French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  We went to bed until dawn. As shredded red clouds breached the sky we opened the window. One of the brothel shutters gaped open. Rapidly we came downstairs. In the rising sun the little golden-haired girl was laughing. When we questioned her, she laughed and said nothing. I took her little hand: it was soiled, and under her nails there were traces of blood

  But when we informed the police, the little girl had vanished, and we found the brothel clean and completely bare of furniture. The agents there showed us a notice: For Rent, nailed to the white door—and laughed in our faces.

  The Sans-Gueule

  THEY found them lying next to each other on the burned grass, and gathered them both up. Their clothes had been blown off in shreds. The explosion had burned out the numbers and shattered the metal identity tags. They were like two pieces of human clay. The same fragment of shrapnel, flying slantwise, had sliced off their faces, so that they lay on the tussocks like a couple of trunks with a single red top. The Major who had loaded them into the ambulance did so mostly out of curiosity: for the effect was, in truth, most singular. They had neither nose, cheeks, nor lips. Their eyes had sprung out of their shattered sockets, their mouths gaped open in a bloodied hole where the severed tongue still wagged. What could be odder: two creatures of the same height, and faceless. Their skulls, covered in close-cropped hair, now had two red sides, simultaneously and identically carved out, with cavities where the eyes had been and three holes for mouth and nose.

  In the ambulance they were dubbed Sans-Gueule no. 1 and Sans-Gueule no. 2. An English surgeon, who was working there voluntarily, was intrigued by the case and took it on. He anointed and dressed the wounds, extracted the splinters of bone, stitched and modelled the mass of meat, fashioning two red, concave hoods of flesh, identically perforated towards the base, like pipes emerging from some exotic furnace. Lying in adjoining beds, the two Sans-Gueule stained the sheets with a twin wound, round, gaping, and meaningless. The eternal stillness of the wound was frozen in silent suffering: the severed muscles did not even pull against the stitches; the dreadful shock had annihilated the sense of hearing, so the only sign of life left was in the movement of their limbs, and by a twin rasping cry, emitted at intervals from between their gaping palates and the stumps of their tongues.

  And yet they started to heal. Slowly and surely they began to control their movements, to develop their arms, to fold their legs so they could sit down, move their hardened gums that still fleshed out their wired jaws. They had one pleasure, which was signalled by some sharply modulated sounds that still had no syllabic content: it was procured by smoking pipes—the stems were held in place in their mouths by pieces of oval rubber, fitted to the dimensions of their mouths. Curled in their blankets, they stank of tobacco, and plumes of smoke escaped from the orifices in their skulls: from the double hole of the nose, from the dark caverns of their eye-sockets, and through the torn mouth, between the remains of their teeth. And each plume of grey smoke was accompanied by an inhuman laugh and a sort of gurgling that came from the uvula while the rest of the tongue wagged feebly.

  There was a stir in the hospital when a little woman with a mass of hair was brought by the intern to the bedside of the Sans-Gueule; she looked at them one after the other, with a terrified expression, and then burst into tears. Sitting in the office of the head doctor, she explained, between her sobs, that one of the two must be her husband. He had been listed among the casualties: but these two mutilated soldiers had no identifying marks, and belonged to a special category. The height, the width of shoulder, and the hands recalled the lost man infallibly. And yet she was in a terrible perplexity: which of the two Sans-Gueule was her husband?

  The little lady was kindness itself: her cheap gown moulded her breast, and due to the way she put up her hair, in the Chinese style, she had a sweet, childlike face. Her straightforward grief and her almost absurd uncertainty mingled in her expression and contracted her features in a way reminiscent of a child that has broken its toy. So much so that the head doctor couldn’t stop himself from smiling; and because he had a crude way of talking, he said to the little woman looking up at him:

  ‘Well, what of it! Take them both home! You’ll recognize which is which when you try them out!’

