One by one, with the gravity of Kings evoked by gods, I saw those who had been the possessors of the treasure emerge from the stone tomb. I saw Genghis with his bow larger than himself; Batou the cunning, the master of the Golden Horde, who wanted the steel of his buckler to be as limpid as the water of the lake of Ala Houl; Tamerlane the cavalier; Ulugh Beg tormented by celestial things: Babar the writer; Humayun of the arched back; and Akbar, the friend of the sun. Depositaries of wealth and strength, none had on his face the calm peace that disinterest and the satisfaction of the conscience give. Somewhere, in the unknowable beyond, there was still something that was the representation of those dead men. Perhaps it was neither a form, nor a contour, nor a vague design; but something unknowable that had no resemblance to any known aspect of matter was linked to that treasure and experienced suffering by virtue of the radiance of its attraction.
Those powerful men were suffering because of their powers, those Kings were bound to their royal past. They had loved the representations of enjoyment that are riches, and those riches retained them with the imperishable force of their attraction. Gold and precious stones exercised a power from which death had not delivered them. The more those men had sought their possession, and the more they had enjoyed it, the more they were enchained. Liberty was the price of detachment. And that lesson had been given to me by I know not what invisible instructor, with the living image of Kings saddened by having been Kings.
Those Kings passed by and disappeared into the shadows. I understood that they had no reality of their own. They were only the illustration of an open book, one of the verities of which it was given to me to understand: that of the necessity of detachment. That verity was linked to others that I perceived poorly, perhaps because they did not have an explanatory image for me as yet. But I understood that detachment was an inexorable law and that the man who was not wise enough to detach himself while alive was condemned to suffer after death, in the measure to which he had been attached.
Why were such things seen by me that night, rather than another? Had it a connection with the invisible gift that the ascetic Narinda had made me, and which I had taken at the time for a joke? Was the cross that I had transported the authentic cross of Saint Bartholomew, and did it contain a virtue communicative of sanctity? For sanctity is nothing but a capacity to detach oneself from the pleasures of terrestrial life.
But what is the good of asking questions that never receive a response?
It seemed to me that the monkey raised its hand toward the sky as if to deliver itself to an invocation, and then it launched beneath the thickness of the trees a round object that must have been some kind of nut or fruit, and started running after it. Did it mean that something was coming to a conclusion?
I stood up and started walking. There had never been a night as serene. A snake slid through the stones, and he sound it made had an amicable resonance. A bird perched on a branch, which seemed to be in ecstasy, drawn by the weight of its dream, almost fell to the ground. A few luminous insects took flight in a spray.
A sensed a great exaltation take possession of me. I would have liked to run, to utter cries, to reach the sky, or at least get closer to the luminous stars. How bright they were up above, but so far away! In order better to distinguish the mysterious figures they form and to which astronomers have given mythological names, I wanted to lie down on the ground, face upwards, and turned toward them. But the ground was hard and bristling with stones. I lay down on the cross of Saint Bartholomew, which was beside me, and in order not to let my hands trail on the ground, where scorpions live, I extended my arms along the lateral branches of the cross.
Then, directly above me face, I saw a star that had certainly just appeared while I assumed the elongated position. It was so luminous that it made those surrounding it pale. It spread a light such as I had never seen. It was an animate light, which communicated a sentiment of delight and peace to me, which made me find the world more beautiful.
I only received the contact for a few seconds, for surprise and the desire to make sure with certainty of the presence of that star caused me to sit up; but, no matter how hard I looked, the star had disappeared.
THE MAN OF EVIL
I had just made a tour of the church carrying the cross of Bartholomew on my back when I saw a silhouette through the trees. I had felt that I was observed for a long time, but had continued to follow the course of my thoughts. I heard a burst of laughter and the man who was observing me marched toward me. I was stupefied to recognize by the form of his hat and that of his sword that he was a European.
The laughter resumed, a laughter that had a tonality of bitter scorn. The man who was before me was Francisco Manoël.
With the tip of his foot he touched the bowl of rice that he found on a stone. The rice, dried by the sun, formed a crackly paste, not very appetizing.
“It’s not as good as the Emperor Akbar’s feasts,” he said. “What a change!”
And he strove to laugh again.
After so many days of solitude, one does not see a man of one’s own race without a keen pleasure. I set down my cross and almost held out my hands to him. But he laughed as one strikes with a whip. I asked him by what unusual hazard he had reached me.
“It’s a very ordinary hazard. I was looking for a saint with a cross on his back. I’ve found the cross, but the saint has been replaced by another. I had no difficulty in recognizing you, even though you haven’t changed to your advantage.”
He stated laughing again.
“The Jesuits learned that their beloved Brother Octave, the one who was mad, was in the vicinity of this village. Their situation is already difficult enough with the new master of India. They do not want to lose consideration because of the extravagances of one of their number. They charged me with bringing him back. For myself, I’m still at their service. Unlike you, I haven’t had the luck of becoming a Court favorite.”
I couldn’t help asking him why he was laughing in that singular fashion.
