Love in 5000 Years

by Fernand Kolney

  “Vainglorious man, who attempted to substitute for human intelligence one that was ordered! A Woman, I sensed the truth of our infamous era before you, and I know now, that nothing is more valuable than the felicity of abandoning oneself, consenting, to rediscovered instinct. Oh yes, my beloved, to be nothing but an animal, an animal opening its veins to the palpitating sap that can be heard rustling everywhere, which lifts the bosom of the Earth, causes a spasm to rise up all the way to the sky, and fecundate the tumultuous womb of the Universe for eternal maternity!

  “When everything mingles, vibrates and interlaces, in a fury of clutches, a perpetual renewal of embraces; when a flower swoons in the breath of enamored breezes, when even a mineral quivers at the contact of magnetic fevers, how puerile it is to oppose the debility of human will to that fatality of tenderness and lust! Well, now I have conquered you! If you knew how dull and ugly life was before the day of the Festival of Life, when, for the first time, I shivered at your touch...

  “I have loved you for a long time, perhaps always. But tell me, when you passed close to me before, plunged in the frost of your abstractions, did you not see my eyes, as iridescent as the wings of dragonflies, and my pale breasts? Did you not scent the aroma of my hair, where vertigo and swoons awaited you?”

  Delirious impulsion had robbed Sagax of all his oratory verve and his ability to say the right thing. Plunging his face into the woman’s throat, he intoxicated himself for a long time with her odor, only able to repeat: “I love you! I love you!”

  Glad to have recovered the power of speech and doubtless affirming her superior elocution, Formosa replied verbosely: “You love me, O my vanquisher, and already you can measure the magical virtue of that single word. Its diamond syllables have cast their gleam into the limbo where you were vegetating, and now their fires have guided you toward the saving light. Oriented by an infallible prescience, you have rediscovered Wisdom and have directed your steps toward the one who already personified it at the beginning of Civilization. Yes, as Carminus explained to me a little while ago, the symbolism is perfect. Have you not asked me to join you on this hill with the Greek profile, this hill with the profile of Minerva, the goddess revered by the first people who, before any other, acclaimed Beauty and Harmony.”

  The pompous lyricism that lovers had used before was reappearing.

  Raised upwards, Formosa’s right hand detached a flight of birds from the vault, which swirled overhead in an acclamation of beating wings. “Henceforth, we are placed under the aegis of Pallas Athene, the Mother of eternal Reason, the Protectress of just combats and peaceful joys.”

  Then her robe fell. Her radiant and pure form appeared, unveiled in the semi-darkness that exalted the nacre of her flesh and the whiteness of her skin, where a silky pink sheen flowed. With her foot in a little pool, in the form of a shell, she raised her arm and nonchalantly twisted her hair in the gesture of Anadyomene.

  “Sagax, you are Vesper and I am Lucine,”40 she said, putting her finger on her companion’s black star. “Sagax, through you I have known sensuality. Merely by having touched me, pleasure snaked through my body like a fiery serpent, when, fulfilling your duty, you wanted to fecundate me. Do you believe that your asceticism was not then a crime against the joy of living? Did you believe, poor fool, that the absolute could be as gentle in caressing your mind as the savor of my flesh will henceforth be to your excited mouth?”

  The Creator of Humans was transfigured. His scientific mind had abandoned him, and he was enthused by the thought that he had become irredeemably stupid. What could it possibly matter that he had been drawn back to the ages of Instinct, since Formosa’s speech perfumed the air that he breathed? His ears had never perceived such tones. It was she who had given rise to those transports fomented by an unprecedented ardor. It was the sight of his body that had intoxicated the woman with a phenomenon identical to the one of which he was the object, and simply in order to draw glory from her physical presence, he would have cast away his intelligence forever.

  He grew in his own eyes, braced himself, advanced his thigh and tensed his calf in an advantageous pose, and felt his brain swollen and his muscular strength increased by an influx of vanity. At all costs, he needed to establish an equivalence, to produce, in imitation of the Reproductress, an exalted lyricism.

