by Elsa Morante
But my heart, armed against her, denied her any compassion: on the contrary, it persisted in its cruelty. One thing above all exasperated me more and more as the days passed: and that is that she, so afraid of my father, never showed any fear of me! When I offended and insulted her, she never replied, yet she stood before me unafraid as a lioness. That attitude of hers was another obvious proof that she considered me a boy, who can’t make himself feared by a matron like her. And yet already the difference between our heights appeared to have shrunk since the time of her arrival; and her audacity was a slap in the face. To satisfy my pride, I would have liked to inspire fear in her, like my father, in whose presence she trembled if only a shadow passed over his face. And often, forgetting all my other ambitions, I got absorbed in the plan of becoming a bandit when I grew up, a frightening gang leader, so that she would fall into a faint at the mere sight of me. Even at night, sometimes, I woke with this thought: I want to make her afraid, and I imagined using unprecedented cruelties, every sort of barbarism, in the desire to make her hate me as I hated her.
When I gave her orders, and was served by her, I acted like a fierce emperor addressing a simple soldier. And she was always docile and ready to serve me, but that obedience showed no sign of being dictated by fear. Rather, in doing things for me, she grew animated and even assumed a pompous demeanor. And her pale, ugly face became fresh as a jasmine. Maybe she hoped that my commanding her, and being served by her, signified the beginning of a reconciliation? There was no way of making her understand how pitiless my heart was.
CHAPTER 4
Queen of Women
The Hairstyle
My father had been quite attentive in the early days of his marriage, but as the months passed his visits began to be less frequent. All spring, we saw him maybe a couple of times, and always in a hurry, like a guest passing through: on those occasions, he sometimes resumed the habit of wandering around the island in my company. My stepmother, who had been pregnant since early spring, waited at home for us.
The month of June passed without news of my father; but, once July arrived, I began to expect him, since the middle of summer was always a season of nostalgia for him and, wherever he was, made him long for Procida.
In fact, in the early days of August, he reappeared and, as usual, spent almost the entire month on the island. The morning of his arrival, he sailed with me from the little beach in the Torpedo Boat of the Antilles, and from then on we resumed our old summer life, on the beaches and the sea: I became again the sole companion of his hours, while my stepmother, in her heavy, languid state, wandered through the shady rooms of the Casa dei Guaglioni.
The summer days followed one another, all the same and all festive, like radiant stars. My father and I never talked about her; and in those happy hours the Casa dei Guaglioni, with its single inhabitant denied lightness and play, seemed like a burned-out planet, outside the earthly orbit. But in fact I no longer found with my father the childish happiness of other summers: the existence of my stepmother interposed itself between him and me. Precisely because she was condemned to that obscure slavery, she often seemed more present than if she had been there, playing with us, not a woman but a fortunate, light creature equal to my father and me. It was as if there were a great mysterious idol hidden in a room of the Casa dei Guaglioni, without will or splendor, but still, by its magic power, able to change the course and the light of summer.
The pregnancy, which disfigured her body, had also altered her face, giving her an almost mature expression. Her features were relaxed, her nose sharpened, and her cheeks were marked by a grave pallor, as if a disease were consuming her blood. In her slow movements, she bent her thin, delicate neck, like beasts when they labor, and her gaze was veiled by a meek, peaceful shadow, with no question, no anxiety.
Suddenly I thought I recognized in her some strange resemblances to my mother. For months now I had avoided looking at that small portrait, which I kept jealously hidden in my room, forgotten by everyone except me. And now, at the sight of my stepmother, the small portrait with its accustomed piety came continually to my mind. I had an aloof, uncertain feeling about it, which changed my hatred for this woman into a kind of jealous question; and, more than ever, as one recoils from a hopeless temptation, I recoiled from looking at the adored portrait.
