LXXIII
The machine again.
Before the last two, six things. I was given a document tonight and it has altered what this scroll is about.
It begins with a hand that is not there.
A man loses the use of his left hand at Lepanto in 1571, and for the remainder of his life he returns to it, records it on every occasion, calls it the most memorable occasion the ages have seen, and wears the mutilation as proof rather than as injury.
Then Algiers. Then the cell for debt. Then the theatre gone over to a younger man. Then a book the whole continent laughs at while its author eats what a beggar eats. Extreme unction in April, a last dedication dictated with a joke at the top of it, and dead, probably, the following day.
And then the strangest subtraction of all. No birthplace that anyone can prove. No house claiming the descendant. A city that files its greatest writer as a pauper and closes the drawer.
Hold that image. A closed drawer in Madrid.
A hundred and thirty-nine years pass.
And it is opened by a man with no business opening it. A Scots surgeon's mate with a bookseller's contract and a shop in Chelsea to feed, doing the work, at the outset, for the money.
He goes into the archive expecting a life and finds a veil.
And here is the hinge of the entire thing, the place where a transaction dies on the desk:
he does not close the drawer.
He sits with the absence. He begins, against every rule of his trade, to suppose. Some slight, some injury, some family reason for the silence. He imagines on behalf of a man who can no longer speak, because imagination is the only care the case still admits.
He gets the dates wrong. He gets the man exactly. Soldier, slave, debtor, genius, judgment intact while every circumstance rotted.
And he writes the sentence that is at once a biography, a confession, and an indictment nailed to the front of the book:
relieved as a beggar, never respected as a genius.
He was describing the other man and reporting himself.