L’Amoureuse by Anonymous
A few days ago, I picked up a phone call from a friend. She was in tears, and after a long moment during which I could only hear her faint breaths on the other end of the phone, she started, slowly, to explain. She said, in a broken voice that sounded like she was on the brink of collapsing, that she had seen someone the night before who reminded her of a past love, and that she had been crying ever since. The vulnerability of her voice made it sound as if this encounter had shredded all the layers of her skin, only to leave her bare and shivering in a saturated world which she no longer seemed to fit into. There was nothing I could say. So, I listened as her pain unfolded between us.
Now, I am a writer. The tragedy of her state touched me deeply; there was something almost heroic in the exhaustion she was put through by all this suffering, by all this love! The sincerity of her state and her helplessness transcended me. She took the shape, in the brief instant of this phone call, of a tragic female protagonist, flying above us mortals, enlightened by the divine. Next to this, I’m also a woman. A woman who, as her friend, knows a bit too much. I knew how the boy she had been crying over for 18 hours straight at the time of our phone call (and probably for way more after that) was nothing but a worthless piece of trash who never had to go out of his way for anyone, let alone for her. I knew how he had briefly played with her before getting distracted by someone else. At last, I knew that nothing concrete had ever really happened between them. To erase all the poetry I tried so hard to include in my prose: it was a two-month situationship. More than two years ago. No contact since. And now, she briefly saw a distant relative of his from afar at a party, and she crumbled into pieces.
As tragic as her situation was, I could not disregard the comedic aspect of it, although it didn’t make me laugh. When I hung up the phone, I started thinking of Commedia dell’Arte. I don’t know why, really. Maybe because it’s a form of living theatre that stays closest to human life and its impermanence: instead of being completely written down, the plays relied on scenarios (canovacci) that indicated the main course of action, while leaving considerable freedom to the actors to improvise the rest of the play themselves. Or, maybe because my friend evoked in me the character of the “Innamorata”, or, as it was introduced to me in school, “l’Amoureuse”.
Commedia dell’Arte is a form of Renaissance comedy built around recurring stock characters, each defined by a recognizable set of traits. The Innamorata — “the girl in love” — is one of them. Her function in the play is quite ambiguous, because Commedia dell’Arte relies mostly on its other stock characters for its comic effect. The Dottore (the doctor), Pantalone (the master), the Zanni (the servants) — they all embody a form of ridicule used to make the audience laugh through their vulgarity and their schemes. Next to this, the Innamorati (“the lovers”) convey a seriousness that doesn’t leave much space for comedy. Instead, they make the audience laugh “in spite of themselves”, because they carry mannerisms that make them ridiculous in the eyes of the audience. They’re portrayed as childlike and self-centred, more in love with the idea of love than with each other. They spend more time running after each other than actually talking to each other!
L’Amoureuse, for example, will faint at every inconvenience between them, pout at the slightest offence, and cry over the smallest trifle. It could be inferred from this description that the Innamorati are no less grotesque and caricatural than their fellow characters, but this is not entirely true. Although they themselves hold a less consequential role within the play, it is their love story, or rather all the twists and turns that obstruct their love, that drives the entire plot. The audience roots for them in no humorous way. The Innamorati thus bring a poetic and serious aspect to the play that successfully reaches the public. As if to sanctify this aspect of them, they are the only characters in the play who do not wear masks. Faces marked by love should not be masked in leather. But how can such vain characters provide the play with the depth necessary for the audience to become emotionally involved in it? Maybe there is something about love that acts as a whole, and that transcends: the ridicule and the sublime it carries aren’t two separate things. Love isn’t sublime and ridiculous. It is sublime because it is ridiculous, and ridiculous because it is sublime.
The entire being of my friend is still carrying the ghosts of something that has never seen the light; spectres that have the power to make her crumble at any moment. An asshole who has nothing in common with her touched her soul on a random Monday and became her first love. I would’ve given them less than a month if they had ever actually gotten together, but it never happened, and what could have been is still haunting her. Yet, that doesn’t make it any less of a first love. The degree of intensity of its ridicule makes it sublime, and the degree of intensity of its sublimity makes it ridiculous. And this is more often noticeable to the outsider than to the lovers themselves.
Each love story is a play for other people, and we often approach it as a comedy. So we look for the flaws that will feed funny stories to share with our friends about one or the other new couple and the ridiculous things their love made them do. This is because such flaws are way easier to find in people in love: they are in such a vulnerable state after having let the other in, and they walk on a fragile equilibrium to determine where exactly one stops and the other begins. And yet we’re hooked. Because that vulnerability, as it rests so close to the human core, has the capacity to transcend us all. I bet most Commedia dell’Arte plays ended in a standing ovation.
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