One day in early summer, before my father arrived, I heard my stepmother complaining that her great crown of curls, in the hot weather, was bothersome to her. A kind of irresistible whim drove me to suggest that she gather her hair into two braids, and then pin them up in two separate knots, just above her ears. (It was the hairstyle my mother had in the photograph, but she, naturally, didn’t know this, nor did I tell her.) She remained confused and grateful, at this unusual involvement of mine in something that concerned her; she made some slight objection having to do with the length of her hair, but I insisted, almost violently, and making no other objection she followed my advice, adopting the new style. So, with that same hairstyle (the only difference was that some of her shorter curls always dangled on her forehead and her nape), she and the figure in the picture seemed to me even more alike.
I had sometimes a strange feeling of consolation, of forgiveness, and almost of repose at seeing the small part that the hair made above the nape, between the two braids; and a new way she had of smiling (with her lips slightly apart from her pale jaws) inspired a sense of truce with my bitterness of before. Maybe the person in the picture, the queen of all women, also smiled like that?
She was worried about what my father would say at not seeing the curls on her shoulders, as he liked; but my father, on his return, didn’t seem to notice that she had changed her hairstyle, as if he didn’t even remember that, at one time, she had been curly-haired. For some time now, he had not interfered in her doings, and was even less concerned with her than, in the past, he had been with me or Immacolatella. He didn’t treat her well or badly; any idea of joking with her, of giving her presents or teasing her, had left him. Sometimes he seemed even to have forgotten her, like a presence that has been there for centuries, inevitable, the same, so that now you don’t even see it anymore. And sometimes, on the contrary, he looked at her with an uncertain, wondering, and at the same time sleepy expression: as if asking himself who was this strange being, and what had she in common with him, and why was she in our house.
Every so often, in speaking to her, instead of calling her by name, he improvised some slightly mocking nickname that alluded to the present disfigurement of her body. But, although these names sounded vulgar, he uttered them not maliciously but with a kind of boyish detachment, and almost affectionately, because it was natural for him to call others by some characteristic of their person: as when he called me moro, or Romeo Amalfi.
After his August sojourn, we didn’t see him for a long period. The weeks passed without any news, as if he had completely forgotten that the island of Procida existed on the earth.
Starry Nights
Meanwhile, I continued my life on the sea. (That year the good weather lasted until November.) From dawn to sunset, I was happily occupied on my boat; and, now that my father wasn’t around to remind me of her by his presence, during the day my stepmother, and her isolated kitchen up there, vanished from my memory. Again I had returned to having no thoughts, as in past summers. But, as soon as the sun set, and the colors of the sea began to fade, my mood would suddenly change. It was as if all the joyous spirits of the island, which had kept me company during the day, were descending below the horizon, giving me grand signs of farewell in the sun’s rays. The anguish of darkness, which others know from childhood, and then are cured of, I only now became acquainted with! That boundless sea, the roads, and open places seemed to be transformed into a desolate land. And a feeling almost of exile summoned me to the Casa dei Guaglioni, where at that hour the kitchen lamp was lighted.
Sometimes, if twilight surprised me in an out-of-the-way place, or on the open sea, outside the harbor, it seemed
to me that the Casa dei Guaglioni, invisible from those places, had fled to a fantastic, inaccessible distance. All the rest of the countryside, with its indifference, offended me, and I felt lost, until that illuminated point at the top of the rockslide came back in sight. I approached the beach impatiently, and, if it was night, certain childish superstitions pursued me as I ran up the hill. Halfway up the slope, to keep myself company I started singing at the top of my lungs; and, hearing me, above, from the yard, someone came to the kitchen doorway calling in a rhythmic and almost dramatic voice:
“Ar-tu-rooo! Ar-túúú!”
