Glorious Ones Read online

  “Even in that crowd of ragged, pitiful orphans, your beautiful spirit shone through to me with an almost blinding light. It was a vision of sorts, Armanda, a vision which I have never forgotten. Over the years, it has given me hope, inspiration, and the courage to keep myself chaste. But it has also intimidated me, and kept me from declaring my perfect love.

  “Finally, last night, I could stand it no longer. Searching for that pure light, I forced myself on you with bestial rudeness. And now, I am wondering: how can I ever make you forgive me?”

  “There is no need to apologize,” I answered coldly. “You were not the first one. There is a shortage of women in this troupe.”

  By then, you see, all my pride was back. For I had not wanted you to say any of those things, Flaminio, I had no desire to hear your praises of my soul. I had wanted you to tell me that my face and body were ethereally lovely, painfully beautiful! But how could I have expected you to lie?

  And so I settled for something less, and made it suffice: I settled for your vision of my beautiful soul.

  Are you wondering why I believed you, when I had heard so many of your lies? I swear to you, Captain: it was not the heat of love which convinced me, but the cold argument of logic. For once, I had no cause for doubt: what else but the folly of passion could have brought you to the bed of a woman like me? And it was true that you had kept yourself chaste. If you had ever paid the slightest notice to the crazy women who pressed their bodies against you after the performances, Armanda Ragusa would have been the first to see. Had you loved another actress in our troupe, I would have killed her with my taunts, my vicious tongue, my only weapons: you know me, Flaminio.

  But, with no reason to doubt, I believed in your vision of my beautiful soul. It gave me back my pride, and helped me restrain myself from asking you why, after that one night, you never came to my bed again. Instead of tormenting you with my lovesickness, I took to staring at you, to watching your every move on stage, just as I had done that morning at the convent. And sometimes, sometimes Flaminio, I fancied that I could see your vision of my beautiful spirit, burning deep behind your eyes.

  Now listen to me, listen to the way I have told this tale: One summer night, a man named Flaminio Scala slept in the arms of the homeliest woman in Europe. Surely, the Captain would never have bothered to visit my dreams if this were the greatest glory of his life; surely, there were finer moments in his career. Of course there were! Flaminio Scala, the leader of The Glorious Ones, was a man of history! And it is for the sake of that history that I will stop this foolish woman’s dreaming, and begin again.

  But how, exactly, to begin? Shall I repeat the Captain’s own account of his early years?

  “My friends,” he told us one night, after a week of shoddy performances, “I started in life as a master criminal, a confidence man, a swindler. One day, languishing in prison, I searched my brain for some way of putting my natural dishonesty to some honest use, and walked out of jail an actor.”

  Yet why should Armanda Ragusa help spread these lies? Flaminio Scala was never a bandit—he was merely seeking some clever new way of insulting his troupe. I laughed, to show him that I understood the joke; in fact, I knew the joke was more absurd than even he would have admitted.

  Flaminio Scala could never have fooled me. I had not forgotten the fierce eyes of the young priests who sometimes came to help with convent business; and as soon as I saw those eyes in the Captain’s face, I knew that it had begun for him in the seminary.

  Still, I must confess some difficulty in seeing him there—Flaminio, with his boasts and his swagger. But perhaps that was the way with all the students who were troubled by what the theologians referred to as “doubts.”

  Doubts! Those priests could never speak the language. Flaminio and his friends had no doubts—they were fighting for their lives!

  Late at night, huddled in the damp cold cells, they were struggling to save that part of themselves which the priests wished so badly to destroy—that part of themselves which still loved the beauties of the earth. In the course of that battle, the acting began—the jokes, the songs, the dances, the innocent showing-off. Soon, it had become a craft for them, and, hour after hour, they labored to perfect the cruelty and precision with which they imitated their professors. At the start, they spoke in whispers, for fear of offending the others. Then, one night, they could no longer resist the temptation to speak out loud.

