201
Much as Sc125, LUCIA sits at a table working on a large puzzle under an implied veranda on the E side of the stage. She is by turns fretful and artificially jolly. A NURSE sits watchfully opposite her.
In another part of the stage (the pool) an ARTIST paints JOYCE's portrait. His eyes are unbandaged but have the uninquisitive quality of a blind person's.
LUCIA When I was small I only had 2 toys: a golf ball and a gray rubber dolly called Glas. I was very fond of Glas but she fell out of the window and her head all broke open. My parents promised to find me another but they never did. I was a dancer, you see.
NURSE Yes I've seen you.
LUCIA I always chose my father's tie. He had a lot, it was very hard. We always lived in 2 rooms that was why I'm not very clever. I always slept with my parents.
NURSE Did you!
LUCIA Yes in Trieste it was with uncle Stani and his family. We had such fun; it was hard to get to sleep when it was hot, with so many people. I went to school there, I can still say Il Senato.
Then we lived in Zurich. I don't know why, I think it was the war. We were very very poor. I had to keep changing schools because we moved all the time. One week it'd be a german school and the next italian. Giorgio got into trouble for not keeping up.
NURSE conventionally And where's Giorgio now?
LUCIA becomes very confused and nervous O? O? I don't know. I think he went to America. Yes, they wouldn't let me hold the baby. She grows distressed.
NURSE That's alright Lucia, that's alright. Calm down. You were telling me about your life in Zurich.
LUCIA O, well. They used to go out in the evening a lot and leave us lonely, locked in like pigs in a sty. Giorgio would yell out of the window as they left. But it made me very unhappy. They seemed to be abandoning us. I used to help Nanno churn the butter. We had no money to buy it until we came to Paris. I had to use tessera to get sugar and things to eat.
There is a light shower
NURSE O isn't that pretty. I wonder if there's a rainbow?
LUCIA threatened by hope A rainbow. What use would that be now?
The ARTIST occasionally addresses JOYCE to turn his head.
JOYCE It's queer what different people remember. If things'd been different ... but we'd no choice. It was an Odyssey - I had to plow on, chartless across unnavigable seas -how else?- the gunwale never more than a flickering inch away from the green engulfing depths. In every surge there were infinite turnings /none at all. A shabby language teacher? A jostled nobody on the clanking tram, getting off 2 stops early to save fares.
If only could've spouted words without reflection, like a journalist's! To've uttered the profoundest commonplaces, been understood, applauded, and forgotten: floating momentarily on the swirling effluent of public thought. And after a lifetime of good lunches the ultimate accolade: a Collected Writings ... remaindered in paperback. Posterity be buggered! Get your snouts in trough boys. What they won't shell out for today ain't worth a blue fart tomorrow.
NURSE Look, maybe that bit goes there?
LUCIA All those purple bits, what do they mean?
NURSE Mean?
LUCIA Yes, they must mean something?
NURSE O they look like part of a parasol to me.
LUCIA No, that's what they are. I want to know what they mean ...
NURSE But they don't mean anything, they're just part of the picture.
LUCIA No no. Everything makes a pattern: there are no accidents. It's all part of a whole. That's why I ... That's why I ... It's just I can't see what it is.
NURSE O we can never really know everything.
LUCIA Why not? Someone must. Everything must fit together, it must, cause otherwise ... There are no edges, no borders, to make a frame. Somebody's lost the box. I haven't a picture to work from.
NURSE O it's an old puzzle.
LUCIA Stupid to have a puzzle without a box lid.
NURSE Why don't you collect up all the sky?
LUCIA So that it can mock me thru the bars?
NURSE Well, it would ... sort things out.
LUCIA How? It's old.
NURSE It's still a good puzzle.
LUCIA If I solved yesterday's puzzle, how'd it help today?
NURSE You learn from it.
LUCIA No, no; the past is a ferocious dog, tied up, waiting to bite you; I went there to see who I was and now I can't get back out.
JOYCE To lose your sight is like losing a limb - nothing's crueler. Your brain still thinks it's there -in your mind you feel it- but you can no longer be touched. I could reach thru time to touch others, and know I have done it, yet who will now comfort me?
O the more you understand, the more is taken away from you. See nothing: die content as an unhearing monkey. In this hour of fame I have a heart of weeds. Praise is nauseous to me, and all the stupid questions like burning rags.
JOYCE turns towards where LUCIA is. The lights dims on the ARTIST. Eventually JOYCE stands, addressing her but having noone to lead him thither.
O Lucia, Lucia. You are the only one who required no explanations, gone under the hill, all of them, all of them, like layer upon layer of felt, burying the past in a blanket of uniformity; yet felt feeling can penetrate it, cutting thru sharply age after age after age: grief the knife that severs and binds.
To be known is perhaps the one wish of god. If s/he could've said it, why bother to create a world, and people it? If it could be said. What are the words? What are the words, Lucia? You know because you would not use them.
One bed after another, and only the graceless fumblcling, the grunted intimacies of strangers. And after, no search for meaning, only the desperate thrust for another fix, another sliming fast of shutters, of punting to be submerged in the strong mask of a rhythmic male buddy. O I saw it all, but what could a father do? The opened door one can never enter?
NURSE Look that's a whole section done now. What is it?
LUCIA having lost interest Gray rats crawling on a rotting pile of rubbish.
NURSE No it isn't silly. Those aren't rats, they're ...
LUCIA Dirty washing.
NURSE No, they're victorian ladies and gentlemen.
LUCIA Same thing. Someone's talking to me, I know but I can't hear ... they've given me those pills to make sure I can't hear what I think.
NURSE Now don't go upsetting yourself. You're seeing Dr Jung after lunch. You don't want to be in a state, do you?
LUCIA A state of grace.
Thinking back to Sc105 LUCIA walks out into the rain and stands looking down into the Ôpool' where JOYCE & the ARTIST are stationary.
NURSE O come in now, y'might catch cold.
LUCIA So what. Come and look.
NURSE What at?
LUCIA The world. The real world.
NURSE comes over reluctantly
NURSE I see nothing but wind-whipt trees and the shredded clouds.
The pool fills with dry ice.
LUCIA That's right. That's all you see.
NURSE Come in, there'll be a storm!
The octopus film is projected onto the swirling vapour.
LUCIA But in that mirrored world is my reality. There I don't fail everyone's expectation of me. I go straight to the very heart of existence - and I know. I am at one.
She suddenly flings herself into billows. LUCIA is borne on the surface for a little while by JOYCE and the ARTIST before sinking. JOYCE and the ARTIST disappear. The NURSE shrieks and rushes toward her, struggling vainly on the upper steps of the pool. A MALE NURSE rushes in.
M NURSE Don't think this is going to do much for my modeling career.
The substance evaporates and LUCIA is discovered lying at the bottom. They make no attempt to raise her.
202
JUNG is suspended upsidown from the catwalk. As he speaks he swings slowly from side to side like an enormous pendulum. LUCIA gives slow dreamy answers under hypnosis.
LUCIA I can't come in yet.
JUNG And when can you?
LUCIA In the fullness of time.
JUNG And when will that be?
LUCIA Never, if you keep stopping it.
JUNG The fire?
LUCIA Yes, and the lake - and others ... I could've -
JUNG waits.
Zelda's already gone in.
JUNG Uhhuh?
LUCIA I saw her amid the flames: bright - dazzling - burn(ish)ed like a jewel; Zelda is of fire too, like me.
JUNG You still see her?
LUCIA No: now she's dull and scorched beneath the ashes - children's voices play above the wreckage.
JUNG jumps down.
JUNG You saw this? How?
He gets straight into an electric wheelchair which he drives over to the poolside.
LUCIA Are you that stupid? No wonder you can't cure anyone. You see too much to understand anything.
JUNG I haven't got your eyes.
LUCIA You don't need eyes.
JUNG How do you know?
LUCIA turns on her front and begins to get up with some of her old energy.
LUCIA You just know. You feel it, like you feel a rithm.
JUNG How tho?
She starts to move predatorily towards him.
LUCIA There's a tap turned on between your tummy and your head. It warms your whole body like sex. You've never had it?
JUNG prepares to back off.
JUNG Did you discuss any of this with Zelda?
LUCIA We didn't need to. We both knew.
JUNG About the lake.
LUCIA describes a large circle around JUNG, circumscribing him. At first he turns on the spot, watching her.
