La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  I believed in that guilt, it was a secret conviction I’d always had; even today it returns in dreams at dawn. As a child I hoped that my father would lock her in the house and not let her go out. I hoped that he would order her to stay in one room, without even breathing, whenever friends or relatives visited. I was sure that she would do terrible things if she merely appeared, and so I hoped that she would be forbidden to expose herself. But contradictorily that didn’t happen. My father in fact couldn’t bear her to be ugly, he got angry if a sentence, a word seemed to restrict his wife’s beauty, he was the first to encourage the care of her looks. He once gave her a lipstick, and I often unscrewed the top of the container to smell its exciting fragrance. When they were going out together I looked apprehensively at my mother, I saw her touch the surface of the lipstick with one finger, and she was immediately even more beautiful than she had been. My father, too, looked at her enchanted and anxious, aggressive and lost. He was dizzy with the pleasure of feeling that he was the unique beneficiary of all that beauty, and yet, at the same time, his anxiety at having to expose her to the lust of the world increased. I didn’t understand him, I became silently angry, frightened. His anguish was mine, I was as alert as he was. Yes, I would have liked him to be more determined, not to punish her with angry quarrels after the sin of exposing herself but simply to forbid her to expose herself.

  All that was the norm of my childhood. The abnormal moment, instead, the most terrible, happened when my father wasn’t home and my mother decided to go out alone, without his consent.

  I studied her, then, while she got ready with her usual care. It was useless to hope that in that circumstance she would decide to go out looking slovenly, unkempt—in other words, less visible. My mother never set foot outside the house without attending to every detail of her appearance, and that threw me into a state of growing anxiety. Every gesture in front of the mirror seemed to me an excess: an excess of danger, a further offering of herself to the rapacity of the streets, of the buses and trams, of the shops. I followed her step by step through the house, I was angry with her, I hated her. I thought: she’ll be stolen, that’s what she wants, she makes herself beautiful in order to leave us and never return. When the door of the house closed behind her elegant body, I was gripped by panic, I trembled, I couldn’t calm down.

  The time of her absence was interminable. In my mind I imagined abominable things, and what I imagined made me vile in my own eyes. Yet the fantasies became an unbearable reality, I considered my mother guilty of confused but repulsive crimes, I hoped she would never return. Soon, however, that wish seemed intolerable, I was disgusted with myself for having conceived it, anything—I said to myself—provided she returns. She didn’t return. Then I stopped playing with my sisters and went almost on tiptoe into the storeroom.

  I opened the door, I entered the darkness, I closed the door knowing that only my mother’s voice in the house would have the magical power to let me out. I didn’t move, I breathed in the odor of DDT, I wept silently. The beast moved cautiously in the dark but didn’t attack me, it was there together with many other colored shapes of the horror, which licked me and retreated. Time was suspended, my body itself lost its dimensions, it was as if something were breathing inside, inflating me: I was afraid I would burst, I touched my skin and it felt smooth and tense as a bladder.

  I daydreamed. I imagined that my mother had only pretended to go out and instead was here and was now spying on me to find out if I truly loved her. I thought that she didn’t like me, so inflated in the darkness, and I pressed my chest and stomach with my hands, but I felt like sobbing and the more I pressed the more I cried. I thought that, wherever she was, she could truly feel me in danger, and I let the terror grow like a summons, so that far away she would be touched by my dilated body and with a start would leave the repulsive things she was doing and return. How terrible that internal tension was, a noise, words, the very voice of my mother that was blowing inside me as if into a balloon.

  Until I heard her footsteps in the house. Then my mood changed, I became sharp and bitter. I resisted joy, I didn’t come out, I wanted to hear my name in her worried voice, I wanted her to look for me without finding me. I imagined that she would open the door of the little room and I would pull her in unexpectedly and barricade myself there with her and give her to the beast, who now was my friend, and he would devour her in a corner. But she didn’t look for me, she didn’t call me or even come to look in the storeroom. Then I emerged. I circled around her, her body set off a wave of revulsion in me, I examined her to discern the traces of the crimes my father would have attributed to her if he had known that she had left the house. I did it fearing I really would discover those signs. I did it hoping to find them before he did, to help her eliminate them in time, so that they wouldn’t be seen.

  Of this self-seclusion in the storeroom I’ve written many times but unsuccessfully. Over the years it’s become a difficult object to arrange on a plain page. Yet surely my two books start from there. The closed door, the imagining of evil, the fear: why did I shut myself in there? The most linear answer I’ve found is the following: the fear that the little room inspired kept at bay the anguish about my mother’s fate. But I know it’s a lazy response. Being in the dark, in the most feared place in the house, was perhaps a form of expiation and at the same time a desperate cry of love. I eliminated the spaces of the apartment, I eliminated the window that looked out on the street at the end of which my mother had disappeared and on which she had to return. I abolished my body, I gave it to the forces of darkness, I let it expand until it was reduced to a tightly stretched skin. I immolated myself, I delivered myself to terror to gain her salvation in exchange. Was I then the innocent who sacrifices herself to redeem the guilty? Or was I the guilty one who punishes herself to restore innocence to the victim? I don’t know. At ten I felt I was in an intolerable situation: I feared that whenever my mother went out she would betray us, abandon our just path for that of others, and that crime of hers made me detest her, I couldn’t forgive the lightness with which she wounded my love, made it insufficient, humiliated it, took away faith in it; on the other hand I felt that she was incapable of abandoning us, I felt it in her body, in her eyes, and, instead, the fact that I had thought it, had imagined it, assumed an intolerable weight.

  To conclude: today I believe that the degree of our innocence derives not from the absence of guilt but from the capacity to feel true loathing for our daily, recurring, private guilt. The feeling of what is right is rooted in the shudder of revulsion that makes our skin crawl, in the expression of disgust that crosses the face of the murderer as he kills his victim. Women have a memory of that expression, of that shudder, they know how many specters they harbor, and—I believe—they have always frequented shadowy storerooms more than men.

  From within these rooms the religious or legal order of the male city appears a simplification, an enclosure where the miscellaneous crowd of ghosts can be chased to the edges. And perhaps, to get to the bottom of your question, it’s really this which makes the difference. Women still entertain ghosts, we have long experience with exhausting secret negotiations with revenants that sink their teeth into you as they caress you, and we don’t avoid them, we know that they are true inhabitants of that tangle of veins, blood, liquids, flesh that is our body. Men instead have long since retreated, they rule broad territories in the light of the sun, in the light of the sun they slaughter the helpless, bomb, humiliate, destroy, but at night with the blades of spotlights they cut through knots that are too tangled, and if they meet their ghosts they get frightened and right away call a doctor, a policeman, a lawyer, some godsend who will draw a line of demarcation between good and evil.

  The Image of the Mother

  I have to confess that when, around the age of sixteen, I learned something about psychoanalysis, it frightened me, and it still frightens me. I know why. It induces us to cast a long gaze, beyond ever
y established order, and when our visual range returns to normal nothing is as it was before, every conversation seems a mask of words that is worn to hide our anguish. Not surprisingly, it’s a fear that attracts me, and I especially like the visionary boldness in psychoanalytic discourse, the corrosive power concealed behind the therapeutic promise. Otherwise I belong to the crowd of the dubious. Is it therapy, is it thaumaturgy? I’ve never been in analysis. But it’s rare that one saves oneself from a rickety landing at the top of a building by throwing oneself down the stairwell.

  I love Freud, and I’ve read a fair amount of him: it seems to me that he knew better than his followers that psychoanalysis is the lexicon of the precipice. I scarcely know Jung. I read Melanie Klein passionately. I know almost nothing of Lacan, I know a lot about Luce Irigaray, I’ve followed the confrontation and the battles in Italy between the different lines of feminist thought. How much those readings and others and the speeches and discussions have influenced my books is a mystery to me; I’m a reader who quickly forgets everything she reads. I hope, however, that the debts I’ve contracted are of little importance, I don’t like stories that are a programmatic enactment of the theory of the group one belongs to.

