At those delicious times when there is a true tale to tell, one may well believe that it was the Devil who dictated it.

One morning last autumn I was out strolling in the Jardin des Plantes in the company of Dr. Torty, certainly one of my oldest acquaintances.  When I was still but a child Dr. Torty practiced medicine in the city of V.; but after about three decades of this enjoyable occupation, with all his patients now dead -- his farmers as he liked to call them, those who had brought him more than most farmers bring their masters, on the best lands in Normandy -- he had not taken on any others.  Already getting on in age, and swelling with independence like an animal who had always stepped on his bridle and eventually snapped it, he had come to immerse himself in Paris, I believe, there in the vicinity of the Jardin des Plantes, rue Cuvier.  Now only for his own personal enjoyment did he practice medicine, in which, as it were, he still took great pleasure because he was a doctor in his blood and bones, and, moreover, an excellent physician and a great observer.  Not to mention his many other straightforward physiological and pathological cases.

Perhaps you've had, on several occasions, the opportunity to meet Dr. Torty?  He was one of those bold and vigorous spirits who did not wear fingerless mittens for the very good and proverbial reason that a "gloved cat does not get the mouse."  He had always borrowed an immense amount, and always sought to take more, from that wily race, so powerful and so fine.  He was the type of man I liked a lot, and I firmly believe (after all, I know myself!) that I liked him for precisely those qualities with which he most displeased others.  In fact, he was displeasing enough when he behaved himself, this brusque, original figure, Dr. Torty.  But once those who most disliked him fell ill, they would salute him with Salaams, as the savages saluted Robinson Crusoe's rifle which could kill them  -- not for the same reason as the savages, but for, as it were, the opposite reason: he could save them!  Without this overriding consideration, the doctor would have never gained twenty thousand pounds of annuity in a small, devout, aristocratic and prudish town, which would otherwise have stranded him at his carriage door before its hospices, had it listened even briefly to his opinions and unfriendly sentiments.

This, however, he realized; and as he always maintained a high level of composure, it amused him.  "They had to choose," he said mockingly, "between me and the Extreme Unction.  And devout as they all were, they preferred me even to the chrisms."  As you can see, the doctor was not annoyed: he had a slightly sacrilegious sense of humor.  An unabashed disciple of Cabanis in medical philosophy, he was, like his old comrade Chaussier, of that terrible school of physicians devoted to absolute materialism.  And like Dubois - the first of the Dubois - to a cynicism which degrades all things, is immediately overfamiliar with duchesses, and addresses the Empress's ladies of honor as "my little mothers," neither more nor less than what he would have said to fishmongers' wives.  To provide you with an idea of Dr. Torty's cynicism, it was he who said to me one evening in the circle of the Ganaches, lustfully taking in with a dominating glance the dazzling quadrilateral of a table and its one hundred and twenty guests: "It is I who makes all of them!"  Moses could not have been more proud, exhibiting the baton with which he changed rocks into fountains.   "What do you want, Madam?" -- he did not have any phrenological bump for respect.  He even claimed that precisely where it could be found on the skull of other men, there was merely a hole in his own. 

Old, already past seventy, but square, robust and as gnarled as his name; of a sardonic face and, under his very smooth, very glossy light brown wig and very short hair, of a penetrating eye, unsullied by glasses; almost always dressed in grey or that shade of brown which for a long time was known as "Moscow smoke," he did not resemble the physicians of Paris in style or dress: proper, white-tied like the shrouds of their death!  He was a different man.  With his buckskin gloves, his thick-soled boots with high heels which resounded with his unsteady step, there was something alert and cavalier about him.  Yes, cavalier's the word, because he had remained (for many more years than thirty!) with his military riding pants buttoned on the thigh, and on horseback as if he were on the warpath to break some centaurs in two.  And one divined all this from the way he still arched his back and large chest, screwed on to kidneys that had not moved and balanced on strong legs free of rheumatism that arched like those of a former postman.  Dr. Torty was one of those leatherstocking equestrians, who had lived in the mires of the Cotentin as Cooper's leatherstocking had inhabited the forests of America.  He was a naturalist who, like the hero in Cooper, scoffed at the laws of society, but like Fenimore Cooper's man had not replaced them with the idea of God.  He had become one of these ruthless observers that could not but be a misanthrope.  This is fatal, and so it was.  He only had the time, while he was making his horse's bloody belly drink the mud of crooked, wrong paths to plough through the other mires of life.  This was not a misanthrope like Alcestis.  He did not become indignant virtuously; he did not become angry -- no!   He despised man as quietly as he took his pinch of tobacco, and enjoyed doing both in equal measure.

Such a person was he exactly, this doctor Torty, with whom I was strolling.

That day happened to fall in one of those gay and clear autumn periods that deterred the swallows from leaving.  At noon Notre-Dame sounded, and the solemn ringing of its bell appeared to pour out above the green, moiré river and its piers and bridges; and just above our heads the jostled air was pure, trembling long and brightly.  The garden's red foliage was, by degrees, wiped clean from the blue fog that drowned them on these vaporous October mornings, and a lovely, late autumn sun pleasantly warmed our backs with a wad of gold.  The doctor and I had stopped to look at the famous black panther, who would die the following winter like a young girl from an ailment in its chest.  Scattered here and there were the usual visitors to the Jardin des Plantes, that special demographic segment of soldiers and children's nannies who loved gawking before the cages' grid and amusing themselves by tossing walnut shells and chestnut peelings to drowsy animals and those sleeping behind their bars.  We had arrived before a panther lurking in his cage who was, if you recall, of that species unique to the island of Java, the country in which nature was at its most intense.  Indeed, the entire land seemed itself to be some great tigress, untameable by man, whom it fascinates and bites in all the manifestations upon its terrible and splendid soil.  In Java flowers are imbued with more brightness and fragrance, fruits with more taste, animals with greater beauty and power than in any other country on earth.  And nothing can convey an idea of this violence of life to those who have not experienced firsthand the harrowing and deadly sensations of a realm at once enchanting and poisonous, at once Armida and Locusta!  Casually spreading her elegant legs before her, her head upright, her emerald eyes unmoving, the panther was a magnificent specimen of the redoubtable creations of her country.  Not a patch of brown besmirched her fur of black velvet -- a black so deep and so dull that the light, in sliding off it, did not itself shine but was instead absorbed like water is drunk up by a sponge ...  When, from this ideal form of supple beauty, of terrible force at rest, of impassive and royal disdain, our gaze returned to the human creatures who were looking at it timidly, who were contemplating it with round eyes and gaping mouth, it was not humanity who had it easier, it was the beast.  And she was so superior that it was almost humiliating!  I was making a comment to that effect in sotto voce to the doctor when two people suddenly split from the group gathered before the panther and planted themselves right before her.  "Yes," replied the doctor, "but now watch!  The balance between the species will be reestablished!"

