THE ESCAPE FROM PARIS
Although I had to miss a great deal that it would have been interesting
to see on the stage, I spent a couple of mornings with the buffo in his
workshop helping to make the scene of the people escaping, which was
perhaps even better than being among the audience later. I think he is
most happy when he is holding up the mirror to nature and reproducing
modern Palermitan life as it appears to him. He enjoyed the devils and
the subterranean road, but the inhabitants of Paris in modern costume,
each saving his most precious object and escaping with the Pope through
the subterranean road to Montalbano, was a larger canvas and gave him
more opportunities. As a creative artist he is in the fortunate position
of being up to a certain point his own impresario, stage-manager and
performer. Nevertheless he has to rely on the co-operation of his father
and Gildo, and there is always the public to be considered, therefore it
is possible that some of the things we made and contemplated in the
workshop did not get so far as to be presented on the stage.
There was a sluggard carrying a mattress under each arm; and a drunkard
carrying a bottle of wine, a real glass bottle that would catch the light
and make an effect. Another man had on his back a table and was carrying
a plate, a knife, fork, spoon and napkin; he was a glutton. The masks
Pasquino and Onofrio were making a comic escape and talking in dialect;
Pasquino was carrying his wife Rosina on his shoulder and a pillow in his
hand, and Onofrio was saving an article of crockery made at Caltagirone.
And because the buffo was studying to become a singer he had made a
musician:
"But I cannot show his voice," he complained.
"He might be practising a solfeggio," I suggested, "which you could sing
for him." But this was not treating the buffo's voice with proper
respect. "Or put a piece of music-paper in his hand and make him a
composer."
"Bravo! But what is written on the music-paper?"
I said: "_Stornelli Montagnoli_."
He began to hum meditatively:
[Picture: Music in the Play]
"No," he said, "that won't do. In the first place it is not yet known in
Palermo, and when it is, it will be so popular that no one in particular
will think of saving it."
"Very well then," I replied, "make it that he has just discovered an
entirely new resolution of the dominant seventh and has written it down
before he forgets it."
"All right. And this is the painter; he has his easel and a picture
which he has only just begun; that is more precious to him than all the
pictures he has finished because it is so full of hope."
"Bravo, Buffo. And where is the miser?"
"Oh Caspita!" he exclaimed. "How clever you are! Of course there must
be a miser. We will make him at once."
So we selected an old man marionette who happened to have nothing
particular to do at the moment, and got a piece of sacking out of which
we made a bag and filled it--not with gold--
"No," said the buffo, "that must be one of the things the people do not
see, they must imagine the gold." Then we loaded the miser with his bag
and added him to the crowd of fugitives.
And he had made a woman saving a mouse-trap; she was a suffragette. That
was because he had read in the _Giornale di Sicilia_ that in England a
meeting of suffragettes had been dispersed by letting mice in among them.
The buffo's suffragette had argued thus:
"In all the world there are mice; Montalbano will be no exception. How
do I know what sort of house I shall have there? It will probably be
over-run with mice. If I take this trap with me, at least I shall be
able to catch some of them."
It turned out that she had to sleep on the floor in someone else's house
like a fugitive from Messina, and the mouse-trap came in very handy.
And he had made a chemist who was saving a medicine chest and a few
instruments. The chemist had argued thus:
"In Montalbano there will be no order. Here in Paris the restaurants are
well-managed and the food is good. How can I tell what sort of food they
will give us there? Very likely we shall have to depend a great deal
upon chance. I will take these instruments and medicine and earn money
by curing those who will be sure to be upset by the badness of the food."
And a man came weeping; his father had died the day before and there had
not been time to bury the body, but it had been put into a coffin and the
undertaker's men were laughing because the son was rich and had promised
to pay them extra for carrying the body to Montalbano and burying it
there; but the son did not see they were laughing, he was in front to
show them the way.
Two boys came along, each saving a marionette, one had Orlando, the other
Rinaldo; they forgot that they were escaping and stopped to make the
paladins fight; a third boy came and said they were his marionettes and
the others had stolen them, and the boys left Orlando and Rinaldo lying
on the stage and began to fight among themselves till their three mothers
followed.
"Be quick, be quick, you silly boys, be quick," shouted the mothers,
hustling everything before them--boys, marionettes and all--as an autumn
hurricane sweeps away the fallen leaves.
"What is that man doing?" I inquired.
"Which man?"
