The Book of Heaven: A Novel (43 page)

The second year, they could play only adults and elderly people, and express themselves only in song, which was like a great storehouse of all articulated human experience, which they could enter to try out what they had not yet felt.

In the third year, they polished their speech, and played only children, to examine the nature of what they were beginning not to be.

And in the fourth year, the girls could play only boys and the boys could play only girls, since to comprehend and interpret the qualities of the other sex was essential training for the performance of tragedy, while no comic role could be played successfully without that skill. It was an attribute of all the great Sheban Tellers, both a source of envy and a scandalous outrage to the theaters of other nations, whose players were not schooled in those techniques. It was in the fourth year, too, that the students also mastered the crafting of the oars.

At the age of fifteen, Sheba began the classes in the rhetoric of love that were reputed to be the most challenging of all. A private tutor was assigned to supervise small groups of students. It was rumored that after you had mastered the history and rhetoric of love, you were initiated into a great secret.

The years of schooling culminated in a distinctive farewell ceremony. Those who were leaving the academy were given three costumes, a wardrobe for the first three roles they would play in public.

Often the initiates disliked the costumes they were given, but there was no explanation and no appeal; no one ever knew how and why they were assigned these particular roles.

After receiving and displaying the costumes, each tutor kissed the graduating apprentice on the lips. Then the tutor leaned toward the apprentice and whispered something in his ear. The audience read many meanings into the expressions on the faces of the tutors as they delivered their inaudible messages, but no one was able to decipher the words of these silky whisperings, any more than one could interpret falling snow. The apprentice was sworn to reveal only indirectly the message given, in compliance with the performer's code, and that code was honored through all the course of Sheban life.

No Sheban, for instance, ever uttered the words “I love you.” They considered this phrase extraordinarily primitive, expressing so little that it could mean anything or nothing. This lazy, amorphous cliché was putty in the mouths of liars, the viscous verbal syrup the abuser poured on the child, the formulaic words prostitutes were paid to say to clients. The proof of this was that no memorable song made use of this phrase; rather, lover and beloved described some element of the world precisely to convey their experience, or sang of each other.

Sheba's tutor was the most venerable and beloved of all the teachers of the theater arts—Noctis the Bridge, who, like all the sages of theater, had earned a personal title honoring a distinctive quality of her expression.

Noctis the Bridge had been queen four times in her life, though she was now frail, in too much pain to perform, and sometimes could not stand to demonstrate a gesture or gait. This, however, forced her students to experiment to find her meaning, rather than to reproduce her performances.

She taught in a large hall, which was lined with white plaster casts of the faces of generations of Tellers, molded on their features at different epochs of their lives. She was distinguished for her use of casts of the same Teller playing a famous role, but at different ages.

She opened her tutorials seated in an armchair set on a rehearsal stage. At times, she would close her eyes, which were a distinctive gray-green, like certain leaves, and tighten her lips with angry concentration before answering a question or giving a criticism. “When I am in dialogue with pain,” she explained to them, “I wait to answer until I am sure that I am really the one speaking, to you, not a ventriloquist's puppet.”

But on the days when she had little pain, she relished her freedom, and reveled in her physical reprieve. She held their young faces between her hands as if she were picking fruit, and showed them in close work, how to set their expressions, using the language of their own features. She even enfolded her apprentices in her arms, if necessary, to demonstrate a stance or evoke a possible response.

When Noctis was delighted with a successful moment, or fresh reading, or had brought them to applause with a passage from one of her own great roles, she broke into a smile that dazzled on her face like the sun on water, currents of radiance mobilizing every feature, shifting from eyes to mouth to cheeks.

Noctis guided them in the subtle art of communicating the pain, grief, or violence of a death without torturing the spectators.

“The epic singer is unique in this,” she taught them. “She herself enters the song. The singer then becomes part of the story. He must never use the audience as an occasion for his own sadism. She will destroy the role if she indulges herself in the punishment of the audience. The suffering, cruelty, and love in the story enter him, and become the gates through which she enters the song.” Madame Noctis, in the Sheban style, freely alternated the pronouns of gender.

Sheba heard this with an impatience that concealed her panic. The last thing she wanted was to be trapped in a song too grand, operatic, and out of scale for her, with no exit. In truth, she thought, she was lazy. She wanted as little suffering as possible. No more than the slight chill of the sea that became voluptuous once she was used to it, the bitterness of almonds that became desirable and delicious.

She had no ambitions to be ascetic, but dreamed instead of a life expressed in laughter and largesse, a magnificent giving of gifts, as if she were the head of a household of inexhaustible generosity. “Can we enter the song through laughter instead, Madame Noctis?” she asked.

“Yes, certainly, it can be done. But I warn you, it will not be an easier path; rather the reverse. Don't fall into the error of so many, like the Zealots, or the Philosophers, who think comedy is trivial, light, negligible. Their comedies are superficial because they don't know how to write any others. They write inferior love stories because of what they believe love is. The Zealots look at love as a form of war. They are a martial people for whom a kiss is a soap bubble unless it draws blood. And for the Philosophers, love is only fatal, a wedding of skeletons.”

Her quicksilver face rapidly took on the stock expressions in the style of a Zealot, then a Philosopher actor. “Remember that tragedy tells the story of the inevitable, actions that make us prisoners, that could happen in no other way, conclusions that cannot be changed. Whereas comedy tells the story of the impossible, the divine, the unimaginable, what could never happen. The tragic hero drowns, the comic heroine walks on water. Which story do you think is harder to tell?” Noctis laughed. It was a laugh of a kind that Sheba had never seen before, her head thrown back, her throat as exposed as a bird's, as if she were about to take ecstatic flight.

Noctis showed them how to fight and strike each other onstage without doing harm. She trained them in the art of touching each other passionately without hurting each other—“one of the great arts of lovers as well as actors.” Much later, she exposed them to the far more advanced and difficult craft of expressing ardent joy without stirring anger, jealousy, or despair in the audience.

“No one doubts the reality of death,” she told them. “But the truth of love is always in question, and many—perhaps you yourselves—do not believe in its existence. Many may never come to one conclusion. But you can examine this physically, through stagecraft, much more usefully than through any words of mine.”

She called on Sheba, and on an acrobatic boy already known for the poise and clarity of his movements. Far had a strength, balance, and grace that made his actions legible to the spectators in the highest, farthest tiers of the theater. He was the only apprentice of their year who had already played in the Arena, taking the athletic and taxing role of the risen corpse in the cycle
Comedies of Spring.
Sheba was daunted by his reputation, and blushed to find herself next to him on the practice stage.

“You are a couple,” said Noctis. “You are angry with each other. Perhaps you are frustrated. Perhaps you are jealous. It doesn't matter. You are both angry. Build the quarrel in your bodies. Show it in your shoulders and hands. You can either sing or speak, whichever feels natural. Then you, Far, strike her, and you, Sheba, fall to the floor. Then stand up and strike back. Far will fall. Watch him carefully; I have not taught any student who falls with more art than Far.”

No one thought Sheba the laughter-loving water nymph could be capable of such a rending scene, but the apprentices had to play whatever role they were assigned.

The couple began to improvise the ugly, menacing rhythm of a pair quarreling. A quarrel between three, or six, is an incident of more diffused power more open to dissent or mediation from one of the company, but a quarrel between two can only escalate farther and farther until their bond is broken, and one prevails. The only chance of ending a battle of two is through the work of both together in partnership. Battles between two opponents are the fights that most often end in death, equaled in violence only by a rampaging mob.

Far and Sheba began by alternating their speeches, first in low threatening tones, then with insults and unfair mimicry, each taking a facial expression of the other and distorting it into ugliness. Far flung down a series of phrases as if he were planting a field; Sheba wildly uprooted every word.

