Máscaras venecianas (part 2)

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

Neither one of them returned to Buenos Aires.  As for my recovery (one of many) – that turned out to be all an illusion, and I continued dragging out my life, my fever attacks alternating with coveted periods of convalescence.

And the years went by quickly; perhaps I should say I didn't feel them.  No fewer than ten years past, dragged out by the rapid repetition of almost identical weeks.  Nevertheless, two facts tested the reality of time: a new improvement in my health – I understood it to be the improvement I had been waiting for – and a new attempt by Massey and Daniela to live together.  I had already spent so many months without a fever that I began to ask myself whether I was healthy.  Massey and Daniela had been separated for so many years that the news of their getting back together surprised me. 

To consolidate my recovery I thought I should break from both my routine and my past.  Perhaps a trip to Europe was the best solution.

I went to see my doctor.  For a long time I mulled over how I should tell him about my plans, what phrasing I should use; I didn't want to give him any opportunity to object.  In reality I was afraid that he would talk me out of it for good or bad reasons.

Without raising his eyes from my medical files, he muttered:

"I think that's an excellent idea."

He looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but the ring of the telephone distracted him.  He had a rather long conversation; meanwhile, I recalled with some apprehension that during my first visit here I had regarded this office as part of a bad dream and the doctor as my enemy (which seemed incredible now).  Remembering all this made me feel very secure, but then other questions arose which alarmed me.  What might he have wanted to say?  Could I really swear that his words were "an excellent idea"?  And if they were indeed, couldn't he have intended them to be ironic?  My anxiety came to a halt when he ended his conversation and explained:

"The spiritual part of you is important in its own right.  A trip now to Europe will be better for you than all the medication I could prescribe."

An array of circumstances, the most important of which being a temporary strengthening of our peso, allowed me to take this trip.  It seemed like destiny was on my side.

I thought that the pleasure of staying indefinitely in almost any part of the world would prevent me from falling into the typical, agency-promoted itinerary: two days in Paris, one night in Nice, lunch in Genoa, and so forth.  Yet a certain impatience similar to that of someone fleeing or desperately in search of something (so that, perhaps, my illness might not catch up to me?) obliged me to reset my trip the next day and visit the most pleasant destinations possible.  In almost absurd haste I went on until one evening in December when, floating through a Venetian canal in a gondola (now I ask myself whether it wasn't a launch stuffed with tourists ... oh, what does it matter!), I found myself in a state of mind in which exaltation and peace combined in perfect harmony.  I heard myself say:

"I'm staying here.  This is what I was looking for."

I disembarked at the Hotel Mocenigo where I had reserved a room.  I remember that I slept well, anxious for the day to come so that I could get up and wander through Venice.  Suddenly it seemed that a faint light was framing my window.  I leapt out of bed, rushed over to the sill, and leaned out.  The dawn was resplendent in its glow over the Grand Canal and the shadows of the Rialto.  Then a damp chill forced me to shut the window and take refuge under my blankets.

Once I had warmed up again, I jumped out of bed.  After a light breakfast I took a steaming hot bath and with no further delay went out to explore the city.  For a moment I thought I was in a dream; no, it was even stranger than that.  I knew that I was not dreaming and yet I could not explain what I was seeing.  "Everything will be explained in due time," I said with nothing more than mild assurance because I remained perplexed.  While two or three gondolas tried to draw my attention with shouts and gestures, a harlequin was moving away in a launch.  Resolved, I still don't know quite why, not to reveal my apprehensions, I asked one of the men rather indifferently how much a trip to the Rialto would cost and boarded a gondola with a hesitant step.  We set off in the opposite direction to that of the mask.  Gazing at the palaces on both sides of the canal I thought: "It would appear that Venice was erected as an interminable series of stages, but why is the first thing I see when I leave my hotel a harlequin?  Perhaps to convince me that this is indeed a theater and subjugate me even more to its whims.   It's quite clear that if I were suddenly to meet Massey, I would hear him say that everything in this world is grey and mediocre and that Venice dazzles me because I came here ready to be dazzled."

We had to pass more than one domino and a second harlequin to be reminded that we were still in a carnival.  I told the gondolier that I found the abundance of people in disguise at this hour strange.

If I understood the man rightly (his dialect was rather broad), he replied that everyone was going to the Piazza San Marco where, at noon, there would be a costume competition.  This was something, he added, that I should definitely not miss as there the most beautiful Venetian women, famous around the world for their beauty, would be congregating.  Perhaps he took me to be ignorant, because he began naming all the masks he saw, pronouncing the names slowly and pedantically.

"Pul-ci-nel-la, Co-lum-bi-na, Do-mi-no."

Of course there were some people passing by whom I would not have identified otherwise: Il Dottore, with glasses and a big nose; Meneghino, with a white-striped tie; La Peste or La Malattia and one that I don't remember all too well, Brighella or something to that effect.

I disembarked on land near the Rialto bridge.  In the mail I sent off a card to my doctor ("Dear Dottore, a splendid trip. Am doing very well.  Regards").  And through the Mercerie I walked towards the Piazza San Marco, looking at the masks that happened to be around as if I were looking for one in particular.  It's not for nothing that they say that if we remember someone in time, we will meet that person.  On a bridge near a church – San Guiliano or Salvatore – I almost walked right into Massey.  I screamed at him in spontaneous ebullience:

"You!  Here!"

"We've been living in Venice for a while now.  When did you arrive?"

I didn't answer him immediately because this verb in the plural came off as rather unpleasant.  It only took a passing reference to Daniela to lower me into the depths of sadness; I thought that my old wounds had healed.  Finally I muttered:

"Last night."

"Why don't you come stay with us?  We have a few spare rooms."

"I would have liked to, but tomorrow I'm off to Paris," I lied so as not to subject myself to an encounter whose effect I could not gauge.

"If my wife knew that you were in Venice and that you left without seeing her, she would never forgive me.  Tonight Catalani's Lorelei is playing in La Fenice."

"I don't like opera."

"Who cares about the opera?  The important thing is spending some time together.  Come over to our opera box.  You'll have a lot of fun: there's a gala party for the carnival and everyone's going to be in costume."

"I don't like costumes."

"Very few men actually dress up.  It's the women who do." 

I had to believe that I'd done enough on my part and if Massey insisted, I couldn't keep saying no for much longer.  I think it was at that moment that I realized that the secret motivation for my trip had been the hope of meeting Daniela and that knowing she was in Venice and leaving without seeing her seemed to be an act of asceticism that was stronger than all my forces combined.

"We'll come get you at your hotel," he said.

"No, I'll come and meet you there.  Leave the ticket at will call."

He insisted that I be punctual, because if I arrived after the first chord had been played I wouldn't be allowed in until after the first act.  I had an impulse to ask about Daniela, but at the same time I was filled with apprehension and disgust owing to Massey's having mentioned her.  We said goodbye.

Máscaras venecianas (part 1)

The first part of a short story ("Venetian masks") by this Argentine.  You can read the original in this collection.

When some people talk about somatization as if it were an inevitable reality, I tell myself bitterly that life is more complicated than they might suppose.  I neither attempt to persuade them otherwise nor forget my own experiences.  For many long years I stumbled from one love to another without a set course; there were few, considering how much time I spent, all sad and unresolved.  Then I met Daniela and knew that I had to search no longer, that everything had already been found.  And that was precisely when my fever attacks began.

I recall my initial visit to the doctor.

"Your glands are not unaffected by this fever," he announced.  "I'm going to prescribe you something that will reduce the swelling."

