Goliarda Sapienza - The Art of Joy

‘Yes, Moira…’

‘Did she let him redeem her?’

‘I’ll say! Only she insisted on an absolutely legal redemption, nothing revolutionary about it, perfectly petit bourgeois , with a church wedding and all the rest.’

‘No! Really? And Jose?’

‘According to what he went around telling people: “I let her talk and then, saying, I was wrong about you Moira , I turned around and walked out of the town hall.”’

‘And then?’

‘And then nothing, I think, until he met Olga from Padua, five years ago, on a sidewalk in Paris. Olga is very beautiful, full-figured and delicate as these girls who are half Italian and half French sometimes are. A long neck, a perfectly shaped little face, fiery eyes and a smile “made in Italy”. You know, those vendeuses who supplement their shop-girl salaries with some evening assignations, the ones you see in the metro reading poetry, maybe only French poems, but never women’s romance novels.’

‘Ah! So this time it was a good encounter?’

‘Oh, yes! For a year, year and a half, Olga was perfect for the whore-proletarian dream Jose had been pursuing since adolescence. Given both her past and her present, that girl had the necessary credentials: her father a railway man, ergo working-class nobility, and not one of those troublesome, unfathomable members of the lumpenproletariat who flock to the cities to snatch up the careless leavings of those who have prospered. She followed Jose with a rapt gaze, listening patiently to our conversations, emptying the ashtrays and affirming with understanding looks and rare smiles of approval that she’d finally found the path to emancipation and the struggle. She blushed proudly when Jose introduced her as “my companion” … and I must say we were all stunned at the news of her engagement to François Gidot, soon to become a fashionable dentist, son of the indeed very wealthy tooth-yanker Albert Gidot.’

‘How did she meet him?’

‘At Jose’s … You haven’t met François? You haven’t missed anything, although for years and years, Jose considered him one of his best friends in the limbo of proud Parisian democrats who, though they weren’t comrades, at least absorbed the Revolution and the unassailable clarté that allows them to dissect any ethical, aesthetic, and, in particular, oenological issue with confidence and precision.’

‘That’s unbelievable! And Jose?’

‘Oh, nothing. He awoke to the situation with similar Olympian revolutionary clarity: clarté versus clarté . And though he didn’t go to the wedding, he sent the young Mrs Gidot a huge bouquet of flowers. Now, between one meeting and another, one article and the next, he must surely have resumed dreaming about the face of some other girl, tried by society’s injustice.

‘It can’t be helped with us old neurotics. Just as I can’t manage to quit sucking the poisonous milk of this cigarette — the hypothetical breast of an even more hypothetical maternal love that I never had — so will he continue to act out his childhood dream. Most likely, it only allows him to contend with frivolous, marginal loves, as it were, which he’s now come to anticipate, and which are therefore controllable. There’s nothing to be done about these personality neuroses; it’s best not to stir things up. It’s too great a risk to attempt to treat them. You might as well live with those small breakdowns, as long as the engine keeps running for better or for worse …

‘What’s wrong, little Mehmet, why are you bristling all over and staring at me with those big, gleaming eyes? Are you shocked, like Jose, by my theorizing? Or are you troubled by the thought that a hero like him can have certain weaknesses?’

‘I’ve told you over and over again that I don’t believe in heroes. And what you’re telling me about Jose, far from shocking me, sounds like something I’ve always thought in some corner of my mind. It’s as if you’ve opened a window on a landscape that I once knew and then forgot. Except that you use words and phrases that are unfamiliar to me … I’m so ignorant, Jò!’

‘You, ignorant, Mehmet? Don’t say that! I’m the one who’s exploiting my specialization and becoming boring. Besides, I’m talking about new theories. Freud discovered that the mind isn’t a fixed star, eternal and immutable, within us, but a whirling light that follows the pulsations of the veins and nerves, a light that dims and brightens, and that, like the heart, the eyes or the liver, is subject to curable or mortal illnesses. His discovery is a dreadful blow to man’s past security. That’s why intellectuals, politicians and doctors themselves oppose him with all the means at their disposal, slandering him, refuting him and — I don’t even dare think about it — they might even go so far as torturing him, as they did Galileo. For now, they’re content with burning his books. And this bonfire of vital words and concepts can only be a prologue to actual torture in the future. Freud said that Europe is now nothing but an immense prison, and he only hopes that Austria’s cell will remain out of it. But that’s not what we were talking about. God, I’m insufferable! When I get started on a subject, I can’t stop.’

‘But I’m happy! Oh, Joyce, tell me who this Freud is. Help me get to know him, teach me his theories, tell me about him.’

‘We’ll look for his books. You read French, and I see that you have Marx and Lenin in the library here. Up north, they arrest anyone who owns these books.’

‘Here, not yet, at least not us wealthy people.’

‘Of course! You say it with no shame, Modesta.’

‘And you’re blushing. Why?’

‘So all you have to do is look for them in Catania, or have them sent from Paris.’

‘Oh, I’ll find them! You’ll make me a list, won’t you? And if I don’t understand something as I read them, you’ll explain it to me, won’t you?’

‘Of course, of course, bambina… ’

When the ‘voice’ pronounces the word bambina , Modesta becomes a little girl and is compelled to run into Joyce’s arms. Or when, side by side, they read those rare books made more precious by long, difficult searches and by the danger posed by simply owning them. If Modesta doesn’t grasp a term, Joyce sorts out every obstacle with her melodious voice, revealing an unimagined world of renewed words, retold myths, emotions, events and passions radically uprooted from the old culture, and slid under the clear scientific glass of Freudian analysis … Memory, as key to a new vision, now becomes the prime means of enabling a backward journey into the subterranean woods of seemingly forgotten memories. Brought to light, rearranged and cleansed of mould and incrustations, they reveal mosaics of glittering gems for the understanding of one’s own life and that of others.

Modesta, disillusioned by the old, idealistic order and by the younger but already decrepit positivism, can’t help sensing the innovation and authenticity that Joyce has brought to the island, and tries to make it her own in order to survive in a world where the old God is being replaced by false, barbarian idols in the streets, piazzas and parks. Going out or travelling now means merely swallowing the venom of empty phrases, the poison of a false order and pompous heroism; whereas there, motionless in front of Joyce, beside the new gleam of intelligence that emanates from her face, the hours, months and years glide along on the oiled tracks of a journey even more exciting than a physical one.

On this journey, Modesta was always alert in watching for the least little hint of a smile or of sorrow on the beloved face. Her every thought, act and wish was taken up with scrutinizing and anticipating the desires of that face of love, driving away the latent grief that lay in wait, and invariably came to trouble it. No, Carmine, it’s not enough to take one’s own pleasure and then ride off freely through the lands and estates of the mind. That word, ‘love’, had an inevitability as certain and unalterable as birth and death, and you had to accept it, aware of not knowing why, when or how it came to be, or toward which bleak shores or green fields it might lead you.