SANTIAGO: The shadows are falling, as I alight from the little aircraft midst shrubs and coconut palms which murmur with the sounds of the island of Zanzibar, confluence of every race, language and religion, the land of a thousand adventures.
KATHIE: The small hotel where I had a room booked was a ramshackle old house full of flies and Arabs.
SANTIAGO: The mystical aura of palaces, minarets and whitewashed fortresses gradually takes hold of me, as a coolie trots slowly through half-empty streets, pushing the rickshaw which bears me to my lodgings — a lofty Islamic tower which stands watch over the city.
KATHIE: I asked for a cup of tea which I gulped down, then I did a quick change, and though the proprietress advised me not to, I dashed out to explore the city. Its name sounded like something out of a film.
SANTIAGO: Swarthy Swahili-speaking servants, who practise animism, offer me a herbal potion and my exhaustion vanishes. My strength and courage return after a Turkish bath and a massage from native women with deft hands and pert little breasts. Though they warn me that robbery and rape are rife, and tell me of every sort of crime that befall lone women in the Zanzibar night, out I go regardless to explore the city.
KATHIE: The streets were very narrow, there was a smell of animals and plants. Natives in local costumes were passing by. I walked on and on until I eventually arrived at a building that looked like a palace …
SANTIAGO: I lose myself in a labyrinth of narrow little lanes, an interminable maze of steps, terraces, balconies and stone pediments. Wild horses whinnying in the woods serenade me, and the scent of the clove tree drives me wild with desire. What is this building with its lattice windows of finely carved tracery, bronze studded gates and dancing columns? It’s the sultan’s palace! But I don’t even pause — I carry on forward midst beturbaned Muhammadans, wailing beggars, hissing whores as shrill as piccolos and ebony-skinned youths with dazzling smiles undressing me hungrily with their eyes, until I reach a little square, where I have a funny feeling the slave market once was …
LA CHUNGA
To Patricia Pinilla
INTRODUCTION
The plot of this play can be summed up in a few sentences.
The action takes place in Piura, a city surrounded by desert in the north of Peru. In the district of the sports stadium, there is a small bar frequented by a poor and dubious clientele and run by a woman known as La Chunga. One night, Josefino, one of the regulars, comes in with his latest conquest, Meche, a slim and very attractive young woman. La Chunga is instantly captivated. Josefino, in order to amuse himself and his friends — a group of layabouts who call themselves the superstuds — goads Meche into provoking La Chunga. In the course of the night josefino loses all his money playing dice. So that he can carry on playing, he hires out Meche to La Chunga, and the two women spend the rest of the night together in La Chunga’s little room, next to the bar. After that night, Meche disappeared and has never been heard of since. What has happened between them?
The play begins some time after this event. At that same table in the bar, the superstuds, who still play dice, try in vain to find out the truth from La Chunga. They don’t succeed. So they invent it. The scenes which they each dream up are brought to life on stage and maybe there is some element of fleeting truth in them. But they are, above all, secret, private truths which lie hidden in each one of them. In La Chunga’s house, truth and falsehood, past and present, co-exist, as in the human soul.
The various themes the play develops or touches upon shouldn’t give rise to confusion: they are love, desire, taboos, the relationship between men and women, the habits and customs of a certain milieu, the status of women in a primitive, male-dominated society, and the way in which these objective factors are reflected in the sphere of fantasy. It is clear in the play, I think, that objective reality does not condition or subdue man’s desires — on the contrary, thanks to his imagination and his ambitions, even the most unsophisticated of human beings can momentarily at least break out of the prison in which he is trapped.
As in my two earlier plays, The Young Lady from Tacna and Kathie and the Hippopotamus, I have tried in La Chunga to convey through dramatic fiction the totality of human experience: actions and dreams, deeds and fantasies. The characters in the play all have two sides to them: they are both themselves and their phantom selves — creatures of flesh and blood whose destinies are conditioned by the limitations of their lives, such as poverty, marginality, ignorance, etc. — and spiritual beings who, despite the crudity and monotony of their existence, always have access to relative freedom, through recourse to fantasy — the human attribute par excellence.
I use the expression ‘totality of human experience’ to emphasize the obvious fact that a man’s actions are quite inseparable from his desires and ambitions; also because the indivisibility of these two aspects of human experience should be apparent in performance, where the audience should be confronted with an integrated world in which what the characters say and what is going on in their imaginations — what actually happens and what is imagined to happen — are one continuous stream, rather like a reversible garment that can be worn either way round, so that it is impossible to tell which way round is which.
I do not see why theatre should not be a suitable medium for showing this synthesis of objective and subjective human experience, or rather, such experience in the process of synthesis. Through stubborn prejudice, however, people are inclined to think that the ambiguous, evanescent world of subtle shades and sudden arbitrary shifts, unrelated to time — the work of the imagination spurred on by desire, cannot co-exist on stage with objective reality, without creating insurmountable difficulties for the director. I do not believe there is any explanation for this scepticism other than idleness, and a fear of taking risks, without which all creative enterprise is hampered.
It is simply a question of finding a form of theatre that capitalizes on what is unique to the theatre, man’s talent for pretending, for play-acting, for putting himself into situations and projecting himself into characters different from his own. In the scenes in which they act out their fantasies, the characters should be indulgent to themselves, love themselves, as they play these extensions of their own personalities, dividing themselves, as actors do when they go on stage, or as men and women do mentally when they call on their imaginations to enrich their lives, illusorily acting out those roles which are either denied them in real life, or which they seldom have a chance to play.
Finding a technique for theatrical expression — a means of realizing this practice so universally shared, that of enriching life through the creation of images and the telling of stories — ought to be a stimulating challenge for those who want a new kind of theatre or who want to explore new avenues, rather than painfully pursuing those three archetypes of modern theatre which are already starting to show signs of ossification from over-use: the epic didacticism of Brecht; the pure entertainment value of the theatre of the absurd; and the affected spontaneity of the happening and other variations on the improvised show. The theatre and the images it can create are, I’m sure, an ideal medium for the expression of that tangled and disturbing world of angels, demons and wonders which lie at the heart of our desires.
Mario Vargas Llosa