“As for you, my son,” the Austrian would answer calmly, as though reciting a part, “may the Jacobin devils bless you in hell.”
“You’re an altar licker, admit it,” D’Avenat would say.
“And wouldn’t you like to lick them yourself, if the priests let you? I can think of other things you’d lick too, only they won’t let you. They’ll have nothing to do with the French. But I hear you’re opening a synagogue in a wing of the Imperial French Consulate.”
“No, we are not. Why should we? It’s more amusing for us to go to church at Dolats and watch His Excellency the Imperial-Royal Consul-General and his esteemed interpreter being altar boys to Fra Ivo.”
“Why not? I can do that too.”
“Yes, I know. You would do anything. But there’s one thing you can’t do—you can’t grow any more.”
“No, I can’t, you’re right,” the hunchback said without batting an eyelid. “But I’ve stopped worrying about it since I got to know your bulk. Oh, when I think how long you’re going to be when rigor mortis sets in! They’ll have a job finding a coffin big enough so your feet won’t stick out.”
“Well, I hope to see you out first. And I’ll spare no trouble or expense to get you a nice little box this size”—and D’Avenat spread his hands about a yard wide.
“Not yet, nothing doing. I don’t feel a bit like dying. No chance of that as long as you’re not my doctor.”
“And a fat chance I’d ever be. Mark my words, the plague will be your doctor one of these days!”
“At least it won’t charge a fee for killing me. True, it’s not as efficient as you are. It lets a man live here and there, which is something you never do.”
And so they went on until both broke out in grins, eyeing each other brazenly. These tête-à-têtes always took place unwitnessed and came to be a sort of respite and exercise for the two interpreters. And they wound up their conversation in French, once more polite and formal. And watching them take leave of each other with a low doffing of hats, the people of Travnik drew all sorts of conclusions about the long and friendly chat of these representatives of two great Christian powers.
With everyone else in town Rotta was always the same: insolent, dour, suspicious, matter of fact, and to the point.
Born at Trieste, Rotta was the twelfth child of a poor bootmaker, Giovanni Scarparotta, who had died an alcoholic’s death. This twelfth child of his was born stunted, ugly, and with a hump; he was so sickly during the first months of his life that they kept a lighted candle over him and once even bathed him and prepared him for the funeral. But when the tiny, pale boy with the hump began to go to school, it was apparent that he was the brightest of all his family and would go further and do better than either his father or his grandfather. And while all the other brothers, big healthy boys, went to sea as sailors or learned crafts or took up those indeterminate jobs by which the Triestinos manage to live as if they were real work, the boy hunchback went to work in the office of a shipping company.
Here the taciturn weakling, with large eyes and a sensitive mouth in a pale face, distributed mail and cut quills, and saw for the first time what the life of gentlemen was like, in spacious airy rooms, the life of well-bred folk in settled and comfortable circumstances, where voices were pitched low and the social round full of amenities, where food, clothing, and other daily needs were never in doubt but were taken for granted, where all thoughts and striving were on a level far above these, directed toward other, higher, more distant goals. The boy privately compared this life, which he was able to glimpse only in daytime on his rounds of the office, with the crowding, squalor, and poverty of his father’s home, with the bickering, spite, and coarseness in his own family and among the neighbors. The comparison made him feel wretched. Now that he’d learned the existence of that other life, he could never again tolerate the abject poverty into which he had been born and in which he was supposed to spend the remainder of his life; and one night, just before dawn, after lying awake many hours with these thoughts, the boy threw off the rags in which he slept, which now filled him with unspeakable revulsion, and, kneeling on the floor, his face dissolved in tears, he swore, not knowing what or to whom, that he would either escape this life of his people or stop living altogether.
There, by his side, the horde of his brothers was fast asleep—younger and older, exhausted apprentices or unwashed, sun-blackened loafers, covered with the same rags as himself. He felt no kinship or brotherly affection for them, but saw them as a pack of ugly slaves among whom he would choke, from whom he must run as soon as possible, forever, at any price.
