I see some new ladies have arrived? Lord Hopeless caught my questioning gaze.
‘Ignatia, my sister’ said Albine Veratrine, and as she said the word ‘sister’ she winked at me out of the corner of her eye and burst into hysterical laughter.
Then she suddenly put her tongue out at me and I saw with a start of horror a dry, red streak all along its length.
Like some kind of poisonous thing, I thought - why has she got a red streak? A poisonous thing.
And from a distance I heard the music again.
‘Oh, oh Sue,
You’re so true ...’
And I could tell, even with my eyes shut, that they were all nodding to the tune.
Poison, I dreamed, and awoke with a cold shudder.
The hunchback in the patchy green doublet had sat a girl on his knee and was peeling offher clothes with angular, jerky movements as if he had St. Vitus’ dance. He was listening to the rhythm of some inaudible music.
Dr. Trembler rose heavily to his feet and began to loosen her shoulder-straps.
‘Between one second and the next there is always a boundary: it does not exist in time; it is a mere thought, it is like the meshes of a net,’ I heard the hunchback say, ‘and the totality of these boundaries is still no time at all, and yet we think them, once, again, and again, and a fourth time ... And if we live exclusively within these boundaries, discounting the minutes and the seconds, unaware of them any longer -then we are dead, we are living in death.
You live fifty years: school takes ten: that leaves forty. Twenty are spent asleep: leaves twenty.
Ten are spent worrying - that leaves ten.
For five years it rains: leaving five.
For four of these you worry them away before tomorrow so you live for one year - perhaps!
Why do you not wish to die?
Death is beautiful.
It is quiet, always quiet.
And there are no cares for the morrow.
It is the silent present you do not know, no past, no future.
There is the silent present you do not know! The hidden meshes between the seconds in the network of time.’
The hunchback’s words sang in my heart and I looked up to see the girl sitting naked on his lap. Her shift had fallen down, but it revealed no body, no breasts - only a phosphorescent fog, from collarbone to hip. And he plunged his fingers into the fog, which rattled like a bass string, and a clatter of limescale pieces poured out.
Death is just so, I felt, just like limescale.
Then the centre of the white tablecloth billowed slowly into the air like a great blister, and an icy draught blew the fog away. Glistening strings came into view, running from the girl’s collarbones to her pelvis. This creature was half harp, half woman!
And it seemed to me that the hunchback was harping a refrain of death and the pox upon her, resembling a bizarre hymn:
‘So Pleasure turns to pain,
Sure it’s not joy again!
You long for pleasure, seek it out;
But all you find and all you pick Is pain.
And if you’ve never had that itch You’ll never have the pain to scratch.’
And a great desire for death suddenly overwhelmed me as I listened, and I longed to die.
Yet deep down inside a life stirred, a dark force. Life and death stood opposed in threatening posture: that’s what’s called paralysis.
My eye never flickered, the acrobat leant across me, and I saw his drooping jersey, his greenish cap and his elaborate ruff.
‘Lockjaw,’ I tried to stammer through my teeth - in vain.
As he passed from one to another looking slyly into our faces, I knew that we sat in a state of paralysis: he was like a poisonous fungus.
We had eaten poison fungi, along with Veratrum album, the white Hellebore.
All of them spectres of the night!
I tried to cry out loud, but could not.
I tried to turn my head, but could not.
The hunchback in his whitened mask stood up gently, and the others followed him silently, two by two: the acrobat and the French girl, the hunchback and the human harp, Ignatia with Albine Veratrine, and with a tripping cakewalk step they vanished, pair by pair, into the wall. Albine turned just once towards me, and made an obscene gesture.
I tried to turn my eyes or close the lids - I could not. I remained staring at the clock on the wall, watching the hands creeping round the dial like thieving fingers.
And that vulgar couplet rang in my ears again.
'Oh, oh, Sue,
You’re so true,
Trala, trala, trala Tra - lalala - la.?
while the Basso ostinato rumbled on beneath:
‘So pleasure turns to pain,
And if you’ve never longed for it you’ll never feel the pain.’
