Torture Garden

by Octave Mirbeau

  Above the water, an enormous wide-open arum-lily – the cornet of its garish flower mottled with brown stains – conveyed the heavy odour of the corpse to us. For a long time the flies continued obstinately and unremittingly to swarm around its corpse-like calyx.

  Leaning on the handrail of the bridge with her face barred and eyes fixed, Clara stared into the water. The light of the setting sun lit up her neck. Her flesh had relaxed and her mouth had contracted. She looked solemn and very sad. As she stared into the water, her gaze perhaps penetrated further and deeper than the water. Perhaps it went towards something darker and more impenetrable than the bottom of that pool. Perhaps it went into her soul, towards the gulf of her soul in which, in eddies of flame and blood, the monstrous flowers of her desire unfolded. What was she really looking at? What was she thinking about? I don’t know. Perhaps she was looking at nothing, thinking about nothing. A little weary, her nerves crushed and bruised beneath the whiplashes of too many sins, she was silent, that’s all. Unless, by a last effort of her intellect, she was gathering all the memories and images of that horrible day, to offer them as a bouquet of red flowers to her sex? I didn’t know.

  I didn’t dare speak to her any more. Her immobility and silence frightened and disturbed me to the depths of my being. Did she really exist? I wondered about it, not without dread. Had she not been born from my debauchery and fever? Was she not one of those impossible images that hatch out from nightmare? One of those criminal temptations shaped through lust to inflame the imagination of sick people who become murderers and madmen? Maybe she was nothing but my soul projected out of myself, despite myself, and materialised in the form of sin?

  No. I could touch her. My hand recognised the marvellous and so vibrant reality of her body. Her skin burned my fingers through the thin and silky material which covered her. And Clara did not tremble at the contact. She did not swoon as she often did at their caress. I desired her and I hated her. I would like to take her into my arms and strangle her until she choked, to crush her, to drink death – her death – from her open veins. I exclaimed in a voice by turns menacing and submissive:

  “Clara! Clara! Clara!”

  Clara neither replied nor moved. She was still looking into the water as it became increasingly dark. But I actually believe that she was looking at nothing – neither at the water, nor at the red reflection of the sky in the water, nor at the flowers, nor at herself. Then I moved a little further away, in order no longer to see her or touch her, and turned towards the vanishing sun, towards the sun which had left no more than great ephemeral gleams in the sky – gleams which were gradually melting away and passing into the night.

  Shadow descended across the garden, trailing blue veils that lay lightly over the bare lawns and more thickly over the flower-beds whose outlines had clarified. The white flowers of the cherry and peach trees – whose whiteness was now moon-like – had elements of slippage and wandering, the strangely stooping aspect of phantoms. And the gibbets and gallows raised their sinister casks and black frames in the eastern sky that was coloured blue steel.

  Horror! Above a flower-bed, against the purple of the dying evening, endlessly turning on the stakes, slowly turning, turning in the void and swaying like immense flowers with stalks visible in the night, I saw, endlessly turning, the black silhouettes of five tortured men.

  “Clara! Clara! Clara!”

  But my voice didn’t reach her. Clara neither replied nor moved, nor turned around. She remained leaning over the water, over the gulf of the water. And just as she no longer heard me, she no longer heard the groans, the cries and the death rattles of everything that was dying in the garden.

  I again felt a sort of heavy oppression – an immense weariness from so much walking through fever-ridden forests and along the shores of mortal lakes – and I was overwhelmed by a despondency that I felt would never again be lifted from me. At the same time, my brain was heavy and tormented me. I felt that an iron ring was clasped to my temples and was causing my skull to burst open.

  My thought then gradually became detached from the garden and the torture arenas, from death-rattles beneath the bells, from trees haunted with pain, from the bloody and devouring flowers. It was trying to go beyond the surroundings of this charnel house and enter the pure light, to finally knock upon the gates of life. Alas! The gates of life would never swing open except on to Death, would never swing open except onto palaces and gardens of death. And the universe seemed to me like an immense, inexorable torture garden. Everywhere there was blood and where life was most apparent, there were horrible tormentors to flay the flesh, saw up bones and turn the skin inside out with sinister expressions of joy on their faces.

