by Linda Ferri
linda ferri
enchantments
Linda Ferri coauthored with Nanni Moretti the screenplay The Son’s Room, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and was released by Miramax in 2002. She lives in Italy.
Michel
Here comes the cradle covered with white muslin sailing into my room. There’s a moment of hesitation, and then the anchor is dropped in the very center so that the little world that was mine now revolves around this newborn sun.
When my sister arrived, there were already three of us—my two brothers, aged seven and nine, and I, who was two. Of the prehistory before she was there I have no mental image; it is before daybreak, everything completely dark.
The next thing I see is my sister in the cradle and a chair next to it on which I’m kneeling, my elbows across the back. I stay there for a bit watching her tiny translucent hands wave in the air. Then I get down and go off to play by myself, waiting for her to grow up.
Not long after that I see an upheaval in our house and a parade of furniture, trunks, and suitcases going down the stairs. Even my little bed is gone, and I’m left alone in the room beside the howling cradle, which is afraid of being alone. There is a frightening emptiness, and the howling cradle resounds in it. I cover my ears and cry.
We are moving to France, to Paris, in Caroline, our fifties Plymouth with gold fins. It’s crammed full with our baggage. My father is driving, my older brother beside him. In the backseat there are me, my brother Pietro, and my mother with Clara in her arms.
Our new place was on the ground floor and so dark that my mother dressed my sister and me in bright colors so she could keep an eye on us. Later on, when we’d grown some, she started dressing us in darker colors, but exactly alike.
As we stood in line in the front hall of the nursery school, Clara, expecting that we’d go into the classroom together, kept holding my hand. She cried if Bernadette, the teacher, tried to separate us to do different activities. Bernadette nicknamed her my “little limpet” and arranged the benches in two circles, one for the littler girls and the other for the bigger ones. The circles just kissed each other, and that was where Clara and I sat.
When I turned five, they decided to move me to first grade.
It’s evening. As usual at every serious moment my mother is sitting on her bed and I’m standing in front of her, our knees touching, my hands in hers. She explains to me that tomorrow I’m going to a new class but that she and the teacher have worked it out so that at first I’ll go to kindergarten as if nothing is different and then at a certain point the first-grade teacher will come to take me to my new class. While my mother is telling me this I feel a wave of fear and excitement, pride and guilt. It’s the first secret I have that doesn’t include my sister, and when I go back to our room I sit on the floor with my back to her.
The next day as we’re standing in line in the front hall, Clara laces her fingers in mine. Mine are limp and damp. We march into class and form our two circles. She starts drawing, peacefully absorbed. On my sheet of paper there appears a house with wavering walls. The first-grade teacher walks in, confers for a moment with Bernadette, and then here it is—she’s coming toward me, holding out her hand. I look at that hand, which seems enormous. I look at my sister, still bent over her drawing, then again at the enormous hand. If I take it, it’s all over. I close my eyes so it disappears. But then someone brushes my chin, and when I open my eyes I see the teacher smiling at me and I feel important, a sorrowful tragic heroine, so yes, I put my hand in hers, get up, and start walking with my head down. We’re almost to the brown door that separates the two classrooms when I hear my sister’s screaming that I know so well. But this time it’s louder and more terrible, and I, her betrayer, turn around. Bernadette is sitting on one of our little stools, covering it completely with her large body so that it looks as if she’s sitting on air. She’s holding Clara on her knees, holding her tight around the waist while Clara is thrashing her arms and legs trying to reach me, her mouth wide open in despair. I stand there petrified, but the teacher is already pulling me along, and together we disappear behind the brown door. She leads me to the first row, and still there’s that screaming, over and over again, and I collapse on my desk with my head between my arms and sob—long, low sobs during the whole lesson, a grieving faithful echo of the persistent screaming of my sister.
