El impostor inverosímil Tom Castro

A short story ("The implausible impostor Tom Castro") by this Argentine, based on real events. You can read the original here.

I provide this name because until 1850, this was the name by which he was known in the streets and houses of Talcahuano, Santiago, Chile, and Valparaíso. And it would be fair for him to reassume this name when he returned to these lands even if such a return were mere fantasy, a Saturday pastime.* On the Wapping birth register, with an entry dated June 7, 1834, his name is Arthur Orton. We know that he was the son of a butcher; that his childhood endured the insipid misery commonly incident to the lower boroughs of London; and that he felt the call of the sea. This is hardly unheard of: fleeing to the sea comprises the traditional English rupture with parental authority, the initiation into the heroic. Geography recommends it, as do the Scriptures (Psalm 107): They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.  

Orton fled his deplorable, pink-tainted suburb in a boat on the sea and contemplated, with habitual disillusion, the Southern Cross; he deserted at the port of Valparaíso. He was a man of placid idiocy. Logically, he could (and should) have died of hunger; but his confused joviality, his permanent smile, and his infinite meekness earned him the favor of a certain family Castro, whose name he adopted. There are no traces of this South American episode; but his gratitude did not wane. It is presumed that in 1861 he reappeared in Australia, still with the name Tom Castro. In Sydney he met a certain Bogle, a negro servant. Without being handsome, Bogle was possessed of a relaxed and monumental aura, the work-of-engineering solidity typical of a negro male who has become older, heavier, and more authoritative. He had a second quality which some handbooks of ethnography have denied his race: notions of genius. We shall see evidence of this later. In short, he was a restrained and decent man, with his ancient African appetites very well adjusted for the use and abuse of Calvinism. Apart from the visits of God (which we will describe later), he was absolutely normal, without any other irregularity apart from a modest and long-standing fear that would delay his step as he entered an alleyway or side street, suspicious as he was of the East, the West, the South, and the North, and of the violent vehicle which would put an end to his days.                          

One evening at dusk in a closed-off street corner in Sydney, Orton saw him in the midst of negotiating his imaginary death. At length he offered him his arm and, in mutual astonishment, the two of them crossed the harmless street. Since this twilight moment now long gone, a protectorate was established: that of the insecure and monumental negro over the obese crackpot from Wapping. In September 1865, both of them read a desperate announcement in a local newspaper.          

The idealized dead man

In the last days of April 1854 (as Orton was provoking an effusion of Chilean hospitality as wide as its patios), the steamer Mermaid, proceeding from Rio de Janeiro en route to Liverpool, was shipwrecked in the waters of the Atlantic. Among those who perished was Roger Charles Tichborne, an English military officer raised in France, the eldest son of one of the most important Catholic families of England. It seems implausible, but the death of this Gallicized young man with the finest of Parisian accents – which awakened the incomparable rancor that can only be caused by French intelligentsia, French wit, and French pedantry – was a transcendental event in the destiny of Orton, who had never laid eyes on Tichborne. Roger's horrified mother, Lady Tichborne, refused to believe in his death and began to publish desperate announcements in the newspapers of widest circulation. One of these announcements fell into the soft, funerary hands of the negro Bogle, who conceived of a brilliant plan.    

The virtues of disparity

Tichborne was a svelte gentleman with an air of vexation about him; he had sharp features, an olive complexion, straight black hair, lively eyes, and was almost irritating in his verbal precision. Orton, on the other hand, was an incontinent boor with a vast belly, features of stunning indefiniteness, a complexion bordering on the freckly, brown curly hair, and sleepy eyes; he was also a vague, almost absent conversationalist. Bogle decided that Orton ought to embark on the first steamer to Europe and satisfy the hope of Lady Tichborne by declaring to be her son.  

The project was one of foolish ingeniousness. I will take a simple example: if an impostor in 1914 had pretended to pass for the Emperor of Germany, the first thing he would have fabricated would have been the waxed mustaches, the limp arm, the authoritarian brow, the downcast mood, the illustrious and highly-decorated breast, and the Prussian shako. Bogle was more subtle: he would have presented a glabrous Kaiser, oblivious to military attributes and honorable eagles, with his left arm in a state of unquestionable health. We do not require the metaphor; we know that a flabby, squishy Tichborne appeared, with the amiable grin of an imbecile, brown hair, and an incorrigible ignorance of the French language.  

