Maldoror and Poems

  5

  What is the shadow which casts the projection of its horned silhouette with incomparable power on to the wall of my room? When I put this dumb raving question to myself, the sobriety of my style is striving less for majesty of form than to give a picture of reality. Whoever you are, defend yourself; for I am going to hurl at you the sling of a terrible accusation: those eyes are not yours...Where did you get them from? One day, I saw a blonde woman pass by me; she had eyes like yours: you plucked them out. I see you want people to believe that you are beautiful; but no one is fooled; and I even less than the others. I am telling you this so that you do not take me for a fool. A whole group of scavenger birds, lovers of the flesh of others and defenders of the value of hunting, lovely as the skeletons which take the leaves from Arkansas panoccos, hover around your brow, like submissive and favoured servants. But is it a brow? It is not difficult to hesitate before answering this question. It is so low that it is impossible to check the small number of proofs for its doubtful existence. I am not telling you this for fun. Perhaps you have no brow, you who cast the image of your buoying movement, like a dimly reflected symbol of a fantastic dance, on the wall? Who scalped you then? If it was a human being whom you locked away in a prison for twenty years and who then escaped to prepare a revenge which could not be a fitting reprisal, he did as he ought to, and I applaud him; the only thing is, he was two lenient. Now you look like a Red-Indian prisoner, at least (let us note this a preliminary point) by your expressive lack of hair. Not that it could not grow again, as physiologists have shown that, in the case of animals, even brains that have been removed eventually reappear; but my thoughts, stopping at this simple affirmation, which is not, as far as I can see, unmixed with enormous delight, do not even in their boldest extremes go as far as reach the bounds of a wish for your recovery; on the contrary, my thoughts operate on the basis of an extremely suspect neutrality which regards what for you is merely a temporary loss of hair as the presage of greater woes to come (or at least wishes it to be so). I hope you have understood me. And even if, by an absurd but sometimes unreasonable miracle, chance allowed you to find the precious skin which your enemy has religiously and vigilantly kept as the intoxicating souvenir of his victory, it is almost extremely possible that, even if one had only studied the law of probability in its relation to mathematics (now we know that analogy can easily bring the application of this law into other domains of the understanding), your justifiable but somewhat exaggerated fear of a partial or total chill would not spurn the important, and even unique, opportunity which would arise so expediently, though suddenly, of protecting the different parts of your brain from contact with the atmosphere, especially in winter, by means of a head-piece which rightly belongs to you because it is natural and which you would besides be allowed (it would be incomprehensible if you were to deny it) to keep constantly on your head, without running the always unpleasant risks of infringing the simplest rules of elementary decency. You are listening attentively to me, are you not? If you go on listening, your sadness will be far from escaping from the inside of your red nostrils. But as I am very impartial and as I do not detest you as much as I ought to (tell me if I am mistaken), you lend an ear to my speech despite yourself, as if impelled by a superior force. I am not as evil as you: that is why your genius bows down before mine...Really, I am not as evil as you. You have just cast a glance at that city on the mountainside. And now what do I see? All its inhabitants are dead! I have as much pride as the next man, perhaps even more. Well, listen...listen, if the confession of a man who recalls having lived for half a century as a shark in the undersea currents along the coast of Africa interests you deeply enough to pay attention to him, if not with bitterness, at least without the irreparable fault of showing the revulsion you feel for me. I shall not throw the mask of virtue at your feet, but shall appear before you as I am; for I have never worn it (if that is an excuse); and from the first moments, if you examine my features closely, you will recognize me as your respectful disciple in perversity, but not as your formidable rival. Since I do not dispute the palm of evil with you, I doubt if another will do so; for he would first have to be my equal, which is not easy. Listen, unless you are but the weak condensation of a fog (you are hiding your body somewhere, and I cannot find it): one morning, I saw a little girl leaning over the edge of a lake to pick a pink lotus; she steadied herself with precocious experience; she was stretching towards the flower when her look met mine (it is true that on my part the look was not unpremeditated). She immediately staggered like the whirlpool the tide causes around a rock, her legs gave