Word Document (draft of June 2008)
A Treatise on Mannequins
Conclusion
ONE EVENING soon afterward, my father continued his lecture with these words:
‘It was not about those incarnate misapprehensions, not about those sad parodies, my ladies, the fruits of coarse intemperance, that I wanted to speak in proclaiming my thesis about mannequins. I had something else in mind.’
Here my father began to construct before our eyes a picture of that generatio aequivoca which he had dreamed up for us — a generation of somehow only half organic beings, some kind of pseudo-vegetation and pseudo-fauna, the results of a fantastic fermentation of matter.
‘They were,’ said my father, ‘creations resembling living beings — vertebrates, crustaceans or arthropods — but that appearance was misleading. They were essentially amorphous beings, without internal structure, products of the imitative tendency of matter, which, being endowed with memory, repeats out of habit all the forms it has once adopted. The range of morphology to which matter is subject is on the whole limited, and a certain stock of forms recurs continually on the various strata of being.
‘These beings, mobile and responsive to stimuli, and yet far from true life, could be procured by suspending certain complex colloids in solutions of ordinary table salt. end p.43 A few days later, these colloids would take form and organise their substance into distinct congealments reminiscent of the lower forms of fauna.
‘In the beings thus created the process of respiration was discernible, of metabolism, although chemical analysis showed in them no evidence of even a trace of proteinaceous combinations, or any carbon compounds whatsoever.
‘Besides, these primitive forms were as nothing in comparison with the richness of the forms, the magnificence of the pseudo-fauna and flora which occasionally appears in certain strictly defined environments. Old apartments are such environments, saturated with the emanations of many lives and events — musty atmospheres rich in the specific ingredient of human dreams — rubble abounding in the humus of reminiscences, yearnings and sterile boredom. On such soil that pseudo-flora would germinate and parasitise, abundantly and ephemerally, rapidly and superficially, and force transitory generations which would abruptly and magnificently bloom, only to wilt and die back.
‘The wallpaper in such apartments must be very antiquated, weary of incessant wandering gazes caught up in the cadences of its rhythms — no wonder that it amounts to a wilderness of faraway, risky reveries. The core, the substance of the furniture must already have worked loose and deteriorated; it must be subject to illicit temptations — and then, on that toxic, tired and savage soil, end p.44 a fantastic deposit blooms — coloured, luxuriant mildew like a beautiful rash.
‘You ladies know that often in old apartments there are rooms no one remembers. Unvisited for months, they wither in neglect between their old walls, and it transpires that they shrink into themselves and develop a brickwork patina, and, lost once and for all to our memory, they slowly lose their existence. The door leading to them from some backstairs landing might remain overlooked for so long by the inhabitants that it takes root, becomes part of the wall, which effaces its trace in a fantastic delineation of cracks and scratches.
‘Early one morning toward the end of winter, after many months of absence,’ said my father, ‘I once entered one such half-forgotten passageway, and I was astonished at the sight of those rooms.
‘From every chink in the floor, from every cornice and embrasure, thin shoots shot up, filling the greyed air with a shimmering tracery of filigree leafage, the azure thicket of some hothouse full of the whispers, glints and swaying of some spurious and blissful spring. Around the bed, under the many-armed lamp and along the wardrobes, clusters of delicate trees were shaking, and they dispersed up above into luminous crowns, fountains of lacy leafage, spurting chlorophyll up to the painted sky of the ceiling. Enormous pink and white flowers sprouted in that enormous leafage in an accelerated process of efflorescence; they budded before my eyes, grew from their centres in a pink pulp and overflowed their brims, dropping their petals and falling to pieces in their hasty bursting.
‘I was delighted,’ said my Father, ‘at that unprecedented blooming which had filled the air with its twinkling rustle, a gentle murmur running like coloured confetti through the delicate shafts of the branches.
‘I saw how, from the shimmering of the air, from the fermentation of the over-rich atmosphere, that hasty efflorescence seeped out and materialised — end p.45 the overspill and disintegration of fantastic oleanders, which filled the room with a fine, languid snowstorm of great pink floral sprays.
‘Before night had fallen,’ Father said in closing, ‘there was no more trace of that magnificent blooming. That whole delusive fata Morgana had been mere mystification, an instance of the strange simulation of matter which underlies life’s outward appearances.’
My father was strangely animated that day; his glances — cunning, ironic glances — darted with verve and humour. Then, suddenly growing serious, he investigated once more the endless gamut of forms and shades which many-shaped matter adopts. Limitary, dubious and problematic forms fascinated him, such as the ectoplasm of mediums — pseudo-matter, a cataleptic emanation of the brain which, under certain conditions, spreads from a sleeper’s mouth and over the whole table, fills the whole room like thin, floating tissue — astral dough on the border of the body and the soul.
‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘how many are the afflicted, crippled, fragmentary forms of life, such as the unnaturally botched end p.46 life of hastily nailed together wardrobes and tables. Crucified wood, quiet martyrs to the cruel inventiveness of human beings — terrible transplantations of the alien and mutually-antagonistic races of wood, their incorporation into a single, discontented individuality.
‘How much wise old torment is there in the stained grain, the veins and contours of our dependable old wardrobes? Who recognises in them, planed and polished up beyond recognition, their old features, their smiles, their looks?’
As he said this, my father’s face dissolved into a pensive lineation of wrinkles which began to resemble the knots and grain of an old plank, from which all memories had been planed. For a moment we were afraid that Father might fall into a certain state of lifelessness which occasionally came upon him, but he suddenly recovered his senses, collected himself, and went on:
‘Ancient and mystic tribes embalmed their dead. There were bodies and faces set into the walls of their homes. In the sitting room stood Father, stuffed; his tanned, dead wife was a mat under the table. I once knew a certain sea-captain who had in his cabin a girandole, made from his murdered mistress by Malayan embalmers. On her head she had enormous deer antlers.
‘In the silence of the cabin, that head, fastened between the branches of the antlers and almost touching the ceiling, slowly raised its eyelashes, and a tiny film of saliva glistened on its parted lips, bursting in a quiet whisper. Octopuses, turtles and enormous crabs hung like chandeliers from the beams of the ceiling, unceasingly wriggling their legs in that silence, endlessly walking, walking, walking on the spot — — — — — ’ end p.47
My father’s face suddenly assumed a sad and concerned expression, while his thoughts, on pathways of no one knows what associations, passed on to new cases:
‘Can I omit to mention,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that my own brother, as a result of a long and incurable illness, was transformed by stages into a coil of rubber tubing, and that my poor cousin carried him on cushions by day and by night, crooning to the unfortunate creature the endless lullabies of the winter nights? Can there be anything sadder than a man transformed into an enema tube? What disappointment for his parents; what disorientation of their feelings, and such frustration of their hopes, all set on a promising youth! And yet, even in that transformation, the steadfast love of my poor cousin tended to him.’
‘Oh! I can take no more of this… I can hear no more!’ Polda squealed, steadying herself against a chair. ‘Silence him, Adela…’
— — — — — — — — — — —
The girls stood up; Adela stepped up to Father and made a movement with her outstretched finger, signifying tickling. Father was confounded; he fell silent and began to retreat, full of dread, backward before Adela’s wagging finger. She pursued him on and on, venomously shaking her finger at him, and chased him step by step from the room. Paulina yawned, stretching. She and Polda, holding one another up, looked with a smile into each other’s eyes.
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