The Bacchantes, page 21
“For the police, of course,” said Dévonet, after a momentary examination. Laughing, he added: “When our house caught fire, those fellows from the judiciary police came to yours. They probably made a deal with the faithful Abrice.”
Everyone laughed heartily. They imagined the chauffeur mistaking one envelope for another, and sticking the wrong message inside with his plump fingers with the black nails.
There was also a letter from Maire Taupin, affirming that everything was quiet and that the forester Germane had recovered his sanity; a letter from Malitorne to Ignacio assuring him that all was well with the château, the gallery and the precious paintings; and one from Lebien, giving the best possible news of the state of the laboratory, unstinting in its praise of Abrice—“in whom one can have every confidence”—Caroline and Antoinette. The two caretakers seemed delighted with their new functions. Les Arges farm was working normally.
“Optimists indeed!” said Tullie, with the most charming moue. “But how far away we are from all that business.” She had noticed that, since their arrival in Naples, Romain had been less amorous of her, and thought that perhaps she was playing the melancholy grave procuress of the ritual for real.
That same day, Donabella received a long telegram from Hatchinson giving her a long list of instructions related to The Dream, the maintenance of his instruments and the staff, especially Giuseppe. The matter of the inheritance was making progress; the American expected to return, with or without Pietro, sooner than he had thought. He would be in Naples in a fortnight. He expressed in English, but vividly, in spite of the alleged reserve of that winged language, the keen desire that he had for his beautiful Italian: “I can’t wait to eat the velvety fruit.” The fruit was her, and the closer prospect procured her a sentiment of horror. She had opened herself up to the man she adored, and to whom she gave herself—with what ardor!—every night in her dreams.
It was decided that the Great Experiment would take place, without fail, a week hence.
That last week was entirely taken up with the final preparations. They were all like actors on the eve of a première performance.
Several costumes and accessories were late, of course, and it was necessary to harass the suppliers, who have been very intrigued by the unusual orders. Ségétan’s sojourn in Naples had not gone unnoticed; every day he had to defend himself against some journalist, photographer or mere curiosity-seeker. The well-trained hotel staff assured these pests that he was in Rome, Palermo or somewhere else.
They did not go to the museums, in order not to spoil their new conception of Greek art with works that were beautiful but cold: the lamentable head of Socrates, subtle and oily, and all those cadaverous statues, which chilled the pleasure of looking at them. On the other hand, they often went to the Aquarium to enjoy the bright shades of silver and gold, crystalline fins, pink scales and supple movements of the agitated and inconsistent marine population, as mobile as the element itself. Captive without being aware of it, the dazzling fish came to sniff the transparent walls of their prison, like humans scrutinizing the unknown on the ball that causes them to rotate without perceiving their rotation.
Ségétan and Dévonet had once had a schoolfellow named Marbrebrot who, in every natural history class, had asked in a loud voice with regard to every new animal, quadruped, insect or crustacean: “How does that one have sex?”—to which the irritated professor replied: “Get out, Marbrebrot.” The two scientists pointed to the extraordinary hairy, gleaming, polychromatic swimmers in tanks of water filled with silvery bubbles and asked one another naively: “How does that one have sex?”
Then the coarse Silenus whispered: “We’ll know next week.”
The month of October was as mild and fine as May, except that the days were shorter. Every day, the Parkers seven and Donabella went to watch the sunset, in order to maintain their excitement, from one point or another of the coast, and remained silent before that forge of Vulcan, beside which Venus, before nightfall, weaves in crimson and violet the indefinite fabric of renascent human desire. Complete abstention had been decided and observed by the lovers a fortnight earlier.
* * * *
Finally, the great day, so eagerly awaited, arrived. It was the end of an extraordinarily arm and calm dusk. When they arrived, the Villa of the Mysteries was plunged in the half-light and silence behind the little gleaming canal. Pompeii was deserted, the caretaker absent by order.
