by Marina Jarre
I recall the terrible feeling of impotence I had once during the first months in Torre Pellice, when, on the ground floor of the house, I met a worker who asked for Grandmother; I understood the meaning of the question, but I wasn’t capable of explaining that Grandmother was upstairs, in her room. The words lay dead in my mouth, I was paralyzed between one life and the other.
For some years no language seemed to me especially beautiful; all languages were useful. And later, when I became accustomed to the school use of Italian and began to have fun with my compositions (although I always had doubts about spelling and syntax, having learned French and Italian almost at the same time), I was limited, I would say, by a lack of inner connection to the technical means of the language: for example, I could never recite an Italian poem perfectly, despite my good memory. Sometimes I realized that one sentence flowed better than another, but I didn’t know why.
I remember clearly when I understood 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.” 15 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.
Then Italian had its moment: late, in fact. Of my school texts I remember rereading the duel of Tancredi and Clorinda, and the end of The Prince, several times. Only when, as a university student, I heard Pastonchi recite Canto XXVI of the Inferno did I have a flash of understanding about Dante.
I read and reread the Canti of Leopardi, which had been given to me by a young student who had tutored us in Latin during middle school, because my mother was afraid that we wouldn’t keep up. For years this student, who was much older than I was, already a young man when I was twelve, wrote me long letters that I threw in the stove. He had a faithful admiration for me, but, even though I so much wanted to be admired, I felt very uneasy about it, because, as always, the mere suspicion that someone might fall in love with me, unreciprocated, instilled terror and embarrassment, as if I were facing incest.
Italian was therefore the Esperanto in which I began to write. That first play was historical, like the ones that were performed on February 17th, like the plays of Schiller. It took place in Spain during the Inquisition, among Protestants and Catholics. There was a lot of dialogue, and everyone was very witty, even the cops, the Protestants slightly more than the Catholics.
In the meantime I had started going to the movies on Sunday afternoons, and my passion for spectacle was fueled decisively. The cinema not only left its sediments but seemed to stir the depths of my imagination and bring to light buried correlations and images. It set in motion my imaginative world, opened pathways, unexpected approaches, oblique references I hadn’t thought of before.
So when the play was finished, the notion of a film on Waldensian history came to mind. I was goaded polemically toward that island whose narrow-mindedness and pettiness I hated; I wanted to argue a little with the church Fathers, talk back, make them get off their pedestals. On the other hand the perfection of their story stimulated me, a perfection that seemed to reflect a requirement of my own that I didn’t care to acknowledge.
I got the idea for the project reading an essay published by the Society for Waldensian Studies on the Glorious Return;16 in it I’d found, among other things, the names of two victims of 1686, Madeleine and Catherine Coïsson, like Grandfather’s sisters. That renewed echo of the Angrognino cousin’s greeting certainly played a role in my inspiration. The film would have to be a Western, in which, in the end, the good win out over the bad, but it remained among the few notes of that time; and when, at twenty-one, I left the valleys I didn’t give it a thought until one night thirty years later, at dinner on the Po with friends. There was talk of the Waldensians, and my film project unexpectedly returned to mind.
As I was telling the story of the forebears who, on hands and knees, holding on to each other by the pants, escaped at night from the enemy surrounding them on Balsiglia and whispered a curse on the young cook who dropped the pot that bounced from rock to rock among the tents of the sleeping Frenchmen, I realized I had forgotten nothing. As if the barbetto God, leaping down without warning from the Val d’Angrogna, had been hiding in my mind, fermenting, like wine in a barrel. Every image was still there, fresh, whole, invented just yesterday.
I hadn’t returned to Torre Pellice except for brief periods right after my marriage and occasional visits later. The house had been divided between my mother and my uncle, and the part that was my mother’s had remained uninhabited. The lawn had lost some pear and apple trees, the big cherry tree near the gate—there was a smaller one a little farther along—the fig tree where I read, imagining I was on the deck of a sailboat, and the grass below the wave-filled ocean. Houses had been built all around, and a little beyond the lawn’s boundary wall ran the noisy ring road, where once fields had stretched to the Pellice.
Besides, I had only seldom, and only on the basis of very precise reminders, thought back to my adolescence and youth; my childhood—which had now become history and, as it seemed, detached from me—had, on the contrary, stayed with me while I had children and brought them up. The disorderly pile of later periods I had pushed away like a jumbled mass in which I could barely isolate the date of my marriage, the birth of the children, the moves. Not even the years when I had taught in this or that school: every time I had to fill out documents, I had to start from the beginning and count and check. My excellent memory was useful only for the written page, the image seen and the one invented.
When I happened to reread my diary or the letters to my mother that I had managed to retrieve, I seemed to perceive conspiratorial winks above my adolescent self, as if two plotters were confronting each other between the lines; each knew something about the other that could have embarrassed him and each was silent out of his own self-interest.
Perhaps I had the sensation that events—happiness and unhappiness commented on and noted—were in fact within the category of the inessential; that the essential was to reveal itself later. Was this the secret that the two plotters were winking at?
