“Oh, he was disgusting to me in those days. He acted like I was his footstool, kicked me around like some piece of garbage from the gutter. ‘Vittoria,’ he’d say, ‘get my cloak! I could teach a dog to fetch better than you! Vittoria, wash my hose. It’s the only job you’re suited for.’ ”
“Why did you put up with it?” I asked her. “Did you love him?”
“Love him?!” she replied. “Love that filthy pig Flaminio Scala?! Love him always jumping on me like I was a horse, riding me, in and out, in and out, off before I even knew what was happening?! That’s not love, that’s not the kind of thing that wins a woman’s heart. And I only let him keep on doing
that
until I was old enough to stand up for myself!
“No, I only took it because I had no choice. I knew that if I left the troupe, I’d have to work on my back, being ridden by more men than one. That was why I fetched Flaminio’s cloak—because the money for my supper was in his pockets!”
But I think Vittoria was fooling herself—unless, poor thing, she’d managed to forget the truth. Because I think she did love Flaminio once, with that peculiar love which women always have for their first man. And that old love was part of the web she fell into, that web Francesco and Flaminio wove around each other like maddened spiders.
For, if she never loved him, how could she have come to hate him so much?
“One morning,” she told me, “I woke up and decided I’d had enough. That afternoon, on stage, I listened very carefully to the applause I got; and suddenly I realized that Flaminio
needed
the Inamorata, the lovesick young girl. The audiences loved her like their own daughters, their sisters, themselves at an earlier age. They were so attached to her, they’d
kill
Flaminio if he tried to play their towns without the Inamorata.
“At that moment, I knew I was free. ‘Flaminio,’ I said, the next time he came to my bed, ‘go jerk off.’
“From that day on, I couldn’t stand the sight of Flaminio Scala. I couldn’t stand talking to him, or even being in the same room with him. It wasn’t some game I was playing to win his affection—believe me, it was the real thing. I’d been freed from his power; everything about him made my flesh creep. I forbade him to come near my tent; whenever I saw him, it was all I could do to keep from vomiting.
“It was such a great change in me, Pantalone, it had to affect my acting. I couldn’t even fake it anymore. I couldn’t pretend to believe that the light in Flaminio’s beady eyes was as sweet to me as the first burst of sun after a spring rain. How could I have said such a thing with a straight face? How could I have fooled the audience into thinking I meant it?
“So that’s why the role of the Inamorata had to change. She could no longer toss on her bed, crying for her man. So he had to begin crying for her.
“But I wasn’t as smart as I thought, Pantalone. If I’d been a little more experienced, I’d have known that it would end the way it did. I’d have known that creep Flaminio would fall madly in love with me, that he’d lose his mind and keep pestering me to this very day!”
I myself knew the rest of Vittoria’s story. It had been like that ever since I joined the troupe. The Captain was making a fool of himself over Vittoria. It was high comedy. Everyone laughed about it—except, of course, for that poor dwarf, who had such a crush on him that she shut her eyes to the whole thing.
Sometimes, I think it was that madness for Vittoria which first lowered Flaminio’s station in the eyes of the others. To tell the truth, I pitied him. I had sympathy for his dreams of glory, of wild love; I had a few of them myself. And I pitied him for being so obsessed with that worthless Vittoria. She had a good heart, I suppose, but she was so coarse, so graceless, so common-looking—I couldn’t understand how any sensible man could worship her so passionately.
But no one could ever accuse Flaminio Scala of being a sensible man. He stubbornly insisted on playing the role of the Lover, as well as that of the Captain. Knowing what we knew, it was embarrassing to watch him perform. He grovelled on his knees, licked the dust off Vittoria’s shoes, tried to put his hands all over her.
“Perhaps you underestimate me now,” he’d sigh on stage. “But someday, when I am immortal, when I am enthroned with the gods in heaven, and all the nightingales on earth have learned to sing my name,
then
you will know what I was,
then
you will know what kind of man loved you!”
“When you are immortal,” the Inamorata would giggle, “I’ll be rotting in my grave.”
But of course, it was Flaminio who wrote the plays; despite Vittoria’s protests, the dramas ended the way
he
wanted. The hero was so noble that he
had
to win the girl. Nothing else seemed possible. The scenarios always ended with the two of them embracing, center stage.
