The original French of this novella was published in L’Alphée, vol 2, April 1980. It is presented here, in translation, by courtesy of Michel Orcel.”
And an excellent introduction to this novella is provided by Philippe-Joseph Salazar.
The door of the apartment was wide open. He was not surprised. He often neglected, out of childish laziness, to close it behind him when he went down to run an errand in the neighborhood. A neighbor across the hall looked at him with a smile. Maybe he was onto something. But what exactly? He tried not to meet that gaze.
He felt he had a valise at the end of his arm, as if he had just returned from a trip. The apartment door was open, the hallway lit up. He remembered that when he went out at night, out of some ridiculous superstition or retrospective bravado against thrifty parents, he always left the lights on. Yet he hesitated for a second on the threshold, then stepped inside. Everything looked like it had been repainted. This was not unpleasant. He figured that the owner had probably taken advantage of his absence to have some work done. She could at least have consulted him about the choice of colors. She had chosen rather bland colors. Pastel blue, pale yellow. It was a little nauseating. In the bathroom, which was also lit up, he caught a glimpse of the “sanitaryware” that had been changed: it was pink. His first favorable impression gradually gave way to dismay. Not content with having everything repainted and wallpapered, she had felt the need to change the furniture and install knick-knacks. In the dining room, he stopped in front of a row of twenty or so chocolate-colored Buddhas, the same as at the Lion de Belfort in Place Denfert-Rochereau. They were illuminated by red and green gleams, the source of which could not be seen. The effect was atrocious. Why did he guess that all this was not malice, but a kind of clumsy attention? Perhaps this misguided good fairy was one and the same with the Wurzburg hotelier who had taken a particular liking to him, and who, in his absence, while he was visiting the Residence, had installed in his room a small plastic basin filled with water alternately tinted green, red and purple by small submerged bulbs, from which a weak jet of water gushed out, its fallout causing celluloid swans to sway? Such good intentions mixed with naïve bad taste deserved sincere thanks. He entered the last room, the bedroom, where indirect lights plunged him into a semi-darkness that made him feel a little better after the harsh lighting of the previous rooms. On one side, he saw a sort of dais, rather luxuriously parqueted in Versailles style, and resting on a set of drawers. Was it a huge secretary, set on the floor, with a writing desk so large it could have been used as a cabaret stage? He thought he had seen it before, but doubted he had ever ordered such a monster of a piece of furniture. The bed had been built into an alcove, hung with heavy Japanese silk curtains, embroidered in relief with birds and flowering branches, which also evoked the décor of the Pagoda cinema, once an exotic cabaret. He was beginning to wonder whether he could live in such false luxury, which was so out of keeping with his tastes. Then he realized that beyond the stage there was no fourth wall. The gaping chamber on this side opened onto a space he had never suspected existed. It was a dark space, but a vast one it seemed, for in the distance one could see colored lights, glimmering faintly, like those that signal the emergency exits in movie theaters during screenings. The faint glow of these lights grazed the openwork arches and colonnettes of some Muslim mosque. The Alhambra? But which one? The Granada palace or the Parisian music hall? Dismayed, he told himself that in any event, his privacy was over. From now on, anyone, tourist or voyeur, could enter his room at any time, and transform it into a public stage.
Should he take the initiative and venture into this dark room at the side of his apartment? It would have to be done sooner or later. It was better to measure the extent of the evil right away. In any case, he could not sleep until he knew for sure. His suitcase remained in the middle of the room, and he ventured cautiously into the dark room, after descending a few steps, guiding himself by the colored lights. The place seemed deserted. Dark room without a photographer? Dark room without spectators? Although his apartment seemed high up on the floors of one of these new Parisian buildings, he had the impression of walking through an underground passage. A sort of cellar which, as he approached the lights, seemed to be as deep if not as towering as the Padirac Chasm. After all, this cabaret lighting was the same as that used to illuminate the famous Causses Caves and Caverns. Perhaps the colonnettes were not imitations of the masterpiece of Andalusian architecture, but limestone concretions converted into stucco by the fake magic of electricity? One just had to resign oneself to the fact that sooner or later tourists would flock to admire this new addition to the Musée Grévin. What was his role in all this? Janitor of these artificial Catacombs, guide, or the even surprise attraction?
For the moment, he was alone, with no trace of any other living presence. He could not decide whether to be disappointed or delighted. He would continue his exploration. Now he seemed to have lost sight of his room. He had been too optimistic in comparing this place to the Padirac Chasm. If he took into account the topography of the area, starting from Denfert, he had walked far enough to find himself now on the left bank of the Seine, the Quai Bourbon on the Quai Voltaire. From here and there, the lights seemed to renew themselves, and the same colonnettes reappeared. Were there other doors leading to apartments other than his own? For the moment, he could not see the slightest trace of a wall on either side, or a boundary of any kind. What if he was in a central location where all the city’s apartments opened onto each other without anyone knowing about it? Perhaps they were all groping like him right now, in that indecisive space between heaven and earth. The thought struck him as at least as strange as the place it purported to define. He hardly recognized it as his own. Was there a breach in his mind as well as in his dwelling? At first, it had seemed to him that he was visiting his own house, open on all sides. Now the doors of his mind seemed open, and visitors began to arrive. Visiting uninvited, visited uninvited; he was no longer at home, nor in himself, to the point where he could justifiably wonder if he was anywhere, or even if he still was, at all. Not without apprehension, he noticed immediately afterwards that the place where he continued to advance, without apparent purpose, among the fading lights, was not only perfectly empty, but also perfectly soundless. His footsteps, which should have resounded under an archway, faded away as if they had trodden on a high mountain snowfield. Nor did he perceive any of that damp, musty smell one readily associates with the idea of a cellar. And he was careful not to touch or even brush against any of the columns, so afraid was he of discovering their absence, or his own. Had their surface been impregnated with salt or saltpeter, he was sure his tongue would have remained deaf and blind to any trace his fingers might have picked up. He gathered around his vision like the drowning man around the last floating plank, with the anguish of seeing this last aid gradually become heavier and swallow him up. For the gradual disappearance of colors, the drop in electrical voltage—or so he thought—was perhaps because of the gradual extinction of his fifth sense. All that remained here and there was a pale halo of light, like a street on a winter’s night with thick fog, a fleeting, barely perceptible trace that receded from moment to moment. Suddenly there was complete darkness. His presence had vanished for good.
He regained his footing when he realized that he remembered the colors, the sound of footsteps in the vaulted entrance to the Episcopal Residence in Wurzburg, the rough grain of the stalagmites at Padirac, the pungent smell of the cellars and the bland smell of the caves, the salty taste of saltpeter, the wadded sensation of snow underfoot. He reeled in these traces of presence and, in this place carpeted with defunct and miraculously resurrected sensations, the light dawned again, the milky light of midnight in a South Jutland forest, where he was walking with you in June. The sea between the pines seemed phosphorescent, and every now and then, through a wider gap, one could see the enormous globe of the sun, with a very extinguished glow, floating above the horizon line. Streams flowing down to the beach crossed the path, and he realized that his feet, as they sank into the water, had the magical power to awaken a silvery luminescence, which faded after his passage, while his shoes, for a few moments, remained impregnated with this mercurial water. How long had he seen himself walking? Through the pink trunks of the Nordic pines, he saw a brighter glow zigzagging in the distance. Was it a mirage? Do memories have their mirages like deserts? The glow drew rapidly closer and soon multiplied like a swarm of glow-worms vibrating in the gloom. A few steps away, he recognized them as candle flames planted at the end of long poles and carried by valets in black suits and powdered wigs, barely discernible in this milky mist; they were slowly waving these frustrating lights, less to illuminate than to comment on a scene he could not yet make out very clearly, but whose shape the candle flames roughly sketched in the air, as if in dots. This is how the statues of the Virgin of Lourdes are sometimes