UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (54 page)

The next day, Taxil found a hall at the Société de Géographie, but it would be free only on Easter Monday. I remember saying: "That's almost a month away. It's better that you're not seen around during this time, so as to avoid stirring up any more gossip. Meanwhile, I'll think about what to do with Diana."

Taxil hesitated for a moment. His lip trembled, and with it his mustache. "You don't want to . . . eliminate Diana?" he asked.

"Of course not," I replied. "I'm a clergyman, don't forget. I'll return her to the place whence I took her."

He seemed bereft at the thought of losing Diana, but his fear of Masonic revenge was stronger than his attraction for Diana had ever been. Besides being a scoundrel, he's a coward. How would he have reacted if I had said, "Yes, I intend to eliminate Diana"? Perhaps, for fear of the Masons, he would have accepted the idea — so long as he didn't have to do the deed.

Easter Monday would be the 19th of April. So if I spoke of a onemonth wait on leaving Taxil, this must have taken place around the 19th or 20th of March. Today is the 17th of April. Therefore, in gradually piecing together the events of the past ten years, I have arrived at just under a month ago. And if this diary were to help me, and you, to find out what caused my current loss of memory, nothing at all has happened. Or perhaps the crucial event took place during these past four weeks.

Now it's as if I feel a certain dread about remembering any more.

18th April at dawn

While Taxil was roaming furiously around the house and having fits of agitation, Diana was entirely unaware of what was going on. In the alternation between her two conditions, she followed our private discussions in a daze, and seemed to revive only when the mention of a person or a place produced a faint flicker in her mind.

She was gradually deteriorating into a vegetative state, with one single animal trait, an increasingly frenzied sensuality, which she directed freely toward Taxil, Bataille when he was still with us, Boullan, of course, and — though I tried not to offer her any pretext — also toward me.

Diana had been barely twenty when she entered our company and was now over thirty-five. Taxil, with an increasingly lubricious smile, said she was becoming ever more attractive as she matured, as if a woman over thirty were still desirable. Perhaps her almost arboreal vitality gave an enigmatic beauty to her stare.

But these are perversions about which I am not an expert. My God, why do I dwell upon the fleshly form of that woman, who for us was meant to be nothing more than a wretched instrument?

I have said that Diana was unaware of what was going on. Perhaps I am wrong. In March she became frenzied, perhaps because she was no longer seeing Taxil or Bataille. She was in the grips of hysteria, the devil (she said) was cruelly tormenting her, wounding her, biting her, twisting her legs, slapping her face — and she showed me some bluish marks around her eyes. Marks of wounds similar to stigmata began to appear on her palms. She asked why the infernal powers should act so harshly toward someone who was a Palladian devotee of Lucifer, and she grabbed my cassock as if to ask for help.

I thought of Boullan, who knew more about devilry than I did. In fact, as soon as I called for him, Diana grasped him by the arms and began to shake. He placed his hands around the nape of her neck and calmed her, speaking to her gently, then spat into her mouth.

"And who tells you, my daughter," he said, "that the one who subjects you to these tortures is your lord Lucifer? Do you not think, in contempt and punishment for your Palladian faith, your enemy is the Enemy par excellence, that aeon whom the Christians call Jesus Christ, or one of his supposed saints?"

"But Father," said Diana, confused, "if I am Palladian, it is because I do not recognize any power in Christ the Tyrant, to such an extent that one day I refused to stab the host because I thought it mad to recognize a real presence in what was only a lump of flour."

"There you are wrong, my child. See what Christians do, who recognize the sovereignty of their Christ, yet despite this they do not deny the existence of the devil; indeed, they fear his enticements, his enmity, his seductions. And we must do likewise. If we believe in the power of our lord Lucifer, it is because we believe that his enemy Adonai has a spiritual existence, even in the guise of Christ, and manifests himself through his iniquity. And therefore you must stoop to trample upon the image of your enemy in the only way that a faithful Luciferian is permitted to do."

"Which is?"

"The black mass. You will not obtain the benevolence of Lucifer our lord except by celebrating your rejection of the Christian God through the black mass."

Diana seemed to be convinced, and Boullan asked my permission to take her to a gathering of Satanist devotees, in his attempt to persuade her that Satanism and Luciferianism and Palladism had the same purposes and the same purifying function.

I did not like to allow Diana out of the house, but I had to give her some space to breathe.

I find Abbé Boullan in intimate conversation with Diana, saying, "You enjoyed yesterday?"

What happened yesterday?

The abbé continues: "Well, tomorrow evening I have to celebrate another solemn Mass in a deconsecrated church at Passy. A marvelous evening, it is the 21st of March, the spring equinox, a date full of occult significance. But if you agree to come, I will have to prepare you spiritually, now, alone, in confession."

