The Big Question: Marcel & Nico

What they want is simple: reassurance that they will be safe in the coming battle, skirmish, whatever is pending. Nico is the one whose palm is being read, but he might not have been the first; the look on Giorgio's face knows the future--he might not have had his palm read, but if not, he knows some other way. If he has, Alessandra has been cryptic, but he knows.

Anyway, I'm considering Nico and Marcel. I think Marcel is deciding whether to have his read, and as he's listening to the woman's interpretation of Nico's hand, he's weighing whether he'd rather know or just imagine what she might say to him.

But the core question for both is the same: will I walk away from the battle, all my body parts intact, all my blood still swishing around inside me?

The Big Question

What does my character want? I don't remember if Stephen King or Joss Whedon (or one of his writers) was the one who highlighted that as being the seminal question the writer needed to be able to answer, but that made sense to me as being a good place to start.

So...one character: The easiest character to start with is....Herve. He wants to get whatever he can from Reynaldo's pocket. I'm presuming he's a somewhat professional pickpocket, that he lives on the fringe of society--and as I think about it, I think he knows Reynaldo. Close associates, even. The comic touch of the round robin pick pocketing leads me to wonder if this is something of a game, can Herve pick Reynaldo's pocket without being caught. If I remember Oliver Twist correctly (haven't read it in....years. Jr hi, I think), Fagin or the Artful Dodger had the young criminals-in-training try to pick his (fagin's or the Dodger's) pockets to prove mastery. Maybe that's the feel for the left side of the picture. I want to make Herve a sad character, misfit and either looked down on by everyone, or never taken seriously--comic relief, but in a dehumanizing way.

And I keep returning to the idea that Alessandra, Reynaldo and Herve are gypsies, or something similar, but I'm not confident about that. Unless Reynaldo isn't stealing from her, but rather retreiving something that the soldiers don't need to see....hmmmm.....gotta think more.

Could be....

Alessandra is not the character who first catches my attention; Giorgio is. His haunted look resonates with me, and I think that when his palm was read, he knew that the battle they're heading for will be his last. I'm not sure that he was actually told that, though. Delving into Alessandra is how I'll decide if Giorgio was told straight out that he's going to die, or if Alessandra is a charleton, or too nice--couching her reading in vague platitudes. Not sure yet. That's one of the things to be explored as I go through this process.

Here's what I do notice, however. Alessandra, a fortune teller in a tavern, perhaps even a gypsy, is dressed in the colors usually reserved for the Virgin Mary--with the addition of the deep blood red. Foreshadowing the blood to be shed on the battlefield? I think so. But the Madonna-ish tone to her... still thinking about that. Is she a prophet? Holy? Doesn't feel right...Is she pure in some sense? Maybe. More on this later, I'm sure.

Hands

I thought I was going to write about the setting today, which I think should be a tavern. But when I started looking at the picture, the strongest image I got was hands. Detailed hands, hands that define and create the action. There's Alessandra and Nico, her holding his hand as she reads it. But that's only the beginning. For every character except Marcel, telling about their state of mind and/or station in life includes reading their hands. Herve and Reynaldo, their stealthy hands where they don't belong; Joseph, pouring midair, a practiced motion worthy of an innkeeper's son, perhaps? Giorgio, gripping the table with one hand, a drink with the other. And Andreas, hand resting near his weapon. Thinking about this...more later.

Day Three: Finishing Names

Time to make decisions. Soldier one, Marcel. Dedicated to Mars. That works. The one whose palm is being read: Nico. The soldier with his back to the audience is hard to name. Because he’s wearing a sword, I think he’s a soldier. Andreas, Greek for man—that’s his name. He’s my blank slate, and he could either be the pivotal part of my story, of barely a footnote.

So, from left to right: Herve (dwarf), Reynaldo, Alessandra, Marcel, Andreas, Nico, Joseph, and Giogio. Odd names, but I have an idea how those names fit. We’ll see…

Day Three: Naming Redux

The taller thief, behind the fortune teller, is Reynaldo. In some tangled logic, that’s an homage to Ronald Reagan. The man pouring the wine….he’s tricky. For a long time, I believed he was a soldier, but he’s not. No armor. No weapon. And he’s serving them. So figuring out his relationship to others in the picture will be my job. In the meantime, a name. Joseph. There are reasons, but none that matter—and it may help me form his character as I go on. That leaves three. By the end of today, I’ll name them.

Day Two

On the far right is the character who haunts me. When I look at the painting in the Great Gallery in Toledo, that’s the character who is looking straight back at me. It’s hard to see him well in the small reproductions, but he has a look of resignation, pain—in Jesus Christ Superstar, Pilate describes Jesus’ expression as “a haunted, hunting kind.” That’s what I see here. Also, he strongly resembles George Harrison during the Maharishi phase, so I am naming him Giorgio.

A quick name, needing no explanation: the dwarf is Herve.

Naming

Day One:

Before I can really write about the characters, I need names. Names tell so much about the characters. For simplicity’s sake, until I have names, I will call them : dwarf, thief, fortune teller, Soldier 1 (closest to her), Feather (back to us), Hand (the one whose hand she’s reading), Waiter, and…the last one really haunts me. I’ll have his name tomorrow.

Today, though, the fortune teller. I want to call her Cassandra, but….obvious. I’d been trying to come up with a gypsy-sounding name, but Esmerelda was it; again, too obvious.

Alessandra, a variant of Cassandra. That Works!