“At the age of one year children can walk and have a full set of teeth; at two, they are taught to swim; at three, the art of flying in the air in no longer unknown to them; at six, they are nubile and acquainted with matters of amour. Finally, at seven, the supreme Master decides their fate anatomically: sterile or fecund. For a boy: giton and subsequently slave, or capable of fatherhood. In the latter case, he is returned to his hearth, sent back to his originating mother and his putative father.”
“That’s all very well,” said Choumaque to his companions, when the phonograph paused, “but I perceive that the rights of the intellect are entirely neglected in that education.”
“What purpose would it serve?” Marjah observed.
“But are great minds not necessary to plan, modify and maintain all your machinery? I’ve seen superb workshops in which young men are employed who are of a generation anterior to mine. When they have gone, what will become of all your discoveries?”
“I don’t know,” said Marjah, with a gesture of indifference. “It’s probable that after them, things will progress of their own accord. Caresco protects us!”
That eunuch is making use, without suspecting it, of the sad king Louis XV’s “After me, the Deluge!” Choumaque said to himself. If the pleasures of philosophy could extract those cerebral cells from their somnolence, he would certainly be a partisan of the optimism of Leibniz.17
They were beginning to feel tired and hungry. Temporarily renouncing a visit to Puericulture, they called a halt and sat down next to a clean spring whose banks were carpeted with moss. A utility distributor fitted into the rock fortunately chanced to be within reach. They demanded alimentary pills, which relieved their hunger.
Marcel was sitting next to the young woman. He admired the curve of her muscular foot, imprisoned by a pink sandal. Miss Mary, perceiving the insistence of his gaze, calmly pulled her robe down over her ankles.
At that moment Marjah came over, holding out the box of fruits.
“Here’s your dessert, neophyte. Carabella entrusted the care of making you the gift to me.
“Offer them to my companions, High Priest.”
She was astonished that the eunuch did not obey her request, and only allowed her to select two fruits when she wanted three. Soon, however, she was no longer giving any thought to that observation. She had been illuminated by a sudden delight.
A great ardent dawn rose within her, and with its first rays, a sentiment of profound joy expanded her new soul. Soft spring-like effluvia liquefied the winter snows beneath which her soul had been shivering. She felt a consistent wonder, and her struggles and distresses, still so recent, melted in the universal warmth.
It seemed to her that she had begun to live again, and all her life attached itself to the person of Marcel, whose voice, in speaking to her, had just begun to murmur a delicious harmony. She would have liked to resist, to experience less charm in contemplating the broadness of his shoulders, the luster of his beard, and suspecting the kind of frisson that their contact would cause to pass through her—but she could not.
What had Miss Mary become, then? Or, rather, what person other than the true Miss Mary had hatched out within her?
All that, the provocation of her brilliant pupils told the young man. She pulled up the robe that she had lowered shortly before, in order to show a little more of her ankle. Flushes of warmth rose to her cheeks, and she rejoiced in that as something that ought to render her more seductive. She laughed on hearing Choumaque, whose stomach was replete, belch agreeably. She approved his proposal to go directly to explore the regions of Sterility.
An intimate animation was pushing the philosopher toward that libertine excursion, for he was counting on encountering Madame Môme there. Indifferently, Marjah acquiesced, and took them toward their craft, which was waiting for them.
As they set off, they noticed that the phonograph, still attached to them by the fluid, had taken a place at the back. The machine continued talking, giving details about puericulture.
“Oh, no! It’s boring us!” Choumaque admitted.
“Press it on the foot, my dear Choumaque, and it will leave us tranquil.”
The philosopher pressed down on the pedal, as Marjah had prescribed. He felt a slight shake in his arm. It was the cicerone, freed from obligation, which was slipping into empty space, uttering a puppet’s screech: the protest of its mechanical soul, broken down, perhaps dead.
They took off, flying over the palaces they had just passed through. In the distance, the sea was sweeping the shore of red porphyry with curt waves. Its hue, blue at the edge, was modified further from the shore, becoming green, with undulations, and a gray tint to its atmosphere that signified bad weather.
