Italian for Beginners

In Denmark in the early nineties a man named after a German city had the audacity (born, we are told, from a severe religious crisis) to return modern cinema to a charming form of dalliance.  Gone were the lavish sets, thunderclap soundtracks and disruptions in that sticky matrix we call the time and space continuum; in their stead came onsite filming, diegetic music, and a sharp focus on the ineluctable modality of the visible with the help of a handheld camera.  Von Trier, a man of devout belief in the future of cinema and his soul, has tinkered with his pretentious manifesto in enough ways as to elicit the envy and derision of far less talented filmmakers and critics, which, of course, only augments his Jupiter-sized ambition. Yet what is most interesting about the Dogme 95 declaration is that it emanated from a small country.  Denmark has fewer than six million inhabitants, but in the last thirteen years it has probably produced thirty first-rate films as well as many others that are sufficiently watchable (the crown jewel of all these titles having been reviewed elsewhere on these pages).  Being a laid-back, attractive, fun-loving nation, if reticent at times, Danes are naturally equipped to handle the rigors of spontaneous acting because hysterics, wild gesturing, and insane monologues simply do not do.  Life and society, however informal Danes tend to be, are constructs that have propelled them to the forefront of European style and urban culture; that they should venture into cinema to record this modern expansion is therefore hardly a surprise.  Yet there is almost nothing modern or progressive about this pleasing take on an old-fashioned comedy of manners. 

The manners involved are those of a small village's batch of eccentrics who range from a widowed and tattooed pastor (Anders W. Berthelsen) to a foul-tempered restaurateur (Lars Kaalund) to a hopelessly clumsy shop assistant (Anette Støvelbæk).  Their sextet is rounded out by an awkward middle-aged hotel employee (Peter Gantzler) who has been, ahem, without love for an extremely long time, a hairdresser (Ann Eleanora Jørgensen), and the Italian in the lot, a young woman called Giulia.  They are all, for one reason or another, single.  Andreas the pastor soothes his grief by driving a Ferrari; Finn takes out his frustrations on the few people who dine at his small establishment, where his service staff includes Giulia; Olympia is so incompetent she can barely hold a job and has to care for an old vulgarian of a father who seems to hate her; Karen cuts hair every now and again, but mostly spends her time seeing to her sick mother; and love-deprived Jørgen keeps making eyes at Giulia although they are, shall we say, linguistically incompatible.  By all indications Danish villages are very bizarre places.  So when an Italian class taught at the local community center unites the characters (except, of course, Giulia), we sense destiny weaving its loom around all involved, which should bring them happiness or at least a new lease on their tired lives.  There might even be a chance of a field trip to that southern land!  Romance shall blossom like jasmine on a young woman's clavicle!  All will be redeemed and the sun shall rise anew on this little Danish village we have come to like so much.

Well, not exactly.  In the middle of the first class attended by Olympia, one of the earth's most cursed mammals, the portly, middle-aged (but very suave) instructor gets a little light-headed then promptly drops dead.  Since this is a canonical Dogme film, no signs of death are actually allowed (that is to say, an actor may fall down and we may assume him to be dead, but a close-up of him not breathing or any fake blood is prohibited).  Their sole respite from the daily tedium now gone, the masses revert to their semi-suicidal state until one student decides to take matters into his own hands and teach the class himself.  His Italian for a non-native is quite good (everyone, it seems, has a secret talent or two) and this makes the dream of Italy much more tangible to his classmates.  My policy of nondisclosure precludes any more details, but I will add that certain things that are expected to happen do indeed take place, with twists that are hardly contrived.  The magic of Dogme is precisely its proximity to our real existence untempered by the manipulative imagery and tones that are supposed to direct our thoughts.  Conflicted emotions, half-gnawed assent, and hesitancy are all perfectly acceptable because that is how we feel most of the time about most of the world.  You may be pleased with the Danes and their cosmopolitan approach to escape or you may say that this sort of stuff only happens to other people.  Or maybe you'll simply forget you're watching a film about strangers, which is exactly what these sweet if misled people might have hoped had they been showing you, for example, one of their prized home videos.

