Three Arched Bridge

33

ONE MORNING, as I walked along the frozen river-bank in the hope of catching sight of the collector of tales and legends (for I did not know then that he had vanished forever), I came face to face with the master-in-chief* The north wind was piercing. Especially it had frozen his eyes’ coating them with a kind of glittering film that prevented you from seeing what was inside them.

To my astonishment, this stera, gruff man greeted me. Only then did I realize how eager 1 was to get to know him. We exchanged a few words and set off walking side by side along the sandbank. The icy crust that coated his eyes seemed to crack in two or three places,making them even more inscrutable. I had imagined that talking with this man would be difficulty but not to this extent. Our conversation was a rambling^ muddled affair, a real maze from which you could not extricate yourself. It was evident that he himself found it painful It was apparently easier for him to construct bridges or towers than to conduct a human conversation. The worst of it was that 1 still sensed that something valuable, perhaps very valuable., lay at the bottom of this tangle, and it was precisely my efforts to understand this that upset me most, When I left him, my head felt cleft in two. I sat down by the fire and once more did my best to recollect the tangle, I began to unravel it carefully, thread by thread, and eventually I seemed to succeed* The essence of what he had said was this: According to signs that he had been studying for some time, the lineaments of a new order that would carry the world many centuries forward had faintly, ever so faintly, begun to appear in this part of Europe, These signs included the opening of new banks in Dürres, growing numbers of Jewish and Italian intermediaries dealing in twenty-seven different kinds of coin, and the almost universal acceptance of the Venetian ducat as a form of international currency. There was also the increasingly heavy traffic of merchant caravans, the organization of trade fairs, and especially (Oh Lord! How he emphasized that word ‘‘especially’,), especially the construction of roads and stone bridges. And all this movement, he said, was a sign simultaneously of life and death, of the birth of a new world and the death of the old* He said something about bridges and the difficulties of building them, and during this part of the conversation I felt as if I were crushed under the rubble of a bridge that he had brought down upon me. But then he explained to me that, of all the monstrosities that deface the earth’s surface, there never had been and never would be anything uglier than corpse-bridges, These bridges are born dead, he said, and they live in death (he used the phrase “they die all their lives”) until the time comes for their demolition (or “ultimate death,” as he put it). He told me that he had built such bridges himself and that now they appeared in his dreams like ghosts. If ever he decided to commit suicide (he told me), he would hang himself from such a bridge. I could scarcely understand what they were. They were not bridges built over rivers or streams or chasms, or indeed over any kind of gap that had to be crossed. They were bridges built in the middle of fields, and their only service was now and then to carry on their backs great ladies, who climbed on them to observe the sunset together with their invited guests. Building bridges was in fashion now, he said, and many princes and pashas considered them to be the same as the porches of their houses. I have built such phantoms, he said. He indicated with his hand the furrowed, foaming waters of the Ujana e Keqe, over which the stone bridge loomed, grim and unloved, and he added: “But this kind of bridge, even if washed in blood, is a thousand times nobler than those.”

And that was more or less my conversation with him.