Weeks before the event, posters began to appear in town, each day more of them—on lampposts, on trees, in shop windows—until you could not escape knowing that the great and illustrious artist Pomo Pursnipov was coming to town to perform. Besides the date and time, and the place—the village green—the posters quoted several important sounding journals citing Pursnipovs literary genius.
“Here are stories with the potential to lift and inspire,” wrote one critic.
“Nothing short of enlightening,” opined another. “Will set your heart pounding and your mind aflame.”
“Let Pomo Pursnipov set you on the righteous path to regaining what is rightfully yours.”
By the day of the event, there were hardly any in the town who declined to attend. The green was crowded with people. The evenings maestro, the celebrated Pursnipov, led by an escort in a gendarmes cape with a lions head clasp and a backwards Yankees baseball cap, walked through the parting crowd from the rear and ascended the three steps to the band shell. All eyes were on him as he sipped from a glass of water and surveyed his audience. Then he ducked down behind the podium, out of view for a moment, and replaced his water glass. Straightening, he cleared his throat and began:
“I came here to tell you a story” Here he paused. “However, I shall tell you neither of the stories you want to hear. The two you want to hear you want to hear in order to be assured that things are working out. They’re not, in case you didn’t notice.
“In the first story—which is true, by the way, so far as it goes—a peasant, a worker, a pauper, perhaps represented by a ragged barnyard fowl, in any case some animate emblem of the dispossessed, lives at the foot of a mountain. On the top of this mountain is a castle filled with all the riches of the earth, enough to buy and sell our hero’s destiny a million times over. Are you with me? Does this sound familiar? Of course it does.
“The rest of the story is a string of predictable station stops that if I were to tell it, I would carefully disguise by adding detail. In your case, seeing as this is a city with cosmopolitan aspirations—like our hero, but more on that later—I would fashion episodes in which our hero—or heroine—happens upon a benefactor or finds a magic something-lamp or lotto ticket, it hardly matters-or wins a scholarship, but!” And here he raised his hand for emphasis. “But he proves, by way of several complementary episodes, that on his way up the mountain he has not, emphatically not, lost the common touch. Call him—where am I?—okay, call him something that impedes his progress up the mountain to the castle—you tell me Come on now, don’t be shy.” And here the artist cupped his ear and beckoned with his other hand. “What’s that? I’m sorry, I can hardly hear you. What? Manuel!”
People looked around at one another and behind them; no one had heard anyone say anything.
“Manuel! Yes, that’s good! You’re good at this! Man well. Hispanic. Also a hint of “manual,” by hand, a laborer, Manny, macho, and so forth. Great! Already in the file of stereotypes. No no, don’t be offended, I’ll be sure to describe his features so fully even you won’t notice that at his core he’s a cartoon.
“At least that’s what I would do if I were going to tell you that story. But, come on, you have heard it before. You know it by heart. And every time you sit there and listen to some variation of it, you make a terrible mistake. You listen and once again identify with the exceptional underdog. Your children watch you, want you to be proud, and they begin to dream of the climb. Thats what I’ve been trying to demonstrate here.
“So… what are the trials we’ll put our hero through on his way to occupancy of the castle? I promise you that any of you can do this if you let yourself. What trials? Anyone? Come on, you’ve heard the tale a thousand times.” And here, once again, Pursnipov cupped his ear and leaned out over the podium. “Yes? What’s that? A jealous rival? A wicked uncle? A wound? Yes, good, good, good. You see? Now there’s a story you can sell!”
The people were once again looking around to see who had responded to the artist’s question, but Pursnipov was going right on, so they quickly turned their attention back to the stage. “Throw in a complication at the end, in the final hour, and never, ever, question whether the company of those who live on the mountaintop, whose castle draws our hero like a magnet, are worth the trip.
“Not that it would matter if you did—that’s just another way of telling the story. Gives it legs. You can throw in that alternate ending from time to time, but not too often. I mean, you can say at the end that it isn’t worth the struggle and that the people at the top are vile, but the story’s already done its work. Adrenaline has flowed. The ear has heard the music. The imagination is engaged. Sure as a certain rhythm gets your toe to tapping, you’ve been seduced again by god and now you’ll listen even more attentively the next time, wondering which twist comes at the end. You’re trapped. But maybe not so easily from now on. Maybe you’ll hold out for a new story, a better one. If so, I shall be gratified, and proud if I have helped you see a way out of the usual darkness.”
He disappeared from view for a moment, stood drinking a glass of water, disappeared to replace the glass under the podium, then stood looking at them for a long moment before he continued.
“So, that’s the first story. Call it the dominant story. So I guess we can call this the recessive story. Yes, like genes on a strand. Like DNA. I can tell by the looks on some of your faces you already know what I’m going to say. I know you don’t want to hear this, but bear with me. That only goes to prove my point, don’t you think?
“The other story I won’t tell, that you want me to tell, that you think that you need me to tell, is the one where—call it the Samson story—call it the Robin Hood story—the one in which our hero Manuel—here we might call him Emmanuel—redeemer, savior, one who comes to set things right, redress all wrongs, reset the switches, and establish harmony on the far side of justice, in short, to give the castle dwellers their comeuppance—does his famous stuff. He brings the house down, to turn a phrase, because he has never forgotten his roots, and because he refuses to participate in the oppression and exploitation he cannot manage to keep from seeing, hard as he tries.
“There’s a good opportunity for a back story here, about lovers parted and rejoined.”
Suddenly, he leaned far out over the podium with his hand to his ear again.
“What’s that? What’s that? That’s right! I see you’re getting in the spirit of this!” He pointed somewhere midway and to the left in the crowd, but no one was ever sure who he had pointed to. “Did you hear what she said? She said the hero, Emmanuel, has a girlfriend! That’s right, a girlfriend from the old neighborhood who reminds him of the world he comes from. The memory, or maybe the possibility, of her love pushes him to a crisis of conscience. But now it’s not a question of returning, of turning away from the life at the castle. It’s a fierce moral struggle now! He sees the enslavement of his own people and his rage at this injustice brings him to turn against the castle dwellers.
“Maybe you double up the lovey-dovey stuff by giving him another girlfriend at the castle, someone he has fallen for on his way up the mountain, someone he has to spare when it all blows up.
“Be honest. Do you really want to hear that one again?”
All was quiet.
“Oh shit. You do. Of course. 1 told you to be honest and you were.
“But the stories we need are different from the stories we want. Maybe Manny is a storyteller now. Not to be self-serving, but maybe that’s what it means to be a hero these days. Maybe all he can do is try out stories that make us less fearful, stories that change what we want. Maybe Manny is Manuela. Maybe Manuela is a kind of Cassandra. Maybe she tells the stories she does in the hopes that no one will have to live them. Maybe that’s why she tells you what you don’t want to hear. Maybe she is Maria, from Mare, the sea, Mnemosyne, the salty memory, the mother of the muses, life-giving, moon-dancing bath of beginning.
“Never underestimate how shrewd a storyteller she is. No matter where she might take you, her every story begins the same way: ‘Once upon a time, a child was born.’”
Here the maestro ducked and retrieved his water glass. All eyes were upon him as he drank deeply. Then he ducked down as if to replace the glass, but this time he never stood up again. The people waited, confused, until a man in the first row, deeply concerned for the artist, hopped up on stage to find no one there at all.
“He’s over there!” someone shouted as Pursnipov climbed into the car driven by his caped escort. The car sped off only moments ahead of the first cries from the men discovering their wallets gone, and the women with their empty purses.