But most important for me is the memory of the casual way that my mother’s hand and fingers pushed the needle and thread through the fabric, lightly pulled it, stuck the point of the needle back in. That pricking, pushing, pulling was done so rapidly and expertly, moved straight forward with such precision, that today any well-performed operation makes me think of it, and it vexes me that I no longer remember the vocabulary she used. She spoke of running stitches, backstitch, certainly of a chain stitch, of buttonhole stitches, but the rest of the words have faded; she didn’t want me to keep them, she wanted me to learn other things. So it’s her hand that remains, with the nails that never grew, it was as if they curved forward, and the swollen blue veins on the back and the rough fingertips, pricked and pricked again, almost never protected by the thimble.
It was the sewing that cast a spell, much more than cutting. The mobile skill of that hand put together the pieces of material, made the seams invisible, the pieces of fabric regained a soft continuity, a new compactness, became a dress, the shape of a female body, skin clinging to skin, an organism that lay in her lap and sometimes slid down to her feet, which were in motion like her hands, ready to go to the pedal of the sewing machine. It was a back and forth that seemed like a dance to me, the hand moved the needle, the mouth bit the thread, the chest often rotated on the chair, turned to the machine to sew, the feet, wide, with a powerful structure, rested on the pedal and started the movement of the machine’s needle, an extremely rapid movement associated with a noise like rolling metal.
The machine appeared to be racing and was still. The big wheel below made the small one on top turn. It spun the bobbin on the pin, bobbins with different-colored thread, I saw the swirl of the blue, the green, the red, the brown, the black, pirouettes stamped by my mother’s feet. The thread stretched to the head of the machine, hurtled down toward the needle, which moved rapidly up and down like an athlete jumping rope, and disappeared into the material, leaving behind a dense stitching escorted by the fingers.
I watched, there was a moment I didn’t want to miss. It was when the thread was running out around the bobbin, and kept dwindling, became a thin covering, and finally unrolled completely. The tail end flew away, too, leaving the bobbin bare to rotate a few more times on the pin, until it stopped, revealing its true color, which had no attraction. It was a moment that made me sad. I took the bobbin off the pin like a corpse, its life was over, I felt, it had given all it had to give, no more joyous swirls of color. The thread was all in Signora Caldaro’s dress, a transmigration of energy, and the dress was ready for the hot iron that would prepare the seams for felling, strokes of warmth, feverish caresses before the garment went to lie in the bedroom and become one with the body of the signora, the lawyer’s wife, and take on the odor of her illness, perhaps of her despair.
My mother soon stopped making dresses for other women, and began to make them for us, her daughters, for relatives, for some neighbors, and mainly for herself. As a child I liked it when she made me a dress. I liked when she took my measurements, because she came very close, I smelled her smell, felt her breath on my face. The clothes she made for me were always clothes that seemed for playing; the ones she made for herself also had a playful aura. I remember when she took off her worn housedress and tried on the dress she was working on in front of the mirror or had a neighbor put it on so that she could see its flaws better. How I liked her dresses, the fragrance they had of creams, of lipstick, a smell of sugared almonds. I tried them on secretly, I put on her coats, her shoes, and if she discovered me she wasn’t angry, she let me. Rather, she looked at me with her melancholy smile, her body concentrated on her sewing, her appearance uncared for.
But even then, around the time of the storeroom I told you about, those dresses communicated an anxiety, too; they contained a poison like the shirt of Nessus. Over the years her capacity for sewing began to weigh on me. By early adolescence I hated that skill, I was ashamed of going around in dresses she had made for me. I would have liked normal dresses, which would make me like other girls. In those dresses of hers, instead, there was something excessive, something eccentric, that was displayed especially in the dresses she made for herself.
