Impressions of Africa (French Literature Series) (8 page)

The equestrian Urbain then made his appearance, in a blue jacket, calfskin jodhpurs, and turned-down boots, leading a magnificent black stallion full of fire and vigor. An elegant bridle was the only ornament on the animal’s head; no bit fettered its mouth.

Urbain took several strides onto the stage and positioned the splendid steed to face us, introducing it by the name Romulus, which the circus folk jocularly nicknamed
tongue and hoove.

At the equestrian’s request to the audience to supply him a word at random, Juillard called out “equator.”

Immediately, slowly repeating one by one the syllables that Urbain prompted aloud, the horse distinctly pronounced “
E…qua…tor…
”

The animal’s
tongue
, instead of being square like those of its peers, had adopted the pointed form of the human organ. This peculiarity, noticed by chance, had convinced Urbain to attempt to educate Romulus, who, like a parrot, had learned over two years of work to clearly replicate any sound.

The equestrian resumed the experiment, now soliciting complete sentences from the audience that Romulus repeated after him. Soon, dispensing with its prompter, the horse volubly reeled off its entire repertoire, including a volley of proverbs, portions of fables, curses, and truisms, recited haphazardly and with no sign of intelligence or understanding.

At the end of this preposterous speech, Urbain led Romulus offstage, the animal still muttering a few nonsensical observations.

Man and horse were replaced by Whirligig, slim and lithe in his clown costume and face powder. Using both hands and his teeth, he carried separately, by their edges, three deep, finely woven baskets, which he set down on the stage.

Ably mimicking a British accent, he introduced himself as a lucky devil who had just enjoyed huge winnings at two different casinos.

As he spoke he showed off his baskets, filled respectively with coins, dominoes, and dark blue playing cards.

First taking the basket of loose change, which he carried to the right, Whirligig, scooping out copper coins by the handful, erected on the edge of the platform a curious construction that rested against the partition.

Coins large and small swiftly piled up under the clown’s nimble fingers, which were apparently quite used to the exercise. We soon made out the base of a feudal tower with a wide portal, its upper portion still missing.

Without pausing for breath, the agile worker pursued his task, accompanied by a metallic clinking full of resonant gaiety. Here and there, narrow loopholes dotted the vaulted walls that rose before our eyes.

Reaching the level marked by the top of the portal, Whirligig pulled from his sleeve a long, thin, flat rod, its brownish color easily confused with the grimy hue of common coinage. This rigid beam, placed like a bridge over the two jambs of the opening, allowed the clown to continue his task on a firm and ample support.

The coins continued to pile up and, when the basket was empty, Whirligig designated with a proud gesture a tall, artistically crenellated tower, which seemed to be part of some old façade of which only a single corner appeared, like a stage set.

With a pile of dominoes pulled in bunches from the second basket, the clown then went on to build, at the far right of the stage, a kind of wall balancing upright.

The uniform rectangles, placed in single file, were laid over each other symmetrically, showing many black backs with an occasional white front.

Soon a large section of wall, rising in a flawless vertical line, showed, against a white background, the black silhouette of a priest in a long cassock, wearing his traditional hat. Sometimes lying horizontally, sometimes upright, depending on the requirements of the priest’s outline, the dominoes created their design by cleverly alternating their black or white faces; they looked as if they’d been glued together by their narrow edges, so precisely were they stacked.

In several minutes, Whirligig, working with neither mortar nor trowel, finished a wall a full ten feet long, which, stretching to the rear of the stage in a slightly oblique direction, formed a rigorously homogenous block. The original motif was repeated over the full width of the mosaic, and we now saw what seemed like whole parade of vicars walking in small groups toward an unknown goal.

Approaching the third basket, the clown picked up and unfolded a large black drape, which, by two corners, each fitted with a ring, was easily suspended from two hooks attached before the performance to the backdrop and to the left wall of the stage.

The black cloth, which hung to the floor, thus formed a wide slanting corner; the axis of the domino wall stretching from the coin tower abutted against it.

Freshly exposed to the air by Whirligig’s action, the visible side of the cloth was covered with a damp coating, a kind of shiny glue.

The clown gracefully positioned himself before this huge target, against which, with remarkable skill, he began to toss the playing cards that he pulled from his reserve by the fistful.

Each light projectile, spinning on its axis, infallibly landed with its blue back against the cloth and remained prisoner of the tenacious coating; the performer demonstrated great precision in symmetrically aligning his cards, which, black or red, high or low, lodged one beside the other without regard for value or suit.

Before long, diamonds, clubs, spades, and hearts, succeeding each other in narrow bands, sketched against the black background the shape of a roof. Then came a complete façade pierced by several windows and a wide door, on the threshold of which Whirligig, using an entire deck, carefully rendered the silhouette of a behatted clergyman emerging from his home, who seemed to be greeting the colleagues heading in his direction.

