Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre

  Or the French Huguenot caught in an ambush: as he climbs the gallows constructed on market day in the main square of Pinerolo, he speaks, praying aloud: “They have bread up at the Balsiglia, and gunpowder and salt and wine and wool from their flocks and blankets and fabric and pots; and around the bunkers canals to let the water flow out. And the God of armies fights on their side. And they have bread and salt and wine.” And the people who listen weep in amazement.

  I don’t weep and I’m not amazed: I narrate.

  My barbetta arrogance is a bastard arrogance, a pale reflection of the just arrogance of those who have a history. Of the joyful arrogance that burns in the great bonfires lighted every year on February 17th. It’s a bastardized reflection that scarcely illuminates my pages, descended as it is through other pages. I’m a Gypsy who goes around in her caravan, telling stories: here are the victims, here the executioners, here the avengers and the happy ending.

  And yet I say to myself, I would never become a Catholic, ever.

  One morning I write: “ . . . in Grandmother’s garden in Torre Pellice grew herbs brought by my Huguenot great-grandmother from her garden in Provence.” Then with my mother I check the names of the herbs, we can’t identify the name of the herb that was used with peas.

  Now every so often she’ll talk to me about when she was a child. A few sentences, spoken almost with bitterness, reflective. She recalls her father’s severity: “My father hit me because I confused b with d. I was four. My grandmother Jeannette—the Huguenot—in the next room said: ‘Ah mon Dieu, mon Dieu, mon Dieu’ while I took it.”

  The finds of domestic archeology regarding my mother’s family are scant. There were repeatedly ruptures so sharp, separations and detachments so sudden (my mother, for example, decided in a few days, for reasons that she never completely explained, to leave a teaching job in Italy—where, she told me, they didn’t pay her in summer—to accept a job at the University of Riga, in a country, Latvia, at an immense geographic and historical distance from the little valley she came from), that it’s difficult to reconstruct a story in which the relations among the main characters intertwine in a complementary, continuous, and evolving manner. Each has his own particular story and is locked into it like a hostile monad. They interact through a contest of merits (where even grammar and dictionary are weapons of perfection) that is never decided because it lacks the single soothing approval, the impossible approval of the barbetto God. For a merely passing grade in Latin Grandfather took his daughter out of middle school, while he let his son, who got even lower grades, go to high school. She never forgave him, but even today she says: “I was his favorite, even though he never let it show.”

  She doesn’t hesitate to say bad things about her brother, of whom she was extremely envious; she alludes to their mother’s preference for him: “My mother couldn’t stand it that I was more intelligent than my brother.” She speaks with the conscious violence that one of the Fathers might have used talking about the water of a bealera, an irrigation channel, stolen by the neighbor.

  Meanwhile I go on writing about Grandmother, who killed the chicken over the stream in the garden. And I see and smell the water running in the garden, in summer, between the stone facing of the banks—a deep smell, like a cellar, different from the smell of the water that pours over the stones of the Pellice and descends, green and clear, in rapid channels toward the factory. Deep as the fragrance of the leaves on the hillside paths between steep high walls of earth held up by rocks and roots; while the sour scent from the sun on the vine leaves is faint.

  I’d need an interval, not to fill with something but a truly hollow, empty break, fresh as the hillside paths, where I could find shelter without asking for anything.

  I’m at a standstill and not writing when the RAI contract arrives; confirming my initial distrust, it’s very vague about terms, doesn’t specify what I’m supposed to do. Furthermore—and this really irritates me—a third of the already small sum promised to me has been added to the director’s compensation. I’d rather work for nothing than be underpaid.

  I telephone immediately and rescind the contract, and to the director I write a rude, clear letter: my Waldensians will remain mine.

  As always when I say no, I’m almost happy and I move on immediately to other projects. Why not make a documentary with interviews in the valleys that were catholicized three centuries ago, the Cuneo valleys, Val di Susa, the valley of Pragelato?

  I search for and can’t find a book I thought I had on the Cuneo valleys; I take a map and trace some routes. I go back to the scattered pages where I wrote the sentences about Torre Pellice and write: “. . . I remember very clearly the first time I said to myself, I’m happy! I was seventeen and was running down across the lawn.”

  At first the girl running struggles to gain an outline. My reluctance to portray her originates in my present aversion toward my past, toward exposing it, defining it: an aversion that has a bizarre counterpoint in the persistence with which I pursue the past of others.

  I will write about Concettina, a student of mine twelve years ago. The first time I had her read, I noticed, surprised, the r that distinctly indicated an unusually correct French pronunciation. Concettina—tall, blond, the blond of grain, not of flax—read with the slightly hoarse voice of many southern children. She was from Puglia, from Faeto, she said, in the province of Foggia. At home she spoke an Angevin dialect (she still pronounced the h in haut); the priest had the documents from Faeto in the parish, but wouldn’t show them to anyone, and at that Concettina smiled.

