The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 12

  And the misfortune was that no other biological power was rising up to oppose to the practices of that maniac the benefits of death. Humans had demanded it, to be sure, but only thinking of the death of their neighbor: an egotism that Théophraste shared, deep down, he who had been the origin of the universal malfeasance. Was it not in that first experiment in his clinic that Tornada had inaugurated this mad enterprise of perpetuation, soon to be applicable to all species?

  Thus Théophraste alimented his revolt. What was being effectuated in the square could not moderate him. He wandered aimlessly amid that fantastic harvest.

  He saw one box taken from an airplane that was clumsily dropped on the ground, which split open, and was put one side until an intact substitute was available. Moans were escaping from it. Théophraste went over to it, lifted the lid, and perceived a woman of the lowest class, injured by a shell. She had a fractured pelvis and one leg was missing, the other crushed: in sum, the entire lower half of the skeleton to be replaced. Provisional ligatures had conserved some of her blood, but her tragic face bore the imprint of anterior privations and complete decadence.

  Struck by the daylight she increased her complaints. “How I’m suffering! Why are they making me wait? Take me to Tornada! He can...”

  “What work do you do?” Théophraste asked.

  “I’m a wool-carder.”

  “Not very rewarding, at present, eh?”

  “No—bitch of a life.”

  “And you want to go on with it?”

  “If one knew what there is after...”

  The eternal terror! Science and progress relieved no one of that. That was the reason for the obstinacy of living so terribly.

  Only those who glimpsed the void were resigned to the tomb. Only those who counted on hyperbolic ulterior compensations were called to it. Théophraste had long ago made a doctrine of an equilibrium between joy and suffering on earth. Now, he no longer wanted to believe in it. He forgot his splendid hours with Mélanie. He did not calculate that his youngest children, raised in the school of cruelty, sensed it less vividly than he older ones, who had traversed a prosperous childhood and were able to compare it with their tormented adolescence. Is not happiness a question of relativity?

  Continuing his tour, Théophraste encountered Dr. Tréfond. With his proliferating eyebrows and his jaw advancing his fangs, he had never realized so clearly the type of the race that he butchered so neatly. He pretended not to notice the painter. The latter went on, reaching the flower-market. There, gripped in the gut, he sniffed, like a hunting dog, the odors of long-lost feasts.

  While awaiting the reign of the substratum, a crew of mutes was sitting in the open in front of a succulent ragout, pâtés and tartlets taken from a helicopter stationed nearby. On the table ingeniously carried by a little rolling tray, circling the aliments were flagons of sparkling apple-juice. Percolators were entertaining coffee, a worthy complement to that regal repast.

  Théophraste was atrociously covetous of that succulence.

  He heard someone call to him. It was Von Karl Winer, the superintendent, who was busy seeing to it that the laborers did not lack anything. His voice took on a note of pity on seeing the lamentable aspect of his predecessor.

  “You here, Herr Labastille? You look vrozen!”

  “I’m not cold,” Théophraste muttered, shivering.

  “But you look ztarving!”

  “I’m not hungry either.”

  Théophraste would have reproached himself as a criminal for taking a single mouthful, a single sip, while his wife and his children were crying famine. In haste to flee the imperious temptation, he headed back toward Notre-Dame. The wind was no longer conveying echoes of the battle. The last sarcophagi were absorbed by the transports.

  Tornada appeared in front of his hut, his bare arms washed but still wearing a blood-stained smock. Exuberantly, he announced: “It’s finished! According to the last radio message, the reds are in the marmalade; the whites have won. Those Fleur-de-lys have hearts in their bellies, all the same! They’ve taken the Élysée and installed a dictator there—some Bourbon scraping that I operated on ten years ago. He was fifty then and was dying of actinomycosis. I think I can reach an understanding with him…if not, his kingdom can starve and I’ll reinstate the Eglantine, which seems to me to be the regime of the future, when my substratum...”

  He smoothed his beard. “Pardon me, old Phraste, for having neglected you. I was gathering provisions, you understand. Now that I have the meat on the shelf for a while, I’m all yours. I can ask you what you’re doing now. You’re no longer a painter, then, and dress like a vagabond? And the Nymph and the microbes, are they swarming as you’d like?”

  Théophraste would have hurled his rancor and resentment at him, but there was no reckoning with Tornada like that. Cunning would be more successful. He was accessible. Besides which, fissures were weakening his rude armor. Sensitivity was brooding in that strange man, in spite of everything...

  He took him by the shoulders. “Do you know, old Nada, that they’re languishing without you? Only yesterday, Récamier, my second youngest, was asking for you. ‘We don’t see grandfather Nada anymore,’ she said.” Persuasively, he added: “You ought to come to see us. Let’s go as far as that. A little walk will do you good.”

  “Hey, Superintendent, cut the protection!” Tornada ordered Von Winer, who was passing.

  The order was immediately carried out. The movement of a handle neutralized the cable. Tornada replaced his smock with a pelisse and they strolled tranquilly, arm in arm, across the river into the almost deserted Rue Saint-Jacques.

  Chapter IX

  Tornada had not set foot in Paris for a long time. Entirely devoted to his frantic work, in his laboratories and his operating theaters, limiting his radio-vision to his own domain, hypnotized by his statistics, which revealed to him the results of magnificent overpopulation, he scarcely took any interest in the political consequences of his fever of survival. All he knew about revolutions was that they produced victims to reanimate, restore and rejuvenate. He knew that he was untouchable, standing on the rock of his science, sheltered from social convulsions by a compromise between peoples and himself. His immense possessions, his oil-wells and his iron and platinum mines were respected, wherever they were. He demanded no more than that from the rest of the world.

  He was, therefore, astonished to observe that Paris was half-destroyed, that the ruins of dynamited monuments were still there, and that the great drama had passed without anyone bothering to scar its wounds. And now that, following the Rue Saint-Jacques on the arm of his old friend Phraste, he was rediscovering the places of his youth, his surprise increased as he saw them in a state of indescribable dilapidation. They skirted the razed Sorbonne, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, holed in a thousand places, and the domeless Panthéon. Further on, near the intersection of the Boulevards Saint-Michel and de Port-Royal, the innocent shell of the Bal Bullier was no longer standing, save for a few sections of walls in faded colors, where there had once been light and music—where, once a week, he had danced crazy jigs with Phraste for a partner.

  “It’s incredible!” he muttered. “All collapsed! Hasn’t there been any reconstruction anywhere?”

  “With what money would they have done it?”

  “But the population’s increasing! Where do people sleep?”

  “In cellars, in the catacombs, in the sewers...everywhere there are rats.”

  “I didn’t know…I didn’t know!”

  “You had more important things to think about…,” Théophraste agreed, slyly.

  At the end of the Rue Saint-Jacques, however, which the painter had intentionally followed in its entirety, on arriving at the Boulevard du Montparnasse, they had to take action to avoid the stampede of members of a military unit fleeing after having thrown away their kit and weapons. An officer brandishing his red sash was trying in vain to rally them; they told him to go to hell. Some were going into houses in order to
transform themselves into civilians, hoping thus to avoid reprisals.

  “There won’t be any need to inform on that lot,” Théophraste remarked, “unless they can hide until they’ve become thin, their healthy appearance will denounce them.”

  “If I don’t intervene, then, they’ll be put to death?”

  “Oh no! Repression would be too kind! They’ll be condemned to life.”

  “So life is a torture for all these people?”

  “Look. Listen.”

  In fact, the people, reassured as to the end of the battle, were now reappearing on the street, invading the sidewalks and the causeway, and Tornada was able to observe their exhaustion. In the groups, he heard his name being execrated, his work abused.

  “What! It’s me they’re blaming!”

  He tucked his beard inside his pelisse and pulled his hat down over his eyes. A necessary precaution: he would have been torn limb from limb if his face, published a million times, had been recognized. Even so, insults were hurled at the warmly-dressed passer-by, who was taken for an Eglantine aristo. Only the company of the pitiful Théophraste preserved him from further violence.

  White snowflakes were floating down, which vanished on the ground and rendered the dirt slippery. The light became more rarefied; and in that raw shadow, the misery became more hideous, the revendications more insolent. At every corner the beggars and the cripples recommenced their supplications and invectives.

  To avoid people and things, they hastened their pace, reached the painter’s humble abode, and climbed the five flights of stairs.

  “This stairway is a dung-heap,” Tornada remarked.

  On the landing he opened his pelisse and spread out his beard. He wanted to reappear in beauty before the Nymph and the children. He expected to find them all assembled, in the pleasant atmosphere of a happy, if not opulent, hearth.

  One going into Théophraste’s apartment, however, he hardly recognized it. Nothing any longer subsisted of the décor, cheerful in its simplicity, of which he had conserved the image. Mélanie, standing like a statue of dolor, dominated the penury of the place, the mattresses on the floor, the children lamenting. She was holding the sleeping Joconde in her arms, her cheek still shiny with little tears. Even tidiness, once the old maidservant’s unique coquetry, was lacking, marking her renunciation of everything.

  To mask his emotion, Tornada said: “Mazette! It’s princely here…but your central heating is as little belated. Fortunately, I’ve provided myself...”

  He exhibited a metal box, scarcely ten centimeters square, and placed it on the table. He pressed a switch, dilating a little funnel, to which he approached his hand with satisfaction, as if it were receiving the gift of blazing logs.

  “My solar accumulator,” he declared. “I’ve been trying for a long time, you know, to put Phoebus in a cage, Well, there it is. Biocolia, Phoebus and substratum: I hope that humanity won’t complain any more about the Superman. Now, let’s chat.”

  He sat down on a chair and crossed his legs. “My dears, I’m beginning to believe that I was mistaken about you. I’d like confirmation, though. When you left me, on a vague pretext of health, I said to myself at that moment: ‘They’ve amassed some money and, weary of my altruism, they want to live in clover while awaiting Uncle Louis’ inheritance...’ Yes, that’s what I thought, and it’s a good thing that you haven’t heard the rest. But now that I’ve plunged into your total deprivation…poor Phraste, one could make lint with your trousers! And you, Nymph, do you know that I wouldn’t use your skirt to polish my boots. And these pallets—if that isn’t enough to make one shiver! So, it’s time to have a chat. Will I have time to listen to you tomorrow?”

  He was addressing himself primarily to the stooped shoulders of the father, but it was Mélanie who, in one of those surges of audacity that the most timid people sometimes have, became the advocate of the cause.

  She put Joconde down on her mattress. With a finger on her lips she bade her brothers and sisters to be silent. Then, coming to stand in front of the Master of Destiny, she said: “Well, yes, we had other motives. Principally, we had one. Théophraste wouldn’t tell you. It was however, him who made the decision to leave you, to run away. Me, I would have stayed, for the little ones…and that motive was that, in serving you, we were conscious of participating in something evil. I say the word, and I repeat it: evil! Evil!”

  Tornada was foraging frantically in his beard. His blinking slowed down. Without paying any heed to these redoubtable warning signs, however, Mélanie went on.

  “You need to hear the truth, for once. You’ve been blinded by your work. You don’t see it and people hide it from you. For you, people only aim the telescope at the aspects of the world that flatter you. We did it too, when we were out there. We did it out of affection, but that doesn’t diminish our fault. No matter. Listen carefully to this; I’m speaking honestly and frankly...”

  She raised her voice. “All your inventions for the wellbeing of humans produce exactly the opposite effect. You’ve worked for their misfortune.”

  Cut to the quick of his megalomania, Tornada got up to leave. But she took him by the shoulders and forced him to sit down again.