way beneath her and, wonder to behold, a phenomenon which occurred as truly as I am talking to you now, she fell to the bottom of the lake; strange to say, she did not pick any more nymphaeceae. What is she doing down there?...I did not trouble to find out. No doubt her will; having joined the ranks under the flag of deliverance, is fighting desperate battles against decay. But, oh my master, at your look the inhabitants of the earth are wiped out, like an anthill crushed beneath the elephant's heel. Have I not just witnessed an example which demonstrates this? See...the mountain is no longer full of joyful sounds...it is as forlorn as an old man. The houses still stand, it is true; but it is not a paradox to state, in hushed tones, that the same cannot be said for those who were inside them and no longer exist. Already the emanations from the corpses have reached me. Can you not smell them? Look at those birds of prey waiting for us to go away, so that they may begin this giant meal; there is an endless cloud of them coming from the four corners of the earth...Alas, they had already come, since I saw you, as if to spur you on to speed up your crime. Does not your sense of smell perceive the least emanation? The impostor is nothing but...at least your olfactory nerves are disturbed by the perception of aromatic atoms rising up from the city, though you do not need me to tell you this. I would like to kiss your feet, but my arms clasp only transparent vapour. Let us look for this untraceable body which my eyes nonetheless perceive: it deserves the most numerous tokens of sincere admiration on my part. The phantom is mocking me: it is helping me to look for its own body. If I gesture to it to remain in its place, it makes the same gesture back. The secret has been discovered; but not, I must frankly say, to my greatest satisfaction. Everything has been explained, the most significant as well as the most trivial details; these last are too unimportant to bring to mind; as, for example, the plucking out of the blonde woman's eyes: that is almost nothing! Did I not recall that I, too, had been scalped, though it was only for five years (the exact length of time had escaped me) that I had locked a human being up in prison so that I might witness his suffering, because he had, rightly, refused me a friendship which cannot be granted to beings such as me? Since I pretend not to know that my look can bring death even to the planets revolving in space, he who claims that I do not possess the faculty of memory is not mistaken. What remains for me to do is to smash this mirror to pieces with a stone...it is not the first time the nightmare of temporary loss of memory has taken hold of my imagination whenever, by the inflexible laws of optics, I happen to stand before my own unrecognizable image!

  6

  I had fallen asleep on a cliff. He who has unsuccessfully pursued the ostrich across the desert all day has had no time to take any food or to close his eyes. If it is he who is now reading me, he can guess how heavy was the sleep into which I fell. But when the tempest with the palm of its hand has vertically pushed a small vessel to the bottom of the sea; if, on the raft, but one man of all the crew remains, broken by weariness and privations of all kinds; if, for hour which seem longer than the life of man, he is tossed like flotsam on the waves; and if, some time later, a frigate's long curved keel should plough through those desolate regions and sight the wretch's fleshless carcass on the ocean, bringing help which almost came too late, I think this shipwrecked man will be even better able to guess the extent to which my senses were deadened. Mesmerism and chloroform, when they take the trouble, can also produce such letharg
ic catalepsies. They are not at all like death; it would be lie to day they are. But let us come straightaway to the dream, lest eager readers, starving for reading matter of this kind, begin to roar like a shoal of macrocephalic whales fighting among themselves for a pregnant female. I dreamt I had entered the body of a hog, that I could not easily get out again, and that I was wallowing in the filthiest slime. Was it a kind of reward? My dearest wish had been granted, I no longer belonged to mankind. For my part I understood this to be the correct interpretation, and I felt the deepest joy. And yet I actively inquired into this to see what deed of virtue I had done to deserve this remarkable boon from Providence. Now that I have gone over in my mind the different phases of my frightful prostration on the granite belly, during which, unknown to me, the tide flowed twice over this irreducible mixture of living flesh and dead matter, it is perhaps not unprofitable to proclaim that this degradation was only a punishment inflicted on me by divine justice. But who knows his inmost needs or the causes of his pestilential joys? The metamorphosis was always in my eyes the high and magnanimous resonance of the perfect happiness which I had long been awaiting. At last the day had come when I was a hog! I tested my teeth on the barks of trees; with pleasure I contemplated