Teatro Grottesco

by Thomas Ligotti

  By this time I was on my feet and walking (staggering, in fact) toward the figure that stood in the archway. All the while I was walking, or staggering, toward the figure I was also demanding that he answer my accusations. But as I walked forward between the long study tables toward the archway, the figure standing there receded backward into the darkness of the next room, where moonlight shone through tall, paned windows. The closer I came to him the farther he receded into the darkness. And he did not recede into the darkness by taking steps backward, as I was taking steps forward, but moved in some other way that even now I cannot specify, as though he were floating.

  Just before the figure disappeared completely into the darkness he finally spoke to me. His voice was the same one that I had heard over those enormous headphones in Dalha’s art gallery, except now there was no interference, no distortion in the words that it spoke. These words, which resounded in my brain as they resounded in the high-ceilinged rooms of the library, were such that I should have welcomed them, for they echoed my very own, deeply private principles. Yet I took no comfort in hearing another voice tell me that there was nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know.

  The next voice I heard was that of Henry, who shouted up the wide stone staircase from the ground floor of the library. ‘Is everything all right, sir?’ he asked. I composed myself and was able to answer that everything was all right. I asked him to turn the lights on for the second floor of the library. In a minute the lights were on, but by then the man in the hat and long, loose overcoat was gone.

  When I confronted Dalha at her art gallery later that day, she was not in the least forthcoming with respect to my questions and accusations. ‘You’re crazy,’ she screamed at me. ‘I want nothing more to do with you.’

  When I asked Dalha what she was talking about, she said, ‘You really don’t know, do you? You really are a crazy man. You don’t remember that night you came up to me on the street while I was waiting for a cab to show up.’

  When I told her I recalled doing nothing of the kind, she continued her anecdote of that night, along with an account of subsequent events. ‘I’m standing there so drunk I can hardly understand what you’re saying to me about some little game you are playing. Then you send me the tapes. Then you come in and pay to listen to the tapes, exactly as you said you would. Just in time I remember that I’m supposed to lie to you that the tapes are the work of a white-haired old man, when in fact you’re the one who’s making the tapes. I knew you were crazy, but this was the only money I ever made off you, even though day after day you come and eat your pathetic lunch in my gallery. When I saw you that night, I couldn’t tell at first who it was walking up to me on the street. You did look different, and you were wearing that stupid hat. Soon enough, though, I can see that it’s you. And you’re pretending to be someone else, but not really pretending, I don’t know. And then you tell me that I must destroy the tapes, and if I don’t destroy them something will happen. Well, let me tell you, crazy man,’ Dalha said, ‘I did not destroy those tape recordings. I let all my friends hear them. We sat around getting drunk and laughing our heads off at your stupid dream monologues. Here, another one of your artworks arrived in the mail today,’ she said while walking across the floor of the art gallery to the tape machine that was positioned on the small plastic table. ‘Why don’t you listen to it and pay me the money you promised. This looks like a good one,’ she said, picking up the little card that bore the title of the work. ‘The Bus Shelter, it says. That should be very exciting for you – a bus shelter. Pay up!’

  ‘Dalha,’ I said in a laboriously calm voice, ‘please listen to me. You have to make another arrangement. I need to have another meeting with the tape-recording artist. You’re the only one who can arrange for this to happen. Dalha, I’m afraid for both of us if you don’t agree to make this arrangement. I need to speak with him again.’

  ‘Then why don’t you just go talk into a mirror. There,’ she said, pointing to the curtain that separated the front section from the back section of the art gallery. ‘Go into the bathroom like you did the other day and talk to yourself in the mirror.’

  ‘I didn’t talk to myself in the bathroom, Dalha.’

  ‘No? What were you doing then?’

  ‘Dalha, you have to make the arrangement. You are the go-between. He will contact you if you agree to let him.’

  ‘Who will contact me?’

  This was a fair question for Dalha to ask, but it was also one that I could not answer. I told her that I would return to talk to her the next day, hoping she would have calmed down by then.

  Unfortunately, I never saw Dalha again. That night she was found dead on the street. Presumably she had been waiting for a cab to take her home from a bar or a party or some other human gathering place where she had gotten very drunk. But it was not her drinking or her exhausting bohemian social life that killed Dalha. She had, in fact, choked to death while waiting for a cab very late at night. Her body was taken to a hospital for examination. There it was discovered that an object had been lodged inside her. Someone, it appeared, had violently thrust something down her throat. The object, as described in a newspaper article, was the ‘small plastic arm of a toy doll.’ Whether this doll’s arm had been painted emerald green, or any other color, was not mentioned in the article. Surely the police searched through Dalha D. Fine Arts and found many more such objects arranged in a wire wastebasket, each of them painted different colors. No doubt they also found the exhibit of the dream monologues with its unsigned artworks and tape recorder stolen from the library. But they could never have made the connection between these tape-recorded artworks and the grotesque death of the gallery owner.

