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Véronique Pittolo (Laura Mullen)

HERO by Veronique Pittolo

Translator: Laura Mullen

                                                                                Attempted Definition

                                                                                The Hero distinguishes himself through his exploits                       

                                                            and a      remarkable courage.

                                                                                Legendary and mythic, he shows his valor through                             

                                                        a series of actions & difficult tests.

                                                                                Devoted to a cause, he will be worthy of public                                    

                                                                       esteem and the glory he has won. Demi-                                                           

                                                              god, he makes us conceive something                                                                        

                                                   divine: solar, energetic and resplendent, he faces                                                              

                    the unknown and is never afraid.

                                                                                The Hero is preferably living, but dead he will be                                    

                                                   more effective. The common man, the faithful,                                                                         

                                      can then identify with him and participate                                                                                          

                  imaginatively in his existence.

                                                                                The modern Heroes are known through the medium                                     

                                              of audiovisual transmissions (radio, television,                                                                              

                             cinema). Their superhumanity is visible on the                                                                                                 

       screen (face enlarged) and audible thanks to an                                                                                               

  electronically filtered voice.

                                                                                Actor, cosmonaut, athletic or revolutionary, young,                 

                                                                  handsome, rich, & amorous, often he belongs to the                                

                                                   world of the spectacle.

                                                                                The cinema has created these stars who became                         

                                                                 idolized heros, objects of a public cult.

BILL stopped abruptly

He entered, stumbled over something.

MURIEL’s shoes make two marks on the ground,

two arms dangle over the edge of the bed.

He caught his feet in the telephone cord.

He turns, shuts off the radio.

(Sound of steps amplified in the stairway.)

At this instant the Hero must make a decision,

seize a last chance and prove his autonomy.

The Hero is he who persists in finding chances.

The heroine wears a dark raincoat and tinted glasses.

A man arrives.

He rests his hand on the stool beside her.

The conversation starts up, it’s 3 in the afternoon.

MURIEL doesn’t mind, the world develops around her, despite her.

She leaves traces of lipstick on the cigarette filters.

Messages, bottles in the ocean.

The heroine is a body in movement before being a thought in action.

From the jukebox a sweet melody.

                                --Jeff?...

                                --...

                                --I’ll pass by the drugstore.

                                   I wanted to tell you how much I think about you.

The man who put his hand on the stool watched him closely.

BILL knew he was an adversary or maybe a potential corpse.

Removing his jacket, he rolls up his sleeves, orders a martini and brushes off fear as if it were something embarrassing that clung to his clothes.

On the bar a pair of dark glasses signals the presence of MURIEL, index of sensual pleasure.

She leaves, heads toward the convertible, crosses the parking lot.

(The cafeteria was shut.)

The sound of brakes always stops the heart of heroes.

She fixes her make-up in the rearview mirror.

(The shape of the eyes suffices to express the complexity of the face.) 

Think of flowers.

As many as possible must be arranged in provisional spaces.

First period: voyage of the lovers.

Around the Hero, despite him, a love story is possible as the air or the hardness of the ground.

His body expresses something.

Close up, you make out his capacity for understanding, in the movies his end is spectacular.

He swims, battles adversaries, scans the incomplete horizon, corresponds with his author.

From Madrid to New York, from London to Paris, one meets him under a variety of  appearances with exceptional women.

In the arms of a heroine, one finds him credulous.

His approach and his silence have been the object of vain commentary.

(As with his innocence and his propensity to failure.)

The Hero must not give the certainty of a conclusion but only fill in dead time.

                                --JEFF,

Cut off.

                                --You’re difficult...

In evening wear in front of a mirror, knotting his tie.

The bell. He turns and leaves the visual field.

What does an intense gaze mean?

How to defend the clumsy gestures?

JEFF doesn’t search for his words, one recognizes him in a significant detail, his way of appearing or taking on a air of detachment.

He’s always waiting for someone or something,

an event, a recommendation, he follows, is followed, rarely looks behind him.

One sees him pass in front of luxury stores.

Moreover, he won’t age.

(A Hero doesn’t age or the actor’s changed.)

World separated into small zones of differentiation.

Everyone can see the reality with their eyes, the same gestures, identical towns and roads without borders.

World without limits in the precarious conversations.

                                --Too late, MURIEL...

It’s too dark to see the tension on the faces.

As soon as he picks up the phone he seems worried

One follows the curve of the left eyebrow just to the cheek,

to the collar of his shirt, the excellent cloth.

                                --What do you want?

The call is cut off, then one hears the clinking of glasses.

He hangs up.

(In New York, JEFF lives in shirtsleeves, in Paris, a grey or black suit. People have seen him in London in a green jacket.)

Hanging up, he looks at the bay without saying a word.

BILL knocks at the door.

BILL spends his time waiting for instructions.

Panicked, he’ll arrive late at the scene of the crime.

JEFF tries to make a career in New York,

he returns to New Orleans where he meets up with the guy who caused the death of his ex-wife.

The rhythm speeds up:

arrested in the middle of the night, accused of spying.

Time is a notion which traverses the Hero,

time accidentally reckoned, time of cities and airports.

On the airplane, MURIEL recognized in JEFF the daredevil she loved once.

(The characters leave the working plan to enter memory’s domain.)

The lover has aged... Picked up in Atlanta ten years earlier, etc.

Desire is incomplete, fortuitous, an old or new test, postponed. The days blur, favoring memories of meetings in a lost space, a flat time, smooth as the surface of a lake.

Suddenly the heroine returns.

(The airplane makes a rough landing.)

The heroine is necessary to the Hero’s validity.

Without her these stories would be limited to a settling of accounts.

Stippled face which preps and strikes the pose,

creature inventing its fate.

The picture comes together...

One can take a mental photograph:

Heroines just about to...at the edge of a catastrophe,

in a spot, a station.

MURIEL is known by the sound of her footsteps at night when she returns and crosses a graveled path.

One hears her walk up to the next floor.

Dead, she’ll be identified on the shore of a lake.

Necessary and complementary, visible and unforeseen, her appearance wilts with time but

action remains the only recourse of the feminine partner.

It’s pouring. MURIEL slips into her raincoat.

A lot of photos from the period when she was a brunette.

In a square, leaning on a bridge, on her bed leafing through a magazine or behind the curtains in a hotel corridor.

On her cigarette butts she leaves lipstick traces and often, under the pillows, hairs.

MURIEL’s house is next to a parking lot, set back from a cafeteria.

Behind: an immense forest, a lake with all kinds of sounds and stones.

Ominous and comforting, her room is a fiction.

Satin bedspread, oval dressing table with multicolored lamps.

Every heroine lays out the space for her own destiny and tries to resist betrayal.