The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  The Eye of Purgatory

  &

  Dr. Mops’ Experiment

  by

  Jacques Spitz

  translated by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  L’Oeil du Purgatoire [The Eye of Purgatory] was initially released by the Editions de la Nouvelle France in 1945 and was Jacques Spitz’ last published genre effort. The thematically similar, but earlier, L’Expérience du Dr. Mops [Dr. Mops’ Experiment] was released by Gallimard in their prestigious literary NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française) in 1939. It was the ninth but last of Spitz’s novels that they published and was perhaps a prophetic portent of what was to come.

  Jacques Spitz was born in the town of Ghazaouet in 1896 in what was then French Algeria. His father was in the French military. He eventually went on to graduate brilliantly from the famous Ecole Polytechnique and subsequently lived in Paris, single, working as a freelance engineer, spending much of his time writing.

  At the start of his literary career, Spitz was influenced by the Surrealist Movement and penned several mainstream novels in that vein, as well as a dark and cynical play about a comical, dystopian future, Ceci est un drame [This Is A Tragedy], published only in 1947.

  In 1935, Spitz turned to science fiction with L’Agonie du Globe [The Agony of the Globe], which was translated in English in 1936 as Sever The Earth and in Swedish in 1937 as När jorden rämnade. In total, Spitz wrote eight major genre novels over the next ten years, becoming the worthy successor of Maurice Renard and J.-H. Rosny Aîné, and heralding luminaries of the 1950s and 1960s such as René Barjavel, Jacques Sternberg and Pierre Boulle.

  In L’Agonie du Globe, Earth is bisected into two hemispheres, one of which eventually crashes into the Moon. The novel established the characteristics of Spitz’ style: the use of realistic, scientific details, put to the service of a wild and surrealistic imagination and a pessimistic view of humanity, the result being a tragicomic satire on a “cosmic” scale. Unlike British and American authors, Spitz did not use science in a realistic context, to predict what might happen if…; his concerns were primarily about the society of men, and in that, he anticipated the so-called “New Wave” and writers like J. G. Ballard and Thomas Disch by at least 30 years. Yet, Spitz’ novels are ever scientifically rigorous and logical in the unfolding of their plots, and never become grotesque or comical.

  His next book, Les Evadés de l’An 4000 [The Escapees from the Year 4000] (1936), is about a new ice age which drives men underground where they fall prey to a scientific dictature; eventually, some more enlightened characters escape and flee towards Venus.

  It was followed two years later by La Guerre des Mouches [The War of the Flies], perhaps his masterpiece, and L’Homme élastique [The Elastic Man] (both 1938). The first featured the inevitable conquest of Earth by mutated flies animated by a gestalt intelligence. It is a particularly dark and pessimistic work, containing some fierce satirical observations about mankind, its foibles, and, ultimately, utter impotence before its implacable enemy. The realistic attention brought to the description of the details of everyday life brilliantly contrasts with the outlandishness of the story. The few survivors of Humanity end up in a zoo. La Guerre des Mouches is everything that someone like John W. Campbell would have hated with a passion.

  By comparison, L’Homme élastique, with its means to compress and decompress atoms, enabling the creation of tiny super-soldiers and flaccid giants, is almost tame, but its handling of the theme of miniaturization is as ground-breaking today as it was when it was written.

  L’Expérience du Dr. Mops (1939) and L’Oeil du Purgatoire (1945) both explored the theme of farseeing into the future. In the former, the hero discovers that he can’t see beyond his own death; in the latter, Dr. Dagerloff’s unhappy guinea pig, the painter Jan Poldonski, sees not the real future, but an increasingly aging present, where death and decay ultimately become overpowering sights. L’Oeil du Purgatoire is a dark, introspective novel, a reflection of the notion of time and aging, certainly unique in the annals of science fiction.

