Today everyone loves as best as they can. But it hasn’t always been like that. When we came into the world we carried an unlimited capacity to love that we trimmed and adapted to the space we had in order to allow that love to grow.
When we fall in love we fuse the capacity to love from two different people and try to nurture it beyond the trims we made when we were children, so that new leaves might sprout again at the knots and scars of the cut branches.
To the old elm, split by lightning and half-rotted, with the rains of April… You know. The old story.
This work is about love, which doesn’t really mean anything. We call love many things. Too many.
The piece begins with two lovers, or former lovers, or ex-lovers who might become lovers again, who have scheduled a date. By accident, or perhaps deliberately, the floor they tread on sinks and they end up falling into a basement of an abandoned factory. They are trapped, wounded, and they cannot find a way out or a way to call for help. While they wait for assistance, or for something to occur (everything is very Godot), they recall what their relationship was. They cannot escape. Or perhaps they can. Maybe those who are trapped are the spectators.
—EVA: Poetry, now, beloved, is that the reality that’s there to trample us
And reality is messing with us in an abandoned factory.
The lovers recall their story. Or perhaps they are inventing it. For many love stories, the narrative matters more than the emotions. Emotions are a substance that is too elusive—something that is created and vanishes in an instant, in a glass of wine, a sunset, or a shower. It exists and at the same time it does not. Love is very quantum, or very tricky. To seize it, to feel that it does not slip away, or that we once had it, we use words. The only thing left of a love story is its narrative.
—FRAN: I think we’re not in the same moment in the same place
As if there’s a lag and I always arrive late to you, and because of that lack of synchronization I miss the rain that wets your hair.
The protagonists hurled scraps of that narrative at one another. Pieces of a puzzle that cannot be fitted together, neither as a whole nor separately. A heap of images, Polaroids, which they lay out before the audience so that they decide how much love there was, or wasn’t, between them. Or how much love each spectator feels.
An alternate title would be: “The Construction-Container of Love”. They are rebuilding a relationship, and in the container parked on the street fall fragments with no order or meaning, yet at the same time they signify something. What ends up in a work container completes its cycle. Perhaps a pedestrian treasure-hunter rescues some diamond, but the rest will go to that dump where nothing returns. The text has a sense of an avalanche, in which we glimpse fragments of what might have been and what did not. In the end, any couple is a balance between what could have been and what was not.
—EVA: To love cannot be conjured in the past; it’s like one of those diseases you carry forever in the blood.
In the end, the only thing that remains from a love is the narrative. That is why every part of a splitting couple carries a different story. If they shared the same narrative, perhaps they could continue the relationship. When the stories diverge too much, the lovers cannot stay together. There is no love without a shared narrative.
When a couple separates and there is a struggle for that narrative, the past becomes a battlefield, said Walter Benjamin. Does what matters for nations also apply to couples? Is a couple a small nation? Better not, let’s not complicate the world of love any further.
The author is a playwright, and also a poet, and also a humorist. The three flavors mingle in the work. A poetic language sprinkled, or seasoned, with bad jokes. Or perhaps bad poems seasoned with good jokes.
—EVA: Your diagnosis makes me feel calmer, thanks to your years of experience as a doctor at the Hospital that doesn’t exist in the specialty of Blabbermouth.
—FRAN: We won’t get out of here thanks to your sarcasm.
(Silence)
—EVA: And if we have sex?
If you are in love, you might want to skip this book, or perhaps you shouldn’t; perhaps it will serve as a warning. Either way, you’ll have to discover it for yourself. True love is always changing, always under renovation, so a collapse is not necessarily bad news.
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Author: Francho Aijón. Title: The Collapse of Love. Publisher: Teatropo. Sale: Todostuslibros.