Nowhere People

It’s terrible when you discover yourself to be meticulous and methodical in the extreme and you discover, too, belatedly, that the person at the top of your list of the school’s greatest stage talents suffers from terrible insecurity about his actual capacity to get up on stage, make it count, face the terror, just put it all out there and perform as he has done so well in rehearsals. First it was the cold that rendered him voiceless, then he discovered it was flu, then it developed into mild sinusitis and then severe sinusitis, then acid reflux, then those palpitations in the left side of his chest, which are clearly baseless given that he, Vicente Fino, is evidently thin, healthy and has no history of heart attacks or anything of the sort in the family. You go all in, you take a risk, because after all he, the play’s male lead, Little Vicente Fino, again, is an anxious little Jewish fag, and charismatic, with a big fucking face like a startled donkey able to rearrange itself into any expression, just as representative of a minority as you are, Adopted Trapped Donato, you who are an Indian, just like the most Indian of Indians, with that unmissable Indian face, like you find in the documentaries by those brothers, the Vilas-Boas, and who had the wretched fortune of being brought up by a white man, a pale little deceased white man, full of ideas that ultimately, tragically, ended up unrealised, like this play which has created so many expectations and that at this moment looks set not to happen. You haven’t stuttered this much in months, because everything happened without your being the centre of attention, and now you’ve spent the last fortnight in the midst of a tempest, the true Prospero with a tempest shoved up his ass, and you’re stuttering like a lunatic. Now it’s five-twenty in the afternoon, the auditorium doors open at seven and, apparently, the play is to start at seven-thirty tonight on the dot, because after the performance come the party and the drinking. The problem is that the Great Vicente Fino is at the ear, nose and throat doctor, he has no voice and, according to his mother (who at the moment, as one would expect, is with him), has a thirty-nine degree fever. The prognosis (you’ve just hung up): Vicente will not go on. And there’s not a blessed soul alive who knows all the lines, only you know all the lines, no one will be such a sucker as to expose himself and become the scapegoat if everything goes wrong. The worst thing is knowing that most of the audience will be there because of Vicente. They are his friends, including some from outside school, who actually appreciate theatrical lunacies. You, take his place? No, you’ll stammer, you won’t manage any fluency at all, you’ll slow down the pace of the dialogue, which is the play’s trump card. And Kika comes into the room without knocking. ‘Sorry to barge in like this, but I have to say something … Can I?’ Kika’s face is very close to yours. The breath that comes out of her mouth is the best that anyone could ever produce. Fuck, Kika really knows how to come on to you. ‘Go ahead.’ Kika has lovely eyes. ‘I know you’re the director.’ Kika has quite some breasts. ‘And you,’ he replies, ‘do the lighting and the sound.’ Kika has a fringe like Regina Duarte from when Regina Duarte was young and hot and was called Brazil’s sweetheart. ‘The thing is, you’re going to have to take Vicentinho’s part,’ Kika says. Focus, Donato, this is not the time. ‘I’m not an actor,’ he argues. ‘But it’s the only way … Wear a mask … It won’t make any difference. What matters are the lines.’ Kika is so very good at moving those lips. ‘You’re forgetting how they’re done,’ he ventures. Kika might put out for him one day. ‘How they’re done?’ says Kika raising her sexy arms. ‘How the lines are said … I’ll ruin everything’ (and ladies and gentleman, the person who has just spoken is the Director, Adopted Donato, who still has the nerve to fantasise about Kika sucking his cock at a time like this). ‘Forget about how they’re said,’ says Kika. ‘Why did I have to invent this damn play?’ says the director. ‘We can do a dramatic reading,’ says Kika. ‘Kika, give me two minutes to think, here, alone.’ Kika opens the door. Would you believe it, this pert ass of Kika’s? ‘The whole cast is outside … ’ Turn round further, Kika. ‘What an utter cock-up … ’ Just turn around now, Kika. ‘You haven’t got two minutes, you have to perform … Wear a mask, it’ll work, I’ll ask Alessandra to track down one that covers everything from your top lip upwards.’ Like, so that it, that lip, can help me go down on you, Kika? ‘What difference would that make?’ the director asks. ‘Oh, no idea, it’s just something you use … You adopt a persona … ’ Kika, Kika, Kika. ‘Don’t talk to me about personas.’ The director gets annoyed. ‘But Jung … ’ Kika provokes him. ‘Oh, Kika, please … now is not the time for Jung.’ ‘Well, then?’ and she gives a smile, the deadliest of Kika’s weapons. ‘Tell them to find the mask.’ Donato gives in. Donato wasn’t even smitten with Kika like this, but today Kika is too much. Kika leaves, Donato sits down at the table on which the pages of dialogue are scattered, the scenes, the acts, with technical cues, the play’s key moments, he opens the elastics round his folder, puts all that paper inside, puts it in his bag. He goes out to talk to the group of actors, he stutters almost the whole time, but his words link together into a strong lecture about the text he wrote and about the critical contribution of everyone there towards making the result so much better than he had imagined. Bit by bit he realises that he is managing to calm everyone down, to ensure at least a minimal degree of unity. Alessandra appears with two masks made by a friend of hers called Guilherme Pilla, they are plastic masks that leave the lips and jaw completely exposed, likewise the eyes. Donato tries on the first and feels so comfortable that he doesn’t even bother with the second.