The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

  Ego autem sum vermis et non homo:

  opprobrium hominum et abjectio plebis.72

  On the steps on the Via dei Vespri, the steep street leading up to Villa Valverde, where Steinn had rented a room, sits a one-legged beggar playing a flute. Every time that Steinn walks along the Via dei Vespri the beggar grabs his flute and blows one measure in a show of respect. And on the days when Steinn sits out on his balcony and watches the smoke from his cigarette creep out and in among the fronds of the palm trees in the calm, he hears the whistling from down on the Via dei Vespri, and the cicadas in the crowns of the trees provide accompaniment. The beggar knows three short melodies and mixes them all together into one, and usually ends up playing off-key like a young cock that hasn’t yet gotten the hang of crowing. But the flute always resounds with redemptive jubilation and heavenly delirium. The spirit is greatly uplifted in listening to such music.

  This virtuoso is named Leonardo Peppino, in Icelandic, Ljónharður Pípín. He has a yellow dog, emaciated and abject, tied with a rope to his remaining leg. But Ljónharður Pípín is not merely a virtuoso; he is also an instrument maker. Wind instruments are his specialty. And more than an instrument maker, he is an instrument decorator: he decorates wind instruments. He makes them from hollow stumps of wood, and decorates them with carvings. His etchings are matchless; his grasp of style unfailing. He whittles all sorts of supernatural species of cabbage, and peering out from between the cabbages are faces like smirking corpses or half-awakened ghosts; an icy and fatal dead man’s bliss shines from their eyes. Twice a day a dark-eyed and filthy little girl comes from a nearby house, gives him a loaf of bread, an onion, and water in a clay jug with two handles. She says nothing and leaves.

  Pípín is a small man, shabby and grizzled, with gray strands of beard here and there upon his wrinkled face. He has cinnabar eyelids, and is usually dirty about the mouth because he kisses the ground whenever an American passes by on the street. But he is a happy man and smiles the whole day, celebrates the glory on the visage of things from morning till night. He smiles at the countenances of the apparitions that are revealed beneath the point of his knife, smiles at his dog as he checks it for lice, smiles at the Americans who buy his flutes, ricordo di Taormina,73 smiles at the bald-headed gentlemen and gracious ladies who hand him two soldi as they pass by, just because such a man should exist, and when night falls he lies down and smiles at good God in Heaven before he goes to sleep. And he sleeps in the Via dei Vespri, on the open street in the five-finger-thick dust, and sleeps deeply and sweetly. Fortune lives in Taormina in Sicily, and Taormina is called the pearl of Europe. Fortune sleeps in the open on the Via dei Vespri.

  Steinn had difficulty withstanding Ljónharður Pípín’s charm. He often stopped on the stairs where the beggar sat, and listened to his Sicilian when he talked about his flutes and praised the magnanimity of the Americans, those God-fearing people whom God sends to care for the poor. Otherwise Steinn did not have the bad habit of giving alms, for such a thing offends God, who has given into people’s hands an entire planet, full of bounty. Pípín’s blissfulness and his arts were, on the other hand, of such quality that twenty soldi was not too much to pay for the pleasure of his company. It was not in Steinn’s power to grant this foundling any fortune other than admiration. And he laughed in his heart to be considered gran’ signore74 in the Via dei Vespri, because he felt himself unworthy to untie the shoelaces of a man who has conquered himself so thoroughly as to be able to kiss the dust before every American.

  And one day when Steinn sat at his meal in the Villa Valverde, and the flute-song was borne in through the open window, the waiter said:

  “Signore must excuse this everlasting noise from that beggar’s shrieking tool. But he once received permission from the police to sit here on the street, and although we’ve complained about him many times to the authorities we still haven’t succeeded in driving him away.”

  “Do you think that you can play the flute better than Leonardo Peppino?” answered Steinn.

  But since the waiter had to admit that that was not the case, it consoled him to mention the fact that this wretched ragamuffin had spent fourteen years in a workhouse.

  “Workhouse?” asked Steinn Elliði.

  “Yes, he was sentenced to prison, signore!” said the man.

  “For what?”

