La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  Delia and Olga tell their stories from within that whirling. Even when they slow down they don’t distance themselves, they don’t contemplate, they don’t carve out external spaces for reflection. They are women who tell their story from the middle of a dizzy spell. So they don’t suffer because of the conflict between what they would like to be and what their mothers were, they are not the painful end result of a female genealogy that moves, in chronological order, from the ancient world, from the great myths of the Mediterranean, to end up at them as a visible peak of progress. Suffering derives, instead, from the fact that crowding around them, simultaneously, in a sort of achrony, is the past of their ancestors and the future of what they seek to be, the shades, the ghosts: up to the point, for example, where Delia, after taking off her clothes of the present, can put on her mother’s old dress as the definitive garment; and Olga can recognize in the mirror, in her own face, as a constituent part of her, the figure of the poverella-mother who has killed herself.

  The Beast in the Storeroom

  I move on to your second question. It’s true that I don’t know how to trace a sharp line between guilt and innocence—I think it’s clear from my books that these are concepts that confuse me. For example, the religious axe that separates the guilty from the innocent doesn’t convince me. Nor does the distinction between those who are legally innocent and those who are legally guilty: there are people innocent according to the law who are stained with blackest guilt and people guilty before the law for whom I’ve felt sympathy, sometimes friendship. No, legal guilt and innocence don’t help much. According to legal truth Adriano Sofri5 commissioned a vile political murder, but his behavior as a man guilty according to the law has proved his innocence against every reasonable doubt, and the fact that he remains in prison is an abomination. Instead, if the present head of the government (I don’t even want to name him), after founding a party with his wealth and his television stations, after entering parliament by means of his money and his company, after making laws that put him above the law, thanks to his countless billions and his media power—in other words, after devoting the major part of his political activity to manufacturing loaded dice for himself and his friends—should one day be declared legally innocent, I would consider that path to innocence his greatest crime, the crime of one who makes arrogant use of economic and political power by demonstrating to the weakest citizens, between one stupid joke and the next, how cleverly democracy can be manipulated. As a result, today, as I write, justice has an admirable witness in jail while, precisely where it should be embodied by exemplary behavior, it is fatuously humiliated or flaunts moralists with a double or triple life. Besides, the entire political class that governs us, which has no culture, no brain, no sense of justice, ironically considers itself innocent and declares with a nauseating sly little smile that the crimes, if they exist, were committed by others. I hate the tone of voice in which these obtuse and blustering power brokers manipulate guilt and innocence. I don’t trust their declarations of intent, their defenses, their proud and immodest self-definitions. I prefer people who are aware of the moral ambiguity of every gesture and try persistently to understand what they really do, both good and bad, to themselves and others.

  For me, the so-called ethical problem began some decades ago, in a little room. There I had a desire to kill, and to punish myself for that desire; it was the secret location of a long conflict with my mother. But let’s go in order, as far as possible. That little room—it appears in a few lines in Troubling Love—was a place without windows, without electric light, in my childhood home, in Naples. It was used as a storeroom and was so crammed with things that it was hard to enter; just passing by made me die of fear. Sometimes the door was left ajar, and a cold breath came out that smelled of DDT. I knew that it was the breath of a large beast, ugly as the yellowish larva of a cicada, ready to devour me. It was lying in ambush in there, amid old furniture, broken chairs, chests, lamps, an anti-gas mask, but I didn’t tell anyone, maybe I was afraid of not being believed. The perils of the little room remained my secret.

  When I was around nine or ten that room became for the first time a place of primary importance. My youngest sister, whom I will call Gina, was then four, and she was an annoying obstacle to the games of my other sister, who was seven, and me. No matter how often we said that Gina had passed through the sieve or under the bridge—slang expressions that meant: she’s not in the game; she thinks she is but she isn’t really, she runs through it, she’s useless in it—she continued to bother us. If we chased her away, she went crying to our mother. If we threatened her, she became even whinier. If we hit her, she threw herself on the floor, screaming and kicking as if we had cut off an arm or a leg. She often asked, anxiously, with a friendly little smile: I’m playing, am I playing?

  Once, in exasperation, I said in dialect: We need a rope, there’s one in the storeroom. Note: I didn’t say to Gina, We need a rope, it’s in the storeroom, go get it. Instead, I expressed a need and indicated the place where, if you wanted, it could be fulfilled, nothing else. I was exasperated, I wanted my sister to die. I thought that she deserved it, because she disrupted our game and had done so from birth. Killing her wasn’t a simple wish; it seemed to me a necessity, even though I knew that sisters don’t kill each other. So I was satisfied with that phrase, which came to me naturally, and which I’ll always remember, as the conscious beginning of my relationship with words: We need a rope, there’s one in the storeroom. The syntax apparently let the child decide if she would go and die in the jaws of the beast or not. But I knew that she would go, she was too happy to have, at last, a precise task. The sentence pushed her and yet covered me, hid my murderous wish. In fact, she started off immediately, she needed a role, she couldn’t believe she’d suddenly grabbed one. From that moment time stood still and I stopped breathing.