From that day on, the boy with the hump turned his face wholly toward the better, higher life on the other side. He worked obediently and with his whole heart and soul, anticipating his master’s wishes, learning, watching, listening, and strained desperately to find the key to that easier, finer life and to learn to wield it. A deep, powerful yearning to attain it and make it his own drove him forward; and from behind he was prodded, no less effectively, by an unforgiving hate of that other, hideous life in his parents’ house and by his abomination of everything connected with it.
So much zeal and energy could not go unnoticed and unrewarded. The youth was gradually trained to do clerical work. He was given small assignments on the ships and with the authorities. He showed himself discreet, tireless, and possessing a flair for languages and a faultless handwriting. His superiors began to notice him. They gave him an opportunity to learn German and raised his salary. He took French lessons from a royalist refugee. The old gentleman, who was paralyzed and forced to maintain himself by tutoring, had once belonged to good and cultivated Parisian society; he instructed young Nicholas Scarparotta in a good many other things besides the languages, such as geography, history, and those other subjects that, in his words, constituted “knowledge of the world.”
As soon as he had achieved this, the youth quite coolly and casually left his parents’ home in the poor quarter and rented himself a modest but clean furnished room kept by a widow. It was his first decisive move toward that better world that was waiting to be conquered.
Little by little, he made himself indispensable in the company’s offices, with the arriving ships, and in dealings with foreigners. He could express himself fluently and easily in five languages; he knew in detail all the procedures of the pertinent government offices throughout the Empire, and the titles of most officials. He memorized everything other people found it too much trouble to remember, but which they needed every minute of the day. And with it all he remained quiet and discreet, modest in his personal needs and demands, always ready to help, never in anyone’s way.
That was how Major Kalcher, the commanding officer of Trieste, noticed him. The young hunchback had done him several favors and given him useful information about foreigners who came and went in the company’s ships. And when the Major was transferred to Zemun, he asked the young man, a few months later, to come serve in the Zemun garrison command as interpreter and intelligence agent. The bootmaker’s son, who had fled one kind of world and was trying to get a grip on another, saw in this call the writing of destiny and a welcome opportunity to remove himself physically from the scene of parental poverty, not many streets away from where he lived.
So the young man came to Zemun, where he soon distinguished himself by his skills and ambition. He crossed over to Belgrade on confidential errands and interviewed foreigners in the quarantine—he had lately learned Greek and Spanish as well. Here the son of the Triestine cobbler, determined to erase all trace of his origin, dropped “Scarpa” from his name and became “Rotta”; for a while he even signed himself “de Rotta.” It was here too that he married a Levantine girl, daughter of an export merchant from Istanbul, who had come to visit some relatives at Zemun. Her father had been born at Istanbul, though his family originally came from Dalmatia; her mother was Greek.
The girl was pretty, quiet, plump, and brought a handsome dowry. It seemed to Rotta that
the acquisition of such a wife was the final move needed to secure him a permanent foothold in the good life and that this would complete his long and tortuous climb, so full of sacrifice and privation.
Meanwhile, at this very point of his life, Rotta also began to realize that the sublime end of the road was not yet in sight, that the reward he had looked forward to was still out of reach. To this already faltering man life now revealed itself as an endless line tapering to infinity, with nothing permanent or secure about it, a spiteful recession of mirrors that opened and doubled back on themselves, stretching ever deeper and farther, to an illusory vanishing point.
