The more respectful in the audience managed to quiet the sounds that could be heard throughout the auditorium. The impatient resigned themselves to listening to Señora Fuchier a little while longer with a mixture of amusement and confusion. Only the thin man insisted on making noise with his newspaper, but his wife said to him, “You’re impossible!”
“There were times when I wanted to start studying. But no, I never dared to. I wanted to, sure, but ‘Now what?’ I asked myself, and I’d spend the whole day thinking maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow. This is what I want to make clear because I don’t like to give myself credit where credit’s not due. You’re all very good to me but between that and my being in the service of Thalia, who’s the muse of theater, well, there’s an enormous gap.”
The urgings to be reasonable were ignored by most of the audience, and the clapping started up again, this time louder and mixed with whistles. A shout from the amphitheater mimicked Señora Fuchier’s voice, and everyone laughed, thinking it belonged to the man who did imitations of radio actors and animals.
“In the first place you have to study a lot and I’m no good, I mean, I’ve never been any good at studying because I’m easily distracted. Like they say I lose the thread and start thinking about something else and can’t concentrate. And the thing that art requires more than anything else is concentration and long hard work and not thinking about anything else. That’s it, I told myself, what you need is commitment. The fact is you don’t have a calling. It’s true you like the theater but not all that much so why even start? Suppose you can’t? If it’s to please your husband, and you know how much he loves you, then fine, but if it’s just vanity why even start? That’s what I tell myself when I think about it at night, and I guess that’s what my husband thinks too. Who knows? You won’t believe it but in my heart it always makes me feel a little like crying.”
The master of ceremonies, alert to his responsibilities, looked at everyone and gestured in his urgency to explain: “What can we do? It’s not my fault. I realize it’s a sad situation, but I can’t do anything about it.”
“I’ve come to this microphone, well, I mean, because I want you to know how happy I am to be here tonight with such great artists but between that and what this gentleman here said, well, the truth is I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. If I could promise you I’d try, I’d study and try to be worthy someday, you know, of the name of actress, but for now I have to be honest and not deceive myself or you.”
Meanwhile, worried about his own problems, the master of ceremonies kept trying to make himself understood with gestures and knowing glances. He wanted to give the public this message: “You must understand. It doesn’t seem right just to cut her off. Maybe if you clap louder, or whistle louder, or something, of course I’m the master of ceremonies but this is all so peculiar. Can you understand my situation? Only once, some years ago, did I have an experience like this. Well, it was when I was just starting out and was easily embarrassed. One day the President of the Republic came to my town, and by coincidence an uncle of mine was celebrating his birthday, and when he saw the President he thought he had come to town to congratulate him and began to tell him over the microphone that he didn’t deserve the honor and was not worthy of the President’s coming to see him, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. Well, what do you want me to do, I’m sorry too. Her being a great actress, well, I mean, I was just being polite.”
“I want to repeat, you know, how happy I feel to be here tonight for the opening of this festival of Italian cinema. It suddenly occurs to me that maybe it would be easier for me to work in a neorealist film but I tell myself ‘What now? What if you’re no good?’ I don’t know, maybe that’s the way I should go: a simple part with no complications, you know, where I wouldn’t be afraid to improvise a little and let my personality go. Oh I don’t know.”
The gestures of the master of ceremonies grew more and more desperate. He wrung his hands and winked his eyes, but a careful observer would have understood that somehow his uncle was involved again with the President of the Republic.
A moment arrived when the audience no longer knew where to direct its attention — to Señora Fuchier talking about her aspirations, her fears, her self-justifications, or to the master of ceremonies with his bewildered gesturing. It opted for open laughter and foot stamping. The thin man gave free rein to his instincts and tried to stand on his seat, but his wife pulled him down by his sleeve and said, “What’s the matter with you?”
“Maybe if I studied with a good teacher I could get used to audiences and concentrate because what I need most is concentration and art, you know as well as I do, what it requires is concentration.”
One by one, the other guests of honor had skillfully maneuvered their way off the stage. Señor Fuchier went to the projection room and told them to start the picture. Then, against a moving musical background, you could see the shadows of the master of ceremonies and Señora Fuchier, one on each side of the stage, running around and waving their hands and making their final explanations.
COW
While I was traveling on the train the other day, I suddenly stood up, happy on my own two feet, and began to wave my hands with joy and invite everyone to look at the scenery and see the twilight that was really glorious. The women, the children, and some gentlemen who interrupted their conversation all looked at me in surprise and laughed; when I quietly sat down again, there was no way for them to know what I had just seen at the side of the road: a dead, a really dead cow moving past slowly with no one to bury her or edit her complete works or deliver a deeply felt and moving speech about how good she had been and all the streams of foaming milk she had given so that life in general and the train in particular could keep on going.
COMPLETE WORKS
Professor Fombona had devoted forty of his fifty-five years to a selfless study of the most diverse literatures, and in the best intellectual circles he was considered a first-rate authority on a wide variety of authors. His translations, monographs, prologues, and lectures, without being what might be termed works of genius (at least, that is what his enemies said), could, under certain circumstances, constitute a precious record of everything that had ever been written, especially if the circumstances were, let us say, the destruction of every library in the world.
He had achieved comparable glory as a teacher of the young. His select group of avid disciples, with whom he usually shared an hour or two in the afternoon, saw in him a humanist of unbounded erudition, and followed his suggestions with an unquestioning fanaticism that alarmed Fombona himself more than anyone; he had often felt the weight of their destinies as a heavy burden on his conscience.
Feijoo, the most recent, had made a timid appearance. One day, under some pretext or other, he had dared to join them in the café.1 Accepted first by Fombona, he then became part of the group as every good neophyte does — with a fear he could not hide and a reluctance to participate in the discussions. After a few days, however, when his initial shyness had been overcome to some extent, he decided to show them some verses. He preferred to read them himself, stressing with an annoying schoolboy intonation the sections he thought most effective. Then he folded his papers with nervous calm, put them in his briefcase, and never spoke of them again. When confronted by any opinion, favorable or unfavorable, he displayed a controlled, irritated silence. It goes without saying that Fombona did not think the works were good, but he saw in the author a hidden poetic force struggling to get out.