In the front row, imitating the way in which her neighbour is holding her hands, apparently to stop her ears and shut out the increasingly high-pitched tinkle—almost a whistling noise—produced by the pearls falling in closer and closer succession, wrists touching under her chin and palms placed against her cheeks on either side, young Temple is herself sullenly watching the episode unfolding in the large rectangular glass where her own reversed image, naked, her black-stockinged legs apart, her face still clasped (as has just been mentioned) in her two tiny hands with their now huge fingers, lies with no shoes on amid a tangle of cushions, surrounded by the roses that have strewn themselves pell-mell from the tray the girl used as a portable stall from which to offer her flowers for customers, overbearing or particular, to choose from.
And it is one of the former sort who has just brutally committed the unexpected assault causing the child to fall with her light load. Behind, slightly in the back-ground, the bald-headed man with the close-set dark glasses can be seen observing with a cruel smile the result of his violations. He may have taken advantage of these to steal the apple with the message hidden beneath the leaves of the bouquet . . . At this moment, however, a stifled cry is heard in the little theatre, though nothing seems to have moved there.
One of the young ladies who are watching the show as if paralysed in their cramped attitudes has suddenly fainted. Without her companions, even those sitting nearest, batting an eyelid, she slumped back with a moan of pain she could no longer suppress, head tilted to one side, lips parted, and eyes closed, unconscious on her straight-backed disciplinary chair. It becomes apparent at this point that she is attached to it; the four serried rows of pearls with metallic highlights forming a dog collar around the base of her neck as well as bracelets around her two wrists are in reality strong bonds fastening the prisoner tightly to her chair: at the top of the upright back and at the ends of the two armrests.
The particularly rigid attitude, allowing no possibility of movement, in which her chains are holding her—may have been holding her for several hours—is doubtless what caused her (fatal?) collapse . . . The more so since the stiletto heel of one of her pink mules with the beaded pompoms has also been nailed to the wooden bar forming the front of the chair seat; this keeps the foot up in mid-air as if in a stirrup, throwing the knee out to one side in a state of extreme flexion and bringing the ankle almost up to the vulva, which the forcing apart of the thighs exposes in full view. Below where the taut suspenders pull into an arch the lower edge of the black wasp-waisted corset that is all she is wearing and on which the lines of force drawing in the waist and thrusting up the breasts are accentuated by further rows of pearls, the red-brown tuft of the sacral triangle is thus displayed with the very greatest ostentation as well as being reflected in the centre of the oval mirror of Venetian glass placed on the floor in front of her by way of a footrest, which is forbidden.
Franck V. Francis abruptly becomes aware of an anomaly that does not fail to disturb him: no one here appears to have noticed his presence. As he cannot have become invisible (even under the magical effect of the green apple!), the only acceptable explanation would be that he is himself a part of the episode: the bald character with the thin-rimmed dark glasses is none other than his own reflection in a side mirror. Contenting himself with this interpretation for the moment, the inspector makes a mental note of the increasingly obvious role played by the pearl beads as an instrument of torture. Several of the pieces of jewellery that they make up must even be presumed to be pinned straight on the young women's skin. Moreover a second young woman is now showing signs of discomfort or distress: crowned with mother-of-pearl headed thorns like a Christian martyr, she is going, once she can no longer maintain the prescribed pose, to drop from her cupped hands—they are chained together with a sort of rosary wound round the joined wrists—the luminous rose symbolizing her virginity, which for her persecutors is an object of additional cruelties.
Meanwhile, on the stage the performance continues: the little flower-seller now wakes up, as if from a dreamless sleep, and immediately begins staring into the eyes of her double, the youngest of the girls sitting watching on the other side of the glass. Without for one moment interrupting this reflective vision, this mirage, she rises to her feet in a pirouette that at the same time sheds from her body the delicate veils of embroidered lace that concealed part of her torso, an improvised chemisette for an under-age prostitute. She then adjusts her black stockings and slips on the elegant high-heeled shoes. Mother-of-pearl butterflies cling to her blond curls . . .
At this last detail the narrator becomes aware of a second inconsistency in the account: according to his recollections, which in this case are fairly precise, Temple, the frail illicit flower-seller of the Opera-House district, was a brunette, a dark brunette. But perhaps these long and softly flowing locks, the colour of ripe wheat, are simply—like many things in this house—a product of artifice? One could swear, for example, that the girl is now even younger, so childish does her figure appear in the glare of the spotlights, whereas the scattered pearls around her have for their part grown in size to become light funfair balloons floating all silvery in the cubic space of the room. At the same time the oval mirror and the strewn roses combine in various decorative shapes of an innocuous nature with no sexual references that can be pin-pointed in particular.
The following tableau, known as “The Bartered Bride”, opens with the presentation of bridal wear (full wedding dresses of white, filmy, translucent material, immaculate tulle veils, beaded half-boots, crowns of lilies, tiara bands, etc.) before Temple, still nearly naked but made by the right lighting almost nubile again with her small round breasts, her already pronounced waist, and the incipient fleece shading her pubis with silky down. She stands facing the audience, legs slightly apart, gazing with an air of studious reflection at the elegant couturier-slaves as they lay at her feet the frills and furbelows of the sacrifice. All she is wearing as yet are the long black gloves—one placed on a hip and the other supporting the chin with fingers splayed—and stockings that stop at the top of the thigh in garters, each of which is decorated with a gold-centred rose.
