Simplicissimus (14 page)

The next day I woke up again (otherwise I would still be sleeping) to find myself no longer in the bed, nor in the splendid chamber, but imprisoned in my goose-coop once more, where it was horribly dark, as it had been in the cellar. What is more, I was wearing a suit of clothes made out of calfskin with the rough side on the outside. The trousers were tight-fitting, in the Polish or Swabian fashion, and the jacket of an even more clownish cut. A headpiece like a monk’s cowl had been pulled over my head; it was adorned with a splendid pair of donkey’s ears. I had to laugh at my own misfortune. I could tell from the nest and feathers I had been provided with what kind of queer bird I was supposed to be. That was the point at which I first started thinking about how I might turn it to my best advantage. I decided to play the fool as foolishly I could, at the same time waiting patiently to see what fate had in store for me.

I could easily have got out using the hole the mad ensign had made in the door, but since I was to be a fool, I decided not to. I not only played the fool who has not the wit to get out of his own accord, I even behaved like a hungry calf that wants its mother and my loud mooing soon attracted the attention of those who had been set to keep an ear open for me. Two soldiers came up to the coop and asked who was in it. ‘You fools’, I answered, ‘can’t you hear that there’s a calf in here.’ They opened up the coop and pulled me out with great expressions of surprise that a calf could talk. They were about as convincing in their roles as a novice actor with forced gestures is at representing the character he is supposed to be playing. I kept feeling they needed my help to act out their farce. They discussed among themselves what to do and decided that the best idea would be to offer me to the governor, who would give them more for me, being a calf that could speak, than they would get from the butcher. They asked me how things were and I answered, ‘Pretty rotten.’

‘Why?’ they asked.

‘Because the custom here seems to be to shut up honest calves in goose-coops’, I said. ‘Surely you fellows must realise that if I am to grow into a proper ox I must be reared in a manner appropriate to a decent young bullock.’

After this brief exchange they led me across the street to the governor’s lodgings. A large crowd of boys followed us and since they joined me in mooing like a calf a blind man would have assumed from the noise that a herd of calves was being driven along the street. To the eye, however, it looked like a pack of fools, young and old.

So I was presented to the governor by the two soldiers as if they had just captured me while out foraging. He gave them a small reward and promised me the best of everything if I were to stay with him. ‘Pull the other one!’, I thought to myself, but I said, ‘Certainly, sir, but I must not be shut up in that goose-coop. We calves can’t stand that kind of treatment if we are to grow up into fine beasts.’

The governor promised me better quarters and thought no end of himself for having made such a splendid fool out of me. I for my part thought, ‘Just you wait, sir. I have survived the ordeal and it has only served to toughen me up. Now let’s see which of us can put on the best act to the other.’

Just then a farmer who had fled to the town was driving his cattle to the drinking trough. As soon as I saw them I left the governor and ran towards the cows, mooing like a calf as if I wanted to suck at their udders. But even though I was wearing their kind of skin they were more frightened of me than of a wolf and shied and scattered as quickly as if they had trodden on a hornets’ nest in August. The farmer could not get the herd back together again, to the great amusement of the crowd of people which immediately gathered to watch this cavalcade of fools. My master laughed fit to burst and finally said, ‘One fool makes a hundred more.’ And I thought to myself, ‘If the cap fits … ‘

Just as from that time on everyone called me the Calf, I had a special mocking nickname for each and every one of them. Most people, and my master in particular, found them very appropriate for I christened each according to his qualities. To put it in a nutshell, in general people considered me a simple-minded idiot and I thought everyone a clever fool. In my opinion that is the way of the world: every man is happy with his own wits and imagines he is the cleverest of all.

My prank with the farmer’s cattle made a short morning even shorter, for it was around the time of the winter solstice. I waited on my master during the midday meal as before, at the same time getting up to all sorts of strange tricks. When it was my turn to eat no one could get any human food or drink down me at all, all I wanted was grass, which was not to be had at that time of the year. My master had two small calfskins brought from the butcher’s and dressed up two small boys in them. He got them to sit at table beside me and for the first course gave us winter salad and told us to tuck in. He had a live calf brought in and got them to put salt on the salad to encourage it to eat it. I stared at this, as if in astonishment, but those standing around urged me to join in.

