Marcel and Choumaque turned round, thinking that they were dealing with a new individual. They could only see a small wheeled stele that had been following them for a few moments, seeming attached to their paces, moving back and forth and turning when they did. They could no longer be astonished by anything, and understood that they were dealing with an ambulant phonograph, which an unknown fluid, doubtless some new adaptation of the mysterious omnium, linked to their persons. Marcel’s bright eyes smiled at his friend. All the same, it interested him; he admired the inventions of the marvelous empire.
The mechanical cicerone continued, in a quavering voice: “You have just traversed the Hall of Sensuality, which is only utilized on major feast days, when the license of sterility is extended to everyone. But you are now about to enter the Temples of Reproduction, where the eucrasic Sowers designated for Repopulation come religiously to accomplish the most sacred act of our religion, which consists of fecundating the blonde mothers.
“That will be your function,” Marjah told Marcel.
“The husbands serve no purpose, then?” queried the young man. “That work wouldn’t suit me...”
“Don’t cast doubt on the wisdom of the benefactor,” Marjah replied. “The fact is that for a man, being married does not imply the qualities of production that a valiant lineage requires. That’s why the title of husband is purely gratuitous. Here, the family is constituted between two spouses by means of children almost always due to a strange Sower; at any rate, children are engendered in conditions of absolute security, while the isolation of the mother puts her beyond the reach of any sowing prejudicial to the race, as you shall see in a moment. There are women among those who have many children who no longer even remember from which men they obtained them.
“But what about the husbands?”
“The husbands are sterilized. The serum with which you have been inoculated, Monsieur Choumaque, removes their procreative virtues, but not their pleasure n amour. They have at their free disposition, additionally, the courtesans commanded by Madame Môme and the gitons of which I am the chief.”
“And the mothers, between the periods of fecundation?”
“If you think about it, you’ll understand that the mothers, outside of their times of production, can only have dealings with sterilized citizens.”
“Those are improbable mores, but, in sum, more rational that one would be tempted to think at first glance,” observed Choumaque. “Even supposing that practices as rigorous would not be honored in the old world. I would not be hostile to wanting to sterilize certain alcoholics, degenerates, litterateurs and politicians. Those inebriates generally engender offspring afflicted with disequilibrium.”
As they were talking they drew away from the statue. Choumaque made a few more gracious remarks to his companions. He congratulated Marjah on having lived for so long in a country where cuckolds did not exist. To Marcel he predicted great joys in fulfilling the function of stallion in Caresco’s stud-farm. Marcel did not want to agree because Miss Mary could hear.
The wheeled phonograph indicated their route. Under its direction they reached the first palace, named Devirginicum, of which a fresco decorated the frontispiece. The fresco represented, with a great richness of hues, a naked virgin lying on an operating table. Standing beside her was a man with the physiognomy of Dr. Hymen. In one hand he was brandishing a scalpel, while in the other he held a dandelion clock, which he was dispersing to the wind by blowing on it with inflated cheeks. The seeds thus dispersed by his breath were gradually transformed into chubby winged children. Beneath that allegory and inscription unfurled, which read: Here the gates of eternity are opened!
“What does that enigmatic symbol represent?” asked Choumaque, addressing himself to Marjah.
It was the phonograph that replied, as if it had understood the question. It recounted the fashion in which the virgins destined for maternity were brought to the palace before the approach of a man, in order that the virginity whose suppression renders the first instants of amour so painful could be surgically removed, under induced sleep. Thus, the young women could subsequently offer themselves to fecund caresses without experiencing the suffering that often discourages the attempts of lovers. Never to suffer, and scientifically to aid the pleasures that nature concedes for the expansion of life, such was the law on the island of Eucrasia.
With this explanation, the visitors penetrated into the Devirginicum. In a sumptuous oval room they found an image almost identical to the one they had seen outside, animated this time. Dr. Hymen had just finished his practice on a superb blonde still lying there, divinely pale and pearly in her sleep, His right hand was holding a bloody scalpel, and although he was not blowing on a flower, at least he was looking with interest at a scrap of pink membrane, recently excised, which he was clutching between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
Doubtless that banal operation did not require great surgical rigor, for he had not put on his antiseptic smock. As on the first occasion that Choumaque had seen him, he was wearing his long frock-coat and green shirt, and his minuscule golden instruments, bizarre in form, were dangling over his protruding abdomen. His face was radiant; his long oblique and hooked nose, slanting toward his turned-up side-whisker—and from his shock of thick black hair, almost mingling with the nap of his flat-brimmed opera hat and dense eyebrows overhanging his glaucous eyes, a suggestion of frolicsome joy was emanating. He was gazing with compunction at eight virgins who were waiting their turn, laughing and chewing pralines.
He perceived the newcomers. “Caresco favors you, Messieurs!” he pronounced, extending his hands toward them, which they avoided taking in order not to touch either the scalpel or the membrane.
Without paying any heed to their hesitation, he immediately became gracious, particularly to Choumaque, to whom he offered a pinch of a sugary powder with which he had begun to fill his mouth.
“You see, my dear Choumaque, I’m accomplishing, in deflowering these virgins, one of the most fundamental rites of our religion. In the same way, certain practices of ancient cults were rules of hygiene. The imbecility of peoples deflected them from their origin and application, while we strive, on the contrary, to impose orthodoxy in all its naïve crudity, in order that our believers, knowing the objective, should conserve integrally usages useful to the species and favorable to Life.”
He adopted a grave expression. His lips stretched toward his black side-whiskers, uncovering the unevenness of his sharp-toothed dentition. Everything about his person darkened, from his flat-brimmed opera hat to the pendants on his abdomen, which ceased dancing, in expectation of great truths.
Slapping his interlocutor on the shoulder, he continued: “And you’ve philosophized, my dear Choumaque! You’ve rambled on for hours about pleasure, dolor and the causes of social ills! You’ve even engendered a doctrine, called that of equilibria. And perhaps you’ve believed in the nonsensical ideas you’ve spouted! How much simpler life is! How easily one can force happiness with a little stroke of the scalpel! Get rid of that which causes suffering—the entire secret is there!
“Would you like to know, my dear Choumaque, who the happiest man in our realm is? It’s the one who possesses the fewest organs, the half-man who commands the airplane that transported you from Paris to our island. And would you like to know who will be the citizen more favored still? It will be the human monad that our great Caresco is preparing at this moment, and from whom he will remove everything that is susceptible of being removed. No windows to the outside, no suffering within.
“And if people claim where you come from that physical happiness consists of the normal functioning of the organs; if they affirm there that living well is being endowed with a beneficent activity, that’s hilarious stupidity: to live well is not to exist! And that’s all there is to it!”
Choumaque made great efforts to follow this original argument. He was about to ask the fantastic philosopher why, in that case, he took so much care to amelior
ate the health of his fellow citizens and favor fecundity—why he did not kill them all, and himself with them—when he saw the doctor’s physiognomy change. Hymen smiled again; his facial hair and his opera hat were flamboyant with gaiety; the pendants on his abdomen clinked in a joyous frisson.
“It’s not otherwise in amour, Monsieur Choumaque. As you see, I remove an average of five virginities a day. I open thereby, in five female loins, the gateway of generation! I am the concierge of eternity! And I have the honor of removing these little membranes, which, in your old world, three times in ten, are the cause of a woman’s repulsion for men, and nine times out of ten—the statistics are there to affirm it—are forced in a detestably maladroit fashion...”
“You’re making fun of me, Monsieur,” Choumaque protested. “Nature has not put that little membrane there in order that it should be pierced by a scalpel. She has put it there, on the contrary, in order to make the woman remember—if not the man—that pleasure comes after pain. Voluptuousness is all the more welcome because it has long disputed with pain. And I see that as a further proof of my doctrine of equilibria, in which it is said that good compensates evil.”
“Good and evil are merely hollow words for us. We do not know them; we do not want to know them. The citizen, in our realm, in subordinate to only one state: enjoyment.”
Having spoken, Hymen turned his back and signaled to a virgin with a magnificent complexion, who advanced for the sacrifice, her hips swaying. Her blonde hair spilled over the pink silk of her tunic. She undressed and lay down on the central table. A current of fluid immediately put her to sleep. Dr. Hymen sniggered and seized his scalpel.
The neophytes and Marjah hastened to leave him to his delicate operation.
They emerged in front of a façade whose whiteness and cleanliness surprised them. Delimiting a vast park, it was bare of the ornamentation and excessive richness that embellished all the monuments in the vicinity; its architectural serenity was restful on the eye.
The soft shades of the allegory decorating the frontispiece were no less agreeable to see. They represented a radiant mother on the point of death scattering to the wind a cup whose liquid was transforming into little pink children; it was the symbol of the cup of Fecundity emptied by Ephemerality.
As soon as they had crossed the threshold, their ears were charmed by music that was harmoniously soft at times and passionately vibrant at others. They were glad to gaze at the cheerful sight of a landscape populated with beautiful trees, and to follow the lively course of nubile foam along streams bubbling over beds of yellow gravel. There were delicate little rustic houses covered in thatch, which the sun was caressing gently, and herds of cows grazing the tender grass; the sound of distant bells quivered in the purity of an atmosphere forcefully vivified with oxygen and embalmed with the fresh perfumes of lavender and heather—all of which reanimated in the eyes of two of the strangers the memory of old engravings representing the landscapes of Normandy a century ago: green, calm Normandy, of a pastoral beauty, when its décor had not yet be perverted by the abuses of tourism.
Only a few statues standing at intervals, all marvelously beautiful, disrupted that rural simplicity. They also saw young men and women, walking arm in arm. Some of them, sitting on the banks of streams, were playing reed pipes; others were dancing; others, leaning their elbows on massive tables, were drinking milk that was being served to them in earthenware ladles. The white foam, freshly emerged from the udder, splashed their lips, brightened by healthy, adding panache to their smiles. All of them were dressed with the utmost simplicity, with a few animal skins knotted round their loins.
As they went past the thatched cottages, they heard cries of amour coming from a few of them.
“You are now,” the phonograph recited, “in the Eldorado of couplings. The Superman has determined that those of his subjects who are designated for creation should subsist here for some while in the state of primal nature. In his great wisdom, he esteems that children thus made are more soundly constituted. The statues you can see are designed to impregnate the passion of lovers with the spectacle of beauty, but they are superfluous, because these individuals, all beautiful, have only to admire one another. The music that you hear inspires the caresses whose frequency is sagely moderated, in order that the seed should be of the finest quality...”
“Rejoice, stallion in Caresco’s stud! Behold the promise of beautiful days,” Choumaque murmured to his companion.
But Marcel was staying in other visions. Without wanting to pause at what that animal regimentation of amour could offer him by way of tinkering, he told Miss Mary how he would have enjoyed that bucolic life in her company, and he was saddened to hear her reply that she had other things on her mind than relaxing in such infantile games. A pressure of the arm that he attempted had no more effect than if he had tried to move the indifference of a statue.
Thereafter, in the awakening of his desire, he allowed his thoughts to run over the delightful landscape and the people who animated it. Alas, it was always to mingle his companion therewith, in order that he might draw her into it, to see himself, like her, in a gleaming nudity, savoring the aroma of her bare skin, her hair loosened in luminous waves. He drew her to him in the shelter of those rustic roofs, laid her down on the ground softened with hay, searched the ecstasy of her eyes, palpated the resistance of her breasts...
These various curiosities led them—after a considerable time, for the garden extended for several leagues—to the entrance of another palace, which the phonograph identified as the Temple of Gestation. It was there that mothers, after the gift of insemination, spent the term of their pregnancy. They lived there in an atmosphere of calm and hygiene, severed from any masculine distraction, receiving intense corporeal care, gratified by a healthy alimentation, frequent baths, and incessantly admiring beautiful paintings and delightful sculptures. It was also the case that plastic living tableaux were performed for them by the best-formed subjects of the island, but always anaphrodisiac.
As the place appeared to visitors to be uninteresting and rather monotonous, given that no performance was being put on at the moment, they passed through it rapidly. Scarcely had they emerged than machines took hold of them and jets of pleasantly-perfumed vapor were directed over their bodies. Immediately dried off, they saw that they were covered from head to foot by a layer of white dust.
Their amazement was calmed by the explanations of the wheeled cicerone. They were being antisepticised before being allowed to penetrate into the Temple of Childbirth. For the same reason, they put on impermeable garments, and thus frosted, they were able to witness the entire mechanism of delivery.
Choumaque and Marcel experienced a keen interest in the procedure, neither of them ever having witnessed a similar operation, but their emotion was considerably diminished, for sterilized apparatus stuck in the fashion of bell-jars over the sacred regions of parturition, which were not very translucent, and while assisting nature with pressures and tractions, hid the labor, so dramatic in its full spectacle.
In the same way, they did not hear any of those howls, like those of a wounded beast, to which the compassion of spectators usually gives rise. All the mothers were anesthetized by the same magnetism that had rendered Choumaque unconscious of his surgical metamorphosis.
They counted eight women laboring in that silence. Around the eighth a man was agitating. His dirty smock and his fury hat, both abundantly covered in antiseptic substance, allowed them to recognize Dr. Hymen. How did the scientist come to be there already? Did he have the gift of duplicating himself?
Choumaque approached him. “My dear Doctor. I bless this new encounter, and I see with pleasure that you’re neglecting nothing in your function as the concierge of eternity, since, after opening the gates, you continue by pulling the cord...”
Had the joke been too strong? The strange individual did not reply. Arms bare, he was kneading a substance that resembled plaster, and when he judged it sufficiently manageabl
e he used it to cover the belly of the woman who had just been relieved of both her child and the container that had facilitated the delivery. Choumaque deduced that, as a result of being plastered, the abdomen avoided the deformation susceptible of subsequently discouraging masculine desire. They left Dr. Hymen to his task and his ill humor, definitively.
Marcel strove in vain to discover in the features of his companion what impression these spectacles were translating there. He was astonished to read nothing therein but indifference and scorn. The rude cohabitations of the Red Land, the overt life of the camps where the women came in search of the generous semen of warriors and sometimes to render them the fruits, had long ago revealed to the heroine the lacerations with which maternity is paid. She had seen the progress of those deeds in which nature demands tears, blood, suffering and screams from those who demand the joy of giving birth and of holding a child forcefully against their breast. By those contacts her character had been tempered even more, and she was genuinely disdainful of the comfortable mechanism of creation here.
A little further on, at the exit, a bath relaxed them as well as removing their microbicidal covering. They put on other costumes with joy. Choumaque put his on more hurriedly than the others, for he was in haste to hide the scars of his new beauty, even though they were scarcely apparent.
“The Temple of Puericulture!” growled the phonograph when, after a kilometer’s march, they found themselves before an ornamentation a hundred meters high, representing, in a vermilion wake, clouds of chubby winged angels struggling as they hastened toward the distant radiation of a life-giving sun surging from a mountain licked by redness. The faithful instrument confirmed that it was the natural sequel to the creative events already revealed to them.
“Here children are brought up, rationally and intensively, from the hour of birth until the seventh year. You shall see, without me having to insist more particularly”—and these words, emitted by a machine, had something piquant about them—“with what care the Superman has organized the development of the individual who will become a citizen of his State. Here, nothing is left to the irreflection of nature. Science reclaims its rights and perfects being, in order to appropriate it to the exigencies of its destiny. A special nourishment, changing every six months, when measurements and weights have been scrupulously recorded, ensures the blossoming of all the organs, one after another.
Caresco, Superman Page 16
