La frantumaglia Read online

  16.

  LA FRANTUMAGLIA

  Dear Sandra,

  Here we go again. I thought I had gotten good at this after The Days of Abandonment, and instead look what I’ve done with the questions from the women at Indice.

  I’m a little embarrassed, but I ended up in a sort of organizational frenzy, I opened drawers, I looked through books, and here we are.

  I could keep all these pages for myself, but it was a pleasure to write them, and the passionate writer always needs an audience of at least one reader. Therefore I send you this endless letter and ask you to forward it to my interviewers, making it clear that I have no desire to make a shorter, publishable version.

  If, when you have time, you, too, would read this ramble through the pages of the two books that I imagine—yes, imagine—I’ve written (real books take their own path and no longer belong to me), you would do me a great favor.

  If you would then let me know what you think, I would be grateful.

  Here is the letter.

  Dear Giuliana Olivero, dear Camilla Valletti,

  Thank you for your request for an interview. I tried to write clear, concise answers, but since you ask complex questions and do so with intelligence, the result seemed to me inadequate. So I dropped the hypothesis of the interview and began to write simply for the pleasure of answering you.

  Vortexes

  You ask me about suffering in my two books. You even come up with a hypothesis. You say that although Delia in Troubling Love and Olga in The Days of Abandonment are modern women, their suffering derives from the need to come to terms with their own origins, with archaic female models, with Mediterranean cultural myths still active within them. It may be. I have to think about it, but in order to do so I can’t start with the lexicon that you propose: the word “origin” is overloaded; and the adjectives you use (“archaic,” “Mediterranean”) have an echo that confuses me. I would prefer, if you don’t mind, to reflect on a word having to do with suffering that comes from my childhood and accompanied me during the writing of both books.

  My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments. The frantumaglia (she pronounced it frantummàglia) depressed her. Sometimes it made her dizzy, sometimes it made her mouth taste like iron. It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain. The frantumaglia was mysterious, it provoked mysterious actions, it was the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause. When she was no longer young, the frantumaglia woke her in the middle of the night, led her to talk to herself and then feel ashamed, suggested some indecipherable tune to sing under her breath that soon faded into a sigh, drove her suddenly out of the house, leaving the stove on, the sauce burning in the pot. Often it made her weep, and since childhood the word has stayed in my mind to describe, in particular, a sudden fit of weeping for no evident reason: frantumaglia tears.

  It’s impossible now to ask my mother what she really meant by the word. Interpreting in my own way the meaning she gave it, I thought as a child that the frantumaglia made you sick, and that, on the other hand, someone who was sick was fated sooner or later to become frantumaglia. What in fact frantumaglia was I didn’t know and don’t. Today I have in my mind a catalogue of images, but they have more to do with my problems than with hers. The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, a story. The frantumaglia is an effect of the sense of loss, when we’re sure that everything that seems to us stable, lasting, an anchor for our life, will soon join that landscape of debris that we seem to see. The frantumaglia is to perceive with excruciating anguish the heterogeneous crowd from which we, living, raise our voice, and the heterogeneous crowd into which it is fated to vanish. I, who sometimes suffer from the illness of Olga, the protagonist of The Days of Abandonment, represent it to myself mainly as a hum growing louder and a vortex-like fracturing of material living and dead: a swarm of bees approaching above the motionless treetops; the sudden eddy in a slow body of water. But it’s also the right word for what I’m convinced I saw as a child—or, anyway, during that time invented by adults that we call childhood—shortly before language entered me and instilled speech: a bright-colored explosion of sounds, thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings. Or it’s only my way of describing the anguish of death, the fear that the capacity to express myself would get stuck—as if the organs of speech had been paralyzed—and everything I’d learned to control, from the first year of life until now, would start fluctuating on its own, dripping or hissing out of a body becoming a thing, a leather sack leaking air and liquids.

  I could continue with the list: it’s one of four or five words in my family lexicon into which I stuff everything I need. But in this case it’s useful mainly for explaining that, if I had to say what suffering is for my two characters, I would say only: it’s looking onto the frantumaglia, the jumble of fragments inside. I’ve kept a passage from Troubling Love that I didn’t use, but I offer it here to talk about this looking onto. The episode has to do with the quality of Amalia’s black hair and is narrated, naturally, by Delia as she investigates the death of her mother.

