Caresco, Superman

by André Couvreur

  Children, covered in flowers and bearers of luminous torches, walking at a brisk pace, ran ahead of processions of courtesans, whose light veils, scarcely posed on their naked bodies, seemed ready to evaporate. In the air, gitons were buzzing, fluttering like butterflies of delightful and infinite hue. A pell-mell of a thousand family groups, surging around a bend, waved great luminous palm-fronds, which enthused the firmament. By contrast, their shadows, on the ground sonorous with their footfalls, were dancing as far as the eye could see, and their superb silhouettes echoed the cadence of a song of joy.

  The long beards of sterile spouses slicing through the brightness of scarlet togas; the breasts of fecund mothers jutting beneath vaporous vestments; blonde hair mingled with flowers; the solid figures of laughing, agile children—everything filed up with the redness shed by the torches. Courtesans searched the area for their lovers, or consulted light mirrors suspended from their belts in order to smile at their beauty. More airplanes landed, going to place themselves, still lit up, in two scarlet ranks that were two stripes of fire from which, at intervals, multicolored fireworks soared, setting the velvet sky ablaze and embalming it with intoxicating essences.

  Soon, the fragments of the cortege joined up, the colors combined; the fête was disciplined into a perfect order before the façade of the Palace of Sensuality, the stone gestures of which were magnificently fulgurant. Then the splendor moved, the songs resumed, and the host began to snake piously, like an enormous luminous stream coming from some celestial spring, whose dissolved individualities no longer existed.

  Choumaque and Marcel had placed themselves at the last column of the peristyle in front of which the procession passed. Sculptural enlacements hanging over them kept them isolated in relative shadow. They were thus able to distinguish all of the physiognomies that were filing along the colonnade in ranks of ten to go into the temple. They marveled at the nudities splendidly apparent beneath the transparency of polychromatic veils; at the faces enlivened by the glare of the brandished torches; at the torsos, gracious in the gitons, broad in the spouses; at breasts, hard in the courtesans, delicate in the virgins; at rumps, firm in the fecund mothers, undulant in the nubile; at the shoulders, powerful in the Sowers, gracious in the adolescent; at the Form, in sum, radiant in all of them, even the slaves, two ranks of whose yellow tunics framed the flow diversified by the distinctive hues of the castes.

  Harmonious bodies, desirable bodies, bodies evocative of fecund Life or sterile Sensuality passed by in thousands upon thousands, all as impeccable as one another, all as vibrant with the same unanimous adoration. Between the compact groups, gaps appeared, occupied by flamboyant allegories surrounded by dancers. Thus, in the tumult of footsteps and songs, they saw the symbols of creation file by: the Mysteries of Life that the funeral of Mirror-of-Smiles had already showed them, but appearing this time in a dazzling phantasmagoria.

  In the distance, all the way to the sides of the hill reddened by the lights, the procession formed a sumptuous trail of flames, a wave of gold, from which departed, toward the depths of the immensity, dusts of light, which came together to reproduce in the sky the images on the ground. In consequence, there were two spectacles, one on the real ground, the other in the enigma of space.

  Then, a final apotheosis irradiated. It was the coronation of Life: two naked bodies celebrating the fecund act, on a cart drawn by twenty lions, whose manes were stroked by naked virgins. To honor them, the voices and the instruments swelled, more enthusiastic still. Thuribles swung by nubile young woman, to whom luminous flowers were thrown, immediately extinguished, sent delightful scents toward the couple, whose nostrils filled with them voluptuously.

  Miss Mary, drunk with exaltation, appeared amid that delirium. Her body, beneath the diaphanous vapor of a floating pink peplum florid with white lilies, was writhing in the same undulations as her companions. Her hair, raised in a head-dress and crystallized with diamonds, had glints of coppery yellow and mat gold. Behind her, ten paces away, the High Priestess was conducting a battalion of dancers by means of gestures, in the first rank of which, Carabella, never taking her eyes off the neophyte, was matching the rhythm of her arms and legs to the perfect movements of star-like bayaderes.

