Auto-da-fé (62 page)
Authors: Elias Canetti
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Literary Criticism, #German, #Novel, #European, #German fiction
Madame was no longer finding enough pleasure in the picture. She forced George to stand up. To her astonishment he said good-bye to her brother-in-law as if he were Croesus, and to the secretary as if she had Croesus' marriage lines in her pocket. 'My husband supports him!' she said when they were outside; she objected to false impressions, but she said nothing about the appropriated share of the inheritance. The sympathetic doctor asked if he might not, out of scientific interest, treat the lunatic for his private pleasure; her husband would naturally be charged nothing. She misunderstood him at once and agreed, with one stipulation, that she should be present at the treatments. Since she heard footsteps — perhaps her husband had come back —she said quickly: 'The plans you have for him, doctor, fill me with curiosity!' George had to include her in the bargain. He carried her forward into his new life, a remnant of his old.
For some months he came every day. His admiration for the gorilla grew from visit to visit. With infinite pains he learnt his language. The secretary did not help much; if she dropped back too often into her native French, she felt discarded. For her treachery to the man, to whom she clung without reservations, she deserved punishment. To keep the gorilla in a good temper George renounced the short cut of learning through any other language. He learnt like a child, who is being taught by words the relation of things to each other. Here their relation was the essential; the two rooms and their contents were dissolved in a magnetic field of passions. Objects — in this his first impressions had been correct — had no special names. They were called according to the mood in which they floated. Their faces altered for the gorilla, who lived a wild, tense, stormy life. His life communicated itself to them, they had an active part in it. He had peopled two rooms with a whole world. He created what he wanted, and after the six days of creation, on the seventh took up his abode therein. Instead of resting, he gave his creation speech. All that was round him proceeded from him. For the furniture which he had found here and the rubbish which little by little had been passed on to him, had long since carried the marks of his activities. The foreigner, who had suddenly descended on to his planet, he treated with patience. He could forgive back-slidings of his guest into the language of a worn-out and faded past, because he had himself once been a man. And he noticed clearly the progress the stranger was making. At first little more than his shadow, he grew in time to be his equal and friend.
George was learned enough to publish a thesis on the speech of this madman. A new light was thrown on the psychology of sounds. Vigorously disputed problems of learning were solved by a gorilla. His friendship with him brought fame to the young doctor who had known hitherto only success. Out of gratitude he left him in the condition which made him happy. He renounced any attempt at a cure. He believed indeed, since he had learnt his language, that he had the skill to change him back from a gorilla into the disinherited brother of a banker. But he resisted the temptation to commit a crime, a temptation provoked alone by the sense of a power which he had gained over night, and instead became a psychiatrist out of admiration for the greatness of the distracted to whom his friend was so closely akin, and with the firm principle that he would learn from them but would heal none. He hacf had enough of polite literature.
Later, when he was working his way through hundreds of experiences, he learnt to distinguish between madmen and madmen. In general his enthusiasm remained alive. A burning sympathy for those men who had so far separated themselves from others as to pass for mad, overcame him with every new patient. Many of them offended his sensitive love, particularly those weak natures who, struggling from attack to attack, pined for the lucid intervals —Jews yearning for the flesh pots of Egypt. He did them the service, and led them back into Egypt. The ways he had found to do so were no less wonderful than those of the Lord when he set free his people. Against his will, methods of approach which he had intended for particular cases were employed also in others, others which he — full of respect and gratitude to his gorilla — would never have meddled with. What he suggested, spread. The director of the institute in which he worked rejoiced at the noise which his school was still making in the world. People had got used to regarding his life-work as finished. And now how it flowered again with his pupil!
When Georges walked along the streets of Paris it sometimes happened that he met one of his cures. He would be embraced and almost knocked down, like the master of some enormous dog coming home after a long absence. Under his friendly questions he concealed a timid hope. He spoke of general health, profession, plans for the future and waited for just one such little comment as '
Then
it was nicer !' or 'How empty and stupid my life is now!' 'I wish I were ill again!' 'Why did you cure me?' 'People don't realize what wonderful things there are in their heads!' 'Being sane is a kind of retarded development!' 'You ought to be put out of business! You've robbed me of my most priceless possession!' 'I value you as my friend. But your profession is a crime against humanity.' 'Be ashamed, you cobbler of souls!' 'Give me back my madness!' 'I'll have the law on you!' 'Sane rhymes with bane!'
