We approached.
The peacocks had stopped still. Their numbers swelling, they now filled the circular avenue and the flowered opening which they dared not cross. Behind us we heard their murmurs and the muted shuffle of the crowd. In fact it was like a crowd that had raced to the threshold of a temple – tightly clenched together, impatient, suffocating and respectful, necks extended and eyes wide with amazement – to stare at a mystery they did not understand.
We approached closer still.
“See, my darling,” Clara told me, “how curious and unique it is … and how magnificent! In what other land could such a sight be found? A torture-hall embellished as though for a ball – with a dazzling flock of peacocks to serve as audience and with walk-on parts both as mob and as setting for the festival! You’d think we had been transported beyond life into the imagination and poetry of the age of old legends! Doesn’t it leave you awestruck? I feel I’m living in a dream here!”
Pheasants with dazzling plumage and long golden tails soared and crossed above us. Here and there several dared to perch on the tops of flowering trees.
Clara, who followed all the vagaries of form and colour of these enchanted flights, went on, after a few moments’ bewitching silence:
“It’s amazing, my love, that the Chinese are treated so contemptuously by those who do not know them and yet are quite astonishing people! There’s not a race that has known how to train and domesticate nature with such exact skill. What unique artists! And what poets! Look at that corpse on the red sand – it has the style of old idols. Look at it carefully because it is extraordinary. You’d have said that the vibrations of the bell, ringing full tilt, had penetrated into this body like hard and compressed matter, forcing out the muscles and making the veins burst and the bones twist and grind. A simple sound, so sweet to the ears, so delightfully musical, so moving for the mind, becoming a thousand times more terrible and painful than all the fat old clown’s complicated instruments. Isn’t it maddening? No, but think about something prodigious: the very thing that causes amorous virgins to cry out with ecstasy and divine melancholy as they pass by at evening in the country, can also cause men to roar with pain and can bring death in the most unspeakable suffering for a miserable human carcass. That’s what I call genius! Ah, an admirable torture! Accomplished in darkness, and so discreet. If you think about it, it is quite unequalled … What’s more, like the torture of the caress, it is very rare today and you are lucky to have seen it on your first visit to the garden. I’m told the Chinese brought it from Korea, where it is very ancient and where it is apparently still frequently used. We can go to Korea, if you like. The Koreans are inimitably ferocious torturers, and they make the most beautiful vases in the world – thick, white vases that are absolutely unique and seem to have been tempered (ah, if only you knew!) in baths of seminal fluid!”
Then, going back to the corpse:
“I’d like to know who this man is. Because it’s only high class criminals who are prescribed the torture of the bell – conspiring princes and high officials no longer in the Emperor’s favour. It’s an aristocratic and almost glorious torture …”
She shook my arm: “You don’t seem struck by what I’m saying … You’re not even listening to me! But think about this bell ringing and ringing … It’s so sweet! When heard in the distance it gives the idea of mystical passover feasts and joyous masses, baptisms and marriages. Yet it is the most terrifying of deaths! I find that tremendous! What about you?”
And as I didn’t reply:
“Yes, yes,” she insisted. “Say it’s tremendous! I want you to, I want you to … Be kind to me.”
My persistent silence caused her a slight movement of anger: “How disagreeable you are!” she said. “You’re never kind to me! What does it need to cheer you up? I don’t want to love you any more. I no longer desire you. Tonight you’ll sleep all alone in the pavilion. I shall seek out my little Peach-Blossom who is far kinder than you and knows more about love than men do.”
I wanted to stammer out something or another.
“No, no, that’s enough! It’s over! I don’t want to speak to you any more. I wish I’d brought Peach-Blossom. You’re unbearable. You make me unhappy, and turn me stupid. It’s awful! I’ve wasted a whole day, which I promised myself would be so exciting with you.”