LUCIA When it's clear, a tall island lies on the water like an abandoned thunderbolt. Pink geraniums burst out from a forest of pebbles. There's a twisting road that runs right to it's heart ... And that's (becomes agitated) In it, in there, it dances, I dance ...
JUNG wonders whether to call a nurse, but is trapt by her.
But when I suffocating as smoke CANT GET THRU -SICK- THE SURFACE. Jangles in my head like a migraine, gouges sick! my eyeballs out with a fork. That's when ... S-i-ckkkkk sounds skewer my brain from ear to ear.
JUNG tries to escape but is hexed within the circle. He dodges around in the vehicle
JUNG But what happens inside the island?
LUCIA seductively approaching In the limitless ocean of desire there are tides that sweep far from the groins of land. Mmhm, yes. (She begins to caress him) Weightless, on the farthest shores of my mind I walk down strange deserted streets, and in unpeopled palaces build luxurious orgies of imagination. I could have gone any other way: all routes converge, tho the same route has all destinations.
She reclines on him.
Can you unlock the hidden vestige of your heart, Doctor Jung, here, before these people? What of the little white-coated researcher, the mousey one whose glasses glinted in the faded winter light of a deserted lab as you buried your face in her bum -Mm?- respected professor?
LUCIA moves into the audience, addressing 2 only of these paras to appropriate INDIVIDUALS.
Don't you wish the act could last for ever, so that the dying embers would continue to send sparks shooting thru your brain? Admit it.
(to a respectable older woman) That time after lunch, so long forgotten, when a cheap hotel seemed the obvious step. Alan, Alex, what was his name? You never did it again. But sometimes, off guard, you catch yourself thirsting for the memory of what can never be acknowledged.
(to a young middle-aged couple) God, you were a rat. But you could never tell her. She was having your child, and you were blasting away with the girl you'd met at a conference. Even on the day your child was born you had to snatch at the starburst ecstasy in a carpark.
(to any leather queen) Don't you long for domination, to savour the exquisite freedom of total restraint? Just the smell of the rubber gives you a terrifying hardon. But it's your secret, yours and mine.
(to a gay man) You saw him in a corridor, didn't you, and followed him to the photocopier. ÒWhile you're at it, will you do this for me?Ó and he did. It was the sweetness of his young unquestioning acceptance you long to recapture. Of course you'd lose your job if anyone found out.
The dream returns time after time. (to a woman) Never so sweet as when you fell asleep with her on the sofa after a student party.
Oh the buried secrets of an enigmatic stranger in the grunted silence of that darkened room who takes you as you have ever since childhood dreamt of being taken.
Moves back to JUNG, speaking with the hard emotionless quality of the psychotic.
You see, I am mad. I can speak of these things. You, you cannot. You dare not express what you really want for you fear no decent person would ever let you near them again. If there were no secrets you would have no hiding-place. But I have no hiding-place. I am a patient: with no rights. I am naked and defenceless before the storm - reaching forever t'ward the outer limit of desire. There is only - a room - somewhere I must get to - a space, it's beyond this - but the only way is ... I don't know any other way (but struggle).
JUNG holding up a Commdia mask What about dance?
LUCIA O yes. Time wasn't right. I was trapt outside the beat. I did the movements but my voice didn't come out until my body stopt.
JUNG Who locked you out?
LUCIA Babbo - Nanno - all of you - with your petty rules and inhibitions.
JUNG The open sky?
LUCIA Dancing, music. Feeling as you want to feel, making love to the one you want. But in my cell, to dream of the open sky would send me mad. I'm so afraid of time running out.
JUNG How could it?
LUCIA But it already has. Everyone's against me, it's just Ôa matter of time'.
JUNG wheels round and changes his mask.
JUNG I too?
LUCIA Of course. You're just an acceptable way of locking me up so I don't frighten people.
JUNG wheels round and changes to a female mask.
JUNG I want to help you break out.
LUCIA You're not free yourself. Yours is just a larger cage with more people, where you all agree not to mention the bars.
LUCIA scrubs out the imaginary line with her foot. JUNG crosses it.
There. Now let there be no more agony. Perhaps this'll be the last time. Know what I've discovered? nothing exists. Even what you enjoy you must not enjoy - illusion itself is only another illusion. There is nowhere to lose your mind, Time stalks you down, and it all ends the same way.
