The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (74 page)

‘Marica,' he said to her, ‘you have saved my days and have smoothed my path back to life. What can I do for you?'

‘Señor,' the girl replied, ‘you can make me happy but I dare not say how.'

‘Speak, speak, and rest assured that if it is in my power I shall do it.'

‘But suppose I were to ask you to marry me?'

‘I will do so very willingly. You will feed me when I am well, look after me when I am sick and protect my work from rats in my absence. Yes, Marica, I will marry you whenever you want and the sooner that is, the better.'

While still not completely restored to health, Hervas opened the chest which contained the debris of his polymathesis. He tried to put the single sheets back together again and suffered a relapse which left him very weak. When he was strong enough to go out he went to see the minister of finance, and pointed out that he had worked for fifteen years; he had trained pupils who were capable of replacing him, and his health was ruined. He asked to be allowed to retire with a pension
equivalent to half his salary. In Spain it is not difficult to obtain these sorts of favours; Hervas was granted what he wanted and married Marica.

Our scholar then changed his way of life. He took lodgings in a quiet part of town and vowed not to leave them until he had reconstructed the manuscript of his hundred volumes. The rats had nibbled away the paper which was stuck to the spines of the books, leaving only the other half of each page; and even that half was torn to shreds; but they enabled Hervas to recall the whole text. In this way he set about rewriting the whole work. At the same time he produced one of quite another kind, for Marica brought me into the world: me, a sinner and a reprobate. Oh, surely on the day of my birth there was rejoicing in hell! The eternal fires of that awful place blazed with a new intensity, and the demons there increased the torments of the damned so as to revel all the more in their wailing.

‘I am unable today to continue my story. Come back here tomorrow at the same time and be sure to do so without fail, for your salvation depends on it.'

Cornádez returned home, his soul filled with new terrors. That night he was woken by the dead Peña Flor, who counted the hundred doubloons in his ears without a single coin missing from the count.

The next day he went to the gardens of the Celestine fathers. There he found the pilgrim, who continued his story as follows:

Diego Hervas spent eight years repairing the damage done by the rats. His work was nearly complete when foreign journals which fell into his hands revealed to him that great progress had been made in the sciences, without his knowledge. Hervas sighed at this increase in his labours but, not wishing to leave his work in an imperfect state, he added to every science the discoveries which had been made. This took him four years, so he spent twelve years without leaving his house, glued to his work nearly all the time. This sedentary life finally destroyed his health. He suffered from chronic sciatica, kidney pains, gravel in the bladder and all of the early symptoms of gout. But at last the polymathesis in a hundred volumes was complete. Hervas summoned Moreno the bookseller – the son of the Moreno who had put on sale his ill-fated
Analysis
– to his house.

‘Señor,' he said. ‘Here are a hundred volumes which contain all that men presently know. This
Polymathesis
will bring honour to your presses and, if I may say so, to Spain. I want nothing for myself, but I beg you of your charity to print my work so that my historic labours will not be entirely lost.'

Moreno opened all the volumes, examined them carefully and then said, ‘Señor, I will undertake the work, but you must bring yourself to reduce it to twenty-five volumes.'

‘Go away, go away!' replied Hervas in the deepest indignation. ‘Go back to your shop and print the romantic or pedantic rubbish which are the shame of Spain! Leave me, Señor, with my kidney stones and my genius, which if it had been better known would have won general esteem. I have nothing left to ask of mankind and still less of booksellers. Go away!'

Moreno withdrew and Hervas fell into the blackest of melancholy. He constantly kept in his sight his hundred volumes, the children of his genius, conceived in rapture, born of pain mingled with pleasure and now consigned to oblivion. He saw his whole life wasted, his present and future existence destroyed. It was then also that his mind, trained to understand all the mysteries of nature, unfortunately turned to the abyss of human misery. By measuring its depth he saw only evil everywhere, and said in his heart, ‘Who are you, author of evil?'

