They felt united, brought close together by the communicative pressure.
“Oh, my boys, that ceremony has slid fire into my blood! Whose turn is it tonight? He won’t have any cause to complain!”
“What, darling! You’ve already forgotten that I made love to you last night?” observed Marius’ baritone voice.
“It is, indeed, me who will taste the supreme delight!” Choumaque admitted. He turned to his friend and proposed: “However, Marius, if your flesh is needling you excessively. I’ll cede you my turn. Egotism is a vile sentiment, which is not acceptable in a country so favored by the benefits of Caresco...”
It was, in reality, a residue of egotism that caused Choumaque to abandon his rights so generously. The excessively easy joy wearied him, even though he had the resource of extracting from artificial forces the physical energy sufficient to respond to Madame Môme’s ardent bounty. The mental energy that stimulated desire was already lacking. He looked back almost with regret to the distant hours when that same mistress, so beautiful now so imperfect then, arrived after an anxious wait with lies in her eyes and implausible excuses on her lips. With what a frenzy of belief he had accepted her explanations! With what burning desire he had taken her in his eager arms!
“Arrange things as you wish,” conceded the High Priestess, ever accommodating. “Even if your desire, encouraged by the recent spectacle, has fixed upon one of my pupils, tell me and I’ll send her to you. As for myself, I won’t have any difficulty finding a substitute for you.”
“I’ll gladly substitute!” said a voice behind them.
They turned round, but their volte-face was not yet complete when, at the sight of the new interlocutor, they threw themselves face down on the ground in frantic prostration.
Caresco! He was before them, in disguise, pale and haggard, his arms folded. The yellow silk of his costume and the symbolic cross of slaves did not prevent them from recognizing his almightiness. He had coiffed himself with flowers that veiled his face.
“Glory to the Superman!” they cried, without daring to quit their position.
The potentate smiled with pride and satisfaction. His habitual humor seemed to be completely modified for the moment. His ordinarily dull, fugitive, somber, disillusioned gaze, traversed by brief flashes of imperious ferocity, was presently imprinted with a radiant cordiality, which did not exclude the stamp of his constant vanity.
“Come on, get up, my beloved subjects! Don’t stand on ceremony! Leave these ridiculous affectations to others. Today, I want us to be four good comrades, chatting together as if we were freshly emerged from the old Latin quarter—or Montmartre, if you prefer, my dear Marius...”
They got to their feet, surprised by this declaration, Marius swelled up with pride at the flattering comment. Madame Môme blinked. She rediscovered the Caresco of the clinic, who had interrogated her gravely about her amours before opening her belly. Choumaque, more independent of observation and less directly petrified by the surgeon’s autocracy, noticed that he was stammering as he spoke, and that he seemed to be having difficulty getting his words out, like a paralytic testing the ground before setting his foot down. He also wondered what trap the extraordinary amiability of the fake slave might conceal.
The Superman’s physiognomy had just changed, however. His character, similar to those overheated countries where storms darken almost instantaneously, was manifestly excited. He seized a tree-branch that was overhanging he path and twisted it in his hands, making the improbable force of his muscles, naked to the shoulder, stand out.
“I tear everything apart! Everything! Will I not end up tearing myself apart, in order that my people can carry each of my shreds successively in triumph? What a magnificent funeral the funeral of Caresco-Superman, Caresco-God, would be! There would be a hundred days of mourning, I tell you! For the first time, my people would know tears, and I’ve calculate the hydrostatic pressure the torrent of flowing tears would produce in falling from one meter seventy, the medium height of my subjects’ eyes, to the ground. Do you know that it would yield a force of twenty thousand horsepower for ten days—enough to power the factories for that lapse of time! What energies wasted! What elements of happiness annihilated! But now I think about it, isn’t it better if I don’t die? I’m only ninety years old! I’ve scarcely begun to live.”