  “I haven’t finished! You’re going to listen to me until I do! Afterwards, you can do as you wish. But I tell you that you’ve missed your goal, if you really were aiming at the one you declared. Look at what has resulted from all your inventions! Too many arms now, in France, in Europe, everywhere, and not enough work. Too many mouths and not enough nourishment.”

  “My substratum...”

  “Shut up! Then what happens? People have got the habit of unemployment, of idleness…and that’s ruin, famine, and, when the malevolent get mixed up in it, Revolution. People are tearing one another part in every country. You only have to look: blood everywhere. America’s resisting, because its people are practical, but it will soon follow the example. So that’s the result. And that’s why we left.

  “But there was another reason for me, more elevated. Try to understand. You see, my good Monsieur, one doesn’t remake the work of the Creator. God, in his wisdom, has decided that we must die: why are you going against his will? Don’t you know, then, that what scientists arrange, God deranges? That if they suppress one malady, God sends another? Isn’t he bound to punish a humanity eaten away by materialism? And you have the pretention to go against him? That’s too much pride, my good Monsieur!”

  Belief, Tornada did not share: he shrugged his shoulders, and then reflected, aloud: “After years of effort for the benefit of my fellows, I end up with the total incomprehension of my work! She’s a good woman, though, who has common sense. She shouts at me, at the very moment when I bring them, in the palm of my hand, so to speak, my substratum to nourish them, Phoebus to warm them, and soon Phoebe to refresh them,15 she shouts at me that I’ve gone off the rails!”

  But Mélanie persisted: “Pride, yes, for the sake of pride! Oh, I know that you can pull out yet more—but where will that lead us? Do you think that you can, with impunity, get rid of the effort, the labor and the suffering imposed on us by the good God? No! No! All your tricks are only good for softening and perverting humanity! Happiness, you see, is a salary. You have to deserve it to receive it. In any case, it can’t be collected on earth. Then again, what you’ll never find, is a means to make people love one another.”

  Tornada clicked his tongue softly. He was, however, shaken, not by his accuser’s humble arguments but by the ardent conviction she put into them. Coming after the revelations of the street, that mother’s protest, which he judged to be reasonable, singularly diminished his laboratory epic. He had, moreover, a soul as strangely constructed as his body. His spirit of domination, his apathy before suffering, his cruelty when it was a matter of succeeding in his scientific endeavors, were supplemented, without his being aware of it and with regard to the smallest objects, by spontaneous sentimental reactions. He then became as accessible to pity as he had been implacable
and cruel in conducting his experiments. Furthermore, nothing could have contributed more to that abrupt reversal of direction than the atrocious poverty he observed in the home of his friends.

  He searched nevertheless for support from Théophraste, and continued to snigger as he turned to him. But the painter, following his wife’s lead, dared to offer a similar judgment.

  “From the point of view of happiness, your work is nothing but a blunder. The overly rapid evolution of a species that isn’t prepared for it is fatally condemned to failure. It requires centuries. Your serum and your patching up are a monumental blunder.”

  When the unpolished Mélanie declared his work a failure, Tornada was able to smile—but Phraste, the painter of Nymphs?

  After her oratorical effort, Mélanie had prudently retrenched. She waited. She regretted her vivacity. How could she repair her imprudence? An instinctive feminine cunning soon advised her. Tornada was not insensible to incense. She swung the thurible.

  “What are you saying, Phraste? Genius doesn’t commit blunders! But it can be unaware that it’s merely an instrument in the hands of God!”

  Her flattery took immediate effect. Tornada smiled agreeably—but he could not be converted as easily as that. Mélanie understood that she had only obtained a partial success. Then, with a discreet sign of the cross, she requested divine intervention.

  And it was accorded to her, through the medium of Joconde.

  The child had just woken up. She stood up, already so fragile, so diaphanous and so faded that Tornada considered her at first with the curiosity of a physician confronted with a pathological case. He put her on his knee, astonished by her feeble weight, examined her pale conjunctivas, and felt her limbs, where the bones were jutting beneath the flesh.