Mr Price, or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two- Headed Calf (Routledge Harwood Polish and Eastern European Theatre Archive, 12)

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Mr Price, Or Tropical Madness and

Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf by StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Routledge Harwood Polish and East European Theatre Archive A series of books edited by Daniel Gerould, Graduate School, City University of New York, USA

Volume 1 To Steal a March on God Hanna Krall Translated and with an introduction by Jadwiga Kosicka Volume 2 Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954–1989 Kathleen Cioffi Volume 3 Country House Stanisl⁄ aw Ignacy Witkiewicz Translated and with an introduction by Daniel Gerould Volume 4 The Trap . Tadeusz Rózewicz Translated by Adam Czerniawski Volume 5 Polish Romantic Drama Harold B. Segal Volume 6 The Mannequins’ Ball Bruno Jasienski Translated and with an introduction by Daniel Gerould Volume 7 Leading Creators in Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre Jarka Burian Volume 8 Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor Krzysztof Miklaszewski Edited and translated by George Hyde Volume 9 Ireneusz Iredyn´ski: Selected one-act plays for radio Edited by Kevin Windle

Please see the back of this book for other titles in the Routledge Harwood Polish and East European Theatre Archive series

Mr Price, Or Tropical Madness and

Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Edited and translated by Daniel Gerould

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2002 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Witkiewicz, Stanisl⁄ aw Ignacy, 1885–1939. [Mister Price. English] Mr. Price, or, Tropical madness; and, Metaphysics of a two-headed calf/ by Stanisl⁄ aw Ignacy Witkiewicz. p. cm. – (Routledge Harwood Polish and East European Theatre Archive; 12) Translated by Daniel Gerould. 1. Witkiewicz, Stanisl⁄ aw Ignacy, 1885–1939 – Translation into English. I. Title: Mr. Price, or, Tropical madness; and, Metaphysics of a two-headed calf. II. Title: Mr. Price. III. Title: Tropical madness. IV. Gerould, Daniel Charles, 1928– V. Witkiewicz, Stanisl⁄ aw Ignacy, 1885–1939. Metafizyka dwuglowego cielecia. English. VI. Title: Metaphysics of a two–headed calf. VII Title. VIII. Series. PG7158.W52 M5713 2002 891.8’5272–dc21 2001048575 ISBN 0-203-21863-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27407-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–27506–7 (Print Edition)

To Paul Berman, American director of Witkacy, for his exemplary productions of Mr. Price and Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf and also The Water Hen, Gyubal Wahazar, and The Madman and the Nun

Contents

Introduction to the Series

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: Tropical Madness – Witkacy’s Journey to the East Daniel Gerould

1

Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness (1920–1925) by StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Translated by Daniel Gerould

11

Witkiewicz’s Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf (1921)

57

Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf (1921) by StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Translated by Daniel Gerould

61

Appendix: Witkacy’s Journey to the Tropics and Itinerary in Ceylon Daniel Gerould

vii

105

Introduction to the Series

The Routledge Harwood Polish and East European Theatre Archive makes available in English translation major works of Poland’s dramatic literature as well as monographs and critical studies on Polish and East European playwrights, theatre artists and stage history. Although emphasis is placed on the contemporary period, the archive also encompasses the nineteenth-century roots of modern theatre practice in Romanticism and Symbolism. The individual plays will contain authoritative introductions that place the works in their historical and theatrical contexts. Daniel Gerould

ix

Acknowledgements

Early versions of the translations appeared in Tropical Madness (N. Y., 1972). Elizabethan Swain provided invaluable help with the revisions. Portions of the introduction appear in Examining the Other in Polish Culture, ed. Elwira M. Grossman (Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), and parts of the appendix are published in Malinowski/Witkacy, Konteksty, Nos. 1–4, 2000.

xi

Introduction: Tropical Madness – Witkacy’s Journey to the East

In philosophy a proponent of biological monadology (derived from Leibniz), Witkacy explored the problem posed by the directly given feeling of the unity of personality on the part of each Individual Being (the “I” or self) as it confronts the plurality of all that lies outside it (the “non-I” or other). From these premises there results the existential plight of the individual in a world of otherness, giving rise to a tragic sense of life. The playwright’s aim was to create a total philosophical and aesthetic system, at the center of which stood the beleaguered “I” stalked by the other. Along with religion and philosophy, art is the principal means by which humanity can experience the mystery of existence. The function of theatre, Witkacy believed, was to reinstate the metaphysical feelings of the mystery of existence which were in danger of being lost forever in the mechanized “happiness” of the perfect anthill society of the future. For Witkacy, the experience of otherness was anxious and threatening – but also the source of wonder at the strangeness of the world and the origin of our awareness of our precarious place in it. Encountering the other is the mainspring of artistic originality. Only through the experience of otherness can one define one’s individuality. Uniformity means the death of creativity. Who or what was the other for Witkacy? In his plays and novels otherness is ubiquitous – in the cosmos, in the star-filled sky at night, in the forest-covered mountains, but also, right at home, in the self. Hidden inside the unitary “I” are multiple “non-I’s,” insidious, subversive, alien doubles plaguing one’s existence and threatening the very stability of identity. The other lurking within can be a destructive as well as a creative force, fracturing any sense of selfhood. 1

2

Introduction

But the most flamboyant instances of otherness in Witkacy’s plays are outer, not inner, and can readily be discovered by looking at the cast of characters of any of his plays. There they are listed in the stage directions – other social classes, other nationalities, other races – described meticulously according to their shapes and textures, hair, skin color, facial and physical oddities. For Witkacy, a painter by training and a portraitist by profession, otherness is defined by what is visually distinctive and different. For this reason, Polish Jews fascinated him, as did women with striking asymmetrical features. But to confront the other in its most exotic form, Witkacy had to leave Europe and everything with which he was familiar. Nothing in his life until that point had as profound an impact on Witkacy as his travel to the tropics with BronislⲐ aw Malinowski in 1914. This pivotal, intense experience of otherness, which occurred during a period of a mere two weeks spent in Ceylon, was the playwright’s first and only exposure to a totally alien culture. The nature of Witkacy’s response to the otherness of Asia was determined in large part by his powerful visual imagination. Above all, the journey to the East opened his eyes to color and radically transformed his perception of the world, as expressed in both his art and his life. After the tropics, white became for Witkacy the color of boredom and power, manifesting itself in regimentation, repression, and violence, while vitality and sexuality were vividly multichromatic. Why did Witkacy react so strongly to the otherness of the tropics? What explains the intensity of his response? Part of the answer must lie in his absolute lack of preparation for what he saw. He had no prior knowledge or experience of any non-Western civilization and, like almost all of his contemporaries, was parochially Eurocentric in outlook. In his formative years, from 1901 to 1914, Witkacy had traveled extensively in Europe. By his early twenties, he had been to most of the major European cities – Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London – where he dutifully visited museums and saw the historic sights. These trips, conceived by his father, formed an integral part of his education as a cultured European and were essential training for his artistic vocation. Travel and cultural sightseeing were rites of passage belonging to an age-old tradition. In these journeys Witkacy followed his father’s instructions and reported to him on what he had seen and experienced; Witkiewicz senior read and commented upon his son’s reactions. For the journey to Australia (hastily arranged to save him from despondency after the suicide of his fiancée), Witkacy was without recognized models to follow. He had no previous experience of Asia or Asians, and no knowledge of the history or culture of these countries.

Tropical Madness – Witkacy’s Journey to the East

3

Witkacy was dependent on his friend Malinowski, the more experienced traveler who was undertaking the trip for professional reasons – to attend the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Witkacy followed passively, paralyzed because of his grief and guilt over his fiancée’s suicide. Witkacy brought to the experience something that Malinowski lacked and envied: the sensibility of an artist reacting spontaneously to new stimuli. The journey to the East aroused still dormant powers of his imagination and influenced the future development of his art. In London Malinowski and Witkacy – rather like figures from a British comedy – prepared for the journey by going shopping for tropical helmets, jungle outfits and various gear to protect themselves against the sun. But socially and psychologically neither of the two appeared to have the inner equipment necessary for engaging with non-European races and cultures. After the death of his fiancée, Witkacy had lapsed into a state of whining suicidal depression, and Malinowski was narcissistically focused on testing his own fragile health before embarking on an ambitious plan to become – in his own words – “the Conrad of anthropology.” If we judge by their comments and remarks in letters and diaries, the two Polish travelers might seem to have responded to the otherness of the dark-skinned “natives” according to the model closest to hand: by adopting the attitudes of their English fellow passengers – in a kind of parody of British colonial superiority. In actual fact, Witkacy was resentful of the smug and superior English passengers whom he must have suspected of regarding him and his friend as only a notch higher than the “dirty” natives. It was only to be expected that Witkacy and Malinowski, two intensely self-conscious Poles endowed with protean selves, traveling on a British ship to a British conference in British Australia, would adopt reigning English attitudes to the peoples of the colonies. More surprising is the fact that on the journey, during the five days from Aden to Ceylon, both Malinowski and Witkacy spent considerable time in their cabin diligently reading Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, a fellow Pole who had transformed himself into a world-famous British novelist. Witkacy’s concept of the tropics owes a great deal to Conrad’s early tales and novels of the South Seas. In order to understand and interpret what he himself saw, Witkacy needed to see the tropics through Conrad’s eyes. The situation was even more complex. The two friends, Witkacy and Malinowski, saw Ceylon and the Sinhalese through each other’s eyes, as well as through Conrad’s eyes and through the eyes of the British colonists. At the same time their status as Poles, as outsiders, made them to a certain extent detached observers, critical of the British and of their empire.

4

Introduction

Unlike the standard colonial dramas in which the superiority of Western civilization is assumed, Witkacy’s tropical plays call into question the white man’s right to dominate. Often royalty – kings, queens, princes and princesses – Witkacy’s Asian others are given to philosophical speculation about the nature of society, drawing analogies between European rituals of power and their own magical practices. The contempt of the colonists for the natives is vigorously reciprocated. By presenting the Europeans and Asians as sharing identical views of each other, Witkacy exposes the relativity of cultural values. “Monkey” is the favorite insult that each race reserves for the other. In Witkacy’s tropical dramas, Mr. Price, Or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf, there is a direct and prolonged EastWest confrontation. Here Witkacy took his revenge on the supercilious British abroad, portraying the colonists as lifeless bureaucrats, ruthless adventurers, and soulless merchants – much as he found them in Conrad. Witkacy’s plays and novels are repositories of racist and colonialist cultural stereotypes, which, when subject to the author’s characteristic parody, become blown up into cartoon-like caricatures that distort the simplistic image, render it ridiculous, and turn it back against its perpetrators. In his novel, Insatiability, for example, “the moving Chinese wall” is a parody of the menace of the “yellow peril” that was treated seriously and sensationalistically in turn-of-the-century popular literature as well as in modernist novels like Andrei Bely’s Silver Dove. Witkacy’s preferred mode of artistic creation, parody, brought the stereotypes of the Asian other down to the level of the inherently irreverent and subversive comic strip. After Witkacy’s return to Poland in 1918, he began translating Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, working with his friend Aniela Zagórska, Conrad’s cousin who was to become the best-known of Conrad’s Polish translators. Having first read Lord Jim on the way to the tropics, Witkacy seemed to need Conrad again after the experience as a form of debriefing. In a short forward to Tumor (1920), Witkacy’s first tropical play, the author lists Almayer’s Folly as one of its sources. Witkacy took from Conrad not only general ideas about East and West, white and colored, but also exact verbal details: geographical places, names of characters, and special terminology establishing local color. Beyond these externals, lies Witkacy’s use of the tropics as a dramatic element – a vision of humanity and a perspective on Western civilization. The so-called savages, innately passionate and heroic in their single-


5

minded devotion to their feelings, are contrasted to the greedy and deceitful representatives of Western civilization. Conrad’s blazing tropical sun drives mad the European adventurers given over to the rapacious pursuit of gold and power. The conventions of European civilization break down, letting loose the aggression and violence that lurked just beneath the surface. In the struggle for power and survival amidst the hostile forces of an alien tropical world, the white colonists go down to ignominious death and defeat, taking with them the native society which is also destroyed once it has been infected by the virus of a foreign culture. Conrad sees the white colonists as moral desperadoes close to criminality, true barbarians under a superficial veneer of civilization. In like manner, Witkacy, in his treatise, New Forms in Painting (1919), refers to the “total rabble, chasing after profits along the least legal path; if they aren’t locked up in jail in old Europe, such riffraff find a field for action in the colonies, where there still blooms a form of existence intensified by the risk of life and fortune.” Witkacy’s anti-imperialism like Conrad’s is free of humanitarian sentiments, concerned simply with the effects of imperialism on native communities and the moral effects on European colonists. Where Conrad sees moral and social loss, Witkacy finds metaphysical impoverishment. The contrast presented by Nina in Almayer’s Folly between “the savage and uncompromising sincerity of purpose shown by her Malay kinsmen” and the Europeans’ “sleek hypocrisy” and “sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar” is the basis for Witkacy’s portrayal of the natives in Tumor as innately passionate and heroic. Witkacy’s Malays have an absolute sense of honor and loyalty – to their past, their traditions, and their origins in the volcano – hence their sense of the mystery of existence. Witkacy’s next play, Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness, completed April, 1920, only two months after Tumor, is deeply indebted to Conrad. The entire play takes place in the East – in Rangoon – and all the characters are either British colonials battling for wealth and trading power, or natives. In Mr. Price, the white colonists interpret the alien culture of the other as giving them complete justification for indulging their worse impulses. “This country brings out people’s natural instincts,” Price observes. Once the Europeans are freed from the restraints of their own civilization, they revert to beasts of prey and succumb to the law of the jungle. The whites are rapacious for gold, sexual gratification, and all forms of self-aggrandizement. They actively seek out the strangeness and madness that they imagine to be inherent in the tropics because it unleashes their insatiable drives toward domination and exploitation.

6

Introduction

The playwright, looking on from the sidelines much like his Oriental servants, views the greed and lust of the Western imperialists from an ironic distance as though he were studying ethnographic specimens. In Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf, “A Tropical-Australian Play,” the aboriginal King Aparura comments that it is “no big deal” that he and his clan have been studied by the British scholar Malinowski – after all, the tribal leader explains, totems really do exist. No one except Witkacy could have created such a drama in 1921. In the first place, Witkacy was the sole playwright of the time who would even have known of Malinowski and been farsighted enough to realize that his work on the “primitive beliefs of Australian aborigines” was important enough to be worth satirizing. In the second place – and this is even more remarkable – only Witkacy would have thought of making the supposedly “savage” Papuan chieftain coolly observe his observers and give an ironic critique of the civilized Europeans’ notion of the primitive. Primitivism was much in vogue in the modernist art, music and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that had nurtured Witkacy. In fact, he himself was a product of the cult of the child, the peasant, and the self-taught that figured so prominently in his father’s system of anti-school education. But rather than accept the modernist stereotypes of the primitive, Witkacy turns the tables and reverses the roles. In the usual primitivist scenario, it is the natives whose savage dances and outlandish mating habits are scrutinized by rational Westerners. In Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf, however, the aboriginal King is the superior philosophical commentator who, standing on the sidelines, watches the white Europeans perform wild erotic dances, participate in bizarre sexual customs, and commit mayhem and murder. Instead of being associated with sexuality or violence, the tribal chieftain is defined by his attempts to understand the universe and control nature through an animist belief in the Great Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa. Witkacy’s “savage” is associated with a system of beliefs and identified by a coherent world view. Aparura finds the origins of civilization (both his own and that of the Europeans) in totems. Aparura’s pre-rational perceptions are part of a total religious culture that, resisting mechanization and fragmentation, looks for healing, strength, and the joy of life. Child and primitive man share the same intuition, as the King tells the young sixteen-year-old hero. The white Europeans, he explains, “don’t have any sense of the mystery, and they commit acts of madness so as to recapture that sense. You and I have it.” The peaceful, contemplative savage Aparura has the same view as his creator, Witkacy, about the mystery of existence. Comparative ethnography becomes, in Witkacy’s hands, a cultural critique of Western


7

civilization. The word “primitive” is a means of interrogating the bases of European superiority. In a series of East/West confrontations between native medicine and European science, Aparura’s pre-conceptual grasp of spiritual sickness repeatedly outmatches the cause-and-effect logic of the famous bacteriologist, Dr. Edward Mikulini who dogmatically insists that there is no disease without bacteria, but who is incapable of dealing with the spread of the tropical plague Kala-Azar. Aparura knows that the plague is civilization itself, which the Europeans bring with them. Their flight to the desert does not take them away from civilization back to the primitive world of Aparura, but only to an empty place where their violent and rapacious desires can be given full vent. The final space of Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf is a strange landscape – hallucinatory, oneiric, hypnotic, nightmarish. Witkacy studies the “coming of age” of the young hero as he passes from boyhood to manhood through tribal rites of initiation. After Patricianello has been carted off to die as a child and be reborn as an adult, the Hooded Figure removes his hood, revealing that he is both Patricianello’s double and the tropical plague Kala-Azar. The plague is the civilized self into which the child has mutated. Society in Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf is represented by its microcosm, the family. Family strife is for Witkacy the flash point where the great cracks in the social order first are felt, then clearly seen. Adult members of the family compete with rival plans of education designed to manipulate the young people, control them, and make someone out of them. An intense battle rages among the adults to mold young souls – making something out of nothing. Above all, society imposes its roles on the young, subjecting them to cruel transformations and reducing them to automatons. “You’ve got to be someone sooner or later,” the Mother tells Patricianello. “Make her into whatever you want,” says Parvis of Mirabella. The collector-Governor father is largely passive and indifferent. Patriarchy is aloof, given to control from a distance and devoted to accumulation. Matriarchy is ferocious and possessive. Infected by the poisons of society, Aparura assumes the paternal role as male mentor. Even the upright totemist is corrupted by alcohol and socialization. Both as an artist and a writer, Witkacy was drawn to teratology. Before 1914 he did charcoal drawings of perverse, ghoulish, ghosted-haunted humans figuratively called “monsters” by the artist and his father. After 1918 until his suicide he made informal pencil and pen drawings of actual monsters. For Witkacy the monstrous is spawned on borderlines between the human and the animal, male and female, this world and that in the form of hybrids. Where boundaries grow blurred, unstable

8

Introduction

dual identities come into existence. The human-beast or beast-human is the monstrous double that homo sapiens must carry. The still anomalous Patricianello hovers between childhood and adulthood, before finally becoming defined as “a hairy male.” He is a calf on the way to becoming a bull, for Witkacy the doublement of aggressive male sexuality. Initially dressed all in crimson, Patricianello is waiting to be identified and labeled, like the Governor’s water bug with its light rosy little wings fixed and stuck on a pin. The boy’s crimson is swallowed by grays imposed by adult roles and suits. “Half a person’s strength comes from his clothes,” Parvis explains, disclosing the role of social masks. But Patricianello is in the process of discovering his own physical identity. “I never knew I had a body,” he exclaims. “For the first time now I’m aware that I have a body.” His new body consciousness is visceral. He doesn’t want an identity – national, social, or cultural – thrust upon him. Most of all, he doesn’t want parents thrust upon him; his mother has suffocated him, and his father has ignored him. He wishes to choose his own parents and create his own genealogy, just as he had earlier attempted to construct a reality for himself out of his thingamajigs. But his body is seized by adults and adulthood, he is packed and shipped – as Hamlet (prototype of Patricianello) had been sent to England by Claudius. Possession of the boy’s fragile identity has been usurped and exchanged with the chicly dressed plague playboy-about-town. The immediate origins of Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf lie in the playwright’s travels to the South Pacific and to Russia. The trip to Ceylon with Malinowski in June 1914 gave Witkacy his butterfly collector and his local magician. During the five days and nights on the high seas from Aden to Colombo, the two friends spent much time in their cabin reading Conrad’s Lord Jim and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Witkacy must have been struck by Chapter 2 of Lord Jim, which describes the narrator Marlow’s visit to Stein, a German merchant and collector of butterflies and beetles which he keeps in glass cases. Stein tells Marlow the story of his breath-taking capture of a rare specimen of butterfly, which he had once dreamed of in his sleep. Conrad patterned Stein after the British naturalist Alfred Wallace. Reference is also made to “some infectious fever.” In Ceylon Witkacy and Malinowski met a magician on July 6, 1914, after reaching Dambulla by bullock cart. On July 6 towards twilight as they go ahead on foot, the sound of the flute and the beat of the drum of Buddhist music come from the jungle. They stop at a roomy rest house with palms in the moonlight. Before four upright sticks and four split


9

pieces of bamboo they see a man sitting at a table covered with flowers, incense, and candles performing a magic ceremony. They help him by holding umbrellas as he lights a candle and reads out prayers while burning incense on coals. It is the first magic ceremony conducted in light of the moon that Bronio and Sta s´ have ever seen. Afterwards they discuss the metaphysical substance of Buddhism as opposed to Christianity. Witkacy saw his first two-headed calf in Russia. It happened in the wake of the Revolution. After he was discharged from the army on November 15, 1917, the playwright-to-be lived in St. Petersburg for eight months, watching the Soviets seize power and waiting to obtain the necessary documents authorizing his departure. It was not until July 1918 that he was able to return to Poland. As he went from office to office gathering papers, he studied the streets and visited the cultural monuments of the crumbling Imperial capital. A celebrated attraction of Petersburg has always been the Kunstkamera, a museum of anthropology and ethnography started by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth-century and housed in one of the city’s oldest buildings on Vasilievsky Island across the Neva from the Hermitage. Its teratological collection was begun in 1718 on order from Peter the Great himself. As a child Witkacy had created his own museums and exhibited specimens of insects and minerals. Throughout his career he collected, cataloged, and exhibited his own artistic works and other items, such as walking canes, letters, and items of clothing. The “cabinet of curiosities” – a European speciality since the seventeenth-century – clearly held a fascination for Witkacy. When he visited the Kunstkamera after being demobilized, Witkacy was thirty-three at a crossroads in life, not knowing what awaited him. Looking through the glass at the two-headed calf in the exhibition case, Witkacy may have thought of both his own double-ridden childhood and also his present monstrous state of divided identities. In the last years of his life, when life began to appear more and more gray, boring, and monotonous, Witkacy expressed a longing for the tropics and voiced a desire to escape to the brightly-colored world of otherness that had fascinated him ever since his trip to Ceylon a quarter of a century ago. But such a way out was not to be; instead of ever reaching the tropics, Witkacy committed suicide in 1939 by slitting his throat and wrists on an early autumn day in what is now Belorus.

MR PRICE, OR TROPICAL MADNESS A Small Drama in Three Acts (1920) written in collaboration with Eugenia Dunin-Borkowska. Dedicated by Borkowska to WlⲐadyslⲐaw Borkowski and by Witkiewicz to Leon Reynel StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Translated by Daniel Gerould

11

12

StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

AUTHOR’S NOTE Neither my collaborator nor I was ever in Rangoon. I’m somewhat acquainted with other port cities in the tropics. Since the action was to take place in the tropics (it would indeed have been difficult to put that whole group in Zakopane or Rabka, or even in Warsaw), and it had always been my dream to visit Rangoon, we decided jointly to transfer the action to that city. The names of the streets are fantastic – but that doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone will be offended. As for the disease, “tropical madness,” opinions are divided. Some consider it pure fiction, a sickness invented by colonial European sadists to justify the crimes they commit against colored people – or even against the representatives of the “superior” white race. Others believe in the reality of this form of insanity, putting it on a par with paranoia or dementia praecox. On the basis of personal experience we lean toward the latter view. “Tropical madness” is actually a serious nervous disorder occurring in the tropics, as the result of the terrific temperature (of which no Ukrainian heat wave can give the faintest idea) and also as the result of spicy foods, alcohol, and the constant sight of naked black bodies. The other problems taken up in the play don’t seem to need any explanation. S. I. W. April 29, 1920

Mr. Price, Or Tropical Madness

13

THE CHARACTERS RICHARD GOLDERS: Forty years old. Head of the GOLDERS East India Rubber Company. Large, bull-like, handsome, dark-haired. Closely trimmed mustache. Hair slightly graying. His face characterized by devilish strength and intelligence. A searching gaze. ELINOR GOLDERS: Twenty-nine years old. His wife. Daughter of Herbert Fierce, eleventh Duke of Brokenbridge. A slender and subtle blonde. Devilishly seductive. STRANGER: A young man, thirty-two years old. Slender, elegant, lighthaired. Completely clean-shaven. Refined movements. Eyes with a deep and thoughtful look. Powerful jaw. GEORGIANA FRAY: Called the Black Pelican. Twenty-four years old. Cocotte. Half Siamese, half English. Golden skin, slanting black eyes. Black hair. Siamese lasciviousness to the nth degree. ALBERT BRITCHELLO: Formerly Wojciech BrzechajlⲐ o before he Anglicized his name – a true Pole, owner of a large trading house in Singapore. Bull-necked, florid face, large gray mustache. Thickset, medium height. Sixty-five years old. BERTHA BRITCHELLO: Née Whitehead – matronly, thin ex-blonde, completely gray-haired, fifty-five years old. Dried-up looking. LILY RADCLIFFE: Their red-haired freckled daughter. Twenty-six years old. Very pretty, but unfortunately common. TOM RADCLIFFE: Dark-haired, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, with an incredible jaw. Her husband. Thirty years old. Owner of a coffee firm in Rangoon. JACK BRITCHELLO: son of ALBERT and BERTHA. Eighteen years old. Half gentleman, half sissy . JIM: Chinese waiter in the cafe of the Malabar Hotel. In a yellow jacket, white trousers and shoes. DAN: Malay, servant of Mr. and Mrs. GOLDERS. In a red turban and white dinner jacket.

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ACT ONE The action takes place in Rangoon. Night. Veranda of the Hotel Malabar. Red pillars, topped by richly ornamented Indian arches, frame the doorway from which stairs lead down to the street. To the right and left of the doorway, grayish yellow drapes as tall as a man hang between the pillars. Above, the starry sky can be seen. A small table to the right, another to the left. A larger table center. To the left the door to the billiard room; to the right a drape, which curtains off that part of the veranda. Upstage, through the doorway, we can see the street: small houses surrounded by palms, further out a quay and the lights of ships out at sea. JIM stands by the left wall, dressed in a yellow jacket, white trousers and black shoes. He wears a pigtail. At the small table in the curtained area to the right ELINOR GOLDERS sits, dressed in a white outfit and tropical hat with a green band, sipping a cold drink through a straw. The small table to the left is empty. These small tables are further upstage than the large table center, at which the BRITCHELLO FAMILY sits, in the following order from right to left: TOM RADCLIFFE, his right profile to the audience; ALBERT BRITCHELLO, facing the audience; LILY, turned three-quarters to the audience showing her left profile somewhat; BERTHA BRITCHELLO, her left profile to the audience. JACK sits slightly further downstage, his left profile toward the audience. They are all dressed in white. Every minute, someone in the group slaps a mosquito on his forehead, neck, cheeks, or somewhere else, or in the air in front of his nose, clapping it in the palms of his hands – the way we kill moths. They drink iced drinks – cocktails and lemon squash. BRITCHELLO: How could you do something like that, Tom? TOM: (Aghast) But Father … BRITCHELLO: (Pounding his fist on the table) No, no and no! (To the Chinese waiter.) Jim! Two rainbows! (JIM goes out.) I’m warning you, Tom, you’re going to end up on the gallows. I’ve never done dirty business. In the last shipment of coffee there were three cases of opium … TOM: (Interrupts him, trying to warn him and calm him down) Quiet, Father. There’s a lady sitting over there. BRITCHELLO: (Looks around somewhat uneasily, then waves his hand contemptuously) Oh, some sleepwalker from another world. (Again angrily) Three cases of opium! And to ship it to my agents! That’s outrageous! I intercepted your letter to Hold. (TOM looks confused.) I can’t fire him now, I need him. I have to look at that ugly mug for another month. But he’ll be booted out, don’t worry. I didn’t want to tell you this until after the fact. But you drove me to it.


