Love in 5000 Years Page 9

  The preparation of the maneuver that produced profitable artificial rain every twenty-four hours had not escaped Mathesis. As it was not supposed to happen until a little later, according to the fixed timetable, he thought that his lieutenant, who was not lacking in a sense of humor, had been unable to resist the desire to bring it forward by a few minutes, in order to drench the two individuals whose deviant behavior would have been signaled to him by his convergence apparatus.

  Taking refuge with the Creator of Humans under the porch of Phalanstery 114, Mathesis could not help smiling, although he was saturated by affliction by the scene that he had just witnessed. The emerald vault immersed them in a violet light in which flashes of topaz danced like golden daggers, radiated by the protrusion of low windows. In the courtyard, close by, was a pool of bloody rubies, and from its bosom sprung a jet of essence of roses, only to break up and then support a heavy corolla of embalmed droplets.

  “Do you, Sagax, whom none of the material and psychic functions of our organism escapes, know of anything comparable to the folly to which we have just been the saddened witnesses?”

  For a few moments, the Grand Physiologist had already been searching his larynx in vain for his voice, for shock had cut his vocal cords. His body seemed only to be supported by legs of damp cotton, and, confronted by his companion’s question, he felt unsteady, and thought he was about to fall.

  Was not the aberration of that couple identical to the one that had been imparted to him? Would not he—he, the Creator of Humans—have gladly comported himself in the same way with Formosa? For some little time, had he not been sensible of the mysterious attraction that the human body now exerted? Was he not skirting the black gulf that psychology was impotent to explore?

  In spite of everything, he had held on to the brambles bordering the abyss, hemming the precipice, and he had avoided the fall—but in the future, perhaps tomorrow, would he be strong enough to resist the inexplicable imperative that was hurling him impetuously toward the woman whose epidermis he had merely brushed?

  For a second, he had a desire to confess everything, to bring the sledgehammer of bewilderment down upon the head of the Prefect of Machines. He would have cried: “Me too—me too, you hear? I’m like that couple; I’m nothing any longer but an invalid, a sick man, a lunatic. No lucid thought any longer germinates within my brain; the memory of Formosa reigns there as an absolute potentate. My heart, my soul, my flesh, demand her, and, you see, she has expelled me from myself; she is installed in the hearth of my mentality, in order, with her slender hand, to ply the distaff of unreason there, incessantly to turn the spinning-wheel of imbecilities...”

  He said nothing…but now, confronted by his persistent silence, Mathesis, the embodiment of Perfection, seemed to panic, gripping his hair. It was the first time that the Prefect of Machines had become aware of his impotence and that of Sagax to assist his fellows.

  The Creator of Humans took hold of his august colleague’s hands, and suddenly, the Grand Physiologist stamped his foot with pleasure. With a sudden surge, an immense joy spread delightful effluvia through his being.

  He had just realized, finally, the reason for his delirium, and that of the couple! Yes, yes, he remembered a document that he had read ten times over, dumbfounded at the first reading by what it had revealed to him.

  “You see,” he said, “this madness, I know now, is what was called, fifty centuries ago, ‘religious faith.’ It comes, indisputably, from defunct epochs. The people of the Occident once worshiped a woman, a goddess, who leaned over their miseries and comforted their distress. She was the Parthenia, the Virgin, the Deipara, the Panaghia, the All-Holy. For more than two thousand years, she provided relief to the dolorous, drank the tears from the eyes of the dying, changed the despair and rage of the vanquished into delight, applied the balm of her gaze to the wounds of the tormented. And the force of that superstition, the illusory power of that lie, was such that many people no longer wanted to live when they perceived their error, when the explored heavens breathed in their face the pernicious exhalation of the void, when the boldest, having plunged in dreams into the glacial solitudes of Infinity came back dragging the white cadaver of Hope!”

  “It is, therefore, merely by virtue of a hereditary return, by an atavistic retreat, that a man like the one with whom we’re concerned, still extends his arms toward a woman, and that she obligingly lifts him up. It’s a sort of mental reflex, which it will be easy for us to vanquish, nothing more...”

