The Golden Rock

by Theo Varlet

  I trembled, impelled to run up there, to see...

  The custodian was stammering incoherent lamentations; I grabbed him by the shoulder. At a run, in ten minutes, hearts betting in our throats, sweating and breathless, we reached the plateau.

  A violet flash of lightning palpitated twice, blazing across the clouds—and a tragic scene overwhelmed us.

  William Klondyke was sitting, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, in front of the open door of a hut, hideously contemplating his acolyte, in the process of plucking the eagle. In the shadows, a pot-bellied stove was darting its crown of blue flame at the belly of an aluminum pot.

  That cookery horrified me, like the sight of Carib Indians in the process of flaying an infant. The fearful hatred of sacrilege took hold of me. The custodian, strangled by panic terror, begged me to flee, but inertly, open-mouthed and fascinated.

  The storm became more violent. Long serpentine ribbons of fire flared up, immense green flashes and violet lightning, dazzling me. The thunder was no longer discontinuous, and loud bombasts burst over the bass rumblings.

  Unsteady, yielding to vertigo, I finally recoiled—but the instantaneous deflagration of blast of blinding sunlight drowned me in its thunderous explosion, a skyfall unleashing the definitive cataclysm of shattered crystal spheres.

  Sidereal silence.

  Crazy blue phosphenes filled my open eyes...

  I glimpsed the hut, still there. I went forward.

  The bitter reek of ozone was mingled with the odor of grilling. The gigantic nudity of William Klondyke appeared, charred, his face crushed. Four limp piles of rubber marked the location of the volatilized vehicle. The chauffeur’s body was streaming and crackling, lying face down in a flaming pool of alcohol.

  Of the Eagle, no sign.

  The force and justice of the immortal Gods! The fulgurant power of Zeus, clearly manifest. The authentic Facts, transparent beneath the symbolism of their appearances.

  I understood the significance of those things—and that I, an unworthy Barbarian, had witnessed the play of the eternal myths: a Titan struck down by a thunderbolt!

  The rain began to fall in huge clattering drops. The storm, its role accomplished, was relaxing, releasing the superfluous clouds in a flood.

  I took refuge in the custodian’s cabin, where the latter was greedily chewing a wedge of gray bread. And under the roof, peppered by the deluge, I experimented mechanically with the comfort of goat’s cheese that tasted like tallow.

  When I perceived that the distraught man had lost all memory of the catastrophe, however, when he offered to resume the tour of the ruins, a sudden cowardice drained the life out of me. I was afraid of that breath of contagious dementia, and I fled, over the sandy road, with the obsession of that thunderbolt sent to punish—over and above analysis and examination—blasphemy and sacrilege.

  On the main road, the Sciacca diligence caught up with me. Harassed by emotion, I huddled in a corner of the empty rattletrap, gazing absent-mindedly at the familiar Sicilian landscape filing past, the bronze-green Indian fig-trees, the zinc-blue aloes. And the odor of the moist earth came in through the open windows, with the perfume of lemon-trees, varnished by rain.

  I was at Castelvetrano in time to catch the express, but its trepidation attacked, without dissolving, the somnambulistic haunting maintained by the red sumptuousness of the Apollinian sunset.

  Finally, at Palermo, when I got back to the electric moons of the Via Macqueda, the jovial rumor of the Quattro Canti, the vesperal idlers on the sidewalks and the illuminated luxury of shop windows, I felt sheltered from the Gods.

  It was only when I had washed and put on dry clothes, however, and was sitting at a bright table in the polyglot restaurant, from the moment that the waiter leaned his shiny bald head over me in order to point out a certain dish of fried calamari and anchovies on the menu, that I began to think rationally about that bizarre day in the sirocco, and gained a better appreciation of the absurd anachronism of this implausible story.

  THE LAST SATYR

  After an abrupt climb, blinded by a thicket, I came out into a dazzling clearing on a terrace emerging from the larch-wood that draped the upper slopes of Mont Antennamare. The lucid panorama of the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas presented the convexity of their miniature and supremely still fresco.

  Beneath the ultramarine of an Angelico sky, the massive Calabras, dappled with snow, overlooked the peacock-blue estuary, where white Messina enclosed a crop of masts in the antique sickle of its harbor.

  To the north, the lapis-lazuli sea widened abruptly, speckled with waves as white as a flock of seagulls, and it colossal slope extended as far as the sharp horizon, where the volcanic cones of the Liparian Islands were frayed at the summit by long streaks of vapor. From Cap Tindarsa, opalized in the distance, to the black clotted waves of the nearby forest, the bare mountains of the Pelorid chain stretched in azure-tinted, glaucous and ashen green planes. Their indolent profiles and bucolic flanks eternalized the sovereign landscape of sensual and divine Trinacria.

  Mother of peaceful and luminous voluptuousness, another Greece, lasciviously anadyomene and burned by African suns, displaying on its beaches the nonchalant siesta of its rich cities, a luxurious sister of the spiritual Hellas, the sacred domain of animal deities, where their games, a long time after the death of Great Pan, were still exuberant in the liberty of the dionysiac forest…of which I dreamed.

  To incite more precise visions, less panoramic syntheses, I sat down on the edge of the rocky terrace, took a copy of Theocritus from my pocket, and started to intone, in Greek, the fifth idyll.26

  The sonority of the Doric syllables, the familiar spell of the verses, was evoking in the perspectives of my mind the enthusiasm of historic intuitions, when a sound of rustling branches disturbed me.

  Brigands?

  I started. At that grotesque supposition, however—blunderbusses and pointed hats—I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Bah! Some animal.”

  And I resumed, more attentively than before, rhythmically intoning the verses, which lit up in evanescent imagery.

  The noise was indubitable this time—the patter of footsteps, brisk and cautious.

  I turned round.

  A satyr!

  More powerful than astonishment, an immeasurable curiosity kept me silent. I stared at the fabulous capriped who was contemplating me, with a suspicious and stupid expression, leaning on a staff.

  Old age, the decrepitude of millennia, weighed down upon that survivor of a semi-divine race, the alert and petulant youth of which is commemorated in the marbles of our museums. Extending from his thin goat-like thighs, abundant red hair had invaded his torso and his overly long arms; a gray mane, from which projected chipped horns and scarred ears, hung in wisps over the snub-nosed face, in which a bestial degeneracy had added flesh to the once-anthropoid character—and in the atonal eyes with horizontal pupils there was a vague, confused sadness, the impotent horror of feeling the remaining drops of his ancient divinity drying up in his immortal veins.

  We remained mute. To maintain a front, I finally slipped the Theocritus into my jacket pocket.

  At that gesture, however, a grimace of infantile dolor twisted the thick slack lips of the silenus.

  “No, no Signor! Ancora!” he stammered, putting his hairy fingers together and stamping his worn-out hooves.

  I obliged his whim, and resumed declaiming the alternate replies of Comatas and Lacon,

  A savage bleat cut off the tenth verse. The silenus sobbed, his neck retracted, rolling the green sclerotics of his upturned eyes, whose tears were matting the dense hair of his white beard.

  The distraught brute’s desolation wrung my heart. I drew closer to the poor lame god and patted him on the shoulder amicably.

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and sniffed loudly. An effort of intelligence contracted his pupils, and, with a crooked smile, he spoke, mingling Sicilian and Greek, with pauses and lo
ng amnesiac stutters, searching for words.

  “Listen, stranger. Your voice has woken me up. I had almost lost my soul, and, as you see, I no longer know the language of my youth. It’s my youth that you’re reading there—my divine youth—for I’m old, as you see! Old! Old!”

  He leaned his chin to his hands, folded over the end of his stick, and he looked at me avidly, with the eyes of a whipped dog, not knowing how to untangle the confusion of his thoughts, knotted by the centuries.

  I encouraged him to go on.

  Then, assuring his gaze as to my sympathetic attention, he continued.

  “Stranger, I shall try to tell you, for you are good, and in spite of your resemblance to the barbarians, the bearers of green umbrellas, who sometimes climb up here, perhaps you are a god. Perhaps you’re immortal too?

  “Oh, if you knew for how many centuries I have found no one who understands! The people of the region flee at my approach, or throw stones at me. Sometimes, when night falls, I take the risk of going to the farms; the servants mistake me for a smuggler and give me bread and cheese. But if they perceive my horns or touch my hair, they cry: ‘To the devil!’ and chase me away with pitchforks, and set the dogs on my hooves. I’ve almost been devoured ten times over. Everyone has forgotten the gods...