These two were a man and a woman, both tall, and from the first look I cast upon them I had the impression of belonging to the elite ranks of the Parisian world.  Neither one nor the other was young, but nevertheless they were perfectly beautiful.  The man had to be going on forty-seven if not more, and women on at least forty.  Thus they had, as the sailors back from Tierra del Fuego might say, passed the line, the fatal line, more wonderful than the equator, which once passed one may never pass again on the seas of life!  But they seemed to be hardly concerned about this circumstance.  Nowhere, on their brow or anywhere else, were there signs of melancholy. 

Slender and with a patrician air in his tightly buttoned black frock coat like that a cavalry officer, as if he were wearing one of the costumes that Titian bestowed upon his portraits, the man looked, by his hooked shape, both effeminate and haughty, his moustache like the whiskers of a cat that had begun to grey at the tip, a fop from the time of Henry III.  And to make the similarity even more complete, he had short hair, which in no way prevented a glimpse of the two dark blue sapphires that shone in his ears.  They reminded me of the two emeralds that Sbogar wore in the same place.  This ridiculous (as people would have said) detail notwithstanding, which showed enough disdain for the tastes and ideas of the day, everything was simple and dandy as Brummell would have wished -- that is to say, unremarkable -- in the dress of this man who only drew attention on his own merits.  And he would have seized our attention completely had he not been on the women's arm, which, at this time, he was. 

Indeed, the woman gained more attention than the man who accompanied her, and she captivated us longer.  She was as tall as he was, her head almost reached his.  And as she was also dressed all in black, she recalled, in the extent of her shape, in her strength, and in her mysterious pride, the large black Isis of the Egyptian Museum.  A curious thing: when one approached this beautiful couple it was the woman who had the muscles, and the man who had the nerves!  I could only discern her profile; but the profile is either the pitfall of beauty or its most brilliant certificate.  Never, I think, had I seen beauty purer or haughtier than hers.  As for her eyes, I could not judge, fixed as they were on the panther, which, no doubt, received from them a magnetic and unpleasant impression.  Already unmoving, the panther seemed to be sinking more and more into this rigid immobility as the woman, having come to behold the beast, looked at it.  And, like those cats caught in blinding light, without its head budging an inch, with only the fine end of its whiskers trembling, the panther, after having blinked several times and being unable to take it any more, slowly withdrew, beneath the casings of its eyelids, the two green stars in its gaze, as if it were shutting itself away.

"Ho, ho, ho, panther against panther!" said the doctor in my ear.  "But the satin panther is stronger than the velvet."

The satin panther was the woman, who had on a dress of this shimmering fabric, a dress with a long train.  And the doctor's vision had not betrayed him!  Black, supple, as powerful in articulation as she was royal in attitude, of equivalent beauty in her own species and of a still darker charm, the woman, the stranger, was a human panther, erect before the panther animal that she dwarfed -- which was what the beast sensed, no doubt, when it had closed its eyes.  But the woman -- if she were indeed one -- was not satisfied with this triumph.  She lacked generosity.  She wanted her rival to open its eyes and look upon its humiliator.  And so, undoing without a word the twelve buttons of the purple glove that cast her beautiful forearm, she took off this glove and, audaciously passing her hand between the bars of the cage, whipped the short snout of the panther, who made but one movement -- but what a movement!  A snatch of teeth as fast as lightning!  A scream came from the group where we were standing: we all thought the wrist had been bitten off.  But it was merely the glove -- the panther had devoured it.  Outraged, the magnificent beast had reopened its horribly dilated eyes and its nostrils pulsated even more.

"Are you mad!" said the man, who had seized this beautiful wrist, which had just escaped the sharpest of bites.

You know sometimes how we say "are you mad"?  He said it precisely that way; and then he kissed the wrist angrily.

As he was on our side, she turned three quarters of the way to behold him kissing her naked wrist, and I caught a glimpse of her eyes...  Those eyes that fascinated tigers were at present fascinated by a man; her eyes, two large black diamonds, designed for all the dignities of life that expressed more in looking at him than all adorations.  They expressed love!

Those eyes were there and they contained a poem.  The man had not let go the arm, which must have tasted the panther's feverish breath, and, holding it folded on his heart, he led the woman through the large walkway of the garden.  They crossed it quietly, all the while indifferent to the murmurs and the heckling from the masses who were still emotional over the danger that the reckless woman had just run.  As they passed by the doctor and me, their faces were turned towards one another, huddled flank against flank as if they wanted to enter each other, he in her and she in him, and from the two of them create a single body by looking at nothing but themselves.  Observing them walking by in this manner one would have said they were higher, superior creatures who did not even perceive in their toes the land on which they walked, and who crossed the world in their cloud as did, in Homer, the Immortals.

Such things are rare in Paris, and for this reason we remained there to watch them leave, this master couple: the woman dragging the black train of her dress through the garden's dust, like a peacock, dismissive even of its plumage.

As they moved away in this manner, beneath the rays of the noonday sun, in the majesty of their intertwining, these two beings were superb.  And at length they regained the garden gate's entrance and clambered into a coach, glittering brass and coupling, that had been waiting for them.

"They have forgotten the universe!" I said to the doctor, who understood my way of thinking.

"Ah, they care quite a lot about the universe!"  he replied in his biting voice.  "They see nothing in creation, and, what is even more damning, they even walk by their own physician without seeing him."

"What?  You, doctor!"  I shouted.  "But then, my dear doctor, you are going to tell me who they are."

The doctor made what is called a pause with the desire of producing an effect, because he was cunning in everything, the old devil!

"Well," he said simply, "they are Philemon and Baucis.  There you are!"

"Damn it all!" said I.  "Philemon and Baucis, with a proud appearance and hardly resembling their ancient namesakes.  But doctor, these are not their names.  What are they called?"

"What!" replied the doctor.  "In your circles, in which I scarcely venture, you've never heard of the Count and Countess Serlon of Savigny as a fabulous model of conjugal love?"

"Upon my word, no," I said.  "One speaks rarely of conjugal love in the company I keep, doctor."

"Hmm, hmm, quite possibly," said the doctor, answering his own thoughts more than mine.

"In such a world, which also happen to be theirs, many things occur that are more or less correct.  Yet in addition to their having a reason not to keep such company, they live almost the whole year through in the old Castle of Savigny in Cotentin.  Such rumors once circulated about them, all the way to the district of Saint-Germain -- where a certain solidarity among the nobility persists -- that one would prefer to keep quiet than to talk about them."

"And what were these rumors, then?  Ah, now you've interested me, doctor!  You must know something about them.  The Castle of Savigny is not far from the city of V., where you were once a physician."

"Now, about these rumors," said the doctor, pensively taking a pinch of tobacco.  "Well then, one thought them to be false!  All this is in the past ... And yet, although a marriage of inclination and the joys it brings remain the provincial ideal among all romantic and virtuous family mothers, they were not able -- at least those whom I knew -- to talk their daughters out of this one!"

"Nevertheless, doctor, you say that Philemon and Baucis ..."

"Baucis, Baucis, harrumph, my dear sir," interrupted Dr. Torty, violently passing his finger over the entire hooked length of his parrot nose (one of his gestures).  "Do you not find that this girl has less of a Baucis air to her than an air of Lady Macbeth?"

"Doctor, my dear and lovely doctor," I said again, my voice filled with tender caress, "are you going to tell me what you know of the Count and Countess of Savigny?"

