The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  The low door had opened. Casting a final glance into the street, Almazan saw a silhouette outlined there. He wanted to point it out to Rosenkreutz, but the door had already closed behind him. He felt an impression of coolness. He was in the interior courtyard of an Arab house and around a jet of water, between pillars of bricks painted in different colors, a few men were seated, considering another man, motionless in the depths of the courtyard, staring at a large polished turtle-shell, as shiny as a shield.

  Al Birouni advanced toward the newcomers. He was thin, with a narrow beard that, combined with his round eyes and a certain emaciation and disproportion in his shoulders and arms, rendered him similar to a night-bird that was also a scholar.

  “This is Almazan, whom Carrillo designated when he died,” said Rosenkreutz. “He will be the youngest among us, but perhaps he will be called upon to play the most active role, for the fortunate hazard of a cure has enabled him to become Abul Hacen’s favorite.”

  A voice resounded. It was that of the man with the turtle-shell.

  “Death will enter Granada. It is mounted on a white mule. It has adopted the disguise of lust. The marrow of men will become warm, and desire will possess them to such an extent that they will push women into the mosques in order to couple with them on the paving stones.”

  “That’s Massar,” said Al Birouni, moving his head up and down as if pecking with a beak. “He’s in a prophetic vein. I suspect him of having absorbed too great a quantity of the green hemp that was brought to him from Persia. Let’s listen to him. We might collect a verity among a thousand extravagances.”

  “What is he looking at in that turtle-shell?” Almazan asked Rosenkreutz.

  “The future or the past. He employs a mode of divination used by the Chinese. A glimmer designs written words or images for him on the turtle-shell.”

  “Six cavaliers accompany her,” proclaimed Massar, whose ascetic face expressed anger and disgust. May the Puerta de Elvira not open! May the ramparts rise all the way to the sky in order to bar her route!”

  The witnesses pressed around him, seeking to understand what he meant. He stared straight ahead, sometimes inclining his head as if to see better. He suddenly uttered a cry and began to snigger.

  “Aha! The cavalier who appears to be the leader is plunging his hand between her breasts. He is caressing her. He is kissing her lips…they are walking entwined…she is laughing... Behold the Queen of Granada! Thanks to her the mosques will change into churches and will be covered with bells like abscesses of bronze. Thanks to her the Palace of the Alhambra will fill up with Christians like a swarm of lice in a stone head.”

  “Always these predictions of the end of Granada,” said a man wearing a golden turban and a gandourah of orange silk embroidered with silver, the sumptuousness of which contrasted with the garments of the others present. “Soleiman also claims that Boabdil will deliver Granada to the Kings of Castile. I don’t believe in clairvoyance or astrology, and yet I don’t like to hear predictions of that nature.”

  That was Tawaz, one of the richest inhabitants of Granada. He made a profession of skepticism and was a poet and musician, putting art above everything. In his palace he had a collection of musical instruments used by all the people of the earth, and claimed that the quality of the sounds that one perceives influences the intelligence and duration of life, in such a way that a man living in a desert only brushed by certain qualities of sonorous waves, carefully regulated, might live for a least a thousand years and acquire an unusual degree of intelligence.

  Tawaz was a disciple of Omar Khayam, the Persian poet who had lived three centuries before, and he proposed to depart soon on a pilgrimage to Nichapour and respire in the cemetery of Hira the flowers of a peach-tree that extended its branches over the tomb of his favorite poet.

  Massar suddenly stopped prophesying and lowered the turtle-shell on to his knees. He had perceived Almazan. He exclaimed: “Bound together like Munkar and Nakir, the two black angels with the blue eyes who ask the dead what their religion was on earth! Bound together by the flame of lust! They do not believe in the Prophet. They make a semblance of hating one another as they make a semblance of loving one another. They will be like the male and female goat who die of exhaustion by virtue of coupling.”

  Massar spat in Almazan’s direction and fell into a profound dejection.

  Al Birouni and his guests immediately surrounded the young physician, making apologies. Massar was an uncultivated intelligence whom they only admitted among them because of a certain gift of seeing the future, which might have been wrongly attributed to him. It was necessary not to take account of what he said. In any case, the time had come to talk about more serious matters.

  Conducted by Al Birouni, they all went into a room entirely covered with green mosaics and took their places on cushions of a darker green than that of the mosaics.

  Almazan noticed a large wheel with a wooden handle, fixed to an iron shaft and seemingly activated by a metal cable that plunged into the wall.

  The more intelligent the men are to whom one addresses oneself, Almazan thought, while listening to Christian Rosenkreutz speak and gazing at his interlocutor, the more they reform the truth and misunderstand it when it falls from above.

  In accordance with to his personal ideas, and the ideas of the sect of Sufis to which he belonged, everyone had an objection to make.

  Those who were Sabeans said that it was vain to preoccupy oneself with what was good or evil. The essential thing was to render worship to the first cause, which the planet Saturn symbolized because it was the most distant. For that Tawaz had had a hexagonal temple constructed in his gardens in black stone, the proportions of which had once been indicated by Pythagoras, and in which the planet was represented as an old dark-hued Indian holding an ax in his hand.

