I was not yet outside when the fanfare thundered more loudly than before.
The Hercules with the pygean11 cheeks had closed his window—but I perceived, at the next one, the desperate face of a woman who was gazing at the sea and weeping.
I saw the Borellis again that same evening, at the theater and in the wings. A veritable multitude was crowding the auditorium to heard Siegfried’s bird sing. Our Parisian party had remained in Monte Carlo in its entirety, contrary to the plans we had made to return to Paris the day after the performance. The previous night’s audience had returned in full, replete with melomaniac fervor. For lack of a smaller folding-seat, Gunsbourg had offered me a stool behind one of the scenery-supports. It was the best way of getting close to Madame Borelli. I watched out for her.
They arrived. The most lamentable of all the memories I have is that of the invalid advancing jerkily on her crutches in the midst of other actors magnificent in their carriage and radiant with pride. The unfortunate woman was clad in poverty-stricken Sunday clothes. I shall long remember her shapeless and colorless bonnet, undoubtedly the victim of many a downpour, diabolically positioned, but on a superb chignon whose fawn-colored tresses were tightly wound, compressing their fabulous opulence. And her bodice! The poor woman! How many times had she laundered that smock to get it into that urine-colored state? And her skirt! Her pitiful skirt, with its faded hues, superannuated petticoats, “decorated” with garlands and worn braid—her sinister skirt, knotted at the base like a sack, upon the secret monstrosity of her legs!
She moved heavily, positioning the sack, then the crutches, then the sack…
I couldn’t tell you whether she was pretty; one only saw her sadness. She looked as if she had been born on the Day of the Dead.
Monsieur Borelli held her close. I perceived a vague similarity between them, like a family resemblance, a certain wild, russet, suntanned quality that linked them confusedly together. Brother and sister? Cousins? Or simply compatriots?
On seeing me, the man stopped short. He resumed walking immediately, his expression reassured and his cheeks puffed out.
“It’s a bit strong! I can’t get used to your beard!” he said to me, as he shook my hand. Then, very quickly, he whispered in my ear: “No news? The old man? Good.” He straightened up again. “This is my wife, Monsieur Director.”
I tried to get the cantatrice to talk. She murmured a few yesses and a few discouraging noes…besides, the performance was under way; we didn’t have the right to talk. The music reigned.
Siegfried’s horn resounded. Borelli gripped my shoulder and whispered; “Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that trumpet beautiful? That’s what I call a nice piece, easy to remember…”
Suddenly, the voice of the bird emerged from the lips of the invalid, so close to me that my throat resonated with it. It was as if the atmosphere were saturated with a maddening sonorous aroma. Seized by vertigo, intoxication, gratitude, I became unsteady on my feet. Scene-shifters, chorus girls, bit-part players and even singers—the entire personnel of the theater—formed a circle around the cripple. There was something in her voice other than genius and sweetness; there was an inexplicable power of attraction. And in the half-light of the place, magnified, transfigured by the love of her art, the golden-haired cripple acquired an irresistible beauty…
She finished. The continuing opera was a tiresome racket. I emerged from an opium dream. La Borelli was no longer anything more than a sad and badly-dressed creature, who could not be cheered up by my praises. The ovations left her indifferent. Her escort led her away hurriedly—“to avoid indiscretions at the exit,” he said. I wanted to go with them; he refused, will an ill grace.
An hour later, unable to calm the agitation that the emotion, though brief, had left within me, I was wandering along the edge of the sea, some distance away from the houses. The silhouette of a man standing on a rock was suddenly outlined in the darkness.
The new Moon illuminated the marine landscape faintly. I thought I recognized Borelli. Divided between dread and curiosity, I advanced furtively through the boulders on the shore, continually losing sight of him only to discover him closer at hand, as motionless as his pedestal. It was definitely him, like a statue.
Where had I met him before?
Remembering the scares that the unexpected sight of me gave him, I paused some distance away and announced myself joyfully. He shivered nonetheless upon his rock, like a cypress in a gust of wind.
