THREE
Then there was a room hissing with greenish gaslight, in which Walser opened his eyes to see a looming figure dipping lint into a bowl of pink water powerfully redolent of carbolic acid. He lay on some kind of day-bed. It was his blood tinged the water pink. He closed his eyes again. Fevvers reapplied the damp lint to his shoulder without gentleness. Now he was conscious, he howled.
‘Easy does it,’ advised Lizzie, tilting the rim of a mug of hot, sweet tea to his lips. Tea with canned, condensed milk in it. English tea. Fevvers did not release her pressure on his dressing. She wore a stern, white shirt secured at the throat with an emphatic necktie but this did not render her in the least masculine. Upholstered in the snowy linen, her bosom looked as vast as its mother’s does to a child as she bends over its bed in sickness. Her displeasure was palpable.
‘So you’ve run away to join the circus, have you, love?’ she asked, not quite pleasantly. Evidently she no longer felt the need to call him ‘sir’.
Walser twitched between her ministrations, disturbing the shawl in which they’d wrapped him. This shawl was made from dozens of little squares of knitted wool sewn together to form a patchwork and its workmanship had the touching incompetence of that of children, first real evidence, he noted, of the existence of the tribe of Cockney nephews and nieces they were always talking about. His wig was gone and his hair was sopping wet.
‘Tiger took one swipe at you and then the Princess turned on the hosepipe,’ said Lizzie. ‘Whoosh! Blast ’em with water, that’s the trick. Knocks the breath out of the buggers. Knocks ’em backwards. Then you scoop ’em up with a net.’
There were comforting, familiar things in Fevvers’ new dressing-room. A gilt clock topped with Father Time, stopped at twelve. A dog-eared poster on the wall. A puffing spirit kettle. Lizzie made him drink more tea.
‘Course, it isn’t a tiger, exactly!’ Fevvers informed him. ‘Didn’t give you a chance to check out its privates, did it. Tigress. Female of the species. Deadlier than the male, and all that.’
‘Charging a bleeding tigress!’ exclaimed Lizzie. ‘What the ’ell got into ’im?’
‘He was having it off with the Ape-Man’s missus, wasn’t he,’ said Fevvers in a flat tone. She pressed too firmly on the compress, so Walser howled, again.
‘No use denying it.’
‘Quick work,’ said Lizzie.
‘She’s a pin-cushion,’ said Fevvers.
‘I take it,’ said Lizzie to Walser, ‘that you wish to remain incognito.’
‘We’re the only ones that know,’ said Fevvers, in the tones of one pondering blackmail.
‘But what the ’ell’s his game?’ Lizzie asked Fevvers, as if he were not there.
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
‘I’m here to write a story,’ he said. ‘Story about the circus. About you and the circus,’ he added in as conciliatory manner as he knew how.
‘That involve screwing the Ape-Man’s missus, does it?’
She eyed the compress narrowly and let it alone, tipped the bowl of water into the slop pail under the wash-stand and wiped her hands on her pleated skirt with a dismissive air. Yet, as if obeying a scenario that predated their disappointment with him, the women treated him with rough compassion. A frock-coated doctor soon arrived to bandage his scratches, whom Fevvers paid.
‘Settle up with me later,’ she said in the accents of a tart with a twenty-four-carat heart.
A female chimp (wearing a green hair-ribbon) delivered a pile of neatly folded clothes, and wig and school cap, too, and they dressed him up again before they sent him back to Clown Alley. Fevvers even slapped a hasty coat of wet white over his features, to preserve his disguise for him, since his right arm hurt far too much for him to do it for himself. All the same, he felt himself much diminished in their eyes and was glad to get out of the dressing-room.
As he closed the door behind him, Lizzie said thoughtfully to Fevvers: ‘How do you think he gets his dispatches through the censor?’
In some pain, and painfully aware that, by the very ‘heroicness’ of his extravagant gesture, he had ‘made a fool of himself’ just as the Colonel had predicted he would, Walser made his shaky way through the courtyard, where the mittened and mufflered children of the wire-walking Charivaris were now playfully teetering along the Princess’s empty washing-line. It was already dark. From the monkey house echoing on the night air, came a rhythmic thud as the Ape-Man beat his woman as though she were a carpet.
