by Marina Jarre
The tremendous God of my mother’s forebears is the same one who compels Abraham to sacrifice his son, and who punishes with the rod of his wrath those whom He himself has chosen. And when he grants us times of peace—the usual thirty years, and if it’s longer it means that in the middle of it he’ll send a plague—we have to stand up to the papists and wear ourselves out in contests of virtue to prove that we’re better.
At first glance it might not appear difficult: the Catholics, in fact, are very ignorant. Hadn’t a Catholic girl (not from the valleys) asked me if the Waldensians were Christians? She had appeared skeptical even about the existence of the Bible. I considered the Catholics at best brothers who were wrong.
Grandfather called his worst students the philistines. They were almost all Catholics, and Grandfather was supposed to teach them French all over again, which he did, with some impatience but with a spirit of justice; in fact, he was called le juste, as well as le fléau (the scourge).
The Catholics—“Look out!”—snare souls by dishonest means. Honest means, which can be summed up in the usual “solid reasoning,” are unworkable with Catholics. Of course, it would be nice to find a Catholic to reason with, but unfortunately their ignorance is a wall that can’t be breached by any attempt at or temptation to reasoning.
Still, the barbetto God has given us this impossible task, along with these valleys to cultivate. He provides for hailstorms on the fields of the wicked and makes the vines of the good prosper, unless one fine morning he discovers they’re guilty of some transgression known only to him. But terrible as he is, you have to speak to him face-to-face, and so maybe you fear the prince less—“our natural prince”—and can remind him that he arrived here after us, who have been here from time immemorial. The prince is solidly planted in the earth, even if it’s the rocky, steep, and scrubby earth of the valleys. He should be followed and respected as the alternation of the seasons for sowing and reaping is respected, and the belly of the pregnant woman, who should be relieved of heavy burdens—but not all, because each of us has to carry some weight.
The devil, too, is, like the prince, natural, after all. The barbetto devil is flesh and blood, and, according to Janavel, you can shoot at him as if he were any papist. “Everyone—but especially the best shots—should have some bronze or iron bullets in order to punish the devil if he appears.”
Why be surprised if, an unworthy substitute for the Lutheran devil, he was gone forever from under my bed, driven out by the garlic and rosemary fragrance of Grandmother’s roasts—wasn’t she worth at least as much as a sharpshooter?
When I set off to take my first communion—dressed in the Waldensian costume, with a handwoven pinafore that along with the cap had come down from Val d’Angrogna, que dicitur Engrogna—I was accompanied by the sound of the organ, and was moved. Swallowing the piece of bread and drinking the wine from the small cup, I promised God generically to be good and to suffer in silence, something that was becoming increasingly difficult for me, partly because no one cared at all that I was suffering in silence, and I missed the audience that every adult had by rights when he suffered in silence.
I didn’t think about Jesus Christ; I sought in particular to avoid the thought of his death. A terror of death pursued me; I dreamed I’d be buried alive under Grandfather’s vineyard in the grass, and I tried to console myself with the hope of resurrection. Despite the small certainty gained that morning in the gym, I continued to consider myself a Christian.
My sister, who a year after me refused to take first communion, reproached me for my duplicity: I was unfaithful by nature, my denials weren’t decisive enough, my assents hesitant. Sisi had gone to catechism, which, she says, was held at seven in the morning, before school. She had gone, she claims, to prove that she wasn’t as lazy as everyone said. Her ultimate rejection wasn’t considered disgraceful; it was more disgraceful to be lazy.
As for me, what persuaded me hadn’t been only my duplicity—which in some cases branched out into many more than two motivations—and my love of ritual, when the symbolism was performed well (I even liked parading around the stadium in the uniform of giovane italiana, carrying the pennant), but the usual contradictory desire to be like others and at the same time the best. I courted institutions and wasn’t opposed in principle, but I needed time to get used to a place, and, without intending to, would stick out at the least opportune moments.