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JIM brings two rainbows. They drink. TOM: (Disconcerted, wants to avoid the issue) All right, Father. Let’s have a drink and make up. One way or another. We’ll end up doing business. BRITCHELLO: Another episode like that, and Lily will come back home with us. I’ve had enough of your shenanigans. They clink glasses and drink. LILY: Please don’t get me mixed up in your business. We’re the flowers that grow in your crates, shipments, cargoes, and embargoes. I don’t understand anything about it, but it’s the flower bed I grow in. And I’m not going to wither away yet. Tom! Do whatever Papa tells you. That’s my advice. BRITCHELLO: (To LILY, impatiently) Fine, fine. Tell him all that at night when you’re alone. And above all, don’t let your fantasies run away with you. (To TOM) I’ve got to be at Golders’ tomorrow. I don’t know him personally yet, but we’re forming a colossal gum and cocoa trust. If you’ll behave yourself, Tom, I’ll take you on as chief secretary. Well – that’s enough business for now. Let’s take a little break. Enter from the street the STRANGER dressed in a white tropical costume, a pith helmet on his head. EVERYONE looks around. BRITCHELLO stops talking and sips his liqueur. JACK: Business in the tropics has a special kind of charm. You’re all so keen on Europe. But I’m telling you, those years there were a deadly bore. Here the most insignificant shopkeeper is something fantastically strange, far stranger than a millionaire in Europe. To say nothing of such creatures as papa or you, Tom. BERTHA: Jack! Behave decently. How can you talk like that about your father? JACK: (Slapping a mosquito on his right cheek – it’s important to remember that they are all constantly slapping mosquitoes) I don’t think it’s insulting. Here in the tropics everyone’s like some kind of strange creature. They’re beautiful, like tigers in the jungle. (Looking at ELINOR) That woman’s talking to herself. Lily, don’t stare at her like that. They all turn and look in ELINOR’s direction. ELINOR: (Aloud, to herself) What strange eyes that man has. They remind me of something, but I can’t remember what.

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BERTHA: (Loudly; they all speak loudly all the time) There are quite a few deranged people here. Everything seems different in this country. I have the feeling that life’s floating backward. That woman looks like some sort of society person, but I wouldn’t trust her. JACK: She seems to be a foreigner from an unknown country. ELINOR: The sun here is like a ball of blood that strikes people down instead of giving them life, and the darkness of night is white-hot like Satan’s bowels. Oh! My poor head. (She massages her temples.) LILY: Unlike anyone I’ve ever seen in my life. I can’t take my eyes off her. I’ve been infected by your perverse fantasies, Jack. JACK: Unfortunately the only thing you’re learning how to do is work yourself up into a nervous state. LILY: I think that’s what we’re all doing. BRITCHELLO: You’re all exaggerating. If you worked the way I did … JACK: (Looking at the STRANGER) That man over there has also noticed our lady stranger. They’ve noticed each other. They’re looking at each other. LILY: Look what’s happening to him. STRANGER: (He shows anxiety in his movements and suddenly, as if not knowing what to do with himself, calls to JIM, in an unnaturally serious tone) Bring me some water! Plain water with ice! Understand? (He halfrises, then sits down again. At the sound of his voice, ELINOR covers her face with her hands and keeps them there. The STRANGER, making an effort to control himself, sits stiffly with clenched teeth and looks determinedly straight ahead. Enter JIM with a glass of water on a tray. He comes up to the STRANGER, who glances at him, then gets up, pushes him away and with a firm step goes over to ELINOR. The glass falls to the floor; JIM picks up the pieces. With the exception of BRITCHELLO, the others all watch in silence. The STRANGER stops in front of ELINOR, as if not knowing what to do next.) Madam, this is not to be believed, but I couldn’t behave otherwise. I am Sydney … ELINOR: (Who has from the beginning been staring at him in amazement, makes a gesture with her hands to repel him) Don’t say anything! I don’t want to know anything. Please go away! STRANGER: No, it can’t be that you’d send me away without saying a single word. You understand, I’m sure, that a person can bring himself to do something like this only once in a lifetime … ELINOR: (Slowly weakens. Her hands fall. She speaks with difficulty, dragging out the words, which seem to stick in her throat) You frightened me. I wish it hadn’t happened. You acted like a person in a trance. There are people all around us. I myself …


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STRANGER: That doesn’t matter. It was you who brought me here. Look into my eyes. ELINOR involuntarily raises her eyes and looks with terror into the STRANGER’s face. During the STRANGER’s last speech, BRITCHELLO turns and looks threateningly at him. Seeing ELINOR’s terror-stricken look, he gets up and, clenching his fists, approaches the STRANGER; JACK bursts into spasmodic laughter. BRITCHELLO: (To the STRANGER) How dare you accost women you don’t even know? Can’t you see this lady doesn’t feel well as it is? Get out of here this minute! The STRANGER looks at him, stunned. ELINOR: (Suddenly regaining her psychic composure) Gentlemen! Don’t get so excited. My husband will be here any minute. BRITCHELLO: What do I care about your husband? I’d be willing to swear you only think you’ve got a husband. I’m an old man and I won’t let any young whippersnapper … BERTHA: (Sharply) Albert! Oh, those Polish aristocratic manners! LILY: (At the same time) Papa! At the sound of their voices BRITCHELLO stops short. He makes a conciliatory gesture to his family and immediately starts talking again. TOM: (To the women) Don’t worry. Papa has to work off some of his Polish love of fantasy. BRITCHELLO: (To the STRANGER, thrusting his fist under his nose) I’ll show you, you anemic milksop! JACK laughs, pounding his fists against his thighs. STRANGER: (Completely calmly) You won’t show me anything. (He grabs BRITCHELLO by the arm and twists it without actually hurting him.) BRITCHELLO: (Gives a faint scream) Oh! He’s some sort of thug! ELINOR: (Getting up) But, gentlemen … I implore you … There’ll be a dreadful scandal. At this moment GOLDERS runs up the stairs from the street, in tropical costume, with a pith helmet on his head. All the while JIM stands by the left wall looking on at the scene indifferently.

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GOLDERS: (Seeing his wife with two strange men) Ellie! Who are these men? TOM runs up to BRITCHELLO and says something in his ear. JACK: (Loudly) Oh, this is marvelous! It could only happen in the tropics! ELINOR: (Stammering) I … I don’t know … Actually I don’t know anything about it. GOLDERS: (Astonished) Have you gone out of your mind? (To the MEN) Gentlemen! You’ve got to tell me what this means this instant! I’m Golders of the East India Rubber Company. Tell me this minute! The STRANGER is completely flabbergasted. ELINOR: Richard! It’s actually my fault! GOLDERS: (To his wife) I’ll talk to you later. (To the MEN.) I’m asking you for the last time what this means. BRITCHELLO: (Finally sorting things out) Good heavens! You’re Golders? I’ve got to talk to you this minute. I’m Britchello from Singapore. I came here especially to see you. I defended this lady from that whippersnapper. (Points to the STRANGER.) GOLDERS: Britchello? I’m at your service. We’ll deal with that man later. (Points to the STRANGER) Business before everything. STRANGER: (To BRITCHELLO) You’re Britchello. I’ve got to talk to you immediately. I didn’t think you’d come back from your trip. GOLDERS and ELINOR look at him in amazement. BRITCHELLO: You’re a common thug. I don’t have any time to talk. I don’t even know your name. STRANGER: Mr. Britchello! I beg you, talk to me before you talk to Mr. Golders. I can’t tell you who I am. Not right now. Everything will become clear later on. I’ll tell you just as soon as we’re alone. GOLDERS realizes that he’s got to keep the STRANGER away from BRITCHELLO. He quickly runs up to his wife and says something in her ear with terrible force, beating his fist on the table; he simply hypnotizes her. BRITCHELLO listens to what TOM is whispering. ELINOR nods her head in agreement and sits down at the small table. GOLDERS goes over to BRITCHELLO and TOM.


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ELINOR: (To the STRANGER, looking at him with a hypnotic gaze) You won’t refuse me your company, Monsieur Comment-vous-appelez-vous, Mr. What’s-your-name. Do sit down. Our conversation was so rudely interrupted. The STRANGER hesitates. It’s clear that he’s waging a terrible battle with himself. GOLDERS waits for TOM to finish whispering to BRITCHELLO. Finally he loses his patience and slaps BRITCHELLO on the shoulder. GOLDERS: All right, Mr. Britchello! Let’s go discuss that business. You’ll be so kind as to introduce me to your associate. The STRANGER sits down at ELINOR’s table. BRITCHELLO: Not right now. (To TOM) Tom! Go entertain the family. JACK: (Stealing a furtive glance of admiration) Papa’s marvelous. I’m getting to love you more and more, Papa! BRITCHELLO: (To GOLDERS with relief) At last. Later on you’ll be so kind as to introduce me to that lady. GOLDERS: Of course, with great pleasure. They cross to the left, sit down at the table where the STRANGER had been sitting and talk quietly. STRANGER: (To ELINOR) You are like a cobra, and I am like a squirrel: I’m rushing into the jaws of the unknown. It may end fatally for me. I’m abandoning my most sacred duties for you. (He looks around toward BRITCHELLO and GOLDERS) ELINOR: Oh, stop it. For once I want to stop thinking about real life. It all happened so suddenly. I’m in a daze. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you. I’m afraid that this moment will escape irretrievably, that people will separate us and I’ll never again be able to … STRANGER: Right now just let me apologize to you. I behaved like a savage. This country brings out people’s natural instincts. Madam, we’re living in a country of indecent flowers, monstrous deities and mysterious people. Oh, madam, those deities – what a profundity of concepts … ELINOR: I’m sure deranged people pray to them … STRANGER: Here no one interferes with them; they can be as mad as they like. Even I feel that nothing is what it seems. Nothing. Do you understand? People say that’s the first symptom of madness. (Gets up) But this business deal has got to be …

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ELINOR: (Interrupts him, talking mysteriously) You remind me of something in a dream. In my castle in England there was a portrait I was afraid of. You have the eyes of one of my ill-fated ancestors. STRANGER: (Somewhat disconcerted, sits down again) You have a castle? Why were they ill-fated? ELINOR: (Smiling) I am, as someone once called me, a white bird drowned in a sea of blood. I have the feeling that I really am swimming in the red depths of the blood my ancestors shed, and my wings are tied by fetters of gold. STRANGER: The shadow of whole centuries hangs over you. You’re a ghost from worlds long dead. ELINOR: (In a different tone, suddenly making light of the whole thing) It’s not so ominous as it seems. Actually I’m dreadfully bored. Unfortunately, I’m bored with you too. STRANGER: No one can escape his fate. I see it clearly: there’s a little gray-green snake dozing in your heart, hidden under a sticky web of subtle dreams. That snake is all cruel longing. ELINOR: (In an artificially profound tone of voice) You’re casting the spell of eternal things upon me. I’m beginning to be afraid. I wish somebody would blindfold me. I was brought up in an old castle, where from my earliest youth, my nanny poured words of pious renunciation into my ears. Those words were killing me gradually. Slowly my heart was closing and I certainly would have lived out this earthly existence without ever awakening, if it hadn’t been for this tropical landscape and this unbearable heat. (Smiles faintly) But to open one’s eyes – what is that really? Women know how to love, I know that. People always say that, and some of them write about it, men I don’t know personally, and even women. But in my heart there’s a secret dozing, and I don’t know what it is – a crime or a great sacrifice. In any case it isn’t love. Oh! How bored I am! STRANGER: That sounds like a judgment on me. ELINOR: (In a markedly coquettish way) In a moment I’ll take my husband’s arm and go off to our villa. Just in case, remember the address: 15 Malabar Road. (The STRANGER hastily jots it down in his address book.) I may never meet you again. When I return to my country, on a cold, foggy day, perhaps this moment will bloom like a flower, and I’ll smile at it gratefully. JACK suddenly gets up and comes over to them. STRANGER: (Vehemently) I can’t stand any more of this … (He stops short, seeing JACK right beside him) This is called the denouement of the situation.


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JACK: (Bowing) Pardon me, but really in Europe … I’ve never seen anything like this … And now … ELINOR: (Looks at him amused. To the STRANGER) You see what frayed nerves can bring you to. STRANGER: (Getting up) Forgive me – this is the last moment … ELINOR: (To the STRANGER imploringly, a request in which a firm command can be felt) You won’t go away. You’ve thrown everything into a state of confusion and now you want to leave me. That would be cruel of you. JACK: Yes, don’t go. That lady (bows to ELINOR) speaks so marvelously. I am a Britchello. That’s my father there talking with Mr. Golders. THEY shake hands. BERTHA: Jack! Come here this instant. STRANGER: (Sits down again) This is the end. I’m lost. JACK: (To his mother) Not on your life. (To the STRANGER) How I wish I could be lost, Sir. How I envy you. ELINOR: (To the STRANGER) You see. That boy has more common sense than you do, although you’re already graying at the temples. You must have suffered a great deal. Suffering always does strange things to me. Not just my own, but other people’s too. Right now you personify a turning point in my whole existence. STRANGER: (Looks at her wildly) Madam, I don’t know if you’re joking or not. My life is being decided for me right now. I don’t know if I can talk … ELINOR: (Indicating JACK with a gesture) We can talk in front of that child. He looks at everything through the heat of the tropical sun. We’re not living people for him. Rather, we represent visions of a reality never fulfilled even in his wildest dreams. Isn’t that so, Mr. Jack? JACK: Everything you say is true. ELINOR: How I envy you. There are still so many, many things ahead of you to experience in life. STRANGER: I’m only afraid of … ELINOR: You don’t have to be afraid of my husband. JACK: But Tom says he’s not your husband. STRANGER: Madam, don’t insult me. I’m afraid of something a hundred times worse. You must promise me that there can be no misunderstandings between us. ELINOR: (Contrarily) I don’t know anything and I’m not promising anything. I don’t even know who you are. Aren’t you only the

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phosphorescence of my white-hot imagination? For a whole year now I haven’t seen any people and I’ve been living only with ghosts. I can’t distinguish any longer between a ghost and a real living being – cat or human, it doesn’t matter. JACK: It’s marvelous the way you talk. Nobody knows anything about anybody, and there’s something going on, but actually there’s no telling what. STRANGER: My name is Sydney Price. ELINOR: Perhaps you’re the son of my cousin, Sir Alfred Price of Pricefield. PRICE: No, Madam. No one in my family has a title. I’m Price from Brixton. My father was a cockney. ELINOR: That means you’re a free man. You don’t know what the web of conventions and intrigues in high society is like. But it’s odd. I see it clearly: you look like my dead brother. PRICE: Sometimes these freaks of nature occur to wreck a person’s whole life. It can happen to anyone, if it comes at the right time, at the proper moment. ELINOR: Oh, I see, you’re obsessed with telling the truth. But in the depths of your soul you’re just a normal well-behaved gentleman. PRICE: (Completely disarmed) No, quite the contrary. Actually I’m a man from another epoch. You are marvelous. In half an hour you’ve changed me into a completely different person. Frankly speaking, that’s what they call great love. I didn’t know it could happen again in my life. Now I’m sure it has happened. ELINOR: Aren’t you deciding too fast? You yourself said that I have a snake in my heart. My snake may turn out to be a murderer. A terrible destroyer of everything that’s important. PRICE: No, no. Don’t talk like that. You don’t know what’s happened. I’m ready for literally anything. ELINOR: (Looks at him intently) You remind me more and more of my brother. Perhaps fate sent you to me on purpose so that I could find out what I’m really like. JACK: Madam, I can’t stand this anymore. I think I shall write an epic poem about all this. May I dedicate it to you? ELINOR laughs sadly. At this moment GEORGIANA FRAY comes up the stairs, in a white dress with yellow sashes and a white hat with a black feather and yellow band. PRICE: (Not seeing her) Nothing exists for me except you. Nothing matters to me. I can stand alone against the whole world. (He looks at the table top, keeping his clenched fists on it. GEORGIANA stops at the door.)


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ELINOR: (Trembling, suddenly catching sight of GEORGIANA) Yes, but why … The two women look at each other. The conversation at the table to the right grows louder. BRITCHELLO: Fine, but in that case let’s issue mutual shares. GOLDERS: Of course – before they find out … He goes on more quietly. Beyond the left door the clicking of a game of billiards can be heard, continuing to the end of this sequence. ELINOR: (Looking at GEORGIANA as she talks to PRICE) So you agree to go through the labyrinth of breakneck fantasies? I’m bored and have to have something really extraordinary. PRICE: (Looking at her) All right – I accept the challenge. (He follows ELINOR’s look and sees GEORGIANA) Now comes the moment of trial. JACK: (Getting up) Oh, what a beautiful woman! GEORGIANA: (Not moving from her place by the column) Sydney! Who is that lady? (Points to ELINOR) You made a date with me and now you’re sitting there with some pale worm. You won’t even deign to recognize me. And just yesterday you said you loved me, that you felt it was a great love, that you’d never expected anything like it in this life. Oh, the way you lie, you pasty-faced beanpole, you washed-out sea slug! PRICE: (Springing up out of his chair) This is just what I was so horribly afraid of. It’s happened. Now I’ll see what the truth is. ELINOR: (Getting up) So you said the same thing yesterday to that poor creature. Oh! How cheap it all is. (She sinks back into her chair again, covering her face with her hands.) GEORGIANA: (To ELINOR) So you’ve been cheated by this anemic milksop too? He’s just an ordinary white Don Juan. I prefer even colored roués to him now. PRICE: (To ELINOR) Don’t you believe it. Believe in the incredible. Yesterday I said it one way, and today I’m saying it another way. Yesterday I didn’t believe my own words. Oh! Those damned words! Why do they always stay exactly the same, when our thoughts are constantly changing? ELINOR: (Uncovering her face) Don’t lie. It’s disgusting. I’m closer to her (Points to GEORGIANA) than to you. You’ve killed the one strange moment in my life. I detest you. PRICE: (Clutching his head in his hands) Oh, how horrible! JACK: (To GEORGIANA) Never mind. He’s a lost man. He said so himself a moment ago.

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PRICE makes a gesture of denial. BRITCHELLO and GOLDERS get up from the table. They have been too busy talking to hear the scene at left. GOLDERS: (Shaking BRITCHELLO’s hand) Excellent. Then our business is all taken care of. (He sees the group of characters at the right and instantly goes over to them.) GEORGIANA: (While this is going on) It wasn’t enough for you to deceive a poor girl of the streets, a poor half-breed. You even had to deceive that lady. (Points to ELINOR) You didn’t even give me money for dinner yesterday. Today I ate with the Chinese on Baldwin Street. (To ELINOR) Oh, Madam! Don’t believe him. He’s a monster. JACK goes over and whispers words of consolation to her; PRICE gives her his wallet, which she throws on the ground GOLDERS: (Coldly to PRICE) Sir! It’s my fault for leaving my wife with a perfect stranger. I thought you were a gentleman. Fine company you’ve chosen for Mrs. Golders, the daughter of the Duke of Brokenbridge. PRICE looks at ELINOR in astonishment. Do you know with whom you’re dealing? With Golders, my dear sir! Maybe you don’t even know who Golders is? Get out, while you still have all your teeth! TOM: So that’s who she is! The famous, invisible Mrs. Golders! LILY registers emotion. BERTHA sits motionless. PRICE: (Proudly) I know perfectly well who you are. I was supposed to talk with you tomorrow. I am Price from the Central Indian Rubber Union. Perhaps you’ve heard something about me too. Because of your machinations I lost my job today – just now – this very minute. I was sent here specially to work out an agreement with Mr. Britchello. I was supposed to catch him in Singapore. You beat me to it in the most repulsive way, by handing your wife over to me for the sake of a good business deal. They all look at him petrified. ELINOR bursts out laughing. GOLDERS: (Frothing at the mouth) Shut up! So that’s the famous Price! I’ll teach you, you whippersnapper. I challenge you to a boxing match. This way, please, to the billiard parlor. (To JIM) Throw everybody out


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of there. (He points to the left door. JIM runs out. The clicking of the billiard balls stops. To PRICE) This way! It’ll all be settled in there. (He points again to the left door) PRICE: (Leaving, to ELINOR) I’m the one who was deceived. I’ve lost everything. He goes out, followed by GOLDERS. BRITCHELLO and TOM start to follow them, but stop at the door and look into the billiard room. In a moment the sounds of a fight and the cries of the enraptured JIM can be heard. BERTHA: (To JACK) Jack! Stop talking to that woman this instant. Nice things they teach you in that Europe of yours. JACK: I know perfectly well how to behave myself. (To GEORGIANA) Miss, I’ll be your knight. Do sit down. (He shouts) Jim! Three rainbows! – may I offer you ladies a drink? LILY: Really, that Jack’s impossible. JIM: (Runs in, insanely overjoyed, scratching his head) Yes, sir! JACK: Three rainbows, you yellow monkey. I’m buying. JIM: Yes, sir. (Runs out) JACK: (To ELINOR) You have no objections if we all sit together, do you? (Not waiting for an answer, to GEORGIANA) Do sit down. We need to fortify the nervous system. There’s no telling what will happen next. They sit down and talk quietly. LILY begins to observe the scene jealously. LILY: (To BERTHA) I didn’t know that woman was a duchess. She has a right to do anything she pleases. We’re the only ones who cling to stupid prejudices. BERTHA: I see you’re starting to get ideas too. It’s all Jack’s fault. BRITCHELLO: (At the door) He really smacked him one! I never thought he could keep it up this long. TOM: He’s in great shape. In something like this weight doesn’t mean anything. They keep on watching. JIM passes between them with three rainbows on a tray and goes to the table with JACK and the ladies. JACK: (Gaily) Have a drink, ladies, and we’ll talk. (To GEORGIANA) What’s your name? GEORGIANA: (Putting on airs) Georgiana. JACK: Drink up. You really are a marvelous flower. From now on, I’m going to live. You don’t understand that. We Europeans are the only people who can really appreciate the tropics.

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ELINOR: Poor Price. After all, I do feel sorry for him. My husband will make mincemeat out of him. GEORGIANA: It’ll serve him right. That’ll teach him that you can’t insult women and get away with it. (Turning to ELINOR) It’ll be revenge for me and for you. ELINOR: (Taking her hand) Calm down. Mr. Price met me for the first time half an hour ago. I just found out what his name was. I see that you’re very interested in him, but actually … GEORGIANA: That anemic milksop told me to come here. He picked the time himself. He begged me to. And now when I came in, he didn’t even deign to look at me. It’s my own fault. Men are brutes that should be kept on a leash. ELINOR: Have you known him for long? GEORGIANA: Heavens, no. I never waste my time in long involvements. He just met me yesterday at a ball at Wilton Hall. I glanced over at him a few times. He was so well-dressed and he took me home with him. This morning I promised him I’d be here, I turned down a couple of old friends. And then he lets me down like this! ELINOR: But I’m not standing in your way at all. You can have him all to yourself anytime you want. GEORGIANA: Yes, with his face all beaten up – your husband will fix him nicely. It’ll serve him right. He should stop playing the gentleman. ELINOR: He told you he loved you? GEORGIANA: He swore it to me. I have a method of toying with them till their guts come spilling out. But he has a certain something that’s even more special. I couldn’t get free of him. I fell for his great love. Love for me – for a colored girl of the streets! ELINOR: Apparently men say things like that all the time. GEORGIANA: Oh, Madam! Please don’t think I’m a complete nincompoop. I’m not going to die of love – that’s for sure. JACK: (To GEORGIANA) Your life must be one huge orgy. GEORGIANA: Does that enchant you, my little man, a continuous orgy? JACK: Oh, yes. Everything here has a special charm. After a day full of dazzling brilliance, the night here is darker than in Europe and it holds more secrets. ELINOR: Yes, you’re a sorceress of the night. I’m glad I met you. This is the first and last time I’ll ever set foot in this hotel. GEORGIANA: I’d advise you not to come here anymore. Especially if your husband plans to beat up all my lovers. ELINOR: Oh, he’s not so frightening as he seems. JACK: (To GEORGIANA) Yes, you’re a nocturnal vision. I can’t imagine you existing by day.


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GEORGIANA: During the day I sleep, or at least lie down somewhere in the dark and think about things I wouldn’t tell a soul. JACK: (Looking around at LILY) And my sister’s so anxious to come join us, she’s simply frothing at the mouth. ELINOR: Do ask her to; she’s so lovely. JACK: (Calls to LILY) Come join us. You’re infernally bored over there. BERTHA: (Indignantly) Lily! LILY goes over to ELINOR’s table. BERTHA lapses back into her mummified state. ELINOR: Your brother’s getting completely carried away in all this confusion and he’s going into ecstasies over literally everything. LILY: He loves everything that’s out of the ordinary. He just came back from Europe a couple of days ago. Did you know that? ELINOR: Oh, let’s not talk about Europe. I’ve had enough of Europe to last me the rest of my life. This evening is a veritable whirlpool of events. There’s no telling what will happen next. At this moment the fight stops. BRITCHELLO: (Going into the billiard parlor) Bravo, Price! I say, you’re a real jaw-buster! TOM: (To the others) He squashed Mr. Golders like a mosquito! He goes into the parlor. ELINOR, GEORGIANA, LILY and JACK spring out of their chairs and rush to the parlor door. BERTHA sits like a mummy, slapping mosquitoes. At the door they meet GOLDERS, who is leaning with his right arm on PRICE. With his left hand he holds a compress to his left jaw. PRICE has a distracted look on his face. GEORGIANA: Look what that thug did to him. He doesn’t deserve to fight with real gentlemen … JACK stops her. ELINOR: Richard! How do you feel? GOLDERS: (Speaks with difficulty) Price is a real gentleman. I can introduce him to you now. (To PRICE) Sydney! This is my wife, Elinor. They exchange greetings.

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LILY: (To TOM) You can learn something from this, Tommy. That’s the way real gentlemen act. TOM is taken aback. BRITCHELLO: Now for the last round of drinks. (To JIM) Jim! Six rainbows! JIM goes out. A glorious evening. (To ELINOR) Don’t worry, it’s nothing. He’ll get over it soon enough. A glancing blow, his ear is only slightly torn off. Jack, I’ll even let you have a drink. GOLDERS: (To PRICE) Don’t worry, Sydney. You’ll get a better job. PRICE: But the Union, the Union will go to hell! BRITCHELLO: No danger of that. We’ll merge the Union with our trust company. JIM brings in the drinks. They all take their glasses. We’ll drink to the success of our General Rubber and Coffee Trust. Long live coffee and gutta-percha, united in an invincible mass of power and glory. Long live tropical fantasy! GOLDERS: (Weakly) Hip! Hip! Hurrah!! They all cry “hurrah” along with him. Even BERTHA gets up. Meanwhile there is a scene in pantomime between GEORGIANA and JACK upstage, a little to the right of the door. JACK shows her a pile of banknotes. They both take a look at the others. Then JACK grabs her by the arm and they both run quickly out into the street. BERTHA: (Cries out) Jack! My Jack has run off with that slut! They all look around. ELINOR and LILY burst out into wild laughter. GOLDERS: That’s what I call taking advantage of the general confusion. (To PRICE) Sydney! That youngster made up for your faux pas. He rid us of that woman’s company. BRITCHELLO: (To BERTHA) Easy does it, Mother. Let the boy have his fun for once. I’ve done so well today I can’t get mad at anybody. (He calms her down with a few hugs)


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TOM: This isn’t Singapore. I’m afraid he might fall into the hands of the Siamese opium smokers. BRITCHELLO: Tom! No smart remarks. Remember your recent escapades. PRICE: (Suddenly awakens from his stupor. To GOLDERS) Richard, I can’t accept your job. (With extraordinary intensity) I love Mrs. Golders. It’s my ultimate love. ELINOR: (Scornfully) But I don’t love you, Mr … Price. (Pronounces his name contemptuously.) There’s no need to feel embarrassed. BRITCHELLO: Now that is real Polish frankness. (To JIM) Jim – the check. I’m paying for everything. (Confers with JIM and pays him.) TOM: What great generosity – two or three rainbows. GOLDERS: (Who until now has kept silent, lost in thought; to his wife) Even if you did love him, I wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary in that. He’s got very fine manners, and what’s more he’s an athlete and a bit of a madman as well. LILY: (To TOM) You see, Tommy! That’s the way real gentlemen behave. PRICE: (Crushed) I don’t know who I’ll be, Richard! You’re so devilishly magnanimous that I really … GOLDERS: (To PRICE) Didn’t you hear? I’m giving you a better job than with the Union. I’m giving you twice the salary. Don’t let a few little scruples bother you. You’ll just get a special secretary who’ll protect you from your own insanities. PRICE: (Suddenly carried away) Starting tomorrow you’ll all see who I am. I’m beginning a new existence. All my energies will be devoted entirely to your trust company. In my personal life I’ll be a corpse to the end. GOLDERS: (Slaps him on the shoulder with his right hand) There, there. Stop making speeches. Maybe it’ll all turn out quite differently. LILY: Mr. Golders! You’re simply wonderful. GOLDERS ignores this and goes out with PRICE, taking him by the arm, all the while holding the compress to his left cheek. ELINOR goes out alone after them. The BRITCHELLO family follows her. JIM: (Cleaning up the table) At last those European monkeys have gone! (He shakes his fist at them as they exit)

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ACT TWO Garden of the GOLDERS’ villa, 15 Malabar Road. Night. The scene is drenched in bright moonlight. Stage left, a set of red wicker lawn furniture. To the right a sculptured bench, three-quarters toward the audience, stands under a group of tall shrubs covered with huge purple and orange flowers. At the left there are more shrubs, mango trees and palm trees. In the background the GOLDERS’ villa, in the style of an Indian bungalow, surrounded by palms and tall trees with strange silhouettes. A tea service is on the wicker table, a hot plate on its own small table nearby. ELINOR, alone, in a pearl-gray dress, paces nervously back and forth between the bench and the table. A red shawl lies on the arm of the chair nearest the shrubs at left. ELINOR: (Sitting on the bench and glancing at her watch) It’s 8:30 already and that idiot’s not here yet. (Gets up) And he said he couldn’t stand waiting till evening. (Stretches) Oh! Aren’t there any men in the world? And to think that a type like that is being wasted on colored street girls. (Begins to pace again) What terrible eyes that man has. Exactly like Henry Fierce. Strange. Three hundred years ago. But that’s impossible. (Stops) Well, perhaps he’s a reincarnation. Perhaps those yellow monkeys are right. (Sighs) Oh, if only Richard were different. If only it weren’t for those infernal business deals. (Paces nervously again) This continual loneliness and suffering, barren suffering in a setting created for something extraordinary. It’s unbearable. Still, Richard’s the best of them. (Resentfully) Oh, you idiot! Why don’t you come? He’s one in a million, and then he goes and plays around like all the rest. What brutes these men are! (Stops) To say the same thing to that little colored animal! The first time I went out of the house, to see him and then to be abandoned forever! (Sits on the bench and buries her face in her hands) No, it’s more than I can bear. What do these people really want out of me? (Sobbing quietly) I’m sick of trying to go on with such a senseless life. From the right, behind the shrubs, enter GOLDERS. He comes up to her and strokes her hair. The left side of his face is black and blue, but he no longer has the compress. GOLDERS: Ellie, calm down. I don’t want to bother you, but after all, you could do something for me too. ELINOR: I keep telling you that I don’t know anything about the gum trade, all those figures are Greek to me. You people with your trusts and lockouts have your lives all mapped out. I’m not saying there’s


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anything wrong with that. It all has its own charm and I don’t hold it against you, but just let me be myself. GOLDERS: (Hiding his irritation) You know, that’s right, but when you get married, you’ve got to realize once and for all what marriage is. ELINOR: I don’t see why it has to mean my annihilation. That’s what you want, the way you force me to do what’s foreign to my nature. You’ll lose me completely. I’ll cease to be a living being. I’m too much of an individual to be able to keep on changing like a chameleon, according to your fantasies. Oh, it bores me frightfully. My soul is floating in some unknown direction. Images of fantastically transformed phenomena whirl about me, as if through the fog at sea. GOLDERS: (Coldly) Leave that style of rhetoric to Sydney Price. (More gently) You’re a sleepwalker and you’ve never really lived. You have to be considered a sick person. ELINOR: I don’t know whether you’re trying to insult me or pay me a compliment. But one thing’s certain, you never had the slightest trouble with me. GOLDERS: Because I’m strong as a bull. You’d like to devour every man in the world, despite that sweet little face of yours. But not me. You have a pair of suicides on your conscience as it is. It’s called getting sick, cracking up, and so forth. But when you come right down to it, those two boys took their own lives because of you. ELINOR: That’s not true. You want to drive me to despair, you want to make me helpless so that you can get me to do anything you want. You’re forcing me to remember dreadful things. I was so young then – I thought everyone was an angel. I couldn’t even have killed a fly, and you … GOLDERS: (With irony) That’s a lot of hot air. You’re killing mosquitoes, aren’t you? And besides, remember your early youth. ELINOR: It was frightful – but only for me. GOLDERS: (Emphatically) Remember the kind of home you were brought up in. It was your mother’s fault. That damned permissiveness about everything. I don’t blame your father at all. You came into the Price household like a destructive ghost. Sir Alfred went mad – because of you. Young Price went to Australia and the devil knows what became of him – because of you. Cunningham took poison, and although Sir Alfred’s daughter is alive, she can’t really be counted among the living. All because of you. Why did it happen to them? Because they assumed the roles of your parents and did all they could when your father died and that blockhead Robert Fierce became heir to Brokenbridge. ELINOR: Don’t forget, if it weren’t for Robert, I’d never have been your wife.

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GOLDERS: (Sarcastically) Yes, I owe that to him, and to a certain other chance event about which … ELINOR: (Springing up from the bench) You’re cruel. Why are you reminding me of all this? Oh! It’s horrible! Richard, you’re the destructive force. For you I gave up a world in which I could at least have died in peace. All that’s closed off to me forever … GOLDERS: What I’m giving you isn’t so bad either. Look at those fantastic tropical trees. You’re surrounded by such magnificence that you couldn’t even begin to imagine it back there in that cold country of yours. I’m giving you all this, and it’s of the highest quality too. ELINOR: You’re my lord and master. You keep me here like a white slave. I’m bored – I don’t want to know all those friends of yours and all those colored monarchs straight out of an operetta. I’m bored – understand? GOLDERS: I can’t figure out what else you want. I agree to everything. I’m your real friend. Maybe you’d have preferred to stay at Brokenbridge and be a nuisance to Robert and have to listen to his reproaches? Because with your past . .. ELINOR: (Threateningly) Shut up … GOLDERS: (Somewhat disconcerted) All right. I won’t ask anything more of you. Be what you are. Forget I asked you to be polite to Price. If you can’t stand him, don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with him myself. Maybe I did act rudely today, but the way you behave sometimes drives me to it. I’ve got to invite Price because he’s useful to me, and you should at least make an effort not to discourage him. ELINOR: (Sits down, dejected) One has to bear the consequences of one’s youthful errors. Alas. I lived utterly unknown to the world. You dragged me away from my home and made me suffer again. (Irritated) Why doesn’t that Price of yours come and get it over with? I don’t see that he’s in very much of a hurry to accept your invitation. GOLDERS: (Helplessly) Ellie! Calm down. It’s really easier to create fifty trusts than talk with you for one minute. I just wanted you to try to be a little nice. Nothing more. Apparently even that’s too much. ELINOR: (In a rage, with tears in her voice) Stop it. You’re using means that go beyond the demonic. Remember, I won’t take any responsibility for what’s going to happen … She catches sight of PRICE, who steps out from behind a clump of shrubs at the right. She jumps up, goes to the hot plate and adjusts it. GOLDERS: But, Ellie! (Turns around and sees PRICE) How are you, Sydney? I am so glad that you’ve come. I was just going to phone for you.


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PRICE: (Greeting them) Your garden is fascinating. I was passing by and naturally I couldn’t resist. ELINOR: (With a trace of the former irritation in her voice) You’re extremely kind to our trees and flowers, Mr. Price. GOLDERS: In any case you’ve done just the right thing. Sit down. Have some tea with us. ELINOR: I’ve learned how to spice tea the Siamese way. It’s supposed to be fantastically stimulating. PRICE: If you fix it, just tea, plain, ordinary tea, will be an absolutely unknown drug to me. He takes some tea and sits in the chair at left. ELINOR sits to his right, the hot plate at her right hand, GOLDERS upstage, facing the audience. ELINOR: Only if I fix it? I should think Miss Fray could take my place quite well. PRICE: Miss Fray only filled a momentary void. ELINOR: A drug always fills a void. That’s what Richard told me when be forbade me to smoke opium. He took away my only pleasure. PRICE: All drugs are equally bitter and all of them leave a feeling of emptiness afterward. Only love, what they call great love, isn’t a drug. And as far as love is concerned, I lost my last hope for that yesterday: I’m growing more and more afraid of you. ELINOR: (Laughs; points to her husband) He must have told you something horrible about me already. That man’s known me such a long time and he still persists in regarding me as a monster! GOLDERS: (Angry) The tea you’re giving him is too strong, Ellie. Today Sydney’s got to be sober as he’s never been before. PRICE: Unfortunately, I’m getting soberer and soberer. I’m afraid I’ll get so sober I won’t be able to go on existing at all. The Malay servant, DAN, appears from behind the bushes to the right. DAN: (To GOLDERS, bowing) Tuan, the bell calls you to a talk. (He leaves) GOLDERS: (Getting up) All right. (To his wife and PRICE) I’ll be right back. (To his wife) In the meantime entertain Sydney. But not too strenuously. He’s got some hard work ahead of him. (He leaves) ELINOR: Mr. Price, you’re an atrocious person. You’ve ensnared my husband. You’ve managed to get a wise man like that under your control solely in order to be able to see me. I don’t think he’ll be able to live without you now.

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PRICE: Does that make you angry? After all, I really am useful to him. Besides, I love you. I told you that yesterday. And I’m saying it again today, although I don’t believe it serves any real purpose. ELINOR: Oh, you should just be glad I didn’t slam the door of my house in your face. You talk about purpose like a real coffee merchant. I can’t be anyone’s purpose. I thought you were a man who didn’t pay any attention to consequences. That’s what I like. How naive I was last night. PRICE: That was my fate: my relationship with you has been ruined by a girl of the streets who for a few hours served as the setting for a scene which was to follow. Don’t be offended if I used the word “purpose.” I’d be happy as long as you didn’t totally reject my company. ELINOR: I understand everything, even what a beggar you are in love. But forgive me. I have no desire to wrong a poor little girl of the streets who went without her dinner once because of you. PRICE: What a fatal memory you have! If you could only forget! Your eyes were so expressive then. Still, I don’t know what there was about it, but I can’t get rid of the memory of that first meeting. Think whatever you like: that it’s all my imagination, or a madman’s fantasy; only don’t drive me away, don’t be cruel. I know you’re trying to talk yourself into despising me. Feelings like mine can’t go unrequited. I’ll do everything for you. I have unexplored potentialities. That’s not just my idea – other people say so too. I ruin everything for myself by my uncontrollable fits of madness. If you’ll become my sole insanity, you’ll create in me what I lack to be truly great. The earth is a small planet. I feel I can go beyond the possibilities of this life of ours. I’ll give you a sense of strength that will liberate you from the world we live in. ELINOR: What you’re saying amuses me. What can you do? Be an even better businessman than my husband? I have no such ambitions, Mr. Price. I prefer to go my own little way. A poor thing, but my own. PRICE: (Enraged and ashamed) You don’t love me … ELINOR: (Interrupts him) Mr. Price, even if I told you I do, what would that accomplish? PRICE: (Gets up and quickly goes over to her) Elinor! Is it true? (ELINOR gently pushes him away.) You have the eyes of a child, but hell is lurking in them. Let me show you your own soul, in the mirror of my love. ELINOR: (Gets up and crosses to the bench) You’re tempting me, and I’m so weak, so exhausted from today and last night. I’d just like to fall asleep quietly. (Sitting) You all torture me so. Even Dan, you know? My husband’s Malay is in love with me. Oh, why are there men in the world!


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PRICE: (Gloomily, sitting on the bench at ELINOR’s right) Who’s torturing whom, that is the question. Since yesterday I’ve been living like an automaton. Actually, I have absolutely no desire to live. ELINOR: Maybe it would be better if you stopped coming to see us. Life is so beautiful. You’ll always find some girl or other on the streets. It hardly matters which one. PRICE: You don’t know how unhappy I am. I suffer constantly, although no one knows it. My life has all the appearances of being happy, which deceives people who don’t see the essential mysteries. ELINOR: You’d never know it to look at you. You look like a man whose every moment in life must be filled with some mysterious charm. PRICE: (Ironic) Oh yes, each and every moment. (With quite unwarranted fervor) Madam! I am the most unhappy man on earth. But my unhappiness is inside. There are two people inside me fighting savagely over a third – the person I’d be if either of them won. ELINOR: (Feigning sympathy) Really? I’m sorry for you, Mr. Price. But I’m not torturing you, am I? I’d like everything to be the best possible for you. You’re torturing yourself. And it would be so easy to stop it. Maybe it’s all an illusion? PRICE: (Angry) I wish it were. I’m going bats. You don’t understand that. There are two people inside of me – there’s a cold calculator, the one all the firms are scrambling after, you know, the expert on coffee, sugar, rubber and human weakness. And then there’s that other person, the one I’m afraid of. ELINOR: That’s interesting. I find a certain similarity between what you’re saying and the way I am. Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with the coffee trade, but … PRICE: (Angry, interrupts her) Have you ever really suffered? ELINOR: I too have my own solitude to escape into where I can weep over the loss of something that never existed. But I’m trying to forget it, and I don’t like people to remind me of it. PRICE: (Moving closer to her) I don’t want to remind you of anything. I loathe all memories. I don’t want you to suffer, but don’t drive me mad. (Suddenly) That’s enough banal talk. A sort of reddish fog is covering my brain. I’m suffocating. ELINOR: (Moving away from him with a satisfied smile; provocatively) No one has ever made me suffer, unless maybe I did myself, I suppose. Still, there’s something about you I like. And yet at the same time I feel a mysterious revulsion, linked with fear. I once knew a Malay prince. He had a kind of wild insanity in his eyes and he used a perfume that reminded me … PRICE: (In a rage) I can’t stand it any more …

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Enter GOLDERS. ELINOR and PRICE look like people caught in the act. GOLDERS looks at them searchingly. ELINOR: (Getting control of herself quickly) Richard, Mr. Price has a marvelous way of talking about business. If you’d ever been able to describe these financial matters to me so beautifully, I’d have been working in your office long ago. GOLDERS: (Laughing) The world-wide market in gutta-percha would look lovely. PRICE: (Jumps up suddenly) Richard. I can’t stand it any longer. I’ll go mad. Today I worked like an ox all day long. I tried to get hold of myself and I can’t. I love your wife with a totally new, satanic kind of love. By the way – I forgot to tell you: all the rubber in Ceylon belongs to our trust. Coffee’s fluctuating, but I’ve sent two cables to Colombo. Only old Picton is with us. GOLDERS: (Lays his hand on PRICE’s arm) Wait a minute – we’ll talk about that later. I have interesting news for you. And for you too, Ellie. My agents were a day late with the news. They’ll be fired for that. (To ELINOR) If it hadn’t been for a chance meeting in a cafe, your beautiful Sydney might have ruined the whole business deal for me. But the chief thing is this: Price is your half-brother, Ellie. That’s the reason for all his fits of madness. PRICE: Stop joking, Richard! (He sits down on the bench, looking wildly at GOLDERS) ELINOR: (Calmly) There wouldn’t be anything strange about that. His eyes are exactly like those of Henry Fierce, second Duke of Brokenbridge. You know, the one hanging in the corner to the left. GOLDERS: That’s it. Price is your father’s son. (To PRICE) I don’t mean to insult your mother, Sydney, but my wife’s father seduced her. It’s an actual fact. Hudson telephoned me just now. That’s why you received such a thorough education, that’s where those beautiful manners come from – traces of which I’ve got on my ear and jaw. PRICE: (Jumps up) Now I understand! (To ELINOR) But you – you won’t want to look at me again. And without you I wouldn’t be able to work any more. That’s how I felt this morning. I never intended to come here. (To GOLDERS) Believe me, I never wanted to be here now but … I couldn’t help it. GOLDERS: (Pleased) I understand you completely, Sydney. There’s nothing odd about it. I was the same way some years ago. (To ELINOR) Isn’t that right, my pet? (To PRICE) She’s a real Hindu love goddess. It’s only here that she’s developed so magnificently.


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PRICE: I have to go. Everything’s hitting me from all sides at once, as if someone had turned on an infernal machine. I’ll blow my brains out. GOLDERS: Don’t you dare. I’m going right now to see the Rajah of Gomong. He’ll join us. The biggest rubber forests on the eastern peninsula. You’ve got to draw up a proposal for tomorrow. But now you’ll stay with her. You have a lot to talk about. And then – to work. ELINOR: (To PRICE) You will stay, won’t you, brother dear? (To GOLDERS) I can call him that, can’t I? GOLDERS: Call him Baphomet if you want to, my dear. (To PRICE) Price! Remember: no fits of madness, no suicides. (To ELINOR) You don’t know. He’s the one who ruined the copper trust on Borneo; he wrecked the negotiations between the Tropical Gold Company and the Sumatran rajahs. And yet he was the sole hope of the Union – he has such brilliant ideas. Everyone’s fighting over him. But we won’t fight over him. Will we, Ellie? Goodbye. Just remember; be nice to him and see that he doesn’t have an attack of nerves. At least until tomorrow he mustn’t make any blunders. (He goes out) ELINOR: (To PRICE, seductively, egged on by her husband’s revelations) Sydney, you’ll stay! Won’t you, brother dear? PRICE: I would have preferred him just to kill me. He despises me. And you make fun of my most desperate feelings. And now there’s the problem of our being related too. He didn’t have to tell me that. Oh, it’s hell! He leaves me alone with you, saying I’m your brother. That’s real cruelty. Now you won’t want to talk to me anymore except as a brother. ELINOR: (Coquettishly) Why wouldn’t I talk to you? My late brother, the Marquis of Turnborough, had eyes exactly like yours, Mr. Price. I mean – like yours, Sydney dear. PRICE: Don’t talk to me that way. I’ll go mad. ELINOR: Why? I loved my brother very much. PRICE: Yes. You loved him like a brother. You don’t know what’s happening to me. I won’t survive this … ELINOR: How I loved him is my own business. PRICE: Let me go. ELINOR: All right, I’ll tell you. I was in love with Henry Fierce’s portrait when I was twelve years old. I was in love. Do you hear, Sydney? I was madly in love. You don’t know how little girls suffer, and even grownup young ladies. Eight years of pretending – it simply drove me mad. And you can’t pretend for even half an hour, my beautiful madman. (Suddenly) Or perhaps you’re upset because your mother …

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PRICE: What do I care about my mother! I never knew her. That’s enough of these jokes. I’m going now to write up that report for Golders, then I’ll shoot myself. I’ve had enough of life. I bid you farewell. ELINOR: (Leaps up and stops him) Don’t you want to love your only sister? Why do you absolutely insist on being a brutal animal? We can love each other at a distance. You’ll come here after office hours and talk to me about flowers, snakes, stars, and entanglements in the make-believe world of psychic perversities. (She speaks the last words in a long, drawn-out, lascivious way) PRICE: Don’t torture me. There can’t be anything between us. I’m your brother. It’s all over. ELINOR: Whatever happens, you can talk with me one last time, can’t you, Mr. Price? You’ve got to calm down, because my husband needs your nerves to be steady for that terrific deal in gutta-percha. (Goes to the table and pours him tea) Your nerves are immensely valuable. If you don’t calm down, I shall have all the engine wheels and surgical instruments in the whole world on my conscience. Come have some tea. She serves him tea. PRICE takes a cup mechanically and sits down on the bench. PRICE: This is sheer torture … ELINOR: (Sitting on his left) There, you see, it’s your mother’s violent temperament, a poor girl from Brixton that they married off to some drunkard. You don’t know how to be patient. PRICE: (Puts his cup on the bench to his right and pounds his fist on his knee) Stop it! Either you’re my sister and we’re seeing each other for the last time in our lives, or you’re going to be my mistress. I was talking nonsense. Forget about that. Actually this isn’t love, but only a wild, gloomy kind of frenzy. I could tear you apart and devour you like a wild animal. I’m talking frankly, I’m not going to make pretty speeches. I’m completely dehumanized and brutalized. You’ve transformed me into a raging beast. I’m a beast who deals in coffee, that’s all I am. ELINOR: (Listens to him with her eyes closed, smiling voluptuously) Now you excite me. Be like this always if you want women to love you. For me you’re lost forever. Oh! How I could have loved you! PRICE: Why, tell me, why can’t you love me now? Is it because I’m your brother? (ELINOR shakes her head negatively without opening her eyes.) Then why? Tell me! Don’t drive me mad. Elinor darling, you’re my one and only. All the past and all future life, future forms of existence and all eternity are nothing compared to this moment. Don’t you


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understand that in the infinity of existence there’s only one such moment? I implore you, be mine! ELINOR: (Stretching herself voluptuously, not opening her eyes) Oh, if this moment could be eternity! That’s what you’re really saying. But when I think of tomorrow … (Turns to him and looks him straight in the eye with madness and terror) Richard seems somehow strangely excited. It’s a year now since I’ve been what I’m supposed to be to him. If he wanted me to be his wife again, could I deny him? Sydney, just think, could you accept that? PRICE: (Controls himself; tries to convince her) Then leave him. We’ll go somewhere far away. I’ve just received an offer to go to South China to be the director of a huge new cotton trading company. ELINOR: Oh! Always those eternal business deals. Just once I’d like to forget about that. To live in some make-believe world where there isn’t any sugar, or coffee, or cotton, or gold … PRICE: Elinor, take pity on me. I’ve got to be someone. You have to have all the things you’re accustomed to. Life in a bamboo hut in a clearing in the savage wilderness, growing rice and bananas, that’s no future for you. ELINOR: Oh, don’t talk about that. You’re my brother, my father’s son, and that’s who you’ll always be. Oh, how ghastly it is. Go away, go away forever. I want to forget I ever knew you. PRICE: Just today. At least this one evening. Don’t drive me away. I can’t stand it any more. It doesn’t matter what happens. We live only once and this moment is eternity. Voices are heard behind the shrubbery to the right. JACK appears, followed by DAN. JACK’s white clothing is dirty, he has spots on his face, he is pale and his hair is disheveled. No hat, vacant stare. He stands and gasps, unable to speak. DAN: This crazy white man forced his way in here. I couldn’t stop him. ELINOR and PRICE get up from the bench. JACK: Help me! Mr. Price! Mrs. Golders! I beg you. Father and Tom are chasing me. I’m afraid they’ll beat me. (He stands there petrified) ELINOR: (Signals to the servant to leave. DAN disappears. Turns her head slightly toward PRICE, who is standing behind her, his back to the audience) Look, Sydney, isn’t he wonderful! It’s youth and that devilish tropical degeneration. He’s been smoking opium. Look at his eyes. It’s a vision from all the hells of wildest rapture. (PRICE, behind her, tenses up with wild desire, staring at the nape of her neck.)

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I want rapture and degeneration too – really and truly, for once in my life. Sydney! I’m yours … (She leans back toward him) PRICE: Oh! The perverse little creature! He plants a wild kiss on her neck below her ear. She trembles all over in a voluptuous shudder. This lasts a rather long time. JACK takes a couple of steps toward them with great effort. BRITCHELLO and TOM rush in from behind the bushes. BRITCHELLO: Aha! I’ve got you, you disgrace to the whole family! (He notices ELINOR and PRICE, who quickly tear themselves out of their mad embrace.) Oh, I’m sorry, so sorry, as the English say on such occasions. You’ll forgive me. I’ve been looking for this brat in all the dives ever since this morning. Tom and I saw him coming out of the worst den on Great Commercial Road with a couple of colored street girls. He got away from us at the corner of Picton Street. We ran after him. He got a rickshaw. We got another one. He came here. He didn’t even pay. But what a mad chase! (To JACK) You wretch! That’s what you are! To make your mother worry so and me waste the whole day in this fiendish town! Tom, give me the whip. You’ll forgive me, Mrs. Golders. I’m handling this the Polish way. Right here and now – in those bushes. I’ll teach him. (JACK rushes toward ELINOR and PRICE. TOM grabs him by the collar.) Over there! Behind the bushes!! TOM drags JACK off, giving BRITCHELLO the whip. They disappear to the right. JACK’s shrieks and BRITCHELLO’s swearing can be heard. PRICE: But we’ve got to save him. That old Slav will beat him to death. ELINOR: (Turns away from him and speaks in a languorous voice) No! Let him scream! I like it that way. Kiss me again, Sydney. You’re strong as an elephant and sinuous as a boa constrictor. Kiss me. (PRICE embraces her and kisses her on the lips in a wild frenzy. ELINOR tears herself away from him) No, no, not here. Not in this house, or in this garden. I have the key to the back gate. It lets out on Great Gopuram Square. We can slip off to your house that way. PRICE: (Grabs her red shawl. She wraps it around his head) Oh! What does it matter! They run out through the shrubs to the right The shrieking stops. BRITCHELLO comes out from behind the bushes. He throws the whip on the ground and wipes the sweat from his forehead. TOM comes next, dragging the whimpering JACK by the arm.


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BRITCHELLO: Once more, forgive me … (Notices that there’s nobody there) Look, Tom. They’ve run away! Oh, now I understand. They took advantage of the confusion and ducked into the bushes. Confused and enraged, TOM lets go of JACK, who sits on the ground and weeps. TOM: Oh, how disgusting! That scum Price! How could he in someone else’s house! BRITCHELLO: It would seem that everything’s just fine. The Duchess is having some fun. You only wish it was with you. Remember, I’ve got a grip on you like this. (Squeezes his fist) One false step and you’re off to the penal colony in the Pengamen swamps. TOM is upset. To the left the shouts of people running can be heard. BERTHA, LILY, GOLDERS and DAN burst in. BERTHA: Where’s Jack? (Sees him) My poor Jack! Even out in the street I could hear him screaming. BRITCHELLO: I gave him a beating. That brat’s developed a taste for opium and girls. BERTHA: Jack! What have you done? (She kneels down beside him and takes him in her arms) JACK: (Pushes her away, weeping) That’s the way it is. If Father didn’t beat me, Mother would, and then Father would kiss me. I remember that’s the way it’s always been. BERTHA calms him down. LILY whispers to TOM. GOLDERS: (To BRITCHELLO) I met these ladies in the street. They were beside themselves with anxiety. I was afraid they wouldn’t be able to manage and invited them here to our place. But why didn’t you come to the Rajah’s? I had to talk to that colored monkey all by myself. You’re supposed to be famous for your cleverness in fleecing all these natives. BRITCHELLO: I’ve been chasing this disgrace to the whole family all afternoon. You don’t know what hell I’m going through at home … GOLDERS: Business before everything. But where’s my wife and that genius of ours, Price? BRITCHELLO: They were here a minute ago. They must have run away because of Jack’s screams when I started thrashing him.

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GOLDERS: (With some anxiety) They’re not in the house. What in hell – ! (To DAN) Dan, search the garden. Tell the white Mem I’m waiting for her. (DAN bows and runs off left. To BRITCHELLO) The Rajah is ours. It’s a good thing you’ve come. (Looks at his watch) It’s half past ten. In a moment they’ll all be here to sign the final contract. Price is supposed to have the proposal ready for tomorrow. We’ll see if he’s really such a genius. LILY: Mr. Golders, today for the first time I see what business is. You’re the greatest man I’ve ever met. GOLDERS: Apparently you don’t know many people, at least not real people. TOM: What about me? Can I be of some use to you? GOLDERS: (Looking at him dubiously) We’ll see. BRITCHELLO: He’s a good boy. But he’s got to be kept on a tight rein. Enter DAN. DAN: Tuan! The white Mem is not here. Neither is the new white Tuan who came here today for the first time. (Points off left) The gate to Great Gopuram Square was open. I locked it. Here is the key. GOLDERS: (Gives a start, but controls himself. Taking the key) All right – you can go. (DAN goes out left. To BRITCHELLO) Quite simply my wife, yes, my wife went for a walk with Price. BRITCHELLO: At eleven at night, by the back gate, which she forgot to lock. They were in quite a hurry to go on that walk. Ha, ha! GOLDERS: Mr. Britchello, I’m the only one who should make any judgments about that. BRITCHELLO: (Not at all disconcerted) And now are you too going to say, “business before everything?” GOLDERS: Yes, sir. Business is business, Mr. Britchello. Let’s go to the meeting. I see a light still on in the front parlor. But what about Price’s proposal? It’s got to be ready by ten tomorrow. BRITCHELLO: Maybe between eight and nine tomorrow morning Price will find a moment or two. Ha! Ha! Really, you’re a dumb ox. (He wants to give him a hug in the Polish manner) GOLDERS: (Pulls gently away from him) You’re wasting your energy needlessly. Save it for the colored rulers, Mr. Britchello. (He goes out right, not looking at the rest of the group) BRITCHELLO: All right, children. Clear out of here. Stop compromising your father. Jack – get to bed. Put a compress on his head and – wherever else he needs one. I beat him like the lowest Malay. (He follows GOLDERS out)


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LILY: Learn from this, Tommy, learn from this. If you behave yourself, maybe these men will let you copy out some of the less important papers. During this BERTHA lifts up JACK, who starts whimpering sobbing all over again. TOM: (Very disconcerted) Lily, don’t drive me to desperation. LILY: You can stop playing Golders; it won’t work. BERTHA: Come along, children! Don’t fight. Tom will be a great man yet. They all go out right.

