The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  †Pronounced Foo Follay – Ed.

  ‡Jacques Ducrow (245–310), former cavalry sergeant and then equestrian, later proprietor Ducrow’s Efican Circus and (302–9) Ducrow Circus School. Ducrow claimed to be one of the English circus family which produced the equestrians Andrew, Charles and William and the clown William. There is good reason to doubt this.

  *Those Voorstanders only now acquainting themselves with Efican English may notice, from time to time, place names like Nabangari which seem to owe nothing to either English or French. The Nabangari was so named by the ‘lost’ Indigenous Peoples (IPs) of Efica. The names of these long dead people litter our islands – tombstones in a lost language. [TS]

  *The Efican circus has its roots in English circus – lions, elephants, equestrian acts, acrobatic performance, feats of strength. The Voorstand Sirkus began its extraordinary development, not as the powerful entertainment industry it is today, but as the expression of those brave Dutch heretics, the ‘Settlers Free’, who were intent on a Sirkus Sonder Gevangene – a Circus without ‘prisoners’, that is, one without animals. [TS]

  3

  On the afternoon of my birth, as the clock in the Chemin Rouge Town Hall struck three, an actor named Bill Millefleur sat down on one of the moulded plastic chairs in the Mater Hospital Maternity waiting room and began to peel the wrapper from a doigt de chocolat. My mother’s lover was very young – just twenty-two, but tall and handsome, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, with finely chiselled, beautifully shaped lips. He ate the chocolate bar quickly, hunched over, as if he were alone.

  There were, at the same time, two other men waiting in the same room, and they were there for the same reason Bill was. One of them – Wally Paccione – was the production manager of the Feu Follet. The other – Vincent Theroux – shared with Bill the distinction of being my maman’s lover.

  Bill worked with Wally every day, saw Vincent at least four times a week. Yet he managed to finish the chocolate without acknowledging either of them. He could not make them go away. Indeed, he feared they had some business being there.

  As he wiped his pretty lips carelessly with the back of his hand and folded his arms across his broad chest, he told himself again what he believed to be true.

  My mother had been with him when she conceived. It was him she loved. She had been with him when her waters broke. It was his speech she had walked out of, turning the great noisy latch and laying a jagged white knife-blade across the circle of his concentration. He had seen her, no one else had. Vincent had been at his office. And Wally, who was now acting in so pathetically paternal a way, had been up in the booth, and from the booth you could not see the door.

  It therefore seemed impossible that they should be here now, unless – and the very thought of this betrayal made Bill’s smooth cheeks darken – my mother had telephoned them.

  My maman had a curious network of loyalties, it is true, but in this case she had no time to telephone anyone – it was Bill Millefleur himself who sent the signal, by leaving the theatre without waiting for compliments about his work.

  When Wally Paccione learned Macbeth had disappeared before notes,* he knew I was about to be born, and he slid down the narrow ladder with a grin on his face which Bill – had he been able to witness it – would have found at once grotesque and threatening.

  Wally was fifty years old. He had big pale lips, a craggy nose, pale grey eyes, ginger bushy eyebrows, a tall freckled forehead, a receding hairline.

  When he strode across the centre of the stage the curve of his broad back suggested excitement, furtiveness, urgency, secrecy. He checked the ‘foyer’, then ran, hunched over, elbows tucked in against his ribs, up one flight of stairs, down three steps, and up another flight to the tower which had once housed the office of the Director of the Circus School but which was now my mother’s apartment. The tower was empty. He skittered down the narrow steps to the second floor. He knocked on the bathroom door and disturbed – not Bill, not my mother – but the notoriously constipated Claire Chen.

  While Bill was running across the Boulevard des Indiennes towards the Mater, Wally was using all his charm to persuade Claire to slide 5 dollars out under the door. He did not run to hospital. He went by cab. Thus he was already in the foyer when Bill came striding in. The two men, both six foot tall, rode up in the lift side by side staring at the numbers above the door.

  When they opened the Maternity waiting room door they found Vincent Theroux – forty-six years old, not very tall, wide in the shoulders but now plump, even portly. He was sitting in a plastic chair, still wearing his broad-rimmed black hat, smoking an Havana cigar. Like Bill, he had a remarkable mouth – a rose-bud which shone like a flower in his neat sandy beard.

