youth without youth

By MIRCEA ELIADE

the university of chicago press

Copyright © 1981ditions Gallimard
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-20415-4

Chapter One

Only when he heard the bell of the Metropolian Church did he remember that it was the night of Easter. And suddenly the rain seemed unnatural - the rain which had greeted him as he had emerged from the railway station and which threatened to become torrential. He made his way forward hastily with the umbrella brought down to his shoulders, his eyes downcast, trying to avoid the rivulets. Without realizing it, he began to run, holding the umbrella close to his chest, like a shield. But after some twenty meters he saw the traffic signal turn red, and he had to stop. He waited nervously, standing on tiptoe, hopping from one foot to the other continually, looking in consternation at the little pond that covered a good part of the boulevard directly in front of him. The traffic light changed, and in the next moment he was shaken, blinded by an explosion of white incandescent light. He felt as though he had been sucked up by a fiery cyclone that had exploded at some mysterious moment on top of his head. A close strike of lightning, he said to himself, blinking with difficulty to unseal his eyelids. He did not understand why he was clutching the handle of his umbrella so hard. The rain lashed at him wildly from all sides at once, and yet he felt nothing. Then he heard the bell at the Metropolian again, and all the other bells, and very close by still another, striking in a solitary, desperate way. I've had a fright, he said to himself, and he began to shiver. It's because of the water, he realized a few moments later, becoming aware of the fact that he was lying in the puddle near the curb. I've taken a chill....

"I saw the lightning strike him," he heard the breathless voice of a frightened man saying. "I don't know if he's still alive or not. I was looking over there, where he was standing under the traffic signal, and I saw him light up from head to toe - umbrella, hat, coat, all at once! If it hadn't been for the rain, he would have been burnt to a crisp. I don't know if he's still alive or not."

"And even if he's still alive, what can we do with him?" The voice seemed to come from far away and it sounded to him tired, bitter.

"Who knows what sins he's committed, that God would strike him on the very night of Easter, right behind a church!" Then, after a pause, he added, "Let's see what the intern says about it."

It seemed strange to him that he felt nothing, that he did not, in fact, feel his body at all. He knew from the conversation of those around him that he had been moved. But how had he been transported? In their arms? On a stretcher? On a cart of some sort? ...

"I don't believe he has a chance," he heard another voice saying later, also far away. "Not a single centimeter of his skin is untouched. I don't understand how he stays alive. Normally, he would have been ..."

Of course, everybody knows that. If you have lost more than fifty percent of your skin, you die of asphyxia. But he realized quickly that it was ridiculous and humiliating to reply mentally to the people bustling around him. He would have liked not to have had to hear them, just as, with his eyes shut tight, he did not see them. And at the same moment he found himself far away, happy, as he had been then.

"And then, what else happened," she asked him in jest, smiling. "What other tragedy?"

"I didn't say it was a tragedy, but in a sense it was that: to conceive a passion for science, to have but one desire - to dedicate your life to science."

"To which science are you referring?" she interrupted him. "To mathematics or to the Chinese language?"

"To both - and to all the others I've discovered and fallen in love with, insofar as I've learned about them."

She put her hand on his arm to keep him from getting angry at being interrupted again. "Mathematics I understand, because if you didn't have a vocation for it, it would be useless to persevere. But Chinese?"

He didn't know why he burst into laughter. Probably he was amused by the way she had said, "But Chinese?"

"I thought I'd told you. Two years ago in the fall when I was in Paris I went to a lecture by Chavannes. I saw him after class in his office; he asked me how long I'd been studying Chinese and how many other Oriental languages I knew. No need to repeat the whole conversation. I understood just one thing: that if I didn't master in a few years - in a few years - Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Japanese, I would never become a great orientalist."

"All right, but you must have told him that you wanted to study only the Chinese language."

"That's what I said, but I didn't persuade him. Because even in that case I'd still have to learn Japanese and a lot of South Asian languages and dialects.... But this wasn't the important thing; it was something else. When I told him I'd been studying Chinese for five months, he stepped to a blackboard and wrote some twenty characters. He asked me to pronounce them one by one, and then to translate the passage. I pronounced them as best I could, and I translated some, but not all, of them. He smiled amiably. 'That's not bad,' he said, 'But if after five months ... How many hours a day?' 'At least six hours,' I replied. 'Then the Chinese language is not for you. Probably you don't have the necessary visual memory.... My dear sir,' he added with a smile that was ambiguous, affectionate, and ironic at the same time, 'My dear sir, in order to master Chinese you must have the memory of a Mandarin, a photographic memory. If you don't have it, you will be obliged to make an effort three or four times as great. I don't believe it's worth it.' 'So, basically it's a matter of memory.' 'Of a photographic memory,' he repeated gravely, emphasizing the words."

