Consecutio temporum

Я пытался найти сочинения школьников о "Говорящих головах" Алана Беннетта; это, наверно, было бы интересным чтением, потому что эти монологи написаны, пожалуй, не для детей, и их попадание в школьную программу по литературе – скорее, дань шедевру, чем необходимое для подростка чтение. Вероятно, основной стимул составителей школьной программы по литературе – запихать в человека всё достойное прежде, чем он перестанет читать. После чего человек, скорее всего, перестаёт читать.

С другой стороны ( Задний ход со странным выводом )

Как бы то ни было, ( номер один: о локдауне и рецепции )

Как бы то ни было, ( номер два: в чём дело )

Стивен Фрай, ( ... ) дала мне повод переосмыслить моё убеждение, что "я не умею читать драму".

Наверно, мой орган ( и исполнительская власть! )

Здесь для смягчения тона цитата из Кристофера Дюранга, который писал (пишет), кроме прочего, короткие абсурдистские комедии. Про пародию на Теннеси Уильямса под названием "Desire, Desire, Desire" он говорит в предисловии:

During rehearsals I thought it was good, but in front of the audience it seemed not to work. Either there's something wrong with the piece or the actress playing Blanche spoke way too slowly. Or both. [...] There are parts of it that are funny and maybe it can work in production; I don't actually know.

И тут же для наглядности скетч по пьеске Дюранга из "Шоу Керол Бёрнетт", сыгранный Робином Уильямсом, который сымпровизировал почти половину (качество уступает количеству, но вариантов нет):



Драма попадает ( впросак ) (не уверен, куда вставить в этой цепочке перевод, но куда-то его обязательно надо всунуть; в комментарии обоснованно подсказали, что в данном случае ему место между драмой и постановкой).

Подводя итоги: чтение пьес Беннетта на бумаге – это сюблим (как называется удовольствие от произведения искусства?) и очень смешно. Но движения души, которые возбуждает, скажем, Мегги Смит в "Bed Among the Lentils", никаким чтением не заменимы.



Надо сказать, что именно об этом монологе я вспомнил из-за писателя по имени Кларк Блез. ( — ) отдаётся лавочнику, который приехал с Западного Берега Реки Иордан:

And then he does something very strange. He pivots, facing me, then throws his arms out straight like a scarecrow, and snaps his fingers. He’s dancing.

[...]

“Come with me upstairs,” he says, and I follow.

The word “seraglio” comes to mind, a word I’ve never heard, or used, but I think I know its meaning. Have I been banished to a seraglio, or did I, a free, forty-one-year-old woman, willingly allow myself to be swept up by passion? It is a room of rugs; Persian carpets double deep on the floor, durries on the walls and ceiling and draped across the bed and chairs. It is an urban tent on the second floor rear of a Palestinian-California grocery store. A fan throbs overhead. There is no window. When I go to rug stores I always feel like lying down on the pile of carpets; a tall stack of rugs is the perfect mattress. I grow drowsy in their presence; maybe there’s something in the dyes that affects the eyes, or maybe it’s something older and deeper, something ancestral perhaps, the memory of windowless tents and carpets. My Dimple Kapadia eyes are losing their luster, the eyelids are descending and I settle myself on the wondrous bed, plush with carpets.

He is over me, in me, around me, in seconds. My eyes are closed but I feel his hard hands and thick fingers unbuttoning my blouse, my skirt, and his hairy back, his mustache — the urgency — and I recognize that same thing in myself, I claw at everything I feel and I hear the popping of buttons, the ripping of cloth.

Мегги Смит Сюзан, жена викария, страдающая алкоголизмом, позволяет совершить над собой нечто подобное индийскому лавочнику помоложе по имени (и фамилии) Рамеш, тоже в магазине и тоже upstairs:

Mr Ramesh has evidently been expecting me because there’s a bed made up in the storeroom upstairs. I go up first and get in. When I’m in bed I can put my hand out and feel the lentils running through my fingers. When he comes up he’s put on his proper clothes. Long white shirt, sash and whatnot. Loincloth underneath. All spotless. Like Jesus. Only not. I watch him undress and think about them all at Evensong and Geoffrey praying in that pausy way he does, giving you time to mean each phrase. And the fan club lapping it up, thinking they love God when they just love Geoffrey. Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Like Mr Ramesh who is twenty-six with lovely legs, who goes swimming every morning at Merrion Street Baths and plays hockey for Horsforth. I ask him if they offer their sex to God. He isn’t very interested in the point but with them, so far as I can gather, sex is all part of God anyway. I can see why too. It’s the first time I really understand what all the fuss is about.
[...]
Mr Ramesh who once [...] put make-up on his eyes and bells on his ankles, and naked except for his little belt danced in the back room of the shop with a tambourine. [...] who one Sunday night turned his troubled face towards me with its struggling moustache and asked if he might take the bull by the horns and enquire if intoxication was a prerequisite for sexual intercourse, or whether it was only when I was going to bed with him, the beautiful Mr Ramesh, twenty-six, with wonderful legs, whether it was only with him I had to be inebriated.

Видимо, задние помещения ориентальных лавок как порочный локус сладости и счастья для фрустрированных женщин – это такой топос в англосаксонской литературе. Или Блез ссылается на Беннетта.

Upd. Внимательные френды caldeye, utnapishti дополняют список соитий на мешках с товаром в подсобке "немыслимым совокуплением" из Салмана Рушди, которого я не читал, потому не знаю, насколько оно порочно, и кто там фрустрирован. Но сочно, конечно, как ему не стыдно.

They came down from those high stacks with more than their clothes smelling of spice. So passionately had they fed upon one another, so profoundly had sweat and blood and the secretions of their bodies mingled, in that foetid atmosphere heavy with the odours of cardamom and cumin, so intimately had they conjoined, not only with each other but with what-hung-on-the-air, yes, and with the spice-sacks themselves--some of which, it must be said, were torn, so that peppercorns and elaichees poured out and were crushed between legs and bellies and thighs--that, for ever after, they sweated pepper'n'spices sweat, and their bodily fluids, too, smelled and even tasted of what had been crushed into their skins, what had mingled with their love-waters, what had been breathed in from the air during that transcendent fuck.