Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

  As we filtered into the gloom, Lemperer plucked me aside and whispered in my ear, “Prian, darling fellow, you sit by me, if you will, for of course I want your criticism of the performance.”

  “Then you should have paid for my ticket, if you are retaining me in a professional capacity.”

  “Your criticism is too amateurish for that luxury. Don’t go above yourself, that’s my sincere warning, or you could find yourself landed with playing the dog the next time we do Beppo’s Downfall . . . No, you see, I also need a more personal word with you about my little naughty wife.” He squeezed my wrist hard, indicating the need for silence.

  A lizard-girl came round selling comfits, and we made ourselves as comfortable as possible until harpsichord music struck up and the curtains parted. We were pleased to see that scarcely a dozen people were attending the show, apart from our own company.

  The screen was a sheet some four feet long by three high. On it shadows pranced, picked out by brilliant flares behind. Principal characters moved near to the screen, and so were densely black, while lesser characters and the scenery were moved at a greater distance, so that they appeared in greyer definition. In this way, great variety was achieved, and the scenic effects were striking, with clouds and water well imitated. The Great Charino’s chief novelty was that parts of his puppets, such as their faces, and the clothes of the more important personages, were cut away and replaced by coloured glass, to give dazzling effects on the screen.

  Although few of the puppets were jointed, their movement was good and the commentary reasonably funny, if time-honoured. What was most amazing was the way in which, after a moment of watching the screen, one accepted the puppets for reality, as if there were no other!

  “I don’t want to do her an injustice in any way at all, and the Virgin herself knows that I cherish the tiresome baggage dearly, but my darling Singla is too fond of hopping in and out of beds that really aren’t fit for her lovely and unruly body. Now she’s hopped into one bed too many . . . I’ve been hearing rumours, Prian . . .”

  At that moment, La Singla, acting perhaps on some disconcerting feminine intuition, thrust her pretty head between ours and said, “What are you two whispering about? Isn’t it a dainty show?”

  “Go away, my love, my honey pot,” whined Lemperer. “Go and flirt in the dark with Portinari—he knows where to stop, if you don’t! Prian and I are talking business.”

  La Singla snorted like a cute little pig and withdrew.

  “You need to be more coaxing than that to a wife to keep her faithful, maestro!” I said.

  The Broken Bridge was reaching its conclusion. I had seen it many times in many forms, but never so well done. The boatman was rowing across the river with every appearance of reality; his back was cunningly jointed to make the movement lifelike. Behind him, snow sparkled on high mountains. The only snag was that sweat poured off the faces of the audience, so intense was the heating of the flares which achieved the lighting effects.

  “I am tired of coaxing the jade! Would not any woman give her maidenhead to be married to a successful man like me, a creative man? But now she’s gone too far—much too far, Prian. I can be a vindictive man when the spirit moves me, you understand!” To help me understand this point, he pinched me hard on the wrist, so that I cried out with surprise and pain just as the plesiosaur began to munch up the ill-natured labourer mending the bridge. At that, the audience burst into laughter.

  “This time she has had the impertinence to fall in love with some worthless coxcomb—yes, I know not who he is, but I found one of his impertinent letters to her, tucked in with her chemises —just this morning, when I was looking for spare laces to my corset. I mean to have the coxcomb waylaid and beaten soundly. No man meddles with my wife’s affections and fails to pay the price!”

  Each of these points he emphasised with further pinches. I was careful not to give the audience further cause for laughter—an intention the more easily carried out because, in his agitation, Lemperer had seized me by the throat and pushed my head backwards over the seat, so that, like Paul Riviere in the farce of the three kings, I was “trapped between chocolate-time and eternity.”

  At last I broke away and slapped down his hand.

  “We may be the best of friends, maestro, but this is no reason to kill me outright! Do you imagine I am the coxcomb you seek? Faith, for my honour, I would as leave climb into bed with you as with your spouse, so great is my respect for you.”

  “Pardon, pardon, I am naturally a man of passion and I forget myself. I trust you implicitly or I would not be taking you into my confidence. It’s no joke to be cuckolded—even worse to have to admit it. Why, I’m as virile as ever I was—No, no, Prian, before this wretched shadow play ends, listen!—I have my thugs and my spies to my command, never fear, but I want you to tell me if you have seen La Singla acting in any way untoward. In any way! I want you to watch her closely, since you are her friend and she trusts you, as I do.”

  “I won’t add to your number of spies.”

  “No, no, damn you, nothing dishonourable—just tell me what you see that’s suspicious, and keep watching, eh? And I’m thinking we should build up the part of Phalante the Bankrupt. Such a funny part, especially when you play it You’ve seen nothing untoward with her?”

  It was not for me to mention La Singla’s visit to the plump astrologer, which was innocent for all I knew.

  “I find it hard to believe such a virtuous woman would deign to deceive her husband, especially such a husband as you!”

  He dug me in the ribs with an elbow notorious for its lethal bone structure.

