Impressions of Africa (French Literature Series)

by Roussel, Raymond

  To give some depth to the main theme, the worm raised itself a bit higher, thereby releasing a larger quantity of liquid onto the violently impacted strings.

  The slightly hesitant rhythm discretely lent the whole the unique character typical of gypsy ensembles.

  After the waltz, a panoply of dances gradually emptied the see-through trough.

  Below, the vessel had refilled owing to the continuous flow that had now run dry. Skariovszki lifted it and for a second time decanted its contents into the lightweight receptacle before returning it to its proper place on the ground.

  The worm, now completely resupplied, began playing a czardas punctuated by wild and abrupt shifts in tonality. Sometimes, huge tremors of its long reddish body produced clashing fortissimos; at others, imperceptible undulations, which let through only fine droplets, lowered the now tranquil zither to a bare murmur.

  There was nothing mechanical about this performance, which radiated fire and conviction. The worm seemed to be like any virtuoso, who, following his spontaneous inspiration, ran through a series of variations, interpreting an ambiguous and delicate passage in new and controversial ways.

  A long medley of light opera arias following the czardas again depleted the provision of liquid. Once more Skariovszki performed the rapid decanting while announcing the final piece.

  This time, the worm energetically attacked a captivating Hungarian rhapsody, each measure of which seemed to bristle with the most harrowing difficulties.

  The acts of agility followed one another seamlessly, spangled with trills and chromatic scales.

  Soon, through a series of enormous jerks, the worm accentuated a certain canto of ample texture, each written note of which must have been part of a thick cluster. This theme, which formed the base, was embroidered with numerous light motifs produced by slight twitches of the supple body.

  The animal was becoming intoxicated with music. Far from exhibiting the slightest weariness, it grew more animated with every harmonic wave it unleashed so relentlessly.

  Its emotion was communicated to the audience, which was strangely moved by the expressive timbre of certain hauntingly plaintive sounds and by the incredible speed of the endless clusters of demisemiquavers.

  A frenetic presto brought the annelid’s enthusiastic delirium to a climax, and for several minutes it abandoned itself unreservedly to its chaotic gymnastics.

  At the end, it prolonged the perfect cadence by a kind of expanding improvisation, reprising the final chords until the last of the percussive liquid had been entirely depleted.

  Skariovszki extended his bare arm, around which the worm coiled itself anew after having scaled the mica slope.

  The Negroes came to remove the various objects, including the earthenware vessel that was again as full as when it arrived.

  Led by the Hungarian, they disappeared behind the Stock Exchange in single file.

  IV

  AT RAO’S COMMAND, the entire portion of the black crowd assembled to the right made an about-face and took several steps back to contemplate the Incomparables’ Theater before them.

  Immediately, our group moved closer, the better to see Talou, who had just appeared onstage with Carmichael in tow; the young Marseillais’s ordinary brown suit clashed with the extravagant imperial toilette.

  Using a falsetto voice, an imitation of a woman’s pitch that matched his dress and wig, Talou executed Dariccelli’s Aubade, a piece requiring the most hazardous feats of vocalization.

  Carmichael, score in hand, prompted the melody and its French text measure for measure, while the emperor, his guide’s faithful echo, emitted numerous trills that, after several minutes of effort, ended on a pure and extremely high-pitched final note.

  Once this romance was finished, singer and prompter again rejoined the audience, while the historian Julliard, succeeding them on the floorboards, sat to our left at his lecturer’s desk, on which lay various notes that he began leafing through.

  For twenty minutes, the marvelous orator enthralled us with his captivating elocution, delivering a brief exposé, filled with inspiring clarity of mind, concerning the history of the Electors of Brandenburg.

  Sometimes he stretched a hand toward one of the effigies affixed to the backdrop, drawing our attention to a characteristic feature or a particular facial expression that his narrative had just evoked.

  He concluded with a brilliant synthesis and, leaving the stage, left us dazzled by the vivid tints of his sparkling verve.

