The Young Vampire, page 22
The sensuality of bringing to life in her a part of the universe that lives in me is a minuscule episode in the immense series of torches which began in the night of centuries. If I had not been here, the Denise of tomorrow would not be the one that she will be. She might even be very different. Her whole environment would have orientated her toward a mental destiny incompatible with that one, and would have rendered communication between us obscure and incoherent.
How much can be introduced into a human brain—provided that it consents! Isn’t it in Denise that I’ve had the best glimpse of the phantasmagoric game of consciousness? Infinite variety. Neither unity, nor continuity, nor homogeneity; sometimes the expansion of a drop of water taking on the dimensions of the Milky Way, sometimes the concentration of the Milky Way into a drop of water; the invasion of centuries or the contraction of everything into a second; a boundless multitude, then a desert solitude, the most powerful of realities and almost total unreality…
In the intoxication of beginnings, every idea imparted to her reappears with the gracefulness of a blossoming. A part of my social being participates in a resurrection—for if I am transforming her universe, she is transforming mine by repercussion. What I give her, she gives back to me, recreated, and by living with her, hearing her and seeing her, I rediscover a way upstream, taking other routes that I once took in following the flow. All kinds of new notions are generated within me—a world of images that needed her in order to be born, a world of impressions whose demiurge she is. What I know, I know differently, and what I feel is participating in an unknown genesis.
I know full well that there is something of that sort in every appearance of a living being. A friend can be a revelation, a mistress reanimates a thousand dying fires and can light a million others. That is the great social privilege: development by one’s neighbor, one’s multiform neighbor—but never, for a long time, has interpersonal development had the amplitude that it has with Denise.
There is a world in which everything comes from her, into which I can only venture as a voyager; Denise is the queen of sonorous waves. In that boundless world, the part played by nature is so negligible that it seems almost non-existent. The sounds revealed by the universe are only noises; if the birds are already more harmonious than nature, the finest chirping of the little russet nocturnal singer is only a rudimentary couplet, so very different from the first human music! But since then, what oceans of living waves!—oceans incessantly increased by the frightful occidental races.
Though very tiny, a Denise is saturated with waves. It’s a gift, and one of the most mysterious. Up to what point is it of interhuman origin? An African, born in the most indigent musical horde and transported as a child to Europe, if he has the gift, can understand the titans of the symphony.
Almost every evening, Denise draws me into the boundless worlds of Human Sound. They have their rivers, their forests, their savannahs, their crepuscular skies and their fabulous nights, their lost archipelagos in the vast oceans, their hurricanes, their rainstorms and the serenity of astral solitudes after the emergence of fauna and devouring humankinds…
At least, that is how, by distant analogy, I interpret their perennially changing existences. There are times when that flow becomes frightening; one feels oneself disappear, losing oneself one drop at a time in eternity. At other times, it seems that there is the most intoxicating promise of duration…
In truth, I’ve never lived hours comparable to those I am spending with this adolescent girl. Close to her, at times, I’ve felt an enchanted peace. As much as is possible for a man corroded by anticipation, it is a happy time. When she arrives in the morning, in her bright dress, a delightful young girl lit up by childhood, what a tumult of admiration! How much dearer she is to me than the most beloved of mistresses; with what ardor I desire never to love her in any other way than I love her now—to be exempt from the frightful desire that will draw her toward the beast. I intoxicate myself with the illusion of a Denise sheltered from the baroque gestures of generation—and I’m sure that she is still a stranger to sexual torment.
But isn’t that the play of an idealism with no real foundation in living beings? And behind my worship, apparently inimical to desire, won’t there be the hypocritical camouflage of the flesh? Impossible to know. Human beings who have been able to produce a world in their own image—poetry, music, art, pure science—have also, and positively, created a transfigured love. If the primitive almost always takes command of it, it also surrenders it; its intensity can become insensible; human-sourced love exists almost entirely in the memory. How many times have I adored a lover almost in the way that I love Denise, while sensing that it is only a truce, and that the beast is ready to leap forth again.
