Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  I dreamed, for example, of walking along the streets of an entirely Gothic city together with nameless friends; the architraves of the portals were carved as if they had been wood, and so, too, were the cornices of the windows and even the edges of the sidewalks. Of the colors of the sculptures I recall mainly a carmine red that in the dream I liked immensely.

  Another time, I entered a courtyard I had glimpsed in reality during a period when I was wandering through Turin neighborhoods in search of a courtyard suitable for a film to be based on a book of mine. The courtyard was bursting with white flowers, their petals transparent but the clusters full and thick, and someone told me I could pick them; while I gathered a large bunch I heard the sound of cars passing on the other side of the decrepit walls that made up three sides of the courtyard (on the fourth there was a palm tree), and I also heard many people talking inside the run-down buildings. Both the sound of the cars—maybe behind the palm tree there was a highway—and the voices were cheerful. Besides—this was the predominant sensation of the dream—the flowers were wild, and I could pick lots of them, as many as I wanted, and then leave the courtyard freely.

  Thus I dreamed many times of returning to Torre Pellice, to the house of my Waldensian grandparents, where I lived between the ages of ten and twenty, placed in the care of my maternal grandmother, after my parents’ divorce. The dream leads me continuously from the house to the lawn and from the lawn to the house. This is always open, flooded with sun, and both the ground-floor dining room and the room upstairs where my mother stayed during her sojourns with us are empty of furniture. I am me now and me then; sometimes I know that I have a child or all my children or even my grandson with me, but I don’t see them in the dream. I go from the house to the lawn through the garden, but I don’t even see it.

  Something always happens on the lawn: once it’s full of water, another time it’s covered on one side by a long green plastic shed roof that runs above the vines planted by my grandfather, from the boundary wall at the far end up to the chicken coop. Sometimes I realize that the fruit trees have been uprooted, but I don’t mind because I know it’s part of some work being done on the lawn. There’s never anything below the low wall on the right, where a path descended directly through the fields to the Pellice river, and never anything beyond the boundary wall, either.

  Sometimes, returning from the lawn to the house, I find myself in the kitchen, which unlike the other rooms is darkened by closed shutters and is full of furniture, pots and pans, dishes, placed all around on tables and shelves. Here and there I also see different foods, which I eat, and they’re good, though I don’t know what they are.

  So I go back and forth and chat with Grandmother—even when I know it’s my mother, she has Grandmother’s face and words—and talk about my departure for Turin. Grandmother tells me to stay a few days more, the weather is good, I haven’t seen any of my old friends. She mentions a friend and neighbor I haven’t seen for twenty years. The names of schoolmates come to mind whom I didn’t much care about then and haven’t thought of since. But yes, I say to myself, I’ll stay longer. And here I feel an extraordinary sense of security: yes, I’ll stay home, in my home. And I’ll eat the good, formless, tasteless food: the sun comes in through the door and the open windows; it’s a September sun, warm and the color of gold. I’ll go out to the lawn and then return to the house.

  Here, constructed by my dream, is a past that didn’t exist and an encounter—with my grandmother and my mother—that didn’t exist, either. Words not spoken, or, rather, not spoken in that serene gilded light, in a house that’s open, and a little untidy. Once I even dreamed of long, frayed curtains on the dining room windows, which were much bigger than the real ones, curtains of a striped fabric like a beach umbrella, still pierced by the sun’s rays.

  These bright-colored dreams escorting me from middle age to old age have, it seems to me, a common meaning, even if the images that compose them come from different settings. Whatever their psychological and imaginative material, however—honed as I am by rivers of reflections and recognitions, I could reconstruct it almost piece by piece—they all pretend that I have resolved and accepted. That I no longer fear any encounter. That I am able to look toward the end as it approaches, enjoying all the colors of life.

