Butterfly (31 page)

“Lying dog!” Marika, rising, fairly screeched. “Get away from her. Get away! Filthy swine, I'll kill you before I'll let you dirty her.” She rushed up to drive him away from the bed with kicks and blows, but then, changing her mind, went instead to the chest of drawers and rummaged there impatiently. When she turned around, she was holding up a small key between her thumb and forefinger.

“This is what you want, isn't it?” Her eyes glinted maliciously. “It is here,” she said as she approached him step by step, the key still held clearly in view. “But I don't know if I can give it to you. It isn't mine, you know, and it certainly isn't yours.” She stopped, contemplated the little piece of shining metal, and shook her head as if deliberating. “No, I really don't think I can. It's hers; it'll have to remain hers.” So saying, she turned to the dormant figure on the bed. Gently, as if afraid to disturb her mistress in her rest, she pushed up the hem of the nightgown in which they had dressed the body. Using one hand to pry open the lips, she inserted the key and with two fingers slowly pushed the offering deep into the inert flesh. When she had at last satisfied herself that it was well ensconced, she turned to the consternated Pinkerton.

“Now you are hers for always,” she said in malicious triumph. “You should feel happy.”

Pinkerton stared at her disbelievingly. He had been too astonished to interfere and now it was too late; even if it were possible, he could not bring himself to fish the key out of his mistress's body, and in any case the rage had subsided. His only thought was how he would clean himself.

As if she had read his mind—perhaps she had guessed from his face—Marika said, “I cleaned you only yesterday, so it won't be necessary to do it again.” She had become serious and spoke quietly in a matter-of-fact way. “In two or three days she will be buried. It will be pointless for you to go on living beyond that. I don't see how you could, even if you wanted to—but I know you don't.

“I think she has left me everything. That in principle would include you, but I don't think it was what she intended. We never discussed the point—for some reason we always put it off. She never gave any indication that she wanted me to have you, and I
think we both assumed you would be hers to the end. You did too, no?”

Her nonchalance stung him. It was true he had no desire to outlive his mistress, but there was something shocking about the way Marika stated it. She looked at him a little in surprise and the mockery returned to her eyes.

“You don't want to accompany her? I'd have thought you'd be overjoyed. Or are you afraid of death? Look at her, look at your mistress. Look how beautiful she is now.” Her voice became soft and dreamy; she seemed to be talking more to herself than to him. “Can you imagine death to be more beautiful? Can you still be afraid when you see her lying there?”

But her words did not calm him—quite the contrary. A terrible anguish, so intense that he felt his entrails sucked up as by a violent tourbillion, came over him. Possibly his consciousness grasped only at this moment the fact that his mistress was gone forever and that he was left alone with life and death and all that lay between the two.

Seeing his tears, Marika contemptuously curled her lips. “Do you prefer to be my slave, then?” She seemed to toy with the idea. “Is that what you want, eh?” She stepped closer and in a graceful movement brought a foot against his cheek.

“Kiss it,” she ordered; but as he turned his mouth to obey, she stepped back with a dancer's agility and brought the foot to the floor in front of her with a little tap. “No! Down, all the way!”

These sharp commands brought him an indescribable relief. Obeying spontaneously, unreflectingly, with the involuntary eagerness of one who reaches for a saving hand without asking to whom it belongs, Pinkerton prostrated himself full length on the floor and pressed his lips to the waiting foot.

Shifting her weight, Marika lifted her other foot and slid it over his head and neck; she let it come to rest on the nape and slowly ground his head against the floor. A profound and familiar
voluptuousness took hold of Pinkerton; a feeling of release not unlike happiness went through him almost in a pang. The temptation at that moment was overwhelming; yet he did not pronounce the word that already soughed lightly over his tongue. For at that instant he knew in his heart that he could not belong to another.

Above him he heard her ask, whether herself or her dead mistress he did not know, “Should I?” Her foot continued to bear down for a few seconds longer, as if she were venting her indecision.

“No, I can't take you,” she said, releasing the pressure on his neck; her casual tone made the words seem trifling. “Sorry. You're hers; you'll have to be hers to the end.”

104

(The Nagaski ms.)

