Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  —MICHEL FOUCAULT,

  Preface to Transgression

  1

  SO, THAT’S DONE! COME in, come in. Myself, I thought I was brilliant. Step over that, my young friend. Oh, not so young anymore, you say? Well. You’ve still got twenty years on me. Always had. Always will. No, around this way! Don’t mind the clutter. A bit hot for you? Here, let me open the trap in the wagon’s roof. That will give us both air and light.

  There!

  Sit now, on that shelf with the pretty weave over it, just under the monster’s wing—yes, it’s the same beast the Hero slew out on the platform. But since that was at the very beginning of the skit, they just toss it in here during the second scene while the Baron and the Peasants are singing that awful song about the Unconquerable Sea, when everybody down in the audience—and up on the stage—feels so insufferably noble. If it creaks and crashes while we’re back here putting it away, you’re supposed to assume out front it’s just the wind on the rocks.

  Now look at that sword, hanging on the wall. Split practically in two! In here it seems like nothing more than the painted wood it is. But I’ve seen our Leading Lady snatch it from the Hero’s scabbard to plunge it into her heart, and I’ve heard grown men off from the platform cry out, ‘No! No, don’t do it!’ till that great lummox dashes it from her hand and plants a kiss on her breast instead, begging her to forgive his unfaithfulness.

  From the platform we always hear the market girls, crowded together down front, start to weep.

  No, that’s true: they didn’t today. But Kolhari is a sophisticated city; the audience demands more. Really, I was speaking of the way they receive us in the provincial markets. Here, they’ve much more likely to appreciate my—

  No!

  I won’t endure either your praise or your carping. You took time off from running your school to come all the way in from Sallese and see our opening afternoon performance. What greater compliment could you pay me? Oh, it’s funny…

  Now, lean close, because I don’t want any of the others loading things outside or scrambling over our roof to hear. But we’ve been friends for years, you and I. I know you were born a prince in Neveryóna; and I also know that well before you set up your school, you dropped your title so that people would deal with you as they would with any ordinary citizen. Believe me, it’s a gesture that, in the eyes of us who know you, makes you extraordinary indeed!

  But about a season back, the oddest gentlemen joined our troop while we were off somewhere to the south. What talent our Director saw in him, I’ll never know, for he was older than I and had never acted before in his life. Wouldn’t you guess, after a few days the rumor went round among us that this odd old man was actually a great southern lord, out of favor with the ministers about our Child Empress, whose reign is proud and prudent. There he was, running about the countryside and cavorting on the platform with a drum and a lot of feathers, just like the rest of us. But that’s not the funny part. He left us very soon. Oh, off the platform, he was pleasant enough, and though I sometimes felt his onstage shenanigans rather overlapped my own, nevertheless, just as a fellow artist, I was sad to see him go.

  Well, don’t you know a day later, the little flute player, whom you saw open our performance this afternoon and who doubles as a driver when we’re on the road, told everyone that she, too, was actually a deposed lady of some status. Then, the young man who plays the comic servant confessed, one night after much cider, that, though he didn’t really have a title himself, he had been brought up as the companion to a northern earl and could, indeed, ape all the manners of a lord if he so chose—perhaps the Director might consider spreading the rumor that another aristocrat was part of the troop…? And that otherwise sane and sensible man consented!

  Within the month, I tell you, it all became too preposterous. Our horseboy became a duke. The three rather bosomy young things who play the witches in the morning skits and the lost peasant girls in the evening had all been, they assured us, ladies in waiting to various titled dames. And the Leading Lady herself was suddenly a distant relation of our empress—a duchess one week, a countess the next. She could never keep it straight. Oh, my friend, I tell you! Out there in the Nevèrÿon countryside, titles broke out among our company like sores among the plague-ridden. And the height of it was that, one night as I lay right on my pallet there—yes, you’re sitting on it—with all the false beasts and birds and weapons and armor you see around us now, just a-clattering as we jounced toward some tiny town on the coast, I actually thought of…you!

  And of your discarded title, my friend!

  I wondered: since he has no use for it, would he really mind if I took it up…for just a while.

  Yes, I’m glad you think it’s funny!

  I’m welcome to it, you say? Oh, you’re only humoring an old artist! You might not have felt so if it had gotten back to you I was using it, now. We must retain some sense of propriety about these things.

  I came to my senses, you understand, even before the next performance. After all, I told myself, as I put the blue paint on my eyes and the gold about my lips: If my Neveryóna friend has cast it aside, why should I take it on? Let those who have never been within the walls of a lord’s estate dream and scheme to be something better than they are! I have the friendship and esteem of a true prince of Nevèrÿon. I have lunched with you in your gardens; I have performed my mimes for your family and friends. You have come to sit in my cluttered quarters, the two of us grinning at one another like tickled boys with mutual admiration. You have even lectured on the fine points of my art to the young men and women whose educations have been entrusted to you by the better-off merchants of Kolhari and its environs. Oh, how good you’ve been to me, from the beginning! It makes me weep. I have need of nothing more from you than your good opinion.

