Madame

by Antoni Libera

  ‘All right, that’s enough, Mr Know-it-all,’ snapped the Tapeworm, cutting off my show of erudition. ‘Do you realise your attitude is a typical example of “cosmopolitanism”? You know what that means, don’t you?’

  ‘It means “citizenship of the world”.’

  ‘No,’ said the deputy headmaster. ‘It means indifference to or even contempt for one’s own culture and traditions. You worship the West; it’s a form of idolatry.’

  ‘The West?’ I repeated, feigning surprise. ‘As far as I know, Greece, especially before Christ—’

  But the Tapeworm didn’t let me finish. ‘It’s a curious thing,’ he said, ‘that in your script you have also omitted Chekhov, Gogol and Tolstoy. Why this strange oversight? You surely don’t intend to claim that their plays are produced only in Russia – I mean, in the Soviet Union. Or do you?’

  I could see that further discussion was fruitless. ‘So, what’s the decision?’ I asked. ‘Can we do it or not?’

  ‘Not as it is, no. Not unless you incorporate the changes I’ve suggested.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said diplomatically; inwardly I made a gesture expressive of what he could do with his changes and snarled, Not on your life, you bastard.

  Insulting the Tapeworm, especially in one’s imagination, was no great feat. Finding a solution was harder. After all the months of rehearsals, after all our hopes and dreams, I couldn’t bring myself to tell the cast about the deputy headmaster’s decision. Yet concealing it, playing for time and making promises I couldn’t keep, was also out of the question.

  With nothing more to lose, I made my way, that very afternoon, to the offices of the Warsaw section of the Amateur and School Theatrical Events Board, housed in one of the city’s theatres. I went there intending to enter our play in the competition; but I did not do so lightly. The idea was tempting: to participate in the festival organised by the Board, the most prestigious event of its kind, and at the same time to defy the Tapeworm – but what if it ended in disgrace? What then? Our experience of the stage was very slight; never having faced a live audience, we did not know how we would react. Would stage-fright paralyse us? Would we forget our lines? How would we cope with the unexpected? The idea of making a hash of it was terrifying. And then the competition itself was another unknown factor: perhaps, regardless of how well we acted, our compilation would seem puerile or, worse, boring, or simply ludicrous in its tragic intensity. Failure in these circumstances meant utter humiliation. I felt I was taking an enormous risk.

  A sleepy calm reigned in the festival offices. Behind the desk a young secretary sat languidly painting her nails.

  ‘I’d like to enter our group in this year’s competition,’ I said, a touch uncertainly.

  ‘On whose behalf?’ inquired the secretary, without looking up from the task on which her attention was bent.

  ‘What do you mean, on whose behalf?’ I asked, surprised. ‘On my behalf. I mean, on behalf of the group I represent.’

  She looked me up and down. ‘You don’t look like a teacher or an instructor to me.’ She returned to her nails.

  ‘And indeed I’m not – neither one nor the other,’ I admitted, with a pretence of chagrin. ‘Does that mean I can’t enter our group?’

  ‘The deadline’s passed,’ she replied, noncommittal.

  Something in my heart contracted in a spasm of dismay, yet I felt a kind of relief. I’d tried and failed, and perhaps it was for the best. My prospects of victor’s laurels had vanished, but so had the spectre of shame and defeat.

  ‘The deadline’s passed . . .’ I repeated dully, like an echo. ‘Do you mind telling me when?’

  ‘At noon today,’ she announced, exuding false regret.

  I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past three.

  ‘I had classes until two . . .’ I said, as if debating with myself.

  She spread her hands in a helpless gesture, taking the opportunity as she did so to inspect the results of her work. ‘You should have come yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ I muttered, and began to shuffle about resignedly, preparing to leave. But at that moment the door opened, admitting none other than S. – one of the most popular actors of the day – himself, in person. The secretary leapt up to greet him with an ingratiating smile.

  S. had distinguished himself not only on stage but also as something of a character: he was known to be moody and capricious, and was generally considered a fascinating personality. Anecdotes about him abounded: how difficult he was to work with, how he would play practical jokes on his fellow actors on stage and yet take pains to make himself agreeable to the theatre staff and, particularly, to his fans. His self-absorption and delusions of grandeur were legendary; his disingenuousness, his transparent attempts to cloak these weaknesses in a veil of false modesty and to portray himself as a timid naïf, were an ever-reliable source of amusement. He craved applause and admiration, and liked to be surrounded by young people, who could be relied upon to provide both; he taught at the drama school and patronised a variety of theatrical events, the festival among them. His latest triumph had been as Prospero in The Tempest, a production for which tickets had been sold out weeks in advance. I had managed to see it several times, and knew it almost by heart.

  Now, as he strode in with an arch ‘Buon giorno, cara mia’ for the secretary, I was seeing him close up for the first time. For a moment I was all but struck dumb with the thrill. But when he magnanimously offered me his hand and with his typical disingenuousness hastened to introduce himself, I recovered my wits and hazarded a gambit in which I suddenly perceived the glimmer of a chance: I addressed him in the words of Ariel:

  All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come

  To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,

  To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

  On the curl’d clouds, to thy strong bidding task

  Ariel and all his quality.

