C. L. Moore - Daemon.pdf - C. L. Moore - widez2

Daemon

Padre, the words come slowly. It is a long time now since I have spoken in

the Portuguese tongue. For more than a year, my companions here were

those who do not speak with the tongues of men. And you must remember,

padre, that in Rio, where I was born, I was named Luiz o Bobo, which is to

say, Luiz the Simple. There was something wrong with my head, so that my

hands were always clumsy and my feet stumbled over each other. I could

not remember very much. But I could see things. Yes, padre, I could see

things such as other men do not know.

I can see things now. Do you know who stands beside you, padre, listening

while I talk? Never mind that. I am Luiz o Bobo still, though here on this

island there were great powers of healing, and I can remember now the

things that happened to me years ago. More easily than I remember what

happened last week or the week before that. The year has been like a

single day, for time on this island is not like time outside. When a man

lives with them, there is no time.

The ninfas, I mean. And the others. .

I am not lying. Why should I? I am going to die, quite soon now. You were

right to tell me that, padre. But I knew. I knew already. Your crucifix is very

pretty, padre. I like the way it shines in the sun. But that is not for me.

You see, I have always known the things that walk beside men-other men.

Not me. Perhaps they are souls, and I have no soul, being simple. Or

perhaps they are daemons such as only clever men have. Or perhaps they

are both these things. I do not know. But I know that I am dying. After the

ninfas go away, I would not care to live.

Since you ask how I came to this place, I will tell you if the time remains to

me. You will not believe. This is the one place on earth, I think, where they

lingered still-those things you do not believe.

But before I speak of them, I must go back to an earlier day, when I was

young beside the blue bay of Rio, under Sugar Loaf. I remember the docks

of Rio, and the children who mocked me. I was big and

strong, but I was o Bobo with a mind that knew no yesterday or tomorrow.

Minha avó, my grandmother, was kind to me. She was from Ceará, where

the yearly droughts kill hope, and she was half blind, with pain in her back

always. She worked so that we could eat, and she did not scold me too

much. I know that she was good. It was something I could see; I have

always had that power.

One morning my grandmother did not waken. She was cold when I touched

her hand. That did not frighten me for the-good thing- about her lingered

for a while. I closed her eyes and kissed her, and then I went away. I was

hungry, and because I was o Bobo, I thought that someone might give me

food, out of kindness. .

In the end, I foraged from the rubbish-heaps.

I did not starve. But I was lost and alone. Have you ever felt that, padre?

It is like a bitter wind from the mountains and no sheepskin cloak can shut

it out. One night I wandered into a sailors' saloon, and I remember that

there were many dark shapes with eyes that shone, hovering beside the

men who drank there. The men had red, wind-burned faces and tarry hands.

They made me drink 'guardiente until the room whirled around and went

dark.

I woke in a dirty bunk. I heard planks groaning and the floor rocked under

me.

Yes, padre, I had been shanghaied. I stumbled on deck, half blind in the

dazzling sunlight, and there I found a man who had a strange and shining

daemon. He was the captain of the ship, though I did not know it then. I

scarcely saw the man at all. I was looking at the daemon.

Now, most men have shapes that walk behind them, padre. Perhaps you

know that, too. Some of them are dark, like the shapes I saw in the saloon.

Some of them are bright, like that which followed my grandmother. Some of

them are colored, pale colors like ashes or rainbows. But this man had a

scarlet daemon. And it was a scarlet beside which blood itself is ashen. The

color blinded me. And yet it drew me, too. I could not take my eyes away,

nor could I look at it long without pain. I never saw a color more beautiful,

nor more frightening. It made my heart shrink within me, and quiver like a

dog that fears the whip. If I have a soul, perhaps it was my soul that

quivered. And I feared the beauty of the color as much as I feared the

terror it awoke in me. It is not good to see beauty in that which is evil.

Other men upon the deck had daemons too. Dark shapes and pale shapes

that followed them like their shadows. But I saw all the

claemons waver away from the red, beautiful thing that hung above the

captain of the ship.

The other daemons watched out of burning eyes. The red daemon had no

eyes. Its beautiful, blind face was turned always toward the captain, as if it

saw only through his vision. I could see the lines of its closed lids. And my

terror of its beauty, and my terror of its evil, were nothing to my terror of

the moment when the red daemon might lift those lids and look out upon

the world.

