Distant Fathers
Page 10
Sometimes I went with Grandmother to bring flowers, especially so that the catholiques, passing by, wouldn’t be able to criticize our bare tomb. An ostentatious indifference toward the cult of the dead—perhaps one of many examples to set for the Catholics—must have been among the old Waldensian customs. But we brought flowers semisecretly to the cemetery: Grandmother wasn’t afraid to be unorthodox if necessary.
As I washed the vase and changed the water, I shuddered, because the smell of rotting flowers led me to think of the people buried all around me, and I was afraid of finding a skeleton on the pile of garbage outside the enclosure. Having arranged the flowers, we took a walk around the tombs, and Grandmother would stop and comment: who was inside or outside, what they had said or done. I didn’t remember anything, partly because, as usual, I was indifferent to relationships, marriages, and quarrels, and partly because I was scared. All I remember is the story of how the old cemetery that used to be opposite the movie theater, where the public park is now, was moved.
And more specifically the episode of an old woman—I think her name was Gonnet—who with the help of her maid emptied her family’s tomb: “Tiens,” she said, taking a femur, “ça doit être l’oncle Eugène,” and she tossed it into the woman’s broad apron. “Et ça c’est certainement la tête de la pauvre Marie. Elle avait une si petite tête.”14
As a result of our visits to the cemetery I developed a long-standing antipathy toward marble floors and a complete indifference to the fate of bodies. I didn’t associate the dead person with the living person who had been; rather, I found him, how to put it, troublesome, disturbing, with something malicious in his face, as if he had just played a trick on the other, the living, treacherously replacing him. As if, while we’re living, our dead self were growing with us, and would suddenly surprise us and take possession of us.
Fantasies that certainly wouldn’t have sat well with Grandmother. She often said the cemetery she liked most was the old Catholic cemetery behind the church, on the road that went up to the fort. Above the entrance, she recalled, were the words: “Here are neither poor nor rich.” She was very proud of having been born on July 14th, Bastille Day, and she always reminded us of that.
However kindly disposed, she was critical of other Protestants, and often considered them a little “excessive,” and she called the Salvation Army, which had a flourishing headquarters in Torre Pellice, l’armée du chahut, with a play of words on chahut, raucous noise, and salut, that is, salvation.
When her son, my mother’s younger brother and Grandmother’s favorite—she considered him better than her daughter, which in essence meant more pliable—married a Dutch Catholic in Amsterdam, where he worked at the Italian consulate, Grandmother was pleased about the marriage and welcomed her daughter-in-law. But it was important to her that their child be baptized as a Waldensian (mainly, perhaps, out of respect for Grandfather’s memory), as I, the daughter of a Jew, had been. And she told me later, she had made her son swear on the family Bible that he had never given in to the enemy. The Bible, placed on a small table in the living room, was seldom used; once when the pastor was vis-iting—this was after Grandfather’s death—and asked for it, a spider emerged frightened from between the pages, which Grandmother leafed through only when she didn’t feel well (that is, had indigestion), and that didn’t happen often. Still, swearing was considered a very serious act, almost unseemly, and Grandmother must have decided on it for a reason she felt was truly essential. When the Catholic daughter-in-law revealed herself in due course to be treacherous and dishonest, Grandmother left to her daughter the small lawn—“my” lawn—remaining from her dowry, provoking a series of legal complications that I had to untangle some thirty years later.
Indeed, even if the history that came to us from the mountains was shared, the inheritances were meticulously divided; I still have from one such division a big hand-woven sheet, in that impossible Calvinist, mountain size that doesn’t fit a single bed or a double bed or even, very well, a three-quarter bed.
As for Uncle Robert, he’d had to choose which one he’d give in to, and his son had in fact been baptized as a Catholic. Someone in Torre Pellice observed to him as an adult: “A Catholic Coïsson!” and said no more.
Although Grandmother was oppressive in her criticisms and comments and combative in her actions, she was singularly tolerant of our friendships. She had, it’s true, an infallible nose for my infatuations, which she remarked on at the table in an incisive, malicious way, but she left us free to play for hours outside the gate, to go down through the fields to the Pellice, which in summer we crossed by jumping from rock to rock. When we were older we went on excursions in the mountains and, in a group, bicycled (I was last of all to learn) down through the valley toward Bricherasio and Pinerolo. Girls and boys of our age would come to our house.
In my friendships I acted as a matchmaker or village sorcerer, according to the occasion. I fostered passionate but shadowy loyalties—I find many names in my diary—and easily felt betrayed. I would then drop the friend and retreat into sullen disappointment.
I was slowly separating from my sister. She indicated that she couldn’t bear what she called my dramatic “poses” as an actress; the strange, convoluted way I approached matters; my Don Quixote-esque impulses restrained by cowardice and timidity. And I was wounded by her brutal comments, especially about my appearance. More and more often I heard her nascent beauty praised: if I liked a boy, she stole him by her mere presence, without making a move. It was precisely her impassive stillness—I kept muddling along—that crushed me. She was absorbed in her own fascination with lazy cruelty, her eyes firm, clear, full of proud ferocity.
