Spinning Wheels of Noir Fiction:
Fausto Paravidino’s Still Life in Ditch
article by Michael Todd Steffen
The denouement of the mystery plot in Fausto Paravidino’s
novel noir drama Still Life
In Ditch (Natura Morta in uno Fosso) intercepts the
reader—it is at once so unexpected, shocking and psychologically convincing. It
is a revelation that silently encores the sum of its speakers and narrative
with its illustrative guy-gal polarity, resonating with the reader (audience),
as the play holds true to its proposal as a noir genre piece. A lot of the
language is blunt, consistently stylistic in its display of brevity, irony and
repartee. So if we at first wince at the rawness of the speakers’ vernacular,
little by little we can come to appreciate the authenticity of the characters
in their linguistic portraits as fulfilling and adhering to pre-established
genre criteria. The text even transcends its literary intentions by capturing
the gratuitous bluntness of our current day street and pop-culture speech.
If
he gives me 5 million up front, I’ll sell him the 7-mil debt.
Sounds
pretty cool to me.
He thinks about it for a second. I quickly
do the math and tell
him that
he’d be making more than 20% on the deal.
He thinks about it another second and
says, “Will you give me
back the 7
million?”
So I ask him if he’s shitting me. If I
wanted a loan I would
have asked
him for a loan and he wouldn’t have charged me a 20%
interest
rate.
I’m turning over a debt to you—I tell
him—you front me
the 5 and
then, whenever you want, you go and collect the 7.
So then he gets all pissed off and says he
doesn’t like the idea,
that it
sounds like a rip-off, that he doesn’t buy debts from people
he doesn’t
know and besides, he doesn’t trust me.
So I ask him how things are going with
Elisa.
“What the fuck do you care?”
“I was just wondering whether you killed
her because you
couldn’t
stand to be with someone who was smarter than you, or
someone
else killed her to let you know that they didn’t want to
deal with
someone dumber than them.”
He asks me what the fuck I’m talking
about. I don’t know if
he’s
playing dumb or if he really is a moron. (p. 28)
To be released
this September, Still Life in Ditch is the 2013 winner of the Loose Translation
Prize sponsored by Queens College, The City University of New York, and Hanging
Loose Press. Kimiko Hahn, Queens College-CUNY, comments, “The series
name…speaks for our collaborative mission to introduce voices new to English
through translators able to foreground the extraordinary writing with which
they work with great craft and attention to the original language.”
This translation
of Paravidino’s writing by Ilaria Papini reads itself, effortless and
transparent, as though it were an original text in English. Richard Schotter calls
it, “luminous…a gift to English-speaking audiences and to anyone who loves
challenging, intelligent theatre, artfully rendered.”
Papini has shown
her ability, moreover, to background Still Life in Ditch with an insightful
Afterward in this edition.
As a lifelong
reader of both fiction and theater, I find this play contains some of my
favorite elements: the style of a literary noir, a multiple perspective
narrative—among my lifelong favorites are such novels as Faulkner’s As I Lay
Dying and such films as Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Bertolucci’s The Grim Reaper
(La commare secca)—and a group of very flawed, supremely human characters.
Also, it has a very unusual structure for a play, with its long, uninterrupted
monologues, blurring the line between fiction and drama. (pp. 60-1)
Papini’s Afterward goes on to reveal some depth of research
into the text and its author’s inspirations.
I reminded [Paravidino]
about his initial commission to write a one-man show, and asked him how he
ended up with a multiple-perspective narrative with six characters, two of
which are women. He told me that he did try, initially, to write a
one-character dramatic monologue, but after a while the other characters just
insisted on being heard.
The elements of
noir fiction, film and drama smack us, direct as they are recognizable:
laconic, gruff characters caught up in the bang-up side-blinding consequences
of decadent lifestyles. Sarcastic, stripped of sentiment, it portrays humanity
at its rawest levels of gullibility, rage, selfishness and resignation. It’s
easy to stratify or cross-identify the male speakers of Still Life in Ditch, as
well as to make out polarities between the speakers, say, between Cop and Dealer,
Mother and Hooker. The guy characters each have narrow objectives and blunt
approaches, including abrupt and radical reversals of fortune. Loveless sex,
greed, murder, bad drug deals, users run out on their luck and money,
blackmail, burlesque brawls, hospital beds all make for stock turns in the
genre, all employed adeptly and entertainingly by Paravidino.
Under the shadowy
fun-making veneer, however, the author suggests a sharp eye for humanity, by
dealing his cards with credibility. The bereft Mother as a speaker makes a
strong case against embellishments and sentimentality. Her daughter’s death
still fresh and surreal to her, she wants the grounding of the plain facts, no
matter how stark.
“The body is this way. If you will follow
me I’ll take you there.”
His frankness makes me think better of
him.
He takes us to her. Bruised, swollen,
pale.
Naked in a way she hasn’t allowed us to
see her in years.
Her broad nipples, the curls over her
vagina are not familiar
to me.
But I recognize her smile over the teeth
that someone has
smashed in.
I look at the policeman, who is waiting
for a verdict.
“It’s Elisa Orlando, my daughter. Here are
her papers,” I
hand them to him.
We are all idiotically embarrassed. Should we leave? Should
he? How does it work? The policeman
gives no sign, perhaps we
get to pick.
Mario keeps on looking at our girl and
says in a low voice,
“Find the
bastards who did this.”
Hearing him invent these words that have
no place in his
mouth
endears me as never before. He is infinitely small,
suddenly I
love him as if I were discovering something wonderful
in him that
he had never before shown me.
The policeman replies, “That’s what I live
for.”
And of course that fucks everything up.
(p. 14)
Noir plays on
stereotypes. As direct and brutal as the males are, the female characters are
typically revealed as weak, confused, contradictory and passive—the victims.
Yet with their feminine patience and allowance, the gals show more acceptance,
insight and roll-with-the-punches turn-of-fortune. Paravidino enhances this
intuitive nature of the ‘female’ by making the Hooker, who is a key witness, an
illegal immigrant with a fluent fumbling grasp of her new nation’s language,
rendered with delicacy and humor by Papini.
I am afraid, I don’t want to do it,
because if my bosses find out
that I
there with them I get in big trouble.
Policeman insist it is very important for
me to talk with him
because
girl in photo disappear and I can help them for girl.
I don’t want to, and cry and say let me
go, let me go away,
that this
scare me.
Policeman explain to me that he know our situation well and that
he not want to hurt me. And he say
also if I want he guarantee
his protection, my bosses don’t
find me and he help me get home again.
I tell him that at home there is war, I
don’t want to go and I
want
Italian papers.
He tell me that what I ask is little too
much for what he is want
me, but if I
tell him interesting thing and I can be useful to him
again for
trial and things like that, he will ask his boss to get me
papers and
in meantime he will put me in protection program. (p. 54)
While creating
his story within the criteria of noir, Paravidino demonstrates a curiosity to
push his genre piece at its assumptions. To an extent, in the Marxian paradigm
that crime and justice necessitate, and rely on, one another, the Cop and
Dealer bear identity in apposition as two chess players across a board of
strategic players. Yet at moments our Inspector Salti lends a suggestion of the
virtue of magnified awareness on the side of justice.
I am following
only one lead, one given to me by a snitch with
ulterior motives.
I want to believe it. I want this to be
just about drugs.
I want my victim to be a woman selling sex
in exchange for
drugs.
I want this so I can neutralize the
violence.
Make it less dangerous.
To prove that they kill only each other.
That those who die have chosen this and
the victims know
their killers, just as the killers
know their victims
and all their lives they are hurtling toward this appointment
and no one else has anything to do with it
because the only ones who die are at-risk individuals.
I want to catch Gipo so he can confirm this theory.
I want to ruin the Orlando girl’s reputation
sully her past
so everyone can go to bed happy.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s not how it was.
Maybe violence is not quite so predictable… (p. 36)
Could anybody
have been the murderer? Is it the Dealer? Is it the Boyfriend? Could this be a
noir noir drama with the culprit one of the most unlikely, the Mother or the
Detective?
To wonder, keep
score for oneself, be on the trail of clues and cues of personality is all part
of the fun and intrigue of reading a good mystery. Yet the speakers in Still
Life in Ditch are so beguiling in themselves, it’s easy to forget, as we are
being entertained, that the story has its objective of unmasking the murderer.
And this makes the moment of the enigma’s solution all that much more
startling, a moment duly left for the reader to discover.
Still Life in Ditch, 64 pp
by Fausto Paravidino
translated by Ilaria Papini
ISBN: 978-1-934909-36-2
published by
Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
will be available for $18
this September
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