Edouard

I was six or seven years old when my father told me the story of a serious-looking man with dark hair and a purple cape, featured in a local newspaper advertisement.

Edouard is a young, aspiring actor. He auditions for plays but has had no callbacks yet. Edouard is also a recluse. He is perfectly content not talking to anyone for months on end.

The artist prefers to spend his time on walks in nature, reflecting on his past choices and actions. Edouard, he tells me, is very introspective.

Do you know what this word means? My father asks.

I did, and I let him know, even though I didn’t tell him that he had explained the meaning of the word in a conversation we’d had, earlier that day. Still, I silently accepted his praise and he seamlessly continued his story.

One day, as Edouard is walking home from an unsuccessful audition, he falls deep into his thoughts. He replays the scene in his mind, analysing every movement and word, truly trying to understand where he went wrong. As he ruminates, the young man doesn’t notice that he is crossing paths with an older gentleman and bumps into him, causing him to fall to the ground.

Edouard apologises profusely and helps the old man get back on his feet. In an incoherent blabber, Edouard explains to the unfortunate passer-by that he genuinely means no harm.

The old man, not particularly bothered by the incident, gets up while reassuringly accepting Edouard’s apology. He then tells him:

"Listen, lad. You look miserable. I can see that right now you want nothing most in the world than to be a successful actor. Isn't that right?"

Edouard nods hesitantly.

"Your wish has been granted, and you will be a successful actor throughout your life on one condition: you must imperatively wear this mauve cape you have at all times. If you remove it, even for a second, the magic will no longer work.”

And soon enough, Edouard starts hearing back from casting agencies. He is called up for plays across the country and works his way up to theatres of world-renown. And the actor, who faithfully keeps his mauve cape throughout the years turned decades, becomes known internationally as "Edouard-the-Mauve-Cape". In spite of his popularity, the actor never finds true happiness, consumed by the thought that his success could only be attributed to his fortuitous encounter with a wish-grantor.

On a visit to his home village, he is stopped by a young local who asks him for an autograph, on the very same path where he bumped into his wish-grantor decades earlier.

The passer-by praises Edouard-the-Mauve-Cape's success and seeks advice as an aspiring comedian himself. The cape-wearer, struck with empathy for the younger man, decides to answer as honestly as he can. He declares that none of his success can be attributed to himself and that it was in fact to an old wizard of sorts he had met decades before on this very road that he owed his career.

Sceptically, the advice-seeker asks Edouard if he really believes his success can solely be attributed to a mysterious encounter. He doubts that decades of uninterrupted cape-wearing is the only reason behind Edouard’s brilliant career and if it really had nothing to do with his talent and hard work over the years.

After an unspecified period of contemplation, Edouard decides to strip himself of the cape, just before a critical play at a famous venue, and to act on his own terms. The idea of being on set without his signature garment made him more nervous than his first auditions ever did. He is then acclaimed for having one of his career's best performances, while learning to recognize his own merit in his work.

This tale has become a myth to me throughout my life, as the details blur. Akin to a puzzle, small pieces of its original account go missing throughout the years. After all, the original telling of the tale was rudely interrupted by my mother a few times, her hands full with my younger brother, who was still a baby at the time, demanding help. Yet, the number of questions it has raised has kept Edouard well alive.

Was there a second encounter with the mysterious wish-grantor? Was he genuinely benevolent? Did he help Edouard develop the self-confidence he needed to be a successful actor? Or had he instead hindered him, creating an unhealthy obsession with his cape and a perpetual fear of being stripped from it by an unfortunate mishap? Was the old man even real, or a figment of Edouard's own imagination? Was the wish grantor truly aware of Edouard's deepest wish and can one really know one's deepest wish as a young adult?

Had Edouard passed the mauve cape on to the younger aspiring actor with reassuring words, thus perpetuating a cycle of unhealthy dependence? If so, was he fully aware of the repercussions? Had he instead burned the cape as to destroy all trace of its existence?

The potential for conspiracy theories and spin-offs surrounding this tale is endless. Perhaps the old man, Edouard, and the boy were all the same person, time-travelling in an attempt to save himself from living life in misery, but each time misdirected, until the final instance in which the cape-wearer freed himself of his own volition.

And lastly, why had my father made up a tale worthy of the classics, deserving scholarly debates on the minute implications of its cultural impact, unaware that I would spend the next 18 years believing this tale had somewhere in it hidden the very essence of our lives? Edouard’s creator is utterly oblivious to the fact that I pondered every layer of the story’s cryptic meaning, applying it to the different phases of my life, while he himself had probably forgotten the tale just as quickly as he had forgotten one of his spontaneous vocabulary lessons.

My analysis of it has changed drastically over the years. It started off as a tale of courage, with a Disney-esque ideal of believing in oneself when I was a child. As I progressed into adolescence, it turned into the darker, more twisted tale of a man struggling with Imposter Syndrome and chronic depression. As I was leaving home, I viewed the cape as a symbol of the conformity, or self-imposed barrier that pushes people further into their comfort zones and away from their childhood dreams.

It took me more time than I care to admit to realise that Edouard was no other than my own solitary, deeply introspective father's alter-ego and that the real-life version of the character had yet to remove his own mauve cape.

My father despises the colour to a ludicrous point, which is what had prompted the dialogue in the first place. Maybe it was just an extended joke, as I can't imagine greater torture for him than a lifetime of wearing mauve.

During my most cynical phase, I scoffed at my father for his continued reliance on his own mauve cape, until I realised that very few of us fully rid ourselves of it, in a grand gesture such as Edouard’s, who most likely burned it for dramatic effect. Most of us have inadvertently stripped our capes, and we have kept them in dark corners of our closets. We try to put them back on despite the omniscient warning of a meadow-dwelling petty crook that they would no longer work.