  ‘Cigar?’ he said.

  Bill turned his back without answering. Wally nodded, took a cigar, and tucked it in the pocket of his iridescent pink shirt.

  Bill inspected the water cooler, looked out the window at the sky. Wally selected a chair on the long wall, facing Vincent.

  Bill also sat. He folded his arms across his chest and watched Wally flipping through a zine. Though he did not like Vincent being there, he was offended by Wally’s presence.

  Wally claimed to have been raised in a touring circus and to have spent his early years as a ‘Human Ball’ being thrown in an act from mother to father, but this cut no ice with Bill, to whom he was nothing more than a small-time crook, one of those Efican facheurs who hang out in artists’ bars, carrying books of poetry for the purpose of attracting middle-class women. Certainly he had done time. He did not deny it. He talked like a crim – said ‘violin’ for jail, ‘musico’ for con-man, ‘riveter’ for homosexual. He was now the production manager – a good one – but he had become so attached to Felicity, during the pregnancy, that he had begun to give the impression that he had been responsible for it.

  So Bill found his presence impertinent.

  Yet when the santamarie entered the waiting room and asked, ‘Which of you gens is the dab-to-be?’ Bill could not publicly lay claim. He began to fear that someone in the room knew something he did not.

  He felt his neck burning. He folded his shirt cuffs. He began to button his red and black plaid shirt.

  ‘It’s you,’ the santamarie smiled, locating him by his high colour. She touched his sleeve. ‘You’re the dab.’

  He moved sideways.

  ‘You’re Mr Smith, right?’

  Of course he was not Mr Smith. He drew further away, pressing his back against the window. His brows pushed down over his dark eyes and his blush spread right behind his pierced flat ears and disappeared down the collar of his work shirt.

  ‘The doctor,’ said the santamarie, ‘says Mr Smith might as well go home and rest.’

  ‘Actually, Nurse’ – Vincent put his fat backside on the window ledge; it touched Bill’s elbow – ‘there is no Mr Smith. There is a Ms Smith, but no Mr. It’s Felicity Smith,’ he said.

  Bill tried to make eye contact with the santamarie.

  ‘Felicity Smith,’ Vincent said, ‘the actress.’ He unbuckled his two-inch wide belt and tightened it an extra notch. The gesture was worldly, confident, sexual. ‘There is no Mr Smith. There is only us.’

  The santamarie smiled at Vincent, nodded. ‘I see.’

  ‘What I see about our situation,’ Vincent persisted, ‘is that it’s vaguely ludicrous. The three of us, all smoking cigars.’

  ‘OK,’ said Bill, who just wanted the santamarie out of there before something embarrassing was said. ‘That’s nice of you. Thank you.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Class dismissed.’

  ‘Was I brusque? I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know what brusk is,’ the santamarie said. ‘But I know when I’m not wanted.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ Wally turned to Bill. He folded his zine and returned it to his back pocket. ‘If you can’t be decent you’d be better off not being here.’

  ‘I’m here,’ Bill said, ‘because my so
n is being born.’ He turned back towards the Sirkus in the park. A giant mouse with a white stick was dancing on the video.

  ‘So you are Mr Smith,’ the santamarie said. She opened the door to the hallway. ‘The water closets are one floor down or one floor up.’

  ‘I sympathize with your enthusiasm,’ Vincent said, as the door slammed shut behind the santamarie. He laid his hand on Bill’s shoulder. ‘I sympathize, but you don’t know it’s a boy, and you don’t know it’s yours.’

  ‘You should go home and check your diary,’ Bill said. ‘If you’re the father you must have put your pecker in the post.’

  ‘Go home,’ Wally repeated. ‘Just like the doctor says.’

  ‘Maybe Wally is the father.’ Bill held his palms upwards in appeal. ‘Now there’s a vision.’

  Wally had pendulous ear lobes, soft like wattles, fair-haired arms with small round scars where no hair would grow. Now his austere face contracted a fraction more. ‘I have not had the pleasure,’ he said.

