“Pallio,” said the speaker loudly. It was a prompter, calling for me. I returned to the prop room, reluctant to take to the stage again. I could no longer remember what attraction I had ever had to it.
Bloomsrnan herself waved at me: I was on. I stepped out upon a dark stage. There was just enough grainy, purple light leaking down to enable me to perceive the silhouettes of three men, pulling something from beneath the bed. Something about the scene—the lithe, long-limbed black figures, crouching—lacked all familiarity—jamais vu swept over me like nausea. I no longer understood what I saw. The dark room was a dimensionless field, and the black figures were nameless objects, ominous because they moved. Meaningless sounds rang in my ears.
I came to and found myself confronted by Ferrando and Ursini, on a brightly lit apron. Their blades were out and pointed at my throat. My first thought was that I’d left my épée in my costume bag, and was defenseless; then synapses fired, for what reason I knew not, and my lines came to me. I was safe from them.
They accused me of Sanguinetto’s murder, and in a rather weak imitation of the ingenuous public Pallio I informed them that Velasquo had been the last person seen with their late master. With trembling voice I quickly shifted their suspicions to Velasquo, feeling thankful that it made sense to play Pallio as a distracted man. I left the stage, and then had to watch while Velasquo surprised them and knifed them both in the back. He did it with a verve and accuracy that left me chilled; surely their improvised blocking couldn’t be so well-done: had he begun already? But in the darkness between scenes Ferrando and Ursini brushed by me, muttering and giggling together. I shook my head in hopes of clearing it, inhaled sharply, and moved back onstage.
Again the light was deep crevasse-blue Caropia was already there: we embraced. This was to be one of our last scenes together, I knew. Surely everyone knew. I moved to the apron and saw below me, in the front row, Ferrando, Ursini, Elazar, Carmen, Leontia, and Sanguinetto. It was the custom for actors whose work was done to join the audience, but it made me uncomfortable. Given the traditions of the genre it always seemed to me that they were still in the play as ghosts, who might speak at any time. I resisted the impulse to move to the other side of the apron.
My attention shifted back to Caropia. In her slim face the pebble-grey eyes were large, and filled with pain. I had so many disparate images of her to link… and yet, within the play and without, I knew nothing real about her. Our backstage silence augmented the Jacobean notion that the other sex was unknowable, a different species, an alien intelligence. Still, watching her bowed head, her slender arms moving nervously, I felt Paulo’s emotions as my own, and I wanted to break into the play and experience that incestuous closeness. I spoke, infusing my lines with all these illusory feelings, to the invisible actress inside her, the one who made them both a mystery. I spoke tenderly of our love, and lamented our situation: “We are so far in blood…” “‘Tis payment,” Caropia cried, and railed against the sequence of unchangeable events she found herself trapped in. Bitterly she blamed our incest: “Our sin of lust has webbed these plots around us, so I’ve dreamt—” I interrupted:
She spoke of the church and we argued religion. Finally I interrupted again:
And Caropia, thinking no doubt of her pact with the Cardinal, replied:
I smiled, a tremendous effort, and continued:
I turned from her and the tone of reassurance left me. I voiced my real concern:
Velasquo entered, several lines too early. Unable to finish in his presence, I moved to the other side of the apron and returned his baleful glare. Below me Sanguinetto was smiling.
There was silence. It was the first time the three of us had been onstage by ourselves, and the triangle we formed was the focus of all the tension we had managed to create. Beneath our polite exchange (Velaquo was inquiring if Caropia would accompany him to the masque) were layers: the reality of the play, the reality of the players… Velasquo’s crafted jests probed at me with an intensity I alone could understand, although all that he did made perfect sense in the context of the play; indeed it must have appeared that he was doing a superb job. Only small stresses in his intonation revealed the danger, like swirls in a river, indicating swift undercurrents. I replied with a brittle hostility that had little acting in it, and we snapped at each other like the two poles of a Jacob’s ladder:
Pallio:
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Pallio:
The audience’s silence was a measure of their absorption. Despite my earlier revulsion, and the blank nausea of the jamais vu, I felt growing within me, insidiously, the pleasure of acting, the chill tingling one feels when a scene is going very well.
This pleasure in the scene’s success was soon overwhelmed by the fear which was making it succeed; Velasquo’s thinly veiled attack was strengthening. His pale eyes glared at me intently, looking for some involuntary movement or expression that would show me to be the one who had recognized him. I struggled to keep only Pallio’s wariness on my face, but it was a delicate distinction, one becoming more and more difficult to make… I exited to the sound of his high laughter.
Once off, I hurried around toward the dressing room. Caropia’s was the only voice emerging from the wall-speakers in the narrow corridor, and footsteps were padding behind me. I almost ran, remembering the early death in Hamlet. But it was only the Cardinal, completing errands of his own.
The dressing room was momentarily empty. I took my épée from my costume bag and once again locked myself in a lavatory stall. The steel of the blade gleamed as I pulled away the leather scabbard.
It was an old épée, once used in competitive electric fencing. I had polished the half-sphere bell and removed the plug socket from inside it to convert it to a theater sword. The wire running down a slot in the blade was still there, as was the tip, a small spring-loaded cylinder. The blade was stiff, and curved down slightly. At the bell it was triangular in cross-section, a short, wide-based triangle, with the base uppermost. It narrowed to a short cylindrical section at the end, which screwed into the tip.