By Paul Mirabile
“Indeed, so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilisation but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other.”
This unreferenced passage was found upon the mangled body of a certain Mister Wilkens after he had thrown himself from a speeding night express from Paris to Madrid. I, riding on that train, and possessing a peculiar nature for the bizarre, decided to investigate rhe reasons for such a gruesome suicide. Fortunately, upon arriving in Madrid, I ran into the Englishman who had shared the compartment in which Mister Wilkens had been travelling on that memorable night. I had seen him on the railway tracks whilst the train officials searched the surrounding embankments for the body of the poor man. Apparently, it had been Mister Wilkens’ travelling companion who had alerted the officials. He knew why Mister Wilkens had killed himself but seemed rather parsimonious with the details when questioned by the police or the press, feigning that he was about to fall asleep when the tragic event occurred, and was only awakened by a terrible laugh or scream. (Which we shall soon learn was a blatant lie!)
When I met him in Madrid by some extraordinary chance and bought him a drink at the famous beer saloon at the Plaza Santa Anna, made famous by its association with Ernest Hemingway who drank and got rowdy there, I offered the man money to divulge the reason for the suicide to me. He bluntly refused. I explained my idiosyncrasies towards the bizarre and he, smiling a wicked smile, promised to tell me only if I would not submit the story for publication or spread its contents orally to the press, friends or family until he authorised me to do so. As to my offer of payment, he suggested two hundred quid would do! I agreed all agog, albeit the amount of money seemed to be rather steep. In any case, I assured him that I had neither friends nor family, and that I had no great love for journalists. His story, thus, would be perfectly safe with me.
This was how I came to be the first to put into writing the nature of Mister Wilkens and the reasons for his suicide. Now if readers ask themselves how I’ve managed to publish the testimony without breaking my solemn oath, I would then have to elaborate on the unforeseeable and tragic end of my informer (whose name, by the way, I never learned). But that is yet another story. Permit me to recount this one first.
*
“We were the only two in the compartment.” My English informant began smugly in a slightly high nasal tone while the air smelt somewhat of that Cambridge midnight lamp oil. “I can genuinely recollect at the train station in Paris that his personality was of a sullen, meek sort, one of a man who had fallen hard, got up, but only to fall again. He wore a tragic, tormented face, and if I recall correctly, every two or three minutes suffered an unsightly twitch under his left eye that made the other eye seem exorbitant. Anyway, once we had left Paris far behind, he engaged in the most singular gambit as regards the way in which he sought to enlist my attention : ‘Have you ever travelled to the Orient ?’ The gambit put so bluntly shook me out of my dreamy thoughts. I noted that his left eye began to twitch as if it sought to put me out even before I ventured an answer.
“‘No I haven’t, although I’ve read many travel writers and adventurers’ tales of the Orient.’
“‘Oh really !’ he snorted in overt contempt. ‘For example ?’
“ ‘Well … there’s Marco Polo.’
“He guffawed : ‘He never left his dingy cell in Venice, the seedy bugger !’ I shrugged my shoulders.
“ ‘I have perused Sir Richard Burton[1].’
“He lifted an appraising eyebrow : ‘Yes, a remarkable polyglot and reader of the Oriental heart ; an ethnologist and anthropologist avant la lettre. He was, nevertheless, a man fraught with prejudices and terribly dogmatic. Alas, a man of his times. Yet, his writings do hold much insight, and so humorous at that. Did he not say that England was just a tiny island ? He secretly despised it for he breathed more spacious air in Asia, Africa and Continental Europe.’ He adjusted his badly knotted tie. ‘Go on …’
“ ‘I’ve read all of Alexandra David-Néel’s novels[2]?’ I pursued with an amused air of a child.
“ ‘Ah ! Now there’s an outstanding, pugnacious explorer ! She outstrips them all — except Burton of course — in intrepidity, intelligence, will-power and writing style. Her sarcasm and irony suit my humour, whilst her practice and research into Buddhism bear the seriousness of any so called specialist or expert.’ He smiled a self-congratulatory smile as if he had brought up the name himself. I must admit that I too was pleased at his overt approval; indeed, to have outsmarted the Brits and the Tibetans through cunning and acumen in order to reach Lhasa on foot safe and sound was a fantastic feat.
“My travelling companion lifted his chin for me to continue my enumeration : ‘Pierre Loti[3] ?’
“He snorted : ‘Please be serious, sir.’ And he yawned.
“‘André Malraux[4],’ I jested.
“He threw up his hands : ‘His novels are wonderful, but his Orient is as imaginary as his imaginary museums.’
