Confessions of a Mask (5 page)

Presently my father was transferred to Osaka. He went alone, the rest of us remaining behind in Tokyo.

One day, taking advantage of having been kept from school by a slight cold, I got out some volumes of art reproductions, which my father had brought back as souvenirs of his foreign travels, and took them to my room, where I looked through them attentively. I was particularly enchanted by the photogravures of Grecian sculptures in the guidebooks to various Italian museums. When it came to depictions of the nude, among the many reproductions of masterpieces, it was these plates, in black and white, that best suited my fancy.This was probably due to the simple fact that, even in reproductions, the sculpture seemed the more lifelike.

This was the first time I had seen these books. My miserly father, hating to have the pictures touched and stained by children's hands, and also fearing—how mistakenly!—that I might be attracted by the nude women of the masterpieces, had kept the books hidden away deep in the recesses of a cupboard. And for my part, until that day I had never dreamed they could be more interesting than the pictures in adventure-story magazines.

I began turning a page toward the end of a volume. Suddenly there came into view from one corner of the next page a picture that I had to believe had been lying in wait there for me, for my sake.

It was a reproduction of Guido Reni's "St. Sebastian," which hangs in the collection of the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa.

The black and slightly oblique trunk of the tree of execution was seen against a Titian-like background of gloomy forest and evening sky, somber and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of the tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth's nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins.

I guessed it must be a depiction of a Christian martyrdom. But, as it was painted by an esthetic painter of the eclectic school that derived from the Renaissance, even this painting of the death of a Christian saint has about it a strong flavor of paganism. The youth's body —it might even be likened to that of Antinous, beloved of Hadrian, whose beauty has been so often immortalized in sculpture—shows none of the traces of missionary hardship or decrepitude that are to be found in depictions of other saints; instead, there is only the springtime of youth, only light and beauty and pleasure.

His white and matchless nudity gleams against a background of dusk. His muscular arms, the arms of a praetorian guard accustomed to bending of bow and wielding of sword, are raised at a graceful angle, and his bound wrists are crossed directly over his head. His face is turned slightly upward and his eyes are open wide, gazing with profound tranquility upon the glory of heaven. It is not pain that hovers about his straining chest, his tense abdomen, his slightly contorted hips, but some flicker of melancholy pleasure like music. Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue, leaning against a dusky tree in a garden.

The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian's martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway.

But all these interpretations and observations came later.

That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly.

My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me.

Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication. . . .

Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything—over the ink bottle, my schoolbooks and notes, the dictionary, the picture of St. Sebastian. There were cloudy-white splashes about—on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.

This was my first ejaculation. It was also the beginning, clumsy and completely unpremeditated, of my "bad habit."

(It is an interesting coincidence that Hirschfeld should place "pictures of St. Sebastian" in the first rank of those kinds of art works in which the invert takes special delight. This observation of Hirschfeld's leads easily to the conjecture that in the overwhelming majority of cases of inversion, especially of congential inversion, the inverted and the sadistic impulses are inextricably entangled with each other.)

Tradition has it that St. Sebastian was born about the middle of the third century, became a captain in the Praetorian Guard of Rome, and ended his short life of thirty-odd years in martyrdom. He is said to have died in the year 288, during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian, a self-made man who had seen much of life, was admired for his benevolence. But Maximian, the coemperor, abhorred Christianity and condemned the Numidian youth Maximilianus to death for refusing, in the name of Christian pacifism, to perform the required military service. Marcellus the Centurion was likewise executed for this same religious constancy. This, then, is the historical background against which the martyrdom of St. Sebastian becomes understandable.

Sebastian became a secret convert to Christianity, used his position as captain in the Praetorian Guard to console the imprisoned Christians, and converted various Romans, including the mayor; when these activities became known, he was sentenced to death. He was shot with countless arrows and left for dead. But a pious widow, who came to bury him, discovered that his body was still warm, and nursed him back to life. Immediately, however, he defied the emperor, reviling the emperor's gods. This time he was beaten to death with clubs.

The broad outlines of this legend may well be true; certainly many such martyrdoms are known to have taken place. As for the suspicion that no human being could have been restored to life after receiving so many arrow wounds, may this not be a later embellishment, a familiar use of the resurrection theme in response to mankind's demand for miracles?

Desiring that my own rapture before the legend, before the picture, be understood more clearly as the fierce, sensual thing it was, I insert the following unfinished piece, which I wrote several years later :

St. Sebastian—A Prose Poem

 
Out of a schoolroom window once I spied a tree of middling height, swaying in the wind. As I looked,
my heart began to thunder. It was a tree of startling beauty. Upon the lawn it erected an upright triangle tinged with roundness; the heavy feeling of its verdure was supported on its many branches, thrusting upward and outward with the balanced symmetry of a candelabrum; and beneath the greenery there showed a sturdy trunk, like an ebony pedestal. There it stood, that tree, perfect, exquisitely wrought, but not losing any of Nature's grace and artlessness, keeping serene silence as though it itself were its own creator. And yet at the same time it assuredly was a created thing. Maybe a musical composition. A piece of chamber music by a German master. Music giving such religious, tranquil pleasure that it could only be called sacred, filled with the solemnity and longing found in the patterns of stately wall tapestries. . . .

And so the affinity between the shape of the tree and the sounds of music had some meaning for me. Little wonder then that when I was attacked by the two of them together, all the stronger in alliance, my indescribable, mysterious emotion should have been akin, not to lyricism, but to that sinsister intoxication found in the conjunction of religion and music.

Suddenly I asked in my heart: "Was this not the very tree—the tree to which the young saint was bound with his hands behind him, over the trunk of which his sacred blood trickled like driblets after a rain? that Roman tree on which he writhed, ablaze in a final agony
of death, with the harsh scraping of his young flesh against the bark as his final evidence of all earthly pleasure and pain?"

In the traditional annals of martyrdom it is said that, during the time following his enthronement when Diocletian was dreaming of power as limitless as the unobstructed soaring of a bird, there was a young captain of the Praetorian Guard who was seized and charged with the crime of serving a forbidden god. He was a young captain endowed both with a lithe body reminding one of the famous Oriental slave beloved by the Emperor Hadrian and with the eyes of a conspirator, as emotionless as the sea. He was charmingly arrogant. On his helmet he wore a white lily, presented to him each morning by maidens of the town. Drooping downward gracefully along the flow of his manly hair as he rested from fierce tourneying, the lily looked exactly like the nape of a swan's neck.

There was none who knew his place of birth, nor whence he came. But all who saw him felt this youth, with the physique of a slave and the features of a prince, to be a wayfarer who would soon be gone. To them it seemed that this Endymion was a nomad, leading his flocks; that this was the very person chosen to find a pasture darker green than other pastures.

Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because
in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his sighs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with a smell of seaweed cast up upon the shore.

This was Sebastian, young captain in the Praetorian Guard. And was not such beauty as his a thing destined for death? Did not the robust women of Rome, their senses nurtured on the taste of good wine that shook the bones and on the savor of meat dripping red with blood, quickly scent his ill-starred fate, as yet unknown to him, and love him for that reason? His blood was coursing with an even fiercer pace than usual within his white flesh, watching for an opening from which to spurt forth when that flesh would soon be torn asunder. How could the women have failed to hear the tempestuous desires of such blood as this?

His was not a fate to be pitied. In no way was it a pitiable fate. Rather was it proud and tragic, a fate that might even be called shining.

When one considers well, it seems likely that many a time, even in the midst of a sweet kiss, a foretaste of the agony of death must have furrowed his brow with a fleeting shadow of pain.

Also he must have foreseen, if dimly, that it was nothing less than martyrdom which lay in wait for him along the way; that this brand which Fate had set upon him was precisely the token of his apartness from all the ordinary men of earth.

Now, on that particular morning, Sebastian kicked off his covers and sprang from bed at break of day, pressed with martial duties. There was a dream he had dreamt at dawn—ill-omened magpies flocking in his breast, covering his mouth with flapping wings—and not yet had it vanished from his pillow. But the crude bed in which he lay himself down each night was shedding a fragrance of seaweed cast up upon the shore; surely then such perfume as this would lure him on for many a night to come to dreams of sea and wide horizons.

As he stood at the window and donned his creaking armor, he looked across the way at a temple surrounded by a grove, and in the skies above it he saw the sinking of the clustered stars called Mazzaroth. He looked at that magnificent pagan temple, and in the subtle arching of his eyebrows there came a look of deep contempt, akin almost to suffering and well becoming his beauty. Invoking the name of the only God, he softly chanted some awesome verses of the Holy Scriptures. And thereupon, as though the faintness of his chant were multiplied a thousandfold and echoed with majestic resonance, he heard a mighty moaning that came, there was no doubt, from that accursed temple, from those rows of columns partitioning the starry heavens. It was a sound like that of some strange cumulation crumbling into bits, resounding against the star-encrusted dome of sky.He smiled and lowered his eyes to a point beneath his window. There was a group of maidens ascending secretly to his chambers for morning prayers, as was their custom in the darkness before each dawn. And in her hand each maiden bore a lily that still was sleeping closed. . . .

It was well into the winter of my second year in middle school. By then we had become accustomed to long trousers and to calling each other by unadorned surnames. (In lower school we had never been permitted to leave our knees bare below our short pants, not even at the height of summer, and thus our joy at first putting on long trousers had been doubled by the knowledge that never again would we have to garter our thighs painfully. In lower school we had also had to use the formal form of address when calling each other by name.) We had become accustomed as well to the splendid custom of making fun of the teachers, to standing treat by turns at the school teashop, to jungle games in which we went galloping about the school woods, and to dormitory life. I took part in all these diversions except dormitory life. My ever-cautious parents had used the plea of my poor health to obtain for me an exception to the rule requiring every student to live in the dormitory for a year or two during his middle-school course. And once again their main reason was nothing more than to keep me from learning "bad things."