They stirred a primordial childish fear in their audience, each of whom had a child's terrified memory of being powerless to stop a similar adult fight at least once. The scene evolved until the pair no longer spoke words, but only made sounds, their hatred so great that it overpowered speech, and it no longer mattered if either spoke the truth. Even their movements were frightening, though the spectators knew perfectly well that a stage fight is more like a dance than a duel.

Sheba thwarted Far's effort to turn his back on her. Far, provoked beyond measure in his liberty to move, raised his arm, and let it fall toward her, inexorably as a cut tree, which gave Sheba time to prepare her own fall; she beautifully conveyed that the blow was a defeat for Far as well as a victory. Then Sheba paused ominously, leapt up, and, with the shocking precision of a viper, struck Far three times in the chest, so that he fell and lay facedown.

The students broke into applause, a rare tribute to a scene particularly well played. Sheba helped Far get to his feet, and they sat down side by side on the edge of the stage, their legs dangling, while they waited for Noctis's comments.

She did not come forward, but said, “I want you to do one more thing before I say a word. Stay just where you are, but turn toward each other, and kiss each other, believably—tenderly, like lovers.”

The pair followed her instructions, and the tentative kiss with which they began became more and more convincing, and showed no signs of concluding, until Madame Noctis said, “Excellent,” a shade drily. Then she made her way to the stage, sent Far and Sheba into the audience with the others, and addressed a question to the whole group: “Now what have you seen?”

One after another of the students spoke about the tempered violence of the fight scene, the stabbing rhythms with which the actors had composed their invective, the clarity and finality of the gestures with which they struck each other.

Noctis held up her hand. “You all speak, as I thought you would, only of the impact of the fight scene. Yet they played a second scene. No one has mentioned their embrace. Why?” The students were silent, recognizing now that Noctis had something particular she wanted them to know. They saw she was now directing them into a scene with her; this was the way she taught. Not one of them wanted to risk the humiliation of answering wildly off her mark.

“You can find the answer in your own descriptions: ‘finality,' you said, ‘clarity.' Violence simplifies everything; a blow has a clear beginning, purpose, and a decisive end. The action defines sharply: Who is the stronger? Though remember, it may turn out to be the victim, tempting the other into anger, luring the aggressor toward disintegration.

“Violence is strenuous, but simpler to play. And with its stark lights and shadows, it simplifies the response of the audience, as it did yours.

“Which is why it is the basis of theater in all martial societies: gladiator fights, dramas as occasions for the display of new and ingenious weapons, or wrestling holds, sports that excite through risk to the players. The audience reacts viscerally, for or against.

“The ones who enjoy and need the violent spectacles are often soldiers, reliving battles without threat to their lives, temporarily absolved from the memories of their own kills by watching combats in which they do not participate. The ones who are distressed and recoil feel an instant reassurance, granted an escape from being either the pursued or the killer. To cheer for the hero is to share his virtue.

“But who is stronger or weaker in a kiss? Instantly, we are in a more mysterious realm, moved out of time by an action that can never be completed, this exchange of life's breath that aims to begin again as soon as it ends. It is easier to enact a slap than an ocean, and easier to describe, too. Through a kiss, the actors leave the stage, and travel somewhere we can't imagine.

“We also saw, as Far and Sheba took each other in their arms, a closed circle. The audience does not share in the kiss; it belongs to the lovers, it excludes them. And to what effect? It reveals something private to each witness, about himself, some secret of his own heart, something she may never have guessed. An audience can be molded into collective response with a violent scene; but there is no collective response to a love scene.

“A quick exercise now: you in the front row, remember their kiss, and quickly imagine a reaction to it.”

“Envy,” said the girl in the aisle seat. “Hope.” “Longing.” “Fear.” “Wonder.” “Despair.” “Nostalgia.” “Wanting what I can't have,” a boy said with a furtive glance at Sheba. “Wanting what I can't have,” the boy next to him said, with a similar furtive glance at Far.