by Anna Banti
“You will go in shame of your nakedness.” And here the first big autocrat neglected to add “and you will need caresses until your last day,” whereas in reality, with this unspoken law, he was reaffirming his own established injustice. Favored, in fact, among mortals are the beautiful and the young, who can offer without shame their own radiant flesh to caress. And also redeemed are those who can offer, at least, some other display to make themselves attractive: champions, for example, thaumaturges, poets. But I? I have nothing to offer. No decoration to unfurl over my shame, not even a championship of the lowest league, no cheap miracle, no song on the radio. I am a bourgeois puppet, disarmed and wrecked, a shadow target for a shooting gallery. We can laugh about it together, Aracoeli!
But you, Mamita, help me. As mother cats do with their ill-born kittens, eat me again. Receive my deformity in your pitying abyss.
Translated by William Weaver
* * *
The Benedictines
by
Maria Occhipinti
The crossing from Ustica to Palermo took four hours, and there was a magnificent sunset over the sea. My baby was in perfect health at the time, growing bigger every day. Upon landing we were taken to our destination by horse-carriage. S. and my fellow villager got off at the Ucciardone prison near the port, whereas I was taken to the Benedictines, the women’s prison of Palermo. As soon as I was inside, the head-guard took my fingerprints. A few of the Benedictine nuns and an elderly female guard drew near, curiously examining me and the child, both quite sun-tanned. We were searched and assigned to the maternity ward.
This was a large dormitory with cement-blocked windows, the type you can find in any other prison, and there was a stifling stench as in a hencoop. The washing was hung indoors where the sun never reached. While awaiting our turn at the wash tub, we would stand there hugging our dirty pile of baby togs. There were no cradles. The mothers and the children slept together on miserable urine-soaked pallets made of lumpy, smelly horsehair. When there weren’t enough beds, the women had to sleep on the floor on old threadbare blankets. When pillows were too few to go around, even for the babies, the hard mattress was folded slightly to support the child’s tender head. Whenever a woman with a pillow was due to leave, the others tried to reserve it long beforehand. But only one could be lucky. My baby and I spent more than five months without a pillow. Sleeping was also difficult because most of the children cried at night, one after the other, as if taking turns.
The food cooked by the nuns was disgusting. They often served us hard unchewable peas, which we, just for the fun of it, made into bracelets, necklaces and even rosaries. We often found ants in the soup and there were never more than twenty bits of short pasta in those watery slops. On Sundays, when they didn’t serve meat, they would give us a taste of canned salmon or an egg, usually rotten. Evaporated milk was handed out in the morning, and we got a quarter of a glass more than the other prisoners. We were also given an extra ladleful of broth at lunch and an extra hundred grams of bread apiece. But if you didn’t get bread in from the outside, you were bound to go hungry. For the babies’ hygiene there was a cubicle adjoining the dormitory, the so-called delivery room, with wash-tubs and gas heating, but only on the occasion of a delivery would the nun deem it necessary to bathe the newborn babe a few times. Her only concern was to baptize it. A former prisoner had left behind, as a memento, a lovely hand-embroidered baby dress, and each newborn child wore that at the christening.
Besides the two women-guards, the staff consisted of two wardens and a head warden. Then there were the nuns: one was the door-keeper, another, by the name of Santa Lucia, accompanied us when we went “to take air.” The Institute belonged to the French nuns of the Sacred Heart Order and they were all to be addressed as Saint or My Mother. Saint Ignazia was assigned to the maternity ward and to the pharmacy. Matters of daily discipline, such as the distribution of meals, punishments, etc., were the domain of My Mother Antonietta who was short and dark with bright black eyes and who never hesitated to send us into solitary confinement for a trifle. She was called the Marshal and had been at her post for twenty years.
Each morning a guard came in with a bucket of warm water, dispensing two ladlefuls apiece to wash our babies with. We never took a bath. Once I complained about this to the Mother Superior who granted us audiences on Thursdays. The Reverend Mother had a soft gentle voice, tremulous and endearing, but deep inside she was just the opposite. Heavy-set, old and decrepit, she was always escorted by two nuns. She would welcome us with feigned tenderness, make us promises galore, but we never obtained a single thing from her.
In a sort of store-room upstairs, there was a faucet with a basin underneath as large as a holy water font in church. In order to wash, we had to kneel down on the rough cement floor. I explained to the Mother Superior that we couldn’t go on like that because of the many diseases that circulate in a prison, syphilis among others. It wasn’t sanitary nor was it humane to make us wash our children’s clothing where the prostitutes scrubbed their underwear. I requested a separate tub for the maternity ward. Although there was a large laundry room on the ground floor, we were not allowed to enter it. The nuns and the guards used it for their own convenience. Those prisoners who had to serve long sentences preferred to labor there as laundresses rather than remain locked up inside their cells.
They would give us no semolina or soft bread to prepare our babies’ night-feedings – only stale bread that was brought in on an open cart, exposed to dust and flies. This was counted out at the door and then thrown down on the floor, in a corner. Later, a custodian distributed it to us out of her large apron. The nuns knew very well where the bread was put and yet they never took the trouble to get a basket.