Choumaque, who had picked up a powerful pair of binoculars, observed a furious tempest. He expressed his fear to the High Priest, who reassured him.
“It’s true that the weather is abominable out there at sea—wind and thunder, doubtless a cyclone—but our physicists deflect the atrocity away from our shores. If you want to be convinced, pick up that microphone hanging in the nacelle and put it to your ear, in such a way that the sensitive surface is directed toward the place where you want to hear sounds...”
Choumaque had scarcely raised the apparatus to his ear than he took it away again, going pale with terror. He had heard, dominating the whistling of the tempest and the roar of the waves, the desperate screams uttered by the passengers of a doomed ship that the waves were engulfing.
“The poor people! Is no one going to send help to them?”
“If one worried about the miseries of others, one would scarcely have time to enjoy life,” the High Priest replied, with his customary indolence.
In spite of the mercy that was like a reliquary of her other personality, Miss Mary deemed herself infinitely pleased to be there, next to Marcel, sheltered from the wrath of the heavens. She possessed a new egotism in savoring safety in the face of danger.
All three of them were glad to hear the eunuch affirm that it was always thus. At midnight, the meteorological indications having advertised the storm, the scientists had launched reserves of omnial fluid into the atmosphere, which had kept away the mists accumulated on the horizon. The climate, always mild, was manufactured in the island’s factories.
It was the first time that Choumaque had really congratulated himself for having accompanied his friend. To be sure, his Stoicism would have maintained his indifference to the engulfing waves, but why die? After all, life had agreeable equilibria. He admired himself, slim in his violet doublet. He passed his hand through his hair, and observed its gilded abundance proudly. His legs, although still a trifle twisted, were padded with solid flesh. He rejoiced in thinking that Madam Môme would not be insensible to their musculature, as well as the contrast between his russet hair and his black beard. He felt triumphant in his new youth.
They reached the regions of Sterility after having flown around the Palace of Sensuality and its dependencies. The airplane carrying them was part of a fleet responsible for transportation to that part of the island. It went, almost of its own accord, to deposit them under a hangar, in which a hundred similar craft, blue and prettily quilted were waiting, their wings folded and ever-ready to depart, attached to an immense central support where they were automatically accumulating the force necessary for aerial journeys. A few effeminate slaves with pretty beardless faces—former gitons who had passed the age of serving the pleasure of others—were cleaning them summarily, for nothing got dirty in this land. In addition, they were checking the stability of mechanisms that were always perfect. They were playing, making merry and singing as they carried out their tasks. Their symbolic crosses, like bloodstains on their yellow tunics, reminded Choumaque of the flags of field hospitals.
After all, are they not amputees? the philosopher said to himself.
The neophytes had got down from the airplane, their limbs rested by the aerial trip. An equivocal sentiment of curiosity urged them
to hasten their visit to this mysterious corner of the island. Choumaque and Marcel, fashioned by the morality of a nation in which the consequence of modesty is libertinage, were perhaps the only people in this country to shiver at a naughty desire, rather than submitting indolently to the tranquil vice of others. Undoubtedly, numerous licentious spectacles had already blunted their sensibility, and they could foresee the moment when, blasé themselves in consequence of the abundance and facility of amours, they would no longer be able to appreciate immorality and would consider it as one of the essential vulgarities of the country. For the present, however, their long continence, Marcel’s ardent youth and Choumaque’s rejuvenation, imagined in advance the scenes that they were about to see. As for Miss Mary, she was floating in an inalterable contentment, à propos of nothing at all.
