Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (8 page)

MOTHER
. And he sent me away!

FATHER
. Well provided for in every way, to that man, yes, sir—to set her free from me.

MOTHER
. And to free himself.

FATHER
. Yes, to free myself as well—I admit it. And a great evil came of it. But I acted with a good intention—and more for her than for myself, I swear. [
He folds his arms; then suddenly turning to the
MOTHER
] Did I ever stop looking after you, tell me, did I ever let you out of my sight? Not until he took you away, from one day to the next, without me knowing it, to another town. Because he was so stupid as to misunderstand my pure interest, pure, sir, without the slightest ulterior motive. I watched the new family that was growing up around her with incredible tenderness.
She
can vouch for that. [
Points to the
STEPDAUGHTER
]

STEPDAUGHTER
. And how! When I was still a little girl, little, you know, just so high—with plaits down to my shoulders and drawers longer than my skirt—I used to see him at the school gate when I came out. He came to see how I was growing up …

FATHER
. That’s vicious! Scandalous!

STEPDAUGHTER
. No, why?

FATHER
. Scandalous, scandalous! [
Turning abruptly to the
DIRECTOR
in agitated explanation
] When she went away, sir [
referring to the
MOTHER
], the house suddenly seemed empty. She had been a constant burden; but she filled the house for me. Left alone in those rooms I felt like some mindless fly. That boy there [
indicating the
SON
] brought up away from home—I don’t know—when he came back, he no longer seemed to be mine. With no mother to be a link between us, he grew up by himself, quite alone, having no intellectual or emotional connection with me. And then (it may be strange, sir, but that’s how it is) I became at first fascinated and then gradually attracted by that family of hers which I had brought into being. The thought of them began to fill the void that I felt around me. I needed, I really needed to believe she was at peace,
busy with the simple cares of life, lucky in being away from me, far from the complex torments of my soul. And to prove it I would go to see this child as she came out of school.

STEPDAUGHTER
. That’s true. He used to follow me in the street, smiling, and when I got home he’d wave his hand to me—like this. I looked at him with wide eyes, suspicious. I didn’t know who he was. I told Mother, and she must have understood immediately. [
The
MOTHER
nods agreement
] At first, for several days, she stopped sending me to school. When I did go back, there he was at the school gate—looking silly—holding a large paper package. He came up to me, patted me, and took from the package a lovely big Florentine straw hat with a border of rosebuds—just for me!

DIRECTOR
. But this is all anecdote, narrative.

SON
[
scornfully
]. Of course. Literature, literature.

FATHER
. Literature, you say! This is life, sir. Passion.

DIRECTOR
. Maybe. But it’s not for the stage.

FATHER
. Agreed, sir. Because all this only leads up to the action. And I don’t say it should be staged. In fact, as you can see, [
pointing to the
STEPDAUGHTER
] she’s no longer a little girl with plaits on her shoulders …

STEPDAUGHTER
. And drawers showing beneath her skirt!

FATHER
. Now comes the drama, sir. New, complex …

STEPDAUGHTER
[
sombre, proud, coming forward
]. As soon as my father was dead …

FATHER
[
quickly, leaving her no time to speak
]. The misery of it, sir! They came back here without letting me know, thanks to her stupidity. [
Indicating the
MOTHER
] She hardly knows how to write; but she could have got her daughter to do it, or that boy there, to tell me they were in need.

MOTHER
. You tell me, sir, how I could have known that he felt all this.

FATHER
. That’s just what’s wrong with you. You’ve never been able to imagine any of my feelings.

MOTHER
. After so many years apart, and everything that had happened …

FATHER
. And was it my fault if that fine fellow carried you off like
that? [
Turning to the
DIRECTOR
] From one day to the next, I say … because he’d found some job or other elsewhere. I wasn’t able to trace them; and so, naturally, my interest faded as the years passed. The drama breaks out, violent and unforeseen, on their return; at just the wrong time for me, driven by the needs of the flesh, still unabated … Ah, what misery, what real misery, for a lonely man who had never wanted degrading relationships; not yet old enough to do without a woman, and no longer young enough to go out and look for one, simply and without shame. Misery, did I say? More like horror, horror, because no woman can give her love to him any more—And when a man realizes this, he should learn to go without … Easy to say! Every man, sir, wears his dress of dignity—outside, before other people. But within he knows only too well the unspeakable things going on in the secret depths of his being. We give in, give in to temptation; even if only to pick ourselves up immediately after, in a great hurry to reconstruct our dignity, solid and unbroken, like the slab on a grave, hiding and burying from our eyes every trace and even the very memory of our shame. And it’s the same for everybody. Though not everybody has the courage to talk about such things.

STEPDAUGHTER
. But when it comes to doing them, everyone’s got the guts for that!

FATHER
. Yes, everyone. But in secret. That’s why it takes more courage to talk about them. Because it’s enough for a man to speak out and hey presto! He’s branded as a cynic. But it’s not true, sir: he’s just like all the others; better, in fact; better because he’s not afraid of using the light of his intelligence to reveal the blushing shame that lies in the bestiality of mankind that always closes its eyes so as not to see. Take woman, for example. What about her? She looks at you, provocative, inviting. You seize her, and no sooner do you hold her close than she closes her eyes. It’s the sign of her commitment, the sign that tells a man: ‘I’m blind, now blind yourself!’

STEPDAUGHTER
. And when she stops closing them? When she no longer needs to hide her blushing shame from herself by closing her eyes; and when instead, dry-eyed and impassive, she sees the shame of the man who has blinded himself, even without love? Ah, how repulsive, how disgusting, all those intellectual complexities,
all that philosophy that first reveals the beast and then wants to save and excuse it … I can’t listen to him, sir. Because when a man feels obliged to ‘simplify’ life like that—so bestially—shrugging off all the trammels of being ‘human’, every chaste longing, every pure feeling, idealism, duty, modesty, shame … then nothing is more contemptible, more sickening than certain kinds of remorse: crocodile tears!

