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.