Love in 5000 Years Read online

  Would he ever discover to what sort of humans those skulls had belonged?

  On that point, having resolved the enigma twenty times over, he was driven back twenty times over into a contrary path. The account of misdeeds, insanities, vices and crimes in which he did not want to believe caused his teeth to chatter. Everything that seemed to emerge from that accursed chest intoxicated him with fear, dragging his reason into a saraband by which he was possessed.

  He leaned over it as if over a vat of poisonous vapors with which the heart inebriates itself regardless. It was the hellish press in which Evil had once trodden the finest grapes of its vintages. The soul of the Ancient World was escaping from it, now brushing his face with its fetid wings—and before the evidence, he remained petrified, one foot in the air, his mouth rounded like the funnel of a horn…for his fingers had just harpooned a formal parchment.

  The text—whose title was missing—began with a prolegomena translated from a foreign author named Aristophanes, who, to all appearances, had written in the most distant antiquity. He read aloud:

  AGORACRITUS (to the people): To begin with, if anyone says, in haranguing you, “O people, I love you, I are you, your interests are dear to my heart and I only want to conduct myself according to your advice,” yes, if anyone begins like that, you leap with joy and you swagger.

  DEMOS, personified by an old man: Me, really?

  AGORACRITUS: Then, the orator retires, after having duped you.

  DEMOS: You think so? I was played in that way without realizing it?

  AGORACRITUS: Your ears heard, and folded up like an umbrella.21

  Here, a few pages were missing, and this passage followed:

  Starvelings of the provinces, failures of the backwoods, physicians subsidized by funeral directors, parasitic advocates in no condition to organize the most fossilized communal places, ran to Paris to satisfy the vile instincts that fifteen generations of plebeian morality had imparted to them. Brought up in kitchens or in the filthiest doorkeepers’ dens, perpetrated in the interval between two washes by their housekeeper mothers, live births that the sharks of procedure had put into the world between a protest and a seizure, the complete absence of good manners and any exterior decency forbade them ever to try their luck in bourgeois drawing-rooms. They sensed in advance that they were in no condition to “arrive,” to move the withered meat of dowagers or warm the scrofula of their daughters, in accordance with current mores. In unison, they decided to make a career in the deliberating Assemblies.

  They came from ghettoes and prisons, from counters and second-hand clothing-stories, from music-halls and gambling-dens, from guard-rooms and sacristies. Virtuosos of trickery, once hoisted on to trestles, they promised the wretched a division of wealth, the immediate dispossession of the sated, universal happiness and intensive enjoyment. The majority even opined in favor of the relentless slaughter of pirates of every quality, and loudly demanded the steam-powered guillotine.

  Then, when the people, led up the garden path once again, had queued in enthusiastic multitudes to bring them their votes and thus pushed them into the councils of State, they hastened to prostitute themselves for Money.

  They were seen running after the most dishonorable enjoyments of life, after the most pestilential profits, after the honors that debase; they were seen stuffing themselves with costly food, getting drunk on fine wines, and their vomit reddened the cloth of the new Trimalchio’s Banquet. They were seen offering their back for passing kings to walk over, and licking the feet of uniformed troops, since they defended their châteaux in Seine-et-Oise and their current accounts with the great bankers. They were seen pillaging the shipwreck of the galleon of the Church, which they had run aground, and stowing away, like one President of the Republic of Forgers, six hundred thousand stray francs in less than a year.

  They were seen to imprison the guileless who, by way of protest, reproduced their old professions of faith. They were seen to starve to death the free writers who marked their foreheads with the stigmata of infamy. They were seen, on gala evenings, undressing hastily in the corridors of official brothels in order not to lose a minute or miss their turn. They were seen to cry out: “Hands down!” to the few men of integrity who wanted to take by the collar all these thieves of the markets of war and devastated regions, in order to choke them. They were seen to protect the makers of hunger who systematically engineered rises in the price of food and reconstituted the Pact of Famine that was the first ferment of the Great Revolution.

