Read Listen to My Voice Online
Authors: Susanna Tamaro
Listen to My Voice
Contents
About the Book
Marta is raised by her grandmother in her
house in Trieste, a safe haven of stories, books
and enchantment. She knows that her mother
died when she was young, and she believes that
her father is a Turkish prince. But as she grows
older and this fairy tale disintegrates, Marta
feels only anger towards her grandmother for
withholding information about her parents.
When her grandmother dies, Marta is alone
in the world. One day, in the dusty attic, she
finds a box belonging to her mother which
may help to uncover her own past. With clues
found in her mother’s journal and a worn
photograph, Marta decides to track down her
father, who she believes may still be alive.
Feeling the need to escape her grandmother’s
house, which is populated by secrets, Marta
embarks on a journey to Israel, seeking what
is left of her mother’s family in an attempt
to make sense of where she came from.
Written as a young woman’s narrative
addressed to the memory of her grandmother,
Listen to my Voice
is a poignant coming of age
story, and a beautifully crafted meditation on
the importance of history and belonging.
About the Author
Susanna Tamaro was born in Trieste in 1957
and is the author of eight adult books and four
children’s books. She established the Tamaro
Foundation, dedicated to humanitarian causes,
with the royalties from her literary work.
Susanna Tamaro lives in Umbria.
Also by Susanna Tamaro
Susanna Tamaro
Follow Your Heart
For Solo Voice
Answer Me
To Daisy Nathan
and to her questions a century
long
Return unto me, and I will return unto you
.
MALACHI
3:7
Prelude
1
MAYBE IT ALL
started when you had the tree cut down.
You hadn’t told me a thing about it – such matters didn’t concern children – and so, one winter morning, while I was sitting in a classroom, listening with a profound sense of alienation as the teacher extolled the virtues of the lowest common multiple, a saw bit into the silvery-white bark; while I was dragging my feet in the corridor at break, chips of the tree’s life rained down on the ants.
The devastation landed on me when I came home from school. In the yard, in the place where the walnut tree had stood, there was a black chasm; the lopped-off branches and the trunk, already sawed into three segments, lay dead on the ground; and a purple-faced man enveloped in the dirty smoke of diesel fuel was manoeuvring an excavator, whose huge jaws tore at the
roots
. The machine barked, snorted, reversed, and reared up, urged on by the curses of its operator. The damned roots didn’t want to loosen their hold on the earth. They were deeper than anticipated, and much more stubborn.
For years and years, season after season, those roots had spread out silently, gaining ground little by little, entwining themselves with the roots of the oak and the cedar and the apple tree, even gathering into their inextricable embrace the gas and water mains. That’s the reason why trees must be cut down: they work deviously in darkness, thwarting the labour of man, and man, faced with such pigheadedness, is forced to deploy technology.
All at once, under a cold winter sun, the tree’s majestic umbrella of roots, with a constellation of little clods still clinging to them, rose up before my eyes – like a roof ripped off a house, or like the vault of the universe at the first blast of the Last Trump – leaving the deepest part of the taproot still buried in the ground.
Then – and only then – the man in the digger raised his fist skyward in a sign of victory, and you, already wearing your apron, applauded briefly.
Then – and only then – I, who hadn’t opened my mouth or taken a step, felt my spine radiate into all things. My vertebrae and my marrow were no longer my own; they were part of an old, exposed wire, and its sparks flew in dissimulated delight from side to side, with cold, fierce energy. They spread out everywhere, like
invisible
spikes of ice with razor-sharp points, invading my bowels, piercing my heart, exploding in my brain, dancing suspended in its fluids; white slivers, dead man’s bones, no dance but the dance of death; energy but not fire, not light, energy for some unforeseen, violent act; livid, scalding energy.
And after the lightning bolt, the darkness of deep night, the unquiet quiet of too much: of having seen too much, suffered too much, known too much. The quiet not of sleep, but of a brief death: when pain is too great, you have to die a little in order to be able to go on.
My tree – the tree I’d grown up with, the tree I’d been convinced would accompany me as the years passed, the tree under whose branches I’d believed I would raise my children – had been uprooted. Its fall had dragged many things down to ruin: my sleep, my happiness, my ostensibly carefree spirit. When the root finally cracked, the sound was an explosion; time was divided into before and after; light was different, shrouded in intermittent darkness. Daytime darkness, night-time darkness, midsummer darkness. And, out of the darkness, a certainty: grief was the swamp I was condemned to wander through.
The tiniest things are the greatest mystery of all. Protected by invisibility, the secret world explodes. A
rock’s
a rock, before and after; it never stops being a rock. But a tree, before it’s a tree, is a seed; man, before he’s man, is a morula.
The greatest projects lie dozing in what’s limited, in what’s circumscribed.
When I understood this, all at once, I understood that small things have to be taken care of.
After the death of the big walnut tree, I wept for days. At first you tried to console me – how could chopping down a plant devastate a girl so utterly? You loved trees, too; you would never have done a thing like that to spite me. You’d decided it had to go because it was causing problems; it was too close to the house, and also to the cedar tree. Trees need space, you kept telling me, and besides, who knows, one day a root might have thrust its way up into the toilet bowl like a nautilus’s tentacle, and surely I wouldn’t have wanted such a frightening thing to happen! You were trying to make me laugh, or at least smile, but with scant success.
After the great eruption was over, I spent every day lying immobile on the floor of my room, staring at an obtuse, cement sky incapable of providing any clarification.
Shortly before, in one of my illustrated books, I’d read a story about sea cucumbers. They’re harmless,
faceless
creatures that are nonetheless as stubbornly attached to life as any other living thing. When they’re attacked, they expel the entire tangled mass of their internal organs all at once – heart, intestine, lungs, liver, reproductive organs – immobilising their predator in something like a gladiator’s net and thus gaining enough time to reach safety, to take shelter in a forest of algae, where they can rest and allow their cells to aggregate and differentiate until they produce a perfect copy of the viscera they’ve discharged.
You see, I found myself in the same condition as a sea cucumber after an attack: emptied out. I had no words to say. I answered none of your many questions. We lived in two different worlds; good sense prevailed, on the whole, in yours, while mine was a universe of threats and darkness, occasionally pierced by lightning. The relationship between our two worlds was unambiguous: I could see yours, but you weren’t capable of perceiving mine.
And therefore, on the third day, after your good sense had been exhausted, your patience overcome, and maybe even the paediatrician consulted, you opened the door of my room and said, ‘Enough already! You’re throwing a genuine tantrum. A tree’s only a tree, and you can always plant another one.’ Then you started busying yourself with housework, the way you probably did in the mornings when I was in school.
It’s never been in my character to fling recriminations in someone’s face. Nobody’s to blame for interplanetary distances; they’re due to various laws of gravitation. Everyone’s horizon is different. You knew that, too: you always used to read
The Little Prince
to me, so you knew that every asteroid has its own kind of inhabitant. I felt a little dazed by your failure to think about the baobab, because the walnut tree was exactly like the baobab. The rosebush you insisted on buying for me afterwards couldn’t take its place in any way.
A rosebush makes a striking appearance and gives off a pleasant scent, but then the rose gets clipped and stuck in a vase and finally winds up in the bin. But a beloved tree puts down roots around your heart. When the tree dies, the roots dry up and fall away, leaving behind minute but indelible scars to remember it by.
