We didn’t know much about him apart from his name, Hieronymus Radspieller, and that he had lived for years in the tumbledown castle, where he had rented a whole floor for himself from the owner — a white-haired, surly Basque, the last servant of a noble family that had withered away in melancholia and solitude — and made it habitable with sumptuous antique furnishings.
It was a sharp, fantastic contrast when you went into his rooms from the completely overgrown wilderness outside, where never a bird sang and everything seemed devoid of life, apart from when the rotten, tangle-bearded yews groaned in terror at the force of the föhn wind or the dark green lake, like an eye staring up at the heavens, reflected the white clouds as they passed.
Hieronymus Radspieller spent almost the whole day in his boat, lowering an egg-shaped ball of glittering metal on long, fine silk threads into the still waters: a plumb-line to sound out the depths of the lake.
He must be working for some geographical society, we conjectured, as we sat together for a few hours in the evening after a fishing expedition. We were in Radspieller’s library, which he had kindly put at our disposal.
‘I happened to meet the old postwoman who brings the letters over the pass,’ Mr Finch remarked, ‘and she told me there’s a rumour he was a monk in his younger days and used to flagellate himself until the blood came, night after night — they say his back and arms are covered in scars. Talking of Radspieller, where can he be tonight? It must be well past eleven.’
‘It’s the full moon,’ said Giovanni Braccesco, pointing with his wrinkled, old man’s hand out of the window at the shimmering path of light across the lake. ‘We’ll easily be able to see his boat if we keep a look-out.’
Then, after a while, we heard steps coming up the stairs, but it was only Eshcuid, the botanist, returning late from his excursions to join us in the room.
He was carrying a plant as tall as a man, with shining, steel-blue flowers.
‘It’s by far the largest example of this species that’s even been found,’ he said in expressionless tones, nodding to us. ‘I never imagined monkshood would grow at this altitude.’ Taking great care not to crush a single leaf or petal, he placed the plant on the windowledge.
He feels the same as we do, was the thought that came to me, and I sensed that at that moment Mr Finch and Giovanni Braccesco were thinking the same thing. ‘He’s an old man and he wanders restlessly over the earth, like someone looking for his grave without finding it. He gathers plants which are withered the next day. Why? What’s the point? He doesn’t think about it. He knows his activities are pointless, as we know ours are, but he will have presumably been worn down by the sad realisation that everything we undertake, great or small, is pointless, just as it has worn the rest of us down throughout our lives. Ever since we were young we’ve been like people who are dying, their fingers scrabbling fitfully at the coverlet, not knowing what to hold on to; like people who are dying and who realise death is in the room, so it makes no difference whether they fold their hands or clench their fists.
‘Where are you heading for when the fishing season here is over?’ Eshcuid asked, after he had checked his plant again and slowly come over to join us at the table.
Mr Finch ran his hand through his white hair, played with a fish-hook and, without looking up, shrugged his shoulders.
‘I don’t know,’ said Giovanni Braccesco unconcernedly after a pause, as if the question had been directed at him.
After that an hour must have trickled away in such leaden, wordless silence that I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. Finally Radspieller’s pale, beardless face appeared in the doorway. As always, his expression had the composure of old age and his hand was steady as he poured himself a glass of wine and drank to us, but he brought an unaccustomed atmosphere of restrained excitement into the room which quickly transmitted itself to us.
His eyes were usually tired and indifferent, and had the strange characteristic that, as with people suffering from diseases of the spinal cord, the pupils never contracted or dilated and did not appear to react to light — Mr Finch used to say they were like matt-silk waistcoat buttons with a black dot on them — but today there was something feverish about them as his gaze flickered round the room, up and down the walls and over the shelves of books, apparently uncertain what to fix itself on.
Giovanni Braccesco tried to strike up a conversation by describing our unusual methods of catching the ancient, moss-grown giant catfish that lived in the permanent darkness of the unfathomable depths of the lake. They never came up to the light and spurned any natural bait; the only things that could get them to bite were the most bizarre forms anglers could think up: lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands which made swaying movements as they were pulled through the water, or others like bats made of red glass with cunningly concealed hooks on their wings.
Hieronymus Radspieller was not listening.
I could tell that his mind was elsewhere.
Suddenly the words came pouring out, as if for years he had doggedly kept some dangerous secret behind closed lips, only to release it with an abrupt cry: ‘At last! Today my plumb-line touched bottom.’
We stared at him, uncomprehending.
I was so mesmerised by the strangely quivering tone of his voice that for a while I only listened with half an ear to his explanations of the process of measuring the depths of the ocean. There were many chasms down there, he said, thousands of fathoms deep, maelstroms whirling round which swept up every plumb-line and held it there, not letting it reach the bottom unless some fortunate chance intervened.