DIRECTOR
. Let’s come to the facts, ladies and gentlemen, the facts. This is just talk.

FATHER
. Indeed, sir. But a fact is like a sack: when it’s empty it won’t stand up. To make it stand you have to fill it with the motive and sentiments that determined it. When that man died and they came back here penniless, I couldn’t know that she [
pointing to the
MOTHER
] had been looking around for work as a dressmaker to support her children, and that she had ended up taking a job precisely with that … that Madame Pace!

STEPDAUGHTER
. And a very fine dressmaker she is, if you want to know. She may seem to be serving the most respectable ladies, but she has fixed everything so that those respectable ladies serve her instead … without spoiling things for the other ladies who are, well … so-so.

MOTHER
. Believe me, sir, when I say that it never even crossed my mind, the idea that that witch had given me a job because she’d set her sights on my daughter …

STEPDAUGHTER
. Poor Mother! You know, sir, what that woman would do whenever I brought her the work that my mother had done? She’d show me how my mother had ruined the things she’d been given to sew. And then she’d start deducting, deducting. So that, you see, I ended up paying, while my poor mother thought she was sacrificing herself for me and for those two by staying up at night to sew for Madame Pace.

DIRECTOR
[
quickly
]. And that’s where, one day, you met …

STEPDAUGHTER
[
pointing to the
FATHER
]. Him, him, yes sir! An old client! You’ll see how it works on the stage. Superb!

FATHER
. Then, when she came in, her mother …

STEPDAUGHTER
[
quick and vicious
]. Almost in time!

FATHER
[
shouting
]. No, in time, in time! Because luckily I recognized her in time. And I took them all back home with me, sir. Now picture this new situation, sir. Hers and mine. Her the way you see her; and me unable to look her in the face.

STEPDAUGHTER
. Very funny! But could I be expected—‘after that’—to be still the modest, virtuous, well-bred young lady, to suit his damned aspirations towards ‘a solid moral health’?

FATHER
. Here’s where the whole drama is for me, sir: in the conviction I have that each one of us, you see, believes that he is ‘one’; but it’s not true: he’s ‘many’, sir, ‘many’, according to all the possibilities of being that exist within us—‘one’ with this man here, and ‘one’ with that man there. All very different. And with the illusion all along that we are ‘one for everybody’, and always the same ‘one’ in every single thing we do.
^*
It’s not true, not true. We realize this when, by some wretched bad luck, something that we do leaves us suddenly hooked up and hanging: I mean that we realize we are not wholly represented by that action and so it would be a horrible injustice to judge us by that action alone, to keep us hooked up and hanging, in the pillory for a whole lifetime, as if a whole life were summed up in that action. Now do you see the malice of this girl? She caught me in a place where she shouldn’t have known me, doing something that should not have concerned her. And she wants to give me a reality that I could never have expected to take on for her, in one fleeting, shameful moment of my life! This, sir, is what I feel most deeply. You’ll see that it gives the drama a very special significance. But then there’s the situation of the others. His … [
Indicates the
SON
]

SON
[
with a scornful shrug of the shoulders
]. Leave me out of it; I don’t come into this.

FATHER
. You don’t come into it?

SON
. I don’t come into it, and I don’t want to come into it, because you know very well that I’m not cut out to be seen here with you lot.

STEPDAUGHTER
. Common we are! Not refined like him! But you can see, sir, that whenever I look at him and fix him with my scorn, he lowers his eyes—because he knows the harm he’s done me.

SON
[
hardly looking at her
]. Me?

STEPDAUGHTER
. You. You. If I’ve gone on the streets, I’ve got you to thank. You! [
ACTORS
recoil in horror
] Did you or did you not deny us, by the way you behaved—I won’t say the intimacy of your home—but the simple charity that relieves guests in trouble? No, we were intruders, come to invade the realm of your ‘legitimacy’. Sir, I would like you to observe a few little scenes just between him and me. He says that I bullied everyone into submission. But you see, it was precisely his behaviour that made me use the argument that he calls ‘despicable’; the argument that brought me into his house as its mistress, along with my mother—who is his mother too.

SON
[
slowly coming forward
]. How they enjoy it, sir, how easy it is to gang up on me! But just imagine a son, living quietly at home, until, one fine day, what does he see coming his way but a young lady, head held high like this and bold as brass, who asks to see his father because she has something or other to tell him. And then she comes back, with the same haughty air, bringing that little one there, and treats his father—who knows why?—in a very ambiguous and brusque manner, asking for money in a way that suggests he must, absolutely must pay up, because he’s under an obligation …

FATHER
. But I really do have that obligation; it’s for your mother.

SON
. What do I know about that? When did I ever see her, sir? When did I ever hear her mentioned? And then one day she turns up with
her
[
pointing to the
STEPDAUGHTER
], with that boy, and that child. And they tell me ‘Oh, didn’t you know? She’s your mother too.’ Then, from the way she carries on [
indicating the
STEPDAUGHTER
again
], I manage to grasp why, from one day to the next, they suddenly came into my home … Sir, what I feel and what I experience is something I can’t say, something I don’t want to say. The most I could do is confess it in secret, but I wouldn’t—not even to myself. So, as you see, there’s no way it can give rise to any action on my part. Believe me, sir, I’m a character who has not been ‘realized’ in dramatic terms; and I’m ill at ease, truly ill at ease in their company. They can leave me out of it!