JUNG You're searching for a fulcrum.
LUCIA I was. Now I crawl blindly over the earth seeking for a crack to enter the antechamber of the silent world and sleep forever in the long meadows of my mind.
JUNG produces a hypodermic
JUNG I'll give you freedom!
JUNG chases her in his wheelchair. LUCIA evades him easily.
LUCIA Ha. You're all woodlice in the crevices of a wall, with no concept of existence beyond your own little territory. taunting him like a toreador. C'mon.
JUNG makes a pass. Sidestepping, LUCIA grabs the handles and tips JUNG sprawling onto the floor. She runs off.
203
The lighting changes to a louche red nightclubby feel, which distorts the faces almost unrecognisably. There is a wooden S/M cross with arm and leg straps on a wheeled stand. Everyone wears shades. JOYCE & BECKETT are seated at a table with several bottles of white wine. JUNG limps over to them, putting his dark glasses on. He is definitely Ôoff duty', making no attempt to perform or charm.
JUNG I don't approve of places like this, you know.
JOYCE Neither do I - but it's one of the few places where one's anonymity is respected.
BECKETT blowing out a cloud of smoke We don't know you - you don't know us.
A blowsy alcoholic MADAME comes out in a peignoir with a GIRL whom she presents to JOYCE. Both also wear shades. The GIRL has a long wig on so that she is more a female image than a real person. They all sit together.
JOYCE And there are consolations.
JUNG There are, consolations - ja?
BECKETT Wine?
JOYCE expansively Ma voi chi siete a cui tanto distilla quant'i veggio dolor? [3]
GIRL Qu'estce qu'il dit, le po?te? [4]
JUNG C'est un morceau apropos de la mortalit? et de l'amour. [5]
GIRL dismissively Oh bien sur.
MADAME She is not yet hard, this one. I saved her for you.
JOYCE rhetorically Why should that make a difference, when one does not come here to fall in love?
JUNG Love can often get in the way of sex, yet there are, ¾sthetic considerations.
MADAME If I suspect any of my girls are sweet on a punter I sling em out. Love is bad for business. We're here to provide a service. You're here to pay for it. If you want to get it for nothing - go home - work out if it comes any cheaper!
BECKETT And you ma cherie?
GIRL with a affected cynicism Can you imagine a brothel for women - where men would sit around in pyjamas - and women would come in, none too clean or reeking of booze and fags to plunder them - before staggering home to their husbands and families with limp excuses about bumping into an old friend?
JUNG Ah but we men had the sense to organise things differently!
As in a regular routine, MADAME beckons JUNG to the horse,
BECKETT So if there were a male brothel you'd not matronise it?
GIRL Go in boasting about my cunt you mean, and then spend an hour unable to orgasm with a stubbly old pox-carrier?
JOYCE to JUNG I have a daughter.
GIRL O don't they all.
JOYCE O no, but this is different. I love her deeply.
GIRL Yes, yes.
JOYCE I don't want her - tho she excites me.
GIRL And that's where I come in.
JOYCE What would you do, my friend?
MADAME begins to strap JUNG onto the horse
JUNG Well, as it happens, I have a professional interest: I am the object of emotional projection by my patients.
MADAME Send em here, we'll soon sort em out!
JUNG Each of us has a male and female side.
GIRL giggling to B Which do you prefer? My male or fee male?
BECKETT Does either come without a fee?
JUNG to JOYCE You're projecting an inner search onto external reality. It's a search for wholeness.
MADAME You can say that again!
JOYCE The image of femininity tantalises.
JUNG To embrace her body is the physical manifestation of a desire to absorb her soul.
MADAME fits an SM hood on JUNG.
MADAME I'll give you physical manifestation.
JUNG We are taught by Society ...
MADAME You need correction, you're spouting.
JUNG to suppress the shadow side of our personalities, that which we fear:
She zips each aperture on the mask one by one.
MADAME I'll make you slaver like a beast.
JUNG but attraction & fear are 2 sides of the same coin.
MADAME You want Excitement? I'll give you excrement.
JUNG When your blood is on fire you can no longer tell whether it was love or hate that inflamed it. Passion is one.
MADAME Keep still, damn you! slaps him around the face How do you hope to come off if you keep thinking?
