My work often ties me in near-total inertness to my desk. In those states of gazing and mumbling, I have tried to hold open doors on reality for her, without realizing that she has opened them herself. Clare often says to us that she has two mothers. Paolo is always there to sew on a button, wipe off a spot and a certain kind of tear.
A dream last night played tricks with my sensation of possession. In the dream a motherly, transparent woman tells me adamantly that Clare was conceived as herself two hundred years before she was born. This ageless woman then becomes a mother to me and puts her arm on my shoulder: “You were born as twins. The other one is on the other side.”
The dream suggests that I can see without opening my eyes. It calms and lifts me. The content reminds me that Clare was never mine or ours. The idea of two centuries tickles. Somewhere in the year the American Revolutionary War broke out this daughter navigated toward existence. Where do these notions come from? The dream floods me and pulls as the smell of coffee burrows into my brain.
My thoughts about Clare might be better directed at realizing we are given a limited role in the identity of another human being. My own life cries out. So does Paolo’s. We both are in need of new methods and work. Someone from Taiwan is asking to translate some of my poems. I like my open perch on the world. But I’m struggling. You always need courage in life; but to break the traps of doing things in Parma, the insidious pressure to conform, you need il coraggio del leone. It hurts. Paolo appears next to me.
The dream’s powdery substance is still falling. “One of the cats threw up,” he says. “It’s poor old Fortuna; she can’t digest hair balls.” I sit up in bed. “I’ll clean it,” I say as the carpet touches my feet. “No, it’s already done,” he says with kindness. “Take your time. I’ve put her out. The lawyer’s feeding Misha.” Rumpling my hair, seeing how Misha’s fate upsets me, he adds, “You look good. Better than Fortuna.”
It is one true thing—there is emptiness in the house, a black hole that snatches light and lets light fall into it, dark but full of heat, when Clare isn’t home. We depend on her, as parents do here, never assuming the tissues to be really separate. We have, perhaps unwittingly, borrowed on her being with us. We have depended on her originality, her youth, her exploration, and her life intertwined at home to keep us from corners of our own. I’m sure it is different in America. My brothers and their wives miss their children, but wouldn’t have it otherwise. The entire culture pitches in, saying it is best for everyone. Here work, as the alternative, seldom has that offer and pull.
It takes the warrior in parents anywhere to really arm for the emptiness of letting a child go. It takes a warrior to stop possessing and let the child swim in waves that may grow quite high. This ethos was the culture in America; then it was contradicted here. Here the cord, the vivid, visceral link, is acknowledged, and the pleasure of it is relished. Growth is called loss and takes a far slower physiological course. Did we prepare for the American version? In a way we did, for a long time. Yet Paolo and I drift back into our sense that she should be around. We telephone, like American parents, and leave our thoughts on her answering machine.
All the world has made pilgrimages to Italy’s hills and towns to see depictions of mother and child. Christian art has interpreted Mary in all her different hours with her son. The mother’s capacity for love, an inner heart assuaging sorrow, is one of the most binding images in the world. Mary, above all mothers, let her son go into society to fulfill his destiny. She is never, for a minute, without knowledge of the life her son will lead. The knowledge is not omniscience but love. We see no clear painted images of God the Father grieving. The parental pain belongs to Mary and to dear, humble Joseph.
Everywhere in Parma there are images of Mary with her child. I like the red-and-blue-robed Romanesque Mary on the front of the baptistery. Sober, conscious, and powerful, she is as much of a mystery as he is. On a maestà, a little votive shrine near our house, the plaque underneath the Madonna image asks for nearly pagan “motherly protection and celestial favors” for male athletes. In the depictions of Mary as mother, we see, over and over, mother and son. It is difficult to find images, secular or religious, of mothers and daughters in Italy. Sometimes we see a rendering of Anne and Elizabeth: the grandmother and mother of John the Baptist. Luca della Robbia made a life-sized white-and-blue-glazed sculpture, fired in joined pieces, of these two women. The psychological closeness seeps through the strange physicality of their white terra-cotta essences. Lavinia Fontana, a sixteenth-century painter from Bologna, renders wonderful group portraits of generations of women. In Sicily many stone carvings of Persephone and Demeter remain in city and village museums. Tufa and marble statues embodying Greek ideas show women goddesses together. After the Reformation, in Protestant countries like Holland, we see many paintings with natural light showing a mother teaching a daughter to read or write or picking lice from her hair, or the two of them laughing together at a window. In America, Mary Cassatt has them brushing hair into electric points, gazing after hoops. Mirrors in every level of meaning come to show relationships of complicity and domestic interweaving. We begin to see women acknowledging their sexual power to each other in painters like Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Degas. Women step into secular positions where learning and pleasures are shared. The mother-and-daughter scenes are on lawns or near mirrors or windows. I don’t know how I’d paint us. How do you find an image for twenty years? And there is no man in her life. That will suffuse her experience; our distances will rearrange.
Clare and I looked at a painting of hers called Blue Wound. She took a pristine, sharp beauty of blue and white and put browns and shit yellows and cord on the picture. “We are restless people,” she said to me. “We can’t simply accept.” She said about a woman painter we know, “Someone should force her to give up white. Imagine her paintings with red in them, the red of real blood.” It is easy for me to imagine Clare many different ways, but I can see her depth ultimately determining her life. Yet if I would characterize her in this moment, I would say that she is looking for red.
Unmarried women and childless women from Emily Dickinson to Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf have written about mothers and daughters but from the baseline of daughterhood. A childless Italian writer, Elsa Morante, wrote one of the most touching stories of mother and child in this century. The child was a son. Women who have lived through the identity from both sides, as daughter to a mother and mother to a daughter, are just starting to analyze this experience as experience. Tillie Olsen, Rita Dove, and Maxine Kumin are American writers who have done it. Natalia Ginzburg published little about her daughters, the one who became a psychiatrist and the one who was damaged from birth. She had a reticence that distinguished what is truly personal and private. Nevertheless, she seemed to feel freer about writing about her boys.
There is much to be done to bring out more about the variety of psychological bonds and borders that are intense, complex, and viscerally close. Sometimes the tie is nothing more than gouging cream from the same jar. At other moments, it flashes the most staggering comprehension, and one feels understood, disarmed, and left without any weapons for privacy. Sometimes the part in common jumps as fast as a flea can hop on and off and leaves bites. Rivalry with stabs of shock and regret plays out scenes that both recognize since heightened awareness is a rather common experience among women. Although Clare has known many boys, she has not fallen deeply in love. Those journeys lie in front of her. Surely any daughter senses and even fears as her own lot what she sees as her mother’s face and relationship. Approval is a nearly endless demand from mother to daughter and back, until the craving is satisfied.
The analyst I see from time to time in Geneva, a wise, learned man, told me that the fetus lives in absolute dark. He had no doubts. “It’s sure, it’s absolute just like the universe, utter darkness.” A friend, short of wind because of the nearly fifty pounds of weight of a full-term baby, was upset by his words. “Even with their e
yes closed, they see light, I’m sure. A finger held to a candle can show the passage of light. Maybe they don’t see, because they don’t know, but light passes through, and I know they already sense something brighter than dark.”
Not all of pregnancy feels like light to the mother, all of it is not that. But I agree with my friend. I think there is light that gets through to the infant from the beginning. That opinion, that wordless, utterly unscientific trust in one’s capacity to know one true thing, is something I’ve always felt about myself and about Clare. The tangle and bond we assume between another of the same sex comes with seeing the cord cut, the grayish-blue sack dragged off. We already know about the separation. Yet with a daughter we assume, until she battles to resist the notion, that the severing is a paradox, and that she will know it, too.
