The Bell of Time

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJP27T7M

The Bell of Time

Drama in Sardinian language in three acts

Translated into English by Ignazio Salvatore Basile

 

 

Characters and Interpreters

Two women

Two lovers

Two shepherds

The rioters

The soldiers

Spike Corner (famous speaker)

Other speakers

Mother and son

Four girls

Various poor people (men, women and children)

Other People

PLOT

 

In a town in central Sardinia a mysterious bell dominates the population by terror. But a group of young people decide to rebel against this dictatorship. Thus the bell is destroyed and broken into a thousand pieces. However, the young rioters set up a police regime that turns out to be worse than the previous one. In the third act, instead of the bell, an amusement park is visible that attracts especially young people. But it is not said that this is the best world that the elderly dreamed of,  at the time of the terrible bell.

Act One

First scene

In the background of the scene there is a huge iron gray bell surrounded by barbed wire. Numerous signs, although not readable by all the public, indicate the ban on entry beyond barbed wire. A path runs along the barbed wire. Two lovers are embraced at the bottom of the path. On both sides of the scene there are two doors: the one to the right gives access to the scene; the other serves the exit from the scene, on the left; on the left a small table with four chairs. Two women are walking in the path, in the opposite direction of  the young lovers, when the scene begins.

 

First woman (making the sign of the Cross)

- Let us make the Cross, for  we are passing in a holy place or in a place of demons!

Second woman (she also makes the Cross and looks towards the bell, gesturing to stop)

- What is it, mistress?

First woman (pulling her forward,  without deliberately looking towards the bell, but seeing the two lovers behind them)

-Don't stop, please. Come with me!

Exeunt

 

Second scene

(The two lovers. She brings him towards the center of the scene, trying to get as far away from the fence as possible)

 

Irene (taking him away, towards the center of the scene)

- But Carlo, why  have you brought me right here?

Carlo (trying to embrace her)

- Here or elsewhere, what does it matter? As long as we are alone ...

Irene (shivering)

- Let's go, please! I'm scared. This place inspires me terror ... (still shivering)

 

Carlo (like before,  in a resentful tone, feeling like a rejected lover)

- Come on, don't be silly. We haven't seen each other all week through and now you're messing around  with these stories here ...

Irene

- Don't take it up! What I’ve  heard about this damned bell makes me feel really  afraid of it!

Carlo (with a certain grit)

- All bullshit! Ignorance, superstitions!

Irene

- But do you know who brought the bell here? Or has it always been there?

Carlo

- Bah, I've always known it right there! But my father says they  have found it there, suddenly, like falling from the sky!

Irene (pointing the bell)

- You can see I'm right, then! It has something sinister and mysterious ... But do any people live inside there?

Carlo

- They say don’t, but I think there is someone inside. Otherwise it  wouldn’t  be fenced with barbed wire and signed "Do not cross" everywhere.

Irene

- But is it  true that anyone who trespass the barbed wire goes crazy. Crazy and deaf to both ears?

Carlo

- But don’t be silly! Do you want to see that I jump over right now?

Irene (starting to tremble, in a pleading tone)

- God watch you! Let's go away, please. I'm scared.

They go out

Third scene

(Two men in working  clothes come out of the door that leads onto the scene and set off on the path)

 

First man

- Year of hunger, this year, my friend! Really bad!

Second Man

- Shut up, mate, please!

First Man (pointing to the land beyond the bell fence)

- At least they would give us the land of the bell; that is beautiful land. You know how many sheep we would feed there!

 

Second Man (with restrained voice and looking around circumspectly)

- Shut up, please! If anyone hears our speech, we might be in trouble! Don’t  you know that it is very dangerous? (Lowering his voice even more) They say that if there were no bell, at this time, we would be even more starving than ever.

First Man (even lowering his voice and going to the opposite door from which they entered)

- They are all stupid, believe me. It’s balderdash spread by Government to cheat the ignorant poor like us. Instead I tell you that ...

  

Scene Four

(Irene and her mom)

Irene

- Mom, yesterday I was here at the Bell with Carlo!

First woman

- But my daughter, are you crazy? But how many times have I told you that you don't have to come here for any reason?

Irene

- Ugh! But why? I want to know why?

First Woman

- How many things do you want to know! The reason is that it's dangerous here!

Irene

- Ehia, I understand! But for what reason is it dangerous?