“I’m laughing at seeing you. You’re like a wolf disguised as a sheep. How thin you are! You’ll no longer seduce the beautiful Rajput princesses. All the same, you still have your teeth.”
As he spoke, he showed his empty jaw and a rictus in which I discovered an immeasurable hatred, all the more so because it was without reason, apart from the jealousy that my teeth seemed to inspire in him. He experienced the need to let his triumph burst forth.
“Luck comes and goes from one to another, by turns. One might have thought that you had taken possession of it, to your advantage. I’d like to know what you did to gain the good graces of those Hindus with the incomprehensible souls. It’s true that it hasn’t done you much good. They’re beginning to believe you dead, but your head has a price on it and represents a hundred gold pagodas to the man who can bring it to the great Katoual. Apart from your cousin Du Jarric, the Jesuits are even more furious with you. And to think that if you’d listened to me…. There are two routes in life. You only had to put on the red boots. So much the worse for you.”
I noticed that the lining of his boots was red.
“What connection has the color of boots with a man’s success?”
“You continue to play the simpleton. But with me, it’s futile, especially at the point you’ve reached. You don’t know that throughout the Orient, from Constantinople to the depths of China, there’s a category of men of the same family who recognize one another by the color of their footwear? They’re the brothers of the left hand. One can, if one wishes, call them that. You didn’t want to be frankly one of ours. You see where it’s led you. And even now, you think you can get out of it by means of the cross, by putting yourself hypocritically in its shadow. One can serve the cross. There are many who do. We’re paid, you and I, to know it. But I wonder whether, on your part, there isn’t a little bit of sincerity.”
He looked at me with an expression on his face in which hatred and curiosity were mingled. While he was speaki
ng I sensed the thought that was within him, and had no connection with what he was saying. That thought had been born a few minutes before when he had evoked the reward promised by that great Katoual for my head. He was thinking that it was possible for him to collect that reward, either by delivering me or by killing me right away, and he was examining those eventualities internally. His words were slower. He was gaining time in order to reflect. For my part, I was obliged to exhort myself to calm, for it is difficult to hear scornful words without reacting.
“Here you are, covered with vermin, and as you’re nourished on the nourishment of beggars, because you’ve become a beggar, you’ve lost the physical strength in which you gloried. For you’re the man who killed Yacoub! The man who killed Yacoub is reduced to this state!”
He was mistaken about my strength, for I had proved that it had not been diminished by my thinness. I had a desire to tell him so, but thought it was better to maintain silence, and I thought that it was fortunate for my interlocutor that a new man had been born in me.
“Listen,” he said to me, with a significant intonation—and now that we were going to talk about serious things, he drew closer to me. “Perhaps all is not lost for you. Although not having had your success, I nevertheless have a certain credit. We’re not far from Lahore, where there are many people from all the lands of Europe. The Jesuits never abandon their own. Although you’ve made too much noise for their liking, they’ll still seek to utilize you. But what you can do for them, why not do for yourself and for me? They’ve been put on the track, I don’t know how, of one of those chimeras that will eternally be the goal of all the adventurers on earth, whether they depart from Lisbon or Rome: a treasure. That treasure is, it seems, worthy of those who are searching for it. It appears that your situation at Court allowed you to have indications in its regard?”
I shook my head negatively.
“Tell me what you know. I’ll save you and we’ll share.”
“It is, in fact, a matter of a chimera.”
“You don’t know anything about a bearded head?”
“Nothing.”
He repeated his question several times, and he could not help shouting insults. Anger rendered his words unintelligible and he spat disagreeably as he spoke. Then he resumed his forced laughter.
“Already, the first day, when I met you before we embarked on the Santa-Fé, I had the feeling that you thought you were of another species than me. You were nothing at all then, less than nothing. You were fleeing Toulouse, where you would have been hanged for I know not what crimes. You’re just a criminal, like me.”
I was not unaware that patience was, among the virtues, one of the most difficult to acquire. Fortunately, I said to myself, I’m a new man. I’ve succeeded in vanquishing my natural violence.
“I could consider you as being one of ours. You surely are. I’m wondering why you haven’t accepted what I proposed to you.”
“I have no memory of it.”
“I offered you a fragment of a profaned host. You should have thanked me on your knees. I, who am speaking, who don’t believe in anything, believe in the power that sacrilege communicates. A power in evil, of course—in what is conventionally called evil. I’ve made the experiment and I’ve seen the effect on others.”
At that point he burst into laughter so insupportable that I made the gesture of putting my cross over my shoulder in order to draw away.
“But that’s what interests you the most. You haven’t asked me what became of Inès de Saldanna.”
I had the belated sentiment that I had allowed the interest that suddenly animated me to show by a stupid widening of the eyes. At the same time, in the back of my mind, I had knowledge of his thinking. He couldn’t get anything out of me. He was going to take his revenge with the bile of words, and then he was going to deliver me in order to collect the promised reward. If some divine power had touched me with some grace, it was the same power that had sent that man to me in order to prove myself and permit me to exercise my empire over myself. I had to show myself worthy of the grace received and touch without indignation the utmost depths of human evil.
