The Lepers

by Henri de Montherlant

  He had intended to examine her body. But she immediately felt cold, and quickly tucked herself into bed. How could he get her out?'Turn round. To the right. Now to the left,' while she shivered: just imagine it!

  'The medico examined her nine days ago, and only saw one patch. Very unlikely that another will have appeared since. As for her genitals, he must surely have taken a look at them since he suspected syphilis.' Nevertheless, as he undressed behind the back of the bed, he had something of the sensation of a soldier adjusting his equipment just before going over the top.

  He dived under the sheet, as one might dive into one of those greenish stagnant ponds in oases, traversed by a snake swimming with terrifying speed.

  But when he was in her warmth, all his uneasiness evaporated. What was there was Rhadidja, the faithful, the excellent Rhadidja. (And he felt the outline of a recent tattoo on the inside of her arm, the ink still new on the surface of the skin.) She whom he knew to her very bowels, the sack of flesh into which he poured his seed. The haven of his security, even the security of his flesh: not once had he deigned to protect himself from her (one cannot possess by protecting oneself!), although she had twice infected him with gonorrhoea, in 1924 and 1926; the fiction of security governed - he wanted it thus - his relations with this woman who consistently poisoned him. The towel he had wrapped round the dangerous hand as a safeguard came undone and was lost between the sheets: well, let it stay there! However, he avoided her mouth.

  Scarcely had he begun to caress her than Rhadidja's face drifted away into a dream-world. Sensuality took possession of her instantaneously, overpoweringly. Her eyes moved while her face remained immobile, her nostrils flared like those of a rocking-horse. And when, her eyes glazed, dead, like dead planets, she sought his mouth, he seized hers - hers, that mouth which yesterday was lined in so supernatural a pink, like the calash of a pair of newly-weds in Algiers, and which tomorrow he visualized with the palate perforated as though by syphilis. He took her mouth, and worked on it slowly and attentively. He was sucked in by this woman as a river is sucked towards the sea. His love of danger, absent until then, now entered him. Clinging to this mouth, so close to the 'haemorrhagic coryza', he felt like a parachute jumper during the moment of his fall when the parachute has not yet opened. But there was nothing more to it, after all - and he was aware of this - than when he drank at lengths from the mouths of advanced consumptives, and drew life from their death. (How he loved to kiss them in that depression in their cheeks that was reminiscent of the gentle hollow between two dunes, and on their sweating temples with the damp locks clinging to them! How he loved to see their pleasure weaken them a little more each day! How he loved to take them as they coughed, like those perverts who take ducks as they decapitate them! Edmonde, her mouth hideously dry ... holding Edmonde's tongue between his lips, it seemed to him that he was holding in his mouth a reptile's tongue, and he liked it.) And just as, then, he used to say to himself: 'Consumptive, me! So what?' so now he sneered: 'A leper, me? Nonsense! I'm well known to be a lucky dog. As lucky as the Devil.' He had an almost mystical confidence in his constitution, like the airman in his pitching bus, or the skipper in his old tub, rolling, shipping water, but always making harbour.

  'One would think you hadn't done it for a long time,' said Rhadidja naively.

  Later, he was ashamed at not having given her his greatest proof of affection - that kiss on the mouth - until carried away by sexual excitement. He took the tainted hand and kissed it devoutly, not far from the leprous spot. He experienced no sensation (of horror, audacity, etc.); his only feeling was the affection he had for her.

  When she had gone, in the utmost silence, he waited for a long time, half dressed, his ear pressed against the door, to make sure that she was not coming back, that there had been no trouble with anyone in the londouk. Finally he gave up listening. Another clandestine assignation that had gone off successfully! For fifteen years and more, his life had been a constant succession of risky ventures that had gone off successfully. ...

  He went and drew back his overcoat from the window-pane. Men and children passed by, all in their big hooded jellabas, a little reminiscent of monks and monklets. The fire had spread. Visibly. As leprosy spreads. Under that sprinkling of stars.

  Then he flung himself back into bed, still half-dressed, the room was so cold. The bottom sheet had kept a fold, a cil [Crest of a dune, in Arabic (Author's note).] where it had been caught between Rhadidja's thighs.

