Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Waiting for Mario: The Espositos, Joyce, and Beckett

1995; Irish American Cultural Institute; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/eir.1995.0035

1550-5162

J. Bowyer Bell,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

WAITING FOR MARIO: THE ESPOSITOS, JOYCE, AND BECKETT J. BOWYER BELL in the very early spring of 1957, I arrived at Via Fra Guittone in Florence to stay with a pianist friend who was practicing for an international competition later in the year. I was to listen to his program. I was to see the city. So, each morning, with the truncated chords of Beethoven repeated over and over for perfection tumbling about my ears I set oV. Either going or coming, I was apt to meet an elderly man clad in a long tweed coat and who had, what seemed to me, an odd Italian accent. He came from upstairs where the family-in-residence apparently took pleasure in hearing the same chords repeated until perfection rather than eroding their enthusiasm. I felt overexposed to music practiced rather than performed. The upstairs Espositos did not. One morning for no good reason the man from upstairs spoke in English, not just everyday serviceable English, but the most elegant Trinity College Dublin English—and on reXection the tweed coat did look rather as if it had been purchased in Ireland although long ago. He was formal and kind and to me old—at twenty-Wve anyone twice my age was old; later, those with more years are merely older. We talked of this and that, books and the weather. Mario Esposito, the upstairs scholar, seemed not just old as a person but old, ancient, out of another time and without great optimism, without great expectations. I was young and American and it was nearly spring. I was not an ancient or heir to Europe’s ills. It was hard to realize how little comfort there was to be found for many Europeans in a century that to me still seemed promising. On his way back and forth to the library, Mario expected nothing, was content with his journeys into the far past where the books were written and the paintings Wnished. He was not exactly of this time, Florence on an early spring morning, and he was gentle , ascetic, intriguing. WAITING FOR MARIO: THE ESPOSITOS, JOYCE, AND BECKETT 7 Coming and going we spoke daily, spoke mostly of my interest in very old books. I yearned for incunabula that I could not aVord, and it was clear that Dottore Mario Esposito knew all there was to know about incunabula and much else ancient. In fact, I was invited upstairs to see his own collection kept in a small book case in a dark sitting room. I found Mario most interesting, austere, precise, penetrating without interest in the transient or for that matter seemingly in recent centuries, somehow both alien and comfortable. Americans, young Americans, assume everyone to be rather like them, and Mario was not: his view of life and history was if not dark at least reserved. Noting on a glorious sunny day that if I had been God I should have made a world with more such days, on his way upstairs Mario paused and noted that he was not sure he would have bothered making the world at all. Yet, in that world he had found a corner, one of the very darkest corners, of history to explore for my pianist and his lady said he was working on St. Patrick, said that the family was odd. Upstairs in the dark room I met his two sisters who, like Mario, had grown up in Dublin and at some uncertain date come to Florence. Their father, Michele, an Italian from near Naples not Florence, had been a famous musician in Dublin for years, but somehow they had ended here on Via Fra Guittone. From what I could discover from my vague and disjointed if polite discussions—somehow they spoke to me but not to each other— the two women as young ladies had become involved, seemingly for social rather than intellectual reasons, in a little theater and with various people they assumed I knew—Jim and Willy and Seán and others. Ultimately , in a Xash of insight, I realized these were the cast of characters for the Abbey Theatre and Jim, not well thought of by the two...