The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  She disappeared into the laurels. She did not come back down. The fishermen became impatient. It was at the beginning of the night that it was necessary to attempt the chance, because there was a coming and going of boats then that ceased thereafter.

  Almazan ran back up the stairways of the garden and then those of the house. He went as far as the roof terrace. He went back down. Everything was deserted. The casket of jewelry that he had noticed on the bed in the bedroom was no longer there.

  Then, gripped by a presentiment, he went to the door to the street. It was only necessary to push it. That was the way that Isabelle had just fled. She had fled voluntarily, because if there had been violence, she would have uttered a cry that he would have heard. He recalled her last words of love. What a mystery the heart of a woman was!

  He traversed the garden again. The three fisherman would take their chance without him. He embraced them. All would be well. The Prophet would guide them safe and sound to the Moroccan shore. He would stay. He did not merit liberty.

  At the corner of the street of the armorers and the marketplace, Almazan was jostled by a man who was staggering.

  “Ali Dordux has just yielded the Abderame gate,” he said. “The Spaniards are in the city.”

  The man sat down on the ground, as if he were relating the story of an event. But he vomited a flood of blood and began to gasp.

  Almazan heard a sound of footfalls and clinking weapons. He only just had time to slip into a doorway. Spanish soldiers, holding their arquebuses in the middle, were running toward the street of the jewelers.

  There was a detonation, and then several others, and in all directions rumors resounded, cries of fright and the sound of axes striking the wood of doors.

  Without knowing where he was going. Almazan went down the street of the armorers. His mind was blank. He was not suffering and he was not astonished. The misfortune of others was in conformity with his own misfortune.

  Above him, on the balcony of a stone house, he heard a heart-rending scream. A semi-naked woman was trying to climb over the balustrade of the balcony and throw herself into the street. Her brown tresses were hanging down and her breast was crushed by the stone. As she was about to swing over, two men surged forth behind her. One seized her under the armpits, the other by the legs.

  They repeated: “We won’t do you any harm! On the contrary!”

  There was a third who lifted a lantern, and by its light Almazan saw an expression of idiotic gaiety on his face.

  A few paces further on a sort of colossus who was carrying an immense two-handed sword under his arm, was holding his neck, from which blood was running, and he shouted: “Bring him here. He’s traversed my neck with his teeth. Since he’s a wolf, I’ll treat him like a wolf and nail him to his door. He’ll serve as an example to others.”

  From the interior of the house someone threw him a thin child about fifteen years old, who struggled.

  The man with the big sword drew a dagger from his belt, seized the child by the wrist twisted it, and with a single blow in the middle of the hand, he pinned him to the wood of the door.

  At that moment, a mercenary wearing a Galician uniform came out of the house opposite. His eyes were shining in a cunning face. He was dragging three young women in night-shirts, attached to the same rope. He took two of his companions as witnesses, one of whom was in the process of loading a chest on to other’s back.

  “Look at these pagans. They’re three sisters. Chained to the same halter like she-donkeys! No one can dispute that they’re mine. I’ll sell them at the price I wish. Here, feel what soft skins they have!”

  He tore the silk gauze chemisette off the first and shoved her forward brutally in order that his companions could palpate the young body.

  But he went sprawling four paces away, his belly opened. The man with the big sword, who turned round to look at the young women, received a dagger-thrust in the right eye, which caused him to collapse.

  Almazan had sprung out of the shadows and he lashed out like a madman. What he had just seen had removed all prudence and all reason. Imprecations resounded. Swords whistled around him. He delivered other blows, and launched himself forward at random.

  He climbed one street and descended another. The force that animated him made him strike and pass on. Through the darkness, howls of rage followed him. He perceived faces on all sides that all expressed the same bestial lust, arms open to seize women.

  Confusedly, he thought: Al Nefs! The demon of lust who doomed me! It’s him who’s expanding, him who’s unleashing, with wings, mouths and tentacles, a multiple, monstrous, infinite life.

  He was fighting against Al Nefs. A strange power rendered him light, winged invincible.

