Eighty-Five

‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home! Is this a holiday? What, know you not, being mechanical, you ought not walk upon a labouring day without the sign of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?’

With that announcement by Flavius, aggressive and superior, demanding and imperious, the young Sherpa has to inaugurate, upon the stage of the school’s assembly hall, the representation of Julius Caesar. There’s about a month left before that happens. And Flavius has only five interventions. It is nothing, for example, compared with the hundred lines that one of his companions has to memorise to play the role of Brutus. But that’s no consolation, either. It is the young Sherpa who has to face the public the second the curtain is drawn.

Although, seen more clearly, the problem is not so much that in the third week of June the school adaptation of an Elizabethan play must be presented in public in the assembly hall of a public school lost in the Nepalese mountain range, nor that it is, precisely, the young Sherpa who must open his mouth before anyone else in order to say: ‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’ The problem is what to do after.