What My Eyes Have Seen and My Ears Have Heard: Neno at the Theatre
For a whole week the granddaughter had been asking. Neno resisted: she had had enough sightseeing; let the girl go with Hasan; she could sit by the window and watch the people coming and going. But one night they made up their minds and went. What follows is the most performative story in the Rome sequence — Neno’s account of the theatre.
AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION
Albanika Press
9/1/20263 min read
For a whole week the granddaughter had been asking. Neno resisted: she had had enough sightseeing; let the girl go with Hasan; she could sit by the window and watch the people coming and going. But one night they made up their minds and went.
What follows is the most performative story in the Rome sequence — Neno’s account of the theatre, delivered to Haso back in Gjirokastra, is itself a kind of theatrical event. She is not merely recounting what she saw. She is reenacting it: the shock, the outrage, the blushes, the shouted warnings to the acrobat about to drop his load, the trembling lips as they stepped outside into the night air.
Genies Behind a Curtain
The theatre itself stops Neno before the performance even begins. The hall is packed on all sides — she has never seen anything like it. The place is huge, ten times bigger than the sitting room. At the far end, a cloth curtain, and from there people came out like genies.
Her granddaughter narrates the plot in whispers: a woman is crying because her husband has left her and loved her friend. Neno’s response to the lovelorn girl on stage is immediate:
“May God never love her, then… And why is she baring her teeth like that? And those clothes of hers — showing all her flesh — doesn’t she have any shame?”
She turns her head to check what the others in the audience are doing. They are enjoying the show. The actors kiss — hop — here and there. Her face turns red. She feels as if she is sitting on thorns. When the first part ends she tells the granddaughter to get up, let’s go. There’s more to see, says the granddaughter. They stay.
The Acrobats
The second part brings a different kind of spectacle. Women in red dresses dance. Then acrobats come out —
“U, pu-pu! The way they twisted and spun, as if they were about to break clean in half.”
They climb ropes and drop straight down. One man holds three people at once on his shoulders. Neno shouts a warning. The granddaughter shushes her: don’t talk, it’s not done. Neno’s response is the most characteristic of the story:
“What do you mean, don’t talk? He’ll break his neck — this is no joke… those poor mothers who see their children like that.”
Her blood turns to water. She is soaked through with sweat by the time it ends. She is thinking of the children in Gjirokastra who spend all day up on walls and under walls. The spectacle and the familiar domestic worry have fused in her mind, and she cannot separate them.
Then the final act: women in glittering jackets and the smallest of underthings, bare legs, men who grab them by the waist and dance with them. Neno freezes. She curses them internally. She looks at the men who came with women on their arms — they are watching the dancers, not their companions — and thinks: why don’t you hold on to your men? Why don’t you stay home with them?
The Walk Outside
When they finally leave, Neno’s lips are trembling. She lets everything loose on the granddaughter in the street:
“Be damned, may you be cursed for this! Is this what you came here for? May you be struck on your head, together with all the learning you do at school. Instead of teaching you good behavior they teach you how to run wild… I don’t want a school like that.”
Then, almost immediately, something shifts. She talks and talks, and begins to feel sorry for the granddaughter — as if it had been her fault. She notes that even Hasan, who is a man, was embarrassed. The anger softens into something more complicated.
The granddaughter’s reply is patient and measured: look, here it isn’t considered shameful; they do it just to entertain people; if I take you a second time, you’ll get used to it and it won’t seem strange at all. She is not defending the theatre as a moral position. She is simply telling Neno that what she experienced as shock is, in this context, ordinary.
It is one of the quietest generational exchanges in the collection. No one wins the argument. Neno’s outrage is real and fully articulated. The granddaughter’s calm is equally real. The story closes with Neno telling Haso to get up, let’s go upstairs, it’s pitch dark down here and her eyes are going blurry. They will talk again up there. The theatre remains unresolved between them — not as a dispute, but as an experience that neither quite knows what to do with.
Old Neno’s Stories — the first English translation of Musine Kokalari’s work — is available now:
📖 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/old-nenos-stories-musine-kokalari/1149899284
📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Nenos-Stories-Selected-Literature/dp/B0GYGKL94G
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