Marcello Atzeni
WOMEN
Nomination Italian Playwrights Project 3th edition (2020/22)
excerpt translated by Thomas Simpson
Ever since I was a boy I had the gift of listening. Especially women, who were my same age, just girls. The first secret I collected? In a garbage pile. That’s right. It was by my school. Francesca decided to tell me about the bells she heard inside. But I won’t write about her anguish. Since then I’ve collected so many secrets, I’ve drawn them inside myself and they live in me. After forty years I decided I should speak about them, write them down. Like a spaceship exploring the galaxies of women. I travel from one star to the next, brushing past the black holes. Sometimes I’ve fallen in, but I made it out. Sentimental stories of broken relationships, trouble at work, childhood destroyed or violated, glimpses of family life, but also moments of pride, of achievement. Stories that sometimes end happily. We need these slices of sunshine, wildflowers, to illuminate the shadows and soften the odor of pain.
With men I played soccer and cards. I also drank and talked about women. Everything else I did with women. What in particular? I listened.
I wasn’t looking for her.
But her screams told me: come here. She told me her story, she invited me to come back.
I didn’t ring the bell; there was no bell. I didn’t use the intercom; she had gone out.
Like her husband. She wasn’t home either.
Her daughter opened the door to me. A little girl with corn-colored hair and saffron eyes.
She weighed less than a mute duck’s feather.
She let me into the dining room. A beautiful table, leaning to port.
Because of the shifting floor. The tiles were gone, letting the raw earth come through, growing and reproducing. She had me sit.
- Mamma’s not home and neither is daddy -she said.
She told me about herself, at length.
I came back a few days later.
She was still alone.
Still not a lucky day for you, daddy and mommy aren’t here.
- So long then - I said.
- Are you kidding? Come with me! -
She picked up a pail filled with feed. As she was filling the bellies of the ducks, geese, and chickens, she took up her story where she’ left off.
Her eyes reacted to the light.
She told me her dreams, saying they’d never be more than dreams.
I was at least three times her age. But I only had a twentieth of her disillusionment.
I went away one rainy evening.
In my rearview mirror I saw her waving, so strong.
The third time the house was empty.
I could feel breathing in the shadows keeping company with two sparrows taking a hydromassage in a puddle.
My spirit, bent in on itself, asked itself. . .
October 1997
Harassment
Can you picture two kilometer legs? Well that’s how mine are. Long, long enough for two women. The office chief noticed them right away. Noticed everything else too. Everyone else, men and women, also noticed this gorgeous thing. Those looks, those stares—that’s a better word—I had been accustomed to since I was a girl. But I wasn’t a girl anymore and you have to live with people’s stares, you just avoid them. Men’s comments, but also women’s too? It’s more exhausting. I’m a woman, not a slide. Just legs, tits, and ass? Obviously you don’t know me. But who has ever really known me? Not my father: he wanted a boy. He said, “You don’t have to worry about men.” I had no idea what he meant and I never asked either. Let him dive into his lake of grappa. My mom? She worked to keep the three of us fed. And when I asked her, “Why don’t you talk?”, she would answer, “The ones who talk too much have time on their hands and all they want to do is chatter.”
My schoolmates, girls and boys? Some days it seemed like I’d never been to school. But that was yesterday; the day before yesterday, actually. I started college running and finished running. Best in my class. And Venice is Venice, not some town deep in the mountains, buried in snow. So I went right to office work: my legs were straight, my career path straight. But it didn’t go well. Not well at all.
For a woman with a job, even if it’s ten hours a day, never a mistake, almost never, because—my mom was right after all—let others do the talking. I have to work. I avoided everyone, men and women. There was an enemy in every corner waiting to put a bullet in me. With the stares, with words, and sometimes with five heavy fingers on my marble ass. I remember those fingers. They ended up inside me. By passing through the main door: my brain.
But there I was following orders all the time, and later I was giving them too. They granted me a career advancement here and there. I was good at my job. But they couldn’t mold me; I wasn;t made of clay. After a period of apparent calm, it seemed everyone had coalesced. But was it really so?
I remember having fainted, and then some hours (or days?) later I found myself in another office: Doctor Bordon, here is your new work station. A desk just for you. No one will disturb you here. Have a great day! And my boss shut the door behind him going out. But where had I ended up? In a room without even the tiniest window! My God! Big desk, coatrack, two old bookshelves, an air conditioner, and a curtain. A curtain! But where’s the window? I turned on the computer and the window opened: that is, Windows.
They knocked on my door. It was the boss’s little friend. “Ciao sweetie! Are you happy? Chief Engineer Sonego told me you’re highly skilled. Good work, you and your legs!” Then she shut the door. No, she shut the door to the cell. It wasn’t an office, it was a prison.
The buzz of the computer, the air conditioner, the neon lights, the printer. And the smell of toner. Why had they done this to me? The bathroom was in the hall, it stunk of mold. I thought moss was about to start growing there. Fine, with moss I’ll make a nativity scene. So what if it’s July? PC, artificial light, tired sounds of the printer and the air conditioner shooting out breeze, hot or cold depending on the season. Its target: the curtain married to the wall. Why this curtain? I opened it. There was a window! No, it wasn’t there; it had been there. They blocked it up. Permanently. Where have they put me? Where have I ended up? PC, printer, printer, artificial light, and . . . right, the coat rack. One of these days I’ll hang myself from it, upside down, la Paoletta! I forgot! There were the bookshelves. One day I went back to my office and covered them with a poster: a mountain lake sheltered tall trees under a bright sky. Finally a window onto my world.
