The Napus, page 20
I have known great inventors, in mechanics and biology, chemistry and physiology, who were always sad and morose, although they were considered as benefactors of humankind and universally honored. I have never known another man as cheerful as a Provençal mariner from Ciotat, who fished for sea-urchins and other fish and shellfish for bouillabaisse and sank from dawn to dusk in his boat. It’s true that he too, in his fashion, was a benefactor of humankind.
When anyone asked the inventor, “Maître, why are you melancholy?” he replied, in a choked voice: “The more progress I make, the more the mystery of all things seems to me to be insoluble—that’s what afflicts me.”
When anyone asked the fisherman, “What is it that amuses you so?” he replied, hauling on his nets: “That I understand almost everything, and that the weather is fine.”
Humankind, on the other hand, only had one choice: either to wait, trembling, for a death without remains that was expanding, like a patch of oil, among white people—for, in spite of Pafenier, even the dirty were beginning to pay tribute, in considerable numbers, to the increasing aphanasia—or to seek diversion and entertainment in the emotion of beauty and love, an escape into artistic creation. The majority opted for the second attitude.
For some time, there had been serious discussion about creating an international festival of the Napus, and the intention would have been realized if some people had not observed that the scourge, far from banishing and setting aside, as had been briefly hoped, that of war, had intensified it instead. There was no reason to celebrate the Devil, or death.
Artistic and esthetic conferences having replaced scientific conferences, it was decided to hold in Geneva, in the old Palais of the ephemeral League of Nations, restored in 2160, an amphitheoty of feminine beauty, to which even German women would be invited, in spite of the recent Archimedes and the unstable and indeterminate character of the armistice. Beauty, in the Greek sense of the word, not being complete without intelligence, however, it was decided that the lovely and gracious individuals of the final selection had to emit, after ten minutes of reflection, a remark or and aphorism that would become their motto, and would be transmitted throughout the world.
It seemed that the contest would be a means of bringing people together in a more agreeable fashion than by means of the question of the white slave trade or the distribution of goiters according to the vices and virtue of drinking-water. Alas, it was the opposite that transpired. Ferocious envy, excited among the candidates by the magnificence of the prizes and subsidies, let to a new cause of aggravation in diplomatic relations, less serious at first than that produced by the Sidoine law and the consequent disagreements, but which became terribly envenomed as it was prolonged.
I had convinced Henriette to compete, convinced that she would at least obtain an honorable mention and that she would find a very original and droll rejoinder. We went to ask Cortenaz for authorization. He received us affably, listened to us distractedly, and, wishing Henriette good luck, gratified us with a sonorous: “Good, good, that’s all right”—but we found out subsequently that his wife had made an atrocious scene, because she too had wanted to enter the lists.
The journey overland, via the Morvan, the Jura and the Faucille pass, was delightful. The caravan was swelled by charming creatures who were collected on the way, in cities, towns and villages; all of them, being intimidated and then emboldened, took on different shades of pink. I was a guide and chaperone, with a dozen of our colleagues from the Aristotle, five of whom were Polyplasts, who had become disinterested in their work to some degree—without, however, developing the slightest inclination to antiscientism—and were no longer dreaming of anything but painting, music, dancing or love. Imagine how that flowered during the journey, and at meal times!
Calm had rapidly returned to the countries recently laid waste by the Archimedes. The rivers had returned to their beds. The populations chased away by the German bombardments had also returned. Peasants and their wives had resumed agricultural labor and household chores, as if nothing had happened. As for the Napus, although it removed, on average, one of our male or female companions per day, no one paid very much attention to it. The eulogy to the person who had disappeared was only pronounced half-heartedly. Often, it was a matter of a pretty individual whom no one knew, who was going to Geneva without having told those around her, and whose identity remained forever unknown. By tacit accord, no reference to Archimedic war, artificial cataclysms, grave recent events or the Napusian epidemic troubled the determined and general frivolity. When we stopped at inns, those who liked dancing danced; the others chatted or sang. It was a very agreeable existence, contrasting pleasantly with our scientific penal servitude in Underground 7.
