Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  On Fabien’s charts the Dreyfus film was divided into eleven scenes. It would be Méliès’s longest film, 780 feet, thirteen minutes in duration. Some of the sets were based on illustrations from the weekly papers, and information about the case came from many sources. Postcards had been printed portraying the trial, and these flying fragments of news, small bits of paper intended to disseminate facts, were, Fabien imagined, channeled through the mail, a chorus of evidence. A Dreyfus display in the wax museum, Musée Grevin, where scenes of recent and historical events were presented as if frames from newsreels, this was one of Fabien’s destinations.

  “Let’s say you live in Paris, and let’s say you can’t read,” Méliès explained. “You visit Grevin’s to learn what’s going on. This way you get as close as you possibly can to events, re­enacted, the museum claims, with stunning accuracy.”

  “I’m not convinced of this project.” Fabien argued with Méliès one last time. “The story isn’t one of strong images. Why bother? People want the preconstructions.”

  “It’s an actualité.”

  Méliès felt there was no longer any point in trafficking in nostalgia and amusements.

  “I look at Lumière, and I fall asleep. Lumière, impressionist of reconstruction, favors haystacks and boats on a lake, cheerful and romantic images as useless and as ephemeral as greeting cards. The urgency of the story under your nose — a monkey trial, featuring garbage collectors and transvestite generals hiring forgers to fabricate evidence — is mesmerizing, impossible to ignore.”

  Fabien didn’t respond. The voyages to the moon kept him from thinking about a locked closet of a woman’s clothes and a child’s toys. The fantastic preconstructions kept him from thinking about the footprints they had left in his apartment. The actualités offered no escape.

  “The trial presents a ready-made story. The characters are well known,” Méliès persisted.

  “Too well known.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “I’m at a loss as to how to depict the details so important to the story.” Fabien showed Georges the palms of his hands as if to say, look, nothing is possible here. “Scenes of forged handwriting, copied, traced, torn up, reconstructed, photographed, and rephotographed are didactic, graphic minutia; it’s not the kind of story that can keep an audience rooted to their seats through silent images. Everyone knows which side he or she is on, and everyone knows how the story will end. It’s a bad idea.”

  “If they’re on the wrong side, the film will change their minds.”

  “You’re playing with fire,” Fabien resorted to clichés. He knew trying to convince Méliès of his folly was useless when the foundation of Star Films was and had always been folly. Folly reigned supreme. He said nothing more to the director, who would not listen to him anyway. Georges left Fabien sitting in his office drawing another prison. Bluette loitered near his doorway kissing the sleepwalker.

  The conductor looked at him twice as he punched his ticket. Fabien fixed his gaze in another direction, staring out the train window at the landscape so familiar he could see it in his sleep. Two dogs tied up in the same yard barked at the train, running the length of their tethers before being snapped back. They were tied to opposite trees so they couldn’t get at each other, and they barked at one another in frustration. Each time the rope jerked them back, they seemed newly wounded and shocked that this jolt had happened to them. Their choking was self-imposed, but they couldn’t stop, and it seemed to Fabien he was no better off. Mind blank, he sat in the train like a strangled mass with no cognitive ability to determine what a rope or a collar might be. Through an unshuttered window he saw a woman angrily trying to clothe a naked boy who struggled to get away from her. In frustration she hit him, and the boy wriggled and resisted her even more. Everywhere he looked he saw ordinary irritation and suspicion, which only served to make him wary and to remind him of things out of reach: rooms he couldn’t rent, rooms that would startle Bluette in their opulence, although she would never see them. He chafed at the threads that determined his identity, tied him to the house of cards that was the Syndicate, tied him to newsprint, tied him to a woman and a child who had disappeared.

  The train drew into Paris, and while he no longer expected to find the woman, collar up and face down, carrying a brass-legged tripod, he still looked at women who seemed to walk quickly with the air of a mission undertaken. Leaving the station he saw the men from the printing operation walking toward him, and he turned his face to a shop window in order to avoid them. Although they appeared deeply engaged in conversation, he suspected the Napoléon had caught sight of him. He didn’t know what they could or would do to him for pictures never taken, but their appearance made him nervous, then as rue Serpente turned into rue Danton he did see a figure in a long billowing coat, tripod legs sticking out like a brass tail behind. Forgetting the two men Fabien caught up to and passed the phantomlike figure, who turned out to be a man. His long hair had been deceptive from the back. La Libre Parole laughed at him still.

