Hell's Gate

by Laurent Gaudé

  You’re dead, Papà, but your story isn’t over. Giuliana must know what you’ve achieved. I’ll take a handful of Càlena earth with me and I’ll go to her. She will love you again. She will cherish your memory. In her thoughts, she will kiss you. You went to the ends of the earth and beyond to do what she asked of you. You succeeded. And now all I have to do is show her my face to bring you back together across the years.

  My mother. Giuliana. It’s you I’m driving towards. It took me a while to understand. It took me a while to find your trace. Giuliana, you know nothing about any of this, cut off from the world in a dusty little village in Gargano. I can picture you dressed in black with your head bowed, talking to the shadows. I’m counting down the miles until I reach you. Soon I’ll be at Vico and, from there, I’ll head to Cagnano. Mamma, I’m driving towards you, and all this time you’ve been waiting for me without even knowing it.

  XX

  Giuliana’s Last Curse

  (December 1980)

  She stood up straight on the crest of the hill. Everything around her was calm. The landscape of Gargano rustled with the busy life of insects. She knew every inch of the surrounding countryside. She breathed in deeply, and knelt down to smell the odour of pines, then she undid her blouse. The fresh air caressed her breasts. She took a small knife from her pocket. She was as pale as a woman walking to the pyre. In the silence that surrounded her with indifference, she began to talk to the stones and this was Giuliana’s last curse:

  ‘I curse myself, me, Giuliana, the woman who did not know what she loved. I believed I could make myself deaf to the world. I banished my husband, my child and my city from my thoughts. I chased away my memories when I should have cherished them as the only vestiges saved from disaster. I curse myself, me, Giuliana the ugly. I miss Matteo. I miss Matteo, swallowed up in death. I miss Pippo. My men were killed and I did nothing. I did not help them. I did not go with them. I banished them from my life. I am Giuliana the coward, who wanted to save herself from pain. So I take this knife and I cut off my breasts. I cut off the first, which suckled my son, and leave it on the stones of the hills in memory of the mother I was. I cut off the second, which my husband licked, and I leave it on the stones of the hills in memory of the lover I was. I am Giuliana the ugly; I have no breasts. I deserve nothing. Now I have decided to become old. I will be hideous and senile. I want to be a worn-out, twisted body. I will be no age. I will deteriorate quickly. I want that. In the weeks and months and years to come, I will wither. Tomorrow my hair will be white. Soon my teeth will come loose and my hands will tremble. I ask for old age and shaking. I have amputated my breasts. I am no longer a woman. No one will ask anything of me ever again. I will not recognise anyone any more. I want to be left with my memories of the past, the disarray of my spirit. I want people not to know what to do with me and to take me to a hospital where I will end my days in the solitude of failed lives. I am Giuliana the madwoman. I have decided today that my skin will become wrinkled and my hair will fall out. I will talk to myself. I will shout out to chase away the shadows that haunt me. My nights will be long with insomnia and terror that nothing will be able to cure. I am Giuliana with no breasts. I am no longer part of this world.’

  XXI

  The Disease that Kills the Trees

  (August 2002)

  I arrive in Cagnano as the first glimmers of sunlight appear. It’s market day. I park at the edge of the village; I’d rather continue on foot. I look around. Everything’s ugly and run down. The houses are tightly packed along a barren hillside. A barely visible sign proudly announces ‘Città dell’olio’, but it isn’t fooling anyone. The roads are dirty, the houses empty. A mass of three- and four-storey buildings without roofs or staircases, built illegally and left unfinished, surrounds the old village. Nothing but vacant buildings. You can see the daylight through them. Who builds in Cagnano? Who are these ghost houses for? This is where my mother comes from: Cagnano, the sad face of the world.

