Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  As we did every summer, we were going to the mountains. I would be alone with the children for two weeks. The Venetian girl who had worked for us for six years had married; she would come later in the summer to help me and had agreed to return part-time in the fall. My mother would join us as usual around mid-July.

  The house where for several years we rented a large apartment, which had no heat or hot water and whose kitchen had a cement floor, was very cheap. In winter we lighted a big woodstove and in front of it at night I bathed the children in a tub. It was an isolated house, adjacent to ruins and empty cottages. By day full of sun, by night dark. Years later, my children confessed to me that the perpetually broken streetlamp in front of the house had been used by them for target practice.

  Through a door in our bedroom there was access to vast, empty attics above uninhabited apartments. The door had never been locked: that sort of carelessness was typical of the house and we were used to it. As we were used to the faint illumination of dim lamps that hung in the most unexpected places.

  My husband hurriedly deposited my pregnant body and my children and left: I felt a relief in him as he set out toward cool evenings on the Po with friends, unmarried men and sterile women.

  The first night I couldn’t sleep: the floor of the attic creaked as if someone were walking there. It creaked all week and I kept waking up.

  The following Sunday I told Gianni, who had come in a hurry to get clean shirts:

  “Listen, the door to the attics doesn’t lock.”

  “Tell Galli,” he said.

  That Galli was our imaginative landlord. He provided us with what he felt like: excellent salad, rather dirty blankets, a large, clean, fenced courtyard, and the many dim lamps that lighted odd corners.

  Neither Gianni nor I liked practical matters and bureaucratic ones even less—I out of timidity, he out of laziness (he was never timid)—and we tried to unload those tasks on each other. He was exceptional on exceptional occasions: he slept on the floor next to the bed of a child who’d had an operation; he brought another to the children’s hospital to have a cut sewed up. He gave injections with a light, steady hand. He walked on the roof like a cat to straighten a fallen chimney. He also went to two funerals in one day, while I stayed home.

  In daily life—apart from sporadic attacks of guilt, as a result of which, in an effort to score points, he washed the dishes—he was in general absent and resentful: I had gotten him into that mess and now he was the one who had to kick the children crawling over his feet while he was on the telephone; yet he never took the initiative to have the phone moved from the hall to the living room. He was extremely disorganized—owing to a primordial disorder—but, once a year, amid clouds of smoke, in an atmosphere of imminent disaster, he prepared the tax returns, with such meticulous care that the tax consultant whom he had to turn to in the end, said, looking at our documents, that she had never seen more masochistic returns.

  Only after nineteen years did he allow me to become a signatory on our meager bank account; I don’t think it was out of distrust—it simply hadn’t occurred to him before. Similarly, we were the last in Turin to have our bills paid by bank transfer.

  So of necessity I found myself on the front lines of the daily routine. I didn’t grieve over it as an injustice; I respected my husband’s scientific work—I also admired it—and it seemed to me that I personally had to respond because he had to hustle so hard for us. I wasn’t yet making comparisons between him and me; gigantic energies overflowed from my happiness.

  Naturally I didn’t talk to Galli about the door. I was afraid of making a bad impression: the floor creaked night after night, always in the same way, and nobody appeared. Inside me the baby moved—he was already a child who didn’t sleep at night—and when I got up to listen at the door of the room opposite, I heard my children breathing peacefully in their sleep.

  I went back to bed and lay down, hands crossed over my belly. I was awake and I thought: confused and impotent thoughts, scraps of thoughts that whirled mostly around the nearly eleven years of my marriage and what there had been in those years between Gianni and me. But I was afraid to face the facts, to extract them from that aura of happiness in which I had immersed them up to then, to examine them, evaluate them with the cold gaze of my adolescence. I isolated some individual events and pondered them, and then, when I should have connected and dissected them—or even gone back to the times that preceded Gianni’s and my meeting—I quickly pushed them away. Even my jealousy—in Turin, my husband preferred to go out with a woman friend of ours—was, like my thoughts, confused and impotent.

