When we came in, the women smiled and blew kisses and flicked feminine waves hello to Sasha, and one of the women—she was heavyset and middle-aged, with heavy purplish pouches under her green eyes, pink lipstick, and dyed bronze-blond hair—said something to the woman in the chair whose head she was working on, and came smiling and clacking on her heels toward us across the linoleum. She and Sasha embraced, exchanged kisses on cheeks. Then Sasha and this woman had a lightning-quick conversation in Portuguese, and Sasha pointed at me. The woman held out her hand to me, palm down.
“Hello, Mr. Bruno,” she said, in an accent with feather-dusted consonants. I put a small kiss on the top of her plump brown hand, because that seemed like the thing to do, and she was introduced to me as Cecília. With a long fingernail, painted pink to match her lips, she beckoned us to follow her through the mirrored corridor of the beauty parlor, where in passing she bid one of the other women with a signal and a flutter of Portuguese to finish her work for her. She scraped aside the turquoise curtain covering the doorway at the back of the room and directed us through a dingy storeroom filled with damp cardboard boxes, down a short, dim hallway, through another door and into another waiting room, which looked much like the waiting area in the front of the front room, with the same metal folding chairs and coffee table with the same magazines on it. There was a plastic potted plant in one corner and a framed mirror on the wall.
This room essentially looked like the waiting room of a normal doctor’s or dentist’s office, in that it was clean and well-lighted and so on, and even professional-looking—but what was missing from it was a feeling of legitimacy, of—well, legality, a basic lack of fear. Yes, that’s it—this room had a little fear in it, a fear that slightly soured its mood; but only slightly soured, like a whiff of milk that’s just beginning to turn but would probably still be safe to drink. The carpet was a little too thin or too questionably stained, the décor a little too shabby, the walls a little too naked of ornament. We sat down in the cheap metal folding chairs, and Cecília went out and brought us coffee in Styrofoam cups, and sat down to ask me a few polite questions, nothing too serious yet, which questions I answered as politely and as well as I could between sips of coffee. Then Cecília turned to Audrey, asked her a few similar questions, and apologized to us before turning to Sasha and launching into a rapid exchange in Portuguese. I liked Cecília—she was businesslike, but beneath that there was something almost grandmotherly about her, something worldly and kind that I trusted.
The other door in the room softly clicked open and two women came out. They looked surprised to see us sitting there. The older of them held the younger one by a linked arm. I realized from their synchronized gait, bodies, and eyes that they were mother and daughter. The daughter’s face, from her upper lip to her eyes, was covered in a bandage: plaster-wetted gauze was wrapped across her nose, a big adhesive bandage secured it to her face, and a cotton pad strapped over that with white tape wrapped around the back of her head beneath her hair. Both her eyes were swollen-lidded, bloodshot, and bruised purple, as if she’d been in a fistfight. She was breathing through her mouth. The mother dipped a careful nod at Cecília, who nodded back with pursed pink lips and knowing eyes, and they went out. The other door was still slightly ajar. The door swung outward and a little man came out: he was middle-aged, thin, and delicate-looking, with pronounced cheekbones, pewtery hair that glistened like fish skin slicked flat to the sides of his mostly bald head, and a neat black mustache that pointed down from his nose to the corners of his lips; the overall effect of his face evoked an aging matinee star from the era of silent film. A pair of wireframe glasses pincered the bridge of his nose. He was snapping off a pair of bloody surgical gloves and whistling. He wore a string-tied white apron, covered in blood. Then he saw us sitting there, and, still whistling, he jabbed an index finger in the air, probably pretending to have forgotten something, turned back inside and shut the door behind him. For a while we heard the clank and scuttle of things being cleaned up or thrown away, the eek-eek of faucet knobs and the hush of water, accompanied all the while by his tuneful and insouciant whistling. Cecília excused herself, rose, went into the room and added the sound of their muffled conversation to these noises. She came back and sat with us again, reassured us with a smile and a wink, and patted me twice on the knee. Soon the man came out again. The wireframe glasses were now pushed higher up on his nose and the gloves and bloody apron gone. He wore elegant shoes and a purple shirt tucked into pinstriped gray slacks; his sleeves were rolled up past his hairy forearms, and a silver watch with a segmented band flashed at his wrist. This was Dr. DaSilva.