In Denise, the beast does not exist. The realm created by man is completely separated from the animal realm.
Anyway, for the beast (emphatically crossed with the ideal) I have Francine. She has not been able to reclaim a single crumb of Marcus, who is busy with ardent pursuits. She has resigned herself to that much more quickly than she would have done if my confession had not reorientated her attitude to me. I even suspect that she can’t think about her adventure with Marcus without disgust. She is able to recognize that there is nothing significant beneath the tramp’s magnetic power and cannot be alone in knowing that it is an external, atmospheric seduction. When a woman arrives in the contact zone, the man loses the greater part of his influence. Then, if she has antennae—if she is not enticed by an excessive fiction, an astonished Eve—she feels her ardor cooling and is conscious that Marcus is, after all, an ordinary lover.
Who knows whether he might suspect that—whether his prompt break-ups are one of the necessities of his game? At least, by withdrawing in haste, he might leave the woman victim to her imagination, enthusiastic to recover the violent love that she still imagines that she has experienced. Thus Marcus triumphs afterwards, as he triumphed before, while during, he loses his prestige at a rapid and accelerating pace.
In addition, Francine, having initially missed him frantically, while simultaneously tormented by my confession, has returned to me more forcefully than I would have wished. In a sense, she remains dear to me. I haven’t had my fill of her physical person, but she has not entirely escaped their wrongdoing; she exaggerates, in the frequency of meetings and their multiplication, and she repeats too often: “You don’t love me any more!”
These words prick me like darts. I have diabolical difficulty replying to them with sufficient warmth. I wait for the brief sentence with an irritation mingled with anguish and the enervating dread of replying discourteously. If she could only shut up! She’s delicate, though.
Why is she so little given to recrimination? Why doesn’t she know that by shutting up, and cutting out half her visits, she would double the charm of her presence? If she would simply accept my days, or not want so many of them, if she only knew the value of silence, it would be so simple! But she’s like those orators who, sensing that they’re losing their audience, try to recapture it by lengthening their speeches immoderately—and end up exasperating it.
What a contrast with Juliane, tenderly resigned, admirably credulous, accepting the worst defeats without flinching and nourishing her love on crumbs that her imagination transforms into feasts! It’s true that her love is nourished by its “elevation”—the real cause, at the end of the day, of its endurance.
This Friday was almost intolerable.
The arrival of Francine had been stimulating. Her costume and her person had a violent brilliance that would have been gaudy if not for their complementary combinations. She was reminiscent of one of those beautiful daughters of tropical countries who exude the salt of sensuality, and I spent a fabulous hour in which the imagination and the flesh enjoyed the full intensity of the adventure.
A novel charm emanated from Francine; she was new; her conquest seemed precious and incomplete. At the outset, I even experienced a shadow of the dread of the early days, when I was fearful that she might escape. She would have been able, had she identified my impressions, to strengthen the game advantageously, to taste the fever of flight and pursuit. Knowing that she was very tempting that day, and miraculously adorned, she had, I think, anticipated a lively response, but she had underestimated its value, and responded to my embrace with a passion greater than my own—with the result that we yielded without delay, having scarcely stammered ten words. At any rate, the expenditure was delightful and the aftermath as languid as euphoria.
After a period of perfect silence, with her head resting on my shoulder, she murmured: “You don’t love me any more!”
She could not have said anything more inappropriate—for I loved her at the moment more than I had loved her at any time since the Marcus affair. The little sentence, as strident as a locomotive whistle, annoyed me insupportably and, with an automatic gesture, I withdrew my shoulder.
Surprised, Francine looked me in the eyes. I had tensed up all the way to my ankles; my face must have been revelatory. “One might think you were angry?”
“No!” I said, incapable of containing myself. “It’s that sentence. Why do you repeat it so frequently?”
