Auto-Da-Fé

by Elias Canetti

  Peter gasped. His mouth twitched violently. Inside it his tongue could be seen, describing despairing convolutions, reminiscent of a drowning man. The lines on his forehead grew disordered. He noticed it while he spoke and clutched at them with his hand; he laid three fingers on the wrinkles and two or three times stroked them with heavy pressure from left to right. The fourth wrinkle received no attention, thought George. It seemed a miracle that there could be a mouth in that narrow slit. But he has lips and tongue like everyone else, who would have thought it. He won't tell me anything. Why doesn't he trust me? How proud he is. He is afraid that I secretly despise him because he got married. Even as a boy he was always against love, as a man he never thought it worth discussing. 'If I were to meet Aphrodite, I'd shoot her.' He loved Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynic school, simply on account of this saying. And then along came an old hag and dragged down the slayer of Aphrodite into utter misery. What a character! How firm he stood! George was conscious of malicious pleasure. Peter had insulted him. He was used to insults, but these struck home. Peter's words had a meaning. It was true: George could not have lived without his patients. He owed them more than fame and daily bread; they were the substratum of his spiritual and mental life. The cunning he had employed to make Peter speak had failed. Instead of talking, he scolded George and accused himself of a crime. He had run away from his wife. So as not to feel too much shame for this shameful fact, he branded himself instead a criminal. A crime, which was no crime, he could bear to have on his conscience. Even men of character prove their integrity to themselves by such devious means. Peter was right to regard himself as a coward. He had not thrown his wife out of the house, he had thrown himself out. From the streets, where he had wandered miserably for a time, a lanky, laughable figure, he had taken refuge in the caretaker's little room. Here —in this prison —he was paying the penalty for his crime. So that the time should not be too long, he had telegraphed to his brother first. A definite role had been fixed for that brother in the whole plan. He was to deal with and get rid of the woman, to reduce the caretaker to his proper station, to talk the man of character out of his belief in a crime, and to lead him back in triumph to his cleansed and liberated library. George here saw himself as an important part of the mechanism which another person had set in motion for the maintenance of his threatened self-respect. The game was worth the two upper joints of a little finger. He was still sorry for Peter. But this pretence of distraction, this abuse of another person's dignity, so as to re-establish his own, this game which was being played with him — who was used to playing with others — displeased him. He would gladly have let Peter Know that he saw througn him He decided to help him back to the calm of his scholarly existence, selflessly and carefully, as was his office. But he planned a small revenge for later years. When he visited Peter again, and he had already decided to do so, he would in the most friendly but perfectly ruthless way, tell him exactly what had really happened between them in that litde room.

  'You have arguments? Let me hear them then? I believe your statements will always lead back to eidier India or China.'

  He had chosen the long way round, the short was closed. Since Peter refused to tell him simply what had happened, George would have to make out from selected learned dicta what his brother really in his heart held against his wife. How was he to draw those thorns out of Peter's flesh if he could not see them? How was he to calm him when he did not even know into what corners the unrest had spread, how it worked within him, how it appeared to him, what it conceived of the past of the human race, which it had substituted — an enormous changeling — for its own?

  'I will stay in Europe,' Peter promised, 'more even can be said of women in Europe. The great popular epics, both of Germans and of Greeks, have feminine broils for their subject. There can be no question of mutual influence. I suppose you admire Kriemhild's cowardly revenge? Did she hurl herself into the struggle, did she risk the slightest danger? She provoked others only, wove her intrigues, abused, betrayed. And at the end, when she had no danger left to fear, with her own hands she cut off the heads of her bound prisoners, Hagen and Günther. Out of loyalty? Out of love for Siegfried, for whose death she was alone responsible? The Furies drove her on? Did she know that she would destroy herself in gaining her own revenge? No, no, no! Nothing great inspired her. She cared for nothing but the treasure of the Nibelungen! She had lost her gewgaws through too much chattering; she avenged her gewgaws. Among the gewgaws it is true there happened to be a man. He was lost with them, and avenged with them. At die very last moment she still hoped to find out where the treasure was hidden from Hagen. I regard it as much to the credit of the poet, or of the people whom the poet embodied, that Kriemhild was slain too!'

  So she was greedy, thought George, and always wanting money from him.