When the gym teacher shouted from the rostrum at all the schools gathered in almost perfect order on the playing field—we were in the provinces, and “almost perfect” was allowed—in their black-and-white stripes: “Who has raised her head to look around? Gersoni naturally!” Gersoni was, unfortunately, me and not my sister.
It wasn’t that I rejected institutions but that institutions rejected me.
Once—it seems to me that we were already in high school—we went on an excursion to Tredici Laghi, by way of Val d’Angrogna. It’s one of the ancient routes from Val Pellice to Val San Martino, and it’s a long hike.
The valley starts off suddenly narrow, and at first the road follows the stream, the Angrogna. On the left, across the stream, the slope is steep and wooded. On the right you ascend, crossing small plateaus where there are villages. The main village, deep in the upper valley, is Pra del Torno. As in other high, narrow Waldensian valleys the contrast between the sunny inhabited part and the thickly wooded opposite side is intense.
We had left in the afternoon, and at sunset, a little beyond Vaccera, we asked a thickset, brown-haired mountain man who was leading his cows to their barn if we could shelter for the night. He asked us where we came from, and our name, then he pointed to the hayloft. As we entered, he looked at me and uttered a brief sentence (which I didn’t understand) in his dialect, with the broad a’s between closed e’s. He then translated it into French: “Nous sommes cousins; le professeur Coïsson était mon cousin.”5 He didn’t say anything else, and let us into the barn.
By the time we arrived in the valleys, no close relatives of Grandfather’s still lived in Angrogna. Aunt Catherine had died and, shortly afterward, Aunt Madeleine, who was in France and whom Grandfather “adored,” said Grandmother, who wasn’t disposed to tolerate other adored women in the family.
While in my sleep I heard the cows in the stalls below us huffing, shoving, peeing, and smelled their warm odor, which reminded me of the smell of milk—which I sometimes drank fresh from a cow—I wondered how that cousin (an Odin?) had traced our relationship through my foreign surname and why he had communicated it by simply declaring it, and with those alien vowels.
I continued to think about it the next day as we hiked in the blazing sun after a freezing-cold dawn up the ciaplé, the stony slope, toward Tredici Laghi, the thirteen lakes that looked to me like small puddles. How distant the big lake where I picked water lilies seemed. Here everything was encased in stone, and the water, sparingly collected, although it was deep and very clear, was more the color of the stone, gray green, almost black at night, rather than the color of the sky.
Within me, besides the surprise—how could I be the cousin of that thickset, brown-haired mountain dweller whose ancient dialect I barely understood?—and the embarrassment of not knowing how to reply, a discordant echo responded to that recognition. I placed my nailed boots on the burning rocks—always rocks—and said to myself that, centuries ago, everyone in the valley had been like that cousin, all the way back to those who in 1332, in the square in Pra del Torno, had killed the local priest, considered the inquisitor’s spy. And that, confusingly, made me proud. Yet speaking of Grandfather, my mother said: “What I couldn’t bear about him was his Waldensian chauvinism.”
Once a year, on February 17th, when the civil emancipation granted to the Waldensians by the ruler of Savoy, Carlo Alberto, in 1848 was celebrated, a historical drama was presented in the Collegio theater, whose subject was an episode from the exploits of Nos Pères. The actors were for the most part high school students; I don’t remembe
r the names of the authors.
The plays were performed in costume, the words were in Italian. The Waldensians were virtuous, the Catholics bad, the prince so-so. But as far as I remember, the Catholics were exclusively those in power: priests, bishops, evil counselors, and commanders, who (with the help of God) were defeated. There were no ordinary people, or at most mute cops.
I was crazy about those shows, compensating in my own imagination for the mediocrity of the script and the production. As I sat in the packed hall waiting for the curtain to rise, the event of the year loomed behind the red drapery on the small stage.
For several days afterward I’d go around the house like a sleepwalker: I’d find myself in the toilet halfway up the stairs holding the plate of butter I was supposed to take to the cellar. I thought endlessly about what I’d seen, I mixed and incorporated it into my fantasies, and, if I put on a show in the attic with my dolls for a sparse audience—my sister and a few friends—I intuited the inadequacy of my performance, the difference between what it should have been and what it was.