He heard the door opening and closing several times and other noises, including strange voices.

"Let's see what the Professor says. If you ask me, I'd say that frankly ..."

The same thing, over and over again! But he liked the voice; it was, no doubt, that of a young doctor, clever and enthusiastic about his profession, generous.

"... His skin was burned one hundred percent, and yet he's survived twelve hours, and so far as we can tell, he's not in pain.... Have you given him any shots?"

"One, this morning. I thought he groaned. But maybe he was just moaning in his sleep."

"Do you know anything about him? Was anything found beside him?"

"Just the handle of the umbrella. The rest was incinerated. Curious - the handle, of all things, a wooden handle.... The clothes were turned to ashes. What the rain didn't wash away was saved in the ambulance."

He knew it would have had to be that way, and yet hearing the intern say it lifted his spirits. So, the two envelopes in his pocket had been incinerated, too....

Without intending to, because he had not been careful to close the door completely behind him, he had overheard: "The Old Man's getting quite decrepit! He told us the same thing three or four times."

It was true. He had been impressed by the news he had read in La Fiera Letteraria, that Papini was almost blind and no surgeon dared to operate on him. For a ravenous and indefatigable reader like Papini, this was an unparalleled tragedy. That is why he kept talking about it all the time. But perhaps Vaian was right: I am beginning to get decrepit.

Then he heard the voice again. "And what other tragedy befell you? You gave up the Chinese language. What else?"

"As a matter of fact, I didn't give it up; I continued to learn ten or fifteen characters per day, but this was mostly for my pleasure and because it helped me to understand the translations of the texts I read. Actually, I was a dilettante."

"So much the better," Laura interrupted him, placing her hand on his arm again. "There have to be a few intelligent men with enough imagination to enjoy the discoveries made by your great scholars. It's a good thing you dropped Chinese.... But what are the other tragedies you referred to?"

He looked at her a long time. She was far from being the best-looking female student he had known, but she was different. He did not understand what attracted him, why he sought her continually, going through the lecture halls where he had not walked for three or four years, since he had taken his Degree. He knew he would always find her at Titu Maiorescu's class. There he had met her an hour ago, and, as usual, when he escorted her to her home, they had stopped to sit on a bench beside a lake in Cismigiu.

"What are the other tragedies?" she repeated, maintaining her calm, smiling gaze.

"I told you that while I was still in the lyce, I was fond of mathematics and music, but I also liked history, archeology, and philosophy. I wanted to study them all; obviously, not as a specialist, but still rigorously, working directly from texts, because I have a horror of improvisation and hearsay learning."

She interrupted him, raising her arms in a boyish gesture.

"You're the most ambitious man I've ever met! The most ambitious and the most driven! Driven, especially!"

He knew the voices well, and had learned to distinguish them. There were three nurses by day and two at night.

"If he had any luck, he'd die now. Because they say that whoever dies during the Week of Light goes straight to Paradise."

She has a good soul; she pities me. She's better than the others because she's thinking about my salvation. ... But what if she gets the idea of pulling the I.V. needle out of my vein? Probably I'd survive till morning when the intern comes. And if he doesn't notice it, the Professor will. The Professor is the only one who's in despair and humiliated over the fact that he doesn't understand; the only one who wants at all costs to keep me alive, to find out what happened. He had heard him one day - no use asking when - he had heard him talking after he had touched his eyelids with infinite care:

"The eye seems intact, but if he's blind or not, I don't know. I don't know anything, in fact...."

He had heard this also: "I don't even know if he's conscious or not, if he hears or if he understands what he hears." It wasn't his fault. Several times before that he had recognized the voice and had understood it perfectly. "If you understand what I say," the Professor shouted, "squeeze my finger." But he could not feel his finger. He would have liked to squeeze it, but he didn't know how.

That time the Professor added, "If we can succeed in keeping him alive another five days ..."

In five days, one of his assistants found out, the great specialist from Paris, Professor Gilbert Bernard, would come to Bucharest en route to Athens.

"Especially, ambitious!" Laura repeated. "You want to be what all those other people are: philologist, orientalist, archeologist, historian, and who knows what else. That is, you want to live a strange life, a different life, instead of being yourself, Dominic Matei, and cultivating your own genius exclusively."

"My genius?" he exclaimed with a pretended modesty in order to hide his delight. "That presupposes I have genius!"

