Three Plays: The Young Lady from Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, La Chunga

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  BELISARIO: ‘Fortune smile upon thee, sweet deserver …’

  MAMAE: ‘A thousand times more fortunate be he …’

  BELISARIO: ‘Who finally may call thee wife.’

  MAMAE: ‘For I am but a humble bard of Tacna …’

  BELISARIO: ‘Who with heavy heart doth end my weary life …’

  MAMAE: ‘And deem myself too small for such an honour.’

  BELISARIO: ‘Mistrust me, therefore, not, when I thee flatter:’

  MAMAE: ‘Since I cannot, sweet Elvira, be thy master …’

  BELISARIO: ‘Let me, leastwise, be thy servant and thy slave.’

  (He starts to write again. As he says the last line of the poem AMELIA enters from the inner part of the house, sobbing. She leans against a chair, dries her eyes. MAMAE remains in her chair, as if asleep, only her eyes are open – a melancholy smile fixed on her face. CESAR enters from the inner part of the house, an expression of remorse on his face.)

  AMELIA: She’s dead, isn’t she?

  (CESAR nods and AMELIA leans her head on his shoulder and cries. He lets out a little sob too. Enter AGUSTIN, also from the inner part of the house.)

  AGUSTIN: Come on, cheer up. It’s Mama we ought to be thinking about now. It’s particularly dreadful for her.

  CESAR: We’ll have to put her on tranquillizers until she’s got over the shock.

  AMELIA: I feel so miserable, César.

  CESAR: It’s as if the whole family were falling apart …

  BELISARIO: (Looking towards the audience) Has Mamaé died?

  AGUSTIN: She got weaker and weaker until finally, like a little flame, she flickered out altogether. First it was her hearing, then her legs, her hands, her bones. Today it was her heart.

  BELISARIO: (Still in the same position) Mother, is it true that Mamaé’s died?

  AMELIA: Yes, dear, it is. She’s gone away to heaven, the poor darling.

  CESAR: But you’re not going to cry, Belisario, are you?

  BELISARIO: (Crying) Of course I’m not. Why should I? We all have to die sometime, don’t we, Uncle César? Men don’t cry, do they, Uncle Agustín?

  CESAR: Choke back those tears, son, and let’s see you behave like a brave little man, eh?

  BELISARIO: (Still at his desk, facing the audience) Like that famous lawyer I am going to be one day, uncle?

  (Making an effort to stifle the emotion that has got the better of him, BELISARIO starts to write again.)

  AMELIA: That’s right, like the famous lawyer you’re going to be one day.

  AGUSTIN: Go and join Mama, Amelia. We’ve got to talk about the funeral arrangements.

  (AMELIA nods and goes out, towards the inner part of the house. AGUSTIN moves towards CESAR.)

  And funerals, as you know, cost money. We’ll give her the simplest there is. But even so: it still costs money.

  CESAR: All right, Agustín. I’ll do what I can. I am more hard up than you are. But I’ll help you out all the same.

  AGUSTIN: It’s not me you’re helping, but Mamaé. After all, she was as much your Mamaé as she was mine. You’ll also have to help me with the legal proceedings, that trying district council, the cemetery and so on …

  (CESAR and AGUSTIN go out towards the street. MAMAE remains still, huddled in her armchair. BELISARIO has just finished writing. On his face we can detect a mixture of feelings: satisfaction, certainly, for having completed what he wanted to relate, and at the same time emptiness and nostalgia for something which is over, which he has lost.)

  BELISARIO: It’s not a love story, it’s not a romantic story. So what is it, then? (Shrugs his shoulders.) You’ll never cease marvelling at the strange way stories are born, will you, Belisario? They get embellished with things one believes to be long forgotten – the most unlikely events are retrieved from the memory only to be distorted by the imagination. (Looks at MAMAE.) My only recollections of you were that final image: a shadow of a woman, huddled up in her armchair, who wet her knickers. (Gets up and goes towards MAMAE.) You were very good to me, Mamaé. Of course you were. But you had no alternative, had you? Why did it occur to me to write your story? Well, you should know that instead of becoming a lawyer, a diplomat or a poet, I ended up by devoting myself to a craft I probably learnt from you: that of telling stories. Yes, that may be the reason: to pay off a debt. As I didn’t know the real story, I’ve had to add to the things I remembered, bits which I made up or borrowed from here and there. Like you did in your stories about the young lady from Tacna, didn’t you, Mamaé?