  “She doesn’t get much peace from a hot-blooded fellow like me, let me tell you here and now, but every woman is a rake at heart. Men are souls of virtue compared.”

  Peace had not fallen on the river. The broken bridge remained unrepaired. Sunset was coming on. Sweet aromatic herbs were lit to one side, to affect the audience with their pleasant odours. A fleet of plesiosaurs cruised placidly up the stream, and the tips of the mountains turned pink as the valley disappeared in shadow. It was suddenly affecting, and it was over.

  “Rubbish, rubbish!” Lemperer cried, jumping on his chair. “Not a witty line in the whole thing! Karagog had better improve on that dismal performance or I shall not be able to sit it through!”

  But most people were amused. Now they cried for cold drinks to slake their thirsts, so hot was it in the tent Portinari came to sit next to me and we drank sherbet together.

  “Well, it was a bagatelle, but very pleasing—and it had novelty!”

  “When I was a boy, an old man on the Stary Most used to give The Broken Bridge in a barrel, with a candle for light. It is probably many centuries old.”

  “Like The Visionaries ... All the same, this had artistry.”

  “Artistry enough. ‘Hokum maybe, but striking theatre,’“ I quoted. “It reminded me of reality without making any ineffectual attempts to imitate it slavishly.”

  “Besides, reality is so unpleasant . . . Think how we sit here in—well, moderate comfort, watching a succession of pictures, while behind the screen poor sweating half-naked wretches feed flares hot enough to roast themselves with.”

  “Isn’t that the nature of all art—that the artist should suffer agonies to yield his audience one single twitch of delight!”

  “Ah, then you have agreed to play Phalante once more! What else was old Lemperer talking about?”

  Fortunately, I was spared telling any lies by a resounding series of chords on the harpsichord and the lighting up of the screen, onto which diverse dazzling figures burst, full of life and colour. Out jumped Karagog, with his long arms and his funny red hat such as they wear still in Byzantium, and the fun began. Although the story was little enough, plots are always less important than what they are stuffed with, and here the stuffing was of the richest.

  Karagog tried to become a schoolmaster, but failed so miserably that the scholars chased him from the school; trie
d to join the circus, but fell from the high wire into a soup tureen; joined the army, but became terrified at the sound of cannon. Images pelted across the screen. The puppet master had contrived a zoetrope effect, so that, in the circus scenes, acrobats and jugglers skipped, leaped, and danced across the screen, some of them tossing clubs and balls as they went. And the parade of the soldiers, all in their great plumed hats, was magnificent, for they swung their arms as they went and the music played lillibullero.

  The battle scene commenced. The screen darkened. Shots and screams were heard, and vivid cries of “Fire!” A lurid flickering light crossed the battlefield, where soldiers stood ready. Smoke was in the auditorium now—I heard Lemperer coughing and cursing. All at once the screen itself burst into flames, and the puppet operators were revealed behind, running madly from the flames. The whole tent was ablaze!

  “You see—realism carried too far!” Portinari said, gasping with laughter as we ran out. A pile of broadsheets stood by the exit and I grabbed one as we went by. Outside, all was pandemonium. The puppets were being flung unceremoniously into a cart, while the assistants threw buckets of water at the blaze and the manager screamed. The flames were spreading to some bowers with trellises where wisteria grew.

  “This will improve our attendance figures, I imagine,” Lemperer said, rubbing his hands. “What a blaze! It was madness to have flares inside a tent, as they did! Let’s just hope they don’t get it under control too quickly!”

  Ashes of burnt tent were falling like autumn leaves. One settled on La Singla’s shoulder, she screamed, and Lemperer beat at it with blows which would have extinguished Vesuvius, so that his poor wife fell away from him shrieking in pain. Turning to me, gesturing ferociously, he said, “What an end to worry if she too went up in flames, eh?”

  Portinari and I, and some of the others in the cast of The Visionaries, went to cool down in the nearest wine shop. In its darkest recess stood a keg of Bavarian beer, and of this the pair of us ordered two tankards. With mutual pledges, we lifted it foaming and amber and living to our lips.

  “What an old bastard Lemperer is!” said Portinari, wiping his mouth and sighing.

  “I wonder we work for him”

  “Yet he has his humorous points. I recall when I first applied to him, I asked if he had any hints for a young actor and he said, ‘Yes, one above all: keep the sunny side of forty.’“

  “Good advice—which I for one mean to follow.” I pulled out from my shirt the broadsheet I had picked up in the pleasure gardens and showed him the rhyme in black letters set at its foot:

  Our Shadow Figures, with their mimic strife,

  They are but to Amuse or chase your Care,

  And beg Indulgence from you Phantoms there,

  Within the greater Raree-show of Life.

  From Orient and Far Cathay come they.

  Even like you, Someone behind the Screen

  Controls their Acts—so think, when you have seen,

  Your Life like theirs is but a Shadow-Play!

  We roared with laughter over it. “It was this inflammatory stuff, and not the flares which set the tent alight,” I said.

