The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  “Can he be playing the Game?” thought Gérard, clasping Paul’s warm hand, staring intently at the face supine in its corner.

  Without Paul’s presence, this cab would have been nothing but a cab, the snow no more than snow, the lamps mere lamps, this return journey a humdrum routine affair. Too homespun by nature for any self-induced delirium, Gérard was totally possessed by Paul, whose spell had finally pervaded his entire consciousness. Instead of learning grammar, arithmetic, geography, natural history, he had been made free of such a sphere of sleep as wafts the waking dreamer past danger of recall, and restores to things their veritable meaning. The opium hidden in their desks—in the shape of pieces of chewed eraser, broken pen-holders—provided these infant addicts with a drug as potent as any drowsy sirup of the East.

  Could Paul be playing the Game?

  Gérard knew better than to suppose that a mere passing fleet of fire engines would have disturbed him in his play.

  He tried to pick up its tenuous threads again, but it was too late. The cab had come to a halt in front of the door.

  Paul roused himself.

  “Shall I get help?” asked Gérard. No need. If Gérard would give him a hand he could manage the stairs … if Gérard would hang on to his satchel….

  Gérard lifted out the satchel, clasped Paul round the waist, and with Paul’s left arm slung round his neck, started to mount the stairs. On the first landing he stopped, deposited his precious burden upon a derelict settee with springs and stuffing bulging through green plush upholstery. He went towards the right-hand door and touched the bell.

  Footsteps sounded; ceased. Silence.

  “Elisabeth!” Still not a sound.

  “Elisabeth!” called Gérard in an urgent whisper. “Open the door. It’s us.”

  “I shan’t open the door!” remarked a small stubborn voice from the other side of it. “I’m sick to death of boys. Turning up at this hour of the night—you must be mad. I’m fed up with you.”

  “Lisbeth, do open the door,” insisted Gérard. “Hurry up, Paul’s ill.”

  There was a pause; then the door opened just a fraction and the voice was heard to say:

  “Ill? You can’t catch me. I know you’re only trying to make me let you in. You’re telling an untruth, aren’t you? Are you?”

  “Paul’s ill, I tell you, do buck up. He’s on the settee, he’s shivering.”

  The door opened wide to reveal a girl of sixteen, with a strong physical resemblance to Paul. She had the same blue eyes shadowed by dark lashes, the same pallor of complexion. But whereas the lines of his face betrayed a certain weakness by comparison, hers, two years older, beneath soft curling hair, had already ceased to be a sketch for the finished portrait, was already groping for its organic principle and racing, disheveled, to overtake its final beauty.

  It was her whiteness that loomed first against the hall’s dark background; that, and the pale blot of the kitchen apron, far too long for her, tied round her waist.

  It was true then, not a hoax, she told herself, struck dumb. With Gérard’s assistance she lifted Paul and helped him in—a reeling figure, his head sunk on his chest. The moment they were in the hall, Gérard started to make a statement.

  “Idiot,” she hissed. “There you go, as usual—trust you to make a hash of it. Must you shout? Can’t you be quiet? Do you want Mother to hear?”

  They crossed the dining-room, describing a circle round the table to reach the children’s bedroom on the right.

  Here the furniture consisted of two diminutive beds, a chest of drawers, three chairs and a mantelpiece. A door between the beds gave access to the kitchen-dressing-room, which boasted a second entrance, from the hall.

  It was a bedroom to startle an unaccustomed eye. But for the beds, it would have seemed a lumber room. The floor was strewn with empty boxes, with towels and various articles of underwear; apart from these, one threadbare rug adorned it. A plaster bust, its features emphasized by inked-in eyes and a mustache, occupied a central position on the mantelpiece. Every available inch of wall space was stuck with thumbtacks impaling sheets of newspapers, pages torn out of magazines, programs, photographs of film stars, murderers, boxers.

  Elisabeth led the way, swearing, forcing a path between the boxes by means of violent kicks delivered left and right. At length they stretched him on his bed, among a tumbled heap of books. Then Gérard told his tale.

