Had he added credence in that legend and did he want to find that book? Had he left Alcala in order to escape a danger that threatened him, or was he only in search of solitude? That was what Almazan had asked himself when had learned of the Archbishop’s arrival a few days earlier.
With his head in his hands he reviewed the details of his last visit to the house of Rabbi Aben Hezra.
He had told the aged Archbishop that he could not continue to live in that ruin, the doors of which were shaky and the windows staved in. The roads were full of thieves and Cantillana, the nearest village, was a league away. In addition to the thieves, it was necessary to fear all the people at Court who, being anxious about his possible return to the Queen’s favor, had an interest in his death.
But Alfonso Carrillo had smiled at the young physician’s fear. For him, material danger no longer existed. He had confided to him that he had discovered an order of dangers far more redoubtable. He knew the secret of evil and invisible forces that oppressed humans. It was not with firmly-closed doors and high walls that one could be protected from those forces. But he also knew the art of directing the beneficent powers that opposed the evil. He no longer had any need of the books, apparatus and telescopes so patiently amassed in Alcala. He had decided to wander henceforth among the centenarian box-trees that surrounded the ancient dwelling with a dark green forest, clad in the white robe of the Greek philosophers.
In addition, he might be about to initiate Almazan into his secrets. He was still hesitant. He thought him too young and above all too handsome, with eyes that were too large and too dark. The beauty of the body, he said, was a redoubtable bond that draws us into the chain of the passions. There was no urgency. Almazan must come again. He had adjourned the revelations.
As they parted, he had placed his hands on Almazan’s shoulders, saying: “Soon.”
And as Almazan had drawn way along the path, Pablo had caught up with him and made him party to his fears. He thought that his master’s discourses were becoming strange and that something disquieting was floating over that solitary house. Furthermore, an unknown man had come the day before and had spent all night conversing with the Archbishop.
Pablo had made a portrait of the man. He said that he was about fifty. He was tall, with a pale face and extraordinarily bright eyes. His black garments were simply cut, but had something Oriental about them. He was not carrying any apparent weapon, and that was what had worried Pablo the most.
Why, Almazan thought, did he make me swear that solemn oath not to reveal his retreat to anyone? Someone knew, though. Who could the visitor be? What could the urgent message have been, and who had poisoned Pablo?
The heat did not diminish as the night advanced. It even became increasingly heavy. The foliage of the orange-trees on the patio stood out against the moon with such clarity that they seemed artificial, carved in jade. The marble basin and the circular colonnades appeared to Almazan so pale that everything around the livid corpse had an unreal air, and he thought that he was meditating in a nightmare.
Suddenly, he leapt to his feet. Coming from he knew not where, a muffled voice had called: “Almazan!”
He looked at the body extended before him. Had the lips not stirred? Was it not him who had pronounced his name, and repeated it several times?
But no; the lips of Carrillo’s servant were now pinched, so rigidly clenched that they seemed closed by leaden pincers. The dead man really was dead, and was reminiscent of a caricature in white wax.
It was from the street that the appeal was coming. The voice was alive, warm and impatient. It was a woman’s voice. At the same time, someone knocked on the door of the house.
Almazan closed the door of the room where Pablo’s cadaver lay, carefully. Perhaps a further envoy was about to clarify the mystery that preoccupied him. Perhaps someone had simply come to seek him for a sick person in the vicinity.
As he reached the vestibule and placed his hand on the lock, he heard: “Open up, I beg you! In the name of Christ!”
He opened the door. Someone rushed inside. It was a woman. She closed the batten of the door immediately and fell upon the bolts that sealed it. Then she threw her arms around Almazan and clung to him.
“They’re after me. I don’t think they saw me. One second more and they would have seen me. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. They’re capable of anything.”
Almazan felt warm breath, a semi-naked body. The woman’s panting respiration caused her firm breasts to stir; her abdomen and legs quivered against him.
Shouts resounded on the quay. Several men went past at a run. There was a heavier tread behind them, doubtless that of an older man. He was trotting, grunting, and sometimes uttering insults. Almazan heard: “Oh, the bitch! Catch her! I must have her!”
Rapidly, the woman quit Almazan’s breast and blew out the lantern that was illuminated near the door.
They both stood there without moving. The pursuers drew away along the quay. They had doubtless turned left, for they could no longer hear anything.
Then the singular visitor uttered a cry of joy, simultaneously savage and childlike. Again she put her arms round Almazan’s neck.
“Thank you! You’ve saved me!”
She started to laugh: long, forced, hysterical, bizarre laughter, as if it were a matter of an enormous and dangerous joke that she had brought to a conclusion. She leapt up and down with satisfaction and her laughter went on and on.
Almazan had drawn her into the patio and considered her in the moonlight.
She was almost a child. There was something delectably passionate, ingenuous and cynical in her features. The expression on her face changed continually and nothing remained fixed but the gleam of two drops of gold that she seemed to have in the depths of her pupils, which had the same tint as the flowing gold of her hair, twisted into a sheaf. That hair agitated, framing her with flame, illuminating her, with the appearance of having a life of its own, and the nuances of that living hair were varied, by turns ruddy and dark, like a silken conflagration, or wheat in the moonlight.
