by Marina Jarre
During visits to the barracks—in that extremely cold winter I had chilblains even behind my knees, and every so often Franchi, provided with a fake beard and false papers, came with me—we had met a French couple, no longer young. Their three-month-old child, a gray, stunted little creature whom the mother couldn’t nurse, couldn’t digest cow’s milk, and wasn’t growing well. Once, while standing there listening to the woman speak, swallowing her words—she was a mountain woman, closed and dignified—about the child to whom she was giving the bottle, we saw her burst into tears. The tears ran down her face, but she couldn’t dry them because in one hand she was holding the bottle and in the other the child. Franchi, with a gentle, delicate gesture, took the bottle and held it at the right level—he was the oldest in a very numerous family—so that the baby could go on sucking while the mother dried her eyes. Yet again his gesture surprised me: I found the child with her faintly acidic odor not very attractive. She died shortly afterward of pneumonia, despite the powdered milk that Franchi had managed to unearth. On his orders I was to bring to the funeral an enormous, unwieldy flower wreath. I was furious because I had to ride the tram with that grotesque concoction and take part in an incomprehensible Catholic funeral with the sobbing parents beside the pale-gray baby’s tiny coffin.
When they left, they entrusted me with some money that had been collected for the upkeep of the grave. I let days pass and, in the end, negligently spent the money on myself. I never went to the cemetery, where—certainly appearing ridiculous—I would have had to look for the custodian in the immensity of graves (the child’s had its number) to find out how to discharge that duty.
I wrote in my diary: “. . . they think I’m sensitive; it’s not true, I simply have an infernal pride.”
I was fifteen when, on June 10th,20 I went out to the square to listen to Mussolini’s speech; I was twenty when I saw the Germans leave Torre Pellice. What are usually called the best years of one’s life are for me contained between those dates. The war and the partisan struggle were part of my days not unlike the smell of the winter air and the sound of barking dogs on dark November evenings.
And here I was, an adult, considered adult, as if the preceding events—what happened, in other words—had caused me to grow up more quickly. But might it have been, I wonder now, an artificial growing up? Similar to that of the young thugs of the periphery today. The death of your contemporaries, the death you see hanging on the gallows with a livid face, fallen forward, can give you the macabre optimism of centenarians, an illusory sense of power, as if you now had in hand your conclusions and there were nothing else to aspire to. And so freedom gives you those feelings, freedom gained but not known, inherited not from parents but from grandparents, property that many of us weren’t capable of handling and so it remained under our parents’ management.
We lived like the crown prince who grows gray-haired and fat while the ageless old sovereign continues to govern and execute. We flirted with the heads of the conspiracy and told them about when we defended the republic, when we, too, were rebels. But we liked cigars and vacations in Biarritz. So they left us to it, even if we tended to have too many children.
The following little episode that I wish to recount here is perhaps a small premonitory symptom of these conflicts and late reflections that the war and the resistance sowed in me.
In 1946, we were involved in an orgy of theater productions. We performed all and everything, some better, some worse, with improvised companies and few essential tools. I liked directing as much as performing. And so I produced in Torre Pellice not Hedda Gabler, alas, but Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down.
At midnight, the show over, we went home, the actors still dressed in German uniforms, and as we marched through the now empty, dark town, in the grip of a melancholy and sacrilegious mood, we intoned at the top of our lungs a German war song, as if to prolong in the streets the play that had just ended. Still singing, we marched up to the barracks next to the elementary school. At the time the barracks was empty and the entrance open. We entered the courtyard and sat on the steps. Little by little we fell silent, looking at the moon. Only at that moment did I realize that the war was really over, but that we were called back to it as to our youth itself by that enemy song, which condemned us to regret lost loves and dead friends.
I find in my diary on the date of April 29th the note copied below.
Torre Pellice had just been liberated; the Germans had left in their trucks; some fascists were running behind the last truck, trying to grab on to the edges of the vehicle. When the partisans arrived on our street, my sister and Marisa had gone to meet them carrying in their arms the guns belonging to some of the fascist boys whom they had persuaded to hide in the cellars and who would then be handed over as prisoners.
As soon as the Germans left, the town poured out onto the streets and a few hours later the beats of the big drum could be heard in the park. People were dancing and singing.
No one paid any attention to a group of French people who came down the road from Villar singing “The Marseillaise” to invite us to take advantage of the occasion and immediately free ourselves, period, from Italian domination.
In the hours after the Germans’ departure I had had for the first time a terrible fear. I was sure they would return to take revenge—wouldn’t I have?—and, besides, standing at the intersection of our street with the main street was a high cart, of a singular shape that recalled a kepi, loaded with weapons. That cart had been left behind by the fascist soldiers who had occupied our house for the previous two days, plugged up the toilet, and listened nonstop to the radio. I had picked up my books in a blanket and brought them to the cellar, and had slept there very peacefully on a straw mattress. Now though, I was afraid that an isolated shot would hit the cart and blow up the whole house, along with all of us.
In fact the Germans returned, and that same isolated shot, from a mortar, I think, didn’t strike the cart but, instead, at the entrance to the town, destroyed the first truck in the column, which was carrying the flamethrowers, pulverizing it. The next day, people pointed out pieces of brain left stuck to the pavement at the sides of the road.
Once the fear had passed, I was plunged into the same state of depression I used to feel on my return from hikes in the mountains. Yet again the adventure had passed beside me and I had been unable to seize it and enjoy it; no way could I share in the general joy, and the years that passed, that became history precisely in the final success—O good, who have conquered evil!—seemed to me yet again an immense, senseless mountain of corpses.
I went to the cemetery alone. Right in front of the entrance, I found the doctor and the undertaker next to some open coffins. Inside, rigid corpses in fascist uniforms.
Back at home I wrote in my diary:
“Torre—evening April 29, 1945.
“Tonight you sleep, there in the cemetery, in rough caskets, without flowers, without tears, Germans and boys of the Littorio. I saw you today, you whom I do not know, on your back in the casket, your face fouled with blood and dirt, mouth open as if to shout, and your hands lying limp beside your body, hands of a boy, defenseless. The tombs of the partisans were covered with flowers. On the streets of the town there are flags. Brothers, forgive this joy; brothers, forgive the smile of mammas and wives; brothers, forgive the dead partisans what remains of them on earth, you who leave nothing, alone in a foreign cemetery.”
In the margin, dated July 3, 1945 (I had happened to see the first documentary on the concentration camps, tacked on to the showing of a film in Turin):
“Buchenwald concentration camp. Brothers, I’d like to have the ‘right’ to forgive you.”
In the preceding years a single cry wounded me to the core, beyond the barrier of complicit pity and impotent rage: pierced me, though it was still dubious as a presentiment. A cry that I might not have cried, but that someone cried to me.
One night, the Germans hanged a fifteen-year-old boy—I think from the Venet
o—between Evi’s hotel and the public scale. They’d found him sleeping, exhausted, on the mountain with a Parabellum pistol beside him. Evi had heard the din around dawn, had got up and opened the window. In the fading darkness she had heard the boy call to his mother. When she told me, the next day, I suddenly started crying, but the tears that bathed my face came not from my books and fantasies or, even further back, from my by now petrified childhood; they flowed from my body, which was aware of itself for the first time, and in which I would have liked to hide and protect the unknown boy.
Precise details about my father’s death reached us ten years later, through information my sister got in a chance meeting in the United States with a distant cousin who had survived.
My father and mother, by now separated forever, had lived apart in Riga, bound by a lengthy court case, because each claimed custody of the daughters. I had found unguarded in the sideboard in the living room the entire package containing the divorce decree; the copy was in German, and Grandmother certainly was ignorant of the contents. The injured party was, surprisingly, my father; on the list of charges that the parties addressed to each other was a lineup of lovers attributed to the wife (unknown names, among which, unfortunately, was the notorious Spaniard), the venereal disease that the defendant had contracted from the accuser, the black eye witnessed by the maid as proof of the beatings given by the signore to the signora, the illegitimate birth of a child of my father’s.
I hadn’t told my sister about the document; she had been questioned after me in the living room and had decisively contradicted me, and would surely accuse me of disloyalty: I was guilty anyway of having guessed and betrayed. But I was silent above all out of shame. Shame for the two parties who were my father and mother, so similar here to the defeated for whom I felt both disgust and pity.
And yet reading the decree didn’t prevent me from feeling a more profound pity for my mother. Compassion for her, surprised in her careless lies, which must have served to bolster her pride. And that was, in fact, the only pity I felt for her as an old woman, sitting erect in her beautiful beige-and-pink dress, the brooch on her shoulder, attentive to the conversations that were going on, her response prompt, her memory perfect.
Her unhappiness hovered over me like a distant cloud, high but dark. She wrote us tender letters; she arrived loaded with gifts. In the war years she came from Bulgaria, where she was the director of an Italian cultural institute after an eventful flight from Latvia during the Soviet occupation. She traveled on troop trains and brought suitcases full of sugar, prosciutto, chocolate, and even eggs. But upon her arrival—anticipated and so longed for—she took refuge in her discontent and always seemed on the verge of being disappointed. Only occasionally, at random moments, did I hear the resonant bold note in her voice again. She stayed shut in her room for hours, she smoked a lot, read, in a tone of irritation answered Grandmother (who in fact had a certain respect for her), and was not at all affectionate with me or my sister.
Between her and me, others had functioned as a screen. First the governesses who had brought me up as a child, then Grandmother, and finally Sisi, who could still make her laugh sometimes.
Once, when I was around fifteen, she found me in tears on the bench in the garden and asked what was wrong. I’d gone out a little earlier in a new dress, and had seen in the derisory glances of some schoolmates I’d run into in the square confirmation that the hem was in fact too long—the dress had been chosen by my mother (it pleased her) because it resembled the one in Botticelli’s Primavera. I didn’t dare insist on getting it shortened, so I answered that I was unhappy because I was ugly.
I saw a timid sorrow cross her face, as of apology, and I realized that she was looking for some words of consolation. Finally she said, “No, of course you’re not, you have such beautiful hair!”
