The Incident at Antioch Read online

  THE INCIDENT AT ANTIOCH1

  A TRAGEDY IN THREE ACTS

  NOTE: The format of this e-book has been modified. The printed book presented French and English text on facing pages. In the e-book, links at the beginning of each Act and Scene connect to French and English versions.

  CHARACTERS

  JEAN MAURY, a right-wing politician

  PIERRE MAURY, a left-wing politician

  CEPHAS2

  CLAUDE VILLEMBRAY

  PAULA, Villembray’s sister

  MOKHTAR, an Arab factory worker, age 50

  CAMILLE, a tough girl from the banlieue3

  RENÉ, a farmer

  MADAME PINTRE, a factory worker

  DAVID, son of Paula and Mokhtar

  PLACES

  The official place of politics: a big bare room

  The place of the war reserves:4 an old military port

  The place of truths: the gates of a big factory

  The place of choices: a country road running through a beet field

  The place of foundations: a city in ruins

  ACT I

  The Road to Damascus5

  SCENE 1: In the official place of politics.

  THE MAURYS are seated on school chairs toward the rear of the stage, one stage left and the other stage right. CEPHAS is downstage with his back to the audience.

  JEAN MAURY: They’ll have to bring Villembray back. (Silence.) Claude Villembray. There’s nothing else possible now.

  CEPHAS: Then let’s wish for the impossible.6

  PIERRE MAURY: O colleagues whose trouble all comes from the desert of the West!7 Let’s thrive in the shattered shelter of the empires of the East.

  CEPHAS: Let me swear never to be one of them.

  JEAN MAURY: No one is, who’s not one of us.

  CEPHAS: O worthlessness of every current emblem!8

  PIERRE MAURY: Did someone just say something I couldn’t hear?

  CEPHAS: While I hear a flock of wood pigeons mournfully rustling. An abominable whirring of wings, in the heart of the earthly witness!9

  People are gathered here in migratory flocks like ones about to be snared in the fir tree nets. This place is no more fit for living than those gray stains inside from which the line hunters’10 blood is dripping. In the name of heaven! It reeks of feathers, droppings, and butchery! (Silence.) Don’t you have anything to say?

  JEAN MAURY: We’re enjoying nightfall.

  CEPHAS: Night, night itself, is of no use to you anymore.

  PIERRE MAURY: The only thing that’s of use, really of use, is what will be in the news.

  JEAN MAURY: National accounts! Balance of payments! Currency performance! Eleventh oil crisis! Industrial base restructuring! Supranational Europe! Goat milk surpluses!

  PIERRE MAURY: Socially responsible downsizing! Unemployment, but only if it’s socially responsible! Absolutely socially responsible integration! Immigrants, provided they’re socially responsible, not social work cases! No discrimination, unless it’s socially responsible! Europe, but only if it’s positively socially responsible! Social responsibility as the life-blood, the ultimate purpose, the entelechy of democratic society as a whole! My horse for social responsibility!

  CEPHAS: Torment by nothingness at the windows in summer.11 The world is like a piece of brown wrapping paper stamped “Addressee unknown.”

  I’m a product of this country of phrasemongers, too. My father was a big man in Parliament; yes, he was. An honorable, eloquent man, he kept his wife in a state of mute anarchy. And I, his son, am making that silence speak the old language of strife. I see war everywhere. Jubilation!

  Yet have I escaped unscathed? Haven’t I been wounded? When I gaze at the big pines at the shore, I’m tempted to give absolution to everything, as if nature in this country were making me the priest of a worn-out old world. Or else I only have eyes for that woman who has just erased the contours of her fame.12 And I dream of a timeless summer on four lakes, in the terraced vineyards of the mountains in the south.

  PIERRE MAURY: Modern technologies. Commitment to river ecology. Citizenship for women, children, animals, the disabled, the visually impaired, the watercress growing in old wells.

  CEPHAS: The real earth fertilizes and turns over its bloody masses and tractors on the salty turf! The stultified13 people eat their fill, and swarm into the golden-windowed offices!

