Last Tales. Isak Dinesen
“Well, Angelo,” said Pizzuti, scratching his head with his two fingers, “there you bring up something to which I have been giving a good deal of thought. I certainly still do believe that I am that great sinner to whom hope was given. But how, now, did things really go with this thief on the cross?
“‘This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,’ the Saviour said to him. But when on the evening of Good Friday Demas presented himself at the gate of Paradise, Christ was not there, and as you know, forty days passed before He came home in all His splendor. Very likely the young King of Heaven, in those days of great events, gave not much thought to an invitation. But I myself—better than most people—will know with what confusion and anxiety the poorly dressed guest did approach the gate.
“And I have pondered,” Pino went on, “who will really have been present behind the gate at which Demas was staring, with the authority to let a thief into Paradise? The Rock of the Church, the great Fisherman Peter, at this dark hour crouched at the back of the high priest’s house, farther away from Paradise than ever before or after. Saint Mary Magdalene, whom Demas knew from Jerusalem, was sobbing into her long hair and had not yet made up her mind to go to the grave. Those friendly saints with whom we are now familiar—Francis, Anthony and sweet Catherine—came upon the heavenly stage only many centuries later. The gentle Blessed Virgin, had she by that time been Queen of Heaven, would have understood all that was going on in Demas’ heart, and so would have come to the gate herself, with her crown on and her retinue of angels—but even her strong heart could not hold or bear any more on that Friday night. Yet after a long time, I have imagined, the little children whom King Herod had had put to death in Bethlehem came running along to throng around the newcomer. No doubt they laughed at the sorry figure collapsed in a small heap over his sundered bones, perhaps they did even point their little fingers at him, as children will do at a ragged cripple. But in the end two of them ran in to fetch Saint Anne, Christ’s blessed grandmother. And as this worthy woman now appeared at the gate and spoke to him, Demas suddenly realized how everything is explained and made clear to the blessed in heaven, for even after the happenings of Good Friday, she was mild and bright as a lighted candle.
“I have now imagined the following conversation to take place between the two of them.
“‘Come in,’ the lady says, ‘come in, my good man, you are expected. But my grandson has been delayed, for He has found it necessary to descend into hell.’
“‘O Lady,’ Demas answers, much ashamed, ‘there will have been some mistake, just as I expected, and it is down there that I am to see Him once more. May I make so bold as to ask the way, for I want nothing better than to be where He is.’
“‘Certainly not,’ said Saint Anne. ‘You must do as you are told. And I myself very much want to speak with one who has seen Him so recently.’
“‘O Lady,’ says Demas again, ‘how can one such as I discourse with you on that which no man on earth can describe?’
“‘I know, I know,’ says the holy grandmother. ‘Who would know better than I? My good man, you did not see Him when He first learned to walk. I myself held one of His little hands, and His mother held the other—never have I seen a child so like his mother! No, it is as you say—it is indescribable!’
“And led by Lady Saint Anne’s hand—that same hand of which she had spoken—Demas stepped across the threshold of Paradise.”
Angelo laughed at his friend’s story.
“Aye, if I had still got my theater,” said Pizzuti, carried away by his own eloquence, “I should have played this scene on the stage. Might it not have been sublime and thrilling, dear Angelo? Now it must content itself to become reality someday.
“And you yourself now,” he said after a minute. “Are you going to Paradise? And shall we meet and talk together there, as we do here now?”
Angelo for a long time found no answer. He took up one of his small clay figures and set it on the balustrade, a little to the left.
“A man is more than one man,” he said slowly. “And the life of a man is more than one life. The young man who was Leonidas Allori’s chosen disciple, who felt that at his hand he would become the greatest artist of his age, and who loved his master’s wife—he will not go to heaven. He was too light of weight to mount so high.”
He set up another figure on the balustrade, at some distance from the first and to the right of it.
“And this famous sculptor, Angelo Santasilia,” he went on, “whom princes and cardinals beseech to work for them, this good husband and father—he will not go to heaven either. And do you know why? Because he is not at all eager to go there.”
He placed his last figure in between the two others, farther back on the balustrade.
“Do you see, Pino?” he said softly. “These three tiny toy figures are placed to mark three corners of a rectangle, in which the width is to the length as the length to the sum of the two. These, you know, are the proportions of the golden section.”
He let his skilled hands fall to rest in his lap.
“But,” he finished very slowly, “the young man whom you met at the inn of Mariana-the-Rat—the good home of thieves and smugglers down by the harbor—the young man with whom you talked there at night, Pino—he will go to heaven.”
TALES OF TWO OLD GENTLEMEN
Two old gentlemen, both of them widowers, played piquet in a small salon next to a ballroom. When they had finished their game, they had their chairs turned round, so that through the open doors they could watch the dancers. They sat on contentedly, sipping their wine, their delicate noses turned up a little and taking in, with the melancholic superiority of age, the fragrance of youth before them. They first talked of ancient scandals in high society—for they had known each other as boys and young men—and of the sad fate of common friends, then of political and dynastic matters, and at last of the complexity of the universe in general. When they got there, there was a pause.
“My grandfather,” the one old gentleman said at the end of it, “who was a very happy man and particularly happy in his married life, had built up a philosophy of his own, which in the course of my life from time to time has been brought back to me.”
“I remember your grandfather quite well, my good Matteo,” said the other, “a highly corpulent, but still graceful figure, with a smooth, rosy face. He did not speak much.”
“He did not speak much, my good Taddeo,” Matteo agreed, “for he did, in accordance with his philosophy, admit the futility of argumentation. It is from my brilliant grandmother, his wife, that I have inherited my taste for a discussion. Yet one evening, while I was still quite a young boy, he benignly condescended to develop his theory to me. It happened, I remember, at a ball like this, and I myself was all the time longing to get away from the lecture. But my grandfather, his mind once opened upon the matter, did not dismiss his youthful listener till he had set forth to him his entire train of ideas. He said:
“‘We suffer much. We go through many dark hours of doubt, dread and despair, because we cannot reconcile our idea of divinity with the state of things in the universe round us. I myself as a young man brooded a good deal over the problem. Later on I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.
“‘We speak about Providence and announce: The Lord is my shepherd, He will provide. But in our hearts we know that we should demand from our own shepherds—’
“—for my grandfather,” the narrator here interrupted himself, “drew most of his wealth from his vast sheep farms in the province of Marche.
“‘—a providential care of our sheep very different from the one to which we are ourselves submitted, and which appears mainly to provide us with blood and