“Clara! Clara! Clara!”
She neither heard nor saw me. Her face was buried in the cushions. Her hat had slipped from her hair, whose russet-golden colour assumed, beneath the lantern’s gleams, tones of old mahogany and her two feet with yellow shoes projecting from her dress were still stained, here and there, with drops of bloody mud.
“Clara! Clara! Clara!”
Nothing was to be heard except for the song of the water, far-off music and, between the curtains of the canopy – down there – the terrible city’s mountain of fire and, closer by, those red and green, alert and sinuous, reflections which pierced the black river like small, luminous eels.
The boat banged against the side. The Chinese woman called out and we came up alongside a kind of long terrace – the illuminated terrace of a flower-boat, rowdy with the sounds of a party.
Ki-Pai moored the boat with iron hooks in front of a stairway whose red steps were soaked in water. Two enormous red lanterns glowed on high from two poles bedecked with yellow streamers.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We are where she told me to take you,” replied Ki-Pai in a surly tone. “This is where she spends the night when she comes back from there …”
I suggested: “Wouldn’t it be better to take her home considering the state she’s in?”
Ki-Pai replied: “She’s always like that after the prison. Anyway, the city is closed and it’s too far now to get back to the palace through the gardens – and also too dangerous.”
She added scornfully: “She’s better off here. They know what to do with her!”
I was resigned: “Help me, then!” I demanded. “I don’t want to treat her too roughly.”
Very gently, with infinite pains, Ki-Pai and I grasped Clara in our arms. She put up no more resistance than a dead woman. Supporting her, or rather carrying her, we had great difficulty getting her out of the boat and up the stairs. She was heavy and icy-cold. Her head was thrown back a little and her hair entirely unloosed, so that thick and supple locks were strewn over her shoulders in eddies of fire. Hooked to Ki-Pai’s rough neck by a limp hand, almost swooning, she uttered faint vacant moans and muttered small half-articulate words like a child. Slightly breathless under her weight, I groaned:
“I hope to God she doesn’t die! I hope she doesn’t die!”
Ki-Pai laughed fiercely: “Die! Her! You must be joking! It’s not suffering that infects her body. It’s filthiness!”
At the top of the stairs we were received by two women with painted faces and whose golden nudity was transparent through the light veils in which they were draped. They wore obscene jewels in their hair, jewels on their wrists and fingers, jewels on their ankles and their bare feet and their skin, rubbed by fine tinctures, exhaled a garden odour.
One of them clasped her hands joyously, crying out:
“It’s our little friend! You see – I told you she would come, the darling. She always comes … Quickly, quickly, lay her down on the bed, the little love.”
She indicated a sort of mattress, or rather stretcher, placed against the partition and on which we placed Clara.
Clara was no longer moving. Under her alarmingly open eyelids, only the whites of her eyes showed. Then the Chinese woman with painted eyes bent down over Clara and, in a delightfully rhythmical voice, as though singing a song, said:
“Little, little girl of my breasts and my soul, how beautiful you are! You are as beautiful as a dead girl. And yet you aren’t dead. You will revive, little mistress of my lips, revive beneath my caresses and the perfumes of my mouth.”
She moistened Clara’s temples with a strong perfume and made her inhale smelling salts:
“Yes, yes, dear soul, you fainted! And you can’t hear me! You don’t feel the gentleness of my fingers, but your heart is beating, beating, beating! And love gallops through your veins like a young horse, love bounds through your veins like a young tiger.
She turned towards me:
“You mustn’t be sad. She always faints when she comes here. In a few moments, we’ll cry with pleasure in her happy and burning flesh.”
And there I was, inert and silent, my limbs leaden and my chest oppressed as if in a nightmare. I ceased to have a sensation of reality. All I saw were mutilated images rising up again from the surrounding shadows and the abyss of the river, fantastically distorted. I was alarmed. The long terrace, hanging in the night, with its red lacquered balusters and fine pillars supporting the bold curve of the roof, was filled with a gossipy, restless and extraordinarily colourful crowd. A hundred made-up gazes were fixed on us, a hundred painted mouths were whispering words I could not hear but in which it seemed that Clara’s name was continually repeated:
“Clara! Clara! Clara!”
And naked bodies, embraced bodies, tattooed arms laden with gold bracelets, stomachs and breasts twisted amid light billowing scarves. And, in the midst of all that, all around and all above, were cries, laughter, songs, flute sounds, the odour of tea and precious wood, the powerful aromas of opium and heavy perfumed breaths.
In the intoxication of dream, debauchery, torture and crime, it seemed that all these mouths, all these breasts, and all this living flesh was about to hurl itself on Clara and take pleasure in her dead flesh!
I could not offer a gesture, nor utter a word. A Chinese woman nearby, very young and pretty, almost a child, with eyes that were at once candid and lascivious, was displaying on a tray indecent ivories, pink rubber phalluses and illuminated books in which hand painted vignettes illustrated the thousand complicated joys of love.
“Love! Love! Who wants love? I’ve enough for everyone!”
However, I was still leaning over Clara: “We must take her to my room,” commanded the Chinese woman with painted eyes.
