“Is that correct?”
“Your eyes do not deceive you, Bruno. Of course I suppose this means that we must cast that sullen child in the role of Miranda. But if anyone can make anyone into a first-rate actress, it is I. How old is she?”
“She’s fifteen.”
“Aha! Convenient. That is the age of Miranda in the play.” Leon quoted: “ ‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old, and twelve year since, thy father was the duke of Milan and a prince of power.’ ”
Leon let me fondle the check and read it over and over on the way home. This was to be our production budget. The next morning we went straightaway to the bank to cash the check before any second thoughts could come to a more sober Mrs. Goyette. The first thing we bought with the money was a sturdy metal box with a combination roll that released its snaplocking clasps, in which we dumped all the crisp, never-been-circulated one-hundred-dollar bills that Leon and I had summoned from their beds of rest in the bank teller’s register, to introduce them into the winding paths of commerce, to be spent toward a good cause, and forthwith set out on whatever untold adventures the world had in store for them. We carefully counted and re-counted the money, and wrote the amount on the top line of the first page of a yellow spiral-bound college-ruled steno pad (much like the notepads that Gwen, my amanuensis, uses to record this narrative), clipped the pen to the pad and put it in the box to keep the cash company, along with a calculator for subtracting expenses. This was the entire extent of the bookkeeping system we cleverly designed for the company expense account of our now-considerably-enriched avant-garde theatre group, the Shakespeare Underground. Leon and I decided on a combination that we each committed to memory, set the combination, shut the box tight, and locked it.
Then we immediately opened it again to pay for lunch. We extracted two of the crisp hundred-dollar bills, fastidiously marked the expense on the steno pad, locked the box, stashed it under the futon, and took a train downtown for celebratory steaks. It took a while to find a nice restaurant that we hadn’t swindled before, but we found one, and over top sirloins and martinis we discussed the immediate future of the Shakespeare Underground. Our first argument concerned the venue. We arrived at no immediate conclusions, as Leon was hard-pressed to think of a theatrical venue that he had not been barred from for some reason or other. Our second argument concerned our first significant production expense, which was to be my nose surgery. Leon argued that it was an unnecessary and irresponsible use of company funds, the relevance of which to the project at hand was questionable at best. Leon, it turned out, would later have to eat a lot of crow concerning his initial objections to my nose surgery, because the surgery in an unexpected way led to the resolution of the first argument. Then we entered the serious planning stages, i.e., preproduction. What we imagined was spectacular, veritably epic in scope and ambition. We had the first of many conversations about what was needed to resuscitate the theatre for the coming twenty-first century—for that was our ultimate aim. I’d been reading Stanislavsky, I’d been reading Artaud. This reading was all part of Leon’s required reading list for my tutelage in modern dramaturgy. As a teacher, Leon equally emphasized both theory and practice, and was particularly interested in the theories of Artaud.
“This shall probably be the greatest production of Shakespeare in history,” said Leon. He gingerly pushed his hair back from his face with his fingertips to prevent it from getting in the martini he was slurping. I had to agree.
“I have realized,” Leon continued, “that Shakespeare wrote at the tail end of the period in human history in which the magic of the narrative art was still truly alive. Later, the wild animal of Shakespeare was captured, killed, taxidermized, and enshrined by the idiotic and anodyne scholarship of the four sad centuries that have followed him, but this obviously is not the Bard’s fault. We must save Shakespeare from his admirers, from his murderers. We must save him by doing away with the tyranny of the text.”
I asked how this might be possible.
