YERMA by Federico Garcia Lorca

ACT ONE: Scene 2

ACT ONE

SCENE 2

A field. Yerma enters carrying a basket. The First Old Woman enters.

YERMA. Good morning!

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Good morning to a beautiful girl! Where are you going?

YERMA. I've just come from taking dinner to my husband who's working in the olive groves.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Have YOU been married very long?

YERMA. Three years.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Do you have any children?

YERMA. No.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Bah! You'll have them!

YERMA, eagerly. Do you think so?

FIRST OLD  WOMAN. Well, why not?

She sits down.

I, too, have just taken my husband his food. He's old. He still has to work. I have nine children, like nine golden suns, but since not one of them is a girl, here you have me going from one side to the other.

YERMA. You live on the other side of the river?

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Yes. In the mills. What family are you from?

YERMA. I'm Enrique the shepherd's daughter.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Ah! Enrique the shepherd. I knew him. Good people. Get up, sweat, eat some bread and die. No playing, no nothing. The fairs for somebody else. Silent creatures. I could have married an uncle of yours, but then . . . I I've been a woman with her skirts to the wind. I’ve run like an arrow to melon cuttings, to parties, to sugar cakes. Many times at dawn I've rushed to the door thinking I heard the music of guitars going along and coming nearer, but it was only the wind.

She laughs.

You'll laugh at me. I've had two husbands, fourteen children-five of them dead-and yet I'm not sad, and I'd like to live much longer. That's what I say! The fig trees, how they last! The houses, how they last! And only we poor bedeviled women turn to dust for any reason.

YERMA. I’d like to ask you a question.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Let's see.

She looks at her.

I know what you're going to ask me, and there's not a word you can say about those things.

She rises.

YERMA, holding her. But, why not? Hearing you talk has given me confidence. For some time I've been wanting to talk about it with an older woman-because I want to find out. Yes, you can tell me-

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Tell you what?

YERMA, lowering her voice. What you already know. Why am I childless? Must I be left in the prime of my life taking care of little birds, or putting up tiny pleated cur­tains at my little windows? No. You've got to tell me what to do, for I'll do anything you tell me-even to sticking needles in the weakest pad of my eyes.

FIRST OLD WOMAN. Me, tell you? I don't know anything about it. I laid down face up and began to sing. Children came like water. Oh, who can say this body we've got isn't beautiful? You take a step and at the end of the street a horse whinnies. Ay-y-y! Leave me alone, girl; don't make me talk. I have a lot of ideas I don't want to tell you about.