Nora, The Ape-Woman Read online

  In the latter regard, he had not yet made up his mind, experiencing a kind of shame in confessing his physical debility. Furthermore, the generative act no longer seemed to offer him the same attraction as of old. He found as much pleasure, so to speak, in what might very justly be called the bagatelles de la porte; all the more so because he was perfectly well aware that his octogenarian carcass, although half-conserved, was somewhat ridiculous beside the body, so supple and so beautiful, of a child of less than twenty. Even rejuvenated by the method of the celebrated surgeon, he would not be in physical rapport with his partner, and that dread troubled his natural conceit; whereas he had the advantage, in badinage that was half-paternal and half-gallant, of preparing the courteous liberties that excite women, and cause them to accomplish acts in which senility finds its count without compromising male pride too much.

  Ernest Paris thus enjoyed that role with Nora, the star of the Folies Bergère, and did not find it too bad. Without engaging the future, he had arrived at certain familiarities that almost put him in the position of an ami de coeur. Let us say, in passing, that the libertinage in question cost him very dear, even though he did not spend a sou. An erudite art-lover and collector, Paris had artistic treasures and curiosities in his home. Under the pretext of forming the young woman’s taste, and in order to have the possibility of a caress, a friction by means of a bold touch, or even a gallant phrase, carefully researched and generously spiced, he brought Nora an eighteenth-century fan, marvelously constructed, of inestimable value, a lace collar of royal provenance, antique embroidery, a rare trinket, a marquetry glove-box, miniatures, and once, he gave her a wax sculpture attributed to Raphael, with was pure beauty. The least of those gifts represented a considerable fortune; each was a pretext for a caress or a comparison: small, discreet, but precise acts.

  In sum, he was no longer a visitor but a kind of spoiled grandfather—spoiled in more ways than one—whom Nora welcomed without ennui.

  In any case, Ernest Paris was an admirable talker when he was possessed of verve, and he always was in Nora’s presence. That quality made him the most agreeable of pastimes. At first, the young artiste, who knew very few people in Paris, only gave audiences to Cécile Borel and her intimate comrade Maud Macfield, and a few people of no interest; but the news spread rapidly of the Master’s assiduity at the house in the Rue Spontini, and that caused the members of Parisian literary high society to do the impossible to be received in the house of the blue dancer Nora Goldry.

  Very flattered, Jules Ducon attracted flies by that means, whom the financier made his victims, and that success gave Nora a position, almost transforming her into a socialite. Besides which, a mutual sympathy brought the two men together: their love for Nora. There was no jealousy between them, but a cordial understanding for the happiness of the beloved women.

  Occasionally, the great man brought Narcisse with him—when Nora asked him to do so, either to cause a sensation or to please a desire to have a new guest in the house. The orangutan understood that perfectly; he knew that he was only there in the capacity of an astonishing animal, and yet, he welcomed those occasions with joy, since it was the only way that he could see Nora, with whom he was increasingly smitten.

  To facilitate those excursions, it was indispensable that Narcisse had an automobile at his disposal—Paris’s, Jean Fortin’s or Marc Vanel’s; an ape, even dressed as a city-dweller, could not risk his large feet in the streets without provoking regrettable incidents. Having noticed that, in the young woman’s drawing room, the venerable Academician always held forth, he employed a trick in order to go there with him more frequently; he played the humble admirer, aiding him in his difficult phases—for the Master was beginning to lose his memory, and sometimes stopped short, searching for a recalcitrant word—guiding him toward piquant anecdotes and facilitating his speech. That stratagem succeeded marvelously; Ernest Paris took his orangutan secretary with him increasingly frequently.

  Sometimes, taking advantage of the invitation offered at Eze, one of the four extraordinary doctors, Fortin, Vanel, Goldry or Voronoff, appeared at Nora’s home, in order not to lose contact with her, rather than with the goal of joining the number of the intimates of the house.

