The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (2 page)

From the lodge the Princess ordered her coachman to drive on into the countryside, where, all morning, she went from
bereaved
cottage to bereaved cottage. From the countryside she drove on into the town. All afternoon she bore comfort from smart house to tenement to suburban villa.

In the days that followed the Princess observed a similar
programme
. Early summer grew into high summer. The Princess persisted. So did the plague.

The Princess seemed the single firm presence in the stricken land.

‘Only one benefit’, editorialised the papers, ‘has arisen from this unprecedented disaster, but that is a benefit of incalculable value. We refer to the bonds of deep, genuinely felt affection newly forged between Palace and People.’

The more, however, the people came to adore and count on their veiled Princess, the more her Ministers worried lest, in visiting plague-infected homes all day, she contract the illness herself.

But ‘We are not’, the Princess insisted, icy behind her black veiling, ‘afraid’; and she set out on a further round of
condolence
.

‘Selfless, selfless,’ murmured the First Minister.

‘Even if for some reason she
is
’, remarked the Second
Minister
, ‘immune to the disease, she may very well collapse of fatigue. And where shall we be then?’

He did not know – nobody knew – that the Princess did not rest even when she came back to the Palace in the evenings, worn out by the lurchings and bumps of the ceremonial
carriage
– which, however, she declined to exchange for a more modern vehicle, because its ritual quality brought genuine
comfort
to the homes outside which it halted. Night after summer night, the Princess, veiled a deeper black than the night itself, a gawky, fatigued, almost failing figure, walked secretly through the gardens while she called, sometimes bitterly, sometimes with an anger no one else had heard in her voice since the plague began: ‘Toad! Toad!’

*

The social life of the kingdom at first threatened to cease.

Presently, however, a tough gaiety, like that of a city under siege, was asserted. Of this, too, the Princess contrived to
become
the centre. Somehow, in the brief hours between her visits of compassion and her solitary wanderings at night, she
discovered
in herself the vitality to lead at least the upper-class stratum of her own generation into a sort of high, desperate fun.

Her social group consisted entirely, of course, of men. The
most noticeable, both on his own account and in his standing with the Princess, was the handsome Count Charming. His beautiful fiancée had been an early plague victim. The Count, seized by melancholy, threatened suicide. Again it was the
Princess
who played rescuer, dissuading him in the course of several tête-à-tête evening talks.

In the general scarcity of marriageable or indeed flirtable young women, moeurs and mores naturally changed. Male homosexuality, hitherto an offence under the laws of the
kingdom
, was legalised. Behaviour towards women reverted to an old-fashioned gallantry, simply because women were rare
objects
. Few young women now survived. Those who did went in fear – except, it seemed, the Princess, who continued to set her subjects an example of duty, high courage and even, in private circumstances where it was not inappropriate, cheerfulness.

Count Charming was so moved by her unselfishness and so fearful, in the dangers of contagion, lest each time he saw her be the last, that he begged leave to accompany her in the State Coach as she travelled among her people.

The Princess consented.

One afternoon, as the coach carried them away from a
cottage
where the Count had been touched almost to tears by the Princess’s simple, gracious bearing as she conversed with the bereaved, he fell on his knees on the lurching floor, gazed up at the Princess and told her there was a question which his whole heart yearned to put to her but protocol forbade.

‘Then shall I’, the Princess enquired from behind her veil, ‘ask you?’

‘Ask?’ cried the Count. ‘Nay, command.’

‘Very well,’ said the Princess, pulling him up from the
uncomfortable
floor, ‘but I do not think it will be seemly to announce our engagement until the epidemic is over.’

‘May that be soon,’ the Count fervently wished.

‘May it indeed,’ echoed the Princess, with a certain clenched grimness in her voice which denoted to the Count how deeply troubled she was by her people’s plight.

*

‘Toad! Toad!’ she called that night in the garden. 

It seemed to her that one short bout of raucous laughter replied.

She whirled towards the pond it had come from.

‘TOAD!’

She was answered by a loud, deliberate, derisory plop.

