For the cost of a lunch in an airship restaurant one could go to Venice or Moscow.
Distance no longer existed.
The most sedentary, most home-loving people had seen the marine solitudes of oceans, deserts, high African plateaux, the icy peaks of Cordilleras, mysterious islands and unexplored wildernesses flee beneath their feet, from nacelles decked with oriflammes.
Newlyweds made their honeymoon voyages to Tahiti or Ispahan amid fields of roses or garden of jasmine. All the maladies that decimate us scarcely existed; powerful serums preserved people from them. It also seemed that the old wines had lost all their force, and that Evil, weary of being Evil, had been vanquished.
Only Death had not been disarmed. It was, as it is today, on the horizon of all hopes, al joys and all lies, like a great mysterious black hole. The human mind had only conquered the earth, but that it had conquered completely; it was no longer a vale of tears, a dolorous halt, a poor inn full of moans and resentment; humans disposed of it at their whim, while awaiting peace there.
One morning in May 2313, Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel’s head, posed on his stele, some distance from the window, was gazing at the light sky, in which innumerable airships were floating, when Clarisse, his maid, knocked on the door and came in.
She was holding a newspaper in her hand; it was the Petit Parisien, the only title that had lasted until then.
Clarisse was not dressed like the women of today, but in a kind of pink tunic, and veils draped in the Greek manner, for in that era, loose, comfortable and brightly-colored garments had replaced the sheaths that confine our bodies narrowly.
The sports that almost everyone practiced made limbs more robust and supple, and Clarisse displayed two bare, round, muscular arms: the adorable arms of a young female wrestler. Her feet were also bare, in sandals attached at her ankles by an apple-green ribbon. A blue headband gathered her beautiful blonde hair.
She moved the doctor’s head to one side, into the frame of the window, and the light sunlight of the nascent spring played in her gilded curls, as immaterial as smoke.
Although it was prohibited for balloons to pass between the houses, Clarisse’s fiancé, a mechanic with a short brown moustache, caused the two-seater dirigible that he was piloting to execute a savant swoop, stopped momentarily outside the window, and blew the blushing young woman a kiss.
“Amour is ever imprudent,” murmured Dr. Jacobus, with his centuries-old lips. “Ever imprudent, and ever joyful.”
Clarisse’s face was still tinted pink when she came to sit on a divan upholstered in colors that would astonish us a great deal, and unfolded the newspaper that she was responsible for reading to her master.
She had the trained diction of an associate of the Comédie-Française and the learning of a Faculty professor, like all the young women of the day.
She began:
“The Yellow Peril. Finally, the anxiety in which we were living has dissipated. The Asiatic fleet has been annihilated at sea in the Pacific Ocean.
“The yellow coalition would certainly never have been able to disembark its forces in European ports, but such a prompt annihilation was unexpected.
“A few Japanese battleships were able to escape the disaster, but the heavy Chinese transport ships have all sunk.
“The international squadron of military airships had arrived at daybreak, with all lights extinct, over the immense Asiatic fleet, like s sudden flock of mighty birds of prey. The spectacle was prodigious. A centuries-old quarrel was about to be settled. Europe, redoubtable, knowledgeable old Europe, having conquered all, was floating above the menacing forces of Asia.
“Beneath the armored nacelles, the solitudes of the Pacific extended infinitely, like turbulent plains. Thousands of ships formed a kind of moving city in that marine desert. It was four o’clock in the morning when the chief engineer, the Frenchman Jacques Desaix, gave the signal to attack.
“The valves opened, the terrible rain, the rain of iron and fire of immense bombs, fell, while the aircraft climbed out of range of the fleet’s cannons, which scarcely responded. Beneath the torpedoes and explosives, beneath the great tubes charged with our frightful blue powder, the sea and the air reared up toward us, and then gulfs opened, swallowing the broken, burning, smashed ships.
