The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  And Aboulfedia must have seen, appearing beyond the green infinites and the glaucous glimmer of the sea-bed, the azurescent cupola, the five columns of sittim wood and the crimson and hyacinth veils of the Temple of Jerusalem.

  XVIII. The Angel of Lust

  It was the month of Schouwal; the leaves of the carobs were blood red and the pepper-trees were dropping their globular berries, dried by the heat. Almazan had come to sit on the threshold of the pavilion in which he had been living for a few days, in the midst of the pleasure-gardens of Alexaras.

  Abul Hacen could no longer do without him and had taken him with him, along with Isabelle, when he went to repose from the fatigues of the war in his villa outside Granada.

  An enormous rose-bush that climbed up the wall of the pavilion had shed the petals of its roses, so abundantly that they formed a thick carpet on the ground. From those petals, a sudden gust of the odor of roses rose toward Almazan, mingled with a more profound perfume of scorched earth. And in the vaporous air of the night, between the golden citrus trees lining a pathway, there was a kind of apparition. He thought he saw one of the four tempters, enemies of the soul, described by Muslim mythology: Al Nefs, the lustful angel, who has the form of a woman and an adolescent at the same time, who draws down by the spell of sensuality.

  Still penetrated by the reading he had just undertaken on the religion of Mohammed and its superstitions, he almost uttered a cry of surprise on seeing the brother of Iblis marching toward him, the delightful angel, such as he had imagined him.

  He was wearing a long blue dalmatic as supple as a cloud, floating above his short silk chemise, the color of which was crimson, like the passions it concealed. The adolescent legs were bare and the feet had minuscule slippers in a gold filigree fabric that made the sand of the pathway crackle slightly. On the infantile head was posed, by a singular caprice, the triple black turban worn by mullahs and teachers of the law, as if it symbolized that the bearer of lust is also the bearer of a certain sagacity.

  But beneath that black turban, burnt gold hair sprang forth like a flame, animated by a life of its own, the same color as the two gilded drops that moved in the depths of the eyes, and in the stride there was something winged and intoxicating. It was by that gaze, when the angel Al Nefs was very close to him, that Almazan recognized Isabelle.

  He did not have time to get up. She had sat down beside him, laughing familiarly.

  “You see, it’s for you that I’ve put on a black turban. Do I not have the appearance of a doctor thus, a commentator on the Law of Mohammed, as they say. A doctor! Fundamentally, I believe that I’d have a great deal to learn.

  She picked up a handful of rose petals and threw them at him negligently.

  He smiled. He felt suddenly invaded by an unexpected wellbeing, the ease that one experiences in the company of individuals that one has known for a long time, and by whom one feels loved.

  He told her that he thought he had seen, for a moment, as she walked along the path, Al Nefs, the angel of lust, such as he is depicted by the Persian theologian Mirkond.31

  That amused her greatly. She repeated several times: “That’s right, I’m the angel of lust.”

  And she leaned toward him, to the point that he sensed the amber and musk perfume of her hair, and the youthful perfume of her breath.

  Almost without thinking about it, he put his arm around her shoulder and made contact beneath the supple fabric of the dalmatic with a warm, moving, desirous carnal substance, which made him shiver.

  Then she leaned against him, to the point that he had the form of her firm breast designed in his bosom, and he saw against his own the line of her bare leg, outside the parted dalmatic.

  She was talking to him now, but in a voice so low that he could not hear it. He understood. all the same. She was saying inconsequential words in which there was mention of her life, happiness and amour. Oh, how bored she was! Her greatest hope was no longer to belong to anyone but one man, the man she loved. Then she started laughing again.

  “Can you imagine that when I came down the stairs to come here, I found the two eunuchs who guard me in the patio of the villa. I was holding my slippers in my hand in order not to make any sound as I walked. I looked at the eunuchs, who were asleep, lying on their mats. I had one to the right and the other to the left. And I had such a desire to tell someone that I was going to find you that I almost woke them up by dropping my slippers on their noses.

