The Girl With the Golden Eyes (7 page)

“He said that! All the better, it will be more amusing. –You can come back in, Paul!” he shouted to his friend.

The mulatto, who hadn’t stopped looking at Paquita Valdès’ lover with magnetic attention, went out, followed by the interpreter.

“Finally, here is a truly romantic adventure,” Henri said to himself when Paul returned. “After taking part in a few, I’ve finally encountered in this Paris of ours an intrigue accompanied by dangerous circumstances, major perils. By Jove, how bold danger makes woman! To annoy a woman, to try to constrain her, doesn’t that give her the right and the courage to leap barriers in an instant that she would have taken years to climb over? Sweet creature, go on, jump! Die? Poor child! Daggers? The fancies of women! They all feel the need to give gravity to their little escapade. But we’ll keep them in mind, Paquita! We’ll keep them in mind, my girl! Devil take me, now that I know that this beautiful girl, this masterpiece of nature, is mine, the adventure has lost its edge.”

Despite this flippant speech, the boy had resurfaced in Henri. To wait till the next day without suffering, he had recourse to exorbitant pleasures: He gambled, dined, supped with his friends; he
drank like a coachman, ate like a German, and won ten or twelve thousand francs. At two in the morning he left the Rocher de Cancale, slept like a child, woke up the next day fresh and pink, and got dressed to go to the Tuileries, deciding to go riding on horseback after seeing Paquita so as to work up an appetite and dine better, in order to be able to pass the time more quickly.

At the appointed hour, Henri was on the boulevard, saw the carriage, and gave the password to a man who looked to him like the mulatto. When he heard this word, the man opened the door and quickly unfolded the step. Henri was carried so rapidly through Paris, and his thoughts left him with so little ability to pay attention to the streets through which they were passing, that he didn’t notice where the carriage stopped. The mulatto led him into a house where the steps were close to the carriage entrance. This stairway was dark, as was the landing, on which Henri was obliged to wait while the mulatto set about opening the door of a dank, foul-smelling apartment with no light, the rooms of which, barely illumined by the candle his guide found in the antechamber, seemed to him empty and sparsely furnished, like the rooms of a house whose inhabitants are away traveling. He recognized that sensation he got when he read one of those novels by Ann Radcliffe where the hero
passes through the cold, dark, uninhabited rooms of some sad and deserted place. Finally the mulatto opened the door of a drawing room. The condition of the old furniture and faded draperies with which this room was decorated made it resemble the salon of a bordello. Here there was the same pretension to elegance and the same assemblage of things in poor taste, the dust, the grime. On a sofa covered in velvet of Utrecht red, in the corner of a smoking hearth, whose fire was buried in ashes, a poorly dressed old woman was sitting, wearing one of those turbans that English women know how to devise when they reach a certain age, and which would meet with an infinite success in China, where the ideal beauty of artists is monstrosity. This salon, this old woman, this cold hearth, all this would have chilled his love, if Paquita herself had not been there, on a love seat, in a voluptuous dressing gown, free to aim her glances of gold and flame, free to show her curved foot, free with her luminous movements. This first interview was like all first encounters that passionate people grant each other: They have rapidly traveled long distances, and desire each other ardently, but they don’t know each other yet. It is impossible for there not to be some disharmony at first in this situation, bothersome only till the moment when their souls have found the same level. If desire makes a man
bold and inclines him not to plan anything, so as not to seem feminine, the mistress, however extreme her love is, is terrified at finding herself so quickly reaching her goal, face to face with the necessity of giving herself, which for many women is like falling into an abyss and not knowing what they’ll find at the bottom. The involuntary coldness of this woman contrasts with her avowed passion, and necessarily reacts on even the most smitten lover. These ideas, which often float like vapors around souls, establish a kind of transient sickness there. In the sweet journey that two people undertake through the beautiful countries of love, this moment is like a moorland to cross, a moor without heather, humid and hot by turns, or full of burning sands, cut off by swamps, leading to joyous groves clothed in roses where love and its processions of pleasures unfurl onto carpets of fine greensward. Often a witty man finds himself endowed with an idiotic laugh that serves as his reply to everything; his mind is dulled beneath the glacial compression of his desires. It would not be impossible for two equally handsome, spiritual, and passionate beings to start out by saying the most idiotic commonplaces, until chance, a word, the trembling of a certain look, the communication of an electric spark, makes them come to the happy transition that leads them onto the flowery path
where you don’t walk, but where you glide along without ever descending. This state of the soul always comes from the very violence of the emotions. Two beings who love each other feebly experience nothing like it. The effect of this crisis can also be compared to the effect produced by the glare of an unclouded sky. At first glance nature seems to be covered with gauze, the azure of the firmament looks black, extreme light looks like darkness. In Henri, as well as in the Spanish girl, a similar violence was present; and that law of physics by virtue of which two identical forces cancel each other out when they meet could also be true in the moral realm. Furthermore, the embarrassment of this moment was notably increased by the presence of the old mummy.

