CIRCE'S ISLAND by PAUL GREGOR :

 

CHAPTER V

 

"Normal? Abnormal?" - Silbermann muttered that late afternoon, "of course neither of these mean anything at all." "And there are still other expressions in dictionaries for retarded children, such as: "raving madman" or "dangerous lunatic", that are a little more precise. By certain symptoms these conditions can be recognised. Symptoms are the great thing! Some of them are outright proofs. Ad literam. Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probet. Here comes an example and immediate diagnosis will follow. Listen to this proposition. Every European who touches this shore and is not panic-stricken before six months are over and does not run away: is a very suspect case. This striking example is furnished by my own biography."

 

They were sitting in a sombre Spartan study. Some forty volumes of astrological Ephemerides occupied the place of honour on the bookshelves. It was reported that Jung consulted them about every patient. On a white wall: a crucifix, almost as big as the one implanted by the Franciscan chaplain of the Portuguese discoverers. The ritual black leather couch - consequently shirked by Gordan - along with two faded armchairs: the only worldly comfort. (How was that? The Jungians did not use couches.) But here it lay, jeering contemptuously at its reluctant victim. The only window remained hermetically shut in spite of the caller's third cigarette and the host's discreet coughing.

 

("Let her open that blasted window if she is so delicate! I'm not going to stop smoking. I'm nervous. No, just curious. But she babbles and babbles like a genuine old queen nearing her second childhood.")

 

These impatient thoughts were unfair. Silbermann's academic volubility was by no means senile, nor did he look anything like an old fairy. If his longish face evoked that of a horse, it was a rather noble courser with beautiful melancholic eyes. Middle height, svelte, his wavy chestnut-brown hair without a shade of grey. Nothing betrayed his fifty-odd years. He could have been any age between thirty-five and forty-three or four. Did he prefer this penumbra for cosmetic reasons? His gestures were slow, ample, measured, theatrical - but not irritatingly so. Nor was his nasal psalmodising voice in any way disagreeable. ("All the same", thought Gordan, "I could readily picture him gazing into a crystal ball.")

 

"But Doctor, your lucidity seems to have resisted a stay of twelve years very well. Therefore as I have been here just twenty-four months, it appears that my risks are six times less than those to which you are exposed. And the..."

 

"Ha-ha-ha! You and your arithmetic! And what if you were six times as crazy as me?"

 

"That's up to you. It's your problem, isn't it? Especially after all these tests you inflicted on me, beginning with the Rorschach. A dozen at least. Still: here I've been all this time waiting patiently for your detailed conclusions."

 

"That's out of the question. You are too full of yourself as it is. I will say, however, that you made all the tests crack at the seams. Unfortunately the other side of the coin is not so promising. But there cannot be any certainty about you, without a complete analysis."

 

"To tell the truth, it's not these things I'm going to trouble you about. I've come to spy on you discreetly."

 

"Another of your former trades! It must have fitted you like a glove."

 

"Not at all. It's too hard on the nerves. What I'm looking for, after all, is my soul's serenity."

 

"Ha-ha-ha! He-he-he!"

 

"I'm happy to amuse you. It might melt your icy aloofness. I was hoping to extort some information from you about a suspect. I am talking about the Empress - or should I say the She-Pope - of the Two-Cemetery Island."

 

"Oh, you mean that Swiss girl? Ingrid Ehrhard? But she is not a suspect! As the English say: she is as mad as the March Hare and the Hatter rolled into one. In fact … sub sigillo … she should have been certified years ago."

 

(They spoke in German. It is a language that, contrary to general belief, permits plain and direct speech. That's what Gordan tried. Not so Silbermann. He was too much a product of Heidelberg University and too fervent an admirer of the Minnesaenger and 19th century romantics. How could he have resisted the temptations of Teutonic syntax? How could he have refrained from meandering, now and then, along its elegant circum-volutions, leaving, here and there, beautifully coloured puffs of mist, around otherwise clear thoughts.)

 

"Is she dangerous?"

 

"Now how should I know that? I'm just a poor little psychiatrist. Not a budding prophet like you … Wait … now, wait a moment … I can guess what's at the back of your mind, even without any help from black magic! Coming back to her … no, I don't think she's capable of … no, it is not likely that she has done much harm to any of her barmy subjects … After all, I withdraw everything: it would be useless to lock her up, since she long ago organised her own personal ... oh … insular loony-bin. In any other country the authorities would have put their foot down! Not here! Pater Omnipotens!… In Brazil you can do anything … A community of 'scientific and healing' spiritualism! And to top it all off: 'directed by the astral body' of the late lamented Gurdieff!! But all the same: no, no! I am quite certain of this: not a single one of her disciples has become a greater nut than he was before, because that would have been entirely impossible. And as to your devious opening … just a moment … let me close my eyes … I shall divine your vile intentions … Eureka! I've got it! … 'Das also war des Pudels Kern!' ... You are going to entrust a certain person to her 'care' … a very tall, blond … Nordic type … who is bi … I almost said: multi-sexual ... which is, according to my standards - well known to you - so much the better for her … I never held back my views about one hundred per cent males or females. Let her go to the Island - to a whole archipelago if she wishes … She will be none the worse for it … it will be better for her than staying in Copacabana … or is it Ipanema? … well anywhere … under the influence of two charlatans! Whom I am charitable enough not to name…"

 

"Please yourself. I've got an elephant's skin. And, by the way, about nineteen-ten Freud was still a notorious charlatan. For some academics the great Jung is a quack, even now. But you didn't catch my meaning. I'm not worried about Dona Lily d'Albuquerque' s mental well-being. Incidentally, she wishes nothing more fervently than to become, for a while, Ingrid's Man Friday. But what about her bodily health? Is there no danger of St. Ingrid of the Isle's past surfacing?"

 

"God knows! But I do not think it probable. During the past ten or twelve years she has not been reported to have been instrumental in any strangulation ... or was it throat-cutting? ... Yes, I know ... History is not precise about that ... maybe both combined in some clever way? ... No, that is final ... nothing like that happened in Brazil ... neither in a motor car, nor while strolling and taking the fresh air … that I promise you: nobody has ever observed her throwing corpses into Brazilian mountain-fissures ... neither for political reasons ... nor for other, more praiseworthy purposes ..."

 

"I've always thought those tales about the murder of some important political figure far-fetched. Ludicrous. The only divinity she adores is herself, or rather her future image as humanity 's lighthouse, or redeeming beam ... which is to come about very soon ... as soon as she's learned how to walk over the waters ... oh, I got it wrong - over air-cushions. Do you know how good the Biblioteca Nacional is? I've been through the Swiss newspapers back to nineteen thirty-four and thirty-five. Absolutely nothing. Nor did I come across anything in the Bern-Canton. "

 

"Oh no, you had better dig into the French papers. In the Bern-Canton? Certainly not! In those days I was still in Switzerland. If somebody wanted to search the ravines now, he would be better off to look around the Route Napoleon. Closer to Grenoble than to Cannes. Not that he would find much, after all these years ... Now what were you saying a minute ago about her convictions? You are underestimating the chameleon. By which I mean complex characters ... Listen, there is a mirror by the door ... what about taking a good look at yourself?"

 

"I assure you: I'm not a conceited gigolo."

 

(Gordan had begun to tramp up and down the room. This call wouldn't bring him new and interesting details. About Ingrid Ehrhard, or about those in her court. Silbermann was obviously closing the drains of his passion for gossip. With his taste for romantic German poetry, the psychiatrist would have described the act as "the closing of a night-flower before the daylight". There was only one way to re-open the flow of his convivial candour, but it was temporarily out of Gordan's reach. A little distant flirtation would have accomplished miracles. Unfortunately he felt the tickle of a nearing, irresistibly bursting, stupid and pointless guffaw.)

 

(Half lying in his worn out armchair, his legs crossed and outstretched, chin resting on the back of his hand, the healer of ailing souls looked not unlike certain faded photographs of Emilienne d'Alen็on, la belle Otero and other celebrated French courtesans of la Belle Epoque, who gazed just as dreamily into the lens. According to spiteful tongues, Silbermann's games were cerebral, rather platonic. Did he find among the rich local fauna, now and then, more tangible relations? Nobody knew for certain. Anyway, Gordan's retreat toward the mirror was a wise move. The nasal voice behind his back waxed alarmingly cordial. To keep his distance Gordan pretended to be lost in contemplation of the light-heavy-weight boxer before him who was for some obscure reason wearing the pontifical colours. As a matter of fact, the sun had lent to his broad face that same complexion of antique gold which Tiberio had received as a gift, in his cradle. The white suit completed the Pope's banner. Of course he was desperately trying - even at the cost of half-witted jokes - to divert an outbreak of hilarity, which would spoil everything. It was no good. One idiotic idea chased the other.) ("Couldn't this display of the papal flag stimulate still more the unasked-for Silbermann sympathy?").

 

"But why shouldn't you be just a little conceited, Paulo? That's what everybody calls you, isn't it? Even the French, I noticed. After such a short time, you are already more at home here ... more so than I shall ever be ... Oh why, why do you so stubbornly persist in squandering your better self?! Yes of course ... do look at yourself … it certainly is not an everyday sight ... Of course you are not Rudolph Valentino ... far from it ... nevertheless you are looking at an interesting specimen ... a male, yes, but somehow different from the others ... I never concealed my low opinion of out-and-out he-men and she-women ... Besides, you are so gifted ... How many languages do you have?"

 

"Just my three more or less native tongues. Slavic, French and German. There was a strong minority of German peasants living in my neighbourhood, on the Danube. I played and brawled with German peasant kids. But you know all that. Haven't you squeezed my biography dry? To the last drop, I'd say. Is it part of your third-degree inquisition? That's what I've observed. You want to go over and over and still over the culprit's evidence. If it makes you happy, I'm game. I also have a little English and some kitchen-Italian. That's all. Now tell me a little more about the Blessed Ingrid. You really believe she's not a public danger?"

 

"You have forgotten to mention your Portuguese. I was amazed Thursday, during that calamitous theological discussion of yours with Padre Walden Pereira. I am not speaking of your scandalous arguments - which I know all too well - but about your linguistic brilliance."

 

"There has been neither calamity nor scandal. Your little inquisitor is much more tolerant than you. Ah, tell me about that character. There is a real sorcerer for you. Hasn't he overthrown the government yet? Don't forget our appointment with him the day after tomorrow. Oh no! Don't make such ironic faces at me! Of course, as you guessed, he fits into my scheme. So do I into his. But plans or no plans, he would fascinate me anyway. That clown-faced midget in his greasy cassock. What a show: all those ministers and senators, Masons or atheists one and all, listening to him as to some oracle! What's he doing? Is my idea of rehabilitating the devil still O.K. with him?"

 

"What cynicism, what sorry confusion in your head! The Padre is a Saint! You grasped not a single word of what he said. He tried to explain to you that divinity's presence and action is of the same nature, whether It reveals Itself in our souls or outside them, in a way perceptible to our senses. The miracles He performs in our souls prove the reality of those He shows to our bodily eyes. And Catholicism is thereby a unique texture of omnipotent archetypes and symbols which trigger, which awaken our supernatural life."

 

"Caramba! Stop it! Stop it before they burn you as they would have done four hundred years ago! You're about to invent one of those discreet heresies the contemporary Church tolerates. Tell the little inquisitor to look out for himself. About the archetypes, I agree with you. Let us say that certain symbols are capable of mobilizing our subconscious forces. But as to your psychological Catholicism, I won't buy it … By the way, whose brainstorm is it? Your's or the Padre's? Of course, you must have concocted it together. Just one thing, Doctor Anglicus. About your religion. Perhaps it was, a very long time ago, a 'unique texture' - or fabric, if you prefer - of energy-creating symbols. It's nothing of the sort any more. The 'texture' is as thoroughly worn out as the Pater Seraphicus' cassock. Within two generations the Vatican's spiritual influence will have become like that of some World-Centre of stamp collectors or animal-protectors. On the other hand, the Quimbanda's archetypes haven't been washed out by time, as yours have. Your superior smile doesn't convince me. Show me the logical necessity of believing in your Catholic God? I was taught when I was under thirteen that I must believe in His existence because He had ordered me to. A vicious circle that satisfied me up to my twelfth birthday. Not after it."

 

"You are playing with words! These are nothing but sophistries! Did the Jesuits teach you this crooked reasoning? You should have stayed with them longer. Then you would have assimilated the luminous side of their doctrine as well!"

 

"At thirteen I had assimilated enough luminosity to lay an ultimatum before my old man. He was, on the whole, rather understanding, so I went to another school. You want to send me back to the former one? Twenty-one years too late. The Padre has more humour. The idea of reconverting me would never occur to him."

 

"The Padre is no psychologist ... so he is not aware how desperately you need Christian faith! He can't imagine how frightening your psychological profile is. But I can guess it, even without analysing you. The tests are sufficient to point out the monstrous repressions which are devastating your subconscious life! What I see down there in your inner self : it is boiling lava without any trace of safety-valves. This is the cause of your schizoid personality ... of your autism, yes autism ... which is simply what we Christians call pride. And on top of everything, such a heterosexual fixation which ... Oh Paulo ... why do you not listen to me ... haven't I made it clear to you that few ... very few women are able to inspire love in all its purity ... listen, listen my boy ... how could a common female infuse into your soul the capacity for giving yourself ... for devoting yourself to somebody else ... plunge you into the live waters of selflessness ... of Love ... which is the only way to the soul's blossoming ... yes! To faith."

 

(Things couldn't have been worse. Gordan was standing before the closed window, looking at the neglected garden and trying to think quickly of a pretext for a hurried exit. He put an unlit cigarette back into its packet. Now Emilienne d'Alen็on's features expressed suffering as well as missionary exultation. Gordan remembered Harnisch's yarn about Silbermann. Harnisch was the smuggling-truck's driver and salesman. Ex-seaman, ex-German, ex-deserter. After having chosen survival, six years ago, his native Brazil had reassimilated him in no time. In the 'interior' they called him the gaucho because of his Rio Grande do Sul-accent. That was of old the gathering place of German immigrants, baptised by popular irony: 'Teuto-Brazilians'. At one time, Silbermann had taken a lively interest in his psychological profile. After many a fruitless interview, Harnisch had jumped to the conclusion that Silbermann would diagnose repressed homosexuality in every single patient, recommending as an absolute panacea the assiduous practice of sodomy. Only, the naval truck-driver - a roguish, red-faced, and always slightly plastered mercenary - had used more direct expressions.)

 

"Think it over, Paulo ... I know I am right ... look ... for instance ... at your age you still do not have children; That is precisely a result ... well a non-result, of the autism I hinted at ... your lack of affection and warmth ... Mater Dolorosa! Do you not realise what a fiendish egoism inhabits you?"

 

"Just a moment. Doctor! What is the name of the Frenchman who said: 'Egoist is a bastard who loves himself more than he loves me.' ? And then, as far as I know, you don't have any children, either."

 

"Sancta simplicitas! You refuse to understand! You are the one who is incapable of dedication, not I! As for me, on principle ... you hear me? I could have children!"

 

(This was going badly. Gordan jumped to the mirror, feverishly arranging his voguish black tie with the ridiculous pearl in it. He remembered the panacea allegedly suggested by the Jungian therapist to the merry smuggler and he stiffened his shoulders to conceal his mirth at the scientifically sensational idea of Silbermann's lying-in, through Harnisch's ministrations. But he didn't come to poke fun at the doctor. Nevertheless, listening to the maternal, frustrated voice behind him, it was hard to suppress an outburst of hilarity. He hastily tried to change the topic of conversation.)

 

"There are contradictions in every character, aren't there doctor? You declared just now that we may consider the Swiss girl more or less harmless. On the other hand, you often fulminated against her in my presence. You said she was the real cause of the regrettable accident which overtook the Abbot Thomas Feller. Have you seen him recently?"

 

"The Padre Walden uses to call every two days on the Benedictines, at Sao Bento's. He is their confessor. The Abbot is all right ... well … as far as circumstances allow. If you ... yes, if you were obliged to carry around a silver plate protecting your brain like he does ... yes! a silver plate one can see throbbing under the skin of his forehead ... particularly when he is irritated ... which happens very infrequently ... for he is a saintly person ... well, with such a plate your speech too would be a little less logical, don't you think? At any rate it was the fault not so much of Ingrid Ehrhard's as of Gurdieff's false prophecies! It was the Abbot's righteous indignation over those fallacious ... yes, mendacious superstitions that almost killed him ... but in spite of your quite uncalled-for grimaces ... he is still a great scholar and an upstanding ... "

 

"I know, he stands almost two metres in his socks. Don't get angry! I'm joking. I'm well aware that he was formerly professor of Thomist philosophy at the Germanicum in Rome. So, after all, you have come to accept my account of that deplorable occurrence? Well, well, the ways of Providence are unfathomable, but even so I am delighted that you agree with my interpretation. I always thought it elegant, even picturesque."

 

"Please stop fooling with serious matters! Of all your masks it is the Mephistophelian Sneer which I hate most!"

 

"That's the difference between you and Goethe's fun-loving Almighty.

 

"...Ich habe Deinesgleichen nie gehasst.

Von allen Geistern, die verneinen

Ist mir der Schalk am wenigsten zu Last."

