Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  One day, I invited a group of strikers to my father’s house. When he returned from the office in the evening, he greeted them politely and retired to his room. That evening he dined out and, the following morning, he advised me to look for another place to live.

  “The reason?” I asked.

  “You cannot receive strange men in my house, this is not a—”

  “Oh, morality!” I broke in.

  “That’s right,” his lady friend at the time who witnessed the conversation interjected, “when we come home, we never know who we’re going to find in this house. And if this continues…”

  “I see.”

  I looked in the phone book for some refuge for myself and found the Villa della Pace for disabled war veterans. I called, yes, there were vacancies, and that very same day, early in the afternoon, I loaded what little stuff I needed in the Studebaker and drove off.

  “What about me?” my son asked me. He bundled up his things to return to his father.

  “You’ll see, in a couple of months we’ll have a home again, I’ll find some loans.” I was wrong about that.

  Though by then I was no longer angry with my mother, I still didn’t communicate with her much, due to the ongoing incompatibility of our ways of life.

  “Each of us should do what he must and live in peace,” she said, “the rest is just pretext.”

  It makes me smile to remember the sense of impotence that overcame me as we sat in the living room and drank tea, which for her was a ritual. Sometimes I flew off the handle.

  “Swear words too now?” she would observe in her soprano voice. “Do you think you can change the world by shouting and using coarse language?” Lowering her eyelids, she went on softly: “Believe me, Lucia, rudeness has never helped anyone, vulgarity has never alleviated an injustice.”

  “Of course.” I gritted my teeth so as not to raise my voice. “In fact, it creates it. Not what you say, though, but what’s in here.” I thumped my chest. “That’s where the real vulgarity lies, deep and intimate, putting oneself above it all, refusing to see.”

  “What do you want from me?” my mother would snap at that point. “You want me to become one of those frenzied, immoral, corrupt people the world is full of?” she countered, her voice crystalline, electric. “What do you expect from me? I’m made for finer things. Ugliness doesn’t interest me.” Then she regained her composure and in a melodious voice added, “Take my word for it, Lucia, everyone in his place,” disappointed that I couldn’t understand so simple, so obvious a concept.

  “What place?” I yelled. “Who assigned it? Can you tell me that? Who!?”

  My mother rolled her eyes to the ceiling and, almost incredulous at my blindness, shook her head, her lovely face showing no sign of wrinkles at age fifty: “Such confusion in that little head of yours, Lucia,” she said, her fingers lightly sweeping my forehead as she smiled appealingly. “But can it be?” As if startled, she looked at the time: “It’s gotten late.” She wrapped herself in her Persian lamb coat, pulled on her gloves, and briefly patted the blonde chignon under the pale fur hat; with a gracious nod of pleasure for the tea I’d offered her and a kiss on the forehead, off she went on her elegant high heels.

  The separation from her husband had been good for her, in my eyes that is. Although she was now solely dependent on her meager salary as a teacher and was herself unusually frugal, when I came back from Germany with Lorenzo in ’62 (after leaving the Villa) she had helped me find a place to live and buy furniture and linens with her ant-like savings. Though her disapproval of my way of life remained unwavering, she kept telling me: “Men can be so hateful at times,” her dark eyes riveted. “Don’t let them snare you, believe me, pay no attention to them but look and pass on,” she recited, sitting straight in her chair, her voice virginal, her beautiful legs crossed.

  It definitely makes me smile to think how inexplicable it must have seemed to her to end up with a daughter like me:

  Me of all people, she must have thought to herself, astounded, who never deviated from the straight and narrow, either in thought or action. And while for years I didn’t dare tell my father what I thought and felt, with her I lost my patience, as if it were easy to depart from one’s habitual ways, from one’s fictitious world, an imaginary castle that …

  *

  I thought I had gone over all the issues that I had laid on the altar of my physical affliction. It was late September. If the reader only knew how it felt to see the lovely weather outside through the half-open window, as I sat shut up in a room, at my desk, forever reweaving the same memories.

