The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  It had only been a year since she had quit her father, the Emir of Malaga, El Zagal,22 to come to the Court of her uncle, the King of Granada. As she was famous throughout Islam for her intelligence and her beauty, Abul Hacen had welcomed his niece with magnificence. He had given her thirty women to serve her. She had sent almost all of them away because of their disgraceful appearance and their ill-omened faces, and it had been necessary to search Granada and the neighboring cities for slaves that were agreeable to look at and also expert in playing musical instruments or reciting verses.

  Abul Hacen had wanted to install her in the Alhambra in the tower of the Peinador, whose splendor was renowned and whose rooms of repose Sultan Hafside of Tunis had once visited as models of refinement. Khadidja had laughed at her uncle’s vulgar taste and the latter, confused, had accommodated her in haste, according to her own indications, in the palace of the Generalife, which was alongside the Alhambra and communicated with it via a succession of antique gardens.

  She scarcely went out of that palace. She spent a part of her time there mixing the essences of flowers to compose perfumes. None of them satisfied her. She said that she wanted to rediscover Kyphi, the sacred perfume of the Egyptians, which permits one to see at a distance when one breathes it in. She also fabricated dyes, because there are harmonies between colors, perfumes and certain stones, and it was indispensable for her to compose a hue exactly similar to that of her emeralds. Her experiments were not always successful.

  Once she had gone along the Darro mounted on a splendid horse given by Abul Hacen, entirely painted in a green that might have emerged from her eyes and her jewels. The King of Granada hid from her the immense hilarity that her passage had provoked among the inhabitants of the Albaycin, not knowing whether the delicate creature might die of shame or whether, on the contrary, it would incite her to have all the horses in her tables painted.

  In any case, he preferred to see her as little as possible. He thus avoided the tyranny of her caprices, which he could not resist.

  Khadidja walked with her face unveiled in imitation of Ouallada, the celebrated poetess of Cordova.23

  She said that since the Ommeyade Caliph Al Mostakfi had permitted his daughter not to wear a veil over her face in the time of the greatest splendor of the Caliphate, she could be permitted to do the same. Unlike Ouallada, Khadidja was chaste and wanted to remain so. However, she glorified amour and she sometimes let it be understood that if she did not give herself, it was because of a secret that she would never reveal.

  Emir Daoud hid his timidity beneath the glamour of his magnificent attitudes. He only spoke about his amour by means of allusions, but those allusions were so transparent that Khadidja would easily have understood them if she had listened to them. She did not pay any attention to them because she knew that the noble Emir had been in love with all the women he had approached, and was misunderstood by all of them, because of the evil destiny that had never ceased to harass him in sentimental matters.

  He had a large fortune, he had been illustrious in the wars against the Christians and he bore the admirable title of Emir of the Sea, which conferred the command of all the King of Granada’s fleets upon him, but amour was his only preoccupation.

  He commenced by reciting the verses of Ibn el Dahane:24 “Under the almond-trees in flower, she wept, and with her eyelid, she has wounded my heart.”

  But he stopped. He extended the flap of his white brocade robe, and attempted to make Khadidja take a path that turned to the right.

  The rigid silhouette of Sultana Aixa had just appeared a few paces away from them. She affected nonchalance in order to disguise the angular character of her torso, and she was leaning on her son Boabdil, a young man of twenty with an abnormally large forehead, a false gaze and almost devoid of lips.

  Aixa was nicknamed the Horra—which is to say, the chaste—because of the affected purity of her mores.25 Neglected by Abul Hacen, she had lived in solitude in the Alhambra, devoting herself to her son whom she loved madly. All her life she had proscribed all adornments, pleasure and even amour from her vicinity. Once, she had nearly caused a maidservant, surprised by her in the arms of a guard, to die under the whip. But at the age of thirty-six, a belated coquetry had overtaken her, and when Khadidja came to Granada, she wanted to wear emeralds and dress in amaranthine veils in order to resemble her. She did not hide the admiration she inspired in her until the moment that admiration turned into an inexorable hatred.

