Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  “Dost thou think, Claudio,

  If I would yield him my virginity,

  Thou mightest be freed.”

  Claudio, answering, had difficulty concealing the hope that surges beneath his pious protest:

  “O heavens! it cannot be.”

  And Isabella:

  “Yes, he would give’t thee, from this rank offense,

  So to offend him still. This night’s the time

  That I should do what I abhor to name,

  Or else thou diest tomorrow.’

  “Isn’t it time you returned to them?” she asked. The sudden thaw was, as suddenly, starred with frost. “If the Duke is to enter on cue.”

  “There’s a moment yet, and I’d rather spend it here. We won’t be alone again, you and I, expect for an instant on stage, for …”

  “Forever. Isn’t that what I said? And what you’ve agreed to? I don’t remember now how that came about. What my reasons could have been. It seemed logical then. Wouldn’tyou feel, if you were to run into me again, out there, as if this prison had breathed on you? All my talk aboutdistrust –you must, if you’ve not been trying todeceive me, feel just the same thing toward me. The samedistrust. The same reluctance.”

  “That’s true,” he said.

  “Yet you would be willing, despite that—

  “To see you again, out there. Yes. I’dwant to.”

  She turned away from him to look across the darkenedVillage at the gray, gleaming planes of the administrationbuilding. “Where?”

  “Wherever you like.”

  “Westminster Bridge?”

  “That’s as good a place as any.”

  “On the side by Big Ben. I’ll go there once a week.What day?”

  “Saturday, or any other.”

  “Saturday, then, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Do youbelieve me when I say. I really hope you’ll be there?”

  “We must try to stop asking each other, Liora, how much we believe of what we say to each other. Soon enough,that will be put to the test. And for now—” He opened the door to the stairwell.

  They listened, attentively, to Claudio, as he sank terror-stricken into a new vice.

  “Sweet sister, let me live.

  What sin you do to save a brother’s life,

  Nature dispenses with the deed so far

  That it becomes a virtue.”

  “Now the god must run downstairs to tend his machine, I know. Oh! one last thing, Number 6.”

  He turned, silhouetted by the fluorescence streaming from the stairwell, the hooded figure of a Franciscan monk.

  “What I tried to say before, what it is I owe you.” Again she hesitated at the sum, and he had time to notice that herface, in this peculiar incidence of light, with its heavy theatrical makeup, was not a face he would easily have recognized. Even the self-defeated smile belonged more to Mariana than to either the Liora he remembered of the Lorna she claimed to be.

  She averted her eyes. “An apology,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He raced down the stairs, taking each flight at two bounds, the friar’s robe bundled about his waist. He paused two beats outside the exit to let the robe fall into place and reached the wings at Claudio’s cue:

  “O hear me, Isabella.”

  As he stepped into the light (the judgment chamber of the second act had become, by adding indigo filters to the overhead spots and modifying their amperage, by replacing doors with grates, by scattering a bit of straw about, the dungeon of Act III), he reminded himself that he was no longer who he had been a moment before: he was now a Duke who is impersonating a friar; who pretends to encounter as though by chance a beautiful young nun in the condemned cell of a Viennese prison; who, bending his head, says to her in a near whisper:

  “Vouchsafe a word, young sister, but one word.”

  Tears trembled at the corners of the brown eye and the blue, but she allowed no pain to be audible in her cold, conventionally reverent reply:“What is your will?”

  (This fleeting thought: Sheis an actress!)

  Then, he was inside the play again, he was the Duke devising Machiavellian schemes to honor clandestine virtue and expose guilts veiled by fair appearance. Till the curtain went down on the third act he could think nothought of his own. Mariana’s cottage was being wheeled into position for the opening ofACT IV.

  The lighting now (and throughout the play) bore out his contention that this was the blackest of Shakespeare’s comedies. The audience would have difficulty, from more than a few rows back, to distinguish this crumb of decayed gingerbread from the dark prison walls just visible behind it.

  He felt a hand in his and gave a reassuring squeeze before he realized it was the Doctor–Isabella–Number 14.

  “How am I doing?” she asked.

  He mustered a smile. “Innocence was never threatened so magnificently.” And let go of her hand.

  Another hand: on his shoulder: Number 7, wearing scraps of the elegance Claudio had preened at his entrance in Act I. He whispered into the monk’s cowl: “It sprang a leak.”

  This was (he thought) the instant of treachery he had been waiting for all this time. His fist clenched (he did not think) around the golden tatters.

  “It’s fixed!” Number 7 cried aloud. “For God’s sake, don’thit me!”

  The stage manager, in the wings opposite them, made frantic hand-signals: The curtain? The curtain?

  “Where is Liora?” he demanded.

  “Number 41is on the set–waiting, like all the rest of us, for thecurtain to go up,” he answered reproachfully. “The intermission has lasted fifteen minutes. If you hold things up much longer, you’ll have the entire theaterwondering . I’ve never seen you like this, Number 6.”

