En memoria de Paulina (part 1)

Part one of a story ("In memory of Paulina") by this native of Buenos Aires. You can read the original here.

I had always loved Paulina.  In one of my first memories Paulina and I are hidden in a dark arbor of laurels, in a garden watched by two stone lions.  Paulina said to me: “I like blue, I like grapes, I like ice, I like roses, I like white horses.”  And I knew that my happiness had begun because these preferences of Paulina’s were also mine.  We resembled one another so miraculously that in a book on the final conjoining of souls into the soul of the world, my female friend wrote in the margin: “Ours have already been conjoined.”  Ours, at that time, meant Paulina’s and mine.

To explain this similarity, I will argue that I was a hasty and distant sketch of Paulina.  I recall having written in my notebook: “Every poem is a sketch of Poetry, and in every thing lies a prefiguration of God.”  I also thought: “I am safe as long as I resemble Paulina.”  I saw (and see even now) identification with Paulina as the best possibility for my own being, as the refuge in which I would be freed of my natural defects, of my obtuseness, my negligence, my vanity.

Life was a sweet habit which led us to await, just like something natural and sure, our future marriage.  Paulina’s parents, immune to the early literary success which I had soon squandered, promised their consent once I had completed my doctorate.  So often we imagined a tidy future with enough time to work, to travel, and to love one another.  This we imagined in such vividness that we became persuaded we were already living together.

But talk of our marriage did not induce us to treat each other as betrothed might.  All our childhood was spent together, and there persisted between us the chaste friendship so typical for our age.  Never did I dare assume the role of lover and say to her in solemn tones: “I love you.”  But I did as she wished, however, and gazed with astonished and scrupulous love upon her resplendent perfection.

Paulina liked it when I had friends over.  She would prepare everything in anticipation of my guests and secretly act like she were the lady of the house.  I must confess that these meetings were not to my liking.  The one we held for Julio Montero to meet some writers was no exception.

Montero visited me for the first time that evening.  On this occasion, he wielded a copious manuscript and the despotic demands that the unedited work made on the time of his fellow men.  Some time after the visit I had already forgotten his hairy, almost black face.  Referring to the story that he read me — Montero had beseeched me to tell him in all sincerity whether the impact of his bitterness had turned out too bold — it happened to be notable because it revealed a vague attempt at imitating a large number of different writers.  The probable sophism had given birth to the central idea: if a certain melody arises from the relationship between the violin and the movements of the violinist, the soul of every person arose from a certain relationship between movement and material.  The hero of the tale designed a machine to produce souls (a kind of stretcher, with wood and pylons).  Then the hero died.  A wake was held, then a burial; but in the stretcher the hero was secretly alive.  Towards the last paragraph, the stretcher appeared along with a stereoscope and a tripod with a galena stone within whose space a young woman had died.

Once I had managed to impart to him the problems of his argument, Montero exhibited a strange urge to meet some writers.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon,” I told him.  “I will introduce you to a few.”

Calling himself a savage, he accepted the invitation.  Moved perhaps by the pleasure of seeing him leave, I accompanied him down to the front door that gave onto the street.  When we got out of the elevator, Montero came upon the patio garden.  Sometimes, in the faint light of the evening, coming to it through the large glass door that separated it from the hall, this little garden suggested the mysterious image of a forest at the bottom of a lake.  At night, projectors of lilac and orange light converted it into a horrible caramel paradise.  Montero saw it at night.

“I’ll be frank,” he said, resigned to averting his eyes from the garden, “Of everything I’ve seen of the house, this is the most interesting.”

The next day Paulina arrived early, and it was five in the afternoon when I had everything ready for the reception.  I showed her a Chinese statuette made of green stone which I had bought in an antique shop that morning.  A savage horse with its legs and mane raised in the air.  The salesman assured me that it symbolized passion.

