| BLACK CASTLE CONTINUED |
| That night I went to bed prey to strange, frightening thoughts without knowing quite why. I was more troubled by the idea of that incident than a boy of my age should have been. It would be pointless for me now to attempt to render in words the inexplicable, singular sentiments that stirred within me at that moment. I felt that those two volumes, my uncle, and myself were caught in a web of mysterious, distant relations I had never noticed till then, relations whose nature I could not decipher by any means, and whose end I could not understand. They were, or they seemd to me, memories. But whose? I did not know. From what period? They were remote. In my youthful intelligence everything was altered and confused. I slept under the impression of those ideas and had this dream. I was twenty-five. It was as if my mind were crowded with all the ideas, experiences, lessons that time would have made me endure over the years to mark the difference between the fantasy of adolescence and the waking reality of adulthood. Nonetheless, I remained alien to this process of maturation, even though I comprehended it. I felt in myself all the intellectual growth of that age, but I judged it with the descrimination and opinions proper to my fifteen years. There were two individuals within me, one belonging to action, the other to the consciousness and evaluation of action. It was a simultaneity of effect, one of those contradictions or oddities peculiar only to dreams. I found myself in a broad valley flanked by two tall mountains. The vegetation, the farming, the shape and arrangement of the cabins, and something inexplicably different, something ancient in the light, in the atmosphere, in everything that surrounded me said that I was in an epoch very remote from my actual existence--two or three centuries away, at least. But how did that happen? How did I come to be in these fields? I did not know. Yet it was natural in the dream: I knew that certain events had justified my stopping in that place, but I did not know what they were; I was not concious of their value, their importance, only of their existence. I was alone and sad. I was walking for a definite reason, fixed beforehand, some purpose that drew me to that place but of which I was ignorant. High over the far end of the valley rose a sheer cliff, perpen-dicular, massive, grooved with cracks from which not one liana spouted. At its summit stood a castle that commanded the entire valley, and that castle was black. Its towers were protected by crossbows and filled with soldiers, the gates of its bridges were lowered, its turrets were packed with men and weapons of defense. Locked inside its inner rooms was a woman of prodigious beauty whom, in in the consciousness of the dream, I knew as "the lady of the black castle." That woman was bound to me by a long-standing affection, and I had to defend her, had to deliver her from the castle. But down in the valley, at the base of the rock where I had stopped, an object painfully caught my attention: on the steps of a tomb sat a man who had just then left the castle. He was dead but still living; he presented a totality of things impossible to describe, the coupling of death and life, the rigidity, the nothingness of the one tempered by the sensitivity, the essence of the other. His eyes, which I knew had been blinded by a red-hot nail, were pierced by two small square holes that made him appear simultaneously terrible and pitiful. Bloody memories were linked to that deed, memories of a crime in which I had taken part. Inexplicable relationships joined me, him, and the lady of the castle. He looked at me with his pierced eyes, and by means of a gesture and a kind of will that he did not manifest, but that I somehow read in him, he incited me to free the lady. A path carved into the side of the cliff led to the castle. An immense quantity of projectiles hurled from the mangonels on the towers hindered me from reaching it. Yet how strange! All of those enormous projectiles struck me without killing me--nonetheless, they stopped me. I saw the lady through the walls of the castle: she was alone, rushing through her rooms, her black hair unbound, her face and dress white as snow, stretching out her arms to me with an expression of desire and infinite pity. And I followed her with my eyes through all those rooms, which I recognized: I had once lived there with her. That sight encouraged me to run to her aid, but I could not; the projectiles hurled from the towers hindered me. At every turn in the path, the shower grew denser and more ferocious, and there were many turns--after this one, still another...I rose and rose...The lady called me from the castle, looked out of one of the broad windows, her hair raining down on her breast, beckoned me with her hand to hurry, spoke words full of sweetness and love, but I could not reach her--my impotence was agonizing. How long that terrible struggle lasted I cannot say--for the entire duration of the dream, all through the night... Finally, I arrived at the doors of the castle, although I did not know by what means. They stood undefended; the soldiers had vanished. The closed doors swung open wide by themselves, creaking on their rusty hinges, and in the black recesses of the entry hall I saw the lady with her long white train, running toward me with open arms, traveling the distance that seperated us with astonishing rapidity, scarcely grazing the floor. She hurled herself into my arms with the abandon of a corpse, with the lightness, the assent of an object that was hollow, flexible, supernatural. Her beauty was unearthly; her voice was pleasant, but faint as the echo of a note; her eyes, dark and veiled as if she had just been weeping, pierced the most hidden depths of my soul, although without wounding it, in fact, investing it with her light as by the effect of some radiance. We spent several minutes locked in an embrace; a delight I have never felt before or after that moment coursed through all my nerves. For an instant I experienced the full intoxication of the embrace without realizing it. Yet no sooner did I pause over this thought, no sooner did the consciousness of the delight descend upon me than I witnessed a terrible transformation in her. The delicately rounded figure I felt trembling in my hands flattened out, contracted, disappeared, and my fingers caught in the folds of that suddenly formed in her dress, grasped the bones of a skeleton protruding here and there...Quaking I lifted my eyes and saw her face turn pale, thin, lose its flesh, bend beneath my mouth, and a lipless grin gave me a desperate kiss, long, parched, terrible...Then a quiver, a deathly shudder ran down my spine, I attempted to disengage myself from her arms, to push away...and in the violence of the act my sleep was broken--I awoke in tears, screaming. I returned to my fifteen years, to my adolescent ideas and opinions, my puerilities. The entire dream seemed to me much more strange, much more incomprehensible, than frightening. What were the sentiments that seized me in that state? I had yet to experience the pleasure of a kiss, had not even thought about love, and could not account for the sensations I felt that night. Neverhteless, I was sad, possessed by an unyielding thought; it seemed to me that the dream was not in fact a dream, but a memory; a confused idea about things, the recollection of an incident very remote from my present life. |