Dante and Unanswered questions

Sometimes a small and apparently unimportant question, such as, Why did my mother acquire so many postcards of William Blake’s Lucia carrying Dante in His Sleep? will trigger a slew of other questions. There is a domino effect to questions, as with so much else.
Postcard stashes are one thing. I can forgive myself for not knowing the reason for them. I can even speculate. The watercolor, one of Blake’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy, is owned by the Fogg Museum at Harvard. I guess that this particular surfeit has something to do with the HILR (Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement) class on Dante’s Paradiso that my father took in 2010. After his strokes, my father forgot discreet decades of his life (Please explain how Cuba came to be Communist, he once said), but his judgment and critical powers were remarkably intact. So, he kept on taking classes at HILR, and, as always, was a diligent and engaging student. That did not stop him from calling on the evening before his class and asking me to read Dante’s Paradiso and come up with 10 or 12 pithy observations and insightful questions. I got off easily. When Dad was studying the Economics of Global Climate Change, he called my sister and asked her to read the assigned text, 836 pages of small print, and give him a detailed synopsis.
Now what do I do with these 20 postcards? Would you like one?
That was just the beginning. In the latest pile we found multiple postcards from Ireland. We had no idea she had even been to Ireland. She had 37 – thirty-seven! – postcards of a detail of the Tara Brooch, from the National Museum of Ireland. Not even the whole brooch, just a detail.

As for the Tara Brooch, it raises more than a few questions, and not just about my mother's stash. Although it is called the Tara Brooch, the piece was found near Bettystown in County Meath, at least 25 kilometers from Tara. It was discovered by either a peasant woman, or her two sons, or one of her sons. The brooch didn’t even start the fashion in Celtic Revival jewelry. That was already in full swing in 1850 when the brooch appeared. And apropos of nothing, my mother was never interested in things Celtic; her tastes ran to the French, the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, and the Vietnamese.

No, that felucca has sailed. I will never ever know why the Dante cards, why the Tara Brooch, why the eight postcards of Mrs Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary, by an unknown American of the 17th century. So many unknowns.
How can I not be annoyed with the idiotic former self who neglected to ask: What are the full names of the seven suitors who wooed and wanted to wed you, my mother, before you met my father? Why, when you kept so many other things, did you destroy the letters from Mr. Jago? Why did you stop going to Mass for many years, and then start up again? Who was your favorite child? Was there ever a time when you knew more than a few dozen words in Arabic? Did my father ever work for the CIA?
Don’t be too harsh, I tell myself. At least five years before we had the tiniest inkling, my mother was already afflicted with Alzheimer’s. She was just covering it up fairly well. As was my father, on her behalf and his own. They were in denial. Not for nothing was my mother who grew up in Egypt known as Queen of Da Nile. Her mantra was, “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” Mine might well have been, “Spit it out. Think later.”
Those fucking questions.
There are so many things I will never know, now that a typical conversation with my mother conversation proceeds thus:
Mom: There’s that nice little thing there in the back….(She is lying on her bed with the duvet pulled up to her chin, and facing the Christmas tree on her screened porch.)
Christine: Do you mean the tree?
M: Yes, the tree.
C: It’s very nice.
M: Everybody thought it was mortar.
C: Mortar or water?
M: Mortar.
C: Oh.
M: Well they wanted to be mean and everybody always…I couldn’t believe it, it was so bad.
C: I’m sorry.
M: Sigh.
C: Everything is fine now.
M: But I have some things. I have some red papers which are white and they’re going to go in here (she lifts the duvet slightly and leans slightly inward) and they’re going to go in here and they …….
C: OK! Mom! Everything is lovely.

One of the more disheartening things I have noticed, whenever I set out to transcribe a conversation with my mother, is how limited my own vocabulary becomes. I use more words, and more complex words, with a three-year-old. My mother can still speak three languages, and can make no sense in any of them. It is like trying to cook a meal with three ingredients, and one is water and one is half a carrot.

