Eight Strings, page 22
For you, I thought, lifting the curtain’s edge to meet Utku’s eye. At my cue, he started a soft tap of the piano’s lower registers, evoking the sound of whittling wood. The lights fell and our young audience squealed as if preparing for a scary story—which it was.
“Once upon a time in our beautiful country of Italy,” I said, beginning the narration, “guess who lived among you?”
The children began calling out possibilities.
“A king!”
“A beautiful princess!”
Mothers and caretakers shushed at first, but the commentary quieted in one section only to rise again in another like a song sung in rounds.
“A toad!”
“My ugly cousin Luca!”
“All excellent guesses,” I said, “but no one has mentioned this fine hunk of wood.”
Giggles erupted as I suspended a single ungainly log against the backdrop of a cozy cottage. Paolo maneuvered the Antonio marionette, a stuffy gentleman with a bulbous nose and elaborate ruffled shirt, onstage. Distracted by his shiny pocket watch, he bumped straight into the log and fell.
“Ouch!” I cried as the log.
Speaking as Antonio, Paolo whined in a fussy Italian at the audience. “Children, quiet! This is very serious art!”
Of course, this only made them shrill with glee, so Antonio clamored upright. I lifted the log to strike him harder and the children begged for more blows.
“I am Pinocchio, the finest grain of cedar!” I exclaimed.
“Am I dreaming? Did that log speak?” Antonio queried the crowd, who reassured him that no, he was not dreaming, and yes, the log was speaking.
As the log, I continued. “Carve me into that which I am meant to be.”
“A royal throne?” Antonio suggested meekly, rubbing his head.
“I am not to be sat upon! I am a real boy! Make my body match my mind.”
“But no one can make cut wood live.” I readied the log to hit Antonio, then he cried, “Wait! Do you hear that? My friend the wood-carver approaches. He can make you a real boy. Stay completely quiet or he will carve you into a toad.”
I settled the log against a chair with a harrumph, and Eduardo brought onstage a misshapen but spritely old man.
“Geppetto,” cried Antonio too warmly. “May I help you?”
“If only I had some wood,” Eduardo said as Geppetto. “I wish to ease my lonely heart, by making a friend who dances, sings, runs, and plays.”
Paolo elevated the log’s strings. Then Antonio held the log like a prize. “Here is the perfect gift!” he exclaimed.
Geppetto ran his hand over it. “Expensive gifts have hidden costs.”
“Nonsense. I only wish to make my friend happy.”
Geppetto faced the audience. “Tell me, children. Should I accept this gift?” The children discouraged him, but Geppetto pulled the wood close. “Soon he shall spring to life with strings.”
“Enjoy!” Antonio said, scurrying offstage.
I dropped down a small knife to hover in the air and Eduardo made Geppetto clasp it. Together, Eduardo and I simulated the carving as Utku played an animated melody and, offstage, Bruno enhanced the sound of striking wood.
“That hurts!” I cried as the log.
Geppetto stopped, confused, then kept carving, and with each slice, I released a piece of wood from the log’s side, which looked like a shaving.
When Geppetto stepped back, the Pinocchio puppet, which had been concealed within the log, appeared dressed in a schoolboy’s red-and-green uniform. Pinocchio glanced at his hands in awe, and then rage.
“Why, you have made me a puppet, not a boy!”
“You speak?” Geppetto said, fending off Pinocchio’s blows, more dangerous now that he possessed arms. “Be still, my child. Mysteries happen all the time, Pinocchio. Earlier today, I was a lonely old man. Now I have you. If you behave, might your other dreams come true?”
“My dream is to become a real boy who learns to read.”
“That is a dream from which one does not turn back. Are you sure you are ready?”
“Yes!” said Pinocchio, but I screeched his nose out—a lie. I heard the children gasp and giggle.
“Don’t lie,” said Geppetto. “Let me help you.”
“No! I will do it myself! Dreams lead to adventures, and I want more!” I made Pinocchio scamper in a heavy-footed circle, his first awkward attempt at running. Geppetto strove in vain to follow as Pinocchio ran offstage calling, “Catch me if you can!”
