Torture Garden Read online

  She half rose from the cushions. Her parted tunic revealed the edges of her ardent rosy flesh below the waist amid the shadows of the fabric. She drew a packet of quinine from a gold sweet-dish on a lacquer tray with her fingertips and, telling me to come closer, she gently placed it on my lips.

  “See what a thrill it gives … such a thrill! You have no idea, darling … And how much better I will love you this evening, how madly I will love you! Swallow, dear heart, swallow …”

  Faced with the fact that I was sad and reluctant, she added, with a dark gleam in her eyes to overcome my last resistance:

  “Listen! I’ve seen thieves hung in England. I’ve been to bullfights, and seen anarchists garotted in Spain. In Russia I’ve seen beautiful young women whipped to death by soldiers. In Italy I’ve seen living phantoms – phantoms of famine – exhume cholera victims and avidly eat them … On river banks in India I’ve seen thousands of completely naked beings writhing and dying in the throes of the plague. One evening in Berlin I saw a woman I had loved the previous evening, a splendid creature in pink tights, devoured by a lion in a cage … I’ve seen every horror, all human tortures … It was very beautiful! But I’ve seen nothing as beautiful – do you know what I mean? – as these Chinese convicts … it’s most beautiful of all! You can’t imagine, I tell you, you can’t imagine. Annie and I never missed a Wednesday. Come, please!”

  “Since it’s so beautiful, dear Clara, and gives you so much pleasure,” I replied melancholically, “let’s go and feed the convicts.”

  “Really – do you want to?”

  Clara glowed with joy, clapping her hands like a baby whose nurse has allowed it to torment a small dog. Then she leapt onto my knees, tender and feline, putting her arms around my neck – her hair covered me, blinding my face with golden flames and intoxicating scents.

  “You’re so nice, dear, dear love … Kiss my lips, my neck, my hair, dear little rascal!”

  Her hair was imbued with such an animal odour and her caresses were so electric that her contact on my skin was enough to instantaneously make me forget fever, tiredness and aches. And I immediately felt heroic ardour and fresh strength surging through my veins.

  “Ah, what fun we shall have, sweetheart! When I see the convicts, I go all dizzy and my whole body quivers in the same way as it does in love. It seems to me, you see … it seems to me that I am descending into the depths of my flesh, right to the dark depths of my flesh. Ah, your mouth, give it to me, your mouth, your mouth, your mouth …”

  With agility, quickly, shamelessly and joyfully, she went off, followed by her dog, to her women so they could dress her.

  I was no longer particularly sad, or particularly weary. Clara’s kiss, the taste of which lingered on my lips like a magical taste of opium, calmed my afflictions, eased the surging of my fever and banished the monstrous image of dead Annie. And I stared into the garden with a calm gaze.

  Calm?

  The garden sloped down gently, ornamented everywhere with rare species and precious plants. An avenue of enormous camphor-trees led from the pavilion I was in to a red door, shaped like a temple, which opened out on the countryside. Between the leafy branches of gigantic trees which partly concealed the view to the left, I caught glimpses of the river gleaming like polished silver in the sun. I tried to take an interest in the garden’s multiple decorations, in its strange flowers and monstrous vegetation. A man crossed the avenue with two indolent panthers on a lead. In the middle of the lawn stood an immense bronze representing some obscene and cruel divinity. There were birds there – cranes with blue plumage, red-throated toucans from tropical America, sacred pheasants, duck with golden casques and clad in brilliant purple like warriors from long ago, tall multicoloured wading-birds, seeking the shade of the thickets. But neither birds nor wild beasts, nor Gods, nor flowers could hold my attention, nor could the bizarre palace on my right which, between the cedars and bamboos, superimposed its light-filled terraces adorned with flowers, its shaded balconies and vivid roofs. My thoughts were elsewhere, far, far away … beyond sea and forest. They were within me, sunken deep inside me … in my very depths!

  Calm?

  Clara had barely disappeared behind the foliage of the garden than remorse at being there seized hold of me. Why had I returned? What folly and cowardice had I obeyed? One day she told me, you remember, on the ship: “When you are unhappy, you can leave!” I believed myself strengthened by my infamous past but I was really only a feeble and worried child. Unhappy? Oh, yes, I had been, to the extent of the worst torment and most tremendous self-disgust. And I had left! By a tormenting irony I took advantage of an English expedition passing through Canton – I was positively devoted to missions! – on its way to explore little known regions of Annam to escape Clara. It meant forgetting, maybe, and perhaps even death. For two years, two long and cruel years … I had walked endlessly. And there was no forgetting and no death. In spite of tiredness, danger and accursed fever, not for a day or a minute was I cured of the frightful poison that woman had deposited in my flesh, that woman to whom I felt attached and rivetted through the frightful corruption of her soul and her crimes of love. She was a monster and I loved her for being a monster! I had believed – did I really believe? – that her love would uplift me, and yet I had descended even lower, to the depths of the poisoned abyss from which, having once tasted its odour, you never emerge. In my tent, in the depths of forests, haunted by fever, after our billeting points, I often tried to get rid of her monstrous and persistent image with opium. Yet opium conjured her up more explicitly, more vibrantly and more imperiously than ever … I wrote wild letters to her, over-bearing and imprecatory letters in which the most violent curses were mingled with the most abject adoration. She replied with charming letters, heedless and querulous letters which I sometimes received in towns and posts we passed through. She spoke of being miserable because of my abandonment of her and wept, pleaded … and called me back. Her only justification was: “You must realise, my darling,” she wrote, “that I don’t have the soul of your frightful Europe. I bear the soul of old China within me, a soul that is so much more beautiful. How distressing that you can’t accept this.” And I learned from one of her letters that she had left Canton, where she could not continue to live without me, to live with Annie in a small town further in the south of China ‘which is marvellous’. Ah, how could I have resisted for so long the terrible temptation to abandon my companions and go to that sublime and accursed town, that delicious, tormenting hell where Clara breathed and lived in unknown and atrocious lusts, whose lack was causing me to languish? And so I had returned to her, like a murderer going back to the scene of his crime.

  Laughter in the foliage, little cries, the friskiness of a dog … Clara appeared, dressed half in Chinese fashion, half in European. A pale mauve silk blouse faintly spangled with golden flowers enveloped her in a thousand folds, outlining her slender body and rounded curves. She wore a large pale straw hat below which her face appeared like a pink flower in the pale shadow. And she was wearing yellow leather shoes on her little feet.

  When she entered the pavilion, it was like an explosion of scents.

  “You think I look weird, don’t you? Oh, such a sad man of Europe, who hasn’t laughed once since he’s been back. Aren’t I beautiful?”

  I did not rise from the settee where I was reclining.

  “Quickly! Quickly! Darling, we must do the grand tour. I’ll put my gloves on along the way. Let’s go, come on! No, no, not you!” she added, gently pushing away the dog which was yapping, leaping and wagging its tail.

  She called a boy and requested him to follow with a meat basket and a pitchfork.

  “Ah, it’s very amusing,” she explained. “A lovely basket woven by the best basket-maker in China … and the pitchfork … You’ll see, a sweet little pitchfork with teeth of platinum incrusted with gold and handle of green jade – green like the sky in the gleams of early morning, green like poor Annie’s eyes. Don’t le
t’s make this unpleasant undertaker’s face, darling … but come, come quickly!”

  And we started to walk in the sun, that frightful sun which blackened the grass, withered the peonies in the garden and weighed on my skull like a heavy iron helmet.

  II

  The prison was on the other side of the river, whose black pestilential waters, emerging from the city, flowed slowly and sinisterly between level banks. To get there, you have to take a long detour to reach a bridge beside which, every Wednesday, amid a considerable crowd of elegant people, the Convict-Meat-Market is held.

