Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I was, indeed, a curious-looking child — strong in the shoulders, withered and tangled in the legs. My hair was dense and blond, and the irises of my eyes — although no longer white as they had been when I was born — were now milky, marbled, striated with hair-line spokes of gold. They were my best feature, and were sometimes thought to be quite beautiful.

Naturally my maman worried continually about her deformed little boy’s self-esteem, but the truth was, I was being privately tutored not only in my schoolwork, but in the radical’s conceit, that I was different, but superior. To cause upset in motel dining rooms — something which would later be the cause of such shame and anger — was no ordeal to me. My comrades placed me in a new high chair which Wally had built for me, and when we played Ultra Rouge towns I would sit with a crushed velvet shawl around my shoulders and bring my intense eyes to stare accusingly at anyone I imagined was the enemy. Few could hold my gaze — bristling Ultras with their shirtsleeves cut high and their elastic-sided boots red with bauxite dust: they grimaced and looked down at their barley soup.

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To the Voorstand reader the disrespectful conjunction of ‘Sad Sack’ and ‘Sirkus’ may seem to indicate an ignorance of the meaning of Sirkus, but it was exactly this conjunction that made the name so appealing to my maman.

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These political thugs published various pamphlets and news sheets which revealed a perplexing mixture of ideas — Efican nationalism, anti-semitism, a passionate attachment to the alliance with Voorstand. While their often extreme actions were always criticized by the government, it now seems certain that they were funded by right-wing elements of the Red Party.

*

Bill Millefleur, as Voorstand readers will be aware, was not as famous a name in Saarlim as we all imagined. In Efica he had become a star. Everyone watched Vids of his Saarlim performances, particularly his part as Franco Hals in

The Black Stallion Gallops into the Burning House. [

TS]

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Named, as every Efican schoolchild knows, after the God of dyeing.

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All European deaths. The deaths of the IPs (Indigenous Peoples, the eighteen tribes of Efica) remain essentially uncommemorated and unresolved. Even Vincent Theroux had difficulty resolving the notion that his great-great-grandfather may have been party to a genocide.

It was never my mother’s plan that I should be an actor, and if she had not been desperate she would not, I am sure, have permitted the seed to be planted by Bill Millefleur: he had always been, until now, an amateur as a father and — you only have to look at the handwriting, the spelling, the eccentric capitalizations to know this — an unlikely expert in the field of formal education.

Until January 381, when Bill’s postcard arrived, my education was conventional enough. Between the ages of six and eight I had a Korean tutor, a Mr Han, a delicate old man who finally died of asthma. He was succeeded, in my ninth year (380), by Claire Chen, who, despite her erratic personal life and slovenly dress, had an almost tyrannical code of behaviour in the class room — that formerly pristine little tower room which was now a wilderness of broken chalk, torn theatre programmes, half-assembled rak-rok blocks, the Great Works of Literature, old horseshoes, and French coins I had found while playing truant in the labyrinthine underworld of the old Circus School.

The chubby Chen had an MA from the University of Nez Noir. Her field was the classics — Plato, Horace, Seneca — but she also made me understand the principles of algebra. She was both clever and impatient, and — having had a convent education herself — not above striking me on the knuckles with a wooden ruler.

It was in response to one of these attacks that I bit her on the thumb, and this, in turn, got me into big trouble with my maman, who began, that night, to shout and scream at me in such a frightening way.

Was she shouting at me about the bite? No, she was not.

Madame, Meneer, she was shouting at me about the bandage on her actor’s thumb.

Chen was meant to teach me in the morning and be available for rehearsal in the afternoon, but when she had returned from the Emergency Room that afternoon, she would not act before she knew — why did her character (Clytemnestra) have a bandage? What should Clytemnestra’s attitude towards the bandage be?

Chen was an anxious actor at the best of times, with a negative intelligence that could readily destabilize a cast. Now she wished to know — should her bandage affect Orestes’ attitude towards her character? Should the bandage be so white and bright when all the costumes were so bloodied and brown? Should she paint her bandage red? Could she perhaps apply other bandages to other parts of her body, and so on?

The production was frail and complicated anyway, very ‘techy’, and the actors had still not found their characters and were trying to fix their problems by rewriting their own lines. Also, the problem with Chen and her bandage arrived in a period when my maman was in crisis with her taxes, her loans, her repayments, her applications to the funding bodies, her medical insurance claims. It was, in addition, the end of the wet season, which meant she was trying, once again, to raise funds for The Sad Sack Sirkus.

My maman came back from rehearsal and asked me, calmly, why I bit my teacher.

Instead of saying that Chen had hit me with the wooden ruler, I said that I did not like her and I would not have her for a teacher any more.

My maman said there was no other teacher she could afford.

I said I did not need a teacher. I said I would be an actor instead.

My maman then turned nuts. She screamed at me in a way I had never seen her scream before. She tore her hair. While I shivered and snivelled in the corner she told me I was beyond her, that she was a working actress and I was a child with Special Needs.

I said I was sorry, but she was lost, beyond herself. She said that she was going to find a Special School for me.

I said Wally would never let her.

That sent her totally crazy, ripping corks out of bottles and drinking wine like water. She said Wally was an emotional cripple. She said she would fire him if he said a word about it. She wept and said she was going to die. I went to sleep behind her great wall of shuddering back.

She frightened me, I’ll admit. Damaged me, even. And yet this truly dreadful night, which gave birth to the fearful notion of ‘Special Needs’, also produced the following message from my father which came into my life like a golden ray from God on High.

‘My advice to you, liebling,’ Bill wrote to my maman in a postcard that arrived two weeks later, ‘is to relax — excuse him his lessons. All the education anyone could need is available just through the work you do. Let him watch Orestes instead. Also: we have a Sad Sack Sirkus coming up, Let him play a PART,’ my dab wrote on the back of the card, which my mother straight away locked in the third drawer from the bottom. ‘Obviously I am not suggesting he top the bill but why not give him a CHARACTER? I myself am rather taken by the idea of The Hairy Man. * Give him the exercise — develop character’s ACTIONS for himself.’

When my mother finally decided to read this to me, I grunted and said that that would be OK, but I was so excited that I developed diarrhoea.

*

A Voorstandish character often used in the Feu Follet to represent Voorstand as a whole. It seems likely that the character has its roots in the animistic culture of the Native People of Voorstand — the famous ‘Suit of Goose-feathers’ in the Saarlim Museum bears a striking resemblance to early artists’ representations of The Hairy Man. It is only after two centuries of Christian settlement that we find The Hairy Man used as a synonym for Moloch or Satan. Even the church-sponsored Badberg Edition of The