The early afternoon heat, a crushing, heavy heat which exhausted me, combined with the smell of tobacco and made me feel sad. I hated the middle of the day, the motionlessness of the afternoon, and that grey light filtering in from the garden.
I climbed up to the attic. I loved it with its arrangement of eighteenth century beams laid on top of each other in such a way that you would have thought they formed the ribs of an upturned ship. The flat, unevenly-laid stones of the roof-covering allowed rays of sunlight to pass through and, as always in attics, a delicious anxiety took hold of me. So as to read in comfort, I sat down on the floor. I showed a strong propensity to sit or even lie down on floors; even a relatively uninformed observer would have deduced the vice in my character from my refusal to use chairs, and would not have been far wrong, for I did indeed feel all-powerful impulses not to act like other people; the social graces and manners I habitually demonstrated did not hold out for long, as soon as I was on my own for a while I slipped back into my wild state.
In the old books which littered the floor, several of which I had stacked up to rest my elbows on, I found cruelty mixed with clumsiness, skill, and flashes of honesty. Those books were well printed, bound with that same red leather which is used to make school whips, and radiated the good smell of old ink. Treatises on Greek versification, books of religious instruction burning with love, Latin tomes as strong as athletes’ muscles, galant little books, I took pleasure in reading them all in that priest’s attic.
I came upon Goya’s Caprices, and I spent the heavy, painful afternoon looking again and again at the engravings which touched me to the quick. This European madness, that was my madness; the demons and the priests did not astonish me, nor did the anguish of prison, which I knew well. As I opened those books, the memory of several of my youthful lives came back to my mind; memories of provincial schools, priests’ gardens, sunny springtimes beside calm rivers. Fragments of the Past which belonged to me enchanted me, and it pleased me to know that I had lived longer ago in that part of France than I would ever have believed.
I practised a curious method to give myself extreme pleasure, for I had noticed that a very large number of strokes of the whip plunged me into a powerful state of delirium, at the height of which I lost consciousness. I knew from experience that it is enough for the punishment to be given gently at first, so that the pain remains easily bearable; after which, beyond a hundred strokes, you no longer feel anything and can continue indefinitely. As long as you have a little courage and perseverance, you can exceed five hundred strokes, even vicious ones, with no other ill effects beyond swollen, blackened flanks, and a little blood on your clothes; one side will be more affected than the other if you whip yourself, for the lashes twist and only strike one side. Then you become delirious, cast out of your own body.
At the far end of a room in the house I found a locked cupboard. On the back of the door, suspended from nails, hung whips, the kind you buy at fairs, some with red handles, others with yellow; old school whips, with handles of turned wood, like chair feet; and several whips which my priest had made himself, their long thongs tipped with knots. I knelt down on a prie-dieu. The habit of confession combined well with my peculiarities, with just one difference: contrary to the spirit of contrition I was not feeling remorse about anything, nor guilt for anything, only a violent and savage desire to suffer and to live. With the shutters and windows closed, I did as I have said. I whipped myself, half-naked, in that darkened room, on my knees on the prayer-stool, in a shadowy gloom which was the accomplice of my eagerness to mortify my own flesh. At the hundredth stroke I allowed myself a rest, I was so exhausted I could do no more; I laid my face gently against the wall. The sounds of the countryside reached me distantly; peasants were travelling past in a cart; people were talking in the yard. I picked up the whip again; I was good to myself; I held back after the hardest strokes; I stopped beating myself when the bite of the leather gave me too much pain, for my courage did not exceed a little compassion for myself. And who could have guessed when it was necessary to spare me, who could have sensed when I needed pity, who better than myself, bleeding from my own blows? I beat myself hard, for a long time, so that each time I could give myself the joy of whipping gently when I had gone too far. I put all the heart into it that my semi-solitude allowed. Then I gave myself proofs of love and kindness, both of which were rather lacking in my life, until at last I fell to the floor, drunk with pity and tender self-love, after more than a thousand strokes.
I was jerked out of this solitary pleasure when a violent thunderclap shook the presbytery. There was a long silence and then I heard the rain coming, a powerful summer rain which drummed on the leaves and on the stone roof. So as to avoid the draughts which, people say, attract the thunder, I closed doors and pulled a few little windows shut around me. In the flare from a bolt of lightning, a second thunderclap sounded above the pine trees; a slow, stormy roll echoed all around before vanishing into the depths of the thick foliage. Our trees were shaking their branches; torrents of water were falling from our roof and making hollows in the earth at the foot of the walls, so deeply that the rain uncovered the stones in the garden. A curiously green light had replaced the brightness of day. A lightning bolt sheared the top clean off a cedar. The entire countryside growled ominously. The storm thundered with terrible detonations, and from time to time with slow tearing noises which originated high up in the sky, hesitated, then came swooping down towards our trees; more often the storm thundered heavily onto the village with a sound of logs being thrown violently to the ground. It went away, came back, frightened me. The river too received its fill of the storm; then it became noticeably weaker. There was no longer so much noise, and everything began to calm down. Silence came, broken by the fall of the last drops of water sliding down off the roof.
