Torture Garden

by Octave Mirbeau

  Here and there, on embankments of earth and red rocks coloured with dwarf ferns, tutsan, saxifrage and creeping shrubs, the slender pointed cones of the timbered roofs of graceful pavilions rose up above bamboo and cedar, eaves sloping upwards in a bold movement. Along the slopes there was a swarming of variety: barrenwort issuing forth from between the stones with delicate flowers, restless and fluttering like insects. Orange-tinted day-lilies offering their calyx of a day to the hawk-moth and white evening primrose, blossoming for just an hour. Fleshy prickly pears, eomecae, moreas, and sheets, torrents and streams of primroses, those Chinese primroses that are so abundantly polymorphous and of which we have only impoverished images in our greenhouses. And there are so many charming and bizarre forms and so many blended colours! And all around the pavilions, between vistas of lawns, in shimmering perspectives, like a pink, mauve and white rain, a nuanced swarming, a pearly, ringed, milky throbbing, which was so soft and so changeable that it is impossible to give an account of its infinite sweetness and inexpressibly idyllic poetry.

  How had we been transported there? I didn’t know. Under the pressure of Clara’s hand a door suddenly opened in the wall of the dark corridor. And all of a sudden, as though she had waved a fairy wand, there was within me a surge of celestial clarity as I stood before horizon upon horizon!

  I stared in bedazzlement. I was dazzled by the softer light and the mild sky, dazzled even by the great blue shadows that the trees softly cast along the grass like a carpet laid for idleness, dazzled by the shifting fairy-play of flowers, of beds of peonies which a light shelter of reeds protected from the sun’s deadly heat. Not far away, on one of the lawns, a sprinkler sprayed a jet of water in which every colour of the rainbow was disclosed, and through which the turf and flowers assumed the translucence of precious stones.

  I took everything in avidly. Yet I saw none of these details I later reconstructed. I saw only an ensemble of mysteries and did not seek to explain their abrupt and comforting apparition. I no longer even considered whether it was reality or dream which surrounded me. I didn’t consider anything. My mind was empty and I said nothing. Clara went on talking. She was probably recounting story upon story. I wasn’t listening to her, and wasn’t even aware of her at my side any longer. In that moment she was so distant! As far away as her voice and equally unfamiliar!

  Finally, little by little I recovered self-possession; my memories of the reality of things returned to me and I realised why and how it was that I was there …

  Emerging from that hell, still quite pallid with the terror of those faces of the damned, nostrils still completely filled with the smell of decay and death, ears still vibrating with the howls of torture, the spectacle of that garden brought me sudden relaxation after an unconscious exaltation like an unreal ascension of my whole being towards the dazzling land of dream. With delight I took in deep gulps of fresh air that was impregnated with fine and gentle aromas. It was the inexpressible joy of waking after an oppressive nightmare. I savoured the ineffable impression of deliverance of someone buried alive in a frightful ossuary who has just raised the flagstone and been re-born into the sunshine, with flesh intact, limbs free and soul refreshed.

  There was a bench made of bamboo trunks close by in the shadow of an immense ash-tree, whose purple leaves, sparkling in the light, gave the illusion of a dome of rubies. I sat down, or rather let myself fall, for the joy of that splendid life almost made me faint, now, with unsuspected carnality.

  On my left was the stone guardian of the garden, a Buddha with tranquil face, squatting on a rock; it was a face of sovereign compassion bathed in azure and sunlight. Bouquets of flowers and baskets of fruits covered the monument’s pedestal with propitiatory and perfumed offerings. A young woman in a yellow dress climbed up to the merciful god’s brow and piously crowned it with lotus and lady’s slipper. Swallows were flying around, uttering little joyful cries. I then dreamed – with what religious enthusiasm and mystical admiration – of the sublime life of the one who, long before our Christ, had preached purity, renunciation and love to men.