Bogle knew that a perfect facsimile of the much-desired Roger Charles Tichborne was impossible to obtain. He also knew that all similarities achieved would do nothing more than reveal certain inevitable differences. Therefore he renounced any likeness whatsoever. He intuited that the enormous ineptitude of the impostorship would be conceivable proof that it was not a matter of fraud, that the simplest aspects of certainty would never be discovered by such flagrant means. One should also not forget the all-powerful alliance with time: fourteen years in the Southern hemisphere in a life left to chance can surely change a man.  

And there was another basic reason: Lady Tichborne's repeated and foolish announcements demonstrated her plain conviction that Roger had not died; they also indicated her desire to identify him anew.    

The encounter 

The ever-obliging Tom Castro wrote to Lady Tichborne. To establish his identity he submitted the irrefutable proof of the two beauty marks on his left nipple and that episode from his childhood, so traumatizing yet at the same time so memorable, in which he was assaulted by a swarm of bees. The note was brief and, much in keeping with Tom Castro and Bogle, free of orthographic scruples. In the impressive solitude of a Paris hotel the lady read and re-read the letter with the happiest of tears; and a few days later, she came upon the memories which her son had evoked.     

On the 16th of January, 1867, Roger Charles Tichborne announced his presence at this hotel. He was preceded by his respectable servant, Ebenezer Bogle. The winter day was full of sun; the fatigued eyes of Lady Tichborne were veiled in tears. The negro opened the windows wide. The light created a mask: the mother recognized her prodigal son and embraced him. Now that she had him for real, she could dispense with the newspaper and the letters he used to send her from Brazil; those were merely the adored reflections which had nourished her solitude for fourteen gloomy years. She gave them back to him with pride: not a single one was missing.      

Bogle smiled with the utmost discretion: here was where Roger's placid ghost had been documented. 

Ad majorem Dei gloriam

This illustrious acknowledgement – which seemed to obey the tradition of classic tragedies – ought to have crowned this story, leaving three assured, or at least probable happinesses: that of the loyal mother, that of the apocryphal and indulgent son, and that of the accomplice as compensation for the providential apotheosis of his diligence. Destiny (the name we apply to the incessant and infinite operation of countless intermingled causes) did not settle matters as such. Lady Tichborne died in 1870 and her relatives took up a case against Arthur Orton for the usurpation of a civil estate. Bereft of tears and solitude, but not of greed, they never believed in the blubbery, almost illiterate prodigal son who reemerged in so untimely a fashion from Australia.

Orton counted on the support of his innumerable creditors who had determined that he was in fact Tichborne, so that he would be able to pay them. He likewise counted on the friendship of the family attorney, Edward Hopkins, and that of the antiques dealer Francis J. Baigent. This was, nevertheless, not enough: Bogle thought that in order to win the battle it was paramount that they gain the strong backing of popular opinion. He needed a top hat and a decent umbrella and went seeking inspiration in the decorous streets of London. It was twilight; Bogle wandered about until a moon the color of honey was duplicated in the rectangular water of the public fountains. God visited him. Bogle hailed a cab and had him drive to the apartment of Baigent, the antiques dealer. Baigent sent a long letter to The Times proclaiming that the supposed Tichborne was a shameless impostor. It was signed by Father Goudron of the Society of Jesus. Other, equally Papist denunciations ensued. The effect was immediate: the good people could not but guess that Sir Roger was the target of an abominable Jesuit plot.

The cab         

The trial lasted one hundred ninety days. About a hundred witnesses pledged on their faith that the accused was Tichborne, among them four companions-in-arms from the 6th regiment of the dragoons. His partisans did not stop repeating that he was not an impostor, and if he had been, he had made sure to be a copy of the childhood portraits of his model. Moreover, Lady Tichborne had recognized him and it was clear that a mother could not be mistaken. Everything was going well, or more or less well, until an old flame of Orton's appeared before the tribunal to testify. Bogle did not display a flicker of emotion at this treacherous manoeuvre on the part of the "relatives"; he took an umbrella, hailed a cab again, and went off to plead for a third illumination in the decorous streets of London. We will never know whether he found it: shortly before arriving at Primrose Hill, he was met by that terrible vehicle which had been pursuing him all those years. Bogle saw it coming, let out a scream, but did not manage to save himself. He was violently hurled against the stones; the nag's traffic-driven hooves cracked open his skull.         

