Legends VI – The Merchant Without a Price

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It was said that he wandered through the streets like a wandering midnight, as if the night itself had lent him steps. He carried no scales, no cash register, no bag of coins; yet a faint, metallic chill ordered people's desires as soon as the hem of his coat brushed against their lives. I met him one evening when the rain had wiped the square so clean that it looked like an open slate. No stall, no sign; just a man with reflective skin for a face, in which nothing of me returned, but a room I didn't own: bright, inhabited, with voices that knew my name. He didn't ask the usual question; he simply raised his hand, and in it lay a small key of matte tin. "It opens nothing," he said, "except what wants to come to you." I laughed, half out of fear, half out of hunger. "And the price?" "Later," he said gently, "when you know what we're talking about." I took the key home. At first, it lay obediently on the table, but in the morning I found it on the inside of my wrist, as if it had asked my skin for permission and received it. During the day, I heard the city more clearly, as if someone had polished a glass between me and the world: voices took on depth, paths spoke of their feet, and the words I had long sought in vain streamed toward me as if they had an old promise to fulfill. It was as if an inaudible conductor were directing me; small things aligned themselves with a meaning that was not mine and yet passed through me. Where there is sharpness, there is hunger. Soon I was waiting for the moment when the key would warm like an animal; I got up earlier and fell asleep later, piling up pieces of paper with sentences that found me, and forgetting to eat when the tiles drank in the afternoon light. When the merchant returned, no shadow fell. "It's time," he said, "for a first prize. Nothing difficult: Give me, as often as you touch it, a piece of your ordinariness." I considered it a gentle bargain, for who misses the pale when the bright calls? After that, I lost the ability to simply let things be. A cup became history, a crack in a tile a geography, a glance a hurricane that lingered for a week. Friends called me more present and yet distant; I nodded, placed my fingers on the crenellated animal at my pulse, and felt it respond. The second time, he demanded slowness. "Just a little," he said, "a few pauses between breaths." I surrendered them and ran through my happiness as if through warm summer rain; everything succeeded, everything glided, but something inside me began to freeze, as if I were standing in the wind in a wet shirt. The nights cut the warmth thin, the days shone like blades. The third time, he stood in my kitchen, where the kettle whistled as if he knew him. "One more little thing," he said, "a drop of your blindness." I didn't know how to measure that, and I agreed. After that, the world burned.