Aboulfedia was pacing back and forth in the room and Almazan gazed in astonishment at his obscene costume, the deceptive gaiety of his youth and the desperate gleam in his little eyes.
“But you’ve come a long way,” he said, suddenly. “You must be thirsty.”
He examined his guest’s dusty costume with a hint of scorn, and then opened the door through which he had entered by a crack, and called to someone whose name Almazan did not catch.
A minute later, a child scarcely twelve years old came into the room carrying a metal tray. Her thin arms and slender legs were naked. She had two brown tresses that fell over her slim shoulders, and her face was that of a little old woman. She looked at Almazan brazenly, almost under his nose, and started laughing. She was missing a tooth, and she had a double scar near her nose, like the trace of an animal bite.
At a sign from her master, she disappeared, waddling, making her short skirt ride up over her loins in order to show off her legs.
Aboulfedia filled two chipped cups to the brim with a dense wine, and emptied one of them in a single draught.
“Oh, you’re right, Almazan,” he went on, “to come and find me. There’s the age of the senses, the age of thought and finally, perhaps, the age of wisdom. Woe betide the man who is wise too soon or who begins by thinking. You’ll become my pupil again. But what I’ll teach you is finer than the philosophy of Aristotle or that of Averroes.”
Aboulfedia drew nearer to Almazan and spoke to him at close range, in a low voice, breathing the odor of the wine he had drunk in his face.
“There are secrets, yes, yes, and I know them. Carnal pleasure is never simple. If it isn’t commanded by the brain it’s nothing but a frisson along the body and a rapid grimace. The amour of a man for a woman is only child’s play. Only debauchery is beautiful. It’s necessary to penetrate into the accursed palace in order to know the enchantments of nature and savor the terrible intoxication. Once one has entered, there’s no question of wanting to return. So-called debauchees who have become saints have restricted themselves to simply coupling in the manner of beasts.
“Debauchery! The ancients made a kind of religion of it, and they were right. They worshiped Priapus, Pilummus, Tryphallus, Angerona, Genita-Mana, Tutana, Typhon and a thousand others, and the festivals of those sublime gods always served as a pretext for formidable scenes of collective possession. I’ve rediscovered in Byzantine manuscripts the description of the rites of certain mysteries.
“At Mendes, a hundred young women were locked in the temple on spring nights with the sacred goat, and it was necessary, in the morning, for the guards to bring whips to drag them away from the delights they had savored. At Byblos, people came from all over Syria to participate in the initiations of the cult of Cotylo, who was called the goddess of lubricity, but who was also that of intellectual penetration, for her priests taught the means of procuring divine ecstasy by means of the carnal spasm.
There were secret schools in Alexandria, Memphis and Heliopolis, where the confusion of the sexes was exercised by the confusion of embraces, and where, to the vibration of certain kinds of music and the intoxication of certain perfumes, one found a state of ideal voluptuousness with the vanishment of one’s individuality. The Moabites and the Ammonites did better still in their worship of Belphegor, who was identified with the plant Mars. They lay down in hundreds at sunset in the sands of the desert, and when he first rays of the bloody sun brushed their bodies, the great cry of stupor that filled the dusk sent their spirits toward the god, and confounded them with the god.
The Rutrem of the Hindus, who had a lingam instead of a head, the Atis of the Chaldeans, who was represented with a vagina on the forehead, and the Anahita of the Persians, whose body was covered with breasts, demanded similar frenzied couplings in secret rituals. The Christian cult of the Devil, the Catholic Sabbat with its goat, the son of the old Egyptian goat, and its witches imitative of Bacchantes, is nothing but a reproduction of the ancient cult of pleasure of which humankind does not want to let go. And the principle is the same everywhere. It’s the profanation of chastity, promiscuity in lust.”
Aboulfedia’s face had become hideous. Droplets of sweat were pearling on his temples. His fat hands were trembling. He let himself fall in the midst of cushions and stayed there is the attitude if a man witnessing an extraordinary scene.