"The physician is the confessor of modern times," said the doctor with a solemn tone of quiet irony.  "He has replaced the priest, my dear sir, and is bound to the selfsame confessional secrecy."

He looked at me maliciously because he knew my respect and love for the objects of Catholicism, of which he was the enemy.  He blinked his eyes; he thought that he had stopped me.

"And he will remain bound to it, just like the priest!" he added dramatically with his most cynical laughter.  "Come over here, we are going to have a little chat."

We begin with an Italian countryside, something not terribly evolved from what you might find in this animal-slaughtering favorite, a green and brown realm of plain rusticity.  At the conspicuous center of our landscape stands a tree, Tarkovsky's eternal hope for the world; to the right and somewhat above the treetop, a power line in the shape of the greatest symbol we have ever known; in the background hills or mountains swimming amidst the mist.   Slowly a small European car puffs its way left, the Italian sinistro, and stops before a garden leading up one of these misty hillocks, and a young, voluptuous redhead emerges, her hair in endless knots, first speaking Russian then Italian.  As she climbs up the hill through a wondrous garden, the man mutters under his breath that he "can't go on."  But he does.  He follows her, onward and upward, to a chapel to gaze at a fresco by this famed artist.  There our redhead, an Italian by the name of Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), does not ask the chapel curator, likely a priest himself, why women flock to see the Madonna del Parto -- that question is very obvious, and would belong in a lesser film.  No, Eugenia well understands the despair of a woman who cannot bear children, or a mother whose daughter cannot bear a grandchild.  What she wants to know is why they pray in the way they do, so fervently silent, then in a chant that culminates in a release of a bellyful of sparrows from the Madonna's statue.  "Why are women more pious than men?" she asks, not incorrectly.  The man pontificates a conservative view of women's role -- to birth and raise children with patience and sacrifice -- and as she walks away in half-feigned disgust, he adds: "You probably just want to be happy, but there is something in life more important than that."  Eugenia stops and returns her eyes to all the mothers gathered, all praying to the one Mother, all beseeching that one of their daughters may bear children, a request punctuated by the opening of the belly.  She does not look on transfixed, but simply curious.  She is curious about her motherhood, about ritual, about all things that get lost in modernity's fire of independence and self-assertion.  And suddenly she knows what word is more important in life than happiness.

The Italian for that word, fede, is not known to her companion, the poet Andrei Gorchakov (the late Oleg Yankovsky), so she translates it for him as vera (вера).  She does not, however, convey the information with any solemnity, but with a snicker, and for good reason: fede means both faith and a wedding band, and Eugenia's mind is definitely much more focused on the latter.  They converse in Italian (his insistence) even though it seems evident Eugenia's Russian would be more useful; then we consider that Italian may be the one trump card she holds over Gorchakov's Russian wife in Moscow.  Indeed, her red hair, her role as his guide to the 'overworld,' and her painful sexual intrigue all denote temptation of the sinister kind and could have led -- again, in a far lesser film -- to carnal exploration.  Yet somehow we know that this will never occur.  In one vignette the camera -- and, in turn, we and Gorchakov -- notice Eugenia's pneumatic curves for what seems like the first time.  His sudden compliment that she is so beautiful simply filters a hormonal reaction, and there is often something about very pure and sacrosanct places that shunts most minds onto different tracks.  Her expression for a few seconds thereafter communicates every ounce of her desire, the entire timeline of her pleasure at the compliment, her arousal, her disappointment when his eyes still do not meet hers, her arousal again, and finally her resignation that even if he did mean it, his comment was probably not enough for them to sleep together.  Gorchakov, a melancholy and fatigued creature, has earned this disappointment: he has come to Italy to comprehend why Pavel Sosnovsky, a late eighteenth-century Russian composer, forsook the hills of Rome and a blossoming career to return to Russia and his status as a serf.  Some say Sosnovsky loved a Russian serf girl, but some always say that.  Others merely aver that he missed his homeland and would rather die enslaved in his native element than live on in exile -- one of the most common interpretations of voluntary exile in modern thought.  Ostensibly a well-known poet, Gorchakov exhibits more interest in the sadness of the locales he visits -- chapels, churches, villages, and finally, these baths -- than in any scholarly pursuits.  He has not come to discover Sosnovsky's motives, he has come to find his own.  His silly joke in Russian to a little Italian girl who could not possibly understand him is one of Nostalghia's iconic passages, due in no small part to the resonance it receives in its closing shots.  Yet at the time it smacks of cavalierness and frivolity, not nearly as sad as later events reveal it to be.   Which can also be said about the third tragic figure in our triptych, the eccentric mathematician Domenico (a marvelous Erland Josephson).

It is probably best not to divulge too much about Domenico's backstory, which explains why apart from his outstanding mind and his German shepherd he is very much alone in the world.  I stand corrected, there is a third companion: his fede, which is so strong as to augment at once his mathematical reasoning and his emotional pitch.  The world simply does not add up.  One drop of olive oil (in another much-discussed scene) and another drop of olive oil do not equal two drops, but one bigger drop.  What we can say is that as we have three characters, so too do we have three dreams.  First, there is Sosnovsky's, recounted in a letter (in Italian) as to why he needs to return to his birthplace.  Sosnovsky was supposed to write an opera for his lord, and there were statues in the park where the opera was to be performed.  As he approached the park he became one of the statues, and instinctively he knew that he if he moved he would be severely punished.  Thus, for a moment or a little longer, he actually turned to stone, powerless, and then realized that this was no dream at all, but his own bitter life.  And he also realized that he could not forsake Russia, and the thought of not seeing its birches or languishing in the scents of his childhood grew intolerable.  Then there is Eugenia's dream, narrated to her Russian guest during a long monologue of frustration when it becomes clear that her desires will not be reciprocated.  I need not describe it in detail; suffice it to say that it involves a worm in her hair that escapes under her wardrobe -- the context suggests that she has already provided her dream with sufficient analysis.  And then there is Gorchakov's dream, the dream he endures after he tells that little girl that little joke about rescuing someone from a pond.  And what does he see in his dream?  He sees himself as himself; he sees himself as Domenico; he sees churches and streets that were never his but somehow should have been; and he weighs the criteria on which we, consciously and unconsciously, base our notion of what is home.  Many claim that for a poet home is his language, the world in which the gilded filaments of his conscience and intelligence fuse into the most sublime and elevated of human expression.  So what does this have to do with birthplace or childhood?  Haven't countless poets composed countless odes thousands of miles away from their natal fields?  They most certainly have.  But maybe it is better to ask whether those odes would have been written if those poets and those fields had never been separated.      

These marble splendors, black anatomy,
Which injure worms upon their sepulchres,
The glacial symbols of death's victory,
He would assemble, by fear undeterred.

It was the other shadow, love's, he feared: 
That common fortune and its common woes. 
Resplendent metal did not blind him sheer,
Nor did sepulchral marble; 'twas the rose. 

He, from the mirror's other side, alone 
Succumbed then to his complex destiny
As the inventor of all nightmares known.

