The Show Goes On

‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ Franz Kafka

Retirement to a tropical island paradise is a familiar dream to many Americans, especially retired or separated servicemembers. As a disabled veteran, even with a very small pension, I was able to retire to the Philippines at the tender age of 49. No less familiar to the more faithful readers of this blog are the details of what followed. The terms of my retirement became completely involuntary when a fellow American – a fellow American veteran – stole my passport less than a month after my arrival. 

There is a chilling transition in the Tom Hanks movie called Cast Away in which a man named Tom Noland who survived a plane crash in the ocean has washed ashore on a small island in the South Pacific. After struggling to survive for several days he locates shelter in a cave. Trying to knock out a rotten tooth with an ice skate, he knocks himself unconscious. The screen dissolves from Noland’s fire inside the cave to a rockpool on a sunny day and the words FOUR YEARS LATER appear. A fish swimming in the water is suddenly speared and the camera tilts up to show us Noland, who now looks like Robinson Crusoe, standing several yards away on a rock. 

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, I am closing out another year in the Philippines. A year ago I planned on not being here. I should have been home by now, but circumstances, once again, got in the way. The circumstances present a somewhat different approach to a country’s deportation of aliens. In the US, which has a sizeable population – in the millions – of the undocumented, deportations, whether voluntary or involuntarily, involve the detainment of aliens and their being boarded on one-way flights back to their country of origin. The length of their stay – or overstay – in the US isn’t an issue. Since they came to the US in a financially disadvantageous position, the paying of fines and/or past visas is overlooked. The only object is their removal from US territory. 

In the Philippines the process is, by comparison, draconian. Aliens are deported from the country, and thenceforth blacklisted by the bureau of immigration, preventing them from ever re-entering the country. But before the deportation takes place, aliens are required to pay penalties for every year of their overstay in the amount of 35,000 pesos per year. Since my overstay, due to the extenuating circumstance of having my passport stolen shortly after my arrival, and of not having a sizeable enough income to acquire a replacement passport, has lasted 14 years, the total amount of my overstay penalties is half a million pesos. 

That may sound like a lot of money, but it’s only $10K. The policy may also sound, to us, like extortion, but it’s worth remembering that this is not a developed country that has much experience with immigration – the incoming kind, that is. The Philippines has a great deal of experience, probably greater than any other nation on earth, with outgoing immigration. Their economy depends on an undisclosed, but probably enormous, influx of cash remittances every month sent by overseas Filipino workers. 

I hired a good lawyer last March, recommended to me by a mutual friend, to negotiate with the Bureau of Immigration on my behalf. He organized an appeal for a waiver of the overstay penalties. Because of pandemic restrictions in Manila, the process didn’t get started until September. And it was only after the appeal was filed in October that the lawyer gave me a ballpark figure of the full amount of my debt. Being a lawyer, alas, he didn’t tell me that my appeal didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Manila. I waited two months for the news, and at the beginning of December I was informed, via a ZOOM call, that the waiver had been denied. (In fact, I wasn’t told it had been denied until I asked.) The reason they gave for denying my appeal was the extended length of my overstay. Never mind the fact that I don’t have ten grand at the moment, but the debt must be paid. 

Once paid, I will have a choice between a voluntary deportation (an involuntary one involves arrest and detainment for an indeterminate period), which will also mean I’ll be blacklisted from ever returning to the Philippines, or extending long enough to acquire an SRRV – a special resident visa that will allow me to come and go as I please. The “special” visa costs another $3K. 

The blacklisting is a curious custom here. The list of people blacklisted by Philippine Immigration includes actors like Michael Caine who devoted a chapter of his autobiography, What’s It All About, to “My Worst Location” – when he acted in a movie called Too Late the Hero that was filmed in Luzon Province. His less than flattering picture of his experience prompted the touchy Philippine government to order Caine blacklisted. 

As for myself, more than one of my friends and family members has asked me why I would ever be interested in returning to a country that extorts visitors who are trapped by misfortune. Another friend who is familiar with the Philippines asked me why I would want to leave and why I would want to return to the States, which he says is a “shit show.” Never mind that paradise by any definition is hell if there is no way out. But so what if my homeland is a shit show – it’s MY shit show. And if, as some people believe, there is going to be a fight, then I want to be in on it. 

