Clara again started walking very quickly, almost insensible to this beauty. She walked on – a hard shadow on her brow and with eyes aflame. You would have thought she was borne along by a destructive force. She spoke but I could make out little, if anything, of what she said. The words ‘death, charm, torture, love’ fell ceaselessly from her lips and seemed to me no more than a distant echo, the minute tinkling of a rarely perceptible, very faraway, bell that blended the tranquil and grandiose carnality of this dazzling life in glory and triumph.
Clara continued walking on. I walked beside her and everywhere there was a fresh surprise of peonies, bushes from the realm of dream or madness, blue spindle-trees, violently streaked holly-trees, twisting and curled magnolias and dwarf cedars which were ruffled like hair, aralium and tall gramineous giant ululalia whose ribbon-like leaves hung down and rippled like gold-spangled snake skins. There were also tropical growths, unknown trees on whose trunks lewd orchids were poised; Indian banyans, rooted in the ground with proliferating branches; immense musa, and, sheltered by their leaves, flowers that looked like insects or birds, such as the enchanting strelitzia whose yellow petals are like wings, aroused by a perpetual soaring.
Suddenly Clara stopped, as though an invisible arm had brutally descended on her.
Restless, tense, her nostrils snorting like a doe having detected a male odour on the wind, she inhaled the air around her. A shiver, which I knew foretold orgasm, ran through her body. Her lips instantaneously became redder and more swollen.
“Did you smell it?” she asked in a short, dumb voice.
“I can smell the aroma of peony that fills the garden,” I replied.
She stamped her foot impatiently: “No, that’s not it! Don’t you smell it? Remember …”
And, with her nostrils open wider, her eyes more sparkling, she said: “It smells as it does when I make love with you …”
Then she leaned sharply over a plant, a thalictus whose long fine stalk with many branches was raised stiffly in a clear violet colour beside the avenue. Each auxiliary branch emerged from a sheath that shone like ivory in the form of sex organs and terminated in a bunch of minuscule flowers huddled close together and covered with pollen.
“Here it is! Here it is! Oh, my darling!”
In fact, a powerful phosphatic odour, an odour of semen, wafted up from that plant. Clara plucked the stem and forced me to breath the strange odour as she smeared my face with its pollen: “Oh, darling, my darling!” she said. “How beautiful this plant is! How it intoxicates me! How it excites me! Isn’t it strange that plants can smell of love? Why is that? … You don’t know? Well, I do … Why do so many flowers resemble sexual organs if not because nature ceaselessly cries out to living beings in all its forms and through all its perfumes – ‘Make love!’ Tell me that there’s only love! Oh, say it quickly, dearest adored rascal …”
While chewing on the bunch, she continued to inhale the odour of the thalictus whose pollen stuck to her lips. She suddenly declared:
“I want some in my garden. And some in my room, in the pavilion – through the whole house … Smell, my darling, smell! A simple plant – how admirable! Now come … come! So long as we aren’t too late – to the bell!”
With a pout – both comical and tragic – she then said:
“Why are you lingering down there on that bench? Don’t look at those flowers … don’t look at them any more. You’ll have a better opportunity later, after you have seen suffering and death. Then you will see how beautiful they are, how feverish passion intensifies their perfumes! Smell again, my darling! And come … Feel my breasts – how hard they are! The silk of my dress inflames their tips! A hot iron seems to be burning them … It’s delightful! Come now …”
She started running, her face covered with yellow pollen and with a thalictus stalk between her teeth.
Clara was not interested in stopping before another image of the Buddha whose face, contracted and gnawed away by time, was distorted in the sun. A woman was making an offering of cydonia branches and I had the feeling that these flowers were little children’s hearts. At the end of the avenue we passed a stretcher borne by two men on which a sort of lump of bleeding flesh stirred, a kind of human being whose skin, cut in strips, trailed along the ground like rags. Although it was impossible to recognise the slightest vestige of humanity in that hideous wound which had once been a man, I felt that, by some marvel, it was still breathing. And a few drops of blood dotted the avenue.
