Those Who Walk Away

Peggy was very romantic – in a dangerous way. She thought marriage was another world – something like paradise or poetry – instead of a continuation of this world. But where we lived, it couldn't have been more like a paradise. The climate, the fruit on the trees right outside the door. We had servants, we had time, we had sunshine. It wasn't as if we were saddled with children right away and up to the elbows in dishwater.

This novel's title is ultimately explained in a casual aside from our third-person narrator who, we suspect, could have probably devised something saltier. It is only very late in our tale, when the narrator relinquishes her hard-won objectivity to excoriate one of her characters, that we realize the title's appropriateness. The accusation is cowardice, and the accused is a young, rich, intelligent, and decent-looking widower by the name of Rayburn "Ray" Garrett.

Ray has everything a young man could wish for materially, as well as something of infinitely greater importance: a taste and a love for art. He has little to say about literature (he quotes this poem in a fit of passion) or cinema, but this being the 1960s, there may not have been as much access to the plenitude of films now literally at our fingertips. No, Ray's love has always been and always will be painting. It is then a sad discovery, and one that occurs early on in our novel and Ray's fictional existence, that his taste and passion for painting do not extend into any creative talent. That is to say, while Ray Garrett may know a dazzling genius's landscapes and portraitures when he sees them, he cannot possibly mimic their accomplishments. So he is relegated, as are so many professors of English with vast and exquisite libraries, to collecting them. His family's fortune allows him an insouciant existence, one that takes a very unplanned turn when he meets Peggy Coleman. Peggy is even younger and richer than Ray; unlike Ray, however, she has not been afforded the bliss of an unbroken home. Her mother would die young and Peggy grew up with her foul-tempered and hack painter of a father, Edward, who will come to play a far more prominent role in Ray's life than either would ever care to imagine. Especially after almost a year of newlywed bliss, residence on Mallorca with "all the ingredients that were supposed to make a marriage go [–] time, money, a pretty place to live, [and] objectives," Peggy, not yet twenty-two years of age, decides that "the world is not enough," and that getting on in this world is not worth the trouble.

The rest of the novel could easily have comprised Ray's inner thoughts on why this all occurred, a diary, in other words, of his eternal guilt. For very laudable artistic reasons, Highsmith grants us only snippets, distant arias from a world Ray shall never know again. Instead of speculate desperation about someone who remained very much a stranger until her death, Ray digs into his own past, his own shortcomings, with the faint hope of excavating a golden key to his puzzle:

From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards. And he felt that because of his parents' money, he had had life too easy.

At first glance this passage may seem rashly composed (witness the echo of "thought" in the second sentence or the pleonastic "retreat backwards"), but this is in all likelihood intentional, the purling brook of worries and images that flow through every mind. A later comment will buttress the notion that Ray's greatest fear involves his own mediocrity, the newness of his family's affluence, and his inability to capitalize on what every artist dreams of having: namely the time and resources to realize his artistic potential. His compromise to himself was to marry a budding painter and establish a gallery of European painters in New York, both of which, of course, substitute a proximity to genius for a share in its creative acts. That Ray ends up in Venice with his former father-in-law, whom he rightly understands as someone of limited artistic ability who has long since forsaken any development in that field so as to cash in on faddish garbage, we must attribute to the conceits of fiction. How and why they will engage in one of the nastiest cat-and-mouse games undertaken by two otherwise well-adjusted citizens, however, we must leave to the curious reader.     

Critics have been predictably dismissive of Those Who Walk Away, perhaps because there are no compelling characters like Tom Ripley to loathe and envy. Yet in one respect, the novel remains one of Highsmith's defining works. You may consider Ripley's harpsichord lessons, leisurely readings in German, French, and Italian literature, and his beautiful French mansion and even more beautiful French wife all indications of high culture and great intelligence, and you may forget that all these niceties swathe a murderous psychopath. Ripley is a marvelously memorable literary creation, one that has been likened to Highsmith herself in her venomous disdain of her birthplace and its social Darwinism, but there is only so much to make of such a comparison. What really drove Highsmith we can only hope to uncover through the medium of her more introspective works, such as the terrible tragedy of Rayburn and Edward. It is in their tale that we find Americans of true artistic sensitivity living in Europe, understated but clear alcoholism, and a certain inability to express oneself fully that is the mark of self-imposed literary exile. The most eloquent words, some of which are quoted at the beginning of this review, are exchanged when the two Americans – one a failed painter, the other a sellout – are not impeded in their locutions by Italians or Edward's French girlfriend Inez. The city of Venice itself assumes the role of hero, an antagonist to both men, whose sins (Ray's being cowardice and, in a way, betrayal, Coleman's being wrath and its explosive consequences) will confound them in the end. So when Ray, who survives more than one brush with death, actually believes he may be dead and that the surrounding realm holds but phantasms and erstwhile joys, he is reminded that Venice's "dark canals were very real." And what could be realer to the weary than time's blackest shroud?

St. Francis of Assisi

The merely modern mind has justified every detail of its facile existence by the simplest means: we are selfish survivalists whose only real wishes are hedonistic and bestial. Not only is such an approach fatally misconstrued, it also really applies to that subsection of humans who believe that whatever they do is good because they want it, and have the ridiculous idea of calling such desire the power of the will. Modern philosophy, in its efforts to reinvent the wheel, the chariot, and the horseman, has smiled upon the silliness of gratitude, of beneficence, of unwarranted and unreturned kindness as some childish desire to blunt a jagged conscience. Somewhere, in our depths, we are compensating for the evil we have inflicted upon others (the common explanation for those who left a life of debauchery behind in favor of a good and pure existence, such as this Russian actor). But these are modern views to age-old questions. They are necessarily as ignorant of what has occurred over the course of human history as today’s agnostic who claims – in the same timid and wishy-washy way he does everything else – that religion, organized or in riot, has always been the refuge of the poor and downtrodden. A refuge, mind you, designed by the reigning elite to palliate the inequities that reality maintains between the privileged and the very underprivileged. Apart from a story about some birds, that same agnostic may or may not have heard of this Saint; but he surely will know little about the man described in this book.

The argument in such an endeavor does not devolve into what St. Francis set out to do, nor what we should think of St. Francis as a human being; this is not, as it were, the tale of a Nordic explorer. The appearance of the man we now call St. Francis of Assisi cannot and should not be explained away by divine intervention, because there has only been one such intervention in the history of Christianity. No, St. Francis must be explained as a man, and as a man he is remarkable in ways that have rarely been ascribed to anyone else among the ranks of mankind. His way was perhaps the Way of the Cross, but it had not the same ends – nor could it have presumed to have – as what Jesus Christ brought to the world. This oddness, an ascetic strain so restrictive as to seem incredible to the modern hedonist, is appropriately addressed in unusual terms:

The truth is that people who worship health cannot be healthy. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshipers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in man like the bias in a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.

On this basis Francis Bernardone, a young Italian who grew up at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, became the most austere admirer of Christian mores the world had ever learned of, and not because he was the most austere of all persons to have ever walked in the massive shadow of Calvary. History is replete with tales of self-flagellating monks, believers burning and starving themselves, in a futile attempt to make up for the sin they feel has made them mortal and wicked. What history lacked before the advent of Francis Bernardone, however, was a soul who committed himself to the trinity that is the vow of the monk – poverty, obedience, and chastity – and did so with such unadulterated and genuine cheerfulness. In a way, Francis was the first among us to divine the teachings of Christianity as the paradoxical amalgam of utter destitution and utter rapture; the first to make happiness and poverty synonymous; the first, in other words, to show us that the meek truly will inherit the earth.

The Brothers Minor, an order that still numbers in the tens of thousands, have persisted through our faithless days as a sort of sideshow attraction. Witness the innumerable popular references to the hooded friar in brown garb with a rope as his belt and the soil as his shoes. Many of us think such an existence to denote enslavement – if not enslavement, then a sad and meaningless resort for the desperate – although no one to my knowledge has ever been forced to become a Franciscan monk. Yet the key to asceticism can be elegantly resolved: if you believe the world to be made by laws that do not change, you cannot believe in anything that violates those laws. As such, if you believe that we were meant to live and survive, you can hardly believe in any culture or mores that shorten your life so that you may repent for our collective moral turpitude. For St. Francis, this is precisely what makes the most sense:

It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it; we are most of us too mean to practice it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics; one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden. But whether he sees it or not, the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only one good thing; and it is a bad debt.

The use of the term “debt” will certainly appeal to those modern industrial souls who measure every gesture and nuance of speech in light of their financial solvency; but there is more at stake here than pure self-immolation which can easily be interpreted as guilt. One thing that did not plague St. Francis was guilt. He did not feel the burden of the Cross upon his shoulder blades or the Weltschmerz that has made many a philosopher sob in the corner of his private study. His only burden was his clothes, which in a much-belabored scene he quickly shed. He then encountered a peasant in brown habit, begged politely for the most measly and holed garment that peasant owned, found some hemp with which to bind the habit to himself, and the rest as they say is history.

