The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (18 page)

‘Señor, the minutes pass with dreadful speed!’

‘Ah, yes, dreadful!’

‘Muguetto will be fearsome when he comes!’

‘It is true, I am out of my mind, farewell.’

‘Do not come near me, sir, no! Do not come near! Or I shall throw myself upon this corpse, and I shall die there, on his icy form. Look how you now seek to break the holiness of love that you had.’

‘Would it thus be a crime to kiss your hand?’

‘Why! yes, it would be a crime! And God, to punish us, could make your lips stay on my hand, or my hand on your lips.’

‘Señora! Señora!’

‘Sir, shall you not be gone?’

‘Senora, one minute more!’

‘Withdraw! Withdraw from here! This is dreadful!’

‘Adored señora!’

‘You deceive me! …’

‘I swear …’

‘This is shameless!’

‘What are you doing, Blondina?’

‘You can see well enough, I am opening this window.’

‘Why?’

‘To call …’

‘Whom? Your mother?’

‘You do not want me to call, you only want me to kill myself, do you not, señor?’

‘Let me close that window; and if I have just uttered again a name awesome to the heart which cannot rest upon the one who bears it, it is no longer with cruelty, señora, it is with steadfast resolve and the sureness of knowing that I can take from you the grief of your heart and replace it with arms that will embrace you all a-quiver with caresses.’

The woman of Tortosa looked directly at Don Sangouligo, like a beaten man whose courage is returning.

‘You need not be on your guard nor take on those threatening looks, señora Blondina,’ he went on. ‘You look upon your friend who has spoken of evil to you for the sake of curing it. If you think it is a matter of my arms and my caresses, how wrong you are, madam! You do not understand. No more of my love, since for you I am an object of mockery and hate.’

‘Señor!’

‘Yes, madam, of hate. At this moment you fear me, and that is why you use that word,
señor
, and in that tone you have. So now, I repeat, no more of my love. There are tears which fall only at night; such will be mine, and you do me wrong in mistrusting me; nor, more of my mother either; only of yours! I know her name, I am going to bless you with it.

Like a butterfly being born in the sun, the Spanish woman’s whole being spread out upon these words which for her were a flower, and which brought Monako to life again.

‘You know,’ she exclaimed, ‘you know whose daughter I am? Is this certain, good señor? I who treated you as if you were a serpent! Why! May I be seized and held fast if I still preserve the smallest bad idea of you! It is to you I should owe the angelic and sacred reunion of a little child with the one who conceived her! Rather, no, now I am grown, but I would become again a little child in the joys I would regain of my early life and my lost cradle! Do you imagine that there is any hate left in me now, señor? Monako! Holy man! Monako! You should not be dead at this moment. Monako! Heed heaven’s voice that is brought to me now!’

‘Yes, the voice of truth,’ Sangouligo replied; ‘And will you grant me? …’

In answer, Blondina gladly held out her hand.

‘Thank you, thank you, madam; but it is in a real kiss that the name I must tell you does lie; what will it cost you, besides? No mark, no trace, since for me you are as one made of marble; but what does it matter, señora, despite you I will have breathed in your breath; that will be my life for always as I leave you forever!’

‘What do you ask of me, señor? I belong entirely to Muguetto!’

‘But you make an exception of your hand,’ retorted Sangouligo, half serious, half scornful. Then altogether lying and scornful: ‘You seek to know your mother, do you not? You love her, do you not? Come now! For pity’s sake; all one can do now is be sure of the contrary, and laugh. Indeed, I challenge anyone to show me a person colder and more unknowable than you. Yes, colder, I will gladly repeat it. You find it bothersome, therefore it is true; I wonder even if you feel desire; or else, it is like wanting a ribbon. Why! you are much like everyone else in the world – wanting everything, and sacrificing nothing to have it. My judgement is taking your measure; I shall not love you for long; I should well nigh be ashamed to. Goodness, I become a fool when I find the proof that a woman lacks a heart. My experience of love resembles yours in the love of a daughter. I was sick and you almost at once provide the cure. What greater scorn! Is there no one here to heed what I cry out so loud, to know that a mother and her kisses mean nothing; that a lover’s kiss is all! That the latter would not be given, even though she receives it each day, for the sake of those other kisses she has been without for twenty-seven years! Look then upon this woman who calls herself a good daughter, and who will die, through her own fault, without the support of children, without the smiles of God; but will rejoice with her lover when she tells him of her senseless fidelity! Look then upon this woman who wants to become a little child again, to regain the joys of her cradle, but who dares not for this purpose endure a red hot iron upon her, and one besides which would leave no trace, for my mouth is thus. Why! I no longer love you, madam!’

