Amor meus continuuus,
Tibi languor assiduus,
Amor tuus suavissimus
Mihi sapor gratissimus …*
I was searching for the further significance of these four lines when Hyacinthe appeared before me completely naked, begging me to flagellate her. She had in her hand the scourge of a canoness: seven cordlets of silk in detestation of the seven deadly sins, with seven knots to each cord in remembrance of the seven ways of mortal failure.
“The seven cords of the viol!” she said, smiling strangely. “The roses will be the drops of blood which flower in my flesh.”
Hyacinthe had no more modesty than any other woman of her race, but only penitential ardour could explain her boldness in displaying herself before me entirely nude, without any attempt to use her hand to veil the sexual secrets of her scarcely-nubile body. Her body was so youthful, so utterly frail, of such Athenian purity of form, as graceful as an unconscious Eve, that my heart quailed at the prospect of bloodying its innocence.
Nevertheless, I obeyed her. Blood-red lines and spots stigmatised the shoulders of my lover, and her buttocks, and her back. Some of the stinging blows strayed towards her belly and the candour of her frightened breasts.
She fell to her knees, hands joined together although her arms were outspread and lifted. She bent her back, but raised her pale head in excitement, crying out whenever the flail was slow to descend: “Again! Again!”
I am sure that she had the illusion of being an earnest martyr, of receiving a thrashing worthy of Henry Suso or de Passidée, who were found in their cells having fainted in a stream of blood while tattered shreds of flesh clung to the iron spurs of the heavy martinets which had fallen from their weary fingers in spite of their determination to suffer untiringly. In fact, I had been as clement as I could, desiring to satisfy her caprice but not to pollute with scars a skin whose integrity was so dear to me.
“Again! Again!”
She looked up at me with eyes en route towards ecstasy, eyes whose whites already ate away at the radiance of the pupils like an eclipse. Within the partially-occulted iris, a cruelty which was not the executioner’s sparked the mad glimmering of little lightning-flashes and sharp-pointed flames.
All of a sudden, she came to her feet. Her arms fell about my neck and she collapsed, dragging me with her into an unforgettable abyss of voluptuous excess – and we dwelt in its utmost depths forever.
*My love [is] continuous,
For thee languor [is] incessantly present,
Thy love most sweet [is]
For me a most pleasing savour …
THE RINGS
After that crisis of bitter debauchery we perceived in our exhausted faces the ironic expressions of those who have nothing more to desire from one another. We hardly spoke any longer. Hyacinthe sang softly and insistently, laid low by virtue of having emptied, to the very last drop, the golden chalice of Babylon.
These days of disenchantment afforded me an opportunity for careful reflections. I perceived all the dangers inherent in our mysticism à deux, and I repented of having associated a woman with products of the imagination which were so disconcerting to reason and to corporeal equilibrium. I felt that the more I had desired to elevate my lover in intelligence and in the experience of love, the more pleasure she had taken in falls and somersaults. She had the artistry and the audacity necessary to conclude and confuse all upward thrusts with a downward thrust, following the dictates of her own nature, which was evidently heavier than the air of spirituality.
It seemed to me that because she was always lying in wait for my gestures and my opinions, in order that she might ingeniously conform to them, I had in the end succeeded in imposing upon her essence none but negative notions. Like some Fakir who could empty a gourd by the magnetism of his stare, she drank the very thought from my expression, contradicting in advance that which I intended to offer, in order that she might afterwards claim the merit of having been persuaded. Could she have any life of her own, apart from me? How could I tell? Very little, according to her own account – and I believe that it was true, for she never manifested any original desire, and the responses of her inner self seemed to be entirely determined by the immediate sensations which she experienced by means of intellectual and sensual contact with my personality. If the shock of such a contact was too violent, the fibres of her being became deadeningly congested, her resonance mute, and I felt that she was no closer to me than some obtuse animal capable of nothing but sterile imitation.
That was what happened after the night of the flagellation. She fell once again into barrenness, equally devoid of physical desire and spiritual love; her flesh utterly indifferent once more. I found myself helplessly forced to come full circle, to renounce the project of mystical ascension; corporeality had become, in the wake of my experiences and my observations, both the means and the obstacle, the motor and the brake, of superhuman elevation.
Given that I had made a mistake, there was nothing to be done save to return the woman to her natural state, and to resume on my own account the ordinary course of a life without indiscreet aspirations. Our paths undoubtedly lay in different directions: we could not possibly organise for ourselves a perfectly ordinary, honest and mediocre existence; our eternal destiny was all or nothing – and only the final parting now remained.
One evening, I knelt down beside the divan where she was perpetually laid down, eyes unfocused, lost in a dream. Discreetly, with no intention other than to arrange its folds aesthetically, I had undone her evening-dress along its entire length. Seething about her naked body, the material simulated the foam of that wave which, having carried Hyacinthe to where she lay, would now perhaps carry her away again. With child-like curiosity I watched her breathing, trying playfully to excite some revolution in the confined undulations, suppressing with my open palm the rebellion of her belly. Her breasts fled, disappearing like magnolia blossoms covered by the snow. I amused myself by following with my eye and my finger the course of her veins, which eventually lost themselves, like rivulets of sap among the golden efflorescence of jonquils and marigolds.
“Do you like this amethyst?” she asked me, plucking an old ring from her finger. “It’s oriental, isn’t it? I found it in my jewel-case, underneath a pearl necklace.”
She got up, nonchalantly readjusting her dress by reengaging several of the hooks and eyes. Then, having emptied out the rings from her jewel-case on to a piece of black velvet, she lined them up, turned them towards the light, and tried them on her fingers.
“Do you always enjoy being in the country, Damase? For myself, I would like to look again upon that great drawing-room where we first met, and see all my sisters – pale girls uncoloured by the ages – and return for a while to the graceful chorus. And I would smile at you, Damase, as you passed along the length of that ancient tapestry. …”
The room seemed to me to be full of funereal shadows. I opened the window; looking out into the night, I saw further than the night; listening to the silence, I heard more than the silence.
“The pre-emptive clarity and sonority of the matinal bells which guided me towards Hyacinthe; the understanding of our souls anterior to the union of our senses; the first spoken words of my lover, so ironic and so highly rational from the moment that she had moved towards me; her insistence on saying that although she was living, she was also as dead as an apparition woven in wool and coloured by dreams. Living! I believed it, and so I dedicated her to Pain, while she dedicated herself to the joy of exploring the sensations of sexual novelty. I acceded to that double desire, which is not at all contradictory, because I wished to magnify her soul; I deflowered her, as was required, in order that she might flourish – was all of that an illusion? When she confessed to me: ‘It’s not much better than eating a peach’ but declared nevertheless that she wished to enjoy further contact with me – and when her feelings were hurt by certain over-ingenious ways of love-making – and when she prayed – and when she wishe
d to understand – and when sacrilege exalted her – and when she jeered at me, defying me to untie the knot of her complexity – and when I put her on the torture-rack – and when she wept – and when we climbed, moist with the sweat of sin, the obscure mount of Calvary – and when I thrashed the impertinence of eternal femininity upon the nakedness of her back – had she not all the gifts ‘essential to life’?”
The voice of silence replied to me: “All the gifts essential to the dream.”
I came away from the window. Hyacinthe was still playing with her rings. She was very pale; it seemed to me that rays of light were traversing her body – that body which nevertheless gave honest testimony to my hands of its evident reality and carnality.
I was cold, and I was afraid. Powerless to oppose the dolorous transformation, I saw her going to rejoin the company of those irresolute women of whom my love had tired. I saw her becoming once again a phantom, just like all the rest.
The Angels of Perversity Page 16