There was some initial business to discuss. After that was over with and the DaSilvas (Dr. DaSilva was the husband of Cecília, who ran the legitimate half of their business) were sufficiently convinced I was trustworthy, Cecília returned to the front of the store and I left Audrey and Sasha in the waiting room to follow Dr. DaSilva back to his office, a cramped but clean, windowless room with a desk, a sink, and an operating table. An assortment of surgical equipment lay gleaming on the counter. The operating table had a white bedsheet draped over it, with fluorescent lamps C-clamped to its edges. Dr. DaSilva decompressed into the office chair behind his desk, and I sat across from him in a small wooden chair facing it. There was a distinct sense of Old World gentility to Dr. DaSilva. Seen close up, he looked even more like a silent film star: he even seemed to move like a man in an old movie, too slowly when standing still and too quickly when walking, and sometimes, while in transit, popping instantaneously from one place to another; you could almost hear the crackle of decaying film as he moved around the room.
“I need your help, Dr. DaSilva. I want a nose.”
“I believe I can provide that,” he nodded. He sat in his cheap wheeling office chair with his elbows anchored on the thighs of his crossed legs and his fingers making a cage, each fingertip leaning on its corresponding fingertip. Dr. DaSilva looked like a man of science. Something about his mannerisms reminded me at that moment of Dr. Norman Plumlee.
“Look at my nose!” I half-wailed. “It’s hideous! I want to put a new nose on my face.”
“What sort of nose are you imagining, Mr. Littlemore?”
“A nice big one.”
“Hm. Would you like, say, a nose like this one?” He tapped the side of his own nose.
“I simply want a nose, Doctor, that will make me look more—um—well—more like a normal person.” I refrained from telling him my whole story. Usually my faculties of speech were enough to convince people that I was just a very weird-looking human. He seemed to believe that I was human, and so I did not tell him that what I wanted, what I really wanted, was a nose to make me more humanlike. I even dared to crack a joke: “Whenever I talk to someone, I see them staring at this aberration between my eyes, and I know they’re thinking: ‘Look at that nose—this guy looks like a chimp!’ ”
Dr. DaSilva smiled warmly and laughed, laughing with me, until he adjusted his wireframe glasses, looked at me a little closer, and quit laughing. He cleared his throat.
“This will be a tricky one,” he said.
“Please, Doctor!”—my fast-beating heart screamed out within my breast—“I don’t care where you get it! Cut it off a corpse for all I care, I just want the nose of a man, a man!”
Dr. DaSilva pulled a big three-ring binder from beneath his desk and flopped it open under his desk lamp. The book was full of photographs of all the nose surgeries he had performed. These were the kinds of noses he could shape with his knife. It functioned as a catalog. They were pre- and postoperative pictures of his clients, with the eyes scribbled out of the pictures to protect their anonymities. These pictures were nothing short of astounding to me. These women went under Dr. DaSilva’s knife and woke up with brand-new faces. He must have been a genius of the craft of plastic surgery. He was an artist—a sculptor—but his medium was not clay nor marble; it was the fragile union of flesh and nonflesh, the fluid marriage o
f the animate with the inanimate. He was like the Rodin of the corporeal—instead of kneading nonliving matter into forms suggesting life, he manipulated the very matter of life. I flipped through the glossy photographs stuck in the plastic sleeves of his scrapbook. They were lovely noses all, beautiful noses. But what I wanted was something a little different from these noses. For one thing, they were all women’s noses. For another, all of these operations were shrinkings or reshapings of noses: DaSilva shortened bones, smoothed out bumpy bridges, narrowed flaring nostrils, turned the downturned up, sharpened bulbous tips, etc. I suppose rhinoplasticians are generally in the business of the reduction—rather than the augmentation—of the schnoz. This, among other things, is what made the surgery I wanted a rather unorthodox one. Usually it is the surgeon’s job to break that delicate little bone in the bridge of the nose, remove the cartilage deemed unsightly and re-form the thing in closer accordance with our standards of beauty. But what Bruno desired was the opposite procedure: what I desired was practically the creation of a nose. I wanted a big, aggressive, human-looking nose to protrude from the middle of my chimp face.