At first I thought that Kate might have left written instructions for me; when nothing turned up, I felt a mixture of disappointment, relief and resentment. She could, and considering how seriously ill she had been, should have provided for such a contingency. Was it not her duty to do so? Was it not part of our contract, which bound us until death, hers and mine? No doubt there had been a tacit understanding that I would die with her, and I could not imagine she had intended otherwise; but why then had she not spoken? How could she, after fifteen years of total domination, leave me at the final juncture on my own? My death, like my life, had been hers, and she herself had once rebuked me for begging her to let me die: a slave had no right to wish for death. This was the meaning of the ritual thanksgiving: that the slave had not only to endure whatever pain the mistress inflicted, but
to be thankful for it. Death—unless it be for her pleasure—was the ultimate escape from the mistress's power, and to want it was to reject the life granted by the mistress's will; as such it was the ultimate betrayal. But if I had no right to claim my own death, Kate for her part had no right to abandon me to it. That was the crux of our agreement. The contract quite explicitly placed the entire burden of my moral existence upon Kate's shoulders: in return for absolute obedience, I would be freed from moral imperatives and purged of moral poisons such as guilt, remorse, ambition, hatred, even sorrow. Yet there I was, alone and betrayed.

But if the business of dying seemed more than I could undertake on my own, that of living was far worse. In fifteen years of slavery I had not had to make a single decision or to take responsibility for a single act; now she who had animated me and determined every detail of my life was gone. I had to die, because I could not live.

Despite my lassitude, I did not want to leave my affairs in disorder and the following morning, after arranging for the funeral, I went to see the solicitor who took care of them. Formerly, Kate was to have inherited everything—that is, everything I had not already made over to her, for during the first two years of our marriage, the greater part of what I owned had been put into her name, and now she had left these extensive possessions to Marika. My holdings, though reduced to a fraction of what they had been, still represented considerable wealth; I now made a new will bequeathing them in equal portions to Lisa and to my long-abandoned daughter, Etsuko.

From neither had I had any news. I knew nothing of my daughter's fate, and my relations with Lisa had been severed for over a decade. During the early years of my marriage, when Kate and I were living in Washington, we had seen her regularly; it was something of a strain for me when she stayed with us, and
she no doubt caught a disquieting glimpse now and then, but on the whole Kate succeeded admirably in keeping up appearances. Later, however, when Lisa visited us in Paris, Kate had made no effort to conceal the kind of life she led or the nature of her relations with me. In fact, she tried to corrupt Lisa. She failed of course, and the attempt was for me an alarming sign of her deteriorating judgment. Profoundly shocked, Lisa fled back to America; she never wrote after that, and I in my shame also kept silent.

I thought of writing a last letter to Lisa and to Etsuko, but when I tried, I found that there was nothing to say.

105

Her silent, bitter tears flowed as from a fountain of reproach, so filling him with despair that he would have hanged himself like Judas on the nearest tree.

Then the tears too were spent, and she only stared. He, unable to endure the horror in her eyes, spoke to her, coaxing her to speak. In an ultimate plea of his writhing heart, he cried out that he loved her, that he would always love her. The words fell absurdly short of what he felt, yet they were in their primitive way true and pure where a more circumstantial representation of his feelings would have veered into the false or grotesque.

Presently she turned her eyes upon him; they were dry now, dry and empty.

“Damn your love! Your love has killed me, can't you see? It sapped away my life, more than any hate could have. Look at me now. I'm . . . nothing. Like you, nothing.” She continued to stare vacantly, her eyes seemed to look right through him. “Prime fruit, the best on this earth—we held it in our hands, we whiffed
its aroma, and we let it rot. Let it rot and ate the putrid flesh. It poisoned us; we're going to die from it now.” She looked down at her wasted body and suddenly began to laugh. Hysteria, erupting shrilly from some dark pocket of the soul, racked her poor body with spasms of mirthless, inhuman laughter. To Pinkerton, it was more terrifying than the shrieks of Hell.

106

(The Nagasaki ms.)

The undertakers, from a considerable distance away, were to come the morning of the funeral; at my request, they were to bring a second coffin for a spouse who, also ill, was not expected to survive. My plan was to keep a last vigil that would end with my joining her over whom I watched.