"The one standing in the corner there--he seems to have a camera."
"Yes, that's right. He has been sent by the Cinematograph Company to
reproduce the scene for their show."
"Oh! I see. That's a capital idea; the people will like that."
"Yes, won't they?"
And two men were dragging a heavy bundle along on the ground between
them, and I asked:
"What's in the bundle?"
"Clothes," he replied.
And there was a woman carrying a hen in a basket, and the hen escaped
from the basket, laid an egg in the middle of the stage and cackled back
into Paris; but the woman saved the egg and said: "Better an egg to-day
than a hen to-morrow."
Another woman was carrying her baby on one arm and leading a child by the
hand, and the child was crying because it had to walk too fast and was
tired.
"This is the astronomer," said the buffo.
"Is that his umbrella under his arm? It seems too long and too bright."
"No; that is Halley's comet which he has predicted for next spring. He
does not want to leave it behind, the Turks might destroy it and he would
lose his reputation."
There was the boy from the barber's shop opposite; he had been playing
with a black kitten when the alarm came and he joined the fugitives just
as he was, in his white tunic with the kitten in his arms and a comb
stuck in his bushy hair. And there came a troop of old women, chattering
and shuffling along and understanding no more about it all than I should
have understood if I had not had my buffo, my programme raisonne, to
explain it.
Then I said: "Buffo mio, we have had a musician and a painter, where is
the poet?"
"Here he comes." And there came a pale, Alfred de Musset youth with long
hair, a roll of paper and a quill pen. "Do you know what he is saying?
He is saying: 'Better to embrace and be betrayed than to suffer and die
in ignorance.'"
"Is that the philosophy of the buffo?" I inquired.
"It is the philosophy of the poet," he replied.
"Isn't it rather beyond the public? Will they understand?"
"The public won't hear that; it is only for you and me. There are many
things we do not tell the public because they are the public; but we
understand because we are artists."
"Very well. And then if we have a poet we must have a critic--won't this
one do? he has a book; perhaps he is going to review it, or perhaps it is
his encyclopaedia to save him from making mistakes."
"If you like, he shall be the critic; only then you ought to tell me what
he is saying."
"He is saying: 'I despise everything because it is not something else.'"
"Bravo, bravo! That is better than what the poet said."
"O my dear Buffo, I am not going to admit that. Besides, it is not true
of all critics."
"What I said is not true of all poets."
"Well, if we don't like what we have made them say, let us have someone
to follow and show them where they are both wrong."
"All right. Let me see. That will be when they have had time to think
it over. That will be the Cold Dawn of the following morning. We will
now make the Aurora."
So we found a disengaged lady marionette and began to dress her in a
piece of cobwebby grey muslin from which the last few spangles had not
yet dropped. I said:
"I'm not at all sure that this is not going too far. Do you think we can
really show the Cold Dawn of the following morning escaping out of Paris
by the underground road?"
"She must go; she will be wanted at Montalbano to show some of the people
that they have saved the wrong things."
"Very true. Yes. That is what people so often do when they travel, they
leave behind them the things they want most and take a lot of other
things that are useless. Now, that resolution of the dominant seventh
was hardly worth saving--at least it was not really new."
"Where did you get it from?"
"I stole it out of the works of the musician whose bust was on your
maestro's piano the other day, the one with the Dutch name who lived in
Vienna."
"I hope you invented what the critic said?"
"Not exactly. Your poet reminded me of something in Walt Whitman and I
twisted it round and gave it to the critic."
"What's Walt Whitman? Is he another Dutchman?"
"He was an American poet, but his mother had a Dutch name."
"Did he come to the teatrino?"
"He never came to Europe. I wish he had been to the teatrino. He would
have liked your Escape from Paris, but perhaps he would not have cared so
much for the paladins. He wrote something about them."
"What did he say?"
"If he had seen the end of the story, when the angel takes Guido Santo's
soul out of his mouth, I believe he would have said that instead of
flying up to heaven he flew across the Atlantic with it and installed it
'amid the kitchenware' to animate all the machinery and things in one of
the Exhibitions held by the American Institute in New York."
"Is that what he said?"
"No. What he said was that all that world of romance was dead:
Passed to its charnel vault--laid on the shelf--coffin'd with crown
and armour on,
Blazon'd with Shakespeare's purple page,
And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme.
