Vieux Carre (2015)
“Nightingale coughs—a fiendish, racking cough. He is hacking and spitting up bloody phlegm. He enters his cubicle.
Then across the makeshift partition in the writer’s cubicle, unlighted except by a faint glow in its alcove window, another sound commences—a sound of dry and desperate sobbing which sounds as though nothing in the world could ever appease the wound from which it comes: loneliness, inborn and inbred to the bone.
Slowly, as his coughing fit subsides, Nightingale, the quick-sketch art...ist, turns his head in profile to the sound of the sobbing. Then the writer, across the partition, is dimly lighted, too. He is also sitting up on his cot, staring at the partition between his cell and Nightingale’s.
Nightingale clears his throat loudly and sings hoarsely and softly a pop song of the era such as “If I Didn’t Care” or “Paper Doll.” Slowly the audience of one whom he is serenading succeeds in completely stifling the dry sobbing with a pillow. Nightingale’s voice rises a bit as he gets up and lights a cigarette; then he goes toward the upstage limit of the dim stage lighting and makes the gesture of opening a door.MoreLess
Then across the makeshift partition in the writer’s cubicle, unlighted except by a faint glow in its alcove window, another sound commences—a sound of dry and desperate sobbing which sounds as though nothing in the world could ever appease the wound from which it comes: loneliness, inborn and inbred to the bone.
Slowly, as his coughing fit subsides, Nightingale, the quick-sketch art...ist, turns his head in profile to the sound of the sobbing. Then the writer, across the partition, is dimly lighted, too. He is also sitting up on his cot, staring at the partition between his cell and Nightingale’s.
Nightingale clears his throat loudly and sings hoarsely and softly a pop song of the era such as “If I Didn’t Care” or “Paper Doll.” Slowly the audience of one whom he is serenading succeeds in completely stifling the dry sobbing with a pillow. Nightingale’s voice rises a bit as he gets up and lights a cigarette; then he goes toward the upstage limit of the dim stage lighting and makes the gesture of opening a door.MoreLess
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