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  A path carved into the side of the cliff led to the castle. An immense quantity of projectiles hurled from the mangonels on the towers hindered me from reaching it. Yet how strange! All of those enormous projectiles struck me without killing me—nonetheless, they stopped me. I saw the lady through the walls of the castle: she was alone, rushing through her rooms, her black hair unbound, her face and dress white as snow, stretching out her arms to me with an expression of desire and infinite pity. And I followed her with my eyes through all those rooms, which I recognized: I had once lived there with her. That sight encouraged me to run to her aid, but I could not; the projectiles hurled from the towers hindered me. At every turn in the path, the shower grew denser and more ferocious, and there were many turns—after this one, another, after that one, still another…I rose and rose…The lady called me from the castle, looked out of the broad windows, her hair raining down on her breast, beckoned me with her hand to hurry, spoke words full of sweetness and love, but I could not reach her—my impotence was agonizing. How long that terrible struggle lasted I cannot say—for the entire duration of the dream, all through the night…

  Finally, I arrived at the doors of the castle, although I did not know by what means. They stood undefended; the soldiers had vanished. The closed doors swung open wide by themselves, creaking on their rusty hinges, and in the black recesses of the entry hall I saw the lady with her long white train, running toward me with open arms, traveling the distance that separated us with astonishing rapidity, scarcely grazing the floor. She hurled herself into my arms with the abandon of a corpse, with the lightness, the assent of an object that was hollow, flexible, supernatural. Her beauty was unearthly; her voice was pleasant, but faint as the echo of a note; her eyes, dark and veiled as if she had just been weeping, pierced the most hidden depths of my soul, although without wounding it, in fact investing it with her light as by the effect of some radiance. We spent several minutes locked in this embrace; a delight I have never felt before or after that moment coursed through all my nerves. For an instant I experienced the full intoxication of the embrace without realizing it. Yet no sooner did I pause over this thought, no sooner did the consciousness of the delight descend upon me than I witnessed a terrible transformation in her. The delicately rounded figure I felt trembling in my hands flattened out, contracted, disappeared, and in my fingers, caught in the folds that suddenly formed in her dress, grasped the bones of a skeleton protruding here and there…Quaking I lifted my eyes and saw her face turn pale, thin, lose its flesh, bend beneath my mouth, and a lipless grin gave me a desperate kiss, long, parched, terrible…Then a quiver, a deathly shudder ran down my spine. I attempted to disengage myself from her arms, to push her away…and in the violence of the act my sleep was broken—I woke in tears, screaming.

  * * *

  —

  I returned to my fifteen years, to my adolescent ideas and opinions, my puerilities. The entire dream seemed to me much more strange, much more incomprehensible, than frightening. What were the sentiments that seized me in that state? I had yet to experience the pleasure of a kiss, had not even thought about love, and could not account for the sensations I felt that night. Nevertheless, I was sad, possessed by an unyielding thought; it seemed to me that the dream was not in fact a dream, but a memory, a confused idea about things, the recollection of an incident very remote from my present life.

  * * *

  —

  On the following night I had another dream.

  Once again I found myself in that place, but everything was changed. The sky, trees, roads were no longer the same; the flanks of the cliffs were crossed by paths covered with honeysuckle; of the castle there remained only some ruins, and hemlock and nettles grew in the deserted courtyards and the crevices of the ground-floor rooms. When I passed near the tomb that had previously stood in the valley and was now no more than a few stones, the blind man was again sitting there, on a step that was still intact. He offered me a bloodstained handkerchief and said, “Bring it to the lady of the castle.” I found myself seated in the ruins; the lady of the castle was at my side. We were alone. There was no sound of a voice, an echo, a rustle of branches in the field. Grasping my hands, she told me, “I have come from so far away to see you again. Listen to how my heart is beating…Listen to how loudly my heart is beating!…Feel my forehead and my breast. Oh, I am so weary, I ran so fast! I am exhausted from the long wait…It has been almost three hundred years since I last saw you.”

  “Three hundred years!”

  “Do you not remember? We were together in this castle. But they are terrible memories! Let us not recall them.”

  “That would be impossible; I have forgotten them.”

  “You shall remember them after your death.”

  “When?”

  “Very soon.”

  “When?”

  “In twenty years, on the twentieth of January: our destinies, like our lives, cannot be reunited before that day.”

  “And what then?”

  “Then we shall be happy; we shall realize our vows.”

  “Which?”

  “You shall remember them in due course…you shall remember everything. Your expiation is about to end: you have passed through eleven lives before arriving at this one, which is your last. I passed through only seven; forty years have already elapsed since I completed my pilgrimage in the world. You shall complete yours after the twenty years remaining in this last life. But I cannot linger with you any longer; it is necessary for us to separate.”

  “First explain this enigma to me.”

  “That is impossible…Yet perhaps you need to understand it. Yesterday I threw his promise in his face; I restored half of it to you, those two volumes, those memoirs you wrote, those pages so full of affection…you shall have them, if that man who was then so fatal to us does not stop you from having them.

