The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Page 17

  They came in on tiptoe. I divined the imprecise disturbance, the mixture of curiosity and confused emotion that the sight of me must cast into the heart of my child. She was four years old! All my adoration for her mother, and all my pity for her, suddenly welled up within me. Never had I cast so precious a glance over the immensity of my past with the one who had gone away, leaving me that creation of her flesh.

  O my sweet Emeline, your eyes were veiled at the moment when those of our child opened to the light of the world. O my dear Ninette, your first whimpers accompanied your mother’s last gasps. I took you away, Ninette, poor little thing, from her livid being, and I swore that I would no longer devote myself to anyone but you. Had I kept my oath?

  Oh, certainly, I was immediately enslaved by your weakness; I was proud that your first smile was for me; I submitted to the charm of your awkward movements; I knew the fear of your benign fevers; it was to me that you extended your arms in preference to all others, and I stopped work to listen to your chirping, to calm your fits of temper, to watch your disordered gestures as you splashed in the bath-water. Then I wrote down your delightful neologisms, in order not to forget them.

  But had I kept my oath; had I fulfilled my mission, from the day when the stranger came into our hearth: the sorceress who was dining on champagne at this moment…?

  “I shall be her mother before anything else!” Lucienne had said to me.

  Ah! Well, yes, her maternity had been brief. A few days later, we had engaged Mademoiselle Robin.

  And as if to increase my remorse further, I heard the sweet chatter of my child, posing her eternal questions:

  “Gone to byebyes, Papa, has he, Mamoiselle?”

  “Yes, my darling, he’s gone to byebyes…the great byebyes!”

  “Why gone to byebyes?”

  “Because he’s tired.”

  “Going out, my Papa?”

  “No, my darling.”

  “I say yes! See his lovely shirt, his fine coat! Isn’t to go byebyes, is it, Mamoiselle?”

  “Yes, my baby.”

  “Go to byebyes a long time, Papa?”

  “Forever, my darling.”

  “I don’t want him to! Wake him up, Mamoiselle. I want to play with Papa!”

  “He won’t be able to play with you any more, my poor love.”

  “No more?”

  “Not ever.”

  “Go to byebyes, forever?”

  “Forever.”

  “Where he go byebyes?”

  “To Heaven.”

  “With little Jesus?”

  “Yes, and the angels.”

  “Ah! Why you crying, Mamoiselle?”

  A sob had just interrupted the child’s questionnaire. She was nonplussed at first. Then, infected by that humble distress, she burst into tears in her turn.

  “Oh, no! Oh, no! Not you, poor thing! Wait to cry, wait for understanding…for suffering! But listen carefully to what I’m going to say. Kneel down.”

  Oh, what would I not have given to raise my eyelids momentarily and engrave in myself the adorable image of that fragile little being, lost in her long night-dress, with her hair carefully beribboned, putting her hands together to offer her innocent soul to me, and to Jesus!

  “Listen…and look at Papa carefully…in order never to forget him... See how handsome he is! How calm he is! How he’s resting in the peace of a just, noble and generous man! In the serenity of a poet! My Ninette, you’re going to be proud of being his daughter. He’s written divine things about you! And then, he was there; he protected you—and now, my poor child, now that he’s gone, to go byebyes in Heaven, who will watch over you? What will become of you, with the other?”

  “Who’s that—the other?” Ninette interrupted.

  “Her—your Mama Lucienne.”

  “I don’t want that! She’s not nice. It’s you, my Mama!”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s you. I want!”

  “You want me to be your Mama?”

  “I want!”

  “You’ll go away with me, if need be?”

  “Yes, Mamoiselle.”

  “Far away?”

  “Far away…far away…as far as Heaven, to be with Papa and you…ask my Papa...”

  O daughter of my imagination, already a creator of dreams, of harmony, what a superb poem your pure lips are singing! Have I ever written anything more lyrical than your desire?

  Then the governess addressed herself to me.

