“I stared at her to keep from looking at him and slowly fell into the disturbing realization of what he wanted to do. He grabbed my arm. My mind was clouded. I shook in fear and cold. I didn’t want to believe what Cannat wanted to do. He kissed me on the temple.
“ ‘My mother is exhausted,’ he said turning toward the girl. He pulled up an old wooden chair for me to sit in.
“ ‘Come my dear Ingrid, give me one last kiss,’ he said as he walked toward her. She didn’t move, it seemed like she had been hypnotized.
“ ‘Cannat, I want to leave,’ I heard myself plead.
“He grabbed Ingrid’s head and smiled at her calmly. For a moment, it seemed like she struggled to break free, but her attempt was no stronger than a sparrow’s.
“ ‘Cannat, have mercy,’ I begged him. ‘I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to. For the love of God, don’t make me. Leave the girl alone. I would have never agreed to something like this. Never!’
“The girl had fainted and Cannat had his mouth over her mouth. Suddenly, I realized he had lifted her off the floor and that her legs were dangling in the air. She looked like a rag doll hanging from his stiff arms. It didn’t look like he was giving her a normal kiss; it seemed like he was trying to inhale her teeth, her tongue, her insides. Her entire body convulsed, as if she had been shocked with a defibrillator. She convulsed again and her legs and arms shook violently. The kiss continued without losing its intensity. She was no longer moving, she didn’t seem to be alive. All of the sudden, Cannat let her go and she fell to the floor dead.
“For a minute Cannat looked like a dragon from a childhood fairytale, a dragon that was about to breathe fire. His face briefly contorted as thou he were about to vomit something foul he had accidentally swallowed. It seemed like he was vomiting her soul. Then, he coughed, cleared his throat, and spit on the floor with theatrical gestures of repugnance.
“ ‘Quickly!’ he yelled and stood staring at me.
“In spite of my terror, I was suddenly lethargic, invaded and overwhelmed by drowsiness. Immediately, I realized my soul had left my body and that Cannat’s physical body had also disappeared. His ethereal essence stood next to me. I was horrified, my eyes fixed on the girl’s body.
“ ‘My God, help me,’ I begged. ‘Don’t let this happen. Don’t let him make me do this.’
“ ‘It’s time!’ Cannat told me. ‘Now!’
“It was a divine order that I couldn’t disobey or even question. It couldn’t be delayed a second longer. I felt myself being absorbed into Ingrid’s body by some sort of supernatural and unstoppable force. In a fraction of a second, I was inside her. I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
“While this was happening, I thought I was still in my body. It felt like I was dreaming; everything seemed wrapped in a cloud of unreality, a fleeting, disturbing dream-like fantasy. When I opened my eyes, I thought I would still be sitting in the chair with that monster Cannat in front of me and with Ingrid’s dead body lying on the floor. However, the vision I saw from my perspective left me confused.
“I saw a couple of dark strands of hair floating across the white film of dust that covered the wooden floor. Then, I saw Cannat’s legs towering above me. I realized I was lying on the floor. Why was I wearing such strange and simple cotton clothes? I turned to look at the chair I had been sitting in. The chair was empty and my old body was crumpled on the floor next to it. It lay lifeless on the floor. I burst out in a broken scream and started to drag myself toward my body. My head hurt horribly; Ingrid must have hit it when she fell. My backside and my right arm also hurt. The tears that spilled across those unfamiliar cheeks were as warm as the ones that had always spilled across mine. My head was a whirlwind of bitter thoughts. Cannat lifted me off the floor and stood me in front of him. He studied me as if it were the first time he had seen that body.
“ ‘Your soul makes her miserable body shine radiantly,’ he said and wiped my tears with his fingers.
“ ‘What is this Cannat? What have you done to me?’ I continued crying. I was filled with the most indescribable horror when I heard my strange new voice.
“He laughed as if he were laughing at a little girl who had just been surprised by the taste of wine.
“ ‘What have I done to you?’ he smiled. ‘I gave you a new life. I gave you a carefully selected young, healthy and marvelous body. Don’t you understand? You have a new life to live with Shallem. A life that could be very long. This body is only sixteen years-old. Almost brand new, and it’s all yours.’ He stood there smiling as if he expected me to thank him.