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ACT THREE The living room of SYDNEY PRICE’s apartment at North Terrace, an ordinary suite of furnished rooms in the tropical style. Another room can be seen through the door upstage center; in it a bed with torn mosquito netting, shreds of which are still hanging on the poles. A sofa to the right of the upstage door, a desk to the left. Further left, armchairs and a table, then a door leading to the hall. PRICE is in pajamas with a blue border and a sash; ELINOR is dressed as in Act Two, but her dress is very wrinkled. They are sitting on the sofa looking through some sort of manuscript. It’s 7:30 a.m. The blinding daylight shines through the lowered shutters. From the beginning of Act Three to a point which will be indicated, the pace of the acting must be irritatingly slow and drawn out. Long pauses. ELINOR: (Slowly in a long drawn-out manner) It’s marvelous now. Leave it as it is. I have the feeling my husband will be here soon. PRICE: (The same way) Just a second, just a second. I’ll just fix up the next-to-last paragraph. I’ve got to make it so perfect that no one can find fault with it. I’ve got to do what I agreed to do. Remember, I have the reputation of being Price, the genius who never slips up. He goes to the desk and starts writing. ELINOR crosses one leg over the other, swinging it impatiently. ELINOR: Anyhow, it’s only thanks to you that I’ve finally come to understand all this tropical demonism. Now I’m beginning to understand Richard. Oh! Why didn’t he ever let me know what it was all about? PRICE: (Writing) Just a second, I’m almost finished. ELINOR: I am sorry you’re not an artist as well a businessman. Don’t you ever write poetry, Sydney? PRICE: (Getting up) I’m done. Poetry? No. Sometimes I paint in water colors, but it’s quite strange. Things get painted all by themselves. I don’t have anything to do with it. (Throws the paper on the table) Still, wouldn’t it be better if you went home, Ellie? By ten o’clock I’ll have to bring them at least a rough draft. ELINOR: (Stretching) Somehow I just don’t feel like it. I don’t even know what I do feel like doing. (Suddenly) You know, I’ve got to tell you something. Nobody ever appealed to me as much as you do, Sydney. Nobody ever did. I’m telling the absolute truth. But still … PRICE: (Standing beside her, with sudden anxiety) But still? Go on, say it.


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ELINOR: (Looking at him) You know what I mean. It was awful, what you did to me, but still it wasn’t at all what I’d … PRICE: (In a broken voice) It was exactly the same for me. Today everything is so pale, petty, colorless, and worst of all – common. So common and ordinary that deals in coffee seem a kind of fantastic fairy tale world in comparison. ELINOR: (Lost in thought) It’s awful. PRICE: Yes, it’s not very cheerful. I’m also telling you the absolute truth. You didn’t appeal to me then and that’s not all. I felt something awful, something verging on the desire to commit a brutal murder, something verging on superbestial madness. ELINOR: Don’t talk like that. Last night will be repeated all over again – and then another morning just like this will happen all over again – empty and colorless as today. PRICE: Yes – it’s ghastly. (Pause) Perhaps it’s because we’re cousins. ELINOR: And quite close ones too. But no – that’s ridiculous. This is something far more horrible. I don’t feel that you’re real. I have the feeling that you’re a ghost, all the more terrifying because you have a body and burning lips, and such a terrible knowledge of love … I don’t even know if I love you. You’re some sort of sinister automaton. PRICE: Don’t say anything more. I feel my life has come to an end. It already happened back then, at the Malabar Hotel. It’s only now that I understand it. ELINOR: (Waking up from her reverie) Tell me, do you love life very much? You haven’t told me anything about yourself. PRICE: (With irony) When have we had time for that? When you fell asleep, I immediately got down to work on that damned proposal, and I have a feeling it was the farewell performance of Price, the genius. I can’t go on with this whole business. It seems I can’t do anything at all anymore. ELINOR: You’re not answering me, Sydney. Do you really love life? Do you very much want to go on living? PRICE: (After a moment’s reflection) I never had that vulgar attachment to life. ELINOR: (Suddenly radiant) But tell me, could you go on living without me now? PRICE: (After a moment’s reflection) No. And not with you either. ELINOR: (In a state of great excitement, getting up from the sofa) Sydney! What I’m saying may seem strange to you, but why not let me kill you? Don’t get angry at me for asking. PRICE: (Covering his eyes with his hands as if he felt ashamed) Oh, Ellie! Do you know what you’re saying?

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ELINOR: (Taking him by the hands) Yes, I do. It’d be marvelous. Let me. PRICE: (Turning his head, but not taking his hands away) You’re shameless. This is more appalling than that whole hellish night. ELINOR: (Passionately) Be shameless with me all the way. Give me that highest ecstasy. I don’t want to murder you. I want you to fall asleep forever in my arms. Do you have any poison? PRICE: (Looks her into her eyes) I have some Indian poison – one drop of it injected into the veins puts a person to sleep forever. ELINOR: (Thrilled) Give it to me …

Pause. PRICE gently frees his hands from hers and goes into the bedroom. ELINOR sits down on the sofa and falls back slowly as if she were swooning in the highest ecstasy. Pause. PRICE comes out of the bedroom, cheerful and calm. He gives ELINOR a little smoked-glass vial.

PRICE: Here take it. (ELINOR trembles all over as if she’d been awakened from a dream. For a moment she looks at him wide-eyed with fear. Then she seems to recognize him and reaches out her hands toward him in ecstatic delight. PRICE falls on his knees before her, putting both his arms around her waist. He doesn’t let go of the vial in his right hand.) How beautiful you are now. Do you have a pin? ELINOR: Oh! You’re marvelous! You don’t know how beautiful you are now. (Unpins a brooch from her collar, looking at him all the while) This isn’t courage. It’s beyond my comprehension. What’s fighting tigers or dying on the battlefield in comparison? And yet I understand you so well, I possess you so deeply at this moment. And you understand me as no one has ever been able to understand anyone ever before. And I’m yours, as no woman has ever been or ever will be again. We are unique, there is no one else like us in the whole world. (Pause) Where’s the vial? PRICE: (Leans his left elbow on her knees and gives her the vial) Here, take it. (He remains kneeling, embracing her hips. ELINOR takes the vial and dips the pin from her brooch in it, carefully. She puts the stopper back on the vial and places it near her left hand on the sofa. While she does this, PRICE speaks) Prick me on the lips so you won’t be able to kiss me anymore. You must go on living – and a kiss now could be fatal … ELINOR: That’s just what I was thinking at this very moment. Really – we’re not two people. We’re one spirit. (Raises her right hand holding the pin) PRICE: (Catching her right hand with his left) Wait. How will you go on living? I want to know.


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ELINOR: Something is opening up before me. An immense space, filled with the smile of Infinity. PRICE: Don’t say another word. ELINOR: Bite your lower lip. Give me your lips. (She pricks him lightly on the lips while looking in his eyes. PRICE rolls over on top of her. She turns him gently to the right and watches as his eyes close. Loud knocking at the left door. Enter GOLDERS. ELINOR speaks, without turning around) Richard! Sydney’s not feeling well. Help me. From this point on the scene should go at normal speed. GOLDERS: (Going over to them) Taking a walk at night wasn’t good for him. You’re looking after your darling brother very tenderly, Ellie dear. ELINOR: He wore himself out writing. If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have created anything half so brilliant. GOLDERS: You expect me to believe that. (To PRICE) Say! Sydney! Get up. The boss is talking to you. (ELINOR gets up, extricating herself with a certain amount of difficulty from under PRICE’s corpse. Then she stretches. GOLDERS feels PRICE’s pulse. He speaks with a certain terror.) Why, he’s dead! There’s blood coming out of his mouth! ELINOR: (With feigned astonishment) Dead? That’s impossible. He bit his lip while be was thinking over the sixth paragraph. (She touches PRICE’s forehead) GOLDERS: Ellie! You’ve got a suspicious look. Aren’t those your teeth the marks on the corpse’s lips? He looks like someone who’s died of a heart attack. That bluish shade. Listen, you were unfaithful to me with that idiot and the next thing you know he had a heart attack and died, you Messalina! Tell me the truth this minute! ELINOR: Unfaithful to you with my half-brother? Have you gone mad, Richard! Messalina! For a year now I’ve been living like a nun, and you insult me and call me a Messalina. (With sudden resolution) But all the same I’ll tell you the truth. I killed Price. GOLDERS: (Terrified) You killed him? Why? How could you do away with someone else’s property? He belonged to me and to our trust. And besides, that’s taking quite a responsibility! How did you kill him? ELINOR: (Pointing to the vial and brooch lying on the sofa) With his own poison and that brooch. (GOLDERS seizes upon the objects mentioned and stuffs them into his pocket.) Look out, don’t prick yourself! It’s instant death! GOLDERS: Where’s the proposal?

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ELINOR: (Looking like a little girl who’s gotten into mischief) There on the table. GOLDERS goes to the table, takes the manuscript and glances through it. Pause. ELINOR stays put, looking ill at ease. GOLDERS: Marvelous. Price acquitted himself excellently before he died. Listen, Ellie. The only way out of this is for me to shoot Sydney Price’s corpse. I caught you in the very act – to judge by the look of things – understand? ELINOR: But you can’t compromise me. That’s a horrible idea. You’ll just make a fool of yourself, that’s all. GOLDERS: And to top it all, you appeal to me. For years you haven’t appealed to me as much as you do today. I like dangerous animals. But now even I’m beginning to talk nonsense. I don’t know how we’ll get out of this. ELINOR: Oh, you perverse bull of a man. Oh, you naive monster. She rubs up against him. GOLDERS: (Taking her in his arms) Oh, damn it all, tell me what to do! ELINOR: (Caressingly) You can’t do without me – can you? Besides, I wrote that proposal almost all myself. I dictated the most important points to him. GOLDERS: That’s not true. That’s one thing I won’t believe. ELINOR: (Facetiously) Didn’t I tell you the truth a moment ago, and wasn’t it a hundred times worse? GOLDERS: But why in holy hell did you kill that poor wretch? ELINOR: I was afraid. I was afraid I might fall in love with him. I didn’t want to be unfaithful to you. He showed me the vial, the idea came into my head and I simply couldn’t get rid of it. I admit I felt like being unfaithful to you last night. You kept pushing me in that direction yourself. That’s why I went with him. Then we started writing and I didn’t feel like it anymore. But he kept begging me. Then he tried to drag me in there … (Points to the bedroom) GOLDERS: All right, all right. But what are we going to do now? ELINOR: (After a moment’s reflection) Listen, I’m sure he’s got a revolver on him. Take it and shoot him point blank through the heart. They’ll think it was suicide. I’ll write a letter in his handwriting. You know I can imitate anyone’s handwriting. Besides, if anyone hears the shot, we’ll say he shot and killed himself right in front of us. In any case, aim well. I’ll cover you with the pillows. Maybe no one will hear. Remember how he was always saying in public that he was in love with me. This is working out very nicely.


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GOLDERS: (Looking at her dumbfounded) You know? I’m beginning to believe that it was you who wrote that proposal. Quick – give me the pillows. If he doesn’t have a revolver, I’ll shoot him down with my own. ELINOR: (Laughing) You don’t have any reason to shoot him down now. You can just shoot him up. And don’t be sorry you’ve lost him. I’ll take his place for you. I’m going to join the company and take up business. I’ve had enough of this life of leisure. You can add my name to the firm. Now it’ll be: Golders, Fierce and Company. That’s what you were always begging me to do. GOLDERS: (Searching PRICE’s corpse; he pulls a revolver out of the pocket) He does have a revolver. What an idea, to keep a gun in your pajamas. Give me the pillows. Really, Ellie, I feel a second honeymoon is on the way. I love you. I, Golders – really love you. (ELINOR gives him a tender look and goes to the bedroom, returning immediately with the pillows. GOLDERS props up PRICE’s corpse on the sofa and presses the revolver against his chest.) Now cover my hand completely on both sides. ELINOR covers his hand and holds the pillows there. A muffled shot is heard. ELINOR drops the pillows, fluffs them up, carries them off to the bedroom and returns instantly. GOLDERS places the revolver in PRICE’s hand. ELINOR: There! Now I’ve got to write the letter. You know, I’m really quite impressed with you now. Killing him was child’s play. But shooting up the corpse – I couldn’t have done that. I’d be afraid he’d haunt me in the night. GOLDERS: Didn’t he even put up any resistance? How did you do it? ELINOR: I dipped the pin in the poison while he was busy writing. He wrote the last paragraph himself. I was so tired. When he finished, he wanted to kiss me. That’s when I pricked him. GOLDERS: All right. But tell me the truth, why did you kill him? I keep feeling you’re hiding something from me. ELINOR: I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know. Understand? I don’t even know myself. I feel so good now. So light and free somehow. Besides, he used to say he didn’t want to go on living because I didn’t love him. The poor thing would simply have gone on torturing himself, and he certainly couldn’t have done it himself. I actually killed him because I felt sorry for him. But also because he would have come between us, Richard! GOLDERS: (Kisses her passionately on the lips) I love you, Ellie! Now I know you’re mine. Blood and breeding really do count for something after all. I love you madly. For the first time in many years I feel I’m not Golders, not an automaton in the gum trade, but really a human being.

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ELINOR: (Gently freeing herself from his embrace) I can see that. Let me write the letter, you great big baby! Give me Sydney’s manuscript. I’ve got to get into the spirit of his handwriting. She takes the manuscript given her by GOLDERS and goes to the desk and writes. GOLDERS: (Sits in the armchair, thinking; after a while) Still, damn it all, there’s something about these women that makes it impossible ever to know anything about them really and truly. ELINOR: (Comes back with the letter and gives the manuscript to GOLDERS) Here’s what I’ve written: “Elinor! I can’t live without you. I’m your brother, but I love you with far from brotherly feelings. Yours forever, Sydney.” GOLDERS: (Takes the sheet of paper and compares it to the manuscript) Marvelous. Put it on the desk. No one’s come. Apparently nobody heard the shot. Lucky I came here on foot. ELINOR: There’s nobody upstairs. It’s a two-storied house. Miss Hackney, a money-lender, and some colored hanger-on of hers live downstairs. (There is a knock at the door.) Come in! JACK: (Enters, very pale, but elegantly dressed; red spots on his face) Oh, excuse me … GOLDERS: Mister Jack! Price killed himself here a short while ago. A frightful accident. Have they all gone deaf out there? No one’s coming. JACK: (Looks at the corpse) Oh! How sad. (To GOLDERS) Some hideous Siamese let me in. No one out there knows anything about it. (To ELINOR) Poor Price. He was in love with you. I know all about it. I’m completely grown up. Please believe me, Mrs. Golders. I went through so much yesterday. (To GOLDERS) Mr. Golders, I slipped out of the house this morning. I went to your place. The people there told me where you’d gone. I want to start a new life. Starting at the very beginning. Just like you and Father. They don’t want to give me any money at home. I’ve got to have money of my own. I beg you, take me on as a lift-boy in your office. I know you won’t refuse me. I want to be a great businessman too. But I’ve got to start at the bottom. I won’t smoke opium! It’s revolting. If you knew how seasick it made me, and not the slightest pleasure. GOLDERS: I like that. All right, my boy. You’ll be my lift-boy. JACK: Thank you, sir. I knew you were a good judge of people. Papa is too, but only about people who aren’t in his own family. ELINOR: (Goes over to JACK and hugs him) Poor boy. How much he must have gone through during the last few hours. Poor little Jack. Whenever you take me up in the lift, I’ll give you some nice candy.


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And on Sunday I’ll invite you to visit us if it’s not nice for you at home. Right? You won’t say no to me? JACK: All right, Madam. Only I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you the way Price did. But I won’t commit suicide. I feel sorry for him, but I must say he was stupid. Life is so wonderful. GOLDERS signals ELINOR to let go of JACK. GOLDERS: (To his wife) You’re not that old yet, my child. (To JACK) All right, but will you say that to me in two weeks, my boy! JACK: Certainly, sir. I have strong will power. We’ve been testing it back in Europe. I won two contests for strong will power. Knocking at the door. Enter BRITCHELLO, BERTHA, LILY, and TOM. BRITCHELLO: Jack! You haven’t run away again, have you? Oh! The rascal! GOLDERS: Excuse me. Quiet please. There’s a corpse in the room. My wife and I found – (Emphatically) do you understand, Mr. Britchello, do you understand, Mr. Radcliffe – my wife and I found Sydney Price’s dead body here. He committed suicide after writing a proposal for the activities of our trust. That Price had a brain tough as an ox! But at the same time so subtle, like a spider web. Here’s the manuscript. (Shows him the manuscript.) Mr. Radcliffe, I’m taking you on as secretary of our association, to take Price’s place. I hope you’ll do a good job. (To his wife) Here’s a new victim for you, Elinor. (To TOM) Mr. Price killed himself because of his unhappy love for my wife. I’m giving you fair warning, Mr. Radcliffe. That’s right. (TOM bows, confused.) Jack’s going to be my lift-boy. (To BRITCHELLO) Don’t waste your breath, Mr. Britchello. It was his own idea. That’s right. Isn’t that so, Mr. Jack? JACK: Yes, Mr. Golders. You’re a second father to me. It’s like in that tragedy by Mr. Miczynki called Basilissa Teophano. I read it in Conrad’s translation. There, it says, “What has my father given me? By chance my father gave me life. You, cosmocrator, gave me faith in the existence of new spiritual peaks.” It was on our reading list at Eton. But Papa says Miczynki is totally unknown in Poland. They think he’s a madman there. But I even know his biography; the Russian Bolsheviks killed him – because … GOLDERS: Stop it, Jack! Stop being so long-winded. You get that from your Slavic ancestors … BERTHA: That’s right, Mr. Golders. Keep a tight rein on him … GOLDERS: I certainly don’t need your authorization. Jack is my employee. Besides, he’s a free man. Nobody’s going to beat him, but

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nobody’s going to pamper him either. He may smoke opium now, but he’s not going to. Right, Jack? JACK: That’s right, sir. GOLDERS: You see, Mr. Britchello, noble Slav, and Mrs. Britchello, grumpy colonial wife – Mrs. Britchello, you don’t understand what the tropical sun is like in the shade of a Singapore cathedral or something like that, in the words of Conrad, your counterpart in the arts, Mr. Britchello. BRITCHELLO: We only came because at your house they gave us this address. I haven’t slept a wink today. Jack had run off by six o’clock. My family really raked me over the coals. Hadn’t we better get down to business, Mr. Golders? Anyhow, these are, how shall I put it, purely personal matters. GOLDERS: (Coldly, giving BRITCHELLO the manuscript) Of course. Here’s Price’s proposal. Take it with you and show it to the rajahs. You’re our only antidote to the natives – that’s all you’re good for. BRITCHELLO: (Equally coldly) Don’t forget I know a great deal. Perhaps even more than you do, Mr. Golders. GOLDERS: I know one thing – that without me, right now you’re nothing but a candidate for president of the West India Rubber Syndicate, which that dreamer (Points to PRICE’s corpse) wrecked long ago. Nothing more, Mr. Britchello. BRITCHELLO: (Good-humoredly) Then let’s stick together and stop quarreling. I’ll give you Jack and Tom. (Meantime, BERTHA and LILY find the letter supposedly written by PRICE on the table and read it.) They can both go straight to hell. ELINOR: (To BRITCHELLO) Please remember that now I’m a partner in the Golders firm. You’ve got to reckon with me as well, Mr. Britchello. BRITCHELLO: Why of course, dear Madam. I believe I’ve already given you proof of that, of … my consideration for your Royal Highness. Long live the union of gutta-percha and coffee, and everything else can go straight to hell! They shake hands. BRITCHELLO holds her hand and turns on the charm for her in the Polish manner. LILY goes over to ELINOR with the letter supposedly written by PRICE. LILY: (With great emotion) Why, the poor thing, he really did die of love for you. ELINOR: (As if she doesn’t know what she’s saying, still holding BRITCHELLO’s hand) Oh yes, he probably did. She smiles at LILY insincerely and conventionally. Short pause, during which it suddenly grows dark and the sound of a gale can be heard.


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GOLDERS: What’s that? It can’t be the monsoon already? PRICE’s corpse suddenly gets up and walks to center stage. Everyone is petrified. PRICE: Don’t be frightened and don’t think these are symptoms of tropical madness, which I’ve been said to personify on the islands for a long time now. That poison was a hoax. It was a sample of a new liquid nail polish, not curare. Mrs. Golders, your perversity has exceeded my demands. I don’t love you anymore. Perhaps you’ll find others who’ll volunteer to be killed. I’ve had enough for the time being. GOLDERS: But I … you! And besides, you had absolutely no pulse at all then. PRICE: That’s right – you shot me up – that’s what you meant, isn’t it? You see, I have a special peculiarity. I can stop my heart from beating whenever I feel like it. If I wanted to, I could die that way. As for shooting me up, you didn’t aim very accurately, evidently thinking you just had a corpse to deal with. It did give me a slight scare – I admit it frankly. But I managed to change the direction of the barrel of your revolver under the pillows. I got a slight bruise on my left side. BRITCHELLO: Now here’s a pretty state of affairs, now here’s a pretty state of affairs. ELINOR: Sydney, so now … my God … I want to tell you … PRICE: No, Mrs. Golders, we’d better not talk about anything. I’ve said too much in front of strangers as it is. But I did it on purpose. I want your husband to suffer a little too. I loathe him. I’m handing him over to Mr. Britchello along with you and his secret. Now he’s not going to let you get away quite so easily. BRITCHELLO: Thank you, Mister Price, thank you with all my heart. He holds out his hand to PRICE. PRICE: (Drawing back) That’s not necessary, I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for myself. I’m completely cured of my madness – my tropical madness, that is – because perhaps I’ve got another kind now. I won’t torment black women anymore or bother white ones with my great love. I’m just an ordinary swine. ELINOR: You’re a real demon! Sydney, don’t leave me. I’ve just started to appreciate you now. GOLDERS grabs her roughly and throttles her, covering her mouth with his hand.

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PRICE: Oh – I don’t like all this going to extremes … Can’t you see I’m cured, Madam. I must admit you’re right about one thing. You’re a genius as a businesswoman, absolutely first-class. Your proposal is marvelous. Ha, ha, ha, ha! How small I seem to myself now. From now on I’m giving up my commercial activities. I’m going to be an amateur water-color painter. You’ll all forgive me, I’m leaving now to buy my boat ticket to England. I’ve had my fill of all of you and the tropics too. Goodbye! (Goes out in his pajamas, without his hat; at the door he says) I hope when I come back that you’ll all be gone. GOLDERS: He’s gone out into the street in his pajamas! After all of this he didn’t really go mad until just now. (Throttling ELINOR) Will you quiet down or won’t you? LILY: Serves her right. She’s a monster, not a woman … JACK: Mr. Golders … (He tries to defend ELINOR) GOLDERS: (Gives him a knock-out blow with his left hand) What? My liftboy dares to?… JACK falls to the floor. BRITCHELLO: You’ll answer me for that, Mr. Golders. (JACK tries to hurl himself at GOLDERS all over again.) Don’t touch him, Jack; they’re common criminals that we’ll keep under our thumbs for as long as we like. If it suits me, that woman will become your mistress, Jack. You’re not going to need colored street girls. All right, Mr. and Mrs. Golders, off to work with you! (He points to the door with his finger and holds the pose) JACK: Father, you can’t do that, she … TOM makes him keep quiet. GOLDERS: Come along, Ellie, for the time being we’ve lost the game. But I find you so attractive now that I’ve got to go on living just a bit longer. Head bowed, he goes to the door. ELINOR follows him. At the door she pulls a revolver out of his pocket. ELINOR: Did you think I’d? … It’s all your fault! You idiot! Did you think I’d give in like you and be the slave of that old blackmailer too? (She shoots herself in the temple and falls over) JACK: (Dashing toward her) Oh – this is horrible! (Kneels beside her) She’s dead.


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BRITCHELLO: Well, how about that, Mr. Golders! Will you survive this too? GOLDERS: At this very moment, in a single second, I’ve developed a new outlook on life. I’ll survive without her or her brilliant proposals. I’m stronger than I thought. BRITCHELLO: You know, I really am impressed! I hope we’re going to create great things together. I’ll use blackmail only when all else fails. GOLDERS: Provided I don’t give myself up to the police and report you first – for concealing both my wife’s crime and my crime of covering it up – for business reasons. Even Price couldn’t have foreseen that. JACK kneels nestling against ELINOR’s corpse. Sound of winds and rain; darkness. BRITCHELLO: You’re trying to force me so that right now … GOLDERS: How about a race to the first policeman, Mr. Britchello? No, sir, you won’t want to lose a partner like me quite so rashly. We’d better abandon all thoughts of blackmail and work together in peace and harmony. Too bad Ellie didn’t live to see my new idea. BRITCHELLO: Still, you’ve come off your high horse a little, Mr. G. Our relationship has grown so complicated it’s beyond my normal powers of comprehension. I’ve got to think it over all by myself. Let’s go. He goes out arm in arm with GOLDERS. The FAMILY follows them. LILY: I have the impression we’re the ones who’ve gone mad now. You see, Tom, they’re the real big shots – Papa and Golders. You’ll never be one of them, not even if you spend a million years trying. JACK: I’ll be an even bigger shot yet. I’ve learned so much today! I’m not starting at the bottom and I am accepting Papa’s help. But even the devil himself doesn’t know where I’ll end up. That you can’t imagine, not even in a fit of tropical madness. They go out. THE END 20 IV 1920 – 17 III 1925

Witkiewicz’s Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf (1921)

When there have been private readings of my plays, I have run across several objections that I should like to dispose of quickly. l) I have been reproached for “careless language.” I think that the language of characters speaking on the stage must be closely linked to the action which is one of the chief elements of what is unfolding on the stage. If a given sentence, in itself rough and unmusical, suited the nature of the actions of the given characters, I left it in its initial state, without smoothing it for the sake of musicality. A sentence in itself has no meaning on the stage; it has value solely in connection with the action. The situation is quite different in poetry. Although even there, in my opinion, excessive musicalizing of the verse, without regard for the conceptual side (even devoid of logical and real-life sense) can produce fatal results. Leave to music what is musical, and to poetry what is poetic, that is, a synthesis of elements: conceptual, musical, and pictorial. Of course, defending this and not some other manner of speech on the part of my “heroes,” I do not do so from the point of view of life, in which people express themselves in a non-literary fashion. I am only concerned with the purely artistic side – the formal side. 2) I am reproached because the themes of my plays are invariably dirty tricks, sexual obsessions, philosophy, and such things, and there’s no place in them for love, devotion, good deeds, sublime feelings, and so forth and so on. Real-life nobility and baseness have nothing in common with Art. Everyone has the right to base his formal construction on completely optional real-life elements necessary for achieving certain, for him essential dynamic tensions in the given whole from 57

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the point of view of Pure Form. Whoever doesn’t like the (unimportant) real-life content of my plays doesn’t have to read them or later on go see them performed. Whoever understands them formally will experience other sensations and it won’t matter to him whether in these plays people or animals sacrifice themselves for one another or whether they kill one another without any reason. 3) Boy-Z˙elen´ski introduced into theatrical criticism the concept (not yet officially accepted) of “humbug” without defining it clearly. Then he used it at the request of certain individuals in a private letter and out of a sense of discretion I cannot make use of his definition. When two critics wink at each other and say the word, “humbug,” it proves nothing about the formal value of the given play. It is possible that because of my use of the grotesque – shooting that sometimes is almost non-stop (for example, in Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix), strangling, tying up, and other such choice morsels – for many people, who don’t understand formal beauty in the theatre and who look at it from the point of view of literature in general, of social questions, of ethics, of history and the devil knows what else, my plays may seem “humbug.” For people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deluded by psychological analysis, a revolver shot (not to mention a cannon shot) is a brutal effect, rendered banal chiefly by the fact that in reality they have almost never heard any shooting. It sounds paradoxical, but nonetheless it’s true. In defense of shooting, nowadays rendered somewhat commonplace by the war, the following can be said: let the critic imagine that he must write his criticism, literally feeling the cold barrel of a gun at his temple: under these circumstances will he write the same thing he would have written after a good supper, in his dressing gown, in a comfortable armchair, in the seclusion of a paneled study? No – shots and gun barrels are not banal things even in life, and on the stage as a purely formal effect, they are completely justified on a par with death. And besides even at the present time there are countries where shooting is the ordinary content of daily life. But is it only in those countries that one can write and stage plays with shooting? Because Poland has no colonies, does that mean that one cannot write in Polish about Australia and revolvers and “represent” colonial affairs on the Polish stage? These are all the petty historical-psychological superstitions of naturalism, from which we must cut ourselves loose; otherwise the theatre will become something so fettered, so fetid, so festering and fusty, that no dog would go near it, not just a person of “degenerate” tastes and desires. Of course, shooting in a realistic play by Kiedrzyn´ski or squaring off with revolvers in Mandarin Wu has a different

