Later that night, far into the masquerade, the spirit of the attendants came to a lull. Everybody but everybody had used, spent, and worn out all their anecdotes; they had recounted all of their indulgencies, and some had even told of strange dreams involving fanciful large birds. At times, the eyes were weary, but each guest remaining, a dwindling number, had felt it time for stories.
To this, many dejected and disprized lovers manqué had felt, not redemption, but instead opportunity to the ends of retribution. It was habit at the chateau to let the women propose topic or theme, which the story would address, employ, or at the very least include. This was left to the women as it is a strange quality left to women to instill a spirit into the men around them, and if she spoke at certain tone, with certain accent or peculiar douceur, all around her with a notion would turn agonist. A lady donning a fanciful masque, which she claimed was to represent Badre al-Badour princess of the Arabian realm, suggested a story of possession – of phantasms that do not inhabit our memories alone, but the physic of animals, houses, and even people.
A man from St. Petersburg came up first; he was so disposed towards his own creativity, that he failed to give up his name even after having drunk half his weight in spirits. Other, more sinister, reasons hovered about him; some felt his views on slavery and the church radical indeed, and still more found the candor with which he spoke of regicide startling.
“What is your name, sir?”
“I am the Gospodin Katorgavich, my lady, I am the son of the fantastic spirits of the land of the Rus. I feel I should disclose some issues of this contest – I have heard this story, it is not mine. I heard it from a radical. He is still in prison, working in Siberia. He called himself Pierre Chevêque. This, I’m sure as those of you who know well of Russia, could only be the pseudonym of an anarchist, a nothing,” and here he paused to take a breath and resolve the dryness of his breaking voice, “– an anarchist like the auxiliaries of ’93, no, worse! Frenchmen think that each among them is Harmodius or Aristogeiton, but we in Russia are every one of us the true spirits of law, if you catch my meaning.”
“Well, then, if that is all along with the story!” said one guest, who, if he heard with the same constancy with which he spoke, had maybe only heard the word “law.”
“No, I’ll none of it,” said another, “You speak of anarchy as if it is nothing! Some nothing, is all I can say. When your nothing is more ruinous than saltpeter is to humanity, would your nothing produce nihil ex nihilo of a country?”
“De gustibus non est disputandum.”
“Aye, taste is one thing, but reason is quite another.”
“Don’t be like that; even Burke understood the difference between aloe and honey.”
“I don’t know about you all, but nobody I knew had a thing to gain from ’48.”
At this, the Tories among them rose to their feet and decried further this assault on their taste and their civilization.
“But he means to oppose your own opposition, surely there is no need for disputation, as you said – who are we, backbenchers?” said a comely young lady, faint from drink.
“Yes, on with the story, I think we’d all like that.”
The Russian gave a dissatisfied huff, a discouraged kind expression on his face would be what some call “deceived” or what others may call “melancholic”. It was a dissatisfied posture, like a commander acquires after his commander orders for the downfall and ruin of the company, or as is habitual to an artist’s model. About it loured the air of familiarity. Underneath it all, it had the virtue of patience. The Gospodin reconstituted himself and resumed:
“My story comes from an atheist, a man whose family had at once been catholic, later orthodox, later Calvinist, in other lands, his relatives were Jansenists and his father was a deist. These are all lies I’m sure. In his family, he claims even to have had an inquisitor in their number, an inquisitor who shall be the protagonist - or antagonist if your philosophy be of another constitution.
It was in Sevilla, or Seville, or whatsoever your tongue has chosen to call the place. A man claimed to be the messiah – not simply the messiah of Ezekiel or the other prophets, but Jesus himself. Surely, the man was an imposter, for he had nothing to say to the Inquisition, not to the men who first shut him it, or even from the Grand Inquisitor himself. And the Grand Inquisitor – and this is true – the Inquisitor theologized himself to hoarseness. Even more so, the selfsame inmate was immolated the next day. At this, my friend established that his family’s incredulity – though it really be blasphemy! – passed through his entire patrimony starting from this moment. For, at this moment, his ancestor was assigned to investigate the fontes et origines of blasphemy and resistance to God’s church. He pestered his superior, not only in the name of all diverse saints that were easy to him, but he asked him in the name of Jesus the anointed. They discussed and disputed – I believe that disputed is the proper term for even a cordial debate – the nature of God. The Grand Inquisitor seemed unfazed, but the investigator was much changed after the night of their dispute.
The investigator went back homeward; nobody remembers his name for shame. Ah! – it just came to me, Chevêque called him the Enquirer. At any rate, Enquirer went home and stayed at his family’s house, as they hadn’t yet found that his faith was diminutive and waning still. That night, they ate much, as no other species of folk can pay for a theology student through university. Egregious among them was the Enquirer himself who ate most slowly, and who in addition ate the most from the table. His relations thought that it was no longer his custom at his cell in Seville, but it was something wanting within him. He thought, so I imagine, of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and Pierre Abelard and Anselmus.