  Whereupon, sizing me up with a keen glance and finding me apparently to his approval, he assumed his Prospero’s severe and haughty look and, taking up where I’d left off, replied:

  Hast thou, spirit,

  Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?

  ‘To every article,’ I said, and went on:

  I boarded the king’s ship; now on the beak,

  Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,

  I flam’d amazement . . .

  He took a step toward me and threw an arm around my shoulders:

  My brave spirit!

  Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

  Would not infect his reason?

  I galloped on:

  Not a soul . . .

  – but then I paused, as if hesitating, and, looking my extraordinary partner straight in the eye, found myself, to my astonishment, continuing in heroic iambics:

  But stay, one such there was – alack, the same,

  Indeed, who stands before you now, come hither

  By dreams of everlasting glory driv’n,

  My entry here to register. This pageant,

  Liege, on which your justice will ere long pronounce

  I would fain enter; but this dread Sycorax –

  I gestured in the general direction of the secretary –

  This monstrous hag, who here doth sit and paint

  Her claws all day, informs me that the deadline

  Now is past. It passed at noon, she says –

  I glanced at my watch –

  ’Twas but three hours ago! Thus envious Fortune

  Deceitfully hath pierced my hopes, and shot

  Her arrows through my flesh. What now, my lord?

  My hopes are spread before you, and my fate

  In your good graces lies. I do beseech thee,

  Give me your hand, and lend me your good favour.

  For this, good sir, most humbly do I pray thee.

  During this improvised tirade S. had been eyeing me with markedly increasing stupefactio
n. Now, as I declaimed my final line, he shook himself out of his stunned state and took up my challenge:

  ’Tis Sycorax, thou sayst, who bars your entry?

  Nay, ’twill not do. I’ll bind her with my magic:

  Thus will she break. In such a one ’tis folly

  To oppose me. She’ll do my bidding.

  With a mock-serious scowl he strode toward the secretary, stretched out his arms as if to draw her into the hypnotic coils of his magic, and declaimed:

  Attendest thou, cruel queen? Dost thou not hear me?

  This youth must be admitted. You’ll see to it.

  And she, melting with adoration under his gaze and falling unwittingly into the flow of the rhythm, replied in the same metre:

  Yes, sir, at once, of course, I’ll do it now!

  At this S. also seemed to relax and lose some of his starchiness. He spread his arms in a rapturous gesture, a blissful smile on his face. And with grotesque sweetness he cooed his favourite phrase: ‘Ah, how lovely!’ Embracing her in a fatherly hug, he began to stroke her hair. At which she flushed and bared her teeth in a nervous smile, full of shame and sweet longing.

  Going home, I walked on air. Within less than half an hour I had been subjected to a hail of experiences so remarkable that each one of them would take days to digest. I had met S., actually met him, in person! What’s more, we had clowned about together, and played our parts as equals, for all the world as if we were on stage; and I had charmed him – I had enchanted him! Most important of all, I had succeeded in getting my group entered in the festival – and with what aplomb! I was bursting with exhilaration and pride. And I felt sure, felt deep in my bones, that here at last was the hour of my triumph; my time had finally come. After such a beginning, such a radical reversal of fate, things could only get better.

  I hastened to round up the cast to tell them the good news and explain what it would mean for us. I felt as if I were addressing troops on the eve of battle.

  ‘I know we’ll win this competition; I can feel it,’ I said as I concluded my morale-building speech. ‘Just imagine how the Tapeworm will look when he finds out! You’ll be covered in glory!’

  For the first time they seemed genuinely convinced. Our performance, since it had been entered at the so-called last minute, was slotted in at the end of the festival, so we had a chance to assess the competition before our turn came. But in the end I decided that this was not an advantage. If the other performances were good, especially if they were very good, they might sow seeds of doubt and clip our wings; if, on the other hand, they were bad, and especially if they were hopeless, they would detract from the value and sweetness of a deserved triumph. I assessed my strategies like a general before a decisive confrontation with the enemy.

  We arrived at the theatre where the festival was taking place a short time before we were due on stage. It was the interval, and one of the first people we bumped into was S. himself, surrounded by a garland of juvenile admirers, presumably festival participants, and basking in their reverent gaze. It was as if he had been waiting for our – or rather, my – arrival. He raised his hands in a gesture of greeting and (having manifestly prepared his lines) exclaimed:

  Here’s Ariel! Spirit, farest thou well? What magic,

  My quaint bird, hast thou prepared for us?

  A wave of heat flooded over me and my heart began to race. It was clear that much depended on what, and how, I replied. Without much reflection, therefore, and heedless of the dreadful risk involved – that of falling flat on my face in front of an unknown audience – I blurted out, making sure only to keep the metre:

  ’Twill be enough, good master, if I say

  That you’ll see all the world on stage anon!

