The Best of Gerald Kersh

by Gerald Kersh

  The young Duke asked: ‘What do you want all those bronze doors for?’

  Leonardo said: ‘Magnificence, you have seen the pebbles in a stream.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You have seen them, and you have touched them no doubt?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They are slimy, are they not? They are covered with little green plants, you will have observed?’

  ‘Well, well?’

  ‘So will be the big pebbles, little pebbles, gravel, charcoal and above all the sand in your Magnificence’s filter. Slime and green stuff will choke it, or make it a source of even more noxious water than ever before. Hence, the bronze doors. Every month the stones, charcoal, sand and so forth, are raked out and the empty places refilled with fresh stuff.’

  The young Duke did not know what to say. He was uneasy. Turning an enormous seal on the forefinger of his right hand he muttered: ‘This is all very well. I have the greatest respect for your knowledge, and all that. But … stone, bronze doors, bronze gratings … I mean to say, bronze pipes, and God-knows-what made out of brass. You know all about these things, of course. But seriously, I really think we’d better let it drop….’

  ‘If you liked the pipes could be simply lead. The gratings would have to be copper, of course, but in about thirty or forty years …’

  ‘Thirty or forty years!’

  ‘What is thirty or forty years?’ asked Leonardo, with a smile, combing his great beard with his fingers. ‘If you build, build for ever. Long after you are dead, Magnificence, by what will you be remembered? The fight you fought with Colonna? The bad portrait of you which you hired poor little Ercole to paint? Oho, no, no, no! Your descendants will say: “Ah, that was the Duke who washed the water here in Abruzzi and cured his people of their belly-aches.” Therefore I say stone of the hardest and bronze of the toughest. I know, Magnificence; I know.’

  ‘You know everything, Leonardo.’

  ‘I know a little of everything, and not much of anything – with the possible exception of the art of painting. Of that I know something. Yes, I know a certain something about painting pictures. But what is that worth? Little, Magnificence – so little! Your wall, upon which I smear my blood and tears, will fall. The bit of wood that I give my life to cover with pigments will warp, Magnificence, crack and rot. I grind my colours and I refine and refine my oils, and hope and hope for a few years more of life, as Leonardo da Vinci, when I have gone where I belong. But mark my words! One cup of sweet water out of your river down at Abruzzi – one cup of water, pure water, in the belly of a grateful ploughman – will make you immortal, and you will be remembered long after my colours fade. Simply because of a cup of clean water, Magnificence! So I talk in terms of hewn stone and mighty bronze, thinking of that cup of good water.’

  The Duke found his opportunity to change this subject. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Now that you mention it. Speaking of colours, and what not. You are the man who painted that picture of the Madonna Lisa, are you not? I mean the wife of Francesco di Bartolommeo di Zanobi del Giocondo – that one. Yes, of course you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leonardo.

  The Duke said: ‘Remarkable man that you are! To-day you make drains. Tomorrow you cast cannon. The day before yesterday you make a sort of Icarus Machine, so that a man can fly like a bird. Ah … can you? Did it?’

  ‘No, Magnificence, not yet.’

  ‘It would not surprise me if you could transmute metals. They say that you are something of an alchemist. Can you turn base metals into gold, Leonardo?’

  ‘I have never tried.’

  ‘Try! try! Who knows? They tell me that the Valentinois has a learned doctor from the Lowlands who——’

  ‘The tank,’ said Leonardo, making a diagram, ‘could be of copper, lined with——’

  The Duke said: ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course. Monna Lisa was a Neapolitan, or at least she was from the South. Yes, she was a Gherardini. Do you happen to know whether she was related to the Florentine family of that name?’

  ‘No,’ said Leonardo de Vinci, ‘I know only that she married del Giocondo – he bought a picture of Saint Francis from Puligo. I have seen worse pictures. He is something of a connoisseur, Giocondo.’

