Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  The men who passed from one bank to the other admired her, and sometimes wanted to take her with them. If they pleased her, she spoke to them in a whisper and arranged to meet them in the evening and satisfy the desire they had for her. But she did not want to quit her profession, her father and her brothers, and above all the river, which she loved because of its color, its immensity and its movement.

  The river had waves that varied according to the light, sparkling pebbles, and fish that swam and were alive; it was similar to her in a way, she found in the flow of the water and its lapping of the bank the regularity of her own desire.

  Now, it happened that, almost simultaneously, the bodies of Jeanne’s father and brothers were covered with red blotches, moist at first, which then became pustules and abscesses. Their eyes became round and protruded from their orbits; their ears shriveled and their cheeks swelled; pieces of their lips came away; their voices became hoarse and they were no longer able to articulate words because of lesions in their throat. After some time they died, and Jeanne buried them herself in the sand not far from the river.

  She was alone henceforth in plying the oars. She acquired a great strength in her arms thereby, and her body became more beautiful in becoming more powerful. In spite of the harshness of her métier, she did not want to quit the boat because she thought that she would not find a variety of men elsewhere as great as the one that the river crossing procured her. She communicated her disease to hundreds of creatures who carried it away, destined to transmit it to thousands of others.

  One of them once made a long journey to avenge himself on her. For several days she saw him on the opposite bank, where she dared not land, waving a sword and threatening her. His left hand was a frightful stump and his head had become so enormous that one could not receive the human features beneath the pale blisters. She showed him to a group of soldiers, telling them that he was the son of a demon and a woman, and that he was persecuting her because she had refused him, and the soldiers killed him.

  The years passed, and by a singular jest of nature, it was not until Jeanne the lascivious had gown old that the disease she had within her manifested itself externally. Her hair and eyebrows fell out, crusts covered her skin, and her tongue became deformed to the point of preventing her from closing her mouth.

  She became an object of horror for men and she suffered from their privation. She could only have them by the favor of darkness, or by refusing to let them cross over unless they yielded to her. People spoke of her far and wide as an example of debauchery punished by the Lord. Gradually, no man any longer came who had not been warned, who kept her at bay with a weapon and threw her the fee for the crossing from a distance. While the boat cleaved the water, until it was knotted to the post on the bank, even they saw the face of the terrible oarswoman smiling at them in an engaging manner, and staring at them with bloated eyes.

  The desire that Jeanne had within her was not attenuated by time. By night, she set a plank beside her, which she hugged in her arms; at dawn she ran over the stones and among the cork-oaks uttering guttural cries that were amorous appeals. She exposed herself naked, lying on the ground, as if a ray of sunlight might have been able to possess her.

  People threw stones at her from a distance. The boatmen descending the Rhône avoided her boat with disgust A priest had cursed her, but she did not expect anything from the future life.

  One evening, when the sun had almost set, she thought she heard the voices of her father and her brothers calling to her; she thought she saw them shaking their heads, ruined like hers and making signs to her with their fingers, which lacked phalanges.

  Then she shivered, thinking about the chill of the damp sand in which it would be necessary to repose.

  The Rhône had flooded; the wind and the water were splashing not far from Jeanne’s hut.

  Someone knocked at the door, and she was very frightened, because she did not know how Death presented herself. She went to open it, however, and she saw on the threshold a young and handsome man with a radiant face. He did not recoil in horror at the sight of her. He did not draw his sword to threaten her. He smiled at her sympathetically and asked her to take him to the other bank, in the same tender voice that men had had when she was twenty years old.

  She rejoiced in her soul at the flooding of the river, which was about to prolong the short journey, and the remains of the twilight, which would permit her to contemplate the contours of youth.

  She only looked at the traveler timidly; she did not draw nearer to him, for old age and ill treatment had worn away her audacity.

  She made him a sign to sit on the bench facing her, and rowed with all her strength; but when she was in the middle of the river she stopped, and she thought that after the great wealth that she had possessed and lost, after one last joy, she would do well to let herself fall into the river.

