Birth and Death of the Housewife [1 ed.] 9781438428130, 9781438428079

Citation preview

Birth

and

Death of the

Housewife Paola Masino Translated and with an Introduction by

Marella Feltrin-Morris

This page intentionally left blank.

Birth and Death of the Housewife

SUNY series, Women Writers in Translation ——————— Marilyn Gaddis Rose, editor

Birth and Death of the Housewife

PAOLA MASINO Translated and with an Introduction by

Marella Feltrin-Morris

This translation is based on the 1982 edition of Nascita e morte della massaia (Milan: La Tartaruga). © 1982, by La Tartaruga edizioni. Permission to publish is gratefully acknowledged to Alvise Memmo. Cover Image: Paola Masino. Fondo Paola Masino. Archivio del Novecento. Sapienza Università di Roma. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Masino, Paola, 1908–1989. [Nascita e morte della massaia. English] Birth and death of the housewife / Paola Masino ; translated and with an introduction by Marella Feltrin-Morris. p. cm. — (Suny series, women writers in translation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2807-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Housewives—Italy—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Feltrin-Morris, Marella. II. Title. PQ4829.A83N313 2009 853'.914—dc22

2008054153 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Acknowledgments / vii

Introduction / 1

Birth and Death of the Housewife / 17

Author’s Note / 211

vi — Birth and Death of the Housewife

This page intentionally left blank.

Birth and Death of the Housewife — vii

Acknowledgments The cliché of the translator as a reclusive figure who works in aseptic solitude is, fortunately, a myth. If the goal of translation is, indeed, that of promoting communication, understanding, and appreciation of different cultures, then a translator can only benefit from the input of proofreaders, specialists, and keen-eyed enthusiasts who will offer a fresh perspective on the text. I would therefore like to thank the individuals who have accompanied me throughout this project and contributed in countless ways to its accomplishment. First, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Rosemarie LaValva, who supervised my first translation workshop and fostered my passion for translation. Her guidance was crucial to my discovery of Paola Masino’s works; Marilyn Gaddis-Rose, whose belief in the importance of translation and tireless contribution to it have been greatly inspiring; Carrol Coates, who shared with me his genuine devotion to translation and profound knowledge of its practical aspects; and Colleen Reardon, who carefully read my manuscript and offered insightful suggestions. I also wish to thank my colleague, Chad Davidson, for proofreading my manuscript and contributing to my positive outlook on collaboration; Dr. Alvise Memmo, for believing in this project and graciously supplying me with useful material on Paola Masino; Professor Francesca Bernardini Napoletano and Alessandro Taddei for welcoming me to the Archivio del Novecento in Rome; my friends María Constanza Guzmán and Nello Barbieri for their steadfast encouragement; and Jon Morris, for his painstaking reading of my manuscript, precious advice, and support. I dedicate this project to him.

— vii —

This page intentionally left blank.

Introduction — 1

Introduction “Defeatist and cynical” were the words Fascist censors used to define Paola Masino’s boldest and most controversial novel, Birth and Death of the Housewife (Nascita e morte della massaia), first published in installments between 1941 and 1942, and then as a single volume by Bompiani in 1945. Indeed, such indignant reaction comes as no surprise, given that the book attacks those very same institutions—marriage and motherhood—that Fascism sought to idealize and promote for the sake of the homeland. Already at the outset of the novel, the nameless female protagonist strikes the reader as being quite the opposite of a submissive homemaker concerned exclusively with the well-being of her household and family. Emerging, like a character out of Samuel Beckett’s plays, from a trunk “that served as her wardrobe, bed, dresser, table, and bedroom, a trunk full of blanket rags, bits of bread, books, and funeral remains” (BDH 17), she displays—already at a very young age—a stubbornly desperate need to feed her mind and unleash her imagination, even at the expense of a body that carries “deadlines, rules, and the need to take precautions” (BDH 90). When she agrees, for her mother’s sake, to step out of the trunk and comply with the role society has assigned to her, she gives up her potential as a human being, turns off her intellect, and prepares for a lifelong performance as a female marionette. Her marriage to an ordinary, socially “proper” older man (whose pompous speeches on the function of women as the guardian angels of the hearth echo those of the regime) marks her further metamorphosis into a Housewife, forever tied to the four walls of an abode that neither shelters nor represents her, but that still lays claim to all of her energy, stifling her creativity. What is most difficult for the Housewife to endure is the realization that literature, which she held as her only support, actually reinforces the traditional, rigid role assigned to women, and that even the great artists to whom she turns

— 1 —

2 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

for consolation and understanding display an equally close-minded view of women as those who have not been blessed by the Muses. Pushkin, Stravinsky, Goethe, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Tolstoy, Cervantes, and Beethoven all depend on the services of female cooks and maids whom they despise but who will cater to their most basic need, that of eating. “Here is our true face,” concludes the Housewife. “Food, slave labor, and eternal dealing with ignorance, deceit, and daily necessities” (BDH 65). Although she remains faithful to her duty throughout her life and even beyond it, the Housewife exudes loathing for a society that requires women to become servants to their men and to a home they are supposed to safeguard and honor well above themselves and their intellectual potential, while their male companions are free to pursue their dreams. Not only does Birth and Death of the Housewife lash out against marriage, but it also paints a harsh portrait of motherhood. The Housewife’s mother is depicted as a vain, shallow woman whose concern with appearance and decorum makes her despise her daughter’s “abnormality.” The Housewife herself, although she accepts her duties toward her spouse and her home, draws the line when it comes to bearing children—another function of women according to the Fascist mentality—and she chooses to remain barren. Her rejection of motherhood is a complex matter: it represents a gesture against Fascism and its call on women to produce children who would then be taken from them and made into soldiers, but it is also perfectly in line with her vision of existence as constant compromise, struggle, and shame, and with her refusal to participate in its perpetuation. In rejecting motherhood, the Housewife is also reclaiming ownership of her own body, a body that she had been forced to translate into a female form when she exited her trunk. From her original appearance (presented as primitive and beastly, but also free and bursting with creative potential), a female needs to be tamed, forced into a standardized body and proper clothes, and finally, chained to a hearth that she will have to guard. When the Housewife undergoes that normalizing process as an adolescent, she is at first fascinated by her own body, which she plans to work on as “if it were a matter of urban planning” (BDH 30). Yet, she soon learns that, as the Bible preaches, the female body is indissolubly associated with shame, and that sexuality is meant to be confined. Only nostalgia is left for her “real” body, the body she was forced to abandon: “[the Housewife] thought of her own white, transparent body, her light bones. Where did that body come from? Certainly not from her mother, nor from the trunk, and not even from her own will. Hers was no longer a body, but a representation, a suggestion, a sample of the necessary attributes. Where were

Introduction — 3

her real bones, her nerves, hairs, nails, all of the semi-solid substances that should be part of her body? Someone must have stolen them when, to please her family, she had deposited them at the bottom of the trunk with the rotten blankets and the bread crumbs” (BDH 125). On entering her new house for the first time, the Housewife wishes she could return to her mother’s womb, find her father’s seed and go progressively back from seed to womb, back to the beginning of humanity, to discover whether the original sin was truly necessary. Here the idea of “original sin” seems to coincide with the separation of roles (physical and social) men and women suffer. If the body has to be molded and conformed to what is socially acceptable, the same is true for sex. Almost immediately after the wedding, the Housewife and her husband settle down to a placidly mechanical evening ritual from which sex is either absent or prudently limited, and soon the couple ceases to share the bed “out of decorum and hygiene” (BDH 69). At the same time, however, the Housewife’s sex drive is consummated in secret, through lonely struggles fought against the shameful flood of “desire and quiver commonly known as those of the flesh” (BDH 52). As for the possibility of adultery, it merely consists of another set of rules well formulated in esteemed works of literature, and these rules must be followed scrupulously. Having therefore discarded this mere semblance of freedom, the Housewife puts her sexuality at the service of her tyrant: the house. In a memorable scene, she gets down on her hands and knees and tests the spotlessness of the floor with her tongue, sliding it up and down the cold marble and moaning in a grotesque orgasm. Although the novel focuses on a single character and the suffocating role she is made to play throughout her life, by merely leafing through the pages one realizes that all of the characters, both male and female, are condemned to act in the same performance. To describe them, Masino draws freely from the virtually inexhaustible genre of the grotesque, so much so that at times the pages read like Expressionist paintings: “For a few minutes, a gaunt but real princess, rented for the occasion, moved cautiously and scornfully through the noisy scene, dragging behind her the trail of her gown as well as a trail of escorts, among whom were two very real counts and a duke. Advancing as one unit—the men glued to the lady’s trail and the lady so thin she was almost transparent—they looked like a floating cluster of jellyfish surrounded and swallowed by a school of sardines or by migrating herring” (BDH 33). Almost no character is spared this treatment, and the result is an ongoing puppet show in which everyone plays a part. The Housewife’s sisters, grotesque

4 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

doubles of Cinderella’s sisters, recreate the Housewife’s childhood in the trunk as a sort of caricature for the guests’ entertainment, but they, too, are pathetic caricatures, just like the respectable ladies whose faces, as the night progresses, turn “green and scaly, with chunks of makeup peeling off like plaster flakes” (BDH 41). And the condemnation to play a part is not limited to the members of the upper and middle class, but it extends to servants, too: “You steal,” the Housewife tells the gardener accusingly, “and you don’t even enjoy stealing; you steal out of duty, because a servant must steal from his master” (BDH 86). While both men and women are victims of their roles, the Housewife seems to imply that the situation for women is more unjust because, regardless of their status, they will always be slaves to their men, their children, and their houses. Not even prostitutes are an exception because, by accepting payment for their sexual performance, they merely attach yet another yardstick to what was already regulated and controlled. The awareness of being no more than a character is what distinguishes the Housewife from everyone else. Perceiving the world around her as a puppet show, she classifies the other characters as types. As usual, she is mordantly ironic when attacking her fellow female citizens, whom she divides into categories such as “Fat, strict women with a hairy mole,” “Wives of artists who don’t make any money,” “Rich, middle-class women,” and “Aristocratic women” (BDH 168–69). The use of caricatures and the insistence on representing the repression of individuality (particularly women’s) by resorting to the stratagems of puppet shows serve an ultimately polemical goal: it is an attack that uncovers the falseness and theatricality of all institutions, but the core of this novel remains the performance that is forced on women, the brutal puppetization of a potentially free individual. Masino’s feminism in Birth and Death of the Housewife is not without ambiguity: on the one hand, the protagonist feels compelled to warn and protect other women, encouraging them to seek independence and self-actualization: “Don’t identify your fulfillment with a man; have some decency, overcome your loneliness: our only goal should be to go back and turn against Adam, he who gave us the first shelter and the first bed to defend for his sake” (BDH 186). On the other hand, she despises women for their corporeity, as an expression of their slavery to a preestablished role: “girdled in elastic waistbands, their bellies and hips ready to burst, always sweaty and moody and unashamed of their animality” (BDH 186), the women around her seem incapable of envisioning any other destiny for themselves other than one as wives and mothers. When

Introduction — 5

confronted with her double, the Housewife is overwhelmed by a mixture of tenderness toward her long-gone unadulterated self, and a sadistic urge to subject her to the same process of “womanization” that she was forced to undergo. The later reappearance of the girl, now reduced to a gaunt baby-popping machine, fills the Housewife with disgust and melancholy. There is no way out: both motherhood and sterility entail a loss. The Housewife is no more fulfilled than the mother she did not become. Another ambiguous aspect of the novel is the symbolic value attributed to the Housewife. The title itself reflects Masino’s intention to depict the demise of an iconic figure: birth and death of the Housewife, not a housewife. Significantly, the Housewife has no name except for the word that defines her, which becomes and stays capitalized on the occasion that marks her symbolic entrance into society—as a housewife. Throughout the book, the notion of her being an emblem is reiterated: when she dons a sack and a piece of string around her waist at a formal dinner, the guests’ initial perplexity turns into enthusiastic admiration and she is hailed as a “radiant example of sacrifice, [a] symbol of the unflinching modernity of our country’s Fashion, unsurpassed for tradition and popularity in the whole world” (BDH 165) and receives a National Certificate of Merit. Later, she is nominated “National Example.” As a symbol, however, the Housewife presents more than a few incongruities: if Masino meant to represent all women and their frustrated desires to follow their intellectual drives, then the choice of a financially privileged protagonist who has plenty of physical space to pamper her intellect, but does not bond with other women and feels contempt for the servants whose very presence affords her the time to reflect, might sound incompatible with her intentions. In her defense, we should note that the representation of the house as an immense mansion with countless rooms, parlors, stairs, secret chambers, replete with maids, cooks, gardeners, and seamstresses effectively functions as a distorting mirror, one that magnifies the Housewife’s obsession with the space that should be her beloved realm and that instead locks her in, choking her creativity. The Housewife’s inability to deal with servants, however, is harder to penetrate: on the one hand, she despises their passivity and lack of initiative and wishes they would rebel—although not steal from her; on the other hand, she firmly believes in a strict division of labor that will ensure her absolute freedom to cultivate her mind while trapping them in a role from which they can never break free. The Housewife’s contempt for servants is a trait that might make her less congenial to an American audience. There is indeed a certain incon-

6 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

sistency between the Housewife’s disparaging attitude toward her servants and her incapacity or refusal to take care of the chores in person, except for very brief episodes. Such pretentiousness, coupled with the lack of a palpable desire for change, may fail to stir much sympathy in readers. Yet, from a cultural point of view, we need to keep in mind that the recourse to house helpers in Italy during the period in which Masino lived (and even nowadays) was not necessarily considered a luxury or an unmistakable sign of social status; it was a common practice even in less affluent households than the Housewife’s. While this fact might not be enough to make her complaints wholly justified, placing them in a cultural context is useful. The nameless housewife is a grotesquely tragic victim of a role that defines her, and the ruthless depiction of how she becomes a slave to her own house (an enslavement that, it is implied, every woman undergoes, whether consciously or unconsciously) is all the more intense because it is at once a painful reflection on femininity and a disenchanted assessment of Masino’s own difficulty in reconciling her career with the pressing demands of housekeeping. In February 1938, in a letter to her parents, Masino announced that she was planning to write a novel, Vita di massaia (“Life of a Housewife,” although the title would later change), a novel that would hopefully “give a little shake to those dear family customs, the slavery of women, and the common cliché of a good housewife.”1 While writing the novel, Masino was forced to adjust to a new life: she and her partner, the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, had moved to Venice during the same year following Bontempelli’s expulsion from the Fascist party. In March, while still living at a local inn, Pensione Calcina, Masino wrote to her parents expressing great joy about the place, which afforded her a lot of freedom: “I am so very happy to be here; at last, I am nobody’s guest and every single hour is my own.”2 To Masino, this carefree atmosphere probably brought back the exciting years she had spent in Paris as a young woman in the late 1920s. However, things changed when the couple moved to an apartment in Palazzo Contarini, overlooking the Grand Canal. On November 28, 1938, only eight months after welcoming her newfound freedom at the Pensione Calcina, Masino began to experience the bitter taste of responsibility to the apartment into which she was about to move. While the new place was spacious and elegantly decorated, it also required constant upkeep and a domestic staff, the threat of which Masino had already anticipated in 1934, when she and Bontempelli still lived in a much less demanding house in Frascati: “Every now and then the specter of

Introduction — 7

the house rises like a curtain of fog with the two servants sheathed in spider webs among heaps of garbage.”3 Spider webs, too, will become a leitmotif in Birth and Death of the Housewife: soft and deceitful like an unconscious dulling of the senses, spider web threads will haunt the young protagonist in her dreams, anticipating her fate as a mindless, marionette-like housewife enchained to her golden palace. Masino’s frustration and worry increased by the minute, and by December 3, 1938, the peak was reached, and the Housewife was born, on paper as well as in reality, as testified by a letter Masino had written to her sister: No, I will never be a happy housewife. I’ll be the Lucifer of housewives, I’ll be the Jewish people in the world of “homemakers” (as it says on the passport), I’ll be the wrongly cursed Cain, and all of my daily life will be but a deluge of dust and broken pipes, or of toilets that won’t flush. It’ll be a Sodom and Gomorrah built on gas leaks and boilers on fire; it’ll be a Noah’s Ark filled with rats cockroaches spiders and fleas, pests that in Frascati, in Rome, and now in Venice have always cheered my dwellings.4 The anticonformist Masino, who had thus far proudly dismissed “homemakers’ duties,” now found herself burdened with dreadful practical responsibilities and with the loathsome task of giving orders, something that, despite the idiosyncrasies of her leftist views, she downright abhorred, especially because the need to keep a constant vigil on her maids inevitably distracted her from her work. In this state of mind, my work cannot flourish. I would have time now, but I’m always obsessed with what is taking place in the servants’ quarters. I’m on the alert all the time, anxiously thinking, “Now I’ll have to order this, now I’ll have to order that.” I doubt that I’ll ever be able to get rid of this nightmare. I hate giving orders as much as I hate associating with the servants, but instead these people want to be ordered around or to order others around. They won’t understand the concept of honest, unsupervised collaboration. I don’t feel comfortable either as a supervisor or as the lady of the house who chats with her maid.5 And while a man can, without effort, ignore what goes on inside the house and concentrate on his work, a woman/housewife is constantly on the alert

8 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

lest any of her maids try to steal from her. “I have given up on an intelligent life, and that’s all there is to it,” she claims in the same letter. “Unless, she is a millionaire, a woman is but a servant, and if she is a millionaire she cannot be intelligent because she lives among too many distractions: she never gets to the bottom of anything.”6 Her resentment of the privilege that grants men the possibility of devoting themselves exclusively to their career is palpable: “If I could just finish my book! If these damned males knew how greater than theirs is our desire to do the things they regard in high esteem but then prevent us from accomplishing.”7 Finally, in 1939, squeezing in time between friends’ visits and social commitments, Masino managed to complete the manuscript of Birth and Death of the Housewife, but her dark portrayal of marriage and family led the Fascist censors to criticize the book harshly and demand that Masino remove any and all words that might even remotely suggest that it took place in Italy, as well as words such as “ ‘Warrant Officer,’ ‘Prefect,’ ‘Homeland,’ and ‘Nation,’ which seemed to be contaminated by the overall disrespectful tone of the story” (BDH 211). Despite her notorious rebelliousness, Masino complied with the order. Yet, the odyssey of the novel was not over: in 1944, when the book was ready to be published, the Bompiani printing house was destroyed in a bombing, and all of the copies were lost. The book finally came out in 1945, obtaining good reviews, but it was already too late: as the critic Beatrice Manetti points out, “if the protagonist’s ‘defeatism’ had been deemed offensive by Fascist censors, now, in the midst of the enthusiasm for the recent liberation and the frenzy for reconstruction, it had become simply incomprehensible.”8 Incomprehensible even to herself, at times, as Masino confessed in a note at the end of the novel: her attempt to restore the book to the way it was before the bombing, relying solely on her proofs, resulted in “a few absurdities” here and there. At any rate, she concluded, such oddities might indeed complement her contradictory portrayal of the Housewife, although by the time the book was published, Masino could hardly identify with her heroine anymore. Too bold for some, too bitter for others, Birth and Death of the Housewife was and remains an “inconvenient” novel, and just like its protagonist, it resists definition: Masino’s tone is at times aggressive and shocking, at other times somber, almost elegiac. Mirroring a leitmotif of death and decay as inextricably tied to the cycles of history, foul images of a “crushed slug” or a “rotten orange” contain “the splendor and decline of great dynasties” (BDH 19). Like a camera lens, Masino’s gaze zooms in on minute details and immediately widens to encompass

Introduction — 9

the breadth of the universe. Thus, the young Housewife’s first menstruation fades into the sunset, and her pain blends with the pain of an aching sky. Such lyrical moments in the novel stand in sharp contrast to the theatrical sections—usually constructed around a social event that marks the Housewife’s advancement in the puppet show of existence. In these sections, Masino displays a consummate ability in handling the grotesque genre and manipulates the language accordingly, accelerating the pace and constructing dark, witty dialogues reminiscent of a Grand Guignol play. The influence of Surrealism and of de Chirico’s metaphysical art are evident in the account of the Housewife’s journey through a valley full of statues. Unpredictability is a distinct characteristic of Masino’s style, and if on the one hand it contributes to her multilayered narrative, on the other hand it relegates her to the hazy realm of indefinable writers. Critics commonly agree that her writing is closer to Surrealism than to magical realism in the sense that she is more drawn toward the unconscious and the realm of dreams than toward the acknowledgment of a magical element hidden in everyday things. And yet, although not fully embracing magical realism, she certainly absorbed its main concept. When asked, in 1982, what the literary journal 900 (where Bontempelli had first theorized magical realism, and to which she herself had contributed) had meant for her, she answered: Who knows? Perhaps it was a natural acceptance of any sort of imagination, an acknowledgment that imagination is the most distinctive human reality. At the same time, it was the tendency to mythicize every ordinary reality in order to expand man’s horizons and give him a legendary stature. City or town—as long as their boundaries, beyond the barriers of clichés and rhetoric, could belong to any city and any town.9 As it was for Bontempelli, for Masino, too, “fantasy and imagination, just like dreams, belong to humanity and therefore they are reality.”10 But if in Bontempelli imagination was always held on a tight leash, constantly watched and controlled by the weapons of style, more often than not Masino gives imagination free rein, allowing it to delve into the darkest recesses of the unconscious. The combination of an unrestrained imagination, a metamorphic style, and a controversial subject matter make Birth and Death of the Housewife a rich and complex work that does not merely invite readers to reflect on women’s fetters and options, but forces them to do so. Masino’s demand that

10 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

the Housewife be regarded as a symbol constitutes a provocation that cannot possibly be ignored. Readers may choose to see in the Housewife a female Christ-figure, or a spokesperson for generations of women who, like Masino, have unwillingly turned into housewives, or even an unintentional accomplice in a chauvinistic representation that will not allow for intellectual aspirations to coexist with wifehood and motherhood. Still, defying all interpretations and standing alone as a unique, unjustly dismissed phenomenon among the heroines of twentieth-century Italian literature, Masino’s protagonist remains an uncomfortable, enigmatic figure whose impudent determination to challenge the bulwarks of traditional female roles reaches beyond historical boundaries and resounds powerfully with contemporary readers.

