The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  It was a kind of casket, the splendor of which seemed mediocre, with two flared handles and two crudely sculpted angels that seemed to be supporting its weight and lifting it up toward the sky. The casket was gold, but a gold so worn and faded that the splendor of the metal had vanished and it gave the impression of being thousands of years old, so prodigiously ancient that there could not be any similar parcel of matter in the world. Only the faces of the two angels, in spite of the times without number, had retained an intense spiritual expression.

  “Well?” said Isabelle, impatiently.

  Abul Hacen straightened up, dropping the divine object, which fell dully.

  How sad the gold and jewels around him were! How heavy the treasure was! Isabelle’s body, with pleasure and power in its form, was displayed at his mercy, a tender pink on the deep red of the standard. But it was far away, at the end of a bizarre avenue bordered by suits of armor, urns, miscellaneous objects of all dimensions whose meaning escaped him. That desirable body floated, as radiant as the stars, became as obscure as a phantom, was confused with what surrounded it; lost in the midst of a thousand lamps that were all going out, it was about to cease to exist, to be invisible.

  He could no longer see it. He had gone blind.

  He passed his hand over his face. It was the blood from a scratch that must have flowed. No, not blood. The malediction with which profaners were threatened, had struck him. He had been punished in the manner that he had feared the most throughout his life.

  But he did not want that. There was a malign influence in the damp subterrain. That was what was troubling his sight. It was necessary to flee. In halting speech, he explained to Isabelle what had happened. He moaned like a child.

  “Save me!” he repeated, beating the air with his hands.

  It seemed to him that she took an infinite time to get dressed. Then, she could not detach the torch. Then there was the door that it was necessary to close. He clung to her veil, and she drew him up the staircase. The necklace of topazes that he still had around his neck made a ridiculous sound as it agitated against his belly. He stumbled several times and Isabelle clenched her teeth in order not to insult him. Finally, they arrived in the room where Ali was waiting for them, and then before the tomb of the kings.

  Then, perceiving that he could see the beautiful stones of the walls again, and the divine twilight, Abul Hacen fell to the ground, put his forehead in the dust, and thanked Allah, who had pardoned him.

  XI. The Temptation

  It was the month of Rabi el Sani. The satiny trunks of the magnolias were whiter and their broad, polished and shiny leaves were mingled with milky flowers, as velvety as ermine.

  Almazan, going through the Court of Myrtles, was breathing in the slightly sickening vanilla odor of those flowers when he heard someone call to him from one of the rooms overlooking the fountain.

  A little ironic laugh rang out and he saw Isabelle de Solis lying on a divan beside a cassolette from which a heavy vapor was escaping.

  “You’re not afraid? You aren’t fleeing at the sight of me?” she said. “I didn’t know that I’d become so redoubtable.”

  He apologized. A thousand things solicited him. The Emir’s service was very absorbing.

  “As you see, I’m so bored,” she said, “that I’m burning musk with the roots of the Gazan plant, which grows in the Caucasus, it appears. An old woman procured for me.”

  She extended her hands over the cassolette and looked at him slyly. “Do you know the effects of the Gazan plant?”

  He did not know them.

  “I forgot that I could scandalize you by talking to you about it. It appears that you’re perpetually plunged in your books and that only science interests you.”

  Almazan replied that he strove to be interested in what he saw. The ideal was to discover the beauty that there was in everything.

  The ideal! She started to laugh.

  “Look! Would you like some crystallized ginger, or neidehs, or a little of the roasted barley liquor that they drink in this country, and which I find so poor. My ideal would be to amuse myself. Is there not a secret for that in your books?”

  “Everyone has the secret of their own pleasure in the faculty of desire,” he said.

  She lay back in the midst of cushions, laughing again.

  “Then I ought to be infinitely happy.”

  Then she leaned toward him, on her elbow, with her chin in her hand, and looked at him intently.

  “You don’t know what I desire?”

  “How could I know that?”

  “I would like you to carry me, as you did in Seville, on to a never-ending staircase.”

