Perhaps unable to believe, in the very depths of her being, that I was as nasty as I was making myself out to be, she lifted her terror-stricken eyes towards my own, searching for some fleeting spark of softness, some faint suggestion of precarious consolation. Pitilessly, though. I maintained the sad gravity whose slavery I had imposed upon the muscles of my face.
Kissing her on the forehead, I said: “The greater part of what I have said might be taken back – but the last, no.”
Suddenly, I felt the birth and growth within me of a diabolical idea – evoked, doubtlessly, by the specious words which I had earlier spoken.
I overturned Hyacinthe on the divan where she had fallen towards me, and I revelled in the dark pleasure of possessing a woman paralysed by terror.
Urgently twisting and turning, she passed from suffering to pleasure. Even in the midst of the music of sexual excitement, however, she did not entirely lose the discord of distress, which hovered in the balance between the unquestionable violence of her actual sensations and the fear that when the ecstasy was over the monstrous vice of my hatred might have caught her in its iron grip for all eternity.
I prolonged the experience most carefully, scrupulously judging the appropriate dosages of movement and hesitation, varying the rhythm of the love-making in order to maintain her state of uncertainty. Hyacinthe suffered deliciously, fearful of the contradictions which martyrised her happy flesh: dying of love in an infernal paradise.
In the end, her tears gushed forth in abundance. I drank them, as if they were precious pearls of blood.
*Will unaided by God is a feeble feather.
THE UNICORNS
When the crisis had passed, Hyacinthe having forgiven me – almost astonished that I needed forgiveness – we were swept resolutely along into the mystical forest, where there are no beasts more wonderful than the timid unicorns. Their skittish flight before her, in such a supremely disdainful manner, provided my lover with the perfect opportunity to regret the loss of her maidenhood. I explained to her that there was an evident merit in such regrets, which made a very fine glaze for her faded soul. Having understood that repentance might be an ornament superior to lost integrity, she consented to offer to Jesus the oblation of those pleasures which had compromised the inborn purity of her fleece.
Metaphor by metaphor we elevated ourselves to the mystery of the Sacrifice. My Love has been crucified. The mysticism which we accepted seemed to us to be the supreme dignity of the human soul, disdainful of requiring intermediaries between its own nobility and the infinite nobility of God, between its quotidian agony and the immortal agony of Christ. In accordance with these conclusions we decided that we would henceforth celebrate our own version of the mass, chanted in the theatre of our imagination by a priest and deacons chosen from among the most saintly persons raised by adoration to stand amid the leaded lights of stained-glass windows.
THE FIGURES
Bells, sacred vases, ointments, blessings and baptisms, trumpets and hammers of olden times, semantra and xylophones, balsams, hand-bells, sounding-brasses, cymbals, bells, sacred vases!
The entire hierarchy is summoned to assemble, from the lowest of the low, to those who will become equal in sanctity to the highest saints: all make the sign of the cross upon their breasts.
In the ritual washing, the dirtied holy water moans in the basin like an ocean of conjurations.
Wives, virgins, clerks, laymen: there are no more captive penitents beneath the symbolic fetter of a stone demon; there is no longer a choir of nuns, for the partition is overthrown and the virgin has lost the vanity of her state. There are no more grilles of tight mesh; the sanctuary has been opened. The priest is no longer required to be old; he is young, and his blond hair is gilded by a reflection of concupiscence in the eyes of unveiled matrons.
Only the Poor, in this liturgy, are taken to the door; their duty is to wail, in order that happy ears may be stricken with terror by the cry of eternal misery.
Sepulchres beneath the flagstones exhale an odour of permanent life; ossuaries, a radiance of stars. Reliquaries contain the dust of love.
The chrism has sanctified the altar – thus Christ purifies himself – and, like an imperial flower-bed beneath the aspergillum of the acolytes, the flames of the candles flourish.
The angels pray, simulating humanity according to the dictates of reason, for it is certainly true that they adore essential perfumes, that they have a taste for holy sweetness, that they hear inaudible speech. They are young, strong, free, more fecund than any human loins. They come forth naked, without corruption; if they are dressed at all, it is with the transparency of fire.
At the lectern of the pulpit, regally elevated, is another angel, attended by authoritarian angelic lions.
PRAYER
Jesus, the grains of incense burn in the censer: the Sacrifice catches light and the future offering is complete in desire. The Sacrifice catches light, and becomes smoke, and love extends its dominion over the panorama of the world. The Figures survey their accomplishments.
THE PRIEST: Henceforth, the holy water will be dirtied, and it will mourn for the incorruptible rosiness: bare your heads, for it is the tears of Jesus.
THE CHOIR: Holy Spirit, Spirit of the summits, Spirit radiant.
Spirit prodigious, Light!
Most bountiful consoler,
Most gentle host of souls,
Refuge from the darkness!
THE PRIEST: O Lord, as Thy Son accepted the burden of the flesh, so I cover my shoulders with the yoke of the chasuble. I will go up to the altar, I will go up to the altar of God, the giver of youth and happiness.
PRAYER
The right is the dignity of the King, but the left is reserved to love; it is there that one tastes the plenitude of excess. The hair of John the Baptist is the gentleness of unblemished souls; it receives into a faint heart the caresses of his Mother.
THE PRIEST: He will bless thee, the one for whom thou mortifiest thyself. So let it be.
PRAYER
The incense-boat is a ship, the grains of incense its crew; the incense-boat is a ship without sails or rigging; the incense-boat is a ship and its flanks are distended with gold. Blessed Virgin and Thurifer, you carry between your hands the barque of Saint Peter, as stable and profound as the breast of God. The incense-boat is a ship and the gold upon its flanks is the peoples of the world: the sacrament catches them and saves them and plunges them into the fiery furnace. The incense-boat is a ship and the censer is the furnace.
THE PRIEST: Perfume rises up above the roses, for roses wilt and wither, while their perfume is an incorruptible oblation.
THE CHOIR: Glory, glory, glory to the Holy Spirit.
EPISTLE
St Paul, Rom: 24*
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: … For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward one another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves the recompense of their error which was meet.
SEQUENCE
THE CHOIR: O staff and diadem of royal purple.
Thy gems have flourished with the prescience of elevation since the time when humanity was dormant in man.
O flower, thou hast not germinated from the dew, nor from drops of rain, and the air has not surrounded thee, but thou wert born upon a very noble staff by the endeavour of Clarity alone.
O staff, thou hast sprung forth all in gold, O staff and diadem of royal purple.
GOSPEL
At that time the Lord, interrogated by a certain Salomé on the time of his reign, replied: “When two become one, and when that which is outside will be as that which is inside, and when the male being upon the female there will be neither male nor female.” Salomé asked: “Until which time
will men suffer death?” The Lord said: “Until such time that you others, women, will give birth.” Salomé asked: “Have I done well, then, having not given birth?” The Lord replied: “Nurse all that is unripe, but suckle not that which hath bitterness.” And the Lord said further: “I come to demolish the labour of women, for their labour be generation and death.”
THE CHOIR. So let it be.
SERMON
God, we read in St Denis the Areopagite, is neither soul, nor number, nor order, nor grandeur, nor equality, nor similitude, nor dissemblance. He lives not, He is not life. He is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. He is not science, He is not wisdom, He is not unity, nor is He divinity, nor goodness. Nothing is known of Him but that He is; and He knows nothing of that which exists but that it is. He is not speech, He is not thought, and He can neither be named nor understood.
OBLATION
She has found that her inheritance consists of twelve baskets: twelve baskets of blessed bread.
The Figures are the guardians of mystery, and all the Figures are obedient to the Symbol.
Woman’s belly is a sacrificial altar, the first station of Calvary, the first dwelling chosen by the Host: obscure oblation, bloody prelude of Transfixion.
PRAYER
The paten carries peace.
Mary, haloed in red, lifts up to a purple dais the Infant-King, while two angels offer the stormy fumes of their censers. Jesus and the angels are similarly aureloed in blood, and in the blue sky gilded with stars thunderclouds are heaped up, the colour of anger and the colour of peace: the colour of blood.
ANTIPHON
The Lord laid himself down to sleep in his royal bed, but the balsam of my love has penetrated his slumber, and the Lord has risen up and said: “I will enter into the body as a good odour, and I will sleep there.”
THE ORGAN: From the gloom of profound exile, the soul with a single bound is exalted to the vivid blue of hope, and then becomes profuse with laudations the colour of the sun.
Glaucous waves surge in the abyss, and the ocean of fear rises up in green foam, but a hand appears upon the face of the troubled waters and an invisible censer distributes an abundance of violet fumes.
Human waves swell up towards the sky. Within the transfigured bodies hearts flutter like roses in the morning wind, and the eyes are amethysts of the utmost purity. Candid clouds disrobe breasts tremulous with love, and all rise up to heaven in the absolute whiteness.
THE CHOIR: O salutaris Hostia
Quoe Coeli pandis ostium*
PRAYER
Magic of terrifying supernaturality, O absolute power, invincible domination of words, marvellous function of syllables: Verba consecrationis efficiunt quod significant.*
ELEVATION
The host is elevated in the solar flames. The Lamb tarries and bleeds upon the earth.
THE PRIEST: Remember, Christ our Lord, the slumber of peace. Grant us the peace of the tomb and the sacred silence of the necropolis.
JESUS CHRIST: You will sleep in peace for three days, if you love me, and the stone of your tombs will break, and you will know Life, if you have known love.
PRAYER
Kisses are the settlers of ancient disputes; kisses are the pacifiers of the body.
COMMUNION
Flesh of the Sacrifice, Blood of Eternal Joy, be the maceration of my flesh and the appeasement of my blood. I will crucify my desires upon the cross of Calvary; I will crown my thoughts with the crown of thorns: I will drive into my side the lance of renunciation; I will drink the vinegar of derision and no pleasure will ever diminish my soul.
JESUS CHRIST: Pleasure ends in unity but the dolours are numbered seven times seven.
THE CHOIR: Compassion! Compassion!
JESUS CHRIST: All is accomplished.
THE PRIEST: Ite, missa est†
GOSPEL*
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Amen.
*Actually verses 24 and 26–7 – significantly omitting 25 – of chapter 1. Verse 25 reads: “Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” I have reproduced the verses as they appear in the Authorised Version. [FA].
*O sacrificial Victim, who opens the door of Heaven.
*The words of consecration bring about what they signify.
†Go, this is the dismissal (this is the formula which ends the Latin mass).
*These are the opening verses of the gospel according to St John; I have rendered them into the English of the Authorised Version.
LAUGHTER
We heard this mass sung in a Benedictine monastery, under a stained-glass window like frosted leaves fallen in the dew of dawn, amid the glory of white crucified with gold. Grace coursed from the blessed host when the monstrance was lifted above the wimples of the nuns, and we were blinded by the inexhaustible waves of the sacred blood of the Redemption.
We heard it sung, too, in the sepulchre of the Carmelites, amid the gloom further darkened by all the mournfulness of the grille and the veil – for there is no joy at all for those trapped in the flesh – and we fell to our knees, bruised by stupor and affliction, ready to beg forgiveness from these expiatresses of our pleasures, dying in perpetual agony. It seemed to us that to kiss one of those bare feet would be an act of indulgence and absolution.
“The obligatory exultation of the Benedictine,” Hyacinthe said to me, “is perhaps more frightful still. It requires of them a sumptuousness of the heart which is truly disconcerting. …”
“Yes,” I replied, “but the ideal of being glorious is less contradictory to human instincts. It is only a paradisal development of the universal tendency to open out and to enjoy. However, what you say is almost true: the joy of a nun contemplating the Resurrection is as far beyond the mediocrity of womanhood as the sacred sorrow of she who weaves in the perpetual night her own shroud and the shroud of Christ … Consider also how far away they are, these individuals who live among us and yet are strangers to the march of our lives. If we were more of our own time, Hyacinthe – you, plucked like an ancient flower from a Flanders tapestry, and I, who have abolished all contact between my soul and vulgar humanity – if we were truly of our time, the mere existence of a few hundred of these disdainful virgins would be an insult to our incontrovertible modernity. And in order not to be angered by these inoffensive fools who do not draw from life a single drop of alcohol or poison – for in our understanding they would seem like infants without experience, equally inapt in the joys of the bed, the table and the stage – and in order to leave no lingering doubt as to the advantages we enjoy as civilized citizens, we would force ourselves to laugh.”
At that point I took out of a box a large sheet of Dutch paper, where the hand of some primary schoolteacher had condescended to write for me a few precious lines – in which, I dare say, the soul of regenerated France is manifest:
Chamber of Deputies
Parliamentary Debates
Session of 9th December 1890
Official Account
M. B. “The Carmelites, a contemplative order (laughter to the left) …”
Hyacinthe was affrighted by the prospect of living under such a stupid dominion. We believed for an instant that the time predicted by Flaubert was upon us.
“But what does it matter?” I said, replacing the document in its box. “We are not responsible for these imbecilic claims; we suffer them and pass judgment upon them. As the bog engulfs and devours these brethren of ours we watch them descend – and when the tops of their heads sink beneath the surface of the mire, we shall place heavy stones there, lest the interior of the earth m
ight vomit them forth again in disgust. Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise!”
Hyacinthe calmed me by means of those secret ways which she shared with all creatures of love – and we slept.
I dreamt that in order to spare her the foulness of the present I had consigned her to the closure of Carmel. In the evening, at the hour of the office, I went into the night-chapel to listen to the voice of darkness – and in the chorus of the veiled voices of mourning, I distinguished the voice of my dear lover, dead and forever Hyacinthe.
Never did I have a more beautiful dream.
FLAGELLATION
In our study of mystical lore we sometimes encountered words which scandalised my loved one, but I interpreted them for her, with all the deference due to texts written by great saints. She learned that the caresses of my left hand, which were the first to be suffered, were proof of the acceptability of the sacrifice; while the caresses of my right hand comprised the entire bloody manual of love: the kiss of thorns; the touch of leaded whips; the adorable bite of nails; the carnal penetration of the lance; the spasms of death; the joys of putrefaction.
We meditated upon this nomenclature. Hyacinthe became overexcited, scornful of her corporeal appearance; and she decided to put her contempt to an actual test.
One evening, I was reading the life of St Gertrude, the patron saint of ingenious delights, whose divine caprice it was to replace with cloves the iron nails of her crucifix. I had reached the page where Jesus himself, in order to delight his wellbeloved, descends towards her, and taking her in his embrace, sings:
The Angels of Perversity Page 15