About the Author11 In 1948, the forty-year-old Paola Masino gave up her literary career and chose to devote herself exclusively to journalism, translations, and the organization and preservation of her partner’s writings. This decision is quite puzzling, coming from a woman who certainly did not epitomize a quiet female figure merely content with performing a support role in her man’s career. At age sixteen the precocious Masino had already written a play, Le tre Marie (“The Three Marias”), and boldly approached none other than Luigi Pirandello, asking him to stage it. Although the work was never performed nor published, the encounter with Pirandello marked her formal introduction to the literary world, to which she had been attracted since childhood. Paola Masino was born in Pisa in 1908, and her family moved to Rome soon after her birth. Her father first kindled her interest in literature and art. While he banned childhood readings that exuded sentimentality, he encouraged her to read the Bible, Shakespeare, masterful storytellers such as Andersen, the brothers Grimm, and Perrault, as well as the great nineteenth-century novelists, particularly French and Russian. The works of Dickens and Dostoevsky had a profound influence on the young Masino, who set out on a lifelong, almost obsessive exploration of man’s dark nature. During the same period, she became deeply interested in religion and delved into the world’s sacred texts, from which she reemerged an atheist, but forever haunted by the concepts of sin and sacrifice. A rebel by nature, Masino interrupted her studies before obtaining a high school diploma, but continued to write and, three years after her encounter with

Introduction — 11

Pirandello, she met the writer Massimo Bontempelli, who was to become her companion for the next thirty-three years, until Bontempelli’s death in 1960. Bontempelli was thirty years older than Masino and separated; consequently, their relationship was considered scandalous, and in 1929, barely of age (which was twenty-one at the time), Masino moved—or was moved—to Paris to avoid rumors, and Bontempelli soon joined her. In Paris, Masino worked for the Bureau International de Coopération Intellectuelle and for the French periodical, L’Europe Nouvelle. At the time, Paris swarmed with Italian intellectuals and artists, from de Chirico to Marinetti, Moravia, Savinio, and Pirandello himself, with whom Masino and Bontempelli maintained a close friendship that lasted until Pirandello’s death in 1936. The couple missed no opportunity to spend time with the Italian group, and also made contact with other remarkable figures such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, André Gide, and Paul Valéry. Masino and Bontempelli returned to Italy in 1931, and during the same year Masino’s first collection of short stories, The Decay of Death (Decadenza della morte) was published. The bold imagery and natural fascination with the fantastic already reveal an uncommon talent in the young writer. Of particular interest, as Giamila Yehya points out,12 is the protagonist of the short story, “Conversion” (“Conversione”), whose “unbridled desire to be a human monster” and therefore to shun physical beauty in a quest for inner sublimity anticipates some of the themes in Birth and Death of the Housewife. Only a few months later, the novel Mount Ignoso (Monte Ignoso) was published and was awarded the prestigious Viareggio Prize. Masino’s writing, however, did not please everyone: Carlo Emilio Gadda, for example, harshly criticized the novel, mentioning among its “enormous sins” a style that reached “the limits of a Futurism of the worst kind,” characterized by “hallucinatory scribbles” and an endless wavering between the “symbolical-fantastic and the real.”13 Nevertheless, in 1933 Masino’s second novel, Suburbs (Periferia), was awarded another Viareggio Prize. The award stirred criticism because of the novel’s crude portrayal of childhood, and Masino subsequently became a target of the Fascist regime, despite the fact that censors had ignored her controversial short story, “Hunger” (“Fame”), published a few months earlier, in which a desperate father yields to the request of his starving children and kills them. Still in 1933, Masino joined Bontempelli and Pirandello in Argentina for the premiere of Pirandello’s When One Is Someone. In 1934 Masino and Bontempelli moved to Rome, and Masino began to collect her reflections in a notebook, a practice that she continued for most

12 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

of her life. Pirandello’s death in 1936 came as a deep shock to Masino, who wrote in her notebook: I loved Pirandello, not as a man, a relative, or a friend, but as an element of the world that I know. When they told me he was dead, it was as if all of a sudden they had announced to me that the grass, the clouds, or the herds of sheep had disappeared from the planet. . . . This death has left me so disheartened that, for a few days now, I’ve been craving for sleep. To sleep so that I won’t hear the noise of a life that to me seems hopelessly tattered. Writing is now a useless attempt to mend it.14 In 1938 Masino completed her second volume of short stories, Big Tale (Racconto grosso), and began to write Birth and Death of the Housewife. In 1938 her short story, “Hunger,” was reprinted in the literary magazine Le grandi firme, and this time Mussolini ordered the magazine to be suppressed. In November of the same year, Bontempelli was expelled from the Fascist party and sent to Venice on unofficial confinement. Bontempelli and Masino’s Venetian home became a regular haunt for intellectuals and artists: Arturo Martini, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo De Pisis, Corrado Alvaro, and Anna Maria Ortese among others. In 1941 Big Tale was published. Between 1941 and 1942, Birth and Death of the Housewife appeared in installments in the weekly magazine Tempo. The Fascist censors intervened, demanding several changes. Still in 1941, Masino began to collaborate with the magazine Domus, where she published Dialogues on Harmonic Living (Dialoghi della vita armonica), eighteen reflections on home design and architecture. She also began to write poetry, which had been her passion during adolescence. In 1943, while in Rome with Bontempelli, she published in Il Popolo di Roma a disillusioned article titled “Youth between Two Wars” (“Gioventù fra due guerre”). As a result, her name was included among the intellectuals to be deported to the north. For nine months during the Italian Resistance Movement, Bontempelli and Masino hid in Rome. In 1944, together with other intellectuals, Masino and Bontempelli founded and directed the weekly magazine Città, in which Masino wrote articles not only supporting the republic and social activism among intellectuals, but also defending autonomy

Introduction — 13

from political groups. In 1945 Birth and Death of the Housewife was finally published. Masino published more poems, and she wrote for several magazines. Between 1946 and 1949, Masino continued her work as a journalist, and often wrote in support of women’s rights. More of her short stories appeared in magazines. Her poems were collected in the volume Poems (Poesie), which was published in 1947. She began to collaborate with the communist magazine Vie nuove, but despite her left-wing sympathies, she remained politically independent. In 1950 Masino and Bontempelli moved back to Rome. Bontempelli’s illness, which had already started to manifest itself in the early 1940s, became more serious, and Masino intensified her work as a journalist to support her partner. She also published more poems, and she began to write librettos and to translate texts from French. During the same period, she undertook a massive project aimed at organizing Bontempelli’s works in an archive, an activity that she continued for the rest of her life. Although the pressure of her work seemed to have exhausted her creative flair, she feverishly continued to write in her notebooks. Massimo Bontempelli died in 1960, and Masino gradually abandoned her work as a journalist to dedicate herself full-time to Bontempelli’s archive. Birth and Death of the Housewife was reprinted in 1970 by Bompiani, by La Tartaruga in 1982, and by Isbn Edizioni in 2009. Paola Masino died in Rome in 1989.

Bibliography Decadenza della morte. Rome: Alberto Stock, 1931. Monte Ignoso. Milan: Bompiani, 1931. Republished by Il Melangolo in 1994. Periferia. Milan: Bompiani, 1933. Racconto grosso e altri. Milan: Bompiani, 1941. Nascita e morte della massaia. Milan: Bompiani, 1945. Republished by Bompiani in 1970. Republished by La Tartaruga in 1982. Republished by Isbn Edizioni in 2009. Poesie. Milan: Bompiani, 1947. Colloquio di notte. Ed. Maria Vittoria Vittori. Palermo: La Luna, 1994. Io, Massimo e gli altri: Autobiografia di una figlia del secolo. Ed. Maria Vittoria Vittori. Milan: Rusconi, 1995. Cinquale ritrovato. Ed. Corrado Giunti. Montignoso: Francesco Rossi Editore, 2004.

14 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

Translations French “Une synthèse poetique de Paris,” in Paris Presse, 21 Jan. 1930.

German Monte Ignoso. Trans. Dora Mitzky. Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1933. Spiele am Abgrund. Trans. Richard Hoffmann. Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1935. Die Geburt der Hausfrau und ihr Tod. Trans. Maja Pflug. München: Frauenbuchverlag, 1983.

English “The Decay of Dying.” Trans. Samuel Putnam. This Quarter 2.4 (1930): 667–71. “Hunger.” Trans. Samuel Putnam. Blast, Nov.–Dec. 1933: 30–32. “Intimate Hour.” Trans. Louise Rozier. North Dakota Quarterly 74.4 (2007): 122– 127. “Blood Wedding.” Trans. Louise Rozier. Absinthe: New European Writing 9 (2008): 112–18.

Translator’s Note The challenge of translating a work such as Nascita e morte della massaia into English is twofold. First, a justification for taking up such a task is necessary. Does this novel still speak to readers more than sixty years after its publication, and after so many other novels have addressed issues of women’s frustration and inner conflicts? I maintain that it does, and that the reason lies precisely in the element that made the novel unwelcome among Masino’s contemporaries: Masino’s language, with its leaps and spirals, tantalizes the reader and makes it impossible to remain unmoved before the Housewife’s frantic attempt to make sense of her fate. This leads to the second challenge in translating the book: handling a language that neurotically shifts from being fervent and almost lyrical, to dryly sarcastic and theatrical. The translator needs to become a juggler, a funambulist, and chase Masino’s ever-changing style in the hope of capturing (although it sounds like a paradox) its fluctuating quality. This project is at the same time exhilarating and humbling; the translator who undertakes it cannot choose to remain passive, lest she lose control of the language in the process of conveying its prismatic quality to the reader. Hence, the notion of

Introduction — 15

a “transparent translation” is put to the test and comes away defeated because the original text itself is never transparent. The translation of loaded terms such as “uomo/uomini” was particularly problematic: because the mood and the style of the novel are constantly shifting, opting for consistency in their translation would actually have been less true to the nature of the book than treating them, each time, according to their context. Therefore, I translated the terms as “men,” “humans,” or “human beings” depending on the specific tone of each passage. For instance, “men” (rather than “people”) creates a sharper contrast to the Housewife who, as a young bride, reflects on how afraid she used to be of the looming sky, when instead “some men even walk with their heads tilted back, staring into the depths of the air without feeling dizzy” (BDH 48). On the other hand, the divisive power of spider webs affects all human relations without distinction, and thus, “they hung about and stretched across the air between one human being and another” (BDH 42). With regard to the cycles of life and death, when the Housewife observes that “what matters is to produce soil, to serve the humans they [the dead] themselves generated” (BDH 19), “humans” has a more encompassing meaning than “men.” For the same reason, in the same passage I translated “figli” as “children” (not “sons”) and “padri” as “parents” (not “fathers”). In several instances I translated the terms “uomini” (when referred to both men and women) and “genere umano” as “mankind,” which, while being—even etymologically—gender neutral, to feminist ears might seem slightly partial toward males. In doing so I aimed to recreate, at least on a subliminal level, the sense of imbalance that surfaces in Masino’s cry for women’s emancipation by means of a male-dominated language. Giving voice (albeit a foreign one) to an author whose utter originality and historical significance were misunderstood or ignored in her own country is an ambitious task, but I hope to have recreated the complexity of a voice that, in an era when a woman’s task was to be silent, dauntlessly confronts and destabilizes the dialectics of gender roles.

Notes 1. Paola Masino, Io, Massimo e gli altri: Autobiografia di una figlia del secolo (Milan: Rusconi, 1995), 66. 2. Io, Massimo e gli altri, cit., 71. 3. Io, Massimo e gli altri, cit., 52.

16 — Birth and Death of the Housewife 4. Io, Massimo e gli altri, cit., 81. 5. Io, Massimo e gli altri, cit., 82. 6. Io, Massimo e gli altri, cit., 83. 7. Paola Masino, Eds. Francesca Bernardini Napoletano and Marinella Mascia Galateria (Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 2001), 23. 8. Paola Masino, cit., 52. On January 7, 1946, when Masino finally received her copy of the novel, she commented, dejectedly, “It was printed very poorly, and it is full of typos. It is truly a cursed book.” In Beatrice Manetti, Una carriera à rebours: I quaderni d’appunti di Paola Masino (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001), 23. In 1982, just before the new edition of Nascita e morte della massaia was published, Masino remarked, “This book needs to be presented as an archeological find, with its cryptic jargon and its deaf areas that reflect—perhaps—the deaf stagnancy of hope, not only at certain times of political history, but also in the history of our own lives.” In Silvia Giacomoni, “Introduction,” Nascita e morte della massaia, by Paola Masino (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1982), 5. While the stormy genesis of this novel undeniably affected the unity of the work to the point that Masino later claimed she hardly recognized herself in it, it also (unintentionally) mirrors the protagonist’s (and Masino’s) inner conflicts, resulting paradoxically in a more faithful portrayal of the Housewife’s and of the artist’s development. 9. Enrico Falqui, Il futurismo—Il novecentismo (Turin: ERI, 1953), 116. In La fama e il silenzio: Scrittrici dimenticate del primo Novecento (Venice: Marsilio 2002) 60, Giuliano Manacorda recognizes some traces of Bontempelli’s magical realism in Masino’s writings, but also, and perhaps more so, an influence of Surrealism, although he admits that Masino’s style is utterly original and hard to associate with any particular movement. 10. Manetti, cit., 63. 11. The following biographical information is drawn largely from the volume Paola Masino, Eds. Francesca Bernardini Napoletano and Marinella Mascia Galateria, cit., which also contains precious material on the author’s works and rare photographs not only of Masino and her family, but of Pirandello, Bontempelli, Palazzeschi, Aleramo and many other writers. For a complete list of available material by Paola Masino, see L’archivio di Paola Masino: Inventario, Ed. Francesca Bernardini Napoletano. Rome: Casa Editrice Università La Sapienza, 2004. For interviews with Masino, see Confessioni di scrittori. Interviste con se stessi, Ed. Leone Piccioni. Turin: ERI, 1951 and Sandra Petrignani, Le signore della scrittura. Interviste. Milan: La Tartaruga, 1984. For an indepth analysis of Masino’s works, see Louise Rozier, Il mito e l’allegoria nella narrativa di Paola Masino, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. 12. Paola Masino, cit., 64–65. 13. Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Review of Monte Ignoso, by Paola Masino,” Solaria 6 (1931): 7–8. 14. Paola Masino, cit., 48.

1 As a child, the housewife was dusty and sluggish. Her mother had forgotten to raise her and now bore a grudge against her because of it. She would say over and over, “What will you do when I am no more? A day will come when you’ll kill me with all this heartbreak. Then I’ll be curious to see how you manage alone in life.” The child kept quiet, heavy with resentment against herself for being doomed to kill her mother with heartbreak. Obsessed by that thought, she searched in all the books and newspapers she could get her hands on for cases of death by affliction. Either she could not find any, or there were so few that she plunged into an even more desperate acceptance of the fate that was to turn her into a character, a cruel prototype. Deeply engrossed in the idea that all that was left for her was to perfect her sad role as the murderous daughter, she had already started to reduce all other thoughts and motions to a minimum. Lying inside a trunk that served as her wardrobe, bed, dresser, table, and bedroom, a trunk full of blanket rags, bits of bread, books, and funeral remains (tin flowers from a wreath, coffin studs, widow veils, white ribbons with “TO OUR DEAR LITTLE ANGEL” written in gold letters, and so forth), day after day the child would enumerate her thoughts on death. She would think and bite her nails; when there were no more nails and no more thoughts, she would chew on pieces of bread and leaf through books in search of more nourishment. Dust fell from ceilings and turned into dandruff on her head, while bread crumbs and pieces of paper got stuck under her nails. Moss grew between the cracks of the trunk, and the blankets in which she wrapped herself to play out the part of the king who is about to be decapitated or the fatal assassin were coated with mildew and spider webs. The trunk reeked of forest and ruins, and inside of it the child took shape. She never had thoughts of pity

— 17 —

18 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

for others or herself. Never did she rebel against the idea that she was going to kill her mom with heartbreak. She had a notion of necessity as something superior and unquestionable. Indeed, she was not interested in questioning such a notion; what she wanted was to discover its causes and effects. Because of her indifference, the child had not yet realized that, while her body was made of meat like the one lying on the tables of market stands or hanging in butcher shops, she nevertheless carried, hidden inside that body, a thought and a sex that were her reason for existence. But the child was unaware of thought because she was inside of it, in the same way that algae are unaware of the sea, and birds of the sky. The child had yet to grab an idea from the outside and brandish it against life. She just squatted, oblivious to herself, an authentic lump of thought without the slightest glimpse of intelligence. Wandering around that gloomy forest of fantasies that she had conjured up around herself, she had invented violence, torture, suicide. From fire and flood, which she had learned about who knows where, she had created her own raptures and children. By then, she had come to feed on that unknown sex that made her dizzy. The pungent odor she emanated inspired her to sing psalms, as if she were wrapped in incense. She sang the products of her imagination and practiced a complex system of sensations that were to bring her bitter disappointments. As soon as she abandoned them, as she would later on, they pushed her to a heroic foolishness. From the agony of the flesh she would glide into images of death, although she was distracted by the notions of death that her family provided day after day. “Pain is when I slap you, death is when the procession takes you to the graveyard.” She was attracted by death as by a summit, a flight. Nothing of what is known as anguish frightened her, but ever since she could remember she had had a recurring dream, one so distressing that it kept her from sleeping: spider webs were all around, above and beneath her, trapping her from all sides. They did not reach her, but they moved together to and fro and tried to wrap themselves around her without managing to even touch her lightly. As soon as they appeared, she immediately started to wave her hands before her face and brush off her neck, suddenly unable to move a step, as if her knees were tied in a knot. Little by little, those astral ties began to clutter inside of her, too. Her brain felt soft and smooth, her heart hanging from a thread, and if she tried to speak, her voice became tangled in a low buzz inside her throat. Then the child’s whole body became contracted

Chapter 1 — 19

as she slept, and her limbs twitched with a fierce shiver, as if she were overpowered by a force that crushed her and sucked every fluid out of her. When at last, after struggling obstinately against herself, she managed to wake up, for a long time she could neither cry nor speak: she just lay as if submerged in a chilly drool. Years of this torture had estranged her even more from her family, since she would only rest when she was sure the people around her were wide awake and ready to come to her rescue. At night she carried a lamp with her to the bottom of the trunk and read until dawn without even daring to raise her eyes from the page, lest she might catch sight of those ghostly spider webs reflected in the air and ready to slide under her eyelids as soon as she lowered them. For these reasons, her family had come to regard her as nothing more than a piece of furniture. Every morning the maids would dust her head, sweep her feet, shake the dirt from her clothes and fold them back against her body. On Easter Sunday they would push her onto the balcony among the chairs and the kitchen cupboards. They would wash her with baking soda, polish her hair with wax, oil her joints, and check the skin on her face and hands to make sure it did not have termites; they would arrange a garland of wallflowers on her head and tie ribbons of blue or pink tissue paper around her neck and wrists. Then they would push her into the dining room among the Easter cakes and the trays of boiled eggs so that the priest could bless her, poor creature. Sometimes the cook, who bragged about her compassion for animals, dragged the child with her when she went to the market so that she could get some fresh air, poor mongrel that no one wanted to be bothered with. But the child did not pay attention to the air. Instead, she stared at the ground, at the things putrefying on the pavement, at the servants’ heels as they trod on patches of green, at the rivulets of blood clotting between cracks like centuries against human life. In every crushed slug, in every rotten orange she pictured the splendor and decline of great dynasties; footsteps came and went, forming solid layers and, stepping on the rubble stuck in the holes of the piazza, created geology. Further down, the child saw the dead who, pressing against each other, would push with their bones, grab on to each other’s shins, bite the clueless newcomers who would try to resist, and force them to mix their remains with those of their worst enemies; because what matters is to produce soil, to serve the humans they themselves generated. Humans. We were summoned to this

20 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

planet from who knows where, and now we have to feed it. Now the dead who carried us in their wombs must carry us on their backs, on their hands and faces. And we must do the same. Children crush their parents’ faces and believe themselves unaware of it. But the child was not unaware of it, although she was unaware of how humans are born, and perhaps even that humans are born. The only thing she knew about, and absolutely wanted, was their death. Indeed, she would say “to arrive” or “to be born” meaning “to die.” Therefore, she despised the cook who led her around, or those who dodged the garbage and who made sure they didn’t soil themselves with the coagulated blood and stench. At the market, she began to love food because to her it appeared as a new way to give and take death. She would stare at the concave stomachs of oxen hanging from iron hooks on the ceiling beams of the butcher shops. They oscillated slowly, deprived of their organs, which were hanging nearby, no longer tied to their natural receptacles, but to strange roots made of metal, and even that metal did not belong to that place, but had been torn out of the earth’s body. The child drew the conclusion that she, too, must have something inside of her that the world needed and that mankind would snatch out of her if she did not offer it willingly. The details of this robbery were still completely unknown to her, but at the very thought she felt as if they were twisting and squeezing her bowels, and was forced to walk in a grotesque manner, with her legs stiff and contracted. In those moments, she also experienced the sensation—a terrible sensation for her—of being immortal, of being unable, despite all her efforts, to be rid once and for all of the body they had put on her. She would then stand on tiptoe and breathe facing up to the sky. She saw the heavenly vault, well organized around the Zenith. She knew that the Nadir and its stars were on the opposite side. Fixed points, as necessary as the heart, the lungs, the eyes, and the liver in one’s body. What if a constellation, like an organ of the body, were struck by an illness and wasted away or went gangrenous; would the celestial face then become livid just like a human face? Would the air, like some foul sick person, turn from blue to yellowish, from clear to thick and slobbering? Would the sky drag purulent rags and scales of infected air over the head of humanity? The child felt overwhelmed by a tempestuous compassion; she wanted the sky to become leprous at all costs, so she could show everyone that she would stick her hands into its sores and feel no disgust. What does the blood of the sky

Chapter 1 — 21

look like? Undoubtedly, the atmosphere, too, has an essence that must moan in pain just like the lymph of trees, the seed of animals, the scent of flowers, and the blood of women. The first time the child saw her own blood, she thought of the sunset. She understood the toil needed to disperse masses of clouds on the horizon, when rays of sunshine can barely find the strength to trickle drops of light on the world. The cluster of fog against the natural course of the sun made her open her arms to the curve of the sky to support its aching hips. As her own body felt heavy and sore along her pelvis, she believed the same thing must be true for the firmament. But in the summer, if the sunsets were pale and passed by quickly, she became distressed and regarded it as a betrayal. Pain was a universal punishment, and when the air shirked it, a heavier weight would burden the shoulders of the world as it struggled to redeem human life. All that suffering seemed to her like a waste if nothing was immediately born out of it. Just as a slaughtered lamb becomes food, she wanted the sunset to engender something useful at once. At the time, she could not see that the night was that something. Little by little, the child had become so hostile to uselessness that she was determined to find a reason in everything and would always search for worth in the things that others despised. She would bring home handfuls of soil because in soil there might be seeds. “Precious things,” she would say to her exasperated family. “Seeds that hide to defend themselves and be born. Perhaps one of these seeds will become a tree that will serve as a scaffold for murderers, or perhaps, at this very moment, it’s carrying inside of it an animal that you will slaughter to keep warm with its skin.” The trunk filled up with the clods and scraps that the child managed to retrieve from the corners of the house: pieces of thread, some lint. “Everything has a reason, and I must discover it.”

This page intentionally left blank.

2 In the meantime, many years had gone by, and the mother was now truly dying of heartbreak as she could do nothing else for the young woman her daughter had become except pity her or deride her, depending on her mood. The girl even looked ugly, although it was difficult to appraise her, unkempt as she was: rather fat and greasy, with colorless hair, opaque eyes, and blackheads on her nose. Pretty hands she did have, but seemed to use them just to torment her nose trying to squeeze those blackheads. The blackheads remained, while her nose swelled up and turned purplish. Pursing her lips in disgust, her mother gritted words of contempt, but from the corner of her eye she would follow her daughter’s procedure and, as soon as she was alone in her room, she too would rush in front of the mirror and, holding a bright lamp in one hand, probe every corner of her body with spasmodic contortions, searching her shoulders, chin, temples, and buttocks for that filthy constellation. Unlike her daughter, the mother was vain and unaware of certain recurring laws in human beings: in women especially, the pleasure of hunting, in any place and on anyone, for those parasites widely known as comedones. The mother did not know many other characteristics mankind shares, especially the instinct by which the more we regard our children as useless to the world, the more we are willing to help them. And this is quite harmful to the rest of humanity, but mothers and fathers do not give a darn about the rest of humanity and only privilege their children. As a result, the world is almost entirely comprised of inept and selfish individuals. All parents should consider their creatures as autonomous beings and not feel obliged to give them—besides a name, nourishment during their early years, and long-term affection—a subjective conscience. As it is, injustice and corruption thrive, while purity and justice remain the distant longings of civilization: so distant that not even the little girl, although she followed rather adventurous instincts, had ever reached that abandoned region where they languish in wait. — 23 —

24 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

But all of this is a digression; this story has no room for general ideas. Every day, then, the mother set out to die of heartbreak a little more because she could do nothing else for her daughter. The latter, in the meantime, having temporarily exhausted her dark speculations on universal matters, examined herself and realized that in all things, all of them, she could pinpoint the pain and the supreme anguish, she could describe the form of desperation, the sound of weeping; but not in birth. Therefore, she slowly rose from her trunk, which after so many years had regurgitated its contents, filling up the room. She disentangled from her hair some sprouts that had grown out of the dandruff; with light hands she pried her eyelids apart and opened her eyes. She removed piles of books from around her legs, dusted herself off, and headed to her mother’s room. She walked unsteadily, with an uncertain step, her hands open in front of her as if she couldn’t see the way clearly. In reality, she was terrified at the thought of bumping against objects, dirtying a wall, stomping on the floor too hard, harming something. She proceeded with extreme caution and when she reached her mother’s door, she did not dare knock. She called out, “Mom.” It was perhaps the first time she called out that name. Her own voice sounded foreign to her, as if it had been torn from the bottom of a cave where it had been chained, choking and starving. On hearing it, the girl started to cry in anguish. As she cried, she had the increasing sensation of being stuck in a narrow passage, engulfed in a blood-red mist, overwhelmed by a strong odor, one she recognized but wanted to escape. And the more she wanted to escape, the more she sank in. “Mom, mom, mom.” Her mother appeared at the door. She peered weakly at her daughter, ready to faint. “Is it you? What do you want from a poor mother, a devastated mother?” “Mom,” said the girl with great sorrow, “why does it cause such pain to say ‘mom’ when one says it for real because of a real need, not out of habit?” “What nonsense,” said her mother shaking her head. “Don’t you know I’m dying? And you call me for this? At least let me die in peace. Please.” “Oh, mom, can’t you for once, just for me, try and call out ‘mom’? Try it and tell me what you feel.” “Your grandmother died a long time ago. If I said mom without a person who corresponds to it, I would be crazy.”

Chapter 2 — 25

“But to say ‘mom’ as I just felt it, it doesn’t matter whether you’re dead or alive: it’s something that exists only in itself, always in one point, and it hurts, it hurts too much. It’s something that wants to break free and cannot. Explain it to me. It’s a laceration of everything in everything, of the world in the sky, of the sky in the universe. Something that wants to get out and be free, but is stuck in a vortex and cannot go forward or back. It’s horrible to call you, mom. Like being born, isn’t it? Or rather, it’s as if someone were being born and all of a sudden they don’t know anything anymore; they stay still, for fear of completing themselves, or of destroying themselves. No matter whether they go forward or back, the human threshold clutches them, and as it expresses them, it reabsorbs them. This is what mom means.” The mother’s face had turned scarlet red. She covered it with her hands and began to moan. The daughter remained still, wild-eyed, with her hands raised and a disgusted grimace on her face. Little by little, she calmed down, blinked two or three times as if she were just waking up, and said, softly, “Is this how one is born, then?” The mother, who was busy moaning, did not answer. The daughter said again, “I had come to ask you, but now I know. To be born is to pass through someone else’s hostile pain, a pain that preserved us, so that we may go where our own pain draws us, and where it will consume us. This is why a mother’s love is always a torn force.” “Shut up. Shut up, you and your mysteries. Dirty, that’s what you are, nothing else but dirty. Dirty all over, in body and thought. Enough. I don’t want you to talk about these things anymore. I don’t want you to mention birth or death ever again. No, birth is no mother. God himself couldn’t make me say that. Birth is love, or rather, it isn’t: it’s marriage. If I said love, who knows what you would make of that? And now go back to your trunk.” The daughter obeyed while the mother rang the bell and called for a maid to air out the room and sweep the floor where the daughter had walked. The girl did not make anything out of the word love. To her that topic had long since exhausted itself, if any topic at all could ever exhaust itself. Truth be told, she had never suspected any relation between human love and birth, nor did her mother’s words stimulate her to look for one. For a long time she had regarded every material phenomenon as the realization of a specific idea, and as soon as she noticed a physical occurrence, she would search for that idea. Her mother, on the other hand, only cared about facts: therefore, she interpreted her daughter’s question as a poorly disguised desire for a husband.