He found he could not depend on his wife; she was lazy, often sick, careless with money, a problem in every respect. If Rotta had not so sharply and absolutely cut every link with the life of his childhood, he might have remembered the old Mediterranean saying which, as a boy, he had so often heard in his parents’ house: Chi vuol fare la sua rovina, prende la moglie Levantina—“If you want to ruin your life, take a Levantine wife.” The work at Zemun was neither as well defined nor as innocent as that at Trieste. He was given risky and unpleasant missions that taxed his nerves and consumed not only his days but nights as well, depriving him of sleep. The motley, coarse, and crafty multitude that swarmed over this important crossroad from Belgrade to Zemun, from Zemun to Belgrade, up and down the Danube, was baffling, unreliable, and very hard to deal with. There were sudden enmities, unexpected clashes, and underhanded vendettas. To survive, Rotta had to use the same methods. Little by little, his tone of voice took on the brittle edge of that dry insolence which is common to interpreters and kavasses in the Near East, and which is no more than an outward echo of inner desolation, of a lost faith in men, of the shedding of all illusions.
When their baby girl died a few months after birth, a mood of sullen recrimination filled the marriage. Quarrels sprang up between them which in no time at all exploded into noisy squabbling full of ugliness and brutality, not much better than the brawls he remembered from his childhood. In the end his wife left him, without regrets or a public scandal, and returned to Istanbul, which, they both agreed, she never should have left in the first place.
About that time it dawned on Rotta that if a man wanted to exchange the world he was born in for that other one he had glimpsed by chance and was drawn to with all his heart, the vows of a susceptible hunchback youngster, crying over his poverty in the depths of night, were not enough—and neither were twenty years of hard dogged work and single-minded service. What was even worse, the “new” world did not exist as a separate, clear-cut, stable entity which a man could grasp and make his own once and for all, as it had seemed to him in those first years; and likewise the “old” world of squalor and meanness that he had tried to escape by such prodigious effort was not nearly so easy or simple to shake off as he had shaken off his brothers and sisters and the rags of his parents’ home; it accompanied a man, invisibly and fatefully through all his apparent changes and successes.
Although still in his thirties, Rotta began to feel cheated and tired before his time, like a man who had scattered his strength lavishly and had not got his just reward. Abstract reasoning was not in his line, yet he could not contemplate his life without feeling lonely and disheartened. Unable to face these thoughts, or himself for that matter, he threw himself entirely into the rough and turbid life of the frontier, where men coarsen and age long before they ought to. He became greedy and mercenary, threw his official weight about, was touchy to an extreme, quick to take offense, obtrusive, rude, superstitious, and inwardly afraid. His conceit struck people as out of all proportion, for he was proud not only of what he had achieved but also of the unseen efforts and human cost that had gone into the achievement. Yet even this vanity was not something he could depend on, since, in the nature of things, even the satisfaction derived from foibles and weakness ebbs away eventually. Having lost confidence in the purpose of further exertions, Rotta let himself drift downstream and confined his ambitions to leading a life without sickness and poverty, with a minimum of work and headaches, with as much gain, stability, and modest pleasure as was possible to get.
Like D’Avenat, the interpreter at the French Consulate, he learned to live with the Moslems, and got used to their customs and ways and to that barely human kind of life which was spent in endless companionship and also endless jealousy, in pecking and intrigue among themselves, against the common folk of all faiths, against strangers from any quarter.
Prematurely worn, he was now a gray-haired, sullen, self-centered hypochondriac, full of little fads and official pedantries. He suffered from imaginary illnesses, was afraid of spells and bad omens, hated the Church and everything connected with it. He felt lonely and thought with loathing about his wife and their life together, yet shivered at the mere thought of the filth and noisy penury he had left behind him in Trieste; he couldn’t even bear to hear the name of his family mentioned. He saved passionately and became a compulsive hoarder, believing that this would make up, at least in part, for what was warped and amiss in his life, and that money was the only thing left which might, if only up to a certain point, lift up, protect, and save a man.
He was fond of rich food and good drink but was afraid of being poisoned; and besides being terrified of the expense, he feared that drink would make him talk and betray himself. The fear of poisoning was groundless, but it preyed on him very strongly; he made every effort to cure himself of the mania, which scared him as much as, if not more, than the actual possibility of poisoning.
