Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

I said I was.

“Cause I worked it out,” she said. Her voice was conspiratorial; she was secretive, with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “Try these on for size.”

She gave me a man’s jacket, a pair of striped trousers, a derby hat. I put them on and looked in the mirror. I was a man. She said, “That’s so they don’t eat you up.”

“I barely recognize myself.”

“It’s a damn good thing you ain’t pretty.”

“I hope you realize I’m going to be taking pictures. And I might exhibit them later on.”

“Girl,” she said, “I want you to show them all over creation.”

“You might get into trouble.”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Or Carney might. It’s his show, ain’t it?” And in her laugh I identified the little chimney-wail I had heard the previous night.

The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner was held in the tent I had seen being hoisted on the grounds of that so-called palace my first day in Verona. I was in my suit, but I think if I had been wearing a sandwich-board and snowshoes I would still have gone unnoticed, because the others were benumbed and rode in the back of the van like people being taken out in the dark to be shot.

I smelled cooking — an odor of woodsmoke and burned meat — as soon as we entered Carney’s grounds. After we parked, I peeked through the flap in the tent and saw them all, with red faces, shouting and laughing and finishing their meal. There were about a hundred of them, men in tuxedos, seated at tables which were arranged around a circus ring. In the center of the ring were embers in spokes, the smoldering wheel of a log fire; and on a spit the remains of a cooked pig, hacked apart, and only its tail and trotters intact. It was not hard to identify Carney. He had the place of honor and in front of him on a platter was a pig’s head, his spitting image, one meathead above the other, dead eyes in the thick folds of gleaming cheeks and that expression you see on the faces of the very fat — dumb swollen pain, as if the scowl has been roasted onto it.

I wanted that picture.

“You just keep out of sight,” said Hornette. “But don’t worry — no one’ll see you. They’ll be looking at us.”

“What are you doing here?” It was Harvey.

“She came along for the ride,” said Hornette.

I said, “The whole thing was my idea.”

“Go on home,” said Harvey.

“She can’t,” said Hornette, “on account of they’ll see her leaving the grounds if she does, huh.”

It was true: we had passed through a number of checkpoints on the way in and surly guards had waved us on. Now we were in a small tent, an anteroom to the big top in which the men were eating.

“Show starts in ten minutes,” said a man dressed as a ringmaster. He was wearing tails and a silk hat, and he had a whip which he cracked at nothing in particular. “Positions,” he said, “positions.”

“That’s Millsaps,” said Harvey. “If he squawks I’m not taking the blame for you.”

I smelled animals, the steam of fur and feet, but it didn’t come from the cages — it was the circus folk who had started taking off their clothes.

“Get on up there,” said Hornette. She motioned to a tower of scaffolding just inside the tent. “And don’t forget what I said — all over creation.”

I slipped through the tent flap and climbed a tall ladder to a platform, where there was a cubicle and a rack of spotlights. I could not have been in a better place than this crow’s nest, in the darkness behind the lights. I had a view of everything and yet was made invisible by the lights’ glare.

A moment later I was joined by the lighting engineer: baseball hat, screwdrivers tucked into the belt of his dungarees. The canvas tent-top slumped near our heads and the smoke and chatter rose to the height of the poles.

The man said, “You got authorization? You can’t stay here if you ain’t got authorization.”

“This is my authorization,” I said. “Smile.”

He did, and I snapped his picture. After that he was nice as pie. His name was Monk.

“Shift,” he said and signaled for me to move. “Look at them.” He jerked the lights into position. “I wish I had me a gun. Ain’t they the limit?”

Ain’t this? I thought, as Monk slashed the diners with light. And I knew I had passed a frontier and had left all the other practitioners behind. Where were they, anyhow? Out goofing off, shooting sourbob trees and dingbats, rubber tires, storefronts, cottages, snow, Abandoned Playground, Ragged Beggar on Wall Street, Torso with Tits: embalming quaintness for the next generation. But this was different; it smelled different and had art’s startling flaw as its beautifying scar. It was flesh and riotous, a cannibal feast in tuxedos, an event which no previous photographer had drained of its light. By a combination of luck, risk, and gumption I was its first witness.

But I almost cried at my bravado, for down there not ten feet from Carney, clouting his food and moving his hands to his mouth, and with an eater’s squirming motion — his back turned to the world and gobbling like the rest of them — was my original patron, my father. If he had not been there I might have seen it as less momentous, this pattern of hogs merely a piece of news. He made me hesitate; he made me act. What a long way I had come to catch him!

His was the first picture I took. I half expected him to keel over from the shock of it — just pitch back with his face missing and his feet sticking up. Nothing happened. But I knew I had started something: my Third Eye told me. Not skirmishing with the picturesque or tinkering with technique, but acting on the raw conviction that, alone in this tent, I was leading an attack on patronage.

They had finished eating when the band marched in, going oompah-oompah and wearing blue uniforms with gold braid. Millsaps was a blur on the bass drum. It was the brandy and cigars phase of the dinner, and while the music was playing — the diners banging spoons — two blacks came on and shoveled the remains of the barbecue — the burned logs, the carcass of the pig — into a barrel and carted it away. The band continued to march. And there was a new sound, a whistling and fluting — this was the steam calliope puffing on a horse-drawn wagon. It was a beautiful contraption, smoke and steam and flute notes: a man was seated at an enormous red and gold pipe organ and beating the trays of keys while the pipes shot jets of steam out as whinnying music.

But that was not my picture, for as the band took their seats under my scaffold (and now I could hear them blowing spit out of their instruments) the steam calliope turned in the ring. I could see an old man stoking a furnace at the back end of the organ, getting up the steam by heaving coal into the firebox. He was reddened by the flames and roasting on his little platform like a pig. So my Stoker , which everyone took for a portrait of a fireman on a train, was actually a stoker on a steam calliope, a man feeding a fire to make music: the underside of all art. I don’t believe there was a photographer in America who would not have preferred the calliope player to the stoker, but I knew the fickle tyranny of patronage — I had a point of view, and I was aware that at the top of this scaffold I was doing my magnum o .

“Good evening, gents!” shouted Millsaps the ringmaster, strutting to the center of the ring as the calliope beeped away. He flourished his whip and said, “Once again, the Millsaps Circus is proud to perform for its bennyfactor, Mister Lamar Carney and his esteemed friends. As in other years, we are privvyledged to be invited to do our stuff for the Pig Dinner—”

He went on in this vein, saying what a pleasure it was, flattering the banqueting cigar-puffers, and I saw Carney beaming with each compliment, the pig’s head beneath his similarly grinning. But that was not the only resemblance. There were multiple images: Millsaps was also a version of Carney, and there was something of Stieglitz in his whipcracking swagger — even something of Papa and the rest, gloating in their tuxes. Then and there I decided it was how Jack Guggenheim himself looked, a creature of snuffling assurance who believed moolah was power and power license — and sittin on his fat ass and trafficking in taste.