Homunculus, page 8
I took care of that too – I found Snow White a boyfriend. Perhaps ‘boyfriend’ isn’t quite the right word for that young man, but apart from his slightly unusual appearance he was a good match: he was very well situated, being a prince of the Kingdom of Drakula, and, best of all, he had an obvious passion I know so well from my own experience – the passion of love! Young women actually like a certain starkness in a male’s appearance, like he had, and the nonchalance in the prince’s intense, dark gaze was uncannily combined with a strangely mocking air (perhaps owing to his dark family history), so that when he smiled in his sarcastic way with just the ends of his lips, his eye teeth, which are slightly longer than ordinary, would stand out. I knew the story of the sleeping princess in a glass coffin would excite him.
The antidote worked just as I expected: Snow White fell into a deep, deep sleep, with imperceptible, almost yoga-like breathing (like the queen used to practice so as to slow down the aging of the body’s cells). She glowed with the vibrancy of a beautiful plant, alive but motionless, her eyes closed, whether it was light or dark outside. “The Seven” acted the bereaved family very convincingly (the shorter the man, the better the actor!), for which I paid them the last penny of my savings. Kneeling around the coffin with caps in hand, which showed up their baldness and gave the scene a more poignant air, they turned on the waterworks and wailed. ‘The Grave of Snow White the Fair’ almost became a cult location, and busybodies came in droves from the most distant lands: pilgrims, adventurers and sentimentalists. One morning, among that whole mob of gapers, he came riding up on a white stallion with a black star on its forehead, and with an inappropriately long cloak waving behind him, which nevertheless suited him in a way. He towered over her, and everything all around seemed just right – the full white blossoms of the plum trees, the gaudy butterflies chasing each other, and a spider strolling along its thread between the lilies – and he kissed her. I was not in the first rows of the audience, and the bobbing of the heads in front of me prevented me from seeing the kiss scene in detail. In any case, Snow White, who at first was surprised, soon found her bearings in the new situation, and the kissing continued.
Since then I haven’t seen Snow White very often, only once or twice a year. She looks rather pale (but I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that she always was a bit anaemic, so her name suited her very well). I asked if she was happy and she answered ‘almost’, and I’m not certain, but I felt her lips gave a twitch. Oh well, there’s a worm in every apple, as the old folk say.
I survived the worst of ordeals with the queen. ‘There is no beauty in force,’ she told me and cold-heartedly kicked me out. And just let anyone say I didn’t do everything for her! I devoted my life to her and her satisfaction, with a love unbearable for the body and agonizing for the soul. And what did she do in return? She laughed at me behind my back to her so-called ladies-in-waiting, those slimy sycophants. I heard that she compared me with a hobbit, a hillbilly with dirt under his fingernails. The ladies of the court giggled loudly and hypocritically. But they’re women, and in front of her they pretended to be genteel: ‘How are you, Mr Hunter? It’s sure been a while since you’ve come to see Her Majesty, etc., etc.’ But in the halls they stuck out their bottoms and waggled their breasts at me. I know that Saint-Crookstile too gossiped in the corridors, calling me a savage from the backwoods, and after the queen chased me away he boasted to anyone who would listen that he – ha, ha – had been the key to them ‘getting rid of that Neanderthal’. But his pride was short-lived. His laughter died in his throat when she, in that same cold, resolute voice, relieved him of his position with immediate effect due to his ‘constant intrigues at court’ and had him deported to the most distant mountain monastery (I can just imagine him in an austere cell, bathed in sweat from the constant howling of a pack of mountain wolves).
But she’s not going to get away with it quite so easily after all she did to me. No chance! My few companions, a handful of hunters, always praised me that my fireside stories in the forest were the best they’d heard in all their life. Hunters’ tall tales are one thing; I’m sure you’ve heard people mock us for our share of exaggerations and lies. But everyone pricks up their ears when I tell my tale.
Now I’ve made up my mind: I’m going to tell the truth about her, with all the frightful and delicate details. The master of patience bags the best catch, as we huntsmen say. I’ll make this a story about her – not about the feminine, well-built and haughty queen who wraps hare-brained hunters around her little finger, but about the stepmother terrified about aging, while lovely Snow White grows up in front of her, as white as snow, as red as blood, and with glossy hair like ebony, and who becomes more and more beautiful with every passing night. I’ll write about the jealous, spiteful queen, who cannot accept the smallest wrinkle on her face when she sees it in the mirror and bathes in fresh mare’s milk three times a day and rubs her body with rare herbal elixirs imported from the Far East, while unemployment and penury ravage the kingdom. And talk about spite: she even paid the highest price a woman can pay by turning herself into an old woman, just so as to trick Snow White into taking a bite of the poisoned apple. Knowing the extent of my obsession with her, she had wanted to use me to kill her under-age stepdaughter. In the depths of my self-deception, I thought I had met a woman whom, for the first time in my life, I could tell my dreams to, and who would listen and understand. But she, my chosen and worshipped one, was my cold-blooded tormenter!
I’ve learnt one lesson: that even the most self-assured of us can become weak and helpless and can go from hunter to hunted. He, who was once master of the situation, begins to feel the horrible fear of a hunted animal; it’s a feeling he used to consider just part of the game, but now his heart beats like a big, crazy ball that fear kicks through a narrow space without an exit, even without windows, and there’s nothing else but the mad beating of the ball – that clod trapped between the walls of his chest. There’s a saying among us hunters, ‘be healthy as long as you live’, which means: be tough, be resistant to minor human illnesses and weaknesses of body and mind because you’re a hunter! That’s what I was, a hunter and a roamer, made for the forests and nights under the open sky, not for palaces and royal finery. Why did I change so much? I used to wear my heart on my sleeve. You just needed to look me in the face, and it said everything. Now, thanks to her, I’d learnt to act, to disguise the most improper intentions with a smile. I was trapped in myself, a victim of my own powerlessness. I felt I was dying because nothing mattered to me any more, but despair made me more resilient and hard-boiled. Saving Snow White was as much the result of my will as it was of my prudence. I have to continue on my path through the night alone, without losing my way.
So I’m going to tell this tale out of spite, and to fulfil my desire for revenge. At least I derived some benefit from her constant disparagements – I learnt to write! She insulted me by calling me a bumpkin, a hard-bodied animal good for just one thing: for giving her satisfaction in bed. But I, from the naïve desire to please her and make her happy, secretly learnt to write: Painstakingly, but patiently. Proud of my progress, I wrote her a letter, which I think went something like this: ‘My one and only love, I swear to you that I will love you for as long as I live – more than the hunt, more than the forest. I need nothing other than you to hold me to your heart. For me, that is the greatest freedom,’ and so on, in that vein.
‘Great snakes!’ she scoffed with her usual sarcasm, blatently showing that she didn’t appreciate my efforts in the slightest. ‘If you think basic literacy makes you a clever-dick, then go ahead with your little ego-trip. But we both know that’s nothing. And if you’ve got it into your head to compare me with your festering forest, why don’t you talk about yourself – once a stump, always a stump!’
That was one of her typical insults, which I felt I was forgetting, however hurtful they were, because my love was stronger than my memory. But now, when they come back to me as fresh as a buffalo’s morning dollops, I’m simply disgusted at everything that woman did to me. She, the outwardly decent and sober queen, who used to thrash about in bed like a bitch on heat, was despotic by nature and could not resist thinking up ever-newer demands for her slave.
Wolves die when they come down with rabies, but foxes pull through without any great detriment. I gazed at her like an infected wolf, stricken with the frenzy of love: she, the foxy one, just had to waggle her tail for me to lose my head and rush off after her without thinking. I was infected with the forlornness and frenzy of love, like rabies, and she would have left me to die in a ditch without the slightest guilty conscience. But I pulled through. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Some time later, maybe it was several months, my desire to hunt again returned. One morning – it’s no surprise that all new things begin in the morning – I set off into the forest with my rifle over my shoulder. Not as the royal huntsman now, but as a poacher. Yet the satisfaction was the same, or even greater, because I was doing something I like the most, even if it was forbidden. Although at the beginning I feIt I had become a little rusty (I was slow and ham-fisted and kept missing my target) I gradually regained my form. By evening I had bagged two hares and four partridges and killed a fat wild boar. I hit it right between the eyes and it fell like a stone.