  Or they are a warning of something that might happen but might already have happened—an angelic message that has chosen the pathway of dreams to reach me, since dreams don’t have space or time, and surely it’s in a dream that the Archangel Gabriel stands firm with his index finger raised. What he indicates with his raised finger will not necessarily happen, or at least it won’t necessarily happen in the life of the one who receives the message.

  These dreams of mine are, in fact, exempt from the repetitiousness of destiny, a kind of invitation to forget the colorless monotony of events, to erase their outlines, to remove them from time, seizing only the imperceptible change, stationary like the vibration of a dragonfly’s wings on the iridescent reflection of the water.

  Time entered my life when I arrived in Torre Pellice with my sister. 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.

  The alternation of the seasons seemed to mark home life according to ancient peasant customs, though these were far removed from my grandmother, the daughter of a by now well-off bourgeois family.

  But year after year the herbs that her mother, a Huguenot from Provence, had brought from her garden near Nîmes to her husband’s Waldensian garden continued to reseed in my grandmother’s garden, handed down when she married, just as the fine pieces of simple, pale walnut Provençal furniture were handed down from one house to the other.

  Wood sorrel, mixed with spinach.

  Borage for frittatas and frittelle.

  Chervil, used not only in frittatas but to season vegetable soups, too. Grandmother also put a pinch of wood sorrel in the frittatas.

  Onion grass.

  Wild thyme.

  Savory, used exclusively, along with parsley, to season peas, during the short season when we ate them, that is, when they were growing in our garden.

  All these herbs had French names and so did rhubarb, which Grandmother used in one of her tartes aux fruits, and cren, horseradish, which was grated to make a seasoning for bollito, boiled meat; and there were French names for the kitchen utensils, the furniture, clothes, the fruit in the orchard, the grapes that lay drying on tables in the attic, the slightly bitter chestnut honey.

  Also French was the small New Testament, with a shiny black cover and very thin pages, which they bought me as soon as I arrived in Torre Pellice. I liked the little book: you had to turn the pages carefully so as not to tear them, and, since I loved books as physical objects, I still remember the smell. With this New Testament, we went to Sunday school, and the first nonhousehold French I spoke was the verses I had to learn by heart from one Sunday to the next.

  All around the house are mountains. Grandmother tells me that when I was a year old and on summer evenings didn’t want to sleep, they’d carry me in their arms to the balcony to look at them. And I, who had come from an immense plain, pointed my finger in amazement.

  In the background, to the right of the valley, was Monte Granero; in the middle Monte Palavas; in the distance on the left Monte Boucie; just opposite our house, beyond the fields and the Pellice, the hill that rises to Rorà. Then, behind the house—you had to move all the way to the end of the balcony to see it—Monte Vandalino, with Castelluzzo. The mountains don’t enclose the valley: on every hill and along the rocky riverbeds are paths, and passes open up through which one can flee to other mountains.

  Places were often mentioned in the family, and they, too, carried time within themselves. Butter wrapped in big green leaves and Seirass cheese in fresh hay, as if in a wig, were bro
ught to us from Sella Veja down through Val d’Angrogna, which Grandfather as a child had traversed every day—five kilometers there and five back—to go to school. Sometimes on Sunday we’d walk to the ruins of the fort built by Vittorio Amedeo II. Below it was the old Catholic neighborhood. The Catholics, too, were place and time, undifferentiated, without interruption. They were a wall that was almost never mentioned but that remained present.

  The Collegio Valdese, where my sister and I go, isn’t far from our house. I carry a notebook on whose inside cover I’ve pasted a picture of my mother—her pale face is severe over the tailored jacket, which has the small fascist emblem attached to the buttonhole—and I look at it secretly during class. I’m still the smartest in math, and after a few months I discover that my compositions are the best, too.

