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  But the most effective proof of your great achievement, and the deepest point of what disturbs me, has to do with your staging of the game of clothes. You have made visible the fact that Caserta’s hypothetical fetishism has no value in itself but in reality is the engine that allows Delia to move from the masculine clothes in which she arrives in Naples to the feminine ones that in an obscure exchange Amalia intended to bring her as a gift, and then to the empty dress in the cellar. You’ve shown that clothes for Delia are always and only a semblance of the body: the body of the mother, a body finally unwearable, a dead body, and yet perhaps precisely for that reason now alive in her forever, impelled to develop autonomously in the future. And in doing so you have created memorable moments, which for me contain the truly emotional part of the film: Delia who looks for the smell of her mother in the only garment she had on when she drowned, the new bra from the Vossi sisters; Delia who, when she takes Amalia’s clothes out of the garbage bag, wipes her hands on the material of her pants with a gesture that seemed to me beautiful; Delia who as she puts on the clothes that were intended for her gradually discovers that they had already been worn by her mother before dying; not to mention the red dress that Delia puts on for the first time in the Vossi sisters’ store.

  On the screen at that point an extraordinary image explodes, which, despite the shock it gave my heart, I hope has a long future. That body in red that, devoured by an obscure and troubling passion, conducts its investigation in a sometimes expressionistic Naples is, I believe, an important moment for the iconography of the female body today, a summary of the woman in search of herself, a movement that for Delia goes from the cold masculinity of covering to the retrieval of the original body of the mother in the depths of the cellar, to the knowledge that the bond with Amalia has been accepted, that the historic flow from mother to daughter has been reconstructed, and that, meanwhile, the unconfessable has been uttered.

  I very much love your finale, with the red disappearing from Delia’s body, to then reappear on the large body of Amalia; the blue-red, red-blue exchange; the movement of expressions of understanding, of satisfaction, of contentment, of acceptance, of grief on Delia’s face as she imagines what could have happened to her mother on the beach; the conclusiveness that is also subtly disquieting as Delia—now in clothes that are definitely hers—calls herself, to the boys on the train, by Amalia’s name.

  It is in this visual explicitness of a more than arduous psychic articulation that your result is for me marvelous and, in its piercing physical recognizability, painful. The finale alone is reason enough to congratulate you again: you have moved me, I’m moved even as I write to you. You’ve given a visual form and found an intelligent dialogue solution to the two sentences that end my book: “Amalia had been. I was Amalia.” The pluperfect had to definitively end the unique, unrepeatable story of Amalia. The imperfect tended instead to reopen her, suggesting a nuance of disturbing incompleteness and yet allowing it to endure in Delia, who now could consciously accept her mother in herself and represent her. And in what direction did you go? You staged a part of Delia’s return train journey. From the visual perspective of leaving Naples, you gave a visionary summary of the end of Amalia’s life. Then you brought in Delia’s identity card, you showed how she skillfully grafts onto her features her mother’s old-fashioned hairstyle. Finally you inserted the boy’s question about the identity card: “Is it expired?” And you did it in such a way that Delia introduced herself to the youth with the name of Amalia. With this skillful visual transposition of the play of verb tenses you not only increased my admiration for you but rid me of a series of prejudices I had concerning the limits of a filmed story.

  NOTE

  Letter of May, 1995, incomplete, not sent.

  9.

  WRITING SECRETLY

  Letter to Goffredo Fofi

  Dear Fofi,

  I’m sorry to have to tell you that I don’t know how to give concise answers to the questions you sent me. Evidently I haven’t reflected enough on many of the issues you raise, and to find comprehensive expression is difficult or even impossible. So I’ll try to sketch some answers just to converse with you outside the pale of journalistic requirements. I apologize in advance for the confusing or contradictory passages you may encounter.

  I will begin at the end, mainly because your concluding questions allow me to start from facts. No, I’ve never been in analysis, even though in certain phases I’ve been very curious about the analytic experience. Nor do I have what you call an education of a psychoanalytic type, if by that expression you mean a sort of cultural imprint, a dominant point of view, a specialization. Also, to assert that I have a feminist mindset seems to me exaggerated. Owing in particular to limitations of character, which I’ve struggled to accept, and within which I live today without too many cravings or too many regrets, I’ve never exposed myself publicly, or taken sides: I don’t have the physical courage that, in general, is required for these things. So it’s difficult today to give myself a personal story that is not completely private (a reading list, bookish sympathies) and hence uninteresting. I grew up, in addition, on things seen or heard or read or scribbled, nothing else. Within this timid frame, like a mute listener, I can say that I am slightly interested in psychoanalysis, and fairly interested in feminism, and that I am sympathetic to the ideas of difference feminism. But I’ve been attracted by many other things that have little to do with psychoanalysis or feminism or with current ideas about women. I am pleased that in Troubling Love they do not appear openly.