This tour de force completed, the clown turned to us to offer this explanation of his triple masterpiece: “A fraternity of reverends leaving the tower of an old cloister to visit the parish priest in his rectory.”

Then, still lithe and agile, he folded up the black cloth with all the cards still attached and demolished in several seconds the evocative wall and brown tower.

Everything was soon returned to the solid baskets, with which Whirligig vanished like a sprite.

After a moment, the Belgian tenor Cuijper appeared onstage, squeezed into a tight frock coat.

He held between his fingers a fragile metal instrument, which he displayed to the audience as best he could by turning it slowly to alternately expose each of its sides.

It was a
squeaker
, similar, though slightly larger, to those little tin nasal attachments puppeteers use to imitate Punch’s voice.

Cuijper briefly related the story of this trinket of his own invention, which, amplifying his voice a hundredfold, had shaken the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels to its foundations.

We all remembered the fuss the newspapers had made about
Cuijper’s Squeaker
, which no instrument-maker ever succeeded in replicating.

The tenor jealously guarded a certain secret regarding the composition of the metal and the shape of its many circumvolutions, which endowed the precious toy with fabulously resonant qualities.

Wary of providing opportunities for theft and indiscretion, Cuijper had manufactured only a single specimen, the object of his constant surveillance; we were therefore gaping at that moment at the very squeaker that, for an entire season, had allowed him to sing the lead roles on the stage of the Monnaie.

These preliminary explanations over, Cuijper announced the grand aria from
Gorlois
and placed the squeaker in his mouth.

Suddenly, a superhuman voice, which sounded as if it could be heard for miles around, burst from his throat, making every listener jump.

This colossal force in no way undermined the charm of its timbre, and the mysterious squeaker, the source of this incredible volume, clarified rather than garbled the elegant pronunciation of the lyrics.

Never straining for effect, Cuijper, seemingly without trying, stirred the air currents around him; yet no shrillness clouded the purity of his sound, which evoked both the delicacy of a harp and the loudness of an organ.

By himself he filled the space better than a huge choir could have done; his
fortes
would have covered the rumbling of thunder, and his
pianos
retained a formidable amplitude, while giving the impression of a light murmur.

The final note, begun softly, then artfully swelled and broken off at its apex, provoked a feeling of stupor in the crowd that lasted until Cuijper left the stage, his fingers once again twiddling the curious squeaker.

A shiver of curiosity revived the audience as the great Italian tragedienne Adinolfa came onstage, dressed in a simple black frock that heightened the fatal sadness of her physiognomy, itself darkened by her beautiful velvet eyes and opulent chestnut hair.

After a brief announcement, Adinolfa began declaiming in Italian ample and mellifluous verses by Torquato Tasso. Her features expressed intense dolor, and certain vocal outbursts were nearly like sobs; she wrung her hands in distress while her entire person shook with pain, intoxicated by exaltation and despair.

Soon real tears sprung from her eyes, showing the devastating sincerity of her phenomenal emotion.

Sometimes she knelt, bowing her head beneath the weight of her grief, then again rose, fingers clasped and stretched to the heavens, to which she seemed to be fervently addressing her heartrending imprecations.

Her eyelashes dripped constantly, while, sustained by her striking impressions, Tasso’s stanzas echoed bitterly, spoken in a savage and gripping tone that evoked the cruelest emotional torments.

After a final, emphatic verse, each syllable of which was hammered out one by one in a voice made hoarse by the effort, the brilliant tragedienne slowly stepped offstage, holding her head in both hands, shedding her limpid and abundant tears until the end.

Immediately two red damask curtains, pulled by an unseen hand, emerged simultaneously from the wings of the empty stage, which they masked completely by joining together at the midpoint.

T
WO MINUTES PASSED,
during which Carmichael went to stand at the front left of the theater, from which a bustling, unseen activity could be heard.

All at once the curtains opened onto a tableau vivant imbued with picturesque cheer.

In a rich timbre, Carmichael, designating the immobile apparition, pronounced this brief apostrophe:

“The Feast of the Olympian Gods.”

In the middle of the stage, behind which hung black drapes, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Diana, Apollo, Venus, Neptune, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, and Vulcan, seated in full regalia at a sumptuously laid table, smilingly raised their brimming goblets. Ready to gaily toast the entire group, Mercury, played by the comic actor Soreau, appeared to be suspended in midair by the wings of his sandals and hovered above the banquet without any visible attachment to the flies.

Closing once more, the curtains blotted out the divine assembly, then parted anew after several moments’ commotion to display a fairly complex scene in an entirely different setting.

The left half of the stage showed a tranquil waterway hidden behind a line of rosebushes.

