The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (15 page)

The woman was not very young; but heavens! how noble she was, how graceful!

The man, by contrast, was no more than twenty; he had large tear-filled eyes; it was happiness that caused the tears; for a smile gave his face serenity then went to find that of the woman opposite as if to say: ‘Oh! Each one of my tears upon seeing you is an angel which flows from my eyes. Ah! How well we are like this, are we not? Loving one another as we do, means that we dream of a
single
tomb for
both
of us, and if something deprived us of the hope of being flesh to flesh when we are dead in the earth, we should be sad as mourning while we live upon it.’ This is more or less the meaning of the smile given to Blondina (a childhood name, the only one she must have had) by our young man, who was called Muguetto.

Muguetto was Spanish, a native of Tortosa, who always carried an orange blossom in his hand. His heart was made of fire, his body was filled with life and his soul was full of love. ‘When you no longer see me with this flower’, he would always tell his friends, ‘say to yourselves: Muguetto loved a woman and was deceived. Then something strange will happen between him and her.’

‘And what is it that will happen?’ the young dom Sangouligo, another Spaniard, interrupted mockingly one day.

The man from Tortosa answered him first with his eyes, then added, biting his lips like a pale-mouthed flirtatious woman: ‘All of you who are listening well to me, gentlemen, might perhaps learn what would take place between
her
and me, if … But I shall never tell you. Vengeance, remember this if you will, holds at its centre a fragrance from the mouth of love. Which one of you would not consent to taste just the tiniest part of that? No one, I imagine. Very well! That is enough. For the taking of revenge,’ Muguetto went on, ‘a man locks himself up alone and thinks. His stomach must be empty for his head to be full. Vengeance comes a little from the heart and a lot from the mind; one must take oneself apart from the noise of men and of things, even from what resembles them; only the voices of bells and of thunder are allowed. Let the room in which you meditate be dark, narrow and warm. Pray to the Madonna, do not forget the Madonna; speak to yourself; listen out for the echo that will come from this. Be calm after disturbance; do not sing or shout; return to being silent, cold and dreamy and you will find something to satisfy your fever. Above all, no blood; for you see, unless it fell from veins that were opened, closed and then re-opened, what you would give would be only a peaceful repose.’

Those who had approached Muguetto as a fine fellow, walked away from him as from a hanged man on a gallows, while he murmured with a smile: ‘Are you pleased, Sangouligo, mocker whom I hate, and who, I know, returns me the favour?’

I might perhaps remember and make use of his lesson, Sangouligo told himself.

*

Blondina’s life was wholly her own. One autumn night, as the wind blew burning and sultry, two monks, one tall, the other short, walked unsteadily along the banks of the Ebro. The cloak of the tall one seemed to conceal something other than his body; and in truth he opened it so as to place on the ground a manner of basket which contained a child.

‘Let us hope that the child does not wake and cry out!’ said the other monk.

‘We have nothing to fear on that account. For did you not see me apply four drops of opium, two upon the tongue and two on its nose? It is as good as dead until tomorrow morning.’

‘Brother, listen! I can hear…’ The monks were transfixed. But after a brief moment, one of them broke the silence: ‘No! Good! Nobody there! Brother, you are the one who made this skiff; stretch its little sails. I did not wish until now to unfurl them. What think you, brother? The wind is gusting stronger. Be careful of the child’s eyes.’

‘By the Christ of the Virgin, and by the nails which entered his hands! I think we must obey everything it has been ordered for us to do. The gold we will then be given, of which a portion already beats against our hearts, would not benefit our holy convent.’

‘Let us hoist the sails then!’

‘Let us hoist the sails.’

‘Come what may!’

‘Upon my soul, yes!’

‘Brother, I can hear a sound and no mistake, someone approaching!’

‘Let us make haste, brother.’

‘The packet of papers?’

‘Here it is.’

‘The rosary?’

‘There it is.’

‘Let us make haste!’

‘Did you write something for the child?’

‘It is upon its head.’

‘What about the diamonds?’

‘Upon its feet.’

‘Is it alive? Are you sure?’

‘Yes … yes … I can feel its breath on me.’

‘Farewell! Farewell! Poor little thing!’

‘Brother, let us be off!’

And, once back at their convent, the monks called upon God.

At daybreak, firm hands carried what had been entrusted to the monks intact to the chief magistrate of Tortosa; except that they told him they had heard crying and gone running to find the child between the ground and the skiff with one eye missing. The packet of papers contained a fortune for Blondina, without any clue to cast light upon the name of the donor. The chief magistrate cared for the child as if by Heaven’s command and when Blondina had grown up and he was dying, he told her: ‘Though you have no family, you are at least rich and free; young girl, do not abuse this! Let my memory be a help to you! Take this, keep it and read it often!’

The chief magistrate stretched out his arms, then died as he uttered the last of these words; and what came into Blondina’s near frozen hand was what one of the two monks had laid upon her head on that warm autumn night.

Here are the words of the monk.

†

By the holy cross that my finger has traced, and whose image must be precious to those whose souls are filled with God alone, little one, do not grow up before you die; this is the first wish in the depths of my secret thoughts; what would you do in the world? Living is damnation. Rise to heaven, graceful little one, while your thoughts are still unformed. Go and stand before God who loves children, who are as pure as is his name and is his majesty. Go! May he give you a place in his fine good heaven; go! may he rejoice at the sight of you; go! may he love you and bless you for ever and ever; go! Let it be allowed me, an old man who must stay on earth, of whom however there remains something of a heart that stirs, but more for God than for life, to tell you something of what I am feeling, you, pale and tender creature whom I call Blondina, because of those gold silken threads starting to play around your head to which I entrust these writings. Yes, I need to commend you to what exists, since they do not want you where you come from, you who were entrusted to me by one all powerful, who gave me an iron order to expose you in a skiff, with your fate cast to the wind and to men. No one forbade me to do this, no more than to place my withered lips on your smooth brow with the utmost holiness and purity in the world. I can also advise you, dear sweet child, that if love should touch you, or you should touch love, to take back to Heaven all the delights that your soul can feel. It is heaven that sends this love, my angel, but heaven wishes for its restitution, as alluring as it was before. Thence, true joy in all its purified plenitude; believe me, when you are at the age to read what I write, lovely little one whose gaze opens on mine as my eyes gaze on yours. Do not forgive yourself Evil, and tell yourself again and again that Good is like a piece of bread from which virtue must take nourishment at every hour of day and night. You have a fortune; but remember that you will not be rich with smiles unless your pockets are open to others; that you will not be warm in winter unless the poor have shod feet and clothed bodies, the poor wracked by blushes as well as by hardship, the poor whose doors you must open softly to throw them succour, and run from them fast. Amid everything that speaks you are what is called alone; poor little Blondina, but let my cross be your guide. Now, never love anything but God; motherless, poor little Blondina, without your mother! Kiss my cross, my child; do you see, the cross is the mother of those who are abandoned; kiss my cross; on one of the arms that it stretches out to you there is a tear, yes, a tear fallen for you, poor little Blondina, fallen for you!

*

Despite what the monk had wished for her, the little Spaniard had already lived twenty-seven years. But why did she let her hair hang over her face, blowing in great waves, and thicker on the one side than the other? It was because it was indeed true that Louminoso of Granada had replaced with a glass eye the one put out by a stick from the skiff blown into it. This endeavour and its success surpassed everything one might have imagined; the eye was finer, more transparent, more natural,
more eye-like
in other words. The colours were so artistically nuanced, the two sections of the cornea so delicately figured, the pupil so skilfully dilated, that one could almost make the eye move by staring hard at it with a dead man’s gaze, that is to say as fixed a one as possible; and since Louminoso, a man between two humps, believed he loved Blondina, who had made his heart speak, he had applied himself to this study for an enormous length of time, from what one could tell: ‘The unseeing eye seems to see better than the one that sees.’

Now let us return to the church where our two lovers are at prayer and at love. Although they were in substance their own masters, that is to say held in check by the laws of the country alone, they drew happiness from mystery, from silence, from shadow, from a gloomy light entering through dusty barred windows with a young hand that is aged and long-since buried. They liked these voices carried on the wind, no sooner there than dying away. Without quite knowing why, they delighted in seeing those long peculiar columns of atoms which dance in the sun, forever rejoining when broken and split by the child that runs across them, and they would tell themselves: ‘That is what we are, all the same; just a little more substantial, that is all.’

The chapel to which they directed their steps, after pouring out their souls before the tabernacle, and which served them as a holy drawing room, belonged to Blondina. It was small and arranged with flowers for God and Muguetto, who for some months now had picked his orange blossom there. Three times a week the Spanish couple had a rendez-vous there at the same time struck by the clock, as if only one who was masked could enter there, or with night darkness covering faces. This is why two doors were opened, one for the man, another for the woman. Doubtless you will be hard put to understand that one might seek for slavery in freedom; and yet is this anything other than that universal human wish: to want what one does not have, and no longer to want what one does have.

When, in this chapel they called Love-and-God-Chapel, Blondina and Muguetto were not conversing aloud from the heart, their words were murmured. Let us listen to them now.

‘Oh my Blondina!’ said Muguetto, ‘My true life, purity of my thought, do you well know that for me you are what the sun is for the world? The more we see it, the more we love it. You know well that when you walk I admire your very shadow, and I always fear that nothing on earth will remain of it? I stop, I look, I search; I am worse than a madman, am I not? This happens whenever I set out to follow you, leaving you ignorant that there is someone behind you walking in your footsteps. Most adored lover above all, yes, above all women, I have not enough soul for yours; it is true, listen, I swear it; and tell me, where do you come from? Can you not answer me, my poor child? Very well! No, do not torment yourself, you are turning pale, be calm, do not tremble unless it is from happiness. I shall say it for you: your father was a saint at the very least, and your mother a relative of the Virgin Mary. God must have commanded them to act as they did. So, forgive them; bless them as I do, do not be sad; I might not have you for myself if they were to make themselves known; let us bless them; will you? I am sure that you want to … There! I was certain that you did.’

Muguetto suddenly realised how loud his voice was in the chapel. All at once there was silence; the lovers prostrated themselves as if the good Lord had passed before them.

When they rose again, like a wild horse, the man from Tortosa pulled the Spanish woman to him, and afterwards, as if in a pool of ice, his face white as death and his lips purple-hued, he stammered, his gestures distraught: ‘Cherished soul, my Blondina! What I felt a moment ago with my brow against the marble is extraordinary. I was struck as if by a ghastly flash of lightning; I have a sense that you will not live for long. I heard a shuffling of chairs, a creaking of walls, a sigh, I know not what this was; but in it there was a sound which sent me these words: SHE IS SOON TO BE DEAD.’

‘No doubt,’ the Spanish woman answered with a smile, ‘either heaven or hell will take me soon if you stop loving me, for there is no air I can breathe but that which your love gives to me.’

‘No! It is not that,’ the man from Tortosa replied, ‘it is something else. Later I shall tell you why I was weeping when I arrived. But I am still too frightened to do so now. It is strange! I am scarcely recovered … See how I tremble … Hold me for a moment … Here! Here …’

And in Blondina’s hand Muguetto’s lay hot with the sweat of mortal agony.

At that moment there was a peal of bells. Doubtless the two coffins that had just left the church were being put into their grave.

The man from Tortosa and the Spanish woman had left Blondina’s chapel and the town’s cathedral, and had gone to the house of Blondina, since Muguetto’s dwelling was distant. Here, as the agitation of his fright began to subside, he was able to smile again upon the purity of his thought, as he called his lover. She had made him be seated, then to lie down upon a fine day bed whose covering her own fingers had embroidered, and had sat at his feet regarding him, as ever, with delirious passion. It was only then that despair came upon her for the loss of half of her sight. Then she began to move about with frenzied agitation; and now her arms were jerking in spasm, and without a kiss from Muguetto who leapt up from the bed, they might well have remained so. But is not the mingled breath of a man and a woman who love one another the supreme balm that heaven gives to the earth?