by Elsa Morante
I turned out the light, but I didn’t fall asleep so quickly. It was curiosity that kept me awake: I wondered if the sleep of women is like that of males, if for example women, too, when they sleep, breathe like men, and snore like them. I had never witnessed the sleep of a woman, while I had seen many men sleep, and they all snored, if in different ways. The snores of my servant Costante, for example, were so loud and lengthy that he resembled a siren. Whereas my father’s snoring was a light and pleasurable sound, like the purring of a cat.
Some minutes passed, and still nothing could be heard from the couch, not even the lightest snoring. Maybe she wasn’t asleep yet? I called in a low voice: “Hey you, are you asleep?” No answer: so she was asleep.
A moment later I, too, fell asleep, and had a dream.
I seemed to be swimming in a deep, shady grotto. I dove down, to get a beautiful coral branch that I had glimpsed on the bottom; and, as I tore it, I saw with horror the water become stained with blood.
I woke up and, at the very moment I reopened my eyes, instinctively turned on the light, with the confused idea of having to hurry somewhere, to prevent some unknown crime or tragedy . . . In reality, everything was peaceful, and opposite me, on the couch, my stepmother was sunk in a deep sleep, so that the sudden light of the lamp didn’t wake her, though it struck her full in the face. At the first instant, her presence in my room seemed to me an enigma, but immediately my memory cleared, and I observed her, curious. She was slightly curled up, to adjust to the size of the couch, wrapped in the covers up to her chin, and her face had an expression of absence and candor. Her silent breaths left a damp and tender freshness on her lips, and the color that tinted her cheeks seemed also to originate in that innocence of her breath. One would have said that she was dreaming of nothing, that in sleep she let the simple thoughts she had when she was awake become even more simple. And she lived no longer with her mind but only with her breathing, like a flower. I recognized on her face that marvelous expression which she had had the day of her arrival, and which the day after had been ruined. The delicate stripes of her eye sockets, which a single day had been enough to damage, were hidden under the long, pitiful lashes. The knot of her curls, on the pillow, seemed the overblown corolla of a big black flower.
She appeared to me prettier than when she was awake. Maybe the famous beauty of women, mentioned in novels and poems, was revealed in sleep, during the night? If you stayed awake until morning, perhaps, would you be able to see the stepmother become beautiful, splendid as a woman in a fable? These speculations of mine naturally weren’t serious, I invented them to entertain myself. But still, a little later, as I was falling asleep again, they mingled with a sort of anxiety. I had the sensation that there was a foreigner in my room, subject to strange metamorphoses.
I slept again, without remembering to turn out the light, and it wasn’t a full, deep sleep: since, even dreaming, I was in my room, with my stepmother sleeping on the couch, as in reality. In the dream she seemed to me wicked, vile: she had tricked her way into my room, pretending she was a boy like me, dressed in a shirt that fell smoothly over her breast as if underneath she didn’t have the figure of a woman. But I had guessed anyway that she was a woman, and I didn’t want women with me, in my room. I advanced against the sleeper armed with a dagger, to punish her for her imposture, and I revealed her as a liar by opening the shirt over her chest, so as to expose her white, round breasts . . . She let out a cry. It wasn’t new to my ears, that cry: I had already heard it, I no longer remembered when or where. And I knew no other sound so horrendous, that could so rattle my mind and my nerves.
I woke with a start, hot and sweating as if it were summer. With eyes hurt by the light of the lamp, I caught a glimpse of my guest sleeping peacefully, in the same position as before, and an unrestrained, senseless hatred assailed me. “Wake up!” I shouted suddenly, getting out of bed and shaking her by the shoulders. “You have to get out of my room! Do you understand? Get out of my room!”
I saw her rise from the covers, bewildered, exposing her bare shoulders and the shape of her chest, and I hated her even more angrily. I was possessed by the absurd desire that she should be a boy like me, whom I could fight until my anger was satisfied. Her woman’s weakness, which prevented me from taking out my anger on her physically, was what, at that moment, most infuriated me.
“Why don’t you cover yourself, you disgusting girl?” I shouted at her. “Why aren’t you ashamed of yourself in front of me? I want you to be ashamed of yourself in front of me!”
She stared at me with eyes full of wonder and innocence, then she looked at the neckline of her slip and blushed. And, having nothing there to cover herself with, in embarrassment she crossed her childish arms over her chest.
Her eyes returned to me, confused and uncertain, as if they didn’t recognize me. But still—and this exasperated me—in spite of my hatred, and my rudeness, she wasn’t afraid of me. In the depths of her eyes there remained (and had remained all through those days) a kind of trusting question: as if my hostility were never sufficient to make her forget a single afternoon when I had been friendly to her; and she still believed in that Arturo! Instead, she had to understand that that Arturo, for her, no longer existed; and that that afternoon, for me, was a disgrace. I wanted to eradicate it from time.
A cruel coldheartedness, which longed to sate itself on negations and brutalities, choked my voice: “And I don’t want you here in my room, understand?” I repeated. “Get out! You bring me bad dreams and . . . you’re dirty and ragged, you’re ugly, you have fleas . . .”