  (He closes her eyes and kisses her on the forehead. As he moves away towards one of the wings, the curtain falls.)

  KATHIE AND THE HIPPOPOTAMUS

  A Comedy in Two Acts

  To Norma Aleandro

  INTRODUCTION

  Theatre as fiction

  In a make-believe Paris, a man and a woman agree to meet for two hours each day to devote themselves to fiction – to the art of telling lies. For her, it is a hobby; for him, a job. But lies are seldom either gratuitous or innocuous; they are nurtured by our unfulfilled desires and our failures and are as accurate an indication of our characters as all those irrefutable words of truth we utter.

  To lie is to invent; it is to add to real life another fictitious one disguised as reality. Morally abhorrent when practised in everyday life, this strategem seems quite acceptable, even praiseworthy when practised under the pretext of art. We applaud the novelist, artist or dramatist who, through his skill at handling words, images or dialogue, persuades us that these contrivances which set out merely to be a reflection of life are in fact life itself. But are they? Fiction is the life that wasn’t, the life we’d liked to have had but didn’t, the life we’d rather not have had or the one we’d like to relive, without which the life we are actually leading seems incomplete. Because unlike animals, who live out their lives to their full potential from beginning to end, we are only able to realize a small part of ours.

  Our hunger for life and our expectations always far exceed our capacity as human beings who have been granted the perverse privilege of being able to dream up a thousand and one adventures while only being capable of realizing ten, at the most. The inevitable gulf between the concrete reality of our human existence and those desires and aspirations which exacerbate it which can never themselves be satisfied, is not merely the origin of man’s unhappiness, dissatisfaction and rebelliousness. It is also the raison d’être of fiction, a deceptive device through which we can compensate artificially for the inadequacies of life, broaden the asphyxiatingly narrow confines of our condition, and gain access to worlds that are richer, sometimes shabbier, often more intense, but always different from the one fate has provided us with. Thanks to the conceits of fiction, we can augment our experience of life – one man may become many different men, a coward may become a hero, a sluggard a man of action, and a virgin a prostitute. Thanks to fiction we discover not only what we are, but also what we are not and what we’d like to be. The lies of fiction enrich our lives by imbuing them with something they’ll never actually have, but once their spell is broken, we are left helpless and defenceless, brutally aware of the unbridgeable gap between reality and fantasy. For the man who doesn’t despair, who despite everything is prepared to throw himself in at the deep end, fiction is there waiting for him, its arms laden with illusions, which have matured out of the leavening of our own sense of emptiness: ‘Come in, come in, come and play a game of lies.’ But sooner or later we discover, like Kathie and Santiago in their ‘little Parisian attic’, that we’re really playing a melancholy little game of deception, in which we assume those roles we long to play in real life or, alternatively, a terrifying game of truth, which in real life we’d do anything to avoid.

  Theatre isn’t life, but make-believe, that is to say another life, a life of fiction, a life of lies. No genre demonstrates as splendidly as theatre the equivocal nature of art. The characters we see on stage, as opposed to the ones we find in novels or paintings, are
flesh and blood and act out their roles right in front of us. We watch them suffer, enjoy themselves, laugh, get angry. If the show succeeds, we become totally convinced of their authenticity by the way they speak, move, gesture and emote. Are we in fact aware of any difference between them and real life? Not at all, except that we know they are a pretence, a fiction, that they are theatre. Curiously enough, in spite of its blatantly deceptive and fraudulent nature, there have always been (and always will be) those who insist that theatre – and fiction in general – should express and propagate religious, ideological, historical and moral truths. But I don’t agree. The role of the theatre – of fiction in general – is to create illusions, to deceive.

