Scheherazade holds our sixth key. We are all like her, in that we tell stories to keep death at bay; but we are not as skilful at it as she is, and our stories sometimes end up working against us. Then we become like Shahryar, jaded and lost (though hopefully not murderous).
Like Shahryar, we need to escape.
*
I have had my own Scheherazade moments, in which stories saw me through a dark time. I have had many of them, in fact: stories in any shape or form have been both my daily bread and my refuge when the skies darken. One of the worst storms I endured was my father’s illness, which began during my teenage years. I came out at the other end, I don’t think unscathed, but alive, only because I was lucky enough to be surrounded by good friends. Among the many people who helped me, and to whom I will be forever grateful, is Superman, greatest superhero of them all.
In the early Nineties, DC Comics, Superman’s publisher, orchestrated a multi-book saga that ended with Superman’s death. It is not unusual for superheroes to die only to reappear later, stronger than before, but this time, we were told, Superman’s death would be for real and for ever (in fact it wasn’t).
The saga was launched with great fanfare. While that fanfare reached as far as Italy, the stories themselves did not, because at that time Superman was not yet available in Italian editions. I knew the character, of course: I had seen the films with Christopher Reeve many, many times, and anyway, everybody knows about Superman.
Much as I would have liked to learn how and why Superman shuffled off this mortal coil, I had to accept the fact that I never would. There was nowhere in Puglia for me to buy American books, and even if there was, I could not afford them. A more fundamental problem was that I couldn’t read English.
One year later (I was twelve), on a Sunday morning, I went with my father into a newsagent’s, and there, against all expectations, was one lonely copy of a fine Italian translation of The Death of Superman, a one-volume collection of the entire saga, just published. That it had found its way to Manduria was nothing short of a miracle.
It was far too expensive for a twelve-year-old, but my father bought it for me. You see, he liked comics too.
It was raining that afternoon, which is not very common in the heel of Italy, so I had another small miracle to savour – dark and sombre weather, perfect conditions to mourn the demise of Superman. I sat in my room, closed the door, and read the story in one go.
When I got to the end, I was in tears.
Superman had died in the arms of Lois Lane. He had died defending Metropolis, but that would not make Lois Lane miss him any less. He had died fighting against a big ugly monster with bones protruding out of its skin: the story never explained who this monster was, where it came from, or why it was set on destroying everything in its path. People called it Doomsday, but the monster itself didn’t even talk. Doomsday was meaningless tragedy made flesh, the superhero version of a random car crash. Superman managed to stop it, but died in the process.
I was sorry for Lois Lane, who would never get to marry the man she loved, and I was sorry for Jimmy Olsen, who had lost his best friend in the world, and I was sorry for Superman, who, with all his powers, would not live to see another day. But I was especially heartbroken at the pointlessness of it all. Yes, Superman’s death had been suitably heroic, but also meaningless, because Doomsday didn’t want to conquer or destroy the world or anything like that, it wanted to kill people for the hell of it. Its violence did not seem to have any goal other than violence itself. In some respects Doomsday got what it wanted: his aim was to kill people, and he ended up killing Superman, the most prestigious trophy of all. As for Superman – the embodiment of the all-American ideal that there is always a reason to be cheerful, always another day to be lived and enjoyed – he was more than just killed, he was defeated.
Even so, my tears seemed disproportionate. All that I knew about Superman came from four films, and two of them were, by my own admission, pretty bad. I had only just met Superman, so why did his death move me so much? With the benefit of hindsight, I understand that I was not crying for Lois Lane, or Jimmy Olsen, or Superman, but for myself.
My father was not well.
The older members of my family had not noticed it yet, but I had, quite consciously. I was a child, and although children can sometimes be unobservant, they have uncannily sensitive antennae, and pick up waves that grown-ups don’t. My father began to forget things, he had significant mood swings that were not in character with the man I knew. Something was not right. Doomsday was coming.
The publisher who translated The Death of Superman started publishing Superman stories in Italian in a regular series, twice a month. I badly, badly, wanted to know what happened next, now that Superman was gone. I wanted to know how he would return, because even at twelve I wasn’t so naive as to think that he wouldn’t. I needed to see him return.
My pocket money was not enough to buy a Superman comic twice a month. And so my father and I began the strangest of dances. Sometimes we would pop into the newsagent together (it had to be that specific shop, or another in the next town, because they were the only two that could be relied on to stock Superman comics), and he would buy it for me. Or, before sitting down on the sofa, he would put coins in his pockets, and when he got up again, the coins would fall out. They were my loot, as if I were a pint-sized Viking and the sofa an unfortunate coastal village. By hook or by crook, my father managed to buy me Superman twice a month, always giving me the impression that I was getting it by my own cunning.
Meanwhile, his health went steadily downhill. It came to a point when even my mother and my older brothers had to acknowledge there was something wrong, and they took him for tests, and he found out that he was going to die. Early-onset dementia: Doomsday was here.
When my father was too ill to continue his dance with me, my mother discreetly allowed me a little more pocket money, enough for me to keep buying Superman. There were superheroes whose stories I probably liked more – among them the Silver Surfer and Doctor Strange – but Superman had something the others did not have, a quality I could not put my finger on, and which made me feel closer to him.
Now I know what that something was. Superman is the parent that lucky children have, before that parent, inevitably, lets them down. Superman is the kind, unbeatable, invulnerable, good parent we have before we discover our parents are mortal, and make mistakes – and yes, that they can be beaten and beaten badly. In some way, my father had seen his defeat coming, and one of the last things he did for me was to hand the baton to Superman: here, he said, take care of my son.
And Superman took good care of me. Unlike my father, he survived Doomsday and came back, as strong and as confident as ever. As my father lost the ability to recognize me and cried all night in the other room (and once almost set our house on fire), and as my family suffered financial hardship and my padded middle-class world turned to kryptonite all around me, Superman would sweep me to Metropolis, where Doomsday can be defeated, where you can die for a while, and return, if not unscathed, at least alive.
A little after I turned eighteen, I had Superman’s shield tattooed on my arm. Two years later, my father died.
*
Scheherazade healed Shahryar by helping him to escape. The sultan had built for himself a cage of grim certainties. He was surrounded by new, unexpected things, as we are, but he had closed his eyes to them, as we do. Adding more new things to his life was not the solution. He had decided there was nothing to see, so he saw nothing, and he would keep seeing nothing. When he stumbled upon a beautiful orgy in a scented garden, he could not find a way of embracing this event – unexpected, admittedly, but also potentially revealing of pleasures yet to come – in his own life. Instead he sulked, because it was not what he expected. The sultan had to be lured out of his world, into other possible lives.