She was small of stature, which further exaggerated her appearance of extreme youth. The upper part of her body was wrapped in a shawl. Her only garment was a short sapphire-blue basquine with black fringes, and one sensed that the shawl had been hastily thrown around her neck at the moment when she had fled and that the basquine had been attached in haste, and was not securely attached. Almazan saw a bruise on her naked right shoulder, caused by a blow or an excessively prolonged caress. He remarked that the carmine of her lips had been crushed by another mouth and smeared, enlarging the design of her lips. A diamond attached to a gold chain was sparkling between her breasts and she wore enormous ruby on her right hand. She had a slightly animal perfume and something lascivious and fatigued was disengaged from her skin.
For a few seconds, she quivered with rage, her face turned toward the quay.
“You heard him panting and dragging his feet,” she said. “That will cost him dear. I’ll have him tied up one night and chastise him with my own hand.”
Then, satisfied with the idea of that vengeance, she stated laughing again.
“What happened” asked Almazan. “Did someone want your jewels?”
“She shrugged her shoulders.
“My jewels? It’s certainly not a matter of my jewels. You’re naïve. Apart from little Rodriguez, who would gladly have stolen them to give to a fisherman in Guadalquivir, the others don’t care about them. You don’t know little Rodriguez? He has blue eyes and he’s well made. The old man likes him too. My God, what a night! Here, would you like my ring as a souvenir?”
She attempted to put her ruby on his finger, and as he refused her gaze made a tour of the patio, and she thought about something else.
“I like your house, but I’d like to rest for a while.”
She headed for the door of the room where the dead man lay. Almazan saw that she was tottering slightly. He overtook her.
“Not
that way,” he said. “Take that staircase.”
But she was obstinate in laughing. No, it was that door she wanted to open.
“Let me go in. I’ll give you my diamond too.”
Then he lifted her in his arms and climbed the stairs. She did not resist. She rolled her head on his shoulder and he felt her hair against his cheek. Her loins folded in abandonment. She had half-closed her eyes and he could see two motionless golden dots through the quivering lashes. He put her down on his bed.
She was suddenly weary. She stretched herself out. She had undone her shawl and her breasts appeared, without her trying to hide them. In the movement she had made as she stretched, her skirt had ridden up above the knee, allowing her naked leg to be seen, the curve of which was perfect. She turned her head and there was a fleeting gaze beneath her mobile eyelids.
“I’ll tell you everything,” she said, with a spontaneous impulsiveness. “But you won’t understand. There are such singular men. You see, everything happened because of Cariharta. A whore like that! She’s filth! I’ll gouge her eyes out. As for him, he’s sure of his affair. I swear it on the Virgin!”
With her little fingers in mid-air, she made the gesture of cutting with scissors, and laughed again, childishly.
“But you doubtless know him. Perhaps he’ll come to find you afterwards in order for you to care for him. Who in Seville doesn’t know the fat Jew Aboulfedia?”
Almazan shuddered. It was a matter of the physician Aboulfedia, with whom he had worked. He was a man of great science, but bizarre and full of whims. He had departed for Rome once, in order to convert the Pope to Judaism. For a long time he had worked on a flying machine and dreamed of launching himself from the top of the Giralda and soaring over Seville like a swallow. As he grew old he had abandoned science in favor of debauchery. Almazan remembered rumors that had run around on his account, and to which he had never lent credence. There had been talk of sadistic scenes that unfurled in his house in the suburb of Triana, of a reconstitution of the ancient Sabbat, with the murder of children and the adoration of the Devil. Risible legends, surely. But it was certain that the procuresses of Seville obtained a great deal of money from Aboulfedia and that on certain evenings he received the dregs of the shady taverns of Triana.
“What are you thinking about? Perhaps you’re wondering how I had the idea of coming to knock on your door? Don’t think that it’s the first time I’ve seen you. You don’t recall having gone one evening to a little house in the Santa Cruz quarter to care for a woman who had a stab-wound in the thigh? I was in the next room, and while you were bandaging the wound I lifted up a door-curtain and examined you. You had a lock of brown hair that was falling over your eyes, and you were continually brushing it backward impatiently. It was impeding your vision. You were staring at my friend Juana’s leg so intently that I was jealous. It wouldn’t have taken much for me to wound myself in order that you’d stare at me with the same intention. That happened not long ago. A Moorish slave had gone to fetch you on my behalf. Do you remember? Isabelle de Solis?”
“Isabelle de Solis?” repeated Almazan. “You’re Isabelle de Solis?”
“That’s me. What of it? Has someone spoken badly of me to you? You don’t think I’m as pretty as is claimed? Oh! Nights in Aboulfedia’s house are tiring.”
She had propped herself up on her elbow and was looking Almazan full in the face, as if she were challenging him.
