Luckily, I have G. in my life. I don’t know what I would have done without him. Despite your sarcasm, he’s not my new lover; he’s a unique person who’s very important to me. All the broken pieces I’m carrying around inside – he’s helping me put all that back together. He alone has the patience to make sense of every fragment and return it to its proper place. G. knows how to see things others don’t see. He knows how to untangle the confused strands of people’s lives and find the thread that will lead them to safety.
I’ve never told you this, but I was pregnant with your child a few years ago, too. You never learned about him, because he was no bigger than a tadpole when he got flushed down a toilet. I did everything by myself, without consulting anyone. At the moment, it seemed like an event of little importance; only now, as I’m digging through the ruins, do I realise how profoundly that act destabilised the whole edifice. In all likelihood, given the shoddy materials that had gone into its construction, it was pretty shaky already: behind me were my mother, with her bourgeois obtuseness, and my father, a grey man who sprinkled me with merely lukewarm affection, which I returned at an even lower temperature. He was a Coleopteron among the Coleoptera, like the metamorphosed cockroach in the story, taking refuge under the bed.
But I don’t want to bore you with these bourgeois trivialities.
That first time, I threw away our child because I was afraid. Afraid of responsibility, of commitment, of having to give up my youth, of not being ready to work for the revolution; afraid of not measuring up in your eyes, of disappointing you. I lied to you the first time we slept together: I wasn’t on the pill. And maybe one reason I had the abortion was that I was afraid you’d deride me for lying.
But the last few times, when we saw each other again after all those years, you never asked me anything about birth control. Do you know why? According to G., the answer is clear: you, too, however unconsciously, want a child. You’re doing your Herod number to mask your terror, but at this point, I no longer have any interest in your fears. My belly’s growing every day, and it’s as though I have a little sun shining inside me. It’s warm, it gives light, and it helps me to see my way forward.
I’ll carry this pregnancy to term. I’m thirty years old and I can’t wait any longer. I’m not the naive girl you portray in your letter, infatuated with her handsome professor – not any more. I’m an adult capable of making responsible choices, and I choose to be a mother. I don’t have a job, but I’ve got a house in Trieste (a gift from my bourgeois family which I was careful not to reject). I spend a lot of time working on my unconscious, by no means a simple task. And from time to time I manage to do some tutoring. When my mother passes on to the next world, however, I’ll have a stable income, so you needn’t worry – you’re going to be spared the spectacle of my coming to you begging with a baby in my arms. It won’t ever happen.
Do you know what G. says? He says each of us is holding one end of a string, and that string can lead us to our star. Each of us has a star; our destiny is to learn how to follow it as it moves across the heavens. It’s a kite-star, our karma is written in its wake, and if we let the string go, all is lost, everything gets tangled into a skein of stars.
In fact, that’s the title of his most important book: Skeins of Stars. I know you don’t care about any of this, but believe me, if you don’t seek out your star, if you don’t follow it, sooner or later your string will snarl and snag with the strings leading to other stars, and there will be no untangling it; your star will grow dimmer and dimmer, until eventually it disappears altogether.
The star’s a little sun, but when its light fades, it becomes cold and icy. And that’s the frigid gloom that will guide your steps while my child and I run happily along, following the rainbow of our kite-stars.
Om Shanti, Om Shanti, Om Shanti.
For a moment, while I was reading, a thick veil fell over my eyes; the words danced before them in agitation, and my hands weren’t all that steady, either.
My mother’s dreams didn’t coincide with my memories in any way. What she thought of as freedom had caused me, child that I was, nothing but bewilderment and confusion. There was never any happy running after the rainbow. Her star was a star of destruction; the modest efforts she made to save herself had thrown me into a state of profound and lasting turmoil.
I put the two letters back into the inside pocket of the shoulder bag, handling them as delicately as archaeological finds newly come to light after centuries of burial. Rest in peace, I told them, rest in peace, white-hot darts, don’t perforate my fragile guts.
As I was saying this, my hands grazed a folded sheet of graph paper lying at the bottom of the bag. The sheet had been torn clumsily from a notepad. What period did this fresh discovery date from?
The heading indicated that the page had been written in May of the year she died. Below the date, printed in block capitals, were the words YOU’VE MADE A FOOL OF ME ALL MY LIFE!
On the back of the page was a brief letter:
Forgive me, forgive me for bringing you into the world.
I’ve made one mistake after another. I’ve spent my life burrowing underground like a mole, blind to everything, and running in circles like a mouse.
There was no horizon, and no future.
I was born to live in a dead end, and now I’ve run out of road.
Forgive me if you can.
If you can’t, I understand. Hugs and kisses.
She’d cancelled her signature – Ilaria – with two thick black strokes, and then, just below that, she’d written in big, slightly childish letters, Mamma.
When your heart breaks, what sound does it make? A splat, like a waterlogged sponge, or a hiss, like a fire in the rain?
I would have liked to learn more, but that was all there was. I had nothing else to rely on but my memories, those few, weak flashes that belonged to the earliest period of my consciousness, but that door had been closed for too many years. My life – the life I knew – had belonged to you, to your house; everything that happened before I came to live here had dissolved. It was as though I’d been born at the age of four.
But going over those years again, discovering things about my mother that some children might never want to know about theirs, had stripped away a veil from my memory, as people returning home after a long absence pull the protective cloths from their sofas.
The first thing that came back to me was an extremely precise odour, the smell of cigarette tobacco and hashish burning in an airless room. Had I been a migratory bird, I could have followed that scent right back to the nest. The nest, in this case, was my mother’s flat in Trieste, a sort of commune where people continuously came and went. I crawled around among men and women, some of them seated, others stretched out on the floor, forming alleyways I slipped through as though they were paths in a labyrinth.
I found only two snapshots from that period in the suitcase. In the first one, I’m in my mother’s arms, dirty-faced, pouting, wearing a red sweater, and she – with long hair and bags under her eyes – is holding one of my hands and waving it, trying to make me say bye-bye to someone. The second photo was taken on my third birthday. There are a lot of people sitting on the floor, and I’m in the midst of them, and before me is a dark, shapeless mass, lit by three little candles, which must be the birthday cake. Behind me, a length of unrolled toilet paper is hanging like a banner, and someone has written ‘Happy Birthday’ on it with a felt-tipped pen.
I didn’t have any real memory of those two events; what remained from the first years of my life was a kind of background noise, a soundtrack made up of competing voices and indeterminate racket, overlaid from time to time by the heartbreaking music of an instrument (later identified as a sitar) that made me cry.
I was afraid of that sound, I was afraid of being alone after everyone fell asleep on the floor, and I was afraid of the moment when the sun would be high in the sky and I’d shake my mother but instead of opening her eyes she’d turn over on h
er other side and keep on sleeping.
I was afraid of the sitar, and I was afraid of my mother, because often she wasn’t herself; she was another person who snatched things and broke them, beat her head against the wall, and kicked doors.
Maybe it was that terror that cancelled her face from my memory. At any second, I knew that reality could blow up, explode into a thousand pieces, and somehow the lighting of the fuse had something to do with me.
Apart from the dismay and the constant anxiety of those days, I remember also the birth of something smaller and more devastating when it comes from a young child: the feeling of pity. Yes, pity was the knot in my throat that made me weep when she was lying exhausted on the floor and I’d move closer to her, fearfully and delicately, so that I could reach out and touch her face.
7
COULD I CONTINUE to ignore my father the way he’d done me? This was the question I kept asking myself, but I found no reply.
During my teenage years, I’d fantasised a lot about him. I stopped believing your whopper about the Turkish prince (and also in Father Christmas) when I was nine, but I often thought about my father; day after day, I put together my personal mosaic of him. To accomplish this task, I used tesserae of the most extraordinary colours: the fact that he’d never tried to contact me must mean that some obstacle had prevented him from doing so, some impediment so dire that getting in touch with me would threaten his very existence, or maybe even my own.
Why else would a father deliberately choose not to watch his daughter grow up? Increasingly fantastic scenarios succeeded one another in my imagination; their settings extended from the venues of international espionage (only a spy would be unwilling to risk revealing his identity) to the most advanced scientific research laboratories (my father must be a biologist, physicist, or chemist working on projects of extraordinary significance for the future of mankind, and therefore he’s compelled to live some sort of high-security underground existence, far from prying eyes, and to deny himself his daughter’s love).
Children want to be proud of their parents; it’s too bad that parents don’t notice. In the most fortunate cases, a father and mother have an idea of how a child ought to be, and everything they say and do conforms to that idea. In the most unfortunate cases, the parents see nothing outside themselves, and they live their lives without noticing the laser beams constantly pointed at them, their child’s wall-penetrating, distance-overcoming eyes, implacable, parched, hungry, capable of reaching them anywhere on earth, of following them to heaven or hell, ready to risk everything, to lose everything, eyes that have sought but one thing ever since they opened onto the world: an answering look.
Every child is born with a need for wonder; he wants to turn his eyes on something he can admire, to be led to a mountaintop where he can contemplate the splendid view, the changing light, the snow, the reflections on the ice, and the soaring eagle, majestically protecting its young, as human parents ought to do, too.
But instead, the landscape that stretches out before many children, all the way to the horizon, is often nothing but an open-air rubbish dump, where automobile carcasses, broken chairs, boilers, sinks, dead television sets, and plastic bags litter the ground: a single expanse of desolation and disorder. And nevertheless, even in such a situation, a child can manage to find something to admire – a marble, perhaps – and for a fraction of a second, as he holds the little glass sphere, the world contains no more shadows and shines in his hands.
To keep away despair, the child holds on to anything at all – a hint, an inkling – that he hopes may grow and broaden until it transforms the whole scene. There’s not a detective or a scientist who can match the investigative talent of a child bent on finding valid reasons to admire the people who have brought him into the world.