As soon as they were out of the hangar their astonishment was awakened. They found themselves in front of an adorably lush flower-bed ornamented by a group similar in its volume and subject-matter to the one they had admired that morning at the Fecundity. The resemblance ended with the size of the monument, however, for the subject glorifying sterile sensualities was quite different. A form in flesh-colored onyx, lying on the ground, was disposed in its nudity in such a way that one could have no doubt about its impotent androgyny. Above it stood a couple, a sterile husband and a fecund mother, bearing the same uniform visage common to the beauty of the race. The hermaphrodite was extending two fingers toward them, with a lovely gesture of amorous languor, holding a cantharid insect18 whose wings, by virtue of a play of omnial light, formed a flamboyant torch in the daylight.
They went on, unimpressed by the grace of those frozen figures, expecting more realistic images. They did not take long to encounter them, on the frontispiece of the Temple of Sterile Lusts, whose fresco featured, with an unceremonious crudity, the science of voluptuous gestures. And when, after having parted the curtains of their archways similarly decorated with light paintings, they penetrated into an immense hall of unusual luxury, filled with perfumes, incense, music and light, they were obliged to stop, stunned and dazzled, hardly daring to look.
Precious metals, with droplets of precious stones rutilant on the walls, splashing the long ardent mauve silken awning, descended from the ceiling like the folds of a great cage of amour. All around, numerous beds stood out, erected on altars spangled with red and gold; and young people, surrounding them, were studying voluptuousness there. There was an entire orgy of flesh, inclined rumps, radiant muscles, firm breasts, in ardent tones of life, which were mingling, palpitating and rubbing together there, savoring intoxication. On the floor, covered with a profound carpet ablaze with bright colors, naked bodies were writhing. Spirals of splendid hair were evaporating in fabrics and jewels, in a mist of incense. At intervals, gasps burst forth, as vibrant as the screams of beasts in revolt.
Marjah scanned the spectacle with his indifferent gaze. “You’re working hard today,” he said to a woman who, interrupting an entirely pedagogical surveillance, came swiftly toward them. He had just recognized Madame Môme.
She did not pause to listen to him. Shaking her amethyst peplum, braided with two stripes, which grated as they moved, she precipitated herself upon Choumaque, parted the hands with which he was veiling his face, and kissed him gluttonously on the mouth.
“Look at Zéphi! How nice and dainty he is! And bicolored too! Isn’t that piquant? I knew that he had the makings of a handsome man in him. Your cloth has been recut, hasn’t it, Zéphi? And I find you young and magnificent. You’re thirty years younger and thirty times better looking! Turn round Zéphi, so that I can admire you!”
She made him pirouette. Dumbfounded, the philosopher hitched up his belt and let it happen, without, however, losing his critical sense, not neglecting to observe the casuistic debate that was unfolding within him.
He was astonished not to feel the thrust that he had expected propelling him toward his former mistress. The display of flesh automatically obedient to the custom of pleasure, the somewhat artificial fervor that reigned over those practices, the tranquil gaze with which Marjah contemplated that labor, Madame Môme’s truly overexuberant welcome, and also the recent memory of what Caresco had said when the potentate had admitted to him that his subjects were merely puppets linked to a keyboard whose secret strings he pulled at will—in brief, the regimentation and coordination of facile sensualities—rendered him perplexed, hesitating between his dogmas and the attractions of amour.
Now or never, he said to himself, is the moment to prove to myself the supremacy of mind over matter. If I can resist the advances of this impetuous mistress, tomorrow, my joviality will not be diminished thereby, and my intellect, richly provided with phosphorus, will once again permit me subtle flights toward the pure conceptions of morality. If, on the contrary, I succumb, experimentation having proved to me a long time ago that one can’t burn the candle at both ends, it will be the worst situation for me: that in which, an old, exhausted oarsman, I’ll have expended all my strength in rowing my boat toward Cythera, so that none will remain to me for appropriate dissertation. But there’s the rub: are the most beautiful theories of the soul worth as much as the possession of a sumptuous rump, I ask the creator of the doctrine of equilibria?
As if she had divined that rude combat, the diabolical high priestess insisted more ardently, gluing herself to the irresolute individual, making suggestions to him with a skillful fluttering of her tongue.
“How happy we’re going to be, Zéphi!”