  At that thought, she was shaken by tremors. She leaned her face on his shoulder. And while she said other incoherent things, he sensed that the body he had against him had suddenly become heavier, more languorous, and also warmer and more abandoned. He was holding in his arms a human form whose will was absent and communicating with the proximity of its blood the mysterious ardor with which it was charged. He yielded to the force of proximity, the law of attraction that summons one body toward another at certain moments, and drifted in the current of pleasure.

  The woman’s face was an oval of silver amid the burning hair. He tipped her over beneath him and immediately, when he felt his lips seized by those tender lips, perfumed like the fruits of spring, as mobile as life itself, as warm as his own heat, he understood that he was linked henceforth to the woman he held, by the fluid, eternal chain of moist lips.

  With a single gesture, he ripped the crimson chemise from top to bottom, while the complaisant arms made the dalmatic slide away from the shoulders.

  The rose petals on which they were lying exhaled the sad and carnal odor of faded things, and in the citrus trees, a nightingale that had begun to sing stopped.

  Abul Hacen did not descend from the horse. The two eunuchs were prostrate, foreheads in the dust of the road. But the order to have them killed did not emerge from the Emir’s mouth. What was the point? Nor was the order given to pursue the fugitives, who had departed on horseback a few hours ago. What was the point?

  He had quit the siege of Loxa in order to come and embrace the woman he loved. And she had fled with a man in whom he had placed all his confidence. Thus, Allah had wished it. That news did not astonish him as much as he would have thought. It seemed to him his dolor had been hidden within him for a long time, and that it appeared to him like a landscape to a voyager on a hill when the mist rises.

  He turned round. A hundred cavaliers accompanied him. The setting sun made the bulging breastplates glitter, and the diamonds in head-dresses shine. He would go to Granada, where he needed to conscript more soldiers, where his presence would calm the popular parties agitated against him by Boabdil’s envoys. Action would appease his thoughts.

  From the villa in Alexaras it would only take half an hour to reach the ramparts of Granada. The road was singularly deserted. The mass that the city formed in the distance seemed silent and hostile.

  No trumpet resounded from any tower, as if there were no watchman to signal the arrival of the Emir and his escort. However, the Emir looked behind him and saw that one of his cavaliers was raising his banner ostentatiously.

  The strangers’ gate, where the road ended, was closed. Ordinarily, it was only closed an hour after sunset.

  The Emir advanced toward the gate. He had taken a spear from his friend Feghani, and he hammered violently with the shaft on the oak of the gate, which resonated dully.

  Anxious faces appeared and disappeared in the crenellations of the walls. People called out and responded. An awkwardly launched arrow traced a curve through the air and stuck in the ground.

  And as the Emir prepared to knock again, a low and rapid voice spoke to him through a barred window that opened to the right, in one of the two towers juxtaposed with the gate.

  “Lord! Make haste to flee! Your son Boadbil has taken possession of Granada. The Hagib’s head is fixed to the end of a pike in the Plaza de Bibarrambla. The Alfaquis have betrayed you. The people have denied you and are crying ‘Long live Boabdil!’ You can no longer count on anyone.”

  Abul Hacen tried to recognize, through t
he bars of the window, the face of the man through whom the inexorable contrary destiny was being expressed. His heart was beating violently. He leaned forward on his horse.

  But then that narrow window in the wall began to spin, it suddenly exploded like a sunburst, growing immeasurably, confounded with the ramparts, with the city and the evening sky. And that luminous mass tarnished, became gray, and then somber, changed into compact darkness.

  “Thus Allah wishes it!” said the Emir, and turned his horse.

  In the uncertainty of his soul, he did not confide to his companions that he had lost his sight, more precious to him than the city of Granada. He had made a sign to Feghani to ride ahead of him on the road to Salobrena, knowing that his horse would follow that of his companion without him giving it any direction.

