The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  As she passes through the cloisters she begins to hear the low thump of a far-off drumbeat. Sometimes there is free theater or performance art by the hot-bread wagons that park on the far side of the cloisters, and she absentmindedly pursues the sound through a narrow arch and down a wet bricked alley until she comes to an open door.

  The door is halved horizontally by a steel bar, and at chest-height there is a shiny patch where the oil from thousands of hands has worn the paint away. At present the door is wedged open with a brick, and from within Isolde can hear shouting and the clear thump of a drum.

  She slips in quietly, padding down the corridor and up a small set of white-nosed stairs. She passes several dressing rooms with doors ajar and realizes that she must have entered the old auditorium by the players’ door. She hesitates and almost turns back, but the drum-thump is louder now and she can hear voices, and she resolves to go on and at least take a look before slipping back the way she has come. She emerges in the thick velvet blackness of the wings, and inches forward in the dark until she finds a gap in the cloth that will give her a view of the stage.

  From the wings the stage looks chaotic, the chalk and pencil lines all visible, the painted flats slantwise and cramped together and unbeautiful, and on the far side the jumbled mess of props and costumes in the wings opposite. Isolde can see a small number of backstage watchers, separated from each other by the quivering upright cloth of the wings, some in costume and standing tense on the balls of their feet as they wait for a cue. She can see past the footlights into the foggy dark underbelly of the two-tiered auditorium, and in the foreground the silhouetted players lit around their edges like the bright thread around the rim of a solar eclipse.

  In center stage there is a boy in a scarlet turban, wearing shabby coat-tails, a torn dirty ruff, and white gloves that are loose at the wrist and soiled. Vertical black diamonds are painted over each eye, spearing down his cheeks and cutting a sticky greasy track through the white powder on his face. They give him an odd haunted look, merry and melancholy at once. From where she stands Isolde can barely see his profile, just the curve of his cheek and the swell of his turban above his temple and a flash of black diamond every time he turns his head.

  “This is a complete deck of cards,” the boy is saying into the dark, shuffling a deck of cards so they cascade neatly from his right hand to his left. “No joker. Aces low. The card you draw from this deck will be yours to keep. You will carry it around with you always like a dirty secret.”

  With a flourish the boy fans the cards in an arc on the felt table in front of him. Her eyes are focusing now, and Isolde becomes aware of others on the stage, clothed in red and black and foaming around this central boy like lepers. The boy is tall and proud and glittering, harshly lit as if he is a figure in an overexposed photograph, bright and misted and glassy-eyed against the glare.

  “If you pick a card of a black suit you will be attracted to men. If you pick a card of a red suit you will be attracted to women. The number value on any spot card indicates your sexual prowess. Ten means you’re good; ace means you only think you’re good.”

  The boy is whipping the cards out of the pack as he speaks, holding them up between his fingers and his thumb, then puckering his hand swiftly so the card pops out and flutters into the air above him. He catches the fluttering card with his free hand, his other hand already reaching to pick up the next. The effect is rather like he is juggling, the cards tossed up in an explosive little arc and snatched away before they fall.

  “If you pick a court card, your sexual life might get a little more complicated. In general, a queen of any suit forces you to cross-dress, a king will give you a sadistic tendency and a jack will give you a masochistic tendency. But there are exceptions.”

  The kettle-drum roll is building and building. As the drum roll gets slowly louder, the boy becomes gradually more urgent. His movements get faster and his throat gets tighter and his voice gets more insistent. The black-clothed figures on the stage have begun to writhe.

  “The King of Diamonds is the only king to carry an axe instead of a sword. For this reason he is known as the Man with the Axe. If you draw the Man with the Axe, your sexual appetite may well develop into a perversion.

  “All the court cards are shown in full face except for three: two of the jacks and one of the kings are always in profile. If you draw one of these one-eyed cards, you will be prone to self-deception and dishonesty.

  “But the most important of all the court cards is the Queen of Spades.”

  Someone collides heavily with Isolde from behind. She staggers painfully and whips around. A boy has fallen back against the wing-cloth, swearing and clutching a handful of fabric to steady himself, his feet slipping on the worn chalky floorboards and his free arm sawing back and forth as he tries to regain his balance. He fumbles to keep hold of the scepter he is holding, but it falls with a clatter and rolls away under a fold of cloth.

  He peers at her sharply and frowns. “What are you doing here?” he hisses, already ducking down to retrieve his scepter.

  “I was just watching,” Isolde says, taking a hasty step back as the boy scrabbles around in the half-dark. “Sorry.”

  “Stanley!” hisses one of the lepers on stage. “Stanley, that’s you!”

  There is no time for Isolde to say more. The boy grabs his scepter, jumps to his feet and hurries onstage, righting his crown and flipping his scepter up in the brief half-second before he is illuminated. Isolde’s last glimpse of him before he dissolves into the harsh stage light is of a face in transformation, caught between a natural expression and a caricature, changing from the inside in the way the bathwater skin begins to pucker and depress when the plug is pulled from underneath.

  Isolde’s heart is still thumping from the collision and she suddenly feels ashamed that she is watching without invitation. She turns and slips away, retreating down the white-nosed steps she entered by, padding softly down the narrow corridor and finally bursting out into the ginkgo-smelling bright of the day.

  SIX

  April

  “Masks or faces? That’s what I keep asking myself. Masks or faces.”

  The Head of Movement was leaning against the radiator in the staffroom, his thin hands wrapped around his mug, frowning in a glassy sort of way at a faint stain on the linoleum floor. “The tall girl,” he said. “Today. Doing that… that piece from… The piece she did today—oh, start me off?”

  The Head of Acting dipped his newspaper and looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Come, you spirits…”

  “Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty. Yes.” The Head of Movement stood quivering for a moment. “She will never convincingly play that part. She is trapped inside her little round eyes and inside the smooth perfect symmetry of her face. All I could think while I was watching was that she would never think those lines. Not her. Not that face. That face would never dare. If I went and saw her in performance I would walk out and say, Lady Macbeth was all wrong.” The Head of Movement tossed his head in frustration. “I look at them all,” he said, “and I see so much hope and vigor and determination, all trapped inside faces that will never sell, that will never be remarkable—modern, pampered, silken faces that have never known tragedy or hardship or extremity, or even… God, most of them have spent nearly their whole lives inside. That girl—Lady Macbeth, today. It is like she’s made of plastic. She is too smooth and round to be real. She will never escape that smoothness and that roundness. She will never escape her face.”

  “You’re in a very bleak mood, Martin,” the Head of Acting said, unwrapping an aspirin and dropping it neatly into his coffee. “I didn’t think she was that bad. I rather liked her freshness. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall’—I thought that was marvelously seductive. She wasn’t trying to be evil.”

  “She wasn’t trying to be evil because she didn’t unders
tand a damn word of what she was saying,” the Head of Movement snapped.

  There was a silence. The Head of Movement bent his head and gulped from his mug in an indelicate snatching way, gasping between each hot mouthful, his throat contracting like a reptile’s when he swallowed. The Head of Acting thought, That’s a bachelor’s habit, bred of always eating alone. He felt sorry for the Head of Movement suddenly, and put his paper down.

  His dissatisfaction with the world always has such a terribly personal quality, the Head of Acting thought; he is freshly disappointed each time anything falls short of an ideal, and he wears his disappointment like a child. It showed a curious kind of innocence for a man of his age—a foolish self-sabotaging kind of innocence, for he knew that he was going to be disappointed, and still he believed.

  The Head of Movement’s instinct inclined toward simplicity and scruple, and yet he was not a scrupulous man: instead he was anxious and undecided and complaining, suspended between points of view. He was forever in the shadow of a principle, forever in the shadow of some floodlit cathedral swarming with bats in the dark, and while he might admire it and worship it and fear its massive contour, he could never bring himself to truly touch it; he would never knock and enter.

  The Head of Acting watched him wince and scowl into his coffee and draw his shoulder blades together and toss his head as if his skin had shrunk. The Head of Acting thought, It is as if, in some deep recess of him, he is still a teenager who has not yet lost that selfish blind capacity to fall in love, and fall badly. He wondered if he was jealous of the man’s anxiety, jealous of the agony of his choices, jealous of his tortured sense of failure and the failed justice in the world.

  “Is it a bad batch this year?” the Head of Acting said. “Is that what’s getting you down?”

  The younger man flopped into a chair like a punctured balloon. “No,” he said, drawing out the word in a doubtful way.

  “You were asking yourself, masks or faces.”

  “Yes,” the Head of Movement said, and sighed. “I used to believe in faces. All my life I believed in faces. I think I might have finally changed my mind.”

  February

  Whenever a door was closed at the Institute another always opened, popping gently forth, invisibly nudged by a draught that could never be contained. The shifty current gave the buildings a muttering, ghostly feel. If Stanley closed a door behind him, he always listened to hear another click open, like a faithful echo, out of the shadows further up the hall. All the doorknobs rattled. Hairline cracks webbed the enamel like dirty lace.

  The academic year began with a lavish production of King Lear, directed by the graduating students and starring all the tutors, proud and flashing in burgundy and gray. The title role was played by the Institute’s previous Head of Acting, long since retired, a sinewy man with long teeth and thin white hair scraped neatly forward over his forehead like a monk. About a month after closing night a costume, freshly flattened, was mounted on the peeling corridor wall. The collar was still stained black from the blood that ran down from empty eye-sockets and dripped sticky and scarlet off the Head of Movement’s gray unshaven chin.

  The year began in earnest. The production of King Lear had been in part a challenge, presented to frighten the first-years and to show them an inheritance they would have to fight to earn. For a time it worked. In the beginning the first-years looked up at the tutors and older students with a kind of meek reverence, but as the weeks wore on they slowly began to inflate, growing ever larger with purpose and self-belief.

  “I’m an actor,” Stanley was surprised to hear himself say, and after an initial pause he found that the definition pleased and even empowered him. “At the Drama Institute,” he then added, and waited confidently for his interlocutor to say, “Oh, the Institute. That’s supposed to be very hard to get into, isn’t it? You must be rather good.”

