Waltz Into Darkness

23

Mardi Gras. A city gone mad. A fever that seizes the town every year, on the last Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. “Fat Tuesday.” Over and over, for fifty-three years now, since 1827, when the first such celebration started spontaneously, no one knows how. A last fling before the austerities of Lent begin, as though the world of human frailty were ending, never to renew itself. Bacchanalia before recantation, as if to give penance a good hearty cause.

There is no night and there is no day. The lurid glare of flambeaux and of lanterns along Canal and Royal and the other downtown streets makes ruddy sunlight at midnight; and in the daytime the shops are closed, nothing is bought and nothing is sold. Nothing but joy, and that’s to be had free. For eight years past, the day has already been a legal holiday, and since that same year, 1872, the Legislature has sanctioned the wearing of masks on the streets this one day.

There is always music sounding somewhere, near or far; as the strains of one street band fade away, in one direction, the strains of another approach, from somewhere else. There are always shouts and laughter to be heard, though they may be out of sight for a moment, around some corner or behind the open windows of some house. Though there may be a lull, along some given street, at some given moment, the Mardi Gras is going on just as surely somewhere else just then; it never stops.

It was during such a momentary lull that the motionless figure stood in a doorway sheltered beneath a gallery, along upper Canal Street. The air was still hazy and pungent with smoky pitch-fumes, the ground was littered with confetti, paper serpentines, shredded balloon skins looking like oddly colored fruit-peelings, a crushed tin horn or two; even a woman’s slipper with the heel broken off. The feet of an inebriate protruded perpendicularly from a doorway, the rest of him hidden inside it. Someone had tossed a wreath of flowers, as a funereal offering is placed at the foot of a bier, and deftly looped it about his upturned toes.

But this other figure, in its own particular doorway, was sober, erect. It had donned a papier-mâché false face, out of concession to the carnival spirit; otherwise it was in ordinary men’s suiting. The false face was grotesque, a frozen grimace of unholy glee, doubly grotesque in conjunction with the wearied, forlorn, spent posture of the figure beneath it.

A distant din that had been threatening for several moments suddenly burst into full volume, as it came around a corner, and a long chain, a snake dance, of celebrants came wriggling into view, each member gripping waist or shoulders of the person before him. The Mardi Gras was back; the pause, the breathing space, was over.

Torches came with them, and kettle drums and cymbals. The street lighted up again, as though it had caught fire. Wavering giant-size shadows slithered across the orange faces of the buildings. At once people came back to the windows again on either side of the way. Confetti once more began to snow down, turning rainbow-hued as it drifted through varying zones of light; pink, lavender, pale green.

The central procession, the backbone, of dancers was flanked by detached auxiliaries on both sides, singly and in couples, trios, quartettes, who went along with it without being integrated into it. The chain was lengthening every moment, picking up strays, though no one could tell where it was going, and no one cared. Its head had already turned a second corner and passed from sight, before its tail had finished coming around the first. The original lockstep it had probably started with had long been discarded because of its unwieldy length, and now it was a potpourri. Some were doing a cakewalk, prancing with knees raised high before them, others simply shuffling along barely raising feet from the ground, still others jigging, cavorting and kicking up their heels from side to side, like jack-in-the-boxes.

The false face kept switching feverishly, to and fro, forward and back, while the body beneath it remained fixed; centering its ogling eyes on each second successive figure as it passed, following that a moment or two, then dropping that to go back and take up the next but one. The women only, skipping over the clowns, the pirates, the Spanish smugglers, interspersed between.

Ogling, bulging, white-painted eyes, that promised buffoonery and horseplay, ludicrous flirtation and comic impassionment. Anything, but not latent death.

Many saw it, and some waved, and some called out in gay invitation, and one or two threw flowers that hit it on the nose. Roman empresses, harem beauties, gypsies, Crusaders’ ladies in dunce caps. And a nursemaid in starched apron wheeling a full-grown man before her in a baby’s perambulator, his hairy legs dragging out at the sides of it and occasionally taking steps of their own.

Then suddenly the comic popeyes remained fixed, the whole false face and the neck supporting it craned forward, unbearably intent, taut.

She wore a domino-suit, a shapeless bifurcated garb fastened only at the wrists, the ankles and the neck. A cowl covered her head. She wore an eye-mask of light blue silk, but beneath it her mouth was like an unopened bud.

