Glorious Ones Read Free Page B

wrestling with the conviction that I myself am the Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, returned to usher in the Judgment.”
    “You are talking nonsense,” the priest answers nervously.
    “And so it was that you doubted me the first time!” Flaminio Scala cries, in a voice so majestic, commanding, and ominous that the altar, painted on the backdrop, begins to pitch and sway.
    The young confessor is trembling now. Has he heard the voice of God? “Tell me more,” he whispers, clutching the inside of the confessional door.
    Flaminio Scala tells him more. In a calm, authoritative tone, he speaks to him of life terrestrial and life divine. He laments his fifteen hundred years of exile, recalls all the agony of his passion. As he describes the unimaginable sweetness of his seat at God’s right hand, his words seem to swell and resound like the notes of an organ.
    Just before the curtain comes down on this scene, a few members of the audience notice that the priest has begun to weep.
    In a brief epilogue, set on the next morning, Flaminio and three accomplices are expelled for their sinful and blasphemous defiance of the First Commandment.
    Armanda Ragusa, I ask myself, what sort of lover are you, to take such delight in the image of your beloved and his friends scrambling for pennies, fishing breadcrumbs from the canals of Venice? What sort of woman are you, to have such contempt for those four spoiled children, so unwilling to dirty their hands with honest labor? And yet, I am not so unlike them that I cannot understand: they had just escaped from prison! They wanted to be free!
    And so Flaminio and his companions came to devise the perfect plan. They would support themselves with the same spoiled foolishness which had so amused them in the seminary—they would be actors! Unburdened by rehearsals, repetition, scripts, their wit would be the freshest thing in Venice! They needed no leaders, no direction, no prearranged dialogue—they would improvise! The plazas of the city would be their stage, their audience—the people of the street! How could they possibly fail!
    What sort of woman am I, to imagine the enthusiasm in their voices, and feel such bitterness?
    Yet perhaps my sin is only the simple, understandable envy of easy success. For, as it happened, Flaminio and his friends proved absolutely right. In no time, they were drawing huge crowds, swarms of urchins, messenger boys on errands, cooks on their way to market, merchants’ sons walking home from school. Young men told their mistresses, children brought their friends; distant acquaintances stopped each other on the street to describe Flaminio’s antics. The people of Venice were desperate for entertainment, and the actors’ caps grew heavy with coins.
    Sometimes, I wonder why Flaminio never spoke of those days with fondness and nostalgia. Surely, it was the only time in his career when he was not alone on top, alone with the worries of a leader. Surely, he was happier then, when there was no Andreini to plague him with vicious tricks.
    But all he ever told us was the story of his friends’ destruction, that gruesome tale which he repeated again and again, like a litany, a sermon against the sins of recklessness and disloyalty.
    “One March evening,” the Captain used to say, “myself and three companions were invited to perform before the Doge of Venice. In retrospect, I see that it was the end of the social season, and the Duke had invited a few stray guests whom he deemed unworthy of anything more than some local amateur talent. But then, I was not yet a man of deep wisdom and wide experience, fully conversant with the subtle machinations of the aristocratic mind; then, I was merely a poor, ambitious boy, who mistook the doors of that gilded hall for the very portals of Paradise.
    “With characteristic good sense, I suggested that I play the Crafty Venetian, and that my friends enact the Three Roman Thieves. The courtiers were cool at first, but, gradually, as it