“Evidently, But the happiness of the Sage does not reside in sensuality. On the contrary, it depends on a healthy chastity...”
He weakened. Effluvia ran through his marrow. He granted himself that he had become young again, and that his transports would doubtless be less dearly taxed than if he were still old. As his eyes blinked, and as uncertainty no longer made him carry out his customary gesture of hitching up his belt, Madame Môme understood his defeat. She agreed with Marjah that he would replace her in supervising the practical exercises.
And there was delirium. Having put her arm around Choumaque’s waist, she drew him away impetuously, like a spirited mare. She seemed to be in haste to get it over with, hurrying the visit, scarcely stopping to give details, not insisting on any explanation, replying to Marcel’s questions that he would have time to find out more later. In any case, she completely neglected the others, overly occupied as she was in pinching, tickling and needling her Zéphi, who felt a communicative warmth not devoid of an admixture of pride.
Thus, they virtually fled the Temple of Sterile Lusts, going past the habitations of the Palace of the Courtesans, which were as many marvels, like a gust of wind. There, superb creatures of the ardent brunette type special to prostitution were awaiting the pleasure of lovers, not very frequent at that hour. Some were yielding to the pleasures of bathing in a vast pool framed by a Byzantine colonnade in green stucco, rippling with solar rays. Their harmonious bodies could be seen cleaving the limpidity of the deep water. Their sparkling mouths, while they enjoyed themselves in the water, were more attractive, purer and more perfumed springs that the waves in which they were frolicking. Others were sitting or lying on carpets placed on the grass in front of the peristyles of their dwellings, occupied in the refinements of toilette. Holding mirrors in their hands, they were affirming their health and recreating the effects produced by various dispositions of their hair, retained by combs of gold, pearls and diamonds. Or they were making admirable fabrics sparkle, draping themselves therein, trying out hieratic gestures, modifying the harmony of their stances, always with the objective of beauty. Then, thus adorned with iridescence and color, they danced in groups, throwing flowers, waving bunches of flowers that linked their quadrilles. Others, finally, were coupling, twittering their pleasure.
But that was only a rapid visit for the High Priestess drew them, ever more hastily, toward the Palace of Gitons. And what they saw repeated, very nearly, the spectacle that they had just tra
versed. Alongside the dwellings ornamented with flowers wedded to the originality of the sculptures, on the freshness of green lawns, in the glitter of odorous water to which marble steps licked by moss led down, and in air of a marvelous limpidity, propitious to the deployment of wings, there were the same languorous distractions, the same concerns for adornment and feminine coquetry.
Now, Marcel and Choumaque contemplated those mores unfurling without experiencing anything but a slight astonishment. Miss Mary was only admiring Marcel.
“Does this interest you, my Zéphi?” said the High Priestess, driven to an extreme incandescence. “But if you knew how many surprises the tenderness of your Môme still has in store for you…!”
They had arrived at the terminal point of their excursion. Rocks rose up there that closed off the region of Sterility naturally. A small Ionian temple stood there, to which one gained access via a gentle slope bordered by myrtle and jasmine bushes. The High Priestess pointed to it with her finger.
“Come into Marjah’s house,” she said to Choumaque, pushing him into the path that climbed toward an incomplete phallus, which, standing on the frontispiece, constituted the emblem of the High Priest’s command.
Marcel and Miss Mary remained alone. An equal intoxication inflamed them.
The young man took his companion’s hand and took pleasure in squeezing the fingers of the huntress Diana. She responded by shivers that, after having run through all her nerves, communicated their vibration to the arms that guided them. Marcel felt his flesh, long deprived of amour, numbed by the succession of significant events that had occurred in the previous month, waking up under a breath of troubling impressions. His vigor palpitated at the memory of recent spectacles. He saw the courtesans again, mingling their young and beautiful bodies, playing on the grass, among the flowers, in the limpid waves, bruising the hardness of their rosy breasts. All those violent aspirations he now concentrated on the virgin whose hand was entwined with his own.
Caresco, Superman Page 17