My first-grade teacher had very white skin and a ribbon in her hair. She called us her “dwarfs” and had us do a ton of fun things—such as pretending that our classroom was a plane, complete with pilot, flight attendant, and in-flight snacks, on its way to faraway lands. After landing, some of us, dressed as Chinese, Africans, or Mexicans, would greet the others, describing our country with the help of books and postcards. All that we did in school was, according to our teacher, “work,” and the gentle yet firm tone of her voice kept us in order. I was the youngest in her class, and she brazenly made me her pet. From the very first day she put me in the desk right in front of her and always kept an eye on me, encouraging and praising everything I did. She told my mother that strictness made me sad.
Sometimes she took me to her home after school. The first thing she would do was to feed me a bowl of soup that sat heavily on my stomach the rest of the afternoon. In that tiny tidy apartment, with no husband or children around, I discovered the sound of my own footsteps. There were little porcelain animals perched here and there, and two children’s busts (a boy and a girl) whose cold, smooth marble cheeks I liked to caress with my fingertips.
Taking me by the hand, the teacher leads me over to say hello to her porcelain animals. “This is Bouncy Bunny, that’s Mouse Camembert, and she’s Skunky-who-never-listens with her friend Finchy-Pinchy” She tells me that yesterday, with a prodigious jump, Bouncy Bunny landed on Skunky’s tail and she got mad as she often does, and let out her noxious cloud, and Mouse Camembert protested to Skunky, who said, “Look who’s talking, you stink more than I do,” and then Finchy-Pinchy took her friends’ side, and that set off such a to-do of pecking and scratching that she had to scold them all, every single one.
“And then what happened?” I ask.
“Then I put them to bed. You see how well they’re behaving. They’re sleeping.”
“I’d like to see them when they’re awake, just once.”
“Yes, maybe one day when you come you’ll find them playing or working.”
At night in bed I imagined the birds chirping, the mice nibbling, and the rabbits hopping in my teacher’s house, just like in Snow White’s forest. But I never saw them. In her apartment there must have been a spell of melancholy and silence that was broken only when she was alone with her animals.
In the Christmas play she cast me as the Virgin Mary. Mama pinned a silk scarf to my hair, a blue veil that gave my face a rapt and solemn look.
Then my teacher began to get sick, disappearing at first a few days at a time. When she returned she was more thin and pale. Then she disappeared for a long time—an interminable time—and she was replaced by another teacher who shamed me by snatching my notebook from under my nose and showing my classmates how messy my handwriting was.
The last time she came to visit us, she kept her coat on the whole time, and I felt that even then she was cold. When the time came for her to leave, she said good-bye to my classmates, kissing them on both cheeks. She kissed me only once and held my face between her hands for a long time.
She never came back. Not then, not the next day, not the day after that. But I didn’t ask any questions, and in bed at night I kept on imagining her in that house, surrounded by her mischievous scampering animals.
The memory of my teacher faded little by little, a paler and paler ghost that evaporated one day when a doll took over
my nighttime dreams. It was one of those women-dolls that you win at carnivals, strangely similar to the girls behind the counters of the target-shooting booths, with a bronze complexion, eyelids with curved eyelashes that open and close over glassy blue eyes, full lips and fingernails painted red, the ruff of her elaborate tulle dress sticking up behind her raven hair.
I had seen her in the home of our housekeeper, Paquita, who was born in Alicante, Spain, and at fifteen had many suitors. One Sunday afternoon she took my sister and me to her parents’ home. They acted as concierges in a building in our neighborhood, and the whole family slept in one room, which had a gas ring and a sink. The toilet was in the courtyard.
On one wall was a poster of a bullfight with El Cordobés and a pair of castanets as shiny as chestnuts, and two small mirrors that deformed my face. Seated on the bed, crowning the exotic charm of the place, was the doll. I was dazzled by it, different as it was from the little dolls my sister and I played with.
For all my begging and wheedling, I had to wait a long time before my parents gave me one, and at night in my bed I imagined her lying beside me. I could feel her cool, slightly grainy skin, and I knew her eyes were closed just like mine: a twin, only much more fascinating than I. Finally, one summer day, my father won her for me by shooting a cardboard bear in the mouth at a country fair.