In sudden, jaw-clamped resolution, the Princess marched back to the Palace. She woke the indoor staff and had them
despatch
messengers to summon an immediate Council. She also had the Head Gardener woken and bidden to wait in an
ante-chamber
.

Pale-eyed at three in the morning, the Ministers convened.

‘Highness! You have not felt symptoms of the plague?’

‘No, no. We have determined on a course of action.’

‘Your Highness is going to accept our advice at last and leave the kingdom until the epidemic subsides?’

‘Do not be foolish. What we have thought of is the way to stop the epidemic.’

‘To stop it?’

‘We cannot imagine’, murmured the Princess, making her way to the dais, ‘why it did not occur to us before.’

To the assembled Ministers she announced: ‘In keeping with the trend of modern royalty, we are of a scientific bent. We have succeeded in tracing the source of the epidemic. The virus is incubated in ponds. Tomorrow every lake, village duckpond, ornamental pond and swimming pool in the kingdom is to be drained. We shall set an example by having the royal water garden drained. The Council is now dismissed. Send in the Head Gardener, Antonio, from the ante-chamber.’

In privacy she gave Antonio directions to drain the
ornamental
ponds to the last drop. ‘And, Antonio,’ she added, as he backed out of the room, ‘all vermin, especially amphibious
vermin
, is to be destroyed. We want – for scientific purposes – to see the corpses.’

The work was carried out next day. The epidemic stopped at once.

The Princess was acclaimed not only the saviour but the belle of her kingdom.

The announcement of her engagement to the handsome Count brought tears of joy to the eyes of the entire population.

Alone in a shed which a working-party had hastily run up on the Palace lawn the Princess picked patiently through the pile the workmen had assembled of small green and brown corpses.
She felt no disgust, some small scientific curiosity and a certain pity. So many of the small green hands seemed to be stretched out, in the rigor of death, imploringly. Only at the very bottom of the already slightly smelly pile did she, with loathing and satisfaction, come upon the vast brown warty corpse of the magic toad.

On her wedding day the Princess comported herself with the utmost grace, feeling safe from scrutiny behind a – this time, white – veil. But scrutiny had in any case been disarmed of any standard of comparison. And besides, the population at large, scarcely less than the bridegroom himself, was infatuated with admiration and gratitude.

The Princess’s wedding present to her husband was a ring in which she had had mounted the most enormous ruby anyone in the kingdom had ever seen.

In keeping with his contemptuous definition of a novel as ‘a short story padded’, Ambrose Bierce’s most characteristic
writings
are fables of extreme brevity, seldom stretching to the length even of this one and sometimes a mere line long.

His own life can be read as a fable: propounding the
problem
of a man born into the wrong time and place.

Bierce was born in 1842 at Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. The anomaly of that circumstance he was already demonstrating at the age of ten, when his favourite reading was Pope’s version of Homer. He was thoroughly and passionately
literary
; and chance had set him down in a milieu as philistine as a spittoon.

By the Nineties, Bierce’s tales and journalism had made him a moderate reputation, hardly any money and several enemies. He scathed religion and dealt Swift blows against corrupt
politicians
. In the United States of that period, Bierce’s sardonic manner seemed shockingly harsh, the values he so fiercely
promoted
shockingly civilised. No doubt he gave double offence by promoting civilisation in concert with a blatant anglophilia: ‘In learning and letters, in art and the science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of England.’

Bierce’s imagination was violent and macabre. He was an Edgar Allan Poe without the horsehair-sofa diction and with a sense of comedy. He may have been the originator of black humour.

Toughly republican in principle, laconically aristocratic in expression, he was a sincere cynic. ‘Do not trust humanity
without
collateral security.’

In 1913 Bierce, by his own account, had ‘retired from
writing
’ and was ‘going to take a rest’. He sought rest by the
paradoxical
method of crossing the border into Mexico, which was then in revolution. His declared intention was to observe the fighting in Mexico ‘and then take shape for South America, go over the Andes and across that continent’.

Carrying as large a sum as he could assemble in United States currency, together with credentials as an observer with one of the rebel armies, Bierce arrived on horseback at Chihuahua City. Thence he sent two letters to acquaintances in the United States, one dated on Christmas Eve and the other on Boxing Day of 1913. He was never heard from or of again.

Everything I have reported so far is checkable fact.
1
Since Bierce vanished there has been, of course, much speculation about what became of him. Indeed, he had become literature’s own equivalent of the
Mary
Celeste
case. The usual and soberest assumption is that Bierce was killed, by accident and
unremarked
, in the revolutionary confusion. But even the sober biographer whom I have relied on for my facts finally
speculates
that Bierce passed through the revolution unharmed and made his way, as he had intended, to the Andes, where in some obscure village he lived out his natural life in sardonic and very Biercean contemplation of how much more famous he had
become
by disappearing than he ever did by the practice of literature.

A recent occurrence has made it possible to confirm and elaborate that speculation.

If Bierce’s life is a fable that poses a problem, his
disappearance
supplies the obvious answer. A man born at the wrong place and time will naturally seek to shift his life to a more propitious place and prolong it into a more propitious time.

For Bierce the more propitious place was indeed, as he openly implied, South America – by way, most likely, of the obscure village in the Andes postulated by his biographer.

Bierce planned the removal long before he had the chance to make it. Six years or so before he vanished, he wrote in a letter
2
: ‘Today is my birthday. I am 366 years old.’

The statement was not, when Bierce wrote it, literally true. He was anticipating a fact which he planned to
make
true. He had already heard that the natives of a certain village in the
Andes possessed the secret of a plant whose leaves, when chewed or, perhaps, smoked, had the property of allowing the chewer or smoker to live 366 years.

However, as Bernard Shaw illustrated in
Back
To
Methuse
lah
, it is not a socially possible act simply to live beyond what is considered the natural span. It is too liable to upset the
neighbours
. A person who undertakes such an enterprise has to arrange to go missing in circumstances where he will credibly be presumed dead despite the lack of a corpse to prove the point, and then he has to reappear in a new identity in
circumstances
where no one will query his lack of a documented
boyhood
and childhood to go plausibly with the age he is claiming to be.

Ambrose Bierce, who had extreme experience of upsetting the neighbours, was certainly alert to that requirement. He had to wait many years (perhaps as many as 14, as I shall presently shew) before precisely the opportunity he needed was supplied by the revolution in Mexico, a country conveniently on his route to South America.

The event that makes it possible to reconstruct Bierce’s actions is the emergence, during the last decade, into fame in French, British and United-States literary circles of a writer living in South America (in Argentina, to be exact), Jorge Luis Borges.

The reputation of Borges rests entirely on a series of extremely brief fables.

In the words of André Maurois,
3
‘Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives.’

Borges’s short narratives are thoroughly and passionately
literary
. Not only are they full of quotation and allusion. They are often
about
authors and books. More than one dissects the
fictitious
oeuvre of a fictitious author: a positively flirtatious hint that Borges himself is in a sense a fictitious author.

Speaking (on British radio)
4
of his invention of fictitious authors, Borges has declared: ‘I was shy – and then there was also the pleasure of the hoax.’

Perhaps he was shyly edging nearer the heart of the ‘hoax’ when he gave one of his pieces (tellingly labelled a ‘parable’) the title
Borges
and
I
.
5

It may be significant that critics
6
admit Borges to be much less famous in his (supposedly) native Argentina than in the
outside
world.

(André Maurois distinguishes that although ‘Argentine by birth and temperament’ – so far, that is, as Maurois knows – Borges ‘has no spiritual homeland’.)

It is certainly significant that the outside world had no
knowledge
of Borges at the time when he was (supposedly) a young writer. He appeared in literary ken already mature and already, according to the sparse biographical accounts which
accompanied
the publication of his works in the outside world,
middle-aged
.

The biographical ‘facts’ advanced about him include the claim that he was born on 24 August 1899 in Buenos Aires.

1899 I take to be the year in which Ambrose Bierce learned of the existence of a longevity-plant in the Andes. (Hence my surmise that he had to wait 14 years for the opportunity to use it.) Buenos Aires = B.A., which = the initials of Ambrose Bierce in reverse. (Bierce was necessarily highly conscious of initials, since his parents arranged
7
for all 13 of their children to bear the initials A.B.) The 24 August I surmise to be a simple slip by a now over-stretched memory. The date is right but it is ascribed to the wrong month. Ambrose Bierce’s birthday is 24 June.