The Sorcerers

Those who believe in something greater than themselves – something almighty, something all-knowing and something all-encompassing – should not take umbrage at the arrogance of men of science.  Now it is true that that the discoveries of the last few hundred years have greatly changed how we view our universe, and how agreeably we exist within it.  But we should not forget the nihility of the physicist's black holes, the bondage of being nothing more than a link on a long chain of beasts, the emptiness at the bottom of the zealous chemist's alembic.  Through fortune and ingenuity we have surpassed all our predecessors in speed of communication as well as some creature comforts that we would not likely give back – yet this comes at a price.  Although we are advanced and equipped like never before, we no longer fend for ourselves.  For keys to all the things we value we consult a locksmith; for the meat we devour we need a butcher; for the software and computers that have transformed our lives in so many extraordinary ways, the vast majority of us still require the aid of a technology specialist.  We know the tools that science has laid at our feet, but their manufacture is divided among so many masters that we might conclude that for every step towards man's conquest of his planet he has become increasingly helpless.  Which brings us to a story from this collection. 

In a forest in Eastern Bolivia that is home to this tiny tribe, our guides are a pair of British anthropologists, Wilkins and Goldbaum.  Perhaps it is always the British, renowned for being emotionally distant, that feel impassioned by these miniature studies of miniature civilizations; perhaps the fact that one of them may be of Jewish descent makes us more sympathetic to their interests.  They have learned hitherto only a "hundred-odd words" of Siriono, much more than what English they have been able to teach "the most intelligent and curious man in the village," Achtiti.  And their struggles, already keen and daily, are exacerbated by the destruction – whether it was wilful remains one of the story's many mysteries – of their campsite.  They dare not leave the site with Siriono instructions since these might prove fatal.  So they decide to ask the tribe to dispatch one of its own to seek help from a contact, Suarez, in Candelaria, the closest town:

The following day, Wilkins prepared the letter for Suarez in Candelaria.  He had the idea of drafting it in two versions, one written in Spanish for Suarez and one ideographic, so that both Achtiti and the messenger could get the gist of the mission's purpose and put aside their evident suspicion.  The second version showed the messenger himself walking southwest, along the river; twenty suns were intended to represent the length of the journey.  Then came the city: tall huts, and among them many men and women in trousers and skirts and with hats on their heads.  Finally, there was a bigger man, pushing the motorboat into the river, with three men on board and sacks of provisions, and the boat going back up the river; in this last image, the messenger was on board, stretched out and eating from a bowl.  

The vision of Candelaria, a town of admittedly no more than five thousand inhabitants, differs so greatly from the tiny Siriono enclave that one might have imagined Wilkins was describing London.  In the meantime, there is little the two foreigners can do but hope that a boat returns with Sanchez and that they will not be slaughtered ("as they do with their old people") owing to their immediate uselessness.  Useless, that is, until the Englishmen survey their remaining belongings and find a tape recorder, gobs of currency, two watches, and most importantly, a box of matches.  The tape recorder was used before the story's events to record Achtiti's voice, playback that engenders fear and loathing; but when the explorers produce small sticks that burn after contact, the natives become very restless indeed. 

The story has a moral that is all too obvious, although sometimes the best lessons are the ones we have to repeat.  It is never determined whether Wilkins and Goldbaum are good men or even good ethnographers.  What can be said about their approach to one of the world's most notoriously primitive tribes is that they care for accuracy and justice in human affairs, even if there are many indications that they do not think all men to be equal.  Towards the end of our tale, we learn more about this tribe, so baffling in its simplicity:

They are not familiar with metals, they do not possess terms for numbers higher than three, and although they often have to cross swamps and rivers, they do not know how to build boats.  They do know, however, that at one time they were able to do so, and the story is passed down among them of a hero who had the name of the Moon and who had taught their people (then much more numerous) three arts: to light fires, to carve out canoes, and to make bows.  Of these, only the last survives; they have even forgotten the method of making fire.

One could envision a world without light or fire if the sun caressed our limbs in sufficient quantity; one could even more easily do without metal, canoes or transportation of any kind; but what seems unfathomable is a life no greater than three.  What of the endless universe and its innumerable questions?  Can they really be reduced to nothing more than parents and one beloved child, the sides of a triangle, the Trinity and its contradictions that are not really contradictions?  Perhaps there's something to the uncomplicated life after all.   

La Veneziana

To Alexandra on her birthday.

Readers of these pages are well-acquainted with what makes true art live and breathe: a clear and precise vision coupled with unshakable principles.  Few will ever contest that art, regardless of the medium, can survive bereft of vision, even though many current entries in modern museums have the arrogance to think that any form of expression is worth preserving as artistic (I once met an impressionable young woman who admitted that after traveling through Italy for three months and visiting the finest European museums, her favorite painter was still some splattering American mediocrity).  Of course, these modern museums cater to trends and box office receipts and have long since understood that the vast majority of us do not want to be intimidated by art.  The vast majority of us would like to waltz into any museum of the world and be able to grasp on some lazy Sunday afternoon with a vapid guide and a bunch of other clueless tourists the essence of all that we see – as if the nuances of the years of work of past masters can be gleaned by the hasty and uninitiated.  True art takes as much preparation on the part of the observer as on the part of the artist himself, a topic broached elegantly in this story.

