Goliarda Sapienza - The Art of Joy

‘Oh, Modesta, your lips are driving me wild.’

‘I have a scar too. Since I was wounded, it’s become the most sensitive spot on my body.’

‘Yes, yes. Where? You too … but where?’

‘No, Jò, not on my breasts … It’s on my forehead, under my hair. But there’s nothing heroic about it.’

‘Oh, look at that! A long, thin scar. It looks like it was made by a knife.’

‘It’s only a gunshot wound from a lover, as they say.’

‘Well I’ll kiss it just the same, like you did with me. A hundred thousand kisses on this serpent of pain.’

Kissing her, I forget the scars. Forget for a moment, and then rediscover the beloved sharp outlines, smell more keenly the scent of her skin. We find ourselves in each other’s arms after a long absence. To make certain, she touches her hand to my forehead. I take her fingers in mine … never to lose her! Only sinking my face between her breasts reassures me.

‘How pretty you must have been as a child, Modesta!’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, I do. Don’t you have a photograph?’

‘No. I hate photographs!’

‘Why? I would have liked to see you as a little girl.’

‘So use your imagination. It’s the same thing. I don’t need a photograph: I close my eyes and I see you as you were.’

‘How was I?’

‘Hold me close and I’ll show you … No, no. Why are you moving away? Don’t you want to?’

‘Yes, it’s just that…’

‘Are you cold?’

‘No.’

‘Are you ashamed? Back to being ashamed? All right. I don’t want to see you blush. Don’t worry, I won’t look at you. I’ll help you dress, but I won’t look at you.’

‘You never told me about that lover, Modesta.’

‘I had forgotten about him, like so many others. I only told you the parts that matter. The rest is superfluous: incidents that are helpful, perhaps, but not crucial.’

‘Incidents! You’re extraordinary. A gunshot that could have killed you and you call it an incident?’

‘He couldn’t have killed me. I knew he couldn’t have killed me. Just as I knew, on the contrary — and I’ve told you about it — that Carlo’s death and Beatrice’s subsequent madness could have destroyed me.’

‘But you must admit that a man capable of giving you that wound — and what a wound! — is intriguing.’

‘For that matter, I wasn’t outdone myself.’

‘You killed him?’

‘No! I couldn’t kill him either. I just left him a little memento. I’ve heard he has a scar all around his wrist and that he’s missing a finger.’

‘And you’re laughing?’

‘What should I do, weep?’

‘But what was his name? Who was he?’

‘I have no desire to dredge it all up. I told you everything, Jò, everything. Besides, what does it matter to you? After all, we won’t see him again.

‘I don’t feel like talking. All I want is to listen to your voice. When you talk to me, I feel like I’m listening to a fairy tale. What an adventurous life you’ve led! You won’t speak? Are you jealous of that young man?’

‘Aha! He was young. I thought so.’

‘Oh, how I wish you were as jealous of me as I was of you.’

‘You, jealous?’

‘Of course, with all those important people you’ve known. All those countries you’ve seen. Who knows how many men and how many women have loved you. And that Jose? I hate him! Did you love him? Tell the truth.’

‘Most certainly not! Loving a man who thinks of me as a failed revolutionary would be the last straw. I may be a masochist, but not to that degree.’

‘So then it’s he who loved you, and still loves you, I know. I can’t bear even the idea of someone desiring you.’

‘Jose, in love with me? Jose in love with the daughter of an ambassador and a Turkish noblewoman? Jose is looking for something more heroic. If you only knew how he teased me! Affectionately, of course. But there wasn’t one meeting when he didn’t greet me by saying: “Oh, here’s our Jò, who’s somehow found the time, between a scented bath and a visit to some atelier in Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to concern herself with us.” He joked, but meanwhile he was the only one who recognized the style and cut of a dress or a hat.’

‘Don’t you see he was in love? Those are the typical words of a man in love, someone who pokes fun in order to hide his true feelings.’

‘Why are you moving away, little one? Your head was keeping me warm. Come back here on my lap. Your eyes sometimes gleam in the dark like Mehmet’s eyes.’

‘Who is Mehmet?’

‘My Siamese cat. If it will reassure you: the only creature I’ve ever truly loved. Come back here, little Mehmet, let me pet you. He too has his weaknesses, however.’

‘Who, Mehmet?’

‘No, Jose.’

‘Oh, tell me!’

‘Jose denounces love, sentimentality, the idealization of women, the book Cuore … God how he hated Cuore ! Jose has always maintained that the only women who deserve to be considered revolutionaries are the Belle Otéros: actresses or dancers, femmes fatales who exploit men and drive them to suicide. 74A fascinating thesis and one with a grain of truth, although that truth is more anarchist than communist. According to him, these women are the only ones who are bringing about the revolution, by subverting the established order.’

‘Well, Gramsci too in a way…’

‘Yes, yes. For that matter, you can read something of the kind in Stendhal’s heroines as well. Think about the Duchess Sanseverina, the Abbess of Castro, Madame de Rênal herself; by falling in love with Julien, she becomes aware of the constraints.

‘But the fact is that he — not satisfied with theorizing these ideas, as we intellectuals all do, but rather trying to apply them to life, poor Jose! — he too has found himself up against a different reality than he had imagined. One would be tempted to smile if he hadn’t suffered so much since his youth, in his fine villa in Parma. He began rejecting the young women of his world — so girlish, as he used to say — and sought help and inspiration in brothels or on the streets. And inevitably, with a head full of romanticism, he fell in love with a certain Moira — a stage name, I think — whom he’d met in a house of pleasure in Ferrara. It seems he lost about twenty pounds studying, being active in politics, and above all by chasing after this Moira; she must have been about ten years older and had suffered many humiliations and wrongs from early childhood until the time she met Jose. “She overcame everything, always uninhibitedly, continuing her work, unashamed, bringing up her two children faultlessly, etc.… etc.… I’ve found my woman,” he went around yelling in the streets. And as soon as he had a little money he went to take her with him and make her his life’s companion, as he said, though as Carlo and I thought, to redeem her.

‘Talking with you about it now, Modesta, I realize that his entire generation had a sentimental penchant for prostitutes. It must have to do with the widespread diffusion and enthusiasm for Russian literature after the war.’

‘But even now…’

‘Yes, of course, but with greater discretion. At that time, Slavic translations were handed out to adolescents like candy! Ah yes, Russian romanticism, and not only minor writers like Arcibasev and Kuprin, but Dostoevsky with his pure, saintly prostitutes. And what about Tolstoy?…

‘How good it is to talk to you, Modesta. Remember Resurrection ? 75I had almost forgotten it. I have a great desire to re-read it. It can’t be helped, as my mother used to say: every ten years we must re-read the books that shaped us if we want to understand anything.’

‘You were telling me about Jose. What became of Jose and Moira?’