  “Do you hear her, Master? What should I do, Master? Inspire me. If you can read my mind, if you have the clairvoyance of the afterlife, you know that I’ve given myself to that child for a long time—yes, from the first day I held her in my arms. So answer me…answer me as departed souls can…must I leave Ninette to that woman? Or will you confide to me the sacred duty of caring for her in your stead? I would be so happy to do that!”

  She fell silent for a moment, pensively. Then she went on: “This is what I shall do, Master. I’ll open your Dawn Songs…I know them by heart, but I’ll pick one at hazard, in the collection, and there, where I’ve opened it, I’ll interpret with all my conscience as an honest woman, as being your response, the poem that I have before my eyes.” Then, to Ninette: “Come on, my love; it’s time you were asleep too. Say au revoir to your Papa.”

  And the crystal voice vibrated, it did every evening. “Bonsoir, Papa. Sleep well, Papa.”

  But before going out, the governess said: “Blow one more kiss.”

  Then I evoked the sovereign emotion of another such kiss. I was leaving—it was before the bewitchment—for a lecture tour of America. Ninette had been brought to the platform of the railway station. As the train pulled away, her nurse had held her up to me in the distance, and her hands had transmitted to me the farewell of her lips. My throat had tightened; I had to wipe away a tear.

  Does one ever know, when one departs...?

  Chapter V

  Does one ever know, when one departs?

  I had, so far as everyone in the world was concerned, departed without any possibility of return. So far as everyone in the world was concerned, except for me. So far as everyone in the world was concerned, except for Tornada.

  For Tornada?

  Let’s see...

  What was I going to become in Tornada’s hands? What was he going to do with me? What was his objective in injecting me with 222? Was he obedient to his conscience as a physician, his duty to heal? Or was he making me a plaything of his science—an experimental subject, as one calls them in laboratory parlance…a witness?

  And that is how a few vague uncertainties accumulated in my brain, issued with regard to that satanic friend. They took on sufficient consistency to plunge me into a horrible perplexity. I would think about it all night...

  Oh, that night! My first mortuary night!

  But let’s not anticipate.

  Mademoiselle Hélène came back as soon as she had put Ninette to bed. She knelt down beside the bed and was still for a long time. She was praying. She was praying as those people pray for whom the recourse to the divinity is a kind of celestial penetration, a communion with the superior being of their faith—which is to say, without pronouncing orisons, without muttering Christian litanies. She did not ask anything of her religion. Believing, she was above her belief. She was floating in the celestial realms where she knew me to be.

  But sometimes, sighs emerged from the most distant depths of her bosom, reaching me like a personal message. I could not yet separate the human and divine in her sadness. Was I its unique provocation, or did I merely suggest to her the memory of her fiancé, killed in the war? Or had the two imprints fused in her pained soul? I did not know, but she inundated me with the effluvia of the soul I mentioned previously, and her virginal company created a sweet ambience for me. I would have liked her to remain kneeling there for hours. Now, I was sure that it was her who had come after my return home, to offer me that first homage of a tear on my hand.

&nbs
p; She got up, though. Someone was coming. She put on a brave face by arranging the chairs and aligning my candles. She liked order, discipline, and the honesty of things, like that of her sentiments. Then again, she did not want to show any evidence of her interior mourning to the diners who were coming to salute me before going to bed.

  “I haven’t thanked you, Mademoiselle, for taking my place tonight. Believe that no one other than me…yes, it required me to feel completely devoid of strength…once again, thank you.”

  “No, Madame, it’s quite natural that you should ask it of me.”

  In the optimism of her benign mourning meal, washed down by a glass of champagne, Lucienne was unruffled by the icy tone of the reply. By virtue of the fact that she had not reacted one way or another to her subordinate’s impertinence, my grievances against her increased. At another time, I would have repeated to myself that she was a spoiled child. I would even have convinced myself that I was partly responsible for that, having always treated her as an idol. But I was evolving with surprising rapidity.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “Tomorrow, when I wake up, early, I’ll take your place.” And to Madame Godsill: “Are you coming?”

