The juggler

by Rachilde, 1860-1953

  "I want," she said, in a very soft voice whose softness contrasted with the violence of her words, "I want you to know what I know, for you to go as far as me, I demand and I have

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  the right to demand that you choose me as I choose you. You must learn about me before you earn me! and if you are already tired, you must allow me to want it in your place!"

  Leon bent over her.

  "Give me your mouth, at least?"

  "You won't know how to kiss me. I'm afraid, I am, of useless gestures. They are what spoil everything."

  "Are you ill? Do you have some kind of infirmity? ... I tell you I'm ready to overlook everything. I need you. I won't rest until I have you. ..." (As she turned her head away, he stood her up on her train, taking her by the waist.) "I can only translate your resistance, Eliante, into a desire to be raped. Frankly, I no longer dare to resort to it. It's not my way. I sense in you an instrument of perdition, and those whom you have held in the tiny pincers of your eyelashes must have had a nasty moment . . . before. But, after ... it must be very funny. . . . Answer me? Do you want to be raped? Killed? I wouldn't feel sorry for you!"

  Eliante smiled.

  "I'm already dead."

  "Why?"

  "I'll explain in a minute. Let's have lunch first, please, what do you say? I was so happy to feel you near me and you are distancing yourself ..."

  "All right, let's have lunch . . . let's talk about the weather, this and that . . . let's talk about everything except love, then!"

  They sat down, one on either side.

  Eliante uncovered a silver bowl in which eggs trembled on a fragrant puree.

  "Do you like that, my dear friend? They are fresh eggs."

  "So I see," said Leon with a shrug, "innocent fresh eggs, mother hen's eggs on a puree of my boiled brains, because I'm

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  beginning to go mad . . . yes, I like that; to devour oneself, for want of something better, is a pastime."

  She offered him the precious little saltshakers.

  "Saffron or cumin?"

  "Plain!" he said brusquely, twisting his napkin.

  They ate.

  "Leon," she asked, in her affectionate voice, "who are you? I don't really know you. I just meet you."

  "I'm not anyone. If it suits you, however, to know that I represent the son of a worthy, provincial notary, I admit it? My parents are egoists who make sure that my memory doesn't disturb them. They live in Dole, an ancient, paralysed town. Madame Reille, my mother, is a devout woman, silent, with no tenderness for the children who play on the avenue in front of her window. Monsieur Reille, my father, must somehow get his fun with the maids, when he finds any to hand. These people are indifferent to me. I write to them to let them know of my progress in the art of killing softly, and I'm already an old student. When I'm a doctor, next year, or the year after, they will stop sending me my modest allowance. They have only one son, but he is their enemy, the enemy of their purse. They are misers! When I think about them, which happens to me in my bad dreams, I'm afraid of them. Avarice is a closed door, you don't know what's happening behind it, and before knocking you feel anxious."

  "Will you return to the provinces when you are a doctor?"

  "No. I'll try to live here, or I'll go to the colonies and study the plague to . . . console myself."

  "The colonies! A warm island . . . lots of flowers and the sea purring around you. Palm trees, big palm trees, and permission to run naked on the sand. Leon, that's my dream, my own dream, to go and live in the colonies!"

  "You are free, Eliante."

  "I have to marry my niece, bury my brother-in-law. . . . One is free only by killing everyone else ..."

  "Let's run away, the two of us."

  "You would marry me in spite of . . . the thirteen years' difference?"

  "I think so . . . but not in spite of the fortune. It's your situation which makes me the younger."

  "You're right."

  As he smiled, she added:

  "You see, we get along marvelously, my little love friend."

  He frowned:

  "Let's not talk about love, or I'll get angry."

  She prepared for him, in a little crystal dish, some fran-gipani tartlets she made herself. She took little boats of flaky pastry and put in them a yellow, unctuous cream which smelled more like the perfume you put on handkerchiefs than pastry, then she sprinkled the whole thing with vanilla.

  "It's vile and pretty, what you're doing, madam!"