In his younger days he had laid much store by dress and had got much pleasure out of astonishing people with the starched whiteness of his shirt and ruffles, with the lace on his chest and cuffs, with the color and number of his silk handkerchiefs, and the immaculate gloss of his shoes. He was now much less particular. The passion for thrift left little room for anything else.
The wealth he had gathered with so much effort and was watching over so jealously became merely a buffer against penury in his own mind. It was true, as the gossip had it, that he had once been a young fop with a hundred and one shirts and thirty pairs of shoes—his chests were still full of the stuff. And it was also true that his savings were in solid gold. But what good were these things when he was never for a moment free of the thought that a shirt slowly but surely frays at the hem, that shoes wear out at the heel, and soles grow paper-thin, that there was no safe place anywhere to hide the money? What was the use of it all? What was the good of twenty years of Spartan work and self-denial when neither money nor position nor clothes could turn one’s fate around (“That bitch Fate,” Rotta would tell himself in his bitter nightly monologues), when, lo and behold, everything kept right on splitting, fraying, wearing out; when through the holes and seam cracks of his footwear there kept staring at him, despite all affluence, visible to him alone, that embarrassing poverty which he thought he had left far behind him at Trieste, far away and forever?
His pathetic eagerness to protect and preserve his money was like a twin sister to his pathetic childhood eagerness for a farthing he never possessed; his present agony of thrift and stinginess was like the old agony of want and hardship. What good was it all? What was the use, when after so much pushing, futile running, and social climbing a man was back at the starting point; when the same meanness and coarseness crept back into his thoughts, though by another way, and the same vulgarity and corruption into his words and behavior; when, in order to keep what had been won, a man had to exert as much unpalatable effort as though he were still struggling with poverty? In short: what was the use of having possessions and becoming somebody when a man couldn’t free himself of his fear of poverty, of his mean thoughts, of his rudeness of speech or shaky society manners, when a person’s stark and grim beginning dogged his every footstep, while this fairer, better, quieter life kept fading away like an optical illusion?
And realizing that it all was in vain, that one’s origins and early years were not to be escaped, Ro
tta threw his head back even more defiantly, moved around more haughtily, eyed the people around him with more contempt, saved more intensely, became a greater than ever stickler for order in his office, sterner and more demanding toward his juniors and all those who depended on him.
Under him, there were two subordinate officials in the Austrian Consulate-General.
The chancery clerk, Franz Wagner, was the son of a German immigrant from Slavonski Brod; he was light-haired and slight, obliging, a fiend for work, and gifted with a perfect handwriting. A small unassuming man, who dissolved in humility at a glance from his superiors, he yet harbored, just below the surface, a large quantity of that soft and controlled but bitter and deadly clerical spite which later, when he had risen in his career, he would vent on the head of some unfortunate junior, who was now perhaps still going to school. This Wagner was a major fly in Rotta’s ointment. The two of them were always at cross purposes, like a pair of born enemies.
The bookkeeper, Peter Markovats, was from Slavonia. He was a tall noncommissioned officer, good-looking, with pink cheeks and black, faultlessly pointed mustaches; trim and carefully groomed, utterly absorbed in his good looks, content with himself, and unmoved by any other consideration.
7
It was no longer autumn, but the winter had not yet begun. It was the season, or rather unseason, which was neither autumn nor winter but worse than either, that freak of the year which can last days, sometimes weeks—days which are as long as weeks, weeks that seem longer than months. It meant rain and mud and snow; snow that turned to rain while still in the air, rain that became mud as soon as it hit the ground. At dawn, from behind the patch of clouds, a pale and listless sun would paint the east a wan rose; at the end of a gray day it would reappear again in the west as a sickly yellow glow, just before the grayness passed into the pitch-black of night. During the day, as at nighttime, the damp breathing of the sky and the soil mingled together in a smoke-thin drizzle that seeped through the town and pervaded everything; in the silent, inexorable alembic of the damp, solid things lost their shape and color, animals changed their temper, men thought and acted moodily.