Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  I often took long walks on the streets on the hill, alone, or sometimes with my friend Lalla. We sympathized with each other over our vertebrae—her neck hurt, as did my back—which at a distance of centuries still felt the dampness suffered by our common forebears (she on her father’s side, me on my mother’s) while they defended the faith up in the mountains.

  In our peaceful words—I told her the names of trees and flowers, we talked about school and books—common sense prevailed, having descended along with arthritis from ancestral caves. A bitter choice that strains to straighten the back and that, in truth—we both knew—offers few consolations, besides trust in our companions who share this reasoning. A simple and modest occupation, suited to the steps of those climbing up and down.

  At home, when I was driven out of my corners, my possible dissatisfactions could be due only to my bad character. Of the terrible inner fury that without direction or purpose gnawed at me, my mother, innocent and indifferent, absorbed by her own complaints, perceived nothing and continued to lay her troubles on my “happiness,” as she called it.

  Precisely defined and returned to my role as a bad girl, I struggled within the maternal constraint that seemed to repeat and emphasize the wrongs I’d endured in my life as a woman: the disavowal of the necessary work of my hands, taken for granted, the solitary burden of responsibilities, also obvious.

  I had leaped over an untasted maturity not into the resignation of old age but into the disorder of an unnatural adolescence—caught in the timeless shadows—of words unsayable and acts uncompleted. Through the involuntary mediation of my children, I had completed the usual leap forward, the blind rational leap behind which I now had to limp along. I wasn’t ready—neither of us was ready—for old age. This seemed my imagination; my mother wanted always to appear the same, and, just as I had erased myself to support the public figure of my husband, I now had to sustain her in her pride. Throughout the day I’d wonder: “And me?”

  Unlike my children I couldn’t smile affectionately at her stubbornness, her ostentatious displays of virtue, her small deceptions; I couldn’t fail to see intention and purpose in her actions. As if she were playing that last card of hers against me (against me alone)—what were my ailments and my hard work in the face of the death she saw advancing—to silence me, as always.

  Soon after she was settled at our house, Gianni unexpectedly had to have a gallstone operation.

  He had always enjoyed perfect physical health, even in periods when he was stressed by nervous overexcitement. I had learned to pay attention to his sleepless nights (ordinarily he could sleep even twelve hours straight), to his sudden uncontrollable streams of words, but I had never had to worry about the cigarettes he smoked, the irregularity of his hours, his improvident way of living. I envied him that health, but I also counted on it.

  That same autumn I had taken care of my mother’s move to our house, made sure she found everything ready, the silver polished on the table, the books in order on the shelves. When, shortly before Christmas, Gianni was about to return, after a month in the hospital, I accepted an invitation to stay for three days in Lazio with my friends Vera and Roberto, among the few old friends with whom I still felt at ease.

  I got everything ready with the usual care; my children were used to keeping house without me, once the essentials were in place.

  My mother greeted the announcement of my departure in silence. As always I had had to overcome my fear to go and tell her. More than a conversation it had been a monologue on my part, she had been silent, never looking at me directly but staring at the corners of her room.

  An hour later I was in the kitchen, filling containers with Gianni’s diet foods; she looked in.

  “Laura’s on the phone. She wants you.”

  She stood in the doorway, slowly rubbing together her small hands resting against her lap, a gesture she made often as if to warm them, but one that just then seemed to me to express a secret satisfaction. Usually she showed me those hands after preparing one of her excellent minestrones for us, complaining every time that her skin was ruined because she’d had to peel and cut up the vegetables.

  I went to the telephone in the living room. My daughter was having a difficult pregnancy; she had lost a child in a miscarriage two years earlier and now, in the third month, she had to stay in bed. I hadn’t told my mother this; I hid the family troubles from her as much as possible. I don’t really know if it was out of concern or so as not to have to endure her anxieties as well as my own.

  “Grandmother told me you’re going away?”

  So my mother had telephoned her; it occurred to me that in fact I hadn’t heard the phone ring.

  “Three days,” I said, “I’m going with Vera and Roberto. I’m tired, you know I spent practically the whole summer in the city with Grandmother.”

  My daughter was silent. I said anxiously:

  “Everything’s ready, as usual.”

  “Papa comes home from the hospital tomorrow,” my daughter said, and that was all. I realized—but still was reluctant to believe it—that my mother had called her to complain about my departure, about my leaving the house on her shoulders. On her, who was served meticulously by everyone.

  “I’ll see him Saturday,” I said, “he’s doing really well and is glad for me to have a little vacation. I only have these three days.”

  “Okay, bye,” said my daughter, in the colorless, chilly voice of her doubts, and hung up the phone.

  At that moment I was swallowed up by an inner convulsion so violent that it emptied me of any reaction that wasn’t the fury I had kept inside for years.

  She, my mother, who had lived as freely as a man, for whom other women, as for a man, had raised children and grandchildren, like a man drove me back into my place as a servant. She blackmailed me through my sons, my daughter, soliciting their complicity. And like that, just like that, she wouldn’t hesitate to ask for Gianni’s, so that I would continue to support the architecture she could blend into without owing me anything. She who, the previous summer, groaning with pain every day while I laced and unlaced her orthopedic girdle, had never let a word of blame escape for the silence of my sister, who had gone on a monthlong cruise. But she hadn’t failed to exclaim, using a specific and deliberate plural: “My poor daughters, your mother is becoming a burden to you!”