  ‘I saw your picture,’ said the Duke. ‘Between ourselves, it’s not at all bad. La Gioconda is by no means a bad-looking woman. She’s his third wife, you know.’

  ‘I know. Her predecessors were Camilla di Mariotto Ruccelai, and Tommasa di Mariotto Villana. They both died within four years.’

  ‘Ah, yes. There are some queer stories about that,’ said the Duke.

  ‘But to return to the tank, Magnificence.’

  ‘To the Devil with the damned tank! Tell me, Leonardo – what was she always grinning about?’

  ‘Madonna Lisa? She never grinned, Magnificence. She smiled, yes. Grinned, no.’

  ‘You must have been alone with her for a long time.’

  ‘Never for a moment,’ said Leonardo. ‘Never for one little moment. There were always waiting-women, secretaries, musicians, dress-makers, and frequently the lady’s husband.’

  ‘A jealous man, that,’ said the Duke.

  ‘Yes. He is going the way to hell, as I nearly did, trying to find the bottom of a bottomless pit.’

  ‘She always struck me as deep,’ said the Duke, ‘ever so deep – deep as the sea. D’you know what? She isn’t by any means what you could call a beautiful woman. But, the few times I met her, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I am not,’ he said, curling the point of his red-blond beard between two fingers, ‘I am not altogether undesirable as far as women are concerned, and in any case … well, I should have … however, there was something about that woman that froze me. In a way, she frightened me. She never said anything. You know, I suppose, that if I want to be amusing – if I go out of my way to be sprightly and entertaining – I could make St Bartholomew roar with laughter at the stake. Well, d’you know what? With the Madonna Lisa I had no success whatever. I believe you must have heard that I tell a tolerably good story. I told her three of the raciest and best I ever knew. There was never anything but that strange little pinched-up smile. You caught it perfectly, Leonardo. God knows how you did it, but you caught it. I stood and looked at the picture for nearly five minutes, and I said to myself: “Aha – he has caught it. There is the smile. There she is. There is La Gioconda to the life. What is she smiling at? She might be the Mother of God or she might be the Devil’s Wife.” And a sort of cold shiver went up and down my spine. Fortunately, at that time I was … anyway it was lucky for me that I had a certain other distraction just then. But one or two gentlemen I know completely lost their heads over her. Yet I am of the opinion – tell me what you think, Leonardo, because you have seen all the beautiful women in the world and know everything – in my opinion the Madonna Lisa is not beautiful.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When you say “no”, Leonardo, do you mean “no, she is not beautiful” or “no, I disagree with you, she is beautiful”?’

  ‘She is not beautiful,’ said Leonardo.

  ‘It seemed to me that her hands were coarse and bony, but you painted them as if they had no bones in them. But she must have been an easy person to paint, because she moved less than anyone else I ever met in my life.’

  ‘Yes, nothing but the blinking of her eyes told you that she was alive,’ said Leonardo. ‘But sometimes she moved her hands. Occasionally she took her right hand from the back of her left hand, and loosely locked her fingers together. But generally she let her hands fall into her lap, where they lay relaxed, with the palms upwards. You see such a disposition of the hands in good old women who have done their work and are content to sit and look at their grandchildren. I have seen hands like hers on death-beds – the death-beds of women who have lived contentedly and died in peace with all their sins forgiven.’

  ‘Yes, she must have been easy to draw,’ said the Duke. ‘She kept so still. Now if you were drawing me, Leonardo, tha
t would be quite a different matter, because I can’t keep still. I pick something up, I put something down, I walk here, I walk there, I take hold of a curtain or a piece of tapestry….’

  ‘On the contrary, Magnificence, that would make you all the easier to portray.’

  The Duke, putting forward his right hand, said: ‘And what do you think of my hand?’

  ‘It is a perfectly good hand,’ said Leonardo, without enthusiasm. ‘It will do everything you want it to do. I see by the third and fourth fingers that you are a horseman. The first and second fingers, and the thumb, tell me that you are a swordsman, and the tendons of your wrist tell the same story.’

