"A WOMAN'S REVENGE" "A FILM BY" "WITH" "Extreme civilization takes its frightening poetry from crime." "And so in this time of ineffable and delicious progress, crime has acquired a strange physiognomy." "The story I have the pleasure of presenting to you here took place in the life of Roberto, one of those men for whom simulation became the greatest art." "A dandy!" "Some will say." "A libertine!" "Say others." "Be what it may, he is an impassive, indecipherable man... and thus enigmatic!" "But the truth is that deep within Roberto feels a deep boredom." "The boredom of one who has exhausted all the charms of this life." "The only thing that might amaze him is the fact that nothing amazes him anymore." "Yet..." "Come on!" "Yesterday, Sunday, an empty day," "I have written nothing for two days." "Today I woke up not so bad," "I slept rather well." "Without dreams, at least nightmares." "I got up at eight, I read, I took breakfast." "I answered an avalanche of letters." "Luísa made an appointment for me for tomorrow at three o'clock." ""You will forget me", she wrote." "And it is so true," "I only remember her when I see her, and each time I see her, I forget her immediately afterwards." "I have to order some new shoes!" "Spring is here!" "I want to look like a Demigod arriving on Earth on the cloud that covered him." "Adorable!" "The Viscountess..." "A sinner with no remorse." "She used to write to me many times, today she is completely indifferent..." "What should I think of this woman?" "I do not know, nor do I want to know." "There goes Madame Veronique." "She was never pretty, but that little nose of hers..." "And those eyes that say everything!" "The freshness of being 18 years old." "The beauty of the Devil is often a Devil of a beauty." "What conversation was that yesterday gentlemen's dinner." "And what gentlemen, Good God!" "Notaries, lawyers..." "Not one single idea." "I decided not to drink so as to speak as little as possible... and in monosyllables." "Alice and her husband!" "Steeped in the torpor of marriage." "She always looks at her husband before she gives any opinion." "Not out of love, but fear!" "How old the Count and Countess are." "They used to have excellent dinners." "The guests as carefully chosen as the wines." "But yesterday's dinner..." "I behaved, as the English say, like someone born with a silver spoon in their mouth." "They learned nothing about me." "Leonoreta..." "She thinks I am in love... poor Leonoreta... the delight of her sighs!" "Me?" "In love?" "What foolishness!" "Caked in rouge..." "Amazing bad taste!" "Having arrived after a long journey, Roberto returns to society once again." "One night he attends a musical soirée." "Where can Roberto have been all this time?" "When he left, he was going to Turkey..." "Now I hear he has come from Boston!" "Who knows what it was." "Is he coming here tonight?" "Roberto?" "He's already inside." " Are you alright, Henrique?" " Me?" "I think so." "Excuse me." "Come on!" "Music!" " You will have to excuse me..." " Always in a rush..." "What are you hiding?" "Mon little boy?" ""If one can give one's soul, Just as one gives a portrait," "It is not my portrait, Madame, That I am offering you today..."" "Always mysteries..., Always mysteries with you." "Promise, promise me you will come to dine with me next week." "After all, mon cher Roberto, I have to hear about your journey." "It was like all journeys:" "With a certain return!" "You are a palace in a labyrinth!" "I will come to dine with the greatest pleasure, my dear friend." "Roberto!" "Are you going already?" "Come on, Henrique!" "It's a wonderful night!" "And I'm starving." "Let Susana sing." "She is amazing." "But it's an inferno inside!" "The heat is unbearable!" "The only real hell I've ever known." "You mean the heat?" "No." "Not the heat!" "The social hell!" "Come on!" "Let's go out for supper!" "We can have a good conversation." "Conversation..." "A rare gift!" "Roberto has that gift:" "He joins a conversation as if the conversation were the world itself." "His true "self" is in an inspired conversation." "Ah, yes!" "What he himself calls his "Fiery Angel" is released." "What fabulous women!" "In all the varieties of their species and races were those I saw in the markets of Andrinople..." "Hotter than the red Andrinople itself!" "That red made out of excrement, urine, animal blood and snot, that is what the silks are dyed with." "Yesterday was the premiere of "Cosí", nothing special." "But an unbelievable thing happened." "There was a girl there who, so it was said, had stolen her mother's lover." "But her mother, being considerably older, knew much better how to make herself loved..." "When the girl realised that the lover was going back to her mother, she was furious!" "She found a way to get hold of her mother's