Dévonet took his place to one side with the gramophone and the Dyonisos. Giuseppe, very pale, busied himself with the operation of he lights, which had to be done at a single flick of a switch. On tiptoe, the couples disappeared into the wings or dressing-rooms, in order to drink deep of wines and cocktails or put on their various garments. They also entered, by a hidden door, into the complete and cynical illusion of their respective roles.
Donabella put on her sacred robe. Ariana stripped off as an Amour. Tullie costumed herself as the grave madam of the terrible game. Mélanie fitted wings to her perfect and elastic body. Ségétan, enlivened by several glasses of myrtle-infused champagne, awaiting his turn, which would not come until later, stayed with Ignacio, the stage-director, in the middle of the large room, or stibadium.
The fateful four chords of the symphony in C minor resounded. The fresco and its first living replica were illuminated brightly at a stroke.
The reproduction of the first three tableaux—Donabella doing her hair, meditating on her cushions, coming to a decision, advancing veiled and clad, listening to the catechistic rule—were meticulously and absolutely perfect.
The young initiate had only drunk three cocktails, in order to keep her head at the great turning of her amorous life and to enjoy the gift of herself more profoundly. Ariana, on the contrary, had yielded to the iced alcohol, but nevertheless held the the initiatory regulations straight and steady before her small breasts.
Then, in accordance with a slow and beautiful rhythm that was only to be accentuated in due course, Donabella, half-undressed, still almost decent, advanced, carrying the carved slivers of the Agape. That scene was very successful, the movements of the ensemble calculated by those of the fresco.
Then Bénalep appeared as Silenus, hairy, deformed, hideous and epidermal, completely drunk, lucking the lute. He directed a terrifying gaze toward Mélanie, full of professorial bestiality, by which he was reunited with Germanism: an antique reconstitution of a Hamburg brothel. That was the snag that Ségétan feared, but he had to keep his observation to himself. He renounced it when, sublime with sacred effort, her little bare feet parted at an oblique angle, one little hand clenched in advance, the other sustaining the hurricane of the veil, Donabella appeared, springing forth.
Her presence effaced the rest. Beside herself, terrorized, she was nevertheless utterly animated by the very object of her terror, half-orchid in color, half-woman in exquisite form. The unfurling of the silk sindone caused her to participate in universal gravitation, as if borne away by the solar orb. A green light burst forth violently. Her toes and thumb were distinct, and her little hollow palm, and the eyes of a hunted hind at bay.
The music fell silent momentarily; then, like a sequence of ardent, cruel, upright but soon bowed-down images, the allegretto of the symbohony in A erupted.
The air quivered, strange vapors, accompanied by a dull growling and a crepitation on the roof of the stibadium, came to interpose itself between the fresco and its replica of ardent flesh, like an unstable veil, rent from side to side and top to bottom. It was the moment of the magic mirror. The shoulder and breast, equally round, of Donabella, her eyes chilled with horror, but avid, her black hair undulating, brushed the svelte and muscular body of Guiseppe, who was brandishing above Silenus the grimacing mask of another Silenus.
The music; the noise of the hail of lava; the abrupt flashes of lightning, which did not trouble the regulated elsectric gleams of the ritual; the giant flatulence of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; those young and glorious bodies, grouped around the quuinquagenarian but athletic torso of the recumbent Ségétan, sleeping off his intoxication: the auditory, visual and chronological ensemble, running from Praxiteles and Pliny over the Beethovian chords, surpassed any scenic and dramatic evocation. The Dyonisian spirit was reborn, and the Master, in his drunkenness mingled with desire, perceived, juxtaposed with his reason, flourishing at the extremity of his instinct, the great principle of the disruption and fall of aircraft, enemy or otherwise, in mid-flight.
There was only one slight hitch; the thyrsis slid along his thigh and fell on top of the sandal of the ritually unshod foot.
The symphony entered the vale of tears, of the weeping damned, at the moment when the kneeling Donabella, her arms outstretched over the phallus hidden in the basket of a liknon,52 was imploring the ferocious Ariana-Telete, beneath the whip.
