by Jo Walton
Olivia stands, and nods decisively. “That will do. I will wait until you have everything ready, mourning my brother, and being as patient as I can.”
“Without your brother’s protection and with your supposed suitor fled, you are peculiarly exposed to my brother’s ardor,” Orsino says, standing too. He looks at Maria, whose attention is only half on her wool; she is looking cynically at the two of them. “Would you feel sufficiently chaperoned if we took a turn in the rose garden, where we would be fully in view from these windows?”
He knows that if she agrees to walk with him in the rose garden then she will agree to marry him. Olivia looks out of the window at the sea of roses, golden, white, pink, yellow, and deepest carmine, then back to Orsino, shaking her head. “We do not have anything to say that cannot be said before my duenna,” Olivia says. “And I have sworn not to marry for fifty years, in memory of my father and my brother.”
“I wanted to offer you my protection,” Orsino says, annoyed that she turned down his offer before he has made it.
“That is very kind,” Olivia replies.
Orsino makes another effort. “And I wanted to say that I have never met a woman I admired more, not just your beauty but your courage.”
“And that too is very kind, but as I said, I have sworn an oath.”
“Such an oath is a strong protection against me, but must I remind you what happened to your brother? If Geryon takes it into his head to marry you by force, it will be a very thin shield, and your guards only a slightly stronger one. Can I offer you this house, until my mother’s return? I do not know all the spells on it, but it cannot be found by those with hostile intent.”
“Take it,” Maria advises.
Olivia hesitates. “You do not live here, you said?”
“No. You’d have it to yourself. There are no servants, but you could bring your own.” Orsino hesitates. “I will need to contact my mother, and she may come back, and if so, of course, as it is her house—”
“I quite understand,” Olivia says. She nods. “I think we will accept Lady Miranda’s hospitality in her absence.”
“But we’ll have to ask you not to abuse your privilege of visiting,” Maria puts in.
Orsino bows and bids them farewell. Outside the drawing room, he casts a single longing and regretful glance down the passage that leads to the door into the rose garden. He is head over heels in love with Olivia, without knowing her, in calf love, like a boy, obsessed with her, needing another glimpse of her the way he needs water. Days when he sees her are happy days, even if she does not speak, or is unkind, days without her are hollow. He does not stay constantly in this state of insanity, he manages to cure himself from time to time, but he slips easily back into it with contact with her. It is not until eighty-five years later when Viola arrives, disguised as a boy, that he discovers what love is. By that time, Orsino is Duke of Illyria and Geryon is already on top of the tower.
28
SUNLIT UPLANDS
You already know the plot of Twelfth Night, right? I don’t need to explain how Viola disguised herself as her brother and was employed by Orsino to woo Olivia and Olivia fell in love with her and the disguised Viola fell in love with Orsino, and then Sebastian showed up and Olivia is delighted and wants a threesome, and Viola’s gender is revealed, and all four of them get married: that is, Olivia marries Sebastian and Viola marries Orsino? Much hilarity ensues along the way, it’s one of Shakespeare’s funniest plays. If you haven’t seen it you should make it a priority. But I don’t need to go into it in detail here. You know the play. And anyway we already saw them all together two hundred years later in Olivia’s bedroom. The important thing now is Orsino and Geryon. And Miranda, their mother, who is more difficult to explain. And Sylvia. And me.
There is a pernicious lie in Western culture that Sylvia has tried to combat in her books for years, and it is this: a child who is not loved is damaged beyond repair. Relatedly, anyone who has been abused can never recover. These lies are additional abuse heaped on those who have already suffered. Being told that the worst thing in the world has happened to you and you cannot recover can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very much so! Certainly recovery is hard. Certainly it takes work and time and help. But it isn’t like losing a body part that can never regrow. People who have been abused will not be the people they would have been if it had never happened. But they can be splendid people going on from where they are.