  The Duke said: ‘Her hands really were a little too large and hard. What made you draw them so round and soft?’

  Leonardo replied: ‘I softened them to make a symbol of terrible strength.’

  ‘I saw no terrible strength,’ said the Duke, ‘only pretty hands – pretty, soft, yielding hands.’

  Leonardo repeated: ‘Terrible strength. Soft and yielding. What is softer and more yielding than a quicksand or a quagmire? And what is stronger? What is more terrible? In the sea, what is stronger and more terrible than those soft, yielding things that lie still in the dark and lay their pliable fingers, or tentacles, upon the diver?’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said the Duke, ‘but, as I was saying, I could have fallen in love with that woman. I couldn’t get to the bottom of her.’

  ‘You had better thank God that you did not fall in love with her, Magnificence,’ said Leonardo, ‘and as for getting to the bottom of her, that is impossible.’

  ‘Yes, as I said, the Madonna Lisa is deeper than the sea.’

  ‘No. She has no depth to which you could dive and no height to which you could climb. She is nothing at all. Del Giocondo will have discovered that much by now. She is, as you might say, God’s judgment upon him, that poor devourer of women. He loves her insanely – and she smiles. He bites his fingers, beats his head against the wall, and goads himself into madness in his hopeless endeavour to find something in her that is tangible – something upon which he may lay his hand and say: “At last I have found you.” And all the time she smiles, and is silent. He may fall on his knees and weep on her feet. She will smile. He may lock her in her chamber and starve her: she will smile. He may humiliate her, beat her with sticks, strike her before the servants … she will continue to smile. This I say with authority, because I have seen it all. And he knows that if he cut her throat, she would smile that enigmatic smile even in death … and he is exhausted, defeated. He is exasperated and worn out (just as I might have been) by his effort to know her.’

  ‘But you know her, Leonardo?’

  ‘By the grace of God and an ape.’

  ‘How, an ape?’

  Leonardo was tired of it all. He made a gesture like a man who is shaking water off his finger-tips, and said: ‘Oh … like del Giocondo, like you, like a dozen others, I lost sleep thinking of her. The smile, the smile, the smile. I have seen every face in the world, from the Throne to the gutter. I can read faces as your secretary can read a book. As a cut key fits the wards of a lock, so the shape of a face falls into position in a keyhole in my mind. Very good, this one baffled me,’ said Leonardo, laughing grimly. ‘I saw the agony of del Giocondo and the calm of the Madonna Lisa, and I wanted to know. I talked to her, watched her, employed ten thousand artifices to get her off her guard. And still she smiled. That smile came between me and my sleep. I hated her bitterly because she was too much with me. Then, to be brief, when the portrait was finished and my brushes put away, God sent the ape.’

  ‘What ape?’

  Leonardo said: ‘Del Giocondo filled his house with musicians, tumblers, dancers, and all that, in order to amuse his wife. There was a choir of little boys that sang. There was a man who made me laugh – even me. Madonna sat with folded hands, quietly smiling. I finished the portrait. Then something happened. Del Giocondo had several large hounds. One of them, a buff-coloured dog almost as big as a donkey, used to lie at her feet. This gigantic hound had hanging jowls and an expression of indescribable melancholy. When I showed the Madonna Lisa the finished picture, she nodded and said, through a pin-hole in her compressed mouth: ‘That is good.’ At this, the great dog, whose ears had caught some warmth in her voice, came forward lashing about with his great tail which disturbed a little sleepy ape no bigger than your two hands.’

  The Duke looked at his hands.

