Impressions of Africa (French Literature Series) (11 page)

Having reached its peak with the meteorological rapidity peculiar to equatorial regions, the storm now unfurled with extreme violence; a terrible wind shuttled fat black clouds, from which burst an incessant cataclysm.

Rao had opened the prison to release Jizme, the graceful and beautiful young native, who, since the triple execution earlier on, had remained alone behind the dark bars.

Offering no resistance, Jizme lay down on the white mattress, placing her own head in the iron skullcap and her feet in the stiff shoes.

Prudently, Rao and his aides edged away from the dangerous contraption, which then stood completely isolated.

Jizme grasped with both hands a parchment chart hanging by a thin cord from her neck and stared at it at length, taking advantage of the occasional flash of lightning to exhibit it to everyone with a defiantly joyous expression; a name in hieroglyphics, inscribed in the middle of the supple rectangle, was underscored at a distance, to the right, by a small triple drawing depicting three phases of the moon.

Soon, Jizme let go the chart and shifted her look away from the front of the red theater, settling her gaze on Nair; the latter, still imprisoned on his pedestal, had abandoned his delicate labors since the appearance of the beautiful convict, whom he devoured with his eyes.

By then the thunder was rumbling continually, and lighting flashed often enough to give the illusion of false daylight.

Then, with a horrible roar, a blinding zigzag of fire jolted across the sky and struck the tip of the lightning rod. Jizme, whose arms had begun stretching toward Nair, was unable to complete her gesture; the electricity coursed through her body, and the white litter soon supported nothing more than a cadaver with staring eyes and inert limbs.

During the brief silence the storm observed after the next deafening clap of thunder, heartrending sobs drew our attention to Nair, who shed tears of anguish while keeping his eyes fixed on the deceased.

The porters removed the apparatus without disturbing Jizme’s corpse, and we waited in pained stupor while the elements gradually receded.

The wind continued chasing the clouds southward and the thunder moved swiftly away, losing more of its force and duration with each passing minute. Little by little the sky cleared and the moon shone brightly over Ejur.

T
EN SLAVES APPEARED
in the wan light, carrying a heavy burden that they set down in the very place where Jizme had just expired.

The new object was composed mainly of a white wall, facing us, which was propped up by two long iron beams planted in the ground on one side.

From the top of the wall jutted a large awning, its two forward corners six feet exactly above the ends of the beams.

The porters left the area as the hypnotist Darriand slowly came forward, leading by the hand the Negro Seil-kor, a poor lunatic in his twenties who walked while uttering soft, incoherent words in perfect French.

Darriand abandoned his patient momentarily to inspect the white wall, especially the awning, which seemed to absorb all his attention.

During this time, Seil-kor, left to his own devices, calmly gesticulated, displaying in the moonlight an oddly carnival-like outfit comprising a pillbox cap, a mask, and a ruff, all three cut out of paper.

The ruff was pieced together entirely from blue covers of the magazine
La Nature
, whose title stood out in various places; the surface of the mask was tightly veined with numerous and varied signatures printed in facsimile; and the word “Tremble” paraded in bold letters across the crest of the cap, visible during certain movements of the young man’s head, who in this get-up looked like a make-believe noble from the court of the last Valois.

Too small for Seil-kor, the three objects seemed better suited to the measurements of a twelve-year-old boy.

Darriand, reclaiming everyone’s attention with a few words, had just tilted the white wall back to show us the underside of the overhanging canopy: entirely covered in reddish plants, it looked like an inverted window box.

Restoring the object to its upright position, the hypnotist offered us several details about a certain experiment he intended to try.

The plants we’d just seen, rare and precious specimens whose seeds he’d gathered during his travels in distant Oceania, possessed extremely potent hypnotic properties.

A subject placed beneath the fragrant canopy was permeated by this unsettling fragrance, which immediately plunged him into a veritable hypnotic ecstasy; at that point, the patient, facing the wall, saw a host of colored images parade across the white surface thanks to a system of electric projection, which the temporary overstimulation of his senses made him take for reality. The sight of a hyperborean landscape, for instance, would immediately chill him to the bone, making his limbs shiver and his teeth chatter; conversely, a scene simulating a white-hot hearth provoked abundant perspiration and could ultimately cause serious burns to his skin. By showing Seil-kor a striking episode from his own past, Darriand hoped to revive the memory and sanity that the young Negro had recently lost to a head injury.

His preamble finished, Darriand again took Seil-kor by the hand and led him beneath the awning, positioning his face to receive the reflections from the white wall. The poor imbecile was immediately overcome by violent spasms; his breathing sped up and his fingertips ran over the ruff, cap, and mask, seeming to find at the unexpected contact of these three objects some private and painful memory.

