Maldoror and Poems

  8

  Every night, swooping with the vast span of my wings into the death-throes of my memory, I summoned up the memory of Falmer. His blond hair, his oval face, his noble features, were still imprinted on my imagination...indestructibly...especially his blond hair. Away, away with that hairless head, shining like a tortoise shell. He was fourteen, I was only a year older. Let that mournful voice be silent! Why does it come to denounce me? But it is I who am speaking. Using my own tongue to utter my thoughts, I notice that my lips are moving and that it is I who am speaking. And it is I who, as I tell a story of my youth, feeling remorse pierce my heart...it is I, unless I am mistaken...it is I who am speaking. I was only a year older. Who is he to whom I am referring? It was a friend I had in the past, I think. Yes, yes, I have already told you his name...I do not want to spell out these six letters again, no, no. And there is no point either in repeating that I was six years older. Even then my superior physical strength was all the more reason for helping him who had given himself to me across life's rough way, rather than ill-treating a being who was obviously weaker. Now I think he was weaker in fact...Even then. He was a friend I had in the past, I think. My superior physical strength...every night...Especially his blond hair. Bald heads have been seen by more than one human being; age, illness, sorrow (the three together, or separately) satisfactorily explain this negative phenomenon. That at least is the answer a scientist would give me, if I questioned him about it. Age, illness, sorrow. But I know well (I, too, am a learned man) that one day, because he had caught my hand as I was raising my dagger to stab a woman in the breast, I grabbed him by the hair with my hand of iron and sent him whirling through the air with such speed that his hair remained in my hand, while his body, hurtling with centrifugal force, went crashing against the trunk of an oak. I know well that one day his hair remained in my hand. I, too, am learned. Yes, yes, I have already said what his name was. I know well that one day I committed a dastardly deed, as his body was flung through the air by centrifugal force. He was fourteen. When in a fit of madness I run across fields, pressing to my heart a bleeding thing which I have long kept as a revered relic, the little children who pursue me...the little children and the old women who pursue me, flinging stones after me, utter these mournful groans: 'There is Falmer's hair.' Away, away with that bald head, shining like a tortoise shell...A bleeding thing. But it is I myself who am speaking. His oval face, his noble features...Now I think in fact he was the weaker. The old women and the little children. Now I think in fact...what was I going to say?...now I think in fact he was the weaker. With my hand of iron. That impact, did that impact kill him? I am afraid of finding out the truth about what eyes did not witness. In fact...Especially his blond hair. In fact, I fled into the distance with a conscience thenceforward implacable. He was fourteen. With a conscience thenceforward implacable. Every night. When a young man who aspires to fame, bent over his desk on the fifth floor, at the silent hour of midnight, hears a rustling sound which he cannot account for, he turns his head, heavy with meditation and dusty manuscripts, and looks round in all directions. But nothing, no start, no sign, reveals the cause of what he so faintly hears, though hear it he does. At last he notices that the smoke of the candle, soaring up towards the ceiling, causes in the surrounding air the almost imperceptible rustling of a piece of paper pinned by a nail to the wall. On the fifth floor. Just as a young man who aspires to fame hears a rustling which he cannot account for so I hear a melodious voice saying in my ear: 'Maldoror!' But before correcting his error, he thought he heard a mosquito's wings...leaning over his desk. Yet I am not dreaming; though I am lying on my satin-sheeted bed, what of it? I coolly make the shrewd observation that my eyes are open, though it be the hour of pink dominoes and masked balls. Never...oh! no, never!...did mortal voice give utterance to those seraphic tones, pronouncing with such sorrowful elegance the syllables of my name! The wings of a mosquito...How kind and gentle his voice is. Has he forgiven me? his body smashed against the trunk of an oak...'Maldoror!'

