Caresco, Superman

by André Couvreur

  One entire hillside was occupied by engineers, scientists and artists, disposed in accordance with the rectitude of a violet band. Less care in adornment was noticeable there; some of them, in pushing up their sleeves, revealed dirty hands. Like Marius and Choumaque, they were former inhabitants of the old world attracted by the Superman, and endowed by him with a usurpation of youth betrayed by the weariness of their gaze. The frivolity evident in the others was only apparent in them. However, they did not disdain all the favors of their new fatherland, for their illuminated eyes coveted the bodies of the dancers. One of them drew a courtesan behind a curtain of trees.

  In the background, the monstrous group of rocks, the mountainous embrace in human form, was outlined in a warm mist, indicated by a deeper blue shade at the base, rapidly evaporating in the splendid sunlight.

  Choumaque perceived Marcel and Miss Mary lost in the crowd. He waved to them, and as they did not notice his gestures, Marius, less inhibited, executed an expansive entrechat, which provoked the joy of the crowd. People liked the whimsy of the former dauber; the diversion of his humor thrown into the universal tranquility. The neophytes came over, holding hands.

  The gracious couple—Marcel’s bold gaze and Herculean torso, and Miss Mary’s pride—imposed admiration. Their love was becoming common knowledge, and people were astonished by it. People moved aside before them, and flowers were thrown at them. People sensed a respectable force passing by. A sterile spouse caressed the foreigner’s hip with a hand laden with rings. A mother thanked the mariner for having gratified her with his useful caresses the day before. A courtesan offered them pastilles and loudly deplored the chastity of the foreigner.

  Once out of the crowd, as soon as they arrived on the mound, where Marius embraced them, the young people were able to talk. They had not seen one another for four days, and that separation, in spite of the diversions constantly offered to them, and in which they were beginning to take an interest, had seemed long to their hearts.

  “Your eyes are clouded, I see, Miss Mary.”

  “I divine less chagrin in yours, Monsieur Marcel.”

  “Why do you say that? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Can I trust someone who has already surrendered himself to fecund mothers?”

  “I have to carry out my social obligations, alas.”

  Privately, Marcel admitted that the duty had been easily accomplished. Introduced some days previously into the Temple of Fecundity, having put on animal skins and drunk fresh milk in thatched cottages, he had, without sacrificing anything of his heart to the fecund mothers, since he was retaining it integrally for the foreigner, given everything of his body with such a facility and abundance that the Superman’s prescription that he be charged with genetic serum at the first sign of weakness had not had to be put into effect.

  Informed of that lack of necessity, Caresco had been surprised by it, and even a trifle offended. He had almost reproached the young man for that natural generosity, when it was necessary, in order to obtain the same results from other Sowers, to deploy all the resources of the inspirational science of embraces.

  Miss Mary, kept up to date by Carabella, had at first secretly deplored the young Frenchman’s inconstancy. Nevertheless, when she learned with what extraordinary folly she had thrown herself upon Choumaque on the evening of the submarine excursion, she imagined that Marcel was the victim of influences similar to the one that had carried her away, and she no longer harbored any resentment toward him, while being unable to liberate herself from a great sadness.

  Now, she feared as much as her friend the fatality that would separate them. The temporary respite in which the Superman was maintaining her, while waiting for his scientists to manufacture the new sortilege whose formula he had found—a respite that was, in the midst of so much madness, the sage thought of a physician leaving the body free of any medicament in order to be able to act more intensively afterwards by means of a new remedy—that regression to fifty degrees of the psychometer had had the effect of bringing the fanaticism back to the normal passionate level of the old world, and directing toward Marcel her pertinent feminine aspirations.

  So, it was with a seductive joy that she heard him continue: “Oh, look! See how marvelous this country is, how sweet the air is here, and nature eternally adorned. See how the caressant sun envelops it in the blaze of spring! Have you ever seen water so limpid, soil more favorable to the health of flowers? All of creation here has a soul of tranquility, peace and grace. Every bud that opens declares its charm; every creature born here is ignorant of bitterness! Listen to those people singing; observe their perpetual gentleness. Do they seem to be maltreated by their lot? Oh, say the word that will unite us forever! Disown the past that has wounded you! Change your future!”

