Nights at the Circus (20 page)

At which Buffo bursts through the coffin lid! Right through. With a great, rending crash, leaving behind a huge, ragged hole, the silhouette of himself, in the flimsy wood. Here he is, again, large as life and white and black and red all over! ‘Thunder and lightning, did yuz think I was dead?’

Tumultuous resurrection of the clown. He leaps from his coffin even as his acolytes hold it high, performing a double somersault on his way to the ground. (He started out in life as an acrobat.) Roars of applause, cheers. He darts round and round the ring, shaking hands, kissing those babies who are not weeping with terror, tousling the heads of bug-eyed children teetering between tears and laughter. Buffo who was dead is now alive again.

And all bound out of the ring, led by this demoniac, malign, enchanted reveller.

The other clowns called him the Old Man, as a mark of respect, although he was not yet quite fifty, hovering about the climacteric of his years.

His personal habits were dominated by his tremendous and perpetual thirst. His pockets always bulged with bottles; his drinking was prodigious yet always seemed somehow unsatisfactory to himself, as if alcohol were an inadequate substitute for some headier or more substantial intoxicant, as though he would have liked, if he could, to bottle the whole world, tip it down his throat, then piss it against the wall. Like Fevvers, he was Cockney bred and born; his
real
name was George Buffins, but he had long ago forgotten it, although he was a great patriot, British to the bone, even if as widely travelled as the British Empire in the service of fun.

‘We kill ourselves,’ said Buffo the Great. ‘Often we hang ourselves with the gaudy braces from which we suspend those trousers loose as the skirts that Muslims wear lest the Messiah be born to a man. Or, sometimes, a pistol may be sneaked from the lion-tamer, his blanks replaced with live bullets. Bang! a bullet through the brain. If in Paris, you can chuck yourself under the Metro. Or, should you have been so lucky as to be able to afford mod. cons, you might gas yourself in your lonely garret, might you not. Despair is the constant companion of the Clown.

‘For not infrequently there is no element of the
voluntary
in clowning. Often, d’you see, we take to clowning when all else fails. Under these impenetrable disguises of wet white, you might find, were you to look, the features of those who were once proud to be visible. You find there, per example, the
aerialiste
whose nerve has failed; the bare-back rider who took one tumble too many; the juggler whose hands shake so, from drink or sorrow, that he can no longer keep his balls in the air. And then what is left but the white mask of poor Pierrot, who invites the laughter that would otherwise come unbidden.

‘The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.’

The great white heads around the long table nodded slowly in acquiescence.

“The mirth the clown creates grows in proportion to the humiliation he is forced to endure,’ Buffo continued, refilling his glass with vodka. ‘And yet, too, you might say, might you not, that the clown is the very image of Christ.’ With a nod towards the mildly shining icon in the corner of the stinking kitchen, where night crawled in the form of cockroaches in the corners. ‘The despised and rejected, the scapegoat upon whose stooped shoulders is heaped the fury of the mob, the object and yet – yet! also he is the
subject
of laughter. For what we are, we have
chosen
to be.

‘Yes, young lad, young Jack, young First-of-May, we
subject
ourselves to laughter from choice. We are the whores of mirth, for, like a whore, we know what we are; we know we are mere hirelings hard at work and yet those who hire us see us as beings perpetually at play. Our work is their pleasure and so they think our work must be our pleasure, too, so there is always an abyss between their notion of our work as play, and ours, of their leisure as our labour.

‘And as for mirth itself, oh, yes, young Jack!’ Turning to Walser and waving an admonitory glass at him. ‘Don’t think I haven’t very often meditated on the subject of laughter, as, in my all too human rags, I grovel on the sawdust. And you want to know what I think? That they don’t laugh in heaven, not even if it were ever so.

‘Consider the saints as the acts in a great circus. Catherine juggling her wheel. St Lawrence on his grill, a spectacle from any freak-show. Saint Sebastian, best knife-throwing stunt you ever saw! And St Jerome, with his learned lion with the paw on the book, great little animal act, that, beats the darkie bitch and her joanna hollow!