“The enormous cannons of the vessels coughed lugubriously and sank into the sea. The disaster is complete, and we shall be tranquil for a century.”
The immortal head of Dr. Jacobus smiled. He remembered the year 1905, European battleships blown up in Japanese bays, Russian armies vanquished in the bare and torrid plains of Manchuria!
“Continue, I beg you, Clarisse,” he requested—and the young maidservant finished the sensational article.
“The dirigibles are to return this evening, in the course of the celebrations that Europe entire will hold for those formidable iron birds, emerged from their hangars and moving through the sunlit sky...
“Latest news. The Council of the Just decreed this morning that the gold and silver coins withdrawn from circulation will be made into crowns for young women who already have two children.
“The death has been announced in Saint Petersburg of the President of the Russian Republic, Dr. Yvan Sianeski, the grandson of the scientist who discovered the cancer microbe and found the serum against the terrible malady that ravaged the twentieth century.
“The death has also been announced of the celebrated cantatrice Bianca Dantellina. She was eighteen years of age. A national funeral will be held in Rome.
“The Ancients have organized the spring festivals. Balloons will sprinkle flower petals over cities all night and all day.”
III. Which might be entitled: Memories and Tears...
After Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel’s last accident, which had reduced him to his simplest expression, since nothing more remained of him than his head, the government of the epoch, the Council of the Just, decreed special measures whenever the extraordinary head undertook an excursion in his automobile or his balloon.
Vehicles had to travel when he passed by at a speed of fifteen kilometers an hour, and his two-seater airship had permission to fly between the walls of houses in the city, or, at high altitude, in zones of the sky in which other balloons never traveled.
On day in May 2450, the doctor’s head expressed the desire to visit the Louvre, the rooms of which conserved the costumes, furniture and everything that remained of our century.
He had never made that pilgrimage to the relics of a distant past, which he nevertheless remembered as if it were yesterday.
The appearance of the old and somber Louvre, massive and solid, had hardly changed.
The curator of the Palace came to meet his machine and took the doctor’s head in his own hands in order to take him in and take him up the broad marble stairs.
The galleries of paintings presented a lamentable sight. The bitumen of the canvases had risen to the surface and almost nothing remained of the masterpieces that we admire. Leonardo da Vinci’s Gioconda, the pure face with the troubling smile, was a black patch in which a few features could barely be divined.
Only the old paintings made on wood, with pigments prepared by conscientious and savant artists, still survived. Of the moderns who had simply bought their tubes of paint from merchants, nothing at all remained.
Immediately, the head of Dr. Jacobus asked to be taken to the nineteenth century galleries. In the display cases, one could see costumes similar to the ones we wear. All the uniforms of our soldiers, along with weapons, short-range rifles, primitive and barbaric sabers, were assembled and labeled, like the short swords and rusty broken helmets of Roman soldiers, and the bucklers and pikes that we see in visiting he displays of antiques in our museums.
Before those costumes, and all the centuries-old garments, Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel remembered exactly. He had worn a uniform similar to that one more than five hundred years ago, when he had done his military service in a small town in the south of France.
He asked the curator who was listening to him speak if he could remain alone in the room for an hour, and when the functionary has placed the head on an armchair and had closed the door. Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel abandoned himself to his memories. They emerged from all those items of furniture, those costumes, those objects that were no longer used; they surrounded him, those memories, like a tide, and for the head that had triumphed over the murderous years, the emotion was infinitely powerful and sweet.
His youth rose up…he saw once again the serious and delicate face of his mother, in the little apartment in which they lived, near the Jardin des Plantes; the meals eaten on fine summer evenings next to the window open to a sea of foliage, while a young woman with whom he had been in love played the piano on the floor below. He distinctly heard the music, after centuries, slightly muffled by the floor. It began with a waltz by a celebrated composer of the epoch, whose name was no longer remembered; afterwards, the young woman played a sequence of popular songs, slow, sad and tearfully sentimental; and in the solemn silence of the room he murmured:
“Remember that, remember that!”