It was a long while before I got over the poison. The others are all long since buried.
They were beyond saving, I was told, when help came at last.
But I think they were only seeming dead when they were buried, even though the doctor says you don’t get tetanus from poison mushrooms; poisoning is different. I suspect they were buried as living dead, and I find myself thinking with a shudder of the Amanita Club, and that spectral hunchback, the Spotted Arum with his white mask.
‘You see the pedlar over there with the matted beard? They call him Tonio. He’ll be coming round to our table in a moment. Buy a little gem from him, or a few Rupert’s Drops - you know, those little glass tears that shatter into fragments like salt in your hand when you break off the narrow tail. A mere toy, nothing else. And have a look at his face, and his expression.
Don’t you think there’s really something very unsettling about the way he looks at you? And in that toneless voice, as he cries his wares. Rupert’s Drops, fine-spun ladies’ tresses. When we go home I’ll tell you the tale of his life - but not here, in this dreary pub: outside, by the lake in the park.
It’s a story I’ll certainly not forget in a hurry, even if he hadn’t once been my friend, though you see him now just as a pedlar, and he no longer recognises me.
Yes, believe me, he was a good friend once, when he was still alive, when he still had his soul and hadn’t yet lost his reason. And why don’t I help him? It really wouldn’t do any good. Don’t you think you shouldn’t help a poor blind soul find its own way back to the light in its own mysterious way - perhaps to a new and a brighter light?
He’s really nothing more than a soul searching for his memory, Tonio here selling Rupert’s Drops! You’ll see. But let’s get away from here.
It’s magical, how the lake shines in the moonlight, isn’t it! The reeds over there by the bank, so dark and sombre. And look at the way the shadows of the elms rest on the water, over there in that inlet!
Many’s the time I have sat on this bank here of a summer’s night, listening to the wind whispering in my ear and wheedling its way through the rushes, while the waves splashed sleepily against the tree-roots, and thinking my thoughts down into the secret marvels under the water, where the gleaming fish stir their pink fins as they dream: old, moss-green stones, drowned branches, dead wood and shells shimmering on the white gravel.
Wouldn’t it be better to lie dead oneself down there on soft pillows
of gently swaying weed, and to forget all this wishing and dreaming?
But I was going to tell you about Tonio.
At that time we were all living up in town: we called him Tonio, though he has another name.
You’ve probably never heard of Mercedes either. She was beautiful: a Creole, with red hair and such strange, bright eyes.
Where she came from I can’t recall now, and she has been gone for a long time.
When Tonio and I met her, at a party at the Orchid Club, she was the mistress of a young Russian fellow.
We were sitting on a veranda, as the distant, limpid tones of some Spanish ballad wafted out to us from the ball-room.
The ceiling had be
en hung with garlands of tropical orchids of indescribable magnificence. Cattleya aurea, the empress of flowers which never dies, Odontoglossas and Dendrobias sprouting from pieces of rotten wood; white, luminous Loelias, like paradise butterflies; cascades of deep blue Lykastas. And out of the thickets of these intertwined blooms there came such an intoxicating scent that I can still sense its pervasive odour when I picture the scene that night, sharp and clear in my mind’s eye, as if reflected in a magic mirror: Mercedes reclining on a rough, bark-covered bench, her figure half concealed behind a living curtain of violet Vandeas, her small, expressive face quite hidden in shadow.
None of us spoke a word.
It was like a scene out of the Thousand and One Nights: I was reminded of the tale of the Demon Princess, who would go to the cemetery by moonlight in order to eat the flesh of the dead on the graves. And Mercedes’ searching eyes came to rest on me.
A dull recollection welled up inside me, as if once, in far-off times and in a far-distant life, a pair of cold, glittering snake-eyes had fixed me, in a way I would never be able to forget.