Apart from a few wispy servants, our characters are five: a Colonel decorated for his forays in Afghanistan; his talented and somewhat cavalier son Frank; an art restorer by the name of McGore and his much younger wife Maureen; and Simpson, Frank's college roommate and complete opposite.  The site of their gathering is the Colonel's estate, which reeks of the liquor and stale glory that supposedly dignify old soldiers.  With minimal effort and secret smiles, Frank and Maureen demolish the Colonel and Simpson at lawn tennis (McGore does not or cannot participate), leading the Colonel down his habitual slope of gruff looks, overformality, and, of course, omnipresent booze.  The occasion for the McGores' visit is ostensibly for Mr. McGore, a cheerless old dog "who considered life's Creator only a second-rate imitator of the masters whom he had been studying for forty years," to work on La Veneziana, which is described thus:

The painting was very fine indeed.  Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in half-profile, standing against a warm, black background.  Rose-tinted cloth revealed her prominent, dark-hued neck, with extraordinarily tender folds beneath the ear, and the gray lynx fur with which her cherry-red mantlet was trimmed was slipping off her left shoulder.  With the elongated fingers of her right hand spread in pairs, she seemed to have been on the point of adjusting the falling fur but to have frozen motionless, her hazel, uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the canvas.  Her left hand, with white ripples of cambric encircling the wrist, was holding a basket of yellow fruit; the narrow crown of her headdress glowed atop her dark-chestnut hair.  On the left the black was interrupted by a large, right-angled opening straight into the twilight air and the bluish-green chasm of the cloudy evening.

A more mature Nabokov would alter our expectations in a superior story, also about forgers and easels, which I will not spoil here.  Suffice it to say that the picture turns out to resemble wholly and strikingly a certain Maureen McGore, a fact noticed by the love-struck Simpson and the very indifferent Mr. McGore.  And so, after batting around a few impassioned ideas that could easily have been expanded into a novel (the story itself is Nabokov's longest), our eyes fall to Simpson, who is very much in love with Maureen but can do very little about his shy unattractiveness and her magnificence.

There are other details that often seem to dovetail in fiction.  Frank happens to be a stellar athlete, inattentive student, and, sub rosa, an artist.  But how this odd fact is introduced (Frank early on states, quite sarcastically to his father, that "paintings perturb me") seems a bit arbitrary:

[There were] occasional rumors that Frank was good at drawing but showed his drawings to no one.  He never spoke about art, was ever ready to sing and swig and carouse, yet suddenly a strange gloom would come over him and he would not leave his room or let anyone in, and only his roommate, lowly Simpson, would see what he was up to.  What Frank created during these two or three days of ill-humored isolation he either hid or destroyed, and then, as if having paid an agonizing tribute to his vice, he would again become his merry, uncomplicated self.

It should be said that this set of characteristics is accurate: it describes, more or less, the poet who is embattled by societal circumstances and the plain nonsense of being a "public intellectual" (a ridiculous title and usually self-imposed).  In fact, true artists will often find the subject of art, which so carelessly devolves into oneupmanship, tedious and unbecoming of real interaction because most people – including numerous artists – cannot converse casually with the precision that such matters deserve.  And what do they deserve?  Perhaps more than McGore, a Philistine of occasional wit and endless platitudes, can offer.  Perhaps McGore, who speaks at length about people entering pictures as a rebuttal to Simpson's silly Gothic notion of portraits' coming to life, is not the type of person to pay any heed to true beauty, even beauty in his immediate vicinity.  That would explain, of course, a few things; yet the motivation behind the McGores' marriage is never fleshed out, apart from the hint of financial stability.  But Venetians have always had far too much art and culture to let money hold them back.

The Vampyre

There is much to be said for being the first – or, at least, the loudest – in the promulgation of a literary phenomenon.  Considering how briefly these phenomena tend to echo within the captive ears of their readership, a topos that has enjoyed two hundred years of uninterrupted (and rising) interest must be termed nothing less than visionary.  Perusing the annals of Gothic literature – a genre of writing which has always given me a sort of guilty pleasure – one learns that it was this poet who first formulated, in our modern sense, the monster that has dug its claws into every major literary tradition.  Given Byron's elevated assessment of himself that is hardly surprising.  Yet despite a lengthy, somewhat overwrought poem in which the beast is described with gory relish, it was not he who first put the real bloodsucker on the map in the dashing, often noble shape for which he is now most renowned, but this half-Italian writer who also died young.  And if he gains no other readers for his works and short life in the future, Polidori will be remembered until kingdom come for this classic tale. 

Byron made one other contribution to the legend in a "fragment of a novel" that he wrote almost three years before Polidori's story was published in 1819.  A first-person narrator begins to talk about a certain Augustus Darvell, and his attitude is given a curious spin:

He [Darvell] had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another, in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources.  It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy.  Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil: I know not how this may be, but in him there certainly was the one, though I could not ascertain the extent of the other – and felt loath, as far as regarded himself, to believe in its existence.  My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtaining, to a certain degree, that common-place intercourse and moderate confidence of common and every-day concerns, created and cemented by similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting, which is called intimacy, or friendship, according to the ideas of him who uses those words to express them.

I include the description in full because the fragment itself is so abbreviated that the rest of it contains but allusions to this primary passage (such is often the case when the germ of an idea has not yet been cultivated into a full-grown flower).  However incomplete the characterization, it provided enough impetus for Polidori to expand the story into a cautionary tale of judgment and imposition, one remarkably acute in its portrayal of human weaknesses.  The weaknesses, as it were, turn out to be all too familiar: delusion, curiosity, and the unforgivable human predilection to cater to those in positions of power.

In The Vampyre, our mysterious stranger assumes the pseudo-Germanic name of Count Ruthven (which may be loosely etymologized as "friend of suffering").  Yet the stage is set not through the third-person narrator, who knows better than to trust such a baleful being, but by the young Aubrey, a naive landed elite:

He [Aubrey] had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honor and candor, which daily ruins so many milliners' apprentices. He believed all to sympathize with virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances: he thought that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of clothes, which were as warm, but which were better adapted to the painter's eye by their irregular folds and various colored patches. He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life.

We all know an Aubrey or two, and most usually they are harmless sorts who dream of life as much as they actually observe it.  In a society in which little crime or misery can be found, the Aubreys of the world stay sheltered if feckless, and only with time if at all understand that there is more to existence than a lyric poem to the mountains.  We should not be astonished, therefore, at the effect that Ruthven has on a person like Aubrey, nor that Ruthven would not hesitate to identify his mark:

He [Aubrey] watched him [Ruthven]; and the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact: allowing his imagination to picture every thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him.

This is the most telling passage in a story brimming with niceties and victories of style, and it thoroughly accounts for the horrific sequence of events that follow.  Aubrey and Ruthven become acquaintances but Aubrey still cannot place what about the Count bothers him so; eventually, he goes to Greece and falls in love with a Greek girl called Ianthe who warns him as all good heroines do not to wander through a dark and gloomy sylvan scene.  And like most of the heroes of contemporary horror fiction, Aubrey just does that and comes across a few rather nasty secrets about his former acquaintance.

What obtains through the end of the story is what habitually befalls those who are both outgeneraled and impatient.  The special twist in this case, and one that indicates the demonic origins of the Count, is a promise that he extracts from Aubrey even after the youth has been witness to flagitious displays of his power.  That Aubrey wavers only slightly might be imputed to the hypnotic clasp of his adversary, although a more cynical mind could easily charge Aubrey with too much optimism in the affairs of man and beast.  And Ruthven would surely qualify for both of those epithets.

Máscaras venecianas (part 4)

The conclusion to the Bioy Casares story ("Venetian Masks").  You can read the original in this collection.

I didn't want to attract anyone's attention or help for fear of getting caught up with some well-meaning Samaritan who would delay me.  Once I felt strong enough I began my search anew.  I tried to advance in the interminable flow of those heading in the same direction and avoid those coming the other way.  I sought the face and attention of every possible woman guised in a domino, and however often I swerved and averted my glance there were so many of them that I might have missed more than one.  The impossibility of looking at all of them was a risk to which I was hardly resigned.  I stepped among the masses: a harlequin appeared on one side, began to laugh, and then screamed something perhaps parodying the gondoliers.  The truth is that I now saw myself as a boat leading its prow through the waters, and in this dream image my head and the prow were interchangeable.  I put a hand to my forehead: I was burning hot.  I began to justify this fact to myself by saying that these strangers were like the beatings of the waves against my hull, and hither came the heat, the incredible heat, and this is where I lost consciousness.

Then came days of confusion, of dreaming as I slept and as I was awake.  I constantly believed that I was really awake and trusted that these dreams, as bothersome as they were persistent, would be completely dispelled.  Soon enough came my disillusionment, perhaps because they were all real facts, difficult to admit, and because they preoccupied me and provoked  in me – with unending fever, which was also real – new deliria.

Making everything all the more frightening and uncertain was the fact that I didn't recognize the room in which I found myself.  I had never before seen the woman who attended to me with maternal efficacy, and who said to me that we were in the hotel La Fenice.  The woman was called Euphemia, and I would call her Saint Euphemia.

I think that on two occasions I was visited by a Doctor Kurtz.  On his first visit he explained to me that he was "just living here, at the heart of Venice," at I no longer know what number on Fiubera street, and that if I needed anything I should call him any time day or night.  On his second visit, he discharged me.  When he left, I noticed that he hadn't asked me for the bill, which gave me a new feeling of anxiety because I was afraid I wouldn't remember his house address, forget to pay him or not find him as if he were a person from a dream.  In reality he was the typical family doctor, of the kind spoken about in other times.  Perhaps he seemed a bit unreal in our day and age, but was there anything in Venice that didn't seem that way?

One afternoon I asked Euphemia how I got to the hotel La Fenice.  She answered me evasively and insisted emphatically that while I had my fever, Mr. and Mrs. Massey would visit me up to two times a day.  Immediately their visits returned to my memory or, better said, I saw Massey and Daniela in a crystal-clear dream.  The worst part of the fever – and, in that sense, everything went on as it was – was the autonomy of my mind's images.  The fact that my will had no power over them scared me as perhaps indicating the onset of madness.  That afternoon I spent remembering one of the Masseys' visits, seeing them as if they were seated at my bedside and seeing Daniela eating chocolates in the opera box, then in a mask reclining over me, talking to me and my identifying her easily.  Reliving or dreaming this scene perturbed me so greatly that I initially didn't hear the words of the mask.  At the precise moment when I asked her to "repeat them, please," she disappeared.  Massey had entered the room.  Her disappearance had made me grief-stricken because I preferred keeping Daniela in my dreams and finding myself without her.  But Massey's presence woke me from all delusions: a form of relief, I suppose, because I began to feel less mislaid, less lost.  My friend spoke to me with his usual frankness as if I were healthy and able to confront the truth, and I tried to pass this test of confidence.  Then he said something I already knew: that after she and I had parted, Daniela was not longer the same woman she was before.  I said:

"I never betrayed her."

"No doubt.  Yet you have to understand that she didn't believe your illness at all until she came across you lying in the street just around the corner."

I was immediately upset and said:

"And she's trying to make up for it with a good nurse and a good doctor."

"Don't ask her for what she can't give you."

"You know what it is?  She doesn't understand that I love her."

He replied that I shouldn't be presumptuous and that she also loved me when I left her.  I protested:

"But I was sick."

He said that love demanded the impossible, then added:

"As you're trying now with your demands that she return.  She won't."

I asked him why he was so sure, and he said that this conclusion was based on his own experience.  I retorted with poorly contained irritation:

"That's not the same thing."

He responded:

"Of course it isn't.  I didn't leave her."

I looked at him astonished because, for a moment, I thought I had heard his voice crack.  He assured me that Daniela suffered greatly and that after what had happened with me, she could no longer fall in love.  At least not like before.

"For the rest of her life.  Do you get it?"

I did not contain myself:

"Perhaps she still loves me."

"Of course she does – like a friend, like her best friend.  And you could ask her to do for you what she did for me."

Massey had regained his swagger.  In the most tranquil tones he began to give horrible explanations, explanations I didn't want to hear and which in my weak condition I barely understood.  He spoke about so-called carbonic children, clones, doubles.  He said that Daniela in collaboration with Leclerc had developed from one of her cells – I believe he used the word cell, but I cannot be sure – children, girls identical to her.  Now I think that perhaps there was only one of them – one was enough for the nightmare that Massey was narrating.  She managed to accelerate its growth with such intensity that in less than ten years she had converted it into a splendid woman of seventeen or eighteen.

"Your Daniela?"  I asked in unexpected relief.

"It seems incredible, but as it were, she is a woman made for me.  Identical to her mother, yet – how should I say this – much more appropriate for a man like me.  I have to tell you something that will seem like sacrilege: I would never swap her for the original, not for anything in the world.  She is identical but at her side I live in another sort of peace, in genuine serenity.  If you only knew how things really were, you would envy me."

So that he wouldn't insist that I ask Daniela to do the same for me, I said:

"I'm not interested in an identical woman.  I want her and her alone."

He replied sadly but firmly:

"In that case you'll never get anything in this world.  Daniela told me that when she saw your face in the bar, she understood that you still loved her.  She thinks that rekindling a past love doesn't make any sense.  To avoid a useless argument when she was told that she wasn't running a risk, she left on the first flight out."