Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  “. . . can you imagine the effects on the viewer?” finished Marcel.

  “Oh yes!” said Méliès. “They would scream. Where are their legs? Where are their arms? What is this writing doing in my eye?!!!”

  “But think of the impact! The drama?”

  “Marcel, we are here to plead for justice, not frighten people away from the theater!”

  “Think of it! What better way to show the impact on Dreyfus than by putting the impact on the spectator?”

  “My head reels, Proust!”

  “Well, just a suggestion. Sleep on it.”

  “I shall have nightmares,” said Méliès.

  Pablo continued to paint, eating a sandwich, drinking wine.

  “Méliès?” said Jarry.

  “(Sigh) Yes?”

  “Enlighten us.”

  “In what manner?”

  “Our knowledge of motio-kineto-photograms is small, but one thing is a royal poser to us.”

  “Continue.”

  “In our wonderful scene of the nightmares . . . we are led to understand that Monsieur Rousseau’s fierce tigers are to be moved by wires, compressed air, and frantic stagehands?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our mind works overtime. The fierce tigers are wonderful, but such movement will be seen, let us say, like fierce tigers moved by wires, air, and stage-labor.”

  “A necessary convention of stage and cinematograph,” said Méliès. “One the spectator accepts.”

  “But we are not here to have the viewer accept anything but an intolerable injustice to a man.”

  “True, but pity . . .”

  “Méliès,” said Jarry. “We understand each click of the camera takes one frame of film. Many of these frames projected at a constant rate leads to the illusion of motion. But each is of itself but a single frame of film.”

  “The persistence of vision,” said Méliès.

  “We were thinking. What if we took a single click of the camera, taking one picture of our fierce tigers . . .”

  “But what would that accomplish?”

  “Ah . . . then, Méliès, our royal personage moves the tiger to a slightly different posture, but the next in some action, but only one frame advanced, and took another click of the camera?”

  Méliès looked at him. “Then . . .”

  “Then the next and the next and the next and so on! The fierce tiger moves, roars, springs, devours! But each frame part of the movement, each frame a still.”

  Méliès thought a second. “An actor in the scenes would not be able to move at all. Or he would have to move at the same rate as the tiger. He would have to hold perfectly still (we already do that when stopping the camera to substitute a skeleton for a lady or somesuch) but they would have to do it endlessly. It would take weeks to get any good length of film. Also, the tigers would have to be braced, strutted to support their own weight.”

  “This is our idea, Méliès; we are not technicians.”

  “I shall take it under advisement.”

  Méliès’ head began to hurt. He had a workman go to the chemist’s, and get some of the new Aspirin for him. He took six.

  The film took three weeks to photograph. Méliès had to turn out three fairy tales in two days besides to keep his salesmen supplied with footage. Every day they worked, the Court of Cassation met to rehear the Dreyfus case, every day brought new evasions, new half-insinuations; Dreyfus’ lawyer was wounded by a gunshot while leaving court. Every day the country was split further and further down the center: There was no middle ground. There was talk of a coup d’état by the right.

  At last the footage was done.

  “I hope,” said Méliès to his wife that night, “I hope that after this I shall not hear the name of Dreyfus again, for the rest of my life.”

  XIII. The Elephant at the Foot of the Bed

  Jarry was on stage, talking in a monotone as he had been for five minutes. The crowd, including women, had come to the Theater of the Work to see what new horrors Lugné-Poe had in store for them.

  Alfred sat at a small folding table, which had been brought onstage, and a chair placed behind it, facing the audience. Jarry talked, as someone said, as a nutcracker would speak. The audience had listened but was growing restless—we have come for a play, not for someone dressed as a bicyclist to drone on about nothing in particular.

  The last week had been a long agony for Jarry—working on this play, which he had started in his youth, as a puppet play satirizing a pompous teacher—it had grown to encompass all mankind’s foibles, all national and human delusions. Then there had been the work on the Dreyfus film with Pablo and Rousseau and Proust and Méliès—it had been trying and demanding, but it was like pulling teeth, too collaborative, with its own limitations and ideas. Give a man the freedom of the page and boards!

  Jarry ran down like a clock. He finished tiredly.

  “The play takes place in Poland, which is to say, Nowhere.” He picked up his papers while two stagehands took off the table and chair. Jarry left. The lights dimmed. There were three raps on the floor with Lugné-Poe’s cane, the curtains opened in the darkness as the lights came up.

  The walls were painted as a child might have—representing sky, clouds, stars, the sun, moon, elephants, flowers, a clock with no hands, snow falling on a cheery fireplace.

  A round figure stood at one side, his face hidden by a pointed hood on which was painted the slitted eyes and mustache of a caricature bourgeoisie. His costume was a white canvas cassock with an immense stomach on which was painted three concentric circles.

  The audience tensed, leaned forward. The figure stepped to the center of the stage, looked around.

  “Merde!” he said.

  The riot could be heard for a kilometer in all directions.

  XIV. What He Really Thinks

  “Today, France has left the past of Jew-traitors and degeneracy behind.

  “Today, she has taken the final step toward greatness, a return to the True Faith, a way out of the German-Jew morass in which she has floundered for a quarter-century.

