The Seducer

A Cut to the Eye

There they were, on board the old lifeboat, renamed the Norge, where Gabriel Sand was now talking about acting, ‘the least understood of all the creative arts’. He demonstrated, for example, after fixing his eyes on the deck for thirty seconds, how he could turn on the tears and when Jonas looked impressed he said: ‘It’s you who sees the weeping and the emotion; all I do is squeeze out a couple of tears.’

As if to underline this illusion, or the air of magic, he lit a cigarette and was soon wreathed in coils of smoke which took on an unwonted movement and dimension in the light of the paraffin lamp. ‘So what do you plan to do after high school?’ he asked.

‘Study architecture,’ said Jonas, not really knowing why, although he had an idea that the urge to do so dated back to walks around Oslo as a boy, when there were certain buildings which he never tired of seeing: the Town Hall in all its massive symmetry and the Art Centre with its so-called ‘golden mean’, but more than anything else, due to the fact that his father often took him down to the harbour to look at the boats, there was Lars Backer’s exquisite Restaurant Skansen, a revelation in terms of functionalist form which for some reason the people of Oslo allowed the powers that be to raze to the ground — as I say: the most unlikely things are forever happening.

‘Rubbish!’ said Gabriel. ‘Be an actor! Build castles in the air, not on the ground. Create illusions inside people’s heads. They’ll outlast structures that’ll be pulled down before you know it anyway.’

The cigarette smoke enveloped him like a swirling veil; it might have been a stage-effect, the only thing lacking was for him to go through to the for’ard cabin and fetch the skull ensconced in the shell of the television. Gabriel smoked Camels as if to betoken his nomadic existence, and Jonas recalled how he and Nefertiti had sometimes bought liquorice cigarettes that came in the most gorgeous packet with a copy of the Camel logo on the front. The camel picture also happened to rank above all others when it came to the cigarette packs they fixed to the spokes of their bike wheels, possibly because it was so rare and hence lent a lot of prestige, as well as being squashy, which meant that they had to glue it onto a piece of cardboard. Seeing Gabriel with his pack of Camels, Jonas had a feeling of being back there, a feeling that everything went in a circle, round and round, like a wheel of fortune.

‘What makes you think I should be an actor?’ Jonas asked, lifting his mug of whisky.

‘To be who you are. Why not follow it through?’

‘I can’t quite see myself on a stage playing some part.’ The very idea made Jonas laugh.

‘Don’t say that, lad.’ Gabriel was vehement now, brandishing his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. ‘Every one of us invents and plays as many different parts in our daily lives as we need in order to be taken seriously. Just look at yourself. I mean, it’s ridiculous to think that each person should be stuck with just one persona.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘What I’m saying is that every human being has many sides to their character,’ said Gabriel. ‘See, any one of us could go off our heads at any time, it just so happens that, for some reason, we don’t.’ Gabriel squinted at Jonas with his two mismatched eyes. ‘I’ll never forget my dear friend Niels Bohr,’ he went on as if something vital had just occurred to him. ‘A man of vision who gave one of the most momentous speeches of the twentieth century, at a physicists’ congress in Como, in ’27 that must have been, in which he introduced the world to the theory of complementarity, working from the basic principle that light appears to exist both in particle and in wave form. So don’t you ever forget, Jonas, that there’s more than one side to a human being; just like light, we contain the potential for both particles and waves. At the very least. Imagine the possibilities! All you have to do is take your pick. So: be an actor!’

Out in the galley, some pickle jars chinked together as a couple of waves — one might almost think Gabriel had ordered them up specially — caused the boat to roll a little more than usual, but neither of them turned a hair. In an act of sheer genius Fridtjof Nansen had once let his boat drift with the ice. Now it was Gabriel’s boat that was drifting, although this was far from being part of some grand plan but an act of sabotage. The boat drifted on, without the two on board, snug and warm down below in the saloon, noticing a thing. They had no idea that they would soon be right out in the middle of the shipping lane and even less idea that the Skipper Clement, more like a small town than a ferry, was heading straight for them.

