An Evening of Literature in a Southern Italian Town

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

“Poets today are liberated – free

From rhythm, rhyme, and structure – even sense,

Producing with their freedom an immense

Fog of unreadable obscurity.

So, at the risk of seeming orthodox

I’ll squeeze my words into the sonnet’s  box.”

           

-- Kenneth E. Boulding, “Sonnet for Sonnets”¹

     The tourist book I consulted on the eve of our trip was not very enthusiastic about Reggio di Calabria.  It said there were only two reasons why anyone would wish to go to this southern Italian town:  to get a boat to the neighboring island of Sicily, and to see the Bronzi di Riace (the bronze statues of nude Greek soldiers that were discovered in the Ionian Sea near the town of Riace in 1972, more than 2000 years after the ship that was to transport them to an unknown destination sank).  “Neither of these activities will take you far from the waterfront,” the tourist book noted, “which is good news because it’s the only part of town worth seeing” (sic.).²  It also warned the tourist about the town’s problem with organized crime, which should make him understand why there would be an unusually large police presence in the area.  

     We were going to Reggio di Calabria to attend the launching of a book on the history of Philippine-Italian relations.  It was authored by Domenico Marciano, an Italian married to a Filipina from Batangas, whose desire to learn more about his spouse’s country of origin had made him, in his own right, an ardent student of Philippine history.  (He had previously written a pamphlet on Jose Rizal’s sojourn in Rome.)  

     The plane trip from Rome to Reggio di Calabria took only an hour and fifteen minutes.   We touched down before 11 o’ clock on a sunny November morning.  After a sumptuous lunch of native Calabrian recipes and a very fruitful meeting with the leaders and members of the Filipino community in the area, we were driven to the venue of the book launch:  the Salone dei Lampadari of the Palazzo San Giorgio (Reggio di Calabria’s town hall). 

     No less than the young mayor of Reggio di Calabria, Dr. Giuseppe Scopelliti, opened the book launching ceremony.  Then came the speeches of the invited guests which included a university professor, a journalist, and a couple of government officials dealing with international cooperation. They talked about the book’s merits and how its insights could help enhance Philippine-Italian relations.  As I listened to their speeches and surveyed the crowd that had gathered there for the occasion, I remembered the self-deprecating joke told by the Filipino scholar, Dr. Florentino Hornedo, during a joint book launch of the UST Publishing House about two years ago.  We were launching our respective books, along with some other authors.  When it was his turn to speak, Dr. Hornedo wondered aloud why authors like us keep writing books despite our knowledge that hardly anyone actually bothers to read them!  (Unlike novels, scholarly works and other so-called “trade books” hardly sell, much less make it to the bestseller list.)

     Indeed,  I wondered as I sat underneath the huge chandeliers of the Salone dei Lampadari, how many of those who had gathered there were actually going to read this pioneering book which took its author almost three years to produce.

     Yet, writers like him will continue to write even if they know that only a few people will actually read them.  For there are a number of reasons why writers feel the need to write, regardless of how low their prospects are of being actually read.  George Orwell, in his famous essay, “Why I Write,”  proposed that writers are driven by four major motives (putting aside the need, for professional writers at least, to earn a living):  sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.  “It can be seen,” Orwell added, “how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.”³

     Whatever his motives were for writing the book that was being launched that evening, I found myself wishing that its author would continue to write, regardless of how many or how few his immediate readers would be. 

     After the book launch, the author and his family hosted a dinner for us in a restaurant along the shore of the Ionian Sea.  It turned out to be the most “literary” dinner I ever had.

 

     During the dinner, one of the invited speakers, Professor Pasquino Crupi (the Deputy Rector of the Universita per Stranieri Dante Alighieri in Reggio di Calabria, and a recognized expert in Calabrian history and literature) literally enchanted us with his spontaneous recitation of Italian poetry.  With a glass of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other, Professor Crupi would ask each one of those gathered around the table what his or her name was, then he would recite an appropriate poem where he could insert one’s name in perfect rhyme and rhythm with the rest of the piece.  He recited the poems with such passion and eloquence, one literally found oneself cast under the spell of his words.      

     Listening to him, I realized what a powerful art oral poetry could be.  Poetry, as everyone knows, was originally an oral art – something to be heard with one’s ears, not just read with one’s eyes.   That was probably the reason why rhyme and rhythm were very important in those earlier days of poetry.  Not only did rhyme and rhythm make poems pleasurable to hear, they also served as mnemonic devices for the poet delivering them.   A poem that only seeks to be read as a text on a page by a pair of silent eyes does not have to worry about these.  It can afford to have lines that do not rhyme, a structure that lacks an easily decipherable pattern, and words and phrases that only another poet can understand.   But, when recited, it can never have the power of the poems Professor Crupi recited that November evening in the southern Italian town of Reggio di Calabria.

NOTES

     ¹Kenneth E. Boulding, Sonnets from Later Life:  1981-1993 (Wallingford, Pennsylvania, 1994), 3.

     ²Damien Simonis et al., Italy (Lonely Planet Books, 2004), 696.

     ³George Orwell, Why I Write (London:  Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2004), 4-6.

A Second Life

 

(On Graham Greene’s “The Second Death”)

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

     Anyone who has been given a “second life” should read Graham Greene’s “The Second Death.”¹  It will remind him of why he was given a second chance to live in the first place.

     True to his reputation as one of the twentieth century’s master story-tellers, Greene starts his story in a way that leaves the reader with no clue as to how it is going to end.   

