Twenty-eight

Excited by a strange and senseless design of the clouds at dawn, the Emperor arrived in Cornwall. But the voyage had been so strenuous, so tortuous and errant, as to leave him with a very unclear memory of the place from which he had first set out. He had departed with three squires and a menial. The first squire had run off with a gypsy woman, after a desperate discussion with the Emperor during a night charged with strokes of lightning. The second squire had fallen in love with the plague, and would hear no reason to abandon a village devastated by advancing death. The third squire had enrolled into the troops of the following emperor, and had tried to assassinate him. The Emperor was forced to consider him condemned to death, and pretended to carry out the sentence by cutting his throat with his little finger; they both had laughed, and bade farewell to one another. The menial had remained with the Emperor. Both of them were silent, melancholy men, aware of pursuing a goal which was not so much improbable as irrelevant; they both had metaphysical notions which were highly imprecise, and whenever they came to a temple, a church, a sanctuary, they did not enter, since both of them were certain, for different reasons, that inside such places they could only encounter lies, equivocations, disinformation. Once they had arrived in Cornwall, the Emperor made no secret of his discomfort: he did not understand the language, he did not know what to do, his coins were examined with suspicious care by diffident villagers. He wanted to write to the Palace, but did not remember the address. An emperor is the only man who can, or must, be ignorant of his own address. The menial had no problems: remaining with the disoriented Emperor was his only way of establishing orientation. As time passed, Cornwall opened to merchant traffic and the tourist trade. And a history professor from Samarkand, Ohio, recognized the Emperor’s profile: by now he passed his days at the pub, served by his taciturn drudge. News of the Emperor’s presence in Cornwall spread rapidly, and even though no one knew what an emperor might be, nor with respect to what part of the world, the locals found it flattering. Beer was served to him for free. The village in which he resided put one of his coins in its coat of arms. The menial was given a generic noble title, and the Emperor, who speaks by now a little of the local language, is in a few days time to marry the beautiful daughter of a depressed warrior; he now has a watch and eats apple pie; they say that at the next elections he’ll be a candidate for the liberals; and he will lose with honour.