L’abbazia di San Galgano
Dove si trova?
Il complesso monumentale di San Galgano sorge circa 30 km ad Ovest di Siena, al confine con la provincial di Grosseto, fra Monticiano e Chiusdino, in una terra serlvaggia e incontaminata, ricca di bellezze naturali.
Museo della “Madonna del Parto”
Indirizzo: Via Reglia, 1 Monterchi (AR)
Telefono: +39 0575 70713
Orari: Novembre–Marzo, tutti i giorni: 9.00–13.00 e 14.00–17.00
Aprile–Ottobre, tutti i giorni: 9.00–13.00 et 14.00–19.00
Costo dei biglietti:
Intero: 3.50
Ridotto: 2.00 (student oltre i 14 anni)
Ridotto gruppi: 2.50 (gruppi a partire da 15 persone)
Gratuito: ragazzi sotto i 14 anni, donne incinte, abitanti di Monterchi, invalidi e disabili
LOUISE AND THOMAS
• • •
JUDITH WAS SO FRIGHTENED she is not even crying. Louise is trying to comfort her little girl, but Judith is terrified, she is shaking. There was a screech of brakes, the wheels hit the stroller, but Judith is unharmed. The van stopped with the stroller crumpled under its axle; the doll flew out onto the road. The driver leaped out, a big black man, he just keeps saying to Judith, “You’re not hurt, are you? You’re not hurt?” He is shaking more than she is.
It is a Sunday in December, the first Louise has spent with Thomas along with Judith and Maud: they have never met him before. Maud discovered that if you say Thomas Thomas over and over it sounds like “stomma stomma stomma.” Judith thought that mommy’s friend really did have a load of white hair, more than daddy, she chuckled and whispered as much to her older sister, so their mother could not hear.
“What’s all this muttering, Judith?” Louise asked.
Judith ran ahead, laughing, she turned to look at her big sister as she started crossing the road. Thomas was the one who saw it coming. He reached out his arm, grabbed the child, and hauled her back. He apologizes to her for squeezing her arm so hard. He hurt her, she gives him a hard time. She’s going to have a bruise. The driver has gone to get the doll, has extricated the stroller. It falls apart, is irreparable.
“What’s your name, sweetheart? I’ll buy you a new one.”
Thomas says there is no need, walks him back to the van.
They were meant to go to the Evolution Gallery at the Jardin des Plantes. Louise is completely drained, she just wants to sit down, have a coffee. Thomas asks the girls what they would like. Hot chocolate. Now, that’s a good idea. Four hot chocolates.
“Thomas saved your life,” Maud tells her sister. Marveling at the enormity of her words, she says them again: “Thomas saved your life.”
“What does that mean, mommy, saved my life?” Judith asks her mother.
Louise does not answer. She is hugging her daughter, suffocating her. She looks up at Thomas, closes her eyes, tears glistening beneath her eyelids.
Thomas drinks his hot chocolate slowly. Judith and Maud play with their spoons and the cocoa left in their cups. The fear is forgotten, for a moment. But the terror is gradually working its way through Louise. Thomas can almost read her agitated thoughts. What if Judith had died? She would have left him, most likely. Pain destroys desire, no love could survive guilt like that. She could only have coped with the shared suffering with Judith’s father, in fact she would only have wanted to try and overcome it with him.
“Thank you,” Louise says eventually.
Thomas shakes his head. In these few minutes of his life, he can see a fork in his own destiny. That was the word Anna used in her last session, when she said, “I don’t know whether Yves is my destiny.” Coming from Anna, the word was ambiguous, somewhere between freedom of choice and the inevitability of fate.
Thomas does not believe in fate. He would have the power of speech and actions shape our lives. To him, that is the point of psychoanalysis, giving the analysand the strength to become the driving force in his or her own life. If the accident just now had actually happened, he likes to think that, against all the odds, he would have known how to play it right, to become one of the people Louise would lean on.
As a teenager, he had endless discussions about the elasticity of individual fates and History (with a capital H, as Perec used to say). The budding Marxist confronted trainee Hegelians. If Hitler had died in a car crash in 1931, would some inertia in the powers that be have doggedly set the war and the Holocaust back on track? Was Stalinism conceivable with a different Stalin? Who could have replaced Trotsky?
