The Eye of Purgatory
Page 24
It wishes me harm, however, and every time it’s there, I feel ill. My heartbeat accelerates, I lose my breath. As a remedy after my accident, there are better ones.
It looks at me without looking at me—I mean that it doesn’t catch my eye. I don’t feel it in front of me. One would think that there is something between us, like a sheet of glass. Its gaze is directed toward me, but flees before my gaze as it attempts to catch it. It puts its hand behind its ear. Mimetically, I too put my hand behind my ear. What’s that I can feel? A small bump…?
“Madame Irma! Madame Irma!” I called out, at the top of my voice.
Footsteps climbed the stairs slowly. They took a long time.
“What?” she said, as she came in. “Are you dying already?” She doesn’t hide her thoughts, my landlady. Exactly the woman I need.
“Tell me something. Look here, behind my ear, above the nape of the neck. I fell over the other day…”
She looked; she touched.
“Nothing broken, that’s for sure: a strawberry mark. In an old drunk like you, it’s nothing extraordinary. You ought to wash a bit, especially your feet, before dying, so I don’t have to do it for you…”
She said it jokingly, to reassure me.
It didn’t matter what she said. I had understood.
Half way between my bed and the wall, the form is looking at me, as on the days of old when I looked at myself in a mirror. The memory is inscribed on its face. But we have exchanged places. I see, and I understand: the form with the birthmark is me, as others see me—worse, what they have made of me forever.
At the end of my purgatory, I finally have the answer to the question that has tormented me so much, and I can explain the perpetual failure of my life: the face that was looking at me was my own. The person that I thought I was: the “me” of my intimate affections, the “me” of genius being only an illusion. The “me” that others made was the only true and durable one…
I understand; I understand everything: I’m going to die, and that is my soul, awaiting me on the threshold of eternity.
And already, slowly forming on its degraded face, I can see the ineffable smile that lingered on the lips of the Unknown Woman…
Notes
1 Like the French beau-père, the English “father-in-law” can, indeed, mean “stepfather,” although that meaning is almost obsolete.
2 Majoresque cadunt altis e montibus umbrae [The Shadows of high mountains grow large] is a popular quotation from Virgil’s Eclogues.
3 Félix Le Dantec (1869-1917) was a biologist and philosopher who wrote several books on evolution and one on atheism, taking a positivist approach derived from Comte.
4 Hans Berger (1873-1941), the director of the Jena Psychiatric University Clinic from 1919-1938, pioneered the use of encephalography in human beings, working on the correlation of brain activity with consciousness.
5 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was painted by Rembrandt in 1632.
6 As rendered in the text I am translating, Narda’s message does not, in fact, contain any spelling mistakes. It is possible that they have been corrected by an editor. At any rate, I decided that it would be inappropriate to introduce any, in spite of the inconsistency.
7 Philopena (philippine in French) is a question-and-answer game in which the loser must pay a forfeit.
8 I have translated this phrase literally, but it is worth noting that the French tâche [task] is phonetically identical to tache [stain], a tacit double meaning emphasized by the use of the term marqué [marked].
9 This is the first couplet of a popular French religious song; the person that the singer is looking forward to seeing in Heaven is the Virgin Mary. The song’s composer is unknown; its accompaniment here by the music of César Franck is presumably cited in the interests of deliberate incongruity.
10 This is a deliberate misrendering of the first line of another French religious folk-song. The actual version begins “Esprit saint” [Holy spirit], but omitting the t renders the phrase reminiscent of the common expression sain d’esprit [“of sound mind”, or simply “sane”]. The subsequent reference of the beatitudes (the blessings contained in two speeches by Jesus recorded in Matthew and Luke) is not to the words of the song; Mops is mixing up lines plucked at random from various sources.
11 There is an untranslatable double meaning here; the French word génie can mean “engineer” as well as “genius;” that is why the card-seller mistakes his customer’s meaning.
12 The reference is to Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour ma chambre (1794), a novel parodying early travel literature.
