Fantastic Tales Read online

  English translation copyright © Lawrence Venuti, 2020

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2020

  Racconti fantastici first published by Treves in 1869

  This translation first published by Mercury House in 1992

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Cover art: Becoming by Mary Frank, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery.

  Text design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Funding for this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation. Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810632

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  Contents

  The Legends of the Black Castle

  Captain Gubart’s Fortune

  A Spirit in a Raspberry

  Bouvard

  A Dead Man’s Bone

  The Lake of the Three Lampreys (A Popular Tradition)

  The Elixir of Immortality (In Imitation of the English)

  The Letter U (A Madman’s Manuscript)

  The Fated

  The Legends of the Black Castle

  I DO NOT KNOW whether the memoirs I am about to write can hold the interest of anyone but me—I write, at any rate, for myself. Nearly all of them refer to an event pervaded with mystery and terror, in which very often it will be impossible to trace the thread of a narrative, or infer a conclusion, or find any reason whatsoever. I alone will be able to do these things, I who am actor and victim at once. Begun at that age when the mind is susceptible to the strangest and most frightening hallucinations; continued, interrupted, and resumed after an interval of almost twenty years; encompassed by all the apparitions of dreams; completed—if such can be said of something that had no obvious beginning—in a land that was not mine and to which I had been drawn by traditions filled with superstition and gloom, I can only consider this the most inscrutable event in my life, an insoluble enigma, the shadow of a fact, a revelation that remains incomplete yet eloquently expressive of a past existence. Were they facts, or visions? Both—or perhaps neither. In the abyss that swallows up the past, no facts or ideas endure; there is merely the past. The mighty characters of things are destroyed, like the things themselves, and with them ideas suffer transmutations—truth lies only in the instant—past and future are deep shadows enveloping us on all sides, amidst which, leaning on our escort, the present, as if detached from time, we make the painful journey of life.

  Yet did we have a previous life? Have we already lived out our current existence in another epoch, with a different heart and a different destiny? Was there a moment in time when we resided in places we now avoid, loved creatures whom death snatched away years ago, lived among people whose works we see today, or whose memory we pursue in chronicles or obscure traditions? I have no definitive answers to these questions. And yet for all that…yes, I have often heard something speak to me of a past life, something murky and confused, I admit, but distant, infinitely distant. I possess certain memories that cannot be contained within the narrow bounds of my life; to reach their origin, I must retrace the curve of years, journey back very far…two or three centuries…Before today, too, I frequently had occasion to linger in some countryside on my travels and exclaim, “I must have already seen this place. I was here, several times…These fields, this valley, this horizon—I recognize them!” And who has not declared now and then, thinking that he has recognized a familiar countenance in some person, “That man, I have seen him before. Where? When? Who is he? I cannot be definite, but surely we have seen one another before, we know one another!” In my childhood, I often saw an old man I certainly knew when he was a boy, and who certainly knew me when I was quite old; we did not converse but rather looked at one another like people who sense that they have met. Along a road to Poole, near the beach at Manica, I found a stone where I vividly recall sitting, about seventy years ago, and I remember that it was a dreary, rainy day and I was waiting for someone whose name and face I have forgotten, but who was dear to me. In an art gallery at Graz, I saw a portrait of a woman I loved, and I recognized her immediately, even though she was younger then, and the portrait was painted perhaps twenty years after our separation. The canvas bore the date 1647. Most of these memoirs go back roughly to that period.

  There was a time in my boyhood when I could not listen to the cadence of certain songs the country women sang to us on the farms without feeling suddenly transported to an epoch so remote from my life that I could not reach it if I multiplied my present age many, many times. I had only to hear that melody to lapse instantly into a condition like paralysis, a spiritual lethargy that made everything around me seem strange, whatever my state of mind when it overtook me. After twenty years, I have never again experienced that phenomenon. Did I never hear the melody again? Or has my spirit, already quite inseparable from my current existence, become deaf to the call?

  Either my nature is infirm, or my thinking differs from other men’s, or they undergo the same sensations, but without realizing it. I feel, yet am unable to express how, that my life—or what we properly use this term to designate—did not begin with the day of my birth and will not end at my death; I feel this with the same force, with the same fullness of sensation that I feel life at this instant, although in a way that is more obscure, stranger, more inexplicable. On the other hand, how do we feel that we are living at this instant? One says, I am alive. But this is not sufficient: when we sleep, we have no awareness of existing—and nonetheless we live. This awareness of existing cannot be fully circumscribed by the narrow boundaries of what we call life. We can contain two lives: this belief, in various forms, has been accepted by every people in every period. One life is essential, continuous, perhaps imperishable, whereas the other is changeable, progressing by fits and starts, more or less brief, more or less recurrent. One is essence; the other relevation, form. What dies in the world? Life dies, but the spirit, the secret, the force of life does not die: it lives forever in the world.

