A Strange Country Read online

  “They are not left to chance,” said the guardian.

  Petrus looked at him gratefully and, trusting his impulse, he said:

  “I have to go wherever there’s wine.”

  The Head of the Council raised his eyebrow, ironically.

  Petrus hunted for his words and couldn’t find them.

  “Wine,” echoed the Head of the Council, thoughtful. “We have never paid any attention to it. It never occurred to elves to grow wine grapes, let alone drink it.”

  On hearing these words, Petrus felt everything come clear in his mind, the way it does in stories and fables, when one grasps what cannot be clearly explained.

  “Wine is to humans what tea is to elves,” he said. “The key to the alliance is there.”

  In a time of miraculous hunting

  Of sacred violets

  Great earthquakes

  Beneath a moon of blood

  Book of Battles

  THE WHIP

  The whip is the only true divinity of hunting country. His knowledge of every copse and every thicket is honored. It is known that he leaves at dawn to mark out the path for the hunt, and this silent prayer through the sleeping woods serves him as the finest of matins, rendering thanks to earth and sky and singing the nobility of thrushes.

  TRAVEL

  If there is one human inclination elves are lacking, it is that of travel.

  This inclination, paradoxically, affects humans because of a flaw that makes it impossible for them to be here, to find themselves in the simple presence of things, and it has molded them into creatures who are both restless and inspired.

  Can anyone imagine what immersion in the world combined with an appetite for change would look like? To welcome the void and delight in fantasy? Yes, we can imagine it, and we dream of it, and we pray to the great winds of dreams to take us there.

  WE ARE ALL

  1871–1918

  At the time when Petrus began traveling all over the world of humans, the Head of the Council returned from Rome with astounding news.

  “We know who the gray notebook belonged to,” he said to Petrus one day when they were both in Nanzen together with the guardian and a handful of his assistants.

  He told them how he went to Rome under a false human identity—an orchestra conductor by the name of Gustavo Acciavatti—and, on the pretext of acquiring some Italian Renaissance drawings, he’d met Roberto Volpe. He was normally pleasant company, but the murder had broken him, and his fascination with the painting was eating away at him. At the end of the evening, the elf had followed the dealer into a large room where the curtains were drawn; the painting was hanging on a wall papered in black silk. The Guardian of the Pavilion shared the image and Petrus studied it with curiosity: a sober, intimate scene was unfolding against a dark background; the protagonists’ faces were devastated. Now better informed about human religions, he recognized a scene from the Christian New Testament.

  “A pietà, like the ones the Flemish painted by the thousand,” said the Head of the Council. “Christ in the arms of the Virgin and, in the background, Mary Magdalene and a few grieving followers.”

  “It’s beautiful,” murmured Petrus.

  He fell silent, prey to a fleeting intuition.

  “It’s magnificent,” said the Head of the Council, “but that is not the painting’s only quality. Although I’ve been studying the art of humans for a long time, it took me a while to understand what I was seeing here.”

  Petrus blinked and his vision of the painting was turned on its end.

  “It was painted by an elf,” he said.

  “It was painted by an elf. An elf established in Amsterdam as a painter at the beginning of the sixteenth century according to the human calendar. In reality, the first elf to have gone over to the human world.”

  “I thought the bridge has existed since the dawn of time,” said Petrus.

  “I should have said, to have gone over for good into the human world. To us he’d vanished into thin air, but apparently, he chose to become a man. It had never happened before, we didn’t have the slightest idea it was even possible. However, we have no reason to doubt this information, insofar as we heard it this morning from the renegade’s father, in other words, from the lips of the previous Guardian of the Pavilion.”

  “Three hundred years ago the offspring of the former guardian went forever into the human world and no one ever knew about it?” said Petrus.

  “I’d summoned my predecessor to Nanzen to ask his advice, and I mentioned the fact that the victim went to Amsterdam in search of a painting and a gray notebook, and he then informed me that his eldest child had transformed the bridge long ago in a way that would allow for permanent passage to the other side, and that afterwards he had settled among humans by taking on the identity of a Flemish painter.”

  “But why did he hide the fact, not to mention how?” asked Petrus.

  “A father’s heart is unfathomable,” answered the guardian, “and he was surely afraid that others might be tempted by the adventure. This morning, however, he couldn’t keep the secret any longer, although he had divulged it earlier to another elf we know—an elf whose family he has been acquainted with since childhood.”

  “The head of the garden,” said Petrus. “They are both from Ryoan.”

  He looked again at the painting. Why do I know that it was painted by one of our kind, even when I know nothing about human painting? he thought. The picture is telling a human story, but the way it goes to the heart of things is elfin. And yet, there is something else, indefinable, something I cannot put my finger on.

  “Why and how did our elf go over to the humans?” said the Guardian of the Pavilion. “His father doesn’t know, his son didn’t want to see him again once he’d gone over.”

  “In what way did he transform the bridge?” asked Petrus. “Why didn’t that transform our world?”

  “In fact, the mists were transformed,” said the guardian. “They were already declining, to a lesser degree, and according to my predecessor, this alteration to the bridge regenerated them in a spectacular way. I think the gray notebook contains the answers to our questions, in the hand of our exiled painter.”