  He signaled back to the stage manager. As the curtainrose, a snare drum trembled in the pit; then, in unison, tenor recorder and horn d’amour, in their lowest registers, sounded the slow triads of Mariana’s song. The simple melody swelled, ebbed, faded back into the knife-edge rolling of the drum, across which Liora’s piercing, flawed soprano traced the same mournful pattern:

  “Take, O take those lips away,

  That so sweetly were forsworn …”

  His hand still gripped the ragged collar, and he shook Number 7 back and forth to the rhythm of his words, the rhythm of Mariana’s song: “Now tell me, again, and coherently, whathappened up there?”

  “Nothing. Really. A false alarm.” He writhed and groveled, whined and smiled, never departing from the character of Claudio. “Number 28 is fixing it now. He’sfinished fixing it. Just alittle leak. The balloon’s already in theair .”

  “How long a delay will this mean?”

  “And those eyes, the break of day,

  Lights that do mislead the morn …”

  “Five minutes at most, he says. But it will be ready at the curtain call, and you can’t go up to the roof till then, in any case. It doesn’t change a thing.”

  “It means that she’ll panic.”

  “So? You needn’t tell her. It’s not the delay that upsets you, is it? You thought I’d sabotaged your project. Admit it.”

  “Damn.” And, on reconsideration: “Damn!”

  At the refrain, recorder and horn again joined the song, moving first in opposition to the soprano’s ascending melody, then, as though she could not resist their downward impulse, uniting with it in a slow decline to silence:

  “But my kisses bring again, bring again,

  Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.”

  “That’s your cue,” Number 7 said.

  It was. It was his cue.

  “What wasthat all about?” the doctor asked her brother, as soon as the Duke had begun to deliver his lines.

  “A little game, a bit of amusement.”

  “We shouldn’t go out of our way, you know, to worry him,” she said, worriedly. “Didit have a leak?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why on earth—”
<
br />   “Don’t raise your voice,” he said loudly. (With his sister he seemed to prefer to take the role of Angelo.) “He’ll hear you.”

  “It will only make him moreanxious to get up there the minute the curtain comes down–and that much harder forme .”

  “I’ve told you that that’s already taken care of. Don’t, don’t, don’tfret! Stop acting like yourself, and act like Isabella. You’reon , in seconds. Good lord, you can’t collapsenow . This is the crucial moment of our own little play, symbolically: this is where it’s arranged for you and Mariana to exchange places. Get out there, darling–and break your leg.Now! ”

  The doctor stumbled in the wings; Isabella walked gravely on to the stage, a symbolic moment that was, after all, only one among many.

  Shortly afterward, it was another woman who stood with Number 7.

  “Can they see us from where they are?” he asked.

  “No. I tried to all through my song. You were soloud –you nearly ruined it.”

  “Does that matter?We won’t be here to read the reviews.”

  She stood on tiptoes, waiting.

  “You’resure they can’t see us?” he asked teasingly.

  “I wish theycould .”

  He kissed her: the exchange had been completed.

  “Do you love me?” he asked.

  “Loveyou? ” she asked incredulously. “Don’t be silly–I love him.”

  “Then shouldn’t you save your kisses, my dear Judas, for him?”

  “I save a special kind for him. Doyou loveme ?”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “I love …” He had to stop and consider.

  Meanwhile, before the painted door of the canvas cottage, Isabella was explaining, to the disguised Duke, the arrangement she had made for her night in Angelo’s bed, an appointment which the Duke would then have to persuade Mariana (who had been, years before, compromised and abandoned by that same villain, when her dowry had been lost at sea) to keep in her stead. By such devious means (the false friar assured her) would virtue emerge not only triumphant but unscathed.

  Reluctantly, as though she still were not fully persuaded that virtue could be so oblique, she repeated Angelo’s instructions:

  “He hath a garden circummur’d with brick,

  Whose western side is with a vineyard back’d;

  And to that vineyard is a planched gate,

  That makes his opening with this bigger key.

  This other doth command a little door

  Which from the vineyard to the garden leads.

  There have I made my promise,

  Upon the heavy middle of the night,

  To call upon him.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Act V, and After

  Isabella has made her accusations against Angelo, Mariana has confirmed them, and the Duke has revealed himself to have been the Friar who arranged the details of Mariana’s assignation.

  Only the denouement remains.

  “Sir,”he said to Angelo,“by your leave.” He paused to gather fresh thunderbolts, while the guilty deputy, revealed, disgraced, curled into a heap of abasement at his feet.

  “Hast thou or word, or wit, or impudence

  That yet can do thee office? If thou hast,

  Rely upon it till my tale be heard,

  And hold no longer out.”

  Angelo’s sternness, turning against itself, became the cringing of Claudio:

  “O my dread lord!

  I should be guiltier than my guiltiness

  To think I can be undiscernible,

  When I perceive your Grace, like power divine,

  Hath looked upon my passes. Then, good Prince,

  No longer session hold upon my shame,

  But let my trial be my own confession.

  Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death

  Is all the grace I beg.”

