“Yes, as in ‘See’-Man.”
Alex bit his tongue. This was already ludicrous enough.
“And what does Si-Man do?” asked Joanna, who until now had remained quiet behind her fake, frozen smile.
“Sell tickets. Beyond that, I don’t care.”
“And are we talking about a singer? A dancer? A performance artist? A clown? Just who the hell is this person?”
“By all the saints.” Maria snatched a flyer from her desk and passed it to Alex. He hoped the picture that resembled a gigantic, angry mutant baby with a Sonny Bono wig, dark tufts of hastily trimmed chest hair and a green-painted moustache wasn’t the artist. “Do you know how much crap goes up on that stage? I don’t ask why. I just count the receipts.”
There wasn’t much text to go on. Just a venue and a date… that evening.
“We should go,” Joanna said.
“What?”
“What?”
“If it’s selling already based on this truly hideous flyer that explains nothing, I want to know why, don’t you?”
“Grand idea,” said Maria, putting her glasses back on. “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, but you should be taking notes.”
“You’re not seriously saying we should buy tickets for this?”
“Buy them?” Joanna scoffed. “Surely between the two of you, someone owes you a favour or really enjoyed the sex.”
“If I get you comps, will it get you out of my office?” asked Maria. “Because I can’t spend all day arguing about this. Listen, I like you three, but you need to smarten up about how this all works. Right now, every young person in Madrid who’s put every substance into their damn body and had every insane idea in between fucking everything that moves from the Retiro to de Campo now thinks they’re an artist. I just know I need to keep the lights on and eat. Are we understood?”
Alex, Joanna and Vicente stared back at her in stunned silence.
“Out,” she said quietly.
They were too dumbstruck to argue.
***
“My arse will swallow the sins of men until I barf oceans of rage that will punish the sleeping sycophants of the old order.”
This was the line that lost Alex, and had it not come just ten minutes into what Si-Manand his audience were calling a show, he might have walked out. Joanna, ever perceptive, had put one hand on his knee and the other on Vicente’s, a private gesture they’d adopted, assuring each other that somehow, they would endure the next fifty minutes together and laugh about it afterwards, no matter how wretchedly drunk they needed to get. It seemed to work. They’d not yet snuck out on a show, which seemed almost impossible in this tiny space. Alex also had a feeling it would earn them jeers from the crowd, as if they’d blasphemed the diaper-clad messiah who’d just fished half a tomato from said diaper and begun rubbing it up and down his body like it was a giant, living piece of breakfast toast.
He jumped as Si-Man let out a primal scream that rattled the flimsy backdrop. Several audience members gasped with anticipation of what would come, which turned out to be several violent exhales followed by a swooping, bowing gesture. Si-Man then lifted his head, facing the crowd with lips pursed and extended like a baboon. He rubbed the tomato over his face before throwing it to the stage with a loud splat. He then pulled back the skin around his eyes, reducing them to slits like some racist Jerry Lewis character before banging on his chest and leading the audience in a chant about “seeing through their lies.” As most of the audience shouted along, the show began to take on the tone of a strange political rally crossed with an American gospel revival, as Si-Man alternated between stomping around in a circle and wiggling his arse at the crowd.
Alex could see Maria’s face now.
“Covered in shit, covered in shit, covered in shit…” sang Si-Man while slapping himself on the backside, doing a jig onstage. The chant continued, a ghoulish whisper that quickly surrounded the three of them as the crowd took it up. Vicente stifled a laugh, which was thankfully lost under the incantation.
Si-Man lifted a small notebook from the pocket of his filthy jacket and read not three, or five, but eight short poems, each less comprehensible and more self-indulgent than the last. Alex tuned out until the next chant began, “I am Maya! I am Inca! I am the Philippines!”
“Oh shit, we’re going here?” Vicente said under his breath.
“A voice for the voiceless!”
“I feel like I’ve fallen into a Dali painting,” Alex murmured. “Only it sucks.”
His neighbour shushed him loudly, a sound quickly buried under another primal scream as Si-Man began pummelling the stage with his fists. He then spread his fingers in a diamond shape and pretended to fuck the gap inside it, ranting something about “restoring the lives they stole. We hear you great thinkers and spirits of lost lands. We see the sins of our vile fathers and are not like them!”
Smallpox and genocide, yes, but to Alex’s knowledge, at least the conquistadors had never subjected their victims to a show like this.
