But I declined to rake up the family scandal and we passed on to Carmida’s husband, Cladinoro, Re di Bizerta, a spurious son of the old Ruggiero da Risa, and so valorous that they speak of La Forza di Cladinoro.
All these knights and ladies were hanging on one side of the stage in two rows, one row against the wall and the other in front. I asked Pasquale how he knew which was which. He concealed his astonishment at such a simple question and replied—
“By the crests on their helmets.”
I then observed that they all wore their proper crests, a lion or an eagle, or a castle, or whatever it might be; Ferraù had no crest, but he had a special kind of helmet, and these boys knew them all in the legitimate way by their armorial bearings, and that was how, on the evening of Angelica’s death, the audience knew all the knights and said their names as they entered.
On the other side of the stage were two
rows of pagans who in this hades, where the odium theologicum persists, are not admitted among Christians. Here hung Il Re Marsilio di Spagna, who was to be defeated this evening, and his two brothers, Bulugante and Falserone, his son the Infanta di Spagna, his nephew Ferraù, now dead, and Grandonio. Then I came upon a miscellaneous collection and could look at no more knights or ladies after I had found the devil.
He was not The Devil, he was only “un diavolo qualunque,” but he was fascinating, and he had horns and a tail—Pasquale and the other youths showed me his tail very particularly and laughed at him cruelly for having one. But it was not his fault, poor devil, that he had a tail: except for the wear and tear of his tempestuous youth he was as he had left the hands of his maker.
There was also a skeleton; they made him dance for me and said that he is used to appear to any one about to die; but this cannot apply to the warriors, for they fight and die freely, and put whole families into mourning nightly, and if the skeleton appeared to them every time, a new one would be wanted once a month.
And there was “un gigante qualunque”—the raw material for a giant, something that could be faked up into this or that special giant when wanted. Similarly there was a lady having her dress and wig altered, they told me she was “una donna qualunque”—the very words I had seen a few weeks previously written up in Rome to advertise a performance in Italian of A Woman of no Importance. I suspect there must have been somewhere “un guerriero qualunque” so constructed that his head could be cut off, and that he had been disguised as and substituted for the Duca d’Avilla when Ferraù appeared to kill that warrior, for, without trickery, no sword in the teatrino, not even la Durlindana, could have cut off a head which had an iron rod running through it.
There was a confused heap of Turks and Spanish soldiers lying in a corner, and at the back of the stage, between the farthest scene and the wall of the theatre, was the stable containing seven war horses and one centaur. Pasquale told me that the centaur was “un animale selvaggio” which I knew, but he did not tell me what part he took in the play. One of the horses, of course, was Baiardo, the special horse of Rinaldo.