Part 13 (1/2)
He was undoubtedly talking about anotherDamian,but something made me ask what the young mestizo was yelling.
”Curses,” the colonel said, ”which is what you yell in charges.”
”That may be,” saidAmaro,”but he was also yellingViva Urquiza! ”*
We fell silent. Finally, the colonel murmured: ”Not as though he was fighting at Masoller, but at Cagancha or IndiaMuerta,*a hundred years before.”
Then, honestly perplexed, he added: ”I commanded those troops, and I'd swear that this is the first time I've heard mention of anyDamian.”
We could not make him remember.
InBuenos Aires,another incident was to make me feel yet again that s.h.i.+ver that the colonel's forgetfulness had produced in me. Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Mitch.e.l.l's English bookshop, I came uponPatricioGannon one afternoon, standing before the eleven delectable volumes of the works of Emerson. I asked him how his translation of ”The Past” was going. He said he had no plans to translate it; Spanish literature was tedious enough already without Emerson. I reminded him that he had promised me the translation in the same letter in which he'd written me the news ofDamian'sdeath. He asked who this”Damian”was. I told him, but drew no response. With the beginnings of a sense of terror I saw that he was looking at mestrangely, so I bluffed my way into a literary argument about the sort of person who'd criticize Emerson -a poet more complex, more accom- plished, and unquestionably more remarkable, I contended, than poor Edgar AllanPoe.
There are several more events I should record. In April I had a letter fromCol. Dionisio Tabares;he was no longer confused-now he remem- bered quite well theEntre Rios boywho'd led the charge at Masoller and been buried by his men that night at the foot of the hill. In July I pa.s.sed throughGualeguaychu;I couldn't manage to findDamian'srun-down place-n.o.body remembered him anymore. I tried to consult the store- keeper, Diego Abaroa, who had seen him die; Abaroa had pa.s.sed away in the fall. I tried to call to mindDamian'sfeatures; months later, as I was brows- ing through some alb.u.ms, I realized that the somber face I had managed to call up was the face of the famous tenor Tamberlick, in the role of Otello.
I pa.s.s now to hypotheses. The simplest, but also the least satisfactory, posits twoDamians-the coward who died inEntre Riosin 1946, and the brave man who died at Masoller in 1904. The problem with that hypothesis is that it doesn't explain the truly enigmatic part of it all: the curious com- ings and goings of Col. Tabares' memory, the foregetfulness that wipes out the image and even the name of the man that was remembered such a short time ago. (I do not, cannot, accept the even simpler hypothesis-that I might have dreamed the first remembering.) More curious yet is thesuper- natural explanation offered byUlrike von Kuhlmann.PedroDamian,Ul- rikesuggests, died in the battle, and at the hour of his death prayed to G.o.d to return him toEntre Rios.G.o.d hesitated a second before granting that fa- vor, and the man who had asked it was already dead, and some men had seen him killed. G.o.d, who cannot change the past, although He can change the images of the past, changed the image of death into one of uncon- sciousness, and the shade of the man fromEntre Riosreturned to his nativeland. Returned, but we should recall that he was a shade, a ghost. He lived in solitude, without wife, without friends; he loved everything, possessed everything, but from a distance, as though from the other side of a pane of gla.s.s; he ”died,” but his gossamer image endured, like water within water. That hypothesis is not correct, but it ought to have suggested the true one (the one that today Ibelieve to be the true one), which is both simpler and more outrageous. I discovered it almost magically in Pier Damiani's trea- tise t.i.tledDe omnipotentia,which I sought out because of two lines from Canto XXI of theParadiso- two lines that deal with a problem of ident.i.ty. In the fifth chapter of his treatise, Pier Damiani maintains, against Aristotle and Fredegarius of Tours, that G.o.d can make what once existed never to have been. I read those old theological arguments and began to understand the tragic story of don PedroDamian.This is the way I imagine it: Damianbehaved like a coward on the field of Masoller, and he dedicated his life to correcting that shameful moment of weakness. He returned toEntreRios;he raised his hand against no man, he ”marked”
no one,* he sought no reputation for bravery, but in the fields ofnancay,dealing with the brushy wilderness and the skittish livestock, he hardened himself. Little by little he was preparing himself, unwittingly, for the miracle. Deep inside himself, he thought: If fate brings me another battle, I will know how to deserve it. For forty years he awaited that battle with vague hopefulness, and fate at last brought it to him, at the hour of his death. It brought it in the form of a delirium, but long ago the Greeks knew that we are the shadows of a dream. In his dying agony, he relived his battle, and he acquitted himself like a man - he led the final charge and took a bullet in the chest. Thus, in 1946, by the grace of his long-held pa.s.sion, PedroDamiandied in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between the winter and spring of the year 1904. TheSumma Theologicadenies that G.o.d can undo, unmake what once existed, but it says nothing about the tangled concatenation of causes and effects - which is so vast and so secret that it is possible that not asingle re- mote event can be annulled, no matter how insignificant, without canceling the present. To change the past is not to change a mere single event; it is to annul all its consequences, which tend to infinity. In other words: it is to create two histories of the world. In what we might call the first, PedroDamiandied inEntre Riosin 1946; in the second, he died at Masoller in 1904. This latter history is the one we are living in now, but the suppression of the former one was not immediate, and it produced the inconsistencies I have reported. InCol. Dionisio Tabareswe can see the various stages of thisprocess: at first he remembered thatDamianbehaved like a coward; then he totally forgot him; then he recalled his impetuous death. The case of the storekeeper Abaroa is no lessinstructive; he died, in my view, because he had too many memories of don PedroDamian.