  She had not even thought of meditating for a few seconds!

  “Wretch!” murmured the governess, resuming her prayers.

  Alas! If only I had been able to retrench myself in the ideal, to find there the appeasement of my rancor. But the oasis was closed to me. I was traversing a mortal Sahara, blinded and burned by the sand, without a vestige of verdure, without a fresh spring, without even a mirage. My thoughts were passing on horseback: valkyries that became witches.

  Everything was a pretext for my memories and my suspicions to become more precise. Those valkyries...

  It was at the Opéra, the previous year. Wagner’s work was being performed. We were occupying, with a few of the Duchesses friends, the first facing box. On the edge, on the red velvet, Lucienne’s blonde nape and dazzling cleavage were leaning over. Aromas, her favorite perfumes, were escaping from her, more intoxicating than the music. That flesh, so much admired, was mine!

  In the orchestra stalls, to our right, an individual, a foreigner with a bronzed complexion and blazing eyes—some Argentinian aristocrat, it seemed to me—as turning round incessantly and studying her insolently through his opera glasses.

  That behavior did not escape me.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  But she flaunted herself for him. He accepted his advances. Women say yes without looking at a man. I should not have allowed her to stifle my questions beneath kisses when I renewed them on our return home.

  The memory of that man, never seen again, is haunting me.

  I am sure now, sure. But why this posthumous jealousy. Chase away those anonymous letters, chase away that past! What does it matter? The present is more troubling!

  For I am asking myself: Am I alive? Am I dead?

  And I inaugurate a terrifying controversy.

  My heart is no longer beating, my breast is no longer rising, my limbs are inert, my face is livid. I provoke the fear of death. Tornada behaves as if I no longer really exist. He has diagnosed my death in front of everyone. He has put on my final costume. He has ordered my coffin.

  Let’s see! Could he have committed this abominable crime of instilling a mortal poison in the veins of his best friend, in order to satisfy his scientific curiosity, in order to determine whether the intellectual function is independent of other organic functions and that the brain still operates, when it is no longer maintained by the other aspects of being? I believed, until now, that the physico-chemical reactions of the encephalum, which engender thought, stop with the last pulsation of the heart, with the last breath of the lungs. But why, in fact, should the brain not enjoy its autonomy, like the fingernails, like the pilous system?

  Then again, in science, today’s exactitude is tomorrow’s error! Apart from a few primordial observations, the truth evolves from day to day! And it is the audacious ones, like Tornada, those who are, like him, devoid of all consideration for their neighbor, devoid of all conscience, devoid of all humanity, who expand the boundaries of enlightenment.

  Semi-madmen? No, complete madmen, unhinged and obsessed, tortuously astray but heading even so toward a single goal: progress.

  Tornada is one of those monsters! If he suspected that his mother had a particular anatomical anomaly, he would cut her throat in order to verify it…and her fingernails and hair would continue to grow.

  Oh my God, Tornada has killed me! I’m dead!

  But no: the madman isn’t Tornada, it’s me, for forging the idea that I no longer exist! What are all these physiological dogmas, the cessations of the heart, respiration, and, contrarily, the post mortem growth of fingernails and hair, all these possibilities of cerebral and nervous prolongation, compared with the unique sentimental reason that Tornada is my friend! Tornada adores my daughter!

  Let’s see! He had a fraternal devotion to my first wife; he wept with me over her tomb; he has taken Ninette under his protection; I even think that he’s made a will in her favor. Come on! He would never separate that child from her parent! Old Tornada, an old Don Quixote of the laboratory, an old eccentric at the mercy of nervous disorders, so be it: you scorn my literature; you lavish your irony upon me; you cover my academic ambitions with your sarcasm; but I know that deep down, you have a heart of gold, and that I’m exaggerating in saying that you’d dissect your mother! Never, absolutely never, would you kill your old friend to verify a ludicrous hypothesis! It’s unbelievable, absurd, impossible...

  And I’m not dead!

  However...