Bewildered and terrified, they looked at him, swollen with dementia; but a slight whistling in the air made him raise his head. It was an airplane carrying a family—a crimson sterile spouse, a blue fecund mother, and green adolescents—passing overhead, returning from the ceremony toward the hearth. Joyful songs descended from it, supported by the chords of a huge harp employed by the gracious gestures of the mother.
“See them fly, the ugly brutes! Are they happy! To whom to they owe it? Answer me, Choumaque—to whom?”
“To their destiny...” But the philosopher caught the fearful glance that Marius darted at him, and continued: “To their destiny, which is you, Superman, obviously.”
Caresco was not listening. He was following his own train of thought, without drawing any inspiration from the environment. Tears came into his eyes.
“Oh, my friends, my dear collaborators, what sadness can equal mine? What lamentations resonate in a heart like mine! I have beatified these people to the point of stupidity! I have gorged them on enjoyments to the point that the concept of unhappiness has become an idea impossible for their brains to entertain. On the other hand, do not humans suffer, most of all, from having given birth to speculative science? I have suppressed that education, and if I were able to discover in the human brain a region particular to that elaboration of ideas, I would open the skull of every one of my subjects in order to remove it…yes, I would accomplish that circumcision on every new-born mind!
“Alas, I have had to content myself with reducing my ideal creature to the animal level, which is to enjoy by satisfying the instincts. Who would dare to claim that I have not succeeded completely? These brutes eat as I wish, and reproduce when I wish, selectively…I am, therefore, more powerful than Nature, am I not? Since Nature nourishes creatures with substances that are always identical, and permits the generation of flawed individuals! Am I not the creator? Am I not the Other? Admit it, my beloved philosopher! And you, Môme—what do you think?”
Without waiting for the replies, he burst into sobs, increasingly stumbling over his words.
“Those poor people—what will become of them when I’m dead? Who will take charge of regulating their lives, as I have done? Who will operate on them? Who will discover the human monad? That doubt causes me abominable anguish! When I think about it, I’m tempted to blow up the island with myself, in a frightful cataclysm, like the one that swallowed up a corner of the world in order to permit this one to spring forth thirty years ago! Can you see that, my beloved subjects! What a melee of bodies and matter, and me! What an admirable sterilization I’d achieve by that colossal fire! And it would be so easy to provoke…so easy! A simple button to press…my masonries disintegrate…the volcano roars, everything explodes…for we’re dancing on a volcano, my dear friends! Ha ha ha!”
Immediately, livid, terrible and drooling, he started dancing. His laughter screeched. As if he were fearful of having allowed too much to be heard, however, he came back to them, and put a finger over his mouth, while accentuating, with a frown, the pleats of his eyebrows, traced in kohl. With an unusual mobility, his face became somber again.
“Don’t say anything!” he commanded. “For if I did that, I’d like to die with the virgin of my choice. There’s one I find infinitely seductive. Do you know her? Her hair is the sun, her cheeks are flowers, her laughter crystal! She’s my queen—she’s your queen! What do you think she’ll think of me? Will she love me?”
He had resumed his expression of amorous fatuity, all his features relaxed by the certainty of soon being adored by the young woman. He picked a dahlia and tore it to pieces with staccato gestures. Then silence fell, no
one daring to reply to him and he no longer speaking. The embarrassment was beginning to become strained when a group of men came toward them. By the negligent fashion in which they wore their long violet togas they could be distinguished as scientists at a distance. That apparition seemed to render Caresco a glimmer of reason. He went toward them, while they, after having recognized him in his borrowed costume, prostrated themselves.
“Well, Messieurs you aren’t at work? Is not happiness, which is idleness for others, work for you? I asked you for a report on the meteorological conditions of our island ten years ago; where is it? And you, Monsieur, what’s become of your new valve? And you, your cultures of myxomycetes? You’re slacking, Messieurs; I’m very discontented with that!”
He accompanied them, intoxicating himself with his commandments, having become practical and positive again, in the service of science, the benefactress of his people. He soon disappeared, leaving the three interlocutors where they were.
