The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear

by Walter Moers

  ‘I’ve got a large vocabulary. I was educated by the Babbling Billows.’

  ‘Babbling Billows? That’s too much! Any other references?’

  ‘There’s a talking encyclopedia in my head which –’

  ‘A talking encyclopedia in his head? The youngster’s a natural! Go on, go on!’

  ‘Well, then I made my way across the desert and found a city – no, I’m wrong, it wasn’t a proper city, it was a semi-solid mirage. But it was full of Fatoms that spoke backwards, and the houses kept vanishing, which made living conditions impossible. After that I lived inside a tornado. That’s why I’m really nearly a hundred years old, but when the tornado went into reverse I became younger again. Well, inside the tornado was a city inhabited by men of a hundred who … No, wait, I forgot to tell you about falling into a dimensional hiatus! I landed in a dimension where they play music on instruments made of milk, and …’

  By now, Smyke was rolling around on the floor with laughter. Laboriously, he struggled up from behind his desk.

  Suddenly realizing that this brief summary of my life must have made me sound mentally deranged, I thought it wiser to skip the story of the Bollogg’s head, say no more, and disappear, never to return, as soon as I’d put this embarrassing situation behind me.

  ‘Stop, that’s enough! Save it for your performances!’ cried Volzotan Smyke. ‘You’re sensational! I’m putting you under contract. I’ll be your agent. You’ll get ten – no, five per cent of all the takings, is it a deal? I’m going to make you rich and famous. Sign on the dotted line.’

  He had removed a form from a drawer and deposited it on the desk. Knio and Weeny thrust me nearer. I bent over the document, but I couldn’t read a word of it, the print was so tiny and the lighting so poor.

  ‘Sign!’ Weeny whispered in my ear. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime. Sign before he changes his mind.’

  What did I have to lose? I’d gone there to become a congladiator, so why not take the plunge? I picked up a pencil and wrote ‘Bluebear’ on the dotted line in big, bold letters.

  I go into training

  Once I had told Chemluth the news, we spent a long time discussing our plans for the future. Chemluth was to be my second and trainer. You didn’t become a congladiator just like that. Smyke had impressed on me that it required nonstop, intensive training.

  Anyone can stand up and tell a straightforward lie – there’s no artistry in that. Getting your listeners to believe that lie, therein lies the secret. Like any great art, that of lying calls for diligence and the application of numerous layers. Just as a painter superimposes layers of pigments and glazes, or a composer constructs scores out of melodies and rhythms, vocal and instrumental parts, or a writer weaves a web of words on many levels, so a liar piles lie on lie to form a masterpiece. A good lie must resemble a stout brick wall, patiently constructed course by well-laid course until it’s firm as a rock.

  It must also mingle fact with fiction, kindle hopes and dash them, lay false trails, perform narrative twists and turns, and proceed by stealth. Above all, the face must lie too. Any tall story, however elaborately constructed, can be blown apart by the wrong facial expression. An ill-timed twitch of the eyebrow, a hesitant flicker of the eye, and the cleverly woven tissue of lies is reduced to tatters. I have seen great congladiators come unstuck because they blinked at the wrong moment.

  Most congladiators trained by constantly lying to their friends and acquaintances so as to remain in form. I myself rejected such training methods, not only because they soon drove all your friends away, but because I found them boring. I went in search of a bigger audience.

  I went down to the shore and lied to the sea. I went outside the city gates and bamboozled the mighty Humongous Mountains. I climbed the highest corkscrew towers in Lisnatat and conned the sky itself. Yes, I lied to the elements, and the roar of the breakers and the mountains’ reverberations were my applause. This is the only way to gain a feeling for great, dramatic rodomontades. Anyone crossing swords with the elements must accept the possibility of being washed out to sea by a wave or struck down by a thunderbolt or an avalanche. It stimulates the imagination and hones the reflexes, makes you cunning and alert.

