An Embarrassment of Riches (20 page)

Our host directed us to our seats. I was shown a chair between Lou-Lou and Madame.

“I saw a wonderful
Othello
at Philadelphia not four months ago,” I remarked in an attempt to make conversation. But Madame seemed ill at ease and preoccupied, a different person from the one who had ministered to my wounds so tenderly in the afternoon.

“How nice for you,” she replied politely, with an abstracted look upon her face.

“Uncle Fernand! Uncle Fernand!”

“What is it?”

“I have to make water.”

“Why didn't you think of that before?”

“I don't know.”

“That will teach you to think ahead.”

“I cannot hold it much longer.”

“O, for goodness' sake!” LeBoeuf surrendered. “Mercure! Take Lou-Lou to the water closet.”

One of the Indians escorted him from the box. Uncle and I shared a glance, both of us startled at the antipathy LeBoeuf had shown his ward, as though we were seeing a previously undisclosed side of his character, and not a pretty side at that. Then again, we had not endured the boy's foolish behavior for years on end, as he had.

“Shakespeare is my favorite playwright,” I remarked afresh to Madame in another attempt to strike up conversation.

“Ah, but we are French, monsieur,” she answered with a trace of a knowing smile. Her jasmine perfume wafted into my nostrils.

“Yes, of course—”

“I do enjoy your Shakespeare. But for rapture, give me Corneille.”

“You like the simple heroic?”

“You might say so,” she replied and looked searchingly into my eyes, then turned away so as to foreclose our discussion.

In a similar box across the theater a group of Negroes, in cream-colored house livery and turbans, entered bearing musical instruments—nine pieces in all. They took their stools and began tuning. Slowly, the chandelier was lowered from the ceiling, its candles blown out by the audience, and then raised back up. A few tapers remained burning in their wall fixtures. The Indians all settled into their seats, and an expectant hush fell over the audience. Lou-Lou could be heard clambering back up the stairway to the box.

“Wait! Wait for me!” he bellowed.

“Sit down and shut your mouth,” LeBoeuf told him, with ill-disguised annoyance.

The orchestra played an Italianate air. The curtain rose on a perfectly ingenious set piece of a Venetian street in vivid moonlight. The audience applauded.

“Monsieur LeBoeuf!” I could not help exclaiming. “What brilliant stagecraft! The atmosphere is marvelous!”

“We employ the new Argand patent lamps,” he whispered.

Two actors now entered the street scene, Roderigo and the scheming villain, Iago. It was several moments before I realized that they were Negroes painted in whiteface. They declaimed their lines in a very odd, wooden manner. When the two characters started that business of crying, “Awake … thieves! Thieves! Thieves!” under the window of Desdemona's father, Brabantio, Lou-Lou burst out in a fit of riotous laughter. A score of red faces turned indignantly up to us from the seats below.

“Silence!” LeBoeuf said. Mocking laughter rippled across the audience. Even the actors seemed momentarily distracted. Lou-Lou managed to regain control of himself. The play resumed. Brabantio and his servants entered with torches. These too were Negroes daubed in white paint. Shortly, the title character made his entrance, a Negro, of course, but the sole member of the cast permitted to act in his natural color. This was indeed as droll a version of the tragedy as any I had met with before. And of all the cast, this Othello spoke his lines with the truest conviction. Physically, he towered over the other actors, being a giant of a man in the prime of life and as strong-looking as an ox, with such great twitching slabs of muscles 'neath his costume robes as would put to shame even a strapping savage like Yago.

It was in thinking of this comparison, as a matter of fact, that the irony struck me: LeBoeuf's Yago seemed every inch the scheming knave as Othello's “ancient” of the same name. Yago, or Iago, is a Spanish name. For centuries the very word “Spaniard” had been synonymous with cruelty, so infamous was their barbarism. Thus, the Bard's dubbing of this arch-villain Iago with a Spanish name was no accident.

