C. L. Moore - Daemon

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 36.35KB 14 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Daemon

Padre, the words come slowly. It is a long time now since I have spoken in the

Portuguese tongue. For more than a year, my companions here were those who do

not speak with the tongues of men. And you must remember, padre, that in Rio,

where I was born, I was named Luiz o Bobo, which is to say, Luiz the Simple.

There was something wrong with my head, so that my hands were always clumsy

and my feet stumbled over each other. I could not remember very much. But I

could see things. Yes, padre, I could see things such as other men do not

know.

I can see things now. Do you know who stands beside you, padre, listening

while I talk? Never mind that. I am Luiz o Bobo still, though here on this

island there were great powers of healing, and I can remember now the things

that happened to me years ago. More easily than I remember what happened last

week or the week before that. The year has been like a single day, for time on

this island is not like time outside. When a man lives with them, there is no

time.

The ninfas, I mean. And the others. .

I am not lying. Why should I? I am going to die, quite soon now. You were

right to tell me that, padre. But I knew. I knew already. Your crucifix is

very pretty, padre. I like the way it shines in the sun. But that is not for

me. You see, I have always known the things that walk beside men-other men.

Not me. Perhaps they are souls, and I have no soul, being simple. Or perhaps

they are daemons such as only clever men have. Or perhaps they are both these

things. I do not know. But I know that I am dying. After the ninfas go away, I

would not care to live.

Since you ask how I came to this place, I will tell you if the time remains to

me. You will not believe. This is the one place on earth, I think, where they

lingered still-those things you do not believe.

But before I speak of them, I must go back to an earlier day, when I was young

beside the blue bay of Rio, under Sugar Loaf. I remember the docks of Rio, and

the children who mocked me. I was big and

strong, but I was o Bobo with a mind that knew no yesterday or tomorrow.

Minha avó, my grandmother, was kind to me. She was from Ceará, where the

yearly droughts kill hope, and she was half blind, with pain in her back

always. She worked so that we could eat, and she did not scold me too much. I

know that she was good. It was something I could see; I have always had that

power.

One morning my grandmother did not waken. She was cold when I touched her

hand. That did not frighten me for the-good thing- about her lingered for a

while. I closed her eyes and kissed her, and then I went away. I was hungry,

and because I was o Bobo, I thought that someone might give me food, out of

kindness. .

In the end, I foraged from the rubbish-heaps.

I did not starve. But I was lost and alone. Have you ever felt that, padre? It

is like a bitter wind from the mountains and no sheepskin cloak can shut it

out. One night I wandered into a sailors' saloon, and I remember that there

were many dark shapes with eyes that shone, hovering beside the men who drank

there. The men had red, wind-burned faces and tarry hands. They made me drink

'guardiente until the room whirled around and went dark.

I woke in a dirty bunk. I heard planks groaning and the floor rocked under me.

Yes, padre, I had been shanghaied. I stumbled on deck, half blind in the

dazzling sunlight, and there I found a man who had a strange and shining

daemon. He was the captain of the ship, though I did not know it then. I

scarcely saw the man at all. I was looking at the daemon.

Now, most men have shapes that walk behind them, padre. Perhaps you know that,

too. Some of them are dark, like the shapes I saw in the saloon. Some of them

are bright, like that which followed my grandmother. Some of them are colored,

pale colors like ashes or rainbows. But this man had a scarlet daemon. And it

was a scarlet beside which blood itself is ashen. The color blinded me. And

yet it drew me, too. I could not take my eyes away, nor could I look at it

long without pain. I never saw a color more beautiful, nor more frightening.

It made my heart shrink within me, and quiver like a dog that fears the whip.

If I have a soul, perhaps it was my soul that quivered. And I feared the

beauty of the color as much as I feared the terror it awoke in me. It is not

good to see beauty in that which is evil.

Other men upon the deck had daemons too. Dark shapes and pale shapes that

followed them like their shadows. But I saw all the

claemons waver away from the red, beautiful thing that hung above the captain

of the ship.

The other daemons watched out of burning eyes. The red daemon had no eyes. Its

beautiful, blind face was turned always toward the captain, as if it saw only

through his vision. I could see the lines of its closed lids. And my terror of

its beauty, and my terror of its evil, were nothing to my terror of the moment

when the red daemon might lift those lids and look out upon the world.

The captain's name was Jonah Stryker. He was a cruel man, dangerous to be

near. The men hated him. They were at his mercy while we were at sea, and the

captain was at the mercy of his daemon. That was why I could not hate him as

the others did. Perhaps it was pity I felt for Jonah Stryker. And you, who

know men better than I, will understand that the pity I had for him made the

captain hate me more bitterly than even his crew hated him.

When I came on deck that first morning, because I was blinded by the sun and

by the redness of the scarlet daemon, and because I was ignorant and

bewildered, I broke a shipboard rule. What it was, I do not know. There were

so many, and I never could remember very clearly in those days. Perhaps I

walked between him and the wind. Would that be wrong on a clipper ship, padre?

I never understood.

The captain shouted at me, in the Yankee tongue, evil words whose meaning I

did not know, but the daemon glowed redder when he spoke them. And he struck

me with his fist so that I fell. There was a look of secret bliss on the blind

crimson face hovering above his, because of the anger that rose in him. I

thought that through the captain's eyes the closed eyes of the daemon were

watching me.

I wept. In that moment, for the first time, I knew how truly alone a man like

me must be. For I had no daemon. It was not the simple loneliness for my

grandmother or for human companionship that brought the tears to my eyes. That

I could endure. But I saw the look of joy upon the blind daemon-f ace because

of the captain's evil, and I remembered the look of joy that a bright shape

sometimes wears who follows a good man. And I knew that no deed of mine would

ever bring joy or sorrow to that which moves behind a man with a soul.

I lay upon the bright, hot deck and wept, not because of the blow, but because

I knew suddenly, for the first time, that I was alone. No daemon for good or

evil would ever follow me. Perhaps because I have no soul. That loneliness,

father, is something not even you could Understand.

The captain seized my arm and pulled me roughly to my feet. I did not

understand, then, the words he spoke in his Yankee tongue, though later I

picked up enough of that speech to know what men were saying around me. You

may think it strange that o Bobo could learn a foreign tongue. It was easy for

me. Easier, perhaps, than for a wiser man. Much I read upon the faces of their

daemons, and there were many words whose real sounds I did not know, but whose

meaning I found in the hum of thoughts about a man's head.

The captain shouted for a man named Barton, and the first mate hurried up,

looking frightened. The captain pushed me back against the rail so that I

staggered, seeing him and the deck and the watching daemons through the

rainbows that tears cast before one's eyes.

There was loud talk, and many gestures toward me and the other two men who had

been shanghaied from the port of Rio. The first mate tapped his head when he

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

C. L. Moore - Daemon.pdf

共14页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

C. L. Moore - Daemon

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: