Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

“To love an evil woman means that you are evil.”

Montalban shrugged. “I like to think of myself as a deeply fallible man who is healthily in touch with his dark side.”

Biserka cast a shovelful of dirt over Radmila’s beautiful shoes. Rad­mila resolutely ignored her.

“Hey, I think I’m getting a blister!” Biserka whined, straightening and sucking at her fingers. “Why don’t we stop all this hard work and let the servants do it?”

“Get out of the way,” said Vera.

Biserka stabbed her shovel into a loose mound of dirt and departed the grave in a huff.

“You shouldn’t have said that to her,” said George mildly:

“Oh, so she has a hard life?” snarled Vera. “I’ve been digging up this island for ten years! Do you smell that fresh air from the hills? I built that fresh air.”

“You thought that was work?” Sonja demanded, incredulous. “Your ten-year vacation on a tropical island? I fought and I suffered! The air was black! The air killed people!”

Radmila was silky. “I hope you don’t expect us to praise you for worm­ing your way into the bowels of a totalitarian regime.”

“Listen to you,” shouted Vera. “You’re famous and rich! Even your daughter is famous and rich.”

“Vera, is it my fault that you missed out on life by dressing up like a skeleton?”

“At least I’m not like her,” shouted Vera, “a soldier’s whore who lifts her skirt for any man with a gun!”

Sonja scowled. “Like a Hollywood actress is the pillar of chastity? I don’t think our dirty skirts are any of your dirty business, Vera.”

“They’re going to kill each other now,” Inke told Montalban. “Those spades can be turned into weapons.”

“Any technology is a weapon. Go and stop them now, Inke.”

“What, me? I’m a nobody.”

“That’s what I treasure about you. You’re a normal human being, and you’ve even got normal kids. Go and stop them, Inke. You must. We’ve got only a few seconds left. Go intervene, make them more normal. Hurry.”

“You do it.”

“I can’t. Don’t argue with me. Do it, go.” Montalban squeezed her shoulder, gave her a little push.

Inke somehow tottered into the midst of the sisterhood. They’d stopped heaving dirt into the grave and were hefting their shovels to bat­ter and slash.

Everyone in the crowd was silently watching the tableau. Even George was staring at her intervention. Yet George seemed unsurprised to see her jumping into the quarrel. He was even daring to hope for the best.

…

MARY MONTALBAN:So, yes, clearly, the funeral was a great cathartic moment. My grandmother died twenty-six years ago. The death of that oldest clone freed the Caryatids to take on different lives.

ENTERTAINMENT INSIDER:We do know a lot about the Caryatids, but we rarely hear much about your aunt Inke.

MM:Well, no, of course not. Inke’s family, but she’s not in the Family­Firm.

EI:So: What on Earth did Inke do for them?

MM:Inke did something they could never do for themselves. Those of us who know them and love them best—we all know that they’re not in­dividuals. The Caryatids are a matched set—a broken, damaged set. Inke knew that, she sensed it. So—there at the funeral, in public—Inke convinced them that they should exchange their burdens. They could choose to abandon their own roles, and play the roles of the others in­stead.

EI:Because Radmila was heartbroken. Sonja was defeated. Vera was hiding in some forest…

MM:Yes, they were miserable, but since they weren’t quite human, they did have other options. If they could see beyond despair, they could hold up one another’s burdens instead of breaking under their own.

EI:Cooperating. Like caryatids changing positions as they hold up some building. “Caryatids” being female sculptures that support build­ings on their heads. From ancient Greek architecture.

MM:I can see you’ve been studying.

EI: Caryatids, that’s not exactly a common title for an artwork.

MM:I know—but it all goes back to the ancient Greeks, doesn’t it? The Greeks were the first to write “history.”

EI:Ancient history seems to mean a great deal to your Family-Firm.

MM:It means. everything. It is everything… Those ancient Greeks, they would never give women a vote, but piling a building on a woman’s head, that was classical behavior for them.

EI:So the Caryatids collapsed, and yet, after that…

MM:They were all such capable, energetic, serious-minded women. Doing their impossible jobs in unbearable circumstances. Once they changed positions, they revived.

EI:As long as each clone was doing the impossible job that someone else should be doing, they each felt like they were on holiday.

MM:Well, of course that is part of their mythos: that elegant, neat solu­tion. They rotated their roles, smooth and easy, without ever missing a beat. But that was a neat solution for us, not for them. We who loved them—the various communities who took them in—in many ways, we made them behave in that way. We forced the issue. We all felt much happier when a new Caryatid arrived to save us from the ugly wreck of the old one. People insisted that they could do the impossible. Because we needed the impossible done. Obviously, it was impossible for them to switch roles without our collusion, but we gave them that because we benefited by it. It was our happy ending, not theirs.

EI:Critics say that Sonja was much better at playing Mila Montalban than the actual Mila Montalban.

MM:That’s a cheap shot at a fine actress, but… Well, Mila had no trouble running an Adriatic island resort. Vera blossomed inside a Chi­nese high-tech research camp. The Chinese much preferred her to Sonja. Sometime later Radmila went to China, while Sonja went to the island… Once in rotation, they didn’t simply bear their burdens in suf­fering, they were able to thrive.

EI:It seems so simple that they could trade existences and end happily.

MM:Oh no, no—believe me, nothing ended. And happiness? It’s sheer arrogance for any outsider, any normal person to think that we could solve their problems… Nobody ever imposes a solution on those women. It’s all I can do just to describe them.

EI:As the scriptwriter, you mean.

MM:Well, as a contemporary media creative, I always wanted to do a classic biopic about my mothers. I mean, to make a cinematic artwork with a linear narrative. A story line with no loose ends, where the plot makes sense. I enjoy that impossible creative challenge. It’s impossible because only history can do that for us. Sometimes it takes twenty-five years, even two hundred years to crush real life into a narrative compact enough to understand.

EI:They say that to end with a funeral is the classic sign of a tragedy. Your latest project, The Caryatids, concludes with a funeral.

MM:Well, that’s a mother-daughter issue… Look, can I be frank here? That narrative is supposedly about my mothers, but as a pop­entertainment product, The Caryatids is the ultimate Mary Montalban star vehicle. It’s not about them: it’s all me. Obviously it’s me. I pro­duced it, I directed it, I wrote the script, and I play all of them. I play every major part: I play Radmila, Vera, Sonja, the bit villain part of Bis­erka, I even play the dead grandmother in the glass coffin.