by Marina Jarre
For a long time all I liked were Doric columns, refectory tables, and Corneille.
Yet I remember as beautiful my blond Fräulein Leni—incomparably beautiful, more beautiful than anyone—while she read me stories and talked to me. One night I’m thrilled to suddenly hear again her sweet, secret German voice whispering timid, tender-sounding phrases in a documentary on television with commentary by Ulrike Meinhof.
Voice and language, you who respond to someone or something that calls to us within ourselves, and not to those who stand by and listen.
Maybe women are beautiful. A little girl is neither beautiful nor ugly. A little girl likely has flaws.
For example, I have disgusting holes that stinky liquids come out of. I don’t care that adults probably have them, too, I never think about it. Just as I never think about that repulsive contraption—a glass cylinder with rubber tubes—that is hanging in the bathroom. I don’t even want to look at it.
Once, when I was very small, Mamma gave me a terrible scolding because after my afternoon nap my hands smelled of pee. Pee is dirty, you have to do it, but don’t touch it.
You mustn’t touch yourself, and I had done some cleaning in that little hole I have between my legs. I like cleaning that little hole.
How beautiful the apple is, round, smooth, with a slightly sour smell. Passing a fruit and vegetable shop and seeing a box of apples, round, solid, perfect, without holes, I have a sudden mad wish to bite one. I stop the governess and beg her to buy me an apple; I’m hungry, I say. We’re not allowed to eat outside of meals, and she won’t buy it for me.
In fact no one is really beautiful, not even adults. The apple is beautiful and the trees in the forest just after a snowfall. And the spiteful black-haired princess under the silver crescent moon is beautiful. She dances with the prince, they whirl from one side of the stage to the other. He lifts her up high with a rapid, light gesture. They’re beautiful, smooth, without holes; they have stockings that cover them from neck to feet. I prefer the spiteful black-haired princess to that insipid blonde the prince has met beside the lake.
I feel irrational tremors inside me; sometimes I admire bad people and I want to be like them.
Besides, my mother also admires bad people, people who don’t get outsmarted, who are stronger, who know how to talk back.
The bad are strong, so their lies are different from the lies of cowards.
My mother admires my sister when she manages to outsmart me. She says so, too, and laughs.
I take good care of my dolls: I comb their hair and dress them, I dust their furniture, make their beds, and wash plates and pots. I rock them to sleep and walk them in their carriage, a real carriage with a top. Sisi tears out the hair on hers and carries them around with arms and legs pulled off, she doesn’t have a complete set of dishes, and she kicks the piano during lessons.
Mamma laughs when she looks at Sisi’s dolls, and laughs even harder when she says: “Sisi has handed off her broken dolls to her sister, sending them ‘to board’ with her; she’ll fix them.”
And so she laughs when she reports that at night my sister “forces” me to tell stories until I fall asleep. Sisi doesn’t sleep and says, “Oof, that idiot is asleep.”
My mother reports to the others what I do.
In fact I’m happy to fix broken dolls, and happy to wash pots and happy to tell stories. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it. I try to avoid what I don’t like as much as possible. The trouble is that I like hardly anything. Maybe that’s precisely what disgusts my mother.
Besides, the things I like I like secretly. They don’t come under the rules. I can’t talk about them.
I walk between the rows of covered stands at the Christmas market. There are a lot of colored lights; brightly lit on the stands are papier-mâché toys, hot cialde—their greasy fragrance spreads in the cold air—and embroidered fabrics. The venders at the stands talk in loud voices and the people passing by respond in loud voices.
I wouldn’t want to have any of those toys—papier-mâché, imagine!—and even less eat the hot cialde. But I like walking amid those noisy, cheerful people. I’m one of them, nobody knows about my shameful secrets, and, seeing me pass by, they’ll think I’ve just eaten a smoking-hot salami and am about to buy a wooden puppet.
