Miguel de Cervantes — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2
In what year of our Lord this befell the several copies of the manuscript do not agree, some setting it down to the autumn when the plane trees along that foreign capital's river had begun to rust, others insisting it was deep winter, and I, who have no stake in the quarrel, will only say that it was in a coffee-house called, for reasons no one living could explain, the Mirror of Gold, that Don Anselmo de Vergara first noticed the fracture. He was a scholar of some fifty years, sent thither not by conquest nor pilgrimage but by that modern species of errantry wherein a man sits each morning before a glowing pane and holds converse, through wires and unseen operators, with a house of business three kingdoms distant, so that his body lodged in one city while his labour and his wages dwelt in another, and of this division — for it is a kind of division, whatever the merchants call it — more shall be said hereafter, for it is not my present business to anatomize it, only to record what followed.
The mirror in question hung behind the zinc counter, framed in tarnished gilt, and had, by the testimony of the proprietor's grandfather, survived two wars, one flood, and the indifference of every regime that had claimed the city between; yet in all that survival it had taken one wound, a hairline fracture running corner to corner like the track of a blade that had struck true but not deep, and it was this thread of silver, catching the lamp at a certain hour, that Don Anselmo now studied over his second coffee with the attention he had formerly reserved for variant readings in a disputed folio.
For he had come to that city, as I have said, to labour at a distance, translating by night the correspondence of men he would never meet, and the solitude of this employment — no colleague at his elbow, no bell to mark the hours, only the small cold flame of the screen and the larger cold flame of his own thoughts — had begun, as solitude will, to loosen the hinges of his judgment; so that where another man would have seen only a crack in old glass, the ordinary tribute time exacts of all mirrors as of all men, Don Anselmo saw a wound withheld from healing, a scar such as the Knight of the Mirrors bore into that famous encounter, and he could not put down the notion, once it had lodged, that the fracture was no accident of manufacture but the record of some old and unavenged affront, waiting, as such things wait in books, for a champion.
It was at this hour that the waiter approached — a fellow the house called Roque, though whether that was baptismal or acquired no one troubled to ask, a man of quick hands and quicker tongue, who had made of the coffee-house a small kingdom in which he alone knew where the true profit lay. "Your worship stares at that glass," said he, "as though it owed you money." Don Anselmo, roused, began upon a period of some length: that the fracture was not mere damage but a testimony, a silent chronicle of violence done and unconfessed, that glass, like honour, once cracked can be polished but never made whole, that he, Anselmo, felt himself called by some obscure sympathy to inquire into its history, for a man who reads all his life learns at last to read what other men pass over without a glance. To which Roque answered only, "A cracked mirror still shows a man his face, señor, only in two pieces instead of one," and went to fetch the bill, for in that house, whatever the philosophy of the matter, the coffee was always paid for first and mourned after.
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Fortune, however — which orders these small histories better than any translator of remote correspondence can order his own — had already begun to arrange that Roque should prove neither so simple nor so honest as his proverb suggested, and that the fracture in the mirror should occasion, before the season turned, a reckoning neither of them yet foresaw. But of that, and of what the enchanters — for enchanters there must always be, when the world declines to confirm a scholar's reading of it — would make of Don Anselmo's crack in the glass, I shall render account presently, begging pardon meanwhile for having lingered so long over one thread of silver in old gilt, when graver matters, no doubt, awaited the pen.
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The several copies of this history, as I take up the account, disagree yet more sharply upon what followed than upon what season it was, for some say Don Anselmo waited three days before he acted, taking counsel of his pillow as prudent men do, while others hold that he rose from his very chair, coffee half-drunk, and went that same hour to demand of the proprietor — a stout widow named doña Pilar, who kept the till as jealously as a duenna keeps a niece — the full history of the wound in her glass. She, being a woman more concerned with the price of milk than with the wars of Flanders, could tell him only that her grandfather had bought the mirror already so marked, from a house that had itself gone bankrupt, and that whatever blade or fist or falling timber had made the crack, no one now living had troubled to record it, for the dead, as she observed with the plain wisdom of her trade, leave few invoices behind them.
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This answer, which would have satisfied any reasonable man, satisfied Don Anselmo not at all, for he had by now built upon that thread of silver an entire architecture of offended honour and silent chronicle, and a woman's ignorance of her own furniture seemed to him only further proof that the truth lay buried deeper than commerce could reach; and it was here that Roque, who had listened to the whole exchange with the stillness of a man counting another's coin before it is offered, proposed that he himself, having a cousin who dealt in the restoration of old frames, might make inquiry among the guild of glaziers and antiquaries, provided his worship would defray the small expenses of travel, of wine for loosening tongues, and of a certain fee customary among those who part with secrets — to which Don Anselmo agreed at once and without haggling, for scholars are notoriously poor merchants of their own credulity.
Fortune, however, arranged the matter better than either of them expected, for on the very evening that Roque returned with a parchment of invented provenance — a tale of a jilted bridegroom, a thrown candlestick, a curse laid upon the glass by a gypsy woman paid in copper — there arrived also, quite without ceremony, a plumber summoned by doña Pilar to mend a leaking pipe behind the same counter, and this plumber, glancing up at the famous crack while he worked, remarked to no one in particular that he remembered it well, for his own father had cracked it thirty years before, delivering blocks of ice in a hurry and letting the corner of one strike the frame; and the whole coffee-house, which had gathered by now to hear Roque's gypsy curse read aloud, broke into that particular laughter which is reserved for men caught admiring an emperor's new clothes.
To seize his hat, to settle his account, to bow with what dignity remained to him, and to quit the Mirror of Gold without once looking again upon the glass was, for Don Anselmo, the work of an instant; yet no sooner had the cold air of the street struck his face than the old comfort returned to him, for he reasoned — as such men always reason — that the plumber's tale was itself no more than a story planted by those same obscure powers that delight in stripping true history of its dignity and dressing it in ice and pipes, so that the fracture's real chronicle, being too grave for common ears, had been hidden behind a labourer's convenient memory; and in this manner the crack was saved for him, though at the cost of every witness who might have believed it.
No longer did he speak of champions or of unavenged affronts, nor did he again seek Roque's cousin among the glaziers, nor did the mirror itself, when at last he passed the coffee-house some weeks later on his way to another errand, draw more from him than a glance through the window, quick and unconfessed. Was it the glass he mourned in that glance, or only the shape of his own solitude, caught for a moment between two pieces of old silver light? The chronicle does not say, and I, who have already lingered far past my duty over one crack in one pane of foreign glass, will not pretend to know it either, but leave the question, as such questions are best left, to the reader's own charitable enchanters.