Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

In the glowing golden reflections in that elevator, Heroic Wally, Divine Roxana, Good Sparrowgrass, surrounded me — the Valiant Mouse. We rose silent as air itself towards the twelve plush red seats, only four of which we would personally require.

We sat high above the crowd wherein we might reasonably have felt ourselves to be blessed. Sparrow produced a cash parole — thereby surprising me — and bought us all fresh perroquets, and then the show started.

You are a settler culture, like ours, and all your Bruder tales reflect your church’s simple devotion to St Francis (with none of the legal and theological complications created by the Saarlim Codicils *). So you permitted no animals in captivity, but animals thrived everywhere in your imagination, laughing, singing, playing tricks, saving humans, doing good and evil.

The Voorstandish aerialistes put on their squirrel costumes and flew through the air without a net. They could make a furry totem pole twenty feet high. They could produce the most amazing facsimiles of a horse, five men and women — dancers, posturers — working with thrilling co-ordination to gallop, to canter, to walk a slack wire. When these ‘horses’ fell, the casualties were always terrible.

This first part of the Sirkus had the clowns — hoards of them in cast-off uniforms of conquered nations — preposterous, pretentious. When they emerged from the stage floor they were ragamuffin POWs set free in Great Voorstand. By the time intermission arrived, these buffoons would have become an orchestra playing wild, lonely, funny, Pow-pow music. It was propaganda, of course. The Pow-pows raced the bears, were frightened by the squirrels, awed, teased and pestered by the moving holographic images of the dancing Bruder Mouse or hayseed Bruder Duck.

There was no slow build-up in this show. The pace, from the first drum beat, was extraordinary. It was like being accelerated into the stratosphere. The jokes and the tricks followed each other at a dizzying speed. It was like being tickled. You could not bear the thought that what you were laughing at would be intensified, although it surely would be, and would be again, as tumbling High-hogs flew across the stage chasing tumbling panicking holographic Bruders.

Above us we could see, through the glass floor, the sparkmajoors in the mixing booth. These men and women barely moved all through the show. Once or twice I would see a hand move. For the most part they seemed to sit with crossed arms bathed in soft blue light.

The performers pushed us, until we were breathless from laughter, and Sparrow’s great ‘Whoo Whoo Whoo’ was like the cry of some great goofy owl eager to take its place on stage.

But we were waiting for Irma.

When intermission came, we said nothing of her to Sparrow. We did not want to trigger the sort of political critique we could expect from any member of the Feu Follet collective. We protected Irma’s good name by leaving it unsaid.

Sparrow, who had laughed so loudly, was quiet and thoughtful in the intermission, continually passing his big hands over his cleanshaven cheeks and bristly neck. I began to wonder if he felt himself compromised, or even ashamed, but when I looked towards him he took off his glasses and polished them. Once they were clean, he leaned across the rail and slowly surveyed the audience. I thought of Savonarola, a figure my mother liked to evoke whenever her work was attacked by censors.

I turned to Wally, but he and Roxanna were involved in intense and private conversation. I waited for darkness, and made my breath into a warm wind which blew between my skin and the mask.

The second half began, as always, with dancing, both live and holographic. There was the grey furry Bruder Mouse with his iridescent blue coat, his white silk scarf, his cane. Everyone cheered the minute he appeared. It was no good to say what Vincent said, that the modern Bruder Mouse had become nothing more than a logo-type, the symbol for an imperialist mercantile culture. Vincent knew the old folk tales of Voorstand, collected the masks and clap-hands of the first-century Bruders, but he had never been to the Sirkus in his own home town. He did not know Bruder Mouse. He had never seen him move.

The Mouse I met at the Sirkus was quick and cocky and as cruel as any animal who has to deal with survival on the farm. He had spark, guts, energy, can-do. We would have liked him, I thought, in the Feu Follet. He had one chipped tooth and one nipped ear. He was a good dancer, had charm, and when Irma, finally, entered the high cone of light that the sparkmajoors erected for her, she danced with him, a quick fast Pow-pow shimmy that had the audience smiling and laughing at once.

The clowns of the first half were now assimilated Voorstanders — they became the orchestra, and as they assembled in their spiffy new eight-button uniforms we knew that we would have to tolerate, for a while, the chorus girls who followed them. Not that we did not think every each one of them to be beautiful, but because none of them was Irma, and by their very existence on the stage they distracted our attention from their queen.

Our Irma’s figure was voluptuous, but you can see today from the old vids that she was not perfect. Her rose-bud lips were a little small, her neck, if you wished to consider this, a little short. It is obvious now — it was not really her figure, or her sinuous movements which entranced us. It was her voice.

We waited for her to sing to us. Roxanna had her hand on Wally’s knee. Sparrow sat with his mouth a little open and repeatedly pushed his wire-framed glasses back on to his button nose. I took my Mouse mask off and waited for her to recite. In the darkness, I smiled.

She alone, of foreign performers, dared recite our own stories on the stage. It was the mark of the skill of your Sirkus managers to everywhere adapt the show to what was local. We did not know there was no Irma in any of the Saarlim Sirkuses. I don’t know if we would have cared. We were flattered, and moved to hear our own tragedies and Pyrrhic victories celebrated in her exotic accent. She did ‘Farewell, Sweet Faith! Thy silver ray’ and also ‘The Story Teller from the Isles’. Her gestures, her movement at such times, were so minimal, her stillness, her small voice, a whisper. Our stories seemed bigger when she recited them, and it is easy enough to attribute all of this to politics and power, except that it takes no account of her enormous talent. You did not think about the individual words but rather the emotion that they generated, like they were so many drops of water, and yet each word was clear, and just as she could put flesh and blood on the bones of our drowned fishermen and make us weep for our abandoned dyers, she could also recite, to a mass audience, the great works of Voorstand literature, moving even that great Voorphobe, Sparrow Glashan, to tears.

When the show finished Sparrow rose with us in our seats and clapped and hooted. As the lights came up, I pulled my Mouse mask back on.

Roxanna and Wally were clapping shoulder to shoulder, and perhaps it was because he saw their preoccupation with each other that Sparrow, his cheeks still shiny, picked me up and held me high in the air. Irma extended a hand in my direction and blew a kiss to me.

*

‘Actress Miffed with Mouse’

, Chemin Rouge Reformer,

4 April 371

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*

The Sirkus was almost never in the round. In Chemin Rouge, the space was shaped, spectacularly, like a slice of pie, with the stage at the apex.

*

I refer to those of the first years — Codicils XIV and XIX, with their very specific instructions for the care, containment and slaughter of cattle, sheep, ducks etc. By the time the famous Bear Codicil was written, and the hypocrisy of hunting and trapping permitted, the rules of the Sirkus were set.