by Julien Gracq
She raised her arms and without an effort, like a living caryatid, supported the sky on her hands. It seemed that the flow of that captivating and mysterious grace could not continue another instant without the vessels bursting in their perilously pounding hearts. Then she threw back her head, and in a frail sweet gesture raised her shoulders, and the foam that blew against her breasts and against her belly sent such an intolerably voluptuous sensation coursing through her that her lips drew back over her teeth in a passionate grimace—and to the surprise of the two spectators, at that instant there burst from this exultant figure the disordered and fragile movements of a woman.
Herminien, lingering on the shore, was transfixed by a tumultuous image. He was living over again that moment when the sun, breaking through the mists suddenly with its fiery darts, imprinted Heide in the depth of his heart—and those tragic moments when, with head thrown back between her shoulders as from too violent a shock, there escaped from her like an involuntary admission, the gestures of possession. Then her long and liquid eyes rolled back, her hands opened, each finger slowly unfolding as in the free surrender of a last resistance, her teeth glittered in the sunlight one by one in all their insolence, her lips parted like a wound henceforth impossible to conceal, her whole body trembled all through its solid thickness, and the toes rose as though all the nerves of the body were stretched to breaking point, like the rigging of a ship ravaged by an unknown wind.
They swam, the three of them, toward the high sea. Lying almost on the surface of the water, they watched the heavy waves come rolling toward them from the horizon in regular succession, and in the vertiginous tumult of their senses it seemed to them that the entire weight of the waters fell on their shoulders and must surely crush them—before forming beneath them a swell of softness and of silence which would lift them lazily on its weary back with a sensation of exquisite lightness. Sometimes the crest of a wave would brusquely throw its shadow over Heide's face, sometimes the salty gleam of her wet cheek would reappear. It seemed to them that, little by little, their muscles began to partake of the dissolving power of the element that bore them along: their flesh seemed to lose some of its density and to become identified, by an obscure osmosis, with the liquid meshes that entangled them. They felt a matchless purity, an incomparable freedom being born in them—they smiled, all three of them, a smile unknown to men, as they braved the incalculable horizon.
They were headed out to sea, and so many were the waves that had already rolled under them, so many the sudden and threatening crests they had breasted, and behind which appeared once more all the aridity of those plains, consecrated to the sun alone, that it seemed to them that the earth behind them must already have disappeared from sight, abandoning them to their enchanted migration in the midst of the waves. And with exultant cries, they encouraged each other in their flight. And it seemed to Albert that the water was actually flowing under them rushing at an unimaginable speed, and would overflow the melancholy shore, while he with his travelling companions pursued a voyage that, in his mind, increasingly took on the character of enchantment. They swam on and on at what seemed to them a constantly accelerated speed. A sharp challenge appeared in their eyes, gaining strength as they pursued this race without a goal. A few minutes more and, with the consciousness of the great distance already covered, an icy conviction became fixed in their minds. It seemed to them, to the three of them at the same moment, that now they would no longer dare to turn back, would not dare to look toward the shore, and with a glance they exchanged a pledge that bound them body and soul.
Each of them seemed to see this mortal challenge in the others' eyes—to feel that the other two were sweeping him along by the whole force of their bodies and their wills—out to sea—further—toward unknown spaces—toward a gulf from which return would be impossible—and neither of them had any doubt as to the insidious character of this abrupt accord of their wills and of their destinies. It was no longer possible to retreat. They swam to rhythmic gasps escaping from their three chests, and with the thrilling chill of death the keen air penetrated their tired lungs. They looked lingeringly at one another. They could not detach their eyes one from the other, while lucidly their minds calculated the unretraceable distance already covered. And in a voluptuous transport, each recognized on the other faces the indubitable signs, the reflection of his own conviction, stronger with every second—now it was certain, they would no longer have strength enough to return.
And with a holy ardour they plunged forward through the waves, and in the joy of their peremptory discovery, at the price of their common death, every instant more inevitable, each yard gained redoubled their inconceivable felicity. And, beyond hate and beyond love, they felt themselves melting, all three of them, while they glided now with furious energy into the abyss—in one single vaster body, in the light of a superhuman hope that filled their eyes, drowned in blood and brine, with the reassuring peace of tears. Their hearts leaped in their breasts, and the very limit of their strength seemed now at hand—they knew that not one of them would break the silence, would ask to turn back—their eyes shone with savage joy. Beyond life and beyond death they now looked at one another for the first time with sealed lips, and through transparent eyes plumbed the darkness of their hearts with devastating bliss—and their souls touched in an electric caress. And it seemed to them that death would reach them, not when the swelling chasms beneath them should claim their prey, but when the lenses of their staring eyes—fiercer than the mirrors of Archimedes—should consume them in the convergence of an all-devouring communion.
Suddenly Heide's head disappeared under the water and all movement in her seemed to cease. Then Herminien, with a sudden shudder, awoke and out of his breast rose an astonishing cry. They plunged into the watery half-light. White shapes floated before their eyes as one or another of their limbs appeared, slowly moving through the opaque greenness in which they seemed profoundly ensnared. Suddenly, in this submarine quest their eyes met, and seemed to touch, and they closed them with the sensation of an intolerable danger, as though confronted by the eye of the abyss itself, magnetic and hideous, engendering an icy dizziness.
In this frenzied search, during which it seemed to them that their hands brandished invisible knives, the form of a breast, as hard as stone, suddenly floated into Herminien's palm, then an arm which he seized with desperate violence, and when he opened his eyes above the surface of the water out of the choking terror that had surrounded him, he found the three of them reunited.
The sun blinded them like a flow of molten metal. Far away a yellowish line, thin and almost unreal, marked the beginning of that element which they had thought to have renounced forever. A spell was broken. They felt the earth's call, it echoed like an alarm bell, sounded deep in their muscles and in their brains. Anguish tightened around their temples, unnerved their hands; straining their wills to the uttermost, they swam towards land, and it seemed to them that they would never reach it now—the effort of their hands in the water seemed to be detached from them and like the dip of a useless oar. There was a burst of sunlight, and the whole bay was resplendent as for a melancholy celebration, a last irony of nature before their now inevitable end. Unendurably the blood tore like searing lightning through their brains.
But at last sand slipped under their feet; and with arms outflung they lay with all their weight, in mortal fatigue, on the wet beach, their eyes following the soothing movement of the clouds in the sky, and feeling all along their now supported limbs, the calm gladness of the earth. The wind caressed their faces and flew away like an insect from a flower, and they were astonished by the regular movement of the clouds, the agility of the grass, the noisy enthusiasm of the waves, and the mystery of their respiration that seemed to come to them like an unknown and charitable guest.
The hesitating spark of life wakened deeper and deeper zones of their flesh and, little by little, out of the mass of dense cold air, the clouds, and the penetrating humidity of the sa
nd, like a statue out of its block of marble, they were born, they were detached. As in the morning of the world they expanded in the torrid heat of the sun, they began to stir on the sand and at last rising, they stood there erect on the shore, each surprised to assume again his own particular stature, surprised that life as it returned in its individual poverty, should hold out to them so quickly the decorous garments and the matrix of an ineluctable personality. But even now, still they did not dare to speak: had it been lost, drowned in the midst of the insatiable waves, the perverse secret of their hearts?
THE CHAPEL OF THE ABYSS
A FEW DAYS AFTER these signal events, Albert strolled idly along the banks of the river of Argol. These perilous gorges, these precipitous crags, veiled in the thick curtain of the woods, attracted his tormented soul. Here the river rolled its waters along the bottom of a natural chasm with towering sides, to which clung all the rich verdure of a glorious forest. The continual windings of the river's course gave an aspect of singular isolation to these retreats. Around Albert the high walls of frowning forest seemed to consume a considerable portion of the sky, and even to touch the edge of the sun's ardent disc although it had already risen high over the horizon. These branches, majestically and rhythmically swaying, were stirred by the wind from the nearby sea which brought with it the roar of the waves and the aerial tumult of boundless space. But below this grandiose symphony, on a level with the stream, all was stillness and untroubled calm in the shelter of the impenetrable rampart of trees through which transparent and motionless columns of coolness rose from the water.
Sometimes, struck by the slanting rays of the sun, the river in one of its broad sweeps burst on the eye with its wide beaches sparkling in the dazzling light, sometimes it contracted into a deep and narrow channel between high verdant walls, where it seemed to be escaping with the thick fluidity of oil, green and black, seemed to be adapting itself to the darkling hue of the high walls, with the guile of a natural snare that struck the senses with a silent horror, like a serpent gliding through the grass.
This natural ambush—with no possible escape for the soul goaded by mystery and curiosity and by the encompassing silence where no bird sang, and where the too apparent symptoms of the habitual lethargy of night were contradicted only by the altogether singular gaze of the white, vacant and blinding disc of the sun darting Albert's eye into the cool entrails of the earth—seemed the scene of an unfathomable crime where the utterly indisputable absence of any piece of evidence must finally attract the eye to the now altogether significant depths of those dark, transparent waters where, haunted by a sinister foreboding, his eye now sought a golden ring set with fabulous gems, or a dagger still smeared with a network of those red and indelible filaments that make the complete dilution of human blood in water forever so improbable.
The curious presence of the sun over that lofty horizon at a late hour of the afternoon (looking more like the moon in the middle of the night brushing the highest branches of the trees), the dark transparence of the water, the limpidity of the sun that a million leaves divided and vaporized into a floating mist like a sulphurous cloud, captured and glaucous—everything conspired in that abysmal aquarium of the air to fill Albert's soul with an eerie feeling that these were not the ordinary effects of light traversing our atmosphere but—and the thought made him shudder—that he was looking at an impossible negative of the night, and, as he lay at full length on the grassy bank, he leaned his face down close to the swift and vibratile surface of the water to touch its incalculable coolness with his cheeks. Great fishes were swimming in the transparent water, embellishing the depths with their lashing movements. A lurking life animated those depths above which all the terrestrial voices seemed to fall uniformly silent, instantly smothered by the rush of those violent cold waters pressing with an unendurable force against his eardrum, and sounding an inexorable alarm.
