by Julien Gracq
However, as the night advanced and the chill of the damp air, imprisoned by the branches along the ground, became more penetrating, the melting power, the witchery of the night seemed to wane; and as his head turned slightly, suddenly his eyes closed again and his arms crossed themselves over his heart as though to protect it from the approach of some invisible terror. Among the long tufts of grass floating in the waters of the spring near his head, it seemed to him that, in a flash, there had been stamped on the retina of his eye, one tuft ineffably different from all the others, whose undulating movement and particularly fine silky substance made it impossible for him to be mistaken. In his despair, he kept his eyes closed for a long time, seeking in vain to flee into the depth of an abyss of darkness and oblivion, while he pressed his hands tightly over the appalling leaping of his heart. But already he knew. With a bound he was on his feet, was gazing down at Heide's completely naked body. Her hair was floating in long swirls over the water and her head, thrown back and lost in the shadows where only her bare teeth shone, was raised at an appalling angle to her body, lifting toward the sky her round breasts caressed by the unbearable ardours of the moon. Blood, like the petals of a living flower, stained and bespattered her belly and open thighs, darker than the rivers of the night, more fascinating than its stars, and around her wrists, tied together behind her back, a thin rope had penetrated the flesh and disappeared completely under a tiny red line from which a drop of blood oozed with an insane deliberateness, rolled down one finger, and fell into the water of the spring with a curiously musical sound.
THE AVENUE
ONCE MORE grey vapours covered the sky, and the castle seemed to be buried under an avalanche, a continual crashing of cold waters. For Heide and Albert, after the flash of catastrophe, it seemed that slowly, slowly their life there began again with all the intoxicating relish of convalescence. Herminien had disappeared from the castle and no one knew what had become of him.
Long days went by, and a visible change seemed to take place in Albert. New forces awoke in him like the sudden rising of sap, like the pushing up of new life. Once more he took deep draughts of the invigorating forest air. Fresh vigour glided through his muscles. All day long he gave himself up to the most exhausting exertions; sometimes bringing a wild boar of the woods to bay, and as though dazed by the proximity of danger, feeling in the midst of an unforgettable spasm, the sharp tusks of the cornered beast grazing his belly, sometimes exhausting his horse in endless rides along the edge of the ocean, torn to its depths by the fierceness of the storm. Often, unable to contain the life bursting in his breast, leaving his horse to stretch its lean neck toward the yellow and salty grasses, whinnying fearfully at the furious gusts of wind, Albert would throw himself into the roaring sea, cleaving the waves with a heart full of anger, and then thrown back at last onto the shore, and conscious only of the hot pounding of his blood behind his closed eyelids, he seemed to feel, still bearing down upon his shoulders, up on his palms now pressed against the sand, the weight of the whole ocean that was yet unable to cool the burning ardour of the illimitable desires to which he had not yet given a name. It seemed to him that within the sweep of his wide arms, within the boundless gulf of his heart, with its powerful appetites, he could contain the entire earth. Then streaming with water and his skin drinking in the icy shower through all its pores as though trying to draw its divine coldness into his heart, he would plunge into the muddy dominion of the rain, into the depth of the forest devastated and swept like a beach by the transparent wind.
Sometimes his thoughts took a different course. It would seem to him that he had tasted some forbidden fruit of the tree of life with sharp thorns, and that he still felt its savour against his teeth—and he felt that over and above the bitter gift of knowledge which he had so often called on out of the depths of the disquietude of his heart, into it had descended with all its poisonous juices, the mysterious gifts of sympathy. That he had tasted of the blood of the dragon, and understood the language of birds. Then a veil of blood across his eyes, a quivering of his lips would announce the disconcerting approach of the atrocious and ineffable object. And lying at full length in the wet grass which he would gnaw in a transport of rage, his face streaming with his own salt tears, he would evoke the white vision of Heide in the bottomless pit of that night of which nothing could ever equal the horror and the fascination. He saw her shackled limbs as though melted and reassembled by the crushing majesty of the thunderbolt, her whole body more ravished, pierced, branded, palpitating, bruised, mangled and lacerated than by the nine swords, streaming with blood, burning with a rosy fire, of a blinding and unendurable radiance, all the marvellous substance of her flesh spurting out like a fruit in the sharp talons of destiny. And this white corpse with the wounds of the thunderbolt, the head thrown back, eyes lost in a mournful spell, took him in a backward course on a static, rocking voyage.
