Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [47]
The scene suddenly shifted, taking him by surprise. The suffragettes had suddenly pulled placards from the van and were brandishing them. Some were carrying drums, others brass instruments, forming a kind of marching band that set about crossing Great Pan Place, pushing great blasts of brazen sound into the sullen damp skies. Brentford, caught in the maelstrom of the moving crowd, could not at first make out the signs that were bobbing over the band. Or, more exactly, it took him some time to simply believe what he saw: THE POLE TO THE PEOPLE said one, WHITE & INUIT UNITE said another, FREEDOM FOR FREEZELAND proclaimed a third. The crowd around him became hesitant, unsure of how to react: was this part of the promotional stunt? Was it a real revolt? Which one was the pretext for the other? The borderline was blurry, to be sure, but Brentford, having paid as much attention to the lyrics as he had, felt little doubt that he was witnessing an event with little or no antecedent, a feast of all firsts, as the Eskimos said, a piece of history in a city that had always strived to keep out of history, nay, a city whose very aim, as proved by the Seven Sleepers’ decision to reverse Time and impose an “After Backward” calendar, was to avoid it at all costs.
Brentford followed the parade down the street as it opened for itself a way among the perplexed, disbelieving onlookers. He was now more or less elbowing his way through them, hoping to see more of the march as it went down toward the Chione Canal and the Boreas Bridge. As long as the cortege stayed in Venustown, with its long tradition of deviant carnival events, this would come off as nothing more than a curious little incident to be added to the local lore, but if it crossed the bridge and entered the city centre at Frislandia, it would become wholly different: a poletical event with unpredictable results.
Brentford stopped at a little booth where a red-hatted Courier, stomping his feet to avoid freezing, was waiting for deliveries to make or messages to carry, and gave him the record with Gabriel’s address. Seeing people in these kinds of menial, low-wage jobs never failed to make Brentford bitter about the way things were heading (down, obviously), and finding them useful did not mitigate his feelings, either.
He tipped the man generously and hurried to rejoin the crowd, but as he reached the tail of the cortege, the march stopped, and even seemed to retreat, the brass instruments tilting back like wheat stalks under the wind. False notes were heard, and slogans turned to screams. Brentford made his way toward the front, more muscularly perhaps than his good upbringing authorized, and almost stumbled into the ongoing chaos.
A host of gentlemen in black frock coats and silk hats had interrupted the procession a few yards short of the bridge. Wedging dark, angular moves into the wavering whiteness of the march, they were trampling the drums, confiscating the horns, which they’d bent beyond repair, breaking over their thighs the signs that cracked like bones. Through their spats and shiny shoes, Brentford could make out, collapsed on the slimy cobblestones, the crumpled cape and kicking legs of Lilian Lenton, her feathered hat knocked across the pavement near his own feet.
He wanted to step in, without bothering about the cost of a fight with the Gentlemen of the Night, when a group of Navy Cadets, probably just out of a nearby brothel, but chivalrous by tradition if not by trade, came to the rescue, shoving and pushing the Gentlemen of the Night away from the women they were brutalizing. It was most unexpected, but the crowd welcomed it with cheers that only infuriated the dapper coppers all the more.
Brentford, as a former cadet, felt quite elated by this turnaround and could not resist doing his bit: he took a step toward Lilian, who had managed to get up, and seized her by her firm lean arms, not without a little thrill of tactile pleasure. Unfortunately, however,