The captain's name was Jonah Stryker. He was a cruel man, dangerous to

be near. The men hated him. They were at his mercy while we were at sea,

and the captain was at the mercy of his daemon. That was why I could not

hate him as the others did. Perhaps it was pity I felt for Jonah Stryker. And

you, who know men better than I, will understand that the pity I had for

him made the captain hate me more bitterly than even his crew hated him.

When I came on deck that first morning, because I was blinded by the sun

and by the redness of the scarlet daemon, and because I was ignorant and

bewildered, I broke a shipboard rule. What it was, I do not know. There

were so many, and I never could remember very clearly in those days.

Perhaps I walked between him and the wind. Would that be wrong on a

clipper ship, padre? I never understood.

The captain shouted at me, in the Yankee tongue, evil words whose

meaning I did not know, but the daemon glowed redder when he spoke

them. And he struck me with his fist so that I fell. There was a look of

secret bliss on the blind crimson face hovering above his, because of the

anger that rose in him. I thought that through the captain's eyes the closed

eyes of the daemon were watching me.

I wept. In that moment, for the first time, I knew how truly alone a man

like me must be. For I had no daemon. It was not the simple loneliness for

my grandmother or for human companionship that brought the tears to my

eyes. That I could endure. But I saw the look of joy upon the blind

daemon-f ace because of the captain's evil, and I remembered the look of

joy that a bright shape sometimes wears who follows a good man. And I

knew that no deed of mine would ever bring joy or sorrow to that which

moves behind a man with a soul.

I lay upon the bright, hot deck and wept, not because of the blow, but

because I knew suddenly, for the first time, that I was alone. No daemon

for good or evil would ever follow me. Perhaps because I have no soul. That

loneliness, father, is something not even you could Understand.

The captain seized my arm and pulled me roughly to my feet. I did not

understand, then, the words he spoke in his Yankee tongue, though later I

picked up enough of that speech to know what men were saying around me.

You may think it strange that o Bobo could learn a foreign tongue. It was

easy for me. Easier, perhaps, than for a wiser man. Much I read upon the

faces of their daemons, and there were many words whose real sounds I

did not know, but whose meaning I found in the hum of thoughts about a

man's head.

The captain shouted for a man named Barton, and the first mate hurried up,

looking frightened. The captain pushed me back against the rail so that I

staggered, seeing him and the deck and the watching daemons through the

rainbows that tears cast before one's eyes.

There was loud talk, and many gestures toward me and the other two men

who had been shanghaied from the port of Rio. The first mate tapped his

head when he pointed to me, and the captain cursed again in the tongue of

the foreigners, so that his daemon smiled very sweetly at his shoulder.

I think that was the first time I let the captain see pity on my face when I

looked at him.

That was the one thing he could not bear. He snatched a belaying pin from

the rail and struck me in the face with it, so that I felt the teeth break in

my mouth. The blood I spat upon the deck was a beautiful color, but it

looked paler than water beside the colOr of the captain's daemon. I

remember all the daemons but the red one leaned a little forward when

they saw blood running, snuffing up the smell and the brightness of it like

incense. The red one did not even turn his blind face.

The captain struck me again because I had soiled his deck. My first task

aboard the Dancing Martha was to scrub up my own blood from the

planking.

Afterward they dragged me to the galley and threw me into the narrow alley

at the cook's feet. I burned my hands on the stove. The captain laughed to

see me jump back from it. It is a terrible thing that~ though I heard his

laughter many times a day, I never heard mirth in it. But there was mirth

on his daemon's face.

Pain was with me for many days thereafter, because of the beating and the

burns, but I was glad in a way. Pain kept my mind from the loneliness I had

just discovered in myself. Those were bad days, padre. The worst days of

my life. Afterward, when I was no longer lonely, I looked back upon them

as a soul in paradise might look back on purgatory.

No, I am still alone. Nothing follows me as things follow other men. But

here on the island I found the ninf as, and I was content.

I found them because of the Shaughnessy. I can understand him today in a

way I could not do just then. He was a wise man and I am o Bobo, but I

think I know some of his thoughts now, because today I, too, know I am

going to die.