  “It’s the limit!” burst out Elisabeth. “Here am I, tied hand and foot to my poor sick mother, while you go snowballing. A precious pair, I must say. My poor sick mother!” she said again, agreeably struck by the phrase and by the sense of dignity it gave her. “I tend my poor mother on her bed of sickness while you disport yourself with snowballs. I bet it was you as usual who made Paul do it, you idiot!”

  Gérard held his tongue. He was familiar with the impassioned rhetoric coupled with schoolboy slang the pair affected, as well as with their perpetual state of nervous tension. But he remained abashed and could not help being a little upset by it.

  “Who’ll have to nurse Paul,” she went on, “you or me? What are you standing there for, gaping at me?”

  “Libbie darling….”

  “I’m not Libbie, and I’m not your darling. Kindly keep a civil tongue in your head. Besides….”

  A far-away voice broke in on them.

  “Gérard, old fellow,” Paul muttered. “Don’t take any notice of the bitch. It’s too boring.”

  Elisabeth was stung.

  “Oh, I’m at bitch, am I? All right, you dirty dogs, I’m through. You can damn well fend for yourself. It’s the end. Fancy me bothering about a feeble ass who can’t stand up to a harmless little snowball! Look, Gérard,” she went on without a break, “watch.” She executed a sudden violent high kick that flung her tight leg higher than her head. “I’ve been practicing that for weeks.” She repeated the performance. “And now, be off! Get a move on.”

  She pointed to the door.

  On the threshold Gérard hesitated.

  “Perhaps…” he stammered. “Oughtn’t we to get a doctor….”

  She swung a leg up.

  “A doctor? I was so hoping to have the benefit of your advice. What it is to be brainy! Perhaps I might humbly beg to mention the doctor’s coming to see Mummy at seven o’clock and I thought of getting him to look at Paul. Go on now, skedaddle!” Then, as Gérard still hovered uncertainly, she added: “Or are you a medical man, by any chance? Oh, you’re not? Then leave this house. Will you be off?”

  She stamped her foot, her eye flashed, steely. Beating a hasty retreat backwards through the dark dining-room, he knocked a chair over.

  “Idiot! Idiot!” she repeated. “Don’t pick it up; you’d only knock another over. Make haste, for heaven’s sake! And mind you don’t bang the door.”

  On the landing, Gérard remembered that the cab was still waiting and that he had not a penny in his pockets. He dared not ring again. She would take no notice; or if she did, she would be expecting to see the doctor and flay him, Gérard, with her tongue.

  He lived with his guardian, whose nephew he was, in the rue Lafitte. He decided to take the cab on home, then explain the situation to his uncle, and persuade him to settle the whole bill.

  He sank into Paul’s corner of the cab; deliberately he let his head loll back, surrendered, as Paul’s had been, to the jolting springs. He made no attempt to play the Game; he was feeling wretched. His fabulous journey was over; he was back now in the discomfiting climate of Elisabeth and Paul. She had shattered his dream of Paul in his pure weakness, stabbed him awake with reminders of his selfish whims. Paul in his relationship to Dargelos, Paul victim, overthrown, was not that Paul to whom he, Gérard, was in thrall.

  There had been something of perversion, almost of necrophily, in the delicious pleasures of that journey with the unconscious youth; not that he envisaged it in such crude psychopathic terms. All the same he realized that Paul’s swoon, the falling snow, had contributed
to an illusion. Paul had been absent, dead. Only the ruddy glow cast by the flying fire engines had given him a counterfeit life. He understood Elisabeth—knew, of course, that her affection for him was simply an extension of her worship of her brother. Oh yes, he was their friend, had witnessed their transports of immoderate love, the stormy glances they exchanged, the clash of their conflicting fantasies and their malicious tongues. He lay back soberly in the cab and let his head roll to and fro and felt the draft cold on the back of his neck and set about reducing his world to commonsense proportions. But a rational approach had its disadvantages as well as its rewards. If on the one hand it enabled him to discern a tender heart beneath her outward harshness, on the other it forced him to recognize Paul’s seizure for what it was—a real, grownup fainting-fit, suggesting dire possibilities.

