Deep dream, p.19
Deep Dream, page 19
“I have a feeling this adventure won’t end well,” mourned Pancho.
The roving sailor had no home of his own, but he was homesick anyway. Life as a diplomat’s spy in a French city was not his métier.
“I’d like to see you happier, Pancho. Are you not fed rich and luscious French food? Do you lack fine French clothes?”
Pancho pulled a long, hand-knitted sock from his pocket. “Have you ever seen one of these?”
“Yes, I have. There’s not a French girl alive without pretty stockings.”
“Do you know what French girls do with these? They fill up these socks with wet sand, and tie a special knot, like so”—sailors were good at knots—“and they creep into a cellar at midnight. Then they strip to the waist and sock the daylights out of each other. They duel with two sandbags, until one girl is beaten half-dead! Now I ask you this, young master. What kind of women are these?”
“Those are loose foreign women. Also, those women are dueling. A gentleman should avoid sordid, immoral scenes with whores and duels.”
“I’m no gentleman. I’m the henchman of a court dandy. They’re two lonely, greedy women. I’m a sailor. What else could happen? It’s bad.”
Baltasar stroked his mustache. “My own father warned me about this, from outer space. What a marvelous society we have! It’s a golden age, in so many ways.”
“Two bar-girls in a catfight. The actresses are even worse!”
“I don’t doubt that. However. Duke Carlos writes to me that he’s very interested in French theater. Of course he doesn’t want any decent Spanish women behaving in that depraved way. Yet, he doesn’t want to be left behind artistically, either. This is a matter of state for us.”
“I’ve been doing my best,” grumbled Pancho. “Those French men, who write the theater plays? They certainly didn’t want the likes of me in their cafe.”
“Should I hire a better spy?”
“I put on a false beard, I pretended that I was an actor.”
“Excellent work, Pancho. So, what did you learn from these ‘disaffected intellectuals?’ In Barcelona we have scarcely any, but here there’s a plague of them.”
Pancho shrugged reluctantly. “I scarcely want to speak about what they say in that dive. Anyway, I speak honest Spanglish, while they speak Occitan-Catalan. Their fancy jabber flies way over my head.”
“You must have understood something,” said Baltasar, dipping a quill in ink. “Tell me, and I’ll write it down.”
“Is it true that there were thousands of millions of men like us? Now there are just a few cities on Earth, and no city has even one million.”
“Yes, it’s true, but of course it’s not about how many people are alive—it’s about how many people had their souls saved.”
“Is it true that before our art world existed, no one’s soul was ever saved? Because there were no Oracles invented. Everybody just died.”
“That was a shame for those ancient people, yes, but that’s our greatest cultural achievement. It’s how we know that our civilization is so superior to the past.”
“Is it true that there were fifteen other kinds of men that evolved from monkeys, and they all went extinct? Not a trace of them, except old stone bones.”
“They certainly have quite a dark temperament, these theater people in your cafe. Are they all writing tragedies in there? Their talk verges on heresy.”
“Once they got drunk, then they talked about actresses.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me, which actress in Lyon is the very best—or rather, the very worst? Because Duke Carlos has demanded that I find him a beautiful woman—the most astoundingly beautiful woman in all Lyon, or France, or the whole world, a paragon of grace and beauty, a veritable goddess … That’s how the Duke always talks, you know.”
Baltasar had seen plays in Barcelona—performances with music, and dance, and poetic recitation.
But the French theater was far more extreme, better-organized, all-consuming even. With theater, they seemed determined to crush every possible form of artistic expression into one single event. Architecture (the theater), elaborate costumes (fashion), music (an orchestra). Choreographed ballet. Singing. Miming. Painted backdrops. Poetry (because the plays were in verse). Even philosophy—because the plays were not mere pageants, but divided by time into coherent, consecutive acts.
In French theater plays, customarily, life ended badly. Whenever the audience left weeping, everyone seemed happier. The theater attracted people of radical enthusiasms. The people needed dream worlds.
