The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2)

by André Couvreur

  Yes, his constant excuse, his obscure argument...

  “Over there,” I protested, “others wouldn’t have let me go! But since you’ve condemned me to it, Marcel, at least let me have the security, the consoling certainty, that if I need to seek a refuge someday—which, alas, I can foresee—it’s here, in your heart, that I’ll find it.”

  “I promise you that, Made, I swear.”

  He wasn’t lying. His eyes, loyal and tender, assured me that I would never lose him. In the ambivalence of love, was his not the better part?

  “I won’t mention it to you again!” I exulted. “Whatever happens, I can no longer be unhappy. So it only remains for us to seal your oath with a celebration. Invite me to dinner!”

  “With all my heart—and we’ll go mad this evening. Yes, we’ll avoid my cheap eatery. We’ll swill champagne! I’ll take you to Ascain. Do you have the courage to go on foot?”

  Ascain: the exquisite walk toward the mountains, a renowned hotel, an arbor…the ideal frame for letting one’s heart sing…anyway, he could have taken me to the end of the world...

  Delighted, I accepted, and we took the road in that direction, arm in arm.

  Well, it wasn’t Marcel who paid for the diner. We were scarcely en route when the blast of a horn announced the green auto. People leapt aside, fleeing. Soon, with a thrust of the brakes that made the wheels screech, Monsieur Danator’s grimacing face and sharp eyes and Adam’s fixed smile immobilized us.

  They leapt out of the car.

  “Finally, we meet again!”

  “Was that my fault, my dear Monsieur?”

  “My son was ill; you must at least have been anxious.”

  Adam embraced me impetuously, murmuring inappropriate remarks in my ear to express the defect that I had caused him.

  “Enough! Naughty boy!” protested Monsieur Danator. He was, however, too far away from us to have heard what his son had whispered to me. It was not the first time that I had remarked the keenness of his ears—unless that hyperacuity was dependent on an exceptional cerebral sympathy.

  “Where are you going, then?” he asked.

  “To have dinner in Ascain.”

  “It’s father-in-law who’ll treat you! Climb into the jalopy. I offer you crayfish, chicken, dessert and a glass of pinard in the mountains. After which, it’s fandango time—back to Saint-Jean, and entrechats for us! Climb in, then!”

  He hoisted us into the car, and in a few minutes of terror for the pedestrians, and or me—for Adam, at the wheel, made the vehicle snake madly—we reached our destination.

  Numerous diners were already at table. I sat down hastily at a place Monsieur Danator indicated to us. Without being greedy, I was ready to savor my food and make up for the preceding days. The décor alone, in fact, would have stimulated my appetite. Above the yellow skylight, making the crystal and silverware sparkle, there was the poem of the night: the breath of the mountains mingled its caress with the aromas of the dishes.

  Once we were at table, however, I noticed that Adam was missing.

  “Where is my fiancé, then?”

  “I left him at the door, in the process of rendering a small tribute to nature,” Monsieur Danator said, sarcastically. “I’m surprised it’s taking so long. Go and see then, my child.”

  I obeyed; I went in search of my fiancé. I did indeed find him behind a bush, in the posture that his father had anticipated, and which all creatures down here—great and small, princes and beggars—fatally adopt in such circumstances, on a strictly equal footing.

  “We’re waiting for you, Adam,” I said, stepping back in alarm.

  But he did not permit me to escape. He bounded toward me like a young tiger, enlaced me in his arms and, under cover of the surrounding darkness, kissed me gluttonously. I should have resisted, drawing from my virtue the strength not to admit his audacity…and I did, indeed, struggle, but that was to drag him aside, to a place where we would be less at the mercy of passers-by.

  Well, inexplicably, once I had constrained him to hide there, when my frenzy brought me to his lips, his own impulse was abruptly cut short. In vain, amazed by that sudden transformation, I strove to reanimate him; in vain I questioned him; there was no response. In the shadows, I was stuck to an Apollo of ice.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go back...”