PC, printer, printer, printer, telephone, telephone, telephone, air conditioner, neon light, printer, telephone, telephone, PC, PC, PC. I turned my gaze to the bookshelf: I couldn’t breathe anymore and no could the poster. I pushed back the curtain and used a letter opener to scrape at the wall. I was in prison, I was trying to escape. Oh God! I can’t breathe!
PC, PC, PC, telephone, telephone, telephone, telephone, printer, printer, telephone, PC, printer, curtain, bookshelf, coatrack, letter opener, PC, printer, printer, telephone, telephone. . .
I was pissing myself. Wrong: I was shitting myself. I went out into the corridor and went into that stinking bathroom. Tears above and shit below. Six days out of seven, ten hours a day not counting overtime. Or was every day overtime?
Sunday. Yesss! Sunday. Sunday… My breakfast was gin & tonic and Valium.
I stretched out on the sofa and. . . the alarm clock went off Monday morning.
Shower, shampoo, hairdryer, gin. . . no, not today, but Valium, at least a taste! I stepped outside my house. But was this sky I was looking at for real? Or was it a gigantic poster over my evanescent head? The engineer and Paoletta. . . fine, they never thought about anything else. Yes, I was back in my cell. What was with me today? I was serene. PC, PC, PC, printer, printer, telephone, telephone, telephone, telephone, printer, air conditioner, curtain, PC, PC, PC, PC, printer, print. . .
Holy Madonna! What is this stink!
This is not my bed! I tried to get up, but there were bars and I was very weak. Still another prison? What was going on?
A handsome man in a white smock crossed in front of me and sat down on the next bed over, which was empty. “How are you feeling, ma’am?”
“I’m fine, I think. Yes, I’m fine. But my PC? My telephone? The curtain? The printer?”
“You see, ma’am, you had a collapse. Your work colleagues called 911. You had a nervouse breakdown. You need rest, plenty of rest.”
“Maybe I do. But the telephone? The PC? Did they close the office window before calling for help?”
“Everything is fine, ma’am. Your colleagues took care of it.”
July 2014
Faded Expressions
On a road hard to travel even for a tank, through overflowing dumpsters exhaling evil “aromas” and a drainage canal stinking of stuff you’d rather not think about, three young Black women sit around a broken-leg table.
Under a tree I can’t identify, they speak a language I don’t know.
They have faces I don’t recognize, but I recognize their expressions. Faded, like those faded flowers on the sofa sitting a few yawns away from them.
Their gaudy clothes, like feathers of tropical birds, are not for the moment attracting any consumers of erotic gymnastics.
The sky, half-black, is long-suffering.
Just like human beings.
Coming apart, incredulous, disillusioned, diving into nothingness.
A pre-Big Bang automobile raises a mountain of dust.
We’re all waiting for an abundant rain.
August 2017
Mary Magdalene
Spring 1995. Exterior, night. Returning home, near the San Michele cemetery I see an outdoor sausage stand. The customers are a Mecca, as they say in the Middle East. All men. I imagine so many people are there at that time of night to “resolve” an itch with the Eastern European girls.
I ask and am granted a space to embroider a story for Cagliari’s daily newspaper.
The initial idea is to write a color piece by approaching the vendors of sausage sandwiches, drinks, chips, and fried onions.
I smell a bad odor, and it’s not coming from the onions.
The broken down car, no-wheel drive, moves forward by inertia after a starting push.
One by one, I introduce myself to the girls come from beyond the sea. That is, from beyond the Adriatic.
The prettiest, friendliest one’s name is Mary Magdalene.
Little more than a child. She has short hair, a black pleated skirt keeping her cool up to the femoral artery, a white shirt and a multicolored bodice from the Balkans.
After a short chat in the open, I invite her to sit in my car, explaining my motives.
She accepts. Her beautiful smile illuminates a simple agenda, which I try to dress up with words.
”I have to go” she says. “I have to work”.
She kisses me on the cheek and goes back to the street.
Near a tried lamppost and a caravan abandoned there the day before they built it.
Every so often I go say hi to Mary Magdalene.
One day she disappears.
Her friends know nothing, or if they do know, they don’t answer questions or answer “mind your own business, we have to work. Wipe your ass with the newspaper of yours.”
A few months later, Mary Magdalene shows up again under the street light.
A “cartographer” has drawn on her splendid face a world map of violence and brutality.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to ask her what happened and how she is.
She gets in the car, without waiting for me to ask she says “take me to the hotel. I live at the beginning of Via Santa Margherita.”
Seeing her eyes overflowing with tears of pain, I try to make her laugh. All I manage to get from her is “You’re totally crazy!”
She gets out, softly closes the car door, and disappears up the broken steps.
Less softly, I pull the car over to the sidewalk.
And I sit there thinking, almost right in front of the old Public Hospital.
Twenty-three years have gone by.
The questions are the same as yesterday: What could I and should I have done?
Spring 1995