  Immediately, the ichthyologist Martignon walked to the middle of the stage, holding in both hands a perfectly transparent aquarium, in which a certain whitish, oddly shaped fish slowly circled about.

  In a few words, the learned naturalist introduced the Sturgeon Ray, an as yet unknown variety that had been procured for him the day before by a fortuitous deep-sea exploration.

  The fish before our eyes was the product of a racial mixture; only the eggs of a ray fertilized by a sturgeon could engender the clearly articulated twin peculiarities that this single aquarium specimen brought together.

  As Martignon slowly withdrew, watching carefully over the remarkable hybrid he had discovered, Tancrède Boucharessas, father of the five children whose skill we had earlier admired, made an impressive entrance by pushing a voluminous instrument on rollers to the front of the stage.

  Though lacking both arms and legs, Tancrède, squeezed into a Bohemian costume, could still move swiftly by hopping on the stumps of his thighs. He clambered unaided onto a low platform situated at the middle of the unit he had just wheeled in and, turning his back to the public, found just at mouth level a large panpipe that, closely fitted to his chin, comprised an ensemble of pipes vertically tiered at regular intervals in descending order of size, from bottom to top. To the right was a hefty accordion, featuring a thick leather strap at the end of its bellows, its buckle fitted exactly to the incomplete bicep that extended barely four inches from the small man’s shoulder. On the opposite side, a triangle hanging from a wire was ready to vibrate under the beats of a metal wand previously attached, with solid fasteners, to the performer’s left stump.

  After settling into the correct position, Tancrède, creating the illusion of a one-man orchestra, vigorously attacked a brilliant overture.

  His head quickly and repeatedly spun back and forth, his lips finding the notes of the melody on the appropriate flute, while his two biceps worked simultaneously—one alternating between perfect and ninth chords by moving the accordion’s bellows in both directions, the other striking the base of the triangle at the correct moment with the metal wand that was like the clapper of an alarm clock.

  To the right, seen in profile and forming one of the lateral facades of the contraption, a bass drum with a mechanical drumstick was counterbalanced, on the left, by a pair of cymbals attached to the end of two solid copper supports. By means of a skillful twitch, confined only to his shoulders while his head remained still, Tancrède constantly shifted his weight up and down, causing the small board on springs on which he sat upright to activate the drumstick and the pair of cymbals simultaneously, their deafening clash blending with the loud thumping of the bass drum.

  This masterful overture, with its fine and varied nuances, ended in a fast-paced presto, during which the little phenomenon’s truncated thighs, bouncing with every beat on the board, punctuated a dizzying melody accompanied fortissimo by the vibrating bass notes of the accordion mixed with the multiple tings of the triangle.

  After the final chord, the small man, lively as ever, left his place and disappeared into the wings, while his two sons Hector and Tommy came to clear the stage, promptly removing the instrument along with the lecturer’s table and chair.

  This task completed, an artist strode onto the boards, elegantly attired in a black suit and holding a top hat in his white-gloved hands. This was Ludovic, the famous singer with the quadruple voice, whose colossal mouth drew everyone’s eyes.

  With a lovely tenor’s timbre,
Ludovic softly began the famous canon “Frère Jacques”; but only the left corner of his mouth moved to utter the familiar words, while the rest of the huge abyss kept still and silent.

  At the moment when, after the first notes, the words “Dormez-vous” sounded a third higher, a second buccal division attacked anew the words “Frère Jacques,” starting at the tonic; Ludovic, through long years of practice, had managed to split his lips and tongue into independent portions and to articulate several intertwined parts effortlessly and simultaneously, differing in both tune and words. By now the entire left half of his mouth was moving, baring his teeth, while its undulations left the right side closed and motionless.

  But a third labial fraction soon entered the chorus, precisely copying its predecessors. During this time the second voice intoned “Dormez-vous,” enlivened by the first, which introduced a new element into the mix by singing “Sonnez les matines” on a silvery and spirited rhythm.

