Fantastic Tales Page 5
Because of his own joy, Ubaldo did not realize that his friend was trembling more and more strongly with each of his words. Raimundo stared at him and his wife with wild eyes. Suddenly, he recognized his friend and the beloved of his youth, illuminated by the flickering flame of the fireplace. “Lost, all lost!” he exclaimed tragically. He pulled free of Ubaldo’s arms and fled quickly into the night toward the forest.
“Yes, everything is lost, and my love and all my life are nothing more than a long illusion,” he said to himself as he ran, until the lights of Ubaldo’s castle disappeared behind him. Without realizing it, he went in the direction of his own castle, which he reached at daybreak.
He entered the garden. It was deserted and ruined. Only a few late flowers shone here and there over the yellowish grass. On a branch, a bird was singing a marvelous song that filled the heart with great nostalgia.
It was the same melody he’d heard at the windows of Ubaldo’s castle. Terrified, he recognized as well the beautiful and golden bird of the enchanted forest. Standing at a window in the castle was a tall, pale man, stained with blood. It was Ubaldo’s image.
Horrified, Raimundo cast his eyes from that vision and fixed them instead on the brightness of the morning. Suddenly, he saw advancing through the valley the beautiful damsel, riding on a spirited stallion. She was in the flower of her youth. Silvery threads of summer floated on her back; the gem in her diadem cast from her brow rays of green gold on the plain.
Raimundo, driven mad, left the garden and followed the sweet figure, preceded by the bird’s strange song.
The further he advanced, the more the song transformed into the old melody of the hunting horns, which in another time had seduced him.
My golden curls wave
And my young body sweetly flowers.
He heard, as if it were an echo in the distance:
And the streams that in the silent valley
Go their way whispering …
His castle, the mountains, and the entire world all sank behind him.
And the warm greeting of love,
The echo of the hunting horns offers you.
Come sweet love, before they fall silent! …
resounded once again.
Overcome by madness, poor Raimundo followed after the melody through the depth of the forest. From that day on, he was never seen again.
E. T. A. HOFFMANN
The Sandman
(Der Sandmann, 1817)
Hoffmann’s most famous story, “The Sandman,” was the principal source for Offenbach’s opera and the point of departure for an essay by Freud on the unheimlich. To choose one story from the many Hoffmann wrote is difficult: if I choose “The Sandman” it is not to confirm the most obvious choice, but because to me this tale seems to be the most representative of the greatest author in this genre in the nineteenth century (1776–1822), the richest in terms of suggestiveness, and the one with the most narrative content. The discovery of the unconscious takes place here, in Romantic fantastic literature, almost 100 years before the first theoretical definition of it appears.
Nathanael’s infantile nightmares are still with him as an adult: he identifies the bogeyman his nanny evoked to threaten him into falling asleep with Coppelius the lawyer, a sinister friend of his father, and convinces himself that Coppelius is the ogre who plucks out the eyes of children. While a student in the city, he thinks he discovers Coppelius in Coppola, a man from the Piedmont who sells barometers and eye aglasses. His love for Professor Spalanzani’s daughter Olimpia, who is not a girl despite what everyone thinks and is in point of fact a mannequin (this theme of the automaton, the doll, will frequently reappear in fantastic literature), is upset by new appearances by Coppola-Coppelius until Nathanael’s madness runs its course.
NATHANAEL TO LOTHAIR
I KNOW YOU are all very uneasy because I have not written for such a long, long time. Mother, to be sure, is angry, and Clara, I dare say, believes I am living here in riot and revelry, and quite forgetting my sweet angel, whose image is so deeply engraved upon my heart and mind. But that is not so; daily and hourly I think of you all, and my lovely Clara’s form comes to gladden me in my dreams, and smiles upon me with her bright eyes, as graciously as she used to do in the days when I used to associate daily with you.