Two powerful men lifted up the stretcher. I followed them mechanically.
Guided by the courtesan, they entered a vast corridor as sumptuous as a temple. On both sides doors opened on large bedrooms, all spread with hangings illuminated by soft pink lights veiled with muslin. Their thresholds were guarded by symbolic animals whose enormous and terrible sexes were thrust forth, bisexual divinities prostituting themselves or straddling sexually aroused monsters. And perfumes burned in precious bronze vases.
A silk door-curtain embroidered with peach flowers parted and two women’s heads were revealed. Seeing us go by, one of the women asked:
“Who’s dead?”
The other replied: “No one! No one is dead. It’s just the woman from the Torture Garden.”
And Clara’s name, whispered from lip to lip, from bed to bed, and from room to room, soon filled the flower-boat with marvellous lubricity. The metal monsters even seemed to be repeating it in their spasms, yelling out in their delirium of magnificent lust:
“Clara! Clara! Clara!”
Here I caught a glimpse of a young man stretched out on a bed. The small opium-den lamp burned within reach of his hand. In his strangely dilated eyes there was a painful ecstasy. In front of him, entwined together mouth to mouth, belly to belly, were naked women, dancing sacred dances as musicians played short flutes while squatting behind a folding screen. Other women were seated in a circle or lying on a sheet on the floor waiting in obscene poses with lustful faces sadder than the faces of the tortured victims. At each door we passed there were groans, panting voices, signs of the accursed, contorted bodies, crushed bodies, a whole grimacing aching; sometimes a yell was emitted from beneath the whiplash of atrocious sensuality and barbarous onanism. A group of bronzes whose arabesque of lines was alone enough to give me a shudder of horror were guarding the doorway: an octopus was enlacing a virgin body with its tentacles and was ardently and powerfully absorbing love, complete love, from her mouth, breasts and belly.
And it seemed to me I was in a place of torture and not in a house of joy and love.
The congestion in the corridor became such that for some seconds we were forced to stop before a room – the largest one, which w
as different from the others due to its decorations and sinister red lighting. At first I saw only women – a scrum of maniacal flesh and brightly coloured scarves – women who were abandoning themselves to frenzied dances and demoniacal possessions around a sort of Idol whose massive bronze, of an ancient patina, was erected in the centre of the room and towered up to the ceiling. Then the Idol itself became clearer and I recognised that terrible Idol named the ‘Idol of the Seven Penises’. Three heads armed with red horns, helmeted by flaming twisted hair, crowning a single torso or rather a single belly, were set up on an enormous barbaric and phalliform column. All around this column, at the exact place where the monstrous belly stopped, seven penises were thrust forward, to which the women offered flowers and furious caresses that were incorporated into their dancing. And the red glow of the hall made the jade balls serving as the Idol’s eyes appear diabolically lifelike. As we began walking again, I witnessed a frightful sight whose infernal quivering it is impossible for me to recount. Seven women suddenly hurled themselves upon the seven bronze phalluses, crying out and shouting. The Idol, enlaced and straddled and violated by so much delirious flesh, quivered beneath the multiple jolts of those possessions and kisses which resounded like the blows of a battering ram against the iron gates of a besieged town. There was a demented clamour around the Idol, a madness of wild sensuality, a mingling of bodies, conjoined with each other in such a frenetic grip that the scene assumed the wild appearance of a massacre, resembling the carnage caused by the condemned men in their iron cages, fighting over the fragment of Clara’s putrid meat! In that atrocious second I realised that lust can attain the darkest depths of human terror and vividly imitate Hell in all its horror.
And I felt that all these shocks, all these panting voices, all these groans, all these bitings, had, along with the Idol itself, expressed and belched out their rage of insatiability and their torture of powerlessness in one word, a single word:
“Clara! Clara! Clara!”
When we had reached the room and placed the still unconscious Clara on a bed, the awareness of where and who I was came back to me. Faced with these songs, debaucheries and sacrifices, these overwhelming perfumes and lewd contacts which further defiled my mistress’s sleeping soul, I experienced an overwhelming shame as well as horror. It was so difficult to banish the inquisitive, chattering women who had followed us, not only from the bed where we had lain Clara, but also from the room where I wanted to be alone with her. I kept only Ki-Pai with me for, in spite of her surly appearance and rough words, she showed she was very devoted to her mistress and took great delicacy and marvellous care in looking after her.
Clara’s pulse was still beating with the same reassuring regularity, as though she was in full vigour of health. Life had not for a moment ceased to inhabit that flesh which had seemed forever dead, and both Ki-Pai and myself were anxiously concerned about her resurrection.
Suddenly she let out a groan. Her facial muscles contracted and slight nervous tremors stirred her bosom, arms and legs. Ki-Pai said: “She will have a terrible crisis. You’ll have to hold her forcefully and be careful that she doesn’t tear at her face and pull her hair out with her nails.”
I thought she could hear me, and that knowing me there beside her, the crisis announced by Ki-Pai would be alleviated. I murmured all the affection and compassion of my heart – ah, yes, all the compassion upon earth – whilst trying to place all the caresses of my voice upon my words.
