The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2)

by André Couvreur

  Lucienne reassured me, however. “Tapestries and rugs—what are you thinking, Papa? Once again, we’re in an apartment! And I don’t see Étienne Montabert’s wife doing a moonlight flit!”

  “The concierge is asleep at night, girl.”

  “I can have my auto at the door.” Guy suggested.

  “Yes, we can arrange it. The word impossible isn’t French!” Jojo boasted.

  In spite of further protests from Lucienne, afraid of the gendarmes, Jojo’s chauvinism might perhaps have convinced them to put my tapestries in a place of safety if Anna hadn’t come to declare that the Funeral Directors had arrived.

  “Get out! Get out!” Lucienne snapped at them. “And don’t come back until this evening, at eight o’clock. Papa, you bring my cousins Berthe and Lise. Have your auto at the door, Guy. I’ll ask Madame Godsill to help me. Tell my cousins to put on evening cloaks...”

  She shoved them toward the door, but Jojo would not be budged. “I certainly hope, girl, that you aren’t going to go mad over his burial—a man who’s leaving you without a sou.”

  “I can’t do any less than a third class convoy, Papa.”

  “Throw him in a pauper’s hearse—that’s already pretty enough. And without delay, you know. In this stormy weather, corpses...” He leaned over me and sniffed. “Smell that! He already has the odor!”

  Would you believe it? That interval, already comical, was to conclude even more ludicrously. They had scarcely left me when Jojo came back surreptitiously. He locked both doors, and then started getting undressed. Alcoholic delirium, I thought—but not at all; his action was sublimely considered. When he had nothing on but his undershirt and underpants—with his boater still on his head, he didn’t lack dash—he selected an armchair, but a chair on top of it, and brought them both to my fourteenth-century tapestry.

  Two steps, surprising in that gouty individual, hoisted him up to the summit of his edifice. He then unhooked my precious fabric, which was only maintained by two rings, and once he was down again he wound it around his waist. Afterwards, he put his outer clothes back on, over the top of it. He took the trouble to stuff a few precious trinkets plucked from the mantelpiece into his pockets, and then replaced the furniture and retired with the dignity of a well-nourished bourgeois.

  I ask you! He was carrying off a hundred and fifty thousand francs’ worth of tapestry wrapped around his belly!

  And I couldn’t launch myself after him, to catch him up and strangle him!

  Oh, Jojo…!

  Chapter VII

  Lucienne having closed my study door, I could only hear very faint echoes of her negotiations with the delegate from the Funeral Directors. I was, however, able to convince myself, from the more perceptible outbursts of voices, that she was arguing very bitterly with them; and if I affirm that the bitterness of the undertakers’ representative was equal to hers, it is because the frenzied mercantilism of those profiteers in cadavers is notorious, and that they lay out an irresistible bait of vanity in order to hike up the expense. What can one not obtain from a woman dominated by the disease of appearances? Can one not obtain flowers, drapes, mutes and supplementary clergy, by suggesting to her softly that one Madame had this, and that another Madame had that, and that the wife of a poet, a highly-reputed writer, cannot deprive her husband, nor herself, of a pulpit from which the orators designated to celebrate the genius of the dear departed can exhaust themselves? One does not bury Étienne Montabert like the grocer on the corner…and that was, fundamentally, my opinion too.

  Unfortunately, the sower of pride was addressing himself to a refractory spouse; his bait proved ineffective and his macabre harvest unfruitful. I put under the same bonnet those two individuals animated by the same interest, and that was the final blow to my love, the definitive annihilation of my marvelous dream. It became as repugnant to me as the thought of that Guy leaning over my Lucienne’s mouth and taking possession of her waist, quivering with desire. Veritably, the resistance of that creature in a pink peignoir to that frock-coasted tradesman ate into my heart as much as the rout of her senses in her lover’s arms.

  Immediately, I made some capital resolutions. I would throw out that venal woman and divide myself between my work, Ninette and her governess. Between the two of them, my world and the joy of my years would grow old. They would take me all the way to my true grave, by way of roads florid with glory, embalmed with tenderness.

  So, I summoned them with all my occult strength.

  Is it necessary to believe in telepathy? One, at least responded to my invocation. I had guessed that it was Ninette when the door opened. Oh, the power of that tender aurora! I was dazzled in seeing her appear, more than by celestial radiation.

  She had just finished getting dressed. My decease, still too recent, only permitted her to wear white from top to toe, save for the black ribbons tying up her carefully-dressed blonde hair. She was supporting with difficulty, with her left arm, among bright fabrics, the enormous doll, a nun, that her godfather had just given her. By the attentions with which she was surrounding it, it was evident that it was, for the moment, her favorite plaything.

  Already endowed with imagination, she attributed a personality to each of the individuals in her collection of figurines. I was represented—which had always flattered me slightly—by a rutilant toreador that she called Pepito. Because of his bushy beard, Tornada became a jack-in-the-box with the head of a devil, but a friendly devil of whom she was not in the least afraid, and whom she even molested frequently. Her stepmother featured under the appearance of a cold and hostile Pierrette, with a velvet mask. The servants each possessed an effigy. Only her governess did not yet have an affectation in her gallery.

  I often spent delightful moments listening to her breathing a soul into her puppets. She neglected the Pierrette, but she frequently animated Tornada-the-Devil and Me-the-Toreador. She made them fight one another, repeating our words, and even our arguments in the course of our passionate discussions. She always finished up by patching things up between us, in favor of a feast cooked by her own hands in her aluminum doll’s house, and I even found in those games our reconciliations at table, before the family meal and the dusty bottle.

  She examined me, as she had the previous evening, with anxious surprise.

  “Sleepy, Papa? Tired?”

  She spoke softly, in order not to wake me if I really were asleep. But it surpassed her understanding that her Papa should be fixed for such a long time in the immobility of the toreador relegated to some corner of her room.

  Slightly indignant, she no longer paid any attention to anything but her doll. She sat down on the floor with it, and I learned then what the newcomer symbolized.

  “Come on Mamoiselle…I’ll dress you…if you’re good, Papa will give you a bonbon…yes, Mamoiselle...chocolate…a praline...”

  She pronounced the word “praline” with a certain veneration. Praline—the treat she adored above all others; it must be the case that Mamoiselle was very dear to her. Oh, yes, dear treasure, I would offer you bags of fondants, mountains of candy! I would offer you enough to stuff yourself, to stretch your stomach!

  “But you know, Mamoiselle…restrain yourself…divide it in two. Mustn’t ever be greedy, Mamoiselle. It’s bad, being greedy.”

  And, reassured in advance, she asked herself: “What am I going to put you in to go out? You’re my Mama; you can’t dress like a bumpkin...”

  Oh, that argot, harvested from Tornada, passing through those pink lips.…

  Now, she took off the nun’s habit, laying the carcass of the doll bare. A lamentable contrast with the evangelical face; no matter, her mind gave that flesh its value, the skeleton was transubstantiated into her beloved governess. Then, she chose from her bundle of rags the brightest fabrics, those most spangled with gold, and draped them rapidly but ingeniously over the form.

  She stood her masterpiece up.

  “No more nun! Woman of world. Wait, Mamoiselle, don’t budge. I’ll b
ring Pepito, to marry you...”

  “Making marriages already!” guffawed Tornada, into whose legs she had just run as she flew away to fetch her toreador.

  I rejoiced in the presence of my friend. Perhaps he would bring forward the hour of my resurrection. Now that I knew the reason for his injection and no longer thought that he had made it with a view to gaudy advertisement, I retained a solid gratitude for him. But the shortest experiments are the best, and I hoped fervently that he had brought me the second magic elixir, the 444, which would bring me back from the realm of the Shades into that of Mortals.

  Not yet, alas! He was only interested in Ninette. He took her in his arms with a gentleness surprising in a man at the mercy of far superior considerations. Ninette had an incontestably calming influence on him.

  “So, microbe, you’re playing next to the corpse. And who do you want to marry?”

  “Mamoiselle. I’ve put on her lovely dress, see?”

  “Oh, it’s little Robin that you’ve defrocked! You can’t leave her in her virginal peace, then—the peace of a nun? What an idea! And to whom do you want to marry her?”

  “Pepito.”

  “That’s your toreador, Pepito?”

  “Yes, godfather Nada.”

  “And Pepito is?”

  “He’s my Papa.”

  “No need for Pepito, Ninette! You can put them to bed together right away! Go on, then! Your poor Papa’s getting bored all on his own! Give him that little pleasure” Go on, then!”

  As she hesitated, he was the one who picked up the doll and laid it on my bed, beside me.

  “Requiescat in pace...” he blessed us.

  After which, delighted by that extravagant marriage, he renewed a game that terrified me every time he indulged in it. He picked the child up, threw her up into the air, caught her on the wing, beneath her armpits, to throw her up again, twenty times in succession. If he failed in that perilous exercise, she would break a limb.

  “Higher! Higher!” Ninette exulted.

  And he joined in: “That’s right! Higher! Up to the sky! Like Papa!”

  One can imagine the amazement of the prefecture’s physician, confronted by that acrobatic scene, as he came in at that moment to certify my death. He was a pasty-faced drudge, his eyes rimmed by inflammation behind a lorgnon. He was dressed in a lugubrious frock-coat with a little black cravat, tightly knotted, appropriate to the gravity of his occasional clients. He took a step backwards.

  Tornada replaced Ninette on the floor. “Come in, my friend. You’re the stiff-checker, right? I’d swear to that just by looking at you. Explain to me, though, why you’re wearing that funereal face? Don’t you realize that you’re sowing terror in families? You ought to come here sprightly and cheerful. Death isn’t so terrible, damn it! Death, ask my old fried Étienne Montabert, here present, whether he doesn’t feel singularly liberated!

  “What do you expect? One can’t always be or have been. His mistake was to embark too soon for Cythera at an age when voyages tire the nervous system. The little death—that could be you—when one abuses it, in the state you’re in, which is to say, wearing the ball and chain, leads fatally to the big one. Crack! An embolism, and here you are, reduced to ingurgitating the waters of a river that the ancients baptized Lethe, but which they ought to have called, more exactly, l’hiver…it’s a play on words: the eternal winter...”

  As his interlocutor was expressing an increasing bewilderment, he stopped tugging his beard and declared, calmly: “I’m Professor Tornada.”

  “Ah!” said the medical examiner, bowing deferentially. The surgeon’s prestige excused all his extravagances, and the humble arrange themselves tightly under the banner of an ardent enemy of officialdom. So Tornada obtained, without further examination, on his declaration of embolism alone, the document that regularized the situation of decease.

  But the scientist, who would have butchered the universe entire for the sake of scientific lyricism, would not have squashed a fly for the pleasure of being malevolent. Foreseeing the prejudice that he was about to cause that funereal colleague, who would be accused of inefficiency when the thunderclap of my revivification burst, he wanted to compensate him in advance by slipping him a few thousand-franc bills. The other refused, but without getting indignant.

  The medical examiner had scarcely departed when Lucienne came back in. She was accompanied by Madame Godsill. Both of them presented the very particular physiognomy that I have often observed among women emerging from a conference with their dressmaker. It is not at all similar to the traces left by a visit to their lover, which also animates the features, but with a more concentrated fire. Here there was excitement, the radiation of creative effort, the transfiguration of great communions at the altar of beauty. Oh, they must have been imagining those combinations of crêpe Georgette and natural crêpe, and crumpling those silky pulps! Their hands were still trembling...

  Damnation! Once again, I was unable to escape the seduction of Lucienne. A violent recollection of my carnal passion relegated, for a moment, all her moral ugliness to insignificance. Would I have the strength, later, to renounce her?

  Tornada kissed their hands gallantly, as he would have done in a drawing room.. Then indicating the doll to Lucienne, he said: “You’ve already been replaced, you see.”