I feel irrational tremors inside me, and I notice them with amazement. Certainly, they’re not normal instincts, but so what, I cultivate them cautiously, the important thing is for no one to know.
With a secret shiver I wait at the circus for the clowns to kick each other in their enormous soft fake bottoms, then walk away, loose-limbed, complaining in weak, artificial voices. I imagine that that rear end is real. I imagine that there’s no rope pulling the row of swans along the back of the stage. Mamma boasts of how astute my sister is who sees that rope right away.
But I wish that the princess’s silvery dress were of real silver. That behind the trees of the magic forest there were other trees and behind those trees castles and in the castles wizards. And I’d like to touch the bare white arms of the equestriennes just resting on the saddles of the black horses. Oh shapely white arms, I would have liked to touch them, or, rather, fondle them. And so I’d like to rest my hand in the place where I see the breasts start to separate. Right in that furrow.
And the little gold ring with the blue stone in the holein-the-wall shop: every day I looked at it and wanted it; I even had a plan ready to steal the money needed when one fine day it disappeared from the shop window.
I don’t always succeed in hiding under my edifice of points; I construct it carefully, but then some terrible flaw jumps out as if from a filthy hole and I say and do something I shouldn’t. And ruin everything. Yet I feel pleased: I’m not exactly proud of that terrible flaw, but, what can I say, I’m fond of it.
Then I’m sorry, but because of the consequences, not because I’ve said or done “that thing.” I don’t know why, but I also feel I’m right.
I reveal to my mother why I always turn around during our walks. And when I see that she’s starting to get mad, I insist: She could abandon us and then how would we get home?
The doctor comes, I have a hard time sticking out my tongue, but I make an effort to go along with the whole ritual until he says “Cough.” Then I lie down again. The doctor writes on his prescription pad, my mother is nervous, she’s in a hurry. The doctor asks if by any chance I’ve worn a garment that irritated my skin, and I immediately report the new pajamas. My mother gives me a nasty look, but I’d like to get rid of the pajamas, which do make my skin itch. But I’ve spoiled things, this illness won’t get me any advantage. Besides, it’s not a serious illness. I never have serious illnesses. For instance: I get paratyphoid fever, I don’t get typhoid.
Some pastries are missing from the tray and I tell on Sisi, who denies it though she still has a mustache of cream around her mouth. She tells lies, too, like everyone else, but since she doesn’t care about telling them well, it’s as if she hadn’t told them.
Mamma has to punish Sisi and prepares to do it right away. Mamma is just and severe: if you make a mistake you have to pay. My sister licks off the cream mustache and goes on denying. Mamma grabs her by the arm and drags her screaming to the door: they’ll take the rest of the pastries to the pastry shop to be weighed, and so my sister’s sin will be evident. Halfway down the stairs Sisi manages to get convulsions and turns purple. Mamma gives up on dragging her to the pastry shop. That night she reports the episode to our father. Of my sister she says: “Poor thing, the little creature is so greedy and then those fits of anger, she feels really ill.” Of me she says: “Miki told on her sister, she’s jealous, for shame!”
(In front of me the icy sea expands, spreading to the horizon with its undulating motion. So white and full of frozen hollows it seems more impassable than in summer when the ships go by, even if they tell me that the Finns came as far as Riga in certain very cold winters, gliding over the sea in their sleds. It’s immobile, but
I know that it’s seething underneath, that it wants to come out like the Düna in spring when it cracks its blanket of ice, and at night I hear it flowing with the sound of thunder.)
Inside me a thought boils up when my mother says, “For shame.” It boils up frigid and green: “Me, she would have punished!”
More than a thought—a thought, in fact, is swift and subtle like a cut—it’s an immense flood of rage and impotence, a stain with fluctuating edges that seeks to invade me completely. I have to hold it firm inside, but now it’s reached the tips of my fingers as they turn down the covers on the bed of my one-eyed doll. One eye fell inside her head, and the doll doctor wasn’t able to fix it. I keep her like that and it makes me sick. But I keep her just the same: I won’t be like my mother.
