The mingling of torture with horticulture, blood with flowers.
In the center of the prison, the Torture Garden occupies an immense quadrilateral space, enclosed by walls whose stones can no longer be seen because of a thick covering of tangled shrubs and climbing plants. The earth, composed of sand and pebbles, like all that barren terrain, was largely dug up and reworked with virgin soil brought at great expense from the other side of the river. It is related that more than thirty thousand coolies perished of fever in the construction of this gigantic garden, which took twenty two years. These hetacombs were far from being useless. Mingled with the soil as fertilizer--for they were buried on the spot the dead enriched it by their slow decomposition, and besides, in no other place, even in the heart of the most fantastic tropical jungles, could a land richer in natural mould be found. Its extraordinary fertility, far from being exhausted in the end, still operate today through the excrement of the prisoners, the blood of the tortured, all the organic debris the crowd deposits there every week which, carefully collected and cleverly rendered with the daily corpses in special retting vats, forms a potent compost for which plants are greedy and which makes them more vigorous and beautiful. Forks of the river, ingeniously diverted through the garden according tot he requirements of the vegetation, provide a permanent moisture, and at the same time serve to fill the pools and canals, whose water is thus constantly renewed, and in which almost extinct zoological forms are conserved--among others, the famous fish with six humps.
Along the slopes, every species swarms: epimedia issuing from among the stones, with its frail flowers stirring and fluttering like insects: orange hemerocallis offering its calyx of a day to the hawk--moth and white renothera offering its calyx of an hour; fleshy opuntia, eomecons, morrea, and sheets, streams and brooklets of primroses--those Chinese primroses which are so extremely polymorphous, and of which we possess only poverty-stricken images in our hot-houses. And there were so many charming and bizarre forms, and so many blending colors: and around the kiosks, between the patches of lawn, in the tremulous distance, it was like a rosy, mauve, and white rain, a variegated shimmering, a pearly, pink, and milky pulsation so tender and changing that it is impossible for me to express in words its infinite sweetness and ineffable idyllic poetry.
"See, my love, what marvelous artists the Chinese are, and how they contrive to make nature an accomplice of the refinement of their cruelty. In our frightful Europe which, for so long a time has not known what beauty is, they torture in secret, in the depths of their jails, or in public squares, among the vile drunken crowds, Here, it's among flowers, amid the prodigious enchantment and the prodigious silence of ail the the flowers, that the instruments of torture are erected, the stake, the scaffold and the cross. You'll see them right away, so intimately mingled with the splendor of this floral orgy and the harmony of this unique and magical nature, that they seem in some way to merge with her, and be the miraculous flowers of this soil and this light."
And in the midst of this floral magic, there arose scaffolds, the apparatus of crucifixion, gibbets with violent decorations and black gallows, on whose tops there leered frightful demon masks; high gallows for simple strangulation, lower gibbets mechanically equipped for the tearing of flesh. On the shafts of these torture columns--as diabolic refinement--pubescent calystegia, ipomcea from Daoura lophospermum and colocynth spread their blossoms, and clematis and atragene Birds piped their love-songs there"
Flowers are violent, cruel, terrible and splendid... like love.
He picked a ranunculus which gently swayed its golden head above the grass beside him and with infinite delicacy, slowly and amorously, he turned it between his red fingers, from which the dried blood scaled off in places:
"Isn't it adorable?" he repeated, looking at it. "It's so little, so fragile, and besides it's all of nature; all the beauty and power of nature. It contains the world. A puny and relentless organism which goes straight to the goal of its desire. Flower do not indulge in sentiment. They indulge in passion, nothing but passion. And they make love all the time, and in every fashion. They think of nothing else; and how right they are. Perverse? Because they obey the only law of life; because they are satisfied with the only need of life, which is love. But consider, the flower is only a reproductive organ. Is there anything healthier, stronger, or more beautiful than that? These marvelous petals, these silks, these velvets... these soft, supple, and caressing materials are the curtains of the alcove, the draperies of the bridal chamber, the perfumed bed where they united, where they pass their ephemeral and immortal life, swooning with love."
"When you're dead do your feet touch the wood of the coffin?"