“‘Pearl Buck[5] ?’ I countered with excessive decorum as if all this were just a parlour game.
“ ‘Hum … yes, she is the only Westerner who really knew China, more so than the American journalists Louis Strong and Edgar Snow. Read her Nobel Prize speech, it’s an incredible lesson in Chinese literature. Yes, Pearl Buck had a genuine love for the East. Her books plunge us into the remotest depths of twentieth century rural China. The Mother is a sparkling piece of penmanship …’
“ ‘I shall not name all the modern travel-writers to the East whom I have read on my train rides, many of whose narratives are quite dull and stereotyped.’ I rejoined, hoping to put an end to this ridiculous ‘parlour game’.
“ ‘So right you are, sir,’ he beamed. He sat back in his seat fidgeting with the buttons on his vest, some of which were missing. ‘I noted, too ….’
“Our compartment door slid open violently. The conductor practically jumped in demanding our tickets. My heart almost jumped with his jump ! Anyway, we dutifully showed them to him. When he had jumped out, so to speak, Mister Wilkens, although unperturbed by all this jumping about, seemed, none the less, beset by something, his eyes staring blankly at the table aside the window where he had placed a shoulder-bag, perhaps because he had lost the thread of our conversation. He looked up and blurted out: ‘You know sir, I spent over forty years living in the East : Turkey, Syria, Armenia, India, China, Laos, Mongolia, not as a conquering dolt, a cosmopolitan snob or a professional prig, but as a pilgrim in quest of my humane origins.’
“My travelling companion was in a state of unusual excitement. ‘Humane origins ?’ I repeated with a soupçon of irony.
“ ‘Yes, humane origins. I see that you fail to grasp the essence of that formula. Humane is another word for Humanism, my dear fellow. Humane defines our human heritage, the fount of our soul and spirit.’
“Just at that moment several French customs officials slid our door open and asked for our passports. When they were examined and returned, a few minutes later the Spanish police entered and inspected them in the same taciturn manner. As soon as these formalities had been completed we leaned back in our seats.
“I sat politely, absorbed in Mister Wilkens’ rather dark comments, exposed with such bursts of emotion. I swallowed every word he said, albeit the digestion caused me great discomfort. Be that as it may, sceptical at first, I grew somewhat more interested as he rambled on, amused at the man’s gyrating gesticulations, wondering, however, if he had gleaned his monologue from a book or from his own experiences as he so pompously pretended. This being said, I did feel a certain fraternal respect for him, although I will confess that he annoyed me with that composed self-sufficient poise. A poise I had stupidly preened in my old university days at Cambridge; you know, the eloquence of words, however boastful and bombastic, hollowing out dismal logic and stale equations. But I was dead sure that if I hadn’t been to Cambridge, this man would have never even addressed a single word to me. He sniffed out his ‘own kind’ ! But of this ‘kind’ I was particularly sceptical and mistrustful, especially of pedants like him. A sentiment of distrust one encounters in people who throw themselves upon you, spilling out their watered down philosophies or immature phantasies during long hours in trains. To be fair though, I did not detect this incorrigible comportment in Mister Wilkens’ hurried, but measured spurts. His words were solid, linked together like the shiny mail-coats of those fine mediaeval smithies.
“ ‘Are you then not content with your many years spent amongst the populations of Asia ?’ It was a mundane question but…
“ ‘Disorientation …’
“ ‘What ? Disorientation ?’
“ ‘Yes, disorientation, sir. Look at the word closely : ‘dis-‘ apart from and ‘orient’ … I am separated from the Orient … my Orient ; like dis-order, out of order, or dis-jointed, out of joint. Or how does disease appeal to you : out of or separated from ‘ease’, or disaster, out of the harmonious movements of the ‘astres‘ or stars ? The Eastern stars of course. Have I made myself understood ?’ He sneezed.
“I nodded without conviction. That pedantic tone, plus his semantic shenanigans unnerved me as well as that left eye of his which had been twitching with each jerky gesture of head and hands. He then began wringing those hands of his like some sort of maniac, gazing at the top berth above me, starry-eyed.
“ ‘Were you there on mission ?’ I ventured, hoping to regain his attention.
“ ‘Mission ? Yes, my mission ; not there, but here in Europe. I must relocate my orientation here in the West, if that is at all possible, given the fact that I am completely disorientated.’ He scratched that twitching eye peevishly. ‘So many languages and cultures studied and taught all gone up in smoke. A tragic fire has set aflame my life since returning to Europe; it has turned all my dreams to ashes. All my written and spoken words wrapped in the flame of a setting sun! And I can assure you sir, no phoenix will ever arise from them. Once disorientated, always disorientated as they say.’ He reached for his shoulder-bag, pulled out a soft-covered book, opening it at random with a look of disdain.