‘It’s nothing new’, they said, seeing that the fare left me unmoved, ‘for calves to eat flesh, fish, cheese, butter and other things. What? Sometimes they get themselves blind drunk too! The beasts know what’s good for them nowadays. It’s gone so far’, they added, ‘that there’s only a tiny difference between them and humans, and you insist on being the only one who won’t join in?’

This argument persuaded me, all the more because I was hungry and not because I had already seen for myself how humans could be more swinish than swine, more savage than lions, more lecherous than goats, more envious than dogs, more headstrong than horses, more uncouth than donkeys, more drunken than newts, more cunning than foxes, more voracious than wolves, more mischievous than monkeys and more poisonous than snakes and toads. They did not even have the innocence of a calf; the only difference between them and brute beasts was in their shape, and yet they all ate human food. So I ate my fill with my two fellow calves, and if a stranger had seen us together at table he would surely have thought Circe had come back to life to turn human beings into animals again, while in fact it was my master who practised that art. My supper was served in the same way as my midday meal and just as my table-mates, or parasites, had to eat with me to encourage me to eat, so they had to accompany me to bed, since my master would not allow me to spend the night in the cow-shed, which I would have done to fool those who imagined they had made a fool out of me.

I came to the conclusion that the Good Lord gives each person sufficient wits to survive in the station to which He has called them. Some people, whether they can put ‘Dr’ in front of their name or not, vainly imagine they alone know it all, but there are as many clever fish in the sea as ever came out of it.

By the time I woke up in the morning my two becalfed bedfellows had already gone, so I got up and when the adjutant came to fetch the keys for the city gates I slipped out of the house to go and see the pastor. I told him everything that had happened, how I had been through both heaven and hell. When he saw that I had qualms of conscience about deceiving so many people, especially my master, by pretending to be a fool, he said, ‘You don’t need to worry about that. The foolish world wants to be deceived. Seeing they have left you with your wits, use them to your own advantage, imagine yourself a phoenix that has gone through the fire, from lack of understanding to understanding, and has been born again to a new life. But do not forget that you are not out of the wood yet. That fool’s cap you have on is still a danger to your reason and the times are so strange that no one can say whether you will escape from it with your life or not. A person can run down to hell quickly enough, but getting out again takes a great deal of sweat and toil. You are not yet man enough to deal with the danger you face, not by a long chalk, even though you might imagine you are. You are going to need more caution and understanding than you did when you had no idea what understanding – or the lack of it – was. Do not put too much trust in your own abilities, wait for things to change of their own accord.’

His changed manner towards me was deliberate. I imagine he could tell from my expression I thought no end of myself for having managed to survive through a combination of his advice and my masterly deceit. For my part, I suspected from the look on his face that he was sick and tired of me. And indeed, what did he get out of his acquaintance with me? So I changed my tune and thanked him for the excellent medicines he had given me to keep me in my right mind. I even made impossible promises and said I would pay him back everything I owed him. This was more to his taste and soon put him in a different mood. He praised his medicines and went on to tell me about the art of mnemonics, invented by Simonides Melicertes and perfected through the efforts of Metrodorus Scepticus, who could teach people to remember everything they had heard or read simply by repeating one word. All of which, he said, would not have been possible without the medicines to strengthen the mind that he had given me.

‘Yes, my dear pastor’, I thought to myself, ‘I have read about Metrodorus’s art of memory in the books you lent the hermit. And quite different things they said.’ But I was was not so foolish as to say that. To tell the truth, it was only in becoming a fool that I found my wits and started to watch my tongue.

