by Theo Varlet
“I went along the edges of forests, sat down beside the sea at sunset, and combed the long hair of my thighs with my fingers, while night fell, sparkling with stars—until the lunar hours of the sirens.
“The sirens are all blue—do you know that? It’s swathed in a nacreous squamous fur that they frolic with the fat tritons with lobsters’ tails. Poor tritons! But it’s naked, in their true azure bodies, that they love one another two by two, the sirens, in moonlit grottoes. Eah! I violated two sirens, stark naked, before the phosphorescent sea, on one equinoctial night.
“I’ll tell you, on the syrinx...”
All of a sudden, he asked: “Have you any wax?”
“We can buy glue in the town, when we go to see the doctor.”
A sudden terror immobilized him.
“No, no! Not the town! I’m cured!”
“As you wish. We’ll ask for some wax at a farm.”
Her excitement was fading away, however; his features crumpled, sweat moistening the thick wrinkles of his forehead. He tottered.
“You’re tired,” I said. “Have a rest.”
The poor god sat down on a patch of pebbles. He crossed his legs and looked at his worn hooves with a sad smile. “What do you think? Do I need to have shoes fitted?”
His head swayed like those of people dozing in a railway carriage. I went to support him, but he stood up, abruptly tensed with grim resolution.
“The Nectar!”
This time, he drank the elixir to the last drop, and then threw the flask into a cactus hedge.
“Now, I’ll tell you...”
Feverishly adjusting his syrinx, he tried it out—but for want of wax, the pipes came apart.
“So be it, god-of-the-nectar—let’s go into the town.”
We set off again. He walked with his neck stiff, his head held high, in a somber serenity, beneath the formidable weight of imminent Destiny. His voluble speech confused fragmentary tales, sometimes fulgurating with wild and grotesque visions.
“I was young and agile! I had races with the centaurs through the forests—centaur dung, mixed with pebbles, bouncing, like slingshots of the trunks of holm-oaks and carobs; the centaurs, without stopping, launched their arrows at the red eye of the sun, which peeped, polyphemically, between the eyelids of horizontal clouds—and the gallops of our dionysiac excursions ran all over Trinacria, from one sea to the other.
“I was young, and handsome! The fauns and the sileni...”
He became excited, in his stories in which ancient liberty was doubled by that of a satyr—and seeing him, his eyes crazed, dancing and whinnying hysterically, I began to dread the approach of the outskirts of the town, the first houses of which were coming into view.
Evidently, the half-liter of caffeine, rum and cola ingested by the god was putting too much strain on his integral youthfulness, and it was necessary, before anything else, to obtain some antidote from a pharmacist.
I buttoned my own overcoat over my companion’s rhedibitory indecency.27
“To go into the town,” I breathed, and I completed the plausible accoutrement—for a foreigner—with a pocket cap.
We passed through the customs post. The tax-collectors smiled benevolently at the “forester,” whom they assumed to be an eccentric Englishman.
I pushed him into a deserted street, drawing him along rapidly.
Suddenly, though, a little girl in a red skirt and corset came around a corner with a bouquet of roses in her hand.
“Un soldo, Signor, un soldo.”
It was the catastrophe.
My satyr stopped dead and stopped in front of the little girl, who smiled at him. Then, suddenly, with an “Eah!” of frantic joy, he launched himself forward, snatching the bouquet in his teeth and the terrified girl in both arms.
I ran forward. He bit me, spitting out the roses, struggling—and, intoxicated, furious and epileptic, he escaped, carrying off the little girl, who was screaming loudly.
While, horrified, I left the implausible rape to take its course in the cowardly god’s flight, dionysiac in spite of everything, two carabinieris emerged from a side-street, whose skillful trip brought the capriped down.
It did not take long thereafter. The two avengers of outraged morality disengaged the weeping child and put the handcuffs on her odious abductor. He, heart-broken, decrepit, empty, fallen from the divine centuries—older than tobacco!—looked at me, stupidly and unreproachfully, and looked at the pipes of his syrinx, imperfect forever, scattered on the ground.
