Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (29 page)

Do you think that for one second Berta was frightened? Hardly! She clapped her hands gaily, was revived as though by magic, and to the fairy spoke the following words:

“You’re the one that loves me so much in dreams?”

“Climb in,” replied the fairy.

And as though Berta had suddenly grown very, very tiny, she found herself seated very comfortably inside the golden coach, which was of course nestled into the curved wing of a swan floating on the water. And the flowers, the proud faun, the soft sunlight watched as the fairy’s chariot flew away on the wind—bearing Berta, the girl with the olive-colored eyes, as fresh as the dawn, as gentle as the princess in a fairy tale, smiling peacefully in the sun.

 

When Berta—the divine coachman had brought the coach back down to earth—ascended the smaragdite-green terraces of the garden toward the sitting rooms of the palace, everyone—mamá, Berta’s cousin, the servants—were waiting for her, their mouths making a perfect O. She was skipping like a bird, and her face was full of life and crimson; her lovely swelling bosom, receiving the caresses of a long stray lock of chestnut hair, was half-exposed, and free; her arms were naked to the elbow, half showing the web of her almost-imperceptible azure veins; and her lips, half-open in a smile, looked ready to break out into song.

Everyone exclaimed: “Hallelujah! Gloria! Hosanna to the king of the Aesculapiuses! Eternal fame to the drops of arsenious acid and the triumphant showers!” And while Berta ran to her own room, where she dressed herself in rich brocades, gifts were sent to the old gentleman in the tortoise-shell spectacles, the black gloves, the double-breasted frock coat, and the illustrious bald pate.

And now, listen closely, my dear mothers of anemic daughters—for there is something better than arsenic and iron for rekindling the crimson of lovely virginal cheeks. And you shall know that it was not the drops, and it was not the showers; nor was it the pharmacist who brought health and life back to Berta, the girl with the olive-colored eyes, as gay and fresh as a dawn, as gentle as the princess in a fairy tale.

 

As soon as Berta found herself in the fairy’s coach, she asked:

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the palace of the sun.”

And of course the girl felt her hands grow warm, and her little heart leap, as though swollen with impetuous blood.

“Pay attention now,” the fairy went on. “I am the good fairy of adolescent girls’ dreams; I am the fairy that cures chlorotics by nothing more than taking them in my golden coach to the palace of the sun, where I am now taking you. Be careful not to imbibe too much nectar of the dance, and not to swoon away at the first bursts of gaiety. We’re arriving now. Soon you will return to your own room. A minute in the palace of the sun leaves years of fire in the body and the soul, my child.”

And indeed they were now in a pretty enchanted palace, where the sun seemed to feel right at home. Oh, what light, what fires! Berta felt that her lungs were being filled with country air, and sea air, and that her veins were being filled with fire. In her brain, she felt a spreading harmony, and she felt as though her soul were growing, and expanding, and swelling, and as though her delicate womanly skin were becoming so much smoother and more elastic. Then she saw real dreams, and heard intoxicating music. In vast dazzling ballrooms, filled with light and fragrance, silks and marbles, she saw a whirlwind of couples swept up by the invisible yet overpowering waves of a waltz. She saw many other anemic girls like herself, who would enter pale and sad looking and breathe that air and suddenly be caught up in the arms of vigorous, slender young men, whose ringleted hair and downy upper lips glowed golden in the light, and those girls would dance, and dance, and dance with them, in an ardent embrace, hearing mysterious sweet whispered compliments that went directly to their souls, and from time to time smelling their breath, which bore the scent of vanilla, of new-mown hay, of violets, of cinnamon, until—feverish, panting, exhausted, like doves wearied from long flight—they would fall upon silk cushions, their bosoms heaving, their throats rosy, and lie there, dreaming, dreaming of intoxicating things. . . . And she, too, was drawn into that whirlwind, that beckoning maelstrom, and she danced, exclaimed, strolled, as she experienced the spasms of a fluttering pleasure, and she remembered then that she was not to become too tipsy on the wine of the dance—although she never stopped looking at her handsome companion with her big springtime eyes. And he would pull her through the vast ballrooms, put his arm about her waist and whisper in her ear in an amorous, rhythmic language of peaceful words, of iridescent, fragrant phrases, of crystalline, Oriental periods. And at that, she felt that her body and her soul were being filled with sunlight, with powerful exhalations, and with life. . . . No, I can say no more!