  I mentioned sleep. And what is sleep? Can we be so certain that sleep is not a separate life, an existence detached from waking? What happens to us in that state? Who can say? The events in dreams where we are witnesses or participants—could they be real? Could what we call by this term be no more than a confused memory of those events?…A frightening and terrible thought! Perhaps we, in a different order of things, participate in actions, feelings, ideas of which we cannot retain any awareness in our waking lives; we live in another world and among other beings whom we daily leave and meet again. Every evening one life dies; every night another is born. But what happens to these partial existences may also happen to that inner, more precisely defined existence that comprehends them. Men always turn their gaze to the future, never the past; the end, never the beginning; the effect, never the cause. All the same, the portion of life to which time can neither remove nor add anything, where our mind has a great right to settle, and from whose investigation it could derive the highest satisfactions and the most useful teachings the life spent in a more or le
ss remote past. We have lived, we live, we shall live. There are some lacunae among these existences, but they will be filled. An epoch will arrive when the entire mystery will be revealed to us; when the spectacle of life, whose threads originate and vanish in eternity, will unfold completely before our eyes; when we shall read, as in a divine book, the works, thoughts, ideas conceived or executed in a past existence or in a series of partial existences that we have forgotten. I do not know whether other men will keep this faith; that, in any case, can neither strengthen nor undermine my conviction.

  But here is my story.

  In 1830, I was fifteen years old and was living with my family in a large village in the Tyrol, whose name I am forced to withhold for several personal reasons. Not more than three generations had passed since my ancestors came to find work in that village. Although they certainly arrived from Switzerland, the direct line of the family was of German descent. The memories that remained of its beginnings were so inexact and obscure that I was never afforded the opportunity to draw very precise deductions. I am, in any case, concerned only to ascertain this fact, that my family was of German stock.

  There were five of us. My father and mother were born in that village and received there the limited, modest education appropriate to the petty bourgeoisie. My family possessed some aristocratic traditions, however, traditions whose origins go back to Old Saxon feudalism. Yet the fortune of our house was so paltry that it repressed all our impulses of ambition and pride. My family’s customs did not differ in any way from those of the humblest families among the common people: my parents had been born and raised among them; their life was a completely blank page. Neither from their society nor from their manner of education could I derive any of those ideas or childhood memories that predispose one to superstition and terror.

  The only personage whose life contained something mysterious and inscrutable and who came to join my family, in a sense, was an old uncle said to be bound to us by common interests. I have, however, been entirely unable to decipher the rational grounds of these interests since I came into possession of my family’s fortune at his and my father’s deaths.

  My uncle had reached ninety years of age then—I am speaking of that period from which these memoirs of mine date. He was a tall, imposing figure, although slightly stooped; his facial features were majestic, prominent, I would say almost chiseled; his gait was proud although unsteady from age, his eyes restless and searching, doubly alive in that face whose mobility and expression the years had paralyzed. When he was still young, he had embraced a career in the priesthood, driven by the insistent pressures of his family. Later, he laid aside the cassock and devoted himself to the military; the French Revolution found him in its regiments. He spent forty-two years away from his country, and when he returned—since he had not broken his vows in the Church—he again took up the cassock, which he wore without blemish or pious affectation until his death. He was known to be endowed with a quick yet habitually calm temperament, an indomitable will, and a vast, erudite mind, although he may have done his utmost not to show it. Capable of lofty passions and exceptional courage, he was esteemed as an extraordinary man, a noble, outstanding figure. What helped to invest him with this prestige, moreover, was the mystery that concealed his past: a few rumors referred to numerous strange events wherein he was said to have participated. He had certainly performed important services for the Revolution; what services and with what influence he performed them will never be known: he died when he was ninety-six, carrying the secret of his life to the grave.

  Everyone knows the customs of village life; I shall not restrain myself from discoursing upon those that were specific to my family. Every winter evening we used to gather in a vast room on the ground floor and sit in a circle around one of those large fireplaces, so ancient and so comfortable but now abolished by modern taste, which has substituted small coal stoves for them. My uncle, who lived in a separate apartment in the same house, sometimes came to join our gatherings, when he would recount adventures from his travels or scenes from the Revolution that filled us with terror and amazement. He was always silent about himself, however, and when asked of the role he played, he diverted the narrative from the subject.

