The Best of Gene Wolfe

The Toy Theater

Eight hours before we were due to land on Sarg they dropped a pamphlet into the receiving tray of the two-by-four plastic closet that was my “stateroom” for the trip. The pamphlet said landing on Sarg would be like stepping into a new world. I threw it away.

Landing on Sarg was like stepping into a new world. You expect a different kind of sunlight and a fresh smell to the air, and usually you don’t get them. Sarg had them. The light ran to sienna and umber and ocher, so that everything looked older than it was and made you think of waxed oak and tarnished gold. The air was clear and clean. Sarg wasn’t an industrial world, and since it was one of the lucky ones with no life of its own to preserve, it had received a flora en masse from Earth. I saw Colorado spruce, and a lot of the old, hardy, half-wild roses like Sarah Van Fleet and Amelie Gravereaux.

Stromboli, the man I was coming to see, had sent a buggy and a driver for me (if you don’t want industry there are things you can’t have, lots of them) and I got a good view of the firs on the mountains and the roses spilling down the rocks as we rattled along. I suppose I dropped some remark about the colors, because my driver asked, “You are an artist?”

“Oh, no. A marionettist. But I carve and paint my own dolls—that’s an art, if you like. We try to make it one.”

“That is what I meant. It is mostly such artists who come here to see him, and the big box which I loaded for you was suggestive. That is your control you carry?”

“Yes.” I took it out of its leather case to show him.

He peered at the tiny dials and levers. “The signor has such a one. Not, you understand, identical, but similar. Perhaps you could . . . ?” He glanced back to where Charity reposed in her box. “It might help to pass the time.”

I made her throw open her lid and climb up to sit on the seat with us, where she sang to the driver in her clear voice. Charity is a head taller than I am, blond, long legged, and narrow waisted; a subtle exaggeration, or so I like to think, of a really pretty showgirl. After I had made her kiss him, dance ahead of the horse for a while, then climb back into her home and slam the lid, the driver said, “That was very good. You are an artist indeed.”

“I forgot to mention that I call her Charity because that’s what I have to ask of my audiences.”

“No, sir; you are very skilled. The skipping down the road—anyone can make them to skip for a few steps, but to do so for so long, over the uneven ground and so rapidly, I know how difficult it is. It deserves applause.”

I wanted to see how far he would go, so I asked, “As good as the signor?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Not as good as Signor Stromboli. But I have seen many, sir. Many come here and you are far better than most. Signor Stromboli will be pleased to talk to you.”

The house was smaller than I had expected, of the Italian Alpine style. There was a large, informal garden, however, and a carriage house in the rear. The driver assured me that he would see to my baggage, and Madame Stromboli, who I assume had been following our progress up the road from a window, met me at the gate. She was white haired now, but the woman she had once been, olive skinned and beautiful with magnificent dark eyes, still showed plainly in her face. “Welcome,” she said. “We are so glad that you could come.”

I told her that it was a great honor to be there.

“It is a great expense for you; we know that. To travel between the suns. Once when we were much younger my husband went, to make money for us. I could not go; it cost too much. Only him, and the dolls. For years I waited, but he returned to me.”

I said, “It must have been lonely.”

“It was, very lonely. Now we are here where very few can come and see us. It is beautiful, no? But lonely. But my husband and I, we are lonely together. That is better. You will wish to wash, and perhaps change your clothing. Then I will take you to see him.”

I thanked her.

“He will be kind to you. He likes young men who follow the old art. But be content with what he shows you. Do not say: How do you do this? Or Do that! Let him show you what he wishes and he will show you a great deal.”

He did. I will not pretend to condense all the interviews I had with Stromboli into a single scene, but he was generous with his time—although the mornings, all morning, every day, were reserved for his practice, alone, in a room lined with mirrors. In time I saw nearly everything of his that I had heard described, except the famous comic butler Zanni. Stromboli showed me how to keep five figures in motion at a time, differentiating their motions so cleverly that it was easy to imagine that the dancing, shouting people around us had five different operators, provided that you could remember, even while you watched Stromboli, that they had an operator at all.

