The agency at Juvisy, although everything was still invisible, became a center of attention. Innumerable supplications were deposited in the letter-box of the only door opening into the warehouses. They solicited Caresco’s favor; they expressed the desire to seek refuge on his island. All the madmen, all the desperate individuals and all the adventurers in the world placed their petitions therein, and never received any reply. Sometimes, however, when the applicants were young and handsome, or capable by virtue of their knowledge or their genius of assisting the impetus of the new fatherland, after discreet enquiries had been made, they disappeared. Their families mourned them in vain; no material trace was ever found of their bodies, nor of their fortunes, if they were wealthy.
That was all that was known for sure about Caresco and his realm. Everything else that was said: the legend of the curious social organization built in his name; the marvels that the most powerful telescopes scarcely allowed to be discerned from far out at sea—for the potentate had forbidden any approach to his island for forty leagues around—was only rumor, sensational false news put out in order to raise the circulation of one-centime newspapers or to interest the readers of papers distributed gratuitously, which had become the custom of almost all dailies half way through the twentieth century.
So, Marcel Girard and Zéphirin Choumaque were equally ignorant of the land of ideal pretention of which Zadochbach’s card had so abruptly evoked the suggestion.
The latter did not seem to be rejoining in the effect that he had just produced, and continued eating.
“Yes, Monsieur Girard, if you consent, I shall take you to Eucrasia. My master’s genius has edified society there in such a way that happiness is absolute, whatever Monsieur Choumaque might say in denying the possibility; and other amours—and what amours, Messieurs!—will soon have banished the memory of the beautiful Hélène.”
“Oh, Master, Master, not to suffer any longer!” said Marcel, suddenly possessed by that mirage.
“It would be the most unfortunate thing that could happen to you, my friend!”
“Stupid!” muttered Zadochbach, addressing himself to Choumaque—and then, more insistently, to Marcel: “Not to suffer any longer! To forget! To enjoy, perpetually and uniformly. Say the word...”
“What do you think, Master? Will you go with me? You know what a lamentable state my heart is in! Hélène, after all her treasons, would like to get me back, and I’ll succumb again, I know it! Think about the mire she’s dragged me through! Think about what she might drag me through yet! Departure, forgetfulness, is the cure!” Marcel, hypnotized by the hope, was carried away.
But at the condition imposed by the young man, desirous of bringing his friend, the Representative frowned.
“Choumaque, coming with you? Pooh! What do you expect us to do with that old windbag in Eucrasia? Anyway, I’ll have to refer the matter to Caresco. Send me a written request at Juvisy, and we’ll see. Perhaps you’ll receive instructions...”
“You’ll accept, Master?” the pupil insisted. “I beg you, don’t abandon me—accept!”
“I’m a Stoic. I’m stoical enough to consent not to suffer any longer, if that’s possible, although it’s inconceivable. And then, to see Eucrasia…that’s truly tempting...”
“It would be necessary,” Zadochbach observed, “for you to abandon your entire fortune.”
“A sage can lose everything without suffering any damage, because all the wealth he has is internal,” said Choumaque sententiously. Then he added: “It’s true that I have nothing to lose, having no luggage but my wardrobe…and even that is in dire need of renewal.”
The Representative had finished eating. They stood up in order to put on their overcoats—but while their backs were turned, Zadochbach disappeared, forgetting to pay for his meal, for which Marcel scrupulously settled the bill.
CHAPTER II
A magisterial flap of wings lifted the airplane toward the superior spheres. Now they were soaring through the azure, so high, so distant from the world, so far beyond terrestrial phenomena that, looking over the bulwark, from which it was still visible, the little Haitian continent seemed a derisory patch in the uniformly green expanse of the Atlantic. Soon it was not even that; the balloon entered into the most intimate communion with space.
Everything expanded in the infinitely calm purity, in the splendidly blue serenity of celestial space; there would have been an enormous silence if the muted rhythm of the propellers and the maneuvers of the crew, obedient to the shrill voice of an invisible captain, had not disturbed the gravity of the voyage.
“Damn! The cold’s beginning to bite, don’t you think, Choumaque?”
“Indeed, the sun is no longer having much effect. I feel as if needles were digging into my flesh.”
“Let’s go back to your cabin, Master. It’s warm there...”
“No, my boy, I experience some pleasure in suffering, Besides which, this spectacle is truly too new, and that immensity gives us, for once, too exact a notion of the infinitesimality of our human being, if I might put it thus, for me not to prefer to let myself be stabbed by the temperature for a few more minutes. Tighten your overcoat, and let’s stay.”
And Choumaque, leaning his elbow on the sandalwood rail, allowed the interrogation of his fatigued gaze to flee into the void.
As for Marcel, he raised his head boldly, gazing at the enormous ovoid fabric that contained the ascensional gas. It was painted red and dotted with little golden vibrions—the color and the symbolic insignia of the realm for which they were heading: spermatozoids and ovules, against a background of blood. In addition, the carapace was enveloped by a network of aluminum wires, almost invisible, joining together at their lower extremity and then separating again to attach to the nacelle.
The latter, in the same elongated form adopted by the balloon, was as big as a settlement, three hundred meters long and fifty broad. Its bow and stern were ornamented with the same sculptural image: a naked woman extending her arms to support two searchlights, which set the immensity ablaze on dark nights, and competed with the light of the stars on clear ones.
The metallic hull was divided into two parts. One, more modest although still luxurious, was reserved for the crew, the engines and the cargo; the other, more sumptuous, offered an extraordinary comfort to the passengers: profound alcoves; a library full of rare books; a theater in which the best orchestras gave concerts; steam baths; richly served tables; and enigmatically closed boudoirs decorated with magnificent fabrics, in which lovely courtesans lying on soft divans awaited the pleasure of the male and female passengers. Refined satisfactions of the senses, intellectual pleasures, intoxications of impressions—all were united there, within those light metal walls; everything offered an exquisite augury of the land of Eucrasia toward which the airplane was headed, and to which it belonged.
At that moment, however, Marcel was scarcely thinking about such things, or of the three days of travel that he had just undertaken without savoring them, absorbed as he was by his amorous memories, His curiosity would have lingered all the more willingly in the study of the invisible machinery of the engine-room, access to which was strictly forbidden to strangers.
He admired the power of the two immense gilded wings attached to the sides of the nacelle, reflecting in their movements the enigmatic force that animated them. Collecting the harsh rays of sunlight, which subsequently spread out in the atmosphere, they fluttered like the wing-feathers of a gigantic bird, rising and falling in aerial strides, or where sometimes content to deploy, without apparent effort, to follow the fluid stream that bore them along.
Beneath the shiny mahogany deck, the dull rhythm of the engines was audible, the beat of the mechanical heart that powered the wings. To maneuver, the slim, handsome crewmen whose muscles bulged harmoniously went back and forth, almost naked, obedient to the orders of a reedy voice emitted by an unseen individual. One of them, a gracious youth as pretty as a girl, provoked the laughter of his comrades by
performing a masterly somersault.
Marcel gazed at all that admiringly He thought about the genius that had so marvelously perfected the aerial locomotion, and who, down below, reigned as master in the Isle of the Blessed. At the idea that he was about to get close to him, perhaps to see him, he felt a grave emotion, further increased by the legend that the journalists of the entire world had surrounded the extraordinary man for so many years, and by the mysterious contract that he had made with the potentate through the intermediary of Zadochbach.
The engagement they had made to become his subjects and separate themselves irrevocably from the rest of the world had seemed so strange that he had not been able to believe it until the last moment. Their preparations, the liquidation of their fortunes that had been demanded of them by the Representative, and the farewells to their friends, had been accomplished as so many implausible actions of suggestion. It was not until they found themselves at the appointed rendezvous at Juvisy that they had remarked the avidity with which Zadochbach had taken possession of their money, and the disdain with which he had rejected their luggage—Marcel’s weapons and trinkets, Choumaque’s books and pipes. It had been necessary, finally, for them to see the hangar and board the airplane to convince themselves that they were not obedient to a fiction.
Then, the departure had taken place, in a mysterious and magnificent take-off by the aircraft, so different in its mechanism from the balloons currently employed that Marcel had forgotten the initial sadness of exile and the unknown. The large gilded wings had emerged from their aluminum elytra, the mechanical heart had begun its muted regular palpitation, and the beacons had lit up splendidly. They had passed through the clouds, soaring through space at a fearful and immeasurable velocity.
They were the only passengers.
For three days, the captain, of whom nothing was heard but his shrill orders, had remained invisible. At the end of the third day—the previous day—they had landed in an unknown country, on a solitary beach, to pick up a third person who was also being expatriated, a woman this time.
As it was dark, the two friends had only seen her elegant silhouette, quickly eclipsed by a private cabin. The graceful image of the unknown woman, her undulating gait, her rather tall stature, marvelously sheathed in a long traveling coat—an entire ensemble of noble grace and harmonious strength—had lulled Marcel to sleep. He remembered, however, the charming gleam of her dark eyes, which, struck by the artificial light, had seemed to him to be full of a mirage of energy and youth. He had compared them with the depraved eyes of the other, the woman for whom regret was still engraved by acid in the silvering of his memory and branded by an iron on his arm.
The parallel had immediately turned to the disadvantage of the former mistress, and in the morning, on awakening, Marcel was no longer thinking about anything but making the acquaintance of the mysterious stranger and discovering whether the reality conformed to all the suppositions, and even unadmitted hopes, that his imagination had engendered.
The cold had become less sharp. A splendid sun set the zenith ablaze, so close that the two friends felt its proximity—although it seemed to retreat again when they looked down at the ground. They breathed in large lungfuls of the gilded air, rarefied at this height, which the oxygen vents opening in the deck charged with the element essential to life.
The airplane’s wings, after rapid movements of descent, when they were deployed vertically, rowed without their speed diminishing. The apparatus combined the effects of lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air flight; Marcel admired the effect without understanding the technicalities. He was about to share his astonishment with his companion when a small high-pitched voice coming from behind them, without them having heard anyone approaching, surprised them and caused them to turn round.
“Glory to the Superman! May he favor you with an operation, Messieurs!”
One might have wondered whether the person who had just addressed those words to them was really human, or whether he might be the clever result of some prestidigitation, presenting by the play of mirrors an individual deprived of part of his body. But no: the light was too harsh, the glare of daylight too sincere, for a phantasmagorical apparition to be able to manifest itself. After a moment’s attention, Marcel and Choumaque were obliged to recognize the positive verity of the phenomenon before them.
It was a legless man, posed on a silently-wheeled pedestal equipped with a deflector reminiscent of a locomotive’s cow-catcher, the sight of whom was at least as extraordinary by virtue of the indescribable complication of his physiognomy as the contours of his anatomy. His torso was swathed in a kind of green leather sheath bolted to the pedestal, and that armature, hermetically sealed, only opening on the right side, to give passage to a single arm, and at the neck, to let through the head.
The latter, covered with abundant black hair, exposed two large appendages whose splayed funnels stretched and pricked up at every sound, in perpetual movement, like the ears of dogs, which bristle at the most imperceptible events. The eyes were invisible, hidden by a cage fixed at the base to the nose, reminiscent of a pair of binoculars. But what secured the originality of the face most of all was the complete absence of a lower jaw. The curve of the jaw and the chin were, in fact, replaced by clean-shaven skin, a kind a glabrous membrane forming a plane that extended to the lower lip, partly opening an entirely toothless mouth.
That disposition must have succeeded a surgical operation, for two semicircular seams circumscribing the cheeks, persisted, designing on that improbable mask a smile that a perpetually-satisfied fish might have traced.
The individual in question, therefore, presented aspects of the human, the animal and the mechanical, and his appearance would certainly have provoked fear if it had not been hilariously ludicrous.
On remarking the impression that he had made on the two passengers, he became even more cheerful, accentuating the pleat of his two seams, and his piercing voice became audible again.
“I astonish you, Messieurs…I can divine your surprise. Permit me, first of all, to introduce myself; I’m the captain of the airplane, and you see in me the happiest man in the world.”
A little bell ringing inside his support structure immediately interrupted him, however. In spite of a keen desire not to cut short the surge of his confidences, he put his only hand to the receiver of a telephone hooked on to his stand and applied it to his upraised ear. He appeared to be following a distant conversation, replying to it in words incomprehensible to the two passengers.
Then, replacing the acoustic device on its hook, he said: “Isn’t wireless telegraphy marvelous, Messieurs? I announce, two hours in advance, at a distance of six hundred leagues, your arrival in Eucrasia. In that regard, I mustn’t forget to give you some information about the country where you’re going to live. But what was I saying…?
“I remember: I was making my profession of faith and declaring to you that I’m the most contented man in the world. No, not man—for, thanks to the Superman, I have the joy of being more than a man. Let’s say that I’m the happiest soul! My soul remains to me in its entirety, although I’m ready to give it to the Superman if he ever has the whim of asking me for it and has the means to take it, in order to put it in a sealed box.”
“Pardon me,” said Choumaque, but who do you mean by the Superman?”
“You haven’t guessed? Super, above—the man who is above humanity: that’s Caresco, almost God.”
Paying no heed to the astonishment of his passengers, the captain seized an ivory back-scratcher suspended beneath his torso and plunged it into his sheath through the opening at the neck. One might have thought that he was calming the misdeeds of some insect.
“Excuse me,” he said, “my scars are itching. Let’s go on, Messieurs. I’ve known the Superman for nearly fifty years, but I dare say that he knows me much better, since there’s no fold, no secret corner of my organism, to which he hasn’t acceded in order to modify it for the better.
“In 1900 or hereabouts my mother brought me into the world with four legs. We weren’t rich; I might have been able to exhibit myself in fairgrounds and earn my living honorably. It was then, fortunately for me and the family, that the surgeon Caresco appeared at my cradle and laid out twenty thousand francs on my swaddling-clothes, in order to have the right to remove my superfluous limbs.
“The operation took place before a select audience, made up of scientists, artists, royal highnesses and even a few great courtesans. It caused a great sensation…I was already famous, and I didn’t die. The following year, however, a tumor appeared in my left knee. My family hoped at first that it was one of the excised limbs growing back. At ten thousand francs a leg, you see...
“But no, it was only a tumor. It quickly became so large that my surgeon decided to extract it, and in order for it not to recur, he cut off the leg with it. That was the second operation.
“At about the age of ten, when I was beginning to reason a little, I found the flagrant inequality between the two sides of my body shocking. I was then suffering from a bad corn on the sole of the foot that remained to me, which became inflamed when I walked, and I begged my benefactor to rid me of that painful affliction. To my great joy, he consented to cut off my last leg. That was the third operation.
“From then on, I was totally committed to him, and entrusted a few more things to him for extraction. Then came the era in which Caresco decided to emigrate to the Isle of the Blessed and found a State there. The idea that he was going to leave me drove me crazy. I expressed my despair to him. Behold his generosity, Messieurs! He took me in his luggage—me, a poor, useless thing, devoid of legs!
“He’d always imposed the condition on me of not procreating, to which I willingly agreed, delivering my genital organs to him, which he removed with a flick of the wrist. That was both the most helpful of his actions, and the sanest of my determinations—because, Messieurs, one doesn’t suspect how useless, wasteful and sometimes painful those organs are.
Caresco, Superman Page 3
