Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  I started running through the garden. “Sheik Sultan!” I shouted.

  Then I reflected that there was to need to run, and that the yacht would not leave without me.

  The bayadere’s robe had been packed the previous evening, just in case.

  I threw a shawl over my shoulders and put rouge on my lips. Already I could hear the sound of the gate opening and the footsteps of the palanquin-bearers on the gravel of the path.

  Ad at the exact moment when, sitting in the midst of cushions, I raised my hand to order the departure, a sweating Hindu child who had no garments save a loincloth and a red turban, showed his head at the window. The porters began to run. He threw on to my knees a piece of paper folded in four. I opened it. There were words traced in French in topsy-turvy handwriting that seemed deliberately disguised:

  You must not go to Chillambaram.

  I looked back through the window of the palanquin. Far away, on the avenue, there was a little Hindu running as far as he could in the opposite direction to that of the palanquin. As my porters had set forth very rapidly, a few seconds had sufficed for the red turban no longer to be any more than an almost imperceptible dot.

  I thought that it was too late to go back and attempt to catch up with the messenger. His flight indicated, in any case, that he had been instructed to give me the enigmatic letter and disappear without explanation.

  I crumpled up the note with a hint of irritation, because I had no idea who could have sent it, and for me, unsatisfied curiosity is analogous to a mental burn.

  But what a desire I had now for that night of opium at Chillambaram! All the gods of India emerging from the mystery of their pagoda and extending their innumerable arms toward me would have stopped me when I launched myself forth along the interminable landing-stage of Pondicherry. The enigma of an unknown danger summoned me with as much force as the enigma of Mir’s dark eyes. Oh, the beauty of that which one does not know, and that which might be revealed to you, whether it be good or evil!

  The wind made my dress flap. An odor of rotten plants alternated with the intoxicating breath of the open sea. And on the launch that took me to the yacht, to the regular beat of the oars, amid the tedious and limited faces of English sailors, I imagined that I was sailing toward dangerous pirates, who had captured me by means of an incomprehensible ruse and whose prey I was about to be.

  The Bayadere Cammatatchi

  I believe that all events can always be deduced in advance, read in the atmosphere, by a clairvoyant person who knows how to cast her intuition artfully around her.

  I ought to have understood and foreseen. Everything was irrevocably settled in the minds of the three men tormented by desire and the woman with the face as wrinkled as an apple burned by the sun.

  First of all there was the unusual insistence they put into making me drink during the lunch on deck; then the fashion in which they all repeated that Mir had preferred to make the journey on horseback in spite of the heat of the day and that he would join us at Porto Novo, where we were to disembark. There was Comtesse Aurelia’s laughter, as sharp as a rapier—laughter that she rapidly veiled when she remembered that it was necessary to disguise her perfidy. She then put on an expression of bonhomie and strove to become similar to a smiling apple, devoid of all acidity.

  There were words whose meaning I didn’t understand and which caused a great deal of laughter. There was a question of a game of cards, a stake, a fortune won or lost, but I couldn’t understand what the prize was or even whether the game had already taken place.

  Prince Vanini told Comtesse Aurelia and me, in fragments, stories about the antiquity of Chillabaram, its fabulous riches, its thousands of priests and its vanished splendors. He spoke with a certain mystery in his voice, as if everything he said had the character of a secret. Everything he knew he had from the Rajah, who nodded his head in approval from time to time. For the Rajah almost never spoke when several people were gathered together, and said himself that it was only possible for him to express himself before a single interlocutor. Prince Vanini, on the contrary, was only loquacious before a numerous audience.

  And there was also the story of the bayadere Cammatatchi, which should have alerted me. The Prince’s voice, when he spoke about her, became even lower, and Lord Portman, who was walking back and forth smoking a cigar, stopped, and I saw his fleshy lips agitating nervously in a fashion so repulsive that I was obliged to look away.