  "But it's deliciously good, dear sir. Taste!"

  She held out a tartlet, which he bit right up to her fingers.

  "Why, it smells like soap," he declared, bad tempered.

  "Do you want some more?"

  "No thank you."

  "Now we'll go and drink our coffee in my room."

  "In front of the big Tunisian sugar bowl? An excellent idea, dear madam."

  "No, in my bedroom. You don't know where I sleep . . . when I sleep; and I want to do you the honor . . . since you are my lover."

  Leon Reille felt a thrill. However, he was beginning to get used to the unusual language of this creature, so ardent and so glacial.

  Ironically, he offered her his arm.

  "You overwhelm me, my dear . . . mistress!"

  The young man no longer thought about raping her. Sulking for the sake of form, almost gay inside, he resolved to maintain all possible decorum. It was indeed a unique adventure. His simple student life wouldn't offer many like this. He found himself in the delicious situation of a man who isn't looking to drink any more because he is already a little intoxicated, but not enough to no longer dare to drink. He would wait for the chance. This woman's wit, spicy like a liqueur from the warm islands about which she had dreamed aloud, amused him enormously. He had overcome one barrier, leaving behind the costume of a conventional lover, that banal gallantry which forces the man to assume a panting appearance, slightly ridiculous when he is resisted in the name of an equally conventional virtue. She accorded him every right . . . except the right to exercise them. He remained the master, the expected, the dominator. She knelt before him, proffering magical words, exuding the powerful and troubling perfume of an incantation, and, despite her servile attitude, she remained, indeed, quite the mistress, the one who teaches love.

  They turned to the opposite side of the old rose salon, where, mysteriously ghostly, the white vase reigned, the memory of which still humiliated Leon. Eliante opened a door under another curtain the color of green water.

  "Ever since the death of my husband," she said in a restrained voice, "no man has entered here, not even my brother-in-law."

  He didn't believe a word of it and teased:

  "Flatterer! ... In any case, since you don't take me for a man."

  This bedroom, vast and dark, looked like a temple. The windows overlooking the garden were three in number, yellow and oval like precious stones, topaz jewels cut with large facets

  like window panes; they let in no daylight, only sunshine, whether thete was any outside or not, a sort of murky sunlight mixed with smoke from a fire. On the walls hung long animal skins, framed by light bands of gold cloth, a thick material half silk, half metal, which threw sharp beams of light on the furs and gave them a fiery reflected lustre. Lions and panthers, brown bears and black, alternated, each one presenting its head in the center of a panel, quite dead heads with eyes shut, mouths closed, not losing their natural expression by showing the horrible artificial fangs of flashy adventurers' bedside rugs.

  There was a lion sleeping on its two crossed paws, its black eyelids lowered, which must have been a terrible sight at dusk, for it seemed to be only sleeping. Weapons were crossed above or below the dead heads, savage, curious weapons.

  On the floor, a red Smyrna carpet, red currant, winey red with violet, almost black, patterns, spread out a pool of blood or grapes on which one trod with a certain apprehension about possible splashes. 2 And black furniture,
glinting with ironwork, gold incrustations, or mother-of-pearl, gleamed in the darkness of the corners or of the draperies. Ebony columns encircled with bronze, with silver, with marble bracelets, held strange idols, from the traditional Buddha, holding up two inflexible fingers, to the Snake-God of Oceania, branching and tufted like a tree. Under a dais of Indian muslin, a Brousse silk, iridescent, changing, one minute a very delicate azure blue, the blue of a French sky turning towards green, the next a dark blue spangled with reddish stars, a pile of multicolored cushions and pale satins made up the bed. It was more like a big egg cut in half, an egg of white lacquer full of delicacies riotously colored in paper wrappers of lace. Opposite the bed, emerging from a swan tuffet, a circular divan entirely covered with that miraculous down, stood a black Eros, an antique marble statue, with green contours, having no doubt long remained exposed to the biting winds and tears of rain. This Eros must, at one time, have held a metal bow, but his right

  arm, bent back at eye-level, now displayed only a stump; the hand had gone off with the taut string, and the left arm was completely missing. The child, pitiful and wild at the same time, flashed emerald pupils set in two white cameos and he opened wide, in the middle of his Negro face of regular ferocity, eyes of a real, divine existence.

