by Elsa Morante
“And while you grow up, and become handsome, she fades . . . Everyone knows fortune can’t meddle with misery, that’s the law of nature! But she doesn’t understand that law: and wants you, I suppose, to be more wretched than she is—old, ugly, maybe mutilated or paralyzed—just to have you nearby. She’s not free by nature, and wants you to be a slave along with her. That is her mother love!
“Unable to be your servant, meanwhile, she contents herself with her romance of the martyr mother and the heartless son. You, naturally, have no taste for a story like that, and you laugh at it: you like other stories, other hearts . . . She weeps, becomes increasingly boring, senile, grim! Everything around her is infested with tears. And you, of course, wish more and more to avoid her. As soon as she sees you reappear, she accuses you . . . Her insults are supreme, biblical. The least she can call you is vile murderer; and not a day passes that she doesn’t recite that litany! Maybe, with her accusations, she’d like to inspire in you self-hatred, and deprive you of yourself, so that she can replace your pride and your boasts, appropriating you, like a grim queen.
“And no matter where you flee, far from her, in the city, you can’t save yourself from her love, from that eternal parasite. In fact, if, for example, you hear thunder in the sky or it starts raining, you can swear that at that precise instant she, down in your hovel, is in despair at the idea: Now he’ll get soaked in this rain, he’ll get a cold, he’ll sneeze . . . And if instead the sky clears, you can be certain that she is complaining: Alas, with this fine weather the murderer will not set foot in the house before night . . .
“No phenomenon of the cosmos, no event of history, exists for her except in relation to you. In this way, creation is in danger of becoming a cage. She would be content, because her love dreams of nothing else. She would like to keep you a prisoner forever, as when she was pregnant. And when you escape, she tries to entrap you from a distance, to give her form to your entire universe, so that you will never forget the humiliation of having been conceived by a woman!”
(Both my stepmother and I had listened to this great outburst from my father without breathing; but, although I was silent about my doubts, I felt somewhat dismayed. Not only had my father’s arguments not cured me of my inborn and unhappy love for mothers; on the contrary, more than once, listening, I had surprised myself thinking involuntarily: “Damn! You would say that someone who has good luck doesn’t know what to do with it; while someone who would appreciate it doesn’t have it . . .”
(In fact, the reasons cited by our chief to demonstrate the wrongs of mothers were, at least in large part, precisely the same for which I, instead, had always resented being an orphan! The idea of a person who loved only Arturo Gerace, to the exclusion of any other human individual, and for whom Arturo Gerace represented the sun, the center of the universe—it was an idea that did not at all offend my taste. So, too, I did not find the idea that a person would weep and sigh for me at all disgusting. In fact, it seemed to me that, if you thought about it, certain actions already fascinating in themselves, like, for example, heading fearless into a storm—or even marching onto the battlefield!—would acquire a much more exquisite flavor, if, meanwhile, someone were in despair over me.
(As for the insults my father complained about, I was convinced that certain insults would have seemed to me not poison but sweetness and light. Further, he reasoned according to his particular experience, and that is according to his mother, who was a tall, large German; but mine was a small Italian, from Massa Lubrense. The Massa Lubrensian women, from time immemorial, have always been well mannered, even too sweet, with no hint of bitterness. In my opinion, my mother would never have insulted me even if she had been forced to by a government decree.
(The fact remained of she who fades while her son becomes more handsome; but this, to me, seemed by all means a guaranteed advantage. For a faded woman, who has lost her own youth, the boy—even if he is not the perfection of beauty like my father—will always seem the emperor of beauty on earth. That, precisely, would have been my greatest satisfaction: someone who would consider me marvelous, unsurpassable, imperial! For my father, who possessed perfection, evidently such a thing hadn’t much importance. And that made me admire even more his heedless sovereignty.)
My stepmother sighed and finally summoned the courage to speak; but her voice sounded wild and remote, like the lament of a cat lost in the night:
“Then,” she murmured, “if those sentiments you’ve listed are an offense, people shouldn’t love anymore, in this world . . .”