It was time for the first shadow play. Above, Bruno unfurled a transparent drop cloth as Paolo and I hurried down to the stage and joined Eduardo behind the backdrop. Vincenzo brightened the lights for only the top half of the screen, casting a muted ivory sheen, gray like sunlight burning off the morning fog. Paolo and I elevated the large cut-out figures of Pinocchio and a cricket on sticks, and they hovered like ghostly two-dimensional silhouettes.
The audience, even the adults, hushed in awe. Paolo began speaking as the cricket, urging an annoyed Pinocchio to help Geppetto. Eduardo raised a third, quivering stick figure to show the wood-carver being beaten by the police, voiced by Bruno and Vincenzo in the wings.
Frustrated by the cricket imploring him to be good, Pinocchio hurled a rock. When it struck the cricket, none of us made a noise. Paolo lowered the cricket down into the dark to mark its death, then I bent Pinocchio’s shadow to weep silently—only to hear the audience make the sounds for me. The shadow play was as enchanting as I’d hoped, and I felt emboldened by the crowd’s reactions.
* * *
THE CHILDREN WERE A chatty delight to perform for, as Carmine had said, and by intermission, the play was zipping along.
I raised the curtain on Pinocchio surveying a miniature stage.
One petite puppet, an Arlecchino repurposed from commedia as a schoolboy, gestured to Pinocchio to join him. “Come see the greatest marionette theater in all of Italy! Sell your schoolbook for the ticket. There is no man alive as skillful with the strings as the amazing Mangiafuoco. See why he is called the ‘Fire Eater’!”
As the pair ran toward the entertainment, I lowered the wild-haired “Fire Eater,” Mangiafuoco. Golden backlights illuminated four small two-stringed marionettes on the tiny stage, which Eduardo and Paolo handled. Thin and domineering, Mangiafuoco chased Pinocchio, believing he was a member of his troupe. When he caught his prey, I made it appear as though Mangiafuoco was manipulating Pinocchio—a marionette puppeteering another marionette.
“You are not mine,” I bellowed as Mangiafuoco in Italian. “Nor did you pay for your ticket! Wicked foundling, I will teach you!”
“But I did pay!” Pinocchio protested. “I sold my schoolbook for your show!”
“Puppets do not need school, but I need dinner. You will be my dinner!” The other puppets sought to rescue Pinocchio but tumbled in a pile. “Stop, or you will be my second course!” Mangiafuoco shouted at them and pointed at the real children in the theater. “Now, dance for the audience!”
Paolo and Eduardo kept the miniature puppets dancing, while Mangiafuoco solicited recipe suggestions from the crowd. When one woman said a disobedient boy would need to be marinated well, I stifled my own laughter by making Mangiafuoco hum with glee. “I know. You will be the firewood over which I cook my meat!”
In the wings, Bruno and Vincenzo cupped their hands over side gas lamps to suggest flickering flames. As Pinocchio, I pleaded, “Please, sir, spare me!”
“But you are only made of wood and I, the ‘Fire Eater.’ ”
“My father will miss me if you burn me as fuel.”
“What are you talking about? You have no father.”
“I do! The wood-carver Geppetto loves me as his own son. He carved me.”
Mangiafuoco leaned closer. “I see that you speak the truth.” He released Pinocchio and pulled out two large gold coins. “For your journey home. I cannot separate a father and son. Find him. Go to school. Become a wiser boy and, one day, a man.”
Pinocchio gazed at the money. “Might I become real?”
“Who knows? I’ve seen stranger things inside a theater’s walls, Pinocchio.”
Once more I crouched behind the transparent screen with Eduardo and Paolo. This time, Eduardo raised the slinky shadows of a cat and fox, who startled my stick figure Pinocchio.
Eduardo spoke as the cat shadow. “Where are you going?”
“To school,” I replied as Pinocchio.
“Join us instead,” said Eduardo, now as the sharp-eared fox. “Give us your coins. We’ll make your gold grow in the Field of Miracles. An entire tree of coins will sprout. You’ll be rich in minutes!”
Paolo lifted a fourth shadow, the now ghostly talking cricket. “Lies, Pinocchio! They will hurt you. Go to Geppetto now!”
