Anne Garreta - Sphinx

I tried to see from the wings what was causing all this commotion. On the stage, at the bottom of the large staircase at the back, was a confused cluster of bodies, some of them almost naked, others in work overalls or in evening wear. Arms, heads, and ostrich feathers were sprouting out of the crowd. Rumbles and indistinct murmurs traveled through the chaotic hall. A firefighter, jostling me, raced onto the stage; the rest of the troupe rushed from the dressing rooms, carrying me in its throng, packing me into the mass. In order to reassure the audience, a stage manager grabbed a microphone to announce that the show had been momentarily interrupted, and to beseech all those who had no business being on the stage please to clear away. Ebbing, the circle moved aside and, in the interstice between a heap of feathers and the imposing stature of a stagehand, with heartrending terror I saw A***’s body, which I recognized even before having truly discerned it, sprawled and immobile on the ground, with two men trying to place it on a stretcher.

While everyone else evacuated the stage, I approached and followed the stretcher into the wings. They brought the body to the dressing room where a doctor, summoned for the emergency, came bursting in shortly after. I stood next to the lifeless body that in my terror I didn’t dare touch — I knew already, obscurely, that a gruesome misfortune I was afraid to name had taken place. Next entered a small group of dancers who came upon hearing the news. The doctor, leaning over the body, straightened up. Seeing that I was watching him, he pronounced his conclusion volubly. Apparently, a break in the cervical spine had provoked an instant and probably painless death.

A murmur rose from the back of the room; the doctor was already on his way out. Some of the dancers, still half-naked, approached the body. They had seen A*** trip, fall headfirst, and violently hurtle down the entire flight of stairs, helpless to resist or direct the fall. At the foot of the stairs, the dislocated body, following a scream that had sprung forth from every mouth, had remained still in the silence of death that preceded the general tumult.

The show was suspended only briefly. They replaced A*** off the cuff with another member of the troupe. The presenter reassured the spectators of the fate of the victim of this regrettable accident, and they redid the finale (which A***’s fall had interrupted) in its entirety. Mourning isn’t much suited to venal celebrations. The show was performed two times each night for successive batches of clients, and the second performance of that night went on as usual, quite naturally and without mishap.

I remained in the dressing room with A***’s body, and the director came to convey his condolences to me and to assure me that he would take care of all the formalities and cover the costs until the insurance money came through. He left, and I found myself again head to head with the cadaver still spread upon the stretcher that had served to transport it, which the two stagehands had set up on a trestle in the middle of the room.

For three hours I stood before this vision of a beloved body I knew to be dead, without the fact resounding in me sufficiently to shift my sentiment or my gaze. To my right, in the mirror on top of the vanity table, was the body’s reflection. From my view, due to a frightening effect of perspective, the body’s image was foreshortened, from the soles of the feet in the foreground up to the head, which was lost in the distance in a virtual space that swallowed up my gaze, stumbling up against the base of the chin, boring into the gaps of the nostrils, and fading along the line of the eyebrows beyond which the forehead faded away. It was as if this sprawled body in the mirror was looming over my gaze.

A halo of lamps, the sole source of light, framed the mirror and bathed the painting taking shape there in a pale shadow; the reflection was melting A***’s body and my face at its side into one single lividity.

From then on I didn’t get out of bed until dusk; in the night, my infernal refuge, I indulged in roving fantasies.

A***’s presence was stolen from me by images. While we were together, I was jealous of all that had engrossed A***. I hated the television, detested those frivolous parties and their cortèges of ostentatious, superficial people. All the time stolen from me by those hours spent shopping, at the jeweler’s, the hairdresser’s, all of that dissipated time. Although, to be fair: some moments of pure pomp had fascinated me as well, the times I watched A***’s body mutate into an image. What price did I pay for them, in suffering? When we lived together, I always interrupted my eternal, languishing reverie to spy on the slow ceremony of applying makeup in the bathroom — the brushstrokes that highlighted the cheekbones, the sharp line of the pencil, the superimposition of different colors on the eyelids to intensify the socket. But I would lose myself in the distance of the gaze, closing myself off in mere vision. Little by little, my gaze, isolated in the mirror — a living enclave — became petrified in the glass facade formed around that face.

Everything stole A***’s presence from me: the infinitely expanding circle of high society friends, A*** playing the role of social butterfly no matter where we went. I salvage crumbs of A***’s presence, captured fragments snatched from the brutal dissipation of that life. From this debris, I recreated an entirely other life, the one I would have liked to live in A***’s company if it had not been for the seduction of anything and everything that sparkled. The time we spent together was dedicated to this imaginary, deflected, and diverted reconstruction of every act, gesture, and word, with the secret intention of thus being able to appropriate and incorporate A***. The strange sensation of never being able to grasp or embrace A*** except in the painting I was reconstructing from those idealized fragments of real life. The strange temptation to recreate a life in which I had felt only barely included: it seemed as though none of A***’s words or gestures had been for me. I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.

The one I loved I saw as dead, had to imagine as dead, had to think of in the past tense in order to bring about my own satisfaction from this living cadaver, a fulfillment that the real being had unconsciously refused me, for I was incapable of enjoying reality. I knew this was a morbid exercise, and had often been afraid that A*** would notice the crumbling happening underground; I was mining a life. How could I have only derived pleasure from my vision of A*** by imagining that all I saw already belonged to death? How could I have seen A***’s death as a side effect of my happiness in our life together? Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present. I mourn a funereal existence, devoted to the vampirization of the flesh that made me feel an agonizing impotence because I was not able to take possession of it except through murder and mummification. Like a parasite, I fed on the images that stole A***’s presence from me, images that, in this henceforth deserted world, are incapable of restoring to me even one iota of A***’s presence.

All those who captivated me thereafter always irremediably betrayed or disenchanted me. The spark they held in my eyes would pass too quickly, consumed, vanished, leaving me as nothing but a heap of dismal flesh, enlivened by a furious access of pettiness or hysteria.