Then suddenly his voice erupted like a triumphal rocket as he declared: ‘It’s the deepest point on earth a human instrument has ever reached!’ and the words burnt into my mind, striking me with a terror for which I could find no reason. There was some kind of eerie double meaning in them, as if there were an invisible presence standing behind him and speaking to me in veiled symbols through his lips.
I could not take my eyes off Radspieller’s face. How shadowy, how unreal it had become all at once! If I closed my eyes for a second I could see little blue flames flaring up round it: ‘Saint Elmo’s fire of death’ were the words that immediately came to mind and I had to force my lips to stay shut to stop myself shouting them out loud.
As if in a dream, my mind was filled with passages from books written by Radspieller and which I had read, full of amazement at his learning. They were passages blazing with hatred of religion, faith and hope, of everything the Bible has to say about promises.
It was, I somehow realised, the recoil from the fervent asceticism of a youth tormented by ardent longing that had sent his soul tumbling back down to earth: the pendulum of fate taking a man from light to darkness.
I pulled myself out of the benumbing daydream that had taken possession of my senses and forced myself to listen to Radspieller’s story, the beginning of which still echoed in my mind, like distant, incomprehensible murmuring.
He had the copper weight from his plumb-line in his hand, twisting it to and fro so that it glittered like a piece of jewellery. He went on:
‘You, as passionate anglers, call it exciting when you feel a sudden pull at the end of your line, which is only five hundred feet long, telling you that there is a large fish on the hook, that immediately a green monster will rise to the surface in a swirl of spray. Multiply that feeling by a thousand and you might perhaps understand what I felt when this lump of metal finally told me: You have touched bottom. I felt as if my hand had knocked at a door. It’s the end of the work of decades,’ he added softly. He was talking to himself and there was a note of apprehension in his voice. ‘What … what will I do tomorrow?’
‘It is a not unimportant discovery for science,’ our botanist, Eshcuid, broke in, ‘to have sounded out the deepest point on the earth’s surface.’
‘Science… for science,’ Radspieller repeated absent-mindedly, looking round at each of us in turn questioningly, eventually exclaiming, ‘What do I care for science!’
Then he hurriedly got to his feet.
Walked up and down the room a few times.
‘Science is as much an irrelevance for you, Professor, as it is for me,’ he said almost brusquely, suddenly turning to Eshcuid. ‘Let us face facts: for us, science is just an excuse to do something, anything, it doesn’t matter what it is. Life, ghastly, horrible life, has withered our soul, has stolen our innermost being, and to stop ourselves crying out all the time in our misery, we devote ourselves to childish fancies just so that we can forget what we have lost. Let us not deceive ourselves.’
We remained silent.
‘But they have another meaning as well,’ he said, suddenly overcome with agitation, ‘our fancies, I mean. It only dawned on me very, very gradually. Some subtle spiritual instinct tells me that every act we perform has a double, magic meaning. We cannot do anything which is not magic. I know precisely why I have spent half my life plumbing the depths. I also know what it means that I have finally — finally — finally struck bottom and joined myself, right through all the swirls and eddies, by a long, fine thread to a world where no ray of this sun can penetrate, this hateful sun, whose only pleasure is to leave its children to die of thirst. What happened today is only a trivial, external event, but anyone who can see and can interpret what he sees is able to tell from the vague shadow on the wall who has walked in front of the lamp.’ He gave me a bitter smile. ‘I will tell you in a few words what the inner meaning of this external event is for me. I have found what I was searching for, from now on I am immune to those two poisonous snakes, faith and hope, which can only live in the light. I felt it from the the way it tugged at my heart today when I imposed my will and touched the bottom of the lake with my plumbline. A trivial external event has shown its inner face.’
‘Have such terrible things happened to you in life? I mean when you were a priest?’ Mr Finch asked. ‘To make you so sore at heart?’ he added, in a quiet aside.
Radspieller did not reply, he seemed to be seeing some image that must have appeared before him. Then he sat down at the table again and, staring fixedly at the moonlight outside, talked like a somnambulist, almost without drawing breath:
‘I was never a priest, but even when I was young some dark, powerful urge turned me away from the things of this earth. There were times when, before my very eyes, the face of nature became a grotesque, grinning gargoyle which made me see the countryside, mountains, water and sky, even my own body, as the unyielding walls of a prison. No child, I imagine, feels anything when the shadow of a cloud crossing the sun falls on a meadow, but even then I was petrified with horror and, as if an invisible hand had torn a blindfold from my eyes, I found myself looking into the depths of a secret world full of the mortal agonies of millions of tiny creatures tearing each other apart in mute hatred among the roots and stalks of the grass.
