UNFOLDED TIME
by Gavarre Benjamin
© BENJAMÍN GAVARRE SILVA
Contact this address if you have produced it or wish to do so: gavarreunam@gmail.com
CHARACTERS:
JUNIOR (20 years old): Somnambulist, fragile. He is a painter but wants to be a philosopher. Represents the potency of desire and the terror of the void.
SINCLAIR (35 years old): Elegant, cynical, an aesthete of pleasure. Represents disenchantment and carnal fulfillment as an escape.
ARTHUR (59 years old): Ironic, serene, and "fortunate." Represents synthesis, forgiveness, and absolute creative freedom.
SCENIC SPACE AND PROPS:
The stage represents the interior of a whale's belly, a dreamlike painting studio—a scenic metaphor for the real world.
· The Walls: Curved, with an organic texture suggesting living, damp tissue. The animal's ribs should be seen as beams of an organic cathedral.
· The Tub: A huge antique claw-foot bathtub, displaced to one side, releasing a constant mist.
· Canvases: Three easels. The one on the left (Sinclair), the center one (Junior), and the one on the right (Arthur).
· Props: Paint cans, discarded brushes, crystal glasses, a wicker laundry basket, and a worn leather armchair.
SCENE 0: PROLOGUE
(The light opens slowly on JUNIOR. He is sitting on the floor, hugging his knees, rocking back and forth. The sound of the whale's heart is a low pulse that makes the furniture vibrate).
JUNIOR: This house doesn’t love me… I know it. (He stands up and caresses the curved wall, his hand leaving a trail in the moisture). Damned thing… it won’t let me out, I can’t get out. I’m in its belly like Jonah inside the whale.
(SINCLAIR emerges from the shadows, moving with an irritating parsimony. He holds a glass of red wine that looks like blood under the red light of the walls).
SINCLAIR: (Laughing with an elegant dryness) The house doesn’t care about you, Junior. You are an insignificant parasite in its digestive system. And you aren’t inside it as if the house were a physical whale… You are inside an idea. Or you are the protagonist of a dream—your dream. Perhaps you are sleepwalking.
JUNIOR: (Turns abruptly) Who let you in? Did the whale swallow you too? How old are you, thirty-five, forty… You are so old.
SINCLAIR: Thirty-five. And I came to remember how stupid I was. Yesterday I was in the bathtub... (He points to the tub with his glass). It remains the most habitable piece of furniture in this house. The water was so hot I thought my soul was going to seep out through my pores.
JUNIOR: (Blinks rapidly, with a mix of disgust and fascination) It’s true! I saw you! … I was watching you. I was hidden in the shadows.
SINCLAIR: (Arches an eyebrow) You were spying on me?
JUNIOR: It was inevitable that I remained attentive. You weren’t alone. That woman… she had a look that made me hungry, a type of hunger that isn’t satisfied with bread. Why do you do that? Why do you profane the silence of this whale with your animal noises?
SINCLAIR: Because I carry out your fantasies, little boy. You dream of being in the tub, accompanied, feeling the weight of another skin upon yours; I simply turn on the tap and let it happen. I remember everything about you, even the way your hands tremble when you try to explain the infinite and end up crying because it has no edges.
(The whale's heart accelerates slightly. A slight tremor causes the wine in SINCLAIR’S glass to spill. The light turns emerald green and the hum becomes a screech of metal. JUNIOR and SINCLAIR feel dizzy as the shadows lengthen. TOTAL DARKNESS).
SCENE 1: THE AWAKENING OF DESIRE
(When the light returns, the environment has changed. The walls seem brighter. On the central canvas, a realistic version of the "Mona Lisa" is depicted, but the figure in the painting is a dark-haired Spanish woman with green eyes. JUNIOR enters walking with the rigidity of a somnambulist. He heads to the laundry basket and urinates with his back to the audience with a sigh of relief).
SINCLAIR: (Sitting in the armchair, watching him with a mix of weariness and pity) You urinated on my dirty pants, Junior. Look at that… my favorite jeans, my white silk t-shirts. Everything soaked in your unconsciousness and your fear.
JUNIOR: (Waking up with a spasm, he shakes his clothes, disoriented) Time is a poorly sewn fabric, Sinclair. If you pull the right thread, the weave tightens or unravels. I dreamed that the thread was in my hand and that if I pulled hard, you disappeared.
SINCLAIR: I’ve already lived this. It’s a circular curse. I’ll have to throw all my clothes in the trash because of your philosophical bladder.
