by Susan Daitch
“I think you have it out for me,” Fabien yelled through the flimsy window.
“No, no, Fabien, I love you, you’re my right-hand man. I want everybody to be happy,” Georges said, dusting himself off.
“This is too much. I’m always the fall guy.” As hard as he tried to turn the tables on Georges, fatherly and slaphappy, Fabien continued to trip on his own shoelaces. In his frustration, he remained the boob, the knucklehead, the one who falls in love with the most hopelessness, with no sense of how maladroit he appears. Even though he made intricate and delicate props in a studio to the left of the stage he was perceived as the one with two left hands. Méliès treated him like a thickheaded boy picked from the audience for a prank while he, Georges Méliès, was the elegant master of ceremonies.
“In tricks I like to take all leading roles, for I can never make my players understand the thousand and one skills needed for a complicated sleight of hand to work well. You’re not really flying out the window. It just looks that way.”
Furniture had been overturned in the fake explosion. Fabien picked up a gauge that had been attached to the bellows and looked through a black aperture used in constructing the optical illusion of the growing head. Most objects were gray, black, or white in order to register more sharply on film, and sets painted in a persistent trompe l’oeil played tricks on the inattentive. A less clever man might walk into windows, knock his head against spaces between painted trees, train cars, or corinthian columns. Ladders, hedgerows, rooms whose painted checkered floors had carefully plotted diminishing transversals, all these were painted or constructed so they narrowed to a point on the horizon. Fabien was careful, but the vistas of distorted linear perspective were so common among studio flats, the landscape of Fabien’s days, that he often felt off balance, as if he were caught in a Uccello painting he couldn’t step out of until he was on the train back to Paris, and even then, as the landscape rushed by, he wasn’t sure. Uccello, fellow lover of practical jokes. Is the horse rooted to the plinth or does he float above it? There was something inaccessible about the pleasures offered by the films he worked on. He built false ceilings and imagined sinkholes. He wanted to ask Georges, “Who laughs, who’s taken in, who splits his sides over your gallows humor?” Georges talked about the profane gaze of the audience, all his optical illusions and sight gags were attempts at second guessing the desires embedded in that profane gaze. Fabien sometimes sensed this future ogling as he prepared to be thrown out a fake window. This is what the spectators want, do it, he said to himself, jump out the window.
When Fabien offered his future wife a retreat into a small apartment filled with drawings of a complicated series of ramps, dollies, and camera plans, she accepted. His two-room apartment was a kind of trial stage for his work for Méliès. Drawings and cardboard models of lunar landscapes and castles covered floors, tables, chairs. At first she was utterly enchanted, but soon grew annoyed at having to pick her way across a floor littered with wood shavings and pencils. Fabien made an effort to clear some room for her, but his work commanded too much space, and he couldn’t afford a larger apartment. Soon her belongings and clothes were seduced into becoming props in entertainments acted out at home.
They had a son who slept in a cradle made from two crescent moons, discarded props, and he played with paper rockets that crumpled in his greedy, willful hands. Fabien restrained his anger at the boy’s destructiveness. He moved self-consciously, knocked into tables, chairs, spilled glasses and folded newspaper pages into all kinds of objects, wiped inky hands on his wife’s dresses, which she refused to wash as she grew increasingly restless and impatient with the constant invention. One day she took the boy and departed.
With its warped floor and only one window, now his apartment choked him. He didn’t like to spend time in it. Each morning he would look in the mirror with a disconnected stare as if shaving a mannequin, then wash up and be on his way. Hair sticking up, often crackling with static electricity as he pulled sweaters off and on, he drew attention in the glass-walled studio, if not on the street, but women avoided him. His wife and son had left him, disappearing into the south, or so he had been led to believe. Then he discovered they had been in Paris all along. Their things, a few pieces of clothing hanging in a closet and toys his son had outgrown, remained scattered around the apartment. It was easier to get rid of himself than to throw these things away. He had met the man she left him for, and held nothing against him, really. The man was apologetic and tended to confess to Fabien as if out of guilt, as if to declare, yes, she left you, but I have all these problems I’d like to tell you about. They met a few times by chance in a bar on the rue du Bac. Fabien didn’t care to spend much time with him and began to avoid that street altogether.
