Glorious Ones Read Free Page A

have killed her with my taunts, my vicious tongue, my only weapons: you know me, Flaminio.
    But, with no reason to doubt, I believed in your vision of my beautiful soul. It gave me back my pride, and helped me restrain myself from asking you why, after that one night, you never came to my bed again. Instead of tormenting you with my lovesickness, I took to staring at you, to watching your every move on stage, just as I had done that morning at the convent. And sometimes, sometimes Flaminio, I fancied that I could see your vision of my beautiful spirit, burning deep behind your eyes.
    Now listen to me, listen to the way I have told this tale: One summer night, a man named Flaminio Scala slept in the arms of the homeliest woman in Europe. Surely, the Captain would never have bothered to visit my dreams if this were the greatest glory of his life; surely, there were finer moments in his career. Of course there were! Flaminio Scala, the leader of The Glorious Ones, was a man of history! And it is for the sake of that history that I will stop this foolish woman’s dreaming, and begin again.
    But how, exactly, to begin? Shall I repeat the Captain’s own account of his early years?
    “My friends,” he told us one night, after a week of shoddy performances, “I started in life as a master criminal, a confidence man, a swindler. One day, languishing in prison, I searched my brain for some way of putting my natural dishonesty to some honest use, and walked out of jail an actor.”
    Yet why should Armanda Ragusa help spread these lies? Flaminio Scala was never a bandit—he was merely seeking some clever new way of insulting his troupe. I laughed, to show him that I understood the joke; in fact, I knew the joke was more absurd than even he would have admitted.
    Flaminio Scala could never have fooled me. I had not forgotten the fierce eyes of the young priests who sometimes came to help with convent business; and as soon as I saw those eyes in the Captain’s face, I knew that it had begun for him in the seminary.
    Still, I must confess some difficulty in seeing him there—Flaminio, with his boasts and his swagger. But perhaps that was the way with all the students who were troubled by what the theologians referred to as “doubts.”
    Doubts! Those priests could never speak the language. Flaminio and his friends had no doubts—they were fighting for their lives!
    Late at night, huddled in the damp cold cells, they were struggling to save that part of themselves which the priests wished so badly to destroy—that part of themselves which still loved the beauties of the earth. In the course of that battle, the acting began—the jokes, the songs, the dances, the innocent showing-off. Soon, it had become a craft for them, and, hour after hour, they labored to perfect the cruelty and precision with which they imitated their professors. At the start, they spoke in whispers, for fear of offending the others. Then, one night, they could no longer resist the temptation to speak out loud.
    The stage is set to resemble a school chapel. Alone in the confessional, a young priest shivers in the December chill, awaiting the midnight bells which will permit him to return to his cell.
    Flaminio Scala enters stage left, swaggering in a manner designed to show the audience that he is up to something; the encouragements of his friends are protecting him like a suit of armor. He kneels gracefully, presses his lips against the smooth wood of the confessional, and begins to speak:
    “Father,” he whispers, then stops, struggling to contain his laughter. “Father,” he continues, in a steadier tone, “I am begging your forgiveness, though I myself am not quite sure if I have sinned.”
    “Most likely you have,” replies the priest, recognizing the voice of his most rebellious student.
    “No,” Flaminio murmurs intensely. “It is not what you think. It is something much more serious, more perilous. Listen: over the past few months, I have been