The audiences loved it. Flaminio and Vittoria were a terrific success; their popularity filled my treasury. It was Amante and the Inamorata who got us invited to France.
But, after that miserable journey, after that incident in the cave and that disgrace at court, the roles of the Lover and his mistress began to change again.
It was obvious, I suppose. But, for a long time, no one noticed. They’d all been under Flaminio’s spell since that dramatic repentance scene. Even I—Pantalone, the observer—even I failed to see how craftily Andreini was working. No one even suspected until that famous show at Perugia, when he pulled the rabbit out of his cap, for everyone to see.
He was always a sneaky one, Andreini. He calls himself a realist. But I call him a schemer, a conniver. If I was really the miser they say, you’d think I’d like Francesco; now that he and Isabella are in charge, I need two boys to help me with the cashboxes. But I could never trust a man who has everything plotted out in advance, who knows every move, every turn. His brain is like a chessboard. There are lumps of ice in his heart. He moves slowly, sinuously, like a snake.
Of course, Andreini’s changed since Isabella’s started leading him down a few tricky paths of her own. But in those days, Francesco was a master. His scheme was so clever, so well executed, so perfectly obvious! On that night at Perugia, when we finally saw it, we were filled with admiration.
Who would have suspected? In the beginning, Andreini had been taken into the troupe to play Arlechino—the trickster, the clown, the half-wild cat, the cold eye. But, for the most part, he’d been hired for his acrobatics, his body.
According to Vittoria, he’d come up from the audience one day and astounded the entire company with an amazing display of gymnastics—somersaults, leaps, and contortions which he claimed to have learned among the Chinese and Turks.
Right then, Flaminio knew he’d discovered a gold mine. Usually, the acrobats were small, wiry fellows like Brighella. Flaminio realized that the crowds had never seen anything like Francesco before. When they saw his long-limbed body cartwheeling across the stage, they’d think they were watching some exotic, wild animal.
So for a long time, we thought of him as the athlete. Years passed before that sneaky Andreini let us know that he also spoke five languages, mimed like an angel, wrote like a professional. But, in those days, he and Flaminio were so close that the Captain seemed genuinely pleased to discover his friend’s accomplishments. So he let Andreini play a bigger and bigger part.
And Francesco made a good Arlechino—somersaulting in the window, slinking around the edges of the stage, popping up from nowhere in the middle of the Lovers’ most intimate dialogues. Dressed in that black and white patched suit, he shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, holding long conversations with himself. He mocked the Lovers’ passion, parodied their endearments, jeered at their troubles. He was always dragging the Inamorata off to stage right, to tell her she was wasting her time on a silly fool like Amante; then, he’d do the same to Flaminio, at stage left. He made the audiences laugh, but all his insults and nasty pranks only made them love the Lovers more.
And then, on that night in Perugia, everything changed.
It was a hot, damp August evening. The plaza was crowded with townspeople and university students. That night, the moment Arlechino jumped on stage, I knew that there was something peculiar about his style. A moment later, I realized what it was.
There was a double edge to his performance. Andreini was acting so brilliantly, he was managing to convey an odd sense about Arlechino. Suddenly, it was the clown who seemed to be the real lover.
He
was the one whose passion for Vittoria surpassed the brightness of the sun, the mystery of the Sphinx, the fierceness of the tiger. And all his mean remarks, all his cold, cruel joking, seemed intended as a tragic mask, to hide his true emotion.
That night, Andreini created a new Arlechino, a clown so eloquent, so passionate, so moving that he nearly broke
my
heart. I looked around to see if the audience realized what was happening, for it seemed that
they
couldn’t fail to respond.
And I was right. Their eyes watered with sympathy every time Arlechino and Inamorata were alone on stage. But whenever the Lover appeared, their faces darkened, as if
he
were the intruder, the foil. As the play went on, and the lovesick clown drew no closer to his beloved, the mood of the crowd grew steadily uglier, more restless, until it began to make me uneasy.
The others felt it, too. “Watch out, Andreini!” hissed Brighella, interrupting the show. “Remember: these are sex-starved, drunken university students, who take these things seriously!”