The Shaughnessy lived many days with death. I do not know how long. It

was weeks and months in coming to him, though it lived in his lungs and

his heart as a child lives within its mother, biding its time to be born. The

Shaughnessy was a passenger. He had much money, so that he could do

what he willed with his last days of living. Also he came of a great family in

a foreign land called Ireland. The captain hated him for many reasons. He

scorned him because of his weakness, and he feared him because he was

ill. Perhaps he envied him too, because his people had once been kings and

because the Shaughnessy was not afraid to die. The captain, I know, feared

death. He feared it most terribly. He was right to fear it. He could not know

that a daemon rode upon his shoulder, smiling its sweet, secret smile, but

some instinct must have warned him that it was there, biding its time like

the death in the Shaughnessy's lungs.

I saw the captain die. I know he was right to fear the hour of his daemon. .

Those were bad days on the ship. They were worse because of the great

beauty all around us. I had never been at sea before, and the motion of the

ship was a wonder to me, the clouds of straining sail above us and the sea

all about, streaked with the colors of the currents and dazzling where the

sun-track lay. White gulls followed us with their yellow feet tucked up as

they soared over the deck, and porpoises followed too, playing in great arcs

about the ship and dripping diamonds in the sun.

I worked hard, for no more wages than freedom from blows when I did well,

and the scraps that were left from the table after the cook had eaten his

fill. The cook was not a bad man like the captain, but he was not a good

man, either. He did not care. His daemon was smoky, asleep, indifferent to

the cook and the world.

It was the Shaughnessy who made my life worth the trouble of living. If it

had not been for him, I might have surrendered life and gone into the

breathing sea some night when no one was looking. It would not have been

a sin for me, as it would be for a man with a soul.

But because of the Shaughnessy I did not. He had a strange sort of daemon

himself, mother-of-pearl in the light, with gleams of darker colors when the

shadows of night came on. He may have been a bad

man in his day. I do not know. The presence of death in him opened his

eyes, perhaps. I know only that to me he was very kind. His daemon grew

brighter as the man himself grew weak with the oncoming of death.

He told me many tales. I have never seen the foreign country of Ireland,

but I walked there often in my dreams because of the tales he told. The

foreign isles called Greece grew clear to me too, because the Shaughnessy

had dwelt there and loved them.

And he told me of things which he said were not really true, but I thought

he said that with only half his mind, because I saw them so clearly while he

talked. Great Odysseus was a man of flesh and blood to me, with a shining

daemon on his shoulder, and the voyage that took so many enchanted

years was a voyage I almost remembered, as if I myself had toiled among

the crew.

He told me of burning Sappho, and I knew why the poet used that word for

her, and I think the Shaughnessy knew too, though we did not speak of it. I

knew how dazzling the thing must have been that followed her through the

white streets of Lesbos and leaned upon her shoulder while she sang.

He told me of the nereids and the oceanids, and once I think I saw, far

away in the sun-track that blinded my eyes, a mighty head rise dripping

from the water, and heard the music of a wreathed horn as Triton called to

his fish-tailed girls.

The Dancing Martha stopped at Jamaica for a cargo of sugar and rum. Then

we struck out across the blue water toward a country called England. But

our luck was bad. Nothing was right about the ship on that voyage. Our

water-casks had not been cleaned as they should be, and the drinking

water became foul. A man can pick the maggots out of his salt pork if he

must, but bad water is a thing he cannot mend.

So the captain ordered our course changed for a little island he knew in

these waters. It was too tiny to be inhabited, a rock rising out of the great

blue deeps with a fresh spring bubbling high up in a cup of the forested

crags.

I saw it rising in the dawn like a green cloud on the horizon. Then it was a

jewel of green as we drew nearer, floating on the blue water. And my heart

was a bubble in my chest, shining with rainbow colors, lighter than the air

around me. Part of my mind thought that the island was an isle in Rio Bay,

and somehow I felt that I had come home again and would find my

grandmother waiting on the shore. I

forgot so much in those days. I forgot that she was dead. I thought we

would circle the island and come in across the dancing Bay to the foot of

the Rua d'Oporto, with the lovely city rising on its hills above the water.

I felt so sure of all this that I ran to tell the Sbaughnessy of my delight in

homecoming. And because I was hurrying, and blind to all on deck with the

vision of Rio in my eyes, I blundered into the captain himself. He staggered

C. L. Moore - Daemon.pdf

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