In popular culture, we knew the songs about public women by Piaf or Brassens: “it’s not every day they laugh. Word!” The character we discover is an astonishing woman, a prostitute with a big heart but flamboyant, not submissive to her daily life because she is humanistic and rebellious.
These are more than the memoirs of a young woman whom destiny led to console, listen, and muster the strength and patience to comply with men’s desires. Coraly Zahonero, a member of the Comédie-Française with a soft tone, a strong voice, and a slight accent that belonged to this woman of Spanish origin, Grisélidis Real, offers us.
But her pain takes us from complaint, albeit with humor and philosophy, to a revolt against the people in power, the institutions that preach morality and cause guilt when they hypocritically visit the girls! And it is these people who legislate on their status! Yet it is the women who are the “doctors of the world.” “What does Socialism do for the hunchbacks, the divorced, the suicidal?” she asks bluntly!
As for God, she wishes He would be inflicted with as many tortures as she has lived through, caring little about the blasphemy. She also wants to be the standard-bearer for all the frustrated women who were asked to remain pure and be the woman of a single man, even if he was unreachable. And it is with a vibrant incandescence and enthusiasm that she feels she is the keeper of all these women who disappeared without knowing pleasure.
Between two knowing glances at the audience, she adds charmingly that the sidewalks should be lined with roses and velvet, as the human situations they take charge of are so deserving. Confessions, a plea, and beautiful bursts of refined poetry are evident, but above all, where her entire flesh and soul are involved. She sometimes describes herself as having neither substance, color, nor appearance, seeing herself as a “jellyfish in her mirror of blood.”
This woman was a great writer, also a painter, who passed away in 2005. It is thanks to Coraly and Philippe Caubère, who supported it, that this show exists. It will be performed again as a trio, with two musicians, next season at the Théâtre de Nice.
by R. Haugade