Her eyes shone with indignation and sadness; she lowered her head and burst into tears. “Because it’s true—and that’s why you’re angry!”
Incompatible sentiments jostled one another, in a furious surge. I felt sorry for her and I was full of rancor; my hatred for Marcus resurfaced, refreshed, and I was subject to the point of ferocity to the annoyance of having been snatched, as if by a blow from a cudgel, from such a blissful moment. So I had great difficulty in saying: “No…it’s not that at all…it’s because…”
At that point, I lost my footing. How could I explain without offending her? It was necessary to take another tack. “I was unusually happy,” I went on. “I was living in the present, with you and entirely wrapped up in you. What you said fell on me like a block of stone. It caused discordant memories to surge forth. There’s no need to say any more about it.”
She listened avidly. “Is that true—that you were so happy?”
“More than you can believe.”
She kissed my shoulder humbly; her tears ran in floods; she sobbed, and moaned: “You’re right…I’ve been an idiot. Oh, my sin! You can’t imagine how much I detest it when I think about it—so the idea that I reminded you of it makes me want to rake myself with my own fingernails!” She threw herself abruptly upon my knees, and cried out in a lamentable voice: “Forgive me, my darling…forgive me!”
I was torn between compassion and an irresistible sensation of ridicule, so touching and absurd did Francine appear. The compassion won. I lifted her up and pressed her to my heart. She was warm, supple, moving, and I yielded, like any common imbecile, to the temptation of a woman in tears.
Scarcely had she disappeared when Madame Donatienne appeared. “Monsieur, it’s the monsieur who used to be dirty and isn’t any longer!”
“Madame Donatienne,” I said, “you’re going a bit too far.”
Madame Donatienne stood firm, massive, attached to the ground like a leaden she-bear. “Monsieur is right,” she agreed, “and Monsieur is partly to blame for it.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Madame Donatienne.”
“I mean that Monsieur is too good—so discipline suffers. I take account of it.”
“I shall be more severe in future.”
She shook her bovine head, with a pitying smile. “Monsieur won’t be. It’s not in his nature. It doesn’t matter to me, because I love Monsieur—but the others! There was a king who said that a master must choose whether to be scorned or hated. Personally, I’d rather be hated—it’s nobler!”
“Show Monsieur Réchauffé in,” I said, rather dryly.
“Fine!” muttered Madame Donatienne.
Gontran Réchauffé appeared. He appeared clad in a brand new fur coat, an ample frock coat reminiscent of the men of 1885, trousers the color of a brown rat’s fur and shiny shoes. Within that, his long skeleton gave him away, more irredeemably condemned to a social life that reproved his gray face and his aggressive eyes. However, that face created for torment and suspicion smiled on seeing me; the orangutan hand shook mine affectionately.
“You see!” he said. “I have new fur, and I’m getting fatter.” He deposited his amusing coat on an armchair and continued: “I’m eating! Every day! Three times! A prodigy, a miracle—I’m amazed by it. I’d got to the point of thinking that the three meals were a legend of the Northern peoples.” He tried to laugh; the laugh did not emerge. “I’ve never been able to,” he remarked. “There’s some animal in my throat that doesn’t permit it. Finally, I’m approximately happy, thanks to the Comte de Mesles, to whom you recommended me—an admirable old beast for whom, old chap, I have considerable affection. We understand one another, like a hare and a rabbit. I, Gontran Réchauffé, am the ideal secretary for that dear old goose. Provided that he lives!”
“Is he ill?”
“Only of old age—which isn’t without danger. In my estimation, he might last 20 years. Oh, long may he last!” Réchauffé sat down on the edge of a chair, then straightened up like a human spring, and took a few absurd strides, beyond humanity and animality—the steps of a Vaucanson duck. “Are you working?” he asked.
“Not too hard.”
“And your ruination?”