Her chatter and the sound of her voice irritated me. For a while I ceased to see her beauty. Her eyes, her lips, her neck, her heavy golden hair and the fervour of her desire and her lustful sinning – everything about her then seemed hideous to me. From her half-open corsage, from the pink nudity of her breasts where I had so many times breathed in, drunk and bitten on the headiness of her intoxicating perfumes, arose exhalations of putrefied flesh – that small stain of putrefied flesh which was her soul. Several times I had been tempted to interrupt her with a violent outburst or use my fists to shut her up or wring her neck. I felt such a wild hatred against this woman rising within me that, seizing her arms roughly, I cried out in a distant voice:
“Shut up! Shut up! Don’t ever speak to me again! Ever! I’d like to kill you, demon! I ought to kill you and throw you into the charnel house, scum!”
In spite of my excitement I was afraid of my own words. But to make them finally irremediable I repeated them, bruising her arms with my frantic hands:
“Scum! Scum! Scum!”
Clara didn’t recoil a bit – not even by a flutter of her eyelids. She thrust her bosom forward and offered me her breasts. Her face was illuminated with unknown and resplendent joy. Simply, softly, and with infinite sweetness, she said:
“Well, then! Kill me, darling! I’d love to be killed by you, dear little darling!”
This was the only gleam of revolt in the long and unhappy passivity of my submission. It faded as quickly as it had been lit. Ashamed of the vile insults I had uttered, I released Clara’s arms – and all the anger caused by nervous excitement suddenly melted away in deep dejection.
“Ah, you see,” said Clara, no longer interested in taking advantage of my abject defeat and her too easy triumph: “You don’t even have the courage to do that – it would be beautiful! Poor baby!”
And as if nothing had happened between us she went back to the frightful drama of the bell with an impassioned look on her face.
During this short scene the two men had been resting. They seemed exhausted. Thin, out of breath, ribs projecting under the skin and with emaciated thighs, they no longer seemed human. Sweat flowed as though from a gutter along the tips of their moustaches and their chests heaved as those of livestock do when worried by dogs. But an overseer suddenly appeared with whip in hand. He screamed out angry words and, as hard as he could, lashed the bony loins of the two wretches who howled as they again set about their task.
Frightened by the cracking of the whip, the peacocks cried out and beat their wings. They all fled in tumult – whirling and bustling in a bewilderment of panic. Gradually becoming reassured, they returned – one by one, couple by couple, group by group – to take their places again beneath the floral arch, their breasts swelling further with splendour as they darted fierce gazes on the scene of death. The pheasants – red, yellow, blue, green – continued to pass across the white circle, embellishing the luminous roof of the sky with dazzling silks and delicate and changing scenery.
Clara called the supervisor over and held a short conversation with him in Chinese which she sketched out for me as he replied.
“These two poor devils have been ringing the bell for forty-two hours without food or drink or rest! Can you believe that? How is it they haven’t died? I know that the Chinese aren’t made like us, that they have extraordinary endurance when it comes to fatigue and physical pain. I wanted to know how long a Chinese could work without nourishment … Twelve days, darling. He only fell at the end of the twelfth day! It’s incredible! It’s true that the work I imposed on him was nothing like this … I made him dig the ground under the hot sun.”
; She had forgotten my insults and her voice had again become loving and caressing as it was when she told me a beautiful love story. She continued:
“Because you can’t doubt, darling, what a violent and continuous effort and superhuman action it must be to set the bell in motion and operate it. Even the strongest succumb to it – a burst vein or a rupture … and that’s it! They suddenly drop dead under the bell! And those who don’t die on the spot become incurably sick! See how the friction of the rope has caused their hands to swell and bleed! Besides, it appears that they have been condemned as well! See – they die through killing and two tortures cancel one another out! All the same, you have to treat these wretches well. When the supervisor leaves you will give them some taels won’t you?”
And going back to the corpse:
“Ah, you know, I know him now. He was a big city banker – he was very rich and stole from everyone. But that wasn’t why he was condemned to the bell torture. The supervisor doesn’t know exactly why. It’s said he treacherously colluded with the Japanese. Well, that would be said, wouldn’t it?”