She had retreated to the door, which was still open; she had a dark and sullen expression, and I believed that finally an irremediable enmity was in place between us. Then I felt the sharp desire for violence, and its pleasure; and, grabbing her pillow, her covers, I threw them out into the hall and harshly slammed the door on her.
For a moment I could still hear some panting and frightened breaths from behind the door. “She’s crying because she’s afraid of the dark,” I said to myself with bitter satisfaction. Finally every sound ceased. And the next day I discovered that she had gone to sleep in the little room next to mine, where Silvestro used to sleep. Evidently, in that tiny room, not so isolated as my father’s room, she felt better protected against solitude and shadows. There she brought all the images of her Madonnas from the room where she had put them the first day, and she arranged them on the pasta chest, the chair, and the windowsill, all around the cot, like bodyguards assigned to watch over her sleep. And, from then on, she retreated there to sleep every night during my father’s absences.
Sleeping Women
Because of her fear, she never dared to shut herself in the room, and always left the door open a crack; and, as she was going to bed, she recited quickly, aloud, all the prayers she knew. From my room I heard the sound of her voice, which seemed to repeat from memory a harsh, melodious lullaby, without meaning. At some points her voice rose, with unexpected emphasis, and a distinct phrase would reach my ears, like, Queen, our sweetness, our hope . . . Come then, our advocate . . . So profound was the silence in the house that, at times, one could even hear the ardent smack of the kisses she gave her Virgins after the prayers were over.
I didn’t care to know how her solitary days passed in the Casa dei Guaglioni; for the most part I appeared only in the evening, when she called me for dinner. At the table, I always had a book, which I continued to read as I ate, and I let her serve me without deigning to talk or pay her the slightest attention. If I happened to give her a fleeting glance she seemed to turn paler than before, to become melancholy and sad. Her fears of solitude must have caused her to suffer. But I didn’t care if she suffered. Didn’t I, too, always live alone?
In those days, I had begun to write poems. I remember one that I felt proud of, as of an almost sublime lyric, entitled “Sleeping Women”; it included the following lines:
The Beauty of Women appears at night,
like nocturnal flowers, proud owls
fleeing the sun,
and crickets and the Moon, queen of stars.
But Women don’t know, for they sleep
like exalted Eagles in their nests,
there, on a cliff, folding their wings
amid silent breaths.
And perhaps no one will ever see
the great Image of their Beauty!
Whenever I passed the little room, even at the hours when its occupant was downstairs and the space was deserted, I looked scornfully in another direction. But one of those mornings (three or four days after the night when I banished my stepmother from my couch) I happened to wake up very early, when she was still sleeping. Seeing that the weather was beautiful, I immediately opened the windows of my room and, shortly afterward, as I came into the hall, I was followed by a gust of wind that hit the partly closed door of the small room and blew it almost halfway open. So, distractedly, my eye fell on her sleeping peacefully, all wrapped in her covers up to the neck. The sun had just begun to rise, and illumined her face like those spotlights which, in theaters, shine on the dancers so that they stand out to the audience. And I saw that, in sleep, she was smiling with joy, in fact almost laughing, revealing all her little front teeth.
I was surprised by this fact and curious about it, because, the night I had seen her sleeping for the first time, I had imagined, from her expression, that when she slept she didn’t dream, and lived only in her breaths, like a vegetable creature. But that smile could certainly have come only from a good dream. What sort of dreams could a creature like her have? That had always been one of my crazy notions: watching others sleep, I often had a tormenting desire to guess their dreams. Hearing a dream recounted later, when the sleeper wakes, doesn’t give at all the same satisfaction (even if he doesn’t lie).
In some cases, the secrets of sleepers didn’t seem to me too obscure. For example, Immacolatella’s dreams seemed fairly easy to guess. At most, she could dream, say, that she was a real hunting dog, as the rabbits of Vivara assumed; or that she had learned to climb trees, like a cat; or that a plate of lamb bones was nearby. But undoubtedly the best thing, for her, was when she dreamed about me. It wasn’t hard to understand.
And her? Who knows what the dream was that made her smile with joy! Maybe she thought she was at home in Naples, in the same bed as her whole family, and the godmother, too? Or that she was at a great fair in the main square of Paradise, among little carts and lights, in a crowd of boys transformed into cherubim? Or did she imagine that my father would bring her a basket of jewels when he returned form his journey? And who knows if I, too, appeared in these scenes? It annoyed me not to be able to see behind her closed eyes: as if she, so dull and inferior, possessed a domain forbidden to Arturo Gerace. I was tempted to intervene in her dream with a trick. Sometimes, on summer days, when I fell asleep on the beach after a swim, my father, awake himself and bored by watching me sleep, would tickle me for fun with the tip of a piece of seaweed, or blow softly in my ear. And immediately a fish-feather, let’s say, made its way into the dream, tickling me with its fins while I was swimming in the depths of the Pacific; or the gangster Al Capone, aiming his deadly air gun in my ear.
I was on the point of entering the room, and repeating with my stepmother the game my father played with me, so as to confuse the thread of her dreams. But was I mad? How could I think of being so intimate with that stupid intruder?
