Listen to My Voice
Before she wrote the letter, she must have made many foul copies – after all, he was a professor of philosophy, specialising in the philosophy of language. As I read those fragments, I got the impression that she was terrified of using the wrong words; every sentence betrayed the great insecurity with which it was written. She seemed like a person suffering from vertigo and forced to walk along the edge of a cliff. The precipice was a choice: life or death.
While she was attending meetings or anxiously hurrying to class, while she was smoking or (probably) weeping in her bed, that brother or sister of mine kept taking shape in her body. With immense sagacity and an imperturbable rhythm, the cells were multiplying and arranging themselves to form what would have been its face one day. The baby was growing inside her, and she couldn’t decide whether to let it be born or not; her power over it was total. As I read those lines, I couldn’t feel any hostility or contempt toward her. My only instinct was to protect her, as if all her desperation, her solitude, and her laughable naivety had gone directly into my veins, coalescing into a sense of infinite pity.
By this time, the midday sun was unbearably hot; it even stunned the insects buzzing around the flowers. Just when I was about to close the diary, a bumblebee fell on the pages, its rear legs covered with pollen. Delicately, I helped it get airborne again.
On the spot where the bee had fallen, there was a sort of golden halo. I read the lines below it:
It’s decided.
Three days from today, at B.’s house.
From the heights of her medical studies, Tiziana said, ‘You’re crazy. They’ll kill you.’
I replied, ‘Maybe that would be even better.’
After this, two pages have been torn out. Then, with a nervous hand, she wrote these lines:
The night afterwards, suspended between relief and confusion, I had a dream. I’m not sure where I was in the dream – all I remember is that at one point I ate a piece of unbaked bread dough, which started to rise in my stomach. Everyone I came across said, ‘Are you expecting?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘It’s just the yeast, still working,’ but when I said that, I wasn’t so convinced I was right any more.
When I woke up, I felt strange, so I called B. ‘Are you sure everything went OK?’ I asked her. She reassured me; the procedure had been perfectly executed. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I showed it to you in the basin, remember?’
She seemed vaguely offended at my having doubted her abilities, so to lighten things up, I made a joke: ‘But suppose you did what the Filipino healers do and showed me a couple of chicken livers?’ We laughed, and the tension was relieved.
I felt I needed to extract myself from my mother’s life for a few days. I couldn’t bear the heaviness of those years any longer.
In order to get rid of the dross and the shadows, in order to purify myself, I took several long hikes across the plateau. Hidden in the bushes, the blackbirds and the blackcaps mingled their love songs, and the tender green of the recently-sprouted leaves lent splendour to the surrounding landscape. A giant cloud of busy pollinators buzzed above the upland meadows, which were dotted with dandelions, daisies, and crocuses.
Sometimes I stretched out in the damp depths of a sinkhole. From where I lay, I could admire the crown of bushes and trees around the rim, while backlit spiders climbed up and down invisible strands of silk, and beetles like violet jewels rumbled heavily through the air. At other times, however, I felt the need to climb higher, to reach a point from which I could gaze out to the far horizon and beyond.
As I walked between the sinkholes and the heights along the Slovenian border, I thought about my brother – or my sister – who was denied the possibility of being born. Would the child’s existence have saved my mother, or would it have accelerated her self-destructive decline? Would I be in the world, I wondered, if that older sibling had been here? Was his or her end also, somehow, the possibility of my beginning?
Beyond our will, our fragility, and our plans, however circumscribed, is there Someone or something that governs the great cycle of births? Why was I born, and not the other one? The abortion could have failed, just as my mother could have lost me involuntarily, perhaps by tripping on the stairs with me inside her.
I ascended and descended the stony paths. As I passed, the grass snakes basking in the sun shook off their lethargy and whished away into the bushes. Wall lizards darted here and there. When a snake comes into the world, I said to myself, or a harvest mouse or a crow, none of them can distinguish itself from the rest of its kind except by its longevity, its ability to stay alive. An animal (for all its extraordinary complexity) can only carry out, more or less effectively, the project inscribed in the genetic patrimony of its species, but what about man? Can’t a human being change the path he’s on, again and again? And isn’t it this bottomless chasm of potential that dismays us, that suggests the impotence of our vision? Who would my brother have been? And as for me, why have I come into the world? Who am I supposed to become?
Those long walks gave me the strength to continue my researches. One morning, I woke to the clicking sound of raindrops against the windowpane. The dark bora, the bora scura, had come up in the night, the temperature had dropped, and the wind was blowing pretty hard, covering the garden in an autumnal light. The innumerable white petals scattered under the plum and cherry trees were the only reminders that spring had begun.
After a bit of breakfast, I slowly climbed back up into the attic. An old curtain in a floral pattern covered a pile of boxes, large and small. Some of them must have once contained liqueurs and chocolates; others were anonymous cardboard boxes sealed with packing tape. With the aid of a penknife, I opened one of them, which turned out to be full of Christmas decorations. I unwound several metres of silver ribbon before I got to the crèche. The stable wasn’t old or particularly well made: two cork walls and a ladder leading up to a kind of hayloft under the roof. Inside, the ox and the ass lay with their legs sticking up in the air, while St Joseph and the Madonna rested on their sides. A small bag contained the manger, the sheep, and the lambs. I found my favourite little statue: an old plaster ewe with one broken limb and a red ribbon around her neck. She was the one I used to hide every Christmas Eve; she was the little lost sheep I made you look for, bleating through all the rooms of the house.
There was no trace of Baby Jesus. He must have been in another box, or maybe he wound up in somebody’s pocket during Advent. I also discovered the few glass baubles that had managed to survive decades of Christmases and a treetop ornament with a hole in it.
The boxes underneath held Grandfather’s various beetle collections: little glass cases with velvet lining, to which the insects were affixed with long, slender pins, the whole labelled with each insect’s Latin name, written out in a clear, unhesitating hand.
While I was cautiously trying to move the cases to one side, I tripped over a plastic bag, sealed with electrical tape and bearing the insignia of the State Police; inside there seemed to be a cloth shoulder bag. For a few moments, my heart accelerated its pace. What could it be if not the purse my mother had with her at the time of the accident?
I tore through the plastic wrapping with my fingernails. The bag had no zippers, just a single button, undone. Inside I found a wallet with a few thousand lire, a membership card for an alternative film club, a few dinars, a train pass for the Trieste–Padua stretch, and, protected inside a transparent envelope, a faded Polaroid snapshot of me as a baby at the seashore, in the arms of a man. The stranger – his hair long and dishevelled, a shell necklace around his neck – smiles at the camera, but I’m clearly irritated. I’ve got a little bucket in my hand, and either I’ve just finished crying or I’m about to start. From what I can see in the background, we must be at Sistiana Bay.
In addition to the wallet, there was a ballpoint pen with dried-up ink, a packet of cigarette papers, a little rolling machine, house keys, a synthetic-fabric scarf, a lipstick, some smokers’ sweets, and, hidden in an interior
pocket, two letters. The first, addressed to my mother, had been sent from Padua a few months before I was born.
The handwriting was tiny and regular, with a touch of angularity in the strokes.
Dear Ilaria,
I’ve received your letter and I’m responding to it at once because I don’t want you to waste your time waiting in vain and I don’t want to encourage illusions that will only make you miserable.
If I were just a bit more hypocritical, if the times weren’t what they are – and naked-truth-telling therefore not so thoroughly de rigueur – I could lie to you and tell you I’m married and that I have no intention of endangering my marriage for the sake of a one-month affair.
Instead, I prefer to be honest and tell you clearly that I don’t want any children. Not any children, or any wives, or any fiancées, or anything that might limit my freedom in any way whatsoever. I don’t want any of that, because I lead a life of exploration, and explorers can’t travel with ballast.
I gather from your words – which are sometimes (pardon me) rather too saccharine – that you don’t feel that way, that you’re still harbouring grand illusions. Moreover, even though several years have passed since we first met, you’re still very young, and the distillate of bourgeois respectability (and sentimentality) that you absorbed in your formative years is still intact. Despite your progressive opinions, all you really aspire to is a popular-song vision of life – two hearts and a cabin – perhaps in its revolutionary version: ‘You and I and our offspring, marching into the bright future.’
‘We’ll build a different world,’ you write. ‘It’s up to us to give the example of a new kind of relationship, without oppression, without exploitation, without violence. Raising children creatively, living as a liberated couple.’
In your opinion, in short, we should play at being young pioneers, and you’re convinced that in this way you’ll succeed – we’ll succeed – in freeing ourselves from the obtuse destiny of the bourgeois, from that long death agony which marriage has always been for everyone.
Only your guilelessness makes me feel indulgent towards you. Besides – why deny it? – it’s the part of you I’ve always liked the most, right from the first moment we met. For this reason, and by virtue of our brief time together, I feel it’s my duty to offer you a few points to reflect upon.
The word ‘love’ occurs several times in your text. Have you ever asked yourself what’s hiding behind that noun, so often used and so often abused? Has it ever occurred to you to consider that love may be a sort of scenery, a cardboard backdrop whose purpose is to give the performance some ambience? The chief characteristic of backdrops is that they change with every change of scene.
The essence of dramaturgy doesn’t lie in that painted cardboard – the visual illusion helps us to dream, to consider the pill a little less bitter – but if we’re honest with ourselves, we can’t deny that we’re face to face with a simple artifice, a fiction.
Love, which has so generously nourished your fantasies, is nothing but a subtle form of poison. It acts slowly but inexorably, and it’s capable of destroying any life with its invisible emanations.
You’ll get that lost look in your eyes and ask, ‘Why?’ Because in order to love a person, you must first know him. Can the complexity of one human being truly know the complexity of another? The answer is obviously, absolutely No. Therefore, really loving someone is impossible because really knowing him isn’t possible.
You’ve come to know a tiny fraction of me, just as I’ve been able to enter into contact with a tiny fraction of you. We offered each other, reciprocally, the best part of ourselves, the one each of us knew the other wouldn’t be able to resist.
The same thing happens with flowers. To attract the pollinator, the corolla exhibits extraordinary colours, but once the act is completed, the petals fall, and little is left of the flower’s former splendour.
There’s nothing shocking about this – it’s a law of nature. All couplings occur as a result of various forms of seduction. Every species, from flowers to humans, has its own ways. But just as the bee can’t say ‘I love you’ to the flower, so too are we unable to lie through our teeth and say we love each other. In these honest, forthright times, the only thing we can properly say (as the bee says to the flower and vice versa) is, ‘You’re necessary to me’.
Years ago, in a difficult moment of my life, I felt the necessity of immersing myself in freshness for a month or two. At the same time, I was necessary to you, too – at least, I hope so – as a means of opening your eyes to some complex questions. And of course, there was the undeniable pleasure our bodies gave each other. And pleasure – beyond the orgasmic enjoyment itself – is also extraordinarily subversive. Meeting you again after a few years confirmed our bodies’ magnificent mutual attraction.
What I’ve said up to this point logically applies to the arrival of a child as well. The flowers that let themselves be fecundated by pollen surely don’t do it for pleasure; they do it to assure the survival of their kind, to guarantee that other flowers like them will exist in the future.
The same mechanism is innate in human beings as well. Despite the complexity of our minds, our bodies want only to reproduce themselves. To them, as to the flowers, it makes no difference whatsoever whether we love each other or not, or how overwhelming the orgasm was. A birth can just as easily be the result of a rape, or of a premature ejaculation. Out of two hundred and fifty thousand spermatozoa, there’s only ever one that wins the race – the best, the strongest, the luckiest, the most dishonest – it makes no difference. What matters is that life is replicated and passed on. And that’s what happened in your case, too. It’s a law of nature.