FOUR
Clown Alley, the generic name of all lodgings of all clowns, temporarily located in this city in the rotten wooden tenement where damp fell from the walls like dew, was a place where reigned the lugubrious atmosphere of a prison or a madhouse; amongst themselves, the clowns distilled the same kind of mutilated patience one finds amongst inmates of closed institutions, a willed and terrible suspension of being. At dinner time, the white faces gathered round the table, bathed in the acrid steam of the baboushka’s fish soup, possessed the formal lifelessness of death masks, as if, in some essential sense, they themselves were absent from the repast and left untenanted replicas behind.
Observe, in his behind-the-scenes repose, Buffo the Great, the Master Clown, who sits by rights not at the head but at the magisterial middle of the table, in the place where Leonardo seats the Christ, reserving to himself the sacramental task of breaking the black bread and dividing it between his disciples.
Buffo the Great, the terrible Buffo, hilarious, appalling, devastating Buffo with his round, white face and the inch-wide rings of rouge round his eyes, and his four-cornered mouth, like a bow tie, and, mockery of mockeries, under his roguishly cocked, white, conical cap, he wears a wig that does not simulate hair. It is, in fact, a bladder. Think of that. He wears his insides on his outside, and a portion of his most obscene and intimate insides, at that; so that you might think he is bald, he stores his brains in the organ which, conventionally, stores piss.
He is a big man, seven feet high and broad to suit, so that he makes you laugh when he trips over little things. His size is half the fun of it, that he should be so very, very big and yet incapable of coping with the simplest techniques of motion. This giant is the victim of material objects. Things are against him. They wage war on him. When he tries to open a door, the knob comes off in his hand.
At moments of consternation, his eyebrows, black and bushy with mascara, shoot up his forehead and his jaw drops as if brow and jaw were pulled by opposing magnets. Tsking his tongue against his yellow, gravestone teeth, he fits the knob back on again with exaggerated care. Steps back. Approaches the door, again, with a laughably unjustified self-confidence. Grasps the knob, firmly; this time, he knows it is secure . . . hasn’t he just fixed it himself? But –
Things fall apart at the very shiver of his tread on the ground. He is himself the centre that does not hold.
He specialises in violent slapstick. He likes to burn clown policemen alive. As the mad priest, he will officiate at clown weddings where Grik or Grok in drag is subjected to the most extravagant humiliations. They do a favourite ‘Clowns’ Christmas Dinner’, in which Buffo takes up his Christ’s place at the table, carving knife in one hand, fork in the other, and some hapless august or other is borne on, with a cockscomb on his head, as the bird. (Much play with the links of sausages with which this bird’s trousers are stuffed.) But this roast, such is the way of Buffo’s world, gets up and tries to run away . . .
Buffo the Great, the Clown of Clowns.
He adores the old jokes, the collapsing chairs, the exploding puddings; he says, ‘The beauty of clowning is, nothing ever changes.’
At the climax of his turn, everything having collapsed about him as if a grenade exploded it, he starts to deconstruct himself. His face becomes contorted by the most hideous grimaces, as if he were trying to shake off the very wet white with which it is coated: shake! shake! shake out his teeth, shake off his nose, shake away his eyeballs, let all go flying off in a conv
ulsive self-dismemberment.
He begins to spin round and round where he stands.
Then, when you think, this time, Buffo the Great must whirl apart into his constituents, as if he had turned into his own centrifuge, the terrific drum-roll which accompanies this extraordinary display concludes and Buffo leaps, shaking, into the air, to fall flat on his back.
Silence.
The lights dim.
Very, very slowly and mournfully, now strikes up the Dead March from Saul, led by Grik and Grok, the musical clowns, with bass drum and piccolo, with minuscule fiddle and enormous triangle struck with back-kick of foot, Grik and Grok, who contain within them an entire orchestra. This is the turn called ‘The Clown’s Funeral’. The rest of the clowns carry on an exceedingly large coffin draped with the Union Jack. They put the coffin down on the sawdust beside Buffo. They start to put him in it.
