Auto-Da-Fé

by Elias Canetti

  So as to carry conviction, George spoke with less emphasis than he had at his command. His mouth took on the lines of years of embitterment. Peter's mistrust grew, so did his curiosity; both could be clearly detected in the increasing tension of the muscles at the corners of his eyes.

  'You still dress very carefully!' he said, the only answer to these expressions of resignation.

  A painful necessity! My profession demands it. Uneducated patients are impressed when a gentleman who seems to them very grand treats them familiarly. Many melancholies are more cheered up by the knife-edge creases of my trousers than by anything I can say. If I do not cure these people, they will stay in their primitive condition. So as to open for them the way to education, even late in life, I must make them healthy first.'

  'You place such emphasis on education. Since when?'

  'Since I have known a truly educated man. The achievement which he has completed and is completing daily. The certainty in which his spirit dwells.'

  'You mean me.'

  'Whom else?'

  'Your successes depend on shameless flattery. Now I understand why you are so famous. You are a consummate liar. The first word you learnt to speak was a lie. Because you delighted in lies you became a mental specialist. Why not an actor: You ought to be ashamed to confront your patients! Their suffering is the bitter truth, they suffer because they have no help left in the world. I can imagine just such a poor devil, suffering from hallucinations about a particular colour. "I can see nothing but green," he complains. He may even cry. Perhaps for months already he's been tormenting himself with this ridiculous green, What do you do? I know what you do. You flatter him, you grasp him by his Achilles heel — and how would he not have one, human beings are made up of weaknesses — you talk to him with your "my friend ' and your "my dear fellow", he weakens, first he respects you, then he respects himself. He may be the wretched-est poor devil on God's earth; you overwhelm him with respect. Hardly has he begun to think of himself as co-director of your lunatic asylum, merely kept out of the general directorship by an unjust accident, then you come along with your true speech. "My dear fellow," you say to him, "the colour you keep seeing is not green. It is —it is —let us say blue!" Peter's voice grew sharp. 'Have you cured him? No! His wife at home will torment him just as she did before, she will torment him to his dying day. "When men are ill and at the gates of death, they become as men out of their minds," said Wang-Chung, a penetrating thinker; he lived in the first century of our era, from 27 to 98, in China under the later Han dynasty, and knew more about sleep, madness and death than you with all your supposedly accurate science. Cure your lunatic of his wife! As long as he has her he will be both mad and dead—which according to Wang-Chung are closely related conditions. Send his wife away if you can! You cannot do it, because you have not got her. If you had her, you'd keep her for yourself because you like a skirt. Shut up all women in your institute, do what you like with them, wear yourself out, die exhausted and stupefied at forty, at least you'll have healed many sick men and will know for what you have received so much fame and honour!'

  George noticed very well every time Peter's voice went sharp. It was enough that his thought recurred to the woman upstairs. He had not said a word about her, but already in his voice there betrayed itself a screeching, shrill, incurable hatred. Evidently he expected George to take her away; the mission seemed to him so hard and dangerous that he was already blaming him for having failed in it. He must be induced to give vent to as much of his hatred as possible. If only he would simply explain, from their origins onwards in a simple narrative, the events as they had appeared to him! George knew well how to play the part of the india-rubber in such a retrospect, and to wipe off the sensitive plate of memory all its traces. But Peter would never say anything about himself. His experiences had driven their roots right into the sphere of his learning. Here it was easier to find the sensitive spot.

  'I believe,' said George, and put on his most charming air of sympathy — who would not have been touched by it — 'that you overestimate the importance of women. You take them too seriously, you think they are human beings like us. I see in women merely a passing necessary evil. Many insects even have these things better arranged. One or a very few mothers bring into being the entire race. The rest remain undeveloped. Is it possible to live at closer quarters than the termites do? What a terrifying accumulation of sexual stimuli would not such a stock produce — if the creatures were still divided as to sex? They are not so divided, and the instincts inherent in that division are much reduced among them. Even what little they have, they fear. When they swarm, at which period thousands, nay millions, are destroyed apparently without reason, I see in this a release of the amassed sexuality of the stock. They sacrifice a part of their number, in order to preserve the rest from the aberrations of love. The whole stock would run aground on this question of love, were it once to be permitted. I can imagine nothing more poignant than an orgy in a colony of termites. The creatures forget — a colossal recollection has seized hold of them — what they really are, the blind cells of a fanatic whole. Each will be himself, it begins with a hundred or a thousand of them, the madness spreads, their madness, a mass madness, the soldiers abandon the gates, the whole mound burns with unsatisfied love, they cannot find their partners, they have no sex, the noise, the excitement far greater than anything usual, attracts a storm of real ants; through the unguarded gates their deadly enemies press in, what soldier thinks of defending himself, they want only love; and the colony which might have lived for all eternity — that eternity for which we all long — dies, dies of love, dies ofthat urge through which we, mankind, prolong our existence! It is a sudden transformation of the wisest into the most foolish. It is — no, it can't be compared with anything — yes, it is as if by broad daylight, with healthy eyes and in full possession of your understanding, you were to set fire to yourself and all your books. No one threatens you, you have as much money as you need and want, your work is growing every day more comprehensive and more individual, rare old books fall into your lap, you are acquiring superb manuscripts, not a woman crosses your threshold, you feel yourself free through your work and protected by your books — and then, without provocation, in this blissful and creative condition, you set fire to your books and let them and yourself burn together without a protest. That would be an event which would have a remote relation to the one I have described among the termites, an outbreak of utter senselessness, as with them, but not in so astounding a form. Shall we too one day, like the termites, dispense with sex? I believe in learning more firmly every day, and every day less firmly in the indispensability of love!

