Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  But were they my arguments?

  You must understand, when I was young and the Master younger, we argued, argued, argued! We would wander back and forth across the Old Market often fifty times a day, one of us always talking.

  Yet somehow I never assumed he was arguing for anything. (By all the nameless gods, in those days he was too young to have opinions!) I assumed he was arguing against me for the fun of it—because I was a man and he was a boy—and I gloried in our altercations as a chance to exercise my own rational faculties.

  Exercises, yes. That’s even what I called them. And from his brightened eyes and quickened breath at their end, I would assume that, as exercises go, they’d been as exhilarating for him as for me.

  What I saw his students perform, however, out on his lawn between the smart buildings, was, yes, very much a version of our arguments from twenty years before, but with the imaginative fancy added that he had somehow won them all—when I had considered them a draw! It was as if he had come to believe in the interim that, somehow, he had, actually, back then, convinced me, so that there I was, in travesty, spouting the exact opposite of what I believed to various interlocutors—and spouting it far more eloquently than he had as a youth.

  And do you think there was one character in the lot with his name? (I’ve never failed to put actors playing actors—and playing bad actors at that—on my stage!) Not on your life.

  A day of it, and, believe me, the effect was quite disturbing.

  But there we were at the end, with all these girls and boys standing about and waiting for my compliments, sure they had all performed quite wonderfully.

  And they had! They had!

  I hugged them and praised them and clapped like a madman—all the while trying to figure some strategy to counter what, yes, I saw it coming to.

  Later, with the clay lamps glimmering on their tripods in the room’s four corners as we dined alone in his study—and, yes, no doubt I had been just as equivocal about his production as he can be about mine—I finally chose my tack. (To mime direction by indirection is one of my most successful aesthetic ploys.) I said:

  —Now, look. I’m absolutely in accord with what I take, or mistake (for we both know both are possible), to be your basic aim. Still, I see some problems. For one thing, you never bring out that I am a theatrical personage. I am the one who puts on shows and spectacles for the general public. I think it’s a fact that, if it were presented early and clearly, would illuminate your entire effect in a far more subtle light.

  —But the point is (we sipped pale cider from old crystal; and he always serves the best), save for the odd note a hired scribe can make, you never write your speeches down. Now my dialogues are transcribed, word for word, in the Ulvayn Island system. By comparison, your performances are spontaneous, free, improvised. They’re not fixed forever like some unreadable barbaric script incised on stone. They have the play of interpretation built into them! If, in my texts, I were to give you more authority than I already have, that lifelike quality to your utterances, which I can only catch by pinning exact wordings to parchment, would be lost. As it is, I think it comes across.

  What could I say?

  I said:

  —And another thing. Half your students are girls—more than half, actually. Why are all the people you have me talking to, played indiscriminately by maidens and ephebes, boys?

  —But you like boys! he protested, with that wide-eyed surprise that betokens true bemusement. You’ve never made a secret of it.

  —Oh, really! I said. Of course I like boys. But three-quarters of my friends are women. Always have been. Always will be. You know that. And besides, I don’t—as a rule—like the kind of boys you have here; and that, in your plays, you have me going on to, endlessly. I haven’t made a secret of that either. You know as well as I do, my tastes are far more, well…trashy.

  —You liked me, he declared, almost petulantly. Besides, not everybody is an expert in the particular set of nastinesses you indulge in down at the bridge. I’m certainly not!

  —All right, I said. Why, for instance, do you have a girl play me?

  —Your voice, he said, is rather high.

  —I am an actor, an artist, I declared. A high voice carries, clear and comprehensible, half again as far across the market as some fuzzy, booming basso. I have trained my voice to be thus, through many years of practice. And unlike some who are born with it naturally, mine did not start off that way. Tenors and sopranos will be our heroes for a long, long time, my friend. Get used to it!

  And this very wise man gave me a surprised look that declared he’d never considered before this basic fact that has fixed the careers of generals, admirals, and politicians as well as actors and singers since time’s dawn—a fact I must explain to three out of five aspiring hopefuls of either sex who come to our wagons for work.