  And drugs? There too I had hidden behind the paralysis when I became addicted to them. And what an effort to detoxify, less violent than that Easter in Mainz, but a hundred times longer: the addiction had lasted for an extended period of time. I began by replacing (in ’55) the stronger narcotics with other, milder ones, morphine with tebasolo, opium with nisidina, with the intention of going from ampules to suppositories to tablets. I ingested diradon and noan pills, always checking the proportions of chloro-methyl-phenyl-benzodiazepine, of diazepam at 1 or 2H-1 and so on, of all these products. I especially stopped resorting to any additional Valium, which had been a constant supplement to my ampules, suddenly panicked at the thought of the particular docility induced by that drug, which inadvertently leads to a loss of control over the nervous system, to a loss of will. How could I have forgotten that it was the basic component of the truth serum used by the Nazis in Dachau?

  It was in that circumstance that my first precise memory of the K-Lager broke through to me. I no longer had to muddle around with the excuse that they were soft drugs, and, whenever I was tempted, I thought of Dachau.

  Perhaps the most painful thing, at the time, was to halve the ampules, knowing what it had taken me to procure them, and pour the leftover down the sink with the water running.

  So painful that, subsequently, so as not to go through that ordeal again, when I had to undergo surgery, I chose—for a time—to have them operate on me while awake rather than be given narcotics and go back to needing drugs. I thought of it as undergoing torture. If you scream, you betray your comrades. I didn’t make a sound and the joy of not having betrayed my comrades generously compensated me for the pain I’d suffered. Now I no longer have these temptations (knock on wood); I haven’t for several years, in fact, and I can do without forbidding myself at so dear a price (let them torture me, I won’t talk).

  *

  Oh God, this parenthesis: “(let them torture me, I won’t talk).” I could delete it and pretend I never wrote it, but I certainly thought it. Can it be that my core nobility pursues me so relentlessly? Who is torturing me, who wants to torture me?

  And all the rest: I take drugs, I’m unjust, I’m wrong—yet the fault is always attributed elsewhere. What have I done up till now if not imply that the combination of circumstances was such that … First I blamed my decline on the struggle related to my physical affliction; then, when that alibi failed, it was the overwhelming battle against my social environment instead. And always this innocence, this ineradicable nobility of intention and genuineness of feeling that are so typical of me. Choleric, fraudulent, muddleheaded, dangerous—but so human, maybe too human. Seemingly a worm but essentially of such refinement, sensitivity, goodness. Wait, I’ve got it: an inveterately elite worm.

  What didn’t I seize upon, in this story of my distortions, to assert this candid image of my deepest nature, always striving against all odds, albeit in the blindest error, for the ultimate welfare of all? And then I railed against bourgeois compunction! I simply replaced the lofty tone that I abhorred in my social class with a tone of humility, of one who also sees her own shortcomings: a more malleable snakeskin, more current.

  It may have been mental fatigue, a lack of confidence that I would ever sort out my repressions—I was lying on the bed again, motionless, my eyes closed—when the thought hit me that this tendency to constantly scrape through was not on
e of the usual snakeskins to be shed, only more adherent than the others, but my real skin. I could go on stirring up my memories until the end of time, I would never find myself wearing any other one.

  And then the most appalling suspicion of all came to me: given that I was so perfectly, indeed, so ardently like them, to the point of constantly being of a superior order of humanity (even in front of the toilet bowl), who was to say that I had ever been different? What if from the beginning I had always and solely been a snake? I claimed that I had betrayed my Lagers. What if I hadn’t betrayed a single thing?

  What evidence did I have that things in the Lagers had been as I had reconstructed them? Not with regard to facts, because those can be spun any way you want, but deep within me, in my innermost self. My heart winced. Maybe you never really went over to the other side, one among many; maybe you’ve always been one of those people who looks down on the “humiliated and insulted.” Maybe your consciousness didn’t make that social leap in ’44 that you’re so proud of. Your footsteps, yes, but not your consciousness. What you’ve now discovered in your Lagers is what you wanted to see, you put it there, it didn’t really exist: in the deepest corner of your mind you’ve always been on this side, WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR NEVER EXISTED.