  For a fourth time the words “Frère Jacques” were heard, this time pronounced by the right corner of his mouth, which had just ceased its inactivity to complete the quartet; meanwhile, the first voice completed the canon with the syllables “Ding, ding, dong,” acting as bass to “Sonnez les matines” and “Dormez-vous” produced by the two intermediary voices.

  Ludovic, his eyes glazed and dilated, needed a constant tension of mind to accomplish this inimitable tour de force without error. The first voice had picked up the song from the beginning, and the buccal compartments, each moving independently, parsed out the text of the round, whose four simultaneously performed fragments blended delightfully.

  Little by little Ludovic accentuated his timbre, beginning a vigorous crescendo that sounded like a distant horde rapidly approaching.

  There was a fortissimo of several measures during which, constantly evolving in a perpetual cycle from one labial compartment to the next, the four motifs, loud and resonant, burst forth powerfully in a slightly accelerated movement.

  Then, calm having been restored, the imaginary troupe seemed to recede and fade out at a bend in the road; the concluding notes faded to a faint murmur, and Ludovic, exhausted by the terrible mental effort, left the stage mopping his brow.

  After a one-minute intermission, we saw Philippo appear, presented by Jenn, his inseparable impresario. The unattached head of a fifty-year-old, placed on a wide red disk with a metal collar that held it upright: this was Philippo. A short, thick beard added to the ugliness of his face, which was nonetheless made amusing and likeable by its intelligent wittiness.

  Jenn, holding this solid disk—a kind of round table with no legs—in both hands, showed the public the bodiless head, which began to jabber gaily with the most inventive sort of volubility.

  With every word his very prominent lower jaw emitted a spray of spittle that, spewing in a shower from his mouth, landed a certain distance in front of him.

  We could find none of the customary subterfuges used in the classic talking head routine. There was no system of mirrors hidden under the disk, which Jenn manipulated freely and without any suspect precautions; moreover, the impresario walked to the edge of the stage and offered the round plate to whoever wanted it.

  Skariovszki stepped forward to receive Philippo, who at that point, passing from hand to hand, carried on with each spectator a brief, impromptu, and droll conversation. Some held the platter at arm’s length, trying to avoid the sprays of sputum flying from the prodigy’s mouth, while his astounding repartee elicited continuous bursts of laughter from us all.

  After making the rounds, Philippo returned to his point of origin and was handed back to Jenn, who had remained onstage.

  Immediately the impresario pressed a hidden catch that opened the red platter as one unfolds an extraordinarily flat box, showing that it was actually composed of two parts held fast by a thin hinge.

  The lower disk dropped in vertical profile, while, held up by Jenn, the circle that until then had acted as lid continued to support the bearded figure horizontally.

  Below this, wearing the classic flesh-colored leotard, hung a minuscule human body that, through complete atrophy, had been able to fit in the narrow hiding place of the hollow plate, barely an inch thick.

  This sudden vision completed the person of Philippo, a loquacious dwarf, who, displaying an outsized head, enjoyed perfect health despite the diminutiveness of his striking anatomy.

  Still talking and spraying spittle, the astounding chatterbox gesticulated freely with his puppetlike limbs, as if to give full vent to his inexhaustible and exuberant gaiety.

  Soon, gripping Philippo by the scruff of the neck, after releasing the metal collar that moved on several hinges with spring catches, the impresario, with his left hand, lowered the upper disk, its aperture allowing easy passage for the inconceivable body below, dressed in flesh tones.

  The agile trinket, whose head, larger than Jenn’s, was the same size as the entire rest of his person, abruptly took advantage of this new freedom of movement to scratch furiously at his beard, without missing a beat in his moist verbiage.

  As Jenn carried him off into the wings, he gaily gripped a foot in each hand and disappeared wriggling, a final gibe sending copious droplets of his abundant saliva far afield.

  Immediately the Breton Lelgoualch, dressed in the legendary costume of his region, rushed forward while doffing his round hat, the stage floorboards echoing under the shocks of his peg leg.