passionate letters to the so-desired man, she had lithographs made of them, and yesterday at the end of the performance, she threw them into the opera stalls." "It was a scandal!" "From right up there in the "Paradise" boxes!" "Paradise!" "It is a good name for that story!" "Paradise..." "Who would take this story and write it..." "I know, for example, and I am not the only one who knows, a woman, a great lady, who happens even to be very devout." "Yet she carries a rosary around her waist with little death's heads mounted in gold." "And she mixed the ecstasy of her penances of self-flagellation with that of other pleasures." "Well, who would write about that story?" "About that woman?" "Who, to make things worse, is the author of pious books and whom the Jesuits believe to be a man, or even a saint?" "What things a person invents for amusement!" "I am so glad you are back!" "Why don't you publish what you write?" "Now you are back you can think about it seriously." "I'm not interested in that." "Doesn't that remind you of someone?" "No..." "You were right!" "A thousand times better than Suzana's "Chévrier"." "The world is so big and so rich." "Sometimes life is so good." "Memory always returns, kneeling at our feet like a dog..." "Always return!" "Memory kneeling at our feet like a dog..." "Before... when alcohol was the flame of the party... on those nights, which were almost always learned," "when death had not yet politely and patiently drunk from this glass." "A reflection of nothing." "We knew that cheating ourselves, repeating the farce, was the only the most dignified way left of ourselves... and what now?" "Out of work actors, useless standards," "a defeated fiction in the war of time." "I could have sworn..." "Oh, I'm not surprised at all." "Let us allow lost ideals be crossed and unloved love and the time that defeated it." ""Death laughing in our green years"" ""And because it is almost the middle of the night", let us allow them to finish their dinner and let us move on to that which is to come..." "You're Spanish?" "Si." "Are you coming?" "I am with you." "A spiral staircase?" "Come in!" "Do you like me?" "So much?" "Wait for me!" "Show me that portrait!" "You're jealous?" "Of a whore like me?" "Do you want to see it?" "Look!" "The ribbon of the Golden Fleece!" "It can only be a Spanish Grandee." "Where did you steal this?" "Stole it?" "POR DIOS!" "He gave it to me!" "Who?" "Your lover, of course!" "No." "He isn't my lover!" "Perhaps not any longer, but you still love him." "Don't you understand a thing?" "Nothing at all?" "Neither of love nor of hate?" "Love that man!" "I detest him!" "He is my husband!" "Your husband?" "Yes!" "My husband!" "The greatest noble in all Spain." "Thrice a duke." "Four times a marquis." "Five time a count, Grandee of Spain and among the highest!" "I am the Duchess D'ARCOS DE SIERRA LEONE." "Sierra Leone?" "Saint-Jean..." "That's right!" "Exactly!" "One summer when I was there... how long ago?" "That year the highest society of Spain came together in Saint-Jean-de-Luz." "All the talk was of the honeymoon of the Duchess of Sierra Leone with the greatest and most opulent Lord of Spain." "A wedding with such pomp had not been seen in that town since the wedding of Louis XIV!" "I made an effort to get close to them, but the group of the Spanish society of the Duke and Duchess of Sierra Leone was strictly closed to foreigners like me." "But I managed to see you." "I sometimes glimpsed you from a distance:" "By the riverbank dunes, praying in church..." "Our dreams so close to love in our souls..." "She left without me getting to know her." "Yes." "I saw you in Saint-Jean-de-Luz." "Yes." "It was I." "In all my glory, in the full splendour of life." "Sanzia Florinda de Concepcíon de Turre Cremata," "Duchess of Sierra Leone." "And now..." "And now?" "Now..." "Now I find myself in the intoxication of vengeance..." "A vengeance I will make so deep that I will die of it." "Like the mosquitoes in my country, who die bursting with blood, in the wound they have made." "Don't you understand?" "But I will make you understand." "You now know who I am, but you don't know what I am." "Do you want to know?" "Do you want to know my story?" "Really?" "I want to tell it to everyone who comes here." "I want to tell it to the whole world!" " Tell me!" " Yes!" "I have so often wished to tell it to the men I brought here;" "But they don't come here, they say, to listen to stories!" "As soon as I started they would interrupt me, making fun and insulting me." "Liar!" "Mad woman!" "I heard many times." "They don't believe me." "But you," "you... saw me... in Saint-Jean-de-Luz..." "I bore this name, like someone wearing a diadem." "This name that I now drag, like the skirt of my dress, through the filthiest mud like they used to drag the shield