The Hippogriff

by Henri de Montherlant

  Every few minutes Solange would draw back a little to gaze into his eyes; then she would kiss him, stroke his face, give him more kisses than he gave himself (he was like an overmatched boxer), and he could feel her long hands on his body in new and unexpected places, on his hip, or his shoulders, like those antique statues with severed marble hands still clinging to them from statues once joined to them but now lost. She thrust her head at him, cat-like, then nestled it in his arm-pit, and she had a way of suddenly pressing herself against him with a brief little moan - literally, a death-rattle of tenderness. As he took her for the second time, he thought he glimpsed a wild look in her eyes, and asked her: 'Well, are you beginning to feel something at last in this confounded puppet-show?' To which she replied: 'I feel less indifferent to it than at first.' Since a great deal was not to be expected from her on this score, Costals considered this reply so forthcoming that he was inflamed by it, and proved it to her a third time. She hung out her tongue like a dog, offering it to him.

  When he got up, feeling hungry, and said to her: 'Come on, then, up you get! Oguefi! ['Get up!' in Arabic.] Time for grub,' she gave a little sigh, almost a cry, and then said to him: 'I love you so much!' as though to imply: how nice it would be to stay here forever. Costals' lip was bleeding, from a bite by his shepherdess; his face was swollen and discomposed by her kisses; and he felt a bit groggy. He opened the door of Solange's bathroom by mistake; and he saw, imprinted on the wet bath-mat, the marks of her bare feet. He remembered that, although he had kissed every part of her body, he had nevertheless omitted to kiss her feet, and the thought saddened him.

  Costals had always felt an obscure affinity with animals. In his day-dreams as a twelve-year-old, he used to see a bear advancing towards him. Whereupon he would smile at the bear, and the bear interpreted the smile as saying: 'Not only do I wish you no harm, but I wish you well, because I understand you perfectly.' (Already perhaps, in this 'I understand you perfectly', there was the intuition of a paranormal knowledge.) And the bear did not attack him. They even became pals, and helped one another. It may be worth noting, incidentally, that the child had despised the Jungle Book. No passionate person can tolerate, on a subject close to his heart, a way of feeling which differs at all from his own. The young Costals would have found it quite natural for the animal world to be completely closed to Kipling. But since this world was not completely closed to Kipling, he was irritated by the writer's superficial interpretation of these beasts, and by the superficial character of the relations between them and Mowgli.

  The performance of 'stopping the bear with a smile' had never, as he grew older, vanished from Costals' mind. If, at the age of thirty-four, he happened to meet a stray dog with a savage look in some lonely wood, it never entered his head to pick up the nearest stone, or even to make the sign of the cross at it, which - animals being always full of hatred for Jesus Christ - would have made it run howling away. He would say to himself: 'If it passes by without looking at me, I won't look at it. If it does look at me, I'll simply look back, and it won't bite me.' There was a mystical faith in all this, and Costals recognized it as such: he knew, therefore, that the whole thing was absurd. In confronting a savage dog he was savouring a triple pleasure: (1) the pleasure of the absurd; (2) the pleasure of putting his trust, not only in the dog (love) but in his own power (pride); and (3) the pleasure of risk (for, after all, he knew he was taking a risk by trusting to his smile).

  When he came back from the war, Costals had struck up an acquaintance with an animal-tamer, Monsieur B—, from whom he had learnt that training by kindness, originating in Germany, had recently caught on in France. Between German trainers and their beasts, male as well as female, bonds of affection would often develop, which sometimes went quite far and by means of which the animals performed from love what the old methods made them perform from fear. Costals had gone into the cage with Monsieur B. and, after four or five sessions as an observer, had learned to handle the animals under the trainer's supervision. He believed that if he had had the time to practise regularly, he would have acquired some skill at it. The taming of felines, in so far as he understood it, was a work of domination based on a mixture of courage, intelligence, 'pure' sympathy and sexual emotion (an emotion that innocently revealed itself in its physiological manifestations), all of which, being liable to turn to violence at a moment's notice, admirably suited his temperament.

