When Steinn Elliði came down into the hall accompanied by the landlord a few minutes before dinner, he saw a man sitting in one corner in a deep armchair, hidden behind an Il Mondo,59 small and slim, with chestnut hair carefully curled, a cadaverous face and black bags under his eyes, a monocle over his left eye, wearing a fascist shirt of raven black silk. This was Bambara Salvatore. He put the paper aside, took the monocle deftly between small slender fingers, and bowed in deep deference:
“My dear sir,” he said to Steinn Elliði. “I am smitten with deeper delight than words can express to have been finally granted the fortune to be allowed to do what I have desired for so long: to greet you.”
He not only spoke flawlessly in English, but his accent and diction were characterized by a particularly grand Bostonian quality.
“I feel as if I have known you for a long time,” he continued. “I can assure you that I have heard more good things spoken about you than any other man. And it is scarcely a week since I ran across an English literary journal that had printed your picture and the most praiseworthy reviews of your newly published poems: in them you were openly compared to the greatest spirits of genius.”
After they had taken seats at a table, Bambara Salvatore switched to French, since most of their table companions were Americans and other English speakers who were busy conversing with each other.
“It truly pains me,” said Bambara Salvatore, and it quickly became clear that his French was no less fluent than his English, “that I shall not be able to have the pleasure of enjoying your company during the time that you perhaps intend to stay in Taormina. The fact is, I am forced to set out on a journey tomorrow evening, and tomorrow morning I have been asked to go to Giarre, a town located some twenty-five kilometers from Taormina, to give my opinion in court concerning some newly sold antiquities that are under suspicion of being forgeries. These blessed Americans let themselves be so heartily duped like dunces, as one might expect, because they have no knowledge of anything but stocks and bonds, and dash off to a judge just as soon as someone tells them that their Adonis with the unbroken nose is a forgery. But I have an exceptionally special desire to be able to speak with you before I go, and although it might be late I hope that you do not take offense at my request that you grant me the honor of paying me a visit this evening. I am staying on the second floor, numbers five to eight.”
A half an hour later they sat beneath the leaves of palm trees in the garden and drank coffee. Two northern Europeans of the twentieth century, two masked souls, two actors. If Fra Angelico had lived seven years after the European war, thought Steinn, he would have used Bambara Salvatore as his model for saints.
Steinn was a child in comparison to Salvatore. Without a doubt, Salvatore had lived a thousand more adventures than Steinn. Without a doubt, he had dived for the cup. He must have run the race of ultramodernism backward and forward and ring after ring while Steinn was still a greenhorn and his fatherland the terra nullius60 between the trenches. Salvatore had found his own little sanctuary and paid homage to the Babel of vanity, dressed like a Fascist, with a monocle. He studied iconography. No one does such a thing unless he knows the whole world by heart. Bambara Salvatore had dwelled in Rome among prelates, in Monte Cassino among canons, in Britain among lords, in Paris among artists, in Berlin among homosexuals, in New York among rich capitalists, in California among movie actors, in India among yogis, in Moscow among chess players. While Europeans squeezed their hands around each other’s necks for freedom and the fatherland, Bambara Salvatore lived alternately in the Orient and America and scoffed at those baboons. He nimbly picked up the thread where the conversation had broken off when they had left the dining table, and spoke entertainingly about his trips through Rajputana 61 in 1917, about his stay in Jaipur, 62 the Paris of India, about the heathen and godlike grandeur that rests over the architecture of the sun-white palaces and magnificent temples of Jaipur.
55.
I see, dear sir, that your eyes widen when you behold the images of saints around me, as if you were asking in your heart: Is it possible then that he has not overpowered God?
Indeed he has, dear sir. You are mistaken; I know precisely as well as you that the image of God, or, to put it better, the feebleness of imagination, is the foundational flaw in the soul of man, the chief cause of human suffering. But I collect antiquities and have a proclivity for finding pleasure in things that are older than I am and that can outlast me. Before the gaudy Christs and Buddhas I reverentially burn my candles, because I rejoice to think that some things are able to endure. And when you consider that the Catholic Church is the ancient relic of all ancient relics you will come closer to understanding what religion I actually profess. I love it, to wit, as he alone is able to, who has seen through its ideology, that most peculiar crossword puzzle under the sun; I love it as one who has gazed into all of the phosphorescent phantasmagoria of worthlessness that descended from Heaven and took up its abode in Peter’s bones. Catholicism is as old as God, as me, as the world, dear sir. It is the first and the last illusion of all illusions, the one true lie poured from the breasts of creation, the harp song of the deep, over everything and in everything like Fujiyama in a hundred prints by Hokusai. A thousand years ago I leaned up against the pillars in its forecourt and left. But it stands there and calls out after you as you leave: “Vous vous en allez; moi, je reste.”63 A thousand years later I take my rest under the pillars in its forecourt, and it asks, “Where have you been?” I love it in a sinful way, like an ignorant man who perceives the harp song of the deep in the smile of his lover, love it because it stands unmoving while the world perishes, because it will remain like Fujiyama in the paintings by Hokusai, will remain when I disappear. And I will disappear and it will remain.