  Then it happened. The man took her his arms passionately, kissed her frightful mouth, caressed her ulcerated breasts and laid her down on the planks of the boat.

  The boat drifted away. Jeanne the lascivious did not get up again to take the oars. She savored the man’s embrace endlessly. And the river-dwelling fishermen who were taking their evening meal were astonished to see a flat boat passing by, which seemed to be empty, but which was pitching, rising up and down on the waves, not because of the waves but by virtue of an interior shaking which, for all eternity, was to sway with the regular and powerful rhythm of amour.

  Lorenza the Venetian

  nicknamed the Immodest

  Khair Eddin Barbarossa,5 who was to become Sultan of Algiers, had the custom of saying, when talking to Lorenza the Venetian, nicknamed the Lewd: “What I commenced by seeing of your body wasn’t the face, and that’s what I’ve loved the most.”

  These are the sanguinary circumstances in which it was given to him to see immediately what women are accustomed only to show after a few difficulties, and in any case, when one already knows their features.

  Dragut the corsair,6 taken prisoner by the Venetians, had spent six years in the galleys. Ransomed at the end of that time by his brothers in arms, the two Barbarossas, Aroudj and Khair Eddin, he had returned to the isle of Djerba, which was the center of Muslim piracy, and had equipped three brigantines. He was drunk on vengeance and had declared that he required as many Christian lives as the thrusts of the oar that he had given.

  His first prize was an Italian galiot that was going from Naples to Cadiz. It was navigating under an unlucky star. There was only a semblance of resistance, for the captain, a certain Felipe de Menarga had been seized, on leaving the port of Naples, by such a violent colic that it was thought he was about to die of it. He did not die of the colic but of a torch that had been paraded over his body in order to make him tell his captors, so as to avoid a long search, where he had hidden the gold and silver that the galiot was transporting.

  All the men were hanged. The women, twenty in number, were to be shared out among the corsairs. They had been grouped on the deck at the moment of the capture. During the hanging of the men it happened that a pistol shot departing from the group of women was fired in the direction of Dragut. The pistol had been dropped immediately, and in the confusion that reigned, it was impossible to determine which of the women had fired it.

  A few of them declared that it was Lorenza. She was the youngest among them. She did not appear to be eighteen years old. She had at that time an extraordinary ingenuousness in her dark eyes. With her milky pink skin, her golden-red hair and her aristocratic hands she had a beauty that would have struck any man whom vengeance had not blinded entirely.

  She was trembling with anger and not with terror, and that might have encouraged the belief that she was the author of the pistol-shot, an insensate action that guaranteed her a certain death. She kept quiet, and her extreme youth made Dragut doubt.

  He reflected. He declared that all the women belonged to him because of that pistol shot and that he would avenge himself on them on arrival a
t Djerba for his six years in the galleys. They were all Italians with the exception of five young nuns, who were Spanish.

  At Djerba, not far from the shore, there was a tree that had seen many hangings. Under that tree, Dragut stripped all the women naked. The pirates opened their dresses with their knives, and sometimes the blade cut their breasts. They were suspended from the branches by the feet, with their legs apart, and Dragut tried to cut them in two with a single stroke of his sword. By the time he reached the twelfth, his sword was chipped and he asked for another.

  While one being brought to him Khair Eddin arrived. The twelfth woman was Lorenza. Her arms were hanging down and her long hair was trailing on the ground. As Dragut got ready, with a mechanical or desperate gesture, she took her hair and threw it in such a way that it fell over the part of her body where Dragut was about to strike. The latter started cursing, but Khair Eddin intervened, cut the cords that bound Lorenza and deposited her on the ground. He asked Dragut to grant her mercy. The latter shrugged his shoulders, dropped his weapon and signaled to his men to untie the survivors.

  “I won’t kill her,” he said, “but I want her to remember me.”

  That evening he had her come to his bedroom, and he kept her with him all right.