Baltasar disliked the theater—but he could see that theater was a powerful and dangerous art. He made his presence known in theatrical circles. He dropped hints about the patronage of the Duke of Barcelona.
Presently, along came a gift to compel his attention. A famous epic poem from the Court of Barcelona, which had been translated from Spanglish into Occitan-Catalan. “News has reached my ear that you are an admirer of the craft of printing, so I offer a distinguished ambassador this token of friendship.” It was signed, “Countess Nicchia.”
The Countess Nicchia was a former mistress of Duke Leo—the “Official Mistress,” a status which allowed her to swan around the court, forcing radical hairstyles and eccentric fabric choices on the more staid and chaste ladies. She’d been expelled from Lyon for her presumptuous behaviors, which were never mentioned in polite society, unless people were drinking.
Baltasar requested an interview. The Countess arranged to meet him in a safe house owned by the Genoese ambassador.
The famous court beauty didn’t look very beautiful—not at first. She had regular features and large eyes, but for this covert meeting she was dressed as a seamstress or laundress; a Lyonnaise everywoman.
“How goes it with the etiquette books?” she said. “I heard you collect those.”
“I do, and I thank you for your interest, but they always seem the same to me. There’s something missing in our lives.”
“Whenever I play a character on stage, she’s just a few lines on paper. Just black and white letters. But that role will not succeed until I climb inside it as a living woman.”
“But what is this inner purpose, that is beyond mere outward form?”
“It is my artwork. Often I disappear.”
“You disappeared from the court, I’m told.”
“I’ve been working in Genoa.”
“Why Genoa?”
“You’re Spanish, so you don’t approve of the wicked Genoese.”
“I have never been there,” said Baltasar, diplomatically. He’d met many fine ladies, but never had a conversation with a woman that crackled with so much tension. It was like the air in the room was on fire.
“We both know why they’re evil,” said the Countess. “Because they use money.”
“Not all the Genoese, surely.”
“They hide the truth from us utopians. They’re ashamed of money—of course. So they sneak their dirty little coins from hand to hand when they think no one sees. But the root of this ancient evil branches through every aspect of their lives. A miserdom has seized their souls, and they scheme about money-wealth, day and night. In Genoa they all have prices, men and women; a cold fog of prostitution chills their hearts.”
“Can it be that backward and horrible?”
“It is, and I saw it, but as an artist, there’s something attractive about it. I have no audience left to conquer here in Lyon; I’m the greatest actress of my generation. Everyone agrees; I was on the arm of the Duke, I set the fashion standards. But Genoa! What a tough audience! I have to stretch to perform for them—these playscripts they love, about robberies, thefts, embezzlements and dispossessions, everything owned or stolen … In Lyon, I took pretty heroine roles, I was romance. In Genoa, I’m the shrewish wife, I’m the backstabbing whore, I’m the angel from hell!”
“Who writes all these dramas?”
The actress shrugged. “Oh, that scarcely matters. Mere writers, there are so many of them. I can take the stage as a mime and slay my audience. Also, it’s about my enunciation, like …” She drew a breath. “In Genoese: ‘I just stabbed this creep in the back. My hand’s all sticky.’ Or, in Occitan-Catalan: ‘My dagger’s wound proves mortal, and the stellar seas incarnadine.’”
“Your accents are so perfect! How do you speak like that?”
“I listen.” The actress rolled her tongue into a U shape and poked it through her lips. “I can mimic your Spanglish accent, too. ‘Can it be that backward and horrible?’”
“Do I really sound like that?”
“You mean, are you that shocked and innocent? Yes.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“I’ve heard about you—but I can see the truth in your eyes. You want something, but you don’t know it yet. You want fame. Not my kind of fame—which is glamorous and notorious. You want the fame of a great moral teacher. You want to become the example of a cavalier without reproach.”
“Well,” said Baltasar. “Here in France, I learn something new every day. Now, if I may acquaint you with a political problem, Countess …”
“I wasn’t born a Countess. I was made one. Also, my name isn’t ‘Nicchia,’ that’s my stage name.”