  Sometimes I re-created the old willow that had been uprooted right next to the garden fence: twisted and bare, near sunset it turned all to gold. Here and there a few branches still grew out of the trunk, yet as the sun went down you couldn’t turn away from its light. When I arrived that year, it had just been pulled out of the ground. I had always said to myself that I would like to write about it and the black crow that would wait for the gilded moment to sit right in the middle of the cavity at the top of the bare trunk and sing. Now it seemed to me that I could no longer describe it, as if the opportunity had escaped me forever.

  I was there, crushed in that uncomfortable double bed in which seven months earlier we had conceived our baby, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t me at all, I was only my belly.

  The Saturday before, while Gianni was putting shirts and underwear in his bag, I had said to him:

  “Why don’t you come a little earlier next week, instead of getting picked up by the police?”

  It was the summer of 1960, and he had excitedly told me how he had dodged the armored police cars, jumping from column to column along the arcades of Via Po.

  “You don’t understand,” he had said, “it makes me feel like I’m still young.”

  I was what kept him from that, me with my belly.

  And another time, when, at the last minute, as usual, he was working night and day to finish a job, he had reproached me because I protested:

  “You don’t understand, I’m in a battle with time!”

  I was she who didn’t understand, she of the suitcases, the measles, the whooping cough, she who was always tired and had a stomachache. She of the bad moods: he came home—as late as possible—and there I was, tired and in a bad mood. The children, however, washed, fed, and already in bed.

  When had I ever been happy? I was depressed as a rule. Terrified before every birth. With each child, in fact, I was more afraid.

  Slowly, wakeful night after night, as I listened to the old attic creak, knowing that outside was the terrible moonlit night of the mountains, so narrow and black in the valleys and light and airy on the peaks, my joy ran out like blood from a body fatally wounded.

  “I’m an unmarried mother,” I said one night in a sudden flash of rational illumination, one of those flashes that go on burning in me, feeble but necessary, in a small luminous circle, like a candle on the table. “I’ve always been an unmarried mother.”

  The baby moved violently, aimed to the right and then exploded in a series of softer little kicks, communicative. I seemed to be shut up inside my belly with him.

  A month later that same summer, I wrote a long letter to my husband, who was camping on Elba with our two oldest children. I asked him to answer. In our shared life I wrote only one other letter on that subject, the two of us, that is, and what would become of us. Neither the first nor the second ever received an answer. The second I later found among his papers, and, as I did with the letters written to my mother, I took it and kept it.

  As for the first, he told me once that he had lost it on Elba, in a café while “he was thinking what to answer.”

  In fact he couldn’t answer, and that impossibility, which clashed with my eternal need for clarity (here, truly, he Catholic and prudent and I Protestant and imprudent), started the long evolution that led to the end of our marriage—though not of our understa
nding—without, however, lowering his defenses so far as to put his equilibrium at risk: this I didn’t even hypothesize, I had so firmly constructed it along with our union, walled it into the foundations of my personal happiness.

  One night three weeks before the baby was born, I dreamed that I was with my three children in an airport in a broad desert valley. With others we were waiting for the end of the world. The valley was rimmed by low morainal mountains, and the sky above their straight flat line was illuminated by a pale and violent inner light, which announced that disastrous event and turned the stone of the valley gray. When it came—and I don’t know how to describe it except as a stellar wind—I threw myself on my children. We survived and, when the catastrophe passed, I got up again. My children were unharmed, except for the youngest, who had a tiny bleeding wound in the corner of his mouth. I woke in the night with a start, and felt the contractions slowly beginning and only toward morning stopping.

  The child who was born in September was a beautiful boy—I called him Andrea—with dark eyes and hair, a round, pale, solid face. When I attached him to my breast, he grunted, sweet and determined as a young wolf.

  I never felt him as I did the three others. He was, yes, my child, and the same ties bound me to him, but he was also another, come from who knows where, out of I don’t know what desire, maybe on that stellar wind.

  My attachment to him who so sweetly grunted while he suckled was, unlike my attachment to the other children, besieged by fears, as if at any moment I would lose my grip, and my capability as a mother would vanish. That child, though so healthy and strong and handsome, might disappear just as he had appeared. Even now that he’s a man, I’m always afraid when he’s far away that he won’t come back, that he won’t phone, won’t write, that he’ll be silent forever. That he won’t recognize me.

  As he grew, I was bringing up his sister and two brothers with a few basic but fixed rules. And at school, too, I was bringing up children—I who so loved to stay in my corner was always in the midst of others—and it didn’t much matter what I taught, the subject was the means, never the end. I tried to take away their fears; in fact, that may have been the only common element in raising children at home and at school. Here I shouted gladly: “I’m not your mother!”

  Laura and Pietro (the “uneven” ones in birth order) say that basically only Paolo had a mamma. “Paolino,” they warble, imitating what they say is my voice when I speak to him or about him. Paolo laughs and Andrea listens silently. Again his dark, nocturnal animal’s silence intimidates me.

  While I wanted the three others—a single whole, from which he lived apart—to obey those fundamental rules, with him I gave in, as if he carried his rules within himself. He got up from the table before we’d finished the meal, even if we were discussing something that concerned everyone. The others pointed it out to me. Laura recalled the day she had to eat the pasta she had rejected sitting on a stool in the bathroom, the plate on the toilet lid.

  Andrea stayed awake at night reading. Once I went into the room, and he looked up from the book: Purgatory! “It’s wonderful,” he said without enthusiasm, making a statement.

  Sometimes he told me his dreams, but he usually didn’t confide anything else. The following dream he wrote to me because he didn’t feel like telling it:

  “There’s knocking at the door. I open it and see first of all Grandmother in a big hat like a sombrero that makes her youthful (strange, after climbing the stairs she’s not even out of breath), my sister, who is with her, and Aunt Sisi. I’m glad, it’s the first time they’ve seen my house, and I want to be hospitable. I shift the chairs so they can sit down, but it’s hard for me to move: the place is very small and I have to gauge my movements. As they start talking, I want to make tea: I climb up on the stool to get what I need, open the cupboard, and with great disappointment see that my mother, who meanwhile has appeared on the scene, has arranged her china where my kitchen things should be. I’m angry, I can’t prepare anything anymore. My first instinct is to throw everything on the floor, but I restrain myself, and I hear my sister saying I’m right. My mother would like to make me accept the fait accompli, but, looking down at her, staring into her eyes, I grab the two most beautiful pieces of china and throw them on the floor, one after the other. My mother, unmoving, imperceptibly bites her lower lip, and I stop, because I understand that my gestures have now lost their dramatic power.

  “We’re downstairs, it’s dinnertime. My mother, instead of giving me food, puts in my mouth a rough shard from one of the pieces of china I broke, saying to me bitterly: ‘Look, it’s the most valuable thing I have.’ I insult her: ‘Shithead, I have only four cubic meters and you want to take half.’ My father intervenes, inopportune as always, saying that perhaps ‘shit is a heavy word.’ Instinctively I respond, ‘Coward, then,’ and immediately it occurs to me that that was the right term to wound her. Even if I’m overwhelmed, I cry and shout, I’m satisfied with my revenge. I wake up sitting on the bed, repeating, now without conviction: ‘She’s the one who started it.’ ”

  When did I ever possess “china”?

  That I might be so hateful and hated in my children’s dreams doesn’t worry me; I flow in countless streams within them and my mistakes as a mother belong to the mistakes contained in the lunar vessels of everyone’s follies. Whatever they may have been, they will bear fruit, I tell myself, and I have no power over that fruit, whether sweet or bitter. They don’t seem settled, fixed in themselves, defined.

  I have only sporadic and fleeting feelings of guilt toward my children; but I still shiver sometimes and regret that I kicked Andrea out of the house when he was eighteen, putting two empty suitcases and a hundred thousand lire on his bed. His sudden absences, my not knowing where he was or with whom, put me in a state of such anxiety that I preferred to know that he was out of the house, on his own, so that I wouldn’t have to wait every time, tormenting myself, for a sign of life from him.