13 To be precise, it was Immanuel Kant who drew a crucial distinction between the world of phenomena—i.e. the world as we experience it via our senses—with the world of noumena, or “things in themselves.” It does not seem to be the case, however, that seeing the world in another guise would constitute an approach to its noumenal reality, so Dagerlöff’s argument is more than a trifle shaky.
14 The word montre, here translated as “watch,”,has a double meaning that is only faintly echoed in English, its alternative significance being “showcase” or “display.”
15 The third-century Neoplatonist philosopher whose essays and aphorisms were collected as the Enneads.
16 Plato’s Phaedo includes a classic account of the death of Socrates.
17 An ex voto is a votive offering to a saint made in fulfilment of a vow.
18 Joseph Nicéphore Niepce (1765-1837) produced the first photographic prints.
19 Fêtes galantes [roughly, “high jinks”—of an erotic nature] is the title of a famous collection of poems by Paul Verlaine.
20 The Church of St. Etienne in the Lorraine commune of Bar-le-Duc contains a famous effigy of a partly-decayed corpse sculpted in white stone by Ligier Richier in the 16th century.
21 Gustave Courbet’s famous painting of a funeral ceremony in his native town of Ornans is on display in the Musée d’Orsay.
22 This citation acknowledges the manner in which this passage echoes Baudelaire’s famous poem “Les Métamorphoses du vampire.”
23 The Campo-Santo [Holy Field] is a cemetery in Pisa, which features a fresco by Andrea de Cione di Arcangelo (1308-1368), more familiarly known as Orcagna, on the theme of “The Triumph of Death.”
24 There is an untranslatable double meaning here; envie, which I have translated as “birthmark” because of the context, more commonly signifies “desire,” and is used in that way a little further along in the narrative, by way of wordplay.
Bibliography
La Croisière indécise [The Indecisive Cruise] (Gallimard, 1926) (non genre)
La Mise en plis [The Hairdo] (Editions du Logis, 1928) (non genre)
Le Vent du Monde [The Wind of the World] (Gallimard, 1928) (non genre)
Le Voyage muet [The Silent Voyage] (Gallimard, 1930) (non genre)
Les Dames de velours [The Velvet Ladies] (Gallimard, 1933) (non genre)
L’Agonie du Globe [The Agony of the Globe] (Gallimard, 1935) (translated into English by Margaret Mitchiner as Sever The Earth, John Lane, London, 1936)
Les Evadés de l’An 4000 [The Escapees from the Year 4000] (Gallimard, 1936)
La Guerre des Mouches [The War of the Flies] (Gall., 1938)
L’Homme élastique [The Elastic Man] (Gallimard, 1938)
L'Expérience du Dr. Mops [Dr. Mops’ Experiment] (Gallimard, 1939)
La Parcelle Z [Particle Z] (Vigneau, 1942)
Les Signaux du Soleil [The Signals from the Sun] (Vigneau, 1943)
L’Oeil du Purgatoire [The Eye of Purgatory] (Editions de la Nouvelle France, 1945)
La Forêt des Sept Pies [The Forest of the Seven Magpies] (Maréchal, 1946) (non genre)
Ceci est un drame [This Is A Tragedy] (Editions de la Nouvelle France, 1947) (theater)
Posthumous:
Joyeuses Apocalypses [Merry Apocalypses] (Bragelonne, 2005) – omnibus volume including: La Guerre des Mouches, L’Homme élastique, La
Guerre Mondiale No. 3 [World War III] (unpublished novel) and six unpublished short stories.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World; Nemoville
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Scaffold; The Vampire Soul
Acknowledgements: The publishers should like to thank Anne Lenclud, Laurent Genefort, Sylvie Miller and Juan Miguel Aguilera.
L’Oeil du Purgatoire 1945, L’Expérience du Dr. Mops 1939 by The Estate of Jacques Spitz.
English adaptation Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Introduction Copyright 2010 by Jean-Marc Lofficier.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Juan-Miguel Aguilera http://webs.ono.com/juanmiguel/
Visit our website at www.blackcoatpress.com
ISBN 978-1-935558-64-4. First Printing. October 2010. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.