Oh! how could I write to you in the distracted state of mind in which I have been, and which, until now, has quite bewildered me! A terrible thing has happened to me. Dark forebodings of some awful fate threatening me are spreading themselves out over my head like black clouds, impenetrable to every friendly ray of sunlight. I must now tell you what has taken place; I must, that I see well enough, but only to think of it makes the wild laughter burst from my lips. Oh! my dear, dear Lothair, what shall I say to make you feel, if only in an inadequate way, that what happened to me a few days ago could thus really exercise such a hostile and disturbing influence upon my life? I wish you were here to see for yourself! But now you will, I suppose, take me for a superstitious ghost-seer. In a word, the terrible thing which I have experienced, the fatal effect of which I in vain exert every effort to shake off, is simply that some days ago, namely, on the thirtieth of October, at twelve o’clock at noon, a peddler of weather glasses and thermometers came into my room and wanted to sell me one of his wares. I bought nothing, and threatened to kick him downstairs, whereupon he went away of his own accord.
You will conclude that it can only be very peculiar relations—relations intimately intertwined with my life—that can give significance to this event, and that it must be the peddler himself who had such a very unpleasant effect upon me. And so it really is. I will summon up all my faculties in order to narrate to you calmly and patiently enough about the early days of my youth to put matters before you in such a way that your keen sharp intellect can grasp everything clearly and distinctly, in bright and living pictures.
Just as I am beginning, I hear you laugh and Clara say, “What’s all this childish nonsense about?” Well, laugh at me, laugh heartily at me, pray do. But, good God! my hair is standing on end, and I seem to be entreating you to laugh at me in the same sort of frantic despair in which Franz Moor [in Schiller’s Die Räuber] entreated Daniel to laugh him to scorn. But to my story.
Except at dinner we, i.e., I and my brothers and sisters, saw little of our father all day long. His business no doubt took up most of his time. After our evening meal, which usually was served at seven o’clock, we all went, mother with us, into father’s room, and took our places around a round table. My father smoked his pipe, drinking a large glass of beer at the same time. Often he told us many wonderful stories, and got so excited over them that his pipe would go out; I used then to light it for him with a spill, and this formed my chief amusement. Often, again, he would give us picture books to look at, while he sat silent and motionless in his easy chair, puffing out such dense clouds of smoke that we were all as it were enveloped in mist.
On such evenings mother was very sad; and as soon as it struck nine she said, “Come, children! off to bed! Come! The Sandman is come, I see.” And I always did seem to hear something trampling upstairs with slow heavy steps; that must be the Sandman. Once in particular I was very much frightened at this dull trampling and knocking; as mother was leading us out of the room I asked her, “O mamma! who is this nasty Sandman who always sends us away from papa? What does he look like?”
“There is no Sandman, my dear,” mother answered; “when I say the Sandman is come, I only mean that you are sleepy and can’t keep your eyes open, as if somebody had put sand in them.” This answer of mother’s did not satisfy me; nay, in my childish mind the thought clearly unfolded itself that mother denied there was a Sandman only to prevent us from being afraid,—why, I always heard him come upstairs.
Full of curiosity to learn something more about this Sandman and what he had to do with us children, I finally asked the old woman who acted as my youngest sister’s nurse, what sort of man he was—the Sandman?
After this I formed in my own mind a horrible picture of the cruel Sandman. When anything came blundering upstairs at night I trembled with fear and dismay; and all that my mother could get out of me were the stammered words “The Sandman! the Sandman!” whilst the tears coursed down my cheeks. Then I ran into my bedroom, and the whole night through tormented myself with the terrible apparition of the Sandman. I was quite old enough to perceive that the old woman’s tale about the Sandman and his little ones’ nest in the half-moon couldn’t be altogether true; nevertheless the Sandman continued to be for me a fearful incubus, and I was always seized with terror—my blood always ran cold, not only when I heard anybody come up the stairs, but when I heard anybody noisily open the door to my father’s room and go in. Often the Sandman stayed away for a long time altogether; then he would come several times in close succession.