After an active day of practical dealings, however, I began to have doubts, for it seemed patently untrue that I was incapable of living; indeed, it seemed absurd to imagine that my faculties could have so atrophied. No, it was not that I was unfit to live, but that I had no wish to prolong a life whose sum total amounted to less than nothing. My life ended the night Butterfly died, orrather, the day I left her side. The phantasmagoric butterfly had been an annunciation, a call I should have done better to heed.

These fifteen years had produced nothing. No insight, no atonement; only degradation. While Kate lived, remnants of passion had drawn me on, and the inertia of habit. But now all of it seemed sordid, preposterous, empty—even Kate herself. A corpse, today still marked by pleasing features, tomorrow festering like any other and leaving behind nothing, no child, no grain of life, no legacy of spirit. Had she ever been more? Perhaps not;
but what was I then who had worshipped her? Yes, I had to die, because my life sickened me, sickened me to death.

Such thoughts, like a swarm of Furies, pursued me into the night. Although sunk in despondency, I adhered to my plan as a miscreant might yet cling to ritual. But there was no enthusiasm, no thrill or hint of exaltation. Mine would not be the love-death dear to the romantic imagination. Even the sight of Kate, beautiful as ever by lamplight, moved me but slightly. Less in arousal than to rouse myself, I touched my lips to her feet, but their unnatural coldness made me shrink back in distaste. Even that last illusory pleasure was denied.

I had intended to die at the crack of dawn, but exhausted by the day's activity and two sleepless nights, I fell asleep against my will. The morning sun woke me. Not knowing the time, I started; but it was still early. Nothing stirred; Marika was not up yet and the undertakers would not arrive for another hour or two. Still, there was no time for dawdling. It would be nice to wash and have a drink, but to what end? I dismissed the temptation with contempt. Better to get on and have done with it.

I rose only for one last look at Kate. Gazing down at her face, I recalled that fatal night in Nagasaki when I had kissed her good night for the last time. To think of all that could have been—but no, I refused to be host to idle regrets. Steeling myself, I kissed her quickly on the forehead and turned away.

Practiced as I was in administering Kate's daily dose of morphine, it took me no more than a minute to prepare the hypodermic syringe. The acute feelings that had assailed me a few hours before were gone. I felt nothing in particular, only my body's stiffness and an unclean dryness of the mouth. Already I was, like Kate, an empty shell, passing from void to void.

The very moment I inserted the needle, a fluttering sound caught my ear. Though faint and of short duration, it was quite distinct in the stillness. Looking up, I saw a large yellow butterfly
at the window; it had been butting against the glass pane trying to get out.

Now it was perched on a lath; I was struck with the oddest impression that it was beckoning me to set it free. I stopped dead in the middle of my operation, and after a brief hesitation withdrew the syringe. But when I opened wide the double window, the butterfly did not stir; again I had the feeling it was watching me. Fascinated, I stood and observed it. It seemed unthinkable that such a bold expanse of color and design could be animated by a body so small and frail. Who could have thought to fashion such a perfect and unlikely creature? And that such creatures should inhabit the earth, and live and fly and propagate—it was a miracle beyond conceiving.

Presently I shut the butterfly's half of the window, leaving only the left side open for its exit. Still it did not move. To encourage it, I blew on it lightly and slowly put out a finger. The butterfly was not frightened; it almost seemed to await my hand. Very carefully, I clasped it and set it upon the window's outer sill. There it rested a long moment before finally taking flight; even then it did not immediately depart but hovered leisurely in front of my eyes and, before setting off, circled once as if for a last look.

I gazed after it in wonder. What thoughts if any went through my head I cannot say. The thoughts came later. I only remember feeling strangely that the butterfly was part of me, and that it had drawn out something in me that now accompanied it in its flight. It was as if life had for a moment touched me with its pure essence. Giddy with new awareness, I felt life washing up in great waves to the latticed window behind which I stood. In every insect, in every leaf, petal, blade of grass, I felt its vital force; and I saw how it pervaded the earth, the sky, the very air I inhaled, fusing all into a stupendous whole that comprised equally the winged butterfly and my heart's consuming fire.