To tell you the truth, I ought to slap your wrists a little. Why didn’t you take some preventative measures? I know you’re dreamy and romantic, but do you still believe in baby delivery by stork? Or maybe what you desired, not so unconsciously, but clearly, wilfully, was a connection, a link that would bind me to you once and for all?
Probably, given the depth and the archaic nature of your conditioning, and even though you don’t realise it, what you (like so many of your female friends) truly want is only the certainty of a future as part of a couple. Some men, faced with women’s biological and primeval blackmail, lower their guard and yield. They do it because they’re weak or banal or afflicted by the innate and unconquerable fear of death. Who but their child can guarantee them eternity?
Many yield, but not I. Any vacillation I might indulge in is blocked by the idea that the baby growing inside you will be not only a stranger, but also a tyrant capable of consuming the energy of our days, a parasite capable of devouring – without any sense of guilt – the people who brought it into the world. I would never be able to know it and therefore never able to love it. You won’t be able to either, despite your having carried it in your womb. One morning you’ll wake up with a realisation: you’ve brought an interloper into the house, and that interloper has the face of an enemy.
All that having been said, I don’t want to influence you in any way. As you and your friends chant in your marches, ‘My womb is mine, I’ll manage it myself’. Do what you want. If you want to keep it, keep it; if you want an abortion, I have no objection. Either decision leaves me completely indifferent.
Just remember, if you appear in front of me one day with a bundle in your arms, I won’t be even slightly moved, nor will I betray my convictions.
I’m grateful to you for the lovely hours we spent together, for the philosophy, the poetry, the sex, and for the guilelessness that was always in your eyes when you looked at me.
M.
My father and the father of my dead sibling were, therefore, one and the same person. The same vile person.
By now, I had very few doubts about the contents of the other envelope, the white one. I opened it a little, peered in, and recognised the handwriting I’d come to know very well.
Every one of your words corroborated what I’ve a
lways known. Children belong only to their mothers; after the fathers perform the necessary fertilisation, they are no longer required.
And soon they won’t even be necessary any more; a donor and a syringe will be enough, and thus the pathetic history of the family, the ballet of make-believe that has destroyed the mental equilibrium of so many generations, will finally draw to a close.
Many of us live in my house in Trieste. I won’t lack assistance or company. The child will grow up without blinkers and without hypocrisy. He’ll never feel compelled to put up a poster in his room with the words, ‘The family is airy and stimulating, like a gas chamber.’
He’ll be a free child, and he’ll be on the way to an equally free world, with no more mistaken ideas and without the repression imposed by patriarchy, capitalism, and the church.
He won’t suffer from fears and anxiety, because his childhood will have been spent in accordance with the innate goodness closed up inside every human heart. And his soul will be so large that I may never truly learn to know it, but, unlike you, I’m not distressed by this prospect, nor will it make me go back on my decision.
That’s the challenge: to send creatures more complete than ourselves out into the world. If we can’t make a revolution with weapons, at least we can do it by raising our kids differently.
G. says that somewhere in the heavens it was written that you and I would meet, and that our existences would unite in a new life. Our destinies and the destiny of our child were inscribed in an astral conjunction long ago – I believe that, even though you won’t accept it. Probably, in order to carry out this plan, we’ve been chasing each other through several lives, and since you refuse to procreate, your karma will be long and devastating. You’ll probably be reincarnated in an animal; I can just see you as a reptile (your cold blood irrigating every cell of your body and its minuscule brain), or maybe a mandrill, with a bright red muzzle to match your behind.
Inevitably, your child will look like you; he’ll have your eyes, your hands, and your way of laughing, but to me he’ll be only himself, and you’ll be an outdated mail-order catalogue. If he asks me anything about you, I’ll tell him of a magnificent, impossible love shared one night on a distant beach . . . I’ll make him dream about his father.