The pastor went on to tell me how Cyrus could call each of his 30,000 soldiers by name, Lucius Scipio all the citizens of Rome by theirs and Cineas, Pyrrhus’s ambassador, could repeat the names of all the senators and nobles the day after his arrival in Rome. ‘Mithridates, King of Pontus and Bithynia’, he said, ‘ruled over peoples speaking twenty-two different languages and could dispense justice and even speak to them all in their own language. The learned Greek, Charmides, could tell people anything they wanted to know from any book in the whole library if he had read it just once. Ravisius reports that Lucius Seneca could repeat 2,000 names in the order they had been spoken and repeat two hundred lines of poetry recited by two hundred different pupils, starting with the last and going back to the first. Esdras, as Eusebius writes, knew the Pentateuch by heart and could dictate all five books word by word to the scribes. Themistocles learnt Persian in a single year. Crassus could speak the five different dialects of Greek in Asia Minor and dispense justice to his subjects in each. Julius Caesar could read, dictate and give audience all at the same time. I will pass over Hadrian, Portius Latronus and all the other Romans and just remind you that St. Jerome knew Hebrew, Chaldaean, Greek, Persian, Median, Arabic and Latin. The hermit, Antony of Thebes, knew the Bible by heart just from hearing it read aloud. And Colerus, following Marcus Antonius Muretus, writes of a Corsican who, having heard 6,000 names, could repeat them in the correct order.

I am only telling you this’, he continued, ‘so that you will not think it impossible for a person’s memory to be strengthened and preserved by medicine, just as there are many ways in which it can be weakened or even destroyed. Pliny the Elder writes, in book seven of his
Natural History
, that there is no faculty in man so feeble as memory; through illness, fright, fear, worry or distress it can lose much of its strength or even disappear entirely. We read of a scholar in Athens who forgot everything he had learnt, even the ABC, after a rock had fallen on his head. Another, through illness, forgot his servant’s name, and Messala Valerius Corvinus, who had previously had a good memory, could not even remember his own name. Hans Scratch, in the sixtieth folio of his
Fasciculus Historiarum
(which sounds as pretentious as if it were written by Pliny himself) tells of a priest who drank the blood from his own veins, which resulted in him forgetting how to read or write, although his memory was otherwise unaffected; when, one year later, he drank the same blood at the same place and the same hour, he found he could read and write again. More credible is what Johann Weiher claims in book three of his
De praestigiis daemonum
, namely that if you eat bear’s brains you will imagine you have become a bear yourself, quoting the example of a Spanish nobleman who, after he had eaten some, ran about in the wild, thinking he was a bear. My dear Simplicius, if your master had known that art you would more likely have been transformed into a bear, like Callisto, than into a bull, like Jupiter.’

The pastor told a lot more of this sort, gave me some more of his medicine and instructed me how to behave in future. With that I went back home, taking more than a hundred young boys with me who ran behind, bellowing like calves. My master, who had just got up, ran to the window and, seeing so many fools at once, was gracious enough to laugh heartily at them.

As soon as I got back to the house I had to go to the drawing room, for some noble ladies were visiting my master and wanted to see and hear such a fine fool. I stood there like a deaf-mute so that one of them – it was the one I had grabbed at the dance – said she had been told this calf could speak, but now saw that it was not true. I replied, ‘For my part I thought that monkeys couldn’t speak, but from what I hear now that is not true.’

‘What?’ said my master. ‘You think these ladies are monkeys?’

‘If they are not’, I replied, ‘they will soon become monkeys. I didn’t intend to become a calf, and yet I have.’

My master asked me how I could tell they were about to turn into monkeys and I replied, ‘Our monkey has a bare backside, and these ladies bare their bosoms, which other maidens keep covered.’

‘You piece of mischief’, said my master, ‘you are a foolish calf and you speak as you are. These ladies quite rightly show what is worth seeing, but monkeys go naked because they have no clothes. You had better make up for your offence quickly or I’ll have you whipped and let the dogs chase you to the goose-coop, just as we do with recalcitrant calves. Come now, let us hear if you can praise a lady properly.’