A woman across the street received other women in her rooms, sometimes the visitors were agitated, sometimes impatient, frightened, or weepy. At night he watched them come and go, one at a time. Each one would place money on a table, then she would shut the curtains, never looking up in the direction of his window, although she might have known he was watching. When she reopened the curtains the visitor would have disappeared, only to be replaced by another within the hour. The episodic visitations and disappearances were not unlike a Méliès film. He had removed his own curtains, not only in order to see out at any time, but so he could be seen as well. Anybody who had the desire to watch could do so, but there was nothing much to see in the rooms he quickly abandoned each morning. Pictures of his family, too small to be seen from across the street, had been put away.
For him the most trivial coincidences transformed even the café next door into a fearful, tottering street barricade he would go out of his way to avoid. The topography of familiar zinc counter and marble-topped tables had always seemed like an airtight escape hatch he descended into after returning from Star Films, until one day in July a deeply tanned European, sensing an opportunity in Fabien’s self-consciousness, sat down at his table and tried to strike up a conversation. He wanted to talk to someone, anyone. The man said he had lived in Algiers, but had returned to Paris during the winter, having lost everything through bad investments. Fabien shrugged, hoping to discourage his monologue, but the man didn’t give up. He said he no longer understood France. He knew, as soon as he opened his mouth, people believed he’d gone native to the core and avoided him. He couldn’t figure out what gave him away, what nuance of speech or gesture did it. He gave up trying.
“Let me show you something. Here’s a stripe in the marble that imitates the route of the Nile, a series of parallel lines like the veins on the inside of an arm.” He traced a pattern on a table top. Fabien couldn’t see what he was trying to illustrate. While spilt coffee spread into Lake Victoria the man reminisced about Berbers, Tuaregs, sandstorms. He’d kept a boa constrictor that became lost one winter night and was eventually found frozen solid in a field in Montmartre. The man made an S curve with his hand. As he demonstrated he brushed Fabien’s lapels and jacket buttons.
The man seemed to turn up every time Fabien went into the café. He tried to avoid the stranger, not looking up when the man entered the room, ignoring gestures to join his table. Invariably he would join Fabien anyway, buying him drinks however much Fabien tried to discourage him by barely responding to his questions or descriptions of the Sahel. If he shrugged instead of answering, the man shrugged in return, but went on remembering. He had begun to wear a haik on his head because, he said, of the heat.
For a while Fabien stayed away from the café, even remaining in his apartment in the morning, having coffee alone, and he crossed the street at night in a hopscotching strategy of avoidance. He blamed the former Algerian with a cloth on his head and took more care watching the woman he believed was an abortionist.
When Bluette Bemon first appeared at Star Films she used to stroll past Fabien’s office what seemed like a hundred times a day dressed as a playing card or as a succubus clothed in black so that only her face registered on film. She wouldn�
�t speak to him, and though at first she barely addressed anyone in the studio, Fabien felt singled out because she crossed his path so often and looked at him with what he interpreted as a cloying expression. He tried to avoid her and decided that her body, pinched into an hourglass shape, struck him as forced and a little repellent. Love is a crime one cannot commit without an accomplice, he quoted Baudelaire to her dressing-room door. He assumed the room was empty and no one could hear him, but Bluette suddenly opened the door and looked at him as if he were some kind of nut. It never occurred to him that he might have it wrong. If, when he arrived at the station, she was waiting for the train back to Paris, he would walk to the far end of the platform, pretending he hadn’t seen her. So he didn’t realize it when in fact she had begun to take steps to evade him.
A plaster volcano, replica of Martinique’s Mount Pelée, lay in the center of Star Films. Edison had filmed a version of the volcano in which the eruption was represented by a barrel of beer left in the sun until it exploded. Méliès wanted to eclipse him, to make Edison look like a cinematic primitive, but when Fabien looked around Star Films, he felt as if he were in a nest of unrelated frenetic activity, nothing more. The weight of boredom was crippling, and as he completed one small task only to be presented with another, his uselessness overwhelmed him. Georges had once cast himself as the Leader of the Institute of Incoherent Geography, and it seemed to Fabien this role never ended for any of them. The wolf could be at the door yet a model universe born just outside Paris spun on its course as if it could always continue on its way untouched.
Off to one side of the set Bluette waited for him. Fabien needed to measure her for the construction of a skeleton-key costume. He walked slowly in her direction but she kept her back turned to him as if he were an insignificant irritation. He tried to talk to her, but she would barely answer him. It occurred to him that to see himself as the object of her occasional glance when she’d done nothing more than walk down a much-used corridor of Star Films was to tip the spotlight on himself when, in fact, no one had been looking. His imitation of Baudelaire rang in his ears. He was the one people laughed at behind his back, not her.
He held the measuring stick up to Bluette’s hip, putting a finger against her flesh at the point where the stick ended. The second placement of the stick brought his finger to the side of her neck. She shivered, as if brushed by something unpleasant, then walked away. He wanted to explain that he wasn’t like the pied noir from the café, who had no idea there ought to be a barrier between thought and speech, but she ignored him, and Fabien was left to petition empty film sets. He followed her, walking close to the stage without watching where he was going. The model volcano convulsed, showering him with flour, cinders, and chalk dust. Flashing lights, another effect, were dim, sputtering on long past their cue.
“Idiot,” Georges coughed.
A washroom attendant who had played Edward VII rushed to help clean him off. Fabien sputtered, blinded and whitened. Bluette passed by, staring through him as if he didn’t exist. Fabien renewed his efforts to follow her, not knowing what to say. It was worse than if she had laughed directly at him. Without really knowing why, he felt as if he had collided with the series of levers and winches that caused backdrops and sets to tumble from the ceiling. He had imagined he was being pursued and desired when she barely knew he existed. In a white maillot she was barely dressed, and even with his flour-occluded vision he could see that she was carefully stepping around his dust, as if the particles might have been deadly germs. A set painter ran outside in a coughing fit, violently gagging.
Georges felt he needed to interject a laudatory distraction. Pounding Fabien on the back he shouted as if they had all been made deaf.
“Apollinaire was interested in how I would reproduce the effect of the volcano. I told him I would do so by photographing cinders and chalk, and he replied: ‘Monsieur and I have the same occupation, we enchant ordinary materials.’ ” Georges smiled, pleased with the comparison.
Edward VII wiped and swept until all the flour, chalk dust, and cinders were gone while Bluette disappeared into the back corridors of Star Films.
LABOR OMNIA VINCIT
Fabien painted the motto, invented by Méliès, on a plinth supporting a plaster statue of Barbenfouillis, commander of a trip to the moon. The statue would be completed by the time Méliès was ready to shoot the last celebratory scene. A Trip to the Moon was a fantastic preconstruction, a film meant to project the future, borrowing from the mathematical and empirical domain of Flammarion as much as from Wells and Verne. Fabien loved this film and was happy to dive back into the world of lewd entertainments. His hurricane of tasks continued to spin into the nothingness of sets made and then dismantled, but after the volcano film he realized the actualities frightened him in some undefined way, and he was happy when Méliès took refuge in preconstructions. So what if the wolf was at the door? A brush fell, spattering his trouser leg. Méliès kicked it aside as he stood with his arm around the plaster statue, which was essentially a portrait of himself. He smiled as if they were old mates, which, of course, they were.
