Of my mother, I only have two black and white photographs.
Apart, of course, from my own life and some biological memories that I don’t know if I can tell apart from suggestion and myth.
I am writing this book so that my mother might become real.
I am writing this book to tear my mother’s smell from the earth. I am exploring a method for those who have lost their origins, a mathematical system of feeling and thought—so complete as to revive a body, as hot as the earth in summer and as firm.
I am starting from what I have, the two photographs that portray her, in the order in which they appeared in my life.
The first
was taken on her wedding day, Saturday, 17 January 1959. Lucia is twenty-two, she is dressed all in white and she is not smiling.
One day, as I stared at this photograph until the images disappeared and the reality that lies behind things and that I call poetry started appearing, I took notes on a newspaper cutting, writing four sentences that will become clear as I write this book: “Her name was Lucia. Few cared about her life. Today is her wedding day. Something of her doesn’t exist any more.”
The second photograph is the rectangle, only a few centimetres wide, glued onto her ID card, which was found in June 1965 in a handbag left behind in Rome. It shows a young woman, fairly good-looking and self-assured, in a black top and a black jacket, wearing gold earrings and a necklace. A simple elegance. Her gaze is sincere, open and remote. Although Lucia is barely smiling, her slightly protruding bottom lip gives the entire face a faintly sulky and childish expression. She looks a bit like Claudia Cardinale in Valerio Zurlini’s Girl with a Suitcase. I don’t know how old she is in this photograph.
In the picture where Lucia is dressed in black, the word “photograph”, writing made of light, writing with light, appears correct.
In the photograph in white, the bride’s gaze swallows up the entire scene in a glassy absence of life. Lucia is putting on the smooth eyes of the prey pretending not to be there, she draws back into an impenetrable gaze, where the world is a landscape of jagged, dreamless beasts asleep outside of nature. And over those open eyes the world glides, it does not settle any more.
Saturday, 17 January 1959. The Bride
The bride has a split lip.
The bride still doesn’t want to. Slaps force her, but her will is unbent. Despite her determination, the deal is nonetheless sealed: the exploitation of the considerable potential for labour and reproduction of a young female in exchange for an increase in property. Apart from the neighbouring piece of land, the Grecos own several other fields, and even some cottages in the countryside. The body of a rebellious virgin in exchange for fields. Clouds are looming on the horizon. But that’s how things are everywhere. It goes without saying: this is the solidarity of the hungry, the logic by which every single body, every single life, is a tributary of one river only—the social ascent of the family. No need to get hysterical, just focus on enduring. The present still bears the ghostly shadow of the times when, at the end of a meal, breadcrumbs are collected from the tablecloths to be kneaded again and country girls have to sell their hair to the city ladies who can afford wigs. As soon as you are out of the gorge of destitution, you must consolidate a lasting possession, a smooth, flat financial surface on which to walk unperturbed towards old age. Every single action of the family is a strategic bridge towards this goal.
Today is the festival of Saint Anthony the Great, patron of pigs and all beasts, with the image of the saint taken in a procession together with farm animals, bonfires and chants. Lucia’s silent nuptials are surrounded by the musical bellowing of the celebrations. Perhaps they are taking advantage of the feast day to save some money.
In the only photograph from the wedding, the bride is confined between her father and her husband. A compact row, an army against anguish. The father, slightly taller than her and with rock-like shoulders, his face like a loaf of stony earth furrowed by rivulets of dry sun. The figure of the father, in a black suit and black tie, is a crack of still wind, stretched like a shadow of history over Lucia’s right shoulder. Lucia’s left hand is trapped under the groom’s right arm. The groom, in a grey double-breasted suit, has his left hand on his mother-in-law’s left shoulder. Delicately, just the tips of his fingers. Lucia’s mother is the figure closest to the lens and yet she is marginal. Puzzled face, raised eyebrows. A slow decline of strength, in her black dress with the round collar trimmed in white lace and the small buttons done up all the way to the neck. A month before Lucia’s twenty-third birthday, no one is touching Lucia. No one is trying to feign joy. The church is the one from their village and it will come back into these pages at the end.
