completely incomprehensible how anyone’s vocal cords could endure the strain: according to one
account, Faker screamed for at least fifteen minutes; according to another and probably more accurate
one, for about five without interruption. Suddenly (while the landlord was deciding whether to break
down the door with a joint effort, place a ladder outside, or call the police) the screams, having attained
the ultimate limits of agony, horror, amazement, and of that other quite un-definable something, turned
into a medley of moans and then stopped altogether. It grew so quiet that at first those present
conversed in whispers.
Cautiously, the landlord again knocked at the door, and from behind it came sighs and unsteady
footfalls. Presently one heard someone fumbling at the lock, as though he did not know how to open it.
A weak, soft fist began smacking feebly from within. Then Monsieur Paon did what he could actually
have done much sooner—he found another key and opened the door.
«One would like some light,» Falter said softly in the dark. Thinking for an instant that Falter had
broken the lamp during his fit, the landlord automatically checked the switch, but the light obediently
came on, and Falter, blinking in sickly surprise, turned his eyes from the hand that had engendered light
to the newly filled glass bulb, as if seeing for the first time how it was done.
A strange, repulsive change had come over his entire exterior: he looked as if his skeleton had
been removed. His sweaty and now somehow flabby face, with its hanging lip and pink eyes, expressed
not only a dull fatigue, but also relief, an animal relief as after the pangs of monster-bearing. Naked to
the waist, wearing only his pajama bottoms, he stood with lowered face, rubbing the back of one hand
with the palm of the other. To the natural questions of Monsieur Paon and the hotel guests he gave no
answer; he merely puffed out his cheeks, pushed aside those who had surrounded him, came out on the
landing, and began urinating copiously right on the stairs. Then he went back, lay down on his bed, and
fell asleep.
In the morning the hotel keeper called up Mrs. L., Falter’s sister, to warn her that her brother
had gone mad, and he was bundled off home, listless and half-asleep. The family doctor suggested it
was just a slight stroke and prescribed the correspondent treatment. But Falter did not get better. After
a time, it is true, he began walking about freely, and even whistling at times, and uttering loud insults,
and grabbing food the doctor had forbidden. However, the change remained. He was like a man who
had lost everything: respect for life, all interest in money and business, all customary and traditional
feelings, everyday habits, manners, absolutely everything. It was unsafe to let him go anywhere alone,
for, with a curiosity quite superficial and quickly forgotten but offensive to others, he would address
chance passersby, to discuss the origin of a scar on someone’s face or a statement, not addressed to
him, that he had overheard in a conversation between strangers. He would take an orange from a fruit
stand as he passed, and eat it unpeeled, responding with an indifferent half-smile to the jabber of the
fruit-woman who had run after him. When he grew tired or bored he would squat on the sidewalk
Turkish fashion and, for something to do, try to catch girls’ heels in his fist like flies. Once he
appropriated several hats, five felts and two panamas, which he had painstakingly collected in various
cafes, and there were difficulties with the police.
His case attracted the attention of a well-known Italian psychiatrist, who happened to have a
patient at Falter’s hotel. This Dr. Bonomini, a youngish man, was studying, as he himself would willingly
explain, «the dynamics of the psyche,» and sought to demonstrate in his works, whose popularity was
not confined to learned circles, that all psychic disorders could be explained by subliminal memories of
calamities that befell the patient’s forebears, and that if, for example, the subject were afflicted by
megalomania, to cure him completely it sufficed to determine which of his great-grandfathers was a
power-hungry failure, and explain to the great-grandson that the ancestor being dead had found eternal
peace, although in complex cases it was actually necessary to resort to theatrical representation, in
costumes of the period, depicting the specific demise of the ancestor whose role was assigned to the
patient. These tableaux vivants grew so fashionable that Bonomini was obliged to explain to the public
in print the dangers of staging them without his direct control.
Having questioned Falter’s sister, Bonomini established that the Falters did not know much
about their forebears; true, Ilya Falter had been addicted to drink; but since, according to Bonomini’s
theory, «the patient’s illness reflects only the distant past,» as, for instance, a folk epic «sublimates» only
remote occurrences, the details about Fal-ter pere were useless to him. Nevertheless he offered to try
to help the patient, hoping by means of clever questioning to make Falter himself produce the
explanation for his condition, after which the necessary Ancestors could become deducible of their own
accord; that an explanation did exist was confirmed by the fact that when Falter’s intimates succeeded
in penetrating his silence he would succinctly and dismis-sively allude to something quite out of the
ordinary that he had expe-rienced on that enigmatic night.