  Desperate appeals emerged from a house. He penetrated into it, leapt over cadavers and saw, by the light of a bronze lamp, a man crouching over a woman he was raping. He had a sparkling helmet and a bulbous breastplate. Almazan plunged his dagger into the base of his skull between the helmet and the breastplate, and, as a Spaniard who had followed him took aim with an arquebus, he turned the blow aside and threw the bronze lamp in his face.

  He resumed his course. In a small square he vaguely recognized an old man with a long white beard. He was standing on the threshold of his house, lifting up a little lantern and smiling as he repeated: “I knew it! It’s the end of the world!”

  Perhaps he had lost his reason. A cavalier traversing the square leaned over in his stirrups in order to examine him. He was wearing a supple coat of mail, a short violet velvet cape, and his features had something sad and grave about them.

  “It’s the end of the world!” the old man said to him, softly.

  The cavalier shrugged his shoulders, and negligently struck the old man on the head with the shaft of his lance.

  Almazan leapt on to the horse behind him, seized him around the body, unsaddled him and rolled on the ground while laboring his face with his weapon. Soldiers who emerged from a side-street launched forward and attempted to pierce his breast with the points of their halberds, but the horse reared up in their midst and Almazan resumed his course, followed by a clamor of rage.

  Fires were lit here and there. He ran, followed by the footsteps of those pursuing him, through a world of hallucination and phantoms. He was carrying the light of vengeance in a fantastic city.

  Fugitives emerged in a crowd from a mosque. He cut through them and also traversed a group of Spanish soldiers seized with panic, who shouted to the others: “Look out! Here come the knights of Santa Hermandad! They’re putting incendiaries to death.”

  He stopped at a crossroads, struck by a name that he had heard in Isabelle’s mouth. One soldier said to another: “It’s Don Gutierre de Cadenas! He’s come to plant the standard of Santiago and the banner of the kings on the tower of the Alcazaba.”

  He saw a young man with blue eyes go by in the midst of an escort, clad in white armor with a white decoration on his helmet that resembled the archangel Michael, such as he is represented in the illuminations of Christian missals.

  He did not stop.

  He was covered in blood and he had the sensation of carrying in his fist, with his chipped dagger, a sort of purificatory flame. He did not weary of striking. He sought to give the wound that saves men. It was the lust of the world of which he wanted to puncture the heart.

  Arquebuses fired on his heels. He heard crossbow bolts whistling. He sometimes passed through the same streets, falling upon the same groups. Howls went up then: “There he is!” But he was pushed forward by an interior law stronger than his will.

  He traversed sheaves of swords without being touched by them and he disappeared into the darkness when anyone tried to seize him, as if he were an animate parcel of that shadow full of fear.

  And suddenly, at a crossroads, in front of him, near enough to touch, like the personification of the nocturnal lust that he was pursuing, a naked creature of extraordinary loomed up, splendid, whose skin was flamboyant, pink and whi
te, under the glare of torches. Only a second! He had for a second a vision of beauty and pleasure, so moving that a sob shook him from head to foot. It was as if his soul capsized, and fell backwards Oh, the ideal was also shining in the matter of flesh! But only for a second.

  Twenty voices cried: “Zorah! The most beautiful girl in Malaga! It’s me who stripped her naked! Pass her to me!”

  The torch-bearer displayed a scarred face with spoiled teeth behind the shoulder of Zorah, Zorah the chaste, who was the glory of Malaga for her poetic genius and her beauty. He was holding her by a handful of her hair and tipping her backwards slightly, which extended the curve of her breasts. And, as if from all directions, with laughter and grunts, men rushed upon Zorah. He waved his torch to the right and the left to defend his prey—but too late!

  The circular flame illuminated four-footed animals, a herd of creatures half-wolf and half-pig, which were shoving one another, biting one another in order to wallow upon the fallen body of the young woman, to pollute her with their claws, their fur and their jowls.

  “A voice cried behind Almazan: “It’s him! It’s necessary to take him alive! He has to be burned!”