At that hour, she was always busy with the preparations for dinner; I entered with an almost dark, indolent expression, and, waiting for dinner, I stretched out on the bench, resting from my day. Every so often I yawned, with a show of boredom and tiredness; I rarely granted her any sign of attention, nor was there much conversation between the two of us. As she waited for the water to boil, she sat on a low stool, with her hands clasped in her lap and her head slightly bent; and every so often she pushed off her sweaty forehead a curl that had escaped from one of the braids. Her enlarged figure, now lacking any girlishness, seemed to me encircled by sovereignty and repose, like certain figures worshipped by peoples of the Orient to which the sculptor has given a strange, misshapen heaviness as a sign of their august power. Even the two gold circles of her earrings, on the sides of her face, lost, in my eyes, their significance as human ornaments and seemed, rather, like votive offerings hanging on a sacred effigy. Sticking out of her slippers were her small feet, which had not played during the summer, like mine, on the beach and in the sea; and the white color of her skin, in a season when all men and boys were always so dark, also appeared a sign of ancient and proprietary nobility. Sometimes I forgot that she and I were almost the same age: she seemed to have been born many years before me, perhaps even before the Casa dei Guaglioni; but, because of the compassion I felt near her, that supreme age seemed a gentle thing.
At times, I dozed a little on the bench, and in that delicate drowsiness the slightest impressions of reality were transformed into images resembling fragments of a fable, which would soothe me like an infant. I saw again the sparkling tremolo of the sea during the day, like the smile of a marvelous being, which at that hour, supine, left to the caressing currents, was resting, too, thinking of me . . . The night air coming through the French door rested on my dark body, as if someone had put a linen shirt on me, cool and clean . . . The night sky was an immense decorated tent, spread over me . . . Or no, it was an immense tree, in whose branches the stars rustled like leaves . . . and among the branches there was a single nest, mine, and in that nest I was falling asleep . . . Down below, meanwhile, the sea waited for me, mine, too . . . If I licked the skin of my arm, I tasted salt . . .
Some evenings, after dinner, drawn by the cool outside air, I stretched out on the doorstep, or on the ground in the yard. The night, which down below an hour before had seemed to me so fierce, here, a step from the lighted French door, became familiar again. Now if I looked at the sky it was a great ocean, scattered with countless islands, and, sharpening my gaze, I sought among the stars those whose names I knew: Arturo, first of all others, and then the Bears, Mars, the Pleiades, Castor and Pollux, Cassiopeia . . . I had always regretted that in modern times there was no longer on the earth some forbidden limit, like the Pillars of Hercules for the ancients, because I would have liked to be the first to go beyond it, challenging the ban with my audacity; and in the same way, now, looking at the starry sky, I envied the future pioneers who would be able to reach the stars. It was humbling to see the sky and think: “There are so many other landscapes, other rainbows of colors, maybe many other seas of unknown hues, forests bigger than the ones in the tropics, other kinds of ferocious and joyful animals, even more loving than those we see . . . other stupendous female creatures who sleep . . . other handsome heroes . . . other faithful followers . . . and I can’t get there!”
Then my eyes and my thoughts left the sky in vexation, and came to rest again on the sea, which, as soon as I looked at it, pulsed toward me, like a lover. Spread out there, black and full of allurements, it repeated to me that it, too, no less than the starry sky, was vast and fantastic, and possessed territories that couldn’t be counted, all different from one another, like a hundred thousand planets! Soon the longed-for age when I would be not a boy but a man would begin; and the sea, like a companion that had played with me and had grown up with me, would carry me away with it to know the oceans, and all the other lands, and all life!
Queen of Women
Autumn was already upon us, with its early sunsets: the cruel moment of darkness came earlier every day, driving me away from the sea. Very often, if I got home before nightfall, I would now find visitors. My stepmother had made friends with two or three Procidan women, wives of shopkeepers or boatmen, who came to see her and lingered to talk, offering help and advice while she worked on the layette for my stepbrother who was soon to be born. I don’t know how she had been able to induce them to cross the threshold of the Casa dei Guaglioni, and at first their presence surprised me, as an implausible apparition. For the most part, they all sat around the kitchen table, which was littered with pieces of cloth and swaddling clothes, and I noticed that my stepmother, so submissive with my father and me, among those women demonstrated, instead, a kind of matronly authority and almost recognized supremacy, even though she was younger.
All of them were small, and she seemed very tall in comparison. And she sewed with an expression of serious absorption, composed and silent in the circle of chattering, gesturing women.