  But then why did I go and be a worker, I defended myself in a whispered pious voice (that suspicion had the clarity of evidence, of something that is real), why did I get myself deported to Dachau?

  Descents into hell, in accordance with the Dantean love of knowledge learned in school. There was no need to drag in the class struggle for that. An artist’s curiosity was enough, as Terence said two thousand years ago, Nihil humani a me alienum puto. Nothing that is human is alien to me, and since today social unrest was also human, I had entered into it owing to my adventurous nature. The rest was a figment of my imagination to ennoble that episode of the Lagers, making it more important (the better to adorn myself).

  No, I rebelled, pitiable, yes, but not to that extent. I’m killing myself to get to the truth, you can’t take that away from me, if you deny that even now …

  Exactly. Now. Not then.

  Therefore (all the more reason) I was only chasing a fantasy, a delusion of how I would have wanted to experience that chapter; I was pursuing a memory produced by my desire. How could I have found any trace of it? That’s why the infamous memory gap loosened up as soon as I thought I’d identified it in the rushing torrent of my life. For this reason not one of the scapegoats blamed for my repression held up to verification. That was the only way to explain why my coming and going in Germany had remained a parenthesis: it did not encompass the significance that I attributed to it. I was populating those forgotten acts and gestures with new thoughts that made the recollection so compelling to me now, almost as if I were repaying a debt.

  Maybe I hadn’t even left Verona of my own free will.

  Think whatever you like, reader, that this is a theatrical dramatization, yet another snakeskin sloughed off so as to be reborn more humane and nobler than ever. Now that it’s all over, I almost think so too. It may be because it took me a lifetime to try to make my suppressions mean something that I now find this pastime tedious. Who hasn’t experienced extreme about-faces, how can you not distrust them? I distrust them and I experienced them!

  I must also say that now, as I write these words, the doubt that came to me doesn’t seem so critical. It can happen, indeed it’s common, inevitable, that the past is viewed through the lens of hindsight. If one then represents it as something grander than the truth, it’s not the end of the world. But at the time, five weeks ago, the life I’d been leading for months may have driven me a little crazy: eyes bloodshot and burning, hair uncombed, a bite to eat at the most irregular hours then left untouched. The fact is that that doubt seemed like the failure of my attempt at self-awareness.

  I had based the recovery of my memories on a falsehood; therefore that recovery was also unsubstantiated. While I’d thought I finally had my feet on solid ground, I’d been resting them on imaginary terrain. I no longer had any hope of making my subjective self line up with my objective self. What else is paranoia? My social rage in the Lagers was my believing myself to be Napoleon or Henry IV.

  It seems incredible but what saved me from the silence of the rationality I was striving for—so that I finally said to myself, if I have to be my own Gestapo, I give up—in short, what unexpectedly saved me (an unhoped-for intervention) was the literary compartment of my brain.

  “What are you complaining about?” it asked me, as it usually does, telepathically, to soothe me. “If things are really as you fear, from a compositional point of view you can only rejoice: you don’t have to understand the repression—your search fails, and that’s that. You even have a nice conclusion: you reveal to the reader that the story of your deviation was a dream in which your imagination enacted one of the most tenacious (and vain) aspirations of all mortals, the eternal human dream of correcting the past.”

  I’ll skip my ego’s indignation (“You’re my real snake, I flushed you out etcetera, your depraved sublimations etcetera”), but then again (why deny it?) my ego was tempted too, being ever so docile behind all its theatrical pretensions.

  It was such a relief to be able to wrap up not only my wartime Germany but my entire complicated life that I almost followed that poetic diversion. Okay, let’s delete the almost: I followed it.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good. After a restorative two-day slumber, I tended to my fingernails, tinted my hair, smeared anti-wrinkle cream on my pasty face, applied tea compresses to my eyelids. I spruced myself up, straightened out the house, and even took a trip to Spain, invited by a couple of young friends.