  Fiction is not a reproduction of life: it complements it by cutting down on what we have enough of in real life, and adding what is lacking, by bringing order and logic to what we experience as chaotic and absurd, or alternatively injecting an element of mystery, craziness and risk into the balanced, the routine, and the secure. There is evidence of this systematic modification of life throughout the history of humanity: it has been recorded rather like the negative of a photograph – in the long catalogue of adventures, passions, gestures, infamies, manners, excesses, subtleties, which man had to invent because he was incapable of living them himself.

  Dreaming, creating works of fiction (the same as reading, going to plays, suspending disbelief) is an oblique way of protesting against the mediocrity of life and it is also an effective, if cursory way of ridiculing it. Fiction, when we find ourselves under its spell, bewitched by its artifice, makes us feel complete, by transforming us momentarily into those great villains, those angelic saints, or those transparent idiots, which we are constantly being incited to become by our desires and aspirations, our cowardice, our inquisitiveness or simply our spirit of contradiction, and when it returns us to our normal state, we find we have changed, that we are more aware of our limitations, more eager for fantasy and less ready to accept the status quo.

  This is what happens to the main characters in Kathie and the Hippopotamus, the banker’s wife and the writer in the little attic room where the play is set. When I wrote it, I didn’t even know that its underlying theme was the relationship between life and art; this particular alchemy fascinates me because the more I practise it the less I understand it. My intention was to write a farce, by pushing the characters to the point of unreality (but not beyond because total unreality is boring), taking as a starting point a situation that had been haunting me for some time: a lady employs a writer to help her compose an adventure story. She is, at this point, a pathetic creature in so far as art for her seems to be a last resort against a life of failure; he is unable to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t Victor Hugo whose abundant personality he admires in all its many aspects: the romantic, the literary, the political, and the sexual. During their working sessions and arising from the transformations the story itself undergoes between what Kathie dictates and what her amanuensis writes down, their respective lives, both the real and imaginary sides of them, that is, what they actually were and what they would have liked to have been – are acted out on stage, summoned together by memory, desire, fantasy, association and chance. At some point during my work on the play, I noticed beside the ghosts of Kathie and Santiago, who I was trying to breathe life into, other little ghosts queuing up behind them, waiting to earn their rightful place in the play. Now when I discover them, I recognize them, and am once again quite astounded. Santiago’s and Kathie’s fantasies, quite apart from their real lives, in many ways reveal my own, and the same is no doubt true of anyone who puts on display that crude mass of raw material out of which he fashions his fiction.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  CHARACTERS

  KATHIE KENNETY

  SANTIAGO ZAVALA

  ANA DE ZAVALA

  JUAN

  The action takes place some time in the 1960s in Kathie Kennety’s ‘Parisian attic’.

  SET, COSTUME, EFFECTS

  Kathie Kennety’s ‘little Parisian attic’ is not a caricature: it has that air of permanence and authenticity about it as if it were a real place.

  Kathie, a woman with a sense of taste, has furnished her ‘studio’ in an attractive manner, reminiscent of the sort of artist’s garret one finds in pictures, novels, postcards and films; it also has something of the genuine chambres de bonne where students and impoverished foreigners congregate on the left bank of the Seine.

  Under the sloping ceiling, there are ageing beams; on the walls, posters of the ubiquitous Eiffel Tower, the inevitable Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, some Impressionist paintings, a Picasso, and – one essential detail – a portrait or bust of Victor Hugo. There is nothing of great elegance, nothing superfluous, just what is necessary to give an impression of comfort and warmth: a little retreat where the occupant can feel safe and protected from the turmoil and scrutiny of the outside world, free to conjure up her innermost demons and confront them face to face. There is a thick wooden desk, a broad delapidated sofa, covered all over with rugs, some cushions on the floor, the tape-recorder and the typewriter, a small record-placer, the usual records of Juliette Greco, Léo Ferré, Yves Montand, Georges Brassens, etc. Filing cabinets, notebooks, papers and some books, but not too many, because Kathie’s idea of culture has little to do with literature.

