Listen to My Voice (9 page)

24 May

Carla convened a special meeting of the group, because, she said, ‘If we can’t make decisions together, what the hell is sisterhood about?’ I was a bit embarrassed at first – it seemed more like a trial than a meeting – but then the ice broke and a bunch of lovely things were said. For a while there were two parties, pro and con, but as the discussion went on, their positions grew less rigid
.

P.’s the one who lit the fuse: ‘First of all, before we can make a decision, we have to know whether the child would be a girl or a boy. We don’t want to bring another enemy into the world.’ Some members of the group applauded and others didn’t
.

B.’s reply was swift: ‘In my opinion, if it’s a boy, that’s all the more reason to keep it. If we don’t start turning out a new kind of man, who else will?’

More applause, and then a chorus of shouts: ‘Yes, we’ll make them play with kitchen sets! We’ll make them coddle dolls! We’ll teach them that aggressiveness isn’t necessary! We’ll make them wear yellow and red, no blue anywhere! And no princes, just children!’

‘And let’s not forget,’ C. said in conclusion. ‘Let’s never forget nature, our teacher. Does a lioness ask her lion, “Sweetheart, do you want to keep this cub or not?” No! She has her cub and that’s it, and then all the lionesses raise their cubs together, like a real sisterhood. Women and their young: this is the law that governs the world – all the rest is idle chatter. Males are useful for only a few instants – after that, they’re no longer necessary.’ The room exploded in roars of approval
.

Waving my hand, I managed with some difficulty to make myself heard. I tried to tell the truth: ‘Comrades! I . . . I don’t know what to do . . . I don’t know if I want to keep the baby.’

A great silence descended on the room
.

‘Whatever the decision is, you’re the one who must make it. As your sisters, our only duty is to be here for you. If you want to keep it, we’ll do what lionesses do and raise it together. If you want to terminate, we’ll take care of that, too. L. and G. have taken a course and they’ve become very good.’

With these words, the official meeting broke up, and at last joints were extracted from handbags
.

5 June

I went to the faculty office and asked for news
.

‘Professor Ancona won’t begin lecturing again until next year,’ I was told
.

I had the presence of mind to say that I was one of his final year students and I absolutely had to talk to him. I might have blushed, however, because the secretary gave me a slightly suspicious look
.

‘Can’t you consult with his substitute?’

‘Oh, no . . .’

‘Then write him a letter and give it to us here in the office.’

The subsequent pages of the diary were covered with scratched-out sentences, probably repeated attempts to find the right words. Every now and then, through the thick scrawl of the felt-tipped pen, some fragment appeared like a fish escaped from a net.
Love
squirted out on one page, and
responsibility
on the next.
What to do? Keep b
. emerges, and under it, written three times in capital letters with many underlines:
DESPERATE, DESPERATE, DESPERATE
.

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.’