Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Gabe Manzini is the man who ruined my life. I had no idea that he existed, or rather I knew only that ‘something’ had arrived which threw a shadow across Wally’s countenance, that had him sitting by his bed at one a.m., waiting for Roxanna to come home.

It was this nameless ‘something’ which also made Roxanna so gentle with Wally, and had her performing small domestic tasks for which she had no aptitude — she darned his socks (once), ironed his trousers (twice), and cooked meals and sandwiches for him continually.

Roxanna was no cook, believe me, but she performed these sad services for Wally in recognition of her role in his silent pain, and Wally, sitting with his rough-skinned elbows resting on the kitchen table, observed her crack eggs inexpertly and did not seem inclined to criticize.

I had never heard or read Gabe Manzini’s name, but I knew he was out there, on the other side of the dusty windows, a something in the night. I intuited him.

This was the man who would end up as Direkter of The Efican Department at the VIA, but let me tell you, Meneer, Madam, your man did not intuit us, not by computer or any other method. His ID check on Roxanna used data banks in four continents, led him to arson in Melcarth, but not to Gazette Street. The part of Roxanna’s life she lived with us was unknown to him.

She had sex with him (and champagne and chocolate mousse). With me, she studied acting. Ostensibly she did this as a favour to my maman, to pay her rent, but when you saw her kneel upon the sawdust to play Exits and Entrances the light shone out of her. She did not ‘act’, which is what amateurs usually do. She had the capacity to ‘be’ which is a gift, not something you can learn in drama school or acting workshops. She was great at exits, at being about to kiss, about to die, about to stab her enemy. Sometimes she seemed paralysed by her own intense feelings, and when she moved it was as if she had to tug herself free of them. She was sometimes obvious in her choices, but there was always something eccentric in her enactment of these choices, a quirkiness which made her interesting to watch. She was technically ignorant, and occasionally sentimental in her tastes, but she had it — the thing that makes you watch an actor on the stage. No one told her she had it. No one said anything to her. But I saw my mother, who had begun by thinking of Roxanna as a whore, soon begin to treat her very differently. As for me, she quickly became my intimate friend and fellow student.

Who knows how our lives would have been if there had been no Gabe Manzini. There is no reason, for instance, why Roxanna might not have become the actress my eleven-year-old heart imagined. We might have reopened the Feu Follet — why not? There is no doubting her raw talent or her enjoyment of the exercises she did with me on the stage.

Roxanna, however, wanted very specific things for her new life: a country house with a park, peacocks, a fountain. She wanted a white carpet, a brass bed with lace-covered pillows of different sizes, and she had persuaded herself that Gabe Manzini could provide these items.

I do not need to point out how naïve she was, on every level, but she had no previous experience of even moderate wealth and she trusted the appearance of his hotel room, the cost of the restaurants he took her to.

She would arrive back at the Feu Follet just after midnight, no ring on her finger, still muggy and musky and happy from love-making. Then she would join me in my mother’s master class — do her entrances and exits, pass through her circles of concentration, frighten and amaze herself, earn herself my maman’s warm embrace.

At two o’clock my maman had to leave. I never knew where she slept, only that it was a different place each night and that she was afraid. I did not know the person she was afraid of was Gabe Manzini. No one knew his name in those days, but I could always feel him — I did not know it was the same thing, the same person — the one who was there in the night, the one who gave Roxanna her puffy eyes, Wally his morning melancholy.

After breakfast Roxanna came with us to the fish markets.

Then we would come back to Gazette Street and Wally would fillet the fish. At around noon he and Roxanna would begin to drink beer. They would argue about food or sing folk songs in rough harmony.

Sometimes Sparrow sang with them. He had a good baritone which he liked to use and he would have come more often, but he found a job in a music-hall restaurant. His employer was a Mr Ho, an Efican-Chinese who, whilst undemanding about many things — he was sloppy in dress and careless about hygiene — had such reverence for the text of his Victorian melodramas that he twice dismissed actors for departing from the written word.

‘You would think it would be easy,’ Sparrow said, ‘but it is just exhausting. The guy is a maniac. He sits in the restaurant following the script with a flashlight.’

The city had election fever. The light poles were wreathed in red or blue streamers made of crepe paper which bled in the rain each afternoon. Ice-cream vans with loudspeakers on their roofs prowled the suburbs. As the day of the election drew closer, more actors began to visit us. It was incorrect, they said, for the Feu Follet to be dark at this moment in history. They offered their services. They wanted to do something for the election — a review, a fundraiser, street theatre. They sat in our kitchen and judged us. They looked at Wally’s depressed demeanour, Roxanna with her Irma hair-do, me in my Mouse mask. They saw only surfaces. They did not see history lurking in the dark.

It was half past eleven at night. Roxanna was with Gabe Manzini, having her ankles kissed. I was lying on my mattress. Wally was sitting on his bed, a blue-lined notebook resting on his knees, his upper body contorted around the pivot of his pencil. He erased constantly, seemingly more words than he wrote. The wattles of his pendulous ears glowed pink.

‘What … are … you … rubbing … out?’

‘Nothing.’

‘A … letter?’

‘None of your business.’

There was a time when Wally would not have risked being seen writing in a notebook. It would have been too much like his early days at the Feu Follet when he had fraudulently represented himself to Annie McManus as a ‘prison-poet’. But now there was no other witness but me and I had no memory of the prison-poet. I imagined him composing a love letter to Roxanna. I napped, dreaming about Roxanna and Wally getting married.

When I felt hands on the buckles of my mask, I was not alarmed — I imagined Roxanna had come in and was doing what she often did before our acting class. I felt the buckles undone, the straps loosened, the mask removed, and my sweaty face meet the coolness of the draught from the open window.

And then: this shriek.

I awoke, my hair on end. The lights were blazing. Beside my mattress, kneeling on the floor — a pale-skinned, slim woman with short hair. My eyes met hers. She shuddered, hid her own eyes, shrieked again.

Maybe I screamed too — how do I know? The woman by my bed was so thin I could see the bones in her chest above her breasts. Once she had finished one scream, she began another. She put her hands across her eyes, but I could see her chipped front tooth, her pink epiglottis. I watched her as she gulped, screamed, gulped, screamed.

You would imagine all this fuss would bring Wally leaping from his bed, but he continued sleeping. He lay on his back with his exercise book on his chest, his mouth open, his arms flung sideways.

A taxi began to toot its horn outside. Still he did not stir. When the woman finally stopped screaming, he turned on to his side, his back toward me.