  It was that night that she had to forgive him, no less than the fear of death and her suspension by the feet. She was, however, in the course of her adventurous life, to know many others as painful. She explained her rancor later by declaring that there is no greater dolor in the world, when one is a woman, than to be treated, in spite of herself, like a young boy.

  It was to the pleasures of that night that Dragut owed a visit, after his bath in the palace of the Sultan of Algiers, whom he was visiting, from a barber whose razor was poisoned. A presentiment made him take the razor, with which he cut the barber’s hand slightly. The hand swelled up immediately, went violet, and the barber fell in convulsions and died without saying on whose behalf he had brought death. It was also to the pleasures of that night that he owed, as he was returning through the Bab-el-Oued gate, a shot from an arquebus that wounded him in the heel, like Achilles. He thought that it was better to have himself cared for on his ship rather than in the palace of his friend Khair Eddin, and he never went back to Algiers again.

  Khair Eddin could have asked Dragut to give him Lorenza as a slave after having saved her, but he did nothing of the sort. Certainly, he had found her beautiful, but she had not impressed him unusually—at least, he thought so. He drank with his companion Dragut while the latter waited for Lorenza and chatted with him about the stupidity of women in general and the slavery in which they ought to be maintained. He wished him a great deal of pleasure when Lorenza appeared, and quit him, laughing.

  It was only some time afterwards that he perceived that the gaze and beauty of Lorenza were floating in the ocean of his soul. The image of her marvelous body, which he had seen entirely naked, and the expression on her face after he had preserved her from death, began to haunt him. That was the moment when he and his brother were commencing, by virtue of their audacity and their victories, to become masters of the seas. Khair Eddin returned to Djerba and asked about the Italian slave that belonged to Dragut.

  He learned that Dragut had departed without giving precise orders regarding the women that he had spared. Lorenza had lived with the Spanish nuns and their conduct had scandalized the virtuous Turk Azim, who cultivated a part of the island and nourished livestock for the usage of the pirates. A little later, after a quarrel, Lorenza had almost killed a nun. She had been locked up and, Dragut having returned, he had sold her to a slave-merchant who had gone to Tunis.

  Khair Eddin is not discouraged, and goes to find the Sultan of Tunis, Muley Mohammed, with whom he maintained the most amicable relations. Not long before, he had obtained the right of refuge in all his ports for all the vessels flying his flag, and after a victory over the fleet of Charles V he had made an almost triumphant entry into Tunis.

  Muley Mohammed promises to search for the slave Lorenza. She is not found. Khair Eddin’s desire is exasperated. He returns to Tunis several times. Finally, it is learned that she was in the harem of the rich Aboulferes, one of the most important individuals in Tunis, because he serves as the Sultan’s banker. Khair Eddin offers to ransom Lorenza. Aboulferes refuses and replies, laughing, that he values her all the more because she has tried to flee his palace several times.

  The Sultan intervenes. In order to set aside the ransom proposal Aboulferes fixes the fabulous figure of twenty thousand gold coins for the ransom. Khair Eddin immediately accepts that figure and Aboulferes cannot go back on it. Lorenza is taken away on the flagship of the most celebrated mariner in the Mediterranean.

  The adventures of Lorenza had not commenced at the moment when she embarked on the galiot going from Naples to Cadiz. She was only eighteen years old then but she had been married twice and was already animated by the desire that was to be the absurd goal of her existence.

  Captain Alonso de Contreras7 records in his memoirs that when he was in Palermo with his company he was noticed by the widow of an oidor who was young, beautiful and rich. Contreras was, according to the portrait he made of himself, “a youthful soldier, extremely handsome and gallant.” He excelled in naval warfare. In Malta he was known as “the friend of the Maina promontory” because, after quarreling with the local inhabitants over a cartload of wheat, he rendered himself justice by attracting their leader on to his frigate, having him given a hundred lashes and dousing him with salt and vinegar, in spite of his quality as a Christian, all the more respectable because he later became a monk. On the Tripolitan coast he was known as “the cutter of noses and ears” because, after exchange of gunfire with the Moors of the coast, he took twenty of them prisoner, cut off their noses and ears, and threw the fresh pieces to their companions on the shore. But he lacked a knowledge of the heart of women and it seems that, in order to please them, he was too respectful and too tender.

