At fairs, therefore, even death took on sham, nostalgic-ridden backdrops, as if the fair were a world of its own, its purpose being to illustrate the boundless melancholy of artificial ornamentation from the beginning of a life to its end as exemplified by the pallid lives lived in the waxworks’ sifted light or in the otherworldly beauty of the photographer’s infinite panoramas. Thus for me the fair was a desert island awash in sad haloes similar to the nebulous yet limpid world into which my childhood crises plunged me.
Chapter Six
The upper story of the Weber house, which I often visited after Etla Weber died of old age, was like nothing so much as a genuine waxworks. All afternoon its rooms were bathed in sun, and dust and heat floated along windows full of antiquated junk that had been tossed onto shelves at random. The beds had been moved to the ground floor, leaving the bedrooms empty. Samuel Weber (Mercantile Agency) together with his two sons, Paul and Ozy, had moved downstairs as well.
The front room, however, was still occupied by the office. It had a musty smell and was crammed with ledgers and envelopes of grain samples. The walls were papered with out-of-date fly-spotted posters, several of which, having held on for years, formed an integral part of family life.
One, an advertisement for mineral water hanging above the safe, showed a tall, svelte woman in diaphanous veils pouring the curative elixir over the ailing creatures at her feet. Ozy Weber, he of the flute-like arms and the turkey-breastbone of a hump emerging from his clothes, must have drunk from this miraculous spring in the deep dark hours of night.
Another was a poster for a shipping establishment, and its steamer, plying the whorly waves, rounded off the image of Samuel Weber by supplying the third maritime element to his captain’s hat and thick-lensed spectacles. When old salt Samuel closed a ledger, placed it under the press, and twisted the iron bar, he really did seem to be piloting a ship through unknown waters, and the pink cotton he stuffed into his ears, its long strands dangling, seemed a clever hedge against the ocean currents.
Ozy, ensconced in an armchair in the room next door, read popular novels, holding the volume high enough to catch the feeble light making its way in from the street. The screen of an enormous pewter spittoon in the shape of a cat stood gleaming in a dark corner, and the mirror on the wall reflected an eerie grayish square, a ghost-like reminder of the day outside.
I went to see Ozy much as dogs wander into courtyards: because the gate is open and there is no one to chase them away. What took me there mostly was a peculiar game I don’t know which of us invented or in what circumstances. It consisted in making up dialogues and delivering them with the utmost gravity. We had to remain straight-faced till the end, avoiding all indication that the things we were talking about had no basis in reality. I would enter and Ozy — dry as dust, never taking his eyes off his book — would say, “That pill I took last night to help me breathe has given me a frightful cough. I tossed and turned until daybreak. Matilda came just now at long last (there is no Matilda) and gave me a rubdown.”
The things Ozy came up with were so stupid, so absurd that they were like hard hammer blows to the head. I should perhaps have left the room on the spot, but I couldn’t help indulging in the pleasure, minor but voluptuous, of lowering myself to his level, so I responded in the same terms, which was the secret of the game: “Well now, I myself have caught a cold (it was July),” I said, “and Dr. Caramfil (who did exist) has given me a prescription. A pity, though, that this morning — have you heard? — he was arrested.”
Ozy would look up from his book. “You see? I told you he was involved in counterfeiting. Has been for ages.”
“Of course he has. How else could he have afforded those music-hall floozies?”
But what I found in that banter was more than the slightly cloying pleasure of plunging into mediocrity; it was a vague sense of freedom: I could, for instance, vilify the doctor to my heart’s content even though I knew — he lived in the neighborhood — that he went to bed every night at nine.
We would go on and on about anything and everything, mixing truth and fancy, until the conversation took on a kind of airborne independence, fluttering about the room like a curious bird, and had the bird actually put in an appearance we’d have accepted it as easily as we accepted the fact that our words had nothing to do with ourselves.
Back in the street, I would feel I had emerged from a deep sleep, yet I still seemed to be dreaming. I was amazed to find people talking seriously to one another. Didn’t they realize one could talk seriously about anything? Anything and everything?
Sometimes Ozy did not feel like talking, and then he would take me upstairs to rummage. During the few years since the space had been abandoned, old man Weber had deposited anything he considered useless “up there,” with the result that it housed the most varied and extraordinary objects. The rooms were suffused with the sun blazing through the dusty, curtainless windows. As we walked along the old floor, the glass windowpanes wobbled a bit in their frames like loose teeth. A bead portière served as a door between the rooms.
I would come downstairs slightly woozy from the heat of the day and muddled by the utter desolation of the rooms. It was as if I lived in a world well known to everyone but me. My body always felt detached, but the feeling intensified when I came into contact with those two rooms separated by the bead portière.
Our favorite pastime was searching through drawers for old correspondence and peeling the stamps off the envelopes. Together with the cloud of dust rising from the bundles of letters came the scamper of tiny insects racing for shelter. Every once in a while a letter fell out of its cover and opened to reveal a masterful, old-fashioned hand in faded ink. There was always something sad and resigned about those letters, a kind of tired end to the period that had passed since they were written, a peaceful eternal sleep of the funeral-wreath variety.
We would also find outdated photographs — ladies dressed in crinolines or gentlemen lost in contemplation, a finger on the forehead, an anemic smile on the lips. Beneath each photograph were two angels carrying a basket of fruit and flowers and then the word Greetings or Souvenir. Like the pictures and objects we saw in shop windows — a pink fruit bowl with a fluted rim, velvet reticules empty but for their moth-eaten silk linings, plus any number of items with anonymous monographs — they exuded an air of perfect harmony, of a life all their own. The life they represented, when the people in the pictures were living, moving beings, was life on a smaller scale, in a space more constrained. It was like a scene viewed through the wrong side of a binocular, perfect in every detail but tiny and far off.
When, as evening fell, we made our way downstairs, we often met Paul Weber on his way up: his wardrobe was in one of the upstairs rooms and he was going up to change. Paul was a red-faced lad with large hands and disheveled hair. He had large, thick lips and the nose of a clown, but his eyes betrayed an indescribably serene and tranquil purity that made everything he did seem distant and impassive.