Dr. DaSilva folded the book shut and stored it under his desk, then produced a sketchpad and a pencil, and asked me to turn my head so that he saw my profile. I did, and he trained his desk lamp on me. I winced.
“Sorry,” he said. “Please be still for a moment.”
I stared straight ahead and listened to the pencil scratching on the paper. When he was done, he showed me the quick sketch that he had drawn of me. It looked like this:
Dr. DaSilva was evidently a skilled draftsman. I agreed this was an accurate rendering of my profile. Dr. DaSilva flipped a sheet of transparency paper over this drawing, and sketched out a prospective nose on top of it. When finished, he showed me the result:
“Yes!” I shouted. “That’s it! That’s the nose I want!”
I forgot myself—I was hopping up and down madly in my seat, and Dr. DaSilva sharply hushed me. I slapped my hands over my mouth such that I resembled the third and final of the Three Wise Monkeys, and, when I was sure no more yelps of irrepressible joy would escape me, I lowered my quivering fingers. The image Dr. DaSilva had rendered drove me to the brink of tears. He understood precisely the nose that I desired. The nose that would make me a man. Dr. DaSilva also offered to trim my ears into a more human size and shape, but I declined. I’ve always liked my ears. It was only the nose I was after.
The price he named was one thousand dollars. I blanched when I heard the figure. By exhorting his pity—pleading that I was but a poor Shakespearean actor, that it might take me months to scrabble together so much capital—I was able to talk him down to nine hundred, but he would not drop a dime lower. Such a price, he said, was charity enough considering how unusual and difficult this procedure would be. Now, at this time, I had sixty-seven dollars and ninety-one cents to my name. It was all stuffed in my piggy bank at Leon’s place. My heart sank as I wondered how many months of scrimping and saving it would take me, how many corners cut, how many frivolities forgone, how many months of monastically abstemious living it would take me to save up so much money. Audrey agreed to lend me two hundred dollars right away, with no interest. Leon was still skeptical.
“I see no reason why you should want to gravitate that delightfully comic face of yours, Bruno. That face is what will make your fortune.”
“Fine then. If it’ll make me a fortune, then I’ll use my face to make my fortune, and I’ll use my fortune to make my face!”
“Pshaw!”
“Don’t worry, Bruno,” said Audrey. “You’ll probably still look like a freak.”
“Thank you,” I said bitterly.
“Bah,” said Leon. “Weep not, ape. We tease because we love.”
How—how to get the money? This financial question now took over the obsessive place in my mind that had been previously occupied by the nasal question. How to get the money. How to get the money. The obnoxious refrain “How to get the money” moved into my waking consciousness, took a seat, kicked off its shoes, and sat there for days and weeks, driving me insane. Where in the world would I turn up nine hundred dollars? Or seven hundred, I suppose, considering Audrey’s promise of a loan. But still. This amount of money seemed an insurmountable peak to me, an insane figure, a wistful, romantic impossibility, a childishly fanciful sum, as if the doctor may as well have asked for one-hundred-billion-trillion-gazillion dollars’ recompense for my surgery.
For a time I sank into a malaise. I entered a period of melancholic yearning. I pined for a nose. I would lock myself in the bathroom and stare at my face for hours, imagining where my nose would be, how handsome I would look. It was not so much that I wanted to aesthetically improve my face, but that… that I felt incomplete without a nose. I felt that I had been born missing one, that my lack of a definitive nose was a glaring and unfortunate deformity that wanted surgical correction. I tried to hatch money-getting schemes with Leon, but Leon still refused to lend even his emotional (not to mention financial) support to my surgery. The money-making schemes I idly allowed to incubate in my mind veered into the fantastic, even the felonious: I would embark upon a life of crime! I would rob a bank! Smuggle diamonds! Of course such fantasies never came close to fruition. I even considered writing to the wealthy Mr. Lawrence in Colorado to ask for the money—after all, a mere seven hundred dollars would be a drop in the bucket to him—but I rejected the idea almost as soon as it had crystallized in my consciousness, for the obvious reason that I was still a wanted fugitive in the world, whose whereabouts were unknown. I was lost, without money or nose. For a long time, my heart was sorrowful.
