Adventures In Immediate Irreality (6 page)

One day I took the bull by the horns and went to the public library. Standing on a
chair in the back of the room, a tall, pale man wearing spectacles that seemed to
tremble ever so slightly saw me coming. There was no turning back, nothing left but
to proceed to the table and pronounce the sensational word clearly and
distinctly—Frid-da—thereby confessing to the myopic gentleman all my
secret vices. But by the time I reached him I could muster no more than a mumble.
The librarian’s spectacles started trembling more noticeably, and he closed his eyes
the better to search his memory. Then he told me he had “never heard of it.” To my
mind, however, the trembling spectacles betrayed a certain inner turmoil, and I was
now certain that
Frida
contained mysterious and sensational
revelations.

Many years later I ran across it again on a bookshop shelf. It was not the black
cloth edition I had seen; it had a humble, dreary paper binding and yellow covers.
My first impulse was to buy it, but I changed my mind and placed it back on the
shelf: I wanted to keep its image intact, the image of a small black book with a
whiff of the authentic perfume of my youth.

Chapter Four

In small insignificant objects—a black feather, a
banal little book, an old snapshot of frail, long-forgotten figures with the
suffering that comes of serious internal ailments written all over them, a dainty
ashtray made of green porcelain in the form of an oak leaf and forever smelling of
dead ashes—in the plain, simple memory of old man Samuel Weber’s thick spectacles,
in such domestic gewgaws and trifles I find the melancholy of my childhood and the
nostalgia of the futility of a world that engulfed me like a sea with petrified
waves. Brute matter—in the deep, heavy masses of earth, stone, sky, or water,
or in its least understood forms: mirrors, paper flowers, painted statues, glass
marbles with their enigmatic internal spirals—has always kept me a prisoner
bumping painfully against its walls, yet spurred me on to share in the strange and
senseless adventure of being human.

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.

In summer I would go to the matinée and emerge only at
nightfall: 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.