That tableau was scarcely accomplished when the shades of the fugitive men and women of 79, evoked by Dévonet’s Dyonisos, glided from all the issues and through the walls of the villa, carrying cushions over their heads to shield them from the fall of ash and lava, like stampeding mushrooms, giving signs of spectral terror, jostling one another, knocking one another down, getting up again.
They passed between the arms of the goddess, brandishing her whistling birch. They went through her, and the imploring Donabella, without dissociating—and when, in the following tableau, the latter was prostrate on Tullie’s knees, her hair disheveled, her back striped, her torso undulating, her nipples vibrant, with a mixture of dread and pleasure, shivering with overlapping spasms, she was surrounded by a crowd of women, the courtesans and matrons of the tragic Pompeii of Pliny the Younger, carrying away and dropping statuettes and jewels.
Outside, the racket redoubled, and the rattle of the rain, splashed with fire, battered the windows of the villa, without marking them with droplets or trickles. The gathering and summation of a nervous tension, carried to the extreme redoubts of being, was the frenetic turbulence of Donabella, offering her entire, long, full, magical body, for which the desire of Dyonisos Ségétan was crying out, to the impalpable friction of the panic-stricken shades.
Then, through the lacunary vapors, while the final chords of the desolate symphony resounded over the real volutptuousness and the simulated catastrophe, the figures of the living fresco were seeen to move, their models becoming immobile.
Amid the fading of the antique mirage, like the scattering of a delicate fabric, Silenus, recovering the strength of a bull, carried the kicking Mélanie away in his enormous biceps, her angry voice drowned by the force of the eruption.
Tullie was subjected to the brutal and supple assault of Giuseppe, who, in his confusion, had mistaken her for Ariana—and who then, realizing his error, released Tullie and hurled himself on to the consenting star, already swooning.
The couples came apart, then rejoined, then mingled, disappearing into the depths of the villa.
Donabella, now a bacchante, and Ségétan Bacchus were invisible; but when the music fell silent, appeals in the Italian language, originating from the delirious parts of the sunlit race with the serious expressions, muffled cries of “Mamma, Mamma,” traversing profound sighs, contralto stammering and stifled gasps, were audible in the distance, throughout the Villa of the Mysteries.
The obsolete, illuminated stibadium had withdrawn backards into the ancient time, no longer able to trouble the living.
In the distance, a kid began to bleat.
In the corridor, on the floor, lay a kind of soft cadaver, still twitching slightly; it was Ignacio, blind drunk and snoring.
A man came in, with a distraught expression, as if he had escaped from a fire or a shipwreck, who almost stumbled over the recumbent figure: the pyrotechnist Dévonet. He had the face of a tragic mummy, his eyes sunk into their orbits, his cheeks like two cameo profiles, his tread leaden but not unsteady.
A specter ran to meet him, fluid and transarent: that of a Pompeiian woman of 79. He burst into sinister laugher and ran to search for—and, he honestly believed, to “rescue”—his wife.
36. “A praetor [a magistrate or military commander] does not concern himself with trivia.”
37. The doctrines of the humanist philosopher Desiderius Erasmus (c1466-1536), which include the sarcastically satirical In Praise of Folly, in which the self-styled goddess Folly, once nursed by the nymphs Inebriation and Ignorance, who has an appropriately self-deluding entourage, extols her invaluable contribution of human life.
38. The common designation of an untitled Keats sonnet first published in 1816, also known as “Sonnet X” (i.e, ten).
39. Unusually, a literal translation of this poem (“À Adolphe Gaïffe,” 1856) conserves the rhyme-scheme of the first six lines as perfectly (or, rather, as imperfectly) as the original, but breaks down in the final six; I resisted the temptation to conserve the rhyme-scheme instead of the precise meaning.
40. Images of Dionysus’ retinue sometimes showed his “nurses” suckling fawns or kids, and that is the case with one of the frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries. Although the author uses the word faon [fawn] twice here, the animal looking on in the fresco is surely a kid; the text subsequently distinguished the two but gets them the wrong way round on one occasion.