XXXVIII
Leon and I began talking seriously about what would be the Shakespeare Underground’s first (and only—but I’ll get to that when the time comes) major production. There was a little—just a little, not much—discussion at first as to which play we should perform for our company’s debut production. We had our hearts set on The Tempest right from the beginning, but we briefly considered others.
“What about Lear?” I suggested. Splayed open before us on the bar counter of Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, under the shadow of the giant rubber shark, was Leon’s battered and loveworn black leatherbound Gramercy Edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, with gold-edged pages as thin as cigarette papers and a ribbon sewn into the binding for a bookmark. Leon’s pudgy fingers flapped through the pages of the book.
“That’s much too dreary for me,” Leon snorted. “I’m frankly not in the mood for it. About the only thing that doesn’t happen to Lear is getting eaten, but if the play had been given one more act, it probably would have. I played Lear once, you know”—Leon was in a wistful mood—“some years ago now…. I was a bit lighter then. I had the beard for it, but not the physique. They told me to lose weight. I did in fact manage to lose a little, but nevertheless the audience laughed whenever I came onstage. That was in the winter, and on the side I was playing Santa Claus in a mall on Long Island. Oftentimes I would get carried away and slip into Lear, and all the grubby little children would commence to sob in terror. They laughed at my Lear and cried at my Santa. The bastards.”
“Othello?”
“I like Othello. It’s got lots of casual chat. You don’t get casual chat in Lear, everyone’s too busy thinking about the universe. But I’m afraid that in this day and age it would be in poor taste for me to wear blackface.”
We discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Love’s Labours Lost, and Coriolanus, but rejected each in turn for various and sundry reasons.
“The Tempest,” Leon declared, “is really the only obvious choice for us.”
“Agreed.”
“We must get it absolutely right, though. The Tempest, of all the Bard’s plays, is the one that offers the most creative leeway in the interpretation of staging, sound, music, scenery: it is a veritable blank slate for mise-en-scène, which makes it both an exciting and a difficult play to produce. The firs
t act is reasonable enough, and so’s the second, but the Bard seems to have dropped acid for the third and fourth acts. Really—just read the stage directions, they’re completely insane. Take this, for instance.” Leon cleared his throat and read: “ ‘Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy; claps his wings upon the table; and with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes.’ ”
“How are we supposed to do that?”
“With magic, Bruno. Some plays want stark, minimalist staging in order to focus the audience’s attention on the human elements of the play. The Tempest is just the opposite. The Tempest is a song to sing beyond mankind. A truly great production of it must be an experience so seductively thaumaturgical that it is rivaled only by the erotic in the scope of human experience. What I envision is not only a play, but also a magic show. The ideal production of this play, of course—the only production truly worthy of the text—would have to employ not tricks, not mere special effects nor slights-of-hand, but real magic. This production shall aspire to come as close to that ideal as possible. It shall be miraculous, nearly a religious experience, really, though it won’t be overtly good for anyone’s soul. No true theatre is. Theatre, Bruno, is a secular miracle.”
So our production of The Tempest would have to involve a spectacular sensory overload of mise-en-scène, involving mysterious tricks of light and sound, smoke and mirrors, music and magic. Leon would play Prospero. I would play Caliban. The rest?—details.
We needed funding: always a problem. How did this wretched and life-denying civilization come to be?—how did we blindly, stupidly, collectively manage to erect an architecture for our world in which we waste so much of our lives fretting and worrying and sweating and losing our sleep and grinding our teeth and biting our nails in putrid consternation over the movement and circulation, over the having and the not having, over the keeping and the losing and the procuring of little pieces of metal and paper? Then I remembered Emily—little Emily! Little Emily, who had nursed me when I was wounded, who had sheltered me when I was hunted. I recalled how her parents so desperately wanted for their beautiful daughter the celebrated life of the stage and screen. Perhaps, perhaps…
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 42