First Woman

-        My daughter! What do you want mom to know about it! But for God’ sake, don't approach this cursed place! (lowering the voice) It is a place of demons! (She makes the Sign of the Cross)

Irene (frightened but curious)

- Is it true that so many people have gone mad?

First Woman (l.b.)

- Of course it's true! There are people who have no longer returned, people who have got  mad and people who have been found dead, frightened to death on the spot! (An increasingly loud bell is heard) Quickly, my daughter! Put your ear plugs on.

(they will put on the caps they have tied around their neck like acoustic headphones for music and they will quickly leave the scene)

 

 

Fifth scene

(four young people, just entered the scene, will take their place at the table)

First young person (like speaking to an imaginary assembly, while the other three young people will remain in the shadows)

- That's enough, comrades! (He will beat his fist on the table) This way  we can no longer continue! (he will pick up a sheet and read it aloud) "In the last twenty years we have had:  fifteen dead, found near the bell and other ten found dead inside the fence. Thirty deaf men, and countless  affected by nervous breakdown! The Bell must be removed from our bid! We  can't continue going this way!

Second young man (coming out of the light)

- But how are we going to remove it? we don’t have suitable means to remove it! It is too heavy !!!!

Third young man (he too comes out of the oxen to the light)

- We wrote to the King, to the Bishop, to the Major and the  bell didn’t  move at all! Whom are we going to ask now for any help?

Fourth young man (he will join the others in the light and in a decisive tone will declare the rebellion of the people)

- We have to do it by ourselves this time! The life is ours, the earth is ours! What do you think they care at the king, the Bishop and the Major? Let's rebel and raise the people and let’s go  together to destroy the Bell!

(to these words the imaginary assembly will react with cheers of consent)

EHIA! Hawk to the bell! All together ! Death to the Bell! Bell ringers to death! Everyone is master at home! Give  the poor the land!

 

End of Act One

The wall collapsed in Berlin

 

https://www.amazon.it/dp/B07H44DYF7

 

Come on! Laissez faire, laissez passer! 

Today is not time

To arrest people anymore!

Don’t you know is November the 9th 1989?

Today there is not time

To stop goods anymore!

Come on!

Only one thousand dollars

Will cost you

A plenty full track!

At 9 past 21 p.m.

The wall is falling down!

Laissez faire, laissez passer!

There are bound to be changes

For our lives further on!

It’s crashing down

Together with our illusions

Their false promises

The wrong secular hope!

Come on!

The wall is not hiding anymore

The totems of progress!

Let’s go worshipping

The glittering gods

Bounding ahead

Laissez faire, laissez passer

 

https://www.amazon.it/dp/B07H44DYF7

 

Come on! Laissez faire, laissez passer!

Today is not time

To arrest people anymore!

Don’t you know is November the 9th 1989?

Today there is not time

To stop goods anymore!

Come on!

Only one thousand dollars

Will cost you

A plenty full track!

At 9 past 21 p.m.

The wall is falling down!

Laissez faire, laissez passer!

There are bound to be changes

For our lives further on!

It’s crashing down

Together with our illusions

Their false promises

The wrong secular hope!

Come on!

The wall is not hiding anymore

The totems of progress!

Let’s go worshipping

The glittering gods

Bounding ahead!

 

In Berlin November 1989

 

London for ever - 28

It was Giampiero who answered at the phone. He was a Ligurian friend I met at Tommaso's home, come to London in the same period of his. With Tommaso he shared the long-standing Italian militancy in the non-parliamentary left-wing groups; the same troubled ideological path: from the confused revolutionary militancy among the Maoists and  Marxist-Leninists to the softer Italian groups of  left ideology, such as the Continuous Struggle, Serving the People and Workers Autonomy.  And after that the gradual but inexorable disillusionment. And even without waiting for the 1977’s  second call, he had withdrawn from his mind all his past, reached London, and set up, licking his wounds  and trying to reconstructing himself and his life. Differently from  Tommaso, Giampiero's ancient political and revolutionary anger had dissolved into London's fog. Nevertheless, though  for the rest of his generation London had been  a bridge to the Oriental philosophy, he had continued on  cultivating  his youthful socialist readings in Italian and in English language; and I did not really despise to spend with him long night-time dissertations at his home,  after dinner, when between his flavoured smoking  pipes and my proletarian selfmade  cigarettes, sunk in a large and comfortable armchair, with disarming but at the same time eye-catching social vision, he still prophesied the  advent of  the power of the proletariat as a unique and inevitable solution to the conflicts of the  counteracting social classes of the capitalist society,  already long-standing in the edge of a fall. And it was so much the strength and security of his arguments that I never  doubted  that Giampiero would hesitate, at the time of the announced socialist victory, to renounce to his good and wealthy position in  a multinational transport company, with the smile of the one who feels, nonetheless, victorious. But what of his bohemian and revolutionary past seemed to survive in him more authentic and strong, was his girlfriend Michelle.

