My mother, brought up in luxury, always portrayed herself as a victim struggling to stay alive, endlessly complaining that her own mother neglected her and moaning that if it rained and she wet her feet, she might die. But you don’t drown in a rainstorm, even without an umbrella.
At this point I think I have to say that I’m distorting the facts. I said I found my mother unconscious. I think I remember feeling a lot of pain and then I remember feeling nothing, not even wanting to cry at her funeral. I was angry; very, very angry. So angry that I killed her off. That’s right, she didn’t really die when I was eight, she lived (the way Primo’s mother did) to cause me years of pain. She lived as you might expect someone who had been an inmate of the camps to live—in constant fear. As if she had suffered horribly. I amplified every danger just the way she did. Rain, minor illness, staying up too late—everything. And like her I tried to justify doing that. I kept wanting to compare myself to other victims: wasn’t I in some way a survivor even though not physically harmed, starved, or beaten? Maybe if I had strap marks, bruises, scars people would—would what? Love me, pity me. Now I can almost laugh about it. I still have my regressive moments. Like Phillip Roth lying on his analyst’s couch complaining, transformed into the breast he wants to suckle.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened but as I began to have some success with my films, I became less and less a wallower. Subtly I flipped into being the one who takes care. Hannah gave me a great opportunity to do that. Caring for her all those years, I was a real mensch, or I like to think I was.
But I fell down. I was a schmuck, I made life difficult for the one person I loved most. I didn’t make Claudia happy either. But when Hannah had her heart attack, I thought of it as a second chance to be caring. I asked her to let me come back home. She did, she let me. She was afraid of having another attack. I went with her everywhere, and I think she liked it. Then, ironically, I began to have trouble with my memory.
Now instead of my caring for Hannah she is caring for me. She does it with kindness but also wry humor and sometimes a glint of something else—a sense of her own power. Like anyone else she can get tired and cross.
My journey home started when I was visiting Hannah at the apartment after her heart attack, when she told me she was afraid of going too far from home and the nearby hospital. She told me that her doctor wanted her to have one of those devices where all you have to do is press a button and you get help.
“But what if I can’t press it? What if I pass out?” she wondered.
“Maybe you should have someone here with you,” I ventured.
“I couldn’t stand to have some stranger wandering around while I’m working. There aren’t any doors to close. It was hard enough for me when you were with me,” she paused. “But then you had your own writing to keep you busy and you used to work outside on the terrace when the weather was good.”
“I could do it again,” I said. “I still like the terrace. If I’m not working, I could feed the gulls, water the plants. You might think of me as an extra pair of hands.”
“Don’t be silly, it would make you frightfully nervous to be looking out for me all the time, noticing if I looked pale in the morning, freezing like a pointer dog if I put my hand to my chest, if I cough. Scolding me when I forget my pills. If you felt suffocated before—that was what you said, wasn’t it? Suffocated? You must have been with Claudia already. I sensed something. I thought that if I cosseted you enough, pampered you, you’d turn back to me. But you only felt more constrained.”
That’s exactly how it had been. She made a quiet nest for me, gave me everything she could.
“I’d promise not to fuss,” I said. “I’d just be there when you need me.” She smiled with her mouth but her eyes were doubtful.
“You really want to come back,” she asked, “for me?”
“For both of us, if you could forgive me. Do you think you could?”
Then a few days later she visited me. “Do you still want to come back?” she asked me. “I thought it wouldn’t be right to take advantage of a moment of weakness.”
For answer I kissed her.
It’s probably understandable that I tried to minimize the importance of my time with Claudia. I hated to admit to myself that Hannah probably guessed I was having an affair long before I moved out. During that time she was more afraid than ever of being alone. I travelled a lot but I always called her and wrote to her even when it was only a short trip.
Dearest Hannle hannah panna my love, I miss you, kiss you. The endearments multiplied as I tried to tug free.
After, I moved out, you can imagine how painful that was. It was spring when I left and she insisted on keeping my winter clothes, my wool trousers, my heavier jackets, in a closet.
“Maybe you’ll be back by winter,” she said. “We’ll be together again.”
Later she confessed that she would go into that closet regularly to smell and caress my things. She kept other things too: ornaments and mementos from our trips. I didn’t want her to feel any more bereft than she had to. I didn’t want the apartment—formerly ours—to seem empty. She kept the paintings and most of the books. I would come in sometimes and see her dusting them with a big feather duster. And I left her almost all the Limoges plates, and pots from the little kitchen. I kept only what was absolutely necessary. (Claudia was less restrained and had taken with her a generous half of her menage with the dentist.)
Hannah’s sister and niece, Leah and Sarah, came to visit during the early months of our separation. Leah was horrified to find that we weren’t living together. Like a child with estranged parents, she kept trying to draw me back into the family circle. She was sure Hannah had done something to “lose” me. Hannah hadn’t told her about our parting, guessing that her sister wouldn’t understand.
I didn’t want Hannah to be embarrassed or harassed and I visited, took them out to dinner, acted normally insofar as I could and kept deflecting Leah’s questions.
“You look as if you’re at the dentist’s and want to jump out of the chair as soon as you can,” Leah said.