A drunken father (let’s say he’s lying on the floor and you have to step over him on your way to school) isn’t a bad person, not at all; he could have come home in a rage and started kicking you, but instead he chose to go to sleep and leave you in peace. And your mother’s good, too, because after neglecting you for days, she comes home and makes you an omelette; she could have skipped that, she could have shut herself up in her room, especially since she’s not hungry and so what if you are, but no, she takes out some eggs, beats them in a bowl, and maybe even looks you in the eye and asks you if you’ve done your homework, because you’re the most important thing in her life.
For years, I’d enclosed my father in an imaginary bubble that followed me everywhere. The bubble was suspended in mid-air, and there he was inside, surrounded by flower petals, smiling the Buddha’s peaceful smile: sublime, inaccessible. I was convinced that sooner or later, the bubble would burst and he’d finally descend to earth so he could put his arms around me.
The bubble did indeed burst; however, instead of the seraphic, imperturbable Buddha, out stepped Professor Ancona, with his beard, his cigarettes, and his words, reasonable on the surface but underneath as sharp as stilettos.
In those days of complete solitude, I read and reread his only letter to my mother. At first, I thought I might agree with some of what he wrote – about his love of knowledge, for example, or his decision to avoid personal ties in order to give himself over as utterly as possible to self-examination: this is a great mind, I told myself, so of course he has the right to avoid tying himself down, to keep himself free from quotidian concerns. But I was still caught up in the bubble syndrome; I wanted to find in him something that was in me, too.
When I went over the letter again a few days later, it made a very different impression on me. It was as though a chemical reaction had taken place between the lines, and the measured, well-ordered, authoritative words now exuded a greenish, acidic, corrosive substance capable of bringing to light the true nature of the person who’d written them. I could see paternalism, derision, cynicism. My mother was portrayed as a character in some romantic novel, seduced and abandoned at her first encounter. The terms were different, of course, as well as the details, but ‘scratch the surface’ (as he used to say) and the story was always the same: The woman falls in love – and dreams – while the man plays a game and enjoys himself.
I’d fantasised for years about meeting my father for the first time, about our first embrace, but those few pages swept away any tender feeling or admiration from my heart and left behind only anger. I felt humiliated as a woman, as my mother’s daughter (and therefore his, too), the product of degeneration rather than generation, brought into the world by a joke of fate.
Now I knew I’d spit on him the moment I saw him. I’d go looking for him, indeed I would, but not out of affection or curiosity, I’d do it only so I could vent the rage I felt rising inside me, so I could get close enough to him to shout into his ears all the things my mother should have said if she’d only had the nerve.
One thing was certain (and I took solace from it): despite his passion for freedom and his lofty opinion of himself, he’d never become what he’d hoped to be; otherwise, I would have read his name somewhere. He must have remained a small or medium-sized fish, shut up for life in the little protected aquarium provided by the university and a few specialised journals. My hunch was confirmed in a bookstore a few days later. On the title page of a book on epistemology translated from English, I read these words: ‘Afterword by Professor Massimo Ancona’.
It wasn’t hard to track him down. I called up his publishing house and asked for his address. They told me most politely that – for reasons of privacy – they weren’t authorised to give out his address, but that I could write him a letter care of the house and they’d be sure to forward it to him.
So I took pen and paper and wrote to him. I presented myself as a philosophy student, young, shy, and filled with admiration for the fascinating complexity of his work.
Could we meet?
The reply wasn’t long in coming. He didn’t live very far from Trieste. He thanked me, fended off my compliments, and added that there was no use in my ma
king an appointment with him, because he was at home every afternoon except on Sundays. All I had to do was ring his bell downstairs and speak my name – Elena – into the intercom, and he’d buzz me in.
The first name I’d chosen for myself was Elena. For my family name, I used your mother’s maiden name. I didn’t want to run the slightest risk of arousing even a tiny suspicion and having our meeting cancelled.
And so the ‘student’ Elena, on a cold day with the bora blowing, took a bus to Grado to meet her father for the first time. She was on her way like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, like Hop o’ my Thumb’s ogre, like all those fairytale creatures capable of biting and causing pain. But she was also going like a child, in naive anticipation, hoping that the story had taken a different turn with the passage of time, because that imaginary embrace was always there, waiting, the arms spread out inside her like the claws of a giant crab.
What was I feeling in the half-empty bus that carried me toward the seacoast, as I prepared myself for this meeting?
Was I fearful? Was I angry? Angry, for sure, but probably more afraid than anything. I watched a landscape of monotonous desolation roll by outside my little window. Soon after passing the cranes rising from the shipyards in Monfalcone, we began to cross over the estuary of the Isonzo River. Every now and then, the slow flight of a heron traversed the sky. Maybe I was more fearful than anything else because – after giving the matter so much thought and devising so many elaborate strategies of attack – I was no longer sure I’d have the nerve to push the button on the intercom or the strength to climb the stairs or the courage to meet his eyes without betraying my emotions, like Ulysses upon his return to Ithaca, shortly before he massacred the Suitors.