Nicasio put six candles up and the chandelier will not fly

—Who is up on the loading gallery at ten past two in the morning?

—It's me, Cándida. Nicasio.

—Come down from there.

—I'm fixing it.

—Fixing what?

—The chandelier thing. The big lamp from the second act, the one with the six candles. Tonight it ended up forty centimetres below its mark.

—I know. I saw the red tape from the stalls, with the chandelier forty centimetres lower and Palmira standing next to the sofa instead of sitting on it. That is why I came back, I was already in the car. And what exactly are you fixing?

—I'm putting in the nine kilos that are missing.

—Kilos are missing, that much is true. Where are you putting them?

—Here.

—"Here" is not a place, Nicasio. I have been head of stage machinery in this theatre for thirty-one years and "here" tells me nothing. Here where?

—On the chandelier. Three three-kilo ingots, cable-tied round the back where they can't be seen.

—Stop. Don't tie anything else. Take your hands off it and look at me.

—They're tied properly.

—I don't doubt your cable ties. Put your arms down. Now tell me what the chandelier weighs.

—Sixty-two kilos. It says so on the fit-up sheet.

—And what did it weigh tonight?

—Sixty-two plus the candles. Seventy-one.

—Roughly. We'll sharpen that figure later, because it isn't seventy-one. And what does it weigh with your three three-kilo ingots?

—Eighty.

—So you say, and we'll come back to that sum. And in the arbour, on the other side of the wall, how much is there?

—…

—Say it.

—Sixty-two.

—Sixty-two. I loaded them myself, with the scales next to me, on fit-up day. So you were carrying a good eight kilos out of balance and you have just made it seventeen. In the wrong direction, and we'll do the fine arithmetic in a minute. If you let go of that rope now, the chandelier does not stay where it is: it comes down on its own until it reaches the floor and stops there.

—But I added weight. If the problem was weight…

—Point that torch down at the gap in the wall. Do you know what is in there?

—The arbour.

—The counterweight arbour. The chandelier pulls the rope down on one side, the arbour pulls down on the other, and both run over the same block in the ceiling. When the two weigh the same they are level, and once they are level you are not moving sixty-two kilos: you are moving the difference, which is zero. That is why on opening night you flew that batten with two fingers and thought it was funny.

—I did think it was funny, yes.

—Well, that bit of fun has a name, and it is the only invention this trade has: the batten does not weigh, the batten is level. What you feel in your hands is the friction of the rope and the gear, and not much else.

—So a half-tonne batten…

—Can be flown by a woman my age with one hand and her coffee in the other, provided somebody has put half a tonne of iron on the other side. And that is what you have done tonight: thrown nine kilos of iron onto the side that was already heavy. It is like helping someone carrying a heavy suitcase by hanging a second suitcase off the same hand.

—So the nine kilos go in the arbour.

—The kilos go in the arbour. All of them, however many they turn out to be. And they go in during the same shift as the weight that goes up, never the next day. Everything that goes up on stage has an iron twin on the other side of the wall, and either both move or neither does.

—All right.

—Now the other question. The candles.

—The candles were plastic, with a little orange filament bulb inside.

—I bought them in 2019. A hundred and twenty grams each.

—Yes. And on Tuesday, in the second act, one came out of its socket and fell onto the table, right in front of Palmira. It bounced once and ended up next to the vase. She carried on with her lines without looking at it.

—Nobody told me that.

—Nobody saw it. There was a small knock and they all assumed it came from the table. I saw it from the wings.

—Go on.

—On Wednesday I spent a while testing the socket and it comes out again if the chandelier descends fast. The plastic has lost its lip from all the rubbing. So on Thursday I bought six beeswax candles, as thick as your fist and with a metal thread in the base, and put them in. Those don't come out.

—And did you weigh them?

—One kilo four hundred each. And the gold dish I put under them in case they ever get lit, six hundred grams. Nine kilos exactly.

—You weighed them.

—I weighed them. On the blue scales in the store, the ones for the sandbags.

—Then you have seven hundred and twenty grams too many in that sum. What did you do with the plastic candles?

—I took them out. They're in the cable box.

—Then it isn't nine kilos. You took out six of a hundred and twenty grams: seven hundred and twenty grams less. Eight thousand four hundred of wax, plus six hundred of dish, minus seven hundred and twenty of plastic. Eight point two eight.

—And now the real problem of the trade, which is this: the ingots come in one kilo and three. You cannot make eight point two eight out of those.

—I put in eight.

—You put in eight. And you are left with two hundred and eighty grams of load uncompensated, which the rope does hold, which I hold with one hand, and which does not move the batten off its mark. Two hundred and eighty grams are the margin you work with every day. Eight kilos are a chandelier that comes down on its own with an actress underneath.

—Then why did it hold for three nights? If it was out of balance.

—Because the batten brake is a clamp and it grips whatever you give it. And because you were on the other end of the rope acting as a counterweight with your arms without knowing it, which is what you took for the weight. A clamp brake holds eight kilos and it holds seventeen. What you don't know is for how many nights, or at what temperature, or with a rope from which year. And Palmira sits underneath.

—Not on the chair. On the sofa.

—On the sofa, which is directly underneath. That is why the red tape mark is where it is and not forty centimetres lower. Forty centimetres is the difference between a lamp that looks good above a scene and a lamp at the head height of someone who played the whole second act standing up tonight because it was in her way.

—Understood.

—Nicasio, what you did about the socket was the right thing to do. I mean that. A candle falling onto a table two metres from an actress is exactly the kind of thing you fix that same Wednesday. And you weighed it, which is more than half the people who have been here twenty years ever do.

—Thank you.

—And then you came up to this gallery at two in the morning to tie seventeen kilos of imbalance to a lamp that hangs over the spot where Palmira sits.

—Put like that…

—Cut the ties. The three ingots in the bag. I'll open the arbour.

—And the batten? If I let it go now with the eight kilos of wax on it…

—That is the good question and it is the first one you have asked all night. You don't let it go. First we bring the chandelier down to the stage floor and chock it, so the wood takes the weight and not the rope. Then I load the eight kilos into the arbour, one at a time, and I count them out loud so you can hear them from below. And then we fly it up, with both of us on the rope, to the red tape, which is where it belongs.

—It's four minutes.

—It's four minutes, yes. The same four minutes as three nights ago, when you put the candles in.

—Right.

—Give me the bag.

—Here.

—And tomorrow you bring me the plastic candle that fell. I want it on the table. It has been up there for fifty performances and it chose to come loose in front of Palmira: I want to know whether the socket is broken or whether it simply got bored.