The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  The waters of the Guadalquivir flowed between their scorched banks like a promise of amour, and the line of hills bordering the horizon and extending a blue-tinted shadow in his direction seemed softer. He experienced an ardent joy in living, and found the word full of beauty

  A kingfisher rose into the air, and he almost stopped to watch the wake of colored plumage that it made in the air. He had the sentiment the somewhere, around him, a childlike face framed by flame was gazing at him with mobile golden pupils. He respired forcefully the vegetal odor disengaged from the matinal earth and thought he could sense the human perfume of a body that he had held in his arms.

  He saw a shepherd descending a slope. He crossed paths with a monk sitting on his donkey. He listened to a distant church bell. He urged his horse forward. Finally, in the distance, to the left, he perceived the somber mass that the gigantic box-trees of Aben Hezra’s dwelling formed.

  Those box-trees loomed up like a wall. They were menacing, tormented and blind. They evoked thoughts of solitude and renunciation. In order to reach them it was necessary to follow a long avenue bordered with poplars, and even when one drew near to two truncated columns, which indicated that there had once been a gate there, the house hidden by the centenarian box-trees still could not be seen.

  Almazan leaned forward in order to see more quickly. He imagined that the Archbishop might be waiting for him at the entrance and that he might perceive his white robe in the distance. But an impressive silence covered everything. In the sky, a bird that was descending and gliding, gave the impression of a message sent by destiny. The truncated columns, with Arabic characters engraved on them, took on the significance of funerary steles. The immobility of the foliage, which seemed to be attentive, penetrated Almazan with an impression of anguish.

  He passed between the columns and tried to utter a shout in order to announce his arrival, but his voice failed in his throat and the sound he emitted was low and hoarse, different from his own voice, as if expressing an internal terror of which he was not yet conscious.

  To his right he perceived the open and empty stables. The horses had been stolen, then. He dismounted, observed that there was no trace of disorder there, and advanced on foot through the mute pathways between the box-trees.

  It was then that a sound reached him. It was the clack of one object against another, or a door that had been closed abruptly, or perhaps the fall of a body. He could not make it out exactly. He advanced at a faster pace. The pathway turned, and he found himself facing the house.

  It had been constructed in the time of the Arab caliphs, in an epoch of peace, when the police were efficient, and it did not have any kind of defense. The park extended behind it, on the hillside, among heather and rocks, and Almazan saw, at a glance, how easy it had been to reach the house without being seen and without leaving any trace.

  It formed a large square mass, whose whiteness the shade of the box-trees caused to stand out more, and which only had narrow opening for windows, placed very high and closed by wooden trellises. The door, which was made of iron studded with bronze nails, was open, and Almazan was struck by an ancient inscription that he had not noticed during his previous visits.

  He went through the doorway rapidly and found himself in the interior courtyard. He took a few steps and stopped in order to look around.

  The courtyard was vast, full of aloes and pomegranates, and weeds had grown between the paving-stones. It was surrounded by porticos that sustained a circular gallery whose sculpted wooden colonnettes had been eroded by time. Windows and doors opened to that courted and Almazan was surprised to observe that they were all open. He had the sensation that there were beings watching from the shadows of the rooms, on every side at once.

  A singular life seemed to be circulating around him. Old wood paneling was uttering sighs, parquets were groaning, and the sound that he had heard before struck him again. He listened. A door had banged to his right. Another banged behind him. Perhaps the wind had just risen at that very moment and, in agitating the battens, was the sole cause of those sounds. But who had opened all the doors and all the windows like that? Had not Archbishop Carrillo always had an immoderate dread of air currents, to the point of having the keyholes in the rooms where he slept stuffed with pieces of cloth?

  Even then, in spite of the extreme anxiety he was experiencing, Almazan saw the face of Isabelle de Solis for a few seconds, and delighted in the memory of cruel and childlike laughter.

