“So that’s why the role of the Inamorata had to change. She could no longer toss on her bed, crying for her man. So he had to begin crying for her.
“But I wasn’t as smart as I thought, Pantalone. If I’d been a little more experienced, I’d have known that it would end the way it did. I’d have known that creep Flaminio would fall madly in love with me, that he’d lose his mind and keep pestering me to this very day!”
I myself knew the rest of Vittoria’s story. It had been like that ever since I joined the troupe. The Captain was making a fool of himself over Vittoria. It was high comedy. Everyone laughed about it—except, of course, for that poor dwarf, who had such a crush on him that she shut her eyes to the whole thing.
Sometimes, I think it was that madness for Vittoria which first lowered Flaminio’s station in the eyes of the others. To tell the truth, I pitied him. I had sympathy for his dreams of glory, of wild love; I had a few of them myself. And I pitied him for being so obsessed with that worthless Vittoria. She had a good heart, I suppose, but she was so coarse, so graceless, so common-looking—I couldn’t understand how any sensible man could worship her so passionately.
But no one could ever accuse Flaminio Scala of being a sensible man. He stubbornly insisted on playing the role of the Lover, as well as that of the Captain. Knowing what we knew, it was embarrassing to watch him perform. He grovelled on his knees, licked the dust off Vittoria’s shoes, tried to put his hands all over her.
“Perhaps you underestimate me now,” he’d sigh on stage. “But someday, when I am immortal, when I am enthroned with the gods in heaven, and all the nightingales on earth have learned to sing my name, then you will know what I was, then you will know what kind of man loved you!”
“When you are immortal,” the Inamorata would giggle, “I’ll be rotting in my grave.”
But of course, it was Flaminio who wrote the plays; despite Vittoria’s protests, the dramas ended the way he wanted. The hero was so noble that he had to win the girl. Nothing else seemed possible. The scenarios always ended with the two of them embracing, center stage.
The audiences loved it. Flaminio and Vittoria were a terrific success; their popularity filled my treasury. It was Amante and the Inamorata who got us invited to France.
But, after that miserable journey, after that incident in the cave and that disgrace at court, the roles of the Lover and his mistress began to change again.
It was obvious, I suppose. But, for a long time, no one noticed. They’d all been under Flaminio’s spell since that dramatic repentance scene. Even I—Pantalone, the observer—even I failed to see how craftily Andreini was working. No one even suspected until that famous show at Perugia, when he pulled the rabbit out of his cap, for everyone to see.
He was always a sneaky one, Andreini. He calls himself a realist. But I call him a schemer, a conniver. If I was really the miser they say, you’d think I’d like Francesco; now that he and Isabella are in charge, I need two boys to help me with the cashboxes. But I could never trust a man who has everything plotted out in advance, who knows every move, every turn. His brain is like a chessboard. There are lumps of ice in his heart. He moves slowly, sinuously, like a snake.
Of course, Andreini’s changed since Isabella’s started leading him down a few tricky paths of her own. But in those days, Francesco was a master. His scheme was so clever, so well executed, so perfectly obvious! On that night at Perugia, when we finally saw it, we were filled with admiration.
Who would have suspected? In the beginning, Andreini had been taken into the troupe to play Arlechino—the trickster, the clown, the half-wild cat, the cold eye. But, for the most part, he’d been hired for his acrobatics, his body.
According to Vittoria, he’d come up from the audience one day and astounded the entire company with an amazing display of gymnastics—somersaults, leaps, and contortions which he claimed to have learned among the Chinese and Turks.
Right then, Flaminio knew he’d discovered a gold mine. Usually, the acrobats were small, wiry fellows like Brighella. Flaminio realized that the crowds had never seen anything like Francesco before. When they saw his long-limbed body cartwheeling across the stage, they’d think they were watching some exotic, wild animal.