‘Señor, here is my brow,’ said Blondina, hesitating no longer as she bent her head forward.

Sangouligo, whose eyes were upon her, like those of a tiger assured of its blood, advanced like a bullet, at first setting his lips firmly upon the brow of the woman of Tortosa – but they did not stop there; when the Spanish woman tried to free herself, she thought that all would be over, in one attempt; Sangouligo, who seized her arms, her head and body with the force of a great four-linked chain, showed her she was lost. She cried out; her mouth was closed by another mouth. She fell. She was raised up and taken again as she was before she fell. Her hair became uncoiled and was cut off before she was on her feet again. Oh! all around the unhappy woman was like a conflagration about to devour a house dry as a tinderbox. Such a dreadful turmoil swept all across the room and made the woman of Tortosa and Sangouligo two demented persons each wanting to devour the other’s flesh. Yet no one! no one! despite the shaking of the wooden floor and of the furniture, the smashing of the flasks and vases overturned! No, nobody, neither through the door nor through the window. In the midst of her manifold terrors and exhaustion Blondina still cried out: ‘My mother’s name! I must have her name!’ Instinctively she thought: ‘At least let me draw one consolation from this crime.’

‘Yes, yes, I shall tell you! Wait! I promise!’ cried Sangouligo in his turn, now everything you might wish him to be, except a man.

Then, at the ghastly height of the struggle, there echoed a dull sound beside the fiendish señor and the poor señora; something had just touched them; but it was only Monako who, not well enough propped up, was slipping from his armchair down under their feet, as if he were trying to bury himself, so as to be gone.

Blondina, exhausted, fell into a swoon, and Sangouligo took his place among the fiends. Still no one!

As chance would have it, not a single one of the lights succumbed to the disarray of this dreadful scene; instead, their light grew stronger, as if animated by some invisible breath. The Devil was embarked upon revenge against the holy death of Monako; he wanted to get a good view of things.

Here are some of the words Sangouligo spoke; Sangoulio, still boiling in a fever, still frenzied, not satisfied with his foul triumph, here, we suggest are some of his words to the insensible Blondina.

‘Come to, come to your senses, señora! Enough has been spilled from broken flasks to tickle your nose. Why! Good, you come back to life a little; so pay heed to what I tell you; my life is going well now; it is no longer halted as I told you a little while ago; vengeance has restored it. So mock, mock now my girl, first covered in flowers, at the ball and then as you left on the arm of Muguetto, señora Blondina, you who belong to two men now, despite yourself, in spite of God, in spite of everything, as your punishment for leaning too hard on the one so as better to knock the other down. Your Muguetto will laugh, will he not, when he learns that we share you? Magnificent Muguetto – the man of Tortosa whose heart is naught but love and jealousy – the lover of one single Beauty who is the Beauty of two lovers! It matters little that she should ever be again the lover of the second; she is so now, and that suffices to make the pleasure of going to awaken the first to tell him: “You are no longer just one with her, nor even TWO, but you are THREE, perhaps
four
.” My mother! I had at first thought I would accuse you of infamy with this monk; but I count for more, I am alive and younger; this will be better believed; I was inspired. My mother! If she learned what has just taken place she would be mad enough with kindness to pity you; she would perhaps not wish to see me again. Oh! it is now that you ought to take her for a plaything. Your mother! It is my turn now to mock you and your mother; who knows her? She is not like mine, all the while breathing the prayers of her child, and of the poor; and if you curse her, I hope you will be sure to be serious and silent in her presence. Farewell, señora! I am avenged and I depart or rather, no, I remain. I said to begin with that I should wait. What will happen to us? Will we laugh?’

Upon this last word; a hand of iron flesh gripped Sangouligo’s wrist.

Muguetto was there with his night sword.

Blondina started towards him, but almost at once held back and concealed herself beneath a drapery. Her lover’s presence screamed out the crime that had just been committed, and of which until that moment she had been not wholly sure. Her strength, her pride and her defences deserted her. Tears there were none. She only blushed despairingly.

Sangouligo licked his lips, as if the better to savour that which seemed already to consume Muguetto.

‘Let none of you come in without being summoned,’ the latter coldly informed Blondina’s servants, and he locked the door behind him, throwing the key into the beard of the monk. Do not be alarmed, and do not come near us.’ Then he walked up to Sangouligo:

‘The devil take you, you are there often enough when I pass in the street; but this time I find you too much in my way to let you go by without a word! …’

‘What can I answer,’ retorted Sangouligo, ‘except that I congratulate you for not carrying your orange blossom?’

Muguetto shuddered, and his body started, as if he were dreaming and trying to wake up.

‘Don Sangouligo,’ he exclaimed, ‘I seized you just now, but I release you so that you can make your farewells to this world, if you lie, for the shedding of your blood will only have value for me insofar as you have only boasted of an infamy. If the contrary should be true, I know that I shall lack the courage, even to curse you. Why, yes, still! Why! yes! yes! I shall call on others to strike you, to give me help in torturing you, to lock you up, to heal you so as to strike you anew. Oh! you will be tended with every care by those best fitted, so as to make you even more sturdy than you are, that your body may long – forever, were it possible – endure the ardour of my horrible suffering. Oh! I implore God to make you immortal. Ponder then upon what you will have taken from me: a lover before she made me a father; a lover I scarcely dare love, for fear that my feeling be not pure enough for her; a lover who is my deep and personal religion, whom I see in everything which bears passion, truth and grandeur! It is strange that at this moment of our being my mind should find measured words. I cannot explain it; my words should be broken, without connection, ghastly with rage and with madness. I should by now have slit someone’s heart, or else my own, or my throat. Blondina! Appear yet before the light of day, to signify its halting, assure me that you understand this calm of mine, because he lied; that in this case he’ll die; that if he makes one move to reach the door he will be rushing towards the jaws of death; if he goes to the window my sword will hold him back by the head, to the panelling, and his body will hang outside like a rope-knotted sheet; for the devil has lied, he has lied with every bone in his body!’

Cupping his chin in his hand, Sangouligo smiled.

‘Is he not damned?’ Muguetto persisted, raising his arm as if in a blessing; ‘Is he not so, beloved soul? Come then before us both, tell him so, pureness of my breath, my lover!’

‘Oh! why did you not think fit to dwell with her day and night, to defend her, to keep her,’ cried Blondina as she issued from the drapery, her appearance disordered and shorn of her hair, and falling to the ground to clutch Muguetto’s knees …

After the Spanish woman cried out thus, there came a silence that nothing broke but for a clock that chimed (our three characters transfixed, each in their place, as if cast in bronze).

*

Some minutes later, the man of Tortosa spilled beads of sweat upon the face of the Spanish woman; then, raising her up he addressed her in a voice whose accents flowed with the sound of tears: ‘Listen, my Blondina, I truly must awaken, or else I shall die. Do you know the means to end this dream, this sleep of mine! Oh! it is too dreadful! Why does God send such sleep, such dreams as these to those whose faith in him is so steadfast, and who have a chapel wherein to invoke his name? Are you not of my mind, my Blondina, why?’

‘But I insist, Muguetto,’ Sangouligo interrupted, ‘since the señora is as if dead, that your orange blossom would now become for you the most searing of mockeries, that it would slip through your fingers were you to wear it again. Does that awaken you? My mother was scorned! Is that a dream?’

And around one arm, Sangouligo displayed the Spanish woman’s hair, promptly setting it around the necks of the two lovers, as he exclaimed: ‘There now! If it so pleased me … Can you feel this rope? Is this a dream? Are you asleep?’

Oh, no!’ the man of Tortosa replied with a leap, ‘Oh no! You who laugh as others scream, and she unanswering, like a grave, this is the proof that you are saved, and I am going mad. It is not you I want, I want only her! And yet … Blondina, listen to me, listen to me now; do not die before you hear me! He who speaks to you is truly wretched. Is there nothing left for us, tell me? Neither our holy love, nor your mother to be found? Oh! who did bring
me
into the world? I arrived at a fateful hour, at midnight … They are no more … And no longer do they pray for their child up there! Blondina, my God-given Blondina, a few words more, to seal our fate! For, you see, I cannot, I must not, I wish not to believe!’