She copied them from dresses worn by movie stars, princesses, from the models of fashion designers. But she had the gift of remaking them so that on her they seemed more charged with energy. My mother never sewed a dress for herself that didn’t make her appear an extraordinary woman. Whereas at home she was diminished to a bundle of rags sitting on a chair, when she went out she endowed her body with the pride of the stunning appearance, the silver-screen splendor of the open-air cinemas on summer nights at the sea. She was a timid woman, yet in the way she dressed she demonstrated a boldness, an imagination that frightened and humiliated me. The more I hated her dressing up, the more, once outside, I felt around her my father’s alarm, the admiration of other men, their overexcited talk, the effort at gaiety intended to please her, the envy and the insult for the way she could make herself beautiful. The effect my mother had in a tram, in the funicular, on the street, in the stores, at the movies embarrassed me. The fact that she dressed with such care to go out, with her husband or alone, gave me the impression that she concealed a desperate disgrace, and I felt shame and pity for her. When, in the clothes she made for herself, she radiated all the light she could, that exposure made me suffer: seeing her decked out, I found her a badly reared child, an adult woman humiliated by ridicule. In those striking outfits I felt alternately seduction, mockery, and death. So a mute fury gripped me, a wish to ruin her with my own hands and ruin myself, and then to erase the false look of a diva’s daughter, the descendant of a queen, that she sought to give me by sewing night and day. I wanted her in her house clothes, that was my mother, even though I was pleased with her novel-like beauty. I wanted her without her flair for sewing. When I could avoid the clothes she made for me, I reacted with the desire to be sloppy: not to look like a pretty little daughter on special offer.
As a girl I was hostile to feminine traits. Putting on makeup, the wish to do so, the desire to wear a flattering dress, the very idea of the flattering dress irritated me, humiliated me. I was afraid that someone would think I was dressing like that to impress him and would laugh behind my back at the effort I had subjected myself to, the time I had devoted to that goal, would go around boasting: she did it for me. So I hid in big shirts, sweaters two sizes too large, baggy jeans. I wanted to eliminate the idea of being well dressed inherited from my mother; I would wear everyday clothes, not like her, who always wore nice dresses in spite of the wretchedness of her life as a woman. I wanted to be dressed alla sanfrasò—she used that expression when she saw me go out. It was a Gallicism of the dialect (sanfasò, sans façon, unfashionable) that she uttered with disgust, the term she used to say: one mustn’t be like that, one doesn’t live like that.
Sometimes I really felt slovenly, as if I were completely alla sanfrasò, and I suffered for it. But often I was sought after in spite of the dull tones, and then I felt I had on a sort of outfit that had never been worn, a beautiful garment that was clearly visible beyond the jeans and shapeless t-shirts. I think that the intense game of clothes in Troubling Love comes from that sensation. Delia, a liberated adult woman, in the tight-fitting clothes that are a carapace for her choked body, is as if assaulted by the clothes that her mother intended to give her; she is obsessed by their murky origin and will have to descend to the depths to find Amalia’s blue dress and have the courage to put it on. I think that Olga’s reaction to her daughter Ilaria’s dressing up is fed by the same emotions. But it’s hard to say what really ends up in books. Or sometimes it’s too easy. I had given Delia a dream that consciously summed up many of the anxieties tied to clothes, to the dressmaking work that my mother did. This passage, too, is unpublished; I’ll transcribe it for you.
As an adolescent I had a dream that I still have. It’s pointless to give the details, the de
tails always change.
In the dream the most varied things happened to me in the most diverse situations, but the moment always arrived when I was in front of a man and had to undress. I didn’t want to, but he was there, he wouldn’t go away, he looked at me with amusement, he waited. Then I tried cautiously to take off my clothes, but they wouldn’t come off, it was as if they had been drawn on my skin. The man began to laugh, he laughed so hard he was bent over double; I became furious, I felt a violent wave of jealousy, I was jealous of him, surely he had another woman.
In the effort to keep him by pleasing him, I grabbed my chest with both hands and opened it, I opened up my own body as if it were a bathrobe. I didn’t feel any pain, I saw only that inside me there was a live woman, and I suddenly understood that I was only someone else’s dress, a stranger’s.