  He bought a few postcards of The Degradation; they were useful, but contained the obvious elements, reminding him that they would need many more swords and army uniforms, boots, and hats. Fabricating sunken boats, assembling a madman’s lab, or reconstructing Manet’s Olympia complete with backless shoes, all these presented concrete problems. For such tableaux he might not have to leave the studio or engage in the pretence of small talk with shopkeepers. Moreover the prison scenes were dull to look at. Acquiring facsimiles of military accoutrements (or the actual objects) often necessitated a kind of acting, presenting himself to a distributor of such things in the guise of a citizen who cheered on military campaigns. He winced at the jocularity and false bonhomie, the hale-fellow-well-met attitude he was habitually greeted with if they mistakenly thought him one of their own, but when Georges reminded him of his picture in La Libre Parole he realized that if recognized now he would be greeted with coldness and suspicion, doors would be shut in his face.

  Fabien turned to pay for the postcards. Beside the stand, glued to a stucco-faced wall, a poster from the Museum of Horrors series glistened, slick and new. Zola’s head had been drawn on a pig’s body, and the pig painted a map of France with a brush dipped in a bowl labeled Caca International. He sat on copies of his own books. Dreyfus and others had appeared in the Museum of Horrors posters with their heads attached to various animals: cows, snakes, donkeys, and elephants. At intervals the Horrors could be seen all over Paris, pasted on houses, shops, kiosks, empty walls. Fabien expected to see Méliès’s head attached to a drawing of an animal, but he wasn’t yet represented in the gallery of monsters. Perhaps the manufacturers of the Museum of Horrors didn’t know how Méliès felt about the espionage trial. When the film was shown they would find out. One day while on an errand looking for a hookah or fez Fabien would turn a corner, and plastered to a wall he would come face to face with Georges’s head attached to the body of a rat or a dog. Or the artist might draw Méliès as the moon, a rocket labeled J’accuse hitting him in his eye, round and terrorized. If Fabien tore the drawing down, new ones would appear in its place. The Horrors were that kind of poster, springing up in triplicate wherever they might have been expunged. After The Dreyfus Affair was shown, he and Georges would be linked in a kind of fraternity of publicity, their portraits reproduced and scattered around the city.

  Now the grotesque caricature of Zola caused Fabien to question the postcards’ accuracy, and he examined them once more. Perhaps the image of cardboard facts carried through the mail was a distorted one, and what passed as small mirrors of actualities were, in fact, more of the hysteric expressions and shrill voices of those whose sympathies were more aligned with the Museum of Horrors. You can’t trust anyone, the concierge had said, leaning against the statue of Pan.

  The Musée Grevin was quiet and nearly empty. One can almost see them breathing and hear their hearts beat! See history come to life! Fabien smiled at the man who took his entrance
fee. If Star Films were to go bankrupt he could get work here. He could make molds or construct sets in studios located on the floors above the tableaux vivants. The rooms were dark and drafty, and he hurried through most of them. He saw a portrait of the last hours of Victor Hugo, blue-white from the attack of pneumonia that would kill him, several scenes from the battle of Waterloo. Napoléon’s last cancerous hour on Saint Helena was also represented, and, most intriguing so far, a mechanized Raft of the Medusa. The raft was pitched over canvas waves, wax figures clung to creaking boards. Although he knew better, Fabien imagined a homunculus sitting under metal ribs cranking the canvas waves. Jack the Ripper followed, himself (or themselves) undepicted in the tableau. Only Mary Kelly stood alone on a corner in Spitalfields, waiting for what the audience knew would be her murderer. This is where the fear enters, Fabien thought, and it seemed to him that now he understood Méliès: one can be afraid even when one already knows the ending. Even knowing the ending, one can wish things will turn out otherwise, one can still be terrified and angry at the inevitable outcome. He passed Mary Kelly and walked on to the scenes of the trial.

