Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  “I’ll pass over the difficulties of the voyage, the length of the journey on horseback from Jerusalem, a bad night in the abode of the Sheikh of the village. No one knew anything. There was no monastery. I set forth at sunrise with my guide, whom I almost obliged to follow me. I went to the right and left across the plain of El-Ghor, and its blocks of stone posed on top of one another to infinity, and that lasted for hours. In the end, I was exhausted. I remember that I distinguished in the distance the bituminous sheet of the Dead Sea, like a lump of molten lead. The blocks that surrounded me affected geometrical forms and succeeded one another regularly. It seemed to me that a flock of birds in flight was circling above the place where I was.

  “Suddenly, I perceived a series of buildings, so flat and low that they were almost confounded with the clayey earth. No tower, no belfry above those juxtaposed roofs, which were barely the height of a man. I urged my horse in that direction and toped, without being able to explain why, some distance from the threshold. I felt the arm of the terrified guide pulling me backwards.

  “Then the low square door opened silently; but when it was open, I couldn’t see the person who had pulled the battens. and no one appeared on the threshold to greet me.

  “The sun was burning overhead and the stones were reflecting a bleak brightness around me. I thought I could distinguish in the distance, in the form of gray mists, the unhealthy emanations that emerge from the mud of the Jordan. It was a little further on that John the Baptist has baptized Jesus, and the convent had been erected there in conformity with the law that dictates that the finest fruit contains a worm, that spiritual effort is immediately undermined by the appeal from below.

  “Perhaps I was impressed by my guide’s words, or did the extreme heat act upon me? From the empty threshold, from the diamond-shapes formed by the mute buildings, as if crushed against the earth, emanated such an atmosphere of extrahuman solitude that the idea of going through the deserted portal gave me the sensation of a danger compared with which death would be nothing.

  “I exerted an effort upon myself. I did not want to have come so far for nothing. I went forward, but only a few paces. From a path that I had not seen, a number of white-clad monks emerged who went toward the monastery. They were monks like any monks, but without rosaries and without crosses embroidered on their robes. They had ordinary faces, which they turned in my direction indifferently: ordinary, but so icy, reflecting such a complete insensibility, that terror gripped me, and I fled as quickly as I could.

  “I did not go back, and when my horse stopped on the road that goes along the Jordan, I wondered whether I might have had a dream.

  “I know that I was a coward, but no power in the world would make me return to the plain of El-Ghor. One does not break twice the bust of the young man crowned with pepper-leaves.”

  We were now walking in silence. I accompanied him over the winding paths that ended at his detached house and I reflected on what he had just told me. I also remembered everything that, in his story of the previous says, concerned the brotherhood of evil with which he had tried to enter into a contest. Did it really exist? Had not the evening at Monsieur Althon’s been a banal celebration of crackpots in which the rites of a puerile Luciferianism only served to sharpen sensuality? Was not the monastery of El-Ghor a monastery like any other, which only the troubled imagination of its visitor had rendered redoubtable?

  I thought that, at any rate, J. N...’s solitary hours must he haunted by apprehensions. If he had chosen that little house on top of a hill, it was surely to be able to keep watch on the comings and goings of those who approached him. I imagined his insomnias, his anguished face against the window pane, the voices he must hear in the sound of the wind.

  As I held out my hand to quit him, I took pity on his solitude.

  “Don’t you find this place very isolated,” I began, “given...”

  He understood my thinking and smiled.

  “You think that I’m afraid of them? A few months ago, that would have been possible, but not now.”

  I looked at him in surprise. His gaze reflected a tranquil confidence.

  “One cannot be afraid of those one loves. That’s the secret: to love the bad as much as the good—more, even, for they have more need of it. The coalition of a thousand brotherhoods of the damned can’t cast the slightest shadow over the dream of a soul full of love.”