But this is my life, not a case study. Ultimately (in about a year), I will pay the penalties that I owe the Bureau of Immigration. By then I will have figured out whether I want to never come back here or get the special visa. Until then I have some advice for anyone thinking about travelling to a tropical paradise: secure your passport and your return ticket in an impregnable safe and never trust an expat.

The Shop Around the Corner

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. There was a little device we noticed in one of the sporting-goods stores—a trumpet that hunters hold to their ears so that they can hear the distant music of the hounds. Something of the sort is needed now to hear the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times, through the dark, material woods that surround it. E. B. White, “A New Package of Energy”

The 81-year-old movie The Shop Around the Corner* is easily one of the least insufferable of the many that are always screened at Christmas – even though it uses Christmas only as a background to its sweet climactic scenes, giving MGM’s set decorators, under the direction of Cedric Gibbons, another chance to show off their considerable skills with chichi. 

The director was Ernst Lubitsch, who had been the most successful director in Europe before he was coaxed by America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, to come to America in 1922 to make movies with her as the star. By the time he made The Shop in 1939 (he insisted on waiting for Margaret Sullavan until she was available), Lubitsch was Hollywood’s leading confectioner. Of all the many foreign filmmakers who moved to Hollywood, either for money or for refuge from war, Lubitsch was by far the most successful, largely because he made films whose aim was to entertain. Considering the number of films, the vast majority in fact, that fail to accomplish this by no means simple ambition, this is saying a great deal. 

Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak work in a leather goods shop in  Budapest. They tell their co-workers (Kralik tells Pirovitch and Klara confides in Ilona) that they each have a pen friend of the opposite sex who is so much more cultivated and refined than the usual sort of people (like Kralik and Klara). Halfway through the film the pen friends plan to meet in a café, until Kralik is fired and can't go through with the meeting. He stands outside the café with Pirovitch hoping to at least see the girl and he discovers that his pen friend is Klara. This love story exists completely on paper – letters passed between two people – until the very end of the film when Kralik fools Klara into believing her pen friend is a Mr. Popkin, balding, with a pot belly, who stole his best line from Victor Hugo, and it’s what makes the film enchanting.  

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan had a chemistry between them that made them co-stars in four films, including the nearly forgotten The Mortal Storm, released five months after The Shop. Though they look awfully young in The Shop, during shooting Stewart was 31 and Sullavan 30. The film is quite innocently beautiful and has inspired considerable critical logorrhea. Damning with fulsome praise, David Thompson was so moved by the film that he came up with a metaphor he admitted even he didn’t understand: “The Shop Around the Corner may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball – whatever that is.” 

A truly great film always yields something new with every viewing, and when you’ve seen a film as many times as I’ve seen The Shop, you begin to look for things you didn’t notice at first. Underneath all the charm and cheeriness and aromatic nostalgia for an old Budapest is something rather topical for our moment. The nightmare of wage slavery, of tyrannical bosses, of unemployment, of the illusion of job security – all of the objectionable aspects of life under capitalism. 

Alfred Kralik has been working in the shop for 9 years, since he was Pepi the errand boy’s age. Yet he’s still only a clerk. When he considers marriage to his pen friend, and asking Mr. Mataschek for a raise, he consults Pirovitch, an older clerk with a wife and children, if he can manage to support a family on a clerk’s salary. 

Kralik: Pirovitch, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? 

Pirovitch: Go ahead. 

Kralik: It’s very confidential… Supposing a fellow like me wants to get married. How much does it cost you to live, you and Mrs. Pirovitch, leaving out the children. 

Pirovitch: Oh, why fool yourself? (he laughs) 

Kralik: Let’s say temporarily – how much it cost? 

Pirovitch: Well, it can be done. And very nicely. Naturally, you cannot be extravagant. 

Kralik: Well, supposing a fellow gets an apartment of three rooms – dining room, living room, bedroom. 

Pirovitch: What do you need three rooms for? You live in the bedroom.

Kralik: Where do you eat? 

Pirovitch: In the kitchen. Get a nice big kitchen. 

Kralik: Where do you entertain? 

Pirovitch: Entertain? What are you, an ambassador? Who do you want to entertain? Listen, if someone is really your friend, he comes after dinner.

This exchange paints a vivid picture of the pinched lives of newlyweds at the very end of the Great Depression. The only difference today is that both spouses have to work. 

