Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (27 page)

“Have you forgotten my
bonbons
?”

I was speechless.

The two sisters looked at each other, stricken with a sudden pallor, and shook their heads disconsolately. . . .

Muttering some words of farewell and making a
gauche
bow, I rushed out of the house, as though pursued by some strange gust of wind. Since then, I have learned everything. The girl that I believed at that moment to be the fruit of a guilty love affair is Amélie, the same young creature that I left twenty-three years ago. She has remained a child; the course of her life has been halted. The clock of Time has been stopped, at a certain hour—who can say out of what unknown god’s inscrutable plan!

 

Doctor Z—was at that moment entirely bald . . .

Myth and Legend

PALIMPSEST I

When Longinus rushed away, spear in hand, after wounding the side of Our Lord Jesus, it was the sad hour of Calvary, the hour when the sacred agony began.

Across the arid hill, the three crosses threw their shadows. The multitude that had gathered to witness the sacrifice was on its way back to the city. Christ, sublime and solitary, the martyrized lily of divine love, hung pale and bleeding on the wood.

Near his crossed feet, Mary Magdalene, lover, her hair in disarray, was pressing her head with her hands. Mary was moaning maternally.
Stabat mater dolorosa!

Later, a fleeting dusk heralded the arrival of the black coach of night. Jerusalem shimmered in the light to the soft evening breeze.

Longinus’ feet were swift, and on the tip of the spear he carried in his right hand there glimmered something like the luminous blood of a star.

The blind man had recovered delight in the sun.

The holy water of the holy wound had washed from his soul all the shadows that prevented the triumph of the light.

At the door of the house wherein he had been blind, a grand archangel stood, its wings spread and its arms upraised.

Oh, Longinus, Longinus! From that day forth, your spear was to be an immense human good. The soul that it wounded was to suffer the celestial contagion of the faith.

Because of it, Saul came to hear the thunder and Parsifal was chaste.

At the very hour when, in Haceldama, Judas hanged himself, Longinus’ spear flowered ideally.

These two figures have remained eternal in the eyes of men.

Who would prefer the traitor’s noose to the weapon of grace?

PALIMPSEST II

One hundred twenty-nine years had passed since Valeriano and Decius, cruel emperors, displayed the barbarous fury of their persecutions by sacrificing the children of Christ, and it happened that one bright azure day, near a brook in Thebais, a satyr and a centaur came face to face.

(The existence of these two beings is confirmed by the testimony of saints and sages.)

The two creatures were thirsty under the bright azure of the sky, and they quenched their thirst: the centaur by cupping the water in his hand, the satyr by bending down over the brook and lapping at it.

Then they spoke, in this way:

“Not long ago,” said the centaur, “coming down from the North, I saw a divine being, perhaps Jupiter himself, in the disguise of a beautiful old man.

“His eyes were piercing and powerful, his thick white beard fell to his waist; he was walking slowly, leaning on a rough staff. When he saw me, he came toward me, made a strange sign with his right hand, and I felt that he was so great that he could have sent down a lightning-bolt from Olympus. I can explain it no other way than by saying that I felt I was in the presence of the father of the gods. He spoke to me in a strange tongue, yet I understood. He was seeking a path through my ignorance, and without knowing how, I managed to speak to him, obeying that strange or unknown power.

“I felt such fear, that before Jupiter continued on his way, I ran madly across the vast plains, my belly near the earth and my mane in the air.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the satyr. “Have you perchance not heard that a new dawn is now opening the doors of the East, and that all the gods, all of them, have fallen before another God who is stronger and greater than they? The old man that you saw was not Jupiter, or any other Olympian being. He was the messenger sent by the new God.

“This morning when the sun rose, we were on the mountain near those where there is still an immense army of centaurs.

“We called to the four winds for Pan, yet naught but echoes responded to our calls. Our reed flutes do not sing as in days gone by, and through the leaves and branches we have seen not a single nymph of living rose and marble like those that once were our delight. Death pursues us. We have all raised our hairy arms and bowed our poor horned heads, praying for succor to this one who announces himself as the only immortal God.

