The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome

by John Guare

  MATT, panic: I’m going blind?

  PETE: No! He’s saying Matisse accepted the realities of life.

  MATT: Life can adjust to me.

  SARAH hands him a watercolor set with a ribbon on it.

  SARAH: I’ve brought you water colors.

  MATT flings down the tray.

  MATT: Watercolor? Prince Charles uses watercolor to paint prissy British landscapes.

  To us: I manipulate massive strokes of heavy, gloppy, yes, toxic sensuous paint—roll, nudge, spread, coax its poisons into the canvas. The arsenic gives the vermilion that lethal intensity. The lead gives the white balls! I darken the canvas with the same black poisoned oil that Rembrandt used. I tame the chaotic malevolent paint with my brush, my hands—wipe my mouth with it.

  To PETE and SARAH: Yes! the back of my head! The lethal paint lets me show what’s beneath the surface. Don’t tell me watercolor!

  PETE: Hey—“What is watercolor but a series of happy, unexpected accidents.”

  SARAH: John Singer Sargent.

  PETE: Yes! You’re great. She’s great.

  SARAH: Find new tools to work with. Rembrandt would find a way to make it work and he’d love it.

  PETE: Marry her, Matt. Don’t let her get away.

  MATT: How dare you speak for Rembrandt! The arrogance. People who say Shakespeare would’ve loved it. Chekhov would’ve loved it. Dearest. I love you with all my heart but how do you know what the hell Rembrandt would do?

  SARAH: If paint gave Rembrandt cancer and it was the year 2000, he’d find a new way to make art and maybe it’d be—

  SARAH takes a video camera out of her bag.

  PETE & SARAH: Video!

  MATT: Video? The last refuge of the untalented? Who brought that contraption in here?

  SARAH: I did. A new way for you to work.

  MATT: Work? You’re telling me I can’t paint. Losing paint? It’s like the loss of language. And I’ll never marry anyone.

  SARAH: Oh.

  PETE, to us: I could see Sarah reel. She had hopes. We all have hopes—

  SARAH holds out a box with a ribbon on it.

  SARAH: I suppose you don’t want these pastel chalks.

  There is screaming outside.

  MATT, screaming: No! What is that screaming?

  PETE: You.

  SARAH: Degas used pastel. If it’s good enough for Degas—

  MATT: I don’t draw ballerinas. What’s next from you two pals? Are you going to whip out a bolt of black velvet? Matt, do the Last Supper with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and Elvis and Marilyn as Apostles.

  SARAH, to us: I saw Matt’s early work in a summer show at a gallery on Twenty-second Street. Haunted paintings with these mysterious titles: “Dunedin.” “Tokelau.” I introduced myself. What do the titles mean? He wouldn’t tell me. He took me back to his studio to show me his new work—these rapturous airscapes. We moved in together that night. I was already coming to the American Academy on a curatorial fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum to do a study of the reception of startling news in Renaissance painting. Botticelli’s Annunciation: The Angel tells the Virgin Mary she’s pregnant. Caravaggio’s Christ calling Matthew the tax collector to come follow—those sudden moments out of the blue when your life changes forever. I said to Matt: “Get out of New York. Finish your work in peace. Apply to the American Academy in Rome.” He submitted his portfolio at the last minute. There were hundreds of submissions. The jury was Jasper Johns and Chuck Close. They picked Matt.

  To MATT, cross: You’re being awful and horrible. We’re trying to help you. A door has closed only slightly for you. All the doctor is saying is he can save you once. Not twice. Nobody likes to change. I want to fight for you. And find new ways for you to work. Can’t you be grateful? Thank the doctor. The good news is you don’t have cancer.

  MATT: I will not thank the doctor. It’s his job to heal me. My job is to finish my paintings. I layer them and layer them and layer—Am I supposed to abandon them?

  IL DOTTORE: È suicidio continuare.

  SARAH: È suicidio continuare.

  MATT: Then let me join a long happy band of artists who have followed their art to the inevitable end.

  PETE: You’re a little bit too old to join the Sylvia Plath sweepstakes. John Keats. James Dean. Sorry—have to be under thirty. Take out an age discrimination suit. Van Gogh rides again! I thought the genius who suffered for his art was an idea that died out with the cigar store Indian and the dumb blonde.