 

"You've scolded me enough. Relax. Besides, you're fond of having me repeat the same stories whenever it suits your whim. So be fair for once. Let me relish - aloud - my version of that historical episode which is a perfect philosophical circle. You may refute it here and now, or never again! Listen carefully and stop me if I'm wrong! Ingrid's spiritual director a couple of years ago, was Gurdieff, magus and dealer in mystical-oriental carpets. In the early thirties he empties London and Paris of all their rich visionaries and gathers them at his feet in the forest of Versailles. There he proclaims his own infallibility. As proof, he explains to the faithful that he never learned how to drive but doesn't need a single lesson, and he is well able to dominate that art in a trice, being directed in everything by the unerring inspiration of the Universal Hydrogen. Proudly he seats himself behind the wheel of the community's newly bought luxury car and sixty seconds later demolishes a tree, the auto and his own nose. Later on, our Ingrid tells your exalted Abbot all about it. And he listens and smiles quite seraphically. Of course, he observes indulgently, such sorry superstitions cannot but harm poor, credulous people. As for himself - Dom Thomas - he has no idea how to drive either, but he is inspired by true Faith, and guided personally by the Holy Ghost. Which is of course a quite different kettle of fish. Whence: a totally wrecked Cadillac and that large dark-red stain throbbing under the skin of his philosophical forehead, over the famous silver plate. Brazilian surgeons are outstanding. When I last spoke to him his answers were more or less intelligible. So much the better."

 

"I must say, you are ... horribile dictu ... quite a trial for somebody who ... like myself ... comprehends your cunning designs ... You would not think of asking about the Father Abbot's health ... were it not for the Benedictines' immense riches ... and for your twisted ... yes, entirely schizoid plan ... it's a maneuver born in a most unscrupulous Balkan ... no, Greek ... no, Levantine mind!"

 

"There, there! That's an almost racist outburst. But naturally you're right, in that I'm principally worried about Dom Thomas because he's the boss of an important trust. The Sao Bento convent owns, as a matter of fact, skyscrapers, endless plantations, factories. How could I prevent my imagination from being inflamed by such gorgeous perspectives? There's nothing schizoid about that. On the contrary: it only shows my realism. Besides, my plan is not secret at all. I discuss it with everybody who wants to listen. Twisted? Why, you may even call it crooked, if you like. How could it be otherwise, with all those twisted characters I have to get moving. Indeed, doctor! I find you lacking in Christian charity! Don't you see how I'm exerting myself, and that I'm a genuine martyr to my ambitions? What a frozen silence! Still the 'no comment' - look? Well then let's come back to the Imperial Court of the Two Cemeteries. You must admit that your German romantics would look like silly little boys thereabouts. What about the two newest inmates of the Holy Island? I mean the dashing colonel of the Habsburg-Dragoons and the noble Baron von Etsch. The latter must be very happy. Has he decided which one is to be his favourite cemetery? Or is he going to pursue his research-work in the depths of both?"

 

"Herr Doktor Gordan! I entreat you to stop this nonsense!!"

 

(This was getting out of hand. As a matter of fact, he had an almost forgotten French law degree, but Silbermann Germanised and solemnised that title only when bitterly angry. This call had proven completely fruitless - but it was essential to end it in a civilised way. Silbermann was an important thread in his cobweb. And then, in spite of everything, he was somebody.)

 

"You know perfectly well ... Ah, Paulo ... you know as well as I do ... that Etsch is a 'von' all right, but no more a Baron than I am … but if you persist in switching our conversation and deflect it to ... bend it backwards ... yes, yes ... with your Byzantine cunning … there's no offence meant ... you used the same adjective describing yourself ... then I must ... I decline categorically to be involved in stupid discussions about genuine and self-made aristocrats ... and about their being or not being intimate friends of His Imperial Majesty Otto von Habsburg ... I do not even want to think about those two malignant clowns ... What an unexpected match ... well: asinus asinum fricat! ... but they are zoologically worse than some harmless asini … and I could not care less what scandalous behaviour did or did not take place in Munchen University's anatomy theatre! I had a deep wish to talk seriously to you. But it appears that, contrary to the greater part of humanity, you are not interested in yourself!"

 

"You couldn't be more mistaken! I observe myself with a loving interest. Let us see. What was it you started to explain, about my schizoid tendencies? Do you mean I might effectively go off my rocker?"

 

"I did not say: schizophrenia. I only stated that your inclinations are a little ... well, anyway ... I cannot give a full diagnosis now ... Why, for that I should at least have begun your analysis ... "

 

"Oh, no! My curiosity doesn't reach that far. And then, I'm really too busy ... Oh, Hell! Almost five! I'll be on the run."

 

"No! No! Wait! You are caught in a characteristic contradiction! You pretend to be too busy to learn essential things about yourself ... things which might even save you from ... the worst fate ... yes, possibly so ... But on the other hand you always have enough leisure to pass half your nights reading! And reading what? Mostly things that would have been burned in saner centuries. So you read ... it clashes with the rest ... a man of action, a fighter ... and at the other end: a bookworm! It's a bit odd, isn't it?"

 

"Well, Cortez managed to conquer Mexico, carrying Horace and Virgil under his arm. And Lermontov? Cervantes? There were others, too. In my case it's a childhood vice. Little time is lost. I swallow a medium-sized book in a couple of hours. Now as to the sort of books ... what good luck you're not a censor of the Holy Office! You know that I'm your friend but I could often strangle you."

 

"It is precisely this aggressiveness of yours which worries me most. You are a cultured fellow. I am almost inclined to say too cultured ... but then you repress so many appalling reactions ... some day they are likely to explode and do thoroughly nasty things ... yes of course I am quite right there ... Or have the nasty things already happened? Before? ... I am just thinking of your a-ma-zin-gly heroic past. I can positively smell around you ... sometimes ... some kind of evil … no! no! don't get mad at me ... aren't we objective observers of life? Let me ask you just a single little question ... Of course you will accuse me of re-hashing ... But what is wrong with that? Explain it by my eagerness to fathom what makes you tick ... or ascribe to me a little forgivable mania for harping on familiar subjects ... In short ... you told me that over there, in your Danubian homeland ... exactly as here in the Rio Grande ... there has long been a large German minority. Where are they now?"

 

"Never again accuse me of crookedness! You yearn for a pathetic and dramatic scene, and look how twisted your allusions are. Ah, but I can deliver the goods. Do you enjoy horror stories so much that you re-read them now and again? All right! I'm game! Well, I've already told you there's not a single Swabian peasant left on the Yugoslav banks of the Danube - and what a hell of a good thing that is. A band of hereditary cretins ... and how they stink! You could smell them from thirty metres or so, because they never, never washed! Then in forty-one, under the German occupation, they discovered that their race too belonged to the higher species, and should have more rights than all the others. Including the right to health-furthering exercise. So they started hunting their Slavic neighbours like rabbits."

 

"Yes. Yes. I know what they did. I'd like to hear about what your people did. Particularly your voice and way of telling me about it ... Won't you recount once more this ugliest canto of that Inferno? Go ahead, please! The Germans enlisted them into units of the Waffen SS and they fought against the partisans. Let us come to the dropping of that horrifying curtain ... Do relate again what happened to them just before the end of the war."

 

"If this is a test, it's a very childish one. O.K. ... Yankovitch, a general of the partisans, had the somewhat extravagant idea of having a few thousand of them buried up to their necks, standing in individual holes, in the middle of a huge field. There was no lack of voluntary manpower for the job. Then he let the tanks loose over the implanted Nordic skulls."

 

"You speak about it precisely in the tone of a radio-reporter covering a football match. A highly characteristic tone and most revealing ... "

 

"Did you expect me to shed tears? I've seen villages 'pacified' by your prot้g้s. And in those villages butcher-hooks, with halved babies hanging on them, and the poster 'Serbian meat - one Dinar a Kilo'."

 

"And you think this justifies those thousands of heads crushed by the tanks?!"

 

"There's no justification for anything if that's what you're driving at. This story fits in with your probing my psyche as beautifully as mustard after dinner. What do you want of me? When those tank-exercises took place, I was far away. More than two thousand kilometres in space and two years in time. In occupied France. I had 'd'autres chats เ fouetter'."

 

"Wonderful! Wonderful! Entrancing! But: '... Der Teufel stellt Dir naechstens noch ein Bein!' And so you crossed the burning, destroyed continent like a luxury-class tourist with the most perfect set of false identity papers in your pocket ... probably looking at the horrors with the same air of snobbish aloofness you show me now … It's thus … there's no doubt about that … it's thus you look at those devilish rituals … It's the same gaze you cast into that … fiendish … diabolical future, the seeds of which you are sowing with … your lunatic projects ... Do not mention … please do not boast any more about your objectivity! It is with that gaze ... that gaze from a hell made of frozen sulphurous fumes … that you inspected German corpses … the bodies of the most beautiful young men … yes … and also of the most cultured young men, the world had ever seen!!"

 

(The psychiatrist had jumped to his feet and pointed towards the ceiling, precisely like St. Genevieve does on that fresco in the Pantheon, where she tries to inject the milk of human kindness into fierce Attila's heart. Then he began gesticulating in his visitor's face. Gordan counted quickly. Ten. When in his thoughts he reached the twenty mark, things clarified a little. When he arrived at thirty, in his exercise of self-control, he understood it all. The director of disoriented spirits was most comfortably settled - and not just since yesterday - in the Kingdom of Schizophrenia. Twelve years of peaceful contemplation, surrounded by Brazil's unreal atmosphere, had somehow distorted the angles of his memory. Having left it behind him, so far away and so long ago - he at certain moments forgot all about the world's recent history, as well as about his place and his role, performed in it of yore. All he wanted was to be left alone amidst the phantasms of his imagination: among beautiful, fair young bodies, the embraces of which he would never feel - a thought that shocked him just as much as the invisible barricade Gordan's stand-offish behaviour erected between them.)

 

("And this," he thought, "is the sort of thing I must discover in people I have taken seriously, up to now. And it's this sort of half-crazed pervert that wants to explain to me what is and what is not normal, and even has the impudence to judge such a complicated reality as mine!" He tried to count a bit more: but anger was growing in him.)

 

"Now listen to me, Sil - ber - mann" he said as calmly as he could, "you mix and mingle and mess up a lot of things. While you're at it, why don't you - as you did last week - point out my lack of charity? Do you feel it would be too stupid, even coming from you? Of what crimes have you convicted me? Are you mad at me, because I crossed the 'burning continent' with artistically forged documents in my pocket? Such was my part. It was as natural to me, as hiding in Switzerland and Brazil was for you. As a liaison agent I was just a wave, overwhelmed in a rip-tide. A wheel in a great design that miscarried. But I fought the nightmares, Silbermann. Have I asked you where you were and what you did, then? So let's drop all this. Anyway: I left the nightmares behind me. Here I am now, perhaps facing other nightmares. Maybe I'm serving another great design that might also miscarry. But then and now and all the time: I always know what I want. So try and tell me: what do you want of me? Are you suggesting I should love your beautiful, cultured Germans? Look, I'm crazy about dogs but when they have rabies I shoot them. You accuse me of deliberately cultivating sexual ecstasies? But in my drunkenness, I can still see clearer than you, amidst your maiden-dreams! Take it easy, man! Do you think those dreams dismay me? I'm shocked by few human peculiarities. Yours aren't amongst them. But I ask you the favour ... " ( - and then, for a few seconds his fury burst like whistling vapour between his heavy lips and, as Silbermann's romantics would have put it: "a greenish poison seeped through his mongoloid eyes") - "of coming down out of your pulpit and never again transmitting the Almighty 's instructions to me. Except for that: you know how much I appreciate our conversations."

 

"Wuesstest Du doch, mein Freund wie grob Du bist!"

 

"Im Deutschen luegt man wenn man hoeflich ist."

 

"You would certainly be the crudest person I ever knew, Paulo ... if you did not control yourself so ... so ... yes, in a word ... that's the word: so monstrously!"

 

(The defender of German culture was back in his armchair. Bent in two, he rocked his head left and right as if searching the floor for some lost object. During this short interlude his eyes flashed once towards the crucifix and then returned to the threadbare carpet and to the contemplation of dark corners.)

 

("That did it," reflected the luxury-class war-tourist. "My pointless counter-attack has brought him back to earth. Now he's becoming vaguely aware of the contradictions between his theories and his practice. He's seeking some comfort in his religion, but, like everybody else in his Church, he believes in it only confusedly, half-heartedly. The most fanatical declarations of faith are nothing but the reverse of secret doubts. There: he's all mixed up but he still doesn't dare push his thoughts to the frontier of the Unthinkable, of a care-free, god-free humanity. If only that cosmic rural constable existed! I should ask him not to let me ever become like this one. Shame! Shame on me and my Pharisee's charity! Is this all I can feel for a person who is, after all, a remarkable and tragic figure?! Be that as it may, I would prefer almost any disaster to this one. To get so irreversibly lost between the things I see and the things I wish to see. Between what I know and what I want to imagine. Like him now." Seeming to answer this undelivered speech, the other said in a low, diffident tone:)

 

"This is the greatest of all the dangers which threaten you ... It's the only unquestionably abnormal trait I could detect in you. Your self-control is inhumanly ... I would say: extrahumanly developed. You know that and it makes you too bold. Thereby you venture into a territory where you are likely to be destroyed. In spite of your robustness ... I can see a symptom of real alienation here in your experiments ... well ... in those sexual practices which are ... entirely morbid ..."

 

"I have told you too little for such an excommunication. Anyway, you would never understand."

 

"Let us forget it for a moment. After all ... it's just one of the symptoms which announce the impending disruption of your personality. You control ... with an unhealthy lucidity ... every one of your gestures ... of your thoughts ... and this leads to a scepticism that makes you disbelieve everything ... you are even too sceptical to be a genuine atheist."

 

"Of course I find the idea of a heavenly chief-accountant irresistibly grotesque. On the other hand Bergson and his Catholic plagiarist: Teilhard de Chardin are probably right. There is in life's evolution an obvious thrust towards perfection. So divinity is some sort of ferment inside the molecules programmed for millions of years. Why should I then cling to such a chemical god who is so absolutely uninterested in my belly-aches and overdrafts? No, no, when it comes to book-keeping I'd rather get the help of an expert recognized by the Chamber of Commerce."

 

"How can you do all you are doing … because after all ... you see I am inclined to believe your claims ... that by your foggy financial schemes … and through those ridiculous Brazilian superstitions … and even at the cost of those sexual aberrations, which are likely to crush you before long ... yes, yes ... exactly as those skulls were crushed under the tanks ... no, no ... let us not think about that for now ... Well ... I am ready to accept that by all these absurd means you are endeavouring to prove ... to yourself ... the certainty of life beyond the grave. But how … how can you conceive the soul's survival without the existence of an eternal ... of an Almighty God ... who is infinitely kind-hearted and just? … Where could an immortal soul come from ... if not from the Father ... who created all and everything?"

 

"And who the devil created Him? Who invented the paternal creator or the lice, of syphilis, of leprosy and hereditary cretinism? In the line of kindness and justice there are better products on the market. It is much easier to think clearly without that idea of a God invented by half-apes scared of thunderstorms. As to survival, I mean our capacity for it ... you can very well imagine it as an electrical charge in us, a tension, an essential force, a radiation, not unlike hertzian waves, that keep on travelling through space, long after the emitting device has been dismantled. I think it is bloody well time for us to know a little more about these things. I've said 'to know', and not 'to believe'. People are fed up with nursery tales in which they are summoned to believe under pain of damnation. Do I believe in the existence of this table? Hell, no! I see it and I can touch it. No need of any catechism to explain its mysteries."

 

"How can you be so stupid, so childish, in spite of the brain which was given to you? This table ... preposterous! Where would the merit be then? Where the soul's joy of recognizing truth behind the veil where it was concealed by Infinite Wisdom? And it was infinitely wise to conceal truth because our mortal eyes were not intended to… "

 

"Here we are! Here's your strategy! It consists in charging everybody else with stupidity! Just like the pursued thief who shouts 'Stop thief!' The merit you speak of, reminds me of Balkan mums trying to intimidate kids who hate their soup. 'So where is the nasty witch?' She's stalking you behind that door! She wants to know whether you are really obedient to your mum or if you drink your soup only because you're afraid she'll transform you into a little pig! Beware of her magic wand! So nine kids out of ten panic and swallow the 'strength-giving' spicy broth. As for me I'm just trying to lure the nasty witch into the open so we can see what she's like."

 

"You want to know the unknowable by means of basely superstitious practices! ... You are playing with the fire... "

 

"Of Hell! Puxa, Doctor! Your little inquisitor is less pedantic. He seems to prefer the cult of the devil to the cult of nothing at all. He's also grasped that my sulphurous channels promise more inside information about the mysteries, than all the angelic choirs put together."

 

"You are distorting everything. The Padre Walden well knows what the word ' psychodrama' means. It's liberation from neuroses by expressing them theatrically. I also explained to him all about narco-analysis. Intoxication which blasts the subconscious wide open. Your Quimbanda is just a mixture of these two tricks. Your magic carries people to a degree of nervous strain which is far beyond human endurance ... and, ah ... God knows I am not joking ... that is why it confronts us with devilish features ... yes ... begotten by a pride ... which has severed all human roots ... that is how pride leads to despair … to the strait-jacket ... id est ... to Hell!"

 

"You are pasting labels on bottles, without even a guess about what might be in them. Your psychodramas and so on, serve to expel neuroses. The ritual of my magic is the very opposite: it instils telepathic forces into the mind. It awakens slumbering energies, unknown delights. Ah well. I don't mean to convert you. To have impressed new ideas on your friend, the Padre, will do for me."

 

"You know, I think I am going to cancel that appointment with him. I cannot allow you to intoxicate him."

