The Crying of Lot 49 Page 6

  Thy pitiless unmanning is most meet,

  Thinks Ercole the zany Paraclete.

  Descended this malign, Unholy Ghost,

  Let us begin thy frightful Pentecost.

  The lights went out, and in the quiet somebody across the arena from Oedipa distinctly said, “Ick.” Metzger said, “You want to go?”

  “I want to see about the bones,” said Oedipa.

  She had to wait till the fourth act. The second was largely spent in the protracted torture and eventual murder of a prince of the church who prefers martyrdom to sanctioning Francesca’s marriage to her son. The only interruptions come when Ercole, spying on the cardinal’s agony, dispatches couriers to the good-guy element back in Faggio who have it in for Pasquale, telling them to spread the word that Pasquale’s planning to marry his mother, calculating this ought to rile up public opinion some; and another scene in which Niccolò, passing the time of day with one of Duke Angelo’s couriers, hears the tale of the Lost Guard, a body of some fifty hand-picked knights, the flower of Faggian youth, who once rode as protection for the good Duke. One day, out on manoeuvres near the frontiers of Squamuglia, they all vanished without a trace, and shortly afterward the good Duke got poisoned. Honest Niccolò, who always has difficulty hiding his feelings, observes that if the two events turn out to be at all connected, and can be traced to Duke Angelo, boy, the Duke better watch out, is all. The other courier, one Vittorio, takes offense, vowing in an aside to report this treasonable talk to Angelo at the first opportunity. Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, “This is my body,” the keen-witted Angelo observing that it’s the first time he’s told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying. Altogether, a most anti-clerical scene, perhaps intended as a sop to the Puritans of the time (a useless gesture since none of them ever went to plays, regarding them for some reason as immoral).

  The third act takes place in the court of Faggio, and is spent murdering Pasquale, as the culmination of a coup stirred up by Ercole’s agents. While a battle rages in the streets outside the palace, Pasquale is locked up in his patrician hothouse, holding an orgy. Present at the merrymaking is a fierce black performing ape, brought back from a recent voyage to the Indies. Of course it is somebody in an ape suit, who at a signal leaps on Pasquale from a chandelier, at the same time as half a dozen female impersonators who have up to now been lounging around in the guise of dancing girls also move in on the usurper from all parts of the stage. For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment. He dies finally in extreme agony, and in marches one Gennaro, a complete nonentity, to proclaim himself interim head of state till the rightful Duke, Niccolò, can be located.

  There was an intermission. Metzger lurched into the undersized lobby to smoke, Oedipa headed for the ladies’ room. She looked idly around for the symbol she’d seen the other night in The Scope, but all the walls, surprisingly, were blank. She could not say why, exactly, but felt threatened by this absence of even the marginal try at communication latrines are known for.

  Act IV of The Courier’s Tragedy discloses evil Duke Angelo in a state of nervous frenzy. He has learned about the coup in Faggio, the possibility that Niccolò may be alive somewhere after all. Word has reached him that Gennaro is levying a force to invade Squamuglia, also a rumor that the Pope is about to intervene because of the cardinal’s murder. Surrounded by treachery on all sides, the Duke has Ercole, whose true role he still does not suspect, finally summon the Thurn and Taxis courier, figuring he can no longer trust his own men. Ercole brings in Niccolò to await the Duke’s pleasure. Angelo takes out a quill, parchment and ink, explaining to the audience but not to the good guys, who are still ignorant of recent developments, that to forestall an invasion from Faggio, he must assure Gennaro with all haste of his good intentions. As he scribbles he lets drop a few disordered and cryptic remarks about the ink he’s using, implying it’s a very special fluid indeed. Like:

  This pitchy brew in France is “encre” hight;

  In this might dire Squamuglia ape the Gaul,

  For “anchor” it has ris’n, from deeps untold.

  And:

  The swan has yielded but one hollow quill,

  The hapless mutton, but his tegument;

  Yet what, transmuted, swart and silken flows

  Between, was neither plucked nor harshly flayed,

  But gathered up, from wildly different beasts.

  All of which causes him high amusement. The message to Gennaro completed and sealed, Niccolò tucks it in his doublet and takes off for Faggio, still unaware, as is Ercole, of the coup and his own impending restoration as rightful Duke of Faggio. Scene switches to Gennaro, at the head of a small army, on route to invade Squamuglia. There is a lot of talk to the effect that if Angelo wants peace he’d better send a messenger to let them know before they reach the frontier, otherwise with great reluctance they will hand his ass to him. Back to Squamuglia, where Vittorio, the Duke’s courier, reports how Niccolò has been talking treason. Somebody else runs in with news that the body of Domenico, Niccolò’s faithless friend, has been found mutilated; but tucked in his shoe was a message, somehow scrawled in blood, revealing Niccolò’s true identity. Angelo flies into an apoplectic rage, and orders Niccolò’s pursuit and destruction. But not by his own men.