All at once an electric lamp, set at midpoint on the lower lip running along the awning’s wide border and powered by a concealed battery, lit the wall with a large bright square due to the combined action of a lens and a reflector. The actual light source remained hidden, but we could clearly see the beam as it projected downward, widening until it met the screen, its path partly blocked by Seil-kor’s head.

Darriand, who had himself activated this light, now slowly turned a silent crank, set at hand height in the left end of the wall. Soon, produced by a colored slide placed before the projector, an image appeared on the white screen, showing Seil-kor a ravishing blonde child of about twelve, full of charm and grace; above the portrait we could read the words “The Young Candiote.”

At this sight, Seil-kor fell deliriously to his knees as if before a goddess, crying, “Nina…Nina…” in a voice trembling with joy and emotion. Everything in his posture showed that his senses, heightened by the intense emanations from the Oceanic plants, made him believe that the adorable girl he’d named so rapturously was an actual, living presence.

After a moment’s pause, Darriand turned the crank again, setting in motion, by means of a hidden diaphanous strip on a system of sprockets, a series of views appearing one after another before the bright lens.

The portrait slid left and disappeared from the screen. On the brilliant surface we now saw a region on the map of France marked with the word “Corrèze”; the capital of this region, a large black dot, carried a simple question mark in place of the word “Tulle.” Before this sudden question, Seil-kor nervously shook his head as if seeking some elusive reply.

Under the title “Fishing for Electric Rays,” a moving scene replaced the geographic map. Here, wearing a navy-blue dress and sturdily armed with a long, flexible pole, the young girl Seil-kor had called Nina fell in a faint, gripping a white fish that flopped at the end of her line.

Darriand continued his operation and the captioned views followed each other without interruption, profoundly afflicting Seil-kor, who, still on his knees, heaved sighs and whimpers that betrayed his growing excitement.

After “Fishing for Electric Rays” came “The Martingale”: on the steps of an imposing building, a very young Negro, bouncing several silver coins in his hand, headed toward an entrance surmounted by the three words “Casino of Tripoli.”

“The Fable” showed a page of a book propped against a huge Savoy cake.

“The Ball” consisted of a merry party in which children moved by twos through a vast salon. In the foreground, Nina and the young Negro with the silver coins rushed toward each other, arms outstretched, while a woman with a benevolent smile seemed to be encouraging their tender embrace.

Soon “The Valley of Oo,” a deep, green landscape, was followed by “The Bolero in the Shed,” in which we saw Nina and her friend dancing feverishly in the middle of an unadorned interior littered with carriages and harnesses.

“The Guiding Path” depicted a tangled forest in which Nina advanced courageously. Next to her, as if to mark his retreat like Tom Thumb, the young Negro tossed a white morsel on the ground from the tip of his knife, having no doubt just cut it from a heavy Swiss cheese wilting in his left hand.

Nina, after sleeping on a bed of moss in “The First Night of Advent,” reappeared standing in “Orientation,” her finger raised toward the stars. Finally, “The Coughing Fit” depicted the young heroine wracked by a horrible cough and sitting, penholder in hand, before an almost completely filled sheet of paper. In a corner of the scene, a page showed in cutaway was apparently an enlargement of the document under the girl’s hand: beneath a series of scarcely legible lines, the title “Resolution,” followed by an unfinished sentence, suggested the conclusion of a catechism exercise.

Throughout this series of images, Seil-kor, in the grip of incredible agitation, had never stopped his violent thrashing, stretching his arms to Nina and tenderly moaning her name.

Letting go of the crank, Darriand abruptly turned off the lamp, lifted Seil-kor to his feet, and pulled him outside, for the young Negro’s turmoil, having reached paroxysm, made one fear the deleterious effects of too prolonged a stay beneath the bewitching vegetation.

Seil-kor soon came to his senses. Darriand having removed his paper trappings, he looked around him like a slowly awakening sleeper, then murmured softly, “Oh! I remember, I remember now…Nina…Tripoli…the Valley of Oo…”

Darriand observed him intently, happily noting these first signs of a cure. Soon the hypnotist’s triumph was plain to all, for Seil-kor, recognizing everyone’s face, began replying rationally to a host of questions. The marvelously triumphant experiment had restored the poor lunatic to reason, leaving him full of gratitude for his savior.

Darriand was roundly congratulated, while the porters removed the admirable projection device whose effectiveness had just been demonstrated so successfully.

After a moment we saw appear at left, effortlessly dragged by a serf, a certain Roman chariot whose two wheels produced as they turned a constant and fairly high C note, sounding true and pure in the night.

On the vehicle’s narrow platform, a wicker armchair supported the frail and puny body of young Kalj, one of the emperor’s sons. Next to the axle walked Meisdehl, a graceful, charming black girl who was conversing gaily with the impassive boy.