“Clara! Clara! It’s me. Look at me. Listen to me.”
But Ki-Pai closed my mouth.
“Be quiet!” she said imperiously. “How do you expect her to hear you? She is still with the evil genies.”
Then Clara started to struggle. All her muscles tensed up, stirred, and contracted frightfully. Her joints cracked, like the rigging of a ship disabled by a storm. An expression of horrible suffering, all the more awful for being silent, overcame her contracted face like the faces of tortured men under the bell in the garden. Between half-closed and beating lids, her eyes were no more than thin whitish gleams. A little froth foamed on her lips. Breathlessly, I groaned:
“My God, my God! Can this be? What will happen?”
Ki-Pai ordered: “Hold her … but be sure to leave her body free – the demons have to leave her body.”
And she added:
“It’s over. She will soon start weeping.”
We held her wrists in such a way as to prevent her cutting into her face with her nails. And there was such a power in her that I thought she would crush our hands. In a last convulsion her body was arched from her heels to her neck. Her taut skin vibrated. And then the crisis gradually abated. Her muscles relaxed, regaining possession of themselves, and she collapsed exhausted on the bed, her eyes full of tears.
She cried and cried for some minutes. Tears flowed from her eyes inexhaustibly and soundlessly, as if from a spring!
“It’s over!” said Ki-Pai. “Now you can speak to her.”
Her hand was now quite limp – moist and burning in my hand. Her eyes were still vague and distant as she sought once more to resume consciousness of the objects and forms around her. She seemed to be returning from a long agonising sleep.
“Clara, my little Clara!” I murmured.
She looked at me for a long time through her tears, with a sad and veiled expression:
“You,” she said. “You, ah yes!”
Her voice was like a gentle breeze.
“It’s me, it’s me! Clara, here I am. Do you recognise me?”
She suffered a sort of slight hiccup, a little sob. And she stammered: “Oh! My dear! My dear! My poor dear!”
Placing her head against mine, she begged me:
“Don’t move. I’m alright like this. I’m pure like this. I’m completely white, completely white like an anemone!”
I asked her if she was still in pain.
“No, no. I’m not in pain. And I’m happy to be here, near you, quite small next to you, quite small and completely white, as white as those little swallows in Chinese stories. You know, those little swallows…”
She uttered only short phrases – and these with great difficulty – short phrases of purity and whiteness. The only things on her lips were little flowers, little birds, little springs … and souls, wings, sky … sky … sky.
Then interrupting her chirping from time to time, she clenched my hand more strongly and propped herself with her head curled up against mine, saying, with greater emphasis: “Oh, my dear! Never again, I swear it! Never again! Never again!”
Ki-Pai had withdrawn to the back of the room. She was singing a song in a very low voice, one of those songs which calm and lull little children to sleep.
“Never again! Never again! Never again!” Clara repeated quietly, her voice foundering, fading away into the increasingly slower song of Ki-Pai.
And she fell asleep next to me – a calm, luminous, distant sleep as deep as a vast, gentle lake beneath the moon of a summer’s night.
Ki-Pai rose gently and soundlessly.
“I’m going,” she said. “I’ll sleep in the sampan. As soon as it is morning, when the dawn comes, you’ll take my mistress back to the palace. And everything will start all over! It will always start all over again!”
“Don’t say that, Ki-Pai,” I begged. “Just look at her sleeping against me, so calm and so pure in her sleep.”
The Chinese woman shook her head with a grimace and murmured with sad eyes in which pity had replaced disgust:
“I see her sleeping against you and I tell you … In seven days time I will guide both of you across the river from the Torture Garden, as I have this evening. And in seven years time I shall likewise still be guiding you across the river, if you are still here and if I’m not dead!”
She added: “And if I am dead, someone else will guide you and my mistress across the river. Or, if you leave, someone else will accompany my mistress across the river. And nothing will change …”
“Ki-
Pai, Ki-Pai, why say that? Look at her sleeping again. You don’t know what you’re saying!”
“Hush!” she said as she placed a finger to her mouth. “Don’t speak so loudly. Don’t move too much. Don’t wake her up. At least when she is asleep she can do no evil either to herself or to others!”
Walking carefully on tiptoe, like a house-nurse, she went to the door and opened it.
“Get out of here! Get out of here!”
It was the voice of Ki-Pai, imperious amid the women’s buzzing voices.
And I saw painted eyes, made-up faces, red mouths, tattooed breasts, and mouths against breasts … and I heard cries and moans, dances, flute sounds, the echo of metal and that name which ran panting, from lip to lip, shaking the whole flower-boat like a spasm:
“Clara! Clara! Clara!”
With the door again closed the sounds died away and the faces vanished.
I was alone in the room where two lamps were burning, veiled by pink crepe … alone with the sleeping Clara who, from time to time, repeated in her sleep, like a small dreaming child:
“Never again! Never again!”
And as if to give the lie to these words, a bronze monkey squatting in a corner of the room, which I had not previously noticed, grinned fiercely as it extended its monstrous sex towards Clara.
Torture Garden Page 20