Could LeBoeuf's Yago have come by his name from the Spaniards, whose dominance of the wilderness to the south had only recently fallen into eclipse? Perhaps “Yago” had some unrelated meaning in his own savage tongue.

I was pondering these ironies when Lou-Lou erupted in another fit of braying hilarity seeing Roderigo and Cassio come to blows in Act II.

“Idiot! Bouffon! Crétin!”
LeBoeuf exploded volcanically.
“Vous êtes impossible! Mercure! Oedipe! Venez ici tout de suite! Enlevez ce nicaise!”

Two Indians rushed into the box and seized Lou-Lou.

“No! Please! I'm sorry! Uncle Fernand—”

“Silence!”

One of the Indians clamped a hand over Lou-Lou's mouth. His resistance was unavailing. They hoisted him out of his chair and dragged him from the box. We could hear his feet bouncing down the treads of the stairway. On stage, the action had stopped dead and all the players were gazing up at our box. Down below, the Indians stirred irritably, like any audience whose pleasure has been interrupted. There were even a few whistles, hisses, and catcalls. Though I was mortified at the indignity Lou-Lou was subjected to, one could not deny that he had been given ample warning about behaving himself and had failed to do so, poor booby.

“Please excuse this regrettable incident,” LeBoeuf addressed both the cast on stage and the audience below. “Resume the play, if you will be so kind.”

The actors cleared their throats, brandished their swords, and recommenced the action. And so it went for another hour or more until the curtain fell on the Moor's tragedy.

Afterward, our host led us backstage while the audience noisily filed out through the doors at the rear. Madame excused herself, citing a headache. Indeed, LeBoeuf's stage equipment was of the very latest design. The aforementioned Argand lamps were arrayed both as footlights at the apron and hung on “ladders,” as they are called, behind scene blinds at each wing. The lamp chimneys were tinted in some cases. Others used transparent silk screens to produce magical atmospheric effects.

“We are experimenting still,” LeBoeuf remarked.

“What kind of fuel do these lamps burn?” I asked.

“Buffalo hump oil. Spermacetti is the best, but
là!
somewhat hard to come by here.”

“May we meet the actors?”

LeBoeuf hesitated, then looked to Yago, who shrugged his shoulders. “Very well,” the Frenchman said. “This way. Come.”

The stagehands, I noticed, were Indians. At the deepest corner backstage was another spiral staircase. We followed LeBoeuf down. It led to a dank, poorly lighted corridor with walls of rough planking and a slatted floor. A familiar, acrid smell rose sourly out of the slats and it took me a moment to recognize what it was: the odor of bilges. We were below the waterline of the floating palace. It smelled like the hold of a ship.

We continued to follow LeBoeuf a short way down the rank, forbidding corridor until we came to a doorless portal. Two strapping Indian guards, armed with pistols, glowered in stark yellow light that flickered from the portal. Inside were the Negroes.

They sat on crude wooden benches helping one another remove the white paint from their faces, hands, and feet. There was something eerily moving about it, as of a ritual done with infinite sadness. A chill ran up my spine. It was quite cool down there for a summer's night. In the far corner, sitting upon a bench alone, was the giant who had played Othello. He sat as still as a statue, stiff-backed, with a grim, determined set to his mouth. Though the expression on his face was by no means a happy one, neither was it the look of stony cruelty that the Indians cultivated. Perhaps I was influenced by having just seen him play the tragic Moor, but I could not help reading the signs of nobility in his broad black face and ramrod-straight bearing. And there was one other quality he possessed, which spoke through his large yellow-white eyes, with their soft, deep brown pools of iris, a quality that seemed lacking in the Indians, and this was a look of soulful humanity. Gazing into the face of this dusky giant, one saw the essential paradoxes and mysteries of human existence refined to a gleam in the eye.

“I enjoyed your performance very much,” I told him. He blinked as though snapping out of a daze and looked up at me. He seemed not to understand. I repeated the compliment in French. This too appeared to bewilder him.