  Doing math homework brings me confidence and peace. I do it with a classmate in a very old house on the edge of town, in the direction of Villar. On one side the slope that descended to the cemetery was covered with vegetable gardens, on the other rose the ancient curving road to Bouissa. We sat in the small kitchen warmed by the stove, on the table an oilcloth and, in order, the paper, the sharpened pencils, the clean eraser. That warm afternoon filled with figures and drawings was swathed in serenity.

  But outside I have to adjust continually: something has broken in my sense of time and from now on time will follow an irregular path; like an old clock, it sometimes runs fast, sometimes it will start up again only with a jolt.

  I have to restrain the leg that is about to bend in a curt-sey—the metamorphosis had surprised me as I went from the curtsey of a small child to that of a young girl—and loosen my tongue, first in French, then in Italian; I have to get used to the mistaken pronunciation of my last name, fighting for months to correct it to “Ghersoni,” then resigning myself.

  One morning I’m sitting in what was at the time the Collegio’s gym but which also housed the school’s theater. I’m listening to the Monday sermon; usually we’d go to a classroom, but perhaps that day was a special occasion. Sitting on the bench I was listening to the minister with my usual attention when suddenly the millenniums spilled out on me and for a second I saw behind him all the peoples on earth in their houses and huts, on the deserts and seas—forever and ever amen—and also on the mountain peaks from which we Waldensians “had been drawn” and I thought: “How is it possible that among all the peoples on earth God favored the Christians?” And answered myself immediately, with an inescapable rational illumination: “It’s not possible.”

  If I put the noun “illumination” next to the adjective “rational” I do so to reduce its size. Those moments which, repeated on other occasions, settled in me forever, those pinpricks, circumscribed in their dimensions but profound, were not miraculous suggestions, they didn’t follow the hint of the raised index finger that I like to imagine in my dreams; rather, they expressed in a few codified words, like a conversation in front of a market stall, reflections and emotions—reflections on emotions—of far in the past. And also of far into the future, because although they stayed solidly inside me, like tiny pinpoint glimmers, I continued to ponder, dissolve, and transform the same emotions, the same thoughts that had inspired those moments; even the circumstances that provoked them might have been realized sooner or later and only in that sense can they be seen as illuminations.

  I had begun to study history in middle school; I had an excellent memory, and, although I was still very shy, I relaxed when I was explaining the connections between events, between causes and effects and the harmonious interpenetration of time and space. I was fascinated and reassured by history’s limitations, by the fact that it had already happened, the words had already been said—and so by the possibility of knowing everything.

  I had always liked historical tales. At first the characters seemed to me wrapped in a thick spiderweb of acts and motivations that I was not yet able to understand completely. Bare, with few features, without clothes or costumes—the centuries hadn’t yet invaded me—they were often reduced to a single detail that had struck me or even just a feeling they had awakened in me.

  At Waltershof I had read two books: one was the story of the last days and execution of Marie Antoinette, the other recounted the adventures of the Germanic tribal leader Arminius. In the Marie Antoinette story I was immediately gripped by the vision of the “bloody head that the executioner picked up and presented to the people.” All the rest—including the unfortunate queen’s body in costume and without, the clamoring crowd, and even the executioner—paled next to the horrible head; I could identify only with that, if I can put it that way. As I read, a long shudder encircled my neck like a scar. I also have a clear memory of the story’s fervent, frenzied tone, and, since I had been taught to consider all exaggerations “insincere,” I suspected that I wasn’t being told everything. I had been brought up on the “reasonableness,” even if cruel, of punishments.

  On the other hand the adventures of Arminius (and his men) swept me away. I read the book all in one sitting, and when I reached the end and looked up, the forest beyond the fields was on fire in the sunset, burning Arminius (and his men), who were tied to the trees. At the same time, the book burned, too, with all its adventures: I remember none of them: what stayed with me was stronger and brighter than the tribulations of Arminius, and it was hatred of the Römer and their wicked deeds.