I ate some bread. That silence, that bread, the coolness of that part of the evening, mingled with the scents floating up from the rain-swept garden, all seemed delicious to me. I had to attend to my priest’s ewes. We kept them in a stable which was entered by a door at the far end of our kitchen, and consequently we could hear them knocking their heads against that door, whimpering close by us like gently captive souls, their feeble squabbles, their murmurs often interrupting what little conversation we had. Behind that door they were born and died in darkness, on their thick bedding, dreaming of green grass. Their smell exuded the all-conquering sweetness of Limbo. Another stable door led out into the garden; I opened it each evening, and they showed pleasure as they walked out into lush meadows.
I followed them and sat down at the edge of a little wood. The storm forgotten, the moon’s perfect disc rose into a translucent azure sky, setting it all aglow; beside it shone the night’s other child, a single star twinkling over the Sarladais hills. The tangled tree-trunks were becoming difficult to make out. The air, now as cold as springwater, showered me with joy, touching my lips and my eyes. A bird sang among the black branches. I saw the bird clearly. Large, blue, crested, it emerged from the greenery with a sound of crumpled wings, and passed above my head with an insistent cry, heavy in its flight.
Our sheep went back when they chose to. They lingered late in the meadows, grazing under the low branches of the trees, and it was almost midnight when I heard them sneaking back along our garden paths. They ventured right up to windows of the house, knocking over the watering cans and chairs, before deciding to go back into their stable. So, paying them no further heed, I set off up the path which led back to the presbytery.
I needed nettles. We had some along our north-facing walls, in damp corners. Tall nettles lived there, along with the rushes which have a fondness for fresh flesh and the blood of young children. I mixed powdered, dried nettles with tobacco, and I found this blend suited me well, not for reasons of economy, for I was not short of tobacco, but because the smoke of powdered grey nettles had particular properties. Protecting my fingers with a handkerchief, I picked fistfuls, which I crammed into my pock
ets.
My priest had still not arrived home. Not particularly expecting him, or even wanting to see him for that matter, since I was greatly enjoying being alone, I went up to my room. I had no desire to put on the light. Sliding between the sheets, I laid my nettles under the pillow to dry, and peacefully smoked a mixture I’d prepared a few days earlier. Nettles have a scent redolent of plants, death, dreams, love and calm water under the moon; and they produce a rapid high. In my white sheets, with my eyelids closed, I smoked. I fell asleep; I forgot to smoke; nettles go out more quickly than tobacco; you have to draw in the smoke regularly to keep them alight; I lost consciousness with an acid taste of burnt sap on my lips; I felt that my soul was detaching itself from my body; I was becoming separated from myself, I no longer inhabited my own face, nor my eyes nor my arms, and I was standing some distance away from my physical self.
In this altered state I could detect in minute detail the secret movements of life, the growth of plants, the fermentation of stagnant waters, here an imperceptible movement of the air, there the crack of a branch. After our ewes had finished roaming up and down the garden paths, and silence was re-established, flowers opened and plums fell. A spell was at work. Like some magical being who left the sheltering greenery each evening to come up to our trees, that spell was making the night grass grow, the leaves open out and pods appear all the way up our pea-sticks. In the distance, beyond the little walls of our kitchen garden, the whole of the Sarladais was singing in the voices of the tree frogs, under the starry sky.
I wanted to see the plants growing and walk among the branches, to join with this garden spell which was calling to me. The darkness of the countryside terrified me. Indeed, I would have stayed in my bed, but the summons was becoming too urgent. I got up and dressed. However, because part of me was afraid, I took a long bayonet from the room next to mine. Among my priest’s possessions were bows and poisoned arrows from Africa and Oceania, naval swords, Indo-Chinese daggers, Malayan knives. An indisputably French bayonet from the 1914 war, which was not too rusty and slid quite easily out of its metal scabbard, seemed to suit my purposes. I stuck it through my belt and went outside, walking into the moonlight.
I saw a sky covered with stars. My steel blade gleamed; the sound of the Vézère reached my ears. Other low stone walls enclosed other gardens. Mankind’s dwellings lay sleeping, their shutters closed. I distrusted and feared humans. Given a choice between the splendour of the night and the heavy sleep of men slumbering in the arms of their wives, deep in those big, soft country beds where people give birth or die in sweat and blood, I had chosen the night. Dogs caught wind of my scent and growled in their chains. The slow sound of the Vézère drew me on; to get to it, I decided to go through the woods rather than skirting the village.
I set off at a rapid, silent trot, diving in among the tall, cold grasses. My legs became soaked with night-dew, and my long bayonet left a furrow of crushed stems behind me, but I felt no tiredness and made rapid progress. The moon lit up little valleys; I walked through transparent shadows, banks of light, and I did not stop until I reached a meadow.