  A discussion of what you call “staying away from the means of mass communication” is more complicated. I think that at its root, apart from the aspects of character I’ve already mentioned, is a somewhat neurotic desire for intangibility. In my experience, the difficulty-pleasure of writing touches every point of the body. When you’ve finished the book, it’s as if your innermost self had been ransacked, and all you want is to regain distance, return to being whole. I’ve discovered, by publishing, that there is a certain relief in the fact that the moment the text becomes a printed book it goes elsewhere. Before, it was the text that was pestering me; now I’d have to run after it. I decided not to. I would like to think that, while my book enters the marketplace, nothing can oblige me to make the same journey. But maybe I would also like to believe, at certain moments, if not always, that that “my” which I refer to is in substance a convention, so that those who are disgusted by the story that is told and those who are excited by it cannot, in a mistaken logical step, be disgusted or excited by me as well. Perhaps the old myths about inspiration spoke at least one truth: when one makes a creative work, one is inhabited by others—in some measure becomes another. But when one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it. Nor, on the other hand, can the book re-enter me. So what’s left is to protect myself from its effects, and that is what I try to do. I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.

  There is obviously more. As a girl, I had an idea of literature as all-absorbing. To write was to aim for the maximum, not to be content with intermediate results, to devote oneself to the page without half measures. Over the years, I’ve fought against this overestimation of literary writing with an obstinate underestimation (“There are many other things that deserve unlimited dedication”), and, having reached an equilibrium—I have a life that I consider satisfying, both on the private and on the public level—I don’t wish to go back, I would like to hold on to what I consider a small victory. I am pleased, of course, that Troubling Love has admirers, I’m pleased that it inspired an important film. But I don’t want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page.

  Then there is the proble
m of my creative choices, which I am not capable of explaining clearly, especially to those who might pick out of the text phrases and situations and feel wounded by them. I am used to writing as if it were a matter of dividing up the booty. To one character I give a trait of Tom’s, to another a phrase of Dick’s; I reproduce situations in which people I know and have known have actually been. I draw on real situations and events but not as they really happened; rather, I assume as having “really happened” only the impressions or fantasies that originated in the years when that experience was lived. So what I write is full of references to situations and events that are real and verifiable but reorganized and reinvented as if they had never happened. The farther I am from my writing, then, the more it becomes what it wants to be: a novelistic invention. The closer I get, and am inside it, the more overwhelmed the novel is by real details, and the book stops being a novel, and risks wounding me, above all, as the malicious account of a disrespectful ingrate. Thus I want my novel to go as far as possible precisely so that it can present its novelistic truth and not the accidental scraps—which it nevertheless contains—of autobiography.

  But the media, especially in linking photographs of the author with the book, media appearances by the writer with its cover, goes precisely in the opposite direction: it abolishes the distance between author and book, operates in such a way that the one is spent in favor of the other, mixes the first with the materials of the second and vice versa. In the face of these types of intervention, I feel exactly what you correctly define as “private timidity.” I worked for a long time, plunging headlong into the material that I wanted to narrate, to distill from my own experience and that of others whatever “public” material could be distilled, whatever appeared to me extractable from voices, facts, persons near and far, to construct characters and a narrative organism of some public coherence. Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for “public interest,” would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.

  Perhaps this last part of the subject, in particular, merits discussion. Is there a way of safeguarding the right of an author to choose to establish, once and for all, through his writing alone, what of himself should become public? The editorial marketplace is in particular preoccupied with finding out if the author can be used as an engaging character and thus assist the journey of his work through the marketplace. If one yields, one accepts, at least in theory, that the entire person, with all his experiences and his affections, is placed for sale along with the book. But the nerves of the private person are too sensitive. If they are out in the open, all they offer is a spectacle of suffering or joy or malice or resentment (sometimes even generosity, but, like it or not, on display); certainly I cannot add anything to the work.

  I would conclude this subject by saying, finally, that writing with the knowledge that I don’t have to appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom. It’s a corner of my own that I intend to defend, now that I’ve tried it. If I were deprived of it, I would feel abruptly impoverished.

  We come now to Elsa Morante. I never met her; I’ve never been able to get to know people who provoked intense emotions in me. If I had met her, I would have been paralyzed, I would have become so stupid that I would have been incapable of establishing any meaningful contact with her. You ask me about influences, a question I find so appealing that frankly I risk telling lies just to confirm your hypothesis. The problem presented itself for the first time when Troubling Love won the Procida Prize. Was it possible that my book had a connection, however tenuous, with that author? I began to search through Morante’s pages to find even a line that might justify, above all to myself, in a thank-you letter to the prize givers, the legitimacy of such an award. I searched mainly in Aracoeli, but I searched unsuccessfully, I didn’t find anything that would allow me to establish a modest connection. On the other hand, I’m not a conscientious reader, with a good memory. I read a lot but in a disorderly way, and I forget what I read. Rather, to put it more precisely, I have a distorted memory of what I read. At the time, because I was in a hurry and maybe a bit opportunistic, I seized on a single sentence in The Andalusian Shawl: “No one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, must think that a mother has a woman’s body.” It was an easy quotation that I’d had in mind for years, annotated in various ways. I’d often rooted around in the sense of anxiety instilled by the idea contained in that passage. It said that women who were expert in dressing women’s bodies nevertheless were unable to do their job when it was a matter of sewing fabric on the body of the mother. I had imagined scissors that refused to cut, measuring sticks that lied about length, basting that didn’t hold, chalk that didn’t leave a mark. The mother’s body produced a revolt among the dressmaker’s tools, an annihilation of her skills. Dressing oneself and dressing other women was easy; but dressing the mother was to lose the war with the shapeless, was to “bundle”—another Morantian word.