  A feeling of contentment crept over him then, as though he had performed a good deed. He remembered an anecdote he had read in some cancionero in which the daughter of the King of France and 'Queen Constantine', abducted by a knight and wishing to preserve her maidenhead, tells him that she is a leper's daughter, so that he does not molest her. Costals despised this knight, and this added to his contentment. Motionless, his eyes fixed on the undulating pattern of the ceiling, it seemed to him that he could feel the poison she had injected into him already stirring in his blood. He had two clear feelings. First, that if he had caught the disease, well, he did not regret that hour of tender pleasure in spite of it all. And secondly, that the horror of the disease would be mitigated because it had come to him from her. He thought: 'Ah! let her give me leprosy!' as a woman thinks of the man she loves: 'Ah! let him give me a child!' Meanwhile his fate was in the lap of the gods.

  13

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  [Letter forwarded from Paris to Marrakesh.]

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

  20 February 1928

  I have recovered my balance, and I'm glad of it. A bit disconcerted, though. A woman restored to equanimity always feels as though she were missing something. Don't think I'm embarrassed by my last letter. After all, if you don't want to disturb women, you shouldn't come and seek them out in their homes through the radio. It's as simple as that.

  Yes, a bit sad. Reaction, no doubt. And they've delivered a dress which I thought would be nice (I never see you, and yet I dress for you alone) and which makes me look such a fright! I dress badly, but at least I know when something doesn't suit me. And I feel crushed. And then there were the fittings, and seeing one's face repeated in half a dozen mirrors. My face always surprises me in the mirror, and I try to recapture the other, the one I used to have, my first face. My passion - my passion for you: I dot the i's and cross the t's because you might not understand - my passion exhausts me and ages me more than a dull and empty life would have done. What was the use of changing! Oh, to be able to age peacefully, having laid down one's weapons with good grace. The day when one will at last be at peace with one's face.... But for that, one would have to have obtained something, however little....

  You destroy everything for me, everything. But I insist: I want nothing else but you. And yet at the same time weary - weary of you: once more I dot the i's and cross the t's. Often, now, when I feel the urge to call you, I put my head in my hands, I close my eyes long enough to faint a little, and it goes. The feeling I have for you will die; it will die, as all useless things die. Gradually the determination not to write to you again is building up inside me. What have I to lose from you that might not just as well be lost immediately? (Reflection of a woman who has an occasional glimmer of sense.)

  My sexual springtime was put back ten years by my mother's exaggerated frankness. One wonders which is better: to leave children in the dark about sex, or to show them things as they are before 'guilty conversations' have yet corrupted them. Both ways end in disaster. When the revelation comes too early, as I know from experience, it retards sexual development. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, the couples I met filled me with repulsion because of the act. The mere thought that a man might speak to me made me bristle. Already solitary by nature, this revelation increased my shyness. If that was what all the hand-kissing, all the simpering, all the social whirl was for! Dances, social calls, casinos, I refused them all. I even pretend
ed for some time that I was engaged, so as to keep people at arm's length. On the other hand, until I was thirty I was ignorant of the psychology of sex. My mistake about you (M. de Charlus! ...) started me thinking, and in the past six months I've bought a whole heap of books on psychology and psycho-analysis. Well, now that I've read these books, I cannot help thinking that there's a certain anomaly in your life, which is the price you pay for your talent, as there is in mine. Wagner, as you know, told Liszt that if he had been happy he would never have written a note. One puts into one's art what one has been incapable of putting into one's life. It was because he was unhappy that God created the world.