The specter

Tom Castro was the ghost of Tichborne, if a poor ghost inhabited by the genius of Bogle. When they informed him that Bogle was dead, he was crushed. He continued to lie, but with little enthusiasm and ludicrous contradictions. It was easy to foresee the end.  

On February 27, 1874, Arthur Orton, alias Tom Castro, was sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor. He made himself well-liked in jail; such was his purpose. His exemplary behavior took four years off his sentence. When its hospitality – that of the prison – finally let him go, he passed through the hamlets and centers of the United Kingdom, giving small talks in which he declared his innocence or affirmed his guilt. His modesty and desire to please were so engrained that, on many evenings, he would begin by defending himself and conclude with a confession, ever at the whims of the public.  

He died on April 2, 1898.

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* I employ this metaphor to remind the reader that these infamous biographies appeared in the Saturday supplement of the evening paper.

The Sign of the Broken Sword

We may reconstruct the past on our own terms – indeed, doing so on the definitions of others is nearly impossible – but we cannot overcome the sensation, captured in many a platitude, about time and pain. However much we have suffered, however wickedly the world has rendered us a disservice, however hollow the special moments desired turned out to be, over time we immerse ourselves in the favorable aspects of memory. A shade despised and now deceased will become the object of our pity; one loved but lost will resonate not because that era ended the way it did, but because it ended at all: overcoming time and mortality remains the greatest obstacle to happiness. And what applies to that narrow pocket of humanity we know is equally valid for those we only know of, which brings us to this tale.

Our story is about the past, but in the present waft two figures, "one man ... enormously big, and the other (perhaps by contrast) almost startlingly small," both thoroughly versed in the mutability of man. They also know, however, that each person possesses some inherent characteristics that will never change; the stronger that person's willpower, the more adamant his mind. Such logic attends the curious case of two soldiers, one British and one Brazilian:

'Sir Arthur St Clare was a soldier of the old religious type .... he was always more for duty than for dash; and with all his personal courage was decidedly a prudent commander, particularly indignant at any needless waste of soldiers. Yet in this last battle he attempted something that a baby could see was absurd. One need not be a strategist to see it was as wild as wind; just as one need not be a strategist to keep out of the way of a motor-bus. Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness. Why the deuce should he diabolically revenge himself only once in his life; and that for the one particular blow that could not have hurt him? Well, there you have it. One of the wisest men in the world acted like an idiot for no reason. One of the best men in the world acted like a fiend for no reason.'

Hyperbole aside, our sober subject is a one-sided skirmish between British and Brazilian forces on Black River in Olivier's South American territory. And while there are few topics more dull or moribund than battle descriptions, the event was noteworthy for two reasons: the discrepancy in troop numbers and the mercy granted to all members of the conquered but one. St. Clare, a man renowned for his cunning and caution, led an impetuous assault on an enemy vastly superior in number; Olivier, a man renowned for his lenity, hanged that dauntless commander and spared his underlings. What seems to be a question of history becomes a question a character, and for that reason the two men prowl about in search of a plinth's revealing inscription. 

Chesterton has a particular relationship to history, which for him is more a study of what kinds of man have existed than of mankind as an amorphous, decision-making collective. As he comments in a somewhat different context:

The only history that is worth knowing, or worth striving to know, is the history of the human head and the human heart, and of what great loves it has been enamoured: truth in the sense of the absolute justice is a thing for which fools look in history and wise men in the Day of Judgment.