A woman of color, who by her costume and finery seemed to belong to a savage tribe of North America, stood motionless in a light boat. Alone with her on the frail skiff, a little white girl held in both hands the handle of a fishing net; with a sharp jerk of her snare, she was yanking a pike from the waves. Lower down, one could see caught in the mesh the head of the fish trying to dive back into its element.

The other half of the stage depicted a grassy bank. In the foreground, a man who seemed to be running at breakneck speed wore on his shoulders a papier-mâché boar’s head, which, completely obscuring his own, made him look like a wild pig with a human body. An iron wire forming a wide arc was attached by its two ends to the encircled wrists that the runner held out before him at different heights. A glove, an egg, and a wisp of straw, the spoils of a fictional theft, were strung on the metal wire at three different points of the graceful curve. The runaway’s hands were open toward the sky, as if juggling the three objects frozen in their aerial path. The arc, inclined on a slant, gave the impression of rapid, irresistible momentum. Seen in rear three-quarters view and seemingly drawn by an invincible force, the juggler appeared to be rushing toward the rear of the stage.

Set back from him, a live goose held a pose as if taking wing, thanks to a kind of glue that attached its phenomenally widespread feet to the ground in mid-stride. The two white wings were extended broadly as if to power this headlong flight. Behind the bird, Soreau, dressed in a flowing robe, represented wrathful Boreas; from his mouth escaped a long funnel of blue-gray cardboard that, striped with fine longitudinal lines copied from those great breaths that draftsmen put before the lips of swollen-cheeked zephyrs, artfully depicted a tempestuous wind. The flared end of the light cone was aimed at the goose, chased forward by the gust. In addition, Boreas, holding in his right hand a rose with a tall, thorny stem, coldly prepared to whip the fugitive to hasten its flight. Turned almost toward us, the bird was about to cross paths with the juggler, each one seeming to describe in opposite directions the sharp curve of the same parabola.

In the background rose a golden harrow; behind this, the ass Milenkaya stretched its closed jaw, through which a seton passed from top to bottom, toward a pail full of whole bran. Certain peculiarities hinted at the subterfuge used to simulate the painful and hunger-inducing obstacle. Only the two visible ends of the seton truly existed, glued to the ass’s skin and respectively terminated by a transversal rod. At first glance, the effect obtained indeed suggested absolute closure, condemning the poor beast to the tortures of Tantalus in perpetuity.

Carmichael, indicating the girl, who, standing in the skiff, was none other than Stella Boucharessas, clearly uttered this brief explanation:

“Ursule, accompanied by the Huron Maffa, aids the bewitched of Lake Ontario.”

The characters all maintained a sculptural stillness. Soreau, gripping between his teeth the end of his long, air-colored funnel, swelled his smooth, flushed cheeks, without letting the rose standing upright at the end of his outstretched arm tremble in the slightest.

The curtains came together, and immediately, behind this impenetrable obstacle, a prolonged din could be heard, caused by some new feverish and zealous activity.

Now the stage reappeared, completely transformed.

The center was occupied by a staircase, its contours disappearing into the flies.

Halfway up stood a blind old man dressed in Louis XV style, facing front on the landing. His left hand held a dark green bouquet composed of several branches of holly. Looking at the base of the spray, one gradually made out all the colors of the rainbow, represented by seven different ribbons knotted individually around the bundled stems.

His other hand armed with a hefty quill pen, the blind man wrote on the banister to his right, its flat shape and cream hue offering a convenient smooth surface.

Several background figures, crowded onto nearby steps, gravely followed the old man’s movements. The closest one, holding a large inkwell, seemed to be awaiting the moment to moisten the quill anew.

His finger pointing to the scene, Carmichael spoke these words:

“Handel mechanically composing the theme of his oratorio
Vesper
.”

Soreau, in the role of Handel, had created for himself a conventional blindness by painting his eyelids, which he kept almost entirely shut.

The scene vanished behind its veil of drapes, and a fairly long interval was marked only by the whispers of the audience.

“Czar Alexei unmasking Pleshcheyev’s assassin.”

This phrase, which Carmichael uttered at the moment the curtains next slid open on their rod, referred to a Russian scene from the seventeenth century.

At right, Soreau, playing the czar, held vertically at eye level a red glass disk that looked like the setting sun. His gaze, passing through that round window, rested on a group of servants at left flocking around a dying man, his face and hands completely blue, who had just fallen in convulsions into their arms.

The vision lasted but a short time and was followed by a fleeting intermission, which ended with this announcement from Carmichael:

“The echo in the Argyros woods sending Constantine Kanaris the scent of named flowers.”

Soreau, playing the famous seaman, stood in profile in the foreground, his hands cupped like a megaphone around his mouth.

Nearby, several companions held a pose of awed surprise.

Without moving, Soreau distinctly pronounced the word “rose,” which was soon repeated by a voice from the wings.

At the precise moment the echo sounded, an intense, penetrating smell of roses spread over Trophy Square, striking everyone’s nostrils at the same time then fading almost immediately.

