The great emancipation story of a woman of the people in the early Middle Ages. She is surrounded by the Church – she wears a cowl – and discovers the importance of money in Rome. She fights with the weapons of a woman, her intelligence and her will, which she directs at the summit of the Vatican. (“There needs to be a Hercules as Pope who would wash from the ground up the Augean stables of Rome with the waters of the Tiber.”)
The birth of a child suddenly ends her career as Pope.
She vanishes into history just as she appeared: with a pop and a fall.
JOHANNA A grape and another grape.
The vines are hacked up humanity.
Cultivated to their best – Don’t make me laugh!
Nature is a twisted knot
that cannot be untangled in a human life.
How much woman and how much man is in me?
I will never fathom it. Sometimes I shy back
from this Malchio, and then again
feel myself pulled towards him. Squabbling
feelings. If I appear to him as a ‘hen’,
the ‘cock’ in me crows; if I show myself as a ‘cock’,
the ‘hen’ in my abdomen mutters.
When I am a man, I must stay far from his bed,
and when I am a woman, I remove myself
from what I want as a man.
Oh, this gender stuff, one day
it must come to an end.