  On one occasion during training, a thunderbolt really did miss me by a hair’s-breadth as I stood at the top of a corkscrew tower with a storm in the offing. I was well into my stride, lying fit to turn the sky black, when I became too big for my boots. Just as I was exuberantly cobbling together a half-baked lie, a huge shaft of lightning bore down on me. I managed to leap aside, but it cut the top of the tower in half. That was an object lesson. A congladiator couldn’t afford to be guided by his emotions. Every lie, no matter how dramatic and spontaneous its delivery, had to be based on cool calculation.

  Reading matter

  Another important training aid was the reading of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow literature. Writers being second only to politicians at lying, they also make the best teachers. I adopted the daily pre-workout habit of reading three books after breakfast, none of them less than three hundred pages long. I even sacrificed half my night’s sleep in order to read more books. I absorbed the entire œuvre of Wilfred the Wordsmith in two hundred volumes – all the novels, novellas, short stories, stage plays, reviews, letters, speeches and experimental sound-poems he had ever written, as well as his twelve-volume autobiography.

  I also read the complete works of Count Zamoniac Clanthu of Midgard, a best-selling author despised by the Zamonian literati, who was really an innkeeper named Per Pemmf and had devoted his life to writing thrillers. All his books told how the hero, Prince Sangfroid, underwent hair-raising adventures in which he vanquished a monster with at least three heads and rescued a red-haired princess from its clutches. They also paved the way for Prince Sangfroid’s next adventure, in which the presence of a monster and a princess was guaranteed. Reading matter of this kind did not expand my vocabulary, perhaps, but it did nourish my imagination, and a well-fed imagination was one of the most important weapons in the congladiator’s armoury.

  My grounding in the classics, on the other hand, I obtained from the stage works of Gongolphian Golph, chronicler of the Zamonian war of succession. The main characters in all his plays were Norselander aristos who delivered unintelligible speeches in rhyming couplets and were pushed out of windows in the third act, if not before. Golph’s dramas enhanced my knowledge of Zamonian history and my ability to extemporize in rhyme.

  Another piece of required reading was The Song of the Trout, an epic poem made up of four thousand sonnets. Allegedly written in the course of several centuries by two hundred Mountain Dwarfs who preferred to remain anonymous, The Song of the Trout had nothing at all to do with trout (the only one it featured didn’t sing and was promptly eaten). It dealt with certain skirmishes between human beings, dwarfs, giants and gods, all of whom tried to outwit each other. Unlike Count Zamoniac’s thrillers, The Song of the Trout had more than one hero – some two hundred of them, as I recall, and all of dwarfish stature.

  I read How Dank Was My Valley, principal work of the regional writer Psittachus Rumplestilt, a poet from the Muchwater Marshes, where a massive shower of meteorites had transformed the countryside into a vast expanse of wetland. How Dank Was My Valley was a heart-rending saga of life among the reed-dwellers. Any aspiring liar must be versed in grand emotions, and they occurred on every page Rumplestilt wrote. Sensitive souls, those reed-dwellers: the sight of a snapped bullrush was enough to send them into paroxysms of grief, shame, hatred, rage, or local patriotism, whichever. This I found most instructive.

  But the congladiator’s most valuable literary aid was The Shortest Legs in Zamonia, the autobiography of the master practitioner Nussram Fhakir the Unique. It describes his fairy-tale rise from peat-cutter in the Graveyard Marshes of Dull to celebrated congladiator so compellingly and in such obsessive detail that no budding exponent of the art could afford to shirk memorizing as much of the book as possible. It taught me a
ll about the congladiatorial profession, at least where theory was concerned.

  I must make it clear from the outset that the spectator’s conception of a congladiator’s training was wide of the mark. There was no official syllabus or diploma, no form of initiation or prescribed course of instruction. There was really only one rule, namely, that everything should accord with the wishes of Volzotan Smyke.

  The tycoon

  Smyke was the uncrowned king of the congladiators. Talented individuals were encouraged, developed or demolished to suit his plans of the moment. I very soon grasped this because he liked having me around, and I was often privileged to be present when he engaged in his multifarious business activities.