“ ‘But I didn’t want this...,’ I murmured between sobs, grabbing him because I couldn’t control my new legs and could barely stand. I was weak because I couldn’t control that large body and my weakness grew even worse because I was traumatized by the sight of my own cadaver. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
“Cannat laughed again, the little girl was still unaccustomed to the taste of wine.
“ ‘You’ll be pleased once you calm down and think,’ he assured me. ‘You’ll get used to the body soon. The only thing that’s changed is your appearance. Nothing more.’
“I looked at my former body lying on the floor and knew it was already lost. Impulsively, I let go of Cannat so I could examine it, or rather, so I could throw myself at it, hug it and cry but my new legs suddenly gave way. Cannat kept me from falling.
“ ‘You asked for this,’ he said, his voice suddenly grave. ‘You wanted this. You didn’t want to die. You prayed day and night because you didn’t want to die. Your pleas and prayers were as obvious as the tears in your eyes. And you knew there were only two gods able to hear your prayers, to answer them. You knew Shallem and I could read your thoughts and wishes. You didn’t dare speak them aloud but you knew you didn’t have to. Shallem heard them and I heard them. Your soul begged us not to leave you, not to let you die. You left it up to your gods to do something. Well, one of them has answered your prayers.’
“ ‘That wasn’t my intention...,’ I muttered, baffled by the sound of my voice and the words he had spoken.
“ ‘Does that make you feel better?’ he asked undaunted. ‘I was able to hear what your conscious refused to admit. You asked me for this. But don’t worry, you can always console yourself, keep fooling yourself with the idea that you didn’t say it aloud. Let’s leave it at that. I made you do this. It’s not your fault Ingrid is dead. Your conscious is clean.’
“ ‘This is monstrous!’ I screamed. ‘It’s horrible! I can’t accept this! Shallem will hate us both!’
“What sad mistake it was for me to raise my voice. Ingrid’s father came out of the back and Cannat immediately killed him. He was struck dead as soon as his head emerged from the door. Then Cannat turned to look at me with the same expression of severity as if nothing had happened.
“ ‘Don’t worry about Shallem. Of course he’s going to throw a tantrum, but he’ll get over it. It will be worth it. Now are you ready to go back?’
The woman sat silently and watched father DiCaprio with a strange smile on her face. Her peculiar Etruscan smile.
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “How horrifying!”
The woman laughed.
“Cannat was right. Shallem threw an authentic tantrum. Much more than that. He was really furious, more furious than I had ever seen him.
“Shallem was terrified when he saw me standing in the middle of the living room. My eyes were wide open, waiting for his reaction. Of course, he recognized me as soon as he saw me in spite of my new body. He stood absolutely still as soon as his eyes rested on that unfamiliar body. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“ ‘Shallem...,’ I muttered shivering. Hearing my new voice made me feel even more dissociated. ‘I didn’t want...’
“He was appalled. He didn’t move or say anything. For a long while, he remained silent. I didn’t know what to do. I asked myself, ‘Will he hate me?’ Suddenly, his face turned into a storm; lightening
burst through his eyes and his voice thundered:
“ ‘Where is he! Where is he!’ he screamed with all his might.
“Shallem screamed Cannat’s name as he searched for him throughout the property. He did this even though he knew Cannat had already left. I was terrified and stayed inside. I hid in a corner and tried to convince myself that Shallem wasn’t concerned about my body’s appearance, that I hadn’t suddenly turned into a strange, obtrusive human. I would have given anything not to be in that situation; not to feel the fear I suffered because I had to confront Shallem’s anger. He was making it very difficult for me. Shortly, he returned, his face red and contorted.
“ ‘I didn’t want this, Shallem,’ I started, unable to keep quiet when he looked at me. ‘I didn’t even realize what he was doing until it was too late. He made me do it!’
“ ‘Is that so?’ he said. He gave me such a severe and stern looked that I wished with all my soul that I could go back to being that decrepit old woman sitting by the window whom he had loved so much. I noticed there was blanket on the chair. The one he had so lovingly gone to look for. Now it seemed like he hated me. I wanted to die.
“ ‘I didn’t ask him to do it!’ I continued hysterically. ‘I would never ask for such a thing! I knew you didn’t want him to do this! I didn’t even know he could do this!’