At times, there are nights when the dark and shadows may convince a body that the heat is far less than one would think; though it be dark, unattended drinks grow lukewarm. The night he greeted his family, the Enquirer found that the dusk had tricked him in his youth, but as a man with more years and hairs and less blood it became clear. Otherwise, it was but a hot night, not unknown on the continent, as you well know. His mind wandered from the light of the hearth, which still progressed as he left. At one moment, it was his fleeting belief that the clouds were talking to each other, disappearing with lulls in the discussion of his family behind him. Of course, how Chevêque knew all this is a mystery to me and I am sure it is as much a mystery to the rest of you.
His philosophy convinced him that all things are fire, as exists in perhaps two lines in all of Plato. He was too of the conviction that all light comes from the sun, or from fire, or from God, but is merely reflected upon the surfaces to converge upon the back of the eye. It is still common today that some places in Spain catch fire for no reason other than careless, hearthless hermits in dry months. That the light of the moon was the selfsame light of the sun, as Anaxagoras taught, discomforted him. To think, that at the antipodes the light of the sun is day while it was once the light that caught the moon. And too, that the fire of a distant land fed the moon and thence to the posterior of his eye. And, that there was perhaps a need in the world for light, as light is heat, to disrupt the world. And thence – but no. They were far more pensive in erstwhile days than we who are yet to be remembered will accredit them.
He fell fast asleep under a type of poplar tree. My friends tell me that poplar trees have a pattern of lozenges along the outward surface, and that they stand like magnificent columns holding up the vault of the sky. It was here that he heard a cry, like the coda to a she-wolf’s howl. It was a distant though familiar memory of his named Constantina, though she was known better as Tina. As I say she is known better as Tina, this does not mean to say that she was well known. A paramour of hers had disappeared, and she only dressed in black. The villagers had gossiped, as washerwomen and vendors will. They conjectured well that they had conceived a child together, but she had it quickened and expelled from her belly. Others, less worldly about such things, believed that she had two lovers: the disappeared man – er, the man who disappeared rather – and her lecherous uncle. Still more compiled the two as we would an almanac of advice; they believed that her being with child was a cause for jealousy among both the disappeared man and the uncle, and that the man left for the hills as the uncle left for his end. Alas! What calumny results from the turbula, from the hungry and impecunious; it lands so often on the most beautiful and unique of the young ladies as well! From these slanders, many of her relatives had forgotten her name, were it not for a simple rhyme that had popped up:
Tantos están a la marina,
Pezes con pescadores,
Papas con pecadores,
Y la bruja negra Tina.
Luckily for all of us, I occasioned a Spanish fishmonger during a stint in the Legion; unluckily for her, the marina and fish were in reference to her maidenhead. What a sight she must have been that night, dressed in black with a radiant face, she must have seemed as the impeccable as the moon that Galileo had denied lay in the temple of night! Just then, he remembered clearly and with crystalline assurance that she was a distant cousin of theirs. In his attempt to find egress on the dry grass, he only drew her ear to him. Clouds passed over the moon, and his body was stoked with the sight of her. Birds flew off branches as he approached them, and owls called as he passed by them, and all the while the underfoot crunched and filled the night with sounds of sweeping. She was not so much à la chasse, or, perhaps more like to making chase than he was pursuing her. This was not a pursuit as the rain pursues the ground, but as lodestone pursues terrible north, even on a far-flung carrack.
Diderot tells us that the Tahitians do this without reserve or shame. These were different times.”
“And indeed,” said one, “I’m led to believe that it is a different time now, as well.”
“You’ve obviously not heard of le monsieur E. Poe.”
“I should think not.”
“It sounds as though the world has been crumbling around all of us.”
“It is like some storm surrounds our civilization.”
“Are you sure you’ve not heard of him?”
“Ostanavlivaitye!” he screamed, “Stop, all! All of you stop! You especially Irish – your face! Your face, you will close it!” The Gospodin began to breathe heavily through his mask, and as such droplets formed at the bottom of it in a strange and saline reservoir. Never has a thespian addressed his chorus so, nor vice versa, nor either to the audience. The Gospodin took some pinches of snuff, and all the while a silence filled the room with an eerie threat as an empty edifice full of vacant seats. He threw a drink down toward his gullet and grasped his chest and worked his eyelids.
“It was a different time too when Abraham sent for a wife for his son, only to have Isaac’s cousin come back on the camel. Neither of her brothers minded; neither had her husband nor grandfather raised their pitch at all. Good sir, I am quite sure we live in different times today and shall into tomorrow. In the years that followed, the Enquirer though much about the patriarchs. He preferred to do so far away from the administration, and thence he went to Hispanola to administrate the Inquisition there, where no women looked as his cousin. This only worsened the matter further, and he hungered for her as many on the continent hungered for sugar. The man came back to find that she had taken her life. The stories he heard were all debauched and ribald, hateful and despicable to the end that they compelled him to excoriate the entire of the countryside for what honor left in his beloved. No! – it was no for her honor; rather it was for something higher.
