The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  That’s how it is when you have three men around one woman – a general excess – passion, foolishness, misunderstanding – the half-assembled audience, imagining the show had begun, stood in their seats and cheered.

  7

  When Wally leaped, what Vincent saw was suicide, gentian violet between its naked toes. He saw the red waistcoat, the huge bunioned feet daubed violet, the violiniste production manager descending like some dreadful cock from heaven.

  If he had been previously aware of the eight-by-eight foot safety net, he now forgot it, and he was in any case too depressed to accommodate the notion that the leap might be a declaration of love.

  When the audience applauded, Vincent was shocked. When Wally bounced off the net and bowed to him, Vincent felt out of joint, confused, angry. The violiniste’s arm was broken – it was hanging like a rag – but he was grinning and running from the stage like some space creature. Vincent could not hope to understand. He looked around, surprised to see the Neufzine critic, a woman not normally sympathetic to the Feu Follet, smiling broadly and applauding. Then the drums started and Vincent gave himself over to his greater fear – the one that had obsessed him all afternoon, the one that had hung around him like a cloud since he had seen the Gardiacivil banging at my mother’s door – that his ‘son’ was somehow monstrous.

  It is clear enough by now that I am not Vincent Theroux’s son, but at the time nothing was so simple. My maman had imagined both of her lovers to be, in different ways, my father. Bill, her public man, was strong and beautiful. Vincent, her secret lover, was rich and intellectual. And if she had conceived me with Bill, it was Vincent she had discussed me with most often. Vincent was married already, but he wanted me, more than anything he could imagine. Bill was only twenty-two, but Vincent wanted the role.

  My maman wanted me too, but after Lear, after Mother Courage, after the tour to Nez Noir. She scheduled me, rescheduled. She named me Tristan* in the summer of 366, even as she postponed me. I was Tristan before my egg was hit, Tristan before they knew if I was a boy or a girl.

  The moment I was conceived, I was Vincent’s little liefling.† He treasured me, the idea of me, just as he might a folk painting, offered by a dealer by transparency, purchased on recommendation, presently being crated in another country. Ever since the day he had seen the small phial of urine turn a gorgeous lilac colour, he had drawn on this reservoir of wonder and joy which was nothing less than my existence.

  And he had maintained this feeling until he had – one hour before the curtain of the Scottish Play – met the Gardiacivil knocking on my maman’s door. I am not suggesting that the sight of uniforms alone depressed him, but the Gardiacivil were no friends of the Feu Follet and he knew they were not delivering flowers. Indeed, they brought with them an administrator from the Mater Hospital and, it was this gen, kneeling on the top step so his fat lips were level with the keyhole, who gave Felicity Smith, actor-manager, a legal warning – that she would be held legally responsible for the death of the child should she refuse to provide it with the proper care for its condition.

  ‘What condition?’ Vincent asked.

  But the three men had that dull, flat-faced look of policemen at murder scenes. They drew a line around themselves and their terrifying secret.

  ‘Are you the father, Mr Theroux?’

  Vincent was a married man, a public figure, the chief executive of Efica’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

  The deputation wished Mr Theroux and Mr Paccione good day. As their footsteps echoed along the corridor below, Vincent heard a high warbling sound from the other side of the peeling brown door.

  It was me.

  It seemed to Vincent’s ear that the noise I made was ‘singing’. Not singing as in a song, but singing like a warble, not a new-born noise, something rather unusual.

  One step lower, Wally was combing his hair excitedly. ‘Listen,’ he said. He slipped his comb back into his shirt pocket, and winked at Vincent. ‘It’s Tristan.’

  But the hair on Vincent’s neck was standing on end.

  He turned and pushed past Wally, and fled into the theatre, and there he sat in his Starbuck* for a whole hour, brooding that he could never love me. He was there when the actors began their warm-ups. He was there as the schoolchildren streamed into their seats, sunk in deep depression, and you can see, straight away, why it was necessary for my mother to choose two fathers.

