by Anna Banti
Whenever the nuns called me an atheist or a non-believer, I always answered that I was far more religious than they. They knew very well that each evening I shared with a friend the piece of bread I earned by preparing the altar cloths or sewing the Mother Superior’s linen or the dresses for the orphans. Having chosen to suffer when I was a young girl, I had stood before the altar in the Ecce Homo Church and implored God for his thorns, his cross, his martyrdom. This was why I always went to extremes in everything, because I had modeled myself after Christ, and Communism, for me, was none other than a way of sacrificing myself for the love of others.
At Easter time, I, too, went to Confession, but it was more like a conversation with the priest. I told him he had better convert the nuns, because we were already suffering enough. We had too much suffering to be able to hate. At the Mother Superior’s celebration party, for example, we were the first to extend our hands to those who tormented us. On that occasion, the whole prison became involved. The dormitory cells were decorated to look like parlors. We vied with each other in preparing the prettiest embroidery. The day before there was a general cleanup. On the feast day, we spread all the blankets on the floor as a carpet for the Superior to walk over. Out of a little fur jacket I improvised a soft cushion. I even wrote a poem to read at her arrival and we all waited anxiously.
Then a nun burst in saying: “Quick, quick, Mother is coming!”
But the Mother didn’t appear. An hour went by, then two; the whole morning passed by. We waited for her all afternoon. At a certain point we were told that the prefect of the city had come and taken her to his house in a limousine. Full of resentment, I asked for paper, pen and inkstand, and wrote a letter my way, telling her she had humiliated us by treating us as habitual criminals, whereas our wishes had been most sincere, and that Christ himself had recognized that the last shall be first. The Mother Superior sent her apologies by a nun, letting us know that she hadn’t done it on purpose.
As the remains of certain ruins retain a part of their former splendor that is worthy of contemplation and admiration, those “immoral” creatures, the prisoners, also have souls that are worth study and meditation, for all has not been lost. Public condemnation is not so overwhelming for them. Although unconsciously, they somehow realize what a precious heritage they possess and this accounts for their survival, even though they are despised by society at large. The prostitute, thief, and killer, so feared and detested, are at heart just as weak and frightened as all other women.
Almost always illiterate, chronic offenders will trust their parents alone. This typically regional attitude may be traced to the three main tenets of the Sicilian upbringing: first of all, hatred of the police; secondly, vendetta in the case of betrayed love; and, thirdly, obedience to family authority. The family, however, is in no position to impart education, and the government intervenes only to increase the police force. What people need, however, is employment, together with schools, housing and hospitals – not more police. Once people are given the possibility of learning about other civilizations, of gaining a new concept of life, they will understand that vindication is barbaric and useless. They need to be helped to see what is still savage inside their hearts and have their latent sensitivity awakened in order to see the horror of their actions. They do indeed have consciences and do not feel at all so powerful as one might think. All the male delinquents I have met are weak creatures, more afraid than others, perhaps. This is why the criminal adores his mother and clings to her desperately. Knowing what a dangerous life he leads and conscious of the fact that his girlfriend or wife may turn him in or tire of the relationship, he is well aware that he will be alone as he trudges through life, and so he feels the need for attachment to his mother. To him Mother means more than God. Many were the fellows I saw at prison visiting-time who burst into tears as soon as they saw “Mama” enter. In the silence of their cells, they would call out for her with their whole soul, for that is where the criminal loses all his inhibitions and self-esteem, and he will cry like a baby. He is no longer the brute who horrified the newspaper readers. He needed a weapon in order to feel strong; and it was the weapon that made him strong.
The Sicilian does not combat the State or his boss by using his intelligence, for that is not part of his cultural formation; his only means of expression is a knife or a gun, with which he gives vent merely to weakness and ignorance. Just as Christ said: these poor wretches know not what they do. And when they implore God before a crime so that everything will work out well, that simply proves how unsure and afraid they are.
After a year and a half of detention we were all anxiously awaiting the national referendum on June 2nd because a Republic would mean amnesty for us political prisoners. After the Republic had been voted in, the Minister of Justice, who was then Togliatti, sent a telegram in late June with orders to release us. It was a damp, hot afternoon when I was summoned to the head office. The warden read the telegram, but then added maliciously, that I was to remain in prison to expiate another crime. What a terrible blow! I rebelled, asking what the other crime was, thinking it was probably on account of that sheet I had torn to shreds and set on fire. I even wrote a petition to the Judge of Appeals that I wished to be told why I was being kept in prison. Several months passed by with neither answer nor interrogation. My family expected me from day to day, not knowing whether I was being kept pending a trial for what happened on that January 6th before I was arrested, or for other reasons. I wrote home saying that I had no idea why I, together with five others, was being kept. Only after my father engaged a young lawyer did we discover that I had been implicated in a crime of extortion: two inmates had fought over two hundred lire! But I had taken no part in the argument and was able to prove it when the investigating judge came and questioned me. Two days later I was set free.