Perhaps now you fear, dear sir, that I am preparing to lecture to you on the ascetic life, just as if I saw nothing in the Catholic Church but a divine institution against whoredom, homosexuality, or crimine bestiali,64 but it is not so: I have, since my childhood, investigated its tenets, and although you see saints and the crucified Christ here, I can assure you, after having looked deeply into the ascetic culture of the Church and found nothing there but a very primitive and deficient type of sadism, that the highest wisdom and the sweetest bliss can only be drunk from the breast of jocundity. This is how Signor d’Annunzio put it, our peerless d’Annunzio: “La vita . . . c’insegna che il piacere è il più certo mezzo di conoscimento offertoci dalla Natura, et che colui il quale molto ha sofferto è men sapiente di colui il quale molto ha gioito,” “Life teaches that bliss is the most secure medium of knowledge that nature offers, and that the one who suffers much is less wise than the one who lives in pleasure.”
A purebred criminal nature is the highest degree of all human perfection. If you understand German I would rather choose to word this wisdom in this way: “Der reine Verbrecher ist der einzige wahre Erkennende.”65 Dostoevsky, entirely Dostoevsky. The perfect criminal is holy as a dove. His crimes are not kneaded out of the imperfection of a slavish nature, which breaks the laws of God and man only from blindness, but rather they are the calculated wisdom of the superman, who must attempt to break free from the conspiracy against genius which the world signifies. The world is a conspiracy of impotence against the soul of genius. Of what use is the bourgeoisie in the eyes of the superman? It is suited only for snapping at the flies that have gotten into its mouth, and for raising wives and daughters who prostitute their honor in secret while swearing oaths of fidelity and who turn out to be pregnant long before they are due for insemination according to the almanac.
The superman enters the world to make the world suffer. He comes to ruin girls’ virginity and the honor of madams, if I may speak metaphorically. It is in the nature of a powerless man to sacrifice himself to a powerful man, but the powerful man is easily distinguished by the fact that the smoke from the sacrifices is a foul stench in his nostrils, and he never rewards weakness with mercy. A man who makes a woman happy
makes a fool of himself. The harlot, the image of self-abnegation, is the revelation of the highest and most noble female nature. She is holy, because she has chosen unhappiness as the reward for her sacrifices, and no one has granted her a title for not throwing her integrity into the bargain. The wise do not touch her, because she has found the highest bliss in the lowest form of misfortune and cannot be tormented. But the criminal, who loves the game of tormenting and believes in the sanctity of pleasure, knows that the fate of modern woman can be read in the depths of her eyes and cries out: “Pereat!” 66 Her path leads to perdition, because she seeks in her loves the ultimate bliss. Over the flames of lust hover imps who ceaselessly sing “Pereat!” while her soul and body are destroyed. Nothing can quench the primordial elements of blind lust that cry out in the breast of the modern woman, nothing but the embrace of death. Laughing and anxious, expectatant and lamenting, she worships her own destruction. She ladles out her heartache in grotesque profanities, cries, bites, genuflections, sluttishness, tearful convulsive laughter, and blind acceptance of your most repugnant caresses.
You work, dear sir, because you are a Scandinavian man, slow to develop; you have hardly run half the race. But when you have finally been convinced that work is the most wretched and vulgar form of opium that human society is capable of giving its slaves, then you find yourself obligated to fight against holiness, and have it either better or worse for years on end until you have attained the highest state of all mortality, the state of the complete criminal, which finds its final rest, if not in suicide, then in the lowest form of pleasure: addiction to the greatest type of poppy that is produced on our Earth, opium. When sexual vigor slackens, this pivot-point of life and center of gravity, the thrill of the game disappears, and then it is just as pleasant for the wise man to lose his consciousness in narcotics as it is for a Buddha to find peace in nirvana after a thousand-year migration from man to beast, beast to man. As for me, I have already run such a huge part of the race that I can now devote myself peacefully to iconography. As an example of how far I have come along the road of the perfect criminal, let me say that when an American friend of mine, one of the greatest bacteriologists in the world, asked if I would like to let loose a pestilence that could wipe out mankind in half a month, I shrugged my shoulders, like this, and answered, no, it is much more entertaining to watch them die out gradually from cocaine, syphilis, and psychoanalysis.
56.
Steinn Elliði walks along Corso Umberto in the midday heat, out through Porta di Messina, asks his way along until he sees tall cypresses looming to the west of the town. He feels as if he is carrying a column of fire on the crown of his head. It is good to dwell in this country if one is going to Hell and wants to get used to the heat. White dust spins up from the road at every step. The Mediterranean Sea is a beautifully green weft in the golden blue haze out near the rim of the horizon. The ripples on the calm sea disappear from view out in the radiant mist, like truth transformed in poetry, or reality that ends in an abstract dream. In these countries men condemned to death, like Saint Anthony, suffered lustful visions.
