Читать книгу Let them all tell you what happened - Mercedes Pescador - Страница 25

And all of a sudden, with no warning, the show of the world and its tragicomedy were going to be interrupted: a planetary event that, on a different scale, would be just an anecdotic stellar dust speck…

I was in Munich, working for a theatre scenography. With just four days left to the premiere, the director told us that everything would be closed. My personal downfall got even bigger. I thought: «Four months ago I was living in Spain and I had a partner, and now this!».

The theatre was getting ready to snooze and I was experiencing, on a small scale, the living metaphor of what was gradually happening all over the world… It was surprising to see the technicians run through the stage like a lawless God, each one of them dismantling whatever they had in front of them. And when they were gone, what was left was a desolated scenario: props, equipment, cables, curtains and lights, all of it abandoned to their own fate. The stalls and the stage looked now more like abandoned modern ruins.

That indescribable feeling reminded me of Polidori’s book about Chernobyl, when he narrated that overwhelming abandonment of the city of Pripiat in just one day. I wondered if the future might remind us in the same way, the abandonment caused by a pandemic of global fear …

I heard the rough muffled noise of the metallic fire-resistant curtain, which always falls down slowly making that characteristic noise, like a bunker beyond the grave. From then on, the theatre would be left empty, physical and symbolically, and in silence: the stalls and the stage are now senseless meaningless spaces.

And the same has happened to the world: the curtain has fallen during an intermission with no return, and the world was left with no audience. In a cosmic second, the stage of the world became fragile and meaningless and, in my mind, I thought I heard the echo, non-existent really, of a voice which invited us to go to the foyer during an intermission which had no near end.

Today I’m in Berlin, starting all over and with many open questions, dwelling in 8 square metres and watching the world through a big window which, ironically, looks over a theatre: a theatre that right now is in pause mode, the same way the world is, and, somehow, same as my world …