“ ‘I know this wasn’t your fault,’ he said in a cold, impersonal voice. He stood there frowning, well away from me and without making the slightest move to close the distance between us. Immediately, I burst into tears and fell to the floor.
“ ‘For the love of God!’ I begged. ‘Just kill me yourself or quit looking at me like that! Make him undo what he did! Let’s leave things as they were or my life will turn into a living hell! Please, I’d rather die! I want to die in peace!’
“And I kept repeating, ‘I’d rather die!’ until those words turned into one unintelligible syllable. He approached me and knelt on the floor. I felt his hands on my shoulders and then his warm breath in my ear.
“ ‘I’m not mad at you, my love. I’m really not.’
“ ‘I beg you, don’t hate me. Don’t hate me,’ I pleaded.
“ ‘No, no. Of course I don’t hate you. He did the right thing by disappearing, he’s such a...’
“ ‘Shallem,’ I said, staring into his eyes. ‘we can easily end this nightmare right now. I’m inside a mortal body, a completely mortal body; I can destroy it. If you want, I’ll do it right now. It will be as if this never happened.’
“Immediately, his face paled and crumpled. He seemed horrified by the idea, as if I had proposed something completely absurd.
“ ‘No! No!’ he yelled at once.
“I thanked God because I would have never been able to conjure up the courage to kill myself. I had spoken merely out of desperation because I needed to hear him say no. I needed to know that, in spite of everything, he still wanted to be with me. And he did.
“I spent the rest of the day nestled in Shallem’s arms. Leaving his arms, standing, moving ever so slightly and feeling the different weight of my arms and legs, feeling my pale, plump skin, feeling the strength in my young heart; all of this exacerbated my terror.
“I stayed nestled beneath the silk sheets when Shallem got up to bring me some fruit. As I waited, I didn’t move a muscle, not even my eyes. I was terrified to look at my strange limbs. I didn’t even dare think about anything. I tried everything to keep my mind blank but my brain was not my own. Ingrid’s memories flooded my mind with places and faces I did not know.
“I screamed in desperation thinking that I was going crazy, that I was being pushed out, that I was completely losing my identity. Shallem came running and began consoling me, hugging me.
“ ‘I’m seeing things, Shallem!’ I cried between sobs. ‘People I don’t know, places I haven’t been. Don’t let me go crazy! I don’t want to be a different person!’
“ ‘Calm down. Calm down. Your soul is just investigating its new body. Your soul is shocked because its inside an older body, not a newborn’s body. It will stop soon.’
“ ‘Don’t let it do this to me!’ I screamed. ‘Can’t you make it stop? I don’t want to see those things, they frighten me! I don’t want to know anything about her!’
“ ‘I can’t stop it. Your soul must adapt itself to its new body. Soon all of her memories will be erased,’ he responded and softly caressed my face as if he couldn’t tell it wasn’t mine. ‘Don’t suffer, it won’t last much longer.’
“ ‘Why did he do this to me, Shallem? Why did he do it?’ I asked as he dried my tears with his hands just as his brother had done a few hours earlier.
“ ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know.’
–III–
“You can’t imagine how I felt when I took off my clothes that night. How my strange new hands trembled as I stripped in front of the mirror. How I felt when I saw those bright and shiny eyes staring back at me; when I saw those ample breast jutting from my chest. It wouldn’t have mattered if the body had been beautiful or horrible. To me, it was a monster. A horrible monster that had seized me; a horrible monster I would never control. When I crawled into our bed, Shallem kissed and caressed me as he had done any other night; my lover’s kisses and caresses were no more nor no less passionate.
“When I awoke the following morning, the visions had stopped tormenting me. Nevertheless, the next few days were absolutely terrifying. I was suffering a fate far worse than that from which I had escaped. It felt like I had been imprisoned in a gruesome costume that I couldn’t bear to touch. A costume that didn’t let me forget, even for a second, that I was its prisoner. When I sat to read, I was stupefied by the rise and fall of my voluptuous breasts as I breathed. When I ate, I was horrified when I saw those coarse hands manipulate the utensils, when I saw the thick arms that held them. Then I would have a narcissistic desire to let my hands roam my face. I felt those pink lips whose sense of touch made my lover’s lips unrecognizable; I felt prominent cheekbones instead of my delicate features. I was constantly nauseated, as if I myself had killed my real body, as if I had been condemned to bury pieces of my cadaver every day.
