The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

And the unconscious shepherd breathed, breathed into his reed. It was the same air; the notes were always the same; they spoke of the life that was no more, they spoke of distant and annihilated things.

"Old and grave melody," said Tristan. "Your lamenting sounds reached me even on the evening wind, as when, in distant times, the death of the father was announced to the son. In the sinister dawn thou didst seek me, more and more uneasy, when the son learned of the departure of the mother. When my father engendered me and died, when my mother brought me to light and died, the old melody came to their ears also, languishing and sad. She interrogated me one day, and now she is speaking to me again. To what destiny was I born? To what destiny? The old melody is repeating it to me: To desire and to die! to die of desire! Oh! no, no. Such is not your true sense. To desire, to desire, to desire, even unto death; but not to die of desire!" Stronger and stronger, more and more tenacious, the philter corroded him to the marrow. All his being writhed in the unbearable spasm. At moments, the orchestra had the crepitations of a funereal pyre. The violence of the pain traversed him at times with tempestuous impetuosity, reviving the flames. Sudden starts shook him; atrocious cries escaped from it; choking sobs were extinguished in it. "The philter! the philter! the terrible philter! with what fury I feel it mount from my heart to my brain! Henceforth no remedy, no sweet death, can deliver me from the torture of desire. In no place, in no spot, alas! shall I find repose. The night repulses me toward the day, and the eye of the sun feeds on my perpetual suffering. Ah! how the ardent sun burns me and consumes me! And not even to have, never to have, the refreshment of a shade for that devouring ardor! What balm would procure a relief to my horrible torture?" He bore in his veins and marrow the desire of all men, of every species, amassed generation after generation, aggravated by the faults of all the fathers and of all the sons, the intoxications of all, the anguishes of all. In his blood blossomed the germs of the secular concupiscence, remingled the most diverse impurities, refermented the venoms, the most subtle and violent, that, since immemorial ages, the purplish sinuous mouths of women had poured out on eager and subjugated males. He was the heir of the eternal evil. "That terrible philter which condemns me to torture, it is I, I myself, who have compounded it. With the agitations of my father, with the convulsions of my mother, with all the tears of love shed in other times, with laughter and with tears, with pleasures and with wounds, I myself have compounded the poison of that philter. And I have drunk it by deep, enjoyable draughts. A curse on thee, terrible philter! A curse on he who compounded thee!" And he fell back on his couch, exhausted, inanimate, to recover his equanimity, to feel once more the ardor of his wound, to see once more with his hallucinated eyes the sovereign image crossing the fields of the sea. "She is coming, she is coming towards land, softly rocked on the great waves of intoxicating flowers. Her smile throws on me a divine consolation; she brings me the supreme refreshment." Thus he invoked, thus he saw, with his eyes closed henceforth to the common light, the sorceress, the mistress of balms, the healer of all wounds. "She comes, she comes! Dost thou not see her, Kurvenal; dost thou not see her?" And the agitated waves of the Mystic Gulf gathered confusedly from the depths all the melodies already heard, mingling them, raising them up, submerging them in an abyss, repulsing them again to the surface, crushing them: those that could have expressed the anguish of the decisive conflict on the bridge of the ship, those in which one heard the boiling of the draught poured into the golden cup and the buzzing in the arteries invaded by the liquid fire, those in which had been heard the mysterious breath of the summer night inviting voluptuousness without end, all the melodies, with all the images and all the recollections. And on this immense shipwreck the fatal melody passed, proud, sovereign, implacable, repeating at intervals the atrocious condemnation: "To desire, to desire, to desire even unto death: but not to die of desire!"

"The vessel drops its anchor! Ysolde! behold Ysolde! She springs to the shore!" cried Kurvenal from the top of the tower. And, in the delirium of joy, Tristan tore off the bandages of his wound, excited his own blood to flow, to inundate the earth, to empurple the world. At the approach of Ysolde and Death, he believed he heard the light. "Do I not hear the light? Do not my ears hear the light?" A great inner sun dazzled him; every atom of his substance darted rays of sunlight that, in luminous waves, expanded through the universe. The light was music; the music was light.