  I went to my son Pietro’s room. Walking as if thunderstruck, I could repeat to myself, in a frenzy, only the same phrase: “You won’t even make a cup of tea for yourself! You won’t even make a cup of tea for yourself!”

  “I’m not going,” I said to him, “it’s impossible.”

  “Why, Mammi, it will do you good!”

  “I can’t,” I said, “your grandmother will make you pay.”

  “I’ll manage with Grandmother.”

  “No,” I said, “you won’t. Only I know how to deal with her.”

  In the weeks that followed, I did my duties toward her tirelessly, as if contracted in a cramp of revenge: I didn’t fail to offer the proper word—hadn’t propriety always been important to her?—a soup, a morning tea for the flu, a pill for a backache, a walk in the early spring sun. She lived with the daughter she herself wanted: the mean, useful girl.

  In the shower, where no one could hear me, I let out my anger, insulting her aloud. I said as in a litany: “Feces, snot, pee, don’t forget your duties.” When, seeing me busy in the kitchen, she asked me, good-humored and greedy: “What are you giving your sick person today?” For that “your,” which yet again chained me to my family’s illnesses and her old age as if to a natural moment of my life, I could have killed her.

  Yet in those months when she was finding me again as a daughter, I realized that she was beginning to be afraid of me, of my labors, of my angry, mute bitterness. Time, which until now had denied us a story, had reversed the roles: I the mother and she the child. Not the mother I had become for my children, however, but the mother she had been, inaccessible and perfect in the
firmament of childhood. And she feared in me her own lack of love.

  Because, simply, that was the certainty that had struck me as I was going to Pietro’s room: “She had never carried me inside, I didn’t exist in her.”

  To this certainty, small and profound like my enlightenments, my anger gradually yielded; I couldn’t help comparing the frail old woman that my mother was becoming with the giant figure against whom I conducted my battle. I saw her protect herself—she who’d been so bold—with the lies and the silent pout with which I, as a child, had protected myself from her. This new, unexpected resemblance surprised me and filled me with a sense of guilt, but didn’t transform my resentment into generosity. My anger, although spent, in fact lay in my mind like a gigantic boulder that is the reminder of a cataclysm. I couldn’t touch anything, I couldn’t bear to rummage among my shards and my trash. I lived day by day and couldn’t accept myself; even my adolescent diary, which I was rereading, irritated me.

  I had picked it up the night my first grandchild was born and had begun to read it as I waited for the phone call from my son-in-law. Leafing through those pages, in which my writing seemed somewhat awkward and alien, I felt that the expected birth reconnected me in some way to that writing, it was—like the birth of Andrea—again an end and a beginning, even if, I said to myself, of a future sustained on whose periphery I would be only a fragment.

  Around the same time, that evening on the Po when we’d ended up talking about Waldensian history, Costanza, a consultant at the Italian state broadcasting network RAI, had proposed that I write something.

  “Why don’t you do a short script on the subject? I’ll present it.”

  “It’s a story of men,” my friend Luissa had said. “You always write stories about men.”

  “Not true,” I defended myself, “I also write about women.”

  “We always expect that you’ll tell the whole story, but you pass us by.”

  “I know them too well,” I replied, “they don’t interest me.”

  “Write about yourself, for once,” Luissa had said.

  “I can’t write about myself,” I’d said, “I’m not ready yet.”

  It was September, the canning was done, I carried the jars to the cellar. Then I amused myself by writing a script.

  After thirty years the mountain people, the forebears of my grandfather Gioanni Daniele, return to walk on the sun-drenched stony ground and the high plateaus, yellow in autumn, the only sound the very faint rustling of dry grass in the wind and the birdlike whistle of the marmots; they cross the mountains at two thousand meters, under the weight of guns and baggage, with their Occitan calls echoing from valley to valley, psalms sung, vines planted among the rocks.

  When I finished the script, I handed it in and started to wait. The thing seemed to be going forward; I had some fears. What did I know about films and screenplays? I would have to learn a new language and I would necessarily be pushed into the background, an old and awkward character.

  A director from Rome whom RAI chose to make the film got in touch; he was respectful—“I understand that this story is also your story,” he had said, and I was stunned for a moment—but he wasn’t very clear about the timing or the responsibilities. I began to sniff papist and Roman traps in which I risked having to do a lot work for the glory of others. His Waldensians, in the end, weren’t mine. His discussed doctrine in a loquacious and earnest manner, mine are more concerned with the practical elements of defense and survival. No, I said to myself, better to get in line for a monthly paycheck rather than deal with some anonymous character who knows nothing about me and will pay me in unpredictable banknotes, different every month. The paycheck, too, is always different, though not by much; a small, clean government paycheck that certainly won’t be related to the work I’ve undertaken with the scruples required by the Waldensian God: the State should be served properly; only thus, when the moment arrives, alas sometimes inevitable, can one disobey it.