The point of Chesterton’s book, of course, is not history or anything resembling historical fact. That is not because St. Francis is fictive or because what he did and said was attributed to him posthumously in a sort of deifying Festschrift; he did not do or say that much to begin with. If what we know of St. Francis of Assisi is that he loved animals, especially birds, and that novels such as this one continue to depict him as a nature boy with a heart for heaven, our perpetuation of these trusted captions is as much our fault as the fault of those who cannot be bothered to learn about anything outside the lifetime of their grandparents. So why does Francis matter at all? Perhaps because he reminds us in a very distant way of what we have always believed:

St. Francis is the mirror of Christ as the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is also more visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his mouth in mysteries.

Mysteries cannot come from someone who is ordinary and plain, in the complimentary meaning of both words, and in our world of never-ending doubts, conspiracies and mystifications, we should be thankful for such clarity. But whatever we do in life, we will never be as gracious or as thankful as that young Italian in brown habit.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Nolimus aut velimus, omnibus gentibus, justitiam et veritatem.

                                                                                                                    Saint Gregory   

Politics is superior to art; at least that is what those who worship the ebb and flow of governments and nations would like us to believe. It is superior because everything, absolutely everything, can be reduced to money and power; in fact, the only real debate in this world bereft of godliness, sanctity and hope, is whether money has more allure than power or vice versa. Occasionally you will even hear the moneyed and powerful, who have the terrible tendency of inhabiting the same mortal forms, talk about how they bestow more upon society. To a man, they opine, they pay more taxes; they invest their money in technology for the good of humanity and not just to satiate their own megalomania and gadget fetish; and yet – heaven be praised – their quenchless greed eventually trickles down the lowly and oppressed, who cannot really anticipate earning as much as the elite because that elite studied for years precisely not "to be treated in the same terms as some half-starved old age pensioner." This argument may sound quite familiar, while the quote is from this famous play.

We should not expect much in terms of plot from such a title, but we would do well to consider the historical context if only because translations have often abandoned it. In the years of upheaval that our parents now consider radical and we wince upon, the inherent moral corruption of a theory propounded by two nineteenth-century German thinkers who really did  very little thinking at all (despite the fact that one of them spoke twenty-five languages) was exposed, carved up like the Elwetritsch it resembled, and stuffed for mounting, where, I should add, it has since remained. In its stead came a new brand of aid to the underprivileged that espoused fairness, competition and, most importantly, restrictions to personal wealth. Why this last point? Because recent history had evinced that we know few bounds and that, for some, bounds are signs of weakness. What Northern Europe accomplished in the 1960s and 1970s is so remarkable yet so obvious that we must have been mad not to have shunted our train onto this progressive track years ago. That would explain why the protagonist and grand magician in the play is known by many names in dialog but only one in stage directions, Il Matto (the Maniac or Madman).

There is an inherent difference between a maniac and madman that I shall not belabor; suffice it to say that our Matto has elements of both categories, in other words, he is sufficiently keen on his aims as to seem obsessed and sufficiently separated from conventional wisdom as to seem absurd. What links a maniac and a madman, however, can be broadly defined as risk. At the play's onset our Matto is bent on frustrating an interrogator who cannot keep pace with his wit, the policemen soon convinced that he is in fact one of them infiltrating the force as a sort of internal affairs ruse. Knowing that they can trust no one fully, they acquiesce to the Matto's game and allow him to run the rather terrible risk of getting them all killed. But that is, in a way, precisely what he seeks, and his target first appears to be a recently diseased anarchist:

Let's hope your employers don't find out you're an anarchist. Know what I mean? Otherwise bang goes your job on the railways ... And naturally he gets depressed. To tell the truth, anarchists are very attached to their jobs. Basically they're just petty bourgeois attached to their little creature comforts: regular income every month, Christmas bonus, pension, health insurance, a peaceful old age. Believe me, there's no one like your anarchist for planning for his old age; I'm referring to your present-day anarchists, of course, your wishy-washy anarchists, not the real anarchists of yesteryear, the ones who were 'hounded by persecution from one country to the next.'