  He launched himself toward her, therefore, encircled her waist with his arms, loosened his grip, collapsed at her feet, recklessly kissed her feet, got up again, red-faced, and then, as the magnificent syllables and sumptuous punctuation did not become manifest, he seized handfuls of her hair and, doubtless to give himself time to think, arranged it as he liked, crowning the woman with a diadem of heaped blonde tresses. Nothing having come of it, his mouth, which refused to say anything, swiftly explored the admired flesh. The caress of his lips ran into Formosa’s most intimate spaces.

  “Oh, your little hands, your little feet, your round hips, your firm breasts, your adorable sex...” he proffered, finally, in different intonations, swelling up, satisfied in site of everything with his improvisation.

  The Reproductress considered him momentarily, disconcerted, the profound clarity of her eyes bearing violet specks, which blackened. Nevertheless, she hollowed her back and once again offered him the corolla of her lips; after having breathed out raucously, the Creator of Humans juxtaposed his own to it wildly.

  Formosa uttered a slight squeal. Was the scientist still ignorant of the subtleties of what was known as suavium?41

  Enlaced by the Grand Physiologist, the woman’s hair had been separated into a sheet of gold, which beat the air with its heavy scent. Her ears reddened, but her throat did not feel any thrill, her flesh was not aroused, her cold clenched teeth opposed Sagax’s, the raspberries of her nipples were suddenly blue-tinged, as if touched by frost, and a waxen pallor began to spread over her forehead.

  Surprised, the Creator of Humans considered his companion, who, her body stiff, her back slightly arched, her head tilted backwards, seemed permanently inanimate. Then, uttering plaints, he threw himself upon her, putting his arm around her hips, seemingly kneading her with his palms, sketched feints and attacks similar in every way to those of a pugilist, and finally launched a further volley of frantic kisses upon the nape of her neck, her loins, her torso, her shoulders, her lap.

  Nothing was able to make Formosa quiver, or cause him to palpitate himself. Further disconcerted, he became annoyed, and resumed, this time throwing into the assault columns of more precise caresses, which exhausted him, beading each of the hairs of his breathless chest with a dewy droplet, while his throat ran through the scale of breathlessness and his limbs were pulled in every direction by the strings of impotent delirium.

  Still nothing!

  No sensation, no physical bliss, not the slightest pleasant shock n his attentive fibers. Then he knotted his fingers in Formosa’s hair, brought her toward him, face forward, and rubbed it against his own, as if he wanted to efface forever the black star that marked his forehead.

  “Why have you deluded me? Why have you made me glimpse joys that don’t exist? Why have you lied to me with your futile beauty and your perfidious speeches? Why, in abusing me, have you made me betray my brethren?”

  The Reporductress opened her eyes, looked him up and down, and pointing her index finger at Sagax’s lower abdomen, with a sovereign scorn in her voice, she had to restart several times in attempting to pronounced a difficult word, previously unused:

  “Eu…eu...eu...”

  Then she concluded by proffering the term that would henceforth express all female reprobation for the Perfected: “Eunuch!”

  Ashamed for the first time of his condition, the Creator of Humans began to moan with distress, and sketched a bound that would have deposited him at the entrance to the grotto, close to the very mouth of Pallas Athene—who, far from being propitious for him, would have expelled him as unworthy of her fertile lessons in tenderness and lucidity—but Formosa, on her knees, had taken hold
of him, and prevented with her hands, which had seized his knee.

  Placing her cheek on his right things, she cried: “No, no, don’t go... Come taste the first fruits with me; come savor with me the sentimental joys, the only ones permitted to us, since I too am almost neutered!”

  They went out and went down the hill.

  A little wood of camphor-trees opened before them; soon, its excessively strong odor drove them out. On the bank of an indolent stream, which was sleeping placidly behind a curtain of arrowheads and duckweed, beneath a small clump of blue water-lilies, Formosa dipped her toe into the clear water and smiled at two dragonflies pursuing one another.

  Sagax was preparing to dry the pearly foot of his companion with his lips, returned to fervor, when he suddenly stood up, uttered a long plaint, and started running, dragging the woman behind him, because a couple of blackbirds had cavorted in front of him, causing him to measure the full irreparability of his reduction. Already, he had only tolerated impatiently the provocation of the insects that were fecundating one another in the grass, doubtless by way of bravado, some of which coupled on the wing, then to all with their wing-cases quivering.