  I had my father’s fine hair. It was very thin and fragile, it had neither air nor light, it wouldn’t obey, settling on my head any which way, and so I hated it. Styling it like my mother’s—the chignon, the wave swelling over her forehead, the rebellious curl that sometimes grazed her eyebrow—was impossible. I looked angrily at myself in the mirror, Amalia had been treacherous, she hadn’t given me her hair. She had kept for herself the luxuriant locks, she hadn’t wanted me ever to be as beautiful as she was. She had given me inferior hair, pasted smoothly to my skull like a dull patina, of an uncertain color that seemed a mockery, brown weakly tending toward black—not the shiny pitch of her hair, not the dark shimmering molten glass into which all those who said to her how beautiful it is blew breath. No one said that to me. No matter that I left it loose and grew it long, so long, I dreamed, that it would reach my feet, longer, perhaps, than hers had ever been, for I can’t remember her with her hair loose—no matter what, my hair remained an inelegant flutter in the air, buds that didn’t burgeon profusely into beautiful hairdos, that had not even a trace of the power that gave her hair the energy of a rare plant in spring. So, once, I don’t know how it began: I was twelve. Maybe I wanted an opportunity to withdraw into an indisputable reason for suffering; maybe I felt irremediably ugly and was tired of looking for beauty in myself; maybe I just wanted to challenge my mother, silently shout my hostility. Anyway, I stole her dressmaker’s scissors, crossed the hall, locked myself in the bathroom, and determinedly cut my hair, dry-eyed, feeling a fierce joy. In the mirror a stranger appeared, an unknown visitor with a thin face, long, narrow eyes, a pale forehead, a wild misery in the moss covering the skull. I thought: I’m someone else. Immediately afterward I thought: my mother, too, under her hair is someone else. Other, then, and others, others, others. My heart pounding in my chest, I stared at the tufts of hair in the sink, on the floor. I felt a double urge: first I cleaned everything up carefully, I didn’t want my mother to be upset by seeing the scattered hair; then I went to show her, to make her suffer, I wanted to tell her, Look, I no longer need to make my hair like yours. Amalia was sitting at her sewing machine, working. She heard me, she turned, what have you done, a breath. Her eyes were bright with tears, and the sockets turned purple. She didn’t shout, she didn’t beat me, she avoided the usual paths of a punishing mother. She saw something that wounded or frightened her. She began to cry.

  I know why, ten years ago, I left that passage
out of the book. The episode seemed to say too much about that mother-daughter relationship, and weakened other important moments; rereading it now, I haven’t changed my mind, the symbolism of the hair is obvious, too exaggerated, evidently only modesty kept me from alluding to Samson and Delilah, or to Iris, who tears a lock of Dido’s fair hair, freeing her from life, or to who knows what else in the confusion of material that crowds around the writer asking to be used, reused, remade, cited. Yet I find here passages that interest me now more than they did then: for example, Delia’s insistence on eliminating from her body the image of the mother, as if her own development as a woman would be possible only by removing Amalia from herself; and Amalia’s weeping at the end, weeping that we can’t fully account for, it’s out of place, excessive. Daughter and mother, child and adult see something; they see that merely putting a hand to the hair can shift everything, as in an earthquake. Delia looks through the window of the mirror and perceives a throng of others, beyond her own shorn head. Amalia looks beyond her daughter’s ruined hair and glimpses something that not even she can describe but that is there and makes her dissolve in tears: my daughter is hostile to me, I won’t expand in my daughter, her development will reject me, will shatter me. Suffering is in this act, which touches a deep chord: a wished-for hairstyle, a rejected hairstyle, the present that is crowded with many others, a gesture that burns bridges, breaks a chain, sets off an eddy that breaks up and causes tears. My two characters, Delia and Olga, originated in that act: women who hold on to their I, strengthen it, become hardened, and then discover that cutting your hair is enough to cause a collapse and lose solidity, to feel yourself a chaotic flow of debris that is still useful and of no use, polluted or reclaimed.

