PAULA
Are you Catholic?
QUITT
Why! You’re actually listening to me!
PAULA
Because you’re talking about yourself like the deputy of universal truth. What you experience personally you want to experience for all of us. The blood you sweat in private you bring as a sacrifice to us, the impenitent ones. Your ego wants to be more than itself, your sentimentality appeals to my inability to feel, your urge to confess merely has the effect of demonstrating to me that I’m still unawakened. You behave as though your time had finally come. Actually, your time as Quitt who suffers his life in exemplary bourgeois fashion has long since passed. Your suffering is over. The fact that you insist so much on yourself makes you suspect. You lack a sense of history, you’re much too much of an example of Western civilization for me.
QUITT
But even if it is for the last time, I’d like to be at the center of things, just by myself. Otherwise I would feel written off once and for all, like a machine, wouldn’t be able to utter a single word meant for someone else. Once when I stepped out of the house the children yelled after me: I know who you are! I know who you are! Tauntingly, as though the fact that I could be identified was something bad. Besides, it seemed inappropriate to me just now to tell something like a story after you thought about me in such abstract terms.
(Pause.)
PAULA
Sit down. (QUITT does so. Pause. They look at each other. PAULA looks away.) Yes, my outfit bothers me too now. And I can’t think of anything I’d like to say to you. But I would like to say something to you. (Pause.) It’s pleasant to sit here in the twilight. I wasn’t thinking of anything just now. That was nice too. (Pause.) Do you like evaporated milk? I suddenly feel like having evaporated milk. (Pause. She speaks as if she wants to avoid speaking of something else.) My workers should never see me like this. Normally, I buy my clothes ready-to-wear, I even feel good in them. By the way, it occurred to me before that we should also plan our advertising together from now on. I would like to go on the basis that we don’t generate any artificial needs but only awaken the natural ones of which people aren’t conscious yet. Most people don’t even know their needs. Advertising, insofar as it describes a product, is only another word for consciousness-raising. What we should avoid is advertising which is inappropriate to its product because it creates misconceptions among the consumers about the nature of the product. That would be the very deception or simulation of something that isn’t there which we are always accused of. But our products exist and their very existence makes them rational — otherwise we, as rational beings, would not have had them produced in a rational manner from rational raw materials by rational people. And if our advertisements don’t lie but only provide an exact description of our rational products, then the advertising will be just as rational. Take a look at the socialist states. They have no irrational products — and still they advertise, because the rational needs advertising most of all. That’s what transmits the idea of what is rational. For me advertising is the only materialistic poetry. As an anthropomorphic system it endears us to the objects from which we have been alienated by ideology. It animates the world of goods and humanizes them, so that we can feel at home with them. I can’t tell you how deeply touched I am when I read on an old fire wall in giant letters PEPSI–COLA HITS THE SPOT. When I see a detergent container in front of a rising sun, it blows my mind. Today, twenty years later, they simply gave the same product the sappy designation IT’S THE PEPSI GENERATION, and my mind goes blank. When I’m feeling unproductive, I look at ads in magazines, it makes my mood seem ridiculous; so advertising is also a form of consolation, but of a concrete, rational kind, as distinct from bourgeois obscurantist poetry. And think with how much more dignity and how much more progressively the copywriters can work than the poets! While the poets in their isolation conjure up something vague, the copywriters, working as an efficient team, describe the definite. Indeed, they are the only truly creative ones — they think something they had no idea about beforehand. Incidentally, we noticed recently what was wrong with the slogan for one of our products. It contained the phrase “a level tablespoon” and the product didn’t sell. Finally it occurred to one member of the team to substitute the word “heaping” for small. Instead of “level tablespoon” we used “a heaping teaspoon,” and suddenly sales increased by almost 100 percent.
(HANS enters during the last sentence and turns on the light.)
QUITT
(To HANS) We don’t need any light.
(HANS turns off the light and leaves.)
PAULA
I can hear my wristwatch ticking.
QUITT
You should be able to afford a noiseless watch. But that probably is an heirloom, not just any old watch. So please try to remember. (Pause.) Or don’t try to remember — as you please.
PAULA
If you tell a child who is singing to itself: Very nice, go on singing! it will stop singing. But if you say: Stop! it will go on singing.
QUITT
There are women who—
PAULA
Stop it, nothing can come of that.
QUITT
There are women you can’t touch because if you did you would be desecrating an heirloom. A necklace, then, has a story which makes every caress of the neck a mere afterthought. Everything about the woman is so complete that every experience you share with her only reminds her of something in her past. Whatever you tell her, she immediately interrupts you with this introverted nodding of the head. She is untouchable, inside and out. She is so full of memories. The most mysterious, delicately stuttering impulse immediately evokes a doppelganger who has already made the impulse crystal-clear to the woman. You begin to understand sex killers: only the slitting open of the belly provides him with the attention every individual deserves. You can’t run your hands through a hooker’s hair — so that her hairdo won’t get messed up.
PAULA
It’s just as you say it is. But why is it like that? Who is responsible for that? And who makes sure that it stays that way? And who profits by it? Instead of naming the causes, you make fun of their appearances. And precisely that happens to be one of the causes. To describe pure appearances is a man’s kind of joke. Von Wullnow would say that I would say: undialectical impressionism.
QUITT
And you: because you’ve got so many causes on your mind, you forget to bother with the appearances. Instead of appearances, you see nothing but causes. And when you eliminate the causes so as to change the appearances, they have already changed so that you have to eliminate entirely different causes. And if you look at me now, please become aware of me for once and not my causes.
PAULA
You have a beautiful tie pin. Your shirt is so new that one can still see the pinholes. Your grinding jaws manifest will power. Your delicate hands might be those of a pianist. One of your earlobes has dried shaving cream on it. And while you behave animalistically, the creases on your pants give you away.
(QUITT gets up and pulls PAULA toward him. She wraps her arms exaggeratedly around him and also puts one leg around his hip, throws back her head, and sighs derisively. He lets go of her at once and walks away. She walks backward. They pursue each other alternately for a short time. Then they walk around by themselves, finally stop.)