“Jakub, trade with us! Jakub, sell to us!” they called out in unison, and those continually repeated cries fell into the rhythm of a chorus, which slowly became the melody of a refrain sung by every throat. My father conceded defeat. He jumped down from the high ledge and ran, shrieking, toward the barricades of cloth. He was grown gigantic with anger, his face bulging into a purple fist. He ran at the cloth ramparts like a prophet of war and began to rage against them. He pushed with all his might into the huge bales of wool and prised them from their places. He pushed his way with his whole body under the enormous bales of cloth and heaved them onto the counter, where they fell with a dull flop. The bales flew out into enormous banners, unwinding and fluttering in the air. The shelves burst forth from all sides with explosions of drapery, waterfalls of cloth, as if smote with Moses’ rod.
The cupboards’ reserves poured out, surging, flowing in broad rivers. The shelves’ colorful contents were disgorged; they grew; they increased; they flooded all of the counters and desks. The walls of the shop disappeared under the mighty formations of that cloth cosmogony, those mountain ranges towering into lofty peaks.
Wide valleys opened between those mountainsides, and the contours of continents thundered amid a broad pathos of uplands. The shop’s expanse widened into a panorama of an autumn landscape, full of lakes and distances, and against the backdrop of that scene, Father walked between the folds and valleys of a fantastic Canaan. He walked with great strides, his hands outspread prophetically in the clouds, and with inspired strokes he fashioned a country.
But down below, on the foothills of that Sinai grown out of Father’s anger, the multitudes were gesticulating and transgressing, worshipping Baal, and trading. They grasped whole handfuls of those soft folds; they draped themselves in that colored cloth; they wound themselves up in improvised carnival masks and mantles, and chattered profusely, albeit unintelligibly.
My father, grown tall with anger, rose over those groups of traders. With a powerful word he reproved their idolatry from on high. Seized by despair, he clambered onto the high gallery of the cupboards and ran madly over the beams of their shelves, over the clattering planks of their bare scaffolding, pursued by an image of shameless licentiousness which he sensed behind his back, deep inside the house. The shop assistants had now reached the iron balcony at the kitchen window, and clinging to the balustrade, had seized Adela by the waist and were pulling her out of the window, her eyelids fluttering and her slender legs in silk stockings trailing behind her.
And as my father’s gestures of fur—in his mortification at the odiousness of sin—became as one with the menace of the landscape, Baal’s carefree multitude down below began to succumb to immoderate gaiety. Some parodistic passion, some pestilence of laughter, had taken possession of that mob. But how could one expect solemnity of them, that multitude of doorknockers and nutcrackers! How could one expect those hand-mills, incessantly grinding out a colored pulp of words, to comprehend Father’s great concerns? Deaf to the thunder of his prophetic anger, those dealers in their silk frogged coats squatted in small clusters around the folded foothills of the material, where they thrashed out, effusively and amid laughter, the merits of the merchandise. Those black marketeers eagerly besmirched the noble substance of the landscape; they ground it up into a hash of idle talk, and all but consumed it.
Elsewhere stood groups of Jews in colored gabardines and huge fur kalpaks, before the high waterfalls of bright material. These were the men of the High Council, gentlemen venerable and full of solemnity, stroking their long, well-kept beards and conducting quiet, diplomatic conversations. But even in the midst of that ceremonious talk there was a flash of smiling irony in the looks that they exchanged.
Among those groups, the vulgar multitude wound its way, an amorphous crowd, a mob without faces or identities. They began to fill the gaps in the landscape; they carpeted its background with bluebells and rattle-boxes of mindless chattering. They were a clownish element, a crowd of Pulcinellas and Arlecchinos, dancing with abandon, who reduced to absurdity with their clownish pranks, lacking as they did the serious intentions of traders, the occasional transactions that were entered into. But gradually, grown bored with their clownishness, that cheerful little multitude began to disband among the further regions of the landscape and slowly became lost there amid its stone curves and valleys. Perhaps they had fallen somewhere, one after the other, between the folds and crevices of that terrain, like children in the corners and nooks of an apartment who are weary of revelry on the night of a ball.
Meanwhile, the Town Fathers, the men of the Great Sanhedrin, strolled in solemn and dignified groups, conducting quiet and profound disputes. Dispersed throughout that great, mountainous country, they wandered in twos and threes on its remote, winding roads, and that whole desert upland was populated with their dark, tiny silhouettes, above which a dark and heavy sky sagged, cloudy and folded, ploughed into long, parallel furrows, silver and white slices, exhibiting in its profundities the ever more distant layers of its stratification.
The lamplight created an artificial day in that country, a strange day, a day with no morning or evening.
My father slowly grew calm. His anger settled, cooled down in the layers and strata of the landscape. He was now sitting in the galleries of the high shelves and gazing out into an immense country passing into autumn. He could see people out fishing on distant lakes. Those fishermen sat in pairs in little cockleshell boats, casting their nets into the water. Boys on the banks carried baskets on their heads, filled with a flapping, silvery catch.