  Ah, yes! The Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, personal interests, hatreds and lies, along with laws, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism and religion. These are its monstrous and hideous flowers – instruments of eternal human suffering. What I saw that day, what I heard, exists and cries out and yells outside that garden, which for me is no more than a symbol of the whole earth. I have vainly sought a lull in crime and rest in death, but have found them nowhere.

  I would like – yes, I would like – to be reassured, to cleanse my soul and brain with old memories. I called Europe and its hypocritical civilisation to my aid, and Paris, my Paris of pleasure and laughter. But it was the face of Eugène Mortain I saw grimacing on the shoulder of the fat loquacious executioner who, at the foot of the gallows, among the flowers, was clearing away scalpels and saws. The eyes, the mouth, the flaccid and drooping cheeks were those of Mme G … who I saw leaning over the racks. I saw her purplish hands touching and caressing the iron jaws replete with human meat. An indelible red stain lay on all those I loved or thought I loved – on those little indifferent and frivolous souls. And it was the judges, the soldiers and the priests who, everywhere – in the churches, the barracks and the temples of justice – continued death’s work. And it was in the individual-man, the collective-man; it was in the animal, the plant and the element. In the end it was the whole of nature, impelled by the cosmic force of love, that was hurled in this way into murder, believing it would find outside life the satisfaction of the furious desires of life which devour it and gush forth from it in spurts of filthy spume!

  Just a moment before I wondered who Clara was and whether she really existed … Whether she existed? But Clara was life, the real presence of life and the whole of life!

  “Clara! Clara! Clara!”

  She did not reply, did not move, did not turn round. A thicker blue and silver mist was rising from the lawns and pond and enveloping the flower-beds, shrouding the torture frames. And it seemed to me that it was accompanied by an odour of blood, together with an odour of the corpse – an incense whose invisible censers were swayed by invisible hands to be offered to the immortal glory of death – to the immortal glory of Clara!

  On the opposite bank of the pond behind me, a gecko began to strike the hour. Another gecko answered, then another and another at regular intervals. They were like bells which call and converse through singing – festival bells of an extraordinarily pure timbre, crystalline and sweetly sonorous, so sweet that it suddenly dissipated the nightmare figures which haunted the garden, giving security to the silence and a charm of untroubled dream to the night. These notes, so clear, so inexpressibly clear, then evoked thousands upon thousands of nocturnal landscapes within me, which my lungs inhaled and in which my thought regained its self-control. In a few moments I forgot I was near Clara, I forgot that, all around me, the ground and flowers were still absorbing blood and I saw myself wandering through the silvery evening into the middle of the enchanted rice-fields of Annam.

  “Let’s go,” said Clara.

  Her sharply aggressive but tired voice brought me back to reality. Clara was in front of me. I could make out her crossed legs under the clinging folds of her dress. She was leaning on the handle of her parasol. And, in the half-light, her lips gleamed as does a frail lig
ht veiled by a pink shade in a large closed room.

  As I didn’t move, she repeated: “Well! I’m waiting!”

  I tried to take her in my arms. She refused to let me.

  “No, no. Let’s walk side by side.”

  I insisted: “You must be worn out, dear Clara. You …”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “It’s a long way from here to the river. Take my hand, please.”

  “No, thank you! Just be quiet! Oh, be quiet!”

  “Clara, what’s the matter?”

  “If you want to please me, just be quiet! I don’t like people to speak to me at this time.”

  Her voice was dry, cutting and imperious. We made our way out. She went in front and I behind as we crossed the bridge and entered the small avenues which meandered through the lawns. Clara walked with difficulty in abrupt steps and jerks. And such was the invulnerable beauty of her body that these efforts did not break its harmonious line, which was supple and full. Her hips maintained a divinely sensuous sway. Even when her mind was far from love, when she stiffened, clenched, and protested against love, it was always love – all its forms, its intoxications, its intensity – which animated and, so to speak, modulated that elect body. There was not an attitude, not a gesture, not a shiver, not a crease of her dress, not a ripple of her hair, which did not cry out love, which did not ooze love, which did not lavish love on all the beings and all the things around her. The sand of the avenue cried out beneath her little feet, and I heard the sound of the sand like a cry of desire, a kiss in which I discerned, clear and rhythmical, that name which is everywhere – as a cracking of the gallows and the death rattle of the dying – and which then occupied the twilight with its exquisite and funereal importunity:

  “Clara! Clara! Clara!”

