Berenice

SADNESS IS MULTIPLE. The unhity of the

earth is multiform. It goes beyond the vast horizon, like the rainbow; its tones are
equally varied and sharp, although they merge with the same intensity. It goes
beyond the vast horizon, like the rainbow! How is it possible that from beauty he
has obtained ugliness and from the promise of peace a simile of pain?

But, according to ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so that grief is born of

joy. The memory of the

• said past produces the present anguish or the agony that it is now has its origin
in the ecstasy that it could have been.

"My colleagues told me that, if I visited the tomb of my beloved, / I could find
some relief to my sadness." (the notes are from the translator).

My first name is Egaeus; I won't mention my last name.

However, I will say that there are no towers in this world older than the dark and
gray ones of my ancestral manor house.

Our lineage has been considered a lineage of visionaries and in many unusual
details more than enough evidence is appreciated to justify such a belief: in the
nature of the family mansion, the frescoes of the main room, the upholstery of the
bedrooms, the carvings of the buttresses of the armoury, but above all in the
gallery of ancient oil paintings, the style of the room that houses the library and,
finally, in the peculiar content of said library.

The memories of my early years are related to that stay and its volumes, about
which I will not say anything else. My mother passed away in it. I was born in it.
It is insubstantial to say that he had not lived before, that the soul does not enjoy
a previous existence. Do they deny it? Let's not argue. Being convinced, I don't
seek to convince others. However, I retain a memory of aerial forms, of spiritual
eyes and full of intention, of musical and sad sounds at the same time; a memory
that does not want to disappear; a reminiscence as a shadow: blurred, variable,
indefinite, unstable; also similar to a shadow because I will not be able to get rid
of it as long as the light of my reason exists.

I was born in that room. I woke up from the prolonged night that seemed non-
existence - although it was not - to a dream country, to a palace of imagination, to
the strange domains of monastic thought and erudition. It's not surprising that

I looked around with surprised and fervent eyes, that I lost my childhood among
books and wasted my youth on dreams; but it is exceptional - as the years passed
and reached maturity still living in my parents' mansion - the stagnation suffered
by the source of my life, the resounding investment that took place even in the
most common of my thoughts. The realities of the world affected me as if they
were visions and nothing else, while the crazy ideas of the world of dreams in
turn became not the essence of my daily existence, but that very existence.

BERENICE and I were cousins and we grew up together in the father's mansion.
However, we did it differently: me in poor health and plunged into despondency;
she was agile, airy and overflowing with energy. She dedicated to walking along
the slopes of the mountains, I to the studios of the cloister. I locked in myself,
given body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation; she wandering
through life without worries, without thinking about the shadows that hovered
over her path or the silent flight of the dark hours like a crow's wing. Berenice! I
invoke his name -Berenice!- and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand
tumultuous memories awaken when they hear it. Ah, with what intensity I see his
image before me, as in the first days of his joy and joy! How beautiful-

So magnificent and formidable! Oh, sylph among the bushes of Arnheim! Oh,
nayade among its sources! However, everything is mystery and terror, and a story
that should not be told. The disease, a deadly disease, rushed like a simun on her
body and, while I watched her tirelessly, the spirit of change invaded her,
impregnating her opinions, her customs, her character and, in a subtle and
frightening way, even altered the identity of her person. Av. the destruction came
and left! What about the victim? Where is it? I didn't know her anymore... or I
didn't recognize her as my Berenice.
Among the long series of diseases added to the main one, which made such a
horrific revolution in the principles and the physical being of my cousin, the most
distressing and stubborn was a kind of epilepsy

That on many occasions ended in a trance - a trance that almost seemed like real
debauchery, from which he used to recover almost always in a surprisingly
sudden way. At the same time my own illness - because I have been told that I
should not call it any other way - - was taking over me quickly, to end up
assuming a novel and extraordinary monomaniac character that gained in
intensity for hours and minutes and that ended up dominating me in an
incomprehensible way.

This monomania, if I should call it that-- consisted of an unhealthy irritability of

those properties of the mind that metaphysical science calls "attention." It is very
likely that I will not be understood, but I am afraid that it is not possible to
communicate to the mind of the non-specialized reader an adequate idea of that
nervous "intensity of interest" with which, in my case, the ability to meditate (for
not using technicalities) was entertained and entrained during the contemplation
of even the most normal objects in the universe.

