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THE CHAIN OF SAINT…

… and these letters circulating forever – wherein simple words coming from simple-minded people inform one of the certainty of material gain, the certainty of future happiness and love, naturally, only for those who continue to spread their messages; in addition to these empty words, lest one should forget, a punishment is mentioned, actually, an ominous hint of a nasty accident and possible death, not just for those who receive this letter but are unwilling to have it copied and continue to distribute it but also for those who stop its distribution through sheer negligence, presumably failing to observe that, even in the sphere of plebeian metaphysics, awards are given for obedience and severe punishment is meted out for sensible behaviour – usually begin like this (quote):

Dear Sir/Madam,

This letter may bring you joy and welfare. This is really a good reason for you not to throw it away but to read it carefully and make a few copies of it. If you send these copies – within seven days at the latest – to all the people you wish good to, you may be certain that fortune will knock at your door soon.

On no account enclose any money or securities with the letters.

This chain has been initiated by ............... He has received a decree from Saint ............... to create a chain of love and hope. Not doubting the finger of fate, ............... set about forming a brotherhood based on this letter and the dialectics of its symbols.

These are the symbols of the chain of Saint………………..

Several days before his long-awaited holiday, Fulvio Salvatore, a Colonel of the Italian Army, received a letter of this kind. In the course of a dinner he arranged for his friends, he showed the letter to those present, asking them all what would be the best thing to do with this paper whose content was rather vague. Some advised him one way, others advised him differently, and he himself said that he would burn the letter because he did not trust such nonsense, and on top of everything else, he had never heard of this Saint............... Thus Colonel Fulvio inadvertently foretold his fate.

Some time during the night a group of six or seven Black Shirts of Mussolini’s burst into the house. The guests were very alarmed. Their confusion was all the greater because none of them could have dreamed that such a bunch of obscure characters would even dare peek into, let alone burst so arrogantly into the house of a senior officer, a man married to the daughter of an industrial magnate whose connections reached to high heaven.

One of the Black Shirts, presumably their leader, told the people present to remain calm and seated, that nothing untoward would happen to them because the Black Shirts had come to talk with Mario Gattini. At that very moment, Mario happened to be at the far end of the big dining-room table, somewhat to the side of the other guests, sunk comfortably into an armchair, glass in hand, right next to an open window.

Knowing full well what the man they were looking for looked like, one of the Black Shirts, a giant of a man, separated from the group and went over to Mario, taking but a couple of steps to reach him. Acting like a clumsy street magician, he unfolded a newspaper wherein he had been hiding a cleaver and, howling with all his might, started hitting the man with it on the head, neck and shoulders. He swung the cleaver until he was certain that he had finished what he had come to do. Then this satanic figure, face flushed, turned to the guests and ordered them to keep quiet about it, or they would suffer the same fate that had befallen that European garbage if they uttered a single word, let alone tried to run away, God forbid.

Shattered by the unexpected event and the horrible sight of their butchered friend, whose body, head mangled out of shape and arms half-torn from the torso, remained seated in the armchair by the window, they remained mute long after Mussolini’s thugs had gone away, staring nowhere in particular in oppressive silence; none of them was able to move, say or do anything. Even the Colonel, his revolver almost at arm’s reach, sat in a daze, staring fixedly at the unrecognisable remains of the head of Mario Gattini, with whom he had been talking about something or other until but a moment before.

The police, having arrived to investigate the case, praised the Colonel’s presence of mind, his military cool, for he managed, owing to his determination, wisdom and sensible conduct, to prevent greater evil and a possible slaughter of innocent people. After all, this was true up to a point. The Ministry issued an official statement to the effect that, naturally, depending on the circumstances, everything would be done to solve this case and punish the villains most severely.

Some time later the Colonel’s younger brother Carlo, an architect, dreamed a strange dream: in it, he held a burning candle whose flame was bloody and, with some effort, made out and read the very lines you are reading now. The next day, Carlo, very worried, hurried over to his brother intending to tell him about the dream and warn him of his foreboding – as if his brother had not lived through something much worse than his brother’s bad dream. People are like that. However, Salvatore had left town with his family an hour before, convinced that a long vacation at the seaside would help them and soothe their souls.

Sometime at dusk, on the outskirts of Naples, the Colonel’s car swerved off the road for no apparent reason, hitting a tree, then a stone wall surrounding a Dominican monastery. The car overturned, caught fire, and the Colonel burned to death together with his wife Stefania and twin sons Alberto and Nicola.

All in all, the main topics at their funeral were the fatherland, the hectic pace of modern life, Abyssinia, nerves, health spas and the beautiful uniforms of the officers of Fulvio’s regiment.

In his brother’s flat, Carlo found the half-burnt remains of the letter he had seen in his dream. He somehow made out its content, that is, its ending, establishing that its words did point out what fate might befall his kind but too suspicious brother unless he carried out the Order imposed upon him by the letter he had received.

xxx

A young and poor Filipino fisherman by the name of Francesco Hernandez received a letter identical to the one received by the above-mentioned Colonel Fulvio. Even though he was almost illiterate, Francesco understood the message. He made a firm pledge to the Unspeakable that he would continue his chain and that he would do whatever the letter demanded of him by the day named in it. Relying on his modest savings and small contributions from his relatives, Francesco had about fifty copies of the letter made, then sent it to almost all the inhabitants of his poor fishermen’s village, which was received very enthusiastically by almost everyone concerned. The unselfish Francesco wanted fortune to smile on everyone in this world. Inspired by his generosity, the local fishermen had copies of the letter made and equally generously sent them everywhere, as if they were cheques. Soon enough, there was no house on the island which had not received at least ten identical messages and sent out an equal number, if not more, of them.

A week later, having gone to Aparri to purchase some fishing equipment, Francesco bought a lottery ticket which won him the main prize: four hundred and eighty thousand US dollars. Everybody believed that his good fortune was just the beginning, a modest harbinger of the coming prosperity for all. They also believed that the good Francesco, their lucky man, would share some of the windfall with them until they got rich themselves, or if not that, that he would invest part of that money into a new fishing boat and equipment, enabling them to make a greater catch more easily, which would be quite understandable. Unfortunately, Francesco forgot all about the difficult, always uncertain profession of a fisherman. Wasting his time and indulging in all sorts of vice, the young man forgot his relatives, friends and the help he had recently received from them. While he had a whale of a time in Aparri, even in Manila, spending his money on whores, all sorts of foolish things and nightly binges in expensive, more often disreputable bars, the island grew nervous, waiting tensely; a mournful kind of hope, mixed with apprehension and disbelief, literally paralysed the life of the small village.

All of a sudden everybody was all eyes and ears. Everyone started telling fortunes and philosophising. Everyone started snooping around, staring everywhere, listening for any suspicious sound, hoping to be the first to tell where fortune might call and where the sound of happy voices would be heard.

On the local radio station (a gift from an unidentified donor from Kansas) women claiming to be seers competed among themselves talking at length about their dreams, describing all kinds of omens which, if interpreted correctly by one possessing otherworldly powers, if unravelled correctly, might point to the names of those who, in a day or two, would be the recipients of a great fortune. The most brazen liar of them all was a certain Mrs Adela Canosa. She kept trying to persuade the listeners that bridges, benches, doorknobs, shoes, even kitchenware, had a soul. To prove her point, she offered the example of a knife with a metal handle, made in and imported from Solingen, Germany, which had told her to drop in on little Velásquez (the listeners would know who she was talking about) and impart to him that he, the worthless no-good scoundrel that he was, would receive an inheritance, most likely from America, but he would do well to give her back the two thousand pesos she had lent him before New Year; after that, let him sit down and daydream about travelling to Aparri, a bank account, whores, beer and American dollars.

Sensing which way the fashionable island breezes were blowing and how the hearts of not very bright fishermen of the island beat, Adela told the listeners, in her very convincing tone of voice, interspersed with killer dramatic pauses, the story of spoons which had finally realised the truth about reincarnation, the truth about samsara and the true causes of their cursed samsara-like existence.

Thus, in a nutshell, without any embellishments or lengthy philosophising, her spoons were convinced that each of them individually and all of them collectively carried clear memories of past existence. As they told her, in their previous lives they had been gears and springs, actually component parts of a great series of faulty Japanese alarm clocks put together in the year 1913 in Osaka. Naturally, in their own peculiar way, they were highly dissatisfied with their previous lives, even though it was not quite clear to them where the roots of this discontent lay. The long years of darkness and boredom, and the sepulchral silence of the Japanese warehouse had been killing them, they said, and it was ironic that they were rescued from the warehouse by a heartless trader, a one-eyed creature bereft of conscience; this fox of a man, a pirate who fleeced his victims, sold them at an exorbitant price to some poor smelters in the Philippines.

The way they are today, having been resmelt into cheap iron spoons, objects mixed with parts of other objects – carrying other memories, stories and experiences from far-off lands – is the only true balm that makes their samsara-like fate, a fate of suffering and neglect, bearable.

