“Delerium I: Foolish Virgin / Infernal Bridegroom”
Let’s hear the confession of a comrade in hell. “O heavenly Bridegroom, my Lord, do not refuse the confession of the sorriest of your handmaids. I’m lost. I’m drunk. I’m impure. What a life!
Forgive me, heavenly Father, forgive me! Ah! forgive me! How many tears! And how many more tears later, I hope! Someday, I will know the heavenly Bridegroom. I was born surrendered to Him. The other can beat me now!
“Now I’m at the end of the world. O my friends!..No, not my friends …Never madness or tortures like these…How stupid!
“Ah! I suffer, I cry out. I really suffer. Yet everything is permitted me, burdened with the contempt of the most contemptible hearts.
At any rate let me tell my secret, let me repeat it twenty more times, just as dreary, just as insignificant!
“I am the slave of the infernal Bridegroom, he who was the ruin of the foolish virgins. He really is that very demon! He is not a ghost, he is not a phantom. But I who’ve lost my reason, damned and dead to the world -they won’t kill me! How can I describe him to you! I no longer even know how to speak. I’m in mourning, I cry, I’m afraid. A little coolness, Lord, if you would, if you only would.
“I am a widow..- I was a widow…- yes, I was really serious once; I wasn’t born to become a skeleton! He was hardly more than a child. His mysterious delicacies had seduced me. I forgot all my human obligations to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. And often he flies into a rage against me, me the poor soul. The Demon! He is a demon, you know, he is not a man.
“He says: ‘I don’t like women: love must be reinvented, it’s obvious. All they can hope for is a secure position. Once that’s achieved, heart and beauty are put aside. Nothing left but cold disdain, the food of marriage nowadays. Or else I see women with the signs of happiness, women I could have made my friends, devoured instead by brutes with as much feeling as a log…
I listen to him turning infamy into glory, cruelty into a charm. “I come from a far-off race; my ancestors were Scandinavian: they used to pierce their sides, drink their blood. I’ll slash myself all over, I’ll tattoo myself, I want to become hideous as a Mongol. You’ll see, I’ll run howling through the streets. I want to go mad with rage! Never show me jewels, I’d grovel and writhe on the floor. I’d want my fortune stained with blood. I’ll never work.”
There were nights his demon seized me and we rolled around. I’d wrestle with him! Often at night, he lies in wait for me, drunk, in the streets or the houses, to scare me to death. “They really will slit my throat; it’ll be disgusting!” Oh! Those days he goes about with an air of crime!
“Sometimes he speaks, in a kind of tender dialect, of death that brings repentance, of unhappy people who surely exist, of hard labor, of partings that tear the heart. In dives where we’d get drunk, he’d weep thinking of those around us, cattle of misery. He lifted up drunks in the dark streets. He had the pity of a bad mother for little children. He would disappear with the grace of a little girl at her catechism. He pretended to be enlightened about everything: business, art, medicine - I followed him, I had to!
I could see all the scenery with which he surrounded himself in his mind: clothes, fabric, furniture: I lent him arms, another face. I saw everything that touched him as he would have liked to create it for himself. When his mind seemed absent I followed him in strange and complicated actions, far off, good or evil: I was sure of never entering his world. Beside his dear sleeping body, how many hours of the night I’ve kept watch, trying to discover why he so longed to escape reality. No man ever had such a wish. I realized - without any fear for him - that he could be a serious threat to society. Perhaps he has secrets for changing life? No, he is only looking for them, I told myself. In short, his charity is bewitched, and I am its prisoner. No other soul would have strength enough - strength of despair! - to endure it, to be protected and loved by him.
Besides, I never imagined myself with another soul - one sees one’s own Angel, never the Angel of another - I believe. I was in his soul as in a palace that had been emptied so that no one should see anyone as worthless as you, that’s all. Oh! I was really dependent on him. But what did he want with my dull and cowardly existence? He wasn’t making me any better, if he wasn’t driving me to death! Sadly vexed, sometimes I said to him, “I understand you.” He would shrug his shoulders.
Thus, my sorrow constantly renewed, and seeming in my own eyes more bewildered than ever, as in all the eyes of those who would have wanted to stare at me if I hadn’t been condemned to oblivion by everyone forever! - I hungered more and more for his kindness. With his kisses and his friendly arms, it really was heaven, a somber heaven which I entered and where I longed to be left, poor, deaf, dumb, blind. I was already addicted to it. I saw us as two good children, free to wander in a Paradise of sadness. We got along. Deeply moved, we used to work together. But, after a penetrating caress, he would say, “How strange it will seem to you when I’m no longer here, after all you’ve been through. When you no longer have my arms beneath your neck, nor my heart to rest upon, nor these lips upon your eyes. Because I must go away, very far, someday. Since I must help others: it’s my duty. Although it’s hardly tempting…..dear soul…” All of a sudden I saw myself with him gone, reeling, hurled into the most horrifying darkness: death. I made him promise never to leave me. He made it twenty times, that lover’s promise. It was as futile as me saying to him “I understand you.”
Ah! I’ve never been jealous of him. I don’t believe he’ll leave me. What would become of him? He knows no one, he will never work. He wants to live as a sleepwalker. Would his kindness and his charity alone give him the right to live in the real world? Sometimes for a moment I forget the pitiful state I’ve fallen into: he’ll make me strong, we’ll travel, we’ll hunt in the deserts, we’ll sleep on the streets of unknown cities, without care, without trouble. Or I will wake up, and the laws and customs will have changed, thanks to his magic power - the world, while still the same, will leave me to my desires, joys, nonchalance. Oh! The adventurous life of children’s books to reward me. I’ve suffered so much, will you give me that? He can’t. I know nothing of his ideals. He’s told me he has regrets, hopes: they can’t have anything to do with me… Does he speak to God? Maybe I should call on God. I am at the bottom of the abyss, and I no longer know how to pray.
If he explained to me his sorrows, would I understand them any more than his mockery? He attacks me, he spends hours making me feel ashamed of everything in the world that ever touched me, and becomes indignant if I cry.
“You see that elegant young man going into that calm and lovely house: he’s called Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, what do I know? A woman devoted her life to loving that spiteful idiot: she is dead, she’s certainly a saint in heaven by now. You will kill me as he has killed that woman. That’s the fate of us charitable hearts.”
Alas! There were days when all busy men seemed to him like the playthings of grotesque frenzies: he would laugh long and horribly. Then he’d resume his air of a young mother, an elder sister. If he were less savage, we would be saved! But his sweetness is deadly as well. I’m in his thrall. Ah! I’m mad!
“Maybe one day he will miraculously disappear; but I must know if he’ll rise up again to some heaven, so I may see a bit of the assumption of my little friend.”
Queer couple!
~Arthur Rimbaud [translated by Holly Tannen, assisted by Lydia Rand]