41. Anangke, or Ananke was the Greek goddess of inevitability, the personification of destiny; the word also existed as a common noun meaning necessity or constraint.
42. Satyreau is an alternative rendering of satyre [satyr], presumably used here as an affectation.
43. In Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, from whom the details of the association of Dionysus with the Orphic mysteries is mostly derived. Telete is identified as the daughter of Dionysus and the nymph Nicaea. Her interpretation as an initiatrix into the Bacchic rites is a much later gloss, and her identification as the whip-wielding character depicted in one of the frescos in the Villa of Mysteries is purely speculative.
44. In this sense, an Amour is an image of a winged child, often holding a bow and arrow, common in Madieval art and adapted into the modern images of an infantile “Cupid” featured in St. Valentine’s Day kitsch.
45. Sindone [shroud] is familiar in Roman Catholic mythology in the phrase Sindone di Torino [Turin Shroud], but some initiation rituals in which nuns are taken into cloistered orders also involve the symbolic doning of a shroud.
46. The Italian painter Giovanni Bazzi (c1477-1549) was known as “Il Sodoma” [the Sodomite], originally applied to him as a slander, but which he adopted and used as a signature, even writing songs about the name (in which he pointed out that “Il Sodoma” was married, with children).
47. A Greek painter of the fifth century B.C., famous for vast mythological compilations.
48. Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor is his most famous, more commonly known as the Fifth. The other cited is the Seventh, named by Wagner as “The Apotheosis of Dance.” The allegro con brio is the fourth movement, but the text subsequently refers (probably mistakenly, although I am not certain enough to have corrected it) to the allegretto, which is the second.
49. De rerum natura begins “O bountiful Venus.…”
50. The quotation is from Horace: “Conquered Greece has captured her rude victor [and brought her arts to rustic Rome]”
51. Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus [Senatorial Decree relating to Bacchanilia] is an inscription discovered at Trilio in Souther Italy in 1640, which dates from 186 B.C. The Senatorial edict banned bacchanals throughout Italy, except with special permission; the historian Livy referred to a subsequent persecution in the reign of Augustus.
52. A liknon was a basket-shaped winnowing fan, sometimes used as a symbol of Dionysus because he was said to have been borne away in such a cradle as a child.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BACCHANTES
A week had gone by since the emotional soirée in the Villa of the Mysteries, Ségétan had shut himself up in the hotel and was taking his meals separately, alone in his apartment, uniquely absorbed in the arduous problem of the aircraft, which he now thought, thanks to the physical image of Donabella, to be complete—that he was finally in possession of the solution.
Tullie, the Dévonets, Bénalep and the Ignacios respected that solitude, still shivering from the Dynosiac night. They did not say anything about it to one another. Donabella had not telephoned and gave no sign of life.
On the eighth day, which was a Tuesday, Hatchison returned suddenly to The Dream, without Pietro. He had liquidated his inheritance. He was glad to get back to his wife, his laboratory and his work. He found the first dispirited, with an absent expression, and immediarely conceived the suspicion that something had happened during his absence. He wanted her immediately, there, like a glass of port. She gave the excuse of a terrible headache and locked herself in her room. Not only did the idea of such a contact horrify her, but she still bore on her tender flesh a few apparent traces of Dyonisos, and she was afraid of the conjugal eye.
The American did not ask any questions, but the next morning, when he resumed his calculations and got his redoubtable apparatus under way again, Giuseppe, moved by the irresistible need to confess that the waves of the past sometimes communicated to their adepts, especially to begin with, told him everything, in a low voice, and in the most ample detail.
The confession lasted an hour. During the story, heavily illustrated—for the boy had been a model and knew how to describe the movements of the body—Hatchinson did not flinch. His angular and varnished face became impassive. There was no alteration in his gaze or his voice. When it was finished, he simply said: “Well…all right,” and gave the narrator a hundred-dollar bill, which was not refused.
Such precision had been furnished to him that there was no possible doubt. He had been cuckolded from head to toe, and in public—and by a man of fifty that he considered to be a charlatan.
