The Artificial Hell

On moonlit nights, the gravedigger makes his way among the graves with a singularly rigid stride. He is naked to the waist and wears a large straw hat. His fixed smile gives the impression of being glued to his face. If he were barefoot, one would notice that he walks with his big toes curled downward.

There is nothing strange in this, for the gravedigger abuses chloroform. The incidents of his trade led him to sample the anesthetic, and once chloroform sinks its teeth into a man, it rarely lets go. Our acquaintance waits for nightfall to unscrew his flask, and as his common sense is vast, he chooses the cemetery as the inviolable theater of his drunks.

Chloroform expands the chest at the first inhalation; the second floods the mouth with saliva; the extremities tingle at the third; at the fourth, the lips, along with the ideas, swell up, and then singular things happen.

Thus it is that the fancy of his gait has led the gravedigger to an open grave where that afternoon there had been a disinterment of bones—left unfinished for lack of time. A coffin has been left open behind the iron grille, and beside it, on the sand, lies the skeleton of the man who was locked inside it.

...Did he truly hear something? Our acquaintance slides back the bolt, enters, and after circling in suspense around the bony man, he kneels and brings his eyes right up to the skull’s eye sockets.

There, deep within, a little above the base of the skull, perched like a man on a parapet upon a roughness of the occipital bone, is curled a shivering, yellow little man, his face crisscrossed with wrinkles. His mouth is purplish, his eyes sunken deep, and his gaze crazed with craving.

He is all that remains of a cocaine addict.

“Cocaine! Please, a little cocaine!”

The gravedigger, calm, knows very well that he himself would dissolve the glass of his flask with his saliva to reach the forbidden chloroform. It is therefore his duty to help the shivering little man.

He goes out and returns with the filled syringe, which the cemetery’s medicine chest has provided him. But how, to the diminutive little man?...

“Through the cranial fissures!... Quick!”

True! How had he not thought of it? And the gravedigger, on his knees, injects the entire contents of the syringe into the fissures, which filters through and disappears into the cracks.

Yet surely something has reached the fissure to which the little man desperately clings. After eight years of abstinence, what molecule of cocaine does not ignite a delirium of strength, youth, beauty?

The gravedigger fixed his eyes upon the skull’s socket, and did not recognize the dying little man. In the skin, firm and smooth, there was not the slightest trace of a wrinkle. The lips, red and vibrant, bit into each other with a lazy voluptuousness that would have no virile explanation, were hypnotics not almost all feminine; and the eyes above all, previously glassy and dull, now shone with such passion that the gravedigger felt an impulse of envious surprise.

“And all that, just like that... the cocaine?” he murmured.

The voice from within sounded with ineffable charm.

“Ah! One must know what eight years of agony are! Eight years, desperate, frozen, clinging to eternity by the sole hope of a single drop!... Yes, it is because of the cocaine... And you? I know that smell... chloroform?”

“Yes,” replied the gravedigger, ashamed of the pettiness of his artificial paradise. And he added in a low voice: “Chloroform too... I’d kill myself before giving it up.”

The voice sounded somewhat mocking.

“Kill yourself! And you’d surely finish it off; it’d be just like any of those neighbors of mine... You’d rot in three hours, you and your desires.”

“It’s true;” thought the gravedigger, “they’d finish me off. But the other one hadn’t surrendered. Still burning after eight years was that passion which had resisted the very lack of the vessel of delight; which surpassed the capital death of the organism that created it, sustained it, and was not capable of annihilating it along with itself; which monstrously survived of itself, transmuting the causal yearning into supreme final enjoyment, maintaining itself before eternity in a wrinkle of the old skull.”

The warm voice, drawling with voluptuousness, still sounded mocking.

“You would kill yourself... Fine thing! I killed myself too... Ah, you’re interested, aren’t you? But we’re made of different stuff... However, bring your chloroform, breathe a little more, and listen to me. You will appreciate then the difference between your drug and cocaine. Go on.”

The gravedigger returned, and throwing himself chest-down on the ground, supported on his elbows and the bottle beneath his nose, waited.

