“Inform your mistress that Prince Cartaphilus is at her gate,” I repeated angrily.
He did not stir.
“You evidently do not know who Prince Cartaphilus is. Here—” I waved before his eyes the letter with the seal of the Imperial Dragon. He looked at the curious characters on the parchment, which of course he could not decipher.
I whispered, “A message from the Shah.” He dropped upon his hands, like a lifeless thing. “Rise,” I commanded, “and announce my arrival!”
The palace was surrounded by a garden, in the center of which a tall fountain rose and fell silently, like a stream of light. A flock of peacocks first screeched at our approach, then spread slowly like magnificent fans their luxurious tails. Several small monkeys climbed rapidly the giant palm trees, and crouching upon the tips of the branches, glared at Kotikokura, whose uncovered teeth shone like whetted knives.
Salome was reclining upon a low sofa, covered with a silk canopy, embroidered with one enormous eagle, whose wings of red gold seemed to flap in the glitter. I kissed her hand. She bade me sit apposite her.
“I am Cartaphilus, gracious Princess.”
“Do not speak in Hebrew, I pray you, Cartaphilus. I hate words that gurgle in the throat. Speak in Greek. Greek undulates like a river, which is stirred by the breezes.”
She understood Hebrew,—that was what I wished to know, to ascertain if she was indeed Salome. “It is natural to dislike the language of the vanquished, Princess, and Greek is certainly more beautiful.”
She patted gently the spotted back of a leopard cub asleep at her side. We were silent. Was she really the Princess who once upon a time praised the subtle and impersonal love of flowers, but accepted the personal embrace of a swarthy Nubian? Was she the reincarnation of the most delightful and most detestable Princess, or a composite of the women I had known? She partook of each; but was different nevertheless. Was she Salome, Princess of Judea, or the Perfect Woman? Was she all things, being still herself?
She guessed my thoughts. “The body is a house wherein dwells a multitude of beings,” she remarked.
I did not know how to begin the conversation, and Salome refused to help me.
“I have traversed the land of Cathay to meet the incomparable Princess.”
She nodded.
“Have you also visited that marvelous land, whose walls encircle so much wisdom and beauty?”
“It may be. I have traveled much.”
“The poets of the Celestial Empire sing of Princess Salome rapturously. She is the magnificent goddess, appearing every hundred years in incomparable glory.”
Salome smiled. “Poets.”
“Poets, Princess, see beyond the walls that encircle others—”
“They deal in symbols.”
“Are not all things symbols?”
We remained silent again for some time. The cub opened its eyes, yawned, and licked the hand of his mistress.
“What does the Shah desire?”
“The Shah?”
“Yes. Did you not show my slave a letter from the Shah?”
I smiled. “It was the only way I could gain admittance.”
She looked at me angrily.
“I beg your forgiveness, Madam, but is not any strategem lawful, in love and war?”
“So the proverb goes, but I dislike proverbs. It is a facile manner of thinking.”
“Quite true, Princess. The letter, however, is from a monarch greater than the Shah,—it is a missive from the Son of Heaven. Do you care to read it?”
She shook her head slowly, and patted the young leopard. I wondered whether she refused to see it because she did not know Chinese.
“The Chinese language,” she said, answering my thought, “is not as difficult as people believe. With a little imagination, and the ability to draw, one can master it within five or ten years.”
“Princess Salome must be well versed in it, then, I am certain.” She did not answer. I was making no impression. My words seemed unconvincing and futile.
‘It is she, Cartaphilus!’ I thought, ‘and once again, she treats you as a Princess treats a commoner.’ My hand itched, as it had itched centuries before, to penetrate the armor of her insolence if not with my love, at least with my sword.
The cub opened wide his mouth. Salome placed the tips of her fingers between his jaws.
“Even the wild beasts adore your beauty.”
She lifted slightly her left brow, as Poppaea had been in the habit of doing, when disdainful.
“In my travels, O Princess, I have mastered the secret laws of love.”
She smiled.