26 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

On making this discovery, the mother felt smart for many hours, and then she shamelessly set out to find a suitable man for her daughter, as any respectable mother does. Naturally, the men she would find were the least suitable for that sort of daughter. To be fair, at first sight she would have puzzled even a philosopher who had attempted to detect in her the smallest trace of a soul. At any rate, those whom the mother, on some pretext, invited near the trunk, were no philosophers. They were cavalry officers who, as soon as they poked their heads into the room, would say, “Oh, pardon me,” and retreat, covering their noses with fine leather gloves. They were young diplomats who, once allowed near the trunk, would light a Camel and toss the match, the ash, and their drawling voices into the depths of the chest, on the crouching girl’s face, “Où êtes-vous, mein Liebe? Votre maman me habló, etc. . . . ,” they would fastidiously stir the tip of their tiny shoes among the rags for a while and, not finding anything, would take their leave. “Do svidaniya, adiós, auf Wiedersehen, so long, jó napot, mes hommages.” Sometimes you would hear, “My respects,” but only from consuls-in-training, those who were just starting their careers. Then came a group of unique artists: they unanimously determined that the girl was picturesque but passé, an example of bad Impressionism. Some were manufacturers, but they declared the goods unusable, even as salvaged material. The search standards were lowered to include simple civil servants or bureaucrats, tax collectors, ushers. They would shake their heads, apologizing to the mother: “It’s not me, it’s my position, you know. . . .” The mother understood. She tried with passing foreigners. They would arrive in front of the house in roaring cars that invaded the road and the whole sidewalk. They would stroll in, yell out “Hello!,” check the girl’s teeth, test her articulations, study the line of her ears and finally, with an uppercut, they would knock her back down to the bottom of the trunk. The girl remained silent. If, once in a while, instead of being so self-absorbed, the mother and the visitors had truly paid attention to that creature, they would have heard a secret laugh, a sour grinding of teeth coming from the depths of the trunk. The coming and going of bachelors lasted a few months. One night, after the last and least desirable match in town had left the house for good, the

Chapter 2 — 27

mother, now truly exhausted, came in and sat down next to her daughter. She was not crying, and this was an immense consolation to the girl, who did not believe in the crying of women in general, and especially in that of her mother. Every time she was forced to witness it, she struggled not to react impatiently. That night, however, her mom must have been suffering for real because she talked to her daughter unaffectedly, saying more or less the following: “My child, see what you have made of yourself. No one wants to look at you anymore. I don’t know why. I don’t know how, after you were born in the same image as all the other creatures in the world, you managed to fall down to this state. It must certainly be God’s punishment, but for what misdeed I don’t know. Why don’t you make an effort, why don’t you try to do something for me, for me who has never asked anything from you? Why don’t you try, for once, to look like any other woman? Just once. Just to convince me that I didn’t give birth to a monster. And if, after you have done your best to try, you should fail, then I’ll resign myself to my fate. After all, you don’t seem unhappy about yours. May God’s will be done. We shall leave, the two of us, because no one will endure your presence in society any longer. Hand in hand the two of us shall walk. We shall make our dwelling in a desert, and may God have mercy on us. We shall eat locusts. Even John the Baptist ate them. We shall drink. . . .” She fell silent because she could no longer remember what people drink when they get lost in the desert. “The urine of our horses,” suggested the daughter. “You’re cynical.” The mother had sprung up from her seat, ready to leave, but the daughter grabbed her by the arm and held her back. “No, mom. You were just now starting to put on a little tragedy, and not even much of one. You do it poorly, you forget your lines, that’s why I was able to interrupt you. And it was a good thing. Certain comparisons shouldn’t be made. John the Baptist is far, far away from us, even if we were to eat locusts like him. Words have value, and you all insist on refusing to acknowledge it. One shouldn’t make comparisons to the sacred to convince a girl she’s dirty. This is a trivial matter, and it hardly depends on me. Not on my soul, but only on my will. Do you want proof? I’ll give it to you. But there’s one thing that perhaps doesn’t depend on me: this pattern of thought that has encompassed me ever since I first came into the world. Believe me, mom, it is a grave thought, even if it seems to you that I’ve become used to carrying it around, that I enjoy it, and that I couldn’t find meaning in life

28 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

without it. I want to prove to you that I don’t find it pleasant, and that I’ll do everything I can to abandon it if you truly want me to. But now be very careful of what you are going to tell me. Think hard before you answer. I may have chosen to be born like this, but you did help me to be born like this. Are you sure that a better form exists for me and that you want me to make an effort to reach it? Don’t you fear that the memory of the thought I’m about to abandon might creep into my life and overturn my whole existence if I choose a normal course? While, if I keep on following mine in spite of sacrifices, I may still be within my truth?” After a brief silence, the mother, looking elsewhere, murmured, as if in confession, “I didn’t understand a word of what you said. How shall I answer you?” The girl scratched her ear and lowered her head. “Fine, I’ll just say this: because I’m stronger than you, I’ll give in. Just tell me what I must do to please you. I can’t imagine what or how, but I’ll do it.” “Will you do it?” The mother’s face and neck were flushed with emotion. She bent down to her daughter and perhaps would even have kissed her, but her daughter was just too dirty. “Will you do it? Will you do it?” She didn’t know what to say anymore. “Listen, then—well, you’ll make yourself beautiful.” She glanced at her for a moment, pensively. “Can you make yourself beautiful? Well, it doesn’t matter. As pretty as you can, whatever comes out, as long as you’re clean. We’ll all join forces and do our best to help you. I’ll make you a pretty dress; I’ll take you to the hairdresser; we’ll wash you, and put on your makeup. And as soon as you’ve become recognizable, we’ll hold a big reception, a ball, how’s that? And you’ll surprise all those fools who saw you and ran away by showing them how much you’ve changed.” “I accept,” said the daughter, and she stepped out of her trunk.

3 The ball was held a week later: a whole week that the daughter spent making herself beautiful. As soon as she came out of her lair, her movements became so swift and her will so assertive, that both her family and the servants were astonished. “Prepare a steaming hot bath. Meanwhile, a maid shall rub my whole body with oil. Keep a lot of ice on hand, and pass me massage gloves and cologne.” Once she was all greasy with oil, she plunged into the hot water, without hesitation, even her face and hair. She endured it. Finally, she lifted her head out of the water and took a breath, but dove in again a moment later. Oil bubbles and thin hairs emerged, and a dark film formed on the surface of the water like baked dust, while the girl’s skin turned from brown to purple, and her limbs stretched and swelled up. All of a sudden, she jumped out. On seeing her so frenzied, her maid crossed herself, but her sisters, who were huddled in a corner enjoying the spectacle, noticed with some surprise and much envy that her breasts were quite soft and firm. But they had very little time to look at them. The girl grabbed a chunk of ice and began to rub it vigorously against her body, while the maid emptied the bathtub and cleaned it. “Quick, another bath! Steaming hot again.” “I don’t want you to!” said her mother. “I won’t allow it,” and rushed to turn off the burning faucets. She withdrew her hands with a scream that she immediately put to good use, “Alas! Poor me! . . . You will die! My creature’s death, never, never, not at any cost!” And, shaking her hands in the air, the mother moved further and further away from the tub. “Stop,” said the creature. “Now, my bath.” The roaring faucets scattered clouds of steam that rolled and clustered together in the room like humid smoke. Bathed in sweat and hardly able to move, the maid, the mother, and the sisters could barely breathe. The daughter continued to rub ice all over — 29 —

30 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

her body. When the tub was filled, she stepped in, lay down, and instructed the maid on how to scrub her back with a coarse brush. That bath was more laborious than the previous one, and it was not the last one of that day. When for the sixth time she came out of the tub, the water had an ambiguous brightness, a suspicious brilliance, as must have had the hot oil in which protomartyrs were once boiled. Finally cleansed, the girl lay down in a bed for the first time in her life. She could not sleep. Despite her exhaustion, she would not abandon herself to rest for fear of the spider webs, and she kept thinking about the renovation work to be carried out on her body. Every now and then, she would uncover one of her feet and look at it. Her toenails appeared to her as a most fearful thing. They must have been made out of flint. How would she carve them? Shape them? Would she be able to? Then there were the hairs on her legs. They would have to go, be burnt. She would build an immense fire and walk through it, leaving behind that fleece that covered her legs up to her thighs. It would give off a pungent, singed odor. The whole neighborhood would panic. Perhaps the firemen would come. Her body was rather interesting; one could work on it as if it were a matter of urban planning. In the meantime, night had gone by. At dawn, the maids started working on the girl again. More rubbing, massaging, and then finally a haircut, manicure, and pedicure. Already by the end of the second day the girl looked like a normal being. But she was not yet beautiful, and she wanted to keep her promise and make herself beautiful. Every day, after her ablutions, the girl would chase everyone out of the bathroom and remain there by herself, studying beauty treatments until nightfall. At night, she would go out and wander down any street her feet would take her to. She would keep walking for fear of sleep because it would be hard for her to fight it if she lay down now, exhausted after too many baths. And during those days the spider webs had turned nastier, she could feel it. If she were to just recall them they would suffocate her. Through the night she walked with feet too tender for her steps, almost peeled, fresh, soft, and white. Innocent, newborn feet with joints that had not yet learned how to move, although she had already started to consume them without restraint. Night would leave her whole body wet with dew: on her unadorned, loose hair; on her eyelashes. Through her face, neck, arms, and hands, that balm entered her veins and made them blue and her skin transparent. On seeing her in the morning, her family thought she was made of some deep-sea

Chapter 3 — 31

substance, like marble that carries on its pale flesh veins like algae and the glow of clear waters. The girl’s eyes were blue, too, just like her veins. And her hair was ash blond, a dead color, nourished with dust, a color that, in the mind of those who had to describe it, appeared as a faded black—greenish, maybe gray, certainly not golden. But her hair was indeed blond, and the girl wore it loose, parted down the middle and resting on her shoulders. Her body, finally revealed, had an uncommon, soft beauty, and what had made it seem fat and flaccid earlier was merely the neglect, and the cramped position into which the girl had forced it when living at the bottom of the trunk. Her face had nothing special about it, except for that ambiguity of colors. Perhaps the same ambiguity manifested itself in her expression and made it impossible to guess whether the girl was about to laugh or cry. That indefiniteness gave her a stronger appeal than that of beauty, and both her family and the servants were immediately mesmerized by it. The mother spoke to her new daughter with deferential tenderness. In reality, she was not wholly convinced that she was the one who had given birth to that strange creature, even more so now that her beauty was proven and that one could even boast about her intelligence as if it were an exceptional phenomenon. Talking to her seemed dangerous to the mother, who was familiar with the girl’s sarcasm. But having tossed her shell of contempt and filth, the daughter actually appeared like any other human creature. She even ate at the table—and properly. How had she learned to? She went out for a stroll and knew how to walk. When the dressmaker came, she was able to order the gown for the ball by herself. She demanded, “A loose, black voile tunic. It has to be thick because I will be naked underneath. My arms and shoulders shall be completely bare, and my chest loosely covered.” “This is a dress for a woman of the world!” her mother screamed. “For a bacchante! For one of the Erinyes! I won’t allow it. For a first dance, the gown must be white, pink, or light blue, and absolutely chaste. No one wears an unchaste first-dance gown, everyone knows that. So, what is it going to be?” “White.” “No cleavage!” “Take note, dressmaker: high-necked.” “Absolutely nothing transparent!” “Like an opaque tombstone. Amen.” But at the ball, even though the dress was the immaculate color of pearl, she showed up as she had announced, unconstrained, entering like a diva an

32 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

hour after the reception had begun. She had hastily unstitched her straps, and ripped pieces of voile from her shoulders. She looked like a queen playing a revolutionary, and to those who saw her, that image was enough to make her terribly distant and magnetic at the same time. Her mother had sent for her, begging her to come down earlier, but in vain. Her sisters, properly bedecked in pink and light blue, were competing in mannerism. The mother went from one room to the next dragging the father behind her and, until the daughter showed up, kept smiling like a beggar pleading for money. The ball had been the subject of much interest, and even the most distant relatives, from all corners of the republic, had rushed to attend it. Some of them had never even seen the girl. Several hours before the reception, when she had not yet appeared, the rooms were already crowded with first cousins, uncles, great uncles, grandparents, never-before-heard-of relatives, and the like. The men’s tailcoats looked worn, the ladies’ gowns out of fashion. The female relatives’ feet, shod in black patent leather, sent a chill down the sisters’ delicate spines. By opening a door and leading them into a mysterious room that revealed itself, to the relatives’ astonishment, to be adorned with crystal, silver, flowers, and bright lights, the mother hoped to be able to push the provincial herd around the tables and convince them to eat, but they would not dare. They would just dip a breadstick in the pâtés, then cautiously, hiding from each other, suck it to test the strange flavor. They found everything complicated and disgusting, and longed for a slice of salami, some country-style bread, and vinsanto. But they would not move from that room. One never knows. . . . Meanwhile, the first prominent figures began to arrive in the large ballroom: a senator and two high officials who wore red and blue badges in their buttonholes. The father bowed before them, and the mother held out her fragrant fingers for them to kiss. They immediately asked, in unison: “And the girl? The girl? Where’s the girl?” “We’re here, too,” one of the sisters finally grumbled. No one ever found out why, but to that, the old senator, answered dryly, “Unfortunately,” then he fell silent again. The two high officials wandered here and there, feigning indifference toward their own status, while obviously relishing the opportunity to flirt with the young women. They, in turn, tried to please them: one would pull a mustache teasingly, another would compliment them and call them, coquettishly, “Your Excellencies,” at which the two officials would immediately shy away.

Chapter 3 — 33

“Oh, no! No ‘Excellency’ here, bella signorina, here I am incognito and, I hope, in intimate company. . . .” The girls found the old fogies’ advances quite boring, and felt extremely uneasy when, to oblige the officials, they were forced to call them by name. Little by little they dragged them toward the group of mothers, where they suddenly abandoned them, and a second later they were dancing with some young men. The young men’s conversation was actually no more intelligent than that of the old fogies, but the girls—who knows why—found it more entertaining. I have heard that sort of conversation myself numerous times and was never able to discern any meaning in it, but it might be that its entertainment derives precisely from the fact that it has no meaning, and one can make it mean anything one wants. The nonsense the high officials uttered, instead, claimed to have a precise meaning. It was in some sense an informative, scientific nonsense, a kind of encyclopedic interrogation that demanded a clear-cut response, an extremely difficult task to ask of young women who are in the mood for dancing. After an hour spent chasing, surrounding, dancing, disappearing, and ambushing, the young men had forgotten the reason why they had been summoned to the ball. All of the rooms were now filled with some golden dust that fluttered about from large chandeliers and sweat-soaked faces. Trails of perfume streamed around loose hair, and heavy puffs of smoke blew out of mouths, each of which gripped a cigarette between its lips. For a few minutes, a gaunt but real princess, rented for the occasion, moved cautiously and scornfully through the noisy scene, dragging behind her the trail of her gown as well as a trail of escorts, among whom were two very real counts and a duke. Advancing as one unit—the men glued to the lady’s trail and the lady so thin she was almost transparent—they looked like a floating cluster of jellyfish surrounded and swallowed by a school of sardines or by migrating herring. The honoree’s brothers, too, had insisted on being present at the spectacle: they were twins and attended a boarding school, which meant that they were doubly united against their family. Their mother had clothed them in shiny black suits that was a cross between navy officers’ uniforms and bullfighters’ outfits. The twins now resembled two mischievous swallows that had grown up as owls. They crouched at the foot of armchairs or behind doors and tripped up the boldest youths or pulled down the ladies’ side zippers. They dipped cigarettes in whipped cream and, after putting them back in silver cases, they

34 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

would offer them around. After a short time, the guests’ clothes were all stained, their faces were frowning, and the conversations were strained. The party risked becoming a failure. The two brothers felt naughty and happy. The mother was at the end of her rope. For a moment, everyone thought she was about to faint. This happened right after she came back from a brief visit to her daughter’s room, where she had gone to urge her to show herself. She had found her crying in front of the mirror. “I look like a newborn, mom,” the girl had said, looking at her with terrified eyes. “Isn’t this your true birth? Your entrance into a woman’s world?” “The heck with clichés! How can you know so many, mom? I wanted a black dress. I’ll get this one all dirty, I’m sure. A black dress to mark the end of my only childhood.” “For heaven’s sake,” screamed the mother, “isn’t one childhood like yours enough? How many would you want? Let’s be thankful to God it’s over and you have gotten yourself sorted out.” “I never thought that burying a child, any child, was meant to be entertaining,” murmured the daughter. Then, rousing herself like a bird after the rain, she commanded, “Go on and try to distract the people. I’ll come, but I don’t want them to see me just yet.” “Wasn’t that the whole reason why they came?” “I don’t want them to, and that’s that. If anybody looks and sees me before I want them to, so much the worse for them. God shall make them blind.” “If you think that God would assist you in your folly, . . .” said the mother as she walked away, shrugging her shoulders. “Just try to look at me!” her daughter screamed after her. “Just try and see if your eyes won’t start to burn. It’s obscene to amuse oneself looking on as someone is being born. It’s evil to watch someone else’s agony for fun. This is what you are all doing tonight.” “This daughter of mine is rabid,” the mother told herself over and over, pulling at the orange tips of her nails. “I must be careful when she walks into the parlor, or else if someone looks at her, she might bite them for real. I should put any shortsighted people near the door so they won’t notice her. But who? The senator. There’s one. Then there are those country bumpkins, the blind cousin and her uncle. And that young diplomat whose name I still

Chapter 3 — 35

haven’t figured out. That would make four. Four may be enough, and they would work as a barrier near the door between her and the parlor.” Putting the four of them together was difficult. Seeing the mistress of the house rush toward him, the senator jumped up from his seat and bowed for the thousandth time that evening as she invited him, “Dear Senator, let’s go to the other room, there’s a surprise.” The senator bowed again and followed her. Almost by chance, they stumbled on the cousin and the uncle from the countryside. You must scheme shrewdly, Mother, without hesitation. If need be, fabricate historical precedents. You know how to do it. “My dear, let me introduce you to the senator. He knew your late mother. Didn’t you, Senator?” The senator raised his eyebrows and just stood there, lost in thought. “Actually,” added the mother, shaking her finger at him in playful reproach, “you had a crush on poor dear aunty.” The senator lowered his eyebrows gapingly, still lost in thought. Without waiting for him to stop staggering, the mother pressed on, inexorably, pushing against him a respectable gentleman, who was as elderly and as flabbergasted as the senator. “And here would be your brother-in-law, if poor dear aunty had returned your passion. Come here, uncle. The two of you meet again, after such a long time. You must be so happy to see each other. I am so jealous. Unfortunately, life has never blessed me with such sweet surprises. But now, take your time to reacquaint yourselves. I’ll leave you for a moment, but I’ll be right back with another surprise. Go on, reacquaint yourselves, reacquaint yourselves.” The uncle and the senator, placed face to face, each a complete stranger to the other, did not utter a word, but began to smile simultaneously, then became pensive. Feeling uneasy about the silence, they would have let out a scream of despair had the mother not returned just in time, dragging behind her the young, visually impaired diplomat. The poor fellow was introduced as the one who, as a child, had sat on the cousin’s late mother’s lap. Having reunited those four characters in the name of such an extraordinary woman who had generously offered her lap, smiles, promises, and connections to all, the mother began to push the flock toward the door that led to the hall. Once there, she tried with incoherent gabbing, with her hands, and with a little push here and there on their hips and shoulders, to keep the four of them together

36 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

to form a barrier. At a certain point, however, feigning distraction and looking at the floor or the ceiling, they all made an attempt to turn their heels and walk away, but the mother let out a small cry, staggered, raised her hands to her neck, then to her face, and just stood there with a terrified look. The four immediately held out eight hands to support her, and at once they opened four mouths to scream, but the mother roused herself, shivering, and with a faint smile, she murmured, “It’s just a moment of exhaustion, a dizzy spell. I thought I was going to faint, but I’m strong. Being a mother is all it takes to build strength! Did I frighten you? Dear friends, you must forgive me.” “Unfortunately,” said the senator for the second time during that memorable night. But as the mother turned around to collect the forgiveness she had pleaded from the faces of the other three guests, she suddenly fixed her gaze on a corner and looked terrified. At last, very slowly she covered her eyes and this time she really did have a dizzy spell. There in the corner, leaning between the two walls, stood her daughter in her violated dress, in her pure nakedness. All around her was a large space of emptiness and silence; a little further, circles had started forming of girls who stared at that woman whose skin and gown were just too white. They exchanged quick words, their ears and foreheads red with embarrassment, while the young men stood in uneasy silence and looked down. The daughter looked straight ahead with a fixed stare. Not a blink from her eyelids alleviated even for a single moment the tension of that cruel self-exposure. Erect like a statue before them all, she now wanted to be seen after she had watched them, unseen, for a few minutes. Exactly like that. She knew who they were. She knew what they were. She had never been wrong. She had always known it, she had been judging them all along. And those who had looked down at her in the trunk had confirmed her judgment. There they stood, each playing his own part: no prompter needed. Here I am now, too, without hesitation, because playing the part I have been assigned from now on is easy. The difficult phase had been conquering what I had conquered, risking my life and my death. Now I give up everything because I’m a good daughter, or perhaps a poorly accomplished human creature with deceptive aspirations, with ideals that never reached their peak. I give in out of daughterly compassion, and therefore I deserve every punishment. Let’s begin. You all, start punishing me: this is what I’m here for. A wrong queen who leads herself to the gallows.

Chapter 3 — 37

(These spectacles of self-condemnation are evil enchantments: the anguish shifts from the victim to the witness, who is left astonished and afflicted, as if he were the one who had been condemned. I am thinking of the piercing pain that Jesus’ crucifiers must have felt in their bones as they walked home that night. Or of the heat that must have run through the veins of those who watched Joan of Arc burn.) At the ball, the sensation they all felt when the girl appeared was precisely the one she had predicted: no one could bear to look at her, as if they were staring at a light that was too bright. Yet, at the same time they all felt they had to look at her in that way, lest they might end up uncovered and naked before everyone’s eyes. A torn edge of the girl’s dress slipped further down the girl’s left breast, and every woman in every room, including those who were further away and didn’t even know the girl was there, instinctively raised her hand to her left shoulder to keep her cleavage in check. The girl noticed the gesture around her and laughed to herself, but her stare remained unchanged. The guests’ agony lasted a few minutes longer. Then the mother put an end to it, rushing toward her daughter. She put her arm around her waist and pushed her to the center of the room. A ghastly smile distorted the mother’s face, and the daughter had pity on her. “Don’t worry. I’ll be normal.” The ritual began: the daughter greeted everyone gracefully. Too gracefully, her mother thought, she must be up to something. But the girl was not up to anything. In fact, she had given up completely. The boys immediately thronged around her: they appraised her, weighed her, so different was she since the first time they had caught a glimpse of her at the bottom of the trunk. A whisper began to circulate that she was not even the same person, that they had borrowed this one somewhere to deceive a man into marrying her, and that later he would find himself with the real girl. No one will ever know what kind of disposition the girl had chosen that night, but what is certain is that, unaware of the rumors surrounding her, she suddenly suggested, “Let’s go and see the trunk whence I came out. Like Pinocchio’s wooden body at the end of the novel.” “Isn’t it a very sad ending?” She turned around abruptly. Next to her was a young man with black hair and a dark look on his face and in his eyes. She replied, “They say that Pinocchio, as long as he is Pinocchio, is a wretched creature, or rather, a

38 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

wretched puppet. And it seems that puppets, even when they are exceptional, cannot become part of human society.” “Bravo. Encore. Excuse me, but the way you talk—is it a pose or your real nature?” “You tell me.” “I say you’re deformed. You have functions, but no limbs. You know facts, but not words.” “And you, even with words, are no better off than I am. In fact, here, for example, you can’t say anything that comes to your mind even if you want to: you must choose. And so, it’s better not to say anything.” “You defend yourself like a scorpion,” said the dark man, scrutinizing her with some languid interest and, after they were silent for a moment, he brusquely leaned against her ear and asked her something. She replied, “Yes.” Her answer was very courteous, free of any embarrassment or defiance, and suddenly the young man blushed. He turned his back on her and started dancing in a contrived manner with some girl who, after a couple of spins, was laughing hysterically, her flushed arms wrapped around his neck. The ladies found the couple’s behavior indecent and looked away. Meanwhile, the daughter, followed by all the young men who had at once become her adorers, had walked into what used to be her room. She stopped in front of the trunk and, with the tips of her fingers, lifted a blanket caked with mud and garbage. She did so with gentle compassion, as if it were the memory of a beloved deceased person. With the same compassion she folded it, placed it at the bottom of the trunk, and reached over to touch other objects. But the others had already thrust themselves onto those things, shoving their hands into the stacked-up pieces of bread and the open books, among the seedlings and the remains of tiny insects. Her sisters, standing on two chairs on both sides of the trunk, acted as guides to the odd expedition and, pointing at one thing after another among laughs and screams, they turned the story into a caricature. “This, gentlemen, is the royal mantle Empress Theodora donned when she strolled around feasting on flea-encrusted bread crumbs, purée of mold, and putrid wine.” “Here are the books, the retorts, and alembics that contributed to enrich the renowned mind of our sister, imperishable genius of our lineage.” “Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the audience, choir-like.