“Nevertheless, days passed and those disturbing and frightful sensations were slowly replaced by a completely new awareness: the pleasure of moving strong hands that obeyed my every command without the slightest tremble; standing sure-footed on robust legs that never grew weak nor buckled and collapsed. Not to mention those keen eyes which, even in a dim candle lit room, could make out the slightest change in my lover’s expression. That was youth forgotten. Things I had taken for granted. Things which had seemed so simple, so natural when I was young now astonished me as if I had just been bestowed with supernatural gifts.
“Until then I had never realized how horrible it was to be old. Old age had crept up on me so inconspicuously, so gradually that I wound up growing accustomed to it. I had grown so used to it that I could no longer clearly distinguish its symptoms. It was as if spilling wine when I brought the cup to my chapped lips, or seeing clumps of hair in my soft brush, or stopping ten times before I finally climbed the stairs to my bedroom were things that had happened since my birth and weren’t the product of a long and sad decline toward decadence.
“My new body was larger and stronger; as a consequence I had to struggle to refine my movements. Except for this detail, I ended up feeling perfectly at ease within it, as if it had always been mine.
“Shallem’s soul disappeared the entire night after Cannat had brought me back in Ingrid’s body. At dawn the following day, he returned only to leave again. He was looking for Cannat.
“ ‘I can’t find him and he refuses to contact me,’ he explained three days later.
“ ‘Why are you looking for him? What do you plan to do?’ I asked, worried.
“ ‘I have to talk to him. What he did wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair to you.’
“I was baffled. My response to his comment was on the
tip of my tongue, as if it were being forced out of me by some sort of internal hurricane. At the last minute, I managed to hold back the words. I was going to say: ‘I don’t care if it wasn’t right!’ My milky skin burned red with shame the entire day just for having had that thought.
“Was Cannat right to do this?” I asked myself. “Was this what my subconscious had pleaded for?”
“And was it?” the priest asked.
“I can’t explain all my conscious behaviors let alone my subconscious behaviors. Can you?”
“No,” he responded.
“You can judge me objectively because you know everything I know. I’ve explained it all and I’ve been frank. But trust me when I say it’s not worthwhile to stop and discuss this now. Although you want to discuss whether I truly wanted to continue living in a new body, soon you’ll see that what happens in the future will reduce what happened to Ingrid to nothing when it comes time for me to be judged. Do you have another question?”
“Yes, there is something else,” he answered as he anxiously leaned across the table trying to get closer to her. “I don’t understand why Cannat put you in a new body. Shallem wouldn’t have suffered long, as he himself had said. Did Cannat love you? Had he started to enjoy your company? This is the only reason he would want to spend another seventy years with you, although, he was always so anxious for you to finally leave them alone. That is, if Shallem didn’t share a part of his soul with you, in which case you would be around much longer than just seventy years...”
“Of course, I spent an endless amount of hours asking myself these same questions. If Cannat hated me, it would have taken him around a year to put an end to Shallem’s suffering after my death. Instead, and as you described, he choose to keep me around seventy more years. Because he choose to keep me alive, I was comfortable thinking that he really did enjoy my company. I had turned into a type of pet, a soft, sweet, controllable and harmless pet. Like a little dog, I would happily greet them when they came back from one of their trips; I always did whatever they wanted. I always supported their decisions. I was understanding and clever; I knew when I wasn’t wanted; I knew when to disappear and not disturb them when they wanted to be alone. They needed time alone, more than you or I could ever imagine, but which I was able to intuit. I wasn’t greedy with time. I begged them to visit this or that foreign country where they could buy me something I pretended to fancy. I begged them to visit our children by themselves because I felt my old age would have frightened them. When they took these trips, they would often spend two or more days alone together. Since it didn’t take them more than a second to travel to the most remote location on Earth, two days was a long time. Also, at night, I would notice Shallem’s spirit had left his body and I knew he and Cannat had gone someplace alone. This made me happy. I believe I was smart to act this way and I knew they always appreciated it. I couldn’t cling to Shallem like a shadow because I was certain Cannat would have killed me and Shallem would have probably ended up fed up with me. Remember we were very different: there were millions of things I couldn’t understand nor share with them.
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