The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome

by John Guare

  DOLO: I made it back home in America.

  PETE: They brought their own food?

  RENZO, eating: American sandwich! Good. Swiss cheese.

  RON: I got a jar of peanut butter.

  DOLO: Plus I brought a pot roast.

  DOLO: produces an aluminum-wrapped bundle.

  RON: I been lugging pot roast?

  DOLO: It’s Pete’s favorite!

  RON: No wonder I got every dog in Rome running after me—

  PETE, to us: I did something very simple. I jumped out the window and began running.

  PETE goes. DOLO sees PETE run by.

  DOLO: Pete! Pete! Pete?

  DOLO runs after him. RON drags her back.

  RON: I’m getting a leash and restraining you—

  DOLO: Pete? That was Pete!

  RENZO returns.

  RON: Everybody looks like Pete to her. Sometimes people look like themselves. What would Pete be doing running away? My boy’d run right into my arms. You want to get run over?

  RON sits DOLO down.

  DOLO: If I did get run over, my name would be in the paper. “American Woman Killed in Rome!” Peter would see it and know we were in town. Pete loves to read the newspapers. Some mothers don’t want their sons to have a life. I’m not one of them. I want him to have a life.

  RON: If you die, I don’t want to spend the night in the cemetery. Killing yourself is not the best way to get a room.

  DOLO: Killing yourself? That’s the one sin that never gets forgiven.

  Music. PETE appears, breathless.

  PETE, to us: I ran down the road into Rome. Get them out of my life! Get them out of my life! Get them —I stopped at the side of the road by the magnificent fountain called the Aqua Paola. I looked at Rome beneath me. I looked up. I saw the blimp floating overhead—slow, silent—like an idea. I put my head into the fountain to cool off. I had the idea for Matt.

  PETE goes. RENZO brings DOLO a cup of water.

  DOLO: Gracias. We’re here for the sins. We won a raffle.

  RON: He don’t have to know all your business.

  DOLO, to RENZO: So lucky living in Rome. Have you done it yet? Gone to the four churches? You must get your sins forgiven all the time.

  RENZO: I’m too busy.

  RON: Sit here quiet till we figure out what we do. The line is so long getting into St Peter’s. My arm hurts. I got to do my stretches—

  To RENZO:

  You mind if I do my stretches? I had a bad fall and my therapy says I got to stretch—

  RON rotates his arms and twists his upper body. Caws of gulls.

  RON: The mosquitoes—the heat—are those sea gulls?

  DOLO: A feeling. Shhhh—I feel it—quiet—he’s here.

  RON: I blame you for Pete taking this Rome thing.

  DOLO: It’s a good prize. He needs it for his career.

  RON: I never had any prizes.

  DOLO: You never had a career. They are sea gulls. But which way is the ocean?

  Heavy Metal music starts playing. RENZO looks at all the bags.

  RENZO: Your—portabagagli è un intralcio—you must keep the passage clear—

  RON: Watch the bags. There’s thieves in Rome.

  RON and DOLO pick up their bags and follow RENZO off. Then

  RON returns, warily, to follow this music, coming out of a studio.

  RON goes gingerly to the studio. He sees JOE, wearing goggles, bent over a table, working on a white object with a dentist’s drill. The drill is loud. The music is very loud.

  RON: Hello?

  RON taps him. JOE is startled. JOE turns off the music.

  RON: Do you know Peter Shaughnessy?

  RON shows him a photo of PETE.

  JOE, rage: I’m here to work!

  RON: Are you a dentist?

  JOE: I’m an artist.

  RON: Me too. Where’s your paint?

  JOE: Painting is dead. A new age demands new material. I work in bone.

  RON: What do you mean? Bone.

  JOE: I carve bone. The elemental material. That’s a flower.

  RON: These white things are all bones?

  JOE: Yes.

  RON: What kind of bone?

  JOE: Human bone.

  JOE turns on the music.

  RON: Human bone? Where’s Pete? What is this place!

  The drill rises in intensity as RON runs screaming out of the studio.

  RON: Where is my boy? I’m calling the police. What’s the cover-up here?

