my father found me at midnight rummaging under the pillows with the torch and he took it away from me. Nonetheless, he did not make any remarks and nor did he scold me. I think that for him the discovery had been so odd that he could find neither the words nor the morals that would have applied in the case of such an event.
A few years later, I saw in an anatomy book the photograph of a wax cast of the inner ear. All the canals, sinuses and cavities consisted of full matter, forming their positive image. This photograph made an exceeding impression upon me, almost to the point of faintness. In an instant I realised that the world might exist in a reality that was more authentic, as the positive structure of its empty spaces, so that everything that is hollowed out would become full, and actual reliefs would be transformed into voids of identical shape, without any content, like those delicate and bizarre fossils that reproduce in stone the traces of some shell or leaf which over the course of time has been macerated, leaving nothing but the sculpted, fine imprint of its outline.
In such a world people would no longer be multicoloured, fleshy excrescences, full of intricate and putrescible organs, but rather pure voids, floating like bubbles of air through water, through the warm, soft matter of the full universe. It was also the intrinsic and painful sensation that I often felt in adolescence, when throughout endless wanderings, I used suddenly to find myself in the midst of a terrible isolation, as if around me people and their houses had all of a sudden become gummed up in the compact and uniform jelly of a single material, in which I existed merely as a void that meaninglessly moved to and fro.
*
In ensemble, objects formed stage sets. The impression of the theatrical everywhere accompanied me with a feeling that everything was unfolding in the midst of a factitious and sad performance. When I sometimes escaped from the tedious, matte vision of a colourless world, its theatrical aspect would then appear, emphatic and old-fashioned.
Within the framework of this overall theatricality, there were other, more astonishing theatrical performances which drew me more because their artificiality and the actors playing in them seemed genuinely to understand the mystifying meaning of the world. They alone knew that in a stage-set universe of theatrical performance life had to be acted artificially and ornamentally. Such performances were the cinema and the wax museum.
Oh, the auditorium of the B Cinema, long and dim like a submerged submarine! The doors of the entrance were covered with crystal mirrors in which a part of the street was reflected. At the very entrance itself there was thus a free show, even before the one in the auditorium, an astounding screen on which the street flickered in a greenish dream-like light, with people and carriages that moved somnambulistically in its waters.
In the auditorium a reeking and acidic public baths sultriness reigned. The floor was made of cement and when the chairs were moved they made screeching noises like brief and desperate screams. In front of the screen a gallery of louts and idlers cracked sunflower seed husks between their teeth and commented aloud on the film. Dozens of voices simultaneously spelled out the titles syllable by syllable, like literacy classes at a school for adults. Directly below the screen an orchestra played, made up of a woman pianist, a violinist and an old Jew who energetically plucked the contrabass. That old man also had the task of emitting various sounds corresponding to the action on screen. He would cry out “cock-a-doodle-do” when at the beginning of the film there appeared the cockerel of the movie company, and once, I remember, when the life of Jesus was being depicted, at the moment of the resurrection he began frenetically to thump the body of his bass with the bow to imitate the heavenly thunderclaps.
I lived the episodes in the films with an extraordinary intensity, integrating myself into the action as a veritable character in the drama. It happened to me many times that the film would absorb my attention so much that all of a sudden I would imagine that I was walking through the parks on the screen, or that I was leaning against the balustrade of the Italian terraces on which Francisca Bertini was acting, with pathos, her hair untrammelled and her arms fluttering like scarves.
In the end, there is no well-defined difference between our real self and our various imaginary inner characters. When the lights came up in the interval, the auditorium would have an air of returning from afar. It was in a somewhat precarious and artificial atmosphere, much more uncertain and ephemeral than the performance on the screen. I used to close my eyes and wait until the mechanical munching sound of the apparatus announced that the film was about to continue; then I would find the auditorium in darkness once more and all the people around me, illumined indirectly by the screen, pale and transfigured like a gallery of marble statues in a museum lit by the moon at midnight.
On one occasion there was a fire in the cinema. The film reel had snapped and instantly burst into flames. For a few seconds, the flames were projected onto the screen, as if a candid warning that the cinema was burning. At the same time it was a logical extension of the projector’s role of presenting “the news”. Its mission had thus, in an excess of perfectionism, led it to present the final and most exciting news item of all, that of its own incineration. Screams erupted from every side, and short cries of “Fire! Fire!” rapped out like revolver shots. In an instant so much noise gushed from the auditorium that it seemed the audience, up until then in silence and darkness, had been doing nothing more than cramming itself with screams and uproar, like calm and innocuous accumulators which explode once their charge capacity is violently exceeded.
In a matter of minutes and before half of the auditorium could be evacuated, the “fire” was put out. Nevertheless, the audience continued to scream, as if they had to exhaust a certain quantity of energy once it had been released. A young miss, her cheeks powdered like a plaster cast, was shrieking stridently, looking me straight in the eyes, without making any movement or taking a single step toward the exit. A brawny lout, confident of the usefulness of his strength in such cases, but nonetheless not knowing how exactly to apply it, was picking up the wooden chairs one by one and hurling them at the screen. All of a sudden a loud and very resonant boom was heard; one chair had landed on the old musician’s contrabass. The cinema was full of surprises.
*
In summer, we would go into the matinee early and leave in the evening, as night was falling. The light outside would be altered; the remnants of the day had been extinguished. It was thus I ascertained that in my absence there had occurred in the world an event immense and essential, its sad obligation of always having to continue – by means of nightfall, for example – its repetitive, diaphanous and spectacular labour. In this way we would enter once more into the midst of a certitude that in its daily rigorousness seemed to me of an endless melancholy. In such a world, subject to the most theatrical effects and obligated every evening to perform a proper sunset, the people around me appeared like poor creatures to be commiserated for the seriousness with which they always busied themselves, the seriousness with which they believed so naïvely in whatever they did or felt. There was but one creature in the town who understood these things and for whom I held a respectful admiration: it was the town’s madwoman. She alone in the midst of rigid people crammed to the very tops of their heads with prejudices and conventions, she alone preserved her liberty to shout and to dance on the street whenever she wished. She went in rags on the street, corroded by grime, gap-toothed, her red hair dishevelled, holding in her arms with maternal tenderness an old coffer full of crusts of bread and various objects picked from the garbage.
She would show her sex to passers-by with a gesture which, had it been used for any other purpose, would have been called “full of elegance and style”. “How splendid, how sublime it is to be mad!” I used to say to myself, and I realised with unimaginable regret how many powerful, familiar, stupid habits and what a crushing, rational education separated me from the extreme freedom of a madman’s life.
I think that whoever has not had this sensation is condemned never to feel the true breadth of the world.
*
The
