Love in 5000 Years Read online

  A rivulet snaking down the hill suddenly sounded its monotonous song, like a maiden at a spinning-wheel, and showed off its nympheas, its pointed arrowheads creeping through the water, and its nonchalant nelumbos, mauve, white, pink and violet, sprinkling the water with saffron powder, and covering it further away with a bloody eruption. Clumps of irises served there as perches for extraordinary birds: waxwings, cardinals, kingfishers, blue-tits and wagtails, like orchestra-conductors beating time for wrens.

  The horizon raced away in front of the fantastic squadron, which was still galloping, and behind old, partly-crumbling walls topped by tumbling curls of ivy, virgin vines, clematis and wild hops, there were orchards and more orchards. Among the humps of the knock-kneed trees, in the convulsions of branches tortured by continual pruning, golden or emerald fruits were suspended. Venerable patriarchs, late-season ancestors with senile trunks, mocked their presumptuous neighbors, which, in the excess of their awkward youth, only produced acidic and shriveled berries.

  Was that not the image, the symbol of life for thinkers like Sagax?

  In the pale green satin of their foliage, raspberries suspended nipples enlivened by the approach of puberty. In amicable neighborhood, cherries elaborated violent filigrees set with rubies, hanging coral clusters beneath their somber vaults. And all the trees, on the day of renewal, covered themselves with a foam of pale flowers, which made them languid, and manifested the moist impure chlorosis of their feverish shoots.

  Felted like a silken carpet tinted by asperules as pink as gums, undulations welcomed and lined the route of the ardent column, displaying unexpected hothouses. Fig-trees, aliziers, jujubiers were living there in perfect harmony in reciprocal confidence and esteem. Pomegranates, their leaves decorating them with ribbons and incarnadine frills, paraded like dandies amid the surrounding hoi-polloi. Palm-trees resembled barbed metal sheets, with festoons of wrought iron, rising up violently against the screen of the sky, whose indigo was maintained by the labor of machines. Nostalgic, seeming to remember, in spite of everything, the natal terrain that had disappeared forever, orange- and lemon-trees, capricious creoles full of nonchalance, demanded to be cosseted and lavished with care in order to produce, every season, abortions of mandarins of lemons. At their feet, open like animal sex-organs and crawling like vice, indecent orchids dripped serous pollen from their horns.

  And all of that Eden of the last humans, that Eldorado of the Perfected, was artificial. The vegetal and the natural order of things, as the ancient humans revered them, had been repudiated by the Perfected, Everywhere, Hermes had replaced the goddess Isis. The triumph of Science: marble, granite, metal porphyry and silk had taken over the roles of trees, grasses, flowers and fruits, and reproduced the forms, colors and perfumes of the meadow, the forest and the steppes that had disappeared forever. Baudelaire would have delighted in it as a supreme creation of art, a perfection of the world stained by too much vulgarity, a definitive victory of mind over matter, enslaved to the henceforth-refined taste of the ultimate mortals.15

  For another hour Sagax and his escort raced through the miraculous Valhalla, intoxicated by speed and desire, as if they wanted, in a rage of possession, to embrace and enfold the divine decor in the coils of the inextinguishable fever. Mossy ravines gaped before them, like vulvas appealing for the insemination of downpours, and a dull rumor rose up from their depths, which seemed to be the moaning of Summer in rut. Successive forests—artificial, like everything else—leaned toward the west. Ancient humans would have declared that they were modeled on the architecture of Greek temples, Alhambras, Assyrian palaces and Gothic cathedrals. Ogives of verdure, parvises of rocks, trefoils of light and twin porches of shade completed them. The earth was dotted with distant lakes, which decorated it with their partitions of tremulous turquoise. Occasionally, a cupola of golden leaves studded the perspective like a Byzantine dome, and sometimes the minaret of a vertiginous poplar loomed up to threaten the sky with its heroic tip.