“An excellent question. The task that lies before us now is to undo the damage that the Enlightenment and its subsequent centuries have wrought upon the narrative arts. We must revive a sense of danger to the theatre, a sense of vitality. To break down not just the fourth wall, but also the first, the second, and the third. These walls should never have been built. Do you follow?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then I shall explain. After many exhaustive years of careful study and reflection on the matter, I have arrived at the inconvenient conclusion that the Enlightenment caused the beginning of the downfall of Western theatre, just as it ruined nearly everything else. You will notice, for instance, that the centuries following Shakespeare produced astonishingly little literature that may be deemed truly significant. The work of Edgar Rice Burroughs is an exception. And some Dickens. But they were swimming against the current.” Leon paused to insert a generous plug of steak into his cheeks. “Take the Ancients,” he went on, gesturing with his fork, his words pillowed in his cheeks by his chewing. “For them, theatre could not be disentangled from the very fabric of life. The Romans took the theatre so seriously that they were known to occasionally execute people onstage, and would write these executions into their plays, as sort of, you know, plot points.”
“One might argue,” I felt it necessary to point out, “that we should not admire the seriousness with which the Romans took the theatrical arts, but rather be appalled at how seriously they didn’t take the dignity of human life.”
“Bah! What a deeply uninteresting perspective. Please henceforth banish it from your mouth in my presence.”
“Sorry.”
“Right. Where was I? I would speculate that Western theatre began its steady crumbling decline around the fall of the Roman Empire, and was nearly complete by the mid-seventeenth century. After that, it would never be as good again. Why, you may ask? Because after that historical moment, the narrative arts had become severed from the body of society—severed like a limb is severed! After that, all narrative art was placed inside a display case, as something to be viewed safely from outside. It became like a caged animal, pacing back and forth before the bars, to be awed and admired only from behind a protective barrier.”
“I know how that feels!”
“Precisely! You are in a unique position, Bruno, because you have seen this cage from both within and without. And just as you have liberated yourself from the confines of this cage, we must liberate narrative art from its cage. We must return the theatre back to the wild, where it is free, if it so chooses, to rip its spectators to bloody shreds!”
“The theatre of wild animals!”
“Bruno!”—Leon grasped me by the arm, grasped it as forcefully as if he had just suffered a heart attack—“What a brilliant phrase! The theatre of wild animals!”
We toasted to this coinage, violently knocking our martinis together in celebration. An idea had just been born. The theatre of wild animals: we fell in love with the idea at once. In the meantime, I was able to convince Leon to begrudgingly permit me to borrow—he considered it a loan, a term I hoped he would forget about—seven hundred dollars from our company cash box to pay for my nose.
XL
My nose. Exactly as I once did, Gwen, upon the lid of a now-quasimythical Plexiglas box on the floor of a small white room in the Behavioral Biology Laboratory of the University of Chicago—the box that led me into civilization—years later, with the same ape knuckles I knocked three times: knock, knock, knock. Only this time it was not a transparent plastic box containing a peach that I knocked three times upon, but rather a door—a door I had seen once before—in back of an inconspicuous Brazilian beauty salon. Beside me stood my magnitudinous friend, Leon Smoler, who, finally bending to my desire to have a new nose, had driven me in his ex-wife’s Wagoneer from the apartment we shared on City Island to this place, and would drive me home following my opera
tion. On the drive to Queens we noticed that Leon’s ex-wife’s car was running low on gas. This problem would have been easy enough to ameliorate, but Leon, acting in rational economic self-interest by seeking to minimize production expenses, wanted to milk every last possible mile out of the current contents of the fuel tank, and he planned to make the eighth of a tank that was already at our disposal when we picked it up from Leon’s ex-wife’s house in Yonkers last all the way from City Island to Queens, then back to City Island, to our apartment behind Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, where he would tenderly outstretch me supine on my bed to convalesce, then back to Yonkers to return the car. I expected to be anesthetized and in no shape to see myself home after the surgery. So long as I got my nose—and I am infinitely grateful to Leon for this favor—I chose not to advise him as to the wisdom or folly of his plan, nor to the ethical questions it raised.
The car was parked outside on the street in front of the Impanema Beauty Salon. Beside Leon stood Cecília, Dr. DaSilva’s wife and the owner of the legitimate end of the business that this establishment conducted. (But what business is legitimate, really? The entire system of economic exchange has always smacked of unnaturalness to me, of absolute spiritual illegitimacy.) In the inner pocket of my jacket was an envelope, containing nine one-hundred-dollar bills, two of them borrowed from Audrey and the other seven borrowed from the production budget of The Tempest. The door opened. There stood Dr. DaSilva, looking even more like a man in a silent movie than he had before: that slicked-back pewtery fish-skin hair, the ends of his elegant little mustaches pointing down and away from his nasal septum like two arrows, the supreme gentility of his manners, and the gentleness of his demeanor.
