Wounded Dog (Cachorro Ferido)
An adaptation of various texts by
Lucia Murat,
Grupo Do Jeito que da, Chico Buarque, Herbert Vianna,
Caetano Veloso and Gonzaguinha.
A
man’s confession and his memories of the 1960s
The
performance begins as the character finishes reading an
interview he had previously given for a prestigious
brazilian newspaper. The character realises that the
journalist has completely turned around everything that was
said during the interview. At this point, he starts to look
back on his time spent as a political prisoner during the
repression of the Brazilian dictatorship after the
military
coup
of 1964, and to compare his life then with what it is
today.
WOUNDED
DOG
(text)
1)
Music
01: It is forbidden to forbid (Caetano Veloso)
musique
02: Einstürzende Neubauten
Son
of a bitch! What’s the point? A three hour interview to
come out with that! To call the fucking torturer a doctor,
and me a terrorist!!! Twenty years on he’s still a doctor
and what’s become of me? They could have at least put an
‘ex’ before each name. Is that really too much to ask?
Ex-torturer and ex-terrorist…They didn’t even need to put
the profession… but doctor and terrorist!!! What’s more the
way it was done – seemingly so fair, and all very
scientific, genre ‘What a balanced article in the free
press’!
*
Father, take away this “chalice”
Father, take away this “chalice”
Father, take away this “chalice”
Full with bloody red wine
2)
If
they think that I am going to dance to that tune then they
are very wrong. I didn’t dance in the ‘pau-de-arara’
(torture instrument) so why dance now because an old fool
has decided to sack me… And it’s no good saying there’s no
connection because there is! Who does he think he is? No,
he can’t do this this to me. He left me bound, in chains,
paralysed even hung once…oh God! I can’t forget that when
I’m being set up. The guy who sacked me is so old and mad,
he’s got one foot in the grave, yet for me he’s the
torturer, the all-powerful.
*
Leave my heart alone
For it is full up to the brim with grief,
And you should take great care
As one more drop could push me over the edge.
3)
Shit…she
hasn’t called me…I bet she’s read the article and never
wants to see me again. She just doesn’t know what to do,
poor stupid idiot…She thinks that she’s not going to be
able to sleep with me anymore because you don’t fuck a
martyr, it’s our Lord, it’s Jesus Christ, who fucks Jesus
Christ??? That’s it, hey? Hard to imagine that he’s human,
that he has desires, he shits, he gets erections isn’t it?
The survivor isn’t human like the torturer isn’t
either…Shit, what’s worse is that I believe that too. All
you lot think we’re different in your pretend belief that
such a thing would never happen to you… Listen up, we’re
going to do something here: gallows for each of us in the
public square…We can stop, we can stop… Leave mine for when
I’m eighty, this is my story and you’re going to have to
put up with me!!!
Musique
3 : The Beatles.
*
I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen
So now don’t ask me or make me promises
I don’t want to say, or believe
That it will be different, that everything has changed
You make it out like you didn’t realize things were not
right
And my mistake was to believe that being by your side
Would be enough
Oh God that was all that I wanted
I would say your name
Don’t leave me
Ever
4)
Music
4: Chalice
(version by Milton Nascimento and Chico Buarque)
Manifesto…manifesto
of… manifesto of hatred…
* “I Took my baby
On A Saturday Bang
Boy Is That Girl With You
Yes We're One And The Same
Now I Believe In Miracles
And A Miracle
Has Happened Tonight
But, If
You're Thinkin'
About My Baby
It Don't Matter If You're
Black Or White
They Print My Message
In The Saturday Sun
I Had To Tell Them
I Ain't Second To None
And I Told About Equality
An It's True
Either You're Wrong
Or You're Right
But, If
You're Thinkin'
About My Baby
It
Don't Matter If You're
Black Or White”
* Poor Americans on that night at Louisiana,
English tourists get mugged in Copacabana,
The street kids are still convinced they were American…
Spanish tourists get taken prisoner at Aterro de
Flamengo…by mistake.
Rich Americans don’t go to Havana anymore.
Gay Americans bring AIDS to Rio during carnival time.
Gay organizations manage to control the illness from
spreading.