of a dishonoured knight out tied to a horse's tail." "This name..." "Sierra Leone... still borne today by the greatest Grandee of Spain, the proudest, who has the rare privilege to remain uncovered before His Majesty the King." "Ten times nobler than the King!" "For the Duke of d'Arcos de Sierra Leone what are all the houses that reigned over Spain?" "Castile, Aragon, Transtamare, Austria and Bourbon?" "He descends from the Gothic kings, and, on Brunehild's side, descends from the Merovingians of France." "But Don Christoval, Duke of Sierra Leone and of other duchies, did not marry his lineage when he married me." "I am a Turre Cremata, of Italy." "Sanzia Florinda Conception de Turre Cremata." "My marriage was a treaty ...one race to another." "As suited the terrible etiquette of Spanish nobility." "Etiquette, made to prevent heart from beating..." "Unless they beat stronger than those iron corsets." "And I was one of those hearts." "I loved..." "Dom Estêvão!" "Before I met him," "my marriage brought my heart no happiness." "It was a grave affair, as grave as was old Catholic Spain." "A marriage that was proud, silent," "sombre." "I was brought up to be what I was:" "The wife of a noble of Spain." "My role was to add another generation to the many generations of irreprehensible, majestic women..." "Those seen in the heavy portraits covering the walls of the castle Sierra Leone..." "Those whose virtue was guarded by their pride" "as a fountain is guarded by a lion." "The solitude in which I lived did not weigh upon my soul, which was as peaceful" "as the mountains of red marble that surround Sierra Leone." "I did not suspect that, under that marble, slept a volcano." "Dom Estêvão, Marquis of Albuquerque, my cousin from Portugal, who has just arrived in Sierra Leone." "Dom Estêvão is going to Bologna to study." "On the way he is giving us the pleasure of his visit and has accepted to stay a few weeks with us." "Love, that love of which I had only heard in some books," "swooped down upon my heart," "like the eagle swoops down and carries off the child who cries..." "I also cried." "But a Spanish woman of the old style was not made for crying." "The days followed one another and my pride rose up against what I felt in the presence of this danger," "Estêvão," "who took unworthy power over me with revolting strength." "I wished to do my duty as a Spanish woman by warning Don Christoval." "You called, Madam?" "I request you to send Dom Estêvão away from this castle as soon as possible!" "I have realised that your cousin feels for me a love that offends me as insolence." "Have him leave, I ask you!" "He would not dare!" ""HE WOULD NOT DARE!"" "He..." ""He would not dare!"" "threw me into Estêvão's arms. " "I do not know whether other women are like me, but that incredulous pride of Don Christoval's, referring to the man I loved, and his disdainful and calm "He would not dare"," "insulted me, as if I were Estêvão himself," "who now possessed me like a God, in the depths of my being." ""Prove to him that you would dare!"" "I said to Estêvão that very night." "It is true that we were hardly twenty years old." "Ignatius Loyola, Knight of the Virgin, did not love the Queen of Heaven more purely than Estêvão loved me." "Adultery?" "Which of us thought of ourselves as adulterers?" "Neither of us felt anything like the desire of vulgar loves." "Estêvão was as pious as a Portuguese knight of the time of Albuquerque." "From him and from the purity of his love," "I took the faith which kindled the purity of mine." "Estêvão had me in his heart," "like someone having Our Lady in a golden niche with a lamp at her feet." "He loved my soul." "Soul to soul." "If the angels love each other before the Throne of God, they must love as we loved..." "He would rather have seen me do a good deed than waltz with me mouth to mouth." "We stayed together hours and hours, able to do anything... and wanting nothing." "Believe me that at that time Estêvão's lips had never touched mine" "and that a kiss of his nestled on a rose that was then held by me," "would be enough to make me swoon." "Could a state of souls like this have lasted?" "Was it possible for this to last?" "Were we not, without knowing it, without even suspecting it, at the most dangerous game for the weak creatures we are?" "We lived in plenitude," "we lived in the blue of the skies." "But the sky was African and the blue was fire." "I think I understand you." "What does it matter what you think?" "As for me!" "Rogues!" "I wish to die the same death!" "Touch not the queen!" "Get the traitor!" "Give the heart of this traitor to the dogs to eat." "Go further, avenge yourself more." "It is I you should make eat it!" "Let my breast be the living tomb for the man I loved." "I felt that it was my breast that was being cut