The irony was unintended. I couldn’t help smiling. Hannah’s sister couldn’t figure it out. I did my best, talked about needing space for awhile, having an important project to finish. Would it have been better to stay away from them? Maybe.
I guess I was trying to show Hannah that living this way was an option. It was possible. She could enjoy her freedom and enjoy seeing me too. I celebrated holidays with her, brought her presents, took her out to dinner, called regularly to check on her. But she was so sensitive. If my tone was slightly preoccupied, if I weren’t engaging with her completely, she felt tortured. But how about me? Do you think it was easy for me to see her distress? Now I had to accept that she wanted to give our script a happy ending, even if it arrived only in old age, two ancient people living together again, surrounded by flowers. And here we are.
But where did all that pain go? Back then I often felt how hard it was for her to accept my invitations graciously, though what she really wanted to do was scream at me, plead with me, dramatize her eternal love.
If, for instance, I asked her to out with me on New Year’s and then told her I’d be away for Christmas—shorthand for being with Claudia—she would have to keep tight control and not complain or withdraw. I knew that, but I still wanted what I was doing to be out in the open. Was that so wrong? She would withdraw into a hard shell, like a tortoise. Conversation would slow and stop. Eventually I would take her back to what was now her place as if she were a tired child and put her to bed, where, she told me, she would lie awake for hours staring at the ceiling.
There was an article in the International Herald Tribune today on drugs that cloud your mind. I used to like to read several papers, Figaro, the Corriere della Sera. Now it is just the Tribune because it is short and easy to get through. I think this was the second time they published an article on fuzzy brains. Apparently if you take both a calcium channel breaker, whi
ch I do because of a single event of heart spasm, and a statin, the combination can turn you into a zombie. The codeine cough syrup the doctor prescribed to keep me from moving around in my sleep can apparently have a similar effect. So which do I chose—a broken head or a fuzzy brain? You’d think it would be a cinch to decide—go for clearing the brain, I mean. But I’m afraid of seriously injuring myself if I throw myself out of bed. I could hit the radiator.
If I’m adding up the pros and cons, I should mention that I dropped my pill organizer on the floor in the bathroom and had trouble getting the pills back in the right order.
“You’re just not concentrating,” Hannah says.
Then she is sorry at sounding harsh and offers to go out for a walk with me. We walk in the sunshine over to San Luigi dei Francesi and look at the marvelous Caravaggios, which perfectly fit my mood. Wasn’t Christ the supreme altruist? As usual I puzzle over Saint Matthew being chosen by Christ standing ghost-like in the doorway of the room where the men are playing cards. Matthew points to his chest, incredulous at being the chosen one. After you look at it awhile it seems almost as if he is pointing to the man next to him, saying, no, not me, him. No, that’s not Matthew; it’s what I would do. Matthew grew into the job.
The illumination kept going off. Italians are stingy that way, often leaving it to someone else to put in a coin. Finally, a dapper little man with a goatee, after looking scornfully around him at the crowd pressing against the railing, dropped in a coin. And the lights blazed up. Hannah and I smiled at each other, holding little fingers, and for a moment felt like new lovers, still lovers after all this time.
When we got home I saw that I had misplaced my reading glasses. I had used them in the church to see the details close up. I was sure I had asked Hannah to put them back in her purse; she had been carrying them for me just so they wouldn’t get lost. We lapsed into a chorus of recriminations. The mood is broken.
It seems as if every hour I do something which irritates Hannah. I keep track of the days and my plans on my BlackBerry—gift from Hannah, of course. I never was very good at keeping my plans straight and now I’m worse. I can’t tell if it is age or a brain filled with plaque, the debris of a lifetime of thinking, gradually returning a man to his animal state, but without the easy pleasure or the knowledge of how to hunt and kill. Even balance and ease of gait, lost. See, I tell myself, I can think well enough. But would I notice if I couldn’t?
It’s better not to think about that too much. In any case right now I am on a plateau. The doctor agrees, and this journal certainly helps me hold on to what I’ve been and done, to who I am.
I had a long talk with Erminia, our donna di servizio who comes twice a week to clean and wash. I found myself wishing she came more often. She is almost a member of the family. But she still works on her own family’s farm, sows and reaps, takes care of the animals. And when she’s too old to do that, there are her grandchildren. It would be good to be one of them, I think. She never finds fault and is resolutely cheerful, always telling me how well I look, how handsome, a little as if I were a child, patting my cheek.
I follow her as she waters, the way I used to tag after my wet nurse, a woman I imagine or partially remember, generously built, solid on her two legs, able to pick up fifty kilos of grain, to work all day in a good humor, carrying me in a pack on her back, talking to herself and me about the olive crop. Erminia’s two sons don’t know how to work the land, she tells me sadly. My mother, in a gesture from another age, put me with a wet nurse until I was three or four and this gave me whatever sense I have of easy-going, loving family life.