  The golden droplets of her eyes were tarnished between her palpitating eyelids, her teeth appeared between her redder lips, like the promise of bites, and sensuality emerged from her garments like an almost tangible wave.

  He was sitting nearby and she was talking to him. She was suddenly full of sincerity and confidence. She yielded to a surge of sympathy whose cause she did not seek.

  She liked pleasure—well, so what? She didn’t hide it. She was merely more honest than others, that’s all. She was dying of boredom alongside the Emir, and the Alhambra, with its splendors, seemed dismal to her because she had no one of her own race in whom to confide. And yet the Emir loved her to the point of fulfilling all her caprices. Had Almazan heard mention of the famous treasure of the kings of Granada? She could draw upon it whenever she wished. She had even had an ugly little casket placed in her room, a box of sorts that might be gold and which all the Arabs had considered venerable and very precious for centuries. She put her turbans and slippers in it. But what was the point of jewels and talismans if one did not have happiness?

  Almazan listened to her anxiously, not knowing whether this encounter with Isabelle was an agreeable event or a trap of his evil destiny.

  Sometimes she poured the roasted barley liquor into a porcelain cup and lifted it to her lips. She had made a sign to Almazan to sit down beside her, she became animated, and her voice lowered as if to give more importance to her words.

  “”To think that I would have been yours the first time I saw you, if you had wanted. I was afraid! You desired me—don’t deny it, I understood that by your gaze—and you nearly threw yourself upon me when you set me down on your bed. I wouldn’t have resisted. Anyway, if you hadn’t desired me, why would you have come to Aboulfedia’s house? To ask him for medical advice, perhaps? You saw me stark naked in the pool with the blue faience. I knew that you were looking at me through the mesh of the golden gauze that the ignoble Aboulfedia had placed there. It was one of his habitual pleasures, and I lent myself to it sometimes. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because I didn’t know you yet. Can you explain to me how it is that one’s whole life depends on meeting one man and not another? What a mystery sympathy is! I’ve been on the point of falling in love with a young Moor named Tarfe. He belongs to an illustrious family, that of the Almoradis, and he pleased me because he’s reputed to be stupid. For stupidity attracts a woman as much as intelligence, perhaps more.”

  Almazan’s expression had darkened. Tarfe was the horseman he had encountered on arriving in Granada for the first time, who had stared at him insolently. He had seen him again since, and the repulsion he had felt for his bestial beauty had only increased. Perhaps Isabelle had sensed that repulsion, for she persisted deliberately.

  “They call him the goat, but with me he’s as gentle as a lamb. We’ve only exchanged a few words and he’s found the means of telling me that he was thinking about me and that he would wave a red lamp every evening at the summit of a terrace in the Albaycin in order to remind me of him. It’s only childishness, but I have so few distractions!

  It deemed to Almazan that his soul had been traversed by a dagger. There were a few scornful words hovering on his lips for the Almoradi whose folly was notorious in Granada, but he was ashamed of them and did not pronounce them.

  While they had been talking, t
he sky had become cloudy and raindrops were making large circles in the fountain in the Court of Myrtles.

  Almazan had risen to his feet. He explained that he could not stay any longer. The Emir might have professed the ideas of the liberal Ommeyades from whom he was descended but he would certainly take umbrage at a longer conversation.

  “You don’t know, then!” Isabelle exclaimed. “The Emir has left. It’s a State secret that only the Hagib and I know. He’s taken five hundred cavaliers and they’ll ride flat out for part of the night Have you heard mention of a town called Zahara, near Ronda? It appears that its church possesses objects of great value, and the wife of my father’s steward, whom I hate, ought to be there at present. Well, the Emir’s going to take possession of Zahara tonight and bring me the treasure tomorrow on a mule, and the steward’s wife with a chain around her neck.”

  Almazan shivered. So the old war of the Moors and the Spaniards, interrupted for a long time, was about to be reanimated tonight. The Catholic kings had left the refusal to pay the tribute unanswered, but the attack on Zahara could only be the first blow in a merciless war.