  “The Superman has said the same thing to me, Monsieur Marcel.”

  They were interrupted by the arrival of the procession. On the route traced by a trail of white roses and lilies, a yellow compactness arrived first. It was a hundred and fifty slaves, blowing into golden trumpets, hieratically raised. Then came lictors brandishing, at the fan-like tips of their long pikes, as many suns, the omnial light of which, radiating like braziers in the light of day, symbolized the eternal work of Science, of the power from which harmonious Life flowed.

  They were followed by a mixed group of all subjects, spouses and mothers of families, adolescents, slaves, sowers, gitons and courtesans, in a rich variegation of peplums, tunics and doublets, their white-flowered hair flowing loosely over their impeccable forms. They were singing a hymn to the Superman, the benefactor and master of their destinies. Closely accompanied by their domestic animals, they were carrying on the plane of their thousand shoulders a vast nacreous shell, that one might have taken for the carapace of some fantastic sea-creature, and whose funnel, pouring out powerful chords that regulated and accompanied the songs, was a sizzling hearth on to which ten Vestals, admirable in their nudity, scarcely covered by a white vapor of tulle, threw still-twitching human virilities that a golden trident extracted from a bloody bowl. At each gesture of the armed limb, a dove took flight, symbolic of life born from death.

  Behind them came a pell-mell of five hundred adolescent perfume-bearers, swarming, ablaze with jewels and precious metals. They were swinging green onyx incense-burners, whose aromatic spirals snaked toward the crowns of the tall trees, and were confused with the vault of foliage—and then with the purity of the heavens, when they reached the clearing.

  A procession of courtesans followed them. Devoid of belts around their robes, their sandals allowing the sight of the perfection of lascivious legs, they were sitting or lying on wisps of floating cloud that had no point of contact with the ground. Their long mauve veils melted admirable into the azured spume, unmistakably real, of their mobile décor. Seen from below, the make-up of their eyelids stood out, violet, ardent and voluptuous. They were plucking stringed instruments and singing, or throwing perfumes and flowers to the people.

  Above their cohesion, in celestial flight, two of them, ardently embracing, their breasts and rumps juxtaposed, were engaging in sterile caresses; and the white cloud of gitons following them reproduced the same tableau, soon effaced by the appearance of a more natural couple in which, with cries of joy, a young Sower and a fecund mother were celebrating generative sensuality with equal immodesty—all of that flowing in the melodious tumult of lyres, harps, flutes, sistrums and horns, before the verdure of the hillsides, beneath the azure backcloth of a deliciously blue firmament.

  However, the people were watching without manifest curiosity, and Marcel, fearful of the affront of the spectacle to his companion, had to recognize that she did not turn her eyes away from it.

  Now the symbols made their appearance. In a cohort of scantily-clad dancers, waving their strong arms rhythmically and aching their heavy torsos, an erect phallus and a parted femininity were evoked, two pink axes around which thousands of vibrions and ovules were spinning and circling, joining a
nd separating, maintained in the air by the magnetic play of fluid. The fecundation of the individual, resulting from the communion of seminal cells, successive embryonic transformations, to the birth of the child—the entire rigorously exact mechanism of generation—was thus developed before the eyes of the spectators, in a hundred different phases, in a hundred successive aspects.

  The result was that an insensible death served as a pretext for a celebration of life and its voluptuous exasperation. But when the people applauded frenziedly was when the sumptuous effigy of the Superman appeared, on a golden throne constellated with diamonds, carried by five hundred violet-clad scientists, his hand holding his carescoclast. He was aureoled by a dazzling nimbus of omnial light.

  Ten thousand voices acclaimed him.

  “I assure you,” said Choumaque to Marius, “that this spectacle only causes me an entirely relative intellectual emotion.”

