Franz ran his finger along the stone balustrade, heaping a little pile of dust. “That’s what happens to you when you’re locked up long enough. You grab everything that happens as an excuse for laughter. And usually nothing is very funny. It just happens to be unusual, to break the monotony.”
“There’s rather more than that to it,” said Javier. “Notice how furiously he laughs. Habitually he is sad, and now he laughs as if he wanted to destroy whatever is amusing him.”
“He knows the amusement won’t last long, that’s all,” you said, Dragoness. “Come on, let’s go, please.”
“Let’s go into the pyramid,” said Isabel, passing her hands through her silky long hair.
“Maybe madness is worse there,” you said.
The four of you walked slowly down.
“The lunatics in Charenton were put on show,” Javier said quietly. “They were paraded before the good citizens of Paris as a spectacle, and the good citizens went home again with quiet consciences. They could congratulate themselves that they weren’t like the patients.” He looked at you. “Every writer must be afraid that he is doing much the same thing. He displays the horror of life and character, only to have his banker-reader sigh and say, Thank God, I am not one of those monsters. The poor writer can well think that he is scandalizing the bourgeoisie, but he isn’t. What a laugh. Following L’âge d’Or, the bourgeoisie developed defenses. Do you think that Tennessee Williams shocks anyone? No, he just makes them feel comforted, like the lunatics of Charenton.”
From the plaza came music, dance tunes dedicated to the young ladies of the city.
“The ancient Germans,” Franz said, as though he had not heard Javier, “were permitted to kill their children if they were insane or deformed.”
* * *
Δ What didn’t occur to you, Dragoness, was that the asylum attendants were like priests. Priests have always watched over madmen, giving them versions of life and the world that they can comprehend, changing their hatred into love, finding peace for them, providing them with the exaltation and the calm that a lunatic needs to go on following his thread. The priest, the writer, the artist, the politician, everyone who supplies the world with images of itself, artificial, false images, interpretations, incantatorial psalms, all of them know that they are manipulating their lunatics. But the madmen, for example my friend Tristram Shandy, don’t even hear the rhetoric. They laugh at their mentors and at the same time gradually transform them into the lunatics of lunatics. Which doesn’t matter: the artful artificers go right on, don’t give up, the idiots. They refuse to recognize that what was reason has become insanity and they disguise it with eroticism or military glory or statism or our need for eternal salvation. The madmen cooperate willingly, for they know that by feeding the lunacy of those who attend them, they make it possible for their own lunacy to go unnoticed. And this is the point, Dragoness: the illusion of rationality must be preserved in order to preserve the illusion of life. Our hall of mirrors again. Baudelaire, hip as they come, decks the corpse out in the myth of Eros, while Nietzsche’s trolley bus parades as the power of Will. Withered old Marx is concealed behind the promise of a second terrestrial paradise (and hold up, comrades, our first paradise was one too many) and great Daddy Feodor Mihailovitch lurks under the advent of that Third Rome which somehow or other escaped Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Your countryman Walt Whitman provides us with his optimistic hope for a new, democratic, egalitarian world (We Shall Overcome and the walls will come tumblin’ down), while our vampire-friend Rimbaud assures us of the divinity of words alone. But look what we have come to. Candy, Lolita, torture, the crematorium, the Moscow trials, Trotsky’s assasination, the Bay of Pigs, police dogs loosed against the Negroes in Montgomery. Buy it and use it and look more beautiful than ever, my Pepsicoatl. That’s the trick of it, too. For you see, Elizabeth, in the age of Victoria and Porfirio, neither Prometheus nor Caesar nor Medea nor the Cid is two persons; even old Don Quixote, with his madness, ends up the poor, defeated shamed old man, Alonzo Quijano, never that other, his secret double. The Dane himself smelled rottenness but had to wait more years than are numbered in heaven, on earth, or in hell, nor dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy, simply to light the fuse of that old cracker Voltaire who believed that the unity of the religious world once smashed, an equally united lay world could be supported; and so off we go: virtue without witness and evil without witness are unthinkable, and when God ceased to be our spectator, we had to create another looker-on, our alter ego, Mr. Hyde, or William Wilson, our double. So we see that Blake was not bleary: Thou art a Man, God is no more; Thine own humanity learn to adore; and that Kleist was riding the wave when he stood up: Now stop beside me, God, for I am two: I am ghost and I walk through the night. And the hell of it is that this also became a vieux jeu when Pirandello and Brecht closed the circle. Drop dead, corpse; every character is another character, himself and his mask, himself and his counterpart, himself and his own looker-on, victim and executioner at once. And haven’t you read Swinburne, the consecrator of English vice? “The day’s spider kills the day’s fly, and calls it a crime? Nay, could we thwart nature, then might crime become possible and sin an actual thing. Could but a man do this; could he cross the courses of the stars, and put back the times of the sea; could he change the ways of the world and find out the house of life to destroy it; could he go into heaven to defile it and into hell to deliver it from subjection; could he draw down the sun to consume the earth, and bid the moon shed poison or fire upon the air; could he kill the fruit in the seed and corrode the child’s mouth with the mother’s milk; then had he sinned and done evil against nature. Nay, and not then: for nature would fain have it so, that she might create a world of new things; for she is weary of the ancient life: her eyes are sick of seeing and her ears are heavy with hearing; with the lust of creation she is burnt up, and rent in twain with travail until she bring forth change; she would fain create afresh, and cannot, except it be by destroying: in all her energies she is athirst for mortal food, and with all her forces she labours in desire of death. And what are the worst sins we can do — we who live for a day and die in a night?”
* * *
Δ You stood before the narrow entrance to the tunnel at the base of the pyramid. There were steel rails on which ran the little cars used to remove the excavated earth. Isabel gestured into the tunnel. “Shouldn’t we go in?”
“I’m tired,” Franz said.
“And I’d like to take a bath,” you said, Dragoness. “I wish we were already at the sea.” You walked toward the small store with an icebox beside its door and got a soft drink while Franz moved to the car, parked a little way from the pyramid. You drank your pop and Javier and Isabel opened drinks also. Franz, in the car, turned on the radio. He moved the knob all the way across the dial, quickly passing commercials, Afro-Cuban music, mariachis, the sound of surf, and stopped at a voice: “… performed by the Symphony Orchestra of Vienna, under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler…” He raised his hands, covered his eyes with his handkerchief, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He stuck his head out the window and called, “If you people plan on getting to Veracruz tonight…” He pressed the starter and nothing happened. Javier paid for your drinks and you walked toward the car. Franz was moving the gearshift lever back and forth.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “The gears don’t seem to work.”
Javier smiled.
Franz got out and went to the back of the car and opened the engine hood. He put his hands inside. Then he shrugged his shoulders and wiped his hands on his handkerchief.