Set Me Free

by Salvatore Striano

  ‘That lot win even when they lose,’ he says with a smile, and a little bit of proud parochialism.

  The Sicilians are crazy when it comes to football. Even if you tear them to pieces in the match, they still don’t feel beaten. ‘Do you know who we are?’ they say. ‘You might have won the match, but we’ve got the Mafia.’ What do you say to that?

  ‘Uh-huh. But it’s different in rehearsals. What matters is what you can do.’ Then I add, out of love for the truth, ‘Except for the Poet, who thinks he’s better than everyone because he’s been inside the longest.’ The Poet is a man named Giulio. He’s insufferable—I even got into a fight with him once.

  ‘Could it be that this Donna Amalia has found a little place in your heart?’ don Pasquale says, to provoke me.

  ‘I like Donna Amalia because she’s good,’ I admit. ‘And because she explains things. I’ve never given or received explanations in my life. Plus…’ I stop. I’ve already bored him to shits with the story of my mother. But he presses me to go on.

  ‘Plus?’

  ‘Plus, I took my mother as my model,’ I mumble. ‘I rehearse in my cell thinking about how she used to say things, how she moved, how she stirred her coffee, how she handled the dishcloth…all those wonderful things about her. Don Pasquale, taking away our rehearsals is like taking away visiting time. It’s cruel. They can’t do this.’

  He slowly pours the coffee, concentrating, as though it’s a ritual. He looks into the darkness of the cup and who knows what he sees there. Perhaps he sees a time when something mattered to him the way this play matters to us now.

  ‘Shut yourselves up in your cells,’ he says in the end.

  I open my eyes wide. He hasn’t understood the problem.

  ‘Well actually, we’re already shut up in our cells,’ I say, trying to maintain a respectful tone. I’d never be rude to don Pasquale. He can turn me to stone with a single glance. ‘We need to come out to be able to rehearse.’

  ‘I understand the problem,’ he retorts harshly. ‘And the solution is that you all stay in your cells and you tell the warden. You tell him: “We understand that you’re in difficulty, and that you have to work out which doors to open and which to close. And until you work that out we’ll stay in our cells, so as not to cause you further headaches.”’

  ‘And do you think then he’ll open things up again?’

  ‘I think he’ll see that you’re not trying to screw him over, that he can trust you. And then he’ll open things up.’

  And so it goes. We put together a nice little delegation—as usual, a Sicilian, a Neapolitan, a Calabrian, an Apulian, a Roman and a foreigner—and we go to see the warden and explain to him that we’re staying in our cells to help him, that we won’t be coming out for visits or anything. Two days later, recreational activities start up again.

  And there’s a surprise awaiting us in the rehearsal room.

  °

  ‘This director here wants to watch us rehearse.’ Cosimo introduces the new arrival, a distinguished man with very short white hair, a straight nose and a little bit of stubble.

  ‘If you’d like a hand, that’s what I’m here for,’ is all the man says. His name is Fabio Cavalli and he’s a theatre director, he explains.

  Some of us are wary. It’s our first time rehearsing in front of a stranger. What does this guy want? How exactly does he want to help us?

  ‘All right, let’s get going. We don’t have a lot of time,’ I say eventually, cutting to the chase like I always do.

  At the end of the rehearsal Cavalli gathers us round and says, ‘You’re really crap.’

  There are murmurs of protest—we’ve given it our all. What the fuck does this guy want?

  ‘We can work on you,’ the director says, pointing at me. ‘But as for the rest of you, look, you’re irredeemable. Just as well they’ve locked you away.’

  I’m expecting an explosion, but he’s spoken so frankly that we kind of have to laugh. We stare at each other. We’re all wearing wigs because we’re embarrassed to get on stage looking like ourselves. We’ve been told there will be TV cameras and we’re afraid that people at home will see us, and that someone who didn’t know we were in prison will end up finding out. We’re afraid of jogging the memory of someone testifying to the public prosecutor, and we’re afraid of embarrassing ourselves. Well, we ought to be embarrassed done up in these wigs, those of us dressed as women with our faces painted, too.