When Matuschek suspects his wife of being unfaithful – and of her being unfaithful with Kralik – he becomes an irascible, tyrannical boss. His employees are defenseless against his temper tantrums, which calls into question the very terms that made them so defenseless and Matuschek’s presumed right to be tyrannical. 

But Lubitsch gives us a rather Dickensian happy ending when the boss is foiled in a suicide attempt and at last learns the value of life and friendship. On Christmas Eve his store makes a lot of money and he gives every one of his employees a bonus. Frank Morgan plays Matuschek in exactly the same tone he used to play the Wizard of Oz, changing from a supernatural monster into a kind old teddy bear. He gives out the bonuses exactly as he gave the Scarecrow a diploma, the Tin Man a heart-shaped clock and the Cowardly Lion a medal. In his shop he delivers a speech to his employees: 

This morning when I received the little Christmas tree that you all sent me, I was deeply moved. I read your little note over and over and it made me very happy that you missed me and hoped that I’d be coming back home soon again. You’re right. This is my home. This is where I spent most of my life.

The speech is meant to be heartwarming, I suppose. But it’s actually sad and quite chilling, especially considering how Mataschek’s wife had to seek attention from another man who didn’t spend as much time in the shop. 

One of the stories coming out of Mayfield, Kentucky in the aftermath of the tornado was how employees at a candle factory making candles for Christmas were told by supervisors when they tried to leave the warehouse as the tornado approached that if they left they would lose their jobs. I was reminded of this report when I watched the scene in which Mr. Mataschek tells his six employees that they have to stay late to decorate the store windows. He loses his temper and berates them – but changes his tone entirely when a customer enters the store, and illustrating everything you need to know about capitalism. The one who has the money makes the rules. 

You could argue that Lubitsch wasn’t interested in changing the world. He wanted simply to observe it and derive from the everyday lives of his characters the lineaments of art. Unedifying entertainment at its richest. At this, Lubitsch was a past master, and The Shop Around the Corner makes the word masterpiece clean again. 

*You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron remake, is one of my late sister’s favorite movies, but it is only mentionable as an illustration of How Have the Mighty Fallen. Whose era would anyone rather live in, when all we can come up with is Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Ephron’s version improves on the original in only one respect – it isn’t a Christmas movie.

My Abortion Story

I’m a man, divorced, and I have never fathered a child – none of which prevents me from believing unshakably in a woman’s right to an abortion. There have been a few occasions in my life when I considered becoming a father. The closest I ever got to the opportunity was when I came home on leave from the Army in 1998 to a wife who had told me she wanted to have a child. 

I was stationed in South Korea and for weeks prior to my leave I lightened up on my drinking and went to the Army aid station to request a sperm count. The only reason that I did it was because in the three years of our marriage neither my wife nor I had used any birth control. My wife suggested that I was “shooting blanks,” if not in those exact words. 

But then my mother had a stroke the day before my departure from Korea and she died a few days after my arrival in Aurora, Colorado. I’m not sure if this had any effect on my wife’s decision, but she informed me that she didn’t want to go through with a pregnancy in my absence, since I had to finish my tour in Korea without her. We were divorced – childless – in 2002. 

After leaving the Army and separating from my wife, I met a young woman on the fourth night of a 30-day vacation in the Philippines. From then on, we were inseparable until I flew home to Des Moines. She was a waitress in a club called The Jungle whence I had gone one mid afternoon. The loud music hadn’t started yet and there were no other customers, which allowed the two of us a space to talk. As was usual in those clubs, she was allowed to leave early provided I paid what used to be known as a barfine. It’s compensation to the club for what revenue they stood to lose without a waitress – or a dancer, for that matter. 

As soon as I paid the barfine, the girl changed clothes and we were out on the street together just before nightfall. We bar hopped together for awhile and I discovered that she enjoyed drinking as much as I did. The difference was she weighed a hundred pounds and she got drunk rather quickly. While I enjoyed being with her, she formed an attachment to me that took me by surprise. Since the time allotted to us was limited by my return ticket, the progress of our liaison from A to Z had to be accelerated. While I believed that our relationship, such as it was, had run its course by the morning of my departure, I soon realized that, for her, it extended well beyond the end of my vacation. When she accompanied me in the hotel limo to the airport, I will never forget our parting on the curb. After a goodbye embrace, she got back in the limo and as it drove away from me, her anxious face appeared in the rear window as she watched me recede, standing alone with my bags on the sidewalk. 