“I, too, have seen that old man with the white beard, before whom you have felt the inrushing of an unknown power. Just a few hours ago, in the neighboring valley, I came upon him leaning on a staff and muttering prayers, dressed in rough cloth, his loins girded by a cincture. I vow to you that he was more handsome than Homer, who would speak with the gods and also had a long snowy beard.

“I happened to be carrying dates and honey. I offered him some, and he savored them like a mortal. He spoke to me, and I understood him without knowing his language. He wanted to know who I was, and I told him that I had been sent by my companions to find the great God, and to plead with him to intercede for us.

“The old man wept with joy, and above all his words and moaning, in my ear rang the harmonious sound of this word: Christ! Then he rained imprecations upon Alexandria, and I, like you, frightened, fled from there as quickly as my goat’s feet would take me.”

At that, the centaur felt a flood of tears falling from his eyes. He wept for the old paganism, now dead, but also, filled with a newborn faith, he wept at the appearance of a new light.

And as his tears fell on the black and fecund earth, in the cave of Paul the hermit, two white heads, two gray beards, two souls chosen by the Lord greeted one another in Christ. And when Antony had told the hermit about his encounter with the two monsters, and how he had come to the retreat in this barren place, the first of the hermits said to the other:

“In truth, my brother, they will both have their reward: half of them belongs to the beasts, which are cared for by God alone, and the other half belongs to man, which eternal justice rewards or punishes.

“I tell you that the reed pipe, the pagan flute, will grow and appear later in the pipes of organs in great basilicas, to reward the satyr that went out to find God, and because the centaur wept half for the antique gods of Greece and half for the new faith, he shall be condemned for the rest of his life to run over the face of the earth, until he takes a wondrous leap, and in virtue of his tears, ascends to the azure sky, where he will shine forever in the wonder of the constellations.”

THE RUBY

“Ah! So it’s true! So that Parisian sage has managed to extract from his retorts and flasks the crystalline scarlet that encrusts the walls of my palace!”

And as the tiny gnome said this, he paced back and forth, back and forth, sometimes with tiny skips, through the deep cave in which he dwelled, and as he paced, his long beard quivered and the bell on the tip of his azure hat tinkled.

And indeed, the news was true: The chemist Frémy—a friend of centenarian Chevreul (quasi-Althotas)—had just discovered a way to make sapphires and rubies.

Distressed, perturbed, and filled with wrath, the gnome (who was expert in the arts of magic, and possessor of a lively genius) went on muttering to himself:

“Oh! wise men of the Middle Ages! Oh Albertus Magnus, Averroës, Raymond Lull! Your skills were not enough to make the great sun of the Philosopher’s Stone to shine in your day, yet now—without studying the Aristotelian formulas, without one jot of the Cabbala or necromancy—comes a man of the nineteenth century to make in the light of day what we create here, in our subterranean chambers. And what is the spell he has cast? A twenty-days’ fusion of a mixture of silica and lead aluminate, coloration with potassium bichromate or cobalt oxide—words that truly seem to be in a diabolic tongue.”

Bitter laughter.

Then he stopped.

The evidence of the crime was there, at the center of the grotto, on a massive rock of gold: a tiny round ruby, softly gleaming, like a pomegranate seed in the sun.

The gnome blew a horn (which he wore always at his waist) and the echo resounded throughout the vast halls of the cavern. Soon there was a bustle, a trampling sound, a noise of jubilation. All the gnomes had arrived.

The cave was broad, and filled with a strange white light. It was the light of the carbuncles that sparkled in the ceiling overhead—encrusted, one upon another, into many-celled spotlights. A sweet light, that illuminated the entire cave.

The carbuncles’ gleam revealed the wondrous mansion in all its splendor. On the walls, veins of gold and silver, strata of lapis lazuli, and precious stones formed strange designs, like the arabesques of a mosque. The crystal irises of diamonds as white and clean as drops of water peeked out from the gloom, and there were agates hanging in stalactites, emeralds of green radiance, and sapphires in weird masses, in sprays and festoons like great blue shivering flowers.

