On the seventh morning, shortly after his earthly reawakening, the Creator of Humans, having contrived the ablation of his desiccated glands, grafted in their stead the scrotum of a yearling bull, removed while alive.44 While the sutures of the rhinoplasty were still fresh, he traversed himself several times, from top to toe, with an intense current of vital fluid.
The following day, it seemed to him that his being had increased tenfold. An exasperated vigor, as paroxystic life, was amplifying his marrows, previously narrowly confined to the hollows of his bones.
Sure of himself, he did not want to defer the ineffable felicity for another minute. He touched a button that opened wide the bay windows of his laboratory. There, in front of the Neuters summoned by his call, he had Formosa assume the posture of the tomb, which is the posture of love. Then, with a cry of victory that insulted the irremediable defeat of Mathesis, he plunged his head into the woman’s throat as if into a tuft of fresh jasmine.
When he took her, when the lavas of joy ran in his transported loins, when pleasure twisted his convulsive flesh like a vine-shoot, when he had finally tasted the unexperienced, a distant cock furiously crowed the triumph of Sensation, the victory of resuscitated Eros.
For a long time afterwards, he remained prostrate. All his nervous strength seemed to have been absorbed by the divine reaction. His nerves, struck with stupor, plunged him into a sort of coma or physical distress; an imprecise mental anguish wound down limply.
Outside, the crowd of the Perfected was swelling by the minute. Other groups, also avid to be initiated into the surprising miracle, came running. A clamor rose up, forcefully woven by a thousand scattered rumors, like an abrupt jet of water above the bowl of a fountain.
“You saw it! You saw it! He has loved! Soon, like him, we shall be able to possess our lovers.”
His saliva sparse, his mouth feverish, Sagax extracted himself, with difficulty, from the mental and carnal stickiness enveloping his intelligence and his flesh. A bleak sadness was oozing in his brain, and for him, the tragic similitude of the two spasms—that of death and that of love—became evident.
Sensuality was the red diamond serving as a clasp for the circle that embraced everything and brought the embrace close to Oblivion. Surely, in that brief second, Death and Life were connected, interpenetrating, reconciled, in order to resume, a moment later, the fratricidal struggle that made the world a perpetual renewal of kisses and agonies.
Curiously enough, since he had possessed Formosa, since she had become a woman and he, in his turn, had become a man, he had seen her face slowly become bestialized. The noble facial expression, the inspiration that, until now, had transported his soul, and had been translated in a purity of gaze and a poetry of speech, had gradually disappeared. Beneath him, the crease of the forehead, now aggressive, the animal throb of the nostrils animal, the spiteful play of the malicious eyes, and the incisors laid bare by the rictus of the mouth no longer translated anything but a hostility, and evident antagonism.
Momentarily, he was afraid of the unexpected being, the adversary, that he discovered pressed against his stormy breast, still panting in the fervent grip of his arms. Then he wanted to thank Nature, beings, things and destiny, for the immense joy that had just been imparted to him. And in a lyrical mode—the only one that suited those conjectures—he sang his delight, by showing Formosa to the crowd.
“I have bruised your face with my face, and your legs, like serpents, knotted around mine! Your teeth, against my teeth, have clicked like rattlesnakes, and a stream of fire has run through my veins! On the fiery wings of intoxication, into the bottomless gulfs of vertigo, my intelligence and has fallen. You are mine! The Science was a liar, which claimed to raise the joy and pride of Knowledge above the sacred delirium that consists of sacrificing oneself to instinct, to immolating oneself in the Species, to continue it in the hectic somersaults of flesh in pleasure...”
He paused in order to get his breath back, and, in return for the felicity to which his genius had been able to give birth in the woman, he awaited a response of gratitude formulated in lyric terms.
Formosa, her gaze harsh, her face even more rancorous since the satiation, stood on tiptoe. With her finger she rubbed the black star with which Sagax’s forehead was still blazoned. Idly, she replied: “No need to think so highly of yourself—I’d hoped for better...”