  Costals' power over animals extended also to young people, but stopped there: he had no power over 'mature' men and women (such a pretty word, 'mature' - like cheese!). In his business relations he had no other faculties but will-power, cleverness, brutality and duplicity, which are the usual ingredients by which a man succeeds in doing what he wants and avoiding what he doesn't want. In his pursuit of women, only prestige, persuasion and patience came into play - nothing out of the ordinary. And moreover, his failures in both spheres were legion. Finally, it must be added that, even with animals and young people, his power subsided like the wind on certain days. Melancholy lulls! He was reduced to being a normal man, and felt totally at a loss.

  In the vast world of the living, animals and young people were the only creatures to whom Costals never wished harm, to whom indeed he always wished well. Perhaps, partly at least, that was the secret of his power over them: they sensed that he wished them well. The reason for this benevolence doubtless lay in their sweetness and grace, but also in the fact that they were the quintessence of naturalness: how could one be angry with them, since they were devoid of pretension? 'Mature' men and women put on airs, and nine times out of ten lower themselves in the process - hence they are a source of justifiable irritation to those who still have some regard for the human species. But one cannot hate, one cannot despise, either animals or children, because one can never accuse them of being unworthy of themselves: they are miraculously exempt. Costals was so grateful to them for enabling him to experience what sympathy is - that quality which, according to him, had been the characteristic of the golden age - so grateful for being able, with them, to relax from the harsh mistrustfulness which was his normal attitude towards his fellow-men, that he tended to express it in somewhat excessive terms. 'They redeem humanity,' he would say of animals and young people. It was because of them, and them alone, that, if he had had the power to do harm on a grand scale (bombing a city, for instance), he would have done it with reluctance, and perhaps could not have brought himself to do it at all. The redemption of humanity by animals and the young was one of his favourite myths, and (which was even odder) had been so ever since he himself had been an adolescent.

  It has been necessary to expatiate a little on this subject, to prepare the reader for the scene which follows.

  No sooner had Costals and Solange ordered a table for lunch in the garden of a little suburban trattoria than a squad of cats came trotting out of the house towards them. They advanced in extended order, one of them stopping dead right in the middle of the manoeuvre to lick a paw. Although there were other people having lunch, it was they who had been picked out at once. The pink cat didn't think twice: at one bound it was on Solange's lap, then it scrambled up over her bust, settled on her shoulder, nuzzled her toque and knocked it askew, raised its tail in the approved style (resisting Solange's efforts to lower it) to show her its bottom, like a tiny full moon, and in fact seemed to have no other objective than to place the aforementioned under her nose.

  As for the yellow cat! A feline prawn. A prodigy of emaciation and virulence, with affinities to the flea, the prawn and the spider. Standing on its hind-legs and wiping its nose on Costals' dangling hand. Jumping on to the table to get nearer to his face. If Costals moved away to take a look at the scenery, balancing itself on the edge of the table, its fore-paws stretched out, waving, as though to hold him back, and proving ad nauseam that, unlike mystic love, feline love does not lend wings, otherwise it would long ago have flown through the air to nestle against his cheek. And all this with such an uproar of purring that Cost
als' own throat seemed on fire. But every time a noise was to be heard from the inn, the creature would turn its head and stop purring. 'Animals, too!' thought Costals. 'They too have only to be reminded of home, and at once their happiness is over.' (Incidentally, it really is an astonishing thing in cats, this gift of being able to stand on their hind legs exactly like goats. That they should do it when one calls them or strokes them, well and good, but to rear up like circus cats ten yards away from a man simply because, having lost sight of him, they have just spotted him again - what sensibility, with an engaging tinge of hysteria!)