  FIFTH BOOK

  1

  Let the reader not be angry with me, if my prose does not have the good fortune to appeal to him. You will agree that my ideas are at least singular. And what you say, respectable man, is the truth; but a partial truth. now what an abundant source of errors and confusion all partial truths are! Flocks of starlings have a way of flying which is peculiar to them, and seem to move according to a regular and uniform plan such as that of a well-drilled company of soldiers punctiliously obeying the orders of their one and only leader. The starling obey the voice of instinct, and their instinct tells them to keep on approaching the centre of the main body, whereas the rapidity of their flight takes them incessantly beyond it; so that this multitude of birds, thus joined in their common movement towards the same magnetic point, incessantly coming and going, circling and criss-crossing in all directions, forms a kind of highly turbulent eddy, the entire mass of which, though not moving in any definable direction, seems to have a general tendency to turn in upon itself, this tendency resulting from the individual circling movements of each one of its parts, in which the centre, endlessly tending to expand but continually pressed down and repulsed by the opposing force of the surrounding lines which weigh down on it, is constantly tighter, more compact, than any one of these lines which themselves become more and more so, the nearer they come to the centre. In spite of this strange way of eddying, the starlings nonetheless cleave the ambient air with rare speed and every second perceptibly gain precious ground as they move towards the end of their weary migration and the goal of their pilgrimage. Neither should you take any notice of the bizarre way in which I sing each of these strophes. But let me assure you that the fundamental accents of poetry retain unabated their intrinsic rights over my understanding. Let us not generalize about exceptional cases, that is all I ask: yet my character is in the order of possible things. no doubt between the two furthest limits of your literature, as you understand it, and mine, there is an infinity of intermediate points, and it would be easy to multiply the divisions; but there would be no point at all in that, and there would be the danger of narrowing and falsifying an eminently philosophic conception which ceases to be rational, unless it is taken as it was conceived, that is, expansively. So, observer of a thoughtful disposition, you can combine enthusiasm with inner coolness; well then, for me you are ideal...and yet you refuse to understand me! If you are not in good health, take my advice (it is the best I can give you), and go take a walk in the country. A poor compensation you say? When you have taken the air, come back to me. Your senses will be less weary. Do not cry any more; I did not want to hurt you. Is it not true, my friend, that to a certain extent these songs have met with your approval? Now what prevents you from going all the way? The boundary between your taste and mine is invisible; you will never be able to grasp it: which proves that this boundary itself does not exist. Reflect that in that case (I am only touching on the question here) it would not be impossible that you had signed a treaty of alliance with stubbornness, that pleasant daughter of a donkey, such a rich source of intolerance. If I did not know that you were no fool, I would reproach you thus. It is not good for you to become encrusted in the cartilaginous carapace of an axiom you believe to be unshakeable. There are other axioms, too, which are unshakeable and which run parallel to yours. If you have a strong liking for caramel (an admirable practical joke on nature's part), no one will think of it as a crime; but those whose intellect, more dynamic and more capable of great things, is such that it prefers pepper and arsenic, have good reasons for acting this way, without the least intention of imposing their mild rule on those who tremble at the sight of a shrew-mouse, or the telling expression of a cube's surfaces. I speak from experience. I have not come here to play an agitator's part. And just as rotifera and tardigrades may be heated to boiling point without losing any of their vitality, it will be the same with you if you can cautiously assimilate the sour suppurative serosity which slowly emerge
s from the irritation which my interesting lucubrations cause. Well, have they not managed to graft the tail from one rat's body on to another living rat's back? Try then, similarly, to transport the several modifications of my cadaverous reason into your imagination. But be cautious. At the moment, as I write, new tremors are being felt in the intellectual atmosphere: it is simply a matter of having the courage to face them. Why are you pulling that face? And even accompanying it with a gesture of which it would take a long apprenticeship to imitate: you may be sure that habit is necessary in everything and since the instinctive revulsion you felt at the first pages has noticeably slackened off in intensity in inverse ratio to the attentiveness of your reading, like a boil which is lanced, it must be hoped, even though your head is still groggy, that your recovery will shortly enter its final phase. There is no doubt at all in my mind that you are already verging on a complete recover; and yet your face is still very thin, alas! But...courage! you have an uncommon spirit within you, I love you, and I do not despair of your complete deliverance, provided you take a few medicines which will but hasten the disappearance of the last symptoms of the disease. First, as an astringent and tonic food, you will tear off your mother's arms (if she is still alive), cut them up into little pieces, and you will then eat them in a single day with not the slightest trace of emotion on your face. If your mother was too old, choose another surgical subject, younger, fresher, and consumptive, whose tarsal bones are good at springing from the ground when one is see-sawing: your sister, for example. I cannot help feeling pity for her fate, and I am not one of those in whom cold enthusiasm merely puts on a show of goodness. You and I will shed for her, for this beloved virgin (but I have no proofs that she is a virgin), two spontaneous tears, two tears of lead. That will be all. The most soothing potion I can suggest is a bowl full of granular and blennorhagic pus in which the following will previously have been dissolved: a hairy cyst from the ovary, a follicular chancre, an inflamed foreskin turned back from the gland by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. If you follow my prescription, my poetry will welcome you with open arms, as when a louse by its embraces cuts off the root of a hair.

