Baccano! - Volume 19 - Chapter 7.6

Digression 2 The Sweetheart Is Guileless

2003 Dalton, library director and immortal, speaks of the past

Let me tell you an old story.

As you probably know, I was once an alchemist. I may still be one, but my main job is “library director.”

How do I hide my identity from those around me? Oh, there are any number of ways to do that. I don’t mind describing them in detail, but this particular story already promises to be a long one, so we’ll save that for another time.

However, even now that I’ve become immortal—now that I’m no longer human—I’ve remained an alchemist. It’s a funny thing.

Has becoming immortal brought me fortune or misfortune? I’ve pondered that question many times, but to be honest with you, I don’t know.

As an Eastern proverb says, “Good fortune and bad alternate like the strands of a rope.” I’ve experienced my share of both fortune and misfortune as an immortal.

If you asked ordinary people, “Was your life a happy one?”, unless you posed your question just before they died, no doubt most wouldn’t have an answer immediately ready for you. Also, naturally, the conclusion would vary depending on the individual. That’s true for immortals as well. After all, the balance of fortune and misfortune is different for everyone.

Let’s see…

While it didn’t register as happiness in the moment, in retrospect, I have had many experiences that I can categorically declare were happy ones.

When I first became immortal, I spent a while traveling around the world.

I and the apprentices from my studio strove to plumb the depths of a variety of fields. However, our efforts to reach their true essence were hampered by our lack of knowledge and experience, and most of all…by our overwhelming lack of time.

When my acquaintance Battuta told me of the elixir of immortality, I initially thought she was teasing me. But from the moment she showed me what it meant to be an immortal, I was captivated.

For some alchemists, immortality is their original goal. In my case, it was a means to an end. If I were immortal, I would gain unlimited time. Even if experiments took a century or a millennium to show results, I could see them to completion with my own eyes. Those were my genuine feelings on the matter.

After all, my hair and whiskers were already as white as they are now.

The thought of dying and returning to oblivion held no particular terror for me. It was only that I didn’t want to contemplate the thought of breaking off my research before it was finished, of being unable to see the outcome.

Consequently, I and nine of my apprentices summoned a demon and became immortals.

At this point, the idea of alchemists summoning demons sounds ludicrous. However, there was a time when alchemy was viewed in the same light as devil worship and mysticism, and there were some who made no distinction between us and magicians.

Once immortal, over the next five hundred years, I saw all sorts of things.

At first, it was painful to watch my ordinary acquaintances die one after another, but I gradually grew accustomed to it. I am told that many who became immortal in the past were unable to come to terms with it and summoned the demon once more to kill—or “eat”—them. Though none of my apprentices did so, at the very least.

Yes, over those long years, I saw many, many things.

Wise rulers and tyrants, transformational moments in the very workings of society—everything from practical matters to the grotesques that lurk in the shadows of the world. You may not believe me, but on an island in the north, I even saw werewolves and vampires. As you can imagine, I thought I might have been dreaming the time I saw several shadowy headless knights on horseback in Ireland, riding in formation. No, that may actually have been a dream…

At any rate, whenever I saw something I had never seen before, it felt as though the very world had expanded. It exhilarated me far too much for one of my years.

Looking back, I really was content then.

Conversely…my unhappiest time was when I lost most of my apprentices.

Originally, I ran an alchemy studio in Northern Europe. A moment ago, I said I’d had nine apprentices. Including myself, all ten of us became immortals.

To be honest, only three of us are left.

Yes, yes, you’re right. Earlier, I said that none had chosen to end their own lives by asking the demon to eat them. Nor were they consumed by someone who’d become immortal on some other occasion.

It was us.

Our companions ate one another.

The first ten years were peaceful—and I realize now that may have been a miracle.

It started with one timid apprentice’s suspicion and desire to defend himself.

Now that no mere illness or injury would kill us, the one thing that could act as our death-scythe was another immortal’s right hand, and that man had an excessive fear of them.

It’s a comical story.