We promised to stay in touch via email, and we did. After a few months had passed, we got around to the subject of having children. I told her what my ex-wife had told me, that I was shooting blanks – I was impotent. To this she quickly corrected me, telling me it wasn’t true, that just a few weeks after my departure, she discovered she had become pregnant – but that she had “taken care of it.” Alone, and not knowing if she would ever see me again, she had got an abortion. So, in the space of two sentences, she had informed me that she had been pregnant with what would’ve been my only child, and that she had ended her pregnancy. 

She had no way of knowing what effect her news had on me. While it had surprised me – and not surprised me – to realize that my ex-wife had told me a malicious lie and that I was perfectly capable of fathering a child, and that I actually had, and that a girl I barely knew and would never see again had come the closest I had ever come to making me a father – only to arrive at the conclusion that she couldn’t go forward with it, I was left astonished and saddened.  

I went back to the Philippines two years later for another 30-day vacation. While the girl and I had stayed in touch, she was nowhere to be found in the town where we had met. I later learned that she had met a man from Austria, that they were married and living in Linz. The last time I heard from her was on New Year’s Eve 2003, when she told me she regarded her marriage to the Austrian fellow to be “on paper only,” and that she would always love me. 

Despite the sad ending of my liaison with this young foreign woman whom I had no reason to disbelieve had carried for a few short weeks what would’ve been my only child, I have nothing but respect for her decision, and that even if I had known ahead of time of her plan to end the pregnancy, it was her decision to make. No one has the right to take that decision away from any woman. I should add that abortion is a criminal offense in the Philippines and that the girl’s abortion had legal on top of medical risks. I will never forget her for our brief time together and for her courage in deciding on an abortion.

Lina Wertmüller

Today in Rome a funeral is being held for Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich-Job, better known simply as Lina Wertmüller. She died on Thursday at the age of 93. Her name, like the full titles of her films, is like a treatise.(1) Rome was also where she was born in 1928 to an aristocratic Swiss family. As often happens to aristocrats in Italy, however, she was a lifelong leftist. Of the twenty-four films she wrote and directed from 1963 to 2004, I’ve been lucky enough to see nine. 

She first gained notice as assistant to Fellini on 8 1/2, and enjoyed a brief but extraordinary creative burst in the '70s that resulted in four films that are superb by any but the most obtuse standards: Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Seduction of Mimi-1972), Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero 'stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...' (Love and Anarchy-1973), Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away-1974)), and Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties-1975). 

These four films are bristling with ideas - about men and women, about history, about politics - that are idiosyncratic as well as manifestly serious. Some critics, political naïfs, claimed her politics were "schematic" and her films like pamphlets. Wertmüller is, in fact, a far more interesting politically committed filmmaker than Ken Loach because her politics is a long way from being doctrinaire. Her best film, Seven Beauties, remains controversial, and was attacked for its appropriation of an otherwise untouchable subject, Nazi labor camps, in a serious and inventive examination of the lengths to which one not very likable or admirable man will go to survive. In his attack on the film, Bruno Bettelheim, eminent child psychologist and camp survivor, took offense at Wertmüller's supposed suggestion that surviving the camps required a betrayal of one's humanity.(2) Wertmüller's point, I think, was that her film is about one man's betrayal of his own humanity. The burlesque manner of that betrayal - scraping together his last bits of libido to make love to an obese and sadistic woman, betrays Wertmüller's design and exposes her very impure protagonist as the monster that he knows he is. 

Because her films were more interested in people than just women, Wertmüller was of no use to feminist critics, who accused her of reinforcing stereotypes. And because she so swiftly went into decline after answering the dreaded call of Hollywood (A Night Full of Rain-1978), it was all the easier to downplay her importance. Her work lost much of its vitality and urgency in the '80s and she only regained commercial attention once with the uncharacteristically sentimental Ciao, Professore! (Io speriamo che me la cavo-1992). If nothing else, the pointless remake of Swept Away (2002), with an utterly unalluring Madonna and Adriano Giannini, son of Giancarlo made the original seem all the more like a masterpiece. 