Instead, compliments and invitations rained on him. His ex-patients looked plump, well and common. Their speech was in no way different from that of any passer-by. They were in trade or served behind a counter. At best they minded machines. But when they had still been his friends and guests, they were troubled with some gigantic guilt, which they carried for all, or with their littleness which stood in such ridiculous contrast to the hugeness of ordinary men, or with the idea of conquering the world, or with death — a thing which they now felt to be quite ordinary. Their riddles had flickered out; earlier they lived for riddles; now for things long ago solved. George was ashamed of himself, without anyone having-suggested that he should be. The relations of his patients idolized him; they counted on miracles. Even when physical deficiencies had been proved, they knew he would manage a cure somehow. His colleagues admired and envied him. They pounced at once on his ideas, they were simple and illuminating, like all great ideas. How was it no one had thought of them before! They hastened to break offlittle fragments of his fame, by proclaiming indebtedness to him and applying his methods to the most different cases. He was bound to get the Nobel Prize. He had long been in the running for if, on account of his youth it seemed better to wait a few years.
So he had been outwitted by his new profession. He had begun from his own feeling of impoverishment, begun with the utmost reverence for the gulfs and precipices which he was to investigate. And in a little while he was a saviour, surrounded by eight hundred friends, and what friends, the residents of the institute; adored by thousands whose nearest and dearest had been reborn through him. For without the existence of nearest and dearest — to be tormented and loved — nobody feels that life is worth living.
Three times a day when he went on his rounds through the rooms he received an ovation. He had grown accustomed to it; the more enthusiastically they ran to greet him, the more violently they crowded about him, the more certainly did he find the words and actions which he needed. The sick were his public. Before he came into the first room he was listening for the familiar hum of voices. Scarcely had one of them seen him from the window than the noise gained direction and order. He waited for this revolution. It was as if they had all begun to applaud. Involuntarily he smiled. Countless parts had become second nature to him. His spirit hungered for rapid transformations. A round dozen assistants followed him, to learn. Some were older, most of them had been in the profession longer than he. They regarded psychiatry as a special field of medicine, and themselves as the administrators of the mentally diseased. Whatever touched on their subject they had acquired with industry and hope. Sometimes they even pretended to agree with the crazy ideas of the patients, just as it said they should in the text books from which they drew their knowledge. One and all they hated the young director, who impressed on them daily that they were the servants and not the beneficiaries of the patients.
'You see, gentlemen,' he would say to them when they were alone together, 'what miserable single-track creatures, what pitiful and inarticulate bourgeois we are, compared with the genius of this paranoiac. We possess, but he is possessed; we take our experiences at second hand, he makes his own. He moves in total solitude, like the earth itself, through his own space. He has a right to be afraid. He applies more acumen to the explanation and defence of his way of life, than all of us together do to ours. He believes in the images his senses conjure up for him. We mistrust our own healthy senses. Those few among us who have faith still cling to experiences which were lived for them by others thousands of years ago. We need visions, revelations, voices — lightning proximities to things and men — and when we cannot find them in ourselves we fetch them out of tradition. We have to have faith because of our own poverty. Odiers, still poorer, renounce even that. But look at him! He is Allah, prophet, and Moslem in one. Isa miracle any the less a miracle because we have labelled it
Paranoia chronica?
We sit on our dück-headed sanity like a vulture on a pile of gold. Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding. If there is a life purely of the mind, it is this madman who is leading it!'
With feigned interest die assistants listened to him. When their promotion was at stake they were not above play-acting. Far more important to them than his general reflections, about which diey had their own private jokes, were his specialized methods. They noted down every word which, on the happy inspiration of the moment, he threw out to a patient, and vied with each other in the use of it, in the firm conviction that they were achieving just the same with it.
An old man who had lived for nine years in the institute, a village blacksmith, had been ruined in his home district by the coming of motor cars. His wife, after a few weeks of acute poverty, could no longer endure her life with him and ran off with a sergeant. One morning when, as soon as he woke, he was beginning to lament their ill-fortune, she had no answer for him: she had gone. He looked for her through all the village. Twenty-three years he had lived with her; as a child she had come to his house, in the first bloom of her youth he had married her. He looked for her in the neighbouring town. On his neighbours' advice he asked at the barracks for Sergeant Delbocuf, whom he had never seen. He had disappeared three days ago, they told him; gone abroad for sure because he'd be for it as a deserter if they got him. Nowhere did the blacksmith find his wife. He stayed the night in the town. His neighbours had lent him money. He went into every café, poked his head under every table and whimpered: 'Jeanne, are you there?' She wasn't even under the benches. When he leant over the bar people screamed: 'He's after the cash box!' and drove him away. From a child up everyone had known he was an honest man. Since he had married her, he hadn't thrashed her once. She had her joke at him, because he squinted with his right eye. He didn't mind. All he said was: 'As true as my name's Jean, I'll show you who's master!' That was how he treated her.
