by Susan Daitch
“You’d only wear a mask if it were lined with a mirror.”
“Shut up Antoine.”
They heard the clacking sound of Bernard closing up his shop, and he finally called out to them that the doors had to be locked.
Fabien left Renard and Antoine in front of a café, walking south as it grew dark. They made no arrangements to meet again. He walked until he came to the building that he thought was hers. Fabien stumbled at the entrance as if drunk. The statue of Hermes was barely visible in the shadows. He thought he saw the boy in the checkered vest and the woman from the cellar printers huddled together under a street light, smoking and whispering, but he couldn’t be sure. He walked on.
He saw a stuffed pigeon in a poulterer’s window. It was part of a display of feathered birds hovering and nesting beside those which lay plucked and raw on beds of ice. This particular bird sat beside a nest but was posed similarly to the one stolen from the wax museum. Was the merchant connected to the vandals? Even whisper the name, Captain D . . . and many clamored for the guillotine. Many citizens would have wanted to deface the Dreyfus tableau, yet the museum didn’t have a guard patrolling the display’s proscenium, and so, it was a ready-made effigy, easily destroyed. Fabien looked at the arrangement of expensive food with a revolutionary’s fascination regarding bourgeois wealth before the rock was thrown, but then entering the shop self-consciously, he bought the display bird. Ice clung to its feet and, although it was wrapped in paper, the melting ice left wet patches on his trousers as he sat in a cab on his way to the train station.
Star Films was deserted at night. He walked past racks of prison garb and army uniforms, a train wreck, half-painted, half-constructed. Light was dimly reflected in its broken windows. Bluette sat perched on the jumble of wreckage, her fluffy hair framed by two enormous rubber ears. If she hadn’t been wearing them he would have assumed she was waiting for the sleepwalker or the astronaut or the cheese, but she looked so absurd, her head sandwiched between two elephant-sized human ears. She might have been waiting for someone and deliberately wanted to be deaf to the man’s approach, to be surprised. He whispered into one of the artificial ears: Why do you torture me? Why do you get under my skin? She couldn’t hear him. He left the stuffed pigeon in her dressing room. If he was a ventriloquist he would hide behind her clothes and through his voice across the room. The pigeon speaks. Seen me before, huh?
As he traveled through Paris Fabien saw special effects as links that created logical connections between otherwise entirely disparate events or objects. What does a flea circus have to do with Gulliver’s Travels? What does a hotel ashtray have to do with Dreyfus? While he searched for props, he created or participated in another event, a parallel set of circumstances and phenomena: the photographer, Antoine, Renard. Everything, every object he encountered in the city, and the routes he had to take to find those things, turned into its own whirlwind, its own journey, and its own tale. He felt like the natives of New Caledonia who marked out territorial boundaries by singing a story, or he felt like Zeno, he would never get to point B. He went to look for plates and his picture was taken. He made a trip to a wax museum, and he met a murderer. He looked for words in the steam billowing over a cup of coffee. He would accept clues or notes of affection in it. He found neither.
“What are you staring at?”
“It’s you!”
“It’s that man whose picture was printed in La Libre Parole.”
He yelled at those who pointed and shunned him but worried that some frightened, panicky part of himself that agreed he deserved to be elbowed out of the way, remained firmly entrenched. He deserved to be shunned, not because he did business at Lazare’s — that, like the trial, no longer mattered to him, if it ever had —but because he was afraid somehow that the idiots who yelled and talked about blowing up boats with people on them had, in their gross stupidity, somehow discovered some truth about himself: he was a coward. He wouldn’t even do a decent job of defending himself, let alone defend the risky gestures of Méliès or those like him. That the toadies of La Libre Parole should be the unveilers of this was unbearable.
There were many short films about weary travelers, travelers who had terrible nights persecuted by boots that walked by themselves, shirts and trousers that had a life of their own, even unzipping for a monstrous pee. He had developed “pyrotechnic furniture,” tables that grew human legs and walked away with dinner, and automobiles, when they did appear, went on “rampages,” as if human and angry with vendettas to settle. But Fabien was sick of images of departure and arrival. Boats, trains, anything that moved, seemed to mock his daily routine. He was happy when trains and rockets crashed, or bridges collapsed, their anthropomorphic features splattered across the set. It should be an Impossible Voyage, he screamed at Bluette’s rubber ears. His travels through the city made him the reverse of Louis, the agoraphobic, but he would have preferred to stand as still as possible. He wanted to go into the studio as flats were painted and hammered and say, Look craphead, I’m a statue. I’m not going anywhere.
Méliès liked to run film backwards, and this always seemed to be funny to him. The audience, Méliès believed, never tired of the joke, but Fabien wasn’t sure the joke didn’t wear thin. Méliès was intrigued by reversal, as if he could turn back clocks, defy gravity and logic. His preconstructions were an answer to Lumière’s straightman realism. A meal could be regurgitated. If the clown always threw up, he would go hungry. This, Fabien decided in disgust while Georges roared with laughter, was a model for all his failures.
“Help me into this, will you?” Bluette was struggling with a musical-note costume.
The staff needed to be taped to her right side. Fabien taped the black wooden bar to her body. The round part of the note began at her waist and ended at her knees. She spoke to him condescendingly, as if he were a servant.
“What are you going to do in this costume? It hasn’t been used in years.”
“I’m going to run across the stage while he’s shooting the scene of the trial.”
“Why do you want to interrupt the shoot?”
“Because, dummy, this film is going to get us all into trouble.”
From the other side of the room Bluette blew him a mock kiss with her eyes crossed. What are you saying? I’m a dunderhead? Get lost yourself. He felt he was getting somewhere, and at the same time he was getting nowhere. If dissolves are like conjunctions, the conjunctions of film, my efforts are one dissolve following another with no substance in between.
A-N-D B-U-T Y-E-T
Dreyfus saw her coming, pointed across the stage, and Bluette was stopped. Fabien watched, leaning out of his office door while Georges snapped her costume in two. She threw the halves of the musical note on the floor, put on her clothes, and marched out of Star Films as if never to return.
“You just want to play Lucie Dreyfus,” Georges yelled after her. “Well, you can’t, and you know why.”
Fabien returned to his office. He spent the afternoon unable to work, drawing figures swimming from Devil’s Island while holding onto goats raised by the leper colony housed there. The fiction had arisen that the sharks that infested the surrounding sea would eat the goats so the swimmer would live and escape. Although it was a fantasy — no one could escape this way — the goats had been removed after Dreyfus arrived at the island. Fabien drew the swimmers like mythological creatures who knew nothing of deprivation. With each frame Devil’s Island receded into the background.
Bluette returned the following day, though there was no work for her. Fabien knocked on her dressing room door balancing a box of Revolutionary costumes on his arm: guillotine earrings, tricolor socks, the jacket Danton wore to his execution. He pulled objects he thought of as bait from the box as they walked back toward his room. He fingered Danton’s collar, made a chopping motion with his hand.
“It’s authentic. I bought it from a woman whose great-grandfather had been a guard in the Bastille.”
“How did
he get it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are the bloodstains?”
“It was cleaned.”
She let him put the gold blades in her ears. At first he was happy she was paying attention to him, then she kissed him as if his cheek were a disembodied rubber feature, walking out the door without thanking Fabien or even saying good-bye.
Fabien believed that if he stepped behind one of the house facades in the Musée Grevin, and there were several in the Jack the Ripper display, he could hide, easily escaping notice only to come out later after the museum was locked up for the night. It was an idea. An imitation of life could be lived here. If there wasn’t enough space behind the painted flats, he could crawl under Napoléon’s or Victor Hugo’s respective deathbeds. Alone, he would approach the display of Monsieur Automata, a mechanical man who could do both factory work and household drudgery, and hinted at a certain freedom from industrialization. In the silence Fabien asked if he might eventually be able to take over his job. He knocked M. Automata’s tin arm. A hollow, tinny sound emerged.