Borelli seemed to be lost in contemplation before the nocturnal sea. A large cloak draped him in Romanticism. Diffuse objects were heaped at his feet.
“You can’t tell me that you don’t love Amphitrite!” I exclaimed, in a bantering tone. “To come at this hour to admire her…”
“So what?” he grunted. “Is it any of your business? Yes, I love the sea, but not so much as solitude, you know!”
I was astonished to hear him speaking so loudly, in a voice that overwhelmed the sound of the waves, when I was so close to him. I felt his anger. He said to me, point-blank: “Why don’t you dare to interrogate me about what’s on the ground beside me?”
“But I hadn’t even given it a thought…” I replied, disconcerted.
Borelli shrugged his shoulders. I observed that his eyes were uniquely occupied with the sea. He studied its moving expanse unrelentingly. It was quiet and pallid in the moonlight. A dolphin was playing in the waves; its contortions and the flips of its tail were visible from time to time in fugitive gleams. The lighthouses, all in a line, gesticulated variously with their infinite arms of light.
“You haven’t given it a thought?” he mocked. “Go on! You’re scared. I hate intruders—you know that very well. Leave me in peace, my dear Monsieur!”
I was only an old man, devoid of vigor…
“Listen, Borelli—I’m going, that’s understood. It’s far from my intention to be disagreeable to you, my lad. But don’t say that I’m scared. I’m not scared. What are those things at your feet?”
“Go away!” bellowed the colossus. “Peace! Peace! Peace! If not…”
I beat the retreat at a steady pace, mastering a furious desire to run away as fast as my legs could carry me.
As I went back into Monte Carlo, I wondered if it might be wise to take advantage of the absence of the redoubtable cicisbeo to attempt to have a conversation with Madame Borelli. The lateness of the hour held me back. Both the adventurers’ windows were dark; the invalid’s slumber seemed to be a delight that should only be broken in exchange for another. I passed on.
The adventure seemed supremely exciting to me; a voice captivated me; a woman excited my charity; a man intrigued my suspicion. I allowed my traveling companions to leave without me.
In the early afternoon, Borelli had himself announced. I received him in my room. It was a social visit, or so he claimed. No allusion was made to the previous night’s incident. After a few superfluous remarks, though, he asked me straight out to lend him 25 louis.
Very annoyed, I procrastinated, changing the subject; I offered him my compliments with regard to the affluence that the singer was attracting to the theater and the principality. Thanks to her, the accommodation was fully booked for a fortnight and the hotels were overflowing.
On that, the husband-impresario told me that he was going to demand a serious pay-increase from Gunsbourg, or his wife would not sing again. I assume that he was on the point of reiterating his request for 500 francs, but an unexpected occurrence interrupted him.
His face changed. With his ear cocked, he gestured to me to be silent. Before I had heard whatever it was, the fanatic hurled himself on to the balcony.
All the passers-by and strollers were heading in the same direction at a hurried pace, with a hypnotic and taciturn gait that was alarming at first glance. In the distance, in the direction of the Villa des Mouettes, an extraordinary voice launched forth in disorganized song—and it was toward that voice that all those people were marching like sleep-walkers.
My visitor lost his temper. “I’ve forbidden her, though…”
What happened next was immediate. Four bounds had taken him to the foot of the staircase, as he too hastened toward the magnetic singer.
Was it the effect of the indomitable curiosity that linked me to their destiny? Was it by virtue of the melodious magnetism? At any rate, the fact is that I bounded after him.
From every direction, people were running toward the barbed call of the voice. What she was singing resembled nothing familiar. It sprang forth, twisting and overflowing in delightful cries. It was the entirety of springtime, singing the entirety of love. Men, subjugated, were heading toward the infernal canticle as little birds head toward the eyes of a serpent. There were some women trying to hold some of them back, and others who were following them toward the voice. Arms extended, eyes crazed, their feverish legs were working mechanically. A host of fanatical automata was pressing at the doorway of the Villa des Mouettes and beneath the singer’s open window. Borelli threw himself into it with a forceful leap, waving his arms and legs, progressing with great thrusts of the hips and shoulders into the bosom of that living wave, with the gestures and a swimmer and an amphibious flexibility. The ecstatic members of the crowd allowed themselves to be brutalized. They were listening, with their mouths open and their nostrils flared, as if their mouths and nostrils were listening, drinking and breathing in the voice, obedient to its despotic tones: Closer! Closer! Forwards! That was what was being ordered without being spoken.