Geneva, when we arrived there, in superb weather, seemed like a beautiful white, warm bird, a swan with smooth plumage, posed on the blue water of its adorable lake. It was decked with flags of all nationalities and various sects, those of the worshippers of the Napus, or napusomanes, representing the scattering of a skull on a bright pink background.
The German competitors, who had already arrived, also under the guard of emancipated Polyplasts and former laboratory heads, had retained the best rooms in the best hotels; through the sparkling windows one could see their blonde hair, their rounded profiles and their dream-filled eyes. In Germany, Polyplasts have square faces, entirely clean-shaven in a military fashion, and are clad in white uniforms devoid of braid, which signify consecration to kultur. Although the truce was not definitive, the Franco-German meeting was cordial—more cordial, even, than other encounters—and there were a few compliments on both sides before the blushing beauties: “Oh my! Sapristi! Damn! Ach doch, aber was, so so.…”
The beauty-cars of Great Britain arrived at the same time as ours, laden with angelic physiognomies and veritable nymphs, who gave the impression of just having emerged from the water, summoned by Amphitrite. Their hair, of a lighter and more vaporous blonde than that of the Germans, as if idealized, was collected and gathered neatly in little baskets in the Greek style.
A physical kinship of sorts was observed between the Bruxelloises and the Lyonnaises, in terms of the solid delicacy of the facial features, as if dipped in honey, legs combining utility with slenderness, and a round but supple waist.
The Provençals and the Bretonnes, although very different in type, were related by the floweriness of the skin, ambered in one instance and blue-tinted in the other, which one might have thought imprinted with rose for the satin quality and variegated carnation for the scent.
How many prejudices there are to rectify, in matters of feminine beauty! For a thousand years, it has been reported, by all authors and voyagers, even more blind than ungallant, that English women have big feet. On the contrary, they have feet of a rare slenderness, and we did not encounter one in Geneva, walking delightfully, as in a play by Esbott, without asking her to take her shoes off—to which she consented amiably. In the same way, it is ridiculous to claim that British women are flat-chested. At the very most, they have a fashion of dressing which gives that illusion to an unobservant person. Finally, it is necessary to recognize that the language spoken on the far side of La Manche is a kind of birdsong adapted to the slender lips of woman and their ironic languor.
Introduced to one another, all these rivals showed themselves to be amiable and courteous, although spiteful individuals had predicted that they would tear one another’s hair out. That evening, at the Geneva Opera House, whose orchestra is particularly fine, there was a performance of Ludovic Spague’s Aphanasic Symphony, which made all the audience-members of both sexes regret his premature death. The competitors, in low-cut dresses, presented an assembly of European flowers, roses and lilies, carnations and daisies, which would have converted Schopenhauer himself to gynephilia and damned more than one hermit.
The two inaugural sessions, devoted to the definitive selection, gave rise to esthetic discussions between the esthetic artists that nearly degenerated into battle. The female judges did not have the same rules and canons as the males, and their choice went for preference to the less gracious and well-proportioned.
Plump herself, Maman Tougourte, a member of the jury by reason of her recent epistolary authority, eliminated all the slender English “grasshoppers,” as she called them, because she had not yet found a publisher in London and only had eyes for Gretchen. Insolent and brutal, she had gained an ascendancy over her colleagues of both sexes, who no longer dared to pipe up when she had delivered judgment and brandished her powerful lorgnette. She led on a leash a celebrated skeptic by the name of Thiberaut, a fashionable writer brushing sixty, with a delicately modeled face terminated by a triangular gray beard, who uttered in regard to everything: “Yes, certainly, isn’t it, all the same,” and whom she had made into her lap-dog. A juror like her, Thiberaut adjudicated, but a trifle belatedly, on contestants no longer under consideration, and when he recalled, involuntarily and against the orders of his mentor in skirts, a beauty judged “too thin” his eyes accompanied her into the wings full of regret and concupiscence—and La Tougourte, waving her lorgnette, said: “Will you kindly refrain from goggling like a fish; at your age, it’s ridiculous.”