Chapter 3 — 39

They’re laughing offbeat, thought the girl, who had remained frozen, with the trembling molds on her hands. For once, she could think of nothing else but this: They’re laughing offbeat. She could clearly picture a staff with all of its notes and, neatly separated, the parts of the sopranos, tenors, baritones, basses. It was just like in the large choirs of grand melodramas where, after the sopranos’ first “aaaahh,” the tenors strike up, and after the tenors’ second “aaaahh,” it is the baritones’ turn, and finally the basses can be heard when the sopranos are already striking their fourth note. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” A new set of voices joined in, shriller and croakier. It was the fathers and mothers who, preceded by the procession banner, had come to see the ruins of that supreme and tragic infantile breed they regarded as barbaric. “Dear friends,” the mother’s conceited voice called out, “here, you see, my silly little child insisted on living, until at last she decided to shed her skin.” “What torment for a mother’s heart to bear, what torment,” rose the women’s piercing cry from the right side. “Glory be to the new daughter, a phoenix risen from foul ashes, honor and balm to her parents!” thundered the men’s booming voices from the left side. Then all of them, as one, “Yes, glory, glory ever after!” The girl was wondering, “Now, who should start the solo?” feeling that, unless she rushed to rescue that crowd with a thoughtful intervention, the whole thing was about to collapse. Right at that moment, an exasperated voice broke the unison, “Then go ahead and place a headstone in memoriam, with a grave light in front of it!” It was the dark man, his face all contorted, as if he were on the verge of tears. In the silence that followed, another voice uttered a few simple words to put an end to the gloomy performance, “Go away, all of you, and leave the child alone. Go.” It was her father. For the first time he had spoken, and now, although he had made no violent gesture, he seemed to have filled the room with his command. People began to disperse in silence. The mother was overcome by panic at the thought that the reception was ruined because the host was starting to mistreat his guests. She began to scream, “Champagne, champagne! Let’s christen my reborn creature with champagne, let champagne drown this memento of my motherly affliction!”

40 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The idea of champagne was met with enthusiastic approval and, mesmerized by that word, all the guests thought they were leaving the room of their own accord and not because the father had ordered them to or because the girl had kept silent, staring motionless ahead with the moldy flowers in her hands. The two creatures remained alone and looked at each other. They loved each other so much, and did not know what to say. Dad hugged his child, and the child drew a heavy sigh, closing her eyes. Little by little, she started to cry. “No, don’t,” said dad, “it’s all very beautiful. Like you now and you before, when you were unkempt. You are always very beautiful, sweetheart, even if you were ugly and mean. You are my child.” “And you are my dad. And we love each other so much. This is why I cry, because every one of them can feel love. Do you think they deserve it?” They kissed and smiled at each other through the tears that still quivered on their faces. They hugged again. At that moment they noticed they were not alone. The young man was sitting there, trying not to look at them. The father immediately left, without saying anything. The daughter approached the young man, “Go ahead, speak the word that defines this scene.” “You are deaf and vain. Goodbye.” At least he doesn’t pick words at random or out of self-interest, said the girl to herself as she followed him toward the parlors. There, in the meantime, people had started drinking champagne, celebrating the death of the trunk’s monstrous dweller. To give more emphasis to the scene, even the servants had been summoned to the toast. Gathered in a small group at the back of the large salon, ever so often they would raise their glasses and all together yell, “Cheers!” Meanwhile, the guests had formed a semicircle and, as soon as the girl appeared at the door, they burst out singing: “Libiam ne’ lieti calici, che la bellezza infiora; . . .” 1

1. “Let us drink from the joyous goblets adorned by beauty.” A famous drinking song from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata.

Chapter 3 — 41

“This music,” interjected an old man with a rooster feather in his buttonhole, “is not appropriate for a young girl. I propose we sing La violetta la va la va.”2 Out of politeness, people pretended to welcome his suggestion, but when he stood in the middle of the room and struck up the first stanza, the choir had already magically scattered about to go and smooch in the corners or dance to the muffled sound of the gramophone. Many more hours went by and dawn came. In the rooms where the girl had been honored, the crowd was as thick as it had been early in the evening, and now that the cold supper was over, plates of spaghetti and large Neapolitan-style pizzas began to circulate. The ladies’ faces were turning green and scaly, with chunks of makeup peeling off like plaster flakes. The young men’s faces were taking on a pale blue hue due to a short, prickly stubble that had been tormenting their skin from underneath and was now arming it with sharp pins. Gowns had lost their freshness, fragrances were becoming more and more subdued while body odors menacingly took over. The men’s and women’s hands were now sticky and puffy. Even their feet had become swollen and sore, but everybody tried to ignore it because talking about feet is considered improper, although no one knows why. The girl’s boredom had been much greater than that of any sensible girl during similar gatherings. On top of that, she was the belle of the ball, as they say. She was seated in a large armchair, one high official on each side who, between compliments, dribbled white and slimy spaghetti all over their dress coats. Behind her, leaning against her neck, the short-sighted diplomat paid homage to her while practicing his American English and, bent over before her, a sculptor pretended to find similarities between her and Pallas Athena to ogle her with leisure. Around her, in the salon, some guests gossiped about her, others mocked, pitied, extolled, gazed in silent admiration, or turned their backs on her. But as they wolfed down pizza and spaghetti, they all took an interest in her. And then, all of a sudden, she fell asleep. She tried in vain to open her eyes two or three times, and she tossed and turned in the armchair, seized by the imminent horror of the spider webs that would soon immobilize her. She fell into a deeper sleep, her eyes closed, her mouth agape, and began to snore. The two high officials stopped eating, deeply offended, their spaghetti-laden forks still in midair. The diplomat heaved himself up, as if he 2. Italian war song with sexual innuendos.

42 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

had just realized that his buttocks were too exposed. The sculptor bent down on his knees and took a closer look at Pallas Athena’s palate. And all the others, each of them frozen in his gesture, remained suspended staring at her, like the Pompeians in the lava of Vesuvius. The girl snored. She snored with crashes and gasps, like one in terrible anguish. Human faces and spaghetti had turned into veils of fine dust, which rose from the plates and thickened all around her. She tried in vain to break free from them, but they were drawing nearer and taking shape. They were spider webs. Taut, constructed according to an unbreakable curse, venomous, they hung about and stretched across the air between one human being and another. Where did they originate? Where did they hang from? Who, who could make them so sly and vast? Why against me? Why by surprise? I didn’t want to, I didn’t, I didn’t want to sleep, and you know it. I haven’t slept in years. Tonight I wasn’t thinking about sleep, I was there in the parlor just to please mom. Who betrayed me? Who pushed me toward them? No human creature could be more scared than I am now. And I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this, despite myself. A strange way of sleeping this girl has, thought the guests as they watched her. She is breathing like someone awaiting a sentence, like an assassin writhing as the noose tightens around his neck. She looks fatigued. She sleeps as if she were accepting a fatal reality. Someone should wake her. She might be in pain. Perhaps her throat hurts and she cannot breathe. Someone put a pillow under her head. Loosen her up. But no one dared touch her. Her face had turned gray, transparent. Her hair was parted and slightly lifted over her forehead and around her head, as if smoke were making it sticky and straight. Tiny beads of sweat oozed from her temples and from her armpits. Her hands lay faceup on her knees. On her ice-cold palms one could see the pulsing of her heart. She must have reached the limit of her strength because all of a sudden her breath grew fainter, her lips turned completely white, a purplish color began to creep around her nose and, with a jerky upward movement, her head and torso rose and immediately sunk back. At that same moment, there where she was sitting, all of the spider webs began to move at once and, piling up one on top of the other, they started to oscillate more and more rapidly. They brushed against her, and she struggled to dodge them as best as she could. She recoiled, but someone was restraining her. She squirmed to keep her face away from them, but the spider webs reached

Chapter 3 — 43

her, one of their edges even found its way into her mouth. She wanted to spit it out. The threads settled on her eyes, and she could no longer open them. A sourish smell entered her nostrils. She felt the current growing stronger and the layers coming apart. Soon they would collapse all over her and bury her. And that smell, that slimy meshwork that was thickening like egg whites on her face, like the gray air that, as soon as she stirred, would weave itself into a spider web. Where are you, you immense and greedy spider that can entrap the universe with your threads? Do you pin them between stars? What is the earthly planet to you? A fly? And me too, a fly? Answer me, I don’t want this. I can take anything but dying of a dream. And then a voice that sounded neither human nor pervasive nor harmonious, not the memory of an animal cry, nor silence, nor an imagined voice, but one that was (and the girl knew it for sure) the only voice that had the right to speak at that moment, said, “Don’t be afraid, they are fastened.” Immediately, the sleeping creature felt that the stringy encumbrance had been lifted from her face, and opening her eyes she calmly looked on as the dusty veils began to oscillate again and slowly disappeared. “See you tomorrow,” they seemed to say. While they faded away, she started to feel increasingly sad. When they were completely gone, she woke up and looked around with tired eyes. “It’s over,” she said. Indeed, her whole childhood was over. Even her nightmare had been put away and cataloged. She curled up in the back of the armchair and buried her face in her hands. One by one, fearing another, eerier sleep, the guests tiptoed out of that room and into the next, then into the antechamber and, after they had opened the door very softly, slipped out onto the landing and down the stairs. They turned on their cars without much noise. Even when they had left the house, they waved goodbye in silence, and those who walked by the windows were careful not to make any sound as they trod along the pavement. In the meantime, the servants were turning off the lights and closing the curtains to keep out the rising sun. They would not tidy anything up for fear of making noise, and they did not dare move lest they might cause the floor to creak. Even the girl’s sisters, brothers, mother, and father, who had been watching her with anxious pity, left quietly without asking any questions and without urging her to rouse herself or covering her with a fur blanket.

44 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

As soon as she sensed she was alone, the girl stood up, and declared loudly, very loudly, in a clear and irrevocable tone, “So, now I am truly cursed.” She headed to the new room they had arranged for her, feeling no emotion, regret, or fear. She closed her eyes and waited for the dream that no longer carried any meaning. In her sleep, she amused herself with empty images, like a well-born young lady. She got up at noon, overwhelmed by the dreariest melancholy. While she was sitting at the table, a series of baskets, plates, and flower bouquets began to arrive for her. Without even looking at them, she would pile them one on top of the other, as if preparing her own stake. Her sisters found it highly improper that her parents would let her accept the flowers sent by all those young men. Her brothers asked her, “How many are you going to marry? How many at once?” Her father kept repeating, “Leave her alone.” Her mother laughed contentedly. At five in the afternoon, no more flowers fit in the house. At six, the dark young man arrived. He did not wait to be announced and, who knows by what instinct, walked straight into the room where the girl, following one final romantic impulse, had furtively curled up in a quiet corner to chew the last moldy bread crumb she had salvaged from the house cleaning. The boy walked up to her and, without saying a word, lifted her face and kissed her on the mouth. The girl brushed her lips with her hands and looked at him. He said, “Now everything is settled.” She did not answer. She kept looking at him and knew without a doubt that she loved him. She also knew that she would love him forever, at all costs and against all appearances, but at the same time she was aware that it was useless to say it because he did not want to know. In fact, he added, “Since you have no examples and you know things, and one can tell you true words, you scare me and I won’t marry you. As soon as I saw you, I thought that by the very act of living I was responsible for your life, and so I don’t want you beside me. I want to put you to the test, to see if away from me you will lose yourself. Now I’ll leave. For me, things will remain the same until the furthest limits of time. We need each other, and therefore we’ll stay apart so we can measure our human value.” He turned around and left. The girl saw herself following him, but she had neither moved nor said a word. With terrible pain, she knew that she had already betrayed him and that she was lost forever. She also knew, and this hurt even more deeply, that he had been the first to lose himself, because only after she had entered the boundaries of the ordinary had he noticed her.

Chapter 3 — 45

As long as they had remained outside of human borders and free of comparisons, they had not been able to meet or sense each other’s presence. To find each other, they had had to become incarnated, and at that point their vicious wandering around the highest goals had begun. Lost in pain, she did not move until they called her to come to dinner. When she sat down at the table, she found herself face to face with the country uncle who had come down for the reception the previous day. He was not very old, and his face seemed compassionate: he was looking at her as if he were lending her a hand to cross the street. Two months later they were married.

This page intentionally left blank.

4 The groom’s house was extremely clean and orderly. When the lady arrived there, it had been decorated festively: it looked like a village, complete with piazzas and parks: in reality, they were mere courtyards and flower beds, but the very idea of being the mistress of all that discouraged the young woman and burdened her with a sense of responsibility that deprived her of any pleasure. The first thing the groom did was to stop at the main door of the mansion, kiss his bride on her forehead, and say, “Welcome to your home, Signora.” After him, as she walked through every room and hallway, down to the cellars and up to the attics, all the servants lined up and bowed, repeating, “Welcome to your home, Signora.” The dogs in the courtyards rushed to meet their mistress and, to her disgust, began to lick her hands, but the groom explained to her that intolerance to a dogs’ licking is a sign of a mean disposition. “It’s a tradition that has existed since the beginning of time between dog and master,” he said. The bride tolerated it, although she wondered what purpose this tradition could possibly carry for man or for dog. Nevertheless, before she could find an answer, she saw a little girl wrapped up in a straw-colored gossamer gown. The girl presented her with a flower bouquet and dropped a curtsey. “Welcome to your home, Signora!” she screamed with fear, dropping another curtsey and staring at her with a bewildered look. “The little girl, too, is a tradition,” said the husband, and went on, “Courteous traditions that have no other purpose than to please.” The bride looked at him with astonishment. They started to visit the rooms one by one. The bride was ruminating: so, it’s not the way I thought it was. The whole history of mankind, not just mom’s, is essentially a quest for pleasure. I was convinced she had some sort of illness and that to heal her I was to sacrifice my life, the same life she gave me. Instead, they’re all alike. No one wants to toil or suffer.

— 47 —

48 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

Then let my task be that of acting properly and pleasing everyone without distinctions or complaints, at the cost of my own self. They entered the first room where, inside large closets hidden in the walls, were the inventories of everything that the house contained: food supplies, books, household effects, servants, animals, plants, bricks. The room had been built out of intersecting hallways that branched off in every direction. “The driving force,” said the groom. They moved on to the library. The bride continued with her musings: to other people, the sky is enough to breathe; until now I used to walk with my head down for fear of bumping against it. But if I forget it, that equals eliminating it. It doesn’t frighten me anymore. Some men even walk with their heads tilted back, staring into the depths of the air without feeling dizzy. “This,” her husband’s voice continued, “is the dining room.” Looking around, the girl felt a deep nostalgia for the instinctive wisdom that had made her live in a trunk. She was then introduced to the room where people rest after eating, the room for smoking, the room for listening to music, the room for conversation, the room for games, the gym, the hanging garden, and the Spanish-style patio: a thoroughly complete sample. The bride reflected: after I was born, I remained at my mother’s doorstep. When my mother violently tore herself away from me, I was left with nothing to cover my back, and I didn’t know which direction to take. Perhaps I was born with nails and a hammer in my hand if people imagine crosses and torture as soon as they see me. To everyone, to the crowd, I show that human hands can be pinned between one finger and the other and hung to a beam in bunches, like heads of lettuce. By remaining crucified in the instant of the first epiphany, one doesn’t learn how to confront death. One has no other choice but to become a stone, if only a stone were dead matter. But it isn’t. “Here is our room, see? It has everything necessary to promote sleep and love. Our bathroom is here. And over there the guest rooms with their bathrooms. What are you thinking?” (She couldn’t say it, what she was thinking was: Appearances don’t count. I too had an appearance, but mankind spurned it and made me cast it off. Let’s see if I won’t change. The man I love said I’m still the same, but it’s not true. By now I’ve begun to enjoy my self-betrayal, feeling paralyzed and frightened before human society. It happens to many—accepting compromises, humiliating oneself. Therefore, our death is useless, like seeds fallen in a place where they will stay seeds forever. When will mankind ever be able to become

Chapter 4 — 49

fertile soil? We fully deserve the divine curse: as long as we remain aware of the limits of life, we can only die.) “I wasn’t thinking. I was admiring.” “Do you like it? I’m glad. These are the servants’ quarters. Then the kitchen, the pantries, the fountains, the laundry rooms, and . . .” “It’s missing a room where we can store some spare suns if we want to take a walk on rainy days; and the night stars if the sky is overcast and our guests would like the moonlight.” (She was horribly offended by what she was supposed to see and felt like biting her husband’s hands, smashing those walls, strangling the dogs, setting the little girl’s gossamer gown on fire. An overwhelming fatigue she had never known before was taking hold of her and shattering her. She was really afraid she was going to scream, and inside of her a thought was moaning: How I wish that right now, at this very moment, I could go back to my own birth, return to my mother’s womb as into a cave, crawl along it, find again my father’s seed, melt with it, and with the seed be reabsorbed into the blood of the man who expressed me, then as a man reenter into his own mother, and then, from man to woman and from woman to man, go back to the first, spontaneous birth. I would seek for myself a different matter, a dead, changeless matter. I would exist as a leaf or the sea, and find out if sin was really necessary to mankind.) “This is uncalled for,” her husband interjected abruptly, “poking fun at the ancestral home. The house is the family: a sacred institution that must be respected and defended. To enhance it is to enhance the good of the country. It is the duty of a good bride to make it prosper.” “Forgive me.” (And to herself: come now, enough thinking. I said that I would bring joy to them, that I would step down from myself and abandon the small pedestal I had built with crusts, dust, and human remains. From now on I shall use those remains for other purposes with frugality and no waste of intelligence, which to them seems like an abuse of energy. Farewell, couple that I loved, farewell to me and you, dark man whose name I don’t even know.) And she added, this time aloud, “I’m ready, uncle,” but she immediately corrected herself, “Dear husband.” “My bride, my dear.” The girl endured the consummation of marriage with painful exaltation (and this was her final, enlightened suffering), and then she immediately fell asleep and had her first dream as a grown-up woman. It was once again the

50 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

spider webs, but they were all torn, small, and full of dust. There are so many of them, the woman thought, and so dirty. A load of spider web laundry to wash. There are some in every house, but they are smaller, and only in the corners. Then she addressed them in a loud voice because they were already fading away and receding, “Will you come back?” She received no answer and woke up with her mind still sore from the tear she had suffered earlier, her flesh swollen and battered. She began to look around the room, which was turning white in the first sunlight. She saw the objects, the air, herself, as she had never seen them. She felt the torment of things under her fingertips. She rolled out of bed with no regard for her wounded hips, so much more tragic than hers the torture of everything around her seemed. She walked over and bent down to touch the windowsills, the doorsteps, the panes. She fogged up the doorknobs with her sighs, leaned her cheek against the walls to feel the struggle of the mortar as it fought to remain sturdy. She could sense the fissure every substance had suffered as those objects were delivered from it: she felt the gash in the marble and smiled at it with motherly compassion; the torture of metal over the fire she soothed with her young breath; the satanic amalgam of glass she tried to soften with the heat of her hands. She had now learned what it meant to be ripped apart, manipulated, revealed; she had learned the pain of creation. From that moment on, she would always respect all things and individuals because they had all suffered or were going to suffer that agony. Uncontaminated things are not good for anything. Life cannot be but contamination and decay. She felt the stinging curse of the original sin. Her husband, who had woken up after her, caught her by surprise as she knelt on the floor caressing the marble doorstep with a corner of her voile nightgown, like a mother caresses her baby’s forehead. She felt ashamed in his presence and hastened to say, “My wedding ring fell off; I can’t find it anymore.” The couple’s first days seemed normal. No one ever guessed the woman’s speculations. Every morning, after spending exactly one hour giving detailed orders to her lined-up servants and another hour going on surprise inspections of their work, she sat down in a corner, exhausted and dazed, waiting for events. Not many events went on in town. After some time, thinking that the young bride must have had her fill of nuptial bliss, certain prominent ladies began to send invitations to the new couple. The husband would say, “It is

Chapter 4 — 51

appropriate to accept,” and the bride would accept. He was thoughtful, and she was affectionate. They soon became society’s favorite couple, and families competed to invite them over. The woman continued to take excessive care of her physical self: her body was becoming more and more diaphanous, like a slide for laying bacilli to examine under the microscope. She hardly read anymore and soon became aware that the thought inside of which she had felt dragged along up to that point had abandoned her completely. But this realization didn’t make her suffer. In fact, she had found a way to occupy all the time that was left for her. Caution had never been one of her characteristics. Once she got married and discovered the function of the outside world and understood that mankind’s obsession is but the desire for greater superficiality, she devoted herself heart and soul to this formula and never mentioned to anyone the realm she had abandoned. She went as far as to forbid herself to say, “I breathe, I dream, I mature,” which used to be the way she tested herself and tried to relate to her inner world. Empty and still: that was how the bride’s days were. Days that would have made anyone wonder how she managed to live inside of them and not fall asleep, how she managed to sit around and not ask for any explanations or advice from older women. What did she feed on? Her eyes were not dull; under her eyelids one could see them move and turn around like a lighthouse, landing on one object after the other. Ever since she had entered the house, the objects had acquired a different meaning in everyone’s eyes. They were still the same, and yet neither the servants nor her husband dared to pick them up or rearrange them on a whim the way they used to. The woman kept silent; she neither reproached nor corrected anyone, she just sat in her armchair as she had sat in the trunk, and with the very pores of her skin she watched and guarded the house. This went on until night came. Then, without any need for either of them to verbalize their wish, the couple would get up simultaneously to go to bed. They would lock themselves each in his or her own bathroom, then at once they would appear in their alcove wearing dressing gowns. All that was left to do was take them off, so that on one side of the bed he would remain in his pajamas, on the opposite side she would reveal her voile nightgown, and then each would lift the folded-up corner of the blankets, slide in between the sheets and, turning their heads simultaneously toward each other, kiss feebly and wish each other goodnight. They would lie on their right side (because lying on the left side is bad for the heart) and, reaching their arms toward the

52 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

edge of the bed, each would turn off their own light. With a brief sigh she would close her eyes, he would close his with a yawn, and they did not feel unhappy. The mature uncle would fall almost immediately into a steady sleep, while the wife stepped into her secret subversive life. She would plunge into it with a joyful frenzy, worthy of great suspicion on the part of her husband, were he ever to discover it. For a while she would lie in wait, her eyes wide open and her body all tense, as if every time she had to overcome horror before she could give in to the life that was drawing her so fiercely. As the desire and quiver commonly known as those of the flesh rushed madly through her body, she tried to resist the flood. She could feel the surge of water lap against her neck, and the dangerous urge to grope her way here and there with her arms and legs, maybe even toward her husband, to seek help. But all the while the man’s sleep became increasingly steadier and safer. When the struggle came to an end and the husband’s sleep had reached a constant rhythm, the wife would doze off for a minute or two. Then, feeling suddenly awake and rested, she would quietly creep out of bed. Although the room was completely dark, she could see perfectly well the furniture around her. Lifeless pieces of furniture, stubbornly determined to be nothing but furniture. They denied their origins as living trees, had no memory of the sky’s womb or of the earth’s. They felt they had climbed up the social ladder, having become mankind’s servants. Each had its own function and was proud of it. The armchair kept the stool at a distance, the bed spurned the cot, the water pitcher had an army of glasses at its command, the large pot pushed the little one, the candles stood at attention before the diffuser. Hierarchy is a cosmic reality, beginning with cherubs and ending with doormen, but one is free not to believe in it: the bride did not believe in it, or rather, until now she had been unaware of it. Not until the first days of her new life had she realized the importance of bureaucracy, both social and domestic. This is how she was able to spend so many hours of the day motionlessly waiting for the night. “At night,” she would tell herself, “everybody sleeps, each according to his or her own status, but since they are sleeping, they no longer know what that status is. That’s the time when I’m free to enjoy my house the way I like it, without responsibilities, without being the mistress. If I want, I can be a hound dog or a pot on the stove, I can be an unborn child or an ancestor.” It was with such intentions, which we strongly criticize although we find them interesting, that she got up the first time and went wandering about the