“I must admit that I found it painstaking to follow Mister Wilkens’ histrionic tirade with any seriousness. There he sat, lofty and smile-less, his head swaying listlessly from one side to the other like a puppet. His twitching eye had become intolerable to look at; I turned my head away and peered out of the window. Darkness had mantled the low-lying countryside in a softness that diverted my attention momentarily from those inflamed words. During this dream-like state, the darkness absorbing me within her lush, humid vortex, it seemed to me — though I am hardly a psychologist — that my travelling companion had experienced a traumatic relationship crisis with peoples of very alien values to his own European ones, a crisis that exhausted and put to trial his intellectual and emotional limits, exhausting him of any margin of repartee, driving him to self-accusation, even to self-maceration. His ‘Oriental’ experiences hardly broadened his vision of the world; on the contrary, they left him in an utter state of culpability. I felt that all his monologuing, if I may use that ugly word, was a confession pronounced before the hour of death. This may be an exaggeration, but I did sense that Mister Wilkens had been touched by some unknown madness, perhaps a loss of identification or an explosion of a multitude of identifications with which he could not cope … nor wished to cope! He made weird grimaces, sighed, fidgeted about in his seat, ignoring me completely until the train pulled into a station. Three minutes later we pulled out. Mister Wilkens had not once raised his eyes from that book, which I am sure he was not reading at all.
“If I remember correctly it was a very cold night, the sky, a crisp, obsidian black, the stars, frozen, and the moon, full and bright. I dare say our compartment was so cold that we were forced to bundle up in our overcoats. Mister Wilkens looked up at me several times from his pretended book-reading, though he displayed no desire for conversation. I broke in on him once, rather bombastically, lauding the French railway system. He nodded apathetically, then plunged his pug nose back into those pages. A few moments later the conductor poked his head in to apologise about the heating that, he promised, should be coming on shortly. I sighed in relief for I was freezing.
“Mister Wilkens cast me a cursory glance: ‘Have you studied things seriously, sir ? I mean the things in life, yourself, for example ?’
“I found the question impertinent, but answered, none the less: ‘Yes I have as a matter of fact … including myself,’ I retorted, holding my head haughtily high. ‘I too have travelled widely.’ He snorted. I remember at that point I had taken off my overcoat, for the heating was slowly coming back on. Mister Wilkens, however, kept his on in spite of the beads of sweat rising to the surface of his high, furrowed forehead. He offered no repartee, thumbing nervously through that book of his.
“I thought to retaliate, judging him an unmannerly upstart: ‘So you consider yourself an Orientalist ?’
“He looked up from his ‘perusing’ and stared at me as if I had insulted him with the grossest of four-lettered words. ‘That is an ugly word,’ he sneered. ‘All your years at Cambridge have taught you nothing. Anyway, to answer your question: no, I am not an Orientalist. Alas, as I have just finished explaining, everything has gone up into smoke: to have learned all those languages for nothing… to have undertaken all those voyages for nothing; to have taught and written for nothing ! Do you understand, sir … For nothing …’
“ ‘But …’
“ ‘But what ? Please, don’t pretend to console or pamper me, I abhor puerile commiseration. For nothing, sir. Do you realise that besides this train from Paris to Madrid back and forth, back and forth …’ A woman threw open our compartment door to step in, but when she saw Mister Wilkens’ twisted face and his twitching eye, she gasped and slammed it shut. He scoffed, fell mute and turned to the window.
“Large snowflakes fell. They formed little rims of melting sleet on the window. The wind whipped them about, giving an impression of so many odd geometric configurations. During that uneasy interlude I searched frantically for something to say. I couldn’t bear that slice of silence arching over us, that biting irony of contempt.
“Before I was able to say what I had finally conjured up to say, he burst brusquely into my crowded thoughts: ‘I must tell you a little story about Sandy, a mate of ours at Cambridge with whom we would go out on Saturday nights to “drink up the town” as the Americans say! There we were, a bit tipsy, carousing with the crowd, having a jolly good time, and Sandy, making a perfect bore of himself. So, to enliven the ambience I mustered everyone’s attention to inform them that I had stuck up for Sandy a week ago. Hearing his name suddenly mentioned, he raised his fat face out of the beer mug and looked blankly at me. I turned to Sandy and said : ”Sandy, how ungrateful you are, just think, I stuck up for you the other day, someone said that Sandy wasn’t fit to live with the pigs and I said that he certainly was !” All of us roared with laughter whilst poor Sandy buried his pasty face in the froth of his beer. In fact the whole pub was howling with laughter. It was truly a smashing night out.’
