Here Comes Treble: A Pirandellian Plot
...When Happiness, in the form of a handsome and charming man, spilt wine in the lap of her borrowed white dress one evening after a concert, she laughed, opened her eyes wide, and accepted it with open arms.
From the time she left Misery to live with Happiness, she became a whole woman, no longer the fragmented person she had been...
Isabel Bradley presents a portrait of a life which travelled from the shadows into bright sunlight.
During her first three years, her mother knew her as the child who didn’t sleep. As she grew from babyhood into a knobbly-kneed little girl, her father knew her as a child over-sensitive to teasing, who screamed when he appeared with a false beard on Christmas morning.
When it came time for her to go to school, her teachers knew her as a bright but shy student who enjoyed her school-work. Other children knew her as one who ran, crying from their taunts. Her few, select friends knew her as a fearless climber of trees, a lover of dolls, and a good partner with a skipping rope.
When her father began teaching her to play the piccolo at the age of eight, he realised that she was a child with musical possibilities. A year later, her flute teacher learnt to love her as a student who did everything she was told, always eager to please. Still later, another flute teacher knew her as a flautist who responded diligently to the most strenuous methods, one who could become a truly accomplished player.
Her fellow-musicians in the youth orchestra saw her as the shy third-flute-and-piccolo – a really good piccolo-player. Some of the young men learnt to know her as flirt. Gradually, as she gained self-confidence, a smidgeon at a time, girls and boys began to see her as good company, someone with a sense of humour. She made more friends. It took a long time for her reputation as a flautist to overtake that of the piccolo-player.
After school, she studied at a secretarial college. Her first boss saw her as newly-fledged and groomed her in business etiquette and image. He never heard her play the flute.
Throughout her secretarial career, she maintained her image of immaculate grooming and good manners. She was seen as efficient, helpful and friendly. Her colleagues admired her, enjoyed her sense of humour and occasionally experienced her temper, which was mostly held in check. They told her their troubles and she shared hers, as women do.
Her first, young husband quickly grew to see her as a nuisance, someone to be cheated on and abandoned – along with their daughter.
Her second, somewhat older, husband saw her as someone who would nurse him in his old age. As the marriage progressed, he knew her to be a good wife and mother, but gradually, as his drinking problem grew, came to see her as an emotional ‘punching bag’, someone to blame for his own faults, to be ground down.
In the context of marriage, she knew herself to be a failure, to deserve misery and blame.
While miserable at home, she was the life and soul of the wind-quintet group that she played with once a week, secretary and principal flautist in an amateur orchestra, liked and respected at the school where she worked and turned to for advice and encouragement by her flute students. She was the harried mother of two, buying school uniforms, transporting them to and from their schools, sporting events and extra lessons, giving advice and doling out love, encouragement and punishment when appropriate.
She played the part of horrified observer at her daughter’s 16th birthday party, when it seemed the entire neighbourhood descended, uninvited, on her home, drank themselves into oblivion, turned up the volume on the pounding music system, and littered the beautiful, open front lawn with beer cans and worse. Her husband was secluded in the music room; he, too, drank himself into oblivion.
When her husband threw her daughter out of home in a scene straight out of a soap-opera, she once again saw herself as a helpless observer, until her cowed spirit arose, horror-struck. After summoning all her courage, she consulted a lawyer about divorce. However, weakened by years of allowing herself to be a victim, she didn’t persevere.
She did, however, read self-help books and grew to see herself not as a failure, but as someone who made a mistake or two, worthy of happiness and love. Looking in the mirror, she told herself each day she was strong, that she deserved better, that she could change. Believing herself and in herself, she grew stronger.
Her daughter returned home, and life continued with its many facets. She felt that no-one knew the entire person that she felt she could be, if only she was permitted by Life to unify all the faceted facets that made up herself. To each person she knew, she showed a different façade.
When Happiness, in the form of a handsome and charming man, spilt wine in the lap of her borrowed white dress one evening after a concert, she laughed, opened her eyes wide, and accepted it with open arms.
From the time she left Misery to live with Happiness, she became a whole woman, no longer the fragmented person she had been.
Or did she?
To a few, whose perceptions were biased by the poisonous talk of those who resented her happiness, she was known as a wicked, ‘scarlet’ woman. Some people knew her, still, as a person not quite sure of herself in unfamiliar surroundings.
Most people knew her, at long last, as the confident, happy wife, mother, friend and musician she was meant to be.
When reflecting on her life, it seemed to her that she lived in a play directed by someone else, a puppet being bounced on a string, changing character with each scene. Some of those scenes, in retrospect, seemed eerily surreal. They could almost be viewed as Pirandellian.
“Pirandellian,” you ask, “whatever is that?”
Luigi Pirandello was a Nobel Laureate in literature, awarded the Prize in 1934 for his contribution to Drama and Theatre. His plays and novels centred on how fantasy and reality intertwine in everyone’s’ lives. In his view, each person we meet creates their own view of us, as we do of them. They only see the facets of us they are capable of understanding, as we do with them. Our perceptions of each other are influenced by personal experiences, cultures and prejudices.
Our heroine in the story above was not a particularly unusual woman. She lived each day as well as she could, and reacted to those around her, bringing into existence those facets of her personality that they called forth. This is the normalcy of life, its oddities creating the style and form of each day.
Every one of us is, in fact, a ‘Character in Search of an Author’.
looking to others for direction in the Pirandellian Play that is our lives.
(‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ was one of Pirandello's most famous plays),
References: http://www.itiscannizzaro.net/Ianni/booksweb/pirandello/teatropira1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
http://www.worldtrans.org/TP/TP1/TP1-9.HTML
Until next time… ‘here comes Treble!’
© Copyright Reserved
By Isabel Bradley