Lucia is wearing a tulle dress shaped at the waist: a voile skirt and a long-sleeved bodice. Below, white court shoes, with high heels. “High” meaning five centimetres. I heard about the shoes from someone because the photograph ends just under the groin, it’s a medium shot.
The bride is not wearing any make-up at all. And yet, she is altogether like a white clown in a line of animals. At that moment, she loses her balance, fails to foresee.
The Tale of the Vine
The little girl is gone, in her place a dark-haired young woman is hoeing around the vine
under the olive trees, where the winter light draws a white cross.
When she dislodges the earth, Lucia wears hobnail boots, work boots with a horseshoe of square-headed nails all around the sole. Heavy shoes, loud and slippery on floors, but the soles don’t wear out and the shoes traverse, unscathed, more than one lifetime, rivers of mud, with howling winds at one’s back.
Air in still bursts. Near gale, sudden downpours at higher altitudes.
The wind arises from behind her as she frees the ditches from the leaves obstructing the water flow. Water goes around the obstacles. She doesn’t.
Assiduous, absolute wind. Esplanades of wind. Social wind. And Lucia in the middle, dressed in black as she hoes the earth. She is beaten by the wind. Her gaze is overladen
and mineral, the gaze of a stone, of a beast of burden.
In the ghostly heart of January, Lucia picks through the clods by hand, as if they were the beads of a rosary, preparing the ground to plant out a cherry tree. She looks at the roots as they yearn for the nourishment of the earth. She feels the dust of her land on her face, she feels the fog that surrounds her shoulders. Like a branch, Lucia stands among the things of the earth. All empty.
Bodies seasoned in the January sun amid apple trees and threshing machines, rusting in the solitude of the northern corner of the landscape. They are inert matter.
Lucia looks at life moving in the infinitesimal form of a fly
on the tree trunk, where centuries overlap in concentric rings. Above it, the laminated patina of the bark, the westering film
of time. Lucia looks at the embers dying out, feels time
passing by. Another pointless day
gone. Lucia
breathes. Engraved in an odd fixity, the ivory of the birches likens the world to a forest of bones. A paradigm.
Here where the proverbial roses
grow, Lucia breathes in
the top notes of envenomed leaves. The rotten winter. Dark rains fallen over the course of millennia. Damp
seeps into the bone. And the murmurs of the birds.
Since she left, no one wants it, this piece of land. The field where Lucia sweated blood is left untilled. In winter, this land slides, it is an unterraced land, abandoned to its own devices and the wheat roots.
Wheat roots can’t hold down the earth, wheat roots are thin. They are a mass, though. All together, they hold the soil. But the soil slides downhill. And sweeps away Lucia’s work.
Lucia is still there, where the world ends and the impression of the valley is the sound of an immense breathing.
I am coming for you, now that I am double your age, and I look at you,
from a life that maybe you imagined for me.
Now I am coming for you and I am taking you away.
Lucia, hold my hand.
Lucia and the Sea
The sea must have made such an impression on her, and the city of Termoli too, high above the sea, with its reinforced concrete steps leading into the old town and the narrow alleys, the sheets hung to wave over the calm at sea, interrupted
by Phoenician trabucchi: the fishing platforms that play over the water like strings, agile jetties made of ropes, boards and stilts on the surf, long-legged constructions assembled to follow the elegance of dragonflies, hovering over the iridescent water
amidst the efflorescence of moss, the slobber of seaweeds and a high relief
of bivalved molluscs. For you too, Lucia, I choose the limpid rhymes dedicated by the poet Giorgio Caproni to his mother Anna—Anna Picchi. And you, Lucia Galante, rhyming with elegant(e). Perturbant(e).
Married four years and no children, the blame must be with the woman. A woman incapable of having children is worthless, dead matter:
“Go to Termoli for treatment!”
To improve fertility, the health service offers quick treatments with spring waters, the fertilizing properties of which, so to speak, were discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps after a sudden upswing in population among the households partaking in the waters. During the sixties, so much faith is put into the beneficial effects of mineralized water that, towards the end of the decade, even Sophia Loren openly takes advantage of the springs in Salsomaggiore.