“They were little people once, you know,” he said. “You have read the history? Never higher than your shoulder—those were the biggest—and they moved with wires. In those days the most any man could do well was four; did you know that? Now they are as big as you and me, they are free, and I can do five. Perhaps before you die you will make it six. It is not impossible. As they pile the flowers onto your casket they will be saying, He could do six.”

I told him I would be happy just to handle three well.

“You will learn. You have already learned more difficult things. But you will not learn traveling with just one. If you wish to learn three, you must have three with you always, so that you can practice. But already you do the voice of a woman speaking and singing. That was the most difficult for me to learn.” He threw out his big chest and thumped it. “I am an old man now and my voice is not so deep as it was, but when I was young as you it was very deep, and I could not do the voices of women, not with all the help from the control and the speakers in the dolls pitched high. But now listen.”

He made Julia, Lucinda, and Columbine, three of his girls, step forward. For a moment they simply giggled; then, after a whispered but audible conference, they burst into Rosine’s song from The Barber of Seville—Julia singing coloratura soprano, Columbine mezzo-soprano, and Lucinda contralto.

“Don’t record,” Stromboli admonished me. “It is easy to record and cheat; but a good audience will always know, the amateurs will want you to show them, and you can’t look at yourself and smile. You can already do one girl’s voice very good. Don’t ever record. You know how I learned to do them?”

I expressed interest.

“When I was starting—not yet married—I did only male voices. And the false female speaking singsong, the falsetto. Then I married and little Maria, I mean Signora Stromboli my wife, began to help. In those days I did not work always alone. She did the simpler movements and the female voices.”

I nodded to show I understood.

“So how was I to learn? If I said, ‘Little Maria, you sit in the audience tonight,’ she would say, ‘Stromboli, it is not good. It is better when I do them.’ So what did I do? I made the long tour outworld. The cost was very high, but the pay was very high too, and I left little Maria at home. When I came back we could do this.”

Columbine, Lucinda, and Julia bowed.

The signor and I said our good-byes on the day before I was to leave Sarg. My ship would blast off at noon, and the morning practice sessions were sacred, but we held a party the night before with wine in the happy, undrunken Italian way and singing—just Stromboli and his wife and I. In the morning I packed hurriedly, and discovered that my second best pair of shoes was missing. I said to hell with them, gave my last suitcase to Stromboli’s man of all work, said goodbye again to Maria Stromboli, and went out to the front gate to wait for the man of all work to bring the buggy around.

Five minutes passed, then ten. I still had plenty of time, a couple of hours if he drove fast, but I began to wonder what was keeping him. Then I heard the rattle of harness. The buggy came around a curve in the road, but its driver was a dark-haired woman in pink I had never seen before. She pulled up in front of me, indicated my luggage, which was neatly stowed on the back of the buggy, with a wave of her hand, and said, “Climb up. Antonio is indisposed, so I told the Strombolis I would drive you. I am Lili. Have you heard of me?”

I got into the seat beside her and told her I had not.

“You came here to see Stromboli, and you have not heard of me? Ah, such is fame! Once we were notorious, and I think perhaps that it was because of me that he retired. He lives with his wife now and wishes the world to think that he is a good husband, you understand; but my little house is not far away.”

I said something to the effect that I had been unaware of any other houses in the neighborhood.

“A few steps would have brought you in sight of it.” She cracked her whip expertly over the horse’s back, and he broke into a trot. “Little Maria does not like it, but I am only a few steps away for her husband too. But he is old. Do you think I am getting old also?”

She leaned back, turning her head to show me her profile—a tip-tilted nose, generous lips salved carmine. “My bust is still good. I’m perhaps a little thicker at the waist, but my thighs are heavier too, and that is good.”

“You’re very beautiful,” I said, and she was, though the delicately tinted cheeks beneath the cosmetics showed craquelure.

“Very beautiful but older than you.”

“A few years, maybe.”

“Much more. But you find me attractive?”

“Most men would find you attractive.”

“I am not, you understand, a tart. Many times with Signor Stromboli, yes. But only a few with other men. And I have never been sold—no, not once for any price.” She was driving very fast, the buggy rattling down the turns.