This went on for years, without my being able to accustom myself to this fearful apparition, without the image of the horrible Sandman growing any fainter in my imagination. His intercourse with my father began to occupy my fancy ever more and more; I was restrained from asking my father about him by an unconquerable shyness; but as the years went on the desire waxed stronger and stronger within me to fathom the mystery myself and to see the fabulous Sandman. He had been the means of disclosing to me the path of the wonderful and the adventurous, which so easily find lodgment in the mind of the child. I liked nothing better than to hear or read horrible stories of goblins, witches, dwarfs, and so on; but always at the head of them all stood the Sandman, whose picture I scribbled in the most extraordinary and repulsive forms with both chalk and coal everywhere, on the tables, and cupboard doors, and walls.
When I was ten years old my mother removed me from the nursery into a little chamber off the corridor not far from my father’s room. We still had to withdraw hastily whenever, on the stroke of nine, the mysterious unknown was heard in the house. As I lay in my little chamber I could hear him go into father’s room, and soon afterwards I fancied there was a fine and peculiar smelling steam spreading itself through the house.
As my curiosity waxed stronger, my resolve to make the Sandman’s acquaintance somehow or other took deeper root. Often when my mother had gone past, I slipped quickly out of my room into the corridor, but I could never see anything, for always before I could reach the place where I could get sight of him, the Sandman was well inside the door. At last, unable to resist the impulse any longer, I determined to conceal myself in father’s room and wait there for the Sandman.
One evening I perceived from my father’s silence and mother’s sadness that the Sandman would come; accordingly, pleading that I was excessively tired, I left the room before nine o’clock and concealed myself in a hiding place close beside the door. The street door creaked, and slow, heavy, echoing steps crossed the passage towards the stairs. Mother hurried past me with my brothers and sisters. Softly—softly—I opened the door to father’s room. He sat as usual, silent and motionless, with his back towards the door; he did not hear me; and in a moment I was in and behind a curtain drawn before my father’s open wardrobe, which stood just inside the room. Nearer and nearer and nearer came the echoing footsteps. There was a strange coughing and shuffling and mumbling outside. My heart beat with expectation and fear. A quick step now close, close beside the door, a noisy rattle of the handle, and the door flies open with a bang. Recovering my courage with an effort, I take a cautious peep out. In the middle of the room in front of my father stands the Sandman, the bright light of the lamp falling full upon his face. The Sandman, the terrible Sandman, is the old lawyer Coppelius who often comes to dine with us.
But the most hideous figure could not have awakened greater trepidation in my heart than this Coppelius did. Picture to yourself a large broad-shouldered man, with an immensely big head, a face the colour of yellow ochre, gray bushy eyebrows, from beneath which two piercing, greenish, cat-like eyes glittered, and a prominent Roman nose hanging over his upper lip. His distorted mouth was often screwed up into a malicious sneer; then two dark-red spots appeared on his cheeks, and a strange hissing noise proceeded from between his tightly clenched teeth. He always wore an ash-gray coat of an old-fashioned cut, a waistcoat of the same, and nether extremities to match, but black stockings and buckles set with stones on his shoes. His little wig scarcely extended beyond the crown of his head, his hair was curled round high up above his big red ears, and plastered to his temples with cosmetic, and a broad closed hair-bag stood out prominently from his neck, so that you could see the silver buckle that fastened his folded neck-cloth. Altogether he was a most disagreeable and horribly ugly figure; but what we children detested most of all was his big coarse hairy hands; we could never fancy anything that he had once touched. This he had noticed; and so, whenever our good mother quietly placed a piece of cake or sweet fruit on our plates, he delighted to touch it under some pretext or other, until the tears stood in our eyes, and from disgust and loathing we lost the enjoyment of the tit-bit that was intended to please us. And he did just the same thing when father gave us a glass of sweet wine on holidays. Then he would quickly pass his hand over it, or even sometimes raise the glass to his blue lips, and he laughed quite sardonically when all we dared do was to express our vexation in stifled sobs. He habitually called us the “little brutes”; and when he was present we might not utter a sound; and we cursed the ugly spiteful man who deliberately and intentionally spoilt all our little pleasures.