  MATT: You instruct me like some Communist art czar that I can’t paint the way I choose to paint? Does this doctor own the Official Painters’ Paint Company? Am I a criminal?

  MATT tries to get up, but falls back in his chair, holding the stitches in his side, his thigh.

  MATT: You give me this news in the land of Giotto, Bellini, Carpaccio, Piero, Michaelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Leonardo? I stand humbly—yes, humbly!—in line behind those painters who have gone where I am trying to go. Don’t give up on me, my brothers! Wait for me! I’m coming.

  IL DOTTORE, to PETE: Ma è sempre cosi dramatico?

  PETE, translating: Is he always this—operatic?

  MATT: It’s my life, Doctor. It’s not Tosca.

  IL DOTTORE: Secondo me, un pò si diverte?

  PETE, to MATT: “I think he’s enjoying his opera.”

  MATT: Opera? You don’t understand one thing about being an artist. You’re an academic locked up in a library doing research on—remind me?

  PETE: Ahh, it’s about to turn ugly.

  MATT: Representations of the toenails of the crucified Christ.

  PETE, to us: It’s actually a study of the fingernails of Christ. In Renaissance painting, why are the hands of Christ sometimes feminine and soft? Why are they sometimes harsh male working-class hands? Gender issues slash class issues slash post-Marxism as revealed in the iconography of the—yes—fingernails of the crucified Christ.

  MATT: Wow! The semiotics of the hermeneutics of the objectified Pre slash Post slash Neo Modern orbital digits of the—

  PETE: You took the words right out of my mouth.

  MATT: Unintelligible jargon. If the doctor said, “Pete, the library gives you cancer,” would you give it up? In a second. If I told you, Sarah, that curating at the Met threatened your life, would you throw in the towel? Of course you would.

  SARAH: I get it! I get it!

  MATT: Not paint? The only good news I’ve ever had is that I am a painter. The only good times I’ve ever had are when I’m in my studio painting with my suddenly lethal—

  SARAH: What about with me?

  MATT: Choose between the joy I feel painting and the joy of being with you? I’d choose—

  SARAH: Don’t say it.

  MATT: Bed is nothing but an empty canvas.

  IL DOTTORE: A letto con una donna come Sarah, Lei non dovrebbe proprio pensare ad una tela vuota.

  PETE, translating: “In bed with a woman like Sarah, you shouldn’t be thinking of an empty canvas.”

  MATT: Does the surgeon think about cutting open his lovely wife whenever they’re in bed?

  PETE, to IL DOTTORE: Quando Lei è a letto con sua moglie, pensa ad operarla?

  IL DOTTORE smiles and nods yes.

  MATT: Then he’s an artist. Un artista!

  IL DOTTORE bows.

  Suppose surgery gave him cancer. Would he give up medicine?

  PETE, to IL DOTTORE: Ma se la chirurgia Le desse il cancro, Lei lascerebbe la medicina?

  IL DOTTORE pauses, then: Troverei un altro modo di fare medicina.

  PETE, to MATT: He’d find a new way to practice.

  IL DOTTORE goes. The screaming in the corridor is loud.

  MATT, calls after: Liar!

  PETE: Bugiardo. That’s Italian for liar.

  MATT: Bugiardo!

  SARAH: We can go—

  MATT tries to get up; the stitches grasp him in pain. SARAH holds

  him. MATT falls back. The screaming outside continu
es.

  MATT: What am I supposed to do? Become an accountant?

  PETE: Maybe. Your last work didn’t sell.

  MATT: Get out.

  PETE: I’m trying to make you laugh—

  MATT: Your kind of laughter gives me cancer.

  Screaming outside.

  MATT: Is that screaming other painters? I’m here with the two of you. The academic and the curator. Nothing ever happens to people like you.

  PETE: Students just shoot teachers.

  MATT: Good. That edge makes it worth it.

  PETE: II poverino. Days like this make me glad I’m not an artist. Step right up! See the artist’s disease—isolation—self-pity.

  MATT: You! An academic. What you know about being an artist could fit in a bedpan.

  SARAH: Do you want—

  MATT: No!

  PETE: Yes! Take this bedpan.

  MATT: And do what with it?

  PETE: Jasper Johns: “Take an object, do something with it.

  Do something else with it.”