Chapter 4 — 53

house, testing that free will which, in line with the teachings of scholasticism, she believed to be mankind’s indisputable prerogative. She soon learned that it was not true. As she moved forward through the rooms couched in darkness, no sense of warmth emanated toward her from the walls, no whisper could be heard. Occasionally a piece of furniture would reveal its presence, but it did so with such a violent crack that it sounded like someone sneezing just to frighten her. In vain did the bride squat down and join the circle of other armchairs, maintaining an extraordinary and tiring balance with her legs bent and her upper limbs stretched out like armrests. No advice for carrying out this metamorphosis came to her from her wooden companions, which remained stiff, sticking their chests out like generals’ wives. Alternatively, the woman would throw herself on the floor next to a bearskin, and lie there with her arms and legs spread open, her head turned to face the bear’s muzzle. She did not talk to it, but looked at it so entreatingly that anyone else would have said, “Don’t worry, dear, I’m here with you. You’re a true she-bear, you’re mine, and I love you.” As silent invocations were not sorting any effect, she tried with the suggestive power of words. She would light a stakelike fire in the fireplace and, curling up and rising from the glowing floor, she would repeat over and over, “I am fire. Fire is born out of me. I am light and heat.” But it was useless: her burning limbs would not soar into the air, nor the flames turn into bundles of muscles. Perhaps it was her own fault because, even though she was unaware of it, she kept listening to herself and sensed her own annihilation, which is the most effective method of self-affirmation. After some time she began to feel sorry for those beings that would not offer any help, but wouldn’t accept any, either. She did not hold them any grudge for this betrayal: it was a desertion of the imagination, and deserting the imagination was what everyone had tried to persuade her to do ever since she had been born. The very fulfillment of marriage had been a proof of the impossibility of bringing about a new phenomenon in mankind because the expression of love must fulfill itself in the same form for everyone: be it love or convenience, strategy or curiosity. But if the woman forgave others for this desertion, she could not do so with herself. Therefore, she would get up at night to find out in solitude whether such collective cowardice was forcing her to lay down her weapons. Once it became clear that she could only break free from human matter at the cost of her own body, for which she was indebted to God, she was left with no other choice than to put it to use, but without wasting it or mortifying it. Only one possibility lay before her, and it pointed

54 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

outward as it enfolded her: to make her spirit a dome, an embrace, a cradle for the manifold expressions of matter: to receive their seed, carry it, deliver its fruit, love and raise that fruit, then set it free as soon as it had grown and perhaps lose it forever, as happens with children. A woman is born with a body like a field, which must be sowed and then procreate. If she remains barren, she will seek to justify her existence by distributing her compassion on everything that the world incessantly delivers. She will teach faith to the animals that will then feed her family, she will nurse the tree trunks and the stones that will become her house, she will serve as a doorstep to the men who from that house will depart to disseminate their family among the countries of the world, like the wind does with seeds, and create new populations. This was the starting point, more unreal than geometric, for the woman to trace her lifeline. A misplaced motherly affection of sorts awakened inside of her; bursts of tenderness led her to touch the corners of her house as if they were part of her child’s body. A scratch on an end table was a scratch on an imaginary baby’s face; withered flowers in a vase were ruffled hair. At first, the uncertainty and shame for the way she felt kept her from yielding completely to this frenzied passion. She limited herself to caring for her plants. In one of her rooms was a thick cluster of azaleas that gave off a pinkish, fragrant light. The woman would often stand in the middle of it and embrace the flowers, trying to turn herself into them. Many of those flowers had already bloomed, some were still budding, others were already hanging limply, but all of their pistils vibrated like antennae searching their way. From them rose a faint buzz, some dust, and the bustling about of a large population headed toward the homeland. The first few times she had been able to break free from it with a small jerk of her joints, like a dry leaf falling off its stalk. But the snap became more and more violent, accompanied now by a feeling of pressure against her heart and a difficulty to breathe, until one night her bones cracked, her arms rose with her hands wide open like foliage among the branches, her knees banged hard against each other and bent, her torso became contorted as if forced by a knot in her marrow. A resinous sap trickled down her hair, over her eyes and inside her ears. It collected around her nose and on her mouth, dripped from her fingers and made her hands sticky. Once it had coated her whole body, impeding her vision, touch, smell, and sound, it allowed her to connect with the flowers.

Chapter 4 — 55

“Flowers,” she said a few years later to a remarkable friend, “are constantly singing.” She was not able to repeat the words of that song, but she said they were very simple; she had grasped them as soon as she had heard them. The letters “s” and “l” of our alphabet recurred in them. Unlike our words, they did not create perspectives, but they stood next to each other unrelated and conjured up thoughts where all images coexisted at the same point. Thinking of those words again, she was caught by panic, but that first night she had not been afraid. That night, acknowledging her new nature, she had been able to sing with them with no need for lips or breath, and in the morning when the shocked servants managed to wake her after shaking her a bit, she opened up and softened with a gleam of light in her heart, a mission in her fingers, and a gracefulness in her breath. Ever since then, she would wander around the house, going from plant to shrub, from flower to flower, and if she saw any of them contracted in the effort of budding or blossoming, with light hands so as not to weigh on the aching petals, she would arrange them in a circle. And if she saw other flowers that had become too old to close their petals and defend themselves from darkness until the following dawn, she would prop up their pistils, draw the leaves closer to the stem, tie them with a hair, and keep them alive for one more day. There were some white buds, gnarled and fuzzy like hornets’ bellies. With her warm breath, the woman ripened them, and then, pressing them with soft, intermittent puffs of breath, she made them sprout. She even entertained the thought that God’s breath on mankind had been somewhat similar to hers on the buds, and because she was aiding with her creatures’ life, she also chose to assist them with their death. When a seedling had reached the end, she would sit next to it, while the melody of flowers spontaneously flowed from her once again. With it, she accompanied the plant’s ending as it bent down, shrank, and broke off. She would then lay it on the ground that had nourished it and gather all of the other houseplants and flowers in their vases, making a circle of them and opening the window so that the wandering air and the voice of the other trees could enter to pay their respects to the remains. She would keep that arrangement, an implied wake, as the room blended in with the color of night. The following morning she took care of erasing any trace of this ritual. She transferred the dead shrub out to the garden and hid it from the gardener so he would not throw it in the dung heap. The servants would follow her

56 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

around and disinfect the house after she had passed. The housewife would spend that day with a vinegar-soaked handkerchief pressed against her mouth. This serves as an example to show by what tricks—played on her own intelligence—the woman quickly went from the most selfless imagination to a series of actual obsessions. Disguised as sentimental speculations, these obsessions succeeded in dragging her below any limit allowed to normal people’s common sense and restraint. It just so happened that, from supporting the margins of an outstretched leaf with her finger, the housewife ended up—by female legacy, no doubt—dusting that leaf, and from the leaf she moved on to the flower bouquets, and then to the tree trunks, prey to a cleaning obsession that left others astonished and her exhausted. Little by little, she began to see nothing around her except for things that needed her care. Her eyes peered through men at the walls that protected them; on hearing women’s voices, she pictured the household belongings they supervised. At first, as it had happened with the flowers, these needs appeared before her disguised as fantasies, and they gave her pleasure. She would sit and stare at her thoughts like someone at the movie theater, and carried on in the same solitude that had characterized her childhood. Here is another example: a lady invited her for tea, and she was offered buttered toast. She picked up one piece of toast and flipped it. Oh, it is not buttered on the top and on the bottom like Pinocchio’s. Since getting married, she had stopped snacking on milk-and-coffee and toast buttered on the top and on the bottom. She was ashamed of asking the cook to prepare it and the servants to bring it. And besides, the real pleasure of children’s afternoon milk-and-coffee is that you did not order it, maybe you do not even want it, you do not know how it is made, where it comes from, how much it costs, how many spoonfuls of sugar went into it; it does not occur to you that in the kitchen they might have enjoyed the good coffee and watered yours down, that they might have spilled the milk all over the stove, or that they must have broken the Saxe sugar bowl if they have not brought it out. A child is occasionally reached by fragments of arguments that must revolve around these topics because he often hears words such as carelessness, waste, and dishonesty reverberate in the air; he notices that mommy’s voice has suddenly become annoyed, that the maid’s mouth is grimy, and that if she opens it, it will be to say, “Find yourself another,” but another of what he does not know. And then, when daddy comes home and finds mommy yelling in the kitchen, he

Chapter 4 — 57

grumbles, “When I married you, you weren’t like this.” Mommy turns pale and her eyes blink very, very quickly. Daddy looks very ugly. For lunch there is vegetable soup, and children do not like it, “I don’t like it.” So mommy tries to spoon-feed him, but he tightens up his lips and shakes his head no. He has stained the tablecloth, and now daddy is yelling, but mommy puts her hand on the child’s head—her child—to defend him from that loud voice. In the meantime she has had the soup taken away in a hurry, “Let’s forget about it,” and here is instead a small steak for her child, and for her and her husband a little bit of cod and a lot of potatoes. After taking a few bites, the husband pushes the plate away and moves the bread. His napkin falls on the floor; he takes a sip of wine and mutters: “My mother used to cook cod with milk.” Meanwhile, his wife sees that he has been casting glances toward her son’s steak, and she is overpowered by cruel contempt for that father, who is hungry for her son’s food. She, too, is hungry for meat; she, too, is sick of cod, but that is what they get with that kind of salary, he is the one who brings it up every time she wants to buy a rose to put on the table as a centerpiece, or a couple of sweets for the little one. Still, she makes an effort and, cutting half of the steak on her son’s plate, says with a voice that sounds normal, “Give some to daddy.” The child remains quiet, his father blushes, the mother cuts again, very slowly, where she has already cut, and at last the man says the words that everybody expected, “No, no, he needs it more than I do.” This husband and this wife truly love each other, they truly love their child, that is why they hurt each other so easily, then feel ashamed of it, picture impossible sacrifices, deceive themselves, and make the situation worse and worse. Where did the housewife learn about these things, she who spent her childhood in a trunk, hearing nothing from her mother except her entreaties pouring over her from above, and feeling nothing from her father except his large hand over her forehead like a blessing? Sitting across from her at the tea party was a gloomy-looking lady who was talking to another lady with a dimple on her chin. The gloomy lady had definitely had cod for lunch, the other one was wearing a very worn woolen black dress, and on her hat she had a little musk rose with golden leaves. The housewife got up and walked over to them; they moved aside and made room for her as was appropriate. A straight line ran between the housewife’s limpid eyes: indeed, she was about to conduct a test, or rather, prove its accuracy. But straight lines between the eyes are not appropriate at high-class parlors, and the two ladies looked at her with astonishment.

58 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The housewife said to the gloomy one, “I’ll teach you an excellent recipe for codfish; your husband will love it.” The lady’s astonishment increased exponentially. Then the housewife turned to the other one, “We all have a flower that reminds us of our childhood, isn’t that so?” The lady smiled, and the dimple on her chin grew deeper. She was self-contained and chaste. With a chubby hand a little chafed by work, she touched the flower on her hat, “It was one of grandma’s brooches.” For a moment her eyes were filled with fluffy meadows, thick foliage, and a long rooflike a dark patch among all that greenery. A black speck emerged from the center of the patch, advancing almost like a human silhouette along an avenue, but as it came closer one could see it was a tear, which quickly flooded the lady’s eye, drowning her memories. This woman wants her mommy, thought the housewife. She married into poverty, and she struggles all day long to keep up at least the appearance of a dignified life. She is courageous, she does not cry, but if she starts thinking of the musk roses of May during her childhood, she feels a great longing for that hollow nest under her mother’s arm, so fragrant with the scent of feathers. As a little girl, she certainly used to play in her garden, and the time would always come when a voice from the tall doorstep would call out to her: “Lulli, dear, your snack is ready, come to mommy.” At that point, the lady got up, “I have to run. My child won’t eat without me. He never wants to be without me.” As she spoke, she became more and more timid and hastened to finish her sentence. She was sure those things could not possibly be of any interest to anyone except her, yet she could not help saying them. However, because the housewife was looking at her encouragingly, she went on to confirm what the housewife had already guessed, and explained, “He even insisted on taking my name. He used to say, ‘My last name is daddy’s, but I want your first name: Lulli.’ And so I became Little Lulli, even younger than he, who’s only five years old.” How happy this woman had to be if her eyes welled up with tears when she talked about her little boy. The housewife reached her hand out to her, and said, “I have a lot of trees and a long roof over my house, and blue and lilac vanilla flowers in pots. We’ll give Lulli his snack on the lawn together. There must also be a musk rose plant somewhere, we’ll find it.” Meanwhile, she was thinking, You alone are the true mistress of everything I own because you enjoyed it as a little girl. Then, just when you should have

Chapter 4 — 59

begun to rule over those things and toil for them, you lost them. Instead, I was suddenly handed them, and so, even before I could enjoy them, I learnt about the cost of rose seeds, and about the upkeep of green lawns. To me, my whole park is now but numbers and risks and clouds and suns that are too hot. It is fair that you, and you alone, Lulli, should enjoy it, you who have carried on yourself that flower image of your childhood, you who have recreated a child with your same name so that you could find again a garden with neither laws nor needs. The housewife was not proud of having guessed the name of one mom and the life story of another. These circumstances occur often, and she knew it. But what she did not know was that, ever since her marriage, she had first been chasing flowers and then other people’s mothers in search of a justification for that amorphous mother who had constructed her, then torn her into pieces, and who now only recognized her as ruins. Her mother would pull her aside and exhort her to reproduce, while at the same time she plotted to find fiancés for her two unmarried daughters and job recommendations for her sons. All of this undoubtedly forms part of a mother’s career, in a social sense. One begins because someone else is pushing from behind and it is uncomfortable to resist; then one continues out of apathy or fear. If only there could be one mother in the whole world, ruminated the housewife, who knew how to be merely a cradle and a coffin, with no tricks, goals, or concerns: an anchor of refuge for when our soul takes off for unknown journeys. Birth without conception occurring between man and woman is untranslatable to human creatures, who have no memory of the sphere where they fluctuated before they were made flesh, and where they consequently became dead. Therefore, when we shed our body to move from life to another form of existence, we are frightened at not knowing the way by which we will become alive again. I don’t agree with those who believe we die forever (then why not live forever, if to them life is an end in itself rather than a brief episode of an endless event?). I think of those who, in that final moment, call out to their mother or to God, and I see that, in that final moment, mother and God are one. Why, then, if mother is to us a wished-for womb, the only womb that can protect us until our new birth and carry us alive and suffer human destiny for us, why can’t we suppose that mother, too, might herself be contained in her own mother, and she in turn and so on? Then what is this dying if not a return to one single womb that contains and expresses everything, the dead

60 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

and the living, the unborn and the deceased? What could this expression be, if not something incorporeal? A breath? A sound? A word? The Word? “When I was little, I also had a large garden, and my Lulli always wants me to ‘tell it’ to him,” said the cradle-mother. “Precisely,” said the housewife. “Some candied fruit, dear? Some pastry?” burst in the hostess with the inopportunity that characterizes people of action, just as the two women were about to reach each other. The housewife hastened to say: “Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, represents the greatest accident of motherly love,” but seeing Signora Lulli’s decorous smile, she realized that they no longer understood each other. What an idiot, she said to herself. There I go thinking aloud, right when I’m in the middle of carrying out my duties. She tried to show some interest in the party, but she was totally inexperienced at it. She spoke very sporadically, and when she did, she was inconsiderate enough to reveal personal things. The two or three attempts she made to imitate some gentlemen who were standing around like pieces of furniture were met with laughs, applauses, exclamations such as “so funny,” “unique,” “congenial,” and the like. Therefore, she left without saying goodbye to anyone, which was the only thing everyone appreciated. When she arrived home, she lingered for a while in the garden. She wanted to see her park with the eyes of Lulli the child, but she could not. To her, the seasons in her garden seemed lifeless and covered with debris: she saw every dry leaf, every nibbled petal, every lump of mud on the paths. The sky was tattered and swarming with annoying insects, the water pouring out of the fountains had a nasal voice, or it spurted out like a drunkard’s babble. “Everything needs tidying up,” groaned the housewife. When did a few wallflower patches and some hawthorn shrubs turn into eternally blossoming, spring gardens? When did she unlearn to discover parks with skyless paths among the wild ivy? It was ever since she found out that transplanting a holly costs a thousand lire and that a wallflower seed costs two-fifty. It was since she learned that garden equals gardener who steals your rare plants, and that park equals one extra item on your tax returns. It was since she started owning too many things besides herself, to the point that to manage those things as best as possible and to investigate other people’s minds and actions, she now forgot to guard her own mind. “If they’re thieves, I’m a prisoner with them. Criminals and their guard live in the same prison. At least they earn a profit or at least enjoy the pleasure of stealing, lying, and soiling, while I only suffer the damage and the disgust.

Chapter 4 — 61

Why, then, do I insist on keeping this job? Why don’t I just divide everything up among them, so that perhaps, once they are rich, they won’t sin anymore and I’ll be able to go back to my trunk and be a powerful king to myself? Can there possibly exist some people who, for their own delight, choose to rule over whole populations, despite the fact that all populations are made up of criminals and irresponsible individuals? Is it possible that no one realizes the iniquity of wealth, a wealth that adds nothing to people’s dignity and a lot to their worries, to their most anxious instincts, to suspicion, ambush, and self-defense? Where will fertile thoughts find their niche? Now that I own feather sofas and greenhouse flowers, where will I accommodate the elves that used to smile at me from among the molds on my body, back when I was a child? On what plants will they sit if the gardener has stolen them?” “There’s always a leaf left, or one can picture it.” “And in the meantime shall I let the gardener go free without warning him of the evil he’s doing?” “He isn’t doing any more evil than some of us do when we eat caviar while others eat garbage, or when a woman steals another woman’s beloved, or when a politician steals another politician’s wallet, or even you when you steal your true conscience from your husband.” “This is common sense, my dear, which is the pettiest of passions.” “In fact it’s not a passion, it’s a vice, and as such it is highly sought after by the human species, and those who possess it boast about it with immense pleasure.” “Do you still believe in vices that bring pleasure?” “I don’t. And do you still believe in virtues that bring pleasure?” “Certainly not. But perhaps one can think that pleasure is an artificial relationship created by humans, whereas God didn’t create anything for the purpose of giving pleasure or pain, but only to generate energy focused on one single goal.” “That of finding a seat for the elves?” “Don’t be sarcastic. Even less so, that of making sure a gardener won’t steal.” “Here I am, Signora,” called out the gardener, panting, as he came running from the back of the alley. “Were you looking for me? I had gone . . . I went . . . today is the day of the flower market. . . . Signora, you won’t believe me—I was at the caretaker’s lodge . . . I . . .” The lady covered her face with her hands and said, “Don’t be afraid. Go ahead and return to your work. I didn’t call you.” She took a few more steps

62 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

toward the house and added, “I never call you when the flower market is in town. Remember it, Leonardo.” Inside the house, her husband was reading. He stopped when he saw her come in, but she invited him to continue, “Keep on reading, dear. Read aloud for me, too, from where you left off. I enjoy it.” “. . . Uncle Luigi was very old but he did not want any household servants because he used to say they were wage-earning enemies living inside his house; he called them scroungers and life’s curse.” While her husband was not paying attention, the wife slipped out of the lounge. She went into her own room, lay down on the bed, and picked up a newspaper. She opened a page at random, and read: A YEAR OF WORK FOR A STAY-AT-HOME WOMAN as shown by the numbers of a curious statistic (Special Report) New York, II—(Staff )—A curious statistic has been carried out in the United States. It has been calculated that, in a year, a stay-at-home woman washes on average a surface of 2.47 acres of glassware, 7.44 miles of fabric, and cleans 12.4 miles of floors! Overwhelmed by a sort of mystical frenzy, she turned the page so violently that a piece of it remained in her hand. She then started reading another article with a malicious intention, but was disappointed: it talked about certain weekly exhibits that were to be held in the next few months. The goal of these exhibits was to present, to the needs and tastes of the public, some new products devised by national companies. One week would be dedicated to fragrances, one to fur coats, one to pastries, one to agricultural products. The housewife was going to stop reading, when a most candid egocentrism gave her an idea: “You were born on May 21st: look at what they are exhibiting on that day.” She started searching last week of April, first week of May, second week of May, there it was: The week of May 15–22 will be dedicated to household items: items for cooking and cleaning, useful to all housewives and good homemakers.

Chapter 4 — 63

Were you hoping that they would exhibit palms of martyrdom? She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but a tear slipped out from underneath her eyelashes without her permission and streaming along her temple it almost reached her hair, but with her fist she chased it away and rubbed her face to wipe out any trace of it. The angel who was watching her shook its head, sorrowfully. She wanted to sleep, but all of a sudden it occurred to her that her maid might come in and find her resting at a time of day when everybody was still working. She was very ashamed of letting her servants see her idling, and avoided every opportunity of being served as well as every chance of being caught unoccupied by some sort of task: she should at least be reading, writing a letter, fixing her hair, or studying some music. “Let’s go and make some music, then.” The music room was spacious, and many scores crowded the shelves. On a large table were several parcels, some of them still sealed, others already opened: they contained all the latest publications sent by music companies at her husband’s request. The woman headed to the large table and picked up a libretto. She had never chosen one more at random than she did that day. The libretto was Mavra, a one-act opera buffa by Igor Stravinsky. The housewife loved Igor Stravinsky very much, and the text of the libretto had been inspired by Pushkin, another passion of hers. Therefore, she sat down comfortably in an armchair, curled up her legs imitating her childhood posture, half-closed her eyes, yawned, and opened the little book. Following the title page were first the reproduction of a sketch representing the scene for the première, then a page with the names of the interpreters, and finally the words: “Oh my dearest, my dearest, dearest one, You my darling, my love, my heart is with you.” How cautiously the housewife made her way there, how vehemently she rushed through the wings onto the painted set, how hesitatingly she took on the role of Parasha, how blushingly she realized she should be the first one to say those words, “oh my dearest, my dearest, dearest one”; she wished she could say them to someone she did not dare to recall, but already the Hussar was answering, and unfortunately she did not see her husband in him, but precisely the one she did not dare to recall: the dark man who had kissed her the day after the ball. For the second time that day the housewife was straying,

64 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

and this time she was straying with a travel companion who was forbidden to her by honor and the law. Gardener, what was your theft in comparison to this crime? But it is so beautiful to love, it is so beautiful to say, with the Hussar and Parasha, “I am consumed by passion’s power burning, burning in love’s glower held by passion’s golden reins.” It is beautiful because you sing softly, “So I wandered, wandered in the woods,” and not once does it cross your mind that the oak trees in your park need pruning, it’s beautiful because. . . . But what is happening? This is a moan. Who is moaning like that? Why, Parasha, why, housewife, are you moaning and bowing your head over your chest? What did you see? Why do you become bent and old, and in supreme despair, as your eyes open wide as if you had seen a ghost, with a strange voice you read, “What a pity now our maid is dead and gone”? From that point on, the housewife kept reading very rapidly with a wicked obstinacy on her face and no more languor or pauses, no clemency for that Hussar now turned into a cook, and no mercy for herself or for Parasha. When she was finished with the libretto, which dealt with the hiring of a cook and the misdeeds of that new cook, who was really the Hussar in disguise, the housewife closed it and slammed it on the large table. With the same gesture, she cast away Pushkin and Stravinsky. Both of them were reduced, in her eyes, to two bottomless frying pans in the hands of that funny cook, Mavra. Even inside their minds, male minds, exceptional minds, a cook was the worst plague among household servants. But the housewife was not grateful to destiny for this consolation; in fact, she was furious, as if her last means of escape had been taken from her, as if this torment, which was no longer just her torment or a mere flaw of her spirit, had finally revealed itself as the most terrible of the two or three shameful physical needs shared by mankind. And therefore, even just thinking about it, just acknowledging it or talking about it, was enough to soil her. She wanted revenge, and so she stormed off to the library. She picked up a volume at random and opened it. Goethe’s Faust, Margaret speaking, “We have no maid—must cook, sweep, sew, and knit, and early run about and late.” Shakespeare, King Lear, “. . . cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels. . . .” Leopardi’s Zibaldone, “Another reason why I love ␮␱␯␱␸␣␥␫␣ is because I do not have to have (as I necessarily would if I had to eat in the company of others) people who assist at my lunch hovering around my table, d’importuns laquais, épiant nos discours, critiquant tout bas nos maintiens, comptant nos

Chapter 4 — 65

morceaux d’un œil avide, s’amusant à nous faire attendre à boire, et murmurant d’un trop long dîner (Rousseau, Émile). Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book IV, “. . . the well-known old door handle, which always angered the countess when it was not properly cleaned.” Cervantes, Don Quixote, “The servant sleeps and the master lies awake thinking how he is to feed him. . . .” “Enough,” yelled the housewife, “enough.” She felt disgust at what she was doing. But one last book happened to fall open in her hands. Did she really think that one book would be enough? That she was going to find a wholly different scenario? Beethoven’s Personal Notebooks. “January 31st. I fired the maid because she had a cheeky way of talking.” The housewife gulped and closed her eyes, in a daze. But it was only for a second. “February 15th. The new cook started today. Now the household staff is complete.” What year was it? 1819, when Beethoven was composing his Missa Solemnis. Moving on: “March 18th. The cook gave me a fifteen days’ notice before quitting. The new maid started on the 22nd. Hopefully things are settled now.” “April 19th. Bad day: I was not served any food.” Now Beethoven was in Mödling. “May 14th. Met the new maid.” “May 16th. Fired her because she ruined all the food.” “July 27th. Maid ran away.” The housewife took a sheet of parchment paper, and in red ink with the best block letters she could manage, she copied those sentences from Beethoven’s Notebooks. Once she was finished, she went straight into her room, to her writing desk, where she kept the portrait of her mother in a silver frame. She removed the picture from the frame and replaced it with the sheet she had copied, then sat down with her arms crossed, staring at it. Here is our true face, she thought. Food, slave labor, and eternal dealing with ignorance, deceit, and daily necessities. Mother. Mechanically, she wrote on the blotting paper, mom, mom, mom, in every handwriting and every language she knew. Someone knocked at the door. “Signora, dinner is served.” The Signora leaned her forehead against the word mom and wept.