Miranda was not loved as a child. Her mother was absent and her father was an obsessive wizard who only took notice of her when he was forced to. The Anteans she lived with feared her, because they feared Prospero. She was not abused, but she was neglected. Prospero taught her classical languages and magic, but he was always distant. She never felt she had his confidence. She didn’t love Caliban and she didn’t love Ferrante, but she married both of them, and the second marriage was worse than the first. The way she loved Geryon and Orsino wasn’t satisfying to her or to them. But she did love them, in her way. It took her a long time to recover from her stunted start. What she loved, what gave her her way out, was magic, and she came to love Ficino and her other friends, in a way that wasn’t sexual or romantic but was real and important.
People who were not loved as children can live and love and love life, they can go into Perché No!… and be greeted by the friendly staff, they can combine redcurrant gelato with fior di latte gelato and have tears come to their eyes at the combination of wonderful tastes. They can write books, they can gasp aloud at Bernini’s sculpture of St Laurence on his grill in the newly reopened part of the Uffizi. Children who were not loved can grow up to learn love, they can be good friends and good parents, they can receive joking text messages from their grandsons, they can carefully work out the time zones to call their best friends on their birthday mornings. They can miss their beloved husband every single day but still be happy. It may be that there are other, better, unimaginable ways of being happy. But this will do, Sylvia says, watching a toddler laughing and chasing after a dog over the uneven paving stones near the Loggia dei Lanzi, with the father puffing along behind, grinning.
There is a story about those paving stones—that they were all uneven, but taken up for an archaeological dig, which discovered the destroyed houses of the Ghibellines on top of a Roman amphitheatre. When the paving stones were supposed to be put back, it turned out that they had been sold as kitchen counters, and new stones had to be bought, which were of course neatly regular and flat. Only the ones near the Loggia dei Lanzi where the toddler was running are original. But Sylvia has a theory that in the Renaissance the ground in the square was pale red. There’s a painting of the death of Savonarola that shows it paved in great red rectangles, and two different Ghirlandaio paintings that have it in the background and looking the same. Reddish, definitely, not grey stones. So there is at least some evidence that in the 1480s and ’90s it was red. That would mean the paving stones that ended up as kitchen counters were put down later—ducal period? Or Austrian? It’s the kind of historical detail it’s hard to find out, because it’s not the kind of thing people record. A piece of art, sometimes. Reflooring the square? Almost never. The uneven stones can be seen clearly in the Denholm Elliott movie of Forster’s A Room With a View. A Roman amphitheatre. The Ghibellines. Savonarola. Red. A Room With a View. Kitchen counters. We think of this sequence every time we walk over those stones, like saying a rosary.
When Lucy was born, Sylvia was afraid. She hoped Idris had stability and love enough for both of them, enough to be the right kind of parent. She half-believed the lie, then, she feared that because she had been abused she couldn’t be a proper mother. But even though her mother always disliked her and sometimes hated her, although her mother made her the scapegoat among her siblings, so they always banded together against her, she wasn’t entirely bereft of love as a child. Montreal in the fifties wasn’t a desert island. She had her father’s offhand love, and she had her grandparents, not just her grandmother
Harrison but all four of them, all close by and offering love and support in their different ways. She had her aunt Cat and her children as an example of a family that worked. Sometimes as a child she wished she belonged to Aunt Cat instead of her own parents, and then prayed for forgiveness for being so wicked. Now she thinks that was healthy. Cat’s grandchild Con is the only member of her extended family Sylvia feels close to—Con, who is warm and funny, who loves Shakespeare, who bakes bread, who has a PhD from Columbia and teaches computer science at Université de Montréal, whose gender is ambiguous and pronouns flexible. When Sylvia is in Montreal she meets up with Con every week or so for a meal, or a trip to the theatre. When she’s away, they exchange email every few days, far more often than she hears from her daughters. Con is one of the people who won’t forgive her for spending this summer away.
