Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  Only with a few colleagues did I find a common understanding. When, for about a year, I’d had official responsibilities on the school board, I realized—to my surprise—that I had lived till then in an ideological isolation that, working in the classroom with students, I’d been completely unaware of. Now I stood before the enemy, with my meager, ingenuous, and partisan tools. To find a solution for even a tiny problem (I discovered I had a different concept of priorities), I would have to embark on a slow, careful political scheme. I lacked a suitable language, I was direct and sometimes deliberately inappropriate; at home, the children made fun of me: “Barbetta”—or even “Mittel-European”; that is, Protestant—“here’s the same old barbetta.” My obstinacies had for them something exotic in which they couldn’t distinguish the Lutheran devil (certainly not Mittel-European) from the barbetto God, who continued to insist that any battle was worth the fight provided it was a good one.

  But I faced yet more proof that institutions rejected me. My snobbishness as a member of a minority by now gave me only scant satisfaction, and I stubbornly persisted in useless, exhausting efforts that sank in the Catholic swamp.

  I was fifty, and I got up at six thirty in the morning to take the tram—my school was on the outskirts—in the cold, still Turinese winter mornings. At the end of the day I was aching with exhaustion all over. But I didn’t feel like giving up either teaching or the work at home; casual conversations with colleagues, the hours in class, the piles of laundry to iron, all anchored my days. School on one side, home on the other, they were the mutual alibis by which I didn’t have to be completely available to anyone. They were obliging grooves that nevertheless gave me the only possible freedom, that of a certain mental reserve.

  In my big, increasingly empty house—Laura and Paolo now lived on their own and I had premonitions of the departure of the other two—I had become used to doing all the work myself and I went through the rooms in silence, no longer followed by the complaints of those women who worked for me part-time. Sometimes for days I’d leave dust on furniture previously polished with great care. I avoided seeing people who had been our friends as a couple; every so often I’d march, slightly out of breath, in a demonstration in which I could shout my rage aloud, and only in an occasional resurgence of activism did I prepare one of those great dinners I’d enjoyed cooking for the whole circle of our friends.

  Only writing took me out of the darkness. Writing was within the narrow measure of my mental reserve. Erasing my tracks as usual, like an Indian being followed, I wrote La Principessa della luna vecchia (The Princess of the Old Moon), the most cheerful and ironic of my books, dedicated to my children and their friends, the only future that seemed possible.

  There was a separation between Gianni and me that lasted years. Our life as a couple seemed over; having won a room for myself, I closed the door at night after dinner and didn’t respond even to the ringing phone. Gianni didn’t speak to anyone and didn’t speak to me; at the table, alone with me, he didn’t ask for the salt or the wine, he pointed.

  I was going through a difficult menopause that I tried to control by means of hygienic and psychological rituals. I certainly wasn’t capable of evaluating the scope of my troubles: I was used to the idea that my imagination exaggerated them. I got my revenge even on the malevolent rule of the Fathers stating that one must suffer in silence; I treated my body that—I kept saying to myself—was no longer pleasing to a man or a newborn, and that had always been alien to me anyway, like a machine I had to maintain so that it would function. I was terrified that it would disobey, and I watched it from up close: cut out the rusty gears immediately, get rid of the broken parts, prostheses, hooks, switches.

  I’d had a turtle for a few months. I had managed to get it through the winter in a hole dug in the soil inside a chest on the balcony. In spring I had fed it a salad it was very greedy for. I got up early even when I didn’t have to go to school—I often slept badly—and first of all went out to the balcony and called it. Hearing my voice, it moved its legs and pushed its head out of the shell.

  One May morning I was awakened at dawn by a storm. I went to get Lipitza—we had found it in Yugoslavia as it was crossing the street—and placed it on the floor at my feet with its ration of salad. I was correcting homework; outside, the black-and-white dawn was striped with lightning flashes. Lipitza, having eaten the salad, lay down, legs extended and head resting on my shoe. My only gestures of tenderness were for its fetal acts.