  Silence. PETE appears in MATT’S studio, carrying a videocamera on a tripod.

  PETE, fierce: I have the idea. Matt. I am on fire. This is what it feels like to be an artist.

  MATT: Pete, are you crazy … jumping out a window?

  SARAH: Are you okay?

  PETE: Idea number five forty-one. Enter Elijah! Why have all these wretched pilgrims descended on Rome from America and Brazil and Budapest and Africa and Australia and the Arctic Circle? What are the sins all these people need forgiven? You want to put an X-ray on life? Show the invisible relation between man and God. What does man say when he thinks he’s alone with God?

  PETE starts rearranging furniture in the studio with a purpose. He drags a folding screen across the floor next to a chair, PETE steps back from his furniture arrangement. He’s created a small chamber with a chair on either side of the screen.

  SARAH: Pete, what are you doing?

  PETE: The confessional! The last frontier. The secret place where art begins. Explore this—the Holy Year—Show this at your precious career-making New Artists for a New Millennium! Start with my parents. Get them into confession. Tape them while they tell you the sins that have brought them all the way to Rome. Put them to some use.

  MATT: They’re your parents.

  PETE: Graham Greene: Every artist has a splinter of ice in his heart. Too personal? Step right up. See actual sins forgiven!

  SARAH: Maybe. Maybe.

  MATT: I don’t know what’s a sin.

  PETE: I’ll tell you what’s a sin—and it’s a sin worse than any Pale Gas. Failure! You conquered the Big C—but poor Matt—he couldn’t beat the Big F.

  To SARAH:

  Am I right? Am I right? Am I right?

  MATT: Get out.

  SARAH: Matt. Listen to Pete.

  PETE: Matt. Listen to Sarah.

  SARAH: Try it!

  MATT: Confession? Isn’t this invasion of privacy?

  PETE: It’s the twenty-first century. There is no more privacy. There’s a magazine that publishes private conversations lifted off cellular phones. Why? I have a right to know. Everybody has a right to know everything.

  MATT: Why would they talk to me?

  PETE: People always talk to you.

  SARAH cuts a piece of white tape and puts it into MATT’S black shirt collar. She steps back and looks at MATT.

  PETE: You always wear black. Tell them you’re a priest. Tell them the Pope looks at videos of pilgrims. Get them to audition and then confess. You’ve got a fortune waiting for you out there. Find out what it is they want forgiven. It’ll be hilarious. And once you tape them, go out and nail the eighty million other pilgrims come to this Mecca and the laughter will unhinge the world and you’ll be famous and marry Sarah.

  SARAH: After you tape them, we’ll unveil Pete.

  PETE: Absolutely! I’ll appear magically, in time for a smashing finale. A vision. The Holy Family reunited. They’ll call it a miracle. Matt, what do you have to lose?

  PETE hands him the camera.

  MATT, repelled: Video?

  PETE: Try it.

  SARAH: Try it.

  PETE: Oh, marry Sarah. Don’t lose her.

  MATT takes the camera like an alien object. He is puzzled.

  RON, DOLO, and RENZO enter arguing.

  RON, off: I’m not leaving here without my son.

  SARAH nods yes.

  MATT: Get them in here.

  PETE goes behind the screen. SARAH goes out to the gate, DOLO and
RON sit by the fountain.

  SARAH, to DOLO: Can I help you?

  DOLO: We’re pilgrims. Doesn’t she look like the stewardess on our flight?

  RON: She doesn’t look anything like—are you connected here? Our son Peter Shaughnessy—we are calling the police—there’s something evil going on here. Human bones. It’s too quiet. It’s too suspicious—

  RON shows SARAH the photo of PETE.

  RON: He could be fat—Peter Shaughnessy.

  SARAH looks at the photo, shakes her head no.

  DOLO: He’s dead.

  RON: Don’t be depressing.

  Takes SARAH aside.

  You look like you know something. Is Pete dead?

  SARAH: If I don’t know who he is—

  RON: Is Pete murdered? Who’s this guy working in bone?

  Tell me the truth?

  SARAH: Calm down—

  RON: Easy for you to say. You don’t even know Pete.

