Torture Garden

by Octave Mirbeau

  Behind the prison, a very long way in the distance, towards the mountains encircling the horizon, extended a rocky, lightly undulating wasteland, whose soil was the colour of bistre in some places, dried blood in others, and in which only scraggy acers, bluish thistle and stunted cherry-trees which never blossomed grew. An infinite desolation! Overwhelming sorrow! For eight months of the year, the sky was constantly blue, a blue washed with red where the reflections of a perpetual fire were rekindled – an implacable blue into which no passing cloud ever dared venture. The sun scorched the earth, roasted the rocks and vitrified the stones which, underfoot, crunched like glass and crackled like flame. No bird would defy that aerial furnace. Only invisible organisms lived there, swarming bacilli which, at eventide, as gloomy vapours rose with the river sailors’ songs, distinctly assumed the forms of fever, plague and death!

  What a contrast with the other bank where the rich and lush ground was covered in gardens and orchards and nourished giant trees and marvellous flowers.

  Having crossed the bridge, we were fortunate enough to find a palanquin to transport us through the burning plain almost to the prison gates which were still closed. A squad of policemen armed with lances, yellow pennants and with massive sails which almost hid them from sight, contained the very large and impatient crowd, which at each moment became larger. Tents had been set up where you could take tea or nibble pretty sweets and rose and acacia petals rolled into fine, fragrant and roughly sweetened patés. In others, musicians were playing flutes and poets were reciting verses, while the punka fanned the scorching air, spreading a light freshness, a slight contact of freshness, over people’s faces. Strolling traders sold images recounting ancient legends and crimes, depictions of executions and tortures, and oddly obscene prints and ivories. Clara bought one of the latter, telling me:

  “You see how the Chinese, who we accuse of being barbarians, are on the contrary more civilised than us, being more deeply immersed in the logic of life and in the harmony of nature! They don’t consider the act of love as something shameful to be hidden. On the contrary they glorify it, celebrating all its gestures and caresses … just like the ancients – for whom sex, far from being an object of infamy and an image of impurity, was a God! You can see how occidental art as a whole loses out by being forbidden the magnificent expressions of love. Among us, eroticism is wretched, stupid and chilly. It is always deceitfully presented as being sinful, whereas here it retains all the vital amplitude, all the throbbing poetry, all the grandiose trepidation of nature … But you’re just a European lover … a poor timid little soul who is sensitive to the cold and has been stupidly indoctrinated with a fear of nature and a hatred of love by the Catholic religion. It has falsified and perverted the meaning of life within you.”

  “Dear Clara!” I objected. “Is it really natural for you to seek sexual pleasure in decay and steer all your desires towards exaltation in awful spectacles of suffering and death? Isn’t that, on the contrary, a perversion of that nature whose cult you invoke perhaps to excuse the criminal and monstrous impulse of your sensuality?”

  “No!” said Clara sharply. “Because Love and Death are the same thing! and because decay is the eternal resurrection of life … Look.”

  She suddenly cut herself off to ask me:

  “… But why are you saying this? How odd you are!”

  And with a charming pout, she added:

  “How tiresome that you don’t understand anything! Why don’t you feel it? Why can’t you appreciate that it is, if not in love, then in lust (which is the perfection of love), that all our cerebral faculties are revealed and sharpened, that it is through lust alone that the development of the personality is completed? Look – have you never dreamed, whilst in the act of love, of committing a wonderful crime? In other words, to individually rise above all social prejudice and all laws – above everything in fact? And if it hasn’t crossed your mind, then why make love?”

  “I haven’t the strength to argue,” I stammered. “And I seem to be walking into a nightmare. The sun, the crowd, these odours, and your eyes. Ah, your eyes of torment and sensuality … and your voice … and your taste for crime … it all scares me … and it’s driving me crazy!”

  Clara laughed lightly in a mocking way.

  “Poor little angel!” she sighed in an odd way. “You won’t say that tonight when you’re in my arms … and when I make love with you!”

  The crowd was becoming increasingly animated. Some bonzes, squatting under parasols, set out long red robes, like puddles of blood, and beat their gongs frenziedly as they coarsely insulted the passers-by who, to assuage their curses, devotedly dropped considerable quantities of change into the metal bowls.