Papa had just bought an ancient Tuscan villa near his native town. It was called Schifanoia—an ugly name and on top of that ridiculous. It means Repel-Boredom, and for a long time I was embarrassed by it. When we went there for the first time, the house was almost entirely empty.
They show me around. Here and there in the large, frescoed halls we see a few dark and imposing pieces of furniture. A smell of mold. Our footsteps echo. And yes, squeaky doors and an inlaid, wooden staircase that creaks with every step. At the top, a door with stained glass in the middle of which gleams a winged dragon.
I’m not at ease in there, and I keep my new doll (not much smaller than I) tight against my hip. The tulle of her pale pink dress scratches my arm and occasionally drags on the ground, which worries me. Then they tell me, “You can go out if you want, but don’t go too far. There are Gypsies around.” With some hesitation I venture as far as the threshold of one of the glass doors overlooking the park, and I immediately hear a rustling noise in the bushes and see something flash in the green leaves. I step back into the large, vaulted hallway and I call: my mother, my father, my sister. No one answers. I’m afraid I’ll get lost if I go looking for them. So I sit in an armchair and arrange the doll on my knees, carefully spreading out her skirt so that I’m hiding behind her. In that deserted and silent room I am pierced by a feeling of unease: it’s the villa, it’s the Gypsies and the uncertain border dividing us from them, a tribe of nomads camping in a place that doesn’t belong to them. And at that moment I find a name for my doll, a magic name, an exorcism that instantly dispels my fear: her name will be Esmeralda, like Gina Lollobrigida in the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Gypsy girl who is as alone as I am now, unhappy and proud, and she will save me from her brothers, furtive shadows in the bushes with an occasional sparkle from an earring or a dagger.
Every year we spent three months of our long summer at Schifanoia, so the fear dissolved, reduced to a bit of mystery I carried in my pocket when I made a foray up to the attic or down to the cellar.
My sister and I made friends with the daughters of the sharecroppers who lived in the farmhouse just below the villa, on the other side of an old iron gate that left a fine red dust on our hands. Their names were Mirella and Annarita. They were cousins, about the same ages as us. We played together every day, but not the whole day, since they had chores. We went to get them; they never came to the door of the villa. Early each morning Clara and I rushed down the lane, past the gate, and burst into their house through the door, which was almost always open. We said right off, “So—shall we go?” without saying good morning. We were sure they’d say yes because it seemed to us in the nature of things that children played during the summer. What else should they do? Every once in a while Mirella’s long face or Annarita’s looking off sideways made us see it wasn’t going to happen. “No, we can’t. We have to do things.” Sometimes Mirella’s mother, a vigorous jolly woman, cut it short. “There, chickies, come back tomorrow.” That was disappointing— Clara and I would have to play by ourselves, and it felt like wearing a dress that was too tight.
Sometimes we did their chores with them, which ended up making them take a lot more time. Even slopping the pigs became a game for us. Pigs are so mean—when they hear you coming with their feed they throw themselves at the gate of the pen, grunting in a terrifying way. My sister and I would creep closer and closer, and then as soon as the pigs got near us we’d break away with shrieks of laughter and alarm.
When piglets were born, the castrator came. It was a big event. Mirella and Annarita announced it the day before, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
With his hat firmly on his head, the castrator sits on a little bench in the farmyard. By his feet he places a small basin into which he pours a purple liquid, a purple so vivid that you see it forever. Then he spreads a handkerchief on the ground, and on it he lays a straight razor that he’s taken out of a leather pouch. All of Mirella’s and Annarita’s families are there. They have a respectful attitude toward the castrator, who is a professional, serious and silent. All of them help, trying to catch the piglets who are running helter-skelter in the pen, flinging themselves from one end to the other, squealing with terror. When they catch one, they put it on the knees of the castrator, who immediately spreads its legs, douses the groin with the purple liquid, picks up the shiny razor, and—zip—a little cut out of which pop two little pink balls which he tosses into a pail without batting an eye.