  And I shall not keep that, I told myself out there in the boondocks, if I sink to this theatrical madness for appropriated nobility.

  Now, tell me I was wonderful, thrilling, amazing this afternoon! No—

  Let me stop!

  Your good opinion, yes. I enjoy praise as much as anyone. But just as you don’t need my advice on how to educate the sons and daughters of your ambitious tradesmen and artisans, I don’t need your advice on how to move an audience to laughter, tears, and the recognitions supporting both—though I know you well and also know how anxious you are to give some.

  But I saw you, out there among the others, only smile—yes, at the end of the third scene—when those around you roared. You and I both know the joke I’d just told was one of my most vulgar—merely a concession to what our Director thinks will please the most insensitive spectators, and worth no more than a smile, no matter how the other onlookers hooted and clutched their sides. Well, I also heard your laughter come, full, rich, and flowing, at that little business with my goblet in the penultimate part, while the Heroine’s Father is asking for more wine…? Even though half the audience missed it and the half who noticed gave it no more than a titter, you must still know: I have been working on that gesture for months! (Did you recognize the eastern count on whom my original observation was based? But no. My art lies in its universality, not in its specificity.) To appreciate that turn of my hand as I glanced down with that complex expression of befuddlement (which my makeup is, you can still see here if you examine my face, designed entirely to enhance) is to appreciate what I really do.

  And you appreciated—I heard you.

  And applauded loud as anyone, at least at the end.

  So you see, I’ve already had your critique. For us to sit here, then, face to face, while I go on to beg you for more and more empty plaudits only demeans us both.

  Yes, they all seemed to have liked it—the whole thing—pretty much.

  Oh, you mean the one with the thinning hair and thickening belly who stood a little off from the others, laughing and clapping heatedly at everything I did? He liked it particularly, you say? Ah, then, you noticed him.

  His is the kin
d of critique I prefer most?

  Oh, you are unkind to an aging actor! But the truth is, he too is a friend. He comes to see all my performances in the city, when he’s here. And, yes: unlike you and the general audience, critical for your separate reasons, everything we do delights him. Once or twice, when there were new and inexperienced mummers recently joined with our cast, and everyone was badly rehearsed, and the audience, sensing it, hardly raised a smile, I’ve seen him applaud just as thunderously as he did today, even scowling at the others as he stalked off afterward—unnoticed, in most cases, by all but me. But those are the days when I think he is perhaps our most perfect spectator and that we need no other. Indeed, I’ve known him almost as long as I’ve known you. And that must be fifteen years now—or is it twenty? Why, I believe it is twenty, if not a little longer!

  But the way I’ve been honored by your friendship, I fancy he’s been honored by mine. And though it doesn’t make me enjoy his applause one whit the less, you will understand: honor is the motivation for his delight far more than any critical capacity. And he honors himself by never having claimed otherwise. He’s known one of the actors personally—me—and for that he will clap the calluses off his hard hands. In a sense, he applauds himself for knowing me at all. Or, perhaps, more generously to us both, he applauds our friendship—more truthfully, he applauds what our friendship once was. And I will also say this (for it particularly pleases me to recall it on those days when he is the only one who claps): though I’ve often found him charmingly naïve, for a man of his class and caliber he is not stupid. And you yourself have said it within my hearing many times: Ignorance is never a sin; only stupidity. He was really just a year or two too old to be called a boy—as were you—when I met him.

  How?

  He was bora on a farm some stades to the west of the city. At seventeen or eighteen, he ran away, here to the great port. A few months later, I found him where one finds such boys, loitering on the Bridge of Lost Desire, beside the Old Market outside.

  Yes, many—boys and girls both—get there much younger.

  My supposition as to why he took so long? I don’t know if you got a close look at his face, but you can see by the roughness there that, as a child, the pimples, pustules, and angry pocks that so often mar the cheeks of the young must have been, on him, particularly severe. By the time he came to Kolhari, they were more or less healed over; but from observing their traces I’ve suspected since the day we met that in full flower they could not have been prepossessing. I’ve just assumed they had something to do with why he stayed at home as long as he did.

  Traditionally handsome? No. Even as a boy, he was on the stocky side, though there’s always been a good bit of muscle in with it. Once in the city, he took to beer like a fly to honey—I use the many-times repeated phrase because nothing is new in his story there. Often during the first year of our friendship, I suspected that, like so many others, he would end a drunkard or a derelict. Not to mention all the petty illegalities that can catch the young and, in these variegated and violent times, kill. More than once, when, in later years, he would be some months away, I’d imagine that the next time I saw him he’d be carrying the welts of some Imperial bailiff’s whip and with them the story of his year or three at hard labor on some prison detail—that’s if I didn’t just learn that on some chill night he’d died in a doorway or in a back alley, too cold, too wet, too long exposed to the elements.

  But, as you’ve seen, it didn’t happen thus.