  However, I’m here, in my “gala outfit,” between two candles; I have a crucifix in my hands; Mademoiselle is murmuring the prayer for the dead beside me; my coffin has been ordered; Lucienne has thrown away her mask; isn’t all that evidence too?

  I’m dead!

  I’m dead, with a brain that is still functioning, like the fingernails, like the hair, but which, like them, is subject to the ineluctable law of decay and will be extinguished when the body is not longer able to furnish its subsistence. I shall witness its last efforts, the death-throes of my little nervous hooks, the neurons. They remain connected, but there will soon be nothing more than their ultimate vibrations, the desperate appeal by wireless telegraph from a sinking boat, the repulsive disintegration of my flesh, the ravages of putrescence, the swarming of the necrophagic fauna. Then there will be torpor, and the night!

  I remember, a few months ago—was Tornada already planning his abominable sin?—Tornada taking me, almost by surprise, to see an exhumation. I had just published my poem Eternal Beauty, in which I sang the adventure of a lover who kills his mistress, buries her with his own hands, and then, driven by his love, wants to recover her from the humus, and discovers her metamorphosed into a flower: a slightly outdated symbolism, but one that lends itself to lyricism. In the real case, Romeo was an errand-boy in a pharmacy, Juliet a waitress in a restaurant, and the law, informed by the revelations of a jealous rival, had ordered an autopsy to discover what poison had been used to kill the beauty.

  “Come and see the flower breathe,” Tornada had said to me.

  Oh my God, what an offense to my senses, to my imagination, that decomposition of a lover! I fainted...

  Had I, then, arrived at that abominable impasse? Was I, too, about to know the revenge of Nature: Nature, the cruel stepmother, who creates in beauty and destroys in horror?

  And remorse overwhelmed me of having loudly inveighed, in an investigation carried out by a newspaper, against cremation, that noble and perfect fashion of rendering human being to dust, in the splendor of flames! But I had had one eye on the Académie, and although talent is not an indispensable condition of immortality, respect for traditions is the foundation-stone of any candidature. If the sword an Academicians wears could be withdrawn from its scabbard, it would be taken out i
n their defense.

  I was dead!

  I was dead, with fingernails, hair and a beard that were still growing, and gray matter that was still functioning, but the frightful problem of the afterlife subsisted regardless. On what shore would I ultimately land, after the definitive arrest of the belated organs? What light would I see? What air would I breathe? What loves would I have? Would I be the impalpable, the invisible, that persists amid the material, brushing them, loving them or detesting them still, and suffering still from their passions? Would I be a fecundating germ? Would I be a dog that licks humans or a wolf that eats them? Would I be a plant that blossoms in the sunlight, an infusorium that belongs to two realms, a drop of water impelled by a wave, a particle of rock incorporating a mountain? Would I be a star palpating on high, or an inhabitant of that star, reproducing what I was on Earth? Would I be a nutriment, a dispersal, an atom? Would I be a sentiment, a sensation, a sound, an idea, an image, a line, a point? Or would I be nothing?

  Tornada had said to Lucienne: no one has ever been to see; no one has come back...

  No one except me, perhaps, if I’m not dead...

  It is necessary to be lying rigid on a bed, in ceremonial costume, with a crucifix between the hands, to suspect the enormous abundance and variety of thoughts that seethe in the brain of a dead man. I soon experienced a great fatigue, as if I had stayed up very late, under the lamp on my work-desk. My interior eyes were blinking.

  A few preoccupations were still fluttering in my cranial cage. Fortunately, they did not have the wingspan of the preceding ones. They were attached to petty details of my suspended life: a contract with my publisher; a critical article on my work. But a chagrin—that was very human—suddenly reanimated me: Firmin Tardurand, my sole competitor for the Titon chair, Firmin Tardurand, that doggerel-monger, that flat-foot novelist, would be elected three days hence in my place!

  He would stand in for me! He would occupy my seat! He would respire my incense! Just recompense for thirty years of curtsies, genuflections, undignified adulations for the powerful of the Cupola…but profound bitterness for the cadaver that I was.