The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  Almazan clenched his teeth. Sometimes, he threatened her. But at other times, livid, wanting to learn more, he begged her to keep talking.

  Yes, the profanation added to the pleasure. Aboulfedia sculpted Christs for himself similar to the phallic divinites of paganism. The droplets of candle-wax were like sparks that stimulated bodies already excited by the murmur of infamous litanies. Rodriguez was as handsome as an angel and his villainy had a perverse attraction. She remembered the rustle of a chasuble over her loins, a drunken woman, tipped over, lips that had a taste of malediction. She had a nostalgia for the lust amid the fumes of cassolettes, in the midst of a parody of adoration.

  Exhausted and furious, Almazan and Isabelle always ended up embracing one another more passionately, on the terrace that overlooked the city and the sea. But afterwards they became sad and dejected, linked by a more solid chain, separated by a more profound abyss.

  By a tacit accord, they never spoke about Tarfe, but with an equal force, they both thought about him.

  King Ferdinand’s army was already in Besmillana, two leagues from Malaga, but no one yet believed in the possibility of a siege. Formidable enclosing walls flanked by square towers erected their mass around the city, facing the mountains. Cannons were disposed on the jetties of the port. And the port and the city were dominated by the Alcazaba, built on a rocky eminence and dominated itself by the castle of Jebelfaro, built on an even higher eminence. The two towers were connected by a covered path and were impregnable. Malaga reposed tranquilly at their feet like a clutch of houses in the shadow of two stone guardians.

  The inhabitants only began to become anxious when they saw, from the height of the ramparts, thousands of cavaliers and infantrymen spreading out in La Vega, erecting their tents and banners there. Only then did they think of fleeing. Those who had boats loaded their goods into them and set sail, either for the port of Almunecar or for Morocco.

  Those who did not make haste saw with consternation, on the morning of the third day, fifteen large galleys and thirty caravels blockading the bay. At the same time, the crowd stationed in the streets and the squares transmitted news that was alternately terrible and reassuring.

  To begin with it was announced that the Council of Merchants presided over by the rich Ali Dordux was in the process of deliberating in the Alcazaba with the Alcaide of Malaga, Aboul Connaxa. Then the entire city sighed with relief. A deputation had set forth for the Spanish camp in order to offer King Ferdinand the surrender of the city. It was known from the example of cities already besieged that King Ferdinand was content with a declaration of vassalage and a tribute in gold. People ran to the ramparts to await the return of the deputation, others gathered before the house of Ali Dordux and acclaimed him as the representative of peace. Then, departing from the two towers, a wave of silence and terror came closer and closer, and extended over the entire city.

  Hamet el Zegri, who occupied the castle of Jebelfaro with two thousand Moroccan mercenaries of the tribe of Gomeres, had descended to the Alcazaba surrounded by his soldiers as soon as he had learned of the sending of the deputation. He had put the Alcaide to death as a traitor to the Moorish cause and had himself proclaimed Alcaide in his place by the frightened Council of Merchants. As master of the army and the civil powers, he had decided on stubborn resistance.

  The people did not have time to comment on that event. Fanfares resounded from all the towers, running in a circle around the city. A cavalcade descended in zigzags from the castles. Hamet el Zegri rode through the streets of the city, followed by his armed troops.

  The mercenaries had black hair and were short in stature. They wore full breastplates in polished steel, and tall helmets with hooked projections that descended over their noses and removed the human appearance from their faces. Their lances were astonishingly long and they carried them very straight, in such a fashion that they resembled young trees planted in the ground, and their bucklers were sparkling metallic masses, of which they made use to crush their enemies.

  Behind them, without armor, clad in brown leather and having no weapon save for a short scimitar, came three hundred cavaliers of the religious order of Rabits. They were warriors who lived in meditation and austerity in times of pace and were invincible in combat because they aspired for death. Hamet el Zegri was part of that order himself. He was bare-headed, strangely thin and seemed immeasurably tall on horseback.

  He harangued the silent crowd before the port.