  'The Greeks were less just. They forgave Helen everything because she was beautiful. For my part, I tremble with indignation every time I think of her again in Sparte, gay and viciously ogling, at the side of her Menelaus. As if nothing had happened — ten years of war, the strongest,' finest, noblest of the Greeks killed, Troy burnt down, Paris her lover, dead — she might at least hold her peace! Years have passed since then, but she is able to speak without embarrassment of* that time when: "Shameless as I was, for my unworthy sake, the Grecians sailed to Ilium." She could tell even how Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, slipped into besieged Troy and killed many men.

  '... Oh what wailing then

  Was heard of Trojan women, but my heart

  Exulted, alter'd now and wishing home.

  For now my crime committed under force

  Of Venus' influence I deplored, what time

  She led me to a country far remote,

  A wanderer from the matrimonial bed,

  From my own child, and from my rightful lord

  Alike unblemished both in form and mind.

  'She told the story to her guests, and, mark you, to Menelaus. She drew the moral for him too. In this way she cajoled her way back to him. Thus she consoled him for her former adultery. Then I used to think Paris, soul and body, more beautiful than you — that's the meaning behind her words — but to-day I know that you are as good. Who stops to think that Paris is dead? To a woman a living man is always more beautiful than a dead one. What she holds now, that pleases her. She makes a virtue of this weakness of her own character, and flatters him with it.'

  So she twitted him with his gloomy face, thought George, and deceived him with a less gloomy one. When the other man died, she wormed her way back with flattery.

  'Oh, Homer knew more of women than we do! The blind must teach those who can see! Do you remember how Aphrodite broke her marriage vow.? Hephaestus was not good enough for her because he limped. With whom did she betray him? With Apollo perhaps, the poet, an artist like Hephaestus who had all the beauties which the sooty smith lacked, or with Hades, the dark and mysterious, to whom the underworld belonged? With Poseidon, the strong and angry, who raised the tempests in the ocean? He would have been her rightful lord, she came out of the sea. With Hermes, who understood all the ruses in the world, even those of women, and whose guile and commercial acumen should have enchanted her, the mistress of love? No, to every one of these she prefers Ares, who made up for the vacuum in his head by the strength of his muscles, a ginger-haired dunderhead, the god of the Greek landsknechts, with no spirit, nothing but fists, unlimited only in violence, in everything else the embodiment of limitations'.

  That's the caretaker, thought George, so he was the second.

  'Out of clumsiness he got himself caught in the net. Every time I read how Hephaestus caught the two in his net, I shut down the book for joy and ten, twenty times I passionately kiss the name of Homer. But I do not omit the end. Ares takes himself pitiably off, true he's an ass, but he's a man; he has a spark of shame in his body. Aphrodite slips away radiant to Paphos, where her temples and altars are ready to receive her, and recovers from her shame — all the G
ods laughed at her in the net — by decking herself out in her finery!'

  When he found the two of them, thought George, the caretaker, still humble in those days, must have taken himself off, embarrassed, forgetting his fists at the sight of the wealthy man of learning. She, however, put on an impertinent air — the one defence of the discovered — took her clothes into the next room and dressed herself there. Jean, where are you?

  'I know your thoughts. You think I have the Odyssey against me. I can read in your eyes the names of Calypso, Nausicaa, Penelope. Let me show them to you with all their beauties — which one writer has taken on trust from another — nothing but three cats in an old bag. First let me point out that Circe, a woman, changed all men into swine. Calypso held Odysseus — whom she loved with all her body — a prisoner for seven years. All day long he sits, weeping bitterly, on the sea-shore, wretched with home-sickness and shame, all night long he has to sleep with her, he has to, whether he wants to or not. He does not want to, he wants to go home. He is an active man, full of energy, courage and spirit, an astounding man, the greatest actor of all time and in spite ofthat a hero. She sees him weeping, she knows well what it is that makes him suffer. In idleness and cut off from human kind, whose talk and action are the air he breathes, he wastes in her company his best years. She will not let him go. She would never have let him go. Then Hermes brings her the command of the gods: she must set Odysseus free. She must obey. Those last hours left to her, she misuses in order to place herself with Odysseus in a more favourable light. I let you go of my own will, she says, because I love you, because I am sorry for you. He sees through her, but he says nothing. And this is the way an immortal goddess behaves: she can have men and love for the whole of a long eternity, she will not grow old. What can it matter to her how he, the mortal, spends his short, small already time-devoured existence?'

  She never let him alone, thought George, not at night, not when he was working.