He is not someone to whom I shall confide the Bullerton secret. Outside of that business however, the stabilization of the franc and the rise in French shares had sufficiently revived my original capital for me to be able to say: “Poincaré has averted it. And if a few banknotes can be of use to you…”
Réchauffé attempted a magnanimous gesture. “No need, and I even intend to repay my debt. I’ve brought a down payment.”
“Listen,” I said, compassionately, “I don’t need it.”
“I know,” he said, seized by the most insipid and imbecile vanity at the idea of playing the role of a gentleman discharging his debts. He had just deposited a 100 and a 50 on the table. “There you are!” he said. “My chest swells.”
It did, indeed swell; he caricatured himself with frightful grimaces.
“What about you?” I said. “Are you working?”
“Incontinently, in a fever. I’ve reached the chapter on the primitive finality, which is nothing but energy—for energy, my dear chap, and the initial finalism, are one and the same thing.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s quite simple. Matter being a combination of electricity, and electricity in its turn a combination of energy, the latter translates itself by means of a finalist impulse—innumerable and vague finalisms seeking a realization, but seeking blindly, with the property of combining with other tendencies. Infinitely various and disordered in principle, the virtualities, in amalgamating their finalisms, arrive at more logical formations. Logic evidently aggregates corpuscles of pure energy into corpuscles of composite energy, and those into properly material corpuscles—let’s call them atoms. They continue to increase in nebular formations, astral formations, the superior formations of the physical world, and eventually in indefinite series, increasingly conscious—of which life on Earth offers one of innumerable examples.”
“You believe in other life-systems, then?”
“I don’t permit myself to say life, for I conceive of differences without number. In certain worlds our life would seem, to superior beings, as rudimentary as the mineral is to us. Doesn’t our life already suggest to us an indefinite continuing ascension, with much groping, but also with an inexhaustible variety of structures, from primitive organisms to man? In sum, obscure tendencies create increasingly clear tendencies, increasingly clear-cut finalities. On Earth, our human finality is a maximum.”
I let him go on. He lost his footing in the subtleties that he perceived, or thought he could perceive, better than he could express them. Chaotic ideas, precious stones sealed in their matrix, bumped into one another, diverged, then tended to order themselves and isolate themselves, without ever succeeding.
Eventually, he frowned, stopped, and only started again after two full minutes of a silence that I thought I ought to respect. “I’m explaining myself badly. When you read it, if I finish my work, you’ll understand it.”
“But it was very interesting,” I said.
“No—I explained myself badly with regard to tendency.”
He shook my hand hastily and stalked out like a giraffe—which permitted Madame Donatienne to show Yveline in.
That was too abrupt. It required a few minutes of preparation. I think I paled. She saw my pallor with an evident satisfaction, marked by a play of the physiognomy that was slight, but easily perceptible to me. It’s certain that I shall always find her desirable, and certain too that she will always take pleasure in it.
Not only will she not forget, but she will not want to forget. Circumstances have contrived that I should be involved in the only adventure in which her frivolity was in accord with her passion. My person means little to her, but she knows how to make up the deficit. I am the accomplice of her only derogation. Consecrated and inaccessible henceforth, she will be glad to evoke me in stormy moments, perhaps to permit me superficial familiarities—but nothing more.
For my part, the temptation that I will have on seeing her will remain impure, but bridled.
“I trust that your trip went well,” I said—she has been absent for several months.
“Splendid!” she said.
She attempted to display some admiration for places, monuments, works of art, but quickly renounced that arid subject to talk about her sumptuary pleasures. I did not listen to her without pleasure; I’ve always had a taste for feminine frivolity. It’s not that I read very much into it, but excitation for costumes, jewels and puerile luxuries gives me an intense sensation of femininity, and introduces me into an intoxicating intimacy, a nature made of delightful artifice. Yveline’s soul cannot conceive of itself in any other manner than dressed and ornamented like her body.