  He chased away that image and made a decision. He went into the large hall on the ground floor that had been the former Arab Mabeyn. The Spanish successors of Aben Hezra had crammed it which somber oak furniture, which stained the bright azulejos of the walls. The dust was so thick that that it seemed to have been cast like a layer of ash. Almazan did not pause in that room. He ran into another, passed under the ogive of an open door, and went through a long sequence of empty rooms full of echoes.

  He could not remember the exact location to which Archbishop Carrillo had taken him when he wanted to see him. He retraced his steps. He visited other apartments. A breath of desolation and a mystery of solitude descended from the ceilings. The sheets of white marble, the paneling of colored cedar-wood and the faded beauties of Moorish art added, by virtue of their abandonment, to the bleak melancholy that filled the place.

  He had arrived at the foot of the stairway. He climbed it. It seemed to him that the search would never end.

  It was then that, having pushed yet another door, he found himself face to face with Archbishop Carrillo, seated in a large armchair, who stared at him with round white eyes. His long and powerful hand was placed on the table, where he was in the process of writing. That extraordinary hand had the appearance of being sculpted from a block of chalk, and it was by virtue of its lividity and the redness of the veins that snaked along it that Almazan realized that he was in the presence of a dead man.

  He had died by the same poison as his servant. He had been sitting down at his table, and death had struck him while he was writing.

  The features of the face were not distorted. The forehead seemed broader. The eyes were terrible. Almazan attempted to close them, but the eyelids resisted and rose again. He only succeeded in part, and the Archbishop seemed to be darting an oblique vitreous gaze beneath them.

  Almazan saw his name on the paper on which the chalk hand seemed to be drawing with the nail of the index finger. It was a piece of linen paper hastily torn from a notebook that was beside it, and where part of the torn sheet could be seen, still joined to the others. He read a few lines in tortured handwriting.

  I am going to die before you arrive, without having been able to tell you what it is necessary for you to know at all costs. These sheets I am placing in the table will inform you partially. I was insane to wait. One never believes that one will die. I could not know that they feared me to this extent. I ought to have realized that as I emerged from ignorance and the truth took possession of me, I would become powerful and, in consequence, redoubtable. But the essential thing is that you live, and for that it is necessary that you flee. Leave without reflection, immediately, and do not return to Seville, either to regulate your affairs or to bid farewell to your friends. This is my last thought. In Granada...

  Archbishop Carrillo had stopped writing at that word. He must have made a great effort, for the last lines were tremulous and barely legible. He had tried to continue, but had not been able to succeed. Incoherent streaks indicated that his hand had ceased to obey his will. However, he had been able to gather his strength and he had succeeded in tracing a name at the bottom of the page—a name unknown to Almazan.

  That name was Christian Rosenkreutz.

  Almazan repeated it mechanically two or three times.

  Then he remembered having heard mention from the Archbishop himself of a death that had occurred in analogous circumstances, and which had been marked by the same symptoms. Don Pedro Giron, grandmaster of Calatrava and Carrillo’s nephew, had left A
lmagro a few years before, followed by a numerous escort. He had been going to the Infanta Isabella, accepted by her brother Henrique as her fiancé. He had stopped overnight in the village of Vilarubia, near Ciudad Real. In the morning, nothing had been found in his room but a cadaver, so white that the servant who was the first to enter had not been able to distinguish its whiteness from the sheets, and had thought the bed was empty.

  From the depths of his memory Almazan tried to recover what he had heard the Archbishop say about that subject.

  Abruptly, he leapt toward the door. He had been struck by a sudden thought. The poison had not been absorbed in food; it was in the air. He was breathing it in. He was about to perish by the same means as the Archbishop and his servant Pablo.

  But he changed his mind. The archbishop must have suspect the manner in which an invisible enemy as attempting to reach him, and he had opened all the doors and windows in order to purify the air. The gusts that had animated the old Moorish dwelling, making the shutters and doors bang like appeals, must have borne away the mysterious mortal force.

