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Island of Point Nemo. Jean-Marie Blas de Robles
Читать онлайн.Название Island of Point Nemo
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781940953632
Автор произведения Jean-Marie Blas de Robles
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
“Don’t tell me you . . .”
“Yes, my dear. But as you see, I survived the terror of Russian sex!”
“How the devil did you manage that?”
“Let us say that I gave my whole body. And added a little from my pocket, to be honest. Two hundred rubles; I have no idea how many ducats that is.”
“The tattoo?” asked Grimod, smiling.
“A giant octopus whose tentacles are curled suggestively around her body. The work of a Japanese artist. Very frightening, I must confess, especially around its beak . . .”
Holmes forced himself to swallow.
“And what did you do with her?”
“What one normally does with an octopus: I harpooned her. And now, you’ll excuse me, but I must change for dinner.”
At this moment, a man sitting near them stood up.
“If I may, you did well: the octopus is a sucking monster, a favorite of the Demon! Allow me to introduce myself: Hégésippe Petiot, Belgian by birth, municipal official by profession, missionary by calling, prophet and Russian Orthodox by divine revelation.”
“Good lord!” Canterel exclaimed, taking a step back. “Good evening to you all, I’m going to take a shower.”
It did not take long for Holmes and Grimod, trapped by Yva returning with their scotches, to envy him for escaping so quickly. This fellow was dreadful! He was explaining how, while walking down Rue de Rome in Paris one November day, he had seen in the distance a terrible black cloud that had appeared to be announcing great wonders.
“And thus an unknown force,” he said, “instructed me in a terrible voice: Look, Petiot, look! Turn your face toward the celestial machine!”
Petrified in the rain that had begun to fall, he had seen the cloud open up with a great crash; out of it came a dry, pale figure, flanked by a blazing squid and a hedgehog on which were speared a multitude of appetizing olives stuffed with pimentos.
“The apparition spoke to me: ‘Tremble, Petiot, and quake! I died over six months ago, and am now resurrected!’”
Unaccustomed to seeing the dead resurrected in the clouds, our man indeed shuddered from his head to his toes and found the courage to ask his name: “Don’t question me, you wretch!” the phantom had responded. “You already know me. I am . . . Bournissac! The accountant-god brought unjustly to court, but now aided by Saint Joan of France, patron of bad poets, who will return all this to order.”
This Bournissac had been caught in the act of embezzling six months earlier and had committed suicide to spare his family the disgrace of a trial.
“Then,” continued Petiot, “Bournissac and Joan of Arc informed me that, in my capacity as a prophet inspired by them, and as a moral Mamluk, I would one day be allowed to advise and guide the future Archimandrake of all the Russias.”
The theophany was then reabsorbed and compressed into a white rhinoceros that had touched down lightly on the Rue de Rome before running off down the pavement. Hégésippe Petiot had thus developed a calling as an apostle that displeased his dear wife, but which overshadowed everything regardless.
“As for my wife’s unthinkable opposition, Bournissac and Joan of Arc ordered me not to bother with it; they tell me constantly: ‘Resist the bourgeois woman, Petiot, resist the bourgeois woman!’ Which I did, by leaving her at her mother’s house so I could devote myself fully to the spreading of the new faith.”
Holmes and Grimod were glad to see him put on his hat and bow in farewell.
“If you run into a white rhino one day,” he whispered, moving away, “let it come to you without fear: praise God and tell yourself that it is Bournissac resurrected!”
The Bitter Poison of Evil Passions
Arnaud lights a Montecristo and watches as the coils of smoke rise in a spiral, then stagnate halfway to the ceiling. He is dreaming the long nightmare of his sleeping wife; pen in hand, he makes up stories, aware of only one and dizzy with its absence.
Yvrose Beaubrun, Dulcie had told him, would read for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. The morning was dedicated to a kind of press review of the local papers. A selection of miscellaneous news items, for the most part, but also regional and international politics, never forgetting the “poem of the day,” which always went over well. After the lunch break, he devoted himself to novels. The factory women—there were also men, but the women were in the majority—compensated him for his services by producing on his behalf as many cigars as he would have if he had worked beside them for the duration of the reading; often a few more, to thank him for the emotions that he was so good at conveying to them. The choice of the title was theirs: Yvrose arrived with a pile of books and read a dozen pages from one of the authors whose work remained in the running after ferocious negotiations; if any of the workers expressed boredom, the book was immediately abandoned. He would quickly begin another. When the magic set in, the whole workshop was captivated by the story, and from then on no one was allowed to interrupt the reading until the end of the book.
Reading aloud is at least as old as the rule of Saint Benoît, who enforced lectio divina among the monks of Monte Cassino, but its first appearance in a tobacco factory was in the nineteenth century, in Havana. The idea, it seems, came from a Spaniard, Jacinto de Salas y Quiroga, who visited Cuba in the 1830s; this humanist had seen it as a way of educating the slaves who were sorting beans on a coffee plantation. The project was not carried out, instead bearing fruit when it was found, thirty years later, in the prisons of the capital. Through certain incarcerated torcedores, who were released feeling that they had benefited from the readings, the practice was introduced in 1865 at the factory El Figaro, supported by a weekly paper devoted to artisans, La Aurora, whose creators were advertising their reformist spirit. “Today,” a columnist had written that week, “in the very heart of the factories, during the most important working hours, the laborers are keeping their imaginations busy, inquiring into the scientific and philosophical truths best suited to their era. They are talking and discussing; they are reading the works of excellent modern writers and consulting one another on the points that surpass their understanding; and finally, they are doing what they can to learn and to move forward on the path of civilization.”
At the end of the same article, however, this great momentum faltered, showing the all too familiar limits of philanthropy. The reading was educational, certainly, and enriching to those to whom it was addressed, but only if certain things were read: the workers at El Figaro had to take care, since they were paying the reader with their own labor, that they were read works worthy of being studied, with teachings that “do not plant the bitter poison of evil passions in their hearts.” Worthy of being studied . . . All of the bosses’ fears were contained in that phrase, and all of their blindness. How did they not understand that there was more rebellion in Edmond Dantès than in Marx’s entire body of work? Once the workers escaped into literature, no one would be able to pull them out of it, not because they were being read Bakunin or Proudhon, but because they could see in the books, as in a mirror, the reflection of their own misery.
This first initiative snowballed with a speed no one had foreseen. At the end of 1866, the five hundred tobacco plants of Havana—more than fifteen thousand workers, seventy-five percent of whom were illiterate—held reading platforms. This became all the plants on the island, then in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Tampa. In 1868, after the voluntary expatriation of the Cuban owners, fleeing the chaos of the first war of independence against Spain, there were readers from the factories of Key West up to New York, but also in Mexico, A Coruña, San Sebastián, and Seville!
“In Seville!”