Once more his eye swept their calm surface and at once his brain recovered its lucidity. He had discovered the real meaning of this inconceivable landscape which he had until now only considered upside-down.
Out of the depth of that chasm, which stung his skin with its mortal chill, rose the trembling, watery visage of the sun, and the reflected colonnades of trees were ranged like heavy towers, lustrous and as smooth as copper, while under his eyes and lips, in the centre of this inverted peristyle of a solemn regularity, appeared the face of the sky like a merciful abyss, henceforth instantly opened, into which man might at last irrevocably plunge and satisfy without restraint what now to Albert was revealed as his most natural inclination.
For a second he closed his eyes under the charm and the terror and the intense pleasure of the temptation, and when he opened them again the curtain of trees was suddenly torn asunder beneath the water, and the reflected image of Herminien, walking without effort under the surface, came toward him through that forever forbidden world—and in the midst of the tumult of his terror and his ecstasy, which sent all the blood surging to his heart, could be heard distinctly the ten strokes of a clock.
Even the way Herminien was dressed, as he thus appeared to Albert in such an alarming fashion among the trees of the opposite bank, differed considerably from his usual attire. His head bare and his brown curls flying in the wind, he wore a long grey cloak that hung in austere folds from his shoulders and enveloped him completely. His face shone with a fraternal exaltation, and it seemed to Albert that this image out of the bottom of the river smiled at him with a smile whose calm and meditative fixity belonged to some region inaccessible to all human relationships. As though borne along by the web of an exalting music, his limbs seemed the prisoners of the fatal laws of a number—although a primary one in every respect—and his step majestic beyond all measure and at every moment plainly oriented, seemed to Albert the materialization, shorn for the first time of all kinds of grotesquely aesthetic veils, of what Kant has called, mysteriously enough, purposiveness without purpose. Whereas still governed by a quantity of the known laws of our planet, it seemed clear that his ways, perhaps for the first time, did not exactly coincide with the paths already traced, and that one could, without too great surprise, expect of this ambiguous apparition miracles, comparatively minor no doubt and not yet formally violating the physical laws already verified, but whose very ambiguity and air of derisive mystification could not fail to engender a feeling of uneasiness.
The curve of his two arms, raised in a gesture of ecstasy, suggested that of a lute, of which, it seemed strangely to Albert, Herminien was, at the same time, both the sound and the strings, and the landscape appeared to concentrate in him all its secret energy, to fire him with a supernatural and tremulous flame, and when he should open his mouth, one had every reason to expect to hear the powerful cry of the forest itself and of the mighty waters, for in a flash the bewitched mind accepted the idea that he occupied the very focal point, the precious and uniquely efficacious centre of this enormous and sonorous pavilion, and that he would shake the entire forest with the least breath of his voice. At that instant the curve of his arms was broken, he placed a finger on his lips, and with a gesture whose gentle seriousness seemed to caress the wall of the heart itself, he beckoned Albert to follow him.
Walking on opposite and parallel banks of the river with the rapid current between them, their reflections met in the very middle of the stream, smooth as a mirror. The shimmering freshness of the grass, the coolness of the air, the corollas of the big red flowers that bowed gracefully as they passed and seemed to distil a subtle and grave incense like the confident and devout soul of morning itself, gave to their silent peregrination the characters of a pilgrimage without a goal, and was for that very reason all the more perturbing. An extraordinary suspense filled Albert's soul, and his forehead, bent toward the ground, seemed to be bowed over his own plenitude. Around them the black depths of the forest seemed to grow denser with every step, the water, confined between its high banks, took on the flowing transparency of night. A rustic wooden br
idge made of logs crudely put together, joined the two banks, and one behind the other they penetrated into the heart of the forest, and pressed forward among its precipitous gorges.
Soon, through the trunks of the trees covered with brilliant and elastic moss, through the branches twisted into fantastic arabesques, appeared the grey walls of a chapel overhanging the abyss. It presented the image of marvellous antiquity and in more than one place fragments of the delicate arches had fallen onto the black grass, where they shone like the white and scattered limbs of a hero treacherously felled, to whom the mysterious oratory would consecrate to the end of time the tears of an insatiable sorrow. Crazy vines with curiously lacy leaves, roots with vigorous thorns, and tufts of grey oats clung to the stones. On all sides the forest encircled it like a stifling cloak, and under the thick branches there floated a vague green twilight that had all the immobility of stagnant water: the place seemed so perfectly enclosed that the confined air could no more circulate there than in a long-closed room, and drifting around the walls in an opaque cloud, imbued for centuries with the persistent perfumes of moss and dried stones, it seemed like an odorant balm into which the precious relics had fallen. And yet, in the midst of this atmosphere of dream where time seemed miraculously suspended, an iron clock bristled with ominous arms, and the creaking, regular sound of its mechanism which it was impossible for the soul in the midst of these solitudes to connect in any way with the measurement of a time empty of all substance in these regions, and which seemed only the starting of some infernal machine, was immediately adopted by Albert as the explanation of the eerie sounds that had so terrified him on the banks of the river at the moment of Herminien's sudden apparition.