  I head further into the village and look for shops. The first I come across is a butcher’s. I go in and everyone turns to look at me. I’m a stranger around here. I explain I’m looking for someone. Giuliana Mascheroni, do you know her? Giuliana Mascheroni, no? I watch their faces harden, instinctively suspicious. They reply in the negative and from their closed expressions I see I may as well stop trying. I leave and ask around elsewhere. I try other shops. Giuliana Mascheroni? I ask the kids I pass in the street. La Signora Mascheroni, no? No one answers. I slowly retrace my steps and find myself back at the market – no more than four or five carts parked in the middle of the square, all of them loaded with fruit and veg. I watch the weathered faces of the farmers come to sell their produce. It’s nothing like the pile-it-high markets in Naples – everything is counted out carefully here, as if the traders can only offer what they’ve salvaged from the sun.

  I approach an old farmer, buy a pound of peaches and ask my question again. Giuliana Mascheroni? He stares hard at me. I get the feeling I should say more. ‘I’m here on behalf of her husband. He died in Naples … I’ve got some things to give her … Do you know her?’ He nods. Then, in thick dialect, he tells me she left years ago. Where did she go? To San Giovanni Rotondo, he replies. To the hospital. I ask if she was ill. He moves his head to say yes and no, and adds that she left to help the nurses. His wife, intrigued by our conversation, comes over to join us. ‘She went mad!’ she blurts out. Mad? I ask her to go on. She seems surprised I hadn’t heard. She mumbles something about harming herself and a knife before the old farmer cuts in, concluding, ‘The disease that kills the trees. That’s what she caught.’ I’m not sure I’ve understood. I ask him to repeat himself. ‘Just like that, without warning,’ he explains, ‘trees can suddenly go yellow. Eaten away from the inside. Nothing to be done. The sap goes bad and poisons the leaves. It was the same for her. Just like that, without warning …’

  I thank them and walk away. San Giovanni Rotondo. It’s about twenty miles from here. If I leave now, I’ll be there in half an hour. As I get into the car, I realise I didn’t even ask the man how he knew her. I might have been speaking to one of her cousins, or a childhood friend – someone who knew her infinitely better than I ever did. But I didn’t ask. I leave Cagnano and its empty buildings behind me and set off as fast as I can.

  XXII

  The Hospital of Suffering

  (August 2002)

  I stand in front of the tall façade of San Giovanni Rotondo hospital. What a grim place this is. The building’s as bleak and depressing as a prison. Above the entrance, a large sign looms over passers-by, its message bearing down on them: Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza. I know those words are lies: there’s no ‘relief of suffering’ here. House of Suffering. That’s what I see written above the door. House of Suffering, as if to warn that you’re more likely to die here than be healed, and not before going through long periods of pain, fever and breathing difficulties. My mother’s in there, behind those walls. Who knows what state she’s in. I’ve been to the ends of the earth and I’ve found her here, at the House of Suffering. I know straight away I’m going to hate this place, as I already hate the whole town and the pilgrims who flock here. Everywhere you look, in every car and shop, inside every wallet, is the bearded face of the man they made a saint. This is the town of Padre Pio, the miracle-working priest who healed the sick and hid his stigmata under woollen mittens. People come from all over the region, even other parts of the country, hoping to find some trace of his person or powers within its walls. But there’s nothing. House of Suffering. It’s like a warning. Through that door, it’s the diarrhoea and distress of cancer patients. It’s the sleepless nights and sobs of those who know nothing will save them. Through that door, it’s the pointless prayers of families counting their rosaries until their fingers bleed, while the dying open their eyes wide like birds and gasp for a little more air, a little more time before the end. It’s coughing fits, raging fevers and endless surgical procedures, leaving pints of s
pent blood around the operating tables. House of Suffering. And every patient prays he’ll be the one to be spared.

  I glare at the façade. If it wasn’t for my mother, I wouldn’t go in. I’d spit on the ground and turn back. But she’s in there. I know she’s in there. She can’t be dead. I have to finish the journey. So I take a deep breath and I force myself to go in. I don’t spit on the ground or go back to my car, cursing this horrible town. I put my head down and climb the grand steps up to the hospital, passing under the threatening inscription ‘Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza’. Really I’m just like every other person entering these doors, hoping to leave my pain here and go away having gained some comfort. I come with my wounds and I hope for relief. I am like them. I want to be the patient who smiles in surprise to find he has been saved, and become one of those who is miraculously cured.

  XXIII

  The Corridor between Us

  (August 2002)

  ‘Relationship to the patient?’

  The person sitting in front of me – a gaunt-faced woman in her fifties – lays a hand on her desk and looks up, toying with a pen in her other hand.

  ‘Her nephew,’ I reply.

  Why don’t I tell her who I really am? I don’t know. I seem to need to approach Giuliana cautiously, little by little. Or maybe I want my mother to be the first to know who I am, ahead of anybody else.

  The woman, the hospital’s head nurse, doesn’t blink. She writes something in her file and begins to talk. I don’t listen at first. I look around the dusty little office, its cramped space and dreary decor. Her monotonous drone takes the flavour out of the words, as if she were drily reciting some official statement. The words fall limply from her lips. She’s talking about treatment. She’s saying I shouldn’t be under any illusions. That it’s a matter of slowing the decline rather than really treating the disease because – and she says this twice – there is no cure. Then she uses the term ‘dementia’ and pauses. ‘When she first came here,’ she says, ‘it was to offer us help. She worked as an auxiliary nurse for more than fifteen years. Then the disease took over.’ I look up.

  ‘Do you have a sense of the state in which you’re going to find her?’ she asks, checking I’ve understood the situation. Her voice is stronger and more piercing now. Her gaze is directed straight at me. I don’t move. She takes my silence as a ‘no’ and embarks on a lengthy explanation of her patient’s condition: Giuliana, my mother, began to lose her mind several years ago. The decline was unusually rapid. Short-term memory was first to be affected. Certain distant memories remain very clear, but she finds it increasingly hard to recall what she had to eat two hours ago, or even whether she’s eaten at all.

  The nurse continues to paint this picture of my mother, ravaged by early-onset dementia like an attack of scabies on the brain. For several weeks, she has been unable to recognise faces, even those of the auxiliary nurses she sees ten times a day; whenever one of them enters her room, she asks their name as if she’d never met them before. She’s incontinent and screams a lot, alone in her room or seated at the dinner table. She’s haunted by nightmares, plagued by visions of horror. It’s a curious case, the nurse adds, because the patient isn’t very old. She’s not even sixty, but the state she’s in, she could be a woman of ninety. Still fixing me with her cold little eyes, she concludes, ‘The reason I’m telling you all this is to prepare you for what’s coming. It’s going to be hard. I don’t know when you last saw your aunt, but I can tell you for certain: the person you’re about to meet bears no resemblance to the woman you knew before.’

  I say nothing. Should I tell her that I last saw Giuliana – Giuliana who is not my aunt, but my mother – on the day of my own death on the streets of Naples twenty-two years ago? Should I tell her that if Giuliana’s gone mad, it’s because of the pain of that day, which kept growing stronger until it destroyed her and everything around her, causing her to hate my father for doing nothing and hate a life that was full only of the emptiness I had left behind, and to finally tell herself that the best, or rather, the only possible thing for her to do was to bury herself away in Cagnano, the wretched village of her birth?

  Giuliana could never have guessed that death was to deal her another cruel hand, slowly, sadistically eating up her mind and turning her into a demented doll. She could never have guessed her life would end here, in the dirty corridors of the geriatric department in San Giovanni Rotondo among the shuffling patients bent by loneliness, whispering at the walls and looking fearfully about them. Maybe she doesn’t care. In fact I’m pretty sure she doesn’t. This life or another: it’s all the same to her. She died a long time before any of this began.

  ‘You do know, don’t you,’ says the nurse, to really drum it home, ‘the chances of her recognising you are very slim?’

  I smile.

  ‘I know,’ I tell her.