And, a ridiculous silhouette, with his flaccid overcoat and the cap dancing on his horns, my poor benighted satyr disappeared, while I repeated to myself the inept, but this time integral, sentence that would record his epitaph the following day, in the local newspapers: “Finally, the filthy satyr was taken to the police station.”
MESSALINA
It was necessary for me to stay overnight in Toulon in order to catch, at seven o’clock in the morning, the wretched little steam train that serves Porquerolles and Port-Cros—the Îles d’Or that I wanted to see again, under the glorious midsummer sun, this time.
In the meantime, my evening started badly, on a terrace overlooking the port. The excessively beautiful sunset, over the harbor bristling with masts, the gypsy violins, the white-clad quasi-exotic crowd, had steeped me in the particular melancholy of idle hours while traveling—and in the sparse poetry of the dusk, evocative of ardent colonial serenities, I felt very far away, very much alone and out of place, before my aperitif.
I had Loti in my soul, and Farrère too.28 Repelled by the attractions of the local casino or the cinemas, rendered blasé by the Old Port of Marseilles with regard to the picturesque qualities of warm streets, I yearned for impossible joys. I was ambitious to visit an opium den—rather foolishly, for I knew that that world was closed and inaccessible. To get into one without an introduction was a great deal more difficult than, for instance, hailing a seemingly sympathetic passer-by to engage him in conversation.
I was beginning to regret bitterly that the harsh certainty of wariness with regard to deception obliges civilized folk to such suspicion—and that the most intelligent are the most untouchable—when a woman brushed past me, in a subtle whiff of ether, and sat down at a table a little further away.
Pooh! A little ether-addicted whore—what was marvelous about that? Would she be any less stupid than her peers?
No matter; she interested me in spite of myself. Of the slender and sensitive type, predestined for delicate tastes, a pretty trinket to look at and doubtless also to handle, the fashionable white outfit brightened the youthful grace of her features and emphasized the charming down of her upper lip. The little whore wasn’t like all the rest.
Anyway, her or another—just as long as I didn’t feel so alone, in the voluptuousness of the all-too-lovely evening. A brief exchange of glances confirmed that she was free, that I didn’t displease her—and, still in accordance with contradictory civilized custom, I moved to her table. She welcomed me with simplicity and I immediately put her at her ease, on the footing of discreet and natural familiarity that we men so gladly grant ourselves with “women of that sort.”
I thus avoided pretentious affectations, the habitual counter to masculine arrogance. She did not even play the Parisienne. Her name was Odette, she was from a good Corsican family, and there was even a small inheritance waiting for her back there. But how could she raise the money for the journey? All her income went on clothes. So she liked “partying”? No, certainly not; she would have preferred something else—to set herself up as a milliner, for example—for the men were often so cruel and brutal. Drinking, moreover, scarcely suited her “constitution.” “And that’s bad, in our profession!” The slightest sleep-deprivation made her ill. Drugs? Oh, yes. A single pipe of opium, accepted on a dare, had made her sleep for forty-eight hours solid. Ether she sniffed occasionally from a flask, nothing much, “to settle her stomach”—and her “friend” complained, claiming that i
t made him ill.
Her voice was not unpleasant, but her torrential Corsican accent was combined with a barbaric, almost negro, syntax of words bristling with harsh dissonances. Such a contrast with her external appearance of a precious trinket, her subtle and refined animal lust, wrung my heart. Except that the naïve perfume of that savagery, enveloping the abject prejudices of her caste, slightly redeemed the lack of culture of her words and her stupidity.
A little port had got her three-quarters drunk, and I hoped for less platitudinous confidences when I took her to dinner.
There again, however, I was disappointed. Her curiosity and her pleasures were paltry or vulgar. All reading was a matter of indifference to her, except for miscellaneous facts and Fantômas, whose craziest and most inept adventures she related to me religiously. She had a horror of travel, which broke her habitual routine. About a sojourn in Tunis she was only able to tell me how repellent she found the city—that vision of the Thousand-and-One Nights!—so dirty and so treacherous for her high heels.