  But, hovering over me like sin was Clara, her mouth red like the cydonia flower, her green eyes – that grey-green of the almond-tree’s young fruits – quickly brought me back to reality, and she told me, as she gestured towards the garden:

  “You see, my love, what marvellous artists the Chinese are and how well they know how to make nature complicitous with their refinements of cruelty! In our frightful Europe which, for so long, has not known what beauty is, we secretly torture in the depths of jails, or on public squares, among revolting drunken crowds. Here the instruments of torture and death, the stakes, gibbets and crosses, are set up amid the flowers, the prodigious enchantment and silence of all flowers. You’ll soon see them, intimately mingled in the splendours of this floral orgy, in the harmony of this unique and magical nature, so that they seem in some way to merge with it and become the miraculous flowers of this ground and light.”

  And as I was unable to repress a gesture of impatience: “Silly little fool!” said Clara, “You don’t understand anything!”

  Her forehead veiled with heavy shadow, she continued:

  “Come on! You must have been to a party when you were sad or sick? And your sadness must have become irritated and exasperated at the joyful faces and the beauty of things. It’s like an insult, an intolerable feeling. Think about what it must be like for a victim about to die under torture. Think how the torture must be multiplied in his flesh and soul with the splendour that surrounds him! And how his agony must become more atrocious, more desperately atrocious, dearest heart!”

  “I was thinking about love,” I replied reproachfully. “And you continuously talk about torture!”

  “Why not – since it’s the same thing!”

  She was standing beside me, her hands on my shoulder. And the red shadow of the ash-tree wrapped her in a mantle of fire. She sat down on the bench and continued:

  “Anyway, since there are tortures wherever there are men, I can’t do anything about it, baby, and I try to make the best of things and rejoice in it, for blood is a valuable stimulant of sensuality … It’s the wine of love.”

  She traced some naively indecent figures in the sand and said: “I’m sure you think the Chinese are fiercer than us? Not at all! We English? Ah, tell me about it! And you French? In your Algeria at the edge of the desert this is what I once saw … One day soldiers had captured some Arabs whose only crime was to have fled the brutalities of their conquerors. The colonel ordered them to be put to death immediately, without an investigation or a trial. And here’s what happened … There were thirty of them – thirty holes were dug in the sand and they were buried up to their necks, naked and with their heads shaven, in the midday sun. So they did not die too quickly, they were occasionally watered like cabbages. After half an hour their eyelids were swollen, their eyes bulged out of their sockets, their puffed-up tongues filled their mouths which were gaping frightfully, with cracked skin and roasted skulls. I can assure you that those thirty dead heads sticking up in the ground like shapeless stones presented a spectacle devoid of charm and even lacking in terror. Us? It’s even worse! I remember the strange sensation I experienced in Kandy, the dismal former capital of Ceylon, when I ascended the temple steps where the English stupidly, without torture, cut the throats of the little Modeljar princes whose legends reveal them to be so charming, like those marvellously skilful icons whose charm is so hierarchically calm and pure with their golden halos and long clasped hands. What I felt had happened there, on those sacred steps – still bathed in that blood of eighty years of violent possession – was something more horrible than a human massacre: it was the destruction of a valuable, moving and innocent beauty. The traces of that double European barbarism remained in that dying and still mysterious India, apparent at each step you take on the ancestral earth. The streets of Calcutta, the fresh Himalayan villas of Darjeeling, the tribades of Benares, the magnificent mansions of the
Bombay tax-farmers could not efface the impression of mourning and death left everywhere by the atrocity of clumsy massacre, vandalism and senseless destruction. On the contrary, they accentuated it. Wherever it appears, civilisation shows this face of sterile blood and forever dead ruins. It might echo Attila the Hun: ‘Consider here, in front and around you! There’s not a grain of sand that hasn’t been bathed in blood, and what is that grain of sand but the dust of death? And how noble is this blood and how fertile this dust! Look … the grass is thick, the flowers multiply … and love is everywhere!’ ”

  Clara’s face was exultant. A gentle melancholy mitigated the mark of shadow across her brow and veiled the green flames of her eyes. She continued:

