“He stole my face; he stole my face.”
“Which one?” she asked with a condescending indulgence that she had prepared to express with a still-smooth gesture when she was suddenly wracked as if by stifled anger, in which the lithe movement snapped. “Which one?” she repeated, having caught hold of the table’s edge, so as to overcome not yet so much her anger as the buoyancy of her rebellious pain. “Which one?” she said for the third time, in a tone whose sloppy, conversational superficiality struck an incredible contrast with its unchecked revolt.
“What, don’t you recognize Giggles?” she continued, laughing as if at a sly joke, but so excessively that I started to catch on to her intent, and in no time I had also actually discovered that this was her attempt to turn my attention away from the empty and, as it were, crumpled spot that was the only thing that testified to what had only just recently been the presence of him who had appropriated my face (and who knows if that’s all). I won’t soon forget her ever-so-splenetic aspect when she ascertained that her gambit had failed; but it was merely a fraction of a second. Like a person who, in the midst of a momentous operation that has been entrusted to him, has let it be known that he’s overheard the flippant rogue, and now regrets it, so too did she shout down her own disgruntlement, and in fact, when she stretched her arms as if to part a curtain that didn’t happen to be there, she allowed herself to depend on the slightly naïve pomp with which she announced her having come to do what she was just now performing. Having thus parted the imaginary curtain, she stepped back as though not to be in the way, and with the admirably fake gesture of criers at the town fair she called upon me to watch.
“You must pay close attention,” I hear just then in a voice that rings a bell somehow, yet is not the voice of this one here, but rather somewhat shaky, sing-song, slightly protracted; a voice that extends no further than absolutely necessary for it to have somewhere to go, with a multitude of fioritura as lightweight as washed watercolor; the kind of voice ground out from a thick shell of time; but again, a voice now refined and domesticated. And I see that it had in fact issued from the woman who had parted the curtain, but who had gone from being the Giggles “from over hill and dale” to Giggles the ur-familiar — intrepidly timid, in the wondrous démarche of her queen, Puppenfee — the trusting Giggles from the tavern up on Rue Lamarck.
“You must pay close attention,” she says after her usual fashion, that is, playfully threatening with her forefinger and hunching over slightly, “because Mutig hasn’t shown you everything.”
“Mutig. .”
“Yes, up on the hill, in the blackamoor’s chest. Mutig is magnanimous, the only one he snitched on was himself. Nothing about anyone else. Look. . do you see?” she cried, pointing with the little finger, which had gone from playfully threatening to autocratically menacing.
And I, perhaps knowing that what I was watching was again just my own apartment, and seeing nothing there besides familiar objects, was nonetheless as though plucked out, as though in spite of everything, and the blinking flaxen light of the wiry nativity scene started up, just as it had up there in the blackamoor’s chest, and just then Giggles was entering, the Giggles of the other evening, an evening already settling down nicely, it leaped fretfully into the luminous rectangle of the door, upon which Giggles was sort of caught. But having leaped for it, it realized its mistake and reeled back, for it had burnt itself on Giggles’s pain, which was so great that it emanated from her soul, creating a bright aura. Like in the monument to Marshal Ney — yes, like in the monument to Marshal Ney — of which it is said that the hand gripping the saber captures the entire action of unsheathing, so too did Giggles’s drooping hand, holding a hat, encompass the action of destruction, and thus in seeing Giggles I was also seeing how — a minute before — she was rushing to my stairs and snatching off that hat. And this, the caught-up-with past of a grotesque drama on a spiral staircase and its still more grotesque shadow, which the gaslights passed from one floor to the next as crudely as a gang passes the hussy they’ve snagged, again contain all those crumpled, dust-covered, shabby, as any-old-as-to-be-unsellable little tragediennes from the blackamoor’s chest, those unmoving, prolonged-unto-jaw-dropping-tedium tragedies, who, when they’d had enough, even treated the tragedian of this community theater like dirt for having taken them literally. Yes, Giggles plays welclass="underline" it’s to a tee, as it had been the other evening, when Mutig treated her like dirt; when, not knowing up from down, she made a break for me. Yes, so too had she entered, hat in hand and in the aura of the overflowing pain upon which the fretful evening, which had settled down and mistook it for light, had flung itself. Yes, so too had she left the door ajar behind her, so too had she fallen exhausted against the wall — oh, such a good imitation! — and it was in that same spinsterishly gaunt, unsightly grief that I twice heard that “je n’en puis plus, je n’en puis plus,” so too was my heart in my throat, so too did I now. .
. . so too did I now feel bad for thinking, Poor, poor Giggles, she’s standing there like a community theater actress playing Niobe, if only she had a real wall behind her instead of a screen; for being unable to rid myself of these slanderous thoughts, for being her admittedly woeful, yet powerless, yet tense viewer, so too did I now. .
No, so too nothing. There’s no point. This time the foul thought of mine did not arise, it did not arise with the squeamish gesture like unto the disgraced, that I not dare; and this time Giggles did not. .
“But Giggles, no,” I shout at the stage, “what’s gotten into you, have you forgotten your part? That’s not how it went. What are you pointing your finger at me for? And why out of the blue? And the velvet darkness all around you, where’s that from? And the way you’re looking at me? Stay there by the wall, don’t come any closer, drop the raised hand, Giggles, I don’t want. .”
“What’s your problem?” I hear right in front of me, “can’t you see past your nose? Wouldn’t you perhaps be afraid?”
The Giggles from Rue Lamarck was menacing the Giggles on the stage.
“I was scared, Giggles!”
“What about them?” and she pointed back with a bubbly cackle. “You have to forgive her, she’s forgotten her part. Anyway, I’ve just put her on notice. Now she knows.
“Now she knows,” she repeated, and she held out her arms as if closing a curtain, and again it was just the two of us (we were perhaps fewer than two), “now she knows that you double-crossed and deceived her then, like you killed her, and killed her horribly.
“That’s not allowed,” she threatened, and she coaxed me into the seat that stood right beside hers. “No cheating. No hope, either. That wasn’t nice, luring her to hope when you knew there was none. You’re older than she is, more experienced. You must have known there isn’t hope for everything. We unfortunates, sinners, we damned, you know, we’re so gullible, all it takes is for you to smile at us and we already believe someone’s shown us mercy. Providing us hope, that’s a trick, and there will be no trickery.
“Really, none,” she repeated with mock pleading. “Or perhaps you would deny having seen what I was all about when I came in — just now, back behind the curtain (she explained, pointing with her chin)? You didn’t?. . But you’ve been telling yourself in your head the whole time! ‘She looks so sinful you’d sit somewhere else. She looks like an outcast. She’s an outcast.’ But then how could it be any other way, I ask you; after all, didn’t I deify a human being — Mutig?