My father turned his head toward her. “You shut up,” he answered, “you were born yesterday and, besides, you were born stupid! If you say another word I’ll kill you. I can do without certain feelings: I leave them to the wretched, who are free only on Sunday. I don’t like love stories of any kind. But the love of women is the OPPOSITE of love!”
Here he started again on his monologue; and, between boredom and restlessness, as he spoke he kept yawning, laughing, turning this way and that on the pillow, like a boy tossing and turning in the half sleep of illness:
“The intention of women is to degrade life. This is what the legend of the Jews meant, which recounts the expulsion from the earthly Paradise because of a woman. If it weren’t for women, our destiny would not be to be born and die, like the beasts. The race of women hates excessive, undeserved things, it is the enemy of everything that has no limits . . . That ugly race wants drama and sacrifice, it wants time, decay, slaughter, hope . . . it wants death! If it weren’t for women, existence would be eternal youth, a garden! Everyone would be beautiful, free, and happy, and to love one another would mean only: to reveal to one another how beautiful we are. Love would be a disinterested delight, a perfect glory, like looking at oneself in a mirror; it would be . . . a natural cruelty, without remorse, like a marvelous hunt in a royal wood. True love is like that: it has no purpose and no reason, and submits to no power outside human grace. While the love of women is a slave of destiny, working to continue death and shame. Ploys, blackmail, self-serving demands: that’s what its slavish feelings are made of . . . Aah! What time is it? Look at my watch, here, on my wrist: I don’t feel like raising my arm.”
I looked at the time on his wrist and told him. He glanced at me from between his half-closed eyelids and called me lazily: “Arturo?” Then, after a pause: “Did you hear what I said about women? What do you think, eh? Am I right?”
I decided in my mind that it was a good opportunity to humiliate my stepmother. And I answered resolutely: “Yes, without women we’d be much better off. You’re right.”
“Maybe, on the other hand,” he said, in a tone of pained uncertainty, “I’m not right or wrong: I talked about a perpetual, limitless existence . . . as if remaining immortal were good fortune and a delight. But then what if this business of living forever bored us in the end? Maybe death was invented to balance too much boredom . . . eh? Arturo?”
“No. I don’t think so. It seems to me that the dead must suffer from terrible boredom,” I said, shuddering at the odious thought.
My father laughed. “You like living, do you, moretto?” he asked. “But you, do you know anything about boredom? Tell me, are you ever bored?”
I thought an instant. “Actually bored,” I answered, “no, never. Sometimes, maybe . . . I’m annoyed.”
“Aha. And when, for example . . . ?”
For example, I had been annoyed during the previous days, when I condemned myself to seclusion in my room in order not to encounter him and my stepmother together; but that I had no wish to confess, and was silent. Besides, my father no longer cared about hearing my answer: distracted, he had turned his head to the pillow. And shortly afterward, from his breathing, which had become heavier, we realized that he had gone to sleep.
My stepmother then rose and, taking a woolen blanket from the small bed nearby, covered the sleeper. This movement seemed almost automatic, it was so natural; and it wounded me all the more because of
its naturalness. In its fatal simplicity it meant: “He may have spoken badly of women; but nothing can cancel out two laws, now established, one of which gives me the duty to serve him and the other the right to protect him. Those two laws are: that I, being his wife, belong to him; and that he, being my husband, is mine!”
I don’t mean, of course, that at the time my intelligence could translate that gesture of the bride (in its two meanings) with the same logical clarity as now when I remember it. Rather, I didn’t stop to ask myself for what and how many reasons that gesture offended me. But the sensation I felt was precise and eloquent: as if a mysterious, double-edged weapon had pierced my heart.
The thrust was so rapid that immediately I forgot it; but it must have been very violent if I remember it today, at such a distance. In truth, unknown to myself, I was subjected to trials more bitter than Othello’s! Because at least that wretched black man, in his tragedy, had a marked field to fight on: on this side the beloved, on that the enemy. While the field of Arturo Gerace was an indecipherable dilemma, without the relief of hope or of revenge.
