LA TRAVIATA: A Tale of Sickness, Serkis, and Synchronicity
“It's the way the illness takes me!
Just weakness!
I'm all right now.
See! I'm smiling.”
Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata
La Dame aux Camélias recounts a fictional version of the passionate — but brief — romantic liaison Alexandre Dumas experiences with an ailing courtesan, Marie Duplessis. Giuseppe Verdi falls in love with a theatrical version of the novel in Paris in 1852 and quickly creates an opera from the tale: La Traviata (or The Fallen Woman). The intriguing work featuring an alluring dying heroine has also spawned several ballets and numerous films, usually titled Camille over the last two centuries.
Though I have never costumed this opera, or the play or ballet, it is a rich work, and the clothing would be magnificent to create. But rather than contemplating how I would devise those costumes today, I am mulling over the illness that imbues this work, taking over the atmosphere like another character. That is what sickness can do to us, right? A malady becomes a companion that — for a while or forever — will not let go of us.
I have actually recently undergone an extraordinary experience concerning this subject. Let’s go back in time. In high school, I became enchanted with the JRR Tolkien series, and I read The Hobbit and the trilogy yearly in Autumn from 1968 until 1976 — when I had my first child, Elin. The reading tradition became too much with maternal duties. But, when she was old enough to understand the works, Elin heard them read several times, and later we shared them with her brother, Seth. We all know the works pretty well, and I have learned much from them through many phases and ages of my life.
But it’s funny how various ideas, characters, themes, and landscapes affect me at different times, when I read any book for a second or multiple times. Or watch film adaptations. I truly relished the Lord of the Rings movie series which debuted in 2001-03 and anxiously awaited The Hobbit until the film finally appeared in 2012-13.
In 2020 — just in time for the Pandemic and Shut-down — Andy Serkis, the English actor, director, and producer with the amazing voice, created an audio reading of The Hobbit, followed quickly by the trilogy. So in the fall of 2021, I luxuriated in listening to the tale of Bilbo going “There and Back Again” to fight the dragon. And in the fall and winter of 2022, Andy read The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers to me. That left the final volume for this fall. I like to read or listen to the works in September to celebrate the double birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo. So, I started The Return of the King on September 1 and listened off and on whenever I had a stretch of time.
On an otherwise bright and normal Monday, I went to the local pharmacy and received my RSV vaccine. Most flu and Covid shots are effortless, with few side effects for me, but this one was different and on Tuesday morning, I had to lie in bed, moaning. What better way to pass a few sick hours than having Mr. Serkis read Tolkien to me? Right?
I was through Book V and about to embark on “The Tower of Cirith Ungol.” It begins, “Sam roused himself painfully from the ground. For a moment he wondered where he was, and then all the misery and despair returned to him.” He was outside the orc gate and entering Mordor and knew not where his master Frodo was.
What transpired over the next few days was startling. My ailing and the hobbits’ dreary adventures became inseparable. Sickness and story appeared to magically inform and alchemically permeate each other. Darkness flooded my mind and life crept at a drained, lethargic pace. Frodo and Sam were dizzy and weary, I was shaky and fatigued; they were chilled and their mouths were parched, I shivered, shook, and became dehydrated; they had uneasy sleep, I tossed and turned with disquieting dreams that made my head ache. When some of their old orc injuries throbbed, a lymph node in my groin flared up as if an evil goblin blade had penetrated my right side.
But the hobbits trudged on. Dazed with pain, weariness, and little hope, still Samwise somehow coaxed, carried, and heaved his Mr. Frodo to Mount Doom to perform the task of destroying the Ring of Power. I was with them, feeling the force of the volcano and the dread of the mission every grueling step of the way. However, the moment they performed their scary but sacred duty, my vaccine reaction peaked after three days, and I began to feel normal again.
What a beautifully astonishing and terrifying experience! Never will I hear or read those chapters of The Return of the King in the same way, for I was altered in this listening. I wasn’t just hearing or reading the words and imagining the hobbits on their arduous way. I stepped through the boundary between fiction and reality. I didn’t have empathy for the characters, I melded with Sam and Frodo, felt their agony, crumpled with their despair, stumbled in their weariness: I was their fellow companion, because it was also my agony, my despair, my weariness.
I have the vaccine reaction to thank for a remarkable, transcendent incident. Well, I have Andy Serkis and the illness to thank. “It’s the way the illness takes me! Just weakness! I'm all right now. See! I'm smiling.” I say that feeling just like The Lady of the Camellias.