JUNIOR: (Points to the painting of the green-eyed woman with an aggressive confidence) Look at her! She watches you, she knows… I painted her while my body slept, or it was the Other… And “when I woke up, the painting was there,” looking at me with that irony of those who know they will remain in the world after our death. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that we exist, Sinclair? To exist is absurd, as it was said…
SINCLAIR: (Drinking wine, glancing at the painting) The Universe was born from nothing. But if "Nothing" is a concept we can talk about, then it is no longer nothing; it is a presence that suffocates us. Perhaps God is a sleepwalker like you, who created the world in one of his nightly crises and now doesn’t know how to wake us up.
JUNIOR: (Approaches Sinclair, defiantly) I saw you in the tub, Sinclair. That woman… she was a goddess full of flesh. And she had too much initiative, if I may say so.
SINCLAIR: (Smiles with lubricious satisfaction) She had the initiative of those who know that time is running out. The water was boiling because she was alive, and I was willing to stop being a philosopher to be a man of flesh and sweat. You are afraid of the body because the body cannot be explained with footnotes. It is bitten, Junior. It is squandered, it hurts, it screams.
(The whale's heart beats again. The characters are alert as if waiting for a catastrophe. The light becomes warm and soft-colored. JUNIOR moves his painting to the left and SINCLAIR moves his canvas from the left to the center. DARKNESS).
SCENE 2: FRAGMENTATION
(When the light returns, the workshop has mutated. JUNIOR’S painting is now on the left. In the center is SINCLAIR’S finished painting, a version of the Spanish Mona Lisa now in a cubist style: a composition of sharp planes and aggressive angles, but retaining those green eyes that seem to follow the characters. SINCLAIR is in front of his canvas, located on the left side of the stage, retouching an edge with almost surgical coldness. JUNIOR is in front of his own painting, looking up at the ceiling with a paranoiac expression).
SINCLAIR: (Without stopping painting) Do you see this canvas, Junior? You think reality is what is touched, but reality is what is thought. I have decided to break her gaze to understand its structure. Fragmenting is the only way not to be devoured by beauty. If you keep it whole, it destroys you.
JUNIOR: (Frosty) You talk about art, Sinclair, but you hide in the angles to avoid admitting that you are no longer so young.
SINCLAIR: (Stops, observes the color of the wine in his glass against the light with an irritating calm) Youth is a sketch with too much moisture, Junior. A poorly fixed drawing that smudges as soon as someone touches it. I, on the other hand, am the pigment that already knows where to stay. (He takes a short sip). You think old age is skin that is no longer so fresh? No. Old age is the excess of information. I have simplified my life until only the edge, pleasure, and order remained.
(SINCLAIR walks toward the central canvas—his cubist work. With a silk cloth, he wipes an invisible spot on the frame. He moves like a gallery owner at his own opening).
SINCLAIR: Look at this woman. You painted her like a virgin asking permission to exist. I broke her into pieces so she couldn’t escape. Fragmentation is the only way to possess beauty without it destroying you. (Turns toward Junior, defiantly). You still suffer for her; I enjoy her as a structure.
JUNIOR: (Stands up, agitated) You lie! You fragment her because it terrifies you that she is real. It terrifies you that time moves outside your damned paintings. (Points to the tub). The mist from that bathtub... it smells like that voluptuous woman, but you only talk about "composition." This place is closing in, Sinclair! I feel the whale's ribs squeezing my lungs.
SINCLAIR: (Walking toward the tub with a predatory elegance) It’s called "intensity," boy. What you feel is the world becoming reality, and your mind becoming consciousness; you too have aged a bit. (He takes a jar of salts from the shelf and drops it into the water with a metallic clink). I have cleaned your dirty brushes, I have organized your paint cans. I have made this belly a temple of form. Don’t let your adolescent panic smudge my afternoon.
JUNIOR: (Fixing his gaze on the third canvas, the blank one) That canvas... it’s too clean. It’s a provocation. It’s like an empty eye watching us from what hasn’t happened yet.
SINCLAIR: (With disdain) It’s just space, Junior. And space is conquered with the will.
(From above comes a melodious WHISTLE—Mozart—and a dry cough, of someone clearing their throat with authority).
JUNIOR: (Losing his composure) Now what? Do we have visitors? It’s him... the intruder from above. Death is coming to claim my bed and my brushes.
SINCLAIR: (Uneasy) And my tub. It’s our old copy, Junior. It’s us… old. He’s coming to claim the space that belongs to him. He has the right to carry out his work.
JUNIOR: No. We can still prevent it. We must destroy his canvas. He cannot enter here; he must remain suspended in the void forever.
(JUNIOR lunges toward the third canvas with a knife. SINCLAIR, with unexpected agility, intercepts him, grabs his wrists, and throws him to the ground. The knife falls, and SINCLAIR kicks it away from the canvas).
