There was a time when I wanted people to like me, but now I want to like people, once I believed them capable of what they espoused, I suppose I wanted to believe them, now I like them if I do, despite what they espouse, and, as I look around me, I marvel at the characters here, yet still long to he in my room, lying on my bed, drawing a chair, reading or musing, listening to the radio, or taking apart a tape recorder, scattering its tiny innards in the air and seeing where they fall, as if they might be an omen, but it's probably good to be with people, not to avoid them, which I mostly want to do, because I'm not sure what they hold in store, yet when the Count recounts how, in the 4th century AD, it was Clement, Ignatius, and Tertullian who determined the twelve books of the New Testament, after years of dispute, or Spike expands on her riotous, ingenue's repertoire, or the Turkish poet sighs about sex and life's recondite treacheries, I am also at home. I can believe that I am supposed to be here, a curious feeling, one that has been growing in me, maybe since I've been here, that it's right that I'm here, or I'm right to be here, that I shouldn't be anywhere else, a sense I don't often have, though I am usually aware of being in or being a body, because I'm encased in dry, sensitive skin, and during the winter, especially, it cracks and bleeds, but anytime a detergent touches my hands, my skin will immediately react to its poisons and for many days afterward the affected fingers, usually the middle and index fingers and thumb, will be inflamed, the skin flaky and tough, tearing and bleeding, and very painful until it heals in the requisite four days. The disconsolate woman with psoriasis opines that her problem is solely environmental, a word I abjure, though my dermatologist told me that most doctors think psoriasis and many other skin diseases have a genetic and psychic origin, because their outbreaks can be triggered by trauma, for instance, shingles, or the chicken pox virus, or herpes complex might live but lie dormant in the spine for many years and break out when a person is under extreme duress. The disconsolate woman has her ups and downs, mood swings, which are marked by patches and flares of red and lakes of pus on her arms and hands, and the world is increasingly poisonous, or toxic, as she'd say, but psoriasis has been around longer than laundry detergents and emissions that have destroyed the ozone layer, though its cause is still unknown. Hippocrates described the disease in the 4th century BC, but it wasn't named until much later. Heredity appears to be significant, and it appears equally in both sexes, but it's uncommon in black people, and I've read that the American Indian and native Fijians don't have psoriasis, and, I guess, must, with assimilation, change, unless they have resistant genes, and then they should be studied. I know my body is in a place, either when it hurts or has pleasure, otherwise I may forget it. The other disconsolate woman, who has asthma, hates her body or hates bodies, a common phenomenon here and in the place I call home. The word for body in Zulu is um-zimba, and if some Zulus hate their bodies, their reasons may be different from those of us in America, where women were historically free to choose their husbands and damned for it, and for whom men, whatever a woman's sexual desire, are an important subject.
On each chair in the Rotunda Room, Contesa has provided a typescript of her one-acter or spectacle, I have it in my hands when she announces that the performance will soon start, explains that she has never done this, that her way is not necessarily ours, though she hopes it will entertain and enlighten us, and she rebukes only herself for what disagrees with us. "You may not like my cuisine," she says pointedly. The head cook may be here, and I watch Contesa's mouth, it sets decisively. The Rotunda Room, which dates from 1838, is painted rustic gold, or sienna, features a high-domed ceiling, and oval windows that are inset around its perimeter, there's some echo in the wood and plaster room, but its black wooden chairs have sensibly curved backs, so that, like a chair by the Eameses, they respond to the lower back, providing lumbar support. Their flat, svelte cushions are covered in thick, tufted dark-green velvet, a gift, no doubt, of the Green Lady, who is known to appreciate theater. The seats are comfortable. During the late 1860s, after the Civil War, a local history book records, seances and sessions of spirit photography occurred in this room, and back then William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley, both abolitionists, attended seances, as did William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper, and some might have been in the Rotunda Room. Spirit photography's early practitioners were often women, who were usually mediums and who manufactured miracles in which dead people shimmered as palimpsests pressed onto glossy surfaces, chemical ghosts invaded the present, all of which people want, against reason, and probably Contesa elected this space for its redolent, spiritladen past with which she may feel connected or in which she feels she can better contact the numinous world.
The room is full, its thirty chairs with our bodies on them absorb oxygen and noise, and also we make sounds, I hear inharmonious wheezing, coughing, and some shortness of breath. Contesa leaves the podium, the lights dim, and, to my shock, from the wings, the odd inquisitive woman wanders onstage, looking about in all directions as if lost, replacing Contesa behind the podium. The odd inquisitive woman holds herself erect in her tatty skirt, a black pullover sweater, while her unruly hair is tucked under a brown suede beret. She would see me soon enough, she said to me in town, I remember that now. She stares at the audience and projects a strength and purpose that is impressive; there is something almost magnificent about her bearing. I cast my eyes quickly over the cover sheet of the typescript: Four Players-The Narrator, Franz Kafka, Felice Bauer, Max Brod-written by Violet.