  In order to hear better, the gecko was silent … Everything was silent.

  It was an enchanting twilight of infinite sweetness, with a caressing freshness which induced intoxication. As we walked we were surrounded by perfumes. We grazed against the flowers, more marvellous from being barely visible, and, like mysterious fairies, they bowed in greeting to us as we passed. Of the garden’s horror, nothing remained: its beauty alone persisted, trembling and heightening as night fell, more and more delightfully, over us.

  I felt more composed. My fever seemed to have passed. My limbs had become lighter, more elastic and stronger. As I walked, my tiredness slipped away and I felt something like a violent need for love rising within me. I went up to Clara, strolling at her side, very close to her, eager for her. But Clara’s face no longer reflected sin, as it had when she was nibbling the thalictus flower and passionately smearing her lips with its bitter pollen. Her icy facial expression belied all the lascivious ardour of her body. At least, as far as I could see, the lust within her, which trembled with such strange brilliance in her eyes and with such rapture on her lips, had completely vanished from her lips and eyes, along with the bloody torture images in the garden.

  With trembling voice, I asked her: “Are you angry with me, Clara? Do you hate me?”

  She replied in an irritated tone: “No! Not at all! That has nothing to do with it, my dear. Please, be quiet … You don’t know how much you are tiring me!”

  I insisted: “Yes! Yes! I can see you really despise me! It’s awful! I’d like to cry!”

  “God! You really get on my nerves! Be quiet – cry if it makes you feel better. But be quiet!”

  And as we were passing the spot where we had chatted with the old executioner I said, thinking that my stupid persistence would bring a smile back to Clara’s dead lips:

  “You remember old fatty, my love? How funny he was, with his blood-covered gown, his instrument-case and his red fingers, dearest. And his theories about the sex of flowers! Do you remember? That twenty males are sometimes needed to satisfy a single female …”

  This time a shrug of the shoulders was her only reply. She no longer even deigned to be irritated by my words.

  I was impelled by a vulgar sexual need and clumsily leaned over Clara, trying to embrace her, and I grabbed her breasts with brutal hands:

  “I want you – here, understand … in the garden, in the silence, beneath the gallows …”

  My voice was gasping: disgusting slobber ran from my mouth accompanied by a flow of abominable words, words she loved to hear!

  Clara nimbly slipped out of my clumsy, gross embrace and, in a voice in which anger, irony, lassitude and irritation were combined:

  “God! You’re just a dirty goat! Leave me alone! In a while you’ll be able to satisfy your filthy desires on trollops, if that’s what you want. Really, you’re too ridiculous.”

  Ridiculous! Yes, I felt ridiculous. And I decided to calm down. I didn’t want to fall again into her silence like a large stone into a lake where the swans were sleeping beneath the moon!

  X

  The sampan, which was lit with red lanterns, awaited us at the prison landing-stage. A Chinese woman with a harsh face dressed in a black silk blouse and trousers, her bare arms laden with heavy gold rings and her ears ornamented with large gold rings, was holding the mooring rope. Clara leapt into the boat. I followed her.

  “Where do you want to go?” the Chinese woman asked in English.

  Clara replied in a jerky voice which was trembling a little: “Wherever you like … It doesn’t matter … On the river … You know quite well …”

  It was then that I noticed how very pale she was. Her nostrils were pinched, her features were drawn and vacant and her eyes expressed suffering. The Chinese woman nodded her head.

  “Yes! Yes! I know,” she said.

  Her thick lips were gnawed away by betel juice and there was a bestial hardness in her expression. She was still muttering words I did not understand.

  “Let’s go, Ki-Pai,” ordered Clara sharply. “Shut up and do as I say! In any event, the city gates are closed.”

  “The garden gates are open …”

  “Do as I say!”

