An Indian Boy Passed by Here
Dear Anton Pávlovitch,
I know for a fact that you were very fussy about titles. I've read the story of how, as you finished the play most people would call your masterpiece, you rejected every single title that came to your mind until The Cherry Orchard popped up. Then you were as happy as a kid with a new toy and took to repeating aloud what you thought was an extraordinary title, making Stanislavsky (or "ski," you would be amused to see how much dissention there is about the spelling of his name) write years later that it was a good title all right, but he couldn't see what you found so extraordinary about it.
I think I know the answer. The Cherry Orchard was such a basic, down-to-earth title that it made people curious, made them wonder what could have made this orchard so special in somebody's life as to become the title of a play. All of your titles were based on the same gimmick. All of them were fabulous titles that did wonders for anyone who was ever in charge of promoting your amazing plays. No small achievement, to do it based on simplicity.
I don't have that gift. More often than not my titles are too far-fetched, if not downright meaningless. Not to mention the penchant I have for incomprehensible titles such as Zugzwang. Something always seems to be the matter with my titles. The play I've written, which has occupied most of my time in recent years, to the point of making it look as if I had become some kind of a maniac, is a good example. In Portuguese it's named Cantando sem Respirar, a word-by-word translation being Singing without Breathing. Trouble is that in Portuguese it's an intriguing title that makes people want to know if it's a literal statement or a metaphor. Oddly, in any other language it becomes totally meaningless.
I wish I knew how to give simple titles to what I write. It hardly ever happens. This journal entry, for example, was going to be named The Indian Boy. For once a simple title. It was a reference to a dream I had just had when I started writing the entry on January 18th. But it was not finished. The entry, I mean. Not the dream.
The reason for leaving the entry unfinished has to do with things that have been in the center of my life for almost ten years. I was fifty-three when I was stricken by Parkinson's disease. The good news is that nowadays Parkinson's is approached differently, as more than one disease. There is Parkinson's proper (a devastating condition and a true tragedy for patients and their families, leading to immobility, great suffering in the final stages and a difficult agony that makes anyone who loves the patient wish he/she may die as soon as possible) and there are the subtypes, each one having to be understood separately, because the initial symptoms and the outcome of one subtype can be very different from another. Mine is called Benign Tremulous Parkinsonism. Once you become pals with it, you can call it BTP.
Friends and family seem to think very highly of what they call my "bravura behavior" towards the disease and the way it has of robbing me of one thing after the other. People were especially admiring five years ago when, as I have told so many times in this journal that one of these days I will hear my online friends screaming, I put on Waiting for Godot at a bookshop, directing the actors (but not the production) and playing Vladmir, the more rational of the two tramps. I got a lot of praise for that work, but somehow I could feel all along that the praise was mostly for doing what I did, not necessarily for the way I did it.
And yet, I think I did a good job. Especially at the end, the final scene, in which, contrary to a great number of interpretations, I've always been dead sure the author wrote the stuff to be played with pathos. From the moment the boy exits up to the play's last image, when Vladimir and Estragon say, "Well, shall we go?" "Yes, let's go", and don't move, I believe what's happening on the stage is an epiphany. It cannot be played without the awareness that this is the conclusion to a pathetic journey, made even more so by the knowledge that it will repeat iself over and over again, well into eternity. It's a dangerous scene. If it's played detachedly, with no warmth, and especially without any compassion, not only it doesn't get off the ground but it makes the whole play pointless. A waste of time. On the other hand, if rather than pathos, the scene is played with anything remotely close to cheap sentimentality, the result is even worse.
Too bad if I end up being called conceited, or pretentious, or some such charming qualifier, but I've never doubted that not only did I get that goddamn scene off the ground, as I managed to elicit a beautiful performance from the actor who played Estragon (my friend of many years, Milton Soares) and I myself gave my very best performance as an actor. The sensation that took over me each night as the scene was being played was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had with fulfillment, the feeling of being at the right place, doing the right thing.
But then, I have also never doubted that I made a horrible mess of the long segment just before Pozzo's first entrance. That's Beckett at his most cryptographic. I never understood one inch of what's going on there. As I played it each night I could feel the frustration that was taking over the audience as they watched two guys talking like parrots, looking at each other with a blank face and empty eyes. At such moments, rather than coming to the rescue, experience acts against you as you don't realize that you're taking a whole lot of tricks out of the bag where they had been for years in order to deceive yourself and the audience. You start moving around and talking in such a way as to make it look as if you were master of your game, when in fact you are failing miserably. During the five weeks the show was on, I never stopped studying the scene but I never really understood it. It will remain one of my most frustrating moments as an actor.
The final balance however must have been positive, for people raved about the production and, to my surprise, about my performance. I think I never got such warm compliments. Even now, five years later, one or the other friend still brings it up and there comes the word "beautiful." I don't mean to say that I'm not grateful. I am. Even the ups and downs will provide me with memories to think in a long time to come about how difficult it is in this life to do something really well. It will make me think about the weird way achievement and failure have of walking side by side forever.
Yes, there was praise for Godot at the bookshop. But I never stopped being convinced that the praise I got was more for what people interpreted as my rebelliousness, my refusal to yield to an incurable disease. Even my neurologist was kind of in awe, saying that my attitude was my salvation. Beautiful words. If only I hadn't become leery of beautiful words. More often than not they work as masks and as such they are utterly destructive, for the only chance of salvation lies in the face becoming plainly visible.
Everybody was wrong. There has never been such a thing as my "atitude towards the disease." I have been reckless and totally irresponsible, recklessness probably being the most common way of running from things you don't have the guts to face. I feel like crying when I think of the tremendous disappointment that would take over people who think so highly of me if they knew the truth. I have no discipline. I was warned years ago that I must sing. Parkinson's robs you of tonus. The muscles of your whole body become weaker, including the muscles inside your larynx, whose function is to sustain the vocal chords. That's why people with Parkinson's have an odd way of talking and a peculiar voice that nobody else has. Research all over the world shows conclusively that singing is the most effective way of keeping your voice in shape. Parkinson's patients who dutifully followed a singing program totally succeeded in preventing their voices from deteriorating.
I'm lucky enough to have a friend who's a famous singer, probably the most successful singer of mantras and related music in Brazil. Years ago he helped me with a singing program to exercise my voice every other day by singing six songs: three easy, two average, and one difficult. All I had to do was take thirty minutes off my day every forty-eight hours to do that bloody singing. Did I? Nope. Why? Maybe in Bulgaria they know a thing like that.
All of a sudden I became aware that I no longer like being who I am. I have no admiration whatsoever for the person inside whose diseased body I feel trapped. Oddly, since I have indulged in getting dangerously close to despising him for having become so vulnerable, I think this person is aging remarkably well. Two years ago, a TV series was made about the great divas of Brazilian cinema. Each episode was an hour-long documentary on one of the ladies. One of the episodes was about Tônia Carrero, whose nephew I am. In between film clips, my cousin Cecil, her only child, his son Carlos, a successful director in his own right, and myself were seen separately talking about her, telling stories and stuff.
I didn't see the thing when it was first aired. By the time I managed to see it, so many people had called or sent e-mails saying that I was amazing, so incredibly charming and good looking, that I was all set to think the opposite. I was ready to find myself impossibly gauche, worn out and unpleasant to look at.
I had the surprise of my life. Thanks largely to the cameraman who, not only did a fine job, but had the wonderful idea of shooting outdoors on a day when there was all the time a breeze not strong enough to spoil the shooting but enough to undo my hair, making me use my right hand again and again to take it off my face. Just try to give an actor, absolutely any actor, a clue like that and you will see what happens. It will look as if it had been planned and the actor rehearsed a lot to make such a silly thing give the tremendous boost it gave to the whole interview. Any actor in the world would have a field day doing stuff for the camera with the breeze as his ally. I should know better than to bring it up, but it probably was my most impressive appearance on TV.
Ironically, at sixty, it was the last one. I will never again appear on TV. Nor will I ever again make a movie. The person in whose body I feel trapped cannot do this kind of work anymore. Not only the disease is progressive as in the disgraceful country where I was born the motherfuckers who manage the big laboratories producing drugs that cannot be discontinued are free to interrupt their distribution for sordid reasons like forcing the price up without anything ever happening to them. Like now. If that breeze came on to do the same trick again, the hand taking the formerly charming person's hair off his face would be visibly shaky, and that, in turn, would look freakish.
Then I had the dream. Without any kind of explanation, just out of the blue, I was what I've been told I should call a "Native American" boy. Trouble is that I'd rather face the seven plagues of Egypt than yield to the particular kind of idiocy that in the 21st century became knowm as "political correctness". I'll be damned if I will refrain from saying "Indian" because somebody up there decided that "Native American" is the politically correct equivalent to it. I could provide a long list of things that are most decidedly incorrect when it comes to politics. I can assure you that saying "indian" is not among them.
So, in the dream I was exactly who I am, my consciousness was intact, even my memories were the same, but I had turned into a teen-age indian boy.
Not only that but the dream made it clear that I was a Lakota.
I'll be damned if I know the meaning of a Brazilian in his early sixties dreaming that he had turned into a teenage Lakota boy any more than I ever knew the meaning of the scene in Waiting for Godot just before Pozzo's entrance. I mean, there are indians in Brazil. Since I had to dream that I had turned into one, why not a Brazilian indian (or should I say a "Native Brazilian")? No idea. All I know is that as the dream began I was a teenage Lakota boy riding his horse on a prairie that couldn't possibly be more beautiful. I was looking ahead, everything I saw spelled splendor, and I was bursting with happiness for feeling so utterly free.
Dear Anton Pavlovitch,
This part of the entry was written almost forty-eight hours after the first part. I had the unfortunate idea of adding a photo of myself in the bookshop production of Godot. Not only did I fail many times before finally getting to post the darn photo, as this devilish machine wiped out everything that had been typed after the photo of the indian boy on his horse. I've never been capable of rewriting anything from memory. At best I can give an approximate idea of what I wrote before.
I couldn't understand the sensation the indian boy caused on Facebook when I posted an entry there about the dream. Unless I put into practice my old theory that Facebook has the strange power of making stupidity engulf the mind of whoever dares entering its bizarre territory. A few brave minds resist heroically. Most succumb. My post about the indian boy got some of the weirdest comments I ever got. But then, thanks to goddamn Facebook, it was read by my friend Celina, who is older than me and has known me all my life (she and my cousin Cecil are cousins). Celina has been doing therapy for quite a few years and is very enthusiastic about it. Knowing, as she does, lots of details about me, she detected a few elements in the dream that she believes are self referential.
Since early childhood, my cousins and I spent the summer holidays with my grandfather in the property he had in the mountains near Rio. There was a horse there. From a very early age one of my biggest pleasures was riding the horse all over the place, which at that time was quite wild (not anymore). Horse riding became even more prominent in my life when I was fourteen. The first horse had become too old and was given freedom to do as he pleased in the field where he spent the whole day until dying of old age.
So, on my birthday, I was given a horse all of my own to ride all over the place again and the time I spent doing it provided me with the strongest sensation of liberty I have ever experienced. Celina thinks the way the dream began was a recollection of my own past. When she sent me the picture she had found on the web, which I have printed here, of an indian boy riding a horse I was taken aback. It was like watching a still of the dream.
She believes the dream became intensely self referential when the word splendor was used as if it were quite common in Portuguese (which it definitely isn't). Her interpretation is that the time I rode my own horse all over the place in total freedom, with so much future ahead, no threats, just hope in what was going to be there for me, the time when I was beginning to move ahead towards adulthood, that was the time of my entire life that spelled like splendor. Not now. Now is the time when I desperately need to revisit the past to be reminded that the splendor was there for me once.
So, in the end, it looks as if the indian boy is a symbol of the very best there once was in me. His appearance in a dream was a blessing. I finally understood that I didn't turn into him. It was him that took over me, coming out of the part of me where he had always been, where I know he will always be. How much easier he has made it for me to go through hell since I have to. And how much I love him for that. In the breathtakingly beautiful Lakota tradition I have long respected and admired, the indian boy has made me have more faith in the Great Spirit.
I know for a fact that you were very fussy about titles. I've read the story of how, as you finished the play most people would call your masterpiece, you rejected every single title that came to your mind until The Cherry Orchard popped up. Then you were as happy as a kid with a new toy and took to repeating aloud what you thought was an extraordinary title, making Stanislavsky (or "ski," you would be amused to see how much dissention there is about the spelling of his name) write years later that it was a good title all right, but he couldn't see what you found so extraordinary about it.
I think I know the answer. The Cherry Orchard was such a basic, down-to-earth title that it made people curious, made them wonder what could have made this orchard so special in somebody's life as to become the title of a play. All of your titles were based on the same gimmick. All of them were fabulous titles that did wonders for anyone who was ever in charge of promoting your amazing plays. No small achievement, to do it based on simplicity.
I don't have that gift. More often than not my titles are too far-fetched, if not downright meaningless. Not to mention the penchant I have for incomprehensible titles such as Zugzwang. Something always seems to be the matter with my titles. The play I've written, which has occupied most of my time in recent years, to the point of making it look as if I had become some kind of a maniac, is a good example. In Portuguese it's named Cantando sem Respirar, a word-by-word translation being Singing without Breathing. Trouble is that in Portuguese it's an intriguing title that makes people want to know if it's a literal statement or a metaphor. Oddly, in any other language it becomes totally meaningless.
I wish I knew how to give simple titles to what I write. It hardly ever happens. This journal entry, for example, was going to be named The Indian Boy. For once a simple title. It was a reference to a dream I had just had when I started writing the entry on January 18th. But it was not finished. The entry, I mean. Not the dream.
The reason for leaving the entry unfinished has to do with things that have been in the center of my life for almost ten years. I was fifty-three when I was stricken by Parkinson's disease. The good news is that nowadays Parkinson's is approached differently, as more than one disease. There is Parkinson's proper (a devastating condition and a true tragedy for patients and their families, leading to immobility, great suffering in the final stages and a difficult agony that makes anyone who loves the patient wish he/she may die as soon as possible) and there are the subtypes, each one having to be understood separately, because the initial symptoms and the outcome of one subtype can be very different from another. Mine is called Benign Tremulous Parkinsonism. Once you become pals with it, you can call it BTP.
Friends and family seem to think very highly of what they call my "bravura behavior" towards the disease and the way it has of robbing me of one thing after the other. People were especially admiring five years ago when, as I have told so many times in this journal that one of these days I will hear my online friends screaming, I put on Waiting for Godot at a bookshop, directing the actors (but not the production) and playing Vladmir, the more rational of the two tramps. I got a lot of praise for that work, but somehow I could feel all along that the praise was mostly for doing what I did, not necessarily for the way I did it.
And yet, I think I did a good job. Especially at the end, the final scene, in which, contrary to a great number of interpretations, I've always been dead sure the author wrote the stuff to be played with pathos. From the moment the boy exits up to the play's last image, when Vladimir and Estragon say, "Well, shall we go?" "Yes, let's go", and don't move, I believe what's happening on the stage is an epiphany. It cannot be played without the awareness that this is the conclusion to a pathetic journey, made even more so by the knowledge that it will repeat iself over and over again, well into eternity. It's a dangerous scene. If it's played detachedly, with no warmth, and especially without any compassion, not only it doesn't get off the ground but it makes the whole play pointless. A waste of time. On the other hand, if rather than pathos, the scene is played with anything remotely close to cheap sentimentality, the result is even worse.
Too bad if I end up being called conceited, or pretentious, or some such charming qualifier, but I've never doubted that not only did I get that goddamn scene off the ground, as I managed to elicit a beautiful performance from the actor who played Estragon (my friend of many years, Milton Soares) and I myself gave my very best performance as an actor. The sensation that took over me each night as the scene was being played was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had with fulfillment, the feeling of being at the right place, doing the right thing.
But then, I have also never doubted that I made a horrible mess of the long segment just before Pozzo's first entrance. That's Beckett at his most cryptographic. I never understood one inch of what's going on there. As I played it each night I could feel the frustration that was taking over the audience as they watched two guys talking like parrots, looking at each other with a blank face and empty eyes. At such moments, rather than coming to the rescue, experience acts against you as you don't realize that you're taking a whole lot of tricks out of the bag where they had been for years in order to deceive yourself and the audience. You start moving around and talking in such a way as to make it look as if you were master of your game, when in fact you are failing miserably. During the five weeks the show was on, I never stopped studying the scene but I never really understood it. It will remain one of my most frustrating moments as an actor.
The final balance however must have been positive, for people raved about the production and, to my surprise, about my performance. I think I never got such warm compliments. Even now, five years later, one or the other friend still brings it up and there comes the word "beautiful." I don't mean to say that I'm not grateful. I am. Even the ups and downs will provide me with memories to think in a long time to come about how difficult it is in this life to do something really well. It will make me think about the weird way achievement and failure have of walking side by side forever.
Yes, there was praise for Godot at the bookshop. But I never stopped being convinced that the praise I got was more for what people interpreted as my rebelliousness, my refusal to yield to an incurable disease. Even my neurologist was kind of in awe, saying that my attitude was my salvation. Beautiful words. If only I hadn't become leery of beautiful words. More often than not they work as masks and as such they are utterly destructive, for the only chance of salvation lies in the face becoming plainly visible.
Everybody was wrong. There has never been such a thing as my "atitude towards the disease." I have been reckless and totally irresponsible, recklessness probably being the most common way of running from things you don't have the guts to face. I feel like crying when I think of the tremendous disappointment that would take over people who think so highly of me if they knew the truth. I have no discipline. I was warned years ago that I must sing. Parkinson's robs you of tonus. The muscles of your whole body become weaker, including the muscles inside your larynx, whose function is to sustain the vocal chords. That's why people with Parkinson's have an odd way of talking and a peculiar voice that nobody else has. Research all over the world shows conclusively that singing is the most effective way of keeping your voice in shape. Parkinson's patients who dutifully followed a singing program totally succeeded in preventing their voices from deteriorating.
I'm lucky enough to have a friend who's a famous singer, probably the most successful singer of mantras and related music in Brazil. Years ago he helped me with a singing program to exercise my voice every other day by singing six songs: three easy, two average, and one difficult. All I had to do was take thirty minutes off my day every forty-eight hours to do that bloody singing. Did I? Nope. Why? Maybe in Bulgaria they know a thing like that.
All of a sudden I became aware that I no longer like being who I am. I have no admiration whatsoever for the person inside whose diseased body I feel trapped. Oddly, since I have indulged in getting dangerously close to despising him for having become so vulnerable, I think this person is aging remarkably well. Two years ago, a TV series was made about the great divas of Brazilian cinema. Each episode was an hour-long documentary on one of the ladies. One of the episodes was about Tônia Carrero, whose nephew I am. In between film clips, my cousin Cecil, her only child, his son Carlos, a successful director in his own right, and myself were seen separately talking about her, telling stories and stuff.
I didn't see the thing when it was first aired. By the time I managed to see it, so many people had called or sent e-mails saying that I was amazing, so incredibly charming and good looking, that I was all set to think the opposite. I was ready to find myself impossibly gauche, worn out and unpleasant to look at.
I had the surprise of my life. Thanks largely to the cameraman who, not only did a fine job, but had the wonderful idea of shooting outdoors on a day when there was all the time a breeze not strong enough to spoil the shooting but enough to undo my hair, making me use my right hand again and again to take it off my face. Just try to give an actor, absolutely any actor, a clue like that and you will see what happens. It will look as if it had been planned and the actor rehearsed a lot to make such a silly thing give the tremendous boost it gave to the whole interview. Any actor in the world would have a field day doing stuff for the camera with the breeze as his ally. I should know better than to bring it up, but it probably was my most impressive appearance on TV.
Ironically, at sixty, it was the last one. I will never again appear on TV. Nor will I ever again make a movie. The person in whose body I feel trapped cannot do this kind of work anymore. Not only the disease is progressive as in the disgraceful country where I was born the motherfuckers who manage the big laboratories producing drugs that cannot be discontinued are free to interrupt their distribution for sordid reasons like forcing the price up without anything ever happening to them. Like now. If that breeze came on to do the same trick again, the hand taking the formerly charming person's hair off his face would be visibly shaky, and that, in turn, would look freakish.
Then I had the dream. Without any kind of explanation, just out of the blue, I was what I've been told I should call a "Native American" boy. Trouble is that I'd rather face the seven plagues of Egypt than yield to the particular kind of idiocy that in the 21st century became knowm as "political correctness". I'll be damned if I will refrain from saying "Indian" because somebody up there decided that "Native American" is the politically correct equivalent to it. I could provide a long list of things that are most decidedly incorrect when it comes to politics. I can assure you that saying "indian" is not among them.
So, in the dream I was exactly who I am, my consciousness was intact, even my memories were the same, but I had turned into a teen-age indian boy.
Not only that but the dream made it clear that I was a Lakota.
I'll be damned if I know the meaning of a Brazilian in his early sixties dreaming that he had turned into a teenage Lakota boy any more than I ever knew the meaning of the scene in Waiting for Godot just before Pozzo's entrance. I mean, there are indians in Brazil. Since I had to dream that I had turned into one, why not a Brazilian indian (or should I say a "Native Brazilian")? No idea. All I know is that as the dream began I was a teenage Lakota boy riding his horse on a prairie that couldn't possibly be more beautiful. I was looking ahead, everything I saw spelled splendor, and I was bursting with happiness for feeling so utterly free.
Dear Anton Pavlovitch,
This part of the entry was written almost forty-eight hours after the first part. I had the unfortunate idea of adding a photo of myself in the bookshop production of Godot. Not only did I fail many times before finally getting to post the darn photo, as this devilish machine wiped out everything that had been typed after the photo of the indian boy on his horse. I've never been capable of rewriting anything from memory. At best I can give an approximate idea of what I wrote before.
I couldn't understand the sensation the indian boy caused on Facebook when I posted an entry there about the dream. Unless I put into practice my old theory that Facebook has the strange power of making stupidity engulf the mind of whoever dares entering its bizarre territory. A few brave minds resist heroically. Most succumb. My post about the indian boy got some of the weirdest comments I ever got. But then, thanks to goddamn Facebook, it was read by my friend Celina, who is older than me and has known me all my life (she and my cousin Cecil are cousins). Celina has been doing therapy for quite a few years and is very enthusiastic about it. Knowing, as she does, lots of details about me, she detected a few elements in the dream that she believes are self referential.
Since early childhood, my cousins and I spent the summer holidays with my grandfather in the property he had in the mountains near Rio. There was a horse there. From a very early age one of my biggest pleasures was riding the horse all over the place, which at that time was quite wild (not anymore). Horse riding became even more prominent in my life when I was fourteen. The first horse had become too old and was given freedom to do as he pleased in the field where he spent the whole day until dying of old age.
So, on my birthday, I was given a horse all of my own to ride all over the place again and the time I spent doing it provided me with the strongest sensation of liberty I have ever experienced. Celina thinks the way the dream began was a recollection of my own past. When she sent me the picture she had found on the web, which I have printed here, of an indian boy riding a horse I was taken aback. It was like watching a still of the dream.
She believes the dream became intensely self referential when the word splendor was used as if it were quite common in Portuguese (which it definitely isn't). Her interpretation is that the time I rode my own horse all over the place in total freedom, with so much future ahead, no threats, just hope in what was going to be there for me, the time when I was beginning to move ahead towards adulthood, that was the time of my entire life that spelled like splendor. Not now. Now is the time when I desperately need to revisit the past to be reminded that the splendor was there for me once.
So, in the end, it looks as if the indian boy is a symbol of the very best there once was in me. His appearance in a dream was a blessing. I finally understood that I didn't turn into him. It was him that took over me, coming out of the part of me where he had always been, where I know he will always be. How much easier he has made it for me to go through hell since I have to. And how much I love him for that. In the breathtakingly beautiful Lakota tradition I have long respected and admired, the indian boy has made me have more faith in the Great Spirit.