Goliarda Sapienza - The Art of Joy

‘That’s enough, Mattia. Get out!’

‘No! Not like this, you fiendish lava devil! Not with that sentence hanging over me. No! For you then, I’m supposedly a sign of death, aren’t I? And what is he? He’s life, right? And to think how much I loved you! I hate you! I hate you!’

I mustn’t turn around … Before I finish the thought, I find I have the gun in my hand. From the recoil that jolts me from wrist to shoulder, I sense that I’ve fired, too, while a whitish flash explodes in my face and makes me keel over … Is it I who drop to the ground or is it the grass that rises up to meet me? Face down, I fire again, without being able to take aim because a warm liquid is now dripping into my eyes. Screams and gunshots echo behind me; bracing my hands on the ground, I try to pull my head out of the dark wave that submerges me. At night, the sea is black if there is no moon … But there is a moon now … from up above, it stares at me with its whitewashed gaze, but it isn’t screaming. It’s Elena who is screaming, and those swift legs, the legs of a hare, are Celso’s. It seems impossible, but Celso runs like Tuzzu … that Celso has the legs of a hunter. He’ll kill him. I find myself hoping that Mattia will manage to escape the hunter … I can only hope that Mimmo has seen me … he has long arms, Mimmo does. And although my head is now banging faster and faster against the walls of the well, I can only hope …

‘ Hope and push, Modesta. Push, that way you help yourself and you help it! ’

‘ The position is right!.. don’t fight the wave of pain, don’t oppose it, follow it with your entire body and your senses, that’s the only way you’ll do it! ’

I push with my entire body and my senses, but that mass of flesh that stirs at regular intervals, sure as day follows night, and rams the walls of my belly, doesn’t want to come out. Was it Prando, unborn, struggling inside me or was it I, unborn, who was struggling against the wire sutures of my forehead to get out? I thrashed about incessantly to be reborn … And one misty dawn, barely tinged with the heat’s reddish glow, I gave birth to myself as though a great wave of carnal pain, washing over my body and crashing far behind me, had carried away all the sorrow, the bitterness, the joyful plans now wrecked against the rocks of Carlo’s death. The disappointment over those plans that had collapsed in such a brief time was a bitter ache. It had been a bitter ache back when Carlo lay dying in bed, when Beatrice, her eyes shining with madness, kept saying:

‘Just think how envious people can be, Modesta! They continue to say that Carlo is dead, when he was here just two minutes ago — you know how he is — every so often he comes down from his study to talk to me. In fact, before I forget, he told me that tonight we’re going to the Opera. Would you like to come too? It’s just envy, going around saying he’s dead, while … don’t you hear his footsteps up there? Listen, he’s got up from his desk now … When he gets up, the chair scrapes on the marble floor. We should get a rug, but Carlo says it’s not suitable for…’

A bitter ache back … when? A year, two years ago? When the girl Modesta, full of the untarnished hope of youth, sure of her future, pressed ahead unsuspectingly, blindfolded … When she walked hand in hand with Carlo, confidently, drinking in his voice, his ideas, his presence as though he were something eternal that would always be with her like the Mountain, the sky, the sea. How often with Carlo, alive, or with Jacopo, dead, had she discussed, held forth, about the contradiction that is at the core of nature. But when his death, final and unappealable, exposed that contradiction, disappointment — like an avalanche that sweeps away confidence and joy — can make you glimpse in your own end a more certain way. Could it be that young people’s adventurousness, their way of rushing into deadly matches, their frequent untimely deaths, were simply the result of some earlier disappointment-contradiction? She had sought her own death confronting Mattia that night, she knew that now, and maybe only someone who has come so close to death can forget and then be reborn as Modesta is reborn day by day, staring into the mirror of dawning at that red, serpentine scar, which splits her forehead in two.

‘It will take three or four years, Modesta, for the redness to fade.’

What did the years matter when you began to understand? The scar that bisects her forehead is now a sign of the healing of her being, itself divided earlier. Modesta is reborn from her body, uprooted from that earlier Modesta who wanted everything, and who couldn’t tolerate doubts, in herself or others. She is reborn with an awareness of being alone. And day by day, hour by hour, she accepts the grief of Beatrice’s return from her long journey through madness.

She has come back serene, but with her hair all white. In her own way, Beatrice is content, left to her memories, dressed in mourning, the locket of her beloved husband on a black velvet ribbon around her neck. Of course, Bambolina suffers somewhat in that house, what with her mother and Argentovivo who do nothing but talk about the past. But in the end, she only sleeps there, because in the morning Pietro, by unspoken agreement with his Mody, takes her to Villa Suvarita, and the sad little face quickly brightens there among Prando, Jacopo, ’Ntoni and some stray friends they picked up in the fields.

‘So many children!’ — she squeals happily, then always adds: ‘I must tell my Mama to come and see them…’

She’s already talking … Yet that moonlit night etched in my memory seems like just yesterday … The wound throbs at the recollection of Mattia. He too had wanted to die, but then he chose to go to America — at least that’s what Pietro reported. And Jose? After having fought in the north, Jose was arrested with Pertini.

‘A storm of arrests, my dear Mody! But what’s most upsetting, what most casts the spirit into the deepest despondency is not seeing any news in the press. This pall of silence over everything. I swear to God! You wander around searching for news, like a dog finding a bone that’s been picked clean or like a starving man seeking a crust of stale bread.’

‘Yes, Antonio, arrests and indifference.’

Every solitary voice of rebellion falls into the lake of indifference, without a ripple. An indifference that slowly but steadily permeates every street, every corner, at each step of history’s way: the murder of Matteotti, the Special Laws, the Lateran Treaty 62 …

Men’s business, Princess, they make and unmake history as they please. Of course, Stella.

I watch her, but that gentleness and resignation I had earlier mistaken for wisdom no longer enthrals me … Earlier … when Bambolina wasn’t here with us. But now that Bambolina is beginning to chase after Prando, why do they stop her and separate them? I have to leave my books and go down. She’s crying inconsolably on the lawn, while Prando runs off happily toward the woods.

‘What is it, Stella, Elena? Why did you separate them?’

‘But she was running like a tomboy, Princess! She’ll dirty her little dress.’

That’s how the rift begins. According to them, Bambolina, only five years old, should already act differently, remain composed, eyes lowered, to cultivate the young lady of tomorrow. Like in the convent: laws, prisons, history erected by men. But it’s women who have agreed to be the keepers of the keys, uncompromising guardians of men’s words. In the convent, Modesta hated her jailers with a slave’s hatred, a humiliating but necessary hate. Today, she defends Bambolina from both men and women, impartially and confidently; by defending her she is defending herself, her past, a daughter she might someday give birth to … Remember, Carlo? Remember when I told you that only women can help women, and you, with your masculine pride, didn’t understand? Now do you see? Now that you’ve had a daughter, do you understand?