  He promised a rapid victory. The provisions were great and permitted patience. El Zagal, who had proclaimed himself King of the realm of Granada by virtue of the death of Abul Hacen, was going to depart from Almeria with an army in order to help Malaga. Hamet el Zegri also knew, from a reliable source, that the Sultan of Egypt, on accord with the Great Lord of Constantinople, was sending an immense fleet to avenge the offenses made to the Crescent by the Spaniards. The sea and the land around Malaga would be the tomb on the enemy armies.

  Those words, the sight of the troops and the faith that animated their leader reassured the inhabitants. The acclamations that had risen a few minutes earlier for the pacific Ali Dordux resounded for Hamet el Zegri the warrior.

  The day passed in a glorious effervescence. The organization of district militias was begun. There was no question of anything except the predictions of a dervish necromancer named Massar, who had come from Granada and had received from Allah the gift of deciphering the future in a turtle-shell. He had seen with an extreme clarity the image of King Ferdinand with a gaping wound on the nape of his neck; and there were people at the crossroads who were offering descriptions of that wound.

  Night fell. A Lombard battery set up on a hill launched its first projectiles at the city. They did no great damage. They fell on waste ground near the port. For a long time, the inhabitants, crouching on their traces, watched the ruddy curves that they traced in the sky, like prophetic comets announcing the reign of fire.

  Almazan now spent his days in the cellars of towers converted into hospitals and filled with the wounded. At sunset, he went to the Alcazaba. He was part of a committee of a dozen members charged with organizing the defense of the city.

  That was what Hamet el Zegri wanted—for neither he nor anyone else knew of Isabelle’s presence in Malaga, and Almazan was honored as the man who had been the friend and counselor of Abul Hacen.

  Almazan worked passionately. He had definitively renounced his Christian attachments and education. In any case, he was an Arab on his mother’s side. He knew that in defending the kingdom of the Moors he was serving the cause of civilization and intelligence. Had Christian Rosenkreutz not come from a distant land in order to struggle by thought against the tide of fanaticism, the active evil of the Spanish people? He would approve of his conduct when he knew of it, and he would forgive him for his abrupt departure and his long silence.

  The incessant activity that he deployed prevented him from thinking about Isabelle. During the day, he rejected the images that made him suffer.

  But when he went along the harbor by the light of the stars in order to return home, when he followed the narrow streets between white walls, those images flowed inexorably into his soul, as alive, as precise and as torturing as ever. He hastened his steps. He went up the steps of the faience porch of his house rapidly, and immediately he shouted: “Isabelle!” his heart beating, full of anxiety, desire and the bitter hope of catastrophe that certain amours bring.

  That evening, he came back later than usual. No servants’ footsteps resonated in the house. No one responded to his appeal. He thought that Isabelle must be in the garden and he went through the ground floor rooms and terraces rapidly.

  Through the laurels whose clumps extended toward the sea with sprays of white branches, he perceived a form drawing away.

  He was about to shout “Isabelle!” again but he distinguishes that the form had a tall stature and was walking with an arrogant assurance. He ran forward. The shadow stopped and came back toward him. It
was a man. Almazan knew that all his slaves had been enrolled as soldiers and were carrying cannonballs on the ramparts. He leaned forward to see the face of the unknown man. The other did the same. They were almost touching, and they recoiled with an equal horror. Almazan had recognized Tarfe.

  The young man had the bestial expression that had always struck him, but a second had sufficed for him to perceive in the crease of the eyelids and the red moistness of the lips a heavy joy, the satisfaction of a sated beast.

  It seemed to Almazan that a red mist enveloped him and rendered his reason obscure. He was transported into the world of jealousy and murder.

  The Almoradi had not been surprised marching furtively. He had allowed the sand of the pathway to crackle without dread. That was because he scorned his rival as a man of an inferior caste, one that did not bear arms.

  Almazan’s fury redoubled at that thought. But he did not have time to seize Tarfe by the throat; the latter had drawn his scimitar and aimed a great blow at him with the trenchant blade.