  “There she is!” Marcel murmured, suddenly breathless.

  She passed very close to them, brushing them. Choumaque, with a rapid movement that Carabella could not see, her eyes being momentarily hypnotized by a celestial apparition, grabbed her abruptly by the wrist and drew her into the shadow. Then the wave flowed on, dominated by the enormity of domesticated elephants and airplanes in the form of gigantic birds, crested by an orgy of women and flowers, human and vegetal corollas fusing in the light. A thousand dancers of both sexes, a hundred musicians playing fulgurant trumpets and tambourines, sistrums, flutes and cymbals, the tail of the cortege, soon separated them from the High Priestess, who had had time to give them a sign, and from Carabella, who had not seen anything.

  “Oh, Miss Mary! Miss Mary!” stammered the young man, clutching her to his heart.

  “Marcel! I’ve finally found you again!” she replied, scarcely defending herself from further caresses.”

  “Let’s go in!” said Choumaque, pushing them toward the august threshold of the temple, with the end of the cortege was now invading. “We need to find Môme again now.”

  After twenty marble steps, the immense hall appeared, paved with a brilliant mosaic, garnished with a circular gallery sustaining the crimson ceiling speckled with golden vibrions and ovules, with huge alabaster pilasters from which scarlet flags studded with precious stones flew. At the back there was a blaze of omnial light displaying an immense stage, with four sets of violet-carpeted steps, at the top of which a single black-clad man, standing on a gold entablement, was officiating: the Superman!

  Six smoky pylons, rising to his height, threw him swirls of blue-tinted perfumes, which lit him up as he passed through them, causing him to scintillate. Twenty thousand faces were looking toward him, their expressions full of ecstasy, their eyes completely fascinated, and frenzy in their flesh.

  As they penetrated into that furnace of light and adoration, they felt that no terrestrial or divine dementia, no royal coronation, no elevation of the papal tiara, had ever equaled that moment of frantic devotion. The man in black had just made a gesture, which the people followed. All attention was fixed on an immense screen supported by two ivory columns, on which images succeeded one another, animated with such artistry that one might have sworn that they were real.

  And it was Life that the people then adored: Life in all is phases, from the moment when the male and female seeds, having agitated separately for a moment, came together in impregnation, and then fertilization, to form the human egg, to which being succeeded. One could follow their evolution, see the affirmation of sex, see the man and the woman grow, see them unite in sexual intercourse. At each transformation, music fell from the ceiling, translating the particular sensibility of each mode, from the soft melancholy twilight of conception to the impetuous intensity of creative caresses.

  At times, the people fell silent, and only the murmur of emotions rose up and dissolved into one agonizing voiced of passion. At others, when the harmonies became sharper, bosoms incapable of moderation exhaled their delirium in cries; then, a long frisson of amour passed through the assembled flesh.

  What charmed the three neophytes most of all, however, was to feel themselves in the same perfect unison of intoxication, and to celebrate Life like the others. It seemed to them that the colored perfumes escaping from the enormous pylons in blue, green and red swirls changed their sentimentality as they breathed them in, enabling them to enter into a communion of profound sensuality with the soul of the crowd. Their faces were inundated by tears. Their breath was amplified, as if at the summit of a mountain of delights. Without having learned any of the words, they sang the melody that everyone was singing. Their voices had soft and sweet vibrations; their hands joined; their featur
es filled with a magnificent joy.

  Marcel and Miss Mary had no time to reflect on the intoxication that took hold of them, to wonder how they were submitting to it. They were traversed by the tremors of an invincible passion; and they knew that the frissons were impersonal, that they would not have been able to extend the sentiment to their companion. The seed evolving before the Redlander’s eyes, and which ultimately became a man, really was The Man; the predominant ovule whose changes Marcel was following, which was transformed into a woman, was, from the very beginning, The Woman. And if they appropriated a designation, if they paid homage to anyone, it was to the black-clad dominator in the bright light. Caresco alone absorbed their frenzy; on him alone was their overexcited adoration concentrated. He was God.