  Clara led me into a tent bordered all around with peach flowers and told me to sit at her side on a pile of cushions and, as she caressed my brow with an electric touch, with a hand conferring oblivion and intoxication, she said:

  “Heavens! How long we have to wait, dear! The same thing happens every week. One day they won’t open the door at all. Why don’t you say something? Have I frightened you? Are you glad to have come? Does it please you when I caress you, dear little adored nitwit? Oh, you have such beautiful tired eyes! It’s a fever … and it’s me as well, isn’t it? Say it’s me! … Do you want tea? How about another quinine pastille?”

  “I wish I was no longer here! I’d prefer to go to sleep!”

  “To sleep! How strange you are! Oh, you’ll soon see how beautiful it is … how overwhelming! And what extraordinary, unknown and marvellous desires will awaken in your flesh! We will return along the river in my sampan. And we will spend the night in a flower-boat. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She slapped me lightly across the hand with her fan. “But you’re not listening to me? Are you listening? You’re pale and sad. You’re really not listening to me at all.”

  She curled up against me, close to me, sinuous and coaxing:

  “You’re not listening to me, naughty boy!” she answered. “And you don’t even caress me! Hold me tight, dear! Feel how cold and hard my breasts are.”

  And, in a more muffled tone, her look darting green flames over me that were sensual and cruel, she said:

  “Well! Eight days ago I saw something extraordinary. Oh, dear love, I saw a man flogged for stealing a fish. The judge simply declared: ‘You don’t always say of a man who is carrying a fish that he is a fisherman!’ And he condemned the man to death beneath iron rods. All for a fish, dear. That happened in the torture garden. Imagine it – the man was kneeling on the ground, his head lying on a sort of block, a block completely black with old blood. His back and thighs were bare … a back and thighs like old gold! I arrived just as a soldier, having grasped his long pony-tail, knotted it to a ring set in a flagstone in the ground. Near the victim another soldier was heating up a very small iron rod in the flames of a forge. And then … Listen carefully! Are you listening? When the rod was red-hot, the soldier whipped the man as hard as he could in the kidneys. The rod went schuitt! in the air and was pushed deep into the man’s muscles which sizzled and gave off a slight reddish steam. Do you follow? the soldier then left the rod to cool down in the flesh which swelled up and closed over. And then, when it was cold, he ripped it violently out along with small bloody fragments. The soldier repeated the operation. He did it fifteen times! And you know, darling, each time the rod was pushed in, I felt it was entering my loins. It was unbearable, and very sweet!”

  As I said nothing:

  “It was unbearable, and very sweet!” she repeated. “You can’t imagine how lovely that man was, how strong he was! He had muscles like those of a statue. Kiss me, dear … Kiss me now!”

  Clara’s eyeballs were turned in on themselves. Between her half-closed eyelids, I could see only the whites of her eyes. Then she spoke:

  “He wasn’t moving … It had formed little waves on his back … Oh, your lips!”

  After a few seconds of silence, she continued:
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  “Last year Annie and I saw something even more incredible. I saw a man who had raped his mother and then disembowelled her with a knife. It seems he was mad, by the way. He was condemned to torture by caress. Yes, my dear, isn’t that wonderful! They don’t allow foreigners to be present at this torture which anyway is nowadays very rare. But we gave the warden some money and he hid us behind a screen. Annie and I saw everything. The madman – he didn’t look mad – was stretched out on a very low table, his limbs and body tied with solid cord, and his mouth gagged in such a way that he was unable to move at all or utter a cry. A grave-faced woman – neither beautiful nor young – entirely dressed in black, bare arms encircled with a large gold ringlet, knelt down next to the madman. She grasped his rod and set to work. Oh dearest, dearest! If only you had seen it. It continued for four hours … four hours, think about it! Four hours of atrocious and skilful caresses during which the woman’s hand did not stop for a moment, while her face remained cold and gloomy! The victim expired in a spurt of blood which splashed across his tormentor’s face. I’ve never seen anything so appalling, and so appalling, my dear, that Annie and I both fainted. I still think about it.”