open." "But, Alas!" ", It was not my heart they tore out." "They tore out Estêvão's heart, from inside his body, that lay at my feet, his breast cut open, quartered like a sack by the hands of those monsters." "I felt the pain that his corpse no longer felt." "They bit me fearfully, they tore my dress and wiped their bloody jaws on it..." "Here it is!" "Look!" "And remember what you see!" "This is the blood of the man I loved" "and I could not save from the dogs!" "When I find myself again alone in the accursed life I lead, when vomit comes to my throat and chokes me," "when the strength of vengeance weakens in me, when the duchess returns and the harlot shocks me," "I wrap myself in this robe," "I rub my soiled body in its bloody folds, that still burn me." "These bloody rags are the talisman that revives me." "When I place them on my body, they move my entrails and the desire for revenge without end rages in me again!" "What can I do for you?" "Look!" "Remember what you see!" "Do you understand now?" "Do you understand what my revenge is?" "I chose it among many," "I chose it among all of them, as one chooses, between daggers, the one that will cause most suffering." "I am a Turre-Cremata!" "Don Christoval would never suspect what was fermenting beneath my face of bronze." "There was not the slightest allusion." "Not a single word." "The silence." "The silence." "The silence of the hate that feeds off itself." "Caesar's wife must be above all suspicion and I had to remain, in others' eyes, the Duchess d'Arcos de Sierra Leone." "I prepared my flight from that suffocating castle." "How?" "It was from the chapel, on an autumn night, when the air hung still in the sky," "that I fled and reached the gorges of the Sierras." "And you came here." "I thought of going to Madrid." "But in Madrid the Duke is all powerful and I would have been arrested at once." "And once I was caught" "I would have been thrown into the in-pace of some convent, to die there between two doors, withdrawn from the world." "This same world which I need so much for my vengeance." "I decided to come here." "Here is the best stage for my infamy." "That man deserved death!" "Kill him?" "Me?" "To kill that man only once?" "Too light a death." "Did he kill Estêvão de Albuquerque?" "Did he run him through with a sword, like one noble to another?" "No!" "He had him killed by his varlets." "He had his heart thrown to the dogs and his body on the dunghill, or somewhere worse, that I do not know," "nor have ever known." "The Duke is brave." "He does not fear death." "Only his pride, his immense pride, would be cowardly, when it concerned dishonour." "It is necessary to wound that honour to crucify him in his pride." "And for that reason I have become what I am, the whore Sierra Leone who receives you tonight..." "But he... the Duke..." "Does the Duke know what you have become?" "Sooner or later, the mud of my shame will fall upon him." "Look, I have brought with me all the jewels and money I had." "I have sometimes thought of fascinating some young man or other, and sending him to the Duke to tell him of my ignominy." "I ended up dismissing that idea." "It is not just on a little heap of dung that I want his name and my memory raised up..." "I want a whole pyramid!" "Any of the men who have climbed these stairs cut spit his wife's dishonour in his face, that spittle that can never be wiped off." "But I do not wish to leave my vengeance to chance!" "Vengeance on your own body, on your own soul." "Vengeance on yourself." "One day the putrefaction of debauchery will end up gnawing at and devouring the prostitute." "On that day, on that day my life will be paid." "Do you understand now?" "The Duke may never find out." "I will know!" "Night after night I will know!" "Feelings like mine may seem insane to you." "But I only find reason in madness." "I drink this filth and find it nectar, because it is the nectar of revenge." "Pleasure..." "The pleasure of dishonouring him." "As if these painted eyes saw us." "For me this image is like the sword that the Arab horseman drives into his horse's flank to make it cross the desert." "And when I feel the horror of being in your arms," "or in the arms of all you men, you so stupid and so fatuous men," "because I do always feel it and I cannot get used to the taste of this filth," "I have this ring of fire which burns me to the marrow." "But I have no portrait of Estêvão." "I only see him in my mind's eye..." "All the better, thus." "If I saw him, I would repent," "I would blush" "at the indignity and the humiliation of the life that is mine." "It is hard to get used... to this." "The shame." "But I must do so." "Warm life... remained... behind," "I turn to you... who freeze... in my light tunic of fire." "What's this?" "Take back your money." "No gold enters here." "I