  “Besides which, the gods have deserted Trinacria, or have fallen into ambushes. I believe there are still nymphs, in the town, but I dare not go there; it’s an abode of unknown and terrible perils.

  “So I remain a miserable, hunted wanderer in the mountains, alone—always alone. I have to spend long, often fruitless, nights lying in cactus hedges with thorns sharper than those of desire, watching out, on the edges of villages, for some peasant woman to pass by...”

  He broke off, and, in a lower voice, as if for a shameful confidence: “Even that, that last furtive joy, escapes me—for a secret disease is corroding me, a divine malady, which came upon me after a young shepherd invited me into his cabin one winter night...”

  And parting his hair bashfully, he showed me his breast and thighs, encrusted with coppery scabs.

  “Do you think I can be cured?” he asked, humbly.

  “In the town,” I said, “there are savant therapies.”

  “Alas, this disease is sapping the strength that old age had left me. Soon, there will be no pleasure left to me but playing this flute, brought from the town by an obliging goatherd. He even taught me some tunes. Would you like to hear them?”

  “Certainly,” I acquiesced.

  The fellow untangled from his breast, where it hung on a piece of dirty and twisted a blue ribbon, a thirteen-sou flute, which he put to his mouth with an assured modesty.

  Abomination. “Viens, Poupoule,” trembled its hideous refrain, followed by the Cake-Walk, and it was necessary for me to submit to “Tarara-boom-de-ay” before being able to stop the sinister performance, which the poor fallen god whistled frenziedly through his dented tin-plate tube.

  “Good, good—have a rest!” I finally exclaimed.

  The unfortunate was choking, his lips slate-colored by starvation.

  “You’re thirsty. Come on, drink!” And I handed him a capacious flask full of a dynamogenic mixture of rum, caffeine and cola.

  He swallowed a redoubtable dose. His eyelids fluttered ad his eyes lit up. And, inflating his nostrils in a broad bestial and silly smile, he asked: “Is it Nectar?”

  “Almost,” I said. “Do you feel better?”

  Making no reply, he picked up his stick—and, with his spine arched, his hams firm, his hooves rattling on the rock—which sounded hollow—he advanced to a point of the terrace overhanging the vertiginous wooded slope. There sticking his chest out, a sovereign silhouette against the sky, whose light added a gold plush to his ruddy pilosity, with a vigorous sling-shot action, he hurled the staff of his old age, no longer necessary, recklessly into the abyss

  “Hee-ah!” he grunted, wildly, brandishing his fits toward the light. “Hee-ah!” And this thorax swelled, creaking like new leather. “Hee-ah!”

  He turned toward me, his expression tumultuous, his lips gleaming, the color of crushed myrtle.

  “Yes, Friend, you are a god! Give me the Nectar again!”

  He grabbed the flask and gulped a large mouthful; then, snatching the tinplate flute from around his neck, he sent it flying, blue ribbon and all, over his shoulder.

  “I remember. I’ll make a syrinx. You’ll see. How did I forget?”

  He was speaking Greek now, in a deep and musical, slightly hoarse voice.

  “Let’s go!” And he dragged me away, by a path that led away from the end of the terrace, rapidly, imperatively and irresistibly.

  We ran over the mountainsides, through the forest. Here and there, lukewarm blue holes cleaved the coolness of the foliage. Then, in the semi-obscurity of tunnels of verdure, a green fluorescence illuminated my companion’s pupils. Every time they settled upon me, a spasm of vigor lifted me up; we galloped, frenetically, through the death-traps of that absurd path; we could, by Hercules, have bounded over the tops of the larches and pines.

  “You see! I remember. It was before the subversion of the luminous order of things. It was before the stupid Arabs, before the Christians, disparagers of life—in the times that simply were. In the torrid radiance of ancient Sicily, I was a god. In the days of the north wind, drunk on raw sunlight and the heady gusts, I looked down on the waves of the mountains. Their green and voluptuous soul filtered through all the pores of my soul—naked then, and beautiful!—and flowed in my young arteries. The universal heart beat in my breast. Listen. In the long summer nights, enraptured by the sirocco, I penetrated the essence of the Panic force. Hee-ah! I know again. I’ll tell you—on the syrinx.”

