crumbling chimney stack and slowly beat its wings upon the darkened air where hung in iridescent characters the words: THE MANSION OF MIDNIGHT.
In the second machine, the mansion split in half to reveal a crimson room and the warning: HUSH! SHE IS SLEEPING! She was as white as my last night’s anaemic lover and, like her, she was dressed in black, but this one had a medieval gown of sheer black velvet with sleeves that came to points on the backs of her hands while her streaming hair contained several shades of darkness. She lay back in the voluptuous abandonment of sleep in a carved armchair where spiders propelled themselves up and down on the high-wires they had spun themselves among the hangings.
When I looked into the third machine I saw a ferocious hedge of thorns; but then, before my very eyes, a young prince with juicy bunches of golden ringlets hanging on the shoulders of his slashed and padded doublet was superimposed on the hedge in a balletic attitude of pleading and from his mouth issued a scroll which read: I COME! The hedge parted forthwith to reveal, in a set of cunning perspectives, the sleeper
inside
the haunted house of the first machine complete with owl above, etc.
A KISS CAN WAKE HER. In the crimson room, the pretty prince with skin as pink as sugar candy and lips like strawberry ice cream bent over the sleeping girl; another slide slipped into place and showed them so close together, his ringlets mixed with her locks and his face pressed so close to hers her pallor took his colour and blushed. A click of the internal mechanism. The tints of warm flesh rushed back into her face. Her eyes opened. Her newly red lips parted.
With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton. In one set of phalanges he carried a scythe and with the other pulled out and squeezed a ripe breast from the girl’s bodice while his bony knees nudged apart her thighs. The emblem read: DEATH AND THE MAIDEN.
The remaining two machines were empty.
It was now in the middle of the day and the heat inside the tent grew oppressive. I went outside and sat on a doorstep, smoking and waiting, but still there was no sign of the peep-show proprietor. A child with crinkled hair tied up in the innumerable pigtails the poor and superstitious adopt for, I think, reasons of voodoo approached and stared at me. Her plaits were so tight they revealed wide areas of the glossy, brown skin covering her skull and, though I questioned her, she answered me incomprehensibly in the multilingual patois of the slums and began to poke indifferently in a clogged drain with a stick. Her face was covered with the whorled eruptions of a skin disease. The good nuns had taken me away from such pastimes and such afflictions but, all the same, you will have noticed I possessed a degree of ambivalence towards the Minister’s architectonic vision of the perfect state. This was because I was aware of what would have been my own position in that watertight schema.
No shadows fell in the drowsing noonday. I inquired at several houses but even those who spoke the standard language knew nothing of the peep-show proprietor except that his booth had suddenly arrived in the shrine garden the previous evening. My shirt was soaked with sweat and at last I walked down to the ocean to catch the possibility of a breeze.
I wondered if all the holiday makers were nothing but phantoms. Nevertheless, most of them had dispersed for lunch and an afternoon nap and the beaches were again deserted. I
In the second machine, the mansion split in half to reveal a crimson room and the warning: HUSH! SHE IS SLEEPING! She was as white as my last night’s anaemic lover and, like her, she was dressed in black, but this one had a medieval gown of sheer black velvet with sleeves that came to points on the backs of her hands while her streaming hair contained several shades of darkness. She lay back in the voluptuous abandonment of sleep in a carved armchair where spiders propelled themselves up and down on the high-wires they had spun themselves among the hangings.
When I looked into the third machine I saw a ferocious hedge of thorns; but then, before my very eyes, a young prince with juicy bunches of golden ringlets hanging on the shoulders of his slashed and padded doublet was superimposed on the hedge in a balletic attitude of pleading and from his mouth issued a scroll which read: I COME! The hedge parted forthwith to reveal, in a set of cunning perspectives, the sleeper
inside
the haunted house of the first machine complete with owl above, etc.
A KISS CAN WAKE HER. In the crimson room, the pretty prince with skin as pink as sugar candy and lips like strawberry ice cream bent over the sleeping girl; another slide slipped into place and showed them so close together, his ringlets mixed with her locks and his face pressed so close to hers her pallor took his colour and blushed. A click of the internal mechanism. The tints of warm flesh rushed back into her face. Her eyes opened. Her newly red lips parted.
With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton. In one set of phalanges he carried a scythe and with the other pulled out and squeezed a ripe breast from the girl’s bodice while his bony knees nudged apart her thighs. The emblem read: DEATH AND THE MAIDEN.
The remaining two machines were empty.
It was now in the middle of the day and the heat inside the tent grew oppressive. I went outside and sat on a doorstep, smoking and waiting, but still there was no sign of the peep-show proprietor. A child with crinkled hair tied up in the innumerable pigtails the poor and superstitious adopt for, I think, reasons of voodoo approached and stared at me. Her plaits were so tight they revealed wide areas of the glossy, brown skin covering her skull and, though I questioned her, she answered me incomprehensibly in the multilingual patois of the slums and began to poke indifferently in a clogged drain with a stick. Her face was covered with the whorled eruptions of a skin disease. The good nuns had taken me away from such pastimes and such afflictions but, all the same, you will have noticed I possessed a degree of ambivalence towards the Minister’s architectonic vision of the perfect state. This was because I was aware of what would have been my own position in that watertight schema.
No shadows fell in the drowsing noonday. I inquired at several houses but even those who spoke the standard language knew nothing of the peep-show proprietor except that his booth had suddenly arrived in the shrine garden the previous evening. My shirt was soaked with sweat and at last I walked down to the ocean to catch the possibility of a breeze.
I wondered if all the holiday makers were nothing but phantoms. Nevertheless, most of them had dispersed for lunch and an afternoon nap and the beaches were again deserted. I
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