  “Ah, how sad and poignant the dead city of Kandy seemed to me that day! In the torrid heat a silence hung heavily, with vultures hovering above. Hindus were emerging from the temple, having offered flowers to the Buddha. The deep gentleness of their gaze, the nobility of their brows, the suffering fragility of their fever-racked bodies and the biblical slowness of their gait; I found it all profoundly moving. They seemed exiled in their homeland, near the gentle God, bound and guarded by Sepoys. There was nothing of this earth in their black pupils, nothing but a dream of corporeal liberation and the expectation of a light-filled nirvana. I don’t know what human respect prevented me from kneeling in front of these sad, venerable fathers of my race, my parricidal race. I contented myself with humbly greeting them. But they passed without seeing me, without recognising my greeting, without seeing the tears in my eyes or the filial emotion which was swelling in my heart. And when they had passed, I felt I hated Europe with a hatred which would never be assuaged.”

  Suddenly breaking off, she said: “But I’m boring you, aren’t I? I don’t know why I’m telling you this … It’s beside the point. I’m crazy!”

  “No, no, Clara,” I replied as I took her hand. “Quite the opposite, I love you to recount this … Tell me more!”

  She continued:

  “After visiting the poor bare temple which had a gong – the only vestige of former wealth – in the entrance, and after inhaling the odour of flowers which were scattered all over the Buddha, I dejectedly went back to town. It was deserted … A grotesque and sinister evocation of western progress, a pastor – the only human around – hung about, keeping close to the walls, with a lotus flower in his mouth. In the blinding sunlight, he had kept on (as though still in metropolitan fogs) his ludicrous clergyman’s uniform, a soft black felt hat, a long black frock-coat with a filthy stiff collar, black trousers falling in dissolute creases above massive clodhoppers. This rough preacher’s dress was set off with a white sunshade, a ridiculous sort of portable punka – the only concession the pedant made to local customs and the Indian sun, which the English have still been unable to transform into sooty fog. It annoyed me to think that you can’t take a step, from the Equator to the Pole, without bumping into that squinting face, those greedy eyes, those grasping hands, that vile mouth which belches forth an odour of stale gin and dreadful Biblical verses directed against the charming divinities and adorable myths of innocent religions.”

  She had become quite excited. Her eyes expressed a powerful hatred that I did not recognise. Forgetting where we were and her criminal enthusiasm and bloody exaltation of just a moment earlier, she said:

  “Wherever there is spilt blood to justify, acts of piracy to be consecrated, violations to bless, hideous trade to protect, you’re sure to see him, that British Tartuffe, pursuing the work of abominable conquest on the pretext of religious proselytism or scientific study. His cunning and ferocious shadow hangs over the desolation of conquered peoples, tied up with that of the cut-throat soldier and vindictive Shylock. In virgin forests, where the European rightly inspires more dread than the tiger, on the threshold of humble straw-huts that have been devastated, between the burnt-out shacks, he appears after the massacre, like a scavenger, to plunder the dead the evening after the battle. A worthy counterpart of his rival the Catholic missionary who also brings civilisation on the end of torches and at the point of sabres and bayonets. Alas! China has been overwhelmed and gnawed away by these double plagues … In a few years this marvellous country, where I so love to live, will be no more …”

  She suddenly rose and let out a cry: “Ah, the bell, my love! I can’t hear the bell any more! Oh my God, he will have died! While we have been talking they have probably taken him to the morgue … And we won’t see him! That’s all your fault as well!”

  She made me get up from the bench. “Hurry up! Hurry, darling!”

  “There’s no hurry, my dear Clara. There will always be enough horrors. Continue to talk as you did a moment ago – because I love your voice and I love your eyes so much!”

  “Quickly! Quickly! You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  Her eyes had again become hard, her voice panting, her mouth imperiously cruel and sensual. It seemed to me that in the evil sunlight the Buddha had become twisted into a sneering hangman’s face. And I noticed the young girl who made the offering departing down an avenue between the lawns into the distance. Her yellow dress was very small, light and radiant, like a daffodil.

  The avenue we were following was bordered with peach trees, cherry trees, quince trees, almond trees – some dwarf and pruned into bizarre shapes, others growing freely in clumps – thrusting forth their long branches, that were laden with flowers, in every direction. A little apple tree whose boughs, leaves and blossoms were bright-red, assumed the form of a bulging vase. I also noticed an admirable tree called the ‘pear tree with the leaves of a birch’. It rose in a perfect pyramid thirty-six feet into the air and, from the very high base to the cone-shaped top, was so covered in flowers that it was impossible to see the leaves or branches. Innumerable petals dropped from it, while others bloomed and fluttered around the pyramid, falling lightly on the avenues and lawns so they resembled a fall of snow. In the distance the air was impregnated with subtle eglantine and mignonette scent. Then we skirted clusters of shrubs decorated with parviflorous deutzias in large pink corymbes and those pretty Peking lingustrum with shaggy foliage in great feathery panicles of white flowers with a covering of sulphur-like dust.

  At each step there was a fresh joy, a surprise for the eyes which caused me to utter cries of admiration. Here there was a vine I had noticed in the Annam mountains with irregular large white indented and serrated leaves – as serrated, indented and extensive as the leaves of the castoroil plant which enlaced an immense dead tree with its tendrils, climbed to the pinnacle of cut branches and, from there, again fell down in a cascade, a cataract, an avalanche, sheltering a whole flora which blossomed at the base between the naves, colonnades and niches formed by its crumbling vine-shoots. There, a stephanotis exhibited its paradoxical foliage, carefully fashioned like cloisonné enamel, and I marvelled as it passed through different colours, from peacock-green to steel-blue, from delicate pink to barbarous purple, from light yellow to ochre brown. Very close by a group of gigantic viburnums, as high as oaks, shook out great snowy globes at the end of each branch.

  Here and there gardeners, kneeling on the grass or perched on red ladders, were running clematis along fine bamboo frames. Others were winding ipomea and calystegia on long thin stakes of black wood. And everywhere the lilies lifted their stalks above the grass, ready to blossom.

  At first it seemed that the trees, shrubs and flower-beds, planted in isolation or in groups, had shot forth wherever the seeds had been randomly strewn with no method and no cultivation, with no other will than nature’s own and no other whim than that of life itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. The location of each plant had been laboriously surveyed and chosen, either to ensure that colours and forms would be complementary and might better emphasise each other’s qualities, or to respect designs, aerial shifts and floral perspectives and to multiply sensations through the blending of natural scenery. The humblest of flowers, as well as the tallest tree, converge
d, by its very position, in an inflexible harmony, an ensemble of art whose effect was all the more affecting because it eschewed geometrical elaboration and decorative effect.

  In addition, everything seemed to have been arranged through the munificence of nature for the success of the peony.

  Gentle slopes were sown not with grass but with sweet-smelling woodruff, pink crucianella that was faded like old silks, and peonies – fields of arborescent peonies unfolded as a lavish carpet. Near to us were isolated ones offering us their immense red, black, copper-coloured, orange and purple calyxes. Others, ideally pure, offered the most virginal pink and white shades. Collected together in a glittering multitude, or else solitary beside the alley, meditative at the foot of trees or tender through the thickets, the peonies really were fairies: the miraculous queens of this miraculous garden.

  Wherever the gaze rested it encountered a peony. On the stone bridges, entirely covered with saxatile plants whose unusual arches bound together the masses of rocks and connected the pavilions to one another, the peonies passed by like a festival crowd. Their brilliant procession ascended the mounds around avenues and paths bordered with small spindle-trees and privets cut into hedgerows that rose, crossed and tangled. I admired one knoll where, protected by tresses on very low white walls constructed in spirals, the most precious types of peony (steered by skilful artists into multiple forms of espalier) were distributed. In the gaps between the walls, some immemorial peonies, rolled up on high bare stalks, were spaced out in square boxes. And the summit was crowned with thick clematis, open thickets of the sacred plant whose florescence, so transitory in Europe, is continuous through the whole year. To my right and left, very close at hand or quite lost in distant perspectives – endless and forever – were peonies, more peonies and still more peonies.