  He fell silent, his hands clutching his pectoral muscles, his head tilted back in the rut of a dionysiac joy, savoring the inexpressible tumult of his enthusiasm, which was induced in me by contagion—me, the resuscitator of a god!

  He went on. His somnambulistic feet kicked up pebbles, which rebounded from precipices. His mane became supple and aerated; his fleece, unmated now, floated like a garment, to the rhythm of his brisk gait, like a rapid dance led by interior harmonies.

  We were going down, though. A valley appeared enclosed by undulating crests and girdled with umbrella-pines—and the great bottle-green sloops of the foothills extended down below in terraces of olive-trees, all the way to the red roof of a farmhouse.

  Further way, in another sterile ravine, where the mountain was split by hectic landslides, the white threads of the highway appeared in the background. The minuscule bells of an animal flock were tinkling, musical festoons in the silence.

  The satyr’s ears were pricked, his nostrils flared. He was whistling through his incisors and he seized me by the shoulders, pointing downwards with his hairy index-finger.

  “The goats! Do you see them? On the bare back of the mountain, the black goats, like lice.”

  His breath jerky, trotting nimbly along the granite spur, he drew me toward the herd, which was grazing the herbage of the impracticable slopes near a bend in the path.

  Abruptly, the capriped let go of me and raced over the landslides with exorbitant bounds. The little goatherd, barefoot and clad in goatskin trousers, started to flee with vain agility, from the satyr’s lightning pursuit—but the dog did not flinch, and the goats, chewing the grass that was dangling in the beards, watched the aegipan pass by placidly. He disappeared behind a mass of rocks, where his victim had just taken refuge.

  I galloped around the long bend in the road, breathlessly, anguished by the drama that was being perpetrated behind the hillock, from which the triumphant onomatopoeias of incoherent hymns soon emerged.

  Five minutes later, instead of a catastrophe, I was amazed to find a bucolic scene: on the knees of the capriped, the little goatherd, still red-faced from running, was fondling with his beard, chattering away, tugging the two soft and downy appendages at the goatlike neck—and the enraptured, tickli
sh god burst out laughing, in the pose of the drunken satyr of Pompeii...

  But the child, frightened by the sight of me, suddenly, ran off.

  Irritated by my stupid anxiety, I called out to the old aegipan: “Tell me, at least…”

  “On the syrinx!” he cried. “On the syrinx! Come on!”

  Ten paces further on, he pulled up a bunch of reeds with a single thrust, of which he chose the best ones. I handed him my penknife, and, while walking along, he shaped his pipes, the sonority which he tested as he went.

  Then he fixed me with an ironic stare, sniggering in my face, brazenly. “He wasn’t afraid of me, you know. He recognized me. You’ll see, god-of-the-nectar: I’ll tell you—on the syrinx. Eah! I’m still a god! From Drepane to Syracuse, Trinacria was ours. The country folk brought us offerings, and invoked us in their songs.

  “On the sloping paths, in the rounded shadows of the umbrella-pines, I sat down with the young shepherds. I taught them new tunes on the flute; and I leaned over, running my fingers through their hair, which had the scent of fresh-cut grass, to see their red lips sliding over the mouthpiece of the pipes, which sometimes cut them and bloodied them with little salty droplets.

  “In the long torrid middays of the late summer, when the landscapes quivered fluidly, lying in ambush beside the roads, I waited for the girls coming back from taking drinking-water to the harvesters—and in the ardent silence of the siesta, I caused the shrill cry of transfixed virginities to spurt forth.

  “I lay in wait in the green daylight of the forests, at the time when the dainty hamadryads poked their heads out of the trees, cautiously parting their living sheaths of bark and leaping to the ground, supple green nudities. They too were mine.

  “And the nymphs, as white and cool as the flesh of nenuphar lilies, who lay back in silence, their eyes closed, on the damp grass, cooing softly, like the gurgling murmur of the nearby stream…and then, alone, I leaned over the spring, to stick out my tongue at my reflection, still grimacing at their dive.