Miguel de Cervantes — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

Whether the man of whom I write was called Alonso, as some chroniclers of this history maintain, or Ildefonso, as others with equal stubbornness insist, or Anselmo, as a certain binder in Salamanca once printed him in an edition since lost to moths and to the general indifference of posterity, I cannot with any confidence determine; nor does it greatly signify, for a man's true name is less often written upon his baptismal register than upon the conduct of his days, and by that second register our friend shall be known to us well enough. He lived, at the time these things befell him, in a northern capital which prudence forbids me to name outright, though the curious reader, turning the globe of Europe with an idle finger, may light upon Prague and not be very far mistaken. He had come there, as so many now come to foreign capitals, not by the summons of king or cardinal but by the invisible tether of a laptop computer, upon which he performed each day certain labours of translation for a house of publishers he had never seen and colleagues he knew only as small square photographs, so that he lived among a great multitude of souls and yet dined, more often than not, in the company of his own reflection.

This reflection he was accustomed to study each afternoon in the mirror of a café called, in the old fashion, the Golden Compass, an establishment so ancient that its gilding had blackened and its marble had yellowed like the teeth of a hound grown old in faithful service. The mirror itself, framed in walnut carved with grapes and satyrs, bore across its lower third a single hairline fracture, thin as a hair drawn from a maiden's head, which some said had been made by a saber in the duelling years of the old empire and others said had come simply of a careless porter and a crate of bottled water; and our scholar, who had read more books of chivalry in his youth than a canon of the Church reads of theology in a long life, and who therefore looked upon all cracked and antique things as upon wounds honourably got rather than accidents meanly suffered, could not pass that mirror without believing he saw in it the scar of some old and lawful quarrel, waiting only for a fit chronicler to restore it to its glory.

It happened one evening—for Fortune, that arranges the smallest matters of men better than their own foresight, had disposed it so—that a waiter of the establishment, a fellow of quick eye and quicker tongue whom the regulars called simply Bertek, and who had made of every foreigner's credulity a modest but reliable trade, observed the scholar's long gaze into the fractured glass and did not let the occasion pass him by. "That crack, sir," said he, leaning close and lowering his voice as though confiding a secret entrusted to few, "was made by the sword of a Hungarian count who fought here for the honour of a lady now three hundred years in her grave, and it is said that whoever buys the house a bottle of the good Tokaji upon the anniversary of the duel may see, for one instant only, the count's face looking back instead of his own." To seize upon this fable, to nod as at a truth long suspected, to call at once for the bottle and press upon the waiter a note far beyond its worth, was the work of an instant; for a man nourished on romances does not test a marvel, he only waits for it to be offered.

"Sir," said the scholar, and here I set down his speech entire and without interruption, as he delivered it gravely and without the least suspicion that his listener composed his face to hide a smile, "I have long believed that the objects which time leaves broken about us are not ruins but inscriptions, and that a fracture in old glass is no more an accident than a scar upon a soldier's cheek is an accident, since both are the signatures which former violence leaves for those with eyes patient enough to read them; and if this mirror indeed remembers a count and a lady and a debt of honour paid in steel, then I count myself fortunate beyond my deserts to have been permitted, in a city where I know no one and am known by no one, to sit each evening in the company of a grief three centuries old, which is, after all, better company than my own solitude, which is not old at all, and remembers nothing, and asks nothing of me but that I go on."

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Bertek, who had heard finer speeches answered with smaller sums, pocketed the note, wiped a glass that did not need wiping, and said only: "A cracked jug still holds water, sir, but not for long." Which proverb, whether he had misapplied it or applied it only too well, the scholar did not stay to consider, being already lost again in the mirror, where his own solitary face, and no count's, looked mildly back at him through the hairline of the old wound; and here, the digression having run somewhat longer than I intended, I lay down my pen and beg the reader's pardon, promising that the count, the count's face, and the count's account shall all be settled in their season.
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That season, as seasons will, arrived in its own time, and it happened that our scholar returned to the Golden Compass on the appointed anniversary, and on the several anniversaries that followed it in his own private calendar, for he had resolved, in the manner of men who mistake a single grant of grace for a covenant, that the ritual of the Tokaji must be repeated if the count's face was ever to be more than glimpsed; and so for three weeks running he called for the bottle, tipped Bertek beyond all reason, and sat with his eyes fixed upon the hairline fracture as a penitent fixes his eyes upon a relic, waiting for the glass to yield up its Hungarian gentleman. Bertek, for his part, took the money with the equanimity of a man drawing water from a well he had dug himself, and offered each evening some new particular of the legend—now the count had been a colonel, now a poet, now a colonel who wrote poetry badly, which last detail he delivered with such a grave face that the scholar wrote it down in the small notebook he carried for observations he judged too fine to trust to memory alone.
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But Fortune, who arranges these matters better than the schemes of rogues or the hopes of scholars, had disposed that the café's proprietor, an old woman named Havlová who had inherited the Golden Compass from a father who had inherited it from his, should choose that same week to have the mirror at last re-silvered, the fracture puttied, the frame regilded, on the grounds that a business cannot live forever on the patience of its furniture; and she said as much to Bertek in the scholar's hearing, in the flat voice of a woman who has buried three husbands and does not intend to be moved by the fourth. "The glazier comes Tuesday," said she, "and that crack goes with him, God be thanked, for I am tired of gentlemen weeping into good wine over a scratch that Pavel the porter made with a crate in 'ninety-one, and I tired of it before Bertek here began selling counts to strangers for the price of a bottle." Which she said not maliciously, nor even much caring who heard it, but as one states the price of bread.

Here I confess I would gladly have spared my reader this scene, and spared the scholar the hearing of it, had not the truth of the history obliged me to set it down entire, for a chronicler who suppresses the humiliations of his hero along with his glories writes not history but flattery, and flattery is a coin that buys nothing in the end. The scholar heard the old woman's words, and I will not pretend that he did not color, nor that his hand did not tighten a moment upon the stem of his glass; but he did not, as a lesser man might, protest, nor call the woman a liar, nor demand his silver back from Bertek's pocket. He only looked once more into the mirror, at his own face and no count's, and said, low and to no one, that enchanters are subtle in their operations and choose always the hour of a man's confidence to work their spite, for it was surely no accident, said he, that the glass should be ordered mended in the very week he had come nearest to seeing through it truly; the same malign influence that had troubled better men than himself, hiding castles as inns and giants as mills, had here hidden a count as a porter's carelessness, and would go on hiding him, be the glass whole or cracked, from all but the rare eye that Fortune, in her own good time, might yet choose to bless.

No longer did he call for the Tokaji on the appointed evenings, nor press notes upon Bertek beyond the honest price of his coffee, nor write in his small notebook the further particulars of colonels who wrote poetry badly; the mirror was mended within the week, smooth and whole and telling no story at all, and he found he could look into it now without expectation, which is not the same as looking into it without loss. Bertek, who had made his trade and lost his customer in the same breath, offered him at parting one proverb more, delivered without malice: "A house once swept clean does not remember its dust, sir, and a man well fooled remembers the fooling longer than the fool remembers the folly." Whether this was justly applied or only loosely, as was Bertek's habit, I will not undertake to judge; I set down only that the scholar nodded as though it answered something, paid for his coffee, and went out again into the foreign evening, alone as before, but a little less certain that his solitude, at least, told him nothing true. Here, this small history being spent, I lay down my pen, having perhaps lingered over a crack in a mirror longer than its worth deserved, and beg the reader's indulgence for it, as one begs indulgence for any grief too small to name and too stubborn to leave.