Almazan considered him with disgust. He thought of the pure air of the highway. He stood up.
“Almazan,” said Aboulfedia, also getting up, “You’re an artist and you love beauty. Doubtless you’ve heard mention of the woman that I cast in the role of Lilith and the adolescent that I had so much trouble finding whose ambiguous form is that of Belial in person, the demon that incarnates the attractions of both sexes.”
No, Almazan had not heard mention of any of those individuals. He did not want to know them. He had a desire to make the old physician ashamed, to remind him of his old love of science and the nights they had spent together leaning over the cadavers of men condemned to death, trying to decipher the mystery of the human organs. It was a prostitute that had come to Aboulfedia one night, instead of the expected Messiah. No matter! Was there not a Messiah who descended at every moment into the soul of those who sought and hoped?
But he kept silent.
It was up to him to preach morality to the old man gone astray. The image of Isabelle de Solis had just recoiled a long way, between the toothless girl and the powdered one-eyed lantern-bearer. She was merely a miserable instrument of a base orgy among the dregs of Triana. He no longer wanted to think about her; he no longer wanted to think about anything.
“Lilith and Belial!” murmured Aboulfedia, in a dreamy voice, as if he were talking to himself. “The prestige of demons who bear on their faces and in their corporeal form the forbidden beauty! It’s pollution that makes the attraction of beauty and the mystery of faces only has a moving profundity if the lips are impure.”
Almazan headed for the door of the garden, but Aboulfedia retained him by the arm.
“I want to show you Lilith,” he said, and an expression of gravity passed over his features. “I don’t believe there’s a body more perfect in the whole of Spain. And God has put hair of flame on her to mark her with the seal of Hell. Follow me, but don’t make any noise, because her fits of wrath are terrible, and then one can’t do anything with hr. She’s more indecent than a bitch in quest of a dog, but sometimes she doesn’t want to let her little fingernail show.”
Almazan sensed that curiosity was stronger than disgust and the followed Aboulfedia.
The room into which the latter had drawn him was entirely dark. Almazan took a few groping paces therein, wondering whether the faint sound of water he could hear was coming from—the intermittent sound of falling droplets.
“I imitate the sect of the Baptists of Byblos,” Aboulfedia whispered in his ear. “First I practice the purification by water.”
Almazan sensed that the hand that was drawing him into a corner of the room was trembling in his own.
“Look, and hold your breath.”
Almazan almost uttered a cry. Aboulfedia had lifted a curtain, and through golden gauze whose mesh formed diamond-shapes, he saw the next room, which was bathed in a delightful turquoise light by a high bronze lamp. The walls were covered with blue faience, and to the right and left there were coverts covered with multicolored carpets and cushions. The middle of the room was a circular pool to which three steps led down.
On those steps Isabelle de Solis was lying face down, entirely naked. Her small breasts were scraping the marble and it was her that was making the irregular sound of water that Almazan had heard, for she sometimes filled the hollow of her hand and threw its contents negligently into the air. The droplets, as they fell back on her nape and back, covered her with a rain of scintillating pearls and caused a long frisson that suddenly made her tense and fold up.
Beside the steps, an open orange was placed.
It seemed to
Almazan that Isabelle de Solis’ eyelids had started to flutter more rapidly when he had gazed at her through the diamonds of the golden trellis, and that she made an imperceptible movement of the head. Could she suspect that he was there?
He was penetrated by surprise, admiration and a sentiment analogous to the one that the discovery of a crime inspires.
“Lilith was anterior to Eve, according to the Talmudists,” murmured Aboulfedia. “The man loved her, with an ideal love, and the veritable original sin was the pollution of a virgin body that had been created for beauty and not for physical enjoyment.”
Isabelle de Solis had raised herself up. She placed her head on her elbow. Her eyes could be seen shining like two droplets of phosphorescent water. She gave the impression of a panther waking up in order to go hunting or for amour.