  And when the people groaned, they were seen, with their canes, to lean on the rifles of black men, in order to make them shoot straight—after which, they stole the cadavers in order to have them buried by night, in the silence of their newspapers, for, they murmured, the faces of the executed are also an indecent pamphlet, which it is necessary to suppress immediately...

  The document, mutilated in its conclusion, stopped its commentary there, but a deed of deposit at a Museum of the period, called the Musée Dupuytren,22 was fortunately appended to it. That document announced that the skeletons of those individuals who, when alive, served as cages for such putrid hearts, monstrances for such mephitic souls, had been exposed for a year, after the victory of the People, on a pinnacle of filth, then hung from the gibbet of a metal tower three hundred meters high, and a pig’s head, renewed every week, had been planted on the vertebrae of their necks. Through the sparkling nights of summer, amid the surly darkness of winter, the wind had invited the white phantoms with the nodding muzzles to dance, and in their perforated thoraxes, nocturnal birds—ospreys, owls or buzzards—made their nests, launching forth to hunt with cries similar to the ancient eloquence of those rabble-rousers. The citizens, on days of Fraternal Feasts, came to insult them; prizes were even awarded to poets who had given a new form to popular prosecution and had distinguished themselves with the brio of their observations.

  Sagax had before him a number of skulls belonging to those who had once been called “politicians.”

  Chapter IV

  A week had gone by since Sagax had identified the unusual skulls, and he had spent that week chewing over all his anguish. To begin with, the mental malaise with which Formosa had contaminated him, far from decreasing, had taken up permanent residence in the depths of his heart and had taken the liberty of turning everything there upside-down. Omnipresent to his eyes, the admirable Reproductress radiated hypnoses that he still could not identify. That disconcerting morbidity, for want of anything better, he called a “malady of appearances” and confessed that he as henceforth impotent to combat it.

  An execrable force, by which he had never been confronted before, expelled him from himself, snatching him from the tutelage of his genius. As he had finally analyzed himself methodically, he had deduced that the principal characteristics of that pathological case were to set the individual adrift, to annihilate his perspicacity, to destroy his will and to throw him, like a disable being, into all sorts of degrading aspirations in which his intelligence threatened to founder conclusively.

  Was it the case, then, that he was he first among all his brethren to be afflicted by this unprecedented monomania? Would he have to confess it one day, declaring himself incurable, and, by virtue of that, unable to continue his Sacerdocy?

  He had thought that he would be able overcome his unreason, thanks to determined overwork, but there again, he caught himself red-handed in presumption. The disease had laughed at his infantile stratagem. The memory of Formosa, the remembrance of her triumphant physique, had followed him all the way to the feasts of horror, the banquet of disgust, at which he had sat down in order to gorge himself with fright. A few documents from the iron chest had, indeed, been analyzed, one by one, in long sessions and scrutinized by him in their acquired meaning and their possible allegories.

  That raid into Time Immemorial had been, for the Creator of Humans, nothing but a slow peregrination in terror. Even though his mind loved to launch into the distance the fragile construct
ion of hypothesis, he would never—never!—have authorized himself to conjecture that bimanes with an articulate language could have indulged, however barbaric they were, in such atrocities and fantastic aberrations.

  And, like an elk hastening its pace in order to free itself from the vile dog suspended from its throat, he had precipitated himself furiously into the preexisting Night of the Ages, in order to rid himself of his obsession with the Reproductress.

  Implausible crimes, unprecedented villainies had then come to smirk at his approach, had hooked on to him in passing, glad to encounter and Annalist for a second time. Crime had stretched its specious hands in order to circumvent a living person who might glorify once again its beauty and defunct strength.

  Thus far, however, he had found nothing that related to the revelation that Mathesis had made to him on the day of the Festival of Life, and he had plunged further forwards. Then, in the nauseating darkness of past Time, he had heard the ferocity of ancient civilization baying; he had seen the Earth split, so to speak, into two slopes beneath a dorsal spine, a bony chain composed of heaped-up corpses. And when, haggard, understanding, his body crushed as if by a mill of panic, he had surged into the light, the smile of the Woman was there, waiting to knock him down into definitive stupidities...

  “Sagax, I have come to ask you to accompany me, for something grave is happening again in the City.”

  Those words abstracted the Grand Physiologist from his painful obsession. He shook himself and looked long and hard at the Prefect of Machines, who had just entered the Fertilization Laboratory unexpectedly.

  He saw immediately that the matter was serious, and that an excess of bitterness undoubtedly awaited him. He had difficulty hiding the frisson of alarm that the appearance of his visitor legitimated. Mathesis was even more hirsute than usual; his llama-hair main appeared to have been raked by desperate hands; the extremities of his moustache were drooping obliquely, and the discouraged curls of his steely eyebrows were hanging down to his cheekbones.

  Sagax inferred that he would learn the nature of the recent disaster soon enough. “I’ll come with you,” he said, simply.

  As they were about to go out they heard a slight sound in the study. One bound took them in there, and they arrived just in time to see the monster, the unnatural son of bottle 1,324, foraging with the aid of a long stick in the convergence apparatus. At the sight of them, the unnatural individual uttered three clucks of surprise, but, even though he was slowed down by his large belly, his legs, whipped by terror, carried him outside in the blink of an eye. Too dignified to chase him, the two Sages looked at one another momentarily. They had understood.

  The examination of the little glass tube in which the Gem-City was reflected told them nothing, in its disorder, of which they were not already certain. Armed with an iron rod, the abnormal had disrupted it in order that no one could know what he was doing at home and bring it to order.

  Head bowed, the Grand Procurator uttered a sigh, which dislodged a piece of filter-paper covering a test-tube. Mathesis plunged his hands into his hair as if he wanted to tear handfuls of afflictions out of his brain.

  In the Machine Sector, work had just come to a halt, and the dynamos, turbines and accumulators, left to themselves, were purring softly, working at a moderate rate, like zealous schoolchildren who can sometimes be freed, without risk, from the authority of prefects and pedagogues. It was the time of Soporal, the delightful hour when the Perfected, having ingested a happiness pill, were digesting the infinite joys of a dream, allowing benevolent phantasmagorias to ride through their brains, opening their minds to the sparkling chariots of the Unreal, which drew their subjugated senses into the savorous steppes of Illusion.

  They took the left-hand sidewalk. In front of them, the automatic sweepers that rotated at ground level without human assistance were moving, cleaning the causeway like enormous hairbrushes activated on a bald head. An aseptic dew prevented the dust from taking flight, aggregating it in clots that were swallowed up at intervals by gaping holes that swiftly closed again.

  In their transparent-walled Phalansteries the citizens were resting, lying on their fluid mattresses. Sometimes, the two Illustrious Individuals saw bodies retract, torsos quiver, breasts swell, arms cleave the air, as if patient thrills were kneading the recumbent flesh like dough. The inoffensive inebriant, for which Sagax had discovered the formula in order to delight his fellows, in order to expel from the world the banality that was the mother of spleen, was doing its work.

  “Shall we take the aerial route?” asked Mathesis, suddenly. “We’ll get there sooner.” He pointed up into the sky.

  Sagax preferred to walk, however; he shook his head and slowed his pace. For several seconds a question had been burning his lips, which he could not put off any longer. He stopped his colleague and formulated it explicitly.

  “Were the stupidity and turpitude of the two individuals that you identified really so virulent that they have traversed fifty centuries? Tell me—the fact is beyond my comprehension. How could the idiot and the monster be born of accursed embryos originating from the year 1900, as you affirmed yesterday?”

  The Prefect of Machines met the eyes of the Creator of Humans, and looked him in the face momentarily, doubtless observing his depression, and shook his head several times.

  “I know your emotional character, Sagax, and I was afraid that if I gave you all the details of the truth abruptly, you would find yourself without the courage to continue your work tomorrow. There is, in any case, a whole world that you need to discover, and the box of documents that you have will make it much clearer than my words, since it includes a document similar to the one that initiated me—the only one that I’ve had time to study, thus far.

  “Know that I have every reason to believe that the evil influence of certain zoosperms has remained neutralized for five thousand years. It is only now beginning, alas, to produce its full effect. Search the archives of the Past, Sagax, and you will know everything, perhaps within a week...” He raised both arms toward a flux of clouds beaten into mayonnaise by the artificial breeze. “Between now and then, undoubtedly, I’ll have learned more and found the means to save us.”

  In the sixth lateral avenue a fresco seemed to have been painted, not long before, on the translucent walls of the bordering Familisteries. The fresco was alive; it was composed of people huddling close together. Curious heads were raised, shoulders agitating, mouths worked by amazement widened into funnels, and at every minute the line of bodies was becoming more compact to make way for a new arrival summoned by a gesture or a shout. On balconies of sapphire foliage a crowd of the Perfected was overflowing, leaning over, bringing fleeces together in a discordant spectrum of colors. A heavy silence fell, troubled only, at regular intervals, by a kind of chirping.

  Mathesis, his face darkened by sadness, said: “It’s here that they’ve been gathering since the day before yesterday, always at the same time...”

  Above the heads of the two Sages, one the walkway of aerial fluid, Neuters who had neglected the Soporal were hurrying past, heading toward the Garden of Delights in order to indulge in their daily revels—but the spectacle that hazard offered them, unexpectedly, was so unusual that they suddenly stopped, seeking to interrupt the magnetism that was drawing them along, desirous of pausing, of becoming stationary at any cost. Some attempted the impossible, putting their heads between their knees, looking downwards, continuing nevertheless along the broad highway, rolling along like large hairy balls bursting into laugher at a spectacle that seemed so comical. They all got down further on, at the first step, running thereafter at top speed to obstruct the depths of the avenue, soon filling it with a confused and curious crowd.

  Freed from contact with things, abstracted from reality, a couple was walking toward Sagax and Mathesis, blind to everything. It was this couple that was causing all the excitement.

  The man was rolling his eyes as he went, twirling his moustache with a satisfied hand, whi
le his legs were shuddering with emotion and the undulation of his body was seeking to show off the various perfections of his individuality. Sometimes, his arm circled his companion’s waist; his quivering palm insistently explored the rotundities of her throat; and his brushing knee requested contacts that left him subsequently tremulous, or pawing the ground with his toes like a stallion. Beneath each of the female’s lowered eyelids, only a little enameled crescent, all that remained of the sclerotic of the eye, was visible, and her seething breast liberated languishing exhalations, extenuated breaths.

  They were only a few paces away from Mathesis and his colleague when, suddenly, the male Perfected, who was red-haired, fell at his companion’s feet and seized her fingers, which he pressed against his sternum, burying them in his pelt. He remained thus, his face upturned, seemingly imploring the Zenith, and an electric spark lit up each of the hairs of his rubescent fleece, which bristled in the ardor of an absurd fever. By way of reply, the Reproductress had put her two enlaced hands around his neck, and, with little cries of pleasure, raised him up, rubbing herself against his breast, and then drew him all the way to her mouth perfumed with expressions of affection. Now they were embracing, she winding around him like a crazed vine, and their lips came together in the frenzy of a savage kiss...

  Abruptly, they fled, uttering stridulant cries. A tumultuous rain, which burst unexpectedly from the placid sky, lashed them furiously. Without their having noticed it, a cloud had raced from the east, driven by the wind of the Machines, and as it followed an uncertain course through the air, an untimely current of cold air had caught it. The alienated couple, fustigated by the downpour, ran off, becoming lost in the depths of the City, while a unanimous burst of laughter erupted from the façades, unfurling its arpeggios and trills.