Alone with Him
Right afterward, whispering that she had to go down and light the fire for dinner, she left.
Until dinnertime, I didn’t move from my father’s room. I felt that I loved him even more than usual, and I was gripped, at the same time, by an anguish I’d never felt before, which, if I tried to translate it into words, I could perhaps put like this: despair at not knowing my fate. Ignorance of our fate, which is with us all at every moment, was always a cause of adventurous joy for me; but today my spirit oppressed me. I looked at my father sleeping, and felt an almost savage affection; but the eternal impossibility of getting an answer and consolation from him gave me a sense of childish weakness. I longed for him to kiss me and caress me, as other fathers do with their childen.
It was the first time I’d felt that wish. Between him and me there had never been such effusions, typical, rather, of women, evidently, and not manly: the only kiss between us had been the one that, in a dream one night, I had secretly given to his pack of cigarettes, but, as for him, not even in a dream had the idea occurred to me that his mouth could give kisses. Are such things thought about a god? The first kiss I had seen him give anyone, since I was born, was the one he’d given the portrait of the Amalfitano today. And, seeing it, I had been consumed by a kind of envy. Why should the portrait of a dead man get what I didn’t?
As far as I could remember, in my whole life I had never even once known what kisses were (apart from Immacolatella’s, and she was always kissing me, in the exaggerated way of dogs). Silvestro told me later that during my early childhood, when he fed and took care of me, he often planted big sloppy kisses on my cheeks, as nurses do; and he assured me that I had given him lots of little kisses in return. Of course the facts must be as he says, because Silvestro isn’t the type for empty boasts; but I no longer remember them. As far as I remember, I repeat, at the time I’m talking about, I had never kissed or been kissed by anyone.
I would have liked my father to give me a kiss, even without completely waking up, in the confusion of sleep, by mistake; or, at least, I would have liked to give him a kiss; but I didn’t dare. Crouching like a cat at his feet, I watched him sleep. Even to hear the soft sound of his breath, or his snoring, seemed precious, since it was still testimony of his fleeting presence on the island: of this stay of his that I had missed—and which now was over, I was sure of it.
In My Room
The next day, in fact, my father left. My stepmother and I went with him to the steamer. Coming back from the wharf, I separated from her and, taking another road, wandered alone through the countryside.
None of my father’s departures in the past, although cruel, had ever distressed me like this one. Although there was no reason to doubt his return (since, sooner or later, he always returned to the island), I felt a desperate and ultimate regret, as if our goodbyes a little earlier, on the pier, had been farewell forever! That goodbye, like all the preceding ones, had been without kisses. The childish wish that had surprised me the day before hadn’t been fulfilled. But, besides, that desire today appeared to me vain. An arid solitude invaded me; and from the depths of that solitude I felt rising the unnatural anguish I had experienced the day before for the first time. Of not knowing my fate.
The weather had turned as fine as spring, and I didn’t go home until dark. Entering through the French door, I found my stepmother in the kitchen singing, as was her habit, as she lit the fire. And this carefreeness of hers I found unseemly. Until a few hours before, I had been angry at her because she was always near my father, like a dog, stealing him from me. And now, instead, I reproached her bitterly in my heart because she wasn’t saddened by the separation from her husband. I felt a dark instinct to punish her; and as she set the table, I reminded her meanly:
“Hey, now that my father’s gone, you’ll have to learn to sleep alone at night!”
Evidently she hadn’t yet fixed her mind on this inevitable ordeal that awaited her. In fact, I saw her change her expression and become frightened, as if my mere words had recalled it to her memory. (This was one of the many signs of childhood that persisted in her: that her imagination, always ready for fairy tales and other childish things, was instead sometimes rather slow about what could bring her pain or adversity. One would have said that she trusted the days and attributed to them a kind of conscientious benevolence: as if even time had a Christian heart.)
During dinner, which lasted no more than a few minutes, she didn’t speak, she was so thoughtful. I ate quickly, without speaking to her, and right afterward went to bed. I was tired from that restless day, and very sleepy. As often during the cold weather, I didn’t waste time getting undressed, taking off only my shoes, and I fell asleep immediately, as soon as I was in bed.
But not even an hour, perhaps, had passed, when I was awakened by small feverish knocks at the door of my room, and by the voice of my stepmother, low and desperate, which behind the door was calling: “Artú! Artú!” I can’t say what I was dreaming in that first hour’s sleep; but I must have traveled vast distances, and had utterly forgotten about her. Understanding nothing, half asleep, I sat up and turned on the lamp near the bed; at that same moment the door opened and she appeared in the doorway, all upset. “Artú, I’m scared,” she said in a faint voice.
She looked as if she had fled from her bed, driven by fear, just as she was: in her slip, and without shoes. On her feet she had only the woolen socks, full of holes, which she usually wore to sleep in, too. And the way she did her hair at night, bound into a single knot on top of her head, reminded me of the crown of curly feathers that ornaments certain tropical birds.
When I returned to reality, I stared at her with scornful, unfriendly eyes. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her like that, in her slip; in the preceding days, I’d caught fleeting glimpses of her crossing the hall or moving around my father’s room. And she hadn’t covered herself in my presence, but retained tranquil and natural manners: since it didn’t seem to her embarrassing to appear in her slip to a boy of fourteen. It was irritating, this behavior of hers!
“I didn’t mean to wake you, Artú,” she said, explaining with pale lips. “I tried to sleep . . . I recited the prayers of Santa Rita so she would help me fall asleep . . . but I can’t . . . I’m too afraid to sleep alone . . . with not another soul in the room . . .”
And, eyeing the dim hall suspiciously, she advanced a little into the halo of my lamp, as if to seek protection against the dark. But I, gruff and contemptuous, didn’t invite her to sit or to enter; and she remained standing, leaning against the doorpost like a servant.
The slip left her slender shoulders bare; they were very white, meager and delicate. And her chest, which the material outlined as if it were naked, appeared to me, in its mysterious mature weight, so tender and vulnerable that it inspired a sense of pity. With a bizarre acuteness I pictured to myself the terrible pain she wo
uld feel if some cruel person wounded her breast . . . That imagined torture filled my mind for some moments. And it seemed almost incredible that a creature like her, so defenseless, vulnerable, ignorant, stupid, could go through the world without being wounded . . .
“You’re over sixteen,” I said to her, with an expression of supreme pity, “and you’re not able to sleep alone at night. And yet you claim to be a grown woman, as if others were children, next to you! You make me laugh! When a person is a certain age and has certain fears it makes you laugh! yes! Look around, see if others are scared to sleep by themselves!”
“Other women,” she apologized, in a lost, humble voice, “sleep with their husbands when they’re married . . .”
“When they’re married. But before they’re married? And when their husband leaves on a trip? Who do they sleep with then? No one!”
“What, no, with no one! They sleep with their mother, with their sister! With their brothers and their father! They sleep with their family! Every soul in this world sleeps with his family!”
And she begged me to let her sleep in my room, on the couch, at least for that night. Starting tomorrow, she would learn to sleep alone, but tonight, in there, she felt as if she would faint, because it was the first time in her life that she had been in a room at night without any relative nearby, and she couldn’t get used to it all at once. In time, maybe, she would get used to it.
Reluctantly, I had to adjust to taking her in for that night. She went into the other room for a moment to get her covers, and she came back running headlong, dragging the covers on the floor, pale, as if she were fleeing a fire. At the sight of her extraordinary terror, I had a fantastic suspicion; and while, comforted, she went to bed on the couch, I asked her if, in there, the ancestor of the castle and the wicked boys who were his knights had actually appeared to her . . . She shook her head, almost offended that I would come up with such idle talk. “You think I don’t know,” she said, “that those are fairy tales of your father’s? But, of course,” she added, with conscientious sincerity, “when you’re alone in a room at night you can also be afraid of fairy tales.”