Hannah never wanted to have a room of her own. No that’s not true. She never liked sleeping with all her sisters and brothers in one bed, didn’t like the noises coming from behind the curtain where her parents slept. And here our attico has just one room, one space where you can shut the door. She insisted that I take it. She could work in the living room or, when it was nice, out on the terrace. I took the library, as we call it, without much thought and now am stuck here, impotent, surrounded by shelves of books while she clacks away.
She never used to write so steadily but it’s her new project, the one she is doing about the daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose husband, a Catholic, is unfaithful with a Palestinian woman. She says it is about the possibility of peace between the three great faiths. A friend to whom she showed her manuscript said she thought Hannah hated the Palestinian woman and was prejudiced, but Hannah swore that wasn’t true. She wants to know the woman and forgive.
I wonder then if it is about us. The Jewish wife has a mother who had survived the camps and is terribly anxious about everything. Maybe Hannah has found the perfect plot to embody our story, except that she is the survivor, not her mother, and Claudia is a Catholic only on holidays.
I can’t say it isn’t an interesting idea to show how her characters’ beliefs affect their love affairs. It is! But if her work obsesses her, consumes her, I can feel it only as a rival. Or as if I am dead already and she is going on with her life with renewed vigor. I said that to her—one of those things you know you shouldn’t say but say anyway.
“You are healthy as a horse,” she said. “I’m the one likely to die. You don’t have to talk like that to get my sympathy,” she kisses me on the brow. Being able to take the high ground always pleases her. She goes downstairs and comes back after a few minutes with a hot chocolate and a cornetto.
“I’m not myself this morning,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing,” she lies. But it isn’t nothing. It’s how things are now. Things trigger me, set me off. Anxiety like a dirty fog condenses into something harsher, hysterical—chokes me.
“Please don’t leave me,” I murmur so low that she doesn’t hear.
It’s Easter. The bells ring out from all the churches. When I was small we used to hide eggs in the garden after my mother and I had decorated them, dipping them in crimson and blue, my favorite colors. She was good at things like this, my mother. Things like egg painting or taffy pulling that had no hint of the practical.
Hannah, with no memories of the Christian holiday, is working away in the living room. Suddenly I hear her push back her chair and close her typewriter. “I’m going for a walk,” she calls to me. I don’t suggest going with her because the weather is grim. Every few minutes the sky spits rain on the terrace, then abruptly pours down, flooding the gutters, licking at the glass door. I crawl back into the new bed where I lie safely next to the wall and fiddle with myself, lazily watching the seagulls circling, trying to hold their course in the wind. The wind whips the white wisteria that Hannah planted, which is blossoming for the first time. If it keeps on like this there will be no more blossoms left by nightfall. A cold draft comes through the partly opened door.
Why isn’t Hannah here to comfort me? She says walking in the wind and rain scours her brain, giving it a fresh space for ideas. She’s gotten to the dead center of the new book. Now there is no question of changing course. She’s waited so long for this. When she first came here and spoke up for the Palestinians, people refused to listen. Who was it who spoke of literature as sugarcoating a bitter pill? Someone in the seventeenth century? That’s what she’s doing now, hiding the medicine. I can tell she isn’t quite satisfied, though she doesn’t complain. I’m sure it’s good but she always wants more. Sometimes when she is reading one of the classics, Dante, Primo Levi, Calvino, I walk into the living room and find her crying because she can never be great.
Last night we watched the pope’s Easter procession at the Coliseum on television. He looked like an impotent old man, hands clasped in prayer, one finger pointing upward, dressed in his gorgeous clothes, high above the thousands trying to get a glimpse of him. Maybe he was thanking God for holding back the thunderstorm, due yesterday. The clergy is in enough trouble. God, your church is besieged on all sides. Maybe he promises more mortification of his flesh. Pronounces himself a willing victim and wishes for a mirac
le to revive the ancient roots. Looking out over the crowd, I thought the only people who looked genuine were the African nuns.
Hannah came back from her walk exultant and announced that she was going to take a break and go back with me to visit my family’s old place, our tower near Todi in Torre Gentile. I think I mentioned it before—we had gone for the weekend and Hannah wouldn’t let me drink wine. I haven’t done or said anything provocative this morning but it is so easy to make her feel guilty, just by a turn of my head or a hint of dullness in my voice. I’m sure she wants me to see how much she cares for me by interrupting her work just when it is going well, trying to make up for being so immersed in it. But why shouldn’t she be? Didn’t I do the same thing for years? Of course I did. And I didn’t just work at home; even before our separation I traveled regularly to conferences and festivals. She always hated my trips, suspecting that I was having a fling. Even if I did it meant nothing.
It’s funny how just thinking of the time when I was the prime mover, so to speak, makes me feel stronger, clearer in my mind, but also makes me want to blame Hannah for my mental troubles. I catch myself doing that and give myself a mental slap.
“I’m packing a picnic,” Hannah says from the doorway.
“It’s a lovely idea but…” I gesture at the rain-streaked door.
“The rain is supposed to stop in an hour or so,” she says, “and if it doesn’t we can start a fire when we get there.” There are two huge fireplaces, one upstairs in the bedroom, the other down in the rustic kitchen, and a fine pile of cut wood near each of them. When the fire is lit there is always a musky smell.
After Auschwitz: A Love Story Page 14