In summer I would go to the matinée and emerge only at nightfalclass="underline" I was waiting for the light outside to change, for the day to end. I would thus ascertain that in my absence an important thing, an essential thing had taken place: the world had assumed the sad responsibility of carrying on — by growing dark, for example — its regular, intricate, theatrical obligations. Again I had to accept a certainty whose rigorous daily return made me infinitely melancholy. In a world subject to the most theatrical of effects, a world obliged every evening to produce an acceptable sunset, the poor creatures around me seemed pitiful in their determination to keep themselves busy and maintain their naive belief in what they did and felt.
There was only one person in our town who understood these things and for whom I felt admiration and respect: the town idiot. She alone among all the rigid townsfolk, their heads brimming with prejudices and conventions, she and she alone retained the freedom to shout and dance in public whenever she pleased. She would roam the streets in rags, filthy, gap-toothed, her red mop disheveled, maternally cradling an old box full of bread crusts and dustbin treasures. She would show her sex to passersby with a panache which, were the intention different, would have been called “a model of elegance and style.”
How wonderful, how sublime to be mad, I would tell myself, noting with profound regret how far the powerful, stupid conventions I had been brought up on and the oppressive, rational education I had been subjected to had removed me from the freedom of a madman’s existence. I believe that anyone who has failed to experience such a feeling will never know the world in all its glory.
My basic, elemental impression of the world as stage took on a frightening intensity whenever I entered a wax museum, but the fright was laced with a vague pleasure and to some extent with the strange sensation everyone experiences at one time or another — that of having lived in a certain setting before. Should I ever sense the impulse for a goal in life and should such an impulse require a link to something truly profound in me, something absolutely essential to my nature, I believe my body would have to become a statue in a waxworks and my life a simple and never-ending contemplation of its exhibits.
In the mournful light of the carbide lamps I felt I was truly living a life all my own in a manner unique and inimitable. All my daily activities could be shuffled like so many cards: I cared for none of them. Man’s lack of responsibility for even his most conscious acts was perfectly obvious to me. What did it matter that I or somebody else performed them given that the diversity of the world engulfed them in the same, uniform monotony.
In a waxworks — and only in a waxworks — there was no contradiction between what I did and what happened. Wax figures were the only authentic thing on earth: they alone flaunted the way they falsified life, and their strange, artificial immobility made them part of the true spirit of the world. The bullet-riddled, blood-stained uniform of a sad, sallow Austrian archduke was infinitely more tragic that any real death. A woman with a pale, yet luminescent face, lying in a glass box and sheathed in black lace, a striking red rose between her breasts, her blond wig coming undone at the forehead, the rouge in her nostrils aquiver, her glassy blue eyes staring motionlessly up at me — how could she fail to hide a deep and troubling, unfathomable message. The more I contemplated it the clearer its sense seemed to be, though it remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished to recall. All I could catch was a distant rhythm.
I have always had a weakness for female frills and cheap, artificial ornaments. A friend of mine used to collect all sorts of such trumpery and hide it away. He kept a strip of black silk fringed with fine lace and spangled with sequins. It had been obviously been torn off an old ball gown and had begun to mold in places. I would give him stamps and even money for a look at it, and he would take me into a small, old-fashioned sitting room when his parents were asleep and show it to me. There I stood, holding the piece of silk, speechless with wonder and bliss, my friend keeping watch at the door to make sure nobody saw me. After a few moments he would come in, take the silk, put it back in its box, and say to me, “That’s it. Enough. Over and done with,” the way Clara did when I dawdled in the back room.
Another object that disturbed me inordinately the first time I saw it was a gypsy ring. I thought it the most fantastic object a man could come up with to adorn the finger of his lady. The extraordinary embellishments used by birds, animals, or flowers for purposes of sexual attraction — the stylized and ultramodern tail of the bird of paradise, the ocellated feathers of the peacock, the hysterical lace of petunia petals, the unlikely blue of the simian pouch — are but pale attempts at sexual ornamentation compared with the stunning gypsy ring. It was made of marvelous tin — fine, grotesque, and hideous. Yes, hideous more than anything. It got at love in its deepest, darkest regions; it was a veritable scream of sex.
There can be no doubt that the artist who fashioned it was inspired by a waxworks vision. The stone, a piece of plain molten glass the size of a lentil, bore a close resemblance to the magnifying glasses used at fairs to enlarge miniature scenes of sunken ships, battles with the Turks, or assassinations of kings and queens. There was a bouquet of flowers carved in the tin setting and colored with all the garish hues of waxworks paintings — the violet of strangled cadavers alongside the pornographic red of women’s garters, the leaden pallor of wild waves in a macabre glow like the semi-darkness of a frost-covered cave — surrounded by small copper leaves and mysterious signs. It was a hallucination.
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.