Kalpa Imperial (10 page)

You’ve all seen the result: the beautiful marble ladies with marble tunics and floating marble hair gathered weeping about a prone figure, one of them lifting her hands to heaven, calling upon him who has left us. But the cemetery’s gone, taken over by the city that obliterated and forgot it. The crypt is a candy warehouse, and the mourning figures lean over the watertank that supplies the Registry of Real Estate. Yet this isn’t what matters in the order of events. The stone is worked, modeled, polished, the empty eyes of the statues gaze unseeing at people. What matters are the people, who have eyes that sometimes see. What matters is that the sculptor was a widower and poor and the woman who commissioned him was a widow and rich. They got married, not before the funeral monument was finished, as that would have been unseemly, but they got married the instant the aromatic herbs were set alight, and the sculptor paid his debts and acquired more servants and more carriages and more horses, and no longer worked in marble or bronze but became a patron of the arts, which is far less tiring, less risky, and more respectable.

So the artists arrived. The first were mere rowdies and idlers who’d heard that there was a rich patron of the arts in that city who might provide them food and lodging while they sat around in cafés till dawn talking about the poems they were going to write, the pictures they were going to paint, the symphonies they were going to compose, sneering at the world which had so far failed to understand them and despising the rich man who insisted that he did understand them and who, before paying for their bed and wine and soup, made them listen to him describing his own works of art and, even worse, giving them advice. But later on came another sort, who only sat around in cafés occasionally and spent most of their time shut away in silence weaving words or mixing sounds or colors. Among these artists who came to the city, early or late, some lacked talent, some lacked discipline, some lacked dedication, but all had a good deal of imagination. The city ascended and twisted yet again: it gained not elegance but a certain eccentric, unexpected beauty. Windowed galleries were built, which you reached by stairways that took off from anywhere, from the middle of a street, from the second-floor balcony of a house, even from other stairways; circular houses were built, labyrinthine houses, underground houses, tiny studios, huge music halls, chamber theaters, concert stadiums. The fashion changed, and the austere suits of businessmen and the gloomy high-necked gowns of their wives gave place to purple and green blouses, paint-splashed smocks, capes, tunics, stoles, naked torsos, sandals, boots, embroidered slippers, bare feet, flowered kerchiefs, cothurns, gold chains, rings worn in one ear, necklaces, bracelets, headbands, tattoos, bodices, colored beads glued on the forehead, anklets, cameos. Schedules changed too: the city that used to get up early, hurry through breakfast, work, eat lunch quietly at home, go back to work, eat dinner with the family and go to bed as the stars came out, little by little disappeared. Offices and institutions opened now about noon, afternoon was the busy time, cafés and restaurants were always crowded, and at night the city glittered. From the distant port far to the north they saw above the mountains a halo of light that never went out but only paled with the rising of the sun.

But let’s not forget Ferager-Manad and his wife. She got no chance at a third husband, a pity, if you think of what a stunning funeral monument she could have raised to this one now that she had so many sculptors at hand to choose from. She died of a stroke one summer evening and I’m sorry to say that her widower didn’t give a thought to mausoleums but only to going out every night with his protégés to try new drinks and new girls while they discussed pure form or the transcendent contents of line. Having filled several years with productive discussions and investigations, he died of pneumonia and was buried, unceremoniously because little remained of the immense fortune his wife had left him, and not where he belonged, because the door of the mausoleum surmounted by mourning figures had stuck shut and couldn’t be opened.

Now we mustn’t forget the capital. The imperial throne was occupied by Mezsiadar III the Ascetic, a well-meaning man, who spent so much time and so much energy in doing good that he succeeded in doing as much harm as twenty emperors of egregious iniquity. Mezsiadar wished all his subjects to be good, a dangerous wish. Gone were the peaceful days of the dynasty of the Danoubbes, founded centuries ago by Callasdanm the Fat, an emperor neither good nor bad, who understood, perhaps through laziness, that men and women are neither good nor bad and that it’s best to let them go on being that way. The current rulers were the Embaroddar, of whom it was said, “Black great-grandfather, white grandfather, black father, white son, black grandson, white great-grandson,” because if one of them reigned well the next was certain to be a disaster, and if one reigned badly people took comfort in the knowledge that the next would bring blessings to his people. The Embaroddars knew the saying too, and as Mezsiadar II had been a good emperor, Mezsiadar III was certain to bring misfortune to all; except that he had decided otherwise; which was precisely why he did exactly what was expected of the members of that long dynasty, which happened to be on the point of ending, though nobody at the moment knew it.