And so perhaps, from well beyond death's shroud,     
Shall he keep building, still alone and proud,
These splendid, wicked wonders endlessly.

Our protagonist is a certain Arthur Fernlee Markam, whom I ought to describe in extenso as his image will prove to be a monument amidst the plot's wafting winds.  Markam is an English merchant, "essentially a cockney," whose abiding dream is "to provide an entire rig-out as a Highland chieftain."  Markam is also a dutiful husband and father of three, if by dutiful one understands that while he needs his space and quiet every evening after a long and profitable business day, he buys his family all the best clothes ("the prosperity of the business allowed them all sorts of personal luxuries, amongst which was a wide latitude in the way of dress") and appurtenances so that they may join him in the glorification of their social status.  Readers of these pages will know what I think of such persons, and they will also know what fate tends to befall them.  In any case, Markam, as stereotypical a Philistine as one could possibly find in the annals of literature, decides that his crowning achievement as a man of culture is to don the tartan of a clan to which he has never belonged and parade around a Scots fishing village in full regalia.  Some faint apprehension, however, prevents him from simply borrowing the Royal Stuart pattern -- probably the only one Markam could ever distinguish from a pincushion.  Instead, and just as appropriately, he orders for a "pretty stiff" check a custom design:

Mr. Markam foresaw difficulties if he should by chance find himself in the locality of the clan whose colours he had usurped.  The MacCallum at last undertook to have, at Markam's expense, a special pattern woven which would not be exactly the same as any existing tartan, though partaking of the characteristics of many.  It was based on the Royal Stuart, but contained suggestions as to simplicity of pattern from the Macalister and Ogilvie clans, and as to neutrality of colour from the clans of Buchanan, Macbeth, Chief of Macintosh and Macleod.  When the specimen had been shown to Markam he had feared somewhat lest it should strike the eye of his domestic circle as gaudy; but as Roderick MacDhu fell into perfect ecstasies over its beauty he did not make any objection to the completion of the piece.  He thought, and wisely, that if a genuine Scotchman like MacDhu liked it, it must be right—especially as the junior partner was a man very much of his own build and appearance.

"The MacCallum," by the way, is neither a pub nor an inn, but the "junior partner very much of" Markam's "build and appearance"; almost as importantly, the sartorial deputy also speaks "with a remarkable cockney accent."  Markam makes his purchase but does not "take his family into his confidence regarding his new costume" as he could not be certain that he would remain "free from ridicule."  Once at the sands, Markum does indeed insist on wearing his outfit and his children laugh their necks red about it.  A tableware accident invites more mockery from his wife, and it is at this point that Markum, by all indications pig-headed in that manner particular to smug, clueless boors, decides that on all outings henceforth he and his martial dress shall not be parted.

That our description has barely passed the first page of the text of Crooken Sands is blithe testimony to Stoker's foresight.  The story ambles at an easy pace -- almost as a metronome of Markum's aimless strolls near and around the village cliffs -- and concludes at precisely the same speed, although by then our (and our English merchant's) pulses are beating noticeably faster.  Without slipping into sly hints at the story's arc, one would do well to brush up on one's Scots, both the tongue and the nomenclature, before tackling this tale.  And while I generally abhor dialect as a stooge-like conceit of the uninspired author, a cat's paw to generate some ancient truism from infallible rustics, it earns its place here.  In fact, the very likelihood that Markum does not quite fully comprehend the local speech seems to heighten the danger in which he soon finds himself.  What sort of danger?  Well, one of the sorts you associate with 'sands,' although perhaps not the first that comes to mind.  And throughout the plight -- it does become a plight for more than one reason -- of our Mr. Markum, I recur to Kipling: "He may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success and go to his grave a castaway."  If that be his besetting sin, then surely we can forgive him.   

Moscow shoeshiners, both female and male, take their time and have the time to take.  Their booths, as tall as a man, lockable, with the surface area of a narrow bed, are small temples of dignity which, if one were to call it human dignity, would be the very prerequisite of dignity.  In these holy halls one has already gone further.  Those who engage there in a seemingly demeaning activity all resemble one another, as if they were mothers and sons, siblings.  Their eyes, the narrow faces with long noses, these profiles I all know from fresco and vase reproductions.  I thought Syrian, perhaps Assyrian -- gleaned, I suppose, from school books with short narratives about the history of Asia Minor; later I heard that one did not know for sure.  Probably from what is now Lebanon, Maronites, forced migrants from one of the largest forced migrations after the First World War.  Shoeshining seems to be their privilege, their fief, an unwritten law, just as the sale of roasted chestnuts in Rome seems to have been the privilege of the Apulians.

In these booths the passer-by can do more than simply have his shoes shined.  A stain remover is available to clean dirty clothes; a sewing kit to re-attach ripped-off buttons is there for the borrowing; scissors exist in order to cut off fringes and tamper with briefcases and shopping bags.  Shoeshining, the main activity, proceeds without haste, without the implication of subjection or lowliness, without any attempts on the part of the shiner to ingratiate himself.  Rushing customers who evince impatience and wish that the ritual be abridged are asked by a dark-eyed look and a gentle shake of the head to indulge in the ritual's full, uncut length.  Woe is woe, dignity dignity, shoes are shoes, and here one can learn what the word "application" means, which might come closest to correctly translating "sacrament."  (Marriage would then be the application of love.)

Carefully, in an appropriate manner, are bootlaces tucked in and socks protected by paper cuffs.  Left shoe on the footrest: with brushes of varied toughness dirt and dust are removed, fluid shoe polish is applied from a bottle.  Right shoe on the footrest: the same application.  Left shoe: brief polishing with a special rag for the liquid shoe polish, the same fate then befalls the right foot.  Left shoe on the footrest: solid shoe polish applied from a can, the same occurs with the right foot.  Left and right foot: blacked shiny with a soft brush.   A shake of the head, a gentle request from a pair of dark eyes: one more time must both shoes be placed, one behind the other, upon the footrest.  Then, from a special bottle, a special blacking is applied which again -- left foot, right foot -- is rubbed on until it shines.

The ritual application is over.  The time that one believes one has lost comes back doubled from that pair of dark eyes.  Gained, not lost.

More I do not know about Moscow shoeshiners.  They are forced migrants who have found a homeland here.  They return lost time to us with one hundred percent interest.  Their profiles seem familiar to me, from vase and fresco reproductions about which I once read in school books.  I would like to know more about Moscow shoeshiners -- everything, in fact -- and will try to do so.  I envy them.

You will know the detective by his cassock, so we'll get to him in a moment.   Our characters, gathered for a charity event that might simply be yet another gambit at tax evasion, are fivefold: Lady Mounteagle, the hostess; Lord Mounteagle, the host in name only and a devoted follower of Eastern beliefs -- whatever that means might depend on whatever Lord Mounteagle thinks you might like to hear; two visiting gentleman, the rather ambitious young politician James Hardcastle, and Lady Mounteagle's rather surly, contrarian cousin, Tommy Hunter, a doubting Thomas when it comes to the otherworldy; and last and somehow least, Phroso the Phrenologist, "a lean, shabby, sunburnt person, with an almost improbably fierce black moustache and whiskers."  If you know something about British literature, you will know that Phroso is very likely not what he appears to be because his physical description exactly matches a stereotype for someone completely different.  Apart from this quintet, we have two men of religion.  One is a confirmed monk of intellectual bent who is all too often ignored or underestimated because he is deemed a slave to his faith and because, doubtless, a small, lumpy fellow who usually comments in a quiet mumble is not going to inspire fear in most casual observers.  The second is "a great religious leader in his own country, a Prophet and a Seer," and his name is the Master of the Mountain. 

