Adventures In Immediate Irreality (7 page)

All imitations make an analogous impression on me. Artificial flowers, for instance,
and funeral wreaths, particularly funeral wreaths, dusty and forgotten in cemetery
chapels, enveloping anonymous old names with outdated delicacy in their oval glass
cases, enmeshed in an eternity with no resonance. Or the pictures children cut out
and play with or the cheap statuettes sold at fairs. In time the latter lose a head
or hand and their owner repairs them by surrounding the neck with scrofulous blobs
of plaster. The bronze of the statue thus acquires the significance of a tragic but
noble suffering. Or the life-size Jesus in Catholic churches, the stained-glass
windows suffusing the altar with the dying rays of a red sunset, the late-in-the-day
lilies exhaling the plenitude of their heavy, lugubrious perfume at Christ’s feet.
In this atmosphere of ethereal blood and odoriferous swooning a pale young man draws
the final chords of a desperate melody from the organ. And all this has emigrated to
life from the wax museum. In the waxworks one can see at any fair I find the
repository of all the nostalgia in the world that, brought together, constitutes its
very essence.

I have only one supreme desire left in life: to watch a waxworks on fire, to observe
the slow, scabrous melting of the wax bodies, to look on, rooted to the spot, while
the beautiful yellow legs of the bride in the glass case begin to twist and turn, a
very real flame making its way up between them to her sex.

Chapter Five

The August fair offered me many ups and downs in addition
to the waxworks. It was a prodigious performance, a swelling symphony from the
prelude of individual booths that came early and set the general tone—like a
series of long notes at the beginning of a piece announcing the theme of the
composition as a whole—to the grandiose finale, all blasts, blares, and fanfares
followed by the immense silence of the abandoned site.

The few early wax-figure booths contained the whole of the fair in a nutshell; they
represented it to a T. The instant the first of them was set up, all the color, the
glitter, the carbide aroma spread through the town. And suddenly a clicking noise
rang out. It was neither the grate of sheet metal nor the far-off jangle of a bunch
of keys nor the rasp of a motor; it was the click—easily discernable amidst the
myriad everyday sounds—of the wheel of fortune. Toward evening the darkening
boulevard would come alive with a diadem of colored lights, the first constellation
to appear, the constellation of the earth. Others soon followed, turning the
boulevard into a glittering corridor that I walked along, dazzled, like a boy of my
age I had once seen in an illustrated edition of a Jules Verne novel, glued to the
porthole of a submarine, peering through the ocean’s murky depths at its marvelous,
mysterious phosphorescent spectacle.

Within a day or two the rest of the fair would be up, the semi-circle of booths
having been laid out, put together, and given final shape. It was divided into
well-established zones of sun and shade—the same year in and year out. First came
a row of restaurants with dozens of strings of colored lights, then the sideshows,
their façades bathed in light, and finally the dark, humble photography booths. The
crowds, making the rounds, would pass from zone to zone, bright lights to darkness,
like the moon in my geography book, which alternated between white and black
typographical regions.

We spent most of our time in the small, poorly lit, occasionally
even roofless sideshow booths, where my father could negotiate a reduced rate for
our large family with the barker. There every exhibit looked improvised and unsure
of itself. The night wind would blow cold over the heads of the audience, and we
could see the stars twinkling in the sky. Lost in the chaos of the night, we had
wandered into a sideshow on this tiny point of the planet, and on this tiny point of
the planet men and dogs were performing on stage, the men tossing various objects
into the air and catching them, the dogs jumping through hoops and walking on two
legs. And where was it all taking place? The sky above seemed vaster still . . .

Once, in one of these miserable booths, a performer offered a prize of five thousand
lei to anyone who could do the sensational yet perfectly simple stunt he was about
to demonstrate. There were only several people in the audience. A heavy-set man,
whose reputation as a miser in trade was peerless, moved several seats closer to the
stage: intrigued by the unprecedented possibility of earning so enormous a sum of
money in a simple sideshow, he was determined to follow the performer’s slightest
movement with the greatest of attention, the better to imitate him and win the
prize.

After several moments of anxious silence the performer went up to
the edge of the stage and said in a hoarse voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, the trick
is to exhale the smoke of a cigarette through the neck.” He lit a cigarette, took
his hand down from his collar, where it had been until then, and released a fine
stream of bluish smoke through an orifice in an artificial larynx, clearly the
result of an operation. The man in the front row was taken aback: he blushed to the
ears and, returning to his former seat, mumbled, loud enough for people to hear, “Of
course if you’ve got a gadget like that, it’s no trick at all.”