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significance than it does in my play. But to clear the air and shake off the stinking psychologism of our theatre, it is worthwhile to thump a few times in the third act not only from a revolver, but even from a heavy howitzer or mortar. During the intermission someone may wink at someone else and say, “humbug.” We are far from maintaining that “humbug” is a necessary element of Pure Form in the theatre. But perhaps from all this “humbugging” a different theatre will finally arise, in which we will cease to be browbeaten by insipid farce, tendentious argument, psychological truth, society, history, and other real-life tidbits. Why go to a theatre in which there can only be found the same hideous, crass, miserable, herd life, through which it seems we already slosh each everyday day. Whatever happens on the stage, the spectator should not find himself where the action literally takes place: not in the living room, not in the desert, not in the tropics, but in a world of formal beauty detached from reality per se, functioning solely as the means of providing dynamic tensions in formal constructions. That is what we should strive for in writing for the stage. 4) One more issue. According to the standard model for plays in the past, each act, and even more so the entire play, was supposed to end with some tremendous rumpus. As in music of the past, each work ended on the tonic, preceded by a prolonged alternation of the dominant and tonic harmonies. Contemporary musical compositions sometimes end in a completely diffuse fashion and often not in the tonality in which they began. They are even written without key signatures, because in the second phrase of the theme the sense of tonality is already disintegrating. The same thing in a certain sense, that is, from a formal point of view, can apply even to plays, and rejection of the above mentioned standard model can enlarge the compositional possibilities: the second act can be more heightened than the third, and the ending can be a slow fading of the glowing colors of the middle and the beginning. Complete freedom of composition, independent of any demands of real-life truth and customs stemming from the theatre of the past, is necessary for the potential growth of new dramatic forms. Of course, the appraisal of the construction of the play must be completely subjective, and will depend solely on the ability of a given individual to understand Pure Form on the stage. There never were any objective criteria; they are a delusion of “experts,” who introduce the criterion of conformity with reality for the evaluation of works of art, which has nothing in common with the reality of life. It is the consequence of a false, naturalistic ideology that has arisen in the context of the complete downfall of painting and literature. The creation of a Theory of Art is the goal per se and cannot

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be identified with the striving to create objective criteria. The latter task is as impossible as squaring the circle or perpetuum mobile. And besides the “experts,” concerned with psychology and history and suffering from the delusion that they are aesthetes and artistic critics and that they possess objective criteria, judge everything primarily from their own personal point of view, not from an artistic point of view, and from the stand point of their own real-life likes and dislikes. Speaking about Pure Form in poetry and in the theatre independent of content is more difficult than in music and painting, since the elements of the form itself are concepts with their own meanings and the actions of some kind of living beings. We think, however, that it is not as hopelessly impossible as some believe and one should assume that with time there will arise a new type of theatre criticism free of all real-life alloys. I ask the reader not to identify my absolute tone in theoretical questions with megalomania with regard to my own plays. I treat them as a certain trend, but not as an already achieved final goal. However, objections of the sort that, in relation to the breadth of my theory which does not exclude the wildest real-life and logical absurdity, my plays are insufficiently wild and absurd, that the characters in them do not walk on their heads, eat glass, and drill into concrete slabs like corkscrews, are ridiculous and hinge on a misunderstanding of my theory, which for many is almost as difficult to grasp as Einstein’s theory. It’s not a question of absurdity for its own sake, but of compositional possibilities. To pile up a series of nonsensical situations and sayings, take a few haphazard expressions or smear a piece of canvas with something or other is an easy task. To develop and realize the generally and foggily sketched out original formal conception is a psychic process of a completely different order. But such conceptions come about by themselves, they are not something previously thought up rationally, they impose themselves in an absolute fashion and in order to realize them, it is necessary to wrestle with them sometimes as with wild beasts. Therefore if artistic work is to be essential, it must be spontaneous and not be subordinate to any theory, except a general Theory of Art, exploring the essential connections of the elements of art in general, and without being the program of a given “direction.” From confusing these last two concepts there arise many misunderstandings between new art and the “experts” stuck in the naturalisticpsychological ideology, despite their claims that they consider form as something essential. 9 V 1921

METAPHYSICS OF A TWO-HEADED CALF StanislⲐaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Translated by Daniel Gerould

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THE CHARACTERS PATRICIANELLO: Slim, blond, sixteen years old. SIR ROBERT CLAY: Governor of New Guinea. Clean-shaven, tall, fifty years old. LADY LEOCADIA CLAY: His wife. PATRICIANELLO’s Mother. Fortyeight years old, completely gray. PROFESSOR EDWARD MIKULINI-PECHBAUER: Fifty-two years old. Clean-shaven, tall, great head of gray hair, gold glasses. Famous bacteriologist. LUDWIG, PRINCE VON UND ZU TURM UND PARVIS: Thirty years old. Handsome, blond, clean-shaven. MIRABELLA PARVIS: His sister. Eighteen years old. Very pretty, chestnut-haired. JACK RIVERS: President of the Gold Stock Exchange of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Dark, with short cropped hair. Thirty years old. HOODED FIGURE: Tall, sinister character in a brown coat hanging down to the ground. A hood over his head. OLD HAG: Incredibly old wreck in gray rags. Hunchbacked. Small. KING: Chief of the Aparura clan. Papuan. Gigantic, frizzy black head of hair and black skin. Half naked. SIX PAPUANS: Gigantic, frizzy black coiffures and black bodies. FOUR SAILORS: Dressed in white. SIX PORTERS: Wearing green aprons. TWO WORKERS

Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf

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ACT I Room in the Governor’s residence at Port Moresby, capital of British New Guinea. Very low ceiling. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The back of the stage is taken up by a thicket of tropical plants covered with gigantic pink, red and blue flowers. The back wall can be closed off: the double doors, equipped with shutters and mosquito netting, are now seen drawn apart. The sunlight streams through the leaves. It’s that time of afternoon when the breeze flows from the sea. The plants are swaying. Several Ceylonese deck chairs (Colombo style). To the right a table, on it there are bottles and siphons on ice, and an ice crusher. PATRICIANELLO’s MOTHER is seated at the left, dressed in an unfastened white dressing gown, reading a book. Her legs are visible in white stockings and white shoes – they are very pretty. At the right, PATRICIANELLO, wearing crimson tights, sits in a small chair and glues together rock-like cubes made of card-board. MOTHER: (Closing her book) Patricianello, stop playing with those thingamajigs. PATRICIANELLO: All right, Mama. (Puts away the cubes, gets up and stretches.) What rotten bad luck – to have such a moldy old Mother! I had a dream today. I saw my other Mother, the real one. She was young, and white, and beautiful. She had pale pink hair. She held me on her lap and kept kissing me. Then I fell into a kind of abyss filled with black fluff. It was frightfully exciting! And yet I felt so awful, so horribly awful, as though everything had come to an end once and for all. There can never be anything in life for me. And it’s not only in dreams that I have that feeling. MOTHER: Just wait a bit! You’ve never seen any white women and that’s why you dream about such ridiculous things. Even at night you keep playing with thingamajigs. PATRICIANELLO: Mama, you’re becoming a bore, always talking about those thingamajigs! I feel completely abandoned. I have the feeling Father won’t ever come back from this expedition. MOTHER: I’m not at all worried about your father. Be good, and don’t talk about that anymore. PATRICIANELLO: Fly River! The most unhealthy place on the terrestrial globe. At the last minute he didn’t want to go, I could tell. The two of you forced him to. MOTHER: What nonsense! Have you been talking to the King again? PATRICIANELLO: Yes, I have, and I’m going to keep on talking to him. He’s the only man I know who’s really wise. Today he told me that if Father doesn’t come back to Port Moresby, then, as chief of the

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Aparura clan, he’ll marry you and carry you off into the heart of the island. You’ll be queen and worship the Great Golden Frog KapaKapa. MOTHER: (Getting up) No, this boy’s just impossible to put up with! Get on with your homework this minute! I’m going to send the King back to his forest this afternoon. PATRICIANELLO: I have plenty of time for my homework. Up till now I’ve been your totem. You worshipped me the way they worship their animals. But today something’s changed; I’d swear you’ve received news of Father’s death. MOTHER: (Menacingly) Will you be quiet? Get on with your studies this minute! PATRICIANELLO: (Winces and goes to the table. He drinks some soda with ice, takes a book, sits down, and reads.) “The chief fault of empiricism is that in accepting the concept of experience as the primary concept, it does not take into account certain unconscious assumptions which imply … “ MOTHER: (Sitting down) Not so loud! Can’t you see I’m reading too? PATRICIANELLO keeps reading, muttering under his breath. From the right, enter PROFESSOR MIKULINI-PECHBAUER, in a black frock coat. MIKULINI: The report’s been confirmed. A fishing boat from Tupa-Tupa met them an hour away from here. Their motor broke down. But apparently it’s nothing serious. MOTHER: (Drops her book and sits speechless) Then … it’s … true?! MIKULINI: That’s what those black jackasses say. And since they know a lot of things better than we do, I have no reason to disbelieve them. On the subject of Kala-Azar, that witch doctor across the way has far more accurate knowledge than I do. My new serum’s turned out to be absolutely worthless. (He sits down.) MOTHER: When will we find out for sure? MIKULINI: I don’t know. When the boat left, apparently they were just about finished with the motor. Parvis has come back. I saw his boy. PATRICIANELLO: (Getting up) Oh! At last! The only person I can learn anything from – except for the King, of course. MOTHER: Say good afternoon to the Professor. PATRICIANELLO: Why, all right, Mama. That doesn’t cost me anything. (He shakes hands with MIKULINI.) MOTHER: Professor, what am I to do with this boy? I have no idea what’ll become of him now.


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MIKULINI: If what we think has happened has really happened, we’ll make something diabolical out of him. I assure you, even if I have to dedicate the rest of my life to it, I must transform him. PATRICIANELLO: Won’t you to ever stop playing blindman’s buff with our souls? Mother, you’re that man’s mistress. (Points to MIKULINI.) And you, sir, killed my father. The MOTHER sits, speechless. MIKULINI: Perhaps I did – but so what, neurotic youngster? PATRICIANELLO: Nothing, at the moment. The worst of it is that my father actually doesn’t mean anything to me at all. PARVIS: (Runs in from the left, dressed in a light khaki costume and long yellow boots; a pith helmet on his head, a riding whip in his hand. Kissing the MOTHER.) Good afternoon, Auntie. (To PATRICIANELLO.) How are you, my little protégé? (To MIKULINI.) How are you, you venerable old malefactor? (He offers to shake hands; MIKULINI puts both hands in his pockets.) An expedition to Fly River, pockets stuffed full of Professor Mikulini’s serum! To get water bugs of course; the Governor’s collection is the finest in all Australia. Even Count PunvoMergusson is jealous of him. The greatest entomologists in the world simply howl with envy. Ha! Ha! MOTHER: (Getting up) We must turn Patricianello into a new type of person. We must mold him into what we want. If we want him to be a criminal, he’ll be a criminal. If we want to make a cabinet minister out of him, he’ll be a cabinet minister, and the kind of cabinet minister we want. PARVIS: Well, Patricianello? Do you want to renounce the horizons I’m pointing out to you for the vile machinations of those two vulgar criminals? Renounce the creation of a totally free strength, independent of everything, strength you’ll be able to use like a fang against whatever or whomever you please – even against yourself? PATRICIANELLO: I love Mama. (He nestles up against her.) MOTHER: Poor child! He was born too late, that’s why he’s the way he is. MIKULINI: Don’t get soft about him, Leocadia. Your feelings are the main obstacle to our turning him into a motor that’ll run just the way we want it to. PATRICIANELLO: (To PARVIS.) But listen, Ludwig. Isn’t what they want and what you want the same thing? PARVIS: Idiot! I want to give you a nameless strength of which you will be the sole master. I want to give you strength for strength’s sake, without any goal. They want to turn you into one certain type of

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person to fulfill one certain kind of function, and nothing but that. They want to plant a tumor in your brain. MIKULINI: (Interrupting) That’ll do, my dear Prince. No scientific comparisons if you please. Patricianello is grown-up enough to decide for himself what he wants to do at this decisive moment in his life. PATRICIANELLO: First of all, I want to know who my father is. MIKULINI: I am–and nobody’s going to deny that. And the Governor adopted you after your Mother and I had already separated. MOTHER: (Somewhat reproachfully, to MIKULINI.) Edward, please, not all at once! PATRICIANELLO: (Clutching his head in despair) How to go on living?! God! How to go on living? I feel like gluing together all the cubes that ever could exist–absolutely all, do you understand? Now I want to have all the insects, like Father. Oh, I know why he died of the fever at Fly River. There was a certain bug he didn’t have in his collection. What would life be like for him without that bug? I saw a picture of it once: It has a green abdomen and light rosy little wings. MOTHER: Who told you your father died? PATRICIANELLO: The King. He knows everything. PARVIS: (To PATRICIANELLO) That black imbecile? Have you been talking with him again? MOTHER: Now I ask you, Ludwig, isn’t that just shocking? PARVIS: (Severely) Patricianello, you’ve disappointed me terribly. I never suspected that you, a white man, would let yourself be influenced by those black monkeys. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. MIKULINI: Even Prince Ludwig, who is my personal enemy, is against that. How can you, Patricianello? Even I don’t know anything about the death of the Governor, so how could that miserable savage? KING: (Enters from the left) Amga gwanok, pelek Kapa-Kapa: Worship the Golden Frog, you slaves to your own vileness. MIKULINI: The damned rascal. MOTHER: Want some gin, King Aparura? Help yourself, it’s there on the table. (The KING goes to the right and mixes himself a drink.) And Patricianello, how about playing with your thingamajigs a while? It’ll do you a world of good. PATRICIANELLO: All right, Mama. He starts to glue cubes again while the KING mixes himself cocktails and tosses them off at a single gulp, one after the other. MIKULINI: (To the MOTHER.) There’s your system of education–to keep that great mind forever occupied with thingamajigs. PARVIS: Yes, Auntie, if he doesn’t amount to anything it’ll be your fault.


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KING: It will be the fault of us all, you white beasts. (He tosses off a cocktail.) PATRICIANELLO: (Gluing cubes) It’ll be the fault of my adoptive father. Nobody’s responsible for anything, only the person who believes that he’s the father–who believes that he’s the father whether he actually is or not–that doesn’t matter. MIKULINI: Is that how you react to discovering the mysteries of life? Oh! I simply can’t believe that you’re my son. PATRICIANELLO: Maybe I’m Prince Ludwig’s son? Everything’s possible. I learned all that from the King. Isn’t that so, Aparura? KING: (Drinking a cocktail behind the table) Amgan kelepe kapak. Does one palm tree know when another bears fruit? Does our Golden Frog know when and by whom the Boundless Distance descends into her crossed thighs? O, malam ampa nam kelepek, o nawam kelepe kapak! Kapak! PATRICIANELLO: If I can’t believe this black broomstick, who am I to believe? I am alone like a scarecrow in the midst of this insane heat and these wild white beasts who tell lies. Forgive me, Mama, but you’re a wild beast too, like all the rest of them. I’m alone, abandoned by everyone. MOTHER: Help, everyone! What’s he raving about? What I have to put up with from that boy! And it’s like this from morning till midnight. But during the night he dreams of even worse things. He dreams about his other mother. Do you understand that, Ludwig? I think it may be tropical madness. MIKULINI: Tropical madness is the invention of barbaric sadists who don’t know the first thing about bacteria. There’s no such disease. There aren’t any diseases without bacteria; I don’t believe in psychic diseases. PARVIS: That’s what all madmen say. Our renowned Mikulini is out of his mind. In our world of specialists that’s all there are–madmen. Each one has his own special obsession. MIKULINI: (Conciliatorily) You’re all children. You too, Leocadia–you seem like a little girl to me today. (Moved) Remember when we first fell in love? A tender scene between the MOTHER and MIKULINI downstage. MOTHER: Yes, I remember. Oh, Mikulini! Why didn’t you always love me the way you do now? Why couldn’t you have settled down in time? You behaved like a disgusting Don Juan at a time when I could have been entirely yours! How wonderful our life would have been!

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MIKULINI: Forgive me! Could I have known that I’d ever, ever be what I am now? I laughed at life and its inner dangers. (Embraces her.) PARVIS: Unfortunately, people change without even noticing it. Suddenly one day the human race gets a reward – a weird character that neither humanity nor the poor victim himself ever expected. (Freezes in a state of meditation.) MOTHER: Don’t listen to him, Edward. He’s a simply monstrous cynic. Wake up, everything’s still ahead of us. MIKULINI: There’s nothing ahead of us anymore. A horrible dusk full of memories of our wasted youth. How could I have left you then, for such a miserable stupid little infidelity? MOTHER: It was your fault. I always told you, hold on to me. You didn’t want to listen to me. MIKULINI: You were a demonic woman, Leocadia. Is it my fault if I was an ordinary Wissenschaftsmann in the German style, and not an artist? PARVIS: Artist? Whoever said the word “artist” will have to answer to me for it. MOTHER: Just don’t beat him, Ludwig. Beat your blacks, beat your Papuanesses, but not him. PARVIS: I’m going to beat someone. It’s disgusting, this comedy you’re both playing now. I’m still young. And so is he. (Points to PATRICIANELLO.) I won’t let you corrupt his soul; it belongs to me and me alone. MOTHER: I’m afraid you’ll change him the way you changed all those young people who had the misfortune to meet you. (To MIKULINI.) Remember young Harvey? Remember Lord Mixten? And that Phil Burnes? Oh, God! I’m so afraid for Patricianello! And I can’t answer for myself or what I might do. PATRICIANELLO: That’s right. If my adoptive father died at Fly River, I don’t have a mother any longer. He was the only one who could keep that horrible witch in check. Ludwig, I’m your spiritual son. PARVIS and PATRICIANELLO fall into each other’s arms upstage. MIKULINI: (To the MOTHER) You’re making Ludwig out to be some kind of demon from another world. It’s not his fault if on his way through life he only met ordinary mess-ups, myself included? Patricianello’s different. He’ll show Parvis. But now let’s get back to our own affairs. The moment is unique. Either I get control of myself once and for all, or I’ll die. I’ll give myself a shot of the serum against Kala-Azar; it brings on the disease quite infallibly, not only in people, but even in monkeys and alligators.


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MOTHER: How is that possible? Could you, the greatest bacteriologist in the world, have doubts about your own serum? Oh! That’s too much to bear. MIKULINI: That’s the way it is. Up till now we believed in my serum and lived by that faith. Do you know what protected us from the disease? The fact that we weren’t aware of the danger. MOTHER: Then let’s get out of here. There’s not a moment to lose MIKULINI: Yes, that’s just fine, provided the Governor – I mean, his corpse – makes it here on the boat. If they all drowned, we’re lost. The regular steamer only leaves from Brisbane every two weeks MOTHER: Oh, my God, my God! How long does it take, after you get the infection, for the first symptoms to appear? MIKULINI: A month – or in some cases two to four months. MOTHER: Oh, my God, my God! To be tortured by uncertainty for so long! MIKULINI: You’ve got to be stronger, Leocadia. We’ve lived through much worse at the sources of the Zambezi. Remember that dreadful disease that I successfully fought off throughout all of Africa? How I loved you then, Leocadia! (Embraces her.) MOTHER: (Angrily, tearing herself away from him) You’d better tell me the tonnage of that ship instead. MIKULINI: The one Robert Clay’s corpse is sailing on? Two thousand tons. MOTHER: (Feverishly grabbing his hand) That’s just a walnut shell! Can we get to Brisbane in it? MIKULINI: That depends on whether the monsoon is late this year. You know how terrible the storms are on the Coral Sea. MOTHER: Oh, my God, my God! Perhaps we could at least get as far as Cape York? There are human beings there too. MIKULINI: And all the same diseases we’re running away from here. No, it’s impossible. MOTHER: Edward! Do you still like me a little? That’s my last hope. (She falls on her knees.) MIKULINI: (Also falling on his knees) All is not lost yet, Leocadia! Be strong. Remember what we’ve been through together. (Embraces her.) PARVIS: (Beating on his shoes with his riding whip, charges at them) You revolting heap of rotting meat! And you wanted to bring up that poor wretch? Ha! I can’t stand it anymore. (Beats them both.) PATRICIANELLO: (Throws himself at him) Spare my mother, Ludwig! Don’t hit her so hard! But that scoundrel you can beat for all you’re worth. He’s my father. My father! That’s so monstrous. (PARVIS keeps on beating them.) How dared he! How dared he be my father! When I could have not existed at all.

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PARVIS throws down the whip. The MOTHER weeps in MIKULINI’s arms. PARVIS: But you had to exist somewhere, sometime. Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter where and how and why? The universe is infinite. PATRICIANELLO: But Ludwig, you don’t seem to realize that I could have not existed at all. So would I have had to accept my own existence even before I started to exist? Accept being incarnated in some accidental outer shell? Accept vulgar dualism? That’s nonsense worthy of my friend, King Aparura. PARVIS: That’s right! Why didn’t I think of that! Son of a gun! A metaphysical mystery. Don’t think about it any more, Patricianello. (To the kneeling pair.) Get up and get out this minute! You’re going to corrupt my protégé completely. Besides, you’ve already renounced him, Professor Doctor Mikulini-Pechbauer. They get up. The MOTHER dries her tears. MIKULINI: Yes, I’m leaving him to your mercies. I haven’t been able to create a life for myself, and I don’t have the right to create one for anybody else – not even for my own son. Come along, Leocadia. MOTHER: Oh, my God, my God! We still have so many months of torture ahead of us. Will we be able to stand it? MIKULINI: Come along, poor old woman. We’ll suffer together. No matter what happens, I’m a man. They go to the left and stop, whispering, at the door. PARVIS: Patricianello! You’re mine! You’re going to be a strong human being. PATRICIANELLO: I’d rather be a common beast. Even that bug my father lost his life for – poor Governor. Poor man! He was only governor of his own collection. He didn’t even have enough strength to be governor of his own soul. I’d even like to be the bug that’s become the most prized item in his entomological collection – that one, stuck on a pin and chloroformed. PARVIS: What? Suicidal thoughts? Suicide is the greatest obscenity in the world. Only physical pain can justify that most hideous of human inventions. I’ll teach you, you little beast. He rushes at PATRICIANELLO with his whip. The KING, completely drunk, jumps up from the table and grabs PARVIS by the arm. KING: Don’t you dare beat my friend, you degraded piece of left-over white pulp.


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PARVIS: (Controls himself) You’re right, you black son of a gun. For that disease we’ve got medicines a hundred times more subtle and more pernicious. Such as a white woman in all her transformations. Patricianello! I’ve got a half-sister in a boarding house in Sydney. I’m turning her over to you, lock, stock and barrel. Make of her what you will. PATRICIANELLO: (Falls on his knees before him) Oh, thank you, Ludwig. I’ve been dreaming of a white woman so terribly. The only one I ever knew was my mother, in that dream of mine. Not that one (Points to the MOTHER), but the real one, the only one I love and who causes me such horrible torment. MOTHER: (Rushing to him) That’s me, Patricianello, my dear little boy; I’m the one who’s always been in your dreams, I’m the only one! MIKULINI: (Dashes to him, pulling a photograph out of his wallet) Look, Patricianello! There she is. That’s your mother when she was my fiancée. Taken at Morton’s in Sydney. PATRICIANELLO: (Glancing at the photograph) That’s her. That’s the mother from my dream. Oh, Mother! What a revolting witch living with that bacteriologist has turned you into! PARVIS: (Looks at the photo and pulls another out of his wallet) Look here, blockhead! Your mother is the real sister of my sister’s mother, isn’t she? My half-sister looks exactly like her. PATRICIANELLO: (Takes the photographs and compares them feverishly) Oh, my God! It’s her! She’s alive! Ludwig, give me your sister. They won’t object. I can’t stand it any longer. Give her to me. What’s her name? PARVIS: Her name is Mirabella, but only at the boarding house. At night she appears at the Crockton Bar as Bubbles de Beau Vine. All Pitt Street is wild for her. What can one do? – il faut vivre, il faut manger. My sheep in Queensland are still only in the embryonic stage. PATRICIANELLO: Mirabella!!! (He faints.) KING: My friend is dying. Take him to your bosom, Great Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa. It’s no big deal that we’ve been studied by Malinowski, that damned unstoppable Anglicized dreamer. Totems are the truth. No matter what scholars write about them. SAILOR: (Rushes in from the left. To the MOTHER, saluting) Your Excellency, my lady: His Excellency, Sir Robert Clay, Governor of New Guinea, has returned to Port Moresby. MOTHER: Alive or a corpse? SAILOR: A corpse, Your Excellency. I didn’t dare tell you. The MOTHER falls in an armchair, covering her face with her hands. MIKULINI: (To the SAILOR) Is the motor working? SAILOR: Yes sir, Professor.

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MIKULINI: Listen, blockhead, and pay attention to what I’m going to tell you. The ship’s to be ready to leave tonight at seven. Tell that to the captain. And if it’s not, the chief engineer will answer to me for it with his head and his disemboweled guts. Understand? SAILOR: Yes sir, Professor. (Salutes and goes out.) MIKULINI: You see, Leocadia, no one can separate us now. (Embraces her.) PARVIS: (To the KING, pointing to PATRICIANELLO) His nerves are weak. Do you think my sister’s going to want such an anemic milksop? KING: Take me with you to Sydney. I’ll teach him our savage strength. PARVIS: (Offering the KING his hand) Fine. This seals the bargain. Together the two of us will bring up this brat and make him into someone. They embrace. PATRICIANELLO continues to lie motionless. From the left enter SIX PAPUANS, carrying the late GOVERNOR. Two SAILORS follow them. MOTHER: It’s him! It’s Robert! (To MIKULINI.) But can’t we catch it from him accidentally? MIKULINI: No. The Fly River fever bacteria are transmitted only by touch. Calm down, Leocadia. The SAILORS prop the corpse up in the deck chair at left. MOTHER: (To MIKULINI) But you will let me get just a little hysterical over him, won’t you? Whatever else he was, he was my husband. After all of this I so need to have a good cry. I beg you, Edward. The PAPUANS run across to the right and fall prostrate before the KING, who stays motionless. MIKULINI: (Lighting a cigar, goes to the right) Go ahead, cry to your heart’s content. I’m not going to stop you. (Steps over the PAPUANS) I’ll get everything ready for the trip. (Kicks PATRICIANELLO, who is also lying down, the photograph clutched tightly in his hands) And you too, my boy, get up and say good-bye to your adoptive father. PATRICIANELLO jumps up. The MOTHER falls on her knees at a respectable distance from the corpse. MIKULINI goes out right. FIRST SAILOR: (Handing a box to PATRICIANELLO) His Excellency told me to give you this, sir.


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PATRICIANELLO: (Takes it mechanically not noticing the corpse) Oh! Then he’s dead? FIRST SAILOR: (Pointing to the corpse) He’s lying over there, sir. PATRICIANELLO: (Glancing over at it) Yes, I knew that. The way I knew my witch of a mother would get hysterical over him. She spent all her life torturing him, and now she’s in despair. How revolting. PARVIS: Bravo, Patricianello! You’re beginning to make a little progress in understanding life. PATRICIANELLO: (Opening the box) Ah – here’s the bug. Scarabella Tripunctata. Scarabella – Mirabella. Oh, that’s your sister’s name, Ludwig, the one you promised me. Oh, my God! Have I been sleeping for a long time? Was it only a dream? PARVIS: (Impatiently) Oh no, that was no dream. If we don’t all croak here in this hole from Kala-Azar or some other obscenity, in three weeks you’ll be with my sister in Sydney. Then you’ll be fixed for the rest of your life. PATRICIANELLO: (Tearfully) But will I be able to stand it, Ludwig? I don’t have the least bit of strength right now. PARVIS: First of all, take off those crimson tights and dress like a human being. Half a person’s strength comes from his clothes. Do you think Alexander the Great would have won the Battle of Tarsus if his garters had kept falling down? And besides, strength of character consists in overcoming momentary weakness. Take that saying to heart – it sounds as though it were taken from a penmanship exercise – and go change your clothes. Well, off you go! You know I won’t tolerate any joking. PATRICIANELLO: (Weeping) I’d rather be that bug. Really – I don’t think I’ll be able to stand all this. PARVIS: There, there. Calm down, boy. We’ve lived through much worse, as our bacteriologist would say. (Pushes him gently out the right door) Aparura, order your subjects to get up and carry off my uncle’s corpse. At this rate we’ll all get sick before we even get started. KING: (To the PAPUANS, pointing to the corpse) Kapam amala – kapa – kapa melem. The PAPUANS jump up, hurl themselves at the body and carry it off left. The TWO SAILORS run out after them. MOTHER: (Crawling after them on her knees) At least give me back his body! Oh, my beloved Robert! I’m a criminal. I killed you. I should have rooted out that entomological obsession of yours. Save him! Maybe he’s still alive. Oh, that such a man could have perished for a tropical green bug!

