Letter to Giulietta Masina as Cabiria

Your misery out along the Ostia Road is unrelieved yet you remain hopeful, until your boyfriend throws you into the Tiber to steal your purse, not bothering to stay and watch as you drown.  After that moment of extremity, your life is no longer livable. You take small solace in the company of a scruffy chicken, whose feathers you stroke with the consoling affection nobody will offer you, while deep in the valley behind a train rolls smoothly along its way to the happiness of others. 

You are so desperately unhappy that you are driven to look for something larger and more genuinely valuable than anything you've ever known, something that will sustain you through life's travails and allow you to enjoy living again.  Your desperate search leads you to a fresh discovery of the low-hanging fruit of glamour and celebrity that was as inescapable in the Italy of 1957 as it is in the America of 2015.   

No wonder that you conclude that the elusive element that gives life the peculiar value you long for is to be found in the glamorous world of money and class.  What choice do you have but to believe in the authoritative promise of Lazardi’s American convertible and the palatial labyrinth of his house?  Dogs bark as you enter his earthly paradise and he later seems to favor you as he sits on the edge of his bed in slippers and smoking jacket, but then his bombshell paramour arrives unexpectedly in the wee hours and you end up hiding in the bathroom, forced to escape like the low-class prostitute you're afraid you'll always be.  

After the collapse of the illusion of wealth and privilege, what remains is religion, so you join a pilgrimage to the holy shrine, where bells of heavenly promise toll unseen through loud-speakers hidden high in the steeple.  You wait patiently for your turn at redemption, your heart full of earnest and holy faith, only to watch in dismay as a cripple throws down his crutches to fall on his face in the dirt and the crowd of anxious supplicants erupts in aggravated rebellion, their hysterical pleas for cures unsatisfied, while peddlers shamelessly hawk religious gee-gaws.  

Finally, the cycle of desperation comes around once again to the irresistible possibility that love is the answer.  Having sold your little concrete house and everything you own, you walk with the miraculous Oscar through the trees toward the promised land of love and family, but you are moving unavoidably towards the river, and the trees pass by like mile markers on the Via Dolorosa, each tree a discrete increment toward the ultimate realization that love is another illusion, created by a seedy sideshow hypnotist.  

You arrive to stand once again on the precipice where your life has no value, begging Oscar to push you in just as your former boyfriend had done.  Oscar takes your meager life savings and his cowardly exit leaves you in terminal misery, inconsolable and ready to throw yourself into the water below, but then the faint sound of an accordion arouses your curiosity and last remnant of hope.  

Wandering miserably and with great reluctance back toward the road of life, you discover a group of mourners walking slowly in acknowledgement of life’s sadness and distress and the reality of death.  A young boy wordlessly invites you to join the procession, and your smile as you fall in beside him is brighter than seems possible for anyone in the world let alone for you, who were desperately suicidal only moments before.  Happiness doesn't require money, fame, celebrity, religion or love.  It exists in spite of all those things in the way you choose to relate to the world.

Giulietta Masina in the role of Cabiria in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria