Impressions of Africa (French Literature Series) (7 page)

After a brief pause, we noticed the Hungarian Skariovszki in his tight-fitting red gypsy jacket, wearing a policeman’s kepi of the same color.

His right sleeve, rolled up to the elbow, revealed a thick coral bracelet coiled six times around his bare forearm.

He carefully watched over three black porters bearing various objects, who halted with him in the middle of the esplanade.

The first Negro carried in his arms a zither and a folding stand.

Skariovszki opened the stand, planting its four feet solidly on the ground. Then, on a narrow hinged frame unfolded horizontally, he rested the zither, which resounded at this gentle impact.

To the left of the instrument, a metal stem attached to the frame of the stand rose vertically after a slight bend, then split at its end like two tines of a fork; to the right, another identical stem formed its companion piece.

The second Negro carried, with no great effort, a long, transparent receptacle that Skariovszki set like a bridge above the zither, fitting its two ends onto the metal forks.

The shape of the new object was ideally suited to this means of installation. Built like a trough, it was composed of four slabs of mica. Two main slabs, identically rectangular, formed a sharp-edged base by joining their two planes at an angle. In addition, two triangular pieces, facing each other and adhering to the narrow ends of the rectangles, completed the diaphanous apparatus, which looked like a yawning, oversized change purse. A gap the width of a pea ran along the entire bottom edge of the translucent trough.

The third Negro had just set down a large earthenware vessel brimming with clear water, the weight of which Skariovszki asked one of us to gauge.

La Billaudière-Maisonnial, skimming off a tiny portion in the hollow of his hand, showed the keenest surprise and exclaimed that the strange liquid felt heavy as mercury.

During this time, Skariovszki lifted his right forearm to his face, uttering several coaxing words with great tenderness.

We then saw the coral bracelet, which was none other than a giant earthworm as thick as the Hungarian’s index finger, uncoil its two top rings and stretch slowly toward him.

La Billaudière-Maisonnial, straightening up again, now had to lend himself to another demonstration. At the gypsy’s request, he received the worm, which crawled over his open hand; his wrist immediately dropped beneath the sudden weight of the intruder, which apparently was heavy as solid lead.

Skariovszki removed the worm, still coiled around his arm, and placed it on the lip of the mica trough.

The annelid crawled into the empty receptacle, pulling with it the rest of its body, which gradually slid from around the gypsy’s flesh.

Soon the animal completely blocked the gap in the bottom edge, its horizontally stretched body supported by the two narrow inner ledges formed by the rectangular plates.

With great effort, the Hungarian hoisted the weighty vessel, the entire contents of which he poured into the trough, which was soon full to the brim.

Then, placing a knee on the ground and tilting his head to one side, he set the empty vessel beneath the zither, at a precisely determined point verified with a glance up and down the back of the instrument.

This last task accomplished, Skariovszki, standing nimbly upright, shoved his hands in his pockets, as if to limit himself from here on to a spectator’s role.

The worm, left to its own devices, suddenly raised, then immediately let drop, a short segment of its body.

Having had time to slip into the gap, a drop of liquid fell heavily onto one of the zither strings, which on impact emitted a pure and ringing low
C
.

Farther on, another twitch in the obstructing body let through a second drop, which this time struck a bright
E
. A
G
, then a high
C
, attacked in the same way, completed the perfect chord that the worm sounded again over an entire octave.

After the third and final
C
, the seven consonant notes, struck at the same time, provided a kind of conclusion to this trial prelude.

Thus warmed up, the worm launched into a slow Hungarian melody, tender and languorously sweet.

Each drop of liquid, released by an intentional spasm of its body, struck precisely the right string, which then split it into two equal globules.

A felt strip, glued into place on the wood of the zither, cushioned the fall of the heavy fluid, which otherwise would have produced a bothersome dripping noise.

The liquid, which accumulated in round puddles, penetrated inside the instrument via two circular openings drilled in the soundboard. Each of the two expected overspills rolled silently down a thin inner layer of felt specifically designed to absorb it.

A fine, limpid stream, emerging from some hidden egress, soon formed beneath the zither and ended precisely at the mouth of the earthenware vessel that Skariovszki had carefully set in place. The fluid, following the slope of the narrow and equally felt-lined channel, flowed noiselessly to the bottom of the enormous basin, which prevented any of it from inundating the grounds.

The worm continued its musical contortions, sometimes striking two notes at once, much like professional zither players who hold a hammer in each hand.

Several melodies, plaintive or lighthearted, succeeded the initial cantilena without a pause.

Then, moving beyond the scope of the instrument’s habitual repertoire, the annelid launched into the polyphonic execution of a strangely danceable waltz.