Unfazed, the performer responded from the stage. “What do you mean? Just do as I
did.” Perhaps he really would have given a prize to a fellow sufferer. In booths
like these, pale, withered old men swallowed soap and stones, young girls contorted
their bodies, anemic, hollow-cheeked children left off chewing corn kernels to mount
the stage and dance to the jangle of the bells on folk costumes—and all to earn
their keep.

After the midday meal, when the sun burned like blazes, a feeling of utter desolation
came over the fairgrounds: little wooden ponies standing inert, their bulging eyes
and copper manes exuding the dire melancholy of a petrified life, the hot odor of
food wafting over from the booths, and a lone hurdy-gurdy in the distance doggedly
churning out its asthmatic waltz, an occasional fluty metallic tone gushing out of
the chaos like a thin, lofty
jet d’eau
from a fountain.

I spent many happy hours outside the photographers’ booths, contemplating strangers,
alone or in groups, standing motionless and smiling against gray landscapes of
waterfalls and far-off mountains. The common backdrop made them all look like
members of a single family who had gathered at a picturesque spot to have their
pictures taken. Once I found my own picture outside such a booth. The sudden
encounter with myself forced into a static pose at one edge of the fair depressed me
no end. Before ending up in our town, it had surely made the rounds of places
unknown to me. For a moment I had the feeling of existing only in the
photograph.

I experienced this sort of mental shift often and in the most varied circumstances.
It would sneak up on me and make an abrupt turnabout in my inner state. I would,
say, happen upon an accident and stand about gawking for a time like the rest of the
spectators when all at once my perspective would change—it was like a game I used
to play: I would make out a strange animal in the paint on my wall and then one day
I was unable to find it, its place having been taken by a statue or a woman or a
landscape composed of the same decorative elements—and although everything about
the accident remained the same, I suddenly saw the people and objects around me from
the point of view of the victim, as if I were the one lying there, viewing the whole
thing up from below and out from the center and feeling the blood pouring down my
body.

And just as at the cinema—without any effort on my part, as a mere corollary to the
fact that I was watching a film—I would imagine myself intimately involved in the
action on the screen, so when outside a photographer’s booth I would see myself
instead of the person in the print staring down at me. I would suddenly find my own
life, the life of the person standing in flesh and blood outside the display case,
indifferent and insignificant, just as the living person inside the display case
regarded the travels of his photographic self from town to unknown town as absurd.
And just as my picture traveled from place to place contemplating new vistas through
the dirty, dust-laden glass, so I myself went from one place to the next, constantly
seeing new things, yet never understanding them. The fact that I could move, that I
was alive, was merely a matter of chance, a senseless adventure, because just as I
existed inside the display case I could exist outside it and with the same pale
cheeks, the same eyes, the same lackluster hair that made such a sketchy, bizarre,
unfathomable image in the mirror.

I thus received a number of signs from without aimed at immobilizing me and cutting
me off from everyday understanding. I was dumbfounded by them, pulled up short: they
encapsulated the vanity of the world. Whenever one came, I sensed chaos all around
me. It was like listening to a brass band with your hands over your ears: when you
opened your fingers for a second, what had been music became pure noise.

I would spend days wandering about the fairgrounds and adjacent fields where the
freaks and performers from the booths gathered around a pot of porridge, dirty and
unkempt, having descended from their exotic sets and shed their nocturnal acrobatic
existence of bodiless women and sirens for the common mush, the incurable misery of
their humanity. What in front of the booths seemed admirable, jaunty, even pompous,
here behind them, in the light of day, retreated into a petty laxity devoid of
interest, the laxity of the world as a whole.

One day I attended the funeral of the child of one of the itinerant photographers.
The door of the booth was ajar to reveal an open coffin resting on two chairs before
the cloth backdrop. The backdrop showed a magnificent park with an Italian-style
terrace and marble columns. In this dreamlike setting the tiny corpse, dressed in
Sunday suit with silver-threaded button holes, hands folded over chest, seemed
submerged in ineffable bliss. The child’s parents and assorted women surrounded the
coffin weeping disconsolately, while the circus band, lent free of charge by the
ringmaster, played the serenade from “Intermezzo,” the saddest piece in its
repertory. During moments such as these—in the intimacy of the profound peace, in
the infinite silence of the plane trees—the corpse was doubtless happy and serene.
Before long, however, it was snatched from the solemnity in which it lay and loaded
onto a cart to be taken to the cemetery and the cold, wet grave that was its
destiny. Thereafter the park was all desolation and void.

