I AM STRUCK by the reference the pope just made to Puccini’s Turandot while speaking of the mystery of hope. I would like to understand better his artistic and literary references. I remind him that in 2006 he said that great artists know how to present the tragic and painful realities of life with beauty. So I ask who are the artists and writers he prefers, and if they have something in common.
“I have really loved a diverse array of authors. I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin. I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, ‘May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.’ I was also impressed because I loved my grandmother Rosa, and in that poem Hölderlin compares his grandmother to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, the friend of the earth who did not consider anybody a foreigner.
“I have read The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, three times, and I have it now on my table, because I want to read it again. Manzoni gave me so much. When I was a child, my grandmother taught me by heart the beginning of The Betrothed: ‘That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains . . .’ I also liked Gerard Manley Hopkins very much.
“Among the great painters, I admire Caravaggio; his paintings speak to me. But also Chagall, with his White Crucifixion. Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The “Et Incarnatus Est” from his Mass in C Minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler. And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the “Erbarme Dich,” the tears of Peter in the St. Matthew Passion. Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s Ring by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the Parsifal by Knappertsbusch in 1962.
“We should also talk about the cinema. La Strada, by Fellini, is the movie that perhaps I loved the most. I identify with this movie, in which there is an implicit reference to St. Francis. I also believe that I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between ten and twelve years old. Another film that I loved is Rome, Open City. I owe my film culture especially to my parents, who used to take us to the movies quite often.
“Anyway, in general I love tragic artists, especially classical ones. There is a nice definition that Cervantes puts on the lips of the bachelor Carrasco to praise the story of Don Quixote: ‘Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, the elderly praise it.’ For me this can be a good definition of the classics.”
I realize that I have become utterly engrossed in these artistic references of his. I desire to enter into his life by passing through the door of his artistic choices. I imagine it would be a long journey, but certainly a journey worth taking. It would also include cinema, from Italian neorealism to Babette’s Feast. Other authors and other works now come to my mind, authors and works that he has mentioned in other occasions, also minor, or less famous, or even local ones: from the epic poem Martín Fierro by José Hernández, to the poetry of Nino Costa, to The Great Exodus by Luigi Orsenigo. I also think of Joseph Malègue and José María Pemán. Clearly I think of famous writers like Dante and Borges, but also of the Argentine writer Leopoldo Marechal, the author of the novels Adán Buenosayres, The Banquet of Severo Arcangelo, and Megaphone, or War.
I think especially about Borges, a writer with whom Father Bergoglio had direct contact in his earlier years. Back then he was a twenty-eight-year-old teacher of literature at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Santa Fe, Argentina. Father Bergoglio taught students during their last two years of secondary school and encouraged his pupils to take up creative writing. When I was younger, I too had an experience just like his. Then, I taught at the Istituto Massimo of Rome, where I also founded the creative cultural project known as “BombaCarta.” I tell him the story. Finally I ask the pope to tell me about his own experience with teaching.
“It was a bit risky,” he answers. “I had to make sure that my students read El Cid. But the boys did not like it. They wanted to read García Lorca. Then I decided that they would study El Cid at home and that in class I would teach the authors the boys liked the most. Of course, young people wanted to read more ‘racy’ literary works, like the contemporary La Casada Infiel or classics like La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas. But by reading these things they acquired a taste in literature, poetry, and we went on to other authors. And that was for me a great experience. I completed the program, but in an unstructured way—that is, not ordered according to what we expected in the beginning, but in an order that came naturally by reading these authors. And this mode befitted me: I did not like to have a rigid schedule, but rather I liked to know where we had to go with the readings, with a rough sense of where we were headed. Then I also started to get them to write. In the end I decided to send Borges two stories written by my boys. I knew his secretary, who had been my piano teacher. And Borges liked those stories very much. And then he set out to write the introduction to a collection of these writings.”
“Then, Holy Father, creativity is important for the life of a person?” I ask.
He laughs and replies, “For a Jesuit it is extremely important! A Jesuit must be creative.”