Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
A Treatise on Mannequins
Continued
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Father picked up with renewed volubility his dark and complicated topic. The lineation of his wrinkles folded and unfolded with subtle cunning. In each spiral, a projectile of irony was concealed. But at times, inspiration spread the vertebrae of his wrinkles, which grew with a kind of enormous, swirling menace, withdrawing in silent volutes far into the winter night. ‘Waxwork figures, my ladies,’ he began. ‘Calvary’s parodies of mannequins—but beware of making light of them, even in this form. For matter doesn’t know how to take a joke. It is always filled with tragic solemnity. Who will be so bold as to consider that they may trifle with matter, shape it for the sake of a jest, and that the joke will not strike root there, will not eat straight into it, like fate, like predestination? Have you any idea of the pain, the silent suffering, the unliberated, shackled to matter suffering of that dummy that doesn’t even know its purpose, doesn’t know why it must endure in that violently inflicted form, of a parody? Can you appreciate the impact of an expression, an appearance—the tyrannous abandon with which it will assail a defenceless piece of wood, lording over it like its own despotic, controlling spirit? Once bestow an expression of anger on some head of straw and canvas, and you abandon for ever it to that anger, that convulsion, that tension, locked into that blind animosity from which there is no escape. The crowd laughs at the parody. Weep, my ladies, over your own fates when you see the destitution of imprisoned matter, oppressed matter that doesn’t know what it is, or why it is, or what that gesture will lead to, with which it has been irrevocably endowed.
‘The crowd laughs. Do you grasp the terrible sadism, the intoxicating demiurgical cruelty of that laughter? For after all, my ladies, we should weep over our own fates at the sight of that destitute matter—violated matter upon which a terrible injustice has been perpetrated. From this, my ladies, springs the terrible sadness of all the clownish golems, all the dummies agonising tragically over their comical grimaces.
‘Here is the anarchist Luccheni, murderer of Empress Elizabeth. Here is Draga, the demonic and ill-starred Queen of Serbia. And here, a gifted youth, the hope and pride of his line, ruined by the lamentable practice of onanism. O irony of those names, those semblances!
‘Is there really anything at all of Queen Draga, even the merest shadow of her being in that dummy, her double? That resemblance reassures us, that appearance and that name, and we feel no need to ask, what is that unhappy creation, in and of itself? After all, my ladies, it must be someone—someone anonymous, someone menacing and lamentable, someone who has never in her deafened life even heard of Queen Draga...
‘Have you heard at nights the terrible howling of those wax dolls locked inside their fairground booths, the doleful chorus of those hulks of wood and porcelain, beating their fists against the walls of their prisons?’
In my father’s face, animated by the menace of the matters that he had summoned up from the darkness, a whirlpool of wrinkles arose, a crater expanding in its depths, at the bottom of which a menacing, prophetic eye blazed. His beard bristled strangely; the wisps and tufts of hair shooting out from his warts, moles and nostrils stood on end. He stood numb, with fiery eyes, trembling with inner perturbation, like an automaton that had jammed and ground to a halt.
Adela rose from her chair, and requested us to avert our eyes from what was about to happen. And then, with her hands on her hips, adopting an air of emphatic resoluteness, she strode up to Father, and demanded very forcefully...
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The girls sat rigid, with downcast eyes, in strange numbness...
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