  Almazan leapt sideways and avoided the blow. He had no weapon. He looked around. There was a gardener’s spade driven into the soil a few paces away. He seized it and raised it in time to parry Tarfe’s second blow.

  Then he started striking with all his strength with his improvised weapon. He struck with a blind rage, first attaining his adversary’s wrist, then his breast, and then his head. Then he belabored a bloody mass that was lying at his feet. Then he threw the spade away and looked around at the mute gardens and the motionless sea.

  In the distance, there was the sound of culverins, and sometimes a red cannonball furrowed the sky. The fires of enemy galleys blinked like evil eyes. In all directions men were on the alert, animated by thoughts of death, waiting for opportunities to kill one another. And he, who had raised his intelligence high enough to measure that murderous folly and reprove it, had just killed too, with the love of killing.

  He leaned over. The young man lay there disfigured. Beside him, his scimitar was reminiscent of a blue snake with a gem-studded head.

  Then Almazan felt an immense distress invade him. He strode back up the stages of the gardens and went through the house again. He launched himself into the street. He went down it, and then took another. He walked at hazard for a long time. Although windows were dark and he did not encounter anyone. As he arrived at the chains that closed his quarter, a patrol of Gomeres called out to him rudely. He identified himself and saw the grim faces relax as if in a dream and the silhouettes of the tall helmets drawing away. He reached the ramparts, went along them, and descended toward the sea..

  He suddenly perceived that he had arrived near waste ground not far from his house. It was there that the dead were now buried, for the cemetery was outside the city wall. But there had been so many of them in recent days that slaves were thrown in a heap in a shallow ditch, and the layer of earth under which they lay was so thin that it did not prevent the odors of decomposition from trailing in the air in putrid gusts.

  Almazan respired those odors but was not inconvenienced by them. In the unknown depths of his soul a distant thought had just appeared. He hastened his pace.

  A kind of chant resounded not far away. He perceived a prostrate man touching the soil that covered the dead with his forehead. He was gesticulating with his arms and chanting plaintively. It was the dervish Massar. Intoxicated by the faith that people had in him, he now claimed to be communicating with the dead and receiving messages from them. Every evening he summoned them to this charnel-house, recited formulae, and implored and threatened them by turns.

  Almazan did not stop. He hastened toward his dwelling as if pulled by an invisible chain. When he opened the door his visage was animated by a cold resolution.

  Isabelle was at the foot of the staircase. She started with fright on seeing Almazan and Almazan understood from her gaze that she was aware of Tarfe’s death, either because she had witnessed the fight from her window or because she had gone down into the garden after his departure.

  He closed and locked the entrance door and saw her flee up the stairs toward her bedroom.

  He went down into the garden to where Tarfe was lying, in the same place. He loaded him on to his back, descended heavily toward the sea and deposited the body in his boat. He climbed into it and rowed with all his strength. When he was some distance from the shore he tipped the dead man into the sea, and had the sensation of killing him for a second time. He was only perceiving the reality of things partially. It was as if he were hallucinating; he fixed his magnetized eyes on an ever more precise image.

  Having returned to the land, he ran. Behind the perforated shutters of Isabelle’s window there was not the roseate light that lamps make though red Venetian velvet. He told himself, however, that she could not have fled.

  He arrived at her door. It was locked. He called to her by name. His voice was low and hoarse. There was no reply. He listened anxiously. Then, along with the heartbeats in his breast, he perceived a light breath coming from the bedroom. Isabelle was there, in the dark, shivering with terror.

  With a thrust of his shoulder he broke through the door. He searched for her, groping, and saying: “Why have you put out the lamps? Where are you?”

  She replied in an ill-assured voice, which she tried to render form: “What is it? I’m here.”

  He felt her, undressed and sitting on the bed. Immediately, she threw her arms around his neck and spread her perfumed hair over his face, as if she had been waiting for a long time. She dared not say: “Finally, here you are!” but she was languorous, warm, almost swooning, for fear is similar to desire.

