Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

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  “Maybe I’ll wait for you here,” says Linden finally. “I’ll keep the house in order, and I can fix up the garden for when you return. In the spring we’ll plant potatoes and maybe onions and peas; maybe some pumpkins too,” he adds. Borrello addresses him wearily, as if he resents having to put into words something he feels he’s already made clear, though of course he hasn’t. “I’m not coming back,” he finally says before returning to his silent observation of the valley.

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  Linden watches him leave from the door the next day; he would have liked to accompany him at least to the main road, but he still has trouble walking and, besides, it’s better if he’s not seen. Borrello gave him his ration card and told him how to use it, pretending to be him. Of course, he won’t be able to do that in Borgosesia, where Borrello is known, but, once he’s recovered, he can use it in Coggiola, or Serravalle Sesia or Biella, if he thinks he can get there without being recognized. Borrello obtained a new document in Coggiola that Linden can use as if it were his own, and he bought a bag of rice, some potatoes, and conserved meat so he can survive until he can walk better and use the ration card. Before he leaves, Borrello lifts one of the floor planks and pulls Linden’s rifle out from beneath it: he had hidden it there about eleven days earlier, on the night he found him wounded and unconscious on the edge of the ravine. He also pulls out a pistol and hands it to him: he tells him he once wanted to kill someone with it, but wasn’t able to pull it off, and no longer needs it. Linden nods; later he has to tie up the dog in the shed so it doesn’t follow Borrello. When he’s finished, and goes outside, the other man has already left, dragging the wheelbarrow containing the ash wood box along the road with some difficulty, stopping at times to cough. He didn’t say goodbye, and Linden thinks that’s best if that’s how he wants it. Borrello taught him something, and Linden won’t be able to forget him or what he learned from him. The dog’s panicked barking can be clearly heard outside the shed and maybe Borrello can hear it too, amplified by the echoes in the mountains; if that’s the case, maybe Linden could shout something out to him too, thank him or convince him to stay, but he doesn’t. Borrello doesn’t look back even once.

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  At midday, when he’s already untied the dog and fed it, Linden and the animal can hear the sound of the train crossing the valley. The dog remains in a dreamy haze, lying there at his feet, but Linden, intuitively, smiles.

  Florence

  APRIL OR MAY 1947

  Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

  GUY DEBORD, Howls for Sade

  The typewritten transcription of a talk; the speaker and date and the location are not noted in the text.

  The manuscript of what, despite its fragmented and somewhat chaotic nature, seems to be a novel. There are two alternating plotlines. In the first, a handful of people about whom we know only their largely unrealistic nicknames, are confined in what is perhaps a hospital or, more likely, a prison. There, somehow, the circulation of a drug among the inmates allows the authorities to extract and by some means profit from their pain and perhaps their memory, though how they do this is never explained. In the second plotline, a man drives along the highways of a country he says nothing about; at some point he picks up a violinist or a cellist—the author alternates the two terms, as if he were unaware of the differences in timbre and especially in size between the two instruments; or, more likely, due to the fact that the novel was never revised—he meets along the road. Predictably, he strikes up a romance with the musician, about whom we never learn anything, not even her name. The protagonist, at least, is called “P.” Over the course of what seem like days or weeks, the young musician tells P. a story that turns out to be a lie, though perhaps not. It’s unclear what relationship there is between the first plotline and the second: maybe there isn’t any, or maybe P. is one of the characters that appear in the hospital or prison (it would be more appropriate to call it a “concentration camp,” though, given what appears to be the date of the manuscript, the early 1930s, that would be an anachronism, or shocking and terrible prescience on the part of its author), and he shows up there shortly after the events of the second plotline, with his mind already completely destroyed by insanity or the drugs they’re giving him or the nature of his forced internment. Maybe he was institutionalized by the young violinist or cellist for some reason, or perhaps P. killed her and was found out and sentenced; maybe the second plotline is a fever dream or delirium of one of the characters in the first one, possibly the guy known as “Rusty.” None of this is explained at any point in the short novel: some one hundred and forty typed pages, double-spaced and with wide margins. The manuscript is headed with the phrase “Shakespeare Machine” and the very ambiguous: “ ‘What have you done with William Shakespeare’s dog?’ she shouted.” Either of the two phrases could be the title of the work, more likely the first, its succinctness making it more appropriate for a title.