  I’ve always had constant, real feelings of guilt toward my books; the only real guilt is “not writing.”

  Nor did I have any guilt feelings toward my students. In a period when confessing collective mistakes had become fashionable—on the example of certain politicians who rightly should have blamed themselves for absolutely individual ones—one of my principals had said during a teachers’ meeting, “. . . because we’re all guilty!” At which I stood up and responded, “Not me.”

  Passion for my work, in fact, cleared me of second thoughts and doubts that were not technical corrections. When, standing in the doorway of the classroom, I looked for a moment at my students and saw them returning promptly from the tumult of recess to their places, where they rose with respect, I was the State, looking with severe eyes on the disorder that was to become order. I was happy to say, “I’m a service of the state, a service that works. Why don’t you take advantage of me? There aren’t many state services that do function.”

  I scolded them: “Damn Italians.” I provoked them: “You won’t get rid of me so easily.” And day after day I went to school, even if I was coughing, had a runny nose, an aching back. I was the state, even with arthritis and bronchitis.

  Naturally I also enjoyed being the state. I said: “You know what you make me think of, Giuseppe, when you have to use your mind? Of the big ape in the savannas who gets up on his back legs for the first time, looks at his hands”—I mime the gesture—“and asks himself: ‘Huh, what’s this?’”

  Next time the class asks: “Will you do the big ape of the savannas again?” Giuseppe smiles, not at all offended, the scoundrel; he even seems pleased to be the center of attention. My little philistines are never offended. Once, one of them asks me: “When will I stop being a damn Italian?” They also reproach me—I’m very proud of their reproaches—and complain about me to me. Salvatore, a small Neapolitan with a strong nose, criticizes me one day for not correcting everyone’s mistaken pronunciation of the French silent r. “Look,” I apologize, “when someon
e makes a lot of mistakes I correct mainly the more serious ones first.”

  I don’t know how much of me had been absorbed by the time I left them, after the final exams. I couldn’t teach much; taught most of them to read correctly and understand what they read, a few to write. I once managed to get out of a gang leader the Calabrian (Latin and Arabic) terms for “cherry” and “stupid,” and he had agreed to grant five minutes of attention to the blackboard on which I had written the Latin and the Arabic.

  A victory no more solid and lasting than the one gained in three minutes during a recess when, in an almost complicit impulse of trust, the same boy confesses that he crucified a cat and skinned it alive: “I committed a murder.” He’s red and sweaty with the emotion of his revelation. I give up correcting him in order not to interrupt.

  For those three minutes I suffered, acknowledging that at any moment they could be revoked: the gang leader would continue to write “Down with the Jews” on walls and, wearing a ski mask with eyeholes, maroon scarf around his neck, would wreck the market stalls near the stadium; and, similarly, the girl with humble eyes whom I had managed to get to pronounce precisely the personal pronoun je—I had a well-founded suspicion that the use and meaning of that “I” was as difficult as its pronunciation—and who though still thin from ages of hunger was already developing some curves from eating processed food (just enough to turn her into merchandise), would sell herself for a few lire.

  I couldn’t forgive those who bought them, even if for different purposes, with the few lire, with an ice cream, a pizza, a class trip provided by the money of well-to-do parents: Weren’t they destroying that fleeting parity, entrusted to achievements not mine, which I had been able to reach in the corridor in those three minutes?

  I felt a singular bitterness, and it was that of the enormous divide between the effort made and the result. It was in any case a bitterness common to those who, like me, great or small, had to support the Italian state in those years. Besides, although my career was disadvantaged and subordinate, it didn’t seem like a waste to me. The satisfaction—in fact, the fulfillment—I got from exercising my damn little Italians, my little philistines, led me in the end to support the poorly developed and poorly regulated rite of careless bureaucratic performances, phony programs, meetings with an eye on the clock, words without reason that from minister to minister perpetuated impotence. Sitting in the back row in the teachers’ meeting room, I read novels during assemblies—I reread all of Proust—and only every so often, raising my head from my book, allowed myself mocking comments on the ministerial newsletters.