“Orpheus the Dentist”
by
Alberto Savinio
translated by Richard Pevear
I had decided to leave on Tuesday. But starting Saturday, when, in the evening, I had the supreme joy of hearing a broadcast of my radio opera Agenzia Fix on the radio, a dull pain began to occupy, at ever more frequent intervals, the upper right side of my jaw, and to spread itself through my head, like a spider its legs.
I thought: “It’s him.” He was one of my last premolars. He had already made himself felt at other times. The pain would wake up, torment me for several days, doze off again; sometimes for whole seasons, like snakes.
Teeth are cunning. His predecessors had done the same. Until, one by one, they left. Without remorse. Yet teeth are part of us. And, in some men, a very important, very “functional” part. In Woodrow Wilson, for example; in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet, despite the extremely important function that teeth have had in the mouths of these two presidents of the United States, many citizens of those States have their teeth pulled, in full youth and perfect conditions of dental health, and replace them with false teeth.
“Why say false? Better to say painless. At the end of this May, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano will produce a work of mine, The Alcestis of Samuel. The one who will bring Alcestis back from Hades this time is not Hercules but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By no means an arbitrary substitution. Perfectly justified. As I myself explain in the context, and as the audience will certainly understand, Hercules is not a singular figure, confined to the son of Alcmene. Hercules, that “purgator,” is a figure who periodically renews himself. The penultimate Hercules, in order of time, was Giuseppe Garibaldi; the latest was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In my version of Alcestis, the part of Hercules, that is, of Roosevelt, will be played by Camillo Piloto. Piloto, at the present time, is studying the physiognomy of the President in minute particulars on photographic documents in the American Library of Rome: the form of the eyeglasses, which did not hook over the ears like mine or yours, but were pinched to the nose; and meanwhile a brave dental technician is fabricating a row of enormous teeth which, in the actor’s mouth, will imitate the famous laugh.
In 1914, in Paris, I got to know a citizen of the United States, of Mexican origin: Marius de Zayas. He had a pair of Nietzschean mustaches which, starting from under his nostrils, fell in a hairy cascade over his sharp and obstinate chin. Marius de Zayas was a theater impresario. In July 1914, he made an agreement with Apollinaire and me for a tour of lectures and concerts the following autumn to several cities of the United States, during which Apollinaire’s Breasts of Tiresias would be staged, accompanied by music written for the occasion by me. A month later the First World War broke out.
The mustaches of Marius de Zayas had not only an ornamental function but also hid his mouth, empty and black as a cave. Zayas, though he was going on thirty then and was immune to cavities, had spent some time in a clinic in New York, and had all thirty-two of his teeth removed one after the other; but, unable to bear dentures, which he abandoned in the water glasses of hotel rooms during his frequent travels, he chewed every sort of food, down to the toughest steak, with his bare gums.
In contrast to Marius de Zayas, toothless and a most robust chewer, we may cite the god Pushan, an Indian colleague of the Greek Hermes and the Latin Mercury, because Pushan, like the son of Zeus and Maia, was also a god of the roads, and not only guided men on their earthly roads, but continued to guide them on the roads of the beyond. Pushan performed his functions as a guide seated on a little cart drawn by goats, and although, unlike Zayas, his gums were armed with leonine teeth, he ate only foods soaked in water.
Two years ago I visited the convent of Saint Francis in Paola. The saint’s relics are kept in a glass case in the church. While Francis was living and working as a saint in Calabria, Louis XI, in France, was casually killing off, by means of other hands, all those who somehow got in his way, and killed so many that in the end, despite a very tough conscience, he began to feel the sting of remorse. How to heal it? The king was told that an Italian monk by the name of Francis, who lived in far-off Calabria, was a good healer of consciences, and Louis ordered that the healer come to France without delay, as today, for the same reason, they call in some famous psychoanalyst: for example, the father of that young American student who, not long ago, married the sister of the Shah of Persia, in a civil ceremony in Civitavecchia, and is now studying the Koran so as to be able to marry her religiously as well. Francis had a sister. Seeing him on the point of departure, she said to him: “You’re going so far, and you’re not leaving me anything to remember you by?” “Yes, I’m leaving you something,” replied Francis, and, so saying, he pulled out a canine tooth with two fingers and left it to his sister to remember him by. Extremely white, this canine tooth now gleams in the glass case of relics, in the church of Saint Francis in Paola. On the relations between Louis XI and Saint Francis of Paola, Casimir Delavigne wrote, as is known, a ridiculous play.
So I thought: “It’s him.” And I thought: “Until he quiets down, it’s not prudent for me to go traveling.” And that morning, instead of making my way to the station, I made my way to my dentist.
My dentist is not only an excellent odontologist; he is also a man of culture and a first-rate musician. Two years ago, at his invitation, I took myself to his house one afternoon, this time to sit not in the articulated mechanical chair in his dental office, but on a more peaceful one in his drawing room, and hear a short but pithy concert: a sonata for cello and piano by Shostakovich, some lyrics by Mahler, and a very tender Ave Maria from the hand of the master of the house, which a Spanish baritone, brown as a young bull from Triana, the school of bullfighters, sang with a velvet voice.
But my dentist is not only an excellent odontologist, and a man of culture, and a musician; he is also a kindly soul. I’ll say more: he is Orpheus. His sure hand had just finished extracting “Him” from his socket, my right cheek was numb and prickly from the effects of Novocain (the strange condition of hemiplegics, who drag half of themselves behind them, reduced to a phantasm), and he invited me to go to the drawing room with him. Sitting on the bench of his Hammond organ, still in his white coat, he pulled out a few stops, pressed on a pedal, placed his right hand on the upper keyboard, which is that of the melody, and his left on the lower one, which is that of the accompaniment, and played a Lullaby of his own composition and of an infinite tenderness; and the hateful memory of “Him” gradually vanished into the harmonious heaven of Euterpe.
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