 

The fairy returned Berta to the garden of her own palace, the garden in which she would cut flowers wreathed in perfumes that rose mystically up to the tremulous branches, where they floated like the wandering soul of the dead lilies.

 

Oh, mothers of anemic girls. I congratulate you on the victory of the good doctor’s arsenates and hypophosphates. But I tell you the truth: One must, for the sake of pretty virginal cheeks, open the doors of your enchanting little birds’ cages, especially in the springtime, when there is ardor in the veins and saps, and a thousand atoms of sunlight buzz in the gardens like a swarm of gold in the half-open roses. For your chlorotic daughters, sun on their bodies and on their souls. Yes, to the palace of the sun, from whence come girls like Berta, the girl with the olive-colored eyes, as fresh as a branch of peach-blossoms, as glowing as the dawn, as gentle as a princess in a fairy tale.

THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS OF CHINA

As fine and delicate as a human jewel was that little girl of pink flesh who lived in the little house with a little parlor with wall coverings of faintest and most delicate azure. It was the jewel-case into which she had been clasped.

Who was the owner of that gay, delicious songbird of black eyes and red mouth? For whom, when Mlle. Spring showed her smiling face as golden as the triumphant sun, and the flowers of the countryside opened wide, and the nestlings began to twitter in the trees—for whom, I say, did this songbird trill her sweet song? Suzette, this tiny little creature was called, and she had been put into the cage all silk and lace and velvet by a dreamy artist-hunter who’d caught her one May morning when there was much light in the air, and many opening roses.

Recaredo—paternal whim! it was not the artist’s fault that his name was Recaredo!—had married her a year and a half ago. “Do you love me?”—I love you. And do you love
me
?—“With all my heart. . . .”

Glorious golden day, when the priest had joined them at last! They went out into the spring-new countryside, to taste in freedom the pleasures of love. There, the campanulas and wild violets (whose fragrance sweetened the air of the creek-side) whispered to one another from their green-leafed windows as the lovers passed—his arm about her waist, her arm about his, their red lips in fullest bloom bestowing kisses upon one another. Later came the return to the great city, to the nest filled with the perfume of youth and the warmth of good fortune.

Did I mention that Recaredo was a sculptor? Well, if it slipped my mind, let me say so now. Recaredo was a sculptor. He had his studio in the little house, and it was a profusion of marble busts and plaster casts and bronzes and terra-cottas. Sometimes passers-by would hear, through the jalousies and wrought-iron railings, a voice’s song and a hammer’s clear high metallic ringing. Suzette, Recaredo—the throat from which the song sprang, the blow of the hammer and the chisel.

It was an endless nuptial idyll. On tiptoe, she would come to the place he was working and pour a flood of dark hair over his neck and give him a quick peck. Quietly, quietly, he would steal to the
chaise longue
where she drowsed, her feet in slippers, her limbs clad in black silk stockings, the book open on her lap, and he would kiss her lips—a kiss that would steal her breath away and make her eyes, her ineffably glittering eyes, fly open. And in the midst of it all, the wild laughter of the blackbird, a blackbird in a cage—and when Suzette plays Chopin on her piano, the blackbird turns sad and stops singing. The wild laughter of the blackbird! It was not insignificant.

“Do you love me?”—Do you not know it? And do
you
love
me?
“I adore you!”

Now the silly animal was pouring more and more cackling on the air. They would take it out of the cage and it would flutter about the azure drawing-room, perch for a moment on the head of a plaster Apollo or the javelin of an old bronze Germanic warrior.
Tiii-iii-iiirit!
. . .
rrr-rrr-rtch fi-i-i-i-i! .
. . Oh, sometimes it could be so naughty, so very very insolent! But it was pretty when it perched on Suzette’s hand and she cooed to it and petted it and kissed it and held its beak between her teeth until it flapped its wings in desperation and then scolded it (with a voice quivering with tenderness),
Monsieur Blackbird, you are a crafty fellow!

When the two lovers were together, they would touch each other’s hair, arrange a curl or a straying lock.

“Sing for me,” he would say to her.