‘And the great ringmaster in the sky, with his white beard and his uplifted finger, for whom all these and many other less sanctified performers put on their turns in the endless ring of fire which surrounds the whirling globe. But never a giggle, never a titter up there. The archangels can call: “Bring on the clowns!” until they’re blue in the face but the celestial band will never strike up the intro to “The March of the Gladiators” on its harps and trumps, never, no fear – for we are doomed to stay down below, nailed on the endless cross of the humiliations of this world!

‘The sons of men. Don’t you forget, me lad, we clowns are the sons of men.’

The others all droned after him, in unison: ‘We are the sons of men,’ as in some kind of clerical response.

‘You must know,’ continued Buffo to Walser in his graveyard intonation, ‘you must know that the word “clown” derives from the Old Norse, “klunni”, meaning “loutish”. “Klunni”, cognate with the Danish, “kluntet”, clumsy, maladroit, and the Yorkshire dialect, “gormless”. You must know what you have become, young man, how the word defines you, now you have opted to lose your wits in the profession of the clown.’

‘A clown!’ they murmured softly, dreamily amongst themselves. ‘A clown! Welcome to Clown Alley!’

Meanwhile, to the accompaniment of Buffo’s sermon, the meal went on. Spoons scraped the bottoms of the earthenware bowls of fish soup; the spatulate, white-gloved hands reached for the shanks of black bread, food sad and dark as the congregation of sorrow assembled at the ill-made table. Buffo, scorning a glass, now tipped vodka straight from the bottle down his throat.

‘There is a story told of me, even of me, the Great Buffo, as it has been told of every clown since the invention of the desolating profession,’ intoned Buffo. ‘Told, once, of the melancholy Domenico Biancolette, who had the seventeenth century in stitches; told of Grimaldi; told of the French Pierrot, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, whose inheritance was the moon. This story is not precisely true but has the poetic truth of myth and so attaches itself to each and every laughter-maker. It goeth thus:

‘In Copenhagen, once, I had the news of the death of my adored mother, by telegram, the very morning on which I buried my dearly beloved wife who had passed away whilst bringing stillborn into the world the only son that ever sprang from my loins, if “spring” be not too sprightly a word for the way his reluctant meat came skulking out of her womb before she gave up the ghost. All those I loved wiped out at one fell swoop! And still at matinee time in the Tivoli, I tumble in the ring and how the punters bust a gut to see. Seized by inconsolable grief, I cry: “The sky is full of blood!” And they laughed all the more. How droll you are, with the tears on your cheeks! In mufti, in mourning, in some low bar between performances, the jolly barmaid says: “I say, old fellow, what a long face! I know what
you
need. Go along to the Tivoli and take a look at Buffo the Great. He’ll soon bring your smiles back!”

‘The clown may be the source of mirth, but – who shall make the clown laugh?’

‘Who shall make the clown laugh?’ they whispered together, rustling like hollow men.

Little Ivan, oblivious to the meaning of the foreign babbling issuing from the blanched, jack-o’-lantern faces that hung over the table, ran round collecting the clinking soup bowls, unnerved yet more and more fascinated by this invasion of glum, painted comedians. The meal, such as it was, was over. All produced pipes, baccy and fresh vodka while the baboushka, kneeling before the samovar, performed the endless, contentless, semi-prayerful gestures of those hands deformed by decades of common toil. Her daughter, the axe-murderess, was far away in Siberia, but, although the baboushka’s life was composed of these gestures simulating praying, she no longer possessed sufficient energy to pray for her daughter’s soul. The charcoal reddened, blackened, reddened.

‘And yet,’ resumed Buffo, after a pull at a bottle, ‘we possess one privilege, one rare privilege, that makes of our outcast and disregarded state something wonderful, something precious. We can invent our own faces! We
make
ourselves.’

He pointed at the white and red superimposed upon his own, never-visible features.

