sergeant. You sleep on the floor. You're a poor man now!'

  Jean laughed and set fire to the village. Out of the burning house of his cousin he salvaged his wife's bed. Before he took it away he strangled the little children asleep in it, three boys and a girl. He gave himself a lot of work that night. By the time he had found his table and his chairs and all his other possessions, his own empty house was on fire. He carried his goods out into the field, furnished the sitting-room like it used to be, and called 'Jeanne'. Then he went to bed. He left plenty of room for her, but she never came. He lay there a long time and waited. He was hungry, specially at night, you can't imagine how hungry. He nearly got up he was so hungry, the rain ran down into his mouth, he drank and drank. When it stopped he snapped at the stars, if only he could have had them, he hated hunger. When he could stand it no more, he made a vow. He vowed to the Virgin Mary he would never get up again until his wife had heard him and was lying there beside him again. Then the police found him and broke his vow. He would have kept it. The neighbours wanted to kill him. The whole village had been burnt down. He was delighted and yelled: 'I did it! I did it!' The police were afraid and went away fast.