  Here, then, the small child heads toward the place of horrors, she’s running, afraid that my other sister will go in her place and she’ll miss her chance. The ugly dwarf, the walking stink. Even my mother can’t bear her, sometimes she shouts I can’t take you anymore; so if the yellow beast eats her we’re all happy. The monster is waiting, now he’s an enormous fly with long transparent wings. He’s eager to fill his stomach, but he’s also furious because he, in turn, fills the black belly of the little room. He has big antennae and is constantly working his jaws. In his large belly there is room for at least two little sisters the size of mine, but chewed thoroughly, ground up. The image makes a wave in my stomach. The wave swells, it makes me dizzy and nauseous, it eats at my guts. I can’t help it, I decide to stop my sister. I run, faster than Gina. I pass her, I enter the storeroom, I close the door behind me. I’m all sweaty, she shouts furiously that she wants to come in, terror freezes my hearing, the beast advances, who will save me. I heard my mother’s voice saying Open that door immediately, and the beast retracted its claws.

  I emerged. Gina saw me and began to scream even louder, she bit her knuckles, she threw herself kicking on the floor. Then my mother lost patience; she was a very anxious woman at the time. She tried to calm the child, but she couldn’t and got angry with me: why had I shut myself in there, why didn’t I want Gina to come in? Because, I said stupidly, it’s our game and she shouldn’t disrupt it. I got a slap.

  Later, I thought a lot about that slap, bitterly; I was a meticulously reflective child. I couldn’t understand: I had kept my sister from being devoured by the beast even though she deserved it, and my mother treated me as if I were the guilty one? Guilty of what? Of not wanting the little girl to ruin our games? So, to be innocent, I had to willingly accept that the third sister should make the first two unhappy? And didn’t it count that I had intervened to save from death the cause of my unhappiness, of the whole family’s unhappiness?

  It took time to get beyond that; it required that games be replaced by soliloquy, a ghost-packed mental theater that lasted through the years, question and answer
.

  Was I not guilty anyway, guilty of words designed to be a fatal trap?

  Yes, but on the other hand who had made me guilty?

  She, the little girl.

  And how?

  With her intrusive behavior.

  So was she the guilty one, before I became the guilty one?

  No. But she wasn’t innocent.

  What would she have had to do to be innocent—exclude herself from the game, not disturb the alliance between the other sister and me, exist elsewhere or not exist at all?

  Yes, certainly yes.

  Innocence—I began to convince myself—is never to get into the situation of arousing malicious reactions in others. Difficult but possible. So I taught myself to be silent, I apologized for everything, I reined in my tongue, I was polite and compliant. Yet secretly I was bad. I didn’t know how to calm the blood that made me potentially a fury, I was seething, and for that I tortured myself. I knew that I was the child who had been able to find the sentence that would send the little girl to her death without taking her there in person. I knew I possessed the capacity to do harm through words without being seen, without bearing the responsibility. I hated myself. My innocence was really a talent for shunting: I hid ferocity behind an appearance of kindness and then I shifted it into words that seemed innocuous but could induce in people who injured me thoughts and actions that could hurt them.

  Soon it seemed to me that I was a beast who pretends to be tame; in every human relationship I saw only chains of guilt, an infinite number of reasons to respond to evil with evil—I saw no innocence. Yet often I argued about redemption. When I felt discouraged and sought a less sinister image of myself, I pointed out that I had run to keep my little sister from entering the room. In reality, I reassured myself, I have a good heart. I felt redeemed.

  But then I tended to complicate everything again. Didn’t redemption mean that there was a sin to redeem? How could redemption cancel out the fact of guilt? Isn’t it hypocritical, I thought, to inject first the poison of fury and then the antidote? So why did I rush to keep Gina from falling into the trap? Why had I hurried to die in her place? Was it possible, with that change of mind, to cancel out my wish for her death?

  I pressed on, gnawed by a sense of guilt, especially when my youngest sister, growing up, infuriated her teachers, did badly in school, complicated in every possible way the life of our family, told lies about herself so as to seem a model girl, and then confessed her wrongdoing in front of all of us with intolerable humiliation. I went back to the little room. I thought: she’s like that because I excluded her from our games, she’ll end up excluded from everything, it would have been better to let her die. I had never seriously rid myself of that desire to kill her. Rushing to keep her from ending up in the mouth of the beast hadn’t signaled a change at all. The negative feelings of before had returned afterward. What then had that moment of devotion been?