  To see if this was true, I looked through the two books. I wanted to see how I constructed Delia, but I reread only some twenty pages. In the case of Olga a few lines were enough—I still had in my mind all the words for her. Finally I decided to reflect on them apart from the books, and I discovered that they have in common at least one trait: they are women who practice a conscious surveillance on themselves. Women of the preceding generations were closely watched over by parents, by brothers, by husbands, by the community, but they did not watch over themselves, or, if they did, they did so in imitation of their watchers, like jailers of themselves. Delia and Olga are, rather, the product of a new, yet very ancient sort of surveillance, a surveillance that has to do with the need to expand their lives. I’ll try to explain in what sense.

  The word “surveillance” has been badly tarnished by its police use, but it’s not an ugly word. It contains the opposite of the body dulled by sleep, a metaphor counter to opacity, to death. Instead, it displays watchfulness, vigilance, invoking not the gaze but, rather, an eagerness for feeling alive. Men have transformed surveillance into a sentinel’s activity, a jailer’s, a spy’s. Surveillance is, if well understood, more an emotional tendency of the whole body, an expansion and an inflorescence on and around it.

  This is an idea from long ago, a trace of which I found in the ugly vigere that I noticed with surprise in the passage of the hair cited above—I had forgotten it. But ugly writing often seems denser than beautiful writing. Vigere, burgeon or expand—a verb that indicates the spread of life—is in the root of vigile, watchful or vigilant, of veglia, wakefulness, and, it seems to me, illuminates the meaning of “surveillance.” I think of the surveillance of the pregnant woman, of the mother over her children: the body feels a swelling wave all over, and every sense is affectionately active. I think also of women’s age-old surveillance over all the activities that allow life to flourish. And I don’t have in mind an idyllic condition: vigere is also to impose, to oppose, to expand with all one’s forces. I am not among those who believe that the line along which vital female energy spreads is better than that of vital male energy; I believe only that it’s different. And I’m happy to note that this difference is increasingly visible. I think, then—to return to the particular meaning of surveillance that I’m trying to define—of the relatively new fact of surveillance of oneself, of one’s own specificity. The female body has learned the need to watch over itself, to take care of its own expansion, its own vigor. Yes, vigor. Today this noun may seem suitable only for the male body. But I suspect that at first it was mainly a female virtue, that the vigor of the woman was like that of plants, invasive life, rampant life, or, to take a word that makes a bad impression, vigenza, force. I’m very attached to forceful women who practice surveillance on themselves and others in precisely the sense that I’m trying to explain. I like writing about them. I feel that they are heroines of our time. That’s how I invented Delia and Olga.

  Olga, for example, who has exercised over herself a “masculine” surveillance, who has learned self-control, and has trained herself to the prescribed reactions, emerges from the crisis of abandonment only by virtue of the close surveillance of herself that she manages to achieve: to remain vigilant, that is, to recover the desire for wakefulness, to mobilize for this purpose little Ilaria, entrust to her the paper cutter, tell her, if you see me distracted, if you see that I don’t hear you, if I don’t answer you, prick me—as if to say, hurt me, use your hostile feelings, but remind me of the need to live.

  You see, for me the child armed with the paper cutter, ready to strike the mother to bring her back to wakefulness and keep her from losing herself, is an important image. In an earlier version Olga, shut in her apartment, increasingly unstable, reached the decision to arm her daughter and use childish hostility after yet another hallucination. The Neapolitan woman who, decades earlier, drowned herself in the waters of Capo Miseno because she couldn’t tolerate abandonment—the poverella, as she was now called in the neighborhood, because she had killed herself, like Dido after the departure of Aeneas—had just appeared to her in the kitchen.

  I have to make a cup of coffee, the coffee will take away my drowsiness. I went to the kitchen, I unscrewed the moka, I filled it with black powder, I screwed the top back on. Pay attention, I said to myself: attention even to how you breathe. When I was about to light the gas, I was afraid: what if I didn’t turn it off afterward? That moment put in chronological order all the actions I had performed to prepare the moka, actions that until that moment had been sloppy, disorderly, not in sequence. I suspected that I hadn’t put water in the bottom. You don’t know how to be in the world, you can’t be trusted. I unscrewed the top part, but I got my fingers wet, the water was there. Of course it was there, everything had been done as it was supposed to be done. I realized instead that I had filled the moka not with coffee but with a black dust that perhaps was tea. I was discouraged, I didn’t have time to remedy it, I couldn’t find the energy. I heard a rustling and saw that the woman of Piazza Mazzini was sweeping the kitchen with great concentration. She stopped a moment, she showed me her ring finger, she didn’t have a wedding ring.

  “The worst is taking it off,” she said. “Mine wouldn’t slide off, I had to have it cut. If I had known that I would get so withered I would have waited. It would have fallen off my finger, look what ugly hands I’ve got, the life went out of my fingers.”

  I realized that I didn’t have a ring, either, I clenched my fingers into a fist to feel their strength. The woman smiled at me, she murmured:

  “You’ll see, if someone sweeps the broom over your feet you’ll no longer be married. And if you’re no longer married, see what happens.”

  As if to give me a demonstration, she began to sweep her feet insistently. I felt disgusted because that action was crushing them. Her feet were of a friable material that under the sweeps of the broom was flaking into bloody scales.

  I cried: Ilaria.

  Relations between Ilaria and Olga aren’t good; they resemble those between Delia and Amalia. But, unlike Amalia, Olga, the woman of today, completes a journey that allows her to accept Ilaria’s hostile love as a vital feeling, which can be used against the fascination with death tha
t comes from the past, from the poverella. Together—mother and daughter—they will declare a right to the life outside, outside the model of broken women.

  Now perhaps I can get to the heart of your question. The passage I’ve cited here—and others, not dissimilar, which I will spare you—went more or less explicitly in the direction you indicated. The poverella of Naples was, in the early versions of the story, loaded with symbols, a sort of synthesis of the abandoned woman, from Ariadne on. The wedding ring that has to be cut off the ring finger, the loss of vital energy, the broom as a condition of domestic slavery and as a sexual allusion, the anguish of not being married or remarried or of no longer finding men, the reduction to frantumaglia: Olga sees in that ghost all the female anguish of the patriarchal epoch and recognizes it in herself. But I didn’t like that. I eliminated all of it, except the Virgilian allusion to Capo Miseno. I eliminated it because it didn’t seem to me the right narrative path, I was afraid that there was a break between the before—archaic models and myths, precisely—and the after, Olga the new woman, and that Olga would seem to be an expression of the progressive fates of the female gender. I decided instead to deepen the confusion of time, as in Troubling Love, where what was Amalia is never different from what is Delia, and so only at the end can Delia state as a goal, as the high point of her own vital expansion, the positive result of her whole journey: Amalia had been, I was Amalia. I wanted the past not to be overcome but to be redeemed, precisely as a storehouse of sufferings, of rejected ways of being.

  Here, for a better understanding, we should speak of how suffering modifies the image of time. The eruption of suffering cancels out linear time, breaks it, makes it into whirling squiggles. The night of time crouches at the edges of the dawn of today and tomorrow. Suffering casts us down among our single-celled ancestors, among the quarrelsome or terrorized muttering in the caves, among the female divinities expelled into the darkness of the earth, even as we keep ourselves anchored—let’s say—to the computer we’re writing on. Strong feelings are like that: they explode chronology. An emotion is a somersault, a tumble, a dizzying pirouette. When suffering hits Delia and Olga, the past stops being past and the future stops being future, the order of before and after ceases. Even writing about it has that movement of confusion. The “I” calmly tells a story, creates clear accounts, makes events go slowly. But when the wave of a feeling arrives the writing arches, becomes excited, spins around breathlessly absorbing everything, putting into circulation memories, desires. Delia and Olga have to gradually calm down so that their narrating “I” can return to the slow course of the story. The return is of brief duration. The pace that puts events in order is only the moment of gathering energy before a new tornado. This is an image that is useful to me: it allows me to think of a period of suffering that hits us advancing like a whirlwind; but also of a writing about emotions that has the sonority of breath, a wind from the lungs that, producing music, swirls the debris of different epochs and finally, whirling, passes.