  Rather late one night, she had gone to render a visit to the young princess in the Generalife. Khadidja, joyful at first, had not disguised her ennui thereafter. Desirous of giving a small indication of her desire for solitude, she had extinguished a lamp and begun to undo her hair. Her gestures had undoubtedly been misinterpreted by Aixa.

  “It seemed to me,” said Khadidja, in recounting the scene to her friend Emir Daoud the flowing day, “that a crude wooden statue became animate before me. I was seized by coarse hands and two narrow pieces of ice posed upon my mouth while I respired in her breath an odor of dusty books and humidity, exactly the same odor that I had respired in Fez when visiting the library, where I was guided by a wise and holy Sufi, clad in very dirty garments. I uttered a desperate scream, my maidservants came, and I asked them to stay with us because the Sultana Aixa and I had just seen the most frightful of all the Gennis of the nocturnal air.”

  And because of that confidence, Emir Daoud would have preferred that there was no encounter between Khadidja and Aixa.

  As they crossed paths, the two women exchanged polite greetings but Aixa’s bad sentiments floated around her like an opaque fluid. She claimed that Khadidja introduced into her room every night one of the Africans responsible for guarding the Alhambra. That calumny, always present in her mind, was reflected in her gaze and the curl of her lip. Young Boabdil, beside his mother, also betrayed his contained hatred, mingled with an obscure desire to humiliate her by possession.

  “I’m quitting you with great regret,” sighed Khadidja, leaning over slightly as if she were about to break. “I’ve forgotten a precious liquid—very precious—in an alabaster vase on my window sill. It’s composed of delicate essences to which the slightest ray of moonlight is contrary, and the moon is about to rise.”

  “And what purpose does such a liquid serve?” asked Aixa, with a snigger.

  Khadidja raised the smallest hand in the world toward the sky, with marvelously tapering fingers, in which the fingernails were mounted like jewels.

  “Nature has such imperfections!” she said. “It’s a liquid to bleach the skin of the hands and render it less coarse. I’ll give you some, not for yourself, but for your maidservants—provided that the moon hasn’t spoiled it.”

  Now, it was Aixa’s despair that, in spite of the cares that she devoted to her person, she was unable to attenuate either the redness or the coarseness of her vulgar hands. In vain the masseurs of the Alhambra had kneaded them with unguents and bathed them in milk. Under the rings that hid them poorly they remained the visible flaw of a body that had not been made for beauty.

  And Khadidja drew Emir Daoud away, showing him the crescent moon on the horizon, with a feigned dread, without even deigning to enjoy the expression of rage hat spread over Aixa’s face.

  As she went along a terrace that ended at one of the gate of the Generalife, however, she suddenly stopped and seized Emir Daoud’s arm. That familiarity was rare on her part, and it filled the latter with pride.

  Perhaps the poet is right, he thought. Words of amour are like arrows launched by a hunter. The deer that has received them continues running, and one cannot tell immediately whether the wound is mortal.

  The terrace overhung one of the gardens planted with all the varieties of roses on earth. That made a stream, an accumulation of various colors. There were violet roses from Persia, cinnamon roses that are milky and greasy, Capuchin roses that incline like rusty urns, and Bengal roses that are the color of flesh, so that when their petals are pluc
ked and strewn on the ground, one might think that naked young women were lying next to one another in order to sleep.

  In the midst of that dazzle of roses, on the sand of a path, Sultan Abul Hacen was sitting. He had parted his robe of pink silk and undone his broad trousers of the same tender hue, which he wore in the hope of seeming younger, and he was displaying a wound that he had in the thigh. He cared for that wound by coving it with a piece of the raw meat of a lamb, for the wound was considered by the physicians as a living force that required to receive an aliment in order that it did not nourish itself on the flesh of the body. That injury had become a kind of obsession in him, the suffering of which was primarily mental, and he showed his wound, without the slightest modesty, to all the people he encountered, in the hope of receiving useful advice for its cure.

  But the stifled cry that Khadidja emitted had not been caused by the disgust inspired in her by the sight of a bloody piece of lamb and a gaping wound on a man’s thigh, amid the scatter of rose petals the color of the violet wound and the color of the pink flesh. She considered for a few seconds the unknown man who was standing next to Abul Hacen and leaning over him with a mocking smile. She put her hands to her breast as if to prevent her suave soul from emerging from a form to which it was scarcely attached, and she said: “Almazan! The physician from Seville! May the prophet watch over me!”

