by Bill Adams
Topolina asked for another glass of wine, shuffled the Trumps back into the deck, and said, “Tesoro mio, I will tell your future. You know the cards?”
“A little,” I admitted.
She’d seen something in my eyes. “Ah, but you do not believe in them.”
I shrugged. “I am a Kanalist, like my boss. We are mystics, yes—but not supernaturalists.”
“What does that mean?”
“When you want to understand how the world works, it is best to take it apart, like a scientist or engineer—to use reason. But you must also be able to drink in the world whole, without any words or numbers between you and it.” I thought of the literary critics I’d gulled earlier. “To know the world as you know a symphony, because you have let it wash all the way through you, without snatching at any part of it. Using abstract reason on everything, putting words to everything, would be like counting out the time while you danced—pointless even if it didn’t trip you up. Does that make sense?”
“What does it have to do with the Tarot?”
“Reason doesn’t tell us everything, yes. But just because the natural world is bigger than our sciences doesn’t make the sciences wrong. There is no supernatural. Things don’t fall up, time doesn’t run backward, and I can’t discover my future in the cards.”
“Again and again,” Topolina said, “people have come back to me and said, ‘Topolina, the cards that didn’t seem to make sense proved absolutely right in the end.’ ”
“Oh, I believe that. My old Master used to say that all oracles prove right when you look back on them. That’s because any present state of the world is so fractally multifarious, so overfull of things, that some of those things must match the symbols.”
Topolina was quite unsnowed. “So you’ve said it yourself: what is on the cards now must match something in the future, yes?”
“Yes, but—”
“Hah, and so much for words. A picture”—she showed me a picture card for emphasis—“is worth a thousand words.” The other girls crowed at this clear-cut rhetorical victory, which I conceded with raised hands. “Now first, you must think—to yourself, do not speak it—the question you want the cards to answer.”
It’s impossible to think of nothing, of course; perhaps I thought, Who is the Pretender? perhaps, What will become of me?
“Next,” Topolina said, “we must choose a card to signify you. You are a wandering actor, you tell me. Perhaps you should choose the Magician, then, who is also the Juggler. Perhaps the Fool, who wanders with a pack on his back. But when I look at you, I see the Cavalier of Swords—the knight who fights the storm and is the storm…Pick one.”
I picked the Fool. Odysseus is a wanderer.
She shuffled the deck, then picked up the Fool with her left hand and used it to cut the cards. She placed the Fool in front of me on the table, turned the top card, and placed it face-up on top of the Fool, saying, “This covers you. This is the water you swim in.”
It was a picture of a sort of ferris wheel run by a blind goddess, and in the seats were three monkeys wearing crowns, rising or falling depending on where they were.
“Fortune, the Wheel,” said Topolina. “See these words, ‘Regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno’?”
“ ‘I shall reign, I reign, I reigned, I am without a reign,’ ” I translated.
Topolina nodded. “The revolution they all speak of—that’s what covers you.” She turned the next card and placed it across the other two horizontally, saying, “This crosses you. Your obstacle, your riddle, your enemy.”
It was the Cavalier of Swords, upside-down.
“Reversed,” Topolina noted. “A brave fighter, a knight in shining armor, but wild—and reversed may mean, you know,” she tapped the side of her head, “matto…a psicopatico, yes?”
“Could be,” I said. “I mark the warning.”
She gave me a dark look to see if I was kidding, and added, “Remember what I said before. The Cavalier could be you; it could be yourself you are fighting.” Then she placed the next card above my buried Fool. “This crowns you. It may be what you most desire, or perhaps only the best you can hope for.”
A beautiful woman forcing open the jaws of a lion.
“Strength,” Topolina read, bobbing her head back and forth as she considered. “A fight to come. Endurance. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to hang in there, yes?”
“Yes.”
“There may be more to it.” But she abandoned it after a moment and turned the next card below the Fool’s feet. “This is beneath you, maybe the ground beneath your feet, maybe undercurrents you cannot see.”
A bearded wise man in a monk’s habit, holding a lantern high. Upside-down.
“The Hermit,” she explained. “Well, that’s clear.”
“Clear?”
“The Master you spoke of?”
Summerisle had in fact lived many years as a hermit, but I said only, “He’s dead.”
“And what he taught you, is that not the ground on which you stand?”
“You win.”
“Reversed. There is a secret here; he is still working through you, you’ll see.” She placed the next card to one side of the Fool, the side he was not facing. “This is behind you, in the past.”
A beautiful woman on a throne marked with the astrological symbol for Venus.
“The Empress, very rich, very powerful, very sexiful. She loved you so much, she might have devoured you. Sometimes a man’s mother.”
“My mother died young.”
“But you know this woman.”
“No argument.”
She smiled, and faced a card on the other side of the Fool. “This is before you, in the future.”
Another woman, with red hair and a slightly boyish jaw and shoulders, but beautiful, with a wooden staff in one hand—seated on another throne, this one shaped like crouching lions.
“Aha!” Topolina said. “The Queen of Fiore, Staves. This is a good woman to love you: smart, strong, like Diana the Huntress, and look—look at the lions. This is what Strength meant, that crowns you. If you endure and win, you will keep her—that’s what winning will be.”
“I know of no one like this—except maybe Fragolina.”
Everyone giggled, and Fragolina playfully batted at my arm.
“But that’s in the future, that’s why.” Now Topolina moved to one side of the cross of cards she had created, and placed a card apart. “This is yourself as you are now.”
The Magician she’d offered me before, standing at a table full of occult props and waving his wand. The girls laughed again.
“I told you this was the actor’s card.” She laid the next one just above it. “And this is your house, those people nearest you.”
A heart, with three swords stuck in it, and rain falling all around.
“The Three of Swords. Not a good card. In this position, I don’t know. Separation from a loved one just before the final battle. Maybe.” She looked into my eyes. “Three swords, one heart…there’s more here, maybe, than either of us can see. The next card tells of your hopes and fears. Sometimes that is another picture of you yourself.” She added it to the top of the column.
The Emperor on his throne, a globe in one hand, a scepter in the other. Upside-down. The Dead Emperor, perhaps?
Topolina had been watching my face closely. “This makes sense, yes?”
“Sort of. A nightmare I have. Fears more than hopes.”
“I’m sorry. Sometimes it means the favor of the Consultant. But not to a revolutionary, no. But here is the end, the last card, anyway. Your destiny.”
A castle turret split by lightning, a man and woman falling to their deaths.
“The Tower. The House of God, they call it sometimes.” She put one hand on mine. “It is bad. Catastrophe for most—but freedom for the strong. And remember, tesoro mio, you have strength on your side.”
“I’ll remember, little mouse,” I said, and leaned fo
rward to kiss her forehead. But her troubled expression didn’t change as she gathered up the cards.
Just then the door to the master bedroom opened, and Paparella came in first, cloaked and discreetly poker-faced. The Pretender followed, not concealing a mood gone sour. “Found the vino, I see. Paparella says you tell fortunes, mouse. Pour me a glass, Chris.”
I passed him some wine while Topolina—the only whore who hadn’t earned her fee yet, I realized—hurriedly asked him which card he wished to choose to signify himself; she could suggest—
“The Magician,” he said, without hesitation.
She cut the deck with the Magician, and covered him with the Empress. The Emperor crossed him. Revolution crowned him. The Hermit lay beneath him—and now Topolina’s fingers were trembling as she glanced between my face and his. All the same cards in a different order: his past the sadness of Three of Swords, his future the battle of Strength, himself the Knight of Swords reversed, his house—a false friend—the Queen of Staves reversed, his hopes and fears or perhaps his inner self The Fool, and his Destiny…
“Madonna Verdi!” she said, and clapped her free hand over her mouth.
The Tower.
“You forgot to shuffle them, cretina!” Dolcezza shrieked, and they all laughed themselves giddy, Topolina with relief, while the Pretender looked on in smiling bewilderment. But she would not try again.
We were six, just right for an evening of Trumps. Native to Venezia, this was an elaboration of the ancient game called Hearts. But the cards that counted one point against you were not hearts, but the twenty-two Major Arcana. And it was not just the Queen of Spades—Swords—that counted fourteen points against you, but the Cavalier as well, unless they fell on the same trick, in which case they were “married” and harmless. And it was not just the Ten of Diamonds—Coins—that was worth ten favorable points, but all the Tens. And, finally, you could choose, when playing one of the Arcana, whether it was a discard or a trick-taking trump.
Hearts is a bloody game, but Trumps is ten times as brutal, and the girls played it for money. The Pretender was an old hand, but I had to struggle, keeping up a literary conversation with him on the side, while the girls called each other “Serpente!” and “Traditore!” I tried to follow what he was saying about how Olivier or Kshatriya or someone never took a breath at the natural pauses in Shakespearean verse, but sneaked them in elsewhere, so that he never seemed to breathe at all—while Topolina interrupted from time to time with some lethal exception to the rules: “If you have taken the Queen of Swords, you may promote the Fool, who has no number, to highest Trump—if you wish”; or, “I forgot to tell you, the Ten of Swords is not negative ten points like the other tens, but it negates all the Trumps you take this hand, okay?” But it was fun.
I even lost some of my irritation with the Pretender when he looked pleased to see the girls so involved and happy. I realized that everyone else he dealt with wanted a piece of his personality, a dab of his charisma; maybe it was justifiable, even necessary, to find rest with those who would be happy with money alone. But I was determined to stop being the yes man; when he tried to fill my glass a fourth time I put my hand over the top and said, “Too much spoils it.” He blinked; I’d made a dent.
And when, at three o’clock, he paid Topolina less than the rest of the girls, I made up the difference. And when he said he’d have one of his Hard Men escort them home, I stayed his hand at the intercom and said, “No, I’ll take them.”
“You have a rehearsal in the morning, Chris. Crash in one of these spare rooms. One of my boys will take them.”
“Yeah, and what else will he do, to make up for your waking him now? How does their kind work off steam against girls who can’t fight back? I’ll see them home. It’s okay to play with toys, Boss, but you have to put them away safe afterward.”