  Vincent’s great fear about his own character was that he was too much of an aesthete, a perfectionist, that he had such an addiction to things beautiful that he could not go and buy a simple tea cup without returning with an object he would have, finally, to lock up in a museum case for fear that his breakfast tea would stain its delicate eggshell glaze.

  It was this flaw in his character, he believed, which had wrecked his marriage. In his version of the story he had captured Natalie Lopale and ‘installed her’ in that beautiful modernist house on the banks of the Nabangari. The house had seamless transparent walls, and it stepped down towards the river in a series of platforms, each one artfully supported on the great round Pleistocene rocks by stainless-steel pegs.

  It was conceited to make himself responsible for his wife’s character, and crazy to imagine that his beautiful house could turn a warm and loving woman into a status-crazed neurotic with a twenty-by-thirty foot wardrobe. Vincent, however, believed both these things.

  He gave great weight to his single two-dimensional flaw. And he sat in the dark believing he could never love me if I was not perfect. He was such a good man in so many ways, humane, generous, humble around artists, passionate about justice and equality, but really – what a weasel.

  He sat in his seat as the drums beat louder, waiting for the darkness to descend.

  *Published speeches of Felicity Smith suggest that Tristan Smith was named after Tristan Devalier, the leader of a calamitous strike at the Imperial Dye Works in 137 EC.

  †‘Liefling’ is a common Voorstandish endearment, meaning ‘darling’. It is unusual that Vincent Theroux, an ardent Efican nationalist, should use the term.

  *Traditionally the Efican circuses offered the first two rows of seats with back supports. These seats, named Starbucks or Starbacks, were marked by one or a number of stencilled stars. In Voorstand, of course, all seats have backs and there are no Starbucks. [TS]

  8

  In the darkened theatre you could smell the freshly disturbed sawdust and know the actors were taking up their places.

  Then a lightning flash: two witches, Second and Third.

  The Witches held a six-by-three foot sheet of shining gauge iron between them.* They made thunder with it. As the drumming reached its peak bright lights bounced off the flexing metal to make lightning.

  The storm raged. As the lightning flashed, the First Witch appeared and disappeared in different poses – her birth-sore body wrapped in foam rubber, a laser gun across her back, a gas mask perching on her forehead, her face painted greasy red.

  The Second and Third Witches threw the gauge iron to the sawdust-covered floor. When the drumming stopped, Vincent leaned forward in his Starbuck, his hand underneath his ear.

  He was convinced my maman had me with her on the stage, and he listened for my ‘singing’ beneath the text like you may listen for a burglar’s footsteps under the noise of the vid. He waited in this strained, intense way throughout Scene II.

  Then the drums came back. Then the Witches. The First Witch stood off to upstage left, in what was, technically, a weak position. Somehow she used it to dominate the stage. The Third and Second Witches leaped and screeched, but the First Witch was immobile, wrapped in rubber.

  Then Macbeth came in with Banquo, one red, one blue, both of them sweating in their airless suits.

  When the Third Witch went to say her line (‘Thou shalt get Kings, though thou be none’), the First Witch stepped across and stole it from her.

  ‘Thou shalt get K
ings,’ she said, and then revealed Tristan Smith in his hiding place, inside the cloak against her sweating breast. She held me up, high, turning slowly so I could be seen on all sides. She had one hand between my legs, the other behind my neck and head. A boy behind Vincent gave a grunt of fright.

  Macbeth said, ‘Oh God.’ It was clearly audible.

  The First Witch’s eyes were opals, burning.

  ‘Thou shalt get Kings, though thou be none,’ she said, and thrust me out into the world.

  ENTER TRISTAN SMITH – a gruesome little thing, slippery and sweating from his long enclosure in that rubber cloak, so truly horrible to look at that the audience can see the Witches must struggle to control their feelings of revulsion.

