A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause

by Shawn Wen

  Idol:

  The Chancay (1100 to 1400 AD) culture developed along the central coast of Peru. Their ceramic dolls were usually women, almost exclusively black and white, rough to the touch. Cuchimilco figure, a symbol of fertility with her engorged belly, her dark nipples, and her short, useless arms.

  Vase:

  Chimú ceramics, rubbed against rocks until they shined, were made for domestic use and funeral offerings. The Chimú (700 to 1400 AD) worshipped the moon, to which they sacrificed their children, animals, and birds. Terra cotta man with tiny head and round belly, resembling a hen.

  COLLECTIONS: PAINTINGS

  Mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century. Oil on canvas, oak board, copper. One marked with blood. Mostly European. École Français, École Flamande, École Genoise. Some of the brushwork was fine and some was sloppy.

  There’s Susanna and the Elders, an apocryphal story from the Book of Daniel. Look at young Susanna stepping out of the bath in her husband’s backyard, wearing only a necklace.

  Here’s an imagined erotic scene from the violent Greek myth, Diana and Actaeon. The nude Diana wraps her arms around Actaeon’s thigh. She whispers a curse into his ear, and he leans back to listen.

  A strange painting called The Costume Ball. The partygoers hold hands. Men and women, their smiling faces illuminated by warm light. They dance in circles. They gossip in twos and threes. Actually, no one is in costume at all except the clown Harlequin, alone and slouching in the foreground.

  M. VERSUS M.

  Marceau plays seventeen characters. The film is all Marceau. Multiples of Marceau. Ghosts of Marceau. Marceau talking to Marceau. Marceau stealing from Marceau. Marceau dreaming of Marceau. Marceau captaining Marceau. This is star power. This is color.

  He is a swimmer who dips his feet into an empty pool. Slowly he lowers his body. Standing firmly on two legs, he imitates the freestyle. The camera shoots him from beneath, so that he’s all wrinkles and nostrils. An old man.

  He wanders through an empty ship. He has an elaborate set stripped of props. As the captain who stands in an engine room crowded with navigational tools, Marceau mimes a telescope. As a crew member who cleans the ship’s wooden deck, Marceau mimes the mop. As the bartender who stands at a stocked bar, Marceau mimes the wine bottle. He’s a passenger sitting at a table crowded with fine china, but without food or silverware.

  Marceau plays dress-up: Starts off as a stowaway, chest hair poking out of his ragged shirt. Now a gentleman in a tux. Then he appears as a captain in uniform. He comes to you in drag as an old lady. She wears a hat overflowing with fruit.

  The camera lens is unforgiving, abrupt. His gestures are cut off. The characters stare at one another. The camera follows their gazes. Marceaus watch other Marceaus, their eyes gleaming with suspicion.

  Find a pink handkerchief. Pick it up. Find the girl who lost her handkerchief. Pick her up.

  The handkerchief belongs to a young woman. She is dressed head-to-toe in pink. All the Marceaus take notice. They vie for her.

  Terry Goldman was a twenty-two-year-old drama student at Moorhead State College in Minnesota. Her only previous role was in the chorus of a school musical. Marceau noticed her working backstage when he performed at Moorhead, and he asked her to appear in his film.

  The girl heads back to her room on the ocean liner. Marceau, our captain, follows. She opens the door with a skeleton key. When he rounds the corner, the only trace left of her is a pink handkerchief on the floor. Captain Marceau picks it up delicately.

  Another Marceau, this time the well-dressed gentleman, sees her in the ballroom. He lays his hand around her waist and they dance. She is pretty and glassy-eyed as he leans in to kiss her.

  COLLECTIONS: JAPANESE DOLLS

  Two geriatrics

  Two empresses

  One princess

  Two archers

  One old man holding a bow and arrows

  Five samurai

  One actor dressed as a samurai

  One actor and one actress, both wearing Noh masks

  SCENE 13

  A sign is propped up stage left of the devil: Pride.

  Marceau wears a newspaper folded in the shape of Napoléon’s bicorn hat. He assumes a wide stance, legs straddled apart. He twists a mustache around his finger and takes a minute to admire the medals that decorate his jacket. He paces the stage, walking in stiff, controlled strides, each step punctuated with an audible stomp.