To be quite open about it, the spoons are bitter about their current existence as well. They keep complaining of the fate allotted to them, that of helpless spoons, which any moron who gets it into his head to slurp something can push shamelessly into his smelly mouth, without asking himself who they are, where they come from and whether it is decent to do all those terrible things to their current existence – without thinking that their past could be more glorious and elevated than his hideous toothless slop container drooling all over them.

If anyone should ask them what they would rather be, in one of their future lives, of course, they would choose the life of chromed figurines adorning the front end of that pride of British car industry, Rolls Royce. It is true that such wishes are somewhat old-fashioned, just like the drawings on the covers of novels Adela reads to them, but her spoons have been yearning for centuries for days of noble leisure, for the far-off barking of purebred dogs, for fine manners and the tingling freshness of morning air.

Adela’s confused parable about the past lives and dreams of reincarnated parts of Japanese alarm clocks, now spoons, would have remained mere female fantasy (originating from a good-looking widow whose charms had only slightly faded) had it not been for her golden aura of a proven prophet. Her reputation, for that is what it must be called without any doubt, stemmed from the fact that she was Francesco’s mother’s sister, that is, an aunt of the man who had recently become the richest person on the island.

What was possibly more decisive in this case, maybe even much more important than a blood relationship and all those clear and not so very clear feelings that go along with it, was the quite proven fact that she was the key person who persuaded (witnesses say – merely reminded in an off-hand manner) her nincompoop of a nephew, the inexperienced Francesco, to purchase by all means, on top of a number of things he was supposed to get in Aparri, a lottery ticket. Bearing in mind Saint Unspeakable’s letter and her own visions, of which she was not at all willing to speak, Adela spiritually prepared that nincompoop and bag of bones to step onto the endless and unknowable cosmic merry-go-round and grab what one could grab there at an opportune moment or change to one’s own advantage.

xxx

Francesco became what one would have expected an uneducated island boy to become: a rich drunkard, a lifelong champion of island patriotism and an insufferable fool.

Owing to his money, a French doctor, Adela’s unstoppable kinship-based enterprise, and many other things which slowly crystallised in the course of magmatic nighttime talks she had with the mysterious doctor Eric Hugo, Francesco was sent off straight to France, to Paris, without resisting. In accordance with a long and thoroughly developed plan, and then in a mad race with time, the nephew was placed in the sanatorium “The Eiffel Tower” at no. 9, Place des Vosges, Paris.

Its former patients proudly tell fairy tales about this discreet and prettily furnished shelter, intended to be a spiritual refuge of first-class gentlemen. They will tell you confidentially (while praising the cuisine and the charm of the professional staff) that “The Tower” excels at treating a complex whole made up of very different symptoms, a whole called “the French syndrome”, otherwise known as “the French cirrhosis”, thought to occur as a result of long-time and immoderate consumption of low-quality red wine, which is admittedly at odds with the exorbitant prices charged by the aforementioned rest home nestling in the very heart of old Paris.

Apart from the main entrance, which is located where two shaded colonnades intersect at an angle of ninety degrees, “The Tower” also has a secret passage, “a vessel for saving one’s soul and face”, as it was affectionately referred to, among the select few close friends, by Mlle Sophie Saphir, an old maid, the owner and God of the sanatorium.

Place des Vosges has always been the pride of those living in its surroundings; formerly just a windy uncultivated plot of land, a gathering place of thieves, traders and peddlers, it was considered by the city authorities to be a proper place for gallows made of stone, the first of their kind – built ten years before the much better known ones from Place des Augustins.

A careful examination of judicial chronicles kept towards the end of the sixteenth century will reveal, here and there, not always very clearly, mainly through asides, that there exists (or existed) a connection between the place where, to the delight of Parisians, public executions used to be carried out for years, and a ditch, shoulder-deep let us say, through which the guards led convicts who were about to meet their maker and the rope to the square.

That is the origin of the phrase, coined by the riffraff of Paris, mockingly turning whatever was down to something that was up: “He’ll pass through the ditch”, meaning that the good-for-nothing vagabond in question might easily end up swinging from the gallows.

Out of respect for that ditch’s past, later builders, the inheritors of the good-natured apron-wearing craftsmen of old, left it intact: they built what there was to be built, then made a path of stone tiles, and when that great flute had finally been made, ready to resound hollowly in the jaws of some giant, the builders deftly made it part of the foundation of the future edifice. Many years later, the heavily made-up Sophie Saphir would move in there with her girls and her servants.