  This marked the beginning of an unprecedented era, where the partisans of the garden gained in influence, the Head of the Council went to Rome on a regular basis in order to meet with Roberto Volpe, and Petrus devoted himself body and soul to his two quests, dividing his time between the world of humans and the Council library. The library contained a section that was closed to the public and only accessible upon special request. But the Head of the Council had placed it at his disposal without restriction or directions.

  “Humans know nothing of our existence and we have always been glad of that fact,” he said, entrusting him with the key. “We are a peace-loving sort, and the wars, however violent, with the peoples on the borders have never had the power to destroy the foundations of our harmony. But humans are a warlike species, on another scale altogether than our nasty orcs or our evil goblins.”

  “Why are they so aggressive?” asked Petrus.

  “They are haunted by the notion of their own divinity, and their appetite for war comes from the fact they have rejected their animal selves,” he replied. “Humans do not recognize the unity of living creatures, and they consider themselves to be above all other kingdoms. Along these lines, I have come to believe that our woes stem from the loss of a number of our own animals.”

  “Apparently in antiquity we were not merely triple,” said Petrus.

  “Our ancestors were every animal at once. One day I shall introduce you to one of these venerable old forefathers.”

  “A living ancestor?” asked Petrus, stunned.

  “That’s the big question,” answered the Head of the Council.

  The Human Literature section in the library
was restricted but, as Petrus would learn along the way, one could count the requests for special dispensations over recent centuries on one hand. It contained scholarly works about humans written by elves who had lived among them, including Guardians of the Pavilion and Heads of the Council through the ages. But it also contained books written by humans, and Petrus began to read them voraciously; his zeal, far from lessening over time, ended up encroaching upon his sleep.

  He could not believe what he was reading. He’d spent so many years yawning over the sublime elegies of his peers, so many years unaware that the object of his quest was to be found in the next room! He devoured essays on the human way of life, where he found the material to plan his journeys to the other side of the red bridge, but it was their storybook fiction that amazed him beyond expression, turning the world on its head, digging tunnels in the marrow of life. As he’d begun to explore the vineyards of France, he chose primarily French novels, and was amazed at how he could understand the language, although he often had to turn to the dictionary because of a lexicon that, to him, seemed to know no limits. Elfin language is univocal and precise; through melodic sounds it represents a natural world devoid of afterworlds, and one can easily match the thing with the word. As for elfin writing, it was borrowed from the earth’s eastern civilizations, and consists of lines full of imagery, the polar opposite of the formal alphabets that we in the West use to signify reality. But French, which by the grace of Nanzen, Petrus could read as if it were his mother tongue, seemed to gain in verbosity what it lost in constituent flesh, and he was astounded that a language of such disembodied essence could, paradoxically, be so rich in inexhaustible possibilities. Nothing delighted him more than whatever was unnecessary, embellishments serving no other purpose than to be decorative, with which sentences and turns of phrase were saturated, and he wanted to read not only works of literature, but also grammar books and treatises on conjugations and, finally, writers’ correspondence, where he would learn how a story is constructed and developed. Then, after relishing the ingeniousness of the language and its practice, he immersed himself anew in a novel, and once again life was illuminated.

  “You will feel the same way about other terrestrial idioms,” said the Head of the Council, one day when he confessed to his admiration for the French language. “But unbridled invention fails to fascinate me—all that reading you enjoy so much leaves me puzzled. I much prefer human music.”

  The motionless journey of literature made him see the world in a way he couldn’t in the mists, just as it would’ve been impossible for him to understand the message of the wild grasses in the channel had he not spent the evening listening to legends and tales at The Hollows farm. Like a damp cloth seeping with ink and pigment, human fantasies made the world exude its invisible layers and exhibit them, naked and shivering, in broad daylight. That was the true grace of stories, their complex weave where one never looked at the visible part of the cloth, but rather at a faint sparkling only hinted at in the weft. This ineffable vibration replaced reason and the explanations of the mind when it came to understanding the heart, and Petrus did not see the characters of tales and novels as any less real than the beings he encountered in everyday life, that life which takes place in the motion of voyage and reveals so little about intentions or souls. One thing amused him: he never felt more of an elf than when he was striding through the countries on earth, only to discover that he was definitely human once he returned to his mists. When he was wandering around the vineyards in France or Italy, he thought tenderly of his serene land of tea and poetry; the moment he set foot in Nanzen, he was overcome with nostalgia for humans and their slovenly ways, for their gift at making life luxurious by spicing it up with the hint of imperfection that gave it all its genius. Finally, he was enchanted by wine and, to add a finishing touch to its benefits, the winemakers also told him stories, tales that had their roots in the soil of the vineyards, then rose toward the heavens of desires and dreams. And so, Petrus understood that it wasn’t the wine that accomplished a task, the way the elves’ tea did, but rather the fictions the wine catalyzed; thus, it was the metaphor, and not the cause of the miracle—however, he refrained from admitting to any of this, partly because he wanted to go on drinking, and partly because what he had begun to suspect at The Hollows was confirmed every time he took a sip from the bottle.