  Isabella emptied into her cup the liquor contained in the alcazars and drank it in a single draught. Her eyes were drowned and her lips moist, as if the approach of pleasure were already making itself felt. The wind of the rising storm lifted her veils and seemed to want to remove them. Throughout her flesh there was the abandonment that the expectation of sensuality gives.

  “Tonight is mine!” she said. “You can’t know the joy that represents. Don’t abandon me. I sense that there’s a flame in you similar to mine. I admit it: I was going to give myself to the young Almoradi tonight. Amour must have rendered him intelligence, for he’s bribed the eunuchs and arranged to penetrate into the Alhambra disguised as one of them. When the sun has gone down, if I respond to the signal of a lamp raised in the Albaycin, he’ll come. But I don’t love that Almoradi.”

  Large leaves detached from the magnolias were swirling, and sometimes one of them fell into the room abruptly, like a new hope on the thresholds of a commencing evening. Isabelle gave the impression of a child desirous of a toy. Her voice had become persuasive, almost pleading.

  “Don’t budge from your room this evening. I’ll simulate a serious illness and have you summoned. Since you’ve cured the wound in his leg, the Emir considers you as his safeguard and that of all the people whose lives he holds dear. Nothing will seem more natural. And fundamentally, I won’t be lying. I need you to cure me.”

  As in Seville, when he had set her down, fragile and palpitating, on his bed, Almazan had a sudden desire to embrace her. Footsteps resonated along the Court of Myrtles. A slave advanced, laughing at the force of the wind that projected her veil over her head.

  “So be it,” said Almazan. “Until tonight.”

  And he drew away.

  XII. The Four Lepers

  In his apartment, he learned from a slave that Christian Rosenkreutz wanted to see him immediately. He put on his cloak and, in spite of the tempest that was blowing, he left the Alhambra.

  Not far from the strangers’ gate, Rosenkreutz had rented a house as narrow as a cell from a weaver. He was outside his door, in the squalls and the rain, and he made a movement of satisfaction when he saw Almazan. But the latter soon perceived, when they were sheltered in the house, that he had nothing particular to say to him. He stood before him silently, and there was a great indulgence in his shining eyes.

  Almazan had a desire to tell him everything, the folly of his desire and the conversation he had just had. Rosenkreutz stopped him.

  “Every man has a battle to fight,” he said, “that of the spirit against the flesh, and he must win it on his own, because there is no fecund victory except the one that one obtains without support. The man who goes backwards has departed before time and he will know a hard recommencement. How I want you to conquer the power that is only given to the elect, only to see in the beauty of matter the spirit that is its eternal meaning, and not the form that is only its temporary expression.”

  The form! The perfect form! The word evoked for Almazan the body of the woman that he could not forget. Oh, the falling curve of the shoulder, the hollow of the back, and the leg as slender as an extended stem. What was the spirit hidden behind the amber and rose of that skin?

  Dusk was beginning to fall. Almazan made a movement to withdraw.

  “I promised you,” said Rosenkreutz, “to introduce you to Soleiman, who recovers the incarnations of men. We’re very close to his house, where he lives with his three brothers in the lepers’ quarter. I’ll take you there.”

  Almazan hesitated. Isabelle might send someone to fetch him after nightfall. But the door was already open, and Rosenkreutz was going along the street.

  They went through the two enclosures of the strangers’ gate, walked for a while through the rain, which had become heavier, and reached the leprosarium.

  It was surrounded by a high wall, of such a frightful yellow color that it seemed to be afflicted itself by the malady that it enclosed in its vast circle. The wall was pierced by a large number of doors, to permit the inhabitants, who could not leave the enclosure, to come to buy food from the merchants who flocked there every morning.