  Resentments proliferated in my mind. I couldn’t forgive our mutual friends (my ex-friends, I called them to myself) for not perceiving the distance—measured not by events, however, but by inflexible, intimate conclusions—between my appearance and my frenzied inner world.

  I didn’t dare to separate from Gianni even though no day passed when I didn’t think of it. I was restrained by the nagging thought of what both he—whom I was used to caring for—and, above all, my children would do. I couldn’t impose on them what had been imposed on me. To let my image as an optimistic and tenacious mother fade. But more than anything else I held on to a firm idea of the unity of our nuclear family, and it seemed to me that I intuited in its cohesion a secret force that was stronger by far than my personal possibilities. When my daughter, at the age of twenty, left us with a sudden, violent act of revolt, amid my cries of despair, anger, and surprise, I felt that her departure made a burning wound in the heart of this nucleus, as if by leaving she had also carried off a living part of her brothers.

  My resentments became furious when, during evenings with friends, I heard Gianni speaking, charming and inventive—yet again I unlikable, the other appealing, he the artist, I the drone—and I recognized his juggler’s tricks. As a faithful old partner, I couldn’t reveal them, an ally in spite of everything. The struggle grew by the hour; the awareness, even here, of my isolation, and of the impossibility of breaking it by persuading others, sometimes led me to wild explosions of protest. Shouting on behalf of the oppressed—my bursts of anger were usually on political subjects—I was shouting on behalf of myself.

  I was sitting, mortally weary, like a corpse in which a support stick has been inserted between back and overcoat, and I looked at my ex-friends, his accomplices. Had even one of them urged me to be “good” with him who was so good, “the poor fellow”? Of course I, too, was afraid of appearing mean to the children if I abandoned their father, helpless, in the woods.

  In the meantime, my mother, who was now seven-ty-nine, had on the advice of her doctor—she had fallen and fractured two vertebrae—and at my insistence moved to our house. I needed to simplify the problem of how to help her, I felt responsible for her, and I thought that if she lived with us it would be a matter of providing for her, so independent and lucid, that bit of nursing and domestic help that I was used to giving all my family.

  When, twenty-six years earlier, I had told her I was getting married—unexpected news, because what sort of man (or here, too, “the poor fellow”) “would be so crazy as to marry you!”—she had had a beautiful trousseau made for me and had given me the most valuable piece of furniture she had, a nineteenth-century cherrywood writing desk.

  She could barely forgive my sister for her divorce from a man who seemed exceptional and never asked her the reasons. No one could have been worse than the husband from whom she herself had had to separate. When, years later, I explained the reasons for my sister’s divorce, she appeared surprised (and incredulous) and changed the subject.

  Once I was settled in my marriage, she periodically gave me beautiful and useful presents for the house. She kept any possible confidences at a distance with both arms; my condition as a “happily” married woman governed and limited our relationship. Naturally she favored my husband, and she came to me through my children, whom she loved without preference or distinction, showering them with presents and following their adventures.

  A photograph of her: she’s sitting erect on the beach, a pale skirt under a pale sweater f
laps in an almost autumnal whiteness; around her Laura, Paolo, and Pietro, as children. She smiles with a happy, rapt smile, not at the photographer but at the September day.

  I continued to court her, to challenge her to the intimacy that would have confirmed her affection, and sometimes I seemed to pirouette around her to win her approval. Every so often I had fits of rage and hatred—and then one of those very rare fights broke out—because she never failed to keep reminding me of any help she gave. I tried to turn to her as infrequently as possible, because I couldn’t bear those complaints.

  Not at all obsessive about money, which she still earned, working—I was never afraid of being without it—generous and magnificent in her gifts, she was capable of reminding me years later that she had once had to wipe the bottom of one of my children, and if for some reason I had no household help, it seemed that I demanded that she wash the dishes. Between her and me, between her generation and mine, a real class difference widened; she wasn’t used to manual labor (which if necessary she did extremely well)—she had had baby nurses, governesses, cook and maid, and thus had never considered the amount of work I’d had to take on.

