Damo or the triad of fidelity wisdom of pythagoras

               
            DAMO, OR THE TRIAD OF FIDELITY(The Wisdom of Pythagoras)





                DAMO, OR THE TRIAD OF FIDELITY

                (The Wisdom of Pythagoras)

                (A Drama in Four Tableaux)
CHARACTERS

    PHAENO — Pythagoras’s widow, the elderly head of the scattered Order. She is wasting away, worn down by age and the fevers of the marshes, yet retains to the very end a mind as sharp and clear as a diamond.

    DAMO — Her daughter. A woman whose hands are calloused and eaten raw by the hard labour of a hired washerwoman, her eyesight destroyed by the acrid fumes of a cheap oil lamp.

    BITELA (VITALA) — Pythagoras’s granddaughter. In the opening tableaux, her unseen childhood presence is embodied by a coarse-cloth doll and Damo’s voice; in the final tableau, grown into a woman, she is the austere and solitary guardian of the sanctuary.

    LYSIS — A Pythagorean disciple who escaped the fire at Croton in his youth. Now an aged exile and wanderer, his temples silvered with years, leaning upon a gnarled staff.

SETTING AND ATMOSPHERE

Place: Metapontum, Magna Graecia. A cramped, oppressive hovel in the marshy coastal outskirts. Its walls are made of unfired mudbrick, streaked with mould and soot.

Floor: Damp, packed earth, with a bed of mouldering straw scattered beside the sleeping place.

Light and scents: A single clay lamp (lychnos), fuelled by cheap, rancid olive oil from the third pressing. It sputters, casting a murky reddish glow and giving off acrid smoke. Only one noble fragrance cuts through this foulness: the clean, bitter-resinous scent of cypress wood.

Furnishings:

    To the left — a skimpous, a crude wooden cot stretched with straps.

    To the right — a shallow clay brazier filled with cold, grey ash.

    At the centre of the room — the kisanos: a massive cypress chest, bound with forged iron bands and secured by a heavy bronze lock. It rises above the surrounding squalor like an impregnable altar.

    A faceless rag doll, sewn from coarse, undyed linen.




TABLEAU I: EARTH AND SHADOWS



(Half-darkness. The wind whistles through the cracks in the mudbrick walls, mingling with the deep, monotonous roar of the Ionian surf. Phaeno lies motionless on the cot, covered by an old, threadbare himation. Damo crouches beside the extinguished brazier, her back to the audience, trying to rake through the cold ashes with her fingers. The rag doll rests upon her knees.)

DAMO (without turning, sifting through the dead ashes; her voice broken, hoarse with exhaustion)

Not an ember left. Not even a splinter of wood to gather from the harbour quays… The rains have soaked everything. The wood is black with water…

(A pause. She gently lifts the rag doll, presses it against her breast and, without turning towards her mother, imitates the innocent, high-pitched voice of a little girl.)

“Mama… why is Grandmother lying so still? Is she angry because I made a noise yesterday? Tell her that the boys down at the harbour shouted at me again: ‘Hey, Vitala! Little heifer from the Lucanian hills!’ Do I have horns? Why did Grandfather give me the name of a young bull?”

PHAENO (without opening her eyes, drawing in the freezing air with difficulty)

Your grandfather… was a wise man, my child. On Samos, names flowed like sweet wine: Phaeno, Myia, Hermodamas… But here the land is stubborn, Dorian. Here, one needs hooves to cling to the rocky slopes, and a heart in which life itself beats — Vitala: springtime, strength, the very force of life.

(She slowly turns her head towards Damo.)

Do not hide behind that doll, my daughter. Tell me the truth: is there even one drop of oil left in the little lamp?

DAMO (letting her arms fall, speaking now in her own exhausted voice)

Only at the very bottom. Barely enough to last until midnight. The wick spits and devours the eyes.

(She turns around. Her face is pale, gaunt and wasted.)

That man was waiting by the cistern again today. Beneath his Phoenician cloak, his purse was full of gold Syracusan staters. He did not ask for the whole chest. He said: “Let me copy just two sheets bearing the diagrams of the celestial spheres. Buy firewood. Buy your mother some pure wine and a warm fleece for the child. Pythagoras died in poverty — must you now go blind in this miserable hole, choking on soot?”

(An icy silence. The dry straw rustles. With great effort, Phaeno raises herself onto one elbow. Her deeply sunken eyes suddenly blaze with their former authority.)

PHAENO

And what did you do? Did you let him near it?

DAMO

I spat on his sandals. I told him that my father’s Measure cannot be weighed in staters, any more than rotten mullet on the harbour stalls.

(Her voice trembles. She presses the shapeless doll against her cheek.)

But, Mother… you are trembling. The cold of the grave pierces the wool. The floor is frozen. Did I have the right to condemn you both to this bitter cold for the sake of dead papyrus scrolls?