Then, his eyes closed, his temples throbbing in a consuming anguish, he felt the wound of her belly come to him. It inundated his eyelids with the savage, savage and blinding, baptism of her blood, and, line by line with fearful tension, weary of the pursuit of the glorious mysteries of the world, he followed the path of a drop of blood along a finger. And now the life of his soul seemed attached to that absurd drop, and he felt that all he had loved, all that he had sought flowed with that sombre drop to the bottom of the spring. And with eyes closed, he glued his lips to that red fountain and, drop by drop, he let the mysterious, the delicious blood stream over his lips. like a sharp thorn he plunged this vision into the depth of his heart which it pierced better than the red fire of a lance, felt blissfully its adorable sting, while a merciless trembling scourged all his living flesh, and he felt himself melting in an extenuating compassion. And now let him confront his fate and an end which was hardly doubtful any longer, let him confront fate that had not turned him into a pillar of salt, he whose eyes had looked upon what they should not have seen.
He dared not admit to himself that he was thinking of Herminien, and doubtlessly also some recollection of Catholic dogma, while seeming to justify and increase his power of concentration on the place of Heide's stigmata which, prevented him, on the other hand, from considering with more than a purely conventional shame the one who now appeared to him as the black angel of the Fall and its dangerous herald. And yet, beyond the pitiful distinctions of good and evil, his mind through an avenging dialectic, embraced Herminien in fraternal connivance. Whatever the transport of hate, whatever the degree of horror that scene might have encompassed, far beyond hate and horror Heide and Herminien must henceforth exist together, sealed to each other in all the lightning glare of the incomparable Event. Together till the end of time, inseparable accomplices like the victim and the knife, united and justified in the fecundity of their miracle, in the light of the unique instantaneous image they had created. For him too, as for Heide, Herminien would be the living salt of his wound, the food of his torturing disquietude. Wherever they went, there he would be, dragging himself at the feet of this couple of marble with vacant bluish eyes, more troubling than a statue dug up in a garden, more perverting than a time-machine, more demoralizing than the undiscoverable rock of offence. Yes, tinged with the overwhelming magic of her blood, his face bent over her face upside down, which before his eyes, as silent as oil, was beginning its incessant journey backward, Herminien was joined to her more closely than on a baleful pack of cards, through the incredible contempt of the artist, like a monstrous trump card, the bust of the king of spades to that of the queen of hearts.
Lying at full length on the mass of furs, her feet bare, her hair dishevelled, a dark cloak around her shoulders, Heide shielded herself from the painful attacks of the daylight, her benumbed mind seeking refuge in an eternal twilight. She had come out of that night of terror as out of the buoyant depths of cold waters, inert, empty, broken, sweetly worn out. Without hate, without anger, mortally crushed, she still felt Herminien's power upon her like the salty fortifying d
eluge of the living waters of the sea whose mysterious waves without shock or effort swiftly bore her along on a voyage without return, to deposit her on the other shore of the ocean whose solemn and overwhelming expanse she explored with the graces of a child's groping fingers, and as though restored to her primitive virginity. It seemed to her that she was ceaselessly wandering and coming to rest on the buoyant waves of a body floating like hair, spread over the world like a carpet of felicity. Her last resistance had given way deep within her, and everything was light—light, loosened, detached, floating, iridescent, unreal, entangled like the threads of a skein of silk in the wind, in the depths of the darkness of that room where she lay motionless, surrounded by her aerial body, floating, flying, unreal as the clouds of the sky and like them forever chased by the great wind.
