On
a dreary night in November, as Bill W. says, I awakened with a profound feeling
of regret after a vivid dream. We have been staying in an apartment in the old
ghetto area of Ferrara, using a heavy green bedspread as a duvet.
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| The Estense Castle in Ferrara |
There
is a heavy-set, older, eastern European woman who wears some sort of flowing
kaftan. She reminds me of my high school English teacher, Liza Benedict, a theater impresario and would-be actress .
She tells me she is putting on a community theater production of Fiddler on the
Roof and, naturally, she wants me to play Tevye. This production is in Yiddish,
or English – it’s unclear. But it will be a casual affair, with just the
members of the village showing up to watch it. It will be fun, spontaneous, more
like a staged reading of the script than a real production. I don’t have to memorize lines or rehearse
much – just pick up a (frayed) copy of the script that is on the table there,
some crumpled, xeroxed pages hastily stapled together, some even in different
colors or on recycled paper with something else on the other side.
There
is a second actor who will also be playing Tevye. He’s an older man, something
like F. Murray Abraham, with a gravitas and yet a flamboyance about him. He
reminds me of my high school math teacher, Mr. Highsmith. He has the script and
has been rehearsing. He and I will share the role (the way actors in Laura
Ferri’s productions at Northwest always did), performing on alternate nights.
There
are only a couple of weeks of rehearsals. I keep looking for a complete version
of the script, but I can never find one. The script I have been given is only partially
complete. Some of the pages are missing; they have been torn away and lost. I
am not sure if the lines are in Yiddish, English, or a combination of the two.
I make a few very half-hearted attempts to rehearse, or to find the missing
parts of the script, but I am reassured by the impresario woman’s words that it
is a casual, community theater style event and I feel I will be able to “wing
it.” After all, winging it is my forte. I can step out onto a stage with even a
partially completed script in my hand and enthrall the audience with the power
of my personality.
Meanwhile,
the other actor, the F. Murray Abraham/Mr. Highsmith guy, is working his butt
off. He is spending many sleepless nights, staying up until 3 AM, memorizing
lines, practicing the songs and dances (particularly the centerpiece, “If I Were
a Rich Man”) to the point of exhaustion. I start to feel some misgivings. Where
is my script? I search around but can’t find it. How much of an effort am I
really making, though? I tell myself I will be okay once the time for performance
comes.
Opening
night arrives, and the other actor is stunning. He has memorized the entire
script, even though we were told we didn’t have to, that a staged reading would
be okay. He steps onto the stage and plays his part immaculately, perfectly,
and the audience is delirious with appreciation. I understand that this
performance has been the defining moment of his career. I watch him and realize
I am not prepared. I don’t even know where the other part of the script is. I
tell him he should just go ahead and do the rest of the performances, and I
will watch from the sidelines, which I do.
I
have failed. I never realized how serious this was. I never realized how much I
would have to prepare. I didn’t know, going into the performance, that it was
the performance of a lifetime, that I could have played the part as well as
Daniel, if I had known, really known, what was going on, that this was not a
rehearsal, not some schlock community theater staged reading, but a performance
that would determine my moral essence, because as Sartre knew, existence precedes
essence, and because I failed to act in this drama, this “Fiddler on the Roof”
where I could have risen to the occasion and spoken the right lines, I became a
failure, a coward, a scum, as Sartre says.
The
profound feeling of regret I had upon awakening has followed me ever since.
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| A frog-demon punishes people in Vasari's Last Judgment |
So
here I am in Italy, eating the weird Ferrara bread called “la coppia” which is
foamy and unsatisfying in texture,
taking walks “fare una passegiata” as they
say in Italian every day with my husband, traveling by train to Venice and
Bologna and Florence and Padova to see marvelous works of art that I have
taught about my entire life.
Here I am planning the next stage of my trip,
researching how to visit Siem Reap and Bali in an environmentally ethical and
sustainable fashion, downloading New Zealand camping apps, reading about
backpacking in Ethiopia. And yet, I am still tormented by regret that I failed
to act in that moment, when we sat in a circle in a humanities department
meeting and heard Daniel Sparler called a white supremacist, misogynist,
anti-Semite, and I said nothing. Worse than nothing, because I read some
hastily-written, conciliatory, completely fear-driven statement which said that
I could not understand how there could be two such horribly divergent
narratives and I was having trouble reconciling them. When I look back on that
moment, and subsequent moments that fall and winter, I understand how anyone,
even someone who considers themself a master of spontaneous, ad hoc performance,
could become a collaborator with fascists.
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| "La Coppia" |
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| Giotto's Lamentation in the Scovregni Chapel |
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| Peter asks, "Is it I, Lord?" in Ghirlandaio's Last Supper |
Yes,
it’s a shame that the school has become so profoundly unwelcoming to the very people
who helped shape it into what it is, that the place I knew and loved and came
of age as an educator is gone now. But I could live with that grief, if that
were all I had to live with. It’s the feeling that during that first week of
September 2018 I somehow lost my soul, and that I will never regain it – that is
my fear and my regret and my grief.
I
suppose it’s the height of ego to believe that I would be exempt somehow from real
sin. I have never felt so Catholic, so glad to be Catholic, as I do here. Right
down the street from us is the basilica of Santa Maria in Vado, where in 1174
the blood of Christ miraculously spurted out of the Host at the moment of transubstantiation
and you can climb a staircase to see the bloodstains on the ceiling. In Padova
we saw the lower jaw, teeth, and miraculously preserved tongue of St. Anthony. There
was also a little notebook where pilgrims could write prayers to Nicolo Cortese,
a priest who is in line to be canonized in the spring – he died under Gestapo
torture in Trieste without divulging any information about the secret network
of the Resistance of which he was a part. The prayer requests will be analyzed
by experts in hopes that Father Nicolo, “Servant of God,” will perform a
miracle or two.Website for Father Placido Cortese In Florence, we climbed the hill to San Miniato al Monte for a
Latin Mass and Vespers in the 1000 year old crypt.
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| San Miniato al Monte |
What
do I seek in all this? What do I ask? I guess the same thing Thomas Merton
sought – the Grace and Mercy of God.
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| My favorite Nativity in the Uffizi gallery |