“I have been as a bee that gathers the perfume from a thousand flowers that its honey may taste the sweeter.”
She clapped her hands. A young slave appeared. She whispered something into his ear.
“Does Cartaphilus enjoy music and dancing?”
“Of course, Princess.” I was piqued at the idea of being interrupted.
What I had taken for marble walls, dissolved and vanished, and the room in which we were became as large as a street. The ceiling was studded with enormous diamonds, which shed a light, soothing and cool like the sun at dawn, when the lower part of its circumference still touches the thin blue line of the mountains.
In the farther corner of the room, several girls were playing Oriental melodies, which were the passionate pulsation of a lover’s blood. Suddenly, strident and insistent, the music changed into a raging sea beating against metal shores.
Naked giants, red-bearded and black, dashed into the room. Their dance mimicked love’s final siege. Was it an amorous embrace? Was it wrestling? Their limbs united, separated and clenched again, until one half lay panting, outstretched under the colossal weight of their conquerors.
The Princess watched the play of their enormous sinews with half-closed eyes.
The bearded giants were followed by clean-shaven men,—black, white and yellow, dancing native dances to which they added movements reminding me of the convulsive spasms with which the body responded to the caresses devised by Flower-of-the-Evening.
These were followed by youths with fleshy hips, whose hair fell over their shoulders in long silken ringlets. Their dancing was almost motionless, like half-congealed waters or wary snakes that creep among the grasses more silently than summer breezes.
The Princess threw a bracelet to one of the dancers. He walked over to her with tiny, mincing steps, balancing his hips like a young Hindu girl, who carries upon her head a crystal vase filled with perfume. Salome caressed him, and bade him sit at her feet. His head against her knee, he remained motionless in an attitude of adoration.
The music played softly a Lesbian air, stirring epicene dreams and shadowy atavistic desires. Girls entered, some tall, slim, with wiry muscles; others, with full-blossomed breasts, wearing like a badge of love, the triangle of Astarte. They formed a semicircle, in the center of which a tall woman, her body half hidden by many veils of various hues, began to dance, first slowly like the young men; but gradually quickening her movements until she seemed like a wind of many colors, turning in a mad spiral.
Salome bade her approach, placed around her neck a gold chain, and embraced her.
The girls sang to the accompaniment of a harp. Slaves shook perfumes out of ivory bowls the shape of roses.
Salome waved her hand. It was as if some divinity had commanded a storm. The bearded men fell upon the women with groans of anguish and delight like wild beasts mating. The women, like maenads, encircled the youths and embraced each other. Bearded giants, full-breasted women, girls indistinguishable from boys, boys hardly distinguishable from maids, curious figures in the chasm between the sexes, all danced to a music that was like a madman’s joy. It was a feast of Priapus, an orgy of sex in which sex over-flowed its limits and blood mingled with kisses. It was a battle of lust punctured by the crash of cymbals and the swish of lashes.
The music died slowly; the dancers, exhausted, dropped to the
floor in heaps of two, three or four; the lights dimmed until one could distinguish merely motion, like some ocean tossed by winds blowing in many directions…
Salome clapped her hands. The walls moved back into their original position. The lights shone once more. The storm abated. One heard nothing save the loud yawning of the cub.
Salome brushed aside one of her braids, and looked at me, smiling. I understood what she meant.
“You wish to convey to me by this exhibition that you too have explored the ways and the byways of pleasure,” I said.
“I too,” she said, “have discovered unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. I have traversed the two hundred and sixty ways of love, the thirteen secret ways that are known only to the Emperor, and the seven ways that are not known even to the Emperor himself. I seek something beyond the ultimate portal of pleasure…”
“Is this orgasmic medley your definition of love, Princess?” I queried.
“Love, Cartaphilus, what is love?”
The silk curtain stirred a little, and the long, hairy arm of Kotikokura moved slowly in, followed by his head.
“Who is that?” Salome asked.
“My slave, Your Highness. His fidelity is so great that he fears to leave me alone.”
Kotikokura withdrew.