  The bayadere Cammatatchi was a priestess of Siva the destroyer, the third god of the Hindu trinity. She was so beautiful that her renown extended throughout India and pilgrims came from the most distant parts of the Deccan to contemplate hr. But she had an expression in her face that drove men to despair. An incitement to death was in the lines of her body. Many pilgrims who had seen her offered their lives to Siva.

  The Rajah of Tanjore, an ancestor of the one who was smoking a cigar beside me and never took his eyes off me, fell in love with the bayadere. By caprice, the marvelous Cammatatchi, who, by virtue of her profession as a sacred bayadere, gave herself to all those who brought important offerings to the pagoda, refused herself to the Rajah of Tanjore.

  “The ancestor of our excellent friend,” said the Prince, designating the Rajah, who lowered his eyes, “was a singularly cruel man. He resolved to have the bayadere in spite of her refusal and to punish her for it. It was the day of the feast of Sidambara...I’m not mistaken?” the Prince asked, turning to the Rajah, who made a negative sign with his cigar. “On the day of that feast, Sidambara, who is an incarnation of Siva, appears to his initiates.”

  “And then?” I said, or the Prince had stopped.

  The yacht had just rounded the rocky banks of Cooleroon, and we were in sight of Porto Novo.

  Lord Portman, who was leaning over the side, shouted: “I think I can see Mir on the jetty. He’s arrived before us.”

  Everyone got up. I looked in the direction of the coast. I distinguished the torsos of a few Hindus sitting on the sand. I saw a man with a staff in his hand pushing three zebus before him, but there was no trace of a horseman.

  Prince Vanini, having looked in my direction and exchanged a glance of complicity with the Rajah and the Comtesse, murmured in a low voice: “Yes, I believe that Mir has arrived first.” And he started to laugh in a servile fashion, turning to Lord Portman: the excessive laughter that is not commanded by merriment but the desire to flatter someone for a mediocre joke whose value one wants to heighten by approval.

  He added: “I’ll conclude the story of Cammatatchi this evening.”

  Lord Portman had indeed been joking, or mistaken. Mir was not waiting for us at Porto Novo. No one was astonished by that, and his father declared lightly that he would doubtless join us at Chillambaram.

  The afternoon was not yet approaching its end, but we still had eight kilometers to cover overland in order to reach the first gopuram of the pagoda, built some distance from the village on the edge of the jungle.

  Palanquins, horses and an escort were waiting for us. Comtesse Aurelia and I were to make the journey in a palanquin. I offered, out of politeness, to climb into the same magnificent palanquin as her, in which, in the midst of a stream of cushions, four people could easily have been accommodated. To my great surprise, she refused. She protested the great heat, a slight headache that she felt around her temples, and that thought she might cure by sleeping a little. Then, there were two palanquins, and she preferred to have one to herself. And when I persisted she turned her back on me, installed herself in the first palanquin and closed the door rather abruptly.

  What a disagreeable woman! I thought, privately, unable to understand that manner of acting, which was not habitual to her.

  We left.

  There was still time to go back. Had I not been warned? Without being very perspicacious, it required no more to see things clearly. But it is noticeable that, when we fall into a trap, it is by virtue of a faculty of blindness that is of our own making, and which blindfolds our
eyes for a while.

  Palanquin-bearers intone a rhythmic chant, full of vague poetry, which initially invites melancholy, and afterwards slumber. My blindness and my quietude combined so well with the changing voice of the telingas and the sway they imparted to the palanquin, that I fell asleep.

  When I woke up the palanquin had stopped. I had been asleep for nearly an hour. Prince Vanini and the Rajah were in the process of dismounting and Lord Portman, standing beside the window, was considering me with his empty eyes. His lips were trembling slightly, and they appeared to me so red, so thick and sensual that I felt my stomach rise in disgust.

  “It’s said that a good sleep is the sign of a tranquil conscience,” he said. And as I opened the door to get down he added, in a low voice: “You who are the cause of all my nights of insomnia.”

  I was confused and surprised. I looked around. We were at the bottom of a steep slope. I distinguished at the summit an enormous red wall, towers, successions of gopurams covered with sculptures whose ensemble formed the pagoda of Chillambaram, as vast as a city...

