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Comprachicos

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Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s Film The Man Who Laughs (1928)

It all started in the elevator to the Trader Joe parking lot. Two odd women first commented that I looked like the actor Wilford Brimley, and then asked me why I didn’t smile. That set me off: I don’t particularly like to go around with a smile on my face, and I don’t think much of people who do. Were these frustrated dental assistants to go around accosting strangers for not airing their teeth?

Then I thought of one reason I didn’t like being all smiley. I remembered Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs (1869), which was turned into a 1928 silent film by Paul Leni starring Conrad Veidt, better known as Major Strasser “of the Third Reich” in the film Casablanca (1942).

Well, anyway, the novel and film were about people called comprachicos who, as children, were mutilated to look pathetic so that their handlers can could use them for begging:

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequefios, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. They traded in children, buying and selling them, but not stealing them. They made of these children monsters. The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The montebank is wanted in the street, the jester at the Louvre; the one is called a clown, the other a fool. By the artificial production of teratological cases the Comprachicos developed a science and practiced an art. They kneaded the features, stunted growth, and fashioned hunchbacks and dwarfs; the court fool was their specialty.

The Conrad Veidt character in the film was a child who was kidnapped and had a permanent smile carved on his face, which made him look pathetic. And that’s what comes to mind when people tell me to smile. I just don’t care to oblige them.

Wilford Brimley (1934-2020)

By the way, I look almost exactly like Wilford Brimley, except that his mustache was a little bigger than mine. Of course, I would prefer that strangers think I am a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, or some other dolicocephalic heartthrob. But then, so it goes.

Jains: The Most Gentle People

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Detail, Pilgrimage to a Jain Shrine c. 1850

Compared to the Jains of India, the Quakers and other pietists seem positively warlike. I am currently reading William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009). In it, a Jain adept describes her initiation:

[W]e were led back onto the stage, and told our new names. I was no longer Rekha; for the first time in my life I was addressed as Prasannamati Mataji…. Then we were both lectured by our guruji. He told us clearly what was expected of us: never again to use a vehicle [to avoid crushing insects], to take food only once a day, not to use Western medicine, to abstain from emotion, never to hurt any living creature. He told us we must not react to attacks, must not beg, must not cry, must not complain, must not demand, must not feel superiority, must learn not to be disturbed by illusory things. He told us we must be the lions that kill the elephant of sexual desire. He told us we must cultivate a revulsion for the world, and a deep desire for release and salvation. And he told us all the different kinds of difficulties we should be prepared to bear: hunger, thirst, cold, heat, mosquitoes. He warned us that none of this would be easy.

As they would walk along, Jains would sweep a peacock feather fan in front of them lest they inadvertently took the life of any creature, regardless how small. During the wet monsoon season, they stayed indoors because the omnipresent puddles were teeming with microscopic life.

Dalrymple’s source, a Jain nun called Prasannamati, blamed herself for being closely attached for twenty years to another Jain nun until the latter died of tuberculosis and malaria. Toward the end, the friend gradually cut down on her intake of food until she in effect died of starvation. Although she was only 38 years old and still healthy, Prasannamati was in the beginning stages of the same kind of starvation suicide, called sallekhana.

As Prasannamati said to her questioner, “Sallekhana is the aim of all Jain [monks or nuns]. First you give up your home, then your possessions. Finally you give up your body.”