  I didn’t tell Concettina that there were probably other documents, too, perhaps in the archive of the inquisition in Trani. In these documents would be the bloody story of Faeto, Waldensian since the Middle Ages and converted by force during the Counter-Reformation. Listening to Concettina read with her fresh, everyday pronunciation, I imagined that in her town people had continued for years to read the Bible secretly in French—or perhaps to recite, handing down the texts orally—and that was why their language had been preserved for so long. Occitan or Franco-Provençal? On that subject Concettina later wrote her thesis. Tall, blond, and beautiful, she married in the church and the priest officiated, as he had for her mother and her mother’s mother.

  I say to myself that I’d like to investigate her smile and the silences of her people. Investigate what remains, even if it’s only a tacit reserve.

  But what about me, what remained in me? In me, a bastard without history, who clings to the history of others, who, in the end, doesn’t even have Concettina’s undetected roots, her tenacious secret “Angevin”?

  In fact the Waldensian God never gives up anyone. He pursues and redeems even bastards. And besides, the Fathers have never given up anything in his name, not a piece of land, a wooded slope, a newborn goat, a water source, a strip of cold sky carved out by the window. Why should they give up Concettina or me?

  To him, crouching in my mind, I am bound by a pact that contradicts itself because it’s imposed and not ratified: a disagreement. A pact of unfaithfulness. A bare pole, planted deep below the surface of minority resentments. In fact the node of unreasonableness (Catholic, never) that I felt gradually swelling inside me as I wrote about the Fathers is wrapped around a denial that, far from bringing me back to their indomitable past, reconnects me to something of myself, remote not in centuries but in repudiations.

  This I should retrace, here would be clues to follow and join together in that other book that Luissa asked of me. I have to write about myself.

  Some weeks after I’d decided not to sign the contract with RAI and after putting books and notes back on a shelf—like jars stored in the cellar—I again sat down at the typewriter and started this book.

  But though I began with the urgency of an inquiry, with the call of the barbetto God, other, completely different motives crowded around, in references and recollections. As I went forward, as I checked, had second thoughts, tried to connect, I not only stumbled in
my chronological disorder and my geographical inattention but felt the need to find a distance that wasn’t simply the past. I would have liked to be able not to divide the narrating I from the past I, not have the one predetermined by the other, point to the signs contained in the circle that was closing. Only in the present—a great present, without walls—would I be able to give unity to the I, but the present refused.

  Before me were my life and my book, and more and more every day it seemed that the former could be transmuted and absorbed into the latter. The pages I wrote took on an irrevocable aspect and oppressed me with an ever-increasing intrusiveness.

  Typing I heard my mother cough in the next room and walk along the hall, and my intention to portray her, someone so evasive and diffident, seemed a betrayal on my part. Yet another betrayal. When I went out I hid the pages that were ready, and once when she asked if I was writing something I said no. At times it was as if her presence physically overpowered the possibility of writing.

  I was realizing that I didn’t want to describe her, find suitable terms, re-create important moments. A real stinginess restrained me. I couldn’t allow her adventures in which she wasn’t my mother, and I tried to crush her under a nagging comparison that I could barely keep from becoming gossip. Happy episodes didn’t occur to me, those comic observations (even of herself) in which her sarcasm softened. I didn’t know how to evoke her sonorous voice, in which the r’s buzzed in the catarrh. I remembered only her silence or the reverse, cutting opinions and tempestuous scenes.

  So I hesitated about whether to record facts, diminish, verify—and so, why not, exorcise—or even give it up: I haven’t understood, haven’t accepted, and don’t know how to represent it. Sink yet again under the ice of the winter sea in Riga.

  In the end, in that long period of uncertainty I recognized that the lines I had struggled to produce, erase, rewrite were nothing but a deep inner cry for help and would never be able to get past the cry; of the book that should have contended only with itself, I was making an accomplice.

  On the other hand I was also turning it into a monument on which conclusions were carved that would comfort and justify myself. A brilliant—and intrusive—restorer who joined together the Gothic stone hands of the Earl of Arundel and his countess wife on their tomb in Chichester Cathedral may perhaps move a public that consoles itself with the peacefulness of death. But that remains a work of restoration that does not concern either the living or the dead. And really, doesn’t seeking peace through a book amount to another misrepresentation? Life alone can give peace and war, and the book has only to tell about that.

  And so I wrote and rewrote, seeking the path from me to what I wrote and from there to the reader and then from the reader back to the book, extricating me from the writing and the writing from me.

  Meanwhile we had had to move and were living in a small apartment on the second floor of an old building in the city center, with vaulted ceilings, deep, sunken windows, very elegant fittings, in winter not much light and in summer a courtyard that was often foul-smelling. I wrote with the bedside lamp on even during the day. I went around among my plants, transported from high up over a luminous, open square to the long, low balcony overlooking a courtyard, deciding whether to water them. I liked when I watered to let the excess rain down into the courtyard.

  The three of us remained, my mother, Gianni, and I.

  Of those years I can reconstruct moments and brief periods in my mother’s last months that were on the whole serene. She and I were in better health, Gianni was as always careful and patient, the children were available and kind; little by little, as age weakened her, my mother began to trust me. Once she praised one of my books and regretted that it hadn’t had its deserved success. A few weeks before her death she asked my sister, who had come to see her: “Where’s my daughter?” “But I’m here,” said Sisi. “Not you, the other one,” she replied.