I took the statement to be good news; but as the doctor was writing down the prescription I asked myself whether the fact that he was giving me something for my symptoms might mean he wasn't giving me anything for my illness because it was incurable.  It occurred to me that if my doubts never left me I would have to ready myself for a stressful and anxious future; on the other hand, if I asked about my condition I would risk hearing an answer that rendered going on with my life impossible.  In any case, the idea of grave doubt seemed far too tiring for me and I got up the courage to ask.  He replied:

"Incurable?  Not necessarily.  There have been cases, I can assure you that there have been cases of total remission."

"Completely cured, you mean?"

"You said it.  I'll put all the cards on the table.  In situations like your present condition, a doctor will rely on all his energy to instill confidence in a patient.  Pay attention to what I'm about to tell you, because it's important.  There is no doubt that some cases have been cured.  Doubts only surface in the how and why of the cures."

"So there's no treatment?"

"There most certainly is treatment, palliative treatment."

"Which now and then results in a cure?"

He didn't tell me no and I poured all my desires of healing myself into this imperfect hope.

There seemed to be no doubt of my having fared poorly in the clinical examination; and yet when I left his office, I no longer knew what to think.  I still wasn't in any condition to attempt a balance, as if I had just gotten some news which, for a lack of time, I hadn't been able to read.  I was more crushed than sad.

Two or three days later the fever left me.  I was still a bit weak, a bit tired, and perhaps I accepted the physician's diagnosis literally.  Then I felt well, better even than before I fell sick, and began to tell myself that doctors were often not so sure about their diagnoses, that perhaps there would be no relapse.  My reasoning was as follows: "If it had to do so, some discomfort would surely manifest itself.  But the truth is I feel better than ever."

I did not deny my inherent proclivity towards a certain disbelief in illnesses.  Probably this was how I kept myself from the thoughts into which I tended to slip regarding, as it were, its possible effects on my future with Daniela.  I had grown accustomed to being happy and life without her was unimaginable.  I would tell her that a century was not enough for me to gaze upon her.  The exaggeration stated precisely what I felt.

I liked when she talked to me about her experiments.  On my own I imagined biology – her field of work – as an enormous river which flowing forth with prodigious revelations on each shore.  Thanks to a scholarship Daniela had studied in France with Jean Rostand and with his no less famous collaborator, Leclerc.  In describing the project which Leclerc had been working on for several years, Daniela used the word "carbonic"; Rostand, for his part, investigated the potential of speeding up the anabolism.  I remember that I said to her:

"I don't even know what the anabolism is."

"All beings pass through three periods," Daniela explained, "anabolism, growth, and then after a more or less extensive plateau, the period in which we are adults, there is the last phase, the catabolism or decadence.  Rostand believed that if we were to lose less time growing we could gain useful years for living."

"How old is he?"

"Almost eighty.  But don't believe that he's old.  All his students are in love with him."

Daniela smiled.  Without looking at her, I replied:

"If I were Rostand, I would devote my efforts to delaying, if not suppressing catabolism.  And I promise you I'm not saying that because I think he's old."

"Rostand thinks just like you, but insists that to understand the mechanism of decadence it is indispensable to understand the mechanism of growth."

A few weeks after my first outbreak of fever, Daniela got a letter from her teacher.  Her reading it to me gave me true satisfaction: I found it incomparably pleasant to see a man so famed for his intelligence value and love Daniela.

The card was a request for her help in an upcoming biology conference in Montevideo, where she would meet one of the group's researchers, a doctor Proux or Prioux, who would be able to update her on the current state of their work.

Daniela asked me:

"How do I tell him I don't want to go?"

She always found these congresses and international conferences useless.  I do not know anyone more reluctant to show off.

"Do you think saying no to Rostand would be a sign of ingratitude?"

"Everything I know, I owe to him."

"Then don't tell him no.  I'll go with you."

I remember the scene as if I could see it now: Daniela threw herself in my arms, muttered a pet name (which I won't bother mentioning since pet names of other people always seem ridiculous), and then exclaimed jubilantly:

"A week with you in Uruguay – how fun!"  She paused and added: "Especially if there were no conference."