Since the warden’s permission was needed in order to have a little pastina for the children, we began to shift for ourselves. By placing two tin cups on the floor of the lavatory (we, in the maternity ward, had a lavatory) together with some of the horsehair from a mattress (the least dilapidated, so that it wouldn’t smoke too much) we would start a fire and manage to cook the baby food. The stall gradually smelled of smoke and the head warden, noticing it, came and asked why and scolded us for it.
I spoke up: “Isn’t it enough for you to treat our children worse than animals? Must you even scold us on top of it?”
Naturally I was put in solitary confinement; the Marshal taking me there “all in the name of God.”
There were three cells situated to the right of the chapel. A partition of wood that reached almost to the ceiling acted as a dividing wall. In the hallway, packed in between the partition and the cells, were piles of dirty bed linen mixed up with extra mattresses and worn-out blankets. In the farthest cell a nun had died in a bomb attack, and it was said you could see ghosts in there. So some of the inmates were afraid to spend the night in that cell. Once a fifteen-year-old girl who had been locked in there started to wail and cry hysterically as nighttime came. The nun’s bedroom was right across the hall on the left side of the chapel, but she heard nothing. Only when we started to curse and beat our clogs against the iron gate did she finally arrive, barely awake, but she refused to let the girl out. So it was not until a fellow prisoner and I were allowed to go into the cell to keep her company that the girl calmed down and fell asleep. There was no mattress or sheets to be had in solitary confinement, only a plank for a bed and a wooden board for a pillow.
My punishments always lasted three or four days. My child would be kept in the dormitory and brought in only at breast-feeding time. At night, however, she would sleep with me, and so as not to make her suffer, I would hold her over my stomach and prop her up among the blankets, remaining almost uncovered myself. The nun would come on a nightly inspection carrying a flashlight. Near the top of the door was a window wide enough to sit in. Thus, during the day, I would clamber up the steel door, sit there and read, holding onto the bars in order not to fall.
You had to get permission from the Mother Superior i
n order to leave the cell. The head warden was not vindictive, after all he was a father and a Neapolitan. Of the wardens, the older was wicked and rude, the younger one, as good as gold; but even the nasty one was more humane than the nuns. You weren’t allowed out of the cell without first begging the Mother Superior’s forgiveness and kissing her hand. Since I was firmly convinced that I had done no wrong, I could not stoop to hand-kissing. I would not be a hypocrite and so I had to remain five days longer in the cell. The warden himself came to try to convince me, but realizing I would not yield, he let me out that same night. My reasoning was: “Shouldn’t they be the ones to have some understanding for us?” Sometimes we swore against God because of our great suffering, and we would be severely punished, “all in defense of God.” But I never thought God needed “them” to defend himself. We were punished enough by God by simply being in that place. Why aggravate our punishment? By increasing our pain, the nuns only made us poor women more bitter, and instead of saving us they just speeded up their own damnation.
I recall that one morning I had left my child in bed while I went to wash the mess tin. On my return, I found the child covered with excrement up to her face. Not knowing how to cope, I quickly called the guard who came with a nun; the nuns always pretended not to hear our calls. Only when some of the inmates, out of anger, started shouting: “BITCHES! BITCHES!” would they run in. That insult was enough to make them come. So in they marched, telling me there was no hot water in the kitchen and that I would have to wait for the second shift, at 4 pm. In despair, I snatched a sheet from the bed, put the two tin cups in the middle of the room with the bucket over them, tore up the sheet in a hundred shreds, and set a match to it, warming the water with that fire. The nun and the guard watched the scene. That night, although in solitary confinement, I was satisfied, even though the matter of forgiveness had to be gone through all over again.
Seeing that I wore a Communist badge and kept pictures of Stalin and Lenin near my bed, they gave political significance to my every gesture, and so insisted that I bow to them; but it was entirely my conscience that dictated my actions, not political or party principles. That time my punishment lasted eight days, but I remained calm. My inmate-friends brought me food, and I didn’t suffer too much. Whenever I found a piece of coal I would write on the wall: DOWN WITH THE HYPOCRISY OF THE NUNS! JUSTICE WILL TRIUMPH! and other such phrases. When the warden passed through on inspection, at the sight of the graffiti, he would pull out a flashlight from his pocket to read them better, but he never said anything. On one wall I wrote that nuns were unworthy of carrying Christ over their breast. With time enough to meditate, I never grew desperate.
One Sunday morning during Mass I was perched up in my usual spot in the cell from where I could see everything. When the priest started preaching about how Christianity was the religion of pity and charity, I listened patiently for a while, but all of a sudden my emotions got the best of me and I found myself shouting: “There’s no charity here, there’s no goodness. Here a mother is punished for rebelling against having her child suffer.” A sort of panic stirred in the chapel. My inmate-pals were overjoyed and some begged the priest: “Forgive her, let her out, she’s a mother.” I was out of the cell in the evening.
