«I’m happy now. How did I pull myself out of it? It’s very simple. One day I fell in the middle of a crowded street, beaten down, frayed, dead of hunger. Crisant casually passed by, picked me up, and we talked.
“You’re mistaken,” he said to me. “You won’t get anywhere with towns and men, you won’t improve them in the slightest if you reproach their defects, defects already well known to all. On the other hand, they never end up knowing what positive qualities they have. If you show these to them, they will end up thanking you for it.”
»Little by little, with circumspection, Crisant made manifest to me his doctrine, a doctrine which I followed to the letter. And I succeeded, as you all can see. Don’t you know Crisant’s theory? It’s as amazing as it is simple.» «Wait,» the impatient Tomeu interrupted. «First say what you did to free yourself from being the redeemer.» «Who, me? Well, I was a lawyer. And in my spare time, as a distraction, a ventriloquist,» laughed the happy Salom. And then he went on to expound to us Crisant’s theory.
Crisant’s Theory
Crisant Baptista Mestres—an eloquent man, with a medical degree and a love for belles lettres and philosophical digression, things they say are very entertaining hobbies—never had the need to work for a living when, all of a sudden, he lost his whole rich inheritance. «Crisant, dear, there’s no bread in the house,» said his loving wife. «Let me get oriented, Laudelina,» commanded Crisant. «Alright,» he said at last. «We will go far, I promise you.» «Look at how we scarcely have any bread,» Laudelina began again. «Think pure thoughts, you know? My theory,» asserted Crisant, completely satisfied. «Fine, but what will we do to get bread?» his wife insisted. «Nothing more than think pure thoughts,» Crisant interrupted. «It’s an infallible secret for prospering, girl. Ah, what a brain I have, what a man I am, among the best! You’ll see the results in no time!» Crisant promised with great optimism. «Thinking pure thoughts: a method for conserving the body’s health, combating all sickness, and extending life. Office: Dr. Crisant B. Mestres, Galatea 15,» was spread throughout the country. «Think pure thoughts. You are intelligent, young friend!» he said to his first client. «Think pure thoughts and you will get better.» «What did he tell you, what did he prescribe for you?» people asked the first to try the new system. «We didn’t talk about prescriptions, but on the other hand he told me some really useful things.» «That’s it, he’s a psychiatrist,» they said indecisively, and ran to Carrer de Galatea, number fifteen, to find out. «Come in, gentlemen, come in,» welcomed Crisant. «I’ll get to you all very soon. What a noble head you have: think pure thoughts,» he said to one. «You are rich and, what’s more, you know it, I know you know it. You deserve a fortune, and anyone who’d pull something against you would be committing a monstrous mistake. Think pure thoughts,» he advised another. «What a looker you are! No, no: looker, with an l, and I’m not from Valls; think pure thoughts,”» he said, enraptured, to a third. «What a nice man. And he’s put everything in its place for me. He’s a thaumaturge,» the flattered people said. «Oh, master Mestres!» they fawned. «You all are the best,» Crisant said. «So, do we have bread in the house now?» he asked his wife. «We’ll never finish it, dear,» Laudelina responded enthusiastically. «You’re the one who’s really the best.» «Think pure thoughts,» Crisant reminded her. «Doing that is enough,» Laudelina very happily agreed. And the sick always filled the office on Galatea, 15, and all hastened to think pure thoughts, sustained by the small conviction of being the best. «I’m the best, no, doctor?» asked the old man Tobies Comes, spoiled by earthly goods. «I’m the best—no, doctor?» asked Count Trinitat Castellfollit, in those heady days the country’s preeminent moneybag. «You’re the best,» Crisant confirmed separately to Tobies and to the count. «You just have to think pure thoughts.» «Hurrah!» exulted those two incorruptible cavaliers and the legion that followed them. «Long live Psychopathic Crisant!» And everyone privately rejoiced at the sweet novelty, the evangelism of Crisant. «I am the best, I am the best,» the elderly Tobies hummed as he dressed before a mirror. And boom! he fell to the floor, as though struck by lightning, and made his debut as a cadaver. «Crisant, my elderly relative Tobies had a sudden ache, and now he’s colder and stiffer than an Englishman, and he had the same illness that I had,» Count Castellfollit, who was above all considered a humorist, now stiff with fright, revealed quickly. «Don’t take it that way, dear Count. They were quite different cases, yours and that of Tobies. Between us, I wasn’t ever able to get the deceased to think pure thoughts. Tobies Comes was never one of the best. But our dear Castellfollit on the other hand, yes, and the best among the best,» Crisant said, calming him. «Thank you, thank