  Unlike humans who lose their faculties when drinking, when he drank wine, Petrus found that some of his qualities were enhanced. Of course, he felt the drunkenness that made the world spin toward amiable shores and, like everyone, he would begin to blather on after only a few glasses. But this didn’t diminish his ordinary skills, and it even endowed him with a few extraordinary talents, as became evident during a fight he unwillingly got caught up in at an inn in Montepulciano, in central Italy, where he’d been welcomed for the night after a visit to a winery. He was killing time, playing with a last jug of Tuscan wine, and he had no idea why tempers flared, but suddenly the lads had gone for each other’s throats, bellowing in dialect and lashing out every which way. Yet, even in the panic, it was easy for Petrus to dodge the blows: the more unsteady he was on his feet, the better he outsmarted the strategies of his adversaries as they whirled their arms uselessly in the air. Well, look at that! he thought, delighted, when a lad twice his height, thinking he’d got Petrus by the collar, crashed enthusiastically against the wall instead. Petrus stumbled in front of another fellow who was plowing the air where he’d stood a second earlier, then he collapsed just in time in front of a third one who wanted to squeeze his throat with his big hairy paws. When the troops had reached the verge of exhaustion and he was the last one standing, he went up to his little room and snored the sleep of the just.

  So many fascinating things happened in these stopping-off places where tempers flared that he felt at home, and established a routine. He had come back several times to visit Jean-René Faure and the good souls at The Hollows, and he always took a room at the neighboring Hôtel de la Poste, where the fare was not as mediocre as Jean-René had declared it to be. Still, he never missed an opportunity to dine at the farm when Marguerite was cooking. She excelled at stews and roasts, but she also knew how to work miracles with the sweets from the garden, and he so passionately loved her quince jellies that she would never let him leave without a little basket full of them where, depending on the season, she would also add a few fresh walnuts, crisp apples, or an armful of pink carnations. Then he would go back to the inn drunk as a lord and sit down in the common room, where they would bring him his half-jug of wine. It so happens that in addition to the well-being procured by these last solitary drops, the innkeeper’s daughter was blonde, buxom, and smiling. In his native land, Petrus showed so little interest in members of the opposite sex that he’d long believed that love didn’t interest him—at least not the sort of love that drove his fellow creatures to declare their ardor, share an open veranda overlooking a little garden of mist, and conceive elfkins who one day would go running among the bamboo and the stones. The young women at the inns, starting with Roselyne-from-the-Hôtel-de-la-poste, made him understand that his past indifference was due precisely to the fact that he loved human women. Picture their first dialogue one evening when Petrus had just come in from a dinner at The Hollows that had lasted longer than usual, due to both a guinea fowl that had been reluctant to cook and a fascinating debate between disciples of Burgundy wine and zealots of claret (the end of said debate is transcribed here).

  “Your fondest memory?” Petrus (not yet familiar with the wines of Bordeaux) asked Jeannot (who had a crush on him).

  “I don’t have any,” replied the lad, “but I dream of tasting some petrus, someday.”

  “Petrus?” said the elf who, that very morning, while pursuing his exploration of human beliefs and religions, had come upon an engraving with the following caption: Sanctus Petrus ad januas paradisi.

  Enchanted by the coincidence, he added:

  “T
hat is my second name.”

  Then he thought, what am I on about.

  “You mean you are also called Petrus?” exclaimed Jeannot, delighted.

  From that day on, they only ever called him Petrus at the farm. And so, when he was sitting on his bench in the common room, and Roselyne came to ask him if he needed anything, placing her smile and her white bosom well within sight of his tired eyes, and she added, what’s it they call you, then, he replied:

  “Petrus.”

  She smiled.

  “That’s a sweet name, Petrus,” she said.

  Then she pinched his cheek and added:

  “Petrukins.”

  I owe it to my honesty as a historiographer to say that things did not stop there, and that the next day, Petrus returned to Nanzen with crimson cheeks and a furtive gaze. Roselyne, for all her youth, was not unskilled, and she led him to her room with a disarming, natural ease. There, delightfully candid, she kissed him, long and gently. Her lips had a taste of Mercurey wine and nothing seemed more desirable to Petrus than this serving girl with her ample forms and mischievous gaze. When she undressed and revealed her lovely, heavy, slightly pendulous breasts, he understood that it was her imperfections that were kindling his desire. Her milky skin, round thighs, plump belly, soft shoulders—all characteristics which, in the mists would have been inconceivable and shocking—filled him with lust, and when she placed her hand in his beard this lust became dizzying. When she tore off his clothes and drew him onto the bed and made him collapse on top of her, the exquisite softness of her offered body almost made him swoon with pleasure. As she was giving herself to him and for the first time he was delighting in intimacy with the opposite sex, he thought: right, this is not the time to falter. And, leaning over her face, seeing the delicate texture of her skin, the sweat beading at her temples, the charming flaw of her nose that was slightly off-center, he thought again: I love her smell. Roselyne smelled of the rose perfume she used every morning, but also the sweat of a long day’s work, and this mixture of refinement and nature pleased Petrus, and broke all the elfin rules governing desire.