The chubby Chen had an MA from the University of Nez Noir. Her field was the classics — Plato, Horace, Seneca — but she also made me understand the principles of algebra. She was both clever and impatient, and — having had a convent education herself — not above striking me on the knuckles with a wooden ruler.
It was in response to one of these attacks that I bit her on the thumb, and this, in turn, got me into big trouble with my maman, who began, that night, to shout and scream at me in such a frightening way.
Was she shouting at me about the bite? No, she was not.
Madame, Meneer, she was shouting at me about the bandage on her actor’s thumb.
Chen was meant to teach me in the morning and be available for rehearsal in the afternoon, but when she had returned from the Emergency Room that afternoon, she would not act before she knew — why did her character (Clytemnestra) have a bandage? What should Clytemnestra’s attitude towards the bandage be?
Chen was an anxious actor at the best of times, with a negative intelligence that could readily destabilize a cast. Now she wished to know — should her bandage affect Orestes’ attitude towards her character? Should the bandage be so white and bright when all the costumes were so bloodied and brown? Should she paint her bandage red? Could she perhaps apply other bandages to other parts of her body, and so on?
The production was frail and complicated anyway, very ‘techy’, and the actors had still not found their characters and were trying to fix their problems by rewriting their own lines. Also, the problem with Chen and her bandage arrived in a period when my maman was in crisis with her taxes, her loans, her repayments, her applications to the funding bodies, her medical insurance claims. It was, in addition, the end of the wet season, which meant she was trying, once again, to raise funds for The Sad Sack Sirkus.
My maman came back from rehearsal and asked me, calmly, why I bit my teacher.
Instead of saying that Chen had hit me with the wooden ruler, I said that I did not like her and I would not have her for a teacher any more.
My maman said there was no other teacher she could afford.
I said I did not need a teacher. I said I would be an actor instead.
My maman then turned nuts. She screamed at me in a way I had never seen her scream before. She tore her hair. While I shivered and snivelled in the corner she told me I was beyond her, that she was a working actress and I was a child with Special Needs.
I said I was sorry, but she was lost, beyond herself. She said that she was going to find a Special School for me.
I said Wally would never let her.
That sent her totally crazy, ripping corks out of bottles and drinking wine like water. She said Wally was an emotional cripple. She said she would fire him if he said a word about it. She wept and said she was going to die. I went to sleep behind her great wall of shuddering back.
She frightened me, I’ll admit. Damaged me, even. And yet this truly dreadful night, which gave birth to the fearful notion of ‘Special Needs’, also produced the following message from my father which came into my life like a golden ray from God on High.
‘My advice to you, liebling,’ Bill wrote to my maman in a postcard that arrived two weeks later, ‘is to relax — excuse him his lessons. All the education anyone could need is available just through the work you do. Let him watch Orestes instead. Also: we have a Sad Sack Sirkus coming up, Let him play a PART,’ my dab wrote on the back of the card, which my mother straight away locked in the third drawer from the bottom. ‘Obviously I am not suggesting he top the bill but why not give him a CHARACTER? I myself am rather taken by the idea of The Hairy Man.*Give him the exercise — develop character’s ACTIONS for himself.’
When my mother finally decided to read this to me, I grunted and said that that would be OK, but I was so excited that I developed diarrhoea.
*
A Voorstandish character often used in the Feu Follet to represent Voorstand as a whole. It seems likely that the character has its roots in the animistic culture of the Native People of Voorstand — the famous ‘Suit of Goose-feathers’ in the Saarlim Museum bears a striking resemblance to early artists’ representations of The Hairy Man. It is only after two centuries of Christian settlement that we find The Hairy Man used as a synonym for Moloch or Satan. Even the church-sponsored Badberg Edition of The
Tales of Bruder Mouse
suggests an identity more like a ‘Bogey-man’ than the devil. These two identities, folk character and Christian demon, co-exist to the present day.
20
I had become a furtive, even sneaky child, one given to wild and dangerously unrealistic dreams. I devoured histories and fictions, personally identifying not only with revolutionaries but with figures like Napoleon whom I was expected to despise. I wrote: ‘J’y suis une grande Destinée’, on a cigarette paper and watched in silent satisfaction while Wally ignited and inhaled my words.
At ten years old I believed books would be written about me.
And although I said, and will say again, that I was not aware of my monstrosity, the opposite was also true: I knew exactly why I could not be an actor, and I was equally determined to become one. I also knew that if my maman saw how excited I was she would become fearful for me and send me back to Chen.
That is why, when she offered me my part in the Sirkus, I affected a passive, pathetic, half-defeated attitude, and when the actors were called the following day, I did not push myself forward amongst them. Instead I sat in the dark and watched them argue about Orestes. When I finally came into the light, it was to complain about boredom. I sat on my mother’s lap and whined and fidgeted, until finally she gave me what I had wanted all the time — a rehearsal room in one of the old stables.
There, with no one watching me, I was an egotist in the great theatrical tradition. I declaimed. I leapt into the air and landed. I scrabbled around the dirty brick floor roaring like a lion. I did my own version of ‘warm-ups’ and ‘breathing exercises’ until my clothes were covered with mud and straw and my knees were cut and bleeding.
Stanislavksy says that in order to build favourable conditions for creativeness, an actor’s organism must be prepared. The Master of the System would have clucked his lordly tongue not merely about my face and body, but also my voice — the failure of fusion in my mid-line structures meant that I would always, all my life, have trouble enunciating my words so a stranger could understand me.
To hell with that. I would make my Hairy Man a mute, something scary that jumps at you from the dark. I would base him on a spider.
This was not original, of course. I had watched my father building a character.* He would say: This character is a crab, or that character is a mole. And he would cut himself some sandwiches and go off to the zoo or the aquarium to study.