  Leon Reille drew back in the presence of the naked lad who seemed to threaten him with his terrible stump.

  "Oh!" he said, "It's horrible! I prefer the pot. At least it's blind. That one must see you as you are."

  Eliante began to laugh.

  "He certainly does see me, but he can hardly touch me."

  Leon held his companion's arm tightly.

  "Why did you bring me here? All these beautiful things are hostile towards me. We leave a little garden the color of hope to come into this cavern where I'm suffocating."

  "I want you to feel at home here!" she said calmly.

  It was the first time she used the familiar form of address. He felt a new thrill. A painful dizziness enveloped him, and he felt like laughing.

  He inhaled deeply the air saturated with a perfume by turns fruity and flowery like this woman by turns old and young.

  "You're mad, Eliante! Or you're terribly vicious," he murmured. "Yet . . . yes ... I'm glad about the play you're acting for me. I no longer dread anything except waking up. So I'll try to become more complicated. What do you want from me at this moment, eh?"

  Wheedlingly, he bent down, seized the white train of her dress, and rolled himself into it, a little embarrassed at finding himself at the mercy of the arrows. She tried to pull the bottom of her skirt away from him, still smiling.

  "I want you to listen to me. . . . When children don't behave, people tell them stories."

  "That put you to sleep, right? I'm going to bed, I've had

  enough of playing the proper gentleman. If I snore, pull on my sleeve. . . . Eliante, the carpet smells of wild animals? Heavens, that's funny! That smells of wild animals, and, in the air, it smelled of tice powder. I'm losing my head or else we're in the dream about faraway islands!"

  Spread out at her feet, all black in his serious young man's clothes, he really looked like the pair to the naked, and chaste, Eros, because of the blackness of the marble.

  He did not sleep at all, his eye fastened on the white love prey, ready to pounce if she tried to slip away too ignobly. Would she slip away again? Or was it really him, the prey stalked by the invisible bow of the cruel hunter?

  She wanted to play? They would play ... as cruelly as she wanted, but he had not had his hands cut off. It would end badly.

  Eliante sat down on the swan tuffet, became serious again:

  "My bedroom," she said, "is just how it was five years ago, on board the Saint-Maurice, the big ship my husband captained. Imagine it all, my dear, heaped up in a cabin relatively too narrow, lit by a porthole, an oval cabin like the egg of my bed, and each time we set foot on land we came back loaded with fantastic booty: idols, animal skins, rare furniture, pieces of glassware or very precious stones, poisoned weapons, fabulous fruit, wild flowers. We piled it up in my room in any order, without any sort of attention. It wasn't always clean, the stuff they brought back for me, it smelled of rancid oil, more rancid oil than vetiver. A horrible smell of coconut oil which impregnates everything in tropical countries and everything you touch smears you with a particular grease." (She smelled her hands.) "For all that I live in Paris, when I remember, it turns my stomach! and then there were cargoloads of spices, skins of wine, jars of special liquids which travelled with us to give the sailors what they call the taste of the sea. My husband

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  never found my room full enough, rich enough. He spent outrageous sums collecting things which got ruined, spoiled, and had to be thrown into the sea before returning to France. Above all, he liked idols ... all the Buddhas you see here are not the most . . . original?" (She hesitated.) "And there are my famous robes, a unique collection of oriental costumes made for me, to order. And the collection of ivories ... I have to show you everything, don't I?" (Her voice died away suddenly. Leon contemplated her from below, spread out on the white waves of her skirt, he had rested his chin on his palms, and he never took his eyes off her.) "By wanting to know another man . . . besides my husband," she began again, "I owe that man a full confession ... he already knows who I am, I want him to know equally the one person whose memory alone could forbid me to love ..."

