Fortunato's Undoing

"Revenge is a dish best served cold"--William Shakespeare

Montresor, the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado," informs us that 'The Thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could..." As to what specifically these injuries were, we are never informed. But, he stresses, it was only when Fortunato "ventured upon insult," that he decided, forthwith and post-haste, to commence upon a plan of revenge. But to do so with the most careful circumspection. Also that, one that punishes must "punish with impunity." Thus he must be able to bring the dread hand of doom down upon the head of his adversary.

They meet at the "madness" of the carnival, Fortunato dressed in the conical cap with bells, the literal costume of a harlequin, or Fool; the jester. In the sacred Tarot, The Fool card is the only one of the Major Arcana to be labeled as zero, having, much like the Alpha and Omega, no beginning, no end. In other words, an immortal circle, vengeance, in this case, Montresor's, 'come 'round' as Yeats might have put it. Death for Fortunato, "slouching to be born."

Montresor is to be the instrument of that undoing, but he is sly about it, holding out a tantalizing sprig of grapes--sour ones, to be sure, having a "taste for vintages," and "buying largely whenever he can." Fortunato, he informs the Reader, is a connoisseur of fine wines (though we are further informed he is, like his fellow countrymen, a "charlatan" in all other affairs of taste and breeding). Montresor informs Fortunato that he has acquired a "pipe" of what he believes to be amontillado, but "he has his doubts.

Fortunato is astounded and enthused, exclaiming, "Amontillado? Impossible. And during the carnival season?" And Montressor reiterates that he "has his doubts."

Suggesting that a man named Luchessi could be called to taste and ascertain whether or not Montresor purchased the rare wine, Fortunato spits out this idea as pure tomfoolery. "Luchessi cannot tell Amontillado from cooking sherry, " he exclaims, later calling Luchessi an "ignoramus." The little man dressed in Fool's Motley has a harsh and acid-sharp tongue. When he ventured upon insult, we remind the Reader, is when he sealed his fate. Or, so Montresor states.

Lured back to Montresor's manse, Fortunato is pushy and insistent, wanting very badly a drink of the fabled wine. They enter the catacombs far below the keep, Montresor stressing to the Reader that he knew full well they would be left alone, as his servants would no doubt desert the premises "as soon as his back was turned." They descend into the dank, damp cellars, the walls dripping and encrusted with niter. Besides them, heaped piles of bones, both the ancestors of the Montressor clan, as well as their victims, are heaped in a charnel array. (Note: such displays were not uncommon in medieval times. The catacombs beneath Paris are littered with the decorative assemblage of human skulls grinning from the walls, and the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo Sicily are, likewise, the repository of ancient, moldering, and skeletonized cadavers.)

They both doff brandy to keep away the chill. Fortunato is afflicted with a cough, and Montresor, who has been playing sly psychological trickery with Fortunato since the story began, suggests that they return, as a drink of amontillado is "not worth your health." The Reader might have already surmised that the long-term health of Fortunato was, in actuality, the last of Montressor's concerns.

"Bah! I will not die of a cough!" Fortunato says dismissively. Then, throwing the empty bottle away behind him, he makes a curious hand gesture. It is here we find, or surmise at least, that Fortunato's insult is one of the sneerings down his nose at Montresor, who claims because he recognizes the sign to be "a brother Mason." In other words, he, Montressor, is also a Freemason.

"You, a mason? Impossible!" retorts Fortunato, as if the very suggestion is absurd. Montresor, thus, is from a familial line or decayed branch of descent that Lovecraft must have noted; at any rate, Montresor has an entirely different form of masonry in mind for this particular evening.

The two proceed downward, deeper into the vault, wherein, a recess in the wall, surrounded by the piled-up bones of Montresor's ancestors their victims, are moved away. Fortunato, eager to be inside and at the cask of amontillado, walks boldly and unknowingly into the dark, womb-like crevice of death. Quickly then, Montresor secures around him a heavy chain, binding him tightly in the crevice. Then, casting aside a pile of moldering bones, he reveals a trowel and mortar. And a load of brick.

Fortunato begins to laugh unmerrily. "Oh," he shrieks, a clever joke. We will have many a laugh about it back at the palazzo." But Montresor is not doing this in jest, nor in vain; he means to brick Fortunato up alive, as payment for his many sins and indiscretions, though we don't know, exactly, what those might be. "He ventured upon insult," Montresor, the Narrator, tells us, and so we leave it at that.