  After that night I no longer felt the desperate need to possess the monologues, not even the final bus shelter tape, which I have never heard. I was now in possession of the original handwritten manuscripts from which the tape-recording artist had created his dream monologues and which he had left for me in a large envelope on my desk at the library. Even then he knew, as I did not know, that after our first meeting we would never meet again. The handwriting on the manuscript pages is somewhat like my own, although the slant of the letters betrays a left-handed writer, whereas I am right-handed. Over and over I read the dream monologues about the bus shelter and the derelict factory and especially about the bungalow house, where the moonlight shines upon a carpet littered with the bodies of vermin. I try to experience the infinite terror and dreariness of a bungalow universe in the way I once did, but it is not the same as it once was. There is no comfort in it, even though the vision and the underlying principles are still the same. I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement – anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.

  SEVERINI

  Iwas the only one among a local circle of acquaintances and associates who had never met Severini. Unlike the rest of them I was not in the least moved to visit him along with the others at that isolated residence which had become known as ‘Severini’s Shack.’ There was a question of my deliberately avoiding an encounter with this extraordinary individual, but even I myself had no idea whether or not this was true. My curiosity was just as developed as that of the rest of them, more so in fact. Yet some kind of scruple or special anxiety kept me away from what the others celebrated as the ‘spectacle of Severini.’

  Of course I could not escape a second-hand knowledge of their Severini visits. Each of these trips to
that lonesome hovel some distance outside the city where I used to live was a great adventure, they reported, an excursion into the most obscure and idiosyncratic nightmares. The figure that presided over these salon-like gatherings was extremely unstable and inspired in his visitors a sense of lurid anticipation, an unfocused expectation that sometimes reached the pitch of lunacy. Afterward I would hear detailed accounts from one person or another of what had occurred during a particular evening within the confines of the notorious shack, which was situated at the edge of a wildly overgrown and swampy tract of land known as St Alban’s Marsh, a place that some claimed had a sinister pertinence to Severini himself. Occasionally I would make notes of these accounts, indulging myself in a type of imaginative and also highly analytical record-keeping. For the most part, however, I simply absorbed all of these Severini anecdotes in a wholly natural and organic fashion, much as I assimilated so many things in the world around me, without any awareness – or even a possibility of awareness – that these things might be nourishing or noxious or purely neutral. From the beginning, I admit, it was my tendency to be highly receptive to whatever someone might have to say regarding Severini, his shack-like home, and the marshy landscape in which he had ensconced himself. Then, during private moments when I returned to the small apartment in which I resided during this period of my life, I would recreate in my imagination the phenomena that had been related to me in conversations held at diverse places and times. It was rare that I actively urged the others to elaborate on any specific aspect of their adventures with Severini, but several times I did betray myself when the subject arose of his past life before he set himself up in a marshland shack.

  According to first-hand witnesses (that is, persons who had actually made the pilgrimage to that isolated and crumbling shack), Severini could be quite talkative about his personal history, particularly the motives and events that most directly culminated in his present life. Nevertheless, these persons also admitted that the ‘marvelous hermit’ (Severini) displayed a conspicuous disregard for common facts and for truths of a literal sort. Thus he was often given to speaking about himself by way of ambiguous parables and metaphors, not to mention outrageous anecdotes, the facts of which always seemed to cancel out one another, as well as outright lies which afterward he himself would sometimes expose as such. But much of the time – and in the opinion of some, all of the time – Severini’s speech took the form of total nonsense, as though he were talking in his sleep. Despite these obstacles to both credibility and coherence, all of the individuals who spoke to me on the subject somehow conveyed to my mind a remarkably focused portrait of the hermit Severini, an amalgam of hearsay that attained the status of a potent legend.

  This impression of a legendary Severini was no doubt bolstered by what certain persons described as ‘Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum.’ The entourage of visitors to the hermit’s dilapidated shack was composed of more or less artistic persons, or at least individuals with artistic leanings, and their exposure to Severini proved a powerful inspiration that resulted in numerous artworks in a variety of media and genres. There were sculptures, paintings and drawings, poems and short prose pieces, musical compositions sometimes accompanied by lyrics, conceptual works that existed only in schematic or anecdotal form, and even an architectural plan for a ‘ruined temple on a jungle island somewhere in the region of the Philippines.’ While on the surface these productions appeared to have their basis in a multitude of dubious sources, each of them claimed the most literalistic origins in Severini’s own words, his sleeptalking, as they called it. Indeed, I myself could perceive a definite unity among these artworks and their integral relationship to the same unique figure of inspiration that was Severini himself, although I had never met this fantastical person and had no desire to do so. Nevertheless, these so-called ‘exhibits’ helped me to recreate in my imagination not only those much-discussed visits to that shack in the marsh country but also the personal history of its lone inhabitant.

  As I now think about them – that is, recreate them in my imagination – these Severini-based artworks, however varied in their genres and techniques, brought to the surface a few features that were always the same and were always treated in the same way. I was startled when I first began to recognize these common features, because somehow they closely replicated a number of peculiar images and concepts that I myself had already experienced in moments of imaginative daydreaming and especially during episodes of delirium brought on by physical disease or excessive psychic turmoil.

  A central element of such episodes was the sense of a place possessing qualities that were redolent, on the one hand, of a tropical landscape, and, on the other hand, of a common sewer. The aspect of a common sewer emerged in the feeling of an enclosed but also vastly extensive space, a network of coiling passages that spanned incredible distances in an underworld of misty darkness. As for the quality of a tropical landscape, this shared much of the same kind of darkly oozing ferment as the sewer aspect, with the added impression of the most exotic forms of life spawning on every side, things multiplying and also incessantly mutating like a time-lapse film of spreading fungus or multi-colored slime molds totally unrestricted in their form and expansion. While I experienced the most intense visions of this place, this tropical sewer, as it recreated itself in my delirious imagination year after year, I was always outside it at some great remove, not caught within as if I were having a nightmare. But still I maintained an awareness (as in a nightmare) that something had happened in this place, some unknown event had transpired that had left these images behind it like a trail of slime. And then a certain feeling came over me and a certain concept came to my mind.

  It was this feeling and its companion concept that so vividly arose within my being when the others began telling me about their strange visits to the Severini place and showing me the various artworks that this strange individual had inspired them to create. One by one I viewed paintings or sculptures in some artist’s studio, or heard music being performed in a club that was frequented by the Severini crowd, or read literary works that were being passed around – and each time the sense of that tropical sewer was revived in me, although not with the same intensity as the delirious episodes I experienced while suffering from a physical disease or during periods of excessive psychic turmoil. The titles of these works alone might have been enough to provoke the particular feeling and the concept that were produced by my delirious episodes. The concept to which I have been referring may be stated in various ways, but it usually occurred to my mind as a simple phrase (or fragment), almost a chant that overwhelmed me with vile and haunting suggestions far beyond its mere words, which are as follows: the nightmare of the organism. The vile and haunting suggestions underlying (or inspired by) this conceptual phrase were, as I have said, called up by the titles of those Severini-based artworks, those Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. While I have difficulty recalling the type of work to which each title was attached – whether a painting or a sculpture, a poem or a performance piece – I am still able to cite a number of the titles themselves. One of them that easily emerges in recollection is the following: No Face Among Us. Here is another: Defiled and Delivered. And now many more of them are coming to my mind: The Way of the Lost, On Viscous and Sacred Ground (a.k.a. The Tantric Doctors), In Earth and Excreta, The Black Spume of Existence, Integuments in Eruption, and The Descent into the Fungal. All of these titles, as my artistic acquaintances and associates informed me, were taken from selected phrases (or fragments) spoken by Severini during his numerous episodes of sleeptalking.

  Every time I heard one of these titles and saw the particular artwork that it named, I was always reminded of that tropical sewer of my delirious episodes. I would also feel myself on the verge of realizing what it was that had happened in this place, some wonderful or disastrous event that was intimately related to the conceptual phrase which I have given as the nightmare of the organism. Yet these artworks and their titles allowed me only a
remote sense of some vile and haunting revelation. And it was simply not possible for the others to illuminate this matter fully, given that their knowledge of Severini’s past history was exclusively derived from his own nonsensical or questionable assertions. As nearly as they were willing to speculate, it appeared that this deranged and all-but-incognito person known as Severini was the willing subject of what was variously referred to as an ‘esoteric procedure’ or an ‘illicit practice.’ At this point in my discoveries about the strange Severini I found it difficult to inquire about the exact nature of this procedure, or practice, while at the same time pretending a lack of interest in actually meeting the resident of that ruined shack out in the marshland backroads some distance outside the city where I used to live. It did seem, however, that this practice or procedure, as nearly as anyone could speculate, was not a medical treatment of any known variety. Rather, they thought that the procedure (or practice) in question involved occult or mystical traditions that, in their most potent form, are able to exist inconspicuously in only a few remaining parts of the world. Of course, all of this speculation could have been a cover-up orchestrated by Severini or by his disciples – for that is what they had become – or by all of them together. In fact, for some time I had suspected that Severini’s disciples, despite their parade of artworks and outlandish accounts of their visits to the marshland shack, were nevertheless concealing from me some vital element of their new experiences. There seemed to be some truth of which they had knowledge and I had not. Yet they also seemed to desire that, in due course, I might share with them this truth.