  Yes, slim indeed. How will she ever recognise the six-year-old boy she said goodbye to on the doorstep one morning in June 1980 after dressing him and leaving him with his father? Will she remember the last kiss she planted on my forehead after running a comb through my hair? I remember Giuliana. The mother who smiled, though her eyes said she was sorry to have to leave so early. The mother who told herself she would enjoy some quality time with her son after work to make up for the hours lost that morning – and who could never have guessed she was about to receive a phone call that would rip her life apart and send her running, chest heaving and lips white, shedding endless tears. The mother I haven’t seen for twenty-two years. Giuliana, who gave up, having no doubt concluded the world was worthless and there was no longer any point in remembering faces and names. Giuliana, who wipes her mind blank every minute and registers nothing, because the only thing that really mattered to her was swept away. Giuliana, who lives in a chaotic world of nightmares and screams, lonely and frightened. I know. Giuliana. I stand up. I thank the nurse and reach over to shake her hand so that she won’t feel the need to accompany me. She gives me the room number. 507. Giuliana. It’s time.

  XXIV

  My Father Is with Me

  (August 2002)

  I walk along the corridor of the west wing. I hear a voice crackling through the loudspeakers positioned at various points around the building, issuing a call to prayer. All around the hospital, those who still have the strength to respond half close their eyes and whisper an Ave Maria to ease the pain of the dying. I don’t stop or recite anything. I just keep on walking.

  Room 507. I stop. I’ve arrived. Mamma, I’m here. In a few seconds I’ll push open the door and see you. I try to imagine it. When I come in, you’ll have your back turned to me. I’ll be surprised how small the room is – a little square space, almost entirely filled by the bed. At the back of the room there will be a window looking out on the trees. All hospital rooms are the same. You’ll be standing there wearing a dressing gown left undone at the waist, falling shapelessly over your hips. I’ll stay quiet for a while and then I’ll say ‘Giuliana’ softly, to catch your attention. You’ll gradually turn to face me and, as you do, I’ll realise you were in the middle of saying something. How long have you been standing by the window and who are you talking to? You’ll try to think who I remind you of, where you know me from, to which part of your life I belong. I might say, ‘I’m your son,’ in a weak, almost quavering voice, as if in apology. ‘I’m your son,’ and I won’t dare to go any further. You’ll frown. You’ll look doubtful. You’ll concentrate hard. Will you remember your child? Pippo, whom you thought you’d never see again, whose memory you banished.

  I have my back against the wall. The door is on my right. I try to catch my breath and slowly, carefully reach for the handle.

  I am dead, Giuliana, Mamma, I’m back from the dead. My father is here – I carry him within me. It’s time for you to know that he came to fetch me, that he did what you begged him to do. I look like him, don’t I? The same features, the shape of my face. Maybe this will be the hardest thing for you to take in. You�
��ll wonder if it’s Matteo standing in front of you, only a Matteo who stayed young. Everything will be a muddle, Mamma, but don’t worry. I’m here so that you can kiss Matteo in your thoughts and let him feel, in that faraway place, that you love him again. He did what no one else would do. I am the boy who came back from the other side. You’ll look at me. Mother. You won’t be able to take your eyes off me and suddenly a smile will appear on your face. You’ll smile a thousand-year-old smile filled with all the light of the first day on earth.

  I take a last deep breath, as if preparing for a dive. I open the door to see a dazzling white light.

  We three are together again. I walk with my father into the room of your insanity. My mother. He’s shaking as much as I am, he who has never faltered. He’s afraid. He’s waited so long to see your loving face. I open the door. For a moment, Giuliana, death no longer exists. The three of us are alive again. For a few seconds, the light in this wretched space is as pure as peace. I stand in front of you, not daring to come closer. I look at you. I say, ‘I’m your son.’ Do you hear me? Can you understand me, though your mind has gone? You look back at me for a long time, with an odd expression on your face. I stay still. My father is waiting too. We are here. The three of us. Time seems to go on and on. Then, with the slow, graceful movements of happy days, you open your arms.