Miguel de Cervantes — Chapter 3: An erased marginal note in a late-century ledger — Novella Movement 2

It is set down, though upon what authority I cannot in conscience swear, that in the closing years of a century whose exact number the moths of the archive of Villaflor have long since eaten out of the parish register, there came to that town a certain Licentiate Alonso de Cabra, a man so given over to the reading of old accounts and older parchments that his eyes, weak from candlelight and conjecture, saw in every smudge a genealogy and in every blot a testament. He lodged, for want of a better inn, above the counting-house of the late merchant Diego de Bracamonte, where the widow kept, out of piety or avarice, the dead man's ledgers stacked like the vertebrae of some enormous beast; and it was there, on the ninth leaf of the volume marked with a cross and the year illegible, that the Licentiate found a marginal note so thoroughly rubbed away — whether by thumb, by damp, or by the deliberate hand of some earlier reader jealous of its secret — that only the ghost of an ascender and the curl of what might have been a final flourish remained, and upon this ghost he built, in the space of one candle's burning, an entire cathedral of inheritance, injustice, and buried gold; for such is the privilege of erasure, that it refuses nothing to the imagination and confirms nothing to the reason, and the Licentiate, being a scholar and therefore an idealist of the deleted, took the blank for a cipher and the cipher for a summons.

His companion in this venture — thrust upon him by the widow, who trusted no gentleman to count her candle-stubs unwatched — was one Ginés de la Rúa, a fellow of no fixed trade but many fixed appetites, who had been pander, muleteer, and twice a penitent, and who now offered himself as amanuensis on the single condition that whatever treasure the ledger yielded should be divided according to who first laid hand upon it. "Your worship may have the honour," said Ginés, "and I will take the ducats, for honour, as my grandmother used to say, does not season the stew, and a bird in the hand starves no man, though a bird in the bush has fed many a fool his whole life long." To this the Licentiate answered nothing, being already bent again over the erasure with a magnifying glass borrowed, he did not say from whom.

Now in the lintel above the counting-house door there had been set, some years before by the merchant's Genoese partner, a small crystal eye no bigger than a doubloon, which the old steward called the sentinel-that-never-sleeps, and which the servants crossed themselves before, believing it the work of enchanters out of the Indies who could see through walls and report a man's sins to his enemies at a distance; and it was this same idle glass eye, and not any power infernal, that on the third night recorded, in whatever fashion such devices record, the Licentiate and his rogue prising open the strongbox beneath the ledger-shelf — to force the hasp, to lift the lid, to plunge both hands into a chest that held, not gold, but forty years of unpaid tithes in copper too green to spend, was the work of an instant, and the ruin of a fortnight's certainty in rather less.

"It is the enchanters," said the Licentiate, rising with what dignity the moment left him, "who have transmuted the gold that was surely written there, and left us this dross in its place, for they favour no man's history but their own, and least of all the historian's." Ginés, counting what he had palmed by the lamp's light, allowed only that a note once erased is easier mended by a thief than by a scholar, and with that proverb, somewhat misapplied, the matter seemed, for that night, likely to rest.

Yet the widow, being a woman who had buried one husband and did not mean to bury her patience along with him, did not call at once for the alguacil, but bade the steward hold the lamp steady while she read, in the Licentiate's own face, the whole history of his folly; for she had seen before, in the years of her marriage, men who mistook the mildew of an account-book for the hand of Providence, her husband himself having once spent a Lent and a fortune besides upon a cipher that proved, when solved, to be nothing more than a merchant's abbreviation for barrels of Flemish herring. "Señor Licentiate," said she, "the sentinel above my door has watched twenty years of tallow-sellers and tax-farmers pass beneath it without once troubling itself to report a miracle, and I do not think it has broken its custom for your worship's benefit. What it has seen tonight is two hands in a box that were not put there by the dead man's leave, and this the crystal eye will say to the justice as plainly as it said it to me, though by what art such glass finds tongue I confess is beyond a widow's catechism." And here the narrator, who has promised his reader neither optics nor demonology, must own that he does not himself know by what Genoese cunning

Ginés, for his part, weighed honour against copper and copper won, so that he was through the door and into the alley before the steward had well cocked the crossbow, taking with him such coin as his pockets would decently hold and leaving behind, as his final bequest to the venture, the proverb already recorded, somewhat improved upon reflection: that a debt collected in green copper is a debt collected nonetheless, and that a scholar's cathedral, however lofty, will not roof a man from the rain half so well as a low door quickly found. Of his later fortunes — whether he came at last to the galleys his two arrests had twice threatened, or whether he died, as such men often do, comfortably and in his bed, having reformed at the eleventh hour into a seller of relics almost as false as himself — this history, wanting further leaves, cannot speak, and the reader is besought to forgive an ignorance shared equally by the widow, the steward, and the moths of Villaflor.

As for the Licentiate, no magistrate was troubled with his case, for the widow, moved less by mercy than by the tedium of witnesses and the expense of ink, contented herself with turning him into the street with his magnifying glass and his dignity, both somewhat cracked. No longer would he sit above the counting-house parsing blots by candle-end; no longer would he number the widow's tithes among the muniments of a hidden lineage; no longer would the ninth leaf of that ledger, cross-marked and year illegible, yield to him cathedrals, injustices, or gold, for the widow had it burned that same week, being unwilling to house a second temptation where the first had so nearly cost her her copper and her peace. He returned, they say, to his own town, and there compiled, in a hand grown no steadier, a treatise upon the erasures of old accounts and the duties they impose upon the conscientious reader, which treatise found, in his lifetime, exactly one purchaser, and that one his own barber, who used the greater part of it to wrap a customer's shaved beard-clippings against the damp.

What is a man to make, then, of a note that said nothing and was made, by the hunger of a scholar and the greed of a rogue, to say everything? The sentinel above the door, being asked no such question, answered none, and continued, oil-fed and incurious, to watch the tallow-sellers pass; and the historian, having led his reader thus far upon so slight and doubtful a thread of ink, begs pardon for the length of the following, and takes his leave of Villaflor before the moths can finish what the damp of that ledger, and the Licentiate's own longing, had already so thoroughly begun.