De ups en downs van een schrijver, tolk, therapeut, echtgenoot What we think we become
06-06-2011
The female alphabet: Bojana
Bojana
You didn't love me. And that's alright. You didn't really need me. And
that's ok. You didn't want to need me. That's fine. I've been loved before, I
know what it's like. Being loved scares me more than not being loved.
You were Serbian. I like that about you. You wore a long black fake leather
coat and boots with heels like daggers. When our eyes met for the first time, I
thought I read: 'Wanna see my gun collection?' But you didn't collect guns. You
collected orthodox icons. Your room was full of them. Fucking surrounded by
icons is way more disturbing than fucking in the midst of stacks of
kalashnikovs and old ammo, I must admit.
Bojana. I thought it meant something like 'battle babe', but boja meant
colour in Serbian, your name wasn't derived from boj meaning battle. It didn't
change much, I kept seeing you like the twin of Xena, warrior princess. We
would meet after work and you'd say: 'my boss wanted me to re-do all last
week's invoices' and I would say: 'So you cut his throat with the rim of a
plastic cup.'
You didn't like that.
You were distant, yes, and you took everything very serious and looked like
you could ram your head through a brick wall if you wanted to, but you only
looked that way. You were very sweet actually. Walked your 11-year old dog
every day. He couldn't walk very fast, so you skipped lunch at work to take him
out. You brought your old grandfather his newspaper every morning. You would
knock on his wooden backdoor and yell: 'Are you still alive?' I thought it was
funny, but of course you were serious. You were always serious. 'I put my soul
into everything I do', you said. And you did. You had a ritual for everything.
You would only put your running shoes on when you were standing exactly in
the middle of your doormat. You would make a cross every time you ate
something. You ate beans at every supper. No matter what the main dish was, you
would warm up a can of beans to go with it. You said it protected you from
colon cancer. You sounded so convincing, I started to do it too.
I liked observing you do things. Everything you did was like a prayer in
motion. You didn't like me watching you all the time. 'What? What? Why are you
smiling?', you would ask while you were folding towels or something.
When you broke up with me, you said: 'You never take anything serious and I
don't think you ever will.'
I said I took our relationship serious.
You said: 'That's the only thing I don't want you to take serious. You make
me feel like I am your study object. It's exhausting.'
I was confused for months after. With new girls I started behaving like a
clown more than ever. They didn't stay either. I texted you and asked if you
really thought I was never serious about anything. You answered: 'God, you are
like a Martian studying to be human.'
I became passive with women. Just sat there with them, didn't dare say a
word, afraid that every word I'd utter would be fake anyway. Passivity turned
out to work rather well. It gave timid girls the courage to open up and made
them playful. It made extravert women use me like a living dildo. Before I knew
it I was being passive on purpose.
And so, as I sit here eating my beans and I keep staring at your picture
with the defiant pose (truly sorry, but you really look like you're about to
climb aboard an Abrams battle tank and shoot some village all the way back to
the middle ages) I have to admit:
you were right once again my serious
Serbian girl, I am in fact studying to be human.
You smoke fifty sigarettes a day. It tastes like shit every time we
kiss. I soak my tongue in apple juice, but it won't wash off.You should be
writing your thesis, but you ride me six times a day. Seven on Sundays. You
take the purple ribbon out of your blonde hair and you strap it around my cock.
It's the only way to keep it completely hard. Every vein feels about to pop,
but the pain drowns in your moans.
To call you impulsive, is to call a nuclear bomb a bit destructive. We
go to restaurants at 3 am. I don't know how you find these places. When the
bill comes, it kindly says: 'Pay what you think it's worth' Homeless poets
crowd our table and pay you with verses to get some of your attention. Little
rhymes on pieces of magazines, napkins, cardboard and even wall paper. You
plaster the tiles of your bathroom with them.
'I wash myself in street poetry', you say. It keeps me young.' Well,
your bathroom sure looks like a temple of punk. For some reason your hands are
on the mirror, dipped in your menstruation blood. You have no idea why you did
it. 'But it looks pretty cool, don't you think?' You love it when I go down on you when you have your period. 'Good doggy', you say afterwards
and then you grab my balls and just squeeze them real hard, until, against all
expectations, the pressure makes me come. You only like sex when you are in
full control. You like giving blowjobs, but only if you leave your teethmarks. I
dont mind going down on you, at any time of the month, I plead not guilty on
any charges of perversion. When I go down on you I feel like Im kneeling
before the altar of all thats feminine. When I tell you its a deeply
religious feeling, you say: Shut up and do it again.