  The dusty pink backdrop is streaked with purple and orange, like a striking sunset. The stage floor is pale yellow.

  As he walks, the general leads slightly with his head, approaching a chessboard to make a move. He stares rather patronizingly at his opponent and gestures with his hand, Well, you go ahead. An air of ease and leisure. Looking down at the board, he chuckles to himself.

  Then his opponent’s maneuver makes him flinch. Double take, thumps his chest in frustration. With each successive move he shows more strain. His hand stutters, unsure where to land. He side-eyes his opponent. Puts on a monocle to scrutinize the board. Tugs at his collar. Grimaces. His opponent makes another move, and he waves his hands as if to say, No, I’m out. He’s above this, turns to go, then paces back. Again his heavy footfalls reverberate. He scans the board, as if hoping to make a strategic play, but instead flips the table. Stands there defiantly, pointing to the distance, daring his opponent to walk away. Happily he watches the man’s exit, relieved to be alone.

  AN INTERVIEW

  I’m not sorry.

  You should be sorry.

  I’m not sorry.

  Two hundred shows a year

  “Family is not important to me. I have no time to be a family father. If I had, I would have stayed in the same town. I would not have toured the world.”

  Being there is enough.

  I was there.

  Where?

  Elsewhere.

  Three hundred shows a year

  Better than dead.

  Not so.

  Better.

  “Marcel Marceau has no private life,” said his brother, Alain Mangel, who served as his manager. The reporter Aljean Harmetz described Alain as expansive and chunky: “His kinship is—if not exactly hidden—definitely not publicized.”

  SCENE 14

  Second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21. Marceau begins with limbs folded. He’s on his knees, fists knotted in front of his face. As he rises, we can see that his feet are turned out balletically. Interlaced fingers release from their tight snarl, and arms undulate like ocean waves. He transforms from water to fish, bringing his hands together, thumbs like tiny flippers.

  “A body rendered obedient,” said Decroux. He taught his students to isolate each unit of the body. “The image of the ideal actor” was a marionette. Marceau learned to unfasten his head from neck, neck from collarbone, collarbone from rib cage. Now each finger moves independently. If I do the fish, I become the fish, I breathe the water.

  Next, one hand portrays earth. Another, a shoot springing from the soil. Marceau holds his arms out as branches. The Tree of Life appears before us, populated by birds and insects. He folds inward then rises, this time as Adam, pieced together out of dust. Man takes his first steps, looks around. In sleep, he clutches his rib, and out springs Eve. Again, Marceau gestures the hourglass figure.

  Behold her womanly beauty! Adam and Eve walk in place, holding hands. His left hand writhes in the shape of a serpent; the reptile’s dirty mouth whispering temptations into Eve’s ear. She gazes upon the snake with intrigue and clutches the forbidden fruit. Eve falls backwards—the mime performing a deep backbend, crown of his head grazing the floor. Cowering on the ground, Adam and Eve hold each other—though we see only one. They face an angry God and take their first steps out of Eden.

  A TWENTY MINUTE SILENCE FOLLOWED BY APPLAUSE

  Sound travels like water, flows into our bodies through inlets and ears. You don’t have earlids, after all. We take it in. Flesh absorbs vibratio
ns. Noise beats at your bowels. It taps softly at the roots of tiny hairs that cover your skin. It can tickle or nauseate. The force is invisible, a ghost. Sound agitates your nerves, wind blowing against stalks of grain.

  As we watch the mime’s expressive form, we lose awareness of our own. We forget to breathe. Thank God our lungs inflate and deflate on their own.

  This is why—at performance end—we scream, stomp our feet, and throw our hands together. And we violently reawaken to our bodies.

  OTHER WORKS

  In Marceau’s painting, a mass of faces gaze directly ahead. Hundreds if not thousands of little specks representing people in the far distance. An audience, if you will. Their eyes all focused. Many have stage makeup applied—painted cheeks, dark lipstick. A few are Pierrots, a few nude women with big, round nipples. Their faces are placid, cast in a pink glow.

