Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel

Author:Raymond Roussel
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780811226462
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2017-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

* Marinette: a sailor’s companion.

† “Stitched” and “unstitched.”—Tr.

5

Twilight had fallen while we were listening to the professor, who now led us up a precipitous path.

A ten-minute climb brought us to a little stone edifice whose front, facing upward toward an immense stretch of forest, consisted entirely of the two closed leaves of a wide, very rusty gate with hinges of solid gold. Within its walls, devoid of openings or cracks, lay a single vast chamber, which was scantily furnished.

An unfinished canvas on an easel depicted an obvious allegory of dawn: a woman whose body was composed of light was being drawn by a mass of cords with winged ends from beyond a pale horizon.

Canterel pointed out to us a certain Lucius Egroizard in the middle of the room, giving us a brief explanation: he had suddenly gone mad when he saw his one-year-old daughter being odiously trampled to death by a band of brigands dancing the jig, and had been undergoing treatment for several weeks at Locus Solus. In the background stood a motionless attendant.

Lucius, who was very bald, was sitting in profile, his left side turned in our direction, at the end of a marble table upon which stood a kind of hearth oriented toward us, comprising two firedogs without projections screwed parallel, with nothing overlapping, on the edges of a square sheet of iron furnished with glowing coals.

Throwing a piece of gray rep a meter long and half a meter wide over the firedogs to form a bridge, the madman, careful to avoid any burning contact, slid its two ends together under the metal sheet until the upper surface was tightly stretched, bordered in front and behind from where we were by a narrow margin descending at a slight incline.

Twelve figures several centimeters high, made of rubber skin marvelously painted and modeled, suggesting a band of sinister prowlers on the corner of the table, were placed by Lucius on the rep, whose square surface allowed the warm air to pass through an infinite number of tiny holes packed closely together. Easily borne aloft, they stayed upright in mid-air due to weights set inside their feet, and soon they were circulating according to the whim of the madman whose fingers wandered over the sieve-like material. Deprived for an instant of all vertical air currents except those which lightly brushed its back or abdomen and moved it at that moment out of its axis, one figure would plunge forward or backward; then, when all intervention had ceased beneath it, would rebound to its former level, deriving a lively jig step from the repetition of this maneuver. Another would pivot according to the action of certain air currents brushing tangentially, after the suppression of all contrary draughts, against some jutting part such as a hand or neck.

Once arranged facing each other in two parallel lines of six, of which the nearest had their backs to us, the aerial dolls danced in classic manner the sprightly jig well known under the name of “Sir Roger de Coverly.

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