THE CRADLE SONG
A monologue from the
play by Gregorio Martinez Sierra
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NOTE: This monologue is reprinted
from The Cradle Song. Trans. John Garrett Underhill. Boston:
Poet Lore Co., 1917. |
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TERESA: Do you know how I would like to spend my life?
All of it? Sitting on the ground at his feet, looking up into
his eyes, just listening to him talk. You don't know how he can
talk. He knows everything--everything that there is to know in
the world, and he tells you such things! The things that you
always have known yourself, in your heart, and you couldn't find
out how to say them. Even when he doesn't say anything, if he
should be speaking some language which you didn't understand,
it is wonderful . . . his voice . . . I don't know how to explain
it, but it is his voice--a voice that seems as if it had been
talking to you ever since the day you were born! You don't hear
it only with your ears, but with your whole body. It's like the
air which you see and breathe and taste, and which smells so
sweetly in the garden beneath the tree of paradise. Ah, Mother!
The first day that he said to me "Teresa"--you see
what a simple thing it was, my name, Teresa--why, it seemed to
me as if nobody ever had called me by my name before, as if I
never had heard it, and when he went away, I ran up and down
the street saying to myself "Teresa, Teresa, Teresa!"
under my breath, without knowing what I was doing, as if I walked
on air! You mustn't be angry with me, Mother. Look at me! It
isn't wrong, I know. Loving him, I . . . he is so good, so good
. . . and good, it cannot pass away! One day he said to me: "I
love you because you know how to pray." Don't you see? And
another time: "I feel a devotion toward you as toward some
holy thing." He! Devotion! To me! And whenever I think of
that, it seems to me as if I was just growing better, as if all
at once I was capable of everything there was to do or suffer
in the world--so as to always have him feel that way!
MORE MONOLOGUES BY GREGORIO MARTINEZ SIERRA |
