CHAPTER FIVE
“What?”
“What?”
“Fuck that!”
“Talking like that will not change anything,” said Maria, lifting her glasses from her nose with a sigh. “It’s about sales. You haven’t made them. Nobody is talking about your show. No press. Nothing. I can offer you the theatre for a week in February, but for now, I need a sure thing.”
“Maria, this isn’t right. We have a deal.”
“A deal? Two weeks theatre rental paid with profit share? Sounds like an okay deal for you, at least if there is a profit, which there isn’t.
Check your contract. A profit-share rental can be bumped or moved for any operational reason at the discretion of the management, and that’s me.
You should be thanking me. At least this way you have six months to get off your arses and start building a crowd.
I don’t know what you thought was going to happen.
That I was going to promote it for you, perhaps? Like I don’t have enough to do.”
“Maria, please, we’re about to completely change the show. Just give us one rehearsal, then come to the next one. You’ll see how great this is going to—”
“Wait, wait…” She silenced Alex with a wave. “You’re completely changing the show?”
Alex’s heart sank as he recognised his tactical error.
“That’s probably for the best. From what I saw…” Maria’s shrug hit Alex like a kick to the gut. “But if you’re changing so much, February would be much better, yes? It’s settled then.”
“Maria, please. It won’t take us—”
“Will you stop? I’ve already filled your slot and the first week is three-quarters sold. Come back when you can turn numbers like that.”
Vicente shook his head. “You already… who?”
Maria shrugged again. “Someone called Si-Man.’”
“Si-Man?”
“Yes, as in ‘See’-Man.”
Alex bit his tongue. This was already ludicrous enough.
“And what does Si-Man do?” asked Joanna, who until now had remained quiet behind her fake, frozen smile.
“Sell tickets. Beyond that, I don’t care.”
“And are we talking about a singer? A dancer? A performance artist? A clown? Just who the hell is this person?”
“By all the saints.” Maria snatched a flyer from her desk and passed it to Alex.
He hoped the picture that resembled a gigantic, angry mutant baby with a Sonny Bono wig, dark tufts of hastily trimmed chest hair and a green-painted moustache wasn’t the artist. “Do you know how much crap goes up on that stage? I don’t ask why. I just count the receipts.”
There wasn’t much text to go on. Just a venue and a date… that evening.
“We should go,” Joanna said.
“What?”
“What?”
“If it’s selling already based on this truly hideous flyer that explains nothing, I want to know why, don’t you?”
“Grand idea,” said Maria, putting her glasses back on. “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, but you should be taking notes.”
“You’re not seriously saying we should buy tickets for this?”
“Buy them?” Joanna scoffed. “Surely between the two of you, someone owes you a favour or really enjoyed the sex.”
“If I get you comps, will it get you out of my office?” asked Maria.
“Because I can’t spend all day arguing about this.
Listen, I like you three, but you need to smarten up about how this all works.
Right now, every young person in Madrid who’s put every substance into their damn body and had every insane idea in between fucking everything that moves from the Retiro to de Campo now thinks they’re an artist. I just know I need to keep the lights on and eat. Are we understood?”
Alex, Joanna and Vicente stared back at her in stunned silence.
“Out,” she said quietly.
They were too dumbstruck to argue.
* * *
“My arse will swallow the sins of men until I barf oceans of rage that will punish the sleeping sycophants of the old order.”
This was the line that lost Alex, and had it not come just ten minutes into what Si-Man and his audience were calling a show, he might have walked out.
Joanna, ever perceptive, had put one hand on his knee and the other on Vicente’s, a private gesture they’d adopted, assuring each other that somehow, they would endure the next fifty minutes together and laugh about it afterwards, no matter how wretchedly drunk they needed to get.
It seemed to work. They’d not yet snuck out on a show, which seemed almost impossible in this tiny space.
Alex also had a feeling it would earn them jeers from the crowd, as if they’d blasphemed the diaper-clad messiah who’d just fished half a tomato from said diaper and begun rubbing it up and down his body like it was a giant, living piece of breakfast toast.
He jumped as Si-Man let out a primal scream that rattled the flimsy backdrop.
Several audience members gasped with anticipation of what would come, which turned out to be several violent exhales followed by a swooping, bowing gesture.
Si-Man then lifted his head, facing the crowd with lips pursed and extended like a baboon.
He rubbed the tomato over his face before throwing it to the stage with a loud splat.