  O ravaged city! I love you and repudiate you! (He raises his fist above his head.)

  JEAN MAURY: Honestly, is this man known to the police?

  CEPHAS: I’m unknowable. One day, I was somewhere else, and I suddenly knew who I was. A sparse crowd of people were running in the rain, with the cops at their heels. They were clubbing the slowest, or the bravest, ones on the pavement. All of a sudden I realized I could never again bear to see hunters stalking their prey that way. I felt an urge to put an end to the eye’s solitude.14

  And I did, because there’s a language! It lets you know where ordinary law leaves off. Follow its rules and there you are in the bustling heart of all the absence contained in the city.15 Life is anonymous, no one’s aware anymore of your actions, which are no longer your own but the actions arising from the very failure to respect the local proprieties. Companions who are hard to place seek you out, people of no particular distinction, with no close friends or relations. With them you live in the folds of the new language, you name what you are and are becoming as heirs to a century and a half of innocence.16

  I’ll only be known when it’s too late, when the old arena of knowledge has gone up in flames, when what was unknown in the past has become the sole source of knowledge.

  We’ll drive anyone out of this place that won’t be an exception to it!

  We see the star of power shining in the night sky. How far away it seems! But close, too, so close that we, the unknowable, are required to reach out and grab it the way you do the moon when a child asks you to.

  And this time, you can be sure, it won’t be about capturing a reflection in some old washbasin painted red!17

  (CEPHAS rushes out.)

  SCENE 2: In the place of the war reserves.

  VILLEMBRAY: Dear Paula, you fill me with amazement, not least because I can call you: sister! Fake sister!

  I’ve studied political affairs and weighed them in the balance. I’m prepared to reckon the consequences of any decision I’m called upon to make and correct any imbalances.

  I know that action merely obeys a pointless necessity and that everything comes about with completely predictable results.

  Thus, every action cancels itself out.

  That’s a sure thing and a source of satisfaction.

  But what about you, Paula, what purpose do you serve? And how should you be counted in the total?

  PAULA: Well, you see, Claude, if we’re to understand each other, from now on we need to see each other to the true extent of our visibility.

  Women needn’t be excluded from the realm of reason. Just because they have moods and give birth doesn’t mean they’re regulated by the stars.18

  No, I stand firm, to show the world the sudden flash of light, the magnificent imminence.

  No destiny binds me to ancient history. When you ask me what purpose I serve, you’ve already captured and destroyed me.

  VILLEMBRAY: Of course, when you speak with your head cocked that way and your hands clasped behind your back as though trying to keep some distinguishing feature of yours out of sight, I feel an overwhelming sense of peace come over me, I’m watching the big prairie buffalo come down on the sea.19

  PAULA: I’m not expressing what I want; I’m expressing the extreme joy there is in no longer wanting anything. I can’t explain it to you; explanation’s been taken away from me. Destined from the dawn of time to spread life, I have a sudden impulse to spread death.

  VILLEMBRAY: So now I’m able to understand your anxiety. For who is questioning you, and who are you answering?

  PAULA: Right, Villembray, or should I say �
�Touché!” I can’t distinguish between the undecidable20 and doubt.

  Nothing matters, except this very nothing that I am, a young woman resistant to abduction and leery of love. And there’s no excuse for not spreading the news, to make it widely known.

  I dread having to face the obstacle of the women themselves, who are annoyed by this revelation, so anxious are they to avoid what’s unsettling about it.21

  VILLEMBRAY: So you keep aloof from all the women, being unconnected to any of them by the bonds of speech. But, Paula! Speak to everyone!

  Don’t be someone useless and excommunicated!

  PAULA: I have no faith to be exiled from.

  (Silence.)

  VILLEMBRAY: The common idea promising those who are nothing the chance to become everything, and “let’s make a clean slate of the past,”22 of course–that’s all laughing from the great beyond.

  Behind the revolution huge mass graves gaped wide. The watchtower for the glorious new dawn was nothing but a prison observation tower. As they say in the papers, Communism collapsed. Everyone’s sitting alone around their campfire now, preparing their own little meal. Others, at the top, are calculating the likelihood of disaster.

  And as for me, Paula, what would you say I am?

  PAULA: Claude, dear brother, I appreciate your sharing with me, however far apart we may be, your belief in the utter meaninglessness of things. You make it a badge of honor and the source of political greatness.

  Naturally, I could never blame you for being the only one among so many useless23 men to know that uselessness is the basis of every assumption about the State. By closely studying the workings of amendments, forecasting the outcome of opinion polls, and appointing the right person as Under Secretary of State for Crab Fishing, you manage to reconcile the people’s silence and the rhetoric from above.

  VILLEMBRAY: That’s very true, Paula, no doubt about it. You can call me the mainstay of this government. There’s no doubt that by tomorrow at the latest, confused by the economic crisis and alarmed by Cephas’s pronouncements, they’ll come and ask me to form a national unity government.

  In the role of captain standing on deck urging his crew in disarray to go down with their heads held high, I, dear Paula, am second to none.

  PAULA: I don’t doubt it.

  VILLEMBRAY: That’s how I became the one they turn to and why they all hate me. Everyone knows that, once I take office, willpower and patriotic duty will be on the agenda.

  I’ll sternly announce reforms and sacrifices. Should any of our African clients act as if they might try their luck with our German or Japanese competitors, I’ll send them in a division of paratroopers, if only to defend human rights, which they’ll most certainly have abused.

  PAULA: There you go! In these totally dreary times, your cynicism is the best thing about men of your kind. Your reputation is well deserved; your sister proudly basks in its reflected glow.

  (Silence.)

  VILLEMBRAY: Oh, if only I could live in different times! Or if only I hadn’t been cursed with this gift for metaphor, on account of which I’m standing here, with everything crumbling all around, holding a ridiculous paper torch!

  PAULA: Oh, come now! Don’t be so serious! What does your soul matter?

  VILLEMBRAY: Look, I’m sure you know. There are moments in the midst of your ordinary activities when you get a sudden glimpse of how pointless the whole thing is, and how the meanings of all things, when lined up end to end, don’t add up to a text that makes any sense. In my case it’s even worse.

  PAULA (uninterested): Oh, come on.

  VILLEMBRAY: You’re sure you’ve fallen on dark times, when no one appreciates your talents or knows how to put them to good use. You feel resourceful and clever enough to grasp the contradiction at the heart of the way things are. You’ve got plenty of self-assurance and ways of influencing people. You lack for nothing. Well, if the right circumstances aren’t there, it’s all a wasteland, your country’s been run aground by the times. Other people have taken over power, and even the language they speak is one you don’t know. You’re better trained than anyone, but for tasks that no longer exist; and as for what really matters, you’re more helpless and naive than a child. On the political stage, where your campaign’s only a minor hit, you’re no better than some amateur theater company mangling Macbeth.24

  By keeping me a child for so long they’ll have aged me, too, in the end. My country’s too old for my ambitions. And the real powers-that-be couldn’t care less, so long as they can squash me like a fly whenever they please.

  PAULA: What do you measure power by? The powerful fragrance of misty gardens, where the boxwoods have just been pruned? The power of truths in the banlieues, at the factory gates, on public transport? The powerful melancholy of the Arabian sands?25 Doesn’t Venice draw its force from having no force at all anymore?

  VILLEMBRAY: But without its chokehold on the Turks and the phenomenal wealth of its Doges, Venice would never even have existed!

  When I see our contented countryside, the quiet restraint of our forest lanes, the human scale of our cities, I instantly sniff out the graveyard and the funeral procession.

  Along the brutal road to profit and ruination we haven’t gone far enough. We’ve been too enamored of our historic monuments, our old train stations, our tiled roofs.

  Tear that all down, I say! Let’s have glass, steel, and asphalt! A nuclear power plant in every registered historical landmark!

  Let’s give full powers to the biggest, baddest capitalists, to the military men, to the reckless, ruthless entrepreneurs! Let’s triple the size of the fleet in five years! Let’s annex our weakest neighbor!

  No. It’s not going to happen.

  O pathetic, backward place! O place of humanity where a tomb is being built! The statesman that I am is good for nothing but designing funeral wreaths.

  (Silence. A big battleship, quite outdated but still impressive, steams into the harbor.)

  PAULA: Yet the roar of the sea is producing a melancholy monster above it. And as if in response to your appeal, this little prefectural site is trying to give us the best thing there is to relieve your despair about being powerless.

  Behold the glorious ship of our obsolescence; behold how the golden shadow of your clouds is reflected on the sea!

  VILLEMBRAY: Hello, you wonderful old tub!

  PAULA: A round of applause for the rusty old gunship, the emblem of our quasi-fame!

  You manifest, without destroying it, the mystery of the machine in its struggle with the symbol. For, like the awakening of a dormant force, you ply the seas as witness to our faded glory. You are the steel version of our history books.

  You old poem floating above the muddy ocean floor! Love me; my present is more ambiguous than your song of praise.26

  You overly symbolic ship! A woman, giving you only this, salutes you with these colors.

  (She removes the red scarf27 she was wearing from around her neck and throws it in the water.) A new day is dawning on our incredible encounter.

  SCENE 3: In the place of truths.

  MOKHTAR: Good morning, Paula Sunshine.

  In Catholic school they recite in a drone: “Mohammed goes to school, Mohammed buys the bread, Mohammed, who’s out of work, goes to the unemployment office,” but you have us warm up28 with weighty words akin to the tales our mothers of exile tell, with the right rhythm. When the car on the deafening track brings its twenty-fifth fender around to my paint gun,29 I say:

  Be the gold, though you come from the night,30

  For what your iron makes of such light.

  In his own hell no worker need share

  Or in the parasols of the awful din there-

  In.

  Penultimate,31 I come before the door.

  O cities’ bitter path! Eagle, stripped bare,

  Of all the have-nots there! The dried-up lake of truth is here.

  He who said nothing cloaked in mud, it’s him I’m waiting for.
<
br />   PAULA: You sure can mock. You probably think I’m crazy, don’t you?

  Apart from this name, Paula, I only suit those who don’t suit anyone. When I speak to you, it’s from you that I get my conviction.32

  MOKHTAR: And you found us silent. No say at all in any of the press.

  PAULA: There where resides that about which no one speaks, there the message of truth is heard.

  Since everywhere else it’s drowned out by noise.

  And since it’s the same for words as for everything that matters: if they mean anything it’s because they’re rare, and come from the least likely person. But if, instead, they’re mechanically spread all over the space into which the speaker’s screen constricts them, they get washed away in the flow of meanings.

  So it was that once, with the image of a perfectly honorable old Arab in my heart, I rode my motorbike all the way to the names that are the guardians of the place of the true for me: Nanterre, Thiais, Villemomble! Vitry, Choisy, Malakoff! Genevilliers! Puteaux and Bagnolet! Les Ardoines, Senons! And even farther away: Garges-les-Gonesse, Livry-Gargan, Flins-les-Mureaux! Poissy, which I combine with Aulnay 3000!33 O banlieues! True weave of the cloth! Gray meaning of the colors of meaninglessness! Who is the poem for, if not this starless desert, where the last nomads live, rooted to the spot?

  Yet this place is mine and I’m the one being questioned. “What was it you wanted to tell us?” you ask. I’m just a young woman and I’m missing the words that elicit other people’s words. On the verge of uselessness, I stay on in this place, though I haven’t figured out its language. I’m a failure at spreading death.

  MADAME PINTRE: And you found us silent.

  MOKHTAR: We were forced to come here from afar because the river’s dried up where we used to raise sows. We’re here alone, without our wives, and housed in something resembling a kennel. Our rights are nonexistent; our documents can be revoked at any time. Meanwhile, the big factory is retooling us for another cruel world. (The factory gates open.) Hail, heavy gates of servitude! Hail, prelude to the place!