by Naomi Holoch
Bennie’d be luscious too, like Cassina, if she really tried, thought Tahuri.
But Huhana was the one. She outshone them all, even Cassina. “Suzie,” they called her in Wellington, but when she came home, she was Huhana, Cassina’s big sister, a woman of the world. While Cassina was tall, Huhana was short, and while Cassina was dark, Huhana was even darker: a ripe, rich color like the polished oak piano the nuns had at school. Huhana wore fashions—her sister got the hoops from her—and when she came into the wharepaku, Tahuri gasped. Her eyes even popped. Wow. This was fashion.
Huhana had squeezed herself into a blood-red tight skirt that gripped her rounded hips and slid in a silken line down her thighs. Her legs nipped together at the knee, making her full bum swing as she walked, and her ankles curved like bows from her black patent leather stilettos. The same stuff, gleaming and brittle, encircled her waist, a tense band three inches wide, clipped together by a bright gilt buckle, set squarely beneath her blouse. Cut low, it was more of a bodice, with no shoulders or sleeves or anything like that. It was like a pari, without the straps—a stiff thing wrapped around the chest and back, covering the front, but showing a lot too. And Huhana was showing it for sure. The material was hard and black and grainy and turned over into a little fold at her titties, which rose and jiggled and heaved like lush chocolate jellies. Tahuri’s fingers twitched at the sight; they looked so soft, she was dying to touch them! Wow!
Huhana beamed at her; carefully looked herself over, powdering down the shine on her face. She’d unclipped the buttons on her slithery black gloves, and they were folded back over her forearms, so her fingernails, lips, and skirt pulsed in the same hot color.
Tahuri was enchanted: she watched as Huhana caressed the frosty glitter knotted at her throat, sparkling on her earlobes; as she slicked her smooth french roll, stretched and straightened her stocking seams, and pulled off her shoes and wiggled her toes, and put them on again, for fashion. And with a wink of silver eyeshadow and arched brows at Tahuri, she was gone.
“That was Suzie from Wellington,” the little girl murmured to herself.
Time passed, and Tahuri was still watching the Big Girls. And she was one herself, at last, but she couldn’t primp and preen like the others—no way. Instead, she preferred to slouch, cool and silent, in the same corner, by the same rubbish tin, watching.
Reti reckoned she was a bit perverted, like her older sister Ben, who went away to Auckland and came back looking like Elvis. Tahuri thought that was okay and went looking for Penu, but missing seeing her; she only stayed one night, then shot back to the big smoke, her royal blue Lurex shirt flashing through the window of the bus. Her younger cousin snatched a quick look at the shirt and waved and waved, promising herself to get one too.
A Lurex shirt. Wow. Even better than the old black jersey she refused to take off, ever. Even at this creepy youth club dance, where all the big girls tittered while their parents and grandparents nodded, and the big boys flashed hungry eyes and razzed each other to ask a girl to jitterbug. And what came after the jitterbug?
Weddings and babies. Cassina with Heke and four little kids; Trina working in the draper’s shop with a big puku, while her husband Lennie sold insurances, and Huhana now Mrs. O’Shea in Dublin, with twins and an Irish sailorman. Bennie was the luckiest of all—she drove a dry cleaning van and grew more muscles and didn’t give a hoot about all that wedding stuff.
This made a lot of sense to Tahuri, so she stayed in the wharepaku, where none of the big boys could ask her to jitterbug.
She checked the toilet paper, and the washbasins, and the floors. She sat on the rubbish tin and went out sometimes and got a drink, or had a dance with Reti, then back she came.
Always, when the Big Girls came parading by.
Watching the Big Girls. Loving them.