  Lorenza provoked him with sidelong glances; he wrote to her, knew her and married her.

  “The respect that I had for my wife,” he wrote, “was such that sometimes, outside the house, I did not want to cover my head before her, so much did I hold her in esteem.”

  It was that exaggerated respect that was doubtless fatal to the handsome captain. Fatality, for him, was to take the form of two men, his friend Juan Cabrera, to whom he would have entrusted his very soul, and his page Rodrigo, who was Spanish and only fourteen years old.

  One day, when Captain de Contreras was absent, the page knocks on the door of Lorenza’s bedroom.

  “Come in,” says the latter, who has already cast her eyes upon the page and who has recognized his voice. He goes in. She is naked on her bed. He tries to withdraw. She calls him back. She makes him sit down beside her, and strokes his hair, promising him a golden ducat—but the page is still timid. He is troubled, he stammers, he leaves the room.

  Lorenza conceives a resentment against him. In addition, she needs to distract herself. She becomes Juan Cabrera’s mistress; he is an accomplished man, full of experience, with whom things are not dragged out. But the pretty face, youth and naivety of the page are still in her thoughts. She wants to make him jealous and is foolish enough to take great liberties with her lover in front of little Rodrigo, one day when they are both sitting on a bench in the garden of her house.

  The page Rodrigo must doubtless have made confidences to comrades on the subject of the visit he made to his mistress in her bedroom, and told them how he was received by her, naked soon her bed. He must have been called an imbecile and given advice. He does not know how to take it. One evening, when his mistress goes past him on the staircase, he pinches her unexpectedly, in a vulgar manner. Surprised, she gives him a formidable slap, which makes him fall down the stairs. He wants to avenge himself.

  “Is it the custom here in Palermo,” he goes to say to his master, Lorenza’s husband, “for men to help women adjust their garter? It
isn’t in Spain.”

  “Why are you asking me that question?” says Alonso de Contreras.

  “Because the other day, in the garden, Lord Juan Cabrera had his hand on Madame Lorenza’s garter.”

  “It is, indeed, the custom in the vicinity to Palermo,” replies the Captain, “but refrain from talking about it.”

  A few days later, Alfonso de Contreras, having made a semblance of going away, returned unexpectedly and surprised his wife and his friend together in his own bed. The dagger-thrust he delivered to his friend killed him instantly. Doubtless his hand was less firm in striking Lorenza; he touched her near the neck. She fell, almost without uttering a cry, and he believed her dead.

  “God has them in his heaven if, in that fatal moment, they repented,” Alfonso added, simply, after narrating those facts, without perceiving that he had scarcely left the guilty parties the time to repent.

  Lorenza was cured of her wound after a month, and the form of her repentance was manifest by an imperious desire to see the page Rodrigo again. One might think that it was with the aim of vengeance, but no; she did not have the slightest anger against him. She asked what had become of him. He had fled on the day of the drama and had not reappeared.

  Her husband had returned to Spain, and, although he had not killed her, he considered her to be dead. She was, therefore, free. She spent a great deal of money picking up Rodrigo’s trail. She finally learned that he had returned to Cadiz, his homeland. She did not hesitate to embark for that city, in spite of the dangers of the sea, on the galiot that the corsair Dragut was to capture.

  She then commenced an agitated life, of which the page Rodrigo was to be the goal, in spite of the fact that she only knew him by virtue of hair caressed in vain, a slap and a dagger thrust of which she had nearly died.

  But in the same way that maladies that are benign if they can follow their course become fatal when they are impeded, there are desires that pass immediately if they are satisfied but which take on a singular force, burst forth and multiply in the soul by virtue of being unsatisfied.