B007P4V3G4 EBOK (18 page)

Suddenly, however, the rumour spread that Emin had died ...
Only the previous day, all Baghdadians had seen him in the
Mosque, and lo: one learnt that ... that he had died! A shudder
passed through the city but still there was no cause for the GrandVizir and the Grand Procurator to get involved in the case now
that the perfectly credible rumour circulated that Emin, on that
warm day, had eaten too much watermelon and had succumbed
subsequently to a severe colic.

Eyebrows in Baghdad were raised, however, when it was learned
three months later that the young, azure-tressed widow was to
remarry, to marry the lieutenant of her bodyguard, to be precise.
It seemed that Fatma had too wide a choice from among her staff,
servants and subjects even to be bothered with the sons and
nephews of the notable families of Baghdad. The wedding took
place with magical pomp and Fatma's new spouse gloried, as Emin
had done, now he saw himself elevated from such a lowly rank to
that of consort of his magically beautiful, magically rich mistress.
But the young lieutenant - Fatma had elevated him to General of
her life guard - died suddenly, of a fall from his horse, it was said. The message was unclear: had the young lieutenant or the horse
taken a fall? Moreover, no one had seen the young lieutenantgeneral of Fatma's bodyguard, neither on a horse nor taking a fall
... indeed, nobody had seen him on the day of his death, and fierce
emotion coursed through the Baghdad families and pervaded the
Court of the Caliph, for they remembered all too well that Fatma
was blue-tressed the way once her father had been blue-bearded.

The sorrowing widow Fatma, in her black veils and weeds
covered in black diamonds, resembled a Queen of the Night,
particularly as her blue hair shimmered through the mourning veils
so suggestively that, without applying any stage-paint, she would
have been able to appear in Mozart's Zauberflote. However, she
did not sing such demanding and difficult coloratura and preferred
to please herself by taking a third spouse: this time, quite simply,
one of her palanquin bearers. That the young Ali was a splendid
specimen of a man who, as third spouse, now looked like a young
sultan in his damask cymar, this it was not possible to doubt, but
what was doubted among the notable families at the Court of the
Caliph was whether, after three months of married life, he had
indeed died a natural How might such a strong, handsome, healthy man as Fatma's palanquin-bearer-consort have died,
of natural causes - following malaria it was said - and been buried
quietly, without any ado?! Heads nodded to one another, eyes
distorted in horror, mouths contorted with secret suppositions, and
the Grand-Vizir and the Grand-Procurator deliberated whether
they would not involve themselves with the Fatma-affair, with
that dying-and-disappearing-after-three-months-of-marriage of one
spouse after the other!

They deliberated so long, however, that Fatma married for the
fourth, fifth and sixth times. The fourth time was with a Persian
merchant from Teheran for whom a long life had been predicted
from the lines in his hand; the fifth was with one of the rowers of
her pleasure gondolas; the sixth time with a humble slave who
worked in Fatma's emerald mine. Each time, after three months, the
ill-fated spouses died. And the widow went about Baghdad like the
Queen of the

Then the limit seemed to have been reached. The Grand-Vizir
and the Grand-Procurator appeared before Fatma's pleasure dome
but it seemed that she had moved to another abode. For she had
several: the one with the onyx terraces and then the one with the
mother-of-pearl ballroom, the one with the chrysolite turrets, not to mention the one with the agate bathroom, the one with the
fountains of quicksilver and the one with the secret libraries full of
occult Which meant that having trudged from one
pleasure dome to the next and drawing a blank everywhere, the
Grand-Vizir and the Grand-Procurator finally found Fatma at home
in her pleasure dome of

She received them, a little irked. She was not as the Queen of
the Night: the beautiful, azure-tressed widow of six men looked
more like a peri from Paradise, in her transparent, white veils, but a
slightly irked peri she was,

What is your business?' she asked, haughtily.

'To know the cause of death of your sixth spouse?'

'Do you first begin,' asked Fatma, 'your researches with my sixth
spouse7'

'We will ascend to your first!' the grandees threatened.

'I would rather descend to my last,' said Fatma: 'and I have only
this to say to you: that I have little to say to you. My sixth spouse
has died ... from a tertian

The mighty gentlemen wished to give a nasty reply but at this
moment, suddenly, the emerald-worker, Fatma's sixth spouse, appeared, alive and well. He looked healthy, solid and lovely, and
under his arm he carried a few folios.

'What is this?' the mighty gentlemen cried.

Fatma shrugged her slender shoulders.

'It is nothing,' Fatma deigned to reply: 'other than that the dear
boy is not dead. He is only a little stupid and that is why, in order
to give him a little more colour to his conversation, I brought him
to this pleasure dome of the Secret Libraries, that he might read a
little at his leisure...'

'But,' - something suddenly dawned on the Grand-Vizir - 'what
about your other five spouses, 0 blue-bearded, I mean blue-tressed
Fatma?'

Again Fatma shrugged those ever-slender shoulders.

'They're alive,' she confessed: 'the way this emerald-workerspouse is alive. However, I sequestered my gondola-rower-spouse
in my pleasure dome of the quicksilver fountains, to teach him to
be a little quicker in his occupation as gondolier-husband, for he
tarried too often for my taste in rowing the marriage-boat on the
ponds of love, and quicksilver, administered in small doses, chases
the blood through the veins; my Persian merchant still continues
to live out his life, which will be a long one, but in my villa with the agate bathroom, for at times he reeked vilely of his camels; my
palanquin-bearer-consort I locked up in my chrysolite tower for he
would only play pranks, the miscreant, on my handmaidens and I
wished to keep him to myself alone. And then we still have my
lieutenant-general; well, gentlemen, with him I dance each night in
my mother-of-pearl ballroom; he dances divinely and it is simply
not fitting that such an intimate pleasure should unfold in the sight
of each and everyone: the dear man therefore waits quietly in the
mother-of-pearl ballroom, until I arrive and And actually,
you know, my first boy is the dearest to me - remember, my
gardener? - and truly he, too, is still alive and he dwells at no
greater distance from the onyx terraces than I require to reach him
every moment that I long for You regard me most
strangely, mighty gentlemen, but it is not otherwise. Look, I am
Bluebeard's daughter, and I take after him in soul and tress. He had
need of many women, I have need of many men. He, however,
killed his wives, on the pretext that they were disobedient to him;
I never killed my spouses; I preferred to lock them up, to civilise
them and to be mistress over them. If I am hysterical then, at the
same time, I am highly feminist, too; in all respects I am a woman.
What more do you wish to know?'

And proud Fatma stood tall, upright, confronting the two
dignitaries of the Caliph. But these, most unexpectedly, called out
for their henchman and ordered:

'Drag this wicked woman along with you, drag her before the
Overlord's divan!'

Thus it came to pass. Fatma, Bluebeard's daughter, was dragged
along all the streets and across all the squares of Baghdad until she
arrived before the divan of the Caliph who condemned her to lay
that azure-tressed head on the block.

'It is strange,' Fatma thought while she was being placed into the
hands of her executioners: 'my father murdered his wives and
people judged him severely for this. I myself objected to his
actions ... I, his daughter, never murdered my husbands: I cared
for them lovingly, reared them, civilised them and developed their
qualities - in a slightly restricted fashion, it is true - in onyx
gardens, chrysolite towers, mother-of-pearl ballrooms and what
have and this view on marriage, no matter how well
considered, is disapproved of too ...'

'It is went on weaving her thoughts: 'but I
believe, I am almost sure, that it is not possible to influence public opinion favourably with regard to love and marriage ... when one
has a blue beard or azure tresses ...'

And, melancholy for a moment about this incontrovertible
philosophy, she bowed the blue-washed head on to the block ...

Attempted a moment yet to solve the problem .. .

But failed, for, in a stream of purple, her last thoughts fled her
twain-cleft neck ...

And the azure-tressed head of Bluebeard's daughter lay in blood
on the floor of the Court of justice ...

Upon which the six men inherited.

Louis Couperus

Did Bluebeard leave a daughter, then it is likewise a fact that Don
Juan left behind a son. You do remember, 0 reader, the history of
Don Juan Tenorio, were it only through Mozart's opera in which,
however, the son, Don Juanito Tenorio, was given no part to

When Don Juan was dragged by the powers of Hell beneath the
floor of his dining room - where there was not the usual cellar but,
it turned out, an infernal place of punishment (I refer you once
again to the Opera and its mise-en-scene) - Dona Elvira, Don
Juan's a touch boring spouse, was left behind with an only son:
Don Juanito. She lived, as you know, in Burgos and as she had
been through much with her gloriously faithless husband, she
indentured her son to a Jesuit monastery, hoping Juanito would
learn to tread more virtuous paths than his father had done. Now I
really don't want to speak ill of the Jesuits nor of Don
Juanito or anyone else, but I cannot keep it from you that, in
the monastery school of the Jesuits, Don Juanito took on that
proper-posh, chaste, lips-clenched and sickly-sweet smiling quality
which, as a young man, did characterise him. Had his father been a
dashing cavalier, a magnificent wrongdoer, a sublime seducer, a
superb sinner, a royal concupiscent, his son Don Juanito seemed,
no matter what, to be turning into what would seem to be an
unctuous hypocrite. Would seem, I said, for in fact Don Juanito did
not become a hypocrite. Don Juanito, with his pale, fine, Spanish
Greco-face, his dark but pious eyes, his black but straight, black hair
- what a lovely curly head Don Juan's had been! All women loved
to stroke Don Juanito did not become a hypocrite and did
not saint it in public and sin it in private at all. He was very pious;
he prayed a lot, he prayed boundlessly for his father's soul who,
following the banquet with the Stone Guest, had disappeared like
that in flames and smoke underneath the floor of the dining room.
No, truly: Dona Elvira - now she had always been very dull and
we ought also to regard Don Juan's case modern-psychologically for once - did achieve her goal in the last years of her life: Don
Juanito seemed to be about to do penance, for the duration of his
life, for all the crimes of his father who had been dragged into Hell.
Then Dona Elvira's spirit rose to even there her
fellow angels do not find her amusing.

Don Juanito, in mourning for his mother, doing penance for his
father, walked with measured tread through the streets of Burgos
and down his path in life, and then, still young, he married the
niece of the Commendatore - you know, the papa of Dona Anna,
almost seduced by Don Juan as well: I mean Dona Anna, not the
Commendatore. This marriage was fixed up by relatives and friends
to reconcile the two warring differing interests
were involved in took place with quiet grandeur in
Burgos. Don Juanito's wife was called Dona Sol even though she
was no relative of Hernani whose beloved spouse was also
called Dona Sol. Dona Sol was an imaginative young woman
and her name seemed aptly chosen: her eyes glinted like little
black suns, her blonde hair glittered like sunshine, a sunny gleam
filled her sweet soul and a sunny glow coursed through her veins. She
had heard tell many tales about Don Juan and, though she had
never betrayed this, she in fact cherished a kind of secret love for
her husband's father and this was why she had not made any
objection at all when she had had to wed Don Juanito. Now,
together with her spouse, she dwelt in Don Juan's palace in Seville
and they sat opposite one another at that same table to which Don
Juan once had invited the Stone Don Juanito unctuously
said the benedicite but Dona Sol looked with curious glances at
the parquet floor, the same which on that terrible night - now
some twenty years ago - had opened up to devour Don Juan ...
But she said nothing and after supper Don Juanito and Dona Sol
soon went to bed.

Dona Sol had actually imagined the nights to be rather different
in this sombre room which Don Juanito had caused to be upholstered in black velvet: his was the most sober of tastes. When
Dona Sol, in the big, catafalque-like bed, would surreptitiously
half-tum her sun-blonde head toward the round back of Don
Juanito, peacefully sleeping the sleep of the just, she would continue
to muse for an hour at least on the mysteries of married life, before
drowsily dropping off, with a sigh. The little light in front of the
crucifix and the image of the Mother of God in the black velvet
room-night faintly lit the unmoved contour of Don Juanito's back and the other, momentarily distinguishable contour of that of
Dona Sol, turned towards him under the covers in the ink-gloomy
shadows. Such, that in the daytime, Dona Sol would frequently
shake her blonde little head and wonder about thousands of
things...