illuminated. He had halted, as a large group was advancing towards him on the same path. They passed without taking his presence into account, or rather they passed through him as if superimposed, and it was only when he found himself in their midst that he saw and understood; at least he thought he understood that it was a procession, and the shrine that the photophore valets were framing with their pious quotation marks depicted, life-size, an episode that at first glance he could not identify with any of those he knew from Holy History. A moving shrine, animated like a tableau vivant, raised above the ground on a sort of bulwark held at arm’s length by two rows of black penitents. She was dressed exactly like one of the eight caryatids framing the clock in the square courtyard of the Louvre, in a very fine tunic that molded her form as if it had risen from the sea, knotted high above the waist, below the two globes of her breasts. Her face, turned to the left, had the regular, impersonal features of an allegory. He recognized Jeanne Marie beneath the goddess’s frozen mask. She was emerging from the pink bathtub where he had asked her to immerse herself fully clothed so that he could desire her, for he loved her. At her feet, kneeling and seemingly recoiling before the goddess on her knees, an angel with outstretched wings lowered his head. Above his long, frizzy hair, at the end of his two outstretched arms, he brandished a lily stem. His wings brushed the ground as the Virgin of Refusal advanced, disdaining to see him. The candles of the robed and wigged valets swirled with ceremonial precision around the group, like a failed Immaculate Conception, Diana rebelling in Mary to reject her vocation as Mother of God. They passed. And then you embraced her with a tenderness that erased their passage. Where did you come from? You disappeared in a breath, leaving no evidence but the trail of your lips. The silence had not been broken for a moment.
He then approached the snow-covered fountain at the center of a large clearing. It was a series of concentric basins, each one higher than the previous one up to the central pedestal, where stood a statue he recognized as that of Latona protecting her twin children. Despite the classicism of Versailles, these superimposed basins resembled a Babylonian ziggurat. Latona or Ishtar? The mother of Apollo and Diana enveloped them with one arm, and with the other seemed to repel a threat, without losing any of her sovereign dignity. On the lower levels, enormous frogs with their mouths half-open alternated with furious peasants, who held out their abusive fists against the divine group besieged on its pedestal. He saw in these peasants as many apostles; he successively identified the Twelve. Judas was among them.
He had ventured into sacrilegious country, where Olympus with its Alexandrian refinements would have taken its revenge on Golgotha. Yet he was somewhere in the middle of Paris. Perhaps in a spectral city invisibly entangled with the other, and denying it. From the mouths of the frogs (monstrous sisters of the ones he was going to watch for during siesta time, behind the poplars that quivered along the wadi, in August, in Immouzer du Kandar) gushed a powerful jet of water that the cold had frozen, and all those half-circles of spun glass falling from one basin to another drew around Latona’s pedestal the bulbous dome of a strange closed crown. Jupiter’s lover took the place of the cross above the crown, as fragile and as locked as destiny. Jeanne Marie is now married, with two children.
He leaned over the inner basin, a sort of instinct for self-preservation preventing him from putting his hand forward to rest on the untouched snow that covered the marble coping; the bottom of the basin was covered with a thin sheet, as smooth as a mirror. Despite the weak light, his gaze could timidly caress the gleaming surface, and here again the same instinct prevented him from seeking the reflection of his face. Perhaps there was no reflection, no shadow, the statues of the apostles and the frogs (frozen by the cold or cast in bronze?) left no trace; the mirror remained empty on its surface, but beyond, in its depths, forms difficult to grasp evolved slowly, like ink blots, merging with silvered mercury plates, sliding into one another, undulations unfolding and redeploying the infinitely subtle values of black and white, and he was left there to contemplate these liquids of different density and driven by an inexplicable dynamism, gently fluctuating, with sudden ebbs and endless fades, beneath the transparent cover of ice.
