“At least they have the satisfaction of having done their duty,” I remarked, “and the pleasure of secretly repeating to themselves that the cultured pearl is always a pearl, even in the obscurity of its closed shell. The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savoured in silence …”
“No,” she replied, “it’s not the same. Vile souls like nothing better than the ostentation of their vileness. It brings them that esteem to which they are so fully entitled; silence and obscurity render them inconsolable.”
Having thus struck up a conversation, I asked her to tell me her name.
“I am a stone and a flower; I am hard and perfumed; I am transparent and sensual; I am coarse and I am gentle; I am two and I am one. Am I named for the stone or for the flower, in being named Hyacinthe?”
“O gem of perfume, O flower adamantine; I hear only the music of paradise in the fresh syllables: such a delicate sensuality; such fraternal eyes, where a kiss might linger in the hope of drinking a marvellous ether!”
We watched the games which our peers played, so dissimilar to the play of our own dreams. We explored the astonishment of our antipathy, without taking pride in the sad vanity of our exile.
“Do you find pleasure in living?” I asked.
“Oh, so very little!” she replied. “So little that I cannot tell whether I really live at all. I am discouraged by the monotonous uniformity of my days, like a musical scale devoid of melody. I have long dreamed that some redemption might fall upon me from on high, from the very highest, and I would be direly grateful for any divine pain which might hazard to pierce my heart and awaken my soul. But I remain untouched; I am not numbered among the chosen.”
“The choice of martyrdom is made by the martyr – but why should one desire it? Take pleasure in your dreams, and in your flesh. If someone were to speak your name with love, would you not be joyful?”
“Yes, to have given joy. But with what object? Were I to love, I would crave such extraordinary extremes of sensuality that eternity itself would be jealous of my ephemeral flourishing.”
“Eternity is not jealous; it is protective. The shelter of its permanence is open to every significant act: it is the palace of symbols. Inaccessible to the egoistic vanities of everyday gesture, pitiless of negative prejudices, it has a charitable welcome for all those spirits which play host to the Spirit of Love. But all around that palace, there are pools of absolute sterility: those who deny life fall into them; and even the formicary of putrefaction is denied to them; they become the nothing that they wished to be, and sleep eternally in the sterile pools.”
“A palace without perfume and without flowers! Where are the flowers?”
“They are painted on the walls.”
“But they are dead!”
“No, they are living – like thoughts.”
Hyacinthe became still while these ideas agitated her soul. She stood against the background of a great tapestry where pale shadows moved. Again she said: “They are dead! They are painted on the wall! Sometimes, I seem to myself to be painted on a wall, dead – no more alive than a faded thought, or those apparitions which pass me by, like those which are all around us now! They are always around us, are they not? Am I any different from the pale shadows on that dead tapestry? You dare not declare that I am alive, do you? You dare not, for fear of being deceived.”
“The privilege of living! But you will be the only one, Hyacinthe, the only one among your peers! You will only live for the one who will make you suffer – and that may not always suffice. O madwoman, more primitive than the abolished goddesses of old, what ambrosia of divinity do you believe that you might drink through the innocence of your blue eyes? Even Christ could only have life at the expense of suffering and death: he came to demand with a barbarous candour the crucifixion of his chosen flesh; beneath the whips, the crowning thorns and the nails his holy blood gushed forth upon the pitiful rocks like fresh water upon a desert.”
“I desire to strengthen that shadow which I am,” said Hyacinthe, “I desire to verify myself, and to exalt myself. What does it matter whether the means to that end are the velvet wings of the Chimera or the rugged back of the Dragon? But … what exactly is it that I desire?”
“To abandon yourself.”
“Yes! And yet I love myself, if nothing else!”
“It is your destiny.”
“But do no injury to my will.”
DUPLICITY
We ventured towards the arborescence of the twisted pillars in the crypt of that gentle and discreet church where we heard the childish, welcoming voices singing psalms to the interiors of our hearts! There were shadows and flowers there; candles and incense; and there was a great silence: the inevitable silence of adoration and fear which falls when the Victim lifts herself up for consecration, beneath the folds of the Holy Shroud.
“Damase,” Hyacinthe said to me, “kneel down and be repentant of my faults, for I am sworn to belong to you. Take charge of my destiny, and accomplish it in accordance with the laws of the redemption.”
“Hyacinthe, I take upon my shoulders that burden which you lay down at the feet of Mercy.”
“I have abandoned myself, as you have demanded.”
“Entirely?”
“Am I twofold?”
“There is the flesh and the spirit.”
“I am neither flesh nor spirit: I am woman and phantom. I have become – that which you will make of me.”
“You have become that which you are; you will flourish according to the power of your own will. What can I do, save to pluck you, and make you sensitive to the value of the sap which flows from your wounds? To live is to deny all joy which is merely personal, and all selfish sorrow. The debauchery and pleasure of mere existence is the third sin, but it embodies the two others. Yes, entirely. You owe it to yourself to refuse neither that infinity which you have chosen by creating yourself, nor that finitude which you have selected from the multitude of sterile grains by loving yourself. Rejoice in the fecundity of adorations and smiles, and in the torture of being crushed in the wine-press in order that you might be drunk: the purest of wines, the dispenser of the finest intoxication. Entirely, O double virgin, most certainly. Be spiritualised, carnal beauty; and be realised, intellectual phantom.”
THE CHOIR: Procul recedant somnia
Et noctium phantasmata!*
“Listen to the conjuration of the voices prized for the purity of their slumber. Nightmares flee, dissatisfied and ashamed, their ugliness prisoned by cloaks the colour of night; and the terrified phantasms fall again into their caverns like heavy fumes. Go to sleep on my shoulder, charming formality of an essence I do not know; sleep, and you will have no dreams but the dream of dreaming.”
“I sleep.”
*Let the dreams and phantoms of the night recede into the distance.
INCENSE
The virgin territories of her soul came to know the astonishment of having admitted an utterly unknown explorer. He had amicable ways of insinuating himself: an air of gentle impertinence, the plausible gestures and the disconcerting aplomb of a person who knew his own strength. He measured precisely the consequences of his audacious coup.
Hyacinthe wondered how she had previously been able to utter and listen to such insanities in relation to matters of spiritual delight. Everything was now becoming clear! Rays of light penetrated her closed eyelids; her intellect, freed from doubt, soared like a bird of dawning in an atmosphere of dazzling limpidity. She understood that all the verities, even the most immemorial, were converging towards a central point in her flesh; and that her mucous membranes, in some ineffably mysterious fashion, were gathering into their obscure folds all the riches of the infinite. For one almost-eternal instant she became convinced that her own essence had absorbed and forever taken possession of the essence of everything; this was a possession and a joy so excessive that she fainted.
On her awakening, however, she felt nothing but a great lassitude and an insupportable fear
of having been duped. She separated herself without rancour from the chimerical explorer, and pledged to him a certain amity, befitting a companion in a great but fallacious adventure.
I, holding the experience in higher regard, had desired to effect in her a transposition to the minor key of my personal and voluntary illusions. I was pained by the impression that nothing had become manifest in her except surprise. Afterwards she displayed, just as she had before, the sadness of having lived so little; if the sadness was different, it was only that ignorance had been replaced by deception.
I disputed this, but the sensation was already so remote and so confused that she replied, with that simple frankness permitted by the nobility of our spirits: “It’s not much better than eating a peach.”
Because sexual pleasure, except that of brute beasts, is only the echo and the resonance of pleasure given, my enjoyment was diminished to the negligibility of the casual refreshment which one might take by plucking a fruit which hangs over a wall while one is out walking – and I doubted the legitimacy of such a defloration.
She acknowledged that there was certain truth in her memory of a flight through the ether – but it was so vague! In the end, by the repetition of similar experiences, her memory was suitably fortified, and she was able to confirm my divination.
“But it doesn’t last forever,” she added. “However brief or extensive it may seem, the moment is nothing but a moment.
“But nothing exists except moments! One needs only to accept that to capture infinity in a kiss!”
“And then what?”
We began all over again.
Our love-making was physically satisfying, but its aftermath was a humiliating sensation of having achieved happiness through unconsciousness. These stimulations were necessary; they became habitual and we gave hardly any thought to them, outside of each moment itself. We had tried in vain to invest our ceremonies with poetry. They took place in a private chapel at night, to the singing of little girls: liturgical mysteries reverently assisted by an ancient bishop not much given to simony, immediately installed under the umbrella of an absolute venerability, in an old house closed to the commonplace: but there was nothing of the sublime, no extraordinary extremes of sensuality!
Hyacinthe was the daughter of a race which had been dead to the world for centuries. She was an autumnal flower, the last of her kind; she accumulated in her scent all the spirit of the lingering sap, but the youth of her complexion was tinged with something unaccomplished, for want of sufficient sun, like that of a rose leaning over a river of shadows. When she walked, it was as if she were enveloped and carried along by a breath of mystery which played in her blonde hair, like the breeze which lifts and animates the trailing tufts of the guelder-roses along the hedgerows of October.
Condemned by the pallor of her nature to perpetual deception, she suffered only for an instant before becoming resigned. I, on the other hand was fully able to understand the folly of continually trying to realise those alluring dreams – exaggerated by imagination to the status of external realities – which fell away whenever I put out a hand to harvest them.
This was cause for desolation, to be sure, but one fit only for children; the frequent repetition of such failings, however, gradually ruined my innate confidence in being alive. Soon the hand was no longer advanced, so certain was I that it could not come back otherwise than empty.
Contrary to popular belief, such a state of mind is an acquisition rather than a loss; once having arrived there, a man has understood the utter uselessness of movement; he confines himself within himself, qualified at last for serious and authentic existence. He no longer interests himself in anything but thought; his relations with the world are reduced to the strictly necessary, to the urgent maintenance of the material substratum, and all the matters which move individuals and nations, are immediately reduced to the meaningless transactions of an anthill.
Hyacinthe was able to take these ideas aboard: she accepted them, and, scornful of everything else, we occupied ourselves with ourselves, and with the infinite.
For ourselves, there was love. Spiritually, we could only find ourselves in God, after having climbed the mystic mountain, there to suffer crucifixion upon the cross of the eternal Jesus. It was that which I had promised to Hyacinthe, and it was that which she believed that she desired.
Physically, not all the grains of profane incense had been burnt. I did not wish to condemn one who had put her trust in me to eternal ignorance of an art so generally esteemed, and I unveiled to her all its secrets, wishing that they might inspire repugnance in her.
Curiosity sustained her in this trial, and we methodically exhausted all the articles of the gnostic gospel, without our health being noticeably weakened:
“Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be,” she said to me one day, “but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different from the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless, three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?”
“In order that you should indeed be truly devoid of carnal hope, so that you would know the humiliation of having an insatiable and deceptive sexuality.”
“If we go on this way, I will come to despise you.”
“Hyacinthe, your adorable body fills me with horror.”
“Damase, your perverse lips sicken my sight, when I see them – afterwards!”
“Your profile is a perpetual joy to me.”
“Damase, do you remember when our souls were on better terms – in the mornings of our love?”
“Yes, and you were pure – as pure as the silence!”
“Give it back to me, my primordial purity.”
“Confession is purifying, Hyacinthe. Set forth your shame in words, and it is no more.”
A VOICE: Hostemque nostrum comprime
Ne polluantur corpora*
“The Word is immanent in the air – and the air, now and then, condenses it in speech. The thought of invisible guardians is always present, all around us, and the circling of their wings affords us the protection of their charity. Such beings know our wishes, and realise them when they are not abnormal. They have the power to reach out a metaphorical hand and the voice is often a great helper: they will make it heard if necessary. The enemy is thus cast out of our community, and our bodies are spared any stain – in the future, in the present and in the past!”
“And in the past!” said Hyacinthe. “That which is done can be undone! Even so, I would like to remember. I would like to keep the memory of moments when you penetrated my flesh for the glorification – vain, but luminous – of my womanly sensibility. For, after all, if I am slightly less of a phantom than I was, I owe it to corporeal insistence, and on that count, I have sinned. And I am hardened too by the memory of your unconsciousness, and of all our gestures of love, and above all of that first and so fearful abandonment, of the kiss upon my eyes, of the gauche manner of self-defence against the joy of understanding, of the joy of the bitter apple which we ate together, like children – which, when it is eaten is finished! And after all, whether it be illusion or not, I love you!”
Hear my sighs, O Lord; my sighs have broken the seven strings of the viol, but I shall make seven more with my seven desires.
Hear my words, O folly; your words have broken the strings of my heart, but I shall make seven more with your seven sighs.
“You delight me, Hyacinthe, more than the perfume of the seven roses which are the seven sensualities; the roses are dead, but you still live – oh my love! Yes, as you have said: entirely! Why grieve for the failure of the real? Why not take pleasure, even if it be absurd, in deceptive caresses? We know that the sensation gives nothing, but why should we not amuse ourselves with that nothing – which is everything in the brief moment when it bu
rsts upon our imagination – and remain frankly contradictory, in order to have the power of smiling within ourselves on tragic occasions.”
“Whether or not it is illusory, I love you,” repeated Hyacinthe. “And you love me, don’t you? In that case, let’s be agreeable to one another.”
She kissed me on the mouth, and we exalted ourselves with the best madness in the world.
*Restrain our adversary, lest our bodies be defiled.
THE ORGAN
“O adorable face which has rejoiced in the stable of the angels, the shepherds and the magi!”
Kneeling before nothing in the middle of her chamber, with her head between her hands and the unravelled innocence of her pale hair extending almost to her waist, she uttered this pious ejaculation in a voice of the utmost purity, having repeated it over and over again, as if it were the amorous strophe of a rosary.
I awaited the continuation; there was none. She picked herself up, smiled at me and said: “I pray for the sake of the music of the words. It is as if that phrase from an ancient book has a strong and gentle music of its own, which sets out to break the doors of negation and to reach, by means of the harmony of its vocal grace, the attentive ear of the Lord Jesus. Yes, attentive, to all that passes here: to the litanies of my secret punishments and the anxiety of making you joyful …
“And then, I think of that ancient woman: that Veronica whose good heart won her the privilege of a miraculous handkerchief. Oh, out of all the things that I have done, to move away from the contented crowd of spectators in order to come near to the one who is carrying his cross, and gently, as though with the hand of an angel, to wipe the sweat from the adorable Face! …
The Angels of Perversity Page 13