The children began to cry for Pinocchio to heed the cricket’s warning, but Pinocchio sighed. “A tree of coins will make Geppetto prouder of me than reading a book.”
Amid the children’s protests, Eduardo leaned the cat and fox into each other, shaking in conspiratorial laughter. “After we get the gold, we’ll kill him and steal it all,” he whispered as the cat.
The fox, cat, and Pinocchio figures merged to form one single, ominous shadow. Then everything went dark to gasps.
Paolo, Eduardo, and I climbed up, and when the lights rose, a slack Pinocchio marionette hung from a tree. Offstage, the wicked fox and cat cackled. This was the only violent encounter I depicted with marionettes, not shadows. I wanted to show Pinocchio near a real death.
It worked, even on me up above. I felt a chill. Some children sniffled or protested. The strings felt slack in my hands, as if what lay below had indeed weakened.
Then, Paolo dropped the luminous Fairy with the Turquoise Hair. Her profusion of diaphanous azure tulle was met with sighs. She tipped her wand to Pinocchio’s forehead. “Live, dear Pinocchio, or your father, like your dreams, will soon die.”
Pinocchio sputtered, as if waking from a fretful sleep. “Who are you?”
“Remember that tiny cricket you killed? He was me, your conscience. I keep you whole and safe. Can you be brave?”
“Yes.” I made Pinocchio stand. The children spurred him on.
“Hurry,” Paolo cried as the Fairy. “Save Geppetto from the belly of the whale!”
He twirled her slowly up, as Eduardo sprinkled handfuls of tiny torn paper scraps, a snowstorm’s swirl. The lights fell into a deep darkness, and Bruno shoved a large wooden whale with an empty belly onstage for the climax.
It was a new form of mechanical theater we had built; its floor shifted on diagonal angles and rolled as if churning on waves. So, too, did the ocean set pieces tilt with levers to simulate the sea. Between Vincenzo’s bursts of lighting and Utku’s cascading scales, we depicted a great storm. Geppetto, already in the whale’s belly, called out as the lights rose. “Pinocchio? Are you near?”
From offstage, the fox and cat called, “Forget him and save us, Pinocchio! Our money was stolen and our tails have been cut!”
“False friends!” Pinocchio said. “You taught me only that bad wheat makes poor bread.”
I lowered Pinocchio into the belly, and he and Geppetto embraced.
“My child, I am so weary,” Geppetto said.
“I will save you, Father, for I have changed and learned and nearly died. The Fairy with the Turquoise Hair brought me back. Look, she guides us out!”
Paolo lowered the Fairy, who gestured them toward the whale’s open mouth, but the storm made Geppetto and Pinocchio fall back. The children screamed in horror. Undaunted, the pair inched toward liberation, and after one last plunge into darkness, they escaped, to the audience’s thrill.
That applause concealed the clatter of our final scene change, a return to the opening cottage. I began to narrate again.
“So, dear friends, like much in life, Pinocchio has discovered what good can come from learning. How should we end his story?”
The children offered plenty of advice as I brought out Pinocchio and Eduardo positioned Geppetto in an elaborate armchair.
The limelights shone brightest on the Fairy, a breath above the stage without weight as Paolo began her final speech. It concluded with, “Dear Pinocchio, you have suffered and grown. Are you ready for your wish?”
“Please make me my father’s son.”
The Fairy raised her wand. Pinocchio’s arms spread wide, as if to embrace the audience, while Utku’s anticipatory strike on the lower registers cascaded into a spiral of chords. When the Fairy tapped Pinocchio’s head, I began to spin him slowly up and down, before settling center stage. Now, I made his first steps looser as he admired and tested his limbs. “How different I move as a boy!”
Geppetto rose from his chair. “Not so different, but more yourself.”
Then the Fairy, Geppetto, and Pinocchio danced, with Pinocchio’s steps a more agile imitation of Geppetto’s now that both were human. The Fairy gestured to the audience, and Utku’s melody enlivened the room. The children began clapping in time, much as they had at the show’s start, as the curtain fell.
I could hardly wait to reopen the curtain, the three of us in the rafters exhilarated by the response—and amazed by our success after so many misfortunes and mistakes in the lead-up. Despite the toil of weeks spent practicing for this show, I couldn’t imagine being untethered to a theater. No rehearsals and scripts, performers and audiences, magic and grit? Who would I be if I had never held the strings and felt that mystery take hold in my spine?
As I signaled for Bruno and Vincenzo to draw open the curtain and applause billowed up, I felt a swell of love for the Minerva, and what it had been like in the days before Constanza. With Carmine, I’d seen how the Minerva’s plays, even in humble and makeshift forms, could, for its audiences, encompass longing and memory, dream and wish, fear and hope. As a theater, it was both of this world and a flight from it. After the awkward silences of Romeo and Juliet, now the many children talking back to me had given this place, and me, too, renewed life.
33
I scurried down from the rafters with the Pinocchio marionette still in hand, giddy and glowing, to find Radillo waiting. Without a word, he simply embraced me, hanging on longer than expected.
“Are you all right, sir?” I ventured.
“I suppose you reminded me of myself back there, with that wonder you just created. You took something minor and made it a masterpiece. Such experimentation, taking risks, understanding your audience, shadow play, all done so well.” His gaze fell to his feet. “It’s something I used to do but haven’t for a long time. You reminded me of when I felt more creative and like a real performer, not just an owner fretting over his costs.”
“Thank you,” I said, humbled. “I learned that from you on The Decameron. Those stories were written centuries prior, under the shadow of a plague to spite death. You said they were fresh, as if written yesterday. You transformed them, gave them new life.”
“How long ago that feels,” he said, as though something had slipped out of his grasp.
“You know, the Minerva has been a refuge to me,” I added, “ever since that first day.”
“If I recall, Carmine gave you a black eye.”
I laughed. “Two, actually.”
Radillo grew thoughtful. “You asked me to teach you something that day. Do you remember?”
I nodded. “The shudder. How to make the same gesture express two entirely different moods.”
Radillo pointed at the Pinocchio marionette. “Tell me what you were thinking about in the opening run, when Pinocchio becomes a boy.”
I unwound the strings once more. “Pinocchio is overly confident as a new puppet. At first, he is too heavy-footed, like an overgrown toddler.”
“Here, watch me.” Radillo took the marionette and bent its knees deeply, arms extended wide as if shoving items off a shelf, then set Pinocchio in an almost drunken run. “It’s a rapid, heavy motion that starts in the wrist. But now look at the difference.” This time he gave a slight heave and drop to Pinocchio’s shoulders in a more controlled, confident run. The marionette’s head faced upright as he accelerated, slipping fleeting glances at his own hands, arms, and feet. “Slow down your right arm. Drag it out. Make each step like breathing when you first awaken.”
Radillo handed the marionette back. I did a rougher but somewhat successful imitation.
“Better,” he said. “If there’s one thing I’ve done right, it’s teaching you. You have such a talent, Franco. A natural, from the start.” He ran his hand through his disordered curls. Even in the dim light, I saw his weary eyes. “If only I hadn’t taken Constanza’s money, but now, without her? The Minerva…”
“Will close,” I said. “I know.”
It was the first time he admitted accepting Constanza’s patronage was a mistake. I knew how much it cost him to say it.
“Thank you, sir,” I added, “for this show.” I looked at the Pinocchio marionette. “I guess I still have a few things left to learn.”
“Don’t we all?” he said. “Puppetry isn’t ever you alone up there, is it? Maybe today especially, on All Souls’ Day, I find myself thinking of those who left us, with only our own memories in the pull of the line.”
I sensed he was remembering Giannina, as I had my grandfather and mother. They were dead, but Giannina was very much alive.
“She might come back, sir, if you asked,” I said tentatively.
“Who?”
“Giannina. Were you thinking of her just now? Someone whom you lost?”
“Yes, her,” he replied, ambling away. “Among others.”
* * *
AFTER I CLEANED UP, I headed out front for a barrage of autographs and several amusing conversations with enthusiastic children. Inside, the exhausted ushers groused as they swept a larger-than-normal amount of debris. After the last children peeled off, I saw Marco emerge, smoking in the early twilight shadows. With a glance around to ensure we were alone, I jogged over. His hair was clean and recently trimmed. From his suit, he would have been at home in the boxes.
