Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Tales of Bruder Mouse

suggests an identity more like a ‘Bogey-man’ than the devil. These two identities, folk character and Christian demon, co-exist to the present day.

I had become a furtive, even sneaky child, one given to wild and dangerously unrealistic dreams. I devoured histories and fictions, personally identifying not only with revolutionaries but with figures like Napoleon whom I was expected to despise. I wrote: ‘ J’y suis une grande Destinée’ , on a cigarette paper and watched in silent satisfaction while Wally ignited and inhaled my words.

At ten years old I believed books would be written about me.

And although I said, and will say again, that I was not aware of my monstrosity, the opposite was also true: I knew exactly why I could not be an actor, and I was equally determined to become one. I also knew that if my maman saw how excited I was she would become fearful for me and send me back to Chen.

That is why, when she offered me my part in the Sirkus , I affected a passive, pathetic, half-defeated attitude, and when the actors were called the following day, I did not push myself forward amongst them. Instead I sat in the dark and watched them argue about Orestes. When I finally came into the light, it was to complain about boredom. I sat on my mother’s lap and whined and fidgeted, until finally she gave me what I had wanted all the time — a rehearsal room in one of the old stables.

There, with no one watching me, I was an egotist in the great theatrical tradition. I declaimed. I leapt into the air and landed. I scrabbled around the dirty brick floor roaring like a lion. I did my own version of ‘warm-ups’ and ‘breathing exercises’ until my clothes were covered with mud and straw and my knees were cut and bleeding.

Stanislavksy says that in order to build favourable conditions for creativeness, an actor’s organism must be prepared. The Master of the System would have clucked his lordly tongue not merely about my face and body, but also my voice — the failure of fusion in my mid-line structures meant that I would always, all my life, have trouble enunciating my words so a stranger could understand me.

To hell with that. I would make my Hairy Man a mute, something scary that jumps at you from the dark. I would base him on a spider.

This was not original, of course. I had watched my father building a character. *He would say: This character is a crab, or that character is a mole. And he would cut himself some sandwiches and go off to the zoo or the aquarium to study.

I therefore crawled around the stables, clawing at loose bricks with my broken nails, trying to find a spider so I might study it. The spiders I caught were not easy models for my instrument to follow. Their legs were fine and supple, mine were twisted, and my feet — although I hate to use the term — were clubbed. When I walked, my ankle had to do the job normally done by the sole of the foot. I had developed thick calluses all over my ankles, but to walk this way for ten minutes put strain on the knees and the hips that could cause me pain for weeks. In short, I could not do a character that walked.

My biceps were not large, but the pale blue-ish skin covered healthy muscle and I knew that muscle could be made to grow. My Hairy Man could climb and drop free-falling out of the dark sky.

There was a rusty steel ladder fixed to the courtyard wall outside my stables, and by the time the company was hammering and sawing at the new set for Orestes , I had taught myself to climb, to hang upside down for fifteen minutes. As a student I was known for my squirming and impatience, but as an actor I had that quality by which great men are often marked: their ability to endure tedium in pursuit of their obsession. By the time my absent father returned to Chemin Rouge I had calluses behind my knees, across my palms. But I could hang upside down for half an hour.

Without revealing my reason, I had found out exactly what time Bill’s flight would land. I knew when his taxi should arrive. The company, which imagined me an amiable sort of pet, would have been surprised at my deviousness. But when, at six o’clock that night, my father finally entered the theatre, he saw the Hairy Man, spotlit precisely, hanging from the ladder on the back wall of the theatre, right up near the lighting rig.

I saw Bill Millefleur, upside down, loose and handsome in his grey silk suit. He looked up at me, light reflected from his skin, his suit, his hair.

‘Hairy Man?’ he called. ‘Am I right?’

My limbs were crying out with pain, but my heart, as your great poet says, ‘was all over the heavens’.

‘He’s a spider, right?’ Bill called. ‘Your Hairy Man’s a spider?’

Beneath my blood-filled head I heard my father walk softly across the cobbled floor. He climbed up the rusty old ladder to where I hung — closer, closer — he smelt of fame, of foreign spices and dry-cleaning.

‘I’m very proud of you,’ he said, and caught me just in time. He lifted me off the rung. He held me to him, thirty feet above the floor, not worrying about the snot streaming from my nose.

‘Just be careful, OK?’

‘Thanks … Dab,’ I said.

My words were not clear and he did not understand me, but I did not care.

‘Floor-work,’ he said when he had got me to the ground. ‘I’d work on that.’ Then he ruffled my hair and went to find my maman.

There were now ten days before the tour began. Sparrow, Bill and my mother were busy rehearsing with the horses. Wally was flushing and pressure-testing the radiator on the Haflinger, assembling his mammoth tool kit — vice-lock, brake-adjusting tool, centre punch, hacksaw, heavy hammer, side-cutters. Once I would have been by his side, under his legs while he fitted tubes inside the tubeless socks, collected brass rivets, clips, blades, rubber rings, corks, bits of wire. But all these activities which had once so interested me now seemed mundane, and I abandoned Wally for my more glamorous father.

I have no excuse. I knew it hurt Wally. I saw the pain when I ate my lunch sitting in Bill Millefleur’s lap.

In the last week they brought the new horses into the Feu Follet and began to run the show. Without giving away the more spectacular part of my performance, I made my character visible. I hung upside down from the ladder where Bill could see me. And in the middle of the animal and human chaos which now filled the whole theatre, and spilled out amongst the taxis in Gazette Street, he would say, ‘Good work’, or, ‘That’s coming along.’

Having been so often and so publicly blessed, I was furious to be informed that the collective had decided not to let me perform the spider action.

Typically it was not Bill who broke this news to me, but tall, cadaverous Sparrow Glashan. He was widely known to be a decent man. It was what everybody said about him, and yet he took my action from me casually, not even noticing what it was he did.

‘But … Bill … told … me.’

‘Bill told you?’

‘It’s … much … better … than … he … saw … I … fall … from … heaven.’

Sparrow smiled and patted me.

‘Fuck … you …’

‘What?’

‘FUCK … YOU …’

Maybe he understood me. He pretended not. He said that it was only in Saarlim that they risked an actor’s life for entertainment. He said that was why it was better to be an Efican.

As for my father, I could not believe what he had done to me. I watched him, smiling, joking with the other actors.

*

Although I had heard the other actors mock this process behind his back, I knew without being told that it was not to do with the process, but his fame in the Sirkus. Sirkus stars, it was commonly thought, could no more act than singers in an opera. They said their inane lines, but it was not acting as we did it at the Feu Follet. You, of course, will know that this opinion is born of jealousy and, further, that the assessment of Sirkus acting is ignorant and ill-informed. It is true that the standard of ‘acting’ in certain of the high-risk Saarlim Sirkuses is not high, but this is the exception, not the rule. As a Voorstander you will quickly see the inability of these provincial actors to ‘read’ a tradition of performance which is closer to Kabuki than their own.