  “A fatto malo a una piccola ragazza,”75 answered the waiter, without going into any more detail. And so the day passed by. In the evening a brass band played at the Piazza Sant Agostino, and a pink moon burned in the green haze over the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, and with this magical world as a background stood the cinnabar red balustrades at the edges of the square, octagonal pillars at every twentieth baluster and a flowerpot on the top of every pillar, with acacias in the pots. And in the crowd of people meandering back and forth over the square stood Steinn Elliði, leaning back against a tree trunk, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the sea. The brass band played a whole act from The Barber of Seville,76 and Steinn knew each and every note by heart and felt the breath of mastery in every wave, but “durch alle Töne tönte ein zarter Liebeston,”77 and it was the flute of the beggar, singing of slavery and prison, quivering with joy and thankfulness, like birdsong in the spring.

  “Saluti, saluti, Eccellenza!”78 exclaimed the beggar, as Steinn walked by in the evening. He rose from the dust to wipe his flute and play to Steinn Elliði’s glory. Steinn stopped, leaned up against the wall opposite the virtuoso, watched him and waited for his meandering rigmarole to wind down. Then he asked:

  “Is it true, Leonardo Peppino, that you committed a crime against a little girl?”

  The beggar bent his head from side to side several times and gave a sidelong glance, then played a long, wailing note on his flute and answered:

  “Dear sir, I am a horribly wicked man. Why am I such a bad man while other men are so good? The notary’s daughter was twelve years old, sir, and was standing in the doorway. And in the evenings when I came home from work she was standing in the doorway. She had two pigeons. And in the evenings when I came home from work I saw how she stood on the threshold, leaned up against the door-frame and held her pigeons by their legs and kissed them on the breast. She was careful not to look at me as I walked by. But when I’d passed by she would follow me with her eyes. But God and men have justly punished me. I feel as if I always understand better and better how God and men are just. Fourteen years in the workhouse, sir, fourteen years in prison with consumption in my leg, fourteen years. But what’s that? I am just as happy having those behind me as I would have been having reigned as a king for fourteen years, because who counts the hours once they’ve passed? It is said that God hears the tears of the wretched fall, and if God hears my tears fall, would I really be better off as a king living in a palace in Rome? And since God and men are good, do I deserve anything else but to be a dead wretch before God and men? Don’t I have reason to thank God and our Lady for being allowed to sit here and play my flutes for the blessed Americans who are so good? When I came from prison worse than dead, with a crutch under each arm and only one leg, then there was no one to help me, absolutely no one, sir, except for good God who rules the entire world. And then I thought to myself: But oh how sweet it is to be allowed to draw breath under your sky, my Lord, free and wide. And you let yourself be crucified under your sky, my Lord, for love of me. But a murderer from Calabria, 79 who was a tremendous musical genius and had been a coal burner up in the mountains all his life – he taught me to play the flute in prison while I lay sick with consumption. And the day before I was set free we were allowed to say good-bye out in the prison yard and he gave me his flute as a parting gift, the only flute that he owned. And ever since then he’s been fluteless.”

  58.

  It was Steinn’s resolute intention to put an end to all vanity, to everything that tied his being to the laws of existence, and he had, not without lustful feelings, tried to envision how he could bring about h
is death in the most ridiculous manner possible. He longed to die with storylike disgrace, and asked himself again and again: “What would amuse Bambara Salvatore best?”

  He was born in Kashmir, the valley of roses, with a harp in his hand like the gods. One day he awoke from his harp playing and saw himself: the roses had paled and died beneath the soles of his feet. But human society can only do two things for all of its sages: turn them into either criminals or suicides. Before the door of the sexton he had sobbed away his last human feelings. And this entire ridiculous tragedy had its roots in an event no greater than this: his mother had forgotten to use contraceptive precautions. But now he was reborn. His suicide did not signify his fear of becoming a criminal, as did Dr. Otto Weininger’s suicide, but rather his escape from a dungeon.