  Suddenly, that magnetism dissipated, and silence fell. The evolution of Life had just been completed. The omnial glimmers went out; everything fell back into darkness. They grasped the verity again and were able to look at one another. One place in the Temple was still resplendent, like a hole in the light, but infinitely distant, where the vault faded away. Something that could not be distinguished was happening at that point. A mass movement was produced in the crowd, carrying them in the direction of the stage.

  Standing there, draped in a black velvet mantle fringed in gold and sown with diamond vibrions, the Superman, extending his carescoclast like a scepter above still-quivering viscera, was officiating. They had difficulty making him out because the perfumes that filled the atmosphere formed a mist interposed before him. But in that pageantry he seemed taller, his features more sharply sculpted with violent domination—which did not prevent them, under the suggestion of the intoxication, from finding him divinely handsome and superbly young. His every movement, brought out the golden luster of his costume and caused the diamond vibrions to glitter. All the light was concentrated on him, creating an aureole about his monstrous presence, while obscurity filled the rest of the Temple. Zigzagging sparks ran over his brown beard, over the curved ridge of his nose, over the jewels of his diadem. Only his eyes remained insensible to such an orgy of clarity; they did not catch the rays; an emptiness as unfathomable as his thoughts subsisted there, in the orifices of the orbits.

  He extended his golden instrument hieratically above the bowl containing the viscera, and proclaimed: “I am the Superman! I celebrate Life!”

  An ocean of acclamations unfurled in response to his voice; forty thousand arms reached out toward him.

  “Glory to Caresco! Gratitude to the benefactor!” howled the crowd, its members falling to their knees.

  Then the Superman made a sign toward the inferior stage. Choumaque, hoisting himself up on tiptoe, saw the troop of geniuses—artists, engineers and scientists—in their violet togas, crowned with flowers. He recognized some physiognomies that he had seen before in the Palace of the Brain when he went through it on his way to undergo the operation that had rejuvenated him. They were all imprinted with the universal exaltation. In the first row, Zadochbach’s lips and Hymen’s shock of hair were displayed, confounded in adoration.

  Behind them, along the steps, there was a brilliant cascade of prostrated backs, descending as far as the third stage, where the sterile spouses, fecund mothers and the most notorious gitons and courtesans were similarly prostrated, bowing their heads to the floor, carpeted with red velvet. The fourth plane formed a vaster oval reserved for sacrifices, where the symbols guarded by nudities had been deposited. After that, there was the anonymous and operable crowd.

  At an order from the potentate, six nubile young women stood up, abandoning the pylons where, as magnificent vestals, they had maintained the fire into which, at intervals, they had thrown the substances of perfumes expanding amid showers of sparks. The first three were swinging fuming gold incense-burners; the other three were armed with tridents, which they were brandishing in the air. They headed, passionately, toward the Superman. At intervals, their rhythmic strides parted the mantle of their hair, allowing the sight, as they went up the steps and came into the light, of their nacreous flesh, the curve of their hips and the proud emergence of their pink-tipped breasts. They were six incomparable masterpieces of creation, as similar as art-works cast from the same mold, endowed with the same simultaneously powerful and delicate type common to the entire race.

  Having reached the Sovereign Officiant, they bowed down and kissed the hem of his mantle, then got up again and advanced toward the sacred vessel. The polished arms of some plunged in the tridents, spearing the viscera, while the others presented their incense-burners. The human fodder, oozing crimson liquid, emerged, traversed the gap, reached the flame and sizzled with a troubled swirl, from which three doves escaped.

  The crowd howled: “Life is not extinct! Nothing dies! Fire purifies life!”

  Caresco had taken hold of the vessel, now dispossessed of its organs but still filled with blood. He raised it to his lips and drank a mouthful, and then, with a circular gesture, scattered the rest. The crowd converged upon that rutilant rain in order to collected the manna. Hands extended. Bodies convulsed, mouths grabbed. Miss Mary received a drop on her cheek and uttered a vibrant cry, which was a cry of joy.

