The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Page 11

  At the sight of Adam’s second witness, however, I wondered whether I was in full possession of my faculties. It was…guess who? Guy Frappart, in person, clad in his purest frock-coat, monocled, as ever.

  His presence initially made me fear some ambush that would make me the laughing-stock of the beach, but I was reassured when, even before the ceremony, I saw Monsieur Danator slip him, along with the bath-superintendant and the Arab, an envelope to compensate them for their presence.

  Unfortunately, being very nervous, my father-in-law mixed up the envelopes during the distribution, giving the Arab’s fee to the ruined gambler and vice versa... and, well, there was a hundred francs for the Arab and, for the bankrupt, the check he had signed during the game...

  Everything was sorted out, however, each one reclaiming possession of his property, and the ceremony was able to proceed normally.

  I won’t go into detail. Monsieur Danator exhibited the necessary compunction. Adam pronounced the sacramental oui valiantly, and I listened fervently to the clauses of the legal code that made me his slave. When the Maire had withdrawn, Monsieur Danator jogged the other witnesses’ elbows in order to hurry them along in making themselves scarce, but retained Marcel for the religious blessing.

  And the green automobile whisked all four of us away.

  On the way, my father-in-law’s eyes were gleaming while he talked to Marcel, not softly enough for me to be unable to hear.

  “How happy they’ll be, the children! They’ll know amour! For Adam is a virgin, Monsieur…and I like to think that Made is too. So the simultaneous taking of those two virginities will be something magnificent…!”

  The, speaking to himself, although I could still hear it: “My God, provided that he can do it!”

  That private remark made me smile, inasmuch as I had my eyes, at that very moment, on the broad span my fiancé’s powerful and promising shoulders. But if I had understood that those few words “provided that he can do it” had balefully overhung my destiny thus far, and that they were still to do so for the rest of the day, well, I wouldn’t have smiled.

  Those words were, if I might put it like that, the substratum, the underpinning, the crystallization and the concrete formula of the Mene mene tekel upharsin of all Danator’s actions, from the day I had made their acquaintance to the moment—now imminent—when that fantastic conjugal adventure would be concluded. For, veritably, at the moment when the automobile went through the barbed gate of the villa under the gaze of the black academician, we were also crossing the boundary of the supernatural. Sometimes, I wonder whether I really lived the hours that followed...

  But no, everything that I am recounting is the truth, In any case, it’s sufficient for me to remember the phenomena that I had already observed, in the Danators and in their abode, to convince me that what happened was the logical unfolding of a long machination, conceived, prepared and executed with a view to concluding with the verification of that “provided that he can do it.”

  But let’s continue, without further quibbling and philosophizing about a story that exceeds the bounds of sanity.

  Scarcely had we entered the hall than Monsieur Danator said to me: “Now, Made, you have to dress for the religious ceremony.”

  “Oh! I thought...”

  “Don’t think. Let yourself go. You belong to us. You will, in any case, have no cause for complaint. Everything’s ready. Come along, then.”

  He took me into the first drawing room, then the second, and opened the door of a room of whose presence I was unaware, which was, so far as my sense of topography permitted me to judge, next door to the room where the power-generating equipment was located—the very room in which Marcel and I had glimpsed the father and son in such curious training exercises.

  “The nuptial chamber!” he declared.

  Its sumptuousness surpasses anything that a teller of fairy tales could engender. Gold gleamed on the walls; silk flowed over the draperies; precious stones described arabesques on the valance of the vast bed clad in pink lace. And on the ceiling, paintings worthy of the greatest masters displayed nudes employing gestures that I could not quite comprehend, but which must have been concerned with amour, to judge by the fashion in which the couples’ faces were expressing the joy and tenderness of their entanglements.

  In spite of the vulgarity of it all and the licentiousness of the paintings, what daughter of Eve would not have swelled up with pride on entering into so much richness, and proudly thinking: “I am the queen of all this!”