That week the head director of the Ucciardone prison, who was also our director, came on a visit. The nuns received him with the usual smiles and bows. All dressed in white, they were like doves fluttering about the man. The director received us in his office, but the Mother Superior was always present at these meetings, so we could never really express ourselves freely. There was always a Guardian Angel following and watching us everywhere. Nonetheless, I decided to try something, so I asked to be received by the director. In the room were Mother Marshal and Mother Superior. As soon as the latter understood my intention when I broached the subject concerning the reforms necessary, she interrupted me, smiling: “Pardon me, director, there are a few things I might say about Occhipinti – but I’ll let them pass....”
This was meant to prevent me from continuing, to keep me from voicing the rest of the truths I had started to acquaint the director with. I wondered: “Why is she hindering me like this? Why will she punish me when the director has left?” Not letting her daunt me, I continued, confessing to having torn up the sheet in shreds to clean my child. I said that, for my child’s sake, I was ready to undergo any type of punishment, but that I hadn’t committed any wrongdoing whatsoever. I told him about the baby-feedings, showed him the mess tin and how seventy grams of pasta did not amount to more than twenty tiny pasta rings, showed him the vegetables, hard cauliflower stalks only good for rabbits, peas that could serve as necklace beads, and told him that was how it was every day. Even the girls from Palermo could receive food from the outside on Thursdays and Sundays only. How long could it be possible to hold out without becoming ill? In what kind of a state would we be when we left the place? But why didn’t the Mother Superior intercede for me instead of flashing her eyes at me so ferociously? The director would not believe me about the quantity of pasta. The Marshal said I had eaten it, but was later proven wrong by the other protesting prisoners. The director saw the ants, too. The nuns said they were insects that were in the olive oil, but then couldn’t they have run it through a sieve with gauze cloth, and treated us more humanely? Why was the management of the institution completely entrusted to them? Wouldn’t we, the mothers, have done better? At the Ucciardone prison the inmates themselves controlled the house organization. I asked for inmate control at the Benedictines’, too – for one of us to be present in the kitchen, but it wasn’t granted. Just for a couple of days a guard was sent from the Ucciardone prison. He would accompany the nun who distributed the soup. With the ladle they would fish out of the kettle the same quantity of pasta as on all the previous days.
“Don’t you see?” the Marshal exclaimed, “with the guard present we weighed the pasta and put it all in the pot. And it’s the very same quantity as yesterday. Are you convinced now that we always cook the same quantity of pasta?”
“Liar, you’re a hypocrite too,” I shouted to the guard. “These are not seventy grams of pasta per person!”
The fact of the matter was that our ration of food had to suffice for the feeding of the orphans, too, and this was the explanation of the mystery. I insisted on having one of us to check in the kitchen. The women wanted it to be me, but this was totally unrealistic. The nuns’ excuse was that we might escape from the kitchen.
Behind our dormitory was the delivery room with two basins for the newborn babies, running water, and a bed with a hard mattress for women in labor to lie on. The midwife was called at the onset of labor pains, one of us acting as the assistant. The midwife, Miss R., knew her job well. By telling spicy jokes she managed to encourage the woman in labor while keeping the others merry. One night around ten o’clock, from my gate I heard someone moaning. It was an inmate in labor. The guard let her lie on the bed while a warden went to call the midwife. A new being was about to be born, but there was no hot water. The kitchen was locked and the guard could not open it, nor could she waken the nuns. As usual, we managed to adapt to the circumstances. We were not to produce any smoke and there was little paper. In order to waste no time, I held the basin close over the flames with my hands, while another woman placed the pieces of paper underneath. Towards the end, I could feel my fingers burning. At times like that we all helped each other with love. We washed both mother and child, but she caught an infection and it was a miracle that she survived. The sanitary napkins for the mother were just poorly rinsed dirty rags. No special diet. Rarely were they kind enough to cook any baby food, but even then it would be brought in either cold, burnt or salty.
We all had our own ways of escaping from all that sadness. We might sing, sew by day and night, contrive to handcraft slippers for the little ones: by using remnants of old blankets for the soles, shortening the sheets to serve as the uppers, removing the thread from the sheets in order to embellish th
e slippers with quaint embroidery. We even had a razor blade, a pair of scissors, files and knives made from tins, but heaven help us should we get caught. As soon as a suspicious sound was heard (a nun or a guard drawing near) a magic word ran through the dormitory: “Muff, muff,” and everything disappeared inside our bosoms.
As in all the other churches, a priest came to our chapel to preach during the Lenten season. The Mother Superior never missed a sermon, always keeping her eyes fixed on the wan faces of the women prisoners. She observed us every day, she could witness the state we were in, but the way we were treated never changed. She probably thought we should feel fortunate if, in spite of all our sins, we succeeded in staying alive. Perhaps to her eyes we all looked in pretty good health.
After the sermon, they made us sing a little song telling of Christ’s passion. It sounded like a lament springing from so many bleeding hearts. Each stanza ended with the refrain:
Because of my sins, O Jesus,
Forgive me, have mercy on me.
At the end, the priest would make each one of us kiss the Crucifix, after which, in single file, the guard would send us back to our dormitories. To me all that cross-kissing was unacceptable. I hated being obliged to do it, all that pretentious humbug, but most of all the lack of hygiene, for all of our two hundred mouths touched the same spot, and the place swarmed with syphilis.