Mother of the Arts is what they were calling the city then, and its inhabitants (poor twits) took great pride in such a fine name. Mezsiadar the Ascetic heard about this “Mother of the Arts” business and was suspicious, not because he distrusted the arts but because by inclination and conviction he was suspicious of everything. He asked for information, and the city officials (poor twits) wrote an enthusiastic and detailed memorandum. So as a precautionary measure Mezsiadar the Ascetic had them beheaded.

“What?” cried the emperor, reaching page  of the -page memorandum. “Where is piety? Where is decency? Where is prudence, modesty, frugality, selflessness? Where?”

Mezsiadar III the Ascetic was afraid of himself and his nights were sleepless. This, I think, explains it all. After ordering that the city functionaries have their heads removed, he sat alone in the shadows, in a bare, cold room, and thought intensely about the many-colored city that came alive at night, about the barefoot dreamers and the naked models, about promiscuity, absinthe, idleness; he thought about what goes on in darkness, he thought about caresses and murmurs, he thought about carpeted rooms, hoarse voices, stringed instruments lazily twanging, about narrow staircases leading up to stifling rooms where the shapes of bodies can be only guessed and an exotic odor tickles the nostrils, he thought about tongues, breasts, thighs, genitals and buttocks, in paintings and songs, fleshy, swaying, bulging, teasing, heavy, foully desirable. That night he sent dinner away untasted, lay down on his comfortless bed, and fell into a fever. Next day two army battalions left for the city.

When the last of the artists, actors, poets, musicians, what have you, had been killed or had escaped, the soldiers painted all the facades of buildings greenish grey, cut back the vines, and sprayed disinfectant on the garrets, the glass-roofed studios, and the music rooms. Paintings and lutes and books were all dumped into a great bonfire, which for the last time brightened the night sky over the mountains. The city remained a barracks as long as Mesziadar the Ascetic lived, though that didn’t help give him peaceful nights or fewer headaches and belly cramps. On the contrary. His arms, shoulders, and head broke out in a pustulent eczema, which he considered to be a punishment for his failure to discover at once what was going on in the mountain city. So he sought information on all the other cities in the Empire, now very numerous; but what was going on in the other cities of the Empire doesn’t enter into my story. A nobleman of his entourage turned the pages of the innumerable reports for the emperor, since his hands were tied to the arms of his chair to prevent him from scratching. He didn’t die of the itch, nor did he die while reading reports; he died a few years later, when nothing was left of the eczema but scars, and the palace doctors said his liver had burst, who knows why.

He was succeeded by Riggameth II, a “white” Emperor, who had hated his father deeply since boyhood and went on hating him even after his death. Thus he tried to undo everything the Ascetic had done. Though Riggameth lived into old age he didn’t have time to undo absolutely everything, but he managed a good deal. For one thing, he kicked the army out of the grey city.

The soldiers and captains and lieutenants departed. Some people painted their houses white or pink or green. A boy composed a song, a woman sketched a landscape, and neither got hanged for it. A theater opened, one or two vines put out buds. And though never again was it the Mother of the Arts, the city acquired a reasonable quota of musicians, actors, and poets.

And then in the arcane order of events, two women appeared. One of them would have gained the Ascetic’s entire approval since she was a widow, pure, and stupid; she had known only one man in her life, and had considered the experience a prolonged torture. The other woman he would have had burned in the public square as indecent, which she was, as immodest, which she was, and as promiscuous, which she also was.