As for myself, I don't think I run a similar risk. I have guessed at and recorded a process inaccessible to humankind, a sort of outrage to rational- ity; but there are circ.u.mstances that mitigate that awesome privilege. For the moment, I am not certain that I have always written the truth. I suspect that within my tale there are false recollections. I suspect that PedroDamian(if he ever existed) was not called PedroDamian,and that I re- member him under that name in order to be able to believe, someday in the future, that his story was suggested to me by the arguments ofPier Dami-ani.Much the same thing occurs with that poem that I mentioned in the first paragraph, the poem whose subject is the irrevocability of the past. In 1951 or thereabouts I will recall having concocted a tale of fantasy, but I will have told the story of a true event in much the way that naive Virgil, two thousand years ago, thought he was heralding the birth of a man though he had foretold the birth of G.o.d.
PoorDamian!Death carried him off at twenty in a war he knew noth- ing of and in a homemade sort of battle-yet though it took him a very long time to do so, he did at last achieve his heart's desire, and there is per- haps no greater happiness than that.
Deutsches Requiem
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.
Job 13:15
My name is Otto DietrichzurLinde.One of my forebears,Christoph zurLinde,died in the cavalry charge that decided the victory ofZorndorf.Dur- ing the last days of 1870, my maternal great-grandfather,Ulrich Forkel,was killed in the Marchenoir forest by French sharpshooters; Captain DietrichzurLinde,my father, distinguished himself in 1914 at the siege of Namur, and again two years later in the crossing of the Danube.
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tis significant thatzurLindehas omitted his most ill.u.s.trious forebear, the theo- logian and Hebraist Johannes Forkel (1799-1846), who applied Hegel's dialectics to Christology and whose literal translation of some of the Apocrypha earned him the censure of Hengstenberg and the praise ofThiloand Gesenius.[Ed.]
As for myself, I am to be shot as a torturer and a murderer. The court has acted rightly; from the first, I have confessed my guilt. Tomorrow, by the time the prison clock strikes nine, I shall have entered the realms of death; it is natural that I should think of my elders, since I am come so near their shadow- since, somehow, I am they.
During the trial (which fortunately was short) I did not speak; to ex- plain myself at that point would have put obstacles in the way of the verdict and made me appear cowardly. Now things have changed; on this night that precedes my execution, I can speak without fear. I have no desire to be par- doned, for I feel no guilt, but I do wish to be understood. Those who heed my words shall understand the history of Germany and the future history of the world. I know that cases such as mine, exceptional and shocking now, will very soon be unremarkable. Tomorrow I shall die, but I am a symbol of the generations to come.
I was born inMarienburg in1908. Two pa.s.sions, music and metaphysics, now almost forgotten, allowed me to face many terrible years with bravery and even happiness. I cannot list all my benefactors, but there are two names I cannot allow myself to omit: Brahms and Schopenhauer. Fre- quently, I also repaired to poetry; to those two names, then, I would add an- other colossal Germanic name: William Shakespeare. Early on, theology had held some interest for me, but I was forever turned from that fantastic discipline (and from Christianity) by Schopenhauer with his direct argu- ments and Shakespeare and Brahms with the infinite variety of their worlds. I wish anyone who is held in awe and wonder, quivering with ten- derness and grat.i.tude, transfixed by some pa.s.sage in the work of these blessed men- anyone so touched-to know that I too was once transfixed like them-I the abominable.
Nietzsche andSpenglerentered my life in 1927. A certain eighteenth-century author observes that no man wants to owe anything to his contem- poraries; in order to free myself from an influence that I sensed tobe oppressive, I wrote an article t.i.tled”Abrechnung mit Spengler,”wherein I pointed out that the most unequivocal monument to those characteristics that the author called Faustian wasnot Goethe's miscellaneous drama2
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Other nations live naively, in and for themselves, like minerals or meteors; Ger- many is the universal mirror that receives all others-the conscience of the world(dasWeltbewutsein).Goethe is the prototype of that ec.u.menical mind. I do not criticize him, but I do not see him as the Faustian man of Spengler's treatise.
but rather a poem written twenty centuries ago, theDe rerumnatures*I did, however, give just due to the sincerity of our philosopher of history, his radi- cally German(kerndeutsch)and military spirit. In 1929 I joined the party.