At fairs, therefore, even death took on sham, nostalgic-ridden backdrops, as if the
fair were a world of its own, its purpose being to illustrate the boundless
melancholy of artificial ornamentation from the beginning of a life to its end as
exemplified by the pallid lives lived in the waxworks’ sifted light or in the
otherworldly beauty of the photographer’s infinite panoramas. Thus for me the fair
was a desert island awash in sad haloes similar to the nebulous yet limpid world
into which my childhood crises plunged me.

Chapter Six

The upper story of the Weber house, which I often visited
after Etla Weber died of old age, was like nothing so much as a genuine waxworks.
All afternoon its rooms were bathed in sun, and dust and heat floated along windows
full of antiquated junk that had been tossed onto shelves at random. The beds had
been moved to the ground floor, leaving the bedrooms empty. Samuel Weber (Mercantile
Agency) together with his two sons, Paul and Ozy, had moved downstairs as well.

The front room, however, was still occupied by the office. It had a musty smell and
was crammed with ledgers and envelopes of grain samples. The walls were papered with
out-of-date fly-spotted posters, several of which, having held on for years, formed
an integral part of family life.

One, an advertisement for mineral water hanging above the safe, showed a tall, svelte
woman in diaphanous veils pouring the curative elixir over the ailing creatures at
her feet. Ozy Weber, he of the flute-like arms and the turkey-breastbone of a hump
emerging from his clothes, must have drunk from this miraculous spring in the deep
dark hours of night.

Another was a poster for a shipping establishment, and its steamer, plying the whorly
waves, rounded off the image of Samuel Weber by supplying the third maritime element
to his captain’s hat and thick-lensed spectacles. When old salt Samuel closed a
ledger, placed it under the press, and twisted the iron bar, he really did seem to
be piloting a ship through unknown waters, and the pink cotton he stuffed into his
ears, its long strands dangling, seemed a clever hedge against the ocean
currents.

Ozy, ensconced in an armchair in the room next door, read popular novels, holding the
volume high enough to catch the feeble light making its way in from the street. The
screen of an enormous pewter spittoon in the shape of a cat stood gleaming in a dark
corner, and the mirror on the wall reflected an eerie grayish square, a ghost-like
reminder of the day outside.

I went to see Ozy much as dogs wander into courtyards: because the gate is open and
there is no one to chase them away. What took me there mostly was a peculiar game I
don’t know which of us invented or in what circumstances. It consisted in making up
dialogues and delivering them with the utmost gravity. We had to remain
straight-faced till the end, avoiding all indication that the things we were talking
about had no basis in reality. I would enter and Ozy—dry as dust, never taking his
eyes off his book—would say, “That pill I took last night to help me breathe has
given me a frightful cough. I tossed and turned until daybreak. Matilda came just
now at long last (there is no Matilda) and gave me a rubdown.”

The things Ozy came up with were so stupid, so absurd that they were like hard hammer
blows to the head. I should perhaps have left the room on the spot, but I couldn’t
help indulging in the pleasure, minor but voluptuous, of lowering myself to his
level, so I responded in the same terms, which was the secret of the game: “Well
now, I myself have caught a cold (it was July),” I said, “and Dr. Caramfil (who did
exist) has given me a prescription. A pity, though, that this morning—have you
heard?—he was arrested.”

Ozy would look up from his book. “You see? I told you he was involved in
counterfeiting. Has been for ages.”

“Of course he has. How else could he have afforded those music-hall floozies?”

But what I found in that banter was more than the slightly cloying pleasure of
plunging into mediocrity; it was a vague sense of freedom: I could, for instance,
vilify the doctor to my heart’s content even though I knew—he lived in the
neighborhood—that he went to bed every night at nine.

We would go on and on about anything and everything, mixing truth and fancy, until
the conversation took on a kind of airborne independence, fluttering about the room
like a curious bird, and had the bird actually put in an appearance we’d have
accepted it as easily as we accepted the fact that our words had nothing to do with
ourselves.