  For a week we drove around with local hosts, from Toledo to the Escurial, from Madrid to Córdoba and Granada, through La Mancha, with its old windmills profiled against the sky on the ridge of barren hills. I won’t be like Don Quixote (I thought), who at the end of his life repudiated his knighthood: I was insane, I was insane, he said, now I’m sensible. I’ve known for some time who I am: a woman who’s always told herself imaginary stories …

  XIV

  When I returned home (to Rome), given that the matter of the narrative was in any case resolved—how I’d tormented myself!—I unexpectedly got the idea that I might also satisfy my curiosity to know whether or not I had experienced the strike at IG Farben, the flight from Verona, and all the rest with the mentality (social rage) with which I had represented them.

  It wasn’t idle curiosity, I told myself, or a roundabout way of slipping back into the paranoia that I had verged on: it was a technique (there, that’s the right word) to exercise my apperception of the external world. Maybe, depending on the discrepancies I found between how I perceived myself and how I’d actually been, I could calculate the curve of my imagination, and then get into the habit of grading it based on my judgments of reality.

  Armed with this new plan, I took the car and went out. Obviously, I needed something more than a single certificate, more than one document, mere guarantees of facts that can easily be manipulated. I needed a tangible sign of my interior shifts, a graph plotting my thinking in ’44. The letters! That was my proof: the letters that I had written from IG Farben. They couldn’t contain much, given the censorship and the fact that they were written to my parents. But if there was the slightest trace of the rage I now saw … stop! don’t get ahead of yourself, find them first. However (my ego and the literary compartment of my brain secretly kept telling me), if I found the trace I was looking for, I would never again let myself be constrained by my snake. Now I understood that it was him, with his classist coils, who had almost convinced me that we were one soul, that my consciousness had never really been with the other side. You can squirm all you want, he taunted, tightening his grip, end up in the K-Lagers or nursing homes, it makes no difference, wherever you go, I am and will remain the social locus of your spirit.

  You’ve revealed yourself! I hisse
d back at him. I quivered with emotion; you feel threatened, I said, trying to hypnotize him in turn. We are no longer in the same skin, all that shedding was not in vain, you were forced to come out to smother me, to silence me, and so you gave yourself away. Now I know what I must look for in my IG Farben letters, not just my social rage, but your disguises. Watch out, I’ll flush you out no matter what, even if it means admitting that I made it all up.

  *

  I’ll skip the initial attempts. Those letters from Höchst seemed to have vanished into thin air. To put it briefly, in one of my father’s filing cabinets I found a slim folder containing the letters, arranged by date, that my mother had written to me at the Pfaffenwiese camp when I worked at IG Farben.

  How did they get here? I’d kept them stowed in the inside pocket of the duffel bag that I had abandoned on the ground in Verona. How could my father have gotten hold of them? Of course, someone must have picked up the bag and found the letters, which must have been returned to the sender indicated on the back of the envelopes. An anonymous way of informing the sender that I’d been captured. Maybe it was someone who had witnessed the scene of the roundup from behind the closed shutters of a window. So the scene was accurate (otherwise how could these letters have gotten here?): If I had simply been rounded up, why would I have thrown away the bag with my documents? They would have been useful to me, they would have liberated me! The person who found the bag would have sent them back along with the letters. I flip through the folder, but all I find is my last time card from IG Farben, the one I had to punch when entering and leaving the factory. My first foreign worker’s passport with the Frankfurt prison stamp isn’t there. Neither is the discharge certificate from the hospital with the diagnosis of the reason for my admission: poisoning due to attempted suicide. My father must have torn them up. So he knew everything about me, at the time of that conversation in Bologna in ’46 when I’d asked him if he’d had them search for me in August ’44; that’s why he was so evasive, as if he couldn’t remember the details.