‘But…so…they’re like us?’ asks Renatino, his face lighting up.
‘These two are the only ones who are like us,’ I say with conviction. ‘All the rest of them are guards.’
‘But Stephano and Trinculo hatch a plot with Caliban,’ Bennett protests.
‘Caliban manipulates them, taking advantage of their euphoria,’ I point out. ‘He tells Trinculo that he should become leader of the island…He’s playing on their simplicity, but also on the fact that they’re so excited to finally be free. You see, these two are the only guys on the island without a care and with nothing to hide. No fear, no guilt, no remorse, no conspiracies. They’re the only ones who are truly free.’
I know for sure that I’ve convinced them, I can see it in their eyes. Renatino’s are shining bright.
‘The only free characters in the whole show,’ I repeat decisively. ‘The only ones who, right from the start, can express their relief, their joy. Take that joy, take it.’ I hand them their scripts. ‘Take it all.’
I know that, as Ariel, I’ll almost always be on their side. I know already that it will be a pleasure to see these two prisoners take hold of the freedom that Shakespeare, with these two characters, threw into his play.
‘Hey, this Antonio guy, what kind of a look does he have on his face?’ I’ve only just finished with those two when Lello pipes up again. ‘Am I supposed to let on that I want to kill my brother, or not?’
I’m starting to tire of this. It’s not like I was born in the theatre, and anyway, I’ve got enough on my hands with my own character. Sure, I seem to know intuitively what to do. But knowing what everybody else should be doing too is a whole other thing.
‘Don’t worry about your character,’ I tell Lello. ‘Think about Prospero instead.’
‘Prospero? But I want to kill him.’
‘Uh-huh. And just think, he forgives you twice over. Work with this, the fact that Prospero forgives you twice. Once, when you set him and his daughter adrift on a boat, not knowing if he’d survive—because you had no guarantee he was going to find an island where he could land and start his life over. And the second time, when you meet up again on the island and try with Alonso to kill him a second time.
‘It’s true…’ Lello murmurs, and I can see that he’s starting to understand. ‘So I can be as nasty as I like?’
‘Exactly! You can be completely unscrupulous. He’s going to forgive you all the same!’ I know, it’s a non-actor’s explanation, but we’re talking about a prison inmate here. The only advice I can give him is: show us the worst side of yourself, the nastiest. Do what off stage can’t be done, what you wish you’d never done. That is the magic of theatre. ‘Don’t worry about what you’re supposed to do. No matter what you do, he’ll forgive you, so who gives a fuck?’
‘I can make Antonio real vicious?’ Lello’s face lights up.
‘As vicious as you like. You can even cut Prospero up into little pieces, but he has to forgive you. It’s written here—’ I thump the script with the back of my hand ‘—that he forgives you. How good is that?’
‘I’ll twist his head off!’ He goes off, happy as can be, to practise his part while to my right I hear Valentina’s voice ring out, ‘Why can’t you hug me, for heaven’s sake?’
I turn around. Valentina is one of the two women, volunteers who Cavalli, as promised, managed to convince to join our theatre company. Ever since our performance of Napoli milionaria, newspapers and TV channels have taken a huge interest in us, and as soon as they discovered that for the next show the director is going to stick two women in with a bunch of maximum-security inmates, they’ve been falling over themselves to interview Valentina, the younger one, who is our Miranda. How does she handle these coarse men, these criminals, they ask her. Is it very hard to make them keep their hands to themselves?
She replies with another question: ‘Coarse, that lot? Why don’t the rest of you men go inside for a bit and take a few lessons in manners and how to treat women?’ I’m not sure what she says is true, that we’re so incredibly polite. But I do know that we respect women, and wouldn’t so much as touch her with a single finger without permission.
That includes Federico, who is our Ferdinand in the play. As a Sicilian, he wouldn’t dream of breaching the code of honour. The thing is, though—just a minor detail—in The Tempest he’s meant to be her beloved.
‘You have to touch me. Embrace me, for heaven’s sake!’ Valentina begs him, so frustrated she’s almost in tears.
We’ve all been really envious of him—when you’re on the inside, having a woman to embrace is a kind of mirage—but now we envy him a little less. He’s faced with a tricky problem. I’m not going to step in this time because, frankly, I wouldn’t know how to advise him.
‘Federico, you have to be more affectionate,’ says Cavalli, who until now has been off to one side speaking to Cosimo in hushed tones about Prospero.
Federico looks at him with his big blue eyes. He’s a good-looking guy, a little over thirty.
‘More affectionate,’ he repeats disconsolately.
‘Well yes, Ferdinand is in love with Miranda!’ Valentina is gentle in her insistence. She places a hand on his shoulder and he jumps. ‘You have to make me feel the love.’
‘Valentina, what do I know about love?’ he replies softly, as though ashamed, but we all hear it because we’ve fallen completely silent. ‘I’ve been in here since I was eighteen years old. I’m all alone…’
We’re pitiful, I realise, suddenly seeing for the first time what a sorry bunch we are. We evoke tenderness, and pity. Our specialties are battles, murder, hatred and betrayal—and we’re perfectly at home with them. The problem comes when we have to show love.
