out your life here as an illiterate and a beggar. Come in the great hall and play chess 
with your father.
  
  After I got to understand it, I wept right at the supper table, and mumbled words no 
one understood about this house of ours being "chaos," and was sent back to my room for 
it.
  
  Then my mother came to me.
  
  She said: "You don't know what chaos is. Why do you use words like that?"
  
  "I know," I said. I started to describe to her the dirt and the decay that was 
everywhere here and to tell how the monastery had been, clean and orderly, a place where 
if you set your mind to it, you could accomplish something.
  
  She didn't argue. And young as I was, I knew that she was warming to the unusual 
quality of what I was saying to her.
  
  The next morning, she took me on a journey.
  
  We rode for half a day before we reached the impressive chateau of a neighboring lord, 
and there she and the gentleman took me out to the kennel, where she told me to choose my 
favorites from a new litter of mastiff puppies.
  
  I have never seen anything as tender and endearing as these little mastiff pups. And 
the big dogs were like drowsy lions as they watched us. Simply magnificent.
  
  I was too excited almost to make the choice. I brought back the male and female that 
the lord advised me to pick, carrying them all the way home on my lap in a basket.
  
  And within a month, my mother also bought for me my first flintlock musket and my first 
good horse for riding.
  
  She never did say why she'd done all this. But I understood in my own way what she had 
given me. I raised those dogs, trained them, and founded a great kennel upon them.
  
  I became a true hunter with those dogs, and by the age of sixteen I lived in the field.
  
  But at home, I was more than ever a nuisance. Nobody really wanted to hear me talk of 
restoring the vineyards or replanting the neglected fields, or of making the tenants stop 
stealing from us.
  
  I could affect nothing. The silent ebb and flow of life without change seemed deadly to 
me.
  
  I went to church on all the feast days just to break the monotony of life. And when the 
village fairs came round, I was always there, greedy for the little spectacles I saw at 
no other time, anything really to break the routine.
  
  It might be the same old jugglers, mimes, and acrobats of years past, but it didn't 
matter. It was something more than the change of the seasons and the idle talk of past 
glories.
  
  But that year, the year I was sixteen, a troupe of Italian players came through, with a 
painted wagon in back of which they set up the most elaborate stage I'd ever seen. They 
put on the old Italian comedy with Pantaloon and Pulcinella and the young lovers, Lelio 
and Isabella, and the old doctor and all the old tricks.
  
  I was in raptures watching it. I'd never seen anything like it, the cleverness of it, 
the quickness, the vitality. I loved it even when the words went so fast I couldn't 
follow them.
  
  When the troupe had finished and collected what they could from the crowd, I hung about 
with them at the inn and stood them all to wine I couldn't really afford, just so that I 
could talk to them.
  
  I felt inexpressible love for these men and women. They explained to me how each actor 
had his role for life, and how they did not use memorized words, but improvised 
everything on the stage. You knew your name, your character, and you understood him and 
made him speak and act as you thought he should. That was the genius of it.
  
  It was called the commedia dell'arte.
  
  I was enchanted. I fell in love with the young girl who played Isabella. I went into 
the wagon with the players and examined all the costumes and the painted scenery, and 
when we were drinking again at the tavern, they let me act out Lelio, the young lover to 
Isabella, and they clapped their hands and said I had the gift. I could make it up the 
way they did.
  
  I thought this was all flattery at first, but in some very real way, it didn't matter 
whether or not it was flattery.
  
  The next morning when their wagon pulled out of the village, I was in it. I was hidden 
in the back with a few coins I'd managed to save and all my clothes tied in a blanket. I 
was going to be an actor.
  
  Now, Lelio in the old Italian comedy is supposed to be quite handsome; he's the lover, 
as I have explained, and he doesn't wear a mask. If he has manners, dignity, aristocratic 
bearing, so much the better because that's part of the role.
  
  Well, the troupe thought that in all these things I was blessed. They trained me 
immediately for the next performance they would give. And the day before we put on the 
show, I went about the town, a much larger and more interesting place than our village, 
to be certain -- advertising the play with the others.
  
  I was in heaven. But neither the journey nor the preparations nor the camaraderie with 
my fellow players came near to the ecstasy I knew when I finally stood on that little 
wooden stage.
  
  I went wildly into the pursuit of Isabella. I found a tongue for verses and wit I'd