by Marina Jarre
In 1935, after her parents’ divorce, Marina and her sister are separated from their father and sent by their mother to live with their grandmother in Torre Pellice in northern Italy. Here, upon her arrival in the Waldensian valleys, a world that contains a tragic history of the persecutions and battles of distant fathers, proud, grim ancestors who, until almost a century earlier, had fought in the valleys to maintain their independence, a harsh world, where even places “carried time within themselves”—it’s at this point, says Jarre, that “time entered my life.” Time, one of the book’s most important subjects, connects its parts into a constellation: “It gave me for the first time a past, a thickness in which to be submerged, avoiding investigations and assaults; the story of my childhood was what remained to me of my preceding existence, since in the space of a few weeks I changed country, language, and family circle.” So begins Marina’s long battle with Italian, which she’s never spoken or written before.
The terrible fate of her father (he was killed in 1941, along with the rest of his family, including a child he’d had with a German nurse, in the extermination of the Jews of Riga) is just touched on in this book, as if Jarre were retreating from history and from her own story. Only much later did she decide to reckon with it, in Return to Latvia (published in 2003), which is in a way the completion of this book.
Jarre therefore continues to observe. She portrays the Waldensian world; the tremendous God of her mother’s forebears, to whom she adapts poorly; her adolescence; fights with her grandmother; the slow separation from her sister, Sisi, at two different moments of growing up; friendships; and first loves. There is also the longing for her mother, who works abroad and whom she rarely sees, a longing that is never called by its name, but when she is speaking of the letters that she and Sisi wrote to her, an image from the future suddenly breaks in: “I was twenty when, going into my mother’s room one day, I saw a letter on the desk, complete with salutation and signature, written in her beautiful clear handwriting. Even now the sight of any sample of her writing moves me, as if I had a more intimate relation with her writing than with her.” This relationship of love, hatred, need, mutual incomprehension, jealousy, and unshakable loyalty lasted all her mother’s life.
Fascism barely penetrates the valleys, apart from school ceremonies, and Marina barely perceives it, except that she is fascinated by ceremonies and eager to be like others, or in fact better than others—but she always gets something wrong and feels constantly deficient.
Something else arrives in her life at this moment, however:
I remember clearly when I realized that words placed in a certain order—following an absolute necessity—were beautiful. Rereading Schiller’s Don Carlos yet again (I read and reread the books that affected me, I carried them with me everywhere, I didn’t care about the name of the author and savagely skipped the pages that didn’t interest me)—anyway, reading Don Carlos again, in the school edition that my mother, studying to be a teacher, had used at the university, I came to where the prince sees Elisabeth for the last time and says to her, “So sehen wir uns wieder” (so we meet again). I repeated the phrase and was moved. I heard a small pause after the So and the lengthening toward death of the final wieder. I was moved not because the prince was about to die—a standard occurrence in a play—but by the inevitability with which the words were joined together and separated, those words and in that way.
Jarre still doesn’t know it, but she has discovered her fate, even though she didn’t really begin to write until many years later, in Turin, already married and pregnant with her first child.
The war unfolds at a distance, unreal. She doesn’t understand it and when finally it enters their lives she again finds herself observing, like a wary spectator, always tugged between very different impulses (“I found the whole thing incongruous, I couldn’t see connections between events that didn’t correspond to my usual readings of History, which corresponded, instead, to cheering crowds and orderly armies”). With the same implacability with which she dissected her childhood feelings and with which she explores those of the fictional characters in her novels, even the most unspeakable sentiments, the most obscenely natural, Jarre describes her uncertain, alienated, and hasty judgments about the war and, later, the resistance. She has a youthful arrogance and difficulty accepting that what was just and obligatory until a short time before has suddenly become wrong. She is overwhelmed by her incomprehension of events, by gestures previously inconceivable made by people she knows, including her grandmother, who on September 8th hides some deserters behind the clematis in the garden, has them strip off their uniforms, and gives them civilian clothes. She’s very aware of her own uselessness: “I was generally a prudent girl, uninvolved and often cowardly.”
She is always stopped on a threshold, she writes, even when some of her friends become partisans and one of them dies. Marina encounters a teacher, Franchi, who she knows is an antifascist; he comes up from the town staggering and asks if she knows that her friend was killed. Only later “an intuition slowly began to take shape in me: Franchi wasn’t drunk; he was swaying because he was desperate. He was reproaching himself because it was his own teaching that had led Sergio to his death . . . But . . . I felt again a kind of respect. In that staggering I glimpsed, in fact, the despair of true pity, what was still denied to me, since I continued to feel compassion only for those with whom I could identify.” Marina interrogates her inability to feel pity, her strange detachment, even when she decides to take part in some partisan activities as a courier; but “rage boiled inside me when, in a tram detoured deliberately, I passed the men hanged on Corso Vinzaglio; the violence was the greater the more impotent I felt, provoked that time even more by the dirty posters dangling above the hanged men than by the sight of their waxy doll-like faces.”