  —Oh, come on! he said placatingly. What’s to the point isn’t that I’m not an expert in your wild and marginal ways, but that the young people whose educations have been entrusted to me, and for whom these pieces are written, are not. I dare say some of them will be. No doubt they’ll go on to point out all my failings as sharply and as cruelly as you have—no, not cruelly. I can say that. You are, and always have been, a very kind man. That’s why I love you. But what I’m trying to tell you is…these productions of mine are not expressions of the real. They are in dialogue with it. ‘What if?’ That’s the game’s name! You told me yourself, that’s what all speculation is about. What if you hadn’t abandoned your wife years ago? I’m sure she’d be just as I portrayed her—like the wives of all thinking men: shrill, resentful, obsessively there, and awful. I admit it, in those parts I’m talking about why I’m not married, not about why or how you once were. (That aspect of it had, I confess, struck me as so ‘off the wall,’ as the young people say, I had not even retained it in memory to critique!) Suppose you did lavish all your wit, wisdom, and affection on the best young men of Nevèrÿon instead of the half-wits, hustlers, and ne’er-do-wells, the silly actresses, simpering market girls, and sly old countesses that you do—

  —You are not a half-wit, I said. But you even admit it: all you have presented, in my name, are your fancies.

  —The voice, he said (with the naïveté, incomprehension, and sense of total Tightness at any and every appropriation that always terrifies me from one of his class and caliber), is, nevertheless and certainly, my own.

  I returned to our wagons here in the market the next morning—of course, he wouldn’t hear of my walking back that night. I shouldn’t worry about all this, you know, but his dialogues are written down. He’s quite proud of them—justly too. For they are beautiful compositions. And he has been having copies made and distributing them to people who can read and write, among both the aristocracy and tradesmen, and even to a few workers, I hear, who’ve mastered the skill—for in practice he’s very egalitarian. The details and mannerisms he had taken from me to decorate, as it were, ‘his’ voices are clear enough so that, in a city as diminished in size by writing as Kolhari, I am clearly recognizable. After all, I am something of a public figure, with my minimal dollop of fame.

  Yesterday, in the Old Market, during our performance, when I was in the midst of what I’ve always considered my most innocent depiction of the failings and foibles of our most aged and mindless minister of state, some young man in the audience suddenly shouted:

  —Fools! You fools—the lot of you! Every single one of you—duped fools! Don’t you know that he is the one who has been out with the teachers of Sallese, corrupting our best young men with his disrespect and insidious argumentation—which, here in its vulgar form, you go on to laugh at? Haven’t you read the accounts of his lectures to the young, taken down by the Master? Do not laugh and applaud. Drive him off the stage, rather! Stone him! Kill him!

  It brought the performance to a halt. And it left an old actor almost too shaken to go on. The audience itself was discommoded and, finally, reduced by a third. My
performance was not at its best for the rest of the day. When the show was over, only an old friend who happened to be there, an unremarkable and even disreputable man in many ways, applauded with any vigor—and, I fancy, some real anger at the interruption. I was grateful to him, but still disheartened. And even he did not come back to see me afterward.

  But the fact is, and it takes an old man to say it:

  The reign of our empress is violent and vigilant.

  It is too easy in our day to see such tendencies getting out of hand, leading, who knows, even to my death—about which, no doubt, my young Master will write a moving and eloquent account, where my screams and protests, my nose thumbings, farts, and insults—and the curses and violences against me they elicit from violent men—will be reduced to, if not replaced by, some cascade of calm and reasoned rhetoric.

  Perhaps a carnival will be in progress outside the prison, where the children and lovers (in all combinations) wandering through the market will be asking: Where is the old mummer who used to make us laugh and cry so? Will the shouts and music in the streets drown out my screams? But you can be sure, that’s another thing he will simply omit. (This Calling of the Amnewor? No, I do not intend to go anywhere near it, I tell you. I have seen it all before, and besides: I have more than enough work of my own to do!) No doubt, I will have my calm moments during it all.

