Chapter 24
When the door of the rehearsal room was opened at lunchtime, Kim spied Santi lurking outside. Santi wasn’t a lurker, but rather the sort that would head out to meet you, and cut you down before you knew what he was about—in short, a producer—so seeing him lurking like that gave Kim pause.
Rehearsal had been weird. Though it started off well enough, Felipa had been quiet, if not downright wooden in her scenes.
Perhaps something was going on in her personal life.
Who knew. So, he’d given her some directions to work on alone in her major monologue, and focussed on the younger posse of actors, including Dídac, improvising the crowd scenes and cameos they shared between them.
Although Dídac played the lead, for much of the show he also formed part of the chorus of young actors, as they played friends and siblings in his village “gang”, often making entrances and exits together.
It had gone well enough until the coffee break.
Then something had come over Dana and Carme too—they had also turned quiet—and the group stopped cohering.
The young male actors, Dídac too, quickly sensed something in the women without knowing what it was.
So the careful synergy Kim had built up in the cast in recent days was soon shot to blazes.
It was as if the entire ensemble concept—an idea central to Kim’s theatrical vision—had faded from the actors’ minds, leaving his main actor Dídac alone, facing a ring of alienated strangers.
It shocked Kim, especially since recently he’d felt that the essential chemistry they needed as a group had just begun to sparkle.
He had begun to hope that they might, just might, all finally pull together to create a halfway-decent production.
Though it would be close with the short time they had left.
And then this, as if some sort of zombie malaise was starting to creep over the cast.
The only actor who seemed immune to it all was Domènec—as self-obsessed as ever.
Likewise, the young puppeteer trio, used to improvising every day as an autonomous unit without much supervision, kept coming up with the goods with little or no input from Kim.
Or so it seemed, every time he checked in.
He planned to coordinate them with the rest of the cast only in the final couple of weeks, once the company began tentatively attempting full runs.
For now, they kept working happily off to one side of the hall, isolated from the zombie plague engulfing their companions.
During the final part of the morning, Kim worked—fought might be a better description—with Domènec on his major scenes and his particular perspective, one that seemed to go against every instinct Kim had regarding this show that he had devised and written himself.
Lastly—and if there were any way it could be first, for Kim it would be—Dídac remained hovering on the edge of his perception.
Kim wanted to throw it all up in the air, send them all to hell, grab Dídac, and ravish him.
That might give the group something to focus on.
As a result, he studiously ignored the gorgeous man in rehearsal, not trusting his own capacity to remain aloof, instead addressing one of the other actors any time a question or doubt was raised.
And so Dídac became gradually quieter, seeming to shrink into and become less sure of himself as the morning wore on.
Kim hated himself, but seemed incapable of snapping them out of this destructive interaction.
All in all, it was a weird, fraught morning.
So to find Santi lurking on the threshold was the last straw.
“What?” he snapped, against his better judgment, now knowing that Santi was a person on whose good side you stayed if you aspired to keep working in the theater—this or any other in Catalonia.
“Let’s go upstairs, Kim,” Santi said, not rising to the bait. “Some events have occurred that we need to discuss.”
“Yeah, OK, let me get my stuff.”
Kim turned to look, hoping for a word with Dídac, but he was gone.
So was Laia. Just one of their lunch dates, maybe.
He changed quickly, grabbed his bag, and headed out.
Rather than simply heading upstairs before him, Santi was still waiting.
Something was off. They said nothing to each other as they went upstairs and into Santi’s office.
A copy of ?Hola!, the Spanish version of Hello!, was lying on Santi’s desk. Unusual reading matter for a producer, though maybe not for anyone as usually bubbly as Santi. However, the producer was anything but effusive today.
“I can’t remember the page number—you’ll find it.”
Indeed, there was Dídac’s face—poorly lit in profile but still clearly recognizable—challenging him from the glossy cover.
“So… what? An interview?”
Kim flipped through until he came to the photo spread, the half-dozen or so grainy images taken at night.
“Really? This is what you’re worried about? Don’t his fans know he’s gay? Why are you confronting me with this?”
“No,” Santi said. “His fans don’t know he’s gay. He’s the young… galán… you know, a… heartthrob? of our most popular telenovela. Millions of women tune in every afternoon to watch him. If they react badly to this scandal, it could significantly affect our box office.”
Kim looked down at the photos of Dídac passionately kissing another man outside some seedy club or other. Echoes of déjà vu washed over him. Was he dating another Tony?—but he pushed those doubts aside. Now was not the time. Instead he said:
“Is Dídac’s influence really that strong on our audience? You think it will affect the show’s success?”
“Will?” Santi shrugged. “Could… definitely. You were pushing to cut him a week ago. How do you feel about that now?”
“What?” No! But he was screaming inside himself. The protest didn’t make it to his lips. To be honest, he didn’t know how he felt. “Ah… What are you suggesting?”
“If we act fast, we can switch him with Isard Muntaner. Muntaner’s caixet, his box-office value, isn’t as strong as Dídac’s…
but that’s for better and for worse. Not so bad in a scandal.
Not so good in takings. But in fact, since that film last year, it’s rising.
He may have become quite a bankable option. ”
“I need to think. This is all… a bit of a shock… Sudden.”
“I’m sorry, Kim. I’ve had the feeling you were getting on better with Dídac over the last week. So this is, ah… upsetting the cart all over you again.”
“Upsetting the apple cart?”
“That one.”
It sure as hell was.
“Ring me tonight with your decision. Then we can make an announcement tomorrow morning. We need to act fast with this, so it doesn’t come back to bite us.
If he’s gone before the scandal fully blows up, we can play it that he was always unreliable—this is just more evidence of that.
If we leave it, it’ll look like we’re pushing him out because of the scandal, which would look bad for the theater. ”
Kim took a physical step back, shocked at Santi’s callousness, all hint of his former joviality gone.
He understood that as a producer the man had to be practical, but this surgical cutting loose of the theater’s strongest asset at the slightest whiff of a scandal gutted him to his core.
Was it all just business? Where was the humanity?
“I… I’ll let you know.”
Then he was out, bashing down the stairs, needing to be gone from this theater, wanting to be on his own, to think.
Kim strode up the street toward the Rambla.
How could Dídac have done this! The one time Kim breaks his own rule, and lets down his guard, the first person in walks all over him!
How was it happening all over again! Another Tony.
His feet pulled him towards the Rambla and across it, to lose himself in the labyrinth of small streets of the Gothic Quarter.
He was hungry but he wasn’t. He wanted to stuff food into himself to try and fill the huge gaping hole that seemed to have opened up in his diaphragm, dampen the unholy scream that was rising inside him at the unfairness of it all.
Without quite knowing how it happened, he found himself outside the restaurant where he’d had lunch after that first day of rehearsal, the day of the read-through, to which Dídac had arrived late.
Kim entered. The same smiling, dark-haired woman came forward, greeting him effusively.
She seemed to recognize him, which ignited a tiny warm glow in his heart—the feeling of belonging somewhere in this strange city, even a little bit.
And as she seated him at the same table-for-one overlooking the kitchen, even the surly chef, who had reminded him so much of Tony, raised his head and nodded gruffly at him, before continuing to hack into a massive slab of meat with a very business-looking cleaver.