‘Perhaps it was hereditary — my father was suffering from religious mania when he died — but soon I could only see the world as a den of cut-throats awash with blood.
‘Gradually my life became one long torment as my soul languished. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think as day and night, without respite, my lips mechanically repeated the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil” until I was so weak I fainted.
‘In the valleys where I come from there is a religious sect called the Blue Brethren, whose adherents, when they feel death approaching, have themselves buried alive. Their monastery still stands with their stone coat of arms over the gateway: Aconitum Napellus, a poisonous plant with five blue petals, the top one of which looks like a monk’s hood, which gives it its name.
‘I was a young man when I sought refuge in the order and approaching old age when I left.
‘Behind the monastery walls is a garden where in the summer a bed full of these deadly plants blooms; the monks water it with the blood that runs down when they flagellate themselves. Whenever a new brother is admitted to the order, he has to plant such a flower, which is then given his Christian name, as if in baptism.
Mine was called Hieronymus and drank my blood, while I languished for years, vainly pleading for a miracle by which the “Invisible Gardener” would refresh the roots of my life with just one drop of water.
‘The symbolic meaning of the strange ceremony of the baptism with blood is that we should plant our soul by magic in the garden of paradise and feed its growth with the blood of our desires.
‘It is said that in one single night, at the full moon, a monkshood covered all over with flowers, shot up on the burial mound of the founder of the sect, the legendary Cardinal Napellus, and when the grave was opened the body had disappeared. The saint, so the story went, had changed into the plant, which was the first to appear on earth, and all the others are descended from it.
‘When the flowers wither in the autumn, we collect the poisonous seeds, which look like little human hearts and, according to the esoteric tradition of the Blue Brethren, represent the “grains of mustard seed” of faith, of which it is written that whoever has it may remove mountains — and we ate them.
‘Just as the terrible poison changes our hearts and puts us in a state between living and dying, so the essence of faith should transform our blood and become a miracle-working power in the hours we spend between mortal agony and ecstatic rapture.
‘But with the plumbline of my insight, I ventured even deeper into these wondrous symbols and faced up to the question: what will happen to my blood, when it is finally impregnated with the poison of the blue flower? And the things all around me came alive, even the stones by the wayside cried out to me in a thousand voices, “It will be poured out, again and again, when spring comes, so that a new poisonous plant may grow bearing your own name.”
‘In that moment I had torn the mask from the vampire I had been feeding and I was seized with ineradicable hatred. I went out into the garden and crushed the plant that had stolen my name Hieronymus and grown fat on my life with my foot until not a fibre was left above ground.
‘From then on my path through life seemed strewn with wondrous happenings. In the very same night a vision appeared to me: Cardinal Napellus, with his fingers in the position of someone carrying a lighted candle, bearing the blue aconite with the five-petalled flowers. His features were those of a corpse, only his eyes radiated life indestructible.
‘He so resembled me that I thought I was seeing my own face. Horrified, I automatically felt my face, just as someone whose arm has been torn off by an explosion might feel for the wound with his other hand.
‘Then I crept into the refectory and, burning with hate, broke open the casket that was supposed to contain the saint’s relics, intending to destroy them.
‘All I found was the globe you can see in that niche there.’
Radspieller stood up, took the globe down, placed it before us on the table and continued, ‘I took it with me when I fled the monastery in order to destroy the last physical relic of the founder of the sect. Later I had the idea that I would show it more contempt by selling it and giving the money to a whore. And that is what I did at the earliest opportunity.
‘Many years have passed since then, but I have not let a minute pass without searching for the invisible roots of that plant, which is the source of mankind’s suffering, in order to banish them from my heart. Earlier I said that from the moment I saw the light, one “wonder” after another crossed my path, but I remained firm, no will-o-the-wisp has lured me into the mire.
‘When I started collecting antiquities — all the things you can see in this room come from that time — there were some objects among them that recalled the dark rites of gnostic origin and the century of the Camisards. Even the sapphire ring here on my finger — strangely enough, its coat of arms bears a monkshood, the emblem of the blue monks — was a chance acquisition I came across rummaging through a hawker’s tray, even that has not made me waver in my determination. And when one day a friend sent me this globe here as a present — the selfsame globe I had stolen from the monastery and sold — all I did was laugh at the childish threat from some stupid fate.
‘No, the poison of belief and hope will not follow me up here in the thin, clear air of this world of snowy peaks; the blue monkshood cannot grow at this altitude.