A fresh change in the lighting causes several bird-cages suddenly to emerge from the shadows, cylindrical in shape and of enormous size (the girl would fit in one, crouching), with, inside them, flapping their wings, solitary, possibly starving, great jet-black rooks of impressive wingspan, which thus serve as a reminder at this point (without one knowing the precise reason for this inopportune reference) of the death of the old king, Charles-Boris. But now it is live mannequins filing in gracefully, like brides adorned for the ceremony, the better to show off the items they are presenting. Silently, one after another, the girls come up to greet the new chosen one, haloed by those floating nuptial veils that could once be admired—as has been said—in the windows of the notorious fake shop that played an often essential part in the discreet capture of the many prisoners who fill the palace of mirages.
The girls who come afterwards, led by strict nuns, have nothing on but black fishnet tights, feathers, and their long hair, or again all kinds of profane negligés and intimate light lingerie, the virgin whiteness of which only accentuates its licentious character. One of them, like Salome before Herod, wears nothing but jewellery forming arabesques against her bare skin; another is wearing nothing at all between her soft boots, which just cover the knee, and a plaited-leather dog leash hanging round her neck and down over her belly and between her thighs; several, showing off the perfection of their bare bosoms, have their faces three-parts encircled by those huge and gorgeous aureoles seen on Byzantine saints, where again the pearl decoration leads one to fear (or hope for) the worst as regards the fate in store for them.
But now a figure of death appears in the procession (probably heralded by the birds), she too dressed up in a combination—now suddenly macabre—of white veils and black net. Temple is afraid. She turns round towards the tall baroque mirror standing
behind her. Her image seems dim to her and in danger of dissolving. She shuts her eyes. Her awareness of her surroundings immediately begins to blur. She is going to be ill. The water of the mirror tilts and becomes covered with mottling, panther skin, and perforated chlamys; Temple feels herself being sucked up, as into a giant sea anemone, by the now spongy glass and by the floor, which has also lost its consistency, the two having merged into one. She is falling, in a whirl. Her fair hair forms an undulating wake down her back. . .
The little girl finds herself, on the other side of the glass and having pushed back its edges the better to step through the frame, in an immense drawing-room with overdone turn-of-the-century decoration, where a number of motionless young women appear to be waiting for the regulars of the house. Half-undressed (even more in some cases, as if the preceding fashion show had left them only fragments, shreds, or odd bits and pieces), they sit quietly in upholstered armchairs or on couches of dark red velvet or recline on day-beds amid a surfeit of cushions. A few are lying on Persian carpets or animal skins on the floor in more abandoned attitudes, limbs awry, faces flung back, offering their vulvas, indifferent to the absent gaze that rapes them, possibly inanimate. It looks as if certain cruel patrons passing through here have accounted for two or three victims among the inmates. The survivors contemplate the sacrificed corpses without the least sign of emotion, used—it seems—to such exactions.
Meanwhile the rooks have been released from their cages and are perched here and there on the carved cornices of pieces of furniture or the pediments of mirrors. One of them, after a heavy though amazingly silent flight, swoops down on the hospitable belly of a lifeless girl. Another, wanting to be stroked, spreads his imperial plumage, fluffed out in all its splendour, against the bare breasts of a reprieved captive who is half-reclining on a couch. At her feet a lion skin recalls something that must have occurred earlier in the narrative . . . But what? . . . And where?
One of the nuns comes up to Temple and murmurs a few words in her ear, inaudibly, probably to persuade her to join her companions and from now on wait in one of the armchairs in this drawing-room whose youngest adornment she will be. The girl feigns a certain hesitation to hide the fact that she is playing a double game. She then agrees to dress herself up in the traditionally indispensable accoutrements as calculated to appeal to various classes of crank, from the beggar-girl's outfit, or the Christian slave or 1900 bathing-beauty costumes, to the single full-blown rose concealing the vulva.
It is humid and drowsy in the suffocating heat of the trying-on room. Time passes, slowly. It is as if the air were becoming thicker, eventually assuming the brownish colour and consistency of barley syrup. The girl who sells roses illicitly on the street still half-remembers the immense deserted beach, the oarweed with the long wrinkled ribbons trailing behind one over the wet sand, the heavy grey pelicans flying along just above the water, the horses performing caracoles in the waves . . .
She hears, as in a dream, someone reading her the prison regulations: she must do this and that, conduct herself thus . . . the whole meticulous list of directives and interdicts . . . If she is not good she will be shut up in the shop with the dead dolls, where she does not even notice, reflected in the depths of a mirror, the bald head of the narrator.