  Cavalli goes on, before he can lose too much ground. ‘Guys, I’d take sincerity as a starting point. I’d begin with the courage that Sasà is showing in not feeling silly.’

  ‘Silly? Moi? Is there something wrong with your eyes?’ I protest in an injured tone, touching my hair in an affected way. And they all burst out laughing.

  I’m a born actor, no two ways about it.

  ‘I only want to give you some advice,’ Cavalli continues, once the laughter and catcalls have died down. ‘If you’re willing to take it. Get rid of this gear that makes you look like the Taliban…’ He points at the wigs and scarves we’re hiding under. ‘You’re unrecognisable like that.’

  ‘But we want to be unrecognisable!’ the Poet objects. ‘So they don’t see us at home…’

  ‘You don’t need to be embarrassed or afraid,’ Cavalli insists. ‘Be serious about this. Behave like actors.’

  We’re not convinced, so we find a compromise. We’ll act in our disguises, because they make us feel safer, but after the last line, each of us will slowly take off his wig. The man beneath will appear.

  I like this idea.

  Donna Amalia will appear on stage, but so will Sasà.

  When I finally step onto the stage I realise at once that perhaps for the first time in my life, I’m right where I belong. On performance night, after just a few rehearsals in the theatre, I feel like I’ve been acting in the theatre forever.

  The audience claps every time I come on stage, and after each of my lines. It’s holding things up, and we have to keep stopping until the applause dies down. I pause after my line, with a funny expression on my face. I can hear them going crazy. They’re applauding me. They’re saying ‘bravo’ to me, the man everyone used to be afraid of. I feel the enthusiasm, the waves of love arriving along with the applause. It’s better than any drug.

  When I take my wig off at the end, slowly, as planned, and stand there with my face bared to them all, my eyes are full of tears. I see Monica, sitting in the third row, holding the red rose that I’d asked one of the volunteers to bring for her. She’s smiling at me like never before.

  At the end of the performance, officials and professionals come backstage. I think some are important figures in the arts, but I don’t know who any of them are. There’s one name I do know, though—Luca De Filippo, the son of Eduardo. The master’s son is here in person. He says, ‘I’m staging Napoli milionaria outside, at the Teatro Argentina. I hope my actress will forgive me if I say that the way you do Donna Amalia…It only took you three minutes to make me forget that there was a man under that costume.’

  ‘Now I know why I can never find good actors for my films,’ says another man, a director. ‘They’re all in jail!’

  An old lady who had been sitting in the front row takes my hand and kisses it. She kisses my hand!

  ‘Signora, what are you doing?’

  ‘Bravo,’ is all she says. ‘Bravo.’

  It’s all over too fast. After only five minutes the guards separate us from the audience and make us return to our cells. Why are you doing this to us? Haven’t we earned the accolades? It casts a shadow over the best night of my life.

  Still, back in my cell I cry tears of joy. I cry all night.

  INTERMEZZO

  When I was little I experienced the streets as a stage. I headed into the street in the morning and I had to be an actor in all sorts of stories, but I hadn’t written or chosen the script. Treading the boards of the real stage, in the theatre, is different. It’s a thousand sensations rol
led into one.

  On stage, someone like me can think: From up here I really have a chance to make it in the world. On stage I stand before you, the audience, and say: ‘This is all I am and you alone are my judges, you must judge me.’ On stage I have the sense that I can attain forgiveness.

  And I feel guappo, I mean truly guappo: powerful, important. I feel taller. I have a perspective from which I look out over the world like a giant and I can say to anyone: ‘Hey, what do you want?’ And I mean, say it well, say it without fear.

  Here in prison they don’t know what to do with me. In prison you can only become one thing: a crime connoisseur. An encyclopaedia. Because all the discussions that take place, all the anecdotes people tell, are crime stories. They can be frightening or boring, instructional or stupid, but that’s all you talk about. You take your own dumb story into a prison and in return you get the other dumb stories. But all you’re doing is exchanging poison.

