In the House of Wax

I Far-sighted into yesterday they stand, gripping their charters and speeches, the presidents and kings, masters of unconscious evil. Their deputies are here — judges, robed executioners, steely and triumphant. And stunned at their feet, the beheaded, the betrayed, healed and hallowed now in this grave sorrow of wax. II We enter, adjust to the gloom, to the lighting that plays on the painted, staring faces. We think to ourselves, murmur to the one standing beside us: "How compellingly strange these people are, and yet familiar to the world we left behind us, the street and the household..." These are the people whose names we learned, whose lives we studied, whose thoughts we have become. Each lighted stage with its play of the lost and the violent — comedians and stuntmen, heroes transfixed in purpose. We pause, to read once more, in deliberate, bald summation, what art, wax, and history have made of the dead: something more than a mirror, less than a telling likeness; an ideality slick with blood. III How easily in the live heat of truth and summer these actors wilt and perish. Henry of Church and England is here, savage and senile, still laced in his armor; his lopped and stunted wives stand grouped around him. Bismark in his iron corset, endlessly dividing Europe; Wilhelm, that struttng dwarf, abject in abdication. And here, the fatal mischief of Sarajevo — how swift a fire, how long a burning, came of the Archduke's festive ride, his shot and bloodied tunic. And no more telling prophecy in the wake of armistice than that one dated cartoon with its hooded sentry and its graveyard owl: "It has been six years..." How easily a puff of smoke, a square of burnt cloth, a shocked cry, can change the world, and leave it neither worse nor better. IV Here is a man, thief or martyr, hanged at Damascus Gate with a hook through his gut. He swung, seared by the sun and kissed by the night. And maybe one of the market women brought him water, and maybe not — once seen by the Sultan's watch, she might have lost her hands. As in the time of Richelieu, certain men the crown accused were exposed in iron baskets like plucked birds. They fouled their nests, starved and blackened until they died; and the city lived with their cries, their rank mortality, night and day. The hook is black and crescent, the body swings, inert, as if asleep and dreaming. The guidebook tells us the man survived his hook and lived; it doesn't say how long. V Here, with his tins and furs, is Minuit, buying Manhattan. We see the Dutchman's flourish, the Indians' foolish feathers. He takes their land, and they his bitter gifts, his brass and trinkets — so little cash in place of an earthy kingdom. Wolfe, Montcalm, on the plain below Quebec: the one dying, the other condemned to follow. We pass, reading from face to face, from book to book, uneasy that among these celebrations so many rigged transactions have gone unquestioned. And all our wigged colonials, our Franklins, conspiring with their strongbox keys and profitable lightning — that so much ink and dust and shuffled paper conceals their tidy pilferings, their purity and blunted wrath. Were there rooms in this house, each with its tabled motions and false partitions might furnish a history, one slow truth at a time. But never in our late arrival have we stilled confusion, to learn how great a folly follows in the wake of fathers. From their deliberate violence we come to our own lamed misrule, its slick banality and crime without passion. To Ike, to Kennedy and Ford, golfers and temporizers; to perennial candidate Nixon, whose cheek was never turned. Out of his sleek arrest he steps towards us, as if to greet a voter — a fixed, ferocious smile on the blue jowls brushed with powder. VI Nothing we have painted and framed in our passage — neither prayer nor courtship, nor solace of sleep and self — escaped the grip of these iron centuries. Here, in a row of lighted cases, a few artifacts are on display. No comfort to us now in that familiar, edged interrogation... But the biting persuasion of chains and collars, of inching racks, fire tongs and screws — in the eyes of kings and churchmen the instruments of truth. And whosoever might trespass, on whatever lawful ground, would find for his solace a more forbidding marriage. As once in a stone embrasure I saw a belt for virgins, a hinged and rusted clasp, with a lock, and a slit for functions — all but one. Imagine with what shocked dismay a man might grope for his sweetness there, and all too soon awaken, clamped in his ecstasy. VII Another room, with smaller people and thinner walls. Here the Queen plays with cryptic cards, hands