"For the love of God Montresor!" shrieks the doomed captive, his belled hat jingling, as he tries to break loose from the chains, cowering in the darkness lit only by the burning candelabra Montresor holds aloft, right before placing the final stone in place, and thus, sealing Fortunato's doom.

Here has resided for fifty years, Montresor, confesses, and NO ONE has disturbed them. "In pace requiescat," is his final appellation.

In Poe, the sins of the past, the greed of the blood, and the vice of murder, familial hate, and betrayal, are hidden "behind the wall" of dire dreams and dark, nighttime fancies. In "The Black Cat," sin and murder are exculpated by a demonic feline, a revenant reborn again to do justice to the slain wife of the mad narrator. Here, the sin is never discovered, but hides, pregnant, behind the brickwork, for half a century. When Montresor is gone, it will scarcely matter, and he must now be very old as he tells the tale of his revenge. Heaped around him in the niter-encrusted tomb as he descends into the trap he has set for Fortunato. (The name is a play on the motley costume of "The Fool" Fortunato wears--the Fool is the zero-numbered card in the tarot arcana, an unnumbered Trump card, and the tarot is used as a device for telling--fortunes. Fortunato's fate is predetermined as ZERO, having no sum equal to an extension of his extinguished existence. (The card is, typically, interpreted as the beginning of the "Fool's Journey", a setting off by a "divine child" for a new destiny. But, watch out! In front of him, as he whistles merrily along past the boneyard, the edge of a dire drop, a cliff, emerges in the distance. it is the card of vagabonds as well.)

To whom do these charnel remains, the heaped masses of skeletons, belong though? Servants, serfs, the bodies of enemies or even of kin--slain and yet deposited carelessly, as if the refuse of a diseased mind was made manifest here, in this dark, dripping place, that is the brain of Montresor. behind the wall, Fortunato dies, in the deepest pits of Montressor's subconscious, his shame, an exteriorization of his bloody sin, his deepest and darkest "small self" weeping in tears at his weakness, unable to break free, finally, from the dark. So the sin must be hidden, bricked away, as it is "insulting." This is an allegory for that one living thought, that thing that is not bones, but dressed in the Fool's Motley, that torments Montresor. The thing that he must erase, kill, and be done with, consign to the darkest place in the recesses of his soul.

What are the piles of heaped bones in this charnel house, piled up conveniently to hide the tools with which Montresor will consign Fortunato to his unfortunate end? Are they the bones of servants, serfs, or ancestors? Why are they not buried properly? Is this the symbolic outer manifestation of Montressor's mental refuse, his deep inward cold and decay, his mental "skeletons in the closet"? Rather, behind the dripping walls, as it were. What is Fortunato but the mental outgrowth, or manifestation of some secret, vulnerable place, some Fool Within, that must be walled up alive as it "ventured upon insult."

Montresor goes to great pains to describe his family crest, a golden foot stomping down the head of the serpent. What does the serpent symbolism? Deception, trickery, artifice? temptation in the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden. Why were Adam and Eve cast out? Because they "knew " each other, in the Biblical sense, the Tree of Life" being merely a symbol of their sacred, secret sin, their metaphysical incest as one developed from the body of another, and incest propagated the race.

Montresor's family motto, Nemo me impune lacessit translates as, "No one provokes me with impunity." Thus, the family crest and its motto is a forerunner of what is to come. Are the heaped piles of bones those that have provoked him, his familial line, in the past? Are they dead enemies? And what is Fortunato's "insult"? We are never told, but something is lurking beneath here, like Fortunato and Montresor's traversal of the dank and foul crypts below, which twists beneath the surface like a writhing snake. But, as to what it is, the Reader is left in as much darkness as Fortunato himself.

Montresor walls in alive that part of himself that Fortunato represents, casting one last gaze upon the besotted, tragic man who simply wanted a sip of a fantastical wine that did not, finally, exist. But all he will drink until the darkness closes in is bitter tears.

And Montressor will be shut of him, undisturbed for half a century. Requiescat in pace.

Vincent Price reads "The Cask of Amontillado"