  One day, Ernest Paris, having decided to separate himself from a fourteenth century reliquary with shutters that formed a triptych, asked Narcisse to take it to the Rue Spontini. In accordance with its destination, he had allocated it a place in her drawing room. The object was heavy and precious, and Paris did not want to entrust it to just anyone.

  The orangutan installed himself in the Master’s auto with the trinket; then he took it up to Nora’s apartment personally and installed it on its pedestal in the agreed location. He then found himself alone with the young woman for the first time. He felt very emotional, all the more so as he realized that the opportunity to talk to the fashionable dancer in private might be unique. Suddenly, however, he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and could not suppress a dolorous groan.

  Nora looked at the model and his image: that face, habitually impassive, which emotion caused to grimace, was so comically intense in the mirror that the young woman, in spite of everything, burst out laughing.

  The orangutan had a sudden inspiration. He moved swiftly behind the armchair in which Nora was sitting, and said: “Laugh, Madame, laugh! Gaiety suits you so well. Laugh, in order not to hear the one who weeps! But no—I don’t even have that relief; my tears are internal and fall back upon my heart. Laugh, for the thought could never cross your mind that a miserable ape might dream of rising up as far as you. And yet, it’s the truth. Yes, I love you, with an amour all the more insensate because it is devoid of hope, for, beneath this grotesque envelope, burns a heart capable of understanding the most delicate sentiments. You know the fable, as old as the world, of Beauty and the Beast. The greatest of poets, Victor Hugo, sensed its justice in creating Quasimodo and Gwynplaine, the Man who Laughs: immortal types of dolor, and sadness via amour, but also of absolute devotion to the object of their love—their adoration!”

  Nora, the ape-woman, was frightened. The ape, who had fallen silent for a few seconds, continued: “That amour, that devotion, I also feel, Madame, and I would have kept the secretly jealously if I had not had a moment of weakness, if my lacerated heat had not allowed that groan to escape that caused you joy. Oh, believe me, that’s not a reproach. If each of my hours of pain could cause you the same hours of merriment, of pleasure, it would be a double joy for me to endure them. My love for you is so exclusive that I wonder whether, if, by some miracle, my adoration for you were not rejected, I might regret that intense dolor, which is for me a kind of voluptuousness...”

  Nora was no longer laughing. She listened to that soft and captivating voice, to which the tone of suffering communicated a very particular charm; she listened to its tone, which, veritably emerging from the heart, was a beautiful epithalamium addressed to her beauty, to her sensibility. Breathless, she was still listening.

  “You’re not laughing any more, Nora? You sense that your beauty can excuse all follies, even the most implausible! If only you were blind, like the poet’s Déa, who could not see the face but sensed the love, and loved!39 A monster can have a heart, a thought, a dream as well as the most magnificent of men, you see. But I don’t even have the consolation that is hope...

  “Who knows, if I had hope, whether I would not see, in the penchant that you were beginning to show for me, a kind of sadism, of depravity, a perverse quest for unknown, unprecedented sensations? An ape of my stature might have physical resources that men do not possess, and lubricity sometimes communicates bizarre inspirations...”

  Narcisse was showing himself to be clever, for he was speaking to the senses of the former she-ape, and Nora was not a vestal. Thus, the thought having been evoked, she suddenly sensed a voluptuous frisson spring up in her loins, which caused her entire being to palpitate.

  “But no,” the orangutan went on. “I will not app
eal to sensuality; my love is too pure; it has put you on such a pedestal; it has dressed an altar to you in my soul, and sees you as a divinity, a creature above humanity. My love for you is more akin to a divine worship than a terrestrial passion. It is necessary for me to spread at your feet the overflow of my heart; it is necessary that you know that one being in the world adores you as no woman has ever been adored, until the detachment of everything, until death itself.”

  Nora, moved, stood up, pushing back the armchair that masked the orangutan. The latter prostrated himself before her. At the sight of the enormous monster, grotesque in his fashionable clothing, ridiculous in his pose, she felt a surge of indignation and anger. What! That formidable caricature, that animal mutated into a human being by speech, dared to love her, perhaps to desire her? And as he approached his horrible mouth to kiss her feet, she shoved him away, and showed him the door with an imperious gesture, shouting: “Get out, insolent! Get out, filthy beast!”