  A play some six pages long entitled “Woodpecker.” The action takes place in the dining room of a middle-class home decorated with the exuberance and bad taste typical of wealthy homes in the early decades of the twentieth century. The scene is banal: the father reads the newspaper, the mother sews, the children—she is older than he is, almost a young adult already—are looking at a photo album. They exchange brief comments, casually formulated and in connection with each of their activities; but despite the actors talking and moving, no sound comes out of their mouths. After a few minutes, the first act ends. In the second act, the action again takes place in the family dining room, but it is of a completely different nature: the man hits the woman, spits in her face, throws her to the floor, and drags her around by her hair, stopping to kick her; the children also slither around on the floor, kissing each other, the young woman masturbating her brother to give him an erection. Although they all seem to shout and moan, none of that is heard: in its place, and thanks to a recording, the audience hears the polite and somewhat childish exchanges of the first act, which contrast significantly with the action onstage. When it ends, giving rise to the third act, the situation has recomposed, the characters are in their original places, and a fifth actor bursts onto the scene and is greeted with displays of recognition and affection by the father and, to a lesser extent, the children: his visit clearly seems to upset the woman, however. None of what they say can be heard by the audience: in its place—and via a recording—we hear the insults, shouts, and moans that correspond to the previous act. The final act takes place on a dark stage devoid of actors; the dialogue from the preceding act is heard, with the visit of a family friend who turns out to be, and this explains the woman’s discomfiture at his arrival, the wife’s lover. The audience should understand, from the stage directions at the end of the text, that the second act is really the third and vice versa, and that the dialogue of the second is really that of the first and that of the third, the second. The author suggests the possibility that the play be circular, reproducing the dialogue of the third act during the first, which is mute in his version; he also proposes adding a fourth act, in which the audience “hears” the characters’ thoughts. In a handwritten note added later, the author realizes another possible way of interpreting his work, in which it was all the wife’s dream, as she considers bringing her lover into the family home, with the predictable consequences for all concerned: in that sense, the play would be a denunciation of Italian women’s situation in the first half of the twentieth century. In the same handwritten note, the author adds that the title of the piece comes from the anonymous poem “Woodpecker / Sad Industrialist / Undertaker,” scrawled on a wall in the town of Sansepolcro in 1923.

  “Kaidmorto,” a comic piece for one actor; length, eleven pages. In the notes for its staging the author indicates that it was specially created for Emilio Ghione and that he is the only actor who has a right to perfor
m it; an addendum dated January 10, 1930, notes the actor’s death a few days earlier, and goes on to state the author’s wish that the piece never be performed. The note is particularly disconcerting: indeed, Ghione, who was an exceptionally popular actor and film director in the 1920s, as well as a novelist, died in January 1930; but the piece’s original concept made it impossible to perform with Ghione alive or not, as it consisted of two simultaneous and contradictory speeches, one in English and the other in Italian, that were to be spoken “at the same time” by a single actor. Both texts cover several pages in two columns with hardly any stage directions. The material impossibility of an actor performing two monologues simultaneously, not to mention that of the audience understanding both at the same time, isn’t brought to light at any point in the play, though it’s implicit in the title, which references the being of the same name described by Diodorus of Sicily who “had a tongue split half from root to tip, so that it could speak to two people at once, in different conversations and different languages.” The texts in the play differ, and describe two dreams in which the kaidmorto appears. The link to Emilio Ghione and the description of the work as a “comic piece” are presumably ironic references to the actor’s dour and occasionally terrifying appearance, even in the rare comedies in which he performed: again, there is a reference in this to Diodorus of Sicily, who wrote that the kaidmorto “would bite laughing.”

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  Luca Borrello’s theater pieces seem to follow two of the relatively vague general guidelines of “The Futurist Synthetic Theater” manifesto (1915) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra, with its string of restrictions and jabs: “it’s stupid not to rebel against the prejudice of theatricality when life itself […] is largely antitheatrical”; “it’s stupid to pander to the primitivism of the masses”; “it’s stupid to want to explain with minute logic everything taking place onstage, when in life we can’t grasp events in their entirety”; “it’s stupid to submit to obligatory crescendi, prepared effects, and postponed climaxes”; “it’s stupid to allow one’s own genius to be burdened by a technique that everyone (even imbeciles) can learn by study, practice, and patience”; etc. (The hysterical italics are the author’s.) An example of B.’s adherence—not without its contradictions—to the Futurist theatrical aesthetic is found in his work “Depressa” [sic].

  In “Depressa,” two characters who strongly resemble each other are arguing in a hotel room; one of them is the shadow of the other, which detached when its “owner” was run over by a streetcar, which seems to have happened just minutes before. The shadow is dying, but it’s never clear why it’s the shadow in its death throes and not the man who was run over. The interesting aspect of the piece, if there is one, lies not in its mimesis of a reality that B. may not even believe in, nor in its adherence to its own guidelines—as confusing as they inevitably are—but in the confrontation between the shadow and its former owner, in the course of which the shadow reproaches the man for various decisions he made in the past, including rejecting a woman, making a poor choice of profession, and something only described as “confusing and terrible” that took place in the cathedral plaza in Perugia. In the notes to the piece—some sixty-two pages typed on both sides, a length that is anomalous in Futurist theater, which tends to be brief and even extremely brief—the author states that the physical resemblance between the two characters can only be guaranteed by choosing twin actors for the parts, something naturally difficult or impossible to find on the Italian theatrical scene of the period and, in general, in every period and country, despite which—as the author specifies—that is a nonnegotiable aspect of the work. The piece must be performed by twins or not performed at all. As for the rest, its title comes, as the author notes in a perhaps superfluous stage direction, from the poem by M. S. Oliver of the same title, which reads: “Depressa fugen les hores / depressa y no tornan més. / Aprofita l’hora / dels encants primers, / aprofita l’hora que no torna més.” No information was found about the aforementioned M. S. Oliver, who is perhaps fictitious; beyond that, as far as is known, the author did not speak Catalan or know anything about Catalan literature.