“Your chlorine! It’s not much, so to speak. And morphine too... Do you know love for perfumes? No? And Guerlain’s Jicky? Listen then. At thirty I married, and had three children. With a fortune, an adorable wife, and three healthy little ones, I was perfectly happy. Yet our house was too big for us. You’ve seen. You haven’t... anyway... you’ve seen that luxuriously furnished rooms seem lonelier and more useless. Above all, lonelier. Our entire mansion lived like this in silence, its sterile and funereal luxury.”

One day, in less than eighteen hours, our eldest child left us to follow after diphtheria. The following afternoon the second went with his brother, and my wife threw herself in desperation upon the only thing left to us: our four-month-old daughter. What did we care about diphtheria, contagion, and all the rest? Despite the doctor’s orders, the mother nursed the baby, and shortly after the little one was writhing convulsively, to die eight hours later, poisoned by the mother’s milk.

Add it up: 18, 24, 9. In 51 hours, little more than two days, our house was left perfectly silent, for there was nothing to be done. My wife was in her room, and I paced back and forth beside it. Aside from that, nothing, not a single sound. And two days before we had three children...

Well. My wife spent four days scratching the sheet, with a cerebral stroke, and I turned to morphine.

“Leave that alone,” the doctor told me, “it’s not for you.”

“What then?” I answered him. And I pointed to the funereal luxury of my house that continued slowly igniting catastrophes, like rubies.

The man took pity.

“Try sulphonal, anything... But your nerves won’t hold out.”

Sulphonal, brional, stramonium... bah! Ah, cocaine! How much of infinity lies between joy scattered in ashes at the foot of each empty bed, and the radiant rescue of that very same burned happiness, fits into a single drop of cocaine! Astonishment at having suffered immense pain, moments before; sudden and plain confidence in life, now; instantaneous resurgence of illusions that bring the future within four inches of the open soul, all this rushes into the veins through the platinum needle. And your chloroform!... My wife died. For two years I spent vastly more on cocaine than you can imagine. Do you know anything about tolerances? Five centigrams of morphine fatally finish off a robust individual. De Quincey managed to take two grams per day for fifteen years; that is to say, forty times more than the lethal dose.

But one pays for that. In me, the truth of gloomy things, contained, intoxicated day after day, began to take its revenge, and I no longer had any twisted nerves left to thrust forward against the horrible hallucinations that besieged me. I then made unheard-of efforts to cast out the demon, to no avail. Three times I resisted cocaine for a month, a whole month. And I fell again. And you don’t know, but you will know one day, what suffering, what anguish, what agony sweat one feels when one tries to suppress the drug for a single day!

At last, poisoned to the very core of my being, pregnant with tortures and phantasms, turned into a trembling human wreckage; without blood, without life—misery which cocaine lent a radiant disguise ten times a day, only to plunge me immediately into an ever-deeper stupor, at last a remnant of dignity drove me to a sanatorium, I surrendered myself bound hand and foot for the cure.

There, under the sway of another’s will, constantly watched so that I could not procure the poison, I would inevitably succeed in decocainizing myself.

Do you know what happened? That I, along with the heroism to surrender myself to torture, carried well hidden in my pocket a little vial of cocaine... Now calculate what passion is.

For a whole year after that failure, I kept on injecting myself. A long journey that I undertook gave me I know not what mysterious forces of reaction, and I fell in love then.

The voice fell silent. The gravedigger, who was listening with the slobbering smile fixed always on his face, brought his eye closer and thought he noticed a slightly opaque, glassy film in those of his interlocutor. The skin, in turn, was visibly cracking.

“Yes,” the voice continued, “that is the beginning... I shall finish at once. To you, a colleague, I owe all this story.”

The parents did everything possible to resist: a morphine addict, or something of the sort! To the fatality of mine, of hers, of everyone, it had placed in my path a super-nervous girl. Oh, admirably beautiful! She was only eighteen years old. Luxury was to her what cut crystal is to an essence: its natural container.

The first time that, having forgotten to give myself a new injection before entering, she saw me drop abruptly in her presence, turn into an idiot, wrinkle up, she fixed her immensely large, beautiful, and frightened eyes on me. Curiously frightened! She watched me, pale and without moving, give myself the injection. She did not cease for an instant the rest of the night to look at me. And behind those dilated eyes that had seen me thus, I saw in my turn the neurotic taint, the uncle interned, and her younger epileptic brother...

The next day I found her breathing Jicky, her favorite perfume; she had read in twenty-four hours everything possible about hypnotics.

