69

The seats are beginning to fill, wealthy patrons taking their places under the awning at the back of the theater, and working people crowding into the cheaper seats with fried pastries or oranges or sacks of spiced nuts in their hands to sustain them through the first act. The smell of spices mingles with the scent of perfume and the fainter smell of blossoms carried on the warm spring breeze. Outside, the trees are heavy with blooms, and the crowd in the courtyard is crushing flowers underfoot.

You expect the crowd. What you don't expect is the fever pitch of the noise, as if the line between merriment and brittle nerves is thin. The flagstones near the vendors' tables are treacherous with spattered oil and spilled wine, and as you watch a velvet-swaddled child slips and drops her pastry and bursts into noisy tears. Across the courtyard a woman shrieks with laughter, and the shriek sends a shiver down your back.

Then a lapdog leaps from the arms of a gentleman in violet-embroidered finery, its owner pursues, and the pair of them collide with the table where the great wooden cashbox sits. The table should not tip over. Even when the table tips, the iron-banded cashbox should not smash open on the ground.

But it does, and a glittering deluge of coins scatters across the floor. There's a smattering of applause, and a general scramble to help, if helping constitutes picking up the cash and putting it away somewhere safe.