  Clara refused the palanquin. We went down through the garden situated outside the city wall on foot and, along a footpath, bordered here and there with brown stones and thick hedges of white roses or trimmed privet, we reached the suburbs where the town was so scaled down as almost to become countryside, and the houses – transformed into hovels – were spaced out at long intervals in enclosures with bamboo fences. Otherwise, there were only orchards in bloom, market-gardens or wastelands. Men stripped bare to the waist, wearing bell-shaped hats, toiled in the sun planting lilies – those beautiful tiger lilies with petals like the legs of spiders, whose savoury bulbs were served as a delicacy for the rich. We went past some miserable sheds where potters turned pots, rag pickers squatted between large baskets cataloguing the morning harvest, while a group of hungry birds cawed as they passed back and forth in the sky. Further on, under an enormous fig-tree, we saw a gentle and punctilious old man bathing birds on the edge of a fountain. All the time we passed palanquins carrying already drunk European sailors to the city. And, behind us, glowing and thickset, scaling the high hill, was the city with its temples and strange red, green and yellow houses rippling in the light.

  Clara walked quickly, unconcerned about my tiredness and heedless of the sun which scorched the atmosphere and, in spite of our parasols, burned our skin. She walked free and lithe, bold and happy. Sometimes she reproached me cheerfully:

  “How slow you are, darling … God, how slow you are! You aren’t getting anywhere. I just hope the prison gates haven’t opened and that the prisoners haven’t been gorged when we get there! That would be awful! Oh, how I should detest you!”

  From time to time, she gave me a witch-hazel drop which had the virtue of stimulating breathing and, with mocking eyes:

  “Oh, you’re a little old woman! A little old woman! An insignificant little woman!”

  Then, half-amused, half-angry, she started to run. And I had great difficulty in following her. Several times I had to stop to take breath. I felt my veins would burst and that my heart would explode into my chest.

  And Clara repeated, in her chirpy voice: “A little old woman! An insignificant little woman!”

  The footpath opened out on the river bank. Two large steamers were unloading coal and merchandise from Europe. Some junks were preparing to go fishing. A considerable flotilla of sampans with mottled tents lay at anchor, rocked by the light rippling of the water. There was not a breath of wind in the air.

  The bank disgusted me. It was dirty and full of potholes, covered with black dust and strewn with fish offal. The stench, the sound of scuffles, flute songs and barking dogs, reached us from the depths of the slums on its edge: lice-infested tea-houses, death-trap shops and suspicious-looking trading-stations. With a laugh Clara showed me a sort of little stall where parts of rats, quarters of dogs, rotten fish and scrawny chickens smeared with copal, clusters of bananas and blood-covered bats threaded on the same spit were for sale, displayed on cadmium leaves.

  As we went on the smell became more unbearable and the filth thicker. On the river ships were crowded thickly together – a jumble of sinister prows and with torn rags for sails. Here there was a dense population of fishermen and pirates – frightful sea-demons with tanned faces and lips reddened with betel, whose glances sent a chill down my spine. They were playing dice, shouting and fighting. Others, of more peaceful disposition, were disembowelling fish to dry them in the sun on breast-hooks and ropes. Still others were teaching monkeys to perform a thousand charming tricks and obscenities.

  “Amusing, isn’t it?” said Clara. “To think there are more than thirty thousand whose only home is their boat! The devil knows how they manage!”

  She lifted her skirts, exposing the lower part of her agile and sinuous legs and we continued for a long time to follow the horrible path as far as the bridge whose bizarre substructure and five massive arches, painted in violent colours, crossed the river where large oily pools whirled and sank, at the mercy of eddies and currents.

  On the bridge the scene changed, but the smell became worse – that smell so characteristic throughout China and which, in town, forest and field, constantly reminds you of decay and death.

  Small shops built like pagodas, tents in the form of pavilions, draped with bright silky fabrics, enormous parasols, set up atop carts and mobile display-trays, were crowded together. In these shops, under the tents and parasols, were fat traders with hippopotamus bellies, dressed in yellow, blue or green robes, shouting and beating gongs to attract customers, announcing all sorts of carrion: dead rats, drowned dogs, quartered deer and horses, purulent fowl. It was all piled up pell-mell in large bronze basins.