66 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

And so she spent some more time among the bleak adventures of her mind while tending to the sixteen tasks that comprised her day: an hour to budget expenses, an hour to account for those expenses, an hour for charity, an hour for monitoring, an hour for surprise inspections, an hour for conjugal tête-à- tête, an hour for representative duties, an hour for complaints from the staff. Even sleep had become an eight-hour ordeal, standing on a train where all the seats were occupied by household worries (who should be invited to lunch with the misanthrope Signor Bartolo? Remember to order a new livery for Egisto; warn the cook not to put too much paprika in the Turkish-style rice; order feather pillows for the blue room; did they tidy the attics? Make sure they sowed fennel flower along the lawns). These worries never got off, never gave up their seat, and when out of exhaustion she fell onto their laps snoring, they knocked her on the floor with a push from behind, waking her up. The worries played dumb, looking at sunrise outside the window. Sunrise is the time of executions. The housewife, who felt she was being dragged toward the new day as to the gallows, could not shield herself from images of those dreary places where so much tyranny was being perpetrated: prison courts, cemetery walls, piazzas, and cells. From here to the end of the line, that was her pastime to avoid thinking of such travel companions. At the break of every new day, a housewife’s first duty is to infuse her kiss to her husband with endless thanks for the well-being he ensures her daily. The housewife had great capacity for hatred within her, but she knew how to dissimulate it. Still, little by little she felt able to bear the monotony of her duties. In fact, if at first such monotony terrified her, now it made her job easier. During those colorless days, life flowed with a rhythm that the woman, in order to feel less humiliated, compared to sea waves, to wind with its currents, to the earth whose unstoppable breath beckons one toward it even though the voice of nature keeps imploring God, “No more, no more.” The housewife’s secret voice emerged in nine pages of a notebook, which she filled with hallucinated handwriting, word after word, one word perhaps every two days, without ever rereading the previous one and ignoring the following one. She would jot them down when she felt that her whole body was on the lookout for those syllables: her knees would buckle, her skin would crack open and rise with a popping sound; the hairs on her body and on her head would sting as if they had been crystals, her breath would taste bitter between her hard lips. They were pages with no relation to her present life, but they were her way of saying to God: “No more.”

Chapter 4 — 67

The woman did not know it; she mistook them for mere attempts to recover her childhood thoughts and regarded them as small samples of escape, much like when, before she closed her eyes at night, she begged for dreams. For a long time, dreams would not come, and it had been a long time since she had abandoned her notebook, when the end of the solar year came (her first year of marriage). On the night of that December 31st she gazed for a while at the sky, between constellations, as if she were scrutinizing a friend’s brow. She imagined the sign of Capricorn traced in neon light across the dark vault between her most beloved stars, Fomalhaut and Betelgeuse, and pictured people’s destinies appearing and disappearing in brilliant signs. The icy remoteness of the sky did not frighten her; there was enough tenacity in the fixity of stars to save all human destinies. What disturbed her was the arrogance of humans who parted eternity for their own benefit. And she was equally disturbed at the idea of belonging to the realm of limited things on a night when unlimited things submitted themselves to human limits. For a moment, even time was a servant to mankind and agreed to strike the arrival of the new year. What if, all of a sudden, Virgo blossomed right there where Capricorn was winding down, or if Leo advanced roaring in the middle of August? What would her husband say, now that he had already arranged the gratuities for the servants? What about the ladies of the congregation, who had already prepared care packages for the town’s poor? What about the workers who were getting ready for the holidays? Oh, such scandal, such anarchy, such abuse! “Sky,” the housewife continued, in a whisper, “prove yourself. Show me that at least you can disobey if you want to. Show me that my husband’s far-sightedness is sometimes wrong: burn the envelopes with the gratuities in them, send a powerful wind, and knock over the alms baskets. Sky, you often create storms. You have all sorts of devices at your disposal: lightning, clouds, pelts, boundless spaces you can fall and hide in. Try and abandon the earth, I beg you. At least just once try and leave these social men without your assistance and the rebels without your foreboding. Let’s see what they can do on their own. Let’s see which of them carry the law in themselves and heaven in their destiny.” She lowered her voice a little and covered her mouth with both hands. “They are all greedy, calculating and thirsty for power, every one of them. They put up with you because they don’t know you yet, but let them come to the conclusion that hours can be obtained without light, space without gaps, and that the earth can revolve outside of any orbit, and you’ll

68 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

be fired. Your beauty will seem like a waste, a fuss, an impudent nuisance. Abandon us, o sky, deceptive science of mankind. Don’t be gentle. Show us that our calculations were fallacious, that our eyes were arbitrary. Hide the years from us, prodigious sky.” Silence. “Fine,” the housewife said finally. “I understand. You think that I’m one of them? That I, too, need you somehow as an excuse for rebellion or as a trapeze for my somersaults? That I’m practicing behind your back in false selflessness and sour pride? To the contrary, I believe that the desire for death and nothingness has truly been an attribute of mine ever since I was born. Farewell, then. When such conversations fail to yield any result, they become ridiculous.” She curtseyed and shut the window. I think the sky heard her words and was offended. Who can tell me it is not true? An ordinary housewife who has the nerve to stand up face-to-face with a tycoon of the universe, give advice, and make accusations, cannot but be regarded by that tycoon as a bighead who needs to be punished. For much less, men and women who are not even ordinary get punished by the tycoons of the earth. Therefore, it is no wonder that, on that night, the housewife finally had dreams, dreams that forced her to change her life and nature. But let us go in order. After preaching to the sky, the woman fully resumed her duties without yielding to any softening or concession. She closed the window, and given that the hour for the conjugal tête-à-tête was striking, she spent a good sixty minutes with her husband, giving him the opportunity to ask her if such and such had been done. “Yes.” If that other thing had been purchased. “Yes, that, too.” If things for so and so had been settled. “Of course.” If measures had been taken regarding business X. “Without a doubt.” And wouldn’t it be better to fire Y? “If you say so.” Even about Z I have my suspicions. “Justifiably so.” And do you love me? “What a question!” But you too are a perfect wife. “You’re too kind!” And so on and so forth until the clock struck eleven. Then, the husband got up, lay one hand on her shoulder, the other behind her head, and looked at her tenderly. He proceeded to clasp her to his heart and, at regular intervals, planted tiny kisses along the part of her hair. The housewife waited with her eyes closed. She was not bored or annoyed, she just waited, already languidly falling into

Chapter 4 — 69

that upright sleep she had become accustomed to. But all of a sudden she felt as if her husband had punched her on the back of her neck. She stiffened and sat still, waiting. Her husband was saying, “You’ve been my lady for almost a year. The whole city has honored us with parties, dinners, galas, and gifts as it is appropriate. We now need to do our duty and return the kindness we have received. To this end, I suppose that my lady and I will be happy to organize a dinner followed by a dance and a reception for the town’s authorities and our most distinguished friends.” Pleased by such a beautiful display of eloquence, he rewarded himself by lifting her face and placing a kiss on the bridge of her nose. The housewife inquired, “When is it scheduled for?” She had heard those words in a movie where they informed a person on death row that his petition for reprieve had been rejected. “I’m thinking the Epiphany, my dearest. In six days. There’s plenty of time to send out the invitations. Do you want to?” “I want to. May I go to bed now?” “My dearest, you’re forgetting that it’s New Year’s Eve, our first New Year’s Eve. It’s customary to wait for it together.” They waited together: at midnight, the husband, who had requested the butler to bring him a basket of broken pots and burnt-out light bulbs, began to throw them methodically out of the window into the garden, and to rejoice methodically at the smashing and shattering noise they produced. Champagne was served, New Year’s greetings were exchanged and magnanimously received from the servants who were present, and with the exhilaration of special events the wife was accompanied to the bridal chamber, although the husband no longer shared it with her, out of decorum and hygiene. In her bed at last, the housewife abandoned herself for a few moments to devastating fantasies, then clenched her fists, opened her mouth, and fell asleep. Right then, with very little courtesy, the sky started to exact its revenge. For the first time after her wedding, it showered her with the dreams she had long wished for, but they were only dreams about servants, servants, and more servants with whom she could not stop arguing. While a maid insisted that she had been robbed, the mender began to tear up the linen in a fit of rage, and before the housewife could make her see reason, the dishwasher burst out

70 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

crying and said that he was going to quit because the cook had hit him. From the back, the cook yelled out that it was not true, and that the mistress had better not believe him. Flabbergasted, the housewife asked to speak with the butler. Where was the butler? In the housekeeper’s arms. Wasn’t there anyone else in the house? Anyone who would follow orders? There was the old servant who had seen all of his masters grow up. The housewife ran to him. “Signora,” his booming voice resounded, “I’m giving you your eight days’ notice,” and turned his back on her. The housewife sat down, her hands on her lap. If only she could have the illusion of dreaming, and just rest in the hope of waking up. But unfortunately, what was happening was real: in one single day, for one reason or another, twenty members of the household staff left the family. The event was exceptional, but possible. The housewife did not know what to do anymore, and the dinner with dance and reception was just six days away. She picked up the telephone and called her mother’s house, looking for the babysitter who used to dust her and oil her when they would pull her out of the trunk for Easter. “Hello? Ferminia, dear, come to my house right away. I’ve been left alone. I don’t know how to make coffee, and in a little while my husband will wake up and ring the bell for breakfast.” Ferminia was a demure angel. She toiled on the floor and with her hands of sorrow she lifted the bodies of mankind and helped them rise to the Empyrean. But today what did that angel reply, that angel whom the housewife thought immutable and eternal? The angel guffawed into the receiver and hung up the phone (thank God at least she left the housewife with the certainty that a contact had been made). The housewife then called an employment agency. At the agency they told her that during the holidays they had no workforce, just one starving mother with five children, who would come part-time. Let her come. Enter a vast, hairy woman with crooked eyes and mouth, and a man’s voice. She held a young, washed-out, dazed girl by the hand. One of her five children, perhaps? It was the first time the housewife had to hire a household helper. Her hands were sweaty, she didn’t know what to say, and her head was swarming with the preparations for the imminent reception. She wiped her hands on her skirt and swallowed. “I need a woman with the strength to throw herself on the floor and polish it. . . .”

Chapter 4 — 71

“Polish it with her tongue, if necessary,” remarked the vast creature with a menacing tone toward a mysterious God of laziness. The housewife wished the woman would leave, and tried to scare her away, “I need a woman who will cook, make the beds and straighten up the kennels for us, the dogs, the horses, the birds, and the cats because I’ve been left alone all of a sudden. A woman who won’t contest my orders.” “Dead silent,” echoed the woman to the housewife. The housewife glanced behind her back to see if anyone was coming to protect her. “Even more important than the cleaning of the house, I would like this person to take care of her own personal cleanliness with the same precision.” “Honor and cleanliness are the wealth of the poor,” recited the sullen woman, shaking the young girl who hung like an appendage from her arm. “Punctuality.” “Even better: meticulousness.” “You all say that all the time, but then . . .” “But then, dear Signora, we do even more than we say. And watch your words.” “Of course, because we have to live in the same house from now on. Cooperating for each other’s well-being requires a division of labor: I give the orders and the other person obeys. Only God knows which one of us has the better destiny in store. Tomorrow, then, at 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. Goodbye.” “Signora, I’m not coming. I’m not the one who needs to come. If I had been the one, with all that was said, I would already have run away. I’m proud of being slovenly, untidy, unpunctual, a loafer, a liar, and a thief if the occasion arises. I, Signora, have always played the part of the man in my own home: I didn’t even get married so I could be freer, and whoever chooses to live with me has to clean his own room and roll the dough. If it were for me, the world would be a sewer. This wretched creature,” and she shook the young girl, “she is the mother with five children and a husband who’s out of work. It’s everybody’s fault. Let’s find a remedy: I get her a job, and you hire her. We’re all set. This one doesn’t even dare introduce herself on her own. She says she looks too tiny, too starved; that she doesn’t inspire much confidence, and that people won’t even try her out. But I guarantee you: this is a little finger, Signora, but it’s the little finger of the Virgin Mary.” In the meantime, the little finger of the Virgin Mary was blushing and trying to hide her shame behind those 180 pounds of vice that ruled over

72 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

her. Even before the housewife addressed her, she threw herself at her feet and begged the housewife to command her, mistreat her, punish her, and not look at her, because if she was so deathly pale, it was not due to ill feelings, but to hunger, and if her shoulders were frail, it was not due to a weak will, but to privation. But above all she begged her, for pity’s sake, to give her an impossible task right away, a mule’s task, an ant’s, and see what she was made of in terms of strength or precision, before she were to regret hiring her. The housewife agreed: let her go and clean the stables immediately—a renowned labor—and after that, to darn this chiffon stocking. “It shall be done, Signora,” thundered the 180 pounds of vice, and off she went into the garden, carrying under her arm the 70 pounds of virtue who was weeping with gratitude. At this point, the housewife, exhausted, opened her eyes. It was late morning, she could feel it, but she did not call anyone, did not look at the clock, and did not move from the uncomfortable position that had woken her up. Instead, with the utmost care she began to cry, out of shame, out of misery, out of fear for that dream that had roped her in. Not even for a moment had she suspected that it was a dream. On the contrary, how painstakingly had she played her role as mistress of the house, how strenuously had she overcome the torment of her soul, which kept rising back to God despite her efforts to make it concentrate on the most trivial of God’s lowest creations. After crying for a while, she felt that even crying, and crying like that, was a rebellion to her new life, and with an utterly mystical cruelty, she immediately forbade herself to do it. In an instant, her eyes became dry, even arid, her lips resumed their normal contour, and her nose turned white again. She tidied her hair with her hand, fixed her nightgown over her shoulders, lay down, stiffened in a dignified position among the pillows, and rang the bell for the maid. Instead of the maid, as a true New Year’s Day surprise, the door opened slightly and in came her husband, walking softly toward her and placing a case on her bed. “Happy New Year, my dearest,” he said, as he covered her hands with kisses. “Happy New Year, my beloved wife. Here is a bijou for my bijou.” He opened the case and pulled out an emerald. “Happy New Year! Happy New Year! Happy New Year!” he exclaimed over and over. The poor wretch did not reply.

5 For six days the housewife concocted and created. She could neither sleep nor eat, and she lost weight. She learned the torment of expectation and the terror of the imminent event. She even tried to pray, but decided that it was sacrilegious to pray merely to rid oneself of material burdens. And so she tried to divert her mind, as neuropathologists recommend, and went to the opera. They were performing The Maid Mistress. She tried to ignore the title, but after a while she realized that she was no longer paying attention to the music and was using her opera glasses to study every fold in Serpina’s gown, thinking: She must have a good maid: that gown is difficult to iron. Another time, her husband dragged her to the movie theater, but the story was that of a grand duke and a grand duchess reduced to working as servants for a family of rich boors to whom they ended up teaching good manners. The third time, her father popped in without warning, made her drop her plans for the guests’ table arrangements halfway, and took her to the Municipal Museum. She seemed serene. She loved dad very much and was happy to be led along by him. Even when she was not listening, just to hear him talk was enough to soothe her. His had been the first man’s voice to comfort her after her birth. He was the noble part of her, that ethereal part existing in everyone: spirit and sentiment. Dear dad, thank you for accepting me, she thought, for opening the door for me when I was knocking at mankind’s hearts to be let in. You did not argue, and you called me daughter, your little girl, almost as if you had really wanted me just like that, so botched up and unfit. Although he could sense his daughter’s thoughts, dad talked about other things because men who love have much decency and, if they are kind, much suspicion of their own kindness. They stopped in front of a dark, vivid painting that swarmed with apparitions. The museum around them was cold, deserted, and glowing. The father spoke of color relations and pointed out areas of the painting to his

— 73 —

74 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

daughter who, looking at the shiny floors, asked: “How do they make them like that?” All of a sudden, without even realizing it, she began to press against her father’s side. She pushed him toward the door and dragged him along, asking him to wait there for a moment, if he did not want to follow her. “But why?” “Can’t you hear? Can’t you? No, dad, I guess you can’t. It’s footsteps, can you hear them?” She pointed toward the ceiling with her eyes and hand while she tiptoed toward the exit and lowered her voice. “Yes, footsteps, but what else?” “Noises, lots of noises, can’t you hear? They must be hauling something.” A triumphant grin traversed her face. “Yes, they are hauling something. So? They are probably hauling paintings, moving statues around.” The daughter shook her head, “None of you wants to believe it. I know, I know that the linen maid steals. She’s always dragging chests and trunks into the closet. She pulls out old clothes, blankets, linen, and at night her henchmen come to take them away. I can’t keep a watch on everything. But now I’ll catch them red-handed; if I show up now she won’t be able to deny it.” She had two swollen rings around her eyes. Her father turned pale, took her by the shoulders, and shook her. “My child, daughter, listen to me, remember: we’re in a museum, you and I. There are no linen maids here, no henchmen, nobody you need to watch except yourself. Do you hear me?” “Yes, yes.” She said yes just to keep him quiet. When she felt she was alone, she started to think, I wonder if, when Raphael was painting, his maid would knock at his door to ask him what he wanted for dinner. But at last everything had been taken care of. And on that day, a few hours before the guests arrived, the industrious housewife enjoyed a moment of long, idle happiness. She found the courage to declare that she was tired, lay down on a sofa and ordered milk-and-coffee with toast buttered on the top and on the bottom, feeling no shame at eating it before the servants. She stirred lump after lump of sugar into the milk-and-coffee, found it excellent, and asked for more. Then, while the house was completely silent after the weeklong bustle, she lowered her eyelashes and, murmuring remote words, fell asleep.

Chapter 5 — 75

The big day arrived: Sunday, January 6th, Epiphany of Our Lord. Zodiac sign: Capricorn. Venus conjunct Moon at 3 p.m. The sun rises at 7:39 a.m. and sets at 6:35 p.m. Angelus bell at 5:15 p.m. Perigee at 1 p.m. A large, brightly-lit room. Scattered here and there are crystal tables set for four with dining sets and candelabra, also made of crystal. On each table are four lit candles, four bouquets of delicate flowers on each plate, and four golden chairs in front of each dining set. The whole room is white, delicate, flowery, and blurry from all the light. The candle flames are the only consistent and definite spots in the Empyrean-like atmosphere. In a corner, on a white satin sofa, the HOUSEWIFE is sleeping, barefoot. She is dreaming, and while dreaming, she laughs. She wakes up with a start. “My God, what a dream! It was so pleasant it scared me. To those who are not accustomed to it, pleasure causes more dismay than pain. (She gets up and bows.) My respects to philosophy. (She wanders around the tables. In her imagination, the DARK MAN starts to materialize on the sofa where she was sitting. He yawns): DARK MAN: . . . ophy. HOUSEWIFE (doesn’t turn around, but in her mind she sees him on the sofa. She gazes at him for a while before speaking): Why do you have it in for me? I just get by in life as best as I can; it’s not that I enjoy it. DARK MAN: No, of course not. HOUSEWIFE: Everyone gets to breathe in this world. Even you, outside of this machine. Won’t you even let me create a few illusions for myself in here? DARK MAN: Can you picture a turbine that falls in love? A train that wants to head down to the realm of Mothers? A refrigerator that speculates on a principle? That’s what you are. A machine trained to keep accounts, run checks, scold, predict, save, and every now and then you revel in illusions of suffering, reasoning, love, as

76 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

you’re doing now. But let’s see if you are able to come over here on this most wonderful sofa, and . . . HUSBAND IN TAILCOAT (comes in and runs toward his wife): My dearest, everything is most wonderful . . . DARK MAN (still invisible to the others): Oh, the mechanism is using my words. HOUSEWIFE (to the dark man): Just let him talk. Amuse yourself, too. HUSBAND IN TAILCOAT: Are you listening to me? Everything is most wonderful, but you are inadequate. DARK MAN: Ha ha ha! HOUSEWIFE: I’ll stay like this for tonight. I’m adequate, dear, don’t worry. I don’t have a train or a crown, but I’ll still play my role to the fullest. It’ll be a memorable night, as my husband commands. (She bows to him.) HUSBAND: These nervous fits are not to my liking, and . . . BUTLER (entering): With the Signora’s permission, the maids are ready, if you want to review them. HOUSEWIFE: In the new uniform? BUTLER: In the new uniform. HUSBAND: What does that mean? HOUSEWIFE: Have them come in. BUTLER (calling toward the inside room): Come in. (Twelve maids walk in one after the other, all dressed in long white frocks, with aprons,

Chapter 5 — 77

white starched caps, gloves with frills and golden ribbons.) DARK MAN (gets up and goes over to touch them): Oh, my! They are real. HUSBAND (outraged): What is this farce? And you, in your housecoat! A SERVANT (running in): The cook, Signora, is afraid—or rather, he hopes—that he misunderstood your orders. He’s crying, pulling the dishwashers’ hair out, banging their heads against the wall. HUSBAND (most outraged): What is this rebellion? And you, in your housecoat! (THE SERVANT, assisted by the Butler, rushes to draw a white curtain that serves as a back wall, and a crystal pane appears, with the kitchen behind it. Servants and dishwashers are running in every direction, carrying frying pans, baskets, and trays. Pots are boiling, cooks are mixing dough, confectioners are beating eggs, the COOK is smacking ladles on the shoulders of helpers who are peeling heaps of potatoes and shelling hills of peas. Gardeners are picking lettuce leaves, while countrywomen are plucking chicken. Feathers flutter around, whirling in the thick smoke. The crystal pane steams up, everything turns opaque, and from the milky fog some confused voices can be made out: Give me that pot. Pass me the ladle, drain this, skim that, fry, grind, mix amidst the sobbing of the . . . ) COOK: It’s inconceivable that I should bring my pots among the common people! Making a spectacle of myself! I, a magician, showing the tricks of my trade! HOUSEWIFE (with a corner of her dress wipes a portion of the crystal pane and knocks on it to get the cook to walk over to her): Cook, if you do as I say I promise we’ll triumph. Put the deer on the spit, the cornmeal in the cauldron, the larks in flocks as if they were still flying in the sky. Listen to me. We must keep up with the

78 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

times. Our times are grandiose, are they not? Let us be grandiose too. Our era is memorable? Let your dinner be memorable too. The moment is historical? Let your cornmeal be just as historical. History prides itself with massacres? Then slaughter all of the animals on our estate one by one and you’ll rise to glory. COOK (behind the crystal panel): If the Signora puts me on the same level as time, which is precarious, I’ll have to resign. If the Signora is talking about a historical event, she is degrading me. The kitchen, Signora, is not precarious, but eternal. The kitchen, Signora, is a necessity, not an event. An event, no matter how historical, can be avoided, but the kitchen cannot be avoided. As for me, I want no glory, I’m not an ambitious leader: I’m a priest. Forcing me to show the ways of my kitchen is like forcing a priest to reveal the mysteries of a ritual. But the kitchen doesn’t want to be revealed, its very steam protects it, even if the Signora has removed the walls that shielded us. (Raising his voice.) Signora, are your guests worthy of being initiated? HUSBAND (most outraged): How do you dare raise your voice and question the Signora? HOUSEWIFE: Cook, my guests are unworthy. That’s why it shall be done. Don’t be haughty, be merciful. Many shall receive the call, but only a few shall be chosen. (At her signal, the servant and the butler draw the white curtain, and the wall goes back to normal.) HUSBAND (beyond any outrage): What is this Christianity—in housecoat? DARK MAN: Ouch, be careful. If the mechanism goes over the top, the machine will blow up. HOUSEWIFE: No, no. Becoming outraged and investigating is part of the lubrication of these machines. DARK MAN: And in the meantime, what about you?

Chapter 5 — 79

HOUSEWIFE (still without looking at him): I . . . (but she stops short out of misery and shame, then turns quickly to the butler). I want to hear music now. (The butler bows and leaves.) (To the servant.) Are your fellow workers ready? All of them freshly shaven? (The servant bows after each question.) Are the lights on? DARK MAN (speaking very slowly, somberly): Enough, now. Come here. You, with me. Is that what you meant to say? When that other one becomes outraged? HOUSEWIFE (as above, blushing): With you. But not now; now I’m going to get dressed up to please him (she points to her husband, pauses, then very softly), and to please you. (Music from above.) HUSBAND: What is this inappropriate music? And you, still in your housecoat. HOUSEWIFE (goes over to the sofa and curls up in the dark man’s arms. To the husband, angrily): Just a moment ago I wanted to get changed, but now I’m so tired from listening to you. I’m going to rest a bit, while they try out the music. My dearest, will you let me turn the light off? (A clock in the nearby room strikes the time.) HUSBAND: Half past eight, and you, in your housecoat. (He turns off the light and goes out. The candles are burning.) HOUSEWIFE (has kissed the dark man for a while, and now she is staring at him, holding his face in her hands. The young man does not move): You hate me so much? Don’t look at me like that. Close your eyes, or I’ll be terrified. They’re so bare, so cruel. (She closes his eyes.) Now, caress me (she takes his hands and guides them over her body, but noticing that he remains listless, she stops). Won’t I ever be your woman?