  We found Monsieur Danator in a state of indescribable agitation. Ignoring the waiter, who was enquiring as to whether we were ready to order, he only had one thing on his mind: calculating the distance that separated our table from the entrance to the establishment.

  “Let’s see, my dear Germaud, if I wanted to buy this place, how far do you think it is, in meters, in a straight line, from here to the door?”

  “About twenty,” Marcel proposed.

  “More like thirty,” the waiter corrected.

  “Personally, I’d estimate at least forty,” Monsieur Danator affirmed.

  It was necessary for him to verify, in front of everyone, the accuracy of his estimate. He went about it as conscientiously as a surveyor, marching, counting, taking reference-points, cursing a tree that impeded the rectitude of his string, and even having a table moved, the diners at which were amused by his caprice and lent themselves to it with a good grace.

  “Forty!” he said, triumphantly. “Now let’s see, from the door to this bush, which is in the trajectory…I’d say ten meters...” He pointed to the spot where, a few moments before, I had joined my fiancé. I wondered what connection there could be between that geometrical mania and what had happened between Adam and me. I set aside my suspicions, however, for after having cried “Ten meters! Just as I said! I have compasses in my eyes, me!” Monsieur Danator announced his resolution to make the purchase.

  “And it will be a good deal for my heirs, for my Adam, and for my Madelinette. To table, now!”

  The meal was tasty. Monsieur Danator, put in a good mood by the success of his measurement, spiced it with jokes at least as salty as the water my fiancé was drinking.

  “But why, father-in-law, are you salting your son like that?”

  “It’s to desalt him, my child,” he quipped.22 But he immediately added: “It’s to fortify his constitution.”

  Ah! I was familiar with his constitution. It was sometimes triumphant, but also subject to singular collapses. Could the salt really change that?

  Forgive me for these stupid jokes. They were suggested to me by the champagne that, at Monsieur Danator’s insistence, I absorbed to excess. I was slightly unsteady on my feet when we climbed back into the auto to go to the fandango at Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

  I had recovered a little self-control when we arrived at the place where the party was being held. Set up in a bandstand, an indigenous group of musicians of whom nothing was visible at first but their red berets glistening under the electric lights, was enlivening the quadrilles. I greatly admired those young men and women, such pure specimens of an ardent race. Oh, how well I understood that amour was their master and that they would go far, after the dance, to seek a complementary intoxication with their eyes. Around them, the profane tourists formed a circle, admiring and applauding, and I had the joy of observing the disappointment of the Frappart-Laricarière couple when they saw me on Adam’s arm.

  “Get into the dance, then!” Monsieur Danator instructed us, rubbing his hands. And as the musicians launched into a tango: “A tango—just the thing! Almost a fandango! Adam dances it delightfully now! Olé, Adam!”

  I abandoned myself to the rhythm, and I thanked Heaven for making the crowd so compact, to hide the scandal of our hip-swaying from view—for Adam reproduced all the original lasciviousness of that dance, honored in low exotic tavernas before our drawing-rooms adapted it to decency. His abdominal thrusts—and mine too, alas—would not, however, have passed unperceived if a whistle-blast had not brought us back to Monsieur Danator.

  “You’re quite ready now, my dear…I’m very pleased…he has you, at least as much as you have him.
Now we’re going to absent ourselves for a little while.”

  “You’re going away?”

  “Yes, until your marriage—which is to say, for exactly ten days; it’s a matter of regulating certain family affairs. We’ll therefore say goodbye until the morning of the sixteenth. An auto will come to pick you up to take you to the Mairie, and from there to our chapel of the Immaculate Conception. No dress, it’s an intimate celebration. Don’t worry, either, about another witness to second your Marcel. I’ll have one. So, it’s understood—until the appointed day.”

  He sniggered. “Until the day appointed for the unmentionable thing. Marriage, my child, leads to bed…it’s a pun.23 In that bed, along with Adam, there will be six millions—but don’t forget my essential condition: integral virginity! Don’t succumb to anything…not the slightest little finger of courtship…giving… giving…you get my meaning?”