“Tunis, you see, is like Marseilles, except that the French there don’t have any money. The Arabs will give you as many douros as you want and voilà! But they want everything for it, and that doesn’t suit me. I had a friend who had a session with them; well, you wouldn’t believe it, but she spilled her guts. I got back to Toulon right away!”
And she always came back to her story, probably apocryphal, of an inheritance in Corsica, where she dreamed of going back to get married—the people back there thought she was “in service”—and live her bourgeois ideal of a simple, tranquil life...
At ten o’clock, to avoid the dangerous “show” chapter, I made a direct allusion to the ultimate goal of our acquaintance, and agreed without haggling the first price quoted, while adding the sacramental promise: “I’ll be very nice, you’ll see!”
In the room at the station hotel, where I had left my suitcase, there was the eternal courtesan scene. The girl, having judged me to be a good fellow, if not a mug, didn’t play up. She meekly allowed herself to be undressed, and, pleased to see me appreciating the quality of her frills, declared that I “wasn’t that ham-fisted, for a man.”
Entirely given over to the pleasure of handling her delicate underclothes and unveiling, beneath of moss of lace, youthful skin and pretty slender limbs, I gradually forgot my rancor, and the exact situation.
She was still in her chemise, standing amid her corolla of striped lingerie, gently massaging the imprints of her corset, when the professional trigger clicked,
“Give me my little present first.”
Clumsy, spoiling the effect like that! No more illusion possible; you’re just a wretched prostitute, to come out with that vile remark! Do you see in me the brutal coarseness of those who’ve “never paid a woman”? Will I, like them, take foul advantage of the law that leaves you without recourse, in view of our obscene pact, against the possibility of my refusing to pay and robbing you of a wage as legitimate in my eyes as paying for my beer of my coffee?
You’re inflicting the ridicule upon me of going in my shirt-tails to rummage in the pocket of my trousers. And that further grievance is added to the disappointment of your stupidity. Oh, you really are all the same! No flair, no delicacy. Not one who knows her trade: a good merchant of illusions, making the most of her trashy goods, putting some grace into the flourish of spreading her legs and the rush of debauchery. Even if masculine boorishness justifies your surly sabotage to some extent, isn’t it more than adequately paid for by the bitterly bargained louis?
Here, little imbecile, here it is, your louis! Bite it—it’s good. And I’m buying a pig in a poke.
But you know only too well that there’s no point in straining yourself; you know that an approximative botch of erotic functions will end, exactly like finely finished work, in the disgust of “animal triste” and the hasty decampment of the customer!
The girl had stuck her purse in her stocking, between the knee and the heel. But I forgot to take delivery. She was the one who had to wake me up from that incomprehensible whimsy, to play my ulterior role.
Passive, resigned, without even seeking to hide her indifference, she submitted to the task.
Afterwards, I expected the customary swindle. Doubtless she’d want to leave, after her hasty ablutions, if I didn’t add a little supplement to the tariff already agreed, the whole night included. For she was only thinking, during the mechanical gestures, of the fabulous opportunity that might be passing by on the boulevard, which Lucie Ether or the little Mandarine whispers to her.29
Oh, I wouldn’t have kept her! But with all her gaucherie and lack of awareness, she was as good as her word and, without hesitation, installed herself for the night.
In the secret hope of avoiding, with epidermal contact, the reiteration of “work,” she put on her chemise “because of the cold”—it’s roasting, and no breeze is coming in through the open window—and then, wrapped up at the back of the bed, against the wall, with her hair loose on the pillow, she became motionless.
I was alone, bitter and ironic, next to that sleeping flesh. My eyes wearied of following the shadows of the plane-trees on the ceiling cast by the street-lights in the square; the last sounds of footsteps died away, and nothing any longer remained to me in the silence but the whistling flight of swallows and the monotonous note of a cricket.
