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TELL me,
Father, why is there so much pain in my soul? Knowing
that the speaker is the Mother Teresa, whose fame almost
threatened to extinguish the popularity of even her most
difficult mission, we can truly understand the question.
We know that she, with her sandaled nuns, walked the
streets and slums, lived in ghettoes and hovels, fed the
poor, the tubercular and the most unwanted lepers in any
society. Those lines, therefore, are almost
embellishment to a life gilded in selflessness. In her
work, the words “poorest of the poor” are not empty
rhetoric. They are a profile of her clients and her
community. And yet, those lines are not about her
difficult vocation. Those lines are about her faith.
Years
after her death, her letters—composed of the
correspondence between her and her superiors and
confessors—are now collected in a book, Mother
Teresa: Come Be My Light. Time magazine put Mother
Teresa once more on the cover of their September 3
issue, seducing us with the title “The Secret Life of
Mother Teresa.”
Mother
Teresa was always good copy, not in the way of those
flamboyant preachers whose suits and speeches could put
to shame our human imagining of the Pearly Gates. She
was good copy because she did what we Christians were
and are supposed to: love our neighbors as we love
ourselves. She was no mere poster girl for charitable
work. She gave us back a definition of charity that
demanded so much that we either opted to go all out to
help her do those tasks or ignored them because we were
not up to the tasks.
Now,
Mother Teresa is back with her letters. This time she is
even more sensational than famous. In the Time essay by
David van Biema, letter after letter is analyzed to
disclose a person who was in anguish because she felt
God was not there in her life. This was the person we
gave the title “The Living Saint.” In the many
interviews, some of which are still played on
television, she constantly expressed her embarrassment
with the title. In not so few occasions, she would tell
the interviewer not to call her The Living Saint. We
thought it was merely humility that pushed her to
discourage us away from that inspiration of being with a
living saint. With the letters, humility does not get a
validation; it is slapped with negation, for Mother
Teresa, knew (as she wrote) that while Jesus has a
special love for (her confessor), she has nothing.
Except “the silence and the emptiness” that is “so
great.”
If the
other saints had their doubts, and if a mystic like St.
John of the Cross had his “dark night of the soul,”
Mother Teresa had the most basic of them all—darkness.
In one of her letters, she talked of a God who had
distanced Himself, who was not there. She wrote:...Where
is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing,
but emptiness and darkness—My God—how painful is this
unknown pain—I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words
and thoughts that crowd in my heart….
At first
it is a terrible thought. This formidable missionary had
no faith for some 50 years! And even when she regained
it, there was always this anxiety that she would lapse
again into that darkness. At a certain point of the
essay, Mother Teresa’s image is likened to that of a
torch singer, she with the torch pining for the return
of her lover, Mother Teresa waiting for the return of
her Savior.
For me,
however, this little nun wins again. She gives us a
final lesson that in faith, as in doubt, a full measure
of honesty secures always the best credibility. Her path
guided by the texts of her letters shining in the
darkness because they were truthful proves that in our
belief systems doubt has always been underrated.
The
Story of a Murderer
Jean-Baptiste
Grenouille’s case is different. He always had faith in
himself until he discovered that he does not have a
scent. The young man is no saint. He has no ambition to
be so. His mother—or the woman who bore him for some
nine months—gives birth to him under a table of fishes,
on the dank and dirty floor of a wet market in what
seems like a rancid 18th-century Paris.
He is
taken to an orphanage. With no friends around,
Grenouille grows up with a keen sense of smell. It is so
keen that he can smell the objects and living things
around him: the grass against his back, the pond across
the meadow, the shallows of the water, the frog under
the wet vegetation.
He is
rescued from the orphanage by a man who turns him into a
slave. Brought to the city, his universe of smell
expands. He catches bad odor and sweet aroma, finally
discovering the redolence of women. He follows a woman
and physically attempts to capture her smell. The woman
refuses his advances and Grenouille kills her. He
follows the trail of essences, which leads him to the
house of Giuseppi Baldini (Dustin Hoffman, in an
eccentric but otherwise entrancing performance). Baldini
used to be a popular perfumer but is now overshadowed by
younger inventors of scents. The young man, poorly
dressed, shows Baldini his extraordinary olfactory
ability. The old perfumer is convinced and buys
Grenouille from his master.
He
learns how to make perfume from Baldini, but he is
always seeking for that elusive scent. He promises to
make the perfumer scents and essences as long as he is
allowed to go. Baldini sets him free and Grenouille
leaves for Grasse to learn how to make perfume through
the process called enfleurage. The process involves
placing petals against animal fats, which are layered on
a frame. Grenouille opts to use fats placed first on a
woman’s body and then he scraps them. To do this,
however, he kills women for his experiment.
Grenouille, in his search for the perfect essence,
becomes the serial killer. He is caught, but not before
he finishes his 13 essences, made out of 13 women.
Presented before the town, its official and its people,
Grenouille places some drops of the essence he made on
his body. An aura envelops him and even the murderer’s
executioner falls down on his knee declaring the
innocence of Grenouille. What follows is the perfect ad
for any perfume: the men and women about to witness the
execution look at each other and begin to engage in an
orgy. The bishop included.
As the
narration puts it, after the orgy the entire town
decides to forget what they have been into. Grenouille
leaves for Paris where more of the perfume on his body
pushes some people to perceive him as an angel. I am not
about to tell you what happens next. Let me just say
that Grenouille, after being acknowledged as an angel,
disappears—without any trace of his body parts lying
around.
Not bad
for someone who, while bathing in a cave, realizes that
he has no scent at all even as all around him, everyone
seems to find a reason to have faith in Faith.
The film
is called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Ben
Whishaw is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He plays him with
the charm and fear factor of a bottle of perfume, the
essence of which cannot be placed. Tom Twyker directs
this parable about senses and religion. Twyker directed
one of the episodes in the cinema
Paris,
je t’aime, which was shown in the last Cinemanila
International Film Festival. |
