I therefore crawled around the stables, clawing at loose bricks with my broken nails, trying to find a spider so I might study it. The spiders I caught were not easy models for my instrument to follow. Their legs were fine and supple, mine were twisted, and my feet — although I hate to use the term — were clubbed. When I walked, my ankle had to do the job normally done by the sole of the foot. I had developed thick calluses all over my ankles, but to walk this way for ten minutes put strain on the knees and the hips that could cause me pain for weeks. In short, I could not do a character that walked.
My biceps were not large, but the pale blue-ish skin covered healthy muscle and I knew that muscle could be made to grow. My Hairy Man could climb and drop free-falling out of the dark sky.
There was a rusty steel ladder fixed to the courtyard wall outside my stables, and by the time the company was hammering and sawing at the new set for Orestes, I had taught myself to climb, to hang upside down for fifteen minutes. As a student I was known for my squirming and impatience, but as an actor I had that quality by which great men are often marked: their ability to endure tedium in pursuit of their obsession. By the time my absent father returned to Chemin Rouge I had calluses behind my knees, across my palms. But I could hang upside down for half an hour.
Without revealing my reason, I had found out exactly what time Bill’s flight would land. I knew when his taxi should arrive. The company, which imagined me an amiable sort of pet, would have been surprised at my deviousness. But when, at six o’clock that night, my father finally entered the theatre, he saw the Hairy Man, spotlit precisely, hanging from the ladder on the back wall of the theatre, right up near the lighting rig.
I saw Bill Millefleur, upside down, loose and handsome in his grey silk suit. He looked up at me, light reflected from his skin, his suit, his hair.
‘Hairy Man?’ he called. ‘Am I right?’
My limbs were crying out with pain, but my heart, as your great poet says, ‘was all over the heavens’.
‘He’s a spider, right?’ Bill called. ‘Your Hairy Man’s a spider?’
Beneath my blood-filled head I heard my father walk softly across the cobbled floor. He climbed up the rusty old ladder to where I hung — closer, closer — he smelt of fame, of foreign spices and dry-cleaning.
‘I’m very proud of you,’ he said, and caught me just in time. He lifted me off the rung. He held me to him, thirty feet above the floor, not worrying about the snot streaming from my nose.
‘Just be careful, OK?’
‘Thanks … Dab,’ I said.
My words were not clear and he did not understand me, but I did not care.
‘Floor-work,’ he said when he had got me to the ground. ‘I’d work on that.’ Then he ruffled my hair and went to find my maman.
There were now ten days before the tour began. Sparrow, Bill and my mother were busy rehearsing with the horses. Wally was flushing and pressure-testing the radiator on the Haflinger, assembling his mammoth tool kit — vice-lock, brake-adjusting tool, centre punch, hacksaw, heavy hammer, side-cutters. Once I would have been by his side, under his legs while he fitted tubes inside the tubeless socks, collected brass rivets, clips, blades, rubber rings, corks, bits of wire. But all these activities which had once so interested me now seemed mundane, and I abandoned Wally for my more glamorous father.
I have no excuse. I knew it hurt Wally. I saw the pain when I ate my lunch sitting in Bill Millefleur’s lap.
In the last week they brought the new horses into the Feu Follet and began to run the show. Without giving away the more spectacular part of my performance, I made my character visible. I hung upside down from the ladder where Bill could see me. And in the middle of the animal and human chaos which now filled the whole theatre, and spilled out amongst the taxis in Gazette Street, he would say, ‘Good work’, or, ‘That’s coming along.’
Having been so often and so publicly blessed, I was furious to be informed that the collective had decided not to let me perform the spider action.
Typically it was not Bill who broke this news to me, but tall, cadaverous Sparrow Glashan. He was widely known to be a decent man. It was what everybody said about him, and yet he took my action from me casually, not even noticing what it was he did.
‘But … Bill … told … me.’
‘Bill told you?’
‘It’s … much … better … than … he … saw … I … fall … from … heaven.’
Sparrow smiled and patted me.
‘Fuck … you …’
‘What?’
‘FUCK … YOU …’
Maybe he understood me. He pretended not. He said that it was only in Saarlim that they risked an actor’s life for entertainment. He said that was why it was better to be an Efican.
As for my father, I could not believe what he had done to me. I watched him, smiling, joking with the other actors.
*
Although I had heard the other actors mock this process behind his back, I knew without being told that it was not to do with the process, but his fame in the Sirkus. Sirkus stars, it was commonly thought, could no more act than singers in an opera. They said their inane lines, but it was not acting as we did it at the Feu Follet. You, of course, will know that this opinion is born of jealousy and, further, that the assessment of Sirkus acting is ignorant and ill-informed. It is true that the standard of ‘acting’ in certain of the high-risk Saarlim Sirkuses is not high, but this is the exception, not the rule. As a Voorstander you will quickly see the inability of these provincial actors to ‘read’ a tradition of performance which is closer to Kabuki than their own.
[TS]
21
Eight weeks later, three hundred miles from Chemin Rouge, Bill came around the corner of Shark Harbour Parish Community Hall, and saw THE HAIRY MAN — already five feet off the ground.
At first he did not know it was the Hairy Man. All he saw was me, snotty, white-eyed Tristan, doing something dumb and dangerous. He started hollering my name.
This drew Wally out from under the half-erected tent, his head thrust forward like a turtle. He was followed by my maman, crawling on her knees, carrying a mug of coffee.
‘What is it?’ she called to Bill. ‘Are you OK?’
Wally tried to grab me by the leg, but I was the Hairy Man, and he was only human. I pulled away from him. He tried to follow, and you would think he was made to fit a tree — his legs were Louis Quinze, and his biceps prominent — but he scratched and scrabbled and could not hold.
‘No, wait,’ Bill said to Wally. I heard this. I heard it clearly. ‘Wait, I know what he is doing.’
Whatever joy this understanding unlocked in my heart, it produced the opposite effect in Wally’s. He had been polite to Bill until this moment, but now all the passions he had bottled up came rushing out, and he was so mad — at Bill, at me, my mother — he picked up pine cones and hurled them up the tree. ‘You’re never here,’ he said to Bill. ‘Don’t play the father now.’
A pine cone hit my ear.
‘Come down, you little prick.’
‘Wally,’ my maman said. ‘That’s enough.’
By then the Hairy Man was already fifteen feet above their heads. I dragged my running nose upwards, past lines of ants. I pressed my cheek hard against the corrugated bark as if skin alone might keep me stuck there, and watched, from an inch away, the ants congregate around the snot-smeared bark.
I now waited for my maman to understand my action. Not a word came up to me. Her silence went on and on, pushed me up and up. When I finally looked down, I was perhaps forty feet from the earth.