  Was Mathesis better informed that he wanted to appear? Did he know that Sagax was also infected by that hitherto-unknown disease? Perhaps he found the explanation furnished by the Grand Procreator bizarre. Doubtless to signal his incredulity, he launched the circumflex accent of his steely eyebrows over his forehead, in duplicate.

  But Sagax wanted desperately to convince his interlocutor. He went on: “I’ve already found a hundred drawings or naïve images in a collection described as a ‘Book of Hours’ corroborating my affirmations, verifying what I’ve just advanced. In each of those engravings, listen to me carefully, a woman dressed in an indigo robe, with a luminous saucer behind her head, is treading, sometimes on a mat of stars, sometimes on a map of the world that serves her has a monocycle. Inevitably, she is extending her arms to a man who, with his hands joined over his epigastrum, is considering his toes with bewilderment, or aiming ecstatic eyes as large as capstans at the clouds. That was the Consolatrix of the afflicted. Now, you cannot deny that the pantomime we have just witnessed is similar to the one those primitive illuminated images restores to us. That fortunately abolished aberration is the religious aberration, which, having gone astray, is recommencing, and manifesting itself unconsciously.”

  The Prefect of Machines shook his head twice, as if to say: “I’d like to think so,” although, indubitably, he was far from being convinced.

  “Do your duty, then, Sagax,” he said, “for my old age is distressed to see such anomalies in the City almost every day.”

  With his companion, the Creator of Humans emerged from the vault that had sheltered them. The downpour had renewed the decor of the city, which, given a shine by its daily bath, was flamboyant in the great cantata of reds and greens, in the hymn of color intoned by the ruby roofs and emerald porches with reignited flames.

  Suddenly, by Mathesis’ side, Sagax, misted by magnetic radiations, disappeared, so to speak, in an enveloping fog of vaporous effluvia. Surprised, the Prefect of Machines had to plunge his finger into the mist, bristling with crackling sparks, in order to assure himself that his illustrious colleague had not been obscured forever, The nail of his index finger, however, fortunately encountered the thorax of the Creator of Humans, the relief of whose exterior was gradually disengaged from its membrane of turbulent waves, and he understood. Sagax had just concentrated his will, and the fluid that his forehead was discharging into the distance still left a reddish mist about his temples, traversed by little lilac flashes.

  Without using words, they walked for half an hour, side by side, went back to the Triumphal Way, turned left, and finally stopped at the corner of the third avenue.

  Sagax’s right arm linked up with Mathesis’ left arm, and they suddenly smiled in mute contentment and common sympathy. The phenomenon was manifest...

  Four feet from the ground, in a café of glass that had only three sides, in a open cell, the alienated couple had enclosed themselves, under the distant suggestion of the Grand Physiologist’s imperious will.

  There, in fact, was the prison, the ergastule with neither door nor locks, in which deviants capable of troubling the harmony and causing harm to their brethren went to isolate themselves, unconsciously, for the hypnotic cure, and from which they son emerged, freed of any troublesome whim or morbid inclination.

  Locked in by the irresistible power of Sagax’s effluence, there was no need for jailers or thick walls. Once incarcerated, the Creator of Humans dispossessed them of their self-determination, proceeded with th
e eviction of their disturbing thought, and undertook the mental cleansing of the soft layer of the meninges where the insanity had settled, thus repairing their brains. It was the sole coercion exercised within the Equitable City. Sagax only used the procedure as a last resort; during his long career, he had not been saddened by a single failure. To cure and not to punish was now the law.

  By virtue of having deferred to the injunction, the radioactivity of the Creator of Humans, the couple had not been exonerated from their hysteria. On the contrary; the tongue of the red-haired bimane was occupied in determinedly polishing his companion’s ear, and then exploring its depths like one of those nasty insects that burrow into the wax and thus cause frightful wounds. That lasted for several minutes, after which, abandoning the object of his delight, releasing the auricular funnel, still varnished with his saliva, he began running his nostrils, open and as black as the shells of winkles, over the quivering neck of the woman.

  The reproductress pressed against her heart a wisp of hair previously snipped from the man’s occiput, and, in her increasing emotion, began crossing and squeezing her legs, with a contraction of her face. At that sight, the neuter, gripped by vertigo, uttered a hoarse cry, reached out with both arms toward the woman, as if he wanted to invite her to some kind of pugilistic contest in which his vigor could not fail to triumph.

  Sagax stopped him dead with an influx of his will and, folded at the knee, with his lips extended like a hopeful sucker, his fingers splayed, the biped was immobilized, indescribably stupid, in the total confusion of his individuality.

  Confined in the next cell, similarly imprisoned by the virtue of the Grand Procreator’s cerebral waves, which had struck a double blow, Phegor, the unnatural son of bottle 1,324, contemplated his neighbors through the transparent wall. His internal delirium was such that his face was striped by red patches under the pressure of a mounting congestion that was beginning to clog his arteries. His orbits could hardly contain his eyes, which bulged before that scene, creating havoc for him. He was labored by such an effervescence that saliva dribbled in little beads from his agitated lips, and his thighs rose, one after the other, in an alternating movement stressed by ecstasy. His hand, curved into a tube and agitated feverishly, invited the prisoner beside him to turpid contacts from which he hoped for some unknown felicity.

  Then a realization flared in Sagax’s brain. Just now, undeniably, he had been mistaken. This disturbing case, the pathological state of the couple and a variant of Phegor’s—that return to bestiality, in a word—could not be classified as “religious faith,” but as a deviation or perversion of the sense of touch. Did that not explain why Phegor, like the crazed couple, was always in search of distressing contacts, of inadmissible juxtapositions of the epidermis?

  In order to cure it, he took a few steps backwards, and suddenly suggested the certainty that his neighbor’s substance had been instantly modified. Henceforth, the skin of his fellows of the same sex would project, at his approach, sharp points, like the spikes of a hedgehog...

  Without any transition, the monster, convinced of that evidence, uttered squeals, fell to the floor in the excess of his dolor, the froth of his saliva spurting from the corners of his mouth, uttering strange words, protesting that “the refined had nothing more to do than die, since the only sensuality permitted by life had just been stolen from them.”

  Chapter V

  For a week, the entire City had been filing past the open cell to contemplate the prisoners of suggestion. Until then, the three delinquents had only been preceded in that jail by the City’s minor delinquents, who had stayed momentarily by, for example, refusing to furnish the daily forty minutes of labor—moody individuals who, by virtue of their acrimonious humor, aroused anodyne troubles in the Phalansteries, whom a few magnetic passes had cured and permanently redeemed.

  The Garden of Delights was almost deserted, and people were flocking to the present prisoners as if to curious animals or phenomena of a surprising order,

  No similar recreation had previously been available to the Perfected. Many of them even forsook the Soporal, preferring to go without its intellectual enchantments, its vagabondage in the beyond of sumptuous dreams, in order not to miss the spectacle that might never be repeated.

  The crowd, however, conscious that human weakness ought only to provoke sadness, suppressed its laughter, watching, painfully distressed, the frolics that were the prerogative of animality. The broad street was obstructed by a motionless multitude, which created gaps, drawing apart in a welcoming fashion to receive late-comers. Multicolored palisades of humans pressed together by a common curiosity were scaled here and there by white togas of women, who, being smaller and mischievous, hoisted themselves up on to broad shoulders in order not to miss anything in the flavorsome scene.

  Astonishment caused wrinkles to run across the faces, paralyzed eyelids, opened mouths and contrived a dull rumor over which rose, spontaneously, shrill squeals drawn forth by amazement. Every one of the absurd gestures of the couple and the monster caused a stir, propagating violent ripples through the agglutinated mass of spectators.

  Everyone followed, passionately, the ups and downs of the struggle, the different phases of the tournament between the force of the Disease and the human will. Some distance away, in fact, in the depths of his laboratory, Sagax was substituting his thought, his “mental double,” for the tottering mentality of the three alienated individuals. One could, so to speak, see the psychological effluvia arrive, which, to begin with, repulsed by violence, strove to use persuasion, spreading out in a conciliatory spray, attempting the impossible in order to compromise with the adversary, allowing the aberrant individuals almost to master themselves. Then, confronted by the negative result, the struck furiously, falling upon them like a Scottish shower, expunging their free will, and, after having, so to speak, put the clamp of slavery upon their noses, constrained the. Breathlessly, to adopt a congruent attitude, in order to lave them motionless thereafter, eyes fixed on some distant mirage and brain impaled by the stake of obsession.

  In spite of that week of intensive treatment, no conclusive success had been obtained. As soon as the three subjects were no longer under the influence of their neurologist, they fell back wholeheartedly ad delightedly into their hysterias.

  The man, the scarlet Neuter, in the fashion of a viper, stuck out an agitated tongue, momentarily forked; then, his mouth blossoming like the corolla of a vicious orchid, he gargled the breath of his companion for a long time—after which he fell into a sort of prostration.

  As for Phegor, the monster, doubtless for want of anything better, conducted himself in the same manner as captive baboons, and his frenzy no longer knew any bounds when a Prytanean youth came to stand in front of him.

  For a further week, as the anxiety of the Gem-City increased, the Grand Physiologist, who had neglected all other tasks, struggled against the invulnerable disorder, launching against it his last reserves of nervous strength, using the supreme resources of his inventive mind, and, at the end of the experiment, had to confess that he was powerless. Submissive to his magnetic influence, the trio of lunatics behaved like a group of schoolchildren caught in blatant insubordination, returned, saturated with repentance, to self-respect, but fell back into abjection as soon as they were able to recover their autonomy. The hypnosis wore itself out against those meninges, poisoned by an unreason whose mental antidote still remained to be found.

  By occupying himself with others, Sagax had finally been able to abstract himself from his own predicament, and almost to liberate himself from his own deviance. His mind had recovered its clear-sightedness and he was obliged to recognize, now, that these accidents could not be blamed on an offensive return of the religious superstition—a ridiculous devotion to Woman, the fetishism of the Virgin Mary—that had desolated the Occident in distant ages. The “deviation of the sense of touch” that he had diagnosed, consequently, in despair of the cause, was no longer acceptable. He, the Creat
or of Humans, had been grossly mistaken when he had offered the first explanation to the Prefect of Machines. Yes, he had committed a great blunder there!

  As he began to sense that that there was something extremely serious, perhaps irremediable, behind this business, he resolved to appeal, once again, to his encyclopedic knowledge. The crisis that he had just passed through might have caused a temporary lapse in his memory. He therefore immersed himself in the library that was stored within his own brain.

  He did not find anything there that could furnish a semblance of an explanation for the strange phenomenon that was desolating his reason.

  Once a year, those who wore the red toga had to appear before the Mechanical Criterion—which is to say, before one of the marvels of the new Social Order. Confronted by that Auditing Machine, which, by its perfection, had acquired a sort of intellectual existence, they spoke, rendering an account of their mission, and the mass of the inhabitants of the Gem-City listened to them in silence.

  To better understand the functioning of the Criterion, the infallible—by virtue of being inanimate—Judge, it is necessary to know that the act of thinking, of willing, disengages of special fluid, which the Perfected had detected a long time ago. Contrary to others, honest, noble and sublime thoughts entailed an emission of pure radiations, sterling effluences. Thus, if the fluid emitted by the cogitation of the delegate of Power, of the Scientist, was not orthodox, it made a particular impression on the impeccable touchstone, which knew neither pity nor weakness, and which it was impossible to deceive.

  Any weakness, violation of established law, offense against equity or contravention of the rules of contemporary civilization, any desire to conceal a base act or pass over it in silence, however well-enveloped it might be in guileful speech, skillful rhetoric or effusive eloquence, would arouse cries of anger, hisses of scorn and clamors of execration from the apparatus, which pronounced its denunciation in the voice of its mechanical larynx.