In the town he told everyone his misfortune. They all gave him good advice. A dirty cobbler said some people didn't know when they were lucky. He nearly killed him. Later he met a butcher. He helped him to look, because he liked walking about at night; he was a very fat man. They gave the alarm to the police and sniffed the river to see if there was a corpse in it. Towards morning they found a woman's, but she belonged to some other man. There was a thick fog and Jean the blacksmith wept when he saw it wasn't his. The butcher cried too and was sick into the river. Early in the morning he took Jean to the shambles. Here everyone knew and greeted him. The calves lowed, there was a smell of pigs' blood, the pigs squealed, Jean wailed even louder: 'Jeanne, are you there?' and the butcher bellowed —no one could hear the calves any more — 'The blacksmith's my friend! His wife's been brought here. Where is she?' The men shook their heads. So his wife's lost, raged the butcher, you've slaughtered her by mistake. He looked among the pigs who were hung up in a long row. 'Here's the old sow!' he bellowed. Jean looked at her from all sides, he smelt at her, he hadn't tasted a blood sausage in years, he loved them better than anything. When he had smelled his fill, he said: 'But this isn't my wife. ' Then the butcher lost his temper and swore : ' Go to hell, you fool ! '
Jean limped to the station, his wife was his lame leg, his money was all gone. He whimpered: 'How shall I get home?' and lay down on the railway lines. Instead of a railway engine a good Samaritan came along, who found him and gave him a railway ticket on account of his wife. In the train the ticket was bad. 'But he gave it to me!'said Jean, 'My wife's left me!' He hadn't a penny in his pocket and at the next station the police took him. 'Is she there? Where is she?' sobbed Jean and threw his arms round the policeman's neck. 'Here she is,' said the policeman, pointed to himself and took him away. He was locked up in a cell, where he raged several days, and his wife was lost for good. He would have found her, surely.
All of a sudden they let him go home. Maybe she's come back, he thought. The bed had gone, the table had gone, the chair: had gone, everything had gone. His wife would never come home to an empty house.
"Why's my house empty?' he asked the neighbours.
'You owe us money, Jean.'
'Where's my wife to sleep when she comes home?' asked Jean.
'Your wife won't come. She's gone with that young sergeant. You sleep on the floor. You're a poor man now!'
Jean laughed and set fire to the village. Out of the burning house of his cousin he salvaged his wife's bed. Before he took it away he strangled the little children asleep in it, three boys and a girl. He gave himself a lot of work that night. By the time he had found his table and his chairs and all his other possessions, his own empty house was on fire. He carried his goods out into the field, furnished the sitting-room like it used to be, and called 'Jeanne'. Then he went to bed. He left plenty of room for her, but she never came. He lay there a long time and waited. He was hungry, specially at night, you can't imagine how hungry. He nearly got up he was so hungry, the rain ran down into his mouth, he drank and drank. When it stopped he snapped at the stars, if only he could have had them, he hated hunger. When he could stand it no more, he made a vow. He vowed to the Virgin Mary he would never get up again until his wife had heard him and was lying there beside him again. Then the police found him and broke his vow. He would have kept it. The neighbours wanted to kill him. The whole village had been burnt down. He was delighted and yelled: 'I did it! I did it!' The police were afraid and went away fast.
In his new cell there was a school-teacher. Because he had such a nice way of talking, he told him his story. 'What's your name?' asked the teacher. 'Jean Prcval.' 'Nonsense! Your name's Vulcan! You squint and limp. You are a blacksmith. A good blacksmith if you limp. Catch your wife!'
'Catch her?'
'Your wife's called Venus and the sergeant is called Mars. I'll tell you a story. I'm an educated man. I've only stolen.'
And Jean listened, with starting eyes. What a bit of news, she can be caught! It's not difficult. An old smith did it once. His wife deceived him with a soldier, a strong young fellow. When Vulcan the smith went off to work, that handsome young devil Mars slipped into the house and slept with his wife. The household cock saw it all, was indignant and betrayed them to his master. Vulcan made a net, a delicate piece of work, invisible, those old smiths knew a thing or two, and put it cleverly round the bed. The two crept in, the wife and the soldier. The cock flew off to its master and crowed: 'They're together at home.' Quick went the smith and called all his relations and the whole village. 'I'm giving a party to-day, wait outside, wait!' He crept into the house, up to the bed, saw his wife and the devil; he nearly cried. Twenty-three years they'd been together and he never thrashed her once! The neighbours waited outside. He drew the net tight, drew it tight, tight, they were prisoners, he had her, his wife. He let the devil go, everyone in the village fetched him a swipe on the snout. Then they all came in and asked: 'Where's your wife?' The smith had hidden her, she was ashamed, he was happy. ' That's the way to do it!' said the school-teacher. 'It's a true story. In remembrance they've called three stars after those people: Mars, Venus and Vulcan. You can see them in the sky. You need good eyes for Vulcan.'