Isabelle de Solis had supplied fuel for all the conversations in Seville. She was the daughter of the Alcaide of Martos and she had been enslaved by an adventurer the previous year. Her father, a severe and pious man, had sworn to kill her. He had pursued her to Seville, but had never been able to catch up with her. Isabelle de Solis, abandoned by her lover, had caused the captain of law, a collector of royal customs duties, who had set so many ambushes in the path of the venerable Alcaide that the latter had ended up quitting Seville, in fear of his life. Isabelle was nicknamed the “hermosa hembra” because of her beauty and the tranquil audacity with which she showed off the jewels of the tax-farmer’s family when she emerged from mass.
Almazan had perceived her at a distance and had admired her. The beauty of women impressed him, but he avoided them out of pride, fearing rejection. He had arrived at considering amour as a danger, a sensual chain that attaches us to what is material, draws us downwards, and diminishes our power of thought. He had decided to banish it from his life. How would he have been able to recognize the “hermosa hembra” in that semi-naked girl running through Triana by night?
He leaned over her. So Isabelle de Solis was in his house, on his bed! The most beautiful young woman in Seville had come to him of her own accord to request protection! And now, with an equivocal grace, she had let herself fall back on his pillow, closing her eyes as if to go to sleep, only to open them again suddenly and provoke him with an oblique gaze and an abrupt stretching of her supple loins.
“Be chaste, if you want to be great in intelligence,” his master Archbishop Carrillo had often said to him.
He knew that the pleasure of the senses was rapid and followed by sadness. It diminished intellectual capacity, the faculty of loving life.
He had a kind of vertigo. A warmth departed from his feet and ran all the way to the roots of his hair. He had a desire to throw himself brutally on that creature, sent to him by a mysterious whim of destiny, and to possess her, willingly or by force. But she would not resist. He sensed a tacit consent in the abandonment of the legs, in the weight of the head sinking into the pillow.
He thought about the dead man lying directly underneath, in a position symmetrical with that of the bed. He thought about the danger that his old master might be in at the present moment. And, at the same time, he imagined Aboulfedia with his flabby jaundiced face, his fat belly and little legs, among naked whores, pale adolescents and the silhouettes of assassins in rut.
He was disgusted with his own desire. He stepped back two or three paces, and then left the room quietly. He went down to the patio.
Suddenly, almost ungraspable, an odor reached him. It was an odor he knew well, that of human decomposition. Almazan had heard it said that certain mineral poisons had an effect of instantaneous disaggregation on the organism they attacked, but he was amazed that the dead man could make its power of destruction sensible with such rapidity. That mortuary odor, which mingled with that of the orange-trees in the calm light of the pale moon, had something atrocious about it.
But was he not mistaken? He opened the door of his study room. He picked up the heavy bronze lamp that was burning there in both hands and leaned over Pablo’s body.
The blanched face was now stained with streaks. The veins of the neck and hands were lacquer red. The lips were green-tinted. An intense curiosity animated Almazan before the mysterious molecular labor that was commencing.
Death, the termination of a temporary form, was the beginning of a more extraordinary activity than that which had made the body move when it was alive. The cells coordinated for the existence of a whole were resuming their autonomy, changing into liquids and gases. In that flesh and those bones, under the action of the destructive mineral, there were liquefactions, explosions, multiplications of parasites, the unfurling of populations on the march amid lakes in formation and on the shores of putrescence, and an incomprehensible life was seething there.
What a drama that was! How much time would humans require before having found the intimate secret of the substance of which they were molded?
He passed his hand over his forehead and stood up. He thought that it was necessary to make a decision, and the embarrassment of the situation appeared to him. It was not in vain that he had sensed invisible evil influences floating around him. His dwelling, once peaceful, now sheltered a dead creature and a living creature more dangerous than the dead one. What was he to do?
While he reflected, it seemed to him that the light was modified and that the dawn was already spreading its first tints.
He perceived that the entrance door was ajar. He ran to it. He looked outside. On the quay to the right, already far away, in the shadow that the Golden Tower made, there was a woman of small stature drawing away.
She was drawing away slowly, without fear, without haste, indolently, as if nothing in particular had happened. Sometimes, she stopped, to respire the morning air, or to contemplate the first roseate hues of the rising sun on the walls of the Alcazar.
II. The Rabbi’s House
Almazan was now riding alongside the Guadalquivir in the roseate light of morning. In exchange for a few reals, one of the hirer’s grooms had had gone to sit on the steps of the house and wait there for the arrival of Guzman, with the mission of sending him immediately along the Cantillana road, to the dwelling of Rabbi Aben Hezra, where he would find his master. Almazan had his key in his doublet. No one could get into his house before he returned. He was tranquil on that matter.
But he was astonished not to be pressing his mount harder and not being more tormented by anxiety, remaining so detached from events. In spite of the corpse he had left behind him and the uncertainty of the danger that Archbishop Carrillo was running, he felt vaguely glad. He reproached himself for that obscure satisfaction, only to savor it again. So, Isabelle de Solis had thought of him! She had come to seek a refuge under his roof! He was accompanied by her affectionate presence.
The Angel of Lust Page 12