Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (30 page)

SPIZZI
. No, it’s the curse of those words that I’ve been repeating for two years with all the feeling that their author put into them.

ILSE
. But those words are addressed to a mother.

SPIZZI
. Thanks. I know that. But the man who wrote those words wrote them for you, and he certainly wasn’t thinking of you as a mother!

COTRONE
. My dear friends, since we’re talking about the blame that he attaches to the words of his part, I have something to say: dawn is near and yesterday I promised that I would tell you the idea that struck me about where you could go to put on your
Fable of the Changeling Son
… if you really don’t want to stay here with us. You should know that today there’s going to be a huge marriage feast to celebrate the union between the two families known as the Mountain Giants.

COUNT
[
worried because he is on the small side, raising an arm
]. Giants?

COTRONE
. Not really giants, dear Count. They’re called that way because they are tall burly folk who live up on the mountain nearby. I suggest that you go and present yourselves to them. We’ll go with you because you need to know how to handle them. The task that they’ve taken in hand up there, the constant physical effort, the sheer courage needed in their struggle with the risks and dangers of a colossal project—–excavating, laying foundations, diverting streams into mountain reservoirs, building factories and roads, clearing new farmland—all this has not just given them massive muscles; it’s also made them naturally thick-headed and slightly brutish. But the fact that they’re puffed up with success gives one a handle on them: their vanity. Lay it on with a trowel
and they soon soften up. You can leave that part to me while you think about your own business. It’ll be no trouble for me to take you up the mountain to the wedding of Uma di Dornio and Lopardo d’Arcifa. And we’ll ask for a hefty fee, because the more we ask for the more seriously they’ll take what’s on offer. But now there’s another problem: how will you manage to perform the
Fable
?

SPIZZI
. Don’t the giants have a theatre up there?

COTRONE
. The theatre’s not the issue. Anywhere will do to set up a theatre. I’m thinking of the play you want to perform. Along with my friends, I’ve been up all night, until a short while ago, reading your
Fable of the Changeling Son
. And I’ll say this, Count: you’re pushing it a bit when you say that you’ve got everything you need and that you’ll leave nothing out. There are only eight of you, and you need a whole crowd.

COUNT
. Yes, we don’t have people for the walk-on parts.

COTRONE
. Walk-on parts? Come off it! They all speak.

COUNT
. But we’re enough for the main characters.

COTRONE
. The problem’s not with the main characters. What matters above all is the magic—I mean that’s what creates the fascination of the tale.

ILSE
. That’s true.

COTRONE
. And what can you create it with? You’ve got nothing. A choral work like this … Now I can see, Count, how you managed to spend your whole inheritance on it. As I was reading through it, I felt absolutely transported. It’s just made to be given life right here, Countess, among us, believers in the reality of phantoms more than in that of bodies.

COUNT
[
pointing to the
PUPPETS
on the chairs
]. We saw the puppets already prepared …

COTRONE
. Already? Ah yes. They were quick about it. I didn’t know.

COUNT
[
amazed
]. You didn’t know? Wasn’t it you who got them ready?

COTRONE
. Not me. But it’s simple. All the time I was reading up there, they were getting themselves ready down here, on their own.

ILSE
. On their own? How?

COTRONE
. I did tell you, my good friends, that the villa is inhabited by spirits. And I wasn’t joking. Here we’re never surprised at anything. Forgive me if I say that human pride is truly idiotic. There are other beings living a natural life on this earth, dear Count, beings that we humans simply cannot perceive under normal conditions. But this is only because of our own defects, our five very limited senses. Well, every so often, when conditions are not normal, these beings reveal themselves to us and scare us out of our wits. Hardly surprising, since we never even guessed they existed! Non-human denizens of the earth, my friends, spirits of nature, of all kinds, living among us, unseen, in the rocks, the woods, the air, the water, the fire. The ancients knew it well, and the simple folk have always known it. And here we too know it well, for we compete with the spirits, and often we win, forcing them to give our magic wonders a meaning that they neither know nor care about. If you still see life as restricted to the limits of the natural and the possible, then I warn you, Countess, that you will never understand anything here. We are beyond those limits, thank God. It’s enough for us to imagine things and straightaway those images come to life of their own accord. If something is truly alive in us, then by virtue of that same life it will emerge spontaneously. Birth is freely given to whatever must be born. At most, we use what means we have to ease those births. These puppets, for example. If the spirit of the characters they represent is embodied in them, then you will see them move and speak. And the real miracle will never be the representation, believe me, but always the imagination of the poet where those characters were born alive, so alive that you can see them even when they are not there in the flesh. To translate them into a fictional reality on the stage is what theatres are usually for. It’s your function.

SPIZZI
. So now you’re putting us on the same level as those puppets of yours.

COTRONE
. No, not on the same level, I’m afraid; a little bit below that, my friend.

SPIZZI
. Even below?

COTRONE
. If the spirit of the characters can be embodied in the puppets so well that they can move and speak, then after all …

SPIZZI
. I’d be very curious to see this miracle.

COTRONE
. Ah, you’d be ‘curious’, would you? Well, you know, ‘curiosity’ won’t help you to see these miracles. You need to believe in them, my friend, the way children do. Your poet has imagined a Mother who believes that witches put a changeling in the cradle in place of her baby son: yes, those wind-riding witches of the night that humble folk call ‘the Women’. Educated people laugh at the idea, we know, and maybe you do too; but let me tell you that ‘the Women’ really do exist, my good friends. Many a time, on stormy winter nights, we’ve heard them round here, shrieking at the top of their voices as they flee past on the wind. Listen, if we want to, we can even conjure them up.