  Smyke not only ran the congladiatorial contests but controlled the Gebba League and the entire port of Atlantis. He dealt in smuggled phogars, pickled belly of pork, Yhôllian antiques, troll hides, blood plasma, coconuts, fake pixie stars, sugar cane, Yeti Beer, and anything else imported or exported by sea.

  He knew every shipyard and every captain and vessel in the harbour, was honorary harbourmaster, chairman of the Gebba Players’ Association, honorary congladiator, and treasurer of the Atlantean Choral Society. He owned the Megathon and most of the city’s corkscrew towers. He maintained a private army of Yetis, Bluddums and Wolpertingers to guarantee his personal safety, controlled thirty per cent of the city’s furdressing salons, and took a sauna with the mayor once a week. No, Smyke wasn’t just the uncrowned king of the congladiators, he was the uncrowned king of Atlantis itself.

  The night of my first public appearance came sooner than I would have liked. I was to have a little sparring match with another young and inexperienced congladiator as a preliminary to the main bout starring Lord Olgort (who was improving with every duel).

  My first contest

  I didn’t feel sufficiently well-trained for it, which was why the said evening found me fidgeting in my dressing room beneath the Megathon while Chemluth massaged my neck and tried to calm me down.

  ‘Just go out there, gah? He’s only a little fish and the rounds won’t be scored, so what’s the big deal? Relax, gah. Your neck muscles are all –’

  The door of the cubicle flew open and Knio and Weeny burst in. Behind them, smoking a fat phogar, Volzotan Smyke squeezed through the narrow doorway. Bringing up the rear was Rumo, his Wolpertinger bodyguard, whom I still found slightly intimidating. I secretly hoped they’d come to cancel my bout.

  ‘Now listen, youngster,’ said Smyke. ‘We’ve got a problem … Our man, the one who’s scheduled to fight Lord Olgort, has gone sick at the last moment. I want you to take his place.’

  Chemluth was as flabbergasted as I. ‘He’s not ready! He’s never had a fight. It’s crazy, gah!’

  Weeny held up a piece of paper. It was my contract. He adjusted his monocle and proceeded to read aloud:

  ‘Clause 14a: The party of the second part undertakes to engage in any Duel of Lies to which the party of the first part assigns him. Should he refuse, a fine of –’

  Smyke cut him short.

  ‘Stop browbeating him with that stupid contract! If he won’t do it, he won’t.’ He took a couple of puffs at his phogar and rested one of his numerous hands on my shoulder.

  ‘There’s a far more important consideration, my lad. A chance like this may not come your way again so quickly. Many congladiators wait years for a title fight, and many never get one at all. I’d think it over carefully …’

  I thought of the Troglotroll. I thought of the labyrinth.

  I thought of the Spiderwitch.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t do it! I won’t do it!’ I cried as they escorted me to the stage, but nobody heard me. What with the bellows of the Bluddums, the blare of the Mountain Dwarfs’ band, the hum of a hundred thousand voices – the despairing wails of a novice congladiator on the verge of swooning with stage fright were completely drowned. I had never felt so terrified.

  ‘Just be yourself, gah?’ was Chemluth’s advice.

  But myself was the last person I wanted to be at this moment. I would gladly have swapped places with any member of the audience, whether snooty Norselander, boisterous Bluddum, or pathetic Duodwarf. Best of all I would have liked to be an Invisible, because then I could have slunk away unnoticed. What an idiot I was! How could I have exchanged a comfortable seat on one of the spectators’ benches for the challenger’s throne? That was the hottest and most uncongenial hot seat in the whole Megathon. Nobody liked unknown challengers. The audience yearned to see them taken apart by the reigning King of Lies – that’s what unknown challengers were for. A few minutes ago I had been scared of a sparring match, and now I was on my way, without any duelling experience, to a main bout with a popular champion.

  If I hadn’t been so pushy I would now be sitting up there with a hot beer in one paw and a buttered corn cob in the other, looking forward to a thrilling contest. Instead of that I was feeling sick – sicker than I’d ever felt in my life. My stomach was behaving like a caged beast, lashing out in all directions and scratching and biting my innards like a cat in a sack. I was so agitated that I temporarily forgot my own name and what I was doing there. My knees were so weak that Chemluth had to support me, and pints of sweat were running down my back into my challenger’s cloak. Challenger! How could I have let it come to this? I wanted to turn and run away, out of the Megathon, out of Atlantis, back into the desert – back into the tornado, for all I cared. Anything would have been better than the prospect of mounting the stage.