In those years I got in the habit of spending hours drawing large black-and-white figures copied from paintings and sculptures. At the painting lessons I had, thanks to one of my mother’s acts of justice—my sister had singing lessons—I was taught to decorate horrible little vases. I would have liked to learn to portray a person in motion.
One of those February 17th shows provided, among other things, the provocation for the worst punishment of my adolescence, worse than being slapped, which also humiliated me, worse than cutting allusions to my physical and moral failings.
One year, a few days before February 17th, in a discussion with Grandmother—the fights between us were becoming more and more frequent—I “answered back.” The Waldensians had “answered back” for centuries, but in the family you weren’t supposed to answer back, just as you weren’t in the neighboring Catholic valleys or at Fiat or to the traffic cop.
My answers improved over the years as I deployed increasingly clever replies. I was goaded by Grandmother’s own cruelty and a certain eagerness to bite that I felt as, still slightly hunched, I began to stretch out and assert myself. A clownish desire to inflict my inferiority, to transform it, was growing in me, and again the words that I had found useful for my best lies as a child came to my aid.
That time, certainly, I had the perfect response, because Grandmother was so astonished that she retreated to her room, where she began to groan in Franco-Provençal. Her groans were very loud—in spite of the season she had even opened the window—and I took refuge behind the chicken coop, truly frightened by the success of my remark. I heard her groaning from all the way across the garden, which was illuminated by the full moon, but I didn’t wonder if she was really ill; I understood that it was comedy, and she was taking advantage of the moon, as if it were a spotlight, to find me, hiding and guilty behind the chicken coop.
That answer led Grandmother to forbid me to see the performance on the seventeenth. I was crushed by that, I humbled myself and, under my sister’s disdainful glances, begged her, taking back not only the response in question but those past and future. Grandmother was inflexible. But that tragic February 17th was also—thank the Lord—the occasion of the only fundamental pedagogical intuition that my grandmother had regarding me. She, too, gave up the performance that she was very fond of and walked with me up and down Via Beckwith as others hurried to the theater. Through a veil of tears—I was crying shamelessly on the street—I looked at the fires lighted on Monte Vandalino and on the Rorà hill and had a presentiment that nothing could ever replace the show I would miss that night. But Grandmother’s decision made a deep impression, and I remembered it forever: by staying with me she was sharing my guilt. She wasn’t getting revenge, as she often appeared to be, but helping carry my burden.
She was usually a capricious, authoritarian pedagogue who seemed to want to impose her own will rather than a general rule of behavior. She was also merciless except on rare and unexpected occasions.
When it came to herself she liked to recount the wrongs she’d suffered. While she described her great love—a very handsome young Catholic whom her mother, the Huguenot, hadn’t let her marry, and who had become the stationmaster in Bricherasio, so she’d see him from the windows of the train as it went by—and recalled the insults she’d endured from her Angrogna sisters-in-law, her eyes would fill with tears, but immediately afterward, repeating a successful remark of her own, she laughed again. She was quick to laughter and tears, which made both short-lived, and gave the impression that, between a laugh and a cry, she was a woman always present to herself and very self-confident.
She talked about Grandfather, ever with tears in her eyes: “Tu sais, moi j’étais gaie et lui était toujours triste!” 7 or, alluding to his conjugal demands (he was ten years older than she) when both were no longer young, she said to me with a quick sob: “C’était dur, tu sais!” 8
When I got my period for the first time—I had jumped down from the wall at the end of the lawn and right afterward noticed I had blood in my underpants—I ran to the house. She was in her bedroom, I explained—pleased—what had happened, and she opened her wardrobe and took a cotton diaper from a pile, evidently ready, gave it to me, taught me to put it on with safety pins, and then with sudden tears in her eyes said: “Et bien, ma pauvre, ça commence!” 9
She cultivated her flower and vegetable gardens passionately. At the age of eighty she got up at six in the morning to hoe. She loved flowers as much as asparagus, and in every corner of the living room were vases of flowers, arranged randomly, without thought. In winter there was nothing. I don’t recall a bouquet of bought flowers, let alone a Christmas tree or a pine bough.