  The shadows were now filling the country. The trace of the paths had faded way. The lights of the village seemed infinitely distant and lost. A bat passed before us several times, but I understood that for J.N..., the darkness did not contain any menace.

  “I thought...,” I said, “I thought that you were prey to certain ideas...the very situation of this house led me to think...”

  “I’ll explain to you what made me choose it. Can you imagine that I’ve got it into my head, I don’t know why, that when I succeed in reaching the point of perfect love, I’ll be informed of it by a material sign. I’ve described to you the painting in which Drevet represented Christ and the angel of evil carrying a cross together and helping one another long a sunken road. When I came here I noticed that the road that we’ve just climbed resembled the one in the painting. I firmly believe that the sign by which I shall know that my redemption is complete will be the sight of Christ and Lucifer advancing toward me, fraternally, united under their common burden. I’ve found, very nearly, the appropriate landscape. It only lacks the characters. And can you imagine that, when I saw you appear the other day, with your cane over your shoulder, I wondered for a moment whether that cane might be a cross...”

  “But I’m nothing like Christ, or Lucifer,” I said.

  “You’re mistaken. Every man is both of them in turn, and sometimes simultaneously, and it’s their intimate union that it’s necessary to operate in the depths of our heart.”

  I quit him after those words. I left the following day, and I have not seen him since.

  THE NIGHT OF HASHISH AND OPIUM

  The Bad Omens

  I lifted the blue gauze that was undulating before my window. A flock of black birds, emerging from the palm trees in the garden, striped the sky slowly, trailing above the scattered masts of the harbor and disappearing to the left in the gilded fleece of the beach.

  A bad omen, I thought.

  And I established a relationship between the color of the birds and the black color of the opium whose intoxication was to be revealed to me that very evening. The evening of opium was poorly announced!

  For I have always believed that a sage providence informs us by a small sign, when we cast our first glance at things, whether the day is to be fortunate or unfortunate.

  Scarcely had I lost sight of the birds than a Brahmin beggar that I knew went past on the avenue. He was protecting himself from the sun by extending his fan of areca palm leaves, and sometimes he agitated his rags. He stopped for a second before my door, raised his head and saw me, He squinted frightfully. He made a bizarre grimace, and I immediately drew back, for I was almost naked.

  I murmured: “Another bad omen!”

  And at the same moment, a tari, a kind of trumpet with a heart-rending tone, which signals mourning, resonated on the landward side, in the Hindu quarter.

  I had also seen the Brahmin with the squint lift his fan and grimace in my direction, and I had heard a tari in the distance, firstly on the morning of my marriage, and afterwards on the morning of the day when I had discovered and read the letters addressed to my husband by a certain Juliette Romano—letters that legitimated my divorce.

  The heart-rending trumpet evoked for me, with a gripping verity, that decisive day of my life.

  I have noticed that, when one has just taken a bath and is not yet dressed, the soul has a tendency to appear naked, like the body. For our true soul only shows itself, even to ourselves, at rare intervals, and preferably in the morning.

  In truth, I no longer loved my husband when I found the letters and learned that he was the
lover of an adventuress recently installed in Pondicherry. He had almost ruined me. That wasn’t of any great importance, but I felt that he was going to destroy my inner fortune, which is made of self-confidence and confidence in life. The fear of that invisible ruination had killed my love. I didn’t hold against him a few base actions that I had discovered—one doesn’t attach oneself to a man because of elevated sentiments—but I resented the fact that he had only considered me as a legitimate wife, and had not appreciated me as a lover.

  I no longer loved him, to be sure, but I suffered nevertheless in knowing that he no longer loved me.

  The tari announcing the death dragged on lugubriously that day, as today, and aggravated by pain. I remember the desire for certainty that animated me, my shrill voice calling for Sheik Sultan and my telingas, the fashion in which I traversed the garden and in which I fell into my palanquin, shouting an address. I remember my confrontation with the woman who had been depicted to me as a redoubtable adventuress, a whore capable of anything, expressly created by God to break homes and damn men.