  He did not move. His dagger slipped from his hand. His winged force had abandoned him. He received a blow on the back of the neck. He felt someone throw his arms around his body and he was dragged away through the ordure of the street.

  He only recovered consciousness the following evening. His hands and feet solidly bound, he was lying in a courtyard sealed by high walls. Some fifteen prisoners were alongside him. He recognized them as renegades. They told him what they knew about events.

  Ali Dordux had surrendered one of the city gates, in exchange for liberty and the guarantee of their property for him and a few families. It was Don Gutierre de Cardenas who had entered Malaga first, but on another side, so it seemed that the place had been delivered by two treasons. The Gomeres, exhausted and starving, had forced Hamet el Zegri to surrender the castle of Jebelfaro. All day long, in the port, bishops and Castilian nobles had shared out the inhabitants reduced to slavery. It was also there that pyres had been set up and, in order to give the army a spectacle, renegades had been burned one by one. The courtyard where Almazan found himself was the one where they had been parked. He was one of the small number who remained, and who would doubtless be burned the next day.

  He spent the night sitting up, too weak to remember, too desirous of death to be afraid.

  The sun had been shining for a long time when the door of the courtyard opened. Men of the Santa Hermandad came in to fetch the prisoners. Almazan was finally untied. An officer pointed at him and said: “It’s necessary to give that one something to eat. He’s the famous Almazan. It appears that the tribunal of the Inquisition has just claimed him, and an escort of fifty cavaliers has been commanded to take him to Seville.”

  And the officer considered him curiously, as if considering a famous criminal.

  Almazan had difficulty walking, and a soldier took him by the arm to sustain him. He could not eat the bread that he was given but he drank a little wine, which intoxicated him.

  As if in a dream he traversed the captive city. The midday sun weighed upon his cranium and the smoke of pyres, in the motionless air, transported a reek of grilled flesh.

  Alongside the Djouma mosque, Almazan went past a long file of young women. They were the children of the richest and noblest inhabitants of Malaga, who were being sent as a gift, as slaves, some to Jeanne of Naples, Ferdinand’s sister, and the rest to the Queen of Portugal.

  A little further on there was a dispute. A Castilian lord on horseback, covered in iron, had stopped in the middle of the street. His expression was savage, and an insensate flame was shining in his eyes. A cord wrapped around his right wrist was attached to the arm of a young woman whose was marching on foot beside him. She had a delightfully modest and astonished face. It was the pretty Jewess Rachel, the daughter of the money-changer Jeroboam. Jeroboam was on his knees, explaining that all the Jews of Malaga had just been ransomed by one of their coreligionists in Seville for twenty thousand gold doubloons. The sum had been paid to King Ferdinand that morning.

  The Castilian lord responded that he had obtained full property in young Rachel, the previous evening, from the King himself, and that the donation was irrevocable. And as the father made as if to launch himself upon his daughter to retain her, the Castilian lord, pulling the cord, put her on the horse’s back in front of him, crushed her breast against his breastplate, and departed at the gallop laughing madly.

  But violence and injustice seemed to Almazan to be the norm of the world, the quotidian stone and cement of which men built their edifice. He had lost the faculty of indignation. Everything was in the order of things and contributed to unknown ends.

  Nor did he make a movement when, on the road to Seville, one of his guards said, as he pointed to a closed litter preceded by a cavalier with a pennant on his lance: “Those are Cardenas’ arms. That litter must contain the beautiful renegade of whom he’s so fond, the one who procured him the glory of being the first to enter Malaga.”

  The litter had disappeared. From a little valley full of wild myrtles and palm trees a healthy odor of which Almazan had lost the memory suddenly rose: an odor that was no longer that of the putrescence of the dead. Only then did he weep.

  XXI. The Torture

  It was a crudely sculpted Christ, singular and horrible. It was nailed to the transversal beam of the ceiling of the immense, obscure room. But the nails were poorly driven in, the cross was adhering poorly to the bam, with the result that it shook, and seemed to be hovering in mid-air.

