Between the columns that succeed one another in the square, where there would be shop windows in our cities, tables support beverages whose composition does not include any alcohol. Coffees, beers, teas, creams, sorbets, ice-creams and chocolates regale the repose of the stroller momentarily extended in his rocking-chair, lending a distracted ear to the news recited to him by the phonograph, its intonations breathed by an actor.
These people no longer take the trouble to read. Enclosed in a kind of mechanical piano are albums indented with various holes, into which fit the protrusions of gears of a dimension corresponding to the capacity and shape of the whole. Louder than a normal voice, a voice announces accidents, the temperature and declaims a chronicle or a story. Nothing is more bizarre than hearing the thousand phonographs under the arcades. Each of the “stations” carries a sign indicating the nature of the recitations. The lovers of news stop under the Voice of Events; people fond of literature sup tea under the Voice of the Poets. Those who like to relive ancient times drink within range of the Voice of India, the Voice of Rome or the Voice of Greece. The marine murmur of those confused voices causes a kind of anguish.
From Chaldean inscriptions and those of Egyptian steles to modern imaginations, the testimony of the humanity of old rains down within the city. One listens to the Idea, the One Idea, the Mother Idea, sounding in its marvelous transformations. It floats over the innumerable cupolas of multicolored faience, over the sound of the high jets of water that spring forth decoratively at the corner of avenues, surpassing the tops of the houses and crowning the city with splendid liquid plumes.
That is what I can hear in this room and what I can see through the window.
Think of the total of labor, effort and activity required for that result!
As soon as dusk falls, there is music. The sounds engulf the city, rising up and floating. Organs cry; invisible orchestras strive. Sometimes, it’s a mass by Palestrina, sometimes a work by César Franck, sometimes Wagner, Beethoven, Gluck or Chopin. Machinery alone replaces virtuosos. One can perceive a slightly annoying stiffness of execution, but only in certain passages. The sensation is brief. A surge of perfect harmonies drowns the awkward note.
I obtained the privilege of knowing these things by giving the seneschal of Amphitrite my word of honor to observe certain conventions. I must not, during my journey, buy or sell anything. All my entitlements have been given to me at the offices of Amphitrite. I have been told that, as a guest of the Dictatorship, I shall not have any expenditure to make. It is forbidden for me to make or receive gifts. All circulation of money, all commercial exchange, is forbidden on the territory of the Dictatorship, and in order to forearm me against human weakness, I was taken to a store, dressed in a coat similar to that of the seneschal, in a kind of somber silk, culottes like those of our cyclists, and knee-length boots in raw leather. A felt hat was adapted to my head. An entire outfit was folded up in a valise, and I was confided to the care of two individuals whose intonations alone denounce that they are women, their costume not differing from that of men, nor their hair, cut roundly up to the ears with a fringe over the forehead, like the pages of the fourteenth century.
I asked in vain for permission to bring my box of cigars. My guardians declared that alcohol and tobacco had no right of entry into the country. I feel a malaise at that deprivation.
The train that brought us from Amphitrite to Minerve, in six hours, travels at a speed twenty-five or thirty per cent greater than our expresses. The carriages are vast rooms equipped with large glass bays, where the entire perspective of an equatorial country files past, imbued with heavy vapors that emanate from marshy regions. Profound divans garnish the walls. The system of lighting and heating by the red electric plaques renders the hours comfortable.
At the stations, people board without any supervision. They are similarly dressed. They speak very little, understanding one another by means of signs; they seem grave and collected. The women are almost entirely virilized. Hands in their coat pockets, legs crossed, they meditate. From time to time the voice of a phonograph announces some item of news. At each station the train’s conductor collects a series of plaques, which he slides into the apparatus.
As in London, the women and men do not seem to desire one another. They do not undress one another with their gaze. Their eyes do not mark any connivance. The women put more sugar in their tea, the men blow their noses into their handkerchiefs more loudly. No distinction of gestures, no coarseness of manners places one or other in evidence. Equals in education as well as in costume, one cannot say that there are inferiors among them. The strong stand aside before the weak, the big before the small, men before women; that’s all.
No one talks to the train conductor or the employees with impatience, but rather making use of the humblest formulae of politeness. During dinner, my companions helped the waitress with an entirely fraternal kindness, and she treated familiarly, making amusing remarks to them. My different manners appeared to shock everyone around me, especially when I asked the waitress to pick up a napkin. She blushed deeply, obeyed, and turned away, not without evidence of her scorn and indignation. My companions made excuses for me, in my capacity as a foreigner.
One does not see fat people or thin ones, nor lame individuals, nor people who are excessively old or children excessively young, nor mothers accompanied by restless infants, nor sick people, pale and coughing. When I expressed my astonishment, my companions informed me. They told me that the first efforts of Jérôme the Founder were aimed at the installation of gymnasia. Scarcely had he driven back the Malay tribes and cleared the fertile land on the High Plateau, and protected them with a ring of forts, than he had nine large wooden edifices constructed on the banks of the River Coti: the Maternity, the Nursery, the School, the College, the Lycée, the University, the Presbytery and the Hospital. Separated by distances of about thirty kilometers, those buildings immediately received their inmates.