Paulina put the little horse on one of the bookshelves and exclaimed: “For life’s first passion, it’s beautiful.”  When I told her I was giving to her as a gift she immediately threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

We took our tea in the breakfast room.  I told her I had been offered a two−year scholarship to study in London. Suddenly it was like we were married, on a trip, in our life in England (it seemed to us as immediate as our marriage).  We considered the details of a domestic budget; the privations, almost sweet, to which we would subject ourselves; the division of study time, of walking, of relaxing, and perhaps even of work; what Paulina would be doing while I attended class; the clothes and books we would take with us.  After some time mulling over projects, we admitted that I had to turn down the scholarship.  My exams were a week away, but it was already evident that Paulina’s parents wanted to delay our nuptials.

Our guests began to arrive.  I wasn’t feeling happy.  Whenever I talked to anyone, I was only thinking of excuses to move on.  It seemed impossible to propose a topic that might interest the person to whom I was speaking.  Whenever I wanted to remember something I couldn’t, or my recollections came back far too slowly.  Anxious, futile, dejected, I moved from one group to another, all the time just wanting everyone to leave for us to be alone and for the moment to come, however brief, when I would walk Paulina back to her house.

Near the window, my fiancée was talking to Montero.  When I saw her she raised her eyes and inclined her perfect face towards me.  In Paulina’s tenderness I sensed an inviolable refuge where we were alone.  How I yearned to tell her that I loved her!  That very night I made the firm decision to abandon my puerile and absurd embarrassment about speaking of love.  “If I could now,” I sighed, “communicate my thoughts to her.”  In her look there palpitated a generous, happy and surprising gratitude.

Paulina asked me which poem was it where a man distanced himself so much from a woman that he did not greet her when he saw her in heaven.  I knew that the poem was by Browning and had a vague recollection of the lines.  I spent the rest of the afternoon looking them up in the Oxford edition.  If they weren’t going to leave me alone with Paulina, looking for something for her was preferable to chatting with other people.  But I was singularly dumbfounded and asked myself whether the impossibility of finding the poem wasn’t an omen.  I looked towards the window.  Luis Alberto Morgan, the pianist, must have noticed my anxiety because he told me:

“Paulina is showing Montero the house.”

Hardly concealing my annoyance, I shrugged my shoulders and pretended to turn back towards my book by Browning.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Morgan enter my room.  “He’s going to call her,” I thought.  He immediately returned with Paulina and Montero.

Finally, someone left.  In indifference and slowness, others then began leaving.  The moment arrived when only Paulina, Montero, and I were alone.  Then, as I feared, Paulina said:

“It’s very late.  I’m off.”

Montero quickly intervened:

“If you so desire, I can escort you back to your house.”

“I can also escort you,” I countered.

I spoke to Paulina but looked at Montero.  I pretended that my eyes conveyed to him my contempt and hate.

Arriving downstairs, I informed Paulina that she didn’t have her little Chinese horse.  I said to her:

“You’ve forgotten my gift.”

I went up to the apartment and returned with the statuette.  I found them leaning against the glass door looking at the garden.  I took Paulina by the hand and did not let Montero approach her from the other side.  In conversation, I openly disregarded Montero.

He did not get offended.  When we had taken our leave from Paulina, he insisted on accompanying me back to my house.  On the way he talked about literature, probably with sincerity and fervor.  I said to myself: “He is one of the literati, I am a tired man frivolously preoccupied with a woman.”  I considered the incongruence which existed between his physical vigor and his literary feebleness.  I thought: “He is protected by a shell.  What his interlocutor says doesn’t reach him.”  I looked with hate at his lively eyes, his hairy mustache, his hefty neck.

That week I almost didn’t get to see Paulina.  I was studying a lot.  After the last of my exams, I gave her a call.  She pleased me with her insistence that it didn’t seem natural and said that at the end of the afternoon she would come home.

I took a nap, bathed with great slowness, and, leafing through a book on the Fausts of Müller and Lessing, waited for Paulina.

Seeing her, I exclaimed:

“You’ve changed.”

“Yes,” she responded.  “How we know one another!  I don’t need to talk for you to know what I feel.”

We looked into each other’s eyes in an ecstasy of beatitude.