  The answer at a certain point was brutal: that moment had been purely a reaction to physical disgust. The image of my sister’s body reduced to a bloody pulp had created in me an unendurable anxiety. And I had run to the door of the little room solely to rid my body of the disgust. But then what was redemption? A way of silencing the anxiety of one’s own body when it had acted out of anxiety about someone else’s body?

  Now I was grown up, and the more I hated any opportunism the more I discovered it in my own actions, my own words. So eventually, in the end, I appreciated my mother’s slap. That senseless punishment seemed like the reality of all punishments. It served to balance the accounts of the wrong I had already done, justifiably restoring my hatred for my sister and the legitimacy of the desire to kill her. And so later—I remember clearly—I planned other, less repugnant ways to eliminate her: poison her, push her out the window, hang her, in a way not to arouse reactions that would then force me to redeem myself. And so? Was I made to do evil? Or was it not my nature but the wrongs of others that led me to evil and did that evil then lead my mother to wrong me and that wrong reinvigorate the desire for murder, in a chain that would never end?

  I was blocked. I found a way out only when at eighteen I swallowed two thousand years of Christianity in Kantian pills. I concentrated obsessively on giving myself a will that was good in itself and I began a wearying struggle to keep external objects from adjusting my will to their requirements. In that daily battle it seemed to me that I resolved all my moral problems and for a while, as long as the effort lasted, I forgot the day that, thanks to a skillful formulation, I had sent my sister to die in the storeroom.

  But the journey isn’t that orderly; it’s writing that makes it so. From that little room to the room in which I’m writing now the way is long and much more twisted, with more detours. The road that at the time seemed secondary later acquired force and became primary. That disgust, for example. And the arrival of my mother. Later I often closed myself in the storeroom, just to test her, to see if she cared about me, if she loved me more than anyone else. So allow me to go back, to when I was about ten, and start again from the moment when I shut myself in the storeroom to keep my sister from entering. Had I really decided to let myself be torn to pieces in her place? I don’t know. I preserve distant emotions, confused with feelings that came later. I kick at the darkness, I overturn objects, I break things, a destructive activity that should keep away not only the yellow beast but also my revulsion. I make noise, I shout, against Gina, against fear, and I even feel a slight pleasure, because in the effort to create a racket the disgust passes, the fury of the body diminishes, the evil that I do and that I fear is done to me is a warm, vivifying fluid. Most important, I feel that my mother hears me and will come.

  I’m glad she’s coming and yet I fear her, sometimes she’s worse than the yellow beast, she frightens me when she’s nervous, I have the impression that she’s returning from the blackness of the black of the storeroom like a ghost. But when she’s not nervous she’s very kind; for example, when she nursed Gina she would let us sit beside her. My sister and I watched, lost, as the infant greedily attached herself to Mamma’s flesh and sucked without stopping. We waited for her to get tired but she never did, she remained attached until she fell asleep. And when she slid unwillingly into sleep and her pale, milky lips slowly gave up the nipple, our mother smiled at us with her dark eyes and let white drops from her breasts drip into our mouths, a warm, sweet taste that stunned us.

  She had a miraculous and cruel body, our mother, she did wonderful things but granted us only a small taste, otherwise she was devoted only to Gina. I harassed her, I was always calling her, I insisted that she hurry immediately whenever I wanted her. She became mean, especially if the call was only a whim. But to me every whim seemed a necessity: that day in the storeroom the necessity seemed undeniable. When my mother came running she seemed good, I thought that putting myself in danger would bring her to me more quickly, in some way more justly, as if my being at risk restored me to her and her to me after a guilty absence. The slap not only seemed unjust but, when I thought about it, gave the injustice deep roots, seemed a disappointing response to a cry of fear.

  It’s here, starting from that disappointment, that the storeroom stops being the place of a deathly ambush for my sister and becomes something more elusive, a space permanently inhabited in memory by my mother and me alone, the sort of place where, as in certain dreams, always the same action, always the same need is repeated.

  But in order to understand I should first tell you what happened to me in those years. My father, like Delia’s, was very jealous. It was a jealousy that was based on the pure and simple fact that my mother was beautiful. What made my father jealous wasn’t that my mother might betray him with a particular man, a neighbor, a friend, a relative. If he had thought such a thing, he would have killed her instantly, her and her putative lover. My father’s jealousy was preventive. He was jealous of the pleasure that other men might feel in looking
at her, being near her, talking to her, touching I won’t say her, something inconceivable, but by chance the edge of her dress. He was jealous of the possible, he was even more jealous of my mother’s power than of any acts she could have committed. He was jealous from the beginning, without selectivity, he was jealous of the fact that my mother, being a living body, exposed herself to life. As a result it wasn’t in other men that my father saw the source of every threat, not at all. The likely rivals were there, on the other shore, and couldn’t do anything but be dazzled by the vital flow of which my mother was the origin. Instead it was her body, in every gesture, that was guilty of that dazzlement. My mother had the naked guilt of being a source of possible pleasures for others.