And she would sing, slowly, and although they were no more than two poor children in love, they looked so lovely, so glorious, so real—he would gaze at her as though she were his Elsa, and she would gaze at him, her Lohengrin. Because Love—oh! young bodies filled with blood and dreams—sets an azure pane of glass before one’s eyes, and gives infinite joy and happiness!

How they did love one another! In his eyes, she was higher than the divine celestial stars. His love ran the entire scale of passion—it was now contained, now tempestuous in its desire, and sometimes almost mystical. Sometimes one might even call that artist a theosophist who saw in his beloved wife a thing supreme and more than human, like Rider Haggard’s Ayesha. He would breathe her fragrance as though she were a flower, he would smile at her as though she were a star, and his heart would swell with pride when he held her adorable head against his breast, to think that he had conquered this bright creature who, when she sat still and pensive, was comparable only to the hieratic profile of a Byzantine empress on a gold medallion.

 

Recaredo loved his art. He had a passion for form. He could bring forth from the marble elegant nude goddesses with calm, white, pupilless eyes; his workshop was a city of silent statues, metal animals, terrifying gargoyles, griffons with long vinelike tails, gothic creations inspired, perhaps, by his studies in the occult and, above all—his great love!—
chinoiseries
and
japonaiseries.
In this, Recaredo was an original. I do not know what he’d have given to have been able to speak Chinese or Japanese. He was familiar with the finest albums; he had read all the good
exotistes,
he adored Loti and Judith Gautier, and he made sacrifices in order to purchase good things from Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kyoto, Nankin, and Peking: knives, pipes, masks as hideous and mysterious as the faces in his hypnoid dreams, tiny Mandarins with cucurbitacean bellies and circumflex eyes, monsters with the open, toothless mouths of batrachians, and tiny soldiers from Tartaria, with wild countenances.

“Oh!” Suzette would say to him, “I detest this house of sorcery, that terrible workshop, that strange ark that steals you away from my caresses!”

He would smile, leave his workbench, his temple of rare gimcracks, and run to the little azure drawing room, to watch his graceful living
netsuke
and hear the mad gay blackbird laugh and sing.

That morning, when he entered, he saw his sweet Suzette lying half-asleep near a large vase of roses upon a tripod stand. Was this the Beauty in the Enchanted Forest? The white throw molding a delicate body, the chestnut hair across her shoulder, the vision respiring a soft feminine fragrance: she was like a delicious figure in one of those tales that begin “Once upon a time there was a king . . .”

He awakened her:

“Suzette, my love!”

His face was all happiness; his black eyes gleamed beneath his red work fez; a letter was in his hand.

“A letter from Robert, Suzette. The scoundrel is in China!
Hong Kong, January 18
. . .”

Suzette, still a bit drowsy, had sat up; she now took the letter from him. So that globetrotter was all the way on the other side of the world! “Hong Kong, January 18.” He was so amusing. An excellent chap, Robert, with such an itch to travel! He would go to the ends of the earth. Robert, such a dear friend! Like a member of the family! He had left two years ago for San Francisco, California. Could you imagine such an idea!

She began to read.

 

And that was that. They both laughed out loud. And the blackbird made its cage ring with an explosion of musical shrieks.

A crate had indeed arrived with the letter—a middling-size crate covered with labels and black numbers and letters that insisted to all and sundry that the contents were most terribly fragile. When the container was opened, the mystery was revealed. It was a fine porcelain bust, an admirable bust of a smiling woman, very pale and most enchanting. On the base were three inscriptions, one in Chinese characters, one in English, and the third in French:
L’Impératrice de Chine.
The empress of China! What Asian hands had molded those lovely mysterious forms? The empress’s hair was pulled back tight, her face was enigmatic, her eyes low and strange, like some celestial princess with the smile of a sphinx, a long neck on dovelike shoulders covered by a silken wave embroidered with dragons, all lending magic to the white porcelain with its tones of immaculate silk. The empress of China! Suzette ran her pink fingers over the eyes of that graceful sovereign—slanting eyes, with epicanthic curves under the pure, noble arcs of the eyebrows. She was pleased. And Recaredo was proud—proud to possess his porcelain. He would make a special cabinet for it, so that it might live and reign alone, as the Venus de Milo lived and reigned in the Louvre—triumphant, sheltered most imperially by the ceiling of that sacred place.