  “With the second conviction of the traitor-spy Dreyfus, she sends a signal to all his rat-like kind that France will no longer tolerate impurities in its body-politic, its armies, its commerce. She has served notice that the Future is written in the French language; Europe, indeed the world, shall one day speak only one tongue, Française.

  “The verdict of Guilty!—even with its softening of ‘With extenuating circumstances’—will end this Affair, once and for all, the only way—short of public execution by the most excruciating means, which, unfortunately the law no longer allows—ah! but True Frenchmen are working to change that!—that it could be ended; with the slow passing of this Jew-traitor to rot in the jungle of Devil’s Island—a man who should never have been allowed to don the uniform of this country in the first place.

  “Let there be no more talk of injustice! Injustice has already been served by the spectacle of a thoroughly guilty man being given two trials; by a man not worth a sous causing great agitation—surely the work of enemies of the state.

  “Let every True Frenchman hold this day sacred until the end of time. Let him turn his eyes eastward at our one Great Enemy, against that day when we shall rise up and gain just vengeance—let him not forget also to look around him, let him not rest until every Christ-murdering Jew, every German-inspired Protestant is driven from the boundaries of this country, or gotten rid of in an equally advantageous way—their property confiscated, their businesses closed, their ‘rights’—usurped rights!—nullified.

  “If this decision wakens Frenchmen to that threat, then Dreyfus will have, in all his evil machinations, his total acquiescence to our enemy’s plans, done one good deed: He will have given us the reason not to rest
until every one of his kind is gone from the face of the earth; that in the future the only place Hebrew will be spoken is in Hell.”

  —Robert Norpois

  XV. Truth Rises from the Well

  Emile Zola stared at the white sheet of paper with the British watermark.

  He dipped his pen in the bottle of Pelikan ink in the well and began to write.

  As he wrote, the words became scratchier, more hurried. All his feelings of frustration boiled over in his head and out onto the fine paper. The complete cowardice and stultification of the Army, the anti-Semitism of the rich and the poor, the Church; the utter stupidity of the government, the treason of the writers who refused to come to the aid of an innocent man.

  It was done sooner than he thought; six pages of his contempt and utter revulsion with the people of the country he loved more than life itself.

  He put on his coat and hat and hailed a pedal cabriolet, ordering it to the offices of L’Aurore. The streets were more empty than usual, the cafés full. The news of the second trial verdict had driven good people to drink. He was sure there were raucous celebrations in every Church, every fort, and the basement drill-halls of every right-wing organization in the city and the country. This was an artist’s quarter—there was no loud talk, no call to action. There would be slow and deliberate drunkenness and oblivion for all against the atrocious verdict.

  Zola sat back against the cushion, listening to the clicking pedals of the driver. He wondered if all this would end with the nation, half on one side of some field, half on the other, charging each other in final bloodbath.

  He paid the driver, who swerved silently around and headed back the other way. Zola stepped into the Aurora’s office, where Clemenceau waited for him behind his desk. Emile handed him the manuscript.

  Clemenceau read the first sentence, wrote, “Page One, 360 point RED TYPE headline—‘J’ACCUSE,’” called “Copy boy!”, said to the boy, “I shall be back for a proof in three hours,” put on his coat, and arm in arm he and Zola went off to the Théâtre Robert-Houdin for the first showing of Star Films’ The Dreyfus Affair, saying not a word to each other.

  XVI. Chamber Pots Shall Light Your Way

  Zola and Clemenceau, crying tears of pride and exultation, ran back arm in arm down the Place de l’Opéra, turning into a side street toward the publisher’s office.

  Halfway down, they began to sing La Marseillaise; people who looked out their windows, not knowing the reason, assumed their elation for that of the verdict of the second trial, flung merde pots at them from second-story windows. “Anti-Dreyfussard scum!” they yelled, shaking their fists. “Wait till I get my fowling piece!”

  Emile and Georges ran into the office, astonishing the editors and reporters there.

  They went to Clemenceau’s desk, where the page proof of Zola’s article waited, with a separate proof of the red headline.

  Zola picked up the proof.

  “No need of this, my dear Georges?”

  “I think not, my friend Emile.”

  Zola shredded it, throwing the strips on the pressman who was waiting in the office for word from Clemenceau.

  “Rip off the front page!” Clemenceau yelled out the door of his office. “We print a review of a moving picture there! Get Veyou out of whatever theater watching whatever piece of stage-pap he’s in and hustle him over to the Robert-Houdin for the second showing!”

  Emile and Georges looked at each other, remembering.

  “The Awful Trip to the Island!”

  “The Tigers of the Imagination!”

  “First News of Home!” said Emile.

  “Star Films,” said Clemenceau.

  “Méliès,” said Zola.

  “Dreyfus!” they said in unison.

  * * *

  Three days later, the President overturned the conviction of the second court, pardoned Dreyfus, and returned him to his full rank and privileges. The Ministry of War was reorganized, and the resignations of eleven generals received.

  The President was, of course, shot down like a dog on the way home from a cabinet meeting that night. Three days of mourning were declared.