  “Who?”

  “Your uncle…he…the man of the valley.”

  “He? My uncle!”

  “Yes, did you see him?”

  “I saw him, and he sends you this bloodied handkerchief by me.”

  “It is your blood, Arturo,” she said, transported. “Heaven be praised! He has kept his promise.”

  As the lady of the castle said these words, she disappeared, and I awoke terrified.

  My uncle was still shut up in his apartment. As soon as he reappeared, I rushed into his rooms to get hold of those volumes, but I found only a heap of ashes: he had fed them to the flames. Yet my terror rose when I stirred the ashes and discovered several fragments that seemed written in my own hand! From the few disconnected words that remained intelligible and with a powerful exertion of my memory, I could reconstruct entire sentences that referred to the events obscurely hinted in my dreams. I could no longer doubt the truth of the revelations; and although I never succeeded in recalling all my memories to disperse the shadows that spread over those facts, it was no longer possible for me to gainsay their existence. The black castle was often mentioned in the fragments, which also touched briefly on the passionate love that seemed to bind me to the lady and the criminal suspicion that hung over the man of the valley. Furthermore, by a coincidence that was as singular as it was frightening, the night on which I had the dream was precisely the night of the twentieth of January: exactly twenty years, then, remained until my death.

  * * *

  —

  Since that day I have never forgotten the prediction; yet although I did not doubt that there was a foundation of truth in the entire collection of facts, I succeeded in persuading myself that my youth, my sensitivity, my imagination had done a great deal to cloak them with authority. My uncle, who died six years later while I was away from the family, never made the smallest revelation concerning those events. I did not have any more dreams that could be considered an explanation or continuation of them; and new feelings, new concerns, new passions came
to distract me from that thought, establishing a new state of affairs and a new order of ideas to banish my sad, painful worry.

  It was only nineteen years later that I persuaded myself, by incontrovertible evidence, that everything I had dreamt and witnessed was real, and that consequently the prediction of my death must come true.

  In the year 1849, while traveling in the north of France, I made my way down the Rhine very close to its confluence with the little River Meuse and stopped to hunt in the countryside. Wandering alone one day along the lower slopes of a small chain of hills, I suddenly found myself in a valley where I seemed to have been on other occasions. No sooner did I have this thought than a terrible memory case a dull, frightening light in my mind, and I knew that this was the valley of the castle, the theater of my dreams and my past existence. Although everything had changed, although the fields, deserted before, were now golden with grain, and what remained of the castle were only some ruins half-buried in ivy, I immediately recognized the place, and thousands of memories, never before evoked, crowded into my troubled soul at that instant.

  I asked a shepherd what the ruins might be, and he replied, “They are the ruins of the black castle. Are you familiar with the legend of the black castle? Truly, there are many legends about it, and they are not told by everyone in the same way; but if you wish to know the legend as I know it, if—”

  “Tell it, tell it,” I interrupted him, as I sat down on the grass at his side. And from him I learned a terrible story, a story that I shall never reveal (even though others may learn it in the same way) and on the basis of which I have reconstructed the entire edifice of my previous existence.

  When he finished, I was barely able to drag myself to a small nearby village, whence I was conveyed, already ill, to Wiesbaden, and here I have been laid up in bed for three months.

  Today, before departing, I induced myself to revisit the ruins of the castle. It is the first day of September; six months are left until the time of my death—six months, less ten days—since I do not doubt that I shall die on the appointed date. I have conceived the strange desire that some memory of me should remain. Seated on one of the castle stones, I endeavored to summon up all the distant circumstances of this event, and it was there that I wrote these pages in a fit of tremendous terror.

  * * *

  —

  The author of these memoirs, who was my friend and a literary man of some note, continued on his journey to the interior of Germany and died on the twentieth of January in 1850, according to the prediction he received, murdered by a band of gypsies in the so-called gorges of Giessen near Freiburg.

  I found these pages among his many manuscripts and published them.

  [1867]

  Captain Gubart’s Fortune

  NOTHING IN THIS world is more fickle, irrational, or singular than fortune. Every man has made it the subject of extravagant speculations and grand dreams, pursuing it indefatigably in casinos or in that noble institution known as the lottery. But fortune is generally found only where it is not sought. It loves unspirited lovers, the simpleminded, and the inconstant. The following incident is designed in part to demonstrate this truth.

  In 1802, Gubart was a violinist, but a very bad one. Nature had not made him for the arts. Even though he was a fine young man and had learned to write and count, his suit of ticking, patched at the elbows and knees, betrayed his condition. Poor Gubart! He was born a lazy beggar, took a wife when he reached sixteen, and had three sons. One night, there was nothing for supper in Gubart’s house, and these fasts were not growing any less frequent. His wife thrust his violin into his hands and said to him, “Gubart, go and play, please, try to scrape together some change for these children. And may God give you good fortune.”

