La frantumaglia
Page 14
Evidently the female city will be a long time coming and doesn’t yet have true words. To look for them we have to descend beyond the squiggles of our blotting paper, into the labyrinth of our childhood, into the unredeemed chaos of fragments of our past and our remote past. An arduous undertaking. The heroines of myths are in general solitary, individuals without affiliation, in search of a small transient sovereignty, which, however, when it is achieved is paid for with shame, with their lives. Often they commit actions that deviate from the male order, at times they rebel against the laws of their native city. It’s rare that they found a city. Only once, as far as I remember at the moment, does a woman decide to plan a polis of her own, oversee its construction, be dux femina facti. Obviously I’m talking about Dido, a character it took me a long time to love completely.
As a girl I was annoyed by her suicide. In high school the story fascinated me not for what Virgil describes at length but for what Virgil barely hints at: the bloody story the woman has behind her, the brother who killed her husband, the flight from Tyre, the skill she displayed in Africa, the way she got the land on which to establish, with her sister, a new city. At the time I liked women who fled. For Dido I had at hand domestic inspirations with which to give her body. And here I should tell you that my mother was a dressmaker for a long period of her life, and that was important for me. With needle, thread, scissors, fabrics she could do anything. She altered old clothes, made new ones, sewed, unsewed, let out, took in, made tears invisible with skillful mending. Because I had grown up in the middle of all that cutting and sewing, the way Dido tricks the king of the Gaetuli immediately convinced me. Iarbas had said to her mockingly: I’ll give you as much land as the skin of a bull can go around. Little, very little, an ironic male insult. The king—I was sure, not for nothing was he the son of Amon—must have thought that even if the bull’s hide was cut into strips it would never surround enough land for the construction of a city. But I had seen the fair-haired Dido in the same concentrated pose as my mother when she worked—beautiful, her black hair carefully combed, her skilled hands scarred by wounds from the needle or the scissors—and I had understood that the story was plausible. All night (crucial labors are carried out at night), Dido had been bent over the hide of the beast, reducing it into almost invisible strips, which were then sewed together in such a way that the seams couldn’t even be guessed at, a very long Ariadne’s thread, a ball of animal skin that would unroll to enclose a vast piece of African land and, at the same time, the boundaries of a new city. That seemed to me true and had excited me.
Later, at university, I still found things to dislike about Dido, I preferred the woman who was at the head of a great enterprise, the woman who was directing the construction of the enormous walls and the fortress of the new Carthage. I was especially struck by the fact that Virgil has her enter just as pious Aeneas, in the temple dedicated to Juno, is contemplating a bas-relief depicting a raging (furens) Penthesilea engaged in battle. I’ve always been disturbed by stories that introduce an almost imperceptible sign of future imbalances into a happy scene, that take your breath away with the specter of an abrupt reversal of fate. When she first appears, Dido, who is very beautiful, and escorted by young suitors, is serenely active, vigilantly governing the progress of works in the city, and I, as a student-reader-translator who already knew what would happen, from that moment on suffered at every word: I was sorry that that woman, in the fullness of her female vigor, would be consumed by a mad love, and would be transformed from happy, lieta—Virgil’s laeta, the adjective suited to her—to furious, like the other, losing female model, Penthesilea furens. I was sorry for her and for the city, which was also rising auspiciously.
Only when I reread Virgil, to help me write the story of Olga, did I suddenly like Dido in every aspect. I have to say that I also liked Aeneas; his dull piety no longer seemed to me mannered—well brought up men of today have some resemblance to him, with that same hesitant yet fierce pietas. This time I felt that the course of the story was true and agonizing, there was no hint of the faults I had found as a girl. But what made the strongest impression was Virgil’s use of the city. Carthage isn’t a background, isn’t an urban landscape for people and events. Carthage is what it has not yet become but is about to be, material that is being worked, stone exploded at times by the internal movements of the two characters. Not coincidentally, even before Aeneas admires the beautiful Dido, he admires the bustling activity of the work of building, the construction of the walls, the fortress, the port, the theater, the columns. His first comment is a sigh: How lucky the Tyrians are, their walls are already rising. Into those walls he puts his feelings as a founder. They accommodate simultaneously the memory of his destroyed fatherland, the hope and yearning for the future city, and the desire of the nomad to camp in the middle of the foreign city, which is also a city-beautiful woman, to be possessed.
Cities are this, stone made suddenly alive by our emotions, by our desires, as we can see above all in the relationship between Carthage and Dido. The work is actively proceeding under the direction of this woman who has fled the horror of Tyre, the city that had abused her, the city where her brother shed the blood of his brother-in-law, and every feeling was forever polluted by the desire for murder. The queen doesn’t want to repeat Tyre and organizes the great urban construction site according to what is just and lawful. She welcomes the foreign exile, she has taken care that the walls of the temple of Juno, goddess of marriage and childbirth, should display the horrors of war and murder, a sort of memento. And she is a woman in her full splendor, the youths who crowd around her say so. It’s evident that under her direction Carthage aspires to be completed, amid endless difficulties, not as an enclosure for the Beast but as a polis of love.