So for a long time, we thought of him as the athlete. Years passed before that sneaky Andreini let us know that he also spoke five languages, mimed like an angel, wrote like a professional. But, in those days, he and Flaminio were so close that the Captain seemed genuinely pleased to discover his friend’s accomplishments. So he let Andreini play a bigger and bigger part.
And Francesco made a good Arlechino—somersaulting in the window, slinking around the edges of the stage, popping up from nowhere in the middle of the Lovers’ most intimate dialogues. Dressed in that black and white patched suit, he shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, holding long conversations with himself. He mocked the Lovers’ passion, parodied their endearments, jeered at their troubles. He was always dragging the Inamorata off to stage right, to tell her she was wasting her time on a silly fool like Amante; then, he’d do the same to Flaminio, at stage left. He made the audiences laugh, but all his insults and nasty pranks only made them love the Lovers more.
And then, on that night in Perugia, everything changed.
It was a hot, damp August evening. The plaza was crowded with townspeople and university students. That night, the moment Arlechino jumped on stage, I knew that there was something peculiar about his style. A moment later, I realized what it was.
There was a double edge to his performance. Andreini was acting so brilliantly, he was managing to convey an odd sense about Arlechino. Suddenly, it was the clown who seemed to be the real lover. He was the one whose passion for Vittoria surpassed the brightness of the sun, the mystery of the Sphinx, the fierceness of the tiger. And all his mean remarks, all his cold, cruel joking, seemed intended as a tragic mask, to hide his true emotion.
That night, Andreini created a new Arlechino, a clown so eloquent, so passionate, so moving that he nearly broke my heart. I looked around to see if the audience realized what was happening, for it seemed that they couldn’t fail to respond.
And I was right. Their eyes watered with sympathy every time Arlechino and Inamorata were alone on stage. But whenever the Lover appeared, their faces darkened, as if he were the intruder, the foil. As the play went on, and the lovesick clown drew no closer to his beloved, the mood of the crowd grew steadily uglier, more restless, until it began to make me uneasy.
The others felt it, too. “Watch out, Andreini!” hissed Brighella, interrupting the show. “Remember: these are sex-starved, drunken university students, who take these things seriously!”
But Andreini couldn’t hear. He, Flaminio, and Vittoria were enmeshed in it together. And perhaps they would have remained entangled forever if that crazy riot hadn’t broken out.
It was at the very end of the play. As always, Flaminio and Vittoria were embracing, center stage. But this time, Francesco stood in the wings, miming a remarkable show of noble suffering.
As soon as the audience realized that the drama was really over, that Arlechino would never win his love, a shocked silence fell over the crowd. Then, a storm of murmurs arose—whispers so hostile, so threatening, so unmistakable in their intent, that I knew enough to run for cover.
From the doorway of the inn, I watched the young men. Many of them were still in their academic gowns; yet they shouted, roared, grabbed rotten vegetables from the stores. They ripped up cobblestones from the plaza, and began to heave them at Flaminio.
“The woman belongs to Arlechino!” they yelled. They ran up on stage, grabbed the actors, and shook them like rugs. “Give the woman to Arlechino, or we’ll hold you prisoner here until you rot!”
When at last Flaminio broke free of his captors, all the spirit had left his face. “All right, gentlemen,” he said. “You are absolutely correct. There is a short epilogue to this drama, which we somehow forgot t
o perform. Return to your places, if you will, and prepare to watch the brilliant conclusion to our entertaining little show.”
That last scene was so easy to improvise, a child could have done it. As the crowd moved back, Flaminio gave a short speech, acknowledging Arlechino as the true Lover, and admitting his error in having claimed the Inamorata’s hand. Then, Francesco and Vittoria ran out from opposite wings, and met in a joyous embrace.
Cheering wildly, the students slapped each other’s backs, and went home.
Andreini’s trick had worked perfectly. From then on, he was the Lover, the star, the one whose eloquence drew such floods of sympathy from the crowd. There was no way for Flaminio to play Amante any more; he limited himself to the role of the Captain.