Yes, it was that tune she had played before closing her piano, on summer evenings, in the Rue de Buffon! And that was centuries—my God, centuries!—ago...
What moved him most of all were the dresses of the women of the nineteenth century. Elegant wax mannequins wore narrow dresses that molded them like sheaths. One young woman with blonde hair hanging down over her forehead, tucking up her skirt, still seemed to be alive and smiling. A long lace jacket floated over the summer dress; between her white ankle-boots and her bright skirt walnut-colored sticking were rounded, with silver flecks, and beneath an umbrella of cerise silk, her immense straw hat set a nimbus around her lovely face, like that of a tall, pert child.
Then the creamy white of an embroidered satin dress attracted his gaze, and he thought about his wedding.
His wedding! It was in 1865. Valentine had been twenty-five, and he had been twenty-six. He had just completed his studies, and a small fortune permitted him to envisage the future without dread.
What a day! It had been May, he remembered, and the sky had never been so blue. Washed by the previous day’s rain, it had the appearance of an immense opal. The Église Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, near the Panthéon, was embalmed with incense, and when the ceremony was over, as they left, he had bumped into a red-haired girl who was selling white roses. He had bought the whole basket, and had covered Valentine’s knees in flowers in the coupé cushioned in white velvet. Pigeons had been flying over the roof of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève; it was the time when the students were coming out of the schools in noisy bands. Their youth smiled at the nuptial cortege, and in the carriage that was carrying them away, he breathed in the odor of fresh roses, mingled with the perfume of new fabric rising from the dress of his blonde bride. Was she blonde! Was she pretty, Lord! Beneath the light crown of orange-blossom garlanding her hair, with its rebellious curls, and her cornflower-blue eyes...
Oh, what a life…what a dream, rather. If only he had discovered his elixir then, if only he had been able to immortalize his young wife, so that both of them could live with their bodies eternal!
But like a large bloodstain, in a nearby display-case, the madder-red trousers of a soldier of the line burst forth, and Jacobus van Brucktel immediately relived the terrible year: 1870!
He had left his young wife with his mother and resumed service as a military physician, following the army, for in spite of his Dutch name, his family had been French for several generations. He had been wounded at Beaune-la-Rolande, and decorated by Gambetta’s own hand. He had been part of General Crouzat’s twentieth corps, and had fought against the troops of Grand Duke Mecklembourg.
Something else that was far away! And yet, no detail of it escaped him, for that year and the one that followed had been frightful for him, as they had been disastrous for France.
He saw it all again: the muddy, soaked roads where men and cannons were entangled; long, bleak, uncertain columns, marching with bowed heads, while along the flanks of the brigades, couriers and generals and staff-officers galloped past, hastening toward hills crowned at every moment with plumes of smoke, while the patient Prussians, like innumerable cockroaches, tightened their circle of iron every day. He had supported fatigue, hunger and cold, and when, after the war, he had returned to Paris, his mother had been waiting for him, dressed in black.
He had understood immediately. Valentine had died during the siege, and the letter had never reached him across the disorganized fatherland; he had not known.
The blow had been hard; then the days had passed, and he undertaken, in order to forget, studies that had absorbed him completely
He had reignited the extinct furnaces of the of alchemists, madmen, seekers that the Church had burned in the Middle Ages, prodigious occult scientists—and in the twilight of his life, when he no longer hoped for anything, he had seen the miracle produced and the marvelous liqueur fall in violent droplets, like liquid amethysts, into his retort...
When the curator of the Louvre opened the door, the hour having elapsed, the doctor’s head, on the red damask armchair, was weeping.