80 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

DARK MAN: Why did you come over to this sofa? HOUSEWIFE (with her mouth pressed against his heart): I want to have your baby. DARK MAN: Such a reason would be more suitable for a husband. HOUSEWIFE: No, no, only for the man you love, only for him. BUTLER (by the door): Is the music fine, Signora? HOUSEWIFE: Fine. (To the dark man.) Sorry. (To the butler.) Let them keep playing, and arrange the servants along the grand staircase. (To the dark man, embracing him again.) Here I am. BUTLER (was about to leave, but comes back and walks over to a table): Oh, this candle is dripping. (He puts it out with his fingers and starts working on it.) DARK MAN (caressing the housewife): A baby? For you, even babies would be a wager, an accessory. But having them, perhaps, would be less fun for you. HOUSEWIFE: That’s precisely why I would want them, my wretched love. (While he keeps caressing her, she inadvertently starts to sniff the air, jumps up, and sees the butler who put out the candle. The foul smell of smoke has spread around the room. She violently pushes the young man away and climbs on the sofa. To the butler, from up there, like a captain on horseback): No, no, what are you doing? Be careful, the whole room is filled with this sickening smell. Turn on the lights, right away. And open the windows while I go and get dressed. (She climbs down and leaves the room, forgetting about the dark man, who slowly fades away.)

Chapter 5 — 81

(The clock strikes three quarters of the hour. The BUTLER carries out his orders. The HUSBAND comes in and looks for his wife on the sofa. Not seeing her, he sits down in the seat that she and the dark man had occupied. He motions to the butler to turn on the lights. His mind is absorbed by gloomy thoughts): My wife is young. They’re just little whims. BUTLER (turning on the lights): I’d call them big ones, if the Signor allows it. HUSBAND: No, you wouldn’t call them anything, I won’t allow it. (An intrusive spirit must reside in the corner of the sofa where the husband is sitting: the husband is restless. He turns around, looking for the butler): Where are you? Come over here. (He scratches his shoulder, which had been against the armrest.) You haven’t supervised the cleaning of this room. There are fleas here (he scratches himself), bugs (he scratches himself furiously), lice, by God! HOUSEWIFE’S VOICE (far away, from her room upstairs): Oh my naughty love, leave my husband alone, don’t prick him, he’s already so calm and collected that I’m starting to suspect he might have been dead for a while. DARK MAN’S VOICE (like a woodworm’s, from within the sofa): I want him to fall like dust over your head, my distinguished lady of homemade rendezvous. Did you get dressed in your finery for your domestic dysfunctions? HUSBAND (scratching himself more and more furiously, to the butler): But where is the Signora? Could it be she was swallowed by these hemiptera, these herdlike bugs? (Blasts of brass band from the garden.)

82 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The guests! Butler, reconstruct the Signora, deck her out, position her in the first salon! (The butler rushes out. Sounds of knocking on the crystal pane behind the curtain.) The cook is summoning, satisfy his requests, chop chop! (The butler runs to the crystal pane, but the woodworm inside the sofa begins to gnaw so loudly that the husband gives a start.) Help me, over here, over here, the hemiptera are digging into the sofa, they are digging into me, too. Exterminate them! (The butler rushes toward his master.) COOK’S VOICE (behind the back wall): Make sure the guests aren’t late! Remember this! You all shall eat! DISHWASHERS’ VOICES (in unison): Amen. A SERVANT (zooms in on tiptoes): Signor, the signori are here, but not the Signora. If the Signor . . . COOK’S VOICE: In fourteen minutes’ time! Remember this! You all shall eat! DISHWASHERS’ VOICES (in unison): Amen. (More blasts from the brass band in the garden.) ANOTHER SERVANT (like the first one): Signor, signori, signore, and the Signora . . . HUSBAND (rising majestically): I am the Signora! (Goes out to meet the guests.) COOK’S VOICE: Thirteen minutes! Remember this! And you all shall eat! DISHWASHERS’ VOICES (in unison): Amen. (The BUTLER fluffs up the pillows on the sofa.)

Chapter 5 — 83

DARK MAN’S VOICE (still like a woodworm’s): Say it: your master is wise, your master is upright, precise, fair, and educated. What’s your master like? BUTLER (to himself): Deleterious. (The clock strikes nine. The last blasts of the brass band resound from the garden. Music comes in from above. The doors burst open, and a buzzing sound of a crowd can be heard moving closer. The buzz gets louder, it becomes a commotion. From the back door, two lackeys enter. They draw the curtain and slide one-half of the crystal pane over the other. From this opening the carvers march in one after the other while the guests enter in pairs from the parlors. A throng of servants in sparkling liveries stream in from one of the side doors. Each of them immediately takes hold of a chair and of the destiny of a specific guest. The twelve maidservants enter from the other side, raising twelve glasses filled with mysterious translucent fluids. Finally, when the whole room is crowded with people, the large central chandelier descends to the floor, opens up like a flower, and from its crystals the HOUSEWIFE rises and comes forward. The guests clap their hands, and the chandelier ascends back to its spheres. The Housewife distributes curtseys, smiles, hands, and greetings, then she glides over to the sofa and stands for a while in front of it to let the dark man admire her in the dress he already knows from the previous party.) HOUSEWIFE (after caressing the back of the sofa, she reaches her seat at one of the tables. Sitting to her right is a CARDINAL, to her left a WARRANT OFFICER, and in front of her a most distinguished NATIONAL LADY and COURTESAN. At her husband’s table, the place of honor is occupied by an OUSTED QUEEN who brings luster to the scene): God help us. CARDINAL: Oh, one of those old acquaintances. NATIONAL LADY: Old acquaintances? Let’s throw them out! Renewal, it’s time for renewal!

84 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

OUSTED QUEEN (from the other table, haughtily): How monotonous these innovators are! They toss something, then fish it back out, toss it, and fish it back out. CARDINAL (smiling): It’s a way to render unto Caesar what Caesar had bagged. OUSTED QUEEN (indulgently): Oh no, Your Eminence, my husband’s name is Henry. Henry XII. NATIONAL LADY (with a voice like a rallying call): And what we won’t toss, we’ll take. We, the Homeland. WARRANT OFFICER (jumping to his feet): I’m ready, Your Excellence! Long live the Homeland! CARDINAL (clapping his hands suavely as if he were at a performance): And long live justice, too. Cheers, cheers. (They clink glasses.) (The servants, carvers, and maids walk around the tables serving the guests. The guests eat, the music plays, the clock strikes the time.) WARRANT OFFICER (to the Housewife, haughtily and decisively): Your descent to the field was most brilliant and crowned by an overwhelming victory. HOUSEWIFE (imitating him): I am gratified and proud. CARDINAL (as above): Good job. You know the script by heart. NATIONAL LADY: And people got to see your legs, which are very beautiful, my dear. That idea was full of good intentions. CARDINAL: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. NATIONAL LADY: How I love the road to hell.

Chapter 5 — 85

CARDINAL: So do I! HOUSEWIFE: What are a woman’s beautiful legs good for? Before marriage she’s not supposed to use them, nor after it. CARDINAL: Before and after don’t exist with respect to eternity: it is, therefore, a wise rule to ignore them in life. NATIONAL LADY: It’s wise to ignore any rule. CARDINAL: In fact, it’s a rule to ignore any wisdom. WARRANT OFFICER (raising his staff of office): Stop! (The Housewife, the Cardinal, and the National Lady freeze into silence.) I am in favor of a rapid advance. Such parliamentarianism irritates me. At ease! (The three of them loosen up.) Forward, march! CARDINAL: But I have no weapons, my dear son. I can’t make an assault. NATIONAL LADY: One makes an assault with one’s heart, Your Eminence! CARDINAL: Madame, be careful of words you don’t know the meaning of. The heart is a muscular organ located in the chest, and it’s not allowed to come out of it, at the risk of death. Occasionally, this muscle, while remaining in its place, was able to assist man during great feats. Feats of tolerance, sacrifice, and humility. But perhaps you meant “those” assaults? (With bonhomie, he points to some couples who are going off into a corner, exchanging languid stares, their hands intertwined.) NATIONAL LADY (irritatingly): You be careful, too, then! These skirmishes have nothing to do with the heart. CARDINAL: Too bad.

86 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

WARRANT OFFICER (to the Housewife, measuring the length of her arm with his mustache): A beautiful, impregnable fortress. The deployment of your wings is perfect! HOUSEWIFE: Shall we have them retire behind the lines? (She hides her arms behind her back and in her mind she immediately runs to the sofa, next to the dark man.) Forgive me, but anything they or I may say tonight must not concern you. You know it: it’s as if I were wearing a mask. (All of a sudden, from the door leading into the garden, Leonardo the Gardener comes in carrying a pot of flowers and, without looking at anyone, walks straight over to the Housewife.) LEONARDO THE GARDENER (standing before the Housewife): Here’s the vase I stole today. Call the master. Where is he? Let him come. I’ll put down my loot here (he puts the pot on a table) and you put down yours. All of them (he points to the guests), wise or foolish as they may be, shall judge. Who, between Leonardo the gardener and his mistress, is the greater thief? HOUSEWIFE (indicating the furtive couples here and there): You don’t know much about the criminal code: one is not judged on mere intent: I only contemplate theft, while instead you steal, and you don’t even enjoy stealing; you steal out of duty, because a servant must steal from his master. How do you expect to be judged with mercy by all these people who are committing your same theft? A squalid theft committed out of duty, habit, lack of imagination? LEONARDO THE GARDENER: What do you think? That I was taught to steal by someone else? I’m self-taught. I used to watch my father do it, and then I practiced on my own, out of pride, until I learned so well that it felt like I had been born with it, with that craving in my hands. That I had the right to want other people’s stuff.

Chapter 5 — 87

HOUSEWIFE: Precisely. Just like them. Each one of them is self-taught, like you. And they, too, feel like they were born with that craving in their hands, with that desire for other people’s stuff. Do you want a proof? (To the butler.) Please ask everyone to be quiet, except for mature ladies. BUTLER (climbs onto a podium and bangs a gong): Silence! Music, clock, servants, people in the kitchen, pets wandering around the house, wind, woodworms, sinister creaks, men, women. By the Mistress’s orders, be quiet. The mature ladies have the floor. (Strikes the gong again.) (Whispers and noises, words, sounds fading away. Silence. Only the ticking of the clock can still be heard, but it becomes progressively softer and slower. Finally, it too dies away. A long silence fills the large ballroom, where only the Husband, the Housewife, the Butler, and Leonardo the Gardener remain. However, one can sense the presence, under the tables, behind the curtains and the doors, of the furtive couples. At last, after the period of total silence, from the most remote corners of the garden, from the far-away parlors, from all hiding places, there rises the CHORUS OF MATURE WOMEN. ) CHORUS OF MATURE WOMEN (initially slow and sobbing, bashful, then increasingly more violent, and finally gloomy and obsessive): At last, at last I’ve met you. For so long I waited for you. And now I’ve found you, but it’s too late. I’m a wretched woman, almost old. My son is your age, and yet it’s you, now I know it, now I can feel it. Getting married was a deceit; my husband never understood me. Why wasn’t I able to wait for you? But now you’ve come, and everything is erased. I suffered so much; that man is a selfish brute. Take me, I’m yours, I’m new. He only had my body, my soul is virginal. (Pause.) I, too, am a virgin for you, for you I’ve become pure again. (Long sigh.) For years, while I waited for you, I rejected his urges. Your love must save me, I know nothing but this love. . . .

88 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

(At the Housewife’s signal, the Butler bangs the gong, and the chorus is silent.) HOUSEWIFE (to Leonardo the Gardener): Did you hear? Each one of them is certain she is inventing those words and feelings. HUSBAND: Not at all. Everyone knows women learn feelings from bad literature. This is not sufficient proof. HOUSEWIFE: Let’s try with men, then. (To the Butler.) Let the husbands have the floor. BUTLER (bangs, etc., as above): The husbands have the floor! CHORUS OF HUSBANDS (following a rushed, whispering rhythm that becomes more and more distinct): O you, Lady, you embody every noble virtue. You are so unique, so precious, you spread poetry and love with every step. Please, believe me: don’t judge me, don’t ask me why I married that woman. She deceived me. As a girl she looked so delicate, so full of ideals; then, as soon as I married her, she turned into a witch, a servant. (The HUSBAND tries very hard not to join in the chorus.) CHORUS OF HUSBANDS (more pressing and articulate): But you, my divine creature, will never, ever sink so low. Getting chummy with the servants, filling your head up with gossip, card games, intrigues . . . HUSBAND (who, despite his efforts, has been dragged into the litany) and CHORUS: . . . recipes, orders; if you say “love,” she answers “the cost of butter has gone up”; you suggest a moonlight journey, and she counterattacks with a pair of stockings that need darning. She has even become jealous now that she has lost her soul and wrecked her body. That’s because she’s weak; she’s not the woman she made me believe she was. She made my mother die of heartbreak; she

Chapter 5 — 89

was not worthy like you. You—perfect one, adored one, sublime and beautiful. You’re beautiful. I like you, I want you. HUSBAND alone (yelling so as to overpower the chorus that still continues murmuring): No! What nonsense is this? What are you making me say? I am a gentleman! I respect my wife, if nothing else because she carries my name. Who has the nerve to say that my wife lost her soul? That her body is wrecked? Besides, my mother died before she was even born. HOUSEWIFE (motions to the Butler, who bangs the gong. The Butler obliges. Silence): You’re only speaking the truth, husband. But the truth is what condemns you all. (Inadvertently, she raises her voice and takes on a preacher’s attitude. Here and there, male heads pop up and start to listen to her attentively. A face with a goatee peeks from under a table, another with a mustache appears from behind a screen, a cluster of bald heads leans in from the door that leads up the stairs, a bespectacled face pokes out of a Chinese vase. As she speaks, the Housewife points her finger at one face after another. Immediately, each face withdraws in fear, reappearing very cautiously, like snails when they are touched.) When you all got married (ample circular gesture), your wife was a little, fragile being or, let’s say, a free spirit, as you prefer (points to a head that immediately disappears), or as you prefer (points to another head that also disappears), or perhaps you, who didn’t even want her and were forced to marry her (points to a third face). Pick whichever you want, in any case we always come to the same conclusion. The conclusion is that, after a few years of marriage, or many years, again as you prefer, every man finds that his woman is a conglomerate of vulgarity, and begins to chase another who, in turn, is to her husband no more than a servant or—such a great honor—‘the mother of his children.’ (Now many female faces begin to appear here and there, too.) Once they have cataloged us, men will continue to consider us good enough to spend an hour with, but after that our place is at home minding the children, the kitchen, or the living room, it makes no difference which one. But out of their way, out of their mind, if not out of their heart.

90 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

CHORUS OF WOMEN OF PLEASURE (suddenly): But they pay, they pay, and in exchange you give them a lot of trouble, while we give them a lot of lovely diseases, a lot of pretty revulsions, and certain little words, certain little moves they can no longer forget, not even when they approach the untouchable “mother of their children,” their untouchable “daughters,” and their would-be untouchable sisters. Because sex is the same for all women, even though men don’t want to hear it. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that true? (They laugh.) HOUSEWIFE (screaming): And what’s it good for? Is that how you save wives, daughters, and sisters, all of them destined to become symbols for the crowd, and commonplaces for their men? Do you free them from the nagging materiality of everyday life? From the friction between bare necessities and spirit? From having to restrain a body that loved to run wild, a heart that knew how to fly, and a soul that enjoyed doing somersaults? And the more a man indulges himself in these ventures, the greater he is; the more he crushes, the more generous he seems; the more precipices he digs in his mind, the more he conquers. But a woman already carries, on her body, deadlines, rules, and the need to take precautions. By asking to be paid, how do you defend them? You’re merely creating another barrier for them, assigning them a market value, leaving them with nothing but that which is tangible and controllable. CARDINAL: My child, but in the Bible the punitive injunction to bear children is but the injunction to embrace the materiality of life. One must accept divine punishment with gratitude and therefore make life the most material of all things. YOUNG GIRLS (bursting into the room from all sides, each dragging an escort along): We want to be punished right now. Go ahead and punish us, what are you waiting for? DARK MAN (suddenly appearing on the sofa): Do you see them? Do you hear them? Why did you speak? Vanity, my woman, just vanity.

Chapter 5 — 91

HOUSEWIFE (to herself): Because I, too, wish I had been punished through you, and given my senses to your children, and remained busily dull in the forced house labor, with the image of my creatures hanging before my eyes to keep me going, like a donkey with hay dangling before its muzzle to draw it ahead. But what good does this sterile clairvoyance do to me? Neither men nor women can accept me. Not even you who love me. DARK MAN: On the contrary, only I, because I love you. And I set you free so that you can be whole. Fulfill yourself, make yourself complete in yourself. (As they talk, the room fills up again; all the mothers hold their daughters and sons by the hand, in long chains; the fathers are gathered in the background, blurred.) CHORUS OF MOTHERS (screaming and pushing their children forward): What are you suggesting? We’re sacred. Sacred: not criminals to be punished. Our children are our pride, our flag. Long live our children! DARK MAN (amused): How nice social life is! Everything becomes a celebration, a demonstration, an acclamation: heroism. Well done! Encore! CHORUS OF MOTHERS (with arrogance): That’s right. Long live our children! MULTIPLE VOICES AND SOUNDS (from the outside, from the sky, and from underground): Ssh! Quiet! (Dismay.) CHORUS OF MOTHERS (fearfully): What was it? Who is towering above us? Where are our children? CHILDREN (separated from their mothers): We’re here, up here. We go up, and you go down. Who’s pushing us to the surface, and who’s dragging you to the bottom? (Cries and moans.)

92 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

WARRANT OFFICER (coming forward): What’s with all this panic? (To the Housewife) Your armies of guests and servants are withdrawing under the disconcerting attacks of your pressing hospitality. Allow me to take charge of the retreat and restore order among the population. (While he speaks, in a corner two of the children, a young man and a young woman, kiss furtively.) SHE: My love, will it be forever? HE: Forever. SHE: Will you cheat on me? HE: Never. (They embrace.) A MOTHER (moves away from the chorus and runs toward the two lovers, separates them, slaps her daughter and attacks the young man): Rogue! Murderers! The honor of a family! You, flirt! And you, seducer! ANOTHER MOTHER (rushing into the fray): You—a seducer, a rogue! (Pulls her son away.) (Now the respective fathers and husbands of the four contenders also rush in and join the dispute. In the meantime, other couples of children start exchanging love vows and embracing, while other parents start insulting each other.) HOUSEWIFE (sadly): That’s it, the panic is over. WARRANT OFFICER: And now we must lead the armies to victory! HOUSEWIFE (ever more sadly): Why? While we despaired, we all heard a warning voice, but in the racket of victory, everyone turns deaf.

Chapter 5 — 93

WARRANT OFFICER: Tut-tut! Are you a defeatist? CARDINAL (blesses him, smiling): . . . for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (To the Housewife, gravely.) A word to the wise. But aren’t they the ones always trying to be deaf? The ones using exclamation marks to fill up their ordinary lives with clamor and arrogance? But you did warn them, my child. HOUSEWIFE (full of hope): Could it be, Father, that they’ll learn to smile and speak softly? Could it be, Father, that they’re still too young and just fooling around? That they don’t even know they’re fooling around? CARDINAL: Unfortunately, they don’t know it. And they’ll never know it because they’re unable to live in any other way. HOUSEWIFE (crying): Who will help us? MULTIPLE VOICES AND SOUNDS (from the outside, from the sky, and from underground) (as before): Ssh! Quiet! (The Housewife understands the word; the Cardinal barely hears its sound, but they both remain still, in respectful attitude. A long pause.) WARRANT OFFICER (who in the meantime has arranged the guests in rows, lines, and groups, bursts in between the two, interrupting their contemplation with an even more soldierly firmness than before): Is the summit meeting between the two opposing powers over? Are you two plenipotentiaries done with the cipher and the secret mission? While you were getting bogged down in useless digressions, your Warrant Officer, who is always on the watch, was preparing the souls and the energy of the population for the attack. Look! (He forces them to turn around and, with a circular gesture, shows them the room with the groups of guests gracefully distributed in the area previously occupied by the tables, which in the meantime the servants

94 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

have removed. The back curtain has been drawn again to mimic a wall. As the Housewife and the Cardinal turn around to look at them, all of the guests bow.) CARDINAL (smiling at the Housewife and speaking softly): When, on the seventh day, before he rested, God turned around and looked at the world he had just spawned, he must have had the same impression of order and gracefulness that we’re having now. There, to make it rotten, it took a few words. Here, you’ll see, one signal will be enough. HOUSEWIFE (ever more sadly): Is there no hope, then? (The WARRANT OFFICER gives a signal and the orchestra starts playing from above. Immediately, all the groups of guests begin to move and dance, but some are dancing a minuet, some others a quadrille, a fox trot, a tango, a rumba, votive ritual warlike dances, all of them out of pace with the music, which spreads around distractedly and arrhythmically. The movement increases in intensity and noise, and little by little even the Warrant Officer is drawn into the circle of pyrrhic dancers and begins to jump with them, while the Cardinal prostrates himself in a devout ritual. Now several little boys and girls, picked up who knows where, come in from the terrace that overlooks the garden. Some are wearing nightgowns, some are naked, some covered in rags, and all of them are ripped and bleeding from climbing over the railings of the park. Lights are turning on in the garden: some people run around and call out to other people, others start to dance. Birds wake up and leave their trees in fright, flying into the scene. Dogs bark, running between the legs of the guests and tripping them. One drags another one down; the chaos increases and now almost everyone is on the floor. The Housewife walks over to the sofa and sits down. Near the sofa, Leonardo the Gardener is still standing with his pot of flowers. Earlier on, he looked like a column with its flower stand, but now, with the early morning light coming in from the terrace, he resumes his normal outline. The glow of the lights in the room is still very bright, but now it is dusty with people’s breath, shreds of flowers, fabric ribbons, feathers, objects that the guests throw at each

Chapter 5 — 95

other, handkerchiefs, knives, glasses, sweets, and ribbons, depending on the dance.) HOUSEWIFE (covering her ears, eyes, nose, and mouth as best as she can. To herself): Ssh! Quiet! MULTIPLE VOICES AND SOUNDS (as before, but now from very far away): Ha ha ha. (At intervals, sounding like laughter.) (All of the guests, collapsed one on top of the other, are fast asleep and snoring.) HOUSEWIFE (lying on the sofa and clasping the pillows in her arms, her mouth against the armrest, exhausted, to herself): Oh, my love, my man. DARK MAN’S VOICE (from far away, harshly): You don’t sway me; you’re false. Every honest woman, to withstand fidelity, pretends she left a great love behind. Every housewife, when the workday is done, finds a dark man who entertains her. Frivolous and weak, that’s what you are, and you need witchcraft to keep yourself from giving in. (Further and further away.) HOUSEWIFE (sitting up on the sofa): Don’t leave, stay, dear shadow, you console me even though you hurt me. Where are you breathing? DARK MAN’S VOICE (barely audible): Don’t be afraid. We’re bound to meet again. Farewell until then. (The Housewife remains sitting with her head in her hands. Leonardo the Gardener takes a step forward. The Housewife lifts her head up and looks at him.) LEONARDO THE GARDENER (resuming a respectful manner): Excuse me, Signora, but what did these people learn to do by themselves? (He points to the sleeping crowd.) I paid close attention, but I didn’t understand.

96 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

HOUSEWIFE: It doesn’t matter anymore, Leonardo. Sweep them away now. Please. (The clock in the antechamber strikes eight.) The Signor will be down momentarily. It’s already breakfast time. LEONARDO THE GARDENER comes back from the closet where he had gone to get a broom, and starts to sweep away the guests. The BUTLER enters with a small table already set with milk-and-coffee and carries it to the terrace, then he lowers the awning against the sun. He comes back in, notices that the big chandelier is still lit, and goes to turn it off. He tidies up a bit here and there, without seeing the Housewife. BUTLER: This morning my fussy mistress won’t dare complain that the house hasn’t been cleaned up yet. We must have slept a half-hour, if that. HUSBAND (entering, in his dressing gown): Didn’t you tell the Signora that I wanted to have breakfast with her on the terrace this morning? I have some urgent matters to notify her of. BUTLER: Yes, Sir. (Leaves.) HUSBAND IN DRESSING GOWN (walks over to the terrace and sits down at the table, smells the jelly, touches the fruit, shows signs of impatience): Always late! HOUSEWIFE (gets up from the sofa and sits down next to him): Good morning. (Eats.) HUSBAND IN DRESSING GOWN: Still in your evening dress? HOUSEWIFE: Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was “still in my housecoat”? (Mocking him.) HUSBAND IN DRESSING GOWN (offended): My dearest, I beg you.