  The cab stopped at his front door. Placating the grumbling driver as best he could, he rushed upstairs to find his uncle, who gave his case kindly and prompt attention.

  Downstairs again. The road stretched blank as far as the eye could see, empty of everything but snow. Presumably the driver had thrown his hand in, picked up another fare willing to settle the amount already on the meter, and driven off. Gérard pocketed his uncle’s money. He thought: “I’ll keep it and say nothing. I’ll use it to buy Elisabeth a present. Then I shall have an excuse to go round and see her and get more news.”

  Meanwhile, in the rue Montmartre, after the rout of Gérard, Elisabeth was with her mother. The sick woman lay with her eyes shut in a bedroom opening into a shabby drawing-room on the left side of the apartment. Four months ago this woman had been young and vigorous. Then, without warning, paralysis had struck her down; and now she looked like an old woman. She was thirty-five years old and longed for death.

  She had been bewitched, despoiled, and finally deserted by her husband. For three years he had gone on treating his family to occasional brief visits, during the course of which—having meanwhile developed cirrhosis of the liver—he would brandish revolvers, threaten suicide and order them to nurse the master of the house; for the mistress with whom he lived refused this office and kicked him out whenever his attacks occurred. His custom was to go back to her as soon as he felt better. He turned up one day at home, raged, stamped, took to his bed, found himself unable to get up again, and died; thereby bestowing his end upon the wife he had repudiated.

  An impulse of revolt now turned this woman into a mother who neglected her children, took to night clubs, got herself up like a tart, sacked her maid once a week, begged, borrowed indiscriminately.

  Elisabeth and Paul had inherited her pallor and her cast of countenance. Their heritage of instability, extravagant caprice and natural elegance was their paternal portion.

  Now, as she lay there, she was thinking to herself: “Why go on living?” The doctor was an old friend; he would keep an eye on the children, see that they did not come to grief. She had become a hopeless liability, a millstone round her daughter’s neck, a burden to them all.

  “Are you asleep, Mummy?”

  “No. Just dozing.”

  “Paul’s strained himself. I’ve put him to bed. I’ll ask the doctor to look at him.”

  “Is he in pain?”

  “He says it hurts when he walks. He sends his love. He’s got his newspapers; he’s doing some cutting out.”

  The sick woman sighed, reluctant to pursue the matter. She had developed the egotism born of suffering, as well as a settled habit of dependence on her daughter.

  “What about a maid?”

  “I can manage.”

  Elisabeth went back to her own quarters. She found Paul lying with his face to the wall. Stooping over him she said:

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Very polite, I’m sure. Charming manners. I suppose you’ve gone away.” (To “go away” was a private term in the Game, i.e., they said: I’m going to go away; I’m going away; I’ve gone away. To disturb a player once this third stage had been accomplished was considered unforgivable.)

  “Here am I toiling and slaving while you go away. You’re a heel; you’re a disgusting heel. Here, hold your foot up; let me take off your shoes. Your feet are frozen. Wait, I’ll get you a hot water bottle.”

  She put his muddy shoes on the mantelpiece beside the bust and vanished into the kitchen. Presently she could be heard lighting the gas. Then she came back and set about undressing Paul. He let out a grunt but made no further protest, silently complying at intervals with such requests as: “Lift your head”; “Lift your leg”; “Will you kindly stop shamming dead? I’ll never get this sleeve off.”

  As she took off his clothes, she emptied his pockets of their miscellaneous contents: item, an ink-stained handkerchief; item, some bait; item, a few lozenges stuck together with fluff. All these she threw on the floor; the rest of the hoard, consisting of a miniature hand in ivory, a marble, the cap of a fountain-pen, she deposited in one of the drawers of the wardrobe.

  Here was the treasure, a treasure impossible to describe because the miscellaneous objects in the drawer had been so far stripped of their original function, so charged with symbolism, that what remained looked merely like old junk—empty aspirin bottles, metal rings, keys, curling-pins; all worthless rubbish, save to the eye of the initiate.