Scarcely had she spoken these words when we heard muffled moans and stifled sobs. They came from behind the white wall directly ahead of us, from which petals were slowly dropping to the red sand. A rain of tears and flowers!
“It’s his family,” explained Clara. “They are there, as usual, awaiting the delivery of the victim’s body.”
At that moment the two exhausted men – by some wonder of will – were still standing and examining the corpse. Clara and I simultaneously uttered the same cry. Clinging to me and tearing at my shoulder with her nails:
“Ah, darling, darling, darling!” she said.
This was an exclamation she always used to convey the intensity of her emotion at the approach of terror as of love.
We looked at the corpse and, in a motion of astonishment, stretched our necks towards the corpse, and could not take our eyes away.
Its convulsed face – its contracted muscles were forced out, hollowed into frightful and hideous angles and its mouth was twisted to reveal its gums and teeth – mimicked a madman’s frightful laugh, a laugh which death had stiffened, congealed and, so to speak, modelled into all the folds of his skin. From two inordinately open eyes a sightless gaze was darted over us in which an expression of the most terrifying insanity remained. It was so marvellously sneering and dementedly crazy, a look the like of which had never, even in the padded cells of lunatic asylums, been detected in the eyes of a living being.
Observing all the muscular displacements in the body, all those deviations of the sinews, those swellings of the bones and face, that mouth held in a grin, that dementia of the eyes surviving death, I realised how much more horrible than any other torture must have been the death throes of the man lying bound for forty-two hours under the bell. Neither the carving knife nor the red-hot burning iron, neither the tearing tongs nor the wedges that divide the joints, crack the articulations and split the bones like pieces of wood, could exert a greater havoc over the organs of living flesh and fill the brain with more horror than this sound of an invisible and immaterial bell which combined together all the known torture instruments and unremittingly and simultaneously affected all the sensitive and thinking elements within an individual, doing the work of more than a hundred executioners.
The two men had started pulling on the ropes once more, their throats hissing and their sides beating ever quicker. But their strength had gone and streams of sweat flowered from their limbs. They could barely stand up now as, with stiffened fingers, they pulled on the leather straps.
“Dogs,” shouted the supervisor.
A lash of the whip caught them across the loins and they did not even react to the pain. It seemed that, their nerves relaxed, all sensitivity to pain had vanished. Their knees, increasingly bent and trembling, knocked against one another. What muscles remained to them under the flayed skin contracted in convulsive movements. Suddenly one of them, at the end of his tether, slackened the bonds, uttered a slight but raucous moan and, with arms forward, fell down beside the corpse, face to the ground, throwing up a flood of black blood.
“Get up! Coward! Get up, dog!” the supervisor was still yelling.
The whip hissed and cracked on the man’s back four times. The pheasants perched on the blossoming trunks flew away with a great beating of wings. Behind us I heard the panic-stricken sounds of the peacocks. But the man did not get up. He did not even stir and the bloodstain grew larger on the sand … The man was dead!
I then dragged Clara away. Her small fingers were digging into my skin. I felt very pale and walked and staggered like a drunkard.
“It’s too much, too much,” I kept repeating.
And Clara followed me docilely, also repeating:
“Ah, you see, my darling! I knew it very well! Did I lie to you?”
We reached an avenue leading to the central pond and the peacocks, which had hitherto followed us, suddenly abandoned us and scattered with a great noise through the flower-beds and the garden lawns.
The broad avenue was bordered by dead trees on both sides – immense tamarinds whose massive bare branches interlaced in hard arabesques across the sky. A recess was hollowed out in every trunk. The majority remained empty but some enclosed the violently contorted bodies of men and women who had been subjected to hideous and obscene tortures. Some sort of clerk dressed in a black robe stood gravely in front of the occupied recesses with a writing-case on his chest and a police register in his hands.