Indeed, he played the Captain more and more, onstage and off. He bragged like the admiral of a toy boat, raged like a frenzied bull. He was always berating Vittoria for having betrayed his love, always scolding Francesco for a million failures and inadequacies.
But poor dumb Vittoria, who could never see further than the coarse nose on her face, was delighted by the change.
“I like playing opposite Andreini,” she told me. “He’s so much more talented, more graceful. His kiss is so much sweeter than stinking Flaminio Scala’s. He’s so much easier to respond to, he’s helping me, my acting is better than ever.”
And it was true. But there was a familiar note in her voice, which I’d heard before, among the young brides who’d come into my shop to buy cloth for their husbands’ suits. It was the way women talked about the men they loved.
As I listened to Vittoria, my head ached with envy. I knew no one would ever speak about me that way. “Vittoria,” I said, “watch out for Andreini. He’s a schemer. He’s got his sights set on bigger game than you.”
“Don’t play the father with me, Pantalone,” she said. “You’ll only make me like him more.”
And so my big cow of a daughter stumbled into Andreini’s trap. Day after day, I watched him work his magic on her, courting her with stories and sweet, flowery speeches. And I watched her falling in love with him.
“Andreini doesn’t care about you,” I warned her. “Anyone in the troupe will tell you the same thing. It’s just another one of his tricks. He’s playing with you, using you; he’s just doing it to make the Captain mad.”
But women never listen to me; I’m not that sort of man. Vittoria continued in her foolishness, and, to tell the truth, she blossomed in it; the Inamorata was never sweeter. The audiences loved to see her trying every charm, every small grace, every ruse in her efforts to enchant Francesco. They showered her with wine-red roses and silver coins.
Often I stood offstage and wondered: does the audience know it’s real? Is that why they like it so much? Do they know it’s real when the Captain hurls himself across stage in clownish agony, begging the Inamorata to sleep with him?
Did they know it was real that night in Venice, when, in an unexpected improvisation, Vittoria suddenly changed the scenario, and consented to the Captain’s pleas?
I knew. She came and told me so, the night it happened. “I told that old jackass Flaminio he can have me one more time,” she said, pacing nervously back and forth. “I’ve invited him to come to my tent tonight. If that doesn’t bring Andreini around, nothing will!”
“Why are you doing this?” I cried. “You’re playing straight into Francesco’s hands. You’re helping him destroy the Captain! Is that what you want? Do you hate Flaminio so much? Don’t you know better than to play Andreini’s fool?”
Vittoria stared at me, her dull eyes brimming with sadness. Suddenly, I pitied her, because I knew that her love for Francesco was real.
“It’s the only way,” she said. “I’m desperate. He’s got another woman, somewhere in the wealthy part of town. Everyone talks about it, it’s common knowledge: he visits her once a week. If I don’t do something drastic now, I’ll never get him, I might as well give up.”
“Vittoria,” I said, “you could sleep with Flaminio in Francesco’s own bed, and he wouldn’t care. He’d thank you for it. You’d be helping him break the Captain down.”
“It’s the only way,” she sighed.
That night, on stage, she invited the Captain to her tent.
The next morning, when she came to see me, I knew at once that her little trick had failed. “I should have listened,” she said. “Francesco didn’t care. Flaminio and I walked right past him last night. I grinned in his face. But this morning, he treated me just as if nothing had happened. He kissed my cheek, and asked me how I’d slept.
“Pantalone,” she said, “I’ve given up hope.” Then Vittoria shrugged her shoulders in such a bitter way that I suddenly saw how she would look when she was very old.
“As for that pig Flaminio,” she continued, “I didn’t even get a good lay out of it. The old fool couldn’t do it. Flaminio Scala, the strongest of the strong—his thing flopped around like an overcooked noodle! All night, he tried and tried, rubbing himself against me like a flea-bitten dog. Just before dawn, our brave Captain put his head in his hands and cried.”
