M Harrison - Viriconium

He caught her hands to stop her from dancing. “I’d kill it,” he said seriously. “I’d-” What he might do he had to think for a moment, staring into Vera’s face. She stood dead still. “Perhaps it would kill me,” he said wonderingly. “I never thought. I never thought things like that might really exist.” He was shivering with excitement: she could feel it through his hands. She looked down at him. He was as thick-necked and excitable as a little pony. All of a sudden she was sharply aware of his life, which had somehow assembled for itself like a lot of eccentric furniture the long perspective of Endingall Street, the open doors of the Allotrope Cabaret, that helpless danseuse with her overblocked shoes and ruined ankles, to what end he couldn’t see.

“Nothing could kill you,” she said shyly.

Rhys shrugged and turned away.

For a week or two after that she seemed to be able to forget him. The weather turned wet and mild; the ordinary vigour of their lives kept them apart.

His relations with the Blue Anemone had never been more equivocal: factions were out for him in High City and Low. If Vera had known he was so hard put to it in the alleys and waste ground around Chenaniaguine and Lowth, who can say what she might have done. Luckily, while he ran for it with an open razor in one hand and a bunch of dirty bandages coming unravelled from the other, she was at the barre ten hours a day for her technique. Lympany had a new production, Whole Air: it would be a new kind of ballet, he believed. Everyone was excited by the idea, but it would mean technique, technique, technique. “The surface is dead!” he urged his dancers: “Surface is only the visible part of technique!”

Ever since she came up from the midlands, Vera had hated rest days. At the end of them she was left sleepless and irritated in her skin, and as she lay in bed the city sent granular smoky fingers in through her skylight, unsettling her and luring her out so that late at night she had to go to the arena and, hollow-eyed, watch the clowns. There while thinking about something else she remembered Rhys again, so completely and suddenly that he went across her-snap-like a crack in glass. Above the arena the air was purple with roman candles bursting, and by their urgent intermittent light she saw him quite clearly standing in Endingall Street, shivering in the grip of his own enthusiasm, driven yet balked by it like all nervous animals. She also remembered the locust of the Allotrope Cabaret. She thought,

“Artistic!”

Though on a good night you could still hear the breathy whisper of twenty-five thousand voices wash across the pantile roofs of Montrouge like a kind of invisible firework, the arena by then was really little more than a great big outdoor circus, and all the old burnings and quarterings had given place to acrobatics, horse racing, trapeze acts, etc. The New Men liked exotic animals. They did not seem to execute their political opponents-or each other-in public, though some of the aerial acts looked like murder. Every night there was a big, stupid lizard or a megatherium brought in to blink harmlessly and even a bit sadly up at the crowd until they had convinced themselves of its rapacity. And there were more fireworks than ever: to a blast of maroons full of magnesium and a broad falling curtain of cerium rain, the clowns would erupt bounding and cartwheeling into the circular sandy space-jumping up, falling down, building unsteady pyramids, standing nine or ten high on one another’s shoulders, active and erratic as grasshoppers in the sun. They fought, with rubber knives and whitewash. They wore huge shoes. Vera loved them.

The greatest clown of his day, called by the crowd “Kiss-O-Suck,” was a dwarf of whose real name no one was sure. Some people knew him as “Morgante,” others as “Rotgob” or “The Grand Pan.” His legs were frail looking and twisted, but he was a fierce gymnast, often able to perform four separate somersaults in the air before landing bent-kneed, feet planted wide apart, rock steady in the black sand. He would alternate cartwheels with handsprings at such a speed he seemed to be two dwarfs, while the crowd egged him on with whistles and cheers. He always ended his act by reciting verses he had made up himself:

Codpoorlie-tah

Codpoorrrlie- tah!

Codpoorlie-tah! tah! tah!

Dog pit.

Dog pit pooley

Dog pit pooley

Dog pit have-a-rat tah tah tah

(ta ta.)

For a time his vogue was so great he became a celebrity on the Unter-Main-Kai, where he drank with the intellectuals and minor princes in the Bistro Californium, strutted up and down in a padded doublet of red velvet with long scalloped sleeves, and had himself painted as “The Lord of Misrule.” He bought a large house in Montrouge.

He had come originally from the hot bone-white hinterlands of the Mingulay Littoral, where the caravans seem to float like yellow birdcages at midday across the violet lakes of the mirage “while inside them women consult feverishly their grubby packs of cards.” If you are born in that desert, its inhabitants often boast, you know all deserts. Kiss-O-Suck was not born a dwarf but chose it as his career, having himself confined for many years in the black oak box, the gloottokoma, so as to stunt his growth. Now he was at the peak of his powers. When he motioned peremptorily, the other clowns sprang up into the air around him. His voice echoed to Vera over the arena. “Dog pit pooley!” he chanted, and the crowd gave it him back: but Vera, still somehow on Endingall Street with Egon Rhys trembling beside her, heard, “Born in a desert, knows all deserts!” The next day she sent him her name with a great bunch of anemones. I admire your act. They met in secret in Montrouge.

At the Bistro Californium, Ansel Verdigris, poet of the city, lay with his head sideways on the table; a smell of lemon gin rose from the tablecloth bunched up under his cheek. Some way away from him sat the Marquis de M-, pretending to write a letter. They had quarrelled earlier, ostensibly about the signifier and the signified, and then Verdigris had tried to eat his glass. At that time of night everyone else was at the arena. Without them the Californium was only a few chairs and tables someone had arranged for no good reason under the famous frescoes. De M- would have gone to the arena himself, but it was cold outside with small flakes of snow falling through the lights on the Unter-Main-Kai. Discovering this about itself, he wrote, the place seems stunned and quiet. It has no inner resources.

Egon Rhys came in with Vera, who was saying:

“-was sure he could be here.”

She pulled her coat anxiously about her. Rhys made her sit where it was warm. “I’m tired tonight,” she said. “Aren’t you?” As she crossed the threshold she had looked up and seen a child’s face smile obliquely out at her from a grimy patch in the frescoes. “I’m tired.” All day long, she complained, it had been the port de bras: Lympany wanted something different-something that had never been done before. “ ‘A new kind of port de bras’!” she mimicked, “ ‘A whole new way of dancing’! But I have to be so careful in the cold. You can hurt yourself if you work too hard in weather like this.”

She would drink only tea, which at the Californium is always served in wide china cups as thin and transparent as a baby’s ear. When she had had some, she sat back with a laugh. “I feel better now!”

“He’s late,” said Rhys.

Vera took his arm and pressed her cheek briefly against his shoulder.

“You’re so warm! When you were young did you ever touch a cat or a dog just to feel how warm it was? I did. I used to think: It’s alive! It’s alive!”

When he didn’t respond she added, “In two or three days’ time you could have exactly what you want. Don’t be impatient.”