I distinctly imagined that I heard the trilling of a toy piano providing musical accompaniment, and after he extended his delicate hand to me and I shook it in greeting, a black title card appeared onscreen, with the words printed on it and framed in an ornate border: Hello, Mr. Littlemore! Perhaps there were other words exchanged between us, but they are cleverly implied by our facial expressions and gestures. The doctor asked who this Gargantua was who loomed so tall and wide beside me, and I answered that this was my friend Leon, who drove me here as a personal favor, knowing that after my operation I would not be in any condition to see myself home. Leon tried to follow me into the operating room, but Dr. DaSilva shook his head and held up his hand, and the piano notes deepened to indicate that Leon was not to be admitted into the operating room, he must wait outside, sorry, it’s my policy, and after some futile arguing Leon stamped his foot and turned away. Dr. DaSilva shut the door, and in my silent movie Leon shuffled over to the waiting area and deposited himself in one of the folding chairs. He then tapped his foot as his eyes flicked back and forth in boredom. He picked up a magazine from the coffee table and begun to flip through it, but it was written in another language, and he could not read it, so he had to content himself with looking at the pictures. Then another black title card flashed on the screen: Meanwhile… Cut to Dr. DaSilva’s office-cum-operating room. Dr. DaSilva politely conveyed me to his desk, his hand on my back. Bruno sat, Dr. DaSilva sat, and across the desk we engaged in one last conversation about the nose that he was going to make on my face. My organs trembled with an emotional recipe consisting of three cups excitement and a teaspoon of fear. My eyes drifted to a work counter on one side of the room, where I caught sight of an open black suitcase. It was a surgical kit, made perhaps sometime in the early twentieth century. The surgical instruments were made with a craftsman’s love and precise attention to detail that we rarely glimpse anymore in objects of modern make. The scientific delicacy of those gleaming instruments!—every pair of forceps, scissors, pliers, tweezers, every knife, needle, saw, scalpel, lancet, caliper, trocar, cauter, retractor, spatula and speculum snug in its place, strapped with green ribbons into its proper depression in the green velvet lining of the case. There was, though, a distinct overture of menace in the way these sharp things glistened. Dr. DaSilva told me what I must do after I leave following the operation. He told me I could not remove the bandages until such-and-such a date. He told me not to get them wet. He told me that I might wake up with a face that was wounded, swollen, badly bruised, looking as if I had been bloodied up in a fistfight. Following surgery, I must stay in bed with my head elevated for the first twenty-four hours. My face would feel puffy, my nose would ache, a dull headache might be present. Swelling and bruising would peak after two to three days, but this could be lessened with the application of cold compresses. Bleeding was common for the first few days of recovery. Do not bend over with the head below the heart, he said, as this might increase swelling and/or bleeding. The nasal packing could be removed after a few days, and the splint could be removed one to two weeks later. I might go a little insane from the unremitting itching beneath his bandages, and it would feel like a swarm of fire ants crawling all over my flesh, but I must under absolutely no circumstances satisfy the desire, which would be a burning one, to scratch the itches. It would be best, the doctor told me, if during the healing period I did not touch my face at all, or at least as little as possible. Do not blow your nose for at least two weeks following the operation, he said. He told me that I must have serene patience to endure the coming vexation, the mad itching, the pain and discomfort that would pinch and enflame and torture my face. Patience, patience. The patient must be patient. Get lots of rest. Painkillers, if you can get them. What do you mean if I can get them, I wailed in alarm, and the doctor reminded me that he was practicing without a medical license, and so he could not prescribe anything. I should brace myself for a long period of excruciating pain, he told me. Vanity is painful. Beauty is difficult. And I should be discreet. Keep a low profile. Invisible, if possible. In fact it would be best, said the doctor, to simply