At any rate, these treatments are gentle and non-invasive: a week of steam inhalation, mud applied to the lower abdomen, spread over the pelvic area in the place of briefs, and plunges in tubs of water rich in sulphurous or salso-bromo-iodic salts, which apparently promote microcirculation in the womb and ovarian functionality, as well as having properties that are anti-inflammatory and rebalance the hormones. Lastly, the mechanical treatments: a series of deep irrigations to remove any adhesions and open up, through sheer hydraulic power, Fallopian tubes assumed to be blocked.
Lucia sets off, takes three coaches and goes to get covered in mud, to have her moist membranes separated and to be hit by jets of condensation in the pools of the riviera. Lucia buys a bathing suit to slide into the fossil water, resurfaced from the darkness under the earth. The water goes through the layers of clay that bear the mark of the history of the planet and comes out in the sunlight, in this minimal story of an unhappily married woman. Alive like a beast, the water whirls
around Lucia’s empty body and the rocks that show the imprint of prehistoric ferns. Clear water, mend the banal and tragic wound of being unloved. Water that touches and water that heals where it touches. The prophecy of a water that dissolves pain like a handful of viperine salt. Lucia buys a bathing suit. This repetition is not an error, but rather an underlining, which will make sense in the end, like many things.
For now, at the simple end of every day, just before evening, Lucia goes down to look, at the sea
and blends the gaze of her eyes, which are the colour of a wood speckled with threads of transparent light,
with a water that does not end
in natural signs. Towards sunset, from land, a horizontal breeze. The incidence of sunlight on the scene. Flat, crushed against the ground. All that movement, that cradle as far as the eye can see. Virgin Mary, give me a child, something to hold, a living creature
to console me. The openness of life in front of
the openness of water. The starlings, in expanding or brief murmurations, on the harbour square, the gaze sweeping from the birds to the sea. How crystal clear is the sea, as if the sun had sprinkled it with time machines, with too much perspicacity.
You are like the oleanders on the lakeside, blue and generous,
like a festival of lights
and the blackness that yields. You hear your heart, Lucia, and the engines, the lifeless thuds of the anchors. Between these sheets that are not yours
your world disappears, you fall asleep to the beating of your heart, which is finally alone.
Where You Did Not Take Me
On 30 December, I telephone the archive of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Rome. Very kindly, the archivist explains to me that, after forty years, all documents (including those relating to investigations) are sent for pulping, unless they pertain to cases of historical relevance. Nonetheless, she promises to check whether any details were transcribed in the so-called “tomes”, even if it’s just the name of the doctor who carried out the post-mortem. However, she points out, the “crimes against oneself” are usually kept for even less time.
I realize that Lucia has committed three crimes, being driven to child abandonment and suicide largely by the first charge of adultery.
Of course, in the case of a successful suicide (so to speak), the dissuasive effect of the criminal prohibition, the so-called “deterrent function of the sentence”, ceases to make sense. I will very soon discover, though, how Lucia the criminal is punished for her choice to put an end to a life that has become unendurable to her.
In the meantime, I submit an application with the Central Archives of the State requesting permission to personally check whether there is a file on Lucia Galante dated 1965. While I wait for these and many other answers and files, in the radioactive mood of someone who feels that they’re carrying out a duty postponed for decades, I am coming with you where you did not take me: into death. I am coming down to understand what you felt.
For those who fall into fresh water, life ends within three, maximum five minutes. Through the capillaries of the lungs, water enters the circulatory stream, doubles the volume of the blood running through the body and swells the red cells until they explode. The lack of oxygenated haemoglobin causes a fatal ventricular fibrillation.
After the first two minutes, when the person feels a strong sense of burning and a weight in their chest, the lack of oxygen causes, in the soul of the one drowning, a feeling of peace due to the progressive loss of consciousness that lasts the three or four minutes left before death from cardiac arrest.
It appears that death by water is the sweetest.
Two minutes and everything is oblivion.
Two minutes and, under the river, here are the stars of your countryside
here are the mornings of your childhood, Easter
and your mum who lets you sleep
with your dog,
here is me, looking at you from the future
as you slowly lower yourself into that atomic mirror,
into that end of the world, and I am looking at you
and I am leaving you
free, I am leaving you
like this, with no remedy,
and for me I only take what I need to explain
the solitude of your matter,
deserted.