Anarchists, we come to learn, are actually very much like the petit bourgeois that socialism was actually trying to protect, never mind the rhetoric espoused by leftist pundits. They are average, frightened by the perils of the world, set in their ways, and married to the notion that there is only so much they can do to advance. Their only hope lies in the fact that these characteristics could easily pertain to the vast majority of humanity, however poor and downtrodden, however isolated or neglected. And they are anarchists because the world order in which they live has not planned much for their survival.

But I have avoided the plot for long enough. On December 15, 1969 a Milanese railroad worker by the name of Pinelli, recently arrested for his alleged participation in a terrorist bombing, found his fatal way out a fourth-floor window. He was not arrested at random: since 1944 Pinelli had been a committed anarchist, although a description of his life will not conjure up ideas of chaos and ruthless revolt. In fact, when one reads that Pinelli studied that bland, artificial and completely tasteless equalizer Esperanto, led a fulfilling life as a worker and publisher of articles regarding workers' rights, got married and enjoyed a quiet family existence, one understands the Matto to be anything but mad. Our Matto is bent on proving police and judicial complicity in Pinelli's demise, and to that end he convinces the other characters (Sports Jacket, Superintendent, Journalist, and the only named figure, Inspector Bertozzo) that his aim is to ensure their innocence in the eyes of the law. He also concocts a rather elaborate explanation of what really happened that cold December evening:

It is rumored that during the anarchist's final interrogation, at just a couple of minutes to midnight, one of the officers present started to get impatient, and he came over and gave him a mighty wallop on the back of the neck ... Relax, Inspector ... The result of this was that the anarchist was half-paralyzed and started struggling for breath. So they decided to call him an ambulance. In the meantime, in an attempt to revive him, they opened the window, put the anarchist in front of it, and made him lean out a bit for the cool night air to revive him. Apparently there was a misunderstanding between the two officers supporting him; as often happens in these cases, each of them thought the other one was holding him. 'You got him, Gianni?' 'You got him, Luigi?' And bomp, down he went.

Why does this description resemble slapstick comedy? Perhaps because that is the only arena in which such a scene could be acknowledged as plausible. Although heavy-handed at times, Fo's work transcends the usual pedantry of satire and begins to graze the fantastic. Surely an anarchist could in fact decide that all is lost and hurl himself towards a concrete grave? Surely an anarchist would be the first suspect on a list of endless suspects and endless crimes that for some inexplicable reason continue to elude Milanese law enforcement officials? Surely paraphrasing a pope, with the omission of two very important words, displays little more than needless erudition? Or perhaps it means that, in time, the truth surfaces from the bottom of every cesspool. Whether we like it or not.    

The New Catacomb

A famous film, whose anonymity I will maintain at least until the arrival of the Google hounds, is often mined for the observation that the tragic thing in life is that everyone has his reasons.  Well, everyone does have his reasons.  But these reasons need not be obscure or contrary or even very different than anyone else's; the reasoner simply needs to think they are his and his alone and exert that greatest of rights, free will.  The selfsame observation has been used to buttress a notion of relativity that some soft-minded charlatans rely upon to inject chaos into our existence, which they then deem an accurate reflection of the cosmos, our souls (mere illusions, they note), and ultimately the patchwork nonsense they pass off as philosophy.  We all know such folk, and theirs is silly, shallow talk.  They have nothing of any originality to express and so claim that everyone has his own expressions, intelligible or not.  Some people, on the other hand, really have their reasons, reasons as astonishingly powerful as any in our tragic fiction, and the boldest among them resolve to act accordingly.  Which brings us to this miniature masterpiece.

Our protagonists are two, both Europeans and leading archaeologists despite their youth, and both enamored with the treasures of ancient Rome.  We begin in Kennedy's rooms in the Eternal City, where the young Englishman, "though little more than thirty," is enjoying the fruits of his "European reputation":

[He] was provided with that long purse which either proves to be a fatal handicap to the student's energies, or, if his mind is still true to his purpose, gives him an enormous advantage in the race for fame.  Kennedy had often been seduced by whim and pleasure from his studies, but his mind was an incisive one, capable of long and concentrated efforts which ended in sharp reactions of sensuous languor.  His handsome face, with its high, white forehead, its aggressive nose and its somewhat loose and sensual mouth, was a fair index of the compromise between strength and weakness in his nature.

The description above could be of any lout or playboy; it so happens to caption one of the world's greatest experts on Roman ruins.  His companion this cold night is Julius Burger, a young man "of a very different type":

He came of a curious blend, a German father and an Italian mother, with the robust qualities of the north mingling strangely with the softer graces of the south.  Blue Teutonic eyes lightened his sun-browned face, and above them rose a square, massive forehead, with a fringe of close yellow curls lying round it.  His strong, firm jaw was clean-shaven, and his companion had frequently remarked how much it suggested those old Roman busts which peered out from the shadows in the corners of his chamber.  Under its bluff German strength there lay always a suggestion of Italian subtlety, but the smile was so honest, and the eyes so frank, that one understood that this was only an indication of his ancestry, with no actual bearing upon his character.

One cannot help but notice the lengthier profile, the juxtaposition in name of that most common German word for citizen and the most renowned Roman citizen of all time.  Yes, Kennedy's companion is a curious cross-breed, and a man on the cusp of being "promoted to the chair of the greatest of German universities."  And as much as Kennedy has little trouble finding willing females as respites between mountainous projects, so does Burger singularly lack the social graces to make use of his imminent glory.  If being appointed to a prestigious university chair at a young age would, in any case, change the minds of most young women.

There are other differences, of course, and these are fleshed out in the heated discussions these academic rivals have that freezing night.  It seems that while Kennedy has just finished another torrid affair that threatened to erupt into full-fledged scandal, Burger has been particularly diligent and unearthed a find of immense magnitude.  In fact, despite his calm tone, his discovery would probably become an event like no other in the field of Roman Christian archeology:

Its date is different from that of any known catacomb, and it was reserved for the burial of the highest Christians, so that the remains and the relics are quite different from anything which has ever been seen before.  If I was not aware of your knowledge and of your energy, my friend, I would not hesitate, under the pledge of secrecy, to tell you everything about it.  But as it is I think that I must certainly prepare my own report of the matter before I expose myself to such formidable competition.

Sadly perhaps, the competition of yesteryear has been overcome by information technology that makes the hiding of such a crypt in our days well-nigh impossible; Burger has, however, succeeded so far. So after jabbing Kennedy for a little more information on the latest flavor of the month – vicarious living forever being the refuge of the superior mind – he offers his colleague a chance to experience the tombs themselves.  This necessitates a long and clandestine midnight route and a few appurtenances that Burger presciently brings along, but with which he does not bother to furnish the eager Englishman – and maybe that is enough from my side. 

Most know the story's author as the creator of arguably the greatest character in the history of fiction, but Conan Doyle had many interests and a concinnity of style that belied his Victorian origins.   While I cannot claim to have ventured far into his spiritual writings, all Conan Doyle's works of suspense are clever, brilliantly polished, and, regardless of the necessary contrivances of plot, often startling in their fundamental truths.  He may take a blissful field on a cloudy afternoon, a northern ship adrift among glaciers, an old pilot, or a South American temperament, and craft around it the vilest of fates.   A South American temperament?  Can one really construct a tale on the tendencies and impulses of an abstract stereotype?  Why not?  After all, we have whole modern novels based on the incessant flow of its narrator's consciousness, even if that narrator is an animal or dead or otherwise indisposed.  A bit gimmicky, I would guess, but then again all plot can be considered gimmicky if it ends with a trick or two.  So you might want to consider what could possibly be made out of Italian subtlety.    

La finestra di fronte

The plainness of bourgeois existence should not frighten us away from the simpler joys of life.  Family, dinner parties, strolls in the park, the anxieties and fatigue of making a small group of people get along at all times – all these we should not be so hasty to dismiss in place of the liberties of an artist's solitary path.  It is perhaps good to have walked both roads before commenting on the shortcomings of the one not chosen; it is imperative to have done so before addressing its benefits.  For better or worse, the option of commitment will be the most palpable among the world's citizens because family remains our basic unit, our basic means of reconnoitring the vast terrains of unknown futures.  An old quandary, surely, but one that can be broached in a multitude of fashions, as in this film.

We shall return to our first scene, which is granted a date but not a place; the second scene, however, is set in contemporary Rome.  Here a young couple, Filippo (Filippo Nigro) and Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) are found walking in dissatisfied silence after, we learn, another public outburst of her anger.  A quick analysis of their subsequent conversation will reveal all the necessary parts of their relationship: Giovanna cannot tolerate a discourtesy while waiting in line, nor the fact that the cashier made an example of her; at the same time, she finds that an embarrassing number of her fellow Italians instinctively treat foreigners like criminals.  Filippo, on the other hand, has little truck with such profundities and simply wants his wife to behave like a civilized human being.  On the last bridge before reaching their car Filippo vanishes from our screen – the cinematic point-of-view is almost exclusively Giovanna's – only to turn up by the side of a dapper elderly gentleman (Massimo Girotti) looking more than a bit confused.  Rightly convinced that the man is an amnesiac, Filippo proposes taking him home until he recovers.  Or, at least, until he can be escorted to the local police presidium for a report.  We are hardly surprised when Giovanna tries to extricate herself from the situation, but less stunned when we arrive at the couple's apartment and behold her two children and snooping neighbors.  Children, of course, are often much more open-minded about bringing a stranger to dinner, if only because they have yet to become mistrustful of good Samaritanship and the warped societal regulations that oblige us to protect ourselves from every outsider regardless of his intentions.  The old man eats but still cannot recall data as fundamental as his name or house address, and so to Giovanna's great chagrin his registration is postponed until the next morning.  In fact, Giovanna shows herself to be so irascible, petulant, and completely unlikeable that we wonder where on earth she derived such self-loathing.  And it is precisely at that point that her and our eyes stray to the open window across the street.

Across the street in terrifying proximity lives a very handsome young banker, Lorenzo (Raoul Bova).  That Giovanna's eyes locate him out of habit rather than sudden interest is supported by a comment from her closest friend and neighbor, Eminè.  The longing that Giovanna's looks betray is combated by her pastry creations which she sells to a pub to supplement her meager income as an accountant and Filippo's "continuous firings" – and here is where her old houseguest begins to come alive.  He has told the children his name is Simone, and without remembering any other particulars he has managed to cook the family crepes.  With these facts in hand, the perspicacious viewer will return to our opening scene in a Rome bakery many decades ago.  It is a scene of inexplicable violence, but one made rational by the time and place, a suspension of all good acts in favor of endless evils and mass perdition.  Simone's vivacity is matched only by his expertise and he counsels Giovanna on tap water, her smoking, and her unfortunate choice not to pursue her dream of opening a pastry shop.  These solemn pieces of advice Giovanna accepts – a stark contrast to her prior rantings to Filippo about Simone's endangering the children – and that same night she and Simone go to the pub.  From afar, as if wondering whether he could ever come any closer, she espies Lorenzo alone on a barstool and, at the same time, completely loses track of the old man.  As she turns to leave, her banker is standing before her very eyes.  They talk in awkward, unfinished thoughts as if in a dream, and we learn that he is very different from her husband – well-dressed, subdued, sensitive to detail.  But when he mentions "her grandfather," they begin a modest search for Simone that reveals aspects of his past all too obvious to readers of fiction (the hallucinatory conversations and collapse in front of a shuttered store being the least subtle) – and we will stop our game of handy-dandy right about here.

Though these developments will hardly shock or amaze, small notes resound that are less predictable, including Eminè's advice about Lorenzo, Simone's real ability, and a few scenes interspersed that augment, for lack of a better term, the film's historical flavor.  However you may feel about such melodrama, and there persist well-worn aspects to this approach, the story moves slowly and truly as if we were assured of each detail's proper category.  When Lorenzo calls Giovanna well out of eyeshot, she still instinctively undoes and fusses with her ponytail; when Giovanna finds a letter by Simone on her kitchen table she does the natural thing and thinks little of its privacy; and when she decides to indulge in the luxury of quitting her job, Filippo, who barely makes ends meet at a gas station and has lost numerous work opportunities, feels like an even greater failure.  As it were, the most cumbrous component of the whole equation turns out to be Lorenzo, whom Giovanna can visit to her heart's and body's content thanks to Filippo's night shift and general obliviousness as if he were indeed the man of her dreams.  Lorenzo doesn't make sense the way our ideals, material or emotional, never quite correspond to what we really need – which is what is so nice about such a movie.  The husband of the bored wife is never painted as a bad man; he is, in fact, a good father, a kind person, and although somewhat of an underachiever, his heart lies very much in the right place.  The ending then seems quite correct in keeping with the tone of the film, which is neither one of hope, nor of self-betterment, nor of passion.  It is one of responsibility – of distinguishing right from wrong, overcoming personal injustices to fight greater evils, and abiding by the choices one makes, even if those choices are fatiguing and dull.  And it does not give away too much by including Simone's mournful words, "it must be wonderful to watch love grow, love that started only as passion, to protect it from time."  After all, time does not need to conquer us wholly and completely.