The name Borges, etymologically cognate with the Italian
borgo
and the English
burgh
, is of course a reference to the village where Bierce renewed himself.

The fables
8
published as by Borges are on average both slightly longer and slightly milder than the condensed and
ferocious
tales of Ambrose Bierce – which were, of course,
comparatively
youthful work. Yet even in the mellowed manner of Borges André Maurois discerns a resemblance to Swift. And
Borges’s fable
The
Sect
of
the
Phoenix
,
9
which reads superficially like a gentle satire on humans’ tendency to conceal how babies come into being and to behave as though they were secretly self-generated in the manner of the phoenix, takes on a sharper satirical edge if it is read as the work of an Ambrose Bierce who has secretly regenerated himself.

Other Biercean characteristics, in addition to the intensely literary tone, have survived the Bierce-Borges transposition. Bierce’s attitude to corrupt politicians survived in Borges’s to a corrupt régime. (It is recorded
10
of Borges that ‘his non-
political
opposition to Perón earned him persecutions during the years of the dictatorship’.) Likewise with Bierce’s attitude to religion, though it is nowadays less ferociously expressed. ‘Borges as a theologian is’, one critic politely
11
puts it, ‘a
complete
heretic’ To his interviewer’s question ‘Do you yourself believe in any kind of God?’, Borges in person (or ‘in person’) has replied
12
: ‘As a matter of fact I don’t.’

Conspicuously, Borges keeps up Bierce’s anglophilia (of which the choice of the first name Jorge is a symptom). ‘I have always gone in for English reading’, Borges has remarked. His literary heroes are Conrad, Kipling, Wells, Stevenson, Shaw and
Chesterton
: just those writers who must have impressed themselves, as the most recent practitioners of English literature, on the anglophile mind of Ambrose Bierce immediately before he undertook his transformation.

To Shaw Borges owes a devotion
13
which probably
acknowledges
how sympathetically, in
Back
To
Methuselah,
Shaw
explored
the practical problems which Bierce had to circumvent before he could ‘disappear’.

(In fact,
Back
To
Methuselah,
which was written after Bierce’s disappearance, may well be the response of Shaw’s imagination to the puzzle of the Bierce case – a response in which
imagination
has correctly solved the puzzle.)

No doubt it is from Conrad that Bierce borrowed, for his
second literary life, the notion of writing in a language not native to him. For the writings of Borges appear, of course, in the outside world purportedly in translation from Spanish.

I say ‘purportedly’ because I suspect that the example of Conrad inspired Bierce-Borges to fiction (or ‘hoax’) rather than to imitating it in fact. Borges, whose English (to judge from the interview I have already quoted which he gave on British radio) is unsurprisingly excellent (if a touch, equally
unsurprisingly
, old-fashioned), admits that the English translation of his writings is at least partly his own work and at least partly spontaneous in the sense of being
thought
in English: ‘in the afternoon I work with Di Giovanni on the translations of all my works into English. We work in collaboration and we try to avoid the dictionary. We both try after reading a sentence to rethink it in English, so we don’t have to stick too pedantically to a text.’ Perhaps the latter part of this statement is a disguised confession that there is no Spanish text to stick to. Few if any of Borges’s admirers in the outside world shew signs of having seen a Spanish edition of his works. Perhaps it is in order to rationalise the evident difficulty of getting hold of such editions that word has been put about that Borges is less well-known in than outside Argentina.

It is the sardonicness of Bierce’s mind which is most
recognisably
prolonged in Borges. True, the writings themselves have become less astringent, but that is because the satirical point has been transferred to the situation. Excoriator of the literary
establishment
during his first ‘lifetime’, Ambrose Bierce must be deriving a sharply painful pleasure from contemplating the sheer ignorance of literature and its history which is now being demonstrated in two continents by critics, academics and Academicians who, never having read Bierce, see great, original and pioneering works of 20th-century literature in slightly diluted examples of the literary form which Bierce invented and perfected (and could scarcely make a living by) a century ago.