  'There is no love! A thing which does not exist can be neither indispensable nor dispensable. I would like to say with the same assurance: there are no women. What have the termites to do with us? Who among them has suffered anything from a woman? Hie mulier, hic salta. Let us confine ourselves to human beings! That female spiders eat their husbands after they have made use of the poor weaklings; that female gnats alone feed on blood, this has nothing to do with us. The slaughter of the drones, among bees, is totally barbarous. If they do not need drones, why do they breed them, if they do need them why do they kill them? In the spider, the most cruel and ugly of all creatures, I see an embodiment of woman. Her web shimmers in the sunlight, poisonous and blue.'

  'But you yourself are talking only of animals.'

  'Because I know too much about men. I prefer not to begin. I will say nothing of myself, I am only one case, I know many more serious ones, each case is wont for the man who suffers it. All really great thinkers are convinced of the worthlessness of women. Search through the sayings of Confucius, where you will find a thousand opinions and judgments on every subject of daily and more than daily life; search for a single sentence about women! You will find none ! Themaster of silence passes them over in silence. Even mourning for their death, since formalities indicate that a certain inner value is ascribed to
a thing, seem to him unsuitable and disturbing. His own wife, whom he married in accordance with custom when she was very young, not out of conviction, still less out of love, died after years of marriage. Her son broke into loud lamenting over the body. He cries, he shakes with sobs; because this woman was quite by chance his mother, he feels her to be irreplaceable. But Confucius in harsh terms reproaches him his grief. Voilà un homme! His experience later justified his conviction. For several years the prince of the State Lu used him as a minister. The land flourished under his administration. The people recovered, drew breath, gained courage and confidence in the men who led them. Neighbouring States were seized with envy; they feared a disturbance of the balance of power — a doctrine which we find in favour even in the earliest times. What did they do in order to be rid of Confucius? The slyest of them all, the prince of Tsi, sent to his neighbour the prince of Lu, in whose service Confucius was, eighty chosen women, dancers and flute-players, for a present. They ensnared the young prince. They enfeebled him, he grew bored with politics, he found the counsels of the wise tedious, he was better amused by the women. Through these creatures the life-work of Confucius came to naught. He took up the pilgrim's staff and wandered, homeless, from land to land, despairing at the sorrows of the people, hoping for some new influence, all in vain; everywhere he found the chiefs and princes in the power of women. He died an embittered man: but he remained far too noble ever to lament his griefs. I have felt it only in some of his shortest dicta. I too do not complain. But I generalize and draw conclusions.

  'A contemporary of Confucius was Buddha. Vast mountains divided them, how could they have known anything of each other? It is possible that the one did not even know the name of the people to whom the other belonged. "For what reason, reverent master," asked Ananda, Buddha's favourite pupil, of his teacher, "from what cause have women no place in the general assembly, pursue no trade and do not earn their living through any profession of their own?"

  '"Women are prone to anger, Ananda; jealous are women, Ananda; envious are women, Ananda; stupid are women, Ananda. That is the reason, Ananda, that is the cause for which women have no place in the general assembly, pursue no trade and do not earn their living in any profession of their own."

  'Women entreated to be taken up into the order, disciples took their part, but Buddha long refused to yield to them. Decades later he gave in to his own benevolence, to his pity for them, and founded against his better judgment, an order for nuns. Among the eight heavy rules that he laid on the nuns the first ran as follows:

  'A nun, even if she should have been in the order a hundred years, must offer to a monk — even should he have been received on that very day —the most reverent salutations; she must stand up before him, fold her hands, and honour him according to custom. She must take heed to this rule, revere it, keep it holy, honour it in all things and never transgress it all the days of her life.

  'The seventh rule, which she is also commanded to keep holy in the same terms, runs thus: 'A nun must in no wise scorn or reproach a monk.

  'The eighth: 'From this day forward a nun may hold no speech whatsoever with a man. But a monk may hold speech with a nun."