Love can be frightened or stimulated by anything. To it, everything has meaning, everything is a happy or foreboding omen. This decrepit woman was there as a possible outcome, and represented the horrid fish tail with which the geniuses of symbolism in Ancient Greece equipped the Chimeras and the Sirens, so seductive, so deceptive from the waist up, as all passions are in the beginning. Henri, though not a hardy spirit—that phrase is always mocking—but a man of extraordinary power, a man as great as you can be without belief, was struck by the totality of all these circumstances.
Moreover the strongest men are naturally the most impressionable, and consequently the most superstitious, if you can still call “superstition” the prejudice of the first impulse, which no doubt is actually insight into the results of causes hidden from other eyes, but perceptible to their own.

The Spanish girl took advantage of this moment of astonishment to succumb to that ecstasy of infinite adoration that seizes a woman’s heart when she truly loves someone, and when she finds herself in the presence of a vainly desired idol. Her eyes were full of joy and happiness, and gleams of light came from them. She was under his spell, and was intoxicated by a long dreamed-of bliss, without fear. She seemed wonderfully beautiful then to Henri, so that all this phantasmagoria of tattered cloth, decay, frayed red draperies, green mats before the armchairs, worn red tile floor—all this distressed, diseased luxury—immediately disappeared. The drawing room was lit up; he could see the terrible, motionless harpy, silent on her red sofa, only through a cloud. Her yellow eyes betrayed the servile emotions aroused by misfortune or caused by a vice under whose slavery one has fallen, as if under a tyrant who exhausts you beneath the flagellations of his despotism. Her eyes had the cold brilliance of the eyes of a caged tiger aware of its powerlessness, who finds it is forced to devour its own destructive desires.

“Who is this woman?” Henri asked Paquita.

But Paquita didn’t reply. She made a sign that she didn’t understand French, and asked Henri if he spoke English. De Marsay repeated his question in English.

“She is the only woman I can trust, even though she has already sold me,” Paquita said calmly. “My dear Adolphe, she is my mother, a slave bought in Georgia for her rare beauty, hardly any of which remains today. She speaks nothing but her mother tongue.”

The attitude of this woman, and her wish to divine what was going on between her daughter and Henri from their movements, were suddenly explained to the young man, and put him more at ease.

“Paquita,” he said to her, “we won’t ever be free, then?”

“Never!” she said sadly. “Even now we don’t have many days left us.”

She lowered her eyes, looked at her hand, and with her right hand counted the fingers on her left hand, thus displaying the most beautiful hands Henri had ever seen.

“One, two, three …”

She counted up to twelve.

“Yes,” she said, “we have twelve days left.”

“And then?”

“Then,” she said, remaining as self-absorbed as a frail woman before the executioner’s axe, as if killed beforehand by a fear that stripped her of that magnificent energy that nature seemed to have granted only to increase sensual delights and convert the coarsest pleasures into endless poetry. “Then,” she repeated. Her eyes became fixed; she seemed to contemplate a distant, threatening object. “I don’t know,” she said.

“This girl is mad,” Henri said to himself, and thereupon fell into a strange reverie.