Neither woman was young, and both remembered the city as it had been before the pious intervention of the late emperor. The widow enjoyed gardening and embroidery, the other one enjoyed men. The widow venerated the memory of Mezsiadar, the other one spat when she heard his name. The widow was digging in her garden to plant a shoot of
trissingalia adurata
when she found her hands wet with hot water that seemed to be rising up from deep in the earth. The other had been a model and lover of painters and sculptors, and then had opened an inn for officers; the money from artists and from army men had run out and she was wondering what kind of business to start up, something entertaining, a place where lots of people would come, where she could talk with lots of clients and maybe, too, why not, maybe, even though she wasn’t the girl she used to be, maybe . . .

It was thus that the springs of the thermal baths were discovered. One woman found her garden full of salty water which killed off her plants, and in disappointment put her house up for sale. Another woman bought it, thinking that the big front room could be used as a tea-room; but since the water kept welling up, she called the neighborhood schoolmaster and asked him what it was.

The first hot bath of the city was established in the garden court of a recently purchased house which hadn’t yet become a tea-room. The widow who liked gardening brought suit, charging that the other woman knew what was rising from under the ground and had fraudulently paid much less than the property was worth. But the other one laughed, and even offered money in compensation, and when the widow wouldn’t take it left the affair to her attorneys and turned her attention to her business, so that she didn’t notice, or if she noticed didn’t think it very important, that the widow lost her suit. She got rich, in any case, very rich—I don’t mean the widow but the other one, of course—and ended up running more than a dozen thermal establishments, until she married, sold some of them, hired managers for the rest, and went travelling. Her husband was a penniless nobleman, a very handsome man, very quiet, very elegant, who was even rather fond of her. And it was she who built the Fountain of the Five Rivers.

A spa city can’t be grey. It became white. Hotels sprang up, consulting rooms, rest homes; there was soft music playing to relax patients resting in their rooms or getting massages or working out in gyms or lying in mudbaths; crystal tinkled in lampshades, vases, glasses; and nobody from the emperor on down found anything to complain about, nobody except the invalids, who whined because they were invalids, because the massage was too rough or too mild, because the water was too cold or too hot, too deep or not deep enough, because they didn’t have enough blankets or too many blankets. But the invalids kept coming, often from a great distance, to spend their money in the city, so everybody listened to them smiling and tried, if there was time enough, to satisfy them.

Now I’m going to tell you about Blaggarde II, the Listener, an emperor who had dreams and visions and heard voices speaking from stones, but wasn’t a bad ruler, all the same. Or could it have been because he saw visions and heard voices that he wasn’t a bad ruler? A small problem, which a teller of tales doesn’t have to pretend to solve; so let’s go on. For at least three hundred years the warm mineral waters had sprung up from the earth, and people had built ingenious and beautiful devices for the liquid that had enriched them and brought them peace. The Fountain of the Five Rivers never ceased to run; statues of dancing women spouted transparent jets from their mouths; stone figures of chubby children cupped their hands under bronze spouts; great alabaster cups, winged monsters with open beaks, improbable bouquets of marble sent streams of water falling into tanks and thence into bathing ponds and swimming pools and artificial lakes, when Blaggarde II marched south to put down the rebellion. We know now how that expedition ended and what effect it had on Blaggarde the Listener, his dynasty, and the history of the Empire. But what the chronicles don’t always say is that the wound that finally brought the emperor to his death remained unhealed ever after the day of the last battle. No surgeon succeeded in closing it even temporarily. A year after the expedition to the south, somebody told the emperor about the waters which cured all ills, in the mountain city called, at that time, Star of Hope; and the Listener took to the road once again, not south this time but north, not on horseback in full dress uniform but lying in a litter and covered with woolen cloaks and blankets, not with songs but with lamentations, not surrounded by soldiers but by doctors and nurses. And he found a charming white city, sprawling but solid, where voices and music never got too loud, where nothing was done in a hurry, and where almost everybody who walked the streets or leaned on the windowsills had eyes as dull as those of the Lord of the Empire.