"In a sense, certainly, you do have it. You don't resemble anyone I have ever met. You live life and understand it differently from us."

"But up to now, at age twenty-six, I haven't accomplished anything. I've just taken all the exams and passed with good marks. I haven't discovered anything, not even an original interpretation of Canto XI of Purgatorio, which I have translated and written a commentary on."

"Why would you have to discover something? Your genius ought to be to fulfill yourself in the life you live, not in original analyses, discoveries, and interpretations. Your model ought to be Socrates or Goethe; but imagine a Goethe without a written opus!"

"I don't exactly understand," he said.

"Do you understand everything?" asked the Professor.

"I don't understand you very well, especially when you speak fast."

He understood very well. The Professor's French was impeccable; without doubt he had taken his doctorate in Paris. He seemed to speak more precisely and elegantly than the great specialist. Bernard was, probably, of foreign origin. But he guessed from his slow, hesitating sentences that - as Vaian had said about their last director, whenever he had had to make a grave decision quickly-he did not dare to express himself.

"When did you become convinced he's conscious?"

"Only the day before yesterday," said the Professor. "I had tried several times before to get a response, but without result."

"And you're sure he squeezed your finger? You felt him squeeze it in response to your question? Couldn't it have been a reflex gesture, involuntary and therefore without significance?"

"I repeated the experiment several times. Try it yourself, if you wish, and you'll be convinced."

He sensed, as at so many times in the past few days, a finger introduced gently, with exaggerated precaution, beneath his own fingers drawn up in a fist. Then he heard the Professor's voice: "If you understand what I am saying, squeeze my finger!" He must have squeezed it with sufficient force, because Dr. Bernard withdrew it quickly, surprised. But a few moments later, after whispering, "Traduisez, s'il vous plait," he introduced it again and said, pronouncing the words clearly and slowly: "Celui qui vous parle est un mdecin franais. Accepteriez-vous qu'il vous pose quelques questions?" Before the Professor had finished translating, he squeezed the finger as hard as before. This time the doctor did not withdraw it, but asked, "Vous comprenez le franais?" He repeated the squeezing, but with less conviction. After hesitating a few moments, Dr. Bernard asked, "Voulez-vous qu'on vous abandonne votre sort?" With great delight, he kept his whole hand inert, as if it were a plaster cast. "Vous prfrez qu'on s'occupe de vous?" He squeezed hard. "Voulez-vous qu'on donne du chloroforme?" He immobilized his hand again, and kept it that way, without the slightest twitch, while listening to the final questions: "Etes-vous Jsus-Christ? Voulez-vous jouer du piano? Ce matin, avez-vous bu du champagne?"

That night, everyone stood with champagne glasses in hand, surrounding them and shouting at them with a sad, mediocre lack of modesty that surprised them both: "Don't drink any more champagne till you get to Venice, or you'll be sick!"

"I was afraid that they drank more champagne than they should have," said Laura, after the train had left the station.

Then he heard the Professor's voice: "Let's try one more time. Perhaps he didn't understand your questions properly. I'll question him in Romanian." And he continued, raising his voice. "We wish to find out your age. For every ten years squeeze my finger once."

He squeezed it, harder and harder, six times; then, without understanding why, he stopped.

"Sixty years?" marveled the Professor. "I'd have thought less."

"In this larval state," he heard the voice of Dr. Bernard saying, "it is hard to estimate. Ask him if he's tired, if we can continue."

They continued the dialogue for another half hour, learning by this means that he did not live in Bucharest, that he had only one relative, a distant one, whom he did not care to inform about the accident, that he would accept any test no matter how hazardous, to verify whether the optic nerve was damaged. Fortunately, they did not ask any more questions, because if they had he probably would not have listened to them. The blindness that threatened Papini had been the first sign. He had told himself, that week, that perhaps it was not a matter of the inevitable decrepitude of old age, that if he repeated the story of Papini (Papini, on whom no surgeon dared to operate), he did it because the tragedy of one of his favorite writers preoccupied him. But soon he realized he was trying to deceive himself. One year before that, Doctor Neculache had acknowledged that, for the time being, arteriosclerosis was incurable. The doctor had not told him that arteriosclerosis was threatening him, but he had added: "At a certain age, you can expect anything. I myself am losing my memory," he continued, smiling sadly. "From a certain time, I've been unable to memorize the verses of younger poets whom I discover and like."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from youth without youthby MIRCEA ELIADE Copyright © 1981 by ditions Gallimard . Excerpted by permission.
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