my snout. Not the slightest trace of divinity remained: I raised my soul to the excessive height of that unspeakable delight. Listen then to me, and do not blush, inexhaustible caricatures of the Beautiful, who take seriously the laughable brayings of your supremely despicable souls; and who do not understand why the Almighty, in a rare moment of excellent buffoonery which certainly did not transgress the great general laws of the grotesque, one day took amazing pleasure in peopling a planet with strange microscopic beings called humans, made of matter resembling pink coral. Certainly, flesh and bone, you have reason to blush, but listen to me. I do not invoke your understanding; it would spit blood at the horror you cause it: forget it, and be consistent with yourselves...There were no constraints there. Whenever I wanted to kill, I killed. I even wanted to quite often and no one stopped me. The vengeance of human laws still pursued me, although I did not attack the race I had so calmly abandoned; but my conscience did not reproach me at all. During the day, I fought my new fellows, and the ground was often bespattered with many layers of congealed blood. I was the strongest, and I won all the victories. Biting wounds covered my body; I pretended not to notice them. The animals of the earth shunned me and I remained alone in my dazzling grandeur. What was my astonishment when, having swum across a river, leaving behind me lands which my fury had depopulated to find other countries in which to plant my customs of carnage and murder, I tried to walk on that flowery bank. My feet were paralysed; and no movements of any kind belied this enforced immobility. It was then, amid supernatural efforts to continue on my way, that I awoke and realized that I was turning back into a man. Thus Providence made clear to me, in a not inexplicable way, that she did not want my sublime projects to be realized even in a dream. Reverting to my original form was such a great grief for me that I still weep at nights. My sheets are constantly wet, as if they had been dipped in water, and every day I have them changed. If you do not believe me, come and see me. Then you will be able to check with your own experience not only the likelihood but the truth of my assertion. How often since that night spent in the open on the cliff have I not joined herds of hogs to take on my ruined metamorphosis as a right! It is time to give up these glorious memories, which only leave the milky way of eternal regrets in their wake.

  7

  It is not impossible to witness an abnormal deviation in the hidden or visible operations of the laws of nature. Indeed, if everyone takes the trouble of ingeniously investigating the different phases of his existence (not forgetting a single one, for it might be just that one which furnished the proof of what I am suggesting), it would not be without a certain astonishment, which in other circumstances would be comic, that he recalls that, on such a day, to speak first of objective matters, he witnessed a phenomenon which seemed to go beyond, and positively did go beyond, the common notions of observation and experience, such as showers of toads for example, the magic spectacle of which was not at first understood by scientists. And that on another day, to speak in the second and last place of subjective matters, his soul presented to the inquiring gaze of psychology, I will not will not go so far as to say an aberration of reason (which, however, would be no less curious; on the contrary, it would be more so), but at least, so as not to cause offence to certain cold individuals who would never forgive me for the flagrant lucubrations of my imagination, an unusual state, quite often very grave, which indicates that the bounds which good sense prescribes for the imagination are, despite the ephemeral pact between these powers, unfortunately overstepped by the powerful force of the will, but also more often than not by the absence of its effective collaboration. To prove the point let us give two examples, the timeliness of which it is easy to appreciate: that is if one has attentive moderation as one's guide. I give you two: the outbursts of anger and the disease of pride. I warn him who reads me to beware of forming a vague and a fortiori wrong idea of the beauties of literature I am shedding like leaves before me in the excessively rapid unfolding of my sentences. Alas! I should like to develop my arguments and comparisons slowly and magnificently (but who is master of his own time?), so that everyone could understand if not my dread at least my stupefaction when, one summer evening, as the sun seemed to be setting on the horizon, I saw a human being swimming in the sea, with the large webbed feet of a duck instead of arms and legs and a dorsal fin proportionally as long and streamlined as a dolphin's, strong of muscle, and followed by numerous shoals of fish (in the procession, among other water-dwellers, I saw the torpedo, the Greenland ananark, and the horrible scorpaena), all of whom showed signs of the greatest admiration. Sometimes he would dive and his slimy body would