Lovers and Other Monsters

by Marvin Kaye (ed)

  Don Juan felt a certain shame at coming to his father’s death-bed still wearing the bouquet of a harlot in his breast, and carrying thither the perfumes of a banquet and the odors of wine. “Thou art enjoying thyself,” said the old man, when he saw it was his son. At this moment the clear, light voice of a singer, who held the banqueters spellbound, sustained by the harmony of the viol on which she accompanied herself, rose above the rattle of the hurricane, and rang even in this funereal chamber. Don Juan affected not to hear the answer thus brutally given in the affirmative to his father. “I blame thee not, my child,” said Bartolomeo. The kindness of these words caused a pang to Don Juan; he could not forgive his father for the poignancy of his goodness.

  “My father, think of the remorse I must feel,” said he hypocritically.

  “Poor Juanino,” replied the dying man in a muffled voice, “I have always been so kind to thee that thou couldst not desire my death?”

  “Oh,” cried Don Juan, “if it were only possible for me to restore life to you by giving you up a part of my own!”

  (“One can always say that sort of thing,” thought the reveller; “it is as though I offered the world to my mistress.”) He had scarcely conceived this thought when the old spaniel barked. The intelligence of this voice made Don Juan shudder; it seemed to him as if the dog had understood him.

  “I knew well, my son, that I could count upon thee,” cried the dying man. “I shall live. Thou shalt have thy wish. I shall live without depriving thee of a single one of the days allotted thee.”

  “He is delirious,” said Don Juan to himself. Then he added aloud: “Yes, my dearest father, you will live, assuredly, as long as I live, for your image will be always in my heart.”

  “I was not speaking of that sort of life,” said the old noble. He collected all his strength and sat up, for he was troubled by one of those suspicions that only rise from under the pillows of the dying. “Listen! my son,” he replied in a voice enfeebled by this last effort; “I am no more ready to die than thou art ready to give up thy falcons, and dogs, and horses, and wine, and mistresses, and gold.”

  “I can well believe it,” thought his son again, as he knelt down by the bedside and kissed one of the corpse-like hands of Bartolomeo. “But,” he answered aloud, “my father, my dear father, we must submit to the will of God.”

  “God is I,” muttered the old man.

  “Blaspheme not,” cried the reveller, when he saw the look of menace which his father’s features assumed. “I beseech you take care; you have received Extreme Unction; I could never be comforted if I saw you die in sin!”

  “Listen to me, wilt thou?” cried the dying man, his mouth drawn with anger.

  Don Juan held his peace. A horrible silence reigned. Across the dull whir of the snow the harmonies of that ravishing voice and the viol still travelled, faint as the dawn of day. The dying man smiled.

  “Thou hast bidden singers, thou hast brought music hither; I thank thee. A banquet! Women, young and beautiful, with white skins and raven locks!—all the pleasures of life! Bid them stay; I am about to be born again.”

  “The delirium is at its height,” thought Don Juan.

  “I have discovered a means of bringing myself to life again. Here! Look in the drawer in the table; it opens by pressing a spring hidden under the griffon.”

  “I have found it, my father.”

  “Good! take out a little flask of rock crystal.”

  “It is here.”

  “I spent twenty years in...” At this moment the old man felt his end approaching; he collected all his strength and said, “As soon as I have given my last breath, rub me entirely all over with that water and I shall come to life again.”

  “There is very little of it,” answered the young man.

  Though Bartolomeo could no longer speak, he still retained the faculties of sight and hearing; at these words his head turned round toward Don Juan with a sudden spasmodic start, his neck remained stretched out like the neck of a marble statue condemned by the thought of the sculptor always to look to one side, his eyes were dilated and had acquired a hideous stare. He was dead, dead as he lost his last, his only illusion. He had sought a refuge in the heart of his son; he found it a charnel-house more hollow than men are wont to dig for their dead. Thus it was that his hair stood on end with horror, the convulsion in his eyes still spoke. It was a father rising in rage from his tomb to demand vengeance at the hand of God upon his son!

  “Hm! The old man is done for,” said Don Juan.