  Gubart reluctantly took his violin and looked at it rudely. Between player and instrument there existed a kind of coldness, a long-standing grudge. Gubart considered the violin an enemy: no matter how many times he ventured out with it, everyone avoided him, and that never happened to him when he was alone. His resentment, therefore, was not entirely unfounded. His wife’s usual remedy for beguiling the children’s impatient hunger during his absence was to tell them some frightening tales about fairies, sorcerers, metamorphoses. In this way, spirit sometimes won a complete victory over matter, and since on that evening Gubart’s three fortunate heirs were making rather nasty sneers and contortions, suggesting that they were not very far from the limit of their impatience, their good mother told them a most beautiful and curious little story, which, we regret to say, has not been faithfully preserved in the chronicle. At the most beautiful moment in the story, Gubart’s wife was interrupted by two knocks on the door. “My God,” she said, “this can’t be my husband back already; he is so fast tonight,” and she ran to open it, interpreting his speed in an extremely unfavorable way. But what a surprise! It was not Gubart at all, but an elegant usher from the palace wearing a uniform with gold-braided epaulettes and a hat with royal insignia. He was holding a large letter in both hands, and, what seemed even more strange, he looked drunk and was finding it difficult to maintain the customarily serious attitude of an usher.

  “Does Gaetano Gubart live here?”

  “He is my husband, but he is not at home.”

  “OK,” continued the usher, “you will deliver this envelope to him as soon as he returns.”

  Gubart’s wife took it with trembling hand; she usually worried about her husband. What could he have done this time? Who wrote this letter? What consequences would it bring? She asked herself these and other similar questions and joined them with the most bizarre conjectures. The little family’s peace had been decidedly disturbed. The children, having broken off their neutrality, were energetically calling for their supper when another knock was heard at the door, and this time it was precisely Gubart returning. He was carrying two large loaves of bread. He had turned in a good performance and was somewhat reconciled with his violin. The screams and tears, the species of civil war in the family, were things that happened every evening, so he was not in the least surprised by them. Yet he was definitely amazed when his wife took him by the hand with an unusual air and asked him, almost tenderly, “Dear Gubart, my husband, what have you done? Confess everything, tell your wife at least. Here is a huge letter that was brought by an usher from the royal palace; read it at once, please.”

  This time Gubart was truly astonished. He broke the seal with veneration, removed from the envelope a sheet of paper folded four times, opened it, brought over a large candle, and read it aloud, although not without several interruptions.

  “His Majesty Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies, etc., etc., having taken into consideration the important services rendered by Signor Gaetano Gubart during the recent disturbances in the kingdom, has seen fit to appoint him to the rank of captain in the infantry, assigning him at the same time to the 4th regiment of the army. Naples, 14 March 1802.”

  The wife and three sons were stupefied and remained speechless for some time.

  Finally, the violinist, like the profound thinker he was, broke the silence and said, “It is obvious that the usher must have made a mistake. Another Gaetano Gubart must exist in this city; and this fact is so clear that it is pointless to abandon ourselves to vain hopes. Yet not for nothing did fortune bring about this error and this coincidence in names. I possess a very important letter, after all, and I can take advantage of it. My wife, take that old suit of clothes down from the cupboard, the one I bought around the time of our wedding: it must need some mending…Yes, of course, I myself will go see the king, and I hope my decision will not prove fruitless.”

  Gubart’s house was humble; it consisted of one room, and on that evening a profound silence reigned there. His wife stayed awake deep into the night mending the wedding suit, and Gubart slept. Who can imagine what dreams were passing through his mind?…

  The king had spent a miserable night, he was
in his worst humor, and if a large hunting party had not been arranged for that day, it would have been impossible to see him.

  But he was coming down the stairs when he heard the loud conversation Gubart was having with the palace guards. “By God,” Gubart was saying, “let me pass, I want to talk with the king, he has appointed me captain.” At that moment, the king reached the last step and, turning to the ushers, made a certain face that signified, Who is this person? What is the meaning of this uproar? “Your Majesty,” said the head porter, “we are not to blame. This man was once a terrible violinist; now he has gone insane as well and says that he has been made a captain.”

  “Of course,” interrupted Gubart, “but I suspect that the king has made an error. Here is the letter I received last night.” King Ferdinand took the letter, read it, and understood everything. Yet since as a rule he wanted to maintain the belief that the supposed royal infallibility was intact, he mitigated the whiplash about to fall on poor Gubart’s shoulders and, barely controlling his contempt, said, “Knave, who taught you to suspect that kings make mistakes? You have twelve hours left to reach your regiment.”

  This was Gubart’s great fortune. But it is rare that a change in the status of one individual does not also produce a contrary change in another. The unfortunate usher who had carried the order that night—and who a few hours earlier had drunk several glasses of Salerno in the old Rosa wineshop—spent ten years in the dungeons of the Ovo prison: four for his conviction and six for attempted escape. He was released poor and sickly and died a beggar.