  At first she was scandalized, and averted her head, like a child blushing for shame: then she lowered her eyes and looked from one bed to the other. The two red mugs rested in their stitches on the pillows, with the same lack of meaning that constituted the whole enigma. She leaned down towards them, and whispered in the ear, first of one, and then the other. The heads did not react at all—but all four hands started to shake—undoubtedly because these two poor bodies whose souls had fled had a vague feeling that a very gentle little woman was close by, who had an endearing manner, and who gave off the sweet smell of a baby.

  She hesitated some more, and then asked if they would let her take the two Sans-Gueule home for a month. They were transported in a big padded ambulance, and the little woman, seated opposite, wept hot tears unceasingly.

  When they got to the house, a strange life began for the three of them. Tirelessly she went to and fro from one to the other, looking for a clue, waiting for a sign. She observed the red surfaces that would never stir again. Anxiously she contemplated the stitches, as one would the features of a beloved face. She examined them in turn, as one might consider different photographs, without being able to choose.

  Little by little the sharp grief that wrung her heart, in the early days, when she thought about her lost husband, ended by dissolving into an irresolute calm. She lived like someone who has renounced everything, but goes on by sheer force of habit. The two broken pieces that between them represented the loved one never joined together in her affections; but her thoughts went regularly from one to the other, as if her soul were continually tilting like a balance. She regarded them as her red ‘puppets’; they were the two comical dolls that peopled her existence. Smoking their pipes, sitting in the same attitude on their beds, blowing out the same plumes of smoke, and uttering the same inarticulate cries, they resembled more those gigantic puppets brought back from the East, those scarlet masks from overseas, than beings possessed of conscious life that had once been men.

  They were her ‘two monkeys’, her red mannikins, her two little husbands, her burned men, her meaty rascals, her bloodied faces, her holey heads, her brainless bonces. She mothered them in turn, arranging their blankets, tucking in their sheets, mixing their wine and breaking their bread. She led them out into the middle of the room, one on each side of her, and made them caper on the parquet floor; she played with them, and if they became vexed she would slap them down with the flat of her hand. At a single caress they flocked around her, like two famished dogs; and at a gesture of impatience they would double up, cringing like repentant animals. They would rub against her, in quest of morsels; they both had a wooden bowl, and into these, with joyful howlings, from time to time they would plunge their two red muzzles.

  The two bonces no longer agitated the little woman as they had before, and no longer fascinated her, like two scarlet wolf-masks superimposed on familiar faces. She loved them equally in her childlike, pouting way. She would say: ‘My dolls are asleep; my little men are taking a walk.’ She was bewildered when someone came from the hospital to enquire which of the two she was going to keep. The question was absurd, it was like demanding she cut her husband in two. Often she would punish them, the way children do when their dolls have been naughty. She would say to one: ‘Look, my little lad, your brother’s been bad, he’s naughty as a monkey—and so I’ve turned his face to the wall, and I shan’t turn him back until he’s said sorry.’ And then, with a little laugh, she would turn the poor, penitent body back again, and kiss its hands. Sometimes she would even kiss their dreadful stitches, and then privately wipe her mouth afterwards, pursing her lips. Then straightaway she would almost split herself laughing.

  Imperceptibly, however, she got more used to one of them, bec
ause he was the gentler of the two. Quite unconsciously, since she had long given up any hope of recognition. She preferred him, like a favourite pet that one likes to caress the most. She spoiled him more and kissed him more tenderly. And by degrees the other Sans-Gueule grew sad, for he sensed about him less and less of her feminine presence. He would frequently remain curled up on his bed, his head hidden under his arm, like a wounded bird. He refused to smoke, while the other, knowing nothing of his grief, went on exhaling streams of grey smoke through every vent in his purple face, to the accompaniment of little squawks.

  So the little woman started to tend to her sad husband, without really understanding his sadness. His head in her bosom would shake with deep sobs that came from his chest; and a kind of harsh groaning would shake his torso. This poor occluded heart was prey to a terrible jealousy, an animal jealousy borne of feelings mingled with memories, it may be, of a former life. She sang him lullabies, as if he were a child, and calmed him by laying her cool hands upon his burning head. When she realized he was very ill, big tears would fall from her laughing eyes onto his poor mute face.