not leave your home for a while—say the first week or two following the surgery. After all this had been said, the doctor asked me again, one last time, if I was still prepared to go through with the operation. This was my last chance to back out. The patient answered the doctor in the brave, defiant affirmative. Then the doctor asked for his fee: everything up front. The doctor was acutely embarrassed even to be discussing money—he was a man of almost aristocratic manners, and disliked the dirty but necessary intrusion of the economic into this conversation. The patient reached a long purple hand into the inner pocket of his jacket and slipped out an envelope, which he slid across the desk. The doctor opened the unsealed flap of the envelope, peeked inside, and counted the money visually without handling it, then rolled open the desk drawer, dropped the envelope in the drawer, and rolled it shut. The doctor nodded gravely. He rose from the desk, pushed in his chair, rolled up his sleeves, draped a white apron over his head and tied the strings in the back. He told me to take off my shirt and lie down on the operating table. I did as he commanded. The thin paper mat on the operating table crinkled under my body and stuck to the sweaty flesh of my back. I rested my sweet head on a little paper pillow, and heard the paper fabric rustle and crunch under my ears. The doctor covered me with a clean white sheet. He billowed it over my body as if changing a bed, and pulled it up to my neck and tucked it under my chin. The doctor clicked on the fluorescent lamps C-clamped to the edges of the operating table. The tubes glowed on—nzt-nzt-ngnzzzzzzzz—stinging my eyes with bright light. Why does it seem at times as if my whole life has been lived out beneath the cold glare of fluorescent lights? The lights of academia, of science, of art, of medicine, of the madhouse. That is my fate, to live beneath fluorescent lights. In my peripheral vision I saw Dr. DaSilva—his body moving quickly and exactly, though with the occasional pops, scratches, blots, and jitters in the old celluloid—as he took a roll of duct tape from the operating table. The primitive restraining device of an illegal physician. I heard the sound of a long strip of tape being unpeeled from the roll. I smelled the incredibly distinctive odor of freshly unpeeled duct tape. With a long band of smelly gray tape the doctor secured my head to the back of the table, then wrapped s
everal more layers of tape around my forehead, until I couldn’t budge it. He did likewise with my arms, until the image of Frankenstein’s monster strapped to the table to presently await his incarnating bolt of harnessed lightning probably became comically analogous. I hesitantly asked the doctor whether these restraints were entirely necessary. The doctor assured me they were a necessary precaution, nothing to worry about. He dabbed alcohol on my forearm, squirted a spurt of clear liquid from the end of a hypodermic needle, knocked it twice with his fingers, slid it deep into a vein and pushed its contents into my bloodstream. Things began to get fuzzy here for me. My sense of time dilated. I felt my body quickly becoming cool and numb. It was a pleasant sensation. Hot and cold at the same time. My breathing slowed faster than my stream of consciousness. I might have muttered incoherently. Lydia—I hope I did not mumble over and over until the anaesthetic took me under—Lydia, Lydia, Lydia… Perhaps the doctor wondered what significance this name had for his patient. What other secrets did morphine unlock from my fading brain? I’ll never know. I woozily observed the doctor wash his hands at the sink as if from a thousand miles away. Somehow I was asleep and awake simultaneously. I could feel the doctor’s delicate hands, I could feel the slight applications of pressure, the deft touches, the surgical flourishes, the cuts. I could just barely feel the doctor mutilating my face with his instruments, and a distant part of me felt the blood running down my cheeks, I tasted it as it dripped a little into my mouth, the warm bitter metallic tang of blood, and I heard, or I dreamt or imagined I heard, a drop or two of my blood go plit plit on the sticky linoleum floor of the operating room. I floated above my own body and watched the surgeon as he removed parts of my face. I watched the doctor break something in my nose and jerk it loose from its envelope of bloody slime. I saw the naked meat beneath my skin, exposed under the hot buzzing lights.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 44