She had her head tilted forward, and the fantastic black and purple-speckled tongues of a Burmese Bulbophyllum had become caught in her hair, as if to whisper to her of some novel and outrageous depravity. I realised how possible it would be for a man to give his soul for such a woman.
The Russian lay at her feet. He too was silent.
The party was a strange affair, like the orchids themselves, and full of odd surprises. A negro came in through the double doors carrying a jasper bowl from which he distributed those glittering glass teardrops invented by Prince Rupert. I saw Mercedes say something to the Russian with a smile, and then he took one of the Drops between his lips, holding it there for a while before offering it to his mistress.
At that very moment a huge orchid sprang away from among the dark mass of foliage behind and reared up, displaying all the features of a demon with greedy, thirsty blubber-lips, no chin, but with glittering eyes and a bluish gaping throat. And this frightful plant-face quivered on its stem, swaying to an evil laugh as it stared at Mercedes’ hands. My heart froze, as if my soul had had a glimpse of the abyss.
Do you suppose orchids can think? At that moment I thought they could. I felt, as one with second sight, that these fantastic blooms were gloating as they floated over their mistress’s head.
And she was the Orchid-queen, this Creole with the sensuous red lips, shimmering satin-green skin and hair the colour of dead copper. No, indeed no, orchids are not flowers; they are satanic beings, creatures who show us only the tips of their antennae, who merely mimic for us their eyes, lips, tongues in swathes of colour that numb the senses, so that we shan’t guess at the existence of the horrific serpent beneath, which, invisible, hides its deadly threat in the realm of shadows.
Intoxicated by the numbing perfume we at last reentered the ballroom.
The Russian called out his farewells to us - and in truth so they were, for death was waiting behind him. The following morning a boiler-explosion blew him to atoms.
Months went by, and his brother Ivan had become Mercedes’ lover, an unapproachable, arrogant fellow, who avoided all contact with the rest of us.
They lived in the villa close by the city gate, and had cut themselves off from all their acquaintances to become submerged in a wild, passionate love-affair.
Whoever saw them, as I did, walking through the park in the evening locked in each other’s arms, lost to the world as they conversed in low tones and taking no notice of anything else, would realise that an overpowering passion of a quality quite foreign to us ordinary mortals was holding these two bound to one another.
Then, suddenly, came the news that Ivan, too, had met with an accident. He had apparently taken a balloon flight quite out of the blue and had, inexplicably, fallen from the gondola.
We all thought Mercedes would never survive the blow.
A few weeks later though, in the spring, I saw her ride past me in her open carriage. There was not a trace of the pain she had suffered in her expressionless face. What went past me resembled more an Egyptian Bronze, with its hands resting on its knees and its gaze focussed on another world, than a living woman.
This impression persisted into my dreams: I saw the statue of Memnon with its aura of superhuman stillness and its sightless eyes riding in a modern equipage against the background of a bright dawn, on and on through a glowing purple haze and a swirling mist towards the rising sun; the silhouettes of the wheels and of the horses elongated and oddly distorted, flickering through the dew-damp streets like violet-grey shadows in the pale, early-morning light.
I was away on my own travels for a long time after that, seeing the world and experiencing all sorts of marvellous encounters, yet few of them impressed me so much as this. There do exist particular colours and shapes out of which our souls will readily spin waking and living dreams: the sound of a street grating underfoot at night, the plash of an oar, a stray whiff of perfume, the angular profile of a red roof, raindrops falling on our hands - all these quite often constitute those words of magic that can recall such images to our senses. A deep, melancholy tone reverberates like the echoes of a harp in such sensations of memory.
I returned home and found Tonio as the Russian’s successor with Mercedes. Dazed with love, his heart and his senses captivated, he was chained hand and foot, just like his predecessor. I often saw Mercedes and spoke to her: there was the same fathomless love in her too. Sometimes I could feel her gaze resting inquiringly on me.
It was just like that time during the night of the orchid.
Tonio and I would meet occasionally at Manuel’s - a mutual friend. And one day I found him sitting there by the window, a shattered soul, his features distorted like one who has been through torture.