  He was truly reborn. His feelings were far from dancing a deranged dance in his breast as before, when he had been a normal person. Tonight he did not despair. He muttered to himself almost involuntarily this foolish aphorism of Maupassant, the conclusion of Une vie: “La vie, ça n’est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu’on croit.”80 Suicide was actually not a more horrid act than, say, eating a slice of bread with sausages. There is, generally speaking, not a more trivial or insignificant act. But from a dead man the power of destiny is wiped away; a dead man has cut himself free from the yoke of his existence. A dead man is freer than God. What prompted Steinn was the desire to defeat this God of the deeps and dawnlight, who can never be eluded, to defeat this power which itself was forced to live and let live. How indigent and worthless is all the glory of existence compared to the strange, victorious smile on the face of a dead man! Even the poems of the divine Omar Khayyám pale before it! He sits in the armchair on the balcony, malevolent like a troll in a grave mound, his mind ice-cold. Down on the Via dei Vespri a lantern shines, and the electricity and the moon join hands in illuminating the garden beyond, while bats, bêtes à bon dieu,81 and locusts play in the crowns of the palms and poisonous mosquitoes hum like fiddles. He lit a new cigarette, tore a page from his pocketbook, and wrote:

  “Til det dansk-islandke konsulat, Palermo. Sicilien.82

  “Jeg undertegnede, etc. request that you excuse the fact that I am forced to trouble you to come here to Taormina to oversee my burial and other things concerning my departure. As I take it for granted that the embassy in Rome shall demand more detailed information concerning my death, it is my true pleasure to inform you that I intend to ingest cyanide tonight at two o’clock. There is no reason for the suicide. With deep respect, etc.”

  He read the letter over, and felt that he had never actually been in better touch with himself than tonight. He had a dismally clear head. On the other hand he regretted most painfully that he was to die without ever having raped a girl or torn out a man’s throat with his teeth. But when he considered it more carefully he concluded that his intention was in fact not to scandalize human society.

  He had only one letter left to write before he died, to Bambara Salvatore, only a very few lines, some clever rhetoric that would be enough to convince Bambara of the fact that the son of Signora Ellidaso had not lacked the courage of a visionary soul. His mind searched everywhere for brilliant words. But the moon over Etna sneered straight into his face, making it more difficult for him to think seriously the more roguish it became; it was as if the moon sucked out from his narrow pupils the mere pittance of genius that remained in his soul; it derided this pitiable soul of his like an insolent prostitute who puckers her lips in the face of a saint. Finally Steinn could bear it no longer and hurled himself off the balcony like an acrobatic clown, turning twelve somersaults in the air before hitting the ground.

  59.

  A little girl sat among the geese by a blue pond in a green meadow. And the geese dabble and drabble or preen their feathers with their beaks. Sometimes they stick their heads into the water and look toward the bottom, with their rear ends up in the air, because these are very discourteous birds. And the girl sits cross-legged in the grass and knits a red sock for her dowry, because she plans to get married when she grows up.

  “I’ll steal her away!” says Steinn Elliði, and he walks straight over to where she is sitting. But when the girl realizes what he has in mind she slips out of his grasp and takes to her feet.

  Damned fox! he thinks, and he runs after her shouting and cursing. “I’ll kill you if you don’t stay still!” The geese start craning their necks and screeching piteously. The sun is squarely in Orion and will soon enter Aries, then Libra. The girl rushes around the pond as fast as her feet can pull her. Steinn follows, singing the newest operetta by Verdi:

  A dunderhead mobile

  By Snowpachy Jón

  From seamobby Frón

  A lioncub profile!

  The gander’s lights went on when he heard this, and he and all of his wives started to chase Steinn. The chase lasted for three days. Then Steinn suddenly remembered that he was one-legged and had forgotten his crutches down on the Via dei Vespri, and thus could not actually run. He sat down on the bank of the pond sadly and picked up his flute to comfort himself, while on the opposite side of the pond sat the girl with her half-knitted sock, singing:

  The sun in the west shines just to be mean

  just to be mean to be mean

  ach du lieber Augustin Augustin Augustin

  ach du lieber Augustin Augustin Augustin

  the sun in the west shines just to be mean

  just to be mean to be mean.

