The Designated Mourner

by Wallace Shawn

  JUDY

  (To the audience) “Can’t I be saved?” I cried out to him, falling on my face in the grass, hugging his legs. “No,” he said. “Love can’t save you.” “But what about the idea of a better world?” I said.

  JACK

  Well, I did take a bath this morning, if that’s what you’re asking. What are you asking?

  JUDY

  I’m asking you, Don’t you—don’t you—don’t you remember how you felt when we went to visit that fucking orphanage ?

  JACK

  Where was that, actually?

  JUDY

  —With the orange trees outside it? We saw the children, we touched them—your shirt was soaked with the sweat of that sick little girl—I mean, what are you now? Do you see yourself now as just—what? As what?

  JACK

  I don’t see myself “as” anything at all. Judy, you see, you’re looking at me. This is me. This is me, and this is all there is to me.

  JUDY

  Jack—please—

  JACK

  Tell me what you’re telling me.

  JUDY

  The orphanage—the infirmary—the orange trees—the girl—the medicine—the beds—

  JACK

  Spare me all the talk, Judy. I’m not interested in talk. Do you see what I’m saying? If you love me, well, make a sacrifice for me. Take a risk for me. Suffer for me. Otherwise, what are you talking about ? You’re talking about nothing. I don’t have time for it, I have no interest in it, it’s worth nothing to me.

  JUDY

  (To the audience) I said to him, “Yes, you can’t imagine it, but yes—the many living under the heel of the few—one day it will end. I believe it will end. For you, that’s a joke. You can’t picture it. But I can.”

  JACK

  (To Judy) Judy, I don’t know what to say. I mean, for God’s sake, what’s happening? I kiss you, and it’s as if my kiss goes hurtling off a cliff. You take off your clothes, but you’re not naked. What can we do, then? What will happen? (To the audience) “You made me,” she said, trying to sum up all the things that had happened over years. “You made me. And then you annihilated me. And then you breathed on the corpse and awakened me. Over and over. How could a life like that have gone on forever?” Useless to hold her hand, to try to explain. Here’s my explanation: I felt this, I felt that. No. That’s not an explanation. You know what love is, you know what grief is.

  JUDY

  (To the audience) A group of men on the front lawn—they asked to see Father. They looked like the people who came over all the time. Father put a robe on over his pajamas, put on his slippers, came downstairs. They said nothing, they smashed his face in with their hands and fists, left him bleeding, and ran away.

  The next day Jack moved out of the house.

  JACK

  (To the audience) Oh, I don’t know. It was a day when something finally just broke in my head, and I was in terrible shape. Then I ran out of the house, and I felt better, so I never went back. You know, it was actually my body that ran out of the house—do you see what I’m saying? What propelled it, it didn’t know, and no one knows, and no one can know. I can certainly describe the afternoon. It was very cold. It was a horrible, horrible cold afternoon, and I was freezing cold. For a long time I was trudging back and forth along the gloomy hallway of the upper story of Howard’s house, and of course there’d been the beating up of Howard just the day before, and so every few minutes I’d hear a painful sound coming out of the room where he lay, where he lay coughing and choking in a mess of bandages. Christ, what could be done for poor Howard? He was all alone. A tiny little man, like a little fly, in that big bed. No one to help him.

  Then eventually I entered our own bedroom, and there was Judy, wrapped up in our bed. She too wasn’t well, or you could say she was exhausted, hadn’t slept, whatever, and she too was freezing cold, she immediately informed me. I sat right down in a chair by the bed and looked at her face for a long time. Well, I mean—you know, I guess we were talking, in a manner of speaking. And at a certain moment I felt I saw her skin grow suddenly pale, and I thought, Oh yes, the pallor of a corpse. It’s quite clear, isn’t it? Her tongue, as she spoke, was like a child’s lollipop. And then for some reason she stopped speaking. Pulling the sleeves of her sweater out over her hands to keep in the warmth, her teeth chattering. Make love to her, I thought—or murder her, maybe. Yes, maybe that was really the thing, after all. And I thought of all those years of getting up each day and reading in the newspaper all those terrible stories, always written in that special tone, so hurt, so shocked, about the people who committed unspeakable acts. The murder. The stabbing. “How could anyone commit such an unspeakable act?” It was all falling away, falling away very fast. How much longer could I go on pretending to be hurt and shocked by unspeakable acts?

  Now she seemed to be falling asleep, and I thought I saw a corpse with a beaten-in face. The rain poured down as I hurried into the garden. The shovel, the gardening shears—anything, anything. She was waiting for me—no time to spare. On the lawn I tripped on a croquet mallet. That would do.

  I came back from the garden, I looked into the bedroom. Something was wrong—something was wrong with my baby. Her sleep was troubled—she was shuddering and snuffling.

  I put the mallet down gently against the wall, and then I stood by the bed and watched her as she slept for a very long time. How could so much joy, so much happiness for me, have been contained in this one little package?

  Well, can’t there be silent language? Must we talk? I felt I was falling through a spiraling darkness. I got into the bed and I dreamed about Judy . . .