Gradually, these nighttime lava flows in an extinct crater ceased to appear to him merely as a spectacle; their swirling became threatening, for it was no longer he who was watching; this bath of shadows was in turn staring back at him, observing in the depths of his own eyes the same basin around the same statue of Latona, filled with the same liquid oscillation. He felt himself disappearing again in the interval between these two symmetrical images, melting away. Then a powerful lateral influence began to exert itself, ferocious as a knife forcing open the two sealed valves of a living oyster. Other presences for the first time not far from him, aware of his own presence and returning it to him. With difficulty, he tore his eyes away from the surface of the basin and managed to turn part of his gaze to this side. Three black shapes were standing a few steps away from him, three human forms hooded in black, three sweaty women’s faces, their hair stuck to their foreheads and cheeks, their cheeks pale with an almost unnatural pallor that looked as if it had been painted with whitewash; they were watching him motionless. As soon as their eyes met, as if on cue, the one at the center of the group came forward and advanced towards him. He stepped back along the basin. She followed, escorted by the other two women. They turned in several complete circles, like two clockwork hands irresistibly tending towards each other, and finally came together; just as they were about to touch, the first of his pursuers threw back her hood and let slip her black feather cloak. She was naked. Her very young, very lean body showed the skeleton beneath the thin, white skin, stretched to breaking point like a dancer’s tights cut from supple parchment. Her two companions seized her and brandished her like a figurehead. Still held aloft, horizontally, she leaned forward with arms outstretched to grab him. He wanted to run, but it was as if a powerful force was enclosing him in this fateful group and hindering his steps. All he could do was bend his torso forward. She grabbed him by the waist, pulled him towards her and, turning his face over and grabbing him by the hair, kissed him on the mouth. At the same instant, the fountain’s basins began to turn, each in the opposite direction to the previous one, the ice networks collapsed, and the waters gushed violently around Latona, besieged by a mist of droplets. The three women had disappeared. At their feet in the snow, he saw coins glinting. At that moment, he recognized them. In the alleys around the Marseilles Opera House, Swan Lake was being performed that night, and he had climbed the stairs of a hotel overlooking the square for the third time, preceded by this tall, skinny girl to whom he had randomly fallen in with. The room was low and narrow, almost entirely occupied by a double bed covered with a Moroccan hanging. A small red bedside lamp was lit. Beside the washbasin was a Japanese silk with embroidered birds, the only luxury in this squalid place. Her name was Françoise, like his mother.
Yet he had lived and felt all this, yet he had been the one he saw, as if absent from himself, preying on the crows around the fountain. But the hint of the past was totally excluded, everything was coming back as it had the first time, from the other side, from this other side he had experienced, and not from the place he had seen, and which he might have remembered had he not been on the other side. The invisible face of his life invaded him on all sides like a spectacle, deprived of all trace of the three unities of place, time and action, as if some malignant genius had played in the meantime with these hidden kernels of his memories; light, shifting, miscible, they moved and superimposed themselves with an elusive fluidity, according to an apparently random order, and yet endowed with the same power of absolute evidence as the place of memories. The image of his own body was no exception to this mutation; he could not see it as a simple double of the image in the memory or in the mirror; it was a moving shadow caught in a network of rigorous forces that guided and shaped it as he wished.
