Black Mirror Read Free

shutters of astonishment. The smile was enormous and the tone one of foolish exaggeration.
    L’Australienne!
    Victoria felt herself suddenly endowed with symbolic accessories: bounding kangaroos, vistas of orange earth, spectral stringy eucalypts, empty dead centres, any number of odd and arresting Antipodean inversions. The mantle of Australianness descended upon her, as though an invisible parasol had collapsed, leaving her drenched in novelty. She stood there bedraggled, pre-empted by nationhood. Duchamp lunged from the doorway, seized Victoria by the wrist, and led her into the drawing room.
    He chanted: L’Australienne! L’Australienne!
    They were all conducting a kind of séance. From the entrance to the drawing room Victoria felt herself lean inwards in anticipation of the life she wished to discover. She could hear incoherent mutterings in several languages, could smell the stale emanations of candles and cigarettes, could sense her own bashful elation at announced admission — since no one had yet detected her black-swan trespass or noted the measure of her insignificance — and she was filled with artistic ambition and a will to impress. Faces turned in her direction, lighting up for an instant like spangles flung into shadow, but then turned away again, just as quickly, preoccupied with the proceedings. The room was pink-coloured from light filtered through drawn scarlet curtains; it made her think, said Victoria, of blood pressed thin on a glass slide. There were golden candles here and there, on ledges and tables, and replicated unevenly on a glass-topped cabinet, but over all was the impression of an organic pinkness. She breathed deeply and imagined her lungs blooming with pigment, so that inside her chest became a vase of pink hydrangeas.
    ( You see how serious I was? How bent on Surrealist transformation? )
    Everyone was there. Breton, Ernst, Desnos, Man Ray, women of extraordinary beauty clad in feathers and furs whose names she did not yet know (one was Gala, perhaps, another Dora, Jacqueline) and they sat at an oval table upon which were scattered letters of the alphabet, symbols and cards. André Breton was busyinvoking the spirit of the Marquis de Sade: his eyes were closed and from his mouth came strange intonings:
    Oh corpus delicti , body
    dismembered and remembered
    no crystal, but worms,
    no necktie but excrement in vertical rivers,
    the absence of butterflies,
    brain …
    Here someone took up the letter J and shouted: Juteux !:
    â€” brain a juicy jungle
    swung through with monkeys —
    Brioche !:
    â€” a brioche curled upon itself
    tasty convolutions, without butterflies.
    hollows intolerable: the banker, the taxidermist.
    Gloved hands, handless gloves,
    razors invading —
    Duchamp took up an A and eyed Victoria mischievously.
    L’Australienne !
    â€” Noir et noir et noir et noir, Breton sang.
    Black and black and black and black,
    black is the body continent
    at which we force frontiers,
    black the juicy jungle, the tasty convolutions,
    the monkeys, the monkeys,
    the razors invading …
    Victoria ceased to listen. She was suddenly ashamed and flushed with embarrassment. Her gloved handburned against her face. She remembered a desert hawk, its whole face sharp, diving fast through the sky towards some cowering creature, and the mushroom of dust as it speared its prey. Then the peculiar silhouette of two beings uprising, its diminishing shape, its wingbeat, its swift arcing away. Whatever recalled this little death stayed as the colour of her cheeks.
    noir et noir et noir et noir
    Surely they could all see it: the stranger rosy with discomfort. A man peered over rimless spectacles in which twin candle flames were reflected. Words everywhere dispersed and disassembled. Faces gleamed with alien light. Three porcelain cats, distinctly bourgeois, seemed to regard her from the ledge above a gaping fireplace. At the end of the table, now a vast expanse of