“What should I call you, then?”
She shrugged. Her mantle slipped; her shoulders were beautiful. “Call me anything you like. I hear ‘Mama’ sometimes.”
“You have children?”
“Five.”
“Five children?”
“If you don’t see much of your children, or have to work to raise them, they’re not the big problem that women imagine.”
“Nicchia, I also have a big problem. You see, in Barcelona, there’s this huge lump of gold …”
She spread her hands indifferently. “Oh yes, that little golden problem.”
“My Duke has the idea,” he said, “that I might escort you to Barcelona. You could model there. Using this gold, our best artists might make a very beautiful life-sized statue …”
“Well, yes … I see … but that’s all a bit stupid, isn’t it? This Duke of yours, he talks such extravagance, but he has no imagination.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I mean that your boss is just a Spanish grandee, stuffy and hare-brained. Yes, I might go to Barcelona; after Genoa, I’ve seen the worst. But never just to pose. Some Duke sends another Duke a golden statue of his naked mistress—that’s so banal.”
“It would be politically effective, though. I promise everyone would notice.”
“That’s not theater, that’s a teenage boy’s idea! If I go to Barcelona, I will attack! With a cultural army, my musicians, my dancers, my set designers, and my costume people. I would fall upon on your city like a blazing star.”
The actress soon became Baltasar’s mistress. She was his “mistress” in the classical sense of “a distinguished, powerful woman you loyally serve, who tells you what to do.”
He’d never before met an aesthetocrat who was truly a major artist. Nicchia was a creative power broker, and her ambitions verged on the metaphysical.
Her affair with the Duke had sputtered out with his alcoholic impotence, but Nicchia wanted to seduce entire populations. For that ambition, she needed manpower. To invade and conquer Barcelona, she needed a Barcelona collaborator, butler, and factotum. It seemed that he would do.
So he obeyed her. An aesthetocrat mistress had an entire counterculture court life, a demimonde with the power of command.
Nicchia knew what to do, but she needed tactical flunkies. “Every woman wants a man who’s as terrible as her father and as tender as her infant son—in the same moment. No man can fulfill that desire for a woman, unless he’s dead. You men are like tongs in a fire for us. We women fret about each other.”
Duke Leo’s boring wife and his utopian mistress had a cruel relationship. While the Duke pretended to forget Nicchia, the wife underwrote her adventures. The Duchess herself had dispatched Nicchia to Genoa, on the principle that an enemy outside your tent, wreaking her havoc on enemies far away, was more useful than a dead one.
Someone had to stage-manage Nicchia’s army of invading artistes, who crept over the mighty Pyrenees, entertaining unsuspecting audiences in Avignon, Nimes, Bezier, and tiny Basque villages. These cultural invaders resembled one of Duke Leo’s armed hunting parties, although slower and bigger, burdened with musical instruments and theatrical construction tools.
Nicchia burned all of Baltasar’s clothes. She redesigned him as her own dandy bodyguard; he wore a feathered helmet, buskins, a breastplate; he had his own cosmetician; his hair was trimmed each day.
Pancho was still in his service, but silent, observant. Pancho stayed with the Spaniards in Nicchia’s caravan. They were a desperate lot. The refugees, demimonde people.
The glorious peaks of the Pyrenees did not transform Baltasar’s soul. He was too busy keeping the horses from starving. There was even a fight once, with some land-bandits. Nicchia won that fight. She had gunpowder.
When they reached Barcelona, his situation grew even worse. He had to stage-manage the small army invading his own city.
He formally presented the actress to the Duke of Barcelona. Nicchia was regally dressed in a dazzling Lyonnaise court dress of asteroid cloth of gold. The two of them had one look at one another and retreated into icy shells of formal court politeness.
But if the Duke was afraid of her—and justly so—she swiftly won passionate adherents in the Barcelona court. The great theatrical artist was the overnight talk of the town.