  'In spite of these barriers which the Exalted One had built up against women in his eight rules, he was overcome with a great sorrow when he had done it and spoke thus to Ananda:

  '"Had it not been permitted to women, Ananda, to follow the teaching of the Perfected, to leave the world and turn to a life of wandering, this holy order would long have continued; the true doctrine would have survived a thousand years. But since, Ananda, a woman has left the world and has taken to the life of wandering, this holy order will not last for long, Ananda; only five hundred years will the doctrine remain pure.

  '"Like a fair field of rice, Ananda, on which the pestilence falls, which is called mildew — that fair field of rice will not flourish long; so will it be with a doctrine and an order which permits women to withdraw from the world and to take up the life of pilgrims; that holy order will not last for long."

  '"Like a fair plantation of sugar canes, Ananda, on which the pestilence falls, which is called the blue disease — that fair plantation will not flourish long; so will it be with a doctrine and an order which permits women to withdraw from the world and to take up the life of pilgrims; that holy order will not last for long."

  'I hear in this impersonal statement of belief a great personal despair, a note of pain which I have found nowhere else in all the countless sayings of Buddha which tradition has handed down to us.

  Hard as a tree

  Crooked as a river

  Wicked as a woman

  Wicked and foolish

  runs one of the oldest of Indian proverbs, genially expressed as most proverbs are, when you think of its fearful subject but significant of the popular feelings of the Indians!'

  'What you are telling me is new to me only in detail. I admire your memory. You quote from an inexhaustible store of traditions everything which bears out your thesis. You remind me of those ancient Brahmins who used to pass on the Vedas — vaster though they are than the holy books of any other people — by word of mouth to their pupils, before the art of writing existed. You have the holy books of all peoples in your head, not only those of the Indians. All the same, you pay for your scholastic memory with a dangerous shortcoming. You don't see what is happening all around you. You have no recollection for your own experiences. If I were to ask you — which I have no intention of doing — tell me now, how did you fall into the hands ofthat woman, how did she deceive and lie to you, how did she misuse and play with you, tell me the stupidities and vilenesses which, according to your Indian proverb, make up the whole of her, singly and in detail, so that I may make my own judgment and not take over yours quite uncritically — that you would not be able to do. Perhaps to please me you would strain your memory, but quite in vain. You see it is just this kind of memory, which you lack, and which I possess; in that I tower above you. Anything that has ever been said to me, whether to hurt or to flatter, I remember always. But mere statements, simple facts which might have been addressed to anyone else, these escape me with time. Artists have this — a memory for feelings, as I'd like to call it. Both together, a memory for feelings and a memory for facts — for that is what yours is — would make possible the universal man. Perhaps I have rated you too highly. If you and I could be moulded together into a single being, the result would be a spiritually complete man.'

  Peter raised his left eyebrow. 'Memoirs are not interesting. Women, if they can read at all, live on memoirs. I notice very well what I experience myself. You are curious, I am not. You hear new stories every day, and now for a change you would like one from me. I renounce all such stories. That is the difference between you and me. You live by your lunatics, I by my books. Which is the more estimable? I could live in a cell, I carry my books in my head, you need a whole lunatic asylum. You poor creature, I'm sorry for you. The truth is you're a woman. You live for sensations. Let yourself go then, chase from one novelty to the next! I stand firm. When a thought troubles me, it does not leave me for weeks. You hurry on to get hold of another at once. That's what you call intuition. If I were suffering from a delusion I would be proud of it. What more evidently proves strength of will and character? Try persecution mania! I'd give you my whole library if you could bring yourself to it. You're as slippery as an eel, every strong thought slides ofFyou. You couldn't manage to have a delusion. Nor could I, though I have the necessary talent: I have character. That may sound boastful to you. But I have proved my character. Of my own free will, alone, leaning on no one — I had not even an accessory — I have liberated myself from a weight, a burden, a living death, a rind of accursed granite. Where would I have been if I had waited for you? Still upstairs! But I went into the street, I left the books in the lurch — you don't know what splendid books they were; get to know them first; possibly I am a criminal. On a stern moral judgment I did wrong, but I take full responsibi
lity, I am not afraid. Death breaks the marriage bond. And am I to be permitted less than death? What is death? A suspension of functions, a negative quantity, nothing. Am I to wait for it? Am I to await the caprice of a tough, elderly body? Who would wait when his work, his life, his books were at stake? I hated her, I hate her still, I hate her beyond the grave! I have a right to hatred; I will prove to you that all women deserve hate; you thought I was referring only to the East. Those proofs which I cited — you thought — were all drawn from my own special subject. I shall tear the' blue down from the sky for you, and I will tell no lies. Truths, beautiful, hard, pointed truths, truths of every size and shape, truths of feeling and truths of understanding, even though in your case only your feelings function, you woman, truths until you see blue, not red, but blue, blue, blue, for blue is the colour of faith! But that's enough, you have diverted me from our first subject. We have come to a halt on a level with illiterates. You debase me. I would do better to say nothing. You make a nagging Xantippe of me, and I had so many arguments!'