Nowhere (7 page)

The general shrugged with all of his tense little body. “There you are, eh? And don’t ever think those wily Florentines naïve, my dear chap! Though it is true enough that Sebastian the Fourteenth more than once made an ass of Lorenzo, who between you and me was not all that Magnificent.... As everyone knows, the model for that picture was Queen Sebastiana the Third, done by Botticelli when he was her court painter and perhaps something more.” He gave me a significantly cocked eyebrow.

“Remarkable! A nude depiction of a reigning princess?”

General Popescu smiled in pride. “Our rulers have often been notable for their lack of shame.”

“They’ve all been called Sebastian or the female version?”

“No,” said Popescu. “There have been Maximilians, Ferdinands, and at least one Igor.”

“And surely amongst the princesses’ names were Isabella and Carlotta?”

“Indeed,” said the general. “I see you’ve done your homework.”

We went through two more rooms hung with the pictorial treasures of the Renaissance. McCoy had long since disappeared.

Finally Popescu said, “Forgive me, but I must take you to the prince. He does not care to wait for his meals!”

He led me to a doorway and stepped aside. I went through it and was met by a horse-faced lackey wearing a green tailcoat, buff knee-breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes. He held a tall staff, which, as I stepped across the threshold, he lifted and thumped buttfirst upon the floor.

He cried, “Mr. Russel Wren!”

Good gravy, I was in the throne room! There, at the far end of a crimson runner, on a three-stepped stage, sat Prince Sebastian XXIII, or anyway it was to be presumed that the distant figure was he: I would have to walk an eighth of a mile to be certain, between two ranks of trumpeters who, hard on the final echo of the stentorian announcement of my name, raised their golden instruments to their lips and began to sound a deafening fanfare. When these musicians were at last done, my head remained, for almost the entire trip down the carpet, as a cymbal newly struck, and the prince was a growing but tremulous image, so agitated was my vision.

He wore a golden crown and red, ermine-trimmed robe.

As I reached the last ten feet of the red runner, it occurred to me that I must make the traditional gesture of obeisance that was probably expected of everyone, even an American democrat, who finds himself before a throne, but still shaky from the fanfare and utterly unprepared for this moment—wretched Rasmussen, to ship me over without adequate training!—I made a fool of myself: I forgot about bowing, which in fact I had not done since appearing, with powdered hair, in a grammar-school re-enactment of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, and instead plucked an imaginary skirt at either side of mid-thigh while dipping at one knee. In a word, I curtsied.

This performance was greeted with explosive laughter from the throne. “How do you do, Mr. Wren,” said the prince, still shaking with mirth. “Welcome to my country.”

“Thank you, sir.”

His plump face was the kind that one assumed had been almost beautiful as a boy, and he still had rosy cheeks and long-lashed dark eyes. With a hand to steady his crown, he now stood up. He looked to be of medium height. The long red robe concealed the particulars of his body, but there could be no doubt that he was very corpulent.

“Shall we go to lunch,” he said, without the implication of a question mark. Lifting the robe slightly, so that the hem would not trip him up, he descended the stairs. When he stood beside me I saw that he was not nearly so tall as I had supposed when viewing him from a lower level: the eminence and the long robe had created an illusion. In reality he was much shorter than I. Which is not, however, to say he lacked that mysterious presence called royal.

A liveried lackey preceded us to the dining room, which was not so far distant from the throne room as I should have supposed, given the size of the palace. The dining room itself was enormous, with a table long enough to have fed dozens. A little army of formally dressed servitors was lined up in silent ranks.

An aged man, festooned with gold chains and keys, shuffled up to meet his sovereign. But what he had to say was reproving. “You shouldn’t be wearing that crown. It’s not at all the thing to wear at table, it really isn’t.”

“You old fool,” Sebastian said, “it’s my crown and I’ll wear it when I please. Don’t interfere or I’ll have you flayed.” So much for the words: his delivery, uncertain and even a bit fearful, was at odds with them.

The old man came forward then and, putting out his tremulous hands, took the crown from the prince’s head. “Now, you just eat your lunch like a good boy, and we’ll say no more about it.” He gestured to one of the servingpeople, a young man with large ears, and gave him the crown, which was golden and encrusted with bright gems. It was the first I had ever seen in use, and frankly it did not altogether escape vulgarity: the jewels looked synthetic.