  When the pink cat nuzzled Solange's neck, Costals noticed that she shivered slightly. She said that it smelt of vanilla, as all cats do when they are young, healthy and well-groomed. And her understanding of cats was demonstrated by the conversation she carried on with it. Every time she said something, it answered with a miaow. If she was silent, and then spoke again, it would reply. What else could that be but speech?

  'I've always been like that with animals: a big sister to them. When I was small, I never made any distinction between them and humans. I used to say to my brother: "If you drum against the aquarium like that, you'll make the fish cry." I maintained that horses didn't like their faces, and that was why they stirred the water they were going to drink with their hoofs, so as not to see their reflections in it. At Toulon, where we had a villa for a time, the days when the sirocco blew used to put me in the same state of electric excitement as the animals, who used to go a bit mad. I simply had to run, and I used to drag Gaston along with me....'

  'I've noticed this animal side of you for some time - from the way you stare at the flame when someone makes us a rum omelette, or the way your voice changes when you talk about your cats, whose names, incidentally, I don't yet know....'

  'They haven't any.'

  'No names? What do you do when you want to call them, then?'

  'I don't call them. They come when they want to.'

  Sublime words, thought Costals. There's the guarantee of my future freedom, if I marry her, as I may well. And the hardest thing to get people to do, even one's friends, is to leave you alone. I'll 'come when I want to'.

  Alone of the four, the blue cat crudely begged for food; the others no doubt were there with the same object, but they disguised it admirably (and what an age the blue cat took to decide whether it wanted what Costals offered it or not!). When Costals held out a bit of mustard at the end of his finger, what a look of disappointment, of irritation, of reproach, and also of snootiness! Monsieur fancied himself, Monsieur felt insulted. But when he was offered a piece of orange peel, that really was the limit: Monsieur fled at once. Now he was sulking, sitting a few feet away from the table, looking the other way when one said pss ... pss ..., like a bourgeois when a beggar approaches, and yawning. As for the mauve cat, which had climbed on to the table, it simply devoured Solange with its eyes, opening its mouth from time to time and emitting a miaow that was more potential than actual (not a sound could be heard): it looked like a cross between a seal and a bear-cub. Solange said:

  'How much more moving the silence of animals is than the verbosity of men!'

  'Yes, but the silence of men is more moving than the silence of animals. . . . Forgive me, but the more I hear people talk about the intelligence of animals, the more I am struck by their stupidity.'[There is an untranslatable pun here: bête = animal, bêtise = stupidity (Translator's note).]

  Meanwhile the yellow cat had buried its head roughly in Costals' half-closed hands, where it had remained for some while, like a child crying into its mother's hands, or a lover into the hands of his beloved. And Costals, when his food was brought, at first did not have the heart to touch it, for fear of disturbing the cat. Fortunately the latter, raising its head and catching sight of a little boy who apparently appealed to it more than Costals, jumped down unceremoniously and ran off to rub itself against his bare calves, leaving our author to resume his lunch. Whereupon the mauve cat, which had awaited its turn like someone waiting to go into the confessional, performed its act, which Costals might have described as follows:

  'Pussy right in the middle of a ray of sunlight, like a dancer under the spotlight, while everything else remains in shadow.

  Pussy shakes a paw.

  Pussy, one ear up and one ear down, like a roisterer. (Why a roisterer?)

  Pussy pushes me away with a paw. Ah! so we have a mind of our own, have we?

  Pussy bites my shirt-cuff with the utmost violence.

  Pussy lifts its dangling ear with its paw, but this time turns it inside out: bad luck! Pussy cannot get it back into place, and gives me a dirty look.

  Pussy sucks the handle of my fork.'

  Etc.