  SARAH: I don’t think he’s dead.

  RON: You don’t? I’m upset. I never had jet lag before. I got to stretch. I have a disability.

  RON, stretches: If I thought he was dead, I wouldn’t be here.

  SARAH: What do you think happened to him?

  RON: I think he’s met someone he doesn’t want either of us to know about. Like what’s this gay pride thingarama doing here? They got no right to have parades during the Pope’s big show

  DOLO: It’s my fault he left. My sins killed him.

  RON: Will you shut up? She’s got jet lag. I got my second wind. You want a sandwich? We brought our own food. I like to know what I’m eating.

  SARAH: But this is Italia. The best food in the world—

  RON: Don’t tell me Italian food. Why would Pete want to come to Rome when we got “The Isle of Capri” right on Queens Boulevard? Oh Jesus, I’m thinking the worst.

  DOLO: Dear God, take my heart out but don’t make the news be bad—

  SARAH: I don’t think your son’s been murdered. I would’ve heard something.

  RON: A cover-up.

  SARAH: Come with me. There’s someone who might help you.

  RON: Where?

  SARAH: In there.

  RON, wary: What’s in there?

  SARAH: Father Matt.

  RON: Father Matt?

  SARAH: He’s in charge of the Americans at the Holy Year. This studio is part of the Vatican representing the American pilgrim.

  RON: That’s me.

  SARAH: He knows all the Americans in Rome.

  RON, to DOLO: He knows all the Americans in Rome. Will he see us?

  SARAH: Of course.

  RON: I got to get freshened up. Is that a lizard?

  SARAH: You’re fine.

  RON puts on a jacket and picks up his bags.

  RON: This Academy is some place. I guess you’d have trouble getting people to apply here if the Rome prize-winners kept getting knocked off one by one.

  SARAH: No one’s ever been murdered here.

  RON: A serial killer’s got to start somewhere.

  SARAH: If you come in here—

  Gregorian chant plays.

  DOLO: In here? It’s dark.

  RON: It’s a holy place. She don’t have respect.

  They step into MATT’S now-dark studio. Candles burn. Behind the screen, PETE has put on a CD of sacred music. MATT stands there in black with his white collar.

  SARAH: This is Father Matt Gee. A close friend of the Pope’s.

  DOLO: Doesn’t he look like—

  RON: No, he don’t! Will you let me enjoy the surroundings? Everybody don’t have to look like somebody else—I like things to be new.

  RON kneels and kisses MATT’s hand:

  It’s an honor.

  SARAH gives MATT PETE’S photo.

  RON: Does my boy look familiar?

  MATT: I spend so much time looking into people’s souls that their faces and bodies are of very little interest.

  RON: This is a very beautiful thought but also frustrating as we are worried something bad might have—

  DOLO: He’s dead—

  MATT: I think not. I pass my hands over this face. No, the vibrations are of life. Not death.

  DOLO: He’s alive?

  RON: You think?

  MATT: I can help you. If I can make a videotape of you holding up this photo, I shall circulate it around the Vatican Missing Persons Bureau.

  RON: They have such a thing?

  MATT: Also I am very touched by your devotion. I’d like to tape you for my boss—my chief—to see.

  RON: The Pope?

  MATT: I can’t keep anything from you. Yes. I think His Holiness would be very interested in seeing you. He is looking at various tapes I make to choose representative pilgrims to dine with him.

  RON: The Pope eats?

  MATT: More than that. In this Holy Year, he will serve you your dinner, then wash your feet.

  RON: My feet aren’t clean?

  MATT: No. An act of humility.

  RON: The Pope wants to humiliate us?

  MATT: Humiliation is not the same as humility.

  RON: You don’t live in Sunnyside, Queens.

  MATT: Say a few words. I think His Holiness might be very interested in seeing you.

  SARAH goes behind the screen and takes the camera from PETE. She returns and hands it as if it were a sacred relic to MATT.

  RON: Is that the camera?

  MATT: Say a few words.

  RON, into MATT’s camera: Your Holiness? Arrivederci! We won a raffle. Dolo, you want to say something? Your Holiness, this is the Mrs.—

  DOLO: We got on a tour with a lot of lovely Nicaraguan people.