She let me talk her into it.  The day of our departure I burned with fever, and by midmorning I felt absolutely awful.  If I didn't want to be burden to Daniela I would have to do without the trip.  I confess that I hoped for a miracle and that only at the very last minute did I announce that I wouldn't be going with her.   She accepted my decision, but then voiced her complaints:

"A whole week apart so that I don't miss out of this borefest!  Why didn't I tell Rostand no!"

Suddenly it was late.  Our very hurried farewell left me with feelings of incomprehension mixed with sadness, incomprehension mixed with neglect.  To console myself, I thought it was a stroke of luck that I hadn't had the time to explain the onset of my fever attacks.  I likely assumed that if I didn't talk about them, they would lose all importance.  This illusion did not last long.  I found myself so sick as to be completely disheartened and understood that it was serious and there was no cure.  The fever only yielded to treatment far more rigorous than what warded off my first attack, and I was left anxious and exhausted.  When Daniela returned I felt happy but I couldn't have looked particularly healthy because she asked me repeatedly how I was feeling.

I had promised myself that I wouldn't talk about my illness, but before god-knows-what-sentence in which I noticed, or thought I noticed, a veiled reproach for not having gone with her to Montevideo, I told her about my prognosis.  I told her only the essential bits, skimming over the treatments, which perhaps might not have taken place without a physician's help, so as to lend dimensions to the terrible truth which he had communicated to me.  Daniela asked:

"What are you suggesting?  That we stop seeing one another?"

I assured her:

"I don't have the strength within me to say it, but there is something that I can't forget: the day you met me I was a healthy man, and now I am anything but healthy."

"I don't understand," she replied.

I tried to explain to her that I did not have the right to burden her forever with my invalidism.  She saw it as a decision which was definitely nothing more than wild thoughts and scruples.  She muttered:

"Very well."

There was no argument because Daniela was very respectful of the will and decisions of others and, first and foremost, because she was upset.  From that day on I didn't see her.  I made light of the situation sadly: "This is the best solution for both of us.  However horrible her absence may be, closing my eyes to the facts would be worse.  It would be worse to tire her out, to notice her fatigue and her desire to leave."  In addition, my illness might oblige me to give up my daily work at the paper, which meant that Daniela would not only have to put up with me, she would also have to support me.

One of her comments came to mind which I used to find amusing.  Daniela said: "How fatiguing are these people who fight and make up."  For that reason I didn't dare make up with her.  I didn't go to see her or call her.  I simply looked for a casual meeting, and never in my life did I spend so much time walking through Buenos Aires.  When I left the paper I did not resign myself to heading home and putting off the chance of meeting her until tomorrow.  I slept badly and woke up as if I hadn't slept at all, but still sure that today would be the day I would run into her somewhere for the simple reason that I didn't have the strength to go on living without her.  Amidst these anxious expectations I learned that Daniela had left for France.

I told Hector Massey (a lifelong friend) what had happened to me.  He pondered the matter out loud:

"Look, people vanish.  You break up with someone and you never end up seeing her again.  It's always the same old story."

"Buenos Aires without Daniela is a different city."

"If that's how you see it, perhaps something I happened to read in a magazine will make you feel better: other cities are supposed to have twice as many people we know."

Perhaps he was saying this just to take my mind off the subject.  He had to have discerned my irritation because he apologized.

"I understand what it means to give up Daniela.  You'll never have a woman like her."

I don't like talking about my private life.  Nevertheless, I discovered that sooner or later I end up consulting with Massey on all the troubles in my personal sphere.  I'm probably just looking for his approval because I consider him honest and fair and because he never lets feelings sidetrack his criticism.  When I related to him the details of my last conversation with Daniela, he wanted to make sure that my illness was really the way I had described it and only afterwards tell me why.  He added:

"You're not going to find Daniela."