  Then, horrible things supported on delightful shoulders filed along a winding path traced along the steps and concluding at the Superman’s feet. Through a tumult of flesh and perfumes, a riot of light and music, passed the monstrous fruits of the imagination, science and genius of Caresco. They were deformed beings fitted with apparatus juxtaposed with their shreds, all the attempts made to reduce the normal, complicated and suffering individual to the primal individual, simple and devoid of dolorous organs: a demented conception of a state bordering perfection.

  First, the half-man captain, planted on his pedestal, presented himself. The surgeon had rid him of his remaining arm, with the result that the machine-man now presided over all the functions of his life with simple thrusts of the head delivered as required to a panel placed behind his occiput. Each pressure activated an ingenious omnial mechanism in the service of his rare needs. Beneath his aluminum mask and his leather carapace, one sensed that he was radiant with joy.

  An enthusiasm saluted him, and its joy mingled with the shrill stridency of his reformed larynx.

  Then, no less acclaimed, came the hermaphrodites, men changed into women and vice versa, displaying their sexual organs; the Thought-reader; the talking animals; an elephant whose trunk had been replaced by the tentacle of an octopus; then the guardian goose of the Brain; then deformities without number, tumors adapted to healthy locations, hollows and lumps, heads without skulls, skulls without brains, and even parts of individuals sustained by an artificial life. Finally, the supreme tableau was the appearance of the last surviving human monad: a fragment of trunk that could be seen to be breathing, with difficulty, and a quarter of a head without a skull, almost devoid of cerebral matter, devoid of eyes, ears and nostrils—all replaced by pieces of flaccid skin—with a single orifice, which was the mouth. In any case, when it arrived in front of the Superman, it burst like a punctured balloon, collapsed and died.

  “Glory to the Superman! Glory to Caresco!” the delirious crowd was still howling.

  “Isn’t it admirable, Marcel?” murmured Miss Mary, her hands extended toward the man in black. “Into what Heaven have we been transported?”

  “Yes, we’re in Heaven!”

  It is, however, necessary for us to return to earth, Choumaque observed to himself, regaining a slight grip on positive verity, like one of those drinkers in whom the sentiment of reality reappears in the midst of their drunkenness, reanimating a gleam of reason in their mental confusion.

  He made a heroic effort to maintain his ideas in that state of normal equilibrium. He understood that if he allowed himself to be impregnated for much longer, he would share the fate of his friends, and that the folly was reaching them from the troubled perfumes emitted by the smoking pylons. New, more compact swirls were escaping at that moment; the vestals were reanimatin
g the fires of Passion.

  He grabbed the hands of the young people and dragged them toward the exit. He ran, crushing their wrists. Purer air suddenly inundated them, as soon as they had patted the heavy curtains at the entrance.

  They breathed in delightedly, feeling their brains relieved of an enormous weight. Now the lights were setting the Temple ablaze again; the fête was resuming. Harmonies rose up tempestuously; dances were deployed, causing all the flames to sway, exulting twenty thousand radiant, almost naked bodies caressing one another.

  Emerged from their fever, they gazed at the spectacle through a veil of transparent smoke, like a distant, remote fairyland that was foreign to them.

  “We were in there!” said Marcel. “And we were joining in with their actions, their songs, their hypnotism! What power drew us away, then? What power has now disengaged us?

  “And how admirable it still is,” remarked the young woman, with a hint of regret.

  “Breathe deeply of the air that the night sends you!” Choumaque was content to order. “Breathe the air of salvation!”

  Madame Môme appeared. Her garments were in disorder, her jewels were missing and her peplum was ripped. It seemed that she had been obliged to make a violent effort to get out of the crowd in which her profession retained her. At intervals, she raised to her nostrils a little gold flask incrusted with emeralds; at each dose of essence that she breathed in, her eyes became more lucid, and the fever left her cheeks. She had to draw the energy necessary to her courageous act from that receptacle.

  “Follow me, quickly!” she said, finally.