The Malady of Death (3 page)

Perhaps you'd look for her outside your room, on the beaches, outside cafés, in the streets. But you wouldn't be able to find her, because in the light of day you can't recognize anyone. You wouldn't recognize her. All you know of her is her sleeping body beneath her shut or half-shut eyes. The penetration of one body by another—that you can't recognize, ever. You couldn't ever.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

*

All you remember of the whole affair are certain words she said in her sleep, the ones that tell you what's wrong with you: the malady of death. Soon you give up, don't look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

The Malady of Death
could be staged in the theatre.

The young woman of the paid nights should be lying on some white sheets in the middle of the stage. She might be naked. A man would walk back and forth around her, telling the story.

Only the woman would speak her lines from memory. The man never would. He would read the text, either standing still or walking about around the young woman.

The man the story is about would never appear. Even when he speaks to the young woman he does so only through the man who reads his story.

Acting is replaced here by reading. I always think nothing can replace the reading of a text, that no acting can ever equal the effect of a text not memorised.

So the two actors should speak as if they were reading the text in separate rooms, isolated from one another.

The text would be completely nullified if it were spoken theatrically.

The man's voice should be rather high-pitched, the woman's deep and almost off-hand.

The man's pacings to and fro around the young woman's body should be long-drawn-out. He ought to disappear from view, to be lost in the theatre just as he is lost in time, and then to return into the light, to us.

The stage should be low, almost at floor level, so that the young woman's body is completely visible to the audience.

There should be great stretches of silence between the different paid nights, silences in which nothing happens except the passage of time.

The man reading the text should seem to be suffering from a fundamental and fatal weakness—the same as that of the other, the man we don't see.

The young woman should be beautiful, distinctive.

A big dark opening admits the sound of the sea—always the same black rectangle, never any lighter. But the sound of the sea does vary in volume.

The young woman's departure isn't seen. There should be a blackout when she disappears, and when the light comes up again there is nothing left but the white sheets in the middle of the stage and the sound of the sea surging in through the black door.

No music.

If I ever filmed this text I'd want the weeping by the sea to be shot in such a way that the white turmoil of the waves is seen almost simultaneously with the man's face. There should be a correlation between the white of the sheets and the white of the sea. The sheets should be a prior image of the sea.

All this by way of general suggestion.