A man announced that the museum was closing, and Fabien walked quickly through the remaining rooms. The area of the Dreyfus tableaux was closed. It was growing dark outside, and he had nothing to look for here anyway. The filming of Méliès’s last actualité was finished. The ironmonger rarely came to the studio anymore. He continued to receive death threats, as if by playing Dreyfus he became the accused.
She stepped in front of him as she emerged from the most remote displays, the freaks: the shriveled heads in preservative baths, the wax copies of Siamese twins. He saw no tripod or camera, only the black hat and a flaring coat that covered a dress, but he recognized the mask. Behind the eyeholes lids flickered as if tired and troubled by deciding where to go next. He reached out his hand. She didn’t move. He yanked the mask from her face. A man stood before him. Longish hair fell out from under the cap. The mask crashed to the floor, and its nose broke off. The man grabbed up his white face and put it back on so that his own nose and a stubbly upper lip poked out through the hole. He carried no camera, but clutched a leg from a tripod, unscrewed from the rest, as if a kind of cane. It was dripping wet, and fragments of wax and paint clung to it. He had smashed the glass jars that held the museum’s freakish specimens. Contaminants. Impurities, he whispered. The vandal of the wax museum struggled to fasten the strings of his mask as he ran down the street, black skirts billowing, feet running soundlessly toward place Maubert.
The woman, the one he had waited for, was a phantom. He looked for Artois’s address, tossing props and costumes right and left, then remembered he had chucked it from the train weeks ago. He tried to find Antoine or Renard, but found no trace of either one. The talent for disappearing into the city was one Fabien envied.
He was folding the damaged and faded flea circus, preparing to throw it into a heap of trash to be burned. The cardboard walls collapsed easily, but he was so preoccupied with its disintegration that he jumped when he heard Renard’s yellowed fingers tapping on the door. His nails, the first part of him to appear on the edge of the jamb, appeared long and dirty, and the rest of him as he slouched into Fabien’s office gave the impression that he hadn’t been working lately. His usually neat clothes were creased and grimy. Before he actually spoke, Renard picked through the trash, draping a coat he found over his shoulders.
“No one will miss this.” He didn’t sit down. “I can’t stay long.” He pulled the coat closer around him, preparing for a dramatic presentation, deciding which tense to use. Fabien read his tone to mean that this was going to end in a request for money.
“Do you remember Antoine?” Fabien nodded. Now he was sure the story was going to be about cash.
“You were the one who told Antoine about the printers where the photographers delivered their plates. Though he couldn’t read, Antoine remembered the address, and he knows the city well. He waited around the butcher shop, hiding under the stairs or watching from an alley across the street. The wait was rewarded. He saw all kinds of people come out of the cellar: generals covered with braid and medals, others arrived in a state carriage.”
“A general wouldn’t have gone into that cellar in uniform.”
“How do you know? If Antoine had a camera we could identify them now, couldn’t we? Antoine wanted one. You might have gotten him a camera. You have a lot of things here.
“He waited at place Maubert. Sooner or later the photographer stepped up to the gate, as he knew she would. She didn’t notice him across the street, although he could see that her disguise had been knocked around, and she held her hand up to her face as if hiding a smirk. He didn’t jump her yet, but let her go in, thinking that if she were expected in the cellar offices, they would grow impatient at her absence and might begin to look for her, so he would continue to wait until she came out again.
“Sometimes he was very canny, sometimes stupid,” Renard said, “either way. When she emerged, he caught her under the stairs and slit the woman’s throat without even looking at her face.” Fabien imagined the body slumped on the stairs, head wedged between a tread and a riser.