Accompaniment and melody vibrated in harmony on the zither, which normally was limited to the production of a mere two simultaneous sounds.

To give some depth to the main theme, the worm raised itself a bit higher, thereby releasing a larger quantity of liquid onto the violently impacted strings.

The slightly hesitant rhythm discretely lent the whole the unique character typical of gypsy ensembles.

After the waltz, a panoply of dances gradually emptied the see-through trough.

Below, the vessel had refilled owing to the continuous flow that had now run dry. Skariovszki lifted it and for a second time decanted its contents into the lightweight receptacle before returning it to its proper place on the ground.

The worm, now completely resupplied, began playing a czardas punctuated by wild and abrupt shifts in tonality. Sometimes, huge tremors of its long reddish body produced clashing fortissimos; at others, imperceptible undulations, which let through only fine droplets, lowered the now tranquil zither to a bare murmur.

There was nothing mechanical about this performance, which radiated fire and conviction. The worm seemed to be like any virtuoso, who, following his spontaneous inspiration, ran through a series of variations, interpreting an ambiguous and delicate passage in new and controversial ways.

A long medley of light opera arias following the czardas again depleted the provision of liquid. Once more Skariovszki performed the rapid decanting while announcing the final piece.

This time, the worm energetically attacked a captivating Hungarian rhapsody, each measure of which seemed to bristle with the most harrowing difficulties.

The acts of agility followed one another seamlessly, spangled with trills and chromatic scales.

Soon, through a series of enormous jerks, the worm accentuated a certain canto of ample texture, each written note of which must have been part of a thick cluster. This theme, which formed the base, was embroidered with numerous light motifs produced by slight twitches of the supple body.

The animal was becoming intoxicated with music. Far from exhibiting the slightest weariness, it grew more animated with every harmonic wave it unleashed so relentlessly.

Its emotion was communicated to the audience, which was strangely moved by the expressive timbre of certain hauntingly plaintive sounds and by the incredible speed of the endless clusters of demisemiquavers.

A frenetic presto brought the annelid’s enthusiastic delirium to a climax, and for several minutes it abandoned itself unreservedly to its chaotic gymnastics.

At the end, it prolonged the perfect cadence by a kind of expanding improvisation, reprising the final chords until the last of the percussive liquid had been entirely depleted.

Skariovszki extended his bare arm, around which the worm coiled itself anew after having scaled the mica slope.

The Negroes came to remove the various objects, including the earthenware vessel that was again as full as when it arrived.

Led by the Hungarian, they disappeared behind the Stock Exchange in single file.

A
T RAO’S COMMAND,
the entire portion of the black crowd assembled to the right made an about-face and took several steps back to contemplate the Incomparables’ Theater before them.

Immediately, our group moved closer, the better to see Talou, who had just appeared onstage with Carmichael in tow; the young Marseillais’s ordinary brown suit clashed with the extravagant imperial toilette.

Using a falsetto voice, an imitation of a woman’s pitch that matched his dress and wig, Talou executed Dariccelli’s
Aubade
, a piece requiring the most hazardous feats of vocalization.

Carmichael, score in hand, prompted the melody and its French text measure for measure, while the emperor, his guide’s faithful echo, emitted numerous trills that, after several minutes of effort, ended on a pure and extremely high-pitched final note.

Once this romance was finished, singer and prompter again rejoined the audience, while the historian Julliard, succeeding them on the floorboards, sat to our left at his lecturer’s desk, on which lay various notes that he began leafing through.

For twenty minutes, the marvelous orator enthralled us with his captivating elocution, delivering a brief exposé, filled with inspiring clarity of mind, concerning the history of the Electors of Brandenburg.

Sometimes he stretched a hand toward one of the effigies affixed to the backdrop, drawing our attention to a characteristic feature or a particular facial expression that his narrative had just evoked.

He concluded with a brilliant synthesis and, leaving the stage, left us dazzled by the vivid tints of his sparkling verve.

Immediately, the ichthyologist Martignon walked to the middle of the stage, holding in both hands a perfectly transparent aquarium, in which a certain whitish, oddly shaped fish slowly circled about.

In a few words, the learned naturalist introduced the Sturgeon Ray, an as yet unknown variety that had been procured for him the day before by a fortuitous deep-sea exploration.

The fish before our eyes was the product of a racial mixture; only the eggs of a ray fertilized by a sturgeon could engender the clearly articulated twin peculiarities that this single aquarium specimen brought together.

As Martignon slowly withdrew, watching carefully over the remarkable hybrid he had discovered, Tancrède Boucharessas, father of the five children whose skill we had earlier admired, made an impressive entrance by pushing a voluminous instrument on rollers to the front of the stage.