  His left hand clutched a hollow bone, cleanly pierced with holes like a flute.

  With a strong Brittany accent, the newcomer, reciting some prepared patter, gave us the following details about himself:

  At age eighteen, Lelgoualch, a fisherman by trade, used to ply his skiff every day off the coast of Paimpol, his hometown.

  The youth owned a bagpipe and was considered the best player in the county. Every Sunday people gathered in the public square to hear him perform, with a charm all his own, a host of Breton folk tunes, of which his memory kept an inexhaustible reserve.

  One day, at the Paimpol town fair, Lelgoualch was scaling a greased pole when he fell and fractured his hip. Mortified by his clumsiness, which the whole village had witnessed, he got up and resumed his ascent, managing to complete it through sheer force of will. Then he limped home, still making it a point of honor to conceal his suffering.

  When, after too long a delay, he finally sent for the doctor, the injury had developed into gangrene.

  It was deemed necessary to amputate.

  Lelgoualch, apprised of the situation, faced his trial with courage and, thinking only of how to make the best of it, asked the surgeon to save him his tibia, which he planned to put to some mysterious purpose.

  They did as he requested, and on a certain day the poor amputee, sporting a brand-new wooden leg, went to see an instrument maker to whom he entrusted a carefully wrapped package, accompanied by precise instructions.

  One month later, Lelgoualch received in a black, velvet-lined case the bone from his leg transformed into a strangely resonant flute.

  The young Breton quickly learned the new fingerings and began a lucrative career playing the tunes of his region in music halls and circuses; the weirdness of the instrument, the provenance of which was explained at each performance, attracted crowds of curiosity seekers and increased his earnings far and wide.

  The amputation was now twenty years in the past, and ever since then the flute’s resonance had continued to improve, like a violin that mellows over time.

  Finishing his story, Lelgoualch raised his tibia to his lips and played a Breton melody full of gentle melancholy. The pure, silken notes sounded like nothing we’d ever heard; the timbre, at once warm and crystalline, indescribably limpid, marvelously suited the particular charm of the calm, lilting tune, whose evocative contours transported our thoughts straight to Armorica.

  Several refrains, by turns joyful or patriotic, amorous or stirring, succeeded this initial romance, each one retaining a distinct unity that emit
ted intense local color.

  After a sweet final lament, Lelgoualch withdrew with an alert step, his wooden leg once more clattering over the boards.

  The equestrian Urbain then made his appearance, in a blue jacket, calfskin jodhpurs, and turned-down boots, leading a magnificent black stallion full of fire and vigor. An elegant bridle was the only ornament on the animal’s head; no bit fettered its mouth.

  Urbain took several strides onto the stage and positioned the splendid steed to face us, introducing it by the name Romulus, which the circus folk jocularly nicknamed tongue and hoove.

  At the equestrian’s request to the audience to supply him a word at random, Juillard called out “equator.”

  Immediately, slowly repeating one by one the syllables that Urbain prompted aloud, the horse distinctly pronounced “E…qua…tor…”

  The animal’s tongue, instead of being square like those of its peers, had adopted the pointed form of the human organ. This peculiarity, noticed by chance, had convinced Urbain to attempt to educate Romulus, who, like a parrot, had learned over two years of work to clearly replicate any sound.

  The equestrian resumed the experiment, now soliciting complete sentences from the audience that Romulus repeated after him. Soon, dispensing with its prompter, the horse volubly reeled off its entire repertoire, including a volley of proverbs, portions of fables, curses, and truisms, recited haphazardly and with no sign of intelligence or understanding.

  At the end of this preposterous speech, Urbain led Romulus offstage, the animal still muttering a few nonsensical observations.

  Man and horse were replaced by Whirligig, slim and lithe in his clown costume and face powder. Using both hands and his teeth, he carried separately, by their edges, three deep, finely woven baskets, which he set down on the stage.