Then he noticed groups of wanderers in the distance, turning their heads to the sky and pointing at something with upraised hands.
And the sky broke out in a colorful, teeming rash; it spilled over with undulating smears, which grew, developed, and rapidly filled the sky with a strange multitude of birds. They circled and wheeled in great, overlapping spirals, and the whole sky was filled with their soaring flights, the flapping of their wings and the majestic lines of their quiet gliding. Some were floating, like enormous storks, unmoving on calmly outspread wings, whilst others, reminiscent of colorful plumes waving in barbarian adulation, flapped clumsily and heavily to remain aloft on currents of warm air. Others, finally, inept conglomerations of wings, huge legs and plucked necks, called to mind badly stuffed vultures and condors with sawdust spilling out of them. Among them were two-headed birds, many-winged birds, and cripples, hobbling in the air in ungainly one-winged flight. The sky began to resemble an old fresco, full of abnormities and fantastic beasts, which circled, crossed each other’s paths, and returned once more in colorful ellipses.
My father, bathed in sudden radiance, hoisted himself aloft by the joists. He stretched out his hands, calling to the birds with an old incantation. Filled with emotion, he recognized them: it was the remote, forgotten progeny of that avian generation which Adela, once upon a time, had driven off to every fringe of the sky. And now it had returned, degenerate and luxuriant, that artificial progeny, that internally wasted avian tribe. Grown preposterously huge, a stupidly shot up manifestation, they were empty and lifeless inside. All the energy of those birds had gone into their plumage, expanded into fantasticality. They resembled some museum of disused species—rejects of bird paradise. Some were flying on their backs; they had heavy, ungainly beaks, like padlocks or zip fasteners, weighted down with colored excrescences, and they were blind. How that unexpected return affected Father! How he marveled at their avian instinct, their attachment to their Master, whom that banished tribe had kept like a legend in their souls, finally to return after many generations to their primæval homeland, on the last day before the extinction of their tribe.
But those blind, paper birds could no longer recognize Father. He called to them in vain with the old incantation, in forgotten avian speech. They heard him not, nor did they see him.
Suddenly stones began to whistle through the air. It
was the jesters, the stupid and mindless tribe. They had begun to aim projectiles into the fantastic avian sky.
In vain, Father called the alert. In vain, he tried to warn them with imploring gestures. They could not catch his words. They could not make him out. And the birds fell. Each one, struck by a projectile, drooped ponderously and sagged in the air. Before they hit the ground they were nothing but ill-proportioned clumps of feathers.
That upland was strewn in the blinking of an eye with that strange, fantastic carrion. Before Father could reach the site of the massacre, the whole magnificent avian brood lay dead, scattered over the rocks. Only now, at close quarters, could Father perceive how utterly paltry was that impoverished generation, how truly comical its tawdry anatomy. They were enormous bunches of feathers, old carcasses stuffed any old how. Many had no discernible head, since that club-shaped part of their body bore no indications of a soul. Some were coated with fur, clotted with a pelage, like bison, and they stunk abominably. Others were reminiscent of hunchbacked, bald and sickly camels. And others, finally, were apparently made of a kind of paper, empty inside, albeit magnificently colored on the outside. And some, at close quarters, were shown to be nothing more than huge peacock tails, colored fans, into which, by incomprehensible means, some semblance of life had been breathed.
I saw my father’s woeful return. The artificial day had already begun to take on the hues of an ordinary morning. In the ravaged shop, the highest shelves were replete with the colors of a morning sky. Among the fragments of a dead landscape painting, in the devastated wings of a nocturnal stage, Father saw the shop assistants rising from their sleep. They rose from among the bales of cloth and yawned to the sunshine. Upstairs in the kitchen, Adela, warm from sleep, her hair tousled, was grinding coffee in a mill, pressing it to her white bosom, from which the grindings derived their sheen and their heat. The cat washed itself in the sunshine.
Fernand Demoustier (1906–1945), who wrote under the name Fernand Dumont, was a Belgian poet and writer best known for his surrealist works. In 1940, he wrote an essay, “Treatise on Fairies,” for his newborn daughter that discusses various aspects of fairies and the fairy world. “The Influence of the Sun” was one of his best-known pieces, for a writer who today is largely forgotten. His work was admired by André Breton, the founder of the surrealism movement. He perished in Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp, during World War II.
The Influence of the Sun
Fernand Dumont
Translated by Gio Clairval
RECENTLY THE SURPRISING STORY has been going around of a couple who decided to live without in the least taking into consideration what could be happening, thought, or said in the town where chance had brought them together despite most categorical opposition from their parents. They must have been, so people declare, in a best-of-three match with the sun, for it was impossible to meet them in any season without seeing on their faces, hands, and hair that special light generally there only on persons returning from vacation.