I think Wertmuller was a candidate for neglected because her films concentrate on often unsympathetic male characters and the women who are drawn to them - and because of Wertmuller's refusal to approve of their actions. The hero of Seven Beauties (I use the word “hero” purely in its rhetorical sense) is a former pimp who survives a German concentration camp by summoning the strength to copulate (there is no better word for it) with the obese female camp commandant. The hero of Swept Away is a stupid Neapolitan deck hand whose superior strength and skill allows him to dominate a particularly useless rich woman with whom he is stranded alone on an island. The hero of Love and Anarchy is a foolish, spotty-faced provincial whose sole chance at being an anarchist hero is through an absurd and hare-brained plot to assassinate Mussolini. Because Wertmuller has a jaundiced view of human beings, her complex, powerful films are difficult for critics to pigeonhole. Her star rose and set in a painfully short arc in the mid-70s. No sooner had we been surprised by the appearance of The Seduction of Mimi in 1976 than we were disappointed by the big-budget, all-star Blood Feud in 1980. 

Until the invention of video, films were permitted very brief shelf-lives. If no one recalls Lina Wertmuller's films, it's the fault of film critics, not audiences. 

(1) Her full name is so long that in their obit Variety misidentified it as Arcangela Felice Assunta Job Wertmüller von Elgg Espanol von Brauchich. 

(2) "If ["Seven Beauties"] is to be taken for mere entertainment, I must state my disgust that the abomination of genocide and the tortures and degradations of the concentration camp are used as a special, uniquely macabre titillation to enhance its effectiveness. . . . I also believe that "Seven Beauties" is a somewhat uneasy, indirect, camouflaged—and therefore more dangerous, because more easily accepted and hence more effective—justification for accepting the world that produced concentration camps; it is a self-justification for those who readily accepted that world under these conditions and profited from it." Bettelheim, "Wertmüller, Lina 1928–" Bettelheim took his own life in a nursing home in 1990 by pulling a plastic bag over his head.

Take This Cup

I cannot save anything but what I can do is write about what I think and feel and the anguish of seeing a world that could already have resolved a large portion of its humanitarian problems, but which not only has not solved any, but which, in fact, aggravates many of them.... The Romans used to say that man is the wolf of mankind. What would they say were they alive today? 

José Saramago 

I have taken issue with the Gospels before – their inconsistencies, their confabulations, and their peculiar prejudices. Christianity is a religion of converts, which explains why so much is made of baptism and why some insist on being born again. Once convincing the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah had failed, the only way the first Christian leaders could keep their sect alive was by turning to converting the Gentiles – all manner of people in 1st century Palestine worshipping a panoply of gods. From that turning point, Christianity was on the road to becoming a world religion, whether that was part of the original plan or not. 

But the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem led directly to a horrific slaughter of infants whose numbers vary wildly, according to which source in consulted. An account of what was officially called “the massacre of the innocents” can be found in Matthew's Gospel. The significance of the event is reflected in its observance on December 28 as a holy day on the Roman Catholic calendar known as The Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. The actual number of infants killed by Herod’s soldiers is stated in a Syrian text to have been 64,000, while a Byzantine liturgy counted 14,000. Clearly, these numbers are absurdly exaggerated, and only begs the question of why they should have been. 

In an extraordinary novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,* the number arrived at was just twenty-seven. Among the arguments that Saramago presents in the novel is that Joseph, the husband of Mary, overhears a group of soldiers in Jerusalem who, under the orders of King Herod, are on their way to Bethlehem to find and kill every child under the age of three. What Joseph does with this intelligence seals his fate and that of his first son, Jesus. As an angel explains to Mary several years after the event, 

the carpenter could have done something, he could have warned the villagers that the soldiers were coming to kill their children when there was still time for parents to gather them up and escape, to hide in the wilderness, for example, or flee to Egypt and wait for Herod's death, which is fast approaching. 

Instead, Joseph tells no one, the children are killed, and he, Mary and Jesus escape to Nazareth unscathed. Thereafter Joseph is visited by a recurring dream in which he is one of Herod’s soldiers and is on his way to kill his own son. Years later, Joseph is captured by Roman soldiers under suspicion of participating in a rebellion and is crucified. By then 14 years old, Jesus leaves home and, on finding Joseph’s body, begins to have a recurring dream of his own in which Joseph is coming to kill him. 

Saramago’s account of Jesus’s maturity and of the miracles he performs loosely follows the commonly accepted chronology, except that Saramago introduces Jesus’s own skepticism of his fate. He introduces a character named Pastor to whom Jesus apprentices as a shepherd, despite his suspicion that Pastor is a demon. 

