. .

"Have you heard at night the terrible howling of these wax figures, shut in the fair-booths; the pitiful chorus of those forms of wood or porcelain, banging their fists against the walls of their prisons?"

In my father's face, convulsed by the horror of the visions which he had conjured up from darkness, a spiral of wrinkles appeared, a maelstrom growing deeper and deeper, at the bottom of which there flared the terrible eye of a prophet. His beard bristled grotesquely, the tufts of hair growing from warts and moles and from his nostrils stood on end. He became rigid and stood with flaming eyes, trembling from an internal conflict like an automaton of which the mechanism has broken down.

Adela rose from her chair and asked us to avert our eyes from what was to follow. Then she went up to Father and, with her hands on her hips in a pose of great determination, she spoke very clearly.

The two other girls sat stiffly, with downcast eyes, strangely numb. . . .

Treatise on Tailors' Dummies: Conclusion

On one of the following evenings, my father continued his lecture thus: "When I announced my talk about lay figures, I had not really wanted to speak about those incarnate misunderstandings, those sad parodies that are the fruits of a common and vulgar lack of restraint. I had something else in mind."

Here my father began to set before our eyes the picture of that generatio aequivoca which he had dreamed up, a species of beings only half organic, a kind of pseudofauna and pseudoflora, the result of a fantastic fermentation of matter.

They were creations resembling, in appearance only, living creatures such as crustaceans, vertebrates, cephalo-pods. In reality the appearance was misleading—they were amorphous creatures, with no internal structure, products of the imitative tendency of matter which, equipped with memory, repeats from force of habit the forms already accepted. The morphological scope of matter is limited on the whole and a certain quota of forms is repeated over and over again on various levels of existence.

These creatures—mobile, sensitive to stimuli, and yet outside the pale of real life—could be brought forth by suspending certain complex colloids in solutions of kitchen salt. These colloids, after a number of days, would form and organize themselves in precipitations of substance resembling lower forms of fauna.

In creatures conceived in this way, one could observe the processes of respiration and metabolism, but chemical analysis revealed in them traces neither of albumen nor of carbon compounds.

Yet these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendor of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly denned environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps, abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such a soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.

In apartments of that kind, wallpapers must be very weary and bored with the incessant changes in all the cadenzas of rhythm; no wonder that they are susceptible to distant, dangerous dreams. The essence of furniture is unstable, degenerate, and receptive to abnormal temptations: it is then that on this sick, tired, and wasted soil colorful and exuberant mildew can flourish in a fantastic growth, like a beautiful rash.

"As you will no doubt know," said my father, "in old apartments there are rooms which are sometimes forgotten. Unvisited for months on end, they wilt neglected between the old walls and it happens that they close in on themselves, become overgrown with bricks, and, lost once and for all to our memory, forfeit their only claim to existence. The doors, leading to them from some backstairs landing, have been overlooked by people living in the apartment for so long that they merge with the wall, grow into it, and all trace of them is obliterated in a complicated design of lines and cracks.

"Once early in the morning toward the end of winter," my father continued, "after many months of absence, I entered such a forgotten passage, and I was amazed at the appearance of the rooms.

"From all the crevices in the floor, from all the moldings, from every recess, there grew slim shoots filling the gray air with a scintillating filigree lace of leaves: a hothouse jungle, full of whispers and flicking lights—a false and blissful spring. Around the bed, under the lamp, along the wardrobes, grew clumps of delicate trees which, high above, spread their luminous crowns and fountains of lacy leaves, spraying chlorophyll, and thrusting up to the painted heaven of the ceiling. In the rapid process of blossoming, enormous white and pink flowers opened among the leaves, bursting from bud under your very eyes, displaying their pink pulp and spilling over to shed their petals and fall apart in quick decay.

"I was happy," said my father, "to see that unexpected flowering which filled the air with a soft rustle, a gentle murmur, falling like colored confetti through the thin rods of the twigs.

"I could see the trembling of the air, the fermentation of too rich an atmosphere which provoked that precocious blossoming, luxuriation, and wilting of the fantastic oleanders which had filled the room with a rare, lazy snowstorm of large pink clusters of flowers.

"Before nightfall," concluded my father, "there was no trace left of that splendid flowering. The whole elusive sight was a fata morgana, an example of the strange make-believe of matter which had created a semblance of life."

My father was strangely animated that day; the expression in his eyes—a sly, ironic expression—was vivid and humorous. Later he suddenly became more serious and again analyzed the infinite diversity of forms which the multifarious matter could adopt. He was fascinated by doubtful and problematic forms, like the ectoplasm of a medium, by pseudomatter, the cataleptic emanations of the brain which in some instances spread from the mouth of the person in a trance over the whole table, filled the whole room, a floating, rarefied tissue, an astral dough, on the borderline between body and soul.

"Who knows," he said, "how many suffering, crippled, fragmentary forms of life there are, such as the artificially created life of chests and tables quickly nailed together, crucified timbers, silent martyrs to cruel human inventiveness. The terrible transplantation of incompatible and hostile races of wood, their merging into one misbegotten personality.

"How much ancient suffering is there in the varnished grain, in the veins and knots of our old familiar wardrobes? Who would recognize in them the old features, smiles, and glances, almost planed and polished out of all recognition?"

My father's face, when he said that, dissolved into a thoughtful net of wrinkles, began to resemble an old plank full of knots and veins, from which all memories had been planed away. For a moment we thought that Father would fall into a state of apathy, which sometimes took hold of him, but all of a sudden he recovered himself and continued to speak:

"Ancient, mythical tribes used to embalm their dead. The walls of their houses were filled with bodies and heads immured in them: a father would stand in a corner of the living room—stuffed, the tanned skin of a deceased wife would serve as a mat under the table. I knew a certain sea captain who had in his cabin a lamp, made by Malayan embalmers from the body of his murdered mistress. On her head, she wore enormous antlers. In the stillness of the cabin, the face stretched between the antlers at the ceiling, slowly lifted its eyelids: on the half-opened lips a bubble of saliva would glint, then burst with the softest of whispers. Octopuses, tortoises, and enormous crabs, hanging from the rafters in place of chandeliers, moved their legs endlessly in that stillness, walking, walking, walking without moving...."

My father's face suddenly assumed a worried, sad expression when his thoughts, stirred by who knows what associations, prompted him to new examples:

"Am I to conceal from you," he said in a low tone, "that my own brother, as a result of a long and incurable illness, has been gradually transformed into a bundle of rubber tubing, and that my poor cousin had to carry him day and night on his cushion, singing to the luckless creature endless lullabies on winter nights? Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema? What disappointment for his parents, what confusion for their feelings, what frustration of the hopes centered around the promising youth! And yet, the faithful love of my poor cousin was not denied him even during that transformation."

"Oh, please, I cannot, I really cannot listen to this any longer!" groaned Polda leaning over her chair. "Make him stop, Adela...."

The girls got up, Adela went up to my father with an outstretched finger made as if to tickle him. Father lost countenance, immediately stopped talking, and, very frightened, began to back away from Adela's moving finger.