  Juliette Romano was a timid individual whose blue eyes had a slightly fleeting gaze, who would have had the appearance of an English schoolmistress full of innocence if a certain something in the milky hue of her neck, and in the solid roundness of her breasts beneath her corsage, had not betrayed a hidden ardor and a capacity for abandonment. After five minutes of conversation she had begged my pardon and confessed everything that I wanted to know. I quit her without having said a wounding word and during the hours that followed I cursed the tari player more ardently, who never ceased to rend my ears for a unknown mourning caused by the timid creature of prey who had just taken my husband from me.

  All that was so far away now! In any case, it’s only the present that counts. But the present was a flock of black birds rising from the right to the left; it was a Brahmin beggar who had just squinted at my door; it was a trumpet announcing the death of a Hindu in a wretched hut of compressed earth.

  It was even more than that, I suddenly remembered. It was one of the good God’s creatures that I had inadvertently crushed the day before; it was a chemise that my ayah had presented to me inside-out as I was about to put it on; it was a game of dominos that children were playing at the foot of the statue of Dupleix, each domino of which they had wrapped in paper—which is, as everyone knows, a sign auguring great calamities.

  Never had there been as any contrary presages against me, never had I been informed with such certainty of the evil fate that was lying in wait for me.

  In the pure light of the morning I saw clearly what it was necessary for me to do. I had to find a pretext to refuse Lord Portman’s invitation, and not go to smoke opium at Chillambaram.

  Nothing was easier. I only had to write two letters of apology, one to Lord Portman and the other to Comtesse Aurelia, who was to accompany us.

  Was there not, in any case, something bizarre about the insistence that Comtesse Aurelia had put into begging me to accept that pleasure party? Comtesse Aurelia had excessively thin lips and an excessively narrow forehead. Her black hair was naturally curly and shone like the plumage of a crow. Were those not the characteristics of an evil influence? She hated me, I was sure of it, because I was twenty and she was thirty-five, perhaps more. Why had she suddenly praised the magnificence of the pagoda of Chillambaram, as she had never previously paid much attention to the ancient monuments of India, and seemed perfectly ignorant of the beauties of architecture—and of beauty in general? Why put on a show of being so passionately desirous to see me dance, as she had made fun of my pretention of learning the ritual dances of the bayaderes before all Pondicherry and all Madras? Why had she depicted to me with so much eloquence, the day before the voluptuousness of smoking opium in a dreamlike décor, when she had told me, a few months before, that she had a horror of the drug and all those who smoked it?

  Was there not something bizarre about that gathering at Chillambaram of three men who had all been in love with me and all disappointed in their desires? On what was their so-called friendship based except their common desire to talk about me, to slander me collectively and to affirm after having drunk or smoked that one or other of them would have me sooner or later, now that I was divorced. For those three men were now inseparable. When they were not cruising along the Coromandel coast or hunting in the forests of Trivatore, they were getting drunk together. Lord Portman was an alcohol drinker, the Rajah of Tanjore was an opium smoker and Prince Vanini attained artificial paradises with the pellets of hashish that were fabricated for him by a Bengali physician in Madras.

  It was by virtue of living in their company that my husband had been detached from me; it was with them that he had lost a part of my fortune in the gambling dens of Madras. I didn’t hold it against them, and I even had the weakness to see them, because there is nothing insensate that one doesn’t do to escape ennui.

  But was there not something bizarre in the recommendation that Lord Portman had made me not to bring with me either the faithful Sheik Sultan, who always marched at the head of my palanquin-bearers, or my creole chambermaid, who would have been so useful to me for changing costume?

  “You’ll find all the necessary staff at Chillambaram,” he had said. “I promise you a night such as you’ve never spent.”

  In saying those words he had run his tongue over his fleshy lips and had made me think of a wild beast about to make a meal of raw flesh.

