Planus by Blaise Cendrars Page A

the district into a frenzy with his lewd dancing dwarfs, whom he hires out for the night. How can I explain to you, little one, you're too young to understand. But let! me tell you that II Domatore presents two little fiends, no taller than a cubit: La Figliuola, a lascivious dancer, and men ruin themselves and damn their souls and commit murder to sleep with her and Barbarossa, a shaggy creature, a vile billy-goat who makes the women lose all sense of shame and procreates monsters on them, twins joined by the skin of their backs, palmipeds, babies with harelips or dogs' heads, or two heads or six fingers and three feet, or with a rudimentary horse's tail; if they're alive, they're put on show at fairgrounds, and, if not, they're preserved in jars. These creatures make the midwives laugh and the matrons despair when they come, into the world with the organs of both sexes, and they present; wrongly, coming out feet first or all misshapen, and often they have* to be chopped up inside the mother's womb, or the womb has to be, slit in two because their heads are too big or the cord is knotted*'
    But you can know nothing of all this, it takes place at night as a consequence of insane lusts and senseless couplings, dreams, longings and nightmares. I couldn't tell you whether this pair of lewd little dwarfs are survivors of the disaster at the Virgil paddock or if the Devil made them later, but God preserve you from meeting them, as He preserved me from meeting II Domatore this year, when I heard him grinding his organ on the night of Good Friday, and, if Carminella trembled, as I told you, I got the colic thinking that, in spite of all my wife's prayers, the saints are deaf or else, like me, they were ill until morning, the lazy pigs, they who have nothing else to do. Oh, Jesus Christ, and Mary the Madonna!'
    tripod, and the two men started gesticulating and Ricordi set up his camera and the officer consulted his watch, and Ricordi examined the sky and focused his lens, and the sky grew pink and the first ray of sunlight flashed forth like an arrow, and Ricordi gave a signal, the officer drew his sword and the drums began to beat hollowly and roll louder and louder, and an order rang out and a sharp salvo^ followed by a single shot, and the wretched little soldier crumpled, his tongue lolling out, half-garrotted by his bonds; and the firing-^ squad filed past the corpse of the executed criminal, then the judges and the clerk of the court, then my father and myself and, behind; us, some civilians, probably the family, for an old woman was; shrieking and shuddering; then a fatigue party came forward to remove the body, and there was the priest, who had given his bless? ing to the whole proceedings, taken confession from the dead man and now accompanied him to the little cemetery of the Fort, a plot: bristling with the crosses of men who had died of cholera. And' everything was a quarter of an hour behind the official schedule, on account of the photographer.
    Is this the Wheel of Things, to which Man is tied, sowing Evil* according to the old lama who taught Kim, this wheel that supports the chariot of State, of Siva and of Kali, the God of Absurdity and the Goddess of Destruction, this united couple who bring food for offspring?
    But the Wheel turns and this universal sowing is a mockery. . . «
    I am dizzy.
    Max Jacob, who cast my horoscope, said to me one day: 'Cendrars, your stomach will save you !'
    And, indeed, I was ravenous.
    I was sitting in front of a bar in Pozzuoli, behind the promontory of the Posilippo, under a vine-trellis. I drank. I ate. I smoked. In the outer harbour there was a boat with a foreign rig, moored to a buoy. The sea was deserted, the shingle-rolling, earth-encircling, limitless sea. I ate, I smoked, I drank. The sea, seen through the vine-leaves, reminded me of a poem by Gerard de Nerval. I kept in the shade. With my Isfahan cane, I absent-mindedly traced patterns in the sand, semicircles,