“She has a noble character” Thiberaut said of her, to excuse himself. “A noble and firm character, and what talent! Yes, but in the end, isn’t it always the same: she’s suffering—confidentially, it’s the menopause.”
The final selection included two Germans of very different types, one classically blonde, the other a haughty brunette; two Englishwomen recently flown from Paradise—one searched for wings in the ridges of their shoulder-blades—a Provençale with a Saracen profile, a Bressane reminiscent of a primitive Madonna and an Italian from a painting by Leonardo, endowed with an ineffable and seemingly hemstitched smile. My poor Henriette had been rejected—which did not prevent me from cherishing her with all my might, and experiencing, in her regard, a sentiment formerly foreign to Polyplasts: sensual jealousy.
The competitors, tastefully clad, but with bare arms and the shoulders uncovered, filed before the arbiters slowly, and were each getting ready to pronounce the expected motto when a Protestant pastor appeared, clutching a Bible under his arm. He was from Sweden, where he had miraculously escaped the Napus, which was taking a heavy toll there because of the sportive hygiene and the absence of dirt. He had a long and anxious face, a black frock-coat buttoned from the collar to the knees and a flat black felt hat with a broad brim. He climbed the steps leading to the stage rapidly, and once there extended his free hand—the one without the Bible—in front of him. He began a speech in a hoarse monotonous voice, in which he explained that the implacable Disease was a result of the decay of morals and, in particular, the immodesty of women and beauty contests.
The audience listened with resignation and consternation, without believing a word that he was saying, given that the Napus, presented in that hypothesis as a certainty, would have begun in the terrestrial paradise, where our first ancestors were naked. With wooden gestures, like an unvarnished puppet, the individual—whose name, we were later to learn, was Nysdröm, was continuing his remonstration when a dry click was heard and the Bible fell to the ground. The pitiless Napus had done its work.
The situation was so comical that everyone fell prey to hectic laughter, and the prizes could not be given out that day. They were never to be distributed, in fact, because of a tragic event whose repercussions were about to interrupt the tacit armistice.
The military men of the École de Guerre and the General Staff had been subject, like all cultured Frenchmen, to the crisis of esthetic and literary renaissance that had appeared in Europe and America in consequence of the death without remains and the vogue for Le Braz. Maréchal Verve had taken up playing the cello with ardor—it was no longer Ingres’ violin—and it was said that his work on the periodic renewal of subterranean fortifications and mobile troops had suffered in consequence. He had been obliged to move after several complaints from his not-very-patriotic neighbors, who found his musical enthusiasm inconvenient.
Général Levin had been gripped by a taste for cinextual art, in spite of Eustache’s campaign, and he had come to Geneva with a company of film cameramen, with a view to making a illustrated text about the esthetic conference. There was general astonishment that the warrior in question should seek, by way of relaxation, such a frivolous occupation, but we were living in baroque times, in which nothing ought to have been astonishing.
Fully occupied with Henriette’s disappointment, I had omitted to make contact with the general, when I literally bumped into him at a corner in the Coraterie. His wrinkled and wizened face was lit up with a frank and benevolent smile and he seem to be free of somber internal preoccupations.
“Bonjour, Général! You’ve come for the beauty contest?”
“Bonjour, my dear Poly 17,177,” he said, in his soft little voice. “I have, indeed, made the trip to take account of this interesting manifestation of beauty, and also with a view to the preface of a cinebook. What do you expect? I’m saturated with military plans. There’ll still be time to resume the yoke when the Boches attack again. For the moment, ‘At ease! You can rest.’ I’m resting. And then I read in the paper that the utterly charming Madame Poly 17,177, née Tastepain, had not made the final selection. What an injustice! I’ll go to set myself at her feet tomorrow. Where are you going?”
The conversation continued. In the square, people were stopping to look at the glorious soldier, the rampart of the Occident against the periodic fury of the Germans. They, and particularly a Polyplast, recognizable by his white uniform, found his glorious and modest personality curious.
I parted company with the noble soldier in order to go to a final examination, and arranged to meet him at the banquet that was due to follow the election of the beauty queen.
Two more aphanasias, fortunately of unknown women of indistinct nationality, had occurred within the last six hours. The proportion was tending to increase, which, in view of the immense quantity of magnetic and wave-transmitting apparatus employed in the vicinity of Geneva, supported the late Sidoine’s thesis. Everyone was talking about him again, but in low voices, for fear of resuscitating the Germans’ Archimedean era.
It was the Bressane who won the prize, and that was justice, in view of the pert animation that heightened her marvelous light-chestnut beauty. Joy erupted in the French camp; we had no suspicion of the misfortune that was to follow.
The banquet, with two hundred places, was held at midday in the stone-paper Palais des Arts, erected in five days at the gates of Geneva by American construction methods, which are the most expeditious in the world. The weather was fine, the rivalries had ceased. The organizers of the grandiose international manifestation were radiant. There was only one shadow over the scene: the Disease—but in sum, that merely increased the shadow of the same kind that everyone bears in being born.
I found myself a short distance away from Général Levin, who was surrounded, and to whom a host of people from al countries, including numerous pretty women, were coming to pay homage. He replied to them all, even the Boches, with the remarkable affability that made such an amusing contrast with the formidable and irresistible shattering and crushing force that was in him.
As the coffee was being poured, after a banal and rapidly-served meal, as is usual at those kinds of feasts, he went pale, put his hand to the pit of his stomach, set down his napkin, goy up discreetly and went to the door. I had noticed his actions because I never took my eyes off him, fascinated by the strangeness of the role he was playing here, even more concentrated, mysterious and decisive that that of Maréchal Verve. I got up in my turn and ran to catch up with him. I did so just at the moment when bent double, he was asking for his kepi and cape.
Stoically, in a faint and halting voice, he said: “My dear friend, I’m suffering horribly. I don’t know what’s wrong. Could you examine me? Let’s go to the nearest hotel.”
The vehicles were parked two hundred meters away. I ran to search for ours. It took me twenty minutes to find the driver, who was having his own lunch. When I came back, the general had disappeared. I asked questions. The cloakroom attendant told me that he had left via a small suburban street, narrow but long, into which I immediately hastened.
I ran the entire length of the street, prey to a crazed anguish and making a thousand suppositions. I perceived a hotel of modest appearance, but tidy, as is typical of Switzerland. I went in and inquired. I was told that a general in uniform, who appeared to be suffering greatly, had indeed asked for a room. He had been given number 12. I ran up the stairs. The door was not locked. I knocked. No reply. I opened it and found poor Levin lying on the ground, curled up in the position of a man suffering the torture of being tightly bound. He was dead.
I immediately alerted the hotel manageress, a Swiss woman with an amiable and honest face. She came up to make sure of the death. She recoiled, gripped by horror at the sight of the contorted corpse, and then knelt down. I did the same. The most urgent thing was to inform the police, the conference-organizers and the press, and I took charge of that.
The manageress, whose husband was absent and whose telephone was out of order, came down too in order to notify a funeral director situated five minutes away and to ask a priest for the prayer for the dead. In our haste we forgot to lock the door of number 12. I noticed vaguely, three paces from the house, three individuals of unsavory appearance who seemed to be keeping watch, but I was in too much of a hurry to obtain their description—which I was subsequently to regret.
Having raised the alarm, without lingering over explanations, I ran back to the hotel, accompanied by a dozen compatriots, who did not want to believe in the catastrophe—for it was one—and were already talking about poisoning. On the threshold, the manageress, standing alongside a medical examiner, equally bewildered, was giving signs of bewilderment and fright. She explained to us that on going back up to the room, she had found it empty. The general’s corpse had disappeared!