Golden topazes and amethysts girdled the cave, and on the floor, with curds of opals, upon the polished chrysoprase and chalcedony, a tiny stream of water leapt up from time to time, falling then with a musical sweetness, in harmonious drops like those of a silver flute played ever so softly.

Puck, mischievous Puck, had played his part in this! He had brought the evidence of the crime, the false ruby—there, upon the rock of gold, like a profanation among the sparkle of all that enchantment—to the cavern of the gnomes.

When they were all gathered at last—some still carrying their mallets and short picks, others dressed as for a celebration, wearing scarlet and gold capes pavéed with gems, and all curious—Puck spoke:

“You have asked me to bring proof of the new human falsification, and I have done as you wished.”

The gnomes, sitting crosslegged like Turks, tugged at their beards, or thanked Puck with a slow inclination of their heads, or (those closest to him) gazed in rapt amazement at his pretty wings, like those of a dragonfly.

He went on:

“Oh, Earth! Oh, Woman! Since that day I saw Titania I have been but a slave to one, an almost mystical adorer of the other.”

And then, as though speaking from the pleasures of a dream:

“Those rubies! In the great city of Paris, flying invisible, I saw them everywhere. They gleamed in the necklaces of courtesans, on the exotic medals of parvenus, in the rings of Italian princes, and in the bracelets of prima donnas.”

And then with his usual mischievous smile:

“I slipped into a certain pink
boudoir
very much in vogue . . . there was a beautiful woman lying there, asleep. I snatched a medallion from about her neck, and from the medallion, I snatched the ruby that lies before you. . . .”

What hilarity at that! And what a tinkling of tiny bells!

“Well done, friend Puck!”

And then came the opinions of that false gem, that work of man—or worse yet, scholar.

“Glass!”

“A spell!”

“Poison! Cabbala!”

“Chemical!”

“To think, imitating a fragment of the rainbow!”

“The rubicund treasure of the depths of the earth!”

“Made of solidified rays of the setting sun!”

The eldest gnome, approaching on his twisted legs, with his snowy beard and wrinkled face and patriarchal figure, spoke as follows:

“Gentlemen! You do not know what you are talking about!”

Silence. All the gnomes were listening.

“I, who am the eldest of you, since I hardly have the strength to hammer out the facets of the diamonds, I, who have watched these deep caverns form, and have carved out the bones of the earth, and have molded up the gold, and have smashed my fist into a wall of rock and fallen into a lake where I violated a nymph—I, the oldest gnome of all of you, shall tell you how the ruby was first made. Listen . . .”

 

Curious, Puck smiled. All the gnomes drew around the Old One, whose white hairs grew even paler in the gleams of the gems and whose hands cast wavering shadows on the gem-encrusted walls like canvases of honey onto which grains of rice had been tossed. And these were the words the old gnome spoke to them:

“One day, my brigade and the others who were charged with toiling in the diamond mines went on a strike that inspired the entire earth, and we walked out through the craters of the world’s volcanoes.

“The earth was gay, and all was youthfulness and vigor. The roses, and the cool green leaves, and the birds whose mouths peck at seeds and send forth songs, and the entire countryside saluted the sun and the fragrant spring.

“The woods were flowering, and all was harmony—birdsong and bee-buzz everywhere. It was a nuptial ceremony of light, and in the trees the sap ran hot, and among the animals, all was quivering and bleating and song, and among the gnomes, all was laughter and pleasure.

“I had come up out of a dormant crater. Before my eyes lay a broad meadow. I leapt up into a great tree, an ancient oak. And then I climbed down the trunk and found myself near a brook, a small clear stream in which the water tittered and told glassy jokes. I was hungry. I wanted to drink that water. . . . Now, listen closely.

“Naked arms, backs, breasts, roses, lilies, ivory hillocks crowned with cherries; echoes of golden, festive laughter—for there, among the bubbling spray, among the shattered water, under the green boughs . . .”

“Nymphs?”

“No, women.”