He was himself filled with horror at this thought and decided to investigate whether evil, to exist, must have been created. Then he examined the same question in a broader context. He turned his attention to natural forces and attributed to matter an energy which seemed to him to have the property of explaining everything without having to have recourse to the Creation.

As far as animals and men were concerned, they owed their existence, according to him, to a generative acid which by making matter ferment, gave it constant forms, in more or less the same way that acids crystallize alkaline and earthy bases in polyhedra which are always the same. He considered fungus substances produced by wet wood as the link connecting the crystallization of fossils to the reproduction of plants and animals, indicating if not their identity then at least the analogy between them.

Learned as he was, Hervas had no trouble supporting his false system with sophistical proofs designed to lead men's minds astray. He found for example that mules, which are a mixture of two species, could be compared to salts with a mixed base whose crystallization is of a compound type. The effervescence produced by mixing some earths with acid appeared to him to be comparable to the fermentation of mucous tissue in plants; according to him this constituted the beginnings of life that had not been able to develop due to lack of propitious circumstances.

Hervas had observed that crystals as they formed accumulated in the lightest parts of the test-tube and were difficult to form in darkness. And as light is equally favourable to vegetable growth, he considered luminous fluid to be one of the elements of which the universal acid, which gave life to all nature, consisted. Besides, he had
seen light turn blue-coloured paper red over a period of time, and that was another reason for considering it to be an acid.

Hervas knew that in high latitudes near the pole, blood, lacking sufficient heat, was exposed to alcalaemia, which could only be halted by the internal use of acids. He concluded that heat, being able in some cases to be replaced by an acid, must also be a sort of acid, or at least one of the elements of the universal acid.

Hervas knew that thunder had been seen to cause wine to ferment and turn to vinegar. He had read in Sanchoniathon that when the world began, those things destined to be living beings had been, so to speak, brought to life by violent thunder-claps, and our hapless scientist had ventured to rely on the authority of this pagan cosmogony in order to declare that the matter of lightning had had the capacity to activate the generative acid which was infinitely varied but which consistently reproduced the same forms.

In his attempt to understand the mysteries of creation, Hervas was duty-bound to attribute it in all its glory to the Creator. Would to Heaven that he had done so! But his good angel had left him, and his mind, led astray by the presumption of knowledge, delivered him up defenceless into the hands of the spirit of pride, whose fall led to that of the whole world.

Alas! As Hervas's guilty speculations were rising above the sphere of human intelligence, his mortal coil was threatened by imminent dissolution. He was struck down by a number of acute diseases, which added themselves to his chronic afflictions. His sciatica became severe and deprived him of the use of his right leg. His kidney stones became larger and tore at his bladder. Arthritis deformed the fingers of his left hand and threatened the joints of his right. Finally the darkest of hypochondrias destroyed his mental powers at the same time as those of his body. He hated the idea of witnesses to his lamentable state and ended up by rejecting my ministrations and refusing to see me. His household consisted only of an infirm old man who devoted all his remaining energy to serving him but he too fell ill and my father was then forced to put up with having me with him.

Marañon, my grandfather, was struck down soon after by a high fever. His illness lasted only five days. Sensing his end to be near, he summoned me and said:

‘Blas, my dear Blas, receive my last blessing. You were born the son of a learned father: would that he were less so! Fortunately for you, your grandfather is a simple man, simple in his faith and works, and he has brought you up in that same simplicity. Do not let yourself be led astray by your father. For some years he has fulfilled few of his religious duties and his opinions are such that heretics would be ashamed of them. Blas, beware of human wisdom. In a few instants I shall know more than all the philosophers. Blas, Blas, bless you, I am passing away.'

And die he did. I paid my last respects to him as was due and returned to my father's house, from which I had been absent for four days. In that time the infirm old servant had also died and a charitable fraternity had undertaken to bury him. I knew that my father was alone and intended to devote myself to serving him. But on going into his room an extraordinary spectacle met my eyes and I remained in the antechamber, transfixed with horror.