out assignments: "You are the Hunchback," she says, "and You the Hangman, and You the Jack of Trades." She pares and quarters her venomous apple, calls for her mirror, and her image smiles to watch her glass fill up with poison. Beauty is sleeping, the Prince is awake, and far in the forest a frostlight winks from the Sugar House. The Witch is singing and lighting her oven. The Woodcutter's wayward children watch, they break and nibble the sweetened glass. The images whisper and darken, conspiring in their tumbled tale of fretful spinners, of drones and dumble- dores, wise eggs that speak and shatter. And it looks as if the painted sleepers in this dreamworks are about to awaken: the crafty Queen and her players, the musical mice, the drones and the spinners — All in a scampering rush, to find the nearest exit... As the looking glass draws us deeper into the bright play of shadows that melt and run and freeze... The mad, mad romp of children, of rabbits and dwarfs, who keep their strange hilarity in so much horror. VIII Call those from underneath, the sold and trodden, their slow and sweating sons, elevate and crown them. Patch up their clothing and wash their skins, rub their faces until they glow, and their dull eyes brighten. Give them speeches to learn, and eloquent gestures, power to grasp, laws to break and mend. Great heat and furious labor bring on in them this drear and mystical change: At first a swinish fattening, and then a leaner look, and in their eyes the same feral glitter of their late unkindly masters. They sicken as they flourish, until like wickless candles they slump and totter; their heads are rotten, their famous flesh has run to sticky pools. They die and sleep afoot, their ignorant hearts grown wise in the ways of wax. IX In all these wax memorials only appearance changes. Crowned heads and axes fall, thugs and jailors rise and displace each other in this long, uneasy walk we have littered with claims and captions. The heroes are always welcomed, are propped and shaven, their ruddy male composure is sleeker than ever, though the great sleeves and brutal collars give way to softer buttons. The paper in official hands rustles as before, though it is only paper, paper in cheap supply, and not the bleached fell of a difficult sheep. And yet the neat persuasions are seen to tighten, and each new litigation is a running noose... All that increases, all that gluts and fattens, matures its option here: Honor to thieves and merchants, long life to the butcher. And for the just petitioner — sweeper of the hallways, scapegoat and discard — no reply but the rote of legal fictions; to which he listens, now as in the days of Pontinus, stricken with understanding. X The rooms are large and numerous, and we in our restless striding find that they never end. It is as if we had lived here always, captive to this endless and malign instruction; had served those mighty tempers, and learned too well these never-blotted names. And we live here still, sharing these murderous spaces, this blood-haunted silence. And once we started from sleep, terrorized and whimpering, to see in the luminous, sunken light, the head of a long-forgotten agent: a face like a father, one who might have comforted, but cannot see or hear us: bald, vacant, and amused. XI All is as it must or might be, here at the story's end — the jury dismissed, the witness excused, and all are guilty. To have come so far, walked so easily through so much anguish, pride, and stupor of evil, and yet we are standing still, locked in an echoing foyer. In so driven, so brief an itinerary, a day will stand for a decade, an inch for a mile — so far has a painted fiction served us. These bones in their period costumes would bend if we touched them; their flesh would yield, and all arrangements topple. But see how they bring toward us the old, sustaining gestures — a stride, an arm outstretched — the furrows in the smiles deepen, and the red lips smear. Great captains command, obedient ranks go down. In all these propped assemblies I know a substance neither wax nor wholly flesh — a tried and mortal nature, familiar as the warmth in my hand. XII Were we not lost, condemned to repeat these names and to honor their crimes, a voice among us might cry out, speak to those who are stopped here: Whose faces are these that melt and run? Children and guardians, giants and dwarfs — Oh, people, people... Who are these heroes and where are their victims? We who are standing here with our guidebooks suddenly closed and all the exits darkened... Until another gallery opens, or the sun through that skylight strikes us all — souls in torment, pilgrims and doting fathers...