  Still, it is not his style to be as flamboyant, or, indeed, as outrageous, as I. But, then, it is not my style to be as persistently rational as he in the face of unjust madness—a human failing I am now old enough to have seen in all too great amounts.

  Oh, there will be bits and pieces of me in his dialogues that I or anyone else would recognize—the details with which he will decorate his text. But there will also be much that only I could give the lie to. And over everything, what his account will not encompass in any way is my real death at their hands.

  (His writing has made of me a monster!)

  Though he is a prince, and I am an old actor, he will have me die in his dialogues as he would die himself, could he, by any jest of the nameless gods, be calumniated, accused, apprehended, and executed in the same mode and manner as he may so innocently cause me to be. I think on some terribly personal level he sincerely feels his writings have cured me of all my abhorrent opinions, while I fear that, with them, he has put me in as grave a danger as if, instead of cider that evening, he had offered me a goblet of bitter, vegetative poisons.

  9.7 Got a flyer from Temple University about a symposium, ‘Post Barthes/Post Bakhtin.’ I was familiar with—and greatly admired—the work of over half the participants: Michael Holquist, Caryl Emerson, Barbara Johnson, Samuel Weber. I had a layman’s familiarity with Barthes and had read Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination in the Holquist and Emerson translation. Two years before, at the ‘Innovation/Renovation’ conference at Wingspread, I’d first sketched out a Nevèrÿon story, ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ after a presentation on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘the carnivalesque’ as an initiator of critical dialogue. I decided to treat myself to a trip down to Philadelphia, then, and attend.

  The conference began at nine on Saturday morning, so at four, I was up and, by four-thirty, on my way through the foggy November black, darkness—and the glimmer of not-quite-rain—struck through by New York’s streetlights, to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  The terminal has a strange kind of life at that hour.

  Joey, Jimmy, Johnny, Jamal, and José among the street people have all mentioned to me using the station to sleep in, and I was on the lookout for somebody I knew. But I didn’t see anyone.

  All the concessions were still closed, but as I walked through the broad glass doors and across the deserted concourse, I passed a shutdown news kiosk, beside which stood a boy about sixteen or seventeen. His jeans were baggy, dirt-blackened, and torn. One of his sneakers had come off and lay on the floor about ten inches from a very dirty foot. He had no coat and just a T-shirt on that was too big, ripped at the neck and yellow from wear. Head bent forward, with a very dirty hand he pulled and pulled and pulled at a lock of black, longish hair.

  I went on downstairs to the Greyhound gates. As I came down the steps, half a dozen black kids, boys about fourteen or fifteen, were horsing around on the stairs. One leaned heavily on the banister, running now up, now down. A few standing at the foot watched him—one smoking—laughing at his antics.

  As I turned to sit on a waiting room chair, I looked back up the steps. A middle-aged white couple, who must have been walking only steps behind me, but whom I hadn’t seen till then, came down. The woman carried their bags. The man looked possibly infirm.

  The kid on the steps let go of the banister and turned: ‘Hey, white folks!’ he called. ‘Where you goin’?’

  The couple ignored him and continued down.

  ‘Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna hurt you!’ The kid continued beside them, squatting on each step. ‘You don’t have to be afraid of me.’

  The couple looked like they might have been exhausted at that hour. They didn’t look very frightened.

  ‘What’s the matter? You afraid I’m gonna rob you? I’m gonna mug you?’ At the stairs’ bottom, he laughed and bounced in a squat, looking at the couple, then at the other boys, some of whom were giggling, some not.

  The couple just walked over to the seats as if they hadn’t heard.

  Leaving my briefcase on the black plastic chair between some passengers, I went into the men’s room. There were half a dozen other black kids inside, and a few Puerto Ricans, most of them older or younger than the ones fooling around on the steps.

  Just as I came in, a tall black guy with glasses, who may have even been twenty, folded his arms, reared back, and actually said to a boy who couldn’t have been more than thirteen: ‘Hey, what’s a kid like you doin’ up this late?’