An unexpected response while I silently turn down the covers for the one-eyed doll: I won’t be like my mother. Unexpected and antithetical to the other, which is also present and conscious: I will be like my mother.
Thoughts that I can almost not think, they’re not even in my head, maybe they’re huddled in some dirty hole of mine, when suddenly I break something, though I’m trying to be good and smart, better and smarter than my sister, who doesn’t give a damn about being good and smart.
No one would pay attention if I said that Mamma prefers Sisi to me. “For shame,” they’d say, “Mamma gives you everything she gives your sister.”
There’s nothing she’s had that I’ve had less of.
When, stock-still behind the living room door, we hear the paper rustling on the packages that Mutti is arranging under the tree and the smell of needles scorched by a candle mixes with the aroma of the brown spice cookies on the oven rack in the kitchen, as many nice, carefully chosen gifts await me as my sister. She has pretty dresses and so do I; until adolescence our clothes are the same.
When I get sick, Mamma takes care of me.
But every so often at the bottom of one of my dirty invisible holes I think—one of those two-faced, conflicting thoughts—that even if I’m a coward and a liar (it’s true), my mother shouldn’t report it to others. Why does she always tell others everything about these flaws of mine?
I’m three years old—my mother recounts—and I’m always complaining that my stomach hurts. Also, I have no appetite and hand pieces of buttered bread to our dog or ask Mamma to send them to the starving children in Africa. She takes me to the pediatrician, who prescribes Vaseline oil. After a few spoonfuls I’m cured. When my mother asks the doctor if he considers it possible that even though I’m so little I invented everything, he—German and Lutheran—responds that even newborns lie.
I remember quite clearly sitting at the feet of a sofa on which my paternal grandmother is discussing with someone a girl who died of appendicitis. She describes the symptoms, the negligence of the parents, the rapid and inevitable end. I recall touching my stomach because while my grandmother was speaking I felt a little pain.
I don’t remember anything else, as I don’t recall my particular lies. But I remember very well some stories I told when I was around six or seven. Growing out of the brief, self-justifying lies told by my sister or the maid, mine were beautiful, elaborate lies, in which what was true—and I distinguished it perfectly—was the core around which I arranged the details of the story.
Sometimes there was an element of reality that, inessential at first sight, struck me, and a story would take off from that image. The stories I told myself as well.
For example, the staircase my mother descended dragging my screaming sister by the arm had a wide, open curve, a curve that from then on triggered my fantasies of flight.
I’m a liar and guilty, and my nightmares punish me for my transgressions.
A short, terrible nightmare that stayed with me until I was an adult: the witch dream.
The first time—I think the summer I was seven—I dreamed I was in the street; two bent old ladies pass by in front of me, heads covered by scarves. I’m calm, I’m taking a walk and I’m alone. One of the two old ladies turns and looks at me just as she goes by. She has the terrible face of a witch. I wake up. The nightmare consists only in the instantaneous exposing of that face which I know is “invincible,” and against which I can do nothing.
The last time I dreamed the witch dream she herself freed me with her words.
It was a dream of flight: we were fleeing in a group, a group of teenagers—my children didn’t appear in the dream, but in fact I was already married and a mother. The dream is suffused with a single violet-black color. The color of a disease, a plague that we are fleeing, and the scrubland we’re crossing is the same color. Passing through a village of dirty cottages, I see a large fat woman appear in the doorway of a hut. She has a swollen violet-black face. If she touches me, I’ll get sick, too, and die. The woman looks at me and I say: “I’m not afraid of you, I’ll go by just the same and I won’t get sick.” Then she starts laughing, she laughs freely, loud (as if she weren’t sick), and says to me: “Of course you can go by, because you have courage!”
One day in the house with the big staircase—the last one we lived in in Riga—my father questions me. We’re alone in the living room.