She had taken her life in a cave in a mountain along the Pyrenees, far away indeed. He scoured the hills to find her, with the help of a dear friend of his in the clergy who knew the mountains well in pursuit of heretics. With years, the goal seemed further distant, and the men had become little more than hermits. Finally, they found a cave with a bush nearby that had her veil caught on it. The veil was visible at two miles away, and the men, now stiff with age, encouraged made it there in bare feet and threadbare clothes over the course of an hour for each mile.
They encountered ferocious insects and throes from miasmata, which I’m told does not happen in the middle of the day. Bits of what looked like her hide remained on the putrid frame of her bodice, and a pile of detritus lay beneath her corpse – having hanged there through the years. In the pile lay not only her flesh, or what looked like organs of the human body, but the skeletons of all that ate of the remains and some evidence of the smallest of animals consuming them. Not unlike Pyrena herself who fled for shame, Tina was consumed by wild things and the forces of time.
It was then that a chattering of the insects, which seemed to follow gestures more closely than figures, gave a cry in some language. They spoke to the Enquirer in some frightful tongue, and he reacted with the passion of a pariah before this assembly of the myriad. It was clear then that these were not merely the fringes of nature’s creation, but the voice of the Lord of Flying Malice – Beelzebub. The man’s friend, whose name has been effaced from memory and which has been as a lacuna in a tome, attempted to stave off the scum. He resisted the droves of unholy beings with his brass crucifix and a draught of water thought to have baptized Francis Borgia, whom the Jesuits later canonized. His attempts had worked for as long as he could stand up straight, and even as he had to stumble, and even when he could not read his Roman Ritual. But, he did not notice in this struggle against the foe, against the Evil One, that his friend had remained oddly still. So great were the numbers of insects that the light in the cave had been blotted out as a door with no space underneath it for the day to enter the eclipse.
All the while, the Enquirer had been asking questions of his love. Not proud as Don Juan in his descent into darkness, nor repentant as Faustus, nor dutiful as Aeneas, he stood as still in darkness as a sexagenarian may do so when faced with the demon. And the evil spoke to him in Greek, and he himself supplied a voice though it were not of his will. ‘To Kata Markon Euangelion,’ they said, and he understood. They then spoke in Latin:
‘…et si Satanas consurrexit in semet ipsum dispertitus est et non potest stare sed finem habet…’
As Satan could not cast out Satan, as the Marco’s gospel recounted, was Jesus unable to cast out evil through the Lord of Flying Malice. But these were lies, as he had learned in the Inquisition: evil despises yet more evil out of pride, murder despises yet more murderers for jealousy, destruction detests destruction for inefficacy. And so did his madness for Tina cast out his madness for the Church. While some find evil in the bleak and dusky forests, he found but love and impassioning bleakness. While some find evil in blasphemers, he and the Dominicans found ill reason, though not always.
He obeyed the Flying Malevolence as he obeyed his heart, and dashed down his friend; the Enquirer took the phial of water and threw it into a hole, fathoms deep. This had left an impression on his hand, as a brand into cattle or prayer to the spirit. He threw the crucifix with it, and later the corpse of his friend. Years of search had ended thus – his friend to rot in an evil place with no crack out of which his soul could leave nor the light creep in. No Avernus remained out of which hero could escape the shades of death.
The insects were now part of him, as corpuscles or drops of blood. In the bargain, he may now live with his Tina for eternity. The insects, all being immortal and in some way had consumed her, regurgitated her flesh and spirit out onto the carcass. Emboldened, her body was now lively as ten men, though it looked like no member of humanity. Conversely, the Enquirer’s body was weak and wasting; he requested that the Malice transfer his spirit into her decrepit frame and the Malice was dutifully compliant.
The two, or perhaps ‘the one’ is more accurate to say, did not love each other as cousins, nor even as lovers. They loved each other as man and wife, brought into a most unholy and unnatural union by Satan’s minion. Each found satisfaction in rubbing Tina’s decaying womanhood, as Beelzebub’s insects found it pleasurable as well. Two hands and two legs flailed wildly. At a time, la señorita Tina controlled one, the Enquirer was in possession of the other. The appearance was one of a hysteric, one whose uterus had been without service. The control was like two beings in a dinghy, each with a paddle, though the boat does not move in any one direction. It was a strange dance, a solitary dance; and too, it was a strange solitude, as it was not a lonely solitude. The son and daughter of Beelzebub completed some God-forsaken trinity, and all three inhabited the girl’s body. The cries came out as from three wild animals: at times the lion, or perhaps the leopard, or the tygre.
It was thus that the Enquirer came to be acquainted with his beloved.
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