  Spitz’ final genre works included La Parcelle Z [Particle Z] (1942) and the somewhat more hopeful Les Signaux du Soleil [The Signals from the Sun] (1943), in which powerful Martian and Venusian Intelligences, unaware of our existence, discuss their plans to mine Earth’s atmosphere for its basic components through sunspots. Their communications are discovered and deciphered by the hero. Fortunately for Earth, the aliens stop once they realize that our planet is inhabited by intelligent life. This is accomplished by encrypting pi into the ionization of the atmosphere.

  Two more genre novels remained unpublished during Spitz’ life: La Guerre Mondiale No. 3 [World War III], which was finally published posthumously in 2005, and Alpha du Centaure [Alpha Centauri], which was either unpublished or pulped upon publication when its publisher was seized by the Germans (stories differ).

  After 1945, Spitz, who had fought during two World Wars and had received the Legion of Honor for his bravery, abandoned science fiction and wrote only semi autobiographical and surreal pieces, but succeeded in selling only one more novel. He died in Paris in 1963. His Estate recently donated the personal journals which he kept between 1928 and 1962 to the Bibliothèque Nationale. They may still lead to new discoveries about this unfairly forgotten grandmaster of French science fiction.

  Jean-Marc Lofficier

  Translator’s Note:

  The versions of the text that I have translated are those in the Robert Laffont edition of 1972, issued in the Ailleurs et Demain/Classiques imprint. I have not had the opportunity to compare them to the original versions issued in 1945 and 1939 respectively.

  Brian Stableford

  THE EYE OF PURGATORY

  DR. MOPS’ EXPERIMENT

  CHAPTER ONE

  If the month of April had not been so rainy in Paris that year, nothing would have happened, or something else would have happened. But what good is it going on about the role played by incidental circumstances in life’s great events? I no longer believe in causes and effects now—the laborious explanations that one forges after the fact in order to take account of a chain of events. All that is of no importance whatsoever, and it is only for the sake of vain mental satisfaction that one imagines a logical sequence in the course of events.

  I had just returned to France to spend a year’s leave there. One has to stay for three consecutive years in the Pacific islands—the Philippines, Timor, Bali—to understand what a return to France might mean. To rediscover trees, dairy produce, cool nights, mosquito-less slumbers, women whose eyes gleam and actually seem to signify something, old houses, ancient landscapes without scorpions, snakes or insects, and people whose language one understands effortlessly…

  My first fortnight in Paris was delightful—for it was in Paris, naturally, that I began. After a fortnight of all kinds of folly, however, I woke up from the kind of intoxication into which that return had plunged me to become aware of the fact that it was raining perpetually, and that I felt chilly. My sojourn in the tropics had rendered me sensitive to cold. I could no longer set aside my fur-lined coat. Two weeks of rain had sufficed for me to be repossessed by nostalgia for the Sun that I had cursed for three years in the equatorial regions. The remedy did not require any great effort of the imagination. I was alone, free to go where I liked; I followed the traditional current that draws idlers southwards, and I woke up one morning in a couchette on a train moving along the Côte d’Azur. I got off in Monaco, because I had just finished my breakfast at that moment, and almost everyone had left the carriage. I could just as easily have stopped at Nice or Menton, but it happened to be Monaco.

  The first day
was execrable. Although the hotel was comfortable and the Sun high in the sky, I found around me nothing but people over 70: little invalid carriages; plaids; blankets over every knee; old mottled and twisted hands with swollen veins and outmoded rings; bottles of mineral water on every table; and, everywhere, the empty, discolored gazes of old people, awaiting death beneath checkered caps like those worn by American millionaires.

  The following morning, to distance myself somewhat from that asylum of excessively rich old people, I took a stroll along a road that followed the coast through the pines and palm-trees overhanging the walls of villas. As I approached a little inlet, I perceived one of those tiny cars that one only finds in Europe, going along the road leading down to the sea. The road was little more than a pathway, and the badly-jolted vehicle had to be steered through the difficult sections with great care. It succeeded nevertheless in reaching the beach, and when the driver got out, I observed to my surprise that it was a woman—a young woman, to judge by her slenderness and the smoothness of her gestures. From the car’s trunk, she extracted a bizarre instrument, which I recognized as one of those tricycles that move on the water, of which one sees a large number on the coast. Then, throwing off her robe, under which she was clad in a bathing costume, the young woman leapt nimbly into the saddle and began pedaling out to sea. One might have thought it an aquatic spider, a plaything like those sold by street-traders on the sidewalk.