  It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words. Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as metaphor. But now, as the Duke gives his fatal command, a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance. Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be. The Duke does not, perhaps may not, enlighten us. Screaming at Vittorio he is explicit enough about who shall not pursue Niccolò: his own bodyguard he describes to their faces as vermin, zanies, poltroons. But who then will the pursuers be? Vittorio knows: every flunky in the court, idling around in their Squamuglia livery and exchanging Significant Looks, knows. It is all a big in-joke. The audiences of the time knew. Angelo knows, but does not say. As close as he comes does not illuminate:

  Let him that vizard keep unto his grave,

  That vain usurping of an honour’d name;

  We’ll dance his masque as if it were the truth,

  Enlist the poniards swift of Those who, sworn

  To punctual vendetta never sleep,

  Lest at the palest whisper of the name

  Sweet Niccolò hath stol’n, one trice be lost

  In bringing down a fell and soulless doom

  Unutterable. . . .

  Back to Gennaro and his army. A spy arrives from Squamuglia to tell them Niccolò’s on the way. Great rejoicing, in the midst of which Gennaro, who seldom converses, only orates, begs everybody remember that Niccolò is still riding under the Thurn and Taxis colors. The cheering stops. Again, as in Angelo’s court, the curious chill creeps in. Everyone onstage (having clearly been directed to do so) becomes aware of a possibility. Gennaro, even less enlightening than Angelo was, invokes the protection of God and Saint Narcissus for Niccolò, and they all ride on. Gennaro asks a lieutenant where they are; turns out it’s only a league or so from the lake where Faggio’s Lost Guard were last seen before their mysterious disappearance.

  Meanwhile, at Angelo’s palace, wily Ercole’s string has run out at last. Accosted by Vittorio and half a dozen others, he’s charged with the murder of Domenico. W
itnesses parade in, there is the travesty of a trial, and Ercole meets his end in a refreshingly simple mass stabbing.

  We also see Niccolò, in the scene following, for the last time. He has stopped to rest by the shore of a lake where, he remembers being told, the Faggian Guard disappeared. He sits under a tree, opens Angelo’s letter, and learns at last of the coup and the death of Pasquale. He realizes that he’s riding toward restoration, the love of an entire dukedom, the coming true of all his most virtuous hopes. Leaning against the tree, he reads parts of the letter aloud, commenting, sarcastic, on what is blatantly a pack of lies devised to soothe Gennaro until Angelo can muster his own army of Squamuglians to invade Faggio. Offstage there is a sound of footpads. Niccolò leaps to his feet, staring up one of the radial aisles, hand frozen on the hilt of his sword. He trembles and cannot speak, only stutter, in what may be the shortest line ever written in blank verse: “T-t-t-t-t . . .” As if breaking out of some dream’s paralysis, he begins, each step an effort, to retreat. Suddenly, in lithe and terrible silence, with dancers’ grace, three figures, long-limbed, effeminate, dressed in black tights, leotards and gloves, black silk hose pulled over their faces, come capering on stage and stop, gazing at him. Their faces behind the stockings are shadowy and deformed. They wait. The lights all go out.

  Back in Squamuglia Angelo is trying to muster an army, without success. Desperate, he assembles those flunkies and pretty girls who are left, ritually locks all his exits, has wine brought in, and begins an orgy.

  The act ends with Gennaro’s forces drawn up by the shores of the lake. An enlisted man comes on to report that a body, identified as Niccolò by the usual amulet placed round his neck as a child, has been found in a condition too awful to talk about. Again there is silence and everybody looks at everybody else. The soldier hands Gennaro a roll of parchment, stained with blood, which was found on the body. From its seal we can see it’s the letter from Angelo that Niccolò was carrying. Gennaro glances at it, does a double-take, reads it aloud. It is no longer the lying document Niccolò read us excerpts from at all, but now miraculously a long confession by Angelo of all his crimes, closing with the revelation of what really happened to the Lost Guard of Faggio. They were—surprise—every one massacred by Angelo and thrown in the lake. Later on their bones were fished up again and made into charcoal, and the charcoal into ink, which Angelo, having a dark sense of humor, used in all his subsequent communications with Faggio, the present document included.

