THE FOURTEENTH MAN

sEEING CLEARLY • SAGES & FOOLS • CLOCKWORKS & CRYSTAL BALLS

The world moves in mysterious ways. Beautiful things happen, horrible things happen, weird things, too. Poetry occurs, everyday life continues, everything changes. Meanwhile we try to keep the pace and find our place.

The Fourteenth Man invites you into a precise and detailed, yet weird and wondrous setting. It offers glimpses of clarity and a clear feeling that there is so much more to explore. Now you see it, now you don’t. And maybe that’s the truth about the truth: You can never catch it, only get a glimpse from a million different perspectives.

This story reveals a practice that existed in Paris in the 19th century. Hard to believe, but true. The Fourteenth Man is fascinating and peculiar, tight and light on the surface, but mighty deep for those who enjoy exploring.

INFO:

The Fourteenth Man can lead you in many directions. You choose. You’ll find a few suggestions at the end. Three exercises and a number of questions. Again: You choose your way and your level of complexity. Remember, you are the main character in your own story.

Read it or listen to it (15 minutes), then, if you want the full experience, consider reading or listening to it again, slowly. Please take your time.

Relevance: The Fourteenth Man may serve as the beginning of a new conversation regarding cities, the senses, culture, history, justice, time, beauty, balances, and luck. You continue the line. Or, it may be 15 minutes in the thought-provoking company of people you wouldn’t otherwise meet.

Prefer listening? We’ve prepared a recording of The Fourteenth Man for you. You can hear the full story below. Remember to check out the exercises and questions at the bottom of this page.

The city had become a haze. Sometimes the color would shift - from yellow over burnt orange to brown - but to monsieur B the streets where he had lived his life had become ones of touches, smells, sounds, and memories. The children called him the blind man. “Watch out, here comes the blind man.” He didn’t mind. He had been a boy on these streets himself.

The haze had been expected, and monsieur B had felt a relief when it finally came creeping from the corner of his left eye. His father had been a horologist, as his father before him. The haze ran in the blood.

Monsieur B remembered every detail of his father’s tiny workshop where no child was allowed to enter: the precision, the occasional glimpse of minute tools, the muted sounds, the quiet sigh of relief when a repair was finalized. Monsieur B’s mother had cleaned the apartments of the rich and, occasionally, read their fortune in her crystal ball.

The city, monsieur B had always felt, was like one of the weights in his father’s workshop, measuring both misfortune and fortune, always needing tiny adjustments. The perfect balance had nothing to do with what seemed right and fair; it was simply a cold question of volumes and calculations. Fortune could only exist with the exact amount of misfortune to counterbalance it, and you would receive not what you deserved or thought you deserved, but what the city needed to keep its equilibrium.

Was monsieur B a fortunate man? The question seemed impossible to answer. How could you talk of fortune without also talking of misfortune? How could you rejoice over a coin found on the sidewalk without acknowledging the sorrow of the coin’s owner padding down her pockets?

Monsieur B had lived in the city long enough to feel balances shift, to slowly come to terms with his allotment. He had been both relieved and frightened as the haze descended upon him, turning the city into a yellow blur, but he had found a new city waiting for him, a city of rattling leaves and bell chimes, of fried fish and roasted chestnuts, of polished railings and aged stone. It was the city as he knew it, but it was also more than the city he knew; it was a double city, a twilight city as finely adjusted and calibrated as a watch leaving his father’s workshop.

He found that if there was a beauty to the city, it was not a beauty of monuments but of the way that things seemed to have a language of their own and would reveal their secrets to whomever took time to examine them. His parents had had the ability to examine the world of details, patiently and calm. Perhaps they had been waiting for things to reveal their hidden language, and for balances to shift: the language of clockworks and crystal balls, of playing cards and dirty laundry.

In his final year at the workshop, monsieur B’s father had gained a reputation of being sloppy, and it was only much later that monsieur B realized that his father had tried to feel his way through the adjustments and reparations, but that the language of watches hadn’t revealed itself to him.

