In the middle of the night, the front door groaned under the blows of the bora; it really sounded as though someone were outside, shouting Gestapo!
By day, instead of protecting myself from the wind, I went out to confront it, running against its gusts like Don Quixote charging the windmills. Kill me, purify me, ravish me, carry me far away, away from here, rip me out of my life. In my heart, I ceaselessly repeated these words.
I slept little, I ate even less, I saw no one, I had no projects; I felt like a boxer alone in the middle of the ring. I’d warmed up for years, worked on my jab and my uppercut, and skipped rope to prepare myself for the final bout, and then my opponent had suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn. I kept on hopping about, of course, but the only adversary I faced was my shadow.
Without any opportunities for conflict, my life was like a carrier bag at the mercy of the wind; my movements were determined by its capricious gusts, not by my own will.
I’d never thought about my future.
As a little girl, I’d had a few unfocused dreams about what I wanted to be – a stationmaster (complete with signal paddle and red cap) or a ship’s captain, a circus acrobat or a dog trainer – but they were just that, only dreams, without any practical connection to reality. From the beginning of my teenage years on, I’d had but one occupation: attacking you. Now that you’d abandoned the field in one brilliant move, I walked around the house like Pavlov’s dog, pulling at my chain and baring my teeth, but the bell I so longed to hear never rang.
What meaning did the days of my life have, now that I was alone in the world? Or, for that matter, even when you were still there? And, in general, what was the significance of all human life? Why did people always repeat the same gestures? Out of habit, out of boredom, out of an inability to imagine anything different or to question themselves? Or perhaps out of fear, because it’s easier to follow a trail that’s already marked.
Pushing my trolley down the aisles of the supermarket, I looked at the pallid faces under the neon lights and asked myself: What life has meaning? And what’s the meaning of life? Eating? Surviving? Reproducing? Animals do all that, too. Then why do we have two legs to walk on and two hands to use? Why do we write poetry, paint pictures, compose symphonies? Only so our bellies can be full and we can copulate enough to guarantee ourselves descendants?
No human being desires to come into the world. One fine day, without being consulted, we find ourselves shoved out on to the stage; some of us are given leading roles, others are mere extras, and still others exit the scene before the end of the act or prefer to climb down from the stage and enjoy the show from the stalls – to laugh, weep, or grow bored, according to the day’s programme.
In spite of this brutal start, once born into the world, no one wants to leave it. It seemed paradoxical to me: I don’t ask to come here, but once I’m here, I don’t ever want to leave. What’s the meaning of individual responsibility, then? Am I the one who chooses, or am I chosen?
Is the real act of free will, therefore – the one that differentiates men from animals – the decision to leave for good? I didn’t choose to come into the world, but I can choose when to bid it farewell; I didn’t come down here of my own free will, but I can go back up whenever I want.
But come down from where? Go back up where? Is there an above and a below? Or just an absolute pneumatic void?
After your death, whenever I thought about the house, the image that came into my mind was the image of a seashell. When I was a little girl, not yet six years old, you bought me one from an old fisherman in Grado. I can still hear your voice as you put the shell over my ear and said, ‘You hear that? It’s the sound of the sea.’
I listened for a while, and then I suddenly burst into one of those intense, unstoppable fits of weeping that irritated and frightened you at the same time. You kept saying, ‘Why are you crying? What’s wrong?’
I couldn’t answer you. I couldn’t tell you that the sound inside the shell wasn’t the roar of the sea but the groans of the dead, that the strange howling I heard was their voice. I couldn’t say that it poured itself into our ears with all the violence of the unspoken, and that from there it went to the heart, crushing it until it exploded. Once upon a time, that seashell had housed a gastropod (just as, for many decades, the house on the Kras Plateau had been our family’s protective shell) which some crab or starfish had then devoured, leaving its calcium carbonate exoskeleton empty. The water, entering every recess of the shell, had smoothed and polished it until it shone like mother-of-pearl, and now, deep in its gleaming insides, that sound reverberated endlessly.
The inhabitants of our house had undergone the same fate: They were all dead, and the wind had smoothed down every memory of them. Alone, I wandered through the chambers and spirals, and sometimes I seemed to be lost in a labyrinth. At other times, however, I realised that only by staying in there, only by searching and digging and listening, would I be able to find a way of anchoring myself.
The wind was a voice, too; it carried the sighs of the dead, the sound of their steps, the things that were never said between them.
As I was there alone, in that house whose walls kept getting thinner, more transparent, I began to think about the young woman in the photograph, enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I tried to remember the sound of her voice, the warmth of her hand, something that might have united us before she disappeared. I would have liked to know everything about her, but now there wasn’t anyone I could ask.
How did she look, who was she, what did she like, and – perhaps the most pressing question of all – why did she bring me into the world?
I started calling out to her as I wandered through the empty rooms.
I was ashamed of speaking that name – somehow it seemed as though I were betraying you. Up until that day, I’d always said ‘Grandma’, and now, all at once, all I wanted to say was ‘Mamma’.
Genealogies
6
WHO ARE OUR parents? What’s behind the faces of the people who begot us? Out of billions of persons, only two; out of hundreds of thousands of spermatozoa, only one. Before we become the children of our mother and father, we’re the result of billions of combinations and choices – both made and not made – but no one’s in a position to shed much light on them. Why that spermatozoon and not this one right next to it? Why does only that one contain the characteristics of the necessary person? The unborn child could turn out to be Leonardo da Vinci, or a plumber, or a ruthless murderer.
And if it’s true that everything’s already predetermined, as in a restaurant menu, if Leonardo has to become Leonardo and nobody else and the same with the plumber and the killer, what sense is there to our entire existence? Are we really just put together from various parts, like pieces in an assembly kit? Is there a number on each kit that determines the project it contains?
Maybe, up in heaven, someone – like an industrious housewife – is bustling about and deciding: Today we need four hundred plumbers, eighty or so murderers, and forty-two scientists.
Or maybe heaven’s empty, as many people claim, and things go forward in a kind of perpetual motion; matter started to aggregate distant aeons ago, and now it can’t stop; the forms it produces are more and more complex. And it’s exactly this complexity that’s opened the way to the great fiction that would have us believe in the existence of Someone up there in the sky.
Why can two people, a couple who perhaps hadn’t even met until a few hours before, by performing an act that lasts no more than a few minutes, become our parents? Is this our destiny, to be half one and half the other, even if fate decrees that we’re to be adopted and sent to live on the other side of the world?
In any case, we’re part of them, and vice versa.
Part of them, and part of their parents and of their parents’ parents, and so on, farther and farther back, until the whole family tree is covered – one grandfather’s passion for insects, great-grandmother’s love of singing, great-great-grandfathe
r’s flair for business, the other grandfather’s alcoholism, various cousins’ efforts to bring the family to ruin, the suicidal instincts of a couple of uncles, a great-aunt’s obsession with the spirit world – all of that is closed up inside us as though in a time bomb. But we don’t set the timer; it’s been set from the beginning, and we know nothing about it. The only wisdom is to be aware that there’s something uncontrolled inside us and that at any moment it could explode.
And so a man and a woman – among billions of their kind – meet each other at a certain point in their lives, and after a period of time that can vary from a few minutes to decades, reproduce themselves in another living individual.
According to the most advanced studies, the origin of this coupling probably can be found, once again, in the sense of smell, as is the case with migratory birds.
In fact, the human nose is the instrument through which we understand that the gametes of the person before us must be united with our own. There are no whys or wherefores, only the law of life, which seems to require that biological considerations trump all others.
It’s the nose, therefore, that suggests copulation, because this extraordinary organ (a valuable legacy from our distant ancestors) never errs, and the only mood it knows is the imperative: Do this, do that, make sure your line will continue into the future, shining like a star.
So do we follow our nose, or fate?
Is the improvement of the species the main factor, or is it the fragility of human beings, with their inexhaustible and inexplicable need for love?
The only image I have of my father in his youth – of the father I was able to track down after you died – is in a group photograph. He’s standing behind my mother. They’re holding cans of beer, as if they’re making a toast – the occasion is a meeting or a party, it’s hard to tell – and she’s looking up at him with the devotion of a dog watching its master. The smoke from her cigarette mingles with the other smoke hanging in a pall over the room. On the back of the photo, a date in pencil: March 1970.
This photograph was one of many family pictures mingled together in a large cardboard suitcase, which I found in the attic, buried under a couple of carpets. I also found many letters, some of them bound together with ribbons of various colours, others tossed confusedly into plastic bags along with postcards from Salsomaggiore, from Cortina d’Ampezzo, from the earth pyramids in the South Tyrol, and from Porretta Terme, as well as train tickets, museum tickets, wedding invitations, birth announcements, messages of condolence, and, at the bottom of the suitcase, four or five notebooks, which, judging from their covers, dated from different periods.
In addition, for reasons only you could fathom, you had saved two boxes of pins (one held safety pins and the other dress-making pins with coloured heads), a broken pair of scissors, an old caramel box containing buttons of every shape and size, an eraser, a tube of dried-up glue, a box of safety matches, a brochure from the Society of Dilettante Latinists, a train schedule from just after the war, a few recipes clipped out of newspapers, and a Bible whose cover had been removed by time, or mice.
Judging from the dust, that suitcase hadn’t been opened for years; surely a good while had passed since your last venture into the attic, and I’d never even considered it. The desire to turn back and explore the past comes only when life changes for some unforeseen or terrible reason, such as an illness or a sudden void. Then, for example, a girl fetches a ladder and ratchets up her courage, because she needs to climb up and get all dusty and open the suitcase. And inside she finds repressed, unspoken words, deeds never done, and people never met; a tiny impact is all that’s needed to liberate the ghosts.
The first ghost I came across wasn’t my father’s (although back then I wouldn’t have been able to recognise him) but my mother’s. I spotted it by surprise – it was hidden under a diary, a packet of letters, and a few scattered photographs.
