I saw Venus once. She looked tired. She was standing on the rear platform of a trolley car in Leningrad, which is what St. Petersburg used to be called in the 1980s, and she was disguised as just another shop girl who'd put in a hard day's work behind a counter. Or, even harder, had pretended to put in a hard day's work while time crawled. She must have been headed for her cramped little room in one of those neo-Stalinist high-rises that reduced the city around it to rubble waiting to happen. She seemed a sad figure with much to be sad about, and who wouldn't be in that even sadder time and place--despite the champagne and caviar served our delegation of visiting American editors with every sumptuous meal? We were treated like tsarist nobles at every stage-managed banquet while the mere Russians had to wait in long lines for just a glimpse of their own national treasures.
I tried to get Venus' attention for a snapshot, turning up my lips into a forced grin and pointing at my still unclicked camera in a bid for her attention. Finally she seemed to notice. And for one sublime moment that still lives and will live forever in unblemished memory, she smiled. And the whole world was illuminated by the radiance of her. For there she was--Botticelli's Venus emerging not out of a great clam shell that framed her beauty but right there, on a tram in the brisk Russian fall. She had humored me, this naive foreigner who didn't realize he was now part of a stage setting rather than drab reality in then-Soviet Russia. The way Intourist had entertained all the foreigners who had somehow made their way into the workers' paradise even while monitoring their every move.
No matter what the weather, as Gertrude Stein might have phrased it, a police state is a police state is a police state. No wonder Cubans still flee theirs despite the thaw in relations with that hopelessly capitalist power just 90 tantalizing miles away. For some reason they're still trying to get out of Cuba on any little dinghy, skiff, or raft that'll float. Who knows how many black, bronze or alabaster-white Venuses are even now risking their lives in hopes of making it to Miami, so near yet so dangerously far? Freedom still beckons, but the gates could be shut again at any unpredictable moment. Quick, set sail before it's too late!
How interesting--to have a saint's day set aside in the middle of bleak February to honor love. Suddenly the month when the birthday of political giants like Washington and Lincoln is observed becomes festooned with valentines, with hearts and flowers instead of political uplift. And this isn't some platonic idea of love that is being celebrated but the sensual, passionate kind of love, the kind meant when boy tells girl, "I'm wild about you!" And he is. Politics suddenly becomes irrelevant. Conservative boy, liberal girl, who cares? How scandalous--and how human.
Isn't this what lovers like the Medicis in old Florence were condemned for--wanting to make their Duomo the greatest of architectural triumphs and their city the most beautiful in the world? That they succeeded made their sin all the more unforgivable. Their beloved city's name--Florence, or flower--still rankles those to whom a drab austerity appeals far more than beauty. For dictatorships abhor beauty; it goes against their cruel nature.
The crowds of mourners, professional and otherwise, mobilized by the omnipresent, omniscient state to bewail the passing of Fidel Castro, a minor dictator who made himself a major disturber of the world's peace, were all part of tyranny's unnatural response to the simple joy and beauty of human love and life. But that kind of forced love of Big Brother, or Big Sister in these unisexual times, cannot stand against the unbidden affection of those who believe the simplest flower is more pleasing to nature and nature's God than all the artificial pomp and circumstance of a sexless, joyless utopia. Which soon becomes just another joyless dystopia. So here's to salud, amor y pesetas--y tiempo para disfrutarlas. Health, love, money and the precious time to enjoy them. That's the engraving on a pewter platter we bought long ago for ornamental purposes only. But now what was but ornamental has become the absolutely necessary.
So here's to Venus, who may be glimpsed only in transit. But a fleeting glimpse is surely worth more than all the niggling objections to her existence in this all too material world. So as Valentine's Day approaches, be sure to give the one you love a bouquet of flowers. And remember to present it with all the ceremony due the Creator's greatest gift--love in all its forms, but especially in its unabashedly, purely carnal, delightfully physical incarnation. Someone once described being in love as a sickness from which no one would wish to recover. Love and kisses to all.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 02/12/2017