hands. I could see the veins in Jeannette’s face and the soft cushion of her lower lip coming ever closer. The champagne, splashed into dozens of little glasses, was being drunk. Some speech was issuing forth from Renaud about our “partnership” and how tonight’s little farce was but the beginning and we would soon be the grandest theater on the boulevards. I saw myself decked out for the part of Lelio, and heard the ditty I had sung to Flaminia on bended knee.
Before me, little mortals flipflopped heavily and the audience was howling as the leader of the acrobats made some vulgar movement with his hind end.
Before I even meant to do it, I had gone out on the stage.
I was standing in the very center, feeling the heat of the footlights, the smoke stinging my eyes. I stared at the crowded gallery, the screened boxes, the rows and rows of spectators to the back wall. And I heard myself snarl a command for the acrobats to get away.
It seemed the laughter was deafening, and the taunts and shouts that greeted me were spasms and eruptions, and quite plainly behind every face in the house was a grinning skull. I was humming the little ditty I’d sung as Lelio, no more than a fragment of the part, but the one I’d carried in the streets afterwards with me, “lovely, lovely, Flaminia,” and on and on, the words forming meaningless sounds.
Insults were cutting through the din.
“On with the performance!” and “You’re handsome enough, now let’s see some action!” From the gallery someone threw a half-eaten apple that came thumping just past my feet.
I unclasped the violet roquelaure and let it fall. I did the same with the silver sword.
The song had become an incoherent humming behind my lips, but mad poetry was pounding in my head. I saw the wilderness of beauty and its savagery, the way I’d seen it last night when Nicki was playing, and the moral world seemed some desperate dream of rationality that in this lush and fetid jungle had not the slightest chance. It was a vision and I saw rather than understood, except that I was part of it, natural as the cat with her exquisite and passionless face digging her claws into the back of the screaming rat.
“ ‘Handsome enough’ is this Grim Reaper,” I half uttered, “who can snuff all these ‘brief candles,’ every fluttering soul sucking the air, from this hall.”
But the words were really beyond my reach. They floated in some stratum perhaps where a god existed who understood the colors patterned on a cobra’s skin and the eight glorious notes that make up the music erupting out of Nicki’s instrument, but never the principle, beyond ugliness or beauty, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Hundreds of greasy faces peered back at me from the gloom. Shabby wigs and paste jewels and filthy finery, skin like water flowing over crooked bones. A crew of ragged beggars whistled and hooted from the gallery, humpback and one eye, and stinking underarm crutch, and teeth the color of the skull’s teeth you sift from the dirt of the grave.
I threw out my arms. I crooked my knee, and I began turning as the acrobats and dancers could turn, round and round on the ball of one foot, effortlessly, going faster and faster, until I broke, flipping over backwards into a circle of cartwheels, and then somersaults, imitating everything I had ever seen the players at the fairs perform.
Applause came immediately. I was agile as I’d been in the village, and the stage was tiny and hampering, and the ceiling seemed to press down on me, and the smoke from the footlights to close me in. The little song to Flaminia came back to me and I started singing it loudly as I turned and jumped and spun again, and then gazing at the ceiling I willed my body upwards as I bent my knees to spring.
In an instant I touched the rafters and I was dropping down gracefully, soundlessly to the boards.
Gasps rose from the audience. The little crowd in the wings was stunned. The musicians in the pit who had been silent all the while were turning to one another. They could see there was no wire.
But I was soaring again to the delight of the audience, this time somersaulting all the way up, beyond the painted arch again to descend in even slower, finer turns.
Shouts and cheers broke out over the clapping, but those backstage