He moved away from the fountain. Or did the fountain move away from him, leaving him on a plain sloping gently down to a forest of fir trees? He could not tell whether this was a wild grove or a skillful alignment of trees in an artistic landscape. The immensity of the tree line suggested a work of Nature, but the wide avenues running in a straight line to the same point at the far end of the horizon suggested an intervention by Art. A park perhaps, but designed by a mad emperor, laid out to serve as a backdrop for triumphs beyond human measure, for the avenues that divided the forest into isosceles triangles were as wide as avenues where armies could have marched, and the fir trees that lined them, like so many snow-covered roofs, seemed to await the funereal banners accompanying with their shiver the passage of tanks, ballistic rockets, all the mechanical apparatus of an army without soldiers. At the far end, where all these alleys seemed to meet, and which he was looking at as if he had had a cartographer’s view of the whole landscape, despite the height of the trees which should have concealed the background from him, he thought he discerned a monument, tomb or mausoleum, whose shapes in the distance remained illegible. The snow on which he strode was as soft, supple and silent as down. Aurora borealis light had blossomed in the sky in sumptuous, pink-tinted piping. He walked with the certainty that he was heading for “the Center of the Empire,” although this expression, which had imposed itself on him, had no precise meaning other than to designate the distant summit and monument. Nothing of what had gone before remained with him. There is no memory within memory. How can you remember a memory? He did not wonder about the future. Neither memory nor future; a single reign of presence divided into successive places and levels, with a shift of emphasis that insisted on the evidence of this or that image. Each one was self-sufficient, yet seemed linked to the previous one by a retroactive logic that forced one to go backwards to have the right to go forwards, to go downwards to have the right to go upwards, and at the heart of this labyrinth, with its double revolution, he saw himself going, he saw himself coming, he had not yet reached himself. He still missed you.
It was the call of this conjunction that caught him so violently there, at the crossroads, and time appeared to him as the double itinerary of this return to unity, not a duration, but a delay, not an unfolding, but a retardation. And my story, in which the two twisted threads of their symmetrical journey are knotted together, is a prophecy of their reunion.
The sort of indifference with which he had hitherto watched his own journey was gradually leaving him. He no longer saw himself merely as a foreign actor on a strange, familiar stage, directed by a director whose designs eluded him. He watched himself still walking from place to place, crossing the seemingly scattered fragments of his life along the way, a little more in tune with his destiny as it unfolded on stage, an immense relief building up inside him, on the threshold of the forest, in this distant Russia, the antipodes of his origins.
He stepped into one of the wide avenues, as if between two capriciously carved cliffs, and immediately, for the first time since his departure, a sound, a long, ominous hooting, like that of jackals around an isolated house in the mountains at the end of August, that night when the radio had announced the declaration of war, and he had taken refuge in his mother’s bed in Ifrane. Soon afterwards, without that first familiar sound having ceased, the rhythm of hooves galloping over icy ground, the confused yet regular rumble of a fantasia of Middle Atlas warriors, began to reach him. And a hyena’s cry, at once excruciating and juvenile, flashed at intervals like a bolt of lightning amidst this sonorous hoot. He could see nothing but the two edges of black fir trees and the soaring white avenue to the summit. Silence engulfed the landscape like a block of ice, shattered from within by these three superimposed storms. And then he heard the sea, saw the Gulf of Syracuse leaping under the sun, the waves crashing in a spray of whiteness on the streaming rocks, listened to the dizzying whirl of crickets and cicadas under the pines, and the rumor of the swell and the organ of the sun setting the sky, hills and sea ablaze. Opposite this splendor, on the other side of the gulf, he saw the city tiered around the port, a city of ruins and ashes, the streets strewn with blackened wood and rubble, his tear-filled gaze wandering through the stained alleyways of the old port, and coming across weary, shaggy passers-by; he could not tell whether they were victims or criminals, like prehistoric peasants dazed by the fire and pillage they may have ignited in a hated city, starving in this chaos of rusted iron and crumbling concrete, under the bombardment of the solar flare.
