The fair in the month of August brought me many
other sadnesses and exaltations. The full spectacle swelled like a symphony,
from the prelude of isolated attractions that arrived much before the others
and that indicated the general tone of the fair, like the prolonged stray notes
that announce the entire theme of the composition at the beginning of the
concert, to the grandiose conclusion, bursting forth with shouts, shots and
fanfare on the culminating day, followed by the immense silence of the field,
deserted once again.
The few attractions that came early encompassed, in essence, the whole
fair and represented it exactly. It was enough that only the first of them
were set up, for all the colors, all the brilliance and all the carbide smell of
the whole fair to descend into town.
In the obscurity of the boulevard a tiara of colored glass would light
up toward evening, like the earth’s first constellation. Soon others would
follow and the boulevard became a luminous corridor, along which I would
wander, speechless, as I had once seen, in an illustrated edition of Jules
Verne, a boy my age, leaning against the porthole of a submarine, looking
out into the suboceanic darkness, at the wonderful and mysterious marine
phosphorescences.
from:
MAX BLECHER,
Adventures in Immediate Unreality
translated by Jeanie Han