I start to wonder if we mightn’t have taken on a bit more than we can handle with Shakespeare. It’s something too different from all that we’ve ever known and all that we’ve ever been. Something that will change us. That’s already changing us.
‘Hey Ariel, can you come over here a minute?’
‘All hail, great master! I come to answer thy best pleasure. What is it?’
I’ve now well and truly become Ariel for everybody in our section of the prison. I recently took up a job so I’m not locked up all day. Every morning at seven, and every evening at eight, I leave my cell early to do the cleaning. It gives me a chance to shower twice a day, so I’m always clean, even in the height of summer. There is no bathroom in your room when you’re in prison, and you only get free access to the bathrooms if you’re allowed out of your cell. I wake up and I wash these nice, long stretches of tiles, and then I go for a half-hour run, have a shower, and go to school. Since I started reading, I’ve decided to go back to study as well, and in a year I should be able to graduate from middle school. Then, with all the time I’ve got left in here, I should be able to get a technical diploma. That is, as long as they don’t go too heavy on the maths, which really isn’t my forte.
Anyway, since I’m out and about I visit all the cells to see if anyone needs anything: maybe a packet of pasta or coffee, or some cigarettes. If someone new has arrived overnight, I check whether he needs anything to tide him over until the next round of shopping. The previous worker didn’t offer this service, but I consider it my duty. Being the only one allowed out and not checking if the others need anything just isn’t my style. It’s not Ariel’s style.
‘Everything all right, Ariel?’ Gaetano asks.
‘You bet!’ I give him a slap on the back. Another thing I would never have dreamed of doing before. But since we’ve been doing theatre, everything has changed, even relations with the guards. Gaetano, who got himself assigned to supervise rehearsals and practically knows the whole play off by heart, looks at us differently now, but so do the other guards.
‘We know that you never get mixed up in anything dodgy,’ they told me when they realised that I visit each cell in the morning running errands. It’s true. Nobody has even dared ask me to deliver so much as a
n illicit message. I’m not going to be a carrier pigeon, there’s no way. But how do the guards know that?
They don’t know. But they trust Ariel.
Everybody trusts Ariel. He’s the one that connects all the characters. And The Tempest has united all of us. Those of us in the theatre company go off to one side during the exercise hour to talk about our parts. We address each other as Antonio, Gonzalo, Ferdinand…the one who’s worst off in this respect is Trinculo, because it sounds kind of rude in Italian, but even he prefers to go by his stage name. The fact is we’ve all come to the same realisation: now that we know these new characters, we can never go back to being who we were before. They’re all grander than we are. All of them, even the worst ones. Even Antonio, who wants to kill his brother. He is part of this strange kind of magic, one that allows us to stand on stage and do something nobody can ever do in real life. And it helps us understand something that we’ve never understood in real life.
Sometimes it wasn’t easy. After the performance of Napoli milionaria, some of the other inmates took a nasty turn. They’re still criminals, and certainly not theatre types. All they saw that night was Sasà in a skirt. They tried to make fun of me: ‘Donna Amalia, you gonna bring me a coffee?’
I had to throw a couple of them against the wall.
‘You’ll find Donna Amalia in the theatre. But here, I’m Sasà. Got it?’ Whether I’m on stage or off, I’m still a Hothead—that’s the message. I’m certainly not a man who’ll just stand there and be made fun of.
But now that we’re rehearsing The Tempest, even those guys are beginning to show a little more respect. They can see that this thing is drawing interest from newspapers and television channels—a couple of journalists have even come to sit in on rehearsals—and we’re starting to become a source of pride. They can see that we’re changing, that we’re coming together. Of course, they tell us off because we try to avoid strikes and disputes with prison management: we don’t want to risk having the project shut down. But they understand that it’s thanks to theatre that we’ve been able to find a way to communicate, to reduce the distance between inmates and guards, and change their attitude towards us. And this is good for everybody, including them.
One day the warden comes to talk to us. He wants to hear how the show is going and what progress we’re making. We explain the plot and characters, getting pretty animated.
‘And then there’s Ferdinand, poor guy, he’s in love but he thinks he’s not going to be able to marry the girl he loves…’
‘And what about Gonzalo’s monologue? How great is that? I’th’ commonwealth I would by contraries execute all things.’
‘Nah, but the best of the lot is Trinculo, that bit where he decides he’s going to be king of the island…’ The two drunks that nobody wanted to play have now become the most popular characters.
An hour and a half into our meeting, we realise that the warden, who spoke at the beginning, has now been silent for some time.
‘So, what do you think?’ I ask him. He looks a bit dazed. Maybe he doesn’t like us.
‘I…Do you realise you haven’t talked at all about prison?’
‘Prison? What’s prison got to do with it?’
‘In my twenty-year career,’ he says slowly, ‘I’ve not once spent an hour and a half chatting to prisoners without speaking at all about prison. I’ve not once spent this long talking about the theatre.’
Huh, it’s true. This statement knocks us out. How many days has it been since I talked about prison, about the problems in here? How many weeks has it been since I gave it any thought? How many nights not turning towards the wall in shame, holding back the tears, thinking that the darkness will never end?