  Those who belonged to the ancient sect of Brothers of Purity founded in Basra by the blind poet Bacchar claimed that it was uniquely necessary to attach oneself to the destruction of dogmas and distribute treatises on the essence of matter and the universal soul.

  Some invoke Avicenna, other Averroes, and there were some who burst out laughing when those names were pronounced. Spirits became heated. All sorts of opinions were emitted. It was prophets who had done the most harm to humankind by their pride. One old man affirmed in the midst of protests that the Buddha of the Hindus was the greatest of them.

  “Was he not ignorant of Pythagoras’ theory of numbers?” cried someone.

  “There is only one prophet,” said another, “who is reincarnated in successive human forms. He has been Pythagoras, Jesus Christ and Mohammed.”

  Clamors rose up.

  “I’ve just heard him in Alexandria,” said a man clad in a miserable brown robe and carrying a pilgrim’s staff. “He’s inhabiting the body of six-year-old child and preaching the law in the suburbs with more science than a doctor.”

  “What’s the point of all this,” murmured Tawaz, with a weary smile. “We’re a part of a humanity that is mistaken, that has followed a retrograde path and is descending toward barbarity. A little music is superior to all philosophies.”

  Even when Rosenkreutz affirmed that it was in the kingdom of Granada that the civilization of the world had taken refuge and that it ought to extend from there into the Occident, there was a concert of protestations.

  Some responded that Bagdad ought to remain the spiritual heart of the world and that it was there that it was necessary to go in order to draw from that fatherland of thought the strength necessary to sages. Others cried “What about Alexandria?” and one voice added “Let us return to India, our Mother!”

  But the question was raised again of the goal of the Order of the Rose-Cross, to which they had initially adhered.

  What was the point of enlightening barbarians like the Castilians or the Andalusians? And were not the others, those who were beyond the Pyrenees, even worse? Better to turn their effort toward the blacks of Africa. In any case, Rosenkreutz had pro
mised to bring scholars and philosophers to Granada from Seville, Toledo and Salamanca. Where were they?

  The explanations that Rosenkreutz gave cast a malaise into the audience.

  Several eminent men of their acquaintance had risen above religions, had been rallied by his cares to the symbols of the rose and the cross. Out there they had titled themselves the Alumbrados.27 They were to come to Granada to confer with their Arab brothers.

  “Well? Well?” people said on all sides.

  “Only Almazan has responded to the appeal,” said Rosenkreutz. “The majority of the others have died in recent days. Perhaps it’s an extraordinary chance that has determined that their lives ended at almost the same time, for causes difficult to explain. Perhaps, as I have hypothesized, there exists a group analogous to ours but which has evil for its ideal instead of good—and by evil I mean, like you, hatred of intelligence, love of the material and the effort to turn back. If such an evil group of men exists, it is not retained by any moral rule and it must possess immense power. Its first preoccupation must be to suppress those who might pose an intellectual obstacle to it. If so, have not the Alumbrados of Spain been its victims?”

  A heavy silence followed those words, and in that silence, a Sufi with a falsetto voice said: “If a secret group of men exists who desire evil and are the Rose-Cross in reverse, they’ll never have a better opportunity than this evening to kill us all at the same time.”

  Laughter followed, but it rang false. They looked at one another and whispered. Was all that really possible? What proof was there?

  “There’s no formal proof,” Rosenkreutz went on. “Only the alchemist Luis Percheco of Majorca collapsed at the moment when he was about to board a ship, struck by a sudden paralysis. He was old and paralysis is a natural malady. Guzman de Pilar, the celebrated professor of Salamanca was found dead in his little room at the University, where he was in the process of putting on the toga in which he taught. It’s true that he had been suffering heart trouble for a long time. The man nicknamed the Great Samuel of Madrid, accused of heresy, was imprisoned by the Holy Office, and when a royal order was sent for his liberation, he was found strangled in his prison. I ought to say that his guard had a hatred of Jews that was pushed as far as madness, and had already murdered several. Finally, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, died in mysterious circumstances, about which Almazan can give you a few clarifications.”

  Anxiety passed through the assembly like a palpable current, a fluid devastating souls. People questioned one another in low voices. In the lamplight, the green of the mosaics became icy and sad, like the reflection of a tomb. Suddenly, like a signal of terror, the teeth of a pale old man began chattering. The noise seemed atrocious.

  A few of those present turned their eyes toward the door.

  Then that door opened suddenly and a servant irrupted into the room. He doubtless thought that he was entering a noisy meeting, for he called to his master in a voice whose pitch was singularly raised, which resonated in a terrible fashion in the midst of the silent assembly.

  Al Birouni advance toward him calmly. The servant was an old man, and doubtless pusillanimous. He learned toward Al Birouni and explained to him in a choked voice what had happened.

