The Electric Hotel Read online

  * * *

  O-mouthed, transfixed, Claude watched the screen, but he also felt some part of him pulling away to his childhood in Alsace, to the autumn his mother died of smallpox while he lay in bed with his own fever. The fever had distorted his vision and he could remember lying up under the eaves of the attic as the shapes of the room fell out of focus. For a month, while his mother slipped away in the room next door, the edges of objects began to slowly quake and fringe. When the village doctor finally sent him to an ophthalmologist, a bearded man who spoke gravely of the fever warping his corneas, Claude emerged with a wire-frame prescription wrapped behind his ears and it was suddenly as if he’d swum to the surface of a very deep lake. The world rushed back in as the coppered edge of an October leaf, the crinoline hem of his teacher’s skirt, the yellow-white flange of a chanterelle mushroom on his father’s foraging table. And with each new Lumière reel, that was the sensation he had now, of being startled from a haze. He was a diver emerging from the murky, myopic depths into a bell jar of crystalline edges and forms.

  * * *

  The fever and his mother’s death turned him into a devout watcher the year he turned eleven, the bespectacled, motherless boy at school who was always flitting his eyes between a sketch pad and the horizon, who fell in behind his father and the dogs as they collected and foraged some order back into the callous universe. Seeing the woman jump into the ocean in one of the reels, he thought of his mother’s habit of alpine swimming, the way she grimaced before the icy plunge but always emerged shivering and roaring with joy, and then he imagined her all these years later on a strip of celluloid, swimming, laughing, waving, forty-five seconds of her tenure on the planet. Nothing would ever be the same in the photographic world, Claude understood as he watched. Magic lanterns had been used for centuries to project mechanical slides, but they were glimpses through a keyhole, a shifting geometric pattern or resolving image. In each Lumière view, every inch of the screen was alive, and it was the background of fluttering leaves, or rippling waves, or drifting clouds that captivated the eye as much as the foregrounded subject. You burrowed into the screen, dug it out with your gaze. In the span of ten minutes, in a hotel basement, the still image and the projected slide had become the slow-witted cousins to this shimmering colossus.

  * * *

  At the end of the screening, while the members of the photographic society continued to sit in awed silence, the brothers turned up the gaslight sconces and discussed their plans for the invention from the stage. They wanted to hire a small army of concession agents to proselytize the cinématographe into the far corners of the world, a grand tour of sorts, to beat Edison at his own game of colonizing human appetites and curiosities.

  —The Lumière concession agents, Auguste said, will project views of Paris and London and Rome for the locals, but they will also make filmstrips of their new surroundings as they travel. They will sell the cinématographes and filmstrips to showmen and photography buffs alike. Imagine, if you will, a tribe of Esquimaux or the bushmen of the Australian desert or the philosophers of Buenos Aires seeing their own lives glowing back at them.

  —Now, said Louis, we would be happy to take your questions.

  * * *

  Not a single member of the photographic society raised a hand. In a sense, they’d been leveled by what they’d witnessed. To ask how the sprockets fed the loop inside the box camera, or whether electricity could be used to fuel the lamphouse, or where the cinématographe could be purchased, was to quibble with wonder. To ask about the mechanics was to grind the air with so much noise. After a long enough silence, the members began to reclaim their coats and hats, the first cigars were lit, and Claude heard one of the veteran members say I don’t know what that was, but it has weakened my heart considerably. Claude stayed in his seat, cleaned his glasses again as if it might polish his thinking, and stood in the aisle. As he came toward the Lumière brothers he realized there were tears on his cheeks, and he paused to dab them away with his sleeve.

  —Were you moved by the views, young man?

  Auguste asked it with a note of fatherly concern in his voice.

  —More than I can say, Claude said.

  Louis, who’d begun to roll up the canvas screen, looked over at Claude.

  —I must learn how to make my own views.

  There was a slight stammer in Claude’s voice.

  —What is your name? asked Auguste.

  —Claude Ballard, sir.

  —Do you have any experience with photography? Louis asked.

  The brothers studied Claude at the lip of the stage, his wrinkled stovepipe hat in his hands.

  —I work as a photographic apprentice at La Salpêtrière, under Albert Londe.

  Auguste gave an affirming nod and reached into his coat pocket. On the back of a business card, he wrote down the name of an optical store on the Left Bank. Then he wrote Noon on March 1, 1896 and handed the card to Claude.

  —Ask for Yves at the optical shop. He will make you a licensed cinématographe.

  —And the date?

  —If you come back here at that time, we will be hiring our first concession agents. Make some views for us to watch and we would be happy to consider you.

  —What should I photograph?

  —Surprise us, Louis said. That is the only requirement.

  Claude noticed Auguste Lumière studying his scuffed shoes and the frayed felt of his hat brim. He felt himself flush in the sconce light and looked down at the floor. He put the card into a deep pocket of his shapeless coat, forced his eyes back up at the brothers, thanked them for their demonstration, and rushed for the stairwell. Auguste called after him.

  —And tell Albert Londe that he might grace us with his presence sometime, instead of just sending his apprentice. Tell him that we just showed you the goddamn moon and stars!