'Now I know,' said Jean, 'why I snapped for the stars.'
Later they took him away. The teacher stayed behind in the cell. Jean found a new friend instead. He was beautiful. A man you could talk to. Everyone wanted to talk to him. Jean caught his wife. Sometimes he managed it. Then he was happy. But often he was sad. Then his friend would come into the room and say: 'But Jean, she's in the net, don't you see her?' He was always right. His friend opened his mouth and look, his wife was there. 'You squint, you do,' she said to Jean. He laughed and laughed and threatened her: Til show you who's master! As sure as my name's Jean!'
This blacksmith who had lived nine years in the Institute was by no means incurable. The inquiries of the director for his wife were fruitless. Even if she could have been found — who could have forced her to come back to her husband? George pictured to himself how the scene in which the blacksmith took all his pleasure would end in reality. He would set up the bed and the net in his own house; at last the wife would turn up. Jean would come softly in and gather up the net. The two would say the old familiar words to each other. Jean would become more and more excited. The net and nine years would fall aside together. 'Oh! if only I could get hold of that woman!' sighed George.
Every day he helped Jean to find her. He wanted her presence so much, that he could hand her over to him as if he carried her about with him. His assistants, the apes, supposed there was some kind of secret experiment behind it all. Perhaps he was going to cure him with these words. If one of them was alone in the room, he never missed making use of the magic formula. 'But Jean, she's in the net, don't you see her?' Whether Jean was happy or sad, whether he was listening or had stopped his ears, they flung their master's cordial words at him. If he was asleep, they waked him up, if he seemed stupid they shouted at him. They shook him and pushed him, reproached him with stupidity and despised his recollections of his wife. The one sentence was transformed to a thousand tones of voice, according to their characters and their moods, and when nothing came of it — the blacksmith was totally indifferent to them — they had yet another reason for laughing at the director. For years that ass had been repeating his simple experiment and still believed that he could cure an incurable with a single sentence!
George would gladly have sacked the lot; but contracts made by his predecessor bound them to him. He knew they meant the patients no good and feared for their fate, in case he should die suddenly. Their petty sabotaging of his work, which he believed to be selfless and which even in their limited view seemed useful, he could not understand. Little by little he would surround himself with people who were artists enough to help him. After all these assistants whom he had taken over from his predecessor were fighting for their lives. They guessed that he would be able to do nothing with them and swallowed his hints simply so that as soon as their contracts were concluded they might at least get jobs somewhere as his pupils. He had a fine sensitivity for the reactions even of men who were too simple, heavy and well-balanced from their very birth to be able to go out of their minds. When he was tired and wanted a rest from the high tension with which his distracted friends filled him, he would submerge himself in the soul of one of his assistants. Everything that George did, he did in the character of someone else. Even his rest; but here he found it with difficulty. Strange discoveries provoked him to laughter. What for instance did these blinkered hearts think of him? Doubtless they sought for some explanation of his success and for the clear-sighted devotion which he showed to his patients. Learning had rooted into them the belief in causes. Conventionally minded, they held fast to the customs and beliefs of the majority in their period. They loved pleasure, and explained each and all in terms of the search for pleasure; it was the fashionable mania of the time, which filled every nead and explained little. By pleasure they meant, of course, all the traditional naughtiness, which, since animals were animals, have been practised by the individual with contemptible repetition.
Of that far deeper and most special motive force of history, the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, in to the mass, and to lose themselves in it so completely as to forget that
one
man ever existed, they had no idea. For they were educated men, and education is in itself a
cordon sanitaire
for the individual against the mass in his own soul.