  Leonardo continued: ‘This absurd ape, enraged as little things are enraged, leapt upon the dog’s back and pulled his ears, grimacing and chattering. The patient dog looked up with such absurd melancholy that it was impossible not to laugh. There was this gigantic dog, which might have killed a leopard,’ said Leonardo, half laughing at the memory of it, ‘and there was this preposterous ape chattering and chattering with ape-like anger while the dog feebly gesticulated with his tail, one friendly touch of which had been sufficient to knock his assailant head-over-heels. I laughed. Monna Lisa laughed – and then, by God, in the bursting of a bubble everything was clear. Then, Magnificence, I was a happy man, because I had uncovered a trivial truth, so that a thousand unconnected pieces fell together and made sense. La Gioconda threw back her head and opened her mouth and laughed, and then I knew why she had always smiled that strange quiet smile.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the Duke.

  ‘She has very bad teeth, that vain and empty woman,’ said Leonardo, laughing, ‘but I have been thinking——’

  ‘Very bad?’ asked the Duke.

  ‘Rotten. Her smile is the secretive smile of a woman with bad teeth. Touching the matter of the water supply; I believe——’

  ‘I detest women with bad teeth,’ said the Duke, yawning. ‘And to the devil with your pipes and water-tanks.’

  The King Who Collected Clocks

  SECRETS such as Pommel told me burn holes in the pockets of the brain. If I could tell you the real name of the King and his country, your eyebrows would go up and your jaws would go down – and then, more likely than not, you would damn me for a sensational rogue and a dirty liar.

  I met the Count de Pommel in the Casino at Monte Estoril, in Portugal. At first I thought that he was a confidence trickster operating under a mask of shy reserve. The Count de Pommel had lost all his ready money on the third block of numbers, and was feverishly convinced that his luck was about to change. Offering me his watch as security, he asked me to lend him a thousand escudos; about ten pounds. In England, as things were then, almost any watch that ticked was worth ten pounds. I gave him the money. Then he began to win. In three-quarters of an hour he won eleven thousand escudos, stopped playing, and returned my money in exchange for his watch, with a thousand expressions of gratitude and the offer of a glass of champagne. He gave me, at the same time, six square inches of visiting card: he was the Count de Pommel, of the Quinta Pommel at Cascais and the Villa Pommel, Lausanne, Switzerland. The watch, he said, was worth four hundred pounds.

  ‘Who made it?’ I asked.

  ‘I did,’ he said.

  ‘There is something about you that made me think you were a clever man with your hands,’ I said.

  He held out his hands. Transparent, bloodless, reticulated with narrow black veins, they seemed to vibrate like the wings of an insect. ‘Once upon a time, yes,’ he said. ‘Now, no. A nervous disorder. There is nothing worse than nerves in my profession.’

  ‘Your profession?’

  ‘Or trade, if you prefer the word. I am, or was, a watchmaker. I got my title of nobility from King Nicolas, Nicolas the Third,’ he said, and added: ‘I am not a nobleman by birth. Actually, I was a Swiss.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I said, remembering. ‘Nicolas the Third collected clocks and watches.’

  ‘His was the finest collection in the world.’

  ‘And you – of course, of course! Pommel – now I get it – Pommel is a name I associate with the Nicolas Clock.’

  The Count de Pommel
smiled and said: ‘It was a toy rather than a clock in the proper sense of the word. Birds sprang out singing and flapping their wings, Father Time held up a mechanical calendar in the shape of an hour-glass; and I devised a barometer also worked by clockwork, so that figures representing the Four Seasons appeared according to changes of atmospheric pressure. The Nicolas Clock was over-complicated. I am far more proud to have made the watch I pledged with you this evening.’

  ‘It seemed to me to be made of gold.’

  ‘Only the case. It is a very simple watch, but perfect; foolproof and waterproof – absolutely accurate. It seems silly, perhaps. I am a retired man, and time does not matter to me. Still, I like accuracy for the sake of accuracy – it is something to be achieved. I cannot work any more; my hands are unsteady, as you see. So I have a regard for that watch. It is the only thing left to me of all that I have made. The others are museum pieces, collectors’ pieces – dead!’

  ‘Did you also make the figures on the Nicolas Clock, Count de Pommel? They are works of art.’