JUNG What could we Ôfall in love' with but the distant pre-echo of our own sexual hypothesis?
MADAME You really a very stupid stupid professor. You know you never have an orgasm if you're not afraid? What am I supposed to do?
JUNG We perceive Search and Achievement as separate but Desire is no more than a mirror to which Fulfilment is magnetically attracted. O put on your stiletto heels, please Madame, I beg of you, I implore you.
MADAME O God! I can't be bothered.
She zips up his mouth, and stands there holding a vibrator to his cock in extreme boredom. Each speaks the 3 following lines quite alienated from the other.
JOYCE But I find here, with her, what I cannot find in real life. So which is Reality?
BECKETT I may not care very much for her, but at least, here, no-body is doing any-body-else a favour. I pay and that concludes the relationship.
GIRL If you're drunk it helps you to forget that it's supposed to mean something.
MADAME By and large men come here because they've had enough of ruling the roost. They long to submit.
GIRL I think of all the nice little girls in private schools, and all their nice little mummies sitting at home like rows of preserved pears in a bottle. But their men prefer to bring their cream to me: they can't be bothered to take the bottles off the shelf at home. Anyway it would spoil the look of the dresser and might leave a mark. Given a choice between a dish of strawberries with champagne and a cup of horlicks - which would you save your cream for?
BECKETT But to a man it's the mere expression of body fluid.
GIRL For a woman to submit implies a sort of acceptance.
JOYCE You two seem to have a very limited view of sex - but you're still young, I suppose.
MADAME idly flicks JUNG with a cat of 9 tails.
MADAME All experience is a whole: you may expand it but you can never exceed it.
JOYCE ÔO circle of Tresmagistus when shall I come to perceive your circumference.'
JUNG XXXX
MADAME undoes JUNG
MADAME Okay that's enough now. You can come out. How was it?
JUNG No, nothing. I couldn't get off at all.
MADAME It's yer own fault, philosophy's useless - if you want an erection. Which'll you do first, cherie?
GIRL Him.
GIRL & BECKETT leave together
MADAME Drink up gentlemen. I'll get you another bottle.
JOYCE What do you think I should do about my daughter? She's very highly sexed.
JUNG professionally Send her to me!
JOYCE It's like a drug: she's hooked.
JUNG Or a hooker?
JOYCE O God, that's what I fear. I dread finding her here.
JUNG Yet nature dictates that all these girls are someone's daughter.
JOYCE I'm at my wit's end. At least here I can keep thought at bay.
JUNG Mightn't it be so for her too?
JOYCE I just don't understand ...
JUNG Understanding's worse - it accentuates your impotence.
JOYCE Why then strive with abstract matters of such profound indifference to my peers?
JUNG Perhaps it's your function in the order of things?
JOYCE And my poor afflicted child - what is her function?
JUNG Would it help to know?
JOYCE Explanation is a morphine, calming the worst agonies of our condition. To name is to tame, to cauterise the dread. We have to know. It's Adam's curse,
JUNG Or salvation. No doubt your daughter is groping toward some, experience her inner self needs.
JOYCE But it's all so - squalid, so ignoble.
JUNG So she's had enough of airy-fairy nobility and wants something dirty to roll in, to feel? Her understanding of masculinity comes from you!
JOYCE Ha, God help her.
JUNG If infinity overwhelms her, how is she to work out a common denominator?
JOYCE gestures helplessly at the empty bottle. They are both well pissed. .
Another drink? Madame. On meurt de soif ici! [6]
You know I like you, stranger. We have shared something uniquely personal together this evening.
JUNG Ah, the whispered freemasonry of deviance.
The GIRL returns with BECKETT & a bottle.
JOYCE Thank Christ for that.
They all fall to drinking in a moment's reflective silence.
JOYCE poss V/O Theirs are no sickrets, maybe know more. But in your fuse his refuse, seed of no life. If we are, then poor, falling forever in a direction not downwards - metamorphosis from singing insects to sky-darkened clamour, dry-as-velvet stiffling for love.
With a glance, JOYCE & the GIRL get up together, and prepare to leave. JOYCE is very drunk. In the exit he embraces her for the first time, almost timidly.
live My arms alone craddle you. At my birth you were always a part