“Mister Wilkens was choking with laughter. He appeared so pathetic to me. He wore such a cretinous smirk on his twitching face. That revolting anecdote of his was cheap and full of childish contempt. Was he doing this purposely to disgust me, to urge me to get up and leave the compartment? He calmed down and eyed me with a sort of conspiratorial smile: ‘Have you ever thought of taking the Leap, sir ?’ He pushed his tortured face forward waiting for an answer. His hysterical tone had shaken me up a bit. I wished only now to be left alone.
“ ‘The leap ?’ I asked, examining him rather warily. It was an odd word which he emphasised with an accompanying gesture of his hand raised high overhead. He noted the tint of circumspection in my voice. He sneered and threw open our compartment window. Stretching his hand out, he caught the flakes of snow that shone in the half-lit wintry night. I made no move. Cold air rushed into the warmth of the compartment. I nodded towards the window. He feigned to ignore me and his sneer erupted into a series of ugly snickers. I snuggled up in a corner and for an instant thought it best to leave him to his madness. It was becoming frightfully cold, and furthermore, his attitude frightened me, his gestures were nervous, erratic. His face, morose, spiteful. He kept tapping his feet and hands, playing nervously with the frayed ends of the cuffs of his shirt. Was it because of the cold or some inner anxiety? I sensed that he was displeased with the tone of my voice and most probably even disgusted with my company, and was undoubtedly endeavouring to communicate it to me. I sprang to my feet to take leave of him. He grasped my shoulder. His fingers were wiry, hard as steel.
“ ‘Yes, the leap, my good fellow. Leaps are like twilights and rainbows, terribly brief. Do you understand who all those peanuts in a jar are ? No, you have understood absolutely nothing of what I have been saying.’ I stood gaping at him, frozen in terror. He released his grip and in one violent movement pushed me aside against the compartment door. ‘You may plead in my favour that I’ve had my day in the sun; I shan’t disapprove of that banality. But tell me, sir, you, so well cultivated, was it all then just fairy dust ? A forty-year timeless fairy tale existence before … before the plunge into this nightmare, waking up into a dank, grim prison of biological and material utility ? Are we all forbidden to accomplish our dreams ? Must we live out our lives in a stifling cocoon of time- and energy-consuming survival of the fittest ? Well sir, yes, I’ve had my day in the bold, rising sun, but it has since sunk …’ Mister Wilkens threw back his head in the most theatrical fashion, grabbed his book, leapt up on to the table aside the window then rolled out of it without uttering the slightest sound. Confounded, I made no effort to stop him. At length, coming to myself, I ran for the conductor. The rest of the story you know.”
When he had finished his account and his fifth beer (which I had been paying for) I again promised him that I would neither write nor mention this unusual event to anyone. I enquired, however, about the book he had been reading or pretended to be reading in the train. My informer said that he had tumbled out of the window with it cradled in his arms, but no one, apparently, made any effort to find it. I paid him, and without another word, he stood and left the beer-hall.
At this point the reader is undoubtedly eager to know why I have broken my vow and have divulged the tragic end of Mister Wilkens. Well, let me record without going into details that a similar tragedy befell my English informer some months ago on the December 9, 1976, on a night train between Paris and Madrid, so reported El Pais[6]. A large photo of him reminded me that I had never asked him his name, and it was only by the photo that I knew it was my informer. Perhaps he, like Mister Wilkens, had also made the leap, although I doubt whether he dabbled in the field of Orientalism. This being said, I hope these suicides are not contagious, and that because of poor Mister Wilken’s embryonic virus, I too have been contaminated by his travelling companion! To look at it from another point of view, however, I have often wondered about that book; that is, Mister Wilkens’ book which he had held in his arms when he leapt out of the speeding train. My guess is that it may be the key in understanding the reason for killing himself, that and the citation found on him, which I have put into quotation as an epigraph to my narrative, and unfortunately –I must confess– whose author I have never been able to discover. I’m sure the key to the mystery lies in that name of the book.
[1] (1821-1890) British military officer, explorer, erudite, writer and polyglot.
[2] (1868-1969) French explorer, intellectual and writer.
[3] (1850-1923) French military officer, traveller and writer.
[4] (1901-1976) French writer, traveller and Minister of Culture under President General De Gaulle.
[5] (1892-1973) American writer, winner of the Nobe Prize for Literature in 1938, born in China.
[6] The national newspaper of Spain (The Nation)
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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