Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [42]
“Don’t forget you’re supposed to be my best man on Saturday,” he added, as he shook hands with Gabriel. “Don’t forget to make up with the bride, then.”
Through the window, Brentford watched Gabriel go away, and felt vaguely worried. Since he had first met him twenty years before, watching in disbelief as “the hurling earl” crawled uninvited on all fours into his Doges’ College dorm room to vomit in the washbasin, Brentford had acquired a rather large spectrum of expectations about what could be regarded as right or normal for his friend. Now Gabriel was undoubtedly tired and could have his moody spells, but knowing him as he did, Brentford sensed there was something else. Gabriel had seemed nervous, elusive, pulling relentlessly on his sideburns while casting quick glances at the street. This “Lancelot” story would normally have goaded him into inventing thousand hypotheses and he would have given more thought to the North Pole trip than he had, as it was a longtime fascination of his. Was this Stella to blame? Or something else? He reverted to his own already numerous problems and found with a sigh that Gabriel’s eerie behaviour had been added to them.
CHAPTER XII
Eskimo Thieves!!!
His filthy habits unsubdu’d
His manners gross, his gestures rude
No friendly hand assists to teach
Instruction comes not in his reach;
And scarcely knowing good from ill
Being untaught, he’s blameless still.
“A Peep at The Esquimaux,” By A Lady, 1825
Hiding the truth from Brentford was something Gabriel could consider doing, but, as a gentleman as well as a friend, lying to him was beyond the pale of the possible. Once he had told him that he was going to the Inuit People’s Ice Palace, he had little choice but to actually go there, however exhausted he was. Wondering why he had not simply admitted that he needed some sleep, he staggered toward the Marco Polo Midway.
Though it was early in the day, and not exactly warm, the Midway was already busy, people taking advantage of the few hours of decent daylight to stroll about and linger in front of the shops, cafés, and attractions that lined the long avenue. A refuge against the most dreaded Hyperboredom of the Wintering Weeks, the Midway was a poetic hodgepodge of architectural styles, but with an overall cheapness that made it more Fairground than Fairyland. Through dreary days or dazzling nights, it catered almost nonstop to all kinds of questionable tastes in mass entertainment. Panoramas, dioramas, oloramas, cycloramas, mareoramas, myrioramas, and panopticons took the spectators through all kinds of famous monuments and places, exotic lands, ferocious battles, and natural catastrophes, unless they preferred a “Trip to the Moon” or a good update on the “War of the Worlds,” or even, if one believed the bold letters above the gigantic archways guarded by angels and devils, a replay of the “Creation of the World” or a peek through the formidable “Hellgate.” Gabriel had patronized, in more senses than one, each of these many times and though he professionally professed to see their naïve vulgarity, he had always tremendously enjoyed them, precisely because the imperfection and mechanical frailty of these industrial visions reminded him, more than anything else, of his own stuttering fantasies, the do-it-yourself of his dreams.
Nevertheless, the very idea of building the Ice Palace right there, a few steps from the pyramid-shaped Palace of Palmistry or the Trilby Temple, said a lot about the seriousness of its planners’ alleged anthropological concerns. The building itself, whose outside was now completed, was shaped, rather ridiculously to Gabriel’s mind, as a rough mountain or an iceberg of huge proportions, as if the Eskimos were some kind of troglodytes living in caves of ice. He walked up to a man in a sort of zookeeper’s uniform whom he supposed was a guard, and having explained his case had