  But now the bones of these Immaculate

  Have mingled with the blood of Niccolò,

  And innocence with innocence is join’d,

  A wedlock whose sole child is miracle:

  A life’s base lie, rewritten into truth.

  That truth it is, we all bear testament,

  This Guard of Faggio, Faggio’s noble dead.

  In the presence of the miracle all fall to their knees, bless the name of God, mourn Niccolò, vow to lay Squamuglia waste. But Gennaro ends on a note most desperate, probably for its original audience a real shock, because it names at last the name Angelo did not and Niccolò tried to:

  He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew

  Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,

  And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.

  No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,

  Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.

  Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas, but not yet to exert the power over her it was to.

  The fifth act, entirely an anticlimax, is taken up by the bloodbath Gennaro visits on the court of Squamuglia. Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse. At the end of it about the only character left alive in a stage dense with corpses is the colorless administrator, Gennaro.

  According to the program, The Courier’s Tragedy had been directed by one Randolph Driblette. He had also played the part of Gennaro the winner. “Look, Metzger,” Oedipa said, “come on backstage with me.”

  “You know one of them?” said Metzger, anxious to leave.

  “I want to find out something. I want to talk to Driblette.”

  “Oh, about the bones.” He had a brooding look. Oedipa said,

  “I don’t know. It just has me uneasy. The two things, so close.”

  “Fine,” Metzger said, “and what next, picket the V.A.? March on Washington? God protect me,” he addressed the ceiling of the little theater, causing a few heads among those leaving to swivel, “from these lib, overeducated broads with the soft heads and bleeding hearts. I am 35 years old, and I should know better.”

  “Metzger,” Oedipa whispered, embarrassed, “I’m a Young Republican.”

  “Hap Harrigan comics,” Metzger now even louder, “which she is hardly old enough to read, John Wayne on Saturday afternoon slaughtering ten thousand Japs with his teeth, this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise ghosts. All from a drunken hassle with Manny Di Presso. Forgetting her first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate she represents. Not to our boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died.”

  “It isn’t that,” she protested. “I don’t care what Beaconsfield uses in its filter. I don’t care what Pierce bought from the Cosa Nostra. I don’t want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Pietà, or cancer . . .” She looked around for words, feeling helpless.

  “What then?” Metzger challenged, getting to his feet, looming. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, a little desperate. “Metzger, don’t harass me. Be on my side.”

  “Against whom?” inquired Metzger, putting on shades.

  “I want to see if there’s a connection. I’m curious.”

  “Yes, you’re curious,” Metzger said. “I’ll wait in the car, OK?”

  Oedipa watched him out of sight, then went looking for dressing rooms; circled the annular corridor outside twice before settling on a door in the shadowy interval between two overhead lights. She walked in on soft, elegant chaos, an impression of emanations, mutually interfering, from the stub-antennas of everybody’s exposed nerve endings.

  A girl removing fake blood from her face motioned Oedipa on into a region of brightly-lit mirrors. She pushed in, gliding off sweating biceps and momentary curtains of long, swung hair, till at last she stood before Driblette, still wearing his gray Gennaro outfit.

  “It was great,” said Oedipa.

  “Feel,” said Driblette, extending his arm. She felt. Gennaro’s costume was gray flannel. “You sweat like hell, but nothing else would really be him, right?”

  Oedipa nodded. She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.

  “You came to talk about the play,” he said. “Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare.”

  “Who was he?” she said.

  “Who was Shakespeare. It was a long time ago.”

  “Could I see a script?” She didn’t know what she was looking for, exactly. Driblette motioned her over to a file cabinet next to the one shower.

  “I’d better grab a shower,” he said, “before the Drop-The-Soap crowd get here. Scripts’re in the top drawer.”

  But they were all purple, Dittoed—worn, torn, stained with coffee. Nothing else in th
e drawer. “Hey,” she yelled into the shower. “Where’s the original? What did you make these copies from?”

  “A paperback,” Driblette yelled back. “Don’t ask me the publisher. I found it at Zapf’s Used Books over by the freeway. It’s an anthology, Jacobean Revenge Plays. There was a skull on the cover.”

  “Could I borrow it?”

  “Somebody took it. Opening night parties. I lose at least half a dozen every time.” He stuck his head out of the shower. The rest of his body was wreathed in steam, giving his head an eerie, balloon-like buoyancy. Careful, staring at her with deep amusement, he said, “There was another copy there. Zapf might still have it. Can you find the place?”

  Something came to her viscera, danced briefly, and went. “Are you putting me on?” For awhile the furrowed eyes only gazed back.