Clara picked two peony flowers and silently placed them on the stretcher with a trembling hand. With brutal smiles the bearers bared their black gums and lacquered teeth and, when the stretcher had passed, Clara said: “Ah! I see the bell! I see the bell!”
And, all around us, all around the stretcher fading into the distance, was a rosy, mauve and white rain, a tinted, milky, flesh-coloured and pearly swarming, a palpitation that was so tender and so changing that it was impossible to express its infinite sweetness and inexpressibly edenic charm in words.
VI
We left the circular avenue which branched off into other avenues winding towards the centre, and which ran along an embankment planted with a quantity of rare and precious shrubs. We took a small path which, in a dip in the ground, led us straight to the bell. Paths and avenues were sanded with pulverised brick which, under the light of a hanging lamp, added an extraordinary intensity and an emerald transparency to the greenness of the lawns and leaves. To the right were florid lawns. To the left, more shrubbery. Pink maples, spattered with pale silver, bright gold, bronzed or copper-red. Mahonia with leather bronzed leaves as large as coconut palm leaves; eleagnus which seemed to have been coated with polychrome lacquer; pyrites powdered with mica; laurel trees on which thousands of aspects of iridescent crystal glittered and sparkled; caladiums whose veins the colour of old gold set off silky embroidery and pink lace; blue, mauve and silver thuyas streaked with sickly yellow and venomous orange. Golden, green and red tamarisks, with branches floating and swaying in the air like tiny algae in the sea; cotton plants whose tufts take flight and float ceaselessly through the atmosphere; salix and its joyous swarm of winged seed. Clerodendrons spread their large flesh-coloured umbrellates like sunshades. In the sunny parts between these shrubs, anemones, buttercups and strange cryptogames were revealed – mosses covered with tiny white florets and lichens resembling agglomerations of polyps or clumps of madrepore. It was a scene of perpetual enchantment.
And amid this floral enchantment had been raised scaffolds, crucifixion apparatus, violently-coloured gibbets, black gallows on whose summits frightful demon masks sneered; high gallows for straightforward strangulation, lower gibbets and machines for tearing the flesh apart. On the shafts of these torture columns a diabolical refinement caused pubescent calystegies, ipomea of Daorie, lophosperme and colocynth to coil their flowers, along with clematis and atragene. Birds practised their love songs there.
At the bottom of one of these gibbets covered in flowers like a terrace column, an executioner was sitting, his instrument-case at his feet, cleaning his sharp steel instruments with silk dusters. His clothes were stained with blood and he seemed to be wearing red gloves on his hands. Around him, as around carrion, swarms of flies hummed and seethed. But, amid flowers and perfumes, this was neither repugnant nor terrible. You might have thought that petals from a nearby quince tree had rained down on him. Moreover, his paunch was serene and easy-going. His face was at rest and expressed good nature and even joviality – the joviality of a surgeon who has just successfully performed a difficult operation. As we passed he raised his eyes towards us and politely greeted us.
Clara spoke to him in English.
“It’s really unfortunate you didn’t arrive an hour earlier,” the gallant chap told her. “You would have seen something very fine … not an everyday occurrence but an extraordinary work, milady! I reconstituted a man from head to toe after removing his whole skin. He wasn’t very well constructed, ha ha!”
His belly, shaken with laughter, alternately swelled and contracted with muted rumbling sounds. A nervous tic extended the gap of his mouth upwards towards his zygoma while simultaneously, in the same movement, his eyelids lowered down to join the top of his lip among the fatty folds of his skin. And this grimace – or multitude of grimaces – gave to his face a comical and macabre cruelty.
Clara asked: “No doubt he was the one we came across on a stretcher just now?”
“Ah! You met him!” exclaimed the fine fellow delightedly. “Well, what did you think?”
“What horror!” said Clara in a calm voice that belied the disgust in her exclamation.
