Last Tales (20 page)

“Good night, Niccolo,” said the baker’s wife. “Good night,” he answered in a toneless voice.

Pellegrina, as has been told, was a baker’s daughter and would know that in a baker’s shop there may be bread left over from yesterday which is given to beggars. But since she never thought of the past she walked on. Also in the old man’s figure and bearing there had been a namelessness akin to her own. If now she added her own loneliness to his, would not the two together reach a rare, a remarkable pinnacle of loneliness? She hastened her steps a little.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I have eaten nothing today and have no money with which to buy bread. I saw you just now buying a loaf in the baker’s shop. Will you, out of compassion with the poor of this earth, give me a piece of it?”

The old man turned all round toward her, so helplessly surprised at being spoken to that she smiled. Her old habit of charming everybody she met got the better of her in the lonely village street in which she was begging her bread.

“I ask for nothing more,” she said in her husky, insinuating voice. “Many people, I am told, are happy to have a bit of bread for supper. I ask for nothing else. If you have a dish of meat waiting for you in your house, I shall not claim to share it.”

The man, who had stood immovable before her, at these words suddenly lifted his elbow, as if to deal a blow or to cover his face.

“Do not strike me,” she said gently. “Cannot you and I be friends? Be not afraid that I shall stay too long with you. I am a woman who is always traveling farther.”

After a silence the old man said: “Come with me.”

They walked on side by side, all through the village, until they came to the old man’s house standing at the end of a lonely narrow road with a low wall running along it.

Here the man stopped and opened the door to the hut.

“Wait,” he said. “I shall light a dip. I myself most often sit in the dark. But I shall light a dip for you tonight.”

She kept standing on the threshold while he raked the ashes from the embers on the fireplace, blew on them and lighted a tallow dip by a shaving. “Come closer to the fire,” he said slowly and hoarsely, pointing to the only chair of the room. She, however, would not take her host’s seat, but pulled a wooden stool up to the fireplace. The old man took down a heavy key from a nail and locked the door.

“How is it,” she asked, “that you leave the door to your house open when you are out and thieves may come in, but that you lock it when you are in it yourself?”

The old man looked at her, then looked away. “I do that,” he said.

The small room was filled with the rank smell of goats and sheep, and was indeed only divided from the cattle-shed by a half-door. She heard the animals moving and munching in the dark. The room was so low that the head of the big man brushed the joists of the ceiling.

Little by little the glimmering of the dip and the fire gained power over the shadows of the room, and in their light the old host stared at his guest for a long time. A fine lady in black silk in the street had asked a piece of bread from him and had sat down on the stool in his room.

At last he asked: “Why, Lady, have you come to this town?”

“I have come to this town,” Pellegrina answered, “because
there is no reason whatever why I should come. And that is the way in which I always travel.”

The old man said: “I have heard of many kinds of people. I have heard of unhappy, moon-stricken people, who are running from place to place for no reason. Those people one must not mock, but must give them shelter and bread. But I know not if you be one of them.”

“No,” said Pellegrina, “I am not one of the moon-struck people, and you, and all others, are free to mock me. But you see, Niccolo, some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly.”

“In such a way,” said the old man heavily, “the hunted and pursued travel.”

“Yes,” said Pellegrina, “but you seamen also name it: running before a following or a fair wind.”

“Why,” he asked, “do you call me a seaman?”

She answered: “I am in the habit of observing the looks and ways of my friends. You walk like a seaman, and you have the eyes of a seaman, which are used to gazing over great distances.”

“And who will your friends be, Lady?” he asked.

“All people are my friends,” said Pellegrina. “I have not got an enemy in the world.”

He was silent again, and a couple of times sighed as deeply as he had done in the street before the baker’s shop.

“It is sixty-five years since I saw the sea,” he said.

“A long time, Niccolo,” she said, “Yet surely you might see the sea again from these mountains.”