It is no doubt through carelessness or through an imperceptible miscalculation that I thus find myself shut up again in the prison with the martyred china dolls, St. Blandina, St. Agatha, St. Violet, St. Claudine . . . Yet I ought to have been on my guard from the outset and suspected the trap, my wits sharpened by the corridor twisting and turning at right angles in that over-abrupt way, in other words without the presence of lateral openings (or some other clue) indicating an overall layout that would justify so exceptional a circulation plan inside the building. Anyway, I shall now be able to reflect at my leisure on the risks of my situation as well as on the only reasonable means of getting out of it: the constitution of an unmarred object that in my judges’ eyes would be tantamount, if not to my innocence, at least to my non-culpability.
At first I believed the mere description of my cell would constitute an adequate narrative thread. I now think that was a mistake. The wall standing opposite the heavy door with the judas, smooth and white like the other three, is pierced by a small, square embrasure situated so high up and penetrating such a thickness of masonry that the criminal, even from the foot of the door wall, can see nothing but the interior of the wall or to be more precise the top and sides of the horizontal shaft leading, supposedly, to the open air. At this end of the shaft five wrought-iron bars—already described—balk all hope of escape. As pointed out in several previous reports the sounds of the sea, clearly identifiable at certain times of the day or night doubtless corresponding to the high tides, reach the attentive ear despite the narrowness of the passage . . .
I can now clearly hear the shrill cries of the golden-skinned beach girls playing ball down below, under the schistose cliff that, where it sticks out into the sea marking the end of the beaches, is called Black Head on the maps, a steep promontory dominated by the old fort with the legendary past, now, it is said, disused. A little farther on (towards the town) the line of huts begins, their serrated roofs almost completely masking the low dune that replaces the rocks at this point. And here, having just at this moment emerged from one of the narrow grey cells in which she has probably just got dressed, is a tall girl in a long, flowing, filmy white dress who might have stepped out of that famous painting representing Lady G. at the coronation of Christian-Charles, a dress so light that the wind, although without force, lifts the flounced hem well above the incongruously high-heeled blue shoes and the delicate ankles, letting it be seen that the left one is encircled by a slender string of pearls.
The heroine of our recent story, with her old-world charms, has come to rest in the middle of an ambiguous gesture, halted by expectation, or surprise, or hesitation: she is holding one hand out in front of her in the direction of the sea, towards where the leaping girls with the fragile, flesh-pink ball are continuing a game constantly threatened by the wavelets of the rising tide, as if she had meant, for example, to hail one of her companions in order to give her an important message before leaving the beach; but at the same time her anachronistically elegant figure is half-turned to face behind her, possibly as a result of her having become aware of a sudden alteration in the landscape: the upper part of a male silhouette on the dune above the triangular roofs.
Or else this presence, impatiently awaited or on the contrary inopportune, is only assumed by the young lady, who wishes—a very plausible hypothesis—to shout something to her best friend without the risk of being overheard by the man she fears may arrive at any moment. As will have been guessed, this is the man who is to come and collect her in the car, the unfortunate Lord G. in person. He will have judged it simpler to call by the beach himself, since it is on his way, in order to make sure that his wife is home by the time agreed and can thus be ready without rushing and without their being late for the inaugural evening at the Lyric Palace.
The chauffeur, suitably dumb, having closed the car doors in almost perfect silence, climbs back into his seat and sets the car smoothly in motion, subsequently driving along the narrow sandy road without increasing his speed. Inside the large, black, leather-upholstered car the couple do not exchange a word. They are both aware of the dangers of the evening to come, and everything was said between them on this subject long ago.
Since the performance is to be followed by a supper they do not dine but content themselves with a light snack, which they take separately. Lady Caroline, incidentally, because of the sea air and the various exertions of the afternoon, shows far more appetite on this occasion than does her husband, as will be remarked upon without fail by (as well as the narrator) the servants in the kitchen. “The master was worried,” they will tell the investigating officers later.
Anyhow, the greater part of the time available is taken up in both cases by the various
stages of their toilet, their concern to present a faultless appearance being amply justified not by the tragic end, which they do not know about as yet, but by the special attention that will be bestowed on them by the other dignitaries of the regime, to say nothing of the more anonymous guests at a gala that everything indicates will be exceptional. Unlike his wife, who as usual has a maid, her favourite, assist her, the young lord dresses himself this evening, preferring no one to know that, hidden under his coat in the folds of a red-silk cummerbund, he has a seven millimetre sixty-five automatic pistol, loaded, just in case.
At exactly half past eight they walk together down the flight of stone stairs. The chauffeur is waiting for them at the bottom. Lord G. notices, on the very edge of the last pink-granite step, an offensive object that he identifies almost immediately: an apple core or, to be more exact, the remains of an apple, green in colour, some two-thirds of which has been munched, without the aid of knife or fork. He is about to push aside this incomprehensible piece of refuse, which in addition might cause an accident, with the toe of his patent-leather shoe. However, without knowing why, he refrains from doing so. The chauffeur, after all, is not responsible for the premises being kept tidy, so that such a deviation from normal conduct, in drawing attention to what might be someone's lapse, would in the absence of any other member of the staff be both unseemly and pointless. Stiffly, Lord G. walks on as if he had not seen anything.
Recollections of the Golden Triangle Page 7