“She was wearing a mask, and as he climbed over her to escape, he knocked it to one side with the toe of his shoe.” Renard paused, then took a drink from a cup of coffee Fabien had on his desk. “He shouldn’t have been so quick. He should have followed her and done it someplace else, not right on their own doorstep. When the body was found, articles appeared immediately calling for revenge. It’s bigger than an eye-for-an-eye business. They believe one of their eyes is worth thousands of other eyes. Didn’t you ever look at that paper again?”
Fabien shook his head. He hadn’t.
Renard didn’t believe him. “They asked for demonstrations that would end in riots with the looting of certain businesses. These businesses, the articles said, were part of a Syndicate, a conspiracy to destroy the whole country.”
“I don’t read those papers. The film about the trial is finished. I’ve been working on Dreams of an Opium Fiend, on Cinderella.” He wanted Renard to leave.
Renard rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if to indicate Fabien lived in a world of phantasmagoria, useless and remote, but for Fabien his indignation had a false ring to it, as if Renard were looking for a part. He took the noseless mask from a crumpled bag and laid it on the floor; sorry-looking, etiolated strings curled wormlike at Fabien’s feet. It seemed to Fabien more like a thing one shouldn’t touch, a poisonous jellyfish or snapping turtle one might poke with a broom handle, rather than the memento mori it appeared to be for Renard.
“All that,” Renard made a sweeping gesture with his arm which was meant to signify the activities of the cellar near place Maubert, “meant nothing to Antoine. All that raving effort and plotting ended on the edge of a razor belonging to a petty thief with a short fuse, illiterate and able to disappear into the city, to melt into the air, as if he’d never been corporeal in the first place. That’s the conspiracy. Nothing.”
Renard asked him if he would like to hear one more thing. Fabien noticed Renard pocketing a box cutter but said nothing.
“The paper stated the photographer was a woman.”
Georges enjoyed playing the part of the devil, whom he envisioned in many different forms from a sixteenth-century courtier with horns to a man wearing almost nothing but tights. The morning following Renard’s visit Fabien found Méliès in a remote part of the studio wearing one of these suits and eating a ham sandwich. The devil wiped his hands on his legs.
“Look at this.”
It was a neatly written threat to burn Star Films down in retaliation for the Dreyfus film. Delivered with the mail, the paper was dirty and scrappy from several foldings. This is how it will look. The panes of glass will burst in the heat. The rocket that traveled to a paper moon, Selenite suits, prison uniforms, Mount Pelée, and cardboard swords will all burst into flames. They will do it at night. They will never be caught.
“I’ll sleep in t
he studio for a while.”
Fabien imagined Georges naively playing an unarmed guard, still in his devil’s suit, horns falling over the side of his cot. These would be among the first things to catch fire.
It was difficult to imagine the threat was a joke. Most things from sets to costumes had been painted in grisaille. Caught on orthochromatic film emulsions, a painted blue sky turned into a gray mass and a red dress was transformed into mourning so everything was painted in black and white. Some films were painted over later, others not. Georges like to quote André Maugé when he called his films salvoes of comic go-getting, but even a brief glance through one of the greenhouse windows of Star Films would indicate a funereal appearance. Although gray and cool-looking, the sets were highly flammable, and fire, once started, would spread quickly.
Georges believed in the camera; it would serve as the press, the judiciary, and even replace religion. There was nothing more beautiful than a box of perfect, flawless convex lenses. He held one up to the light and every object around him appeared more solid and authentic. His possessions, the wobbly props and the actors who surrounded him every day, had definition assigned to them by virtue of being seen through curved glass. Fabien took the lenses from him, put them on a shelf.
“Finish your sandwich,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Fabien had traced Bluette’s foot on a piece of paper, lead pencil nudging each grimy toe. The foot smeared, and they had to start over again. He held her foot down, skirts brushing the back of his head and began to trace again. Finally the paper foot was accurate, and he cut it out, folded it, and put the paper foot in his pocket.