Certain individuals, who had had the extraordinary privilege of getting into their home on one pretext or another, affirmed that it was full of and even cluttered with shining objects of strange shape for which they had not been able to discover the use or necessity. Others claimed that certain rooms on the first floor (into which they had not had occasion to go, but had been able to steal a glance, on the sly, thanks to a door having been left accidentally half open) offered a spectacle such as you could not conceive, they were arranged in such a singular way, were decorated with such inexplicably phosphorescent wall paintings, and had such an unusual and novel appearance that, really, one had to give up trying to describe them.
These people were closely questioned all the same, but, as was to be expected, their contradictory and confused explanations, far from allaying curiosity, aggravated it to the point where soon, all over town, people no longer spoke of anything else. Those who were most curious, the very ones who, for personal reasons they could not admit to, had always defended the principle of the inviolability of the home, went so far as to advocate use of the worst pretexts, so as to be done with this aggravating enigma.
It did no good.
The bogus beggars, the obsequious canvassers, the make-believe bailiffs ran into the polite but categorical refusal of an obstinately closed door. And so they had to bow to the facts, whether they liked it or not, but with that unconfessed confidence they persist in placing in the outcome of events, with that secret hope that in the end events one day will take a favorable turn; but the days slipped by one after the other without bringing the least response that that immense collective curiosity could feed on, and nothing, in truth, was more exasperating than finding oneself everywhere in the presence of that couple, telling oneself that all one had to do was question them to get to the bottom of the matter, and doing no more than tell oneself so and repeat it to oneself, for no one would have risked doing this, since the couple seemed to have, in the highest degree, that attitude made up of coldness, indifference, and disdain which instantly discourages the most determined of people.
Then people tried not to think about it any more, to tell themselves they had been the sport of an illusion or victims of a bad joke, that after all those two were like everybody else and that one would have to be very credulous to lend an attentive ear to such talk, but all that was to no avail, it was no use crying “hoax,” speaking of other matters, opening a newspaper or going for a walk, people discovered with some amazement that it was impossible not to think of it any more.
People were on the point of seizing control when, one day, as if they had guessed it was important to strike an attitude, the couple moved among the crowd letting something like a long scarf float behind them, a wake in which all who passed could not but think of the silence, scarcely interrupted by the distant crowing of the first rooster, of an April dawn in an orchard full of dew.
The news spread like wildfire and gave rise, as you can imagine, to the most diversified comments. While some claimed it was a matter of the purely chemical production of a perfume with the distillation of which the shining objects glimpsed in the secret house must have something to do, others, on the basis of vague considerations of a psychic order, gave free rein to their confusional thought, deducing with a rough appearance of truth, that everyone was facing a manifestation of an immaterial order that must be connected with the well-known phenomenon of thought transference, and most with their customary pettiness, persisted in locating the importance of the whole question in the wretched point of knowing whether the phenomenon was material or not, in centering all their hopes on getting this trifling thing dear, incapable as they were of realizing for a single instant the overwhelming significance of this thing that had never come about before.
If it was quickly established through many witnesses that they were dealing with a phenomenon perceptible to everybody, no one proved capable of explaining its origin and nature.
The depositions did not provide the conclusive element. Most of them betrayed almost total indigence so far as investigative means are concerned, but they made it possible nevertheless to establish that the phenomenon, fluid or perfume, acted in the same way upon everybody. No one spoke of dusk, or of a pine forest, of a farmyard, or of a September mist. The measure of agreement was surprising. It made no difference whether it was midwinter, whether one was in the midst of a crowd, in the hubbub of an intersection initialed by railroad switches, it made no difference whether one was taken up with the most absorbing preoccupations, with the most animated conversations, with the most secret women, all one needed was to pass through the couple’s wake, as the earth passes through the cone of shadow during an eclipse, to find oneself in the presence of that reverie which encroaches like bindweed.
The authorities remained defenseless for, even showing that notorious bad faith they never fail to manifest toward anything that, in any way, can look like disturbing e
stablished order, it was still practically impossible for them to give the couple’s movements the felonious interpretation that could have justified the inquisitorial measures impatiently demanded.
However, more scandalously beautiful than an indecent assault, more provocative than a shout of laughter in a lighted church, more indifferent than the path of a cyclone, the couple moved about the town letting that unforgettable atmosphere float behind them that corresponds exactly, I have said, to the silence (scarcely interrupted by the distant crowing of the first rooster) of the dawn of a very fine April day in an orchard full of dew. Then people decided to appeal to specialists and were astonished to find that not a single one existed in the whole world. Thanks to their insistence, a few mystified psychiatrists made it known that they would immediately hold an extraordinary convention in the town, with the purpose of examining the question, but the very morning of their arrival a thick fog suddenly came down over the town.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 147