“Yes,” said he, “I might see it. If I walk up two hours by the path behind the house, I shall see it from there. By the time when I had first got the house, and had built the chimney and the shed to it, I walked up those two hours and came to a flat bit of ground, and from there I saw it—gray.”

“All the same,” she said, “it has had a strong grip on you, to have flung you up as high as here. You have lived in one house for sixty-five years, Niccolo, and yet you are a traveler of my own kind. And while those who travel toward a goal before them are traveling in fear of never reaching it, alas, I have myself lately left an unfortunate young man, who for a long time still will be rushing toward a goal that he will never reach, and his name, Niccolo, was Lincoln—we, who are running before the wind, may be without fear, for what will we have to fear? Therefore you must not fear me, no more than I fear you.”

“I do not know,” he said after a pause, “how it comes to be that a hunted and pursued traveler should look so joyous?”

Pellegrina answered: “It is like this: joy is my element. Therefore do I also wish that tonight I might give you joy.”

“In what way would you give me joy?” he asked, surprised and as if angered.

“It is like this,” she said again, “that just as it is forbidden me to remain long in the same place, remembrance is forbidden me. But you, my friend, who are free to remember things, look you back sixty-five years, or ten or fifteen years more, and tell me whether there you will find an hour in which you were happy.”

“It is not good to remember things,” said he.

“I have forgotten,” she said, “what it is like to remember things.”

“And it is not such hours as you speak of that I remember,” said he.

He sat on for a long time. In the end—as from the bottom of a deep draw-well and by the aid of a heavy and rusty chain—he heaved up a recollection. When he had been a very small child among his brothers and sisters, it seemed that in the evening, and as she had got all her children put to bed, his mother had sung to them.

“I do not much like,” he said, and looked in front of him into space, “to listen to people talking. Maybe it is better to
hear them sing. Maybe you would give me joy, as you say, if you would sing to me.”

“I would fain do so, dear Niccolo,” she said, “but unfortunately I cannot sing.”

Now Niccolo could think of no more things which would give him joy. But he called to mind that besides the bread he had onions, cheese and wine in his house, and brought forth these.

“I have not,” he said, “during those years of which I have spoken, had anybody come into my house. I have not shared a meal with anybody. I have forgotten how, in sharing it with other people, one breaks bread. Do you this for me.”

She did as he required and handed him half of the loaf. “Is not this a fair hand?” she said as he took the bread from her. “The mouths of many fools have kissed it.”

“I do not like to touch people,” he said. “I do not like hands.”

“But if I am to break the bread with you,” she said, “I ought, I think, to say grace as I have heard it said. ‘Dear Lord,’ I should say, ‘help us that we may with happy hearts administer to the wants of this our flesh, which you have destined for the glory of the resurrection.’ ”

“But that is a lie,” said the old man. “There is no resurrection of the flesh. Or tell me, Lady, how that flesh would ever rise again which the fish have eaten?”

Pellegrina smiled at him. “I am no priest, Niccolo,” she said, “but we will pretend that I be one. I shall answer you, then, that the dumb fishes, too, are pious creatures of God, and that our flesh, if it be eaten by them and be committed to their keeping until the Lord decides otherwise, the while is safe and well with them.”

The old man sat on in silence, munching his onions.

“And if,” he asked suddenly, “one man has eaten of another man’s flesh? If an evil man, a boy with no good in him, has eaten of the flesh of a good and holy man? And many years have passed, so that it has become one with his own?
How would it come to happen that this flesh should rise?”

“Alas, Niccolo,” she said. “Life is hard, and sad things happen round us in the world. Yet I can tell you that the Lord likes a jest, and that a
da capo
—which means: taking the same thing over again—is a favorite jest of his. He may have wanted, now, a sailor stuck on the top of a mountain, such as was Noah, whose name begins with the same letter as yours. It is a very sad thing that for the olive leaf I can only bring you a twig of laurel, all dry. But I shall tell you, to make up for it, that the Ark upon its rock may well have been laughing at the weightless flotsam from the deluge, running about from one place to another.”

