A lake and a film set are both sites of trauma in today’s unforgettable Translation Tuesday showcase—a sensitive coming-of-age story by Italian author Michele Orti Manara in frequent contributor Brian Robert Moore’s effortless translation. An actress in a film set has been hospitalized; the narrator—a mere twelve-year old with zero acting experience—has been asked by her director-father to step into the role. Many unsuccessful takes later, the father makes the narrator revisit a distressing incident from her childhood—all in the name of coaxing the performance he needs.
What do people do when we’re not watching them?
We pretend so much in public that there’s no way to know what happens when we shut a door behind us and stay on our own with our things, our faults, our smells.
It applies to everyone, in any moment.
It applies to me, too, when after selling the last tickets for a screening I open the door to the storage room and go inside.
“Now what’s down there?” the late audience members must think while heading into the theater. A fleeting thought, because then the dark of the theater swallows them up, and the film starts.
*
When my sister and I are eleven and twelve years old—and feel the inevitable crazed desire to have the house to ourselves as much as possible—one afternoon, between a sip of fruit juice and a bite of a cookie, she asks our mother: “How come you don’t work?”
And our mother, who has in front of her three baking trays, a pot brimming with ragù and a continent of handmade pasta, says without turning around: “Because your underwear doesn’t wash itself, because the groceries don’t walk all the way here on their own legs, and because otherwise no one would have time to deal with these fucking lasagnas.”