  “Here! Here! Come on by! Look and choose! You’ll not find anything better anywhere … No one has anything more rotten!”

  And, while rummaging in the basins, they brandished disgusting quarters of sanious meat like flags at the end of long iron hooks and, with atrocious grins that accentuated the red gashes on their faces that were painted like masks, they repeated, amid the furious echo of gongs and simultaneous clamours:

  “Here! Here! Come on by! Look and choose! You’ll not find anything better anywhere … No one has anything more rotten!”

  As soon as we stepped onto the bridge, Clara said: “You see, we’re late! It’s all your fault! Hurry up …”

  In fact, a large crowd of Chinese women, as well as some English and Russian ladies – for there were very few men apart from the traders – swarmed on to the bridge. Everywhere were gowns embellished with flowers and metamorphoses, multicoloured parasols, fans as nimble as birds, laughter, cries of joy and jostling, all that was thrilling, colourful, singing, fluttering in the sun, like a festival of life and love.

  “Here! Here! Come on by!”

  Bewildered by the crush, dazed by the barking of the traders and the sonorous vibrations of gongs, I almost had to fight to get through into the crowd and protect Clara from insults and blows. A really grotesque combat, because I had no resistance or strength and felt myself borne along by this human tumult as easily as a dead tree thrown hither and thither by the raging waters of a torrent … Clara herself plunged into the fray with all her strength. She suffered the brutal contact and, so to speak, violation by the crowd, with passionate pleasure. One moment she cried out triumphantly:

  “See, darling, my dress is completely torn. It’s delightful!”

  It was very difficult for us to open a path to the crowded shops that seemed to be being besieged, about to be looted.

  “Look and choose! You’ll not find anything better anywhere …”

  “Here! Here! Come on by!”

  Clara took the sweet little pitchfork from the hands of the boy who was following us with his sweet little basket, and used it to rummage through the basins.

  “You go through it as well, darling.”

  I thought my heart would fail me, due to the dreadful smell of carrion that exhaled from these stalls, from these shaken up basins and from the whole of the crowd as it hurled itself on the carcasses as though they were flowers.

  “Clara, dear Clara!” I implored. “Let’s go, please!”

  “Oh, how pale you are! Why? Isn’t this fun?”

  “Clara, dear Clara!” I insisted. Let’s go, I beg you! I can’t stand the smell any more.”

  “But it’s not a bad smell, my love. It smells of death, that’s all!”

  It didn’t seem to
affect her. No grimace of disgust marked her white skin, as fresh as cherry tree blossom. To judge by the veiled ardour of her eyes and the pulsing of her nostrils, it seemed as though she was sensually aroused … She inhaled decay with delight, as though it was a perfume.

  “Oh what a beautiful, beautiful piece!”

  With graceful gestures she filled the basket with vile fragments.

  And we laboriously continued on our way through the excited crowd and the abominable smells.

  “Quickly! Quickly!”

  III

  The prison had been built at the river’s edge. Its quadrangular walls enclosed an area of more than a hundred thousand square yards. There was not a single window and no opening at all other than the immense door crowned with red dragons and fortified with heavy iron bars. The watch-towers, square towers surmounted by roofs with upturned edges, marked the four corners of the sinister ramparts. Smaller towers were spaced out at regular intervals. At night all the towers around the prison shone out like lighthouses, projecting a distinctive light over the surrounding fields and the river. One of the ramparts plunged its firm foundations adorned with sticky algae into the deep fetid black water. Through a drawbridge, a low door led to the pier which extended into the middle of the river, and patrol-boats and sampans were moored against its bulwarks. Two halberdiers kept watch at the door, lances in hand. A small battleship, that resembled a European fishing boat, lay motionless to the right of the pier, its three cannons trained on the prison. To the left, as far as the eye could see along the river, twenty-five or thirty rows of boats masked the opposite bank in a jumble of multicoloured boards, variegated masts, rigging and grey sails. And, from time to time, you could see those massive paddle-boats which were operated with difficulty by the stiff and vigorous arms of unfortunates who were locked up in cages.