At night they crawl into the houses

Creeping down the chimneys like

Smoke, black smoke.

What can a poor mother know?

Tired out, her day’s work done,

She sleeps at last, while in the dark

Those bending figures lean and stretch

Their scraggy fingers …

ILSE
[
amazed
]. You even know the verses by heart already?

COTRONE
. Even? But we can put on the whole
Fable
for you right now, Countess, from beginning to end, just to try out all those necessary things that you don’t have and we do. For one moment, Countess, for one moment try to live out your part as the Mother, and I’ll show you, just to give you an example. When was your son exchanged?

ILSE
. When? You mean in the
Fable
?

COTRONE
. Of course, where else?

ILSE.

Lying asleep one night,

I hear a plaintive cry, I wake,

Grope in the darkness, in my bed,

And by my side:

Not there.

Where could that crying come from?

My little child, so tightly wrapped

In swaddling bands, could not have stirred—

COTRONE
. Why are you stopping? Go on. Ask the question. Ask it. Just as it is in the script: ‘Is not that true? Is not that true?’

He has hardly finished the question before the stage, darkened for a second, is flooded as if at some magic touch by a new unearthly light, and the
COUNTESS
finds herself flanked by two women, the
PEASANT NEIGHBOURS
of the first scene of
The Fable of the Changeling Son.
They immediately answer her:

FIRST NEIGHBOUR
. It’s true. It’s true.

SECOND NEIGHBOUR
. A baby, six months old, how could he?

ILSE
[
looks at them, listens to them and is seized by a fear which is shared by
SPIZZI
and the
COUNT
who recoil
]. Oh God, can it be them?

COUNT
. How is this possible?

COTRONE
[
shouting at the
COUNTESS
]. Carry on, carry on! What’s so surprising? You drew them here yourself. Don’t break the spell and don’t ask for explanations. Say: ‘When I picked him up …’

ILSE
[
obeying in a daze
].

When I picked him up

Where he’d been thrown—

There—under the bed—

From some unknown source above comes a powerful derisive cry:

VOICE
. He fell! He fell!

The
COUNTESS
looks up in terror, as do the others
.

COTRONE
[
quickly
]. Don’t lose your place. It’s in the script. Carry on!

ILSE
[
surrendering to the spell
].

Ah yes, I know.

That’s what they say: he fell.

FIRST NEIGHBOUR.

He fell, they say

Who did not see

The way he was found

Under the bed.

ILSE.

Say it then, say it,

How he was found,

You who came running

As soon as I shouted:

How was he found?

FIRST NEIGHBOUR.

The wrong way round.

SECOND NEIGHBOUR.

Feet pointing to the bedhead.

FIRST NEIGHBOUR.

The swaddling bands in place

Stretched tightly round

The baby’s little legs.

SECOND NEIGHBOUR.

Tied with a ribbon …

FIRST NEIGHBOUR.

All in order.

SECOND NEIGHBOUR.

So someone must have taken him,

Taken him from his mother’s side,

And put him there under the bed

Out of sheer spite.

FIRST NEIGHBOUR.

If only it were simply spite!

ILSE.

When I picked him up …

FIRST NEIGHBOUR.

Such tears!

From offstage and all around come gales of incredulous laughter. The
TWO NEIGHBOURS
turn and shout as if to ward them off:

THE TWO NEIGHBOURS.

It was a different child,

It wasn’t him.

We swear it!

For a moment darkness returns, still echoing with the laughter which ceases abruptly when the stage is once again lit as it was at the beginning of the act. Through the various doors, half-asleep as if just woken by the laughter, come
CROMO, DIAMANTE, BATTAGLIA, LUMACHI, SACERDOTE
to find the
COUNT
,
the
COUNTESS
,
and
SPIZZI
stunned and perplexed by the mysterious source of the laughter and the sudden disappearance of the
TWO NEIGHBOURS
during that moment of darkness. They enter all speaking at once
.

CROMO
. What’s this? What’s going on? Is this a rehearsal?

DIAMANTE
. I can’t manage it; I’ve got a sore throat.

LUMACHI
. Ah, Spizzi, dear fellow! Thank God for that!

BATTAGLIA AND SACERDOTE
. What’s all this? What’s all this?

COTRONE
. You have been performing, Countess, with two living images, figures born directly from your poet’s imagination.

ILSE
. Where have they gone?

COTRONE
. Vanished.

CROMO
. Who are you talking about?

BATTAGLIA
. What happened?

COUNT
. The Two Neighbours appeared to us, from the first scene of the
Fable
.

DIAMANTE
. ‘Appeared’? How do you mean, ‘appeared’?

COUNT
. Here, here, all of a sudden, and started performing with her. [
Indicating the
COUNTESS
]

CROMO
. We heard the laughter.

LUMACHI
. And how! Who was laughing so loud all over the place?

SPIZZI
. A bag of tricks! All a set-up! Let’s not be dazzled like a bunch of dummies. After all, we’re in the same business.

COTRONE
. Ah no, my dear fellow, if you put it like that, then you’re not in the same business. There’s something that’s more important to you. If you really were in the same business, you’d be the first to
let yourself be dazzled, because that’s the one sure sign that you belong. I’ve told you already to learn from children who first invent a game and then believe it and live it as true.

SPIZZI
. But we’re not children.

COTRONE
. If we were children once, we can always be children. And, in fact, you too were amazed when those two figures appeared.