  He is small, not small like a baby, smaller, more like one of those wrinkled furless dogs they show on television talk shows. His hair is fair, straight, queerly thick. His eyes are pale, a quartz-bright white. They bulge intensely in his face. He has a baby’s nose – but in the lower part of his severely triangular face there is, it seems, not sufficient skin. His face pulls at itself. He has no lips, but a gap in the skin that sometimes shows his toothless gums. He has, as make-up, two blue dots, one on each cheek.

  Vincent saw him. His son. He saw the ghastly rib cage, saw his shrunken twisted legs, bowed under him, heard him make that noise he had called ‘singing’.

  Vincent put his hand up to his open mouth.

  Tristan’s forehead mirrored his, wrinkling like a piece of cloth. Then, from the depths of his turbulent stomach, he brought forth the business that was bothering him – yellow-green, strongly sulphurous. His mother did not notice it for a full minute, but when she did she smeared it on her cheeks – one stroke on each like a decorative scar – and blew kisses to the fellow in the front row dressed in black.

  I did not come back on stage, but for Vincent the aesthete, who felt he had invented me, it was a kind of hell. He was left alone with his thoughts and theories in the dark – a two-hour production with no interval.

  *Gauge iron is known to you in Voorstand as galvanized iron, an essential building material in many colonial countries including Efica. In Chemin Rouge we grow up listening to deafening tropical rain on gauge-iron roofs, knowing what it is for roofs to rust, to leak, to lift in cyclones, to gleam in the sun. [TS]

  9

  So let me ask you, did you notice, in the theatre, how the witch’s suit was red? A slightly plummy red? Did it signify something political – the red, also the blue?

  Meneer, Madam, forgive me – but if you had a little more knowledge of the countries whose destiny you control, I could get on with my story. I am eager to let you see how my mother and I abandoned the stage and retired to the tower apartment, but it is now obvious you know nothing of Red and Blue and therefore nothing about Efica. As you yourselves were once subjects of the Dutch you will understand my passion to set this right before we move on – it is the periphery shouting at the centre, and you will forgive me, I hope, for surmising that you know even less about Efica than the British and the French who colonized the eighteen islands, murdered its indigenous inhabitants, set up dye works and prisons, and then abandoned us as being an unsuccessful idea.

  In the dreadful years of 90, 91, 95, our population nearly starved – French dyers, English convicts – it made no difference. We were left with little seed grain, no ships, abandoned like a folly three thousand miles from home. In the great European Exhibition of 102, none of our European parents devoted so much as a bioscope image to our existence, while we, even while our children’s bellies swelled and our mothers’ breasts dried up, comforted ourselves with Shakespeare and Molière.

  Three hundred years later the same habits persist on both sides. And even you – literate, liberal, students of the Sirkus and the pages of the Saarlim Verlag – will need a little assistance in spite of the fact that we both speak, more or less, the same language.

  If you follow foreign affairs you may know that we are a country whose southern islands are granite, that the granite is filled with caves which the English once found attractive as ready-made prisons, and that you, from the year 358, have found useful as a place to lay your miles of ‘navigation cable.’*

  Whatever this navigation cable does, your government will not say, not even to our government, but you value it immensely, and value our ‘Red’ governments which let you keep all this shiny metal lying in our guts. Red? Did I say ‘red’? I did, Meneer, Madam. It is red I wish to speak of now.

  If you make anything red in Efica, it means something particular, but not what you are presently imagining. It was red dye-stuffs the French came to get, the reason they shanghaied the master dyers of Rheims and shipped them to Chemin Rouge, the reason you will sometimes find Efica on old French maps named ‘Rouge Asie’. It was red that Louis Quatorze wanted, and red he found in the little yellow-flowered cactuses which grew on Efica.

  Even after Louis found easier ways to get red at home, the red dye works continued to do business with Europe and the colour red begat its own establishment in Efica – the owners of the so-called Imperial Dye Works who produced it. It was these local capitalists who called in European armies on three occasions to help them put down the Blue factions.