I remember the first time I said to myself: I’m happy. I was seventeen and was running down across the lawn. It was May or early July—the grass was still short or had already been cut—and suddenly for the first time the future filled me: Aldo was about to return from Rome (today you’d say my boyfriend, but at the time there was no name to indicate aloud the beloved). Summer was waiting for me, long, interminable; in Grandmother’s garden I sometimes secretly kissed the soft, perfumed laps of the roses.
But both happiness and unhappiness were only scratches on a smooth surface: in reality, nothing penetrated the depths of the amoeba it covered. Events were crushed against it, were absorbed, transformed, digested, and allowed the formless inner being to expand and contract according to its own rules and needs.
Of wartime I remember the autumn days in Torre, the evenings with dogs barking in the dark countryside, and the fog that smelled of the stoves lighted in the houses. Or very clear days in March, when there were no shadows in the garden, and, at the end of the valley, the sky animated by both sun and wind above the mountains.
In my entire diary only two dates refer to the events of those years; maybe the uneasiness I feel in rereading it, and the reluctance to remember, lies in those limitations of my memory, as, during the wait for reality, every feeling that wasn’t the feeling of myself dissolved. I was
at a standstill on the threshold of myself.
Only anger and pity truly agitated me to the depths, both incongruous pseudopods of the amoeba I was talking about before.
I felt a vigilant but labile pity—stingy like the liking I felt for myself and nourished precisely by my feeling of inferiority—toward anyone who was for any reason mocked and persecuted by others, by the strong. I seldom dared to show my pity.
And so for the young substitute literature teacher, Catholic, a nephew of the bishop of Pinerolo, summoned to teach in the middle school here—for lack of anything bet-ter—the Liceo-Ginnasio of Torre Pellice. Thin, pale, with slightly reddened eyelids.
One morning he asked one of my classmates, a broad, robust country girl from San Giovanni who even then was planning to be a midwife, what the Madonna of Dresden in a photo in our anthology made her think of. And she, rising tranquilly, in a clear, sonorous voice had answered: “Of an idol.”
In the roar of laughter that followed this answer—laughter that might have appeared to be directed at the innocent country girl but was instead directed at him, the papist, who believed he could provoke, but had been shot—I seemed to perceive behind the reddened eyelids two tears and, oh, how I would have liked to find a consoling response and the courage to offer it. Yet not only did the Madonna of Dresden not inspire me but along with pity for the bishop of Pinerolo’s nephew I felt some disgust for him, so ugly, so thin and pale.
Those I pitied often slightly disgusted me. Thus the poor man with the Waldensian surname, a peasant from the hill in Torre Pellice, who promised cigarettes to my male classmates in exchange for “appointments.”
One of them had confided this to me; they also told me about going in a group on bicycles to a brothel in Pinerolo, and boasted of coming home “so weak they could barely hold on to the handlebars.”
I received these confidences without batting an eye. I found it despicable that they got the cigarettes in advance from that poor man, who then waited for them behind a bush—here, too, they went in a group—and having got the cigarettes they followed him home shouting insults and throwing stones. He fled, begging for mercy, afraid that someone in his family would hear them. As for the service that they were supposed to perform—and which they dishonestly refused—I didn’t exactly understand what it was. Besides, although I was curious, I didn’t dare find out: sex was something gross, a damp and sticky touching, expelling and receiving liquids, being insulted and stoned. Nothing that happened to me seemed yet to be part of it. Not the little trick invented by my sister that in our private language had the German name das Schöne, not the sudden jolt in my groin when the boy who was chasing me in fun suddenly grabbed me, not even my lengthy fantasies.
My senses didn’t sleep, they dreamed, curbed by the sheer intensity of the dreams rather than by the restraints of upbringing and the times. Sometimes they awoke unexpectedly at the warm contact of even an unknown arm, or at the sudden direct glance of someone I’d never noticed. But I was too attached to absolute requirements of beauty—beauty of action—to follow such calls.
In my diary the date of June 20th is repeated for three years, the day in 1943 I fell in love with the person I find later designated only by the initial “A.”
I had been in love before and would be later; this love, however, repeated on three dates, had a particular importance because it pushed me to confront myself with myself for the first time. It was the primary motivation for keeping my diary in a sustained way. Of course, put like that, it excludes him, my “A.,” hurling him into the disembodied world of my phantoms, and even less reproduces the intense fragrance of the winter air, a shining day in December when we stopped to rest in the midday sun on the roof of a hut just emerging from the snow. Yet that love left me as completely as the sand dries after a violent summer storm. Not because it wasn’t at the time very strong and painful—long-lasting and not reciprocated—but because it released nothing in my inner self except the awkward and sometimes lucid lines of my diary. It still belonged completely to the inner storytelling that kept me in adolescence beyond the usual limits before I began to write. It was precisely the smell of the winter air and the sound of a Chopin nocturne played by Giuseppe, rather than a recognized surge of the senses, and, as such, it, too, always led me back to myself. I could perhaps say that it was the first, somewhat frigid attempt to love myself.