  Steinn noticed that the flute was not a flute at all, but rather a paltry water gun made of an angelica stalk with a hole at the end. Now he started to shoot it with all of his might, until he watched the girl fall lifeless to the ground. Steinn was seized with painful remorse, but he resolved, all the same, to go to the girl’s father and ask what he should pay – then again, this was only fantasy.

  60.

  The Situation in Cairo

  In Cairo a great banquet is being held. He was told that the sultan’s wives had risen up against the sultan and castrated him. This was criticized in the papers, and men blamed the collusion of the Bolsheviks. But to make amends the women invited all of the most prominent men in the country to a feast. Steinn dismounted his horse, tied it to the columns in front of the palace gate, and went in to examine the caricatures on the Gobelin. All of the carpets on the floor came from countries famous for textile weaving. Velvet flowed in sumptuous folds from the couches onto the carpets. The windows were near the roof, and sleeping birds cuddled in every window, with the twilight blue sky in the background and a star here and there. Eunuchs carried in wine, and the maidens stepped forth from their bowers and appeared in the banquet hall, clad in long trailing silk veils that could be torn off from top to bottom with one quick hand movement, embroidered with long-legged pelicans and other noxious birds, while their hips and breasts swelled beneath the silk like heavy sea-waves in sunshine mist. Their eyes glittered like black diamonds. And the dandies entered, with white teeth and long mustaches and fezzes on their heads, otherwise dressed like gentlemen from London and Paris, and appearing to be jacks-of-all-trades, alchemists, and diviners.

  After a drawn-out ceremonial greeting two women and two men sat down at each table; the cups are filled to the brim, and a conversation about politics begins:

  “Mosul,” said one man.

  “Angora,” replied a girl, and she laughed.

  “Moscow,” said another man.

  “Afghanistan,” said another girl, and she laughed.

  “All things must once begin,” said a third man, as if to inject a philosophical profoundness into the conversation.

  “All things have been once before,” said a third girl, and she laughed.

  “Bena Kipa!” said a fourth man, as if in agreement.

  “Bena Kipa, Bena Kipa!” they all said, and they laughed raucously. “What, might we ask, didn’t the Chinese know two thousand years before us? Cheers!”

  Steinn Elliði had never witnessed a more
soulless or idiotic gathering.

  The clinking of glasses was heard throughout the hall, and the wine splashed into the air in long arcs, then fell down like rain. Everything was one great Babel of burning eyes, sparkling diamonds, swelling bosoms, sweating hands, and gleaming lips.

  “I dream golden dreams,” says one man.

  “Behind cinnabar palace walls,” answers a girl, as if attempting to distort his meaning.

  “I dream of poison mistresses!”

  “Who never existed!” the girl distorts.

  “Never existed!”

  “Never existed!” echoes the crowd.

  And songs

  arise,

  claps

  resound

  in hundredthousandmillionfold myriads of primitive forests where gigantic steeds of stormcloud rear, and drunken hippos lie upside-down on cliffs

  like Rhodymenia palmata,83

  stand on their hind legs and fume,

  neigh,

  rear,

  hiss,

  snort,

  pish

  like the fate of the millions. “Il piacere, il piacere!” my lords.84 The goal of life is joy. Or better put, the joy of life is the death that swallows the consciousness of the living in the bottomless oblivion of the lunatic. From every direction, “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” “Up with the wine, Ave Dionysus!” In howling laughter and weeping song slumber the mysteries of the lotus blossom. “OM! My lords and ladies, OM!” And the men pour cup after cup into the faces of their wives and drink the wine madly as if from living springs and groan the Tibetan prayer like fiddles with slackened strings: “Om mani padme hum!” 85 And they lean over their concubines like lotus blossoms over turbid ponds. Oh, the joy in the lotus blossom! Until everything starts to fall into silence; the revelry is at its climax; here and there silk is heard torn, frenzied creatures pant, and the eunuchs sprinkle wine and perfume over the gathered guests, who entangle themselves like kelp on the floor and up on the couches; they strew roses over the corpses and howl like devils in this glorious graveyard. And it is twelve midnight, and from the nearest minaret comes the cry: