Caresco, Superman

by André Couvreur

  Above him, however, the firmament already formed a livid vault in which the last vacillations of the stars were struggling. One more resistant star exhausted itself attempting to continue its glow. One might have thought that the dawn, blowing on it, were reanimating its death-throes. Then, all of a sudden, it vanished, drowned in the sea of light that was visibly winning, and which soon swelled into immense mauve stripes, iridescent currents, like horizontal red ribbons knotting the two ends of the world. A golden dome burst forth, and all vegetable force was enthused.

  In that celestial magnificence, a little airplane appeared. It had the form of a seabird holding the threads of a nacelle in its beak, in which two people were outlined. Choumaque recognized the beard of a sterile husband and the blue costume of a fecund mother. He hailed them as they passed overhead:

  “Greetings, flyers! You’re up early, worthy spouses.”

  “We haven’t been to bed, philosopher. We’ve been up all night with Mirror-of-Smiles. We owe him that.”

  “Is Mirror-of-Smiles ill, then?”

  But they did not reply; the airplane was already too far away. Choumaque assumed that they had been engaged in some legitimate debauchery, shrugged his shoulders and went in to get dressed.

  An hour later he was pacing up and down under the peristyle of a small green sandstone temple. A gap between red porphyry columns brought an overt and immeasurably developed femininity to its frontispiece. Edified in the confines of the Sterility, set apart from any other kind of habitation, the temple was the residence of the High Priestess Môme. One reached it after traversing paths bordered with jasmine and rose bushes, delimiting transparent lakes where the calices and leaves of lotuses lay dormant.

  Marius had spent the night there, and it was him for whom Choumaque was waiting. Since their encounter, the two old friends had become inseparable again. The object of their past dissent, Madame Môme, now formed the most solid link of their fraternity. They shared her.

  Every second night it was Choumaque who climbed the steps of the little temple, assured of immediately finding the caress of odorous arms to welcome him. He had no wish to reproach his mistress for having granted Marius the same favor the previous night. Môme devoted all the minutes of the day to them when she was not absorbed by her apostolate and was able to go with them on long excursions, visits to forgotten corners of the island, sometimes accompanied by Marcel and Miss Mary. One might have thought that the mild communism had always existed, so easily had it become banal custom.

  In the beginning, Choumaque had certainly found the unprecedented in the pleasures that the High Priestess lavished on him to the point of satiety. She had initiated him into all the mysteries of Venus. But after ten sessions, as instructive as they were ardent, he had begun to accept the accomplishment of those rites with a more moderate impulsion. He felt quite disorientated to observe that the great vital mechanism of the island extended its components all the way to the alcove. He experienced the feeling that his personality had been diminished, and sometimes, as he emerged from those comfortable intoxications, scratching his loins, he regretted the times when, in a situation of similar division, jealousy would have bitten his heart and exasperated the impetuosity of his kisses.

  Every morning, however, the two friends met up. Marius, less discreet, generally went to surprise the lovers in bed. He enquired about their night, and permitted himself, while joking, a few petty liberties with Madame Môme’s person. He pinched her in sensitive places, and administered joyful slaps on the buttocks. The High Priestess responded with a few delicate locutions, or playfully threw ampoules of odor at the painter’s head, which burst in a salvo, prompting him to turn somersaults.

  When they had calmed down, they chatted, while swallowing balls of complete aliment, washing them down with wine aromatized by exquisite and unfamiliar essences. Then, having completed the meal taken on the edge of the bed, the courtesan commenced her toilette. Both of them admired the constant youth of her body as she plunged into the perfumed basin, the natural transparency of her transplanted teeth, the abundance of her rich tresses enriched by new growth with gilded glints, and the serenity of her features, replastered by the fluid of beauty, without a wrinkle or a fissure.

  If it had not been for the antiquity of their gazes, they would never have been able to believe that their combined ages were nearly a hundred and seventy years.

  Choumaque more reserved, did not go into the lovers’ dwelling in the morning. He waited at the door, in front of the charming panorama. He did not waste his time, though; he found material to content his curiosity. The courtesans’ villas commenced their alignment not far away. Their style and their variety delighted him. The first rays of sunlight bathed them with a particular poetry in their frame of greenery and flowers. The great velvet curtains were lifted up in front of the atria, initially to give passage to domestic animals, and then to beautiful young women, who stretched lazily, and kissed the nocturnal companions to whom they were bidding farewell voluptuously. They were alert gitons, or sterile spouses with long curly beards, strong and powerful in their languid indolence, or even fecund mothers, whose silky peplums opened slightly to allow a glimpse of their blue tunics, unstigmatized by the red stripes of the courtesans. Airplanes took away all those lovers, mingling them with the aerial circulation that was very active at that moment, steering them toward other pleasures—or rather, other indifferences.

  Finally, Marius appeared, finishing pinning the golden clasp to his shoulder that maintained an unusual mantle.

  “Hello there, Choumaque!”

  He was clad, exceptionally, in a violet moiré toga, hiding a doublet of the same color belted with white velvet and studded with gems He came down the steps of the peristyle in a noble fashion and embraced the philosopher.

  “I’m glad to see you.”

  Choumaque confessed an equal satisfaction, and enquired about their mistress. Was she still young and pretty? Had she been, as usual, ardent in dalliance?

  At those questions, Marius; expression darkened. “Well, obviously—but between us, old chap, I confess that it wearies me slightly. She’s indefatigable, that tamer of my loins!”

  “You’re too happy, Marius. The heavens of your bed, like the real heavens, are always too clement to your desires. In Eucrasia, the women are too beautiful, awakenings too perfumed, the countryside too cheerful, health too perfect, and everything too compliant.”

  “Don’t say that, orator. Wait, before pronouncing judgment, until you’re habituated to our ways. You’ll see that we are, in fact...”

  “Too happy?”

  “Even so...”

  The philosopher shook his head. For the moment, however, he had at least one grave preoccupation that could, by opposition, make him aware of the price of the real happiness that would ensue if ever the threat suspended over Marcel and Miss Mary were dissipated. Having told Marius about the love of the two young people, and also the conversations he had had with the Superman, he had enquired about the possible outcomes. What would be the foreigner’s fate? Might she not be taken to the table of immolation in spite of the promise of neutrality that should have protected her for the duration of her sojourn?

  The frightful scene that Choumaque had witnessed, the flesh profaned, the blood shed, the insensate actions of the sacrificer, and the kind of perverted eroticism that the surgeon had given to the spectacle at the moment when he adored the extracted organ, all haunting the philosopher’s unquiet mind like the fiction of a bad dream, had made him insist that Marius request the simple advice of their mistress. He had obtained the promise of a request made discreetly, in a whisper, for the walls, and even the furniture, in this ingenious country were so cleverly equipped with recording devices that it was almost necessary to speak in sign language—and one could not even be sure that confidence emitted by mime would not be captured by marvelous machines that would subsequently transmit them to Caresco.

  So, that day, after a brief excursion, arm in
arm, when the philosopher was firmly convinced that only the trees and the flowers could be witnesses to their intimacy, he leaned toward Marius’ ear. “Well, what have you done about our young lovers? Have you asked our beautiful friend?”

  “Shh!” murmured the painter. Don’t speak so loudly! Do you have to shout? One interrogates more intelligently, damn it! Of course I’ve asked. I’m your brother, aren’t I?”

  “What did she say?”

  “The divine Môme replied that there’s only one means of putting the Superman off Miss Mary, and that’s if she were no longer a virgin. That’s up to Marcel to arrange.”

  “Virginity,” Choumaque professed, “is a matter of elastic appreciation, if I might put it like that. How does one divine, from the mere silhouette of a demoiselle, whether she still possesses it? It’s not as plain as the nose on her face, I imagine!”

  Marius shrugged his shoulders. “That’s an underestimation of our great man’s resources of investigation, old chap, and to suppose that he has launched himself on a trail unworthy of his little foible...”

  “Foible is an entirely appropriate term. So, how does the Superman know?”

  The renovator of frescos leaned toward his friend far enough to brush his ear with his lips. “Know, my darling, that there are exceedingly well-organized archives in Eucrasia, in which the anatomical dossiers of every subject are catalogued, obtained by means of the omnial radiograph. When new subjects enter the realm, on the very first night, while they’re asleep and without their suspecting it, photographs are taken, all the way the most intimate folds of their being, and immediately recorded. That experiment is repeated every week, for sanitary reasons.”

  “Bah!”

  “Now, the Chief Radiographer, who is a great scientist and a friend of mine, confided to me yesterday evening the unfortunate continued innocence of Miss Mary.”

  Choumaque fixed his stare upon Marius’ hairy head, which was ornamented by a violet beret from which a white silk tassel emerged. He would have liked to pierce those tresses, and then the skull, in order to search for the truth in the cerebral substance. To be sure, after so many marvelous surprises, the philosopher no longer had any reason to be astonished by a further eccentricity of social regimentation. On the other hand, Marius, a worthy child of the south, was endowed with such a fertile imagination that one had to wonder whether that declaration might not simply be the fruit of his fecund fantasy.

  “In that case, let’s await events,” he concluded, letting go of his friend’s arm, which the confidence had caused him to grip harder.

  “Let’s at least await today’s event, of which you seem to have no suspicion, since your costume is the same as any other day. Haven’t you noticed that all the men are wearing white belts over their tunics and that white also appears in their headgear? Today, similarly, the gitons who are the heroes of the celebration will be dressed entirely in white...”

  “What celebration are you talking about?”

  “Mirror-of-Smiles’ funeral. If you need more ample information, ask that giton passing by. You’ll understand the psychology of those people better than via my mouth.”

  An adorable adolescent was advancing through the flowers of the silky meadow. He was murmuring a gracious song that Choumaque had heard sung in chorus many times by groups of airborne musicians, and whose melody, compared with the stupid popular refrains of the country that the philosopher had just abandoned, was particularly captivating. His delicately vigorous torso was expanding in a white doublet, split from the neck to the heart, which came down to the knees in the fashion of a pleated tunic, decorated with a vertical red stripe, the symbol of asexualization. His wavy blond hair was crowned with a number of large lilies with a becoming pallor. He leaned over periodically toward the prettiest flowers and picked them in order to gather them into posies.

  Choumaque went over to him. “Well, child, you’re looking very handsome and joyful today!”

  “Is it not a day of celebration for us, philosopher? We’re celebrating the funeral of Mirror-of-Smiles, my brother before the Superman...”

  “He’s dead, then?”

  “Yes. He’s very happy. He’s progressing toward the better life. Tomorrow, perhaps, his metempsychotic state will emerge from sleep, so that, reborn from the loins of a fecund mother, he will become a being superior to the one he was.”

  “But what has happened to Mirror-of-Smiles? I thought that no one died in this land, any more than anyone grows old?”

  “Indeed, philosopher, one does not die. One disappears one day, without anyone knowing how, probably because it pleases the Superman that one disappears…but Mirror-of-Smiles has had the good fortune to fall out of his airplane and break his back. When the Superman reached him, he observed immediately, so badly broken was by brother, that there was no possibility of saving him, and he administered the coup de grâce.”

  “Did the child suffer?”

  “Suffer?” The boy raised his wide eyes, full of astonished interrogation. He did not understand the meaning of the word. Choumaque remembered that all the people were equally ignorant. In any case, the drama had passed in the greatest mystery, the subjects having received the instruction, when such an event occurred, to flee the accident without rendering assistance. Only Caresco was to intervene.”

  “So, giton, you envy Mirror’s fate?”

  “Who would not envy it?”

  “But you’ve never thought of assisting such a favorable event by letting yourself fall from an airplane, like him?”

  “No, I’ve never thought of that.”

  “His mentality doesn’t extend that far...” Choumaque murmured.

  The adolescent passed by without even offering his candid vice, so intent was he on his flower-picking. Choumaque and Marius heard him resume his song.

