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

In the third month of his residence in that city whose name he had chosen for its distance from his own, on a morning when the rain had not yet finished falling from the night before, a man named Tsepo sat down at a small table in a café that stood at the corner where two old streets meet, and he opened his machine of glass and metal, and he began the work that his employers, who were far across the sea, had sent to him. And this was his labour: to sit alone in rooms and cafés among people whose language he could follow only partway, and to answer messages from those who could not see his face, and to be paid in a currency that bought him solitude more readily than it bought him bread. And this is the first thing that must be understood of him: that he had come to that capital not because he loved it, but because a screen may be opened in any city, and he had reasoned, in his scholar's manner, that a foreign loneliness was at least an instructive loneliness, whereas the loneliness of his own country was merely shame.

Now in that café there hung upon the wall an old mirror, bordered in gilt that had gone the colour of a dying leaf, and across its face ran a single crack, thin as a hair, beginning at the upper corner and travelling downward until it lost itself somewhere near the frame. And the mirror had hung there, so the proprietor said, since before her grandmother kept the register, and no one had ever replaced it, for it was cheaper to live with a fracture than to purchase a new reflection. Tsepo took his seat beneath it each morning, and he did not choose that seat for the mirror; he chose it because the light was good there for his machine. But he came, in the weeks that followed, to look up from his labour and study the crack more than he studied his own face, and this was the beginning of the matter, though he did not yet know it.

There entered, on the ninth day of that month, a man of perhaps forty years, dressed with a neatness that suggested calculation rather than habit, who sat himself at the next table without invitation and remarked upon the mirror as though he had been asked. He said: "That fracture is older than either of us, and it has never once been mended, and I have wondered why." Tsepo answered that he supposed it was a matter of expense. The man said: "No. It is a matter of belief. The proprietor believes, as her grandmother believed, that a mirror once cracked shows a truer face than a mirror whole, for the whole mirror flatters, and the cracked one confesses." And he said further: "You are a man who works with his eyes fixed on a small bright square all day, and I think you have forgotten what your own face confesses. I could tell you, if you wished it, and the telling would cost you very little."

Here the narrator must halt the tale and set down plainly what the man's speech concealed, for such glossing is owed to the reader once and no more in a chapter of this length: the man was no antiquarian and no reader of mirrors, but a dealer in attentions, one who had marked the foreigner's isolation as a shepherd marks a lamb strayed from the flock, and his talk of confession and fracture was bait laid upon water he already knew to be full of fish.

Tsepo, who was learned in books and empty in company, felt in that moment the particular hunger of a man three months without a single unhurried conversation, and he leaned toward the offer as a plant leans toward a window. And that was the first payment given, though no coin had yet changed hands: he gave his attention, freely and entirely, to a stranger whose motive he had not troubled to weigh. Outside, the rain that had paused in the morning began again, and it struck the window in three distinct waves, and each wave, had he counted them as he would later learn to count all things in that city, foretold one of the three debts he would incur before the year was finished. He did not count them. He only watched the crack in the mirror catch the grey light and divide his own reflected face into two unequal parts, and he thought, without alarm, that a face so divided might yet be made whole by a stranger's kindness.

It was not kindness. It was the beginning of the reckoning, and the reckoning did not tarry, but began at once to unfold in the manner following.

For it was made within the same fortnight as the first, though it was heavier by far than the first, and it was this: that Tsepo began to close his machine of glass and metal earlier each evening than his employers required, in order that he might sit longer beneath the cracked mirror and listen to the man called Vuk speak of confession and of fractures and of truths that mirrors alone could tell. And this is the third thing, and the costliest, that within one month Tsepo had given to this man, at his asking, the sum of four hundred of the foreign notes that his labour had earned him, for Vuk said that he knew a dealer in old glass who could, for that price, silver the crack from beneath so that it would never again be seen, and he said that a man ought not to look each morning upon his own face divided, and that friendship, once proven, was owed such small mendings. Four hundred notes: that is a debt easily named and easily counted, though it is not easily forgiven.

On the twentieth day of the second month Vuk did not come to the café, nor on the twenty-first, nor upon any day thereafter, and the proprietor, when Tsepo asked of him, said only that she knew the man as one who took his coffee standing and paid seldom, and that she did not know his house nor his trade nor whether Vuk was in truth his name. And here the narrator sets down what by then needed no further glossing, for the reader had been told once already and one telling in a chapter of this length is enough: the man had marked the foreigner's solitude the way a fowler marks a bird too long from its flock, and the mirror and its fracture had been nothing to him but a net cast upon known water.

Tsepo asked himself no questions in the manner of those who wonder and turn a matter over in the private chambers of the mind, for such turning is not given to men of this history; he asked, instead, one plain question of the proprietor, and it was this: "Was the mirror ever, in your grandmother's time, or in yours, sent out to be mended?" And she answered him, wiping the same table she had wiped each morning of his residence: "Never. It has hung cracked since before I was born, and it will hang cracked after I am gone, for a mended mirror costs more than a whole life is worth, and besides, no one has ever offered to mend it who did not first wish to be paid for the offering." This was the binding speech, though it was not spoken by the tempter but by the woman who had outlived him without knowing his name, and it named the price plainly, and it did not, because it did not need to, offer any withdrawal, for the debt was already spent.

The loss is stated thus, and no more shall be added to it: four hundred notes gone, one month of evenings surrendered, and one further thing besides, which is harder to number but was in the ledger nonetheless — that Tsepo, who had come to that capital reasoning in his scholar's manner that a foreign loneliness was an instructive loneliness, discovered that instruction, too, may be sold, and that he had bought a lesson at the price a fool pays and not at the price a scholar pays. He did not weep in the café, and no one there expected him to, for grief in that place was measured by the proprietor's ledger and not by any man's face.

He returned the next morning, and the morning after that, to the same table beneath the same mirror, because the light was good there for his machine and because there was, in that city, no other seat that knew him. He opened the glass and metal instrument, and he answered the messages of those who could not see his face, and he was paid in the currency that had always bought him solitude more readily than bread. The crack in the mirror ran as it had always run, from the upper corner down into the gilt, dividing the light each morning into two unequal parts, and it was never sent out, and it was never mended, and the proprietor's grandmother had been right in her belief, though no one now living could say from what wisdom the belief had first come. That is to say: the fracture outlived the swindler's name, and it outlived the four hundred notes, and it would outlive Tsepo's residence in that city also, for such is the nature of a crack once let alone — it does not close, and it does not widen, and it asks nothing further of the one who looks into it, having already been paid in full.