  Another is tinted blue. Again, the mass of faces, eyes forward. Each mouth forms a wide, toothy grin. It’s sinister. There are no Pierrots this time, but many in the audience directly resemble Marceau with his wiry hair, deep-set eyes, big nose. Again, the big-chested women in front, barely contained by their bras.

  Bip at the Circus. Bip in the Crowd. Bip in the Country. In Bip’s Dream, he flies over the tiny city in a dark blue night. In Bip’s Arrest, a cop apprehends him in front of a crowd of people, in a glowing red city. The Death of Pierrot and the Birth of Bip. Bip Is Possessed by His Dreams. Vultures Scrutinize Bip. Bip’s Imitators. The Angel Bip Rises. Two paintings called Bip’s Despair.

  CLIVE BARNES ON MATERIALISM

  “How we love the invisible mantel shelves he so casually leans against.”

  SCENE 15

  All the clichés, the jokes, mimes trapped in invisible boxes come down to this: a man walks along and hits an invisible wall. He jumps back. He can’t see the wall, but he can feel it.

  He reaches as high as he can and recognizes that the wall extends far above him. He puts one hand forward, then the other, then takes a step. Two hands forward, another step. His eyes light up only as he learns to navigate—feeling around corners, turning ninety degrees, looking for an exit. His mood turns from confounded to desperate. He pounds the surface of the wall with his fist.

  The man finds an opening and tries to pry it open. He sticks his head in and looks from side to side. Climbs, shoulders first, and begins walking again. Almost immediately, he smacks into a second wall, stunned by the impact. Again he searches the perimeter, rounding the corners of this secondary space.

  As he goes deeper, the room shrinks, evidenced by the actor’s increasingly constricted movements. The man is shrinking as well. Finally he dies, body folded into a knot.

  Seeing is a way of possessing. With our eyes, we have what we desire. We are in control.

  But when we watch the mime, desire turns to envy. Our limbs are incapable of such articulation. Our muscles cannot call upon so deep a vocabulary.

  We’re jealous of the volume and range of his movements. We cannot even mimic the gestures. Bip’s passions are not for us.

  M. WRITES ABOUT M.

  Marcel Marceau signed a deal in 1965 to write an autobiography. He titled it My Silent Cry. It was slated for release in 1970.

  In 1983, he said in an interview, “Now they are desperate. But I don’t think the book is late. It’s ripe to come out now. I feel I’m in my prime. If I had died during the sixties I would not have been ‘achieved.’ I know time is running out. I have now ten years of full power. If I’m not better now than I was ten years ago I would have stopped. How could I tell? The public.”

  By 2007, the year he died, the memoir was still not published. And the world never knew what Marcel Marceau wept for, openly or privately, silently or aloud.

  BIP THE STOIC

  He doesn’t exactly “take it like a man.” Too sensitive for that. When the butterfly’s wings stop beating, when it wilts in his fingers, when it devolves to more insect and less flower, the corners of Bip’s lips tilt. His eyes hollow out. He turns into a mannequin. But he doesn’t cry.

  Bip’s predecessor Pedrolino was the baby of the mime family. He bawled when his wife Franceschina was unfaithful, guilt-ridden over crimes he did not commit. He sobbed when he was caught and punished for playing tricks on Pantaloon and the Doctor, tricks he himself was tricked into playing. He lamented when he was beaten by his masters. He blubbered when he was given a plate of spaghetti, tears streaming down his face with each bite.

  SCENE 16

  He is not exactly a comedian. Not a tragedian. He swings between these two poles. His face is a metronome, his mouth its needle.

  COLLECTIONS: CLOCKS

  He had seventeen:

  Nine of them were gold.

  One had a blue enamel sky and cherubs circling the dial.

  Another was engraved with butterflies.

  One was actually a sundial.

  One was a train conductor’s watch.

  The watches were mostly from the 1800s, but one was from the reign of Napoléon III and another from the reign of Louis XVI.

  They were signed by the watchmakers: Gille Boisdechesne, Vacheron Constantin, Courtecuisse, Johan Schrettegger in Augsburg, Joslin and Park.