And what history lies in the heart of men? According to Chesterton, each person might not be substantially different from any other – let us leave this codswallop to the relativists and their cretinous and insincere games of oneupmanship – but each person does have a different concept of the world. Perhaps no two people have exactly the same memories, but it is even less likely that two people will have matching ideas of who they are in the realities that greet them upon waking. Father Brown reviews the extant details, including a memoir by a certain Captain Keith who would posthumously become St. Clare's son-in-law, the accounts from soldiers and related narratives that describe the oddly broken sword with which the general is immortalized and petrified, and then a few observations that could only be made by someone who knows what untruths may lurk behind flaunted virtue and good reputation. He also knows what harm can befall those who attempt poliorcetics with unwhole weapons. Perhaps broken words would be more like it.

Pushkin, "Кто из богов мне возвратил"

A work ("Which god has ever yet restored") by this poet.  You can read the original here.

Which god has ever yet restored  
All those with whom I came to share             
My mud-bound march and vulgar mores,
When Brutus led us in despair, 
And freedom's specter was our lord?  
All those with whom my front line tears           
In bottomless tent cups I drowned,        
And curls tight-wrapped in ivy's sheers  
With Syrian myrrh in embalmed crown?

At war's worst hour will you abide   
That I, poor Quiris fearful, fled
My shield cast down beside my pride,
With vows and prayers in my stead?
How fear reigned whole and how I flew!
But Hermes in a sudden breath 
My world made safe, whence he withdrew
And saved me from most certain death.

But you, O you, first love of mine, 
Again in battle did you rage, 
And then to Rome fate's force would bind  
Your steps to my warm, simple cage. 
Sit now beside my hallowed hearth 
And let us pour.  Do not regret
My wines or perfumes, sweet or tart,
The laurels sit.  Lad, pour us wet!
Here pale restraint will find no place:
Like Scythians wild I wish to drink 
And with a friend so celebrate,
That senses bleed and do not think.

Open Hearts

We are, said a wise man a long time ago, nothing more than the sum of our choices. Freewill remains the constant in the universe that allows our lives to rotate with the planets or in counterpoise, but in each case with distinctive energy that some of us humble dreamers dare to call souls. What is strange about these two assertions is that people disassociate freewill from any type of faith because, they claim, faith involves submission, accepting one's destiny, and, most criminally, divesting oneself of any responsibility for one's decisions. Now I am all for freewill. I truly believe that with determination, persistence, and optimism (and, admittedly, some luck), just about anything can be achieved. One man can choose not to retaliate and inspire a whole multiethnic nation to walk the path of least resistance; one woman can devote her life to helping those whom the world wishes were never born; and a man who survived orphanages, war, P.O.W. camps, cancer, expatriation, and one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes in modern history can win the Nobel Prize for literature. In addition to their faith, all of these heroes – and it is much harder to be a hero when you choose not to resort to violence – share an indomitable will. A will to do what is morally right for the world, even if such a scenario costs them everything they hold dear. Of course, it is not the task of every person to enact mass reform, nor to lead millions onto the righteous path, nor to sacrifice himself for the greater good of mankind. No, to most of us hyperbole does not apply. Most of us have enough to deal with in the small ambit of our private life, a locus which can be just as tragic as a national catastrophe. Which brings us to this film about choice.

We are introduced to two couples at different stages of their development. The first, young and freshly engaged, are Cecilie (Sonja Richter) and Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas). Life began the day they met and has improved as they have grown together, sharing the tender smiles of those who understand fate as the reflection of our desires and the influence of something greater still. It is in the rays of this omnipotent sun that they bask, drunk on the sweetness of things, in love so wonderful and profound that we suspect that it cannot last for the entirety of a motion picture. Indeed, they stay enamored and cooing until Joachim gets out of a parked car and is promptly run down by a motorist who never saw him. That motorist is Marie (Paprika Steen), and her collision with Joachim can be attributed to an argument she was having at the wheel with her hellcat teenage daughter Stine. 