Mother seemed to dislike this hateful Coppelius as much as we did; for as soon as he appeared, her cheerfulness and bright and natural manner were transformed into sad, gloomy seriousness. Father treated him as if he were a being of some higher race, whose ill manners were to be tolerated, while no efforts ought to be spared to keep him in good humour. Coppelius had only to give a slight hint, and his favourite dishes were cooked for him and rare wine uncorked.
As soon as I saw this Coppelius, therefore, the fearful and hideous thought arose in my mind that he, and he alone, must be the Sandman; but I no longer conceived of the Sandman as the bugbear in the old nurses fable, who fetched children’s eyes and took them to the half-moon as food for his little ones—no! but as an ugly spectre-like fiend bringing trouble and misery and ruin, both temporal and everlasting, everywhere he appeared.
I was spellbound on the spot. At the risk of being discovered, and as I well enough knew, of being severely punished, I remained as I was, with my head thrust through the curtains listening. My father received Coppelius in a ceremonious manner.
“Come, to work!” cried the latter, in a hoarse snarling voice, throwing off his coat. Gloomily and silently my father took off his dressing gown, and both put on long black smock-frocks. Where they took them from I forgot to notice. Father opened the folding doors of a cupboard in the wall; but I saw that what I had so long taken to be a cupboard was really a dark recess, in which was a little hearth. Coppelius approached it, and a blue flame crackled upwards from it. Round about were all kinds of strange utensils.
Good God! as my father bent down over the fire how different he looked! His gentle features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful convulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius. Coppelius plied the red-hot tongs and drew bright glowing masses out of the thick smoke and began assiduously to hammer them. I fancied that there were men’s faces visible round about, but without eyes, having ghastly deep black holes where the eyes should have been.
“Eyes here! Eyes here!” cried Coppelius, in a hollow sepulchral voice. My blood ran cold with
horror; I screamed and tumbled out of my hiding place onto the floor. Coppelius immediately seized me. “You little brute! You little brute!” he bleated, grinding his teeth. Then, snatching me up, he threw me on the hearth, so that the flames began to singe my hair. “Now we’ve got eyes—eyes—a beautiful pair of children’s eyes,” he whispered and, thrusting his hands into the flames he took out some red-hot grains and was about to throw them into my eyes.
Then my father clasped his hands and entreated him, saying, “Master, master, let my Nathanael keep his eyes—oh! let him keep them.” Coppelius laughed shrilly and replied, “Well then, the boy may keep his eyes and whine and pule his way through the world; but we will at any rate examine the mechanism of the hand and the foot.” And thereupon he roughly laid hold of me, so that my joints cracked, and twisted my hands and my feet, pulling them now this way, and now that, “That’s not quite right altogether! It’s better as it was!—the old fellow knew what he was about.” Thus lisped and hissed Coppelius; but all around me grew black and dark; a sudden convulsive pain shot through all my nerves and bones; I knew nothing more.
I felt a soft warm breath fanning my cheek; I awakened as if out of the sleep of death; my mother was bending over me. “Is the Sandman still here?” I stammered. “No, my dear child; he’s been gone a long, long time; he’ll not hurt you.” Thus spoke my mother, as she kissed her recovered darling and pressed him to her heart. But why should I tire you, my dear Lothair? why do I dwell at such length on these details, when there’s so much remains to be said? Enough—I was detected in my eavesdropping, and roughly handled by Coppelius. Fear and terror brought on a violent fever, of which I lay ill several weeks. “Is the Sandman still there?” these were the first words I uttered on coming to myself again, the first sign of my recovery, of my safety. Thus, you see, I have only to relate to you the most terrible moment of my youth for you to thoroughly understand that it must not be ascribed to the weakness of my eyesight if all that I see is colourless, but to the fact that a mysterious destiny has hung a dark veil of clouds about my life, which I shall perhaps only break through when I die.