We may ask what mountain, although Lord Mounteagle and those of like conviction would deem such a simple question too simple for their man, but we do need to explain our title.  Meru's blood moon is a gem, one of those gigantic rubies we may imagine once adorned a maharaja's headgear or a silk pillow in a cool, shadowy palace chamber.  The jewel is on display chez Mounteagle because lord and lady are, well, "mad,"  a "popular way of saying that she and her husband were interested in the creeds and culture of the East," and in making sure that everyone admires them for these selfsame interests.  It is also on display for the implied reason that it would be unsafe anywhere else, when precisely the opposite would be true: once an item is placed in a museum, even in a pompous fraud's private collection, it becomes a thousand times more valuable in the eyes of insatiable capitalists (satiable capitalists, a far less destructive species, would never have anything to do with jewels or jewel thieves).  We know from the story's onset that the moon will be stolen, it is only a matter of culprit and motive.  And when the ruby finally goes missing and the Master of the Mountain himself is wrestled into captivity, he is quick to degrade his captors:

'You are learning a little,' he said, with insolent benevolence, 'of the laws of time and space; about which your latest science is a thousand years behind our oldest religion.  You do not even know what is really meant by hiding a thing.  Nay, my poor little friends, you do not even know what is meant by seeing a thing; or perhaps you would see this as plainly as I do .... If you were to be utterly, unfathomably, silent, do you think you might hear a cry from the other end of the world?  The cry of a worshipper alone in those mountains, where the original image sits, itself like a mountain.  Some say that even Jews and Moslems might worship that image; because it was never made by man.  Hark!  Do you hear the cry with which he lifts his head and sees in that socket of stone, that has been hollow for ages, the one red and angry moon that is the eye of the mountain?'

Since this is a Chesterton tale, we know what befalls those with preternatural pretensions.  We are also relieved to see our detective, small and humble as he always seems to be in physical appearance, already addressed by Lady Mounteban -- I mean, Mounteagle -- on page two of our story.  Unfortunately, Father Brown is asked the one question that no man of faith can answer with a straight face or without some inward sorrow.   And if, by the end, one person will regret having committed the crime and another will regret not having done so, we may decide to forgive them both.  After all it's the ecumenical thing to do.

As moonlit night again shall reign, 
So sadness leaves; the city waits. 
And we embrace the stifling grates
That keep us from the garden's mane.

Who knows it now that saw it then,
Replete with child, hat, summer wear; 
Alone in bud, who knew it bare,
Those open ponds in sleepless pen. 

And standing mute in shadow'd sleeves,
Shapes gently seem to straighten, rise;
And brighter and more stone-like eyes
Guard alleys' entrances like eaves. 

These paths exist like tangled flares,
Nearby and peaceful, with one aim. 
To meadows does the moon move fast;
The wind these petals coats like tears,   
And fountains fall to owners past, 
Cool traces of their game will last,
Amidst the moonlit nighttime air. 

Let a couple of years pass by then go and visit Mr. Masetto: you will find Zerlina essentially unchanged.  As she goes along and plays with him in the opera, so now she -- pretty, beloved, etc. -- is pottering about his house.  Were you to say to her, "But how was it then with that Don Giovanni fellow?" she would answer: "Yes, it was odd, it was an odd wedding day, such a hullabaloo, and I had to be on the lookout everywhere I went: suddenly Masetto would appear, grousing, suddenly Don Giovanni, who wanted to speak with me.  I firmly believe that if it hadn't been for me, they would have killed each other."  So must she remain in order to make herself a female character distinct from Anna and Elvira.  Comparatively, Anna is far less culpable than Zerlina.  She has confused Giovanni with Ottavio, nothing more.  But because she is considerably developed, this may end up troubling her for the rest of her life.  This she fails to disclose for as long as possible, and becomes crazed with the idea of vengeance. 

Yet Zerlina remains undaunted and proceeds, in carefree fashion, both to a dance with Don Giovanni and confession at Masetto's, which is altogether somewhat remarkable, and each of these gentlemen in due time will become stakeholders.   She is abroad in all parts and feels herself to be in the same circle of society as those noble ladies and just as important as any of them.  She is about to reel in Don Giovanni, not because he has seduced her, but because he has killed Masetto (it is significant that she confounds the physical and the moral), and therefore finds that Leporello is just as culpable, because he too has killed Masetto, her own little Masetto of whom she is so fond, and towards whom everyone else is rather nasty. 

Elvira is a vast female character with an absolute passion to know and understand what it means to be seduced.  She does not wish to save a modicum of her honor from the world, she wishes to stop Don Giovanni, naturally with the reservation that he wants to be true to her.  So she forsakes the mission's itinerant component -- but in this way the mission likewise is stopped.  This is genuinely feminine, an exquisite invention.  Yet in a way, on her mission as a woman she is out of her depths, außer sich, and therefore there must fall upon her a comic light.  I am not thinking of her deeply tragic situation in the second act where she mistakes Leporello for Don Giovanni, about whom one writer has said that this is almost cruel, if for another reason.  She herself is seduced, and now she wishes to rescue others, without thinking that for such an endeavor one needs preliminary studies and numerous exams, whereby one might acquire the ability to take on others.  This she cannot do at all.  Nor, therefore, can she make herself understood to Zerlina, and in this respect Elvira remains a comic figure.  She transfers all her pathos to Zerlina and in the end, am Ende, Zerlina can better understand Don Giovanni than comprehend Elvira.  Thus an actress portraying Zerlina ought not, as used to be done in this work, to become appalled or seized by fear due to Elvira's talk -- that would be far too much.  She should marvel at this new surprise, and marvel that the good listener and viewer will almost smile upon the situation, while still detecting the tragic element in Elvira.

Now to Don Giovanni.  If the singer were to imbue his voice with imagination and use this performance for such an accompaniment, what then?  The situation would become a seduction scene; perhaps, but not in an opera.  On the other hand, in a drama where a seducer does not sing to the girl but for the girl, so by this method he can help out in terms of imagination.  I shall outline precisely such a scenario.  There would be no farm girl, but a lady, a Donna, a developed girl with considerable qualifications.  The seducer has the voice, he knows how to let his imagination infect it.  So sometimes he sings for her what she would like to hear.   And then one day -- as is to be understood, coincidentally -- he selects the performance as Don Juan.  This he performs with complete imagination and inspiration.  Naturally, he does not look at her, not a glance, not a desire, otherwise all would be lost.  He looks straight in front of him and his voice begins to rise and brighten as he sets the mood for the imaginary allurement and seduction.  So the Donna listens, safe and comfortable as she is, because she knows that he is not singing to her, that this is not about her, and this is where she gives in to daydreams.  And when these dreams are assumed to have taken effect, here is where the seducer procures the first rendezvous both in his imagination and in the imagination's view and the weakened notion of the face-to-face meeting.  Should this be portrayed, this would in essence no longer be an opera, but its transition from this situation to the seduction's reality as reflected in a drama or tale.  

