The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (17 page)

While I spoke, there came a marked change over the countenance of the sleep-waker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin generally assumed a cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper; and the circular hectic spots which, hitherto, had been strongly defined in the centre of each cheek,
went out
at once. I use this expression, because the suddenness of their departure put me in mind of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle by a puff of the breath. The upper lip, at the same time, writhed itself away from the teeth, which it had previously covered completely; while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue. I presume that no member of the party then present had been unaccustomed to death-bed horrors; but so hideous beyond conception was the appearance of M. Valdemar at this moment, that there was a general shrinking back from the region of the bed.

I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed.

There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar; and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice—such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.

I have spoken both of “sound” and of “voice.” I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct—syllabification. M. Valdemar
spoke
—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. He now said:

“Yes;—no;—I
have been
sleeping—and now—now—
I am dead
.”

No person present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress, the unutterable, shuddering horror which these few words, thus uttered, were so well calculated to convey. Mr. L—l (the student) swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be induced to return. My own impressions I would not pretend to render intelligible to the reader. For nearly an hour, we busied ourselves, silently—without the utterance of a word—in endeavors to revive Mr. L—l. When he came to himself, we addressed ourselves again to an investigation of M. Valdemar’s condition.

It remained in all respects as I have last described it, with the exception that the mirror no longer afforded evidence of respiration. An attempt to draw blood from the arm failed. I should mention, too, that this limb was no farther subject to my will. I endeavored in vain to make it follow the direction of my hand. The only real indication, indeed, of the mesmeric influence, was now found in the vibratory movement of the tongue, whenever I addressed M. Valdemar a question. He seemed to be making an effort to reply, but had no longer sufficient volition. To queries put to him by any other person than myself he seemed utterly insensible—although I endeavored to place each member of the company in mesmeric
rapport
with him. I believe that I have now related all that is necessary to an understanding of the sleep-waker’s state at this epoch. Other nurses were procured; and at ten o’clock I left the house in company with the two physicians and Mr. L—l.

In the afternoon we all called again to see the patient. His condition remained precisely the same. We had now some discussion as to the propriety and feasibility of awakening him; but we had little difficulty in agreeing that no good purpose would be served by so doing. It was evident that, so far, death (or what is usually termed death) had been arrested by the mesmeric process. It seemed clear to us all that to awaken M. Valdemar would be merely to insure his instant, or at least his speedy dissolution.

From this period until the close of last week—
an interval of nearly seven months
—we continued to make daily calls at M. Valdemar’s house, accompanied, now and then, by medical and other friends. All this time the sleep-waker remained
exactly
as I have last described him. The nurses’ attentions were continual.

It was on Friday last that we finally resolved to make the experiment of awakening, or attempting to awaken him; and it is the (perhaps) unfortunate result of this latter experiment which has given rise to so much discussion in private circles—to so much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted popular feeling.

For the purpose of relieving M. Valdemar from the mesmeric trance, I made use of the customary passes. These, for a time, were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as especially remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by the profuse out-flowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the lids) of a pungent and highly offensive odor.

It was now suggested that I should attempt to influence the patient’s arm, as heretofore. I made the attempt and failed. Dr. F—then intimated a desire to have me put a question. I did so, as follows:

“M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?”

There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before;) and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth:

“For God’s sake!—quick!—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken me!—quick!—
I say to you that I am dead!
”

I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first I made an endeavor to re-compose the patient; but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful—or at least I soon fancied that my success would be complete—and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken.

For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared.

As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely
bursting
from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely
rotted
away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.

Bereavements

Although Poe found poetic inspiration in a beautiful woman’s death, he tended in fiction to portray her passing as an unromantic agony. Indeed, the fiction tends to emphasize the recoil of a male narrator from a dying woman whose return from the grave sometimes savors of revenge. The tales of loss surely owe something to Poe’s own recurrent bereavements—the deaths of his mother, of the beloved Mrs. Stanard, and of Frances Allan—and weirdly anticipate the early demise of his wife. But unlike the poems, which underscore grief and longing, the tales typically reflect a complicated loathing of mortality itself.

The early tale “The Assignation” introduces a succession of fated young women in Poe’s fiction and unfolds from the viewpoint of an interested spectator. When the Marchesa Aphrodite dejectedly casts her baby into a Venetian canal, her paramour, a Byronic visionary, foils the infanticide and so wins a mysterious wager. Unable to escape her marriage to the cruel Mentoni, the woman honors her vow to the visionary in a manner that the narrator comprehends too late.