And then the Mystic Gulf truly became irradiated like a sky. The sonorities of the orchestra seemed to imitate those distant planetary harmonies that, long ago, the souls of vigilant contemplators believed they surprised in the nocturnal silence. Gradually, the long tremblings of restlessness, the long bursts of anguish, the pantings of vain pursuits, and the efforts of the ever-deceived desire, and all the agitations of terrestrial misery, were appeased, became dissipated. Tristan had finally crossed the limit of the "marvellous empire"; he had finally entered into eternal night. And Ysolde, bent over the inert shell, felt at last the heavy weight that still crushed her slowly dissolve. The fatal melody, become clearer and more solemn, consecrated the great funereal hymn. Then the notes, like ethereal chords, began to weave about the lover veils of diaphanous purity. Thus commenced a sort of joyous assumption, by degrees of splendor, on the wing of a hymn. "What a sweet smile he is smiling! Dost thou not see? Dost thou not hear? Am I alone to hear that new melody, infinitely sweet and consoling, that streams from the depths of his being, and ravishes me, and penetrates me, and envelops me?" The Irish sorceress, the formidable mistress of philters, the hereditary arbitrator of obscure terrestrial powers, she who, from the tops of the ship, had invoked the whirlwinds and tempests, she whose love had chosen the strongest and most noble of heroes to intoxicate and destroy him, she who had closed the path of glory and victory to a "conqueror of the world," the poisoner, the homicide, became transfigured by the power of death into a being of light and of joy, exempt from all impure covetousness, free from all base attachment, throbbing and respiring in the breast of the diffused soul of the universe. "Are not these clearer sounds that murmur in my ear the soft waves of the air? Must I respire, drink, plunge myself, slowly drift in the vapors and perfumes?" All in her dissolved, melted, dilated, returned to the original fluidity, to the immense elementary ocean in which the forms were born, in which the forms disappeared to become renewed and to be reborn. In the Mystic Gulf the transformations and transfigurations were being accomplished, note by note, harmony by harmony, without interruption. It seemed as if all things there were decomposed, exhaling their hidden essences, changing into immaterial symbols. Colors never before seen on petals of the most delicate terrestrial flowers, perfumes of an almost imperceptible subtlety, floated there. Visions of secret paradises were revealed in a flash of light; the germs of worlds to be born blossomed there. And the panicky intoxication ascended, ascended; the chorus of the Great All covered the unique human voice. Transfigured, Ysolde entered into the marvellous empire triumphantly. "To lose oneself, to throw oneself into the abyss, to swoon without consciousness in the infinite throbbing of the universal soul: supreme voluptuousness."

CHAPTER II.

For two entire days the two hermits lived thus amid great fiction, respired that burning atmosphere, saturated themselves with that mortal forgetfulness. They believed they had transfigured themselves, that they had attained superior heights of existence. In the vertiginous heights of their love-dream they believed they equalled the personages in the drama. Did it not seem to them that they, too, had drunk a philter? Were not they also tormented by a limitless desire? Were they not also linked together by an indissoluble bond, and did they not often feel in voluptuousness the horrors of the death-agony; did they not hear the rumbling of death? George, like Tristan when he heard the ancient melody modulated by the shepherd, found in that music the direct revelation of an anguish in which he believed he had at last surprised the true essence of his soul and the tragic secret of his destiny. No man could better penetrate the symbolic and mythical sense of the philter, and no man better than himself could better measure the depth of the inner drama, solely inner, in which the pensive hero had consumed his strength. Nor could any one better understand the despairing cry of the victim: "That terrible philter which has condemned me to torture, it is I, I myself, who compounded it."

He then undertook the funereal seduction of his mistress. He wished to slowly persuade her to die; he wished to entice her to go with him toward a mysterious and comfortable end, during that beautiful Adriatic summer, full of transparencies and perfumes. The great phrase of love—that spread out in such a wide circle of light around the transfiguration of Ysolde—had also enclosed Hippolyte in its charm. She repeated it ceaselessly in a low tone, sometimes even in a loud voice, with signs of exuberant joy.

"Wouldn't you like to die such a death as Ysolde's?" asked George, with a smile.

"I would," she answered. "But, on earth, people don't die like that."

"And if I died?" he went on, always smiling. "Suppose you saw me dead in fact, not in fancy?"