Outraged, the Creator of Humans, retreated impulsively. Stumbling however, he suddenly recovered, wanting to give flight to a new phase, the imperious beauty of which would hoist his mistress, this time, to the degree of exaltation at which he was presently established.
Why had Formosa undergone this metamorphosis?
Yes, why? In the grotto, which she herself had named the Grotto of Minerva, she had been the one to unleash eloquence, while he had appeared to be an incurable dullard. Now that the sexual vibration had endowed him with speech that was magnificent in every sense, the Reproductress was dowsing his effervescence with the dirty water of the basest material considerations. Was the function of love, then, to elevate the man only to abase the woman? Did the conjugated sex not like to raise its gaze above the ground, for fear of getting a stiff neck?
He opened his mouth just as Formosa was marching toward the bay windows in order to close them. With desire satisfied, modesty had been born in her. Pointing her pink fingernail at the crowd of the Perfected, she added: “No, but…just look at all these impolite individuals, interested in people’s amours...”
And she stuck her tongue out at them.
Standing on her right foot, Formosa abruptly stretched out her arms, and hr body, pivoting on the axis of her toes, gyrated several times in continuous rotation. That lasted a full minute; then, snatched from the ground, she came to butt Sagax in the chest—which rendered a noise like a gong.
Stupefied, the Grand Physiologist tried to cry out, but his mistress’s hair, wrapped around his neck, strangled him with its perfumed lasso.
Then he raised his head, and he hugged her more strongly against his pectorals, and made blinkers out of his palms in order to prevent her from seeing what happened next.
In front of them, the compact flood of shiny-furred torsos and shoulders, which, a little while before, had been flourishing with heads delirious with ecstasy and shaken by tics of approval—that entire crowd of humans of different colors—was prey to a catastrophe aroused by an exasperating and unknown element.
To begin with, a gigantic sieve seemed to make all the bodies dance like grains of wheat seeking in vain for the mesh of a capricious filter. Almost immediately, a vast funnel hollowed out the center of the multitude, throwing back toward the extremities the human waves that were unfurling and climbing. Then faces were heard to collide, head to vibrate, belies to burst, and in a unanimous collapse, thousands of rumps fell sideways.
Suddenly, there were tumultuous currents, fringed by a foam of spilled brains. Masses of Perfected, clinging to one another, were borne away, flowing in tidal sheets, and then, raised up in deep waves, disappeared toward the horizon with a convulsive reflux.
Some, decapitated and hurled into the air, festooned space with red arabesques designed by the blood spurting from their sectioned necks. Others, their abdomens pierce, were knotting around their loins the red cloth of escaped intestines. Contracted hands were slapping faces at hazard, and torn-out tongues flying around capriciously, like incarnadine petals dispersed by the wind.
A hail of extirpated eyes peppered the ground, only to rebound immediately. Cleared, the ground appeared to be dotted with scarlet pools, streaked by red marshes. Spontaneously, the fabulous magnetic cyclone whirled away everything that remained of the crowd caught in its swirls as if in untearable nets. It drew the survivors into the distance, kneaded them in heaps, embraced them again in its tentacles of devastation, toyed with them momentarily, and slyly offered them to the snaking scythe of mighty lightning flashes that was setting the Orient ablaze.
Flesh sizzled, roasted alive
, fleeces blazed like tufts of esparto-grass. In a matter of minutes, everyone was a victim. Outside, within the visual radius, thousands of bodies were being quietly consumed, fuming like incense-burners surrounding the invisible altar of resuscitated Crime.
Slowly, the barbaric symphony of cries of horror that had served the prodigious massacre of the High Mass of Extermination as a liturgical chant died away...
Conscious that those who had come to witness the spectacle of Amour were dead forever with regard to the workings of superior intelligence, Mathesis, with the complicity of Thales, had made use of celestum, and had launched thunderbolts like the ancient Zeus. He had killed them, in order to prevent the cancer from spreading, in order to save civilization in spite of everything.
