Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (4 page)

The committee members had stopped at the gun’s report. Jarry held up his finger to the nearest waiter. “Check, please!” he said.

He left the hall out the front door as the reporter, swearing great oaths of vengeance and destruction, was carried back into the kitchen for butter to be applied to his burns.

Jarry felt a hand on his shoulder, swung his arm up, came around with the Colt out again. It was the man who had stood him on the chair.

“You talk with the accent of Laval,” said the man.

“Bred, born, raised, and bored
merdeless
there,” said Jarry.

“I, too,” said the man.

“We find Laval an excellent place to be
from
, if you get our royal meaning,” said Jarry.

“Mr. Henri-Jules Rousseau,” said the man.

“Mr. Alfred-Henri Jarry.” They shook hands.

“I paint,” said Rousseau.

“We set people’s hair afire,” said Jarry.

“You must look me up; my studio is on the Boulevard du Port-Royal.”

“We will be happy if a fellow Lavalese accompanies us immediately to drink, do drugs, visit the brothels, and become fast friends for life.”

“Are you kidding?” said Rousseau. “They’re getting ready to serve the cabbage back in there. Do look me up, though,” he said, heading back in toward the banquet hall and putting his napkin back under his chin.

“We shall,” said Jarry, and mounted his high-wheeler and was gone into the darkness.

VI. News from All Over

January 14, 1895
Le Cycliste Français

TRAITOR ON THE GENERAL STAFF!

ARREST AND TRIAL OF THE JEW CAPTAIN DREYFUS

DEGRADATION AND STRIPPING OF RANK

DEPORTATION TO GUIANA FOR LIFE

“S
ECRETS VITAL TO THE NATION,”
says a General, “from which our Enemy will profit and France never recover. It is only the new lenient Jew-inspired law which kept the Tribunal from sentencing the human rat to Death!”

VII. Like the Spokes of a Luminous Wheel

T
HE REPORTER NORPOIS RODE A CROCODILE VELOCIPEDE
of singular aspect. Its frame was low and elongated. The seat was at the absolute center of the bicycle’s length, making it appear as if its rider were disincorporated.

Though extremely modern in that respect, its wheels were anachronisms, heavily spoked and rimmed to the uncaring eye. On a close examination it was revealed the spokes were ironwork, eight to each wheel, and over them were wrought two overlapping semicircles, one of a happy, the other of a sad, aspect of the human face.

In unison, front and back, the wheels first smiled, then frowned at the world around them as they whirled their rider along the newly macadamized roads and streets.

In his sporty cap and black knickers, Norpois seemed almost to lean between the wheels of strife and fortune. Other bicyclists paused to watch him go spoking silently by, with an almost inaudible whisper of iron rim on asphalt. The crocodile frame seemed far too graceful and quiet for the heavy wheels on which it rode.

Norpois worked for
Le Cycliste Français
. His assignments took him to many
arrondissements
and the outlying parts of the city.

He was returning from interviewing a retired general before sunset one evening, when, preparatory to stopping to light his carbide handlebar-lamp, he felt a tickle of heat at his face, then a dull throbbing at his right temple. To his left, the coming sunset seemed preternaturally bright, and he turned his head to look at it.

His next conscious thought was of picking himself and his velocipede up from the side of the road where he had evidently fallen. He noticed he was several dozen meters down the road from where he had turned to look at the sunset. His heart hammered in his chest. The knees of his knickers were dusty, his left hand was scraped, with two small pieces of gravel embedded in the skin, and he had bitten his lip, which was beginning to swell. He absently dug the gravel from his hand. He had no time for small aches and pains. He had to talk to someone.

* * *

“Jules,” he said to the reporter who shared the three-room apartment with him. As he spoke he filled a large glass with half a bottle of cognac and began sipping at it between his sentences. “I must tell you what life will be like in twenty years.”

“You, Robida, and every other frustrated engineer,” said Jules, putting down his evening paper.

“Tonight I have had an authentic vision of the next century. It came to me not at first as a visual illusion, a pattern on my eyes, some ecstatic vision. It came to me first through my nose, Jules. An overpowering, oppressive odor. Do you know what the coming years smell like, Jules? They smell of burning flesh. It was the first thing to come to me, and the last to leave. Think of the worst fire you ever covered. Remember the charred bodies, the popped bones? Multiply it by a city, a nation, a hemisphere! It was like that.