  RON, into MATT’s camera: A question? Why would the Vatican pick El Al for the official airline of the Holy Year?

  MATT: All religions are one.

  RON: Now he tells me.

  DOLO: We really like Rome. We got to our hotel like we told you—

  RON. And our tour guide—

  DOLO: A lovely nun from Africa—

  RON: Burko Fasina—

  DOLO: —Told us our rooms weren’t ready for another eight hours! We picked up our bags and ran. We want to find Pete.

  RON: Pot roast! Dogs biting my ass.

  DOLO: I showed Pete’s address to a policeman.

  RON: He pointed down a street.

  DOLO: And there was St. Peter’s and the Vatican bigger than any postcard—I could smell incense!

  RON: And piss.

  DOLO: Ron!

  RON: Your Holiness, why do you let them put rows of portable toilets around the edge of your holy square—

  DOLO: —Which I never knew was so enormous—filled with thousands of chairs and giant TV screens and an altar set up for mass, I guess, with you—Will His Holiness actually hear this?

  RON: Your Holiness, they leave about this much space for all of us in line to get inside—

  DOLO: I tried to fall on my knees but there was so many people I couldn’t—

  RON: The line to get in stretched for miles—

  DOLO: We’re only here three days.

  RON: At the rate we’re going we should be inside by the Holy Year Three Thousand.

  DOLO: We could see a marching band made up of little children—

  RON: They looked like dwarves to me.

  DOLO: Plus German pilgrims in leather shorts—

  RON: —Who were—well, I think it was yodeling. I saw somebody in a window—

  DOLO: Was it you, your Holiness? I took out a hundred pairs of rosary beads I’m carrying for the Altar Society and waved them up at you to bless.

  RON: A gypsy tries to snatch them out of her hands.

  DOLO: I held on for dear life!

  RON: I hit that gypsy in the nuts.

  DOLO: I kept the rosaries, but the gypsy got my wedding ring.

  The gypsy pulled it right off.

  RON: I guess I’m not married, huh? A free man—

  DOLO: Lifted over the crowd, I saw a naked baby
with no arms or legs.

  RON: Parents were holding up the kid.

  DOLO: The parents—beaming with hope.

  RON: Your Holiness, were you supposed to grow the baby arms and legs?

  DOLO: I wish that baby was my Pete so he could never leave me.

  RON: Miracle! We got close to the Holy Door—

  DOLO: About to go inside! All my sins forgiven!

  RON: What happens? The Swiss Guards push us back, and fifty thousand Chinese people—

  DOLO: He’s not kidding—

  RON: —Barge in front of us through some special door—

  DOLO: It’s not fair, your Holiness. We were here first!

  RON: The Swiss Guards push all us pilgrims back down the stairs.

  DOLO: Everyone tilted and we all fell down the stairs—

  RON: —The wheelchairs—

  DOLO: —The babies—

  RON: —The tour guides—

  DOLO: —The marching bands!

  RON: —Through the fence, right into the rows of the portable toilets—

  DOLO: —And they tip over, everything smelling of incense and urine—

  RON: I pulled Dolo. Get me out of St. Peter’s. We ran and ran and—

  DOLO: A taxi appeared. That was a miracle—

  RON: A cardinal all in red got out.

  DOLO: We jumped in and showed the driver the last address we had from Pete. And here we are.

  RON: One church down. Three to go. I think that counts as a visit, don’t you?

  MATT puts down the camera. It’s out of film. SARAH reloads the video.

  MATT: My boss will be very glad to get this report.

  RON: Any help he needs—

  DOLO: Could you get the Holy Father to bless my hundred rosaries?

  DOLO takes out the hundred rosaries.

  SARAH, taking them: Give them to me. And Father Matt might just know a secret door into St. Peter’s.

  RON: To get us in special? Now you’re talking.

  DOLO: We don’t want to put anybody out.

  MATT takes the camera from SARAH.

  MATT: Tell His Holiness what do you do?

  RON, into MATT’S camera: I’m a painter.

  MATT: Would he know your work?