  When I left Waltershof I left Arminius (and his men) there forever: Arminius with his German name, in his German forest whose trees and flowers I long thought of by their German names (and they were trees and flowers different from the Italian ones). Nor did it occur to me to find out who those hateful Römer were. I didn’t connect them at all with the Romans in the wretched schoolbooks of fascist Italy; the contrast was too strong and the forest of Teutoburg too far. Only much later, when I read, in German, Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, did I suddenly realize that without noticing I had gone over to the other side.

  But studying causes and effects and events—after the millenniums spilled out on me, that morning in the gym, and the centuries began to besiege me, the way the high tide eats away at the beach little by little—I felt fear rising in the face of History. It didn’t provide security; on the contrary, it didn’t stand still, in a past with impenetrable walls, but filled the world with waves of the dead and then of the living and then of the dead again, operating blind as a seed.

  I looked out the classroom windows at the hill of Rorà opposite, white with snow and striped by black rows of trees.

  A little farther away on the same hill was the house of Giosué Janavel, the seventeenth-century Waldensian resistance leader, which you could still visit. When the cold disappeared from the mountains, the Catholics of Luserna, chatelaines and soldiers, would go looking for him on the paths that ran in furrows now obscured by earth and stones. And he, with his men or alone, with the help of a boy, would shoot at them with the culverin, the musket he himself had perfected. To keep the faith and fight the good fight. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice for they will be sated.

  Meanwhile in class we read the Bible, from Genesis in the first year of middle school to the Apocalypse in the last year of high school—the pages rustled rapidly when the teacher told us to skip certain chapters and, scenting racy passages, we immediately rushed to read them.

  Thus Lot lay with his daughters and Solomon compared the breasts of his beloved to two hills crowded with sheep. The discordant animal comparison repulsed me; I found those breasts grazing in the middle of Holy Scripture indecent, nothing to do with the timid itch of my own nipples growing under the black smock.

  Besides, I read the Bible on my own as well, I read and reread where it’s written that the God who approaches isn’t the great wind, isn’t the fire, but is, in the end, a sweet subdued music. Or about Moses and the burning bush that’s on fire but is not consumed. And then where it’s written (the two words next to each other, “it’s written,” give me peace) “the
spirit blows where it will.” Yet the Bible often disturbs me; its stories aren’t rational, or harmonious, and the causes and effects are obscure, but since I read the Bible the way I read Victor Hugo, Joshua stopping the moon and Jesus walking on water appeared to me as images, not reflections. Because another story was taking place on unknowable pathways behind those images, I was forced to reread. But even then matters of doctrine and theology made me impatient, and I was excited only by a text where the one point I really cared about—which concerned my relations with God—was manifested in a poetic and dramatic form. The whole New Testament seemed to resound with the final terrible cry of Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If God hadn’t taken pity on him, why should he take pity on me?

  He was a tremendous God, no longer hidden and counting the stars behind the clouds sketched in my seventeenth-century Lutheran religion book but there, right there, above the Granero, Boucie, Roux, and Guinivert mountains, and hadn’t he often descended in the fog to hide an ancestor positioned, with his harquebus, behind a rock or a wall, lying in wait for a Frenchman or a Piedmontese—a papist, in other words? Sometimes he hadn’t come down; but the decision was His. You can’t make deals with Him, the God of the barbetti,5 the God of my mother’s Waldensian forebears.

  You can’t offer him works, since, if you look carefully, some personal advantage will always be found in the end, something to take to the market, butter or Seirass or veal. Refuse works, but you have to work well, remove the rocks from the fields, carry manure to the pastures in the pannier, help the widow and the old man and listen on Sunday to the pastor’s sermon. Not only to learn but to criticize what the pastor has exaggerated or what he should have said and didn’t. And woe to him if, giving in to weariness after walking up and down the mule tracks, he has repeated himself in the sermon and surreptitiously added the conclusion of an old one. The community has the right to his new sermons and, in the end, the “minister” doesn’t plow, doesn’t milk, and doesn’t hoe.