Though lacking both arms and legs, Tancrède, squeezed into a Bohemian costume, could still move swiftly by hopping on the stumps of his thighs. He clambered unaided onto a low platform situated at the middle of the unit he had just wheeled in and, turning his back to the public, found just at mouth level a large panpipe that, closely fitted to his chin, comprised an ensemble of pipes vertically tiered at regular intervals in descending order of size, from bottom to top. To the right was a hefty accordion, featuring a thick leather strap at the end of its bellows, its buckle fitted exactly to the incomplete bicep that extended barely four inches from the small man’s shoulder. On the opposite side, a triangle hanging from a wire was ready to vibrate under the beats of a metal wand previously attached, with solid fasteners, to the performer’s left stump.

After settling into the correct position, Tancrède, creating the illusion of a one-man orchestra, vigorously attacked a brilliant overture.

His head quickly and repeatedly spun back and forth, his lips finding the notes of the melody on the appropriate flute, while his two biceps worked simultaneously—one alternating between perfect and ninth chords by moving the accordion’s bellows in both directions, the other striking the base of the triangle at the correct moment with the metal wand that was like the clapper of an alarm clock.

To the right, seen in profile and forming one of the lateral facades of the contraption, a bass drum with a mechanical drumstick was counterbalanced, on the left, by a pair of cymbals attached to the end of two solid copper supports. By means of a skillful twitch, confined only to his shoulders while his head remained still, Tancrède constantly shifted his weight up and down, causing the small board on springs on which he sat upright to activate the drumstick and the pair of cymbals simultaneously, their deafening clash blending with the loud thumping of the bass drum.

This masterful overture, with its fine and varied nuances, ended in a fast-paced
presto
, during which the little phenomenon’s truncated thighs, bouncing with every beat on the board, punctuated a dizzying melody accompanied
fortissimo
by the vibrating bass notes of the accordion mixed with the multiple tings of the triangle.

After the final chord, the small man, lively as ever, left his place and disappeared into the wings, while his two sons Hector and Tommy came to clear the stage, promptly removing the instrument along with the lecturer’s table and chair.

This task completed, an artist strode onto the boards, elegantly attired in a black suit and holding a top hat in his white-gloved hands. This was Ludovic, the famous singer with the quadruple voice, whose colossal mouth drew everyone’s eyes.

With a lovely tenor’s timbre, Ludovic softly began the famous canon “Frère Jacques”; but only the left corner of his mouth moved to utter the familiar words, while the rest of the huge abyss kept still and silent.

At the moment when, after the first notes, the words “
Dormez-vous
” sounded a third higher, a second buccal division attacked anew the words “
Frère Jacques
,” starting at the tonic; Ludovic, through long years of practice, had managed to split his lips and tongue into independent portions and to articulate several intertwined parts effortlessly and simultaneously, differing in both tune and words. By now the entire left half of his mouth was moving, baring his teeth, while its undulations left the right side closed and motionless.

But a third labial fraction soon entered the chorus, precisely copying its predecessors. During this time the second voice intoned “
Dormez-vous
,” enlivened by the first, which introduced a new element into the mix by singing “
Sonnez les matines
” on a silvery and spirited rhythm.

For a fourth time the words “
Frère Jacques
” were heard, this time pronounced by the right corner of his mouth, which had just ceased its inactivity to complete the quartet; meanwhile, the first voice completed the canon with the syllables “
Ding, ding, dong
,” acting as bass to “
Sonnez les matines
” and “
Dormez-vous
” produced by the two intermediary voices.

Ludovic, his eyes glazed and dilated, needed a constant tension of mind to accomplish this inimitable tour de force without error. The first voice had picked up the song from the beginning, and the buccal compartments, each moving independently, parsed out the text of the round, whose four simultaneously performed fragments blended delightfully.

Little by little Ludovic accentuated his timbre, beginning a vigorous crescendo that sounded like a distant horde rapidly approaching.

There was a fortissimo of several measures during which, constantly evolving in a perpetual cycle from one labial compartment to the next, the four motifs, loud and resonant, burst forth powerfully in a slightly accelerated movement.

Then, calm having been restored, the imaginary troupe seemed to recede and fade out at a bend in the road; the concluding notes faded to a faint murmur, and Ludovic, exhausted by the terrible mental effort, left the stage mopping his brow.

After a one-minute intermission, we saw Philippo appear, presented by Jenn, his inseparable impresario. The unattached head of a fifty-year-old, placed on a wide red disk with a metal collar that held it upright: this was Philippo. A short, thick beard added to the ugliness of his face, which was nonetheless made amusing and likeable by its intelligent wittiness.

Jenn, holding this solid disk—a kind of round table with no legs—in both hands, showed the public the bodiless head, which began to jabber gaily with the most inventive sort of volubility.