Then passion explodes, absorbs all energy, turns into mad love. Immediately the city, too, reacts. What had been started stops, the work breaks off. Like Dido, the stones wait to decide their fate. If the love between Aeneas and her is happily fulfilled, becoming a joyful long-lasting connection, Carthage will gain power from it, the work will start up again, the stones will welcome the positive feeling of the human beings who are shaping it. Instead, Aeneas abandons her. Dido, the happy woman, becomes furious, raging. The past is joined to the future, Tyre virtually reaches Carthage, every street becomes a labyrinth, a place to get lost without art, and the blood that Dido has left behind returns to stain the new city. It is no longer unfinished. In the words of the dying Dido, Carthage is suddenly a city distinguished by hatred and revenge, and her final curse conclusively dismisses the hypothesis of a just polis: Nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto is her bitter cry.
This is the result of getting lost in the urban labyrinth without art, without a thread: No love, no accords. The Virgilian connection between love and the constitution of civic life is significant. Certainly the wars between Rome and Carthage had economic and political causes, not the abandonment of Dido by Aeneas, not the removal of love, which is only a poetic cause. But why “only”? I—like anyone who loves literature—believe that the poetic causes say more than the political and economic causes, in fact they go to the heart of the political and economic causes. I’m one of those who believe that it’s precisely the exile of love from cities that leaves them open to economic and political oppression. Until there is a widespread culture of love—and I mean solidarity, respect, a movement toward a good life for all, the antidote, in other words, to the furies and to the easy impulse to annihilate the enemy—the reality of war, of devastation, means that the accords of communal life will always be provisional, truces for catching one’s breath and recovering weapons and renewing the desire for destruction.
No love between peoples, then, no accords: the two things go together. One line says more than a thousand ponderous readings. And there’s nothing to be surprised at. Writers of stories know that the poetic causes are not moths with transparent wings. They have flesh and blood, passions, complex feel
ings: poetry is digging around in one’s belly with movements that are never predictable. Dido is nourished on sweat and saliva, she’s not a crust of caramel on the top of a crème brûlée. She can curse the person she still loves; she can kill herself with a gift from the beloved.
As a girl, as I said, I detested that suicide. I thought that as a woman you go into labyrinths with a magic thread that can control getting lost. And yet I’m convinced that the mistake of every new city lies at its roots, is in its claim to be a city of love while leaving no possibility for labyrinths, a place neither difficult nor impractical, a space of joy, with no furies lying in wait. Even a feminine city—a future that redeems the past—risks not knowing how to completely reckon with itself. It’s a shortcut to set aside what is formidable about women, to imagine us merely as organisms with good feelings, skilled masters of gentility. Maybe that’s useful for encouraging us, for political growth, but those who create literature have to make hostility, aversion, and fury visible, along with generous sentiments. It’s their task, they have to dig inside, describe women from close up, feel that they are there, Aeneas or no Aeneas, Theseus or no Theseus.
I don’t like to think, as we often tend to do, that the tremendous actions of the heroines of myths are merely the product of a pernicious male racket, of a patriarchal plot: in the end it’s like attributing to women a lack of humanity, and that isn’t useful. We have to learn, rather, to speak with pride of our complexity, of how in itself it informs our citizenship, whether in joy or in rage. To do this we have to learn the art of getting lost in the difficulties and impracticalities, there is no Ariadne who doesn’t cultivate somewhere a troubling love, the image of a beloved mother who nevertheless gives birth to suicidal dolls and minotaurs.
Listen to us, see us. Sometimes in the urban labyrinths we fearlessly ask burial for our brother, sometimes we collaborate in the killing of our stepbrother and flee with his murderer, in certain cases we kill our children, more often we utter terrible curses before falling victim to the furies ourselves. The story of Virgilian Carthage expresses well how consumingly the polis lives on the feelings of its citizens. It also expresses what happens when love—the thread both for getting lost and for finding our way—is banished, each breath becomes fire, the accords of civic life dissolve.
But that’s enough, what counts is to try and keep trying to sew for ourselves with needle and thread the perimeter of the city. As a diligent student I was never bored by winter afternoons spent on the lines of the Aeneid. It was wonderful to see the queen on the throne as she managed equitably the enormous work site, a rare occasion to dream of founding a city. I tried out endings different from the one in which she stabs herself with the sword that was a gift from Aeneas. I imagined that she expelled the furies, found love again, learned the art of getting lost and finding the way out. Every so often I would get up and go to the window; my cold feet prevented me from studying. Often when Naples comes to my mind, it’s a cold city in a storm.
Women’s Clothes
I know I’m in danger of overdoing it, but, if I’m going to talk to you about clothes and makeup, as you asked, you’ll have to endure my telling you yet again something about my mother.
Her work as a dressmaker began—for me, naturally—in the fabric stores. I liked going with her. I would look at the clerk spellbound—or at the owner himself if the shop didn’t have clerks—as he moved with a sort of cheerful lightness. He took the rectangular rolls of fabric down from the shelves and, facing my mother, began unfolding them in waves even before they had touched the counter, making the block of fabric jump, leap, turn rapidly over itself as if it were alive. She touched the fabrics, rubbing an edge between thumb and index finger, meanwhile staring straight ahead, as if not looking at the material increased the sensitivity of her fingers. I inhaled the odor of the new fabric, a sharp smell that normally lay stagnant in the shop but that the rapid unrolling of the material had blown directly in my face. I stood beside my mother, my head reaching her waist, the material of her dress just touching me. I looked at the fabrics that piled up on the counter, I felt that she was choosing the right one on which to weave her spell. It was a spell I was deeply familiar with but it enchanted me anyway, always. The new fabric that she was about to buy would be marked with chalk, the scissors would cut it, shreds would cover the floor. My mother, with pins, with needle and thread, would give it a shape, the precise shape of a body, she was able to make bodies of fabric. The smell of the new fabric would be released for the last time, an alien wild fragrance, which, once tamed in our house, would then be lost.
This was how it always happened. I clearly remembered when the dress she now wore, which had her smell, had been in its turn a fabric in the shop. When she decided to buy it, she would tell the clerk in a cordial voice how many meters she needed. The clerk performed broad, swift gestures that made the fabric flow along a short section of the counter’s edge. That dance was followed by a precise strike of scissors, a sharp tug, an agonizing whiff of another bitter smell. I was an expert, the art of clothes began there.
As for ending, it ended on my parents’ bed. The oldest memory I have of a dress just finished—at least the one that seems to me the oldest—is of a black dress, or maybe dark blue, spread on the red quilt of the double bed. There my mother laid the freshly ironed dresses, there was no other place in the house—she said—where they wouldn’t get wrinkled. We were forbidden to enter that room when there were clothes ready to be delivered. I must have gone in once, I can’t fix a date, certainly I wasn’t that young. It was a phase when I felt sudden gusts behind me, presences at my back even when there was no one in the room, shadowy things, which, however, didn’t frighten me; in fact I was glad for them, because I could describe them to my sisters who, unlike me, were afraid. I opened the door, I looked into the room. The dress was lying in the middle of the bed, the waist narrow, the sleeves spread, the skirt arranged in a trapezoid. Nothing happened except a puff of air that inflated the dress, a brief swelling as if for a breath. Afterward, one edge of the skirt was rumpled, just lifted. I was afraid that my mother would blame me, as she usually did for everything. So I went to smooth it down. Instead, for no reason, I lifted it up and looked under the dress. There was the naked body of a woman, with the legs cut off, the hands cut off, the head cut off, violet but bloodless: a body of a material without veins. I retreated, left the room. I was reprimanded when she discovered—and scolded me, because she was already anxious—that the dress was in disarray.
I’ve always felt that dresses aren’t empty, that they are human beings who at times stand empty in a corner, desolately lost. When I was a child I tried on my mother’s dresses. I found inside them beautiful women of great renown, but dead. Then I put them on, wore them, and gave life to their adventures. They all had the smell of my mother, I imagined I had it, too. They had no husband but many lovers. I felt their pleasures intensely, their adventurous bodies released mine. As soon as I felt the material on my chest, my legs, it warmed my stomach, my imagination. I knew the fabrics well, they had been in my mother’s hands for a long time, in her fingers, on her lap.
As a small child I saw the dresses come into being, before my mother stopped working as a dressmaker. She didn’t teach me anything about it, but at a certain point I helped take out a basting, or she taught me a stitch she called a whipstitch, and one that she called a hemstitch. But her work remained in my eyes: the gestures, especially, and the tools fascinated and preoccupied me, a fascination that contained a hint of fear. I didn’t like the material to be cut, the cutting made me uneasy, the shreds of material that ended up on the floor under the table repelled me. When I learned the expression “to cut the clothes on,” to gossip, I endowed it with that ambiguous childhood feeling. Was the material shaped by the scissors on the living body, to cover it? Or was the living body denuded by the action of the scissors? I went back and forth between those two fantasies and watched my mother.
Signora Caldaro’s dress was for parties and balls, my mother sewed it, unsewed it and resewed it, she stitched and stitched. I was afraid of the needle, but I also liked the harmony of the sewing that it left behind, like a wake. My mother pricked the fabric with a swift, skillful movement. She sat concentrated on the chair, bent, the dress on her knees. Sometimes she let me thread the needle, if I insisted. I had to wet one end of the thread, sticking it in my mouth, then I had to squeeze and twist the part that was bathed in saliva between tongue and lips, finally I had to pass the prepared thread through the eye of the needle. Succeeding on the first try, while my mother praised me, was good, but it was just as good if I didn’t succeed. She took the thread, passed the end between her lips, and gave it back to me to try again. Sometimes I twisted the wet thread between my thumb and index finger so that it became taut and pointed like a pin.