Only a powerful genocide, dressed in cassock, tie or
pinafore can pull the wool over their eyes to the fact that
homosexuals, making up the major group of victims, are the
only people capable of leading the movement that will fight
to put an end to the spread of HIV.
Americans appear very clear- cut, with their distinct
gestures, their limpid smiles, their shining, piercing eyes
that penetrate deep into the eyes of others, but that are
incapable of looking inside themselves…
Americans represent a large chunk of the happiness in this
world.
According to Americans, white is white, black is black and
mulatto is nothing special.
Gay is gay, hetero is hetero, woman is woman and money is
money… and in that way they earn their living, they
negotiate, they lose, they authorize, they pass laws,
whilst down here (South America), the regime is based on
ambiguity.
And we dance with a grace – the secret of which even I
don’t know, between pleasure and misery, between horrendous
and sublime.
Americans are not really Americans, they are an old
people, humans, who arrive, wander and pass through…they
are ‘typical’ Americans.
The Americans sense that something has been lost, that
something has been broken, is being broken.
Manifesto of hatred for humanity…One day I will write this
book. Will they let it be published? When will I finally be
able to hold my head up when I hear talk of torture? What
do I mean? A staid look, a slightly pained face, nothing
too strong, mustn’t piss anyone off, at the end of the day
no one is responsible but the torturer. You? No, not you,
you were at home looking after the children or who knows,
in Paris, looking after that head of yours. The only place
you weren’t, and this is for sure, was in the DOI-CODI (the
dictator’s cellars).
Music 5 : Einstürzende Neubauten.
(At
this moment the character receives a huge electric shock as
if he were reliving an instant of torture. He continues the
text in a thin voice, a trickle)
Well
very good, I learnt my lesson… a staid look, a slightly
pained face…nothing very strong…and my hatred? In which
shit hole do I throw my hatred?
*
When I call out, please, listen to me
For word by word, here is somebody opening himself up to
you
Heart in my mouth, chest open, I go on bleeding
I sing the struggles of this life of ours
When I open my mouth, this powerful force
Everything you hear, if I am alive, is the truth
Look at how my eyes glisten, and my hands tremble
And how my body drips with sweat, bursting with guts and
emotion
And if I cry, if the salt wets my smile
Do not be alarmed, sing, for your song is my strength to
sing
When I call out, please, listen to me
Because this is my only way of surviving: to love.
5)
Listen,
I didn’t write this…Look I’ll read it for you:
‘Another book published about the prisons in the sixties.
Despite the mass of books that have been published in the
years following the amnesty, the left remain unsatisfied,
still awaiting the great catharsis, but we should ask
ourselves if it’s really the right moment to go back down
memory lane…’ What’s that? The right moment? Is there ever
a right time? When? And the bloke signing the article is a
New-Yorker type, who finds it not ‘in’ to talk about
torture, prisons…well of course, he’s a modern or rather a
post modernist and now he talks to me of a time, and I must
remember the moment that he decides…the twat!
6)
Music
6 : la la la Human steps
You
won’t believe what I did…I was at a works do, you know how
it is, all very refined, all very intellectual. As we
talked about this and that, someone, I don’t know who,
bought up the subject of the dictatorship in Brazil and the
marks it left. You know, the culture question, something
like that. I hesitated, took a deep breath and began…like
someone talking nonsense: ‘I, for example, during my first
months in DOI-CODI…’ and I went on like that as if I was
talking about the dress of the imbecile sitting opposite
me. Fuck, that froze the conversation somewhat. I could see
written all over the face of the guy sitting next to me
that he didn’t know what to do: ‘Oh God…should I ask a
question or not?’ As for the imbecile sitting opposite me,
I felt she would have liked to have taken my hand in a
gesture of solidarity, but she preferred to come out with a
short, effective phrase: ‘What an era eh?’ I swear it was
funny. I felt the way they looked at me, the way they moved
their hands…they didn’t know what to do with their
hands…each with his own doubts. This time it was me
directing the performance. I called the shots.
