Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Give me your hand,’ Bill said.

Wally’s big pale lips twisted in a smile, a kind of grimace. ‘I’m here for the long haul.’

‘Sure you are.’

‘You want to know what love is?’ Wally said.

‘Wally,’ Bill said, ‘don’t do this to me.’

But Wally did do this. Showed him exactly what his love was made of. First he grinned, showed his two gold teeth to Bill, then he winked, then he knelt and slipped under the bottom wire.

That’s how it is when you have three men around one woman — a general excess — passion, foolishness, misunderstanding — the half-assembled audience, imagining the show had begun, stood in their seats and cheered.

When Wally leaped, what Vincent saw was suicide, gentian violet between its naked toes. He saw the red waistcoat, the huge bunioned feet daubed violet, the violiniste production manager descending like some dreadful cock from heaven.

If he had been previously aware of the eight-by-eight foot safety net, he now forgot it, and he was in any case too depressed to accommodate the notion that the leap might be a declaration of love.

When the audience applauded, Vincent was shocked. When Wally bounced off the net and bowed to him, Vincent felt out of joint, confused, angry. The violiniste’s arm was broken — it was hanging like a rag — but he was grinning and running from the stage like some space creature. Vincent could not hope to understand. He looked around, surprised to see the Neufzine critic, a woman not normally sympathetic to the Feu Follet, smiling broadly and applauding. Then the drums started and Vincent gave himself over to his greater fear — the one that had obsessed him all afternoon, the one that had hung around him like a cloud since he had seen the Gardiacivil banging at my mother’s door — that his ‘son’ was somehow monstrous.

It is clear enough by now that I am not Vincent Theroux’s son, but at the time nothing was so simple. My maman had imagined both of her lovers to be, in different ways, my father. Bill, her public man, was strong and beautiful. Vincent, her secret lover, was rich and intellectual. And if she had conceived me with Bill, it was Vincent she had discussed me with most often. Vincent was married already, but he wanted me, more than anything he could imagine. Bill was only twenty-two, but Vincent wanted the role.

My maman wanted me too, but after Lear , after Mother Courage , after the tour to Nez Noir. She scheduled me, rescheduled. She named me Tristan *in the summer of 366, even as she postponed me. I was Tristan before my egg was hit, Tristan before they knew if I was a boy or a girl.

The moment I was conceived, I was Vincent’s little liefling. †He treasured me, the idea of me, just as he might a folk painting, offered by a dealer by transparency, purchased on recommendation, presently being crated in another country. Ever since the day he had seen the small phial of urine turn a gorgeous lilac colour, he had drawn on this reservoir of wonder and joy which was nothing less than my existence.

And he had maintained this feeling until he had — one hour before the curtain of the Scottish Play — met the Gardiacivil knocking on my maman’s door. I am not suggesting that the sight of uniforms alone depressed him, but the Gardiacivil were no friends of the Feu Follet and he knew they were not delivering flowers. Indeed, they brought with them an administrator from the Mater Hospital and, it was this gen, kneeling on the top step so his fat lips were level with the keyhole, who gave Felicity Smith, actor-manager, a legal warning — that she would be held legally responsible for the death of the child should she refuse to provide it with the proper care for its condition.

‘What condition?’ Vincent asked.

But the three men had that dull, flat-faced look of policemen at murder scenes. They drew a line around themselves and their terrifying secret.

‘Are you the father, Mr Theroux?’

Vincent was a married man, a public figure, the chief executive of Efica’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

The deputation wished Mr Theroux and Mr Paccione good day. As their footsteps echoed along the corridor below, Vincent heard a high warbling sound from the other side of the peeling brown door.

It was me.

It seemed to Vincent’s ear that the noise I made was ‘singing’. Not singing as in a song, but singing like a warble, not a new-born noise, something rather unusual.

One step lower, Wally was combing his hair excitedly. ‘Listen,’ he said. He slipped his comb back into his shirt pocket, and winked at Vincent. ‘It’s Tristan.’

But the hair on Vincent’s neck was standing on end.

He turned and pushed past Wally, and fled into the theatre, and there he sat in his Starbuck *for a whole hour, brooding that he could never love me. He was there when the actors began their warm-ups. He was there as the schoolchildren streamed into their seats, sunk in deep depression, and you can see, straight away, why it was necessary for my mother to choose two fathers.

Vincent’s great fear about his own character was that he was too much of an aesthete, a perfectionist, that he had such an addiction to things beautiful that he could not go and buy a simple tea cup without returning with an object he would have, finally, to lock up in a museum case for fear that his breakfast tea would stain its delicate eggshell glaze.

It was this flaw in his character, he believed, which had wrecked his marriage. In his version of the story he had captured Natalie Lopale and ‘installed her’ in that beautiful modernist house on the banks of the Nabangari. The house had seamless transparent walls, and it stepped down towards the river in a series of platforms, each one artfully supported on the great round Pleistocene rocks by stainless-steel pegs.

It was conceited to make himself responsible for his wife’s character, and crazy to imagine that his beautiful house could turn a warm and loving woman into a status-crazed neurotic with a twenty-by-thirty foot wardrobe. Vincent, however, believed both these things.

He gave great weight to his single two-dimensional flaw. And he sat in the dark believing he could never love me if I was not perfect. He was such a good man in so many ways, humane, generous, humble around artists, passionate about justice and equality, but really — what a weasel.

He sat in his seat as the drums beat louder, waiting for the darkness to descend.

*

Published speeches of Felicity Smith suggest that Tristan Smith was named after Tristan Devalier, the leader of a calamitous strike at the Imperial Dye Works in 137

EC.

†

‘Liefling’ is a common Voorstandish endearment, meaning ‘darling’. It is unusual that Vincent Theroux, an ardent Efican nationalist, should use the term.

*

Traditionally the Efican circuses offered the first two rows of seats with back supports. These seats, named Starbucks or Starbacks, were marked by one or a number of stencilled stars. In Voorstand, of course, all seats have backs and there are no Starbucks.

[TS]

In the darkened theatre you could smell the freshly disturbed sawdust and know the actors were taking up their places.

Then a lightning flash: two witches, Second and Third.

The Witches held a six-by-three foot sheet of shining gauge iron between them. *They made thunder with it. As the drumming reached its peak bright lights bounced off the flexing metal to make lightning.

The storm raged. As the lightning flashed, the First Witch appeared and disappeared in different poses — her birth-sore body wrapped in foam rubber, a laser gun across her back, a gas mask perching on her forehead, her face painted greasy red.