“I am afraid it is no use, Sammy,” LeBoeuf touched my shoulder. “They do not speak either tongue.”

“What? Why then how do they—?”

“Sheer mimicry,” LeBoeuf said. “Like parrots. Of course, a parrot cannot strut about the stage, nor bellow, like this sturdy chap, ha ha,” he added in an attempt at humor that fell flat to my ear.

“What
do
they speak?” Uncle inquired, his own curiosity piqued by this strange revelation. “They must speak something.”

“They speak a kind of patois. Various Africanisms. Some Choctaw. We are so far away from ... from anything, you see. Many of these … creatures were brought here as babes, straight off the slaver's boat. The tongue they speak amongst their own is unique, tribal, you might say. To keep slaves, to
own
slaves, this is a regrettable thing.
Tant pis. C'est ça.
Our economy depends upon it. Without the slaves, there would be no hemp, without the hemp, no Chateau Félicité,
n'est-ce pas? Alors
, we do the best we can by the poor brutes. Each one is entitled to work himself to freedom.”

“A noble policy, sir,” Uncle observed. “Not one in an hundred American slaveholders follows so enlightened a custom.”

“We do what we can,” LeBoeuf reflected modestly.

“Just how do they work themselves to freedom?” I inquired.

“Simply by doing what is asked of them over a term of years.”

“And then you simply let them go free?”

“We send them downriver to their freedom.”

“I see. But how do they manage wherever it is you send them—St. Louis, or New Orleans, I presume. Without a language?”

“How does anyone manage in a foreign land, Sammy? How did we when we landed in England in '91? My English was no better than your Uncle William's French. Or when we came here to this wilderness? Eh? I assure you,” LeBoeuf glanced slyly at his adjutant, Yago, “that I had not a word of Choctaw. And yet, we managed.
Au fait
, we flourished. Man is an ingenious animal. He learns. He survives. He aspires. We here at Chateau Félicité aspire to the greatest things.”

“What is the name of this Othello?” I asked, meaning the strapping slave who had portrayed him.

“Is it important? Call him what you like.”

“I should like to know, that's all. To address him by it, so he knows that he is appreciated.”

“Call him
Cinq cent vingt-trois
.”

“How melodious,” Uncle said.

“Why, that is not a name. It is a number, 523,” I said, surprised and not a little shocked.

“What!” said Uncle. “A number?”

“Names, numbers, what does it matter? They are just sounds, no? Did you not say it was a pretty sound, William,
mon ami
?”

“Yes, but—”

“They do not know it is a number. Besides, they have their own names amongst themselves. For our purposes, believe me, this is much more convenient, more logical.”

LeBoeuf turned and left the room.

“Well done, Othello,” I said, resolving that the name suited him better than any number. The huge fellow nodded his head ever so slightly, as though he understood after all.

“Come along now,” LeBoeuf called from the corridor, clapping his hands twice. We left the stinking bilges and returned to the fairyland above.

It was past midnight when we left the theater. LeBoeuf, yawning, invited us to the library for a dram, but we declined and said goodnight. Shortly, we were back in our apartment.

“The more I see of Fernand LeBoeuf's handiwork, the more facets of genius doth he reveal,” Uncle declared whilst rubbing his weary eyes. “I tell you, this is a man of Ben Franklin's timbre.”

“Uncle,” said I, moving to his side and speaking sotto voce, “I think we should have a talk.”

“A talk? Very well, nephew.”

“Not here,” I whispered. “The walls may have ears.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“Art still in thrall to the plots of Shakespeare, Sammy?”

“Please, Uncle, bear with me. Tomorrow, after breakfast, let us make some excuse to retire aboard our keelboat. It should be safe to talk upon her deck, out in the open.”

“Hast thee uncovered some shifty connivance?” Uncle asked in a scoffing tone of voice. “Hast thee learned that LeBoeuf is in the service of the Spaniards? Or is it the Austrians?”