Donna Amalia: ‘What do you want from me? I only did what everybody else was doing: I was just defending myself!’
I read that line and it’s like I’ve been hit over the head. I re-read it.
I hear it in my mother’s voice.
Then I hear it in mine.
What do you want from me? I only did what everybody else was doing.
You’re my son and I died before you—that’s what everybody does. You don’t have to feel guilty.
I abandoned my mother but only because they were going to kill me. I was just defending myself. What do you want from me?
I turn the pages. And within the story of Napoli milionaria I see something new. It’s not just the play I used to watch on TV every Christmas with my parents when I was a boy. I find my own life in Naples, people I know. The son Amedeo, who has turned to crime, the daughter Mariarosaria, who whores herself to American soldiers…and Donna Amalia, a woman who loved her little boy before he lost his innocence.
I’m nine years old again and I’m in Standa with my cousin Totò stealing lipstick. And I can see once more the basement of the department store, where the security guard is sticking needles in our hands ‘so that we learn not to do it again’. I can see my mother marching towards the store to tear strips off him, to teach him not to do it again.
They’re just children. Just children…
I’ve never started anything. I’ve only ever reacted to the actions of others. Wrong reactions to wrong actions. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone to the store to steal? No, at nine years of age I could go in there and steal. It was my mother who shouldn’t have sent me to steal, and the guard who shouldn’t have stuck needles in my hands. I shouldn’t have sold contraband cigarettes? What about the police that would buy them off me? At the age of nine, how can you tell that something is really wrong if nobody is showing you by example? I was allowed to make mistakes because I didn’t know any better. I was just a child. And everybody around me was doing a lot more and a lot worse than I was.
I only did what everybody else was doing.
I absolve myself. The voice of my mother in my head stops insulting me.
What do you want from my mother and me? We were only defending ourselves! And in so doing we hurt ourselves and each other.
After all those weeks, a tear, just one, manages to find its way out of my eye.
6
‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’
Ophelia in Hamlet
Act IV, Scene V
‘What have you done? Are you trying to kill yourself?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, shrugging my shoulders.
‘You’re mad! You’ll destroy your body. Don’t you know there’s a whole schedule for this sort of thing?’ Lucia, the doctor, is astonished, and her eyes show fear.
‘I’ve never been very good at doing what I’m told.’
I’ve decided to go off the drops. I decided last week while standing in front of the mirror. Was that really me, that dull-eyed rag doll? Swollen, grey, with broken capillaries, my entire face covered in a patina of failure.
‘You’ve become like all the others,’ I told myself. At least half the inmates here are on medication; it’s their only way of surviving.
And for those in charge, who don’t know what to do with us, it’s the easiest way to make inmates behave. Except that you can’t just find that stuff in a pharmacy, and when you get out, you’re still in its clutches. You’re enslaved forever.
There are a lot of faces like this one around the prison, I told myself. Too many. You don’t need to see yet another one when you look in the mirror. So I reached out and emptied the little medicine bottle down the sink. There’s no point trying to give up if it’s still full: if you happen to glance at it while you’re feeling bad, it only takes a moment to swallow a mouthful of the stuff. If the bottle’s empty, you won’t have the choice.
‘Striano, you can’t quit the drops just like that. You have to reduce the dosage in stages.’ Lucia’s face shows complete incomprehension; to her mind I should have gone insane by now. ‘There’s a year-long schedule you have to follow to go from 120 drops to zero. Three days at 120, three days at 112, and so on…’
‘I don’t have that much time at my disposal.’
‘What do you mean you don’t have that much time?’ She’s kind, so she doesn’t come out and say it, but what she’s thinking is that I’ve got all the time in the world, I’m in prison.
But that was before.
‘I’ve got the show.’
‘What show?’
‘The play. It’s on in two weeks. There’s no way I could get on stage with my face the way it was.’ I slap myself on the cheek, to show her that I’m back in good shape. ‘Don’t I look handsome now?’