  “Your dress is on the divan. Put it on quickly, Made. I’ll come back for you.”

  “Dress myself, on my own?”

  “Would you like the negro?”

  “Oh! No...”

  “There’s no danger with him, you know.”

  “Even so...”

  “Alone, then…anyway, just a few fastenings...”

  He left—and I recognized, in fact, the simplicity of sliding over my body, which it was necessary for me to undress completely, a costume composed of translucent veils in which the braids were garlands of pearls connected by diamond florets: the luxury of an empress, but the inconvenience of cellophane. I don’t know what abolition of my modesty prevented me from rejecting that transparency, at the idea that I was about to appear thus clad before strangers, before Marcel, and, above all, before the curé.

  I had scarcely finished dressing when Monsieur Danator came back in, without knocking. He examined my costume with a satisfied eye, and then offered me his arm. I imagined that it was to lead me to the altar, but it was for a practice that causes my pen to hesitate...

  My pen, it is true, will often hesitate in the course of the final phase of this narrative; the ink I’m employing ought to be scarlet to match the confusion of my face...but I’ve promised to tell all, and too bad for anyone who doesn’t understand the heroism I’m putting into it.

  No, it was certainly not to conduct me to the altar, but to take me to a secret door, the mechanism of which he activated by pressing the navel of a golden caryatid. As soon as the way was open, we found ourselves in the power supply room, whose proximity I had suspected.

  “Here?” I queried, fearfully.

  “A formality, my child. A simple confirmation, in accordance with our agreement.”

  Satanic agreement! It laid me out on the same metallic table on which I had seen Adam; it made me adopt the same position as him and focused on the same part of my individuality. No apparatus, however; no terrorizing paraphernalia—no, the simple rapid glance, circular and expert, of a scientist in search of a symptom, the glance of a mariner scrutinizing the horizon.

  He tapped my buttock. “That’s all right. It’s complete. You’ve earned your six million. And permit me to congratulate you, for at your age...”

  He helped me to regard an upright stance, took my arm again, and I understood by his gravity that, this time, it really was for the ceremony of the soul following that of the body.

  Back in the first drawing room we found Adam waiting for us, clad in a costume not much different from mine, his sculptural beauty transparent beneath a Greek robe; then, in the hall, Marcel was smoking a cigarette. Incomprehensible friend! He didn’t even manifest any surprise at our accoutrement...

  Forming a little cortege, we went through a series of rooms, and then subterranean corridors leading to the armored door at which, on two occasions, we had stopped. It rotated on its hinges, and we discovered an immense grotto, lit by electricity, at the walls of which the sea was beating.

  “Our laboratory! Our crop-fields!” said Monsieur Danator, proudly.

  The place was magical, mysterious and menacing. It was, however, merely the commencement of an even more formidable lair, which a mass of rocks hid from view. Nothing there revealed to us what it was that science took from nature; the laboratory and cultures announced by Monsieur Danator were behind that heap of flint. There, the profane could only admire a panorama impressive in its wildness, and feel overwhelmed b
y formidable unknowns.

  I observed the same impression in my companions. Adam, his nostrils dilated, was avidly aspiring the air reaching us from the invisible gulf; Marcel was interrogating the enigma with an emotion that made him tremble.

  But Monsieur Danator did not let us linger under the terrible charm of the place. He drew us rapidly along a little stony path into a crypt hollowed out in the stone. The opening was narrow and surmounted by a Christ carved in the rock itself—but about that symbol there was a second, representing a naked woman cradling a new-born child in one arm while, with the other, she was completing the Savior’s agony by directing the flames of a murderous torch at him.

  “Our chapel,” said my father-in-law.

  He pushed us one by one into an arched room that ceded nothing, in the original richness of its decoration, to the other splendors of the villa. There was an altar at the back; two golden armchairs, upholstered in Utrecht velvet, constituted the only seats, reserved for Adam and myself; and a priest, kneeling on the steps of the altar, was so deeply engrossed in his prayers that he did not even turn his head when we took our places. To give him the signal to commence the mass, Monsieur Danator went to tug on his chasuble.

