Five Weeks In Ferrara

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.

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.

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,

"La Coppia"

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.

Giotto's Lamentation in the Scovregni Chapel

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.

"Mephisto" - winner of Best Foreign Film in 1981

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. 

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.

My favorite Nativity in the Uffizi gallery