  Then he snatched off her nightshirt abruptly, and hugged a creature anxious to know whether she was about to receive amour or death. He had laid her down beneath him and, understanding her fear, he did not undeceive her. He even took her neck in his hands in order that she might believe that he was about to strangle her. She moaned softly. One of her legs was dangling over the edge of the bed like the broken stem of a flower. She seemed never to have loved him as much. And he now glimpsed in the dim light a tender, milky form, the color of sap, whose warmth burned his loins, whose beauty softened him, and he aspired a greater sensuality with the corruption of that body.

  A little later, he got up, lit a lamp and opened the window. He leaned out for a few seconds toward the white laurels in the garden, toward the horizon of the sea where the Spanish caravels made patches. He was avid to question his mistress, to know for how long she had been seeing Tarfe again, to torture himself by the evocation of their caresses.

  She was stark naked on the bed and he saw that she had just fallen asleep. Her breath was peaceful, and a half-smile wandered over her lips, reddened by kisses.

  And as he considered her, the nocturnal wind blew into the room a moist breath in which the perfume of laurels was mingled with the odors of cadavers from the nearby charnel-house.

  XX. The Putrescence of the Dead

  As the months passed, hope decreased in souls. El Zagal’s army, marching to relieve Malaga, had been crushed by the double effort of Boabdil’s army coming from Granada and a Spanish army under the command of Gonzales de Cordoba. The fleets from Constantinople and Alexandria had not arrived. On the contrary, the Spanish galleys became more numerous and could be seen disembarking troops and provisions to the right and left of the city wall.

  The Spanish camp was now surrounded by a large ditch and its surroundings were strewn with sharp spikes that prevented cavalry from advancing. Near the bridges over the ditches, the catapults and bombards accumulated like bronze flocks, and behind them, the tents, surmounted by flags and banners of all colors, were as innumerable as sand dunes in a desert modeled by the wind

  Sometimes, the guards on the ramparts of Malaga, crouching behind the crenellations, saw an enormous tower rolling toward the city made with wooden beans. That tower, the work of the engineer Francisco Ramirez de Madrid, stuck to walls like an animate monster, and flying gangways
and ladders sprang from it, from which swarms of enemies precipitated. Trumpets resonated, causing defenders to run from all directions. There were merciless hand-to-hand combats. But the essential thing was for the soldiers of Malaga to protect a group of men armed with large bundles of firewood soaked with resin, which they set ablaze and launched at the feet of the tower. The fire ended up taking hold. The Spaniards who had not yet leapt on to the ramparts fled in the midst of flames or were grilled on the platforms. And nothing any longer remained but the charred and rickety skeleton of the vanquished tower.

  At other times, it was the besieged who attacked. Hamet el Zegri, followed by his Gomeres, succeeded in reaching the Spanish camp during the night. Christians and Moors stabbed one another in the dark, rolling down the slopes, impaling one another on the spikes as they fought. The Gomeres came back bloody, bearing as trophies damascened breastplates, belts ornamented with jewels and exsanguinated heads that they had cut off.

  But when summer came, all those in Malaga who had been given the faculty of reflection understood that the Moorish cause was doomed.

  King Ferdinand’s army had received immense reinforcements. It extended over all the surrounding mountains, and the long files of mules that were bringing supplies to it formed animated furrows.

  There had never been a month of Schaban so torrid. The implacable heat of the sky multiplied the misery of the siege. Water ran short. The imams gathered solemnly in the Djouma mosque to ask Allah to make the beneficent rain fall on that unfortunate port of the earth. They traversed the city in procession, followed by the silent people, and they filed along the ramparts.

  At the same time, behind Cardinal Talavera and priests bearing relics, an immense religious procession holding candles and singing canticles went through the Christian camp to thank God for his protection.

  The sun blazed pitilessly, on the one hand on the black and yellow robes of the imams, and on the other on sparkling surplices, the miters of bishops and the gold of crosses. Between the two processions extended a blank space where there were corpses that had not yet been removed and over which crows were soaring. But neither the imams nor the Catholic priests turned their heads. The former silent at the summit of the ruddy walls, the latter singing among the tents and the standards, they followed their route as if their faith had rendered them blind.