“The smell came; then I saw in the reddened clouds a line of ditches, miles, kilometers upon thousands of kilometers of ditches in churned earth, men like troglodytes killing each other as far as the eye could see, smoke everywhere, the sky raining death, the sky filled with aerial machines dropping explosives; detonations coming and going like giant brown trees which sprout, leaf, and die in an instant. Death everywhere, from the air, from guns, shells falling on all beneath them, the aerial machines pausing in their rain of death below only to shoot each other down. Patterns above the ditches, like vines, curling vines covered with thorns—over all a pattern formed on my retina—always the incessant chatter of machinery, screams, fire, death-agonies, men stomping each other in mud and earth. I could see it all, hear it all, above all else, smell it all, Jules, and . . .”

“Yes?”

“Jules, it was the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced.” He stared at his roommate.

“There’s some cold mutton on the table,” said Jules. “And half a bottle of beer. He looked back down at his paper. After a few minutes he looked up. Norpois stood, looking out the window at the last glow of twilight, still smiling.

VIII. One Ordinary Day, with Anarchists

A
LFRED JARRY SAILED ALONG THE BOULEVARD,
passing people and other cyclists right and left. Two and a half meters up, he bent over his handlebars, his cap at a rakish angle, his hair a black flame behind his head. He was the very essence of speed and grace, no longer a dwarfish man of slight build. A novice rider on a safety bicycle took a spill ahead of him. Jarry used his spoon-brake to stop a few centimeters short of the wide-eyed man who feared broken ribs, death, a mangled vehicle.

Then Jarry jumped up and down on his seat, his feet on the locked pedals, jerking the ordinary in small jumps a meter to the left until his path was clear; then he was gone down the road as if nothing had happened.

Riders who drew even with him dropped back—Jarry had a carbine slung across his back, carried bandoliers of cartridges for it on his chest, had two Colt pistols sticking from the waistband of his pants, the legs of which were tucked into his socks, knicker-fashion. Jarry was fond of saying firearms, openly displayed, were signs of peaceableness and good intentions, and wholly legal. He turned down a side street and did not hear the noise from the Chamber of Deputies.

* * *

A man named Vaillant, out of work, with a wife and children, at the end of his tether, had gone to the Chamber carrying with him a huge sandwich made from a whole loaf of bread. He sat quietly watching a debate on taxes, opened the sandwich to reveal a device made of five sticks of the new dynamite, a fuse and blasting cap, covered with one and a half kilos of #4 nails. He lit it in one smooth motion, jumped to the edge of the gallery balcony and tossed it high into the air.

It arced, stopped, and fell directly toward the center of the Chamber. Some heard the commotion, some saw it; Dreyfussards sensed it and ducked.

It exploded six meters in the air.

Three people were killed, forty-seven injured badly, more than seventy less so. Desks were demolished; the speaker’s rostrum was turned to wood lace.

Vaillant was grabbed by alert security guards.

The first thing that happened, while people moaned and crawled out from under their splintered desks, was that the eight elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the Anarchist ticket, some of them having to pull nails from their hands and cheeks to do so, stood and began to applaud loudly. “Bravo!” they yelled, “Bravo! Encore!”

IX. The Kid from Spain

H
IS NAME WAS PABLO,
and he was a big-nosed, big-eyed Spanish kid who had first come to Paris with his mother two years before at the age of thirteen; now he was back on his own as an art student.

On this trip, the first thing he learned to do was fuck; the second was to learn to paint.

One day a neighbor pointed out to him the figure of Jarry tearing down the street. Pablo thought the tiny man on the huge bicycle, covered with guns and bullets, was the most romantic thing he had ever seen in his life. Pablo immediately went out and bought a pistol, a .22 single-shot, and took to wearing it in his belt.

He was sketching the River one morning when the shadow of a huge wheel fell on the ground beside him. Pablo looked up. It was Jarry, studying the sketch over his shoulder.