  SARAH: Marcel Duchamp. It’s art if you say it’s art!

  MATT: It’s a bedpan. It’s not a work of art.

  PETE: This is just a bedpan? Get it out of here. What is Matt’s new medium? What we’re looking for is a signature style that Matt will stick to so people can look at it and say Hey! I’ll buy that. That’s a Matt Gee. Don’t worry, old boy. We’re going to solve this for you.

  MATT: I don’t need any academic to solve anything for me.

  SARAH: Matt, say “Thank you, Pete.” Pete has been the best’ friend to you—

  MATT: Thank you, Pete. Ugh, I said it.

  PETE: Niente. “All art has one thing in common—filling up an empty space.”

  MATT: Did you make that up?

  PETE: Of course not. It’s Beckett. I think it’s Beckett.

  SARAH, whispers to PETE: It’s Beckett.

  PETE: It’s Beckett.

  To MATT:

  Why are you looking at me like that?

  MATT: You’re terrifying. Do you ever say anything that’s not ripped out of the Rolodex of your mind? Here’s the difference between you and me. You’re a walking footnote. I am the text.

  PETE, stung: You’re really ugly—you with your superiority.

  MATT: I am superior to you. Academic! Living in a university like some welfare state clawing your way to tenure so you’ll be guaranteed a post that will protect you the rest of your dusty days.

  PETE: You think the shit you grind out means you deserve a loft in Tribeca and a place in the Hamptons paid for by some Wall Street Medici pouring endless cash into your black Armani pockets? Shit! There’s a medium for you.

  MATT: The moral splendor of paid summer vacations at some conference to read a paper on the history of halos.

  PETE: You’ll be some slut painting vodka ads: Absolut Matt!

  SARAH: Boys! You’re both idiots!

  PETE: And what is Sarah’s role in your over-sensitive, justifiably paranoid life? To sneak your work into the Metropolitan Museum?

  SARAH: Leave me out of this—

  PETE: Is the Met good enough for you?

  MATT: Yes. After I’m dead!

  PETE: An artist. Bow down to the sacred artist. I could be an artist.

  MATT: You? You think you know so much about an artist’s life?

  PETE: You think an artist’s life is so unique?

  MATT: It’s a sacred vocation.

  PETE: It’s a job. You’re not part of some divinely inspired priesthood. You’re a guy who sniffed too much Benjamin Moore paint. “Everybody is an artist.” Joseph Beuys.

  MATT: You couldn’t be an artist if your life depended on it.

  PETE: If what happened to you happened to me and I was rash enough to define myself as an artist, I would find one million new ways to work.

  MATT: You!

  PETE: You actually think I couldn’t be an artist if my life depended on it?

  SARAH, to us: That’s the moment I should’ve remembered. That’s where it all started. I looked away at that moment so I only heard it at a glance—

  PETE: I’ll take that bet. I’m going to find a way for you to work. You’re going to look me in the eye and say “Pete, I apologize. You are an artist.”

  MATT: I’ll take that bet. Librarian!

  PETE is furious. SARAH kneels by MATT.

  SARAH: Find a new way? For me? Take this pencil? This piece of paper? Ground zero. Begin again? Circles. Squares.

  MATT looks at her so tenderly.

  MATT: You don’t understand—Thank God for you—I mean that.

  SARAH and MATT embrace, gingerly.

  PETE: This is too personal. I’ll be downstairs.

  MATT: It’s not too personal. It’s life. Personal is the place where art begins. You’re not an artist. It gets personal? You run back to the Gobi Desert.

  PETE, to us: I started to reply—I mean, the nerve of this guy—but the guy is sick—right? I came out into the corridor of the hospital in Rome to cool down—Ospedale Nuovi Regina Margherita in the Trastevere—Did I tell you we’re in Rome? We’re all at the American Academy. We’ve each won a Rome prize, but the screaming was so—

  The hospital corridor is dark and lined with the screaming VICTIMS of a traffic accident, strapped onto gurneys, sitting in chairs. One wounded PATIENT, American, grabs PETE’S arm.

  PATIENT: Fourth church—Get me to the fourth church—

  PETE: The fourth church?

  PETE doesn’t understand. PETE’S arm is clutched by another injured PATIENT.

  PATIENT 2: Don’t let me die before I get to the fourth church-

  PETE: Nurse?