“I don’t believe I’m being too adventurous in affirming that he’s mad,” Choumaque declared.
“Mad—do you think so?” said Marius, dubiously. “For thirty years we’ve seen him like this. In thirty years, a madness has finished evolving, old chap, if I can believe what I read...”
“That’s possible,” concluded the wisdom of Madame Môme, “but me, I agree with Zéphi; it’s incontestable that the Superman is soft in the head.”
CHAPTER XXII
Marcel had fallen asleep during a play at the Athenée, a theater in Paris, of which the ingenious combination of the cinematograph and the phonograph had offered him the spectacle.
After the emotions of the funerary day, with the memory of the pleasant walk he had taken in the company of Miss Mary, and the sweet promises that had been exchanged between them when they had lost sight of their friends—an entirely chaste walk and entirely pure promises, provoked by the threat they sensed hanging over them—he had he had come home, confused by the young woman’s new change of mind, and had gone to bed. Then, as he had been unable to sleep, as his excitement, whipped up by the visions that he had had before his eyes, kept him agitated between the sheets, making him search for places there that did not burn like contact with overheated flesh, at the limit of his resistance, he had gone to demand a little appeasement from the utilities panel. For a moment, he had placed his temples on the conductive wires of dreams, and the whole night had gone by in delightful transports in which imagination played the sole role, and brought him the presence, in unsuspected attitudes, of Miss Mary, the courtesan Carabella and even Madame Môme.
So, when, on awakening, Marjah had told him that it was time to go to the Temple of Fecundity, where the blonde mothers were waiting, the young man, by virtue of an entirely natural transition of fiction to reality, had seen reappear with the sentiment of his dignity the proud, chaste and serene silhouette of Miss Mary. Then, he envisaged in all its deplorable consequences the critical problem that the pirouette of the slave, now departed, had left behind him. He told himself that he was already weary of the pleasures of the Temple. He would rather conserve in the young woman’s heart the place that he had already acquired, attracting if he must the anger of the Superman.
He resolved to submit that casuistic anguish to the resolution of his kindly master’s common sense. As soon as he was dressed, he went into the corridor to press the button advertising his presence, and to confide his name to the mouth of a resonator, which, in its turn, would transmit it to the philosopher’s ears.
When Marcel had been announced, there was a tumultuous stir in Choumaque’s room. Madame Môme had spent the night there, in obedience to the invariable pact of amorous alternation, and the barked name surprised her just as she was trying to give her second lover a further proof of her valiant tenderness and professional savoir faire. The philosopher shoved her away.
“Get out, quickly! Go, quickly! I don’t want my pupil to catch us!”
“Why? He’s seen many others!”
“Let’s go! Out!”
He threw garments at her pell-mell, and made her run around the room, disheveled and bewildered. And as there was no door, he ended up engulfing her behind the artificial rock framing the basin of the bath. He lay down again, and waited for her to finish panting, hurling a few insults at her. Then he shouted “Come in!”
“What! You’re not up yet?” Marcel demanded, going to dart a glance at the sun and observing that its height indicated approximately nine o’clock.
“I slept late,” Choumaque replied, yawning and stretching in order to put on an act. Then, sniffing the perfumed air that the ventilators, he added, with feigned indifference: “We’ve woken up to opopanax today! Is that really opopanax? Tell me—your sense of smell is more discriminating than mine.”
“No, it’s Peau de France,” Marcel estimated, “but forget such trivia, my friend. Oh, if you only knew what’s happening in my heart…!”
“I have a slight suspicion...”
In a heart-rending tone, the young man related the extent to which he was supersaturated by the pleasures of the island, how, in a country where everyone was able to believe that everyone else was at their beck and call, he had to go and serve as a stallion in the Superman’s stud. Certainly, at the start, he had done full honor to his musculature; he had not even had to have recourse to the genetic serum—but now he had had enough! Did not that exigency surpass the most arbitrary military service and taxation of other lands? They were burdening him with a duty of insemination! And what if the blonde mothers didn’t please him, after all? And what if he had reasons for not satisfying their caprices?