  Bill whooped.

  ‘You petticon,’ Wally said. He sprang from his chair, stepped on to the coffee table, and launched himself at Bill, his neck tendons tight, his pale lips stretched across his teeth, his right fist raised like a hammer.

  Bill leaped over a row of blue plastic chairs, yelping with pleasure, his teeth white, his eyebrows arched high.

  ‘For Chrissakes,’ Wally said. ‘You didn’t even ask why we can go home.’ He let his scarred and tattooed hands hang limply by his side. ‘You didn’t even ask her how she was.’

  He went to stand beside Bill, to look out of the window at the Sirkus. In a moment Vincent joined them, his large black hat silhouetted against the bright arc lights in the park. Vincent put his arm first around Wally’s shoulders, then Bill’s. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ he said.

  It was the first time it had occurred to Bill that she might not be.

  As for Tristan – not a word about me. I did not exist for any of them – I was a thing, an idea, a ripple on the other side of a beautiful woman’s large white belly.

  But by this time, just after noon, I was, regardless of what the santamarie had said, already two hours old.

  *The critique of an actor’s performance normally offered by the director and, sometimes, the playwright. In the leftist Feu Follet these critiques might be offered by other actors, assistant stage managers, the house manager – by any member of the company.

  4

  My three ‘fathers’ were treated badly, as if their alliance with my maman were unnatural or perverse, and they were separately and jointly responsible for my peculiar condition. They were lied to. They were given to understand the labour was long, that the labour had not begun, that there was a C-section to be performed, that Ms Smith had been shifted to another hospital. They were told, bluntly, to go away, to wait at home for a call, and what is incredible is that they tolerated this treatment. They were not meek men, but they were men, intimidated by birth, and so they went meekly, and with so little idea of what was happening to Felicity that they could not even answer each other’s questions in the street outside.

  Five storeys above their heads, in a small windowless examination room, two doctors were nervously trying to persuade Felicity that it would be better, although they did not use so blunt a word, for them to kill me.

  There was nothing much in the room: a metal cabinet with one thin drawer and two fat ones, a bright red bin labelled ‘Sharps’ and another, larger one, marked ‘Bio-hazard’, the chair on which my maman sat, the paper-covered couch on which Dr Eisner perched.

  Marc Laroche, the obstetrician, leaned against the door and folded his long thin arms across his chest. He had known Felicity for ten years, had seen every play she had appeared in or directed,

  ‘You don’t have to decide anything now,’ he said, but he could not look her in the eye or pronounce the illegal act he was silently advocating.

  My maman turned to the paediatrician. She had not known him three hours ago. His name was Eisner. He was very young. He had dark beautiful doe eyes which were now filled with pity. ‘You can take as long as you want,’ he said.

  Marc Laroche jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. ‘God damn it,’ he said.

  Felicity had given birth less than an hour before. She was weak, frightened, in shock.

  ‘I want to see him,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Marc Laroche said. Then, ‘Of course.’

  He left the room. Dr Eisner smiled at her, frowned, fussed with the slippery paper on his examination couch, then left the room as well.

  Felicity was abandoned to the hum of the lighting. She thought: this is not happening to me.

  A long time later the two doctors returned, rolling a small perspex crib. Tristan was lying in the crib. She did not look at him directly, but saw that he did not take a lot of space. He was swaddled in a bright patterned cloth.

  ‘Unswaddle him.’ She heard herself say it. She was aware of removing herself from herself, of becoming a character whom she could watch. She closed her eyes, breathed a little – in–out, in–out.

  The young men did not say when they had done unwrapping, but she could tell from the stillness in the room. She opened her eyes. She had no distance from herself, or not sufficient. When she saw the baby’s face again, she put her hand across her mouth. A noise came out, a noise so painful that Marc Laroche’s anxious face contorted in sympathy.

  ‘God damn,’ he said.

  She thought: I am the mother.

  But she did not want to touch Tristan. She made herself. Her character touched me. I was naked, defenceless, frightening.

  ‘Damn,’ said Marc Laroche.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said.