More provocatively Poe narrates “Berenice” from the twisted perspective of Egaeus, who traces the decline of his cousin by dwelling on revolting changes in her appearance and “personal identity.” Berenice figures mostly as a cadaverous abstraction, yet her dazzling teeth become, in the narrator’s alienated mind, obsessive emblems of her individuality. Reacting to her reported demise, Egaeus betrays his madness by performing a bizarre, unconscious outrage.

Identity figures again in “Morella,” where the unloving narrator marries his “friend” and joins her in metaphysical studies on the fate of “personal identity.” Her wasting illness so intensifies his antipathy toward her that she makes a dying vow: she will compel him to “adore” in death the one whom he abhorred in life. The daughter whom Morella delivers on her deathbed incarnates her appearance and identity so exactly that the horrifying outcome of the girl’s belated christening fulfills the curse and dooms her adoring father to endless melancholy.

“Ligeia” marks Poe’s most intriguing variation, however, on the bereavement plot. When Ligeia grows ill, her narrator-husband agonizes at her “pitiable” decline and marvels at her determination to resist death by force of will. In the “mental alienation” provoked by her loss, he marries blonde Rowena Trevanion but cannot hide his loathing for her
or
his longing for Ligeia’s return. In the ambiguous final scene, he witnesses the possible reincarnation of raven-haired Ligeia, yet the reviving woman shuns him, forever shrouding in ambiguity her actual identity.

Poe employs a spectatorial narrator to study the strange bond between brother and sister in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Attempting to help his childhood friend, the narrator rationalizes the terrors inspired in Roderick by the illness of Madeline. Fearing that her apparent death may be a trance, Roderick buries her beneath the house, but he perversely screws down the coffin lid. Whether by natural or supernatural means, Madeline returns from the tomb, falling upon her brother and frightening him to death as their ancestral home collapses upon itself.

The only bereavement tale with a happy ending, “Eleonora” evokes the bliss of the narrator and his cousin-wife prior to her fatal illness. Despite his vow that he will never remarry, the narrator later weds the “ethereal” Ermengarde and in a mystical moment receives absolution from the spirit of Eleonora. Conversely, in “The Oval Portrait” a traveler at an Italian chateau finds in a bed-side book the story of a portrait on the wall before him. Married to a “maiden of rarest beauty,” an artist-husband has subjected the woman to endless sittings and so fails to notice her decline, achieving the effect of “Life itself” in his painting at an unimaginable cost.

Stay for me there! I will not fail.
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
[
Exequy on the death of his wife, by Henry King, Bishop of
Chichester
.]

 

 

Ill-fated and mysterious man!—bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Once more thy form hath risen before me!—not—oh not as thou art—in the cold valley and shadow—but as thou
shouldst be
—squandering away a life of magnificent meditation in that city of dim visions, thine own Venice—which is a star-beloved Elysium of the sea, and the wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters. Yes! I repeat it—as thou
shouldst be
. There are surely other worlds than this—other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude—other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?

It was at Venice, beneath the covered archway there called the
Ponte di Sospiri
, that I met for the third or fourth time the person of whom I speak. It is with a confused recollection that I bring to mind the circumstances of that meeting. Yet I remember—ah! how should I forget?—the deep midnight, the Bridge of Sighs, the beauty of woman, and the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.

It was a night of unusual gloom. The great clock of the Piazza had sounded the fifth hour of the Italian evening. The square of the Campanile lay silent and deserted, and the lights in the old Ducal Palace were dying fast away. I was returning home from the Piazetta, by way of the Grand Canal. But as my gondola arrived opposite the mouth of the canal San Marco, a female voice from its recesses broke suddenly upon the night, in one wild, hysterical, and long continued shriek. Startled at the sound, I sprang upon my feet: while the gondolier, letting slip his single oar, lost it in the pitchy darkness beyond a chance of recovery, and we were consequently left to the guidance of the current which here sets from the greater into the smaller channel. Like some huge and sable-feathered condor, we were slowly drifting down towards the Bridge of Sighs, when a thousand flambeaux flashing from the windows, and down the staircases of the Ducal Palace, turned all at once that deep gloom into a livid and preternatural day.

A child, slipping from the arms of its own mother, had fallen from an upper window of the lofty structure into the deep and dim canal. The quiet waters had closed placidly over their victim; and, although my own gondola was the only one in sight, many a stout swimmer, already in the stream, was seeking in vain upon the surface, the treasure which was to be found, alas! only within the abyss. Upon the broad black marble flagstones at the entrance of the palace, and a few steps above the water, stood a figure which none who then saw can have ever since forgotten. It was the Marchesa Aphrodite—the adoration of all Venice—the gayest of the gay—the most lovely where all were beautiful—but still the young wife of the old and intriguing Mentoni, and the mother of that fair child, her first and only one, who now, deep beneath the murky water, was thinking in bitterness of heart upon her sweet caresses, and exhausting its little life in struggles to call upon her name.