"I know that all too well," I  said.

Many times I've come to think that the ingenuous insensitivity of my friend is a virtue, since it lets him speak his mind with utter frankness.  People who consult him professionally – he's an attorney – praise him for what he thinks and for having a clear and simple vision of the facts.

I spent years marooned in my nightmare.  I hid my illness as a badge of shame and believed, perhaps with good reason, that if I couldn't see Daniela it wasn't worth seeing anyone.  I even avoided Massey; one day I learned that he was traveling in the United States or in Europe.  During work hours at the paper, I tried to isolate myself from my colleagues around me.  I retained in everything a certain thin hope which I never explicitly formulated but which helped me overcome my despair and adjust my actions with the invariable aim of reconstructing the ravaged sand castle that was my health: the desperate hope of curing myself – don't ask me when – and of finding Daniela again.  But hoping was not enough for me; I gave myself to imagination.  I dreamt of our reencounter.  Like a demanding film director, I reshot the scene again and again so that it would be even more moving and triumphant.  Many are of the opinion that the intellect is an obstacle to happiness.

But the real obstacle is imagination.

From Paris I got word that Daniela had immersed herself in her work and biology experiments.  I thought this good news, indeed.  I was never jealous of Rostand or Leclerc. 

Here is where I think I began to improve (the sick vacillate continuously between illusions and disillusions).  During the day I didn't think much about the next attack; the nights were also less frightening.  One morning, very early, I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell.  When I opened the door, I saw Massey who, as far as I understood, had arrived from France – directly, without even so much as going by his own house.  I asked him whether he had seen her, and he said he had.  The silence that ensued was so long that I asked myself whether the fact that Massey was present here had anything to do with Daniela.  Then he said that he had come for the sole purpose of telling me that they had gotten married.  

The surprise and confusion left me speechless.  Finally I rejoined that I had an appointment with my doctor.  I was in such bad shape at this point that he could only believe me.

I never doubted that Massey had acted on good faith.  He had to have concluded that he wasn't taking anything away from me because it was I who had distanced myself from Daniela.  When he said that their marriage would not be an obstacle to our seeing one another, the three of us as we had before, I had to tell him that it would be best if we didn't see each other for a while.

I didn't tell him that his marriage wouldn't last.  And I didn't reach this conclusion out of spite, but based on my knowledge of the two people involved.  It is clear now that I was consumed by spite.  

A few months later I heard the news that they had split up.

The Secret Garden

This tale is one of the first of these beloved stories, and one where the style that would make Chesterton famous was not yet developed: there are too many characters and too much idle chatter.  We are introduced to a large grouping in Paris and then somewhat impertinently asked to distinguish them from one another based on features far too commonly incident to short fiction.  Our dramatis personae include: Aristide Valentin, the host, head of the Paris police department and a militant atheist; Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador to France; Lady Galloway, currently the ambassador's wife and once upon a time someone else's; Lady Margaret Graham, "a pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-colored hair," as well as Lady Galloway's daughter; the Duchess of Mont St. Michel – a title which may or may not refer to this phenomenal location; Doctor Simon, "a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty of superciliousness"; Commandant O'Brien, a tall, dark and handsome Irish graduate of the French Foreign Legion who "had left his country after some crash of debts"; Julius K. Brayne, an American multimillionaire "ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel"; Valentin's unctuous assistant, Ivan; and last but not least, a man described only as "Father Brown of Cobhole, in Essex."