  Before I knew you, I attended a lecture at the Lamartine Society in Issoudun by an obscure poetess with nevertheless a certain talent, Claude Violante, who is in reality Mlle Marie-Alix de la Roche de Villebrune, a youngish spinster of some forty-two or -three summers.The title was somewhat ridiculous: Must a great writer necessarily be a virgin? But the idea was not. This woman maintained, with plenty of scientific proofs to back her, that the more eloquently an artist spoke of a thing the less he knew about it, that many famous laureates of women, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Poe, Pierre Louys, were impotent, that d'Annunzio had certainly remained a virgin until an advanced age, that Byron was repressed, and preferred young men to women, as is evident from his odd friendships with Eddington, Niccolo Giraud, Lord Clare, etc. ... and that the real Aziyadé 'was a small boy' (the remark, it appears, is Mme Juliette Adam's); in short, that the more splendidly a writer celebrated women, the safer it was to assume that he knew them very little in the flesh. I thought of all this again as I listened to your talk on Radio-Paris. The obvious embarrassment you felt at speaking in public made me think that you were shy, and that this shyness must extend to many spheres. And this confirmed what I have always thought, guided by that feminine intuition that seldom fails: that your insistence on emphasizing the carnal act in your work was an indication that your experience of these things was limited. And as I have never understood why you persisted in denying us both an innocent pleasure - which is sheer lunacy.... Perhaps that might help me to understand a little: not only have you never dreamed, in making love, of giving pleasure to the other person [In one of the preceding volumes, Costals says: 'Our pleasure is the pleasure of the other' (Author's note).] (which is why you cannot imagine that to desire a woman is to give her a proof of love), but you yourself do not like pleasure, you do not like sex.

  There is no need for me to tell you that the less you have, the closer I, who have nothing, feel you are to me. My theory about you helps me to live. Therefore it is true.

  A.H.

  Perhaps you try to pray, and cannot. Poor, poor child, it's fantastic how unhappy one can be. All the same, how much happiness one would create, when one has nothing, with the non-happiness of one who has everything, like you!

  This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

  14

  For the next five days Costals, each night, when darkness fell, received Rhadidja and knew her.

  Save for that blissful hour, a trying time. Appalling weather, and telling himself all the time: 'Rain, disturber of assignations. She won't come. It's raining too hard.' The little room was sinister, with its walls decorated with ornamental patterns (native) almost invisible under a layer of dirt, with its pillar carved with a knife, unconvincingly supporting a battered ceiling, doomed to collapse under the first heavy snowfall. The sea of clouds floated past at window level, like waves at the level of a port-hole; above them the snow on the peaks, like foam above a raging ocean. He always hoped that one morning the mountains would have disappeared, as mirages did not far from there; but no, there they stupidly remained. Sitting in this room which the kanoun entirely failed to heat (never within living memory has a fire been known to give out any heat in North Africa), a blanket over his legs, a scarf round his neck, Costals tried to work; and eventually, tucking himself up in bed fully dressed, he continued his paper-work there. ('Nothing but mistakes! Nothing but mistakes!' Rhadidja would exclaim on arrival, looking at all his crossed-out drafts.) His relations with the landlord, a great patriot and a certified brigand, were an additional ordeal for him, because of the efforts at cordiality he had to make. For although the fondouk had the advantage that one could come and go without anyone being the wiser, Rhadidja was liable to be noticed. Hence, to avoid a fuss - she maintained that her parents knew nothing of her behaviour - the necessity to soft-soap the patriot a bit. If the price of pleasure can never be too great, it is nonetheless fairly steep. If it sometimes forces us to restrain our arrogance, if it teaches us to make a concession or two, that is the measure of its power.

  As soon as he arrived in Morocco, Costals had written to Solange. He wrote to her again from Tighremt, a letter which he would post in Marrakesh in a few days' time. Generally speaking, as regards letters, he was exactly like a child - sweating over them as he never did over a page of one of his books, because he never knew what to say in them; or else putting down anything that came into his head as long as it filled up space; dropping them and taking them up again, like a cat with a mouse; and finally giving up the ghost on the pretext that he had told enough lies for one day. What, then, is one to say of his letters to Solange? He wrote them out of a sense of duty: already the torrent of oblivion had begun to flow through him. He had reached the end of this woman as one reaches the end of a cigarette; she had served her time. Whenever he thought of his bad behaviour towards her, it was as though he were pulling at a dressing: it 'pinched', and began to bleed again. But the rest of the time, no pain at all. However, he had made up his mind to soothe Solange, conscientiously to keep that little flame alive.... He affected an extreme tenderness in his letters: protesting too much, like a husband; alas, 'a long speech is not a long love' (St Augustine). In the event, these letters were not so long. He cut one of them short on the pretext that the bus was waiting to take it to the post. In the middle of the other his fountain pen ran out of ink, and it's so tiresome writing in pencil. In both of them, full of self-congratulation, like a businessman paying his debts, he emphasized how astonishing it was that he should be writing to her at all, pointing out that he was writing to no one else at the moment, that he had put all his friends into cold storage. With marvellous dis-ingenuousness he wrote: 'And yet you complain!' He felt some regret at having had to do what he had done to her, but no remorse. Why had she wanted him to marry her? (Why had Andrée wanted him to take her?) He was like a motorist who is grieved at having run someone over but cannot help saying to himself, in all good faith: 'Why did he throw himself under my wheels?'