  She held her finger out and touched my hand. I grasped the finger and held it with an intensity that surprised her. I was barely human. I was like some dream she might expect to stay forever hidden in the entrails of her consciousness. She tried to jerk her hand away. I would not let go.

  The feeling – she had felt this before: it was when you held the worm in your fingers before you baited your hook, the way the life shrank from the hook, the way you responded to it, that strong demand within your fingers. It was not your personality or your character. It was something more basic than character. Now she held her hand against the little thing’s chest where you could see its beating heart. She did not know what she felt. It was like the bomb blast at the theatre when Suzi Jacques lost her leg – flesh, blood, screaming. I wailed and my awful face shrank up in fear as if I could smell the harm floating in the sterile air.

  Felicity heard herself make mummy-noises.

  When the hovering Marc Laroche came to her side, she saw his intention was to take Tristan away.

  ‘Show me how to wrap him,’ she said. And when he hesitated: ‘Please.’

  She was aware of how she looked. She was an actress. She had been a model. People were always stirred by her beauty. It was the first thing anyone would write about her. She was ‘tall and willowy’, had ‘stunning cheekbones’, a ‘mass of curling coppery hair’ which framed her ‘slightly triangular face’. She could see the doctors being moved (Marc Laroche to tears) by her beauty, my lack of it, by what they would describe as ‘love’. But what she could not say to them was that it was not anything half so noble. It was not anything she could help or alter.

  ‘I think you should let us have him now,’ Marc Laroche said when he had swaddled me, not expertly.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said. She took the bundle and sat with me on the straight-backed chair.

  ‘Just the same,’ he said.

  She looked at his long bony fingers as they stretched towards her. She shook her head.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just take your time.’

  But no one moved. They stayed like this, not speaking, for the best part of half an hour.

  ‘Well …’ Marc Laroche said at last. ‘I think we might put him in the nursery now. What do you think?’

&nb
sp; My maman shook her head. ‘I want him in my room.’

  ‘Listen,’ Marc Laroche said, ‘you’ve got to face it, Felicity …’

  ‘In my room,’ my maman said.

  ‘It will be even harder for you later.’

  ‘In my room.’

  My maman got her way. She kept the crib hard against her bed. In the night there were feeding difficulties because of deficiencies in my lips.

  She tried to stay awake all through the night, but finally she could not keep her eyes open. She slept with an arm and a leg placed protectively across the top of the bassinet.

  I was safe. Laroche and Eisner were home in their beds, relieved, you can bet, not to have jeopardized their careers with an illegal action, but at seven o’clock the next morning, just as the night staff were leaving, when the first floor-polishers and vacuum cleaners brought a level of confusion into previously calm corridors, a santamarie tried to move Tristan to the nursery. There was no evidence that the woman meant to kill me, but my maman was not taking any chances. She picked me up – I weighed only four pounds – and walked out of the hospital.

  There had been no time to try to find her tote bag – she arrived on the street in her hospital wrap. But although she was nearly naked at the back, she held herself in such a way that you would never think the wrap was more than just a summer dress. And as, walking to the hospital, she had hidden the feeling of the pumpkin between her legs, she now hid the fact that she was aching and sore from labour and everything in her wanted to shuffle, not along a public street, but in some quiet protected environment with shiny floors and pink-faced women in white uniforms.

  She barely noticed the alien Sirkus. The river bed existed like some bright white over-exposed photograph. She carried Tristan along the sandy path in a kind of daze, and when he vomited an acrid substance the colour of summer grass, she wiped the muck with her finger. There was not much of it – but it was bright and inexplicable and she was frightened.

  The Boulevard des Indiennes was filled with large trucks loaded with reinforcing mesh. She got caught for a minute on the traffic island before limping across to Gazette Street which was, at this hour, dominated by dull corrugated walls of metal shutters and roller doors and lined by bright red and silver taxis, all double-parked, driverless, complacently illegal. Her destination was number 34 – the Feu Follet. The posters on the cracked concrete wall outside advertised the Scottish Play with previews beginning on this first Monday in January. In normal circumstances Felicity would have played Lady Macbeth, but she had taken the part of First Witch in respect of her condition.