French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (38 page)

I
T
was a strange house, grey and shuttered, and it seemed to blink from its windows, reclining sleepily as it was on the slope of a long street. Its deep-set door was stained white, and there was no keyhole, bell, or knocker. As if in times gone by it had carried the double stroke of the red cross and the inscription: ‘May The Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’
*
as a warning that plague was within. It may be that Morgiana had marked it in chalk, to deceive the brigand.
*
But time had worn away these signs; the nonchalant patches of whitewash on the wood spoke of neither crime nor plague; and the door seemed immured in silence.

The windows were sealed against sunlight and darkness alike by close-fitting shutters. Even on very hot days, when we put our fingers between the slats we could feel the cold, as if we had felt the shadow oozing from the house. Sometimes, during thunderstorms, when lines of dazzling rain beat on the pavement, two shutters would yawn open as if to breathe in the storm and a red curtain swelled in the deep darkness of a strange bedroom.

During the day the house was terribly silent. No milk-girl and no postman came knocking at the door. It was so situated that at all times, like that town in Upper Egypt, Syène, where no body, at noon on the summer solstice, sheds any shadow. Its walls never impinged on the sunlight, and at night it was completely smothered in darkness.

It was said that children, after beating incessantly at the door, had sat down to wait. Suddenly, they had heard a dreadful oath coming from inside. Then silence again. And despite their hammering on the door with boots and sticks, and the sand and mud they flung against the shutters, nothing more was heard.

The lights in the house came on regularly. Around nine in the evening a reddish light filtered through one of the shutters. At midnight it went out, and an hour after that several yellow lamps shone confusingly. At crack of dawn, on the dot, all lights went out.

We imagined the house occupied by forgers, and we tried to spy on them. But we never saw a soul coming out or going in. And besides, crucibles would have been needed, and metal and plaster and moulds, as well as accomplices to circulate the new coins.

So we came to dread the brothel, without knowing why. One night we stopped in front of it. From the edge of the pavement we could hear some heavy breathing, regular and continuous, which seemed to come rumbling straight out of the façade. As if a heavy sleeper were lying spread out up against the inner wall. We listened to this breathing for more than an hour. And abruptly we took to our heels, imagining that the white door would open and something would leap out at us.

Rather than casting its shadow on the sunlight, the brothel absorbed it. The house could not have been more silent, or its white-stained door more mute, if lepers had lived there. But bit by bit, the idea came to obsess us. We walked past the shutters in terrible suspense, thinking that some fleshless hand would come thrusting out. Crossing the street we would hold our breath, to avoid inhaling dreadful vapours. We would wake in our beds (for our house was almost adjoining) with the sound of ratchets and bells in our ears. We had read how lepers used to cloister themselves like this, wearing scarlet hoods, and with two joined pieces of wood dangling on a straw from their hands, and we became convinced they tolled their passing-bell in the night.

One day of torrential rain, falling in a seamless sheet, we finally saw a face behind the swollen red curtain. It was not the face of a leper. It was the pinched face of a little girl, with golden hair. She was crying and shivering in the gusting wind. When she saw us she made a dreadful grimace and shouted insults. But a hand dragged her back inside and pulled the shutters to.

At night we were wakened in our beds by a squeaking noise. Then there were screams and the crash of furniture falling and mirrors smashing. We got up half-dressed and slipped outside. Now there were several lights in the brothel, and they were moving about. A red lamp seemed in pursuit of a yellow one, at another window a yellow lamp was in flight; behind one shutter a reddish light was circling slowly.

In the midst of the moving lights, we heard terrified pleas and stifled sobs. We dashed at the white door, full of horror and courage,
and beat on it violently. There came two long groans, like the death-rattle. And then silence, the same oppressive silence as before. And then the lights went out, one by one, and not all together at daybreak. And all our calls brought no response.

