Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
A Treatise on Mannequins
Conclusion
ON ONE of the following evenings, my father continued his lecture with these words:
‘I did not mean, in setting out my thesis on mannequins, to speak about those incarnate misapprehensions, those sad parodies, my ladies, the fruits of vulgar intemperance. I had something else in mind.’
Here, my father began to construct before our eyes a picture of the generatio aequivoca that he had dreamed up for us, some generation of only half organic beings, a kind of pseudo-vegetation and pseudo-fauna, the products of a fantastic fermentation of matter.
These were creations similar to living beings, to vertebrates, crustaceans or arthropods—but that appearance was misleading. They were essentially amorphous beings, without internal structure, embryos of the imitative tendency of matter, which, having been endowed with memory, repeats out of habit the forms it has adopted in the past. The range of morphology to which matter is subject is on the whole limited, and a certain stock of forms continually recurs on the various strata of being.
Such entities—mobile, and responsive to stimuli, and yet far from true life—could be procured by suspending certain complex colloids in solutions of ordinary kitchen salt. A few days later, those colloids would take shape, organising their substance into distinct congealments reminiscent of the lower forms of fauna.
In the beings thus created, the process of respiration was detectable, of metabolism—but chemical analysis showed in them no evidence of even a trace of proteinaceous combinations, or any carbon compounds whatsoever.
And even these primitive forms were as nothing compared to the richness of the forms, the magnificence, of the pseudo-fauna and flora that will appear at times in certain strictly defined environments. Old apartments are such environments, saturated with the emanations of many lives and events, spent atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredient of human dreams, rubble abounding in a humus of reminiscences, yearnings and sterile boredom. That pseudo-flora would rapidly and superficially germinate on such soil, parasitise profusely and ephemerally, forcing transitory generations that abruptly and magnificently bloomed, only to wilt at once and die back.
The wallpaper in such apartments must be all used up, grown weary of incessant movement over all the cadences of its rhythms. No wonder then that it amounts to a wilderness of faraway and hazardous reveries. The core of the furniture, its very substance, must have worked loose and deteriorated, fallen prey to illicit temptations. And then, on that toxic, tired and savage soil, a fantastic deposit blooms—coloured, luxuriant mildew, like a beautiful rash.
‘You ladies know,’ said my father, ‘that often in old apartments there are rooms no one remembers. Unvisited for months, they wither in neglect between their old walls. And before you know it, they shrink back into themselves and develop a brickwork patina. Lost to our memory for ever, they slowly begin to lose their existence. The door leading to them from some backstairs landing might remain for so long overlooked by the inhabitants that it strikes root and becomes part of the wall, where all trace of it is lost behind a fantastic delineation of scratches and cracks.
‘Early one morning, toward the end of winter, after many months of absence,’ said my father, ‘I entered one such half-forgotten passageway, and was astonished at the sight of those rooms.
‘From every chink in the floor, from every cornice and embrasure, thin shoots had 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 false and blissful spring. Around the bed, under the many-armed lamp and along the edges of the wardrobes, clusters of delicate trees were shaking, spreading above me into luminous crowns, fountains of lacy leafage, spurting chlorophyll up to the painted sky of the ceiling. Enormous pink and white flowers sprouted in the midst of that leafage, in an accelerated process of blooming. They budded before my eyes—pink pulp burst forth from their centres, and they overflowed their brims, dropping their petals, and falling to pieces in a hasty climacteric.
‘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 that hasty efflorescence seeped out and materialised from the shimmering of the air, a fermentation of the over-rich atmosphere, an overspill and disintegration of fantastic oleanders, filling the room with a fine, languid snowstorm of great pink floral sprays.
‘Before night fell,’ Father said in closing, ‘there was no more sign of that magnificent efflorescence. That whole delusive fata Morgana had been nothing but mystification, an instance of a 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 that many-shaped matter will adopt. 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 will spread from a sleeper’s mouth and over the whole table, filling the whole room in a thin, floating tissue, astral dough on the border of the body and the soul.
‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘how many are the afflicted, crippled and fragmentary forms of life, such as the unnaturally botched life of armoires and tables nailed together in haste—crucified wood, quiet martyrs to the cruel inventiveness of human beings, terrible transplantations of 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 armoires? Who recognises in them, planed and polished up beyond all 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, all of its memories planed away. For a moment, we were afraid that Father might fall into a certain state of lifelessness which occasionally came upon him, but he quickly recovered his senses, collected himself, and continued:
‘Ancient, mystic tribes embalmed their dead. Bodies and faces were set into the walls of their homes. The father stood in the parlour, stuffed—his tanned, dead wife was a mat under the table. I once knew a certain sea-captain who had in his cabin a lampe-Mélusine made by Malayan embalmers from his murdered mistress. On its head it 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 lashes. A tiny film of saliva glistened on its parted lips, bursting in a silent whisper. Octopuses, turtles and enormous crabs, suspended like chandeliers and girandoles from the beams of the ceiling, wriggled their legs unceasingly in that silence, endlessly walking and walking in their places...’
My father’s face suddenly assumed a sad and troubled expression, whilst 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 winter nights? Can there be anything sadder than a man transformed into an enema tube? What a disappointment for his parents, what an upheaval for their emotions, what frustration of their hopes, all set on a promising youth! And yet, even in that transformed state, my poor cousin tended him with steadfast love.’
‘Oh! I can take no more of this... I can hear no more of it!’ Polda squealed, steadying herself against a chair. ‘Silence him, Adela...’
The girls stood. 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 backward in dread before Adela’s wagging finger. She pursued him on and on, venomously shaking her finger at him, and she 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.
> -Nimrod- >