The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (21 page)

He stared for a long time at the lovely flowers, smiling, moving.

He forced his way with difficulty through a tangle of the most monstrous flowers, growths that seemed to have sucked from the earth every known poison, every possible putrefaction.

He was wandering through wet marshy weeds, beneath gigantic, dark-shadowing trees, exulting in a violet mournfulness; he walked past monstrous hedges of deadly nightshade, overladen with berries that gleamed like polished ebony, past bushes of hideous henbane whose dirty ash-coloured leaves shrieked with the horror of midnight; pale hemlock blocked his path; the thorn-apple terrified him with eyes that seemed glazed with grey glaucoma; tall bushes of belladonna whipped him in the face; he was blinded by ranunculus which was burning in the red glow of an Alpine fire.

And deeper and deeper he bored into himself, into this hideous realm of poison until he stopped, suddenly, petrified with fear.

The room narrowed around him; space hurtled towards him, constraining and constricting, closing in around him as a wall, and he suddenly found himself in a mysterious chamber, like the temple in Eleusis, where arcane mysteries were celebrated, or in a secret room of the cult of Isis, where the priestess offered her hymen to the consecrated goat, or in an underground vault dedicated to the goddess Kali, where the Thugs let poisonous snakes suck the eyes from their victims  …  or, rather, he was in a ruined catacomb where Satan, with his two-pronged phallus, forced his beloved to bleed in inhuman lust, or he was in the crypt of a medieval chapel where blasphemous priests celebrated a Black Mass upon the naked body of their chatelaine  …

Astonished, terrified, he looked around him.

From the ceiling there hung a lamp, thickly clustered with rubies which looked like menstruating eggs, with diamonds as large as fists, suffused with the pale light of a watery goitre, with precious stones which adhered to the lamp like lumps of cystoid ganglia, onyx, beryl, chrysolite – and through the foul waters of the sick jewellery there poured a flood of light, light suffused with expiring rubies and the green jack o’ lantern of an emerald gulf-stream.

And in the dreadful magic of the light, a light which once, perhaps, lashed the febrile earth at its genesis into a senseless rut of procreation, when it was still seething with fire and furnace; by this dreadful light he gazed around the wall at a curious ornament which formed its cornice.

One and the same female countenance with an ever-changing expression, an ever renewed mourning, despair, passion, lust, longing  …

But it was
her
face, and the eternal song of her soul, he thought, astonished.

He saw her, innocent and pure as a child with the eyes of a white tuberose, still as the reflection of pale stars in a dark stream, soft as the echo of a shepherd’s pipe in a Spring night, steeped in the intoxicating perfume of the lilac  …

But then again sad and sorrowing, like the blossom of a black rose in the suffocating heat of July – (and only occasionally does a wild cry burst from her soul, like the cracked tone of a broken chord which resounds across the sun-drenched, grassy sea of the steppes) -

Or again abrupt, yearning, like the poppy flower dying in the sacrifice of lust: as though through the dream-heavy, sultry woe a serpent should crawl again, a snake of greedy, smouldering music, breathing out lust and torment.

He once saw her eyes swimming in a haze of intoxication, then again bold and insolent as though they were in the grip of Indian hashish  …  In one vision he saw her mouth like the parted blossom of a mystical rose, then again gaping in the scream of an orchid’s open calyx, proud and inaccessible as the blossom of an aglaophotis, and scornful as antirrhinum.

An endless row of heads – one and the same head – and all the expressions in an endless variety and alternation: an endless scale of sadness from the first trembling of desire down to the deepest whirlpool of manic despair – the whole eternal song of love from the first tremor of the heart which fills the veins with blood, through the glow of ardent passion, through blind, greedy longing down to the hell of lust, which cannot satisfy, cannot
be
satisfied – the whole hurricane of insane eroticism from the first blossoming of the thoughts of joy which, spider-like, enfolds the brain, to that last dark, shrieking, torment-tossing chaos, when the soul loses itself, bursts, and explodes in fragments.