  * * *

  Claude took the stairs two at a time, rushing out into the glittering cold Parisian daylight. His glasses fogged in the open air, and for a moment the street came at him as if through a sheet of ice, everything muted, the pedestrians living as dashes and daubs of color. He stepped under a tobacconist’s awning to let his glasses defog. As he stared through his freshly cleared lenses, he found himself already auditioning passersby for reels—the shopgirls bundling along, arm in arm, their breath smoking in the chill as they gossiped, the butcher hauling a marbled side of beef over his shoulder behind a glass storefront, the ravaged old flâneur idling along with a spaniel and a cane and a wilting flower in his lapel.

  * * *

  Claude entered the fray of the street again, wending his way back toward the hospital. In the photographic plate of a clothier’s window he saw his own image fixed, saw himself the way the Lumières or a Parisian passerby might—a tall provincial kid in a stovepipe hat too tight in the brim, a slouching sack coat and wrinkled black wool trousers, a bespectacled, unblinking expression that was earnest, if he was being kind, and hangdog if he was being honest. For a year, he’d wanted to believe his wiry build and high-bridged nose might distract Parisians from his mawkish clothes and big-knuckled hands shoved into his trouser pockets, but he understood now that he looked like he’d borrowed a fat uncle’s funereal suit. He peered into the store window at a rack of tailored nankeen jackets, a walnut table of neckties, a wall of brogues the color of brandy and oxblood. He combed through the voluminous pockets of his coat, counted out his money, including part of next month’s rent, and stepped through the clothier’s doorway. His prodigious future, he felt sure, involved a Nile-blue necktie.

  * * *

  When Claude returned to the hospital in a mushroom-colored jacket with a blue silk necktie and caramel-colored shoes, the doctors and nurses of the neurology wing took notice. As he walked down the long white corridor, one nurse called him Casanova, another called him a duke of the provinces, and a physiologist, a bespectacled, dapper dresser in his own right, said, Welcome aboard!

  * * *

  Albert Londe’s
secretary said he was in meetings, so Claude decided to finish developing some plates in the darkroom. This narrow space was his sanctuary. Eyeglasses folded, moving by feel, rinsing and hanging exposures under an amber bulb. It always seemed to him in here that he was graceful and unencumbered, that there was someone with perfect eyesight moving inside him. Only once the prints were dry did he put his glasses back on and study the distorted postures of hysterics, the knuckled spines and bowed arms. He placed the better images into a dossier for Albert Londe to present to a panel of neurologists.

  * * *

  Today, while a woman’s buckled torso dissolved into view from a chemical bath, he felt a thickening line of dread in his throat. He saw himself in the darkroom for the next year while Albert Londe enlisted him to put the cinématographe to gainful medical use. He believed in science, in the photographic study of human movement and disease, but the idea of only making filmstrips of the hobbled and the stricken and projecting them for amphitheaters full of medical students was unthinkable. The Lumières had worked out how to reduce life to an emulsion and smear it onto a narrow strip of celluloid. To limit their invention to hospitals and lunatic asylums was to miss its point entirely. It was to stage an opera inside a train station.

  * * *

  When Claude emerged from the darkroom, Albert Londe stood waiting for his dispatch from the monthly meeting of the photographic society. Bearded with his dark hair cropped close to his ears, his coat buttoned almost to the knot of his necktie, a clipboard in his hands, he carried an air of scientific heft and certitude. On the neurology ward, they called him the Walrus. Claude was still wearing an apron from the darkroom, but something about his appearance clearly bothered his employer, perhaps the blue necktie flashing above the small island of bromide on his white apron. He searched for something in Claude’s countenance.

  —Have they done it? he asked. How does it compare to Marey’s photographic gun? I doubt they have bettered twelve consecutive frames per second in a single sequence. Am I right?

  Claude hesitated, didn’t know where to begin. Londe had developed a camera with nine lenses that could render human movement to a tenth of a second. But compared to the cinématographe, it was a painting on a cave wall.

  —Well, Ballard? What did you see?

  For a moment, Claude wanted to tell him that he’d seen his own future etched into the basement wall of the hotel. He could also imagine telling Londe how the invention parsed the images into a continuous, seamless stream, that the study of the human figure would never be the same. But when he finally spoke it was to protect what he’d witnessed and felt, to keep it as his own.

  —Sadly, sir, I don’t believe this will be of interest to your work. In one image, we see Auguste Lumière and his wife feeding their infant daughter a meal. Breakfast, I believe it was, out in the countryside.

  Albert Londe broke into a smile, then a chuckle, shaking his head slightly. He touched a brass button on his coat.

  —Vraiment, babies eating a bucolic breakfast? That is what all the fuss is about? I have long said that the brothers Lumière aren’t committed to scientific photography. They are commercialists, factory owners, businessmen …

  He turned his attention to his clipboard, paged through a handwritten schedule.

  —Now, Claude, can you set up the studio for tomorrow morning’s studies? We have a delegation of physicians arriving from Vienna.

  Claude nodded and watched Albert Londe disappear down the corridor.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until he sat with Odette that evening in the consumption hospital that Claude grasped the magnitude of his lie. Within days, or weeks, Albert Londe would hear about the Lumière exhibition from other members of the photographic fraternity and wonder why his apprentice had downplayed its impact. He might hear of Claude coming forward, tears on his cheeks, to ask where to obtain a working cinématographe. He felt sure he had sabotaged his own chances at La Salpêtrière, jeopardized the wages that helped pay for Odette’s treatments.

  * * *

  He watched his sister as she slept beneath the blue windowpane, night descending over the rooftops of the thirteenth arrondissement. Snow flurries whirred above her head, a spinning halo that brought him back to the reels in the basement, to the beautifully calibrated mirage. Her eyes fluttered and she woke coughing, her chest shaking. In the last month she’d become feverish and weak and luminously pale, her long blond hair turning flaxen. The attending physician had been a disciple of the doctor who’d invented the stethoscope, had traveled the world studying pulmonary consumption, insisted visitors cover their mouths and noses with cloth masks, kept the windows cracked to allow ventilation, but it was clear he’d run aground with Odette’s case. The disease was winning.

  * * *

  Claude poured her a glass of water from a jug beside the bed and propped her up with pillows. She took a sip of water, licked her lips, smiled through a sigh.

  —Have you joined the circus, mon petit frère?

  —I bought some new clothes.

  —Father always said you’d become a dandy in Paris. Next it will be absinthe … and poems about the sadness of the moon.

  On the nightstand lay a bible full of pressed wildflowers, a gift from their dead mother, open to the Book of Psalms. Claude glanced down at a vellum page and read the words Let me know how transient I am.

  —I saw something today, he said.

  —A madwoman pulling her hair out?

  Claude shot out a laugh, felt his breath hot against the face mask.

  —The Walrus sent me to another meeting of the photographic society.

  —Did someone bring back photographs of the North Pole again?

  She coughed again, dabbed at her mouth.

  —I’d rather see almost anything … than all that ice and whiteness, she said.

  —The Lumière brothers from Lyon did a demonstration of something they call the cinématographe. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  —Tell me.

  —The machine projects images onto the wall. Only they’re not photographs, exactly, but something else entirely. You see people moving and going about their normal lives, as if you are watching them from a window. Everything is silver and quiet. They walk along, smile, ride bicycles … it’s as if you’re watching your own dreams or memories up there. Everything is moving before you, over you, all of it quickening along … and you could touch it, it’s so real. There was a woman and her sons running out along a wooden plank and jumping into the ocean. I thought of Mama …

  He watched her staring out the window into the falling dark.

  —This woman thrashed about in the waves like a happy dog in a mountain lake, Claude said.

  She blinked slowly and smiled, her voice coming from far away.

  —And what will they do with this silver quickening?

  —The brothers are hiring concession agents to demonstrate the device all over the world.

  —Will you join them? she asked plainly. After I’m gone?

  Claude watched Odette’s eyes come back from the window and settle on him. Until now, they’d carried the possibility of her death in the gaps and silences that gathered around their words, in the lingering gazes they cast out the window onto the rooftops. Now she’d said it aloud and he couldn’t look at her. He had promised his father that he would take care of her, assured him that Paris doctors were a league above the country hacks in the north. And yet he surely must have admitted defeat the second he’d taken the business card and imagined showing his reels to the Lumières. As long as Odette was alive, there was no chance he would leave Paris. But if she died, he was suddenly and terrifyingly free. He looked down at his hands, then at the impossible vanity of his toffee-colored shoes. He felt a tear well up and wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  —Dear brother, I’m not afraid of it. I never have been. Who knows? Maybe death is its own silver quickening. You hate La Salpêtrière … photographing all those poor derelict women for me
n in white coats. You should work for the brothers from Lyon … travel the world. Do you know that I have always wanted to go to Brazil?

  —If I wanted to apply, I’d have to purchase a cinématographe and make some views of my own.

  —Views?

  —The moving photographs.

  She closed her eyes for a long time, then startled awake.

  —I’m tired again. It’s like quicksand, always pulling me back down.

  —You must rest. I will sit here with you while you sleep.

  He watched as she closed her eyes, tried to imagine what rippled through her thoughts and fitful dreams.

  * * *

  Within a week, the optical supply store had made Claude’s cinématographe and he’d parted with a month’s wages. The box camera, without the projection stand, was small enough to fit inside a carrycase, and he brought it with him wherever he went. He captured lovers in doorways, a juggler in the Tuileries Garden, a woman selling bread and hothouse roses from the basket of her bicycle. It reminded him of foraging with a satchel and a pair of hand shears, of excavating a copse of trees or a riverbank with his eyes. For a year, he’d pinned Parisians behind his eyeglasses, imagined their lives, and now he arranged them behind the brass-mounted lens. He liked the way the box camera felt in his hand or on a tripod, the mechanical click and certainty of its gears. But none of his initial views were novel. Like the Lumière reels, they were all filmed outside in daylight, and they captured strangers either going about their business or performing a feat for the camera. The camera glanced about but it didn’t reveal.