  The stage is set to resemble a school chapel. Alone in the confessional, a young priest shivers in the December chill, awaiting the midnight bells which will permit him to return to his cell.

  Flaminio Scala enters stage left, swaggering in a manner designed to show the audience that he is up to something; the encouragements of his friends are protecting him like a suit of armor. He kneels gracefully, presses his lips against the smooth wood of the confessional, and begins to speak:

  “Father,” he whispers, then stops, struggling to contain his laughter. “Father,” he continues, in a steadier tone, “I am begging your forgiveness, though I myself am not quite sure if I have sinned.”

  “Most likely you have,” replies the priest, recognizing the voice of his most rebellious student.

  “No,” Flaminio murmurs intensely. “It is not what you think. It is something much more serious, more perilous. Listen: over the past few months, I have been wrestling with the conviction that I myself am the Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, returned to usher in the Judgment.”

  “You are talking nonsense,” the priest answers nervously.

  “And so it was that you doubted me the first time!” Flaminio Scala cries, in a voice so majestic, commanding, and ominous that the altar, painted on the backdrop, begins to pitch and sway.

  The young confessor is trembling now. Has he heard the voice of God? “Tell me more,” he whispers, clutching the inside of the confessional door.

  Flaminio Scala tells him more. In a calm, authoritative tone, he speaks to him of life terrestrial and life divine. He laments his fifteen hundred years of exile, recalls all the agony of his passion. As he describes the unimaginable sweetness of his seat at God’s right hand, his words seem to swell and resound like the notes of an organ.

  Just before the curtain comes down on this scene, a few members of the audience notice that the priest has begun to weep.

  In a brief epilogue, set on the next morning, Flaminio and three accomplices are expelled for their sinful and blasphemous defiance of the First Commandment.

  Armanda Ragusa, I ask myself, what sort of lover are you, to take such delight in the image of your beloved and his friends scrambling for pennies, fishing breadcrumbs from the canals of Venice? What sort of woman are you, to have such contempt for those four spoiled children, so unwilling to dirty their hands with honest labor? And yet, I am not so unlike them that I cannot understand: they had just escaped from prison! They wanted to be free!

  And so Flaminio and his companions came to devise the perfect plan. They would support themselves with the same spoiled foolishness which had so amused them in the seminary—they would be actors! Unburdened by rehearsals, repetition, scripts, their wit would be the freshest thing in Venice! They needed no leaders, no direction, no prearranged dialogue—they would improvise! The plazas of the city would be their stage, their audience—the people of the street! How could they possibly fail!

  What sort of woman am I, to imagine the enthusiasm in their voices, and feel such bitterness?

  Yet perhaps my sin is only the simple, understandable envy of easy success. For, as it happened, Flaminio and his friends proved absolutely right. In no time, they were drawing huge crowds, swarms of urchins, messenger boys on errands, cooks on their way to market, merchants’ sons walking home from school. Young men told their mistresses, children brought their friends; distant acquaintances stopped each other on the street to describe Flaminio’s antics. The people of Venice were desperate for entertainment, and the actors’ caps grew heavy with coins.

  Sometim
es, I wonder why Flaminio never spoke of those days with fondness and nostalgia. Surely, it was the only time in his career when he was not alone on top, alone with the worries of a leader. Surely, he was happier then, when there was no Andreini to plague him with vicious tricks.

  But all he ever told us was the story of his friends’ destruction, that gruesome tale which he repeated again and again, like a litany, a sermon against the sins of recklessness and disloyalty.

  “One March evening,” the Captain used to say, “myself and three companions were invited to perform before the Doge of Venice. In retrospect, I see that it was the end of the social season, and the Duke had invited a few stray guests whom he deemed unworthy of anything more than some local amateur talent. But then, I was not yet a man of deep wisdom and wide experience, fully conversant with the subtle machinations of the aristocratic mind; then, I was merely a poor, ambitious boy, who mistook the doors of that gilded hall for the very portals of Paradise.