Now if Mr. Hansen were to be assigned this situation in a drama, then his performance would be the definitive version, the omnibus numeris absoluta, and every person who has a sense for such observations would certainly not deny that it is stunning to hear such a superb performance.  Calm and insinuating in his voice, wistful and dreamy yet clear in his expression, articulating every letter so that nothing is wasted and no time is lost, he engenders a rare effect.  But when it is in an opera, as in this case, the battle must be fought, and this sensational performance would not be in the right place, a golden apple in a silver bowl.  Don Giovanni is no pampered sitar player, but rather a seducer who has a need for such a mask at first approach.  Were one to take another moment in the opera, the guitar aria, for example, or Don Giovanni's aria as worked into Elvira's first part, "Poverina, poverina," then dwelling on this last point, I would say that here the performance could be put to use.  Nothing essential of what is Don Giovanni concerns this outburst, Don Giovanni who remains in a way based upon himself and in constant anticipation of pleasure.  For that reason should the voice be imbued with imagination, an ironic tinge should not arise in Don Giovanni's rumination about this relationship, although this will be precisely the impression made on the listener and viewer who understands Don Giovanni.  The actor must then also be sure to remain at peace until this moment, when the contrary then becomes correct and during the aria he will go back and forth in a certain tension.  But most of all he may not emerge when he sings these words, because Elvira won't hear them anyway.  Nor should he sing them to Leporello as the remaining part of the aria.  The essential here is that Don Giovanni is in the mood.  The unique effect in this situation should not result in reflections or assessments by Don Giovanni, but in the search for the total effect, which one writer has demonstrated. 

In the duet with Zerlina, Don Giovanni sings to Zerlina.  This is Don Giovanni, and Zerlina is the adorable little farm girl.  Compared to the Donna in the hypothetical situation outlined above, it was necessary to begin in such a manner because the attraction was not immediate.  For that reason it all began as innocent reverie and this holds true for the entire seduction: one moment of premature passion and all would be lost.  Just because Zerlina is now a farm girl, it does not follow that Don Giovanni ought to begin with rascally mischief; Don Giovanni never does that.  Naturally, with natural power and no posing or study, Don Giovanni always has a certain dignity and grace.  Even the recitations before the duet are flavorful in the good sense.  This is completely correct because Don Giovanni is a man who acts without reflection.  And to understand a farm girl on such a broad plain of the imagination and in an idealizing surtout when one, like Don Giovanni, is certain that she is in the process of seeing and admiring this handsome man, is a superb method of making her dazed in the head.  A fellow quick to his fists would be understood all too rapidly by Zerlina and would put her on her guard, since in all her naïveté Zerlina is honorable and does not understand jokes.  And she does not at all understand the man she sees.  At the same time, however, one may see Don Giovanni's haughtiness here as an important commentary on the text, see him catch flies with candy, see how he in a certain sense is right when he says to Elvira: "that was only in jest."  This replique is neither vicious nor ironic, but forthcoming and direct.  Don Giovanni considers Elvira to be too powerful to be affected by a little fling with little Zerlina; she the seduced par excellence, ϰατ' ἐξοχην, and Zerlina!  It is still easy to allow Don Giovanni some reflection, and in the opera the art is precisely in keeping this tendency at bay, for a Don Giovanni without the slightest reflection would be a meager figure and the opera would fail in its construction.  The actor must embody haughtiness in his posture, his expressions, his gestures, his presentations, in all his figure's finality.

Then the duet begins.  One feels that one hears the accompaniment's dreamy plainness (due to the fact that music is a universal medium) in Don Giovanni's application of his charms in which he seizes Zerlina, in his and the accompaniment's natural power.  As he stands there, the very best, and sees her giddy and confused, he sees that her non-willingness is a cloaked surrender, and so he musters all his haughtiness in almost commanding omnipotence.  This is the self-esteem of natural force.  The accompaniment on the first part, "Be mine," is therefore not ingratiating but energetic and decisive.  Now she gives in.  Don Giovanni, of course, does not do things this way.  Here again one must notice his haughtiness.  Compared to Anna, Elvira and others of their type, it is not unthinkable for Don Giovanni to enjoy a pleasure so greatly in the moment in which he has become victorious, as if he were a lover who gave as much as he took, and then revert a moment later to a seducer.  But Zerlina is captured and served in another way.  Here there is jest and pleasure and Don Giovanni is directly and purely musically in his element.  Zerlina is no more insignificant to him than any other woman, but simply something different from Elvira and Anna, and, actually, in her own way just as attractive, and essentially just as preoccupying for him.  Therefore I shall reiterate that Zerlina must be cast and held as such.  When she is seen and heard in relation to Don Giovanni, a certain elation will be evoked in the good listener and viewer because he, in vain, will use this serious category against her.  When she is seen in relation to Masetto, a smile will be coaxed out of the same listener because Zerlina is essentially neither seduced nor saved, but constantly dangling in the wind.

One person or another, various people, perhaps even many people might think it somewhat insignificant that one almost never sees Zerlina made into an object of aesthetic interpretation.  I personally tend to see this as insignificant, and therefore feel obliged to apologize to Mr. Hansen -- in the way he knows that he will see his name in print, perhaps then he will do himself the inconvenience of reading what has been written here -- and to beg Fædrelandet for forgiveness that I, curiously enough, am still struggling with such a contribution,  if the shortcoming is precisely that it is no longer hard to write.  Mr. Hansen can with little difficulty forgive me.  What luck when one has the desire and has made one's choice in life to have then precisely the singing voice that he has; what luck when one has the desire and has chosen one's job as an actor to have so many good qualifications as he really does have.   When one has so many gifts and has also made something of them, one may with little difficulty squander some rehearsal time on one's gait and posture.  The truth is I would not believe that my legs or my gait stood in any relation whatsoever to my understanding of the most immortal of operas.  Soon I should get a few other legs to walk on.

Don Giovanni has been staged yet again.  Compared to many other warmed-over, refined, and not at all nutritious pieces, with this opera the theater has, as our colloquial language puts it, a tasty chunk of meat that will tide you over for a long time.  And the public would be happy to know that there is such a thing, even if it were performed less frequently.  The papers have already voted about the performance both as a whole and in its details, thus about that I will not risk developing so quick an opinion, or one at all about the newspaper's audit and evaluation.  There is a lovely old rule traced to the long-dead Socrates: one should modestly deduce from the little that one knows rather than from the innumerable things that one doesn't.  The newspapers' theater reviews command me to assume the greatest possible modesty and an aesthetic abstinence from any conclusions.