Marie is half of the second couple in our love trapezoid with her surgeon husband, Niels (Mads Mikkelsen). Now in their mid- to late thirties, Niels and Marie lead a steady bourgeois life with three children and a comfortable home in one of Copenhagen's more privileged quarters; in other words, this idyllic structure is as likely to crumble as the blissful, energetic, and impecunious world of Cecilie and Joachim. And fate's wicked game has already assumed its course: upon learning how Joachim ended up in his hospital's intensive care unit, Niels feels a certain affection towards Cecilie, who is much younger and lovelier than his loyal wife. He begins, as men are supposed to do when they court, with small gifts of his time and money. Once the extent of Joachim's injury has been fully ascertained, however, Niels feels obliged to replace the lost happiness that Cecilie might never find again and let her love blossom anew – or some other excuse for what he lacks in his marriage. After all, it was Niels's wife and daughter who took away Cecilie's love, so wouldn't all be fair in the solar system if he could restore some of her trust in human bonds? Not to mention that Joachim, given the severity of his injury, has nothing but the nastiest words for the person he once loved.

Without making light of the talent on hand, as well as the sublime threads that intertwine at just the right moments, the plot as described above could have been culled from any ordinary soap opera and kicked out to its melodramatic limits. Yet the four actors weave their emotions slowly, hesitatingly, as if unsure what the next scene will bring and cognizant that what they say might be later held against them. What we witness is the finest form of semi-improvisation possible in cinematic form, and one rarely employed in the inevitable plots of inevitable commercial films with inevitable revenues. Open hearts, a rather poor pun on Niels's profession and the amenability of his heart and that of Cecilie's to overcome societal obstacles and attempt a life together, has a certain appeal yet does not translate the original Danish, Elsker dig for evigt ("Love you forever"). The simplicity of that last phrase and the decision to pronounce it sincerely to another human being, that may be the hardest choice of all.

The Body Snatcher

It might be better to pretend that this story never happened, which of course it did. Graverobbers are for obvious reasons of supply some of history's most chronicled criminals, yet with the explosion of medical science in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not graves which were violated but the bodies themselves. These bodies were sold in parts to anatomists and medical students for scientific purposes and tomb after tomb went hollow. Even more morbid is the fact that demand began to get fussier and fresher bodies became all the rage, leading one particular team to pursue the freshest bodies out there, those of the still living. The actions of William Burke and his accomplice were so notorious as to be immortalized in a verb, so when we meet Fettes and Macfarlane in this small masterpiece of horror, we understand them to be his direct descendants.

The story begins with their unwanted reunion: Fettes is constantly soused and impecunious; Macfarlane, garbed in the finest boutique-bought whitewash, a successful London physician. They meet by chance and are none too pleased about it, for their consciences share crimes of diabolical scheming. It turns out both were once students of a certain K., a physician who collected cadavers for his own medical experiments, and had no qualms or questions about the work of his minions. The tale is too brief to provide much characterization of their sinister master, so we only get the following snippet:

There was at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K- was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. 

That K. is really Stevenson’s compatriot Robert Knox is not so much a secret as a literary device to prevent the piece from becoming historical journalism. Suffice it to say that imagining two of Knox’s suppliers, with a few pale strokes of ghoulish vengeance thrown in for good measure, would make a glorious tale of horror (not unlike what would be produced half a century later in a very different setting). Stevenson’s genius does not allow him, however, to stop at the Gothic. The arc of such a story (devised and perfected by, among others, this author) is built in five acts: the re-encounter, the origin of their acquaintance, an “agenbite of inwit,” the appearance of an even greater evil, and then the destiny of all souls involved. You might think the opening section clumsy and almost unconnected to the meat of the tale, and you would not be wrong. But the story makes us wait for the integrant appearance of a man called Gray.

Gray is a marvelous sketch in the annals of literature, a being that barely defiles more than two pages and yet is etched deep in our memory. He becomes, I can say without being indiscreet, the unremovable stain. These are all evildoers, but there is something about him that outhowls the other devils:

This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal–black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

The end looms the moment Macfarlane is obliged to foot the bill for their long and gluttonous night, and then spend the next day “squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern.” This all culminates in a scene in a carriage that could be taken (substituting a car or train for the fly) from any contemporary horror film. If you haven’t read Stevenson, you are missing one of literature’s unheralded giants, capable of portraying both sides of human nature in equal load (as he does in a more famous work, one of the most perfect literary creations of all time). In The Body Snatcher, there is only one side, and it is remarkably vile; but its vileness wields the distinct advantage of making us cringe in fear of dark and darting shapes in the night. Endless, blackest night, that is.