She’d return from the market with the shopping bag and a live chicken tied by the legs. She’d cut its throat herself at the stream—I remember the creature’s brief guttural cry—and skinned rabbits. She was very good at treating the sick; she skillfully cared for Grandfather during his last serious illness. I don’t remember her ever being frightened. So I didn’t recognize her in her coffin: on her face was an expression of fear and surprise. Grandmother didn’t believe she had to die.
She loved to travel. She came to see us in Riga with the widow’s veil on her hat. She liked to go out, and never missed a Sunday service, partly because, coming home, while we ate her excellent roast, she could serve us her satire of the sermon: nothing escaped her, a forgotten word, a stammer, a repetition. At her funeral, the minister recalled “l’esprit un peu sec de notre chère paroissienne.” 10
But Grandmother’s wit was anything but dry. She said to Grandfather, who liked eggs but hated chickens, and didn’t want any to cross his path: “Toi, tu voudrais que les poules ne fussent que leur trou!” 11
As for Grandfather, she recalled with great amusement a woman from Angrogna who touched wood whenever she met him on the street. Questioned by Grandmother, the woman revealed that Grandfather—teacher at the Collegio, editor of the local newspaper Écho des vallées, justice of the peace, member of an association that supported the French language—belonged to a family of sorcerers. “Ils sont nés en grognant,” 12 Grandmother said of the inhabitants of Angrogna, where grognant means both grumbling and growling.
At home, if she wasn’t in the kitchen, where she cooked wonderfully, using an incredible number of pots and pans that someone else washed, Grandmother sat in an armchair at her small worktable, which had also come from her mother’s house, and whose drawers were full of thread; here she sometimes fell asleep in the summer heat with her eyeglasses on the tip of her nose, then she woke up and knitted or mended while she read novels. She was a tireless reader of romance novels.
She was already sixty-five when we arrived in Torre Pellice, but she never seemed old to me—she lived by herself until her death—since there was nothing that she couldn’t do if she wanted to, no judgment that she didn’t dare express; when she didn’t understand a book, it was the book tha
t was bête or drôle.
“She was an iconoclast,” my mother would say of her; she couldn’t forgive her for not appreciating the value of the refined gifts she brought her. Grandmother put everything on the same plane, the thin cotton dress and the costly shawl. She had sold to the junk dealer medals belonging to her own father, a volunteer with Garibaldi, and the magnificent walnut bed inherited from her parents. For her they were all worthless vieilleries. She had even burned in the stove—my mother said—many books from Grandfather’s library.
What could I say, who at sixteen had burned my Bible in the wood-burning hot-water heater, tearing the pages out one by one? Submerged in the bath of all those verses as if in the stifling heat of inferno, I heard Grandmother on the other side of the door calling me: “Mais es-tu folle, Mina?” “C’est fini,”13 I answered, in reality already repenting, not the gesture, so apt for our little domestic theater, but, rather, the definitive loss of my Bible.
My battles with her—interlocutor of my adolescence and lightning rod, certainly not voluntary, for my mother—weren’t battles with an angel, an unearthly presence that assails you in the half sleep of an uncertain dawn and you don’t know whether it’s a blazing sword from the outside or a hidden dagger within.
Grandmother was a whole person—flesh and blood, like the barbetto devil—and, unlike Jacob, I didn’t emerge from the contest injured; rather, I came out strengthened, as if that domestic theater of ours had, without my realizing it, purged me of certain bitter moods, certain malignant wastes. As an old woman I would like to have a garden where I could pick my tomatoes and taste them still warm from the sun, right next to the stem where they have a flavor of fruit and vegetables together. And eat them with bread, the good crusty bread from Torre Pellice, the best in the world.
I went only rarely to the cemetery where my mother’s family tomb is, near the entrance gate.