accept it from no one." "I am a penny-ha'penny girl." "Thus." "Duchess D'arcos de Sierra Leone Cunt, Ass, Cocksucker, Twat" "Mouth-farter And other pleasures of sex" "We stayed together hours and hours, able to do anything... and wanting nothing." "We lived in plenitude, we lived in the blue of the skies." "Travel notes..." "I saw the sea in the morning twisting and leaping dark green and spume on the wind... with the first rains of November." "In the silence of my house" "I listen to the crackling of the fire," "I see ashes and coals, a dance of flames." "Over the fireplace, some books recall other times, ornaments that dissimulate a lost passion." "Neither greatness nor wretchedness nor hidden words, alone among white walls, a ghost alone in this village of ghosts." "Of his meeting with the duchess, Roberto said not one word:" "He kept it and locked it in the most mysterious corner of his heart, as if it were a rare bottle of perfume from which something would be lost if it were allowed to breathe." "A cloak of silence that falls on souls that are closed for ever, without doubt witnesses that what can be said here, cannot be said here." "Unless it is precisely, beneath a mask, and through diversions." "To occupy his empty time," "Roberto turned to the last, derisory, traces of a great past:" "Gambling, fencing, reading..." "Woe for those who do not know how to wear the mask they have chosen." "Tired of everything and everyone, Roberto goes off on a journey again." "Past the summer and its ardent glow;" "Some things for other things are all gone." "When Roberto returns, he is invited to a dinner at the Spanish Embassy." "Your Excellency will forgive me, but do you know whether there are any of the Sierra Leone family still at Madrid?" "Certainly there are!" "The Duke himself." "So then who is the Duchess de Sierra Leone who died this morning?" "Is she some relation to the Duke?" "It can only be his wife." "But some years ago I was told she had died." "She disappeared and no one knew why nor how." "The truth is a great mystery." "She was haughtier than her husband himself, the proudest of the 'ricos hombres' of all Spain." "They lived in isolation in Sierra Leone, that desert of red marble, where eagles, if they exist, must die stifled of boredom amongst there peaks." "But was it known that she in fact died?" "I had that idea." "One day the duchess disappeared and no one has ever found a trace of her." "Since that time nothing more has been said of the issue." "No one has dared ask questions of the Duke who is a man of the time of Charles V." "And the Duke has never said a word about his wife." "The Duchess d'Arcos de Sierra Leone was not like one of those silly girls who might do something foolish or be carried off by a lover." "As a single woman she was a Turre-Cremata, the last of the Turre-Cremata." "I have no doubt of this!" "Lord Ambassador of Spain, I have the honour to announce, your Excellency, that the duchess died this morning." "And, what you would assuredly never suspect, her body is in the chapel of St Lazarus, which, as you know, usually receives the bodies of women who are... unworthy." "And have you no further information?" "None, Excellency." "Besides, as I knew I would have the honour of meeting you this evening" "I thought you might inform me." "I shall have this information tomorrow." "Very well." "Did you know the duchess?" "I will be back." "Here lies Sanzia Florinda Conception de Turre Cremata" "Duquesa D'Arcos de Sierra Leone A Repentant Harlot" "Who died a St Lazarus On the 21st of April 18.." "REQUIESCAT IN PACE" "Father, did you know the lady who is in the chapel?" "I did." "The wretched woman." "She was No. 119." "She caught the most frightful of diseases." "In a few months she was rotten to the bones." "One day, one of her eyes popped out of its orbit and dropped to her feet, like a large coin." "The other one turned into liquid." "She died, but she died without a whimper through incredible tortures." "It was only at the end I was told she was a duchess." "Very wealthy, she left everything to other patients like her, and ordered a grand funeral." "She only wished to take with her, on her arm, a medallion on a bracelet from which she had never separated." "But what is most strange, at least for me, is that she demanded, no doubt as penance," "that beneath her titles, on the coffin and in the grave, it should be written that she was a harlot..." "And she did not even wish, no doubt, due to her humility, that the word "repentant" be written." "But what is your interest in her?" ""Time hath its order regularly known;"" "Not so the world, which so confused doth roll," "That God thereof would all forgetful seem:" "Nature, opinions, use, events, the whole" "Combine to make us feel the life we own is really nothing but a dream"."