He asks me about the preceding summer when we were with Mamma in Torre Pellice; a colleague of my uncle’s came to see us every day, a professor with a Spanish surname, who had white teeth and eternally lustrous hair. My father asks me if that man and my mother often talked.
And that man? And Mamma? And here the words begin to come out, all warm, all ready and new. Of course, Mamma and that man often talked in the evening, sitting on the green bench, under the living room window. One night while they were chatting, he gave her something sparkling. A ring? I don’t know, I couldn’t see clearly, I was in the house. A bracelet? Maybe, but I was in the house and couldn’t see clearly.
And on this something sparkling I continue to insist even during the subsequent confrontation with my mother, sitting next to my father on the living room sofa. My mother, unusually gentle: “But really, Miki, tell him it’s a lie!” But I, no, I assert that’s how it was, just like that.
The truth is that the words would take possession of me: I spoke them and they broke off from my will and pursued their own way, by themselves, intertwining, connecting, forming new shapes. I knew I was giving in to an irrational impulse when I let the words run away from the real point of departure, but I couldn’t resist. They overwhelmed me in an irresistible current, they hurled me toward whoever was facing me: I had to try to catch him and drag him with me. I was there in my words, finally emerging from myself, freed from my weak and clumsy gestures. My lie was me, me who could finally strip others of their sentences and their rules, so that they would listen to me just for an instant, and, beyond their adult silences, their deliberate reticence, I would be allowed to take possession of them, to enclose them with me in my circle of light.
The stories I told my sister at night, on the other hand, I constructed out of reality and its details. I never related the fairy tales I read eagerly. In my stories my sister and I were protagonists of adventures and expeditions. There were no fathers and mothers, and adults were often made fun of. We locked the household seamstress in the storeroom. Other times we left for Italy in secret. The adults were stupid and didn’t notice what Sisi and I were plotting. I ridiculed them by making them fall down the stairs or walk along the street with wreaths of dried fish around their necks. Talking, I lingered happily on practical details. The places had their names, the days and weeks were specified.
Once, during a walk on the beach—it was fall, we were already wearing quilted jackets—we hid amid the enormous roots of a fir that rose up out of the sand and formed a real den. Our governess, after calling us for a while in a loud voice, left, thinking we had gone ahead on the walk home. After a certain time had elapsed, we followed her on the same road. When we got home, we found that Mamma was not at all alarmed, in fact was almost amused, having assumed the adventure was my sister’s idea. That
irritated me. I had again missed an opportunity for getting points.
Trapped in my more and more complex, more and more inexplicably useless lies, I continued to follow the damn unstated rules. I was engaged in a constant, if cautious, operation of exposing the lie not only of my neighbor but also of the reality that appeared in unexpected and, it seemed to me, illusory shapes.
It’s summer and we’re with our governess at a hotel on the shores of a lake. We’re playing in the sand in our bathing suits; I’m playing with a small Finn named Arndt. He’s in love with me.
I’m always in love. Boys are handsome, unfortunately they’re a little stupid. My nursery school classmate who already wears below-the-knee pants, knickerbockers, is handsome. He’s old, he should be in school, but he’s stupid, so he goes to nursery school.
Once Aunt Jo, my sister’s godmother, comes to see us, with her own son, who is very tall, he’s ten and is really stupid. He spells out the words letter by letter when he reads, while I who am barely five read fluently. When he’s about to leave, I pull my mother aside and beg her: “Ask him to stay for dinner, I like him a lot.” My mother smiles but doesn’t say anything to him, and they leave. Later she tells about my request, and smiles, surprised and kindly.
I’m not in love with the Finn—he’s a year younger than I am (he’s six), and I’m a little afraid that the situation would seem preposterous—but I’m happy to play with him: he’s very accommodating and he listens to me. When his father comes to see him, he takes us on long boat trips on the lake. He rows for hours in silence and the two of us, in silence, sit in the boat as it glides through the gently rustling reeds.