The hangman explained: “He was a miserable coolie from the port – a good-for-nothing, milady. Certainly he wasn’t worthy of such fine work. Apparently he had stolen a bag of rice from the English – our dear friends, the English … When I had skinned him, leaving his hide attached to his shoulders only by two small incisions, I made him walk, milady. Ha ha! Really a great idea! Enough to make you split your sides! He seemed to be wearing – what’s it called? … Ah, yes – an Inverness cape. The dog had never been so well dressed, nor by a finer tailor. But his bones were so hard I cracked my saw on them – my beautiful saw.”
A small whitish and greasy fragment remained between the teeth of the saw. He flicked it away with his fingernail and it was lost in the grass among the florets.
“That’s the marrow, milady!” the jolly chap said. “He didn’t have too much of it.”
And, shaking his head, he added: “They don’t often have too much because we are always working with low-class people.”
Then, with an air of calm satisfaction: “Yesterday – my word! It was very strange. I turned a man into a woman … He he! It was so lifelike, it could have fooled even me! Tomorrow, if it pleases the genies to offer me a woman on the gibbet, then I’ll turn her into a man … That’s not so easy, ha ha!”
The effort of this fresh laughter caused his triple chin, the folds of his neck and stomach to tremble like jelly. A single red arched line then joined the left corner of his mouth to the corner of his right eyelid amid puffiness and furrows from which thin threads of sweat and tears of laughter ran.
He replaced the cleaned and gleaming saw in the case, which he closed again. The box was charming and admirably lacquered: a flight of wild geese over a nocturnal pond where the moon turned the lotuses and irises silver.
At that moment, the shadow of the gibbet placed a transverse purplish bar across the executioner’s body.
“You see, milady,” continued the verbose fellow, “our profession, like our beautiful porcelain vases, our beautiful embroidered silks and our beautiful lacquers, is gradually vanishing. These days we no longer know what torture really is. Although I try to carry on in the true tradition I’m overwhelmed … I can no longer hold back its decadence on my own. How can I? Today executioners are recruited from just anywhere! They don’t pass any tests or examinations. It’s who you know and how influential they are that determines the choice. And what choices they make, if only you knew! It’s shameful! These important functions used to be entrusted to genuine scholars and people of merit who had a perfect understanding of human anatomy and had diplomas, experience or natural ability. Today, anything goes. The most jumped-up shoe-repairer can assume these honourable and difficult positions. No more hierarchy, no more tradition! Everything is going down the drain! We live in an age of disarray. Something is rotten in China, milady.”
He sighed more deeply and, showing us his completely red hands and his instrument-case gleaming in the grass beside him:
“And yet, as you can see, I do the best I can to revive our annulled prestige. For I’m an old conservationist, myself, an intransigent nationalist, and I loathe all these practices, all these new methods which Europeans, and in particular the English, bring us. I don’t intend to vilify the English, milady … They’re fine people and very respectable. But you must admit that their influence over morality has been disastrous. Each day they take away China’s exceptional character. As far as torture is concerned, milady, they have harmed us so much, so much … It’s a great shame!”
“Nevertheless, they know how to do it well!” interrupted Clara, who was wounded by this reproach in respect of her national self-esteem; for though she took pleasure in being severe towards her compatriots (who she detested) she still expected others to respect them.
The executioner shrugged his shoulders and, his nervous tic having become worse, displayed the most imperiously comical grimace one could imagine on a human face. And as, despite our horror, we had great difficulty in holding back laughter, he sharply declared:
“No, milady, they don’t know at all. In this respect, they’re real savages. You just have to consider India – to mention only India – to see how vulgar and unskilful they are! And how stupidly – yes, stupidly – they squander death!”
He joined his bloody hands together as though in prayer and raised his eyes to Heaven saying, in a voice seeming to cry out so many regrets:
“When you think, milady,” he cried, “about all the fine things they could have done down there – yet haven’t and never will do! It’s unforgivable!”
“Well!” protested Clara. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“May the genies bear me away if I’m lying,” exclaimed the Fat Man.
And, in a more gentle voice and with didactic gestures, he stated:
“In torture, as in other things, the English aren’t artists. I’ll admit as many qualities you like, milady, but not that one – no, not at all!”
“Come on! They have made the whole of humanity cry out!”
“Bad, milady, very bad,” the executioner rectified. “Art does not consist of killing indiscriminately, slaughtering, massacring, exterminating men en bloc. It’s too easy, really. Art, milady, consists in knowing how to kill, according to rituals of beauty, something about which the Chinese alone know the divine secret. To know how to kill. Nothing is rarer and that’s the sum of it. To know how to kill. That means to take the same care over human flesh as a sculptor does over his clay or piece of ivory – to extract all the marvels of suffering it harbours in the depths of its shadows and mysteries from its sum total. That’s it! There has to be science, variety, elegance and invention – genius, in the final reckoning. But everything today is becoming lost. European snobbism has overwhelmed us: battleships, machine-guns, long range rifles, electricity, explosives and who knows what? Everything makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic. What it amounts to is that all the indecency of your progress is gradually destroying our beautiful traditions of the past. Only here, in this garden, do we at least try to maintain them as far as we can … But how difficult it is! How many obstacles and continual struggles … if only you knew! Unfortunately, I suspect it won’t last long. We are being conquered by mediocrity. And everywhere the bourgeois spirit triumphs …”
His countenance contained a singular expression of both melancholy and pride, as his gestures revealed deep lassitude.
“And yet,” he said, “the one who is speaking to you, milady is certainly not just anyone. I can take pride in having disinterestedly devoted the whole of my working life to the glory of our great Empire. I always finished top – by a considerable margin – in torture examinations, I have invented – believe me – some really sublime things: wonderful tortures which, in another time or under another dynasty, would have given me fame and fortune. Now they barely notice me at all … I’m misunderstood. Let’s be frank: they scorn me! What can you expect? Genius today counts for nothing. I’m accorded not the slightest recognition. It’s disheartening, I tell you! Poor old China, once so artistic, so grandly illustrious! Ah, I really fear it may be ripe for conquest!”
With a pessimistic and distressed gesture, he appealed to Clara for confirmation of this decadence, and his grimaces were quite untranslatable.
“Well, look, milady! Doesn’t
it make you want to weep? I’m the one who invented the rat torture. Let the genies gnaw away my liver and twist my testicles if it isn’t so! Ah, milady, an extraordinary torture, I swear to you … Originality, picturesqueness, psychological understanding, scientific application of suffering – it has them all. And it’s incredibly funny into the bargain. Its inspiration was the old Chinese gaiety that has been so neglected these days … Ah, how it would have excited everyone’s good spirits! How expedient for livening up listless conversations! Well, they rejected it … Even worse, they wanted nothing to do with it. Yet the three tests we did before the judges were colossally successful.”
Since we didn’t seem to sympathise – in fact his old employee’s recriminations rather irritated us – the executioner repeated with emphasis:
“Colossally … Colossally …”
“What is this rat torture?” Clara demanded. “How is it I don’t know anything about it?”
“A masterpiece, milady, a pure masterpiece!” affirmed the fat man in a resounding voice as his flabby body settled into the grass.
“So you say – but …”
“A real masterpiece! And you see, you don’t know about it … no one knows about it. What a pity! How can you expect me not to feel humiliated?”
“Can you describe it for us?”
“Can I? … Certainly I can. I’ll explain it, and you can judge … Listen carefully.”
And the fat man spoke whilst making precise gestures in the air to portray forms:
“You take a condemned man, sweet milady, a condemned man, or someone else – since the success of my torture does not depend on the victim being condemned for anything in particular – you take a man, as young and strong as possible and with powerful muscles (by virtue of the principle that the stronger they are, the more they struggle and the more they struggle, the greater the pain). Right. You undress him. Right. And, when he is completely naked – are you following, milady? You then make him kneel down on the ground with his back bent and fasten him down with chains riven into iron necklaces which crush his neck, wrists, shins and ankles. Right! I hope I’m making myself clear? Then you place a large rat which, to excite its ferocity, has been deprived of food for a couple of days in a large pot with a small pierced hole at the bottom – a flowerpot, milady! And you apply this pot hermetically to the condemned man’s buttocks like a suction-cup by means of robust straps attached to a leather belt around his loins. And now it takes shape …”
Torture Garden Page 15