The Dance of the Papers by Roberto Mazzucco

 The Dance of the Papers by Roberto Mazzucco

 

Kafkaesque but in reverse, if that is feasible.

 

This is a comedy for all the dark accents that can even make one cry.

Thinking of the bureaucracy that I have been living through, I could not laugh at all the humor.

Instead, passages in this adapted play made live again some of least pleasant moments of my life.

We all know from Kafka what a class of individuals can do when they control the access, the benefits or the papers.

These state employees can turn your life into hell and that is what happens to the hero of the story – Piccini-who, like Joseph K. becomes a victim.

He had an accident and then he is trying to get the money that is due, but has an uphill journey ahead of him.

He is sent from this desk to another down the hall only to find that from there his files have been sent away.

It takes five days for the documents to travel a few meters or feet, from one bureaucrat to another, stationed in the same building.

They are unmoved by the pleas of those who come with pressing issues and desperately need a piece of official paper.

It is true that these people are often underpaid and work in difficult or at times awful conditions, in stuffy rooms with little space.

At least that is true in countries like mine and India, Africa and the emerging countries, but even in other more advanced places.

What they have going for them almost everywhere is a kind of intangibility coupled with a job for life, from which it is next to impossible to fire them.

In the case of this story, the file is lost, after years of useless stress and pointless requests and demands.

In order to find out what happened to his dossier, the aggrieved petitioner impersonates an inspector-

-          We have a complaint – he tells the staff of the bureau

-          For...

-          There is a missing file

-          You that this what happens on a regular basis

-          I want to know who lost it

-          We can’t tell, for many dossiers simply go missing

It is not useless to insist, but counterproductive because once his game is up, Piccini is in for a series of surprises.

I sympathize with him, for I had to deal with Leviathan in his worse forms- once during the Communist regime.

After that fell apart, with its tyranny, it was replaced by a kind of anarchic free for all paradigm that caused other and some of the same problems.

For instance, after 1989 I bought a car which I sold to a guy who was supposed to “radiate „it, to clear it so to say and place it under his name.

He did not do it and in the vacuum of rules and lack of necessary papers I found myself paying tax for a car that I did not own.

Not anymore. But it took the national tax office more than ten years to accept my charge that they are taxing me for no good reason.

And I had to pay in taxes more than the original car cost- it was a second hand jalopy from the West of Europe, good for a country who had at that point 1 car for every thousand people or so.

Piccini has way to deal with the Hydra and if you read this play you will find out what he does in the end.