As well as these good childhood examples, later she had even more, with her friends, but perhaps most notably Idris’s parents and the way they loved and respected each other and their son. It took her some time to realise what different cultures his parents had come from. The whole Islamic world was the magic carpets of Elam to her then. She had never considered that Iran and Pakistan were as different as Finland and Greece. Idris’s parents found each other in a Muslim centre in Edmonton, both immigrants to Canada. English was their common language, and the language Idris grew up in, though it was not their native tongue. But the quiet love they shared was sufficient to help them find a shared path ahead. Idris loved his parents, and admired them, and was proud of them, as they were proud of him. Sylvia saw it in the way they all behaved to each other. But most of all she saw it in the way Idris talked about them. When Idris started training to became an engineer, his mother started to study mathematics. “She started from almost nothing,” Idris tells Sylvia. “Enough arithmetic to add up the grocery bill. But she took a class, and more classes, and she loved it, and now she is tutoring in algebra and calculus.” Idris is an only child. “I think they would have liked more, but she hurt something when I was born, and the doctor said more would be a bad idea, so they made do with me.” But it is clear to Sylvia that there is no making do necessary, they not only adore Idris but also respect him. She kept coming back to that thought, honour, respect, because she was only just learning how important it was.
When Lucy was born, Idris was only part of the way through teaching Sylvia what it means to love somebody who isn’t offering love only to snatch it away. Her mother had left scars, which Steve had maliciously widened. But when, after thirty-one hours of labour, after panting, after trying to breathe into the pains, and trying to breathe against them, after pushing at last, holding Idris’s hand in one of her hands and a midwife’s in the other, the baby is put on her breast, naked and still smeared with blood, she feels a deep triumphant joy and an upwelling of tenderness she could never have imagined.
This is not to say that motherhood was easy, or that she did everything right. There were times she wanted to scream with frustration, and times she couldn’t wait for Idris to get home so she could leave the girls with him and shut herself in her room for an hour, not even to write but just to read and breathe in peace. But if she ever felt any impulse to behave as her own mother had, she was so immediately horrified at herself that all temper, all emotion, vanished, and she could be calm. Her emotions came back slowly, after leaving Steve, her awareness of them. All through the divorce process and then the therapy, and the time after, in Europe, up to the time she met Idris, they were slowly rebalancing. Healing doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. But it happens.
She sang to the girls, despite her toneless voice, lulling them into a true sense of security. She loved them fiercely. She told them stories and took them to the park. Idris taught them to ice skate, to speak four languages, and to play street hockey. She wrote in the early mornings before they were awake, getting up sometimes at half past four, or five, writing before she was exhausted, and going to bed early. These were the years when she had no social life, because she fell asleep at eight o’clock. But the books she wrote were good, better than the Illyria books, deeper, more vivid. She improved technically as a writer, and tried more ambitious things. The books she wrote then were for children, but were not in any way childish. And I too learned, and grew, and changed my chameleon skin over and over, like a repertory actor who takes the parts he’s given and makes them his own. I was a dragon, and a scholar, and a prince. And slowly, as the girls grew, I developed a different sense of myself, of who I was outside the parts she gave me, the continuous sense of my reiterated and renewed and separate self.
(And she loved me too. Some people might not see that as healthy and sane, but it was good for both of us. It always was, even when we were fighting about things.)
Miranda never had the luck to find anyone like Idris. But she flowered into a great wizard and a good person. Geryon and Orsino both had difficult childhoods, especially Geryon, who she left with his father. Geryon and Caliban love each other, but Geryon couldn’t help feeling abandoned. And when Miranda summoned him to Thalia, it was too late for them to make a real connection. Miranda’s own mother, Geltrude, after abandoning Prospero for his usurping brother Antonio, then poisoned herself after Ferrante killed Antonio, and before Miranda could even talk to her.
