I was now sure that Frida contained the most secret and most sensational revelations.
Many years later I found the book on the shelves of a bookshop. It was no longer my little book bound in black cloth but a lowly and wretched pamphlet with yellowed covers. For an instant I wanted to purchase it, but I changed my mind and put it back on the shelf. It is thus that I still preserve intact within me the image of a little black book in which lingers a little of the authentic perfume of my childhood.
Point of Balance, Oil on Canvas, 2008
The Impression of the Theatrical
In small and insignificant objects: a black bird’s feather, a nondescript little book, an old photograph with fragile and outmoded personages, seemingly afflicted with a serious internal illness, a delicate green faience ashtray, moulded like an oak leaf, forever smelling of stale ash; in the simple and elementary recollection of old man Samuel Weber’s spectacles with their thick lenses, in such trifling ornaments and domestic things can be discovered all the melancholy of my childhood and that essential nostalgia for the world’s pointlessness, which enveloped me everywhere, like water with petrified ripples. Gross matter – in its deep, heavy masses of earth, rocks, sky or waters – or in its most incomprehensible forms – paper flowers, mirrors, glass marbles with their enigmatic inner spirals, or tinted statuettes – forever suspended in a confinement that struck painfully against its walls and perpetuated in me, without meaning, the bizarre adventure of being human.
Whithersoever my mind might wend, it encountered immobile objects, which were like walls before which I had to fall upon my knees.
Terrorised by their diversity, I used to think of the infinite forms of matter and for nights on end I would writhe, agitated by series of objects that filed endlessly through my memory, like escalators ceaselessly unfolding thousands and thousands of steps.
At times, in order to dam the torrent of things and colours that flooded my brain, I would imagine the evolution of a single outline, of a single object.
For example, I would imagine – and this as a precise inventory of the world – the chain of all the shadows on earth, the strange and fantastical ashen world that slumbers at life’s feet.
The shadow man, spread like a veil over the grass, with spindly legs that trickled like water, with arms of darkened iron, walking among the horizontal trees and their flowering branches.
The shadows of vapours gliding upon the sea, shadows as unstable and aquatic as transient sadnesses, skimming over the foam.
The shadows of birds in flight, black birds rising from the depths of the earth, from a sombre aquarium.
And the solitary shadow, lost somewhere in space, of our spherical planet…
At other times I would think of caverns and hollows, from the vertiginous heights of chasms in the mountains to the warm, elastic, ineffable sexual cavern. I had procured from somewhere or other a small electric torch and in bed at night, maddened by insomnia and by the objects that kept filling my room, I would crawl under the quilt and examine with taut attention, in a kind of aimless but painstaking study, the wrinkles of the sheet and the little clefts that formed between them. I needed such a precise and trifling occupation in order to calm myself to some degree. On one occasion my father found me at midnight rummaging under the pillows with the torch and he took it away from me. Nonetheless, he did not make any remarks and nor did he scold me. I think that for him the discovery had been so odd that he could find neither the words nor the morals that would have applied in the case of such an event.
A few years later, I saw in an anatomy book the photograph of a wax cast of the inner ear. All the canals, sinuses and cavities consisted of full matter, forming their positive image. This photograph made an exceeding impression upon me, almost to the point of faintness. In an instant I realised that the world might exist in a reality that was more authentic, as the positive structure of its empty spaces, so that everything that is hollowed out would become full, and actual reliefs would be transformed into voids of identical shape, without any content, like those delicate and bizarre fossils that reproduce in stone the traces of some shell or leaf which over the course of time has been macerated, leaving nothing but the sculpted, fine imprint of its outline.
In such a world people would no longer be multicoloured, fleshy excrescences, full of intricate and putrescible organs, but rather pure voids, floating like bubbles of air through water, through the warm, soft matter of the full universe. It was also the intrinsic and painful sensation that I often felt in adolescence, when throughout endless wanderings, I used suddenly to find myself in the midst of a terrible isolation, as if around me people and their houses had all of a sudden become gummed up in the compact and uniform jelly of a single material, in which I existed merely as a void that meaninglessly moved to and fro.
*
In ensemble, objects formed stage sets. The impression of the theatrical everywhere accompanied me with a feeling that everything was unfolding in the midst of a factitious and sad performance. When I sometimes escaped from the tedious, matte vision of a colourless world, its theatrical aspect would then appear, emphatic and old-fashioned.
Within the framework of this overall theatricality, there were other, more astonishing theatrical performances which drew me more because their artificiality and the actors playing in them seemed genuinely to understand the mystifying meaning of the world. They alone knew that in a stage-set universe of theatrical performance life had to be acted artificially and ornamentally. Such performances were the cinema and the wax museum.
Oh, the auditorium of the B Cinema, long and dim like a submerged submarine! The doors of the entrance were covered with crystal mirrors in which a part of the street was reflected. At the very entrance itself there was thus a free show, even before the one in the auditorium, an astounding screen on which the street flickered in a greenish dream-like light, with people and carriages that moved somnambulistically in its waters.
In the auditorium a reeking and acidic public baths sultriness reigned. The floor was made of cement and when the chairs were moved they made screeching noises like brief and desperate screams. In front of the screen a gallery of louts and idlers cracked sunflower seed husks between their teeth and commented aloud on the film. Dozens of voices simultaneously spelled out the titles syllable by syllable, like literacy classes at a school for adults. Directly below the screen an orchestra played, made up of a woman pianist, a violinist and an old Jew who energetically plucked the contrabass. That old man also had the task of emitting various sounds corresponding to the action on screen. He would cry out “cock-a-doodle-do” when at the beginning of the film there appeared the cockerel of the movie company, and once, I remember, when the life of Jesus was being depicted, at the moment of the resurrection he began frenetically to thump the body of his bass with the bow to imitate the heavenly thunderclaps.
I lived the episodes in the films with an extraordinary intensity, integrating myself into the action as a veritable character in the drama. It happened to me many times that the film would absorb my attention so much that all of a sudden I would imagine that I was walking through the parks on the screen, or that I was leaning against the balustrade of the Italian terraces on which Francisca Bertini was acting, with pathos, her hair untrammelled and her arms fluttering like scarves.
In the end, there is no well-defined difference between our real self and our various imaginary inner characters. When the lights came up in the interval, the auditorium would have an air of returning from afar. It was in a somewhat precarious and artificial atmosphere, much more uncertain and ephemeral than the performance on the screen. I used to close my eyes and wait until the mechanical munching sound of the apparatus announced that the film was about to continue; then I would find the auditorium in darkness once more and all the people around me, illumined indirectly by the screen, pale and transfigured like a gallery of marble statues in a museum lit by the moon at midnight.
On one occasion there was a fire in the cinema. The film reel had snapped and instantly burst into flames. For a few seconds, the flames were projected onto the screen,