Creatures with lobster claws, spiked heads, and sharp knees did cartwheels and stood on their heads with the agility of monkeys. They were acrobats hired to play Selenites, creatures who lived on the moon, a moon who cried a custard tear when pierced by the rocket sent by Barbenfouillis’s Astronomy Club. One acrobat, needly points growing from her skull, was poked by an astronaut’s umbrella and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. This would be the film Méliès would be most remembered for. The image of the moon with a rocket in its eye would be reproduced in other films long past Méliès’s death.
Bluette Bernon played Phoebe, rocking on her crescent moon. She caused a snowstorm that woke the travelers on their way into the stratosphere; now she rubbed her back where the wooden seat had irritated her. Bluette, swinging in superlunary space, appeared fearless. Even the vertiginous momentum of the crescent moon she jumped from didn’t seem to scare her. Fabien watched her argue with Georges. The backs of her knees were tense and straight and her bare toes curled against the floor. She didn’t want to sit on the moon swinging her legs like an ornament in the wind.
“If this is a preconstruction, then there aren’t any rules. I can play any part in the script and I want to be an astronaut.”
“Girls can’t be astronauts, dear.”
“Do me a favor, Georges?” Bluette looked bored. “Wake up.”
“You, Bluette, can go to the moon.” Georges meant this as an insult.
“Exactly.”
On film Bluette had been transformed into a houri, an opium dream, a large key, but she stared at him now as herself, in open hostility, and turning on a silver heel, put her arms around a passing stagehand. Georges was blind to her signs that seemed to say I am loved, allegiance isn’t where you think; it’s turned elsewhere. Perhaps because he knew there would be no coup. Star Films wouldn’t be overturned by a recalcitrant Phoebe, but Bluette’s gesture bothered Fabien, because it seemed to him that she flirted openly with anyone, but not him.
Georges surrounded himself with women in chaotic chorus lines that looped around the sets and went absolutely nowhere. None of the grotesque but agile Selenites, like clay in Méliès’s hands, held any interest for Fabien. One complained that her costume prevented her from sitting down; she was tired. She had unfastened her monstrous head, technically fashioned after deep-sea diver helmets, and held it in her hands, blond hair falling over her shoulders. Were they half crab, half monkey, or humans with complicated histories? What were their individual and collective identities? Fabien had no idea. The project of finding out would involve too much peeling back layers of costume and too much effort. He painted over the it of vincit and watched as the crescent moon was removed from the stage and carried off into storage.
“Subjects dependent on the imagination are infinitely varied and inexhaustible,” Georges said, smiling and looking around the set as Fabien searched for h
is hat. Fabien didn’t quite believe Georges would rest in those subjects, pleased with himself and languidly pleased with the women who looped brainlessly in and out of his films. There would be other actualities, more terrifying than the sugary dreams trick photography was capable of creating.
“Tomorrow you can dismantle the moon!” Méliès shouted after him.
While waiting for the evening train back to Paris Fabien watched for her. She approached as he looked in the opposite direction, and when he turned around he saw her. One of the actors carried her bag. It was a tall man Fabien recognized as a character who often stood in front of the other actors and had a tendency to look directly into the camera lens. When the film was screened it would appear that he, and only he, addressed the audience, upstaging the others whose gaze was directed at painted sky. Fabien stood a few yards behind them and watched as they boarded. He remained on the platform and waited for the next train.
The man beckoned to Fabien with such urgency that he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen him. He was talking loudly to someone else in the café, but still signaled frantically. As he sat down Fabien heard the word Kabyles. Fabien didn’t know what he was talking about and wanted to leave the table at once, but inertia kept him sitting, listening to the pied noir who, bareheaded and anxious, now denied ever having owned a haik.
“An Algerian tribe of the south Sahara,” the man turned exclusively to Fabien, “a kind of Berber, but more dangerous. They’re coming into the country now through Marseilles.” Unscrewing the cap of his pen with a flourish and a jerk of his elbow, he drew a picture of one with a big nose and a knife in his mouth. Fabien told him the drawing looked like a cartoon.
“I’m not an artist like you.” The man was hurt and annoyed.