‘In me the old adage has become a new truth: If you would seek out the depths you must climb the mountains.
‘That is why I will never go back down to the lowlands. I am healed. Even if the wonders of all the worlds of angels should fall into my lap, I would cast them away as so much dross. Let the aconite remain as a poisonous medicine for the weak and the sick at heart in the valleys, I intend to live and die up here in the face of the fixed, adamantine law of the unchanging exigences of nature which no daemonic spectres can break through. I will continue to plumb the depths, not aiming, not hoping for anything, happy as a child for whom the game is enough and who has not yet been polluted by the lie that life has a deeper purpose; I will continue to plumb the depths, but whenever I touch bottom I will cry out, as if in triumph, “It is only the earth I am touching, once again the earth and nothing but the earth, the same proud earth that coldly throws the hypocritical light of the sun back into space, the earth that remains true to itself, outside and in, just as this globe, the last miserable legacy of the great Cardinal Napellus, is and will ever be a piece of dead wood, outside and in.
‘And each time the lake will tell me again: it is true that, generated by the sun, terrible poisons grow on the earth’s crust, but inside, in its chasms and abysses, it is free of them and the depths are pure.’ The intensity brought red blotches to Radspieller’s face and his voice cracked with the emphasis he put on each word: ‘If I could have just one wish’ — he clenched his fists — ‘it would be to let down my plumbline to the centre of the earth, so that I could shout out to the world, ‘See: here, there, see: earth, nothing but earth!’
We looked up, taken by surprise when he suddenly fell silent.
He had gone over to the window.
Eshcuid, the botanist, took out his magnifying glass, bent over the globe and said out loud, in an attempt to cover the embarrassment caused by Radspieller’s last words, ‘This relic must be a fake. It must be from this century, the five continents’ — he pointed to America — ‘are all on the globe.’ Matter-of-fact and normal though his observation was, it could not relieve the strained atmosphere which, for no obvious reason, began to take hold of us and gradually intensified until it was threatening to turn into fear.
Suddenly a sweet, overpowering smell, as of alder buckthorn or spurge laurel, seemed to fill the room.
I was trying to say, ‘It’s coming in from the park,’ but Eshcuid forestalled my stuttering attempt to shake off the oppression that had taken hold of us. He stuck a needle in the globe and was muttering something about it being strange that even our lake, such a tiny point, was on the map, when Radspieller’s voice started up again from beside the window and interrupted him in shrilly scornful tones:
‘Why has the image of his Eminence, the great Lord Cardinal Napellus, stopped pursuing me, as it used to waking and sleeping? Is there not a prophecy concerning the neophyte in the Codex Nazareus, the book of the gnostic blue monks, written around 200 BC: “Whoever feeds the mystical plant to the very end with his blood will be faithfully guided by it to the gate of eternal life; the sinner who pulls it up, however, will see it face to face as death and his spirit will go out into the darkness until the new spring comes.” Where are they, these words? Have they died? A two-thousand-year-old promise has been dashed to pieces on the rock that is me! Why does he not come, so that I may spit in his face, this Cardinal Nap—’ Radspieller broke off with a gasp. I saw that he had noticed the blue plant that Eshcuid had placed on the windowledge when he came in and was staring at it.
I was about to jump up and hurry over to him when an exclamation from Giovanni Braccesco stopped me.
Eshcuid’s needle had caused the yellowed parchment skin over the globe to split and come away, like the peel coming off an overripe fruit, leaving before us a large, shining glass ball.
Inside it was a wondrous work of art, enclosed in the ball in some way that was beyond our understanding: the figure of a cardinal in cloak and hat, standing and in his hand, his fingers in the position of someone carrying a lighted candle, a plant with steel-blue, five-petalled flowers.
Petrified with horror, I could hardly turn my head to look at Radspieller. Lips pale, his features those of a corpse, he was standing against the wall, upright and unmoving, like the statuette in the glass ball, and like it with the poisonous blue flower in his hand, staring across the table at the face of the Cardinal.
Only the light in his eyes told us he was still alive, but we knew that his spirit had disappeared for good in the black night of madness.
Eshcuid, Mr Finch, Giovanni Braccesco and I parted the next morning, almost without farewell. The horror of the last few hours of that night still held our tongues in thrall.
For years I have wandered the earth, alone and aimless, but I have never met any of them again. Just once, after many years, my path took me to that region. Of the castle only the walls were left, but as far as the eye could see there grew from among the fallen masonry, in serried ranks the height of a man in the scorching sun, a steel-blue bed of flowers: aconitum napellus.