But will he fit? Of course he won’t! His legs and arms can’t be bent, won’t be bent, won’t be ordered about! Nobody can lay out this force of nature, even if it is dead! Pozzo or Bimbo runs off to get an axe to hack bits off him, to cut him down to coffin-size. It turns out the axe is made of rubber.
At long, hilarious last, somehow or other they finally contrive to load him into the box and get the coffin lid on top of him, although it keeps on jerking and tilting because dead Buffo can’t and won’t lie down. The clown attendants heave the coffin up on their shoulders; they have some difficulty coordinating themselves as pall-bearers. One falls to his knees and, when he rises, down goes another. But, sooner or later, the coffin is aloft upon their shoulders and they prepare to process out of the ring with him.
At which Buffo bursts through the coffin lid! Right through. With a great, rending crash, leaving behind a huge, ragged hole, the silhouette of himself, in the flimsy wood. Here he is, again, large as life and white and black and red all over! ‘Thunder and lightning, did yuz think I was dead?’
Tumultuous resurrection of the clown. He leaps from his coffin even as his acolytes hold it high, performing a double somersault on his way to the ground. (He started out in life as an acrobat.) Roars of applause, cheers. He darts round and round the ring, shaking hands, kissing those babies who are not weeping with terror, tousling the heads of bug-eyed children teetering between tears and laughter. Buffo who was dead is now alive again.
And all bound out of the ring, led by this demoniac, malign, enchanted reveller.
The other clowns called him the Old Man, as a mark of respect, although he was not yet quite fifty, hovering about the climacteric of his years.
His personal habits were dominated by his tremendous and perpetual thirst. His pockets always bulged with bottles; his drinking was prodigious yet always seemed somehow unsatisfactory to himself, as if alcohol were an inadequate substitute for some headier or more substantial intoxicant, as though he would have liked, if he could, to bottle the whole world, tip it down his throat, then piss it against the wall. Like Fevvers, he was Cockney bred and born; his real name was George Buffins, but he had long ago forgotten it, although he was a great patriot, British to the bone, even if as widely travelled as the British Empire in the service of fun.
‘We kill ourselves,’ said Buffo the Great. ‘Often we hang ourselves with the gaudy braces from which we suspend those trousers loose as the skirts that Muslims wear lest the Messiah be born to a man. Or, sometimes, a pistol may be sneaked from the lion-tamer, his blanks replaced with live bullets. Bang! a bullet through the brain. If in Paris, you can chuck yourself under the Metro. Or, should you have been so lucky as to be able to afford mod. cons, you might gas yourself in your lonely garret, might you not. Despair is the constant companion of the Clown.
‘For not infrequently there is no element of the voluntary in clowning. Often, d’you see, we take to clowning when all else fails. Under these impenetrable disguises of wet white, you might find, were you to look, the features of those who were once proud to be visible. You find there, per example, the aerialiste whose nerve has failed; the bare-back rider who took one tumble too many; the juggler whose hands shake so, from drink or sorrow, that he can no longer keep his balls in the air. And then what is left but the white mask of poor Pierrot, who invites the laughter that would otherwise come unbidden.
‘The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.’
The great white heads around the long table nodded slowly in acquiescence.
“The mirth the clown creates grows in proportion to the humiliation he is forced to endure,’ Buffo continued, refilling his glass with vodka. ‘And yet, too, you might say, might you not, that the clown is the very image of Christ.’ With a nod towards the mildly shining icon in the corner of the stinking kitchen, where night crawled in the form of cockroaches in the corners. ‘The despised and rejected, the scapegoat upon whose stooped shoulders is heaped the fury of the mob, the object and yet – yet! also he is the subject of laughter. For what we are, we have chosen to be.
‘Yes, young lad, young Jack, young First-of-May, we subject ourselves to laughter from choice. We are the whores of mirth, for, like a whore, we know what we are; we know we are mere hirelings hard at work and yet those who hire us see us as beings perpetually at play. Our work is their pleasure and so they think our work must be our pleasure, too, so there is always an abyss between their notion of our work as play, and ours, of their leisure as our labour.
‘And as for mirth itself, oh, yes, young Jack!’ Turning to Walser and waving an admonitory glass at him. ‘Don’t think I haven’t very often meditated on the subject of laughter, as, in my all too human rags, I grovel on the sawdust. And you want to know what I think? That they don’t laugh in heaven, not even if it were ever so.