  The first few weeks of the year seemed to pass in a flurry. Initially the first-year batch appeared tentative and apologetic and bashful with each other, but in fact each student was carefully carving out a place within the context of the group: those who variously wanted to be thought of as comic or tragic or eccentric or profound began to mark out their territory, fashioning little shorthand epithets for themselves and staking claim to a particular personality type so that none of the others would have a chance. One of the girls might drape herself over her classmates as they walked from Movement down the hall to Voice and say, “God, I love you guys! I love you all!,” just to secure her place as someone who was indubitably sweet. With that place occupied, the others scurried to make known their social or musical or intellectual talents, each defining a little space for themselves that no one else would be able to touch. The other students all said, “Esther is so funny!” and “Michael is so bad!,” and just like that each won the double security of becoming both a person and a type.

  Stanley wasn’t sure what marked him out as a person. He hung back at the beginning of the year and let the other boys claim the roles of the leader and the player and the clown, watching with a kind of uncertain awe as they worked to recruit admirers and an audience. He guessed he wanted to be thought of as sensitive and thoughtful, but he didn’t pursue the branding actively enough and soon those positions were taken. He found himself thoroughly eclipsed by several of the more ambitiously moody boys, boys who were studied in the way they tossed their hair off their forehead, thin boys with paperback copies of Nietzsche nosing out of their satchels, boys wearing self-conscious forlorn looks, permanently anxious and always slightly underfed. Whenever these boys began to speak, the class would peel back respectfully to listen.

  Stanley found himself quietly shepherded into the middling drift of the unremarkable students in the class. Like the rest of them he nursed a small hope that one day he would come into his own and surpass them all, but the hope was half-buried, and in his lessons Stanley rarely bloomed.

  “We’ll make something of you yet,” the Head of Improvisation said to Stanley one morning, reaching over and tapping his chest with her finger. “There’s something in there,” she said, “that one of these days is going to just ripen, overnight. You’ll see.”

  She walked away and left Stanley with the hot echo of her touch on his sternum and a feeling of joyful arrival that stayed with him for the days and weeks following. He applied himself more vigorously to his technique, spurred on by this germ of confidence that swelled his chest to bursting. He began to believe in his own ripening, waiting for it with a pious kind of expectation like a cleric awaiting a response to prayer. He became more patient with his own failures, safe and confident in the knowledge that one day soon he would surely succeed.

  “It’s a strange thing,” the Head of Improvisation said later in the staffroom, pausing to count stitches with the pearly edge of her fingernail and tug the woollen square out flat to check her progress. “It’s a strange thing, how we caress their egos like we do. I see how much it affects them, lights them up, and I feel so responsible, even guilty, like I am handing a loaded pistol to a child.”

  “All actors are perverted by their profession,” the Head of Acting replied, shaking out his newspaper and folding it crisply along the existing seam. “We inflate their egos to make up for everything about them that gets trampled and broken. You’re not damaging them, Glenda. You’re just softening the blow.”

  Most of Stanley’s friends from school had now dispersed, swallowed up by the local university and the polytechnic or packed off overseas to pursue better chances somewhere else. Stanley buried himself at the Institute. The first-years were required for long hours each day, and more and more often Stanley found reason to come into the buildings on the weekends, nosing around the script library or taking a book up to the viewing gallery above the dance hall, where he could watch the weekend school groups take classes in ballet and rope work and basic tissue. He found a flat with two other first-year actors, thin solemn figures who, like him, had let all the other bones of their live
s fall away. He became consumed by the Institute so totally and wholeheartedly that he sometimes thought about the sour-faced boy from Wardrobe with the ancient gramophone in his arms. He had seen the boy several times on his way to and from the art department, always hauling cans of paint and bags of fabric scraps and half-finished puppets stuck with pins.

  At home the boys talked nothing but acting, film and theater, and street performance and revolution, snug in the shell of their own irrelevance but all of them giddy as if they were standing together and alone on the edge of a new uncharted world. They talked long into the night and drafted plays on greasy scraps of newsprint and imagined what marvelous lies they might one day be paid to tell.

  “When they write our biographies,” his housemates said, “when they write our biographies, all this will be in the opening chapter, the chapter before the big break, before we get famous, before everything starts happening. And this is the chapter that everyone will find really interesting and inspiring, because it will show that we are just people like everyone else, people who started from an ordinary beginning, people who were once poor and struggling and earning an ordinary wage. In that way, this chapter will be the most interesting chapter of the whole book.”

  Stanley began to look at himself differently, cherishing the parts of himself that he might be able to use, delicately prodding himself for weaknesses, both fearful and hopeful that he might cause himself to bruise or break. His father, who had never before figured very prominently in his daily life, began to surface as a source of tragedy to be mined and exploited and spent. In class he talked about his father more and more. Gradually and unconsciously Stanley began to regard himself as a tragic figure—not a victim of the ordinary lash of adolescence, but a person more profoundly wronged, a kingly figure, an emotional hero. At night he sighed and pounded his pillow and sometimes cried.