  On the day of his departure for Marrakesh - he planned to stay six or seven weeks afterward in the Sous, and then in another sector of the Atlas - a few minutes before Rhadidja left him, he said to her:

  'You know I'm very fond of you.'

  'I know.'

  'I think I've said everything I wanted to say to you. And you, have you nothing to say to me?'

  'No....'

  There was no ill intent in this 'no', which was merely a simple and sober expression of the reality - that she could think of nothing to say to him. During these six days Costals had heaped kindness (and money) upon her. He had given her a proof of no ordinary kind, if not of love at least of 'something', by not allowing himself to be put off by her disease. He had promised her that he would do whatever was necessary to see that she was given the best possible treatment by the doctors. Nevertheless she had nothing to say to him. When she had left, he gave a sort of shudder; not a shudder of grief but a shudder of amazement: 'Incredible ... incredible....' Yet it is better to receive no gratitude for something that deserved it, than to see someone (nothing is more embarrassing) show gratitude out of all proportion to the little one has done for them, and that with bad grace. Then he sighed - a sigh of relief that their meetings in the fondouk should have gone off without a hitch. The inveterate clandestine lover, each time he leaves a love-nest, each time he is f
inally parted from a mistress, each time a further stage in his life comes to an end, is wont to sigh: 'Another flagrante delicto avoided!' A bittersweet compound of melancholy and relief, like cool wind and raw heat on the seashore. And his motto might be: 'As long as it lasts!'

  'Are you Pierre Costals the writer?' asked Dr Lobel, physician in charge at the Marrakesh hospital. 'Do sit down. You'll forgive me, I hope, but my profession is all-absorbing ... and then, we become such savages here ... anyhow I must confess that I've never read any of your books.'

  That's all to the good,' said Costals, with an insolence that was for once unconscious.

  'But one of your friends has talked to me a great deal about you.'

  'H'm.... In that case I foresee the worst.'

  'M. Richard, a professor at the lycée in Rabat. But you mustn't think I haven't read anything of yours. I remember a particularly stimulating article, in which you made an eloquent defence of the Eiffel Tower.'

  'What! ...' said Costals, outraged. 'I've never done any such thing.'

  'Come, come, don't you remember? Three or four years ago. There was a press campaign at the time in favour of the demolition of the Eiffel Tower. You wrote an article pointing out that, whether one liked it or not, the tower was part of the common inheritance of Paris.'

  'It's possible that in the course of an article I may have remarked incidentally that these sudden journalistic indignations against the Eiffel Tower, or the Trocadero, were nothing but snobbery, sheer ballyhoo, if not rather suspect. But I've never devoted an article to the Eiffel Tower,' said Costals with restrained vehemence. That he should have published eight books, forged out of his flesh and blood, and that he should be known only by a casual sentence in a newspaper column, and whose sense was distorted, at that - how typical of the relations between writer and public! And yet it was quite natural that a doctor should not have read his works; doctors have other things to do. Nevertheless everything would have gone better if Lobel had had the slightest idea who Costals was. As it was, the latter glided gently, by a familiar process, from the fact that Lobel had not read him to the presumption that Lobel was a dismal nincompoop. The power of doctors, not only over our bodies but over our minds, is so great that we have a tendency to consider them unworthy of it. Our whole life depends, or may depend, on them; this makes us judge them severely; it is as much as we can do to allow them different tastes from ours, whether literary, political, erotic or gastronomic.