At last, She appeared; at first just a speck at the end of the avenue, barely perceptible in the midst of a cloud of snow raised around Her; and he was amazed to know in advance that it was Her, and to have recognized Her so soon, even before seeing Her visible trace, in the mere rumble of Her approach. She grew with lightning speed, while on either side of the avenue, stone armors surmounted by empty empaneled helmets had sprung up; panoplies exactly similar to those that crown the garden façade of the Palace of Versailles, and whose crude copies, made under Haussmann, adorn the slate roofs of the Prefecture of Police, in the Île de la Cité. Interminable hedge of honor of absent warriors, standing on their pedestals in the snow, as motionless as the trees, so preserved was this place from any wind, any movement other than his own upstream and that of the spirited crew downstream. He could now see the nostrils and chests of the green horses, their hair flowing over their manes and their arms outstretched to maneuver the reins, like the bronze group above the Seine on one of the pediments of the Grand-Palais. It was in the middle of the avenue, with the monument indistinguishable in the background, and on either side the fir trees and armor standing guard in a seemingly endless enfilade. Without lowering his gaze, he saw the flanks of the horses fly over him and the brandished hooves rise above him like a groundswell, and beyond the flood that seemed to engulf him, he saw for a flash Her face, the arc of Her eyebrows, the arc of Her lips; he heard Her voice as if from the depths of a conch shell, giving indistinct orders over the rumble of wheels and gallop, and he plunged forward with a kind of savage contentment. By the time he emerged, the chariot was already turning around, a pack of wolves streaming back towards Her as if to gain new momentum with Her. The armor was still there, as empty as skeletons on the winter landscape. She attacked again, furious, but without hatred, as if by play; he barely had time to hide his eyes behind his right forearm, in a gesture as much of piety as of instinctive protection; the Amazon and her green bronze carriage were surging. Horses whinnied, wolves howled, women’s cries that he was hearing for the first time extinguished what silence remained, and above the storm, the same imperious voice triumphed. This time, he was swept away by the irresistible tide, rolled several times over himself, gasped for breath; he could no longer see or hear; he was no more than a drop carried by the ocean’s ebb; and he found himself lying on his side like a drowning man, abandoned on the snowy shore as smooth and scorching as the fine sand of Tangier beach. When he opened his eyes, the chariot had disappeared upstream, behind the monument that crowned the hill.
The wolves were still there, a few meters away from him, each held on a leash by a tall, sparse-haired woman whose gait was so attuned to that of the animals that they looked like centaurs, neither wolves nor women, walking in a semicircle towards a center that happened to be himself. He struggled to his feet, and on all fours, sped off into the forest. With such ease and agility, he ran—or rather, leapt! Grazing a stone panoply as he passed, he knocked it over, and sank with the lightness of desire into the maze of tall, columnar trunks; the firs had the prehistoric majesty of the redwoods.
Beneath the tall, dark branches, he fled, without a single point of reference, without looking back, without fear, without reflection; all for the sheer joy of the run, with only the determination rooted in his muscles to force his way through any roadblocks that might stand in his way to the central hill. He crossed the frost-laced lichen bushes that sometimes obstructed his path between two trunks with the ease of a thoroughbred horse, but he did not damage them. He felt himself melting into the forest’s flat night, a shadow among shadows, but a moving shadow crossing a frozen people, rooted in itself and not in the earth. His vast antlers occasionally knocking against the low branches made him vaguely aware of his metamorphosis, but he was not surprised; he did not stop. He ran again, as an adolescent, escaping the Gordian knot of the family group, through the cobbled streets of the Volubilis ruins, his agile stag body drinking up space with the same thirst, or perhaps already time redeemed in space. He inhaled the scent of resin. wet with dream dew, with the same springtime freshness, and the melting snow pierced by dead branches; the breath of obscure foliage sensed by his nostrils, all took on a poignant flavor of undivided presence in the wind of the blind race. Suddenly, as he emerged from a long, vaulted alley supported by two colonnades of shafts, he discovered the central square in the light, a vast earthwork in the shape of a truncated pyramid. He paused on the edge, head held high, seeing as if he had flown over it, the surface of the immense esplanade, paved with black and white tiles like a chessboard; and on either side of the playing field, arranged in two rows, two series of tall figures, totems, Easter Island statues, menhirs, but passed through the mill of reason: the cutting geometry of Manhattan alignments. He climbed the long ramp that led up to the platform, and continued to see as if from above the grid network of streets, the crossroads, the rectangular central void, and the long cruel stakes of the Siege of Gergovia bristling in two symmetrical massifs. There She was; he suddenly saw Her at the end of an enfilade, draped in a cape of iridescent black feathers, holding two wolves on a leash, and surrounded by a retinue of scattered-haired, violently farded women, similar to those who had threatened him earlier; the same perhaps, or wearing the same mask.
