Galego | English

Theatre

NOCTURNOS

By MANUEL LOURENZO

About this book

Nocturnos by Manuel Lourenzo is a triad of singular elements in what is regarded as “reality”. They are obviously not –for those who know the author- remotely conventional, neither in plot nor form. Xoana, the queen and owner of Castile, hugs a mummiphied corpse, on her way to a stoning that lasts four decades; the crypt of the Capulets becomes alive with the revival of the childhood of those lovers of the night, when the light lays her egg in Verona; actors rehearse the sequences of a film in the same mansion that Henry James uses for the story of the original script of That story of Bly…

Three stories, three dramas coated in irony, are like a veil made of gauze that never hides horror -- they just discolour it.

Book fragment

SCENE I

Field in Palencia.

Dawn.

Xoana pulls a carriage with the mummy of Filipe.

A crow caws

XOANA

The crow. Just a caw in the air. With the day it comes, with night it goes. Rumour has it, it warns us. But in our times who understands its Latin.
This looks like a good place. Let’s stop here. Candles belong to the day and travel to the night, on the moon. There is greed in the eyes and it is the King and Queen who pass by.
Let us stop here, in Torquemada. Not in Gante or in Brussels, but in a vessel whose mast is lost in the high seas.
Our vessel, Filipe. Our bed of love and death on the waves.
Never like in that storm I came to feel the real and true motherland.
The motherland was us in the fury of the rough seas. It was your beauty, Felipe. It was my hands around your neck.
This moor shall also be our motherland, and our bed and our home.
My motherland is, my lord, wherever you are.
Goodbye, Miraflores de Burgos. Goodbye plague. Goodbye old motherlands of memory, knitted in tender blue.
Now send the crow, a bird of future prognoses.
Ubi tu, Philippe, ego, Johanna.
Wherever you go, there you will find me.
I am with you, my Prince. Both together are Law and Land.
The rest is air.
She sings
My friend
Takes my love with him.
My lover
is taken by my love.