My husband is shocked at seeing Alba in the same hour we return. During the meeting we attended, a Sicilian talked to us about reform. He doesn’t believe it’s possible. He tells about his own faculty, where a new forty-million-dollar complex went up. He has eight students. The elevator to the eighth floor, where his gargantuan offices are, is manned only in the mornings. Rather than climb the stairs to take off a little weight, his solution became not to work afternoons.
Alba has slipped to another level. Her body is giving in. She can barely talk. She knows. Weariness of being sick and dying fires her spirit. She reaches for irony when her son mentions that a friend has called with her prayers. “So that’s why I’m so badly off.” There is doubt, touches of bitterness. She who has done everything in her power is not being spared. That hurts. It hurts her. She remembers other injustices: how even her husband couldn’t protect her from gossiping vicious friends. Her eyes search. The lids drop into sleep. She holds hands willingly. She says thank you anytime a move is made. It’s too hot to be covered by a sheet.
Alba has written out the plan for her funeral. She did it months ago in the mountains, when she felt sick but believed that death included resurrection. She wants no flowers, no money wasted for ephemeral show. Money should be sent to a nun she knows in Africa. She is building a clinic inside a godforsaken prison. But there must be music—male voices singing about the mountains, children singing about Father Sun and Sister Moon. She wants the bells rung—clanging, stabbing bells pealing out the good news. She wants her radical hope publicly proclaimed. Her son Pietro, whose sensitivity has always fascinated her, holds the envelope. He hasn’t opened it yet.
Her name, she doesn’t want her maiden name written anywhere. No more links to her mother. She removes the diminutive from her first name. She will not be a little anything. She doesn’t want to be called Widow Menozzi either. Alba—dawn—Alba—the strong light breaking from the dark into the morning—that is all she wants added to her husband’s tombstone when she is laid down beside him. She has left two pages of instructions, making sure, as she always does, that her three children will not make any mistakes.
Yesterday, while we were still in Rome, she had Angela promise to give Libero’s gold pen to Clare. It wrote all his letters from Naples. As Clare bent over her, Alba kissed Clare on the cheek. As Clare stood up, Alba said gravely, “Remember me.” She added, with authority subdued to a whisper, “Mi raccomando, listen to me. Life’s a climb.”
Alba’s face is very close to death now. She opens her eyes. They say goodbye to me. Paolo will be the only one in our family with her through the night. Night has taken on a texture that I’ve always known as part of life. But now we are in it. It is wordless, heavy, numbing. It is futureless, banal, and horrible, and yet wide, widening. It is the sea, without coming up for air. It is real, full of feeling and the heroic solitude of humans’ helplessness.
Alba is still breathing. Dear Alba, stripped to the bone, to the essential, to the challenge. Vulnerability almost has the upper hand. Alba nods. She is still awake and wants only her three children around her.
[4]
BUTTERFLIES
A small engraving with three hand-colored butterflies hangs near my computer. It was given to me by a friend, who, as a painter, insists on evenness. Nothing in her canvases must be of a different intensity or level. The engraving is here from an eighteenth-century botanical manuscript. Since it was cut from the book, the information about the butterflies’ context and, indeed, even the names of the accurately drawn creatures are missing. The butterflies with their lavender minuscule spots are flat. They flutter with Platonic existence. The naturalist, however, drew them to be identified in the larger world. How did he—we must assume he—choose three as the arrangement for that page? Did he wish to suggest by the asymmetry a kind of random freedom in any one moment? Since two of the gossamer creatures are roughly the same, it’s unlikely that scientific necessity prevailed.
In an essential way, the butterflies’ representation is connected in my mind to defining what it is like to write in Parma. I have whirled this sentence around for years trying to find the proper level of evenness. I want the introspection to be broader than literary thought. But it’s not science either. This interrogation between me and the world is a kind of naturalist’s endeavor.
Another butterfly rests on my computer. It’s on a postcard picked up in Milan at an exhibit of Vladimir Nabokov’s lepidoptera. His white triangular gauze net and five glass cases of butterflies that he’d caught, pinned, identified by date and place, genus and species, were on display at the natural history museum there.
Nabokov used black ink to catalogue them. He smoked a pipe, one of which was on loan. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses for sight dimmed by microscopes and peering into space nestled in cabinet 3. It was moving to see simple and solid objects that played such a central part in his life. There were photos of him, young and running in white shorts through the grass. Together with the paraphernalia, they were more than enough words for the eye.
In the first case, all of the butterflies had been caught in a village called Wallis in Switzerland. I knew the city was French and not my name even in sound—Val-lee. But I snatched at it as a sign. My eyes tolled the town’s name, written twelve times, next to the perfect iridescent blue wing sets. I had struggled to get to the exhibit. The strange coincidence of the village’s name pulled me into a sense of arresting pattern that Nabokov often felt. These fleshless, boneless creatures, in tune with what they masked and reflected, beat at the heart of his work. Almost nothing, and yet chased down from the air, each captured an astonishing detail of reality.
By chance, the butterfly on the postcard resting on my computer is not from his collected groups, although I bought it on that visit. In the orange flare on otherwise transparent stained-glass scales for wings, its body forms a little, open-chested astronaut. The identity a scholar has bestowed is Cyrestis thyodamas from southern Asia. It is not clear why it was slipped into the wire display rack, since it had nothing to do with Nabokov, except that it has wings. Probably the museum’s shopkeepers thought it was more or less the same. In any case, it was a fellow traveler, out of its cover. Experts of context, mimetic mirrors, butterflies absorb place down to a shattering specific reprojection of its distilled appearance. In the rack, all the butterflies were strangers in a foreign land. What can I add?
Studying the insect, suspended without any foliage or clue to its place, not knowing that I kept it fluttering in my mind in an absolute sky, one day Clare said, as she snatched the intriguing card from my computer, “This little guy would be fabulous on a T-shirt.”
[5]
THE SCREAM
I use a fountain pen when I write by hand. I like physically touching what I convey. Words are envelopes: I am inside them, the way yellow is inside a lemon, black inside an ant. When I look at a fountain pen, that strange little stick, I wonder why I don’t see it as more stabbing, harder. Why don’t I see it as less flowing, even as a tool for tattooing?
Why, too, I wonder, don’t I imagine changing colors of ink? In some perverse way, the commitment to navy-blue ink remains nonpareil. It covers so much so well, like logic itself. But I should change colors, since I see them—green, turquoise, purple, blue-black, a red, the slightly horrifying color of blood. Why not experiment? Why not give the literary less room? Traces of the old blue would remain if I persisted in merely filling the pen’s shaft and using one nib. I would need a cartridge pen and new gold points. Otherwise, the tone would turn muddy, going toward browns in the end.
I wouldn’t mind changing. So much has been left out. Women’s voices that would have brought subtlety and subversiveness to the page have been dismissed and overlooked. But if I change colors I would also like to play with the flow. I would hope for something closer, more awkward, halting, more urtext. Then perhaps I would need to eliminate the ink. That done, I could get rid of the pen. I would use just gold points to incise and scratch, drag along th
e paper, signs and symbols, and a dense, tearing crosshatching. It would be a relief. I would be writing from a long silence that pertains to women.
My generation in America are a strange and contradictory breed. Officially we have not lived with veils, and yet because we had little encouragement, we often lived double lives. Most of us were without models, unless it was our fathers. To the extent that we have been isolated, we have explored a palpable inner life. We know well what we see and feel in our own minds. We understand authenticity and linkages to the greater world. Like plants and trees and birds that filled niches with living wealth, now we are out of those fixed niches and, with that, under new pressure from the environment. What is endangered is our moving too quickly away, without recording the acuteness and specificity of the genius that our out-of-the-worldness, our seeing “slant,” allowed. Difference was our realm. We have experience of observation, subtle, fine, ordinary, and engaged, that no one had time for. Born, we were immediately directed toward it in ourselves, society, others. We have observed character until we know violence, darkness, light, and every variation on a theme. Starting from unanesthetized childbirth, we have universes of life and death to articulate before they disappear.
Disturbing silence and reproducing its tissues is a great responsibility. Beyond human silence, though, is a far greater one. I try to remember that and to write toward or from it. Inner silence mimics or contains the infinite one. It is important to imagine writing using all the tools that have not been stressed in books: tattoos, colors—periwinkle, cobalt, robin’s egg, scarlet, emerald, saffron—cross-hatchings, rips. I want pen and non-pen.
We went to the sea, forced ourselves into its renewal, two weeks after Alba died. There was nothing to do, nothing more, and we knew that. At the sea, a few hundred meters from us, was the shifting beauty we hoped would be there to work its rhythms of nothingness and depths into our bodies; the warm sand rubbing, the salt drying and stinging. The waves of the Adriatic were singing to us, each fold an opening, over and over, without end. The blue breathed and yet heated. Behind the hotel there had been a fire. The smoke from the sap of new pines and old scarred oaks still hung around and came into our room at night, when we all slid, aching, back into the feelings of grief.
Burnt, black, unrepentant, and powerful, the hill smoldered and stank. The ash was more than a foot deep. It belched and bubbled. Curious, I left the beige sand one morning and climbed the hill. Clare didn’t want to come. Paolo didn’t want to leave the beach, but he came, as he often does, to keep me company. Paolo wanted to stay on the road, but I rushed onto the land. I wanted to feel the effects of the fire, the texture of the ash, the force of destruction. I wanted to get into the blackened woods and then look back down at the endless sea.
I climbed over the fence, with a pelting of his noes falling on me. The ooze stuck to my legs and shoes. I sank. It was like walking on jelly. Large trees had fallen, one on top of the other. Trunks lay on the ground and stumps were cracked halberds. A stone nearly the size of a man had exploded into four perfect pieces. Energy remained, released from all the broken points.
Nothing was growing in the gray and black except some white stalks rising from huge burnt bulbs, gripping the soil like paws. They were weird and lunar on otherwise felled cover. I stood, and Paolo stood with me in the utter destruction, except for the snaking meter-high white antennae with ivory flowers to come.
Heat still rolled off the ground. All the trees’ life hung as shrouds of burnt organic smell. Pines looked like snapped brooms. The cones had burst like popped corn. The sea, not far off, stretched out beyond a promontory where a collapsed tower of stone butted up. The sea went on with its blue waves—all the way out. Seamless. Puckering. Blue.
Paolo took samples, from one bulb, then another. He stuffed pinecones into his pockets. Later, in Parma, with his books, he confirmed that the plants, those white growths that looked promising, were poisonous. Nature never lies or makes false moves. In all that destruction, hope did not survive. It was too soon for hope. A tough residue of poison gave out the first sign of growth after the fire. The white flowers were deadly.
Returning from the sea was hard. We all still felt bruised. The discrepancy between Alba’s death and the petty repetitions in our lives overtook me. So much had been displaced; yet we were returning to our own ways that had not changed. Soon after we entered our front door, I opened my mouth to say something simple and a scream began.
Let me draw it with a gold point. It was long, sounded terrifying, and has not found space in many books. It was me rushing out into all that is bigger than me, unable to shape it or stop. It was human, deeply human, and under the grief was fear.
It made Clare and Paolo stare. I couldn’t bring it to a halt. It kept coming and coming. I was not observing it, but bringing it up, like a huge fish from the deep being pulled on a line, up and up from the sea it came, struggling, inevitable, and in need of being released.
When it stopped, I left the house, looked up at the full moon, walked the dog, checked myself to see if I was crazy, and looked into Parma faces that didn’t smile back. I was calm and alive: closer to anyone who was afraid and closer to the stoic part of myself. I thought: Paolo, you didn’t expect that of me. Clare, maybe that sound, piercing so much frustration, will help you later on.
How can I convey that scream in words? Why, I asked, don’t women draw more in their works? Why don’t they make that contribution to uncensoring the happenings inside families? Why be overly analytical? Why not just let the force show? And that is why I put down this scream. Not as a suggestion, but as a symbol of participation in a book of common experience inside the hours, each varied, that should return to the page, not as words, but as lines in common patterns So much humanity resides in the eye, in all that is seen and not said. The seeing eye is not the one that watches television or talks without some sense of human possibility. It is touched, nearly to the center of a life and with that link, joined to others. The eye that sees may feel and do or with that feeling it may do nothing but remember.
Words have something of us inside them, after they have been humbled. After the intellect has taken its place as one side of words, they join all that ever was in words. But drawings are closer to symbols and as such always broader than a single language. Saint-Exupéry left us pictures, so we could feel, as clearly as Thomas putting his hands in Christ’s side, the reality of the planets and the frailty of a rose that was only his. The sweetness of his drawings showed us his vulnerability.
Here is the scream. It is like a runaway river. It can’t be stopped. It is part of wounding, tearing life. It covers so much ground.
And then I thought: Why not draw the sun? It touched every grain of sand as we lay on the beach.
And why not draw the sea? How similar their patterns are in my mind’s picture. Both are life-giving.
Here are the poisonous plants of no hope. One must always be aware of appearances.
And two more pictures. One is a black butterfly that I saw rising up over my left shoulder as I looked at myself in the mirror. It rose from the middle of our bed. It was one more butterfly that has come to the house.
And the other sketch is a waterfall that I felt as I lay on the ground. The feeling of water poured from my feet and from my mouth as a friend held her hands over me. It rushed like life from my body.
These experiences emerged like hieroglyphs, to be interpreted, from other feelings after Alba’s death, after the scream opened up the ground.
One supposed physical image of Giovanna is that of Diana over the fireplace
[6]
GIOVANNA
I wanted Giovanna for myself. Like John D. Rockefeller, who reconstructed a French medieval cloister on the Upper West Side of New York City, I wished to set up the badessa elsewhere, out of Parma’s history and ideologies. To lift her significance into relief, I wanted to coax Giovanna into my own ends. Her cloistering was simple. The meaning of her silencing seemed clear. But
it was impossible. Like the magnificent fresco that she had commissioned about 1519 from Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio, she was bound by time, an institution, and a culture. I couldn’t see her my way. As to her person, most of her existence was not recorded; I had only the intrinsic pattern of a few facts. My eyes often strained, trying to find contact in dusty books and sometimes I realized that I was staring into space.
The Renaissance woman who attracted me was complex. The freedom fighter resisting the orders of three popes was fierce and courageous, but the cloistered human being moved me more, even if the life she lived in that condition was brief. The state of siege leading up to it was a long ordeal. As the world shifted on her, its darkness drew out her identity’s groping, deep roots. Her own doubts and her awareness of violation as the church’s power flogged her brought her vulnerability close. I felt her stark eyes, no longer protected by privilege. The weapon that testified to her resistance: words. Because of the twelve intelligent, rebellious lines she left, I knew her. For their contents, a single feeling overcame me: I wish that I could have kept watch, sharing a few hours of her despair.
The mysterious laws of existence that Giovanna cites in the motti, aphorisms she puts on the walls of her chambers as documents of her case, are sextants between human and divine law. They are often pagan. In them, Giovanna asserts her right to exist, under the original terms of the convent’s laws. But as part of an order pledged to the pope, she recognized religious experience as well as obligations. Was she walled in or walled out of silence by the time she was cloistered in Parma in 1524? The unanswerable in her voice was where I most completely joined it. I envied her defiance that remained rooted. The abbess was part of a group and never left it. Her strong sense of place came over me. As is often true of knowledge, the more I learned, the better I could see that she had lived fully, even in black and white. That she was an exceptional, resolute humanist fighting for existing legal rights only struck me at the end, after I had stressed her sex and religion.
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