The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  The death of a mother or a father ends youth, it’s commonly supposed. But for you, it wasn’t so. Losing your father ushered you into a yet more sequestered part of the sunlit days that made up your childhood; it was a place – that youth, that southern childhood – like a walled garden, where the temperature is more constant within than it is without, where the climate is kind, clean, and fresh, like the envelope of newly laundered sheets, tightly tucked all around the way you have always done it, from the time when your mother used to put you to bed playing pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, and would knead you and roll you and work you over till you squealed and she could slide you under the covers for sleep to do you to a turn.

  16

  From the diary of Davide Pittagora

  RE D’ITALIA, 8 APRIL 1913

  I CAN RELIEVE myself over the side (leeward, to be sure), but for Maria Filippa and the girls the problem is severe – the conveniences are pestiferous, Rosa tells me. So we have set aside one of our cooking pots for the purpose – what else could we do?

  Pericle managed a little carrot purée – and is more content – how sweet the sound of his snuffles at my dear one’s breast! He drums at her chest with his free fist to summon her to his attention – what an imperious little man! He was born to command – America beware! – Italians like to have their own way from the cradle on! It’s a miracle, and one that we fathers can only contemplate in wonder, how the will to live springs so fierce and strong in such a tiny creature. At times, Maria Filippa turns her head away from the baby’s sucking as if he gives her pain, she stiffens her neck and sighs – it’s true, his need pulls at her blindly, and cries out in fury when denied. Do cubs, or kittens, or whelps or baby bats or newborn whales or any other infants of the mammal kingdom howl so fiercely when hungry and thwarted in their hunger? I seem to remember weak squeaks and yelps of blind puppies at birth – only our species knows red-blooded appetite to this degree, I think. We are born with fury in us, our survival depends on it. That is why we have dominion over all other creatures.

  Yet when I see you, my own beloved wife, with your eyes hollowed by our son’s appetite, I sometimes wish that I could change places with you, and give you respite. In the opera today divas customarily sing in men’s roles; I can think of sublime examples – think only of Cherubino! I can remember Gluck’s Orfeo, I heard it once at the Petruzzelli, with La Parsi-Pettinella, it was, at her most firm and rich, in the part of the despairing god who loses his Eurydice to the shades. He turns to gaze at her beloved face once more – too soon! Ah, that lament – expressive of man’s highest yearnings for the ideal of love – should be sung by all true hearts when they fear the ineluctable loss of their dear one. Such love as the god felt for his Eurydice is synonymous with good, and it is entirely proper that it be given to a mezzo to sing. Art is our mistress, and Orpheus, god of music, must have a feminine soul in him for that reason. I should transpose Orpheus’s lamentation and sing it here on this ship – it is catchy too. Catchy melodies bring more in our fedora! Leonora in La Forza – as soon as her father’s dead – plays throughout the opera in male dress – in the disguise of a holy hermit, retired from the world to a cave – there are numerous occasions when the mezzo or the contralto enters into the action in the disguise of a man. Of course the opposite – the hero singing with a woman’s voice – used to be traditional. Angels’ voices, they called the castrati, once upon a time (those cardinals!), and Achilles wore a dress in the great lyric drama which opened San Carlo in Naples: though the intention of the divine Metastasio was to chastise the hero for lingering with his beloved Deidamia in her chamber, for debasing himself in women’s clothes in order to stay by her side and avoid fighting in the Trojan War. Alas! Exploits must come before women! Courage is a greater good than Love! The hero must to battle. So they say. Now a man in a woman’s part belongs only to opera buffa, to the grotesque.

  I can understand, however, how Achilles chooses weapons rather than trinkets. I have always loved the explosion of powder in the barrel, the flight of a bullet – I always admired a true shot – Tommaso and I played together at this in the olive groves when we were boys. In spite of what happened, I still find something exhilarating about gunfire. Though I’m a mild man, the crack strikes me with a kind of pleasure.

  I would become the shipboard fool – its trovatore no longer – if I spoke aloud my thoughts when I see Maria Filippa gnawed and emptied by our boy. Talking to Tommaso, when we were children and discussed many things, I sometimes felt that I might be able to admit the unspeakable, that the desire I felt, that the dream I nourished of a lady to love – before you, my true lady appeared – contained a dream of something I might become through her and with her, perhaps like her.

  Beh! Enough of this. It’s foolishness, and we men are fortune’s darlings, not to bear children in sorrow and live in subjection all our livelong days.

  Yet if you, my darling, read me one day, perhaps you will appreciate my yearning to reach some resemblance to you. In your souls, you are more true to the soul itself – we men are beasts beside you.

  Rosa has become very quiet – her greed makes me laugh at her. She flared when I reproached her yesterday. I caught her taking a biscuit from our supplies without asking my permission. There is something wilful about her – It is not altogether feminine. I sense a heat in her that burns too fiercely. And she does not seem to understand that I could do otherwise than laugh at her.

  10 April

  Pericle rallied – his appetite returned and we were all overjoyed. But our hope returned too soon! It has failed again, and he lies feverish, motionless, his limbs limp, his skin dry and flushed. Exhaustion has become our most familiar companion. I sat up with Maria Filippa last night for a while; she applied soaking cloths to his small burning body to cool him – when they became hot at contact with him, she wrung them out and renewed her dabbing, patting. The salt streaked his body – but there isn’t much water aboard to spare. She shrieked at me when I asked what I could do – I hardly recognised her – my head hurts with the vigil, the motion and the wind at sea and he gets no better. She is heroic in motherhood, her own small body an engine for life.

  Sandro says we will be quarantined on arrival in New York if we call the ship’s doctor – or worse, that we will be sent back. The other women and their babies are terrified, for their children and for their voyage’s success too. My headache has not remitted – Sandro exhorts me to show my mettle and overcome it. But I find I cannot. The only solace came in the arms of my dear one for a moment, when changing places with my poor baby I eased her discomfort – how sweet the honey that flows from a mother! And how strange to repossess again the pleasure of an infant for a spell.

  She said that she felt better too, and even laughed, for the first time since the baby has been so ill, patting my big head at her breast. She added that I had truly helped her – with my feeding from her, she will still have milk for Pericle when he finds his appetite again.

  12 April

  Maria Filippa showed me our baby dead.

  14 April

  I will not write of it, I will attend to the necessary routine tasks before me. I will fetch food from the rabble in the bilges who control the supply like cut-throats, I will empty the night-soil pan in the morning, I will struggle to sleep and I will talk to my darling girl of America and the life which we will have to enjoy there together. Let no one say men do not grieve for their children – perhaps my pain cannot be compared to my Maria Filippa’s – but how it does make me travail too. I must keep order in my house, and think of the days and years to come, which will they say heal the hurt. I will never again think indulgently of the divine ruler and bear the evils he allows to roam the earth without complaint. I’ll not humour his ministers or his followers – except the women, they feel these matters differently – for if there is a God he is a brute, a bully, with a mailed fist to crush the blameless, and that limp bleeding thing they hang up in the churches nothing but a lie to mask his cruelt
ies. Does he know, can he really know, of our human sufferings?

  Nothing will ease me, nothing except to see my Maria Filippa well again.

  Papà San stayed up all night with the Commissioner. I do not know exactly what transpired, nor do I want to; the upshot seems that my debt to Sandro – he has been good to us though throughout it all – has increased by half again. But we will at least be able to give our angel a proper burial – and pass through medical inspection on arrival without anybody inquiring of him. Or so we are promised. Maria Filippa would not have survived the furtive disposal Sandro urged. We had an argument, and in spite of the lethargy which has overcome me I managed to persuade him. He agreed to play cards for the necessary sums.

  Headaches rack me – my dearest cannot sleep and beside her I find no rest either. She clasps to her heart the sad little bundle with its blackened face, then throws it down again on the deck – I am glad we can lay him to rest with proper ceremony for her sake.

  It seems to soothe her to think of him in heaven, her little angel with others up there. It cannot help me. Another child on board is ill. We are becoming a plague ship. Maria Filippa insists on helping nurse him. Cati and Rosa, who suffer also at our baby’s vanishing, take turns to sit up with her – we fear for the balance of her mind, for she will not eat or sleep, but stares first at the baby who is ill and then begs death to take her instead. Sometimes she paces, hurling imprecations I never thought to hear on her lips, and then leans over the rail to stare at passengers below with their gaggles of children, and implore them to give one to her. ‘Could I not have been left my own little boy?’ she cries. ‘When you have so many?’ I tell her, ‘We will have more.’ And I pray, my dearest, that when you come to read this, my hopes will have come true.

  PART TWO

  FANTINA

  Death will come and will not terminate anything. For since human memory is too short, there is the family memory, narrow and limited, but a little longer, a little more loyal …

  INGEBORG BACHMANN

  17

  The American Girls

  RIBA, 1933

  IMMA PUT DOWN the brown exercise book and stopped reading. Her pale skin glistened. ‘Do you want me to go on?’ she asked her mother. Maria Filippa nodded.