After a few moments of silence she said, “There is a place, not far from here. The ground is flat and you may drive off the road to where a stream comes down from the mountain. There is grass there, and flowers, and the sound of the water.”

“I have to catch my ship.”

“You have two hours. We would spend perhaps one. For the other you can sit in a chair down there, yawning and thinking nice thoughts about Sarg and me.”

I shook my head.

“You say that Signor Stromboli has taught you much. He has taught me much too. I will teach it to you. Now. In an hour.” Her leg pressed hard against mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s somebody else.” It wasn’t true, but it seemed the best way of getting free of an embarrassing situation. I added, “Someone I can’t betray, if I’m going to live with myself.”

Lili let me off at the entrance to the spaceport, where I could pile my bags directly on the conveyor. As soon as the last of them were gone she touched the horse’s rump with the lash of her whip, and she, with the horse and the rattling buggy, disappeared in rising dust. A coin-operated machine inside the port vacuumed most of it out of my clothes.

As she had said, I had almost two hours to kill. I spent them alternately reading magazines and staring at the mountains I would be leaving.

“For the Sol system and Vega. Gate five. You have fifteen minutes before departure.”

I picked myself up in a leisurely way and headed toward Gate Five, then stopped. Coming toward me was a preposterous figure, familiar from a thousand pictures.

“Sir!” (Actually it sounded more like “SeeraughHa!” given a rising intonation all the way—the kind of sound that might have come from a chummy, intoxicated, dangerous elephant.)

“Sir!” The great swag belly was wrapped in a waistcoat with blue and white stripes as broad as my hand. The great shapeless nose shone with an officious cunning. “Sir, your shoes. I have your shoes!”

It was Zanni the Butler, Stromboli’s greatest creation. He held out my secondbest shoes, well brushed. In his flipper of a hand they looked as absurd as I felt. People were staring at us, and already beginning to argue about whether or not Zanni was real.

“The master,” Zanni was saying, “insisted that I restore them to you. You will little credit it, sir, but I have run all the way.”

I took my shoes and mumbled, “Thank you,” looking through the crowd for Stromboli, who had to be somewhere nearby.

“The master has heard,” Zanni continued in a stage whisper that must have been audible out in the blast pits, “of your little talk with Madame Lili. He asks—well, sir, we sometimes call our little world the Planet of Roses, sir. He asks that you consider a part of what you have learned here—at least a part, sir—as under the rose.”

I nodded. I had found Stromboli at last, standing in a corner. His face was perfectly impassive while his fingers flew over the levers of Zanni’s controller. I said, “Joruri.”

“Joruri, sir?”

“The Japanese puppet theater. The operators stand in full view of the audience, but the audience pretends not to see them.”

“That is the master’s field, sir, and not mine, but perhaps that is the best way.”

“Perhaps. But now I’ve got to catch my ship.”

“So you said to Madame Lili earlier, sir. The master begs leave to remind you that he was once a young man very like yourself, sir. He expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.”

I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili’s cheeks, and of Charity’s cheeks, as blooming as peaches.

Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box.

Now it seems that all toys are high tech. Goodness knows there’s nothing wrong with high-tech toys, but it seems to me that we had just as much fun with low. Can I have been alone in playing with puppets and marionettes?

There was once a marionette in the form of a robot with a spiked club, and a blond boy with a sword who was to fight him. Best of all, there was a puppet, just one puppet, a grinning monkey. I wish I had him still.

G. K. Chesterton had a toy theater, doubtless with a princess, Saint George, and a dragon. Back then they were a penny plain and tuppence colored, but if you got the plain sort you had the pleasure of coloring everything to suit yourself. You might have a princess with fiery red hair, if you liked, and a flaxen dragon. Years after my monkey had returned to the jungle (or wherever), I read about Chesterton’s theater with pleasure. By then I already knew of certain sad toys possessed by adult men.

And long years after I had finished this story and sold it, and almost forgotten it, I set out to write a circus story to be called “On a Vacant Face a Bruise.” Chesterton had never really forgotten his toy theater, and I soon learned that I had never really forgotten mine.