  “Wait! You haven’t seen the best yet.”

  After the procession of all the gitons in the colony—who, under the guidance of Marjah, clad in white and gold, their hair decorated with huge lilies, were waving garlands of pale flowers to delightful effect—the “best” predicted by the artist was the appearance of Mirror-of-Smiles. One might have sworn that he was still alive, not even asleep, on seeing him pass languidly by, lying on his side, on a couch of saffron-colored silk embroidered with crimson, which an invisible mechanism maintained in the air at head-height.

  His charming mischievous face, eyes candid with vice, had been made up in such a way as to render the complete illusion of health and life. Surrounded by familiar objects, his zither, his knucklebones, his jewelry, with one arm supporting the head with its undulations of bright blond, he seemed to be lost in a reverie, awaiting the pleasure of a sterile spouse or a lust-provoked courtesan. His body, repaired after the fall, the wounds closed and the limbs reattached, was nude, allowing the divination, at the intersection of the joined legs, of the pink delineation of the incomplete sex.

  “But he’s not dead!” exclaimed Choumaque.

  “Yes he is, old man. He’s looking at you without seeing you; listening to you without hearing you. He’s simply admirably embalmed. You’ll know why shortly.”

  The rite dictated that the dearest companions should be around the cadaver, sending him incense and throwing flowers. There were more thurible-bearers swinging their perfumed spirals, waving pennants, running, jumping on top of one another, stamping their feet, standing aside to kiss the child’s pink toenails, exposed by his open-toed sandals. And directly behind, framed by two rows of slaves raising trumpets fulgurant in the sunlight, was the crowd of those who had loved the boy’s caresses, Carabella in the front rank, ardent in her flowing brown hair; and sterile husbands with long beards falling in ringlets over their crimson togas; and fecund mothers, sumptuously draped in their veils constellated with topazes; and courtesans clad in light azured fabrics striped with the characteristic embroidery; and then the entire anonymous, polychromatic, sparkling, singing, dancing crowd of twenty thousand people joyfully accompanying Mirror-of-Smiles, the giver of intoxication, toward his new stage of perfection.

  And the cortege ended with the evolutions of splendid bayaderes, animated by Madame Môme’s commands; while, in the last place. Adolescent flute-players, slaves striking cymbals, accompanied with a concordant tumult the melody issuing from a cart full of musicians and drawn by thirty pairs of lions. Behind the cart, the crowd flocked, jostling, noisy and picturesque.

  “Let’s run to the Field of Truce now, in order to get a place near the funerary crypt,” Marius said to his companions, content to have caught a kiss blown by the High Priestess.

  They detached themselves from the mass and took a short cut, leaping over steams invested by golden moss. Marcel had not let go of Miss Mary’s hand, which he felt more warmly applied to his own. As they were about to go into a delightfully spick and span avenue that bordered the funerary habitations, however, the lovers perceived that they had lost track of Marius and Choumaque. Marcel took advantage of that to turn his companion away from the cortege, the immodest vision of which was renewed at the bend in the road, in a tumult of people, clamors, songs, harmonies, flowers and perfumes. Tranquil nature seemed more captivating still to them.

  Marius stopped Choumaque, who was nearly out of breath. They had arrived near the mausoleum dressed for the mortal remains of Mirror-of-Smiles, in a location that was still deserted. In the vicinity, a quantity of similar monuments surged forth over blocks of red rock, beneath magnificent shade, framed by fresh lawns diversified in places by orgies of flowers, as if the entire vegetal soul of the soil were exhaled there. Little lakes cluttered with lotuses received flashes of sunlight there and reflected them into the infinite silence.