As for Baltasar, his artistic duties were just getting started. Her theater had to be rebuilt; her orchestra had to be rehearsed and expanded; her sets had to be painted; her chorus line ballerinas wore out dozens of their soft silken shoes. He was a chief collaborator in a cultural army of occupation. No day was ever like the next.
Nicchia had to choose a theater play for her premiere. She asked his opinion about that matter. Of course, Baltasar knew what his own city needed.
The true purpose of art was human self-actualization: so that people could present the best possible version of the human soul to the afterlife. So Barcelona needed a high-minded play, of moral loftiness. A play to convey aspirations toward nobler standards of behavior. A drama of men and women seeing and overcoming their limitations, refusing evil and embracing virtue—yes, even if they dramatically suffered on stage for that moral choice, even if they died for the sake of their goodness.
As long as they died in the embrace of an Oracle, all would end well. That was what a Spanish audience needed: theater with dignity.
The actress took careful note of Baltasar’s earnest counsel and did the opposite. She put on a horrific tragedy, about an arrogant queen overcome by her worst instincts, who massacred rivals and laughed at plague-stricken children, set a church on fire, and then died screaming in the large red paper flames.
Baltasar avoided this dreadful travesty—because he’d read the script—but then, members of the Barcelona court came to congratulate him about it.
Of course, they envied him—a suave young Spaniard who’d conquered an older woman and brought her to heel. His success was complete because her play, they said, was the most amazing drama any living human being had ever seen.
It was a cultural turning point.
Nicchia’s strange drama was recited in the rarefied language of Occitan-Catalan, but that feat excited them even more. The court intellectuals promptly declared that the language should be renamed Catalan-Occitan. Everyone who was anyone in Barcelona would speak and write in that exalted way, henceforth.
In the future of art, a new Barcelona drama would eclipse Lyon drama. No more of the old-fashioned ritual exchanges of toys, bottles, gold, salt, and rarities. The future of art was a culture war of two utopias, a war made entirely from small model theater worlds, designed to represent utopias.
Performance followed triumphant performance, and it seemed Nicchia’s show would grind on for eternity—when sudden news arrived, by carrier pigeon, that Duke Leo had died.
The old man had drunk something he shouldn’t; he’d died with such agonized speed that they could scarcely drag him to the Oracle.
“Where, presumably, he departed into heavenly glory,” said Nicchia, dressed head to foot in gold-threaded black mourning garb, and looking quite lovely. “It’s a fortunate thing that I myself am so far away in Barcelona, or the French might imagine that I had something to do with his demise.”
Baltasar was unsurprised to see her so cool and collected; she was always the picture of disciplined calm when she’d been screaming and flailing on stage. “What’s to be done about this crisis? What’s the future of your art?”
“Well, I’d hoped to launch a second play here, now that I have this local audience tamed. Something more intimate, maybe a woman’s domestic drama. Too bad that history decrees otherwise.”
“What did history decree to you?”
“Well, the Duchess Marie has a son by Duke Leo—but I have two. While Leo was living, his kids were of little consequence, but now his widow is the Regent of a ten-year-old boy. Also, she’s a moron. She’ll attack me, and repress everything that made Lyon great.”
“What plan do you have about that?”
“Oh, I can never make any such plans; but I’m an actress, so I can improvise. Maybe fortune will smile on my star. After all, if the Duke died—and no one thought he would—maybe the Duchess will do much the same.”
“She, too, might drink from the wrong bottle.”
“If the right courier delivered it.”
Baltasar went to church to seek confession, thought better about that, and went to discuss matters with Pancho. He spoke of his darkest suspicions—a bloody secession struggle—a French coup d’état. Worse yet, he was already Nicchia’s partisan. Because she was his mistress.
Pancho nodded. “It’s a sandbag fight between the mistress and the widow.”
“But what weapon does the mistress have? She’s just an artist.”
“She has you. Also, she could hire Genoese mercenaries. They always show up when there’s blood in the gutter.”