The whistle, the metallic rattle and the screeching brakes of an express train coming into the station woke me up. The locomotive came to a halt, wheezing in the darkness. Then there was the rumor of a crowd; talking loudly and walking briskly, the travelers were shaking themselves and dispersing; fiacres raced along the avenue.
The luminous dial of the station clock marked two o’clock. Beside me, the girl was still asleep. The black wisps of her hair partly hid her pale, crumpled, aged child-like face, her nose pinched by a churlish existential weariness. She slept, her breath imperceptible, as if dead.
The door of the hotel banged; new arrivals climbed the stairs, invading the next room, where the bustle of unpacking began.
Malignity of fate! Why that particular room, with the hotel three-quarters empty? With that ridiculously sonorous partition wall, the traditional carelessness of my neighbors and their bumbling, I was in for an hour of enforced sleeplessness. What vestimentary complications can these people have to disentangle? What odious mania is driving them to prance back and forth instead of going to bed?
My only recourse was to employ the pastime that I had to hand.
Discreetly, in order not to demand my due, and to leave the game some grace, I attempted to stir that bestial and exhausted sleep, habitual in whores, who seem to be sleeping off the aftermath of an orgy. My caress explored the delicate leg, the boyish hip...
First she grunted, recoiling in annoyance; then professional instinct relaxed her muscles and disposed her submissive flesh for “work”—still asleep, arms extended, eyebrows furrowed.
Pooh! What insipid pleasure can be extracted from such passivity?
I abandoned the enterprise.
Besides, what was being said next door was taking a piquant turn, and my new neighbors, now vituperative, were about to take responsibility for my diversion.
“A second pillow, my girl! You can see, however, that there are two of us! Ah! And then you’ll bring me a big, big jug of hot water—very, very hot!”
“Yes, Madame.”
The imperative voice, lush and spicily sonorous, combined with a discreet Provençal accent and a slightly forced distinction, evoked for me a buxom and lascivious hussy, an arrogant hetaira.
As for her partner, the distracted monosyllables with which he greeted her passionate wheedling, until the chambermaid’s return, gave me no clue as to is identity. In fact, were the bizarre acoustics that were conveying the slightest words to me so clearly no coming through some orifice?
I took careful stock of the partition.
In the sealed-up communicating door, a luminous point revealed th
e classic drilled hole. I looked through it, but could only see a black straw boater and a stupid dust-cover, hanging in the wardrobe. Since some traveler in a roguish mood had bored the eyehole, the bed had doubtless been moved.
Too bad; my imagination would supply the gesture and attitudes.
The expert courtesan—for the special terms of her ardor immediately set aside the hypothesis of a honeymoon voyage of a habituated couple, or even adultery—increased her efforts, less concern to arm herself up than to defrost her sulky lover.
The ass! Or, rather, what grave worries were absorbing him? His clipped and weary voice suggested a inveterate roué—but not aged, though, for the other praised in turn his beautiful bead, his beautiful arms, his beautiful chest, his “Herculean muscles.” Yes…one of those semi-foreign semi-crooked lady-killers who hang around Nice and Monte Carlo, cleaned out by the green baize, thinking more about the failure of his martingale than the charms of his conquest.
The attraction of his physique compensated the latter for the absent gold; even after the delivery of the “big, big jug of hot water—very, very hot” had brought the psychological moment of the “little present,” she didn’t make the slightest allusion to it.
An affair of the heart, then? The whims of women! The irony of fate! To couple that boiling courtesan with a morose imbecile, a worthy pendant to the little brat who had thwarted me! While I, without any pretence to the contours of a Farnese torso,30 would have given such a fine response to the impetuosity of the beauty, who was parading he glorious eroticism before an indifferent gaze there behind the partition!
Like me, she loved life, she knew the great game of Love—she didn’t haggle!
And she was literate too! Her crude words—technical terms, after all—were relieved by allusions and images of whose refined condiment the vulgar minds of the meretricious were invariably unaware.