Other questions hover. Where did he stand in Louise’s story? Did a lover have to turn up at this particular point in her life? Was he interchangeable? Thomas has no idea. He doubts there is some hidden agenda. A breakup has not already happened before the meeting occurs. There are more chance events and contingencies than necessities. Of course, in an ecosystem, occupying the same niche requires the same response: all large marine predators are alike, sharks for the fish, killer whales for mammals, plesiosaurs for dinosaurs. But man is not the natural world, history is not evolution, and Thomas has stopped trying to find a material or scientific answer to a question that could never be either of these. He will never know whether he or Hitler was replaceable, ersetzbar. Suffice to say, life never serves up the same dish twice.
Judith and Maud have finished their hot chocolate. They want to go home. So does Louise. They can go and see the thousands of butterflies and the big white whale another time. Louise opens the door to the apartment building, the girls run upstairs. Louise turns to Thomas.
“If Judith had … I wouldn’t have had the strength for anything, you know. I couldn’t have gone on. My life would have stopped.”
“No,” Thomas says. “No. That’s the worst thing, it wouldn’t have stopped.”
ANNA
• • •
Incomplete list of Anna’s purchases.
(from September 8 through December 21, 2008)
One silk dress, size 6, zipper to the side, pleated below the belt, silvery beige, 129 euros.
One pair of pumps in brown faux crocodile leather, size 8, low heel, 79 euros.
One tunic in embroidered cotton, size S, beige and emerald, fastened at the neck, V-neck, embroidery along the neckline and below the bust, flared below the bust, 49 euros.
One black cotton dress, size small, with Navajos pattern, short buttoned sleeves, A-line, 99 euros.
One cotton blouse, size 8, opalescent color, slightly fitted, open pointed collar, sale price 55 euros.
One pair of low-waist jeans, W27 L34, bleached Genoa blue, straight leg, five diagonal-cut pockets including one coin pocket, with leather belt, 89 euros.
One pair of ballet pumps, taupe, small blue tulip on the edging, size 8, 69 euros.
Two silk and polyamide bras, 34B, one in mouse gray and one in bright red with white lace pattern, push-up style with underwiring, hook-and-eye fastening, adjustable straps, 34 euros. Two pairs of “boyshort” underwear in embroidered silk and polyamide tulle, size 8, one in mouse gray and one in bright red, embroidered waistband, 28 euros.
One trench coat, black shot with green, two internal buttons, one belt, wide black leather lapels, size medium, 249 euros.
One pair of black leather sandals, with jeweled ring effect over big toe, two-inch heel, tie-straps at the ankle, size 8, 55 euros.
One one-piece swimsuit, size 8, watermelon pink, deep V-neck with tie at the bust, 49 euros.
One black cotton T-shirt with embroidered neckline, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal screen print, 15 euros.
Two pairs of underwear in embroidered tulle (one black, one gray-beige), size 6, 66% polyamide, 25% polyester, 9% elastane, embroidered waistband, 38 euros. Two bras (one black, one gray-beige), 34B, 60% polyamide, 35% polyester, 5% elastane, embroidered, 48 euros.
One pair of taupe-colored, ruched leather boots, round toe, narrow leg, coming high up the leg with diagonal top line, slipon, size 8, 219 euros.
On
e chocolate-colored cotton jacket, size 6, single-button fastening, long sleeves, piped pockets, navy blue leather shoulder panels, 99 euros.
One pair of red suede moccasins, white overstitching at the front, low heel, size 8, 39 euros.
One denim skirt, 100% cotton, size small, chalk color, button fastening, zip fly, patch pockets to the side with buttoned flap, small slit to front and back, 59 euros.
One short, low-cut dress in blue cotton, with flounce in navy blue tulle, size 6, 119 euros.
ANNA AND YVES
• • •
IT IS NIGHTFALL. Anna cannot bring herself to leave. She rests her head on Yves’s shoulder, thoughtful.
“My darling goy.”
Yves knows full well that Anna calls her husband “my darling.” He recognizes the tenderness beneath the irony.
“Do you know what?”
This “Do you know what?” makes Yves smile. It is very often the pattern that sets off Anna’s questioning. He answers every time without sounding tired of it: “No, Anna, I don’t know what. Tell me.”
“You also like me because I’m Jewish.” Yves is about to think this is a ridiculous comment, but she adds: “You would have liked to be Jewish.”
It is a statement of fact.