  And she fell full length on the paving stones of the terrace—but lightly, as if invisible wings had attenuated her fall.

  A few days later, everyone in the Alhambra knew that there was a secret that occupied the life of Khadidja.

  Perhaps, following the example of so many Arab scholars, she was searching for the philosopher’s stone.

  Her room was cluttered with bottles, jars and powders. Someone emitted the hypothesis that she wanted to capture the force of rays of sunlight with certain glasses of a special form, and condense it into certain stones in order to make powerful magic talismans. She had sent for all kinds of lenses used in telescopes and had been seen extending them toward the sun and trying by that means to burn the light down on her arms. Or might she simply have a liaison with a perfumer, or even with a perfumer’s apprentice?

  Wrapped in the green silk of her albornos with silver spangled fringes, at the hour when the shops closed, she had slipped into the Albaycin and, by means of a long detour, she made her way to the celebrated street of the perfumers that ended in the Square of Bibarrambla, which embalmed the entire quarter with the effluvia of all known essences, She had emptied the Persian perfumer’s stock. She had carried away all the unguents and all the pastes of the Arab perfumer and all the flasks of the Hindu perfumer. A negro slave, a Christian slave and a Tunisian child recognizable by his red fez marched behind her when she returned, carrying full coffers.

  Abul Hacen had read an urgent message that she had addressed to him and the Sultan of Tunis, and had remained confounded by astonishment. She begged the Sultan to send her, without delay, willingly or by force, at a price of gold or by means of threats, an individual of dissolute mores named Hassan, who lived with the dregs of the people and exercised the decried profession of depilator, in which he was reputed to be very skilled.

  Princess Khadidja had a secret of which she might die, but which she did not tell anyone. It was because of that secret that she had sworn to herself never to love any man.

  She, whose constant effort tended to spiritualize her material form, who had a skin more transparent than the water of a spring emerging from a rock, who reflected by the bright green of her eyes thought in its ineffable essence, had in the groin a tuft of stiff, oblique hair, ugly and deeply rooted. It had grown without reason in her childhood, by the inconceivable mystery of some original pollution. It was the symbol of the Beast, the terrible link that united that ideal creature with matter.

  She had resigned herself to bearing that seal of Iblis on her person. But now she had seen once again the only man she had ever thought she would be able to love, the physician Almazan, who had once come to her father’s house in Malaga. He had accompanied a Jewish physician who had been consulted regarding the malady from which her mother had died. She and he had stood together for a few moments on a mirador turned toward the sea. She had been astonished that he spoke Arabic without an accent and he had replied that if one loved what one desired to know, one knew it immediately. Perhaps words with a double meaning! The conversation had been limited to that, and the insensate princess had devoted herself to that memory.

  Against all expectation, the physician had reappeared in her path. Perhaps it was an effect of the protection of the Gennis or an obscure will of destiny. But what good would it do? No dream was realizable. There was no hope of ever reposing her fragile heart against a beloved breast, for the hairy shame was attached to the impeccable marble of her flesh.

  Oh, what plant juice, what mineral with devouring virtues, what formidable and delicate corrosive could stifle at the root the living force of that thick hair?

  And during the night, in the hot air that blew from the hills of Granada, Princess Khadidja, amid her cushions, shed the pearls of her tears between the emeralds of her necklaces, because of a little brown patch that she saw, a little lower down than the inflexion of the thigh, on the nacreous amber of her skin.

  VI. The Automata

  When Almazan emerged from the Alhambra through the Puerta de la Justicia, the blacks of the Moroccan guard who were squatting on the threshold got up precipitately and inclined their spears in front of them as a sign of respect.

  They all knew the amity that Abul Hacen had for him since the wound in his leg had begun to heal. Almazan had replaced the bloody pieces of lamb with dressings of pure water, renewed every day, and the rumor was running around that he had the power of curing bodily harm by communicating his will to the water. Abul Hacen did not do anything without consulting him. He had lodged him magnificently in the Plaza de los Aljibes, near his Alcazar, and sometimes had him woken up during the night to converse about medicine and philosophy.