Their animated voices muffled the sound of my footsteps as I came in from outside; but, at my entrance, they immediately fell silent, shy and distrustful; and a few minutes later they all dispersed, because in Procida women customarily withdraw into their own houses when darkness descends.
Sometimes, coming up from the sea a little earlier than usual, and lingering outside to enjoy the sunset, I happened to hear their conversations. The subjects were almost always the same: doings of immediate family and other relatives, or matters regarding the various jobs of their husbands, the house, the children, and in particular the coming birth of my stepsibling. On one of those occasions I heard my stepmother’s voice reveal to the others the name she had decided on for her firstborn: if it was a girl, she said, she would call her Violante (Violante was her mother’s name); and if it was a boy she would call him Carmine Arturo. Actually, she explained, she would have preferred to call him Arturo, because ever since she was a child she had liked that name more than all others; but since there was already an Arturo in the house, and two brothers can’t have the same name, she had decided on Carmine for the first name, in honor of the Madonna del Carmine, the protector of Procida. Carmine also sounded all right, she observed, especially if you said Carminiello. Carminiello-Arturo! Further, she intended to add to this double name, on the certificate of baptism, Raffaele and Vito, the names of her father and brother.
Usually, when her friends left, my stepmother went on sewing a little longer, while I rested on the bench. For months, she had been putting aside the little sums given to her occasionally by my father, and had done her best to pick up scraps of material in the shops of Procida, to make these clothes for my stepbrother. It was a matter, in reality, of five or six items, which might all fit in a shoebox; and they seemed of a rather cheap quality, as far as I could understand. But her younger brothers had always been content, for baby clothes, with old rags and women’s shawls; and the making of a layette like this assumed, in her eyes, the importance of a solemn princely ceremony. Still, in the rigorous attention she gave the work, you could discern a certain inexperience and lack of skill.
I didn’t devote any particular thought to my stepsibling. His birth was now approaching; but he remained unreal, like a character from China, which for us meant nothing. It was strange, the idea that in reality he already existed among us, in our h
ouse. My stepmother herself, although she was preparing the layette, never spoke of him, and didn’t even stop to think about him, I’m sure. At times, one would have said she lived almost unconscious of carrying him inside her. The cats, the birds, the beasts, too, when the time for a family arrives, are busy preparing their nests, like creatures preoccupied and inspired, without thinking of the one who commands them.
Autumn. Last News of Algerian Dagger
September had been beautiful but as hot as August; and the first autumnal air, instead of bringing relief to my stepmother, seemed to exhaust her weary blood. Her eyes had become opaque and expressionless, as if the spirit that nourished their splendor were wasting away. And that majesty which a short time before had made her misshapen body almost divine was now becoming a pitiful lethargy. Even her hair had lost its beautiful raven blackness, and looked parched, dusty. She was ugly, terribly ugly; and my mysterious sibling, who made her ugly, was transformed in my thoughts into a kind of monster, or illness, to which she submitted without struggle. Circled by a halo of sadness, with the braids that had come loose from the buns, she moved through the kitchen, and no longer sang as she lit the fire. At brief intervals, she would return to her stool to rest; and maybe, turning on me her opaque, expressionless eyes, she hinted at some topic of conversation: her mother, her sister, her home in Naples . . . Of the time of her engagement, and of her wedding, however, she never said anything; that subject, like God, or my stepbrother, seemed to belong to that mysterious power which can’t be translated into words or even thoughts. Only seldom, and fleetingly, did I hear her name Vilèlm, and sometimes I thought that in some unconscious hint of hers I caught a gleam of his mysterious life outside the island . . . But even then my pride wouldn’t lower itself to show her that her conversation interested me. I would almost have been tempted to ask her some questions, to explore, through her ignorance, the fascinating secrets that she herself couldn’t know . . . But, scornfully, I restrained myself. In fact, I made a show of paying no attention, and even less than to her other subjects. And, as usual, her little voice, discouraged by talking to herself, soon faded.