He walks along the wall and stops in front of the gate of a graveyard where the cypresses tower over with a Böcklinish, 67 solemn air in the glowing midday sky. He had never found himself in a more astonishing neighborhood. Finally he placed his hand on his forehead as if to defend himself against attack, and his palm became drenched with sweat. Two farm girls with black eyebrows and eyelashes came down the road from the west, bearing huge baskets on their heads; they stopped near the graveyard gate, lowered their baskets, and sat down quickly on the crumbling wall to catch their breath. Their backsides were burly and they began to read the inscription over the gate with difficulty.
“Questa soglia divide due mondi. La pietà li congiunge.”68
The other girl looked at the first, solemnly and contemplatively: “È vero!”69 she said, and nodded her head. Inside the gate stood two lissome banana trees; then a broad pathway lined with cypress trees crosses the yard, and from the conical crowns of the trees came a constant chirping of cicadas. On both sides of the main pathway were first-class graves, for the yard was divided into three sections according to rank. Here each gravestone was showier than the last, for under them lay men of rank, while most of those who were buried in the third section on the outskirts of the yard lay under bare stones. Steinn searched and searched without finding; he examined the inscriptions on the memorials and had no scruples about treading on the graves, elated that, despite the intensity of the parching drought, he was able to promenade aboveground, while these wretches had to remain still, down in the dirt, thoroughly rotten.
Finally he came to a gray brick wall, covered completely with compartments. It is quite common in the southern lands to dispose of corpses in a Saracen way: the coffins are shoved into compartments in the walls, and then a plate is screwed over the compartment and the name of the occupant is inscribed on the plate. Gaudy green lizards crawled back and forth along the wall, nimble and quick, and disappeared into the most unbelievably narrow holes like the souls of the departed. Their eyes were like living pinheads. Steinn read the minute inscriptions on the plates, to see if his mother might have been thrust into one of the compartments. But he found nothing.
He finally realized that it was childishness to try to find one foreign woman in such a large town. Nothing was more likely than that she rested under some bare marker in the third section, so he saw no other way than to visit the sexton. On the left side of the gate, within the yard itself, was a little house with a doghouse out front, wherein lay an old, sagely guard dog with its head on its front paws. The dog looked at Steinn as he walked by, saw immediately that this man was secretly grief stricken, did not think once about barking, and instead regarded him with a look of sincere compassion, as if wanting to say, “Nihil humani a me alienum puto.”70
The house stood open and two bulky women worked in the kitchen; one was the housewife. She came to the door and stood there opposite the traveler, clad in black, tall and shriveled, like the women who are paid to weep at the cheapest funerals. Steinn lifted his hat and asked about a foreign woman who had been buried here.
The housewife answered that her husband had gone to take a midday nap; otherwise he knew everything about those who had found their rest here in the graveyard.
“But maybe I could help in some way,” she said, and added: “I wonder if this foreign woman was one of the faithful or if she was a heretic?”
“She was certainly one of the faithful,” said Steinn, in the hope of avoiding any fuss.
“Catholic?” reiterated the woman.
“No, she wasn’t strictly Catholic, but all the same very faithful,” answered Steinn, and he laughed in his heart, since this was the first time in his life that he had given credit to his mother for anything.
“Then other rules apply here,” said the woman. “Since she is not Catholic, then she is lying in the other graveyard.”
“What other graveyard?”
“Yes – there is actually another tiny yard a short distance from here, for Turks, Jews, and heretics. They don’t receive any church service, you know, but instead are buried like dogs.”
“Yes, very pitiful,” said Steinn Elliði.
“But all the same I think that the good God who rules the universe has mercy on them,” said the woman. “By the way, I can hear by your accent that you’re from northern Italy, sir,” she added.
“Yes, I’m from northern Italy.”
“Well that’s good luck,” said the woman. “Because my husband actually comes from northern Italian stock. If you give him a few soldi 71 for tobacco, I almost think he’d be willing to get himself up and dressed and take you over to the heretics’ yard. Wait just a moment, sir; after five or ten minutes my husband will be ready.”
When the woman had gone back into the house Steinn clenched his face with both hands. In front of the doghouse lay a donkey-load of firewood. For a moment he felt as if
he would lose his balance and faint. He let himself sink down onto one of the bundles of firewood, supported himself with his elbow on his knee, and covered his face with the hollows of his hands, sat in that way motionless for a while. But his body was suddenly seized with uncontrollable shaking. It was as if his chest were going to burst, and the sobs were forced like unstoppable laughter up out of his throat, sore and dry. The guard dog looked at Steinn Elliði like a wise man, but Steinn Elliði howled like a guard dog.
He himself didn’t know whether he was laughing or crying. But he certainly laughed and cried all at once. His heart was ungovernable. Neither Heaven with all of its might nor Earth with all of its wisdom could break the back of this power. The tears burst forth like water that suddenly sprays from cliffs; they fell down below his hands and were lost in the white dust on his feet, the dust that thirsts ceaselessly for human tears, the dust that swallows all human tears. And the worm writhes back and forth in the dust.
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