Like everyone else, I was held voluptuously captive by the toils of the melody, and I immersed myself involuntarily in the human heap in order to get closer, at any price, my eardrums fascinated, my soul numbed…
It was resonating in the depths of a gulf, into which all those amorous individuals withed to precipitate themselves.
The charm lasted until the intervention of the plump manager. His outburst reached us as a fearful summons, proffered in an idiom that was impossible to comprehend…
Then, crushed by a silence more silent than any other, we looked at one another as if emerging from an adorable and shameful dementia. Everyone resumed his interrupted journey, head empty, nerves jangling, full of astonishment and confusion. Many had glided as far as the threshold of the room; they slipped away, blushing. A few were weeping. Life recommenced; the noises of it set all their teeth on edge.
That kind of scandal only had fortunate consequences for my friend Gunsbourg. Madame Borelli sang the bird as she had the night before, in the presence of an elite audience which crammed the corridors and blocked the exits, a noisy and profuse crush; but Wagner’s music on her lips was not sufficiently imperious a spell to draw the legion of her admirers into the wings.
I was placed in the orchestra stalls.
On raising my eyes, I perceived in the balcony, directly above my head, an old gentleman whose long white beard made me shiver. The opera-glasses revealed the image that mirrors habitually relay back to me, with the difference that, of the two of us, it was me that was the reflection. I was the faded, soft and discolored replica of that august old man; the copy of which he was the original. With the complexion of an old sea-dog,12 a Roman nose, two turquoise flames beneath shadowy eyebrows, and his forehead barred by a reddish line like those left by heavy helmets, he looked like the venerable admiral of a squadron of yore, a commander grown old in naval glory, a doge of Venice, mistress of the sea, immortal or resurrected. A frock-coat constrained the amplitude of his torso. Many a lady was peering at that combined patriarchal and military majesty through her opera-glasses. Royal names were running from mouth to mouth in his respect.
There was no doubt about it: this was Signor Borelli’s enemy—perhaps even his ancestor and the ancestor of the singer; for, it must be admitted, the family resemblance I had already noted assimilated all three of their faces.
That of the old man took on an expression of tragic grandeur when the bird began to sing. Its ancient solemn rectitude shifted nervously, as if to deplore…
Bravos. Encores, Hurrahs. Disorder.
I tried to find him again. He had disappeared.
Ought I to warn the interested party? I hesitated over that until the final act and concluded by opting in favor of the old man, against the persecutor of my protégée. Borelli’s adversary could only be a friend of the oppressed woman, an ally for me; it was, therefore, her and not the Italian who had to be informed as soon as possible.
In the hope that the plump man would devote himself once again to the shadowy task in which I had disturbed him on the strand on the previous night, and which, no doubt, would prevent him from leaving the shore, I went to the Mouettes.
The drowsy concierge mumbled that neither Monsieur nor Madame Borelli had come back from the theater—to which he swore—and that, moreover, they never came back before 3 or 4 a.m., which he had already told me a little while ago, and that he did not understand why I had woken him up twice in succession to ask him the same thing.
The news of this double absence confused my ideas and upset my plan. Moreover, the old man had been there. I resolved to bring the matter into the light, and set off resolutely for the rocks where Borelli had snapped at me. Having had second thoughts, though, I turned back; I climbed to the top of the cliff that bordered that part of the shore, from whose heights I would be able to look down on the setting and the action.
My heart was beating rapidly. I felt strange.
