Pilgrimage

Light ricocheting inside. Re-admitted once again inside this spatial arrangement, emblematic of the papier-mâché puppet clown with the brown eyes and the broken arm, he slowly crouches on the floor, and they can almost see him, they can almost see that tear. He has to make the trees that surround him real; he has to sit on the empty rock –light as a feather- and surrender; he has to hold onto the taste of honey and remember what it felt like to put your teeth into the hard crust of the bread and allow the sweetness to dissolve, to become a taste of something new. He is leaning. He is talking. He says ‘they always said I could do it’. They can see him. They can hear him. They want to feel like him.

-‘They always said if I put my mind to it then I could make it’ he says and his stillness reverberates inside the semi-circular structure with immensity; a flipped coin falling on the wooden planks will be heard all the way to the back. He closes his eyes, gives a deep sigh and opens his mouth, he has something to say, he wants to say something but he stops, instantly swallowing his breath. They think the trees behind him are about to move. They want to know, to find out.
-‘Maybe I should just stay here. I could sleep here, comfortably, surrounded by trees.’
Raindrops create puddles create lakes create oceans. Somewhere he is lost in a wood of burnt out charcoal, flattened black earth, dead animals and silent men. Somewhere he needs to move and show them that he knows. Trickle down the glass and disappear. He remembers the autumn day and the matches and the long dry sticks and the compass and the map. He remembers the immediate routes between brook and spot and clearing and meadow and brook again. He has to be lost to do this. They want to know.
-‘I can make it to the monastery, I’m sure. If I sleep here tonight at dawn I can start walking again. Two days walk, really. Maybe more. He will show the way.’
Now they think they know him. Now he is like them, more than they are, faithful, humbler, better, more determined. Now they aren’t lost. He is their hero and he knows but he doesn’t know. Pine cones, rhododendron, chrysanthemums, evergreen all around. He remembers the motherly sound, unbroken, coherent in its chaos, evergreen all around. The sun on your hair makes you beautiful. The rain on your face makes you beautiful. In the middle of the forest there are no right paths. He gets up, prepares the ground for sleep, ceremoniously gathering the leaves together, the fresco of a bed of lines mingling, following each other to some unknown ancestral place where rain constantly falls and the tapping is heard all the way to the back. They look at their hero with starving eyes, waiting, always waiting before they blink, lest they miss the important moment, the resonant speech, and falter. Rain falls on evening lands. Rivers turn gold and silver easily through the mist. He can remember. He can smell.
‘Bread and olives like everyone else. To please Him. To be humble and true. To believe. To abstain. I chose this. I chose this.’ His voice sounds like the crackling noise of pebbles rushing on the undertow as the waves retreat from the shores of distant lands. He eats only as if he has to, without a trace of hunger or lust. They want to move close to him, all of them, they want to get up and move close to him and hear that voice say ‘You are forgiven’.
He can sense the suffocating guilt surrounding him. He can feel the trickling beads of perspiration, the louder, faster heartbeats as he lies down on his back and mumbles the prayer. ‘Pater noster…’ They want to learn it, again. They want to say it with him. They want to chant and laugh and dance and sleep on a bed of leaves. They want to be forever trapped in the rain and the pines and the solid rock.

He rises abruptly and looks at them. ‘Let there be light!’ he says and the light falls on all of them, bathes them out of the darkness of the theatre, the darkness of looking up and not being able to move.