Third person, free indirect speech, omniscient narrator, by unknown
The figure looks like Manny Face, but we can’t be sure, since we see him from the back with only an occasional glimpse of a profile.
He moves up to the window; it is one of the windows of the residence of The Hunched Cornish. It is a window at the back of the building, arrived at through an archway from the busy street in front. The window overlooks nothing but a desolate, empty courtyard of rusted rails and broken concrete, filled with garbage and thrown-away junk. The window is wide open.
The figure hears something like the gagged and muffled cries of a woman coming from within. His heart races as his mind floods with trepidation and anxiety.
He spreads the fingers of his hands across the windowsill and slowly, carefully raises his head to bring his eyes above the brick line and level with the room inside.
There, with her arms tied above her head by a rope fastened to a large hook in the ceiling, is Tango Baby, her mouth taped shut.
She is shoeless and the rope is shortened to a length that forces her to stand on her toes. She is real yet unreal, projecting into the figure’s visual field in neon pastels. Her bursting womb protrudes obscenely, like she is about to give birth. Her large breasts fall out of a blouse from which the buttons had been torn and scattered about the room. Her bulging eyes search the window for salvation with crazed desperation. She looks directly at the figure standing outside but does not see him.
There is unsettling, low-rumbling laughter coming from inside the room off to the side.
Suddenly, the massive frame of a demented figure, seen only from the back, now eclipses Tango Baby’s muffled pleas. Only glimpses of his huge head and deeply lined and scarred face can be seen as he moves in flashes around his prey. He wields a large kitchen knife with which he taunts her, quickly jabbing its point into her neck but each time only leaving a tiny pink mark without cutting the skin and drawing blood.
To the figure at the window this looks like The Hunched Cornish. Yet, for all its hellish size, unlike that pre-Mycenaean monster, this hulking beast is somehow taller, lither, stretching lengthwise over a longer, narrower swath of space. Its legs are longer, the shoulders narrower and higher up under the neck; the entire posture and manner of movements, indeed, the very order of their sequence, are altogether different; the low sinister laugh, which rings with the gravelly din of The Hunched Cornish’s familiar contempt, is also somehow not the same.
Is this it, then? Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty?: the inverse of life, its invisible other side, which is theater, and the theater is nothing more than a religious spectacle, a spectacle of evil, which we, after all inner resistance breaks down, recognize as life itself. While the life we live, the one we think we live, is truly an illusion.
Beyond this harrowing scene, farther back in the room and off to the side but still visible, a dandy very much like Huysmans’ Des Esseintes blithely mixes flasks of perfume, oblivious to the ordeal.
August 19, 2014