  But like the loss of Isabelle, this new misfortune did not bring him the despair that he would have expected. The night that fell sent gusts of fresh wind into his face, and as he went forward a great calm descended within him. It seemed to him that he had accomplished a long voyage and had finally arrived in port. He even ceased squinting while staring to the right and left in the hope that he might still be able to distinguish the contours of things. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, and perceived that he could see.

  He saw the realm of the spirit, more luminous than the terrestrial realm. He saw events unfolding like a long logical chain in which everything was explicable and deducible, and in which a great harmony reigned. He was only an effect of distant causes himself. He understood everything that it had required, of wars, conquests and peoples on the march in order that the blind king who had lost his kingdom, turning his back on Granada, could ride away.

  He saw the history of his race unfurl, as if in an immense, prodigious animated, living, colored tableau. In the distance, Mohammed advanced, followed by the litters of his wives, and camels destined for sacrifice, and he kissed the black stone of the Kaaba. He climbed the hill of Safa and made the assembled people an allocution, which the Koreischite Rabia repeated word for word, in a resounding voice. Abul Hacen saw the naïve and fantastical faces, the sheepskins thrown over shoulders like cloaks, and behind, between a few clumps of palm trees, the tents of the nomadic people.

  Down the flank of a mountain of sand rode cavaliers who were the advance guard of Amrou, on the march toward Memphis and Alexandria. He saw Okba’s soldiers traversing the Baghreb, Mousa’s overrunning Spain and Gaul. Cities crumbled, others rose up with their porticos, their minarets, their bazaars and their castles charged with miradors. He saw the thousand jets of water and the magical masses of flowers of the Garden of Zohrah, the forests of capitals and cupolas of the starry fibers of the Mosque of Cordova, the stones of synagogues, and the lace of Alcazars. Ascetic prophets preached, pilgrims set forth, muezzins clamored the formulae of prayers in the sky, and Caliphs covered in precious stones received ambassadors.

  Dynasties succeeded one another. The voluptuous Almoravides watched dancing girls twirl and listened to amorous verses and the music of darbukas. The austere Almohades, in the middle of a circle of mullahs, raised crudely bound Korans in their ringless hands. Abderame the Sage rendered justice. Almanzor the cavalier traversed the plains. Al Hakem the bridge-builder scrutinized the war of rivers. In the end, Abul Hacen saw several Emirs who resembled him in their facial features. They were his ancestors the Nasrides, and among them he distinguished the great Muhamad Alhamar with his thin gray beard and his torn gandourah, like the symbol of the simplicity of his mores.

  But the last of the Nasrides was a fat, ridiculous man, puffed up with pride, with eyes sparkling with lust. And in that fat man he recognized himself. For the first time he saw himself as he was, with his jaundiced jowls, his bald cranium and his enormous belly, and he almost laughed at that caricature of an Emir.

  And the events that had not yet happened, but whose causes had been generated by his folly, also unfurled before his eyes. Cities were taken one by one, Christian pyres burned in public squares, he saw the grimaces of those who were tortured because they did not want to deny their faith, and the desperate expressions of those who had renounced it.

  Alongside was extended the beautiful young Spanish woman for whom he had lost the kingdom of Granada, naked on a bear-skin, with her eyes closed. It was not voluptuousness that had made her close her eyes; it was in order not to see him, because of the disgust he inspired in her. And in a jacket of white fur and an ermine urban, he perceived her in the distance fleeing on horseback with Almazan, But he did not suffer from it. He no longer had any remorse.

  Everything unfolded in a predictable order. Civilizations flowed from the depths of the horizon, filled kingdoms, threw forth a thousand lights. Then the lights paled. Men were born who were more refined, more avid for enjoyment, less willful, and they were swept away by new races. He, the culpable Emir, had merely been an instrument in the hand of Allah. He had served him by means of his stupidity as his ancestors had by their courage. Life was an immense tangle of causes and effects, in which everyone had his allotted place and where virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, were merged like the colors of a painting and had the same utility.