“Inès de Saldanna carried, on her swan-like neck, a fragment of the soiled host. I had made her believe that it was a fragment of the holy cross of Jesus Christ. Certainly, she was a miserable prey destined by her brother to the lubricity of Hindu sovereigns, for they love to have beautiful foreigners among their wives, but the host communicated to her a power of lust that good Christians qualify as demonic. She has abandoned herself to it entirely.”
“That is the most frightful of lies!” I cried, betraying by the sound of my voice the heartbreak I experienced.
“And do you know who it is that she has demanded, among many others, the man who pleased her most of all, because he was of her race, and also because of his incomparable seduction?”
He began laughing again, and I had the weakness to show him how he had triumphed by crying out in a strangled voice: “Who was it?”
“It was you. Ten times she begged me to go and find you. But you were so occupied! You, the seducer! Ten times, I told her that you refused to come.”
I continued to read Francisco Manoël’s thoughts. He’s a miserable rag devoid of reaction, he said to himself. I’ll collect the hundred gold pagodas, but I’ll poison his soul beforehand. I noticed that he had put his hand on the butt of a long pistol of a model that was unknown to me and must be recent.
And as the mind, when it is overexcited, seems multiplied, at the same time as those perceptions, I had the sensation of an interior voice that said:
“Remember the star, the face of your mother, the violence that you have rejected.”
Francisco Manoël was still laughing. In order to fire it, would it be sufficient for him to pull the trigger of the pistol, or was it necessary to light a wick?
“Anyway, what would you have done with her? A woman who has been everyone’s? That was good for me, and more!”
The body sometimes acts as if it is not directed by the mind at all, absolutely autonomously.
My arm had extended with great force and struck Francisco Manoël in the face. I don’t remember whether it was with the flat of the hand or a closed fist, and that problem is, in any case, unimportant. The blow was such that he took two or three steps, stumbled and almost fell. His hat rolled on the ground.
He straightened up with a growl of joyful hatred, and he extended his pistol toward me. There was no wick to light. The joy was greater than the hatred. He had me at his mercy and he had, in his own regard, an excellent reason to kill me and collect the hundred gold pagodas.
I saw the contraction of his finger, and, by an instinctive movement, I held out the cross between us. He fired, and my fortune dictated that the bullet hit the wood of the cross. It made a little dry click. There was no disappointment. He was a man of war. In the same second his hand dropped the pistol and drew the long sword that he had at his side. Also in the same second, I dropped the Cross of Bartholomew on his head. He collapsed, with the inhuman cry of those struck by death.
Then I drew away with long strides. I reached the road and marched in the direction of Lahore.
THE MUD OF THE TAPTI
It is very agreeable to be a beggar, on condition of only addressing oneself to very poor and very simple folk. They have a noble charity that magnifies both the mendicant and the benefactor. It is also necessary to possess a wooden bowl and to content oneself with a nourishment of crushed millet and boiled rice. But the estate of the mendicant becomes humiliating as soon as one approaches a city and its corruption.
I reached Lahore, the city of pagodas, and the first evening, in the courtyard of a caravanserai where men and camels were piled up pell-mell, I approached a group of men sitting around a fire of palm-branches. The flames were high and bright and illuminated laughing faces. A man with a long beard was recounting joyous stories. He was gesticulating and speaking with such great rapidity that I had difficulty compreh
ending him. However, I distinguished a few features of the following story.
When the great Akbar died, the marble of the ceiling of his palace opened and the people gathered there saw Devas in festival costumes who had come to conduct him to the blissful Svarga. He rose up lightly into the sky. But there was a Portuguese in the Court who was out of his mind. His taste for colorful costumes, turbans and strange belts had informed perspicacious minds that he was a reincarnation of a bird, for the habit of a colorful plumage in a life as a parrot gives the desire for sumptuous clothing in a human life. That insensate Portuguese had wanted to follow Emperor Akbar in his rise into the sky and he delivered himself to disorderly leaps at the very moment when the Emperor’s son came to weep over the body of his father. People had tried to catch him, but he had run into the gardens, and those pursuing him had been utterly amazed to see him leaning over the branch of a tree above the Jumna. He had resumed the form of his past life, and no bird had ever been seen with such sparkling plumage.
I did not hear any more. A foreigner of noble appearance who was standing in the crowd of listeners had just drawn away. I followed him, pushed by I know not what presentiment, and it was with a certain regret, for I would have liked to know what had become of the parrot. But it is always necessary to respond to the signs of destiny. The sign, on that occasion, was the fugitive gleam in the man’s eye.
He was a rich Venetian who had arrived from Delhi and had just confided his merchandise to the guardians of the caravanserai. His name was Nicolas Matteotti and he was the man who had founded the first European trading-post in Lahore. I had known his name for a long time but that evening, he was merely, for me, some traveler emerging from a caravanserai.
When a life has almost no value anymore and is at risk of being taken away from its possessor at any moment, one does not hesitate to gamble with it. I gambled mine on a single card, and I won.
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