Great French Short Stories
Page 25
Besides, every decent person preaches
The perfectibility of the Species.
The Mandarins were of the opinion that the sources of social competition should be atrophied, neutralized, that society should be organized into cliques of exclusive initiates, scraping along in peace, with great walls of China between them, etc., etc.
And the music, playing on alone, seemed to complete the sense of what the speakers were too ephemeral to formulate.
In the end, you could hear the silence growing larger, like the pale mesh of a fish net cast out on an evening of fishing; the company arose; apparently it was Salomé.
She entered, descended the spiral staircase, tense in her muslin sheath; with one hand she signed to them to recline again; a small, black lyre dangled from her wrist; with the tips of her fingers she flicked a kiss toward her father.
And she came and took her place, facing them, on the platform, behind her the drawn curtain of the Alcazar stage; she waited for them to exhaust the possibilities of observing her, but saved appearances by pretending to sway on her pallid feet, spreading their toes wide apart.
She took no notice of anyone. Powdered with exotic pollens, her hair fell loosely onto her shoulders in flat locks, while on her forehead it was entangled with yellow flowers and bits of straw; supported over her bare shoulders by two armlets of pearl was a dwarf peacock’s spread tail, with an ever-changing background, silken, azure, golden, emerald, a halo against which her pure face was etched, that superior face, but politely indifferent to the knowledge that it was unique, that pinched neck, those eyes exhausted by their iridescent expiations, those lips, a circumflex accent of pale pink setting off those teeth, and those gums, of an even paler pink, in that too crucified smile.
Oh! The celestial, sweet creature, so understandably aesthetic, the delicate recluse of the White Esoteric Islands . . . !
Hermetically bemuslined in a spidery jonquil with black dots, which several fibulae pinned together here and there, exposing the arms in their angelic nudity and forming, between those soupçons of breasts, whose nipples were dotted with tiny pinks, a sash embroidered on her eighteenth birthday; then, a little above that adorable umbilical dimple, joining a jeweled girdle of an intense, jealous yellow, casting an inviolable shadow into the hollow between those meager thighs, and halting at her ankles only to reascend her back as two sashes, fluttering apart, finally joining again at the pearl armlets below the dwarf peacock’s tail and its changing background, azure, silken, emerald, gold, a halo for that pure superior face; she swayed on her feet, her pallid feet, spreading their toes wide apart, bare except for anklets from which rained a dazzling fringe of yellow silk.
Oh! The little Messiah, complete with womb! How burdensome her head was for her! She didn’t know what to do with her hands, even her shoulders seemed ill at ease. Who was it that crucified her smile, that poor little Immaculate Conception? And who exhausted those blue eyes?—Oh! Their hearts exulted, how simple her skirt must feel! Art is so long and life so short! Oh, just to chat with her in a corner, near a fountain, to find out not her Why, but her How, and then to die . . . ! To die, unless . . .
Do you think she may make a speech, after all . . . ?
Craning forward out of his heap of silken cushions, his wrinkles dilating, his pupils jutting out from the battlements of his tarnished lids, pretending to be interested in fingering the Seal, which hung around his neck, the Tetrarch had just handed a page the pineapple he had been nibbling and his towered tiara.
“Look inward! Look inward, before you do anything, O Idea and Contour, Caryatid of these islands without history!” he pleaded.
Then he smiled at everyone, like a contented father, as if to say: “You will see what you will see,” giving the necessary information to his guests, the princes, in highly disorganized form, so that the two of them gathered that the Moon had been bled white in order to cast the horoscope of the little creature before them, and that she was generally admitted (a council had been devoted to the question) to be the foster sister of the Milky Way (she has everything!).
Now, delicately planted on her right foot, her thigh raised, her other leg bent behind her in the manner of Niobe, Salomé, permitting herself a small coughing laugh, perhaps with an idea of suggesting that the last thing to do was to imagine that she took herself seriously, plucked on her lyre until she drew blood, and, in a voice without timbre or sex, like that of an invalid calling for his dose, which neither he (nor you, nor I) ever actually needed, she improvised as follows:
“O Non-being, by which I mean the latent Life to come day-after-tomorrow, but no sooner, how worthy you are, how forgiving, coexisting with the Infinite, the ultimate in clarity!”