  It was then that I recognized the priest as the negro Ultra.

  “Yes it’s him,” said my father-in-law. “I told you that he’s taken holy orders…so I make use of that from time to time…to baptize my children, for example. He has, for me, the advantage that, being mute, he spares me insanities, and being deaf, he doesn’t store my reflections. All that remains of his former status, therefore, is a certain hieratical beauty, which causes me to forgive him for it. And I even consent, as you see, for you, Made—oh, you must be dear to me!—to help out with the ceremony…sursum corda, olé, olé!

  At the same time, he slipped over his frock coat the white robe of a lay brother. His unexpected appearance prevented me from accepting the nuptial consecration with the desirable gravity. He performed the office as required, however, kneeling down and getting up when necessary, punctiliously transporting the Holy Book, presenting the burettes of water and wine of the Offertory at exactly the right time, even muttering the responses to the ritual words that the negro was not pronouncing. He put so much fervor into it that he did not notice the absence of Marcel, who had gone exploring.

  Soon, the symbolic ring was slipped on to my finger. I was Madame Danator junior, before Heaven as before men.

  My religious demands then being contented, my father-in-law abruptly brought the ceremony to a close, throwing his robe at the negro’s head, and we went to lunch.

  I will not describe the feast again, similar in all respects to the first meal I had eaten at the villa, including Adam’s renewed temerities, in spite of the imminence of the moment that as about to leave us to one another.

  This time, I was convinced that they did not escape the negro, but the poor man’s serenity caused him to rise above the impropriety, for he continued his service without giving any sign of astonishment.

  When I stood up, the ground was vacillating beneath me.

  “Well,” Marcel said to me, “I see that I have nothing further to do here...”

  “Nothing further,” agreed Monsieur Danator. “You could only embarrass them. See how illuminated they are! Get lost, then. Ultra will show you out and lock up the Immaculate behind you…and en route for Cythera...”

  I was in such a state of excitation that I did not realize that my friend’s retreat left me in peril, by abandoning me to those abnormal creatures. I watched him go around a corner of the gravel path in the grounds without a quiver, guided by the servant, and disappear behind a clump of rhododendrons.

  Immediately, an animal impulsion glued me to the lips of my beautiful spouse.

  “Wait! Wait! Not in front of me!” groaned Monsieur Danator. “My God, the girl’s in a hurry!”

  He separated us.

  “Go to your apartment. Get comfortable. Adam will join you…yes, right away, I’ll send him to you right away...”

  I obeyed. Feverishly, I went to the room in which I had changed costume a little while ago, in which the situation now demanded that I undress. I only had a few veils to take off, however; I might as well have kept them on, but my inconceivable nervous excitation wanted me nude, liberating me from the chaste hesitation that makes the hand of a virgin tremble and inspires her to protect her menaced flesh with at least a flimsy tissue. I tore off my dress rather than unfastening it; I undid my hair; and I lay down, magnificently indecent, on the golden and jeweled bed.

  But dare I recount what happened next…?

  I’m married now; I can therefore permit myself, for my spouse as well as myself, all the audacities of narration, all the images of the most realistic truth, on condition that they do not offend, at least in the reading, my own sentiments of delicacy, and that my husband, to whom I have given an honest account of my emotions, as is required between two individuals who have cemented a union as perfect as ours, will not find therein material for retrospective jealousy in imagining that my heart participated in that implausible event...

  But I suppose these documents might go astray, and fall under the eyes of strangers. Well, if that is the case, if destiny dictates that these lines encounter curious individuals other than my husband, or—who knows?—that they are published one day, I beg those who frighten easily to close their eyes until the end of this shocking scene, for it might be that they become too interested in this scabrous passage and that, driven by the evil demon, they will continue reading and, in the final count, discover, to my shame and the shame of my posterity, that improbable event.