  PETE pulls free. Another PATIENT clasps him and pulls PETE close.

  PATIENT 3, whispers: I murdered a man. Long ago.

  PETE: Nurse? Infermiera!

  Another PATIENT grabs at PETE.

  PATIENT 4: I was a prostitute. I sold my body—for no reason—I don’t know why I did it—I was possessed—I want that forgiven—many men in a night—for years—I want God to forgive—if I get to the fourth church—

  PETE pulls free. Another PATIENT clasps his arm.

  PATIENT 5: My baby fell off the boat. I let him drown. I was angry. You know how when you get angry you don’t think? That’s not a sin—he drowned—I thought he was joking—why do I feel it’s a sin? If I can get to the fourth church—

  PETE turns and moves away, but another PATIENT grabs PETE’S arm, hurting him, pulling PETE down.

  PATIENT 6, whispers: I committed a perfect murder.

  PETE: Nurse!

  PATIENT 6: Do you want to hear how I did it?

  PETE, alarmed: Yes—No!

  FATHER SHAPIRO, a jovial priest, 50s, lopes on cheerily, giving comfort to the agonized PATIENTS in the hall, checking name tags. He carries plastic shopping bags.

  FATHER SHAPIRO: We all took a bit of a nasty spill back there. Chin up. It’s a wonderful day in the Eternal City! And where are we from? New Haven? I have wonderful friends in New Haven. “To the tables down at Mory’s—

  FATHER SHAPIRO & PATIENTS: —To the place where Louis dwells.”

  PETE signals FATHER SHAPIRO to stop.

  PETE: This man murdered—

  PATIENT 6 makes shushing noises.

  PATIENT 6: No no—only God knows—Father Shapiro, you’ll see that we stay an extra day and get to the fourth church?

  The PATIENTS cry out: The fourth church!

  FATHER SHAPIRO: I’m just a Vatican representative. We take no responsibility for your travel plans. Don’t touch me!

  PATIENTS:

  This tour goes back to New Haven Connecticut tomorrow—

  I have to get to the fourth church—

  I let my baby die—

  I have to be forgiven—

  I couldn’t take care of it—I didn’t mean to starve it.

  PETE is horrified. FATHER SHAPIRO is perturbed, yet sunny.

  FATHER SHAPIRO: Perhaps a refund for the lost
day when you get back to America—I’ll write you all letters on Vatican stationery. Here’s a valuable, beautiful, official Giubileo t-shirt, blessed by His Holiness.

  FATHER SHAPIRO pulls t-shirts out of his plastic bags.

  PATIENTS:

  I don’t want a t-shirt.

  I don’t want a refund.

  I don’t want letters.

  I want peace.

  I didn’t come all this way to get a refund!

  Get us to the fourth church—

  Don’t let me die before I go to the fourth—

  Can you talk to the tour guide and get our tour extended?

  We can’t go home without going to the fourth church—

  FATHER SHAPIRO, irritated: Your tour has to leave tonight. You have no hotel rooms—

  PATIENTS:

  Let us stay here—

  Till we get to the fourth church!

  FATHER SHAPIRO: The hospital hasn’t enough room—

  PATIENTS:

  What do we do?

  Three churches—that’s not enough—

  God says you have to go to four

  The rule is you have to go to four

  Get me out of this hospital—

  Back tomorrow—the rule is four churches.

  Listen to me—to me—four churches—

  Get me to the fourth church.

  PETE: The fourth church?

  FATHER SHAPIRO impatiently turns to PETE.

  FATHER SHAPIRO: I can’t help you. You can sue the Vatican all you want. The Vatican will not pay—please—take a t-shirt.

  PETE: I don’t want to sue anybody. I love this t-shirt!

  FATHER SHAPIRO: Were you on the bus?

  PETE: What bus?

  FATHER SHAPIRO: You’re not a pilgrim?

  PETE: No!

  FATHER SHAPIRO: You’re not in Rome for the Holy Year?

  PETE: No!

  FATHER SHAPIRO: Do you want spiritual guidance?

  PETE: No!

  FATHER SHAPIRO happily takes PETE’s arm.

  FATHER SHAPIRO: We’re going to be great friends!

  PETE bursts out laughing.

  VOICES:

  Give me peace …