One of these women broke away from the group, and coming up to him between the cliffs, gliding swiftly over the gleaming marble huts, gave him no time to flee. He did not want to. She grabbed him by the neck, and with a vigorous squeeze, led him to the back of the chessboard, on one of the four sides of the board, in front of one of the two rows of pawns.
She and her retinue, meanwhile, had taken to the streets, and he caught sight of her several times, a small black shape moving swiftly at the head of the troop, heading in exactly the opposite direction to his own. He did not have long to wait. With precise haste, the game soon began. One after the other, distinguished only by their size and a few architectural details at the top, the King, the Queen, the two Knights, the two Bishops and the two Rooks set off. He watched in amazement, as if he had moved them himself by the sheer mental force of his will, as the black and white skyscrapers slid across the smooth marble surface. It was as if an entire city had been freed from its foundations and was playing upon itself, in a solemn, absurdly titular court ballet. As the game progressed, several cities of different profiles appeared on the stage, a series of configurations of fearsome beauty, as if this otherworldly Stonehenge could only subsist in the monotonous ceremonial of its own destruction, in a closed time from which creation, forever banished, left no other exit than the ever-repeated redistribution of the same pieces in a different order. From time to time, a piece that had been defeated, then chased away by another, collapsed with a huge, silent crash, and dissipated into space. Gradually, the playing field settled, and only the Empire State remained on the battlefield, facing its black double and surrounded by the strongest triumphant figures.
The aurora borealis had dissipated, and the uniformly gray sky covered the scene, billowing like a velum; he looked around him: the board strewn with the game pieces arranged in a semicircle around the King sat atop a truncated cone whose gentle slopes stretched to the far horizon, to the four cardinal points. From up there, he could see the whole forest like the black and silver mantle of a Sevillian Virgin during Holy Week, and the avenues that divided it like so many glittering braids formed a five-pointed star around the chess set placed on the summit like a diadem.
The game was over. All the pieces returned to their original positions. The woman, who had been keeping pressure on his neck throughout the game, pushed him forward towards the chessboard, and together they entered the central street, crossing the white and black squares one by one until they reached the central point, at the intersection of two white and two black squares. She advanced to meet him, surrounded by a large retinue. And as She advanced, he recognized his mistake. He no longer had before him the woman who had played him on the slopes, and from whom he had derived his metamorphosis; his twin brother reigned alone on the summit, there all along, on the other side of the game, waiting to defeat him, looking exactly like his sister, dressed in the same green iridescent feathered cloak, his face swept by the same hair. But this hair was blonde. And these women he had mistaken for the Huntress’ companions were the God’s companions, also bearing a striking resemblance to their furious sisters, blond servants of the nocturnal Apollo, the Apollo in exile on the other side of the sun and now a chess player in his sister’s kingdom.
A few squares away, he signaled to his retinue; the Court halted. The God let his cloak slip; he was naked. He held in his hand a lyre, which he brandished above his head, both arms in a loop, like the green bronze statue that rises above Paris, atop the dome of the Opéra. At this signal, his guardian drew a bow and quiver from beneath his long cloak, and with his other hand, increased his pressure on the great stag’s neck to force him to kneel before the God. He then took several steps away.
The silence had never been broken since his arrival on the plateau, but now it seemed as hard and transparent as a faceted diamond, inside which a sacrifice was being prepared. The God was still standing, his body stretched out to the extreme, holding on to the spikes, and brandishing above his head the lyre like a crown; his whole body taut as a bow. His guardian took the wood of his bow in his left hand, drew an arrow from his quiver with his right, adjusted and took aim. The whistle of the arrow split the diamond right through. He was struck in the chest. A single drop of blood trickled down the crack, covering him like a crimson epidermis. The heads of the executioner, the God’s companions and the God himself were severed.