Sebastian made no resistance, but he stamped his foot once his head was bare. “I did so want to wear it for once while eating. You are a withered old person, a feebleminded dotard.” His short dark hair showed the impress of the crown.

Immune to the abuse, the old man limped to the head of the table, pulled out the stately chair there, and said, “You just sit down and have your ice cream, young man, and no more nonsense.”

I was amazed to see the prince promptly do as told, though he was still muttering peevishly.

He said to me, “I suppose you wonder why I tolerate the insolence of this wretched old thing, but he’s been my personal retainer since childhood. There’s no one else I can trust, you see.”

I had not been told where to sit, and not wanting to call attention to myself—it’s strange how the presence of royalty makes bad taste of what would otherwise be routine—I shyly slid out the chair on Sebastian’s right and sat down.

The prince picked up a large soup spoon and began to bang it on the tabletop. This sort of infantile demonstration was familiar to me from visits to my married sister, whose daughter, my niece, was an unusually disagreeable baby as well as one of the ugliest children I had ever seen, a dead ringer for my jawless, flap-eared brother-in-law.

“Ice cream!” Sebastian was shouting. “I want my ice cream.” These complaints went on for some time, no doubt because Rupert moved so slowly. But at last the old retainer wheeled up to the table a trolley on which, embedded in a tank full of crushed ice, was what would appear to be a canister of vanilla ice cream of the capacity of several gallons. Amidst the chains with which he was hung, Rupert found a golden spoon. He plunged this implement into the container and carefully gathered some ice cream within its bowl. He brought the spoon up but did not taste its contents before inhaling the aroma with quivering nostrils. At last he took the spoon’s burden between his desiccated lips, chewed awhile, rheumy eyes rolling, and then brought up from behind him, in his left hand, a shallow silver vessel and, turning away from the prince, but towards me, deliberately spat out the melted residue of what he had been tasting. This was not a palate-piquing spectacle.

The prince cackled maliciously. “I look forward to the day when someone
has
poisoned it, you ancient swine, and you fall to the floor and die, foaming at the mouth and writhing in agony.”

Rupert’s dried-apple countenance stayed noncommittal as, using two spoons, he built, within a capacious golden bowl, a Himalayan peak of ice cream. Sebastian watched the project with every appearance of mesmerization. When the mountain had at last been sculptured to Rupert’s taste, the old man lifted a gold sauceboat high as his shoulder and poured from it a stream of butterscotch syrup onto the summit of the vanilla Everest. From other golden vessels he took, in turn, whipped cream, crushed nuts, chocolate sprinkles, those edible little silver beads, and finally a garishly red maraschino cherry.

When Sebastian saw that the dish had been completed, his importunate cries became more shrill, and when the old retainer at last delivered it to him he fell upon it with a ferocity for which the word “attacked” would be a euphemism. So swift was his work that for an instant I believed he was using no tool but rather shoveling it in with both bare fists. But after my eye adjusted to the motion I could identify, along with the spoon in his right hand, a fork in his left, and though he ate so rapidly, he employed these instruments with the deftness of a surgeon.

No sooner had the last spoonful gone from bowl to prince than a lackey whisked away the former and old Rupert supplied his sovereign with a napkin the size of a beach towel. Sebastian made vigorous use of this linen sheet, but in point of fact I saw not the least besmirchment of his mouth after the furious bout with the elaborately garnished ice cream.

For a few moments after the withdrawal of the empty bowl Sebastian sat with closed eyes, his expression one of momentarily weary sweet sadness, suggesting the well-known postcoital effect, but then his eyes sprang open and he looked at me for the first time since I had sat down.

“It is probably not easy to accept the display you’ve just seen as not gluttony but a heroic effort to allay it.”

“Indeed.”

“By eating a sweet course as opener, one kills a good deal of the appetite for the rest of the meal,” said the prince, earnestly compressing his several chins against his upper chest. “It’s an American technique.”

“Sounds like it,” I could not forbear saying: I really had lost some of my awe of him after witnessing the foregoing scene.

“And the infantilism serves an emotional purpose,” he went on. “Being royal is to be deprived of the warmer human feelings. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Wren. It was not my mother the queen who gave me suck, but rather a peasant wetnurse whom I never knew, and I was reared by nannies and servants. In a word, that mound of ice cream topped with the preserved cherry might well represent the royal dug I was denied.”