  To my right, quite some distance away, was the village, with a single two-story house dominating the palm-thatch roofs, which must be the travelers’ bungalow. A large number of Hindus were watching us fearfully. To the left, Lord Portman’s servants formed a respectful circular group. Behind us a saw the road we had followed paling between coconut palms and cacti. But I searched in vain for the second palanquin, the one bearing Comtesse Aurelia.

  In interrogated the Prince, who was beside me.

  “How well you must have slept,” he said, laughing. “We’d only covered a few hundred meters when the Comtesse felt her headache worsen. An hour’s sleep always cures her in such cases. Lord Portman went to install her in a cabin in the yacht, and he rejoined us before we had arrived. Comtesse Aurelia will arrive for dinner, doubtless at the same time as Mir, who can’t be much longer now.”

  Could I now refuse, without being absolutely ridiculous, to visit the pagoda, take part in a dinner long prepared and accepted by me, under the pretext that I was the only woman in the company of three men? I should have done. A false shame prevented me from doing so.

  We climbed the hill on foot. A few Hindus clad in yellow and black robes conversed with Lord Portman. I assumed that they were the Brahmin guardians of the temple. I distinguished in their attitude the deference and the scorn that one has for those one believes one has duped by an excellent bargain.

  The sun was about to set and projected a red wave over the great stone wall, more than ten meters high, mute and inalterable, as eternal as the religion whose mysteries it encloses. We were at the foot of one of four fabulous portals formed by a truncated rectangular pyramid with seven steps. Sculpted on that portal were divinities of all sorts, maleficent Boutas, elephantine Ganeshas, Vishnus with nine arms, and faces and animal limbs that were superimposed and interlaced, and made a kind of animal forest of stone.

  Prince Vanini drew closer to me and I felt his warm breath on my cheek.

  “The antiquity of the monument renders the intoxication of opium or hashish more profound. You’ll see.”

  I turned away, but the Rajah took my arm lightly while walking and said to me: “It’s here that my ancestor made love to the bayadere Cammatatchi, who must have resembled you. Scarcely will I have crossed the threshold than I shall imagine that I’m my ancestor and that you are Cammatatchi.”

  Servants passed at a run, carrying carpets, boxes and torches: the final preparations for the dinner and the evening.

  Lord Portman, who had remained in rear, advanced toward us joyfully.

  “Even the Brahmins won’t be sleeping in the enclosure,” he said. “They’ll spend the night in the village. Chillambaram belongs to us until tomorrow, and I’ll have the door locked behind us.”

  He made us a sign to follow him.

  I would have sworn that at that moment, in the monsters and gods sculpted on the mass of the gopuram and covered with a vegetation of cryptogams, there was a sort of living stir, with facial grimaces, the quivering of horns and rumps, the advancement of snouts and elongations of claws. At the same time I was traversed by a mad, desperate, panic terror. The immensity of my folly appeared to me clearly, Mir had not been invited and would not arrive on horseback. Comtesse Aurelia was in the pay of the rich Lord. She had long been the procuress and accomplice of his pleasures. It had been agreed between them that she would spend the night on the yacht. I was delivered without defense to three men who nurtured against me the same wounded self-esteem and unslaked desire. I had fallen into a trap. I was about to be at their mercy in the confines of that redoubtable and unknown place, where I could neither call for help nor flee.

  While reflecting, and almost involuntarily, I had passed through the shadow of a vault alongside Lord Portman. I was in a second enclosure, bathed by twilight. I turned round. There was a noise behind me. It was the iron-bound wooden door that had just closed.

  The Pagoda of Chillambaram

  As if in a dream, the ruined magnificence of Chillambaram extended before my eyes.