  We also had moments of serenity, talking about my children, books, her translations; she translated from Russian, she was modest, exacting, grateful for the beauty of the text she was translating, fierce about others’ mistakes.

  In summer, after a month spent together (not without storms, because, naturally, she wasn’t used to staying with others, and the grandchildren, taken all together, were a little less adorable), she lived by herself in our house in the mountains, watered the flowers, polished the doorknobs, read her books in the sun; when she returned to Turin in September she was tanned and wrinkled like an old Angrognina.

  In the city she came to us every night at quarter to seven from her small bright, elegant apartment, near ours. She talked to the grandchildren, who were having a bath and getting ready for dinner. She smoked in every corner of the house—she didn’t stop smoking until the age of eighty, and I dared to make fun of her, saying “virtue takes the slow road!”—and once she crushed a lighted butt in a fried egg, mistaking it for an ashtray (she was very nearsighted). When she was making something to eat, one of the grandchildren observed the cylinder of ash as it got longer and longer, balanced over what she was cooking. Meanwhile she would talk about her job—she taught French in a middle school—and her sharp, well-honed insults, especially about her principal, were probably the first swear words my children heard from the mouth of an adult.

  Alone with me she was cautious and slightly ill at ease. One afternoon when she was already old she summoned me to her house, and, reminding me of “everything she had done for my children,” charged me to hand over, after her death, her most valuable objects, the ones she cared about most, to my sister, who didn’t have children and who, after her divorce from her American husband, lived and worked in Turin. Pressing together her lips, which she dampened a little with her tongue, she spoke with precision: the Russian silver, Grandmother’s worktable, the prints, and two eighteenth-century porcelain vases. She scrutinized the room with her small, light brown eyes, as if to forget nothing. I had so profound a fear of her closed face that, witnessing her as she lay dying, I winced if an unconscious shadow of severity ever crossed it.

  So as she searched with her gaze, it didn’t occur to her—in her mind I had been so subsumed by my children—to leave to me any object she cared about.

  From my grandmother’s house I kept the big pale-walnut Provençal wardrobe, the small painting of her parents’ house, the little table that held the Bible in the living room, a small chair, and Grandfather’s Bible, in which someone had stuck a scrap of paper, the writing on it already unsteady,

  noting Mark 4:35: “ . . . et Jésus dit: passons à l’autre rive.”21 Grandfather’s books.

  And two large porcelain cups, with pink painted roses, one without a handle; I use it in the morning for breakfast.

  Returning home after that monologue of bequests, I was distressed and disturbed. It seemed to me—and I was childishly resentful and uneasy—that the old blackmail leaked out of my mother’s words: “When I’m not here anymore, you’ll see.” But that list especially upset me, it was so precise, delivered with compressed lips and evasive eyes. The bequests didn’t matter—it was true, besides, that my mother had lavished gifts on her grandchildren, had bought games, books, clothes, taken them to the movies, the circus, the beach—and yet I felt (and was wounded by it) that, as usual without appearing to, she had intended to exclude me from her silver, from her eighteenth-century vases, from her prints, and gradually from the drawers with the powder-colored nightgowns, cream-colored gloves, the gold pin with the cameo. From the secret of her preciousness. Maybe, I tried to convince myself, she wanted to trust me, by making that consignment, but I swallowed my tears and wondered: I would never succeed in understanding her.