One day Bonomini closeted himself with Falter in the latter’s room, and, like the knower of
human hearts he was, with his horn-rimmed glasses and that hankie in his breast pocket, managed
apparently to get out of him an exhaustive reply about the cause of his nocturnal howls. Hypnotism
probably played its part in the business, for at the subse-quent inquest Falter insisted that he had
blabbed against his will, and that it rankled. He added, however, that never mind, sooner or later he
would have made the experiment anyway, but that now he would definitely never repeat it. Be that as it
may, the poor author of The Heroics of Insanity became the prey of Falter’s Medusa. Since the intimate
en-counter between doctor and patient seemed to be lasting abnormally lang, Eleonora L., Falter’s
sister, who had been knitting a gray shawl on the terrace, and for a long time already had not heard the
psychiatrist’s release-inducing, high-spirited, or falsely cajoling little tenor, which at first had been more
or less audible through the half-open French window, entered her brother’s room, and found him
examining with dull curiosity the alpine sanatoriums in a brochure that had probably been brought by
the doctor, while the doctor himself sprawled half on a chair and half on the carpet, with a gap of linen
showing between waistcoat and trousers, his short legs spread wide and his pale cafe-au-lait face
thrown back, felled, as was later determined, by heart failure. To the questions of the officiously
meddling police Falter replied absently and tersely; but, when he finally grew tired of this pestering, he
pointed out that, having accidentally solved «the riddle of the universe,» he had yielded to artful
exhortation and shared that solution with his inquisitive interlocutor, whereupon the latter had died of
astonishment. The local newspapers caught up the story, embellished it properly, and the person of
Falter, in the guise of a Tibetan sage, for several days nourished the not overparticular news columns.
But, as you know, during those days I did not read the papers: you were dying then. Now,
however, having heard the story of Falter in detail, I experienced a certain very strong and perhaps
slightly shame faced desire.
You understand, of course. In the condition I was in, people with out imagination—i.e., deprived
of its support and inquiry—turn to the advertisements of wonder-workers; to chiromancers in comedy
tur bans, who combine the magic business with a trade in rat poison or rubber sheaths; to fat, swarthy
women fortune-tellers; but particularly to spiritualists, who fake a still unidentified force by giving it the
milky features of phantoms and getting them to manifest themselves in silly physical ways. But I have
my share of imagination, and therefore two possibilities existed: the first was my work, my art, the
consolation of my art; the second consisted of taking the plunge and believing that a person like Falter,
rather average when you come down to it, despite a shrewd mind’s parlor games, and even a little
vulgar, had actually and conclusively learned that at which no seer, no sorcerer had ever arrived.
My art? You remember him, don’t you, that strange Swede or Dane—or Icelander, for all I
know—anyway, that lanky, orange-tanned blond fellow with the eyelashes of an old horse, who
introduced him self to me as «a well-known writer,» and, for a price that gladdened you (you were
already confined to your bed and unable to speak, bin would write me funny trifles with colored chalk
on slate—for instance, that the things you liked most in life were «verse, wildflowers, and for eign
currency»), commissioned me to make a series of illustrations for the epic poem Ultima Thule, which he
had just composed in his Ian guage. Of course there could be no question of my acquainting myself
thoroughly with his manuscript, since French, in which we agonizingly communicated, was known to him
mostly by hearsay, and he was un able to translate his imagery for me. I managed to understand only
that his hero was some Northern king, unhappy and unsociable; that his kingdom, amid the sea mists,
on a melancholy and remote island, was plagued by political intrigues of some kind, assassinations, insur
rections, and that a white horse which had lost its rider was flying along the misty heath…. He was
pleased with my first blanc et noir sample, and we decided on the subjects of the other drawings. As he
did not turn up in a week as he had promised, I called his hotel, and learned that he had left for America.
I concealed my employer’s disappearance from you, but did not go on with the drawings; then
again, you were already so ill