In America a grasp of basic Freudianism was now enjoyed by millhand and shopgirl: it was instructive for me to hear such platitudes from an absolute monarch.

I offered, “Or perhaps that of the wetnurse?”

Sebastian stared above my head. “No, the whipped cream and other embellishments would suggest a higher class.” He fluttered his long lashes: he really had very nice eyes. “In any event it’s a theory that derives from the studies of a certain professor who was not appreciated at the University of Vienna, but my great-grandfather saw the fellow’s possibilities and brought him here. Froelich?”

“Or perhaps Freud, Your Royal Highness?”

Sebastian shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“He became quite well known.”

“For this theory of the substitute tit?” The prince smiled. “Is it not extraordinary what frivolous enterprises will succeed in the world beyond Saint Sebastian? My great-grandfather’s interest in the professor was due to their common keenness for collecting classical antiquities and Jewish jokes.”

At that moment Rupert rolled the trolley to the tableside, and I was pleasantly surprised to become aware that a footman was discreetly laying a place for me, with a plate bearing a gold relief of the crown, heavy gold cutlery, and a napkin of linen a good deal finer than any stuff I had worn against my skin: the serviette was embroidered with the crown, and the cutlery showed it in cameo.

On Rupert’s trolley were several footed vessels the bowls of which were spanned by golden-brown domes of pastry. With a spoon from his dependent gear the old retainer broke through one of these and tasted whatever lay beneath, then put the bowl before Sebastian.

The prince scowled at it. “You old sod, you have spoiled the looks of this dish, as well as the surprise.”

“A pity,” said the imperturbable Rupert. “But I could hardly taste it without breaking the crust.”

The prince seized a spoon and smashed the remainder of the pastry, churning the fragments into the contents of the bowl, which seemed to be a clear soup. He then dug into this mix with much the same urgency with which he had ingested the ice cream. He had emptied the first bowl by the time the lackey had placed mine before me, and before I penetrated the crust, Sebastian’s empty vessel had been removed and Rupert had served a second order.

When I broke through the gossamer puff-pastry dome, I inhaled a celestial aroma which I could not have begun to identify until I saw, in the first spoonful of amber broth, black morsels of what could only be the priceless truffle, of which there were approximately as many pieces as there are noodles in a packet of my usual soup, Lipton Cup-a: I trust it is not bad taste to wonder what each of these bowls would have cost in New York.

Sebastian drained four or five of them into his gullet, and we did not converse during this performance, which had no sooner ended than Rupert returned with a trolley load of the largest poached salmon I had ever seen and a sauce in which at least a pound of beluga caviar figured.

It was during the fish course that I remembered that McCoy was not there. But it seemed impolitic to ask the prince about him, or indeed anything else, for with his last bite of the salmon, he turned eagerly to the new dish brought by Rupert, an enormous salver on which reposed dozens of tiny ortolans, which is to say birds the size of, uh, wrens: morally no different from cooked chickens, perhaps, or, speaking pantheistically, no more pitiable than a stringbean that has been boiled to death. Yet, this spectacle for me was fraught with pathos, and in fact I lost such little hunger as I had had.

Sebastian however seemed only just to be hitting his gustatorial stride with the small birds, seizing each by its hairpin legs and plunging it beakfirst into his mouth, biting it off at, so to speak, the little knees and discarding the legs of one en route to the next: quite a pile of these limbs began to accumulate alongside his plate. Apparently he could deal internally with the bones and beaks.

When a footman offered me a similar dish, I waved him off, but I did begin to sip the champagne I had been served by another.

Perhaps it was the diminutive size of what he was eating that reminded Sebastian of his own childhood. In any event, after the second dozen of the ortolans, he suddenly stared at me with misted eyes and said, “Like the old heirs apparent to the French throne, I was most savagely treated as a child. I was whipped bloody by my tutors, viciously slapped and pinched by my nurses, and the detestable old jackal who stands behind me at this moment was crudest of the lot. My boyhood, Wren, was a living hell. It was intended to be, of course. That’s the only sort of thing that develops the ruthless, vengeful qualities of character so necessary to a ruler.”