 

"Don't be funny, Doctor. He is too much a Brazilian, and consequently too polite, to tell you he doesn't give a damn for your protection. He gladly let himself be intoxicated, the last time. So he'll get in touch with me. With your blessing or without it. Wait. I didn't mean any offence. I'm sure he will be, just as I am, glad to have the assistance of a psychiatrist in that tricky business. Hell! It won't be a picnic! Quite a job! Exorcising all those girls … two dozen of your venerated Benedictines! Yes I said 'your' and 'venerated'. Because you never dared threaten them with strait-jackets! Although they're at least as cracked as me!"

 

"Not a single one of them is chronically unbalanced ... You know that Jung describes certain neuroses as unchained demons that assault the spirit ... and overrun it … So after all ... At least I think ... if the considered action is … essentially ... just a psychological experiment … and if the Padre sees it from this perspective ... then..."

 

"His perspective is very close to mine. Never before coming to Brazil have I imagined a nation so obsessed by sex and magic. There must be some connection between these two ways of raving. If so, in that communicating vessel we - yes, the Padre as well as myself - might find the answer to the main question. Can we, or can we not, somehow get out of this skin?"

 

"How deeply I am displeased with all of this! You mingle the most sublime and the most murky elements! And the same happens in your projects. Metaphysics with the backing of banks. Indeed!"

 

"That's proof of my sanity! Does nature ever produce pure gold? That little Brazilian mystic, the Padre, understands me better. And then, our practical aims are identical. Neither he nor I want the Benedictines' property to be sequestered. Still less do we welcome the idea of putting the motor-racing Abbot under a trustee. We should both be deeply alarmed at any restriction of his freedom of will and his economic leadership. So we shall do everything to sink the vile machinations of Monsignore Pallavicini from the Nunciatura. To be more precise: we both oppose the ignominious plotting of the Banco dello Spirito Santo de Roma represented by the aforesaid Monsignore. He dreams of infiltrating the Banco de Minas Geraes of Rio. Because the majority shareholders of the Banco are precisely the Benedictines. Don't you see that the Holy Ghost is not at all against banking transactions? Nor is your miniature Saint so very ethereal. Besides: he wants to spy on his cloven-hoofed competitor's tricks. That's all right with me. Doctor, don't you ever smile?"

 

(The other kept silent and passed a hand over his forehead and eyes. Gordan went back to his armchair. He couldn't leave now. Silbermann would bear him a grudge, once left alone to brood in this heavy atmosphere. Even if he missed his appointment, he had to stay, in order to treat the psychiatrist. The Jungian was an indispensable junction of contacts. With the two Benedictine cloisters and with other key-points of the Catholic hierarchy. Also with the Swiss girl and her zombies of the Cemetery Island. Then, there was the personal importance of this relationship. Where, in Rio, could he indulge in this sort of dialogue? Only here could he discuss loudly - in the course of relaxed bickering - his own secret doubts, locating them and clearing them away.)

 

"Couldn't we open the windows? I'm smoking too much."

 

"Oh, never mind. I wish that was the worst thing about you! The main disaster is your logic … your spurious logic ... I see you amidst clouds of smoke, with lights around you … but they are artificial and pernicious! I am truly … literally afraid that the devil might fetch you away ... quite soon … you and your logic! To get you with your amazing but entirely false spirit … Tell me just one more thing ... the other day, you dropped a remark ... oh, quite incidentally ... about your sexual power ... no! no! Wait a moment and do not jump down my throat! Ah, but now we discover the blushing adolescent in you! How quaint you are! Look here ... you and I ... we are not children anymore, alas! We can talk about anything ... you cannot always avoid … ah ... slippery subjects ... is it true that you establish sometimes … such ... records? Ha-ha-ha ... between the evening and the morning star? Or did you exaggerate a little?"

 

(Was this a new attempt at some veiled flirtation? Maybe reiterating the former offer of a free analysis? Gordan was irresistibly reminded of his confessions during his pious childhood and of the solicitous and unctuous voice coming from the heart of darkness: 'And how many times did you do this my child?' But fortunately, he couldn't detect anything but scientific curiosity in the Doctor's eyes.)

 

"What's the point of such statistics?"

 

"They might well be the key to your psyche. If they are true. But maybe you have magnified reality... ah ... a little ... in a poetical ... let us say, epico-mythical way ... Or rather as dramatists do … of course ... ha-ha-ha: are you not the 'Pirandello Yugoslav' of the French pre-war reviews? That's it! Have you not pirandellised things? Did you not dramatise your story?"

 

"A single juvenile offence, that should have been booed by the Paris public, doesn't give you the right to call me names. Dramatist and poet and what else? Why not charge me with outright mythomania? But my 'psychological profile' is in your drawer. So: am I a mythomaniac?"

 

"Well, it is not impossible, but doesn't look exactly like it ... it's not probable, after all ... You are too much of a megalomaniac to accept the compensations that lies could offer ... On the other hand, if you have been speaking the truth, that makes your case that much more serious ... and then you are beyond the usual anthropological measurements ... ha-ha-ha."

 

"Go ahead. Try and measure me zoologically. I don't mind. You know how much I admire our four-legged brethren."

 

"Ha-ha-ha ... how right you are. What a relief from the soul's burdens a little merriment can be. But then: there is nothing much to laugh about. If we look for a rational explanation of your prowess ... Let us say that your energies sprout from the fertile black soil of your Danubian homeland. And you dare repress them? Paulo! No nervous system on earth would be capable of resisting them! Not in the long run! Not amidst those satanic aberrations! What do you call them? The 'orixa's love'? What are the orixa's? Witches?"

 

"No. Jungle divinities. It's just a poetical, sonorous name. Anyway, your ideas about this matter are too vague. You can't judge those things without personal experience of them. In 1830 several scientific Academies declared that railway passengers would go mad at speeds above thirty kilometres per hour. And anyway: I don't repress anything at all."

 

"All the same, it has to be some repressive act ... ah ... you are speaking about inverted currents … everything considered, it must be some sort of coitus interruptus … Horribile dictu ... and you perform such exercises with your lovely mistress?! Small wonder she turned for help to his Underworldly Lordship!! Or else ... if I am mistaken, please enlighten my fumbling spirit."

 

"Too complicated. I'm not going to draw bawdy sketches for you. No Kama-Sutra for the Sir Doctor Blandish! And as to Livia, let's drop her."

 

"You are an astonishingly prudish propagandist for: 'Magical Fulfillment through Sexual Obsessions'! That is only one of your psychological inconsistencies. There is no rhyme or reason in it."

 

"I'm consistent with myself. A man can very well be possessed of sexual demons and at the same time loathe vulgarity. Verbal details stink. It's a moron's delight to sniffle and ruminate ... filth? oh no: filthy tales! Not bodily dirt: there isn't any. No, the infantile idiot craves for rhetorical dirt. Slimy, nauseating descriptions are just the trademark of stupidity, of powerless imaginations ... Yet, the memories of events that overflow everyday banality can be recalled to life only by the language of symbols."

 

"Ha-ha-ha! Now we arrive at the Gordanian theory of sado-masochism. Priceless! Whenever you stick knives into throbbing tissues ... in the Gavea-Forest - under the Emperor's Table … or over there in Montenegro ... Or in the French Massif Central skirmishes … it's just a symbolical expression of true love! Well, I say ... your mad-house philosophy goes too far ... !"

 

"Herr Doktor, your provocations are to no avail. I'm not going to fly into a rage spitting out the spicy details you're looking forward to. You're not going to hear a word about Livia's imaginary penances … well, more or less imaginary ... and let me amiably assure you that you are drivelling. I'm not in the habit of sticking knives into anything ... here, or in Europe. We had guns and grenades for those jobs. And by the greatest Orixas: there wasn't a trace of eroticism in the Second World Rumpus. Nor in my modest contribution to it."

 

"Maybe so ... but given the fact that for you symbols are everything ... that you ascribe omnipotence to them ... I cannot help wondering … if ... don't you believe symbols are capable of giving a little push to the shaky mental balance of these people? Oh yes, should your pipe-dreams ever come true ... you would not waver for a moment before plunging all of this country ... huge as it is ... four thousand kilometres from the North to the South and as many from East to West … into a deluge of dementia ... you would drown it in mass-delirium ... worse than the children's crusades ... worse than all the roaming hordes of flagellants ... perfectly capable of that, you are ... you and your sym-bol-ic-al vampirism … "

 

"At last! I've always longed for a title! So you elevate me to the rank of a Count Dracula ... But a very reasonable Dracula, I am. One who only goes in for a little relaxed, social blood-drinking. Your caricature of me is malicious. What makes you mad is your suspicion that I'm holding juicy episodes back from you. And also: the very existence of the unknown irritates you. For me it's the opposite: the unknown attracts me very much. Poetry alone can put the secret world of great passions into our reach. Metaphors express more than descriptions. 'Burning desires' and so on. Images do it. We don't go up in flames so it seems wrong. But we feel something very close to it, so the image is alright after all. A worn out, threadbare metaphor, but still truer than reality. For it tells more about our excitement than a close-up photograph of a salivating vagina with hairs, pimples, dribbles and other aesthetic delights. That's why this lecture to you, now, will be quite plausible. Listen well. A desire that is very strong, and also feverishly active ... a desire so powerful that you would call it demented … is bound to turn into sadism. It materialises in pictures, as these are the only possible outlet for it: it creates images. In those images it pierces … yes ... it uses daggers and other tools … it tortures but it does that in order to subdue by this lascivious pantomime - to subdue beyond and across all the barriers of reality ... Of course it enchains and at its utmost: it kills ...to immobilise fleeting love ... to transform it into an object … eternizing it ... taking possession of it, forever ... as a petrified image - under an unblinking, frozen eye. And this fearful poetry also acts the other way round: in the inexpressible, boundless devotion of the maso. Moreover, one looks in vain for male or female principles. There are no clear landmarks in these dim catacombs. Both sexes perform puppet shows in both styles. Helter Skelter. It's just that you, Hochgelehreter Herr Doktor, must be seriously sick if you imagine me plunging Brazil into bloodbaths and whatnot. Even if there was the remotest possibility of my bringing it about. Do you fancy me in the part of some idiotic Nero, doing Indian dances around my victims? I agree to be a monster, just to please you, but not such an imbecile. No, no. My aspirations are different. It's obviously possible to domesticate the poetry of excess, just as lightning and steam have been tamed. That's precisely what Christianity did, diluting the very Jungian archetype of blood-drunk sacrifices, transposing them into the symbolic, cerebral cannibalism of the Communion! Here was a poetical image strong enough to stir the depths of the soul. Too bad for you, but nowadays it doesn't stir things up much. Images wear out. Speak too often about 'the light of the Spirit' or even about the 'Pink Fingers of Aurora' and you'll sound very silly. That's why we desperately need a new language, a new poetry! To revive our capacity for ecstasy. To regain our sense of eternity. That's all I'm looking for."

 

"If only I wouldn't hear so many rumours about your sect of gallows-birds! I'm not jesting: the very thought of them makes my hair stand on end! It literally freezes me ... see ... touch my hands ... why, oh why always those violent excesses ... why not choose the great Calm ... the Confidence ... in Providence … instead of infernal delirium ..."

 

"Nothing comes from the great Calm. Without delirious fevers humanity wouldn't have known a single great saint or a single great artist."

 

"Be careful", sneered the Doctor with unexpected hostility. "Or you'll end up cutting off one of your ears with a razor in order to offer it as a gift to a harlot."

 

"If it would enable me to paint as Van Gogh did, I'd give serious thought to the matter. But that sort of frantic surgery seldom leads to the 'Wheat-Field with Ravens'. It works only if the human engine - that paints or writes or builds - is equipped with a terrific boiler. And the steam in it must be kept under an uncommon pressure. Otherwise the best ships are portbound. As useless as scrap. The steam is the sexual desire. The hot and moist climate here brings it close to the boiling point. So it instills a drop of madness into the Brazilian's blood. Well, let us complete nature's work. Let us bring to life a dozen autochtonous geniuses. Let us over-feed the boilers."

 

"They will explode! Yours will be the first to blow up ... I pray to the Lord to spare you but ... but ... it's necessary to be rude ... you are talking twaddle! All your discoveries are pure nonsense! The desire, the fleshly lust you exacerbate in the course of those ceremonies for paranoiac kitchen-maids ... what could ever come of it? Maniacs and more maniacs! A public danger! ... Veritas odium parit! Maybe you'll never forgive me but this is the moment to be utterly frank with you ... The basest quack is less dangerous than you! What presumption! To stick your nose into matters about which you are totally ignorant! Put this in your pipe and smoke it: sexual desire is unable to fertilise the spirit! Lust can only act on a higher level, after it has been sublimated! This can be brought about particularly by Faith, which alas you have lost! This is all. This is a proven fact. Every undergraduate in psychology knows it! But you persist stubbornly ... pigheadedly ... with your unspeakable ... with your dreadful ... oh! No! no! Let all the ships rust in their berths! It is a thousand times more merciful fate than to be dragged by you, towards whirling … yes, towards yawning gulfs ... towards shipwreck ... towards a material, moral and physical ruin! I am dismayed at the idea of all those unhappy creatures you are manipulating … Including your … your ... that Dona Livia! And those two ladies with your friend the painter ... and the wife of that cultural attach้ ... oh why, Almighty God, why have I introduced you to the Padre Walden? ... and these poor nuns who are falling to pieces right now ... even without your 'help' … You ... you want to cure them? Heaven only knows how many other unbalanced persons are menaced by you ... solely because you dare dispute the scientifically established truth ... warranted by me! By all my honest past as an academic and research worker!… "

 

(What had happened? The host was running up and down, gesticulating, shouting, shaking and kicking the floor like a spoiled child having a fit. He behaved like a passenger on one of those endangered ships which he imagined whirling on the edge of cyclones, typhoons and other unpleasant things. He must have decided that Gordan was disrespectful of all his human and intellectual values and impervious to his admonishments as well as to the warm feelings behind them. The psychiatrist's psychosis was a menace to Gordan's design. It was essential to salvage and reassemble the pieces of the wrecked Silbermann by any means, even the most cynical. The Danubian began his maneuver in an absent, meditative tone.)

 

"Our planet has seen a great many universally accepted scientific truths. The earth was flat. The sole cause of the arrow's flying was the turbulence of the air around it. The blood did not circulate. Not I, but you, are the dramatist, Doctor. You are trying to crush me under the weight of your academic authorities. Do I have to topple you from your pedestal with the very words of your supreme master, Jung? Didn't he write: 'Our modern psychology is still on a very primitive level, comparable to that of the Thirteenth Century's surgery'? So don't be cross because I wouldn't let you operate on me according to the rules of your dogmas (belonging to the same era). I keep on sniffing, like the good hunting dog I am, sniffing at the track I've found. It leads from sexual obsession to bloody symbols and from them to - let's say - telepathic faculties. I've no mind to give up my sniffing, particularly not here in Brazil. I'm too curious. What am I going to unearth? How should I know. Maybe a disaster. Or the contrary. Anyway, there's no omniscient adviser we can consult. Oh no! Stop pulling your hair out! What's the point in holding your hands over your ears! Listen, listen, for your own good! I haven't yet explained to you the paramount importance of the Orixas love for the peace of your: yes, your spirit! Come, let us sit down and talk quietly. The devil is busy elsewhere ... that's right. There, there. It's not really the Orixas' 'technique' that matters for you. It will always be the privilege of very few, very strange individuals. It stems from a fever and it winds up in a higher, still hotter atmosphere. But it is the point where the analysis of your case begins."

 

"But ... but you are distorting everything! Brazil is inhabited by entirely normal people! Here is the proof that you are slipping into acute schizophrenia! Brazil is full of the sanest people in the world!"

 

"Maybe. Anyway you can only observe one sector at a time. Mine is full of nuts. Now if you say I was looking for them, I shall answer that they were easy to find. So their number must be great. Now let us examine this rutting crowd and its bisexuality. Be patient: you'll see what an interesting new light will be thrown on your problems!"

 

"No! no! no! Excuse me ... you said you had an appointment…"

 

"Before leaving I must introduce my friend the ecstatic chimpanzee. Experiments were made and it was ascertained that a chimpanzee, when in heat and short of better solutions, tried to rape dogs, cats and - poor he - even a hedgehog! Here we have a striking example of the monkey's Universal love for all God's creatures."

 

"You are a sadist! I am not listening! What has all this to do with me? We are not apes!"

 

"Are you so sure of that? Anyway, this is how we grasp the causes of those scabrous disguises we can see during the Carnaval. As we said: one of the reasons is this hot climate, which ..."

 

"Nonsense! Rubbish! They are childishly gay, ah ... that is ... merry ... those travesties are just for fun... for laughs ..."

 

"So they say. So they say. However, observing their dances, their gestures, we detect in them such a relief and at the same time such an exuberance ... it gives the impression that they somehow changed their skins ... the men as well as the women ... I repeat: this air is an aphrodisiac ... Why? Perhaps an influence of the stars? You believe in them, don't you? You and Jung. And now we arrive at your personal case: at your homosexuality."

 

"I forbid you! You soil everything! You are not a blackmailer, as far as I know ... "

 

"Of course not. Let me see your forehead. Let me! There, don't be afraid of me ... I'm not trying to rape you ... Hey! Your forehead is burning now. Doctor, see a Doctor. Easy ... easy ... everything will be all right ... of course. I understand you. Whatever you confided to me was meant just theoretically. I can see your point. Your conscience is clear. We are sinners: all of us. Why should a homosexual temptation be worse than any other of the devil's artifices? The more so as all of your emotions are domiciled on a 'higher', an incredibly sublime level. No, I'm not jeering at anybody. Listen to me, please. You'll be reassured, once and for all. It's a grave matter (in spite of my jokes). But it's nicer to relax than to fly into fits. From the concupiscent chimpanzee we arrive directly at the principle of all obsessions. At the way they grow into universal love. Which of course includes bisexuality. And so, after all you should think a little better of my 'technique', which you condemn without the faintest idea of what it is. Without guessing its possible benefits."