  “With characteristic good sense, I suggested that I play the Crafty Venetian, and that my friends enact the Three Roman Thieves. The courtiers were cool at first, but, gradually, as it became apparent that I would consistently trick and frustrate that absurd trio of scoundrels, the Duke began to bellow with laughter and beat his fat fists on the table.

  “ ‘One Venetian outwitting three Romans! What patriotism! What wit!’ What could have pleased His Excellence more! We were a brilliant success—so brilliant, in fact, that, at the end of the play, the Duke offered to reward the author of our comedy with a hundred pounds of gold!

  “Watching the nobleman’s wet, snarling lips, I realized that he was a dangerous man; I cautioned my friends to be careful. But, heady with triumph, still caught up in their mischievous roles, they ran down from the stage and danced before the courtiers’ table.

  “ ‘I am the author,’ said my friend Salvatore, reaching forward to tweak the Duke’s beard.

  “ ‘No, I am the author!’ insisted Giovanni, poking the nobleman in the ribs.

  “ ‘I am! I am!’ cried Claudio, screwing up his face and feigning a childish tantrum.

  “ ‘Take these idiots and break their necks!’ screamed the Doge of Venice, crashing his gigantic forearm against the plates and goblets. ‘I will not have my dignity insulted this way!’

  “I stood back, my feet rooted to the stage. Had I not been a fellow of such boundless courage, my heart would have stopped. Gradually, I realized that the Duke had not included me among the condemned. But, at the same time, I understood that there was nothing I could do to help my friends.

  “The next morning, I watched them hanged in the courtyard, as a lesson for seditious actors. Clustered on the balconies, the Duke’s guests watched, grinning uneasily, trying to understand if it was all still part of the previous evening’s entertainment.”

  That is how you always ended the story, Flaminio, with that same description of the guests. “But what then?” I wanted to ask you. “What happened next? What happened when you left the palace?”

  And this is what I think: I think you left the Doge’s hall a determined man, Captain, the leader of a troupe, an adult with no more patience for the wildness of half-grown boys. Already, you had decided to gather together a group of actors who could perform perfectly under your direction, who could improvise faultlessly, who could fill the stage with complete, complex figures from life, unlike the mean, flat caricatures which had once delighted you and your friends from the seminary.

  Naturally, it took some time to assemble such a group. You stole actors from other companies, interviewed shopgirls and magicians, recruited beggars from the gutters. But still, you were extremely selective about the men and women you chose for the permanent troupe, and all that picking and discarding took many, many years. By the time you saved me from the convent, many of you had been together a decade; and that was long before we had even seen Isabella Andreini!

  But gradually, as I came to realize the exceedingly strange way in which you had chosen us, I wondered that it had not taken you forever.

  You had typecast us perfectly, Captain. On the day I finally understood, I laughed out loud. It seemed absurd, impossible, and yet you had done it. You had found a group of actors so similar to the roles they played on stage that improvisation was effortless—they simply played themselves. And if, for the purposes of comedy, they agreed to exaggerate some aspect of their nature into a monstrous grotesque? The audience perceived the terrible self-doubt beneath Dottore’s pompous display, and came away from your plays with a sense of having seen to the core of life.

  Of course, you made your mistakes. We all know how Francesco fooled you again and again; who can say what tricks Isabella played? And how could you have known how many of us would come to resent you for refusing to acknowledge those private aspects of our souls, which we did not parade on stage? Yet, like all of your schemes, this one worked admirably: The Glorious Ones were a magnificent success.

  But once in a while, Flaminio, I am tempted to think that your plan for The Glorious Ones worked no better than your decision to entertain the Doge. I wonder if you did not introduce a poison into our blood, which has only begun to strangle our hearts. And, most of all, I ask myself whether that old scheme of yours will not prevent me from fulfilling your last wish, from compiling the true, factual history which you so desire.

  For how can I begin to tell the truth, Flaminio, when the truth is that I myself was never quite sure just when we were acting?

  II Brighella

  THAT CRAZY DWARF IS petrified of dying, that coward. That’s why she’s always on my back, nagging me, breathing her nauseating stench down my neck.