  Dreyfus had been released the same night, and went to the country home of his brother Mathieu; he was now a drawn, shaken man whose hair had turned completely white.

  XVII. Three Famous Quotes Which Led to Duels:

  1. “The baron writes the kind of music a priest can hum while he is raping a choirboy.”

  2. “I see you carry the kind of cane which allows you to hit a woman eight or ten times before it breaks.”

  3. “Monsieur Jarry,” said Norpois, “I demand satisfaction for your insults to France during the last three years.”

  “Captain Dreyfus is proved innocent. We have called attention to nothing that was not the action of madmen and cowards.”

  “You are a spineless dwarf masturbator with the ideas of a toad!” said Norpois.

  “Our posture, stature, and habits are known to every schoolboy in France, Mister Journalist,” said Jarry. “We have come through five years of insult, spittle, and outrage. Nothing you say will make Dreyfus guilty or goad our royal person into a gratuitous display of our unerring marksmanship.”

  Jarry turned to walk away with Pablo.

  “Then, Monsieur Jarry, your bicycle . . .” said Norpois.

  Jarry stopped. “What of Our Royal Vehicle?”

  “Your bicycle eats merde sandwiches.”

  XVIII. The Downhill Bicycle Race

  A. Prelims

  The anemometer barely moved behind his head. The vane at its top pointed to the south; the windsock swelled and emptied slowly.

  Jarry slowly recovered his breath. Below and beyond lay the city of Paris and its environs. The Seine curved like a piece of gray silk below and out to two horizons. It was just after dawn; the sun was a fat red beet to the east.

  It was still cool at the weather station atop the Eiffel Tower, 300 meters above the ground.

  Jarry leaned against his high-wheeler. He had taken only the least minimum of fortifying substances, and that two hours ago on this, the morning of the duel.

  Proust had acted as his second (Jarry would have chosen Pablo—good thing he hadn’t, as the young painter had not shown up with the others this morning, perhaps out of fear of seeing Jarry maimed or killed—but Proust had defended himself many times, with a large variety of weapons, on many fields of honor). Second for Norpois was the journalist whose hair Alfred had set afire at the banquet more than a year ago. As the injured party, Jarry had had choice of place and weapons.

  The conditions were thus: weapons, any. Place: the Eiffel Tower. Duelists must be mounted on their bicycles when using their weapons. Jarry would start at the weather station at the top, Norpois at the base. After Jarry was taken to the third platform, using all three sets of elevators on the way up, and the elevator man—since this was a day of mourning, the tower was closed, and the guards paid to look the other way—returned to the ground, the elevators could not be used, only the stairways. Jarry had still had to climb the spiral steps from the third platform to the weather station, from which he was now recovering.

  With such an arrangement, Norpois would, of course, be waiting in ambush for him on the second observation platform by the time Jarry reached it. Such was the nature of duels.

  Jarry looked down the long swell of the south leg of the tower—it was gray, smooth, and curved as an elephant’s trunk, plunging down and out into the earth. Tiny dots waited there; Norpois, the journalist, Proust, a few others, perhaps by now Pablo. The Tower cast a long shadow out away from the River. The shadow of the Trocadéro almost reached to the base of the Tower in the morning sun. There was already talk of painting the Tower again, for the coming Exposition of 1900 in a year and a half.
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  Alfred took a deep breath, calmed himself. He was lightly armed, having only a five-shot .32 revolver in his holster and a poniard in a sheath on his hip. He would have felt almost naked except for the excruciatingly heavy but comforting weapon slung across his shoulders.

  It was a double-barreled Greener 4-bore Rhino Express which could fire a 130-gram bullet at 1200 meters per second. Jarry had decided that if he had to kill Norpois, he might as well wipe him off the face of the earth.

  He carried four extra rounds in a bandolier; they weighed more than a kilo in all.

  He was confident in his weapons, in himself, in his high-wheeler. He had oiled it the night before, polished it until it shone. After all, it was the insulted party, not him, not Dreyfus.

  He sighed, then leaned out and dropped the lead-weighted green handkerchief as the signal he was starting down. He had his ordinary over his shoulder opposite the Greener and had his foot on the first step before he heard the weighted handkerchief ricocheting on its way down off the curved leg of the Tower.

  B. The Duel

  He was out of breath before he passed the locked apartment which Gustave Eiffel had built for himself during the last phase of construction of the Tower, and which he sometimes used when aerodynamic experiments were being done on the drop-tube which ran down the exact center of the Tower.

  Down around the steps he clanged, his bike brushing against the spiral railing. It was good he was not subject to vertigo. He could imagine Norpois’ easy stroll to the west leg, where he would be casually walking up the broad stairs to the first level platform with four restaurants, arcades and booths, and its entry to the stilled second set of elevators. (Those between the ground and first level were the normal counterweighted kind; hydraulic ones to the second—American Otis had had to set up a dummy French corporation to win the contract—no one in France had the technology, and the charter forbade foreign manufacture; and tracked ones to the third—passengers had to change halfway up, as no elevator could be made to go from roughly 70° to 90° halfway up its rise.)