Dacia Maraini
In her novel Letters to Marina (1981), Dacia Maraini, one of Italy’s best-known contemporary women writers, brings together setting and character so that each progressively reveals the other. The narrator, having fled to a village to escape the mysteriously invasive powers of a female lover, addresses a series of letters to her while attempting to finish a long-overdue novel. Although not herself a lesbian, Maraini, in her work, reflects the importance of feminist liberation struggles in Italy, assuming the right of all women to shape their lives as they choose. This freedom infuses the pages of the novel excerpted here. With humor and an extraordinary talent for evoking a sense of place, Maraini follows her narrator in her “routine” interactions with the life of the village, creating a text that speaks eloquently of the vibrant inner life of a woman alone.
from LETTERS TO MARINA
Dear Marina
A short time before I left Rome the porter gave me a parcel with a note. I recognised the handwriting immediately: those l’s like buttonholes sewn in angry haste and the r’s that get confused with those speedy flying n’s. And your firm threatening signature M. The note read “Red Riding Hood has eaten the wolf” and even if you hadn’t put your signature I would have known it was you.
Inside the parcel I found a pendant of black antique glass with a long teardrop to hang carefully round my tense white neck as a mark of my ingratitude.
I’ve asked you so often not to send me presents. I don’t want them. The last time I picked up that ring you gave me I could feel your breath in my ears like a ferocious dragon. I felt the flames reaching right down my throat. It isn’t presents you’re giving me but little magic signs to imprison me inside the charmed circle of your will. The black glass teardrop on my throat the small crown of bleeding thorns on my finger the green enamel serpent encircling my wrist—I am nothing but a plaster madonna hung with votive offerings that will stay there forever scintillating in the morning sunshine and in the evening lights as a memory of eternal promise.
Dear Marina
Another day of seclusion. Every morning I get up at half past seven. The alarm clock goes off but my eyes are open even before it starts to ring. My sleepy gaze rests on the gasometer that stands at the far end of the football ground to the right of the sea. I look to see whether the large gray cylinder has risen or gone down during the night. On the distant horizon to the north I can make out the fiery plumes of the oil refinery in the morning mist. When the wind blows toward the south the flat is permeated by the heavy sickly sweet smell of oil.
I get washed and dressed and go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. I hear my neighbor singing while she warms the milk for her boys. Later I hear her impetuously thumping the floor-cloth onto the floor as she drags it through the flat. The walls are made of paper and one can’t avoid participating in the lives of one’s neighbors. Signora Basilia has a loud hoarse voice and her tiny body is capable of the most incredible feats. Out of her minuscule belly she created and expelled two boys who weighed eleven pounds each at birth (she says with pride that “they tore my body apart like two bulls”). And while she does the housework she bellows forth in a great deep voice full of cavernous echoes that you’d think belonged to a woman ten times her size.
I eat and drink slowly while I try to imagine the fingernails of my characters. One can sometimes tell more from someone’s fingers and nails than from their faces. Strange that with you I looked first at your feet rather than your hands. Perhaps it was because your cactus feet were so clearly visible beneath the table. From time to time you touched them as if you weren’t quite sure of still finding them there all quiet and peaceful. After all feet talk like hands: yours told me that you were romantically and perversely in love with yourself.
After breakfast I go down to buy a paper and something for lunch—a thin slice of meat two tomatoes and a bunch of basil which I put in water in a glass jar to stand on the table where I work. I like to smell it while I’m writing.
The newsagent asks me “Are you on your own?” I don’t quite understand what he’s getting at—on my own? Without children or husband or mother or father or sisters? He
gives me an equivocal fatherly look whose implication is that if I am alone here without a man and without a family he will protect me—at least that’s how I interpret it. The first time my neighbor came to see me on the excuse that her children were asleep she too asked me, “Are you all by yourself?” and from then on her curiosity has grown daily. A woman on holiday alone must be hiding something: some sort of grief or unrequited love or illness. Who knows what secret sorrow it might be?
For a moment I thought of telling her: “I’m here to escape from a girl who wants to gobble me up.” But she wouldn’t have understood. And anyway that’s not the whole truth. I’m also here to write my book. And to escape from the temptation of letting myself be destroyed by the child who has installed himself in my womb.