He then pulled back the skin around his eyes, reducing them to slits like some racist Jerry Lewis character before banging on his chest and leading the audience in a chant about “seeing through their lies.” As most of the audience shouted along, the show began to take on the tone of a strange political rally crossed with an American gospel revival, as Si-Man alternated between stomping around in a circle and wiggling his arse at the crowd.
Alex could see Maria’s face now.
“Covered in shit, covered in shit, covered in shit…” sang Si-Man while slapping himself on the backside, doing a jig onstage.
The chant continued, a ghoulish whisper that quickly surrounded the three of them as the crowd took it up.
Vicente stifled a laugh, which was thankfully lost under the incantation.
Si-Man lifted a small notebook from the pocket of his filthy jacket and read not three, or five, but eight short poems, each less comprehensible and more self-indulgent than the last. Alex tuned out until the next chant began, “I am Maya! I am Inca! I am the Philippines!”
“Oh shit, we’re going here?” Vicente said under his breath.
“A voice for the voiceless!”
“I feel like I’ve fallen into a Dali painting,” Alex murmured. “Only it sucks.”
His neighbour shushed him loudly, a sound quickly buried under another primal scream as Si-Man began pummelling the stage with his fists.
He then spread his fingers in a diamond shape and pretended to fuck the gap inside it, ranting something about “restoring the lives they stole. We hear you great thinkers and spirits of lost lands. We see the sins of our vile fathers and are not like them!”
Smallpox and genocide, yes, but to Alex’s knowledge, at least the conquistadors had never subjected their victims to a show like this.
“This, is our great healing. Together as one heart and spirit.”
“Oh, good Lord…”
“Shhhhhhhh!!!”
“As avatars of the Great Montezuma—”
Alex could stand no more. Ignoring the looks and indignant grunts from those he passed, he edged his way over several sets of knees to the end of the row and snuck out as quietly as he could.
“Yea, know we cannot walk from this, brother!”
Alex hurriedly shut the door behind him, expelling his relief in one long, steady breath.
* * *
“Alex?” Leo said. “I thought that was you. What did you think of the show?”
As if his night could get any worse. Alex hoped the third glass of wine he now held would kick in soon. “It was… a show.”
“He’s brilliant, isn’t he? Completely shakes off the conventions of structure and dramaturgy—”
“He certainly does that.”
“—while delivering a message that feels so today. As we shake off the shackles, what about the shackles we left behind? Ooof! It gives me chills.”
“We? Who is ‘we,’ Leo? And who’s doing the shaking? Because Semen—”
“Si-Man.”
“Si-Man, seemed to think he was single-handedly saving the colonised world. It was patronising, Leo. It was gross and borderline racist.”
Leo let out an exaggerated sigh. “Not everyone can get it, I suppose.”
“I suppose not. Now excuse me, I think I see someone—”
“Oh, you know someone here? Wouldn’t think it’s your crowd. Who?”
“Anybody.”
“What?”
“Antonio. Yes, I think that’s him. Excuse me.” Alex ducked away toward the stranger he’d picked to be his hastily invented friend. In the corner, he spied Vicente nursing a bottle of beer while he waited for Joanna.
“Are you okay?” Vicente asked.
Alex shook his head. “I think I’m actually dumber after watching that. I’ll let you know later if I remember how to put on pants.”
“Maybe we should ditch Blood Wedding and do The Emperor’s New Clothes?”
“He was wearing a diaper.”
“Right. Apparently ready to be covered in—”
“There you are!” Joanna swept toward them with a bored-looking woman sporting thick spectacles and a bob haircut. “This is Peach. She’s kindly offered to introduce us to Si-Man.”
“Pardon?”
“Introduce us?” asked Alex. “That’s really not necessary.”
“Chill, brother.” Peach’s tone contradicted her stiff smile. “Joanna tells me you guys bumped your slot so we could have a two-week run. Right on. I know Si-Man is way grateful. The least we can do to give back is share the energy, you know?”
“You’re his manager?”
“Woah, woah, harsh word. My name’s Peach, and it’s my job to reach opportunities. Inspiration. I’m Si-Man’s arms, mind, and heart. Holding them together those times when the world is just too much. We all need a little help holding on, you know?”
“He does seem a sensitive soul.”
“Oh man, you’ve just seen the surface. Just the sur-face. Come see the show we’ve got planned for your old slot.”
“Will there be quite so much bare arse?” Vicente asked.
“Hey!”