I left, and Boullan remained with her for more than an hour. When he finally called for me again, he said that Diana would be going to the church at Passy the following day, but would like me to accompany her.

"Yes, Father," Diana said to me with eyes unusually sparkling and cheeks flushed. "Please do."

I should have refused, but I was curious and did not want Boullan to think me a prig.

I tremble as I write. My hand runs across the page almost by itself. I'm not recalling but reliving it, as if describing something that is happening at this very instant.

It was the evening of the 21st of March. You, Captain, began your diary on the 24th of March, recounting how I had lost my memory on the morning of the 22nd. If something terrible happened, it must have been on the evening of the 21st.

I am trying to piece it together but find it difficult. I have a fever, I fear; my forehead is burning.

Having picked up Diana at Auteuil, I give an address to the fiacre driver, who looks at me out of the corner of his eye as if he mistrusts a customer like me, despite my ecclesiastical dress, but when offered a generous tip he sets off without saying anything. We travel farther and farther from the center of town, along roads that become darker and darker, until we turn into a lane flanked by abandoned houses which ends abruptly at the almost derelict façade of an old chapel.

We get out, and the coachman seems anxious, to such an extent that when, having paid the fare, I search my pockets for a few extra francs, he shouts, "It doesn't matter, Father, thanks all the same!" and forgoes the tip in order to be off as soon as possible.

"It's cold, I'm frightened," says Diana, pressing against me. I pull back, but at the same time, though I cannot see her arm, I feel it under the clothes she is wearing, and I realize she is dressed strangely: she wears a hooded cloak, covering her from head to foot, so in the darkness she might be mistaken for a monk, or one of those characters appearing in monastery crypts in those gothic novels that were much in vogue at the beginning of this century. I had never seen it before, though, then again, it had never crossed my mind to examine the trunk with all the things she had brought with her from Doctor Du Maurier's house.

The small door of the chapel is half open. We enter a single nave, illuminated by an array of candles that burn on the altar and by many lighted tripods that form a circle around a small apse. The altar is covered with a dark pall, like those used for funerals. Above, in place of the cruci- fix or other image, is a statue of the devil in the form of a he-goat, with a large phallus protruding by at least thirty centimeters. The candles are not white or ivory but black. At the center of the altar, in a tabernacle, are three skulls.

"Abbé Boullan told me about them," Diana whispers to me. "They are the relics of the three Magi, the real ones, Theobens, Menser and Saïr. They received a warning when they saw a falling star burn out, and turned away from Palestine so as not to be witnesses to the birth of Christ."

In front of the altar, arranged in a semicircle, is a row of youngsters, boys to the right and girls to the left. Both groups are so unripe in age that little difference is to be noted between the two sexes, and that charming amphitheater would seem populated by sweet androgynes, whose differences are all the more concealed by the fact that all wear a crown of dried roses on their heads, except that the boys are naked, and can be distinguished for their member, which they flaunt and show to each other, while the girls are covered with short tunics of almost trans- parent fabric, which caress their small breasts and the unripe curves of their hips, without hiding anything. They are all very beautiful, even if their faces express more malice than innocence, but this certainly increases their charm — and I have to confess (a curious situation in which I, a member of the clergy, confess to you, Captain!) that while I feel, not terror, but at least fear in front of a woman who is now mature, it is difficult for me to resist the seduction of a prepubescent creature.

Those unusual acolytes hold resinous branches to the tripods, lighting them, and with them they charge the thuribles, from which a dense smoke and an enervating aroma of exotic spices are unleashed. Others among those naked, gracile children are distributing small cups, and one is also offered to me. "Drink, Monsieur Abbé," says a youth with brazen gaze. "It is to help you enter the spirit of the ritual."

I drink it and now see and hear everything as if in a mist.

Here Boullan enters. He is wearing a white chlamys, and over it a red chasuble embroidered with an upside-down crucifix. At the intersection of the two arms of the cross is the image of a black he-goat, rearing up on its hind legs, horns spread. At the first movement the abbé makes, as if by chance or negligence but in fact out of brazen depravity, the chlamys opens to reveal a phallus of notable proportions that I would never have imagined on that flaccid individual, and already erect, due to some drug taken earlier. His thighs are bound by two dark yet transparent stockings, like those worn by Celeste Mogador when she danced the cancan at Bal Mabille (now reproduced in
Charivari
and other weekly publications, and there, alas, for priests and abbés to see, whether they wish to or not).

The celebrant has turned his back to the congregation and begins his Mass in Latin while the androgynes give the responses:

"In nomine Astaroth et Asmodei et Beelzébuth. Introibo ad altare Satanae."

"Qui laetificat cupiditatem nostram."

"Lucifer omnipotens, emitte tenebram tuam et afflige inimicos nostros."