My jealousy, as in childhood, didn’t undermine the solidarity I felt with her, wasn’t related solely to her—about whom my mother was silent, while her face lit up—but was a feeling I would call inevitable, deep-rooted. My defeats plunged me into a primitive melancholy, and for years any allusion to her beauty or elegance—but also to the success of anyone else—overwhelmed me with a mortal sadness that at first drove me to give up, to sink once more under the ice of the winter sea in Riga. Then I reemerged and got busy again.
I gave my friends advice, I listened to their confidences (the disappointed lovers of my sister, who was very selective, came to tell me their romantic sufferings), sometimes I exchanged one confidence for another, but mainly I was investigating myself, what people thought of me.
I furtively read letters that were written at home; I tried to apprehend conversations by surprise. I was always sure I’d find flattering appreciations of myself when I picked up a letter left unguarded on the table. And if instead of praise I found negative judgments, which was what usually happened, I enjoyed those, too, as they supported my position as “serenely solitary.” The phrase is from my diary, where I find it already in ironic quotation marks.
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.
In that period, with the war over, theatrical performances resumed. I had been given an important part in a play, a comic-pathetic role. Overcoming my terror of being onstage, I’d had a genuine success. Someone had even stopped me on the street the next day to congratulate me.
So the letter lay on the desk, surely full of enthusiastic praise for me; I began to read, and found instead a long, insistent—a good half page—description of my sister, who as an extra in another play had crossed the stage fleetingly in white wig and Goldonian costume and, turning her head somewhat awkwardly toward the audience, had asked, with her slightly defective pronunciation of s: “But where is the baroness?”
Standing straight in front of the desk, with the letter in my hand, I was agitated by disappointment, triumph (I’ve got you, stupid, you with the favoritism you always den
y), and above all dismay. The tone of enchantment with which my mother wrote about my sister, the effusiveness so different from her habitual reticence, seemed to me unnatural and forbidding. No optimism could overcome that pitiless confirmation.
Her usual exaggerated refusal to praise me was natural—she was educating me—but the brutal innocence with which she obliterated me from the page, denying me any hope, was monstrous.
Suddenly, when I left the room—whom could I tell without also disclosing my indiscretion?—an ironic sneer, in quotation marks, surprised me, like a surge of joy: there is always some secret to discover in the heart and soul of others. Alas.
Gradually I stopped glancing at other people’s letters. I still like reading books of letters and diaries, though; maybe that’s how I satisfy a lingering Peeping Tom curiosity.
Withdrawing to enjoy my “serene solitude,” I read and fantasized a lot. During vacations I might not go beyond the gate for weeks. In summer I was allowed to stay alone in the little room under the gabled roof. While I settled with my books into the warm dusty odor of the wooden walls, I was torn between the satisfaction of being able to lock myself in and revulsion toward the swifts that made nests all around. I heard them arrive, beating their wings, landing with heavy thuds, and I considered whether it might not be better to confront the daily fights with Sisi in our shared room. But the nights, fragrant with hay, sparkling with stars, immense over my head as I looked out the little attic window, filled me with rapture. I felt gigantic energies in myself, still held tight, it’s true, in the grip of my will, not dissolved and soothed in the flow of a true presentiment but ready for flight.
I fantasized for hours walking back and forth on the balcony—in winter on the first-floor landing—and the heroine of my fantasies was very beautiful. Very handsome, too, was the hero, with whom I identified just as fervently.
But what transported me on summer nights beyond the dark mass of the mountains and the unceasing roar of the river was the approach of a reality that I feared and tried to insulate myself from. I wrote in my diary: “I’m afraid of the woman that I’m about to become, that I will fatally become if nothing interrupts the necessary evolution of my spiritual life. I feel her already alive in me, and every day she becomes more mature and complete.”
Group excursions to the mountains gave me the same sensation of being stirred at once by fear and avidity. After crossing the last fields, I took my bare feet out of the boots to rest on the short, coarse, fragrant grass of where we stopped. We climbed toward long rocky crests, hardened by sun and frost. They were our peaks, and they all resembled one another. The stones slid under our feet toward the gullies below. I was usually among the first to arrive and among the last on the descent: my ankles, barely protected by the edge of the boots, couldn’t support my long legs, and I was constantly wrenching them on the way down.
For me all goals were the same. Violent thoughts agitated me during the hike and sometimes became emotions: arriving among the first, descending among the last, talking to the boy I was in love with, but always life, with birth and death, and I, what was I doing there. As if the sun-soaked stones crumbling under my boots into increasingly fine fragments as we neared the peak were one of those symbols that I was fascinated to see represented.