“Is he a man…or a beast?” She sat up, wrinkled her brow a little, as Damis used to do, when very much interested. “Who is he, Cartaphilus?”
“A denizen of the forest, Princess. I found him in Africa.”
“In Africa?”
“A curious country…peopled with extraordinary beings.”
“What is his name?”
“Kotikokura.”
“Kotikokura…” The name seemed to float like music from her throat.
“It means ‘The Accursed One.’ ”
“The Accursed?”
“He dared to laugh at the gods…”
She looked at me, fathoming my thoughts.
“It is not difficult to become a god, Cartaphilus…”
Again her eyes traveled to the curtain where the eyes of Kotikokura gleamed.
“Cartaphilus, will you sell me your slave?”
“He is not really my slave. He is my friend, who has saved my life on several occasions.”
“Your life, Cartaphilus?” There was a touch of irony in her intonation.
“Not my life, then, my skin…”
She remained silent for a while. “I will give you in exchange three of my slaves, a maid, a boy and if you wish, my favorite hermaphrodite…”
“I cannot barter my friend for your slaves.”
“Take six of them…twelve, Cartaphilus. They are marvelous people, past masters and past mistresses in the art of pleasure…and pain.”
I made no answer.
“Well?”
“Kotikokura!” I called.
He appeared immediately. I made a sign. He returned with a casket of jade, and walked out again. Salome watched him with a curious fascination.
“Princess, deign to accept this.” I opened the casket, which was filled with exquisite trinkets of jade and ivory. I recounted their history and their symbolism. I spoke of the great artists who had imprinted them with their dreams. Salome, paying no attention to my explanation, toyed with the tiny figure of Li-Bi-Do, an obscene god, long forgotten, even in the Celestial Realm, and carelessly tossed the others aside.
“Kotikokura has an extraordinary head…and what arms!”
‘Did she need a headless lover to excite her emotions?’
“A strange head,” she mused.
Was it her intention to decapitate Kotikokura?
‘Should I offer his head for her love?’
“Let me have Kotikokura, Cartaphilus.”
I remained pensive.
“Does Cartaphilus believe that Salome desires to repeat the same sensation forever?” she remarked, again reading my thoughts.
“Kotikokura shall remain with Princess Salome, if she commands, for one night,” I said angrily.
“What will you take in exchange?”
“Cartaphilus does not bargain.”
XXX: SALOME WRITES A LETTER—MAGIC RUINS—THE TOKEN—I LAUGH
AT dawn Kotikokura appeared, bringing me a letter. It was in Hebrew, on thin parchment: “What Cartaphilus seeks Salome must also seek. In strange things and strange places she seeks her soul. Farewell!”
I looked intently at Kotikokura. He lowered his eyes, and bent nearly in two. I raised my fist to strike him. ‘Cartaphilus, are you jealous…jealous of an ape?’ I laughed, opened my fist and caressed his head. “It is well, my friend. Salome preferred Kotikokura, as she once preferred…but no matter…”
I asked him many things. He merely grinned or grumbled. Nevertheless, my desire to possess Salome did not abate. She must pay for her pleasure! I was a Jew, and required payment. My generosity had been merely a gesture.
“Salome shall be mine! We go there again this evening, Kotikokura. Am I not God Ca-ta-pha?”
Kotikokura knelt. “Ca-ta-pha! Ca-ta-pha!”
The gate stood wide opened and unwatched. No sword, no eunuch. Two owls, perching upon it, hooted at our approach, and rocked it by merely flapping their wings. What the previous night had been a gorgeous garden was now a wilderness of giant weeds, which scratched our hands and faces, as we tried to make a pathway to the house. I looked in vain for the peacocks, and Kotikokura watched the palm trees, whose withered leaves were covered with a heavy white dust, to discover the monkeys. Only large bats brushed threateningly against our faces.
The steps leading to the palace, shook under our feet, and the door, hanging from one hinge, swung against us like a broken branch. We lit a torch. Rats, enormous worms and lizards, scurried into the large holes of floors and walls, or remained in the corners in menacing attitudes. Our faces became entangled in the cobwebs, which hung from the ceilings where diamonds had been glittering like lamps.