Only the cry of a boy hanged in revenge at the end of the war by the fleeing Germans, a cry in the night, a cry to his mother, finally breaks the dissociation that inhabits her and opens her to “true pity.” When a friend tells her about it, “I suddenly started crying, but the tears that bathed my face came not from my books and fantasies or, even farther back, from my petrified childhood, they flowed from my body, which was aware of itself for the first time, and in which I would have liked to hide and protect the unknown boy.”
Of her Latvian childhood nothing remains except the rosy mirage of a long Baltic beach where she and Sisi gather shells and pebbles; they learn of their father’s fate only ten years after the fact, and, like his person, and his frightening immensity, it falls into silence and repression. Yet Jarre writes, “his death remained within my life like a hidden seed, and gradually, as I lived and aged, it grew in my memory, not unlike a longtime love.”
The third section is about herself as a woman: with her detached gaze, sometimes alienating and often permeated by a subtle, delightful humor, full of observations and surprising reflections. Jarre first of all describes her own old age, the changes in her imagination, her intelligence, her dream activity, and her desires, her daily routine (her writing here is among the best and most interesting in Italian literature on the old age of women; there are equally unforgettable passages in Silence in Moscow, written later, when she was much older, and perhaps more brutal as death approached). Then, with the same wavelike movement of the first part, she turns back, to herself as a young bride, to the possession of her own body only at the moment of becoming a mother (“As a woman I had to be born from myself, I gave birth to myself along with my children”), to the struggles of her years as a housewife, a French teacher in a school on the outskirts of Turin, a mother of four children, a wife, and, finally, a writer, though she gives only a few hints of what will become her true subterranean life: “the need to transform, the impulse to represent, to re-create, the conviction that everything can be reproduced and portrayed. Not in a tapestry with threads of silk and gold: my unicorn is still always a stray dog sleeping in the July heat in the cool shadow of a closed newsstand.”
Yes, she is an extremely refined stray dog, and this is the other great theme of Distant Fathers: the lack of belonging, of homeland, of identity, at times proudly pursued, at times suffered, at times merely recorded as a fact. She feels a similar alienation from the Waldensian world, although it’s partly hers: “There was no bond between me and that world, which remained outside me. No, the poor, rocky houses in shadow, the four pointed crests, the woman with the high, clear voice marked by those r’s were not related to me. Their history didn’t precede me, I hadn’t come from that.” Just like the distance-closeness to her mother and to her own origins, contained in the image of the newly hatched ducklings who follow the cart in which the children are leaving the forest where they’ve been hidden from their father, leaving their childhood, and the lifelong avoidance of an anguished, irreparable, and annulled suffering. Return to Latvia was written, years later, to repair that mutilation at least in part.
Distant Fathers is a book of stone and splendors. Marina Jarre isn’t a metaphysical writer, she never gives in to shouting and excess (“I don’t weep and I am not amazed, I report”): her prose remains lean, smooth, and beautiful even in moments of great intensity, and maybe that’s why her moments of lyricism, her magnificent metaphors, the incredible intuitions in her penetrating study of the mind of the living erupt on the page with such emotion and vividness, grand as a spectacle of nature, like the ice breaking up on the Düna. Distant Fathers, so indefinable and original, so like its proud author, is something that was completely missing from the Italian literary landscape of the time, and which unknowingly prefigured the autofictional writing of recent years and the new directions it is taking. It’s a book that still has much to say about writing and about human beings in the present and future, as great books always do. They keep going, and they keep us going.
1 Cristina Campo (1923–1977), Sotto falso nome (Under a false name): Milan (Adelphi, 1998). Alexia Mitchell was a pseudonymous poet whose identity was never discovered. (All notes are the translator’s.)
The Circle of Light
For my sister Sisi
There are days when the sky above Turin is immense. Days of summer haze when from early morning the heat blurs the horizon, blurs on one side the hills and on the other the mountains. At dawn the trees rustle in vast leafy waves with a slow, continuous movement that spreads through the whole city. The sky looms opaque, a uniform yellowish gray, cloudless and still. Under this sky the swallows wheel and warble. Soon afterward, around eight, the trees, swaying more and more slowly, close in on the birdsong until their movement stops, the sky turns a violent yellow, and the sound of cars fills the streets.
I happen to hear Gianni and some of his friends talking about the Turin of their childhood and adolescence, when they’d go skating at the Italia: here was the footbridge over the railway; there they’d walk along the street with the brothels or on Via Roma before the reconstruction, when the buildings were still slanting over the old shops. Turin ended at the Mauriziano hospital, and there the fields began.
Talking about that Turin, Gianni and his friends aren’t at all sad, aren’t regretful about anything. I heard Gianni regretting only the tracks of the No. 8 tram that were torn up some years ago. “They’ll see,” he said, vengefully, “when there’s no more gas!” Once, walking through the Valentino park, he mourned the giant monkey puzzle tree in the botanical garden, whose stump, an enormous gray ruin, sticks out through the railings.
He talks about people, and as he talks the city narrows into a tight circle where everyone knows everyone else.
“She was bowlegged even as a child,” he reflects, of a woman passing by.
“You know her?”