You always get your way. You once walked up to a girl and offered her
money for the boots she was wearing. You got them for 40 euros and a kiss on
the lips.I call you Miss Pallenberg when I text you. As in Anita Pallenberg,
Brian Jones' girlfriend until she 'eloped' with Keith Richards. You kinda like
it. 'I guess we do have the same decadent style', you say. You pride yourself
on your decadence. 'Some people they try so hard to get their yaya's out, they go on till it's five to twelve. I go on till it's five past twelve.' To
this day I don't know if you knew you were paraphrasing Hitler.
It's too late to ask you. You also 'eloped'. You called me 'too much of
a thinker, not enough of a do-er'. That stung. That stung bad. For months after
you left, I tried rather obstinately to prove you wrong. But first of all, I had
trouble locating these underground go-go's, as you liked to call them, and then
when I did locate them the people there looked at me like I was the taxman,
about to bust their moonlighting asses, clumsily posing like one of them. I
kept falling asleep whenever I sat down during the daytime. I had to admit you
were right.
That was hard, swallowing my pride. Getting used to 'normal' sex after
you left, was even harder. Like going back from cocaine to cafeine. Sometimes I
still run into one of those bum poets. I smilingly throw them a dime. As a
small offering to fucking in the fast lane. I often wonder what kind of guy
could keep up with you. They say you are sharing a floor of an old factory with
a manic-depressive playwright somewhere in East-Berlin. I have a good feeling
about that.
When I really miss you, I look at the napkin you left me, pinned on my
own bathroom wall.
Stand up and face the music
Embrace madness, everybody is already so frigging
normal
embrace madness, but do it genuinely, open your eyes
everybody is already so stupendously
delusionally
blind
embrace madness
it's the only thing that's pure
I go for a jog then, even if it's 4 am and pouring harder than over the Mekong delta. And when cops pull over and ask if I'm in
the habit of running so early in the morning and I say, without bothering to
look at them, 'sometimes I just feel like it' and they drive off with a wry
smile, I feel like you and I really connected at some very deep level. And the
eight months we were together suddenly feel like so many life-times. And when
my new girlfriends put up some token protest when I want to lick the crimson
nectar right off their thies, I just say 'embrace madness' and dig right in.
Inspired by yesterday's gut-slashing monologue I have started work on a monologue of my own:
'my advice to all you 20-something Cassanovas'
In this monologue I will play a 46-year old Latino who reflects on his life and that of his friends and co-cassanovas, as a warning to young guys who are as restless as he was and still is.
Benjamin (academic and editor of Balzac) and yours truly went to see a play yesterday in Vienna.
Entrance fee: 27 fucking euros
whoopsy daisy, they are rich across the border
Luckily we were sponsored by the Flemish representation in Austria, so it didn't cost us one cent.
No, I'm lying, the obligatory wardrobe ran off with 80 cents.
Anyway, I was very impressed (and I'm smug enough not to be impressed easily, yes, ok, come on, shoot me) and want to stage something like it. Starting with the monologue 'on the destructiveness of porn'
Who will direct this, remains to be seen, because my directors are either busy becoming a doctor or busy seeing doctors because they are falling apart from too much booze.
Nevermind, I'll direct it myself.
Hell, if I learn to articulate a little bit more, I'll even act it myself.
Description copied from http://mqw-2011.k-lab.net/en/program/detail/?page=8&order_by=date_asc&filter_keyword_ids=16&event_id=6444
(monologue was in german language with an intentional fat Flemish accent)
"A godsend", the
Flemish weekly Knack called it. Indeed, this must be the most
overwhelming collective guest lecture ever held by 30 Belgian
missionaries to the Congo in one theatre: the magnificent solo Mission
by Belgian actor Bruno Vanden Broecke, which he will perform in German
for his German-speaking audience. It is almost impossible to believe
that the man on stage is no real-life missionary but an actor - and that
his report, reflections and comments are not those of a Belgian priest
with 50 years' experience of serving in post-colonial Congo but culled
from interviews conducted by young playwright David Van Reybrouck with
dozens of Congo missionaries. In his informal lecture, the missionary
speaks of his life in Africa over time, of belief and community, of
different Congolese ethnicities. He speaks about the Eucharist, about
God and about getting stuck in the mud, about wars, festering wounds and
the barrel of a gun pressed against his forehead. He describes an
utterly ruined country and its enchantingly beautiful nature. Both in
content and performance, this production is one of the most impressive
theatrical experiences of recent years.
Cast Text: David Van Reybrouck / Director: Raven Ruëll Production: Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg, Brüssel