  With an air of regret, she added:

  “On one of her fingers, the woman had a large ruby which gleamed back and forth in the sun like a small red and dancing flame during the torture. Annie bought it … I don’t know where it went – I’d really like to have it.”

  Clara fell silent, her thoughts doubtless back with the impure and blood-stained images of that abominable memory.

  Some moments later a murmur ran around the tents and the crowd. Through my worn out eyelids which, in spite of myself, had almost closed at the horror of this tale, I saw gown upon gown, parasol upon parasol, fans, happy faces and accursed faces, all dancing, whirling and hastening on. It was like a blooming of immense flowers, a whirling of enchanted birds.

  “The gate, dearest!” exclaimed Clara. “The gates are opening! Come, come quickly! And don’t be sad. Ah, please! Think about all the beautiful things you’ll see and which I’ve told you about!”

  I got to my feet. And seizing me by the hand, she dragged me I don’t know where.

  IV

  The prison door opened onto a wide dark corridor. At the end of the corridor but further on the sound of bells came to us indistinctly, muffled by the distance. Upon hearing them, Clara happily clapped her hands.

  “Oh, dear love! The bell! We’re in luck. Don’t be sad any longer. Don’t be sick any more, please.”

  The crowd at the prison entrance was so restless that the police officers had difficulty bringing some order to the tumult. Clara threw herself resolutely into the melee of chattering, cries, sounds of suffocation, rustling of fabrics and clatter of parasols and fans, so exalted by hearing the bell that I didn’t dream of asking her why it was ringing and what its muffled tolling, that far-off tolling that caused her so much pleasure, signified.

  “The bell! The bell! The bell! Come on!”

  But we didn’t get very far, despite the efforts of the boys, and the basket carriers who, elbowing their way strongly, tried to make a way through for their mistress. Tall porters with grimacing expressions, incredibly emaciated, with bare chests and scarred under their rags, were holding up baskets of meat, whose decomposition had been intensified by the sun which had caused swarms of maggots to hatch out. I saw around me spectres of crime and famine, images of nightmare and killing, demons returned to life from the most distant past and the most terrible of China’s legends. The laugh of one of those nearby revealed a slash of saw-like mouth with betel-lac-quered teeth which extended to the edge of his goatee in sinister twists. Others were arguing and cruelly pulled one another back by their hair. Yet others, slinking like wild beasts, slipped into the human jungle, picking pockets, cutting purses, snatching jewels, and then vanishing along with their booty.

  “The bell! The bell!” repeated Clara.

  “What bell?”

  “You’ll see. It’s a surprise!”

  And the smells rising from the crowd – the smells of toilet and abattoir combined, the stench of carrion and the sweat of living flesh – sank my spirits and chilled me to the bone. I often felt the same lethargic torpor at evening in the Annam forests while the miasmas rose up from the deep humus and death lay in wait behind each flower, each leaf and each blade of grass. My breath almost failed me and I felt I was about to faint.

  “Clara! Clara!” I called.

  She gave me smelling salts, whose cordial power revived me a little. She was unconstrained and joyful in the midst of this crowd whose odour she inhaled, submitting to the most repugnant embraces with a sort of sensual swooning. She presented her body – the whole of her lithe and vibrant body – to the harshness, the blows, and the mauling. Her skin, usually so white, was now an intense pink. Her eyes contained a hazy brilliance of sexual joy. Her lips had swelled up like firm buds ready to blossom. She told me, with mocking pity:

  “What a little old woman you are! You’ll never be anything but an insignificant little old lady!”

  After the dazzling and blinding sunlight, the corridor we had finally reached at first seemed to be completely in shadow. Then the shadows gradually faded and I could see where I was.

  The corridor was vast, lit from above by a skylight whose opaque glass allowed only an attenuated light to pass through, giving it the feel of an aquarium. A feeling of fresh, almost cold damp completely enfolded me. I felt as though I was being caressed by a spring torrent. The walls sweated, like the surface of a subterranean grotto. Beneath my feet which had been burned by the pebbles of the field, the sand scattered across the paving-stones of the corridor had the gentle sweetness of dunes at the sea shore. I inhaled the air deeply, filling my lungs. Clara said to me:

  “You see how well they treat the convicts here. At least they have fresh air …”

  “But where are they?” I asked. “I see only walls on both sides.”