IV. In which is witnessed a great celebration and a...
More large intervals of time went by. The generations succeeded one another, each bringing its discovery, and the immortal head of Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel witnessed those passages and those victories of humans over natural forces and old mysteries. The scientific conquests extended logically, like a long sequence of theorems, flowing mathematically one after another, and there was only one crime of savant madness to deplore. The scandal was enormous, but it would take us too far astray too recount that terrifying history, for which the entire twenty-sixth century retained an insurmountable horror.
Fortunately, toward the end of the same century, an astronomer discovered an apparatus that permitted life on the planet Mars to be seen. It vaguely resembled today’s cinematographs. On great screens the appearances were imprinted of a world hitherto unknown. Theaters no longer existed, people having wearied of old worn-out and decrepit dramas, and the crowds of the year 2600 were surprised, in the luminous transparences, by the agitations of the beings that inhabited a heavenly body millions of leagues from the Earth.
The immortal doctor enjoyed an immense popularity, and every evening, the powerful luminous projections outlined his illustrious head in the clouds. It was during that year, 2600, that the government decided solemnly to celebrate Jacob van Brucktel’s seven hundredth anniversary. The President of the Council of the Just disembarked from his airship, at the hour fixed for the ceremony, on to the balcony of the house where Dr. Jacobus lived. He was introduced into the room, where he made a speech; then, personally taking the celebrated head in his hands, he carried it to the nacelle ad placed it in the midst of the members of the government, on a mechanical pedestal admirably ornamented with foliage.
The machine rose into the sky above the colossal city.
It was floated alone in the blue solitudes of the sky when, at a given signal, balloons rose up from everywhere.
Aboard every nacelle, a young woman dressed in incredible silks threw flowers toward the machine in which the members of the government were, presided over by the doctor’s had.
The people of Paris soared over the deserted city.
In an immense dirigible painted blue and entirely garlanded with branches that formed porches of verdure and charming triumphal arches, a choir of women, chosen from among the most beautiful, sang a hymn, and beneath the sparks of rockets that were bursting at vertiginous heights, the sky released a rain of iridescent pearls, vermilion fires, and clusters of bright stars.
Gradually, however, the sky cleared, and by midday, nothing remained in the open air but the government dirigible.
Then, the dull rumble of thunder was heard on the horizons, and war balloons—the entire international squadron—arrived, like a monstrous whirlwind. They st
opped a hundred meters from the flowery nacelle, immobilized, forming an immense circle, lined up as if for a review.
The airship contained the head moved, passing slowly before them, like a delicate basket of flowers before a population of whales.
The crews applauded; vast red banners floated from the rigging, bearing inscriptions in white letters celebrating the glory of the doctor.
The President of the United States of America left his vessel and came to place a crown of laurels on the snowy hair of the immortal head.
After the popular rejoicing, which lasted all day, there was a great banquet that evening at the French presidency.
Although not eating, the doctor’s head watched from the best place, on a flowery pedestal, wearing the crown offered by the United States.
When the meal was over, the guests went into the reception rooms of the Palace, where Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel met then; the interminable file-past lasted until midnight.
In a matter of hours people were able to come from Germany, Greece, Vienna or Constantinople, and the air was furrowed all night long by moving lights, which were the searchlights of dirigibles bringing all the dignitaries of Europe to the doctor’s reception. On his decorated stele, with a word for everyone, he greeted those bowing passers-by and beautiful ephemera from the height of his immortality. He was, undoubtedly, only a head, and everything save for the pleasure of his eyes was forbidden to him, but at least he was alive, he could think, and his sensations were as fresh as in the days when, young and possessed of all his robust limbs, he had trod the paving-tones of a vanished Paris with his solid heels.
Those who filed past his living ruin certainly enchanted him with their beauty, and the complete harmony of their bodies. Wine delighted them, they could walk under the trees, over carpets of moss and grass, huddle together and embrace one another, but what did all that matter, since they would end, since each of them had a skeleton within, like a livid hidden monster, lying in wait, sly waiting for the moment of death to show the chalky whiteness of its bones.
The Mirror of Present Events Page 10