  In his hurry to hold up the mysterious crystal before the light of the lamp, like a drunkard consulting his bottle at the end of a meal, he had not seen the pallor fall upon his father’s eyes. The dog gaped as he gazed alternately at the elixir and his dead master, while Don Juan glanced to and fro at his father and the phial. The lamp cast up its flickering flames, the silence was profound, the vial was dumb. Belvidero shivered; he thought he saw his father move. Terrified by the set expression of those accusing eyes, he closed them as he would have shut a shutter shaken by the wind on an autumn night. He stood erect, motionless, lost in a world of thoughts. All at once a sharp sound, like the cry of a rusty spring, broke the silence. Don Juan, startled, almost dropped the phial. Sweat colder than the steel of a dagger broke from every pore. A cock of painted wood rose on the top of a clock and crowed three times. It was one of those ingenious machines which the students of those days used, to wake them at a fixed hour for their studies. The dawn already glowed red through the casements. Don Juan had spent ten hours in meditation. The old clock was more faithful in its service than was he in his duty toward Bartolomeo. The mechanism was composed of wood, and pulleys, and cords, and wheels, while he had within him that mechanism peculiar to man which is called a heart. Not to run any risk of spilling the mysterious liquid, Don Juan, the sceptic, placed it again in the little drawer of the Gothic table. At this solemn moment he heard in the galleries a stifled commotion; there were confused voices, muffled laughter, light footsteps, the rustling of silk—in short, the din of a merry troop trying to compose themselves. The door opened, and the Prince, the friends of Don Juan, the seven courtesans, and the singers appeared in the quaint disorder of dancers surprised by the light of morning, when the sun struggles with the paling flames of the candles. They were all come to offer the customary consolations to the young heir.

  “Ho! ho! poor Don Juan; can he really have taken this death to heart?” said the Prince in La Brambilla’s ear.

  “Well, his father was very kind,” she answered.

  The nocturnal meditations of Don Juan, however, had imprinted so striking an expression upon his features that it imposed silence on the group. The men stood motionless. The women, whose lips were parched with wine and whose cheeks were stained with kisses, fell upon their knees and tried to pray. Don Juan could not help shivering at the sight; splendor, and mirth, and laughter, and song, and youth, and beauty, and power, the whole of life personified thus prostrate before the face of Death.

  But in this adorable Italy debauchery and religion were then so closely coupled that there, religion was a debauch, and debauchery a religion! The Prince pressed Don Juan’s hand with unction; then, all the faces having simultaneously assumed the same grimace, half sadness, half indifference, this phantasmagoria disappeared and left the hall empty. Verily, it was an image of life. As they descended the stairs the Prince said to La Rivabarella: “Who would have thought that Don Juan’s impiety was all a sham? Yet it seems he did love his father!”

  “Did you notice the black dog?” asked Brambilla.

  “Well, he is immensely rich,” remarked Bianca Cavatolino, smiling.

  “What’s that to me?” cried the proud Veronese, she who had crushed the comfit box.

  “What’s that to you?” cried the Duke. “With his crowns he is as much a prince as I am.”

  At first, swayed by a thousand thoughts, Don Juan wavered between several plans. After having taken count of the treasure amas
sed by his father, toward evening he returned to the mortuary chamber, his soul big with a hideous egoism. In the apartment he found all the servants of the house busy collecting the ornaments of the state bed, on which their late lord was to be exposed on the morrow, in the midst of a superbly illuminated chapel; a grand sight which the whole of Ferrara would come to gaze at; Don Juan made a sign and his servants stopped, trembling and discomfited.

  “Leave me here, alone,” said he in an altered voice; “you need not return until I have gone.”

