pervigilium veneris

Let those love now who never loved before,

let those who always loved, now love the more.

Original artwork by Roman Preneste

These lines are part of "Pervigilium Veneris" or The Vigil of Venus, a first century Roman poem translated into English by Thomas Parnell in the XVIIth century. The Eve of Saint Venus -as Anthony Burgess humorously called it in one of his books- used to be a Pagan festivity meant to celebrate the beginning of Spring, although the poem would normally be brought up again at the end of summer, on occasion of mid-August festivals. With the advent of Christianity, the Pervigilium Veneris accommodated into several different Virgin Mary festivities, among which May First and Assumption -on the 15th of August. I love to think that to this day, Venus is still worshipped in disguise, in Catholic countries all over the world. 

The Decameron, 1971

Now let me tell you a short story about a Spanish friend of mine. Hilario Toledano was born on a 15th of August 1971, to late middle-aged parents. For some obscure reason, they were positive the baby would be a girl, so they had planned to call it Asunción -Spanish for the Virgin's Assumption. 

To be honest, the name Hilario always sounded to me like a last-minute solution to some unexpected emergency. And it was. Shy, brooding Hilario was the youngest of many siblings. I mean youngest by far. By the time he reached his teens, everybody else in the family had flown the nest. Hilario was a bit like those kittens raised by humans, who don't really know they will be cats one day... until they find out. He thought of himself as conventional, because everybody around was extremely so; thought of himself as a Christian, because his parents hadn't told him the family descended from hidden Jews; thought of himself as straight, because he believed everyone around to be so.

The day he turned fifteen, Hilario was feeling particularly mournful and deserted: he had just fallen out with some friends, his room-mate brother was away in the military service, his closest sister had just married and gone on her honeymoon, and another brother was staying in a hospital for the whole summer. So his well-meaning old parents made him a nice birthday meal and then disappeared into their bedroom to sleep a long siesta.

The only way to spend his birthday money Hilario could come up with was kill a couple hours at the village cinema... on his own.

Picture one of those rural movie theatres built in the 1920s: a cathedral-like, chilly inside in a cheap Decó style -only with crumbling walls, worn-out curtains, mouldy carpets, squeaky chairs, a battered screen and the inevitable pungent reek of lemon air freshener... And the movie was "A Room with a View". (Of course, what else?)

A Room with a View, 1985

Let's see. Considering Hilario's state of mind that afternoon, he may have been deeply impressed by ANY film whatsoever. Probably. But FATE -or Italy, depending what you call IT- wanted James Ivory's masterpiece to become part of Hilario's hard-wiring forever.

"It is Fate that I am here," says George Emerson to Reverend Mr. Beebe on their way to the pond. "But you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy."

Without knowing it, Hilario was pretty much in a disposition for what ancient Greeks called a mysteric ritual of initiation. And I believe such was exactly the kind of experience he went through during the show. Boy, how the movie spoke to him. The minute young George Emerson (above) goes on screen, Hilario immediately thought he would identify with that character and see the picture from George's point of view. Just a sound, easygoing, physical guy with an appetite for life.

- If I could be like that, every girl would like me -thought Hilario.

But then book-worm Cecil Vyse (below) comes into the picture, setting an uncomfortable polarity between Lucy's two gentlemen callers.

-Poor sod -thought Hilario-. What a pedantic jerk, and a sissy too! If I WAS LUCY, I would never go for a guy like that... But wait a minute...

Exactly, Hilario. Wait a minute. You meant to take sides with George, but now you are thinking like Lucy... Oh-Oh!

Who wins Lucy's heart -and flesh- in the end? Healthy George or refined Cecil? The answer is simple: the winner is whoever shows better knowledge of Lucy's soul -as well as himself's. As George puts it, Cecil can't love anyone intimately, least of all a woman... because he doesn't even know he is a homosexual. However, he eventually does when Lucy breaks the engagement by using delightful analogies of Leonardos and Mona Lisas.

This is the good part. Like Cecil, Hilario was given a chance to open his eyes: the film was telling him he would never be a George type, an action man, a breeder. For Christ's sake, Hilario even hated tennis as much as Cecil did! Like Cecil, my friend preferred books, and Art, and Music... and yes, men too. A heart-piercing realization for a kid who only wants to fit in the world some day.

When the show ended and lights went on, the boy was in a deep state of shock. On his way back home, as he almost sleep-walked through the mid-August, sunset-glowing countryside, every bird, every fly, every leaf on every tree seemed to be chanting:

let those love now who never loved before,

let those who always loved now love the more.

But Hilario felt painfully excluded from all that. Like Cecil, he was going to need a long time to come to terms with himself.

-Did you enjoy yourself, dear? -asked his mother when he got home

He could hardly make it to the bathroom in time to hide his tears. But he could still hear his father say:

-The poor kid is bored to death...

"A Room With a View" changed my friend's life inasmuch as it confronted him with parts of himself he had refused to see before -and it did it at a very impressionable age. I am sure it all was for the better. I mean, Hilario could have ignored these calls and gone on lying to himself. Like Cecil, he could have tried to take a trophy wife and made her miserable. Instead, he chose to embrace his book-worm nature and became a poet.

Not a very well known one. but a poet all the same. As Spanish poet Marino Sánchez put it, the fact that a poet can be ignored doesn't make him/her less of a poet.

Ser poeta ignorado es casi tanto

como alcanzar el cielo sin medida.

Es escuchar mi voz en la encendida 

proclamación oculta de este canto.

We all have to thank Hilario for confiding his teenage story to me, because without him I wouldn't even have been interested in this wretched film, and this blog wouldn't exist at all. Next week I will tell you what happened when I saw "ARWAV" myself, and how it changed MY life too.