  We need different stories. Bigger than the ones we grew up with, capable of helping us understand how we ended up in here.

  I went straight from reality to the stage. I’ve never seen theatre or read books, and I’ve never had any stories to consume; instead, reality consumed me. Perhaps that’s why, for me, the veil between life and performance is thinner. On stage I don’t give you an actor’s performance. I give you, directly, everything I am.

  You ask: ‘Had you really never acted before?’

  And I reply: ‘Guys, I’ve been acting all my life.’

  But this time it’s different. You got me involved, got me reading, put a script in my hand? Well, now I’m going to show you who I am.

  I don’t want to come down from this stage.

  7

  ‘My library Was dukedom large enough.’

  Prospero in The Tempest

  Act I, Scene II

  ‘So who is this, anyway?’

  The room is a cacophony of voices. Cavalli has really done it this time. For our next show, instead of a play by Eduardo, he’s brought along a script by some Shapesgear, or Spakesheer, or some other unpronounceable name. Who is this fellow and what’s he got to tell us?

  ‘He’s one of the greatest playwrights of all time, dammit!’ exclaims the director, as if we’d just insulted his mother. ‘You can’t be such donkeys that you’ve never heard of Shakespeare!’

  ‘Yeah, nice name. Shakes-Beer!’ The jibes start flying thick and fast as we compete to see who can best mangle this intruder’s surname. Shakes-Beer does make me laugh. Then I think, poor guy, he’s a foreigner. He can’t help it if he’s got stupid name. So I change my line of attack.

  ‘But listen, Fabio. What kind of story is this? A bunch of Spaniards get shipwrecked on an island, there’s a sorcerer, a spirit of the air…I mean come on. What does this have to do with us?’ My tone is reasonable, I don’t want to come right out and tell him he has screwed up, but this play is completely wrong. While he was telling us the story and reading the first few lines, the others couldn’t stop yawning.

  Fabio stares at me as if to say, ‘I didn’t expect this from you.’ But instead he says: ‘Do you want to know why you’re exactly the people to be putting on this play? What it’s got to do with you?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I reply, without averting my gaze, but a little unnerved by the intensity of his.

  ‘For one reason, and one alone.’ His tone quietens all those voices making fun of Shakespeare, so that the next few words fall upon an eerie silence. ‘It’s about vendetta, forgiveness and freedom.’

  I am silent, too. I never had much faith in words until I began this theatre thing. Now I’m starting to understand their value. And these are three heavyweight words. One of them we know well. One we’ve never encountered. And the third is not a part of our lives at all.

  I remain uncertain. I feel like those words struck me physically. In any case, nobody is convinced. Ours is a theatre company started up by two Neapolitans, composed mostly of Neapolitans: hands off Eduardo.

  ‘Fabio, we’re loyal to Eduardo!’ This time it’s Cosimo speaking, maybe in part so that I’m not the only one taking the initiative. He doesn’t like it when I speak on behalf of the group or when the others come to me; he wants to be the only leader. I let him speak. The theatre company was his idea, after all. I don’t care about appearing to be in charge. I just want the guys to deliver their lines properly and for us to perform like professionals.

  However, I agree with Cosimo. Eduardo De Filippo brought us success and we will not betray him. He wrote dozens of beautiful plays, enough to keep us busy for the length of our sentences, even the lifers.

  ‘We won’t disrespect him in this way. We have our code of honour,’ Cosimo adds decisively. There are shouts and whistles of agreement and approval.

  Cavalli looks at us. We’re all against him.

  ‘You’re talking like gangsters,’ he says contemptuously.

  ‘Well actually, Fabio,’ sneers Francesco, a Sicilian, ‘we are gangsters.’

  ‘What you are is a bunch of dickheads,’ says the director as he gets to his feet. ‘Do whatever you like.’

  He slams the door behind him, leaving the script there on the table.

  We start celebrating like we’ve held off the worst kind of enemy—the English invader—and discussing which will be the next Eduardo play we put on.

  But as we leave, I walk past the table and take the script with me. Nobody needs it, and I don’t mind the idea of having something else to read in my cell. The Tempest. Ridiculous story. Nice title, though.

  Over the next few days I don’t open the play because I have other things to read. I’m loyal to Eduardo like everyone else, but Cavalli’s words really struck me, and made me think that there’s still so much I don’t know. We’re gangsters and we’re ignorant—how is it possible I’ve never even heard the name of this unpronounceable author, this Shakespeare guy? And who knows how many other writers are out there? Maybe even some talented playwrights.

  What if there were other plays as good as Eduardo’s? That would be hard. But what if we could find one everybody would agree on? I might even be the one to find it.

  I enter the prison library, uneasy—I still feel weighed down by the thought that I’m betraying Eduardo.

  ‘Hi, Bennett.’

  The librarian nods. He’s a Nigerian man, very tall and handsome, and highly educated.

  ‘Sasà, I’ve never seen you here before. What are you after?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just that now we’ve done Napoli milionaria, we have to choose something for our next performance,’ I explain. ‘I wanted to look at some books, see what’s out there.’

  As I say it I realise it’s a crazy undertaking. There really are heaps of books in here. And who knows how many more there are on the outside. I feel dizzy: where do I even start?

  ‘Have you got something particular in mind?’ he asks kindly.

  ‘No, I’ll just take a look around,’ I say, in the same way you reply to the sales assistant in a clothes shop. I don’t want him to see that I have no idea where to even put my hands. I might be ignorant, but I have my dignity.

  I park myself in front of a bookshelf and run my eyes along the titles until I finally find one I recognise. Sure, I could take this one. I’ve often heard of it but I’ve never read it. I don’t think it’s right for the theatre, but at least this way I can save face. It’s a start, as they say. And while I’m here I grab another thick book, one with a soft cover: The Godfather. It says it’s a novel, so who knows if it will tell things like they really are.

  I go back to the table with my loot and hand it over to Bennett, whose eyes open wide.

  ‘No, Sasà!’ He looks at me and shakes his head violently. ‘Forget about this one, it’s not for you!’

  His tone is really worried. What an overreaction.

  ‘What, The Godfather? You think it’s going to give me bad ideas?’ I’m smiling, to let him know that, sure, books are important, but you don’t need to make
a big drama about it.

  ‘No, not The Godfather, that’s not a problem.’ With his chin he indicates the other book, like he doesn’t even want to touch it. ‘This the one you shouldn’t take. It’s a bad book.’

  ‘The Divine Comedy?’

  ‘That’s right. Forget about Dante.’

  ‘But he’s really famous. People always talk about him…’ I’m confused. How come it’s yes to The Godfather but no to The Divine Comedy? What sort of a librarian is he? Is he on something? Impossible. Bennett doesn’t even smoke.

  ‘Yes, he’s the most famous writer there is, but he’s also the biggest bastard of them all,’ he retorts. ‘This guy is not for us, Sasà. He destroys us, burns us, cuts us into little pieces, makes us suffer. This guy sends us to hell.’

  He seems really convinced. But I’ve always been the kind of person who becomes more determined to do something the more you tell me not to do it. It’s not arrogance, but nobody should think they can give me their opinion and that’s that. I’ll hear you out, but I’ll think for myself and respond, and maybe I’ll even be able to change your mind. So I say to Bennett, ‘Well, I’ll read it and let you know.’

  In resignation, he records the loan and says goodbye.

  I set off with Dante under my arm and I can feel Bennett’s eyes on my back, just like my mother’s when she would watch me head out in bad company, knowing that I was going to get mixed up in some kind of trouble.

  Over the next two weeks I read Dante and I begin to understand what Bennett meant when he said he was the biggest bastard of them all. There’s something that doesn’t add up with this Dante sending everybody to hell. He takes all life’s problems out of the mix and puts everything in order, but there’s no compassion. As I read I imagine him as a priest in a long cassock, stern and grim, throwing each person into their circle of hell. He’s not speaking to me, he’s judging me. Maybe somebody chaste and pure can feel protected by Dante; they might like his obsession with creating order. I just feel the desire to rebel.