Toward midday I stop writing. I take my swimming costume and go down to the sea. I pass in front of the newsagent, who greets me deferentially. I cross the Piazza Santa Caterina walk along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele cross the Via Liguria and I’m there. I go down some concrete steps onto the crowded dirty beach. I hire a beach umbrella and a deck chair and for a while I sit and read. Then as soon as I start to sweat I go into the water. I swim three hundred strokes as if I were undergoing a penance. I don’t enjoy the smooth oily water that’s littered with rubber canoes and screaming children and bits of plastic that cling to my body. I swim back to the shore and sit in the sun trying not to listen to other people’s transistors. I read for about an hour and then I go home feeling hot and bad-tempered.
I’ve noticed some newly painted wooden boats that are for hire and tomorrow I think I’ll hire one and go right out to sea.
At home I eat lunch listening to Rigoletto my eyes gazing vacantly out of the window onto an ancient landscape desecrated by the concrete tower blocks. From the kitchen window I can see white rocks that make sharp patterns on the green water small bushes bent by the wind and the steep coastline with mountains behind dominating the town.
After lunch I lie down for a rest on the big bed that’s steeped in the familiar odors of conjugal life: sweet almond oil and urine cleaned over and over again with water and soap and talcum powder that smells of flowers. A huge bed with eighteenth-century brass bedheads a lumpy wool mattress that has witnessed God knows how many acts of copulation and birth and marriage and fights and rapes and deflowerings and abortions and death-agonies.
At four o’clock I start working again. At seven I go down for an ice cream. At nine I have supper and then I read till eleven. Then I go to bed. This is my solitary day which is like all my other days and which I am determined to keep as monotonous and spartan as possible until I’ve finished this book and have freed myself from all those alien and unacknowledged ghosts from the past.
…
Dear Marina
Last night I took sleeping pills and I woke this morning after a short heavy sleep in such a daze that I couldn’t recognize things in the market. I stood in front of some lettuces for five minutes thinking, What on earth are those objects? “Chicory endive radishes” I kept repeating the words to myself without being able to associate the object in front of my eyes with the name I had in my mind.
Red mullet whiting trout eels scorpion-fish swordfish. For a moment I become aware that I am looking at the fish through the eyes of a woman who lived centuries ago: a woman whose hands were covered in shining scales and who had all her life been familiar with this dead white fish the smell of entrails and putrescence the faint scent of carnations. I do not actually see the fish I recognize them by touch. They are part of my experience of the world perceived through fingers that open snatch knead dip stuff and baste and through hands impregnated with rich overpowering smells.
I got talking to the old woman in a flowered apron who was selling fish and shouting rude jokes to the passersby. But she didn’t seem very eager to talk to me. She looked at me suspiciously. What was I doing there chatting away while she was working? Why wasn’t I buying anything? So in order to ingratiate myself with her I filled my shopping basket with fish: squids that were bruised and slippery “genuine” clams and even an octopus with long pinkish-gray tentacles.
All at once it dawned on me that this was probably the same woman through whose eyes I’d just been looking from a distance of a thousand years. I watched her more closely and almost unawares I felt myself slipping into the greedy exuberance of her dark wrinkled body. I could tell she lived on her own from the way she handled money: her fingers closed round the notes with casual yet voracious haste like the quick graceful cunning of a fox as it lays hold of a chicken.
The swing of her coral earrings helped me to lose myself in her: two long narrow pendants widening out at the bottom with a small flower of tiny yellow petals fastened onto the earlobes. They swung lightly to and fro as her shoulders rose and fell following the movements of her hefty arms. Her large wrinkled hands grasped the fish flung it down on the table and took hold of the knife—less a knife than a hatchet with a massive handle—letting it fall precisely where the clean flesh meets the backbone. From time to time she used her wrist to shove back a wisp of gray hair that had slipped out of her bun.
I sensed the cheerful disdain she felt toward her customers who came up gave her the once-over sniffed at her fish felt like having a good snigger behind her back started to make some comment but were never quite quick enough for her. I sensed her irritation at the political argument going on between two market stallholders. I feel as if nothing matters anymore neither politics nor the market not the fish nor anything at all. All my attention seems to be concentrated on a few small sensuous pleasures: the raw taste of homemade grappa which fills me with the burning certainty that I am still alive the sensation of coolness in my genitals as I sit for ages on the lavatory while my eyes follow the image of a fly dying on the wall opposite the feeling of clean sheets against my bare feet the crisp dry consistency of a new thousand-lira note the weight of hundred-and two-hundred-lira coins in the palm of my hand the sour milky smell of my newborn nephew as I secretly offer him my wrinkled breast and he sucks from it a few drops of fluid the last residue of my unfulfilled womanhood.
Dear Marina
Yesterday I came back home with two kilos of fish which I hadn’t an idea what to do with. I cleaned them mechanically forcing myself back into some sort of familiar routine. I put them all into an earthenware dish and took it round to my neighbor. Basilia looked at me with astonishment. Suddenly little Mauro climbed on my back pulling himself up by my hair. He and his brother have a habit of attacking the bodies of grownups biting pulling shouting smelling shoving in a way that makes them invincible. One can tell that when they grow up and have money they’ll be adored by women and will give them a bad deal just the same as they are robbing their mother now. Big strong and lively with their curly heads acting as cushions they throw themselves against the walls and make them tremble. Woe betide all those who find themselves in the invaders’ path! I said this to their mother and she gave me a beatific smile happy to think of her sons growing up to be winners. She has watery eyes and sparse dry hair and when she smiles she shows her black decayed teeth.
She is delighted to see me. She makes me sit down and forces me to eat stale baby rusks and drink some vinegary wine that smells of strawberries. Then in her supple voice so unexpectedly and mysteriously powerful she tells me about herself. How she was raped by her father when she was nine—“I was a woman already. Just imagine! I was having periods so I got pregnant and my mother aborted me with a liter of Epsom salts. That gave me an ulcer and it’s still there. When I was twenty-five I got pregnant through the Holy Ghost—that’s the only way I can explain it. I didn’t want that second child so I went to a neighbor and she lent me a probe and showed me how to push it in. After struggling with it for three days the miscarriage started and I couldn’t stand the pain so I said, ‘That’s it! I’m going to the hospital.’ But I never said a word to Toniano I wasn’t going to tell him. So I went to hospital and they scraped me out. Then they asked m
e, ‘Who got you an abortion?’ I said ‘What I don’t know anything about that. It just happened.’ They said they knew that wasn’t true but they’d let it go this time. They kept me in the hospital for three days but they couldn’t stop all the blood I was losing not even with all their big pipes and tubes. And so it went on—after Mauro there was an ugly girl who was born dead and then the last.”
I tell her about my miscarriage at seven months. She listens attentively and sympathetically. From now on we are friends. We have both suffered the same things: miscarriages hemorrhages unwanted pregnancies. We are equal. But we are also very different and I use the dish of fresh fish to efface these differences created on my side by privilege and on hers by premature aging. She thanks me warmly. Her eyes don’t display any envy but even a little compassion. “Poor thing all on her own” is what she is thinking and she sees herself as being luckier than me because she has a husband who screws her every night and sons who eat her alive.
…
Dear Marina
I’ve decided to leave tomorrow. I shall go and see Fiammetta in Sicily where she’s rented a house on top of a cliff. “There are three hundred steps to get to it” she told me triumphantly. “There’s no electricity or running water but it’s a marvelous place. The water’s clean and clear and you can catch fish weighing five kilos so why don’t you come? But you must arrange it because I’ve no more money to put in the phone”—and she laughed exultantly as only she can not giving a shit about anyone or anything. I said yes and I felt more lighthearted. I want to leave this place that’s overrun with mice and I want to swim in a sea where the water’s clean and I want to be touched by Fiammetta’s gaiety.