Gabriel was no longer in the theatre, but he could look back on what had been a remarkable career. After leaving school he had followed his English mother when she moved back to London, where he soon found himself caught up in the theatrical scene, and it was here, among other things, that he formed a firm friendship with the actor John Gielgud, who was the same age as himself. More than once Gabriel had described Gielgud’s inimitable interpretation of Hamlet — not the much-vaunted production at the New Theatre in 1934 but the one staged in 1930 at the Old Vic, the best Hamlet ever, according to Gabriel, making Jonas laugh with his imitation of Gielgud’s way of speaking, in which ‘Words, words, words,’ came out as ‘Wirds, wirds, wirds.’

Every person has their own quintessential story, one which says more about who they are than any other. Gabriel Sand’s was a classic story, albeit with the odd twist or two; in the early twenties John Gielgud had persuaded him to take part in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to be staged at a little theatre near King’s Cross — the competition for parts was fierce, but even so, after only one audition, Gabriel was signed up.

Just for the fun of it, and to show Jonas that he could still remember it, Gabriel did the first half of the balcony scene for him, taking both Romeo’s and Juliet’s parts; he played it any number of different ways, to show what a wealth of techniques an actor has at his disposal: everything from diction and tempo to pauses and posing. For Jonas, it was a bit like when his father played the organ and showed him how he could make a tune sound different by switching to a different register. One version Gabriel did as a parody so outrageous that it put Jonas in mind of Norwegian actors, those few he had seen.

Gabriel stood on the deck with a bookshelf at his back and a paraffin lamp as his only spotlight and truly became another person, or rather a whole host of other people, and even in his antiquated suit and without a single prop he was Juliet, to the life, and then, in the warm light that glinted softly off his gold tooth and the watch-chain draped across his stomach, he suddenly played the balcony scene in a way which left Jonas convinced that Romeo and Juliet wanted to die and, thereafter, by dint of only a few minor alterations, forced Jonas to change his mind completely and believe that it was all down to the hand of fate. More than just about anything else, what he admired was Gabriel’s beautiful English; it was perfect, spoken like a true native. Jonas never witnessed better theatre than in the saloon of an old lifeboat, on a stage that reeked of tar and whisky, birch logs and Camel cigarettes.

In the London production Gabriel had played, not Romeo, but his friend Mercutio. To cut a long story short, the cause of all the drama — off-stage, that is — was that Gabriel, by all accounts an incorrigible satyr, had seduced and bedded the girlfriend of one of the other actors, something he had not given a second thought, such goings-on being not exactly unknown in those circles. In any case the rehearsals went smoothly, with no confrontation of any sort. But his injured fellow-actor, who, as luck would have it, was playing the part of ‘the furious Tybalt’ and, as such, his adversary in the play as well, had other plans.

‘I knew on the first night that something was wrong,’ said Gabriel. ‘Bloke had this really crazy look in his eyes. And at the beginning of the third act, in the sword fight that breaks out between Mercutio and Tybalt, where Mercutio is meant, right enough, to be mortally wounded, I suddenly realized that this man really was out to kill me, right there on the stage: that way he could get away with saying that it had been a regrettable accident. Oh, you should have been there! He fenced like a madman, using a needle-sharp rapier — no foil. I had to use every trick I knew to fight him off. And the audience — well, of course, they were thrilled, shouting “Bravo, bravo!” They’d never seen such a fierce or realistic swordfight. After the performance John Gielgud told me he’d only ever seen one man fence better than me, a young actor by the name of Laurence Olivier.’

The fight had grown more and more frenzied, with his opponent becoming ever more frantic in his efforts to deal Gabriel the coup de grace — a truly fatal blow, that is. Gabriel was at his wit’s end by the time Gielgud, who was playing Romeo, decided, thank heavens, that the fight had gone on long enough and stepped in, as he was supposed to do in any case in the play, to stop them. This allowed Gabriel to stagger back and die, without actually being fatally wounded. It was as he was about to deliver his final lines, beginning with ‘Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch,’ that he realized that Tybalt, his adversary that is, the boyfriend of the woman he had seduced, had nonetheless managed to deal him a rather nasty wound over one eye, drawing blood — to the delight of the audience who assumed that this was merely a splendidly lifelike stage effect.