  The orangutan uttered a terrible growl. That was too much! That she disdained him, that she felt for him the repugnance of a woman for a creature who had nothing human about him but intelligence and speech, was understandable—but that she did not understand that an ape, moved by intelligence to her level, and even, from that point of view, far above her, deserved better than to be considered as a vulgar animal, a stupid beast, he could not tolerate. Anger vibrated within him; the civilized ape disappeared, to give way to the ape outraged in his pride.

  “Well, yes, I’m only an ape,” he said to her, with a formidable expression, “but you’re wrong to remind me of it so harshly, when you’re in my power, and no human power could extract you from my arms....”

  Horrified, Nora recoiled, her gaze not missing a single expression of that horrible visage—and by a singular affinity of atavism, the anxious eyes of the dancer rolled in their sunken orbits; her forehead wrinkled; her hair, usually flat on her cranium, bristled; her lips curled back, revealing the terrible jaw; and a dull growl emerged from her contracted throat.

  Astounded, the orangutan looked at her, and suddenly, he recalled phrases pronounced by one or other of the four doctors, here and there, on the Riviera, at Beaulieu, in the place known s Little Borneo, the paradise of apes. He had the intuition, or the memory, that this seductive doll was a member of his race; he divined that her gracious envelope hid a soul similar to his own, and morally inferior, for he sensed singing within him, in addition to love for the woman, all the poetry of his natal forests.

  Throwing his jacket and waistcoat rapidly to the ground, displaying all of his powerful hairy body, and extending his immense arms toward Nora, he cried: “Come to me, Nora! To me, your brother and your equal! Four doctors have made of an orangutan the cerebral human that I have become, as they have made of a little she-ape, by means of esthetic surgery, the pretty dancer that you are. Wake up, Nora! Wake up! Listen to the appeal of our ancestral forests singing in your heart!

  “Yes, I am the Beast, but I have the superiority over human beings that the harmony of primitive nature vibrates in me! Listen to me, for I am the soul of the world! Yes, I am the Beast, but also the ancestor and the precursor! I am the Beast, here—but in the lands of the sun, I am the uncontested master, being the strongest and most intelligent of animals.

  “Do you remember, Nora, our forests, our mountains, our rivers and our sunlight? Our forest, so vast, so profound, of a thousand tree-species, a thousand flowers, drowned in shadow and terror at the base, but resplendent at the summit beneath the blaze of our incomparable sun! Do you remember our mountains, with bizarrely jagged profiles, outlined against improbably colored skies? Do you remember Borneo—our rivers, our impetuous torrents rolling their hasty and foaming waters through a chaos of rocks; elsewhere, as calm and restful as a lake? Irradiating all of that, the tropical Sun! Compared with that Sun of ours, the pale sun of Europe resembles one of our full moons...

  “Tell me, Nora, do you remember? And our brethren, the real masters of that land of dreams, the apes, the orangutans—can you see them, bounding through the high branches, in vertiginous leaps, living in habitations suspended like nests, and living free, untamed, innocent and simple, ignorant of hypocrisy and modesty? The Beast, they will say—so be it, but the Beast triumphant, because it is strength, and because it is instinct, that intelligence of primitives, the instinct to which all the pretended civilized revert at every convulsion of their so-called progress...

  “Wake up, Nora, to the appeal of the Beast, to the appeal of amour, the only amour truly worthy of you, worthy of us—for you are of my race! Let the soul of the ancestral forests sing within you; let the entire scale of the sounds and colors of our fatherland of light sing within you! Remember Borneo, our great natal island, Nora! Remember, Nora!”

  Bewildered and hypnotized, the young woman seemed to see the magical tableau of her homeland, evoked by the orangutan’s cantilena, unfold before her. No, all of that was not dead in her memory; from the faded past, a half-effaced dream surged for from the utmost depths of her self. She abolished the milieu in which she found herself; the sumptuous apartment disappeared in the mirage of mysterious virgin forests. Humans no longer existed for her; the orangutan who evoked her land of yore was the simian lover that she would have been obliged to take in the décor of her infancy.

