The Knight And Death; And One Way Or Another, page 1
THE KNIGHT AND DEATH
and
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by
JOSEPH FARRELL
AND SACHA RABINOVITCH
Contents
Title Page
The Knight and Death
Epigraph
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
One Way or Another
About the Author
Also by Leonardo Sciascia and available from Granta Books
Copyright
THE KNIGHT AND DEATH
(a sotie)
Translated by Joseph Farrell
An old Danish bishop, I remember, once told me that there are many ways of reaching truth, and that burgundy is one of the many.
Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales
Each time he raised his eyes from the paper work, and even more each time he leaned his head against the top of the high, unyielding chair-back, he saw every detail, every outline in all its clarity, as though his gaze had newly acquired a subtlety and a sharpness, or as though the print were being reborn before his eyes with the same meticulous precision with which, in the year 1513, Albrecht Dürer had first engraved it. He had purchased it many years previously at an auction sale: one of those sudden, rash cravings for possession which, at certain times, in the presence of a painting, an etching or a book, took hold of him. He had competed for it with others who had themselves set their hearts on it, reaching a state of near hatred for the most tenacious of his rivals, who then casually abandoned it to him. The price corresponded to two months’ salary, and when he came to handing over the money, the sum involved took him aback. At the time it was sizeable, and not only in relation to his ability to pay, but now, with the soaring rise of inflation and the tenfold increase in the value of the works of Dürer and all the other great engravers, it seemed derisory. He had taken it with him from one workplace to another, from one office to another, always choosing to hang it on the wall facing his desk, but of all those who, over the years, had passed through his office, only one (a talented swindler, who genially accepted the destiny which would see him taken from that office to become guest of some inhospitable prison for a period of years) had taken the time to look at it and appreciate it: to appreciate it fully, in the light of the most up-to-date catalogues of the print dealers of Paris and Zurich.
This appreciation had alarmed him somewhat; in an initial impulse of meanness or avarice he had decided to take it home, but the decision was forgotten almost as soon as it was made. He had long grown accustomed to having it there before him, in the many hours he spent in his office. The Knight, Death and the Devil. On the back, on the protecting cover, there were the titles, written in pencil in German and French: Ritter, Tod und Teufel; Le Chevalier, la Mort et le Diable. And mysteriously: Christ? Savonarole? Had the collector or dealer who had wondered about those two names perhaps thought that Dürer had wished to symbolize one or the other in the figure of the Knight?
Time and again, gazing at the print, he had asked himself that question. But now, leaning back in the chair in exhaustion and pain, he stared at it, groping for some meaning in that purchase made all those years ago. Death; and that castle in the background, unattainable.
With the many cigarettes he had smoked during the night, the ever-present pain had lost its heaviness and density, changing shade to a more diffuse agony. It was undoubtedly possible to give the names of colours to the different qualities and shifts of pain. At the moment it had changed from violet to red: flame red, in probing tongues which quite unpredictably pierced every part of his body, to linger there or fade away.
Automatically, he lit another cigarette, but would have let it burn out in the ashtray had not the Chief, on entering, launched into his customary tirade against the destructive habit of heavy smoking. A senseless vice, a death vice. He, the Chief, had given up smoking within the last six months, and was extremely proud of himself, but he still experienced, together with a certain pain, pangs of envy and rancour when he saw others smoke; both were nourished by the fact that, at the very time when the memory of smoking was to him like a paradise lost, the smell of smoke occasioned a discomfort which came close to nausea.
‘Don’t you feel suffocated in here?’ said the Chief.
The Deputy picked up the cigarette from the ashtray and inhaled slowly and voluptuously. It was perfectly true. The atmosphere was suffocating. The room was full of smoke which hung thickly around the still burning lights; like a transparent curtain, it veiled the glass of the windows through which, flickeringly, morning was beginning to shine. He inhaled once more.
‘I can understand,’ said the Chief in a tone of superior tolerance, ‘that certain people may lack the will power to kick the habit entirely, but to pursue a death of this kind with such stubbornness and self-indulgence … My brother-in-law …’ He employed his brother-in-law, a chain-smoker deceased a few months previously, as a blind, in a delicate effort to avoid having to refer directly to the illness of which, plainly, the Deputy was intent on dying.
‘I know. We were friends … You, I imagine, will have already chosen your own style of death. I must get you to talk to me about it one of these days. Who knows, you might even persuade me to choose it too.’
‘I haven’t chosen it, and it is not a thing that can be chosen; but now that I have given up smoking, I hope to die a different death.’
‘You are no doubt aware it was the converted Jews who invented the Catholic Inquisition in Spain.’
He was not aware. And so: ‘I have never had much time for the Jews, strictly between you and me.’
‘I know, but I would have expected you to have some interest in converts.’ They were almost colleagues, having known each other for years, and so could indulge, but always without malice, in the occasional ironic, pointed or even sarcastic remark. The Chief let them pass on account of the unease occasioned by the incomprehensible loyalty of the Deputy towards him. Never had he met a Deputy of such loyalty; initially he had left no stone unturned in his efforts to locate a hidden reason; now he knew there was none.