  “Please, Doctor…!” she said, in an offended tone. Not that joking in front of her husband’s body afflicted her, but the indecipherable threat that she sensed within my friend’s mockery constrained the hypocrisy of a protest.

  She took her suspicion out on Ninette. “What are you doing here?” And, abruptly taking hold of her hand, she made as if to withdraw.

  Tornada interposed himself, however. “Leave the child alone; she’s playing at marriage—what could be more comforting? Tell me, my dear friend, have you made a decision about the ceremony?”

  “Certainly. It will be the day after tomorrow, before noon. I would have liked to keep him for longer, but I was obliged to give in to the advice of the Funeral Directors.”

  “That’s wise. And the placement in the coffin?”

  “Tomorrow evening.”

  “I’ll help with that. Have you thought about the bereavement notices?”

  “I’ve left that to the Funeral Directors.”

  “Good. And the escorts of the coffin, I’ll wager?”

  “That’s true, there are the escorts. How many are there?”

  “For important corpses, six. One can’t have any fewer for Étienne.”

  “Six…won’t that be too many for a modest hearse?”

  “Modest? You haven’t chosen the first class, then?”

  “No—on reflection, and in conformity with Étienne’s very simple tastes, I chose the fifth.”

  “You did well. Victor Hugo had himself drawn in a pauper’s hearse.”

  “I didn’t dare go that far...”

  “In media stat virtus…”46 He reflected, dusting his beard. “Let’s see, who are we going to designate?”

  “You first, Doctor.”

  “Me? Oh no, not me…spare me that chore. You know me, I’m too active ever to allow myself to put the cordon of a pall in my hand. No, no…take…get Academicians…get Directors and Presidents of something or other. There are plenty of them...and you’ll give them so much pleasure! Look—ask Firmin Tardurand, Étienne’s competitor for the Titon chair. He’ll do the good deed! And telegraph the Messieurs immediately. These days, they might perhaps be in the country; they’ll need time to come back.” He picked up his hat. “It’s noon; go to table—you must be dying of hunger.”

  “Not at all!”

  “But yes, yes…you must force yourself. It’s the law of gizzards: when the stomach is full the brain is lightened. The cafard has flown away!47 I’ll see you again very soon.”

  He withdrew. Lucienne saluted his back by thumbing her nose and Madame Godsill imitated his fashion of twisting the hanks of his beard. Then they smiled.

  And I was a cad
aver!

  A logical consequence of their grimaces, Lucienne said: “Remind me to telephone the hairdresser to have my hair curled tomorrow morning.” And a further consequence: “What if I were to replace the crêpe Georgette with undulated crêpe?” But these grave concerns flew away in the face of the demands of the stomach. “Come and have lunch. We’ll think about it at table. You’re going to have a poor repast, my dear. Hors d’oeuvre, chicken, chipped potatoes, asparagus and maraschino ice cream...”

  Ghoul! I insulted her, to the shame of my pen—I who, ordinarily, rejoiced so much in watching her eat.

  A few hours went by in solitude. I spent them mulling over my disappointment, sadness, bitterness and resentment. I would now have liked to be able to close my eyes, in order to get rid of the fixed smile on the portrait of the wretch. It seemed to be mocking me. I was burning everything that I had adored in that woman. The mild Sicamber becomes enraged in death.48

  It must have been about three o’clock when the Vestal came in. I could no longer, henceforth, so long as my death might last—and my life too, I hoped—name Mademoiselle Robin otherwise. Vestal she was by virtue of the devotion with which she surrounded by immobile body; Vestal by virtue of the love that she had for Ninette, the prolongation of my blood, the course of my millennial torch; Vestal by virtue of the prosaic concern that brought her to renew the two candles that were ready to expire, and to place a cup containing holy water and a sprig of box-wood. She was obeying the commandments of her religion, and all the traditions of virtue, without fail. She was maintaining the symbolic flame...

  The other, the sacrilegious, would never have thought of it. She would have let me molder in the dark. Her concerns were entirely devoted to ostentation, to fashion, to the kind of crêpe that would embellish her best as a widow.