against common sense
by Douglas Messerli
Gustaw Herling The Noonday Cemetery, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (New
York: New Directions, 2003)
For a long time now I have
taken every opportunity
to speak out against the
opposition of strangeness and
naturalness (or
verisimilitude). Whoever closely
observes reality, whoever
trains themselves to notice
the apparent “strangeness”
of many of its manifestations,
knows that we allow
ourselves to be limited and bound in our
way of looking at “natural”
or “plausible” events, seeking in them
exclusively that which
appears to our sense of realistic level-
headedness. There is no
division into “strange” and “natural”
things. There is—if one
absolutely insists—a division into
“common” and “uncommon”
things, things that are “ordinary”
and those that are
“difficult to grasp.”
Perhaps what I have been describing
throughout these memoirs as incidents of strange coincidence—incidents which
may lead the reader to question my truthfulness, but in fact represent truth as
I know it—may be related to the marvelous uncommonness mixed with the common of
Herling’s stories. In short, these works often read more like
realistically-portrayed nightmares than what we usually describe as fiction.
Although Herling also argues against strictly psychological
interpretations of experience as against the spiritual or miraculous, we
quickly recognize in these short works that he is nearly fixated upon death. Almost
every tale in this volume concerns an inexplicably violent ending. The title
story relates the tale of a quiet caretaker of an isolated cemetery of
Albino—that is until during World War II, when it becomes a battleground of and
ultimate resting place for a German officer, Manfred Weinert. The caretaker,
Fasano, treats the officer’s grave almost as a shrine until one day the Nazi’s
wife appears to grieve her husband. Without comprehending one another’s
languages, the officer’s wife, Inge, moves in with Fasano. Every day they
appear together at the cemetery until one day in August 1949, when they do not
show up. Several days later their corpses are found in the closed-up house,
with a revolver lying in a “dried pool of blood in the wide space between the
bodies.” The “story” concerns the author’s attempt—despite the near-absolute
silence of the nearby villagers—to unravel the suicide-murder. Who killed whom,
and why? There are no answers to this tragedy, only speculations, and the more
one pursues the “truth,” the more difficult it is to comprehend.
“A Hot Breath from the Desert” concerns another murder. This time
involving a loving British couple, Derek and Violet Porter, who begin work on
an archeological dig, but later move into a small house in Agropoli, where they
paint and sculpt. During World War II they are forced to retreat to England,
but in the mid-1950s they return to Agropoli. But now Violet is pale and gaunt,
distracted in her behavior, later described as a virulent form of amnesia. By
1958 Violet has completely withdrawn. Her husband gently cares for her until
one night, watching her sleep with a smile upon her lips, Derek becomes
violently angry and smothers her with his pillow. Once again, there are no easy
answers as to what has made the husband snap, what has turned him from a loving
caretaker to a murderer. Herling fills his story with details from the doctors,
police reports, and the later trial, without coming upon a definitive answer.
Truth is, in fact, a major issue in Herling’s work. What is history or
even myth? Erudite, a reader of great literature (his tales are peppered with
mentions of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Hoffman, Bulgakov, and others), the
author perceives that any definitive solution to the various events and crimes
he recounts is clearly impossible. “The Eyetooth of Barabbas” concerns the holy
relics of Price Sicard buried in a Cathedral of Benevento, bombed and destroyed
in 1943. Of particular interest to the narrator is the “eyetooth” of the
criminal released in exchange for Christ. Recounting the Barabbas tales of
Giovanni Papini and Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist, Herling reconsiders the role
of Barabbas in the crucifixion story. Was Barabbas truly “saved,” ultimately so
absorbed in knowing that Christ “died in his place” that he is transformed into
a believer, or is he to be demonized, to be eternally represented as a sinful
outcast for his passive role in history. What the author comprehends, leading
him on his impossible search, is that if such a tooth were to be discovered it
might explain Barabbas’s metaphysical position; for in the beliefs of Prince
Sicard’s day, a large eyetooth “was the identifying mark of the Devil, just as
today it is the insignia of a Vampire.” As in most of his other tales, Herling
does not find an answer to his question: the Germans have stolen the relic.
“The Height of Summer” is a horrifyingly eerie story concerning the rise
in suicides throughout Rome during the Ferragosto, at the height of summer,
August 15th. In particular, the tale relates the deaths of nine
Romans on the night of August 15th to the 16th in 1995.
Although a committee investigating these deaths uncovers numerous details about
each of the victims, there is no conclusion to be made—simply the reiteration
through the author’s own experience that there is something mysteriously
terrifying about such nights.
“Ashes” concerns an affluent family with whom the author stays on the
island of Panarea, one of the Aeolian Islands, the Seven Pearls. Through a
series of unfortunate situations, the happy Bernardi couple’s daughter, and
later Loris’s wife die, the beautiful home in Panarea is left to ruin, and like
Poe’s House of Usher, crumbles away into the ocean during a particularly
violent storm, leaving nothing but the ashes of a once happy family.
“The Notebook of William Moulding, Pensioner” concerns a discovered
manuscript of a retired British Chief Hangman—the last of his species—and the
uncanny events that force him to remember the faces of his victims whom he
previously discounted as human beings. Moulding, as an old man, is destroyed by
young boys in a meaninglessly vicious attack.
“The Silver Coffer” is a tale of a beautiful coffer cherished by the
narrator-owner only to see it blacken in a few days’ time, forcing him to
discover a secret message within its walls, revealing, through its fragments,
the terrible murder by Abas Petras—head of a religious order at the time of his
death—of his sister, poet Teresa Demagno, in the 16th century.
Perhaps my favorite of Herling’s tales is the long, most definitely
“uncommon” story of the surgeon Don Fausto, who, fascinated with the Neopolitan
belief in the iettatura, the evil
eye, discovers that he is relative to one of the most noted of the possessed,
Don Francesco Ildes Brandes, a converted Jew tortured by the Spanish
Inquisition before he turned his eye upon the judges, all of whom were
destroyed. Don Fausto, himself, is in turn tortured and ultimately killed by
the portrait of Don Ildebrando he keeps in his castle near the small village of
Montenero, a village which itself is soon after destroyed in a horrible storm
of lightning and thunder. Herling’s telling of this terrible story has all the
markings of Poe and Hawthorne as he attests to its utter strangeness:
What I will say next will
lead many of my readers to laugh and shrug their
shoulders. Yet I will say it
anyway, because the present age has been
excessive in inculcating in
us the cult of “common sense.” We observe
inexplicable phenomena out of
the corner of our eye and pretend that
we have not seen them; we
read in bolder authors about ghosts of the
dead, and regard them as
phantasms, productions of sick imagination—
anything so as not to
jeopardize our “common sense” or to be propelled
into the ambit of another
dimension, beyond the threshold of “verifiable,
tangible reality.” We pass
through life with one eye all too sharp, yet the
other blind, as if covered
with a film. Is it enough just to see? No, it is
not enough.
The joy of reading these thirteen tales is that Herling returns us to a
world where mystery and revelation, terror and belief, evil and good have been
restored, common sense replaced by an open wonderment of life.
Los Angeles, April 1, 2003