Then in the novel’s longest chapter, Jesus rows a fishing boat alone to the middle of the Sea of Galilee (which is actually a lake) when an impenetrable mist descends on it. When the mist clears around his boat, Jesus notices God sitting in the prow. After conversing with Him a short while, Jesus hears the sound of someone behind the mist swimming towards the boat. It is Pastor, and he climbs aboard the boat, sitting between Jesus and God. Pastor is, of course, the Devil, a former beloved angel whom God cast out of heaven. In a conversation both strange and humorous, God informs Jesus quite matter-of-factly of his future mission, that he is to announce to the Jews that he is His son and that he will be put to death for it – but that his sacrifice will attract even Gentiles to embrace God. Jesus asks him what will follow, and God gives him a macabre account of all those, including his current followers, who will meet violent deaths in His name. 

God sighed, and in the monotonous tone of one who chooses to suppress compassion He began a litany, in alphabetical order so as not to hurt any feelings about precedence and importance... 

God then launches into an appalling account of martyrdoms. After several dozen decapitations, eviscerations, bludgeonings and stabbings, 

have you had enough, God asked Jesus, who retorted, That's something You should ask Yourself, go on. So God continued... 

At the end of his list, and after relating to Jesus all of the wars to be waged, and seeing how appalled Jesus is, God says 

You are not to blame, your cause demands it. Father, take from me this cup. My power and your glory demand that you drink it to the last drop. I don't want the glory. But I want the power. 

Surprised by these glimpses of the future, Pastor makes a proposal to God.

I've been listening to all that has been said here in this boat, and although I myself have caught glimpses of the light and darkness ahead, I never realized that the light came from burning stakes and the darkness from great piles of bodies. It shouldn't trouble me, for I am the devil, and the devil profits from death even more than You do, it goes without saying that hell is more crowded than heaven. No one knows better than You that the devil too has a heart. Today I use it by acknowledging Your power and wishing that it spread to the ends of the earth without the need of so much death, and since You insist that whatever thwarts and denies You comes from the evil I represent and govern in this world, I propose that You receive me into Your heavenly kingdom, my past offenses redeemed by those I will not commit in future, that You accept my obedience as in those happy days when I was one of Your chosen angels, Lucifer You called me, bearer of light, before my ambition to become Your equal consumed my soul and made me rebel against You... if You grant me that same pardon You will one day promise left and right, then evil will cease, Your son will not have to die, and Your kingdom will extend beyond the land of the Hebrews to embrace the whole globe, good will prevail everywhere, and I shall stand among the lowliest of the angels who have remained faithful, more faithful than all of them now that I have repented, and I shall sing Your praises, everything will end as if it had never been, everything will become what it should always have been. 

But God selfishly refuses Pastor’s proposal. 

I neither accept nor pardon you, I much prefer you as you are, and were it possible, I'd have you be even worse. Because the good I represent cannot exist without the evil you represent, if you were to end, so would I, unless the devil is the devil, God cannot be God. 

“Is that Your final word,” Pastor asks. “My first and last, first because that was the first time I said it, last because I have no intention of repeating it.” Pastor shrugged and said to Jesus, Never let it be said the devil didn't tempt God.” 

So Jesus rows back to the shore only to find out from his followers that he has been on the lake forty days. Jesus goes through with God’s plan and the story ends as it always has - except that, instead of Jesus saying "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do", as he is dying, he says "Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what he has done." 

The narrator of the novel is both knowing and unknowing, modern and ancient. He even intrudes at one point with a postmodernist editorial: 

When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens. They argue that this narrative approach best serves the ever desirable effect of verisimilitude, for if the episode imagined and described is not, and is not likely to become or supplant, factual reality, there must at least be some similitude. 

The novel, which is one of the most powerful indictments of Western history in what is now called the Common Era (C.E), but used to be Annis Domini (A.D.), is filled with the breathing details of a story that is at once all-too-familiar and exceedingly strange. When Joseph is visited by his dream for the first time, hiding in the cave where Mary had given birth to Jesus, from Herod’s soldiers, he fearfully awakes: 

Yet the night, calm and remote from all living creatures, showed that supreme indifference which we associate with the universe, or that other absolute indifference, the indifference of emptiness, which will remain, if there is such a thing as emptiness, when all has been fulfilled. The night ignored the meaning and rational order that appear to govern the world in those moments when we can still believe the world was made to harbor us and our insanity. 

*O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, 1991. English translation by Giovanni Pontiero, New York: Mariner Books, 1994.