They grew bored over the course of three long days on the Café du Louvre’s terrace, and, in fact, none of them — not even Picabia, the one who had launched them on this escapade — was overly clear about what they were doing there. Duchamp, the most depressed of all, kept repeating, in his opinion five bachelor machines lost in an African port didn’t amount to anything more than a ridiculous group of hobbled contraptions. Picabia tried to be more optimistic and, though fully aware he was deluding himself, he constantly saw — besides his friends’ irritation — signs in the sky or in the square’s porticoes or in the impressive miniatures that the locals sold. But not until the afternoon of the third day did Picabia think he saw a sign of real interest: a one-legged man, no less, playing a flute made from his own tibia: someone identical to Lelgoualch, a fictional character in Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa.
Darkness and magic. Picabia made the suggestion that this time, this really could be a highly revealing sign. But revealing what? Duchamp, Szalay, and company asked in unison, visibly annoyed, already very tired of Picabia’s questing after free associations that might plot a course through the chaos. Then, all of a sudden, they saw a gorgeous foreign woman go by (“tall, tanned, extremely sensual, a bona fide apparition”) who, crossing the square at high speed, disappeared down an alleyway and was followed by Lelgoualch and his musical tibia.
After a few moments of general stupor, Picabia reacted and, trying to work out if the others had seen the same thing he had, remarked that he’d just seen a beautiful animated machine. Morand said to him that, yes, indeed, a comic variation on the orange blossom had just gone by. Szalay chimed in and, attempting to guess the foreign woman’s nationality, roundly confirmed that there were three sexes: men, women, and that French woman who had just furtively crossed the square. Rigaut abruptly got to his feet, beside himself, and “in love, even before meeting her, set out in pursuit of the femme fatale.”
This woman turned out to be Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter and sculptor, who was traveling along the eastern coast of Africa in the company of the poet William Carlos Williams, a good friend of Duchamp’s. At the dinner following this happy encounter, she seemed enthusiastic about Picabia’s talk of bachelor machines, their fictions and their other future conspiracy. Lelgoualch provided continuous musical accompaniment to everything said over dinner, to the point that his enchanted tibia would respectfully respond to the group’s silence, O’Keeffe now operating as the femme fatale, already responding to the bachelor mechanism and expounding her theory as to what she understood by extreme sexuality: a concept intimately tied up with the functioning of the bachelor machines, which soon became one of the most characteristic Shandy traits.
Aware that the bachelor machines’ most distinctive characteristic was eminently sexual, Georgia O’Keeffe asserted that they were also composites, combinations of mechanical and organic components, tied to each other in close circles, by complex bonds of pleasure and terror, ecstasy and punishment, life and death.
“Therefore, love, like energy or libido,” Picabia tells us the femme fatal declared while filing her nails, “ought to be separated from its genetic purpose, which we understand as reproduction; one’s own satisfaction is the only thing that should be sought. In a word, copulate for pure pleasure, never thinking about progeny or other trifles. This is what I understand by extreme sexuality.”
After quoting O’Keeffe word for word, Picabia’s description of the foundational soiree in Port Actif comes to an abrupt close; an enigmatic and suggestive silence — a pact — arose between the stealthy conspirators: “If up to that point we’d dragged our pasts behind us like the vaporous trails of comets, knowing precious little about our future conspiracy, Georgia’s statement brought us together suddenly, in the perfect silence of stealthy conspirators, and that night there were no more words, because this struck us as the ideal tone that would allow us to slowly mold — in the most absolute and alluring of silences — the other characteristically portable traits. Everyone fell silent, understanding that there was really no need for any audible conversation, since we’d already been in conversation for a very long time (though not with expressed words). We spoke to each other silently, and our conversation was one of the most interesting imaginable; words pronounced to be heard could not have had the effect of this silence.”
I have no more information on this pact of stealthy conspirators that founded Shandyism than Picabia offers in his book, but I think the facts are reliable enough for one to conclude that, thanks to the definition of extreme sexuality by a femme fatale, the birth of the portables’ world became reality: a universe that was born of mistakes and coincidences. Of mistakes, such as Berta Bocado’s confusing one Russian for another. And of coincidences, such as the encounter with Georgia O’Keeffe, leading to the expulsion of maternity from the Shandy language.
All seems to indicate, then, that the influence of femmes fatales on the portable world brought about the birth of the secret society. But, as is well known, to be born is to begin to die. That the femmes fatales installed themselves in the Shandy bachelor machines did not exempt the latter from irreparable future breakdowns, since, at the very moment they became aware they were alive and portable, they embraced Death, which explains both the immediate appearance of the word suicide on their horizon and the fact that one of those who dined in Port Actif — specifically the one who had fallen in love with the femme fatale — took charge there and then of the fate of one of the portable “offices,” the General Suicide Agency.
* Yes, femmes fatales, yes. It was clear from the outset that every “bachelor machine” should incorporate into its complex workings the occasional vamp, as only thus would he function with bogus efficiency and without fear of breaking down — although, paradoxically, to “break down” was, ultimately, the fatal destiny of these machines, so admirably unproductive were they.
HOTEL SUICIDES
It seems to be historically constant that among founding members of secret societies, there is always one who likes to contradict the rest. In the Shandy’s case, all of those who dined in Port Actif were great lovers of life except for Rigaut, who declared himself, from the outset, on the side of death (“Vous êtes tous de poètes et moi je suis du côte de la mort”), more concretely of suicide, a word that would not be banished from the Shandy’s language until the day Rigaut — after vacillating for two years — committed suicide in an opulent hotel in the city of Palermo.
He took so long to come to this decision that he had time to witness the famous wave of youthful suicides in Paris in 1924, a trend sternly criticized by some of those who’d dined in Port Actif: “This whole thing of taking one’s life nowadays,” wrote Szalay, “seems to be the exclusive domain of willfully moronic youths, and the most youthful and moronic of all — or, at least, the one closest to us — is our impetuous Rigaut; something will have to be done about extreme youth and suicide, two words that currently seem intertwined and that are very much at odds with the portable spirit.” And Paul Morand, with clear reference to his friend Rigaut, concluded a lecture in Reims with these words: “Sirs, suicide is ridiculous. If one wishes to take one’s life it ought to be done in a timely manner, that is, when one is still a child; doing it any later is slightly ridiculous, for one can no longer be timid after the age of seven.”