Reflect tirelessly for many hours, with attention focused on some frivolous
resource present in the margin or in the typography of a book; stay for almost an
entire summer day absorbed in a singular shadow that fell sideways on the
upholstery or the floor; spend a whole night observing the constant flame of a
lamp or the embers of the fire; daydream for days due to the perfume of a flower;
monotonously repeat a normal and ordinary word until the sound, by dint of
reiterating it, stopped transmitting to the mind all kinds Of idea; lose the sense-

I take a few words: in my case the mental faculties that I exercised the most were
those of attention, as I have said before, but those who daydream use the
speculative ones.

At that time my books, although in reality did not serve to worsen the ailment, as
will be seen they participated in great measure, due to their imaginative and
inconsequential nature, of the qualities of the disease. Among others, I remember
well the treatise of the Italian nobleman Celio Secundo Curión, De ampli-tudine
beati regni Dei; the great work of St. Augustine, The City of God, and that of
Tertullian, De carne Christi, of which the fra-

Se mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est: et sepul-tus resurrexit;
certum est quia impossibile est occupied all my time during many weeks of
arduous unsuccessful investigations.
It will seem that, unbalanced only by trivial things, my reason resembled that sea
islet that Pto-Lemean Hephaestión v spoke of, who firmly resisted the attacks of
human violence and the even more devastating fury of the waters and winds, but
trembled at the touch of the asfódelo. And although it may seem undoubted to the
careless thinker that the alteration produced in Berenice's moral state by her
unfortunate illness would provide me with many objects for the exercise of such
intense and anomalous meditation, whose nature has been difficult for me to
explain, the truth is that her misfortune hurt me and took me very seriously the
total collapse of her peaceful life and

Moderate, so I used to meditate bitterly on the miraculous means capable of

provoking such a strange and sudden turn.

But these reflections did not share the peculiarities of my illness and were like
those that in the same circumstances would have crossed the mind of the majority
of humanity. True to her own character, my disorder was delighted with the less
important but more surprising changes caused in Berenice's physical body, with
the singular and most frightening deformation of her personal identity.

I'm sure I never loved her during the most promising days of her unparalleled
beauty. Within the strange anomaly of my existence, my feelings never came
from the heart and my passions always emanated from the mind. Through the
gray of the early morning, between the latticed shadows of the forest at noon and
the silence of my library at night, she had fluttered before my eyes and I had seen
her not as the Berenice who lived and breathed, but as the Berenice of a dream;
not as an earthly, mundane being, but as the abstraction of said being; not as
something to admire, but to analyze; not as an object worthy of love, but as the
subject of the most abstruse and disjointed speculation. But then... then I
shuddered in her presence and the paleness took hold of me when she
approached; however, as I bitterly regretted her decline and desolation, I
remembered that she had loved me for a long time and, in a fateful moment, I
told her about marriage.
With the passage of time, the time of our nuptials was approaching when, a
winter afternoon of one of those days

Abnormally warm, quiet and foggy for the time of year that allow the beautiful
Alcíone to be raised, I was sitting alone, or so I thought, in the internal room of
the library. But when I looked up, I saw that Berenice was standing in front of
me.

Was it my imagination altered, the foggy influence of the environment, the

vacillating gloom of the camera or the gray hangings that surrounded his figure
that led me to perceive his silhouette as something imprecise and confusing? I
don't know. He didn't say a word and I wasn't able to issue a single syllable. A
shiver ran through my body, a feeling of unbearable anxiety tormented me, an
absorbing curiosity permeated my soul and, lying on the chair, I remained
motionless for a while, almost without breathing, with my eyes fixed on it. Oh!
His extreme thinness was excessive and not a single vestige of his previous being
was hidden in the lines of his outline. My pressing look finally stopped on his
face.

The wide forehead was very pale and exceptionally placid. The hair, which had
been like jet, covered it in part and eclipsed the hollows of the temples with
innumerable ringlets that were now of an intense yellow and out of tune,
discordant by their unreal character, with the melancholy that prevailed in the
face. The eyes had no life, they seemed dull, without a pupil, and fear made me
involuntarily pass from his glassy gaze to the contemplation of the thin and
contracted lips. At that moment they opened and, in a smile of extra-no meaning,
the teeth of the transformed Berenice were

Being slowly exposed. I wish I had never seen them or, if I had seen them, I wish
I had died right away!