One afternoon when I was sixteen I went to the hairdresser and had my braids cut off: they ended in curls so perfect that my classmates hinted that they were made with curlers. When I came home with short hair, my mother, as meek as that time in the living room with my father, observed only: “What a pity, with your beautiful hair!”
Sometimes, instead, she exploded in sudden destructive outbursts where she seemed to let out, as if liberated, repressed storms, in a violent, even coarse language, in one hand a Bible and in the other a firearm. Any time I talked back she was surprised, and retreated, wounded by my rage.
Our fights were very rare, however (I didn’t dare confront her, kept distant by her unhappiness), and often were expressed in letters left for one another on the table. If I was late returning from a vacation—in general, she couldn’t stand the fact that I went on vacation—she wrote me furious postcards reminding me of my duties. She didn’t trust the speed at which I studied and nagged me about the deadline for my exams although I wasn’t at all behind.
I find her mentioned twice in my diary: in a half page of recriminations on family life: “Even a cat loves its kittens, but she doesn’t reproach them for the milk given.” And on the other hand, briefly, at another point: “My mother is a dear woman.”
Of our father she never spoke. Sometimes Grandmother told us about him.
An acquaintance had gone—she recounted—to our house, where he lived with his daughter, whom the German mother, a nurse, had left with him, so she could return to Germany with a racially pure passport. He had to scrape money together after a bankruptcy and was selling furniture and fittings; leading the buyer around the house, he had asked him—Grandmother reported—if he wanted, in addition, Irene, the daughter, who followed him everywhere, clutching (I saw it immediately) his dressing gown.
I thought of this image often; it was the only one that resurfaced from a past gone by and concluded, submerged now and awaiting a future restorer. When I was a mother, writing my first book, I dedicated it to Irene, who died with him, at the age of six.
It seems to me that nothing else binds me to him, except the memory of that death and the voice I never heard of the child Irene.
His death remained within my life like a hidden seed, and gradually, as I lived and aged, it grew in my memory, not unlike a longtime love: nourished in part by tenderness for the young bodies of my children, for their gestures and laughter, for the limbs, gestures, and laughter of their friends. In this originated—late, as is my habit—my adult pity, the way jasmine produces runners that root in the earth from which they came. The only roots I recognize as mine.
5 The word barba, from the Latin barbanus, or uncle, was a term of respect for the Waldensian preachers. The diminutive barbetto or barbetti was a popular term referring to the Waldensians.
6 “We’re cousins, Professor Coïsson was my cousin.”
7 “You know, I was cheerful and he was always sad!”
8 “It was hard, you know!”
9 “Well, my poor girl, here you go!”
10 “the slightly dry wit of our dear parishioner.”
11 “You’d like it if the chickens were nothing more than their hole.”
12 “They were born complaining.”
13 “Are you crazy, Mina?” “It’s over.”
14 “Here, this must be Uncle Eugene.” “And that is certainly poor Marie’s head. She had such a small head.”
15 “So we meet again.”
16 In 1689, a group of Waldensians returned from exile and reconquered their homelands; this was referred to as the Glorious Return, or La Glorieuse Rentrée.
17 “This is not love, love finds its end in an act; it’s nostalgia, it’s feeling homesick for a being as one feels homesick for a country. And this has no cure.”
18 On October 28, 1940, Mussolini announced that Italian troops had invaded Greece.
19 In July of 1943 Mussolini and the Fascist government collapsed; on September 8th Italy officially surrendered to the Allies and the Germans occupied the country from Rome north.
20 On June 10, 1940, Mussolini declared war on France and England.
As a Woman
Among all my friends,
for Lalla
Once I could remember the dates of battles, the numbers of men and horses, the names of my students from ten years earlier. I would review a battalion of veterans, identifying them one by one. Now I want to shake off the names the way a dog shakes off rain.
I’ll be sitting down to fantasize: I’ll sniff the odor of the evening wind that’s turned pure and crystalline after blowing thousands of miles across the desert.
I want to die in Piazza San Marco, my head on my knees.
But death throes in the middle of a square is inconvenient and ostentatious; certainly someone would come along and get rid of me, taking me to the hospital, where I’d die within the sanitary confines of a bed behind a green screen.
I suspect there’s something illicit about fantasizing on my own—at my age—a gratuitous fantasizing that yields nothing, neither a written page nor a hope of anything concrete. There is in such fantasizing a hint of impiety, the intention to replace an act of faith, which is an end in itself. May I at least be allowed to die like Fuffi, the Siamese cat who after a move took refuge in an old linen wardrobe and there prepared for death, sleeping amid piles of freshly laundered sheets. He no longer ate, no longer peed; he opened his foggy eyes meowing when his master came to get him for the daily injection that even cats get these days, but so it is, you have to give some satisfaction to those who survive you. His fur lost its shine and under it Fuffi got thinner, clearly intending to disappear completely and forever in the linen wardrobe. Finally, the plaque with name and date—on the wardrobe, of course—again, to please those who survive you.
There is still something transparently ordinary in my fantasy, contained in the dailiness of the images; I will end up visiting, in imagination, deserts and mountains on group tours. All in all, a low-cost, almost permissible fantasy, with the modesty of flowering balconies and linen closets.