I watch, hypnotized. What this ritual signifies I don’t know, and I don’t dare ask. It’s a half-closed door to a dangerous room that both attracts me and terrifies me. Behind that door— besides the castrator and besides playing doctor with our friends—there was Saint Maria Goretti, the favorite saint of Mirella and Annarita (my sister and I had picked as our favorite Saint Clara because she was the friend of Saint Francis, who could talk with wolves). Mirella and Annarita took turns telling us their saint’s story.
It was a puzzling story because it was never clear what the saint had refused to do before she was killed. They liked telling it that way with shy giggles of embarrassment, and we liked that understanding and not understanding, which made you want to hear it all over again. We never told that story. It was the exclusive repertory of Mirella and Annarita, as was the song “Mario, So Young,” which was about a soldier, Mario, who was in love with a girl, “a swallow of spring.” Mario was sent to the front in Montenegro, and she betrayed him with a lieutenant. When Mario came back, he found out and “even though he lived on poetry,” he shot her dead. When the two cousins sang this—and they chanted it as intently as a hymn, with a look of bleak fatality— I got goose bumps and it made my head spin, as if I were foreseeing the risk I would run by growing up and becoming a woman.
In the small garden of our first home in Paris I kept a turtle, Ruga. One morning, when I brought her a leaf of lettuce, I noticed she was gone. So I cried and despaired, but they sent me to school anyway.
That same day at four, on a winter afternoon that was already dark and with the lights on in the living room, the governess who was coming to take care of my sister and me rang our doorbell for the very first time. Even though our avenue was lined not with cherry trees but with horse chestnuts, I nourished the hope of finding myself in front of Mary Poppins, or someone like her in the ways that mattered most, which for me, obviously, were the abilities to tidy up without lifting a finger and to jump into a landscape drawn on a sidewalk and enter a world of merry-go-rounds and cotton candy. Such a person, moreover, would immediately know where Ruga had gone.
As soon as the doorbell rings, Clara and I rush to the door, and never
have I been so exasperated by my mother’s measured steps. I shout, “Come on, Mama, she’s been waiting for ages.” Finally, here is my mother opening the door, but I still can’t see anyone, because I’m behind her, and all I hear is a voice greeting us from the threshold, and I’m disappointed, the voice doesn’t match. Then the governess comes in: the age isn’t right, immediately confirming my fears, because Mademoiselle Bernard is already well advanced into that barren zone of gray-white hair and curved backs. The attire also doesn’t fit the image, since it’s missing two main items: the large handbag and the umbrella. The small hat is there, thankfully: it’s not identical, because this is a beret, but at any rate it’s there, where it should be, some evidence of deeply desired extravagance, maybe hidden in the large brooch with the end shaped like a Moor’s head.
We settle in the living room, and, while talking with Mama, Mademoiselle occasionally smiles at Clara and me, revealing two prodigious, prominent incisors separated by a black hole.
But since Mama always says that neither people’s age nor their appearance is important, I resolutely aim for her soul, searching for some disembodied affinity between her and Mary Poppins. I am scrutinizing her when Mademoiselle pulls from her little purse a transparent plastic box with a gold lid and offers each one of us a red gumdrop.
That’s all: that gesture was enough to make what hope remained in me collapse. No matter how you looked at it, Mademoiselle just wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Mary Poppins, whose magical qualities were blended in my mind with her brusque and proper manners. So I said good-bye and went to play in my room, until Clara came to tell me that it was settled: Mademoiselle would come every day, except for Saturday and Sunday, from three to six.
Dame Dame, as Clara rechristened her, had been born in 1899, and at some point, a three-headed Hydra (War, Bankruptcy, Divorce) had ruined her life. Her father, Henri, had been a rich textiles manufacturer; her mother, Jeanne, had been a very beautiful woman, as documented by a photograph that showed her in a white lace dress with a tiny umbrella over her chignon, which was as soft as a nest of feathers.