  He had immediately added, as if to reassure me: “You’re risking absolutely nothing; Comtesse Aurelia won’t quit you.”

  “What would I be risking?” I had said, immediately, putting an icy innocence in my expression.

  “Nothing other than not having experienced hands to take off your dress and put on the costume of the bayadere Cammatatchi.”12

  And he had started to laugh, the distant laughter that is habitual to him, while his eyes were deprived of all human expression, to the point of giving the impression that his spirit was no longer inhabiting his body.

  For the evening at Chillambaram had been organized in order to see me dance. I had made the imprudent promise to do so at Comtesse Aurelia’s house, one evening when Lucilio Vanini, pill-box in hand, had just described the architectural marvels of Chillambaram and made me ashamed of never having traveled the forty-nine miles that separate the ancient pagoda from Pondicherry. That same evening I had made known to the Rajah of Tanjore that desire to try, once, the effects of opium.

  Lord Portman, always prompt to multiply opportunities to see me, had proposed organizing a dinner and a night in the pagoda. He had taken charge of bribing the Brahmins and getting them to empty the space for the entire extent of the vast enclosure of the walls. He took charge of having two or three rooms cleaned before the sacred pool and organizing a comfortable smoking-room sheltered from mosquitoes, lizards and snakes. We would have an orchestra and intermediate dancers, but on condition that I animated the artistic feast by dancing in the same costume and in the same place where the celebrated bayadere Cammatatchi had once danced.

  I had accepted. Everyone had uttered cries of joy. Lord Portman had added: “We’ll be tranquil. I’ll bring my panther to guard us.” Then, his eyes fixed, he had fallen into a meditation and profound as the void.

  And now the day had come for the departure for Chillambaram, and destiny was sending me all kinds of warnings to incite me to postpone that departure.

  I got dressed slowly. I took several turns around my room. I was going to write the letters of apology. I would not go to Chillambaram.

  I affirmed to myself that what was guiding me was only the imperious notification of destiny, and not the ridiculous bourgeois sentiment that comes from fear of compromising oneself.

  I have never been afraid of compromising myself, either in France before my marriage or since my arrival in Pondicherry. I deem that a well-established bad reputation is one of the conditions of happiness. One wears that bad reputation like an armor, the sparkle of which
distances you from mediocre and tedious individuals. The darts of calumny slide off it and it permits the conquest of the most redoubtable of the enemies of our pleasure, which is our natural timidity.

  I wandered in the garden under my parasol and I was about to go back upstairs to write the letters when I heard the prolonged cry that palanquin-bearers utter when they stop.

  Behind the gate I perceived the exceedingly wrinkled face of Comtesse Aurelia.

  “Well, are you ready? They’ve just fired the cannon of the yacht to alert us.”

  I ran toward the door to declare my resolution.

  “No, no, I’m not stopping,” said the Comtesse, with a determined volubility. “You know that I don’t like to be late. Lord Portman has sent you this little golden box that you must put around your neck. It’s a surprise, but it’s necessary not to open it until this evening. And some news—perhaps bad news, or good, I don’t know. Mir, the Rajah’s son, will be with us. His father is bringing him because he asked to see you dance, it seems. But I’m afraid that one spectator more might be too much for your timidity.”

  She started to laugh, and before I could reply she made a sign to her telingas to start walking.

  I remained motionless, considering the Chinese flowers of the silk parasol, which I had lowered. In my left hand I was holding a little gilded box suspended from an antique chain, which Comtesse Aurelia had handed to me though the bars of the gate and which I passed mechanically around my neck. How singular the flowers on the parasol were! In the calyx of each one there was the face of a student at the University of Madras: the face of Mir, the Rajah’s son; Mir with the impenetrable eyes; twenty years old, like me, perhaps nineteen, whom I identified mentally with the Rama of the Hindu poems, and to whom I gave that name when I thought about him.