Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Smith Alexander McCall

Author:Smith, Alexander McCall [Smith, Alexander Mccall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307427298
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

HOLY MAN

AUDEN HAD CALLED SUCH PLACES ‘weeds from Catholic Europe’, and this is how Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld thought of them too; as usual, Auden’s imagery struck him as so rich, so laden with associations, and when he received the letter from Goa, with its unfamiliar, faded stamp, the haunting metaphor crossed his mind again.

It was a thin, dejected-looking envelope, much tattered by its journey. Indeed, in one corner it appeared that some animal, possibly a dog, had bitten it, leaving small tooth holes. In another corner, the paper had split, revealing a single sheet of greying parchment within. Von Igelfeld turned it over and saw the address of the sender, typed erratically across the back flap: Professor J. G. K. L. Singh. The name made his heart sink: J. G. K. L. Singh of Chandighar, author of Dravidian Verb Shifts.

Impulsively, von Igelfeld tossed the letter into his wastepaper bin. It had clearly met with near disaster on its trip to Germany, von Igelfeld thought; had the dog swallowed it, then it would never have arrived at all. If he threw it away now, then he was merely fulfilling its manifest destiny.

Von Igelfeld turned away and picked up the next letter, a quiet, reassuring letter, with a solid, familiar, German stamp, and the name of the sender neatly typed in the right hand corner: Professor Dr Dr (h.c.) Florianus Prinzel. This was Prinzel’s monthly letter, in which he would bring von Igelfeld up to date on developments in the Institute in Wiesbaden. At the end, penned in the slightly unsettling violet ink she habitually used, would be a small postscript from Ophelia Prinzel, with heart-warming domestic news of a trivial sort. This was exactly the sort of letter which von Igelfeld liked to receive, but even as he opened it and smoothed out the pages, his gaze turned guiltily to the poor, abandoned Indian letter, with its sad stamp and its flimsy paper.

Von Igelfeld wondered whether there was a moral obligation to read a letter. Surely the moral principles involved were the same as those which applied when somebody addressed a remark to one. One does not have to answer; but inevitably does. Yet, why should one have to answer: was there anything intrinsically wrong about ignoring somebody who said something to you if you hadn’t asked them to say something in the first place? Von Igelfeld wondered what view Immanuel Kant had expressed on this subject. Would Kant have thrown Professor J. G. K. L. Singh’s letter into his wastepaper basket? Von Igelfeld doubted it: the matter was clearly embraced by the Categorical Imperative. That settled that, but then the disturbing thought occurred: what would Jean-Paul Sartre have done if he had received a letter from J. G. K. L. Singh? Von Igelfeld suspected that Sartre might have had little compunction in doing as von Igelfeld had done, provided it made him feel authentic, but then, and here was the crucial di ference, he would not have worried about it.

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