The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (11 page)

Of course I often repulsed strangers in those isolated estuary towns, but when I say this did not affect me you have to see the crowd that I was travelling with: men with tattooed fingers, women with tinted leg hair, crushed velvet, aromatic oils, ornamental face scars. By the time I was two I had become their emblem, their mascot, and I shared with them their sense that we were an avant garde, not only artistically, but also morally. Thus I remained as swaddled and protected under the bright southern
skies as I was inside the rank dusty womb of the Feu Follet.

I was, indeed, a curious-looking child – strong in the shoulders, withered and tangled in the legs. My hair was dense and blond, and the irises of my eyes – although no longer white as they had been when I was born – were now milky, marbled, striated with hair-line spokes of gold. They were my best feature, and were sometimes thought to be quite beautiful.

Naturally my maman worried continually about her deformed little boy’s self-esteem, but the truth was, I was being privately tutored not only in my schoolwork, but in the radical’s conceit, that I was different, but superior. To cause upset in motel dining rooms – something which would later be the cause of such shame and anger – was no ordeal to me. My comrades placed me in a new high chair which Wally had built for me, and when we played Ultra Rouge towns I would sit with a crushed velvet shawl around my shoulders and bring my intense eyes to stare accusingly at anyone I imagined was the enemy. Few could hold my gaze – bristling Ultras with their shirtsleeves cut high and their elastic-sided boots red with bauxite dust: they grimaced and looked down at their barley soup.

It was never my mother’s plan that I should be an actor, and if she had not been desperate she would not, I am sure, have permitted the seed to be planted by Bill Millefleur: he had always been, until now, an amateur as a father and – you only have to look at the handwriting, the spelling, the eccentric capitalizations to know this – an unlikely expert in the field of formal education.

Until January 381, when Bill’s postcard arrived, my education was conventional enough. Between the ages of six and eight I had a Korean tutor, a Mr Han, a delicate old man who finally died of asthma. He was succeeded, in my ninth year (380), by Claire Chen, who, despite her erratic personal life and slovenly dress, had an almost tyrannical code of behaviour in the class room – that formerly pristine little tower room which was now a wilderness of broken chalk, torn theatre programmes, half-assembled rak-rok blocks, the Great Works of Literature, old horseshoes, and French coins I had found while playing truant in the labyrinthine underworld of the old Circus School.

The chubby Chen had an MA from the University of Nez Noir. Her field was the classics – Plato, Horace, Seneca – but she also made me understand the principles of algebra. She was both clever and impatient, and – having had a convent education herself – not above striking me on the knuckles with a wooden ruler.

It was in response to one of these attacks that I bit her on the thumb, and this, in turn, got me into big trouble with my maman, who began, that night, to shout and scream at me in such a frightening way.

Was she shouting at me about the bite? No, she was not.

Madame, Meneer, she was shouting at me about the
bandage
on her actor’s thumb.

Chen was meant to teach me in the morning and be available for rehearsal in the afternoon, but when she had returned from the Emergency Room that afternoon, she would not act before she knew – why did her character (Clytemnestra) have a bandage? What should Clytemnestra’s attitude towards the bandage be?

Chen was an anxious actor at the best of times, with a negative intelligence that could readily destabilize a cast. Now she wished to know – should her bandage affect Orestes’ attitude towards her character? Should the bandage be so white and bright when all the costumes were so bloodied and brown? Should she paint her bandage red? Could she perhaps apply other bandages to other parts of her body, and so on?

The production was frail and complicated anyway, very ‘techy’, and the actors had still not found their characters and were trying to fix their problems by rewriting their own lines. Also, the problem with Chen and her bandage arrived in a period when my maman was in crisis with her taxes, her loans, her repayments, her applications to the funding bodies, her medical insurance claims. It was, in addition, the end of the wet season, which meant she was trying, once again, to raise funds for
The Sad Sack Sirkus.

My maman came back from rehearsal and asked me, calmly, why I bit my teacher.

Instead of saying that Chen had hit me with the wooden ruler, I said that I did not like her and I would not have her for a teacher any more.

My maman said there was no other teacher she could afford.

I said I did not need a teacher. I said I would be an actor instead.

My maman then turned nuts. She screamed at me in a way I had never seen her scream before. She tore her hair. While I shivered and snivelled in the corner she told me I was beyond her, that she was a working actress and I was a child with Special Needs.

I said I was sorry, but she was lost, beyond herself. She said that she was going to find a Special School for me.

I said Wally would never let her.

That sent her totally crazy, ripping corks out of bottles and drinking wine like water. She said Wally was an emotional cripple. She said she would fire him if he said a word about it. She wept and said she was going to die. I went to sleep behind her great wall of shuddering back.

She frightened me, I’ll admit. Damaged me, even. And yet this truly dreadful night, which gave birth to the fearful notion of ‘Special Needs’, also produced the following message from my father which came into my life like a golden ray from God on High.

‘My advice to you, liebling,’
Bill wrote to my maman in a postcard that arrived two weeks later,
‘is to relax – excuse him his lessons. All the education anyone could need is available just through the work you do. Let him watch Orestes instead. Also: we have a
Sad Sack Sirkus
coming up, Let him play a PART,’
my dab wrote on the back of the card, which my mother straight away locked in the third drawer from the bottom.
‘Obviously I am not suggesting he top the bill but why not give him a CHARACTER? I myself am rather taken by the idea of
The Hairy Man.
^*
Give him the
exercise –
develop character’s
ACTIONS
for himself.’

When my mother finally decided to read this to me, I grunted and said that that would be OK, but I was so excited that I developed diarrhoea.

I had become a furtive, even sneaky child, one given to wild and dangerously unrealistic dreams. I devoured histories and fictions, personally identifying not only with revolutionaries but with figures like Napoleon whom I was expected to despise. I wrote: ‘
J’y suis une grande Destinée’
, on a cigarette paper and watched in silent satisfaction while Wally ignited and inhaled my words.

At ten years old I believed books would be written about me.

And although I said, and will say again, that I was not aware of my monstrosity, the opposite was also true: I knew exactly why I could not be an actor, and I was equally determined to become one. I also knew that if my maman saw how excited I was she would become fearful for me and send me back to Chen.

That is why, when she offered me my part in the
Sirkus
, I affected a passive, pathetic, half-defeated attitude, and when the actors were called the following day, I did not push myself forward amongst them. Instead I sat in the dark and watched them argue about
Orestes.
When I finally came into the light, it was to complain about boredom. I sat on my mother’s lap and whined and fidgeted, until finally she gave me what I had wanted all the time – a rehearsal room in one of the old stables.

There, with no one watching me, I was an egotist in the great theatrical tradition. I declaimed. I leapt into the air and landed. I scrabbled around the dirty brick floor roaring like a lion. I did my own version of ‘warm-ups’ and ‘breathing exercises’ until my clothes were covered with mud and straw and my knees were cut and bleeding.

Stanislavksy says that in order to build favourable conditions for creativeness, an actor’s organism must be prepared. The Master of the System would have clucked his lordly tongue not merely about my face and body, but also my voice – the failure of fusion in my mid-line structures meant that I would always, all my life, have trouble enunciating my words so a stranger could understand me.

To hell with that. I would make my Hairy Man a mute,
something scary that jumps at you from the dark. I would base him on a spider.

This was not original, of course. I had watched my father building a character.
^*
He would say: This character is a crab, or that character is a mole. And he would cut himself some sandwiches and go off to the zoo or the aquarium to study.

I therefore crawled around the stables, clawing at loose bricks with my broken nails, trying to find a spider so I might study it. The spiders I caught were not easy models for my instrument to follow. Their legs were fine and supple, mine were twisted, and my feet – although I hate to use the term – were clubbed. When I walked, my ankle had to do the job normally done by the sole of the foot. I had developed thick calluses all over my ankles, but to walk this way for ten minutes put strain on the knees and the hips that could cause me pain for weeks. In short, I could not do a character that walked.

My biceps were not large, but the pale blue-ish skin covered healthy muscle and I knew that muscle could be made to grow. My Hairy Man could climb and drop free-falling out of the dark sky.

There was a rusty steel ladder fixed to the courtyard wall outside my stables, and by the time the company was hammering and sawing at the new set for
Orestes
, I had taught myself to climb, to hang upside down for fifteen minutes. As a student I was known for my squirming and impatience, but as an actor I had that quality by which great men are often marked: their ability to endure tedium in pursuit of their obsession. By the time my absent father returned to Chemin Rouge I had calluses behind my knees, across my palms. But I could hang upside down for half an hour.

Without revealing my reason, I had found out exactly what time Bill’s flight would land. I knew when his taxi should arrive. The company, which imagined me an amiable sort of pet, would have
been surprised at my deviousness. But when, at six o’clock that night, my father finally entered the theatre, he saw the Hairy Man, spotlit precisely, hanging from the ladder on the back wall of the theatre, right up near the lighting rig.

I saw Bill Millefleur, upside down, loose and handsome in his grey silk suit. He looked up at me, light reflected from his skin, his suit, his hair.

‘Hairy Man?’ he called. ‘Am I right?’

My limbs were crying out with pain, but my heart, as your great poet says, ‘was all over the heavens’.

‘He’s a spider, right?’ Bill called. ‘Your Hairy Man’s a spider?’

Beneath my blood-filled head I heard my father walk softly across the cobbled floor. He climbed up the rusty old ladder to where I hung – closer, closer – he smelt of fame, of foreign spices and dry-cleaning.

‘I’m very proud of you,’ he said, and caught me just in time. He lifted me off the rung. He held me to him, thirty feet above the floor, not worrying about the snot streaming from my nose.

‘Just be careful, OK?’

‘Thanks … Dab,’ I said.

My words were not clear and he did not understand me, but I did not care.

‘Floor-work,’ he said when he had got me to the ground. ‘I’d work on that.’ Then he ruffled my hair and went to find my maman.

There were now ten days before the tour began. Sparrow, Bill and my mother were busy rehearsing with the horses. Wally was flushing and pressure-testing the radiator on the Haflinger, assembling his mammoth tool kit – vice-lock, brake-adjusting tool, centre punch, hacksaw, heavy hammer, side-cutters. Once I would have been by his side, under his legs while he fitted tubes inside the tubeless socks, collected brass rivets, clips, blades, rubber rings, corks, bits of wire. But all these activities which had once so interested me now seemed mundane, and I abandoned Wally for my more glamorous father.