  And soon she was prey to a poignant anguish, for she thought she recognized gestures he had made in an earlier illness. Certain movements seemed familiar from before; and the way he held his emaciated hands reminded her of hands that had been dear to her, and which had brushed her sheets, before the great abyss had opened up in her life.

  And the wail coming from the poor abandoned one pierced her heart; and in a breathless uncertainty, she once more scrutinized the faceless heads. They were no longer just two purple dolls—one was a stranger—and the other was part of her own self. When the one who was ailing died, all her grief returned.

  She now truly believed that she had lost her husband; and she ran, full of hate, towards the other Sans-Gueule, and then stopped short, seized by her childlike pity, in front of the wretched red mannikin who was smoking away joyously, uttering his little cries.

  52 and 53 Orfila

  TO one side of a wide road planted uniformly with trees, whose close-cropped foliage made each of them resemble a sugarloaf on a frail stem, was a flat, yellowish wall, with two identical wings at either end. The paint on the entrance gate was dreary; it led into a sandy oblong courtyard which separated parallel buildings with their tall glazed doors; the two-storeyed constructions had low roofs from which grey-slated bell turrets rose at regular intervals. Seemingly endless grey cloisters led off from the corners of the yard; and a series of little garden beds, round, square, triangular, and lozenge-shaped, in which the flinty earth could be seen between the thin grass, varied, along with the benches, the melancholy stretch of enclosed ground with a few traces of pale green.

  Amongst this geometrically arranged vegetation, descending the steps, under the glazed doors, around the single pool of dusty water, emerging from the dull mouths of old stone which stretched away on every side, groups of almost immobile human beings moved haltingly forward, heads shaking and knees trembling; old men and old women, some of whom, to judge from their ceaselessly nodding heads, seemed to be saying yes, yes, while others, their heads wagging from left to right, said no, no; ancient affirmatives and negatives stubbornly on the move, but feebly and without variation.

  The men wore hats that had lost any pretence of shape, the crown either knocked in or knocked out. But several wore them ambitiously at a rakish angle. The women let their thin white hair flow loose under dirty bonnets; but some of them wore curled wigs, which looked startlingly black above their parchment faces. Crossing each other in the garden area, some old beaux would bow with a flourish, while some of the old women clucked and simpered behind their glasses. And they would gather in groups, to read the local newspapers and offer each other a hand; while the more addled among them stared in dismay at the wily little smiles which they could no longer understand.

  The hospital where they lodged admitted them from the age of sixty upwards, for a thousand francs or so a month and a little extra for the meat dish. The rich had their own room, which was given a number, off a corridor. No one was possessed of a name anymore. You were Voltaire 63 or Arago 119. All distinguishing signs, that had served in society over a lifetime, were left at the admissions desk; this animated cemetery was more anonymous than the ones that hold the dead.

  It was a regimented society, with its own rules and conventions. The owners of the private rooms off the corridors, having the wherewithal to lose at the gaming table and offer to pleasant members of the opposite sex delicate morsels from the canteen, despised the wretched denizens of the common wards, where one had no escape from prying eyes, either to wash or to hide one’s bald head.

  Entitled to twice-weekly medication, they would lay siege to the in-house nurses beforehand, for a glimpse of the register. They would come with torn old bits of paper on which they had written their order, as if on a trip to the grocer’s; and they took pleasure in imitating a cough, which they forced from their rasping lungs, in exaggerating the pain in their twisted limbs, in feigning insomnia, in complaining of imaginary ills. At the ward round they outdid each other with their complaints, so they could hold aloft in triumph their chits for the bath, their phials of camphor, their flasks of glucose. They would place them on their bedside table, and gaze at them one by one, as if they were healing works of art or provisions they had laid in at a bargain price; but their greatest joy was to possess more than anyone else—since for them these objects were their last vestiges of property.

