Thomas Mofolo — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

In the second winter of his residence in the foreign capital, a man named Tsepiso, a translator of old chronicles who did his labour by lamplight and by wire, sent his words each evening to masters he had never seen, and for this reason he was called by the people of that city a worker of the new kind, though he called himself nothing at all. And he came each morning to the same corner of the same café, the Café des Trois Colonnes, because it was old, and because it was quiet, and because upon its western wall there hung a mirror bordered in tarnished gilt, and across the face of that mirror ran a single hairline fracture, thin as a hair pulled from the head of a corpse, running from the frame's upper claw down to the height of a seated man's eye. He did not know when the fracture had come, and no one in the house could tell him, for the mirror was older than the café, and the café was older than the street, and the street had forgotten its own first name.

This is the first thing that must be told of him: that he had crossed water and law and language for the sake of an advancement he could name to no one, not even to himself, and this advancement he called ambition, though it had by then no further shape than a longing to be spoken of well in rooms he would never enter. Also it must be told that he ate alone, and worked alone, and greeted the mirror each morning before he greeted any man, for the mirror alone had kept its position at that table longer than he had kept any friendship in that city. That is to say, he had exchanged the sum of his kinship, cousin for cousin and feast for feast, for the wire and the lamp and the empty chair opposite him, and this exchange had seemed to him, each time he made it, entirely reasonable.

Furthermore there attended upon that café a man of no fixed trade, called by the waiters Andrieu, though this was most certainly not the name given him at his baptism, and he was a dealer in curiosities, in tickets to shows that did not exist, in introductions to men who did not wish to be introduced, and in histories of objects that had none. He seated himself, on the ninth morning, opposite Tsepiso without invitation, and he asked him only this:

"You look each day into that glass. Why."

"Because," said Tsepiso, "in my country a man does not sit before a stranger's mirror without paying it the courtesy of his face, and because the fracture pleases me, for it divides my likeness into two portions that do not quite agree, and because I have no other company at this hour that will not ask of me more than my face can pay."

"And do you know," said Andrieu, "what the crack costs the house each year in luck. Do you know how many patrons of this café have prospered mightily after the day they first remarked upon it aloud, and how many have gone under within the twelvemonth. I will tell you the count, for I have kept it: eleven have prospered, and eleven have been ruined, and none has walked from this room the same as he entered it. The glass gives an increase to a man's want, whatever that want may be, but it takes its fee first from what he loves least readily. This is not a bargain I offer you. It is a bargain the mirror has already offered, and you have already, by your daily bowing to it, begun to accept."

The reader unacquainted with the customs of exiles may ask why such words, spoken by an idler over the price of coffee, should be given weight by a man of learning; let it be answered plainly, that shame before an absent community, and not any love of marvels, makes a lonely man credulous, for he who cannot be seen by his own people will believe almost any voice that promises to see him.

Tsepiso paid for the rogue's coffee, and did not answer him, and returned the following morning, and the fracture, in the low winter light, seemed to him wider by the breadth of a fingernail, though he could not swear that this was so, and he did not ask the proprietor, and he did not write of it to his masters across the water, and this silence, small as it was, was the first payment.

And there is a second thing that must be told of him, following close upon the first, as one footstep follows another: that in the third week after the rogue's arithmetic, Tsepiso ceased to answer the letters of his cousin Mmatsepiso, who wrote to him twice in a month asking only after his health and the price of bread in that country, for he had begun to reason, in the manner of a man building a wall one stone at a time without counting the wall, that correspondence not paid for in coin was correspondence wasted, and that his hours belonged now to the wire and the lamp and to no woman's questions, however kindly meant. And this was the second payment, and it was smaller than the first, being only a silence added to a silence, and he did not feel its weight, for a debt taken by increments does not announce its total until the total is asked for.

Also it must be told that he began, in that same season, to translate less faithfully than before, adding to the old chronicles small ornaments of his own devising, a phrase here that the dead author had never written, a flourish there that made the sentence sing where before it had only walked, and his masters across the water, who could not read the old tongue themselves and trusted him entirely, praised him for these ornaments without knowing they praised a forgery. This was the third payment, and the largest, for a translator who invents is no longer a translator but a liar paid in the coin of trust, and he knew this, and he did it nonetheless, because Andrieu had told him, on the eleventh morning, that the mirror rewarded only what was offered to it freely, and a man does not offer freely what costs him nothing.

On the ninth week Andrieu came again and sat, and this time he did not wait to be asked his purpose.

"Thy masters have written thee a letter of high praise. I have heard of it in the street, for such news travels faster than the post that carries it."

"They have. They say I have a gift for their tongue that no scholar before me possessed."

"And thy cousin. Has she written again."

"She has ceased to write. I did not answer her the last three times, and a woman does not throw good ink after bad."

"Then the glass has been paid," said Andrieu, "and paid in full, for I told thee it would take its fee first from what thou lovedst least readily, and a man's own kin is always that which he protects last and loses first, since he believes, wrongly, that kinship mends itself while wire and lamp do not. Dost thou wish now to withdraw. I ask this once, and I will not ask it twice, for the glass does not offer twice what it offers once."

Tsepiso did not answer him at once, and this is the plain gloss that must be given here, without ornament: that he did not wish to withdraw, not because he loved the mirror or believed in its fracture's power, but because to withdraw would have been to confess before a stranger that the wire and the lamp had not, after all, made him a man spoken of well in any room, and this confession his pride would not permit him, though his pride cost him more than any mirror could have asked.

"I do not wish to withdraw," he said.

And that was the whole of his answer, and Andrieu rose, and paid for nothing, as he had paid for nothing on any morning, and he did not come again to that café, neither that winter nor the following one, and no waiter could afterward say with certainty that such a man had ever sat there.

On the morning after, Tsepiso came to his table and looked into the glass, and the fracture had not widened, for it was glass only, and cracks in glass do not feed on the debts of translators; but his own face within it seemed to him divided now not by a hairline but by a gulf, the one half a man who once wrote letters to a cousin across water, the other half a man who wrote ornaments for masters who would never learn his name to speak it wrongly. He wrote that day to no one. His cousin, in her own country, ceased at last to expect his letters, and told her children, when they asked after him, only that he was well, for she did not know that he was not, and could not have been told it across such a distance in any tongue.

The house did not fall, and no fire came, and no regiment marched upon that street; the debt was paid in the only coin such debts are ever paid in, which is the slow subtraction of a man from the ledger of those who once loved him, entry by entry, until the page is blank and no one troubles to ask why.