  That, the philosopher said to himself, is the most admirable example of the sybaritic fatalism imposed by Caresco’s malice on intelligent creatures. The idea of death that haunts the human soul with so much fear in other lands, which imposes so many discouragements or superb hopes, is welcomed here with the confident serenity with which the early Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and all peoples of primitive conceptions accepted, and still accept, paradisal superstition.

  I believe I can divine Caresco’s strategy. He would like to regress his creatures to the rudimentary sensibility of animals, vegetables, and perhaps even things, since it has been discovered that things also have their sensibility. Doubtless that’s the motive that has driven him to attempt his human monad, and I can’t refuse it an appearance of reason. It’s evident that people suffer by virtue of their exasperated sensibility—but on the other hand, do they not benefit from a proportionate joy, as my doctrine of equilibria says?

  Caresco has, therefore, had this madman’s dream, consisting of returning humans to their state of original insensibility, to the state of indifference that must have been the lot of primitive humans. Because it will require several generations, he’s imposed this faith in a future life—which is certainly a powerful means of domination, independently of the others he possesses.

  What a strange paradox that man is, undoubtedly ferocious, who poses as a benefactor of his people to the point of wanting to reduce them to the mentality of brutes! Who can give me an explanation of that extravagance? Is it not better to believe that I’m simply dealing with a great mental imbalance, which has created and innovated a social theory with the sole motive of being able to satisfy at his leisure his mania for disemboweling?

  Suspended between all these suppositions, Choumaque was no longer listening to his friend, who was waxing lyrical in pompous descriptions of the spectacle that they were about to witness. Marius had to lead him to the pneumatic tube and help him to modify his costume. In a nearby house they found a white moiré scarf, with which the philosopher girdled his loins.

  The ceremony was held on the Field of Truce near the Caravanserai. A mass movement of picturesque crowds was heading in that directio
n. They completed the journey in the company of twenty courtesans who declared that they were fond of funerals and praised the merits of Mirror-of-Smiles, whose caresses had been artful. Unselfconsciously, like excited animals, they recounted intimate details; they laughed as they activated the mechanisms of their perfume-sacs, while arranging their mourning coiffure, sown with irises and powdered with silver.

  One of them, who had attended the philosopher’s lecture, brazenly confessed the scant pleasure that she had obtained therefrom. Furthermore, she was not alone in that opinion, since all the attendees had promised that they would not come back to yawn at such nonsense. Perceiving that Choumaque had a mediocre appetite for frankness, however, the obliging girl strove to seduce him. She did not succeed, even though, for the sake of temptation, she loosened the fastenings of her tunic to uncover the rigidity of her breasts and the red line on her firm belly.

  They headed for a bright patch among the immense cedars. It was a clearing in which, perched on a small mound, they were better able to see the cortege file past. The crowd was already massing along the entire route, and they quickly recognized, by the colors of the costumes, that all the classes of society were present. Their noses in the air and eyes wide open, chatting, laughing and larking about, the people waited, on the slope, for the gaudy procession to pass, enameled by dazzling decorations.

  The irregulars—mauve-clad courtesans, white-clad gitons and slaves in yellow costumes decorated with snowy brain—had priority over families today. They were in the front rows, while the husbands and fecund mothers, virgins, adolescents and Sowers, held back. Marius, consulted, confirmed that it was the dictate of the law. Did not those creatures of pleasure and servitude have a right to the best places, since it was one of their own that the fête was honoring?

  In any case, the harmony was perfect and universal. Baskets of glazed fruits and candied preserves were passed around and emptied. Canticles rose up, accompanied by musicians, languidly allowing their pink fingers to run over the strings of lyres and harps, waving sistrums and blowing with inflated cheeks into golden flutes. The long beards of sterile husbands shook gravely at every movement of the mouth, undulating over the red togas. Large white tuberoses were entwined in the silvered tresses of fecund mothers, and the breeze collected sweet perfumes therefrom. Courtesans, waving bunches of dahlias, sketched out a sacred dance. The delicate shape of their ankles, shod in bright sandals with mauve laces, was revealed at every step as light tulle took flight. Airplanes arrived, even more vibrant with music, hymns of praise to Caresco, pouring out of their sparkling polychromy.