  Meanwhile I began to do more extensive research on the subject.

  On a clear autumn day I got in the car with my friend Chicchi to go to Balsiglia, where in 1689 a famous battle was fought between the Waldensians and the troops of the duke allied with Louis XIV. In the small café beside the bridge we were served an excellent tea—the best tea to be found in Italian cafés is in the valleys, perhaps to compensate for all the wine guzzled by the Fathers—by a woman who spoke with the high, clear, rolled-r timbre of many Waldensian women. The sound of that r, in male voices as well—even my Dutch cousin’s voice has it—is for me an immediate signal in which I can’t separate the fear of rejection from the hope of welcome.

  That autumn day, the few old houses across the bridge under the crest of Balsiglia with its four sharp peaks were in shadow and locked up, the small museum was also closed.

  We walked up part of the way to observe from across the stream the wooded slopes where three centuries earlier the battle was fought. The family that owned the café was digging potatoes out of the ground in a field a little ways off; the Germanasca descended gurgling. It was the same Germanasca into which three centuries earlier the Tron-Poulat brothers—those who were harvesting their potatoes were also called Tron or Poulat—had thrown the mill’s grindstone before leaving, armed, for Swiss exile. They recovered it later from the waters of the stream, as they prepared for the long winter of 1689 in their bunkers.

  I looked at them, the Tron-Poulat family, digging potatoes, and again a sense of inadequacy surprised me, similar to the one that had overwhelmed me when the peasant in Angrogna, leading his animals into the stable, had told me we were cousins. The fall day was so intense around me, in the blue of the sky, in the clear air fragrant with thyme and resin, in the gestures of the people who down below were putting potatoes in sacks, that I seemed an imperfect filter for this reality—which is the same, I said to myself, as that of the era of the events I want to narrate. There was no bond between me and that world, which remained outside me. No, the poor, rocky houses in shadow, the four pointed peaks, the woman with the high, clear voice marked by those r’s, were not related to me. Their history didn’t precede me, I hadn’t come from that.

  And yet the Western was still there, entire; as then, my heroes weren’t always heroic—had I not planned the film precisely so that the Fathers would get down from their pedestal?—and, as then, my Catholics didn’t belong to the hated circle of the persecuting authorities and the mute cops.

  In fact, today I pay new attention to their motivations, even if I continue to feel antipathy toward official aspects of the Church—the gold, the purple, the hateful chanting, the bureaucratic obsession with rites, and even that Italian literary and political style, with its excessive and deliberately ambiguous use of adjectives, which to myself I call “Catholic.”

  When, on the screen, the pope looks out his window, my mother, although she doesn’t seem at all connected to her origins, sniffs, her habitual expression of scorn, and observes: “Look at that cuckoo!”

  Digging among the documents—I sit for hours in the Biblioteca Reale and delight in reading the anti-Waldensian pamphlets of Prior Marco Aurelio Rorengo; his style is rough but vivid, not at all “Catholic,” and I find the Fathers quoted in their everyday language, the moods of the seventeenth century, the details of a quarrelsome but not bloody coexistence in that brief period. I take notes and ponder: it seems to me that I am equidistant between the religious arguments of the prior and those of the Fathers (I am, in truth, indifferent as usual to doctrine), although not, naturally, between those of the persecuted and the persecutors.

  One night I ask Gianni: “If you were dying, would you want the last rites?” I realize that he reflects before answering in the negative; that hesitation surprises me and distances him from my idea of him, but, I don’t know why, compensates me for an earlier response. Seeing the pope on the screen, I was gripped by one of my thoughts and asked him: “Do you think he believes in it?” and he immediately, calmly, replied,
“Of course not!”

  One day my daughter has lunch with us. Her baby, a few months old, sleeps in the next room while we eat. Describing my research at the Biblioteca Reale, I cite the four hundred children who were abducted from their families and given to families of solid Catholic faith during the campaign of 1686.

  “Four hundred,” I say, “never returned, despite their claims.”

  My daughter turns pale; her freckles go gray.

  “Is that true?” she asks.

  “Of course it’s true.”

  “I,” Laura says, “would immediately become a Catholic.”

  Catholic? Why not? Our children aren’t baptized; we got married in the town hall in Turin and my young communist colleague and friend, tiny in her large tricolor scarf, read the customary formulas. “Let the children decide,” we had said.

  Suddenly, however, I don’t know how to respond to my daughter. That I, rather, would have fled over paths and cliff faces?

  When she’s gone, I recall the phrase that Vera’s grandmother used when speaking to one of her grandchildren who had become a Catholic in order to get married: “You preferred the light of the candle to the light of the sun.” I write it down, I find it beautiful, I will use it.

  For that matter, I’m constantly finding beautiful phrases that accord with the facts in the documents I’m consulting.

  It’s 1688, a Catholic farmer who has bought a farm confiscated by the duke from the Waldensians now exiled in Switzerland—forever, it’s thought—is sowing when he hears a voice from the other side of the fence: “Hey you, listen! Odin’s telling you to sow carefully for next year!”