Manuel took me silently aside.
It was a remarkable story he told me, in haste, and in a low whisper: Mercedes was a satanist - a witch! Tonio had found this out from letters and other papers he had discovered in her possession. And the two Russians: they had been murdered by her, using the magic force of imagination, and with the aid of Rupert’s Drops.
I read the manuscript myself, later. The victim, it says there, will be destroyed at the very same moment that the little glass phial, hidden in the mouth and then passed on in a moment of deep emotional intensity during Mass in church, is snapped in two.
And both Ivan and his brother had found just such a sudden and horrific end.
We comprehended Tonio’s stark despair.
Even if mere chance were to be held responsible for the success of the sorcery, what an abyss of demonic love lay yet in this woman! A sensibility so exotic and intangible that we mere normal mortals are constrained to sink into a morass of incomprehension if we dare to try to light our way down into these fearful riddles of a cankered soul with any sort of preconception.
We sat then, the three of us, half the night through, listening to the old clock eating the time away, while I searched and searched in vain for any words of comfort: in my brain, in my heart, in my throat. And Tonio’s eyes hung unwavering on my lips: he was waiting for the lie that might yet numb his senses.
As Manuel - behind me - took the decision, and opened his mouth to speak, I knew it, without having to turn round. Now, now he would say it. He cleared his throat, his chair scraped on the floor - but then silence came again, ages long. And we felt the lie palpating its way across the room, uncertainly reaching out to touch the walls, like a headless and insubstantial shadow.
Words then at last, mendacious words, dry and withered.
‘Perhaps ... perhaps ... she loves you ... differently from the others.’
Absolute silence. We sat and held our breath: if only the lie should not die. It tottered, ready to fall, on jelly-feet: another second, and ...
Slowly, but slowly, Tonio’s expression began to change: the phantom of Hope!
The lie had become flesh!
Should I tell yo
u the end? I shudder to put it into words. Come on, let's stand up: there’s a cold shiver running down my back. We’ve stayed here too long sitting on this bench, and the night is so cold.
Look: fate fixes us with its eye like a snake - there is no escape. Tonio descended once more into a mad maelstrom of passion for Mercedes. He walked at her side, he was her shadow. And she with her demonic love held him trapped in her embrace, as an octopus of the sea clasps its victim.
And on Good Friday fate stepped in. Tonio stood, that stormy, early April morning, before the church door, bareheaded, his clothes all torn, and with clenched fists was trying to stop people going in to Mass. Mercedes had written to him, and this had been enough to tip the balance into madness. They found her letter in his pocket: it asked him to give her one of Prince Rupert’s Drops.
Ever since that Good Friday Tonio’s mind has remained imprisoned in ultimate darkness’.
Coagulum
That eccentric old fellow Hamilcar Baldrian sat lonely at his window and gazed through the panes at the autumnal gloom.
Puffy, dark blue-grey clouds slowly changed shape in the sky, like a shadow-play lazily orchestrated by a giant hand somewhere in the invisible distance.
A blank, sad sunset gleamed through the frosty haze.
Then the clouds sank away to the west, and the glittering stars eyed their way through the mist.
Deep in thought, Baldrian got up and paced the room. What a difficult business this was, calling up spirits. But had he not followed all the instructions to the letter, just as Honorius prescribed in his great grimoire? Had he not fasted, watched, anointed himself and recited St. Veronica’s little supplication everyday?
No, no, it had to succeed. Man is supreme on the earth and the powers of Hell are subject to him.
He returned to the window and waited, waited until the cusps of the moon, dull and yellow, thrust up above the frozen branches of the elms.
Then, trembling with anticipation, he lit his old lantern, and started to put together a variety of strange objects he fetched from a cupboard and out of a trunk: magic circles, green wax, a stick surmounted by a crown, dried plants. He tied everything together in a bundle, placed it carefully on the table, and, quietly reciting a prayer, started to undress, until he stood quite naked.
The Opal, and Other Stories Page 16