  “Look, old chap!” said Marius, embracing the décor with an enthusiastic gesture. “What Elysian Fields, where you can discuss philosophy gravely with the Shades!” Then he added: “Anyway, I haven’t brought you here to advise you to die here so much as to initiate you into a further surprise. Do you know why Caresco, who is as scornful of dead flesh as he is of living flesh, has instituted these pompous funerals around a made-up cadaver? Why, instead of omnially pulverizing the useless remains of Mirror-of-Smiles and extracting its chemical ingredients—as he does with the majority of those who disappear—he insists on magnifying the death of gitons and courtesans who provide sensual pleasure? Wait, my darling, and you’ll see…it’s diabolically ingenious!”

  He drew the philosopher to a splendidly lighted crypt into which they both penetrated—and what Choumaque saw there did, indeed, fill him with astonishment. A magnificent naked female body was displayed there, lying on a nacreous marble slab, set ablaze by the ivory reflections of two long golden candlesticks. The dead woman bore, in her extinct splendor, the same artificial life at which Mirror-of-Smiles had caused them to marvel a little while before. At her feet, which three steps permitted the attainment, an adolescent had just knelt down, and he was speaking softly, melodiously, reciting the most delightful loving phrases.

  He undoubtedly believed that she was replying to him, for after he had proposed an exchange of tendernesses, he stood up, ran his hand over the hardness of her frozen breasts, put his arm around her stiff waist, and placed his lips on her breathless mouth. His entire attitude, the frissons that ran through him, and the enthusiasm of which he was showing signs, proved that he was sensing the reality of an unreal intoxication.

  “We can talk aloud,” said Marius. “He won’t hear us. That courtesan and that young man adored one another as much as one can adore one another in this land where the gifts of the flesh constitute the only fashion of loving. Now, it happened that one day, the courtesan was, like Mirror-of-Smiles, the victim of an unforeseen accident. She drowned, I think, stunned by erotic pleasure, while giving the benefit of it in a pool. She was immediately directed to this crypt, and as her lover felt severely deprived, the Superman decided that he should not be entirely deprived of her tenderness.

  Every time that adolescent desires her, every time that a memory of the past reanimates his appetite for her, he comes here, places his hand on that lever you can see there, fixed in the rock, and extracts therefrom a fluid of illusion, which takes him back to the most beautiful hours of his amour. So you can see him embracing that mannequin as if it were still alive, and the fellow won’t soon stop on such a fine route...”

  “It’s very well imagined,” Choumaque admitted. “For isn’t everything illusion? And what reality is worth as much as an illusion?”

  “Admire, then, the wisdom of our Caresco, who knows how to adorn the chagrins that an abrupt separation can cause us. New fires, however, soon extinguish the old. At first, that lover came every day. Then he spaced his visits, after having savored the amity of a pretty girl. Now, it’s been two months since he placed his hand on the lever, and it doubtless required the circumstance of that ceremony to bring him back here once again—perhaps for the last time.”
<
br />   The deluded individual accentuated the manifestations of his delirium. Choumaque looked at him with pity. “The unfortunate fellow, who has never suffered!” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Outside, the crowd was gathering precipitately. A formidable cheer greeted the body of Mirror-of-Smiles, which slaves had just seized in order to introduce it into a crypt topped by a pink sandstone cross. They saw people who, after having followed the body directly, raced to seize the lever dispensing the fluid of illusion.

  CHAPTER XXI

  The last trumpets and the last chants resounded, and the cortege scattered. Madame Môme, the High Priestess, followed her battalion of courtesans briefly with a satisfied gaze as their lovers took them away in airplanes. Then, protecting her eyes with her hands, placed as a shade, she looked for Marius and Choumaque. The latter, leaning against one of the columns of a mausoleum, saw her detach herself from the dazzling flow of colors and come toward them.

  Her pastel peplum, floating about her body and fixed at the shoulder by claws of brilliant gemstones, was decorated with jewels representing in miniature the erotic instruments whose employment she taught her pupils. They greeted her young silhouette, and her languorously provocative gait, still swaying to musical rhythms, joyfully. She came to them, successively plastered on their lips the savor of her perfumed mouth; then, detaching two camellias from her hair, she planted one in Marius’ brown mane and the other in Choumaque’s red tresses. After which, taking their arms, she drew them away.