With every word his very prominent lower jaw emitted a spray of spittle that, spewing in a shower from his mouth, landed a certain distance in front of him.

We could find none of the customary subterfuges used in the classic
talking head
routine. There was no system of mirrors hidden under the disk, which Jenn manipulated freely and without any suspect precautions; moreover, the impresario walked to the edge of the stage and offered the round plate to whoever wanted it.

Skariovszki stepped forward to receive Philippo, who at that point, passing from hand to hand, carried on with each spectator a brief, impromptu, and droll conversation. Some held the platter at arm’s length, trying to avoid the sprays of sputum flying from the prodigy’s mouth, while his astounding repartee elicited continuous bursts of laughter from us all.

After making the rounds, Philippo returned to his point of origin and was handed back to Jenn, who had remained onstage.

Immediately the impresario pressed a hidden catch that opened the red platter as one unfolds an extraordinarily flat box, showing that it was actually composed of two parts held fast by a thin hinge.

The lower disk dropped in vertical profile, while, held up by Jenn, the circle that until then had acted as lid continued to support the bearded figure horizontally.

Below this, wearing the classic flesh-colored leotard, hung a minuscule human body that, through complete atrophy, had been able to fit in the narrow hiding place of the hollow plate, barely an inch thick.

This sudden vision completed the person of Philippo, a loquacious dwarf, who, displaying an outsized head, enjoyed perfect health despite the diminutiveness of his striking anatomy.

Still talking and spraying spittle, the astounding chatterbox gesticulated freely with his puppetlike limbs, as if to give full vent to his inexhaustible and exuberant gaiety.

Soon, gripping Philippo by the scruff of the neck, after releasing the metal collar that moved on several hinges with spring catches, the impresario, with his left hand, lowered the upper disk, its aperture allowing easy passage for the inconceivable body below, dressed in flesh tones.

The agile trinket, whose head, larger than Jenn’s, was the same size as the entire rest of his person, abruptly took advantage of this new freedom of movement to scratch furiously at his beard, without missing a beat in his moist verbiage.

As Jenn carried him off into the wings, he gaily gripped a foot in each hand and disappeared wriggling, a final gibe sending copious droplets of his abundant saliva far afield.

Immediately the Breton Lelgoualch, dressed in the legendary costume of his region, rushed forward while doffing his round hat, the stage floorboards echoing under the shocks of his peg leg.

His left hand clutched a hollow bone, cleanly pierced with holes like a flute.

With a strong Brittany accent, the newcomer, reciting some prepared patter, gave us the following details about himself:

At age eighteen, Lelgoualch, a fisherman by trade, used to ply his skiff every day off the coast of Paimpol, his hometown.

The youth owned a bagpipe and was considered the best player in the county. Every Sunday people gathered in the public square to hear him perform, with a charm all his own, a host of Breton folk tunes, of which his memory kept an inexhaustible reserve.

One day, at the Paimpol town fair, Lelgoualch was scaling a greased pole when he fell and fractured his hip. Mortified by his clumsiness, which the whole village had witnessed, he got up and resumed his ascent, managing to complete it through sheer force of will. Then he limped home, still making it a point of honor to conceal his suffering.

When, after too long a delay, he finally sent for the doctor, the injury had developed into gangrene.

It was deemed necessary to amputate.

Lelgoualch, apprised of the situation, faced his trial with courage and, thinking only of how to make the best of it, asked the surgeon to save him his tibia, which he planned to put to some mysterious purpose.

They did as he requested, and on a certain day the poor amputee, sporting a brand-new wooden leg, went to see an instrument maker to whom he entrusted a carefully wrapped package, accompanied by precise instructions.

One month later, Lelgoualch received in a black, velvet-lined case the bone from his leg transformed into a strangely resonant flute.

The young Breton quickly learned the new fingerings and began a lucrative career playing the tunes of his region in music halls and circuses; the weirdness of the instrument, the provenance of which was explained at each performance, attracted crowds of curiosity seekers and increased his earnings far and wide.

The amputation was now twenty years in the past, and ever since then the flute’s resonance had continued to improve, like a violin that mellows over time.

Finishing his story, Lelgoualch raised his tibia to his lips and played a Breton melody full of gentle melancholy. The pure, silken notes sounded like nothing we’d ever heard; the timbre, at once warm and crystalline, indescribably limpid, marvelously suited the particular charm of the calm, lilting tune, whose evocative contours transported our thoughts straight to Armorica.

Several refrains, by turns joyful or patriotic, amorous or stirring, succeeded this initial romance, each one retaining a distinct unity that emitted intense local color.

After a sweet final lament, Lelgoualch withdrew with an alert step, his wooden leg once more clattering over the boards.