  When the steps of the old serving man, who was the last to go out, only sounded very faintly on the flagstones, Don Juan barred the door precipitately; then, certain that he was alone, he cried out: “Let us try!” The corpse of Don Belvidero was laid on a long table. In order to hide from every eye the hideous spectacle of a corpse of such extreme decrepitude and leanness that it was almost a skeleton, the embalmers had placed a cloth over it, which enveloped it entirely, with the exception of the head. This sort of mummy lay in the middle of the room; the cloth, naturally flexible, indicated vaguely the gaunt, stiff, sharp form of the limbs. The face was already marked with large livid stains, showing the necessity of finishing the embalming. In spite of his armor of scepticism, Don Juan trembled as he took out the stopper of the magic crystal phial. When he had come up close to the head, he was compelled to wait a moment, he shivered so. But this young man had been early and skilfully corrupted by the manners of a dissolute court; an idea worthy of the Duke of Urbino gave him courage, and a feeling of keen curiosity spurred him on; it even seemed as if the fiend had whispered the words which reechoed in his heart: “Anoint one eye!” He took a cloth, moistened it sparingly with the precious liquid, and rubbed it gently over the right eyelid of the corpse. The eye opened.

  “Ah! ah!” exclaimed Don Juan, pressing the phial in his hands as in a dream we cling to a branch by which we hang over a precipice.

  He saw an eye full of life, the eye of a child in the head of a corpse; in it the light quivered as though in the depth of a limpid pool; protected by the beautiful black lashes, it sparkled like those strange lights that the traveller sees in a desert country upon a winter’s night. This eye of fire seemed eager to start out upon Don Juan; it thought, accused, judged, condemned, menaced, spoke; it cried aloud, it hit. Every human passion pulsated in it; the tenderest supplication, a kingly wrath, the love of a maiden entreating her tormentors, the searching look on his fellows of the man who treads the last step to the scaffold. So much of life beamed in this fragment of life that Don Juan drew back in terror. He walked up and down the room; he dared not look upon this eye, yet he saw it on the floor, in the tapestries. The room was strewn with spots full of fire, and life, and intelligence. Everywhere gleamed those eyes; they seemed to bay at his heels!

  “He would certainly have lived another hundred years,” he cried involuntarily, at the moment when, brought back by some diabolic influence to his father’s side, he found himself gazing at this luminous spark.

  All at once the intelligent eyelid shut and opened again hastily; it was like the look of a woman who gives consent. If a voice had cried out, “Yes!” Don Juan could not have been more terrified.

  “What am I to do?” thought he. He had the courage to try and close the pallid eyelid, but his efforts were useless.

  “Tear it out? That might be parricide, perhaps,” he pondered.

  “Yes,” said the eye, quivering with astounding irony.

  “Ha! ha!” cried Don Juan, “there is sorcery in it.”

  And he drew near to tear out the eye. A large tear rolled down the hollow cheeks of the corpse, and fell on Belvidero’s hand.

  “It burns,” he cried, as he wiped it off.

  This struggle was as tiring as if, like Jacob, he had been wrestling with an angel.

  At last he rose, saying to himself, “If only there is no blood!”

  Then summoning up all the courage necessary to be a coward, he tore out the eye, and crushed it in a cloth; he did not dare to look at it.

  He heard a sudden, terrible groan. The old spaniel expired with a howl.

  “Could it have been in the secret?” thought Don Juan, looking at the faithful animal.

  Don Juan passed for a dutiful son. He erected a monument of white marble over his father’s tomb, and entrusted the execution of the figures to the most celebrated artists of the time. He did not feel perfectly at his ease until the day when the statue of his father, kneeling before Religion, lay, an enormous pile, over his grave. In its depth was buried the only remorse which had ever, in moments of physical weariness, touched the surface of his heart. As he reviewed the immense riches amassed by the aged orientalist, Don Juan grew careful; had not the power of wealth gained for him two human lives? His sight penetrated to the depth and scrutinized the elements of social life, embracing the world the more completely in his gaze, because he looked upon it from the other side of the tomb. He analyzed men and things only to have finished, once and forever, with the Past, shown forth by History; with the Present, represented by Law; with the Future, revealed by Religion. He took matter and the soul, he cast them into the crucible, and found—Nothing. From thenceforth he became Don Juan!