  The wind that passed over him was colder now because the road was passing through mountains. The horses were weary and out of breath. The sound was audible of spears that the cavaliers were allowing to trail among the stones behind them. Abruptly disturbed night-birds fluttered their wings in the branches.

  Suddenly, Feghani stopped. The place where they had arrived overlooked several valleys, and the city of Salobrena, whose Alcaide was entirely devoted to Abul Hacen, was perceptible in the distance in the mist. Dawn was beginning to break.

  “You see?” said Feghani, showing him the mass of white terraces.

  Oh yes, he could see. He had been blind all his life, but he could finally see. What he saw was not the sun rising over the terraces of Salobrena, it was the incomparable dawn of the truth.

  XIX. The Siege of Malaga

  Isabelle adapted herself poorly to the obscure life she now lived in Malaga. The house where she lived with Almazan was spacious and splendid. Gardens descended in stages to the sea, and from the terrace on the roof the peaks of the mountains surrounding the city could be seen, but she scarcely went out. Hamet, of the Zegri family was in command of the troops in Malaga, in the absence of El Zagal. Perhaps he had not forgotten his family’s hatred of the former favorite. She had to fear the echo of that hatred.

  In the evening, Almazan and she cast off in a boat with a triangular sail and wandered along the shore. Then she rediscovered her gaiety. She amused herself making the water spring up with her hand and throwing droplets toward the sky. By the light of the stars, those droplets fell back like a luminous cascade, and she thought about the sapphires and pearls of the treasure of the Alhambra. She fell silent, contemplating that which, in the regions of the soul, is beyond regret.

  At other times the two lovers sat in the terrace of the house, huddled against one another, and listened indefinitely to a darbuka player placed amid the white laurels of the garden. Distant music came from the city. Singers went along the shore and their voices trailing in the night seemed to open invisible doors to the world of desire.

  Almazan and Isabelle embraced one another then and they never wearied of the pleasure of possessing one another. But the repose that followed the caresses was always mingled with bitterness. Isabelle thought about the glory that she had lost. Her vanity, which she had developed like an appetite, no longer being satisfied, made her suffer. And Almazan remembered Rosenkreutz, whom he had abandoned without warning, his projects and his goal. To defend the spirit, to transmit the truth! Oh, how far away he was from that!

  Both of them understood by their reciprocal silence the order of thoughts in which they were sunk. With a common accord they escaped from that shadow to find themselves face to face again, active and clear-sighed, avid to make one another suffer on a terrain, always the same, whose desolate curve they follo
wed endlessly.

  Isabelle talked about the men by whom she had been loved. First she threw out a name, negligently. “Him too?” Almazan questioned. She said no, quietly, turning her head away. The he took her by the wrists, it was necessary that she confess, that she tell him how it had happened, and he threatened her, he wanted her more.

  She swore than she had never loved anyone but him. They both agreed that the past was an abyss over which it was necessary not to lean, in order not to be scourged by the breath it exhaled. But they were both avid to recommence, he because of the devouring curiosity that is the foundation of human desire, she for the emotion of a more intense sensuality born of an ever more furious jealousy.

  It was during the most tranquil nights, under the most immaculate skies, that Isabelle evoked her past debaucheries in Seville with Aboulfedia and the suspect individuals that he gathered in Triana for his obscene celebrations.

  “You’ve heard mention of the Sabbat,” she said. “He knew the fashion in which it was celebrated in all lands. He had us put on singular costumes and there were rituals so absurd that we couldn’t accomplish them without bursting into laughter. Oh, we amused ourselves a great deal, sometimes, with Rodriguez! I was always the woman who was lies naked on the altar and on whose belly the mass was celebrated. At first I had difficulty remaining serious, but as the ceremony went on, either by virtue of the heat, the mingled perfumes of incense and musk, or because of the diabolical atmosphere, my reason went astray, I no longer thought about anything, I had a desire for caresses, I received them, and I didn’t know afterwards which men had made so many marks on my body in clutching me against them.”