  She filled the bottle, slipped it between the sheets, pulled off his day shirt, skinned him like a rabbit, swore, put on his night shirt; disarmed, as usual, melted almost to tears, by the grace and beauty of his body. She settled him down, tucked him in, then said with a little gesture of dismissal: “Go to sleep, silly.” After which, summoning a look of maniac concentration, she started to practice a few exercises.

  She was startled by the faint ringing of the front door bell; it had been stuffed with a cloth to muffle it, and was barely audible. The doctor had come. She flew to meet him, clutching his overcoat to drag him towards Paul’s bedside while she poured out explanations.

  “Go and get the thermometer and then run along, there’s a good girl. You can wait in the drawing-room. I’m going to sound his chest and I always dislike an audience.”

  Elisabeth crossed the dining-room and went into the drawing-room. Here too the snow had been about its magic work. The room hung in mid-air, miraculously suspended, changed, unfamiliar to the child who stood there, stock still, staring, behind one of the armchairs. The lamplit brightness of the opposite pavement had printed on the ceiling several windows made of squares of shadow and half-shadow curtained with arabesques of light; upon this groundwork the silhouetted forms of passers-by circled diminished as in a moving fresco.

  The mirror, which had begun to come alive, revealing within its depths a spectral figure, motionless, poised midway between floor and cornice, added a further touch of travesty to this aerial dwelling, swept darkly ever and again by the broad headlight of a passing car.

  She tried to play the Game but found she could not. Her heart, aware, like Gérard’s, that their private legend would not assimilate the snowball and its consequences, was beating an alarm. Such events belonged to the stark world of fear and doctors, a world of people who run temperatures and catch their deaths. In a flash she saw it all: her mother paralyzed, her brother dying, no help in the house, no love, the cupboard bare, cold scraps, dry biscuits nibbled at odd hours, then nothing—a bowl of broth perhaps, left by a neighbor.

  Within the framework of their legend, the consumption, in bed, of quantities of barley sugar had become de rigueur—a fortifying accompaniment to their ceremonial sessions of quarreling over books. They read the same books over and over again, snatching them acrimoniously from one another, devouring them with gluttonous indiscretion, aiming to reach satiety, revulsion, and so begin the Game; for this initial stage was integrally designed like every other—beginning with the ritual preparation of the beds, the smoothing, the brushing out of crumbs—to serve the Game’s one end and give it wings for flight.

  She had gone well away at last when
she heard her name called. “Lise!”

  It was the doctor, shocking her back into the world of grief. She opened the door.

  “Come now,” he said, “no need to make such heavy weather of it. He’s not dangerously ill. It’s serious, mind—but not dangerous. The slightest blow on a weak chest like his…. No more school—that’s out of the question. Rest, rest, and again rest. You were quite right to tell your mother it was just a strain—we don’t want her worried. You’re a sensible girl; I can rely on you. I’d like a word with your maid.”

  “There isn’t a maid any more.”

  “Capital. I shall be sending a couple of nurses in tomorrow. They’ll take turns running the house and doing the shopping. You’ll be in charge, of course.”

  She did not thank him. She was accustomed to miracles and accepted them as part of daily life. She expected them to happen, and they always did.

  The doctor paid his routine visit to his other patient and went away.

  Paul slept. Elisabeth kept watch beside him, listening to his breathing, her passionate anger spent, or rather turned to a passionately tender contemplation. Sick and asleep, he was exposed to scrutiny, immune from teasing. She could examine the mauve stains beneath his eyelids, the fullness and forward lift of the upper lip; she could lay her head against the boyish arm. What is this uproar in her ears? Blocking one ear, she strains to listen, hears her own hammering pulses amplifying his. Louder, louder? … She panics. Surely if this goes on it must mean death. Wake up! She must wake him up.

  “My darling!”

  “Mm? What d’you want?” He stretches himself; her haggard face confronts him. “What’s the matter? Have you gone nuts?”