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  Despite the aforementioned difficulty of finding a pair of identical twins on the Italian theater scene, the next two plays by Borrello again require them.

  The first, entitled “Red Red Balloons” [sic], consists of a series of completely meaningless dialogues that are to be performed while the actors hang off an iron structure: from the description offered in the long note that begins the play, the structure is similar to a scaffolding typically used in the construction and repair of buildings, to which dozens or hundreds of balloons have been tied (the author exaggerates here, despite not giving exact figures). The actors have to untie the balloons and let them float up to the stage ceiling: because they’re performing upside down, the balloons’ ascent is perceived by the actors as a fall, which they find disconcerting, and which gives rise to situations that should be comical and, yet, aren’t, or aren’t very. Instead, the audience may be overcome by boredom, which was possibly the author’s desired effect.

  A similar piece, with completely different characteristics, offers greater narrative development and a deeper engagement with the aforementioned mood. The work, entitled “Abel, Cain, Seth,” offers only half a dozen pages of dialogue that is diagrammatic. Most of the manuscript consists of performance notes that are, unlike the dialogue fragments, highly precise: according to them, the piece should be performed on a large stage with a double bed placed on an inclined plane, a sewing machine with its respective chair, an umbrella stand filled with umbrellas, a dissection table with its surgical materials, etc. All these objects should be laid out in such a way that they create different, clearly defined spaces around them through lighting that comes up when the action is taking place there and hides them while it’s on another part of the stage. The action begins in the bed, where, at the start, a woman should be having sexual relations with a man. Yet the man, designated simply by the letter P, should be played by three actors, brothers, if possible, insists the author (in other words, triplets). The author’s insistence stems from the fact that the entire play revolves around this plot: three brothers are born joined at the waist—and because of that rejected by their parents, who hand them over to circus performers who, due to a series of events that the author insinuates in the notes but refuses to clarify, are now their owners. As teens they fall in love with a woman, one of the circus midgets. In spite of, or perhaps due to the sexual possibilities offered by these conjoined triplets—three heads, four arms, six legs, three penises, three tongues, etc.—the midget accepts the lover or lovers into her bed. But each of them longs to possess the woman exclusively, which is—in this and similar cases, or not—anatomically impossible. The arrival at the circus of a surgeon who offers to separate the three brothers, despite the obvious risks, changes everything; the brothers argue: one of them refuses to take part in the experiment in the name of everything they’ve been through together; another, in the name of all they have left to go through together. (The spectator understands, or should understand, that each of them “embodies” a verb tense, states the author: past, present, and future.) Only one of the brothers, the third, clings to the idea of separating from the others: he gets them drunk with the help of the woman and the surgeon, so that the operation can be carried out. That third brother dies. The initial situation—the woman and her lover, now double, are in bed, etc.—is repeated; when they are done, and as in the first act, the woman sews. Shortly after, the brothers argue: the elimination of one of them doesn’t allow either of the remaining ones to exclusively possess the woman; it doesn’t even mean they enjoy a greater percentage of her despite sharing her between two instead of three. One of the brothers, the taller one, now claims to fear the operation’s future consequences; for the other brother—of course—the future is inconceiv
able. Once again, the latter convinces, or is convinced by, the surgeon to perform another operation, and the second act ends with the two brothers lying on the dissection table, one of them drugged by the other. In the third act they have already been separated, and the woman frolics with one of the brothers in bed: she is apathetic, however; when they finish the sexual act and each heads to an opposite end of the stage—the woman goes back to her sewing—the other brother bursts onto the scene. He’s survived the separation but doesn’t seem to understand what’s happened; in one of the more comic scenes, he tries to join up with his brother again by inserting himself under his clothing, hopping onto his back, etc. The other brother, who has no arms because he was the one in the middle, fights him off, they tussle, he kicks his brother on the floor over and over again. His concern for the future made no sense: the young man has no future. The murderous brother realizes, understands, regrets, but when he looks to the midget for comfort, she rejects him. Beside him he finds the surgeon, naked and, for the first time, completely bald, like the brothers. The midget has finished sewing what turns out to be a suit: it is made of blue latex, similar to the one worn by the brothers: the surgeon gets into it; the suit has two dolls, one on either side, that represent the other brothers. The midget kills the surviving one and goes off with the surgeon, who takes the triplets’ place in the circus hierarchy. The curtain comes down.