  The Breguet was a fake. (Did Marceau know?)

  You are ever the beholder, the authority, the eye.

  He is always performer, the perceived, a puppet doomed to traffic in symbols, a constant stream of new gestures to calcify cliché. He is the life-sized marionette, tumbling for our amusement.

  His fingers tickle at your ribs. You shudder and sigh. You are a bag of hot air, squeezed in his grip. Maybe he was in charge all along.

  What happens then?

  You call him genius, master, icon, greatest.

  And he agrees: “I know what I am worth. If Marcel Marceau did not know what he was worth, he would be in trouble.”

  M. ON MOST MIMES

  On Marcel Marceau’s second tour of America, he returned to find mimes trapped in imaginary boxes on every street corner. Mimes at Thirty-Fourth and Eighth. Mimes at Forty-Sixth and Seventh. Mimes in Central Park. Mimes at Lincoln Center.

  A journalist asked Marcel Marceau what he thought of the copycats.

  Marceau responded, “It’s better than mugging people.”

  A journalist asked Marcel Marceau why most Americans hate mime.

  Marceau responded, “Because most mimes are lousy.”

  Marcel Marceau said, “A great artist in mime has pupils with whom he works regularly, often throughout his whole life, and who in turn carry on the traditions they have learned from their master. But sometimes, when the mime gets old and dies, and his pupils have become very few, the art fades into obscurity. We have to wait for a great new artist to arrive to carry on the tradition and add his own work of advancement.”

  He lobbied the French government for ten years to build a mime school. Thirteen times, he asked for an audience with President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

  “Either France will give me a subsidy or I will go to America. France owes this to me.”

  Two American universities offered to fund the mime school. In 1978, France gave him two hundred thousand dollars.

  He said, “If it had been done in America, it would have been two million. I would have said yes, but I am a masochist.”

  The Marcel Marceau International School of Mimodrama no longer exists. The building still stands on rue René Boulanger. A dance studio.

  Marcel Marceau said, “I knew I would die one day. I didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, he was the only mime in existence.’”

  COLLECTIONS: PERFORMING DOLLS

  A set of shadow puppets from 1890.

  Two mechanical dolls also from the late nineteenth century. The woman is dressed like a trickster, the man like a Renaissance-era patrician. They were meant to be mounted onto a street organ, striking their carillon bells in time. But for now they stand unanchored. The man’s instrument is missing, so his hand is suspended holding air.

 
Wind-up Turkish magician from the French manufacturer La Maison Rambour, circa 1898. Baby face, glassy blue eyes, and an open mouth. He’s porcelain, dressed in a turban. When you crank him up, he lifts a silk pouch to reveal a snake hiding underneath. He sticks out his tongue in surprise and waves his wand to wish the serpent away.

  COLLECTIONS: SACRED DOLLS

  Eighteenth-century Burma: statuette of a monk holding his hands in anjali mudra position.

  Eighteenth-century Cambodia: bronze torso of Vishvakarman, the creator, meditating in dhyana mudra position.

  Twentieth-century Tibet: the wrathful god Mahakala with three heads and six arms, one broken hand.

  Nineteenth- and twentieth-century China:

  Buddha gilded in lacquered wood, sitting between two Guanyin Bodhisattva.

  A divinity seated on a lion’s back.

  Three Gods of War.

  European gods and saints, carved from wood, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century:

  God the Father, crowned and sitting on a throne. The hem of his red robe grazes the floor. A disheveled old man, loose gray hair held in place by a heavy crown. Shards are chipped off from his high forehead and narrow nose.

  Saint George on horseback, towering over a tiny, doomed dragon.

  Saint Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar, his saber still drawn.

  Saint Anne instructing the Virgin. The paint has worn off both women, and the Virgin’s head is missing. Anne’s voluminous cloak is suspended in motion, as if tossed by an incessant wind.

  Two baby Jesuses manufactured in different countries. The Italian Lord and Savior has a fat belly, his infant dick dangling. He’s at play, distracted by some wonder of nature. The Spaniard is pious, thin, and swaddled in a baggy diaper. He looks forward, provocation in his eyes.