TWO MINUTES PASSED, during which Carmichael went to stand at the front left of the theater, from which a bustling, unseen activity could be heard.
All at once the curtains opened onto a tableau vivant imbued with picturesque cheer.
In a rich timbre, Carmichael, designating the immobile apparition, pronounced this brief apostrophe:
“The Feast of the Olympian Gods.”
In the middle of the stage, behind which hung black drapes, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Diana, Apollo, Venus, Neptune, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, and Vulcan, seated in full regalia at a sumptuously laid table, smilingly raised their brimming goblets. Ready to gaily toast the entire group, Mercury, played by the comic actor Soreau, appeared to be suspended in midair by the wings of his sandals and hovered above the banquet without any visible attachment to the flies.
Closing once more, the curtains blotted out the divine assembly, then parted anew after several moments’ commotion to display a fairly complex scene in an entirely different setting.
The left half of the stage showed a tranquil waterway hidden behind a line of rosebushes.
A woman of color, who by her costume and finery seemed to belong to a savage tribe of North America, stood motionless in a light boat. Alone with her on the frail skiff, a little white girl held in both hands the handle of a fishing net; with a sharp jerk of her snare, she was yanking a pike from the waves. Lower down, one could see caught in the mesh the head of the fish trying to dive back into its element.
The other half of the stage depicted a grassy bank. In the foreground, a man who seemed to be running at breakneck speed wore on his shoulders a papier-mâché boar’s head, which, completely obscuring his own, made him look like a wild pig with a human body. An iron wire forming a wide arc was attached by its two ends to the encircled wrists that the runner held out before him at different heights. A glove, an egg, and a wisp of straw, the spoils of a fictional theft, were strung on the metal wire at three different points of the graceful curve. The runaway’s hands were open toward the sky, as if juggling the three objects frozen in their aerial path. The arc, inclined on a slant, gave the impression of rapid, irresistible momentum. Seen in rear three-quarters view and seemingly drawn by an invincible force, the juggler appeared to be rushing toward the rear of the stage.
Set back from him, a live goose held a pose as if taking wing, thanks to a kind of glue that attached its phenomenally widespread feet to the ground in mid-stride. The two white wings were extended broadly as if to power this headlong flight. Behind the bird, Soreau, dressed in a flowing robe, represented wrathful Boreas; from his mouth escaped a long funnel of blue-gray cardboard that, striped with fine longitudinal lines copied from those great breaths that draftsmen put before the lips of swollen-cheeked zephyrs, artfully depicted a tempestuous wind. The flared end of the light cone was aimed at the goose, chased forward by the gust. In addition, Boreas, holding in his right hand a rose with a tall, thorny stem, coldly prepared to whip the fugitive to hasten its flight. Turned almost toward us, the bird was about to cross paths with the juggler, each one seeming to describe in opposite directions the sharp curve of the same parabola.
In the background rose a golden harrow; behind this, the ass Milenkaya stretched its closed jaw, through which a seton passed from top to bottom, toward a pail full of whole bran. Certain peculiarities hinted at the subterfuge used to simulate the painful and hunger-inducing obstacle. Only the two visible ends of the seton truly existed, glued to the ass’s skin and respectively terminated by a transversal rod. At first glance, the effect obtained indeed suggested absolute closure, condemning the poor beast to the tortures of Tantalus in perpetuity.
Carmichael, indicating the girl, who, standing in the skiff, was none other than Stella Boucharessas, clearly uttered this brief explanation:
“Ursule, accompanied by the Huron Maffa, aids the bewitched of Lake Ontario.”
The characters all maintained a sculptural stillness. Soreau, gripping between his teeth the end of his long, air-colored funnel, swelled his smooth, flushed cheeks, without letting the rose standing upright at the end of his outstretched arm tremble in the slightest.
The curtains came together, and immediately, behind this impenetrable obstacle, a prolonged din could be heard, caused by some new feverish and zealous activity.
Now the stage reappeared, completely transformed.
The center was occupied by a staircase, its contours disappearing into the flies.
Halfway up stood a blind old man dressed in Louis XV style, facing front on the landing. His left hand held a dark green bouquet composed of several branches of holly. Looking at the base of the spray, one gradually made out all the colors of the rainbow, represented by seven different ribbons knotted individually around the bundled stems.
His other hand armed with a hefty quill pen, the blind man wrote on the banister to his right, its flat shape and cream hue offering a convenient smooth surface.
Several background figures, crowded onto nearby steps, gravely followed the old man’s movements. The closest one, holding a large inkwell, seemed to be awaiting the moment to moisten the quill anew.
His finger pointing to the scene, Carmichael spoke these words:
“Handel mechanically composing the theme of his oratorio Vesper.”
Soreau, in the role of Handel, had created for himself a conventional blindness by painting his eyelids, which he kept almost entirely shut.
The scene vanished behind its veil of drapes, and a fairly long interval was marked only by the whispers of the audience.
“Czar Alexei unmasking Pleshcheyev’s assassin.”
This phrase, which Carmichael uttered at the moment the curtains next slid open on their rod, referred to a Russian scene from the seventeenth century.
At right, Soreau, playing the czar, held vertically at eye level a red glass disk that looked like the setting sun. His gaze, passing through that round window, rested on a group of servants at left flocking around a dying man, his face and hands completely blue, who had just fallen in convulsions into their arms.
The vision lasted but a short time and was followed by a fleeting intermission, which ended with this announcement from Carmichael:
“The echo in the Argyros woods sending Constantine Kanaris the scent of named flowers.”
Soreau, playing the famous seaman, stood in profile in the foreground, his hands cupped like a megaphone around his mouth.
Nearby, several companions held a pose of awed surprise.
Without moving, Soreau distinctly pronounced the word “rose,” which was soon repeated by a voice from the wings.
At the precise moment the echo sounded, an intense, penetrating smell of roses spread over Trophy Square, striking everyone’s nostrils at the same time then fading almost immediately.
The word “carnation,” which Soreau then uttered, yielded the same phonetic and olfactory response.
One by one, lilac, jasmine, lily of the valley, thyme, gardenia, and violet were named aloud, and each time the echo disseminated strong fragrances, in perfect accord with the obediently repeated word.
The curtains closed over this poetic scene, and the atmosphere promptly cleared itself of any intoxicating odors.
After a tedious wait, the next abruptly unveiled scene was indicated by Carmichael, who accompanied his gesture with this brief commentary:
“The fabulously wealthy prince Savellini, suffering from kleptomania, robs street hoodlums in the poor quarters of Rome.”
For the first time Soreau appeared in modern dress, wrapped in an elegant fur coat and decked with precious stones that sparkled at his necktie and his fingers. In front of him a circle of sinister-looking ruffians avidly surrounded two combatants armed with knives. Taking advantage of the onlookers' concentration, who were too fully absorbed in the duel to notice his presence, the man in the fur coat furtively explored their repellent pockets from behind, emptying them of their sordid contents. His thrusting hands now clutched an old, dented watch, a grimy change purse, and a large, checkered handkerchief still partially buried in the depths of a much-patched jacket.
When the supple, habitual closure had covered over this antithetical fait divers, Carmichael left his post, thereby bringing to an end the series of frozen tableaux.
The stage was soon returned to view for the entrance of the aging ballerina Olga Chervonenkov, an obese, mustached Latvian who, dressed in a tutu ornamented with leafage, made her appearance on the back of the elk Sladki, which she crushed under her considerable weight. The good-natured beast trudged across the boards, then, relieved of its corpulent rider, plodded back toward the wings, while the performer assumed first position for The Nymph’s Dance.
Her lips set in a smile, the former prima ballerina began a series of rapid turns, still showing certain vestiges of her past talent; beneath the stiff folds of her tulle skirt, her monstrous legs, squeezed into clinging pink tights, performed their practiced task with enough agility and remnants of grace to inspire justifiable surprise.
Suddenly, crossing the stage with tiny steps, both feet raised onto the point of their big toes, Olga fell heavily and cried out in anguish.
Doctor Leflaive left our group and, rushing onstage, diagnosed the lamentable condition of the patient, who had been immobilized by a muscle cramp.
Calling Hector and Tommy Boucharessas to assist him, the able doctor carefully lifted the unfortunate ballerina, who was carried offstage to receive the necessary care.
The moment the accident occurred, Talou, as if to prevent any interruption in the proceedings, had discretely given orders to Rao.
An immense choir suddenly rang out, composed of deep, vibrant male voices that buried poor Olga’s distant wails.
At this sound, everyone turned toward the west side of the square, in front of which the black warriors, squatting near the weapons they’d laid on the ground, all sang the “Jeroukka,” a kind of proud epic written by the emperor, who had taken as subject the detailed narrative of his own exploits.
The melody, with its bizarre rhythm and tone, was based on a single, fairly brief theme, repeated ad infinitum with new words each time.
The singers chanted each couplet, clapping their hands in unison as if they were a single man, and this glorious lament, executed with a certain opulence and character, produced a rather grandiose impression.
Nonetheless, the constant repetition of the single, eternally unvaried musical phrase gradually gave rise to an intense monotony, accentuated by the inevitable opportunities for prolongation offered by the “Jeroukka,” a faithful and exhaustive record of the life of the emperor, whose notable deeds were many.
Completely inaccessible to European ears, the Ponukelean epic unfolded in garbled stanzas, no doubt relating many capital events, and night gradually fell without any indication that the tedious drone might be nearing an end.
Suddenly, just as we were despairing of ever reaching the final verse, the choir stopped short and was replaced by a lovely soprano—a marvelous, penetrating voice that echoed purely in the already opaque twilight.
All eyes, seeking the spot from which this new performance originated, lit on Carmichael, who, standing at left before the front row of the chorus, thus completed the “Jeroukka” by phrasing solo, without changing a note of the musical motif, a supplemental canto devoted to the “Battle of the Tez.”
His remarkable head-voice, which flawlessly reproduced a female pitch, soared delightfully in the limitless acoustics of the open air, apparently unimpeded by the difficult pronunciation of the incomprehensible sounds composing the song.
But after several moments, Carmichael, initially so self-assured, faltered in his recital, his memory refusing to recall one word in the series of unintelligible syllables that he’d conscientiously learned by heart.
From a distance, Talou loudly whispered the fragment forgotten by the young Marseillais, who, picking up the narrative thread, continued without further hesitation to the end of the final couplet.
Immediately the emperor uttered several words to Sirdah, who, translating into excellent French the sentence her father had dictated, was forced to inflict three hours’ detention on Carmichael as punishment for his slight lapse.