‘Striano, have you really cut out the drops just like that? How do you get to sleep?’
‘Oh, you know, I tire myself out reading,’ I reply truthfully. ‘I read and read, and I eventually get tired.’
I can see the look of incredulity on her face, but I really am telling the truth. It’s true that I started taking the drops because I couldn’t sleep. Night is a prisoner’s worst enemy. It’s when you’re alone, and all your ghosts turn up. The guys in the cell next to mine all take drops because they can still sense Paolo’s spirit in there—he hanged himself two weeks ago. They managed to stop him on four previous occasions but the fifth time he did it at 5.40 in the morning, in complete silence. He even put a cushion under the covers so that if they woke up they wouldn’t notice the bed was empty. Now nobody can sleep in that cell anymore, not without drops, because they sense that he’s there. I can understand that. My mother is still around.
But she no longer scolds me. Now, if she comes I can say to her: Leave me in peace, Mamma, I’m reading. I’ve often fallen asleep with the script on my face. And in the daytime, instead of thinking about my troubles, I think about my lines, about my movements on stage. We have five hours of rehearsal twice a week and I make it a point of honour always to improve something from one rehearsal to the next.
‘Striano, you’ve got to be careful. Go back on the treatment… You can’t be cured instantly,’ Lucia tells me.
I nod. ‘You can’t be cured instantly, it’s true. But my treatment’s already underway.’
‘In what sense? What do you mean?’
‘Theatre is my medication, doctor,’ and I smile at her the way Donna Amalia would smile.
Don’t get me wrong. I had vowed not to get involved in the theatre project. I gave the script back to Cosimo. But before that, I read it four or five times. I couldn’t put it down. By the time I returned the script, I knew all the parts. I’d learned a lot of the lines by heart without even realising it.
Cosimo was hanging out his washing on some clothes horses in the yard. A week had passed since he’d left me with that bundle of pages and we hadn’t spoken since.
‘Cosimo, I don’t want to do it…’ I told him, holding out the script. ‘But what a character, eh, Donna Amalia?’
‘Why don’t you want to do it?’
‘Cosimo, I’m not Donna Amalia, I’m Sasà, look at me—beard, hairy all over…’
‘So what? It’s the theatre.’
‘Sure, some little parish show, with boys playing girls’ roles… And everyone else gets to have a laugh—look at that guy, dressed up all slutty.’ And to show him what it would be like I recited a couple of Donna Amalia’s lines, right there on the spot, with all the gestures and a woman’s voice.
He burst out laughing.
‘No, that’s not theatre! That’s pantomime.’
‘Exactly.’ I became enraged and thrust the script at him. ‘And I’m not going to be a caged monkey. I’ve told you it’s not for me. Go find somebody else.’
But Cosimo is not one to give up. The next day he came up to me while I was running in the courtyard. I removed my headphones out of politeness, but I didn’t want to listen to him. I could see that he wa
s still holding that script.
‘I hope you didn’t take offence?’
‘What do you think I am, some sensitive actor type who takes offence?’
‘I’m sure you’d be good. But you played Donna Amalia too much like a transvestite. It can be done well.’
‘Why should I bother?’
‘You’re like me. You don’t like staying cooped up in your cell too long.’
I pricked up my ears. It was true. Being involved in theatre meant getting away from my cell and spending a few hours out in the open. More than that, as I gazed at those sheets of paper in Cosimo’s hand, I realised that I’d been missing it. The night before, even though it was only for a few hours, my cell had felt empty without my coffee-stained script. The truth is, it had already begun to keep me company. It was the first cellmate I’d had since arriving in Italy that hadn’t made me feel in danger.