  2

  I saw an object on a mound before me. I could not clearly make out its head; but already I guessed it was not of any common shape, without however being able to state precisely the exact proportions of its contours. I did not dare approach this motionless column; and even if I had had the ambulatory legs of three thousand crabs (not to mention those used for prehension and the mastication of food) I would still have remained in the same place if an event, very trivial in itself, had not levied a heavy tribute on my curiosity, and made its dikes burst. A beetle was using its mandibles and its antennae to roll along the ground a ball, the principal element of which was excremental matter, and rapidly advancing towards the aforesaid mound, going out of his way to make his determination to take that direction quite clear. This articulated animal was not very much bigger than a cow! If anyone should doubt what I am saying, let him come to me, and I will satisfy the most incredulous amongst you with reliable eye-witness accounts. I followed at a distance, obviously intrigued. What did he intend to do with that big black ball? Oh reader, who are continually boasting of your insight (and not without reason), could you tell me? But I do not wish to put your well-known passion for riddles to such a severe test. Suffice it for you that the mildest punishment I can inflict on you is to point out that this mystery will not be revealed to you (it will be revealed to you) until later, at the end of your life, when you will open philosophic discussions with your death-pangs at your bed-side...and perhaps even at the end of the strophe. The beetle had arrived at the foot of the mound. I had fallen in behind it and was following it at the same pace, though I was still a long way from the scene of the action; for, just as stercoraceous birds, restless, as if they were always starving, thrive in the seas which lap the two poles, and only accidentally drift into temperate zones, so I, too, felt uneasy and began to walk forward very slowly. But what was the corporeal substance towards which I was advancing? I knew that the family of the pelicanides consists of four distinct genera: the gannet, the pelican, the cormorant, and the frigate-bird. The greyish shape which appeared before me was not a gannet. The plastic block I perceived was not a frigate-bird. The crystallized flesh I observed was not a cormorant. I saw him now, the man whose encephalon was entirely devoid of an annular protuberance! I vaguely sought in the recesses of my memory for the torrid or glacial country in which I had already observed this long, wide, convex, arched beak with its marked unguicular edge, curved at the end; these scalloped sides; this lower mandible with its sections separate till near the tip; this interstice filled with membranous skin; this large, yellow and sacciform pouch, taking up all the throat and capable of distending considerable; and these very narrow, longitudinal, almost imperceptible nostrils in the groove at the base of the beak! If this living being with its pulmonary and simple respiration and body decked with hairs had been entirely a bird down to the soles of its feet and not just as far as its shoulders, it would not then have been so difficult for me to recognize it: an easy thing to do, as you will see for yourself. Only this time i shall spare myself the trouble; for to make my demonstration clear, I should need to have one of those birds placed on my own desk, even if it were only a stuffed one. now I am not rich enough to buy one for myself. Following a previous hypothesis step by step I should immediately have determined the true nature and found a place in the annals of natural history for him the nobility of whose sickly pose I admired. With what satisfaction at not being completely ignorant of the secrets of his dual organism, and what eagerness to know more, I contemplated him in his permanent metamorphosis! Though he did not have a human face, he seemed to me as handsome as the two long tentacular filaments of an insect; or, rather, as a hasty burial; or, again, as the law of the restoration of mutilated organs; and, above all, as an eminently putrescible liquid. But, heedless of what was happening round about, the stranger kept looking straight ahead with his pelican-head. Some other day I shall resume the final part of this story. Yet I shall continue my narrative with sullen eagerness; for if on your part you are anxious to know what my imagination is driving at (would to heaven that it were only imagination!) for my own part I have resolved to finish all at once (and not twice) what I wanted to tell you. Although, nonetheless, no one has the right to accuse me of lack of courage. But when one finds oneself in such circumstances, more than one will feel the throbbing of his heart against the palm of his hand. A coasting ship's master, an old sailor and the hero of a dreadful story, has just died almost unknown in a little port in Brittany. He was the captain of a sea-going ship, working for a privateer, and was away from home for a long time at a stretch. Now after an absence of thirteen months he returned to the conjugal home at the moment when his wife, who was still confined, had just presented him with an heir whom he felt he had no right to acknowledge as his. The captain gave no sign at all