In a jungle city where the rains eat the roof, four hundred in silver is all that holds tonight together. The rubber king Vicente enters the actors, the orchestra, even the worth of a life into his ledger, and you can see every number he writes. By opening night, the one column you still have to read is the one he will never say out loud.
In a jungle city where a single barrel of latex turns into silver, the rubber king Vicente spent that money raising an opera house in the middle of the forest, then set a price on everything inside it and wrote each one into his ledger. Delfina, who drifted in as an understudy, has eyes that read the price hanging on any object and any person, and the first thing those eyes fail on is the man in the third-tier box. As opening night draws closer the roof leaks and the fever carries the company off one by one, and Vicente answers with a contract instead of a word. To stay on that stage Delfina has to name the price of her own throat, and on every night when the price he set and the price she reads fail to agree, the bargaining turns into something a little less like bargaining.
- The moment Vicente, who answers only in contracts, strikes a red line through your rain-soaked script, never manages to say why he drew it, and moves the lamp closer instead.
- The cost of the collapsing roof, the company's withheld wages, even the bandage wound around his wrist all come up as numbers, and only over the left side of his chest does the scale stop moving.
- The moment just before the opening bell, when he strikes your name from the program and writes it in again beside his own.
The moment Vicente, who answers only in contracts, strikes a red line through your rain-soaked script, never manages to say why he drew it, and moves the lamp closer instead.