  When I arrived at the water’s edge, she was already some distance away. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided that my underpants could take the place of swimming trunks, and set forth in my turn into the transparent water.

  I had no specific intention of joining the siren on the tricycle; I was merely giving way to a juvenile impulse to play in the water, as an example had been set for me on that sunny morning. I was a good enough swimmer not to have any fear of introducing myself in those conditions, and even of taking delight in a certain vanity—but the water in the cove, already warm, caressed my cheek so pleasantly that I was soon thinking about nothing but swimming. To be sure, the prospect of an adventure always occupies the mind of a man of my age when he has nothing to do and a year’s liberty of which to dispose, but what adventure could match the simple pleasure of merely being in the infinite expanse of water, as clear as in the tropics?—and which, moreover, offered itself as far as the eye could see, without the barrage of steel nets that protect Oceanian beaches from sharks, I was free to go as far out to sea as I wished, my eye at the level of the horizon, cleaving the soft expanse with my arms…

  If European seas have no sharks, though, they offer other inconveniences.

  A motor boat arrived to pollute the essence of my marine surroundings with its horrible noise and odor. Returning to the surface, I found myself 50 meters from the young woman, who was still pedaling, high above the water, now steering for the shore.

  The motor boat’s wake struck the flank of the tricycle, whose floats were lifted up. I saw the apparatus sway. Its occupant tried to steady it, but was finally tipped into the sea. At first, I laughed—but a scream soon reached my ears, and I saw and arm waving as if appealing for help. I swam toward the overturned tricycle. One of the young woman’s ankles was caught between the chain and the frame; stuck in an inconvenient position, she was unable to swim. I held her up with one hand, while bracing the other against the inverted machine, and she pulled free.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Just in time, I think.”

  A few strokes took us to the shore, pushing the apparatus ahead of us. I looked at her: the oval of her rubber cap outlined a very young face with exceedingly pure features. But women always look attractive thus, I said to myself, thinking of nuns and aviatrixes. Then I recalled the damp, firm figure that my arm had enfolded while I freed her.

  “It’s lucky you were there,” she said, finally, in an entirely natural voice, which no longer retained the slight breathlessness of her cry for help. “I might not have been able to get out of it on my own.”

  She rubbed her ankle.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked, with some hypocrisy, for I saw it as a pretext to touch her bare leg.

  “A slight graze,” she said, drawing away slightly. “It was the chain that trapped me.”

  My gaze moved back from the ankle to the face. With an abrupt gesture she liberated her rubber-clad hair: a surge of blonde curls, slightly damp around the nape of the neck, blossomed in the sunlight. As soon as she had shaken her head in order to permit her hair to resume its natural shape, I was able to estimate her age—about 20.

  “I was trying it today for the first time,” she explained, picking up the tricycle with both hands in order to reload it into the car, “and I haven’t gotten used to it yet.”

  As I manifested some slight surprised at see her making preparations to leave so quickly, she said: “I’ve interrupted your swim. Forgive me.” And she started the car.

  I remained alone on the beach, rather disappointed to find the adventure cut short. Obviously, I had not expected her to throw her arms around my neck, telling me that I had saved her life, but she didn’t have to leave so suddenly, without shaking my hand, or even uttering one of those polite formulas which at least permit the hope of a further meeting…

  Lying in the Sun, I was meditating on the ingratitude of young women, while accusing myself of not having been able to take advantage of the situation, when two blasts of a horn made me lift me head. Having reached the cliff-top, the unknown woman had stopped her car and was sounding the horn to attract my attention. She waved her hand twice in a friendly gesture, then set off again.

  That fashion of taking her leave, which revived my regrets, seemed to me a trifle perfidious. She’s a little tease, I thought. I thought her lost forever. I didn’t yet know that the Côte d’Azur is no more than a large village.