I had no husband to go home to, since he, expecting I would serve a long sentence, had gone to live with another woman. With that particular cycle in my life ended, I was truly free, liberated from all the burden of prejudice. But I felt like a fragile empty shell in the middle of an immense ocean. Obliged to face the problems of daily survival and of giving my daughter different cultural values, I wandered through various cities of Italy, enriching my store of experiences, meeting new people with other ways of thinking and customs. I even went to Switzerland and after I saw, first-hand, what an adult civilization was like, and witnessed a more modern conception of love, liberty and self-respect, the men of my homeland appeared to me extremely immature; barely at the crawling stage.
What remains in my heart, after so much disappointment and bitterness, is the sweet indelible memory of the Sicilian women who did not rebel as I did, who know how to serve their husband-owners with common sense, and can even feel compassion toward their men – all the while, waiting hopefully for things to change for them, too.
Translated by Gloria Italiano
* * *
The Tree
by
Anna Maria Ortese
Last Saturday, as the first snow began to fall, which was just towards five in the afternoon, I found myself at the Central Station, having accompanied a person to a train. At first, I didn’t even realize it was snowing, but it struck me, once again in the open, that something in the tone and color of the great, broad square before the station had slightly changed. It was the very same square that all of us can see at any hour of the day or night, to the right the large hotel surmounted by a flattened dome, and the tramway tracks on the left, leading towards the center of town past a variety of cafés where brightly lit windows open back through a whitish haze to a glimpse of the reds and yellows of bottles of liqueurs. But the cafés, and I grasped it only after a moment or so, were all dark and empty, though open, and no trams were running, not so much as the most distant clanging of their bells. I thought there must have been a power failure in this part of the city, perhaps elsewhere as well, and I made up my mind to go back to my hotel on foot. After all, it was not very far away, and the weath
er wasn’t cold.
As I looked about, a little bewildered, in search of the street to take (at least ten streets run out from this square) that indistinct sensation of just a few moments before came back to me, but now with the weight of a real disturbance: the sensation that something abnormal had taken place. Where I found myself was not Milan, no more than Hamlet and Ophelia are citizens of England. The plain looking houses that rise up in the many streets around the square had an evanescence, and a heart-rending pallor. Their walls seemed to shine from some interior source and were no longer lit by starlight, nor by any ray of brightness belonging to the world of our own. “It must always be like this, at certain hours of the year, and for me to realize it now is to be explained by a particular fragility of my nerves.”
I started down Via P., from which I would then cross Piazza Grande and reach my hotel. And I once again, skirting close to the walls, felt strangely intent, like a person who had just received an important piece of news, something concerning one’s own personal life, only shortly before. But, to tell the truth, I couldn’t remember what that news might have been; so my calm began little by little to creak and give way like a sheet of ice over a stream of warm, black water murmuring and fleeing beneath it.
“Let’s see,” I said to myself. “The hotel. Everything there okay. The bill paid up. Work to do for tomorrow...quite fine. Let’s see what else.” And then, suddenly, I grasped the reason for that sense of dismay I had felt at the exit from the station. My dismay lay in a fact that was quite entirely banal, yet alarming: I no longer had any idea of whom I had accompanied to the station.
“But nothing could be more normal,” I remarked to myself after a moment of reflection. “When we’re especially fatigued, even the name of what month it is, or of the season, can slip our minds. Maybe it wasn’t even an important name. At any rate, I’ll recall it again in a moment.”
I wanted to give myself a rational explanation for what had occurred, but as soon as I had put my finger on it, I ceased to be at peace, and I might have said that a mouse had slipped inside my dress and found its way up close to my heart, where at first it nibbled tenderly and then with greater zeal, striking deeper. Finally it bit to the pulse and the seat of life itself, and I felt a lacerating pain.
The mouse fled. I saw it run away directly from in front of me and then across the street to hide at the curb, from where it watched me with a strange, flashing brightness in the tiny pupils of its eyes. But even though the pain was still horrid and the beast right there, I refused to own up to it. “The weather is really changing,” I remarked to myself. “This twinge is a warning. I’ll drink a small cup of hot rum as soon as I’m back in my room.”
I began to feel cold, but paid it no attention as I trained my eyes upwards here and there onto those buildings that looked so dead while yet suffused with a vague spark of dawn, an uncertain reflection, those facades where not a single door or window stood unshuttered to allow the glimpse of a face, a light, and where not a single voice resounded, not a sound, not even the lightest sound, of passing footsteps. “At this hour, in Milan, everyone is asleep,” I continued to spin out to myself. “It’s a city of workers. They go to bed early, by nine o’clock.”
At that point, a clock from a distant church, a clock, seemingly, that wasn’t quite sure of this world and the clapper of which resounded with a clear, grave music, struck five hours and two quarters.
“There’s one of those clocks that gets stuck,” I mumbled after a moment.
I reached the park, and here I realized that it was really snowing, quite heavily. The snow fell from the sky like a whirlpool of light, and when looked at steadily, it gave the impression of swirling back upwards. It rose and fell. How beautiful it was! It didn’t touch the ground, and its large, transparent flakes just barely caressed the branches of certain trees and then melted away. It seemed a hand that wants to write out something immense and portentous, or to stroke a forehead, and that continually repents, trembles, and vanishes. One felt a vague, profound desire to be ravished into that raiment of light, to hover upwards from the black earth and flee into a place made only of serenity, music, and joy. And why was that not to happen?