“Do you mean I regret not being Jewish?” he asks, amazed.
“I do. There’s this regret. You’ve built yourself around it.” Yves does not answer. She takes her idea further: “Being Jewish is an identity. If you could have chosen one, that’s the one you would have chosen.”
Anna genuinely thinks everyone would like to be Jewish, certainly all writers. Jews all have to do with knowledge and books and handing down memories. A Jew, she says, works hard, wants to pass something on to his children, to leave something for the world. Protestants do too, she concedes, sometimes. But Yves remembers a comment Anna’s sister, Nora, made when Anna introduced her to her friend Hugues Léger’s work. Nora thought one of his books was magnificent, so perceptive that she could not help a: “Are you sure he’s not Jewish?”
It took Anna staring at her in amazement for Nora to start blushing, equally embarrassed to discover her spontaneous assumptions as she was for revealing her prejudices. Yves had nodded, floored, more than a little annoyed.
He wanted to lash out at her: “No, Nora, Hugues Léger wasn’t Jewish. Being Jewish isn’t a prerequisite for writing a great book. And it’s not enough of a qualification either. Would you like me to name some bad Jewish writers?”
But Yves spared Anna’s sister. He settled for an ironic smirk, dressing it up in great magnanimity.
And yet Anna never says anything by chance. It is true: Yves would be a good candidate to qualify as a Jew. He is not a philo-Semite, the sort of anti-Semite who loves Jews, but he is interested in Jewishness. He knows a lot about Judaism, its rites and festivals, he listens to klezmer music. Because he speaks German, he understands Yiddish, but who speaks that anymore? He sent Anna a text message for Rosh Hashanah: A gut yor. Even though her father was born in Hanover, Anna did not know it meant “Happy New Year.” Yves may have become a Trotskyite and a militant, but that was out of visceral antifascism and loathing for the slaughter of the Holocaust, a subject on which he has an impressive collection of books. It is also true that a lot of his friends are Jewish, that he has a particular fondness for Jewish jokes, his favorite being the one about the “alternative.”5 Lastly, he is very aware that he has fallen in love with more Jewish women than statistics could have predicted.
“Okay, you’re never going to be Jewish Writer of the Year,” a (Jewish) friend once told him, “but why don’t you go for the Goy Novel Prize?”
For all that, does Yves regret not being Jewish? Saying no would start Anna analyzing his reaction as a denial. Yves wants to find a suitable answer to this question he has never asked himself. He is probably an indeterminate cocktail of Gaul, Viking, and Goth, but he has never hated the insecurity of having no clear provenance, like a wine’s appellation contrôlée, never wanted to wear another man’s shoes. He has built himself around a refusal to belong, a rejection of family. He likes the fact that his mother tongue sometimes feels foreign to him. He would like to give Anna a precise answer. As soon as the conversation turns to Jews, or worse, to Palestine and its “territories” (a word she does not always qualify with “occupied”), to “terrorism,” he is always on thin ice. The subject is so close to Anna’s heart that she sometimes loses all sense of judgment. She once let slip a “You French people,” which riled Yves, particularly as she would have left him for a “You Jews.”
Yves takes the leap: “To be absolutely honest, Anna, I’m glad I’m not Jewish. If I’d been born Jewish, I might have settled for that. That whole illusion of being something is so intoxicating. I could have been one of those kids in a yarmulke demonstrating with a PROUD TO BE JEWISH sign. Do you really think you can feel proud just for being born Jewish? That’s just as stupid as saying you’re proud for being French.”
“No. It’s not the same. Jewish culture is five thousand years old.”
“Hey, that’s enough fictionalizing, Anna. Two thousand eight hundred at the outside. And being a Jew today isn’t like it was under Ptolemy or Caesar.”
“Those kids don’t have to hide, they don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
“That’s not the point. Everyone, whether or not they’re Jewish, can be proud of Jewish culture. Everyone has a right—a duty, even—to be, just as they should be proud of everything the human mind has achieved. When I walk through the Alhambra, I’m very proud of Muslim culture.”
“Really? I didn’t know you were such an ecumenical slob with regard to religions.”