Both children, aged seven or eight, wore red headpieces that stood out against their ebony faces. Kalj’s, a kind of simple dust-cap cut from the pages of some illustrated newspaper, displayed on its circumference in the lunar light a richly colored picture of cavalry-men charging, underscored by the name “Reichshoffen,” the incomplete remnant of an explanatory caption. Meisdehl wore a narrow bonnet of similar provenance, its red hues, due to abundantly depicted house fires, were elucidated by the word “Commune” legible on one of its edges.

The chariot crossed the square, still emitting its shrill C, then halted next to the Incomparables’ stage.

Kalj climbed down and disappeared to the right, taking Meisdehl with him, while the crowd gathered in front of the small theater to watch the final scene of
Romeo and Juliet
, performed with many new additions taken from Shakespeare’s authentic manuscript.

Soon the curtains parted to reveal Meisdehl, lying on a raised bed in profile, as Juliet in the depths of her narcotic slumber.

Behind the deathbed, greenish flames, colored with mineral salts, escaped from a powerful brazier hidden at the bottom of a dark metal container, of which only the edges were visible.

After several moments, Romeo, played by Kalj, appeared to contemplate in grieving silence the corpse of his adored companion.

Though they were lacking traditional costumes, the actors’ red bonnets, with their characteristic shape, would identify the Shakespearean couple.

In the flush of a final kiss placed on the dead girl’s forehead, Romeo brought a thin flask to his lips, then flung it away after having downed its poisonous contents.

Suddenly Juliet opened her eyes, rose slowly, and descended from her bed before Romeo’s frantic gaze. The two lovers fell into each other’s arms and exchanged many caresses, abandoning themselves to their trembling joy.

Then Romeo, running to the brazier, pulled from the flames an asbestos thread, the end of which hung over the lip of the metal container. This incombustible wick bore fiery coals over its entire length, which, cut like precious stones and glowing red from the heat, looked like shining rubies.

Returning center stage, Romeo clasped the curious ornament about Juliet’s neck, her skin enduring without a tremor the burning contact of those terrible jewels.

But the lover beaming with hope and confidence was suddenly seized in mid-joy by the first throes of agony. With a desperate gesture he showed the poison to Juliet, who, contrary to events in the familiar version, discovered at the bottom of the flask a remnant of the liquid, which she greedily swallowed as well.

Half-collapsed on the risers leading to the bed, Romeo, under the spell of the fatal potion, was on the verge of gripping hallucinations.

Everyone had been waiting for this moment to gauge the effect of certain red lozenges: fashioned by Fluxier and thrown into the brazier one by one by Adinolfa, who was concealed behind the deathbed, they were designed to release clouds of smoke in various meaningful shapes.

The first apparition soon emerged from the flames, in the form of an intense and precisely formed vapor that depicted the Temptation of Eve.

In the middle of this vision, the serpent coiled around a tree trunk reached its head toward a graceful, relaxed Eve, whose conspicuously raised hand seemed to rebuff the evil tempter.

The contours, at first very sharp, thickened as the cloud rose into the air; soon the details blurred into a shifting, chaotic mass, which promptly vanished into the flies.

A second puff of smoke reproduced the same scene; but this time Eve eagerly stretched her fingers toward the apple, about to pluck it.

Romeo turned his distraught eyes toward the hearth, its green flames infusing the stage with a tragic glow.

Another thick, meticulously sculpted billow of smoke, escaping from the brazier, created before the dying youth a joyous bacchanal; women performed a feverish dance for a group of debauchees with jaded smiles; in the background lay the remains of a feast, while in the foreground the presumed host directed his guests’ admiration toward the lithe, lascivious dancers.

Romeo, as if recognizing the vision, murmured these words: “Thisias…the orgy in Zion…!”

Already the vaporous scene was rising and beginning to dissipate. After it had drifted away, a new cloud of smoke, originating in the usual place, reprised the same figures in different postures; this time joy gave way to terror, and dancers and libertines, jumbled together on their knees, bowed their heads before the apparition of God the Father, whose infuriated face hovered in mid-air above them all, motionless and terrible.

A new emergence of sculpted fog, succeeding the interrupted gyrations, was greeted by this cry from Romeo: “Saint Ignatius!”

Now the smoke formed two superimposed subjects, to be viewed individually. On the bottom, Saint Ignatius, thrown to the beasts in the Roman circus, was but an inert, mutilated corpse; on the top, a little to the rear, Heaven, populated with haloed figures and depicted as an enchanted isle surrounded by calm waters, welcomed a second image of the saint, more transparent than the first, which represented his soul separated from his body.

“Pheor of Alexandria!”

This exclamation of Romeo’s was directed toward a phantom that, in its sculpted nebulosity, had just emerged from the brazier following Saint Ignatius. The new figure, standing amid an attentive crowd, looked like some illuminatus preaching the good word; his simple robe flapped around his ascetic body, apparently wasted by fasting, and his emaciated face contrasted sharply with his voluminous temples.