"Well, it is not true. But of course if he never came to the teatrino he
could not know. Americans do come to the teatrino. I never know which
are Americans and which are English; for the English come too. They come
in the winter and the spring, and when they are pleased with some stage
trick--"
"I suppose you mean with some miracle?"
"Of course," he replied; "it is the same thing. When they are pleased
with some stage miracle, they clap their hands and applaud."
"That is nice and sympathetic of them."
"Yes, and they shout out loud and cry: 'Bravo, very good night.'"
"No, Buffo! Is that really what they say?"
"Yes, they shout: 'Bravo, very good night,' and it is a pleasure to hear
them."
"I should think so. I must come in the winter next time and hear them
say that."
"They all ask me some questions. I know what they mean, but I cannot
speak to them, and, if you please, will you write down for me in English
what I shall tell you, so that I can show them the paper?"
"Certainly, my dear Buffo, any little thing of that kind. If any of them
come to see the Escape from Paris, I should think they will have a good
many questions to ask. For instance, there is the Aurora"--He was
finishing her off by putting a silver fillet round her hair and a shining
star upon her forehead--"I cannot help it, but I still feel unhappy about
her. She does not explain herself."
"That will not signify. We must leave room for the imagination to
play--not too much, but it is a mistake to be too exact. There must be
some mystery which the public can take in any way they choose. It is
like the nuts on the bicycle, they must not be left loose, but they must
not be screwed too tight."
I gave way, saying: "I suspect you are right. It flatters the spectators
to feel that they are helping the performance by using their imagination.
And if they don't understand--well, they can think they do and that
flatters them again. And there is another reason why we must not tell
the public everything--it would take too long."
"Ah yes! We must not bore the public or they will not come again to the
teatrino, and then where would the money come from to pay for my singing
lessons?"
So we let the Cold Dawn follow among the rest. There were half a dozen
rollicking blue-jackets off the warship in the port, they had been
spending the evening with their girls and were escaping with them. When
I objected that Paris was a sea-port town only in a Bohemian sense, he
replied that that was enough for him; and when I said that if the sailors
really had a ship anywhere near, they would have done better to escape by
sea, he complained that I was being fastidious.
There were soldiers arm-in-arm and singing, they had been interrupted
while drinking in a wine-shop in a side street off the Via Macqueda and
were saving the marsala which they had not finished.
After them came the maresciallo dei carabinieri in the uniform he wears
for a festa, with a plume in his three-cornered hat. He was a broad,
beefy fellow, taller than the soldiers, being made of a marionette who is
usually a giant. He came swinging along, all so big and so burly,
followed by a lady, showily dressed, who walked mincingly and was saving
a pair of pink satin shoes and a powder-puff. She kept calling to him to
stop, she wanted to speak to him. But he would not listen, he was not
going to pay any attention to her--not in his gala uniform, it would not
have been proper. Besides, there were people looking.
A blind musician with a broken nose and a falsetto voice was led by his
mate who carried a 'cello. An interrupted wedding party followed, and
school-children with their professors, sick people out of the hospital
with doctors and nurses to help them, and a rabble of water-sellers,
shoe-blacks, pedlars and men pushing carts.
Then followed the paladinessa Ettorina still mad, so mad that they were
dragging her along and forcing her to escape while she struggled to get
free and did not want to go, because a mad person does not understand
danger. And paladins and warriors came--Amantebrava, Lungobello,
Ottonetto and many more whose names I do not remember.
Last of all came Pope Gregorio III. He was not one to leave the city
till the last of his flock had been saved. He wore his tiara and was in
white robes with a red cross front and back; he carried his crosier in
his left hand and on his right thumb was a diamond ring which sparkled as
he blessed the people. So he passed with his Secretary of State, his
cardinals, his bishops, his monsignori, his acolytes, his chamberlains,
his Guardia Nobile and his Swiss Guard; some carried lighted candles,
some carried banners and others crosses; some were swinging incense and
others were intoning the psalm _In Exitu Israel_. The solemn pomp of the
procession disappeared into the opening of the subterranean road and the
sound of the singing could no longer be heard. They were all safely
gone. The stage was empty. Yet the curtain did not fall.
Then came a poor mad boy, a sordo-muto, who had been overlooked. He was
in a great hurry, making frightful inarticulate noises and running this
way and that, being too much alarmed to go straight. Before he had found
the mouth of the tunnel the curtain fell and we did not see what became
of him. He may have been left behind after all.
CATANIA