We went to bed until dawn. As shredded red clouds breached the sky we opened the window. One of the brothel shutters gaped open. Rapidly we came downstairs. In the rising sun the little golden-haired girl was laughing. When we questioned her, she laughed and said nothing. I took her little hand: it was soiled, and under her nails there were traces of blood

But when we informed the police, the little girl had vanished, and we found the brothel clean and completely bare of furniture. The agents there showed us a notice:
For Rent
, nailed to the white door—and laughed in our faces.

T
HEY
found them lying next to each other on the burned grass, and gathered them both up. Their clothes had been blown off in shreds. The explosion had burned out the numbers and shattered the metal identity tags. They were like two pieces of human clay. The same fragment of shrapnel, flying slantwise, had sliced off their faces, so that they lay on the tussocks like a couple of trunks with a single red top. The Major who had loaded them into the ambulance did so mostly out of curiosity: for the effect was, in truth, most singular. They had neither nose, cheeks, nor lips. Their eyes had sprung out of their shattered sockets, their mouths gaped open in a bloodied hole where the severed tongue still wagged. What could be odder: two creatures of the same height, and
faceless
. Their skulls, covered in close-cropped hair, now had two red sides, simultaneously and identically carved out, with cavities where the eyes had been and three holes for mouth and nose.

In the ambulance they were dubbed
Sans-Gueule
no. 1 and
Sans-Gueule
no. 2. An English surgeon, who was working there voluntarily, was intrigued by the case and took it on. He anointed and dressed the wounds, extracted the splinters of bone, stitched and modelled the mass of meat, fashioning two red, concave hoods of flesh,
identically perforated towards the base, like pipes emerging from some exotic furnace. Lying in adjoining beds, the two
Sans-Gueule
stained the sheets with a twin wound, round, gaping, and meaningless. The eternal stillness of the wound was frozen in silent suffering: the severed muscles did not even pull against the stitches; the dreadful shock had annihilated the sense of hearing, so the only sign of life left was in the movement of their limbs, and by a twin rasping cry, emitted at intervals from between their gaping palates and the stumps of their tongues.

And yet they started to heal. Slowly and surely they began to control their movements, to develop their arms, to fold their legs so they could sit down, move their hardened gums that still fleshed out their wired jaws. They had one pleasure, which was signalled by some sharply modulated sounds that still had no syllabic content: it was procured by smoking pipes—the stems were held in place in their mouths by pieces of oval rubber, fitted to the dimensions of their mouths. Curled in their blankets, they stank of tobacco, and plumes of smoke escaped from the orifices in their skulls: from the double hole of the nose, from the dark caverns of their eye-sockets, and through the torn mouth, between the remains of their teeth. And each plume of grey smoke was accompanied by an inhuman laugh and a sort of gurgling that came from the uvula while the rest of the tongue wagged feebly.

There was a stir in the hospital when a little woman with a mass of hair was brought by the intern to the bedside of the
Sans-Gueule
; she looked at them one after the other, with a terrified expression, and then burst into tears. Sitting in the office of the head doctor, she explained, between her sobs, that one of the two must be her husband. He had been listed among the casualties: but these two mutilated soldiers had no identifying marks, and belonged to a special category. The height, the width of shoulder, and the hands recalled the lost man infallibly. And yet she was in a terrible perplexity: which of the two
Sans-Gueule
was her husband?

The little lady was kindness itself: her cheap gown moulded her breast, and due to the way she put up her hair, in the Chinese style, she had a sweet, childlike face. Her straightforward grief and her almost absurd uncertainty mingled in her expression and contracted her features in a way reminiscent of a child that has broken its toy. So much so that the head doctor couldn’t stop himself from smiling; and
because he had a crude way of talking, he said to the little woman looking up at him:

‘Well, what of it! Take them both home! You’ll recognize which is which when you try them out!’

At first she was scandalized, and averted her head, like a child blushing for shame: then she lowered her eyes and looked from one bed to the other. The two red mugs rested in their stitches on the pillows, with the same lack of meaning that constituted the whole enigma. She leaned down towards them, and whispered in the ear, first of one, and then the other. The heads did not react at all—but all four hands started to shake—undoubtedly because these two poor bodies whose souls had fled had a vague feeling that a very gentle little woman was close by, who had an endearing manner, and who gave off the sweet smell of a baby.