you,» the count wept, euphoric. «Ask of me anything you want,» Crisant said. «I want nothing but to do good: I am a modest man,» Crisant said. «I am taking care of you. You are a soul that would obtain beatitude ahead of time. If we, your friends, didn’t watch out for you, God protect us. No, we won’t leave off, by no means, not until you sit, at the very least, among the immortals—for example in the Acadèmia de la Llengua,» answered the all-powerful Trinitat. «No, no, please,» Crisant, with a modest perfection, stammered. «Enough, silence: make this sacrifice for me,» requested the count. And Crisant was made an academician—one of his life’s most hidden dreams—and adviser of the Banc Nacional, member of Parliament, president of the Board of Barefoot Indians, and professor of Characterological Graphology at the University, where he was suddenly surrounded by many disciples, among them the favorites Amaranta, Pupú Alosa, Ludovicus Baronet, Maria Victòria Prou, Mimí Pitosporos, and two or three silent, affected people who formed a closed, hermetic, circle; the circle of Crisant’s orthodox doctrine. «We love him!» they said at the sight of themselves in such a highly eminent group. «You’re all the best,» Crisant meted out in intimate settings. And he spread praise among his apostles. «What beautiful hands you have, Amaranta! And you, Alosa, the manner in which you move yours! And, you, Baronet, what beautiful silence! Silence is the best trait there is, because it allows pure thoughts to be expressed. And you all,» he said to the two or three affected people left, «you all are also the best, because you admire me and you admire so purely your companions.» «Glory be to Crisant!» the country exalted. And they offered him, in homage, a five-thousand-place meal. «Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,» Crisant began when it was his turn to deliver a speech. «Thank you for this bounteous downpour descending upon my head.» «A poet, goodness me, a poet! Thaumaturge, financier, academician, patron, and now poet,» the throng cried. «And master above all. He loves his pupils, he stimulates them, he helps them, he knows them, and then there’s this school of great clinicians that he’s created! What did you all tell me about Baronet’s silence, Amaranta’s hands, Alosa’s gestures, Mimí’s talks, or Victòria’s tender spirit?» «You can count on this: they are great clinicians,» the public acknowledged. «I already know, dear Professor, about your great day yesterday,” the Princess Bijou Fontrodona said the day after the event. «N’est-ce pas, maman?» «Oui, ma fille, une journée tout à fait historique,» the broken-down duchess, Stephana Martin, swallowing a yawn, agreed. «Surely I was needed there, being the country’s only princess,» Bijou added. «And the best,» interrupted, gallantly, the great man. «You are adorable,» the Princess said, utterly pleased. «But I was not able to attend, due, as you will already have figured, to my husband, the Prince.» «Yes, of course, the Prince,» Crisant said. Then all three of them sighed. «And what are you thinking to do now, what projects do you have?» Bijou inquired. «Just a book,» the great man said, with an air of confidentiality. «A book in which you will no doubt express your curative theory, how fantastic,» the kind Princess said. «Yes, and moreover, a type of confession, an autobiography. For, ladies, I will reveal my hidden tragedy. In reality I am neither a clinician, nor a financier, nor a patron of barefoot Indians, an academic nor a poet. I am a philosopher. As a young man I followed the teachings of Efrem Pedagog, a sublime genius as far as I am concern
ed, and Efrem considered me the best of his pupils. I owe my whole doctrine to him. Life and circumstance took over afterward, and no one saw the philosopher in me, when in fact I am nothing other than a philosopher, or a failure: and there you have what I want to tell in my book.» «Really? A philosopher?» commented Bijou, with a bit of frost in her voice. But she quickly recovered. «You are terrible, Crisant! A philosopher. A failure . . . Your ambition has no limits, dear friend.» Everyone laughed, and Crisant’s ears turned deep red from the psychological collapse. «Following a train of thought,» the Duchess said when everything calmed down. «I would like to ask you a favor, Crisant: nothing major, a little obligation. It is about Melània . . . an old pupil of yours.» «Melània, Melània . . . » Crisant, trying to recall her, said. «Ah, yes, a Melània attended my lectures for three straight years. Not another word, Duchess, I implore you. Melània was intolerable. She never accepted my theory; she slandered it, only thinking of herself, and I find these flights of freedom unpleasant. Melània did not belong, to put it this way, in the category of the best,» Crisant explained. «Request of me, on the other hand, anything you may want done for Mimí or for Baronet, or for the good of Amaranta, or Alosa, or Victòria.»