Now then, it is enough for two people to sip the delights of life in an abnormal way for them to understand each other all the more intimately the stranger the attainment of pleasure is. They will unite at once, excluding every other passion, to isolate themselves in the hallucinated bliss of an artificial paradise.

In twenty days, that charm of body, beauty, youth, and elegance was suspended from the intoxicating breath of perfumes. She began to live, like me with cocaine, in the delirious heaven of her Jicky.

At last our mutual somnambulism in her house seemed dangerous to us, however fleeting it might be, and we decided to create our paradise. None better than my own house, which I had touched not at all, and to which I had not returned since. Wide, low divans were carried into the drawing room; and there, in the very silence and the same funeral sumptuousness that had incubated the death of my children; in the deep stillness of the room, with the lamp lit at one in the afternoon; under the heavy atmosphere of perfumes, we lived hour after hour our fraternal and taciturn idyll, I lying motionless with open eyes, pale as death; she stretched out upon the divan, holding under her nose, with her freezing hand, the flask of Jicky.

Because there was not the least trace of desire in us—and how beautiful she was with her deep dark circles under her eyes, her disheveled hair, and the ardent luxury of her spotless skirt!

For three consecutive months she rarely failed, without my ever managing to figure out what combinations of visits, weddings, and garden parties she must have made so as not to be suspected. On those rare occasions she arrived the next day anxious, entered without looking at me, threw down her hat with an abrupt gesture, only to stretch out at once, her head thrown back and her eyes half-closed, to the somnambulism of her Jicky.

To make a long story short: one afternoon, and by one of those inexplicable reactions with which poisoned organisms launch their defense reserves in an explosion—morphine addicts know them well!—I felt all the deep pleasure there was, not in my cocaine, but in that eighteen-year-old body, admirably made to be desired. That afternoon, like never before, her beauty arose, pale and sensual, from the sumptuous stillness of the illuminated room. So abrupt was the jolt that I found myself sitting on the divan, looking at her. Eighteen years old... and with such beauty!

She saw me arrive without making a movement, and as I leaned over she looked at me with cold strangeness.

“Yes...” I murmured.

“No, no...” she replied with a white voice, dodging the mouth in heavy movements of her mass of hair.

At last, at last she threw her head back and yielded, closing her eyes.

Ah! What use was it to have revived for an instant, if my virile power, if my pride as a man would revive no more! I was dead forever, drowned, dissolved in the sea of cocaine! I fell to her side, sitting on the floor, and buried my head in her skirts, remaining thus a whole hour in deep silence, while she, very pale, also kept herself motionless, her eyes open, fixed on the ceiling.

But that lash of reaction that had kindled an ephemeral lightning flash of sensory ruin, also brought to the surface of consciousness everything of male honor and virile shame that was agonizing in me. The failure of a day in the sanatorium, and the diary before my own dignity, were nothing in comparison to that of this moment, do you understand? Why live, if the artificial hell into which I had plunged myself and from which I could not escape was incapable of totally absorbing me! And it had let go of me for an instant, to plunge me into this end!

I got up and went inside, to the well-known rooms, where my revolver still was. When I returned, she had her eyelids closed.

“Let us kill ourselves,” I told her.

She half-opened her eyes, and for a minute did not take her gaze off me. Her limpid brow once more had that same movement of tired ecstasy:

“Let us kill ourselves,” she murmured.

She then swept with her gaze the funeral luxury of the drawing room, in which the lamp burned with a high light, and slightly knitted her brow.

“Not here,” she added.

We went out together, still heavy with hallucination, and crossed the echoing house, room after room. At last she leaned against a door and closed her eyes. She fell along the wall. I turned the weapon against myself, and killed myself in my turn.

Then, when at the explosion my jaw dropped abruptly, and I felt an immense tingling in my head; when the heart gave two or three jolts and stopped, paralyzed; when in my brain and in my nerves and in my blood there was not the remotest probability that life would return to them, I felt that my debt to cocaine was paid. I had killed myself, but I had killed it in my turn!

And I was wrong! Because an instant later I could see, entering hesitantly and hand in hand through the doorway of the drawing room, our dead bodies, which were obstinately returning...

The voice broke off suddenly.

“Cocaine, please! A little cocaine!”