  It made, by comparison with Granada, a dismal city that nothing would have distinguished from the other if a particular silence had not filled it. That silence came, not from the absence of the joy of living, for joy was as great there as elsewhere, but from the prohibition of all negotiation, the malady being supposed to be communicated more by the circulation of objects than personal contact. The great silence was even more impressive on rainy days, for then all the lepers emerged from their thresholds and held out there faces and bodies to the sky in order to be washed, attributing a mysterious curative force to the rain.

  The twilight aggravated the chalky hues of the houses. There were rich ones with gardens, but by virtue of the sandy nature of the soil, the vegetation had something sickly about it; the palm trees were tumefied, and the pines secreted a more abundant resin like lymph. Dilapidated buildings succeeded one another, giving the impression of being stuck together, and their façades were cracked, ready to come away like crusts.

  Rosenkreutz and Almazan slid though the long side-streets, sometimes looking at a face larger than natural, with enormous eyes, brushing blanched bodies that moved aside precipitately as they approached, and they did not listen to the stammered apologies or the hoarse salutations.

  A large shadow extended above them.

  “This is the dwelling of the four brothers,” said Rosenkreutz. “It’s an old fortress that has been rebuilt by them. Their story remains inexplicable for me. The disease afflicted them almost at the same time. All four were bad men, debauched to the point that Abul Hacen’s predecessor thought of banishing them from Granada. After a night more agitated than the others, spent in the company of his brothers, Soleiman had a kind of revelation. He claimed that the Prophet had appeared to him and he started to lead an ascetic life, but of a special asceticism—that of a very ancient sect of Sufis who sought divine ecstasy in the intoxication of wine. Then, intermittently at first, and then more and more frequently, he had visions of the past, and acquired the gift of reading in the astral light the previous lives of men. At the same time, the symptoms of leprosy developed in the four brothers. The Emir, who did not like them, hastened to send them here. Then they acquired this ancient castle, which they furnished sumptuously. Soleiman has accepted his destiny without complaint, while his brothers live with him in a constant rage, more avid for pleasure than ever.

  The two men had traversed an enclosure in which the rain pattered on foliage they could not see. They perceived the presence of recumbent men who might have been servants, or the masters of the place. Someone recognized Rosenkreutz, for a broken voice emerged from the shadows and shouted: “He’s there. You can go in.”

  Almazan shivered, so sinister was that great stone building and those sic
k men lying in the mist of shining puddles.

  At the top of a long winding stairway that must have been used by watchmen and archers in past wars, they opened a door and found themselves in a room that resembled an Egyptian tomb, in the presence of Soleiman.

  Sitting cross-legged, he was weeping. He did not make any movement, but his eyelids rose two or three times, and a slight sign of his swollen finger asked his visitors to wait in silence.

  Rosenkreutz sat down beside him. Almazan kept slightly apart.

  Finally, Soleiman spoke, but he addressed himself to himself rather than to the man who was with him.

  “Khadidja! Princess Khadidja! All three of them claimed that they saw her, that she had emerged from her tomb, and they clicked their shaky teeth and trembled again with desire. But the other was a poor young woman that a Barbary ship had abducted from Corfu. The other was a Christian and she is dead! How could that be Princess Khadidja?”

  On hearing these incomprehensible words, Almazan drew closer.

  Tears were still running down Soleiman’s face, but he emerged from his meditation. He wiped his face and he turned to Rosenkreutz, murmuring: “As the poet has said, tears are the offering of a soul in pain.” Then, with a heart-rending smile, he added: “Oh, a great deal of pain.”

  Suddenly, he leaned forward, his face illuminated by an expression of dolor and intelligence.

  “Christian Rosenkreutz, who departed from Germany and marched toward the Orient until the day when you encountered the wise men who taught you the double symbol of the rose and the cross, who has received the mission to perpetuate the truth, do you believe that the man who has killed in this life can be pardoned one day?”

  “There is no pardon for sins,” said Rosenkreutz softly. “There is a law of equilibrium. The effect follows the cause and their enchainment can perhaps be called pardon.”

  “But you would doubtless turn away if you knew that one of those you have chosen has spilled blood voluntarily.”