The couch Salome had sat upon crumbled at my touch; the canopy was devoured by sharp-fanged moths and other insects; the skeleton of a small animal, yellow and frail, like the tendrils of a large, fantastic leaf, cracked under Kotikokura’s step.
“Kotikokura, are we dreaming?”
He scratched his head vigorously.
“Were we not here last night? Was not this a palace, luxurious, gay?” His eyes galloped from corner to corner. The rest of the furniture was an indescribable hill of débris, except one huge bed which seemed intact. We approached it. Pathetically, like a living thing, in a vast cemetery, shone upon it Li-Bi-Do the exquisite tiny god of jade I had given Salome.
“It was not a dream, Kotikokura!”
He bent his head.
I struck the bed a heavy blow. It crumbled into a shapeless mass.
The foul air stifled me. My throat tightened. “Let us go out.” As we reached the spot where the fountain had been, I noticed a large stone basin, made white by the moon. “Was this basin here when we entered this evening, Kotikokura? Did you see it?”
He scratched his head.
“Are things changing under our very eyes, Kotikokura? Are we enchanted?”
The basin was deep. I looked into it. A large tortoise, whose back glittered like a great yellow and black jewel, lay within it motionless save for a tiny, sharp head which moved rapidly like the tongue of a bell.
“A tortoise, Kotikokura! Is this Salome? Was the Chinese philologist right? Was it this animal with whom you spent the night?”
Kotikokura grinned.
“We shall take it with us. Its name shall be Salome, in honor of the magnificent Princess.”
I inquired about Salome of many people. No one had ever heard of her. The castle had been in ruins for generations. It was a place haunted by evil spirits and queer beasts, but as I insisted that I had seen and spoken to a beautiful Princess there, whose retinue was enormous and magnificent, that peacocks spread their gorgeous fans at our approach, and monkeys hung on the branches of palm trees, t
he people smiled or laughed, and as I turned my face, pointed to their foreheads significantly.
One old woman, thin as a skeleton, with eyes as dazzling as the beads of a stuffed animal, hissed: “Salome? A witch, who died three hundred years ago.”
I would have considered the whole matter a dream, a nightmare, had I not found the little obscene divinity upon the bed. “And the letter!” I exclaimed suddenly. “You brought me a letter from her, did you not, Kotikokura?”
He nodded. As I reached for the missive, a thin stream of ashes fell to the ground, and I remained empty-handed.
For a very long time, I could think of nothing save Salome. I was quite certain that I had actually met her and that, much better versed in magic than I, she had been able to transform ruins and death into life and magnificence for a night. But why had she treated me so disdainfully, preferring an ape’s caresses to mine? Was I he whom she must shun?
Perhaps—and this pleased me and comforted me more than any other idea—she feared that if she yielded herself to me, her personality, weaker than mine, would be submerged and conquered.
Perhaps possession would slay desire.
No! Seeking was better than finding…
I laughed aloud. Kotikokura, frightened, crouched behind me.
XXXI: THE ELOQUENT HAMMER—KOTIKOKURA DISCOVERS TEARS—MOHAMMED OR JESUS?—I REACH THE OUT-SKIRTS OF MECCA
“HE is the Prophet!” shouted the horseshoer, dropping the animal’s leg, which he held in his lap.
“He is not the Prophet!” shouted back the owner of the horse, placing his foot into the stirrup.
“He is the Prophet!”
“He is not!”
A crowd gathered. The two men shouted back and forth their absolute convictions, adding insults, dealing with their physical appearance, their professions, their morals, their intelligence, and the probity of their ancestors.
Infuriated, the horseshoer struck his opponent a powerful blow. The man fell, his face covered with blood. The horseshoer raised his hammer over the victim’s head. “Do you believe he is the Prophet?”
The man grumbled, “I believe.”
[The Wandering Jew 1] - My First Two Thousand Years the Autobiography of the Wandering Jew Page 15