My father had taken off his clothes and had dressed himself up in a bed-sheet as if it were a shroud. He was seated watching the setting sun. Having looked at it for some time, he raised his voice and said, ‘Oh star whose dying beams have met my eyes for the last time, why did you shine upon me on the day of my birth? Did I ask to be born? Why was I born? Men told me that I had a soul and I have nurtured it even at the expense of my body. I have cultivated my mind but rats have devoured it and booksellers have disdained it. Nothing of me will remain. All of me will die, in as great obscurity as if I had never been born. So, nothingness, receive your prey.'

Hervas remained for a few moments plunged in sombre thoughts. Then he took a goblet that looked to me to be filled with old wine, lifted his eyes to heaven and said, ‘Oh God, if there is one, have pity on my soul, if I have one.'

After that he drained the goblet, put it on the table and placed his hand to his heart as though he felt some anguish there. Hervas had prepared another table, on which he had placed cushions. He lay down on it, crossed his hands on his breast and did not utter another word.

You will be surprised that, seeing all these preparations for suicide, I did not fling myself at the goblet or call for help. I am surprised
myself, or rather I am sure that a supernatural power held me rooted to the spot where I was standing, leaving me no freedom of movement. The hairs of my head stood on end.

The charitable fraternity who had buried our old servant found me in this position. They saw my father stretched out on the table, covered with a shroud, and asked me whether he was dead. I replied that I did not know. They asked me who had put the shroud on him; I replied that he had dressed himself in it. They examined the body and found it lifeless. They saw the goblet with the dregs of a liquid in it, and took it away to examine it. After that they went away, making their displeasure clear to me, and left me in a state of utter dejection. Then people from the parish came, asked me the same questions and went away saying, ‘He died as he lived. It is not for us to bury him.'

I remained alone with the body, and my depression reached the point where I had lost all power to act or to think. I slumped into the chair in which I had seen my father sitting and relapsed into the same immobility in which the people from the parish had found me.

Night came. Clouds covered the heavens. A sudden gust of wind blew open my window, a bluish light seemed to flash across the room, leaving it darker than it was before. In the midst of all this darkness I thought I saw some fantastic shapes. Then I thought I heard my father's body utter a long groan, which echoed and was repeated across night and space. I tried to get up, but was transfixed where I was, unable to make the slightest movement. An icy chill pierced my limbs. I shivered as if in a high fever. My visions became dreams and sleep conquered my senses.

I awoke with a start and saw six tall, yellow candles lit around the body of my father and a man sitting in front of me who seemed to be watching for the moment of my awakening. His face was majestic and imposing. He was tall; black, somewhat wavy hair fell across his forehead. His look was keen and penetrating, yet also soft and seductive. For the rest he was dressed in a ruff and a grey cloak, much as gentlemen dress in the country.

When the stranger saw that I was awake he smiled at me affably and said, ‘My son – I call you this because I look on you as though you were already mine – you have been forsaken by God and man
and the earth has closed itself to the remains of this scholar who gave you life. But we will not forsake you.'

‘Señor,' I replied, ‘you said, I believe, that I was forsaken by God and man. This is true of man but I do not believe God can ever forsake one of his creatures.'

‘Your remark is correct in some respects,' said the stranger. ‘I will explain this to you another time. Meanwhile, to convince you of our concern for you, I am giving you this purse. You will find a thousand pistoles in it. A young man must have desires and the means of satisfying them. Spend this gold freely, and count on us always.'

Then the stranger clapped his hands. Six masked men appeared and took away Hervas's body. The candles went out and deep darkness fell. I did not stay long where I was. I felt my way to the door, reached the street and, on seeing the starry sky, imagined that my breathing became easier. The thousand pistoles that I could feel in my pocket also contributed to raising my spirits. I crossed Madrid and reached the far end of the Prado at the spot on which a statue of Cybele has since been placed. There I lay down on a seat and soon fell asleep.