Listen to My Voice (10 page)

‘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 always 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
.

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.