  On the other hand, how to deny that Troubling Love comes in part from what, at the end of the eighties, I knew about the research and the debate on female childhood and on girls’ attachment to the mother? The very title of the book, for example, preserves traces of a passage of Freud’s essay “Female Sexuality” (1931) concerning the girl’s pre-Oedipal phase: “In reality during that phase,” Freud writes, “the father is for the girl only a troublesome rival.” Troublesome rival, a “rivale molesto” in Italian. At the time, Edizioni E/O was proposing titles for my first book like Il molestatore (The Troublesome Man), Molestie sessuali (Sexual Harassments), and I remembered that phrase of Freud’s, which I thought would be a good title: Rivale molesto (The Troublesome Rival). But then the reference to the paternal image seemed misleading, and, in what for me was an important shift, I finally chose Amore molesto (Troubling Love). It seemed in keeping with the story that love should be troubling, the love that makes the father the daughter’s rival, the exclusive love for the mother, the single great tremendous original love, the matrix of all loves, which cannot be abolished.

  It was a theme that interested me at the time and still does today; women analysts and women philosophers have done work on the pre-Oedipal phase in girls with fascinating results, and literary writing can only make use of it. But I would insist that I don’t like repeating and reinforcing the lexicon of some orthodoxy. I prefer stories that, if they are really stories, plunge down the path of suffering without paying attention to the “right way.” I always read stories by women with trepidation: novels, diaries, narratives of women’s lives that touch dark depths. I expect something that seemed unsayable to appear miraculously on the page, and miracles are possible, sometimes they happen. But when I feel that the story, whether invented or real, is concerned with being “correct,” I pull back unhappily, I sense a flaw in the excavation that women in particular should not allow themselves. We have to watch ourselves, attend to our very individual expansion into the internal lands that are ours, and drill, searching beyond the tested vocabulary. Better to make a mistake with the incandescent lava we have inside, better to provoke disgust with that, than to assure ourselves success by resorting to murky, cold finds.

  Psychoanalytic theory is, like all the objects of this world, of ambivalent usefulness. It names psychic reality, takes credit for it, in short organizes into universalizing representations what in the individual, beyond any system, beyond any analysis, remains pure specific inner disorder, irreducible flashes of ectoplasm, a jumble of fragments without any chronology. If the storyteller resorts to that inventory lazily he has no hope of making a true story. Psychoanalysis is a powerful stimulus for those who want to dig inside, it can’t be disregarded, it conditions us even when we reject it, it’s the map for any treasure hunt amid the shadows of our body. A map, however, is only a map. Neither a cross, nor a tall tree, nor Skeleton Island is enough to make Treasure Island. It’s a matter of insuring that the story, even if it starts with named and studied psychic objects, has sufficient inventive force to continue on where there are no reassuring signposts or recognizably commendable tones.

  As far as I’m concerned, when I write I hate all the clichés of analysis and I confess that I put aside many pages of both Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment precisely because they seemed like a textbook. It was frequently painful, because what I was narrating was mine, I had struggled to dig it out and find a form for it, I was sorry to waste it because I had been unable to avoid the influx of soothing formulas. Here is an example from my second book; the unpublished passages give me a melancholy satisfaction.

  Suddenly I had before me two beings in one, bodies of different times now superimposed. Ilaria is three, maybe younger. I saw her as she was now, at seven, hateful and beloved at the front door, and as she had been only four years earlier in the living room, a tormenting doll, two Ilarias and a single one.