  In spite of the genius deployed by the Perfected to make the artificial triumph everywhere, Nature sometimes attempted an offensive return. Although the soil of the Perfected’s Valhalla had been universally metalized, Nature sometimes got the upper hand over human will. In the distance, clumps of roses were set, like finely-wrought brooches, at her throat, which the Cosmos had spurred. Sextuplet hills of amethyst heather unfolded precariously from time to time at the frightened necks of the mountains. Glaciers set sheets of diamonds over her crevassed bosoms. Here and there, pendants of rhododendrons dotted the dark tresses of high-standing forests with mutinous carbuncles—and a perceptible odor came nevertheless from her underwear. Her armpits were scented by verbena and her mouth exhaled, in spite of everything, an aroma of herbs that propagated sentimentality. Her sex still dispersed a warm scent that provoked fainting-fits. Profound Nature, the Nature that one did not see, which had transformed the world for so long into an evil and deadly place, might have been sniggering secretly at the human vanity that had proclaimed the definitive triumphs of Pity and Clairvoyance.

  A prodigious clamor suddenly provoked the clouds. The Illustrious individual and his two hundred cavaliers went into the green granite propylaeum of an immense circus built in the center of a Valley of Delights. Arranged on the steps, ten thousand people, with no clothing but their natural furs, were expressing their enthusiasm in a chorus of delirium—and like machine-gun fire, the cheers, rebounding in a hundred echoes, projected their spray to disturb the torpor of the surrounding landscape and make the distant glass houses where the Perfected dwelt vibrate with deep and prolonged notes.

  With white bodies, blue eyes and red heads surmounted by a single horn, the steel mounts were now only progressing at a measured pace. Through the middle of the escort, deployed in a crescent, they advanced toward the sacred mound. That mound, in the form of an animal, cloaked with orfray and byssus, raised up to a considerable height the ivory altar florally patterned with rubies, braided with emeralds, with chrysoprase foliage, where the surprising phenomenon was to be accomplished. A porphyry table supported by a pedestal of onyx dominated it, bloodied by the expectant sky.

  Sagax, clad in red, had descended from his chariot and, raising bottle 4,245 aloft in his hands—the incarnadine bottle which he offered from afar to the affection of the multitude, like a benevolent paten—he went toward the altar. In front of him, settled on the ground, the pink flamingoes preceded him, opening the march like the masters of ceremonies who had once provided a prelude to the pageants of the Ganges, or struck three blows in the matinal apotheoses of the phosphorescent Nile. An organ of gigantic dimensions, as large as an ancient basilica, came to life, mewling at first with infantile babbling, uttering shrill cries, then swaggered in the speech of an ogre, and, swelling its bosom, blew out squalls from its two thousand metal laryrnges, and gave a human lightness to the grave speech of the hurricane’s tempestuous voice, better to impose the joy of the incomparable Hour.

  From a little temple with columns of jasper and a fronton of lapis lazuli, clinging to the slope of the nearby hill, emerged a procession of young women with unbound hair and white linen tunics. The organ saluted their approach. And in front of them came Formosa, her forehead circled by a crown of white roses, borne on a litter of blue-embossed amaranthine leather by four red-haired youths with myosotis irises. Alongside hedges of willows, artificial privet and laburnum, due to human artistry, the procession came, brushing the sparse statues, passing other temples that ornamented the décor of that pure and several splendor of marble in the bosom of the tranquil verdure.

  Now Formosa was in the circus, and the organ, gurgling hiccups of satisfaction, became calm at the sight of her, with one last groan of pleasure. A quasi-religious emotion stilled the blood in the veins of the spectators, and the love of Beauty caused waves of fire to run through the marrow of their bones and their spines. A unanimous rapture uplifted the populace distributed over the vast amphitheater, bringing the tawny or brown manes close
r together, causing the heads that collided to click. All of that human host with disparate pelts displayed over the high stalls the conflict of colors, the insurrection of contrasted shades. The gold of tawny furs protested against the ebony of brown torsos; gray seemed to rear up before scarlet, while beside chestnut breasts the cymbal-clash of squirrel pectorals suddenly burst forth.

  “You see! You see!” sang the crowd. “It’s her, the Clarissima, whose sparkling eyes are tinted like the wings of hummingbirds…the One whose sacred flanks will liberate us from the heavy burden of Knowledge…the One whose sacrifice will permit us to continue to play, fraternally, on the banks of springs, beneath the flowering peach-trees...”

  Standing on the porphyry table, Formosa had allowed her robe to drop, and the sparse light kissed her epidermis, reddened by an evanescent sheen. Her round, pure thighs and satined pelvis supported the bust of an idol with vibrant rose-tinted breasts of marmoreal flesh. The harmonious curve of her hip, swollen by the generous saps of youth, was fustigated by the long amber tresses with which the enamored breeze played. And her strange eyes, the color of nectarines, were speckled with blue like imprints of lapis lazuli.

  Thus, she offered herself to everyone, proclaiming that her body was devoid of mystery for any gaze, because contemporary humankind had dressed its soul in the white corselet and the lily gorget of innocence, and the lust that had murdered reason and strangled the will had hidden its hideous face forever in the bosom of Great Pan.

  Already, Sagax had made a sign bidding Formosa to lie down on the table, where two white peacocks had just settled, immobile and hieratic. Very pale, his forehead creased, the undersides of his eyelids quartered by sudden wrinkles, his entrails feeling as if burned by the rotgut of anguish, he was about to assume, once again, the heavy responsibility of creation...

  And he doubted himself now.

  He remembered culture 1,324 and bottle 1,753. Was he, once again, about to engender a monster or a cretin? No matter—he had to be brave.

  Brandishing his golden syringe, he prepared to take from his father, the 4,245, the purpurine semen that had brought him into the world.

  He took one step, then another…and suddenly stepped back, disconcerted, with the groan of a wounded beast...

  His trembling hand fell back heavily, and sketched a gesture of impotence in the void.

  Then Mathesis, the Prefect of Machnes, ran forward and hurriedly climbed the steps of the altar.

  Mathesis, like the Creator of Humans, was dressed in red. Manifestly older than the latter, he had just entered into his two hundred and thirtieth year. Very tall and thin, he had allowed himself to age for some time, no longer obviating the degeneration of his cells, disdaining to manage his physique so as to please others. Hirsute, his skull was planted with a briar-patch of gray hair identical to the hair of a goat. His ascetic bones clicked when he waked and his bronzed face seemed to be tinted by shadow. Eyebrows of seditious wrack surmounted his orbits, where fiery pupils glowed, and he had an enormous moustache beneath his nose, still black, which resembled large chunks of charcoal. Although mild-mannered, he had a hostile and rebarbative appearance, like the Science he personified and which, for a long time, had ensured the life of the inhabited World.

  His arms, long and slender, like levers, extended toward the steps of the circus; he arched his back effortfully, as if he wanted to pick up all the people and draw them to him. Turning toward the Fecundator, he spoke, lyrically:

  “The Nature that you have just confronted, Sagax, and which we have enslaved to the sole interests and the sole grandeur of Humankind, must have sent through your veins the generous effervescence without which a thinker cannot dream of giving birth to a beautiful and durable work. You know that humans, in contrast to animals, have the faculty of creating with the fevers of intelligence alone, and the joy that they know in awakening the confusing miracle ought to equip their shoulders with the wings of sacred exaltation. There is none of that in you, and I would be unable to explain the phenomenon if I had not seen the wrinkles that doubt has engraved on your forehead and if, in those dolorous lines, I had not read your discouragement. You think that you are blameworthy in the eyes of your brothers, but that is only a vain appearance.

  “Hear me, before running the flame into the palpitating crucible, before throwing a new spark into the Future; before giving us your equal and successor, let a just pride uplift your heart and transport your body, for you are not culpable...”

  Sagax was unable to contain himself any longer under the pressure of the speech that forced him to evacuate his remorse. Bewildered, a cluster of joy melting slowly in his being; the ambrosia of comforts poured into his delirium-inebriated soul. He had seized the right hand of the Prefect of Machines in both of his, in order to thank him and to beseech him to say more. His head tilted backwards, and tears of gratitude trickled out of the little basins of his orbits. Then, as Formosa loomed over both of them in her splendid nudity, standing on the porphyry table, he exclaimed: “Oh, if you can, if your knowledge can elucidate the mystery, remove from my shoulders the cilice of shame, tell my brothers that I have not failed…!”

  On the large paving-stones of the hemicycle the anxiety was intense. Tightly packed together, the furry bodies leaning forward now seemed to form a single human block, a multicolored stream in which emotion had soldered the variegations together, striped at intervals by the white streaks of women’s togas. Muscles tightened by attention tugged at the faces, opening mouths like straits of shadow. And above the steps, running through the brushwood of arms, were girandoles of overlapping and soliciting hands.

  “I proclaim that he is without reproach. Everything will be explained to you shortly. Originally, bottle 1,758, which produced the idiot, contained spermatozoids taken from an asinine psychologist who flourished around the year 1900 and who exhorted people to cut one another’s throats. His name had not been reconstituted. The one which conceived Phegor was adulterated with spermatozoa taken from a homosexual who lived in the same era, under the denomination of Polyphème des Vespasiennes.”16

  Mathesis had spoken.

  A storm of sudden joy drew the people clad only in their natural furs from the stalls. Now, in a cadence of delirium, twenty thousand fists struck twenty thousand breasts. The circus had suddenly acquired the voice of an unleashed tornado, and howled: “Yes, yes, he is pure, we know. He is as stainless as the May dew, as the saliva of the dawn...”

  Sagax then embraced Formosa. His pious hands, curved in the form of a shell, sheathed the woman’s breasts, in order to lie her down, quivering, on the august couch of the scientific wedding.

  To either side of his shoulders, the white peacocks soon extended their fans, displaying the lacy dawn of their ocellate tails, deploying the stars of their plumage with emerald meridians and interlacements of sapphire.

  Irritated by a light breeze, the Woman’s tresses softened behind her head in a nebulous blondeness, and her flanks, which summoned Life, rose up under a undertow of shivers that heightened the nacre of her epidermis.

  The expert fingers of the Creator of Humans ran over the milky skin of the thighs, which parted gently, rising up toward the clouds as if to receive the sky. Facing the people, her sex, touched, opened like a flower necklaced with gold, displaying the pink silk of its folds...

  There was a fulgurant zigzag of bright metal, which plunged, drawing after it barbs and flashes of sunlight, and the sacred syringe had disappeared into the estuary of the Reproductress.

  Now, her body full of rocking motions, her nipples launches full tilt in the surge of vertigo, her belly aspired by the navel, as if by a maelstrom of madness, her two arms twisted by pleasure and the red foam of the sluice, Formosa moaned in a spasm akin to that of death...

  Sensuality, the dispensatrix of disorder, frenzy and hatred between mortals, had just reappeared in the New World, perhaps to tilt it, like the Old, toward decadence and the Abyss!

  Before the spectacle, as surprisin
g to him as it was unprecedented, of a Woman in pleasure during the act of artificial fertilization—throughout his entire career, it had never happened before—Sagax the Creator of Humans had been gripped once again by his terrors. A fearful sweat had enlarged the pores of his forehead and was fuming at his temples. Again he threw himself upon Mathesis, who was similarly astounded, grasping his shoulders with his hooked fingers.

  “You see! You see!” he moaned. “One might have thought she was a beast who had just welcomed the male. Is bottle 4,245 too, my father, no longer anything but a jar of disappointments, an urn of dereliction?”

  His body bent double, his spine curved like a sickle, hugging the author of his days to his pectorals, he was about to tumble down the steps of the altar when the helpful Mathesis masked his flight and concealed his distress.

  Convinced that something unprecedented, a prodigious fact that might perhaps open an era of desolation, a cycle of chaos, had just occurred, he wanted to sanction the affliction, to trigger mourning. Abruptly, he leaned over, touched a button, and thus suspended the operation of the Machines that were assisting the sun…

  Then, a dismal floodgate up above released penumbras, allowing semi-darkness to flow, which streamed over the immense circus and the City. Afflicted by cataracts, the gummed-up eye of the star blinked toward the west, no longer filtered, with a maculated light. A gray and dirty shroud enveloped the Earth, whose teeth appeared to be chattering, with canine cliffs and molar mountains.

  The sky stirred like the baldaquin of a catafalque, already tearful with stars, ready to unfold over the dying planet the crêpes and mortuary curtains of definitive Night. A rain of ash seemed to bog everything down, gradually blurring the violence of colorations, liming the sumptuous décor, soiling the distant perspectives, wrapping the Edenic landscape in the gigantic dust-sheet of its dirty underwear.