I shall say little about my years of apprentices.h.i.+p. They were harder for me than for many others, for in spite of the fact that I did not lackvalor, I felt no calling for violence. I did, however, realize that we were on the threshold of a new age, and that that new age, like the first years of Islam or Christianity, demanded new men. As individuals, my comrades were odious to me; I strove in vain to convince myself that for the high cause that had brought us all together, we were not individuals.
Theologians claim that if the Lord's attention were to stray for even one second from my right hand, which is now writing, that hand would be plunged into nothingness, as though it had been annihilated by a lightless fire. No one can exist, say I, no one can sip a gla.s.s of water or cut off a piece of bread, without justification. That justification is different for every man;I awaited the inexorable war that would test our faith. It was enough for me to know that I would be a soldier in its battles. I once feared that we would be disappointed by the cowardice of England and Russia. Chance (or des- tiny) wove a different future for me-on March 1, 1939, at nightfall, there were riots in Tilsit, which the newspapers did not report; in the street be- hind the synagogue, two bullets pierced my leg, and it had to be ampu- tated.
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It is rumored that the wound had extremely serious consequences.[Ed.]
Days later, our armies entered Bohemia; when the sirens announced the news, I was in that sedentary hospital, trying to lose myself, forget my- self, in the books of Schopenhauer. On the windowsill slept a ma.s.sive, obese cat-the symbol of my vain destiny.
In the first volume ofParergaundParalipomena,I read once more that all things that can occur to a man, from the moment of his birth to the mo- ment of his death, have been predetermined by him. Thus, all inadvertence is deliberate, every casual encounter is an engagement made beforehand, every humiliation is an act of penitence, every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more cunning consolation than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes; that individual theology reveals a secret order, and in a marvelous way confuses ourselves with the deity. What unknown purpose (I thought) had made me seek out that eve- ning, those bullets, this mutilation? Not the fear of war-I knew that; some- thing deeper. At last I believed I understood. To die for a religion is simpler than living that religion fully; battling savage beasts in Ephesus is less diffi- cult (thousands of obscure martyrs did it) than being Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ; a single act is quicker than all the hours of a man. The battle and the glory areeasy; Raskolnikov's undertaking was more difficult than Napoleon's. On February 7, 1941, I was madesubdirectorof the Tarnowitz concentration camp.
Carrying out the duties attendant on that position was not something I enjoyed, but I never sinned by omission. The coward proves himself among swords; the merciful man, the compa.s.sionate man, seeks to be tested by jails and others' pain. n.a.z.ism is intrinsically amoral act, a stripping away of the old man, which is corrupt and depraved, in order to put on the new. In bat- tle, amid the captains' outcries and the shouting, such a transformation is common; it is not common in a crude dungeon, where insidious compas - sion tempts us with ancient acts of tenderness. I do not write that word ”compa.s.sion” lightly: compa.s.sion on the part of the superior man isZarathustra's ultimate sin. I myself (I confess) almost committed it when the famous poet David Jerusalem was sent to us from Breslau.
Jerusalem was a man of fifty; poor in the things of this world, perse- cuted, denied, calumniated, he had consecrated his genius to hymns of hap- piness. I think I recall that in theDichtung der Zeit, AlbertSorgelcompared him to Whitman. It is not a happy comparison: Whitman celebrates the uni- versea priori, in a way that is general and virtually indifferent; Jerusalem takes delight in every smallest thing, with meticulous and painstaking love. He never stoops to enumerations, catalogs. I can still recite manyhexameters from that profound poem t.i.tled ”Tse Yang, Painter of Tigers,” which is virtu- ally striped with tigers, piled high with transversal, silent tigers, riddled through and through with tigers. Nor shall I ever forget the soliloquy”RosenkranzTalks with the Angel,” in which a sixteenth-century London moneylender tries in vain, as he is dying, to exculpate himself, never suspect- ing that the secret justification for his life is that he has inspired one of his clients (who has seen him only once, and has no memory even of that) to create the character Shylock. A man of memorable eyes, sallow skin, and a beard that was almost black, David Jerusalem was the prototypical Sephardic Jew, although he belonged to the depraved and hated Ashken.a.z.im. I was severe with him; I let neither compa.s.sion nor his fame make me soft. I had realized many years before I met David Jerusalem that everything in the world can be the seed of a possible h.e.l.l; a face, a word, a compa.s.s, an adver- tis.e.m.e.nt for cigarettes-anything can drive a person insane if that person cannot manage to put it out of his mind. Wouldn't a man be mad if he con- stantly had before his mind's eye the map of Hungary? I decided to apply this principle to the disciplinary regimen of our house, and .. .
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