  The child of before is on the couch, stomach down, but her legs aren’t stretched out, she’s on her knees. She’s wearing a red dress, white underpants, it’s summer. I stop in the doorway, she doesn’t seem to notice me. Her chin sinks into the green pillow, there is a veiled look in her round, wide-open eyes, her cheeks are red, her hair pasted to her sweaty forehead. Her arms are crossed, they disappear under her stomach, they go up and down with effort, she’s panting. I intuit that she is working with both hands on her sex. She’s moving like a reddish spider, wounded, last gasps. I’m ashamed of her, I know that children masturbate, I’m a mother who has done her reading. But just the same I’m ashamed. Did the blond babysitter with the reddened skin teach her? Did she do it to gain the child’s affection and hear her say don’t go, I love you, and so be sure of keeping the job? Did I teach her without wanting to, out of the need to be loved by that always hostile child? And how did it happen, when? Little machine of rosy flesh, she touches herself frantically, as I must have done at her age.

  That thought was enough. Yes, that thought was enough to see three children now, three Ilarias, but the smallest was me, I was masturbating as I pretended to wash myself, I felt the soap on my fingers, a sensation that remains, and I like it, I often dream that I’m washing my hands and I use up the whole bar of soap, I washed for hours with the motion that my mother had taught me.

  I looked and was afraid. We were three, Ilaria at seven, who was staring at me, I who resembled her but was as young as I appeared in a picture of many years earlier on a beach, Ilaria at three lying on the couch masturbating and wetting the green cushion with saliva. All in the same time but in no time, I no longer knew if the time was now or then or a vortex of hot wind. I knew only that Ilaria in her red dress had looked up, had seen me, but hadn’t stopped touching herself, in fact she had smiled at me with a childish smile that was also an expression of weariness. And I had thought I shouldn’t reproach her. But maybe I should have, and uttered a prohibition, as is always done, shouted at her what are you looking at, stop it, and don’t laugh, what’s behind that look and that smile, I know you, I know everything about everything, beloved child, spiteful child, I know that if you had the strength and the malice you would twist my neck and then you would fuck my corpse. As she is dreaming of doing now, I saw it in her eyes. It’s a dream that’s already vanishing, and yet she will cultivate the feeling as long as she lives.

  Texts like that seem to me missed opportunities. I remember that as I was writing my heart was racing and that rapid heartbeat frightened me, pushing me back toward known terrain, I felt it was urgent to get to the end quickly and calm down. But that is precisely the wrong way to tell a story. If your heart accelerates you have to let it accelerate, and run the risk of letting it burst. On the page I cited I know that something came to the surface, the living tail of a reptil
e that is darting off. I even know where the something is: it’s in Olga’s look at little Ilaria who is masturbating. I should have stayed there and kept the wriggling material from slipping away. But I couldn’t do it, I let go and retreated into illustrative writing, into cryptic citations, to expel the bitterness from my blood.

  That is the worst sin the writer can commit. And also the worst sin of someone who reflects on what he has written. You ask, for example, if, in writing about betrayals, I kept in mind the original betrayal of the parental images. I am inclined to answer, with the slight agitation of someone who fears she will be coming out into the open when she wishes to remain sheltered: yes, of course, I had them in mind. But it’s not true, it’s not true in those words: I wanted to avoid the slightest allusion to such formulas, they would be ice for the writing, saying everything and nothing. So I aspired to go beyond, forget the formulas, tell a story that I knew well and that as a writer I wanted literally to get to the bottom of. When we tell a story, the only thing that should matter is to find a cascade of our words that will flood all the marked-out territory with the persistence—even if devastating—of a mucilage. In the case of abandonment, I tried to tell what a destabilizing force is released even today, even when the abandoned woman has considerable tools for defense, resistance, counterattack. Often, the narration of the crisis seemed to rest on quicksand; I thought it was necessary to give Olga more story, more past, more motivations. I worked a lot to that end. But when I realized that I risked either normalizing her tragedy or confusing the abandoned woman with the cold investigating Delia of the preceding book—whose literary sister she is in any case—when, especially, I realized that, by dint of looking for motivations, I was about to return somewhat pedantically to the theme of attachment to the mother, I let it go. Of that journey into the past I kept only a few essential passages, the rest ended up in a drawer. From which I’m now pulling out a few pages for you, those (deleted from the book) which relate to how Olga makes an effort to understand Mario’s betrayal by resorting to a reexamination of her own erotic experience, occasions when she planned to betray him.