  'We know little of Nausicaa. She was too young. But we can note her tendencies. She wants a husband like Odysseus, she says. She had seen him on the sea-shore, naked. That is enough for her, he is beautiful. Who he is, she has no idea. She makes her choice from his body alone. There is the legend of Penelope, that she waited twenty years for Odysseus. The number of the years is correct, but why did she wait? Because she could not make up her mind between the suitors. She had been spoilt by the strength of Odysseus. No other man can please her. She cannot promise herself enough pleasure from these weaklings. She love Odysseus! What a myth! His old, weak, weary hound knew him when he came in, disguised as a beggar, and died of joy. She didn't recognize him, and lived cheerfully on. Before she went to sleep every night, it's true she cried a little. At first she used to long for him, he had been a fiery, strong man. Then crying grew to be a custom, a sleeping draught that she couldn't do without. Instead of an onion, she used the memory of her dear Odysseus, and cried herseif to sleep with that. The good old servant Eurykleia, the careful little mother, soft-hearted and always busy, broke into cries of joy at the sight of the defeated suitors, the hanged maids! Odysseus the avenger, the man who had been injured, had to reprove her!'

  It is the housewifeliness of Penelope and Eurikleia that he hates, thinks George; she had started as his housekeeper.

  'I regard as the most precious and the most personal legacy of Homer the words which Agamemnon, as a sad blue shadow in the underworld after his wife had killed him, spoke to Odysseus:

  Thou therefore be not pliant overmuch

  To women; trust her not with all thy mind,

  But half disclose to her, and half conceal...

  Steer secret to thy native isle, avoid

  Notice; for woman merits trust no more.

  'Cruelty too is one of the chief characteristics of the Greek Goddesses. The Gods are more human. When was a man more mercilessly tormented and harried through life than was Herakles by Hera, who had done her no wrong, except by being born? And when at last he died and got free of the terrible women, who had made even his death a hellfire, she spoiled his immortality by an underhand trick. The Gods wanted to reward him for his sufferings, they were ashamed of the hatred of hard-hearted Hera; as suitable indemnification they made him an immortal. But Hera smuggled a woman into the gift. She coupled him with her daughter Hebe. Gods are haughty: for a man to have one of them to wife seems to them an honour. Herakles is defenceless. If Hebe were a lion he could strike her down with his club. But she is a Goddess. He smiles and thanks them. He has been transplanted out of a dangerous life, whither? Into a never-ending marriage! A never-ending marriage on Olympus under a blue sky, with his eyes on the blue sea....'

  What he really fears is the indissolubility of the marriage. George was glad to think of the divorce, which would be his present to his brother. Peter was silent and looked fixedly in front of him.

  'Tell me,' he began hesitantly, 'I suffer from optical illusions. I was trying to imagine the Aegean Sea. It seemed to me more green than blue. Is there any significance in that? What do you think?'

  'But what are you thinking of? You are a hypochondriac. The sea takes on the most different colours. You must have had a greenish tinge as some particularly happy recollection. It's the same with me. I too like the vicious green colour, before thunderstorms, on dark days.'

  'Blue seems to me more vicious than green.'

  'The associations with various colours are in my experience diffèrent in different people. In general blue is regarded as a pleasant colour. Think ofthat simple, child-like blue in the pictures of Fra Angelico!'

  Peter was again silent. Suddenly he clutched at George's sleeve and said: 'While we are on the subject of pictures, what do you think of Michelangelo?

  'What made you think of Michelangelo?'