  JUDY

  Let’s go quietly.

  JACK

  Then when I woke up, my face felt wet. Tears? No—it seemed to be blood. The cat had clawed me. A few whiskers had been left on the pillow as a sign.

  JUDY

  Let’s go quietly.

  JACK

  I’d been in a battle. I was badly wounded. They’re carrying me along to a hospital. Everyone’s kind, polite. I’m lifted onto a clean bed. My bowels wiped up. I’m washed, bandaged. Then a long night follows. A nurse sits near me. At one moment I wake up, and I see her smiling. She looks directly into my eyes and draws a finger across her throat.

  JUDY AND HOWARD

  Let’s go quietly.

  JACK

  Why? Where are we going?

  JUDY

  You remember the place. Past the bell tower, the meadow—

  JUDY AND HOWARD

  Let’s go quietly.

  JUDY

  —the trees, the clearing—

  JUDY AND HOWARD

  Let’s go quietly.

  JUDY

  —the metal sculpture—you said “a swan or a duck”—

  JUDY AND HOWARD

  Let’s—go—

  JUDY

  —the track where the children ride in carts—

  JUDY AND HOWARD

  —quietly.

  JACK

  I don’t understand why we have to do this.

  JUDY

  And please, darling, would you just be very simple at the end of your life? Could you tell me you “love” me? Say, “I love you,” use those very words?—those very same words that have been used by everyone—by the poor, the ugly, the stupid, the weak?

  And you know, the silly thing is that I still can’t think of the name of that actress—I mean, the one who played the sister of Tarzan’s wife. But do you remember that movie where she played a nurse? My favorite part was that incredible scene where she’s lying in bed with this frightening guy, and all of a sudden, there’s this amazing, wonderful shot of her ass—just this absolutely gorgeous, beautiful ass, seen from above—and you hear her dialogue while you look at her ass, and it’s as if the dialogue were somehow literally being spoken by her ass, and it’s so incredible.

  JACK

  (To Judy) For God’s sake, don’t you have any feelings at all? For the
sake of Jesus—you’re trying to kill me! (To the audience) I was awakened by the sound of my own shouting. I ran out of the house, and I was out for good.

  HOWARD

  There was a fantasy I always used to have about Joan. Maybe I dreamt it too. I’m lying in bed with warm pillows and blankets, and there’s a low fire sitting in the grate, and Joan comes into the room with a delicious sandwich on a white dish. And after I’ve eaten it, she sits beside me and we look out the window as she holds me very tightly.

  Through the window, under a bright moon, we see horses playing on the grass, and birds playing in the sky above the house. And her very cold hand is stroking me slowly but purposefully with a delicate motion, up and down, and I’m thinking about this whole rather twisted question of death, and I say to myself, For God’s sake, will you stop struggling? Lie back. Put your head on the pillow. Close your eyes. Don’t you know how to enjoy anything? Just wait for the moment which you know will come. There. There. One, two—it’s a certainty.

  PART TWO

  JUDY

  (To the audience) Then one day there was a funny postcard with a picture of an outdoor restaurant—no salutation, no signature. (She reads) “In a very pretty garden, I ate lunch without you today. At a wobbly table with a thin rose crawling bent and unbalanced out of a tiny vase, I ate an egg and didn’t think about you.”

  JACK

  (To the audience) I stayed in a little hotel for a while. An adorable hotel—whitewashed walls, fruit, a few plants, and that was about it. Except I kept having—guess what—memories. Not particularly painful memories, but one day I found myself brooding about an article I’d seen that had some interesting pictures that had accompanied it: I was thinking particularly of two specific pictures of the very nice actor who was the subject of the article, and one of them showed him kissing his wife, and then the other one showed him when he was acting in a movie, and he was kissing the woman who played his wife in the movie, and he looked exactly the same in both pictures, and at the time I’d read the article I’d said to myself, He’s a liar, he’s lying, he’s lying in one of these pictures at least. But now as I thought about it, I suddenly thought, Wait a minute, no, he’s not lying. He’s not lying. He’s not lying, because he’s not pretending to be the same person in both pictures. Jesus Christ—that actor wasn’t lying, I’m the one who’s lying when I keep on insisting that I am the same person—the same person I was this morning, the same person I was yesterday. What’s that all about? And why do I do it? What is the point? Why am I struggling every day to learn my lines, to once again impersonate this awful character—this terrible character whom I somehow believe I’ve been chosen to play, this terrible character whose particular characteristics are impossible to remember? I feel exactly the way a criminal must feel, trying so hard every day to stick to the story he was telling yesterday, the alibis, the lies, the interconnected details—it can’t be done, you can’t remember it all. So why do I keep trying to pretend to be the same, when in fact my body is simply a shell, waiting to be filled by one person and then another?