  So, it’s understood; I wash my hands of the responsibility.

  Come on, now! All my courage!

  Adam didn’t take long to arrive at the secret door separating our room from one where, a little while before, Monsieur Danator had established my right to the six million.

  God, how harmonious he was in his nudity, similar to mine! His splendor was only marred by a slight wine-colored stain at the place in his loins where, a fortnight ago, the chalky surface had been that his father had polished with so much rigor.

  A trifle! I assured myself. Who, then, can boast of possessing an absolutely immaculate body; and how I am forced to marvel even so…although I’m astonished that he isn’t manifesting his passion in the fashion in which I know it ought to be manifest...

  Nevertheless, he lay down beside me. Our admirable bodies, made contact, fused; and I waited with all my nerves exasperated for him to pour the supreme intoxication into me. He announced his intention; he stammered suggestive words, which I heard for the first time, in order to signify to me that he was about to overcome the timidity inseparable from a first encounter; but—O disappointment!—his transports did not live up to his promises.

  Twenty times I thought that nature was about to triumph in him; twenty times, nature stole away. An inferno of lust, I was burning for his flames; a paradise of kisses, I yearned for his appeasement; but the unfortunate boy was trapped in the limbo of functional incapacity!

  “Come on, Adam, do I not inspire you, then?”

  “Yes, indeed, Made!”

  “No, indeed, Adam—you’re like a limp rag.”

  Gently, he placed his hand on my mouth, and disentangled himself.

  “Wait…I’ll be back...”

  Still in the apparel that the good God gave him, he went out by the same door as he had come in. I thought, at the moment when that door closed again, that I heard a voice vibrant with anger crying in the next room: “White cabbage! White cabbage!” but I was in such a state that I paid no attention to it. In any case, I could scarcely imagine that Adam had gone in quest of his father remonstrance or encouragement.

  He came back after a brief interval.

  Finally! His shining eyes, his crimson complexion and his panting respiration advertised an efficacious enthusiasm; and, indeed, as soon as our embrace was renewed I recovered confidence…but I
counted too soon on the victory; his efforts were crowned by the same lack of success.

  My tender solicitude then became overlaid with irony. “Oh, it’s hardly worth the trouble of being built like Hercules and extolling your temperament as the equal of a prince of the rabbit-warren, only to retain the prowess of a seraglio-guardian!” I scolded him.

  He appeared no more sensitive to my causticity than to my tenderness, and said, smiling: “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ll be back.”

  And he retraced his steps.

  “White cabbage! White cabbage!” proclaimed the voice next door, so clearly this time that I perceived that the door had remained ajar.

  Who could have resisted the curiosity of finding out what was happening in that room? I got up and went to see.

  There, in the décor with which I was familiar, were my father-in-law and his servant, both in laboratory smocks. They had just taken hold of my spouse, and while the negro held him bent double, compressing his neck, Monsieur Danator was plunging a little syringe filled with a colorless liquid into his buttock. When the injection was finished, they straightened him up again, and pushed him under an apparatus similar to a shower, from which electrical sparks soon sprang forth, enveloping him as if with a luminous mantle.

  That lasted for about a minute. Afterwards, they brought him out of the apparatus, bent him over again, and Monsieur Danator labored his loins magisterially with the aid of rods.

  “There you go!” he cried, at each stroke. “We’ll soon see whether it’s true that like calls to like!”

  I couldn’t get over it! Why were they flagellating my beautiful Apollo, the object of my extreme desire? What had he done to them to deserve it? Was I not the only one who ought to judge whether or not he required correction? For I did not think that they would have had the impudence to witness the bankruptcy of his impulses...

  And I conceived of that brutality as the price that I attached to my disappointing spouse.

  But the most extraordinary thing of all was that, far from protesting, far from complaining, Adam accepted his punishment with a kind of pleasure.