Was she mocking? She went on:
“Love! That compulsive mania that refuses to accept an absolute death (feeble subterfuge!). O traitorous Brother, I cannot honestly say that we have reached a time for mutual explanations. For all eternity, things are as they are. But how real it would be to make each other some concessions in the realm of the five existent senses, in the name of the Unconscious!
“O latitudes, altitudes of those Nebulae of good intentions, filled with little fresh-water jellyfish, please do me one good turn—come and graze in empirical meadows. O transients on this earth, so eminently idem as incalculable others, all equally alone in a life indefinably infinite in its strivings! The active Essence loves itself (listen carefully, now), loves itself dynamically, more or less freely: it is like a profound soul forever playing solitaire with itself, exactly as it pleases. I command you, be the passives of nature; enter the Discipline of the Benevolent Harmony, but automatically as Everything! And let me know how it feels.
“Yes, you hydrocephalic theosophists, you are like the tame fowls of the people, nothing but arbitrary groups of phenomena without any guarantee of being governed from beyond: go back to existences tainted by negligence, and in my name browse, for your daily meal, for your seasonal sustenance, on those deltas without sphinxes, whose angles equal two rights in spite of all. O you generations of incurable pubescence, behold the true decorum; and whatever else you do, pretend to be utterly enmeshed in the irresponsible limbo of the potentialities of which I speak. The Unconscious farà da se.
“And you, O fatal Jordans, O baptismal Ganges, insubmergible sidereal currents, cosmogonies like Mamas! When entering, wash yourselves clean of the more or less original stain of the Systematic; first of all, let us be minced into lint to help out the Great Curative Power (or should we call it Palliative?), which sews up all holes, in the prairie, in the epidermis, etc.—Quia est in ea virtus dormitiva. Go . . .”
Salomé stopped short, brushing back her hair (powdered with exotic pollens), and her soupçons of breasts churned so that the pinks fell away from them (widowing their nipples). Trying to recover herself, she took her black lyre and plucked out an irrelevant fugue. . . .
“Oh! Go on, go on, tell all you know!” Emerald-Archetypas moaned, clapping his hands like a child. “I give you my tetrarchic word! You will be given anything you desire: the University? my Seal? the Snow Cult? Inoculate us with your Immaculate Conception charm . . . I am so bored, we are so bored! Am I wrong, gentlemen?”
Actually the company was breathing a murmur of unspoken discomfort ; some of the tiaras tottered. Each one felt ashamed of the others, but the weakness of the human heart, even among so correct a race . . . (neighbor, you get my drift).
Having summarily slaughtered a number of theogonies, theodicies, and formulas of national wisdom (all in the offhand tone of a chorus master who says: “All right, now, one measure to get our breath?), Salomé, a little delirious, returned to her mystical gabble, her head quickly thrown back, her Adam’s apple leaping frightfully—her whole being soon becoming little more than a spidery fabric, her soul like a transitory meteor drop.
O tides, lunar oboes, promenades, twilight gardens, obsolete breezes of November, hay-gathering, missed callings, animal gazes, vicissitudes! —Jonqu
il muslins with funereal dots, exhausted eyes, crucified smiles, adorable navels, peacock halos, dropped pinks, irrelevant fugues! There was a rebirth of non-culture granted to all, and their youth was restored besides, the systematic spirit died in spirals amid showers with a turmoil that was doubtlessly definitive, for the earth’s own good, thoroughly understood everywhere, touched by Varuna, the Omniversal Atmosphere, who gave each one the test of readiness.
And Salomé insanely insisted:
“It is pure being, I tell you! O sectarians of the consciousness, why label yourself as individuals and therefore indivisible? Why not breathe on the embers of some other sciences, in the Sunrise of my Septentrions?