  Her eldest daughter found the place, but she stayed looking at the page and did not resume. ‘It’s so sad, Mamma.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Imma shook her head slowly. She was composed in movement, and at first glance serene, with a pale wide brow which never rucked when she spoke or smiled, unlike her sisters, Lucia and Talia. She brought a pale hand to adjust the slide in her autumnal, varnished hair and objected, ‘Mamma, I remember America. I don’t want to go on. I was there too. I don’t need reminding they were hard times. I remember them. Besides I want to forget that side; I want to be happy, and I want to remember Papà happy. And I can’t be happy when you’re always wanting us to look back on the past and be solemn and dismal.’ She stood up and went over to the gramophone. ‘Let’s hear some music instead. Papà would want us to. Mamma! Poor Mamma, you mustn’t brood. He wouldn’t like it’ She sifted through the heavy discs in their brown paper sleeves. ‘I can’t go on reading to you because I’ve got to make the dress for Lucia. I promised I would in time for Fantina’s name day, and she wants buttonholes, proper ones, doubled in a different fabric, and you know how long they take.’

  It was her mother’s turn to sigh. Almost to herself, she murmured, ‘But I’m ready now to hear what Papà wrote. Before, I wasn’t. When I think how I used to tease him about his writing! He was always writing, hardly speaking. Too shy to talk, except to make a speech, or tell a story. Tongue-tied. Not like my children. How I used to tease him about his writing!

  ‘Immacolata, you are the eldest, it’s a privilege for you to read Papà’s work. It’s not suitable material, not for Lucia, you know that It would upset her. And Fantina idolised Papà.’ She came to a stop, and sighed again. ‘She wouldn’t like to hear his strange ideas.’ Again, she paused, heavy, over the work in her lap. ‘America changed him.’

  A year had passed before Maria Filippa was able to sort out Davide’s clothing in the drawers where they lay; she had managed to move the chests and wardrobe to their new small apartment on the Via Calefati without unpacking them. One morning, she began getting the girls around her to help her. They no longer went to school, now that their father wasn’t there to take note of what they were learning; Maria Filippa felt she could not manage such supervision on her own. ‘Think what would happen. What would I do about it?’ she asked, looking out at the horrors sweeping the world and comparing them unfavourably to the happy coddling she could offer in her three rooms. ‘They will only learn about folly and cruelty, and I can teach them all that here, at a safe distance.’ That day, together, kneeling on the floor, they had begun opening drawers which exuded an aura they recognised, musty as it had become over the year. They had unfolded Davide’s shirts, his detachable collars, nightshirts, socks – some fine, some thick, some for evening, some for day – his chemises, his underpants, his good jacket, his ordinary jacket, his braces, his cravats; they sorted his boxes of extra studs and buttons, and his sock suspenders. His smell hung in the air, the vanilla and rose of the pomade he wore on his hair opening as they shook out his things; his razor, which Maria Filippa had quickly pushed into a drawer when he died, still had shavings buried in streaks of soap near the handle, where the cover closed over the blade and he had failed to wipe it clean. The bowl of his shaving soap was marked with the swirling flourish of his strokes. There was black hair in his comb, too (he hadn’t gone grey) and, between the tines, a little dust It was a ceremony of farewell, this tidying up, more testing and yet more ultimate and far sweeter than the rituals of the funeral Mass and burial the year before. Maria Filippa was planning new homes for all Davide’s things, pleased that she would be able to perpetuate his presence, in gifts to chosen beneficiaries.

  ‘What a dandy Papà was!’ Talia exclaimed later that morning, arranging a spotted handkerchief in the pocket of the best jacket, and stepping back to admire the effect ‘So many wing-collars!’ She had set one above the jacket with the handkerchief.

  ‘Can we keep one suit, please?’ Lucia put in. ‘To remember him by.’ Imma, folding the chemises she’d examined for tears, had given her a look. ‘You’ll be dressing up in it, if I know you.’

  Lucia: ‘Please.’

  ‘As long as you show no disrespect to your father.’ The phrase was fixed, even more firmly now than in his lifetime. It had become their mother’s law: in the name of their father, they could do this, not do that, he would like it, he wouldn’t like it, telling off the possibilities like counting cherrystones: only it was Maria Filippa who now stood in his place, and she was less biddable than he had been. Talia minded especially about leaving school: she was good at gymnastics, and had hoped to be included in the athletics team.

  Lucia smiled as she took the suit Talia had styled and held it up against herself. She began to hum and kick out one leg after another, lifting the trousers, until even Maria Filippa giggled too. Then, reaching down into the coffer-like bottom of the wardrobe, Fantina had found a pile of books. There were many the same: a green soft-cover fifty-page volume called – she read, for she had just learned to read at her elementary school: Un libro di discorsi, A Book of Speeches.