Page 24 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

sometimes in his dressing room. He would picture the huge legs of the actress

he’d invited up to his bedroom that evening; but could he have known that his
son was ill? And what difference would it have made? In the lightning flash of
a thought, the face of little Kit would pierce the darkness where all our
thoughts live and die, and he felt terribly sad and anxious. Then a moment
later, it would be Josepha, the actress, whose name came back to him, and the
way he’d sat kneading her breasts, while she panted and thrust her tongue in
his mouth and made him come.

And then he would go on drinking, the breach had been opened up, he was
thirsty, lost in his eternity. Suddenly, he would think about Louisa when she
was very young. How pretty and delicate she was! He thought back to the
young woman he had loved and he wondered what had happened to them. He
would wonder what had slowly turned the pretty girl from Saint Louis, with

her gentle, graceful ways, into this sad, hard woman. Yes, between two
performances of the show, when he got up from his little siesta in the
afternoon, tired, his face crumpled by sleep and temporarily slashed by the
creases in his pillow, in the strange gloom that greets you when you wake in
the middle of the day, he would doubtless think about the little boy. Kit
Carson Cody, his son, bore the name of a famous scout, as if life and
adventure would, for him, always be one and the same. And then he would

hear his little voice. For voices remain inside us longer than the rest. Oh! if
only I had been there! he would lament, and then he would resume the bitter
refrain against his wife, the mauvaise foi of the father and the drunk.
He had gone on travelling, burning himself up with his success, taking the
glad tidings to the four corners of America. He had been all over the world, to
Paris, to London, and even as far as Rome. And finally, after dragging his

grief and his fame to the far ends of the earth, outside the Colosseum, where
Nero tortured the Christian martyrs, Buffalo Bill requested permission to put
on his show. His request was refused. By an irony of fate, the Colosseum
wasn’t big enough.

And so it was, that going from one railway station to the next, long after Italy,
and long after countless other performances, the troupe, which had crossed the
Atlantic and travelled round Europe, arrived one fine day in Nancy. The ocean
crossing had required several ships. Their hulls contained 1,200 stakes, 4,000

poles, 30,000 metres of rope, 23,000 metres of canvas, 8,000 seats and 10,000
items of wood and iron, all destined to create a hundred big tops lit by three