We wage the so-called war of existence for the destruction of the mass-soul in ourselves, no less than for hunger and love. In certain circumstances it can become so strong as to force the individual to selfless acts or even acts contrary to their own interests. 'Mankind' has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down into an idea. It foams, a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal. In spite of its age it is the youngest of the beasts, the essential creation of the earth, its goal and its future. We know nothing of it; we live still, supposedly as individuals. Sometimes the masses pour over us, one single flood, one ocean, in which each drop is alive, and each drop wants the same thing. But it soon scatters again, and leaves us once more to be ourselves, poor solitary devils. In memory we can hardly conceive that we were ever so great, so many and so much one. 'Disease,' says one overburdened by intelligence; 'the beast in man' soothes the lamb of humility, and does not guess how near to the truth is its mistake. In the meantime the mass within ourselves is arming for a new attack. There will come a time when it will not be scattered again, possibly in a single country at first, eating its way out from there, until no one can doubt any more, for there will be no I, you, he, but only it, the mass.
For one discovery alone Georges flattered himself, and it was precisely this: the effects of the mass on history in general and on the life of individuals; its influence on certain changes in the human mind. He had succeeded in proving it in the case of some of his patients. Countless people go mad because the mass in them is particularly strongly developed and can get no satisfaction. In no other way did he explain himself and his own activity. Once he had lived for his private tastes, his ambition and women; now his one desire was perpetually to lose himself. In this activity he came nearer to the thoughts and wishes of the mass, than did those other single people among whom he lived.
His assistants explained his activity in a way which meant more to them. Why did the director admire his idiots so? they asked themselves. Because he s one himself, though only half. Why does he cure them? Because he can't get over it that they're better idiots than he is. He envies them. Their presence gives him no rest. They are considered something special. He has a morbid desire to draw as much attention to himself as they do. The world thinks of him as a normal man of learning. He'll never get any further than this. As director of the institute perhaps he'll grow quite sane and — what a hope — die soon. I want to be mad! he screams like a little child. This ridiculous wish must obviously arise from some experience of his youth. He ought to be mentally examined some time. But a request to make use of him as the object of such an examination, he would naturally turn down. He's an egocentric; it's best to have nothing to do with such people. The image of a madman must have been bound up with his sexual experiences from early youth. He has a morbid fear of impotence. If he could only convince himself he were mad, then he would never be impotent. Every lunatic gives him more pleasure than he can give to himself. Why should they get more out of life than I do? he complains. He feels completely at a discount. He suffers from a sense of inferiority. Out of envy he goes on plaguing them until he cures them. One would like to know his feelings, every time he lets another come out. It doesn't occur to him there are new ones coming in as well. He lives on the petty triumphs of die moment.
There's
your great man, whom the world admires! —
— To-day, on the last round, they even omitted the outward appearance of servility. It was too hot, the sudden change of weather in the last days of March weighed heavy on their torpid souls. They felt like the despised inmates of the place. Established assistants, each one had their own barred window somewhere and could press their heads against it. They were exasperated at the inexactitude of their sensibilities. Usually some ran on ahead and competed to open the doors, that was if no nurses or patients got there first. To-day they followed George at a little distance, with wandering, distrustful minds, cursing their boring work, their director and all the sick people in the world. They would rather, to-day, have been Mohammedans, seated each one alone in a small well-furnished paradise. George was listening to the familiar noise. His friends watched him from the windows, and remained as indifferent as his enemies behind him. A sad day, he said sofdy to himself; approbation and hatred passed him by, he breathed only in the stream of other people's feelings. To-day he could feel nothing around him, only the heavy air.
In the rooms a hateful quiet reigned. The patients were careful not to quarrel in front of him. They remained eager to get to the windows. Scarcely was the door closed behind him than they were pushing and squabbling. The women asked him — but without giving up their places — imploringly for his love. He could find no answers. All sound and healing thoughts had abandoned him. One of them, as ugly as sin could never be, screeched: 'No, no, no, I won't give you a divorce!' Others shouted in chorus: 'Where is he?' A girl blubbered delighted: 'Leave me go!' Jean, good-natured Jean, was threatening to give his Jeanne a box on the ear. 'I had her in the net, I was going to take hold of her; she's gone!' he wailed. 'Hit her over the head, said George, he was fed up with that thirty-two years of faithfulness. Jean hit her hard and did her crying for her. In another room all of them were wailing because it was already dark. 'They're all mad to-day,' said the male nurse. One of the many Gods Almighty said: 'Let there be light !' and raged at the disrespect with which he was treated here. 'He's nothing but a little bank clerk,' the man in the next bed whispered confidently to George. Another asked, 'Is there a God?' and wanted his address. A dapper looking gentleman, whose brother had ruined him, was complaining of how bad business was to-night. 'As soon as I've won my case, I shall lay in a stock of shirts for approximately fifteen years!' 'And why should people go naked?' his best friend asked him profoundly; they understood each other perfectly.