PHAENO (a note of bronze rings through her weakened voice)

They are not dead. We are the ones who are nothing but mortal clay.

Look at that cypress chest, Damo. It is not merely wood. It is the axis around which a blind world will one day learn to breathe again. Cylon believed he had burned Pythagoras. But fire consumes only the flesh. Had you accepted even a single coin from that merchant, you yourself would have lit your father’s funeral pyre a second time.

Hunger will pass. The cold will die with our final breath. But this chest must remain unstained.

DAMO (falling to her knees before the chest, placing her palm upon its dark wood)

I shall sell nothing. I swear it upon your white hair and his memory.

PHAENO (weakening, sinking back onto the straw)

Watch over Vitala… When we are no longer here, someone will knock at this door. Not a thief. Not a merchant. A man who has passed through the fire and comes seeking not gold, but the flame… Give him everything. Freely. From hand to hand.

(The lamp flame trembles, stretching the shadow of the chest across the mud wall. Slowly, Damo lays the linen doll upon the dark lid of the chest.)




TABLEAU II: THE BROKEN CIRCLE AND THE MARSHES




(Time has passed. Outside, a dense, clammy fog hangs over the winding lowlands of the Bradano River. The mournful cries of marsh birds echo in the distance. Phaeno breathes heavily beneath the fever. Damo rinses coarse pieces of cloth in a wooden tub.)

DAMO (wringing out the soaked fabric, her hands reddened by the icy water)

That stench rising from the marshlands again… The earth never dries here. In Croton, the stones were warm and the mountain wind was clean; here there is nothing but decay, reeds and bouts of marsh fever. One man in every two at the harbour is shaking with chills. Why did Father bring us to this swamp?

PHAENO (raising her head with difficulty)

He was seeking a shore where tyrants would disdain to dirty their sandals. The people of Metapontum did not take us in out of love for the truth — they feared only the wrath of the gods if they cast the fugitives back into the waves.

(A pause.)

Who was knocking near the drain at daybreak?

DAMO

Hippasus and his followers… Those who call themselves “mathematicians”.

PHAENO

Hippasus? The man who proclaimed the secret of incommensurable magnitudes in the public squares, and then imagined himself the equal of the gods? What did he want?

DAMO

He said that the teaching was dead while we kept the writings locked away. He claimed that the theorems belonged to those who build siege engines and calculate profits for the money-changers of Tarentum.

He threw a drachma at my feet. “You guard the secrets of the Cosmos like a beggar guarding a sack of stale lentils! Hand the scrolls over to the Council of Men, or we shall bring the archons here to break the lock.”

PHAENO (with a bitter smile)

Men… They have memorised the diagrams, but trampled the Measure beneath their feet. Some call themselves “mathematicians” and trade their calculations with the wealthy; others, the “Acousmatics”, have reduced the Master’s word to a shadowy cult, bowing before prohibitions and afraid even to touch the flame! They have torn a living body of thought to pieces. They have forgotten that Number is neither profit nor sorcery. Number is justice.

DAMO

I hurled his coin into the gutter. I told him that if an archon’s axe ever touches that lock, I shall pour burning pitch inside before the iron can strike the bronze.

They turned away. But they will return when they learn that your strength is fading.

(She approaches the tub, takes the rag doll with her wet fingers and speaks in a soft, trembling child’s voice.)

“Mama… why was that wicked man shouting at the door? Did he want to steal Grandfather’s chest? I buried the key beneath the hearth, in the ashes… He won't find it, will he, Mama?”

PHAENO (gazing at the doll with a distant, almost detached look)

He will not find it, Vitala. Those who come to plunder search only with the eyes of greed, and this chest is guarded by purity itself.

(Phaeno slowly falls silent, sinking back onto the straw. Her fingers grow numb.)





TABLEAU III: THE LAST ANVIL



(Twenty years later. The little room is darker still, as though consumed by emptiness. The cot stands abandoned — Phaeno has long since been laid to rest beneath the sandy dunes by the sea. Beside the chest, upon the straw itself, Damo lies dying. Her features are hollowed, her eyes clouded and lifeless, blinded by cataracts after decades of smoke.)

(BITELA enters, now a grown woman, stern-faced and dressed in a roughly patched woollen chiton. She carries an earthenware jug filled with clean water.)

BITELA (kneeling, gently moistening her mother's cracked lips)

I brought water from the upper spring, Mother. Drink.

DAMO (her blind hand searching the empty air until it finds her daughter's fingers)

Bitela… Is that you? Nothing but darkness… Nothing but the lingering smoke of that lamp before my eyes. Place my hand upon the wood.

(Bitela guides her mother's hand onto the lid.)

It is smooth… Not a single worm has touched my father's cypress.

Bitela, what are those cries in the street?

BITELA

Triremes have arrived from Syracuse. Mercenaries, noise, the clinking of silver. Everyone is rushing to the harbour to enlist. The city has no eyes for the poor.

DAMO

Let them run… Let them choke on their own frenzy. Listen to me, my daughter. When Grandmother Phaeno died, she gave me one command: “Be the anvil.” And for twenty years, I have been that anvil.

I have borne the blows of frost, hunger and destitution; the mockery of the market women whose laundry I washed until the skin was torn from my fingers… But the hammer has broken. The chest remains intact.

(With an immense effort, she draws from beneath her tattered garment a leather cord bearing a bronze key.)

Take it. I did not surrender it to the merchants. I did not hand it over to the rulers of the city. Now this burden is yours.

BITELA (clutching the cold metal key; her voice breaking under the anguish of absolute loneliness)

Mother… I shall be alone. Entirely alone in this dreadful, foreign city… In hunger and cold. How shall I know whom to trust? What if the whole world around us has gone mad and can be bought for a few copper coins?

DAMO (her breathing becoming more laboured, each passing second weaker than the last)

You will know him… A true brother will not come to buy. He will come destitute, covered in wounds and road dust. You will see in his eyes that same sacred hunger which consumed our lives.

Give him everything. Freely. From hand to hand…

For my father… For Phaeno… For that little girl with the rag doll who never had a childhood…

(A strangled breath. Damo's fingers loosen and slip from the wooden chest onto the earthen floor. Absolute silence fills the room.)




TABLEAU IV: LIGHT THROUGH THE ABYSS




(A few years later. A storm-lashed night. Rain beats against the mud walls. Upon the edge of the chest rests the old, faded linen doll.)

(A measured, deliberate knocking sounds at the door: five distinct blows — the sacred interval of the Pythagorean pentad.)

BITELA (without moving, in a low, hollow voice)

There is nothing here to steal.

A VOICE FROM BEHIND THE DOOR

I have not come to take what belongs to another. Since the fire at Croton, I have wandered the roads of exile for thirty years, carrying in my heart nothing but the scattered sparks of the Master's teaching.

(Bitela rises and draws back the heavy wooden bolt. On the threshold, drenched by the rain, stands an old man with white hair, wrapped in a torn cloak and leaning upon a gnarled staff.)

BITELA

Name yourself.

LYSIS

In my youth, they called me Lysis. Today, I have no name other than that of an exile. I have walked the length and breadth of Magna Graecia…

Tell me, woman: does the sacred chest still live, or has the fire reached it even here, in these marshlands?

(Bitela silently steps aside, moving towards the back of the room and pointing towards the cypress chest.)

(Lysis enters slowly. His staff slips from his fingers and falls with a dull thud upon the packed earth. The old man sinks to both knees in the mud from the road before the chest.)

LYSIS (his trembling hands brushing the bronze fittings)

It is here… Great gods… Not a single mark of fire.

(He raises his eyes, brimming with tears.)

How much did they offer for it? The merchants… the envoys from Syracuse… How much gold did they promise Damo?

BITELA

Enough to buy the finest houses in Metapontum. They offered physicians and the warmth of a hearth when Grandmother Phaeno was burning with fever, and my mother was losing her sight from washing clothes in icy water.

LYSIS

And Damo…?

BITELA

My mother died upon that straw. Blind and destitute. She used to say: truth is not a thing to be bartered. Sell it, and the world becomes a marketplace in which the executioners will always be right.

(She unties the cord from around her neck.)

Unlock it yourself, Lysis.

(Lysis inserts the bronze key into the lock. A sharp, metallic click cuts through the air. He lifts the massive lid. The room fills with the deep fragrance of cedar oil and undamaged papyrus. Lysis touches the scrolls with almost religious reverence.)

LYSIS (pressing a scroll against his forehead)

The Master's hand… The ink has not faded.

I shall carry them to Boeotia, to Thebes. The young Epaminondas is growing up there; pure minds are gathering there. We shall copy every line, every theorem, every harmony. The light shall return to humankind!

(Bitela gazes at the open chest, at the old man kneeling before it, at the miserable rag doll resting upon its wooden edge. Her petrified face suddenly begins to tremble. She covers her face with her rough hands and falls to her knees before the chest. From deep within her breast erupts a sob that has been held back for decades.)

BITELA (weeping inconsolably, her tears falling upon the ancient cypress wood)

Grandmother… Mother…

We held firm… We did not sell a single line!

Can you hear me there, beneath the cold sands by the shore? Not a single defiled coin has profaned it! We kept the flame alive…

But what a terrible night it was… What an endless, freezing night… Gods above, how long that night lasted!

(In silence, Lysis draws the dry edge of his travelling cloak over Bitela's trembling shoulders. Outside, the storm begins to subside. Through the narrow window, the first ray of a clear dawn slips into the room, illuminating the white linen of the doll and the ancient gold of the rescued scrolls.)


(CURTAIN)



T.D.