 

"Do you ... in fact believe ... that your, ah, method ... is really able to restore youth and conserve it?"

 

"I'm convinced of it. Of course I can't tell for sure until thirty to forty years are past. Now back to the despairing chimpanzee. Unfortunately for him he hasn't read Stendhal, so he is quite defenceless. But we know the celebrated theory of love, don't we? You throw a dry branch inside a cave full of stalactites and after a couple of months, coming back, you find the same banal object again, but now surrounded with glistening crystals, turned into a unique jewel out of the Arabian Nights. Cheers! I see you're interested. Very well: the cave is your imagination. I'm sure imagination is the very highest human gift. The poor little monkey-baby in his cradle didn't receive it. Nor is fantasy his cup of tea, later, when he has become a grown-up suitor. If he were to be endowed with it, he would - after a couple of painful failures - elevate the unapproachable hedgehog into a sublime being. Simian troubadour, he would sing moving serenades and compose love-lorn madrigals, praising the beauty of the virtuous hedgehog."

 

"Ha-ha-ha ... you are a complete nut, Paulo! Ha-ha-ha ... it's impossible to take you seriously … Why, what do we have in common … the two of us … ha-ha … with your zoological psychology? What a hare-brained individual you are! My God, what a pity for you!"

 

"I'm aware of my outrageous talkativeness but I'm entranced by the originality of this prospect! Here is the Imperial Road which leads from the obsessions - whatever they might be - to the catholicity of love!! Harken to the First Gordanian Law: 'Given a certain intensity of excitement and an easily reachable opportunity: everybody without exception - everybody - is capable of any sexual deviation'. Just look at convicts and sailors. Oyez, oyez! Do you know that a couple of days ago I myself had the feeling of … eh … being something of a Greek philosopher. There was a boy, maybe fourteen years old - at Copacabana. He shined my shoes. Well, he was as beautiful as a Moorish prince … no, as a Moorish princess ...No shirt, shorts, barefoot … and the blessed heat … melted gold flowing around me and through my heart … In Europe I should never have dreamed such ideas … but there, looking at his glistening teeth … while we jested with each other … not without some coquetry on his side, it seemed to me … well, I assure you … for a moment the scale of my emotions was extended over new territories and … then and there, I fully sympathised with Alcibiades and Co and all his symposia."

 

(There was a silence, much more relaxed this time. "What a whore you are, dear Gordan", he said to himself. Was that episode true? "Of course, I'm unable to operate with outright lies. Fortunately my truth has so many facets that it's easy to light up the one which suits me best. What did I leave in the dark? The fact that the sensation I experienced was faint, hazy and that I immediately forgot all about it … up to this minute. But I still need this dear old boy. His embitterment is gone and all of a sudden he considers our relations with favourable eyes. This remains none the less a qualified mental prostitution. But what's the importance of it all, compared to eternity?" he thought, concluding this belated self-examination.)

 

"And since then: do you have your shoes polished frequently?"

 

"Ha-ha-ha! Oh no! As it is I'm already crystallising too many things. If I now start to produce an entirely new sort of crystal I'll lose my bearings, I'll be counted out. Maybe later … as soon as I can see whether I've won or lost. Mine is a ticklish game and you've got it all wrong. You imagine I'm assembling some huge 'machine infernale'. Far from it. I'll just throw a little match into the Brazilian collective mind. It'll make a big bang or it won't make anything at all. Later … if your diagnosis proves wrong … I mean if my sanity doesn't go down the drain during my trip … then I might stop, and have a close look at myself."

 

("Oh, the beautiful Balkan cat-house!" he thought, continuing his half-amused self-incrimination, while Silbermann got to his feet, dragging himself, hands in pockets, towards the window of his ground floor flat. Outside the last sunbeams flickered among the shadows of the neglected garden' s luxuriant vegetation. The metallic chirping of giant cicadas seemed to clink against the window panes. Jung's disciple pronounced the following sentences in a choked voice, brooding before his bushes, without turning around.)

 

"I am not going to start my sermons anew … but I want you to explain something. There's still another of your reactions that does not make any sense to me … What is the reason for your aggressiveness... your vulgar banter … every time the sphere of Sacred Truths is mentioned in your presence?"

 

"It's the voice of divine wrath that thunders, through my mouth, anathemas against idolators like you! It's the voice of my chemical and fermenting god, who leads all the Universe, from evolution to evolution, nearer to the divine being that Man is programmed to become. That God - the motor behind evolution - is present in me, too! For here we have at last a really ubiquitous divinity! And he is sickened by your narrow dogma that aims at preventing me - me! from thinking and seeking! And I fume, I'm wild, I go mad when I call to mind the countless generations of poor bastards, who were forbidden to think and seek the truth … because of your bullshit."

 

"What you are impudent enough to call bullshit, is rooted in the deepest convictions of precisely those countless generations! ... It was and is the consolation of millions and millions of souls … Superior spirits … venerable beings bow down to the ground before those Truths … and you … you … want to be more intelligent than the conjugated brains of a Universe full of believers!"

 

"There were many Asiatic generations … at least as enlightened as the European ones … and amongst them a swarm of venerable and superior spirits ... all of them deeply convinced that the world is carried around on the back of a cosmic elephant. Every one of those hand-picked souls found sweet consolation, a sense of security, in that sacred and so obvious cosmology; and the sacred pachyderms sacred back held out, for thousands of years, against sacrilegious unbelievers. I am myself crazy about the elephant and, whenever I arrive in a new city, I run as soon as possible into the zoo, to present him my respects and some biscuits. But don't ask me to burn incense to Him, to light candlesticks around Him, or to bow to the ground before Him, just because someone from His Family, at one time or another, carried humanity on His back. Besides, he would be the first to find my demeanour suspicious, if not hopelessly idiotic. Now, on the whole I'm rather tolerant. There is no point in such tragic faces. Think of the Padre Walden: he's blithe as a lark. Nothing I do or say frightens him. Do you know that our encounter the other day was a real thunderbolt of mutual love at first sight? Probably because in spite of his dogma, he is able to think. He still has the guts to look for new evidence for his cause. He squints over the fence into the competitor's backyard. Flames or no flames: he isn't yellow. Nothing gives the jitters to that glorious little clown."

 

"Tell me another thing, Paulo," said the doctor, leering at Gordan over his shoulder, "do you suppose that your lovely mistress ... well, the Senhora Livia da Fonseca: that she is really possessed by the devil? Are you really capable of believing that?"

 

"Puxa! She believes it!" cried the caller in a triumphant voice, himself coming closer to the window. "It's the only thing that matters. She believes it firmly enough that - sixteen days from now isn't it? - she'll make a community of less talented mediums obey her. The power of imagination is everything. It's the hard core of all other powers. As soon as she imagines him with sufficient intensity: her devil becomes real. Obviously so: because he influences reality. And what I, myself, unrestrictedly believe is this. Imagination can grow so strong that it ... "

 

(- and in that moment he heard his own voice, which was usually somewhat hoarse, but which resounded now like a gong, struck with Gordan's own, entire, untarnished faith. -)

 

"…that it can condense into a matter, as palpable as this window pane, I am touching now. And also I believe that I shall stumble on this new sort of reality, somewhere under this endless Brazilian sky. Then I shall know for certain everything about my upward-striving God, who is fermenting, distilling the perfection of future Universes. Not about his existence: that's obvious. What I'm eager to discover are his intentions: particularly with respect to us, here and now. Is he going to keep his lift's door closed, leaving us here to rot at this exitless dim ground floor? Or will he consider giving us a ride, upwards, over thousands of floors, to the top of a never-glimpsed skyscraper? As soon as this question is answered by positive evidence - by evidence, if you please, and not by some ludicrous belief - then the world and life will be so changed ,.. all of a sudden they'll be unrecognizable … Life will be just a joyous rubbing of eyes!"

 

"You know, my dear Paulo," enounced the physician, this time with a blank, poker face and still staring at his garden, "You ought to hop into the first plane for Paris and never again set foot on these shores."

 

"Oh! Ah! Doctor, this rich idea beats even this afternoon's fantastic rambling! Nom d'une pipe! Don't you realise that this is my paradise? Every morning I'm drunk on beauty! On these wild colours! And then: these swarms of gorgeous girls! Besides: at the present time I'd be a poor devil under Paris' pastel-coloured sky, under its grey-blue opaque gloom. Not in twenty years there could I hope to earn what I got out of the past twenty-four months. Let me also admit that the people I mix with here in Rio may be an odd crowd, but vulgar or boring they certainly are not! Then, above all I have the distinct feeling of being on the verge of an important discovery. Stop your jokes, dear Doctor! Why don't you even think of going away yourself after all these years?"

 

(There was a short silence and then he managed to guess the answer in a quite unexpected way. The physician kept gazing at a point of space, in front of him. The expression in his eyes was again - as it had been at the beginning of their discussion, sad, but there was also a quietly but madly entranced gleam in them. Gordan's eyes followed the direction of that gaze. Before the window, stood two banana trees, with their absurdly jagged, two-metre long leaves. A banana-bud, about the height of a man, rose before a shimmering blue background formed by a narrow slice of the ocean. That Martian bud resembled a lance, pointing haughtily skywards. It consisted of a four-inch thick, gnarled stalk, crowned by a sturdy gland: round at its base, sharp at the top, flaming purplish violet in colour. Ah, yes. With a little imagination it could be seen as a stylised enlargement of a coloured illustration. In an anatomy handbook. Ah, yes. In full erection, at that. The psychiatrist seemed lost in contemplation. The melancholy of that moment moved Gordan. He understood that his friend was living exclusively for his dreams and that he was their prisoner, for ever. He was feeling, like a light breath on his face, the gathering of the weary thoughts, that the other began to formulate.)

 

"Wohl kenne ich dies' Land! Well do I know this land. Better than you do. You can achieve whatever you want here. Everything will be docile, subdued to your wishes. But it's like building sandcastles. The first breeze will wipe them out. To whom do you think you are praising this beauty, my friend?"

 

(Without any concealed grin, Gordan reflected how very different the various notions of beauty may appear.)

 

"Yes it is this splendour" Silbermann pursued, "this glory that caresses every instant of my life and pours sweetness into my soul, even at the thought that I shall be dissolved in it, untraceably, as water vanishes in water."

 

After that they talked for a couple of minutes about other matters and parted on quite cordial terms. Back in the Studebaker, Gordan rubbed his temples pensively. His black alligator shoe hesitated a minute above the starter which was, in those times, in the left front corner of the car's floor.

 

And now, sitting this morning on his terrace, the cacha็a bottle between his knees, he was under the impression that he remembered every moment of that conversation, quite literally, with amazing clarity. People, rescued from deathly perils describe that clarity. It illuminates the panoramic vision of life's every single minute, which materialises before them, when death seems imminent. But Gordan might have been mistaken and was probably only able to recall the topics of that conversation, its accents, the essential rhythms and tonalities, which then, in their turn, recreated all the details of that dialogue.

 

He felt sure that the ideas advocated by him were on the whole, absolutely correct. However, he admitted the possibility that the iron circle of his logic might have been, all the same, crossed, infiltrated, by one or two illusions.

 

But in spite of the sincerest will to be frank with himself, he was unable to see by which ones.

 

CHAPTER VI

 

Elbow reposing on the parapet of the terrace, profile to the sea, propped up in his chair, Gordan suddenly realized that his heart had stopped beating. This lasted two or three seconds. With a silent curse he pulled himself together. Why this jumpiness? Why this mixture of joy and fright? Wasn't it his own will which had been transformed just a moment ago, into a living form, here before him, below him, less than fifty metres away. The long-premeditated scenario was about to unfold. Now. In a couple of minutes. It would be easy. Just like diving into an icy underground river. He drank again, as if he wanted to store warmth, for later. The light dizziness which ensued was rather pleasant.

 

Teodora had arrived. Motionless, washed over by little waves, eyes closed.

 

He breathed deeply while scanning the landscape from the corner of his eye. From here until the first rocks of Leblon, the Ipanema beach offered a six-kilometre long perspective, without the slightest animation, absolutely forsaken. Behind Gordan, at his right the glittering arc of Copacabana was also empty. So much the better. He remembered, with slight irritation, Tiberio's gibberish. According to him, a bewitchment had to be prepared "with strategical precision". Just like the "squaring of political accounts" in Gordan's far-away homeland. In this line, the sorcerer's experience was impressive, although it was restricted to family wars and municipal elections in the north, in Brazil's most disreputable Federal State, Alagoas. "Perfect familiarity with the site". "A chronometric punctuality" (which was the weakest point of all these telepathic games.) The man had talents, but sounded like a pretentious crook. Well, of course. He was a part-time crook and a part-time demon. Were there other equally puzzling characters mixed up in this? Hmm. Probably so.

 

A single truck, loaded with scrap-iron, broke the silence, emerging from behind the house, heading towards Ipanema with a startling jangle. The aged vehicle scuttled away in the direction of Leblon, along the narrow, black concrete ribbon that followed the coastline. This road separated the row of villas - licked by the reddish flames of blossoming bougainvillea - from the pavement which bordered the beach. The only house built on the two hundred metres wide strip of white sand, was occupied by Gordan (and a judge's numerous family, who lived on the lower floors). An open-air staircase - which he preferred to the inner one - led him directly to the door of his secluded garden, twenty steps from the nightly tide-mark. Under his scanning eyes oases of playful coconut trees, planted at regular intervals, enlivened this miniature seaside Sahara.

 

As everywhere in Brazil, the pub across the street had no front wall. The white marble tops of the tables called to mind Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre. The cafe was empty. The fishermen had vanished and the usual patrons, the troubadours, had not yet shown up. (For this pub, sporting the proud title of "The Cafe of the Fine Arts", was the headquarters of the beach district's composers. Barefoot mulattos and creoles composed their often remarkably rhythmical folk-songs tapping on the tables with empty matchboxes. They were watching for the publishers from the city's centre, who used to drop in and buy up copyrights. That was a wise move, in this country of jobless lawyers.) A yawning postman, clothed in khaki, was pushing letters under uninviting doors. Still further along a black maid swept the gangway.

 

Should some curious person come too close, he would take the dripping medium for an eccentric swimmer, unafraid of the harshness of the Brazilian winter. But the absence of an audience was preferable. The aspect Teodora presented was amazing in more ways than one. She was still wriggling, just as she had before, all along the beach. For her, this was now the normal thing to do. Hadn't she temporarily been turned into a Jararaca snake by hypnotic orders?

 

Only, why had she kept this smart bath-robe on? It needed wringing and drying. It was of brown terry-cloth with large green fishbone designs. Eyes still closed, lying on her back with a suffering look, she stiffened and then shook her head slowly from left to right. Something the matter with her neck? Under the half-open bath-robe shone a gaudy yellow bikini. Congratulations to Tiberio! He couldn't have chosen a better fitting spare body for Pedro's wife.

 

The same athletic shape. Tanned, muscular, broad-shouldered. Just a little overweight, but long-legged. Almost as tall as the Danish woman. Not a blonde, of course. Her loose ebony locks curled freely around her strong breasts. She confessed to thirty-eight years, but looked younger than that. Her eyes were planted well apart. (Again the same question: why was this face so familiar to him?) Her short, straight nose had nothing in common with Lily's haughty profile. However Tiberio had declared that physical resemblance of the mediums was less important than the affinity of their horoscopes. He established these following the rules of some African astrology, which he had probably invented himself. For the sorcerer jealously guarded the secret of this unfathomable science.

 

The strategical position looked fine. The magic triangle was very narrow and its tip reached into the distance. Its base was marked by two almost neighbouring heads. The unconscious half-caste's and the would-be sorcerer's. The latter felt a slight aching in his limbs. They were getting numb. The top of the triangle darted over the pub, well into the room behind the Palacete's balcony, five hundred metres from here.

 

He lowered his eyelids. The bay's splendour reached him now just through a tiny slit.

 

At the same moment he heard the gong of the first round. The slow hammering of a drum neither close nor very far away. Like a sound muffled by invisible vegetation. Was it the expected signal? Ex๙'s radio? Or just the droning of his own blood? He opened his eyes and the drum stopped immediately. This didn't prove the sound had been a delusion. It was possible to transmit, by telepathy, relatively feeble noises over a distance of thirty or forty kilometres. He had made experiments with a chronometer, pencils and a telephone within reach. The information given by the chronometer was dubious. Rumbles, cracks, bangs often arrived five minutes or more behind schedule. As if the telepathic waves had to claw their way through reluctant layers of … of what? Was our material world a bad conductor of that sort of electricity? But on the other hand it was possible to confirm by the telephone that the sound he heard was the same that had been caused miles away. Nobody on the other end of the line could have guessed Gordan's auditive sensations. Cheating, in this case, seemed impossible. But if he wanted unquestionable truth he had to mistrust everybody, everywhere.

 

There was a very strange common point to all these "transmissions". Perhaps it could help to clarify them. It was indispensable that the emitter - of a distant hammering, for example - should in fact drum, while he concentrated on a real saucepan or some other suitable instrument. It was as if imagination - this powerful master-builder - needed a spot, a corner of the already existing universe. In order to lean on it, to embed into it the pillars of a bridge leading to new worlds Gordan coveted.

 

But not with the idea of leaving the old world for good! Nothing was further from his mind than to become a permanent immigrant in dreamland. His proposal was to live by turns in both realms. Why did all other illuminati want to burn the gangways behind them? Why should higher knowledge imply blindness to the beauties of the material universe?

 

Here was a reality fit to hook the bridge of his robust imagination onto. Teodora. Visible. Suffering under her artificial slumber. But was all this true? Where did the truth end and the hysterical stage-play begin? No way of knowing that. What a deadlock. He hadn't seen enough miracles to believe but he had seen too many to give a cold shoulder to their playground.

 

Was it at all possible to know the truth about the universe of the spirits?

 

But of course it was! In one single case. His own. Hadn't nature tailored him to measure - with his boiling imagination and his cool eye - exactly for that purpose? Wasn't he designed to penetrate mysteries? Or could it be that he was designed to be the clown of the spirits? So what? Since when was he so afraid of being ridiculous?

 

2

 

He knew that jealous spirits at the French Embassy called him "the General's Clown" behind his back. The Ambassador was a Flying General. During the blitz he was - in spite of his age - spitting fire above London. According to malevolent rumours the Viscount d'Arcy de Rocquencourt had been named ambassador to Brazil with the sole purpose of allowing him to re-gild his family's coat of arms. If this was true, it was Marcadet's job anyway. This faithful family lawyer to these particular d'Arcy had been created Commercial Attach้ at the Rio embassy. As to the General - a jolly fellow full of the sparkling vitality of middle-aged (and even much older) Frenchmen - he was bored stiff in the office. He haunted the departments and the corridors doing imitation acts. The most successful was of a cavalry Sergeant in the Riding School. Often he bellowed from a distance: "Captain! Gordan!" (The French Army had recognized Gordan's rank.) "Come and do me the obsequies!" (This was the literal translation of a Portuguese formula of courtesy) "Let's go to my place and have a press conference!" That was their favourite game: making literal translations of newspaper articles and massacring the headlines. That brought forth things like this:

 

INTESTINAL INCOMMODITIES

AT THE PRESIDENCY OF THE REPUBLIC.

 

No, he was certainly not a clown there. The General was laughing with him. But here?

 

3

 

Wasn't he, even now, the king of idiots for watching Teodora so intently? A couple of years ago, and in a less crazy country, he would certainly have had an irrepressible fit of laughter at the very idea of ethereal umbilical cords.

 

Teodora, with her arms resting along her body, reminded him of a dark brown exclamation mark (with a spot of yellow sunshine round its middle) between the wheat-flour-beach and the aquamarine sea. Who but a half-wit could have admitted the existence of an invisible umbilical cord, sprouting from among the idyllic colours of this landscape and connecting the medium with the tall Danish girl, up there behind the balcony window? (Yes, but who would have believed in radio waves aroun 1847?).

 

Was there really (wireless!) communication between these two personalities? Was it a fact that they mingled? Were they about to swap bodies? Of course, this was just the thought suggested to them, during thorough brainwashing sessions. Of course, such a metamorphosis couldn't be accomplished in a week, by the stroke of a magic wand. A gradual subtle impregnation was necessary. Moreover the recipe comprised paralyzing ingredients. First of all: terror, the irreplaceable international language. It galvanized slumbering forces.

 

And then: the relay stations. Like this one. In order to enhance their efficiency, the cerebral vibrations had to emanate from several skulls. Like in the case of mass psychoses. The crowd's psychosis sharpened its senses and allowed it to see quite remarkable things. Today: flying saucers. Yesterday: levitating saints, who (whenever they felt like it) fluttered up to the ceilings of their chapels.

 

The relay station: the imagination of the masses was omnipotent. Perhaps it could even catch the fairy "bluebird" Gordan was after. Translated into prose to turn dreams into throbbing palpable flesh and blood. This happened rarely. But everything pointed to the conclusion that it had happened. Lourdes wasn't just a den of crooks. Nor was the Quimbanda.

 

4

 

He lowered his head, not being keen just now on social contacts. Pedro and Monsieur Anatole had re-entered the stage, at his right, coming from the same direction as the noisy lorry that had invaded peaceful Ipanema. They advanced slowly, brooding, probably recapitulating the main points of their former conversation.

 

("What an over-excited fellow, this Pedro! I've told him more than once not to show the tip of his nose before nine o'clock. There's going to be a small crisis at his place, at about half past eight. Small? Or not so small? How should I know. Anyway this plebeian offspring of the noble Viscount of Djurudjuba must by no means be allowed to mix things up still more. Quite so. He's a commoner, because the Empire distributed only life peerages. However, not so good an omen, this! Too many slightly cracked viscounts around me! Wherever I look: a nutty viscount! How hard I've tried to make clear to him that no miracles are to be expected today. We'll need several climaxes and several weeks to impregnate those nervous systems. But try and explain that to a vis-count!").

 

Oh, but this topped everything! These two peripatetics had crossed the tarred road and stood now at the edge of the sidewalk - prettified every hundred metres or so by cement banks -, precisely in front of Teodora.

 

Their viewpoint commanded the beach from a height of two metres. Stairs of concrete led downward, unless one preferred to jump.

 

Facing Africa, as the two explorers did now, there was nothing much to be seen. Just the sand, the South Atlantic and the skyline. The three of them absolutely empty. The only intriguing sight, at a distance of about a hundred and fifty metres: that motionless darkish exclamation mark - that is, the forest divinities' messenger-girl. And then, of course: the universal greed for sensations stirred. The picture taken in by those four scrutinizing eyes suggested some sort of accident.

 

Was Monsieur Anatole able to see that far? It seemed so, judging by his excited tapping and wriggling. His well-known eagerness for scientific discoveries would compel him, in a moment, to jump down and rush toward the sea to analyse the situation. Pedro would follow at his heels, his pipe sticking out provocatively like some kind of extraterrestrial antenna, contrived to spy on the human condition.

 

Gordan was infuriated. It didn't help to repeat to himself that this chapter of the procedure was after all secondary. For anybody to cut into this state of concentration was almost as unpleasant as the interruption of coitus. It was certain he would feel the frustrating effects later. And it was essential for him to feel fit at half past eight. Otherwise how could he hope to neutralize the stupid violence that would be unleashed in the Palacete.

 

How the devil did Tiberio dare prophesy that no bothersome outsider would show up. Or else - he had said - an intruder who appeared on the scene would, for some reason or other, turn and walk away without noticing what was happening.

 

Had Gordan, after all, been taken in by a mythomaniac swindler? Suddenly one of his rare fits of blind fury swept over him and he gnashed his teeth.

 

At this very moment, down below, Teodora lifted both her arms as if doing breathing exercises. Had she felt her partner's irritation? If he wanted to believe that, he could. It wasn't unthinkable. (But how could he ever be sure?) Well, a great number of coinciding facts pointed toward a convincing probability. But in that case he would be comfortably tucked into statistics, up to his ears. And everybody knew that all the concerned parties cooked their statistics. Consciously or unconsciously. How far could Gordan trust himself? A good point: not a man in ten million was unprejudiced enough to ask himself such questions. He was just the one.

 

Pedro and his aide-de-camp exchanged disappointed glances. What a pity! This was obviously no sensational corpse washed ashore. However, Monsieur Anatole's demeanour called to mind another remarkable working hypothesis. Still looking in the direction of Angola, he lifted his nose, sniffing the morning breeze, while his whole body expressed - owing to his incomparable mimetic talents - a slightly shocked astonishment. Did he thus acknowledge the ethereal presence of some vile smelling astral body on the beach?

 

A knowledge of the underlying circumstances was necessary to explain this problem. The relations between the black Monsieur and Madame Pedro had a facade of cool, formal politeness, but concealed spontaneous mutual antipathies. It was hard to tell which of them hated the other more cordially. And now, the Monsieur's prompt and hostile reaction! As if the intimation to leave a room had been pronounced by a strong, vulgar voice which couldn't fail to scandalize a sophisticated spirit. Had the projected exchange of personalities taken place, at this side of the beach, much earlier than was expected? A more credulous Gordan could have believed that.

 

Anyhow, certain facts seemed to confirm that possibility. Monsieur Anatole began sneezing violently, as if sensing a still fouler smell than the one from the magical cock. He shook himself energetically as if stepping out of his bath, and without any explanation trotted away from the beach toward the alley-way where he was domiciled. Had he concluded that Lily's unasked-for presence at the beach at such an inconveniently early hour was a quite sufficient reason for him to choose an altogether different place for his own activities? Was this his motivation? A questioning of the interested party would have met - in spite of his natural eloquence - with linguistic difficulties. Maybe his brusque departure was inspired by the idea of his impending breakfast? Plausible, because Gordan's own subtle thoughts had begun to descend toward that commonplace problem. Of course he rejected them at once.

 

The abandoned artist was less inclined to asceticism. His objurgations remaining - as usual - without any effect on the behaviour of the four-legged philosopher, Pedro directed his lonely steps toward the pub of the Composers, its aromatic thick black coffee and its savory shrimp pancakes.

 

Gordan had nothing to restore himself with, besides the cacha็a. In order to regain the state of grace he bestowed some more of the fiery stuff on himself. (What? What? More than half the bottle was gone!) With or without magical immunity, his head began to swim a little. This was quite all right for what he had to do. But it was time to stop.

 

Cheek reposing on his fist, he looked around. He stared at the flocks of little islands. They were of melted silver. The sea! The sea of Odysseus! (Or of the Argonauts?) And here, closer, under him, the long, strong, hospitable, glistening thighs of the girl. A sensation of well-being spread through his nerves. Why should he worry about the contradictory onslaughts he was confronting? There was at least one certainty. Brainwashing was a fact. It was practiced all over the world, on a large scale. Some people did it to themselves, without knowing it. It wasn't a bad thing in itself, everything depended on its aim.

 

The aim of the present case? Lily, an aggressive lesbian, is all of a sudden subdued, fascinated by the authoritarian regime which rules over the Ingrid-island. At the same time she is scared. Her violent nature compels her to commit a crime that would spoil her life. Not because of the all too lax law courts. But for much more serious reasons. So the wish to be cured rises in her. Just as in the case of some unlucky kleptomaniac. Or of a repentant drug addict. However one looked at it: the aim of this psychodrama was praiseworthy. For a couple of reasons. Gordan would help to unearth the tendencies of Lily's subconscious life. Left alone she would never have been able to discover the meaning of her behaviour. She was too stupid for that. The Danish Valkyrie wanted to "change her surroundings" and "her impulsions". But to do so it was by no means necessary to go to the devil's kitchen to be re-flavoured and laced with the sweet docility of a meek creole girl. This had already been done. At her birth. Her second nature, the subdued one, was in her, just waiting to be awakened.

 

The impending shock? The panic? The shrinking back from herself? The escape into a servitude that - she felt it - could only be salutary? Why not, if it was her most fervent dream?

 

Could such Damascus-like conversions be operated by a serpent: as dangerous as it was imaginary? Not so imaginary as that! And he had witnessed still more surprising metamorphoses provoked by equally preposterous means. People believed themselves to be trees. Or flowers that spoke to each other. What did the surgeons of the thirteenth century know about all this? Silbermann and his equals, indeed! There was at least a thoroughly researched fact at the basis of all these mental acrobatics. Researched by himself. It was the extraordinary receptivity of two sleeping brains to mutual dreams, after only short training. Wanda and Lily were sleeping, up at Pedro's. They could never have resisted that sort of sleepiness! The same was true for Teodora. He too would dive shortly into a tormented but willed dream. It was indispensable for his project. He willed it. The law of his life demanded it. Every life had its secret law but most people didn't know it. He, Gordan, was of the elite familiar with the law of their own life. An emotion (or was it a cosmical thunderbolt?) had dictated it to him, and so he had engraved on his own soul his only stone tablet.

 

5

 

It was a recollection from his childhood. It still haunted him. But how could he translate into words this force, terror, softness, rapture, which had kept on wringing his heart right up to this moment? Whenever he wanted to analyse it, to explain it in logical terms - trying to liberate that from the blindness of his senses - he ended up holding just a disappointing skeleton in his hands. He had to open his grasping hands, letting That drop back into obscurity, from where It revived and guided reality - oh how irresistibly!

 

It had happened during a summer stroll with his parents, when he must have been six or seven years old. All of a sudden he stood paralysed, in front of the sun's huge red disc which touched the silent skyline of his native land. A powerful agonizing craving squeezed his throat. He wanted to run, to hurl himself forward across the fields, toward the setting sun, further, still further, reaching eventually the other side of that monstrous, red, celestial beast. There, behind it, without any doubt, lurked something that was magnificent and frightening and more valuable than anything else in the world.

 

6

 

Lazily scanning the glittering islands, he expelled the fear from his spirit. There was no danger at all. He felt himself able to inhabit two separate floors of consciousness. Getting down from the level of hallucinations would be no problem. Gordan wouldn't get trapped up there, a prisoner of the phantoms. Was he all the same running some risk? Yes, but ducking it an unavoidable misfortune would befall him. A long peaceful life in the company of his greatest yearning - irrevocably frustrated. Time for philosophical speculation had run out.

 

7

 

He closed his eyes. Then opened them just a little. Painters examine colours this way. Seen through this slit Teodora shrank into a brownish-yellow, flickering speck. It was the trembling of his own eyelids. His elbow left the balustrade. He clenched his fists and tightened his muscles. Those of his arms, legs, stomach - of his whole body, imprisoning his breath at the same time in his bursting chest. The strain shook him from head to toe like the vibration of a motor designed to throw him upwards.

 

Like a diver he held his breath for a full minute. As soon as small bells began clinking in his ears - like railway signals to the big locomotive that was his roaring heart - he abruptly relaxed and let himself glide into a restful Nirvana.

 

He erased all his thoughts. An imaginary windscreen wiper swept them away like raindrops. The brown stain, which had formerly been Teodora, darkened, danced through the luminous slit, towards the innermost screen of his eyes. Had he completely closed them for a moment? He wasn't sure of anything, any more. With a mutineer's blind hate he clenched his fists again.

 

Five or six times: the same alternation of painfully cramped muscles with gratifying plunges into quiet. Ten minutes later when he stopped this weird warming up for good, his body was covered with sweat and his heart beat like a mad dervish drum.

 

With all his weight he leaned anew against the parapet. In his thoughts he started to paint - imagining the careless strokes of many nimble brushes - the picture he wanted. Now the brown speck broke into three or four pieces. Among them quivered - like will-o'-the-wisps - a few subsiding sparks of the surrounding world's sunny glory.

 

He didn't think: "I will". He just felt an ever-swifter circular motion stirring the inner core of his brain, while that locomotive seemed to rush through his skull and its ghost engines thundered - quite independently of Gordan and all his intentions - the overwhelming, smashing, crushing chant: "Iwill. I will ... ".

 

First slowly, then with increasing pace, he let heat waves stream into the cavity of his chest, and deeper, around his diaphragm. Shades, recollections of the past night. Of Livia's sweetness. And the lightning that had nailed them together.

 

He didn't think, he sensed. He touched, he felt the knot: the unity of all this at his fingertips. Of the happiness that sprouted in him, deep deep inside him and - he was aware of it - now beamed from all his pores. And then the joy! The joyous knowledge of his power. Of the power to project into space pictures, coloured, moved, animated by his vital force, by the stocked, piled-up, omnipresent life-energy: by his all-pervading desire.

 

Had he closed his eyes? He didn't know. Teodora had vanished in swirling black smoke. The same thick cloud engulfed Gordan. There was no horizon, no sea, no beach, any more. Nothing but green and red beams, Flashing zig-zag through a rolling black fog.

 

The dazzling-coloured rays flickered, gathered, and then, all of a sudden: the enemy was there, before him. Suspended in mid-air - the long, black, forked tongue quivering less than a metre from Gordan's face. The Jararaca. The most poisonous and by far the ugliest Brazilian snake.

 

A fading voice whispered still in his ears: "it's nothing, it's just your imagination!" But at the same time he felt the touch of a slimy body that made his chest and his shoulders shudder, and froze the nape of his neck.

 

The blazing Jararaca swung, swayed, came spinning toward his eyes, carving up the blackness, as horrifying as the other one he had encountered two months earlier, while stalking deer. He had seen it from just as close quarters as he saw this one now. It was perched at shoulder height at the edge of a shallow ravine through which he wormed his way, the two-barrelled gun hanging loosely in his hands.

 

Seven or eight feet long. Green squares on its back. A fat, shining, dirty-white belly. The narrow pointed tail, coiled up, ready to strike. Its rings twisting furiously, long after the hellish little round head - full of rows of white pins of teeth - had flown away, torn off by the double charge of buckshot, fired almost point blank.

 

Here it was again. It burst into him, plunged into his bowels, through his nostrils, through his throat: the thick, heavy, pestilential stench of the reptile. It choked him, it strangled him, here and now while that poor dying voice tried a last time to murmur into his ear that none of this was true.

 

Then with the rage of a nearly defeated warrior he squeezed his diaphragm, pressing it like a lemon to force out the last drops of courage. In order to attempt the ultimate acrobatics of the mind: the double leap between the two flying trapezes of his - of everybody's - ever-present hostile twins - of man's two opposed wills. In the cases in which this fencing with one's other self succeeded, it worked a lot like the sudden braking that hurls the passenger of a speeding car forward.

 

He made it. He galvanized the voice of reason for the last time, and with it came the fright. The frightening thought that this was already madness, raving madness: this obstinate will to see something that didn't exist. To purge his mind from this demented vision was a matter of life and death - more important than anything else. He seized the left-overs of his energies in order to prevent himself from: WILLING TO SEE THIS. His teeth chattered while he clung to a second will that had become powerless, unable to prevent him from craving to SEE THIS. It wasn't possible. Not any more.

 

Vertigo stirred his brain, his head spun, his skull was going to explode. It was the panic of a fall into an unfathomable well. All of a sudden he understood that nobody could be so irresistibly attracted except by a massive and deathly reality, which was here, in front of him.

 

Then the horror spiralled and rocketed and with wide open eyes he saw - no, he lived in the reflection of his original, of his first, of his deepest will. Here was the loathsome, fat, dirty-white belly of the Jararaca turning slowly toward the dwelling of the fainted women, boring itself into the dark clouds, twisting its rings as it did in the jungle, only to vanish, finally, amidst this smoky, this black foliage.

 

When he came back to this side of life - shivering and dazzled by the sun and the reborn colours - Teodora was nowhere to be seen. He discovered her, however, a moment later, further away, bent in two, dragging herself towards a cluster of coconut-trees. She collapsed in their shadow and didn't move. He remained seated, absent-mindedly running his fingers through his hair. Hell! After all this, there still wasn't the slightest trace of a secure belief in him. Had somebody offered him a treasure, as a reward for a candid answer, he would have been unable to say whether he had been asleep or not.

 

After a quarter of an hour he began to breathe freely and the memory of his voluntary hallucination was fading away. A wave of victorious pride caressed his still throbbing heart. The law of that criminal, spell-casting hag applied to him too. This at least, was certain. He knew that such a cyclone, such a whirlwind of delirious imagination as that which he had raised in himself just now - could strike, and was bound to strike unerringly and from afar. Moreover he had ventured, once more, into the Kingdom of Schizophrenia, and here he was back again unharmed, just as sane as before. "As good as new!" He could, with impunity, undertake such excursions again. If it was necessary: he would do it even now, at this very moment.

 

As can be seen, this optimist took a lot of things for granted.

 

CHAPTER VII

 

1

 

Taking the chair with him he returned, to the table, the two folders and the cacha็a-bottle. No, he wasn't drunk. Balkan atavism was no empty word. Within half an hour perspiration and the marvelously rich Brazilian breakfast (comparable only to its British equivalent) would efface this innocent dreamy mirth. Was it more? Yes, a silent exultation. Just like the feeling he had had years before when, in the last set of a very tight match, an inkling of victory had somehow arisen in him. To hold onto this pleasant state of mind, he allowed himself a last long gulp.

 

Of course, had his clairvoyance been as sharp as he assumed, had he really had a hunch about the impending events, his mental attitude would have been slightly different. Without falling into the opposite extreme of a depressive crisis he would all the same have thought of defensive measures which it would have been reasonable to prepare.

 

He did nothing of the sort and began (just like the itinerant poets of the "Cafe of the Fine Arts") tapping rhythmically on the table with his palms, humming under his breath the samba that served as a liturgical hymn to the great She-Devil, close relative to Livia:

 

Salve ta-ta, Peomba-Gira!

Salve Ex๙-Mulher!

Ela esta na encruzilhada

Ela que faz tudo o que quer.

 

Which meant more or less:

 

Hail to thee, oh Whirling Dove!

Hail, oh Woman-Ex๙!

She is waiting at her crossroads

Doing whatever she wills to do.

 

2

 

("The jingoism of these fellows is unbelievable! What an odd idea to reproduce their glorious banner even on such a nondescript folder!") He opened the dark green cardboard file with the triumphant, thick, sunshine-yellow stripe printed across it. The consternating inscription's invisible ink was of such sophisticated contrivance that not even his staggering telepathical feelers could detect it. It was better this way. He would have been upset for no reason.

 

Even if it had been possible to discuss things with that friendly ghost of a distant future (with the character he would become himself, thirty years later) nothing but a meaningless squabble would have resulted. That jovial futurist phantasm, whose hand would later decorate the patriotic Brazilian folder (somehow rediscovered, retrieved from the rubbish of some attic or other) with the impertinent heading, didn't seriously blame his forerunner and hadn't the slightest intention of hurting his feelings. Quite the contrary. He looked at this collection of loose pages with sympathetic nostalgia and thumbed through them with amicable understanding. He didn't deny the truth of some of the thoughts he encountered, mixed up with passages of an intimate diary, with lyrical effusions, and somewhat pretentious aphorisms. The whole thing pointed toward the plan of some ulterior literary work - the main lines of which were so far disappointingly foggy.

 

("Isn't it time to begin it at last? Fate has been more or less clement, up to now, but is this reason enough to think so little and so sluggishly about it? Thirty years maturing should be enough, for any book, shouldn't it?").

 

The only thing that really irritated the future ancestor was the tone of these notes.

 

("This raving individual, mumbled the not-so-dignified Elder - projecting himself into the neutrality of the third person singular - gives the impression of a dishevelled, plastered poet - of a wriggling young hound. He is at the time of this 'diary' obviously fifteen to twenty years under his real - no, let's say under his statistical - age. Now: even if this abnormal disparity still exists and still resists the downpour of time - yes, even if the slowness of the life-clock is still a fact: it could never produce nowadays such romantic, such poetic fits as it did thirty years ago. So what! To hell with it! Aren't reason and a balanced mind the highest good? No? Are they nothing of the sort? Why should I be cross all of a sudden? Am I envious? Jealous? Of whom, you great Brazilian Gods, who are forgotten or turned into petty Bourgeois by the filthy industrial miracle and even - oh horror - into officers of some local Salvation Army! Cross with whom? Jealous of whom? Probably of time. Of that greedy slut that has pinched and carried away so many beautiful things. Well, some of them are still with me. So that's that.").

 

Thus it was, after all, with a slightly melancholic toss of his head and a grin more mischievous than nasty, that this old mountebank printed on the top-secret dossier of Gordaniana the ominous title:

....ZRTHSTR'S SS

 

Unaware of this future crime of "l่se-majest้" - drunk on cacha็a and on last night's (and quite a few other nights') memories - he flipped through the disconnected smudgy scraps of paper covered with his scrawl, on which he could re-read snatchy passages like this.

 

3

 

"…and what a never ending crowd of lovely girls … quite a devaluation of this gorgeous currency … your cook is Gina Lollobrigida - Sophia Loren your housemaid - both of course in their early twenties … the teen-aged Raquel Welch and Claudia Cardinale are washing up the dishes over there in the pub ... and the others, wherever you look … kitchen-maids or aristocrats - the same high distinction in all of them ... and plenty of it ... oh miracle, a crowd of marquesses … watching their gait unconnected words come to your mind, such as queens, sluts, circus acrobats. Tall and slender like El Greco figures but not skeletons, by no means! And what curves … just where they ought to be ... the length and the flexibility of these limbs ... no, of these antennae carrying rubies, are beyond measure. The same suppleness somehow otherworldly - somehow a little monstrous - undulates around their arms and legs and hips. These girls don't walk: they flow. They are at the same time aggressive and coy, and the grace of The Arabian Nights smiles around their glittering teeth. They are a blend of a wild-cat mentality with French boarding-school virtues … I absolutely must put all of this down … so I can recount it later … thirty years from now when I'll be no good for anything but story-telling…"

 

('… and what do you know about that, imbecile!' grumbled a deep hoarse voice from far, far away.)

 

"… yes, I absolutely must fix it in my memory … the first night I spent with Livia under the sign of the 'Orixa's' love demon... so let us remember the premiere … when was it? … three or four months ago … I had known two, three other virtuosi … but never, never that sublime folly before her ... Love? This? What a bad joke! A scream! Love! A grotesque sham! A mushy, hypocritical masquerade, invented by European and obviously anemic, phthisical minstrels! Just a short carnival, during which the poor cretins go around disguised as charming princes and even more spurious princesses … so much ado about nothing … and then the choking disappointment and the throwing-up the next morning … the morning of that Ash Wednesday which for some exceptionally poor bastards lasts up to the end of their lives … how could such translucent masques resist this merciless pagan sun and the deep black of these shadows? How could that wishy-washy sentimentalism stand up against a bodily passion that is material, all right, but of a material that transforms us into something like the 'glorious body' promised by the Church … not only during a sugary carnival's love story … but for that eternity which the same Church used so long as a bait to lure us…"

 

"Of course I have to write this … I want to have forever before my eyes pictures of my coming together with Livia … even if it was just the fulfillment foreshadowed by three or four of her predecessors whom I had met also under the flaming red sign of the 'Orixa's'. Anyway, every minute with her is the first one … only the devils and the fairy queens know how many such Walpurgis nights I've had so far ... But I can see them clearly. There's no need trying to sculpt and paint on these shabby pages … a few sketches will do … Boy! Are you off your rocker!? Stop, stop this scribbling at once! Are you drunk? Writing about this?! And what about security regulations?! Of course my very best friend, Gordan, is plastered once again! What security? What nonsense! Wake up! The war is over! It ended more than two years ago! And who on earth would fancy coming up here and rummaging among my papers? … surely not old Dona Conceicao, the cleaning-woman, if she can read which I doubt very much … and then to be on the safe side: I won't put down a thing about the delirious dialogues … not a word about Livia's whips and hair-shirts … nor about the slight, red stripes along her back … Oh nothing much! Just pale pink arabesques … Let me forget her library of biographies of Saint Catherine of Sienna and other wonderful saintly sado-masochistic girls … and first of all don't write a word about the devil visiting her, and about his eccentric demands … These follies are just a faint musical background to … to what? And what would old Pedro say? Ha-ha-ha. If ever he came to read this he would say: 'No, nobody ever took you for normal, mon cher grand ma๎tre! But this story is the summit of your Brant๔me-like talents … oh no, who is Brant๔me compared to you … tell me one secret: do you get excited while writing? You know what I mean … Good Heavens! What a pornographer the world has lost in you! But you're too slow! Why not come to the point? Or is it part of your tactics?' … O.K. Dom Pedro, you're right … let me get to the story's hard, hard core!"

 

***

 

"The first night with Livia. Precisely the same as every night I have passed at her side since … Open window, lukewarm air, scents of her sleeping park flowing around our naked torsos … there it is: the trademark of all Brazilian nights: always and everywhere the perfume of that little white flower … just like the jasmine, but five times stronger … its working hours begin after nightfall … they call it 'dama da noite' - the Lady of the Night … and while one's meandering by night, passing before the always wide open doors of the dark gardens - one receives a whiff of this deathly sweetness … yes, in more than one sense, because they say that one bunch of this in a sleeping-room with closed windows would put you out for good … fortunately, these windows are open and Livia doesn't belong to this poisonous botanical species … shall I describe her now? Why should I stick her photograph into this diary … anyway, I'll never forget her … but how can I know that? Well, just a swift sketch … who knows what might happen to my memory later … She's like the Brazilian girls I've been talking about … But this is nonsensical … that was just a summing-up… of course here as anywhere the girls are of all sorts… there are even natural blondes. The only difference: the number of dazzling beauties is much greater here … Livia is… how old? Twenty-four or twenty-five. And she's ivory white … one should say a pure Portuguese. A whiteness of which her ridiculously snobbish family is not a little proud … almost as tall as me … but … but where does this face of an adorable but entirely white Japanese come from? Next I'll try to prompt the truth out of one of those gossipy spinsters in the neighbourhood ...of course I don't give a damn one way or another, it's just curiosity … I was told that in the last fifty years many sons of Nippon have settled here to earn their daily bread ... Oh, sorry, I mean their rotten fish … and what would the unbelievably noble Fonseca family think about such a yellow blood transfusion? There's nimbleness about her as well as subjection to my whims … but now and then a show of … of a coy resistance which she manifestly and joyously expects to be crushed … all this makes me think of the Far East, where, by the way, I've never set foot. Mostly because it doesn't attract me at all… 'Thanks, querida, another whisky would be fine, querida' … Oh this … this looking at each other … half-naked, trembling with desire but knowing that eternity is before us, and we want it … this long vertiginous wait … inhaling deeply every beauty around us … and in us… even poetry… only to protract this icy and burning expectation... because we want it this way ... Let me light your cigarette, Cara ... what do you mean? The strophe of Alphonsus de Guinaraes' sonnet about the garden we read together yesterday? Voce e quem manda!

 

"A fonte dourada chora

"Por entre seixos be luar,

"Quando se fecham, Senhora,

"As janelas do teu lar."

 

"I was fencing all this afternoon with the French translation. Listen.

 

"Entre cailloux argent้s

"G๎t la fontaine dor้e qui pleure

"Lorsque se ferment, oh ma belle dame,

"Les fen๊tres de ta demeure."

 

("The golden fountain is weeping

Among moonlit pebbles and loam

At midnight when they close, Senhora,

The windows of your home.")

 

"Claro, tem razao. Of course I know it's far less beautiful than the original. Thank you, of course you're right, my drink is too pale, let's freshen it up. Look: every shadow ... all the garden is 'brightening'... easy … easy … because it has already started … with this endless … senseless night-watch … it was indispensable to see each other ... to take each other in from afar … to feel ourselves severed from each other … chaste, strangled by anxiety … without any obstacle between our feverish, greedy arms ... no barriers between us but our will … to transform nature into a magic garden.

 

"But it's only later, when I'm firmly anchored in the hot, wet velvet of her body, that time indeed comes to a stop … everything around us, in us: is natural, 'normal' if you wish. But every moment transfigures nature … Our motions are slow, floating, calling to mind those of deep-sea divers. The heat of our hearts and the waves of our tenderness rise imperceptibly but steadily to become lumps in our throats.

 

"All of a sudden, spasms of fever and violent jerks let the waves of passion foam and then … abruptly: the clash with a ruthless stop-bolt and we are projected into the throbbing immobility of a statue of lovers above a proud barbarian gravestone. Seconds and minutes go by, a slight blessed shudder runs over us and a new floating undulation arises from the depths.

 

"We are settled in each other for voluptuous hours, we live submerged under the ever-growing tide of lust.

 

"I whisper into her ear. I am telling her soft and gentle and cruel and terrifying tales.

 

"We are both living inside our two bodies and also far beyond them. We are part of the exuberant nature which surrounds us, of its soothing quiet and also of its sadistic Black Masses. We are ceaselessly changing. Into night-flowers, birds, trails of blood, rags of skin lacerated by razor-blades - now we are hoarse yells, now the murmur of brooks under the moon. Only in our imagination? Where does imagination begin? Where does it end? Is it morbid? Why should we care?

 

"The only thing I know for certain: this is eternity. Our sighs are sighed by our innermost life. Our breathing follows the rhythm of permanent orgasm, we are cast in the iron mould of unending lust: ceaselessly ebbing and flowing.

 

"We are that fabulous being of Plato, with two heads, four arms and four legs.

 

"Without releasing her, without loosening my embrace by an inch, I manage to get to my feet and - my arms around her shoulders and her legs around my hips I carry her - obeying a dark longing - to the source of the intoxicating perfumes: to the open window. Everything becomes possible now. It wouldn't be at all astonishing, for us, to take off and fly out above those slumbering trees. Was the flight of the witches something like this?

 

"But all this is just a description of a picture seen from outside. All this might be cramped, forced, artificial. But it's not. This is a new, hitherto unknown state of consciousness. We wouldn't have access to it, my mistress and I, if we didn't have the capacity for gliding, for imperturbably swinging from one layer of the soul to another quite different one, A power we have acquired by mastering corporeal pain, the fear of death and: above all: the drunkenness of our senses. Thus, and only thus are we able to split ourselves in two parts, looking from a little distance at our bodies that struggle and suffer and exult. But we see them from above for we are floating in the air, above these sweating forms, above those screens made of crude matter that cannot any more conceal from us the serene, the immortal life-essence, vapours of which are ascending toward us, now. One cannot glide over the sucking pits: over grasping passions if one is not half detached, half liberated from their weight. Otherwise one's pure aura is instantly swallowed by childish gluttony, which leads to an awakening in a bleak dawn dipped into the dreariness of exhausted animals.

 

"The ejaculation which ends these nights is almost the same as anybody else's. The difference? After all these over-heated hours, the emission of the vital substance is surprisingly minute. There is in certain countries a proverb saying that married couples who are in a lasting, frantic love with each other, do not beget children. Has it something to do with my story? Be that as it may everything points toward the probability that the organism absorbs during this endlessly renewed rapture a great part of its own vital secretions which - as well as the origin of life - still harbour some mysteries.

 

"On the other hand, this final 'd้nouement ' lasts such an absurdly long time and is so free of the 'little death' (which is the ancient name of the 'normal' coitus) that one literally feels the waves of his own passion - of his own vibrating electricity - running back into his own diaphragm, into his own brain, plunging them into a death-like sleep. Two hours of it do more good than a normal night's sleep."

 

***

 

('All the same it's funny how poetically this fellow yells about, well, about not so extraordinary facts of life', grumbled the observer from the inverted fourth dimension, laying down his x-ray telescope, closing the folder and clapping the rubber band around it. 'Of course I know he has been in quite a few exciting situations. He could have spoken more clearly, more realistically about them. However I shall not throw the first nor the second stone at this poetaster. Must a man of action be an absolute brute and preferably an illiterate one, in order to be taken seriously by other bipeds?').

 

4

 

So he was at the top of his form, at five o'clock in the morning when he reached his shabby pent-house.

 

"How objectively, how realistically have I succeeded in putting in a few words such a delicate theme!", he congratulated himself pushing away the green and yellow folder and opening its yellow and green twin-brother. This gesture indicated his return to common terrestrial life: to his disorderly but successful business correspondence. Everything was fine. And best of all: the days which followed such nights were, as a rule, full of surprises. Wonders would come of this light-heartedness, this sensation of strength, this impression that he could leap over houses.