  As the executioner’s aides had tipped him on to his back against the rack and were in the process of attaching himself to it, Almazan had perceived that astonishing divine emblem above him and could not take his eyes off it.

  The head was too large and disproportionate with the body, which was etiolated and short, like that of a child halted in his growth. The ignorant artist, doubtless involuntarily, had put an expression of stupidity in the physiognomy. The jaw was thick and square, the eyes were holes, holes full of dead shadow. The thorns of the crown were almost all broken, except for two, at each extremity, which gave the crown the aspect of a diabolical miter ornamented with horns, and gave the Christ floating beneath the ceiling, grating and quivering, the appearance of a bat in a dream, a bizarre night-bird ineptly crucified.

  Almazan’s widened gaze scarcely saw the things that surrounded him, the gripping tableau of the torture chamber about which he had thought for such a long, whose horrors had been described to him so minutely by his companions in the dungeon. He always came back to that Christ above him.

  For the torture chamber was simpler and less terrible than the one he had imagined. Two resin torches on the wall did not permit him to see, at the back, the pulley that lifted patients by the arms and let them drop, breaking their joints, nor the iron pincers for tearing out the tongue, nor the mysterious instruments. The face of the executioner did not reflect a base cruelty but only a limited indifference, and a tic that the right eye had made him shake his head perpetually.

  The four aides, with thickset bodies, gave the impression of four columns of matter supporting in that subterranean location the entire edifice of the prison. Like matter, they were taciturn and inanimate. And on the face of the inquisitor who had been handling his trial for months, he found the same faithful sadness, the same absence of hatred, the same desire for persuasion. That inquisitor, inconvenienced by his tall stature, doubtless timid by nature, who only drew his authority from his faith, was looking at him with the large attentive dog-like eyes. He was a dog, the executor of orders, who had been instructed to bring back a soul to the church.

  Only the Christ was in anguish, up there, on which face a sculptor had once out the stigmata of stupidity.

  The seconds were interminable. They were waiting for someone. Almazan’s overexcited senses perceived the sound of the door
turning, and, by the respect on faces, the movement of the executioner toward him and the inquisitor’s respectful inclination before someone he could not see, Almazan understood, his heart began to beat more rapidly in his breast, and he began to be afraid.

  Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, had just come in, and was standing behind him.

  It was not the prospect of torture that frightened Almazan, even less that of death. It was something that had flowed toward him in the air, something hideous and inexpressible, emanating from the being that had just entered behind him. He did not see him. Immobilized on the rack, he could not see him. But he knew that putting him to the question had been delayed because the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, absent from Seville, had insisted on interrogating him personally.

  Now he was there. Three paces away from him stood a little old man whose face he did not know but which he imagined sculpted in stone, an ecclesiastical Moloch who had sent so many men to death by pointing at them with his bony finger.

  He remembered conversations he had had on his subject with Christian Rosenkreutz. What a mystery was the soul of that organizational genius, that precise and methodical workman, who had made the Catholic Church a machine of suspicion, of poisoning, and of burning! The machine was perfect, since no one, in all of Spain, could work on a discovery, study the sciences or approach philosophical problems, without being pursued as a heretic. What a mystery that a man could possess, with an absolute faith in his truth, such an absence of pity, such a perfect hatred of thought.

  Rosenkreutz had spoken the truth. Men of elevated spirituality are incarnated in certain periods to preach philosophies and found religions. They were those named sages or prophets: Buddha, Plato, Jesus, Mohammed. But there were others who had given themselves the mission of driving humankind backwards in its progress, others who had an abstract love of evil, of entirely pure evil, which is the negation of intelligence: Nero in Rome, Genghis Khan in Mongolia, Hakem in Egypt. And this one, Tomas de Torquemada, was the most complete incarnation of intelligence lucidly organized to destroy the intelligence of which it was born. He was Satan, the Prince of Evil, in the uniform of a Dominican, with the aspect of an ascetic old man.