“Do you call it life to inquire stubbornly after the details of self and whatever else there is, with the inevitable question after each step: Ah! well, whom am I deceiving now?
“Get rid of contexts, species, realms! Nothing is lost, nothing is gained, everything belongs to everyone; and everything is already full of submission, no need for confessionals, ready for the Prodigal Son (he won’t be allowed to explain, only to relax).
“And these are not just devices for expiations followed by relapses; they are the trampled vintage of the Infinite; not experimental, but inevitable; because . . .
“You are the other sex, and we are the little darlings of childhood (always as unattainable Psyches, at that). So, before the evening is over, let us immerse ourselves in the harmonious mildness of pre-established moralities; let us drift along, exposing our flourishing abdomen to the air; surrounded by prodigality’s perfumes and some appropriate hecatombs; toward the beyond where no one will hear his heart’s beating or the pulse of his consciousness.
“It all advances as in stanzas, my pulse rate swells like cannon shells, in our lust’s furor no caesura, our priestly dress a flattened mess, leave it behind and let us wind along the shore of Nevermore; I must vault up out of me!—(You can see it’s not my fault.)”
The little yellow oratress in black dots broke her lyre over her knee and reclaimed her dignity.
The company, intoxicated, kept up appearances by mopping their brows. There passed a silence of ineffable confusion.
The northern princes were afraid to look at their watches, and even more so to ask, “And when is her bedtime?” It couldn’t possibly be later than six o’clock.
The Tetrarch examined the embroidery of his cushions; it was all over; Salomé’s hard voice suddenly made him look up.
“And now, Father, I want you to tell them to bring up to my room, in a plate or something, the head of Iokanaan. That’s right. I’ll go upstairs and wait for it.”
“But my child, you can’t mean it! That foreigner . . .”
But all those present in the hall fervently urged the tiara to fulfill Salomé’s will on that occasion; and the aviaries ended the discussion by resuming their deafening glitter.
Emerald-Archetypas sneaked a side glance at the northern princes; not the slightest sign of approval or of disapproval. Doubtless it was none of their concern.
Decreed!
The Tetrarch threw his Seal to the Administrator of Death.
The guests were already dispersing, changing the subject, in the direction of the evening bath.
IV
Leaning her elbows on the Observatory parapet, Salomé, fugitive from festivals of state, listened to the familiar sea sound of beautiful nights.
A full outfit of stars on one of those nights! Eternities of braziers in the zenith! Oh, for the means of making an escape, so to speak, on an Exile Express, etc.!
Salomé, the foster sister of the Milky Way, never really gave of herself except to the stars.
According to a color photograph (ectoplasmic) of the stars called yellow, red, white, of sixteenth magnitude, she had had diamonds cut in precise imitation and sprinkled them into her hair and her other charms, even her evening dress (funereal violet muslin with gold dots), in order to commune tête-à-tête on terraces with her twenty-four million stars, just as a sovereign about to receive his peers or satellites will wear the insignia of their territories.
Salomé had nothing but contempt for vulgar trinkets of first, second magnitude, etc. Up to the fifteenth magnitude, no star was her social equal. Besides, her special passion was nebulae matrices, not fully formed nebulae with already planetiform disks, but the amorphous, the perforated, the tentacled. And the Orion nebula, that gaseous pasty of sickly rays, had always remained the favorite son of all the jewels in her flickering crown.
Ah, dear companions of the astral prairies, Salomé had ceased to be our little Salomé! And that night was to inaugurate a new era of relating and etiquette!
In the beginning, after being exorcised from her dress’s virginity, she felt a new connection with those nebulae matrices: that she, like them, had been impregnated with an orbital path.
Later, this drastic sacrifice to the cult (although she was really lucky to have extricated herself so discreetly) and made it necessary, if she wanted to dispose of the originator, that she perform the act (a serious one, in spite of what they say) called homicide.
Finally, in order to bring about the silence of the tomb for the Originator, she had had to present a diluted specimen to all those present of the elixir she had been distilling in the anguish of a hundred nights formed like this one.
