Page 344 "They called him 'Our Man in Havana."

From page 344 of the book:  Regretfully, I listened as Owen joined them, dealing the cards, winning pot after pot of chips, relating episodes of his childhood and his adolescence, especially those incidents concerning the discovery of sex and the failure of love. They were full of disappointment and unrealized expectations. He talked of injured cousins, divorced aunts, infant deaths, business failures, heart attacks, teenage abortions, and friends' cancer. The old men hooted and howled and begged him for more. They called him 'General.' They called him 'Professor.' They called him 'Our Man in Havana.' Whistles by the old priest nearly shocked me to sobriety. Revenant grasped Owen's hands and said to him:
"Do your best, my friend. We ask only that you do your best. Don't be afraid."

Clockwise from top left: Cover for the novel "Our Man in Havana" by Graham Greene; Graham Greene, 1904-1991, English author, playwright and literary critic; Book cover photo of Greene's "A Life in Letters"; Alec Guiness as James Wormold in the movie version; movie poster; scene from the movie with Alec Guiness and Ernie Kovacs (Captain Segura).

The black & white film version of this book, which I actually just saw a couple days ago, is incredible.  Produced & Directed by the great Carol Reed (if you don't recall Reed, he did "The Third Man"), its comedy is brilliantly entwined with its suspense, all fixed against the shadows and strange sources of light of Reed's view of pre-Reveolutionary Cuba, although the movie was filmed just after Castro overthrew the government of the previous dictator.  I highly recommend this film.  It's available from Netflix.  And one more thing, Ernie Kovacs does a stupendous job, as does Noel Coward. 

Page 337 "My God, I thought, this man's blood was so toxic from medicine, how could he hope to live from the cure?"

From page 337 of the book:   Amid the disarray of glasses were drug vials, some empty, some still with pills in them. I read the labels and afterward identified them with Dr. Fanon's help. There were little bottles of demerol, to squelch his pain; diethylstilbestrol, an estrogen agent, to combat the production of testosterone; fluorouracil, an antimetabolite that directly fought the cancer; as well as vincristine, a mitotic inhibitor, which blocked the DNA assemblage within the cancerous cells. My God, I thought, this man's blood was so toxic from medicine, how could he hope to live from the cure? Another cytotoxic drug huddled in the background: medroxyprogesterone acetate. It was to act as an assassin of the cancer. A large bottle of vitamin C stood next to the vincristine.

The antimetabolite Flucytosine was originally developed in the 1950's as a potential antineoplastic agent. Although ineffective against tumors it was later found to have antifungal activity. This small molecule is transported into susceptible fungal cells by a specific enzyme cytosine permease and converted in the cytoplasm by cytosine deaminase to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU)- a pyrimidine anti-metabolite used as chemotherapy for many types of colorectal cancer.

An antimetabolite drip (chemotherapy)

A dividing cancer cell

A comparison of cell division

Page 335 "Both have been cited in the Bank of Credit & Commerce International scandal."

From page 335 of the book: "Your francs were transferred from Luxembourg to two banks in Hong Kong. One is a local branch of a New York City bank, the other is British. Both have been cited in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal."

"You, Monsieur Shanzenbach, and many others have lost great sums of money.  But everyone knew the risks.  There was no babies here, Monsieur Vann.  Everyone knew what kind of people those bankers were; everyone knew about the CIA deposits and about Abu Nidal.  C'est la même chose.  It's all the same to us.  They have the same faces, you know.  They have the same capacity to kill and be killed."

Abu Nidal

[Abu Nidal (1937-2002) was the founder of Fatah–The Revolutionary Council, a militant Palestinian group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization. At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of the struggle," was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian political leaders. He told Der Spiegel in a rare interview in 1985: "I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing ... nightmares."] (Text courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Page 329 "...the white rafters above the Stations of the Cross."

From page 329 of the book:  Revenant cocked his head to one side, facing a stained-glass window and, raising his chin, looked to the white rafters above the Stations of the Cross.

Here's a little reminiscence of my friends Joe Savino and Joe Centrone from the early 1960s:  They were in St. Sebastian's Church, in Woodside, Queens, and they're about seven or eight years old, give or take a year.  They come to Station #10, and the caption beneath the bas relief of Jesus having his clothes removed said: "Stripped of his clothes like a rose."  And Joe Savino explained that "We just thought it was hilariously funny.  We're kids, what do we know?  It was like watching Beavis and Butthead doing the stations of the cross.  We were so solemn, in the solemnity of the Church, and then all of a sudden, we're laughing hysterically.  There was something about the rhyme of 'stripped of his clothes like a rose' that cracked us up."

Page 328 "If they only knew what Mary had to put up with..."

Feast of the Assumption procession in Marseille, France

El Greco's "The Assumption of the Virgin" 1577

From page 328 of the book:  "Don't let that bother you, Father.  You're doing this for yourself anyway."
He halted and shot me a perturbed look.
"You told me so yourself."
"Perhaps I did," he said.  "Perhaps I did.  Feast of the Assumption.  If they only knew what Mary had to put up with, they would've nailed Him to the cross a whole lot sooner, I'll tell you that."

Page 327 "Revenant, sitting beneath their portraits, sullen, crabby, posed a bizarre contrast to their dialectical history."

From page 327 of the book:  Revenant, sitting beneath their portraits, sullen, crabby, posed a bizarre contrast to their dialectical history. A "How To" book on binoculars lay open in front of him on his desk. Piled next to the book on binoculars was a copy of Diseases of Canaries by Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz. Beneath that was Mervin Roberts' All About Breeding Canaries. I refixed my attention onto the priest.

Above & below left: Robert Stroud, the Bird Man of Alcatraz

           

Page 330 "Father Revenant, do you realize what you're saying?"

[...that man was surrounded by a fearful void, he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meanings. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, "Why do I suffer?"]    -Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Friedich Nietzsche

 

From page 330 of the book:  You may ask, "Father Revenant, do you realize what you're saying?" ...Suffering is, my friends. I've been suffering most of my adult life. Up here," he pointed to his temple. He faced our half of the nave. "So I know what I'm talking about. Friedrich Nietzsche said that the crying question with us all is, 'why do I suffer?' Well, Friedrich, you suffer because you know the possibility of joy without Christ, of salvation without Christ. It's an option if we could only be better than what we have been. I'm a priest and I'm telling you it's possible."

Revenant continued, "look at Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Look at Crime & Punishment.  Why suffer?  Why suffer?!  Because suffering is the only cause of consciousness, my friends.  And as the Russian said, when we are going 'through the terrible furnace of doubt,'" and he looked directly, gothically at Owen, "'we are capable of anything.'  I think that’s pretty good.

Heroes of mine: Fyodor Dostoyesky & Marcel Proust

[An additional comment from Proust, if you don't mind--
"...brief though our life may be, it is only while we are suffering that we see certain things which at other times are hidden from us; we are, as it were, posted at a window, badly placed but looking out over an expanse of sea; and only during a storm, when our thoughts are agitated by perpetually changing movements, do they elevate to a level at which we can see if the whole law-governed immensity which normally--when the calm weather of happiness leaves it smooth--lies beneath our line of vision..."]