If Mr. Hansen's performance is one which says a lot with universal applicability and admirable skill, it is also one that is ready-made and complete.  And I do not dare to have a general opinion on the matter so ready-made.  On the other hand, there is a single point that caught my interest, on which I would like for a moment to dwell and thereby request the reader's attention, as I do not wish to delay anyone in a hurry, nor waste any businessman's precious time.  I would rather dwell on this detail because I do not consider it a high-water mark in Mr. Hansen's interpretation and version, about which in general I have no opinion apart from the fact that it is indeed a high-water mark, perhaps something this actor performs everywhere at the same level (which, of course, cannot darken a detail's genuine brilliance) or at a lower level elsewhere (which, of course, could only reasonably make the high-water mark more eye-catching).  This point is the duet with Zerlina in the first act where we see, even if we may be of another opinion regarding the performer's importance in the scene, that this ought to be considered an absolute success.

The first thing required of a singer is voice.  The second is presentation, which is the union of voice and mood, as well as something else apart from the voice's suppleness in the coloraturas or roulade, since this is in theory their mutual commensurability and in reality the voice and mood's harmony in the presentation.   The last thing that is required of a dramatic singer is that his mood and feelings be correct given the situation and poetic individuality.  When a singer loses the mood and feeling of his part, he comes off as in the throes of artificial passion; if he is also an actor, he can still incorporate opposites at once into his gestures and movements.  The more he has reflected and practiced managing his voice against the mood's piano, the more combinations he will have at his disposal and, in such a way, the more fully he can give vent to the composer's demands (only when, of course, the composer's work understands when to make demands upon the singer's presentation and is not simply one of those intolerant and unperformable operas).  If he has taken less time to reflect, his mood and character will not have as great a significance.  Yet one thing remains: the universal, all-encompassing reason for mood and feeling, to be able to have voice determine imagination, and to be able to sing with imagination.  Such was the performance by Mr. Hansen which I beheld and admired at the aforementioned point.

For the duet with Zerlina huge demands are made spontaneously.  The first scene with Anna is too stormy for one to recognize Don Giovanni properly; but here everything lies in perfect order, the surroundings have been removed, and we anxiously and attentively wait to see how he will manage his first attack.  And we think: here we are going to learn whether Don Giovanni is a dandy and a windbag (what a person becomes when he wishes to be a Don Juan) who has in Leporello a faithful trumpeter and in Mozart a powerless troubadour, or whether he is indeed the famous Don Juan and whether this opera is indeed our composer's most renowned work.  The composer performs what has to be performed.  The accompaniment is ingratiating and convincing, like a stream's purling recurrence, charmingly returning, whereby the orchestra seems to supervise itself, hold in that pattern, and not allow itself to be concluded.  

All this has a dreamy yet captivating effect, as the scent of a flower may become like a sedative; it leads on into the endless, not with the energy of desire, but with silent craving and aspiration.  Mozart knows full well what he is doing, and the individual personality of a Zerlina does not seem to possess prerequisites that would condition another interpretation, such as, for example: a most powerful arousal of passion in a union of desire, where female lust would translate into energy and the risk of almost competing with Giovanni's natural might; or a female damnation of Giovanni, in which there would arise a boundless female realm; or a vanquished rebellion that founders in its pride; or the whole thing performed with noble simplicity, or defiled with heightened purity; or that same meek intensity that offended once now offends for a lifetime; or that deep faith in God, once disappointed, is now disappointed forever; or infinity's holy passion, led astray into perdition; or female recklessness that enters the light itself, and so forth.  

Zerlina's seduction is at a quiet wedding which proceeds without being called of.  Thus the essential comes to pass: she does not know how it came to be, but it did come to pass and she was seduced.*  And the result of Zerlina's greatest effort in the exercise of reason is this: one cannot explain it.  Now the interpretation of Zerlina is of great importance.  It was therefore a mistake by an otherwise meritorious actress, Ms. Kragh, to sing the replique "No!  I shall not," with strong emphasis, as if it were a decision which had been brewing in Zerlina.  Far from it.  She is bewildered, dizzy in her head, curious about her heart from the very beginning.  If we imbue her with thoughts in this respect, then the whole opera appears erroneous and mistaken.**

The following words, "Masetto's soul will bleed," deal with the same.  If this sympathy had a category, the whole thing would not be possible.  The replique must therefore not mean more and not be sung in any other way than to remain at the level of sudden gestures, such as, for example, staying in one's apron and pushing away Don Giovanni's embrace.  Precisely this makes her beautiful and lovable, and her relationship with Masetto correct.  To detect a work of atonement in the aria "Batti, batti, o bel Masetto" would be pure misunderstanding.  She is still not quite in possession of level-headedness, which can always extend, and quite abundantly, into Masetto's household, but not into Don Giovanni's snare.  She sees that Masetto is angry, so there's nothing else left to do, and she has to speak well for herself, both for his ears, and for her own.  For what this whole thing was is still not clear to her, and in her innocence her innocence is utterly doubtless.  She must be kept in this naïveté; she can only be very wise to Masetto, and he can only be so angry.  Thus neither character should have any atonement to make, as she was just redeemed.  By no means.  This begins again as soon as she sees Don Giovanni, and so again must she go and whimper a bit for Masetto, comfort him, and trust herself finally, that it is Don Giovanni and Masetto who have become enemies, God knows what for, and she has become the person who will have to satisfy them with her talk.

------------------------------

* Therefore Leporello and Zerlina would, be able to engage in splendid conversation when he says to her what he used to say in bygone days to Elvira regarding Don Giovanni, and what most revolted her: "Yes, oh yes!  It is so strange, because as quickly as he is here, so is he gone."  And then Zerlina would say: "It is not that at all, I tell you; one really has no idea how it all comes to pass."

** The system in such an instance would be altered and we would move towards the profound and the Greek, in that Don Giovanni would stumble over a straw, over a little Zerlina, while he fell under the sway of wholly other powers.  The complete effect and the complete unity of the story would be disrupted.  Anna's passion, the murder of her father the Commendatore, the reunion with Elvira, all of this is against Don Giovanni; he is in the process of being stopped and for the first time in his life he is left gasping for air.  All of this has happened so early on, in the first two scenes, that the opera is still at its beginning.  What now of the seduction that is to take place in the play?  One of two: it shall involve either a seduction so complicated and dangerous that he is motivated purely by the thrill, which incites his greatest desire and greatest strength (which, nevertheless, will weaken the effect and be weakened by the impact of Anna and Elvira), or an insignificant, lovable little farm-girl imbued with natural roguishness and childlike qualities, a type of woman that one may find in the north and for whom the Catholic Church has a dubious category.  Don Giovanni is well in his element here, with the impact on the rest of the play not weakened.  This is Mozart's intention, and in this intention the play has its own beautiful unity and Mozart his own joyful mission.  Don Giovanni and Zerlina relate directly to one another like natural force and natural destiny, a purely musical relationship.

Women are cellos, fellows the bows.

For what is the body but a swamp in which the spirit drowns?  And what is marriage, that supposedly seamless circle, but a deep well up out of which the man and woman stare at the impossible sun, the distant bright disc, of freedom?