And suddenly, she seized the orange that was beside her, tore away pieces of peel, and started throwing them in the direction of the cushions that were to her right, aiming carefully, her puerile face suddenly becoming full of attention.
Almazan perceived that there was a form lying among the cushions. The slender upper body of a very young man emerged. He smiled wearily; his features were taut and his immense eyes enlarged by kohl were moist and devoid of light.
But Almazan did not have the leisure to consider him. The curtain raised by Aboulfedia had just fallen back in front of him. The old man was panting angrily. He exclaimed: “I’ll get you! Haven’t I forbidden it? The son of a gypsy that I pulled out of the mud! Beggar! Swine!”
He agitated in the darkness, no longer able to find the door, stamping his feet. Meanwhile, on the other side, like a spring waterfall, like precious stones agitated by a goldsmith in an invisible casket the naked Isabelle de Solis’ laughter echoed musically from the blue faience.
Aboulfedia traversed the first room and disappeared, doubtless to the room where the pool was, to chastise Belial for bathing with Lilith.
But Almazan did not follow him. He had seen enough. He no longer aspired to anything but going far away, to forgetting the old physician, the young woman and their obscene companions.
He ran into the garden, found his horse, made an imperious sign to the one-eyed servant, who was near the door, and fled.
The road wound between two rocky hills and on the horizon the twenty-four towers of the Alhambra appeared, solid, legendary and sunlit, like stone sisters amid walls of ocher.
They dominated a colorful accumulation of turquoise domes, mosques the color of mat pearls, flat terraces bordered by azulejos the color of emerald, and porticos the color of amethyst. Granada! The city was staged on the flanks of three open hills, like the streaming pieces of a pomegranate from which a torrent of precious metals, faiences and jewels was flowing, amid woods of laurier roses and clumps of pistachios.
Almazan looked around at the countless shiny irrigation channels that dated from the time of the Ommeyade Caliphs. Men were walking in the cultivated fields, Russet vines displayed their abundance. An impression of wealth and joy rose from the fertile plains.
Granada! Almazan recalled all that he had heard said about the old Arab city. There, poets and scholars were honored more than warriors. No one was persecuted for his religious beliefs. In the whiteness of palaces embellished by the art of centuries, the descendants of the race that had conquered the world remained, refined and subtle.
A young woman crouching in front of a low house, who was practicing playing a darbuka, made him an amicable hand signal from a distance. That gesture and the music that resonated were for him the material symbol of Arab hospitality and their love of beauty.
He hastened forward. He perceived the mass formed by the Puerta de Elvira on the horizon.
A horseman advanced toward him at a gallop. When he was a few paces away he stopped and considered him in a threatening fashion. He was a young man, scarcely twenty years old, with a complexion more bronzed than the majority of the Moors he had encountered. He was very handsome, but there was something unintelligent in his face, and even bestial. By the magnificence of his garments, Almazan thought that he must belong to a rich family. He had stopped too, surprised by the hostility of the young man, and he was about to ask him what he wanted when the unknown man, uttering a dull groan that lifted his chest, spurred his horse and drew away along the road at top sped.
Scarcely had he disappeared than another horseman arrived and, before Almazan had recovered from his astonishment, he dismounted and addressed several obsequious bows to him. He was an old man with large moist eyes and a certain plumpness.
“Please excuse him, Lord,” he said. “You seem to be a stranger and you don’t know him. Did he address some insult to you? Did he strike you? In that case...”
The old man put his hand to his belt.
Almazan was about to reply that if that had been the case he would have taken charge of punishing the young man himself, but the old man did not give him time. He touched his forehead with his finger and uttered a flood of words.