28. to be continued...

The story of Mr Winningoes - 7

- “Have a drink, please. It is cognac from Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate of French people.”

This way saying he poured some of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining  that a cognac, to be really good, has to leave, if slightly rotated, a thin layer of color inside the glass.

As soon as I had drunk, I immediately felt a comforting warmth. On the warm’s alcohol wave I thought that that man surely knew so much indeed about life. His theories, yet quiet abstruse to me, showed however a sort of suggestive charm.

- “You certainly know how has the second world war concluded” - said the man, who went on talking about the last phases of the war, mixing them with some personal circumstances and original points of view, totally different from official historical interpretation .

- “Excuse me , my friends, for detouring from the main path” - he returned to say taking back the main stream of his narration. -“After all, such problems, didn't interest to me so much at the time, neither they interest to me today. I had to follow my life, and rather, the use of the atomic bombs in Japan made me understand, even more, the urgency of stopping mankind’s foolishness, under the risk of destroying the world and all its living forms. When I was dismissed, appointed as a real hero, I decided to go to pay a visit to my father. I still felt some grudge towards him and perhaps, I thought, I would  fling to him my medals,  which “his” king had given to me. But the memoirs of my happy infancy wound me in a veil of emotion and when I saw my father, old and tired, convicted on a wheels chair, I understood that was time to pass over and look at future.

7. to be continued...

If you want to read more of this please go to the link below

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/edit-book/one?digitalItemId

Memoirs of London - 13

CHAPTER II

TOMMY

13.

Tommy belonged to the old guard of the Italians in London.

He worked illegally and at the same time he perceived the weekly unemployment allowance which officially was due  for being fired from the factory where he had previously worked.

But  according to his personal opinion it  was instead a form of reimbursement of the taxes paid in those years.

 Afterwards, he sentenced, in a society like the English, where a pair of gloves for fox hunting cost a hundred pounds (that he was more or less how much he earned for a selling mirrors for a month in the street ( inclusive of  Saturdays and Sundays) is not surely up  to the proletarians like him make economy.

Moreover  he had to defend himself in some way from the inflation invented by bankers and masters to exploit the working class.

 And since the escalators in London were only in the subway, he defended himself by perceiving that little government aid that, coupled with the variable payroll of the mirrors, allowed him to live quietly.

Tommy (as they called him in London, but his real name was Tommaso) was a bourgeois guy, of those who, in the eyes of the majority, could  never justify their anxiety or their dissatisfaction in the society.

High, long-limbed, and with regular facial features (I admired him and a little envied him for the ease with which he attracted the women’s gaze) Tommy  was endowed with a willing and determined character that, combined with his affectionate and altruistic charisma, instinctively wore you to love him,  well despite some of his contradictions which himself  was unable to explain and  which he did not even realize.

 But the latter thing was a common trait of  the generational movement which I also belonged to.

He had left Rome in the early seventies, when the dream of a more liberal society had already been broken on the barriers of respectability  and bourgeois hypocrisy. So, disappointed by the betrayal of that working class in whose union he, activist of the student movement, had blindly believed; still overwhelmed by that youthful rage that in the ideal years of '68 had released the highest vital energy; shocked, unbelieving, that the bloody boom was just the outbreak of an air bubble rather than the first crunch of the fatal collapse of a weary system, to be cut off at all costs; with the desire to forget and to find the more than ever living animosities of emancipation; driven by the fascinating cultural appeal of the new frontier of the movement, which in the shadow of the Big Ben sought refuge and regeneration in those years where the instances and the search for a new identity of a restless and shaky West seemed to find, if not an answer,  at least a reverberation of hope and ransom in the crises and illusions of Oriental myths, of which the capital of the former British Empire for its past colonial and vocation constituted the ideal and secure outpost; uncertain, helplessly and  confused, he was  passively dragged into London by one of those energetic currents, as mysterious and inexplicable as invisible and uncontrollable that impetuously are capable of dragging the fate of whole peoples and nations.

