Cittàbapini
SCENE I.
NOON
A greenish man[1] stares blankly at the
city – the city stares back at him –[2]
EVENING
He smiles at the city – the city roars
with laughter –
MORNING
He makes grimaces at the city – the city
puts out its tongue, a dawn-reflecting
tape of river, at the greenish man –
The greenish man – battling – “You are
too big – I must eat you—”
The city swallows him–
The greenish man– stifling– “I am not
at home in you—”
The city spits him up—
The greenish man– execrating a passing
woman— “You are not a man—”
A man passes—[3]
The greenish man– “Horrific resemblance
to myself– I am not– unless–
disparate to the neighbors– I am– to
prove myself unique—”
The greenish man climbs to mountain’s
vertex– to meditate on differentiation–
prior to conclusion–
The mountain shakes him off–
The greenish man– rolls down into the
city again—
The curtain falls in the mud—[4]
SCENE II.
The city is fast asleep—
The greenish man– wide awake—
The greenish man–with a stylograph
and a bouquet of manuscript[5]– is spreading
himself over the city– feverishly–
“Now I shall never see anything but
myself—”
He drops a tear into the river—
The river washes him away—
He smiles into the sun—
The sun receives the greenish man—
And burns the city up—
The curtain does not fall[6]
- Greenish man may refer to envy, or to the fact that Papini, who was considered “one of the ugliest men in Italy”, had also been compared to a toad. ↵
- The city in this case is probably Florence. In Italian “città” is feminine, and Florence has traditionally been also called “Fiorenza” (marked feminine), Thomas Mann had written a play on Renaissance Florence entitled Fiorenza (1907), an allegorical female figure who becomes the lover of Lorenzo il Magnifico as he is battling off Savonarola’s attempts to undermine his rule. ↵
- This and the previous two verses echo the poem “Virgin Plus Curtains Minus Dots”, in which “virgins” are kind of imprisoned within the domestic walls, and look outside, onto the streets at the persons walking freely on the streets who are men, “somebody who was never a virgin”. “You are not a man” might also refer to contemporary anxieties about masculinity and femininity both in biology and culture. See also the ambiguities emerging from theories such as Weininger’s in Sex and Character (1903), who suggested that each organism had a mixture of the masculine and the feminine. This did not prevent his theories from being utterly misogynistic (and anti-Semitic). Papini mediated Weininger’s works for the Italian public in the little magazine Lacerba. These references are important because they point to the performativity of gender: virgins are not natural bodies but are “made” by cultural practices. See also Loy’s (in)famous call for the “destruction of virginity at puberty” in her “Feminist Manifesto” and her poem on Catholic priests “Black Virginity”. ↵
- The curtain recurs in Loy’s texts: in the poem “Virgin Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” it constitutes part of the barriers that separate the domestic spaces that “make” virgins into what they are— other barriers that Loy associates to this situation are doors, for example in the poem “At the Door of the House”; see also “The Pamperers” below, where curtains are both a playful figuration of the “social fabrics” but also curtains in front of a window. In “The Pamperers” too, curtains are associated with mud (p. 16 of this document). ↵
- Sarah Bay-Cheng classifies Loy's plays as “poetic dramas” that function as both entertainment and explorations of language. Loy's metatextual reference to a "stylograph" and "manuscript" may be connected to Loy's material interests in paper as both a writer and an artist who later made constructions out of paper and other found materials (Bay-Cheng, Sarah. “Modernist Poetic Drama: A Critical Introduction,” Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama, edited by Barbara Cole. Selinsgrove, PA: Susequehana University Press, 2010.). ↵
- In the Rogue publication, the final line is followed by a space, then: February 28, 1915, Firenze. ↵