  Then, with the cry of a wild beast, the cry of war and amour of her former brethren, she fell into the great extended arms of the orangutan, and embraced him frenziedly.

  The she-ape had finally found her male!

  And strangely enough, that simian embrace was mingled with cries, stutterings, bizarre articulations, guttural onomatopoeias that had a precise meaning, baroque vowels, mingled with cavernous or nasal sounds that constituted words; and the two apes understood one another, for they were gesticulating without modesty and speaking orangutan.

  Oh, if Dr. Goldry had been present, what a lesson he would have obtained! At that moment, the air of the virgin forest was caressing the couple in folly.

  XV. The True Jesus, by Ernest Paris

  In Ernest Paris’s study, the Master, buried in his high-backed chair, sitting before a sumptuous blotter fabricated with one of those superb morocco bindings decorated with coats-of-arms and dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century, was perorating, as was his habit. He was clad in dressing-gown like a pilgrim’s robe, and simply coiffed in a cardinalesque skullcap.

  Narcisse, sitting a short distance away at a small table, was sorting out notes and pads of paper, which he was taking from his immense sack, made from an old bed-sheet.

  “I agree,” said Ernest Paris, “that this preliminary work is rather tiresome, but think, my dear boy, that it’s more than twenty years that this book, Le Vrai Jésus, has been in progress, abandoned, then taken up again, dropped, and picked up again. That’s because, you see, I’ve always striven to believe in the existence of the man, Instead of making, like Renan,40 a work of the imagination, I was obstinate in ferreting through texts in order to base myself on something solid—which won’t prevent me from being accused of similarly making a Messiah to my own whim. Certain pages are very good, and, if they become harmful to the unity of the book, I’ll be able to utilize them in the form of tales—which I’ve already done, on occasion. So, it’s necessary for you to carry out a triage of all that rubbish, classifying the different documents in folders, according to their genre, and their religious or historical scope. You can already find the folders in…in...oh, where the devil are they? Damn! It’s always the same; here, under the pretext of arranging things, everything gets turned upside down. Pédauque! Pédauque!” Ernest Paris rang his hand-bell frantically. “See how wretchedly I’m served! And that wretched Paphnuce,41 who’s still God knows where… Pédauque! Ah, finally!”

  “What is it? No need to make such a racket. What’s the matter now?”

  “My folders! There were a whole lot of them. What have you done with them?”

  Pédauque started laughing—whic
h always exasperated her master.

  “Well? Don’t stand there laughing like an idiot. Where have you put them, the folders?”

  “Monsieur is sitting on them. You put them there yourself, when you found that you were too low down to look in the big book of pictures that...”

  “That’s right…that’s right! Indeed. My apologies, Pédauque. Go.”

  The good woman went, shrugging her shoulders. Ernest Paris stood up, lifted up the cushion, and took out thirty red cardboard folders.

  “It did seem that the seat had something abnormal about it, but I thought my stature was growing along with my reputation. Oh, vanity! Perhaps I’d do better to abandon the book. I’ll have all the Christians on my back, Catholic or Protestant. And you know, Narcisse, that I value my repose above all else...”

  “Did you hesitate for a moment over the Dreyfus Affair? For Jesus too, it’s a matter of the triumph of Truth.”

  “Possibly—but people don’t like anyone to prove to them that they’re idiots. Bah! After all, the book, Le Vrai Jésus, will only be published after I’m dead. By then, I’ll have nothing to fear from anyone.”

  “Are you yielding to Monsieur Vanel’s arguments then, Master?”

  “It’s necessary. St. Paul, the true founder of Christianity, didn’t know Jesus. And obviously, neither did the Apostles; otherwise, they wouldn’t have waited so long before spreading their doctrine, forty years after its original composition—and there are also serious discrepancies between their texts. I except Saint John, whose amphigoric caprices in the Apocalypse have nothing to do with the existence of the Messiah.”