Latin American Plays

by Sebastian Doggart

  MARIA starts circling around DOLORES and the FAN, looking at him as though he were a strange insect.

  MARIA. Desk . . . files . . . public office.

  FAN. Correct. A bureaucrat. A civil servant.

  MARIA continues rotating.

  MARIA. Lots of telephones, you said . . .

  FAN (nervously). Yes. Lots. Going ring . . . ring-ring?

  DOLORES (sings softly). ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses . . . ’

  MARIA (to the FAN). Working?

  FAN. Perfectly.

  DOLORES. ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses . . . ’

  MARIA stops.

  MARIA. Then it can’t be a public office. The telephones there never work.

  DOLORES. ‘A pocket full of posies . . . ’

  MARIA. A hospital?

  FAN. Colder.

  DOLORES. ‘Ah-tish-oo. . . ’

  MARIA. The telephone company?

  DOLORES. ‘Ah-tish-oo. . . ’

  MARIA. Nobody would answer there. A company, you said?

  DOLORES. ‘We all fall down.’

  MARIA. A newspaper? Warmer?

  MARIA looks at the FAN inquisitively. She picks up the newspaper. She starts to flick through it. DOLORES uses the pause to try and stop her.

  DOLORES. Ay, that’s enough. No more unnecessary cruelty. Don’t read the newspaper now. I’m not interested in who died today. I’m not interested in whether the dead are younger or older than me. I don’t care if Mamá finds out, if Mamá suffers if they’re older then her or is pleased if they’re younger . . .

  The following scene should be played in a very stylised manner, almost like an operatic trio. Even so, DOLORES’ voice dominates the chorus, without drowning it out. This stylisation has been prepared by the previous verbal trios between DOLORES, MARIA and the FAN. It should be extremely obvious that the FAN is moving his lips while MARIA reads the newspaper, repeating exactly but silently what she is reading out loud.

  MARIA (reads assertively). ‘Born May 6, 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA. . . ’

  DOLORES (to MARIA). Do you realise what you’re doing. You’re stopping us celebrating. Today, today when the thing we’ve wanted so much has happened, the thing we waited for for years, for ever. And you don’t even stop and celebrate.

  MARIA. ‘Son of an inventor and pianist. . . ’

  DOLORES. Today I was recognised! I woke up, had breakfast and nobody . . . (She points violently at the audience.) Nobody . . . none of you . . . recognised me . . . But lo and behold just after midday an admirer arrived with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, and he said to me: I admire you. You are she.

  MARIA goes on reading the newspaper. The FAN mouths MARIA’s words.

  MARIA. ‘He studied painting at the Chicago Arts Institute.’

  She pronounces it in a French accent: Chicageau.

  DOLORES (to MARIA). Do you understand? You are she. He said it to you too. You are she.

  MARIA. (reading). ‘Aged fifteen he had his acting debut in Dublin. He directed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.’

  FAN. We are all honourable men.

  DOLORES. Don’t you realise? We don’t have to prove to anyone any more that we are them.

  MARIA. ‘He devised and directed a black Macbeth for the Federal Theatre during the Great Depression of the 1930s.’

  FAN (in syncopated rhythm). When shall we three meet again, yeah man.

  DOLORES. We have a witness.

  MARIA. ‘He directed and starred in a fascist version of Julius Caesar.’

  FAN. We are all honourable Menschen.

  DOLORES (pointing to the FAN). He doesn’t lie! He’s seen all our movies. He doesn’t lie!

  MARIA. ‘In October 1938, he terrified thousands of listeners with his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds . . . ’

  FAN. We are all honorary Martians.

  DOLORES (very sad) Wells . . . He doesn’t lie . . .

  MARIA. ‘In 1940 he reinvented the art of film-making with Citizen Kane.’

  FAN. We are all honourable tycoons.

  MARIA. ‘His name entered the Hall of Fame alongside Griffith, Chaplin and Eisenstein . . . ’

  DOLORES (increasingly uncertain). He doesn’t lie . . .

  MARIA. ‘In 1942 he dressed Dolores del Río as a leopard and used her in Voyage au pays de la peur . . . ’

  DOLORES (desperate). No, Journey into Fear. Its name is Journey into Fear. You can’t read English . . .

  MARIA (still going through the paper). Gringa. Pains of the River.

  DOLORES. Frog. Marie Joyeuse.

  MARIA. Douleurs de la Fleuve.

  FAN. We are all honourable tributaries.

  DOLORES. María de los Angeles Félix! Happy Mary of the Angels!

  FAN. Mary had a little angel, its cock was black as coal, and everywhere that Mary came, the cock was sure to grow . . .

  DOLORES. You only came to Los Angeles because your name is María de los Angeles, you vain bitch. We could have gone to live in Rio, we could have flown down to Rio. Oooh, my youth!