  This failure of dressmakers faced with the problem of dressing the maternal body stayed with me for a long time. It was accompanied by a much earlier impression, that of a careless reader, inclined to fantasize on a few lines and not very attentive to true meanings. This impression was connected to reading Arturo’s Island, which I did for the first time twenty years ago. I was overwhelmed by it but for reasons that at the time I was ashamed of. As I read, I thought, through the whole arc of the story, that Arturo’s real sex was female. Arturo was a girl, it had to be. And although Morante wrote as a male “I,” I couldn’t help imagining her as a mask of herself, of her feelings, of her emotions. It wasn’t a matter of “being transported,” in an ordinary literary way. I perceived—and the same thing happened later with all Morante’s male characters, who go shamelessly into the depths of their relation with their mother—a disguise aimed at doing, in literature, precisely what the mothers’ dressmakers couldn’t do: removing the maternal figure (dead mother—Nunziatina—homosexual father) from her shapeless wrapping; using the limbo of a male adolescence—freer as in many other things—to not muffle her, to tell what otherwise, in the female experience, has no shape.

  I also thought for a long time about the epigraph, from Saba, to reinforce that impression. Saba writes, “If I remember myself in him, it seems clear to me . . . ” In whatever direction you take “Il fanciullo appassionato” (“The Passionate Boy”) in its entirety, somewhere in me, where Arturo’s Island is concerned, all that counts is that line and that in him, placed under the title to say: “It seems to me a good thing that I can remember myself writing from inside him, Arturo.”

  On the other hand—I think—the moment has to come when we’ll truly be able to write outside of him, not from an ideological claim but because, like Platonic souls, we’ll truly remember ourselves without need of the comfort, the habit, the distancing of having to represent ourselves in him. I imagine that the mothers’ dressmakers have been studying for a long time. Sooner or later we’ll all learn not to bundle up everything, not to bundle ourselves.

  What to tell you, in conclusion? I’d like it if even a weak connection existed between Troubling Love and Morante’s books. But I have to confess that many of Morante’s stylistic traits are alien to me; that I feel incapable of conceiving stories of such breadth; that for a long time I haven’t valued a life in which Literature counts more than anything else. There are, rather, certain low levels of storytelling that appeal to me. Over the years, for example, I’ve become less ashamed of how much I like the stories in the women’s magazines I find around the house: trash about love and betrayal, which has produced in me indelible emotions, a desire for not necessarily logical plots, a taste for strong, slightly vulgar passions. It see
ms to me that this cellar of writing, a fund of pleasure that for years I repressed in the name of Literature, should also be put to work, because it was not only with the classics but there, too, that the desire for storytelling developed, and so does it make sense to throw away the key?

  As for Naples, today I feel drawn above all by the Anna Maria Ortese of “The Involuntary City.” If I managed again to write about this city, I would try to craft a text that explores the direction indicated there, a story of wretched petty acts of violence, a precipice of voices and events, small, terrible gestures. But, to do so, I would have to return there to live, something that for family and work reasons is impossible.

  With Naples, though, accounts are never closed, even at a distance. I’ve lived for quite a while in other places, but that city is not an ordinary place, it’s an extension of the body, a matrix of perception, the term of comparison of every experience. Everything that has been permanently meaningful for me has Naples as its backdrop and is expressed in its dialect.

  This emphasis, however, is recent and is the product of repeated visits at a distance. For a long time, I experienced the city I grew up in as a place where I continually felt at risk. It was a city of sudden quarrels, of blows, of easy tears, of minor arguments that ended in curses, unrepeatable obscenities, and irreparable breaks, of emotions so extreme as to become intolerably false. My Naples is the “vulgar” Naples of people who are “settled” but still terrified by the need to go back to earning a living through temporary odd jobs; ostentatiously honest but, in the event, ready for petty crimes in order not to make a bad impression; noisy, loud-voiced, monarchist, but also, in certain ramifications, Stalinist; drowned in the thorniest dialect; coarse and sensual, still without petit-bourgeois decorum but impelled to give at least superficial signs of it; respectable and potentially criminal, ready to sacrifice themselves to the occasion, or the necessity, not to appear more fool than others.