 

Trifling but meaningful events would take place. Sometimes he would throw his cigarette-butt, without aiming, into the middle of a tiny ashtray three metres away. In this mood he used to drive through Rio's erratic traffic with the bold awareness of having a sleepwalker 's invulnerability, absent-mindedly speeding, wriggling out of dangerous situations, nearly brushing other vehicles without ever a scratch. Waiters brought him newspapers which he was just about to request. In the street, gazing at a woman walking before him, she didn't look back. No. She stumbled a little.

 

Undoubtedly: his batteries had been recharged. He looked up at the distressing cupolas of Pedro's baroque castle of horrors, ("No, no, it's not his fault. A noble uncle of his had this beauty built.")

 

He asked himself what on earth might be going on behind that balcony. Could this morning's state of grace help the realisation of an old dream? Of a televisionary capacity dawning in his spirit?

 

He closed his eyes and his faith was immediately rewarded. Abruptly he sighted a large, austere room. Darkish, full of smoke, somehow monastic with its niches, saints, stained-glass windows.

 

Beneath these, the nude bodies of two women and a boy were entangled in an extraordinarily complicated way that would have gratified the most overflowing imagination. A long "mata-porco", a knife for killing pigs relaxed in a corner, and a display of a dozen flesh-wounds evoked a savagery beyond anything Montenegro's rocks and valleys could have offered.

 

There was also a broken flask of ether with a vaporizer on it, and another one uncorked. Tiny clouds of vitriol seeped from its belly. The smell was unmistakable.

 

Unfortunately this picturesque vision faded away at his first critical thought. Of course! He was just embroidering with threads provided by his perfect knowledge of that place and of the characters in it.

 

If he wanted to know the exact score of the game played over there he couldn't (yet?) rely on his televisionary powers but had (just as any common mortal!) to trot up to that uncanny Quimbanda-monastery and use his earthly, commonplace eyes.

 

("Preferably from close quarters and with a magnifying glass", he reflected but then noticed that the curtain behind the balcony was not entirely drawn and might thus give away some of the secrets of St. Pedro's Domes. "No magnifying glass! What I need are my binoculars!").

 

And thereupon he awarded himself a renewed certificate of lucidity, impartiality and a dozen other intellectual virtues - inseparable from such a scrupulously scientific seeker as Cardinal Gordan of Hell's almost achieved Vatican.

 

CHAPTER VIII

 

But he had been thinking of his wartime binoculars. They had vanished into thin air, long ago. What he owned now was an antique naval telescope. ("Where in Hell have I left it?") He liked the feel of its long brass tube and the idea that some Portuguese pirate had used it before him, scanning the sky-line for his victims' mast-tops. ("So my romanticism goes back to Treasure Island? What's wrong with that? Childish or not: I still like that book.")

 

The modern versions of this optical instrument were probably the most coveted devices in Brazilian cities. Telephoto lenses came next. ("What a bunch of lascivious apes! Right. And what about yourself?!").

 

Lying in ambush behind curtains, lots of Brazilians spent a considerable part of their spare time staring at beauties scattered around swimming-pools or sunbathing behind bushes, dressed in Paradise-style, or at others relaxing in their torrid flats - all windows open yearning for the smallest draught. These peeping Toms were everywhere. Even their unarmed eyes pierced through feminine clothing like x-rays. Voyeurs seemed to be part of the landscape. In the city centre, in the offices and cafes, they stood around gaping at the kaleidoscope of dazzling girls, in ecstasy, with half-open mouths, hands in pockets. (Not those of their jackets.) Sexual craving heaved the chests and filled the lungs all over these eight million square kilometres.

 

He glanced at his divers' watch. (A useful item in this climate. Moisture penetrated everywhere. After a couple of days, stowed away trunks and shoes were covered with thin greenish layers of mould. "This climate is a killer", Silbermann had once moaned. "Did you know that the average temperature here is precisely at the level maintained by scientists in their cultures of microbes? A kingdom for a rush of dry, cold air!" "Not for me", Gordan had protested, "give me hot humidity any time. I never felt healthier. There must be some affinity between me and our sub-microscopical brethren.")

 

It was 6:47. The dilapidated chest of black sculpted wood was very beautiful. It stood half-open in the middle of the anarchic bedroom. There was a huge bed with a sumptuous, dusty canopy and some thirty or forty books lying helter-skelter under it. Kitchen-chairs, a broken Venetian mirror, reproductions of El Greco and poor dear Vincent's corn-fields, and then: in a corner, a superb, man-size, cubist statue of Ex๙ (moulded and soldered with rusty spare parts, stolen from wrecker's yards by mechanics in the Sao Cristovao suburb.) In the opposite corner, one of Pedro's chefs-d'oeuvres was leaning against the wall. The master of the lodging had indefinitely postponed its "accrochage".

 

The chest's inside was as chaotic as the rest of the place but he had no trouble unearthing the telescope from under heaps of dossiers, laundry and fresh linen. On top of the whole jumble lay an open envelope containing his spending money for the current month. He extracted a few small notes from it and threw it back where it had been without counting the cash. Nobody would come here during his absence except for Dona Conceicao, the cleaning-woman, and a very few starving but still resolutely exploring cockroaches. Among them this penthouse must have had a very bad reputation. Like the Sahara or the North Pole in gourmet circles. He didn't keep a crumb of food at home.

 

Not so the lodgers on the two lower floors. The "Desembargador", the Appellation Court judge and his prolific family walked on rolling carpets of invading cockroach-troops. This exalted magistrate never omitted - during his rare encounters with Gordan - to complain (in a stentorous voice and with gestures worthy of some sensational criminal process) the misdeeds of those orthopterians. As a matter of fact these insects swarmed all over Rio. In those days they seemed just to laugh at the countless anti-cockroach products contrived by contemporary pharmacology. Since then the economic situation of the cockroaches (even theirs'!) had catastrophically deteriorated. ("It's unjust to annoy them and to pursue them", declared Dona Conceicao about this creeping population, "they are Brazilians too after all, aren't they?").

 

Dona Conceicao would never have touched somebody else's money. The idea of larceny would come sooner to the mind of her crawling prot้g้s than to her's. Definitely: this was not a country of petty thieves.

 

("Yes, but ... however ... still ... how shall I put it??") Well, in short: as soon as the sums involved in a transaction reached a point where it began to excite the native imagination, their "psychological profiles" changed radically. Time and again European importers received shiploads of rotten oranges or pebbles, modestly veiled by a thin layer of alligator-skins or exquisite tropical fruits. Long before the arrival of the ships in Europe the Brazilian branches of the buyers' banks had unblocked the letters of credit and had paid the price of that astonishing merchandise, to the last "centavo". What else could they have done? All the ship's documents and bordereaus and dispatch-notes had been presented to them officially, in due form. Everything was there. The signatures of the port authorities, of the naval Court's experts, of the Director of Customs, of the Ministry for Foreign Trade with certificates guaranteeing the provenance and quality - together with sanitary approbations, classifications, chemical analyses - every stroke of the pen, every paragraph on every sheet having been authenticated, certified, legalized by legions of notaries.

 

For in every forlorn jungle-village there were at least two "tabeliaos" (notaries) sitting and legalizing day and dark and might and main. 'Whatever deed the first tabeliao judged even by his standards too perplexing, would be obligingly and promptly legalized by his competitor, the document's authority being strengthened by rows of special decorative stamps and superb renaissance-style wax seals encased in carved wood containers and dangling under the parchment diploma at the end of yellow and green-striped silk-strings. As to the European importers: why should they be pitied? All those Gringos had to do was to drive their own prices up a little, so they would be indemnified by their Gringo customers and everything would be all right. Should those foreign blood-suckers change their minds and begin to pay decent prices for Brazilian goods: such funny cargoes would never again be seen. And even so: even now while their stinginess was flaying the hapless Brazilian farmers, those bewitched shiploads were relatively rare. Maybe periodically a thumb to put the balance of justice right. ("Anyway, the Gringos were obviously on the winning side, otherwise they wouldn't keep on buying up whatever they could in our Wonderland! Therefore it's easy to see where the real thieves are!").

 

2

 

Palm-greasing was more than a national habit. It was a style of life. Gordan had at first sight rediscovered here, the Balkanico-Levantine socio-economic rules of his homeland. From the very first days he felt like a stranded fish thrown back into the sea. (There was but a single moral law. One didn't take in his friends. As to the State, Banks, exaggeratedly rich strangers: the main reason Providence created them was so they could be fleeced.)

 

Half a year after having disembarked in Rio, less than nine months after his farewell to arms, he was at the head of his first fortune. (Wrong: it was the second one. Both his father and mother had been driven in their coach from a twelve metre high dam straight into the Danube, by a probably very drunk coachman. This happened in 1938. Eighteen months' life in the exuberant atmosphere that characterized Paris between the wars and the purchase of a pavilion in Neuilly - recently resold - didn't make a big dent in his inheritance. It vanished completely however a little later, under the clouds of gunpowder that descended on the Balkans.)

 

In Rio, in those days money came and went, flowing nimbly both ways. In 1947 (things have got a little bleaker in the meantime), one just had to register a commercial firm, with a minimum of formalities, and the banks began, without second thoughts to advance money on the new "enterprise's" drafts, i.o.u.'s and other proofs of sales on credit. (A bank manager after a couple of quick ones: "You know, the greatest medium in town, that's me! I just have to sniff at a draft and I know whether it's genuine, covering an existing deal or just eye-wash about complicitous sham purchases and sales of poetically imagined goods. Even our greatest firms often enough use such rags, particularly when they are low on cash. Me? I never open my mouth. Like a half-wit, without batting an eyelid I advance the dough. All of them pay up sooner or later. All of them make money. None of them wants to be kicked out of business.")

 

In less than six weeks he had made more than half a million Cruzeiros. The heavy-weight dollar was worth four (still very respectable) Cruzeiros. In the following thirty years the rest of the world never had a chance to stop admiring the Brazilian economy's vertiginous progress. According to today's papers more than eighteen thousand old time Cruzeiros would nowadays buy a single anemic dollar. Forward, ho! That proud ultramarine currency's value had been multiplied by - 4500, or in other words: it's worth four thousand five hundred times less now than it was thirty years ago. How silly Europe's exotic peoples look with their poor devaluation rate of a mere three hundred and fifty or so! What a proof that the future belongs to the very young nations! Cheers to their progress!

 

In a sense he had pinched those hundred and thirty thousand and some dollars while serving Marianne (the virgin-emblem of the R้publique) as he had done before in the 'Massif Central' and around Carcassonne. (But maybe not exactly in the same way?) To cut a complicated story short, it was about the famous and colossal Exposition destined to reaffirm, shortly after the war, France's prestige in Latin America. Plans from Paris were grandiose. Eight million cruzeiros had been earmarked for the gloire's renovation at the Antipodes. Three huge buildings had to be redecorated from top to bottom. Gigantic shop-windows, the building of new pavilions and boxes was a must. The French Navy's surviving destroyers were mobilized for the overseas transport.

 

That outdated Cruzeiro's acquisitive power was tremendous. In the homeland it was relatively mightier than the contemporary dollar's in the U.S.A. Legions of architects, decorators, carpenters, mirror and glass-makers, electricians, inn-keepers, lorry owners, firms of night-watchmen, Union bosses of dockers and porters, speculators in real estate leases - all of them dreaming of fat contracts, crooked one and all - besieged the commission of French technicians who couldn't have been more dumbfounded by the reactions and the indecipherable mentality of this outlandish rabble and above all by the middle and lower class Brazilians' total ignorance of Racine's language.

 

The Embassy lent them Gordan as chief-interpreter of the popular idiom and mentality. (With French, Latin and some Italian behind him, only a peerless imbecile wouldn't have spoken fluent Portuguese after three months in the country. But perched on the sumptuous ivory tower of their language the French instinctively disdain polyglot achievements.)

 

In a matter of a week the wayward Roland of this 'chanson de geste' advanced, from an interpreter's role to the unofficial rank of a commercial adviser to the French delegation, and his prestige came close to the authority of a spiritual director in business-matters. Every morning, at the head of the flabbergasted board of experts, he discussed prices with would-be contractors, booting out the most obvious thieves, suggesting in a very cool tone provisions, clauses, deadlines, contractual fines, alternative solutions and then just after the contracts were signed and the first instalment handed over, he exchanged a rapid and grave glance with the overjoyed candidate.

 

It was a cosmic laser-beam that connected in a trice the secret life of Balkan valleys with the sombre forests of Amazon country. (This mystical communication was made easier by the fact that when thinking of business all Brazilian brains tick exactly the same way.)

 

Every single one of those honest undertakers had from the very first minute seen through the situation and understood its real meaning. This frail old discreetly coughing unobtrusive functionary of the 'Arts et M้tiers' who understood nothing about anything could not for a moment be taken seriously for the genuine big boss of the Exposition. The chief of chiefs could be nobody else but this sturdy, loud-mouthed devil of a Gringo who knew (or guessed?) the rules of Brazilian poker-games so well. He loyally protected his government's interests. Hadn't he thrown out the most impudent offers? But then he didn't seem inhuman or devoid of conciliatory spirit. Quite obviously it was this martially but not always inimically yelling Gringo who would control everything from the beginning to the end of the works and on up to the final settling of accounts. How much might his goodwill be worth? Oh, as usual. Five to ten per cent of the gross. Naturally this already figured in the smart tradesman's preliminary calculations of costs and administrative expenses. He would have been full of mistrust about the whole deal, had he not managed to locate the man in the key position: the central palm to be urgently greased. That was why the business card - ceremoniously dog-eared and presented to Gordan - bore the faintly penciled mention: 'Office-hours from seven a.m.'.

 

Two arduously and zealously active weeks followed. Every morning he made the milkman's round of three or four contractor's places and collected his entire commission, staying for a few minutes' amicable chat about the weather, the latest musical show and the football. Thereafter the delighted companions parted, not without having in lyrical accents proclaimed the superiority of a beautiful friendship above all of the world's other treasures, at the same time exchanging 'abra็os'. (A gesture which consists of tapping gently on each other's backs and means nothing at all.) Then he returned to the Exposition's headquarters, and got on with the defence of the interests of 'la Douce France' as well as his own.

 

Even now he was still so much a Byzantine that he regarded these arrangements as profoundly equitable. According to his flashing arithmetic he had spared Lady Marianne a total loss of one and a half million cruzeiros - a sum that would have been irremediably ghosted away without his intervention. It would be a flagrant injustice not having rewarded himself for his services with a third of that amount, even if the description of his merits, in terms of commercial book-keeping, might have been a somewhat intricate task.

 

Thus had it happened that Brazil's cultural horizon was widened by the founding of 'CORCOVADO BOOKS'. It made a little money but solely owing to a few unobtrusive subsidies from the 'rue de Lille' - of the 'Oeuvres Fran็aises เ 1'Etranger'. So far he had published only two widely circulated school-books: a new French-Portuguese (and vice-versa) pocket dictionary and a bilingual selection of Michelet's historical works. But all this was bound to change. 'Corcovado' would soon become a great power in Brazil. An enterprise with assets of at least five million Cruzeiros, exclusively controlled by the extirpator of anti-Expositional wrongdoings!

 

Just as everywhere else: a solid financial basis is also, in Brazil, the best material for asphalting the royal highway that leads to substantial gains. However, this was not the perspective which entranced him most. (He meant it seriously.) He deemed his present way of life quite satisfactory.

 

But on the other hand, such an important publishing house as the one he had in mind (for he realised once more that a capital investment of five Brazilian millions had a much longer arm than elsewhere) could speed up the ripening of ideas and natural inclinations. No, no: power didn't attract him either. He loathed the recollections of personal power and the way even a nondescript company-commander had to exercise it over conquered villages.

 

But he wanted at any price to see with his own eyes the reactions of a secluded country (which Brazil still was - almost as much as the dying Chinese Empire) if its inhabitants all of a sudden came to know that life beyond the grave was a fact. How would people react, having to think about eternal life clearly, practically, as about the arrangements for impending holidays? The paramount influence on his thinking was Bergson's philosophy. This half-forgotten Father of a new followerless Church affirmed that all worldly greed would be dampened by the certainty of survival, just like the electric lights of a smoky ballroom seem to fade at dawn when the rising sun's glare breaks in through the open windows. People wouldn't be turned into angels but the pursuit of material goods would become less hectic, less cannibalistic. This would probably lead to a sensible improvement of human nature, ironing out its worst iniquities. For Gordan was perfectly aware that behind the many-coloured sparkling scenery he had chosen (or that had been chosen?) for his activities, unimaginable strangling misery oppressed Brazil's endless spaces and countless crowds. And who would not prefer living among satisfied people to sitting in the middle of an arena for Victorian rat-fights? But he had arrived at the conclusion that it was quite impossible to change the course of history by external action. Only a psychological thunderbolt, an abrupt Bergsonian change of the soul's illumination, the new sun of a new empirical religion would be capable of transforming (gradually, yes, but not at all slowly) this planet's present aspect.

 

(While brooding over these transcendental problems, his good faith was beyond any doubt, wasn't it? Well, well ... there was the very faint shadow of a doubt, just now arising in his spirit. He remembered a few discussions he had had before which were somehow related to this self-analysis. How ruthless, how aggressive had been his verbal duels with priests! Even at Silbermann' s, when he had met Padre Walden, the "little inquisitor" whom he had immediately liked. Of course the "holy midget" had a great sense of humour and wasn't easily offended. And naturally in all those altercations Gordan's outbursts were mitigated by a falsely urbane tone, by ironical understatement, by cool although transparently abusive sarcasm. He bluntly accused God's men of bad faith. Behind their passionate defence of religion, Church, divine revelation and so forth there was a dark point. And it stank. Didn't they, with their unctuous declamations - consciously or unconsciously - protect their personal comfort? Not their spiritual comfort. The bodily one. Their social standing. Or to put it very simply: their jobs.)