  MARIA. Or to the village of Dolores, to ring the bell of independence. (She goes on reading) ‘And in 1941 he did not film The Road to Santiago with . . .

  DOLORES. ‘Dolores del Río.’

  Sadness. The trio breaks up. MARIA throws the newspaper far away from her.

  MARIA (to DOLORES, but looking at the FAN). May I introduce the author of the Los Angeles Times obituaries. (To the FAN.) We’ve been reading it for years, honourable sir. The obituary page is the first thing we look at every day. Nothing interests us more than finding out who died yesterday. You seem very young to devote yourself entirely to dead meat.

  DOLORES. What are you saying? How do you know?

  MARIA. I saw him moving his lips every time I read. Repeating his own memorable phrases about yesterday’s celebrity death.

  FAN (correcting her). Today’s. What you read is the midday five-star final edition. My newspaper’s proud to be the first with the latest.

  MARIA. In love with what he writes.

  FAN (with sudden sarcasm). Who’s a clever dick then?

  MARIA. Cleverer than you, you constipated ink-shitter. Sure, I’m very smart, a hundred times smarter than you. I’m the mother of Tarzan and all the rest of the chimps in the world. Get it? I am the top dog and you are the lowest and ugliest tramp who ever stepped on my fitted carpet. Go graze in another field . . . lambikins. This Big Bad Wolf is in charge here.

  DOLORES. Holy Mary, mother of God! (To MARIA) You’ve offended my fan!

  The FAN makes as if to turn and walk out.

  FAN (to DOLORES). I’m sorry. I really am.

  MARIA (to DOLORES). Don’t be stupid. He’s just a smartassed hack who wants to hear your reactions to Orson Welles’ death.

  DOLORES. I don’t care what he is. He recognised me, he admitted that I am she. You don’t, you say you love me and you don’t admit it.

  MARIA. That’s because I love you. Because I love you for who you are, Lola.

  DOLORES (not listening, insistent). It’s the same with Mamá, she says I’m crazy, we’re both crazy, both of us: you María and me Dolores!

  MARIA. She’ll be happy today. Welles was younger than her.

  DOLORES (bewildered). Wells? No, she cried a lot when he died, she said they were contemporaries, travellers in the same time machine, she said . . .

  MARIA. Orson?

  DOLORES. No, he’s just a kid. Why should he die? I’m talking about Herbert George.

  MARIA takes DOLORES by her shoulders.

  MARIA. Wake up, cutiepie. Come out of your trance. Orson died today. Orson. Your contemporary.

  DOLORES is stupefied. She stares blindly at the audience in front of her. She murmurs.

  DOLORES. Wells. H.G. Wells. The author of The Invisible Man. Mamá says she met him once. On holiday in the Caribbean. On the island of Doctor Moreau. A very uncomfortable place, Mamá told us. The chambermaids ate the soaps and tore the sheets every morning. The waiters came through
the window with bananas in their hands.

  MARIA. You’re getting it mixed-up. You’re writing your own history.

  DOLORES (resuming a logical, mundane and serene tone of voice). No. Welles adapted Wells to the radio and terrified the citizens of the state of New Jersey but he also fooled the newspapers of the Hearst chain who believed the Martian invasion dramatised by Welles to be true. So Welles stole the front page from Howard Hughes who was trying to go round the world in a wooden plane but found himself unpublicised because of Wells, Welles and the Hearst Chain, which is why Hughes then offered Welles Orson all the money in the world to make Citizen Kane and Welles responded by making the anticipated parody of Howard Hughes’ future life through a real-life parody of William Randolph Hearst, thus making fun of them both. In other words, Welles invaded Howard Hughes’ future through Hearst William Randolph’s past and Wells Herbert George invaded Hearst’s future by offering him a little Martian granddaughter who held up a bank with a machine-gun on the same day that Hughes fled Managua Nicaragua in a helicopter to die of starvation, surrounded by cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and Coca-Cola bottles, isolated and invisible. H.G. Wells wrote the invisible man who is Howard Hughes, and Welles – which one? —adapted Wells – which one? (Pause.) I cry for them both. (Anguished again, she goes over to MARIA.) Who will cry for us?

  MARIA. ¿Quién?

  The FAN imitates Orson Welles in the party scene in Citizen Kane.

  FAN. ¿Quién? Charlie Kane!

  DOLORES and MARIA continue acting out the scene with the greatest intimacy, totally indifferent to the FAN’s music-hall buffoonery.

  DOLORES. Yes, will anyone cry for you and me?

  FAN (teasing). The grateful public.

  MARIA. Mamá . . .

  DOLORES. No, she’ll be pleased we went first.

  FAN. Kane? ¿Quién? Charlie Kane? Kane será será.

  MARIA. The public . . . Our public . . . Our public will cry for us . . . Listen . . .

  A murmur of applause and ovations: vivas, bravos. It crescendos until it reaches an unbearable pitch. MARIA listens calmly, or rather sadly; DOLORES becomes more and more terrified until she puts her hands over her ears and screams. Meanwhile, the FAN has gone over to the toilet, his reel under his arm and the portable projector in his hand. He takes off the white telephone and places the projector on top of the toilet lid. While MARIA and DOLORES are occupied downstage in the following scene, the FAN prepares the projector upstage. He takes off his coat and reveals his sleeveless, diamond-patterned jumper. He takes the roll of film carefully out of the can, places it next to the projector and starts rolling on the film. From time to time, he interjects a pun from his dubious repertoire.

  DOLORES (screaming). No! Make them be quiet! No applause! Applause pursues us like a ghost! Applause is worse than a howl, a whisper or the clang of chains! Applause is our Frankenstein: it created us, María, and it killed us!

  FAN. Citizen FranKanestein.

  DOLORES leans against MARIA. They both sit down on the floor downstage, DOLORES’ head leaning on MARIA’s shoulder. MARIA strokes DOLORES’ hair. DOLORES puts her arm round MARIA’s waist.

  MARIA. I’ll cry for you, little sister, if you go before me.

  DOLORES. Together. Together.

  MARIA. Will you cry for me?

  DOLORES. No, together, please. Who would take care of me? Who would take me on Sundays to Santa Monica beach to show off my beautiful body in a bikini? Who would bury me in the sand on my birthday and tie twenty candles from my belly button? Who, little sister, who?

  FAN. Kane or Abel?

  MARIA. Do you need me?

  DOLORES. You know I do. My memory . . . is you.

  MARIA. Do you forgive me for not being like you . . . ?

  DOLORES. The black sheep?

  MARIA (nods). Black as pitch.

  FAN. Lady Cain.

  DOLORES. I think I was a bit jealous of your life.

  MARIA. And I of yours, doll.

  DOLORES (with a pout). Don’t rub it in that we’re different.

  MARIA. No, I wasn’t jealous of you. I’m not complaining about anything. Who can take down the tapestry of our lives?

  FAN. An Amerikane in Paris, that’s who.

  MARIA. Do you regret not doing anything?

  DOLORES. A child of my own?

  MARIA. No. No. They would have taken it away from you. I didn’t abandon mine. They took him away from me.

  DOLORES. Everyone always says you abandoned him.

  FAN. You ought to be Kaned.

  MARIA (in a hard voice, paying no attention to the FAN). No. They took him away from me. The public. The producers. All of them. They came to an agreement. The soulless woman couldn’t have a child. It would be a contradiction. The man-eater ate her child first.

  FAN. Cainibal!

  MARIA (to DOLORES). You know what I am jealous of you for?

  DOLORES. What, my angel? What, my poor little doña?

  MARIA. You never had to lie.

  FAN. Hughes lying?

  DOLORES (with a flash of flirtatiousness). Ooooh, if you only knew! One of the times I got married I was fifty and my husband was forty. He asked me before the ceremony to say we were both forty, you know, to be like the perfect couple. When the judge asked his age, he replied very seriously. ‘Forty years old.’ When he asked mine, I replied very cheerfully: ‘Twenty years old.’

  They both laugh and hug each other happily, their great intimacy restored.

  MARIA. That’s nothing. When they launched me, they made up an official biography that wasn’t mine. Not my origins, not my husbands, not my son, nothing. I couldn’t believe it when I read it. I was another woman. My life had been wiped out.

  FAN. Hughes who?

  MARIA. My husbands . . . my son . . . my lovers . . . were hidden away, taken out of the photos in which I appeared with them.

  DOLORES. Jesus! Like poor Trotsky.

  FAN. Whose? Hughes, that’s whose.

  MARIA (with a sour smile). Wiped out. They never existed, you see.

  FAN. Jesus! The Cruci Fiction.

  DOLORES. Why did you put up with it?

  MARIA. Because I wanted to be wanted. I wanted to be admired. I deserved it. Half my life has been used by other people. The other half I sold to success to get back the life that the others took away from me.

  FAN. You Kane take it with you.

  MARIA. I’ve done everything to be wanted and admired. First comes the admiration, I told myself, and then love will come.

  FAN (playing pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake). Patty Hearst, Patty Hearst, where are you?

  MARIA. But some of what I’m saying isn’t true. The truth, then and now, is that I want to be wanted, I want to be loved, Lolita, and for that I was and I am prepared to pay any price, first the humiliation, then the glory and now the forgetting.

  DOLORES. Now the forgetting . . .

  MARIA. Yes, because now we have to be forgotten, Lolita, so our movies can be remembered. Our movies are timeless, you know, they are eternal.

  DOLORES (in a dream) They’re like the perfume that’s left of our lives . . .

  MARIA. Yes, only our movies can laugh at our generation and survive it: to escape a sad childhood, a movie . . .

  DOLORES. No, it was very happy . . . dolls and hoops and roundabouts.

  MARIA. To escape poor and insecure adolescence, a movie.

  DOLORES. No, no, dances and boyfriends and moonlit serenades . . .

  MARIA. Yes, to escape smutty, decadent and humiliated youth, a movie . . .

  DOLORES. No, Hollywood: the contract with Warner Brothers, the invitation to Pickfair, the swimming pool, the greyhound, the silk parasol and the organdie hat . . .

  MARIA. Yes, Guadalajara: the invitation to Chapala, the little contract with the producer who demanded the goods up front, the sleazy motel, the hungry dogs barking, the mariachis falling silent.

  DOLORES kisses MARIA passionately.

  DOLORES. Not any more María.
We’re both royalty now, queens, floating for ever in our gondolas down the Grand Canal of Venecia towards the palace where our doges await us. (Pause.) Two queens of a single kingdom. We shall be remembered. Nothing has been forgotten.

  FAN. Nothing has been forgotten.

  The FAN turns on the projector. The light should blind the audience, physically hurt them as if to supplant the vision they are about to be denied. What the FAN projects will be seen by him, MARIA and DOLORES, and imagined by the audience, since the screen supposedly occupies the audience’s place.

  MARIA. Any price. First the humiliation, then the glory and now the forgetting.

  FAN. Sorry. I told you I’ve got all the movies you’ve made, girls. Pardon me. Of your films, Lolita, I’m only missing Carmen. (To MARIA) But I’m not missing anything of yours, not even this one . . .

  As the FAN projects the movie, DOLORES watches first with alarm, then with embarrassment, finally covering her eyes and sobbing, shaking her head repeatedly, incredulous. MARIA stays calm, neither sad nor happy, but grave and severe as if she were watching a dance of death.

  FAN. It’s incredible what you can find in the files of an old newspaper like the Los Angeles Times. These are things that the guys in editorial inherit from the executives: executed images, you know? A bit clichéd, overplayed, and passé . . . well, even the hardest pornography gets boring if you look at it more than twice. Sex is so mechanical, twice is too much, but once is always great, the first time’s always surprising and exciting. Holy Mother, we tell ourselves, this time it’ll be better, this time it’ll be true. Truth? Truth? Didn’t I tell you that when the tribes migrated to the north they couldn’t see each other because the light was so weak, and they had to invent the lie of language to recognise each other in the darkness. But movies . . . movies. Could they be the truth? Because in the darkness they take us back to the world of pure gesture before language, when you didn’t have to talk to say I love you, I hate you, I’ll save you, I’ll kill you, run away, come here . . . (Pause) You weren’t listening. You were too preoccupied with your dumb lies. Truth? No. Just look at them monkeying around. He really looks like a monkey, a gorilla, and no woman disobeys a gorilla. He says: run away because there’s danger. And every woman runs away without hesitation. And she . . . she looks like she’s going to tear the sheets apart and eat soap. Good God, how vulgar. Was it for this that we were created in His own image, etcetera? To behave like this, worse than wild beasts and in a bed . . . Ooooh! Maybe in the same bed where we were born and where we’ll die, the cradle and the grave of our dirty pleasures. (The FAN stops rolling the film and furiously walks over to MARIA who is sitting downstage next to DOLORES. The play of white, blinding light and the shadows of the bodies comes across like an hallucination and the struggle between the FAN and MARIA projects itself like a bitter parody of the sexual act. He takes her by the wrists and tries to lift her up.) I’m sorry not to let you forget. Look. (He takes MARIA roughly by the neck, forcing her to look at the images.) Remember? Remember when you made that? What year was it . . . thirty-five, thirty-six? Look at how primitive the technique was . . . they didn’t even use sound . . . seriously gross. (As she tries to break free from the FAN, a negative, moaning pain can be heard in MARIA’s voice. The FAN picks her up by her armpits.) The reel was forgotten in the oldest file of the Los Angeles Times. You ran away from Mexico to run away from your lost youth. You crossed the desert and the Grim Reaper didn’t appear to you. What appeared to you was your forgotten, rotten, stinking youth: look at it. Who would want to watch a 1930s porn movie, with a forgotten little girl who today would be an old hag. Ughhh. No-one likes to think his mother screwed too, his grandmother opened her legs, his sister sucked the milk of human kindness, his daughter will also go on vacation to the island of Doctor Moreau . . . that they all howled with pleasure with another man, that those women said the same to the other man as what you did: fuck me . . .