  All afternoon, I dragged regrets and a morose state of mind though various dives in Nice. That evening, back in Monte Carlo, after having hesitated between roulette and the Russian ballet, I opted for the latter. Although the auditorium was mostly filled with the old people whose appearance I found depressing, the audience was elegant and my neighbor, in particular, set me dreaming. All that I could see of her was a fine, intelligent profile, but her perfume, which enveloped me rather insidiously, gradually effaced the memory of that morning’s failed adventure. In the darkness, I let myself lapse into the game that consists of substituting for the nagging impression of a woman the presence of the one who might perhaps take her place. An already-dulled past regret was mingled with a not-yet-too-sharp future curiosity. My neighbor was veritably embalmed, and her slender hands, virginal of rings, were delicately taking hold of the reins of my reverie when I suddenly recognized, three rows in front of me, the golden hair that had glistened in the morning sunlight on the beach.

  Instantly, I only had eyes for that blonde nape. From various slight movements, I understood that she was accompanying her neighbor, whose bald head reflected a fraction of the stage-lighting into the gloom. I was already assuming that he could not be a very serious rival.

  This time, it was necessary not to let the opportunity escape.

  During the interval, good luck helped to bring me face to face with the couple in the corridor leading to the boxes. I needed no further ruse; the unknown woman came up to me smiling, holding out her hand.

  “Father, I can introduce you to my savior,” she said, laughing, “but I don’t know his name.”

  I gave my name; the bald gentleman murmured a name that I didn’t catch.

  “And this is my cousin Narda,” she continued, indicating a slightly awkward young woman of about 17, who was standing to one side.

  “Since you have saved her life,” the father said to me, straight away, “I can entrust her safety to you. I must absent myself momentarily—don’t wait for me.”

  He was speaking with a slight foreign accent, and his extraordinarily bushy eyebrows contrasted with his close-shaven head, which I had thought at fir
st to be bald. He disappeared into the crowd. I went into a corner of the foyer with the young women. The morning’s incident furnished a ready-made topic of conversation.

  “A scratch that one can scarcely see through a stocking,” she replied, still smiling.

  My suit must have inspired more confidence than my swimming-costume, for amiability showed through the banality of the words. I learned that young Narda had arrived straight from her Swiss boarding school for the Easter vacation.

  “…And she prefers going to the theater to going swimming with me,” she added, teasingly.

  To which Narda replied, in an almost child-like voice: “Yvane doesn’t understand that the water of Swiss swimming-baths is much calmer.”

  I smiled, and turned back to Yvane, whose name I had finally learned. “If you wouldn’t mind my company, I’d gladly accompany you on your next nautical experiment.”

  “We’d need a tandem,” she replied, lightly, without giving any answer to my proposition.

  The interval elapsed without my being able to obtain a firm engagement, which I could not solicit overtly. The bell rang and we had to go our separate ways. With a furrowed brow, disappointed once more, I was returning to my solitary seat when Yvane came toward me again, cutting through the crowd.

  “I forgot to ask you to come to tea the day after tomorrow,” she said, rapidly. “We live in the Château de la Colle, a few kilometers from Nice on the road to Vence. Ask for the house of Doctor Mops—my father-in-law—and you’ll find it without any difficulty.” Then, with a friendly nod of the head, she allowed herself to be borne away by the tide of spectators.

  I had agreed without saying a word. The belated invitation reminded me of the adieu launched from the cliff-top. Was it typical of her turn of mind to return to unsettled situations? Or should I see these intentional postscripts as a demonstration that she was merely giving way to the obligations of politeness? I was thinking about that, recalling her words, when I was suddenly caught up by the term “father-in-law.” I would not have thought that she was married, and, on leaning that she was, all the ideas that I had already formed in her regard were revealed as misleading. Nothing in her gestures or her costume—her simple long white dress and the absence of jewelry—indicated that she was in the power of a husband. As the curtain went up again, however, she turned her head slightly toward the auditorium and, meeting my gaze, made me a sign so manifestly ingenuous that I understood my error. “Father-in-law” has two meanings.1 Her mother must have remarried Doctor Mops.