7)
Why
can’t that be seen as funny? Why did they stare at me as if
it were a joke in bad taste? Can nobody laugh over
tragedies anymore? I remember hearing this story about a
girl who had been paralysed by the pau-de-arara but despite
that, she asked the guard not to sit her on the toilet seat
for fear of catching something and I was dying to laugh.
Someone from outside would have gone mad…someone from
outside…the laugh is of my making, the humour and the tears
too…torture can only be described: she spent three days in
the pau-de-arara, she became paralysed, she was given an
electric shock – fast, short, fat, impersonal…but nobody
wet themselves on the pau-de-arara, nobody fell off the
pau-de-arara nobody laughed at anybody!!!
8)
My
friend Pedro:
My friend Pedro was a thorn in their sides. Like a bough
full of courage that isn’t yet fully grown, he came out, he
fought and he died. And this is how he died, with a broken,
swollen, sectioned body. He died in agony like a drowned
man, tortured. He, like his father, disappeared. But no-one
expected to see him reappear. After two days in the dark
rooms, subjected to electric shocks, cold water, the
beatings, the questions, nobody expected anything more than
a pile of flesh and bones. Nobody expected Pedro to be made
out of rock…Because a rock can be stopped, it can be inert,
but it can also be hurled into the air, fired, a shot-put,
a broken window…because a rock can be anger in a crowd, can
be fire, hunger, fever, a rock can be more!!! Because meat
is worth more than rock and Pedro is worth much more than
meat, because there is no use in building dams for the
rivers if we can’t stop the rain. Nobody expected that his
friends, brothers, everyone knew everything, but couldn’t
help. The difference between Pedro and us is like comparing
a bank robber with a pickpocket …But time is the great
healer, and time heals all…even the wounds left by
Pedro…except those engraved on your body after he was left
in a corner, agonizing, whilst they drank their coffee! But
what I mean to say is that nobody expected it to be me, the
boy of that very night, that would tell this story.
* Oh,part of me
Oh, the half of methatwas snatched away
Come and remove your shadow
For this “saudade”°
hurts like giving birth
And like tidying the room of a dead child.
°like
nostalgia
Music 7 : Leather Flower (by Zeca baleiro)
One
day I said to one of my torturers, the one that reckoned he
was intelligent… and efficient… that I would rather he kill
me than carry on the torture…that’s all very well, you
might say, but I cannot stress to what extent it was true.
He laughed…he laughed and said that in twenty years time
I’d thank him. I don’t know how it is that life continues,
all I know is that life goes on and I’m incapable of giving
thanks. I wish that such an option in life as torture never
existed. But today I don’t want to think about that, no…I
want to go out…yes I will go out, I might get drunk, I
might even pull someone…Even if tomorrow morning I might
have to assess the situation. Listen watch out, yeah? Watch
out because they’ve seriously messed me up…yes, that’s
right…I should put up a sign: Beware, wounded dog!
Music
10: Flower in the “Favela” (slum)
THE
END
Notes:
At
the beginning when the public arrive, the character is sat
staring at the public. The music of Caetano Veloso begins
and he lights a cigarette and smokes it until the song has
finished. Then he gets up, takes off his black jumper and
lets it fall to the ground as if he were hanging it on a
coat hook. Then he takes the newspaper and sits on the
chair with his back to the public for the first
choreography. All the music marked by an asterisk is sung
by the character.
Before text no. 3, he throws up in a bucket, as if he was
ill. Then he plunges his head into the bucket (of water) as
if being manhandled by someone. He pulls out a wet mobile
phone from the water. After the text The Beatles start and
another choreography follows.
Before
text no. 4, he puts on his boots.
Scene
5: Transition to beginning, military tap dancing.
Transition until the end: he drinks an entire bottle and
finishes laughing like a drunk.
In the last scene (6), the music by Zeca Baleiro plays to
the end. When the text ends, the music gets louder. The
lighting fades softly on the character who is putting back
on his black jumper.
Props:
Pair
of brown trousers
Brown shirt
Long sleeved black jumper
Chair
Aerial chair
Pair of boots
Belt
Bucket
of water
Mobile Phone
Newspaper
Packet of cigarettes
Ashtray
Lighter
Bed frame
Traduction: Christobel Crova et Rosa Butterfield