She hesitated some more, and then asked if they would let her take the two
Sans-Gueule
home for a month. They were transported in a big padded ambulance, and the little woman, seated opposite, wept hot tears unceasingly.

When they got to the house, a strange life began for the three of them. Tirelessly she went to and fro from one to the other, looking for a clue, waiting for a sign. She observed the red surfaces that would never stir again. Anxiously she contemplated the stitches, as one would the features of a beloved face. She examined them in turn, as one might consider different photographs, without being able to choose.

Little by little the sharp grief that wrung her heart, in the early days, when she thought about her lost husband, ended by dissolving into an irresolute calm. She lived like someone who has renounced everything, but goes on by sheer force of habit. The two broken pieces that between them represented the loved one never joined together in her affections; but her thoughts went regularly from one to the other, as if her soul were continually tilting like a balance. She regarded them as her red ‘puppets’; they were the two comical dolls that peopled her existence. Smoking their pipes, sitting in the same attitude on their beds, blowing out the same plumes of smoke, and uttering the same inarticulate cries, they resembled more those gigantic puppets brought back from the East, those scarlet masks from overseas, than beings possessed of conscious life that had once been men.

They were her ‘two monkeys’, her red mannikins, her two little husbands, her burned men, her meaty rascals, her bloodied faces, her holey heads, her brainless bonces. She mothered them in turn, arranging their blankets, tucking in their sheets, mixing their wine and breaking their bread. She led them out into the middle of the room, one on each side of her, and made them caper on the parquet floor; she played with them, and if they became vexed she would slap them down with the flat of her hand. At a single caress they flocked around her, like two famished dogs; and at a gesture of impatience they would double up, cringing like repentant animals. They would rub against her, in quest of morsels; they both had a wooden bowl, and into these, with joyful howlings, from time to time they would plunge their two red muzzles.

The two bonces no longer agitated the little woman as they had before, and no longer fascinated her, like two scarlet wolf-masks superimposed on familiar faces. She loved them equally in her childlike, pouting way. She would say: ‘My dolls are asleep; my little men are taking a walk.’ She was bewildered when someone came from the hospital to enquire which of the two she was going to keep. The question was absurd, it was like demanding she cut her husband in two. Often she would punish them, the way children do when their dolls have been naughty. She would say to one: ‘Look, my little lad, your brother’s been bad, he’s naughty as a monkey—and so I’ve turned his face to the wall, and I shan’t turn him back until he’s said sorry.’ And then, with a little laugh, she would turn the poor, penitent body back again, and kiss its hands. Sometimes she would even kiss their dreadful stitches, and then privately wipe her mouth afterwards, pursing her lips. Then straightaway she would almost split herself laughing.

Imperceptibly, however, she got more used to one of them, because he was the gentler of the two. Quite unconsciously, since she had long given up any hope of recognition. She preferred him, like a favourite pet that one likes to caress the most. She spoiled him more and kissed him more tenderly. And by degrees the other
Sans-Gueule
grew sad, for he sensed about him less and less of her feminine presence. He would frequently remain curled up on his bed, his head hidden under his arm, like a wounded bird. He refused to smoke, while the other, knowing nothing of his grief, went on exhaling streams of grey smoke through every vent in his purple face, to the accompaniment of little squawks.

So the little woman started to tend to her sad husband, without really understanding his sadness. His head in her bosom would shake with deep sobs that came from his chest; and a kind of harsh groaning would shake his torso. This poor occluded heart was prey to a terrible jealousy, an animal jealousy borne of feelings mingled with memories, it may be, of a former life. She sang him lullabies, as if he were a child, and calmed him by laying her cool hands upon his burning head. When she realized he was very ill, big tears would fall from her laughing eyes onto his poor mute face.