  He gestured sternly to Liora.“Come hither, Mariana.”

  Reluctantly she released the Doctor’s hand to step forward a pace, two. She seemed acutely sensible of her own guilt in creating this scene, as though not justice but revenge had been her motive in helping to bring Angelo this low.

  “Say,”the Duke demanded of Angelo,“wast thou erecontracted to this woman?”

  Angelo, in the fury of his penitence, had knocked his eyeglasses to the stage. Squinting, he moved toward her on his knees.

  Liora–Lorna–Number 41–Mariana took a third step forward.

  “I was, my lord.”

  “Go and take her hence, and marry her instantly.

  Do you the office, Friar-which consumate,

  Return him here again. Go with him, Provost.”

  Exeunt Number 7 and Liora, flanked by a monk and the prison warden.

  He stepped down from the rude wooden platform erected on this make-believe highway that looked remarkably like a brothel, a judgment chamber and a prison.

  At the Duke’s first step toward Isabella these multivalent walls were to begin their slow evaporation, while the lights would mount toward an afternoon brightness. He waited for the man at the light box to pick up his cue.

  In the expectant silence he could hear, off-stage, the opening and closing of a door.

  At his next step the light dimmed. The small crowd of Officers, Citizens and Attendants assembled on the stage shifted uneasily.

  There was no help for it: he began the brief scene in which the Duke, not done dissembling, condoles with Isabella for the death of her brother (who isn’t dead). By his last line–“Make it your comfort, so happy is your brother.”–thick night had palled the stage in the dunnest smoke of hell. A single feeble spot picked out the faces of the Duke and Isabella.

  Angelo and Mariana returned (bound in wedlock), a black shimmer of velveteen, a sheen of black rayon. Contrary to his own blocking, he approached the pair of them as he pronounced the sentence (which he would, a moment later, revoke):“ ‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’ ” Angelo collapsed, throwing his arms over his head (another departure from the acting script), while Mariana backed away from him along the edge of the apron until her long gown had snagged in the extinguished footlights.

  He repeated her cue:“Away with him!”

  “O, my most gracious lord!”the blond waitress cried, with genuine terror.“I hope you will not mock me … witha husband.”

  The Duke’s pause exceeded Mariana’s in its unreasonableness. Even the most tolerant members of the audience were beginning to think this an eccentric interpretation to judge by the sudden epidemic of coughing from the orchestra and balcony.

  Recalling that the balloon would not be ready to ascend before the curtain fell, he decided to continue to be theDuke. The play was near its end, in any case. The few moments’ head-start she’d won by having Number 127 stand in for her would not, probably, prove to be decisive.

  When the Duke began speaking again, his delivery was more eccentric than his sudden, unaccountable silence. It was almost as hard to distinguish the words rushing past as it was to make out the faces of the actors on the darkened stage, and even when the words could be sorted out their sense could not be, for he was omitting phrases, lines, entire speeches seemingly at random. When Isabella and Mariana tried to plead in Angelo’s behalf, he interrupted at their first pause for breath. He dispatched the Provost off-stage to resurrect Claudio, and a full minute before he had returned (barely in time for the end) he addressed the darkness as though it already contained Claudio (as, for all anyone in the audience could tell, it might have).

  With a final admonition to Angelo to love his wife (omitting the final scene with Lucio, as he had skipped past Escalus already), he began the Duke’s concluding speech. It went by, like a racing car, in a single blur of blank verse, braking only as he reached the last six lines of the play. This much, a few seconds, he was willing to sacrifice for art’s sake:

  “Dear Isabel,

  I have a motion much imports your good,

  Whereto if you’ll a willing ear inc
line,

  What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.

  So, bring us to your palace, where we’ll show

  What’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know.”

  By sticking out the play to its end he had lost, at most, two and a half minutes. Now, as soon as the curtain dropped …

  Instead, in floods of light, the audience rose, as though it had often rehearsed this moment, clapping and cheering, and the cast surrounded him. Hands wrapped about his arms and legs, lifted him into the air, placed him on the shoulders of the Provost and Lucio, who carried him forward in triumph to the foot of the stage. The applause swelled. Flowers arced upward, fell to the stage and into the pit. The last row of the balcony began stamping its communal feet, and soon the entire theater had taken up the steady, stupefying rhythm.

  Not till Angelo had stepped forward for his second stand-call did he notice that it was not Number 7 in Angelo’s velveteen robes, but the doctor’s assistant, Number 28, who had prepared the balloon for its ascent. Likewise (as 7’s double role had required), it was another actor who received the applause for Claudio.

  This was a possibility he had never once imagined, and what he found so astonishing now was not their collusion but his own guilelessness: neveronce!

  When he had stopped trying to squirm down off their shoulders, they lowered him of their own accord. Hand in hand with the leading lady, he took several calls. She was presented with an enormous bouquet of roses, white and red together as at a funeral. He was given a plaque, with his number etched on the gilt plate beneath two masks, one that smiled and one that frowned.