  After I’d stayed in the hotel for several weeks, I developed the habit of walking in the park, and one day in the middle of the park I was standing at a lemonade stand drinking lemonade, and I happened to meet a very sweet girl. She was with some friends, but she was standing apart from them, and, I don’t know why, I felt I’d feel comfortable talking to her, so I just started talking, and she responded in a quiet little voice. Her little pink mouth was so small, it was just like a tiny little mouse mouth really, her little skirt like a bit of foam from the sea, her shoes like miniature containers for sewing equipment. We talked for a while, and her friends then said they were going to leave, but she stayed behind, and we kept on talking. In that quiet little voice she told me about a sensation she said she’d been experiencing lately—“almost as if I’m in a picture,” she said, “and something smudged it.” “Is there also almost like a sort of funny silence?” I asked. “Yes. I think so—” “Well, don’t you know what that is?” I said with a laugh. “I think that’s despair . . . aha ha ha—”

  I went out for a while with the lemonade-stand girl. I had an affair with her, you see. Shall I tell you the subtle approach I used to lure her into it? Well, we were standing there at the lemonade stand, and it was getting dark, and I looked her in the eye, and I said to her, “Would you like to have an affair with me?” Wasn’t that clever? She responded by touching me a little bit crudely. Then she introduced herself—her name was Peg—and we went to her apartment.

  I often cried in bed when Peg and I made love, because I felt like a lamb who was feeding on grass, and folk tales tell us that happy lambs quite often cry.

  Holding me in her arms, Peg was limitlessly kind. Her goodness was sort of like an ocean, really, and I was free to swim in it, and I swam and felt free.

  You know, I’d always wondered, How can people say that they’re moved by nature—how could that be possible, when the tree, the flower, have really no meaning? No one made them, no one intended anything particular by them, so how can people say that they mean something, is that not like the belief of someone insane who thinks the raindrops on the window are bringing him a message? No—not at all—lying next to Peg, I saw I’d been wrong. It was easy now just to look at her shoulder, her neck, her cheek, and receive a kind of direct communication, as if her body were literally speaking to mine, as if I was able to hear things now, a stone talking, or a tree stump at night, or the moon.

  Anyway, things didn’t work out with Peg. She got tired of me. Maybe my problem was just having always been very unhappy—you know, unhappiness being a kind of cold sort of marshland in which other emotions just refuse to grow.

  One day, lying on a beach after swimming, our teeth chattering, her goose-bumped skin pressed close against mine, she said, “Jack, I love you,” and I thought, What does she mean? Is she talking about me? My name rang so oddly in my ears.

  JUDY

  Each night, alone in the house with Father, I’d go to bed late. I’d fall asleep instantly, as if I’d been clubbed, then three hours later I’d wake up again—sweaty, terrified, my heart pounding. Lying in my bathtub in the dark. I’d twist back and forth under the little stream of water as if an invisible person were whipping me brutally. Mustn’t touch myself, I’d think. That would be bad. The wrong direction.

  All Father’s friends were putting pressure on me, as if I were the one who had all the answers, somehow, as if I could explain what was going on. Why? Why me? I’d wait and wait, then dawn would come, and the distant sound of violence—that vague, low roaring and groaning, the snapping of guns—would finally grow quiet, or almost quiet. That heartsick feeling didn’t go away, the oppression, the awfulness—but yes, sure, it was soothing, it was comforting, to feel the sweetness of the morning air, to hear the birds, the insects.

  Every once in a while I’d still sometimes throw on some earrings and a dress and go to a party at some embassy or other and chat with the bureaucrats, the wives, the rising young couples. But I learned nothing, really nothing, beyond the obvious fact that half the high officials were in their twenties now.

  JACK

  After a while I just concluded there wasn’t any hope—an important insight. There’d be no happiness in my own life, nor would peace be won in the world at large. Was there anything, then, that I could expect to achieve in the coming years? Well, perhaps I could somehow train my mind to focus less compulsively on terrifying images of death and disease. Perhaps I could learn how to pass more easily from one moment to the next, the way the monkey, our ancestor, shifts so easily along from branch to branch as he follows the high road through the forest at night. Let me learn how to repose in the quiet shade of a nice square of chocolate, a nice slice of cake. A delicious cup of tea isn’t, perhaps, that hard to come by; the trick to be learned is just not to think of other things while you drink it.

  JUDY

  The radio broadcast some absurd message. There were
to be some new people in high positions, some new policies, all very vague, but from the tone of it you knew it was going to be bad. Everyone was talking on the telephone all day, and most of the old friends—the ones who were left—wanted to come over to the house—we knew we wanted to be together. Father got inspired and decided to cook.

  And so that afternoon around five they all came, shambling through the courtyard into the garden to stand once again under the stiff little trees with their frozen pods. Mary was there, and Herbert, and Arthur, and Bob, and Sam. Sam brought a jar of Indian chutney, which made a nice complement to Father’s meat. As dusk fell in the garden, we could hear these really extraordinary sounds—you know, the boom of explosions, and very loud shots. We knew they were nearer than they’d ever been before. Still we sat at the garden table or strolled near it, eating the meal Father had prepared. The odor of the flowers seemed peculiarly strong, as if their last drops of perfume were being squeezed into the air in the knowledge that no one would be able to smell them later. No one ate much, but we all ate something.