And suddenly: all these heads began to detach themselves from the wall and became alive, they started to form and assume shape, arms, lusting, drunken, shrieking arms stretched out towards him, naked female forms leaped from the walls, climbed down to him, threw themselves upon him and overwhelmed him with a sea of greedy bodies, bodies that promised the lust of the abyss; a hideous laughter, weeping, groaning, screaming burst from the room, echoing around the thousand corners and crevices, gasping arms embraced him, flinging him to and fro, and he was suffocating in the mad hysteria of flesh, in the rabid orgasm of an infernal rutting. He was enveloped in a horrendous orgy of tangled limbs which could not be separated, in the shrieking spasms of a hideous copulation – the most ghastly images of perverse sexuality blossomed before his eyes, a demented Sabbath of blood and sperm.

Then, in a trice, everything disappeared.

He saw her upon the crucifix, stretched in the full glory of her nakedness. Golden snakes twisted about her arms, her ankles, and a broad golden girdle embraced her hips, a girdle closed by a clasp which rested on her navel, a precious lotus-flower, sparkling with the rarest jewels. She gazed at him with her eyes half-closed, from under her long lashes lustful snakes were creeping, tempting with a flattering whisper  …  She was rocking back and forth on the cross in a lascivious ballet, her pudenda twitching, her breasts stretching towards him  …  Her voice was hot, sucking  …

Do you recall how my father dragged me, naked and ashamed, before your throne?

Do you remember how you were sitting on the throne, shuddering, shrieking with lust, and stretching your arms towards me?

I was pure as the lotus blossom which gave birth to the god, you have shattered the holy lamp of my soul, poured out the ardour which was held in my veins, you have eaten away my soul with the acid of desire and wild, lustful dreams, and you then have crucified me.

Her voice was shrieking in panting lubriciousness.

Do you remember how your eunuchs pressed golden nails into the white lilies of my arms, blood was squirting in steaming spurts, and I scorned you, I spat curses and vituperation into your face, I bit into your soul with the poison of my jaws  …

Come, come you poor slave of the blood, blood which you have whipped into a raving madness, come into my embrace which you have never tasted, come into the hell and the perversion which you have awakened within me; you have crucified me, and are rolling in the dust before me  …

Creep closer, closer! Lick my feet, that they should twist in the febrile ardour of your lips, oh!, more!, more fervently, stronger!

He was creeping up to her  …

And there was a hideous scream: ‘O Ashtaroth, Ashtaroth! Mother of hell and lust!’

But at that moment his brow was touched by a breath, an eternal, pure, holy chaste exhalation from the still hands of lilies  …

He feared to gaze upwards, he feared it might be a dream again, this time a holy dream of eternity  …

The hellish horror disappeared without trace, he felt her hand caressing his brow and her still, chaste kisses closing his eyes, her silken hair spilling across his arms with a loving benediction.

He felt her hand in his, he saw the two stars of her eyes, and an unknown blissfulness poured into his heart  …

Yes, it is she, she, as quiet as death, the chaste one, the holy one; it is she who once gave him the bouquet of flowers  …

*        *        *        *

It was already late in the morning when he laboriously pulled himself out of bed, feverish and exhausted.

Why does she avoid me? He asked himself, despairingly. Why does she flee from me?

His thoughts grew confused: a thousand plans, a thousand decisions criss-crossed his brain, and a thousand images floated across his soul, until he finally sank, collapsing, on to the chair.

He could understand nothing.

He examined the entirety of his anguish, his ravings and his madness, since she gave him the flowers.

Pain arose within him, and a wild hatred.

I’ll crucify her, crucify her! he repeated, with a demented smile.

He closed his eyes and revelled in the mortal terror of his slave.

In a gigantic palace courtyard, somewhere in Sais or Ekbathana.

Around him stood his warriors in their heavy silver armour and their golden helmets; the rings of their breast-plates were glinting in a blinding gleam, and their eyes were flashing with the bloodthirsty greed of wild beasts of prey.

Three times the trumpets sounded: the eunuchs dragged the poor slave into the courtyard.

She was mad with fear; her lips were bleeding; she gasped, fell backwards; the black slaves seized her by the arms and dragged her across the scorching, sun-drenched flagstones to the foot of the cross  …

The King closed his eyes and gave the sign.

They swung her upwards on to the ebony wood of the cross; the executioner seized her hands, a slave held her tight by her hips, and one heard the blows of the hammer  …

But at that moment the King roared like a rabid beast  …

He tore her from the cross and held her like a child in his arms; the blood from her wounds dripped on to his raiment; he kissed her wounds and drank her blood  …

The minions who dared to touch her were hanged, drawn and quartered; he made her a goddess, and brought sacrifices to her  …

Yes, yes, she was his God, and the whole world should genuflect before her  …

O God, how he loved his slave, he, her most abject slave!

And why should he torment himself so?

He decided quite suddenly to tear her out of his heart, never more to think of her, to throw out the flowers together with the red ribbon which reminded him of her with such anguish.

But when it grew dark he ran out to the house into which she had disappeared the day before, and waited  …

He finally caught a glimpse of her as she stepped out of the doorway – she looked around, but did not notice him.

He followed her, quietly.

He must not frighten her! She must not disappear from view! He scarcely dared to breathe.

She was walking quickly, as though she sensed that someone was quietly creeping behind her: she increased her pace, the white gleam of her dress flickering in the dusky avenue of hot, blossoming acacia trees like a will o’ the wisp between clumps of reeds in a dark swamp.

He was now almost certain that he would lose sight of her: he stepped up to her, half conscious and scarcely aware of what he was doing.

She stood stock still, terrified, and gazed speechlessly at him  …

‘I was afraid I might lose sight of you,’ he said at last. ‘You were walking so quickly.’

He was breathing deeply, and fell silent.

They were walking slowly next to each other.

He regained his composure.

‘I don’t know how I dared to hold you back, but at the moment I crossed your path I didn’t know what was happening to me  …’

He fell silent for a moment, then spoke quickly, abruptly, in a staccato fashion, and urgently, as though he wished finally to rid himself of his burden:

‘You don’t realise how much I have sought you. I’ve been wandering for days throughout the streets, in churches, parks and boulevards, just to catch a glimpse of you – not a glimpse, no, only the remotest impression, the most distant breath from your soul. I didn’t know you, I’ve never seen you before, I only knew that I would find you amongst a million women. The one who gave me the flowers, whose eyes have kissed the depths of my soul, can only look like you.’

She walked even quicker and he begged, implored and whispered ardently:

‘Oh, how I love you, my divine slave. You are my earth and my song, you are everything that is deep and pure within me. I carry you within me like a holy sun: you gleam in the depths of my soul like the radiance of a powerful star in an ocean tempest, your eyes are like two tuberose stars, and every night you embrace me with the willowy slimness of your limbs  …’

She stopped, trembling, and let her head sink low.

‘How often have I held you in my arms, how often have I touched your face with an infinite love, kissed your eyes, lifted you to my breast and drunk the divine joy of your lips!’

He grabbed her by the arm. She was trembling like a heart that has just been ripped from the breast.

‘Say a word, just one word. I know that you love me, that you must love me, for she who sends such flowers must truly love. You know full well that you gave yourself to me when you gave those flowers.’

Again he fell silent, and only looked at her with an imploring gaze.

She said nothing, withdrew her hand and walked on quietly.

‘Just say a word, he begged. If you wish, I’ll never say another word to you – just permit me to follow you from afar, that I should catch a glimpse of you occasionally, that I should taste your form, the music of your steps, the endless harmony of your movements. Just grant your permission, you don’t know the agony I’m in, what sorts of hideous dreams I have, driving me into madness, just say one word, at least tell me that I should go away  …’

He became more and more confused, he stuttered, stammered, tormented himself unspeakably, tripped himself up and forgot what he wanted to say to her.

The tears were flowing across her face, but not a tremble, not a twitch of the muscles betrayed the fact that she was crying. She was quietly weeping the blood of her heart, weeping as a seagull weeps who has lost the way, who longs to return, but does not return  …

He felt a whole world collapse in a thunderous crash within him. His heart was gripped by a wild, hopeless sadness: he walked alongside her as at the moment of their ultimate decline when the sun is extinguished for ever and an eternal night, shuddering, arches over the earth.