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Introducing Irony (Version 2)

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[90] <h2 class="nobreak">HISTORY</h2> SUNLIGHT stuck to the gray floor like curdled honey and clung to the black wall like visible fever on the breast of a savage. This contradiction gave a fugitive radiance to the room in which King Ferdinand stood, moulding figures of happiness. On sunless days the room was a depressed insult to his rejoicing, forcing it into adroit retorts. He had made this chamber a necessary enemy. As he moulded his figures of happiness, his wife stood beside him, ready with colors. “You have almost finished this half-pyramid of eyes emerging from a flat surface and ending against a vertical wall,” she said, as though the sound of her words made their obviousness subtle. “What color shall I use to excite your design?” King Ferdinand turned to her, like a blind man peering into fantastically returning sight. Creative absorption had ruffled his middle-aged face into an ageless insurrection, but when he spoke a wrinkled order once more reigned beneath the granite lull of his forehead. “Give each eye a different shade of color and, for the wall, make a blue of inhuman brightness: a blue that has swallowed a constellation and defies night,” he said. “This form symbolises my last happiness, wherein the clashing sequences of my life have been smashed to a challenging glare. I have become immortal until I voluntarily tender my immortality to death, if he takes it.” The wrinkles on King Ferdinand’s cheeks ascended to a sentence of belief hacked upon his forehead. His broadly cumbersome face shrunk to a lighter scope and his red moustache shone like a coal of expectation. His wife played with her dark green gown as though it were relaxed[91] gaiety. Her body, like a plump blunder, ended in the deft recklessness of her head; the high amber of her face raised its slightly turned lines of brooding abandon. She looked at her husband as though she considered his flesh an unimportant tragedy calmed by his words. The smell of listening earth drifted through a window and bird-cries violated the air, like expiring emotions. King Ferdinand stood in the manner of one to whom motion has become a dim travesty, and the blood in his veins was a prisoned resonance. His folded arms were weighted in a marble posture beneath his long sleeves. Queen Muriel touched his arm and gave him life. She led him to a corner of the room and unveiled a small figure, and her hands were pliant consummations. “My first happiness,” she said, in a voice of climbing distinctness. They carried the figure to the light. Almost as slim as a personified plant-stem, a conventionalised monk grew straight from the center of two lean hands cupped into the semblance of a flower-pot. The hands met each other in an effortless tenderness; the thinly high monk bore the suggestions of hood and cassock and his face wore a look of indistinct triumph. “And so I like to believe that your happiness has grown uncertainly from the rarely caught touch of my hands,” she said. The door of the room opened and two men strode in. One of them curved upward into pompous impatience. The tight inquisitiveness of a gaudy uniform revealed his tall body. His face was like an expansive fallacy—large rolls of flesh indecisively interrogated the thin slant of his nose and slid into the refuge of his brown beard. The second man was waspishly abbreviated and clad in mincing castrations of color. His tinily sharp face suggested a soulless beetle. “Have you come, as usual, to bestow your explosive[92] admiration on my figures?” said King Ferdinand to the man whose face resembled a redundant mistake. “Three men of your guard will murder you, with restrained admiration, tomorrow noon,” answered the other man, in whose voice a sneer and apprehension were partners in a minuet. “You will be killed on the palace steps and the cheers of a huge audience will make death’s leer articulate to you. While you have taken the role of a hermit in an aesthetic petticoat your friends have been arranging a last happiness for you. You are considered an imbecile who paints pretty figures with the blood of his country.” The flashing hardnesses of a wintry repose assaulted King Ferdinand’s face. “My brothers are quite willing to use this blood as an unsolicited rouge for the lips of their mistresses,” he answered in a tone of remotely amused reproach. “I have not assailed my subjects with taxes or led them to wars and that has been a serious error. They are probably in the position of a man with his chains removed, who is angry because he has forgotten how to dance!” The acridly shortened man spoke. “When you are dead, sire, your brothers will gamble for your throne by throwing roses at your head. He who first succeeds in striking your bulging eyes, will win.” “Death does not like to be made a cheated jester,” said King Ferdinand. “He will doubtless devise a better joke for my winning brother.” Queen Muriel, whose face had grown old with choked disdain, stepped forward. “Now that your shrewd bantering has made itself sufficiently nude, tell us why you have come,” she said. The tall man, who carried with him the air of an animated mausoleum, spoke. [93]“Today I saw an old libertine tottering down the boulevard. Glancing to his feet he spied a lily, clipped and fresh. He sidled blithely to the edge of the walk to avoid stepping on the flower. There is little pleasure, after all, in flattening a child from another world.... My carriage will take you to the frontier, tonight.” “My caprices have never been able to strut gorgeously because they hold a sincere sympathy for motion,” said King Ferdinand, still mechanically jesting. His hand rose to one cheek as though signaling for a friendly trance and his eyes closed unceremoniously. “We will take your carriage,” he said in the voice of an abstracted tight-rope walker. The two men tilted their gaudiness into imperceptible bows and departed. King Ferdinand and his wife stood staring at each other as though their bodies were teasing curtains. Then, without remembering what had occurred, they let gay words poke each other and began to discuss colors for the monk’s figure rising from cupped hands and blossoming into indistinct triumph. That night their carriage stopped upon a hilltop and they were killed by three men. One of the three had a thin nose and a brown beard—the tight inquisitiveness of a bright uniform revealed his tall body. Among historians he was to be noted as the man who killed an imbecile king and led his country to glory and prosperity. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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