I quoted: “Ce n’est pas un amour, l’amour trouve sa fin dans un acte; c’est une nostalgie, c’est avoir le mal d’un être comme on a le mal d’un pays. Et ceci est sans remède.” 17
On June 5, 1944, I wrote in my diary, “Rome has fallen. And German soldiers defended it!” Four more exclamation points follow, along with a Latin quotation (I was studying the complete works of Horace for the Latin literature exam), then “Where are the Italians? On the battlefields in Africa, Russia, Greece. The Italians of Italy have betrayed their homeland. Only the dead were true Italians.”
Two weeks later, I was bicycling with my friend Giorgio, returning from Pinerolo, where we had gone to get the plans of the city’s barracks. Giorgio had put these plans, which were on rather big sheets of paper, in his pocket. I pedaled beside him because my presence was intended to make him appear more natural at various roadblocks we had to pass. He had with him a document exempting him from military service as a Waldensian student of theology.
It wasn’t clear to me why I was there. But I wasn’t worried about it. Giorgio and I had plenty to talk about, and I was happy to try starting a little argument with him.
At home we were too immersed in our internal conflicts to pay attention to external ones. Grandmother considered wars the useless and damaging occupation of great men. My mother’s joke-telling antifascism irritated me; I knew she had been fascist in 1920, one of the first Fascist Party members in Genoa, where she was teaching at the time, and I found in her a certain fatuousness. I didn’t know the whole earlier history of antifascism; Grandmother told me that Grandfather would slip away in a hurry when he met a group of fascist boys, not only because he abhorred fascism but so as not to have to salute those armed brats.
She had also told me that when at the armistice of 1918 the maid rushed into the house shouting that the war was over, and everyone had gone to the square to celebrate, he wouldn’t go out: he hadn’t wanted the war and now he didn’t intend to celebrate the bloody victory.
Grandmother, naturally, was a republican; I was torn between a secret love for Peter of Yugoslavia (photographed in a white uniform behind his father’s bier) and disgust for the incomprehensible devotion of many Waldensians to the inelegant Savoys. They even boasted that the royals preferred Waldensian maids to all others.
The practices of fascism—fascist Saturdays, compositions on the Duce, gymnastic exercises—had greeted me in Italy accompanied by the widespread, saccharine sound of “Faccetta nera,” the marching song of the regime. At the same time I was met with an entire, completely new series of customs that I couldn’t distinguish at all as different from the fascist ones. Everything for me was “Italian.” But since in the Waldensian world the important celebrations were, somehow or other, on February 17th and August 15th, when a great collective walk celebrated La Glorieuse Rentrée, those anniversaries ended up being much more significant for me than the imported October 28th.18
But mass demonstrations, especially in films, were pleasing to my theatrical tastes. The closer authority was to me, the more unjust it seemed; as it got further away it acquired the dignity and weight of a moral entity. I was inclined to obey and considered that obedience neither more nor less than one of those prices adults had always made me pay, so that—once duty was done—I could retreat to a corner to do my own business. I felt a little guilty—a little cowardly—when I took refuge in my corners; so I considered it an act of virtue to be dragged to a torchlight procession to celebrate the taking of Barcelona or to go to the Saturday afternoon assembly.
Mussolini was therefore simply the State, in my eyes, recipient o
f fanfares and bows: a state that unfortunately had a potbelly and made many grimaces, grimaces that every so often provoked laughter, quickly muffled, during newsreels at the cinema. That bothered me, like my mother’s jokes, even if deep down I found the goose-stepping Italians basically ridiculous.
For the still more distant Hitler I felt a kind of repugnance: his shrieked speeches, his way of being German didn’t at all correspond to the idea of German I had been brought up with.
Once, at fifteen, I happened to win the Ludi Juveniles, the fascist youth competition, in Torre Pellice with an essay on I no longer remember what. I went to get the prize—The Story of San Michele, by Axel Munthe—at the local fascist headquarters, I think in the elementary school. I was led into a small bare room where the young fascist in charge in Torre Pellice was to give me the book. He was scarcely more than a kid, pale, with very light blue eyes against his white skin, and well known as a staunch ideologue. He picked up the book and, observing my face with his faraway eyes, praised me briefly for the essay, then asked, abruptly, what was my fascist faith. Just like that. My fascist faith. Now, I’ve already said that as a rule I tried to adapt (when I wasn’t gripped by a raging fury), and I desperately sought a valid response, but nothing came to mind and I was silent. He then shrugged his shoulders and locked his lips in a bitter crease. With the same bitter crease—I imagine—he died, battered by the crowd in front of the Porta Nuova station in the last days of April, 1945, at the end of the war, when Turin was liberated.
In my memory of the encounter a faint sensation of pity lingers, not the sort that overwhelmed me: even if I had disappointed him, he was still, in his thin boots, on the side of the stronger. I had felt the same faint sensation toward the very timid and cultured vice principal of the Liceo-Ginnasio Valdese, to whom, by law, I had had to bring a declaration of mixed race or of non-Aryan race—I don’t remember the terms—and who, red in the face and very embarrassed (I think he had been a student of Grandfather’s), had had, by law, to take it.