  In a profound beech-grove, starred by mossy paths, into which they threw themselves, a doe-rabbit coupling with a buck ran off as they approached, carried the unslaked male clinging to her back.

  Twenty paces further on, a red deer, whose luxuriant belling touched the keyboard of distant echoes, unsheathed his ardor in order to service his hind, pawing the ground beforehand with his fuming hoof.

  In haste, they emerged from the wood, but at the foot of an oak they suddenly ran into a black-furred individual lying among the pellitories. The fellow stood up, exhibiting a tumescent face and a red forehead, and drew a chestnut-furred woman to hr feet in her turn. Both had cheeks spotted with the red marks of kisses, and the flattened grass there was imprinted with a capricious mesh. Hands imploring, with a hesitant step, the man came toward the Grand Physiologist.

  “Give me back my virility, Sagax, you who can do anything…!”

  And then other men got up, at a distance, in every direction, and ran toward him, each dragging a lover with her breasts soaked in saliva, her torso creased with red wrinkles, doubtless from having been kneaded too much, and unkempt fair full of gleaming ants.

  Soon, the Creator of Humans was surrounded by a kind of human thicket with trunks of different hues, bodies furred in ebony, gold, copper, pale bronze and mahogany. A mournful wind shook the living thicket, which exhaled a plaintive concert of lamentations.

  “You’re our father; give your children the ability to love...”

  A red-haired giant with madder-red eyes like rowan-berries embraced his ankles—and when he got up, with two beetles enameled with chrysoprase and lazuli on his chest, lost in the coarse hair like two sumptuous shirt-buttons, he presented the petition of his tears and begged plaintively: “You who are August, enable us to know love, the sole joy that makes life endurable!”

  With his hands and shoulders Sagax made a gesture that translated his impotence. His eyes spoke while his mouth remained mute. He would never—never!—be able to graft the cutting of vigor on to them.

  In the vicinity and as far as his gaze could reach, he saw consternation lower the hirsute heads of the Perfected, whose previous fidgeting had coiffed them with crows’-nests. Without transition, the eight hundred eyes that were focused on him filled with flames, suddenly ignited by the commutator of a unanimous anger. A murmur rose up, which soon sank into a silence in which it was evident that the hatred had only paused in order to coordinate its offensive more effectively. Fists were raised, lowered and raised again, higher, hammering the air. Then a redoubtable circle, which propagated a torrential rumor, advanced like an immense sickle to attack Sagax.

  Jostled, some men in the front rank vacillated momentarily, knocked down by the rush of others, then crawled between the legs of the preceding rows in order to regain their places. Positioned in front of the Grand Physiologist, the colossus with bloody eyes caused the air to whistle with his arms, wielded like a saber, and his rage at not being able to become a male again was such that his grinding teeth made a sound like a giant rap. Clamors exploded like the shells of ancient armies and shortly thereafter the shrill screeches of women rose up. Hands passed beneath the loins of their geldings, they displayed the derisory mentules42 in their palms.

  “Monster, why have you crippled them?”

  Step by step, Sagax retreated, doing his best to protect Formosa, whom terror had knotted to his body like a liana. A more savage vociferation, whose breath he felt on his face, almost knocked him down.

  “Why are you marked on the forehead with an abominable sign? Answer—is it not to designate you more clearly to the just vengeance of your brethren?”

  What could he do? Stupefy them with his fluid—but his volition, in disarray, was not up to the task. Behind him, only a narrow free space remained, through which flight might be attempted, strictly speaking.

  Like crescent moons, the imprecatory mouths drew nearer and he received the radiant heat of hostile faces on his skin. One moment more and the clawed fingers of the crowd would grab him. Love had brought men to murder!

  He hesitated no longer. He threw the woman on to his back and escaped, bounding like a chamois.