Lucy and Meg had Idris, and Sylvia too. She loves them. And she loves Con, and Con loves her back unreservedly. Con found friendship and affection with Sylvia when Con’s own parents didn’t know how to cope with a teenager who wasn’t comfortable in either gender. Sylvia and Idris bought extra theatre tickets and hockey tickets and accepted Con as almost another child of their own when things were most difficult at home. If Con is now happy and successful it is partly due to Sylvia. (“And especially Idris,” Sylvia adds.) Meg and Lucy miss their father, and they may find Sylvia an inadequate substitute for his warmth and understanding, but they are each always glad to see her when she makes the trip to see them. They are not close to each other.
“But neither of them kept the other chained on top of a tower for three hundred years either,” I point out cheerily.
“So that’s our standard for sibling rivalry now?” Sylvia asks.
We are in the Uffizi, and in the second Botticelli room she stops in front of Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Four Angels and Six Saints. It’s a terrible title for a lovely picture. It was the April picture in a calendar of religious art her grandparents had in 1951, and which she loved so much that her grandmother gave her the calendar page as a Christmas present that year, framed, in a frame her grandfather made. She had it on her bedroom wall from then until she married Steve. She has a much better print of it on her bedroom wall at home in Montreal now, and she doesn’t need one in Firenze because the painting is right there in the Uffizi, and she has the Friend of the Uffizi card, which is the best value for sixty euros in the world, considering that it costs twenty euros to go into the Uffizi once, and there are always incredibly long lines, while the card lets you go straight in at both the Uffizi and the Palazzo Pitti as often as you want for an entire calendar year. This painting isn’t her favourite Botticelli, now, it isn’t even her favourite Botticelli in this room, but because she has had a connection to it for so long it has a special meaning for her.
It has the Madonna in the centre, with the Christ child on her lap. She’s a very sweet-faced Madonna, but not insipid at all, thoughtful and sad and loving. (She looks like Olivia, or rather, Sylvia has based what Olivia looks like on her.) The Christ child too is more like a real baby than in much Medieval and Renaissance art before Raphael, who raised the bar for babies. This one has a very adult expression, but then, he is supposed to be God. In the top corners are angels pulling drapes, and crowning the Virgin, and looking very serious about it. Botticelli’s angels, apart from the archangel Michael, are not gendered, which makes them very interesting, because it’s unusual to see pictures of intelligent beings with interior lives but without gender. You do not say “he” or “she” w
hen you look at them—and as “it” doesn’t seem to fit for a thinking being, she tends towards “they,” a pronoun that Con also favours. (Con loves Botticelli’s angels.) Sylvia has always wanted to write a book about their home life, what they do in Heaven, but she’s never had enough world for it. In the painting, below the Madonna and angels, there’s another row of figures, standing about, bearing witness. There’s St Catherine, with her wheel; St Augustine, writing in his book; and St Barnabas, with his odd-shaped flaying knife. On the lower right there’s St Ignatius of Antioch, holding his heart in his hand (it looks like scarlet plush), and John the Baptist, and the archangel Michael.
It’s the archangel she has come to look at today. He stands there looking pensive. He has dark wings and dark armour, and he holds the globe of the world in his hand. Christianity, unlike many other religions, does not look forward to a battle at the end of time; Ragnarok, Kali Yuga, when Good will fight Evil. Manicheanism, a very popular religion at the time of the rise of Christianity, and one which St Augustine tried for a while, had that, and Christianity wanted to make itself distinct. So while there are apocalyptic elements in Christianity, Armageddon, and the Book of Revelation, and while Satan and Hell and the story of the Rebel Angels are certainly present, in Catholicism and most mainstream varieties of Christianity around the world it avoids being all about that. Indeed, one way of looking at what makes Christianity different is to consider that God did an end run around all that. God cheated by incarnating, being crucified, harrowing Hell, and saving everyone ahead of time by the back door. We in the West are so familiar with Christianity, whether or not we belong to any church, that it’s easy to forget what a weird outlier it is among human religions.