And it seemed to her that she now lived in Albert as his chosen child, bathed in the very dawn of the world, in the shimmering glow of limbo. Out of the depths of that night now hidden from her by the sudden cataract of great waters, out of her annihilation, little by little, she was reborn in him. Again she saw how he came toward her in the moonlight, with the calm of his eyes, the inexplicable simplicity of his gestures as though immersed once more in original purity, and how he bathed her, kissed and clothed her, and his arms around her, supported her, and how she felt more deliciously encompassed than by a legion of angels from heaven, felt something more inundating and sweeter than consciousness in sleep would be, confiding herself to him forever in delirious trust, in an absolute abandonment of herself above an abyss in which henceforth only his arms could bury her. Stripped of her annihilated body, of her numbed senses, floating over the forest like a soul ready to be taken, as unarmed and unattached as the Walkyrie, his mouth then gave her breath, his hand brought a hand to life, and in an unbelievable kiss of the soul, it seemed to her that by Albert she had been disembodied forever.
Soon began the glorious days of autumn particularly unmistakable in the melancholy curve that the sun, already noticeably lower over the horizon, drew across the sky, in whose calm expanses as though constantly swept by a wonderfully pure wind, its golden trace seemed to linger like the wake of a magnificent ship, and hardly had it turned its course toward the horizon than the moon, as though attached to the beam of a celestial balance, appeared against the blue light of day with the ghostly glow of an unexpected star, whose malignant influence would now, of itself alone, explain the sudden, strange, and half-metallic alterations of the leaves of the forest whose surprising red and yellow brilliance burst out everywhere with the irrepressible vigour, the fulminating contagion of a luxuriant leprosy of the vegetable kingdom. In this calm atmosphere the castle was filled with light echoing noises, and often Heide and Albert, seized with an inexplicable uneasiness, would find themselves together in the great drawing-room, to which they seemed drawn by the expectation of the arrival of some disturbing visitor—and as their eyes met, an embarrassment was born between them that grew more painful with each succeeding second.
Heide's already extraordinary pallor visibly increased with each day of this pale, cold season, with the ever shorter appearances of the heatless sun, from which her face seemed, and in a way that now appeared fatal to Albert with the decline of autumn, to draw all its luminous life. And the constant fading of that angelic countenance, as though afflicted by the same malady that was ravaging the trees of the forest, startled Albert, and plunged him into an inexhaustible and disquieting reverie. They would then engage in vague and languishing conversations whose mingling sound would more and more frequently dwindle into a stifled vibration still perceptible for a long time in the silence that seemed to close around them with a curiously engulfing power, and again would begin what they dared not admit without terror was nothing but an interminable waiting. Then their eyes, with unerring instinct, would turn toward the tall French windows behind which the dancing shadows of the branches, constantly outlined in a slow and gentle swaying, revealed the oppressive presence of the forest. And the whole drawing-room in the declining day was filled with the shadow of the branches, with their dark abundance, which plunged them into the heart of the forest in a silence that no longer protected them from its encroaching arms, and the brilliant, yellow splashes of sunlight, gliding through the stained glass onto the walls, seemed to their bewitched eyes to indicate not the steadily advancing hour of the day, but, on the contrary, like a precise level, to mark the overwhelming oscillations of the entire mass of the castle struggling like a ship in distress on the powerful swells of the forest.
Then sometimes, in a gust of wind, the doors of one of the tall windows would open with a symmetrical solemnity and while their blood rushed suddenly to their hearts, and the long draperies one after the other rose and swelled with eerie slowness in the midst of the wild and suddenly magnified noise of the wind, great volleys of dried leaves would whirl through the lofty room with an icy whirring, and the shivering skeletons of the leaves' dried veins would alight on furniture and carpet with the dislocated jerks of exhausted birds. And, looking away from each other, they dared not, in the terror of their hearts, measure the intensity of their desperate and deceived expectation by the tragic shock which had made both of them leap up at the first sound. And the wind, with the mysterious deliberateness of a hand, unrolled one by one the heavy folds of the silken curtains slowly swelling and unfurling like sails; but the mass of those dark fabrics had long since resumed their severe rigidity when, at the farthest end of the room lost in semi-darkness, a vast brown hanging, with a great slapping sound in the midst of the completely restored silence, seemed in the inexplicable heaving of its ample folds, like the image of a convulsion, as weirdly autonomous as a face rising out of the darkness and suddenly touched by concentric waves of terror.