SINCLAIR: (Shouting, over the rising heartbeat) Stupid! If you destroy his canvas, you erase me too, you erase us. He is already existing in the future.
JUNIOR: (Struggling on the floor) He is an intruder! He is Death and decrepitude!
(The whale's heartbeat reaches a deafening climax. The walls begin to vibrate and dilate. The light intensifies until it becomes a blinding white, like a cosmic birth. There is a rebirth, a new "Big Bang" of saturated light).
SCENE 3: ARTHUR’S SYNTHESIS
(The light returns: clear, golden, almost Mediterranean. The third canvas, now in the center, is an explosion of Jackson Pollock-style abstraction, full of light, drips, and movement. ARTHUR (59 years old) stands before it, cleaning a brush with a silk cloth and whistling Mozart softly. He moves with a grace and calm his younger versions lack. JUNIOR and SINCLAIR are on the floor, like castaways who have just been washed up on the beach).
ARTHUR: (Without turning, with a warm and ironic voice) You know... weapons and knives shouldn’t exist, because there is always someone who thinks they can use them.
JUNIOR: (Astonished, sitting up) You managed to get in... Even though I tried to erase you.
ARTHUR: (Turns, smiling with radiant sympathy) I didn’t enter, Junior. The Universe simply folded over itself so we could greet each other. (To Junior). You still search for the origin of consciousness in the ceiling of this whale. I already found it: it’s the moment when you stop trying to leave and start enjoying the color of the walls. Freedom is not a door, it is a brush.
JUNIOR: An old man who enjoys his confinement—that’s what I became. (Indignantly, to Sinclair). And you, you animal, did nothing but have excesses: excesses of flesh, excesses of wine.
SINCLAIR: (Trying to regain his cynical pose) I’m not to blame for this horrible painting, I swear cubism can still be understood… These splotches of paint are a gross idea of art. Is that chaos of stains your great work? It has no structure. It’s an insult to the cubist logic that cost me so much to build.
ARTHUR: (Laughs warmly) It’s the forgiveness of logic, Sinclair. Junior is our innocent Spanish Leonardo. You, Sinclair, broke the world into little cubes to control it; I simply threw the cubes out the window and kept the vibration. (He approaches the tub and touches it with nostalgia). And thanks for the tub, really. I close my eyes and I still feel the weight of that woman on my legs. She had a laugh that sounded like brutal flesh, like fire, like desire that hurt.
SINCLAIR: (Surprised, lowering his guard) I thought you’d forgotten the details... amidst all this "abstraction."
ARTHUR: The body has a stubborn memory, Sinclair. Junior dreamed of her as a dark-haired virgin; you fragmented her so her departure wouldn’t hurt you; but I... I still keep the moisture of her skin in my old hands.
JUNIOR: Saying you are old is a pleonasm; you are so old that when you breathe, white dust and bitterness come out.
ARTHUR: You have to overcome the erroneous idea you have of me… I managed to transcend you, and the other too. And I also enjoyed my body, though it may not seem so. Junior, don’t make that face. Sex is the only philosophy you should have practiced. It’s the only thing that made us feel real inside this colossal whale. Now my tub is for magnesium salts and sciatica, but I thank Sinclair for having had the courage to take his body to the most unexpected registers of pleasure—especially in the case of a... cubist painter, a strange paradox.
JUNIOR: (Whispering) Is the whale stopping? Are we dying? You are the culprit.
ARTHUR: (With a shadow of melancholy but without fear) The whale is diving very deep, Junior. But it’s not the end. It’s the moment when you must give up so much rage. It’s the moment when the silence is so pure that we can finally hear what we are painting. (He points to his painting). Look closely... here are the green eyes of your Spanish woman, Junior. And here is the red of your wine, Sinclair. I’m not alone if I can see you in every splash of color. I forgive your fear and your anger, Junior, and I forgive your arrogance, Sinclair. At the end of the day, we are all the same brushstroke in the dark. (Arthur extends two clean brushes to them). Paint with me. There’s no longer anything to run from. We will be part of the great whale.
(JUNIOR and SINCLAIR slowly stand up, ready to reconcile, trying to overcome their resistances. They approach the large abstract painting. ARTHUR begins to whistle Mozart again. He gives the brush to JUNIOR, who takes it with nobility and humility. SINCLAIR takes his own brush. The three, in a perfect choreography of different ages, begin to add colors to the canvas. The whale's hum becomes a soft and rhythmic heartbeat. Mozart's music is heard ironically elemental and sweet. The light slowly fades to white until only their silhouettes remain, working together in a single pulse).
CURTAIN