  Young and handsome, master of the illusions of life, he flung himself into it, despising yet possessing himself of the world. His happiness could not consist in that bourgeois felicity which is nourished on an occasional sop, the treat of a warming-pan in the winter, a lamp at night, and new slippers every three months. No; he seized on existence as an ape snatches a nut, but without amusing himself for long with the common husk, he skilfully stripped it off, in order to discuss the sweet and luscious kernel within. The poetry and the sublime transports of human passion did not seem worth a rap to him.

  He was ever guilty of the fault of men of power who sometimes imagine that little souls believe in great ones, and so think to exchange high thoughts of the future for the small change of our transient notions. He was quite able to walk as they do, with his feet on the earth, and his head in the skies; but he preferred to sit down and parch under his kisses the fresh, tender, perfumed lips of many women; for, like Death, wherever he passed he devoured all without shame, desiring a love of full possession, oriental, of pleasures lasting long and gladly given. In women he loved not themselves, but woman. He made irony the natural habit of his soul. When his mistresses used their couch as a step whereby to climb into the heavens and lose themselves in the lap of intoxication and ecstasy, Don Juan followed them, as grave, sympathetic, and sincere as any German student. But he said I, while his mistress, lost in her delight, said We! He knew perfectly the art of being beguiled by a woman. He was always strong enough to make her believe that he trembled like a schoolboy at a ball, when he says to his first partner, “Do you like dancing?” But he could storm too, on occasion, and draw his sword to some purpose; he had vanquished great captains. There was raillery in his simplicity, and laughter in his tears—for he could shed tears at any moment—like a woman, when she says to her husband, “Give me a carriage, for I know I shall go into a consumption.” To merchants the world is a bale or a heap of bills of exchange; for most young men it is a woman; for some women it is a man; for certain minds it is a drawing-room, a clique, a district, a town; for Don Juan the whole universe was himself. A model of grace and high breeding, with all the charm of wit, he moored his bark to every bank, but when he took a pilot on board he only went whither he chose to be steered.

  The longer he lived the more he doubted. By studying men, he discovered that courage is often rashness; prudence, poltroonery; generosity, diplomacy; justice, iniquity; scrupulousness, stupidity; honor, a convention; and by a strange fatality he perceived that those who are truly honorable, of fine feeling, just, generous, prudent, and courageous, gain no consideration among men—“What a heartless jest!” thought he; “it cannot be made by a God.” So he renounced a better world, never doffed his hat at the sound of a Name, and looked upon the stone saints in the churc
hes as works of art. But comprehending the organization of human societies, he never did too much to offend their prejudices, because he knew that he was not so powerful as their executioner. He deflected their laws with that grace and esprit so well described in his scene with Monsieur Dimanche; in fact, he was the type of the Don Juan of Molière, of the Faust of Goethe, of the Manfred of Byron, and of the Melmoth of Maturin, grand figures drawn by the greatest geniuses of Europe, to which the lyre of Rossini will some day perhaps be wanting, no less than the harmonies of Mozart. Terrible images, perpetuated by the principle of evil ever existent in man, images of which copies are found in every age; whether the type enters into treaty with man and becomes incarnate in Mirabeau; whether it is content to work in silence like Bonaparte, or squeezes the world in the press of its irony like the divine Rabelais; or again, whether it jests at beings, instead of insulting things, like Le Marechal de Richelieu; or better still perhaps, mocks both men and things at once, like the most celebrated of our ambassadors. But the profound genius of Don Juan Belvidero summed up in advance all these geniuses. He made a jest of everything. His life was one mockery which embraced men, things, institutions, and ideas. As to eternity, after having talked familiarly for half an hour with the Pope Julius II, at the end of the conversation he said to him, laughing: “If it is absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather believe in God than the Devil; power united to goodness always offers more resources than the genius of evil.”

  “Yes, but it is God’s will that we should do penance in this world...”

  “Ah, you are always thinking of your indulgences,” answered Belvidero. “Well, I have a whole existence in reserve wherein to repent of the faults of my former life!”

  “Ah! if you understand old age in that sense,” said the Pope, “you run a chance of canonization.”

  “After your elevation to the papacy all things are credible.” And they went to watch the workmen building the immense basilica dedicated to Saint Peter.