I gathered up everything very carefully and went down to the living room. I didn’t want to stay up in the attic, in their territory; I felt too vulnerable. By way of pretending that I wasn’t alone, I switched on the television set and sat down in the armchair.
The pages of the diary were of Florentine paper with little lilies printed on it. On the first page, someone had drawn cubical letters in red ink with a felt-tipped pen: REBELLION. The word was underlined three times and followed by an indeterminate number of exclamation points.
14 September, 1969
Holy Cross Day
What’s so uplifting about a cross? Bah! The only uplifting thing I can think of is that today’s my first day of freedom! Farewell to the noxious exhalations of Trieste; farewell to the prison of my family.
Making her accept my choice wasn’t easy. I could take the same courses in Trieste, so why incur the expense of moving to another city?
The Mummy gave in before I thought she would. The magic word was ‘autonomy’: ‘I want to test my autonomy.’ She lit up. ‘If that’s the reason,’ she said, ‘I’m in agreement.’ I could have told her that I was going no matter what she said. I’ve finally stopped being a minor, and I can do whatever the hell I want. I’ve already lost two years because of her closed mind.
When I came here in July, an announcement on the bulletin board at the university led me to this flat right away. It’s a real hole. I’m sharing it with Tiziana, who comes from Comelico and is studying medicine.
In any case, I don’t stay home very much. I feel like a dog who, after trying for many years, has finally managed to jump the fence; I’m always roaming around, sniffing the air, my eyes wide open in wonder, and I’m determined to try everything, to understand everything.
21 September
Back from buying groceries – they have to last for a whole week!
27 September
Half of what I bought has disappeared from the fridge. Asked T., who denies everything. Avoided an argument.
2 October
Telephone call from the M. I’m still asleep when the phone rings. She says the bora’s blowing ferociously – it’s cracked the trunk of a tree in the garden. ‘Why would I care about that?’ I say and hang up. I know very well that this is just one of her ways of controlling me.
13 October
First class. The lecture theatre’s full, I get here late, and I have to stand the whole time. The professor’s an old guy with a reputation as a fascist. While he’s speaking, there’s a lot of tension in the air. Balls of wadded-up paper fly from one part of the hall to another. When, at the end, he explains the lecture schedule, a group of students rise to their feet and start hissing and whistling, joined by a large number of the others. The professor leaves in a huff, accompanied by a chorus of mocking laughter.
15 October
T. never buys groceries. She waits for me to do it so she can live like a parasite. She’s selfish and stingy, and one of these days I’m going to tell her so.
30 October
The M. called, at dawn as usual – she must be convinced that being a student is like being a farmer. ‘There’s a long weekend coming up,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come home?’ I was feeling magnanimous, so I said, ‘Because I have to study.’ Then I turned on to the other side of the bed and went back to sleep.
4 November
Today, when I woke up, I thought about the times we’re living in. It’s incredible. Everything’s changing so insanely fast there’s no more room for hypocrisy, conformism, or injustice. It’s as if we’ve all suddenly opened our eyes and understood that we can’t go on in the old way. No more duplicity! No more slavery! The boss can’t exploit the worker any more! The man can’t exploit the woman! Religion can no longer oppress humankind.
Freedom is the operative word for the times to come. Freedom for workers, freedom for women, freedom for children – they don’t have to be caged up in the obtuse rigidity of the educational system any more. We mustn’t clip their wings, because a different world can arise only from spontaneity and freedom, and we, we ourselves
, are going to be the protagonists of this revolutionary change!
18 November
I’ve begun my philosophy of language course. The teacher’s an assistant professor. He’s got only a few grey hairs, and they make him even more fascinating. He’s the only professor who has a beard. Everyone listens to his lectures with great attention. When we left the lecture theatre, I said to Carla, my new study partner, ‘Not a bad-looking guy, Professor Ancona.’ C.’s smile was slightly malicious: ‘You think you’re the only one who’s noticed that?’
2 December
C. managed to drag me to a women’s consciousness-raising group. At first, I felt a little embarrassed, because they were all talking about their own bodies.
According to them, they had finally learned to know their bodies only because of the disintegration of the atavistic sense of guilt they had all shared, and this new knowledge allowed them to recognise the incredible violence that had been done to their imaginations with the childhood injunction that girls must play only with dolls and miniature cooking sets. ‘The prelude to slavery!’ one of the women shouted, and everyone applauded.
My turn was coming up, and I didn’t know what to say. Then a memory came to me like a flash, an episode with my father: I must have been six or seven, and after dinner, walking with great care, I brought him his coffee in the living room. ‘What a good little housewife!’ he exclaimed, smiling at me.
Now, I said, it was clear that I’d been carrying that mark, that burden, that destination stamp inside me ever since. What if I’d wanted to become a neurosurgeon or an astronaut? My words caught everyone’s attention and earned general agreement. To hell with the good little housewives and all other clippers of wings. When I left the meeting, I felt as though I’d grown lighter.