Introduction to the Study of a Small Giraffe
«You haven’t heard?» asked Emma Raquel Baladre. «A little giraffe was born in our zoological park.» «When?» asked diligent voices. «Today at dawn,» Emma clarified, pleased by our attention. «Our zoo can rival the best in the world now. Actually, it’s among the most important. Do you all know what it means that a giraffe was born in our city, in our climate? The treatment that had to go into the long gestation period, the discretion, the interest. Ah, our modest little zoo! People, I’m telling you: we don’t have to be jealous, in this respect, of any other in the world,» perorated the renowned patriot Carranza i Brofegat. «Have you ever tended to any part of a giraffe?» Tomeu asked him. «No, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about,» responded Carranza. «Ah, if you could all see the giraffe!» continued Emma Raquel Baladre. «So precious, so light, so little!» «It will always be bigger than a wolfdog,» Tomeu pointed out, not being one who easily developed a soft spot for animals. «Yeah, man, the same for you,» Emma protested, slightly indignant. But she soon calmed down. «This morning, when I heard the news, I went to see it with my niece,» she continued. «She was so enthusiastic! And she wasn’t scared at all.» «How old is she?» inquired those good souls Clàudia and Melània. «Not yet three,» Emma said. «The little thing!» Clàudia and Melània said. «It’s been a while since we’ve seen her. You have to take us to her.» «It will be my pleasure,» Emma said. «Thank you,» Clàudia and Melània, ever good girls, said. «And you say the giraffe didn’t scare her?» «Not at all; they even became friends. She cried out to it and the giraffe came to her as though it had known her all its life. The parent giraffes ambled backwards, very pompously, satisfied with their paternity. It was moving.» «Listen,» screamed Justi Petri, upon entering. «There’s just been a new run-in between the troops and the extremists. I saw three or four soldiers with my own eyes laid out on the ground with shrapnel . . . Bloodcurdling!» «I don’t feel bad for them, I just don’t,» responded Emma Raquel Baladre, who was, during that period, a pioneer in those revolutionary ideas—ideas as full of hypocrisy as firm gravitas—that flourish today. «Four or five? It should have been more!» «Why?» Tomeu asked: «I have to enlist, and you well know it, some time in the near future. What would you say if I were one of the dead?» «Don’t come to me now with complications,» Emma cut him off. «All I know is that gunning down lots of people, when they’re your people, is abominable.» «But what do you want those boys to do? They’re under orders, they can’t do anything else,» Tomeu said. «Disobey,» Emma didactically offered. «They would shoot them on the spot for insubordination,» Tomeu countered, irritated. «Well, they would then win my complete respect,» Emma granted. «Right, but I’m not interested in that; it’s the same stuff every day. We were talking, Petri, when you arrived, of real news: a little giraffe was born in our zoo.» «I’m surprised,» Petri confessed. And the conversation stretched on, with renewed drive. «The little giraffe died last night, Emma,» Melània said the following day. «Don’t any of you talk to me about it! I was having breakfast when I found out and I couldn’t put down another bite,» Emma lamented. «And what did it die of?» the patriot Carranza asked. «There are multiple stories, as you’ll see. Some say that her mother, while asleep, crushed her. Others that it was the brutal jealousy of the father. Others, perhaps the closest to getting it right, said that it was due to complications from the birth. The thing is that it’s dead. The mother is going to suffer badly, poor thing! Without a doubt they’ll reduce its food. Because they feed it. Just think: besides the foliage, an entire bucket a day of milk to make it strong during lactation.» «I’ve had enough of giraffes!» Tomeu suddenly cried. «I’ve had enough of them! Thank goodness it’s squashed.» «Heartless jackass!» Emma shot out. «You deserve . . . » «Guys!» our Justi Petri, bursting in on us, said. «The funeral for the fallen soldiers from yesterday is passing by now. Attending it . . . » «Poor giraffe!» melancholic Emma Raquel Baladre remembered. «Our modest zoo didn’t have to be jealous, in that respect, of any other in the world!» added, quite measuredly, the renowned patriot Carranza i Brofegat.