Every woman known to be pregnant was taken to the Maternity. Cares of every sort were lavished upon her. The best game from the hunts was reserved for her, the most beautiful fabrics, the most comfortable seats, and all the honors. None of that has disappeared from mores in fifty years. The mother remains the sacred individual, above all. In place of the primitive wooden buildings, palaces have risen up, filled with statues and paintings. She lives there, dispensed from work during the entire period of pregnancy, that of nursing and that of primary education. For her, Chinese cooks of considerable science prepare feasts; choirs of young women sing and make music; the best troupes of actors perform the masterpieces of known literatures; gardeners complete marvelous flower-beds and the paths of vast parks.
“It is,” my companion told me, “a year of royal triumph. Nothing similar is accorded to our inventors or our physicians, who are nevertheless honored in imitation of historic emperors. Jérôme the Founder has judged that nothing is more beautiful than producing a thinking being. You will doubtless see corteges of matrons going by in their ivory and silver litters. The law obliges everyone to prostrate themselves before them. Our heroes, our inventors and our doctors, wallow in the mud as they pass by, while a seneschal or the dictator himself is only saluted by the crowd, whose members affirm themselves his equal.
“Have you enjoyed those honors?” I asked.
“Twice,” she replied; “at fourteen and a half and at twenty. Look, for that I wear two gold plaques in my buttonhole.”
“And your children?”
“I had news of them ten days ago. The elder, who is now thirteen, is finishing her choreographic studies. I was shown her painting. She is collaborating in a large painting that will ornament the Temple of Iron. The picture represents the triumph of our aerial ships, on the day when they were finally able to take flight, after fifteen years of fruitless attempts. At this moment, my daughter ought to be in the country for the autumn sowing. Physical labor is very good for her. Last year, after the beet harvest, she was definitively rid of her
migraines. I hope that the doctors will think her strong enough to be transferred to the city of Diane next year, for it’s better to approach the male early; that way, one avoids the exhaustion of unslaked imagination.”
I knew that the family and marriage no longer existed in the nation, but I had a great deal of difficulty hearing at young mother talk like that, with her legs crossed and her frail hands choosing pastilles for her mouth.
She went on: “My second, a boy, is eight years old. He seems a little slow for his age. I think it’s my fault. His father, so far as I can tell, was a poor old man who came from France in his youth with Jérôme the Founder. Still victim of your illusions about sentiment, he loved me, as you put it. He seemed so unhappy that I didn’t refuse him my body. It’s necessary to be kind, isn’t it, to all weaknesses? I imagined that his semen would be infertile—on the contrary. The child seemed puny, a trifle stupid. He had to be inscribed in the instructors’ section. He was crammed by all mnemonic techniques, with grammar, history and geography, and will doubtless spend his life reciting it into scholarly phonograph.”
“And now,” I asked, “are you not hoping for another maternity?”
“As you can imagine, in this country the hope of many women is pregnancy. There are fortunate ones who don’t spend ten months outside the Mothers’ Palace; every intercourse fecundates them. But for the greater number, the facility of amour renders them sterile. Thus, personally, I was taken at fourteen, after the second embrace. That happens to the majority. The conditions of the first encounters are so special. When we leave University, and are truly women, we’re transferred to the city of Diane. There we live in the Maidens’ Palace.
“Every day we perform dances; we put on sumptuous costumes appropriate to emphasize our beauty; we listen to phonographs reciting erotic poems and stories. After a few weeks, there’s a great festival to which males of thirty are invited, selected from among the most handsome and robust. They come in silk leotards. In the morning there’s a service in the Basilica. The archbishops file past at the head of processions. One is intoxicated by incense and the sound of organs.
“Afterwards there’s the admirable cortege of Mothers, who go past on litters with great sheets of precious fabrics. A feast brings the sexes together. They mingle. After that, in front of the assembly of men, dressed in ballet costumes, the virgins dance certain long, very beautiful dances, in which we’re educated from the age of six at college so that we can perfect them at the lycée and the gymnasium. When the dances are over, everyone accepts an intoxicating beverage and goes to lie down in her lodge, on cushions, amid flowers. The man comes in. One devotes oneself to reproduction for two weeks, either with the same man, another or several.
“The festivals are prolonged. Almost everyone, in the following month, becomes pregnant and leaves the city of Diane.”
“They never return there?”
“Never. There’s another city, Venus. Similar ceremonies are held there for those who emerge from the Mothers’ Palace after their little one is weaned. You’ll doubtless witness one of those Festivals of Reproduction. Before then, we’ll have the great Festival of Locomotion at the Temple of Iron, in the city named Vulcan. That’s held every spring, on the anniversary of the day when, for the first time, the aerial ships were able to sustain themselves in the transparency of the air. A week after that is the Festival of Nutrition, the celebration of the earth, shortly before the rainy season. Those three great Festivals mark, for our calendar, the end of the annual labor, at the epoch of your winter solstice.”
“But,” I said, excited by the description of the Festivals of Diane, “outside of these amorous ceremonies you mention, the taste for passionate things doesn’t seduce souls?”