While he listed his reasons for not obeying: his love for Miss Mary, and the certain sadness that child would experience in believing him detached from her—the loquacious Carabella had told her everything—exposing his distress with a exaggeration that belied the infidelities of previous days, Choumaque listened gravely, caressing his bicolored beard and hair with a golden comb and polishing the pink varnish he had just put on his nails with an ermine fur.
“So, what do you think, my dear Choumaque?”
“I think, my friend, that you’re damnably lucky to encounter obstacles before your desires. If my theory of equilibria is no lie...”
“Oh, I beg you, Choumaque, don’t lead us astray in your philosophy! I’m asking you for practical advice. Is it necessary to continue to betray the woman I love? Is it necessary for me to rebel against Caresco? What will come of it?”
“Nothing good, certainly, in one solution or the other. My personal sentiment is that. if the love of one woman is already something cumbersome, that’s all the more reason for the love of a colony ought to tire you out! It’s up to you to decide whether your loins are solid enough…or whether your fear of the Superman is less than your affection for Miss Mary. Furthermore, as I know you, the two sentiments are bound to predominate by turns.”
“I beg your pardon, Master, but you’re mistaken! I love Miss Mary far more than I fear Caresco! And I’d gladly overthrow the latter!”
“No, he can’t be overthrown. And then, don’t speak so loud!”
Deep down, Choumaque rejoiced to see the spirit of revolt lighting up in his pupil’s eye. He had feared that the solvent mores of Eucrasia might already have completely perverted his character—worthy, to be sure, and full of generous impulses, but which continual depressions had weakened fatally and led to the concessions of egotism. Go on! There were resources there!
And to convince himself of it more fully, he told him about the operation that he had witnessed surreptitiously in the company of Marius. He did not spare any realistic detail in depicting the sadistic madness that was translated in the surgeon by visceral ablations.
“And these people tolerate such horrors! These stupid people don’t rebel, don’t break their chains?”
“What chains?” Choumaque observed. “They don’t believe there are any; they don’t feel them—or, at least, they’re so sugar-coated that they�
�re content to lick them. They have faith in their Superman, in his metempsychosis, and that’s sufficient for him to tie their hands, to cloud their minds, to drive those magnificent creatures all the way to the operating table in delight! Faith has always led to the most improbable immolations, as witness the Christians, as well as to the most abominable atrocities, as witness the Inquisitors. In the name of faith, certain negroes at the beginning of the century roasted their relatives on a spit and ate their tongues with pious delectation. In the name of faith, the people of the Red Land allow themselves to be slaughtered by the English. In the name of faith, Miss Mary herself has come here, toward a mystery, and will stay here, corrupted and castrated.
“In sum, faith is encrusted stupidity, and Caresco, with his new religious system, only had to bring back and exploit ideas as old as human stupidity—which is to say, immemorial. And you, my poor friend, who are uttering such a cry of protest at this moment, I wouldn’t give you a year living among these women, these flowers, this music, these perfumes, these serums and these fluids—and that’s a generous estimate—without arriving at the same cacothymy as the people surrounding us, without accepting to lick the sugar of your chains, in the company of Miss Mary, dispossessed of a pound of flesh and a pint of her blood. Don’t be astonished—you’re already following that downward path. I’ve acquired the conviction from certain little signs that escape you. Anyway, it’s inevitable. It’s human.”
“Never! Never!” Marcel shouted, more violently. His whole frame was vibrating. To affirm his determination, he punched a malassite motif decorating one of the bedposts, and broke it.
A cry of anguish responded to his vigorous action. Madame Môme had just emerged from her hiding place, showing herself immodestly nude and ruffled, the symbolic trace on her abdomen displayed on the polished ivory of flesh like a sign approving the words that had just been pronounced.
Caresco, Superman Page 27