Literature is divided into genres, according to what the author writes. If it’s a play, we talk about dramaturgy; if you write a story in the form of a novel or short story, we tend to label it as a narrative; and if it is a poem, whether it follows meter and rhyme or not, we call it poetry. As opposed to poetry, there is prose, masterfully defined in a few words coined by Fortuny like this: “Cambia de línea sin tomar el metro”. There is also the essay and, after all, everything that is written, such as scientific treatises and even the instructions for a refrigerator, which today are more summarized than a few years ago.
Of all this range of possibilities, where would the parliaments of Kings Melchior, Gaspar and Baltasar fit? It hurts to say. Do they belong in fiction or are they more real than some supposedly political parliaments? Is there a case law? Do they have inescapable rules? Can they be innovative or avant-garde, while maintaining tradition?
I asked myself all these questions last week, when the Commission of the Cavalcade of Kings of the Lagoon gave me the task of writing the speeches of the three Kings and, as a tip, the one of Page Faruk. This character is His Majesty’s emissary, who arrives in town on January 1st at noon to collect the scoundrel’s letters.
I have not found any PhD thesis on this subgenre. So, how do you tackle such a task without being pretentious, but leaving a personal mark that does not betray tradition? Now, in retrospect, I can assure you that it is not easy. The Commission of Kings has standard, timeless speeches that pass from year to year, and that the people who play the characters read faithfully or make their own contributions.
In 1993 I myself played Patge Faruk and I remember that, apart from the traditional parliament, I spoke about the war in the Balkans, which was in full swing. Now, then, in Page Faruk’s speech it was time to talk about the war in Palestine, the war in Ukraine and the African conflicts. It was also necessary to talk about the drought, with a request that the Kings picked up in their speeches on the 5th.
In front of the computer, and with all these considerations in mind, I remembered Toby Ziegler, the character in the series The West Wing of the White House who writes the president’s speeches. With the illusion of a small child when he writes the letter to the Kings, I felt for a few moments more important than Ziegler, because I was writing for the sovereigns of the world of illusion.