                                                                                                                 Tom Marshfield

There is a fine quote from an old film which will be admitted here in paraphrase to ward off the Google hounds: there is a time to frolic, and a time not to frolic, and this is not one of those times.  Readers of these pages know there are works that make it to Deeblog, a warm, fuzzy salon of positive thoughts, heady coffee aromas, and headier observations, and many more that do not, for a variety of criteria, the simplest of which is that they do not induce the back-chilling aesthetic bliss necessary to be memorialized.  For reasons that will become resoundingly clear, this novel is really neither one of those works, in no small part because it is hardly a novel at all.

We begin --  I take that back, we do not really begin anywhere at all.  Our narrator, who introduces himself through the generally dishonest tactic of self-deprecation and martyrdom, has been shipped to a rehabilitation clinic somewhere amidst the sands of the American Southwest.  He is a wiry, nervous Anglo-Saxon in his early forties (in the opening chapter he declares himself, "41 this April, 5'10", 158 lbs"), apart from his calvity almost feminine in his shape and shadow, a father of two and in principle -- in fact, very much in principle -- a married man of the cloth.  We do not yet know the crimes that precipitated his commitment, but they will be revealed by the man itself with glee bordering on malice.   He looks around his sanitarium, for that is indeed where is housed, if a nice sanitarium with golf and tennis available to its inmates, that is, its guests, and rightly contemplates what on earth or beyond he could have in common with this pack of rats and their keepers.  His description early on affords us a hint or two:

All middle-aged men, we sit each at our table ... suppressing nervous gossip among the silverware.  I feel we are a 'batch,' more or less recently arrived.  We are pale.  We are stolid.  We are dazed.  The staff, who peek and move about as if preparatory to an ambush, appear part twanging, leathery Caucasians, their blue eyes bleached to match the alkaline sky and the seat of their jeans, and the rest nubile aborigines whose silent tread and stiff black hair uneasily consort with the frilled pistachio uniforms the waitresses perforce wear.

The era, in case it mattered to you, is late Nixon, a time of paranoia and penitence and a convenient excuse for our narrator's tone.  Soon it becomes evident that he has been confined for a month due to an acute case of satyromania, which may conjure up a picture of a man-goat in our beclouded minds, but which could make for some interesting insights on what has led our man of God to become a man of the insatiable flesh.  The Reverend Marshfield cannot really tell us why; but at least we may empathize with his diminishing faith in his own convictions (hearing out a sobbing parishioner he deems, "but as an act of fraternity amidst children descended from, if not one Father, then one molecular accident").  He feels enslaved by his chosen path, which at once must have been chosen for him by some Other force and must not have been.  His wife Jane, herself the daughter of a clergyman by the name of Chillingworth, his two teenage boys, his weekly sermons, the lonely, broken women who sit through those sermons and gaze unknowingly at a spry, sexually perverse minister and suggest with their bodies' lack of movement the consent Tom seeks with his roving, raving mind, his sporadic visits to his father deep in the throes of dementia -- all this conspires to drive our holy man away from both the Holy and mankind for all its flaws and stigmas.   His solution, at least for the lower half of his mortal coil, is a wonderland where everything that should not be is, and everything that should be is not.  And not surprisingly, the heroine of this land is a single mom by the name of Alicia Crick.

Alicia is also the musical director at Tom's small church, and on Sundays they are united if not in common purpose then in melody.  When Jane and Tom were courting, he saw his future wife "walk[ing] a cloistered path to me, [and] it was as if a lone white rose were arriving by telegraph," a Beatrician image for those who believe in beatitudes.  Not so much with Alicia, whose "jaw wore a curious, arrogant, cheap, arrested set, as if about to chew gum."  Jane is portrayed as equally lithe and fragile as her husband, even if her husband's fragility is only manifest in the cavities of his conscience.  Mrs. Crick, however, possessed "small ... smartly tipped breasts," a "comfortably thick" waist, "homely" and "well-used looking" feet, and "active hands, all muscle and bone."  Mrs. Crick swiftly turns out to be such a "revelation" in bed -- our novel is saturated (Tom might say satyr-ate-it, and be almost funny) with puns and footnotes on puns, and puns on footnotes -- that life with the "good wife's administration sex," that "solemn, once-a-week business, ritualized and worrisomely hushed," becomes absolutely unbearable.  One evening, the horrible truth descends upon Tom like the rain upon a lost hitchhiker along a lonesome midnight road:  

My porch.  My door.  My stairs.  Again the staircase rose before me, shadow-striped, to suggest the great brown back of a slave; this time the presentiment so forcibly suggested to me my own captivity, within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred, within a cavernous unnameable sense of misplacement and wrongdoing, that I dragged my body heavy as if wrapped in chains step by step upward.

We will not say much more on the matter except that Alicia, bless her soul, is acquired and discarded early on in our fragmentary flashbacks, and cannot be considered happy about such a reversal of fortune.  And so Tom begins his real journey, his journey back to Alicia that merely re-captions his journey back to his lost youth of irresponsibility, which involves prurience to a degree found only in erotic trash, cussing of the kind found only in popular trash, and an apotheosis from both of these hellish straits through the occasional visits to his Alzheimer-ridden father, who alternatively does not remember Tom, or confuses him with his brother, thus erasing Tom's childhood and innocence in one fell swoop.  Without first, of course, causing him and us a great deal more grief.

As a stunning exception to the vast majority of his peers, Updike, who died three years ago today, was very public about his religion and religiousness, even if he migrated congregations more than once.  Consequently, he was essentially obliged to make any protagonist clergyman a skeptic (what then would be the fun if not?) to avoid the execrable label of zealot.  At some point I remember reading that Updike was Hawthorne's literary descendant (the ballad of Tom Marshfield begins what would be known to Updikeans as “The Scarlet Letter Trilogy").  In hindsight this claim seems less far-fetched, although Updike was far more prodigious than any other serious author and Hawthorne was, like so many, rather fussy about his prints.  The problem with such productivity is not leaving yourself enough time to reflect and reconsider, and there is also such a thing as leaving yourself too much time.  So does a novel like A Month of Sundays get nearly ignored by posterity by virtue of its rambling, pointless beauty -- the rambling, pointless beauty of life itself -- a novel, admittedly, in binding and bookstore category alone.  There are overwritten and overwrought passages, surely, and sometimes one wishes there were fewer (occasionally they begin to crowd against our sunset), and the book cannot be read in one or two sittings.  It is more properly a patch of poems, a purple, thriving, majestic patch, with real genius, a rarity in our era of half-baked hallucination and urban rage.   Consider: "From the far end of the house sounded the electric sloshing of television's swill";  "That money, green and golden money which instinctively seeks the light"; "I loved shedding each grade as I ascended through school"; "Children returning from school shout in the acoustic wet street"; and Frankie, one of Tom's conquests, long since rich but undersexed, "lets out ... a giggle even older than the mink" (this same woman would later be "feeding mosquitoes on the nectar in her veins [and] admiring [her husband's] dragonlike skill at igniting brickets," perhaps the novel's most sensational passage).  Only the artistically obtuse would complain that there is no plot, structure or even point to Tom's peregrinations, apart from the very acceptable excuse of wanting to create more purple patches.  And maybe like Alicia, we won't mind the hypocrisy, just the unhappiness.