That night, after the child was asleep, he found Villon’s verses in the net and printed them out. One stanza caught his eye:
Literally, it was something like, “I know the doublet by its hem, I know the monk by his habit. I know the master by the man, I know the nun by her veil. I know when a conman talks jargon, I know fools fed on creams. I know wine by the barrel, I know everything except myself.”
If the poet were alive tonight, and if he were an English speaker, what would he write? Some of his rhymes were forced, for instance “cresmes” and “moy mesmes”; he would not have done that if the language had given him a better choice. After a while he thought he saw some others that the poet might have liked. He wrote, and crossed out, and in an hour he had:
The more he read about Villon the more deeply interested he grew. As a young scholar, Villon had actually been proposed for a benefice and might have died a bishop; but then, as Wyndham Lewis said, “The Church would have gained a rascal and poetry would have lost a prince.” At the age of thirty-two he was arrested for a crime of which he was more or less innocent, tortured, and condemned to be “hanged and strangled.” On appeal, since the case was weak but Villon’s odor was strong, his sentence was commuted to ten years’ exile from Paris. That was the last anyone ever heard of him. Although he wrote, in The Debate of the Heart and Body of Villon, that the fault was in his stars, it was certainly his character and not mere circumstance that made him a criminal. He might have become a prelate, like many of his class at the University of Paris; instead, he chose poverty, crime, and poetry.
11
Stevens looked up Palladino in the net and found two books, The Optimal Society and The Myth of Money, both in Italian. As he had expected, there were not many reviews, and none by people whose names he had seen before. The books were under copyright; he paid the fees and downloaded them. Over the weekend he read them both; they were witty and surprisingly lucid, like the man himself. There was an English translation of The Optimal Society; Stevens sampled that too, and found it badly done.
Palladino was staying with friends in a vast shabby apartment near the river. When Stevens arrived at the appointed hour, he found the professor seated at a tea table with Maria Orsi and four others: Bruno Colmari, the young man who had introduced Palladino at the lectures, an elderly couple named Lanciani who were the owners of the apartment, and a blond middle-aged woman named Carla della Seta.
Palladino welcomed him effusively. “My dear young friend, come in. You have given us money, now let us give you tea.”
“Since the money is worthless,” Stevens could not help saying, “I am getting the better of the bargain.”
Palladino laughed. “Quite true! When you came in, we were just talking about this worthless money that we must have. You know, the goldsmiths used to keep gold on deposit for their customers and issue receipts for it, which the customers could use to pay their debts, and these receipts circulated like currency.
“Well, the goldsmiths, who were now bankers whether they wanted to be or not, discovered that in any given period only a certain percentage of these receipts would be presented for payment; therefore they could issue more receipts, which would also circulate like currency even though there was no gold to back them, and by loaning these receipts they could gain interest on this imaginary gold. And so you see that all the weight of modem finance rests on a fantasy!
“Every bank today loans more money than it actually has, and each time this imaginary money is deposited in another bank, it generates still more imaginary money. Well, all money is imaginary now, because there is nothing to back it. You cannot go to a bank or to a state treasury and redeem your money for gold or anything of value; but everyone accepts the imaginary money and therefore it is as good as if it were real. We agree to pretend that it exists, you see, and so the world goes round and everyone is happy, except those who have no money.
“What if we gave everyone some of this imaginary money? It costs nothing to make it, since it does not exist; but then, we say, there would be too much money, and since everyone would want to spend it, the prices of goods would be driven up. Yes, and we also say that we must have new markets for the goods we produce. Only in a world where imaginary things are treated as real could we believe these two contradictory things at once.”
“But, Professor,” said Stevens, “even if money is imaginary, isn’t it true that goods are real and that if there are fewer goods than people who want to buy them, the prices will go up?”
“My dear friend, you are still thinking in terms of money. Without money, there will be no prices.”
“Very good, but then how do we decide who gets my chicken, if there are five who want it?”
Palladino beamed. “Let us have a demonstration. Let each of us put something of value on the table. Not money, and not anything of great value—just some trifle, a thing we would be willing to give away to a friend.” He looked in his pockets. “I don’t seem to have anything. Wait, here is a nail-clipper. That will do very well.” He dropped it on the table. Maria contributed a little mirror, Bruno a packet of tissues, Signora della Seta a pencil, the two Lancianis respectively a bottle of scent and a key-chain without the keys. Stevens added his Swiss Army knife.
“Very good!” said Palladino. “Now let us say that each of us desires each of these things. But there is only one of each thing, and there are seven of us. And we have no money! What can we do? First we write our names on slips of paper.” He wrote on a pad, tore off a piece and folded it, passed the pad around. “Now, dear Rosa, may we use this bowl? Excellent.” He put the folded slips in the bowl. “Maria, will you be kind enough to draw? We will draw first for the nail-clipper.”
Maria unfolded the slip. “Signor Kauffman.” Next the tissues, which Palladino got; the scent bottle, Bruno; Signor Lanciani got his own key-chain. Maria got the knife. The pencil went to Signora della Seta and Signora Lanciani got the mirror.
“Now it is a rule of these demonstrations,” said Palladino jovially, “that we do not give our prizes back. Another time we may offer them again and get something else instead. But we see now, do we not, that without the use of money we can decide who is to have something each of us wants. And if we are sometimes disappointed, well, we have been disappointed before. Is your question answered?” he said to Stevens.