The crowd wheeled round, passing one after another areas of maximum illumination and regions of darkness, like the moon in my geography book, which alternately traversed typographical zones of black and white.
Above all we would enter the small and poorly lit booths, with few performers, lacking even a roof, where my father could negotiate at the entrance a reduced, group fee with the director, for our entire, numerous family.
The whole performance there would have something makeshift and uncertain about it. The cold night breeze blew over the audience’s heads and on high, all the stars gleamed glassily in the sky above us. We were lost in a fairground booth, astray in the chaos of night, in the minuscule point of a planet in space. In that point, on that planet, people and dogs were performing on a stage; people were tossing various objects into the air and catching them, dogs were leaping through hoops and walking on their hind paws. Where were all these things taking place? The sky above us seemed even vaster…
On one occasion, in one of those impoverished booths, an artiste offered the audience a prize of five thousand lei to anyone who could imitate the sensational and very simple act he was about to perform. There were only five persons sitting on the audience benches. A fat gentleman, whom I had long known as a peerless miser, astonished by this unheard-of chance to win such an enormous sum in a mere fairground booth, quickly changed places, moving a number of benches closer to the stage, determined to follow with the most exacting attention the performer’s every move, so that he could then reproduce them and win the prize.
There followed a few moments of terrible silence.
The artiste came to the edge of the stage: “Gentlemen”, he said hoarsely, “I am about to blow cigarette smoke out of my throat”. He lit a cigarette and taking his hand from his collar, where he had been holding it all the while, he blew fine trails of bluish smoke through the orifice of an artificial larynx, with which he had presumably been fitted following an operation. The gentleman on the front benches was left bewildered and embarrassed: his face turned red as far as the ears and returning to his former place he muttered loudly, through gritted teeth: “Well, of course, it’s no wonder, if he has a contraption in his throat!”
The artiste replied imperturbably from the stage:
“Well, well, be my guest”, perhaps truly disposed to grant the prize to any fellow sufferer…
In such booths, to earn their daily bread, pale and haggard old men would swallow stones and soap before the audience, young girls would contort their bodies, and anaemic and emaciated children, laying aside the corncobs they were nibbling, would climb onto the stage and dance, shaking bells tied to sticks.
In the daytime, immediately after lunch, in the blazing heat of the sun, the desolation of the fair was boundless. The immobility of the wooden fairground horses, with their boggling eyes and bronzed manes, somehow acquired the terrible melancholy of petrified life. From the booths came a warm smell of food, while a lone hurdy-gurdy, somewhere in the distance, insisted on pouring out its wheezing waltz, out of whose chaos, from time to time, would spurt a metallically whistling note, like a sudden “jet d’eau”, high and slender, spouting from the mass of a water basin.
I used to like to linger for hours in front of the photographers’ booths, contemplating the unknown persons, in groups or alone, petrified and smiling, in front of grey landscapes with cataracts and distant mountains. All these personages, due to their common backdrop, seemed members of the same family on an excursion to the same picturesque place, where they had been photographed one after another.
On one occasion, in such a display case, I came across my own photograph. That sudden encounter with myself, immobilised in a fixed attitude, there at the edge of the fair, had a depressing effect upon me.
Before arriving in my town, it had, of course, also travelled through other places unknown to me. In an instant I had the sensation of not existing except in a photograph. This inversion of mental positions often happened to me in the most divers circumstances. It would sneak up on me and all of a sudden transform my body from within. In an accident on the street, for example, I gazed for a number of minutes at what was happening as though at a hackneyed performance. All of a sudden, however, the entire perspective changed and – as in that game which consists in descrying a bizarre animal in the paint on the walls, which one day we can no longer find, because we see in its place, made up of the same decorative elements, a statue, a woman or a landscape – in that street accident, although everything remained intact, it was suddenly as if I was the one who was lying stretched on the ground and saw everything from my position as the person knocked down, from below, from the centre to the periphery, and with the vivid sensation of the blood trickling out of me. Likewise, without any effort, as a logical consequence of the mere fact that I was looking, I used to imagine myself in the cinema, experiencing the intimacy of the scenes on the screen. And it was exactly in this way that I saw myself in front of the photographer’s booth, from the position of the one peering unflinchingly from the cardboard.
The whole of my life, the life of the one standing in the flesh and blood outside the glass display case, all of a sudden appeared to me indifferent and insignificant, just as to the living person behind the glass the voyage of his photographic ‘I’ through unknown towns also appears absurd.
In the same way in which the photograph that represented me wandered from place to place contemplating through the grimy and dusty pane of glass vistas that were ever new, so too I, on this side of the glass, forever perambulated a personage similar to myself from place to place, forever looking at new things and forever unable to understand anything of them. The fact that I moved, that I was alive, could be nothing more than a mere occurrence, an occurrence that had no meaning, because, just as I existed on this side of the glass display, I could also exist on the other side, with the same pale face, with the same eyes, with the same lustreless hair, all the things which in the mirror assembled me into a fleeing, bizarre, incomprehensible figure.
It was thus that there came from the exterior various warnings, immobilising me and abruptly snatching me away from everyday comprehension. They stupefied me, rooted me to the spot, and summed up in an instant the whole of the world’s pointlessness.
Everything appeared to me in that instant chaotic, just as when listening to a brass band and stopping my ears and then ungluing my fingers for an instant, the music would seem in that instant pure noise.
I would wander through the fair all day and especially through the surrounding field, where the artistes and freaks from the booths gathered around a cauldron of maize porridge. They were dishevelled and dirty, having descended from their beautiful stage sets and nocturnal existences as acrobats, bodiless women and mermaids into the promiscuous mush and irremediable wretchedness of their humanity. What had seemed admirable in front of the booths, untrammelled and even sumptuous, here, at the back, in the light of day, sank back into petty and uninteresting familiarity, the same as the rest of the world.
One day, I witnessed the funeral of the child of one of the itinerant photographers.
The doors of the diorama were wide open and inside, in front of a photographic backdrop, the open coffin lay across two chairs.
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