  Clara smiled.

  “How odd you are! Now you’re more impatient than me. Just wait! In a moment, my darling … Hold on!”

  She stopped and pointed out an indistinct spot in the corridor, and her eyes were radiant, her nostrils quivered, her ears straining to hear the sounds, like a young alert roe deer in the forest.

  “Can you hear? That’s them … Can you hear?”

  Then, beyond the clamour of the crowd which filled the corridor, beyond the humming voices, I perceived cries, muffled wailing, the clanking of chains, the panting of breaths, like bellows, the strange and prolonged groaning of beasts. It seemed to be coming from within the depths of the wall, from under the ground, from the very abyss of death … You couldn’t tell from where.

  “Can you hear?” continued Clara. “That’s them. You’ll see them in a moment. Let’s go on! Take my arm … Watch carefully. It’s them! It’s them!”

  We went on again, followed by the boy attentive to his mistress’ gestures. And the frightful stink of corpses also accompanied us and remained with us, augmented with other smells whose ammoniacal sharpness stung our eyes and throats.

  The bell was still tolling down there in the distance – slow and soft, muffled like the groans of a dying man. Clara repeated for the third time:

  “Oh that bell! He’s dying. He’s dying. He’s dying, my darling … perhaps we shall see him.”

  I immediately felt her fingers nervously clenching my skin.

  “My darling! My darling! On your right! How horrible!”

  I swiftly turned my head. The infernal parade had started.

  On my right were vast cells in the walls, or rather cages closed off by bars and separated from one another by thick stone. The first ten were each occupied by ten prisoners. All ten revealed the same scene. Their necks gripped in an iron collar so large it was impossible to see the bodies – they looked like frightful heads placed on tables, living but decapitated. Squatting in their own filth, hands and feet in chains, they could neither lie
down nor rest. The slightest movement displaced the iron collar, causing shooting-pains in their throats and their bleeding necks, and causing them to shriek in such suffering and to utter violent insults against us mingled with supplications to the Gods.

  I was struck dumb with horror.

  Delicately, with pleasing shivers and exquisite gestures, Clara rummaged in the boy’s basket with the fork, lifting out some scraps of meat which she graciously flung through the bars into the cage. Ten heads were simultaneously swinging on the balanced collars. At the same time the twenty bulging eyeballs cast flushed looks on the meat – looks of terror and hunger. Then a single agonised cry rose from the ten twisted mouths. And, conscious of their powerlessness, the condemned men did not move. They remained with heads tightly bent over, as though ready to roll down the collar, their emaciated and wan features convulsed in a rigid grimace, in a sort of immobile sneer.

  “They can’t eat,” explained Clara. “They can’t reach the meat … It’s not surprising considering those contraptions. Though it’s not new, basically it’s the torture of Tantalus, intensified tenfold by the horror of the Chinese imagination. Still, can you believe that there are such wretched people?”

  She threw another small piece of carrion through the bars which, falling on the edge of one of the collars, caused it to sway slightly. Stifled groans answered this gesture. A still greater ferocious and desperate hatred lit up twenty eyeballs at the same time. Instinctively, Clara recoiled.

  “You see …” she continued in a less assured tone. “They’re amused when I give them meat. It allows the poor devils to pass a little time, and gives them a little illusion. Let’s go on!”

  We slowly passed the ten cages. Some women passing by let out cries or bursts of laughter or abandoned themselves to impassioned mimicry. I saw a very blonde Russian woman with a blank, cold look hold a revolting greenish fragment with the end of her parasol which she alternately offered and withdrew. And the convicts drew back their lips, baring their teeth like mad dogs, with famished expressions which were no longer human, and tried to snatch the food which always evaded their mouths, sticky as they were with dribble. The curious woman followed all the vicissitudes of this cruel game with an attentive and joyous expression.