There was a bench, and I approached it. I sat down, and remained there quietly to look around me as I held the upturned collar of my coat tight against my face. In the spinnings and reversals of that eddying of white, inside that magnificent calm, as though a mantle of white velvet were rushing to fold itself around the world, I reheard a remote and harmonious echo of that clock, a song of hours. Any number of memories unwound through my mind, but without fever. I saw my mother and my father, early mornings in the sunlit garden, I listened to the ceaseless sound of the March wind on the hill. Then, at a certain point, all these images and sounds of light disappeared, and I saw myself again in this city, in my hotel room as I prepared to go out and turned off all the lights.... Yes, all the lights suddenly went out, and my mind lapsed back into its great confusion, and again that sensation of a brutal pain at my heart. Something must surely have happened, there was no longer room for doubt.
I would have given anything at all to have been left unreminded of it, and to let everything remain exactly as it was, with neither form nor name. I got up from the bench, and, vacillating, fixing my eyes as best I could in front of me, I set out to where I thought I would find the exit.
But the exit was no longer there, or at least it couldn’t be seen because of the snow that had fallen. However, there was a great number of trees: their black, twisted roots came almost up from out of the ground, and some of them seemed to be human beings – human beings deprived of everything and at the end of their lives, and who huddled now against a wall and cried. In pure and absolute silence, the snow continued to fall on these creatures. I walked in the midst of them, and would have said that they silently stepped aside to allow me through. Never before, here in the park, had I realized that there were so many trees, and all so sensitive. The sight of them began to feel oppressive, and to frighten me. Why were they suffering? I felt quite fine, entirely fine. No, it wasn’t because of me.
“The hotel should be somewhere close by,” I began again to repeat to myself with absurd intensity. “The windows will all of course be dark, but the entrance will be bright and full of people. There’s Corrado, Daniele, the lovely Iris, the others.”
A sign, quite large and just like the ones that parade one after the other along the highways, hung at the top of a pole fixed into the earth, and gigantic letters, in a sharp, bright green, spelled out these words before my eyes:
“SILENCE. DISAPPEARED. TRANQUILITY.”
“Disappeared” was the word I stared at most, entranced, much more than at the others. It awakened my heart to such a depth of echoes and suspicions as to arouse a true terror that sucked all the heat from my forehead, and for an instant I was embraced with immobility itself.
“So even now,” I continued, while breathing a sigh that released me from this horror, “they insist on putting up signs on the grass, as though that hadn’t been proved already to be so entirely useless....” As I said this, my eyes, which were full of tears for which there was absolutely no reason, ranged off into the distance to a large open space where, once, a small monument to Cavour had stood. The small monument was no longer there, and in its place was a dazzling tree, rising up to a great height.
This time I said nothing; but as I shook myself together, pushing away the anxiety that like a crazed bird dashed against the walls of my skull, I looked at this solitary, towering tree of ice that stood before me and I attempted to see it as no more than an artificious and puerile Christmas tree. But those branches were decorated with nothing but ice, even the trunk was covered with ice, and the peak burned with no light that wasn’t a light of ice. Here and there from out of the whiteness hung sharp, pointed daggers of that muted blue that ice can take on, and they gleamed.
A supreme need to ignore the meaning of what was happening drew me to the base of
that tree, gazing upwards, just like any other citizen, to admire its wintry transformation; and that was where I stood, smiling though both cold and full of pain, when the tree first moved: laden and sparkling with its burden of frost, it bent down and touched my forehead. I retreated, and the creature moved again.
Its roots had drawn out of the earth, like paws, and they weakly advanced within the light of the snow. They advanced to follow me. This, naturally enough, was a dream, though a horrid dream. So while hurrying my steps as best I could towards where I imagined the gates of the park to be, I set to repeating my eternal, monotonous, refrains: “Work, okay; tomorrow, Sunday...; phone Corrado...; let’s see what else.” As I ran these statements through my weakened, submerging mind, the apparition of ice and branches slithered up beside me on its pitiful roots and emitted a sound that I’m sure you could hardly have listened to without crying. It was just that various, profound, and finally similar to the story of a human life.
“These branches really do creak,” I remarked from out of my obstinate compulsion to lie to myself, “but I would never have imagined that snow could be so much like metal. And, yes, it’s of course that this tree has grown so light that the wind can carry it along like a leaf while making its boughs resound with such an enchanted noise....”
I began to run, while thinking these phrases, towards the gates, which stood there, I could see them, facing onto Via Boschetti. I came out into the street and then halted, though still with the sense that this supernatural creature of ice was just behind my shoulder, because my heart was about to explode. I was to see, however, that the tree was no longer there.
At that point, finally safe, I felt a faint desire to see and hear it once again, as though that conjunction of light and pain had held the hidden secret, the name, the thing, everything the nature of which I could not understand, that had made my heart that night go mad.