I’m holding the crumpled script now, as I enter the rehearsal room. There is a theatre in the prison, but they haven’t shown it to us yet; we’re rehearsing in a large, empty room until we’ve learned our lines. From two in the afternoon until seven in the evening, this is our kingdom. Here I can forget that I’m in jail. Here I’m in Naples, in a poor home inhabited by poor people. In some ways, it’s a little too close to reality. In other ways it’s a completely different reality, and a lot better than life in my cell. This is confusing for me, but it’s not a negative feeling. I count the hours until it’s time to come back to this room. There are fifteen of us and Cosimo is lead actor and head of the company. Most of us are Neapolitan, as you’d expect. The main female roles, of which there are two, are of course played by men: I’m one of them. We’ve given the third female role, a small one, to a Calabrian without, shall we say, a great deal of talent.
It took only one rehearsal for me to realise that I do have talent. And that this whole theatre business is something I know better than anything: a challenge.
Here, like elsewhere, I want to show who I am and what I’m capable of. Anyone could see straightaway that I was the most motivated, the one who really gave it his all. Cosimo has been complimenting me a lot on my involvement. He’s actually a bit surprised to find that it’s often me, not him, who manages to get the others motivated.
Like today with Michele, who is totally distracted and is delivering his lines in random ways.
‘What’s going on, Miche’? Are you going to do this properly or what?’
‘Ah…my visit went badly…’ His wife came to see him today, and there’s clearly some kind of problem. Michele places the script on a chair. ‘Sorry,’ he says, retreating to a seat in the corner.
‘All right, let’s go on without Michele,’ says Cosimo. ‘Hey, Sasà. Where are you going?’
Go on without Michele, my arse. In prison there’s a very basic principle—if you’re doing fine but somebody else is not, then you’re not doing fine, either. Prison is where friendships are really glued tight; unlike on the outside, in here people have a true love for others, even if they would ordinarily have nothing to do with each other.
‘Hey, what’s up?’
‘Sasà, leave me be. It’s my wife. She’s in a bad way.’ I can see he’s struggling to tell me, partly because it’s painful for him, and partly because he’s afraid of reopening my old wounds. I’m guessing his wife has the same thing my mother had.
I put an arm around his shoulders. I wouldn’t do this anywhere else, but in the rehearsal room these kinds of gestures are easier.
‘She’s sick, Sasà. And she’s all alone,’ Michele murmurs. ‘It’s not just that my wife is dying, but she’s going to die alone, without me.’
‘I understand,’ I say, and I mean it. ‘But we made mistakes, Michele. Part of our punishment means not being able to be with our family and friends when they’re dying. And you know what? Even people on the outside are unable to be with their family, because they don’t have the time. We’re not the only bad guys.’
He looks at me in surprise. ‘You’re so right.’
I’m surprised, too. Where did that come from? Yet it’s true, and that’s the way it’s always been. We only do what everybody else is doing. We make mistakes, we betray others, we leave our loved ones on their own.
‘I feel lonely,’ Michele adds. ‘Even though nothing has happened yet. I feel so lonely.’
‘Nobody’s alone in prison. At least not like on the outside.’ It’s true. Here you only have to show that you need a hand and along it comes at once. It’s how we show the world, ourselves, the Creator watching us, that we still have some positive energy. We know God exists, that there’s some kind of external force. And here you don’t experience loneliness unless you’re completely rejected by prison society, which means you really are a nasty piece of work. ‘You’re not alone, Miche’.’ I gesture towards the others, who have started rehearsing again, with Cosimo giving me a dirty look every so often because I challenged his authority. ‘You’ve got us. The company.’
‘I know, Sasà, thank you…but the thought of rehearsing today, after such a bad visit…’
‘What the fuck do I care that you had a bad visit?’ Now that he’s had some tender treatment he needs to be shaken up a little. I can sense it. ‘We need to rehearse,’ I add.
My rough voice snaps him out of his lethargy, and he looks at me uncertainly.
‘We need to rehearse?’
‘You bet we do, no matter what.’ And I get up and pull him to his feet as well. ‘We’re actors, Miche’.’