We are in a pool of light. Every step I take towards you makes a
subaquatic noise.
Lucia, I hope that, as you go, you hear again the festival bells raining
abundance and flowers on a countryside that is still asleep.
I hope that you are finally resting.
Monday, 28 June. The Things Left Alone
At six in the evening, Francesco Mastrandrea, a thirty-five-year-old porter, notifies the carabinieri of the presence of “four pieces of luggage” that have been abandoned several days before in Rome, under the porticoes in Piazza Esedra, opposite the Italian Company for Tourism, where he is employed.
The portico floor in Piazza Esedra, where the luggage has been left, is speckled with large flakes of polychromatic marble, curiously identical to that of the hall in the building where I will later live.
Some creatures in police uniforms expose our things on the station
desk. I wonder if they have pity for them, if they touch them
with love as they put them in the bag
where the things of the dead go. Who knows how many times they have
already rearranged the things of the dead, these bodies
in uniforms that must defend themselves from the scream of pain arising
from the things
that are now nothing but things. Maybe they joke with one another,
maybe they think about their mothers as they open this abandoned
handbag.
List of the things left alone:
a green leatherette suitcase containing folded items of men’s and women’s clothing, Maria Grazia Greco’s birth certificate, issued on 16 June by the Milan Town Hall, and a gold bracelet;
a black sealskin briefcase containing Giuseppe Di Pietro’s driving licence, a fountain pen, photocopies relating to construction projects and some letters, eventually unsent, in which Giuseppe desperately pleads for any kind of job from contractors he used to work with;
a black handbag, a Boston bag, with handles, containing Lucia Galante’s ID, “profession: farmer”, and some other objects, as shown in a photograph that appeared on page 5 of Il Messaggero on 29 June:
the gold necklace and the two earrings with radial setting and a dark stone worn by Lucia in the photograph from her ID, a matching pendant, a thin 18-carat gold chain with a cross, a ring, a steel watch, two drop earrings in their box, a metal ring with a red stone and two loose keys;
a red nylon net containing nappies and baby clothes, together with a plastic doll at least forty centimetres tall, a reproduction almost in full scale of my little figure at the time, with short hair and ears poking out.
Lucia divests herself of all her valuables except the wedding ring.
No one, for an undefined number of days, has touched that handbag abandoned on the ground.
The carabinieri only photographed the valuables, but in 1980, together with the handbag that holds them, I was given: a black purse made of faux crocodile skin containing twenty lire from 1958; a small “free sample not for sale” tube of Colgate toothpaste; a trapezoidal bottle, made of blue, see-through plastic with a white cap, of Stilla eye drops, the liquid within turned by the years into a blue, egg-shaped pebble about two millimetres across; the carefully folded information leaflet for Forhans mouthwash; the two small white gloves from her wedding day; a plastic collar stiffener for a men’s shirt; a bronze thimble with a blue ink stain and a round tub of Nivea cream in which, as I have already written in 2010, when I undertook a first, very quick attempt at writing down this account, “the foil is slightly folded in an unusual way and bears the impression of a right index finger and the matching half-circle smudge on the tin bottom. All women take their hand cream with the same gesture.”
But there is more, a gift that comes from time and that, back then, I had missed: the toothpaste tube retains, on its two opposite faces, the metaphysical imprint of Lucia’s childlike fingers, index and thumb. My mother’s hands.
Neat and tidy, she pressed it only once, the surface where the name Colgate is printed in red facing
upwards, where her eyes still shone.
At any rate, I cannot see any signs of terminal destitution. Eye drops, toothpaste and hand cream. No make-up—Lucia likes to stay clean.
What do the two loose keys in Lucia’s bag open, though? Which doors? Despite the frantic investigations by the carabinieri and the police, Lucia and Giuseppe do not appear to have checked into any guest house, boarding house or hostel in Rome.
They seem to have come to Rome only to kill themselves.
Finally, in the photograph of the objects dumped in front of the journalists’ lenses—the suitcase split open like a clam along its outside zip—a white bra can be seen. On show just like that, in the newspapers. The things after us, the things
after we are no longer responsible.