“The city takes care of its own,” his mother had said as they left the crammed apartment behind the workshop for the final time. “We’ll get by.”

Monsieur B was proud to say that he had gotten by. He had worked, and he had learned to enjoy the treasures that the city had reserved for him: the sunny walks, the falling leaves, the sound of children playing in the park, the newspaper that someone left behind on a bench by the room that he rented from madame K.

He had taken what the city had offered him. He had been an errand boy and a waiter; he had sold tickets on the tramway, in the underground, and on the racing tracks; he had manned a newsstand and delivered parcels; he had been a janitor, and a night watch, and before the haze he had been a custodian at the sleepy art museum a few blocks from his home.

Now, he attended dinner parties. At six o’clock he shaved, put on his suit, and sat waiting for the phone to ring. Some evenings it rang before he had tied his shoes; other evenings it remained silent, and he fell asleep in his chair with the tie loosened and the radio on.

It had begun as a coincidence. Madame K had thrown a dinner party, and one of the guests had called in ill. They would be 13 at the table. Madame K was upset. “Monsieur B?” she called out. “Please shave and put on your best suit. Hurry, hurry. We need an extra guest at the table.”

“Me?” monsieur B answered from his room. “Why would you have me at your table? I’m nothing like your guests. I don’t know how to converse like they do.”

“Just keep your mouth shut and squint,” madame K said, arranging a bouquet in a vase. “They’ll think you’re a sage.”

“But I’m not a sage, and I only have one suit,” monsieur B answered. “It hasn’t been cleaned for months. The trousers are stained.”

“All the better,” madame K said. “They’ll think you’re too preoccupied to worry about stains. We can’t have a table of 13; we simply can’t.”

So, he became a sage, and he became the fourteenth man. He made it through dinner without hardly uttering a word, and as soon as coffee was served in madame K’s living room, and a gentleman sat down to play the piano, monsieur B excused himself, went to his room, and locked the door behind him.

“You were marvelous,” madame K told him the following day. “They found you very interesting and original.”  

“I didn’t say anything,” monsieur B answered. “I just sat there. How could they possibly find me interesting?”

Madame K folded her arms. “It’s not what you say. It’s what you don’t say.”

More invitations followed, always accompanied by a discreet promise of a modest salary for his inconvenience. Sometimes a car would be sent, and monsieur B would be hurried through a back entrance and find himself seated among lawyers, writers, actors, and financiers. He would eat and toast and occasionally offer a faint smile as his fingers examined the texture of the tablecloth, the engravings of the cutlery, the fragile porcelain cups. And when time came for coffee, he would excuse himself and fumble his way home, deciphering the building’s hidden signs with his fingers, hearing rain drop from leaves and balconies, smelling the sudden hot gusts of air from ventilation shafts as the screeching trains rattled through the belly of the city. It was winter, but winter was giving way. Birds were singing again. Could they – like him – sense it too?

One cold afternoon madame K knocked on his door. She was in tears and handed him an invitation.

“Madame K,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“They’re selling our building,” madame K answered. “And I always thought that the owners were such nice people.”

“Selling?” monsieur B asked. “But they live here, too. They always say hello. Why would they sell this nice building?”

“That’s why,” madame K answered. “Because it’s so nice. They’re throwing a dinner party and asked me to hand you this invitation.”

“Will you be coming too?” monsieur B asked. “You know these people better than I do.”

Madame K shook her head. “I’m not invited,” she said.

The following evening, monsieur B put on his suit, tied his shoes, and made his way to the owners’ apartment on the third floor. The guests were already seated in the dining room, and a maid held his arm as he shuffled across the wooden floor. Like a talisman, he thought. A talisman bringing luck to the table with his stained suit and sorry shoes.

 He examined the guests. Did they live in a haze of their own?