Pablo didn’t know what to do or say, so he took out his gun and showed it to Jarry.

Jarry looked embarrassed. “We are touched,” he said, laying his hand on Pablo’s shoulder. “Take one of ours,” he said, handing him a .38 Webley. Then he was up on his ordinary and gone.

Pablo did not remember anything until it was getting dark and he was standing on a street, sketchbook in one hand, pistol still held by the barrel in the other. He must have walked the streets all day that way, a seeming madman.

He was outside a brothel. He checked his pockets for money, smiled, and went in.

X. More Beans, Please

“G
EORGES MÉLIÈS,” SAID ROUSSEAU
, “Alfred Jarry.”

“Pleased.”

“We are honored.”

“Erik Satie,” said Méliès, “Henri Rousseau.”

“Charmed.”

“At last!”

“This is Pablo,” said Satie. “Marcel Proust.”

“’Lo.”

“Delighted.”

“Gentlemen,” said Rousseau, “Mme. Méliès.”

“Dinner is served,” she said.

* * *

“But of course,” said Marcel, “
Everyone
knows evidence was introduced in secret at the first trial, evidence the defense was not allowed to see.”

“Ah, but that’s the military mind for you!” said Rousseau. “It was the same when I played piccolo for my country between 1864 and 1871. What matters is not the evidence, but that the charge has been brought against you in the first place. It proves you guilty.”

“Out of my complete way of thinking,” said Satie, taking another helping of calamari in aspic, “having been unfortunate enough to be a civilian all my life. . . .”

“Hear, hear!” they all said.

“ . . . but is it not true that they asked him to copy the
bordereau
, the list found in the trash at the German Embassy and introduced
that
at the court-martial, rather than the original outline of our defenses?”

“More beans, please,” said Pablo.

“That is one theory,” said Marcel. “The list, of course, leaves off halfway down, because Dreyfus realized what was going to happen as they were questioning him back in December of ’94.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Rousseau. “There are too many theories, and of course, none of this will be introduced at the Court of Cassation next month. Nothing but the original evidence, and of course, the allegations brought up by Colonel Picquart, whose own trial for insubordination is scheduled month after next.”

Méliès sighed. “The problem, of course, is that we shall suffer one trial after another; the generals are all covering ass now. First they convict an innocent man on fabricated evidence. Finding the spying has not stopped with the wrongful imprisonment of Dreyfus, they listen to Colonel Picquart, no friend of anyone, who tells them it’s the Alsatian Esterhazy, but Esterhazy’s under the protection of someone in the War Ministry, so they send Picquart off to Fort Zinderneuf, hoping he will be killed by the Rifs; when he returns covered with scars and medals, they throw him in jail on trumped-up charges of daring to question the findings of the court-martial. Meanwhile the public outcry becomes so great that the only way things can be kept at status quo is to say questioning Dreyfus’ guilt is to question France itself. We can all hope, but of course, there can probably be only one verdict of the court of review.”

“More turkey, please,” said Pablo.

“The problem, of course,” said Satie, “is that France needs to be questioned if it breeds such monsters of arrogance and vanity.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Satie,” said Madame Méliès, speaking for the first time in an hour. “The problem, of course, is that Dreyfus is a Jew.”

She had said the thing none of the others had yet said, the thing at base, root, and crown of the Affair.

“And being so,” said Jarry, “we are sure, Madame, if through our actions this wronged man is freed, he will be so thankful as to allow Our Royal Person to put him upon the nearest cross, with three nails, for whatever period we deem appropriate.”

“Pass the wine, please,” said Pablo.

* * *

“It is a rough time for us,” said Jarry, “what with our play to go into production soon, but we shall give whatever service we can to this project.”

“Agreed by all, then!” said Méliès. “Star Films takes the unprecedented step of collaborating with others! I shall set aside an
entire week
, that of Tuesday next, for the production of
The Dreyfus Affair
. Bring your pens, your brushes, your ideas! Mr. Satie, our piano at Théâtre Robert-Houdin is at your disposal for practice and for the
première
; begin your plans now. And so, having decided the fate of France, let us visit the production facilities at the rear of the property, then return to the parlor for cigars and port!”