  At the depiction of the assassination attempt against Dreyfus’s lawyer, a wax figure of Labori lay under a lamppost, a woman bent over him, fanning his face. Fabien took notes: lampposts, see storage. There were stacks of lampposts left over from other films. A crowd of wax figures gathered around Labori, forever slumped and bloody, or at least until a hot August when no one was in the city to notice him melting away. He went on to the next small room, a display of two soldiers carrying a basket of files. The prosecution had assembled over four hundred secret documents and transported them in wicker baskets; Fabien made a note of the basket. The scenes were not in any particular chronological order that he could figure out. A man held a stuffed carrier pigeon as if he were about to release it. Another pigeon appeared to be flying out the window. Its back half had been to the taxidermist’s. Its front half was painted as it intruded into two-dimensional space. Painted birds dotted the sky. They were being dispatched to carry news of the trial from Rennes to Paris. A cage containing three pigeons sat on the floor, near the edge of the stage, far to Fabien’s left. A velvet rope separated spectators from the diorama, a kind of room within a room. He took notes about clothing and furniture while standing in front of it.

  Madame Thullier, the colorist for Star Films, had said in advance that she refused to work on any film about Dreyfus. If it were to be colored, the work would have to be done elsewhere. The ironmonger dressed as Dreyfus would not pass under her brush. He remembered that when he met her she had given him her hand, fingers still bearing the indentations of sprocket holes and smelling of aniline paint diluted by alcohol. In her rooms rows of women sat over strips of celluloid. One painted only blue then passed the film on to the woman next to her who painted only red, and so on until all colors and all frames were accounted for. As he stood in the wax museum it seemed to Fabien that this film shouldn’t be colored. It wasn’t a preconstruction. There was no color match for torn prison laundry or an ordinary courtroom chair. The frames should remain black and white.

  The dark walls and smell of wax figures closed in on him. He put his notebook in his pocket and walked away, but as he turned to look back at the tableau he noticed one of the pigeons had been taken from the cage at the left end of the diorama. Now only two remained. A woman with a lumpy shape under her coat disappeared across the threshold into the darkness of the next display. He watched the back of her long coat, only the white of her neck and ankles was visible. She seemed careless, unhurried, as if certain no one was watching her. He’d seen no one else, then he gradually heard voices coming in his direction. A gang of men who seemed to be working in concert moved from display to display. Leaving Napoléon and Hugo untouched they slashed each tableau representing the affair and trial, beheading each Dreyfus, throwing paint and smearing obscene phrases over backdrops and furniture. No one stopped the vandals. The rooms grew raucous. Spectators jumped ropes and stole clothing, a wax assasin’s gun, swords, a gavel, a wax moustache. Fabien ran. The gang followed, smashing the Siamese twins, the octopus man, and other freaks cast in wax. They were all aberrant, all Dreyfus.

  As he stepped out of the museum a man brushed past him, almost knocking him into the marquee. He pointed at the woman now lingering on a corner, possibly waiting for the gang to finish in the museum. Wisps of hair stuck out from her black hat, and she had Bluette’s walk, occasionally mannish, but her authority was tentative. She began to run before he could get a close look at her face, running fast, without turning to identify the man who shouted after her. The man chased her, calling out. Fabien quickened his pace, only to collide with the other pursuer when he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

  “She melted into the air,” the man wheezed.

  Fabien apologized for the collision. Once again the phantom was like the succubus in black who barely registered on film.

  “A lot of people,” he continued, “are looking for that woman. She takes all kinds of pictures.” He coughed again into a handkerchief. “She took my picture as I turned away from a newsstand. She was fast as if she had been waiting for me, but I hadn’t stolen anything. As the camera flashed, I grabbed at her, but she got away.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “No.”