Before we get to our murder – and The Secret Garden most certainly contains the coldest and bloodiest of murders – we should examine our guest list once more.  We have a diplomat, a young, pretty girl, a few aristocrats, a doctor, a policeman, a young, pretty man, and a man of the cloth who is neither young nor pretty; we have an atheist and a priest, a very rich philanthropist and a very humble servant of God, a soldier and a policeman, a priest and a scientist, an Irishman, and a couple of Englishmen and a couple of Frenchman; most of all, however, we have a set of people who for varying reasons might be considered or consider themselves above the law; only Ivan, a sniveling lackey completely at Valentin's bidding, could be thought of as in any way obedient to authority.  What is more, the home of Valentin possesses a peculiar addition:

It was an old house, with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the oddity – and perhaps the police value – of its architecture was this: that there was no ultimate exit at all except through the front door, which was guarded by Ivan and the armory.  The garden was large and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into the garden.  But there was no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall smooth unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden, perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn to kill.

However you wish to interpret this passage, one should recall that the same threats were made at Holmes and Watson and, still, these detectives did little to protect themselves from the waves of lawbreakers who would have loved to end their days.  In fact, 221b Baker street differs from Valentin's urban fortress the way acceptance differs from self-importance.  Whereas one may impute the lack of threats to Holmes and Watson as a mere plot device so that they would not become people actively hunted by underworld mercenaries (with the exception of this story), Valentin's residence in the middle of Paris with no way out but a guarded gate suggests either pride or madness – or a touch of both.  And if indeed we are dealing with pride, we should recall the myriad forms that pride assumes: a castle that no one can egress or ingress; a mountain of riches which render its owner moribund and perpetually terrified; a sensation of rising above the demotic elements into a realm of unadulterated righteousness; and the worst crime of all, that of lying solely for your own benefit.

The crime in Chesterton's tale is not so much ingenious as recondite, bordering in its details on the positively insane.  Accusations are hurled at everyone, including the priest, when a body is found in the previously impenetrable garden with its head severed, and more than one investigation proceeds at the same time. The ensuing chaos would not become characteristic of the Father Brown stories; yet the wildness in the storytelling is a sure sign of a writer testing himself to see whether he really loves his cast of fictionalized men and women although he often doesn't really get to see them.  The story also contains magnificent details, setting the precedent for the artistry of so many other Father Brown excursions:

Lady Galloway screamed.  Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now.  They saw the proud, white face of the Scottish aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house.  The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.

A "satanic tragedy" with every single character (except one) besieged by pride, by self-importance, by vanity?  That would need a secret garden and its fruit.

Cuento sin moraleja

A parable ("Tale without a moral") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

There once was a man who sold words and screams.  Business was going quite well despite the numerous people he encountered who would dispute his prices in search of discounts.  The man almost always consented; and in this way he was able to sell plenty of street vendor screams, a few sighs bought off him by some pensioner women, and words for slogans, letterhead, and false witticisms.

Finally the man knew that the hour had come and he asked for an audience with the country's petty tyrant.  The tyrant, who looked just like all his colleagues, received him surrounded by generals, ministers and cups of coffee.

"I have come to sell you your last words," the man said.  "These are very important because they will never come to you at the right time; rather, you will find it convenient to utter them in some deep trance and thereby easily settle your historical fate in retrospect."

"Translate what he says," the tyrant commanded his interpreter.

"He's speaking Argentine, your Excellency."

"Argentine?  Then why don't I understand him?"

"You understood me perfectly well," said the man.  "I repeat: I have come to sell you your last words."

The petty tyrant rose to his feet as was customary in such circumstances and, suppressing a shudder, ordered that the man be arrested and placed in one of those special dungeons that these types of governments always seem to have at their disposal.

"What a shame," said the man as they took him away.  "I know you'll want to say them when the moment comes, and you will need to say them to settle your historical fate in retrospect.  What I was going to sell you is what you will want to say, and there is no getting around it.  But seeing that you won't accept this offer, you will never learn the words in advance.  And, of course, when the moment comes in which they'll want to gush forth for the first time, you won't be able to say them."

"And why won't I, if they're what I'll need to say?" asked the tyrant with the steam from another cup of coffee wafting before him.

"Because fear will not permit it," the man said sadly.  "You'll have a rope around your neck and nothing but a shirt on; fear and cold will be rattling your every bone.  Your teeth will be clattering and you won't be able to articulate a single word.  The hangman and his assistants – among whom you will find several of these gentlemen here – will wait a few minutes in all likelihood for the sake of decorum.  But when nothing more than a stifled moan emerges from your lips for hiccoughs and supplications (these, as it were, you will spout effortlessly), they will lose all patience and give you to the noose."

Wild with indignation, the ministers and especially the generals surrounded the petty tyrant to request that the man be shot immediately.  Yet the tyrant, "who was as pale as death itself," shoved his way past them and shut himself off in a room with the man to buy his last words from him.

In the meantime the generals and ministers, humiliated by such treatment, began to organize a coup and the next morning seized the tyrant as he was eating grapes in his favorite arbor.  So that he could not utter his last words, they put a bullet through his head and killed him on the spot.  Afterwards they went to look for the man who had disappeared from the governmental palace.  They found him soon enough: he was loafing about a marketplace selling public cries to acrobats.  Placing him in a stagecoach, they took him to the fortress and tortured him so that he would reveal what the tyrant's last words might have been.  Since they could not wrest a confession out of him, they kicked and beat him to death.

The vendors who had bought screams off him continued to scream on the street corners, and one of these screams soon became the watchword of the counterrevolution which did away with the generals and the ministers.  Before dying, some of them were confused by thoughts that all this had been nothing more than a clumsy chain of misunderstandings, and that the screams and the words were things which, strictly speaking, could be sold but which could not be bought, although this seemed absurd.

And they all rotted – the petty tyrant, the man, the generals, the ministers – but the screams resonated from time to time on the street corners.

Doubt

One of the lessons that theology teaches you, should you be open to such lessons, is that faith derives much of its strength from denial.  This philosopher paraphrased the matter more succinctly: what cannot be doubted is not worth knowing or believing.  It is easy for the simple materialist minds of today to contemn any form of spiritual belief system, but not quite as simple for them to swallow that their own cosmogony is not only less provable, it is also less likely.  When we consider that people of faith sense the greatness that surrounds them whereas those of no faith stare into the night sky and see nothing except unlimited emptiness in a meaningless void, the divide becomes even more egregious.  Those of faith will struggle with the principles they have because those principles are sometimes very hard to apply; yet the faithless will never admit that they have doubts.  How can one doubt the straight road of evolution and progress into that meaningless void?  They will never admit that they have moments, sensations, thoughts, which could not possibly be explained by human science; instead, they will emphasize the tricks we play on one another and on ourselves (modern psychology, the trick's on you).  The truth of the matter is not that truth is relative, but that within the bosom of good people – and the overwhelming majority of us are good – there is a tendency to act within the boundaries of a moral law that provides no immediate benefit, and often no benefit at all apart from a clearer conscience.  We witness this law when we feel pain for others that are not dear to us and to whom we cannot relate; we sense the law when we feel proud about the election of a great leader and the downfall of a tyrant; and most of all we enter into this covenant when we love something and someone more than we love ourselves.  Selfishness, the calling card of the unimaginative frauds who have never loved anything or anyone and so think that all of humanity is just as shallow and miserable, is not our propeller, it is a life preserver to be used in emergencies.  For almost every hour of our privileged existence we can afford to care about the rest of humanity and, to the utmost of our particular ability, do something to better it.  For that reason do many very good individuals take the cloth, and immediately assume a far greater burden than the average citizen.  Which brings us to this recent film.

The year is 1964, a year that might have been bold enough to imagine the events of 2008.  America has begun its long journey into a fairer world for non-Caucasians, and integration is evident at some of the most consistently segregated levels, including Catholic schools.  One such institution is the Bronx parish elementary and middle school run by the draconian schoolmarm Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep).  Those who have as well as those who haven't attended Catholic schools agree that too many academies promote a trinity of oppression, discipline, and fear, and Aloysius does little to dissuade us of this stereotype.  Yet the moral complexity of her character gains a particular hue when she casually reveals that she had been married during the war and, having lost her husband to continental strife, decided that she was better off never marrying again.  This biographical detail is never explained or exploited; it simply alerts us to the fact that what we think we know about ascetic lifestyles pales in comparison to what persons of that order might know about us.  Aloysius has a small staff of sisters, including the callow Sister James (Amy Adams), but by far the most dynamic and charming of her teachers is the mercurial Father Flynn (a particularly superb Philip Seymour Hoffman). 

Flynn is the pastor of the church, and therefore by default also its voice and face.  His first sermon, which opens the film, relates the tale of a shipwrecked sailor, a sole survivor who steers his lowly makeshift raft in accordance with the stars.  Clouds gather and "for twenty days and twenty nights" (our modern impatience can apparently only tolerate half the Biblical number) the sailor cannot read the starry firmament.  He has no way of knowing he is on the right path to salvation apart from his inner feelings which tell him, most of the time at least, that he should have no concerns.  The sailor and his plight nourish a primitive metaphor; yet its use, and more importantly, the secularization of the imagery into mere astrolabe guidance bespeaks Flynn's true intentions: the Church must modernize.  As Aloysius's nuns eat in morbid silence around a lifeless table, he dines on bloody meat, and drinks and smokes with two other priests; as Aloysius consumes her tea like her morality, conventional and bland, Flynn takes three sugars; as Aloysius raps the napes and knuckles of her imperfect pupils, Flynn runs a spirited basketball practice; and as Aloysius forbids any of the students from touching a sister's wimple, Flynn routinely hugs and pats his greenhorns.  And one student garners special attention from Flynn, a young and curious boy called Donald Miller, who just happens to be the school's first and only African-American.

What happens and doesn't happen within the parameters stated above composes the core of the film's questions, and the questions accumulate.  Flynn's initial reaction to Aloysius's hints and allegations is to compose a sermon on intolerance (which he delivers with gusto in the middle of the film), but he never truly convinces us or his colleagues of his intentions.  As the debate heightens we begin to notice the less conspicuous details in each camp.  Aloysius suggests that Sister James use a photograph of this pontiff to watch her students while writing on the board, like "having eyes in the back of your head," an image Sister James likens to a "monster."  Flynn, on the other hand, engenders a strange reaction from one of the boys, a fidgety character by the name of William London who, according to Aloysius, "would burn his foot [to miss] half a day of school."  Both parties seem to be skirting what may be loosely termed traditional moral values for the sake of achieving an ulterior aim, although the aim itself never quite comes into cloudless focus.  Flynn is both angelic in his compassion and devilish in his irreverence, his long, immaculate nails emphasizing his alleged purity as well as the bestial desires that seem at times to bubble within him; on the other hand, Aloysius, we are reminded, may be a metaphoric victim of the creeping blindness that has stricken the older sisters of her parish. 

Reminiscent at times of this film based on a play whose title is an old pun for Latinists (importantly, the Mother Superior in Agnes of God was also married before becoming a nun), Doubt has been hyped as allowing two, or indeed even three possible interpretations of what actually occurs.  Astute viewers will see, however, that only one explanation collects all the details into a complete set.  And while the tone of the film's last line should have been changed or omitted altogether, since what is said is clear from the expression on the person's face, we have already gathered our evidence and amassed our doubts.  The falling branches are the sign of a falling world; autumn itself betokens radical and evident change; and a strange gust of wind that blows through everything and everyone acts as the metronome to the oddities at the parish (not to mention the light bulbs bursting at critical moments).  So when Aloysius declares that "every easy choice today will have its consequences tomorrow," we are reminded of the simile that Flynn uses for gossip involving a feather pillow.  If only all human ambitions could be elucidated so elegantly.