reappear almost immediately two hundred metres away. The porpoises, who in my opinion have well deserved their reputation as swimmers, could scarcely keep up with this new kind of amphibian, and followed at some distance. I do not think the reader will have cause to regret it if he brings to my narration less the harmful obstacle of stupid credulity then the supreme service of profound confidence, examining lawfully and with secret sympathy the poetic mysteries, too few in number in his opinion, which I undertake to reveal to him as and when the opportunity arises, as it unexpectedly did today, inwardly imbued with the tonic scents of aquatic plants which the freshening wind blows into this strophe, which contains a monster who has appropriated the distinguishing features of the palimped family. Who speaks here of appropriation? Let it be known that man, by his multiple and complex nature, is not unaware of the means of extending his frontiers; he lives in the water, like the hippocamp; flies through the higher layers of the air, like the osprey; burrows in the earth, like the mole, the woodlouse, and the sublime maggot. Such is, in its more or less succinct form (but rather more than less), the exact criterion of the extremely invigorating consolation which I strove to conceive, when I thought that the human being whom I saw so far off swimming with his four limbs on the surface of the waves as the most magnificent cormorant had ever done, had perhaps only acquired this novel change in the extremities of his arms and legs as a punishment in expiation of some unknown crime. It was not necessary for me to trouble my head attempting to manufacture in advance the melancholy pill of pity; for I did not know that that man, whose arms, one after the other, were beating the bitter waves, while his legs, with all the power of the nar-whale's spiral tusks, were forcing back the aquatic layers, had neither deliberately appropriated these extraordinary powers nor had they been imposed on him as a punishment. From what I learnt later, here is the simple truth: prolonged existence in this fluid element had imperceptibly brought about important but not essential changes in the human being who had exiled himself from the stony continents; these I had noticed in that object which a hurried and indistinct look had, in the primordial moments of his appearance (by and unspeakable act of tho
ughtlessness, the aberrations of which will be well understood by psychologists and lovers of prudence), made me take for a fish of a strange form but not yet described in the naturalists' classifications; but perhaps in their posthumous works, although I do not make the excusable claim of tending towards this supposition, imagined under conditions which are too hypothetical. In fact, this amphibian (since amphibian it is, the contrary cannot be proved) was visible only to me (leaving out of consideration the fish and the cetacea); for I observed that some peasants, who had stopped to contemplate my face, which was troubled by this supernatural phenomenon, and who were vainly trying to explain why my eyes were constantly fixed, with a persistency which seemed invincible but in reality was not so, on a point in the sea where they themselves could only see an appreciable but limited number of shoals of fish of all kinds, distended the apertures of their huge mouths almost as much as a whale. 'It makes us smile, but it does not make us turn pale, as it does him'; they said in their picturesque language. 'And we are not so stupid as not to notice that he is not exactly looking as the bucolic frolickings of the fish, but much farther into the distance.' So that, for my part, mechanically turning my eyes towards the spread of those two mouths, I said to myself that unless in the entire universe one found a pelican as big as a mountain or at least as big as a promontory (marvel, if you please, at this restriction which does not waste a single inch of ground), no beak of bird of prey or jaw of wild animal would ever be able to surpass or even equal each of these gaping, but too dismal, craters. And yet, though I am fully in favour of the positive use of metaphor (this rhetorical figure does far more service to human aspirations towards the infinite than those who are riddled with prejudices and false ideas--which comes to the same thing--are prepared to acknowledge), it is nonetheless true that the risible mouths of these three peasants are still big enough to swallow three sperm-whales. Let us shrink this comparison somewhat, let us be serious and content ourselves with saying that they were like three little elephants which have only just been born. In a single stroke, the amphibian left a foamy wake one kilometre long behind him. In the brief instant when his forward-straining arm remains suspended in the air before plunging down again, his fingers, outspread and joined together by a fold of skin in the form of membrane, seemed to be soaring up towards the heights of space and grasping the stars. Standing on the rocks, I used my hands as a speaking-trumpet and exclaimed, while crabs and crayfish fled into