The four squares in the center of which the stag now lay tilted in one piece, and as the decapitated Court looked on, standing as if on parade, the body slid into a pit that lay below the marble. He then descended the steps of a spiral staircase, in total darkness. He had regained both his legs, and was gradually getting back into the habits of a human body, groping and exploring each step before taking a step.
It was then that he felt his hand grasp him. He accepted it, as if it were alms, but the touch of this hand was not protective; its warmth was fraternal.
When they finally emerged from the endless staircase into the nave of the cathedral, the Office was already well underway. They walked up the fluted columns, through the red and violet rays falling from the stained-glass windows; there was nobody on the chairs nor on the prie-dieu. The altar sparkled with candelabras; heaps of illuminated candles were strewn even on the steps, as if for a chapelle ardente, and incense vapors enveloped the choir in an abundant cloud, while the canons, standing before their stalls, chanted. They recognized the same faces in the ministers of the Office, who crossed themselves in front of the golden monstrance, which had surrounded his awakening that night when, as a child, he had been attacked by Arab sheepdogs and had fainted on the embankment without even trying to flee, after having been bitten and thrown to the ground by the furious animals. Swarthy, bearded faces, with eyes that stared back at him from the depths of the Stone Age and hands protruding from long, rough, tawny wool capes. The crystal lunula at the center of the monstrance was stained with blood.
A crypt opened up beneath the choir; they descended. Light streamed in through a door leading to the outside. They saw an empty tomb whose lid had been placed against the wall. Through the door entered, one after the other, three women, hands outstretched, absent and as if caught in a vision. They were followed by three others, who lined up on their side as soon as they entered. They did not speak, but moved slowly, as if inside themselves. They circled the empty tomb without seeing it, their gait and gestures seeming to revert by instinct or habit to a very ancient ritual which clothed their bodies to conceal as much as to express the movements of the soul in the presence of an invisible gaze. From time to time, the maids would bend over one of them to wipe her damp forehead, or help her up from a kneeling position, with movements of sublime simplicity and naturalness, which made of them so many modest and respectful echoes of those holy women. They stood without daring to make a gesture, without daring to descend the last steps, sensing beyond the threshold the dawning warmth of a Mediterranean spring morning, and seized by the coolness of this grotto, where mystery lay within their reach, in a very gentle, very secret evidence, and yet more serious than the pomp of Gods, Kings and Priests.
One of the three women interrupted her procession and sat down in front of the tomb; they could see her against the light; but it was as if they were looking at her face, so transparent was the interior of her soul. The one that followed her, standing in front of her, held her with an almost caressing gesture, one hand on each shoulder; the other two women, on either side of the follower, leaned over her, and their followers repeated their gesture, softening it a little, from a step away. Each of the two women clutched a vase to her breast, which they then opened, and at the same time; they placed the sandstone lids on the coping of the tomb, and as their seated companion raised her head towards them, they poured the contents of the vases, very pure water scented with rosemary, onto her offered face in one movement, the breath of which immediately filled the grotto. The water wetted the veil, trickled down her face and ran into the woman’s hands, which were open in a corolla under her chin. The two women then each took their companion under one arm, lifted her up and kissed her, one after the other, before their eyes, with infinite tenderness. They then put the lids back on the two empty vessels and set off again, all three of them escorted by their followers, with the woman who had received the holy sprinkling in the lead. As they passed through the doorway, they knew that love had passed with them. They ran after them, they wanted to embrace them, to throw themselves at their feet; but, all at once, this moment of purely interior beauty had cured them of the grossly pagan manifestations of faith. They were content with the gift of love they had received, watching from the threshold as the procession of holy women returned to Jerusalem, soon a mere speck in the light of the rising sun, calmly, nobly, as it wound its way through the hills, past fig and olive trees and bushes bristling with long, fleshy thorns. They stepped out onto the threshold. The corridor was still lit. The neighbor was still there, smiling.
Claude Delidel id est Marc Fumaroli
Featured: Hélène Glorifiée (Helen Glorified), by Gustave Moreau; painted ca. 1896-1897.