However, their fear was dissipated in the resplendent light of day. The amazing radiance which every morning rose from the clear surface of the river drew them lingeringly through the light mist still veiling the high branches of the trees, and, falling on them in fine drops, seemed by the evidence of their wet faces the true mark of the baptism of the new day, the refreshing and delectable anointment of the morning. Little by little, the trees came confusedly out of the mist and as though by a unique privilege, stripped of their particularly picturesque quality, filled the barely awakened soul with the pure consciousness of their volume and of their harmonious luxuriance in the heart of a landscape in which colour seemed to lose completely its ordinary power of localization and, on the shores of these calm waters, inscribed for the eye, freed as by a miracle from all that the ordinary work of perception contains of a reductio ad absurdum, appeared only the soothing and almost divine conjunction of the horizontal plane and the sphere. And nature, restored by the fog to its secret geometry, now became as unfamiliar as the furniture of a drawing-room under dust-covers to the eye of an intruder, substituting, all at once, the menacing affirmation of pure volume for the familiar hideousness of utility, and by an operation whose magical character must be evident to any one, restoring to the instruments of humblest use, until then dishonoured by all that handling engenders of base degradation, the particular and striking splendour of the object.
With slow steps, they entered the forest, virgin in every respect, and pursued their way along those noble avenues. And now the sun showed above the crests of the high mountains, a cool breeze swayed the trees, and the roughened waters sparkled with a thousand lights, but all day long the bluish shadow of an iridescent fog still lingered over the horizon as though kept at a distance only by the radiation of this luminous couple. Unbelievable then was their felicity, their inexhaustible and absorbing bliss, and into the deep waters of each other's eyes, into their depths, they plunged like strong swimmers, and prolonged to the point of dizziness the fixity of their intolerable gaze, in which alternated the very ice of the abysses and the atrocious fires of the sun. They could not satisfy their inexorable eyes, devastating suns of their hearts, dripping suns, suns of the sea, suns sprung drench
ed from the lowest depths, icy and trembling like a living jelly in which light has been made flesh by the operation of an inconceivable spell.
One day, through the trees, they followed a wide green avenue covered by a vaulting of branches a hundred feet overhead, whose singular character, immediately apparent to the soul always on the alert for the perpetual snares of the forest, was due to the fact that while it ran through particularly hilly country and continually embraced each slightest sinuosity, yet the rigidity of its direction imposed itself upon the eye in the midst of all the natural undulations of the ground, and, directly in front of the traveller through the dark barrier of trees at the horizon, carved a luminous and sharply defined notch—suggesting to the mind, obsessed by the impenetrable wall of trees, a door opening onto an entirely unknown country which, because of the insistent straightness of the avenue drawn over hill and dale as by some wild caprice, by a will royally disdainful of all difficulties, seemed to confer a gift of supreme attraction. Amazing, too, was the indubitable exaggeration of its dimensions, leaving between the glorious walls of lofty verdure the span of a veritable clearing covered with a carpet of grass, vast and empty as the bare stage of a theatre, and whose colossal width seemed destined to reveal gradually to the soul all the, by no means ordinary, terrors of agoraphobia. And yet, in spite of the abnormal urgency suggested by the straightness of this cut—as though on a planet inhabited by mad geometers it had been considered of prime necessity to paint first of all the meridians on the ground—the character of pure direction, free from all idea of a goal, seemed in its peremptory affirmation alone sufficient—Albert and Heide turning to look back, noticed, not without a feeling of uneasiness, that the avenue only a short distance behind them, gradually invaded by the extravagant vegetation of the underbrush, little by little relinquished its geometric majesty and was lost in the impasse of the uniform ocean of trees.