“Isn’t it a great misfortune? He’s not twenty years old, and what incomparable beauty! You can imagine the chagrin that it causes his father. But it’s believed that there’s no remedy. Everyone is aware of it in Granada, for he belongs to the greatest family in the city. He’s an Almoradi. So the Zegris haven’t failed to profit from it to spread all sorts of calumnies. It afflicted him at about the age of fourteen. From that moment on he thought of nothing but women. In principle, the Koran forbids them before marriage, but in practice it isn’t a sin. The son of Ali Hamad could have any women he wanted. He doesn’t want any of them! As soon as he gets close to a woman he’s afraid; he starts to tremble and his teeth chatter. Note that he spends his days summoning them and desiring them. And in what a fashion! To the point that those who know him have nicknamed him the goat. The impotent goat! It’s funny. How can it be explained? In sum, his mind has been disturbed by it. He no longer knows what he’s doing. The greatest physician in Fez has come to see him and found no means of curing him. As he insults passers-by, his father, whose steward I am, charges me to follow him to apologize for him and pay compensation if necessary. Is it…?”
The talkative fat man held out a purse. At Almazan’s negative shake of the head, he went on: “Personally, I think that it will pass one day without anyone knowing why. Evils come and go according to the caprice of Allah.”
He had mounted his horse. He burst out laughing. “But today, it requires the woman to whom he addresses himself to be a very great lover to be able to satisfy him.”
He was already far away, but Almazan could still hear his laughter, and he wondered why the young man he had just encountered, and even his servant, inspired such a great revulsion in him.
The Puerta de Elvira was encumbered by muleteers and beggars. By the roadside, on a bank, a man was seated. He looked at Almazan for a long time with soft and very bright eyes.
He stood up, approached him and said: “You must be Almazan, the physician from Seville. I’ve been waiting for you since this morning. Alfonso Carrillo might have mentioned me to you. My name is Christian Rosenkreutz.”
And, not doubting that Almazan would follow him, he set about preceding him, with a slow tread, which gave the impression of hardly touching the dust.
V. Princess Khadidja’s Secret
The gardens of the Generalife were disposed in terraces, and the whiteness of wrought stucco porticos and faience basins alternated there with the shadows of cypresses and those of spindle-trees arranged in squares, with the consequence that the gardens gave the impression, at a distance, of a succession of miraculous chessboards. It was there, among the pistachios, the laurier roses and the arborescent magnolias planted between clumps of box-trees, in accordance with the teachings of the gardeners of Bagdad, that Princess Khadidja came every evening to watch the sunset.
She took two or three more rapid steps in order to make a butterfly rise up, and Emir Daoud, who was accompanying her, thought that she was about to take off
behind the insect.
She was tall, delicate and mobile, like the jets of water in the fountains amid which they were walking; she was as transparent as a vapor, leaning over like a lily whose flower is too heavy for its stem; and every time she moved, the emeralds with which she was covered made a precious music as they collided.
She had made the butterfly flee the pathway in order that it would be safer amid the clumps of orange trees, because she could not bear the idea of the death of a living being without weeping. Recently, she had stayed shut up in her room for two days, refusing all nourishment, because she had found the tiny corpse of a nightingale on her window-sill.
When the butterfly had disappeared, she fixed her immense green eyes, which were the same color as her emeralds, on the Emir, and said to him indulgently, as if in a dream: “Yes, yes, I like everything you say to me very much.”
But the Emir knew that she had not heard what he said and thought that perhaps she could not even see him.
Princess Khadidja was always thinking about something else. She memorized poems by El Motannabi or Abou Nowas,20 who were her favorite poets, or she even composed a few lines herself, which she then copied out in a book of Samarkand parchment bound in gold, which had been sent to her by the Sultan of Egypt and illuminated for her by a celebrated artist from Damascus. Then, while walking and chatting, she glimpsed, she said, the confused and very beautiful images of certain beings that she called her Gennis21 and with whom she conversed in thought. She attributed all her distraction, all her forgetfulness and all her moods to those Gennis, and no one knew, when she laughed and talked to them, whether she was serious or making fun of them.
The Angel of Lust Page 15