Talking to my mother in old age I tried to retrace the routes of these excursions, but apart from the mountains I didn’t recognize the places, the villages, the pastures, the lake. She traveled around there with ease, that village was such and such, in that other she had stayed with her father, who was taking her on a hike and had taught her to beat the ground with a stick to chase away the vipers. She cited names not only with infallible geographic precision (the Angrognine vowels accurately pronounced) but also as the names of real places, roads, bridges, each different from the others and in each a memory different from the others.
For me memory was singular, bare and hard like the stony ground: the need I had for others—to pass them walking, give them a hand, talk to them, touch them—and my inferiority to them.
I wrote in my diary: “I need to exert my personality over others either in opposition when I can’t dominate them or in friendships where I’m the stronger.”
I returned from excursions the way one returns from a defining adventure, and as I dragged my aching feet along the final kilometers, I often fell into a deep depression: yet again I hadn’t managed to join in.
To tell the truth, there was no gap between my fantasies and the fulfillment of a reality both feared and desired but, at best, opposition between my ambitions and the implacability that was a condition of their success.
Still, after all, the force and intensity with which I portrayed life (and enjoyed portrayals of life) and the force and intensity with which I lived and tried to assert myself were both drives of my ego, and not only didn’t fight but coexisted without schizoid torment or twin-like adhesion. Already as a child I was carried away by the beauty of the lies I invented but never confused with reality, and similarly, later, I would put on my different pairs of boots in turn, now going seven leagues, now only two inches; but the huge seven-league leap didn’t suffer from the extreme patience of my two inches.
The parallel existence of practicality and imagination that was congenial to me complicated my relations with others; I would have liked to be accepted in my wholeness, and I continued to be surprised each time—and so I isolated myself—that to be accepted I had to reduce, confine, castrate myself. Maybe that’s why it seemed to me that I found unity in performing. And was, besides, entirely likable at last.
Inevitably, however, now and then I would be seized by a nostalgia for reunion (for “return,” I say to myself, and yet again this Sehnsucht, yearning, becomes a liturgical nostalgia for a return to the immense luminous beach of childhood), and not only that, but I shaped as privilege and named as choice the yearned-for truce.
I started writing relatively late. At first I wrote some poems, only two of which I’ve saved. I kept a diary to narrate myself to myself. When I was eighteen it was considered unseemly to have, for whatever reason, psychological difficulties (the word wasn’t used; in a letter to my mother I find “psychic”); we don’t talk about anyone who might have suffered from the notorious “nervous exhaustion.” Worse than syphilis. Preoccupation with oneself, reflecting on one’s own conflicts, was the sign of an equivocal and, naturally, weak character.
Also at eighteen I started writing a play with a friend. At that time I was overcome by a general nausea toward reading. In the preceding years I had read through Grandfather’s library—almost all the books were in French—and whatever books or pages I happened to come upon. Grandmother, who had exiled Zola to the top shelf, considering it dangerous (I read Nana standing on the threshold of her room, not having yet discovered the use of the flashlight to illuminate banned books under the covers at night), gave me romance novels that my mother considered repulsive. She let me read any book, provided it was by an important author, a “good” book. I remember reading Les Dames Galantes, by Brantôme, from beginning to end, curled up in front of the lighted stove in her room during a Christmas sojourn. I greeted a toothache that arrived at the end of the reading as the well-deserved divine punishment.
So between the prohibitions of the two of them I read every readable book in the house, apart from the many volumes of geography. Reading, I discovered that Don Carlos had a hunchback; it was an unpleasant discovery, since I still couldn’t bear the hunchbacks of History. I also found in an autopsy report on Napoleon that he had small genital organs. I was ignorant of everything on the subject, having missed, because of the long-ago betrayal of my Finnish friend, the chance to find out, while I knew a lot, from Les Dames Galantes, about the measure of females. But I saw a kind of disappointment, and surprise, in the statement that such a great man had small genitals, that he wasn’t “handsome,” in other words. Anyway, I didn’t love Napoleon—I loved Athos—nor did I love Louis XIV or Alexander the Great.
I read Jules Verne, but the geography didn’t interest me; maybe I was convinced that it could have easily been invented. Besides, didn’t I always wander around unknown cities with the topographical intuition of the one who had planned and built them himself?
The rhythm of the wheels of a train at night still takes me back to childhood sensations: plains, mountains, rivers; the lights of stations where the noise of the journey pauses. The cities I arrive in and depart from are always a station; as the train passes, mountains, rivers, plains become anonymous, and down there behind the lighted windows you see others in their precarious and illusory immobility, for they, too, are on the train traveling with me.
No, I didn’t care about maps, banal surrogates for invention. Or more simply I rejected the change, the transmutation, out of a kind of laziness, the same that had surprised me as I learned one language after another, and had prevented me from recognizing the name of the Römer so obvious in that of the Romans.
Every language had qualities that were neither translatable nor interchangeable. In every language I was different. Every language has its time.