But Andreini couldn’t hear. He, Flaminio, and Vittoria were enmeshed in it together. And perhaps they would have remained entangled forever if that crazy riot hadn’t broken out.
It was at the very end of the play. As always, Flaminio and Vittoria were embracing, center stage. But this time, Francesco stood in the wings, miming a remarkable show of noble suffering.
As soon as the audience realized that the drama was really over, that Arlechino would never win his love, a shocked silence fell over the crowd. Then, a storm of murmurs arose—whispers so hostile, so threatening, so unmistakable in their intent, that I knew enough to run for cover.
From the doorway of the inn, I watched the young men. Many of them were still in their academic gowns; yet they shouted, roared, grabbed rotten vegetables from the stores. They ripped up cobblestones from the plaza, and began to heave them at Flaminio.
“The woman belongs to Arlechino!” they yelled. They ran up on stage, grabbed the actors, and shook them like rugs. “Give the woman to Arlechino, or we’ll hold you prisoner here until you rot!”
When at last Flaminio broke free of his captors, all the spirit had left his face. “All right, gentlemen,” he said. “You are absolutely correct. There is a short epilogue to this drama, which we somehow forgot to perform. Return to your places, if you will, and prepare to watch the brilliant conclusion to our entertaining little show.”
That last scene was so easy to improvise, a child could have done it. As the crowd moved back, Flaminio gave a short speech, acknowledging Arlechino as the true Lover, and admitting his error in having claimed the Inamorata’s hand. Then, Francesco and Vittoria ran out from opposite wings, and met in a joyous embrace.
Cheering wildly, the students slapped each other’s backs, and went home.
Andreini’s trick had worked perfectly. From then on, he was the Lover, the star, the one whose eloquence drew such floods of sympathy from the crowd. There was no way for Flaminio to play Amante any more; he limited himself to the role of the Captain.
Indeed, he played the Captain more and more, onstage and off. He bragged like the admiral of a toy boat, raged like a frenzied bull. He was always berating Vittoria for having betrayed his love, always scolding Francesco for a million failures and inadequacies.
But poor dumb Vittoria, who could never see further than the coarse nose on her face, was delighted by the change.
“I like playing opposite Andreini,” she told me. “He’s so much more talented, more graceful. His kiss is so much sweeter than stinking Flaminio Scala’s. He’s so much easier to respond to, he’s helping me, my acting is better than ever.”
And it was true. But there was a familiar note in her voice, which I’d heard before, among the young brides who’d come into my shop to buy cloth for their husbands’ suits. It was the way women talked about the men they loved.
As I listened to Vittoria, my head ached with envy. I knew no one would ever speak about me that way. “Vittoria,” I said, “watch out for Andreini. He’s a schemer. He’s got his sights set on bigger game than you.”
“Don’t play the father with me, Pantalone,” she said. “You’ll only make me like him more.”
And so my big cow of a daughter stumbled into Andreini’s trap. Day after day, I watched him work his magic on her, courting her with stories and sweet, flowery speeches. And I watched her falling in love with him.
“Andreini doesn’t care about you,” I warned her. “Anyone in the troupe will tell you the same thing. It’s just another one of his tricks. He’s playing with you, using you; he’s just doing it to make the Captain mad.”
But women never listen to me; I’m not that sort of man. Vittoria continued in her foolishness, and, to tell the truth, she blossomed in it; the Inamorata was never sweeter. The audiences loved to see her trying every charm, every small grace, every ruse in her efforts to enchant Francesco. They showered her with wine-red roses and silver coins.
Often I stood offstage and wondered: does the audience know it’s real? Is that why they like it so much? Do they know it’s real when the Captain hurls himself across stage in clownish agony, begging the Inamorata to sleep with him?
Did they know it was real that night in Venice, when, in an unexpected improvisation, Vittoria suddenly changed the scenario, and consented to the Captain’s pleas?
I knew. She came and told me so, the night it happened. “I told that old jackass Flaminio he can have me one more time,” she said, pacing nervously back and forth. “I’ve invited him to come to my tent tonight. If
that
doesn’t bring Andreini around, nothing will!”