It was only a matter of time before a story about necrophilia written by an 18-year-old woman in 1895 wound up on this blog...

"Isabelle Eberhardt, mystisk ikon," by Pablo Castro, 2008

Swiss-born writer and adventurous vagabond Isabelle Eberhardt moved to French colonial Algeria at the age of twenty-two, adopting the costume of a local Arab male, in order to pass unnoticed. Fluent in Arabic and several other languages, Eberhardt explored the arid regions of North Africa, practiced journalism, engaged in espionage and anti-colonial political exploits, converted to Islam, joined the mystic Sufi brotherhood, smoked hashish, and traveled with nomads among the dunes. Having fled a confining life in Europe where her anarchist-nihilist father, a former priest who, on an occasion when she said she wished she were dead, promptly proffered her his revolver, she found fulfillment in her role as a female counterpart to the Richard Burton author-explorer-interloper-incognito paradigm. She was drowned in a desert flash flood, aged twenty-seven. Eberhardt's brief, exotic life has been the subject of both book and film biographies. Her chthonic tale "Voluptuous Corruption," published here for the first time in English translation, serves up the subject of necrophilia as a subtle blend of tenderness and perversion, and makes poetry of pathology.

Eva Svankmajerova, Vanitas - Curtain Call, 1993

Voluptuous Corruption
(from Infernalia, 1895)
by Isabelle Eberhardt
Translation and the above bio by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

In the nocturnal silence, the dismal, oblong hall, faintly lit, vaguely slept.

From the infamous tables, from the grimy, befouled floor, mounted a dull, insipid odor—an odor of human entrails, of clotted blood, of splattered drugs...

In this perfume of misery, in this dolorous salon, upon two slabs, two cadavers dozed, covered by bright white sheets, sinister vestments of terror.

Close to the naked wall, wall of hospital or prison, of asylum or barracks, beneath his lamentable drapery, a man reclined, eyes closed, fixed forever in his from-now-on eternal indifference. Very young, twenty years old perhaps; the profile of a milk-white statue, very soft, blanched lips barely smiling on the livid face, a smile from beyond the tomb...

In the corner opposite, an outspread woman, she too, beneath the miserable shroud.

An image mystical and pure, in her pale transcendental beauty of a martyr...

Beneath the bluish shadow of jet black hair, a motionless pallor, flesh voluptuously radiant in the coldness of death, a stranger henceforth to inflamed kisses and ardent embraces.

The rigid form peeped from the infamous veil, flaunting the curves of its perfect figure...

And over this sinister realm of shadowy death, the flickering flame of the gas threw its cruel reflections.

In the dense, ponderous silence, in the nauseating odor, both of them young and beautiful, the nameless cadavers slept their sleep of astonishment...

They still had kept their human form but, in the mortuary hall, they counted for naught, they were naught, expunged forever from the lists of the living.

Wretches crushed by destiny, laid low by vice; travelers forgotten in an hour, they had washed up here, stranded. Tomorrow, under the frigid scalpel, cut into strips, shamefully skinned, picked apart, entrails bared, they would be shown to other young men, to young women, avid to live, to learn, to love, their organs torn open, sliced to ribbons, bleeding remnants of the bodies which were, no doubt, their only wealth and happiness during lives of sordid abjection.

They were going to expose their final misery to the sublime indifference of the sun—to the sun in its eternal joy...

What did it matter!

Eva Svankmajerova, Dreams and mothers, 1988

In the grand enigma of eternal Becoming, who would regret this blood, this life, this sacrificed flesh?

And all of them who, tomorrow, were going to soak their hands, young and warm, in this icy blood, in this mutilated meat, afterward would go try to assuage a little the pain of their pitiful brethren, would try to appease one day the great howl snatched by incessant Becoming!

Then they, too, would come to roll, suddenly inert and glassy, in the same Nothingness without form, without duration, without name...

And so forth, forever...

They lay awash in the strange effulgence of the feeble light...

Close to the miserable couch where the sallow woman slept, a student, night watchman at the clinic, stood stiffly.