His teeth chattering and his forehead as green-tinged as that of a cadaver advanced in decay, Sagax dragged Formosa into the basement where, he assumed, they would be safer. A thought stopped him. Why had the Prefect of Machines let him live, when it would have been child’s play for him to annihilate him, while sparring he Fertilization Laboratory?
As he was about to disappear, without having found the answer to that postulate, his eyes blinked impulsively in the sudden and irritating brightness that fell from the dark clouds. Above his head, in colossal red letters, an inscription was traced across the fuliginous sky. It said:
Traitor, we have shown you mercy in order to give you time to realize the disgust and horror of your work.
Sagax, then, judged it futile to hide in the darkness, since he had been granted a stay of execution. There was no doubt about it; his death-sentence was irrevocable, and he was certain that Mathesis would carry it out when the time came, as he had just annihilated a third of the inhabitants of the Equitable City, a third of the last silk-moths still gnawing at the Tree of Life.
But what did it matter? Was he not going to sublimate himself in a fire of delirium so exceptional, was he not going to saturate himself with a joy so formidable that all the things of his world, including death, would appear futile and miserable henceforth?
Does not love permit us to deny everything apart from it? Does the iridescent veil of divine illusions with which it drapes reality not enable us to laugh at what frightened us the day before? Does its exalting force, its power to multiply self-confidence a hundredfold, authorize the individual to believe himself the master of fact and the ruler of the future? Adversity no longer exists for its elect, and the hope that laughs at all despair.
Sagax, who speculated thus, almost came to believe that it only required a little will-power for him to become the stronger, to crush Mathesis in his turn.
Having caused the wireless electric light to shine, he had lain down beside Formosa on the nuptial couch, on the fluid bed that raised them above the ground—and he tried to take her for a second time.
Without his being able to figure out why, however, the hostile woman refused, and as he persisted, she suddenly leapt at him, clawing his face with a single muscular release, spitefully, amid a volley of shrill cries. Then with the supple stretching of a cat, she appeared to offer him everything, purring with anticipated pleasure, and, without transition, reassumed a defensive position, ready to bound at the slightest alarm, nails at he ready, her eyes phosphorescent.
Stupefied, the Creator of Humans raised his hand to his face, scored with thin scratches. He tried to get up, but she held him back, her fingers hooked into his bronzed hair—and an outburst of sobs elevated her bosom; her eyes began to gush large oblong tears, which trembled momentarily on her lashes, subsequently to fall on to her breasts.
Sagax, moved by the adorable purity of the uncovered breast, forgetting the injury done to the lover he was, advanced his mouth in order to taste the delicious salt of his mistress’s tears.
With a soft palm she pushed him away. Hampered by sighs, her speech foundered to begin with, and then resumed, plaintively, amid the tremors of her larynx, gradually becoming clearer, weakened a few more times, and finally maintained a reproving tone.
All night, only stopping to draw breath, she reproached the Grand Physiologist “for having been the bane of her life.”
For six hours, Sagax, resigned, endured that lament.
So, Formosa counted as nothing the miracle from which she had benefited; she treated as negligible his feat of genius, and him, who had duplicated the work of Nature herself, who had, so to speak recreated his lover by completing her. In her ingratitude, she had gone so far as to regret her amorphous life of yore. His treason, his violation of the law, to which he had consented in order to know and confer love, remained entirely to his count.
He was alone...
At the return of the Sun, which had required human help to dispel the star-spangled night, Formosa had finally sponged away her tears with her fists. Spontaneously, she declared that her vestment was ridiculous, that ample togas were made for those “who had no waist.”
She bent down, rummaged in corners, put her hand between the networks of conductive wires, slid it behind the bottles of spermatozoa, and soon, with a cry, came back triumphant. A red thong hung from her proudly-raised right arm. Afterwards, she buckled it beneath her breasts, making a high belt of it, and, pinching her face, looked at herself with pleasure, sketching a pirouette of satisfaction on the tips of her toes.
