Caresco, Superman

by André Couvreur

  Still kneeling, Choumaque gazed curiously at the reproduction in solid gold of that legendary instrument, so constellated with diamonds and precious stones that the eye was dazzled. He shivered at the idea that he was doubtless to serve as a further subject for experimentation in a matter of minutes. But the apparition of four brown-skinned women clad in light mauve veils with golden girdles, dotted with jewels, distracted him from his contemplation.

  They emerged from the Temple singing a slow chant; they came forward two by two, the couples united by garlands of flowers. The fabric of their costumes was so transparent that the philosopher could perceive the red stripe on their abdomen, the symbol of their status as courtesans. Madame Môme, adorned like them, was leading them, bearing a green onyx amphora on her shoulder in a hieratic gesture, while behind then, a boy was holding up a golden trident whose prongs were diamond-tipped.

  The cortege approached two pink pylons erected in front of the entrance. Golden vibrions ran along the steles in question, and their summits were emitting an odorous blue smoke. The High Priestess unrolled her ribbon of women and flowers around her, while the chanting continued, developing and amplifying, following a more rapid rhythm that carried the dancers away. Arms, legs, buttocks, breasts, hair and flowers crossed paths harmoniously; human corollas melted into the luminosity of petals. Then, when the performance was complete, the Priestess held out her amphora, the child plunged his trident into it and brought out a bloody morsel of flesh.

  The silence became complete before that action, of incontestable emotion. The quivering shed moved at the end of the pike, describing a semi-circle, was deposited in the scared fire, then sizzled, giving off a gush of brilliant flame, from which a dove took flight amid spirals of smoke. Then dances began again, impelled by a more vibrant harmony.

  “What does that signify?” Choumaque asked of his guide, who did not get to his feet.

  “Shut up, my dear Choumaque! Marjah replied, in a whisper, with a fearful gesture. “You shouldn’t speak here, for your voice might trouble the work of the Superman. However, as your surprise might dispose you unfavorably to the operation, I shall take the liberty of whispering an explanation of what you’ve just seen.

  “You’ve just witnesses one of the fundamental rites of our religion. The morsel of flesh that the fire has destroyed is a womb that Caresco has just removed. I would have told you that it was a male sex organ if the Holocaust, instead of being offered to the flame by a boy, had been given by a woman. In the latter case, it is gitons who accompany the ceremony, who dance and sing, covered with flowers, while it is a courtesan who sacrifices the organ.

  “Now, would you like to know the significance of the rite? Well, this is what our dogmas inform us, which is the truth: the metempsychotic succession never ends. There is in the world a strictly limited quantity of male attributes and female attributes, which evolve in their destination, changing being without changing sex. If one is destroyed, a replacement is immediately engendered elsewhere. This morning, for the harmony of his people, Caresco must have sacrificed one of these organs. Before death can occur in the freshly-extracted tissue, he has it burned, and the dove emerging from the flames represents the essence of the new sexual organ, going to attach itself in another location, in a new-born individual.”

  Marjah stood up after having spoken. The expression of gravity etched on his face indicated his blind acceptance of what he had just said.

  The man is a believer, Choumaque thought, but what I admire most is not his credulity; it’s the power of the Superman, who is able to have such nonsense admitted. Caresco is a great joker, unless he’s a great madman. I imagine that he’s more likely a joker, since he has understood that the religious dream is useful to the submission and happiness of the inferior souls that are the generality. In sum, his doctrine is worth as much as the one my curé taught me—but how I prefer the Stoical conviction of the great Seneca, who wrote an immortal text on the brevity of life!13

  Now Marjah was hurrying his companion toward the entrance. The women moved aside, laughing, to let him pass. The neophyte’s silhouette amused them, although the latter attempted to hide from the ridicule beneath the amplitude of his peignoir. Madame Môme’s gaze appeared to him to be less cruel than that of her younger and prettier companions, however.

  “Courage, Zéphi,” she murmured, as he went past her.

  That greeting from his former mistress fortified his heart as he penetrated into the Temple. He was able to admire the cold order of the first room that followed the atrium, the white tiling through which wound little streams of blood, the complicated tubing running along the oval jasper walls, and the glass display-cases containing instruments of a purely retrospective interest, since the Superman no longer employed anything but his Carescoclast, and had not done so for thirty-five years.

  As he cast his eyes over the display-cases, he noticed that the little implements seemed to be welcoming him amicably and smiling at him with their metallic gaze. A label was attached to each of them, and he read several of them, thus conceived:

  Tracheotomy that saved the life of Prince Arthur of Saxe, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1920.

  Enterotomy that saved the life of Tsar Alexander IV in 1927.

  Craniotomy that saved the life of Pope Piux XI in 1919.

  And many others.

  All those powerful lives saved, the memory of those surgical events, which the publicity of the epoch had not neglected, were not, however, sufficient to reassure the philosopher, and he was unsteady on his feet as he approached a kind of central altar made of gold, on long legs, covered with a red sheet and disposed like a raised bed. He suspected that it was necessary to lie down on it.

  Around the bed, there were no more of those grim displays, nor of the gleaming tools that constituted the wall of the Temple or filled the museum cases. There was nothing there but a single scalpel in a bowl and the famous Carescoclast, suspended from a long elastic wire fixed to the arch. The great principles of Stoicism did not prevent Choumaque from feeling a chill in the marrow of his bones as he looked at them.

  He was about to take his place on the apparatus when the strange physiognomy of Dr. Hymen suddenly surged forth from a trapdoor fitted in the floor. His top hat with the flat rim, tilted slightly backwards, still framed his clean-shaven face, comical and cruel, his oblique hairy nose, his little upturned side-whiskers and his eyes like drills, arched by thick black brows. The rest of his stiff body was, however, surrounded by a long butcher’s apron covered with stains, and his hands and bare forearms were soiled with blood.

  “Is this the subject?” he said, addressing Marjah. “That’s all right; you can go now.” Then, giving his lips a gracious expression that was really a grimace, he added, as Marjah drew away, executing a pirouette: “You’re going to be patched up, my friend; it won’t take long.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” asked Choumaque, increasingly anguished.

  “You’ll go to sleep first. For the rest, we’ll decide later.

  “Shall I see the Superman?”

  “He’s the one who’ll open you up, and it’s a great honor that he’s doing you, but you won’t see him, since you’ll be anesthetized.”

  “I’m hesitant, truly hesitant,” the philosopher confessed, raising a trembling hand to an absent belt.

  “Let’s get on with it! You can see that we have no time to waste!” said the doctor, pointing to other individuals who had just appeared, and who seemed to be awaiting their turn.

  Choumaque looked at them, in the direction indicated by his torturer’s finger. Through the transparent wall he saw five men and five women, all young and beautiful, built on the same harmonious model that he had already observed several times. Sitting in a circle on the carpet of the atrium, they were playing knucklebones and teasing one another joyfully, but in silence.

  “They’re certainly more interesting than you,” the doctor continued. “In a little while, the Superman is going to attempt on
them one of the most extraordinary operations of his long career. Already, in our Fecundities, we create sex at will. Here, in the Temple, we’ve often transformed women into men and men into women, but the results were always infecund. This time, we want them to be capable of reproduction. The Master will owe to his genius alone the transformation of a woman into a man, and reciprocally, while transplanting the generative organs extracted from the one into the location of the generative organs extracted from the other.14 That’s amusing, ha ha! Then he’ll make hermaphrodites! Ha ha! What do you say to that? Then he’ll construct his human monad type. That will be the bouquet! You see, therefore, that we have meat on the slab, and that we can’t waste any time! Let’s go! Hup!”

  Choumaque had scarcely understood these last words than the doctor grabbed him by the skin of the belly with the strength of an orangutan, lifted him up in the sir and placed him on the bed. Vainly, he struggled; the two bloody hands held him down. Then his thoughts suddenly reeled. A mobile wire applied to his temples poured a fluid into him that stunned him.

  He sucked in air delightedly and felt himself swell up, rising toward the sky. He glimpsed a soft and pleasant landscape. A man he did not know was there, sitting under an oak tree, and he went toward him in order to philosophize. But he tried in vain to construct a seductive controversy; he could not follow the logic, for what he could see was too admirable for him to think about anything else.

  In fact, the black eyebrows, the penetrating gaze, the oblique nose, the downy side-whiskers and the furry hat with the flat rim of the stranger sitting under the oak gradually lost their astonishing significance, and were transformed into a ravishing ballerina clad in mauve, exactly similar to Madame Môme. Yes, it really was his former mistress, within the range of his desire, and the color of her costume alone delighted him with a strange ecstasy. She did not prove as rebellious as before; she favored him with unknown caresses, which, successively applied to organs modified in turn by the operation, plunged him into a voluptuousness as long as the practice lasted and as extraordinary as it was curious.

  CHAPTER VII

  Almost at the same moment as the philosopher Choumaque was being subjected to the marvelous suggestions of a hilarant fluid, Miss Mary Hardisson extracted herself from a restful sleep.

  At first, she had some difficult collecting her thoughts. She experienced astonishment at having woken up in that room, utterly dissimilar to those that the banal luxury of cosmopolitan hotels had offered to her during a year of adventures. Gradually, the disposition of the apartment—the bed-alcove exceptionally decorated with great festoons of white velvet; the neighborhood of the opaline basin in which she had relaxed the previous evening after having purified herself by means of the artificial rock mechanism; and finally, in a corner, the presence of the pigeon-holes of which she had taken advantage to demand a sleeping potion that did not arrive—made the memory of the strange country to which she had come as a last resource more precise.

  She remembered again having refused the services of Carabella, offered with a seductive insistence whose intention she had not understood. The courtesan’s ardent face, pretty and flavorsome, each expression of which she saw renewed, caused her to compare the woman with the rude wives of her homeland, also beautiful, but of a strong and healthy splendor, as if virilized by sharing the struggles, privations and alarms endured during the war.

  She thought about General Hardisson, the organizer of the defense, about the devotion of the farmers collaborating with his audacity, about the cannons that followed his stature.

  Harry, her brother! She had loved him more than ever one evening, at the end of a battle, when, while picking up the wounded and the dead, she had found him under a pile of bodies, with blood on his forehead, icy. He had a livid beauty, all of his almost-extinct soul surfacing in his eyes...

  Oh, the poor, dear, fraternal head—how she had pressed it against her lips then! How she had shivered with hope on finding that he was still breathing! Then, having cared for him, healed him, she now knew that he had resumed the road of the glorious calvary; she knew that his deeds embodied further bravery. From behind what ambush, at this moment, was his bold gaze scrutinizing the horizon, anticipating the enemy’s approach? In what corner of the land had the hero taken refuge with his last tattered flag?

  Quickly! She wanted to see Caresco, to obtain the power of his liberating engine!

  She got up, and after having plunged into the basin she searched for her clothes. The previous evening, she had put them on the edge of the bed, and was astonished to find them replaced by a pink tunic and a peplum—a kind of long Roman robe fixed at the shoulder by means of a golden clasp studded with jewels, simulating a bird. A long leotard of the same fabric, with translucent mesh, designed to sheath the entire body, accompanied these garments, as well as a green metal girdle in several shades, mounted with diamante roses, and sandals in pink ibis-skin.

  The costume resembled, almost exactly, the one worn by the young women who had flown to meet the airplane. The lightness of the fabrics, so favorable to the aeration of the skin, initially prompted a gesture of revolted modesty, and she swore never to disguise herself in that fashion. As she could not remain naked, however, she hoped to find more decent resources via the utilities panel. Alas, the clothing button, when she pressed it, provided her with a host of garments even lighter, more revealing and even more indecent.

  Then, rummaging through the pile, she chose the most opaque fabrics, doubled the transparencies, filled in the necklines, and dressed herself in as chaste a fashion as possible, in conformity with her warrior ideals. Then she put on the sandals and the peplum, which appeared to have been tailored specifically to fit her body.

  As she turned round her gaze was struck by the flamboyance of a quantity of marvelous items of jewelry displayed in a jade bowl. All kinds of rare stones were set in all kinds of metals, for various usages; they were so curious, so dazzling and so astonishing in their design that it seemed that they could not simple serve for adornment. She was not mistaken, for their alloys emitted bracing effluvia. She looked at them without desire; the only jewels that the daughters of the Red Land wore were stilettos in the hair and daggers in the belt.

  Finally, having taken a step toward the exit, she was suddenly surprised by a veritable prodigy. The entire room seemed to expand and become infinitely large. At the same time, she saw the image of a woman dressed in pink, who was none other than herself, appear on the walls, repeated a thousand times. What magic had transported her thus into a palace of immensity? The walls, now covered in mirrors, permitted her to look herself in the face, contemplate herself from behind and from the side, to observe how the broad pleats of the robe, curving regally inwards over the hips, gave her a harmoniously new outline, and how the pallor of the fabric fused gracefully with the blonde flesh of her cleavage.

  The sight revolted her, like a sacrilege. Was it, then, for a masquerade that she had left her homeland? To what reproaches would she not have been subjected by her warrior comrades, the she-wolves of the Red Land, if they had seen her thus disguised in iridescence, her waist imprisoned in green metal?

  O my sisters in suffering! You who patch your garments, you whose hands are chafed by washing the bloody linen of our heroes, behold my sacrifice, harsh daughters of my homeland!

  Observing the unruliness of her hair, however, she looked for a comb. Her eyes going to the utilities panel, she pressed the coiffure button. Instead of the object she expected, she saw a pigeon-hole open, revealing a machine with complex gears; the latter began to turn with metallic hands that emerged from the box, extended and moved up and down, brandishing hot irons and sketching the gestures of an expert hair-stylist.

  She realized that she was supposed to surrender her head to the curious apparatus, but abstained, for fear of something going awry and leading to some complication. She stood there watching the machine cavort until it had finished its service and retreated into the wall, after a click that
closed the compartment. Then she remained perplexed, wondering how she was going to discipline her hair, now that the play of mirrors had also attenuated and the walls of her room, having gone pale, had resumed their appearance of uniform pale blue lacquer.

  Two women dressed in yellow, with the embroidered cross on slaves at navel-level, arrived at that moment; they greeted her, invoking the name of Caresco.

  “You are not coiffed, beautiful neophyte,” said the one who appeared to be older, although still young. “Permit us to offer you our aid. We are your servants, by the grace of the Superman.

  They made her sit down, and immediately occupied themselves with her. While one of them pushed her head toward the reactivated apparatus and presented her long blonde hair to the machine, the metallic arms combed, it curled it and pinned it up over the temples, with four long curls that snaked over the nape of the neck and fell upon the nacre of her shoulders. The other, took a charming like device from its box, which was applied to Miss Mary’s face and set about kneading and massaging it, discreetly accentuating the young woman’s complexion and features. It was not make-up; at the most it was a light supplement of health, beauty and charm.

  At the same time, the younger of the maidservants went to place her foot on a particular section of the parquet, and the walls, obedient to its pressure, became mirrors again. The neophyte thus understood how she had provoked the astonishing transformation a few minutes earlier, doubtless by walking over that point in the mosaic.

  To complete her toilette she was decked with the jewelry that she had disdained. In spite of her resistance, the servants, invoking orders from above, placed on her wrists, ankles, ears and bosom an entire stream of riches—whose value, she thought would have procured many cannons and rifles for the warriors of her homeland. Her face was framed with the light grace of lilacs, which, arranged in a pale bouffant over the blondeness of her hair, seemed to be emerging therefrom to die here, at the place where a large Rembrandt-style hat was positioned. She was obliged to resign herself to it.