Wherever my thought turned, it ran into rampart-like objects and inertias that brought me to my knees. Contemplating the infinite forms of matter, terrorized by their diversity, I twisted and turned for nights on end, distressed by the endless series of objects filing through my memory like an escalator with thousands upon thousands of unremitting steps.
To keep the flow of things and colors inundating my brain, I would picture the evolution of a single object or even no more than its contour, or, attempting to inventory the world, imagine a chain of all the shadows on earth, the strange, uncanny, gray realm that lies sleeping at the feet of life, a black man stretched veil-like over the earth, his spindly legs poured out like water and arms of dark iron, or wandering through the downcast branches of horizontal trees: The shadows of ships skimming the sea, shadows unstable and aqueous, brief intimations of sadness, here now, then gone, racing the foam.
The shadows of birds in flight, jet black, as if out of the depths of the earth and into a darkling aquarium.
And the lone shadow, lost somewhere in space, of our sphere of a planet.
At other times I thought of vertiginous mountain chasms, of caves and grottos, and of the warm, supple, ineffable cavern that is the cavern of sex. I had somehow managed to procure a small flashlight and, crazed with insomnia and the onslaught of objects filling the room, I would plunge under the covers and conduct an intimate, intricate, yet arbitrary study of the creases in the sheets and the miniature valleys they formed. Without a precise, demanding occupation of the sort I would never have been able to calm down. My father once came in at midnight and caught me poking my flashlight under the pillow. He took it away, but made no remonstration; indeed, he said not a word. I believe he found the discovery so aberrant that he lacked the vocabulary and moral category to apply to it.
Several years later I saw a picture of a wax casting of the inner ear in an anatomy book. Every canal, sinus, and cavity was filled in, forming a positive image. I cannot describe the impression that picture made on me. I all but fainted at the sight of it. In a flash I divined that the world could exist in a reality more real than ours, a positive cavern structure where everything hollow would be filled in and the prevailing reliefs hollowed out into identical spaces completely devoid of content like the strange, delicate fossils that reproduce the traces of a shell or leaf left over the ages to carve out the deep, fine imprint of its contours in stone. In such a world we humans would no longer be fleshy, gaudy excrescences full of complex, putrescible organs; we would be pure voids floating — like air bubbles in water — through the warm, soft matter of the universe.
It was in fact an intimate, painful sensation I had experienced many times over during adolescence when in the course of endless wanderings I would suddenly find myself terribly isolated. It was as if the people and houses around me had suddenly been glued into a thick, uniform paste in which I existed as a mere void moving hither and yon with no rhyme or reason.
Objects, on the whole, I perceived as backdrops. The notion of the world as stage accompanied me everywhere: life seemed to unfold in the midst of some sad, artificial performance. Indeed, the only way out of the tedious vision of a lackluster world was to see it as theater, bombastic and passé.
Within the framework of this grand theatrical scheme I was attracted by certain unusual genres because their artificiality seemed to enable the actors presenting them to comprehend the mystification of the world involved. They alone knew that in a world which is all theater, all backdrop, life must be portrayed in a false, ornamental fashion. I have in mind the cinema and the waxworks.
Oh, Cinema B, as long and dark as a sunken submarine. The main doors, which consisted of mirrors, reflected a section of the street and thus gave a free show before you even entered. They made an unusual screen in which the street appeared in a greenish, dreamlike light and vehicles and people wended their somnambulant way through its waters.
Inside it had the pungent, acidic heat of the public bath. The floor was cement. Every time the chairs moved, they creaked with sharp, desperate cries. In the cheap seats near the screen a group of pretzel vendors and assorted riffraff provided a running commentary on the film while cracking their sunflower seeds, and several dozen voices sounded out the title cards as if they were texts for an adult literacy class.
Just below the screen, there was an orchestra made up of a pianist, a violinist, and an old Jew sawing away at a bass. The old man was also charged with making sound effects at the appropriate moments. He would call out “cock-a-doodle-doo” when the rooster mascot of the film company flashed on the screen before the title, and once, during a picture about the life of Jesus, I recall his rapping the bow frenetically against the sound box of the double bass to imitate celestial thunder when the time came for the resurrection.
I experienced the action on the screen with great intensity, feeling I was an integral part of the drama, a veritable character. I was often so involved in a film that I thought I was actually strolling through the grounds of an estate or leaning on the balustrade of a terrace in Italy while Francesca Bertini paced up and down with great pathos, her hair streaming, her arms flapping like scarves in the wind. After all, there is no well-established difference between our actual person and the various inner personages we create for ourselves.
The room seemed to have returned from a voyage when the light came on between reels. There was something precarious, artificial in the air, something much more tenuous and ephemeral than the story on the screen. I would close my eyes and wait for the projector’s mechanical rattle to announce the continuation of the film, then open them and peer into the darkness at the people around me lit indirectly by the screen, pale and transfigured like a gallery of marble statues in a moonlit museum at midnight.
One day the cinema caught fire. The film tore and immediately went up in flames, which for several seconds raged on the screen like a filmed warning that the place was on fire as well as a logical continuation of the medium’s mission to give the news, which mission it was now carrying out to perfection by reporting the latest and most exciting event in town: its own combustion. Cries of ”Fire! Fire!” broke out all over the room like revolver shots. In no time there was such a racket that the audience, until then seated quietly in the dark, seemed to have been storing up great wailing and ululation, like batteries, silent and inoffensive unless suddenly overcharged and then explosive.
Within minutes — and before half the cinema had been evacuated — the “fire” had been put out, yet the audience went on howling, as if compelled to exhaust the energy released. A young woman, her face powdered to a gypsum white, was screaming shrilly while looking me straight in the eye and not making a move in the direction of the door. A muscular pretzel vendor, convinced of the value of his strength in such situations but not knowing what to do with it, grabbed one chair after another and flung them at the screen. Suddenly a great crash rang out: a chair had hit the old man’s double bass. One never knew what one would see at the cinema.