  But Chemluth was holding me by the right paw and Smyke by the left, and the Wolpertinger was grimly marching along behind me. There was no escape.

  The challenger’s throne

  Although there were only ten steps leading to the challenger’s throne, they seemed endless. I wouldn’t be able to climb them without losing my balance or my senses. Smyke and Chemluth let go, leaving me with no support at all. The first step seemed to be made of rice pudding or some equally yielding substance. There was no terra firma under my feet. I must have looked like a drunk trying to stand up straight, but I managed to climb the second step. It was a little more resistant than the first, but still as soft as a swansdown pillow. I debated whether to enlist the use of my forelegs and go down on all fours. The third step merely swayed like a ship in a moderate sea but appeared to be of some solid material. The fourth was quite firm and didn’t sway either, nor did the fifth and sixth.

  I made it. It was just nerves, excitement, the first time. My stage fright waxed and waned, a perfectly natural phenomenon familiar to everyone who appears in public. Sooner or later you calm down of your own accord. In an excess of self-confidence I half turned and looked over my shoulder. I found myself confronted by a restless sea composed of thousands of hostile faces. Everything started swaying again. My legs turned to spaghetti. I staggered to the right, I staggered to the left, and then I opted for the only correct course of action: I took the remaining steps in one enormous stride and flopped down on the throne. The audience gasped with relief. My nerves subsided altogether.

  Invisible support

  It was as if magical forces were flowing into me. I sensed the presence of those who had sat there before me – sensed the presence of my idols: Mutra Singh, Ambrosiac Nassatram, Salguod Smaddada, Gnooty Valtrosa, Husker Pothingay, Elija Moju, Barimbel Cornelis, and – of course – Nussram Fhakir the Unique. I could sense their proximity, even though they were long dead or retired or had disappeared. All had once been challengers, all had once sat here before overthrowing the King of Lies and ascending the victor’s throne. I felt as if Nussram Fhakir were standing behind me in the flesh and speaking to me. He whispered that this was my night, that the royal throne was being defiled by an unworthy Troglotroll, and that it was my responsibility to efface that blot on its dignity.

  Or had sheer stage fright simply scattered my wits?

  Lord Olgort

  Then Lord Olgort was carried in. He was somewhat
surprised at first to see me on the challenger’s throne, but after a moment he seemed to relish the sight. He gave me a look of mingled anticipation, curiosity, and compassion, like a cat with a captive bird in its claws.

  Strangely enough, this left me completely unimpressed. Being the challenger, I had to tell the first story. I didn’t even have to think, nor did I need to recite any of the lies I’d learnt by heart and saved for an emergency.

  My first story seemed to come from outside, as if my idol had whispered it in my ear. It percolated my brain and emerged from my lips as a flawless tissue of lies. Such, at least, is my recollection. Of the story itself I remember as little as I do of any of the other tales I told on that magical night, but it must have been pretty good: I scored 9.0, the highest number of points any novice’s opening gambit had obtained in the annals of the Duel of Lies.

  The Troglotroll was history, even after the first round, but he didn’t know it. That’s to say, he seemed to have at least an inkling of the fact, because his riposte, despite its customary originality, was delivered in slightly hesitant tone of voice. Minor though they were, no one had ever heard him betray such shortcomings. People were accustomed to his lamentations and feigned subservience, but this was genuine uncertainty, and that an audience never forgave. A King of Lies was always measured against his peak performances. The Troglotroll’s feeble opening effort earned him a mere 3.5 points.

  I was even better the second time. The past masters in my head advised me to pay more attention to the histrionic frills, employ dramatic gestures, intensify my mimicry. Although my story lasted only three minutes, I managed in that short time to reduce the whole audience to tears twice and unleash four gales of laughter. Frenetic applause ensued.