  Orfila ward was inhabited by two old women who were too poor to rent a private room. Two rows of beds, of dubious whiteness, stood opposite each other, and lying on the folded sheets was a double bank of female busts, wrapped in camisoles. No. 53 would get up, still having some use of her legs, despite rheumatism of the left knee and partial paralysis of the left arm, which was folded over her waist. She was respected, because she was said to be in receipt of a little money from some distant relatives. But this she preferred to save and use as she liked, rather than pay the administration in exchange for a room of her own. In the bed directly opposite, no. 52 would vex her by flaunting her greater mobility; she had the use of both arms and only a touch of gout in one of her toes. But due to a weakened muscle, her lower right eyelid drooped, showing the bloodshot underside of the eye.

  These two women were rivals, not only in body but in matters of the heart as well. As far as human passions were concerned, nothing had diminished in these old men and women. There existed make-believe ménages à deux or à trois in the rooms; there were violent exhibitions of jealousy; warring parties flung snuff-boxes and crutches at each other in the corridors. At night, ragged shadows waited at doors, armed with a menacing bolster, night-bonnet pulled down to the chin. There were bandy-legged pursuits, sufferers from coxalgia going headlong, jealous spats between old women chattering as they washed their linen: one would sing the praises of her man, who was decorated and well turned-out; the other vaunted hers, who still had the use of all his members.

  So it was that sometimes bony fists would make contact with bony cheekbones; hair was pulled out, leaving the pointed or pitted skull even balder. Spectacles were smashed over black tobacco noses; sharp old elbows would appear in symmetry, hands placed on hips. And frightful querulous oaths would ring out all day long.

  War broke out between 52 and 53 over a pipe made of red barley-sugar. There was an old military-looking gent—almost certainly a former concierge—who paid regular visits to 53 Orfila, supposedly his cousin. The words ‘my cousin’, sounding incessantly in the toothless mouths of both parties, rang like an echo in the ears of the nurses, who in consequence lowered their guard. But 52 had taken a fancy to her neighbour’s man. She puckered her mouth, rolled her eyes, brushed him with her camisole when he passed,with a little stammer. The others heartily detested her, because she could move about so much. Thick, rheumy laughter provoked in others nervous coughs of exhaustion. Flattered, the old man gave up his games of bowls and cards to spend the aft
ernoon flirting. No. 53 straightened his tie, administered his eyedrops, and gave him some precious electrical pills which she kept in a little box hidden under her pillow.

  But she couldn’t help gazing jealously at 52’s night-table. No. 52 consulted regularly with the doctors, and returned with numerous bottles that she would smugly put on display. The day when the old man gallantly produced from his checked hankie the red pipe, no. 53 squirmed with joy, pumped up her pillow and, leaning on it, pipe beween her teeth, stared out her rival.

  She waved the pipe around like a child, sucked on it, and looked at the end she had sucked; she made bawdy innuendos that were not quite picked up, but not quite lost either.

  In any case, from that time on 52 disappeared at the same time every morning. No one knew where she went. For several days she seemed distressed. And then she got happier and happier. Eventually, returning one morning from her mysterious walkabout, she thumbed her nose magnificently at 53’s red pipe, and parting two fingers, she made the sign of a pair of horns over her forehead. Then she touched her right arm with a kind of mocking despair, as if pitying 53 for not being able to do as much.

  This was the breaking-point. A plot was hatched in the ward against the brazen hussy. People affected to spit when she passed, and touched their eyes, simulating nausea. They whispered among themselves, and cut 52 out from everything. A rustle of paper and the scratching of pens could be heard in the evening.

  And yet the old man, feigning innocence, would still come to see his ‘cousin’.

  No. 53 showed no signs of irritation. But she was less effusive, and asked her cousin, pointedly, what he did with his mornings. The old man rubbed his hands and lied through his teeth.