PER VOCE SOLA (For one voice alone)

IL MURO / MURI - MUROS (The wall)

Opening Scene

An unfinished dry-stone wall runs from stage right to centre stage. It is clearly incomplete. Small piles of stones lie centre stage, near the unfinished end of the wall, and stage right. A wheelbarrow stands centre stage.

The curtain is already open. Lights up.

A man in a vest walks towards the unfinished section of the wall. He is wearing a peaked cap and drinking from a green glass bottle. He reaches centre stage and stands facing the wall, his back to the audience. He studies the wall for a while.

He drinks again and exits the way he came.

He returns without the bottle, this time on the other side of the wall. He walks almost to the end, bends down, then straightens up holding two stones, which he tries to fit into place.

MAN: Cussa conca ’e linna de Bachis no s'el biu oe!

That blockhead Bachisio hasn't shown his face today!

No. Haven't seen him.

And I'd already told him, before I'd even finished drinking, that he had to come.

Because if I'd told him afterwards, there'd have been no bloody point.

That's Bachisio for you: if he drinks a bit too much, he can't even remember whether he's alive!

Not that you need reminding he's alive. You can see it.

And smell it.

Bachisio is about the size of a Fiat 500 estate... and smells like a Fiat 500 estate after you've left it sitting in the midday sun with a crate of melons locked inside.

You can't bloody well stand next to him indoors.

Outdoors isn't much better.

No. But he's good. A good man. And he works well.

When he remembers to bloody turn up, su diaulu chi l'ha fattu!

Bachis and I arrived here, in the Calvana mountains, in 1964.

The 9th of May, 1964, to be precise. We'd been offered a piece of land at a really low price.

So Bachisio and I looked each other in the eye and decided to leave.

The two of us and two hundred sheep.

We didn't dare risk any more than that. In case things went wrong.

That morning I'd woken up with this taste in my mouth.

I'd drunk a good bit of water to try and wash it away—and to deal with the thirst that always gets me around half past three in the morning.

The thirst went away. That taste didn't.

So I sat up in bed and started moving my tongue around inside my mouth.

Running it over my teeth. Smacking my lips. And yes. Yes.

There was no doubt about it. What I could taste was something new.

I don't know if that's ever happened to you.

Because you can't really explain these things. It's not as if you can explain the smell of bread that's just come out of the oven.

Or, I don't know, the taste of that music that was playing when you kissed her round the corner from school.

No. You can't explain these things.

That's why I ran straight over to Bachisio's. He was getting dressed to go out to the flock and start his day.

I went to Bachisio's and shouted: “Bachis! Bachis!!! Su diaulu chi t'ha fattu, Bachis, open the bloody door!”

Because Bachisio was getting dressed and he didn't know I'd woken up with that taste of something new in my mouth.

Otherwise the door would've been open already.

A man alone, standing before an unfinished dry-stone wall, sets stones into place and tells his story.

From this ancient, everyday gesture emerges a journey through memory: the Sardinia he left behind in 1964, hunger, the longing for a different life, his arrival in the Calvana mountains with two hundred sheep and his lifelong friend, Bachisio.

Moving between Italian and the Sardinian language, between rough-edged humour and melancholy, the protagonist reconstructs a world of pastures, smells, silences, nicknames, hard labour, male friendship, migration and roots that refuse to be torn out.

The wall soon becomes far more than a piece of manual work. It is craft, identity, family memory. Every stone has a soul; every fit demands a practised eye, patience and the ability to listen.

To build a wall is to choose, to preserve, to separate, to protect.

But it can also mean to hide.

As the protagonist's story unfolds, something darker slowly begins to emerge.

A man asks him to build a special wall—an “invisible” one, capable of disappearing and of making something else disappear with it.

What at first seems merely a mysterious commission becomes a moral threshold: between obedience and responsibility, innocence and guilt; between the craftsman's simple act of doing his job well and the truth that his work ultimately comes to contain.

Muros is a monologue about memory, belonging and the shadowed territories of conscience. It was one of the winning works of the international Per Voce Sola award, promoted by the Fondazione Luzzati – Teatro della Tosse in Genoa.

It is a story that begins with earth, stones and language, and arrives at the fragile boundary between what we build in order to live and what we build in order not to see.