  “Brighella! Remember this? Remember that? Write it, write it, put it down in black and white.”

  “Go stick it up your ass,” I tell her. “You’re just out to keep your name alive after the worms start crawling through your rotten bones!”

  “No,” she says, with that proud, silly smile which makes me want to smack her. “It has nothing to do with me. Flaminio’s ghost commanded it, in a dream.”

  “Fat chance,” I say. “What self-respecting ghost would waste its time in the bedroom of a greasy toad like you? No, my dear, I know a coward when I see one. Remember how you were that night we slept together, always peeking out of the corner of your eye, terrified I’d roll you off the bed and crack your skull?”

  “So you’re the expert on cowards, Brighella?” she spits at me, her voice crackling with hatred.

  “Indeed I am,” I nod. “God knows, I’ve had plenty of practice. This whole troupe’s as yellow as a cesspool, every one of those pissants but me and Isabella Andreini. And lately, watching her make moon-eyes at that big cow Pietro, I’ve even had my doubts about her. But there is no doubt in my mind that you are the most spineless of all, my slimy little jellyfish.”

  “You’re the coward!” cries Armanda Ragusa, provoked to the edge of tears.

  “Armanda,” I say, “that remark is so witless—even for you—that I’m quite satisfied of having won our discussion.”

  Ladies and gentlemen of the future. I know what’s running through your dim little brains. “Of course,” you’re thinking, “that Brighella had good reason to be so cocky. He was the one all the artists painted, he knew his immortality was secure. He knew that history would remember his nasty face, his wicked grin, his cold, vicious eyes. He knew everyone would see his short, skinny body, hunched up, crouched, ready to dart about like the gadfly he was.

  Ah, my unborn audiences, you’re no geniuses. Those fourth-rate scribblings have nothing to do with my fearlessness, nothing whatsoever! What kind of idiot do you think I am? What good would eternal fame do me if I were frying in the fires of hell?

  No, my dull-witted friends, the reason I’m so brave is this: I know I’ll never go to hell. I know my soul will never die. Because I, Brighella, the Gadfly, I alone have been absolutely promised eternal life!

  You’re wondering where I get the nerve to make
such claims? I will tell you. I’ve had a vision, a real vision of holy salvation. Now, you want to know what it is. I’ve got your curiosity aroused. Your tongues are hanging out, you’re covering yourselves with drool.

  All right then. Since you’re so eager, I’ll tell it specially, just for you. But it’s a long story, my friends—deeper and more complicated than anything your mean little spirits could comprehend. So I’ll spare you the details, and make it short.

  I was born into a family of petty crooks—gangsters, swindlers, whores, pimps, thieves. At the age of eighteen, I was caught with my hand in another man’s pocket, and sentenced to be hanged from the gallows.

  They marched me up to the scaffolding. They placed the noose around my neck, some idiot priest mumbled the prayers, the floor dropped out from under me.

  And then, just at the right moment, the rope snapped. “What a pleasant surprise,” I thought, as I tumbled gracefully through the air.

  But suddenly, in those few brief moments before I landed nimbly on my feet, I heard the voice of God.

  “The accused,” said the Lord, “has been sentenced to Eternal Life!”

  Of course I knew it was God. His tone was so shrill, so earsplitting, I had no doubt. My heart beat fast, relief washed through me, the air was singing in my ears.

  Nevertheless, I managed to stand up straight and brush myself off; then, I bowed, and left the jail, a free man.

  Since then, ladies and gentlemen, Brighella the Gadfly has never felt a moment’s fear. I wasn’t even ruffled that night I first met Flaminio Scala, that night I first stung him, in the tavern.

  It had been years since my brush with death. I was back to my old ways, my old tricks. I spent my evenings in the cafés, picking fights with wealthy-looking drunks, and challenging them to step outside for a duel. Then my friends, who were hiding in a nearby alley, would jump out, steal the drunk’s money, and run off.