  He was entitled to be anxious. I was only retained to virtue by the harvest of the six million. Only one astonishment still persisted: why that sine qua non? For the sake of honor? For the race?

  “Keep taking your medicine. You haven’t missed any doses?”

  “No,” I affirmed, even though I’d only taken it once.

  “Double the dose!” Reassured, running his hand over the flat surfaces of his face, he added: “Made, art is incomplete. Look at painters and sculptors, for example, in matters regarding the myths of Amour. Well, they’ve served us Aphrodite up to the hilt. Yes, we see her in all postures, to every advantage, dressed, undressed, nude…at Pompeii, there’s nothing else…in Rome, she’s squatting, as if waiting for a remedy…well, not one of those daubers in oil or hackers of pebbles ever thought that Aphrodite had a sister, whom it would have been interesting to represent…”

  “A sister?”

  Anna…get it?”

  “No.”

  “Anna Phrodite. It’s a pun.”

  “Ah!”

  “I condemn you to imitate Anna for another week…” He guffawed, and slapped his thigh. And that was the signal for the farewell embraces.

  “I confide her to you!” Monsieur Danator called to Marcel, before disappearing.

  We set off on the return journey, silently at first. When we went past a lighted shop window I looked covertly at my companion, and observed that his face was set in consequence of a keen displeasure.

  “Monsieur Danator has confided me to you, Marcel.”

  “I’m no prouder for that.”

  “Marcel!”

  “Protest as much as you want, but you won’t prevent me from informing you that you’ve just been behaving like a slut. Your fashion of dancing was the final straw! Oh, it’s not him that I blame…he’s just a creature, a reflection…it’s unconscious. But you, Made, you! To deliver yourself like that, in front of me, to those gesticulations fit for a brothel! You, Made, the woman I put on a pedestal of respect and admiration, giving me that abominable spectacle!”

  He was insulting me, but I was glad to hear it, because it was evidence of jealousy. It screamed to me that he was still mine, that his abnegation was merely a lie.

  However, I wanted even more certainty.

  “You’re a fine one to lecture me like that! What rights do you have over me, except for the sentimental authority that we’ve mutually conceded? Let me do as I wish, then, and if it pleases Adam to renew his familiarities, and me to accept them...”

  “You call that familiarities?”

  “Oh, my dear, he’s permitted himself many others!”

  “Others?”

  In order to be alone, we had gone down on to the sand of the beach. The location lent itself to confidences: the noise of the waves, in half-covering my voice, further encouraged them. Then, I dared to tell him all the suggestions to which my fiancé had given birth in my inflamed intellect. Obviously, I put a certain reserve into it—a discretion of terminology and imagery, as modest young women are able to do in making confessions; nevertheless, in a few sentences, he was documented.

  Oh my God! The anger that surged then from his normally angelic and magnanimous character! The epithets that he brought out, to compare me to the woman in the raincoat, whose watchful silhouette was outlined in a halo of light on the sea-front! At the same time, he had grabbed my wrists, and was twisting them—and I welcomed those violent actions with the same intoxication as if they had been caresses.

  “Oh, you do love me, Marcel! You do love me!”

  He let go.

  “Alas, yes, I love you. I would have preferred only to tell you that later…to wait…yes, to wait until the other was no more than dust in my hand...but I’m at my wits’ end. Oh, what does science matter? What do the origins of life matter, now that I know that I can be jealous of nothingness! I adore you, Made!” And, in a lower tone: “I adore you.”

  I wasn’t listening. I was astonished by his words. I was simply cradled by the distress in his voice, quivering with the confession that he had finally abandoned to me. All my flesh rejoicing, I allowed myself to be drawn to his breast. Our lips met, and undoubtedly, this time, I would have weakened irredeemably, if Monsieur Danator had not suddenly reminded me of the engagement I had made with him. Had that diabolical man, then, had prescience of what was happening to his detriment, far away from him? Blasts of a horn and blasts of a whistle advertised his presence on the road; a prodigiously luminous headlight set an entire section of the cliff of Saint-Barbe ablaze, and then stabilized in front of my hotel.