Encouraged, she resumed her search, and discovered an old rusty metal rod, which she passed through a fire and whose heat she verified with a grimace by bringing it close to hr cheek. Sitting in front of a sheet of glass that served her as a mirror, she remained there until midday, her forehead furrowed attentively, curling her hair with the iron, arranging the curls scrupulously, stretching the with cautious fingers, contemplating her face in profile and three-quarters, alternating satisfied mouse and discouraged pouts.
By turns, she put her hair up and down, titivating it into corymbs, plaits, cadenettes, long curls and kiss-curls. Why should she not wear it curly or wavy, like the elegant women of old, according to what the poet Carminus had told her? Was her beauty not equal to theirs? Oh, another thing! She remembered, now. The women of antiquity lad worn head-covers called “hats.” In consequence of the good taste of their headgear, their influence over men had been greater—and she gave Sagax until the evening to procure one for her, no matter how.
“Tell me that you’ll give me one, darling, for otherwise, you know, I won’t be able to love you any more...”
The Creator of Humans was ready to do anything to reconquer the love of his mistress. Almost without hesitation, he decided. He went in quest of the nacarat sheet that covered his father, bottle 4,245, and set to work incontinently. Passion had rendered him intuitive, and, by virtue of an imaginative inspiration, he succeeded in representing the form of the object that the woman coveted. With the aid of brass wire, which he wove tightly and over which he stretched the fabric, he succeeded in composing a frame in the form of a pancake, at least as large as the wheel of the chariot that had taken him to the Festival of Life. With a large square of muslin he manufactured an immense veil, like the envelopes of gauze that, five thousand years before, shop-owners had used to prevent flies from consigning themselves to oblivion on their chandeliers. When he had covered the red mount, which had previously magnified the recipient dear to his filial piety, Formosa trembled with enthusiasm. Without further delay, she wanted to try it on, ran to the glass, looked at herself for a long time and came back disappointed.
“It doesn’t suit me…put a dent in it, my love...”
He was required to begin again several times, working on the ground at Formosa’s feet—and when his eyes begged for mercy, the latter stimulated him by simply advancing her lip to translate her scorn. By turns, the excessive pancake was transmuted into a rounded melon, a tricorn hoop, an inverted tub, the roof of a dovecot, the wing of an albatross, a beehive, and a swan’s nest. An elegant upward turn and a slight appendance at the rear, which gave it the appearance of an antique chestnut-stove, seduced Formosa. Delightedly, she perc
hed it on the seething curls now amassed at her temples.
“Oh! It suits me, you see, my darling, it suits me...”
Then, prancing, she made a tour of the Fertilization Laboratory, simpering as she filed past the formidable jars in which the huge pestles were turning of their own accord, derisively imitating the hum of he gases that filled the tubes of red copper with the rumors of their confinement. Tucking up her toga, she showed her calves to the gigantic flasks, curtsied to the right and left to the ten thousand Cultures that were aligned on the parallel shelves.
She stopped, pointing a scornful finger at them. “It doesn’t disgust you, then, to put your hands in there...? Yes, I know meddling with all those indecencies—you call that Science? All men are the same...”
And her throat spread out he scales of a prolonged burst of laughter. She hiccupped again, then ran to the Grand Physiologist, collapsed at her feet beneath the weight of a sudden despair.
“No, no…this hat is decidedly hideous. It lacks flowers. Wait for me—I’m going to look in the Garden of Delights.”
Sagax was obliged to retain her by force, but she escaped from him, ran to her improvised mirror and sulkily took the hat off, and put it back on, untiringly, with neither rest nor respite.
There was mortal danger in leaving the Laboratory. Was he, Sagax, going to let a woman run that risk? Come on, he was no coward! He would go to pick the flowers necessary to her adornment. Already, he had come to think of that as a perfectly legitimate desire. And he marched to the door, reaching it. Bravely, he went out, and raised his head, challenging the Hall of the Machines, from which lightning might flare at any moment to pulverize him, along with the black star on his forehead.
Love in 5000 Years Page 21