The secret passage, actually just a tunnel caving in here and there which time has not managed to gnaw away, is about twenty steps long and connects the sanatorium with the back room of a grocery store, actually a warehouse filled with the mainly worthless goods purchased in the kasbahs of Maghreb and western African shores.

From the warehouse, the soul- and face-saving passage leads further on through the shop and from it straight to Rue Turenne. One might jokingly observe that the said passage was often used in the opposite direction as well – at least while Mlle Sophie tranquilly reigned over “The Tower”.

Sophie rented out the place, which had a telephone and two big shop windows, to a Tunisian. It was more important to her that the Tunisian should oversee the “lifeboat” passage than to draw rent from the premises she had not invested a single franc in or to collect a measly percentage from the sale of gaudy cloths, all sorts of trinkets or the grinning African idols and ugly women with giant breasts hanging down that queers and all sorts of Parisian painters went mad about.

xxx

It was raining over Paris; a pleasant spring rain was falling and the sun shone through the clouds. It is 11 o’clock in the morning; the month of May.

People go about their business not paying any attention to occasional bursts of rain. Women enter expensive shops and go out, repeating the well-rehearsed choreography of closing and opening their umbrellas. Some women wave their hands trying to get a taxi. When one does appear and stop by them, they carry in various boxes, sit in the back and go off somewhere. Several boys tread through the puddles along the curb – they are happy to be able to do as they please and because no one disturbs their defiant game, no one bothers them or cautions them. The city lives the full life of a proud capital. This unimaginably big human habitat is the ideal capital of Europe, the whole world, the universe. To the many serious-looking men in dark suits hurrying about on some important business and to the elegant ladies spending money making the rounds of extravagant shops, it seems that this kind of life, the exciting life of a metropolis, will last till the end of time, until the sun burns out and the planet sinks into eternal darkness.

Francesco sits by the window in the attic of the sanatorium. He has his new suit on, designed and made to measure. The suit is somewhat uncomfortable for a young man unaccustomed to continental climate and life in a big city. He also has a striped shirt on, the collar of which has rounded tips, and a tie on which there is a bird which might be a parrot embroidered with a gold thread. His underwear is also brand new and it itches. His freshly cut hair, parted in the middle, still smells of the sharp but pleasant liquid which the barber used to massage the roots of his hair.

Francesco concluded that he was doing well at “The Tower”: he assured himself that he was much better off than he had thought he would be. After all, he lived in a big city now, among people (mostly women) whose language he did not understand, but all in all, he lived in a comfortable flat – even the most expensive hotel in Aparri had nothing like it. He ate and drank what he wanted, he had a fine suit, he spent all day looking around, doing nothing and, most importantly, he had money.

A man of twenty-four, in his prime, swarthy, dark-haired and black-eyed, he is not aware that he is becoming a creature that Sophie dresses up merely to parade him, to show him, the way one shows antique furniture, a nice painting by a trendy artist, a new horse-drawn carriage, a new car or a newly-purchased astrakhan fur coat. Francesco looks down through the closed window at the street, the people hurrying somewhere, the hats, the umbrellas, honking cars, then at the curtains with floral patterns and tiny men with eyes open wide. His thoughts are confused, but everything hinges around the question: how will his life in Paris continue? The smell of coffee and freshly baked pastry wafted in from the corridor.

If he could snap out of his reverie, or if his image in the mirror could ask his other self – the flesh-and-blood one – that image would certainly, under the circumstances, wonder whether to speak out or to advise him what to do, of his own accord, for his own sake, regardless of what Sophie has already decided about this, that, anything, or literally about everything that concerned or would ever concern “The Tower”, its subjects, patients, guests, flowers, menu, finances and so on and so forth.

As on this rainy day, he had imagined, on several earlier occasions, hearing the sound of sailboat sirens coming from some place or other. He was familiar with those sounds and there was no way he could have mistaken them for the sounds of some other device, the noise of machines or factory sirens. One moment he would maintain to himself that Paris was possibly by the sea, and another he would try to stop himself believing this. If Paris was by the sea after all, beside some great expanse of water, why did Sophie never take him to the shore to show him the famous Paris harbour?

Whenever he asked one of Sophie’s whores about those sirens – imitating the sound like some Negro jazz saxophone player – she would shrug her shoulders, thinking to herself that it was such a pity and truly a sin that this strapping, handsome fellow in his prime should be so much off his rocker.

Raša Todosijević