  Introducing himself as Antoine Notelle between fits of coughing, he described how the incident had happened so quickly and unexpectedly that he could remember nothing concrete but her coat. “As fast as a thief,” he said. He had searched crowds for her on streets and in arcades but met with no success until that afternoon when he recognized the flaring black skirt in front of the wax museum. He knew no reason anyone would want to take his picture and then run off. Notelle’s eyes rolled back and forth as if on a pendulum. He pulled at his frayed cuffs, but scanned the crowd like a professional on the lookout for tourists, provincials, vulnerable naifs who left wallets where they could be easily lifted. Fabien wasn’t sure that he, at Antoine’s hands, couldn’t become just such a mark. He was easily pushed around. Even though he knew what sent the photographer to that particular kiosk and what drove her to wait for Notelle to turn around, even that knowledge had little currency for a man who worked the streets. Antoine thought she worked for the police. If Fabien told him the real reason, what would it mean to this stranger who clung to him? So they want to scare some people, so what? Leave me out of it. The Dreyfus affair, dragging on for years, had nothing to do with him.

  “I’m sure we’re walking in the same direction.” He took Fabien’s arm as if to steer him, and although Fabien wasn’t sure what direction that might be, Notelle couldn’t be shaken off. A volatile and animated person, once he had decided to take Fabien into his confidence, Notelle seemed to take up more space on the sidewalk, appearing to double in size when he spoke. He wound a black scarf tightly around his neck, a kind of noose or tourniquet that ought to have arrested the flow of speech but didn’t. Sometimes he coughed into its ends, which flapped over his chest. They stopped at a street corner and stood before a poster advertising cigarette papers. A boy posed smoking a cigarette, and the letters he puffed spelled Moi, je fume le papier . . . C.A.P.I.T.A.I.N.E. Fabien felt his pockets while Antoine stared at some women evidently window shopping across the street.

  “Have you any?” Fabien asked. He pointed at the poster.

  “Boys?”

  “No, cigarettes.”

  Antoine stared blankly. It was, Fabien felt, like suddenly discovering someone you’d been chattering to in a queue or on a train was, although nodding along, stone deaf. Notelle couldn’t read. Lines of print or script looked like graphic clutter, sinkholes of possibility, boring and frightening at the same time because he had no way to unlock their signification. What had he been doing at a newsstand if he was illiterate? He would skip over written language, whether cartoons or the caricatures of the Museum of Horrors, lines of print didn’t register in his field of vision. Antoine squinte
d at the poster as if he could read but had only forgotten his glasses.

  “You know, don’t you, where these photographs end up?” Even if Antoine had traced his photograph as far as the butcher shop near place Maubert, the activities of the basement would have been a mystery to which he had no access. Yet he brought out Fabien’s desire to twist arms until he heard a scream.

  “I told you I don’t know.”

  “I don’t understand why she bothered to take my picture. I didn’t steal anything.” Just as Fabien had guessed, Antoine couldn’t care less about the trial. He hardly knew anything about it.

  “Who’s Dreyfus? Let me tell you an actual story,” Antoine said. “I have a friend, Louis, who’s afraid to take a single step beyond his door. He lives in a top floor garret with dirty lunettes for windows, which he covered over with papers. Why? He believes policemen dog his steps. He looks out at the street from between tears in the papers, and should he see anyone looking up at him, there’s no question that they are agents of the police. In fact,” Antoine explained, “it would be difficult to see a specific face in one of those lunettes. They are so small and recessed, even without the paper coverings, you’d have a hard time making out anything if you’re standing on the street. People often do look up. A woman in a building next door has a habit of leaving her windows wide open, and she attracts attention. This has been pointed out to Louis, but to him all the voyeurs, all the dirty old men are really the police, and they’re after him. The police probably don’t know of Louis’s existence. His crimes are all imaginary. Believe me.” He stared into the distance as if overcome.

  A sandwich man passed them, took off his boards, and went into a café laughing uncontrollably. Antoine ignored him, but Fabien turned and watched the man slip out from his signs advertising a seer at place des Vosges. Despite his empathy for Louis, Antoine wasn’t easily suckered into anything. Even hysterical laughter could be an act, a ruse. Not just anyone had the ability to recite a story designed to entangle strangers. Some could do it convincingly, some couldn’t. Fabien didn’t know whether to believe this Antoine, a lung case, a noctambule who didn’t need light to read, a man who claimed he had a vulnerable spot: a sealed room in Montparnasse. Why? What did he care about a man who never went out?