We were approaching the bell. On the right and left there were immense red and purple flowers and blood-colored peonies, and in the shade, under enormous parasol-shaped leaves, petasites and anthuriums like bleeding tissues seemed ironically to greet us on the way, and point out the path of torture for us. There were other mutilated throats, diclytras and their garlands of little red hearts, and fierce labiates with their firm and fleshy pulp the tint of mucus; they were veritable human lips--Clara's lips crying from the tops of their tender stalks.
From place to place in the recesses of the palisade which concealed verdant halls and beds of flowers, there were wooden benches equipped with chains and bronze collars, iron tables in the shapes of crosses.. blocks, gridirons, gibbets, automatic quartering machines, beds studded with cutting blades and bristling with iron spikes, stationary pillories, wooden horses, wheels, kettles and tanks suspended over extinguished fires--all the apparatus of sacrifice and torture, covered with blood, here dried and blackish, there sticky and red. Puddles of blood filled with hollow parts; long gobs of coagulated blood hung from disjointed machinery. Around these apparatus, the soil actually was wet with blood. Blood still starred the whiteness of the jasmine, marbled the pink coral of the honeysuckle and the mauve passionflowers, and, bits of human flesh which had flown under the whips and leather thongs, were stuck here and there to the edges of the petals and leaves.
The peacocks had followed us for some distance, brazen and wary at the same time, stretching their necks and trailing the splendid trains of their oscillated tails across the red sand. There were also some all white, their breasts speckled with bloody spots, and their cruel heads crowned with a broad fan-shaped crest, each feather of which, slender and stiff, bore at its tip what looked like a trembling droplet of pink crystal.
Iron tables, racks already set up, and sinister gear grew more numerous. In the shadow of a great tamarisk, we perceived a sort of rococo armchair. Its arms were made alternately of a saw and a steel blade, and its back and seat of iron spikes. A scrap of flesh hung from one of these spikes. Lightly, adroitly, Clara lifted it with the tip of her parasol and tossed it to the hungry peacocks who hurled themselves upon it, striking out fiercely with their beaks. For several moments there was a dazzling scramble, a clash of gems whose marvelous spectacle I loitered to admire despite my disgust. Perched in the neighboring trees, some lophophores, scared pheasants, and great fighting cocks from the Malay Peninsula with damascene breasts, watched the conflict of the peacocks and cunningly awaited feeding-time.
A horrible adaptation of that charming fable of the hamadryads, imprisoned in their trees.
Plants and trees, atmosphere and earth were alive with flies, intoxicated insects, fierce and quarrelsome beetles, gorged mosquitoes. Around us all the fauna of the cadaver was hatching in myriads in the sun. Filthy maggots swarmed in the red pools, and dropped from the branches in soft clusters. The sand seemed to breathe and walk, lifted by the movement and pullulation of vermicular life. Deafened and blinded, we were halted at every step by these buzzing, multiplying swarms. And at times we had the horrible impression that our feet were sinking into the soaking earth, as though it had rained blood.
"See how that cadaver on the red sand takes on the tints of the old idols. Look at it carefully, for it's extraordinary. You'd think the vibrations of the bell, ringing wildly, had penetrated the body like some hard, compressing substance... that they'd forced the muscles out, made the veins burst, and twisted and ground the bones. Don't you think it's maddening? No, but conceive of this prodigious fact--that they very thing that can make amorous virgins walking in the country in the evening cry with ecstasy and divine melancholy, can also make men roar with pain, and kill a miserable human carcass under the most ineffable agony. I say it's genius. So discreet, for it takes place in the shadows, and its horror, when you come to think of it, could not be equaled by any other. Besides, like the torture of the caress, it's very rare today, and you're lucky to have seen it on your first visit to the garden."
The irises lifted their strangely flowered stalks above the water, their petals the color of old sandstone vases, precious blood-purple enamels, sinister purples, blue flamed with orange ochre, velvet blacks, and their calilyxes sulpur-colored. Some, immense and twisted, looked like cabalistic characters. The water-lilies and nelumbos spread their great swooning blossoms on the golden water and looked to me like severed, floating heads. We remained some minutes leaning on the balustrade of the bridge, looking silently at the water. All enormous carp whose golden snout alone could be seen, slept under a leaf, and between the Indian grass and the reeds smaller carp swam back and forth, like evil thoughts in a woman's brain.
