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HISTORY OF PUPPETRY was the hour of the week in which Radha and others played with paper, making puppets with pinned joints and hands and feet that spun like weather vanes. They were learning histories of Punchinello, a beak-nosed figure who stands for nothing. The place and century of his birth is the sort of thing learned people in tweed jackets argue about, but for a couple of centuries he’s been present in Austria, where he is Kasperle, setting his cunning aside to concentrate on brutality without pause, until every other puppet in his world is dead and then his master must see to it that he doesn’t go after his audience too. In Hungary he’s the terse and sardonic Vitéz László, in France the twinkle returns to his eyes and he becomes Polichinelle, a demon from the merriest of hells. In England Punch is a sensitive chap; any passerby who so much as looks at him the wrong way is promptly strangled with a string of sausages. When he takes up his Turkish residence Karag?z is too lazy to attempt very much murder, though he has a reservoir of verbal abuse to shower upon anyone who comes between him and his meals. Wherever you find him, he is careful not to discuss the past. Whatever it is you’re asking about, he didn’t do it and hasn’t the faintest idea who might be responsible, in fact he doesn’t know anything at all, he wasn’t “there,” see, he’s been “here” the whole time . . . which begs the question, where were you?
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WHEN RADHA and I walked into the History of Puppetry classroom the first thing we noticed was the ocean of space that surrounded Rowan Wayland, and for caution’s sake we chose seats that maintained his solitude. We watched him but had difficulty finding out whether keeping our distance was weak or wise; nobody would talk about him. Wayland himself behaved as if his pariah status was perfectly natural, walking around the building looking straight ahead with his collar popped up around his ears. Radha remarked that he gave her the strange feeling of being an extra on a film set. It took two weeks for curiosity to change our seating vote. “Maybe he’s just misunderstood,” I said. Radha agreed to risk it.
He had a pair of red needles and a heap of wool on top of his books and was knitting while he waited for the teacher to arrive. There’s a gentle assurance many knitters have as they fix their patterns in place. Rowan’s knitting wasn’t like that. He stared at his sock-in-progress with an insistence that brooked no compromise, as if he’d learned that this was the only way to ensure that each stitch stayed where he’d put it. We took the seats alongside him, Radha said hello, and kept saying it until he acknowledged her with a sidelong glance.
“I’m Radha,” Radha said, before he could look away again.
“OK,” he said. “Why—I mean, what do you want?”
“Nothing,” Radha answered, with the guileless good cheer that makes her so dear to me. “Just saying hello. This is Gepetta.”
He smiled at me, and kept knitting. At first, second, or even third glance it was difficult to pin down what made him so much avoided. Rowan’s physical effect—godlike jawline, long-lashed eyes, umber skin, rakish quiff of hair—is that of a lightning strike. In full sunlight the true color of his hair is revealed to be navy blue, and when he scratches his head, as he sometimes does when he’s thinking, his hair parts so that the two tiny corkscrews of bone at the front of his skull are visible. Yes, horns. Not scary ones—I think these were intended as a playful touch. The problem with Wayland is that he’s a puppet built to human scale. Masterless and entirely alive. No matter how soft his skin appears to be he is entirely wooden, and it is not known exactly what animates him—no clock ticks in his chest. Rowan is male to me, since he moves and speaks with a grace that reminds me of the boys and men of my Venetian youth. He’s female to Myrna. For Radha and Gustav Rowan is both male and female. Perhaps we read him along the lines of our attractions; perhaps it really is as arbitrary as that. He just shrugs and says: “Take your pick. I’m mostly tree, though.” His fellow students already had all those confusing hormone surges to deal with. So most of them stayed away, though I’m sure they all dreamed of him, her, hir, zir, a body with a tantalizing abundance of contours, this Rowan who is everything but mostly tree. I’m sure Rowan Wayland was dreamed of nonstop.
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