Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  On television I prefer to choose programs that excite neither emotion nor thought. If I give in to extraordinary occasions—whether film or ballet or concert or opera—I cry. And similarly I cry when I reread the same books and even the same pages—unsure if I’m reading or remembering—of prose, usually. Poetry seldom moves me, not even German poetry. But I start repeating to myself, in my usual mutilated version, lines of Leopardi and even of Petrarch. Perhaps the time is near when I will weep, saying: “Sweet and clear is the night and without wind.” And I don’t know if I’m weeping out of a melancholy envy or, rather, because, in the beauty of something so perfect that I will never be able to re-create it, I feel my farewell ever closer.

  But my weeping is transparently ordinary, too, since I’m now digging up right on the surface the topsoil of the years that remain. It seems to me that I bring little to light, and my curiosity about myself—with the fictions of a woman laid aside, what’s left is to discover myself in the hardened sediments that old age will grow out of—is therefore a slightly fearful curiosity: How is it possible that I truly desire nothing besides life for my children and the absence of suffering for me? At what point and in what way—and how is it that I never realized it—and by what vortex was the intensity of emotions sucked up?

  In the months after my hysterectomy I dreamed that an enormous, very healthy white tooth fell out; this irritated and worried me, but in the dream I kept repeating: it doesn’t matter, I’ll have a false one put in!

  So I continue to have faith in artifice, in exercises for polio victims, in the grammar of children: “Let’s say you was the mamma and me the papa.” If I weep over a masterpiece, maybe my melancholy envy is, in the end, envy for an unattainable artifice. Will I be able to call this envy emotion?

  In the future I give shape to an immovable laziness in which I am submerged as if in the sea still warm from the summer heat, the sun a little lower on the horizon, the beach empty, the sea at Carrara, where Giorgio taught me to swim.

  I try firmly to keep before me the days that are more than thirty years behind me.

  I had joined Giorgio in Carrara, in his house in Fossola, in September. I got married the following year—I’d known Gianni for three months and we were looking for a house, only the difficulty of finding one had kept us from marrying immediately—and some years later Giorgio left for Argentina, where he, in turn, got married.

  In the morning we’d buy focaccia, still hot, at a bakery in Fossola, and some white grapes—it would be our lunch—and took the tram that went to the marina, the same one that carried the marble workers, whom I saw sitting exhausted on the seats.

  On the beach there was only us; it was a fine September and in the sun we picked grapes in the vineyard at the foot of Giorgio’s vegetable garden.

  So he taught me to swim; he never scolded and always praised me. The first two successful armstrokes were like a baptism into the life of the body, repeated every time I’ve swum since then. Even today, I return from the pool purged in limbs and spirit, even if I smell of chlorine.

  After our swim we lay on the sand and Giorgio taught me bridge, which I never played again after that. We stuck the cards in the sand and talked really about nothing until the sun sinking over the sea sent us home.

  It may be that precisely in artificiality—in the construction of our emotions—old age is perfected. When, as an adult, wizened redskin, I sit in a circle of young people and teach them—not on the basis of my experiences: my experience is only the collective experience, as it is for every medicine man—I feel a tranquility, a secure expansion in space, certainly different from when I was younger and unable to separate from self-consciousness.

  Not even to young women do I recount personal stories, but happily present negative examples—of how I was awkward and embarrassed and naive—that conceal a little laugh: I made it, let’s see what you can do. But as my grandmother pitied me, I pity young women and try not to weigh on them, try to hide the deceptions that await them. And yet I wonder: Mightn’t it be the usual naivete, not innocence but estrangement, that drives me to tell stories to those who have already dissected and dissolved these tales?

  One of my current fantasies of flight: I’m sitting alone on the beach in a bathing suit, right on the line of the waves, head hidden by a big straw hat, dark glasses on my nose. I’m facing the sea and far off on the horizon is the sailing ship Bounty. I’m reading. Around me I hear the prattle of the usual stories and I imagine that—bent over my book, chin hidden by the hand in a gesture that rises to cover the mouth, while I gaze slowly at the sea—I look like an English spinster. In fact I’m clean, I don’t soak my underpants in the sink, I love the fire chief and the crown prince; thus I loosen and knot ties easy to tighten and disentangle, and I also recognize in their stories—theirs, the women’s—the unassuming and rational lucidity of my fantasies.

  Maybe there has always been an old woman in me.

  I wasn’t beautiful (an unmediated beauty) in a family of beautiful women: Grandmother, my mother, my sister, and today my daughter. Now when I look at myself in the mirror I find my wrinkles beautiful, but a moment later I’ve stopped thinking about it.

  It doesn’t matter to me whether my grandchildren resemble me; nor indeed did it ever matter to me whether my children resembled me. Nor am I at all like my parents, though randomly heterogeneous elements inherited from everyone were repeated in me: my mother’s thin eyebrows, the sharp, clear gaze I remember in my father, even though his eyes were black like my sister’s and mine are brown. I have my paternal grandmother’s beautiful hair, my father’s large long hands, my mother’s beautiful complexion. But as a whole I feel contained within a featureless interior “I,” and at times I seem to resemble only my sister, whom I am so unlike; but I, too, wrinkle my nose when I laugh and cry.

  As a woman I had to be born from myself, I gave birth to myself along with my children. And yet I’ve always thought and had fantasies about—and desired—men. For me, even the opera, which is beyond attraction and in fact chills and repels intimacy, carried the ornate plumage of allure. I of course wanted to be a woman, but I didn’t immediately feel that I was one. That featureless interior of mine was also sexless, there was an indecisiveness between my desire and the achievement. And so the happiest moment of my life, the triumphal confirmation that I was in fact a woman—and from here the conclusive choice of being one—was the moment when I felt my daughter separate from me, with a slight but sharp, painless cut, preceding (though to me it seemed simultaneous) the grip of the forceps, exactly as one detaches a fruit from the branch.

  I’m still, to this day, a woman in her; I like walking behind her, anonymous, hiding in her beauty. She proceeds confidently through the greenhouse where she’s looking for a vine to give as a present. She explains to the young gardener what she wants. She considers herself timid—my mother also considered herself timid—and “not very identified with her role.”

  I seldom connect the tall, beautiful blond woman with the child I brought into the world and breast-fed, maybe partly because she, too, has children.

  Only when I suddenly hear her voice on the telephone, tender with the guttural sound of her r’s: “Dove,” I say to her, “dovey. Little tiger!” as when she was a child.

  During long weeks I spent in the hospital where she worked in another department as a pediatrician, I’d hear her approaching in the corridor: her footsteps, like her father’s, are also the rapid, light gait of a person more nimble than his weight. When she walks her ankles creak faintly. “Shitty ankles (or shitty veins) you made me, Mamma.” Her defects or what she considers defects she’ll gladly trace back to me or my mistakes. She even accused me of having swaddled her as an infant, the way people did a hundred years ago. That’s why she has a belly. Every so often I defend myself: “look how I put the Band-Aid on your umbilical hernia; look, the varicose veins come from the Jarres, too. The belly, too!” But I don’t dare say that I’ve never had a belly.

>   I walk behind her in the greenhouse, unobserved. I glance with my usual kleptomaniac’s gaze among the vases—there are so many, no one would notice if I carried one off—while she proceeds creaking and proud.

  I think of my hortensias, which are so thin. Laura, my daughter, always has splendid ones. She germinates sweet potatoes with long curled shoots, and her geraniums flower two weeks before mine. Asked as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up, she answered: “A lady, like Mamma.”

  Instead she works, as I worked and my mother before me. Every so often in my cuckoo-like detachment I make a sudden movement: Haven’t I loaded her shoulders with a burden too heavy?

  She mentions the unknown recipient of the vine; I, meanwhile, consider the climbing roses lined up in long rows with their labels. I can never guess if those stories of hers—the young recipient of the vine is separated from his wife and has a terrace exposed to the investigations of the old ladies opposite—are messages or random communications. I suspect her of having an appointment with a part of me I would prefer not to identify. Might it be “our bizarre superego” that she alludes to every so often? Damned, having escaped the snares of a rather wild upbringing, now it runs around on its own and passes itself off as me. I’m very slow in picking up the thread of my daughter’s conversations, following an inner path that doesn’t correspond to mine. I’m often surprised by the men she calls fascinating. Even the actors.

  I decide on a yellow climbing rose. There was a yellow climbing rose on the chicken coop in Torre Pellice. Or was it white, one of those that flower right away and reveal a brownish-yellow heart when they open, as if they had been dipped in tea?

  She tells me about the child. I find that she reasons with him too much, but I choose to be silent, just as I am while considering yet another rearrangement of the furniture, even though the wardrobe really doesn’t go in the entrance hall. I’m slyly silent, and I relax. My gestures are manifested in her while she germinates potatoes and geraniums. Born whole and perfect not from my uterus but from my mind. Armed not by me, luckily, and not with my weapons: our kinship lies in my desires, satisfied yet so rarefied in my conscience that it’s difficult for me to reawaken them. If I see her living and acting, she fulfills those desires expelled by my adult resolve. Always with some anxiety: she’s not only unpredictable to me but, while I may fear for the safety of her brothers—I hug them and kiss them as if they were still my small children—I’m afraid of losing my intimacy with her, although it’s uncertain and rarely spoken of.

  What was I like as a young woman?

  I got married in December of 1949. I had met Gianni in June of the previous year, and after two weeks we decided to get married. What decided me so swiftly—in the past I had always hesitated when someone proposed marriage, and I had never even thought of marrying my so madly beloved “A.”—was a thunderbolt not so much of love, or not only of love, as of security. He was broad, blond, freckled, no taller than I was—as he ages he becomes gray over a reddish tint that wasn’t noticeable before—though I had always liked tall, thin, dark men, and had kept photos of Gregory Peck on the wall. But he gave off a dazzling persuasiveness in which his passion for me merged with his brilliant intelligence. I yielded to this persuasiveness as to an adventure that would bring me the enchantment of the first real experience: love didn’t return to me and wasn’t even a conquest, but came from the outside, imposed itself like a “worldly” choice. I chose exactly the man whom the future suggested that I choose. I made a marriage of convenience in which the convenience had to do not with money, which I was indifferent to—we were dirt-poor—but with the superiority of the man who wanted to marry me.

  I was very happy in the first years of marriage. Of the happiness I felt when I ran down across the lawn in Torre Pellice I can reconstruct the sensation that everything unpleasant fell away from me, peeling off; it wasn’t yet happiness and was happiness no longer, while I was possessed by the certainty “I can.”

  Saying “I can,” I let go of the tension of defense. As for the rest, happiness should be recounted as in a sequence of TV ads; it is in fact completely without irony.

  At thirty-four, after ten years of marriage, I was expecting my fourth child. It wasn’t a planned child, but I was very pleased because I liked having children and didn’t think I’d have others; my third was three and a half.

  My husband and I had spent Christmas vacation with the children in Val di Susa in a house we’d rented for the whole year; during that vacation it had seemed to us we were setting out toward a physical understanding that had till then been lacking in our union. It was a lack I didn’t resent (that happened later, when it acquired the meaning of an object desired and not possessed), occupied as I was with having children, nursing them, moving—from apartment to apartment, each one lighter and bigger and nicer, like my mother’s houses during my childhood—so it seemed to me that I had exactly what I wanted. Around me everything had the luminous clarity in which every question has an answer.

  Of our Christmas vacation I remember the almost complementary joys of love at night and skiing during the day, when I felt I was slowly gaining confidence in my legs and my back, going up and down the small fields behind the house.

  In general the fact that we had little money also contributed to my happiness, that we had to run up debts and then save to pay them, that we organized our life with little money. I kept the account book carefully, day by day. I was teaching outside Turin, in Settimo, and I traveled back and forth by train or bus. We didn’t have a car: we bought our first one nine years after we married. I remember the happiness of my cold feet, in winter, as I looked out the windows of the bus at the plain stretching past Turin to Milan, furrowed by the black dots of the pylons. I can repeat only the word happiness, even though there’s nothing particularly happy about the details that come to mind.

  I greeted the certainty of my fourth pregnancy like a queen her crown. I didn’t think of it as a risk to that timid start of sexual harmony between Gianni and me; rather, it was the demonstration of our new partnership, the child of love.

  In reality I continued to be ignorant and alienated regarding the practice of sex; my husband contributed to this, and, not much more expert than I was, had, with a certain ill will toward the hostile female body, fueled my sense of guilt for my coldness. To the embarrassments of our generation, add our mutual insecurity, his reserve and my pride. He would never have talked about it, any attempt of mine shattered against his muteness. So—without realizing it—I got used to compensating for that failure of ours with the other riches of my life.

  I had a blue skirt made; at the market I bought a piece of matching fabric and the usual dressmaker transformed it into the usual loose tunic. I was an elegant pregnant woman—I also had some beautiful blue-and-white shoes—even if my belly was a little larger than it had been the other times. The elastic stockings I had to wear weren’t nearly as ugly as the thick, conspicuous ones I’d had to wear nine years earlier when I was expecting my daughter. My breasts were swollen and firm and paid no heed to the “you’re irresponsible” of my friends and the silence of my mother; it seemed to me that my big belly radiated a beneficent aura that would heal everyone.

  Never as in that spring had I been so available and understanding. I carried around my radiant belly and, protected by its halo, settled conflicts, found the right word or the suitable gesture to soothe and distract. Even my jealousy—Gianni often went out alone at night, I was too tired to go with him—fit with new urges in the physical union we’d hoped for and initiated.

  And yet gradually I noticed that there was an impediment, an obstruction between him and me. He appeared listless and inert, scarcely livelier at the moment of goodbye, when he could go out. I was used to his silence—he who was so talkative away from home—and didn’t feel it as a lack of response. I talked to him about everything, I told him everything. When we were separated, I wrote him long letters. Until then my talking and his silence had—at l
east so it seemed to me—perfectly complemented each other. And similarly my having children and his accepting them.

  Naturally I tried to take him by the hand, to draw him out of a dimension that for the first time was secret. I needed him within the framework of my joy. But there was nothing to be done; he followed me passively as if merely giving in to the pressure of my hand.

  The baby began to move, my face was round and rosy, and my three children put their hands on my belly to feel it rise and fall.

  “That’s the head!”

  “That’s the bottom!”

  “No, it’s a foot. Does he kick even when you go to the bathroom?”

  When school was over, I bought a blue-and-green striped bathrobe that really looked good on me.

  Sitting in the tram, in a June dusk, I looked out the window and, seeing the roofline of the San Giovanni Vecchio hospital against the sky, said to myself: “Someday I’ll have to write about the roofs of Turin, in summer, when the swallows have arrived. They’re very different. What are they like? Well, naturally, they’re happy roofs.”

  I was finishing typing the manuscript of my first book, Il tramviere impazzito (The Mad Tram Driver), and I was packing the suitcases to go to the mountains. I left the closets in the usual meticulous order: resoled shoes, attached to every child’s coat a little bag with its scraps of fabric, the list of purchases to make in the fall. In the drawer of the small desk—which held the sheets of graph paper with the diagrams of the growth of my three children while they were breast-feeding—notes with the dates of vaccinations. In my suitcase the account book in which in September I would record, as I had for the others, the date of birth and sex of the baby. If it was a girl its name would be Anna.