  “I could do as well before you drain your tankard,” said Portinari.

  “You have little faith in my capacity for Bavarian beer!”

  I raised my tankard to my lips and commenced to drink, while my portly friend screwed his face into a ghastly enough grimace to make his Muse cower in submission. As I set the tankard down, he raised a hand, uttering a cry of triumph.

  “There’s no Free Will—or if so, ‘tis as rare

  As is Free Beer! Our puppets teach you this.

  But this analogy is neither here nor there . . .”

  “Yes, ‘For puppets have no Hearts to give the Fair.’“

  “No, no, wait—’Since Humans, unlike Puppets, Drink and Piss,’ It has to be an A,B,A,B, rhyme scheme!”

  “I concede victory, my fabulous fat friend, and will prove to you that free beer is not so scarce as you may think . . .”

  Eventually I made my way home for a siesta, going slowly by way of the coolest and most shadowed alleys. Much was on my mind besides the beer, for the shadow play had given me a splendid notion for our own comedy.

  So the surprise was not entirely as pleasant as it might have been when I turned in at my archway in the Street of the Woodcarvers. A female form slipped out of the shadows toward me, to reveal itself as La Singla. She was full of apprehension that she might have been followed and insisted on coming upstairs with me—not that I long resisted the idea, for her perturbation lent her added prettiness. How demurely and professionally she turned her bangled Iberian wrists in expressing that disquiet!

  Of course, she wished to find out from me what her husband had been saying before the fire started—wished so insistently that she pressed me against the door of my own bed chamber.

  “Ah, so you are involved in some deep affair, Mistress Lemperer! Else why should you be so anxious! You delightful creature, you have certainly come to a man who can take your mind off your troubles.”

  “Do not sport with me! Tell me what my husband said—you know as well as I that he cannot be trusted. Tell me, and I will give you a kiss and go.”

  “It’s a friendly opening offer. Firstly, you must tell me who your fortunate lover is, then I will help you.”

  She looked very unhappy. “That I cannot do, for I do not trust you entirely.”

  “So! Whom do you trust? Well, who could trust you?” But I began to feel sorry for her and eventually told her what her husband had said, confirming that I had not revealed her visit to the plump fortune-teller. She gave me my reward—and largesse beyond—and when I had seen her out, I fell on my bed and went at once to sleep.

  * * * *

  That evening I left the Street of the Woodcarvers rather later than usual. I had spent some while working on my idea, conceived in the ombres chinoises. My inspiration was this: that I should play Phalante as a soldier rather than as an apothecary, and we could then bring in some contemporary business referring obliquely to the bankrupt military state of Byzantium, which would naturally amuse a Duke of Ragusa.

  I rummaged in my chest and produced most of the uniform needed, even to a fine pair of soft cuffed boots. I equipped myself with a wooden sword in scabbard, which hung from a heavy scarf crossing over the coat from one shoulder, and a fine cravat dividing in two and falling near to my waist, in the fashion of Croatian mercenaries.

  Regarding me in my cheval glass was a gallant military figure! He saluted me. All he lacked for true effect was a plumed tricorne hat. What battlefield would not have been enhanced by his apparition on it? He was fully as colourful as any puppet—and I could work all his joints with greatest flexibility!

  I began to work them, marching my gallant soldier back and forth before the mirror. What a swagger he had! How alert and fierce he was, fit to cut down fifty Ottomans! How speedily and yet gracefully he drew his sword, tempered from best Toledo timber!

  There lay one of the pleasures of being a player. I could be who or what I would, merely by changing my outer clothes. An old man, a young man? Rich or poor? Soldier, judiciary, cut-purse, monk, apothecary, noble, beggar, miller . . . ? All trades, professions, ranks, and degrees were within me—wise man or fool, it needed only the appropriate dress for the appropriate character to be called forth, to take me over, to live my life for a brief hour. I had been such a necromancer that my every mouthful of food had been eaten by the correct star, such an elder statesman that my every limb had trembled and creaked for weeks after, such a jackanapes that all my friends shunned me while the piece was running! By no more than the trifling adjustment of my hat, I had plumbed the wells of folly or scaled the mountains of truth. I was that instrument, an actor, which could strike out all the chords of human feeling.

  Only one trifling disability attended this great gift: among the dazzling concourse within me, my own self was often lost to view.

  The next
morning I allowed the cockerels to rouse me earlier than usual. Today I would be a soldier, and go to Lemperer’s rehearsal as a soldier. In that fashion, I could persuade him more readily to my idea; he could resist a costume no more than I. It was a shame I would have to borrow a plumed hat from him. But would not La Singla love me a little more for seeing me in these wondrous feathers?

  While dressing, I gazed down at the street, which the bustle of the day had already wakened. Apprentices were coming and going, often with food and drink, laundry women were about, and the milk cart was rumbling along the street, pulled by an ox with silver bells on its horns. And I saw a soldier there, happening to catch his gaze as he glanced up at my window. He wore a plumed tricorne such as I coveted!