She is right. Yves loathes religious figures, Jewish ones as much as any other. In churches, Prévert used to say, there is always something that does not ring true. But he is happy to acknowledge the universal qualities of Judaism. When he read his piece about foreignness, he omitted an idea he wanted to keep for another text. It was that in Hebrew, becoming a Jew was called leitgayer, which means “become ger,” become a foreigner, because the Jews were foreigners in the kingdom of Egypt. So the temptation to become something else is inseparable from Jewish culture. Anna would most likely retort that he was philosophizing, that leitgayer simply meant becoming a guest, a guest of the Jews. But ger is less ambiguous in biblical Hebrew, he had talked to a rabbi about it: it means “foreigner,” period. Nothing sacred can be achieved without being aware of this rootlessness. The tribe of Levi had no right to own land for that very reason: a priest is a living emblem of people who are never completely at home.
Yves’s mischievous side could almost say that, in order to conceive the world properly, you have to conceive it as a Jew would, as someone from nowhere and who owns nothing would. But he is pretty sure he has already said that to Anna, and he would rather not repeat himself.
“Look, Anna, I’m just saying that being under the illusion of being Jewish because your mother is, doesn’t really mean being Jewish anymore. Being born Jewish is nothing. You can’t cut corners to become one.”
“More sophistry. Sophistry that conveniently forgets about the pogroms, the persecutions, the Shoah.”
“I’m not forgetting anything, Anna. But saying Einstein and Freud were Jewish geniuses means thinking the same way as the Nazis.”
Yves is getting carried away, so he can tell that Anna has touched a nerve, that actually, yes, if he really did have to choose some mythical connection, then maybe. But there would be other possible options. Anna shrugs her shoulders, she does not want a fight.
“But it’s true, Freud and Einstein were Jews. Look, I’m bored of this, it’s beside the point. You haven’t answered my question.”
Yves says nothing, amazed at his own clarity. In the past, when a situation was too tense, his mind fogged over, bombarded with parasitic images. At fifteen, he would lose the thread of his thoughts during family arguments because he would suddenly have an absurd mental picture o
f a Galápagos turtle laying an egg. He would lose the ability to argue his point, even when he knew he was right. It took him some time to realize that this stupid habit was a symptom, that it derived from his inability to face up to things completely.
“Anna, I’m going to give you one last reason why I’m glad not to be. If I were Jewish, I’m not sure our relationship could have happened.”
Anna says nothing in reply. She remembers that, during one of her sessions when she mentioned that Yves was a goy, Le Gall asked: “Could you have fallen in love with a Jew?”
She sat there in silence. Le Gall had asked the right question, though. The fact that Yves was a goy made everything easier. Sneaking into another Jew’s bed would have been obscene, it would have meant betraying the union blessed by the synagogue. Yves was from another universe, parallel and exotic. His world coincided so little with hers that it was barely a scratch on the marriage contract.
5. To avoid interrupting the narrative, but not frustrate the reader, the author has allowed himself this footnote.
One day Moshe goes to see the village rabbi and says: “Rabbi, I’ve just heard a new word and I don’t know what it means. It’s the word ‘alternative.’ What does it mean?”
The rabbi thinks and replies: “Moshe, come back and see me tomorrow with the deeds for the little plot of land down by the river, and I’ll answer your question.”
The next day Moshe comes back. He has the deeds in his hand. “Right,” says the rabbi. “Now you’re going to go to the market in Radom, and come back with two rabbits, a vigorous buck, and a young doe.”
The next day Moshe is there with his two rabbits in a cage. “All right, Moshe, now listen carefully. You’re going to fence off the plot down by the river, where the soil is soft, and you’re going to put your rabbits in there. In a few months you’ll have twenty young rabbits, you can sell half of them in the market, and reinvest the rest of the money to buy the neighboring plot, which you will also fence. By the end of the year you will have bought all the land along the river up to the bridge and you’ll be the richest man in the village. You’ll carry on with your business and your investments, buying up all the plots on both banks and down the valley, all the way to the village of Brentsk, and you’ll be one of the most prominent men in the region. You will marry young Sarah—oh, don’t deny it, Moshe, I’ve seen the way you look at her—so you’ll marry young Sarah then, and she’ll give you two beautiful children, a boy and a girl. Meanwhile, you’ll carry on breeding thousands of rabbits, selling them in the market in Radom, Piotkrow, and Kativice, and you’ll be rich, very rich. Your children will grow up, your daughter will start seeing the doctor in Lublin, the boy will start studying at Lodz. And then, Moshe …”
Enough About Love Page 11