The nebulous night was not as favorable to watchers as the one before, and the moon was still on the point of rising. The sea—the ancient sea, the Latin sea—lulling its eternal insomnia, was reciting its pagan legends and the poem of its mythology in the darkness. Flecks of foam whitened it here and there. Clouds being sparse, the clarity of the sky showed me the fugitive gleams of the nautical play of a dolphin in the far distance. But then the thunderous clamor of a horn went up—a horn sounding Siegfried’s fanfare!
I stopped.
Beneath my post, there was a statue standing on a pedestal: Borelli, who was sounding the trumpet-call on an instrument so small that it could not be seen; Borelli alone; a sculptural Borelli.
Ah! I thought, suddenly. God, how stupid I am! I didn’t realize it until now. He doesn’t resemble any actual citizen! It’s the Tritons he resembles, with his bloated cheeks! The Tritons of painters and sculptors! The two decorative Tritons of the water-pavilion at the Palais de Longchamp, in Marseilles, at which I was looking only the other day! All well and good! That’s why it seemed impossible to encounter him, since he wasn’t in the land of dreams!”
The fanfare having concluded, Borelli called out to someone—but he was still alone. I was looking at him from behind. He was standing between the sea and me, on the rock, in his overcoat. His calls multiplied, and became more precipitate, to the point at which he seemed to be hurling invective at the waves. He really was calling out, but to whom? Darkness. No one.
He crouched down, and leapt down from the rock. He was no longer visible…
Oh! Yes: at the very edge, on the fringe of the waves.
And the horn began to sound again—no longer Siegfried’s leitmotiv but long howls reminiscent of what hunting jargon terms a compulsory summons. And then again, another bitter discourse shouted in the solitude, into the Mediterranean darkness: the liquid desert where a single dolphin was frolicking. And then the insistent trumpet call again, imperative, roaring….
Nothing more.
The Moon was veiled with cloud.
Borelli was dragging something out of the sea—something that resisted him. Like a fisherman hauling in his net—the simulacrum of a fisherman hauling in his net, of which absolutely nothing could be seen. Ah! The thing had yielded, had broken; having fallen backwards, he blasphemed. I heard foreign words, imprecations…
He was struggling on the spot. Suddenly, I saw that he was naked. In the same instant, he slid sinuously into the water, swimming with the rapidity of a seal, with great thrusts of his shoulders and
hips, just as he had surged through the middle of the crowd…
Fascination, equal to a passion, made me tremble. The most fantastic thing of all, however, had not yet occurred.
While the Hercules was swimming out into the open sea, becoming blurred in the depths of the darkness—heading almost directly for the dolphin, which could no longer be made out—I heard a kind of whinnying sound, out at sea. Several others followed, mingling together; gigantic, paradoxical whinnying sounds, with an unusual resonance; a choir of stallions imitating the barking concert of seals; horses crossed with walruses; ambiguous striders of the shadows and the sea…
At that moment, another of Borelli’s calls reached me, above the din.
An infinitely distant voice answered him…
I just had time to throw myself flat on the ground and stick my fingers I my ears. I had just felt myself marching forward, toward the edge of the cliff. One more step, and I would have been dead. For that faraway voice, from the remotest distance, as the hallucinatory voice of Madame Borelli, frenzied now, and triumphant, who was singing her springtime song like a hymn of deliverance!
Slowly, I relaxed the vice-like grip of my fists upon my ears; by that means I established that the human voice and the whinnyings had vanished.
The Moon emerged from a mass of cloud.
In the sea, a moving dot was heading straight for the shore; another dot, gleaming was following it a few fathoms behind: two men. The first came ashore. That was Borelli again. Dripping and painting, he headed for Monte Carlo. The second stood up at the same spot, and immediately launched himself on the heels of the fugitive. That one was an old man, and he was a giant—the old man whose feeble miniature I was. His long white beard floated in the wind of the pursuit. A golden crown helmeted him with spikes and fire. Although devoid of clothes, he would have been reminiscent of Charlemagne had he not been more sovereign than any emperor. At the end of one superb and menacing arm he was brandishing a sort of fork, like a lance and like a scepter.
The Doctored Man Page 4
