The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (16 page)

‘Calm down,’ said Muguetto in tones almost as sweet as those he had presently heard and returned; ‘It is not good to let yourself be carried away like this. I don’t want this to happen any more, do you hear? I implore you a thousand times, naughty child that you are, since I find you well and I would not want you to be any different. Certainly not, that is not what I would want. Would you be little Blondina from the floating basket, grown into the passionate Spanish girl, dancing in a way that men would die for, with those feet as large as my finger? And it was at one of the salons of the duchess Florea that I noticed you, when the good magistrate took you there; for you go to salons, whenever you are so inclined. You are loved in Tortosa; of course your two horses are considered as a father and a mother, and your carriage like a family. How much men’s actions are made up of absurdities and injustices! But let us leave that aside; what does it matter? Are men my concern? Is there anything that lives in the world for me, except you? And should it happen again that you are discontented with what you are, and with your ignorance about your father and your mother, then I shall look at you no longer, I shall say to you no longer that I love you, you will go without kisses for two whole days. There! I feel restored now, I am better, I was burning in a fire; and you, my Blondina, oh yes, you will long be my Blondina. Who will make it otherwise? Heaven? Heaven is too good. Earth? Earth is not to be feared but by those who are afraid of it. Answer me, my lover, have you recovered from my fright? SHE IS SOON TO BE DEAD!’

‘What can I say, my Muguetto? You well know that in your presence the only language I have is my rapture. Does your voice not halt mine? All my heart has for yours is the madness of its beating; how would my lips speak that are burned by you? Nonetheless they still find the will to answer you that if a woman were to replace me by your side, I should wreak vengeance, for I should go mad. I believe not mad enough to be tied, to be confined; thus, now and then I could be there standing before you, at the very moment when you were least expecting it. I might be numb, my head drooping like the Redeemer on the cross, or else dancing like the first time I saw you; and with a diamond or two upon a rag that barely covers me, clutching you, wanting to play with you, mutely calling to you: Muguetto, you are faithful to me! See now, all of you who lie to me, that he is indeed faithful, for I am touching him, for I am holding him, for I am in his embrace! And my face would be horribly gaunt, and frightfully pale, and it would thrust itself upon your face and make it shudder.’

Muguetto thought for a moment, then replied: ‘If you were to deceive me, I should crack your skull to smithereens, and I should count the pieces and curse your soul anew for every one of them.’

‘My vengeance would be a better one than yours,’ Blondina answered serenely; ‘it would be the stronger because it would be slower.’

Shouts, bursts of laughter, sounds almost like screams echoed from outside, reaching the two lovers through a casement window.

‘Do you hear!’ the Spanish woman exclaimed, ‘That is Séraphine-
the-lovesick-madwoman
going by; she has not stopped yet! They say she loved someone. Muguetto, do you see those bones that are all she has for flesh on her face? I would have a face like hers. Do you see those lips flecked with white foam? I would have lips flecked with white foam. Do you see those arms, that unclothed neck? Mine would be the same. And that child she drags along with her, that someone left! Like her, I would laugh dementedly with grief, I would turn and look at people as she does, haggard and frightful, without telling them to leave me alone and keep their remarks to themselves; I would walk about like her mechanically and I would keep on walking so as always to have someone beside me. Do you see that big stone that someone just put in front of her and was knocked by her bare knees? Look! The skin has been torn away and we can see it is bloodied underneath. Well, my lover, I shall rise to my feet as she does, dazed and staining the cobblestones as the blood falls droplet by droplet. There! Now someone is throwing her a piece of bread; she is as agile as a monkey, she has not let it slip from her grasp! I too shall have bread and as she does I’ll devour it like an idiot. And do you see now, Muguetto, that handful of mud has hit her in the face! Mine too, oh yes, Muguetto, my face too will be lashed with mud if you stop loving me, and as I go by, before they lock me up, people will shout: Look, there is the sister or the cousin of Séraphine-
the-lovesick-madwoman
! Let’s have some fun with her; what do you say? Let’s have a bit of fun And after that I will only have the pity of the madhouse, and chains for my arms. What! We cannot see
the-lovesick-madwoman
any more; she has vanished; for now she has a mob upon her. Muguetto, there is more I have to say to you …’

‘No! Enough! Enough,’ the man from Tortosa broke in, shuddering.

‘Very well! Yes, it is enough; and now tell me why you were weeping.’

‘Because as I was on my way to the church I heard a man, his voice disguised, cast these hellish words upon my ears and those of every passer-by in Tortosa: “Handsome Muguetto with the orange flower, you are being deceived!”

‘It came from a window that I do not know; and the man’s head darted back in through the casement, like that of a snake into its coils.’

‘And you believed this voice?’ said Blondina.

‘If that had not been so, I should not have wept. There are beliefs that poison one so fast, that the poison burns or freezes tears. To think you were deceiving me! A free woman deceiving her lover! But imagine for a moment what this means: at least a thousand serpents with a thousand heads lying there around my heart, turning it into a grave; yes, a grave of writhing serpents in the sun where a living man would be cast. What would happen down there would not be more dreadful than what would happen to me, if I had believed what we have just spoken of. I would have been changed into a spectre by the time I reached the church, if my legs had kept me upright to get there. And then, as I entered and saw you, what phantom of grief would have struggled to reach you, striving to speak murmured reproaches! But, no avail! Every striving would have failed beneath despair’s abyss; and then, the vestiges of a human being would have fallen on the flagstones and would have turned to a mysterious dust.’

‘We are both insane,’ the woman of Tortosa said in answer; ‘Me over my folly of
the lovesick madwoman
, you over your vision in the church and your grave of serpents in the sun.’

‘That is very true,’ the Spaniard answered; ‘so I shall leave your hair which is moistened by my lips, and your hand which my own has caressed, and I shall place you in God’s keeping until first thing tomorrow; may he be with you always in your slumber, in your dreaming, in your blood! Tomorrow morning my Blondina, be ready at the day’s beginning; we shall go and love one another on the banks of the Ebro; we shall see the blue of the sky mirrored in its course, and hear the breeze and the sighing waves sing their
seguidillas
. Be ready. Farewell! My life for you, until my death on this earth!’ The man of Tortosa made off, and as he went he could hear his lover calling out: ‘Muguetto, my dear Muguetto, my adored one, more of your words, more! …’

Soon after her lover had left her, she received two visits, the first of which was like her mortal agony, the second her death.

This is what happened.

A servant came in to announce that a man in a long robe and with a long snow-white beard, was asking to see señora Blondina for a moment.

‘Show him in,’ she stammered, still a-flutter from Muguetto’s departure.

The white-bearded man appeared. The double door closed behind him. Then Blondina was face to face with a monk.

You have guessed it; it was indeed the one who had exposed the little girl to the elements in the skiff, and written what was found placed upon her brow.

Upon a sign from the señora, he explained himself as follows. His head shook with age like that of a plaster rabbit.

‘Child Blondina,’ he began, after looking around to make sure there were only the two of them, ‘you are startled to hear your name spoken thus without ceremony and to be so addressed; but the one who stands before you, child Blondina, as I call you again, is the monk Monako, known as the Very Aged; but it is something other than his one hundred and eight years which endows him with the right to speak in this way; it is memory and truth. Shall I tell you in few words what these are? I have come to do that; I promised; moreover, it had to be done; I could not do so before, for ever since your birth until this moment I have always been spied upon, as closely as is a knife to the throat that it cuts. You are settled again, are you not? What does this mean, what is this all about? You are wondering. Well I am here, do not lose patience. Do you hear how I stammer? Yet less these days; do you see how time has addled my head? It empties it faster every minute, and I must make haste to forestall it by drawing out what duty compels me to communicate to you. It is as well that I do so now; perhaps two days or two hours later would mean you knew nothing; God in heaven! what little did it matter, besides; what little did it matter. Am I mad? No, I am old, my child!’

‘Do not tax yourself, Father,’ Blondina interrupted.

‘Yes, yes,’ Monako replied, enlivened by the presence of the woman of Tortosa, and by the mere sound of her voice. He went on: ‘How strange! Might my head be steadied? Might my tongue be loosened by the sweetness of your words, señora? Might you take away some of my one hundred and eight years? There! I beg of you, make my beard and my hair turn black again, my dear pure señora!’

‘And would you still go back and live enclosed by four walls, to look only at a pit?’ the Spanish woman asked.

‘There!’ Monako retorted, ‘I am becoming younger! Listen. You are never to repeat what will issue from this old soul of mine, which is a little rejuvenated now, strange to say, without my being able to account for this metamorphosis. Truly, my head is stilled; look! I have ceased stammering; listen! oh my child! the body and the soul are at rest in a monastry a star of tranquillity for earthly passions and agitations. There is solitude for the most part, God unceasingly there around one, and the sky that enters through the gate of the grave; prayers and holy water as dew for the soul; one’s thoughts as family and for one’s senses the sun, the finest work to issue from the mighty and eternal hand of God! Yes, my child, we have this, and we are happy. We dream of angels and celestial graces; the nights are like a slumbering river, and we walk on the grass of the monastery, admiring its colour, intoxicated by its freshness and its fragrance; and the eyes of the true cloistered monk see in only two directions: inclined towards the earth or heavenwards – nothing that is around him.

‘What can we hear from outside, through the gates, the iron trellises, the skylights? Men’s footsteps passing; children who have crept near and who run off as if they had been burned, shouting: “Don’t go there! Look, the door is ajar! The wind will blow you inside and bang the door shut, and you will be gone; the trellis will snag on your clothes if you touch it; and if your feet step on the skylight, a monk will pull them in as ghosts do in your bed.” May God keep them and save these children whom we look upon only as flowers on which we bestow a sigh, some, because they wither, others because they grow. Does a cloistered saint sigh over anything else but flowers and children, over Heaven in other words? Yes, my child; it is God’s will that the child be his regret and flowers his love, so long as the bells are quiet, so long as the chanting monks are silent. But when the chanting monks give answer to the bells, when the cell doors open for the church to be filled with row upon row of penitents, when the air of God’s temple wafts embalming forgetfulness of over-many thoughts of the world fashioned far from sacred gatherings, then, then, in the midst of the tapers’ glow, the monk’s body ends and his soul begins, for the monk has reflected: the earth is small.’

Blondina, thus oblivious to all but Monako, this memory and truth of which he was to acquaint her, interrupted: ‘Well then! Why should I not repeat your words, Father? They contain nothing that would offend the houses of the holy orders.’

‘No, my child, thus far no,’ replied the monk; ‘but the heart of all this, the real heart which destroys what you have just heard, I shall explain to you, or try, at least. For this to tell true, you must not imagine that I judge other monks by my lights. I have seen, I have heard, and I have had no doubts. I walked those long corridors, which bear the scent of God, with the sagacity given by silence and the moon, which is an awesome meditation or else religious zeal. The latter all too seldom comes to begin with; how many saints have first been devils! I am not unware that Penitence is Sin turned hermit; in order to rebuild one must first have cast down. And so I halted on my night perambulations – from midnight until two o’clock – my eyes upon the garden, upon the spades and the crosses, and I was sad, for I loved my mother and I saw her no more; it is the rule in convents to see one’s mother no more. I bent my ears to the wind, and it returned to me lamentations of the heart from one of the cells. I went nearer and reflected: “If I pluck a secret, if I steal it rather, at least let us kneel down.” And I knelt. There is the crime indeed, is it not, and the savouring of it? No matter! I shall go on. Oh my child! I no longer left my retreat after that night on which one of my brothers spoke these muffled words within his own:

‘“I pray ceaselessly, and nothing comes to my succour; I strike myself, I fast, I weep; the flame that drove me to the monastery still consumes me; nothing ever will restore me but the funeral bier. Today I can count one more wrinkle than yesterday; so much the better!
She
is dead! And I too shall soon have that happiness. And she thinks she will long have tranquility alone with the worms; I too wish to be among them; I want them to make me garters and patterns on my skin. Faith! What a fine and lovely thing is faith! The more one surrenders unto it, the more one loses oneself in suffering. Of the one hundred brothers that we number, ninety are my like, and are clowns of religion. Our faith is in the cloister, our mask at large upon the streets. I challenged God to appear; I cried out: Be seen! Carry me off, if you are so powerful. Bah! You are not able to. If you existed, you would show yourself plainly now and then. And I laughed like one possessed. And I draw blood from myself every morning so that the blood might be renewed, for I believe that my reason is going. Last night I made my challenge to God again, and I saw a spider run across a relic.”’