Paolo and I are tasting the salty thinness of our new broth. We never meant to possess Clare, but it happened. “Meant” floats on myriads of slips, torn, scribbled, perfectly penned, and hanging around behind the lining. Intentions were written over and over. Rereading them is like weeding a garden, and, underneath, are the lingering days that hummed into years of feasts.
Time’s a number and ours alone and never one thing
[22]
JAMES
It is late March, nearly sunset. The piping squeal of our cordless telephone cuts through my English lesson at about 4:30 in the afternoon. My student, a distinguished woman in her early sixties, stops telling me in mid-sentence about her father negotiating the treaty that settled Trieste inside of Italy. The details leading up to that moment—the elite liberal education he received in Vienna, the years he spent in hiding after he, as a prefect, the chief of police, decided to let 150 prisoners taken by the Germans escape—never reach their conclusion. It’s James Gill’s youngest daughter on the phone. Her voice goes nowhere. The wind is knocked out of me. We say nothing.
He had told me. He had told others—in words and in different ways—the same thing. This would be his last year. In November he panicked because a depression overwhelmed him; he feared he might take his own life. His eyes gave out in December. His heart ticked at 40 percent the normal rate. The cortisone was turning his body into mush. Could I come a bit sooner? Once a month wasn’t enough. We had stood over the heat of the Xerox machine on the second floor of his apartment. He was mixed up, laughing, half joking, as he photocopied the same chapter twice and lost the pages he was looking for. The medicines did it, the medicines.
We were duplicating the book, a story about his grandfather from Russia and a boy who in one or two ways—brilliant, a troublemaker—resembled himself. It was a rich, learned story, funny and full of pain. It had obsessions—death first and last—and in the surge of words, thought that often reached the intensity of modern music, he might well lose track of a character. He or she would evaporate—drop from sight without letting us see motivation or feeling. Usually it was a woman. The boy character’s mother kills herself. In the pages that follow it’s as if the event has no impact on the child. She just is neatly buried. James’s mother gave him up to his father when they separated in 1930. She had taken another lover.
The look in James’s eye when he handed the manuscript over to me had none of the mischief he often called forth to make life jump. I’d been reading chapters for several years, but in the last few months he declared it coming to a conclusion. Now, over the Xerox machine, he was putting the final version into my hands. I didn’t agree.
James’s glances, if they weren’t pointed, contained wild, contiguous spiral flights of stairs. This look was, instead, indescribably still. Personal, frightened, it contained a mass of feeling: trust, self-doubt, hope that he rarely allowed himself. “It’s not true, the memoir. That’s the funny thing. It’s not my life,” he said without drawing any particular conclusion and stuffing his hands in his pockets.
We had had, after an elegant lunch, the usual—a felt (even though it was all about thought) conversation, with questions ranging from which of Schubert’s Impromptus do you prefer to what do you think about Ecclesiastes. Lunch with James was like living in a beautifully paced book. James was no longer able to read my work and ask tactful questions. The magazine had shut down years before. His interest never flagged. But his energy was measured. His manuscript absorbed the entire writer in him. Now he was rushing. We made tapes. We discussed. The whole project veered close to an abyss—an ambiguous, unsatisfying place where life and the pen have unequal weight. The man in the book was dying. But the sixty-eight-year-old man slouching on the turquoise couch, taking his glasses off and putting them on while making avid notes, was not the man in the book. The man in the book was not vulnerable enough, manic enough, searching or funny enough to be the sensitive, frail, profound man on the couch.
My life in Parma changed at the heart level without James. On the surface it was one more surprisingly terrible loss. He had never ceased helping me on my path as a writer. He was someone who held the door open. Like Picasso’s blue period, it was as if the black dreams had shown me I could not escape a specific coloring to the phase I was in. Yet I hoped I could see something in the altered, altering light. My heart would have to open to the strong, hard facts of life.
As I tried to cope, Italy zigzagged on. Craxi was accused of having traveled back and forth into France on a false passport from Tunisia, where he is in exile, unwilling to stand trial. The story came and went and never was resolved as truth or fiction. Di Pietro made the strange, unclear move of stepping down from his judgeship. It was a startling response—a crack in the defense that was going to lead Italy to a new place. Why, of course, was the question on everyone’s mind. Romano Prodi, a professor of economics from Bologna, the founder of a party called L’Ulivo, Olive Tree, demonstrated little aptitude for communication, but he gave signs of courage.
Suddenness plays a part in any life. It might be a kiss, or some drive that awakens inside and tells you that hibernation is over. A different life commences. James’s first letter accepting my poems had been like that. His death would be the same. I didn’t see change as the issue. Rather, it was an obligation to dig deeper.
The snowstorm that began as rain came up within an hour after we had released petals and blades of grass into the hole where James was to be buried. The cemetery in Montreux is venerable and un-crowded. Trees tower like passions and movements walking on air. Vladimir Nabokov, another Russian exile, is buried directly behind James. Rising up to the west slants a small mountain with a simple brown chateau on top. In front, the mirror and choppy waves of Lake Leman. The snow, in a matter of an hour, turned into a capacious blizzard. In three hours, the streets were covered, the street signs buried, the buds and trees stopped, sepulchered.
Five of us crammed into a car, after having sobbed and spoken about fragments of a life. V.’s voice had turned into a hoarse cry as he confessed, “I do not believe in God, so for me this really is the end.” As different as we were and strangers to one another, our emotions and ideas on James strangely coincided. If there is love, elements even at their most contradictory and difficult fit irreplaceably into that single being. Clare said that as she hugged me, before Paolo handed my bag up the steps of the train.
In Lausanne, we mourners were emotionally desolate. I let myself be cradled in the rocking rhythms. My father’s funeral, formal, contained except for my younger brother’s sobbing in my arms, came back deeply regretted, unexpressed, burning like a piece of dry ice. The storm’s blasts enforced the immensity of the loss. Under the tumultuous white blanket nothing could be recognized. Everything had changed. A husband and wife, inseparable friends of James’s, bickered over the directions to a hotel they knew two hours before. Their sharp, nervous comments were shorthand for how his going had set things flying loose in them. We drove in circles. James’s cousin, a red-haired woman with strong, handsome features, showed me her eyes. Their experience flashed out. They touched me, as surely as if a match had burned my skin. Early the next morning she kept me
company peeling a beautiful, simple red-and-green apple at breakfast. The peel made a nice, healthy spiral. She had a terrible hacking cold. Torn because she had to leave a daughter who was waiting for a child, she had come to salute her cousin, who, from childhood on in France, had shared many fierce integrities deriving from their being Jews. During the night, a call reached her at the hotel. Her tired, grief-stricken face lifted into relief as she gave me the news. It was a girl.
I was still groping, a few weeks later; grief pushed me along in its enveloping stream. I didn’t want words. I wanted silence again. Jimmy (his French name), Jimmy (his American name), Vova (his Russian name), James, to the people who knew him as an international editor in Switzerland, and Gems, Clare’s eight-year-old spelling using Italian phonetics, were all one name—for a man who, since his Russian father had taken him from Germany to France and then to the United States, had lived inside the collisions of complicated families and parallel worlds of different languages and places he absorbed as home.
James often talked about death, so much that I would have to tell him to stop. Sometimes it was the Holocaust. When I came to edit and we had finished our work, he would often take out large old-fashioned photo albums and we would turn over page after page of handsome, intelligent, prosperous people. His aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Killed. Incinerated. Dead. We would look and look until I could look no more. The next time he would take them out again. Sometimes we stopped at photos of his ten-year-old brother, who died suddenly while he was playing with five-year-old James. Sometimes it was talk of his own disease. But then he would drop the topic and move off into more promising forms of life, usually his children and their great gifts.
James had a beautiful voice. Cortisone made it hoarse and that depressed him. His answering machine message was made on a good day. Even that clicks on in my brain.
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