  Behind her unease and my fear, we both remained stuck at the same point where we’d left each other in Riga. Each of us probed what was dissimilar in the other: I, in her, her reluctance. Absolute in her passions, she either loved or hated; unable to mediate, she would suddenly cast off those she considered unworthy or unfaithful, with the same secret joy with which she annihilated me in her furious judgments, but she called on reason as a motive for her abandonment. She, in me, my need to convince and conquer, thus my indiscretion. I wouldn’t easily resign myself to losing someone, I calculated, but my reasonableness led me to find a justification for everyone. Behind a deliberately shut door, she might not give in for years; I was always ready to turn back at the first blandishment. If I barred the door—I, too, was very touchy—I stayed close to it hoping to be called back, and consoled myself by fantasizing. She hated fantasies and was ill-suited to imagination (translating Pasternak in masterly fashion, she constantly asked me for confirmation: “Do you think it’s possible that this is really what he wanted to say?”), so she detested my fantasies and saw my imagination as a lie.

  After her death, I had to put her things in order and found some letters that were still sealed. Letters from some aristocratic German women with von surnames—“Liebes Signorchen . . . ”—had never been opened, including even the last ones from Tante Erna, dear friend and aunt of our childhood. In Germany my mother also corresponded with the former head of her office in the economic section of the German command in Turin, where she’d worked as an interpreter. She, who regularly passed on information to the resistance movement, admired that pacific and honest man, who after the war wrote to her at length: “Liebe, sehr verehrte Frau Coïsson . . .”

  The letters from the cousin who had sent the news of our father’s death were unopened, apart from the first, closely written on sheets of transparent paper. My mother had never let us read it, although she reported to us the contents. The cousin had written again, asking why she hadn’t had a response. Also unopened was a letter from my uncle’s lawyer, in which he insisted on clarifying the situation of the house in Torre Pellice following a lawsuit with a negative outcome for my mother.

  She had never opened that correspondence—as she hadn’t left any written note of her wishes—but had kept it intact in her drawers, delivering herself, hidden, to me.

  In reality we were present to each other in the first person, above all and only, in the letters we exchanged, a probably decisive epiphany on many occasions.

  As soon as she settled in with us, with her furniture and her things, in her tidy, polished room—she hired and paid a woman to come three times a week to clean it, and the other rooms as well—an implacable light was shed on my shadows, tracking me down in the most silent moments, the most remote corners. If I was concealed there with an image of my children’s childhood, an inexact family date, some buffoonery, there she was, precise, cutting me out in a dazzling blade of light, reducing, diminishing, dispossessing.

  In my limbo I took shelter in a hazy existence, with no outlines: I wandered back and forth on the path
way of the same thoughts—whether to end my marriage, stay alone with the two children who were still home, find a small house near the school—and tried to gather, here and there, in a disordered, slightly maniacal way, the crumbs that were exclusively mine to keep. In my mind I made lists of what I still cared about and what I would throw away without regret. I had emptied my room of furniture, placed my books, my necklaces, lotions, and some unframed photographs on metal shelves inherited from a child’s room.

  I tried to get rid of the womanly ornaments that remained to me. I have no further need for symbols, I said to myself: the cup with blue-and-white squares (the only relic of my childhood in Riga), my newborn daughter’s pink undershirts, the silver vase dented because it frequently fell off the small dresser in the entrance hall, knocked down by the children hurrying by.

  One night I threw my wedding ring in the toilet.

  I treasured, on the other hand, even casual encounters, with anyone.

  With the beautiful unknown woman I met in Piazza San Carlo during a demonstration one morning in June, 1976. I wandered here and there in the crowd of young men and women, in blue jeans or flowered skirts, clogs on their feet, children astride shoulders, young policemen in civilian clothes with faces freshly shaven amid those slightly dirty youths with their red flags. I was obviously the only mother in the square—the only father, Vittorio Foa, was on the stage—and I couldn’t make up my mind to stay. Until, behind the stage, I found that other mother of my age, in a tight flowered dress, also in search of a place. We talked for a few minutes, she gazed at me with beautiful luminous green eyes. She had eight children—she told me (her dark hair was streaked with white)—and she had left home with the younger ones. She was on their side, against her husband and the older children. She spoke calmly and decisively.