The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3)

by André Couvreur

  Once alone in the studio, with the door securely bolted, they found no way to communicate at first, save with the tenderness of their gaze; he prolonging the blinking of his eyelids, as when he marveled at a spring morning; she, with her head bowed and her shoulders stooped, joining her hands as she did in the moments when she offered her soul to God.

  Finally, in a voice as contained as the prayer, she said: “Master, do you still want your servant?”

  “Need you ask, Nymph?”

  “Then I’ll resume my service right away.”

  She took off her elegant velvet hat and her bright gabardine coat. In order to show off the measure of his work, Tornada had kitted her out splendidly!

  Then she looked at the clock. Ten o’clock. Time to pose. Everything was ready: the brush, the palette and the easel bearing the incomplete woodland scene. What texture! What color! What effects, among those spreading branches, that limpid pool, that yellowing moss and those virginal lilies! There was nothing wrong with it—except, of course, the dryad.

  “Poor Master!”

  She retired behind the screen. Théophraste could hear the rustle of her silken dress; but that did not last. She reappeared, nude from neck to waist, the rest of her body undulating in the old sheet that she used while posing. She advanced toward the bay, automatically taking up a position in the light. All the radiance of the heavens dusted her impeccable flesh.

  “That’s good. Don’t move. Look up. A suggestion of merriment about the chops. I’m doing my Salon piece. Outside the competition, this time.”

  And Lapastille set about feverishly grasping the adorable, interchangeable, familiar face of the protectress of waters, woods and mountains.

  Two hours went by. She did not budge. Nor did he. The splendor of his dryad enthused him more than the observation that she was maintaining her pose so valiantly.

  When noon chimed, he threw his brush up into the air, caught it as it fell and shouted: “Is the grub ready?”

  Then, observing his mistake, he started to weep.

  Only then did he think of kissing her on the forehead.

  Chapter V

  A radiant June entered the dining room in waves, causing the crystal on the tablecloth to glisten, animating the characters in the Gobelins tapestry and bringing through the wide-open window the symphony of nature, chirping birds and equally sonorous young buds. It would have been summer in that small house in the middle of the Parc de Saint-Cloud, an abode of sweetness, repose, and tenderness, if, through a gap between the leaves and the flowers, a massive, enormous stone wall had not loomed up two hundred meters away, directly in front of the eyes of the diners, which could easily have been thought to be the wall of a recently-constructed fortress or some impregnable prison.

  The Lapastille family was finishing lunch. Around the table were: Théophraste Lapastille, the father; Mélanie, the mother; and then, on chairs of various heights according to their ages: Rubens, the eldest child, five years old, Rembrandt, the send, four years old; Fragonard, the third, three years old; Ruysdael, the fourth, two years old; and finally, in their wheeled crib, the youngest two, the twins, Fornarina and Bethsabée, born eleven months previously: half a dozen, no more—but soon to be augmented, it was evident, by a new recruit. And Théophraste had no intention of stopping such fine reproduction.

  The former painter—alas for his palette and brushes!—and the former nymph—alas for her studio poses!—had become, the former the general administrator and the latter the personnel director of Professor Tornada’s clinic, which had been necessarily transported in the wake of his fantastic scientific conquest into these few hectares of the Parc de Saint-Cloud, bought from the State.

  To tell the truth, these high positions did not demand, from the former, much in the way of administrative talents, gold flowing without measure and without control into the patronal hands, or from the latter, any disposition to brandish the rod, the personnel being entire composed of chimpanzees of an intelligence reinforced by Tornada and trained to replace humans in a service further simplified by machinery. Thus, sometimes, leisure permitted them to resume in secret some intoxicating communion with art.

  Mélanie no longer blushed in making her offering to Eternal Beauty by extending her nudity below the waist, and Théophraste rediscovered in his model, in spite of repeated maternity and her concern to nourish each new infant, the virginal maintenance of form and the visage uniquely powdered by health obligatory for the protectresses of woods, waters and mountains.

  They had reached the dessert of the meal common to all the staff—including the chimpanzees—an entremet cake that the children were coveting with all the gleam of their little blue eyes, the blue of cornflowers.

  The general administrator raised his voice.

  “Nymph, do you know what day it is?”

  “You’re asking me? It’s the twelfth, the anniversary of our marriage. A red letter day in my life, my Phraste!”

  “An Arc de Triomphe in mine!”

  “Five years already! Time flies!”

  “And so do we, damn it! We soar in eternity, with this rabble!”

  Mélanie gazed amorously at her progeniture. She did not discriminate between them, but, the twins being the weakest, she looked a little more fondly at them. She had obtained them with difficulty, according to Tornada, who had brought them into the world, and had been obliged, at one moment, to deploy a battery of his fluid.

  “Come on! Let’s send for some champagne?”

  “It won’t do me any harm?”

  “Bah! One glass...”

  Mélanie wiped away a little milk regurgitated by Bethsabée and rang.

  Chuia-a, the chambermaid, a sturdy she-ape, came running. As she reached the door, in order to come in, she stood up straight on her hind legs, which, with her light dress, her white apron and her lace bonnet, completed the image of a soubrette. With her profound and keen eyes beneath the bulging brow, her muzzle, scarcely flattened and definitively depilated in its surroundings, she was no uglier, in sum, than the majority of the daughters of Eve. In order to adapt her intellect to her functions, Tornada had grafted on to her a fragment of cerebral substance obtained from a hotel-keeper, and it seemed that the heritage in question favored her aptitude for serving the Lapastille household. Only the power of speech was lacking. The surgeon had thought briefly about also endowing her with a speech center, but he had preferred, in the final analysis, to give his friends the inestimable gift of mutism.

  Mélanie had only to show her the champagne glasses; she brought what was required to fill them. The liquid merriment foamed. The children had a tiny share. Théophraste even provoked a grimace from the twins by placing a gilded drop on their lips.

  “Phraste, that’s not permitted!”

  “What’s not permitted,” said a voice at the window, “is drinking without me!”

  “Come in, then, old Nada!”

  “I will!”

  The short legs and great beard of the chief leapt through the window—a veritable acrobatic feat, considering the height of the window, the encumbrance of various parcels containing gifts for the children and the whip tucked in his armpit, but in all his manifestations the man was surprising and extravagant. Now living with him and under his orders, however, the Lapastilles had mastered the principles for possible frequentation. When they saw his eyes wild, his tics unchained and his hand foraging in his beard, they knew that it was better to steer clear of him On the other hand, when his trepidation eased, his eyelids fluttered and he smoothed his beard or arranged it in pleasant curls, that was the moment to talk business with him.

  As for what he became in the course of his ardent scientific practices and in his operating theater, where he transformed human being, it would have been necessary to ask Dr. Trefond and a few chimpanzees, his only aides in such circumstances. No one, moreover, obtained anything but total silence from them; the chimpanzees being naturally mute and Dr. Trefond having been rendered so by a suppression of
the vocal cords demanded by Tornada and carried out on the first day of his entrance into his employ. That measure ensured the secrets of his sorcery, concurrently with the insurmountable walls and an absolute prohibition on communication with the outside world.

  In any case, the most active agent of human renovation, the serum, was prepared in Tornada’s special laboratory, in the shelter of the colossal walls, devoid of windows and with no other access than an iron door defended by murderous fluids, in which the scientist always worked alone.

  Resigned to the master’s psychology, Théophraste deployed his affectionate solicitude in a skillful manner. He was able to bring his nervous oscillations back to the neutral point by bringing him home. The Lapastilles’ hearth was, for Tornada, a place of calm and relaxation, an oasis.

  The surgeon immediately lent himself to the clear gaze of the children, whom he adored as much as he was capable of loving human beings. He remained pensive before their awkward gestures, and listened to their babble as if to music—a contemplative state that, admittedly, rarely lasted longer than a few minutes, but which provoked a joyful reaction thereafter, when his crazy wit took over. For the parents he rediscovered his medical-student humor and his mental somersaults, to which Théophraste riposted merrily. At such moments, one would not have thought that one was face to face with a man whose discoveries were changing the world.

  This time, however, he paid less attention to the children. He was preoccupied by his work. He asked for a glass of the blonde liquid and a slice of cake, and spoke while chewing.

  “I haven’t had lunch. I’ve been operating since five o’clock this morning. I’ve only just finished. Thirty-three macrobiotized11 on the table—and I’ll begin again this evening. Mostly facile, but I had a stroke of bad luck with one of them. An aortic aneurism, would you believe, old Phraste! At ever seric installation the devil went off again, like a pendulum clock that restarts, tic-tock, tick-tock, for two seconds, and then stops again. It took four injections for him to resist. Not easy, you know, to rummage around at the same time...

  “Then there are the cancers; there really are too many of them. I have to spend more time on cleaning out than transubstantiation. Micrococcus has insufficient action on neoplasms. Perhaps by shoving in a little more fluid…no matter, it’s an abomination. I’ll look into it. But there’s so much to do! Humankind is rotting! Then again, I also have to do Jhuisi’s lumbar puncture. He’s a delightful orangutan, but I’m killing him, poor thing. Already he has no liver; I gave it to a manufacturer from Perpignan. I’m killing him. Me too, with this workload. This evening, tonight, twenty more subjects. Oh…how are things with you?”

  He was not sated; he eyed the cake covetously. “Can I have another slice? Not bad, this composite. It’s 103, made with my electric autocooker, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “I beg you, Nymph, not to call me ‘Master’ any longer. You know the effect it has on me. I think I’m a member of the Institut, and then I want to vomit, like an ectoplasm. Just call me Nada. ‘Old Nada’ is for Phraste. More composite, please. Wonderful! Oh, it’s nice here.”

  He had another glass of champagne to wash down the slice of cake, which he had stuffed into his mouth almost all at once. Then, when words could get through again, the torrent of his ideas resumed their flow.

  “Too much success. It’s going to be necessary to organize things differently. I’m no longer sufficient to the task. Perhaps I can teach my method to a few select aides, reserving the difficult cases for myself. I’ll make them deaf mutes, obviously. But for the serum, you know, the juice, no one but me. What can the knife do without my Micrococcus? Oh la la, one can graft! Yes, I’ll get assistants—but what I also lack is personnel. As I dip into my chimpanzees, you see, I eliminate them. They’re so gentle, so supple, so intelligent! Do you remember, Nymph, when they tied you up? Well, I’d only showed them how to do that once. The pigs, you say? Yes, the pigs. But the pigs can only be used with regard to the gross organs. Ask them for brains, spinal cords, and it’s a waste of effort! Now, the longer it goes on, the more they bring me Ramollots and barbons at the end of their careers, senile drooling imbeciles with their tongues handing out.12 It troubles me, you know, that shortage of personnel...”

  Anxious, he addressed himself to Lapastille: “How many superior brothers are being sent from Borneo?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “And from Guinea?”

  “Six.”

  “That makes twenty-eight. Twenty-eight in a month! What are my trackers doing, then? I pay them three million a year for results like that! Oh no! Not on your life. I’ll get gorillas. I don’t like them; they’re unintelligent, incapable of adapting, they won’t render any domestic service, but they have their marrow! Gorillas, then—it’s settled. Make a note of that, Administrator. Write to Gabon this evening. Say that it’s for me. As for the personnel…”

  Mélanie calmly raised her voice. “Why not ask for nurses?”

  “Humans, in my house? That’s crazy, Nymph.”

  “Not, not so crazy. What could you have to fear from them, if their functions stop at the iron door? They’d never penetrate your rotunda, much less your laboratory. They wouldn’t do much more than saying hello and goodbye to the clientele. I think that by applying to the Red Cross, who have a selection...”

  “Perhaps, in fact...” Tornada stood up, and shook his shoulders. “The human viper in my house! Who would have believed it? Everything was going so well! At times, you see, my dears, I’m tempted to send the whole bazaar to the Devil! Oh, a little island somewhere, in the sun...”

  “You don’t have the right,” Mélanie protested. “You’re doing admirable work, unrealizable by anyone else.”

  Théophraste added his support. “You’ve become the primary force in the world, old Nada. You’ve increased the prosperity of the world be repopulating it. People charter steamers to come running to what the newspapers call the Park of Youth. Do you know what Sigmann, the showman, proposed to me yesterday? A lecture by you at the Opéra. He’ll offer you three million—in gold francs, naturally—to speak for three-quarters of an hour. My god, a million per quarter hour is a tidy sum. But as you already have too many—millions, that is—I said to him: ‘Monsieur Sigmann, Tornada’s time is worth more than that. When he wants to, he can earn fifteen million in fifteen minutes. Everyone is offering him their fortunes in order to continue living. And I, his administrator, Monsieur Sigmann, can no longer count his money. We only take it from the rich in order to pay the expenses of the poor people on whom we operate, and, Monsieur Sigmann, we haven’t yet squandered it all. Do you know, Monsieur Sigmann, that I’m going to be obliged to buy the platinum mines of Ulea?’”

  “You’re buying things” Tornada asked, indifferently. “What’s the point? Give it away, since you know that I no longer care about wealth, except for you and your inheritance.”

  “Oh, pardon me…I have that now, thanks to Uncle Louis’ savings. I have six kids, old man, and it’s not over yet, eh, Nymph? So, in fifteen years, that Pactolus, with the paintings...”

  Tornada shrugged his shoulders. A passion for art was, for him, mere semi-dementia. He sat down, picked up one of the twins like a parcel and sat her on his knee. His tormented face did not frighten the child, who plunged her hand into his familiar long beard. She was quickly imitated by her elders. Soon, Tornada was cutting capers with four riders pulling in different directions.

  “They’re trying to pull my hair out! No! Those microbes…!”

  But he cast them off almost violently. His laughter chilled, his brows furrowed. Further premonitory symptoms...

  “Do you know, Phraste, that others are poaching on your preserves?”

  “What others? What preserves?”

  “The Granives, of course. They’re said to be having a fourth child.”

  “So what? Isn’t my priority assured?”

  “You’re not there yet.”

  “I don’t
want talk about it anymore.”

  Tornada feared some treachery on the part of those competitors for the inheritance. Not against him; he knew that he was beyond reach. His sun had dissipated the darkness. Muted press campaigns had fizzled out. The contest of laboratories had concluded with his inevitable and worldwide triumph. Although, according to the information provided by his private police, Marcel Granive was working on a new biological poison, Tornada believed him to be quite incapable of achieving any realization. Ambushes might, however, be set for his friends. In fact, it was more to protect them than to obtain real services that he had taken them under his aegis, enrolled in his clinic.

  They would see. He swished his whip through the air.

  “Pay attention! Madame the directress of personnel and Monsieur the general administrator, I invite you to accompany me.”

  They went out through the front door. They took a shady path, retained from the old park, leading to the service sector. Tornada had placed himself between the two spouses, linking arms with them. The charm of the place ought to have restrained him from recriminations, but everything else acting upon him was contrary in its effect.

  “Oh, why is it that stupid humanity is so reluctant to let go? Are things so wonderful on this side of death? Or is it the unknown that frightens them?”

  Mélanie made the sign of the cross. Although her profound faith had been shaken by her physiological adventure, and she wondered how a man could acquire quasi-divine power, she remained faithful to her ideas about the afterlife.

  They reached the edge of the wood, and the slope of the terrain, deprived of trees, displayed the hospitable domain to them in single glance. Edified in accordance with Tornada’s plans, it was merely a cold succession of rectangular buildings, symmetrically disposed from the edge of the property to the fortress of sorts that was visible from the Lapastilles’ window: no concession made to architectural superfluity, but masses of concrete coiffed with slates, painted with an identification number and only possessing two subterranean gashes for an entrance and an exit. They gave the impression of vast mousetraps, or warehouses for precious materials, all the more so as an entire network of railway lines traversed them, converging, with the aid of junctions and points, on a single track leading to the fortress. No distinction existing between rich and poor, it was in these closed cages that the renovated were lodged in common, abandoned to their own nature with no further care, asleep for the duration of the time their scars required to heal.