- "Ciao," I said, getting  behind him from a narrow alley.
- "You bloody scared me," it was his lusty response.

- "Excuse me Tommy! You were so overwhelmed that I could not resist the idea of ​​a joke. How are you?

- "Well, well .... And you? Did you find a job at last?

-"Yes I did! A company for which I have worked in the past has promised me to summon me ..... maybe next week ....! Do you know those machines that turn milk into cream, hang on by souvenir shops along the streets ...? "

- "Ah, yes, I seem to have noticed them, sometimes. Tourists seem to be crazy for them, don’t they?

-" surely they do! But also British seem to like them a lot.
- "Then it is even better! How much  do they pay you? "
- "I  work a 10%, ‘you know?"
- "And how it comes weekly?"
-"I do not know! It depends on the position! There at Oxford Street there would be a lot, but I will not be sure of that! Given my past experience, however, I could also have a good pitch! Ihope well...
- "I have spoken to my boss anyway! I was waiting for you to call me at home ... "
- "Yes, I called you, but you didn’t seem to be there..."
-"Didn’t I?! When did you call? "

He always spoke in a calm, almost indifferent tone, as if his words were the story of other people, not his owns. That day I felt in his voice an unusual emotional thrill.

- "I called a few days ago. Then I knew about the ice creams would take me back and I did not try again…’ you know? I just came to say hello to you! “

He  smiled slightly, seeming to regain his indifferent air as usual.

- "What did your boss say by the way?" I went on.
- "He said the place is available for you"

- "well I'm glad hearing it; thank you. Anyway,  I try in the ice cream now; Later, if they do not give me good wages, I might be asking them .... "

- "As you like! Do not worry, the work here is easy. And then maybe you'll take my place. Here is good enough ... "

- "How are you leaving?"
- "I’m going back to Italy"
- "Do you go on holiday?"

- "No, not on vacation. I'm meditating a more challenging step, a more important choice. Here in London I just broke. Think that yesterday the police broke into the house while there was no one and when I came back I found all my stuff out of the door ... "

-"Do not tell me! Another certainty of London that crumbles .. "

I was genuinely sorry for that news, not just for my friend, but for the fact in itself. I paid five pounds of rent for my furnished room on Caledonian Court Road, but I had always been fascinated by these free-lance communities that in  London were called  squatting houses, because, according to my way of thinking at that time, it was more appropriate to occupy unlived  houses that let them empty and lifeless.

At that time, I only considered the sociological and cultural aspect of the squatting phenomenon without worrying about the economic aspect, especially from the point of view of the owners of the houses .
Anyway, so things were going to happen, even if the situation was  to change seriously very soon.
- "Bloody Hell," Thomas continued, "only last year they would not be allowed to do such a thing! Crushing a squatting! "
- "I heard that they were about to issue a new Squatting Act .... do they have already done it?"
-"No I do not think so. I would have known if they did. The Conservatives are still on  the opposition but  they are getting stronger ... "

Again I noticed in her wards  that unusual emotion.

- "Where are you living  now?"
- "I have sheltered in the house of friends, in Fulham; They are organized; There is always someone at home and if they all leave, especially in the evening, they leave the lights on. And even the houses on the side are occupied by squatters: families of unemployed workers, poor devils. There they will not dare to break through …"
- "So you're okay, right?"
- "Yeah, maybe it was all there!"

He stared heavily in my eyes as if he were considering the importance or the opportunity to continue talking. I supported her gaze, then I offered one of my cigarettes. He continued after breathing smoke into the sky.

- "But tell me what am  I still doing  here? I'm bursting, ‘you know? I do not even remember what I  came here for and what's worse, sometimes,  I do not even remember who I am! My life, my thoughts, my actions are so different since I live here! Who is the real Thomas, do I ask to myself? It was only yesterday that I fought, albeit naively, to change society and  today I’m living  in a cloud of illusions, in a space which  I don’t even know the course? "

His unusual tone lit up my congenial polemic force and as I could, I tried to face him, also because, although he did not know the course, as he said, I felt I had to continue my journey; moving forward and without turning back.

- "Movement always follows a course, in my opinion! We need  to wait! We are in a moment of stasis; Soon clouds will light up! ...

- "No! Enough it’s  enough!" He  interrupted me abruptly, "I want to go back to earth, I have to tie myself to my past, to my true story! And, by the way,  what movement are you talking about?"

13. to be continued...