Absurdist Nonsense

This morning we decided to visit the botanic garden in Cochabamba, towards the north of centre. The Martín Cárdenas gardens, named after the Bolivian botanist born just before the turn of the 20th century, is a peaceful and well-kept green space in the city.

Despite the tranquilo atmosphere, there was plenty of work going on in the gardens. Gardeners tended to the plants, while work continued on the construction of greenhouses for more varieties. A large range of cacti dominates one end of the gardens, while the beneficent face of the Cristo de la Concordia looks down over this and the rest of the city.

Martín Cárdenas botanic gardens

Re-entering the bustling centre of town, we stopped at Gopal's vegetarian restaurant for lunch at another quiet spot in a delightful secluded courtyard tucked away off Calle España. Only open for lunch, Gopal's offers a buffet for 20bs. A smiley lady gave me a school dinners-style tray and a bowl which I filled with wholemeal bread, cream of vegetable soup, a mix of many delicious salads, wholegrain rice and a skewer (brocheta) of fake meat with peppers and banana in salsa de maní (peanut sauce). We sat and enjoyed the healthy, filling and tasty feast.

Veggie feast

Afters

In the evening we made our way to mARTadero - the nearby arts and performance space - for the first night in a three-day run of La Cantante Calva. While we were keen to experience some theatre and equally in need of improving our Spanish, we were concerned that our limited abilities would preclude deriving substantial edification from the piece. We need not worry, said the man at the box office, it is an absurdist piece, so.it probably won't make sense anyway. It turned out to be a Spanish rendering of The Bald Soprano by noted avant-gardist Eugène Ionesco.

Sample dialogue:

SRA. MARTIN: Puedo comprar un cuchillo de bolsillo para mi hermano, pero ustedes no pueden comprar Irlanda para su abuelo.
SR. SMITH: Se camina con los pies, pero se calienta mediante la electricidad o el carbón.
SR. MARTIN: El que compra hoy un buey tendrá mañana un huevo.
SRA. SMITH: En la vida hay que mirar por la ventana.
SRA. MARTIN: Se puede sentar en la silla, mientras que la silla no puede hacerlo.
SR. SMITH: Siempre hay que pensar en todo.
SR. MARTIN:
El techo está arriba y el piso está abajo. . .
SRA. SMITH: Cuando digo que sí es una manera de hablar.
SRA. MARTIN: A cada uno su destino.
SR. SMITH: Tomen un círculo, acarícienlo, y se hará un círculo vicioso.

Which of course translates as:

MRS. MARTIN: I can buy a pocketknife for my brother, but you can't buy Ireland for your grandfather.
MR. SMITH: One walks on his feet, but one heats with electricity or coal.
MR. MARTIN: He who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow.
MRS. SMITH: In real life, one must look out of the window.
MRS. MARTIN: One can sit down on a chair, when the chair doesn't have any.
MR. SMITH: One must always think of everything.
MR. MARTIN: The ceiling is above, the floor is below.
MRS. SMITH: When I say yes, it's only a manner of speaking.
MRS. MARTIN: To each his own.
MR. SMITH: Take a circle, caress it, and it will turn vicious.

Improve our Spanish, needless to say, it most certainly did not. However, we found that we grasped much of the dialogue at face value, but discounted our understanding as wrong, since the conversations are full of contradictions and non sequiturs.

The play arose through Ionesco's own battle with a foreign language. He attempted to learn English with the aid of the textbook L'anglais sans peine, the contents of which would form the basis of his first play satirising the banality of bourgeois conversation. The book illustrated the language to him by way of phrases uttered between the aforementioned couples (the Martins and the Smiths), but which  were ultimately as empty and meaningless as the absurdist and disjointed back-and-forth between the characters as parodied in La Cantante Calva. Ionesco played on this idea of discussion without meaning by having the characters simply announce and affirm obvious truths as though to highlight the pointless way in which language is often used to fill the days between birth and death without significant analysis or insight. It almost makes one wonder why one bothers drawing breath to share such mundane inanities. Or inane mundanities. Whatever. The ceiling is above, the floor is below. Now let that be an end to it.