     A dying man begs his mother to bring his best friend to his death bed.  Since this is not the first time for the friend to hear the mother say that her son is dying, he at first thinks it is another one of those times when either the mother is overestimating the seriousness of her son’s illness or the son is using his illness as an excuse for something else.   He initially hesitates to go, but later on changes his mind when he senses that his best friend’s illness may indeed be serious.

     When he faces his dying friend, the latter tells him why he has asked to see him.   “I am dying,” he says, “and I want to ask you something.  The doctor’s no good  -- he’d think me delirious.  I’m frightened, old man.  I want to be reassured.”

      The dying man then narrates to his friend that many years ago, before the two of them met, and he was not much more than a boy, he fell badly ill and was thought to be dead.  He was, in fact, going to be buried.  But on the way to the cemetery, a doctor emerged from somewhere, stopped the funeral procession and touched the stretcher on which his corpse lay. Next thing the man knew, he was out of the stretcher and was alive again.  The funeral procession resumed; but this time, the doctor had taken his place on the stretcher.

     The dying man assures his friend that the experience really happened.  He had indeed been dead.  In fact, he had seen what awaited him beyond the door of death and it scared him.  But now, ironically, he wants his friend to reassure him of the opposite:  that the experience he just narrated was only a dream, a nightmare and nothing more.  He is afraid, and he wants to be reassured.

     The best friend tries his best to convince him that, yes, of course, it was only a dream.   The truth is, he himself is starting to get scared and he needs to reassure his own self that the story was indeed just a dream.  It is at this point that Greene delivers his coup de theatre.   In a sudden shift of dimension which only a master wordsmith like Greene can pull off, the reader is made to realize that although the story appears to be happening in the twentieth century, it is actually the continuation of a story that began centuries ago, during the time of Jesus.  The dying young man Greene is talking about is actually the dead young man we read about in the Gospel of Luke (chapter 7, verses 11 to 17).   He was being carried out to burial in a town called Naim when a healer named Jesus approached and touched his stretcher, and  then commanded him to wake up.  He got up and received his second life.

     All this happened so long ago, he has forgotten all about it.  But now, everything is coming back to him.   Realizing that he did not make the most of the second life he was given, the dying young man is understandably scared of the consequences of his choice.  He confesses to his friend that after he was brought back to life, he went “straight” for a couple of years.  “I thought it might be a sort of second chance,” he says.  “Then things got fogged and somehow… It didn’t seem really possible.  It’s not possible.  Of course it’s not possible.  You know it isn’t, don’t you?”  His desperate attempt to convince himself that it was all a dream stems from his realization that he has wasted his second life -- his second chance -- and now it is too late to do anything about it.

     At the same time, Greene makes us realize that the dying man’s best friend is also a character whose own life story began during the time of Jesus.   He was the blind man who was cured by Jesus and given a chance to see.  Like his dying friend, he too has forgotten all about the gift that he received from Jesus a long, long time ago.   He has, over the years, become “blind” again – no longer in the physical sense, but in a spiritual one.  As a consequence, he has lived a life as morally reprehensible as that of his dying friend.  

     Unlike his dying friend, however, this other man is being given a chance to change the direction of his life.  Through his encounter with his dying friend, Jesus has cured him anew, this time of his spiritual blindness.  Now, he can see things clearly once more.  If he is willing enough to learn from his dying friend’s experience, he can start living a good life all over again.

     The first time I read Greene’s story, I remembered the second chance I myself was given in the wee hours of May 16, 1998.  A raging fire struck the Lung Center of the Philippines where I had been serving as resident chaplain for six years, and turned much of the building into a huge heap of ashes and useless debris.  Several people died in that fire, including our ICU patients.  I myself could have burnt to death in my room on the third floor of the building, had I not been fortunate to have my cousin-priest, Father Raymond Oligane, as my visitor on the night before it happened.  He was awakened just before the fire spread.   The first thing he did was to run to my sleeping quarters and knock on my door until I woke up.  We were able to depart the burning building before it was too late.

     If Father Raymond did not visit me that night, I would never have been awakened.  I have always been one who is not easily roused from sleep.   That, plus the fact that I had no neighbors on the third floor of the Lung Center building at that time, would have spelled my certain death.  Luckily, God sent my cousin-priest to be my visitor on the eve of the fire.

     I lost everything I had in that fire – including most of the poems, essays, spiritual reflections and academic articles I had written since I started writing many years before.  They all perished in that merciless fire.  But despite the fact that it was not easy coming to terms with the loss, it was nothing compared to what I was given that fateful day:  a second life, a second chance to live and fulfill whatever it was that God still wanted me to accomplish in this life.

     It has been many years since that tragedy happened.  I often ask myself whether I have done justice to the second life I received that day.   It was not difficult to keep in mind the obligations that the “gift” entailed when the memory of the experience was still fresh.  But, to borrow the words of the dying young man in Graham Greene’s story, “things get fogged” after a while, and you begin to lose sight of the gift you have received and what it requires of you.  Greene’s story was a timely reminder sent my way by The Giver of that gift.

     In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote:  “Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time  may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.”² 

     It is unfortunate that even we who have actually been given a second life and, hence, should have no difficulty following Marcus Aurelius’ advice, often forget the priceless lessons of our own experience.  But, then, it is never too late to learn the lessons anew.

NOTES

     ¹Graham Greene, Twenty-One Stories (London:  Vingate, 2001), 186-191.

     ²Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Maxwell Staniforth, trans.  (London:  Penguin Books, 1964), 114-115.