The idea that I had lowered myself to such indulgent fantasies about her continued to annoy me for the entire day; so that later, to give vent to my irritation, I tore up the poem about the “Sleeping Women.”
Every time my mind, distracted, or for some other involuntary reason, yielded to less hostile purposes toward her, I became more irascible, as if in revenge.
Bad Mood
That first absence of my father’s was much shorter than I would have predicted. Not even a week had passed since his departure when, to our great surprise, he returned. He arrived unexpectedly, as usual, and I, who happened to be near the gate, was the first to see him; but he barely deigned to say, “Hey, moro!” he was so impatient to appear to her. Immediately, with violent anxiety, he asked me where she was; and at my rude answer that she was in the kitchen he went rapidly around the house, setting off toward the French door. I followed him, though unwillingly, and in quite a bad mood: in fact, my happiness at seeing him again was ruined in a moment, by feeling so neglected and unimportant in his eyes.
At his unexpected appearance my stepmother became red in the face with pleasure; and he, noticing that blush, turned radiant. He entered without embracing or greeting her. “My goodness, what a mess your hair is!” he said, glancing at her with an expression of confidence and possession. “Didn’t you do your hair this morning?” Right away he gave her the gifts he had brought: a wooden bracelet, painted in different colors, and a belt buckle, made of bits of mirror. For me, on the other hand, he had brought nothing; but seeing me sulking in a corner he gave me fifty lire.
Then he asked the usual question, which he repeated at every arrival: “What news?” But unlike the past, when he addressed the same question to me alone, this time he displayed a real curiosity to hear the answers. Still confused by the suddenness of his return, she began to answer: “We’re well . . . we’ve had good weather here . . . and I had a letter from my mother, signed by my sister as well . . . and they write that in Naples they’re all well and the weather is good . . .” and he, in the middle of this information, every so aften asked: “And did your godmother write? And did you go to Mass?” as if, on a momentary whim, he took a kind of frivolous pleasure in interfering in her affairs.
At the same time, he was going through the kitchen, and he looked around, and recognized the objects with gestures of pleasure and ownership, as if it were ten years since he’d been home! Occasionally she shook her head slightly, with two curls in front that were like bells, and, laughing with her dark mobile eyes, said timidly: “I didn’t expect it . . . I didn’t at all expect to see you here today . . .”
Then, with casual confidence, like a sovereign, he gave her this response:
“I always do what I like. When I feel like leaving, I go. And when I feel like coming home, I come back here, and you have to do what suits me.”
Soon afterward, he went up the stairs with his suitcase, and we followed. As soon as we were upstairs, right away, first of all, she went to get her covers from Silvestro’s room and put them back on the small bed in my father’s room.
While he unpacked his suitcase, I stayed there in the room with the two of them: I was lying faceup on the big bed, my arms under my head and knees crossed, and I stared silently at the ceiling with a dark, distracted face. But soon the feeling that my presence was useless made me violently uneasy, and jumping down from the bed I headed toward the door, with the savage attitude and wily step of a tiger. Then my father laughed maliciously and shouted after me: “Hey, Arturo, where are you going? Why so angry? Are we in a bad mood?” But still he didn’t trouble to detain me or call me back. I thought: “Well, I’ll go out. I’ve got lots of money, I can go to the café and the tavern, and maybe even get drunk if I want!” But at that moment any place on earth, if I thought about it, seemed to me empty and hopeless. And in the end I stayed downstairs, in the great boys’ room, where we almost never sat; and where I remained until dark, sitting on one of those broken couches, without thinking of anything or anyone.
My father stayed on Procida for a couple of days and then left again. After about two weeks, he appeared again, for another day or two. And so, always, in those first months of marriage, he continued to show up at frequent intervals, even if his stays were quite short. But I remained indifferent to his departures and his returns: since it was clear that he didn’t come to Procida for me.
Certainly he must have noticed from the start my obvious, ostentatious antipathy toward my stepmother, and in fact on some occasions one would have said that it amused hi
m; but, like an idle despot, he left me to my moods and resentments, without too much concern for me. Only once did he say something about her. It was a moment when I happened to be alone with him in his room while he was making his preparations to depart. I was watching him without saying anything, when, kicking under the bed some old shoes that he didn’t need for the journey, he glanced at me and observed, in a tone of casual arrogance:
“Well, moro, you’re in quite a bad mood, eh? so it seems?”
Without answering I shrugged one shoulder contemptuously, and he resumed, with a half smile, looking at me from between his eyelashes:
“Will you tell us why you’re so angry with her? Why that poor Nunziata’s so irritating to you?”
I frowned, shutting myself in my self. He let out a laugh and then scowled sarcastically, as his eyes clouded mysteriously:
“Hey, come on, moro,” he exclaimed, “you can be sure the dangerous rival who steals my heart from you certainly won’t be poor Nunziatina!” As he uttered that phrase, his voice, and his features, had something brutal about them; then he smiled, almost to himself, with his mouth closed and the corners of his lips lifted. And I recognized that fabulous goat-like smile that I recalled having seen on his face other times.