There are the memories evoked by the postcards with their bizarre images and unfathomable messages; it is as if each word is a portal to a memory palace.

And then there are the strange photographs of dubious provenance; and even when identified, still it remains unclear what I was thinking when I took them.
Here is a picture taken inside the Cathedral of León, Nicaragua. I know that because it says so on the back, and nothing more. The picture’s main feature is a dark green plaster dragon at the foot of a robed statue. Between its bared teeth, the dragon is biting something red and amorphous. Because it is in a church and inside a glass case, I am guessing this red dangling blob was once a bouquet of faux flowers; I only say this because on so many occasions I have been shocked to find plastic or silk flowers gracing a statue inside a tropical church, when just outside there are real flowers in profusion, agapanthus, datura, bougainvillea, jacaranda, birds of paradise, and wild ginger.

The statue is truncated above the knee by my photographic ineptitude, so without a renewed visit to the León Cathedral or a conversation with the current deacon of the cathedral (assuming there is one, which is an optimistic assumption given the dearth of clergy in Central America and everywhere else, except Rome), I can’t tell you which saint’s feet the dragon sits upon. I guess it is either Saint George or Saint Margaret of Antioch, because they are the two saints most commonly represented with dragons. St George is generally shown on horseback slaying the wicked dragon and thereby saving the princess about to be devoured by said dragon, as his daily meal of a beautiful virgin.
Recently I revisited the story of Saint George and the Dragon, on account of Leda, precocious and beloved granddaughter. As we sometimes do, I met up with Leda and her mother in Grand Central Station. They have come from hipster Brooklyn; I have debouched from Metro-North. The very first thing Leda showed me was a postcard of Raphael’s St George and the Dragon, this having been her choice of all the possible postcards in the bookstore in Grand Central. (In case you are wondering which Raphael version of Saint George’s heroic feat/ animal slaughter, it was the one in which the grateful virgin princess is off to the side in a prayerful position, not the one in which George’s candy-cane lance is broken and the dragon is nipping at his heels as the virgin flees in the background.) Precocious granddaughter explained to me that it was a good thing George was killing the dragon, which prompted us both to wonder exactly why are dragons always the villains (I am thinking pre-Puff.). We learned that one reason dragons were so fearful and feared, was that, along with their tongues of flame and their appetite for virgins, their exhalations spread plague over the countryside. Leda added, peripherally or perhaps not, that she sometimes has dragon breath in the morning. “But it’s alright, Nana,” she explained. “We all do. Even you.”
Back in Nicaragua, I am now persuaded that the saint only seen from the knees down is Saint Margaret, because she is wearing a gown and she is not on horseback, and the dragon is not dead. Saint Margaret of Antioch is the patron saint of childbirth for the very good reason that when she was swallowed whole by a marauding dragon, the crucifix she carried aloft tickled his throat and he coughed her right back up. Her emergence from the maw of the dragon being a rough version of childbirth, if you have a vivid imagination. If you perceive the dragon as representing Satan, as it generally was in medieval times, then the patronage becomes even more farfetched.




← Leda’s choice. Note praying princess. ←another Raphael St George, this time with the princess fleeing.
This morning – finding the postcard under our bed where it must have flown when Leda was practicing her somersaults - CSB asked me how Raphael died. Was this a trick question? (Would Watson know?) I knew he died young (37) but I didn’t know how. But I do now.
Vasari tells us that after a night of riotous sex with his beloved mistress, Raphael developed a raging fever and died on Good Friday of 1520. This was the same year Magellan sailed through the Straits of Magellan, though they were not yet so-named, and also the first year of the smallpox epidemic that would kill half the Aztec population (Gracias, conquistadores.) Most importantly, in 1520 chocolate made its first journey across the ocean from Mexico to Spain, so that 490 years later more than $1 billion could be spent on chocolate hearts on or about February 14.