Come and Go

Background >

Character

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

— T.S. Eliot

Three female figures of similarly undeterminable age sit side by side 'very erect, facing front, hands clasped in laps.' Their appearance conveys little individuality. Their actions are identical. Their speech is largely monosyllabic, repetitive and devoid of colour. Surrounded by pervasive darkness, they appear barely visible beneath a soft vertical

light. Their faces are darkened beneath wide-brimmed hats every bit as drab as the full-length, high-buttoned coats that shroud their form. Alike in their appearance, movements and concerns, their twilight days have reduced even their names: Flo(rence), Vi(olet) and Ru(by). Ruby Cohn, in her study Back to Beckett, fancies that they 'vie for arcane information; they express rue – 'oh!', life flows on.'

Bound together by shared and tender dreams of 'the old days,' their 'When did we three last meet?' resists the fateful concern expressed by Macbeth's three Weird Sisters' – 'When shall we meet again?'

In barely audible, monosyllabic speech, each is careful to say nothing that might disturb present decorum: 'Let us not speak.' Their long silences and dreadful whisperings contain the unspeakable but inescapable knowledge of the fate of their common human condition. Nothing may be done but to come and go.

The situation carries some suggestion of the aura of dread that pertained to The Three Furies, goddesses of retribution, or to those other 'daughters of the night' – The Three Fates, who concealed from mortals their appointed destinies. Indeed, the final image of the trio being bound together with joined hands and interlaced arms may even hold ironic allusion to Botticelli's personifications of beauty, charm and grace in his famous painting of The Three Graces.