‘You know, sir,’ I say, shaking my head, unable to keep a smile from my lips. ‘You need to get out more.’
‘Thanks, Sasà. You write real beautiful.’ Lello steps away, putting the sheet of paper in his pocket and glancing around to check if anybody has seen him. But even if they have, nobody will say anything. At least twenty of the guys in here get me to write their love letters for them.
As soon as you take up reading, you’re faced with a problem: you suddenly know loads more words. And if you read poetry, it’s even worse: you know more beautiful words. Words for love, regret, tenderness, longing—feelings that no one in here is capable of expressing. Leafing through the pages of all those books, I found myself with my hands full of words. And I wouldn’t be Ariel if I didn’t decide to throw them all up into the air and let them float onto the dry pages of these men’s letters, these men who have never been granted words.
I love thee best when joy has fled
thy cowering brow and eyes aghast;
when all thy heart is drowned in dread;
when life for thee is overspread
by dreadful storm-clouds from the past.
Thou cam’st to kindle, goest to come; then I
Will dream that hope again, but else would die.
From the way these poets are able to describe love and absence, you’d think they were all condemned to weekly prison visits. One by one, following the recommendations of don Pasquale, who knows heaps about poetry, I’ve been accompanied from the library back to my cell by the lot of them: Baudelaire and Neruda, Donne and Quevedo. But the best, the greatest, remains Shakespeare.
I soon discovered that, as well as theatre, he wrote a lot of sonnets, and I can’t drag myself away from the music I hear in them. Even the other inmates have learned where the most beautiful love poetry comes from, and when I write their letters they ask, ‘Can you stick some of that Shapesgear in?’ I remember that not so long ago I was mangling that name, too, and it’s hard to believe. They ask cautiously for Shakespeare, as though they were asking for a prohibited drug, and I write their wives addictive words.
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alterations finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Yet do thy worst, old Time, despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Once I’ve handed over the umpteenth letter, I go back to my cell feeling a little melancholy. Writing for other people’s women makes me miss Monica more than ever. I open up a collection by Baudelaire that I haven’t yet returned, and perhaps never will, because some days I find my very own torment in those pages, and because so many verses are about the sea. The sea that I miss so much.
love Ocean always, Man: ye both are free!
the Sea, thy mirror: thou canst find thy soul
in the unfurling billows’ surging roll,
thy mind’s abyss is bitter as the sea.
Things are not looking good if I find myself agreeing with Baudelaire. ‘And poets tire of verse and maids of love.’ Maybe I’m just tired of writing other people’s letters. But what if Monica’s tired of loving me? What if she’s tired of coming to see me every two weeks, married to a kind of ghost that she can’t even touch? What if she’s tired of waiting for me?
What if she’s no longer my Miranda?
To a prisoner, Miranda is the ideal woman. Chaste, perfect; he dreams his woman on the outside is like this, too, but knows she’s not. Like everyone else, I spend ages trying not to think that my wife could be cheating on me—a lot of us are on medication just to keep that particular thought at bay. We know that if things were the other way around, we would never wait ten years for our wife. Not even eight years, or five. It’s not how men are made. I
t’s in our nature to cheat. Women cheat out of spite, lack of affection, revenge, or because they lose their way. Women cheat because of absence. Absence…
But Monica is like Miranda. The woman who says, ‘Girls, when you feel like your heart is going to stop, then that’s it—forget about your head, don’t go flitting about.’ Miranda is faithful to Ferdinand from the very first day. And when her father tells her that she can’t love Ferdinand, because she’s never seen any other man apart from Caliban, she replies: ‘My affections are then most humble. I have no ambition to see a goodlier man’. It’s love. And she’s the love we all wish for.
Monica is Miranda, I’m sure of it. But I’m no Ferdinand. None of us is. Ferdinand helps carry her load and takes away her troubles, whereas we’ve never saved our wives any toil. I went out stealing, and all I brought home was stolen bread, too meagre to nourish the soul. Stolen bread doesn’t satisfy. In fact, it makes you even hungrier because you swallow guilt along with it. And the person who receives it is unable to eat peacefully, either. I remember those evenings as I lay next to Monica, after we made love, when she would say bitterly: ‘I bet as soon as it gets dark you’ll run off to use cocaine; you prefer it to my company. What do you want from me?’
I’d like to have been Ferdinand, or even to become him. To know how to be close to the person you love, to make a simple gesture that’s not the usual ritual of flowers and gifts. So perhaps it’s not by chance that at this very moment, my eyes fall on the little mirror in my cell.
I stand up and detach it from the wall. I take some salt and lemon juice and I scrub hard with a rag until the white enamel on the back comes off. This way the mirror becomes a sheet you can see through; another inmate taught me this.
Then I go and get a photo of Monica, a close-up in which she looks especially beautiful. I like it a lot and it’s hard to part with it, but Ferdinand is guiding me. Carefully, I attach the photo to the mirror, along with a smaller photo of a rose. Now, when I look into it I see Monica, as beautiful as a painting.
Set Me Free Page 9