“Thank you,” I replied.

Nothing had ever moved me as much as the admission, on the part of Paulina, that our souls were conjoined in profound compatibility.  I confidently abandoned myself to this blandishment.  I don’t know when I asked myself (incredulously) if Paulina’s words concealed another meaning.  Before I was able to consider this possibility, Paulina embarked on a confused explanation.  Suddenly I heard:

“That first evening we were already so hopelessly in love.”

I asked myself whom she might mean.  Paulina continued:

“He’s very jealous.  He is not opposed to our friendship, but I promised him that I wouldn’t see you for a while.”

I was still waiting, however, for the impossible clarification which would calm me.  I didn’t know whether Paulina was joking or serious.  I didn’t know what expression my face now wore.  And I didn’t know what was tearing it apart was my anguish.  Paulina added:

“I’m going.  Julio is waiting for me.  He didn’t come upstairs so as not to bother us.”

“Who?” I asked.

Immediately I feared, as if nothing at all had occurred, that Paulina had discovered that I was an impostor and that our souls were not joined.

Paulina answered in all naturalness:

“Julio Montero.”

The response did not manage to surprise me; nevertheless, on that horrible night, nothing moved me more than those two words.  For the first time I felt far away from Paulina.  Almost contemptuously, I then asked:

“Are you going to get married?”

I don’t recall what her response was.  I think that she invited me to her wedding.

Then I found myself alone.  Everything was absurd.  There could not have been a person less compatible with Paulina (or with me) than Montero.  Or was I mistaken?  If Paulina loved this man, perhaps then she had never resembled me.  An abjuration was not enough for me; I discovered that many times I had caught a glimpse of the terrifying truth.

I was very sad, but I don’t think I felt any jealousy.  I went to bed, face down.  Stretching out my hand, I found the book which had just been reading for a while before.  I cast it far from me in disgust.

I went out for a walk.  On one of the corners I took a look at a merry−go−round.  That night it seemed impossible to go on living.

Over the years I remembered her.  And as I preferred the painful moments of our split (because they had taken place with Paulina) to the subsequent solitude, I ran through them again and again, examining them in minutest detail and reliving each one.  In such distressed deliberation, I thought I was discovering new interpretations of the facts.  Hence, for example, in the voice of Paulina telling me the name of her lover I was surprised to find a tenderness that, in principle, did not fail to thrill me.  I thought that the girl felt sorry for me, and her goodness moved me just as her love had before.  Later, reconsidering the matter, I deduced that this tenderness was not for me but for the name she had uttered.

I accepted the scholarship and silently busied myself with preparations for my trip.  Word, however, got out, and on my last evening I was visited by Paulina.

I felt far from her, but once I saw her I fell in love again.  Without her saying it, I understood that her appearance was a furtive one.  Trembling in gratitude, I took her hands in mine.  Paulina said:

“I will always love you.  Whatever may be, I will always love you more than anyone else.”

Perhaps she thought she had committed a betrayal.  She knew that I did not doubt her faithfulness to Montero, but as if disgusted by having pronounced words that involved her (if not for me than for an imaginary witness) in an unfaithful intention, she added rapidly:

“Obviously, I’m sorry for you is not important.  I’m in love with Julio.”

Everything else, she said, was not important.  The past was a desert region in which she had been waiting for Montero.  To our love, or friendship, she could not agree.

Then we spoke a bit more.  I was very resentful and pretended to be in a hurry.  I walked her to the elevator.  Once we got to front door it immediately began to pour.

“I’ll find you a taxi,” I said.

With sudden emotion in her voice, Paulina yelled at me:

"Goodbye, darling.”

She ran across the street and disappeared from sight.  Sad, I turned around.  Upon raising my eyes I saw a man crouching in the garden.  He sat up and pressed his hands and face against the glass door.  It was Montero.

Rays of lilac and orange light crossed above a green background with dark thickets.  Pressed against the glass, Montero’s face seemed deformed and ghastly pale.

I thought of aquariums, of fish in aquariums.  Then, with frivolous bitterness, I said to myself that Montero’s face suggested other monsters: those fish deformed by the pressure of the water living at the bottom of the sea.

The next day, in the morning, I departed.  I hardly left my cabin for the duration of my journey, and instead wrote and read intensely.

I wanted to forget Paulina.  In my two years in England I avoided thinking about her whenever I could: from meeting with other Argentines to the few telegrams from Buenos Aires where the daily newspapers are published.  It’s true that I seemed to be in a dream, a dream so real and of such persuasive vividness that I asked myself whether my soul was counteracting at night the privations I imposed upon myself during the day.  Obstinately I eluded her memories.  By the end of my first year, I managed to ban her from my nights, and, almost, to forget her.

Blame it on Fidel

I think that Communists are those who do not fear the Lord and move houses all the time.

One of the great platitudes of modern discourse is that we have a lot to learn from children.  Children, we are told, can distinguish good from bad so easily that they will be able to sense when something or someone is secretly evil; children also allegedly possess an innate ability to perceive the truth amidst the ruins of lies and deceit.  Whatever you may think of our younger generations, they certainly do not distinguish good and evil unless they have experienced both to a sufficient extent – usually, one hopes, the mark of adulthood.  For them what is good is what keeps their life running in their favor, which invariably entails a happy family, a certain amount of fun, and a small assortment of odds and ends that do not appeal to adults but perhaps once did.  Evil, in their view, may be loosely construed as whatever prevents them from achieving these goals.  So when a bully mocks a coeval, he probably does not know that what he is doing is morally despicable because he needs to put someone down to make himself feel better (alas, such weaknesses often extend well past our school days).  Yet small children can only do so much harm.  It is from the cruel and conniving teenager, often quite aware of what he should and shouldn't do, that we often avert our eyes in discomfort because his schemes could already be so diabolical as to impress the most ruthless of despots.  So perhaps we should forget the idea of children's moral barometers and address a much more valid point, that of truth and lies – which brings us to this film.

The plot is shoddy for one very good reason: our protagonist is a child and children care little for plots.  That child is Anna De la Mesa (Nina Kervel-Bey), a precocious little busybody who is nine as the film begins in the fall of 1970.  Anna loves her Catholic girls' school and daily routine, and is in general quite pleased with the bourgeois existence provided by her French mother Marie (Julie Depardieu) and Spanish father Fernando (Stefano Accorsi).  Yet on the periphery of this blissful realm lurk a few characters whose motives she cannot quite fathom.  These would include the family's acerbic Cuban housekeeper, who keeps blaming every global malfeasance on her country's dictator, and Marga and Pilar, her father's sister and niece.  Marga and Pilar are refugees from Franco's Spain where Marga's never-seen husband Quino, a militant communist, is murdered as an enemy of the state, forcing Fernando to bring them to France.  That same autumn two political occurrences overshadow the De la Mesas' personal life: the death of this local leader and the rise of a much more distant one.

While De Gaulle's death ushered in the possibility of a more socially liberal France (the war-weary discontent of the 1970s did the rest), Frei's deposition by Allende seven thousand miles away from Paris resonates more strongly in Anna's household.  Allende, you see, is the first democratically elected Marxist president in the Western hemisphere, and although the atrocities of the Soviet bloc were known at this time through the diaspora and defection of many famous figures, there persisted the stubborn and half-blind hope that socialism could triumph.  Not the fantastic social democracy that pervaded Northern Europe and made it the model of political and social development for the world, but a throwback Das Kapital sham of superefficient factories, genteel laborers, and uprisings that had already been proven to be an opium pipe dream.  Marie and Fernando (suddenly sporting a Fidelian beard) radicalize themselves by trading their lovely home for a more proletarian apartment, reducing their diet to simpler and coarser meals, and fighting for women's right to choose and Allende's dusty agenda.  We can wax sentimental about Allende in light of the brutality of his successor, but at the time he was not expected to do quite as much as the film suggests.  Still, a watershed had been attained, and once the De la Mesas turn towards a life of greater freedom from old and tired authorities, there is hardly any way back.

Anna, of course, finds all this either appalling or just plain stupid.  She waits in the car with her younger brother as Fernando visits the Chilean embassy and, appropriately enough, accrues a parking violation; she stares at the hairy monsters, apparently all Chilean dissidents, who smoke, drink, and conspire in her apartment; and, most importantly, she watches her parents scream and rant as if they themselves were an insidious cabal and not a pair of squabbling fools.  The silly political debates are stymied by the director's felicitous decision rarely to elevate the camera.  Most of the world is seen at Anna's level, and for that reason appears big, cumbersome, and goofy – which slowly starts to look less and less coincidental.  Critics most frequently mention Fernando's imbecilic decision to bring his daughter to a rally that will conceivably be dispersed by tear gas, but there are many other instances of a child discerning the uselessness of sudden communal radicalization.  The irony feeds off the incessant bickering, Marie's odd and very public lie, and the origin of Fernando's surname, all of which completely escapes little Anna.  What does Anna understand about communism apart from the quote that begins this review?  That communists like facial hair, eschew hygiene whenever possible, are obsessed with red (perhaps explaining Anna's aversion to a series of red foods dumped on her plate), and are amazingly frugal.  To that last end Anna assumes responsibility for pathologically cutting heat and electricity, even in coldest winter and regardless of whether anyone is still using the utilities.  But the perfect political metaphor comes when Anna, her brother, and Pilar all play tag around a group of cocktailing adults.  The adult world is tall, old, stodgy, faceless, and distant and at the same time clumsy and overbearing, as well as a bit mysterious.  Mysterious, mind you, in the same way that a foreign ritual or game is mysterious, because once you know the rules it doesn't look nearly as profound or intriguing as it did initially.  Perhaps the real secret is that once you get to adulthood, the rules seem just as arbitrary.

Borges, "Prólogo al Elogio de la Sombra"

The beginning ("Prologue to In Praise of Darkness") of a fantastic collection by this Argentine.  You can find the collection here.

Without initial consideration, I have devoted my now-long life to literature, to teaching, to idleness, to the tranquil adventures of conversation, to philology, of which I know little, to the mysterious habit of Buenos Aires, and to the perplexities that, with no small arrogance, are called metaphysics.  Nor has my life lacked the friendship of a certain few, which is the only kind that matters.  I do not think I have a single enemy, and if I have had any, they have never made themselves known to me.  The truth is that the only people who can hurt us are those we love.  Now, at my three-score and ten (in Whitman's phrasing), I put to press my fifth volume of poems.    

Carlos Frías has suggested that I use this prologue to announce my code of aesthetics.  Both my poverty and willfulness are opposed to such advice; I am not the possessor of a code of aesthetics.  Time has taught me a few tricks: avoid synonyms, which have the disadvantage of suggesting imaginary differences; avoid Hispanisms and Argentine coloring, archaisms and neologisms; favor ordinary words over the more surprising; imbed in each story circumstantial features as demanded by the reader of today; simulate minor uncertainties, for if reality is precise memory is most definitely not; narrate the facts (this I learned in Kipling and the Icelandic sagas) as if I did not quite understand them; remember that previous norms are not obligations and that Time will be tasked with abolishing them.  Such devices or traits certainly do not comprise a code of aesthetics.  What is more, I do not believe in any codes of aesthetics; in general they are nothing more than useless abstractions.  They vary according to author and text and have little value apart from being an occasional stimulant or instrument.

This, as mentioned, is my fifth book of verse.  It is reasonable to presume that it will be no better or worse than its forerunners.  With the mirrors, labyrinths and swords expected by my resigned reader come new thematics: old age and ethics.  The latter, as everyone knows, never ceased to preoccupy a certain very dear friend whom literature bestowed upon me, Robert Louis Stevenson.  One of the reasons I prefer the Protestant countries to those of Catholic tradition is their attention to ethics.  Milton wished to educate the children in his academy in the knowledge of physics, mathematics, astronomy, and natural sciences; whereas Johnson observed in the middle of the eighteenth century: "Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance."

In these pages I see the forms of prose and verse coexisting without discord.  I could invoke illustrious antecedents, such as The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Tales of Chaucer, or the Book of a Thousand and One Nights.  Yet I would prefer that these divergences seem accidental and would want this book to be read like a book of verse.  A volume in itself is not an aesthetic act – it is a physical object among other objects; an aesthetic act can only occur when it is written or read.  It is common to aver that free verse is nothing other than a typographical pretense, yet I think in this affirmation lies an error.  Beyond its rhythm, a versicle's typographical form serves to announce to the reader that what awaits him is poetic emotion, not information or reasoning.  There was a time when I inhaled the vast respiration of the psalms* or of Walt Whitman, and after so many years I realize, not without melancholy, that I have limited myself to alternating among certain classical meters: the alexandrine, the hendecasyllable, the heptameter. 

In one milonga I have tried to imitate, respectfully, the flowery courage of Ascasubi and the street songs of the barrios.

Poetry is no less mysterious than other elements of our orb.  This or that felicitous verse cannot make us vain because it is the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are ours.  I hope that the reader will discover in my pages something deserving recollection; in this world beauty is common to all.

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*And here I deliberately write psalmos.  The members of the Royal Spanish Academy wish to impose upon this continent their phonetic incapacities; they advise us to use rustic forms such as neuma, sicología and síquico.  Recently it has occurred to them to write vikingo instead of viking; I suspect that soon enough we will hear of the works of Kiplingo.

Vallejo, "Amor"

A work ("Love") by this Peruvian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

You, Love, no longer come to my dead eyes;
For you my heart weeps, its ideals unshunned. 
Still open are the chalices to run
Autumnal hosts near your auroral wines.

Divine cross, Love, my deserts need your dew,
Your astral blood that yields both dreams and cries.
You, Love, no longer come to my dead eyes,
Which fear and seek your teary dawn anew!

I love you not, O Love, when you are far,
And raffled off in beards of merry bards,
Or short and fragile women's healthy glow.

Come fleshless Love as stunning ichor flows;
That I, in Godlike ways formed from this dust,
Might love and might create devoid of lust!

The Mission

It is unfortunate that the very titles of some works of art discourage a certain segment of the population from viewing them, and another, equally regrettable segment from understanding what on earth or beyond they could be about.  Mention the words "organized religion" to these modern know-it-all skeptics – they know who they are because they know absolutely everything – and you will not fail to notice a sarcastic snicker looming on their thin lips.  They will use terms such as voodoo, witchcraft, superstition, myth, and, most recently, opiate (hilariously rendered as "opium" by some of the more brilliant among them); they will claim that the Church and other conduits of spiritualism have killed so many for nothing, or for nothing more than to enslave and intimidate the survivors; they will claim that all this is a monumental sham for the sake of power; and if that argument doesn't hold water, they will assert that religion is the refuge of the poor, the cold, the downtrodden, to give them hope when life mocks them cruelly.  While all these notions are logical to someone of no imagination, principles or foresight, they are quaintly and wholly illogical in another, more important way.  That we may not be immortal is an acceptable premise, never mind the intuition in so many of us that instructs us otherwise; but what is not acceptable is the fallacy that should we all be nothing but evolved amoebae, we would then have to adhere to manmade law.  True, there are consequences for such infringements.  Yet there is no logical justification for refraining from committing a crime apart from conscience, and if our consciences are biochemical figments of our imagination, then I should do well to rob and kill anyone whose loss is my gain.  That is, by the way, the law of the jungle whence we emerged.  And the jungle of this film will not soon be forgotten.

Our story is simple: we are in the 1750s amidst what certain academics believe to be some of the greatest missionary activity in the history of Catholic Church. The story, which makes perfect sense from first to last, lacks only the coherence of fiction – which is, in fact, its strongest quality.  In the beginning a man is pushed down a stream on a cross, completely at the whims of nature, of God himself who will do with him what He will.  As his body, still alive, wends its way through the rapids, we know that he will cascade over an endless cliff of water and from this perch we shall see the establishment of something much greater and higher.  The man turns out to be a Jesuit priest, and the waterfall comes under the aegis of these people in the jungles of Paraguay.  Despite this ominous introduction, we sense no evil, and shortly thereafter a replacement Jesuit is found in Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) who has on his side a consort of brothers and irrefragable faith.  Gabriel climbs – slowly and with the lushest of backgrounds – the mountain from which his Jesuit colleague just tumbled, and he clambers up with one end in mind: the reduction must be reestablished for the good of the Guaraní people, whom he comes to adore, and, ultimately for the good of the brothers as well.  Barefoot and exhausted, he gains the summit, rests upon a rock, and there takes out a long thin package.  He does not unravel food or a weapon, man's two crutches, but a flute.  His music attracts the natives, who initially act as we might expect them to act, and then assume a quiet dignity and gentleness of movement that do not distinguish them from their European brethren.  Soon Father Gabriel has a new home, and the Jesuit reduction is on track to convert more souls to the way of the Lamb.

Is this imperialism?  Most certainly.  But it is imperialism performed in such an innocuous manner that we wonder who is converting whom.  Peace between peoples of astonishingly divergent origin who can coexist and even thrive together should always be lauded.  So it is hardly surprising when Gabriel is summoned to tend to Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert de Niro), an incarcerated slave trader and mercenary who exemplifies what schoolchildren learn about Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors and their scions.  His world is the opposite of that of the monks: he enjoys wine, women, luxury and servants; he rides on steeds that would terrify anything on two legs; and he wears a countenance that suggests he usually gets what he wants.  There is one exception to that rule, a young woman called Carlotta, who ends up madly in love with Mendoza's brother Felipe (an emaciated Aidan Quinn).  One evil eve after being verbally jilted by Carlotta, Mendoza finds the two in bed and Felipe falls into the despicable trap of duelling a man who has neither qualms nor rules for meting out vengeance.  The brothers clash, the inevitable occurs, and the next time we see the normally slick-haired and stylish Mendoza is as a ragamuffin prisoner sitting on some hay.  "He has not seen anyone in six months," Gabriel is warned by another priest, "I think he wants to die."  But Gabriel has seen many repulsive sinners in his life, and he asks unhesitatingly whether this penance is remorse, to which Mendoza replies that "there is no penance hard enough for me."  They talk further, decide on a plan for the expiation of his horrible crime (contained in part within a magnificent scene by that same waterfall), and Mendoza sheds his previous titles and becomes, after reading chapter thirteen of this epistle, a brother in the Jesuit order.

The rest of the film is devoted to a debate that has many faces.  On one side, we see the hypocritical exploitation and manoeuvring of both the Spanish and Portuguese representatives, men long since blinded by glitz and greed; on the other side, the Jesuits and their hardscrabble but happy existence far from the hum of men.  But there is a third side, a great arbiter and Church dignitary called Altamirano, whose name could connote looking above or high or, in his case, not looking at all.  Ultimately it is he who will decide the fate of the Guaraní; whether their sanctioned murder of each couple's third child is truly to facilitate parents' flight from European oppressors; whether their sweetest tones are merely winds channeled through a beast; and whether missions and missionaries are as important as the central and often compromising tenets of Church authority.  An unorganized and beautiful film that initially promises to be fast-paced, slows down in the middle to the tempo of a stage play, then picks up at the end in a most menacing fashion, The Mission deservingly boasts one of the most legendary soundtracks in recent cinematic history.  And it is the bedlam of the conflict's resolution and the unclear yet enthralling path it takes to that bedlam that have been alternatively praised and chided.  But what is war if not chaos?  And what is love if not submission?  Questions asked, answered with few words, and best explained by the very final shot which could represent so many of us just looking in the mirror.  Some of us, however, may gaze forever at a web of mirrors and see nothing at all.