THE NOISE OF A DOOR when it closed distracted me and when I looked again
I discovered that my cousin had left the room.
But, oh! That white and frightening spectrum of the teeth had not abandoned my
deranged mind and it was impossible for me to scare it away. Neither a speck on
its surface, nor a shadow on the enamel, nor a notch on its edge remained
unengraved in my memory, despite the brevity of its smile. I saw them even more
clearly than in the first moment. The tee-th!! The teeth! They were here, there,
everywhere, visibly and palpably in front of me; long, narrow and excessively
white, with pale lips twisted with pain, as if that were the exact moment of their
transformation

Then the absolute frenzy of my monomania fell on me and I fought in vain

against its strange and irresistible influence. Despite the enormous amount of
objects present in the outside world, I was only able to think about the teeth. I
wanted them with an unbridled zeal. The other diverse issues and interests were
assimilated to his contemplation. For the eye of the mind only they existed and,
due to their exclusive individuality, they became the essence of my mental life. I
saw them outside which.

It was the light. I was looking for them whatever my mood was. He analyzed its
characteristics. I was afflicted by his peculiarities. He was reflecting on its
structure. He pondered about the alteration of his nature. I trembled when I
attributed to them in my imagination a sensitive and sensitive capacity and even,
without the help of the lips, the faculty of moral expression. From mademoiselle
Sallé it was said: that tous ses pas etaient des sentiments', and from Berenice I
believed very seriously that all ses dents étaient des idées.

Des idées!" Ah! That was the stupid reflection that destroyed me! Des idées! Ah,
that's why I coveted them madly!

I believed that only by possessing them could I regain peace, after returning my
reason.

So I was surprised at the end of the afternoon, then came the darkness that was
delayed and left-- and it dawned again. The darkness of a second night already
surrounded me and I continued to sit and motionless in that lonely room,
engrossed in my reflections, still under the frightening tyranny of the specter of
the days, since it floated among the changing lights and shadows of the room
with the most vivid and atrocious clarity. Over time, my reverie was interrupted
by a scream that expressed horror and consternation that was followed, after a
pause, by the sound of worried voices, mixed with moans of sorrow or pain.

I got up from my seat and, when I opened the doors of the library, I came across
one of the maids standing in the antechamber, they cry-

C, who told me that Berenice was... she wasn't there! In the early morning she
had been prey to epilepsy and, as the night approached, the tomb was waiting for
her tenant and all the preparations for the burial had been carried out.

I FOUND MYSELF SITTING in the library, again in solitude. Apparently I had

woken up again after a confusing and overwhelming dream. It was midnight and
I knew that Berenice had been buried since sunset. But from that depressing
intermediate period he did not keep a clear discernment and they conclude.
However, he remembered it full of horror, of an even more frightening horror for
its inaccuracy, of a more terrifying terror for its ambiguity. It constituted a
disturbing page in the history of my existence, full of unintelligible, atrocious and
blurred memories. In vain I tried to decipher them while, from time to time, like
the spirit of a deceased sound, I seemed to hear the shrill and penetrating scream
of a female voice. He had done a feat, but which one? I asked myself the question
out loud and the echo of the camera answered me: "Which one?"

Next to me, on the table, there was a lit lamp and next to it a little box. Nothing
in her attracted attention and I had seen her frequently because she belonged to
the family doctor, but how did she get there, why was she about

My table and why did I shudder when I looked at it? There was no way to
explain all that and my eyes ended up perched on the pages of an open book and
on one of its phrases, subra-yada. It was about simple words and at the same time
exceptional-
Les of the poet Ebn Zaiat: Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum

Amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas. So why, when I read
them carefully, did my hair stand on end and my blood froze in my veins?

Someone knocked softly on the door of the library and, pale as someone already
in the grave, a lackey entered with punctures. He seemed crazy with fear and
spoke to me in a trembling, rough and very low voice. What did he say? I heard
choppy phrases. He spoke of a violent cry that had disturbed the nocturnal
silence, of how all the inhabitants of the house had gathered to discern where that
cry came from... Then his voice became impressively clear when describing a
desecrated tomb, a disfigured and cushioned body that was still breathing, still
throbbing... still alive!

He pointed to my muddy clothing covered with dried blood.

I didn't speak and he took my hand delicately: he showed me the marks left on it
by human nails. He drew my attention to an object leaning against the wall. I
looked at it for a few minutes: it was a shovel. I let out a scream, threw myself
towards the table and grabbed the box that rested on it. But I was unable to open
it. I was shaking so much that it slipped out of my hands,
It fell to the ground hard and broke into pieces. From its interior, producing a
kind of chattering, several dental instruments rolled out, mixed with thirty-two
small entities, white and similar to ivory, which were dispersed on the ground.