“No, but we were at elementary school together—she also went to Silvio Pellico.”
He doesn’t mourn the Turin of long ago, I say to myself, because he hasn’t lost it. He hasn’t lost his childhood.
I often envy other people’s childhoods. Sometimes all of a sudden I’ll envy a child in a stroller or a young pregnant woman with her trim, graceful potbelly. Envy flourishes in the unease I’ve always felt, at having to find out, at being excluded, and in the nostalgia I feel for the Turin of long ago that the child in the stroller and the slender young woman with her nice little belly come from, unchanged.
The regret that Gianni and his friends don’t seem to feel feeds on what I don’t know and haven’t seen, on smells I haven’t smelled, on the existence of that other I was not.
I’ve been in Turin for more than thirty years, and I know the new city that opened up like a ring around the old core thoroughly. It matured and aged with me, in its enormous avenues to the south and west bordered without interruption by large apartment buildings, in the new villas of the residential areas on the hill, in those foggy and less built-up neighborhoods near the highway to Milan, where on the street gas stations seem to predominate, and above, sparkling in the night, advertising billboards.
I spent a summer in Turin with a botanical book. At five in the afternoon I’d go out and walk along the perimeter of the gardens in the center and in the Crocetta neighborhood, or wander through the public parks, and I’d identify the trees by comparing them with the descriptions and illustrations in the book.
The summer wind lifted dusty scraps of paper toward the thick canopy of the horse chestnuts. In the park nearby, a Japanese pagoda tree flowered, while in the small garden on Via Bertolotti the acacia flowers were fading. In the Lamarmora Gardens the leaves of the Judas trees, in certain sunsets made bluish by the summer storms that swirl continually around the city, like black gates that open and close, sometimes to the north, sometimes to the south—the leaves of the Judas trees, as I was saying, were an intense pale green, lit by azure.
Looking around—would that be a wingnut or an ailanthus?—I’d be startled by a sense of solidarity, unspecified, undirected, yet addressed to those who, like me, were walking the streets of Turin in summer.
As I passed through neighborhoods, street after street, on dusty sidewalks littered with paper, squashed gelatos, condoms, syringes, dog poop, the street in the end became the place, the only one possible, indistinguishable from other places, and the people, and I with them on the sidewalk, indistinguishable from one another.
Large apartment buildings sprang up on interminable, empty, new, muddy boulevards, fragile at first in their spaced-out solitude, then settled within circles of earth planted with slender saplings—nettle trees?—or, unexpectedly, straight rows of maples furrowed the big parking lot between San Giovanni Vecchio and the Stock Exchange building: random changes, susceptible to further, daring transformations, made by an invisible hand in a single night. Debatable were the telephone booths, exact copies of the time- or space-travel machines in science fiction films, but obviously telephone booths—these, too, testifying to the daily need for, the naturalness of, such travels.
This is the place without a name, the same as other places, and my time the same as others’ time. I will no longer escape.
When, as a child, I imagined running away from home, Italy was the country I would have liked to escape to. Italy, my mother’s native country, where it was always warm and you spent long hours in the garden. So what if my summer vacations came with diarrhea, because of too much fruit picked unripe off the trees?
My sister and I were born in Riga.
A photograph of me at five: hair tied in two thick pigtails next to my tiny face, I’m standing, in a pretty striped velvet dress, chosen like the others by my mother, with a pinafore over it, beside the dollhouse, one hand on the flat roof, holding my doll Willi, who is next to the cage of Pippo the canary. I have a hint of a gentle, stubborn smile and I’m gazing into the distance, sideways.
In another photograph, I’m looking away again, with the same half smile above the small obstinate chin, sitting next to my mother and my sister, who’s looking straight ahead with shining, curious eyes. My mother, in profile, turned toward me, smiles a proud, emotional smile.
She has two tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
My self-consciousness was tied to my fears, my awareness of others to my sister’s appearance in my life.
We’re going to the Kaisergarten. I walk with my hands resting on the bars of the carriage with my sister in it. I think I’m pushing it, and I remember distinctly the glint of the bars at the height of my head. Behind me walks the Schwester—naturally she’s the one pushing the carriage. But I think: “Now they’ll see me, they’ll say what a good girl she is, taking her little sister out for a walk.” We meet someone and stop. And that someone, up above me, says: “What eyes this child has, they really look like two black plums.” I know right away that my sister’s eyes look like black plums. The word “plum” has a very tender sound in German. And that same sound is repeated by my mother, when, later, the Schwester tells her the story.
At night I dream of walking on the maple leaves on that same sidewalk; next to me walks a tiny, soft, whitish being. I crush it, and crushing it gives me an immense sensation of power. I know that it’s “alive” and that I can kill it. That it’s at my disposal. Another time I find a lot of them on a low wall, and again I crush them. There’s a large stain where I crushed them. Awake, I’m frightened by these dreams: awake, I can’t hurt anyone, I can’t even look at the coachmen who whip the horses. They’ve told me you have to kill a horse that falls and breaks its leg, because “if a horse falls it can’t get up again.”