Goliarda Sapienza - The Art of Joy

‘What are you talking about? Come, go to bed, you’re tired.’

‘Help me, Jò.’

‘Help you with your insanities? I’ve tried. You’re wasting yourself, Modesta. You waste your time, your money. You know how hard I’ve tried to make you reason. You haven’t even been able to put your poems together. By now we could have had a volume ready to publish.’

‘What do the poems have to do with anything? I’ve told you over and over, Jò: for me written words are just a pastime.’

‘Then why did you urge Mela to study so hard?’

‘Because she’s poor! And the poor girl can only rely on her own abilities if she doesn’t want to wind up married to some lowly clerk or…’

‘And you, on the other hand, being rich, can waste your abilities.’

‘Oh, Jò! I got rid of my properties when I was twenty because I didn’t want to become a slave to my estate. At thirty, I rid myself of the word “artist” because I didn’t want to become a slave to my talent. I’ve told you that before, and I’m telling you again. And besides, this morning I discovered why Mela is so peaceful, and why Bambù has been too since Mela landed in our midst.’

‘What did you discover?’

‘If you hug me and smile, I’ll tell you.’

‘It’s incredible. After all those tears your eyes aren’t even red, and your face is as fresh as if you’d slept all night.’

‘That’s because you’re holding me in your arms and smiling at me.’

‘So let’s hear it then. What did you discover?’

‘Kiss me first. Kiss me. I want so much to feel you naked. If we hold each other tight, naked, we’ll be one single person. This morning I saw the mirage, the trees told me that … There, come on top of me and hold me, hold me close.’

‘What did the trees tell you, little one?’

‘They were making love in the shelter? And what did you do?’

‘Nothing. Why are you so pale, Jò? Don’t worry, I made sure they didn’t notice me, and then I came home.’

‘But you spied on them if you were able to tell me everything they said.’

‘Spied? What does that mean? I was dazzled by their joy! They were so beautiful, holding each other, naked.’

‘You saw them, too?’

‘For a moment, before I went away.’

‘How disgusting!’

‘What’s disgusting, Jò? Me? Since, according to you, I was spying on them? Or those two holding one another?’

The mournful, enigmatic mask crumbles as a flush rises heatedly from Joyce’s neck to her brow. Disconcerted, Modesta watches the composure of those marble features shatter. At one time she would have respected the silence that always managed to recompose that face.

‘What’s disgusting, Joyce? Disgusting, the two of us naked together a few moments ago?’

‘Oh, us! We’re lost, Modesta, but Bambolina, so young … Oh, that Mela! I never liked her, never! She should be sent away!’

Once the blanket of silence has been torn, her voice breaks as well.

‘Us, lost? What are you talking about? Lost to what?’

‘Normality, the laws of nature…’

‘What are you saying, Jò? Who really knows nature? Who established these laws? The Christian god? Or Rousseau? Answer me! Rousseau, who moved God out of the heavens and put him in a tree?’

‘What does Rousseau or God have to do with it? I’m worried about Bambù! Oh, Modesta, you have no idea. In Paris, in those haunts for homosexuals … heaps of emaciated bodies, swollen, jaundiced faces marked by shame, the dense smoke and alcohol fumes … a real antechamber of hell, if hell existed! You have no idea.’

‘But I do, because I’ve been there and…’

‘You? Me, never … only once — and I fled.’

‘You shouldn’t have, because by actually being with them and talking to them I realized what they’re seeking in that “antechamber of hell”, as you called it.’

‘What can they be seeking? They get together and take drugs to forget.’

‘No, Jò! They’re seeking the real hell to atone for their sin.’

‘What else can they do if society rejects them, points its finger at them?’

‘Them? Nothing. But only because they’re ignorant and full of prejudices, just like the society that points its finger at them. And they display their wounds only to ask for forgiveness from the society that they too — they more than anyone — consider hallowed and just, rather than fighting it. Jò, come to your senses! What have we been talking about all these years? I see that we’ve merely been conversing amiably about progress, about science, like people do in sophisticated salons. But at the first slight confrontation with reality you want to drag me into the panic that seizes you as it does all intellectuals at the sole idea of putting into practice the theories so often expounded.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes, you do! In your opinion I should send Mela away, right?’

‘I didn’t…’

‘That’s what you said. Don’t you see that by doing that I would make those girls feel that they’re sinning? I would be branding them — I, who represent, who embody society to them, as your Freud says. Afterwards, what else could they do but end up in those very places? And I wonder, Jò … Who was it who branded you with that shame? You weren’t in a convent.’

‘You know very well I wasn’t in a convent.’

‘Yes. One of the few things I do know about you. Was it your mother then?’

‘No!’

‘Then who? Your father?’

‘My father! My father called himself a free thinker and didn’t care about us.’

‘So who was it?’

‘Oh, leave me alone, Modesta. I can’t take any more of this!’

‘No! The time for silence and suppression is over. It’s over inside me and you have to talk. You underwent analysis, which saved you, you told me.’

‘Oh, forget analysis and Freud! We’re talking about Bambolina’s future.’

‘And doesn’t Bambolina’s future, and Mela’s too, hinge on our thinking and the few battles that have been won? Or would you rather I teach them the convenient old practice of saying one thing and doing another?’

‘But Bambù will become a useless creature like me, little one!’

‘And like me: say it, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Oh, with you it’s different. I don’t understand you, and sometimes you frighten me. You’ve had a child, men…’

‘You were married too.’

‘Enough! Stop this interrogation or I’ll kill myself. I’ll kill myself!’

‘And I say stop using suicide as blackmail.’

‘I would have been better off dying that night!’

‘You didn’t die and I love you, Joyce! Talk to me! What’s this wedding band you wear on your finger?’

‘A lie, Modesta, like the various false passports to get across borders.’

‘I understand, but you’ve had…’

‘Shut up, shut up! Don’t say that word. I hate men, I hate them!’

‘But you must have known some.’

‘No! I hate them! They scare me. They always have, since I was a child. Don’t hound me, Modesta. Since I was a little girl I’ve always hated them.’

‘Like you hate women. That’s what you said once.’

‘I hated women before I knew you, but you’re an exception.’

‘But you’ve had friends like Carlo, Jose…’

‘That’s right, you’re like them.’

‘So for you I’m like a man. Is that what you mean when you say I’m an exception?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know!’

‘So if I’m like a man — an exception — you are too, it seems to me. One may count as an exception, but two no longer confirm the rule. Two in this house, two more in another house, and who knows in how many others? Carlo once told me: “Don’t ever imitate us, Modesta.” Doesn’t this tell you something?’