“It’s the avenue of the accused,” Clara told me. “And these people you see standing here come to take the confessions which only prolonged suffering could tear out of these wretches. They don’t often confess. They prefer to die like this rather than prolong their death-throes behind prison bars only in the end to perish from other torments. Generally the courts don’t make excessive use of detention, except for political crimes. They judge en bloc – in batches and at random. What’s more, you can see that there aren’t many accused and that most of the recesses are empty. Still, it remains a fact that it is an ingenious idea. I really believe they got it from Greek mythology. It’s a horrible transposition of the charming fable of the wood nymph entrapped in the trees!”
Clara approached a tree in which a woman who was still young was growling. She was hanging by her wrists from an iron hook and her wrists were held between two blocks of wood clasped with great force. A rough rope of coconut thread, covered with pulverised pimento and mustard and soaked in a salt solution, was wound around her arms.
“That rope is kept on,” Clara was kind enough to explain, “until the limb is swollen to four times its usual size. Then it is taken off and the ulcers it produces often burst, causing hideous wounds. It frequently causes death and the victim never recovers.”
“But suppose the accused is found not guilty?” I asked.
“Well – too bad!” said Clara.
Another woman, in another recess, with her legs spread, or rather torn apart, had iron collars around her neck and arms. Her eyelids, her nostrils, her lips and her sexual parts had been rubbed with red pepper and two screw-nuts crushed her nipples. Further on, a young man was suspended from a rope passed under his armpits. His shoulders were weighed down with a large stone block and you could hear his joints cracking. Another one, with head and shoulders tipped back, whose balance was maintained by a brass wire which bound his neck to his two big toes, was squatting with sharp and pointed stones between the bends of his shins. The recesses in the trunks were becoming emptier. Only occasionally was there a crucified or hanged or bound man. Their eyes were closed, seemingly asleep but probably dead! Clara said no more, and didn’t explain anything further. She listened to the heavy flight of the vultures as they circled above the interlaced boughs and, higher still, the croaking of the ravens which soared in the sky in innumerable flocks.
The lugubrious tamarind avenue ended in a wide terrace blooming with peonies. We went down it to
the pond.
Irises rose up out of the water, their long stems bearing extraordinary flowers whose petals were coloured like old earthenware vases: precious glazes that were purplish blood-coloured; sinister purples; blue flames twisted with orange-ochre; or velvet blacks with sulphur furrows. Some of them were immense and shrivelled up like cabbalistic characters. Water lilies and nelumbriums spread their great blossoming flowers across the golden water, giving the suggestion that they might have been floating severed heads. We remained leaning over the balustrade of the bridge gazing lightly into the water for a while. An enormous carp, with just its golden muzzle visible, slept under a leaf, and cyprinoids passed between the cat’s tail like red-hot thoughts in a woman’s mind.
IX
And that’s how the day ended.
The sky became red, streaked with large emerald bands of a surprising translucence. It was the hour when flowers assumed a mysterious gleam, a radiance that was both violent and restrained. Everywhere they blazed as though it was they – from all the sunlight with which their petals had been impregnated throughout the day – that gave the evening air its light. Between the intensified green of the lawns, the avenues of pulverised brick seemed like ribbons of fire in some places and streams of incandescent lava in others. The birds were silent in the branches. The insects had ceased humming and were dying or sleeping. It was just the moths and the bats that started to circulate in the air. Everywhere, from sky to tree, from tree to the ground, silence had assumed its domain. And I felt it penetrate into me as well, chilling me like death.
A flock of cranes slowly descended the grassy slope and established themselves not far away, around the pool. I heard the patter of their feet in the high grass and the snapping of their bills. As they rose motionless on one foot, with head under their wings, they appeared to be bronze statues. And the carp with golden muzzle sleeping under the nelumbrium leaf gyrated in the water, plunging down and disappearing to leave wide waves on the surface which gently swayed the once more closed calyxes of the water-lilies, becoming larger and getting lost amid the clusters of iris where diabolical flowers, strangely simplified, inscribed fatalistic signs straight out of the Book of Fates into the evening magic.
Torture Garden Page 18