I couldn’t bear it, my jealousy increased. I was jealous now of that woman I had discovered inside, I tried to hit her in every possible way, grab her, I wanted to kill her. But between her and me was an impassable distance, I couldn’t even touch her, and the laughter continued, uncontainable. In front of me, watching, however, was not the man but my mother, and I wasn’t surprised, it seemed, rather, that she had always been there.
When I woke up, even though I knew the dream well, I was angry, I felt disgust and the wish to do harm.
Delia’s dream was partly invented, and you can feel it, yet it came from that real adolescent anxiety. What was the secret dress that men saw on me? How had I put it on? If I had been able to take it off would I become someone other? What other?
Unfortunately dreams are difficult to relate; as soon as you write them they force you to invent, to put in order, and they become false. In novels especially they are so shamelessly functional to the requirements of the psychological construction of the character that their artificiality becomes intolerable. Sometimes, however, nightmares take the right form in a few lines. Of all the literary clothes I know, the one that best describes the emotional state I felt as a child is the dress worn by the very feminine Harey, the heroine of Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, the ghost of a woman who has killed herself for love, a masculine word made woman. I’ll cite a passage; the narrator is the protagonist, Chris.
“Harey, I have to go,” I said. “If you really want to, come with me.”
“O.K.”
She got up suddenly.
“Why are you barefoot?” I asked, going to the closet and choosing two bright-colored overalls, one for me and one for her.
“I don’t know . . . I must have lost my shoes somewhe…” she said uncertainly.
I pretended not to have heard. “You won’t be able to put this on over your dress. You have to take it off.”
“The overall . . . ? But why?” she asked, trying to take off her dress. But a strange thing happened: it was impossible to get it off, it didn’t have buttons. The red buttons, on the front, were only decorative. It lacked any type of opening, a zipper or anything else. Harey smiled, embarrassed.
I find that smile of Harey’s moving, as I do every one of Harey’s actions in the book. That dress that you can’t take off and therefore don’t know how it got on terrifies me and attracts me. A few lines later, Chris, the novel’s hero, takes a sort of chisel and cuts the dress off, starting at the neckline, so she can finally take it off and put on the overall “that’s a little too big for her.” But it’s the classic brisk male move: I was never enthusiastic about that decisive surgical intervention. For me Harey’s dress hides another one underneath, and then another and another, and no external intervention can resolve the problem. Besides, Lem makes Harey a ghost who returns, returns always with an invincible energy. And she always wears the same dress. And to undress her Chris needs to cut it again and again. If the ghost of Harey returned a thousand times, she would always wear the same dress, and Chris, by dint of cutting, would find in the room in the station of Solaris a thousand dresses all alike—that is, a single female dress that has a thousand reflections. What to do with a dress like that? Must one learn to take it off in order not to die? Must we resign ourselves to the idea that it is the dress of our death as women, and every attempt at resurrection only offers it to us again as a symbol of our humiliation? The passages in the books that influence us we rewrite according to our needs.
For example, also on the subject of clothes, I certainly put my own interpretation, as a girl, on The Best of Husbands, by Alba de Céspedes. I’m talking mainly about the first hundred and fifty pages, which is the story of a mother-daughter relationship and, more generally, a memorable catalogue of relations between women. When I read those pages for the first time, I was sixteen. I liked many things about them, others I didn’t understand, still others annoyed me. But the point is the conflicted reading that developed, the fact that I couldn’t seriously identify with the young Alessandra, the first-person narrator. Certainly I found the relationship between her and her mother, Eleonora, a pianist who is held back by a vulgar husband, very moving. Certainly, in the passages where Alessandra describes her deep bond with her mother, I recognized myself. But her absolute approval of the passion that Eleonora feels for the musician Hervey disturbed me: I mean, rather, that Alessandra’s acceptance of it seemed to me sentimental and improbable, it made me angry. I would have fought a hypothetical extramarital love of my mother with all my strength, the mere suspicion kindled my rage, incited my jealousy much more than her definite love for my father. In short I didn’t understand, I had the impression of knowing more about Eleonora than her daughter could perceive. And it was precisely the pages about the dress made for the concert with Hervey that marked the difference between me the reader and the narrator. They seemed to me brilliant, and I still love them today, as an important part of a book that now seems to me to have a great literary intelligence.