“Okay…Dad. You girls go down to the dock; Chris will be along in a minute.” I wondered if we were going to quarrel, but after they left, his manner was apologetic. “Don’t be mad, Chris. It’s not that I don’t think they’re human…just that nothing seems quite real to me. A crazy dream, you’d see it in my place. Let me show you something.” He picked drunkenly through the books on a nearby shelf. “Forgotten little gem by Walter de la Mare. On Napoléon. Byron admired Napoléon at first, you know. At first. He’s mentioned in the original Manfred somewhere, one of the spirits brags of freeing him from Elba:
‘The Captive Usurper,
Hurl’d down from the throne,
Lay buried in torpor,
Forgotten and lone;
I broke through his slumbers,
I shiver’d his chain,
I leagued him with numbers—
He’s Tyrant again!
With the blood of a million he’ll answer my care,
With a nation’s destruction—his flight and despair.’ ”
I had no idea what the Pretender was babbling about, but suddenly he found the book he was looking for, leafed to the de la Mare poem, and showed it to me. “You read Ur-Linguish, don’t you, Chris? This is what I’m talking about. It’s crazy to think you’re Napoléon…even if you are. Even if you are.”
I read the short poem, and read it again.
“Do you see, Chris? That’s what it’s like.”
I just nodded, and left. But in the gondola, with the whores sleeping on each other’s shoulders aft, I watched the blue dock-lights dance in the water and thought about it.
NAPOLEON
“What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.
Chapter Thirteen
Another few weeks of rehearsals passed, and at some point I realized I’d achieved my goal. I had become the Pretender’s confidant, his father confessor, his friend. I kept my room at the Hotel Angleterre, for I needed the privacy to take off the gyal-wa mask at least once every forty-eight hours. But I often flopped in a spare bed in the Pretender’s palace suite after we’d spent long hours drinking or smoking hard stuff or talking, talking, talking.
Things we talked about: the four humors, fencing on stage, the Claudian emperors, comedy versus tragedy, Ur-Linguish prosody, actors and actresses, redheaded women, cats, sailing, deep space, the military, butterflies, wine versus beer, whiskey versus sex, the great books, Kanalism, the stories of Daedalus and Odysseus, the sayings of Heraclitus and Lao Tse, Szechuan food, Lord Byron versus Shelley, the erotic versus the pornographic, frustration and sadism, the hard-ons of hanged men, death by drowning, the stupidity of Wayback sheep, the length of men’s hair, the folly of fashions, free will, fate, ice cream, the last act of Hamlet…The list could be twenty times as long.
The Pretender still found time to work in some serious wenching. His groupies repelled me, but a smart-mouthed waitress at the Flying Dutchman was something else again—deft, affectionate, and funny—and I missed more than the sex when she stopped barhopping with us to accept a better job a few hundred kilometers across town.
While the Pretender hated to pass up any vice, I did manage to slowly cut down the level of intoxicants by pressing him harder and harder when we fenced in the mornings, working on his vanity, prodding him to choose fitness. I was afraid to do otherwise. My own head for liquor dates back to a time booze almost sank me, the first few years after I arrived in this century. I’d beaten it then, and the measure of my victory was that I could still indulge; but I knew better than to think I had a permanent immunity to the habits that grow stronger and stronger until they master you.
The more the Pretender shaped up, the more I found myself liking and pitying him, despite myself. The obnoxious excesses were not natural to him; they were the stigmata of celebrity. When the whole human sphere sucks up to you, what do you do? You can adopt the popular view of your own total wonderfulness—or feel fraudulent and unworthy in the face of it
. Either way, you can never behave naturally again; it’s a ticket to the madhouse. It made me wonder if I ever wanted to be known as Evan Larkspur myself.
The Pretender presumably suffered another kind of stress—that of Pretending. But he couldn’t speak of that directly. Maddening. I had come so far, yet I knew little more than when I started. And I was learning nothing new, because it was important to him not to talk politics with me. And the secret of who he really was, whom he was fronting for and why—that was all politics, apparently.
So my problem slowly ground itself sharper and sharper. Any day now I could expect to be contacted by the Tribunal’s mystery man, Rezakhan, and put to work against the Pretender. I couldn’t help Von Bülow against any legitimate anti-Column effort, but the only alternative probably required revealing my true identity to the Pretender. And I still didn’t trust him. I didn’t understand a single thing he did.
◆◆◆
One night the Pretender and I had dinner with Julia and her mother. We ate at the Flying Dutchman, the Pretender’s favorite hangout. The interior of the Dutchman was decorated to suggest an ancient sailing ship, scudding along in a perpetual storm. The floors did not pitch and roll—it was thought better to leave seasickness out of the scenario—but the light fixtures swayed in time with a creaking in the wooden walls. Large portholes displayed holographic scenes of a wild sea and lightning-riven sky, and realistic wave and storm sounds played in lieu of background music. A host of minor details allowed you to infer a whole mythical history of the ship Flying Dutchman if you were in the mood, but the staff had the sense to play it as a fantasy retreat instead of a comedy routine. They didn’t address you “Ahoy, me hearty!” but quickly and quietly delivered good meals with large drinks.