We are actors. Even outside this room we find ourselves talking about the show, about rehearsals, about things that didn’t go well and how we can improve. Even when we go out into the yard for exercise hour, we go over our lines.
It gets on everyone else’s nerves. They ask us, ‘What’s going on. Aren’t you interested in prison life anymore?’
‘It’s not that we’re not interested. It’s just that the theatre project is more important.’
‘Fooling around on stage? What’s the point of that?’
‘Well, for instance, it helps reduce your sentence. It weighs on you less.’ The theatre is like a beautiful door, one that prison management can’t close.
Or at least that’s what we think.
‘All recreation activities are suspended.’
‘What do you mean, suspended?’ I stare at Gaetano. No rehearsals? They’re keeping us locked in? What’s happened?
‘Suspended, Sasà. Isn’t that clear enough? No more activities until the warden decides what to do with you all.’
‘You lot are never going to work out what to do with us.’
‘Sasà, now’s not the time to joke around.’ I can see that he’s nervous. Things must really have turned ugly if he’s afraid of being seen acting friendly with me.
‘Do you see me laughing?’ I reply nastily. The show is on in ten days. What do they mean we can’t rehearse? We should be rehearsing twice as much. We’re nowhere near ready.
‘It’s because of that guy who escaped,’ Gaetano decides to tell me, though I’d worked that out myself. ‘The warden is new, you know how it is…he’s only just started here and someone escapes. He doesn’t know the prison and until he gets a sense of the lie of the land he’s suspending everything.’
‘But that’s not fair! It’s not as though the guy escaped from the theatre!’ No, he just strolled right on out, exiting the visiting area. His mother and brother came and they handed over their ID at the entrance, but it’s not as though the guards check you again when you come through to collect it on the way out. You say your name, they give it back to you, and they let you out. So out he went in place of his brother, no trouble at all. By the time the guards realised, it was too late, and they couldn’t very well lock up his family in his place.
When we first found out, we celebrated—the poor guy was a lifer. But it turns out there was nothing to celebrate. Now what will we do? Apart from having a show to prepare, there’s also Federico, a Sicilian kid. H
e’s seriously unbalanced and depressed. Theatre is his only medication. If you cancel rehearsals on him, it’s like taking methadone away from a heroin addict. I should go and tell the psychiatrist. Forget about the drops, doctor. This guy is going to kill himself, or somebody else.
I need to talk to don Pasquale.
‘Don Pasquale, can I come in?’
‘Of course, Sasà, come on in. Can I make you a coffee?’
‘I never turn down a coffee.’
Don Pasquale is a man with a heart of gold, and two life sentences for murder. There’s no contradiction in that, it’s just the way it is. He’s sixty-two years old and he knows that his life is over. He’s no longer interested in anything. He doesn’t get involved in anything in here, and only confides in two or three people at most. I’m one of them. The other is Leonardo, the guy I stood up for on the football field, who’s like a son to him. Ever since that day he has opened his cell door to me, a great honour, and every so often I drop in to say hello, or when I have a problem, like today.
‘They’ve suspended all activities, don Pasquale—the theatre project.’
He nods. ‘You need to see things from the warden’s point of view. Some fellow escaped when he was based in Padua; now he moves here and it happens again.’ I don’t know how, but don Pasquale always knows everything. ‘He’s walking on eggshells.’
‘But we didn’t do anything.’
‘If you didn’t do anything you wouldn’t be in here.’
‘Don Pasquale, don’t take it out on me. I’m worried about the show.’
‘Why?’ he asks point-blank, fixing those dark eyes on me, as deep as a bottomless well.
‘Why?’
‘Why are you so interested in this?’
I hesitate. It’s a good question. But there’s a complex answer.
‘Because it’s bringing out the people with talent, don Pasquale. And I’ve got talent,’ I say, with conviction. ‘On stage, you’re good not because of what you did on the outside, but because of what you’re doing right there and then. It’s not like football with the Sicilians.’
Set Me Free Page 6