Let’s look, then, if you don’t mind, at the story of that dress, whose development is complex. Eleonora has talent as an artist, but, dulled by her role as the wife of a vulgar man, she is diminished, and has the faded appearance of a sensitive woman without love. Her mother, Alessandra’s grandmother, also wasted her life: she was Austrian, and a talented actress, but she married an Italian artilleryman and had to pack up in a box the veils and feathers of her costumes for Juliet, for Ophelia: she, too, was fated to give up her talent. But now Eleonora, nearly forty, going from house to house giving piano lessons, ends up at a wealthy villa as the teacher of a girl named Arletta. She meets her brother, the mysterious musician Hervey, and falls in love. Love restores her talent, her desire to live, her artistic ambition, and she decides to give a concert with Hervey. It’s at this point that the problem of the dress arises. What will Eleonora wear for her concert of liberation, in the luxurious house of Arletta and Hervey?
As an adolescent reader, I trembled at every line. I liked the fact that love counted so much in that book. I felt that it was true, that one can’t live without love. But at the same time I perceived that something wasn’t right. The clothes in Eleonora’s closet distressed me, I recognized something I knew. “They were all of a neutral color,” de Céspedes writes, giving voice to Alessandra: “brown, gray, two or three were of raw silk, with melancholy collars of white lace: clothes suitable for an old person . . . The dresses hung limply from the hangers. I said, softly, ‘They seem like so many dead women, Mamma.’ ” There: the image of the clothes as dead women hanging on the hangers must have fit well with my secret feeling about clothes: I have often used it, I do still. And there is another image, a few pages earlier, which I immediately inserted in my vocabulary, which refers to the vanishing body of Eleonora in love: “She was so thin it was as if the dress held only a faint breath.” The dress animated only by a warm breath seemed so true. I read. I read avidly to see how it was going to end. What dress would Eleonora wear? She jumps up, she goes to the dresser, she takes out a large box. The daughter, Alessandra, doesn’t take her eyes off her mother: “The box was tied wit
h old string: Mamma cut them with one snip. She took off the lid, and inside were pink and blue veils, feathers, satin ribbons. I didn’t suppose she possessed such a treasure: so I watched, amazed, and she turned her eyes to the portrait of her mother. I understood that these were the silks of Juliet and Ophelia and I touched the material with reverence. ‘How could we alter them?’ she asked me uncertainly.” I trembled. The dress of liberation would arrive through the maternal line; the costumes of Eleonora’s actress mother, thanks to the dressmaker’s wisdom of a noisy neighbor, Fulvia, become clothes for a concert performer, a garment enabling her to appear beautiful to Hervey. Eleonora puts aside the neutral clothes of her role as wife and uses pastel veils to make a dress that is the color of a woman in love, a lover. I was nervous. I didn’t understand the joyful attitude of the daughter, Alessandra. Reading, I felt that things would not turn out well, and I was surprised that that sixteen-year-old girl—a girl the same age as me—didn’t even suspect it. No, I wasn’t blithely blind, like her. I perceived the tragedy of Eleonora. I felt that the passage from dull clothes to bright-colored clothes would not improve her situation. Rather, when Alessandra exclaims to Fulvia, the neighbor-dressmaker “We have to make a dress for Mamma out of Ophelia’s robes!” I was sure of it, the tragedy was near. The new dress made from the old theatrical fabrics wouldn’t save Eleonora. Alessandra’s mother—it was clear—would kill herself, would surely drown.
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