  Furiously, he ran away, hurdled a rivulet, leapt over a flowering hedge, his strength multiplied tenfold, and crossed a meadow where his rapid heels kicked up entire clumps of moist grass behind him, while the mob was unleashed with discordant barks. A little wood beckoned to him; he ran into it, zigzagging between the densely-packed trunks and pale staddles, blurring his tracks, cut across paths.

  He thought he was safe, but when he looked back the red-eyed giant was thirty paces behind, his body bent double, his nostrils flared, like a bloodhound on a trail. On the downward slope of a hill, he slipped on loose stones, and when he got up, he saw that the hounds with human faces were gaining on him.

  With joyful howl, they were even announcing the imminent capture of the hunted beast that he was. In a few strides, however, he regained his lead. Then he felt an ardent fire devouring his breast; a swarm of buzzing flies seemed to fly into his empty head, and he became miserly with his breath, only breathing parsimoniously.

  The opposite slope having been scaled at top speed, he became stupidly interested in unimportant details—convolvulus swooning under the kiss of a wasp, frogs ejaculated by the grass, a lizard withdrawing its scaly head into its hole. In the throes of pain, he thought that, before long, he would no longer see those things, previously banal but full of savor now.

  Having reached and surpassed the crest he ducked down, and instead of running straight ahead made a cunning detour, running laterally. And suddenly, he had the joy of seeing the human pack, carried away by the momentum of its rush, swerve too rapidly and collapse in a heap, men and women mingled, submerging the colossus, whose red fur made a red patch in that heap of backs, shoulders and torsos, where arms were swimming and legs kicking.

  Down below, a gluttonous ravine swallowed twenty bodies in succession, which rolled over one another like large boulders, while one of the Perfected, launched straight ahead like a projectile, ricocheted several times and remained motionless and inert after four convulsive somersaults, seemingly sucking the gross teat of an anthill.

  Sagax was saved. A vast forest summoned him with the rhythmic sway of its first trees.

  He gathered what remained of his strength, tightened his muscles like cords and was about to reach it, redeemed and free, when he was abruptly pulled backwards. Formosa’s flying hair had been caught by the sly thorns of a bramble-bush, which it covered with a golden sheet, and as he struggled with maladroit hands to free her, he understood that he was doomed.

  The chase recommenced, aided by an unexpected assistance. In the distance, behind him, on a narrow, rectilinear path, Mathesis, in order to bar the route, had suspended gravity, bringing into play the magnetism of t
he pole, and a hundred Neuters were running over the floor of air, who would rain down upon him in a matter of seconds. Their mass, indecisive at first, was swelling.

  Rallied by the lead bloodhound and profiting from his confusion, the pack surrounded him; then, their chops sticky with foam, their eyes bloodshot, they got ready to fall upon him. Above the tall shivering poplars a flock of cranes was already trumpeting the halloo with their sonorous throats.

  No, he did not want to die; he must not—and he had an inspiration. He rediscovered the lie, that social balm of ancient civilization. He settled on imposture, the sole means of appeasing the anger of plebeians and governing them. Credulity could not have disappeared entirely from the human brain. Promising the unrealizable in order not to concede the possible had always succeeded for the politicians, tyrants and sociologists of old. Why not imitate them, in despair of his cause, when his life was at stake?

  He took the chance.

  Gently, he let the woman down, extended his arm to implore a momentary armistice, rallied his breath and, under the growls of nearby exhalations, before the bared canines that were about to tear him apart, he shouted: “If you kill me, you will never, never become men again. Give me time, and I will complete you.”

  “When?” demanded those within the murderous horde who had conserved the power of speech in spite of the demanding chase.

  “In four weeks, at the latest,” Sagax declared.

  “He has spoken! He had spoken! Salutations and respect to him—he is still our father!”

  And suddenly prostrate, crawling, with respectful nods and tongues imbued with vapor, the pack came on all fours came to lick the feet of the Grand Physiologist—who drew away, carrying Formosa.

  For ten minutes, Sagax had been marching pensively, bowed down by the weight of his precious burden, when he suddenly felt a vague itch, a slight prickling in his feet. He did not pay any great attention to it at first, assuming that in the course of his furious race he must have injured himself, slicing his skin to the quick.