of astonishment or anger; he coldly asked his wife to get dressed and come for a walk with him along the town ramparts. It was January. The ramparts of St. Malo are very high and when the north wind blows even the bravest men cower. The wretched woman obeyed, calm and resigned. When she returned, she became delirious. She died during the night. But she was only a woman. Whereas I, who am a man, in the face of no less a tragedy, I do not know if I had enough self-control to stop the muscles of my face from twitching! As soon as the beetle had reached the foot of the mound, the man raised his arm towards the west (in the precise direction where a lamb-eating vulture and a Virginian eagle-owl were engaged in combat in the sky), wiped from his beak a long tear-drop which scintillated like a diamond, and said to the beetle: 'Miserable ball! Have you not been pushing it for long enough? You have not yet satisfied your passion for revenge; and already this woman, whose arms and legs you tied together with pearl necklaces to form a shapeless polyhedron so that you could drag her by her tarsal bones through valleys and over paths, over bramble
s and stones (let me approach, to see if it is still she) has seen her bones gouged with wounds, her limbs polished by the mechanical law of rotatory friction, and mingling into a congealed unit, her body presenting instead of its original outlines and curves the monotonous appearance of a homogeneous whole which but too much resembles, in the confusion of its several crushed elements, the mass of a sphere! It is a long time now since she died; leave these remains on the ground and beware of increasing to irreparable proportions the rage which is consuming you; this is no longer an act of justice; for egotism, lurking in the teguments of your brow, slowly, like a phantom, raises the sheets which cover it.' The lamb-eating vulture and the Virginian eagle-owl, carried away by the vicissitudes of their struggle, had now approached us. The beetle trembled at these unexpected words and what at any other time would have been an insignificant movement this time became the distinguishing mark of a fury which knew no bounds; for he rubbed his hind legs dreadfully against the side of the elytra, making a shrill noise: 'Who do you think you are, pusillanimous creature? It seems you have forgotten certain events in the past; you have not kept them in your memory, my brother. This woman deceived us, one after the other. You first, and then me. It seems to me that this wrong must not (must not!) disappear so easily from our memories. So easily! Your magnanimous nature allows you to forgive. But do you know, despite the abnormal condition of this woman's atoms, reduced to a pulpy pate (it is not now a question of whether one would think, on a first investigation, that this body has noticeably increased in density as a result of the working of the two powerful wheels rather than by the effects of my ardent passion), whether she is not still alive? Hold your tongue, and leave me to my revenge.' He resumed his activity, and went away, pushing the ball in front of him. When he had gone, the pelican exclaimed: 'This woman, by her magic power, has given me the head of a pelican and changed my brother into a beetle; perhaps she deserves even worse treatment than that which I have just described.' And I, who was not sure that I was not dreaming, guessing from what I had heard the nature of the hostile relations which, above my head, joined the lamb-eating vulture and the Virginian eagle-owl in bloody combat, threw my head back like a cowl to give my lungs the maximum freedom and elasticity and, looking upwards, shouted to them: 'You two up there, ease your strife. You are both right. For she promised her love to both of you; therefore she has deceived you both. But you are not the only ones. Besides, she has deprived you of your human form, making cruel sport of your most holy sorrows. And you would still hesitate to believe me? Besides, she is dead; and the beetle has subjected her to a punishment which has left and ineffaceable mark, despite the compassion of him who was first deceived.' At these words, they put an end to their quarrel, stopped tearing out each other's feathers and ripping off scraps of flesh: they were right to ask thus. The Virginian eagle-owl, handsome as the memento which a dog leaves on the curb as it runs after its master, buried himself in the crevices of a ruined convent. The lamb-eating vulture, lovely as the law of arrested chest development in adults whose propensity to growth is not in proportion to the quantity of molecules their organism can assimilate, vanished into the higher strata of the atmosphere. The pelican, whose generous act of forgiveness had made a great impression on me because I found it unnatural, resuming on his mound the majestic impassivity of a lighthouse, as if to warn human mariners to pay attention to his example, and steer clear of the love of dark sorceresses, kept on looking straight ahead of him. The beetle, lovely as the alcoholic's trembling hand, disappeared on the horizon. Four more lives which could be erased from the book of life. I pulled a whole muscle out of my left arm, for I no longer knew what I was doing, so moved was I at this quadruple misfortune. And to think that I believed it was excremental matter. What a fool I am.