‘The code of the circus permits of no copying, no change. However much the face of Buffo may appear identical to Grik’s face, or to Grok’s face, or to Coco’s face, or Pozzo’s, Pizzo’s, Bimbo’s faces, or to the face of any other joey, carpet clown or august, it is, all the same, a fingerprint of authentic dissimilarity, a genuine expression of my own autonomy. And so my face eclipses me. I have become this face which is not mine, and yet I chose it freely.

‘It is given to few to shape themselves, as I have done, as we have done, as you have done, young man, and, in that moment of choice – lingering deliriously among the crayons; what eyes shall I have, what mouth . . . exists a perfect freedom. But, once the choice is made, I am condemned, therefore, to be “Buffo” in perpetuity. Buffo for ever; long live Buffo the Great! Who will live on as long as some child somewhere remembers him as a wonder, a marvel, a monster, a thing that, had he not been invented, should have been, to teach little children the
truth
about the filthy ways of the filthy world. As long as a child remembers . . .’

Buffo reached out a long arm and purposefully goosed Little Ivan as he passed by with glasses of tea.

‘. . . some child like Little Ivan,’ said Buffo, who did not know Little Ivan had watched from the top of the stove as his mother chopped up his father, and assumed the child was both innocent and naive.

‘Yet,’ he went on, ‘am I this Buffo whom I have created? Or did I, when I made up my face to look like Buffo’s, create,
ex nihilo
, another self who is not me? And what am I without my Buffo’s face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy.’

Grik and Grok, the pair of musical clowns, old troupers, always together, the Darby and Joan of the clowns, turned their faces towards Walser, bending to catch the feeble lamplight, and he saw those faces were mirror images of one another, alike in every detail save that Grik’s face was left-handed and Grok’s face was right-handed.

‘Sometimes it seems,’ said Grok, ‘that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks,
man-eating
fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead . . .’

‘But, as for us, old comrades that we are, old stagers that we are,’ said Grik, ‘why, do I need a mirror when I put my make-up on? No, sir! All I need to do is look in my old pal’s face, for, when we made our face together, we created out of nothing each other’s Siamese twin, our nearest and dearest, bound by a tie as strong as shared liver and lights. Without Grik, Grok is a lost syllable, a typo on a programme, a sign-painter’s hiccup on a billboard –’

‘– and so is he
sans
me. Oh, young man, you First-of-May, we cannot tell you, how would we have sufficient words to tell you just how useless we used to be before Grik and Grok came together and pooled our two uselessnesses, abandoned our separate empty faces for the one face,
our
face, brought to bed the joint child of our impotences, turned into more than the sum of our parts according to the dialectics of uselessness, which is: nothing plus nothing equals something,
once
–’

‘– you know the nature of plus.’

Having delivered themselves of the equation of the dialectic, they beamed with gratification beneath their impenetrable make-up. But Buffo wasn’t having any.

‘Bollocks,’ he said, heavily, belching. ‘Beg pardon, but balls, me old fruit.
Nothing
will come of nothing. That’s the glory of it.’

And the entire company repeated after him soft as dead leaves rustling: ‘That’s the glory of it! Nothing will come of nothing!’

Yet the musical clowns, such was their ancient authority within the tribe, stubbornly at once set out to prove they could at least make a little something out of it, for Grik began to hum the softest, tiniest kind of melody, while Grok, his old lover, started to drum, softly, his gloved fingertips against the table top, hum of a drowsy bee and rhythm faint as a pulse but sufficient for the clowns, for the others now rose up from their benches and, in the dim gloom of the Petersburg kitchen, they began to dance.

It was the bergomask, or dance of the buffoons, and if it began with the same mockery of gracefulness as the dance of the rude mechanicals in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, then soon their measures went sour, turned cruel, turned into a dreadful libel upon the whole notion of dancing.

As they danced, they began rhythmically to pelt one another with leftover crusts of black bread and emptied their vodka bottles over one another’s heads, mugged pain, resentment, despair, agony, death, rose up and pelted, emptied, turn and turn about. The baboushka lay drowsing on the stove by now, her ample sorrows forgotten, but Little Ivan, entranced, hid in the shadows and fearfully could not forebear to watch, his thumb stuck firmly in his mouth to give him comfort.