‘Consider the saints as the acts in a great circus. Catherine juggling her wheel. St Lawrence on his grill, a spectacle from any freak-show. Saint Sebastian, best knife-throwing stunt you ever saw! And St Jerome, with his learned lion with the paw on the book, great little animal act, that, beats the darkie bitch and her joanna hollow!
‘And the great ringmaster in the sky, with his white beard and his uplifted finger, for whom all these and many other less sanctified performers put on their turns in the endless ring of fire which surrounds the whirling globe. But never a giggle, never a titter up there. The archangels can call: “Bring on the clowns!” until they’re blue in the face but the celestial band will never strike up the intro to “The March of the Gladiators” on its harps and trumps, never, no fear – for we are doomed to stay down below, nailed on the endless cross of the humiliations of this world!
‘The sons of men. Don’t you forget, me lad, we clowns are the sons of men.’
The others all droned after him, in unison: ‘We are the sons of men,’ as in some kind of clerical response.
‘You must know,’ continued Buffo to Walser in his graveyard intonation, ‘you must know that the word “clown” derives from the Old Norse, “klunni”, meaning “loutish”. “Klunni”, cognate with the Danish, “kluntet”, clumsy, maladroit, and the Yorkshire dialect, “gormless”. You must know what you have become, young man, how the word defines you, now you have opted to lose your wits in the profession of the clown.’
‘A clown!’ they murmured softly, dreamily amongst themselves. ‘A clown! Welcome to Clown Alley!’
Meanwhile, to the accompaniment of Buffo’s sermon, the meal went on. Spoons scraped the bottoms of the earthenware bowls of fish soup; the spatulate, white-gloved hands reached for the shanks of black bread, food sad and dark as the congregation of sorrow assembled at the ill-made table. Buffo, scorning a glass, now tipped vodka straight from the bottle down his throat.
‘There is a story told of me, even of me, the Great Buffo, as it has been told of every clown since the invention of the desolating profession,’ intoned Buffo. ‘Told, once, of the melancholy Domenico Biancolette, who had the seventeenth century in stitches; told of Grimaldi; told of the French Pierrot, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, whose inheritance was the mo
on. This story is not precisely true but has the poetic truth of myth and so attaches itself to each and every laughter-maker. It goeth thus:
‘In Copenhagen, once, I had the news of the death of my adored mother, by telegram, the very morning on which I buried my dearly beloved wife who had passed away whilst bringing stillborn into the world the only son that ever sprang from my loins, if “spring” be not too sprightly a word for the way his reluctant meat came skulking out of her womb before she gave up the ghost. All those I loved wiped out at one fell swoop! And still at matinee time in the Tivoli, I tumble in the ring and how the punters bust a gut to see. Seized by inconsolable grief, I cry: “The sky is full of blood!” And they laughed all the more. How droll you are, with the tears on your cheeks! In mufti, in mourning, in some low bar between performances, the jolly barmaid says: “I say, old fellow, what a long face! I know what you need. Go along to the Tivoli and take a look at Buffo the Great. He’ll soon bring your smiles back!”
‘The clown may be the source of mirth, but – who shall make the clown laugh?’
‘Who shall make the clown laugh?’ they whispered together, rustling like hollow men.
Little Ivan, oblivious to the meaning of the foreign babbling issuing from the blanched, jack-o’-lantern faces that hung over the table, ran round collecting the clinking soup bowls, unnerved yet more and more fascinated by this invasion of glum, painted comedians. The meal, such as it was, was over. All produced pipes, baccy and fresh vodka while the baboushka, kneeling before the samovar, performed the endless, contentless, semi-prayerful gestures of those hands deformed by decades of common toil. Her daughter, the axe-murderess, was far away in Siberia, but, although the baboushka’s life was composed of these gestures simulating praying, she no longer possessed sufficient energy to pray for her daughter’s soul. The charcoal reddened, blackened, reddened.
‘And yet,’ resumed Buffo, after a pull at a bottle, ‘we possess one privilege, one rare privilege, that makes of our outcast and disregarded state something wonderful, something precious. We can invent our own faces! We make ourselves.’