I emboldened myself to ask:
"Are there still museums and libraries?"
"No. We want to forget the past, save for the composition of elegies. There are no commemorations or anniversaries or portraits of dead men. Each person must produce on his own the arts and sciences that he has need for."
"In that case, every man must be his own Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, and his own Archimedes."
He nodded wordlessly.
"What happened to the governments?" I inquired.
"It is said that they gradually fell into disuse. Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship
—but no one on the planet paid any attention. The press stopped publishing pieces by those it called its 'contributors,' and also publishing their obituaries. Politicians had to find honest work; some became comedians, some witch doctors—some excelled at those occupations. The reality was no doubt more complex than this summary."
Then his tone changed, and he said:
"I have built this house, which is like all other houses. I have built these furnishings and made these household goods. I have worked in the fields, though other men, whose faces I have not seen, may well have worked them better. I can show you some things."
I followed him into an adjoining room. He lighted a lamp, which also hung from the ceiling. In one corner I saw a harp; it had very few strings. On the walls hung rectangular paintings in which the color yellow predominated. They did not look as if the same hand had painted them all.
"This is my work," he said.
I examined the paintings, and I stopped before the smallest of them, which portrayed, or suggested, a sunset, though there was something of the infinite about it.
"If you like it, you may take it back with you, as a souvenir of a future friend," he said serenely.
I thanked him, but the other canvases disturbed me. I will not say that they were blank, but they were almost blank.
"They are painted with colors that your ancient eyes cannot see."
His delicate hands plucked the strings of the harp and I could hear faint occasional notes.
It was then that the banging began.
A tall woman and three or four men came into the house. One would have said they were brothers and sister, or that time had made them resemble one another. My host spoke first to the woman:
"I knew you would not fail to come tonight. Have you seen Nils?"
"Every few evenings. He is still mad about painting."
"Let us hope he has better luck at it than his father had."
Manuscripts, paintings, furniture, household goods—we left nothing in the house.
The woman worked as hard as the men. I felt embarrassed at my own weakness, which kept me from being much help to them. No one closed the door as, loaded down with our burden, we left. I noticed that the house had a peaked roof.
After about fifteen minutes of walking, we turned toward the left. In the distance I saw a kind of tower, crowned with a dome.
"It is the crematory," someone said. "The death chamber is inside. They say it was invented by a philanthropist whose name, I believe, was Adolf Hitler."
The caretaker, whose height did not take me aback, opened the gate to us.
My host whispered a few words. Before going in, he waved goodbye.
"There'll be more snow," the woman announced.
In my study on Calle México still hangs the canvas that someone will paint, thousands of years from now, with substances that are now scattered across the planet.
The Bribe
The story I shall tell is about two men, or rather about an incident in which two men played a part. The event, which is not at all singular or fantastic, is less important than the character of the two men involved. Both were vain, though in very different ways and with very different results. The anecdote (for it's really very little more than that) took place a short time ago in one of the states of the United States.
In my opinion, it couldn't have happened anywhere else. In late 1961, at the University of Texas in Austin, I was fortunate enough to have a long conversation with one of the two men, Dr. Ezra Winthrop.
Dr. Winthrop was a professor of Old English (he did not approve of calling it Anglo-Saxon, which suggests an artifact cobbled together out of two separate pieces). I recall that without ever actually contradicting me he corrected my many errors and presumptuous temerities. I was told that on oral examinations he never put questions to the candidate—instead he invited the candidate to chat about this or that subject, leaving to the person being examined the choice of the topic to be discussed. Of old Puritan stock, a native of Boston, he'd found it hard to adapt to the customs and prejudices of the south.
He missed the snow, but I've noticed that northerners are taught to take measures against the cold the way we are against the heat. The hazy image that remains to me is that of a man on the tall side, with gray hair, less spry than strong. My recollection of his colleague Herbert Locke is clearer; Locke gave me a copy of his book Toward a History of the Kenning, which declares that the Saxons soon put aside those somewhat mechanical metaphors they used (the sea as "whale-road," the eagle as
"battle-falcon"), while the Scandinavian poets were combining and intermingling them almost to the point of inextricability. I mention Herbert Locke because he is an integral part of my story.
I come now to the Icelander Eric Einarsson, perhaps the true protagonist. I never saw him. He had come to Texas in 1969, when I was in Cambridge, but letters from a mutual friend, Ramón Martínez López, have left me with the conviction that I knew him intimately. I know that he is impetuous, energetic, and cold; in a land of tall men he is tall. Given his red hair, it was inevitable that students should start calling him Eric the Red. It was his view that the use of an inevitably error-ridden slang makes the foreigner an interloper, and so he never condescended to use the ubiquitous "O. K." A fine scholar of English, Latin, the Scandinavian languages, and (though he wouldn't admit it) German, he easily made a way for himself in American universities. His first article was a monograph on the four articles de Quincey had written on the influence of the Danes on the lake region of Westmoreland. This was followed by a second, on the dialect of the Yorkshire peasant. Both studies were well received, but Einarsson thought his career needed something a bit more "astonishing." In 1970, Yale published his copiously annotated critical edition of the ballad of the Battle of Maldon. The scholarship of the notes was undeniable, but certain hypotheses in the introduction aroused some controversy in the virtually hermetic spheres of academe. Einarsson claimed, for example, that the style of the ballad is similar, though admittedly in a distant sort of way, to the epic fragment Finnsburh, rather than to the measured rhetoric of Beowulf, and that the poem's employment of moving circumstantial details oddly prefigures the methods that we admire, not without good reason, in the Icelandic sagas. He also proposed emendations for several readings in Elphinston's edition. In 1969 he had been given an appointment at the University of Texas. As we all know, American universities are forever sponsoring conferences of Germanists. Dr. Winthrop had chaired the previous conference, in East Lansing. The head of his department, who was preparing to go abroad on his sabbatical, asked Winthrop to suggest a person to chair the next one, in Wisconsin. There were really only two candidates to choose between—Herbert Locke and Eric Einarsson.
Winthrop, like Carlyle, had renounced the Puritan faith of his forebears, but not their sense of right and wrong. He did not decline to offer his opinion; his duty was clear. Since 1954 Herbert Locke had been of inestimable help in the preparation of a certain annotated edition of Beowulf which, at certain institutions of higher learning, had replaced that of Klaeber; he was now compiling a work that would be of great usefulness to Germanists: an English/Anglo-Saxon dictionary that was certain to save readers hours of often fruitless searching through etymological dictionaries. Einarsson was much the younger. His sharpness and impertinence had won him general dislike, including Winthrop's, but his critical edition of Finnsburh had contributed not a little to building a reputation. And he was disputatious; at the conference he would be a better moderator than the shy and taciturn Locke. That was the state of Winthrop's deliberations when the incident occurred.