  'Precisely in the centre of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Eve is created out of Adam's rib. The representation of this event, which turned the newly begun and best into the worst of all worlds, is of a smaller size than the creation of Adam and the Expulsion from Eden on either side of it. It is a narrow and wretched process: the robbery of man's worst rib, the splitting into sexes, of which one is no more than a fragment of the other; yet this little event is in the very centre of Creation. Adam is asleep. Had he been awake he would have locked up his rib. Oh that the passing desire for a companion should have become his fate! The goodwill of God was exhausted with the creation of Adam. From that moment he treated him like a stranger, not like his own work. He held him to words and moods, swiftly changing as clouds, and forced him to bear the result of his whims for all eternity. Adam's whims grew into the instincts of the human race. He sleeps. God, the good father, contemptuously benevolent at this occupation, conjures Eve out of him. One of her feet is on the earth, the other is still in Adam's flank. Before she has the means to kneel she is already folding her hands. Her mouth murmurs words of flattery. Flatteries addressed to God are called prayers. She has not learnt how to pray in real sorrow. She is cautious. While Adam sleeps, she is hastily building up a hoard of good works. She works by instinct, and guesses God's vanity, which is gigantic, like himself. For the different acts of creation God bears himself differently. Between one act and the next, he changes his garments. Wrapped in a wide, beautifully draped cloak, he contemplates Eve. He does not see her beauty, seeing everywhere only himself; he accepts her homage. Her mien is humble and sinful. From her first moment she is all calculation. She is naked but feels no shame before God in his wide cloak. She will not know shame until one of her sins miscarries. Adam lies there, limp, as if he had been with a woman. His sleep is light and he dreams of the sadness that God is giving him. The first dream of mankind was this fear of woman. When Adam wakes God leaves them, cruelly, together; she will kneel to him, her hands folded as they were before God, the same flatteries on her lips, loyalty in her eyes, the lust of power in her heart, and so that he shall never escape her again she will tempt him to depravity. Adam is more magnanimous than God. God loves himself in his crea
tion. Adam loves Eve, the Second, the Other, the Evil, the Misfortune. He forgives her what she is: an expanded rib. He forgets, and of One, Two are made. What misery for all time!'

  A whim, a caprice is to blame for his marriage. He entered into it against his will. He cannot forgive himself. It irritates him the more that he can only believe in the Categorical Imperative and not in God. Otherwise he could transfer the blame to Him. He thinks of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to get some idea of God. There is no other credible Bible God to be found anywhere else in pictorial art. He needs Him in order to abuse Him. Aloud George uttered some non-committal sentence as far as possible removed from his thoughts.

  'Why for all time? We were speaking of termites who have got the better of sex. It is therefore neither an inevitable nor an invincible evil.'

  'Yes, and just such another miracle as the love riot in the termite hill and the burning of my library, which is impossible, out of the question, inconceivable, stark madness, treason unparalleled to priceless treasures such as no one else has gathered together, sheer scandal, an obscenity, something you must not even mention to me in jest, let alone presume, you can see now, I'm not mad. I'm not even a little unbalanced, I've gone through a lot, there's nothing wrong in getting excited, why do you sneer at me, my memory is perfect, I know everything I want to know, I am master of myself, why? — even if I married once I never had a single love affair, and you, what haven't you done in love, love is a leprosy, a disease, inherited from the first living organisms, others marry twice, three times, I had nothing to do with her, you insult me, you've no right to say it, a madman might do such a thing but I shan't set my library on fire, clear out, if you insist on it, go back to your Bedlam, where are your wits, you answer everything I say with Yes, or Amen! So far I've heard not one personal expression of thought from you, you rattle, you think you know everything! I can smell your contemptuous thoughts. They stink. He s mad, you think, because he abuses women! I'm not the only one! I'll prove that to you! Takeaway your filthy ideas! You even learnt to read from me, you squirt. You don't even know Chinese. Very well, I'll have my divorce later. I must rehabilitate my honour. A wife isn't necessary for a divorce. Let her turn in her grave. She's not even in a grave. She doesn't deserve a grave. She deserves hell! Why is there no Helh One must be founded. For women and womanizers, like you. What I say is the truth! I am a serious person. You are going away now and won't bother with me any more. I am alone. I have a head. I can look after myself. I'll not leave the books to you. I'd sooner burn them. But you'll die first, you're already worn out, that's your disgusting way of life, only listen to yourself, to the way you talk, without force in long involved sentences, you're always polite, you woman, you're like Eve, but I'm not God, those ways cut no ice with me! Take a rest from all this femininity! Maybe you'll become human again. Miserable, unclean creature! I'm sorry for you. If I had to change places with you, do you know what I'd do? I have not got to, but if I had to, if there were no other way, if the natural law was merciless—I would know a way out. I'd burn your lunatic asylum, till it flamed like daylight, with all its inhabitants, with me too, but not my books! Books are worth more than lunatics, books are worth more than men, you don't understand that because you're a play-actor, you need applause, books are dumb, they speak yet they are dumb, that is the wonder, they speak and you hear them more swiftly than if you had to hear them with ears. I'll show you my books, not now, later. You'll say you're sorry for your revolting suggestion, or I'll throw you out!'