The smell of the forest – the smell of gunpowder – and the calm certainty of death. How exciting it is!
This fairy tale should not be told to democrats
The Story of the Letter Q
There once was a king who was unhappy in his marriage and disillusioned with love in general. Such was his exasperation at all the quibbles of his queen, whose name was Quince, that one day he blew a fuse and decreed that the letter Q be abolished – even the ‘kw’ sound itself – and that it be replaced with ‘tw’. Throughout the kingdom, it was now forbidden to say or write ‘question’: it had to be ‘twestion’. ‘Query’ was to become ‘twery’. Instead of ‘quintessence’ people could only say and write ‘twintessence’, and ‘quail’ was to be ‘twail’. Such was the depth of the king’s disillusionment that the decree even ordered that names containing the letter Q be changed forthwith: ‘Quentin’ was to be ‘Twentin’, and ‘Quinta’ – ‘Twinta’. Breaches of the new rules were reported without qualms (sorry, twalms). Soon they mounted, and the fines were nothing to be sneezed at (which had the side effect of augmenting the budget). And so the citizens who were used to being obedient bit their tongues and submitted to the king’s decree. Everyone, in fact, except the children.
It must be said that children often don’t understand adults, and vice versa. As such, although the decree only applied in a handful of cases (as not many words contain Q), it struck the children as being a bad idea. Or a ‘crackpot notion’, as their parents used to whisper. The children who followed their parents’ conversations were of the same mind, though not because of ‘quintessence’ (a term they didn’t yet understand) or ‘inquisitiveness’ (an innate characteristic of children, albeit hard to pronounce), but above all because of the names!
Children are often given nicknames by other family members or their playmates, to help identify them. Sometimes these are derived from their name: Quirina becomes Rina, and Quasimodo – Modie. Sometimes nickname are based on an imagined similarity with animals, for example Mousey, Piggy or Bugs Bunny, and other times on a prominent feature of physiognomy – Big-Nose, Jug-Ears, Googly-Eyes. The decree about replacing Q with tw made things awkward for Quentin, Quinta, Quincy and Quartz, who had already suffered due to being given a fancy name by their parents, so being turned into Twentin, Twinta, Twincy and Twartz overnight made each of them feel their hard-won identity was being tampered with. Plus it was unfair, because Peter, Robert, Igor, Irina, Sandra, Andrea and the other children didn’t have to change their names at all.
And so a small group of disenfranchised children had no choice (because their parents, like I said, were pusillanimous) but to turn for help to the White Hermit, who lived beyond the edge of the city, in a cabin in the woods.
By common opinion of the adults, the White Hermit was a ‘renegade’. Various stories were in circulation concerning his past and why he left to live in solitude. Some claimed he was a member of the royal family who, in the name of ordinary citizens and their empty pockets, had constantly demanded a reduction in the large bills for electricity, heating and water, and was therefore chased away from the court. Others said he had been a leader of the republican opposition who, after a long and tenacious struggle for human rights, became disillusioned with his fellow party members and supposedly like-minded people, who bandied around slogans about justice and equality but were actually filling their foreign bank accounts. Whatever the truth was, many wronged citizens still called on the White Hermit in his cabin to complain and possibly receive some kind of moral support. So it was that Twentin, Twinta, Twinn, Twincy and the other children whose names had been changed knocked on the White Hermit’s door one day.
He listened to their grievances and after brief but intense reflection he said to them: ‘Let’s write directly to the king!’ And the White Hermit and the children sat down to write a letter. When they had finished, it read like this:
Our esteemed King, Your Majesty,
Your decree that ‘Q(u)’ be changed to ‘Tw’ was certainly issued for a deep and important reason. You, as the most powerful man in our kingdom, can change a thousand things with just one word, and the change of one letter has changed our lives. Although our parents say that tomorrow everything will be better, we don’t believe it, because when we go out to play in the street we are met with jeers from the other children and they make us feel ashamed. We sincerely and respectfully request you to take action to give the letter Q back to our names.
They sent the letter to the king the usual way, by post. The court security service checked to see everything was in order and then laid the letter on the king’s desk. In the meantime, however, the king had fallen in love again and had difficulty remembering the decree. Even as he was reading the letter he was rather astonished and found it all hard to believe.
He decided to revoke the decree, but just as he was about to sign a new decree annulling the old one his secretary announced that his new bride-to-be had arrived at the palace. The king dropped everything, literally, including the fountain pen for adding his signature, which the children were waiting for so impatiently.
How long would they have to wait? Let us hope not for long. And may the king still be happily in love with his new queen, though perhaps a tiny bit less than in the first flush of love so he will again have time for things at his desk.
This fairy tale should not be told while waiting at the dentist’s to have your false teeth checked
Neverland
I believe it was the great, erudite Cicero who said: Praeteria mutare non possumus. We cannot change the past. Where then does this constant need of some human beings come from to resurrect and embellish the past? Do they wish to flee from the problems of the present? That would seem the simplest answer to why they keep retelling, adorning and getting carried away with anecdotes from their past. Then again, perhaps that endless repetition and embellishment of stories from their youth conceals the need to maintain a balance between what we once were and what we are today, for each of us installs a filter in the river of life in order to decide what to take out and what not. Some small part of us is always dying at every moment, but we seem to believe we’re immortal, even at funerals of our nearest and dearest, and we construct our own personal history as if we were Caesar or Galilei. Doesn’t it seem pointless to make the effort to be remembered when we know we will have to go away one day? But isn’t it so very human, that flimsy significance that gives us a sense of self-satisfaction and security and tells us that we are a marvellous and unique work of the Creator just when we are at our most insignificant? Aging mitigates our megalomania of course, although I can vouch that some of my age-mates still like to think they are little heroes. Heroes with walking sticks, huh! Except for him, the eternal child, who can fly – up, up and away – and will stay as intelligent and feckless as he is forever.
And what can I say, having two such different lives behind me? I sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens, close to the autumn of life, and around me pigeons peck at the crumbs of bread I bring for them every week. Everyone has their own destiny. For example, there are some trees whose leaves begin to turn yellow and fall as early as August, like those people who experience the culmination of their life-force and attractiveness in their youth and afterwards let the years trample them down almost without resistance. As wise Horace aptly said: Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines. Things have a proper measure, there are also definite bounds. Other trees keep their leaves until late autumn, holding on like the last proud hairs of those lonely veterans who walk the main paths of the park, elegantly dressed but each with some salient feature like a white silk handkerchief in the upper pocket of his redingote to emphasize his flight from the boring routine of family life. Ancient and too proud to go to a smoky pub, they strut through the park with their carefully maintained exteriors, as upright as possible. Even when a sudden shower of rain comes that can make a man as sopping wet in one minute as if he’d fallen in the Thames, these haughty characters open their umbrellas with all the calm in the world, as if they were opening a parasol on a summer afternoon. Some of those trees seem to have deliberately detached themselves and become like those eccentrics so typical of our Isles, and, standing alone in a meadow, they spite the wind and rain, peculiar to the very end, when they will be chopped down and their trunks mutilated to be carted away to an elegant furniture workshop or a humble, firewood market. There is another type of deciduous tree in the park, too, those which shed their golden leaves not gradually but all at once, spreading that soft aureole all around, which children and their mothers find so enchanting as they run around the tree and shower each other with the leaves. Which people correspond to those trees? Ipso facto, by that very fact, they have something that radiates from them, without pretence, refinement and disguise, something others perceive as a power influencing them when they are nearby or hear them speak. Quod natura dat, nemo tollere potest. What nature gives, no one can take away. And Peter? What kind of tree is he? Certainly not deciduous! He is self-satisfied and eternal, without signs of weakness or wear. A conifer! Yes, and in particular one of those that the skilful Japanese stop in its growth and leave small, handsome, and unchanged – a conifer bonsai!