It was at this point that Gabriel had his threefold revelation: Firstly, he saw quite clearly how he, Mercutio, constituted the very nub of the play — and later in life, this perception would lead to his bringing a fresh motivation to every part he played, inasmuch as he worked from the premise that the entire play centred on that one part, no matter how small the part might be.

Secondly and more significantly, Gabriel gained a fresh insight into the chain of cause and effect: it suddenly dawned on him that he had not slept with that woman because he was attracted to her but in order to avenge the cut to his eye. As if the latter had come first.

And finally, perhaps even more importantly: as Gabriel is about to deliver the line about his hurt being neither so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve — just as he says these words he sees something down in the auditorium which makes him think that that cut must also have opened a flap in his consciousness, created a new aperture into his inner self, because down in the auditorium he sees hundreds of people all with his own face, just dressed differently, and this leads him, with a sort of existential Eureka! to the realization that he is manifold, that he contains a multitude of different personas within himself — all at once.

‘From then on I saw the world through different eyes,’ said Gabriel. ‘And it made me a better actor. I remember all the arguments we had, John Gielgud and I, up in his flat, about those old theories that say you have to forget yourself on stage, as if we have this nucleus inside us, this individuality which constitutes our self and which will always get in the way of all the other roles we try to play. On this point, I always maintained — so strongly that I don’t think John ever forgot it — that, on the contrary, I was those other roles; that the potential for all of them was already there, inherent in me, it was only a matter of unearthing it.’

While Gabriel’s boat, the Norge, floated more or less motionless out in the sea lane, thanks to the tug-of-war between wind and current, and the Skipper Clement was drawing level with Oscarsborg, packed to the gunwales with people who were already having a high old time, letting their hair down, as if the ferry to Denmark were a stage-set on which they were expected to assume roles other than those they played in everyday life, Gabriel rose and went out to the galley.

Jonas thought he had gone out for more corned beef to replenish the plate on whose white china only a couple of slices of tomato lay in splendid isolation; instead Gabriel came back with an onion which he promptly and ostentatiously proceeded to peel, having first taken a long swig of whisky.

‘Few things annoy me more than Ibsen’s metaphor of Peer Gynt and the onion,’ he said. ‘It’s a poor look-out when an author comes up with a bad analogy, but it’s even worse when such an analogy is given credence and adopted as some sort of moral guideline, not to mention being elevated to the status of a kind of national emblem. Who in the world would expect to find a kernel in an onion? I mean, it’s nothing but a bundle of leaves! Botanically speaking, it’s the absolute height of nonsense! If it’s a kernel he’s looking for, then Peer Gynt ought at least to look at the rootstock or at the part to which the very innermost leaf is attached, the onion base, the point of growth, which is definitely not found in the middle of an onion.’ Gabriel snorted and commenced to remove layer after layer from the onion, laying them side by side on the plate in front of them while illustrating that Ibsen’s metaphor was enough to make you weep, wiping away the tears with a voluminous blue handkerchief. The most annoying thing about Ibsen was that he believed he was presenting a negative image of a human being, when in fact it was a positive image. Quite phenomenal. We were all these layers. What was wrong with that? To be oneself, which was what Ibsen was always going on about, actually meant accepting that people had many sides to their character and that it was the sum of these that was the kernel. ‘The greatest freedom, the very hallmark of mankind,’ said Gabriel, ‘is the freedom, at any time, to reinvent oneself, by drawing on all of one’s potential. That’s why you ought to be an actor, Jonas. To gain a clearer understanding of this. Reinvent yourself. Be a king. Be a duke!’

It was during the months following Gabriel’s reflections in this vein that Jonas found himself taking a fresh view of the portrait of himself as a one-year-old, which hung in the hall at home, the sort of portrait that was very popular in the fifties, presenting forty-eight different images of Jonas, each one just slightly different from the others, in one frame.

Now, however, he was on board an old lifeboat, examining a row of onion layers arrayed on a plate, before finally looking up to meet the eye of an old actor, well-oiled by now, who lit another Camel and was soon enveloped in a cocoon of smoke. ‘Be a duke,’ he repeated, but Jonas had lost the thread, he had caught a whiff of danger, although he could not have said what it might be: a drifting iceberg perhaps, or the Skipper Clement, now only a few hundred metres away from them in the darkness and looking, from the shore, like a resplendent floating palace.