“The taste for that pastime has certainly lost its prestige if you consider it with your European illusions. Here, a woman doesn’t refuse a man her flesh, any more than she would refuse to return a greeting among you. It’s a politeness that we grant quite graciously, without attaching any more importance to it.”
“But what if an old man solicits you, or an unpleasant man?”
“For one thing, old people live in the Presbyteries, for the most part. They go in at the age of forty. The deformed don’t frequent the milieu of the beautiful and the healthy. They live in particular places reserved for their distress. Thus, we only encounter individuals of admissible appearance and stature. Then again, to accomplish that very simple function, we have no need of so much choice or circumlocution. Nothing in the laws or habits opposes the exercise of an instinct useful to the expansion of the race. One reproduces when one has the desire, with whoever proposes it, just as one eats in the company of a passer-by in the refectory of the train or travels in a vehicle with a driver.”
“What about the ideal?” I said.
My two companions smiled.
I considered them. Brunettes, evidently imprinted with Malaysian blood, they had languid eyes with long lashes and mat eyelids with delicate corners. Their slightly flattened noses did not spoil the sad sensibility of visages striped by blood-red mouths. In the folds of silk vests their liberated breasts did not vanish to such an extent that they could not be divined to be form and full. They also had broad hips under the vast tails of their jackets, svelte calves within their gaiters, and pointed feet. The more loquacious of the two was named Théa , and the other, who had thus far only said anything by means of smiles, was named Pythie. Although she was younger, three medals indicated the number of her children. I complimented her on the grace of her figure after several births.
“It’s for the doctoresses to receive those flatteries,” she replied. “The art of obstetrics has reached a high degree of perfection, for the greatest recompenses are reserves for those who discover the means of embellishing and ennobling maternity.”
“What recompenses?”
“Exemption from labor, for one, two, three years, or for life. Thus, three times a mother, I’m dispensed of work for nine years. I’m not accompanying you by virtue of function, but out of amity for Théa , in order to help her in her task. In any case, I declare myself doubly glad of that friendship, which has offered me the joy of knowing you, Monsieur.”
I bowed. That Pythie seemed very charming. She even pretended to look at me seductively. Something akin to a golden stripe bordering her iris illuminated her thick lashes. I gazed rather fixedly at her breasts. She perceived it, smiled, and, turning toward me, unbuttoned her waistcoat, in such a way that I could perceive brown skin inflated by respiration.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“That gratitude is sincere,” said Théa , whose hand insinuated itself, for a natural observation toward the most excited part of my flesh.
I felt some shame at that undissimulated gesture, but the other three passengers in the salon did not appear to pay any heed to it.
“To Lucine, two male children have just been born; well constituted,” cried the shrill voice of the phonograph at that moment. It continued: “Four ships have departed for the province of Cavite. Spanish troops have been defeated at Luçao. Our allies have burned the plantations of Altavila and Notre-Dame del Pilar... The calculation of the harvest is concluded. The reserves appear sufficiently furnished for us to hope for a reduction in agrarian labor of five hours a week during next year’s toil... The ninth group of engineers has concluded experiments with the glass-blowing machine. It is thought that the fabrication of bottles will cease to require human breath in six weeks...”
A blast of a whistle signaled the end of the phonographic communication.
“There’s a fortunate conquest of matter,” said the traveler sitting opposite us to his neighbor. “I rejoice in it, for I’ve been blowing glass for four years and I’m a little weary of it.”
“You have broad shoulders,” she replied, “which denote lungs capable of supporting that fatigue.”
“Certainly, but I’ll adapt very well to another kind of work, and I confess to you that I shall take adva
ntage joyfully of my trimestrial leave.”
“You’re going to Minerve?”
“Yes, I’m undertaking some very interesting work on the variations of Aryan idioms. Only in Minerve are the libraries sufficiently well furnished to permit me to carry that curiosity through.”
“How can you succeed in interesting yourself in philology, Monsieur,” I asked him, “while blowing glass?”
“My God, it’s easy. My section works from six o’clock in the morning until midday. By four in the afternoon I’ve strolled sufficiently. It’s necessary to kill the hours before bedtime. By chance, my comrades have very similar tastes. One operates on the Chaldean languages, another on the Egyptian, two others on the Celtic. We thus have a common subject to group our minds and our conversations.”
“Monsieur is European, and is visiting the Dictatorship as a guest of the Council,” said Théa .
“Well then, Monsieur. I’m glad to wish you welcome,” replied the bottle-blower. “The phonograph informed us of your voyage. I understand that it astonishes you to hear such words, but why? Do you not have compulsory military service in Europe? Are you not obliged, at times, to play the cavalier second class in a barracks? As a stable-hand, you clean out the filth, polish the saddles and bridles, you groom the horses. That doesn’t prevent you, in the evening, from reading a literary magazine. We do social service for twenty years, as you do military service for three, that’s all. It’s no more brutalizing, and the art of Production elevates the mind, whereas the art of Destruction debases it. Every trimester we enjoy a fortnight’s leave. I’m going to utilize my leisure in Minerve.”
The Humanisphere Page 28