“I don’t want to die, not after I’ve become immortal.” It’s laughable, but that was what my apprentice thought, and to escape that fear…he ate another apprentice. His own mother, of all people.

From that point on, everything happened in the blink of an eye. Rather, that’s how it felt to me. After all, the killing went on for three years.

The motives varied. Some felt paranoia, like that first apprentice, while others were possessed by greed. Still, others simply ate and called it an experiment.

At the end of this ugly cannibalism, the only ones left were myself, Renee, and…a man named Archangelo.

Renee is a brilliant alchemist but rather lacking as a human being. The girl has no concept of danger.

How did she survive, you ask? It’s simple: She was protected. By myself, I wish I could say, but that wasn’t the case. While my apprentices were consuming one another, I threw myself into my research so I wouldn’t have to face reality.

You could say that man was far better than I was, for whatever it’s worth. Archangelo protected Renee to the end, and his motive for consuming others was love… That’s really all it was.

Archangelo was fond of Renee. To protect her from the right hands of his fellow apprentices, he ate all the survivors. He was a faithful man. At the very least, he wasn’t a villain. He was straitlaced, like an unbribable civil servant. Maybe it was his serious side that made it impossible for him to choose a different path from mine.

Nonetheless, even after he’d done all that, he still didn’t confess his love to Renee. It wasn’t due to inexperience; he knew full well what the result would be.

Renee Parmedes Branvillier isn’t capable of understanding love from others. She isn’t human enough.

Lacking… Yes, she is lacking in humanity. Maybe she was born that way, or perhaps it’s the result of trauma—I don’t know. She was like that by the time she became my apprentice.

Archangelo knew his love for Renee would never be reciprocated. He was also aware that he would hinder her work as a researcher. As a result, he continued to protect her while keeping a slight distance between them—and before he knew it, he’d ended up eating many of the other apprentices.

He turned suspicious eyes on me as well, but I categorically refused to be eaten for a reason like that. I made a deal with him.

That’s why my right hand is a prosthetic.

As you know, if those who’ve drunk the elixir of immortality want to kill each other, they need their right hands.

I cut off my own right hand, and as it tried to return to my wrist, I pinned it to a board with my knife. When I held out my arm to Archangelo, he looked bewildered. Yes, it’s a rare occurrence for him. In any case, I gave him my right hand and had him seal it in a place only he knows.

I did it to prove I wasn’t his enemy.

I wasn’t frightened of him. I was just fed up with my apprentices killing one another. You could definitely say I was unhappy then.

Perhaps it means that, unlike Renee, I still had some human emotions left.

…Or possibly I was just sad that I had fewer assistants to help with my experiments.

At this point, there’s no way to tell which it was. There’s also no need to.

After all, no matter how things may have been in the past, that incident cost me most of my humanity.

Don’t you see? If I’d had any humanity left, why would I have gone out of my way to make others immortal?

There were several reasons I taught Maiza Avaro how to summon the demon.

…Although I’ve forgotten most of them, by now.

Ah yes, when you become an immortal, the capacity of your memory does increase, as compared to ordinary humans. When I forget anything, it happens in the usual way. However, from the fact that I’ve lived several centuries and my memory hasn’t imploded on me, the true form of our immortality itself really must be…

Whoops, I almost wasted our time on a different tale. My apologies. Steel yourself; the old tell long stories.

At any rate, I gave Maiza a path to immortality in the full knowledge that he and the rest might begin to kill one another. I don’t know whether what I did brought misfortune to my new apprentices: Maiza, Elmer, and Huey. No doubt it will take several centuries, or millennia, to know the results of that.

You could say it’s an experiment made possible by immortality.

An experiment… Yes, one could call what I did to Maiza’s group an experiment. My actions amounted to using my beloved apprentices as guinea pigs.

…Do you think me a brute?

In that case, you’re still normal. If you can avoid it, you shouldn’t get involved with this grotesque world.

I pray you’ll find happiness as an ordinary human.

Mind you, I don’t know what that looks like for you, and I won’t burden myself to find out.