  You may have noticed that poor Banquo wore blue. It was the colour blue that Wally’s great-great-grandparents were collecting, out on the mudflats with their jute sacks. The colour blue, extracted from shellfish by a stinking process, was the poor people’s dye, harvested originally by ex-convicts. Blue has been the party of idealism, of reform.* Blue governments have given women the vote, a thirty-five hour week, a national health scheme.

  To be consistent, my mother should have made me up with red – after all, I was a witch’s child – but she could not put that hateful colour on my skin, hence the two blue spots. And although many of the company found the symbolism confusing, and some others were critical of the manner in which she had introduced me to the world, it was – they all agreed – just like her.

  It was not like her to limp up the stairs after Scene III and leave her comrades one witch short for the remainder of the play, but that is precisely what she did. She laid her sweating baby in the crib. She lay down on the bed herself, curling up, her knees almost touching her chin. Her red make-up was still on her face. Her body was still clad in foam rubber, strapped with canvas. She pulled a pillow across her eyes and lay still, but only for a moment. Almost immediately she began to forage amongst the rumpled sheets, finally finding what she had been looking for – a small plastic bag of very dry marijuana (not like her either – she had stopped smoking on the day she knew she had finally conceived). Then, with her make-up still caked on her face, she rolled what was not the first cigarette of that particular day. It was a small cigarette, but the ganja was from Nez Noir, the northernmost island, and was therefore very strong.

  In a short while the entire company would come up the stairs and enter the tower. It was what happened after each production. Unless she was to be a total coward, she would have to unlock the door.

  *The Voorstandish Navy’s ELF-FOLK (ELF for Extra Low Frequency) PROJECT has remained a mystery to the Efican people until 427, as we go to print. We now know that 2,400 miles of insulated cable was threaded through our nation’s belly. The cable was grounded at each end in the dry bed-rock of Inkerman, thus turning our most populous island into a giant antenna. The low conductivity of Efican granite allowed for the more efficient generation of extra low frequency waves and enabled the Voorstandish Navy to communicate with its SNEEK 77 submarines at depths of 400 feet.

  *The Blue Party is formally known as the Efican Democratic Party, or EDP. Its supporters are more familiarly referred to as Blueys or Muddies, the latter term providing a direct link back to the men and women who gathered those ‘briques bleus’ in the mangrove mudflats in the early days of settlement.

  10

  Vincent skulked around the windy little cobbled courtyard, while all the cast and half the audience pushe
d up the noisy staircase to the tower to see exactly who I was. It was the tradition at the Feu Follet that anybody could come up to the tower on opening night – audience members, critics, visiting actors, spies from the VIA and DoS* – and anybody could give notes – Moey Perelli’s dad, for instance. Vincent too, and this was a privilege that he relished. He was the theatre’s biggest single patron, but on opening night he always sat on the dusty floor in his good black suit. He drank wretched wine from paper cups without ever puckering his fastidious lips. He seemed so confident, so worldly, wealthy but hip. He had such a detailed knowledge of theatre history, an excellent eye, a real feeling for the moment when a scene lost energy or focus. No one but my mother knew that each opening night he had to steel himself to face ‘them’, to win the respect of actors of half his age, wit or taste.

  And because of these windmills he felt he must dispense with, the sessions in the tower had always been the high points of his life – first the discussion, the exercise of his considerably theatrical education and sensitivity, and then, some time before dawn, his secret love-making with the leading lady beneath the turning ceiling fan. He was addicted to the whole process, and no matter how he anguished over the deceitful phone calls to his wife, he could not bring himself to give up either my mother or the theatre.

  On the press night for Macbeth, however, he stayed down in the foyer. He pretended to read the tattered hand-written notices on the walls. He jiggled his car keys in the big pockets of his fashionably baggy black trousers.

  He could not love his child – he was clear on that. It was not that he would not like to, but that he could not. It was his flaw, his weakness, not admirable, but beyond him. And if he could not love the baby – one step led to the next – Felicity would not love him. He had seen it in her eyes on stage when she pasted that vile green muck on to her cheeks and pointed at him. It was not to do with text or character, but to do with him and her – he understood her perfectly.