  Dropping the mooring rope, the Chinese woman grasped the stern-oar robustly and worked it with a supple skill. And we glided through the water.

  It was a balmy night. The air was warm and infinitely light. The water sang at contact with the sampan’s prow. The river appeared to be illuminated for a great festival.

  On the bank opposite, to our right and left, multicoloured lanterns lit up the masts and sails and the crowded decks of the boats. Strange sounds – cries, songs, music – came from them as from a joyful crowd. The water was entirely black – a matt blackness as thick as velvet – with, here and there, dull, lapping glints, and with no more vivid reflections than the broken red and green gleams of the lanterns decorating the sampans which criss-crossed the river at that hour. And beyond a gloomy space, in the dark sky, the city loomed in the distance between the black indentations of the trees, with its tiered terraces like an immense red brazier or a mountain of fire.

  As we moved further away, the high prison walls could be discerned less distinctly as, with each round of the watchmen, the floodlights projected triangles of blinding light over the river and the countryside.

  Clara went under the canopy which turned the boat into a kind of indolent silk-lined boudoir imbued with the aroma of love. Strong perfumes burned in an ancient wrought-iron vase – a naively synthetic representation of an elephant with four barbarous and massive feet resting on a delicate tracery of roses. There were sensuous prints on the hangings – boldly lustful scenes strangely and skilfully conveyed by a wise and magnificent hand. The frieze of the canopy, a precious work of tinted wood, exactly reproduced a fragment of the decoration of the subterranean temple of Elephanta that archaeologists, in accordance with Brahmanical traditions, bashfully call: The Union of the Crow’. A thick mattress of embroidered silk occupied the centre of the boat and a phallic-shaped transparent lantern, partly veiled by orchids, hung from the roof, shedding the mysterious half-light of a sanctuary or alcove over the interior of the sampan.


  Clara threw herself upon the cushions. She was extraordinarily pale and her body trembled with nervous spasms. I went to take her hands. They were icy-cold.

  “Clara! Clara!” I implored. “What’s up? What’s the matter with you? Tell me!”

  She replied in a hoarse voice which issued forth with difficulty from the depths of her contracted throat: “Leave me alone … Don’t touch me … don’t say anything to me … I’m sick.”

  Her pallor, her bloodless lips and her voice that suggested a death rattle frightened me. I thought she was going to die. Panic-stricken, I called the Chinese woman to my aid.

  “Quickly! Quickly! Clara is dying!”

  But after drawing back the curtains and showing her chimera’s face, Ki-Pai shrugged her shoulders and exclaimed brutally: “That’s nothing … She’s always like that whenever she returns from down there.”

  And she grumbled as she returned to the stern-oar.

  Under Ki-Pai’s vigorous thrusts, the boat quickly skipped over the water of the river. We passed sampans similar to ours from whose canopies with closed curtains came songs, the sounds of kisses, laughter and gasps of love that mingled with the lapping of the water and the distant reverberation, almost smothered, of tam-tams and gongs. In a few moments, we had reached the other bank and for a long time skirted the landing-stages crowded with black and deserted boats or ones that were lit up and full to bursting, low dives, dockers’ tea-houses and flower boats for the sailors and the riff-raff of the port. Through the portholes and lighted windows, I caught vague glimpses of strangely made-up faces, lubricious dances, wild debauchery and faces intoxicated with opium.

  Clara remained insensible to everything happening around her, both in the silken boat and on the river. Her face was buried in a cushion that she chewed. I tried to make her inhale smelling salts. Three times she pushed the flask away with a tired and leaden gesture. With bosom bare and breasts bursting the torn material of her corsage, legs tense and vibrant as viola strings, she struggled for breath. I didn’t know what to do or say. I was leaning over her, my anguished soul full of tragic uncertainty and really disturbed forebodings. To reassure myself that it was a passing crisis and that none of the well-springs of life were broken, I grasped her wrists. In my hand her pulse was beating rapidly, lightly and regularly, like the heart of a little bird or a child.. From time to time a sigh was emitted from her mouth, a long and grievous sigh which caused her bosom to rise and swell in pink billows. And I murmured, in a very low voice, trembling and gentle: