The hour we actually looked at each other
The San Fedele Church, in Milan, is covered with a giant screen playing a jewelry commercial with an American actress. It goes on and on. When you think it’s getting to the end, it goes back to the beginning. Sacredness wrapped up in commerce and eternity degenerating into a loop.
I’m at the piazza waiting. I won’t be able to see my nephew Jaime playing Pozzo in a “Waiting for Godot” production in Lisbon, so I let myself stay here, on this stone bench — a little, symbolic gesture of solidarity with all the Beckettians out there.
The American actress’s giant face appears to be looking at the bronze figure of Alessandro Manzoni in the piazza. He’s a lot smaller than her, but has the privilege of tridimensionality. (Reading his name on the base of the statue, I think, not without a sense of guilt, about the Portuguese edition of Manzoni’s novel, “Os Noivos”, I left at home, mostly unread.) Apparently, he died on that exact spot, coming out of the church, but I don’t have such information at this point. I just sense some special silence around the statue. The piazza in front of it is like a stage.
Nothing really happens — until you stop and wait. Then you see there’s something happening all the time.
A man jogs through the place, unbalancing reality, putting the city out of context. His feet are on fire, or maybe he’s just wearing his new flames sneakers. Another man, carrying a bouquet of flowers, crosses the piazza in a hurry. He looks like he’s trying to go as fast as he can without actually running. There’s surely some love emergency nearby; imagine it if you can.
It’s only after he’s gone that I notice the group on the other side of this Milanese piazza: six, seven women in her twenties listening to an old man, a guy with a philosopher’s head (bald, with the most crazy, platonic, disheveled hair). The women are sitting on stone benches like mine and the man is on his bike, leaning forward as he speaks. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I hear the women laughing from time to time. A choral, gentle laugh that fades away slowly, as if dismantled by the breeze. The scene is so surprising that it looks staged, if you know what I mean. That’s act one.
Act two; evening light. A man and a woman, dressed in black, enter the piazza walking side by side, looking at their phones. Without ever looking up, they walk to the center of the piazza and, then — following some instruction from their screens, no doubt —, turn at exactly the same time and exit the stage in another direction. There’s a simplicity, that one could also call a strangeness — how may I put it?, there’s this relaxed precision— in their actions that makes me think of the adjective “Pina Bauschian”. They are probably tourists like me, but they move like dancers. Distracted, intelligent dancers. Only when leaving the piazza, does the man look at the woman for the tiniest second; just enough to check if she’s still there, by his side, looking at her phone, walking blind.
Peter Handke’s “The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other” — that play with no words, where characters simply cross the stage — also comes to mind. But in this piazza’s accidental theater, some people do speak. Like the Brazilian couple that has just got here. The tall man says he’s tired, that he doesn’t want to walk anymore, but the short woman keeps telling jokes, making him laugh, and he kind of drags himself behind her. She pulls him with an invisible thread made of wit, perseverance, nonchalance, timing.
Sitting on this stone bench, I wait for act three. I try not to look again at the damn commercial on the Church façade, but I end up giving it one more glimpse. God? Godot? Anyone?