The word “carnation,” which Soreau then uttered, yielded the same phonetic and olfactory response.

One by one, lilac, jasmine, lily of the valley, thyme, gardenia, and violet were named aloud, and each time the echo disseminated strong fragrances, in perfect accord with the obediently repeated word.

The curtains closed over this poetic scene, and the atmosphere promptly cleared itself of any intoxicating odors.

After a tedious wait, the next abruptly unveiled scene was indicated by Carmichael, who accompanied his gesture with this brief commentary:

“The fabulously wealthy prince Savellini, suffering from kleptomania, robs street hoodlums in the poor quarters of Rome.”

For the first time Soreau appeared in modern dress, wrapped in an elegant fur coat and decked with precious stones that sparkled at his necktie and his fingers. In front of him a circle of sinister-looking ruffians avidly surrounded two combatants armed with knives. Taking advantage of the onlookers' concentration, who were too fully absorbed in the duel to notice his presence, the man in the fur coat furtively explored their repellent pockets from behind, emptying them of their sordid contents. His thrusting hands now clutched an old, dented watch, a grimy change purse, and a large, checkered handkerchief still partially buried in the depths of a much-patched jacket.

When the supple, habitual closure had covered over this antithetical
fait divers
, Carmichael left his post, thereby bringing to an end the series of frozen tableaux.

The stage was soon returned to view for the entrance of the aging ballerina Olga Chervonenkov, an obese, mustached Latvian who, dressed in a tutu ornamented with leafage, made her appearance on the back of the elk Sladki, which she crushed under her considerable weight. The good-natured beast trudged across the boards, then, relieved of its corpulent rider, plodded back toward the wings, while the performer assumed first position for
The Nymph’s Dance
.

Her lips set in a smile, the former prima ballerina began a series of rapid turns, still showing certain vestiges of her past talent; beneath the stiff folds of her tulle skirt, her monstrous legs, squeezed into clinging pink tights, performed their practiced task with enough agility and remnants of grace to inspire justifiable surprise.

Suddenly, crossing the stage with tiny steps, both feet raised onto the point of their big toes, Olga fell heavily and cried out in anguish.

Doctor Leflaive left our group and, rushing onstage, diagnosed the lamentable condition of the patient, who had been immobilized by a
muscle cramp
.

Calling Hector and Tommy Boucharessas to assist him, the able doctor carefully lifted the unfortunate ballerina, who was carried offstage to receive the necessary care.

The moment the accident occurred, Talou, as if to prevent any interruption in the proceedings, had discretely given orders to Rao.

An immense choir suddenly rang out, composed of deep, vibrant male voices that buried poor Olga’s distant wails.

At this sound, everyone turned toward the west side of the square, in front of which the black warriors, squatting near the weapons they’d laid on the ground, all sang the “Jeroukka,” a kind of proud epic written by the emperor, who had taken as subject the detailed narrative of his own exploits.

The melody, with its bizarre rhythm and tone, was based on a single, fairly brief theme, repeated ad infinitum with new words each time.

The singers chanted each couplet, clapping their hands in unison as if they were a single man, and this glorious lament, executed with a certain opulence and character, produced a rather grandiose impression.

Nonetheless, the constant repetition of the single, eternally unvaried musical phrase gradually gave rise to an intense monotony, accentuated by the inevitable opportunities for prolongation offered by the “Jeroukka,” a faithful and exhaustive record of the life of the emperor, whose notable deeds were many.

Completely inaccessible to European ears, the Ponukelean epic unfolded in garbled stanzas, no doubt relating many capital events, and night gradually fell without any indication that the tedious drone might be nearing an end.

Suddenly, just as we were despairing of ever reaching the final verse, the choir stopped short and was replaced by a lovely soprano—a marvelous, penetrating voice that echoed purely in the already opaque twilight.

All eyes, seeking the spot from which this new performance originated, lit on Carmichael, who, standing at left before the front row of the chorus, thus completed the “Jeroukka” by phrasing solo, without changing a note of the musical motif, a supplemental canto devoted to the “Battle of the Tez.”

His remarkable head-voice, which flawlessly reproduced a female pitch, soared delightfully in the limitless acoustics of the open air, apparently unimpeded by the difficult pronunciation of the incomprehensible sounds composing the song.

But after several moments, Carmichael, initially so self-assured, faltered in his recital, his memory refusing to recall one word in the series of unintelligible syllables that he’d conscientiously learned by heart.

From a distance, Talou loudly whispered the fragment forgotten by the young Marseillais, who, picking up the narrative thread, continued without further hesitation to the end of the final couplet.

Immediately the emperor uttered several words to Sirdah, who, translating into excellent French the sentence her father had dictated, was forced to inflict three hours’ detention on Carmichael as punishment for his slight lapse.