  Ill, in bed, and cared for by me, she said suddenly one evening: “Certainly, the Lord spared you nothing.”

  It was the only time I heard her name God.

  Then she added, hesitating, searching for the words: “First your father, then four children to bring up, and then me.” She broke off and after two minutes of silence concluded: “You were”—as if speaking of something in the past that she hadn’t realized before—“the Waldensian and Sisi the Jew.”

  And with those words—with which she intended certainly to “do justice to me” and perhaps thank me—she separated us yet again in her heart.

  There isn’t much I can add, except this: there was certainly a fracture in her—again a rift, an estrangement—between the moral rule that she felt obliged to transmit and her own nature. Released from that duty (hadn’t the same obligation led her, now a European, who had married a Jew, to bring me from Riga to the Waldensian church of Torre Pellice so that I could be baptized?), no longer bound, I was saying, by that promise made by others before her, to whom, not voluntarily, she belonged, my mother happily loved my children.

  But between her and me was the rule that, unintentionally, from a distance, and secretly, she had had to hand down to me.

  Why she wished to impose and pass it on to me in particular I don’t know. I could try saying (entering just for a moment into the matter of those mysteries of love that I discovered to be impenetrable as I was reading the description of my sister in a white wig): because she was unable to love me. Was I not both the proof of her failing the rule and at the same time the cause—blameless but undeniable—of her unhappy marriage? Or rather: it’s unlikely you’ll love someone who reproduces, well or badly, a model that oppresses you and that you compulsively hand down. The one you raise to be your rival.

  In me she rejected both what lay outside the rule or contradicted it, and the feared norm that she saw gradually solidify and take shape in my actions, even though at first sight it was deviant and new.

  The women in my life were seldom and reluctantly women for me—my grandmother, empathizing with me for a future, inevitable shared injustice, while she provided the pad for my first period, as much as my mother, who gave birth to me and nursed me—but the men, the Fathers, were father and mother to me, example and touchstone; and so the conclusion is the opposite of what I stated to Luissa that night on the Po: I don’t know women, I know only men.

  Wasn’t it the father my mother as an old woman feared in me, wasn’t it the Fathers, in her, I was unfaithful to?

  Furious rages against men continue to overwhelm me—uncontrollable rages, when I get up to speak, to cry out, because of an unjust act, a boast, an abuse of power, a mockery of someone who is younger or can’t defend herself. I’ve never loved men older than myself and only the voice of the tenor or even the countertenor seduces me, even though, singing to myself, I sing in a bass voice Verdian arias for great old men. But I shout and weep against the women who weren’t women for me, rather than against men.

  Through women the Fathers have reached me, walking over the stony ground, and handed over the rocky fragments of their inheritance, the bastard, unfaithful barbettaggine, passed down through the centuries by the forebears of my grandfather Gioanni Daniele, a harsh, stingy but inalienable bequest.

  Absent from my life in different ways, father and mother, symbolic ghosts, both stamped it indirectly and involuntarily with a black mark, not even imprinting that themselves, my mother with her inability to accept me, my father with his tragic death.

  Symbolic ghosts that stealthily haunted my affections, not in order to be revived as real earthly semblances but, on the contrary, in order to endow those affections with their own familiar but elusive qualities; stronger than the presence of the beloved was the grip that wanted to hold love tight. Only as a mother of children (both mine and others’) did I escape that deception.

  On the other hand, familiarity with the symbol as such, and its innate autonomy, roused in me the need to transform, the impulse to represent, to re-create, the conviction that everything can be
reproduced and portrayed.

  Not in a tapestry with threads of silk and gold: my unicorn is still always a stray dog sleeping in the July heat in the cool shadow of a closed newsstand.

  Two years had passed since my mother’s death; I had decided to retire. I was again revising my autobiography during a stay with Andrea in Bordighera. Now with my mother no longer alive, when I reread it, there was indeed a temptation to yield to the past: protagonist, antagonist, story, conclusion. Maybe it would have been easier to entrust the process of that difficult separation to the irrevocable event.

  I was having terrible dreams: I was confronted by something that had the aspect of my mother in old age, and I tried to cut it in pieces with a hatchet; while I tried in vain to destroy it, the thing, spurting blood, continued to proclaim that it was my mother, while, crying and screaming, I called out: “Come and tell her that you’re the real one, that you’re dead, that you’re not her.”

  I could, truthfully, have drawn consolations from our last encounter, attributing it to the will of our common Inscrutable, but I disputed this right with memory and chance, I couldn’t make up my mind to give up the present, and the weight of my anger, although spent by now, was still in the present: the hatred that had fought beside us, like Siegfried beside King Günter, hidden in its enchanted cape, that had driven us one against the other in an inherited struggle—image against image, not person against person—in a competition of useless merits, on behalf of those who had preceded us.

  The last time I spoke to her I had gone to see her in the facility on the hill where she had spent the summer. It was mid-September, and a nurse had called me, worried because she had refused to eat for several days. I went with my son Paolo, who as a doctor had taken care of his grandmother in those years. A few days earlier she had said to me, “I don’t feel like reading anymore,” and I had had a kind of presentiment.