‘Converts or not, I’ve no time for them. You, on the other hand …’
‘I, on the other hand have no time for converts, Jewish or not: every convert opts for something worse, even when it seems better. The worst, in someone who is capable of conversion, always becomes the very worst of the worst.’
‘Conversion to not smoking has nothing to do with it: granted that conversion is generally an abomination.’
‘It has everything to do with it: because the tendency is to become persecutors of those who still smoke.’
‘How can you say that? Persecutors! If I were a persecutor, these offices would be filled with huge notices screaming No Smoking at you: it might be an idea – in spite of you, and for your own good. Because I am saying this for your good: my brother-in law …’
‘I know.’
‘So, let’s say no more about it. As regards your philosophy on converts, I could produce arguments to annihilate you, just like that.’ The snap of the thumb and index fingers indicated the lightning speed of the act of annihilation. It was a gesture he employed frequently, because there was no limit to the number of things he planned to annihilate; and the Deputy, who sometimes attempted to imitate it, but without ever managing to produce the slightest snap, was prone to a childish envy on this account. ‘However, we have work to do. Come with me.’
‘Where?’
‘You know already. Let’s go.’
‘Isn’t it a bit early?’
‘No, it’s already seven o’clock: I was deliberately killing time with your philosophy.’
‘Early, always early.’ He hated the police custom of executing warrants, carrying out house searches, routine investigations and door-to-door enquiries in the early hours of the morning or, more often than not, at the dead of night. Both fellow officers and the lower ranks considered it a pleasure to be savoured whenever the slightest opportunity or the remotest justification presented itself. The thunderous knock at the door behind which unwitting families were enjoying their rest, their sleep; at the very hour when sleep, once the weight of exhaustion has been lightened, becomes less dark, more open to dreams, more blissful; the terrified – Who’s there? and the solemn, booming reply – Police; the door held barely ajar, the eyes, distrustful and sleep-filled, peering out; the violent shove at the door, the rush of bodies; and inside, the agitated awakening of the whole family, the voices of fear and bewilderment, the crying of the children … For such a delight, there was not a man in the force, whatever his rank, who would think twice about his own lost sleep. The Deputy, however, loved to sleep, after at least an hour with a book, right through from midnight to seven o’clock, and on the rare occasions when – invariably because of the division to which he was attached – he had to take part in such operations, he was always tormented by a personal sense of anguished shame.
‘It’s seven o’clock,’ said the Chief, ‘and it takes at least half an hour to get to Villaserena. After all, in the circumstances, I can hardly allow myself any special consideration, not even for him.’
‘We have already allowed ourselves just that,’ said the Deputy ironically.
‘If it had been anyone else, we would have been there three hours ago, and already had the house upside down.’
‘No doubt,’ said the Chief, stung to the point of cynicism.
The black car waited for them in the courtyard – a beautiful, harmoniously colonnaded, baroque courtyard. There was no need to tell the policeman at the wheel where they were making for: everyone in the building which, buzzing as busily as any beehive, was even then coming back to life, was fully aware. How many calls, wondered the Deputy, had already gone out from that building to alert the President of the visit he was about to receive? The President: there was not the slightest need to add ‘of United Industries’, because in that city, anyone referring to ‘the President’ without further qualification had only one person in mind; for any other President, not excluding the President of the Republic, some specification was essential.
They remained silent for the entire half hour of the drive, or race, in the traffic which grew more frantic by the minute. The Chief cast and considered, recast and reconsidered what he would say to the President: concern was written on his face like the toothache. The Deputy knew him well enough to be able to decipher every detail of that concern: almost word for word; with each and every erasion, correction and replacement that he judged suitable for the case. A palimpsest.
They arrived at the villa. The officer at the wheel (I have been overcome by a sudden inhibition about using the word driver: with a sense of regret at having used it on other occasions; but will it ever again be possible to say, as was common in my childhood, chauffeur?) got out and rang the bell at the gatehouse long and imperiously. The Chief’s toothache gave him a visible, stabbing pain: not like that, for God’s sake! There are ways and ways. But he said nothing, out of deference to custom.
The Chief gave only his own name to the doorman who came forward. Not to mention the word Police seemed to him the first act of consideration due to the President: but the doorman was sufficiently quick-witted and experienced to grasp that he should announce – two gentlemen from the police, even if, as a Southerner, the word ‘gentlemen’ stuck in his craw; he made up for it with the contempt he put into the pronunciation. He came back without saying a word: he opened the gate and signed to them to proceed along the avenue towards the villa which could be seen at the foot of the tree-lined driveway, in all its enchantment, in all its song. (‘When a building sings, it is architecture.’)
Everything – entrance hall, staircases, corridors, library and President’s studio – of a fragile, musical rococo, as though indeed a burst of song.
They had not long to wait: the President glided in silently from behind a curtain. He was clad in a velvet dressing-gown, but was already shaved and on the point of dressing with that severe and sure elegance which the fashion journals – now of each and every fashion – attributed to him. There hovered in the air around him an irritation at being compelled to delay his customary, almost lengendarily punctual, morning departure for the offices of United Industries, from whose top floor, as though in confidential familiarity with heaven, he took the daily, invariably correct, decisions which kept the whole country on the road to affluence and well-being; even if it was besieged on one side by the spectre of poverty, and on the other by that of plague.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this unaccustomed visit?’ asked the President, taking his time over shaking the Chief’s hand and almost ignoring the Deputy’s. He uttered the word ‘unaccustomed’ as though watching it materialise in large italics.
The Chief spluttered, as everything he had prepared fled from his mind, like hydrogen from a punctured balloon. He said: ‘You knew Sandoz, the lawyer, well and …’
‘We are friends,’ replied the President, ‘but as to knowing him well … you don’t even know your own children well … in fact, you invariably know them badly, very badly indeed. In other words, Signor Sandoz is a friend of mine, we see each other a lot, we have interests which are, if not exactly in common, at least closely related. But you said, I think, knew: so …’
The Chief and the Deputy exchanged understanding glances. There flitted into those minds trained in distrust and suspicion, trained in the setting of word traps or in picking up stray words which could be converted into traps, the certainty that the President already knew – and it hardly came as a surprise, since there was no shortage of his acolytes in their offices – of the death of Sandoz. The Chief immediately put the thought aside, in the belief that for his part the President had a mind trained in not compromising his informers. He said: ‘Unfortunately, Signor Sandoz is no more: he was murdered this evening, probably some time after midnight.’
‘Murdered?’
‘Murdered.’
‘Unbelievable! I left him just shortly before midnight. We said goodbye at the door of the La Vecchia Cucina restaurant … Murdered! But why? And by whom?’
‘If we knew, we would not be here taking up your time.’
‘Unbelievable!’ repeated the President, but then he corrected himself. ‘Unbelievable! … what am I saying? Nowadays in this country everything is believable, everything is possible … I myself …’ He was unable to make up his mind, thought the Deputy, between pretending he wanted to show them out and admitting that he understood there was more to come and that he had other questions to answer. By placing his hands on the arms of the chair as though to raise himself and see them to the door, he chose the pretence; ill-advisedly because the Chief sensed it instinctively and, quite unconsciously, freed himself of the unease to which he had been prey until that moment. As was normal when beginning an interrogation, he settled into the armchair as though taking up residence in it. His voice trembled with the customary – Say what you please, but I won’t believe a word of it. The well-prepared attack was launched – ‘We had to come and disturb you, at this inopportune hour, to ask you something that might be entirely meaningless, but could just as easily provide the starting point for our investigations: investigations which, I need hardly say, will not affect you, your person …’ He went on: ‘In one pocket of Sandoz’s jacket, we found this card.’ He pulled out of his own pocket a little rectangular, ivory-coloured card. ‘On one side, typewritten, there is your name: CESARE AURISPA, PRESIDENT U.I. … and on the other, in handwriting, I’ll kill you … a place-marker, as can be easily seen … but the I’ll kill you?
‘A threat carried out there and then, you must have concluded. And, plainly, by myself in person.’ The President laughed: an ironic, indulgent, bitter laugh.
The professional reserve of the Chief vanished immediately. He protested with vehemence: ‘Whatever makes you say such a thing? For goodness sake … I’d never forgive myself for thinking …’
‘Not at all,’ said the President generously, ‘you can forgive yourself. It’s just that you’ve got it wrong: and we have seen too many men in your position fall in love with their mistakes, cultivate them like flowers, wear one or two in their lapel. It’s normal, quite normal. That’s how, some times, the most simple things in the world become damnably complicated … your deductions were totally correct. That card marked my place at the dinner yesterday evening organised by the local cultural society named after Count de Borch; and it was me who wrote that I’ll kill you. A little joke between me and Sandoz, as I’ll explain. I gave the card to a waiter to take over to poor Sandoz, who was seated on the other side of the table, five or six places along from me … The joke was that we were both pretending to be flirting with Signora De Matis, and since the lady, as had happened at other dinners of the same kind, had been seated beside him …?’
‘You were pretending to be flirting, you say.’ The Chief adopted a tone of disbelief, an incautious trick of the trade. The President, in fact, noticed it; and with a touch of disgust:
‘You can take my word for it; in any case, just look at her
‘I wouldn’t dare doubt it,’ said the Chief. But the deputy thought to himself – you did doubt it, you are still doubting it: it’s a credit to your profession, to our profession. In spite of his resolution not to speak, he directed a question at the President in the standard police form of a statement or assertion: ‘And Signor Sandoz replied by writing on the place marker in front of him …?’