 

("Well spoken, Gordan, but what about a closer look at yourself?" This inner voice that asked this disagreeable question came from his recollections of a secular tradition. Of the pitylessly boring Jesuitical self-examination. Were his own convictions, his seeking his - let's say, metaphysical - experiments entirely free of egocentric motives? Was he not propelled mainly by the will to unfold, to multiply his natural gifts? To exploit them fully. And maybe not with the sole purpose of attaining his spirit's sovereign freedom? Worst of all: had his striving not been tainted by the wish to keep and to strengthen his own venturesome but by no means unpleasant social position? For sure, had some joker asked him such a question he would have protested with the same indignation - the same leonine roars and howls uttered by the Church-dignitaries he had openly indicted for venality and hypocrisy. But now, alone, he could cooly discard that ugly suspicion. Vulgar egoism didn't figure among his motives.)

 

***

 

The future ancestor had a fit of laughter, cleared his throat, lit the day's thirtieth cigarette and began one of his hoarse, grumbling lectures. Unfortunately the Inter-Time Tel & Tel Inc. having yet to convene its first meeting of stockholders, Gordan couldn't listen. It might have been useful because it was concerned with his meditation.

 

"You silly ass! You're taking yourself for Schopenhauer! You with your note-book of youthful Gordanian 'Paranaesen und Maximen'! Here's a better aphorism for you to chew on. 'No one is capable of conceiving thoughts that would crush him!!!' - Example: nobody could think he's an incurable cretin and a really hopeless failure. As soon as he dares think such a thought seriously: the man can get out of his predicament. Why? Because it was the feeling of latent reserves of energy in himself (which could manage to ram his prison's walls) that opened his eyes to his incarceration, which he would otherwise - feeling himself weak - desperately deny, christening his dungeon: full liberty! So: insight is conditioned by strength! WISDOM by FORCE!! Above a certain level of banality they begin growing towards each other as if attracted by an obscure identity. Listen: let's make a metaphysical joke between us. (By the way, don't worry about my yelling at you: I condescend to recognize a few common points in us. How come? I dunno.) Let's offer to the 'calotins' as the Jacobins called the priests, a poisoned gift. Venomous, but so beautiful that they will be enraptured swallowing it. Good. Haven't I shown you with my usual brilliance that Wisdom and Force or Power or Might tend to meet. And what about the other attributes of Divinity? Does an extremely wise and powerful man blackmail or steal? Why, the knowledge of his exceptional position brings Justice automatically into the picture. Whom would he be compelled to envy or what would he covet beyond the contemplation of his wonderful achievements? So here we have Beauty or Glory. For the sight of such a wise, mighty, just spirit functioning is harmonious: esthetically uplifting: truly glorious! (Think of Goethe!) And so we draw the converging lines of the rest of the adoring litanies that enumerate all the much-praised qualities which - in these mortal waters where we, poor fishes, are a-paddling - remain isolated. Only in the highest spheres do these shining virtues unite. Where? At the surface where water touches air: eternally vivifying air. At the point where the blindingly white beam of Divinity plunges into our mortal element and is immediately refracted into a rainbow of the finest virtues. Which get less and less fine as they dive further and further away from Eternity. But they can converge again in the shape of very highly developed personalities, coming close to the sacred air (ether? sky?) and return into the virginally white and perfect beam: during the moments of Beatific Vision and Purified Dying. Now isn't this something for the highest Board of Directors of the Heavenly Banco dello Spirito Santo? Shouldn't they jump and dance for joy? Isn't my metaphor - even if we take it only for a metaphor - a more convincing argument in favour of deity's existence than St. ArisThomas' (sic!) hilarious 'proofs' beginning with the 'unmoved mover'? But we'll stop the rejoicing in Israel, you and me my boy, with a single hard look at His so-called Creation. At the bloody garbage produced by that snow-white 'Wunderkind'. What was the 'mortal element' for, if He felt so perfect alone, by Himself? A sadist then? Oh no! Just thin air. So strengthen your will in order to endure more truth about yourself. Don't for a minute see yourself in such a goddam blameless pure and noble light. Or else you'll go and try to butt in walls with your bare skull. Fortunately I happen to know it's pretty thick. However, try to learn modesty. You are not God. Look at me. I succeeded in becoming modest. Humble even. I know that I'm not God. Just a Half-God. That'll be all for today.

 

And for tomorrow and all the other days. I'm fed up with this still mute Inter-Time-Phone (Progress indeed! My arse!). And your 'Paranaesen und Maximen': back to the attic! Moreover: I know your story too well. Eureka: Eureka! From where I sit I'm omniscient regarding your funny person! In hindsight? Everybody is? Wait! Wait! I know more about you than the best historian could ever scratch together. Why? You bloody idiot! Because your perfection bound fermenting molecules are still in me! And mine were already in you dictating your forethoughts!! So isn't the future Man-God already in both of us - (poor but fighting bastard-animals) - whispering omniscient advice? Oh, no I have to stop! Too early for the sixth whisky and soda! Well I don't dislike your tale but I'm busy recounting more recent adventures. I'll leave the sequel to your bawdy legend for my unobtrusive twin-brother. He's nostalgic, poetically-minded - but underneath the same lusty, slightly perverse pig as all our family. He'll not use the In-Ti-Phone. Too discreet, the hypocrite. He too expends tons of brackets but few exclamation marks. You'll be O.K. with him. A last tip. Couldn't you booze a little less? Couldn't you accept a little restraint? No? Well, I never did. Still going strong. Medical Wunderkinds, aren't we? Tant mieux. Touch wood.

 

And that's the way hm, hm, hm, hm

By which I get my wealth

And very gladly will I drink

Your Honour's noble health.

 

Farewell and cheerio, Funnyface!

 

***

 

Alas, due to the technical imperfections of his time, Gordan couldn't follow all these well-meant injunctions. He thought he saw his own 'psychological profile' very clearly. Didn't he know he was driven solely by that (cosmic? mystic? prophetic?) thunderbolt which had struck him in childhood, in front of the gigantic red sun!

 

What was his craving to know the unknowable if not an inborn refusal to yield to banality settling in life's petty dimensions. He never thought of death. Particularly not when it was close at hand. Only life interested him. This, or another one.

 

Because there was … there were ... he couldn't for a second doubt it ... somewhere, about these endless spaces - far behind these Wagnerian mountains ... there lived ... forlorn among the galaxies of superstitions and charlatans … there existed … (every sense thundered it in Gordan's ears: he or they was or were bound to exist in this land of madness, poetical trance and the Wisdom of Pure Beauty) ... there was or there were … one or several true prophets … living, probably unknown even to themselves … he or they were the missing link between material and non-material life … and their presence would reveal the terrifying and magnificent secret of the red sun's other side.

 

It was a question of life and death for him to find that magical pin in Brazil's gigantic hay-stack. But he would never find it without the radar-system of a strong organisation. It was a must also for the tumultuous events that would follow the great discovery.

 

How lucky it was that nobody guessed his thoughts! It would have been the joke of the century ! The boiling down of his Grail-seeking to this infamous equation: The Central Secret of the Universe = the pinching of a certain amount of money.

 

Yet it was a strictly logical deduction. It resulted from the same internal geometry of nature which determined the shape of crystals. The sacrilegious equation which depreciated the value of Beatific Vision - fixing its price at five million vile Cruzeiros - proceeded from a firm reality: as immovable as the axioms of Euclides. Here's why.

 

3

 

Brazil's lower classes were full of the most generous disposition but were sorrily lacking in the means to manifest it. As to the wealthy citizens, it happened that they threw huge sums away but they did it exclusively by exhibitionism. Showing off was their greatest passion. In all other circumstances Moli่re's 'L'Avare' was a Prodigal Son compared with them. Nothing could distress this elite more (getting them into a state of panic-stricken dismay) than a request for money be it for the most sublime causes.

 

Of course they never bluntly refused the loan or contribution or investment they had been asked for. The rules of Brazilian courtesy came first! Unfortunately it just happened that they were (every single one of them) at that very moment facing total bankruptcy. As soon as they succeeded in averting the imminent danger of death by starvation for themselves and their poor families, this dear and excellent friend could count on them: their house and fortune would then be entirely at his disposal. And thereafter, they fled the dear and excellent friend like plague, smallpox and elephantiasis.

 

Moreover: what a stupid idea! Funds for a publishing firm?! How silly! Had Gordan had other ideas: a dope-smuggling network for instance or a steady little white-slave circuit: serious people would take him seriously and several hands as discreet as they were open would support his clever enterprise. But that line of commercial activity was not to his liking. His law-degree hadn't been of much use so far. It did allow him, however, to locate with the greatest precision the border between civil and penal law, and to perform his haphazard operations exactly there. He had never had the slightest trouble. This was a comforting thought but didn't resolve the impending problem.

 

There was no real money in books. Everybody thought so. However this wasn't always true. For example the Ultramundain Poems of Humberto Campos (of this great Brazilian poet) turned out to be a gold-mine for one of Gordan's competitors. The deceased bard, ex-member of the Brazilian Academy of Belles Lettres, had had the noble idea of temporarily leaving his dwelling on the Elysian Fields in order to honour the Spiritualist Circle of a derelict and noisome village with a visit. There he dictated, through the mouth of an illiterate medium, an entire volume of his newest lyrical creations to another (literate) seer whose handwriting began, just then, to resemble (oh miracle!) more and more the handwriting of the departed genius. This similarity - as well as the obviously Camposian inspiration of the heaven-sent works - was confirmed not only by the etherified laureate's widow (who of course drew - as was only just - new extraterrestrial royalties from the clairvoyant publisher of those transcendant verses) but also by most of the aristocratic academicians delighted to see (at last!) headlines about a literary subject on the first pages of the Brazilian newspapers together with their own photographs and interviews authenticating the awe-inspiring phenomenon of desincarnate versification.

 

Very few critics dissented. They hinted timidly at a few discrepancies in the style of the new quickly materializing poems. But these skeptics probably hadn't taken into account the psychological shock, the effects of the euphoria that troubadour must have felt while wandering in the fifth dimension and observing from up there how his sales increased from the usual gloomy thousand (a total to which his stay on this unpoetical planet had accustomed him) and shooting past the mark of six hundred thousand copies sold in less than six months.

 

4

 

But Gordan's schemes didn't include such primitive tricks. He was yearning for a sublime truth far above trickery. ("Although", he reflected, "it has never been possible to separate completely these two levels of perception: reality and illusion. Nowhere does nature produce pure gold. She hides it among rocks and sand. The purest mystics have resorted to tricks. Sometimes they deluded their public, thus creating the necessary atmosphere. But more often than not they deceived themselves. Yet these self-delusions cast their nerves towards higher and higher degrees of rapture - until they reached the ultimate limit of the soul's growth: the revelation of its own divinity. But to attain such heights and bring their message back to the crowds bound to the plain, they had to be entranced by the ideas and the symbols of their own mythology. Of the legends and ceremonies that were living energies then and there. The gods that inhabited the saints' souls could never have spoken without the help of those theatrical effects.

 

He darted a sidelong glance at his own show. The banquet of the bad spirits was set up at the corner of the alley-way leading toward Pedro's, and the two bewitched girls', pseudo-baroque calamity. From the balcony window they could have seen the 'Nature Morte (very morte) au Col Blanc'. A few early risers had started their morning stroll. They stepped respectfully down off the sidewalk moving coyly around the visible meeting place of invisible demons. No doubt there was awed whispering about the Lord of the Seven Crossroads. Manifestly he was everywhere, poking his nose into everybody's business.

 

Only a few days earlier Gordan had witnessed the self-immolation of a very pale girl who howled and wriggled in her many-coloured blazing dress kneeling on the pavement in front of a rather indifferent crowd.

 

"She probably couldn't help punishing herself", a middle-aged lady explained unctuously. And, finishing her funeral oration, "She must have betrayed Ex๙ with some misbeliever!"

 

Her tone conveyed heartfelt indignation about the suspected sacrilege. It was indeed an unforgivable thoughtlessness to multiply in such a blameworthy way the quite satisfactory number of the Sinister King's horns.

 

5

 

The mental attitude of these people couldn't be more favourable. What had to be done was to unite the countless but essentially similar sects and to instil a new mysticism into this collectivity's highly receptive heart. He didn't aspire to the role of a prophet nor would he run for the Papacy of the new Church. But he felt a generous humanitarian enthusiasm, seeing himself with his mind's eyes as an Eminence Grise behind the throne of a never foreseen Pontificate.

 

He was no dreamer. His plan was feasible. Under two conditions.

 

First: he needed the sacred fire: the inner aid of a never vacillating gapless faith. Without it he was incapable of convincing anybody of anything. However: if he marched resolutely forward he would certainly - on his road to Damascus - encounter his faith. Preaching to others is also a kind of auto-suggestion. Total faith would come to him: 'like a thief in the night'. He heard the babbling of miraculous sources - the presence of still virgin mines in the depths of his subconscious. Even if the price of fanatical belief was foundering into definitive madness he would not recoil. But he trusted his hitherto benevolent Destiny. He had a distinct premonition of his growing power. He would realize the medieval dream of the Homunculus, create artificial beings condensed from the auras of ecstatic virgins. The exploration of remote jungle hide-outs for miraculous mandragora-roots and their hanged producers awaited him. Descents into the caves of ghosts from vanished Atlantis, encounters with omniscient sages flashed through his imagination. No doubt: the mystical lightning of a new Religion would pierce and exalt Gordan at the end of this road.

 

But there was a second condition to be fulfilled, however prosaic it might seem. No great dream had ever been materialized without a cast iron foundation under it. To shake up the consciousness of even this unimportant corner of the world, a relatively small but efficient clockwork of numerous wheels was necessary. Pencil in hand, using all his tactical talents he had calculated the project and its cost. Dozens of expeditions all over the enormous, partly empty, partly unexplored territory - doing psychical research on an unprecedented scale - filming - probing relentlessly. He anticipated the publication of the first, most sensational accounts of Brazil's unknown mysteries, and then the financial snowball permitting further digging into the hard core of Occultism's no-man's land. His sharp-edged arithmetic had led him to reliable conclusions.

 

He needed: five thousand shares (nominal or to the bearer) at a thousand Cruzeiros each, duly signed, partly paid and deposited at one of his banks charged with the incorporation. This was all he wanted. A proof of immortality and five millions. Surprisingly enough, these two things were inseparably intertwined. A surrealistic delirium? Not at all. Just his fantastic but hard-boiled reality. ("No panicking at the thought! Easy, easy!").

 

How could he put his hands on five million? He had at least a dozen prosperous friends. He hadn't even tried to bother them about his idea. It would have been hopeless. Nobody would go along with a publishing project. Not even the modestly lucrative diffusion of spiritualist books would find financial supporters. Profits of forty or fifty per cent in a year didn't interest anybody. Brazil's new-born industry, mightily protected by an unassailable barrier of high customs duties practically didn't have to reckon with foreign competition and drained all the free capital. Only propositions assuring a yearly gain of more than a hundred and fifty per cent were found worthy of a serious Brazilian investor's attention. Thus the normal solutions were out. That left the hare-brained ones.

 

6

 

"Poor people come to see me about their money-problems", his ally the sorcerer Tiberio had explained, going on in his much too polite, soft, Brazilian voice:

 

"And what do the wealthy customers want? Miraculous cures maybe? Not on your life. The best doctors money can buy are taking care of their precious health. What the rich ladies and gentlemen want to find with our help is: rejuvenescence and beauty (which is quite relative, and depends on taste, ha-ha). Sometimes bloodthirsty revenge ! Listening to their cruel ideas would freeze even thy blood. But mostly they want amorous conquests of quite astounding sorts. That's right! Even now, after thy amazingly rapid progress, thou canst not guess half of what is happening around me - around this servant of thy servants who obeys thy orders ... and whom thou darest call ... yes indeed ... what a funny Gringo art thou! ... why was it thou calledst me last time when we got so very plastered together ... Why am I the Great Golden Cat? ... Well it doesn't matter ... some Gringo joke probably ... what of it ... aren't we chums? I'll presently show thee still other tricks ... even here in this cave … What cave? Where? Ha-ha-ha ... in front of thine illustrious nose! Hidden by the undergrowth and that thick cedar-tree ... there are three holy daughters of the Spirit ... sleeping in the cave… they've been sleeping there for more than eleven days… awaiting their initiation … and they have compresses of very special herbs on the shaven tops of their heads and all around their skulls. Ha-ha-ha, thou wilt see what my little sweet and scented herbs can do ... Thou wilt see all sort of things that will please thee ... but: Caramba! Thou wilt learn that I'm not a cat ... golden or not ... I'm a tucan with a big thick gold and yellow beak and I like to dig with it into deep pockets filled with - yellow and gold Spanish doubloons! ... Oh yes … thou knowest … if I had to choose between glory glory halleluia in heaven's eternal bliss or a huge heap of the right stuff here in this valley of tears … well I'm nothing but a poor ignorant caboclo - half-caste … I'd modestly and humbly choose the dough ... Doesn't thy Gracious Excellency agree with me?"

 

Gordan's Gracious Excellency did fully agree. But what a Chinese puzzle had come of this agreement !

 

***

 

ฉ The Estate of Paul Gregor.

Edited by Philippe Pissier, 2003 / Edition ้tablie par Philippe Pissier, 2003.

A 666 NETWORK offensive.

Accueil Sommaire Liens

M'écrire pour me dire tout le bien que vous pensez de moi