  Almazan went to the window and breathed in deeply. Then he examined the wooden shutter. He noticed a narrow opening, rounded in form, and freshly made. Someone must have come, at nightfall, along the gallery overlooking the courtyard, and made the hole, narrow in appearance but broad enough to allow death to pass through it. The poison must have had an effect all the more rapid because the chamber was hermetically sealed. Doubtless the Archbishop had summoned Pedro, the latter had come, and a few minutes, or perhaps a few seconds, had sufficed for him to respire the same death as his master.

  Neither of them had imagined then that the dose of the poison absorbed was sufficient for their hours to be counted. Pablo had left for Seville. The Archbishop was so certain of seeing his servant come back with the man he called his son that he had not thought of writing down what it was so urgent to tell him. It was only at the end, either because of an onset of pain it by virtue of the singular perception that the spirit sometimes acquires at the moment of quitting its corporeal form, that he had traced those few enigmatic lines in haste.

  Why was he, Almazan, under threat? What had he to do with any vengeance by which Archbishop Carrillo might have been pursued because of an existence that had been divided between violence and justice, folly and wisdom? Why that imperious order to go immediately to the realm of the Moors? Was the danger so great that all of Catholic Spain was forbidden to him? And by virtue of what confidence did the Archbishop exhort him to go to Granada, on the very day when he was to come to consult him about his eventual departure for that city?

  Almazan reread the paper he was holding in his hand. Who was this Christian Rosenkreutz? What was the truth that had rendered the Archbishop redoubtable to the enemies to which he made allusion, and who were those enemies?

  By crowding his mind, all those questions had annihilated his faculty of grief. He had never loved the Archbishop tenderly. He had been grateful to him, fearful of him and admiring. He was the man who had guided the development of his ideas and had orientated them in a direction very distant from the teachings of the Church. Almazan owed to the Archbishop his liberty of thought, and he had measured the inestimable extent of that benefit.

  He approached the dead man with the intention of formulating mentally a speech whose magic would be powerful enough to resonate in the beyond. But he could not find the words. Could love alone inspire them? The Archbishop’s face seemed to him to be formidably serene, but simultaneously imprinted with such a frightful solitude that Almazan remembered the faces of so many simple men that he had seen on their death-bed, and he wondered whether it might not be better to prefer an expression of pitying attachment to the majesty of a seeker of truth in the individuals one quits.

  He took the Archbishop’s hands and crossed them. In the course of that gesture a small metal object fell to the floor. It was a cross made of alchemical gold, but a singular cross with a thick rose in the middle, a cross that Almazan thought sufficient to have its possessor burned by the Holy Office.

  He put it in his pocket. He took from the table the notebook that the Archbishop had placed there with his intention and left the room, under the vitreous gaze of the dead man, filtering through the half-closed eyelids.

  And it seemed to him, at the very moment when he quit the physical form of his master forever, that Isabelle de Solis was at the door and making him a sign, laughing sacrilegiously and showing her bare breasts immodestly, outside her torn chemise.

  III. The Archbishop’s Notebook

  As soon as he was among the shadows of the box-trees in the park, Almazan started leafing through the Archbishop’s notebook.

  There were notes devoid of sequence, often contradictory. Some of them had been written feverishly, others scrawled furiously. Sometimes, a few pages had been torn out.

  In the same way that the spirit of good is incarnate in messiahs and prophets, the Antichrist descends into the soul of certain individuals to set an active perversity to work in order that the world goes backwards. That is logical; it is certain. One cannot imagine a medallion without a reverse side, pleasure without pain, light without darkness. That has always been hidden by those who knew. The colleges of the priests of ancient religions only revealed it in their Mysteries to Initiates of a superior order. Would the world gain anything from such knowledge? A few strong men would stand up to struggle with more ardor, but terror would curb the weak and they would be borne away by the attraction of evil. For evil possesses seduction and it is more powerful than good.

  Thus I have been able to live for so many years under the reign of the Antichrist without being aware of it.