  As he did every night, he had made a tour of his house, which he was responsible for guarding. The house was surrounded by a garden and he was to maintain a particular surveillance over the large room in the form of a rotunda where his master’s precious automata were kept. He had just observed that a window in that rotunda, which no one was allowed to enter and was locked internally, had been staved in and remained agape. He had passed through the garden an hour before and had not noticed anything abnormal. During the previous hour someone had introduced himself into the hall of the automata. He had come to notify his master immediately.

  The Sufis had all come forward while he was speaking, and those who were nearest heard what he said. Others did not understand, and their common fear was aggravated by that. The anguish was modulated by the clicking of the bloodless old man’s teeth.

  There were a few minutes of confusion. Where was this rotunda? Was it the room that communicated with the one where they were? What as it necessary to do?

  Al Birouni raised his hands, trying to reassure everyone. He went to the wheel that Almazan had noticed and began to turn it. Almost at the same time, a sinister cry resounded, a cry expressing an immeasurable fear, a cry so unexpected that the calm Al Birouni remained motionless, his hands attached to the wheel as if it were part of him.

  The philosophers, suddenly deprived of their wisdom by the terrible strangeness of the cry, rushed for the door. They jostled one another, flowed into the interior courtyard of the house and reached the street, some leaving their turbans and others their staffs. They disappeared, uttering feeble cries, like a flock of timid birds.

  Al Birouni had tried in vain to halt that unforeseen panic. He made a sign to those who had remained to follow him into the next room in order to take account of what had happened. Rosenkreutz and Almazan went forward first, but they stopped, nailed to the spot by surprise.

  They had before them an immense room of which the ceiling could scarcely be distinguished. Close to the door, against the wall, a man was crouching, gasping with fear, his hands over his head as if to protect himself.

  A naked negro advanced toward him with a large and measured stride, and when he was about to reach him, pirouetted, took a dozen large strides in the opposite direction, and recommenced.

  An elephant was sweeping the air with its trunk with a regular rhythm, while its mahout leaned over to prick its flank with the same rhythm.

  Two silent individuals, a Chinaman and a Persian, were making the gestures of playing chess on a little nacre table.

  Above them, a screech-owl, to which Al Birouni had given the resemblance of his own face, deployed its wings, traced an ellipse in the air while making the sound of a meta bobbin unwinding, and returned to its perch, to depart again with the same deployment of wings.

  A snake twisted its green-tinted coils; a pelican clicked its beak; an octopus extended its tentacles.

  At the back, the color of milky wax to which the moonlight gave the appearance of flesh, a naked young woman raised herself up among cushions, waved a fan of feathers, hid her face modestly, and allowed herself to fall back with a voluptuous movement of the legs, like an invitation to pleasure.

  The silence, only troubled by the grating of springs and the hiss of invisible wheels, added further to the phantasmal character of the assembly of automata.

  “He is, I believe, merely an unlucky thief,” said Al Birouni, making a semblance of not perceiving the admiration of his companions and leaning over the man shivering with fear.

  “Or perhaps he’s a curious individual who has heard mention of these marvels and wanted to contemplate them,” said Tawaz.

  Al Birouni’s servant had brought the terrified man to his feet and shook him rudely. His master made him a sign to take him away.

  They attempted to interrogate him, but he remained bewildered, his eyes staring. He stammered incoherent phrases.

  “That teaches us,” said Tawaz again, “that it’s necessary not to demand philosophy from warriors, or courage from philosophers.”

  It was impossible to get anything at all out of the unknown man. A black slave had come forward and got ready to lash him with a long leather whip. Rosenkreutz opposed that.

  Wearily, Al Birouni gave the order to throw him out.

  The door to the street closed behind him and his rapid footfalls were heard as he fled. Only then did it seem to Almazan that the face of the man was not completely unknown to him.

  Tawaz got ready to leave. He smoothed his orange silk gandourah, and then took a box covered with emeralds from his pocket and spread a light cloud of gold powder over his beard.

  “There are some lute players in my house,” he said. “Would you like to hear them?”

  Christian Rosen
kreutz’s eyes had lost their gleam. He lowered his head. He seemed very tired. He leaned over Almazan’s shoulder and said to him in a low voice: “What a melancholy spectacle to behold: after a meeting of sages, a meeting of manikins!”

  The courtyard was full of slaves holding up torches. Before closing the door of the rotunda, Al Birouni had made a tour of it. From a distance, Almazan saw him lean over the naked young woman and kiss her delicately on the forehead, perhaps the lips...

  First light was beginning to blanch the terraces. Almazan went down the streets of the Albaycin alone. Christian Rosenkreutz had quit him suddenly at a crossroads with a vague gesture signifying: When she we see one another again? and he had disappeared, as if he had dissolved in the pre-dawn twilight.

  Almazan walked solely, without haste. He thought that the doors of the Alhambra would open at sunrise, and that it would not be necessary to wake the Moroccan guards.

  As he was about to reach the Darro he heard the sound of hoofbeats. He stopped. A few cavaliers emerged from a street that led in the direction of the Puerta de Elvira. He had nearly bumped into them, but he steps aside under a portal. Then he passed his hand over his face, thinking that he was dreaming.