  I may have even had something to do with that—though life is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able to do with our own.

  Certainly it would be more generous, if not more accurate, to say that he gave me quite a bit of pleasure, at least for a time. Truly, he was then and is now the most genial of men, if somewhat self-deprecating. And the goodwill he maintains to this day allows me to remember that pleasure and continue to call our relation friendship, if only as my memorial to the friendship it was.

  What does he do?

  Your interest makes me suspect you might like to meet him, in which case I’ll tell you only what he, certainly, would wish me to say, leaving him, in due time, to say more, if and when it pleases him.

  Frankly, he doesn’t do much.

  He lives as best he can, sometimes in Kolhari, sometimes away from it, now and again taking up menial work, though seldom steadily or for any length.

  Oh, you don’t want to meet him?

  Well, then: He’s a smuggler.

  Has been for years.

  Yes, that’s my friend, as you saw him there. Though after he quit the bridge—trading one dishonorable profession for another—our friendship reduced to smiles, nods, a few words exchanged on the street or in the market. They were warm and sincere enough words. But on the whole it’s been little else. Oh yes, by then he was coming regularly to see me perform. And he’d always stand a bit off—and clap and cheer the loudest. In that he did no differently then from what he does now.

  That he still does it, I assume, is his own memorial—if not habit.

  I’d say once a year or so—though, more recently, it’s been more like once every eighteen months (and believe me, sometimes more than two years have elapsed between)—he waits around after the show to meet me. It happens so infrequently, I always invite him in. He sits where you sit now, leaning forward with his heavy hands hung between his knees. We talk. He smiles. I tell him a little of my life. He tells me a little of his.

  I say it’s been twenty years?

  A thousand times we’ve waved and nodded when both of us have shared the city (and in his profession he is away from it as much as I), but within that same period we’ve actually sat together for serious conversation less than ten.

  In the early days, when I still thought of him as a youngster, on a few of his visits he had his arm around some girl’s shoulder—on one occasion two at once. Beaming, he introduced them, showing them off to me, me off to them: his old friend, the wonderful, talented, much applauded, madly and marvelously magical mummer. I found it amusing; and, politely, he didn’t stay long, so that in the end it was harmless.

  Was it five years ago? Ah, more, likely seven! Sitting where you sit now, he told me he’d been living with a widow, just outside Kolhari, by whom he’d had two children. It only made me realize how long it had been since I’d seen him.

  I remember glimpsing him out in the audience a few times after that, once with some terribly young and frizzy-haired barbarian tucked under his arm, as freckled as a quail’s egg and who, I’m certain, was not his widow at all but the grubbiest of prostitutes from the bridge across the market.

  They didn’t come in to see me.

  I confess I was relieved.

  Once, when he dropped by and we went down to the waterfront, where, rather uncharacteristically, he bought me a mug of cider while he had a few beers, I learned, in the course of our talk, that he’d collected a wealth of information about the Liberator—you remember, that political upstart everyone in the country was talking of ten years back or so, when his headquarters were raided out by your uncle’s? Well, he knew every battle and skirmish and story and rumor, every fact and surmise about the man. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, but he’d been collecting these tales for years, keeping them all in his head. And only once had he met him, he said. But it confirmed for me what I’d dreamily suspected from the beginning: there really had been something unusual about him—though no doubt it would never come to anything that brought him reward in the socially managed markets, old or new, of need and necessity. What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting. Yet the interesting boy had become an interesting man: it would be the rare student from your school who could give you so rich and so textured an account of his field of study as that man you saw today could give of his perfectly pointless and obsessive
pursuit.

  Oh? Fifteen years back, you say, was the raid on the Liberator’s mansion? Well, you should know. It was right out there in your neighborhood.

  The last time he dropped in, when I asked after his family, he told me that, oh, he hadn’t seen the widow in almost a year—nor his children; nor hers.

  I believe that was when it struck me: by no stretch could I think of him as a youngster anymore. What in his youth I’d been able to look on as a handsome solidity had, in the man, run simply and brutally to fat. You saw—and I think you’ll admit, though I’m twenty years his senior, too—I’ve kept my figure a bit better than he. Also, he’s losing his hair. Mine, miraculously has only thinned. Yes, he’s very much a man and is today as close to middle aged as I am to being simply and brutally old.

  No, I don’t really think he’s been doing as well of late as he once did. It pains me to admit it of one who, for so long, I thought of as a child, but his decline is just another of those little shocks by which the nameless gods remind us of death.

  Thank them all, whoever they are, that I can still mime, however clumsily, can still sing, however reedily, can still dance, however stiffly, and can skew each to the other in a parody of age’s failings artfully enough to make an audience laugh.

  Why, yes. I suppose you could say that. In a sense, my friendship with him has gone more or less the way of my friendship with you. But whatever the cares and concerns in your various undertakings—not to mention my own—you are both doing well enough, in twenty-plus years, to come here to the market on the first day of our return from our triumphant provincial tour and catch our opening performance.