  To get rid of the mauve cat, Costals spread out a newspaper on the ground for it. The pliability and dryness of this newspaper, and the crackling noise it made, played marvellously on the mauve cat's nerves. Now it would sit on its posterior, playing with the edge of the newspaper with its fore-paws and then, of course, losing its balance, falling over backwards, catching sight of its backside in the process, whence an irresistible temptation to lick it there and then. Now it would sit on the newspaper, with the tip of its tongue, which it had forgotten to draw in, sticking out like a bit of ham sticking out of a sandwich, without its knowing - and even if there had been twenty people there, not one of them would have drawn its attention to it, as one would to a gentleman with some bird-lime on his jacket. And yet this forgotten bit of tongue gave it a not very intelligent air. When the mauve cat made as if to leave the newspaper and come back to the table, Costals gazed at it sternly, and the cat stopped with a paw in the air.

  'The way you stopped that cat reminds me of the way I control our black tabby. I may tell you I don't like her at all, because she's always been everybody's pet, especially my father's. I only have to look at her and her face falls, she lowers her ears, and slinks away at once, sensing that I don't like her.'

  A slight pause, and she added: 'I don't like her!' with such passion that Costals felt that she could be dangerous one day.

  'I'll show you something even better.'

  Placing his hand over the root of the mauve cat's tail, he took its hind-quarters in his palm. Whereupon the mauve cat, which was obviously a female, completely lost its head. Erectile and vibratile, stretched to snapping-point, in a really sensational nervous paroxysm, frantic, snarling, its eyes like those of a Russian woman (bright green and popping out of its head), it twisted and writhed like a serpent-cat, offered itself right and left, all its dignity (which had never been great) gone to pot, 'came' and 'went' like an 'easy' bull, covered Costals' ankles with hairs - unimpeachable evidence, an examining magistrate's delight - fawned on his shoes, and reminded him in a thousand ways that it was high time it was exorcized. Costals himself was seriously affected by the Spirit. In front of the mauve cat, as in front of a bouquet of flowers, he would have liked to dance, prostrate himself, bang his forehead on the ground, and finally eat it - this last impulse being that which inspires believers to eat their God, lovers to kiss and bite the person they love, which is an adumbration of the act of eating him ('devour with caresses'). He contented himself with uttering cries and mimicking; his face had become cat-like, he had adopted their infantile ways, their look of wild innocence, and even purred, with such a realistic purr that Solange, leaning towards him, listening, was quite taken aback. Soon - as with the plush rabbit - he had to break off, feeling that the moment was coming when there would be nothing for it but to slash his own flesh and crunch ground glass.

  As they were leaving, after touching farewells to the charming squad, he said to her:

  'In Provençal, a young girl is known as a chatouno. From now on I shall call you the chatoune.'

  From this lunch he took away two profound impressions, left by (1) Solange's animality, which brought her much closer to him, and (2) the strange look (jealousy?) she had given him when he had gone on holding the two warm little hands of
the yellow cat in one of his.

  Afterwards they took a taxi to the harbour. The sea was sea- green, the sky was sky-blue, the steamers - their hulls painted with minium - bled into the water. The quays smelt of hemp, tar, wood and brine. In the scorching barges kohl-eyed dockers lay sleeping. A liner was getting under way, and as it headed for the open sea it gave a little toot, poor thing, to keep its pecker up, and made water behind: piddling with fright. Clearly it was a boat that was new to the job.

  They walked along the jetty, then stopped and sat down on a pile of rope. A delicious compound of cool breeze and warm sun! From time to time a wave struck the base of the jetty with an explosive thump. A fishing-boat called Dignitas (imagine a French trawler calling itself Dignity) was bearing off, and its hawser, unwinding along the quayside, was the image of a sea-serpent sliding lazily into the waves. Along its beams the sun lit up a flickering patchwork of flames and flowers, and the shadow of the boat, beneath it, was absinthe-green. Gulls rocked up and down on the swell, with an air of acute discomfort, as though they were about to be seasick. And amid the slow, ponderous movements of the harbour, a single motor-launch alone added a touch of speed, leaving in its wake a wide Neptune's trident of foam that lingered on the water long after it had disappeared. On the other side, towards the open sea, the waves surged and tossed like a woman having a bad dream.