Free Black Mirror by Gail Jones Page A

decorated all over with plastic hands. There was a radiator cap on the top of his helmet, a fancy jewelled dagger lodged in his belt, and he led a pair of panting, unhappy Borzoi hounds. Edward James, who was Dali’s English manager, followed carrying a billiard cue to serve as a pointer for the illustrations. There was a pulse in the air: beat-beat, beat-beat . The gallery was so sweltering and so poorly ventilated the air throbbed with the fan-beat of programs and hats. Expirations of all kinds were apparently imminent. Women mopped with handkerchiefs and put the backs of their hands against their cheeks to test their own temperatures. Men, all imitating my beloved Jules, ran their index fingers around the insides of their shirt collars or worried fussily at neck-scarves and bowties. I remember that Leonora lifted her hair from her neck, shook it breezily, then let it drop. Lifted and dropped. In retrospect I endow this gesture with ravishing grace. The necks of women and men, their points of exposure and enclosure, continue to excite me.
    We sat together and watched Salvador Dali asphyxiate. Behind the circle of glass he gulped like a goldfish. His muffled voice became weaker, his face was lobster, and he began to flail, drowning in air. Wild gesturesrequested the removal of the helmet, and the audience was aroused by the expectation of disaster. Edward James tried to unscrew the wingnuts of the helmet but they would simply not budge. The hounds exposed enormous tongues and panicked and tangled. James tripped, Chaplinesque. When he recovered he used the billiard cue to assault the helmet, and with the assistance of another man finally released Dali’s head from its deadly aquarium. The audience sat with mouths open: inhaled fish-like, collectively.
    And would you believe it? Salvador Dali continued his lecture. He talked in Spanish-accented French with incomprehensible intensity on the subject of paranoia and the Surrealist rage against death. Leonora took notes. But I was distracted. A single plastic hand had detached in the flurry, and lay on the floor, orphaned, at the foot of the diver. It was white, child-size and appeared immaculate.
    This body-piece, my Anna-tomical, was my sign, my wonder. I saw the beauty of things in dislocation. I saw the asterix of every hand. And I saw my own hands, glimmering, white and open before me, as though for the first time. As though fabulously new.
    Victoria paused.
    Single-handed, she joked. I became a Surrealist single-handed.
    Her laugh was throaty and full and Anna joined in. But her drifting mind had snagged on an earlier sentence: I saw the asterix of every hand .

    The Paris Victoria arrived in: less a city of monuments, than one of marvellous conjunctions. Her own face, astonished, appearing on glass surfaces.
    She bore in her eye the principle of convulsive beauty: together and correspondent existed type-writers, aeroplanes, purple hyacinths unfolding, the fur collars of large women trapping droplets of water, cigarette smoke, velotaxis, old men weighted by sandwich boards, telephone receivers (ringing loudly or sitting silent), café names writ effulgent with electric lights, marble columns, kerbside garbage, gargoyles on the verge of effacement, the lit faces of patrons leaving a crowded cinema, lampposts, stairwells, wind-blown hair, the dark and deadly-looking night-time canyon of the Seine.
    She linked arms with Jules Levy, held him preciously to her, and met the city, jamais vu , hyperaesthetic. It was a reincarnation.
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    A woman passes by with a corsage of parma violets, pinned to the lapel of a dun-coloured jacket, and Victoria exclaims as though she has never seen violets before.
    In front of the Hôtel de Ville, in the cloudy square, children are riding a golden and fancifully decorated carousel; their smiles flash with each up-down circle they travel in. It is incomparably festive. Victoria almost weeps.
    An Algerian — she supposes — is