  We crossed an enclosure strewn with isolated statues and pavilions. We passed under porticos, went along galleries, descended staircases. We sometimes encountered a marble elephant of natural size, a white bull under a mandapam with four columns, or a solitary cross-legged idol. We traversed uncultivated walled gardens, more enclosures, further rooms surrounded by colonnades, courtyards paved with stone slabs worn away by time and ordered with bas-reliefs representing mysterious scenes. Deformed statues gazed at us from niches or emerged from an upper floor of stone. We were suddenly in the presence of a hideous figure with an enormous mouth, sharp teeth curved back like tusks, pointed ears, and two long horns on the head.

  We had just traversed a kind of quincunx strewn with monoliths under the dense shadow of an enormous tower with pyramidal step when, having come through an obscure portico, I saw a wide staircase extend at my feet and I was inundated by green light.

  It came from a reflection of the sky in the waters of the sacred pool. The pool was in front of us, in a square of sculpted colonnades, hexagonal towers and silent temples. It sparkled like an emerald; it was alive, like an immobile body.

  But I did not have the possibility of admiring the harmony of the monuments, those looming up around me and their doubles reflected in the depths of the waters. I was listing in my mind all the reasons for rancor that the three men walking beside me had.

  I saw once again the earthen color that the Rajah’s face had taken on, the day when he had seized me by the waist and tried to approach his lips to mine. That was in the drawing room of my villa one evening when my husband had invited him to dinner. I had detached myself from his grip without difficulty and as he looked at me, simultaneously surprised by his own audacity and my resistance. I had contented myself with showing him the mirror that was beside him. He had looked at it without understanding, and had looked at me with astonishment. Then I had said to him:

  “It’s a French mirror of special fabrication. If you care to examine it with a little attention, you’ll see therein that the number of years that separate us would permit you to be my grandfather.”

  The Rajah had remained silent, looking at the tips of his feet, and he had murmured: “I’ve been deceived. I thought you were a true Frenchwoman.”

  I could not tell whether that was an insolence directed at all the women of my country or the natural expression of his disappointment.

  I saw was again the episodes of the struggle that I had had to sustain with Prince Vanini—for it is the destiny of every slightly attractive woman who has a certain gleam in her eye; she cannot be alone with a man without the latter resuscitating the primitive beast dormant within him and attempting to tip her over, like a male animal blinded by desire in the presence of a female.

  In the depths of the governor’s garden, under palm trees where there were no longer any lanterns, at a party one night, I had made the error of going
with him. The orchestra was playing a languorous waltz, my dress was too low-cut and perhaps he had extracted from his pill-box the frenzy by which he was suddenly possessed.

  He had grabbed me by the hips and lifted me off the ground, simultaneously plunging his head into the hair over my neck. In resisting, I had clung on to the plastron of his shirt, which I pulled with all my might. The plastron tore in two, causing the button holding his collar to fly off, so that the collar fell on to the pathway, with the cravat and the pearls of the plastron. He understood immediately the extent of the catastrophe, the difficulty of finding the pearls in the dark, the ridicule of traversing the illuminated part of the garden with his short in tatters. He had released me so abruptly that I fell.

  “That’s not sporting,” he said. “You’re a...”

  He stopped abruptly. His voice had changed, and taken on a crapulous tone that I did not know; I divined a gross insult that he retained. I thought for a few seconds that his fist was about to strike me in the dark. Nothing happened. I had taken pity on him, however; I helped him find the pearls and readjust his collar. And as we walked back in silence toward the light I noticed for the first time that the hand posed on the rip in the plastron, the hand of the aristocratic Prince, was a hand with square fingers, singularly hairy: the hand of a murderer.

  And I also saw again the scene in Madras, in a dance-hall for the usage of foreigners to which Lord Portman had taken Comtesse Aurelia and me, one evening of idleness, after my divorce.

  In the midst of the smoke, among the cries of drunken sailors, to the sounds of a deafening tom-tom, a fake bayadere had danced a synthetic nautch on a little stage. As dancing is my passion, I was following the dancer with my eyes in order to discern the element of traditional art that there was in her movements, and the extent to which she was dancing a veritable nautch.

  The place where we were was so cluttered with sailors of all nationalities that we were narrowly crowded together and I felt with an invincible repugnance the warmth of Lord Portman’s shoulder against mine.