  One evening—I remember it as if it were yesterday—we assembled in that room as usual. It was winter, but there was no snow; the frozen, frost-whitened ground reflected the rays of the moon, producing a vibrant white light like an aurora. Everything was silent, and you could hear only the irregular hammering of some drops that trickled down from the icicles on the drainpipes. All of a sudden, our conversation was interrupted by the unexpected dull thud of an object thrown into the courtyard from the low perimeter wall. My father rose, went out, and hastened to the gate, which opens onto the street. But he heard nothing more than the noise of some footsteps and saw, down the broad expanse of street stretching before him, only a few people walking away. Then he picked up a small box that had been thrown on the ground and returned to the room with it. We all gathered around him to examine it. Instead of a box, it turned out to be a huge square bundle, wrapped in old, grayish, rust-stained paper and stitched along the sides with white thread at exact and regular intervals—a feature that declared the office of a woman’s hand. The paper, cut here and there by the thread, reddened and worn at the edges, indicated that the bundle had been made some time ago.

  My uncle received it from my father’s hands, and I saw him tremble and blanch as he examined it. The paper was cut, and he drew out two dusty old volumes. No sooner had he glanced over them than a cadaverous pallor came over his face, and concealing a more profound feeling of grief and amazement, he said, “How strange!” After a brief moment during which none of us dared speak, he resumed, “It is a manuscript, two volumes of memoirs dating back to the very beginnings of our family. They contain several of our most glorious traditions. I gave these two volumes to a young man who, although he was not a member of our immediate family, was related to us by certain ties which I cannot now reveal. They were the pledge for a promise that time, not I, has prevented me from keeping: yes, time…,” he added to himself in a low voice. “I knew him at the University of ———, when he was studying theology there; he was guillotined on the Place de la Grève, and his family was destroyed by the Revolution, it must be forty years ago now…not one of them survived…How strange!”

  After a short interval, he noticed that a very fine reddish dust had accumulated in the pages, and as if recalling some danger, he told us, “Wash your hands.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing…”

  We obeyed. The rest of the evening was spent in silence. My uncle was given to sad thoughts, and one could see that he was trying hard to evoke or drive away some very painful memories. He retired quite early, shut himself in his apartment, and remained there for two days before he appeared again.

  * * *

  —

  That night I went to bed prey to strange, frightening thoughts without knowing quite why. I was more troubled by the idea of that incident than a boy of my age should have been. It would be pointless for me now to attempt to render in words the inexplicable, singular sentiments that stirred within me at that moment. I felt that those two volumes, my uncle, and myself were caught in a web of mysterious, distant relations I had never noticed till then, relations whose nature I could not decipher by any means, and whose end I could not understand. They were, or they seemed to me, memories. But whose? I did not know. From what period? They were remote. In my youthful intelligence everything was altered and confused.

  I slept under the impression of those ideas and had this dream.

  I was twenty-five. It was as if my mind were crowded with all the ideas, experiences, lessons that time would have made me endure over the years to mark the difference between the fantasy of adolescence and the waking reality of adulthood. Nonetheless, I remained alien to this process of maturation, even though I comprehended it. I fel
t in myself all the intellectual growth of that age, but I judged it with the discrimination and opinions proper to my fifteen years. There were two individuals within me, one belonging to action, the other to the consciousness and evaluation of action. It was a simultaneity of effect, one of those contradictions or oddities peculiar only to dreams.

  I found myself in a broad valley flanked by two tall mountains. The vegetation, the farming, the shape and arrangement of the cabins, and something inexplicably different, something ancient in the light, in the atmosphere, in everything that surrounded me said that I was in an epoch very remote from my actual existence—two or three centuries away, at least. But how did that happen? How did I come to be in these fields? I did not know. Yet it was natural in the dream: I knew that certain events had justified my stopping in that place, but I did not know what they were; I was not conscious of their value, their importance, only of their existence. I was alone and sad. I was walking for a definite reason, fixed beforehand, some purpose that drew me to that place, but of which I was ignorant. High over the far end of the valley rose a sheer cliff, perpendicular, massive, grooved with cracks from which not one liana sprouted. At its summit stood a castle that commanded the entire valley, and that castle was black. Its towers were protected by crossbows and filled with soldiers, the gates of its bridges were lowered, its turrets were packed with men and weapons of defense. Locked inside its inner rooms was a woman of prodigious beauty whom, in the consciousness of the dream, I knew as “the lady of the black castle.” That woman was bound to me by a long-standing affection, and I had to defend her, had to deliver her from the castle. But down in the valley, at the base of the rock where I had stopped, an object painfully caught my attention: on the steps of a tomb sat a man who had just then left the castle. He was dead but still living; he presented a totality of things impossible to describe, the coupling of death and life, the rigidity, the nothingness of the one tempered by the sensitivity, the essence of the other. His eyes, which I knew had been blinded by a red-hot nail, were pierced by two small square holes that made him appear simultaneously terrible and pitiful. Bloody memories were linked to that deed, memories of a crime in which I had taken part. Inexplicable relationships joined me, him, and the lady of the castle. He looked at me with his pierced eyes, and by means of a gesture and a kind of will that he did not manifest, but that I somehow read in him, he incited me to free the lady.