  The boy folded his arms indignantly and declared: ‘I told you before, I ain’t no kid!’

  Yeah,’ declared his even younger companion: ‘He knows his way around!’

  Stifling a laugh, I went to the urinals.

  At the far end stood a particularly good looking black guy in a gray Confederate cap; he seemed to be there pretty permanently.

  A minute later, I came out to see the kid who’d been horsing around outside look up the steps again, where a tall, rather refined looking white man, with silver hair and an expensive gray suit, his overcoat over one arm and carrying an attaché case, was starting down.

  The kid dashed up the steps. ‘Hey, white man!’ he demanded. ‘Where you goin’? You afraid of me? You afraid I’m gonna follow you where you goin’, I’m gonna beat you up, I’m gonna rob you? Now, you don’t have to be afraid of that!’ As the boy came on down the steps beside him, calling out his taunts, the man paid as little attention to him as had the couple.

  At the bottom of the steps, among the other boys, an older black kid, maybe seventeen, suddenly called up: ‘Nigger, why you acting like such a fool!’

  The boy clowning on the steps didn’t even glance back: ‘Now you don’t have to be afraid of me. I ain’t gonna hurt you, white man!’

  As the first kid reached the bottom the second kid stepped up on the stair: ‘Hey, nigger! Why—’

  The first boy danced back, grinning. ‘I’m just askin’ these white folks where’re they—’

  Suddenly the second grappled the first boy in a headlock. ‘—do you talk like such a fool!’

  ‘Hey! Let go of me!’ The first, his mouth muffled by a forearm, giggled—‘Let me go, you…crazy nigger!—’ while others, who’d been watching and chuckling themselves, turned away as the kid was dragged off.

  I was still standing almost inside the men’s room door. As I stepped away, a nondescript, middle-class black woman in a brown coat and hat absently wandered in. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ I said, turning back. ‘That’s the men’s room.’

  ‘Oh, it is?’ she said. ‘Well, where is the ladies’ room?’

  ‘About three yards d
own the hall, ma’am,’ said a Puerto Rican boy from inside, loitering by the basins.

  I got my briefcase again and for a while strolled about the Greyhound departure area.

  Wearing a ratty thermal vest and looking disheveled and unwashed enough so that it was moot if she were a passenger waiting on a bus or a bum in to keep warm, one teenaged white girl sat by the wall near her knapsack, bound closed with dirty twine. (If she were a derelict, she’d probably taken pains to achieve the ambiguity.) In a cloth coat and a knitted cap, a shopping-bag lady wandered along the far gates with her bundled sacks of paper and cloth, muttering to herself, occasionally spitting, now and again snapping out some curse.

  At one point, as the woman passed almost directly in front of her, the girl looked sharply away.

  A man perhaps thirty slept on the floor, wedged into the corner by the transparent plastic wall of the north-end waiting area. New black work shoes. Stained and ancient workman’s grays. A middling old pea-jacket fallen open over a shirt with some name stitched in yellow thread, soiled and worn to unreadability, across the torn pocket. His black beard was more or less neatly shaven; his hair was fairly short. When the great cleaning machine, pushed by a black attendant, sudsed over the floor, its spinning brush dangerously close to his face, he sat up suddenly, lurched to his feet, and, one hand out before him, staggered into the waiting area and collapsed on a row of black plastic seats without—as far as I could tell—even opening his eyes.

  A bunch of tough Puerto Rican girls in very thick makeup and blue down coats, none over sixteen, kept moving in and out of the ladies’ room, sometimes razzing and sometimes being razzed by the black and Puerto Rican boys lounging about, but more often just in their own, harsh, serious little world.

  I hadn’t been in a bus station at that hour for over a year. A clear difference from the last time, however, was the increased number of people sleeping on the seats, floor, or benches who looked as if, three weeks or three months ago, they might have been working—a very different population from the eternal indigents (still there of course) who wander about such places year in and year out.