Staging Empire

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Part I:

Introduction

Prologue:

A King Listens

Italo Calvino

The scepter must be held in the right hand, erect; you must never, never put it down, and for that matter you would have no place to put it: there are no tables beside the throne, or shelves, or stands to hold, say, a glass, an ashtray, a telephone. High, at the top of steep and narrow steps, the throne is isolated; if you drop anything it rolls down, and can never be found afterward. God help you if the scepter slips from your grasp; you would have to rise, get down from the throne to pick it up; no one but the king may touch it. And it would hardly be a pretty sight to see a king stretched out on the floor to reach the scepter fetched up under some piece of furniture—or, when it comes to that, the crown, which could easily fall off your head if you bend over.

You can rest your forearm on the arm of the chair, so it will not tire. I am still speaking of your right arm, the one holding the scepter. As for the left, it remains free: you can scratch yourself if you like. At times the ermine cloak makes you neck itch, and the itch then spreads down your back and over you whole body. The velvet of the cushion, too, as it grows warm, produces an irritating sensation in the buttocks, the thighs. Feel no compunction about digging your fingers in where you itch, unfastening the gilt buckle of your big belt, shifting your collar, your medals, the fringed epaulettes. You are the king; nobody can utter a word of censure. The very idea.

The head must be held immobile; always remember that the crown is balanced on your pate, you cannot pull it over your ears, like a cap on a windy day. The crown rises in a dome, more voluminous than the base that supports it, which means that its equilibrium is unstable: if you happen to doze off, to let your chin sink to your chest, the crown will then go rolling down and smash to bits, because it is fragile, especially the gold filigree studded with diamonds. When you feel it is about to slip, you have to be clever enough to adjust its position with little twitches of the head; but you must take care not to straighten up too briskly or you will strike the crown against the baldaquin, whose draperies just graze it. In other words, you must maintain the regal composure that is supposed to be innate in your person.

In short, everything is foreordained to spare you any movement whatsoever. You would have nothing to gain by moving, and everything to lose. If you rise, if you take even a few steps, if you loose sight of the throne for an instant, who can guarantee that when you return you will not find someone else sitting on it? Perhaps someone who resembles you, identical to you. Go ahead then and try to prove you are the king, not he! A king is denoted by the fact that he is sitting on the throne, wearing the crown, holding the scepter. Now that these attributes are yours, you had better not be separated from them even for a moment.

Into the great lake of silence where you are floating rivers of air empty, stirred by intermittent vibrations. Alert, intent, you intercept them and decipher them. The palace is all whorls, lobes: it is a great ear . . . the palace is the ear of the king. Here the walls have ears. Spies are stationed behind every drapery, curtain, arras. Your spies, the agents of your secret service: their assignment is to draft detailed reports on the palace conspiracies.

This palace, when you ascended the throne, at the very moment when it became your palace, became alien to you. Advancing at the head of the coronation procession, you walked through it for the last time, amid torches and flabella, before retiring to this hall which it is neither prudent nor in accord with royal protocol for you to leave. What would a king do, roaming through the corridors, offices, kitchens? There is no longer any place for you in the palace, same this hall.

Sharper in your memory are certain glimpses remaining from the battle, when you moved to attack the palace at the head of your then loyal followers (who are now surely preparing to betray you): balustrades shattered by mortar explosions, breaches in the walls singed by fires, pocked by volleys of bullets. You can no longer think of it as the same palace in which you are seated on the throne; if you were to find yourself in it again, that would be a sign that the cycle has completed its course and your ruin is dragging you off, in your turn.

But perhaps you have never been so close to losing everything as you are now, when you think you have everything in your grip. The responsibility of conceiving the palace in its every detail, of containing it in your mind, subjects you to an exhausting strain. The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.

Do you think your predecessor is still alive, the king you drove from the throne, from this throne where you are sitting? Is he the prisoner you had sealed up in the deepest cell of the palace? You spend every night listening to the underground tom-tom, trying in vain to decipher its messages. But you harbor the suspicion that it is only a noise you have in your ears, the throbbing of your heart in upheaval, or the recollection of a rhythm that surfaces in your memory and reawakens fears, remorse.

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