I knew that Vittoria was telling the truth; and it occurred to me that her story was a weapon which I didn’t want Andreini to have. So I tried to make a deal with her, in a way she could understand.
“Vittoria,” I began, “do you know what a premonition is?”
“Of course,” she replied, always proud when she knew the answer to anything. “It’s a warning from the future.”
“Well then,” I said. “I’ll tell you something. I’ve just had a premonition.
“If anyone else in this troupe hears that about Flaminio, if anyone else learns that he has been cursed in that way, a terrible spell will descend upon all of us. Our souls will fall under the power of the devil, who’ll control us like marionettes. Do you want that to happen, Vittoria? Can you understand that you must keep this a secret?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her big eyes wide with terror.
But I needn’t have worried; over the next months, Vittoria barely talked at all. She gained weight, became dull, slow on her feet. She spent most of her free time sleeping. Often, she’d go on stage without combing her hair. She stopped coming to see me. She was so melancholy, she no longer had the energy to join the others in taunting me.
Gradually, her Inamorata became less and less attractive. By spring, the audiences never applauded her. There was something in the way she looked at the Lover which was too disappointed, too unhappy, too real. It unsettled them, embarrassed them; they felt they were watching a part of her life which they shouldn’t have been allowed to see.
The rest of us worked our hardest to make up for Vittoria’s failure. But there was nothing we could do. The crowds grew thin, the cashbox empty; once again, we were on the edge of starvation. I was tired, hungry, forced to waste my energy convincing those fools that I couldn’t give them credit.
Of course, it was Andreini who finally brought it up, that night he called that awful meeting.
“As much as I love Vittoria,” he said, getting straight to the point, “I regret to say that I can’t play opposite her any more.”
Vittoria was sitting in a corner. I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t bear to imagine what pain Andreini was causing her. I wanted to defend her. But I was watching, from the edge of things; it wasn’t my place.
“You’re right, Andreini!” shouted that bastard Brighella, who was never a great friend of Vittoria’s anyway. “We might as well put a lump of dough on stage, for all the popularity she’s earning us. And a lump of dough would eat less, that’s certain.”
Armanda nodded vigorously. I was surprised she didn’t chime in, for she’d always hated Vittoria. But the dwarf was in a strange state in those days.
“Vittoria’s been with us longer than you have,” protested the Captain. He knew that Andreini was right; but he was being torn in so many directions, he didn’t know what to do.
“I’m quite aware
of that,” replied Francesco. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to look for some better setting in which to display my skills.
“Besides,” he added, “our sweet Vittoria won’t have to suffer. I’ve used all my influence to find her a job as a barmaid, at a local inn, where the owner’s wife is a special friend of mine.”
The decision had been made; there was no way Flaminio could object. “My apologies, dear lady,” he said to Vittoria. He went over to her, and offered her his arm. As they walked slowly away, leaning on each other, Vittoria seemed too numb to acknowledge me; and I couldn’t meet her eyes.
So that was how I lost my only friend, my only connection with the others, my small, inadequate portion of love. These days, I’ll admit, Armanda’s pleasant enough to me, Columbina’s kind. Isabella does her best to make me feel included; but she’s fighting against my nature, against impossible odds.
That night, when Flaminio returned after showing Vittoria to her new home, he was a changed man.
“It’s the beginning of the end for him,” I thought. “This time, there’ll be no sudden comebacks, no wondrous repentances, no miraculous reversals.
“Andreini’s won at last. He’s humbled the Captain, made him dismiss the woman he loves, made him change the casting of the troupe. He’s taken everything but the Captain’s title.
“He’s turned Flaminio into a eunuch,” I thought. “What else does that snake Andreini have in store?”
And I soon found out.
“Andreini,” said Flaminio, in a strained, tired voice. “We need to find a new Inamorata.”
“Just to prove that I have only the best interests of the troupe at heart,” replied Francesco, “I will take all responsibility for finding a new actress.”
The very next morning, he appeared in our camp with Isabella.
Glorious Ones Page 5