  What had he come back to search for? Me, undoubtedly, to give me some final instructions...

  But that trumpeting reappearance had sobered Marcel up. He pushed me away.

  “What are we doing? I’m crazy! Forget it! And if you can’t forget it, tell yourself that it’s necessary…yes, that it’s necessary, in a superior interest that you can’t yet comprehend, but which will one day magnify me in your eyes…for you to remain the fiancée and become the wife of Adam Danator.”

  He fled, leaving me alone on the strand, and my sobs joined in with the magnificent and tormented symphony of the sea.

  VI

  I won’t describe the sentiments I passed through during the week preceding my marriage. I won’t describe them because it would be impossible for me to analyze them. After hours of anxiety, sadness, anger, at the whim of two men who were rivals in my mind and assumed a dominant position by turns, calm and peace followed. Furthermore, all my emotive faculties paled progressively under the certain anesthesia of the medicament that Monsieur Danator had prescribed for me. I often had recourse to it. When, at table, I forgot it, the maître d’hôtel reminded me about it. He leaned over me and whispered: “Mademoiselle…the tonic...”

  And I took it. In any case, I became addicted to the drug, in which the taste of mint predominated, presumable to mask that of the philter. I habituated myself to it, as others do to morphine or cocaine. As soon as I absorbed it, my whole being rejoiced, and certain suggestive images passed through my head, like cinematic scenes, in which Adam and I always played the leading roles. But those demonic visions were confined within me; I did not allow them to emerge from my microcosm in order to project them on to one of the numerous cavaliers who, either during the familiarities of bathing, the dances at the Pergola or conversations at the hotel, signaled to me they would gladly have been their beneficiaries. By that means, I retained my pride, my haughty manners.

  The Sabbat was internal. In confrontation with society, the Succubus remained the integral Virgin.

  The most inconceivable thing was that those devouring fires did not damage my health in the slightest. My organism fared splendidly. I ate with a hearty appetite; I slept on the drift. I must, during that period, have regained the weight of which I had been dispossessed by the mental turmoil of the preceding fortnight. Sometimes, I regretted that Marcel did not come near me. I would have dazzled him with my renewed glamour—but I only caught a few brief glimpses of him. I was no longer astonished by his complete detachment; I no longer thought ab
out the incoherence of our final scene.

  Thus I arrived at the morning of the great day.

  The dawn of the marriage…the annunciatory dawn of instants that would dissipate the mysteries of human being, in which the prudery amassed by age-old yokes would be torn apart by the brutalities of possession...

  Do young women think about that? Do they interrogate the fraud or the felicity that often results from a first embrace, when, fearful of appearing in the apparel of seduction, they deliver themselves to the dresser, worrying about an imperfect pleat in the dress, stamping their feet because their veil is inconvenient or the crown of orange-blossom, awkwardly posed, in ill-adapted to the undulations of their head-dress…? To appear, to seduce, do they see beyond that when, under the guidance of the solemn papa, in dress suit and white gloves, they make their entrance into the room where the family is waiting impatiently...

  To appear, to seduce...

  Personally, it’s true, I didn’t have to occupy myself with those contingencies. My costume, in conformity with Monsieur Danator’s orders, was a simple two-piece, as discreet as possible. I had dispensed with attaching a symbol of my virginity to my hair. I waited tranquilly in my room, therefore, for the automobile promised by my father-in-law to come and collect me.

  It arrived at the appointed time.

  My departure from the hotel passed unnoticed and I was soon at the Mairie. There was only one person at the door to welcome me: Marcel.

  “They’re waiting for you. Don’t be astonished by the witnesses. The Danators have no family in the region, and no friends either, so they brought just anyone...

  Just anyone indeed, for, on penetrating into the room where the municipal official was about to marry me, I recognized, to be my witness along with Marcel, the bath-superintendant of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and to render the same office to Adam, an Arab who sold peanuts on the beach.