  There is nothing special or unusual about what Kathie or Santiago wear. The story takes place some time in the 1960s and this can be indicated in the way they dress. Santiago’s clothes reflect the modest salary and the hectic life of a journalist and lecturer, and it would not be inappropriate for Kathie to dress, when she’s in her little attic, in the Bohemian style of Saint-Germain in the 1950s: black turtle-neck jersey, tight-fitting trousers, stiletto-heeled boots. The costumes Ana and Juan wear need not be so precise. Unlike Kathie and Santiago, who are characters of flesh and blood, contemporaneous with the action, they only live in the minds and the imaginations of the two protagonists. They exist in so far as they are projections of the protagonists’ memories and fantasies. Their subjective, if not to say perceptual, nature should perhaps be subtly suggested in the way they dress, but any outlandishness or exaggeration should be avoided. One possibility is that, as Ana’s and Juan’s thought-processes, gestures, speech and names fluctuate in accordance with Kathie’s and Santiago’s recollections, so might their dress, if only in small details – such as the acquisition of a hat, a cloak, a pair of spectacles, or a wig – to emphasize the metaphorical, volatile nature of their personalities. The same might happen with Kathie and Santiago when they shed their identities and assume new ones, as a projection of either their own or the other’s fantasy. But none of this should be carried beyond the bounds of credibility; the characters should never seem grotesque or like circus clowns – Kathie and the Hippopotamus is not a farce, and should not be performed as such. It is in the subtext, the inner workings of the characters’ minds lying at the root of what they say and do on stage, that we find elements of farce.

  The action of the play exceeds the conventional limits of normal life: it takes place not only in the objective world but also in the subjective world of the characters themselves, as if there were no dividing line between the two, and it moves with complete freedom from one to the other. Any exaggerated speech, gesture or movement, any distortion of reality such as we find in slapstick comedy would be counterproductive and out of place here: the play’s intention is not to provoke laughter through any crude stylization of human experience, but, by using the combined techniques of humour, suspense and melodrama, to lead the audience imperceptibly to accept this integration of the visible with the invisible, of fact with fantasy, of present with past, as a separate reality. Objective life becomes suffused with subjectivity, while the subjective life of the individual acquires the physical and temporal tangibility of objective reality. Characters of flesh and blood become to a certain extent creatures of fantasy, while the phantoms that emerge from their imaginations become cre
atures of flesh and blood. The deepest concerns of Kathie and the Hippopotamus are, perhaps, the nature of theatre in particular and fiction in general: not only that which is written and read, but, more importantly, that which human beings practise unwittingly in their everyday lives.

  Visual effects can be helpful in the staging of the play, but it is primarily the use of music as a background presence that can evoke most effectively the different atmospheres – Paris, Black Africa, and the Arab world – that is to say the exotic appeal of a good part of the story.

  It may not be superfluous to add that in this play I have tried, as I have in my novels, to create an illusion of totality – which should be understood qualitatively rather than quantitatively in this case. The play does not attempt to paint a broad panorama of human experience but seeks to illustrate that experience itself is both objective and subjective, real and imaginary, and that life is made up of both these levels. Man talks, acts, dreams and invents. Life is not just a rational catalogue of events – fantasy and ambition play their part as well. It is not the result of cold planning – but also of spontaneity. Although these two aspects of human experience are not entirely interdependent, neither could do without its counterpart without destroying itself. For a long time we have resorted to fantasy as an escape from reality when it becomes unbearable for us, but this is not just escapism; it is a devious means of gaining the knowledge required for understanding that reality. If we could not distance ourselves from it, it would seem confused and chaotic, little more than a stifling routine. The exploits of the imagination enrich reality and help us better our lives. If we didn’t dream, life would seem irredeemable; if we didn’t allow our imaginations free rein, the world would never change.

  Mario Vargas Llosa