  Then, to avoid further complications, I gestured pointedly at my watch and turned energetically to the dressing-rooms. The remaining cast members, beaming with pride, followed joyfully on my heels. Just before the door closed I heard S. still casting his charms over his admirers. ‘That’s how we always talk,’ he was saying.

  Our performance went very well, as I’d been sure that it would. There was no question of anyone’s forgetting his lines – not a single slip, not even so much as a stutter. Our acting was inspired, and we enjoyed it. One by one, the most sublime scenes from the greatest works of drama unrolled before the audience, each culminating in a monologue that fulfilled the function of a Greek chorus. But the force did not flow from our technique, our mastery of the texts or our confidence on stage. It flowed mainly from the fact that every line we uttered was imbued with truth – the truth of our own feelings and experience. In speaking the lines it was as if we were talking about ourselves. Just as the crowd of students had taken up that ‘No more’ and endowed it with a meaning of their own, so now we were singing our own song, with the words of the classics as our text.

  It was a song of anger and rebellion, bitterness and resentment. Not this, it said – youth should not be like this! School should not be like this, the world should not be like this! Prometheus chained to his rock was a young teacher we had adored, fired for ‘excessive liberality’ in the classroom. The unyielding, uncompromising Creon personified the narrow-minded Tapeworm. Every silly and pathetic Shakespearean creature represented the Eunuch or his like. But the Misanthrope I reserved for myself: Alceste was me. It was with special relish that I spoke the lines of his final speech:

  May you always be true to each other, and know

  All the joys and contentments that love can bestow.

  As for me, foully wronged, maligned and betrayed,

  I’ll abandon this world where injustice holds sway

  And retire to some tranquil and far-away place

  Where honour’s a virtue and not a disgrace.

  But I put even more intensity into Hamm’s monologue from Endgame – perhaps because these were the closing lines of our performance. I took a few steps forward, stared piercingly at the audience, in particular at the jury, seated at a long table with S., their chairman, in the middle, and began with tremendous calm:

  Me to play.

  You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh,

  and little by little . . . you begin to grieve.

  I cast a long, lingering look around the room and went on:

  All those I might have helped. Helped!

  Saved. Saved!

  The place was crawling with them.

  Then I turned on the assembled company with a thunderous glare and launched with fury into the attack:

  Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on

  earth, there’s no cure for that. Get out of here and

  love one another! Lick your neighbour as yourself!

  Out of my sight and back to your petting parties!

  Having spat this out, I sank into a kind of gloomy apathy and spoke the final two sentences softly, as if more to myself than to the audience:

  All that, all that!

  The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

  I let my head sink slowly down, and then came the blackout, during which we all hurried offstage.

  The storm of applause that broke out left no room for doubt as to the results of the competition. And, indeed, we were not left long in suspense. The good news, at that stage still unofficial, was brought to us about an hour later, in the foyer, where we ran into the members of the jury as they emerged from their deliberations. It was S., of course, who announced it – predictably, in the following form:

  Most excellent, my spirit! Thou didst well

  And worthily perform. The prize is yours.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I replied, finally putting an end to this Shakespearean back-and-forth. ‘It’s too beautiful to be true . . .’

  ‘You’ll soon see for yourself,’ he said, likewise reverting to prose. ‘Prospero never lies. At most . . . he might play tricks,’ he added with a roguish wink, and proceeded to honour us each in turn with a shake of the hand and a solemn ‘Congratulations�
�.

  I was happy. Here it was, granted at last – the thing I’d dreamed of so often. The reality of which I was a part, which I had in a sense created, was indeed on a par with the stuff of legend. I felt like a hero whose deeds would go down in history. I was not, however, allowed to feel this way for long.

  A few days later, when official news of our victory reached the school, the Tapeworm ascended the stage at morning assembly (which on Saturdays always included a summing-up of the week) and proceeded to favour us with a speech. It went more or less as follows: ‘It is my pleasure to inform you all, as well as the School Board, that our drama group has won first prize at this year’s Festival of School and Amateur Theatres. We congratulate them; we are delighted.’

  ‘There, you see, sir?’ shouted our Haemon, unable to contain himself. ‘And you didn’t want to approve it!’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ replied the Tapeworm with a complacent smile. ‘What I didn’t want to approve was something quite different, something that certainly wouldn’t have won you any prizes. Fortunately your leader’ – his eyes sought me out and he pointed in my direction – ‘turned out to be a sensible boy. He took my advice and made the necessary changes.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ I couldn’t let such a brazen lie pass. ‘We played everything according to the script!’

  ‘The e-men-ded script,’ he enunciated, wagging a playful finger at me to defuse the tension in the air: I was, after all, publicly accusing him of lying. ‘But enough of this squabbling over trivialities,’ he concluded magnanimously.

  The Tapeworm’s move was not without effect. Although in principle people believed me, not him, seeds of doubt had been sown: the deputy head had his faults, but it was hard to believe him capable of such deceit. So we were constantly baited and teased – jokingly, but in an annoying way – with questions like, ‘Well, was it censored or not?’