the darkness of the most secret crevices: 'Oh you who swim faster than the winged frigate in its flight, if you still understand the meaning of these loud sounds which mankind utters as the faithful translation of its inner thoughts, deign for a moment to halt your swift movements and tell me briefly the phases of your true story. But I warn you that you do not need to address me at all, if your bold design be to arouse in me that feeling of friendship and reverence which I felt for you the moment I saw you for the first time moving through the waves with the grace and the strength of a shark on your indomitable and rectilinear pilgrimage.' A sigh, which made me shudder to the bone and made the rock on which the soles of my feet rested stagger (unless it was I who staggered, violently pierced by the sound-waves which brought such a cry of despair to my ears), could be heard even in the bowels of the earth; the fish dived beneath the waves with noise of an avalanche. The amphibian did not dare approach too close to the shore; but as soon as he had ascertained that his voice reached my eardrum distinctly enough, he slowed down the movement of his palmate limbs and lifted his wrack-covered head up from the roaring waves. I saw him bow his head, as if, by a solemn command, to summon the wandering pack of memories. I did not dare interrupt him in this holy and archaeological occupation; absorbed in the past, he looked like a rock. At last he spoke, as follows: 'The centipede is not short of enemies. The fantastic beauty of its countless legs, instead of attracting the admiration of other animals, is perhaps only a powerful stimulus to their jealous irritation. I should not be surprised to find out that this insect is exposed to the intensest hatred. I shall not disclose my place of birth to you; it is of no account in this story; but it is my duty to prevent the disgrace which would spring from my disclosure from befalling my family. After one year, heaven granted the wish of my father and mother (God forgive them!): two twins, my brother and I, were born. All the more reason for us to love one another. But it was not to be so. Because I was the more intelligent and handsomer of us two, my brother hated me, and made no attempt to hide his feelings: that is why my mother and father lavished most of their love on me, since by my genuine and constant friendship I was trying to appease a soul which had no right to bear ill-will against his own flesh and blood. Then my brother's fury knew no bounds, and he damned me in our parents' hearts with the most unbelievable calumnies. I lived for fifteen years in a dungeon, with maggots and foul water for my only food. I shall not tell you the unspeakable torments I endured during my long and unjust confinement. Sometimes, at any moment of the day, one of my three tormentors would take turns to come into my room, carrying tongs, pincers and different instruments of torture. The cries which the tortures wrung from me left them unmoved; my abundant loss of blood made them smile. Oh my brother, I have forgiven you, first cause of all my ills! Is it not possible that one day, in your blind rage, you may see the light?! I reflected much in my eternal prison. You can guess how strong my hatred of mankind in general became. My progressive enervation, my solitude of body and soul, had not yet deprived me of reason to the point where I felt resentment against those whom I had not ceased to love: the threefold iron collar in which I was enslaved. I managed, by means of a cunning trick to regain my freedom! Disgusted by those who lived on land and who, though they called themselves my fellow-beings, appeared to resemble me in nothing (if they found that I resembled them, why did they hurt me?), I made my way towards the pebbles of the beach, firmly resolved to kill myself in the sea should in any way remind me of my previous unhappy existence. Would you believe your own eyes? Since the day I fled from my father's house, I have not had as much reason as you might think to complain of my life in the sea with its crystal grottoes. Providence, as you see, has given me in part the nature of a swan. I live in peace with the fish and they provide me with all the food I need as if I were their monarch. I shall whistle in a special way so as not to set your teeth on edge, and you will see them all reappear.' It happened just as he had predicted. He went on swimming regally, surrounded by his train of loyal subjects. And though after a few seconds he had completely disappeared from sight, using a telescope I could still see him on the furthest limits of the horizon. With one hand he swam and with the other he wiped his eyes, made bloodshot by the terrible self-control he had had to muster to approach the shore. He had done this to please me. I threw the tell-tale instrument against the steep and jagged rocks; it leapt from rock to rock, and its broken pieces were swallowed by the waves. Such were the final gesture and supreme adieu by which I bowed down, as in a dream, before a noble and unfortunate mind. Yet everything that happened was real, that summer evening.