“You have not answered me,” he said and stared at her.

“In my heart I have answered you,” said she. “But I shall answer you over again:

“Alas, Niccolo, I guessed it when in the street you raised your hand against me—to strike or to hide your face—as I spoke to you the word of meat. Sad things happen in the world round us. I have heard of people shipwrecked in a boat, and the one of them might well be a good and holy man, and the other of them might well be a boy with no good in him, who saw no other way of saving his life than eating of the flesh of his dead companion.”

“Yes, it was like that,” Niccolo said after a pause. “We had got away from the ship in a boat, the two of us, I myself and the old chaplain of the ship, the
Durkheim
, all alone for a long row of days, on a long row of gray waves. And when he had died, I saw no other way of living on than by eating of him. I would not touch his face, and I would not undo his clothes. His left hand lay beneath his body; I ate the flesh of his right hand. On the evening of that same day I was picked up by a Spanish ship.

“I have told nobody,” he said after another silence, “what I have now told you. If, when you go away, you tell it to the people of the town, they will chase me out of my house and away from the mountain by throwing stones at me.”

“And then,” she said, “I shall have no house to offer you instead, as you have offered me yours.”

“Are you going to tell them, then?” the old man asked, his pale eyes on her face.

At that she became so sad that she dropped her head and her long hair fell forward.

“I told you that I was your friend,” she said. “Should I then, always, be betraying my friends?”

“I have got no friends,” said Niccolo. “I know nothing of the ways of friends. Are you going to tell your friends what I have now told you?”

“No,” she said, “it is to you that I shall tell something. The right hand of that good man, the ship’s chaplain, when the hour of resurrection comes, will grip you by the hair—and that, Niccolo, is why you have still got such long, thick hair—or will hold on to the very entrails and bowels of you, to lift you up with him. And you shall see before you the flesh, the thought of which has followed you in the dark, radiant like the sun.”

“From where do you know this?” he asked.

“I have come from far away,” she answered, “and I have got far to go. I am nothing but a messenger sent out on a long journey, to tell people that there is hope in the world.”

“Are you an angel then?” he asked.

“I was an angel once,” she answered, “but I let my flight feathers wither and fall off, and as you see I can no longer get up from the ground. Yet, as you will also see, I can still flutter a little, from one place to another. But we will not speak any more of me. Tell me instead of the shipwreck. And the more things you can tell me about it, Niccolo, the more joy you will give me.”

The old man after a while set to telling his long tale, with the breaks and searchings for words of a man who has lost the habit of speaking, and with the keen recollection of details of a man whose thoughts have time after time gone over his theme. The
Durkheim
had caught fire and had gone
down, in open sea, south of the Cape. The crew had taken to the boats; at the last moment the ship’s boy had dragged the old ship’s chaplain through the fire and the smoke, and had tumbled with him into a last boat that had been overlooked. In this boat the two had suffered great distress, until one morning the chaplain died.

During this account Pellegrina, who had come in from the cold, on her stool close to the fire grew sleepy. Yet when it was finished, and the narrator had sunk back into silence, she asked him to tell her more about his life. Niccolo told her slowly and unevenly as before that he had been a wild boy and that, while quite a small child, he had broken his little sister’s nose with a stone. As he related his life on board the ships and in port, she asked him if he had ever had a sweetheart. “No,” he said, “when the
Durkheim
went down I was but fifteen, I had never kissed a girl. And afterwards I thought my mouth too rare a thing to give to kissing women.”

In the end her eyes twice fell to. “Niccolo, my friend,” she said, “I could spend the whole night sitting up here and listening to you. But I am tired after a long journey, and I must needs sleep. Show me a place where I can lie down for a couple of hours.”

Niccolo looked at her, looked round the room, and got up from his chair. There was no bed in the room, but only on the floor a couch made up of goatskins, “I have got but this bed to give you,” he said, “and you will be used to a silken bed. But lie down there and fear not me. I shall do you no harm.”