“Welcome,” the owner said. He was an elderly, potbellied gentleman, flanked by his young wife and what seemed to be a small bulldog, mounted on a stack of books and gasping for air. Monsieur B nodded and looked around. There were no other animals at the table, although one woman wore a fox stole, complete with feet and head. It could also be a dead cat. The haze made it difficult to tell.

Dinner was served. Monsieur B ate absentmindedly and toasted to celebrate the decision to sell. Fresh bottles of wine were carried from the kitchen, and the bulldog had a second serving of stew. Monsieur B had a feeling of seeing a new light on the distant winter sky, halfway covered by naked branches. He felt droplets of spit land on his face as a woman told him of tasting shark meat on a recent adventure, and he slowly leaned back as a man told the woman of buying and selling a house without ever setting foot in it. Monsieur B smiled his faint smile and toasted yet again, and he thought of the languages of sharks and of unvisited houses.

The owner rose from his chair and made a toast to the neighborhood. The bulldog barked, and everybody laughed.

“We have such big dreams,” the owner said. “For us, for you, for the neighborhood. Big dreams and major changes. We’re pushing the municipality to make our dreams come true. Luckily, we have a councilwoman with us tonight. One of the good councilwomen, that is.”

Laughter again. A toast. The owner gestured towards monsieur B and held up his glass. “Let’s hear a few words from our resident sage and lucky charm. Monsieur B, I’m sure you’ll forgive us for selling. Be assured that we won’t rest until all renters have found new homes. You, madame K, everybody. We will do our best to assist you. What do you say? A toast?”

Monsieur B had never felt that he could examine the haze, but now it finally stood out clearly to him. He wanted to reach out and touch it. The haze was not a hindrance, he thought, not a disability, but a gift with its infinite variations and details. He both saw the haze and the swaying owner with his raised glass; he saw both the orange ripples and the fox stole. The haze felt like a force growing in him, an imperfect force that somehow made the world even more precious. An imperfect force for an imperfect man, he thought.

So, he slowly rose and smiled his faint smile. And then he began telling the party of the haze that only he could see, of its characteristics and burnt colors, of the incredible details that sometime resembled a paeony, sometime a conch, sometime a walnut shell bobbing in a lake. He told of the way that everything had a language of its own, and that it was only because of the haze that he had finally learned the languages of his home.

“Everything is much more detailed than we think,” monsieur B said. “And it’s only when we take our time to examine the details in everything that we begin to understand beauty. Luck, unluck; maybe it’s all a question of perspective.”

Silence. Then laughter. “What an original,” someone said. “It’s really true what they say.”

Coffee was served, and monsieur B excused himself. The owner padded him on the back, thanked him for bringing luck to the party, and offered him a cigar.

Monsieur B put the cigar in the chest pocket of his jacket and smiled as he slowly walked down the stairs of the old building. He had a sense of a new light on the sky, even though it was a winter night, and the icy wind streamed through the leaking windows.

Madame K sat waiting for him in the living room. He had never known much of her life. Another woman had lived with her for many years, and they had used the small room, monsieur B’s room, for storage. They had sold antiquities from a tiny shop that had once belonged to a friend of monsieur B’s father.

Everything can be bought and sold, monsieur B thought as he sat down beside madame K. Even our history. Even our memories.

“Well?” madame K asked. “How did it go? What did they say? And what did you say? You must have said something.”

“You know,” monsieur B answered and found the cigar in his pocket. He handed it to madame K. “I’m not much of a talker. They gave me a cigar. That’s something, isn’t it?”

He reached out and held madame K’s hand, as gently as he could. She put the cigar in her mouth with a puzzled look, and there they sat with the muted sound of a party upstairs echoing from the hallway.

“We’ll be alright,” he said. “It’ll be the beginning of an adventure.”

Then she laughed, finally, and he laughed with her.

Winter was giving in; he could feel it. It would only be a matter of days.

Credits:
Written and produced by The Empty Square
Illustration: Samuel Toi
Voice artist: TJ Trueh