And the naked doll, made of plastic. A poor thing that was all that was possible.
In the photograph, the doll has her little legs askew, covering the nakedness in the middle. By chance, or thanks to the admirable decency of a carabiniere.
No pushchair was found in the abandoned luggage; I myself was set down on a rug. I can imagine taking the last trip, from Milan to Rome, in Lucia’s arms or in a light fabric sling that was later abandoned on the shore. Maybe in the rug, tied across her shoulder, just like I carried my children. Always on me, safe.
Intelligence of Love
Lucia’s love for me—destined precisely for me, surely and simply—lies in the fact that she did not take me with her in death, it lies in where she did not take me and in the fact that she redelivered me to life. To the life of all. Making, of my life, from its very origins, life that goes back to all.
Finally, it lies in having endured, even in that very short interval of time in which she still lived, the pain of going while leaving me in the danger to which she was exposing me by abandoning me.
In those years, though, more trust is put into children, and into life at large. Life makes a different music, a deep bass with little trills of laughter. Those who have endured the war rest in the righteous conviction that, if you want to live, you can survive almost anything. That there is no life without a wound. No one, if living, is left untouched.
Despite this widespread wisdom, Lucia and Giuseppe’s last will is, nonetheless, to protect their daughter’s life—as best as they can and in the best world they can imagine and, even more importantly, reach—through an internal motion that we can define as a sequence of ordinary expressions, suddenly all invigorated and clear: “strength born out of desperation”, “the ingenuity of the poor”, “the art of getting by”.
But there is a beacon that shines and blazes above all expressions: Dante’s ultimate alchemical formula of the “intelligence of love”, that feeling of the intelligence that allows a peasant woman and a bricklayer to put together, piece by piece, a news item, to salvage what was salvageable, that is me, life left to live and that must escape the ruin.
Once and for all, Dante has found the name
of the immortal love of mortals.
Lucia crossed herself before lowering herself into the water. Even if, over those two years with Giuseppe, she resolved to vote for the Communist Party, her political faith certainly coexisted with the symbolic value of an act that comes from her childhood and bonds with what is sacred in the earth and the heavens.
Then, she entrusted herself to the water, with no violence. I am certain, as much as I can be, that this is how it went: a suicide like this is not like jumping off a bridge, impulsively, it is letting oneself go into the water, an element that is like life before life, like destiny.
Take Me Home
The hearse is rising, very slowly, from the bottom of the countryside. It is the first midnight of July, Lucia’s body is coming from Rome, it has crossed once again the shadow and the mountains, it has touched the nearby towns, it has climbed from the provincial road to the threshold of her home. But they don’t let her in, not even now that she is dead: half the town is gathered at the crossroads at the end of the main street, just outside the village. Even the parish priest has come down to the outskirts of town to entrust Lucia Galante’s brief life to a benign Father, though without opening the doors of the church to the coffin with the remains. They wait. Since the news arrived, this is all Palata can talk about. Even the youngest ones are up tonight, they slip in through their parents’ legs, they hear the small crowd whisper:
“It’s the girl who jumped . . .”
Many of the adults are character actors, sad ruminators of tragedies; others are here in earnest, staying up until the small hours to bid the final farewell to the daughter of this land. The older children, infected by the commotion of the adults, run back and forth:
“Here it comes, here it comes!”
The hearse stops by the crowd at the crossroads. The wood of the coffin aspersed with holy water, the hatch closed on her own body’s reasserted solitude, Lucia travels alone along the street where she used to go to school, proceeding into the moonless night. Before leaving, Lucia taught me to say “Mum”. Tonight, they leave her for tomorrow’s burial.
The next day, they lower her into her own earth in silence, eyes downcast and in haste out of shame. No mass and no funeral. Because Lucia, who wanted to choose life at all costs, eventually gave up the gift of life in the last act of freedom possible.
Forty-seven years later, they take her out of the earth to put her in a shared ossuary—someone needs to go through the place where she sleeps, not bothering anyone. And so, the sun of a Saturday in May touches gently
your little matter. The music be with you, my daughter.