Topic
«A machine,» I explained once, «caught my friend Eleuteri while he was working» (during his short life he did nothing else) «and cut off his right femur. They say Eleuteri let out three or four extremely sharp cries. That he sprawled out on the floor, soaked in an expanding pool of blood. Some collapsed at the sight of him, others went to find help. The doctor showed up and gave many useless orders. Eleuteri was moved to an improvised ambulance, and they went off in search of an undiscoverable cure. Once his body had been well studied, they finally decided to carry him home to his mother. Folks piled up at the door, making much racket.
“What’s this, what happened?” the old woman asked.
“Ok, don’t get frightened. Eleuteri, at work . . .,” began the tragic heart.
“He’s dead!” the old woman shrieked.
“Yes, it’s true; you had to be told,” admitted the coreuta, a neighbor with the tested mettle ideal for these situations.
“I want to go where my son is, I want to see him,” bellowed the unfortunate woman.
“Marieta, calm yourself, woman, you’ll get yourself worked up,” prophesied the kind souls. But the mother made headway and embraced her son’s remains.
“How white!” everyone weighed in at the sight of him rigid on the bed. “Of course. He doesn’t have even a drop of blood left in his veins. How did it happen? It hasn’t sunk in.”
»There were multiple stories of what had happened, and none of them were satisfactory. The cadaver meanwhile had a smile on its thin lips. The horrified, agonized grimace gone, his peaceful features reminded his mother of the boy’s infancy, a world unto itself. Poor, little Eleuteri—so quiet and insignificant in life—had grown up, controlling this moment with supreme hierarchical power. Everyone revered the noble, marble man, the splash so new in the silence.
“Is the body all mangled?” the heart continued.
“No, and after a little bit of work by the doctor, sewing him up, you all wouldn’t even know it. A deep gash on the right leg and that’s it.”
“He barely suffered while it was happening, surely,” the doctor responded, swelling with pride from the praise. “The impact was so utterly violent that his sensory functions shut themselves off.”
“He was my son,” Marieta panted.
»Rows of solicitous witches mobilized and returned with orange blossom water, lime blossom tea, and piping hot tisanes.
“Drink it, Marieta.”
“This woman won’t be able to handle it, as delicate as she is, and maybe it would be for the best.”
»Others opined that that wouldn’t be the case, because who then would
pray for poor Eleuteri? And they surrounded Marieta, they massaged her, joined her in wailing out her pain, each wanting to be the first to give thanks and praise. All of the women thought: “If it were to have been my boy at home!” And they terrified themselves, they wanted to distance the portent, and they hugged Marieta when it was their turn—and God willing, no one else’s—to be in that, the bitterest of roles.
»The brother and fiancée of the deceased, having been urgently told, arrived. The brother was married, had a family, and for this reason he was immediately shut out from the front line of the grieving. The fiancée, on the other hand—poor girl!
“Almost a widow.”
“You said it. They were getting married within the month, in November!”
»The upheaval of Nepomucè Garrigosa, Eleuteri’s boss, was far more telling. He’d loved Eleuteri like a son, so much so that he’d taken him on as his apprentice! Eleuteri was so honorable, so good, and could do anything, and was so humble, so very prudent, and satisfied with little: he contented himself with a fifth of the salary he deserved.
“This is the first displeasure he’s ever caused me. He had my complete confidence, I didn’t even give him orders anymore, because he knew his obligations and never stopped working. If he had to work fifteen, twenty hours? He did it like that. And now this stupid, inexplicable death. I loved him like a son, I tell you, Marieta. The lady of the house didn’t dare come, forgive her. You’re in mourning, no? None of you would be able to keep up with her, she’s even made herself sick.”
»The tender discussion provoked spectacular weeping. What else? Eleuteri was watched over the entire night, and the following day the entire town accompanied him to the cemetery.
“The boy was insured, Marieta. With the new laws in place you’ll receive at least fifty bucks, which is always a consolation. And don’t you worry about the burial and the services, that’s all on me. And what’s more, here you have the wages for the week that poor Eleuteri didn’t get to complete. Are you happy?”
Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Catalan Literature) Page 8