  The Antichrist is not the man who sheds blood, he is not the man who kills the body, and he is not the man who burns churches, but the man who lights a flame at their summit to create the belief that God has descended there.

  Why does the truth appear to some when they are young and capable of action, and to others only at the end of their life? How have I been able to be possessed to such a degree by pride, to expend myself for vain interests, to accomplish so many sterile and criminal acts? With the material and spiritual powers that were devolved to me, what tasks I might have been able to accomplish! Since the initiates who live in Damascus and Jerusalem knew me and chose me, why did their messenger not arrive sooner? How much time wasted! Christian Rosenkreutz has told me that it is necessary for every man to discover himself and extract the truth from his soul as a miner extracts a little gold from a subterranean seam, but that does not appear to me to be a sufficient response. They ought to have enlightened me, since they could. I criticize them from the bottom of my heart, but that is the effect of my nature. I once cursed the Pope, I have cursed God, and I am cursing those who are bringing me the truth. But is it really the truth?

  According to many prophets the Antichrist ought to be a Jew of the tribe of Dan. Saint Jerome and Saint Anselm affirm that he will be born in Babylon. Saint Hippolyte represents him as merciful during the early years of his life, in order better to deceive men. He will travel the earth mounted on a donkey. His stature will be surprising and one cannot fail to recognize him by his astonishingly red and gummed-up eyes. What childishness!

  I was struck, a few years ago, by eyes such as I had never seen. They were bright eyes, miraculously profound, which did not reflect hatred, or pity, or desire, or pride, but a strange certainty that made me shiver. The eyes in question were those of a prior of the convent of Santa Cruz in Segovia. He met me at the convent door, surrounded by Dominicans of his order. When he had kissed me hand, bowing respectfully, I thought that I was surrounded for a few seconds by a supernatural light, and I contemplated an apocalyptic spectacle of the end of the world. There were no extravagant abysms, no flames springing forth from the earth. The angels were not sounding their trumpets through the clouds. There was merely the sign of regression on the faces of the people surrounding me.

  The old porter of the convent h
ad taken on the expression of a faithful dog and the key he was holding in his hand resembled a bone that he was about to gnaw. The birdlike profile of one of my pages was emphasized to the point that he seemed overwhelmed by the weight of a beak. My guards, whose breastplates were gleaming like corselets, were insects raising their stings. A peasant on all fours before a stream was gulping water with a woolly jaw like that of a sheep. I saw leonine faces, supple bodies like those of snakes, hands on which talons grew like those of vultures, and others that were webbed like those of ducks.

  The prior and the Dominicans had raised their heads and were looking at me with ecstatic eyes filled with nothingness. And I was obliged to make a great effort of will not to whistle, bark, croak or roar. I quit them in haste, telling myself that the Antichrist would have a similar power of emptiness in the depths of the eyes and that his reign would not be marked by any visible catastrophe but by an internal movement of the human soul toward the Beast, which is the supreme sin.

  I learned not long ago that Tomas de Torquemada has been raised to the rank of the Queen’s confessor.

  The Rose-Cross! A secret order that has for its aim defending and transmitting intelligence. Are there men disinterested enough and pure enough to be part of it? And why have I been chosen? Am I worthy of it?

  It was a year ago, to the day, that Christian Rosenkreutz came for the first time, bringing me the message.

  The idea that there are individuals consciously orientated toward evil and that those individuals accomplish evil lovingly and logically, as a divine duty, has something terrifying about it.

  He is right; evil almost always triumphs. What has become of the wisdom of the Egyptian priests? It is extinct, almost without leaving any trace. And that transmitted in the Mysteries of Eleusis? Nothing left. The explanation of the world by means of numbers that Pythagoras taught has been lost. Since the origins of Christianity, the letter has stifled the spirit and the Pope would be astonished if anyone told him that his Church is only the shadow of a truth that has been deliberately lost. The Gnostics of Alexandria, the disciples of Nestorius and certain sects of Syria and Palestine also possessed that truth. They have disappeared like a lamp that is blown out. The force of evil!