Paquita seemed to him preoccupied by something other than himself; she was like a woman under the influence of both remorse and passion. Maybe she had another love in her heart that she alternately forgot and remembered. In an instant, Henri was assailed by a thousand contradictory thoughts. This girl became a mystery to him; but, contemplating her with the expert attention of the world-weary, a man starved for new sensual pleasures, like that Oriental monarch who asked for a new pleasure to be created for him—a horrible thirst to which great souls are prey—Henri recognized in Paquita the richest combination nature has ever created for love. The presumed workings of this mechanism, with its soul set aside, would have frightened any other man but de Marsay; but he was fascinated by this wealth of promised pleasures, by this constant
variety in happiness, every man’s dream, and also what every woman in love strives for. He was driven wild by the infinite made palpable, and transported into the creature’s most excessive delights. He saw all that in this girl more clearly than he had ever yet seen it, for she complacently let herself be observed, glad to be admired. De Marsay’s admiration became a secret rage, and he revealed it completely in the looks he gave the Spanish girl that she understood, as if she were used to receiving such looks.

“If you were not going to be mine alone, I would kill you!” he cried out.

Hearing this, Paquita covered her face with her hands and naively cried: “Holy Virgin, what have I gotten myself into?”

She got up, threw herself on the red sofa, plunged her head into the rags that covered her mother’s bosom, and wept. The old lady received her daughter without emerging from her immobility, without showing her any emotion. The mother exhibited to the fullest that gravity of savage peoples, that impassivity of statues, on which observation runs aground. Did she, or did she not, love her daughter? No answer. Beneath this mask all human emotions were smoldering, good and bad, and anything at all might be expected from this creature. Her gaze passed slowly from her
daughter’s beautiful hair, which covered her like a mantle, to Henri’s face, which she observed with an inexpressible curiosity. She seemed to be wondering by what magic spell he was there, by what caprice nature had made so seductive a man.

“These women are making fun of me!” Henri said to himself.

At that instant, Paquita raised her head and gave him one of those looks that sear your soul and burn you. She looked so beautiful to him that he swore to himself he would possess this treasure of beauty.

“My Paquita, be mine!”

“Do you want to kill me?” she said, fearful, trembling, anxious, but led back to him by some inexplicable force.

“Me, kill you!” he said, smiling.

Paquita let out a cry of fear and said a word to the old woman, who took Henri’s hand without asking, and her daughter’s hand, studied them a long time, then returned their hands to them, nodding her head in a horribly significant way.

“Be mine tonight, this very instant, follow me, don’t leave me, you must, Paquita! Do you love me? Come with me!”

In an instant, he said a thousand senseless words to her with the rapidity of a torrent leaping between rocks, repeating the same sound in a thousand different ways.

“It’s the same voice!” Paquita said sadly, without de Marsay hearing her, “and … the same fervor,” she added.

“All right, yes,” she said with an abandon of passion that nothing could express. “Yes, but not tonight. Tonight, Adolphe, I didn’t give enough opium to the
Concha
, she might wake up, I would be lost. At this moment, everyone in the house thinks I’m asleep in my bedroom. In two days, be at the same spot, say the same word to the same man. This man is my foster father, Christemio adores me and would die in torment for me without anyone being able to tear a word against me from him. Adieu,” she said, seizing Henri’s body and twisting herself around him like a snake.

She squeezed him tight, brought her head up to his, offered her lips, and gave him a kiss that gave them both such vertigo that de Marsay thought the earth was opening up, and then Paquita cried out, “Go away!” in a voice that let him know how little in control of herself she really was. But she clung to him, still crying “Go!”, and led him slowly to the stairway.

There the mulatto, whose white eyes lit up at sight of Paquita, took the torch from his idol’s hands, and led Henri out to the street. He left the torch under the archway, opened the door, put Henri back in the carriage, and let him out on the
Boulevard des Italiens with amazing speed. The horses seemed to have hellfire in their bodies.

The scene was like a dream for de Marsay, but one of those dreams that, even as they evaporate, leave behind a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness in the soul, which a man chases after for the rest of his life. One single kiss had been enough. No tryst had ever taken place in so decent a way, or so chaste, or even so cold, in a place made more terrible in its details, before a more hideous divinity—for this mother of hers had stayed in Henri’s imagination like something hellish, crouching, cadaverous, vicious, savage, something the fantasies of painters and poets had not yet guessed. In actual fact, never had a tryst more inflamed his senses, or revealed to him bolder sensual delights, or made love gush more from his core to spread itself like an atmosphere around a man. This was something dark, mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained and expansive, a pairing of the horrible and the heavenly, of paradise and hell, that made de Marsay almost drunk. He was no longer himself, and yet he was old enough to be able to resist the intoxications of pleasure.