  "Eliante," interrupted Leon, a little worried, "you are talking . . . Chinese! You are mixing up feelings that have nothing to do with each other. Did you love your husband, yes or no? Is it to his memory you want to remain faithful? Which man do you wish to know in me? I've told you what I am: not much! You, you are an adorable creature, very perverse probably, that delights me today; if tomorrow I bitterly regret it, in whatever connection, rest assured that it won't be to you I complain! I have reached the temple, I don't care to leave. Are you then more of a little girl than Missie? And damn it all, Madame Eliante Donalger, can it be you don't know, in practical terms, what your niece professes to know very well in theory? Monsieur Donalger loved you passionately, I'm sure. You hardly returned his love, it wasn't a crime because you were too . . . young for him. At present, your cup overflows . . . you are tired of being a widow . . . offer it to me, that cup, don't worry, I undertake to drain it! I have a thirst capable of leaving an ocean of love dry. So the story about the pot was no joke? You would have liked to fulfill the fine dream

  of staying chaste ... by staying in love? That gives you an attack of nerves, madam? He was very good, very generous, this husband, showering you with presents, satisfying all your whims, and, you poor girl, having left a sad convent, you felt remorse at not completely satisfying that man? Am I guessing right? You owe him everything, and you think you also owe him eternal fidelity. I believe, my beautiful Eliante, you are exaggerating. One doesn't love to order, you can't put on real passion like one of your oriental robes. That man might be the best of mortals, you were not bound to adore him for his generosity alone. So show me his portrait before the other things, would you, my . . . friend?"

  Eliante stood up. He noticed she was smiling, now, with a strange smile, and the small folds which set her delicate mouth between two parentheses were unusually deep. 3

  "Yes," she said in a dull tone, "I'll show it to you. I should have begun with that."

  She turned to a large cabinet incrusted with mother-of-pearl and gold, a piece of dark lacquer with starry reflections, separated into two parts by a twisted shelf imitating the staircase of a pagoda crowded with ornaments. The left panel depicted mountains of ice illuminated by northern lights. Eliante turned a grating key, the mountains of ice disappeared, swallowed up, and fire seemed to leap out from inside the piece, which was lined with red copper. From this flashing sanctuary, she removed a wallet of mauve Morocco leather, opened it, and the medical student couldn't help noticing that the portrait of the deceased was sheltered from indiscretions like an anatomical part.
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  Leon sat up on his knees, leaning his elbows on Eliante's knees. He was finally going to meet that husband whose memory still enchanted his widow; the other man, the dead enemy of the newborn love.

  Madame Donalger placed in front of him a large photo-

  graph, an officer's head, topped by the low and braided kepi of the navy, his cheeks bearing the traditional whiskers, a stiff collar, a forty-five-year-old face, in which the eyes seemed gentle, the very contemplative eyes of a water-lover, but, despite the precautions of the photographet, who had placed his subject under the awning of an antique colonnade, the flaw of this face was immediately apparent and held one's gaze so that one scarcely noticed the rest.

  Commander Donalger had lost half of his nose, either by a gunshot or saber cut, or through a machinery accident, a boiler having exploded near him. 4

  Leon made a gesture of pity.

  "Poor man!" he murmured.

  "It's not very noticeable in this portrait," she said in a dull voice, her hands trembling slightly. "There is an earlier one which one of his friends had drawn on board, at the time of the accident . . . this one."

  She passed him a sheet of yellow paper on which was reproduced the same face, only this time, quite horrible. It looked like a caricature, like some macabre joke. The face, cleanshaven, showed a bloody stump where one could distinguish the cartilages forming the opening of the nostrils, which no longer existed except as pulp. Stoically, the lips smiled, intact and mocking, trying to give some presence to the terrifying mask, laughing at his own ugliness, seeming not even to feel it. That sailor was blonder, paler than the official character in the photograph, but, his eyes, copied, without the tricks of touching up, retained a frightening expression of feline ruse. If this younger Donalger was really a brave man, he must hide certain cruelties of character, deep in his courage, forbidding himself to be a brave man.