He stared at her carnal envelope, seared by a dreadful desire.

His pale face, with anguished black eyes, convulsed with icy shivers.

With all his will, with all his youthful energy, he resisted, struggling against the sinister beckonings of neuropathic compulsion.

But, unable to flee, he stood fascinated, immobile; languishing, flagging instant by instant, fallen prey to a shocking natural beauty, heart brimming with disgust...

He felt himself drained of force, powerless in the face of the hideous embrace which he madly desired.

And he would soon surrender...

His suffering was intolerable in this pitiless night...

His virility revolted against the abominable coitus; his will took flight...

And he remained motionless, forehead drenched in sweat, fists clenched tight...

He felt strong and fine; he was quite young and altogether male. And his pride balked at the thought of this funebrial simulacrum of love which, so many times before, had dragged him into the ineffable abysses of voluptuousness.

Eva Svankmajerova, Existential Moment, 1978

Sickened, he beat back the obscure phantasmagoria born from his compulsion which, tonight, appeared in the face of this woman his eyes watched without modesty, and unblushingly devoured; the face of the horrible chimera whose gelid form, triumphant beneath the limp drape, debased him, degraded him, rendered him vile.

He strove with all his energy, with all the numbed, half-conscious, but still-living chastity which was in him, to restrain his delirious desire until it could be transferred to the possession of a living woman—no matter whom...

But all the pictures conjured up by memory, under violent force of will, were pale and impersonal... while that which he viewed before him—the corpse—her young flesh simmering, whispered to him, sighed and quivered, and he buckled in a swoon.

The blush of shame, in the face of downfall, mounted to his cheeks... he despised himself, he loathed himself in this tortured hour.

His gaze glided over the contours of the funereal drape. He knew, and he looked askance.

But he wanted to see, to look at reality, invincibly.

To this desire, he gave in, wrestling all the while against the other, which he knew to be morbid and infamous.

With his violently trembling hand, he lifted the drape and regarded the lamentable nudity which sprawled before his lewd and insolent gaze.

Then he felt himself sinking, with one long shudder, into the depths of the triumphant flesh...

He fell upon the chalky cadaver, gripped by a savage thrill, mournful, painful, teeth clenched, wincing, shivering in his horrible fever...

Once taken, he no longer felt her coolness, but only the spasms of ultimate voluptuousness.

With all his strength, he clasped her, clutched her to him again and again; she felt alive, burning, crazy under his caresses, and he clung to her palpitating flesh, lascivious and soft in its mellow heat of passionate love...

He let out a furious rale of voluptuosity, the cry of triumph, the grand hallelujah of all-powerful, all-conquering neurosis.

Enraged, the pure, savage male, he thrilled all the more as he felt her come alive, throbbing under his mad caresses.

He pressed her violently, until it hurt, his lips upon those of his phantom-lover, of the insensate decedent.

Once again, the same voluptuous shudder shot through the entire length of his body.

His head, with eyes enlarged by rejoicing, rested languidly, tenderly, upon the breast of the deceased.

And she, distant, inanimate, insensitive to the ardent caresses of this male who had possessed her in spite of death, remained always outstretched, face turned toward the ceiling drowned in vague shadows.

Her dead eyes remained shut, without joy and without pain, in this monstrous coitus; she recumbed more passively than any lover ever could, beneath the potent shudder of the living being.

At the pale rise of the fine spring morning, on her couch of blood and love, the departed and her lover lay peacefully, reposed in sleep: she, ever tranquil, already flown toward the shadowy unknown; he, destined to revolve a few more years within the impersonal turbillion of eternal Becoming...

Translator: Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Eva Svankmajerova, Golden-mouthed teachers, 1983

Read more about Eberhardt on LailaLalami.com.

My choice of images by Eva Svankmajerova to illustrate this post is pretty random, but I'm always looking for reasons to feature her nightmarish and beautiful work. They come from Anima Animus Animation, which you can read about at Giornale Nuovo.