— One of the many superstitions of my land is to make sure and salute the priest twice each morning (so he doesn’t come blessing us in the afternoon); another is to only practice on our carpets in the small airfield that’s located just outside the city. For the route laid out for the flying of carpets out of Baghdad [Hagrabah. Spell], as recorded in Burton’s translation of Alf Laila Wa-Laila, is dangerous and restricted. Now I admit Wallace and I have never needed magic carpets to fly. Especially Wallace.
Then he flung the puppet in the air. But he did it so crudely, the erstwhile invisible wires that allowed the puppet to walk alongside him on the stage, could clearly be seen by the audience (which, in the dark, looked a sparse congregation of pearl buttons and dentures), and resenting the spell being broken so abruptly, they all began to boo. Cornelius Sacrapant reacted as if he’d intended the effect — standing center stage, proud and erect, grinning smugly, waving his hat, and bowing to receive the occasional projectile on his bald pate. Once the puppet was back in his hands, he made it say goodbye with a sober wave. Then, not knowing what to do next, the magician’s proud veneer began to dissolve, as he remained rooted in the middle of the stage, raising a nervous hand to fix what remained of his hair, and stepping from side to side. As the booing continued, he set the puppet on the ground and manipulated its strings so it pedaled its feet, performing the action of climbing a falling ladder. No one was amused. Nevertheless, thirty seconds later — I counted the seconds because I was bored — Cornelius Sacrapant had gotten rid of his nerves and remained on the stage, suspended five feet above the heads of the audience, and although they continued jeering, he dismissed their jeers with one of those ambiguous gestures characteristic of Henrietta Bonham-Carter, and cheerily finished his routine.
Five minutes later, on the same stage, Bambi began performing a routine of disarming delicacy. There were various allusions to the past and present in her dress, which everyone thought marvelously quaint. The little space she had on the stage didn’t matter. Her lithe slender frame moving around the stage seemed to cause time to throw open its arms. My eyes pursued the outline of her cygnean nape, the taut muscles of her back through raven mesh, but when she turned I saw she had a sad face, with false lashes and lips smeared with wax, like an abandoned doll, or an actress in a silent film playing the role of a garreted spinster. Then she began her performance. She opened with a recitation — interspersed with oscitations and eructations — of a monologue by the teenage actress in The Seagull. Then she turned to the audience and mewed some passages by Brecht: the effect being of a cat that fell down a sewer, surprising a plague of rats. Then she performed a Bovary that was worthy of a dose of Arsenic, a Karenina deserving of being flung under a train, and the audience responded with a muted applause, hoping she would end it there. But she continued with her own version of Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody vocal. Then she performed imitations of Marlene Dietrich, Patsy Cline, and a tango vocalist named Libertad Lamarque, before concluding with an a capella from Wagner’s Ring Cycle that was so lugubrious we all demanded she transport us back to the present immediately. The performance ended with a last vocal flourish and a gesture of painful defiance. All that remained was for the DJ to yodel his own farewell. During the set, I suppose the Diva was explaining her life to me, a tragic life, which had been preserved only by the most delicate means.
Then James, [apparently] invigorated after his third pint, finally told us everything. But his account was confused, clumsy, inarticulate, erroneous, and — in many respects — untrue. It was an account in which he described people of dubious intellectual accomplishments, but in which he made use of every superlative to exaggerate those accomplishments. An account moreover obscured not only by alcohol but by his insisting on playing a cute rhetorical game (which I tried to ignore to get to the heart of his narrative) in which he reversed greater and lesser degrees of comparison. So, for example, “extremely” was less extreme than “very,” “tremendous” less tremendous than merely “good” or “nice,” “invaded and usurped” more lenient than “landed and solicited.” Most of the time, success in these sorts of exercises depends on the personality of the performer. Homer, for example, paid no heed to the sequencing of events when it came to their telling and retelling. And Jesus, whose biggest hit was the Sermon on the Mount, suggested a disproportioning perspective on the qualities of the blessed. And so it was with James, sitting there with his flat face and want of a neck — far from Byronic — hardly a profile to be printed on freshly minted coins. He was more a Jeffrey Aspern lookalike. In brief, from his terrible account, we managed to decipher that we had to hit the ground running if we wanted to save the father of St. Mawr.
An hour later, the rescue party had been organized. Thanks to Honor’s intervention, we managed to secure the services of Hulot, a magnanimous canine, a chien de St.-Hubert, or what the English call a bloodhound, whose owner had been absent from the meeting. Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous story is often translated in Spanish as “The Bloodhound of the Baskervilles.” But when the reader conjures up the image of a bloodhound’s face — those drooping ears, those melancholy jowls, those large compassionate eyes — he forgets all about the monster of the story. He thinks instead of a loyal companion, a friend, dedicated to searching for what’s lost, to sniffing out any false trails. He thinks of that little mongrel mascot who’s first introduced in The Sign of Four: one of the most memorable scenes in all of Holmes.
— Christine Knowles — said Bambi — now calls herself Charmian to seem more distinguished. I knew that sooner or later she’d show her harpy’s claws. I got to know her on the West End — the worst actress I ever saw. Onstage, she looked like a useless piece of furniture, one of those garish ornamental pieces collecting dust in the mansions of impotent inbred aristocrats. Poor woman, she eventually married an American professor [of English Literature] and dedicated her life to her kids …
— What’s wrong with Americans besides the fact they’re all born with a natural incapacity to properly speak The language? — said Hope.
— They speak with an accent — said James — that’s their only fault. And, as long as they don’t become fans of some baseball team or other, it will remain their only fault.
As if she wasn’t listening, Bambi continued:
— Now she forced her kids to do horrendous doodles, assuring them they’re enriching contemporary art …
— Not that there’s anything original in that — said Hope—. The task was begun years ago by Sir Herbert Read.