Well, after all, that was her life; she was a speciality, a minor speciality.
Now in her presence, on a cushion, among the fragments of her ebony lyre, the head of John (in the tradition of the head of Orpheus) glowed, dipped in phosphorous, rouged, curled, grimacing at those twenty-four million stars.
When the object was handed over, Salomé had cleared her scientific conscience by trying out those notorious experiments after decapitation that have caused so much talk, but as she had anticipated, all the electric shocks produced only a facial rictus of minor consequence.
Now she would try her own theory.
But, think of it, she had stopped lowering her eyes before Orion! She steeled herself and stared at that mystical nebula that had presided over her puberty, for ten full minutes. How many nights, how many future nights, to the winner of the last word . . . !
And those choristers, those firecrackers, below her, in the city!
Finally Salomé consulted her reason, shook herself, and pulled up her shawl, then she unclasped the opal of Orion from her person, a mottled jewel, sprinkled with gray-gold, put it in John’s mouth like a Host, kissed the mouth mercifully and hermetically, and sealed the mouth with her own corrosive seal (an instantaneous process).
She waited, a minute passed . . . ! Nothing signaled to her out of the night . . . ! With a “Well?” that sounded rebellious and irritable she picked up that jovial object in her little feminine hands . . .
She wanted the head to fall intact into the sea, without first smashing against the cliff rocks, and so she exerted all her strength. The missile described a convincing phosphorescent parabola. Oh, such a noble parabola! But that unfortunate little astronomer had failed abominably in calculating her distance, and, flying over the parapet, she gave her first human cry, and she fell, winding down from rock to rock, to rattle her last in a picturesque channel bathed by the tides, far from the sound of that festival of state, lacerated to the bone, her sidereal diamonds tearing into her flesh, her skull shattered, paralyzed by vertigo, in short sick unto death, in agony for more than an hour.
Nor did she finally attain the viaticum of seeing the head of John, a phosphorescent star, upon the sea . . .
As for the endless distances of heaven, they remained distant . . .
Thus ended the existence of Salomé, I mean the one from the Esoteric White Islands; she was less a victim of illiterate destiny than she was one who wanted to live in the world of artifice, instead of simply from day to day, as all of us do.
DOVER · THRIFT · EDITIONS
FICTION
THE QUEEN OF SPADES AND OTHER STORIES, Alexander Pushkin. 128pp. 28054-3
FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley. 176pp. 28211-2
THE JUNGLE, Upton Sinclair. 320pp. (Available in U.S. only.) 41923-1
THREE LIVES, Gertrude Stein. 176pp. (Available in U.S. only.) 28059-4
THE BODY SNATCHER AND OTHER TALES, Robert Louis Stevenson. 80pp. 41924-X
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Robert Louis Stevenson. 64pp. 26688-5
TREASURE ISLAND, Robert Louis Stevenson. 160pp. 27559-0
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, Jonathan Swift. 240pp. 29273-8
THE KREUTZER SONATA AND OTHER SHORT STORIES, Leo Tolstoy. 144pp. 27805-0
THE WARDEN, Anthony Trollope. 176pp. 40076-X
FIRST LOVE AND DIARY OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN, Ivan Turgenev. 96pp. 28775-0
FATHERS AND SONS, Ivan Turgenev. 176pp. 40073-5
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Mark Twain. 224pp. 28061-6
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, Mark Twain. 192pp. 40077-8
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES, Mark Twain. 128pp. 27069-6
HUMOROUS STORIES AND SKETCHES, Mark Twain. 80pp. 29279-7
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, Jules Verne. 160pp. 41111-7
CANDIDE, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). 112pp. 26689-3
GREAT SHORT STORIES BY AMERICAN WOMEN, Candace Ward (ed.). 192pp. 28776-9
“THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND” AND OTHER SCIENCE-FICTION STORIES, H. G. Wells. 160pp. (Not available in Europe or United Kingdom.) 29569-9
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, H. G. Wells. 112pp. (Not available in Europe or United Kingdom.) 29027-1