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KING: Well now, that’s just hilarious! The poor Governor often told me confidentially what tortures he suffered with that matron. And now she’s howling like a koala! PARVIS: (Helping the MOTHER up) Now, Auntie, really! This is just a bit too much. Stop pretending to be in such despair, or I’ll start beating you in earnest. MOTHER: (Suddenly gets up and speaks with total calm) You know, you’re right. What am I actually pretending for, when I absolutely couldn’t care less? PARVIS: (Claps her on the back) There, you see, Auntie. Everything’s going to come out all right. MIKULINI: (Enters from the right) You know, I had to tie Patricianello up and send him right off to the ship. He thrashed about like a fish out of water. But what else could I do? They caught him on a rubber plantation just as he was tearing off like a madman in the direction of the Great Jungle. Do go and get changed, Leocadia. We’re leaving in an hour. MOTHER: Oh, this trip frightens me so! Two thousand tons on the Coral Sea, just before the monsoon begins. MIKULINI: I think everything bodes extremely well. (To the KING) Goodbye, Aparura. I hope we’ll meet again. PARVIS: But didn’t you know? The King’s coming with us. He’s going to teach your son savage strength. MIKULINI: R-really? You know, it’s all working out marvelously. Come along, Aparura, I’ll fix you up in one of my old outfits. KING: (Dancing and clapping his hands with great delight) Aparam kalan magatala. What will my Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa say to this? MIKULINI takes him by the arm and they go out right. PARVIS goes out after them, striking his boots furiously with his whip. Lost in thought, the MOTHER slowly follows him out.


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ACT II A room in the Hotel Australia in Sydney. The usual first-class hotel chic. At the left, a bed where the MOTHER lies dying, a white nightcap on her head, a compress on her face covering her nose and eyes. At the back a matched set of furniture. A door downstage right, a sofa further up, and the upstage right corner concealed by a dark green screen decorated with orange flowers. A window at the back, through which can be seen a typical Australian apartment building. PATRICIANELLO, in a gray cord suit, sits in an armchair at the head of the bed. Only his head and legs are visible. Behind him upstage right, a door to the adjoining room. In the middle of the room, half-unpacked tropical waterproof bags are lying about with things all in a mess. Dusk is starting to fall. PATRICIANELLO: (Reads) “And when she turned around, she caught sight of Lord Pumpkin’s pallid face directly above her. The train rushed on, sending out clouds of white steam along the Cornish coast. Lord Pumpkin grew paler and paler, and his lips swelled up like hideous, obscene tropical fruit. ‘You’re suffocating me, stop,’ whispered Eglantina in a faint, languid voice. Lord Pumpkin went definitively, convulsively pale; his face ceased to exist, and his teeth …” MOTHER: (Whining) Stop, I want to talk to you. I keep feeling I’m dying. My nose is getting stiffer and stiffer all the time. When it goes through the ethmoid bone to my brain – I’ll be dead. PATRICIANELLO: (Gets up and flings his book on the floor) You’re a foolish old hypochondriac. Can’t you understand, Mother, it’s only now that I’ve seen you in that photograph that I really love you. MOTHER: It’s just an illusion, Patricianello. The times are over when we used to play together with those thingamajigs. Life is just beginning for you. Do you think a son’s love for his mother is going to keep me alive? PATRICIANELLO: (Standing by her bed) But, Mother, you’re a crazy old witch, you won’t ever die. And anyhow, Mikulini is the greatest doctor in the world. Not long ago he cured the Prince of Northumberland, the King’s brother. And the Princess of Lancaster is still on her feet, even if she did lose her nose. MOTHER: Stop, don’t say another word. I want to tell you something; I loved only you, my precious son. The Governor, Mikulini, and a number of others in between were only pitiful delusions. PATRICIANELLO: Oh! So you did have lovers? That’s hard to take. I’d have preferred you not to tell me about it. But it can’t be helped now; what happened happened. I don’t hold it against you.

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MOTHER: Listen to me, that’s not all. Parvis … Ludwig Parvis. My nephew … He was drunk … I was crazy … Don’t be angry with him. He’s a good boy. He was the last. PATRICIANELLO: After all, in the old days even seventy-year-old courtesans still seduced men. I don’t see anything wrong with that, it’s just I wish it weren’t you, Mama. MOTHER: Don’t be silly, Patricianello. You seem so grown-up to me in those clothes, but as soon as you start to talk, you’re such a poor little boy. Sit down there behind the bed, so I won’t see your outer layer. PATRICIANELLO: (Sits down behind the bed) Through the metal bars on your bed I can see the ganglions turning somersaults in that poor hypochondriacal head of yours. In a certain sense, Mikulini is a great man. MOTHER: Yes. I’m glad he was the last of the last. Don’t think I was an ordinary demonic woman. I loved all my lovers, every one of them. Even Ludwig–although he’s not a human being; he’s a perfectly constructed automaton. He’s so wonderfully built he can even fool himself on that score. PATRICIANELLO: Oh, that Ludwig of yours! If only he could have fooled me! I must confess that now I think he’s less than nothing. And you wanted to entrust my upbringing to him. I’ll bring myself up. That’s where my greatness will lie. Do-it-yourself education without having to correct one’s parents’ mistakes or those of any other teachers fate accidentally assigns to us. I’ll bring myself up. MOTHER: For heaven’s sake, boy! What are you raving about? It’s like trying to pull yourself out of the swamp by your own hair. A big boy like you spouting such nonsense. PATRICIANELLO: That’s just it, Mama. It’s just because I am big. Tell me one thing: did you love the Governor, my adoptive father? MOTHER: Yes, Patricianello. I’m telling you the truth now. It was the one true feeling in my life, except for my love for you. That’s why I tortured him, that’s why I killed him. Now you know everything. Mikulini and I sent him to Fly River. He knew the serum was completely worthless. I had to do it. Forgive me. PATRICIANELLO: I do forgive you, Mama. I believe in earthly punishment. That’s why you’re dying now. I believe that evil exacts its own vengeance–but right here on earth. If there is another world, it’s too wise to take vengeance on our crimes. And if it does take vengeance, it’s not another world, but one just like ours. MOTHER: Yes. No religious faith can fathom eternity unless it postulates the absurdity of eternal tortures and eternal delights. Only earthly punishment counts for anything, and earthly rewards too. But


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that’s just the private theorizing of perverted individuals. That’s what Mikulini claims. Without faith in the here and now, those same facts would be neither punishment nor reward; they’d simply be bad or good, good for some and not for others, without the sanctions of higher beings. PATRICIANELLO: Mother, leave philosophy to others. You’re talking deliriously, as though you had a fever. MOTHER: I do have a fever. You don’t want to believe it, but that thing, that unknown thing – for which even Edward couldn’t find the bacteria – is attacking my brain. I feel as though I’m thinking someone else’s thoughts. Save me, Patricianello! I love only you! PATRICIANELLO: (Rushes to her and falls on his knees by her bed) Mama! Mama! And you’re the only one I love too. Take pity on me! Ludwig’s going to bring me his sister. They may be here any minute now. Hold on a little longer, don’t die! If she comes after you’ve gone, I’ll be finished. I’ve got to see the two of you together. Mother dear, don’t die yet. (Sobs.) MOTHER: You poor, poor thing. I’m the only one you can really love. Our spirits will meet someday. Have you read the Allgemeine Gespenstertheorie, the general theory of ghosts? On the basis of absolute ontology and the theory that inanimate matter does not exist, everything is possible. MIKULINI: (Enters in a black frock coat, a yellow leather bag in his hand) What? More of those damned moods of yours? Get up, you miserable protoplasm! (With sudden tenderness.) Just think, sonny boy. Mama’s dying. And nothing can be done about it. My serum is absolutely worthless. PATRICIANELLO: (Gets up suddenly, hissing with rage) Father, I loathe you. MIKULINI: And you’re absolutely right to, my son. PATRICIANELLO: (Rushing at him) I’ll kill you! You criminal! You charlatan! MIKULINI: Stop it! We’re in Australia, not Port Moresby. We’re in one of the most democratic countries on our globe. You’ll rot in prison, and that’ll be the end of it. Regardless of the fact that you’re a minor. PATRICIANELLO: (Controls himself) That’s true. I’ve got to keep a hold on myself until I meet her, that accursed demonic woman, Mirabella. Oh! No matter how hackneyed the term is, there’s no other way of putting it. MOTHER: I’m suffocating. Change my bandage, Edward. MIKULINI rushes to the MOTHER and wraps her up with preparations which he pulls out of his bag.

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PATRICIANELLO: Mama! How are you feeling? Oh, my God, my God! Death is a terrifying thing!! MIKULINI: (Changing the bandage) But it’s not your death, you nitwit. Only one’s own death can be terrifying. Do shut up and stop bothering me. PATRICIANELLO: (Lighting a cigarette) Maybe you’re right, Father dear. My death is still a long way off. No point worrying unnecessarily about it now. MOTHER: (In a strangled voice) I’ve brought you up to be a dreadful egotist. The poor Governor wouldn’t have been able to stand what you’re saying. PATRICIANELLO: It’s just that I have the courage to say it. Everybody feels the same way I do, even those who sacrifice themselves for others, not to mention those who act the same way I do, or worse. I’m going to talk about all of it. I don’t want to lie. MOTHER: Poor boy! Still, he is noble-minded. Although from another point of view, he’s a revolting beast. Edward, save him from the treachery of life. MIKULINI: I swear to you, Leocadia, I’ll save him and I’ll teach him everything. But there’s one thing … The door opens and PARVIS enters with MIRABELLA, who is wearing a gray tailored suit with peach-colored sashes, her hair pulled back. PARVIS carries a rather large dark suitcase; he is wearing a gray sports outfit. PARVIS: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I have the pleasure of introducing to you my sister Mirabella. She’s a combination of two types: enchanted strumpet and the streetwalking princess. MIKULINI: First of all, try to be more discreet. If it becomes known that she (Points to the MOTHER) is sick, we’ll all rot away in quarantine. Leocadia’s probably going to die, but we may just manage to escape catching the infection. I’ve prepared a new serum; it’s here in my bag. Unfortunately, Lady Clay is already so far gone that it would be too late to try this cure on her … No one listens to him. They all go over to the bed. Dusk has fallen and it is almost completely dark. MIRABELLA: Good evening, Auntie, how are you feeling? MOTHER: I’m dying, my dear. PATRICIANELLO: Don’t talk that way, Mama. You’re just tearing my guts out, I’m in such despair. I couldn’t appreciate you till now. I won’t be able to stand it.


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PARVIS: Don’t be silly, Patricianello. Look at her. (Points to MIRABELLA) She’ll take your mother’s place. Yesterday she seduced the president of the Kalgoorlie Gold Exchange. As a result, all the largest mines are now in our hands. He can falsify the records about the amount of gold being mined and not turn over a certain portion to the government. What’s left over will be ours. PATRICIANELLO: (Switching on the light) Yes, she’s pretty and looks just like my other mother. But now none of this has any charm for me any more. Everything in my life comes either too early or too late. Enter KING APARURA and JACK RIVERS. The KING is wearing an elegant gray suit, RIVERS a cutaway. KING: Ladies and gentlemen, meet my new friend, Jack Rivers, President of the Kalgoorlie Gold Exchange. They shake hands with the others. MIKULINI: The battle’s beginning. So that we’ll all start with equal chances, I’ve got to give you all a shot of the serum. (He takes his instruments out of the leather bag and during the course of the subsequent dialogue gives them all shots of the serum – except the mother and the KING – in the following order: PATRICIANELLO, RIVERS, PARVIS, MIRABELLA.) MOTHER: Edward! I’m dying. I feel something bursting and it’s all running into my brain … PATRICIANELLO: (Waits for the shot, his arm bared) Mother, I beg you, don’t lose consciousness. MOTHER: A red shawl has come down and covered my brain. Ludwig, don’t beat me so horribly. The Golden Frog is climbing into my head through the back of my neck. KING: You see? At the final moment, the patient has been converted to true totemism. Kapa-Kapa is winning. MIRABELLA goes to the MOTHER. MIKULINI gives PATRICIANELLO his shot. PATRICIANELLO: Mother, hold on for just a moment longer. MIRABELLA: She’s sinking fast. RIVERS: If she dies, we leave for the desert before the day is over. The Kalgoorlie Express leaves at ten in the evening. PATRICIANELLO rushes over to the MOTHER.

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MOTHER: The trunk of an elephant is eating my brain out. A hooded figure is looking at me sideways. I can’t get a glimpse of its face. Through the door at the left, from the adjoining room, a FIGURE in a brown coat with a hood over its head enters and stops in the center of the room. It keeps its head lowered so that its face is invisible until further notice. PATRICIANELLO: Mother! Don’t leave me. I’ll take all the blame on myself. I’ll be a good boy and do my homework. I don’t want to love anyone but you. MOTHER: Love Mirabella. She’ll take my place for you–she’ll take the place of all other women. Only hold her tight. FIGURE: (In a voice like a scream heard from a great distance) I am Kala-Azar. (He sits down in a chair in the center of the room.) KING: Welcome, envoy of the Golden Frog. He and the FIGURE shake hands. MIKULINI gives RIVERS his shot. MOTHER: This is the end. I don’t have a brain anymore. The Golden Frog has eaten out my last thought through the back of my neck. I’m dying. MIKULINI: Forgive me, Leocadia; I don’t have time to say good-bye to you. But I think we’ve said all there is to say. MOTHER: I don’t exist! I don’t exist. Where am I? She meows like a cat a few times and dies. MIKULINI gives PARVIS his shot. PATRICIANELLO: (On his knees by the bed) Mama! Mama! Don’t leave me! (Jumps up.) Listen, all of you, I don’t know what’s happened. It surpasses my powers of comprehension. And what if I don’t ever understand it? What’ll happen then? PARVIS: You’re not at all obliged to understand it. Look at Mirabella instead and respect the wishes of your late mother who told you to love her. PATRICIANELLO: Love this, love that! I don’t know what it means. RIVERS: Mr. Patricianello! We’ll both love her. Is it a deal? PATRICIANELLO: All right, all right. Do whatever you want, all of you. Certainly, Mr. Rivers. I agree. We go on living without realizing the ultimate monstrousness of Existence and see it only in wretched little plays at the theatre. PARVIS: You know, Patricianello, you’re developing at such a fast clip that I simply can’t keep up with you. Right, Mirabella? You’ll get real satisfaction out of him.


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MIRABELLA: He’s marvelous, the dear little thing. (Goes to PATRICIANELLO downstage) Well, how about it? Will you be able to love me? MIKULINI gives MIRABELLA her shot. PATRICIANELLO: I think so, as long as Mr. Rivers helps me. RIVERS: But with the greatest pleasure, young man. We’ll create a totally new situation. In the desert where I come from everything is permitted. Life there is quite mad. Sometimes there’s no rain for ten months. We drink ourselves blind. And the things we do with women there! It simply defies description. We turn them into impossible monsters, triple, quadruple, or some other multiple. Our red desert is a marvelous thing–and the gold flows in torrents … MIRABELLA: Listen, Jack, we’re going to pay you a visit there today. Go quickly and reserve berths for us all. RIVERS: (Pointing to the FIGURE) And what will we do with that? Shall we take him with us too? MIRABELLA: (After getting her shot) We’ll check him through in the baggage car. They won’t let him on the coach. Go now, Jack. She pushes him gently towards the door. RIVERS leaves. FIGURE: (In the same voice until further notice) I’ll pack myself into my trunk. I’ll be ready in half an hour. I’ve always dreamed of the red desert and the sinister salt lakes. (He gets up and goes out left.) PATRICIANELLO: I feel as though some gigantic scales have fallen from my inner eye. A simply immeasurable horizon is opening up before me. PARVIS: A declaration of love is about to begin. Now, I’m always amazed that men have enough energy to start that whole business up over and over again. MIRABELLA: Stop bothering him. Let him have his say. MIKULINI sits where the FIGURE had been sitting and is lost in thought. PATRICIANELLO: Wait a minute. I think I’ve just invented something totally new. I’m imagining a monstrous end of the world, in which God Himself has been swallowed up by infinity. And all you can see are His little black horns receding in the distance. I see His throne where no one sits anymore, and you, Mirabella, are crawling up that throne like a spider along a thread, and someone, beyond infinity and God, is kissing you on your lips that no longer exist. That someone is

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me. I knew what was going to happen and worked it all out a long time ago, centuries ago. I don’t know how I go on existing; for a long time now no individualized beings have come into this special world of mine. You are my other, real mother and in you I’m born a second time for a murky, double life where there won’t be any more shadows. For the first time now I’m aware that I have a body … MIRABELLA: Aren’t you finished yet? You could say all that in three words, “I love you.” They all tell me the same thing. But up till now I’ve been something of a Diana. Jack Rivers was the first man I ever kissed. PATRICIANELLO: What you’re saying doesn’t hurt me. That’s only the outer layer of your personality talking. My love will conquer all that. MIRABELLA: You’d better just grab me by the scruff of the neck. Otherwise I might slip away from you with all my layers, inner and outer. PARVIS: That’s right, Patricianello, you must learn to hold onto her with a vice-like grip. PATRICIANELLO: (Whining) I’d rather have someone hold onto me like that. MIRABELLA: Such a cute little boy and such a nitwit. What a pity! PARVIS: A damned mama’s boy. PATRICIANELLO: (Throwing himself at him) You vampire bull! You don’t know the first thing about a son’s love for his mother! One more word and I’ll beat you to a pulp! You don’t know that in her (Points to the MOTHER’s corpse) I loved that other mother of my dream. And it shut out everything else for me. How could anyone else really exist for me? PARVIS: Maybe you’re right. PATRICIANELLO: (Angrily) And besides, today’s the first time I’ve ever seen a white woman. Except for my mother I didn’t know anyone on this accursed island. We landed an hour ago, and right away they expect me to be some sort of Don Juan – just ten minutes after my mother’s died. No, that’s going too far. (Weeps.) PARVIS: (Taking him in his arms) There, there, calm down. Everything can still be straightened out. You can’t stay here. You’ve been through too much already. I’m a bit violent, but believe me, I love you like a son. KING: (Who until now has remained stage right) That’s right, Patricianello, don’t let yourself get swept away by the acceleration my partner in your upbringing wants to force on you. The Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa won’t tolerate such vulgar haste from her worshipers. PARVIS: (To MIRABELLA, who stands looking on, lost in thought) Come on, Mirabella. Go change your clothes and let us have a look at you from a different angle.


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He picks up the trunk he has brought with him, and both he and MIRABELLA go behind the screen at the right. PATRICIANELLO: They’ll think up some new dirty trick to crush me. I don’t even get a minute’s rest. Oh! How the very fact of existence torments me. KING: Already? You’ve got to develop more savage strength. Gather your strength in, puff yourself up like a frog, grit your teeth and say to yourself, “I can stand anything.” Ready? PATRICIANELLO tries to follow the KING’s example. MIKULINI gets up and comes over to them. MIKULINI: (To the KING) Wait, Aparura. We’ve got a problem here far more important than savage strength. (To PATRICIANELLO.) Listen, my son, I’m old and hard to please. You can call me a depraved person if you want. That’s just the way it is. PATRICIANELLO: What’s all this leading up to? Are you planning something atrociously swinish again, Father? MIKULINI: How can you say that! I know Parvis hates me and now he’s out to crush me completely. He knows I can’t help falling in love with Mirabella – can’t help it – understand? She looks just like your mother as a young girl. And Ludwig is giving her to you out of pure spite. In a moment she’s going to dance, to dance for you. I won’t be able to stand it. Patricianello, give her to me. I implore you by the memory of your dead mother. You can console yourself with someone else. I can’t – this is my last chance to enjoy life. PATRICIANELLO: You implore me by the memory of my dead mother, even though you’re the one who killed her with your accursed experiments. I know the whole story. MIKULINI: How? But after all, what does it matter? I sacrificed myself for all of us, for all humanity. Kala-Azar no longer exists, but the price was her life. I had to experiment on a white person. Who could I use, if not her? I had to have a drop of white lymph, infected by the earlier unsuccessful serum, in order to create this new one that works infallibly. PATRICIANELLO: Poor Mama. Oh, my God! What a brutal monster this father of mine is! MIKULINI: I beg you! It was also because I’d been suffering so much with her that I killed her. I kept trying to relive our former love, to reassemble the pieces of my broken life, and I couldn’t. I ended up hating her for being too old. Forgive me, and give me Mirabella!

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PATRICIANELLO: (Listens, his hands hanging limply. Then he clenches his fists and screams) No, no, no! I have a right to her too. She’s the only one who can take my mother’s place for me. What am I saying? Take my mother’s place? Take both my mothers’ places, this one (Points to the MOTHER’s corpse.) and that other one in my dream. (He looks as though he’s being definitively transformed from a child into an ordinary hairy male.) KING: (To PATRICIANELLO) It’s the last beautiful moment in your life, my pupil. A hideous hairy male has just strangled your delicate little child’s soul. MIKULINI: The lucky idiot! In a couple of totally painless seconds he’s lived through what cost me an entire lifetime in reality, not just a few fantasies in some dream world. Oh–it’s not worth talking to any of you! I wanted to settle it in a friendly fashion. Now–I’m declaring war on you. (He starts to go out, but stops at the sound of PATRICIANELLO’s voice.) PATRICIANELLO: I’m not afraid of you. I’m a completely different person now. You yourself taught me to be strong. But now my strength is evil. That’s your revenge on me for my refusing to hand her over to you. MIKULINI: (Admiringly) I didn’t know you were so intelligent. But the difficulty of the situation only spurs me on. My son, our relationship has come to an end once and for all. (Takes a chair and places it on his right; then pushes the waterproof bags toward the sofa with his foot and sits down in the chair. He yells in the direction of the screen.) Hey! Hurry up in there!! PARVIS: (From behind the screen) Just a second, Uncle. For all of us here a test of strength is about to begin. PATRICIANELLO: Tell me, Aparura, how is it I’m so bright about philosophy, but in real life the slightest thing is an unfathomable mystery for me? Why isn’t it possible to figure out why everything is the way it is, and not some other way? KING: Even my Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa can’t figure that out. She is what she is, and not something else; she is golden, and not green. Find joy in that. They don’t have any sense of the mystery, and they commit acts of madness so as to recapture that sense. Only you and I have it. Find joy, Patricianello, while you still can. Who knows? Perhaps by tonight you’ll have become nothing but a bored little machine, yawning from satiation like an alligator in the hot river mud. (MIRABELLA comes from behind the screen, wearing a devilishly fancy ball gown in shades of black, violet, and orange; PARVIS follows her, holding a riding whip.) Look over there, that’s life, standing face to face with you for the first time.


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PATRICIANELLO looks around, sees them, and stands dumbfounded. At the same time the FIGURE comes in through the door at left and stands there motionless. FIGURE: I can’t pack myself in. I’ve lost my secret power over things. PARVIS: (To the FIGURE) Better forget that and watch what’s going to happen next. We’ll pack you in ourselves. (To MIRABELLA.) All right, sister dear, show what you can do! RIVERS: (Runs in from the right) Everything’s ready. The things are already at the station. The berths are reserved! Hurrah! All aboard for Kalgoorlie! Off to the red-and-gold desert! Hurrah! PARVIS: (To RIVERS) Quiet, Gold Mountain! Mirabella’s going to dance. From the room off left a piano is heard. A wild oriental dance. MIRABELLA dances for a moment; they all watch enraptured. FIGURE: Oh, no! I can’t hold back! I’ve got to dance too at least once in my life. He throws himself at MIRABELLA and they begin to dance wildly together, but in such a way that the FIGURE’s face is not visible. The KING goes over to the bed, takes the bedspread hanging at its foot, and covers the dead MOTHER with it. Then he leans against the bed and watches the dance. MIKULINI: (Jumping up from his chair) That’s enough! I can’t stand watching that. (Points to the stage left door) Make them stop playing, Ludwig The music stops and a monstrous OLD HAG in rags appears at the stage left door. MIRABELLA and the FIGURE freeze in a very contorted pose. OLD HAG: (In a hoarse, deep voice) What’s happened? PARVIS: (Angrily) Nothing. Keep playing. What are you stopping for? OLD HAG: That customer there’s yelling for me to stop. PARVIS: What do you care? Just keep playing until I tell you otherwise. FIGURE: (Starting to dance again) Uma hija gamba gaga Manga haja gamba haha! The OLD HAG goes out left. The music begins again. MIRABELLA resumes dancing.

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MIKULINI: I’m lost. I’ve fallen in love for the first time now that it’s too late. PATRICIANELLO: (Comes over to MIKULINI) You’ve got to die, Father, otherwise I won’t be able to start another life. Do you understand, Father? MIKULINI: I want to live. I’m sick and tired of bacteria. I didn’t kill the love of my life for nothing. Get that hooded bastard out of here! PARVIS: (To the FIGURE) Kala-Azar! Get him!! Zoop! The FIGURE, gyrating wildly, grabs MIKULINI and, while dancing with him, strangles him. MIRABELLA stops moving. The sound of the piano gradually diminishes. The FIGURE hurls MIKULINI on the ground stage center and stands there, not moving, with his back to the audience, facing MIRABELLA. PATRICIANELLO remains with his back to the audience the whole time. RIVERS: Hurrah! That’s just the way we do it in Kalgoorlie! Three cheers for life stretched to the breaking point!! PATRICIANELLO: (To the FIGURE) Thank you, my friend. How marvelous. I feel as if I’d committed a crime, yet at the same time I have an absolutely clear conscience. Now I don’t have either a father or a mother, I’m a full-fledged orphan. PARVIS and RIVERS whisper together; RIVERS goes out. MIRABELLA: (Going to PATRICIANELLO) But you still have me. You’re really beautiful. I’m starting to fall in love with you. Kiss me. PATRICIANELLO: You’re the person I saw in my dream. You’re my other mother. I love you and hate you at the same time. I’d like to beat you and torture you. Oh, I don’t know what I’d like to do! The whole world is too small. I’m suffocating! MIRABELLA kisses him. PATRICIANELLO collapses on the ground in a dead faint. She kneels down beside him. During this scene PARVIS runs to the left and drags a large, empty trunk out of the other room. The music stops. PARVIS: (To the FIGURE, pointing to MIKULINI’s corpse) Take him by the legs. (The FIGURE and PARVIS put the corpse behind the screen; to the FIGURE) Climb into the trunk! The FIGURE crawls into the trunk, PARVIS locks it with a key. RIVERS comes in with SIX PORTERS in green aprons.


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RIVERS: Take this young man and that trunk and carry them out the side door to the automobile waiting in the yard! TWO PORTERS fling themselves on PATRICIANELLO, four on the trunk, and carry everything out right. The tipped-over waterproof bags are left behind. The KING goes to MIRABELLA, offers her his arm and escorts her out right. The OLD HAG appears at the left door. MIRABELLA: (At the door) Well, aren’t you coming with us, Ludwig? PARVIS: In a minute, I have to pay the check. (MIRABELLA, RIVERS, and the KING go out. The OLD HAG comes over to PARVIS.) All right, old girl, here’s ten pounds for you, fifteen bob for the rental of the piano, and this is for your niece. (He runs off quickly to the right.) OLD HAG: Hope you break your neck, you teletripe. (Goes to the bed and raises the bedspread. At the sight of the MOTHER’s corpse with its bandaged face she shrieks in terror and collapses on the ground.) Oh! Oh! Oooh!

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ACT III The desert in the vicinity of Kalgoorlie. A brick-red plain extending to the horizon. Something like a traversable road cuts diagonally across the ground. To the left, the salt lakes sparkle in the moonlight. To the right, the glow of a far-off city is seen. In the center of the crossroads, a sign with the number eight at the top. On the right arrow of the signpost is written “KALGOORLIE;” on the left, “DESERT.” The post faces the audience directly; to the left of it (as is usual in totally wild places in Australia) is an open telephone booth. The moon, quite high in the sky, lights the stage. Enter PATRICIANELLO from the left, wearing a long gray overcoat. He has a knapsack on his back and a tropical khaki-colored pith helmet on his head. He also wears khaki underneath. PATRICIANELLO: To wait or not to wait? Should I say to hell with it all and start a normal life as a petty functionary in the Boulder Mine Company or some other mediocrity farm? Who am I? An ordinary little abortion that those two lunatics didn’t succeed in creating, or someone who goes so far beyond them that he’s virtually nothing himself? The banality of the problem terrifies me. (Puts his knapsack on the ground) Mama and Mikulini! What ghastly bad luck to have such a mother and father! Compared to something, I’m nothing. But obviously I’m someone. But who? Oh, my God, my God! I call You to witness, You, Personification of the Mystery of Existence! Either there are societies of finite beings, or there’s one Being infinite and without limits – and if that’s the case, it’s not worthwhile being anything – not even nothing. RIVERS: (Enters from the right, dressed the same as PATRICIANELLO) Just kill yourself, that’s the best you can do. They’re still not here yet? PATRICIANELLO: Not so far. RIVERS: It’s late already. In an hour the police may be here. I’ve got everything with me, all the surplus gold converted into checks payable at Port Darwin up to September thirtieth. If we can just manage to get across the desert – everything will be all right. The telephone cables have probably been torn out by the savages. It’ll take three weeks to get all the way around by boat. But we’ve got to leave as soon as possible. They might catch us here. PATRICIANELLO: And am I mixed up in this nasty, absolutely humdrum business too? RIVERS: Yes, you are – very much so, in fact.


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PATRICIANELLO: Hm. How do you figure that? RIVERS: I forged your Mother’s and Professor Mikulini’s signatures. Dead people’s signatures! Ha! Ha! And I’ll even admit something else – yours too, Mr. Patricianello. PATRICIANELLO: Now I understand your going into a – how shall I put it? – partnership with me in love for Mirabella Parvis. You’re an ordinary, everyday sort of scoundrel, not a metaphysical one at all. I can be the partner of any scoundrel, but I won’t be one myself, Mr. Rivers. As for significant matters, everything’s over between us. RIVERS: All right, fine. We’ll settle our accounts at Port Darwin, Mr. Clay. PATRICIANELLO: Don’t call me by that name. From now on I’m going to be myself. My name is Joseph Mikulini. My papers bear that out. RIVERS: Absolutely, Mr. Mikulini, Junior. So let’s wait patiently. I can’t make my getaway without that infernal cousin of yours, Prince Parvis. He’s the only one who has any power over that little animal, and without her nothing’s any fun for me. Oh, that damned Parvis! What a cold, revolting scum! PATRICIANELLO: Ludwig? He’s the best fellow in the world. He murdered my father for me the way you’d kill a fly. RIVERS: Tell me, why did Parvis hate him so. PATRICIANELLO: Mikulini killed his father, trying out one of those antitoxins of his, and he ruined Parvis, in purely financial terms. And then too, Parvis is his son, just the way I am. Do you understand? My Mother and Ludwig’s Mother were both in love with the Professor and both of them were his mistresses. Ludwig knows all about it and can’t forgive the Professor for making him only a Mikulini and not a Prince Parvis. Common ordinary snobbery. But then, snobbery’s one of the most tremendous forces in the world, isn’t it, Mr. Rivers? RIVERS: Oh, yes, sir. I’d pay a million pounds this minute to be an ordinary English baronet or even a European baron, instead of an Australian gold king. But is that young lady the Professor’s daughter too? PATRICIANELLO: Don’t worry, Rivers. The young lady’s an ordinary authentic European princess. We’re both in love with her – aren’t we? But I have an infernal kind of premonition that our dispute will be settled by some third party, and he won’t be European in the least. Admit it, Rivers, if she weren’t a princess, you wouldn’t have fallen so madly in love with her. RIVERS wants to say something. Enter from the right the hooded FIGURE.

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FIGURE: They’re still not here yet. Every minute is precious. PATRICIANELLO: Sit down over there, under the signpost, and don’t bother us. The FIGURE sits down under the signpost. RIVERS: All right then, Mr. Mikulini – between us it’s a battle for life or death. But it will be decided only at Port Darwin after we’ve gone aboard the Dutch liner. A moral battle, you understand – not with revolvers or check books. That’s too banal. First we’ll settle our accounts at the Commercial Bank; and then strength of mind, nothing but strength of mind. (He holds out his hand to PATRICIANELLO.) PATRICIANELLO: On one condition. RIVERS: What’s that? PATRICIANELLO: If Mirabella calls on spirits to help her, you won’t try to put any pressure on them, Rivers. Because if you do, I refuse to have anything more to do with you and I go straight to the police in Kalgoorlie. That’s not blackmail – it’s an absolutely essential condition. RIVERS: Agreed, but I’ve got to admit you’re a lot shrewder than I thought. They shake hands. From the right enter MIRABELLA and PARVIS, wearing gray overcoats and khaki helmets. MIRABELLA: At last I’ve found you, my dears. Ludwig and I were both so worried about you. PARVIS: In point of fact, I wasn’t. I’ll find my way out of any situation. That’s no exaggeration, and yet I assure you that my strength is only a sham. I don’t believe in any strength, all strength is relative and really depends on some trick. PATRICIANELLO: No one has any doubts about that, Ludwig, old boy. I’ve seen through your trick; it’s hatred, artificially whipped-up. I’ve started hating and I’m as strong as you are. PARVIS: And just who have you come to hate so, my dear little brother? PATRICIANELLO: Myself and her (Points to MIRABELLA.) But mostly myself. And that’s more than enough. MIRABELLA: How prettily he chirps, the little chickadee. Don’t you think so, Ludwig? PARVIS: I’m afraid he’s right. Self-hatred generates far greater strength than ordinary egotism does. This greenhorn has invented something new and if …


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TWO WORKERS carry in the trunk. They place it stage center and go out. RIVERS: Is that our luggage? But where’s the rest? Where are the horses, the asses and the mules? And most important of all, where’s the car? PARVIS: The first ass, Jack, is you. To let yourself get caught by a simpleminded trick like this. There’s nothing here. Did you really think I’d give Mirabella to a healthy gold-gathering bull like you? She’s the only woman I love with an ideal love, and I won’t give her to anyone except my brother, the naive Patricianello. We’re both sons of the great Mikulini. Now isn’t that the height of distinction? All the checks become my property. I have a passport issued in your Christian name, Jack, and even in your surname. I am Rivers. He shoots RIVERS, who crashes to the ground without a groan. MIRABELLA: A good thing you killed that stupid businessman. Now I’m yours, Patricianello. PATRICIANELLO: But am I yours? That is the question. The world’s coming to an end, but I go on existing. I’ve lost my sense of the strangeness of existence, that’s what worries me. PARVIS: And your sense of physical pain, and your sense of the most horrible of all horrors that can happen? Lost your sense of all that too? PATRICIANELLO: What do you mean by that? Talk simply, don’t get all involved in complicated symbols. I’ve got a feeling you know something monstrous. PARVIS: Yes, your Mother and Mikulini are alive. I saw them in town half an hour ago. They were racing down George Street in a car at breakneck speed, and, unless I’m mistaken, they’ll be here any moment. Aparura was with them. And our car is impossibly late. We should have left twenty minutes ago. PATRICIANELLO: Ten Mothers, a hundred Mikulinis can come here. I won’t knuckle under to them. PARVIS: Easier said than done. Remember, there’s no telling who the characters I saw in town actually are. PATRICIANELLO: That’s true. They could be some kind of hideous phantoms. It makes my flesh creep. PARVIS: Humble yourself before yourself, my brother. Mirabella will be yours, if you know how to win her. But remember, I have as much right to her as you do. Kinship doesn’t mean a thing here. PATRICIANELLO: But I had the impression that I loved her. PARVIS: How do you know I don’t love her too? I wanted to see how far I could go and I overreached myself. I tossed off one too many port and ginger at the Boulder Mine director’s house, and my head’s

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starting to spin. Patricianello, save me from myself. (He sits down on the ground.) PATRICIANELLO: Ha! – that’s a good one! But who’s going to save me from myself? MIRABELLA: I’m yours, Patricianello. You’re both disgusting sex fiends. But I like being with you when you spout all that nonsense to kill time. PATRICIANELLO: It bores me already, even though I don’t know what you’re actually talking about. “I’m yours, I’m yours,” you keep repeating like a windup toy. But what does that mean? (In a different tone) Oh! I’m starting to get so horribly afraid! Wait, let’s talk about something else. Why isn’t the King here? (To MIRABELLA) How are you mine? Like a talisman, or a gas mask, or like a bullet-proof vest, or a kitten with a pink ribbon? I don’t have the slightest idea what it means – that you’re mine. You can’t even protect me from myself. Let alone phantoms! MIRABELLA: See, Ludwig! He’s utterly devoid of all manly feelings. He’s nothing but an automaton, and a badly constructed cowardly one at that. He’s backing down at the last minute. PARVIS: All Mikulini’s automatons are that way. Actually I have a greater right to you, sister dear, than that booby. Patricianello has all the rights. I don’t have any, even though in point of fact I have them all. My situation is clearer – I’m not even your cousin. What an abysmal filthy swindle the whole so-called social structure is! MIRABELLA: What do you mean by that? PARVIS: That I’ve loved you like a madman for several hours already. Now I understand why women never existed for me. You’re the only one I ever loved, and I have to part from you. He lies down, his face to the ground. From the right the GOVERNOR of New Guinea, Sir Robert Clay, enters and, unnoticed by the three of them, goes to the FIGURE and sits beside him under the signpost. They whisper between themselves. The GOVERNOR is wearing a tail coat, a fur coat flung over his shoulders, a top hat on his head. MIRABELLA: Oh, what ridiculous, long-winded drivel! I’m a completely normal young girl. Don’t put me into a rage, or I’ll shoot you both down like dogs. They’ve pulled all the old theatre props out of the closet and they’re having fun playing with them. This character is the same person’s son as that character, she’s not his sister, but then he’s in love with her and so on and so forth, etcetera. Can’t you understand that for someone who’s watching your game from


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the outside, it can all really be quite tragic? Silly children, that’s all you are. PARVIS: She dares talk about tragedy – a girl who doesn’t love anyone! Maybe you love that idiot who’s taken it into his head that he’s the incarnation of Kala-Azar? (He starts to search RIVERS’s corpse.) PATRICIANELLO: Yes, Mirabella, he’s right. Today for the first time I’ve really begun to understand Ludwig and his life. You know, at the Beggars Club, the poshest club in Sydney, he was known for shooting on the spot anyone who uttered the word “artist” in his presence. In the depths of my soul I’m an artist, but I’ll never really be one. He’s right, to be an artist is the worst swinishness that can exist. PARVIS: (Getting up from RIVERS’s corpse) You know, children, there are simply unbelievable riches here. We could go to some island and start a new life. Only we can’t go back. We’ve got to get all the way to Port Darwin through the desert. That imbecile has cut off all lines of retreat. We have till September thirtieth. Or else it’s prison, etcetera, etcetera. MIRABELLA: Oh! Why didn’t you stop and think a little before you got me mixed up in all this awful business? At this moment I’d like to be the girl tending the sheep on your prairies in Queensland, Ludwig. A peaceful, quiet life on the farm, in a little corrugated iron house. There’s nothing else I want. PARVIS: Yes. Just when everything’s all set, an adventure the likes of which the world has never seen; when we can be only the devil knows what in the Dutch colonies, that’s when she backs out and wants to be a simple little girl. Really, the world’s too small for you, Mirabella. MIRABELLA: Oh, if you knew how sad I am. I feel so small and miserable, and there’s nothing I want anymore. PARVIS: (Accidentally looks around upstage and catches sight of the GOVERNOR) Good heavens – no, purgatories! The Governor’s ghost! (PATRICIANELLO and MIRABELLA jump up and stare for a moment in terror.) Now even I’m starting to be really afraid. FIGURE: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! GOVERNOR: (To the FIGURE, in a flat, indifferent voice) Don’t laugh, Murphy. (To the others) I’m no ghost. I was at a first-rate dinner with some friends of mine in Kalgoorlie. But I’m still a bit reduced after the last dose of Professor Mikulini’s serum. You didn’t get my telegram in Sydney? PARVIS: No, Uncle. But how did you find out where we were? Who told you? GOVERNOR: Aparura. I had dinner with him. He looks wonderful in a tail coat. PARVIS: Did he tell you that they’re alive.

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GOVERNOR: (Indifferently) Who? PARVIS: Auntie and Mikulini. I mean, he was riding in the car with them half an hour ago. GOVERNOR: (Continues saying everything completely indifferently) No. He didn’t say anything to me about it. I saw him an hour ago. He was going off to the club to gamble. And besides, I was at their graves in Sydney. They’re certainly dead. PARVIS: (Clutching his head) My head is spinning. I just saw them in town. GOVERNOR: Nonsense. Hallucinations. Have some gin cordial. Do you a world of good. (Pulls a flask out of his back pocket and gives it to PARVIS, who drinks automatically; to PATRICIANELLO) Do you have the bug, Joe? Aparura was telling me you use it as a talisman. PATRICIANELLO: Here it is, Father (Pulls a little box out of his waistcoat pocket and gives it to the GOVERNOR.) That is … actually … you’re not my father, Father. Even I’m not sure. Professor Mikulini claims that he’s … GOVERNOR: Nonsense. I’m your father. (Looks at the box.) Scarabella Tripunctata. Jolly good. Who’s that young lady? (He points to MIRABELLA.) PARVIS: That’s my sister … we’re just about to set off for the desert. She’s engaged to be married to … GOVERNOR: Stop! I don’t care anything about that, as long as I have my bug. And what are you doing here, Joe? PATRICIANELLO: (Embarrassed) Me? Nothing, Father … I’m seeing them off … that is … I mean … (Suddenly in another tone of voice) After all, what does it matter, I’ll tell you everything. I’m going to the desert with them. GOVERNOR: Jolly good. Go. Independence above all. Your Mother’s no longer alive, God be praised. I feel wonderful without that old witch. You too, Joe? Right? PATRICIANELLO: Yes … Even though … GOVERNOR: Nonsense. I’m going to rest a bit and then I’m going back to town. I’m not asking about anything. Independence. When you manage to get out of this one, you’ll put in an appearance at Port Moresby. Understand? PATRICIANELLO: All right, Father. The GOVERNOR goes upstage and sits down in the telephone booth. MIRABELLA: Now there’s a terrific joke. I had a laugh or two out of that mannequin.


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PATRICIANELLO: Everything’s fine. Only our automobile’s late. Our driver couldn’t have been picked up somewhere by the police, could he? PARVIS: Maybe. I don’t care anymore. I’m not budging from here. I can die here like a dog, but I won’t go anywhere else. It’s all over. (He sits on the ground.) MIRABELLA: (Sitting next to him) That Rivers was an idiot. He promised unheard-of wonders. Life is always just as hideous and atrocious wherever you are. Red desert or flowering creepers or luxury hotel, the setting doesn’t change anything. I’ll die here like a dog too, with Ludwig. He’s right. PATRICIANELLO: (Sitting beside them) You still don’t understand the ultimate atrocity. I’d already worked it all out in New Guinea. The very fact of existence is in itself something hideous. PARVIS: That’s no revelation. Being aware of it is just as tiresome. I was a fakir in Bombay for a year and a half. MIRABELLA: It’s always that way with that Ludwig. Whatever you say, he’ll tell you, “Yes, I know all about that, I’ve even done it.” PARVIS: Because as a matter of fact that’s the way it really is, Mirabella. What haven’t I done! Everything and nothing. This celebrated earth of ours is an old squeezed-out lemon. I’d rather be a young lizard on Venus right now. I assure you, I’m quite serious. PATRICIANELLO: Then I prefer to die like a dog too – sixteen years of life are enough. What could I be? At most a Ludwig Parvis. PARVIS: You’re insulting me. I’m not such a nobody. PATRICIANELLO: No, but you give the promise of being more than you really are. Maybe you’re a would-be artist who didn’t make it? PARVIS: Shut up! PATRICIANELLO: Anyhow I’m not going to start writing, painting, or composing now. In our times those games are too easy. Bored automatons have to be entertained. But I won’t play the fool for them. PARVIS: Stop. Let’s die like dogs quite simply without analyzing things further. All three lie down on the ground. Pause. PATRICIANELLO: Just let someone try and say that what we’re experiencing now isn’t tragic. The only things those monkeys know are the trashy little dramas they see in their own boring lives and in their wretched theatres. Someone might claim there’s not enough action in what we’re doing – well, all right, by all means. But just go ahead and try adding more. It will all blow up and that’s the end.

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PARVIS: Someone might say to us, “Start doing something useful.” To create a healthy bull out of the ruins of a total wet noodle. No, I’ve had enough of that. I’m through breeding bull-rams in Queensland forever. FIGURE: (The same voice as in Act Two) I think I hear the sound of a motor. PARVIS: It can’t be! So I won’t die here like a dog after all? A few more insignificant events. Why should that matter to me? (Listens intently.) MIRABELLA: Keep lying there, Patricianello. I love you and Ludwig. You’re brothers, but not of flesh and blood. You are creators of a new order of barren, metaphysical self-torturers who stick their bare souls out into the absolute Nothingness of Existence. A glorious life opened up before our eyes. The Dutch colonies aren’t anything like the English colonies. There, everything’s possible. But we’ve gone beyond that hypothetical possibility. This is the end. There’s nothing left. Let’s keep calm – that’s our sole task. PATRICIANELLO: But Mirabella, you don’t understand – this is no ordinary renunciation, no ordinary suicide. This is something else, it’s the absurdity of life in and of itself. That’s something you won’t see on the stage of any theatre. MIRABELLA: What you all lack – all of your without exception – is courage. I’m not talking about showing off over just anything in front of anyone else. I mean the courage to accept and experience oneself completely. No matter where: prison for life, a monastery, a farm in the bush, or a high position in some hideous big city … PATRICIANELLO: (Getting up) I’m still a child, but I understand a great deal. That’s all fine tonight. But tomorrow? When the merciless desert sun climbs into boundless space, and this burnt-out brick is all around us – they’ll be nothing, only the blue of the sky and the salt lakes, and the red of the earth, desiccated and laden with gold. And the infernal everyday day in the desert will begin. And the sun will burn so hot that our tongues will turn black and parched and we’ll howl for a single drop of water. And there, three miles away, the town, with its hotels, bars, and rows of houses, theatres, dance halls, young girls and their boy friends, the boredom of an ordinary everyday day – will we be able to endure it then? Will we be able to stand the fact that life’s worth no more than a glass of iced lemonade? I know, I know: Death. But maybe it’d be better right away, what do you say? Without all this comedy. I’ve got some sodium cyanide – I stole it when we visited Boulder Mine. Want to? PARVIS: Quiet, you idiot! A car’s heading straight for us.


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PATRICIANELLO: Oh, he’s got that damned instinct for life, life at any cost. Let’s trust to chance this once. If that’s our car, we start a new life; if not, we end it all right here on the spot MIRABELLA: In this new life of ours in the desert, I dare say you’ll drink up all my blood once the water runs out, Patricianello. PARVIS: Quiet! That’s enough of that foolishness. They’ve got nerve to start flirting at a time like this. When our whole lives are at stake. Ultimately life doesn’t matter, but there it is, something’s got to be done with it. It keeps forcing itself upon us whether we want it or not. MIRABELLA: Oh, this rotten continental climate. I’m cold, Patricianello, put the plaid blanket around my shoulders. (PATRICIANELLO wraps the blanket around her and sits down beside her.) Ludwig’s very vulgar with his disgusting attachment to life. PARVIS: We’ll see what happens. Death isn’t as difficult as you might think. Especially if it’s death for no apparent reason. FIGURE: The car’s coming now. Stop all that ridiculous talk. Everything will be cleared up by itself. PARVIS: Ha! Ha! The problem is just dealing with the situation we’re in – not worrying about what will happen later on. PATRICIANELLO: That’s no concern of ours. It seems we’ve mastered the problem of Existence in its totality, without even meaning to. MIRABELLA: That’s right, Patricianello, I love you. What I’m saying now is very banal, but a moment like this justifies my saying it. Kiss me. PATRICIANELLO kisses MIRABELLA. From the right the car drives onto the stage; only its front part is seen. MIKULINI and the MOTHER, in fur coats, get out of the car. The KING, also in a fur coat, crawls out after them. The OLD HAG from Act Two sits behind the wheel as the chauffeur. MIKULINI: (Helping the MOTHER out of the car) At last we’ve found you, my dear little children. (Notices RIVERS’s corpse.) What’s this? Jack’s been killed? PARVIS: That’s right, Father. I killed him. MIKULINI: And a good thing you did, my son. He was an ordinary highway robber in a business suit. (To the MOTHER) Well, how are you feeling, old girl? MOTHER: Marvelous. You’re the greatest bacteriologist in the world. Dr. Minelsin is a complete cipher compared to you. I feel thirty years younger. PATRICIANELLO: Mother, Mother! It’s me!

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MOTHER: Well, what of it? Stay there on the ground with your Mirabella. Don’t let me bother you. PATRICIANELLO: Oh, that’s how it is, is it? So I’m to assume that it never took place? MOTHER: What? PATRICIANELLO: Your death, and everything that happened in New Guinea. MOTHER: But of course. I don’t exist for you anymore. What more can a Mother do for her son than to stop existing for him as a Mother? MIRABELLA: (Jumping up) Get that old she-wolf out of here. She’s pretending! My aunt – as if I cared. She lets him love me, because she’s jealous. That’s what’s known as hyperjealousy. Only Mothers are capable of that! Get her out of here. She’s taking him away from me. She knows that if she allows him everything, he won’t want anything. Oh! What treachery. What female swinishness. And so sublimated, so disguised – it’s disgusting! PATRICIANELLO: Don’t get so excited. I have a say in all this too. MIRABELLA: You don’t have any say. You’re just an ordinary mama’s boy. You don’t understand anything. You’ll do whatever you’re told. PATRICIANELLO: That’s what you think. My Mother stopped existing for me a long time ago. Ever since I saw you in my dream, back in New Guinea. MIRABELLA: You’re lying, you’re lying because your Mother’s here. PATRICIANELLO: That is … actually … I’d like to say something, but I don’t know what to say. MIKULINI tinkers with something in the motor. MOTHER: (Leaning on the KING) But go on, dear boy. I’ve already told you I won’t stop you. MIRABELLA: That’s a lie. The most lying women in the world are Mothers and all those sickening Motherly sweethearts. I want to be taken by force. I want to be raped by soldiers invading a conquered city. Oh! There aren’t any brutes left in the world. Oh, what a miserable fate! (She falls to the ground.) PATRICIANELLO: (Irresolutely) That’s a ridiculous way of posing the problem – as far as I’m concerned, of course. (To PARVIS, who is helping MIKULINI repair the car) Perhaps you could take my place, Ludwig? PARVIS: (Without getting up) Where? PATRICIANELLO: In all this love business. I see I’m not capable of anything significant.


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PARVIS: Forget it. We’ve got more important things to do here. The motor’s broken down, and he takes up my time with such ridiculous nonsense. (Goes to work on the motor again.) MIRABELLA: Oh! These Mothers, these Mothers. I’d like to have a son, just so I could make his life miserable the way you do, Aunt. Aunt! What an atrocious thing the family is! Who ever invented such a swinish mess? FIGURE: (Going to her) The family is the nucleus of society. KING: If it weren’t for our totems and my Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa, your so-called civilization wouldn’t even exist. MIKULINI: (Turning away from the motor) Let’s not get involved in insignificant arguments. You, hooded comedian, and you, King, you’re both right. Both these elements have gone into the making of our “so-called civilization,” as Aparura rightly called it. Family or no family, the motor’s fixed. We can do whatever we want. The desert or the city – the waterless, demonic city. Today I don’t want to be a father, but a dear old uncle who can at least provide a little pleasure for his favorite nephews. My sons! Consider yourself my nephews. Diseases don’t exist. We’ve accomplished great things. We can take a little rest. A short ride through the desert will do us lots of good. Who knows, perhaps we won’t ever come back? To tell the truth, that would do us the most good of all, eh? PATRICIANELLO: But what am I to do with that one? (Points to MIRABELLA) To love her or not to love her? That is the question. PARVIS: Brother dear, put that out of your head. Once you hesitate about any question that has to do with real life, it proves you should never try to settle it. It proves that the game’s not worth the killing of a single bug. PATRICIANELLO: Don’t talk about bugs! My poor adoptive father almost lost his life for a bug, didn’t he? Scarabella Tripunctata! Scarabella – Mirabella. Oh! That was all so long ago! I was still a child. Look, the poor Governor’s sitting over there. (Points to the telephone booth.) He’s dozed off and no one’s even noticed him. (They all turn toward the telephone booth.) You’ve taken everything away from me. The strangeness of life exists only in the realm of ideas. (Points to MIRABELLA) She is for me what that bug of his was for the Governor. Exhibit number one in a collection which I don’t even have. At least the Governor had his collection – I don’t even have that. I’m ready to lose my life for her at any moment.

He pulls out a revolver and tries to blow his brains out. MIKULINI grabs his hand.

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MIKULINI: Blockhead! Drop that, you damn fool! He snatches the revolver and throws it far away. All the others watch. MOTHER: Patricianello, stop playing with those thingamajigs once and for all. Your thingamajigs are still the same, they’ve only changed their outer shape. It’s the same insatiability that made you want to glue together all the cardboard cubes in the world. You ought to be ashamed; life, real life, is still ahead of you. You’ve got to be somebody sooner or later. PATRICIANELLO: And they dare stop me from killing myself? They dare tell me to be somebody? When they’re just ghosts. The vile ghosts of loathsome people! Ludwig, it’s simply outrageous that monsters like that can dispose of the life of a man like me … Mirabella, did you hear what I said? MIRABELLA: I heard you and I’m not in the least interested. Life is over for me. Ghosts or no ghosts, the Mothers are winning. But they’re only winning against automated mama’s boys. PATRICIANELLO struggles with himself. KING: Mama’s boy automatons are the type of the future. Except that the whole of society will be their Mother … and their upbringing will be thoroughly mechanized … PATRICIANELLO: (Interrupts him) Damn it, they’re not winning. Even though according to the general theory of ghosts, ghosts are possible in principle, and this theory agrees with transcendental monadology and formal ontology, no mother, no mother of mine will ever defeat me and that’s final. MIRABELLA: (Jumping up) Oh! Does that mean that I can believe again in the possibility of living? Everything depends on such ridiculous things sometimes! FIGURE: (Pushing her back down on the ground) Right now don’t believe in anything, Mirabella. In a moment, in less than a moment, you’ll have a chance to see it all clearly for yourself. I only hope I can last till that final moment. Overpowered, MIRABELLA sits down. MIKULINI: (Suddenly waking from a momentary trance) And now that’s enough! Dammit, I’ve had enough of these paltry feelings, these dead, stinking problems, these lame ideologies – of all this philosophy of yours. We bacteriologists regard all living things as a culture of


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bacteria. Some bacteria win out, others die off – that’s an apparently banal fact, but on the whole the Truth is banal. I don’t know how to lie and I’m not going to start learning now. (To PARVIS) You, my dear son, must die – that’s how it has to be. PARVIS: I’m ready. Only let me give you these papers. They’re the proof of Jack Rivers’s larceny and the checks, which are payable at Port Darwin until September 30. (Gives MIKULINI the papers.) That doesn’t cost me anything. I assure you, death, for me, means absolutely nothing. (To MIKULINI) Where am I to stand? MIKULINI: (Pointing to the signpost) Over there, against the post. At least there you can lean against something. Sorry to have to make you move. I’d shoot you right where you are, but I’m afraid of damaging the car. (To the GOVERNOR) Governor, now just get out of that booth, Excellency, or you might get shot. The GOVERNOR docilely comes out of the booth and joins the group downstage. PARVIS: (Standing before the signpost) Only no symbols. I spit on symbols. My death isn’t symbolic; it’s death itself, how can I put it, death … MIKULINI: (Aiming his revolver at him) Nobody’s interested in hearing your last words. Undoubtedly they’ll be just as uninteresting as the first ones you ever uttered in this world, Ludwig Parvis. Stand still, or I won’t get you in the left eye. PARVIS: Wait, Father! I’d still like to think a little more about that … MIKULINI: (Shoots) Bang! Bang! There, he’s lying on the ground. There, he’s thrashing about in the final death throes. I’ve even resolved the question of whether or not to shoot one’s own son. (MIRABELLA doesn’t bat an eyelash. PATRICIANELLO falls on his knees and prays.) I’ve brought a certain period of my life to a close. MOTHER: Patricianello, try to endure this painful scene as best you can. Just once in his life he had to be revenged in a truly significant way. Actually, it was Ludwig who snatched everything in life away from him except me. I’ll stand by him to the very end to make it up to him, my beloved Mikulini, gentle as a ram. Patricianello, I beg you, try to endure it all till the very end. PATRICIANELLO: (Getting up off his knees) But Mother, won’t you ever stop worrying about me? Nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m like that doll that never tips all the way over, a little pop-up toy. MIKULINI: All right, that’s enough of your jokes. Now you’ll be what I want you to be. You’ll be a cabinet minister yet, President of the Commonwealth of Australia, you’ll be King of Malay, sovereign Rajah

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of the island of Bali, anything and everything. Understand, idiot? My life’s dreams are going to be fulfilled in you. PATRICIANELLO: (Terror-stricken) I don’t want to! I want to die! MOTHER: Don’t be afraid, dear boy. You can’t die. You’ve got to be somebody. PATRICIANELLO: (Desperately) The general theory of ghosts! You terrify me – you don’t even exist. Death doesn’t frighten me. But you do, you hideous ghosts! I love Mirabella because she’s pretty and alive! I want to die for her the way the Governor did for that bug of his! Help! GOVERNOR: (Indifferently, in a matter-of-fact tone) A revolting lunatic. Dawn begins to break. MIKULINI: No, my dear fellow. You’ll go on living, you damned little fool. And you’ll live the way I want you to. I’m a typical specimen of all of humanity. I’m a scoundrel – I know it – but you’ll be an even bigger scoundrel than I am. Get him! My son will be the great representative of mankind. In the eyes of the new supreme God – in the eyes of the crowd!! Hurrah!! He throws himself at Patricianello and grabs him. The MOTHER and the KING help him. They load PATRICIANELLO into the automobile. PATRICIANELLO: I want to die! I don’t want to! Mirabella!! Save me! They gag him and load him in. MIRABELLA: (Suddenly jumps up) But I love him! I won’t give him to you, you cursed torturers of the loutish human race! I won’t give him to you, you hideous she-wolves, you raging beast-mothers! FIGURE: (Holding her back) Take it easy, Mirabella dear. I’m still here. He throws off his brown robe and hood, revealing an incredibly beautiful, elegant young man about town, totally identical to PATRICIANELLO. He wears a tail coat. He and MIRABELLA stand facing each other, neither of them moving or saying a word. MIKULINI: (Sitting in the car) By the way, Your Excellency, how did it actually happen you didn’t die? GOVERNOR: (Indifferently) I survived your serum. I was in a comatose state, but since no one took the trouble to have me buried – you all ran off like a pack of the worst cowards – I came to in a couple of days and took the first steamship to Sydney via Brisbane. Of course the local


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magician helped me recover – he knows more about medicine than you and all your famous disciples. The School of Mikulini! What a fraud! The school of utter dunces. MOTHER: And you’re not at all surprised that we still exist, Robert? GOVERNOR: I was at your graves in Sydney. That’s enough for me. Once you were gone, Leocadia, I started to breathe freely. Now I’m in love with all of Aparura’s abandoned harem. It’s marvelous. And besides, I’ve got my bug and I’m absolutely happy. OLD HAG: (At the steering wheel of the car) Are we off? The GOVERNOR cranks the automobile. The motor starts. MIKULINI: Step on it, old girl, in high gear. Mothers, and even fathers, are always right. We’re going back to Kalgoorlie. Throbbing of the motor. The car backs out offstage right. MIRABELLA: (Staring at the FIGURE) Oh, how pretty you are! GOVERNOR: (Indifferently) That’s Murphy. Prettiest boy in all of Sydney, and of all the club men in the colony the most bored. MIRABELLA: Why were you wearing that frightful hood all this time? GOVERNOR: He wanted to give you a surprise. And who are you, my precious? MIRABELLA: I’m Princess Parvis, Ludwig’s half-sister GOVERNOR: Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Well, that’s just fine. Take care. I’m going back to Kalgoorlie for a little auction bridge. FIGURE: Good-bye, Your Excellency. We’re staying here. (The GOVERNOR goes out right. To MIRABELLA) I’m not Murphy at all. The Governor’s a lunatic, everyone knows that. I am Kala-Azar. MIRABELLA: Will you love me? FIGURE: Of course I will. But I must inform you, I don’t have a cent. If I get thirsty, I’ll drink up all your blood. MIRABELLA: Oh! For me that’ll be real, bestial bliss. The dawn grows brighter and brighter. FIGURE: Shall we go? These women are strange, always wanting to sacrifice themselves for something – no matter what. But we can try it and see what happens. After all, we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose. (They go upstage to the left of the phone booth. From the right enters the GOVERNOR, revolver in hand; he follows them stealthily stalking his prey.

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Suddenly he shoots twice. MIRABELLA falls. The FIGURE turns around.) You’ve shattered my right arm, Your Excellency! GOVERNOR: I wanted to try out this revolver. It’s already been beautifully broken-in. I beg your pardon. It’s just a scratch; they’ll bandage you up in town. And apart from that, I don’t like to see young girls hanging about in suspicious places. (He goes into the booth. The FIGURE remains motionless.) Hello – Eccentric Club. (Pause.) Hello! Sir Robert Clay here. Send my car around to Crossroads Number Eight. (He comes out of the booth.) FIGURE: I’m cold. The GOVERNOR pulls a flask out of his fur coat and pours the contents down the FIGURE’s throat, as the FIGURE tips his head back. GOVERNOR: Gin Cordial. Do you a world of good, Murphy, my boy. 29 III 1921

Appendix

Witkacy’s Journey to the Tropics and Itinerary in Ceylon February to May 1914: Zakopane Witkacy’s fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska commits suicide, plunging Witkacy into a state of suicidal despair. On February 28 Witkacy writes to Malinowski, saying that he would like to see his friend. Malinowski replies immediately, proposing that Witkacy go with him to Australia, where the Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its Congress; he also indicates his readiness to come to Zakopane. Witkacy responds that the prospect of going on the trip together is the only bright spot in his life and urges his friend to come to Zakopane as soon as his lectures end. Much to Witkacy’s disappointment, Malinowski postpones his trip to Zakopane for a few weeks, until the second half of April. Witkacy starts to plan for the trip and writes asking Malinowski to bring him cyanide so that he can always be the master of his fate. Malinowski comes to Poland in the second half of April after spending his vacation finishing his book, Wierzenia pierwotne i formy ustroju spolⲐ ecznego. After going first to Warsaw and Kraków, Malinowski arrives in Zakopane April 30. Sta´s greets him on the platform at the train station. Sta´s’s mother is waiting for them at Nosal, tears in her eyes. The two friends spend the next days together, visiting acquaintances, developing photographs, talking about the past and future. In the late Spring and early Summer of 1914, personal relations between Malinowski and Witkacy were unusually complex. Malinowski was genuinely pleased to have Witkacy as his traveling companion, both for his own sake and also for the sake of his distraught, suicidal friend. And yet he often felt burdened by this friend who seemed morally bankrupt and psychologically crippled for life. Although each was undergoing a severe crisis of his own, Malinowski could function with great efficiency in furthering his ambitious dreams of becoming “the Conrad of anthropology.” Witkacy could not come to terms with his own tragic destructiveness. 105

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Privileged children, coddled “mother’s boys,” secretly convinced of their own worth yet unsure of themselves in an alien world, Malinowski and Witkacy were friends who at this point needed one another. Nurtured on fin-de-siècle Nietzscheanism, they share a common language and mode of perception. They were both given to endless self-analysis and experienced the fatal attractions of the abyss. Self-creation out of the void was a constant imperative. As creative individuals they felt that they must surmount their own nothingness in order to rise above the herd. Even though it appeared that Sta´s was already finished, Malinowski felt an unwavering loyalty to his friend. In Zakopane in May, when the two friends spent much time together, Malinowski never stopped believing in Sta´s’s genius and individuality, but he experienced Witkacy’s downfall as the loss of an ideal. For Malinowski, Sta´s represented both what was best and what was worst about the Polish spirit of “going it alone.” The consequences in Sta´s’s case had been appalling. Malinowski is remarkably honest in describing his contradictory feelings for Witkacy, admitting that admiration for Sta´s’s brilliance sometimes turns to envy. While expressing compassion and the desire to extend a helping hand, Malinowski fears that his friend may already be in the clutches of death. The instinct for self-preservation dictates keeping at a safe distance and even forgetting Sta´s. Malinowski leaves for England on Saturday 9 May, spending a day in Kraków and then returning to London via Leipzig and Hanover. May 24 to June 9: London Witkacy arrives in London on Sunday, May 24 and stays with Malinowski and his mother for eighteen days. A number of financial arrangements remain to be made. The cost of the trip for Malinowski is covered by the British Association, because he is the secretary of the anthropological section. Witkacy must be placed on the list of members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in order to get a reduced fare ticket at 80 pounds one way, second class. Sta´s has for the entire trip only 2,000 rubles, or 200 pounds – a modest sum. Malinowski presents Sta´s to his professor and mentor at the London School of Economics, Charles Seligman, whose help is undoubtedly necessary in solving all the practical problems. The two travellers go shopping, filling the apartment with tropical gear (as well as painting and photographic equipment). Malinowski also introduces Sta´s to the Polish émigré, Józef Retinger, and Witkacy sees Polish friends Jerzy Z˙ulⲐ awski and Ignacy Wasserberg, then in London. (Wasserberg is married to Karolina Oderfeld, sister of Anna, to whom Witkacy was engaged briefly in 1913.) Sta´s is in a terrible psychological state. On the occasion of a quarrel between the two friends, Malinowski admits that Witkacy is partially in the right. In their spare time Malinowski and Witkacy visit museums, develop film, and pay farewell visits. When the the travellers leave London on Tuesday morning, June 9, Edward Westermarck, another of Malinowski’s professors at the London School of Economics, sees them off at the train station where they depart for Folkestone. At the last minute Malinowski is overcome by a feeling of the total senselessness of the trip. Witkacy later will voice the same sensation, further evidence of their close emotional kinship.

Witkacy’s Journey to the Tropics and Itinerary in Ceylon

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June 9 to 11: France The trip was one of several stages and occasional stop-overs. The first leg of the journey takes the travelers from London through Paris to Toulon. The train trip to Folkestone where the ferry leaves for Calais is lugubrious, causing Malinowski to feel that he has been left to his fate with Sta´s. The express train to Paris takes them directly to the Gare du Nord where Jerzy Z˙ulⲐ awski, now in Paris, is waiting to take them by taxi to the Gare de Lyon so that they can check their luggage to be ready for their departure the next day. They take a nearby hotel for the night and then go by Metro to the Z˙ulⲐ awskis for supper. After supper, they take a walk and visit Andrzej Strug and his wife. Finally they walk up the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Seine, over the Pont des Beaux Arts, through the Louvre to the Place du Théâtre, then by-pass the Palais Royal, go along the avenue de l’Opéra towards the boulevards, and return by bus to the Gare de Lyons. On the following day, June 10, when they visit the Louvre to see the Gioconda and the Egyptian antiquities, Sta´s shows signs of anxiety. Before returning to the Gare de Lyon, they do more sightseeing, taking in Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, and the quai with the bouquinists. On the overnight train to Marseilles, they talk a lot and sleep poorly. On the morning of June 11 it is very hot on the Mediterranean in the south of France. They stroll about the back streets of Marseilles before leaving for Toulon where they embark on the SS Orsova of the British Oriental Line from the stifling Quai Cronstadt. The Orsova was a modern two-stacker of 12,000 tons, built in 1909, 536 meters in length, accommodating 400 passengers in first and second class and 700 in third class. Speed was 18 knots. Since the Orsova came from Britain (via Gibraltar), why – we may ask – didn’t Malinowski and Witkacy take the ship from Liverpool with the other conference participants rather than travel to Toulon? The answer appears to be that from Toulon the trip was four days shorter and proportionally cheaper, making it worthwhile to go via Paris by train. The Orsova went on to Australia; Malinowski and Witkacy stay in Ceylon to do sightseeing, not because they had to wait for a ship. Malinowski planned to stopover in Ceylon for two weeks to see the temples and ruins and to test his physical reaction to the tropics; he wished to see how he could withstand the heat. June 11 to 28: Through the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean The Orsova leaves Toulon Bay at night. When Malinowski and Witkacy awake on June 12, the ship arrives near the northern tip of Corsica, then passes by Elba, Montecristo, and Giglio. The Polish travelers do not like the ship or the company. The next day, June 13, the Orsova arrives very early at Naples, allowing Sta´s and Bronio to spend the first half of the day ashore. Malinowski visited Italy ten years earlier and knows Naples and the surrounding countryside. The two friends go to the post office to send letters, then take the tram to Posillipo Capo and a fourwheeled cab to Pozzuoli on the bay of Baiae and on to Solfatara. They ride uphill with a view of Camaldoli and the bay of Campagna. After lunch in Naples, they return to the ship for the afternoon sailing. As they travel through the Bay of Naples, they see Sorrento and Pompei, then the Gulf of Salerno before it disappears in the fog. On the following day, Sunday June 14, they sail along the

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Appendix

Calabrian coast and on to Taranto (a town of Magna Graecia full of antiquities), where they go ashore briefly and wander down the tiny streets. The next two and a half days are spent on the high seas without further stops, with the result that the Orsova arrives in Port Said on the evening of June 16. The travelers go ashore to buy postcards and stamps and wander through the lighted street bazaar and Arab quarter with fruit sellers and street musicians, the novelty of which Bronio and Sta´s experience together. Witkacy writes that the people inspire more confidence than the Italians in Naples. “The worst mob in Egypt has nobility and dignity and the lowest mob inspires confidence.” The Orsova leaves Port Said (the last stop before Colombo) at 2:30 AM on June 17 and, passing slowly through the Suez Canal, arrives at Suez only at 1 PM the following afternoon. On June 18 they leave Suez and on June 19 pass the Sinai Desert. The next three and a half days are spent traversing the Red Sea. Sta´s is gloomy, and the friends talk less than usual. On June 20, Witkacy composes a very pretty melody, giving rise to disquiet on Malinowski’s part, since it reminds him of his own artistic impotence. On June 21 they pass by the volcanic island Zuqar and the mountain Jebel Sabir on the Arabian side. By 10 PM they pass the British fortified island Perim in the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. On June 22 at 6 A. M. they pass by Cape Guardafui and then the island Socotra, going from the Gulf of Aden into the Arabian Sea. After five days and nights on the high seas (during which time Bronio and Sta´s read Lord Jim and The Master of Ballantrae – both by travelers to exotic places), the Orsova has covered the 2,100 miles from Aden to Colombo. The entire trip has taken a total of seventeen days, five days less than it would have from London. June 28-July 11: Ceylon The Orsova arrives in Colombo Harbor at 2:30 A.M. on June 28. In the morning the first view of Ceylon disappoints the Polish travelers; the scenery is not as tropical as they had expected and seems boring rather than strange. They make the journey by tender to the city under a sweltering sun. Malinowski alone goes to see Ronald Ferguson, editor of The Ceylon Observer and son of the late John Ferguson, author of travel and guide books. Ferguson, to whom Malinowski has a letter of recommendation, gives advice on what sights to see. The Polish travelers are thus well-informed tourists able to make efficient use of their limited time. Bronio and Sta´s go sit by the seashore, where they get their first view of tropical flowers, watch the rolling waves, and enter into conversation with a Sinhalese. Then they take rickshaws to Victoria Park, an ornamental recreation ground with gardens, bandstand and promenade, golf links, tennis courts, and galloping course and carriage drive. Along the way they pass by a Muslim funeral. They return on foot to the port along the lake lined with palms and stop at a small Buddhist shrine with garish paintings dating from the nineteenth century. They return to the ship to arrange the removal of their luggage and meet Lewin and Heriteau, members of the excursion. After lunch, they go to the station to get the train to Kandy but arrive too late. They decide to spend the rest of the day sightseeing in Colombo where they must now stay overnight. They take the tram to Cinnamon Gardens, the area south and west of Victoria Park, a


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residential district of crossroads, bungalows and magnificent trees and plants. They get off the tram and walk through the countryside until they reach the golf course and open fields, with views of palm plantations and swamps in the distance. They return along the railway line. They buy bananas, drink lemon squash, and eat supper in a Sinhalese cafe near the port. After a stroll in the Pettah, the native quarter, they spend the night in a cheap Sinhalese hotel. Malinowski sleeps better than the previous night on the ship in the harbor, but Witkacy, unable to fall asleep, gets up and lights the light. The Polish travelers economize and do not stay or eat at the elegant British Hotels, such as the Bristol or Grand Orient. In 1914 Colombo was a large colonial capital with imposing Victorian government buildings, banks, importing houses, clubs, monuments, stately residences and parks. Lack of money as well as a desire to see the real Ceylon lead Malinowski and Witkacy to reject the pomp of British empire and to explore – following, of course, the instructions of British experts. They go by tram or on foot, buy local produce and stay in small hotels. Botany and religion are their specialties. As Tatras highlanders, they study the flowers, plants, and trees, drawing parallels to the flora of Zakopane. As adepts of philosophy and ethnography, they observe the varied indigenous religious practices, temples, priests, and artifacts, sometimes comparing them to Christianity. What strikes Witkacy most is the plurality of bright sensory impressions: the rich diversity of races and skin colors, kinds of costumes (from simple loin cloths to gorgeous silks), hats, and hair styles, the mixed and motley crowd, the animation of the street bazaars, the babble of different tongues, the exuberance of the flora, bird and animal life, and the intensity of the climate and rapid changes of topography. On June 29 they breakfast quickly at 6:30 A.M. and take the tram to Maradana Junction (one mile from the port) where they catch the 7 o’clock train to Kandy. The journey of 75 miles takes four hours because, after the first fifty miles in the low country, the steep ascent into the mountains begins and the train now averages only eight miles an hour. In his letter to his father written the same day, Witkacy describes the spectacular views, dominated by the towering Allagalla Peak of 3,394 feet. Here is Henry Cave’s account of the ascent from his 1908 guidebook. “Two powerful engines are now attached to our train, one at either end, and so sharp are the curves that it is frequently possible for the passenger seated in the train to see both; or from his seat to take a photograph including in the landscape a large portion of the train in which he is traveling. At one moment, on the edge of a sheer precipice, we are gazing downwards some thousand feet below; at another we are looking upwards at a mighty crag a thousand feet above; from the zigzags by which we climb the mountain sides fresh views appear at every turn; farreaching valleys edged by the soft blue ranges of distant mountains and filled with luxuriant masses of dense forest, relieved here and there by the vivid green terraces of the rice fields; cascades of lovely flowering creepers, hanging in festoons from tree to tree and from crag to crag; above and below deep ravines and foaming waterfalls dashing their spray into mist as it falls into the verdurous abyss; fresh mountain peaks appearing in ever-changing grouping as we gently wind along the steep gradients; daring crossings from rock to rock, so

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startling as to unnerve the timid as we pass over gorges cleft in the mountain side and look upon the green depths below, so near the edge of the vertical precipice that a fall from the carriage would land us sheer sixteen hundred feet below; the lofty Tolipot [a huge palm with gigantic fan-shaped leaves that flowers once in its lifetime as it nears its one hundredth year] is flourishing on either side; the scattered huts and gardens, and the quaint people about, so primitive in their habits which vary little from those of two thousand years ago … The precipitous mountain of Allagalla is the most conspicuous feature of the landscape. Our train creeps upon its step side of granite … . The peak towers aloft 2,500 feet above us, while the beautiful valley lies a thousand feet below.” The Polish travelers arrive in Kandy by 11 AM. The ancient feudal capital, located at 1602 feet halfway between the low country and the high mountains, Kandy is a cosmopolitan beauty spot of 30,000 inhabitants surrounding a large artificial lake (built by the last independent king) and ringed by hills covered with tea plantations. Everywhere there are flowers and flowering trees. The Polish travelers go around the lake in rickshaws and visit the European quarter with flowery roads named after the wives of the colonial governors. They find Kandy “a magical locality.” They ride to the post office and then go to Cargill’s, an elegant British store, where they buy clothes. In the evening they visit the remains of the royal palace and go on a tour of the Temple of the Holy Tooth with its great dagoba or silver bell-shaped shrine. But they not able to go inside the closed shrine. The Tooth (canine, about three inches long and curved, according to Leonard Woolf who saw it at close quarters) is only taken out once a year for the great festival in August when it is carried on the back of an elephant in a procession around the temple. For the rest of the year it is kept locked in a small inner shrine in the temple in the smallest of five concentric bell-shaped gold caskets nesting one within another. Instead, they visit the adjacent Oriental Library in a small octagonal building, with a magnificent view of the lake. The beggars and vendors, the trinketry, statuettes and statues of Buddha seem to spoil the effect and produce disillusion and disappointment. Everything is without symmetry, order, or even artistic disorder. The music of the gongs and tom-tom at the entrance of the shrine is monotonous rather than enhancing. To the Polish travelers it seemed as though children were playing at sacred mysteries. The illusion is broken and the mystery dissolves into nothingness. This crude form of Buddhism seemed no better than the shoddy Catholicism of Southern Italy and lacked the charm of strange artistic effects based on hallowed tradition. First contacts with a new culture and religion are invariably anticlimactic, frustrating expectations. They stay at the Hotel Suisse, not at the fashionable Queen’s Hotel. The next day, June 30, they take a stroll to Peradeniya, two miles to the south, with its impressive Botanical Gardens built by the British. The Mahaweli Ganga (River) surrounds the gardens. They return to Kandy. After a nap, Malinowski calls on H.C.P. (Henry Charles Purvis) Bell (1851-1937), first Commissioner of the Archaeological Department, responsible for important excavations of the ruined cities. Bell offers advice on things to do and see. He recommends travel by bullock cart.


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The following morning, July 1, the Polish travelers check out of the Hotel Suisse and take Lady Horton’s Walk, which offers views of Kandy, the lake, Mahaweli Ganga, and the tea plantations. In Kandy, they go shopping once again at Cargill’s. Then they set out for Matale, eighteen miles north of Kandy, in a cart drawn by humpbacked bulls, which travel at three miles an hour. They follow along fields, paddies, and gardens in the vicinity of the Mahaweli Ganga. Once they cross the river, they feel that they are at last in primitive Ceylon where there are no Europeans and no lodgings. They visit a shrine, come across a dignified wedding party, and discover two Buddhist chapels in the thick jungle. At sunset Bronio and Sta´s reach the summit of a crag on which stands a tiny dagoba. From this high point the entire valley is visible as well as the mountain peaks in the mist. They return to Kandy by bullock cart in the moonlight. The room in the cheap lodgings they find is flea-infested, and a drunken neighbor vomits next door. On the morning of July 2, they make the journey by train to Anuradhapura, one of the great ruined cities of Ceylon and its capital for over a thousand years, where they stay for two days visiting the shrines and ruins. Although the distance is only 110 miles, they must make the slow descent from Kandy and change trains at Polgahawela Junction for the Northern Line. For the first time they travel first-class. The trip takes between five and six hours. The landscape changes from lush to dry jungle. They stay in a fine hotel, the only hotel in Anuradhapura. To go sightseeing, they engage a bullock cart with a guide. First they visit a shrine with the Sacred Bo Tree, and then they go south to a shrine in an open field. There is a large dagoba and rows of stone pillars erected perpendicularly. Packs of apes inhabit the ruins, giving rise to thoughts on the decline of culture in a nation. The moon is out by the time they return to the hotel. The next day, July 3, they go along the lake, past the restored dagoba to a new dagoba in ruins overgrown with grass. They climb to the summit of the tetrahedron from where there is a marvelous view of the mountains. Sta´s has a bad day, despairing at his lack of strength and incapacity to write the article that he has promised to produce. In the afternoon they sit on the terrace of the hotel. At night they set off by moonlight, loading their things onto the bullock cart and going some of the way on foot. A tom-tom can be heard as they cross the railway line and the Malwatu Oya Ganga (River). They reach the small village of Maradankadawala on Saturday July 4. Malinowski and Witkacy go separate routes at one point. Bronio goes left along a pond and enters the jungle. When he comes out he is covered with ticks. With the help of his friends, he de-ticks his shorts and socks. Only one tick has burrowed into his skin and must be removed with iodine. Returning to the pond, Bronio comes across Sta´s. They spend the rest of the day in the Rest House (special inns run by the British Administration). Malinowski writes in his diary but admits he could not do an article under such conditions. Sta´s begins his article very well. Despite his depression and all the stressful conditions of travel in the jungle, Witkacy displays remarkable tenacity in writing. July 5 finds the Polish travelers on the road from Maradankadawala to the small settlement of Kekirawa. They meet many carts going in the opposite direction, north to Anuradhapura for the festival of the Tooth. In the evening they go

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to the dagoba from where there is a wonderful view of the pond, hills, and rice fields. The dinner was accompanied by cockroaches. By July 6 the journey seems monotonous through the green walls of dry jungle. The heat is terrible. Malinowski goes on foot and takes photographs or sits in the cart and watches lazily. Towards twilight as they go ahead on foot, the sound of the flute and the beat of the drum of Buddhist music come from the jungle. They stop at a roomy rest-house with palms in the moonlight. Before four upright sticks and four split pieces of bamboo they see a man sitting at a table covered with flowers, incense, and candles performing a magic ceremony. They help him by holding umbrellas as he lights a candle and reads out prayers while burning incense on coals. It is the first magic ceremony conducted in light of the moon that Bronio and Sta´s have ever seen. Afterwards they discuss the metaphysical substance of Buddhism as opposed to Christianity. It is here in Dambulla that Witkacy thinks of killing himself, holding his Browning pressed to his temple. At 7 A.M. on July 7 they set out to visit the rock temples of Dambulla. First they climb to the top of “a solitary mass of rock which rises from the plain to a height of about five hundred feet and is about a mile in circumference” (Henry Cave). The shape of the rock recalls that of an elephant. The summit is on “a huge boulder of dark gneiss five hundred feet high and two thousand in length. The ascent is made by a steep but picturesque stairway cut in the natural rock” (Cave). From this vantage point they have a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside: plains, mountain ranges, dense forest. Then they descend into the caverns. What they see there in the dim religious candlelight is marvelous, especially the huge recumbent Buddha. Henry Cave describes the scene in the following words. “The scene presented on entering is imposing though weird and grotesque. We notice at once a strange mixture of Brahmin and Buddhist images and pictures. Here is Vishnu in wood standing opposite to a colossal recumbent figure of Buddha forty-seven feet long and carved out of solid rock”). There are many larger than life-size Buddhas, but also Hindu deities including Ganesh with four arms and an elephant’s face. In the largest cave, which is one hundred and sixty by fifty feet, the walls and ceiling are covered with frescoes blending Buddhism and Hinduism and depicting various historical scenes. Henry Cave has captured the powerful effect of a visit to these caves. “Few visitors enter these caverns without being greatly impressed by the strange and eerie feeling which seems to increase as the eyes get more accustomed to the dimness, while some are unable to rid themselves of the haunting memory of the uncanny vision.” On July 8 the Polish travelers reach Nalande, thirty miles north of Kandy, where it is even more stifling than at Dambulla. Here Witkacy again contemplates killing himself, sitting with his Browning pressed to his temple. They must return to Kandy through Matale, retracing their steps in the opposite direction. After staying overnight in Kandy, they take the train back to Colombo, arriving on July 10. On July 11 at twenty minutes to ten in the morning, Witkacy’s fatal hour, they board the SS Orontes of the British Oriental Line. The Orontes, built in 1902, with a tonnage of 9,026, accommodates 320 first and second class passengers and the


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same number of third class. The ship is bound for Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sidney at a speed of 18 knots. The Orontes arrives in Fremantle on July 21, having covered the 3130 miles from Colombo in ten days. What happened in Australia is a separate story. Witkacy completed his account of the journey to the tropics July 19 on the high seas, shortly before arriving in Fremantle.

Other titles in the the Routledge Harwood Polish and East European Theatre Archive series: Volume 10 The Conspiracy of Feelings Yurii Olesha and The Little Theatre of the Green Goose Konstanty Ildefons Gal⁄ czyn´ski Edited by Daniel Gerould Volume 11 A Dream Felicja Kruszewska and An Excursion to the Museum . Tadeusz Rózewicz Edited by Jadwiga Kosicka Volume 12 Mr Price, Or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf Stanisl⁄ aw Ignacy Witkiewicz Edited by Daniel Gerould This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.

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Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Greek and Roman Theatre Archive,)

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Mr Price, or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two- Headed Calf (Routledge Harwood Polish and Eastern European Theatre Archive, 12)

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Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose (Routledge Harwood Studies in Russian and European Literature)

The Central and Eastern European Countries and the European Union

Magic or Madness

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Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Greek and Roman Theatre Archive,)

Gardzienice: Polish Theatre in Transition ((Contemporary Theatre Studies))

Scenes of Madness: A Psychiatrist at the Theatre

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A Madness of Angels: Or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift

Economics and the Price Index (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

Calf Rearing: A Practical Guide

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The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics

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Kind of Madness, A

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