The second crop was growing in abundance between cliffs full of sheltered hollows overgrown with thick vegetation. The World was there before my eyes, the world of stars and leaves in the Great Time of the Night. The earth was turning slowly in a clear sky striped with pink clouds, pointed like the prows of boats. The rocks and the woods lived their real lives in the moonlight, far from men. And I lived my real life with them; I nourished my soul, I drenched myself with happiness, I drank in the strength of the World; this was reality, lasting and unforgettable. The fathomless, living presence of magical space imbued every leaf. Eyes wide open, I had only one desire: never to return to live among humans. Indeed, I was quickly forgetting them; there was not one fragment of my true being, of my real personality, which did not participate unreservedly in the eternal celebration of sovereign night.
A bird sang. Birds sing at night more often than people think. I loved that soul, whose language of love and joy I now understood. In the middle of the meadow stood a few trees, four, very close together, so that their crowns formed a single round, shining ball of leaves. The bird was singing there. I rid myself of my sword, laying it down in the grass. My mouth voiced tender calls, exactly like the bird’s, and he answered me as if I was a bird. Then I prowled like an animal, here and there, among the grass, around the tree.
I wanted to go further. The waters of the Vézère flowed twenty metres or so below me. I would have entered the woods without further delay, to go down to the river, if a feeling of weakness had not held me back. I retraced my steps, picked up the bayonet, and instantly regained complete happiness; the steel and copper blade in my hands attracted forces which guided me in the semi-darkness, which protected me from the cold of the night, and which reassured me. Because of its weight, this blade also acted like a light pendulum, helping me to run. I left the light-filled meadows to plunge deep into dark undergrowth. I used my sword to break through the brambles, which snatched at my clothes, to forge a way through the densely tangled vegetation, to uncover faint paths leading to the river, whose mirror-gleam captivated me. It served me less to open up a path through the shadows and the sweet-chestnut shoots than to give me a better understanding of my most secret instincts; for I was choosing my path according to magic spells and fears. Here, beneath the branches, the gleam of light on water delighted me; there, some damp cave filled me with fear, some outcrop of rock enchanted me, while another saw me turn away from it, for no other reason than love or enmity. Just as my relationships with humans so frequently left me unmoved, so the feelings I experienced at night proved rich in the extreme, and full of subtle nuances; some tree or other pleased me, some branch which I pulled towards me with the tip of my bayonet seemed brotherly, some leaf made me want to press it against my eyes, some jumble of tall rocks which had fallen from the cliff filled me with alarm. The weight of the hills; the water sparkling in places as it threaded on downstream, straining to carry away dead wood; the moon’s dazzling light; even the contours of the landscape: all of these things I felt as forces, some dangerous, some not. Memories of human settlements, fragments of the Past lived on in the depths of the greenery, in the crevices of the rock; and new forces too, disturbing forces of love and dreams.
I was pushing aside a leaf with the underside of my blade when a young tree with healthy, shining bark appeared before me in all its beauty. It soared quite high into the sky and I loved it instantly. I pressed my cheek against it. I loved it with love. In the darkness, femininity overcame masculinity within me, because I had wanted to visit the place of springs and spells, and so betray mankind in the time of the night.
On my knees at the foot of the tree, pressing my lips to its soft bark, I spoke to it tenderly in a kind of half-sung whisper, drawn from the deepest part of my being and my truth. My song was a little hoarse, modulated in my mouth like an animal’s growl. I unfastened my belt buckle, put my arms round the tree and acted the woman with it, my chest bare, my loins bare, gripping the trunk tightly between my thighs. Like this, I sank into pure, simple, absolute, delicious sensual pleasure. I loved the tree, I desired the tree. My personality inclined me to be unreservedly happy. In this land of painted caves, the most distant realms of the Past looked upon me with approval. In my relations with the tree, the womanly part of me derived from the first nights of the earth; this love of leaves dated from the very first evenings, the first Paradises, and gave me the curious character of an enchantress. A deep-seated memory returned to me in a flood of pleasure.
Once I was sated, my masculinity returned to me, and I paid more heed to the beautiful, starry sky. I wanted to see it at closer hand; so I buckled up my belt and climbed into the tree, scaling it from branch to branch, until my head was above its crown. Night was moving on. Many stars were sinking below the horizon. Everything seemed dark and dangerous, except the sky, except the river which spread a blaze of light all around. T
he hills of the Sarladais, recently so bright and shining, were now covered in mist. Once again I was feeling the cold, so much so that the only desire I now felt was to return as quickly as possible to my bed.
Once I had climbed down from the tree it was impossible to find the path I had taken. The mist had occupied all the low ground, and the sinking moon no longer provided any light. The Vézère was flowing towards the village; since I could not go back the way I came, it seemed to me that the best thing was to float like a piece of dead wood and thus return to the land of the living.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice Page 5