She was no more than five feet two or three, and her step was dainty and graceful. She was not in the cavalcade, she was part of the footloose flotsam coursing along beside it. She was on the far side of it from him, it was between the two of them. She was passing from man to man, dancing a few steps in the arms of each, then quitting him and on to someone else. Thus progressing, with not a step, not a turn, wasted uncompanioned. She was a sprite of sheer gayety.

Just then her hood was dislodged, thrown back for a moment, and before she could recover and hastily return it, he had glimpsed the golden hair topping the blue mask.

He threw up his arm and shouted “Julia!” He launched himself from the door niche and three times dashed himself against the impeding chain, trying to get through to her side, and three times was thrown back by its unexpected resiliency.

“No one breaks through us,” they told him mockingly. “Go all the way back to the end, and around, if you must cross over.”

Suddenly she seemed to become aware of him. She halted for a moment and was looking straight across at him. Or seemed to be. He heard the high-pitched bleat of her laughter, in all that din, at sight of his comic face. She flung her arm out at him derisively. Then turned and went on again.

He plunged into the maelstrom, and like a drowning man trying to keep his head above water, was engulfed, swept every way but the way he wanted to go.

At last a Viking in a horned helmet, one of the links in the impeding chain, took pity on him.

“He sees someone he likes,” he shouted jocularly. “It’s Mardi Gras, after all. Let him through.” And with brawny arms raised like a drawbridge for a moment, let him duck under them to the other side.

She was still intermittently in sight, but far down ahead. Like a light blue cork bobbing in a littered sea.

“Julia!”

She turned fully this time, but whether at sound of the name or simply because of the strength of his voice could not have been determined.

He saw her crouch slightly, as if taunting him to a mock chase. A chase in which there was no terror, only playfulness, coquetry, a deliberate incitement to pursuit. A moment later she had fled away deftly, slipping easily in and out because of her small size. But looking back every now and again.

It was obvious she didn’t know who he was, but thought him simply an anonymous pursuer from out of the Mardi Gras, someone to have sport with. Once when he thought he had lost her altogether, and would have had she willed it so, for she purposely halted aside in a doorway and remained there waiting for him to single her out once more. Then when he had done so, and there could be no mistake, she drew out her clown-like suit wide at the sides, dipped him a mocking curtsey, and sped on again.

At last, with one more backward look at him, as if to say: “Enough of this. I’ve set a high enough price on your approaching me. Now have your way with me, whatever it is to be,” she turned aside from the main stream of the revelers and darted down a dimly lighted alley.

He reached its mouth in turn moments later, and could still see the paleness of her light blue garb running ahead in the gloom. He turned and went in. There were no more obstacles here, nothing to keep him back. In a minute or two he had overtaken her, and had her back against the wall, his raised arms, planted against it, a barrier on either side of her.

She couldn’t speak. She was too winded. She leaned back against the wall, in expectation of dalliance, the fruits of the chase now to be enjoyed alike by both of them. He could make out the pale blue mask shimmering there before him in the dark. The red and yellow glare of torches was kept to the mouth of this side street, this byway; it couldn’t reach in to where they were. It was twilight dim. It was the very place for it—

He tried to lift the mask from her face and she warded him off, shunting her head aside. She tittered a little, and fanned herself limply with her own hand, to create additional air for breath.

“Julia,” he panted full into her face. “Julia.”

She tittered again.

“Now I’ve got you.”

He looked around where the light was, where the crowd was still streaming by, as if in measurement.

Then his hand fumbled under his clothing and he took out the bone-handled pistol he’d carried with him throughout the Mardi Gras. She didn’t see it for a moment, it was held low, below the level of their eyes.

Then he pulled at his own false face, and it fell to the ground.

“Now do you know me, Julia? Now do you see who I am?”

His elbow backed, and the gun went out away from her, to find room. It clicked as he thumbed back the hammerhead.

It came forward again. It found that empty place, where in others a heart was known to be.

Then he ripped ruthlessly at the eye-mask and pared it from her. The hood went back with it, and the blonde hair was revealed. She saw the gun at the same time that he saw her face fully.

“No, doan’, mister, doan’—” she whimpered abjectly. “I din’ mean no harm. I was jes foolin’, jes foolin’—” She tried to grovel to the ground, but the taut closeness of his arms kept her up in spite of herself.

“Why, you’re a — you’re a—”

“Please, mister, I cain’t help it if I doan’ match up right—”

There was a sodden futile impact as the bone-handled gun fell beside him to the ground.