At the same time it was a logical extension of the projector’s role of presenting “the news”. Its mission had thus, in an excess of perfectionism, led it to present the final and most exciting news item of all, that of its own incineration. Screams erupted from every side, and short cries of “Fire! Fire!” rapped out like revolver shots. In an instant so much noise gushed from the auditorium that it seemed the audience, up until then in silence and darkness, had been doing nothing more than cramming itself with screams and uproar, like calm and innocuous accumulators which explode once their charge capacity is violently exceeded.
In a matter of minutes and before half of the auditorium could be evacuated, the “fire” was put out. Nevertheless, the audience continued to scream, as if they had to exhaust a certain quantity of energy once it had been released. A young miss, her cheeks powdered like a plaster cast, was shrieking stridently, looking me straight in the eyes, without making any movement or taking a single step toward the exit. A brawny lout, confident of the usefulness of his strength in such cases, but nonetheless not knowing how exactly to apply it, was picking up the wooden chairs one by one and hurling them at the screen. All of a sudden a loud and very resonant boom was heard; one chair had landed on the old musician’s contrabass. The cinema was full of surprises.
*
In summer, we would go into the matinee early and leave in the evening, as night was falling. The light outside would be altered; the remnants of the day had been extinguished. It was thus I ascertained that in my absence there had occurred in the world an event immense and essential, its sad obligation of always having to continue – by means of nightfall, for example – its repetitive, diaphanous and spectacular labour. In this way we would enter once more into the midst of a certitude that in its daily rigorousness seemed to me of an endless melancholy. In such a world, subject to the most theatrical effects and obligated every evening to perform a proper sunset, the people around me appeared like poor creatures to be commiserated for the seriousness with which they always busied themselves, the seriousness with which they believed so naïvely in whatever they did or felt. There was but one creature in the town who understood these things and for whom I held a respectful admiration: it was the town’s madwoman. She alone in the midst of rigid people crammed to the very tops of their heads with prejudices and conventions, she alone preserved her liberty to shout and to dance on the street whenever she wished. She went in rags on the street, corroded by grime, gap-toothed, her red hair dishevelled, holding in her arms with maternal tenderness an old coffer full of crusts of bread and various objects picked from the garbage.
She would show her sex to passers-by with a gesture which, had it been used for any other purpose, would have been called “full of elegance and style”. “How splendid, how sublime it is to be mad!” I used to say to myself, and I realised with unimaginable regret how many powerful, familiar, stupid habits and what a crushing, rational education separated me from the extreme freedom of a madman’s life.
I think that whoever has not had this sensation is condemned never to feel the true breadth of the world.
*
The general and elementary impression of the theatrical turned into authentic terror as soon as I entered the wax museum with its mannequins. It was a fear mixed with a tinge of vague pleasure and somehow with that bizarre feeling we each sometimes have of previously living in a certain setting. I think that if the urge for an aim in life were ever to arise in me and if this impulse had to be bound to something that is indeed profound, essential and irremediable in me, then my body would have to become a mannequin in a wax museum and my life a simple and endless contemplation of the display cases of the dioramas.
In the gloomy light of the carbide lamps I used to feel that I did indeed live my own life in a unique and inimitable way. It was as if all my everyday actions had been shuffled like a deck of cards. I felt no attachment to them; people’s irresponsibility towards their most conscious acts was a fact whose obviousness was plain to see. What importance did it have whether it was I or another who committed them, as long as the variousness of the world enveloped them in the same uniform monotony? In the wax museum, and only there, no contradiction existed between what I did and what occurred. The waxwork figures were the only authentic thing in the world; they alone falsified life in an ostentatious way, becoming part of the true atmosphere of the world through their strange and artificial immobility. The bullet-riddled and blood-stained uniform of some Austrian archduke, with his sad, yellow visage, was infinitely more tragic than any real death. In a crystal casket there lay a woman dressed in black lace, with a pale and gleaming face. An astonishingly red rose was fixed between her breasts, and the blonde wig at the edge of her forehead was coming unglued, while in the nostrils the red colour of the make-up flickered and the blue eyes, as clear as glass, gazed on me motionlessly. It was impossible for the waxwork woman not to have a profound and disturbing significance, one known to no one else. The more I contemplated her the more her meaning seemed to become clear, lingering vaguely somewhere inside me like a word that I was trying to recollect and of which I could grasp only its faraway rhythm.
*
I have always had a bizarre attraction for feminine trinkets and for cheaply ornamented artificial objects. A friend of mine used to collect the most various found objects. In a mahogany box he kept hidden a strip of black silk with very fine lace at the edges, to which were sewn a few glinting glass disks. It was, of course, torn from an old ball gown; in places the silk had begun to moulder. To see it I used to give him stamps and even money. Then he would lead me into a salon in the old style, while his parents were sleeping, and show me it. I would remain with the piece of silk in my hand, mute with stupefaction and pleasure. My friend would stand in the doorway and keep a look out in case anyone came; in a few minutes he would return, take the silk from me, put it in the box and say, “Enough, now it’s over, you can’t have any longer”, which was the same thing Clara sometimes used to say to me when the lingering in the cabin lasted too long.
Another object that disturbed me exceedingly when I saw it for the first time was a gypsy ring. I think it was the most fantastical ring ever to have been invented by man to adorn the hand of a woman.
The extraordinary masked-ball ornaments employed by birds, animals and flowers, designed to play a sexual role; the stylised and ultra-modern tail of a bird of paradise; the rust-coloured feathers of the peacock; the hysterical lacework of petunia petals; the wholly unlifelike blue of a monkey’s chops – these are but feeble attempts at sexual ornamentation compared with the dizzying gypsy ring. It was a tin object, superb, fine, grotesque, and hideous. Above all hideous: it assaulted love in its darkest, most basic regions. A veritable sexual shriek.
Of course, the artist who fashioned it was also inspired by visions of the wax museum. The stone of the ring, which was a simple piece of glass melted to the thickness of a lens, wholly resembled the magnifying glasses in the dioramas of the wax museum, in which I used to gaze at sunken ships enlarged to the extreme, battles against the Turks and the assassinations of royalty. On the ring could be seen a bouquet of flowers chiselled in tin or in lead and coloured with all the violent hues of the paintings in the dioramas.
The violet of throttled cadavers next to the pornographic red of women’s garters, the leaden pallor of furious waves within a macabre light, like the semi-obscurity of funeral vaults covered with a pane of glass. All these framed by little brass leaves and mysterious signs. Hallucinatory.
Otherwise, I used to be impressed by everything that was an imitation. Artificial flowers, for example, and funeral wreaths, especially funeral wreaths, forgotten and dusty in their oval glass cases in the cemetery chapel, framing with old-fashioned delicacy anonymous old names, submerged in an unechoing eternity.
The cut-out pictures with which children play and the cheap statuettes from flea markets. In time, these statuettes would lose a head or an arm and their owners, repairing them, would surround the delicate throat with the white scurf of plaster. The bronze of the rest of the statuette would then acquire the significance of a tragic but noble suffering. And then there are the life-size Jesuses in Catholic churches. The stained glass windows cast into the altar the last reflections of a russet sunset, while the lilies at that hour exhale at the feet of Christ the plenitude of their heavy, lugubrious perfume. In this atmosphere