  That evening, Abul Hacen had one of his habitual fits of melancholy, caused by the sadness of growing old, and he had retired to his apartments, determined to sleep for a long time because of the youth that repose gave to his features.

  Almazan went down as far as the Darro, went along it for a while, and perceived Christian Rosenkreutz, who was waiting for him. They both plunged into the narrow streets of the Albaycin.

  “I’m taking you to the house of Al Birouni,” said Rosenkreutz. “He’s a sage, and above all, a scholar.26 Don’t be astonished by his eccentricities or those of the other men who will be there. There are great differences between the races. Religious faith often leads to fanaticism. And it’s a singular effect of wisdom only to penetrate into minds by troubling their equilibrium and bringing with it a part of error. But you’ll see all the Rosicrucians present at this moment in Granada.

  The sun had just disappeared behind the mountains of Loja, and from the heights of the radiant mosques, night had precipitated abruptly over the city in a cavalcade of shadows. There were still children playing in the dust of the crossroads, and because of the narrowness of the streets, the two men stood aside in order to let a mule pass with its silent conductor.

  But Almazan, accustomed to the nocturnal life of Seville, where the spies of the Holy Office swarmed, turned round from time to time, and did not take long to perceive that someone as following them.

  He remarked on it to Christian Rosenkreutz, who started laughing.

  “Fortunately,” he replied, “we’re neither in Castile nor Andalusia. The police had maintained the organization of the times of Muhamad Alhamar, and after Alexandria and Bagdad, Granada is the city where one can wander by night with the greatest tranquility. Although our meetings are secret and our fraternity must not be divulged, it’s not because we have anything to fear from Abul Hacen. He professes tolerance for all forms of belief and imposes that tolerance even on the most fanatical of Alfaquis. But the
three wise men who founded our order knew that the possession of the truth and the love of good give birth, for those who acquire that possession and that love, to an immediate danger of death. So the three men who have summoned me to the Orient, since they sent me here, prescribed that the first duty of the Rose-Cross was to seal their lips forever with regard to the mission with which they are charged.

  “That’s what I can’t comprehend,” said Almazan. “Why not act in broad daylight? Why not spread thought like a light, around which all those who are struggling again darkness would immediately gather? How many evils might be avoided and how much time gained in that manner! Why remain an elite aristocracy who possess a spiritual treasure but who only deign to distribute it in parcels?”

  The street that they were following climbed a slope between white walls, over which the foliage of pomegranates dangled. They could not be very far from the city ramparts. Almazan perceived behind him the soft footfalls of someone walking. He wanted to stop, but Rosenkreutz drew him on.

  “All civilizations have perished,” he said, “because the intelligent men directing them made use of their knowledge not for the grandeur of the spirit but for material enjoyments and egotistical ends. So long as men believe that their effort ought to consist of augmenting the wellbeing of the body, they will not glimpse the goal. Why give those insensates weapons with which to doom themselves? Are you sure yourself, Almazan, of making a usage of your intelligence that will not bring you backwards on the road to your distant perfection?”

  As Almazan remained silent, Rosenkreutz stopped in front of a low door and signaled to him that they had arrived.

  “All his life, Al Birouni has studied the laws of mechanics and sought perpetual motion,” he said. “He has fabricated automata as a diversion and has achieved extraordinary results. The flying dove of Archytas of Tarente of which Aulu Gelle speaks, the iron fly of Regiomontanus and the Bronze Head of Roger Bacon are nothing compared with his creations. In addition to the science of mechanics he has sought the appearance of life and had succeeded in giving it. He has fabricated a naked young woman who is so beautiful that one of his slaves killed himself because he was in love with her. He has reproduced inside her body, with different metals, all the parts of the human organism; the liver in made of bronze and the heart of gold. He claims that he would have been able to making her pronounce entire sentences, but he suddenly lost interest in mechanics in order to study submarine flora and fauna with the same passion. He has had a glass bell constructed in Almeira and proposes to place himself in it soon and have himself lowered in the bell into the depths of the sea. You’ll see other men no less astonishing in his company.”