Back in the street, I would feel I had emerged from a deep sleep,
yet I still seemed to be dreaming. I was amazed to find people talking seriously to
one another. Didn’t they realize one could talk seriously about anything? Anything
and everything?

Sometimes Ozy did not feel like talking, and then he would take me upstairs to
rummage. During the few years since the space had been abandoned, old man Weber had
deposited anything he considered useless “up there,” with the result that it housed
the most varied and extraordinary objects. The rooms were suffused with the sun
blazing through the dusty, curtainless windows. As we walked along the old floor,
the glass windowpanes wobbled a bit in their frames like loose teeth. A bead
portière served as a door between the rooms.

I would come downstairs slightly woozy from the heat of the day and muddled by the
utter desolation of the rooms. It was as if I lived in a world well known to
everyone but me. My body always felt detached, but the feeling intensified when I
came into contact with those two rooms separated by the bead portière.

Our favorite pastime was searching through drawers for old
correspondence and peeling the stamps off the envelopes. Together with the cloud of
dust rising from the bundles of letters came the scamper of tiny insects racing for
shelter. Every once in a while a letter fell out of its cover and opened to reveal a
masterful, old-fashioned hand in faded ink. There was always something sad and
resigned about those letters, a kind of tired end to the period that had passed
since they were written, a peaceful eternal sleep of the funeral-wreath variety.

We would also find outdated photographs—ladies dressed in crinolines or gentlemen
lost in contemplation, a finger on the forehead, an anemic smile on the lips.
Beneath each photograph were two angels carrying a basket of fruit and flowers and
then the word
Greetings
or
Souvenir
. Like the pictures and objects
we saw in shop windows—a pink fruit bowl with a fluted rim, velvet reticules empty
but for their moth-eaten silk linings, plus any number of items with anonymous
monographs—they exuded an air of perfect harmony, of a life all their own. The
life they represented, when the people in the pictures were living, moving beings,
was life on a smaller scale, in a space more constrained. It was like a scene viewed
through the wrong side of a binocular, perfect in every detail but tiny and far
off.

When, as evening fell, we made our way downstairs, we often met Paul Weber on his way
up: his wardrobe was in one of the upstairs rooms and he was going up to change.
Paul was a red-faced lad with large hands and disheveled hair. He had large, thick
lips and the nose of a clown, but his eyes betrayed an indescribably serene and
tranquil purity that made everything he did seem distant and impassive.

I loved him dearly, though in secret, and my heart would pound whenever I met him on
the stairs. I liked the simplicity with which he spoke to me, smiling all the while,
as if whatever words we might exchange had an esoteric, ephemeral meaning behind
them. He retained his smile even in the most serious of conversations, even when
talking business with old man Weber.

I also loved him for the secret life he led outside the rounds of daily life, a life
whose echoes came to me only as the scandalized whispers of grownups: Paul spent all
the money he earned at the music hall, on women. There was something incurably
fatalistic about his debauchery. Old man Weber was powerless to oppose it. At one
point the whole town was buzzing about his having unharnessed the horses from the
hackneys in the main square and taken them to the music-hall, where with the help of
the town’s most eminent drunkards he had improvised a kind of circus. Then there was
the rumor about his bathing in champagne with a woman. And that was only scratching
the surface.

I found it impossible to define my feelings for Paul. All around me I saw people
wasting their lives in tedious pursuits—young girls in the park grinning inanely;
businessmen casting wily, self-important glances; my father hamming up his role as
father; beggars, half-dead with fatigue, sleeping in filthy nooks and crannies —
merging one and all in their banality. It was as if the world as definitively
constituted had lain waiting inside me forever and all I did from day to day was to
verify its obsolete contents. Only Paul stood outside it all in a life so
tightly-knit as to be absolutely inaccessible to my understanding. I would preserve
every movement he made, every gesture, not so much to fix them in my memory as to
grant them a double existence. I would force myself to walk the way he did, study
the way he used his hands and rehearse the pattern in front of the mirror until I
could reproduce it precisely.

Paul was the most sophisticated, most enigmatic figure in the Webers’ upstairs
gallery waxworks, which till then had consisted of ship’s captain Samuel Weber and
the delicate, sickly infant Ozy in addition to himself. And then he brought in the
woman it had lacked: with her pale face and mechanical gait she made the waxworks
complete.