Chapter 5 — 97

HOUSEWIFE: I beg you, too, my dearest. HUSBAND IN DRESSING GOWN (getting up): What is this, wife? HOUSEWIFE (getting up): What is this, husband? HUSBAND IN DRESSING GOWN: Let’s not lose our heads. If you’re tired, that’s not a good enough reason for you to show up in such a state and for the jelly to smell like tin can. (He hands her the bowl to make her smell it.) HOUSEWIFE (grabs the bowl and throws it on herself. Then, in furious desperation, seizes the jug and pours the milk over her head, clutches the cup and smashes it against her shoulders, cuts herself with the butter knife, streaks her face with the egg yolk. As she grows more and more frenzied, she begins to sob, and her sob turns into a howl): How will I save myself? Where will I save myself? Who will save me? Without a break, when can I breathe? (She cannot stop talking and hurting herself.) BUTLER (reappearing at the door): Signor, the Signora is not in her room. HOUSEWIFE (suddenly very calm, without turning): The Signora is here. Have someone bring me a dressing gown.

This page intentionally left blank.

6 The party left everyone with a sense of suspicion about the woman. Rumors began to circulate all over the province. The ousted Queen, who still loved to be regarded as queen, conspired with the authorities and convinced her fellow women to stop visiting the house because, she said, it would be very easy to win back the supremacy of the salons, which after all was their exclusive prerogative. The persuasive task turned out to be even simpler: indeed, that province had been an independent state until the previous century, and the ladies still felt the influence of their ancestors and the presence of other members of the aristocracy, albeit an aristocracy that had been weakened by use. Spurred by these reasons and by the Queen’s authority, the ladies resolved to organize receptions even more sumptuous than the Housewife’s, spread as much gossip about her as they could make up, and form alliances of peace and friendship with the most distinguished ladies of the nearby regions. To that end, they judged that two weeks would suffice; during the third week, the sanctioned strategy was going to be overwhelming politeness toward the enemy. The individual appointed to carry out these deliberations was the Queen. She accepted the investiture and, on her way to the Housewife’s villa, she persuaded Lady Governor Blamblan, the gentlewoman Catamantalède, and the Cardinal’s sister to stage an extraordinary performance in the Grand Theater Hall. She showed them how relatively effortless it would be for them to carry out the attempt with, respectively, their husband, king, and brother; and she promised not only their personal triumph over the Housewife, but also a display of imagination and lavishness that would forever bury the memory of the Housewife’s reception. Galvanized by her speech, they vowed loyalty and assistance to each other and expressed the hope that, after gaining absolute authority over the women in the area, they would become the leading ladies of the homeland by means of the three powers: bureaucracy, the throne, and the church. — 99 —

100 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

However, this alliance revealed itself useless when the servant, doubled over in his bow, announced to the ambassadresses standing at the door of the antechamber that, since the previous day, the Signora had moved to the Capital and had no intention of returning to the villa for a few years. In the Capital, where she had moved by herself, the Housewife had found a four-room apartment and a maid, all of which gave her the illusion of having regained her peace. The husband had not followed her because of his job, although perhaps intelligence had also played a part in his decision. The four-room apartment consisted of bedroom, living room, maid’s room, closet, two tiny bathrooms, and a stove hood that served as the kitchen. The Housewife thought: with no more cleaning army to lead, no more meetings to supervise, no more assaults to prevent, I’m about to be happy. I want to become a companion for my maid, like the ones that appeared in books and comedies until the eighteenth century. “What’s your name?” she asked the girl who had just come to meet her. The girl hesitated, “Zefirina,” she finally said, and the Housewife had the impression that everything was going the best possible way. “Signorina Zefirina,” she continued, “listen to me very carefully. I’m going to hire you, but this must not mean that you’re the servant and I’m the mistress: It must mean first of all that we are two creatures who live in the same house and share the chores. You’ll wash the dishes and cook the food because I don’t know how to do it, and I’ll earn the money to buy that food by doing another job that perhaps you wouldn’t know how to do.” (She had in fact decided to start working in one of her husband’s businesses; that way, she would get some rest from giving orders by receiving orders in turn.) “You don’t have to compete with me, Signorina. You don’t have to distrust me or try to take advantage of what I’ll hand over to you. Instead, if you help me to save on costs, if you don’t break too many dishes for fun, and if you take care of my linen and my clothes, you’ll get to enjoy them more once I give them to you, and you’ll contribute to the greater good of the household. You’ll be my helper, perhaps even my advisor for many practical matters, rather than just someone to be watched, reproached, or directed. Do you understand, Signorina Zefirina?” Zefirina answered, “First of all, I don’t like to be called Zefirina, so call me Rina or I’ll leave. Also, when I’m done with my day’s work, I want my hours of freedom, and no one to mind my business. The era of slavery is over. We, too, are made of flesh. We are worth what we weigh.”

Chapter 6 — 101

This time it was the Housewife’s turn to hesitate, “But that’s precisely my point, Signorina Rina. I didn’t want to impose either duties or rights on you . . . ,” but she was interrupted. “And don’t call me Signorina, or you’ll make me uncomfortable. As long as you’re talking to me, I’m still a servant.” “But no,” the Housewife wanted to explain, “that’s exactly what I don’t want: I don’t want a servant, I want a worker like me, employed to do different chores, but for the same goal,” but she refrained and kept silent, feeling humiliated. “If I want respect, I’ll give it,” continued the servant. “It must be clear from the start that you’re the one with the money, and therefore you give the orders. Fair’s fair.” And that was how the Housewife realized that, no matter how big or small, a house is always a grindstone to which she had been tied ever since her wedding day. Some brides find pleasure in working the grindstone, others find a profit, others still consider it a duty, but all of them, since the world was created, have been working it in the most natural way. Why was she the only one who saw it as an arbitrary torment? She insisted on searching, with her best will, for a reason that would make that torment acceptable or plausible to her as it was to other women. With utmost care, she began her new life. To be more certain that she was paying attention, she picked up the notebook where she had written nine pages of confessions and, without looking at them, in the middle of page ten she wrote, in block letters: MEMORIES, PART TWO. From then on, she periodically wrote down what was happening to her. It was not much, as anyone can ascertain by reading the journal faithfully reproduced below. MEMORIES, PART ONE Hail to me, woman, and listen to yourself. Starting today, I want to forget about birth and death and be but a drop of matter that finds its reason for existence in the tenacity with which it maintains its shape and survives. After all, isn’t it obstinacy that keeps me breathing and forces me to reflect on myself, and narrate myself out day after day, from myself and to myself if not to others for lack of a shared language? If it weren’t so, why would I relive my whole existence action by action, day after day, like one who’s about to die? Why am I a stranger to abandonment, distraction, and indulgence? If the living reach death by distraction, by which way will I encounter it? Or is this

102 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

relentless telling about myself and representing myself a sign that my life is only agony? Or that a single thought has always dwelled inside of me, a thought that I’ve been winding and unwinding since childhood without ever breaking it or enhancing it? Could it be that I was destined to live the three ages of man all at once? I don’t remember ever thinking in a different way, nor do I believe that a child could feel differently from the way that I do now, or have hints of ideas or abstract curiosities other than the ones that I still discover in myself, even about things I have already experienced. If that is true, it is possible to accept the fact that, to me, memory is life, and not in the world of ideas, as it were, but in the world of actions. That is, by remembering, I create the event. I could even say “by foreseeing it” if, as I explained before, I hadn’t already foreseen, or perhaps even planned everything, as a child. What had been established between me and destiny back then came about later on, and every time I tried to break the absurd deal I had made with a motionless power, it was in vain. That deal has survived as a fatal necessity, and by now I know that life inside of me has gone full circle. Even though I’m not yet thirty years old, I could already tell it all. And it would be no different from the way I would have told it ten years ago if I hadn’t cherished some hope for rebellion, or from the way I would have told it during my early childhood if I hadn’t been defeated by the laziness of having to overcome the ordinary form of what for me was exceptional. To someone who’s aware of this, it’s useless to wait for old age as a time for afterthoughts and conclusions, or to anticipate death to face it with budding illusions. Someone who’s aware of all this can talk about one’s own life starting from any point in time, from the end or the beginning, and its thickness or dimension won’t change. Let’s talk some more—but today I’ll listen and you’ll speak. The first incessantly distressing thought in my life has always been the death of my father and mother: it’s the only unacceptable fear I’ve known. I can’t conquer it, nor can I come to terms with it. I can only wish that at some point, for some reason, I’ll start to forget about these two essential creatures. Perhaps not even hatred would lead me to accept this arbitrary necessity, the injustice of a certainty that, with its imminence, can sweep away every other interest. It’s not enough for me to tell myself it’s the law of nature, or to avoid thinking of it, as children and adults do by instinctive wisdom. All it takes is one creature, perhaps even me, who realizes day after day what will

Chapter 6 — 103

happen to her in an hour, a month, a year, or a century, for all humanity to pay, through her, the price of the original sin. My common sense, when I bring up these things, answers, “That’s because, to you, your father and mother were but dad and mom. You never knew them as lovers, members of society, soldier, female, nor can you look at them that way even now. You barely know their names, and certainly don’t know where and when they were born. They preceded you, and you wish they would stay by your side and behind you like time and space.” “It’s true: they were only able to make a daughter out of me in the most servile and selfish manner. Thanks to that I now keep searching my mother’s face for the first image I ever saw; I keep searching my father’s body for the first tree we ever climbed together; I need to know that their closed eyelids protect our sleep and that their brow gives us shelter like a roof to a house. Eating is discovering the taste they taught me to find in every dish; and seeing, now that I’m far from them, is but remembering or retracing the way they saw the same thing and showed it to me.” “And yet you used to sit alone in your trunk and often ignored them. You ventured into sleep and reawakened without help, and when they called you, you followed them without recognizing them.” “But I couldn’t help following them. They saved me from birth by letting me ripen in that second womb through other seeds, and they felt no jealousy. In their own way, however ill-equipped for the daily task of life, these poor creatures lead us and help us as they can. All parents are forced to cripple you as soon as you let out your first cry, otherwise you would take off for perilous regions from which they have been banned. They’re forced to make you soon forget why you were born and to throw away the instruments of torture you had strapped onto your body to be later slaughtered and thus redeem the world. They love you as long as you’re one of their own breed; they mark the territory around you to be able to safeguard you within it. They’re in good faith when they think they can take care of your soul later on, but during the journey, they often forget about it. A mother is one who asks: ‘Did you eat enough? Are your feet cold?’ And a father: ‘Is your work coming along? Tell me about your hopes, lead me inside your wishes.’ And because we’re still on this planet, when you realize that your feet are resting on them, that you’re using them as roots to rise up toward the sky, and that those two points mark the space of what is endless and eternal, that’s when the two of them wear out

104 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

and die. And then you feel that the whole chain of humanity is falling apart, that days no longer go by in order but at random. You feel that the world has no hooks to hang on to and that the soul is arbitrary.” Let’s think about it together. What if they were going first just to wait for us? To help us at the other end the way they helped us at our human entrance? Perhaps that’s why, when a child dies before his parents, even strangers are overwhelmed with dismay. It’s no longer enough to think that death is always by our side and that it’s not determined by age. What a father and a mother are deprived of as their eyes become motionless and their mouths hang limp in a frozen pause is not their reason to live, apparently, but the shared breath of existence, or God. And so God makes his presence felt in the cruelest breath with which our life goes on even without human intentions or physical reasons. They drink him, they chew him, they try to extract from him a flavor that will tell them where that reason is now hiding, that reason they had aimed at since birth, that reason which enabled them to bear the thought of their own death or that of others, but not their son’s. And instead it was through their son that such reason was taken away from them. This is how death goes from being a conquest to becoming merely a grim hope for mankind. MEMORIES, PART TWO The Capital—Wednesday, February 1st.—Took possession (possession, one more possession) of my office. Later on, met Muriel Lale and her husband, the Baron. Thursday, February 2nd.—Feel very much like roaming, but it must not be done until Sunday, when there’s no work. My heart, have patience and willpower. Friday, February 3rd.—Sunday, Sunday, please come soon. Saturday, February 4th.—What shall I write? And yet, a journal is meant to be kept every day. Well, thank God, whether it’s good or bad, I’ve come up with a line for today. Bluffing is part of the game (small consolation). Sunday, February 5th.—Good morning, Sunday, here you are for me. But I’m leaving, oh day empty of daily significance. At last I’m finally going to roam outside of myself, of the office, and of all compromises and commitments. I’ll leave you alone and naked; and alone and naked, like Rhea Silvia at the fountain, is also this page, which I’m leaving thirsty for useless secrets. Now and forever, farewell, sacred memories, with all that follows.

Chapter 6 — 105

Sunday, March 5th.—Are you still here, O Sunday, a month later? Yet I had bid you a long farewell. I should talk to you a bit, then, since you managed to wait for me for so long. But what shall I tell you? All that happened to me during these thirty days were office and home, home and office. And when I thought I had already lost the game, just a little while ago fate placed a nice card in my hands. Take a look at it: last night I dreamt I was going to the gallows, happily. The funeral procession was walking through beautiful, tall corn fields, and for the first time since I got married I saw their true essence, which is that of gathering light and heat and, through their stems, carrying them into the deep soil to give life to the seeds. To my eyes, each one of those unripe ears of corn resembled the indefinite, tender look of women who are expecting their first child: a sense of arduous understanding, of mischievous confidence. With the same feeling I was leading myself to my passing, which was the first source of warmth that had sustained and nurtured my body by nourishing my root. But an individual can only comprehend his own death, if he comprehends it at all. Therefore, although I was enfolded in heartfelt serenity as I headed for it the way seasons head toward each other, my mother, who was accompanying me, could not, would not accept that I was blessed. She tortured herself, wept, and touched my shoulders. I could sympathize with her, and in an attempt to help her, I said, “Think, mom, that perhaps in death there are no more servants for anybody.” She shook her head. The fields and the road became covered with spots of shadow and the sky with clouds. I insisted, “Do you think we’ll have to give orders there, too?” She kissed my hands. Her head was wrapped in mourning veils, I was in rags, and the insects from the dungeons were crawling on my neck. At the end of the road, a dark block marked the limit of my living path. But dismay gripped me only when I saw that, arranged on the myrtle shrubs along the sides of the road, was my house furniture, all dusty, worn, and falling apart. Beds, chairs, shelves just stood there as I passed by, testifying to my untidiness. I begged my mother to take care of them right after I died, but she was so absorbed in her grief that she didn’t understand me. She could do nothing but put her fingers on my lips and eyes and look at me. And so I resolved to postpone my death. I postponed it, if I remember correctly, “to the following week.” Now my question is: Is it legitimate? If I want to die, can a household thought distract me from the most supreme of actions? And why? Which God endowed trivial matters with such great importance that they can keep

106 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

you here or there, where you don’t want to be, like words that don’t exist in themselves but still drag stubborn forces along with them? Where is the sphere in which clearing out and dying coincide, and love and kitchen stand on opposite sides? Monday, March 6th.—I went to a reception yesterday. In a corner a creature was weeping and talking at the same time. She wept without tears, without sobs, without relief. Her hair was coming undone, her hands were shaking, and her throat pulsing. As I drew closer to comfort her, I saw that her dress was very ugly, while mine was very beautiful, and my tenderness became pervasive, “Don’t be afraid, Signora. Feel free to blow your nose, run your hand through your hair, heave a sigh, no one saw you, and I’m here to shield you.” She was looking at me. She also immediately noticed that my dress was very beautiful and that hers was very ugly, and became aggressive, “I,” she hissed, “am extremely poor.” It’s difficult to react to such a statement, and not to react is just as difficult, so I spoke in my own way, “Someone who’s able to cry at a party is not poor.” She understood me. “Right,” she answered, “if that had anything to do with it. But it’s for another reason. I’ve been married three months; I love my husband, and my husband loves me. I should be happy. I’m not. In fact, I’m unhappy, wretched, and derelict.” “What did you used to do before?” “I used to teach mathematics. Unimaginable points, infinite numbers—and you all, spidery ratios of rotating planes, and you, monstrous unknown, why did I forsake you?” Quoting one of my beloved writers, I answered, “One never knows these things for sure.” She understood again. “Unfortunately,” she soliloquized like an ancient heroine. “For love, I abandoned numbers, but I did love the one, the man, one man. Why didn’t they tell me that substance is not like abstractions, and that one plus one is not two, but three? Husband, wife, and maid?” And she went on complaining about her maid who . . . Wednesday, March 8th.—For some time now, when I walk down the street, I happen to look at the people who pass by laughing, young ones singing, children disobeying their nanny, and I’d like to stop them and say:

Chapter 6 — 107

“Don’t grow up, don’t go home. With adult age and houses come society, cohabitation, and servitude.” Thursday, March 9th.—War has been declared against us. The causes are many, our hopes are great, the reasons are countless, the aftermath unpredictable, the effects debatable. The only certainty will be the dead. For my part, I hope that if any bombs are to fall on private buildings, they’ll fall on our villa and rid me at once of my wealth and responsibility. No victims, though, or just me. I don’t want salvation at the cost of other people’s lives. If they start distributing food stamps, Zefirina will have such little leeway to cheat on the shopping expenses that it won’t even be worth keeping an eye on her anymore. Thursday, March 23rd.—Two weeks have gone by since the declaration of war. I reread what I wrote on March 5th. Inside each earthly event, everyone reads first of all one’s particular outcome, both spiritual and material: a manufacturer sees a possible profit; a mother, the death of her children; a politician, the rise or fall of his portion of power, and so on, with desires, hopes, and contingent pursuits. And yet, in those moments they all feel most noble, most disinterested, most magnanimous and memorable. Each one of those people who have already calculated down to the last cent how much they’ll earn or lose in this war would greatly despise me if they read what I wish for myself. And yet I didn’t wish death on anybody, just the destruction of certain walls instead of others that are more beloved by their owners, or more useful to society. If that desire had been expressed by a detainee with regard to the prison where he’s confined, everyone would have thought it fair. Saturday, March 25th.—War is blossoming while my soul breaks away from me and, wandering through the history of mankind, it wonders why words cannot be given one single value and one single way to use them, or why ideas cannot be like water and adapt to each person they reach. I prefer the first method, but perhaps mankind prefers the second, which is also held by many religions and a few myths. Tuesday, March 28th.—Here we go, the war suggested a dream to me, but this one, too, ended badly, as usual. I was on the porch, watching paratroopers jump from invisible airplanes. The sky, filled with tiny raining men and white umbrellas, looked like the sea in summertime, when jellyfish migrate. As they came down and sailed around me, the paratroopers remained stuck in taut clotheslines. Kicking their feet in

108 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

the air, they all yelled at me, while I ran from one to the other showing them the laundry and protesting: “Don’t you recognize your shirts? Here are your handkerchiefs. Who watches over your sleep if not I? Who always makes sure you find freshly laundered sheets on your bed? What are you complaining about? Who are you yelling at? Porches are for housewives to hang the laundry they washed for their men. Gone are the days when poorly washed lovers gazed at the stars from crenellated towers; the days when maidens, wrapped for weeks in the same shirt, had a chance to sigh over a pot of basil. All those days are gone, all the poetry in the world has expired for women ever since you, men, placed the burden of the house on their shoulders. To eat is to know a day in advance how much you’ll chew the next day, how much it costs, how it was made; it is to fear waste and suspect theft. To sleep is to inhale, with every breath, the bleach on the pillowcases. To read is to keep an ear cocked in case the maid comes to tell you the gas bill has come, or the bathroom faucet is broken. To look out the window is to see the servants in the house across from you beating the carpets. Spring is mothballs, summer is bug spray, fall is camphor, winter is sawdust. And the whole year round it’s Radio, Sidol, Vim, Lux, Persil, Ata, and as many other products as all of the other nations provide.1 You fly, and we remain on the ground. At the most, from your flights you bring us your torn parachutes to be mended, cleaned, folded, and put away. Still we smile. But then you complain that our ropes (the ropes that carry your laundry) hold you down, and so you’re off again to look for some pretty angel in the sky.” And in fact, after dangling for a while on the clotheslines, now with a soft bounce the aviators rose and spread again all over the sky. They looked like round yawns let out by the air. “But that pretty angel—poor soul—if you truly love her, don’t marry her. Don’t cast her among us women. It wouldn’t be long before she, too, found herself with her wings wrinkled and greasy, and had to find her own means to wash them and hang them out to dry on the porch. And on your return you would get stuck in them and perhaps mistake them for the neighbor’s nightgowns. And without that important attribute that kept her, as a young girl, in the sky by your side, your wife would seem to you opaque and guilty.” 1 Radio, Sidol, Vim, Lux, Persil, and Ata were popular household products for cleaning floors, scrubbing steel and ceramic, doing laundry, etc.

Chapter 6 — 109

The aviators were now far away and certainly couldn’t hear me, but I knew that even if they had been in my arms, they wouldn’t have heard me. There are words that men don’t hear. Friday, March 31st.—When I’m at the office, the thought of the house never leaves me, but as soon as I’m at home, I forget that the office even exists. Does this mean that my nature, my function, my truth, are strictly defined by the house? I’m afraid this is a nightmare. By being overwhelmingly accepted by humanity throughout the inexorable course of centuries, these reasons, which are the most futile and forgotten, have become inextricable. Saturday, April 1st.—War is all around the edges of our homeland, but inside it our soul may doze off in petty habits, or fly over fires and alight on the sleep of times past or future. It may dream of the roads of mankind, of peace or war before the eyes of the Lord, and let Him level all paths. Sunday, April 2nd.—I wish I never had to stay at home. To my heart, which is becoming increasingly useless and aggressive against my mind, my house has become the road to hell because it’s true that those who walk two paths shall suddenly fall. But the mad ones must be saved. Monday, April 3rd.—Soon it’ll be Easter, and yet all around us the war will still be going on. At this point Easter can no longer not come, and perhaps every time it comes, all wars back to Cain’s time are washed away, and everyone looks up to Cain with sympathy and respect. But I’m thinking of all the wars that Easter never got to take by surprise, when Cain was still cursed and without escape. Tuesday, April 4th.—. . . no . . . No . . . NO! Wednesday, April 5th.—If I had written yesterday, all I would have talked about would have been the torment, the torment, the torment of the house. No, no, I refuse. Wednesday, April 12th.—I didn’t write anything for a week because I didn’t want to give in to the humiliating demon. But today Zefirina introduced me to the vileness of megalomania, and that’s a good thing. She brought me dinner and said, “Signora, may I tell you something? You’ve been elected queen of the building!” Clapping her hands, she repeated, very loudly, “Queen, queen of the building!—I’m sorry,” she added hastily, “let me explain. In this building there are twenty apartments and nineteen house mistresses, since the man in unit five is a bachelor. Out of the nineteen ladies, you have been elected Queen by all of us maids, the doormen, and the trash man. We had a contest:

110 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

for a whole week we took the garbage bins to the doorman’s lodge, where we waited for the garbage man. Then the garbage man opened the bins one by one with the doormen as witnesses, he calculated the quantity of waste and, based on the number of people in the household, determined who had more stuff. Signora, you won; you were acclaimed unanimously as Queen. I always said you were a grand lady, who only eats the tiny middle leaves of vegetables, and never the sinewy, fatty parts of meat. They thought I was lying, but now they’ve seen it, now they know. You can walk tall down the stairs of this building, and to think that there are even families of ten! I’m proud and honored to serve you, your Majesty!” Thursday, April 13th.—Yesterday, when I jotted down what Zefirina had told me, I thought it was funny, but rereading it today I sense the squalor of it all. Pride, competition, greed, war—they’re all a river that never stops running toward its inlet, even if its inlet flows into the most secluded corners of death. Friday, April 14th.—My husband wants me to return home for Easter, while my old folks want to come down and spend it here with me. Instead, I’m going with Muriel to her celestial countryside. I want to see how she manages as the mistress of a house. Saturday, April 15th.—Regret over that last sentence I wrote yesterday. Thursday, April 20th.—Holy Thursday. Easter is very close and I cannot change. Saturday, April 22nd.—As I was walking out this morning, the church bells started ringing, and the doorwoman stood up and knelt against her little chair on the sidewalk, weeping. I asked her why, and she said it’s from the grief of being pregnant with a fifth child, and that certainly Jesus, while He’s resurrecting, can see her pain and is saddened by it. She wishes she wouldn’t have the baby because she’s poor: she doesn’t know how she will feed it, clothe it, or take care of it. She doesn’t even have much time between working at the doorman’s lodge and minding the other four little ones. And yet, if God has sent it to her, then it is meant to be, and she should rejoice as she did the first time it happened, but right now she just can’t bring herself to do it; she has but dark forebodings. The woman’s words were interspersed with tears and anxiety and rapid signs of the cross on her forehead and mouth. Nevertheless, her little deformed body emanated a fervent warmth that compelled me to hug her, and her to smile at me.

Chapter 6 — 111

In church, at High Mass, instead of the catafalque, in the center of the aisle stood the President of the Republic. And he was beautiful and powerful and robust and strong, but he gave no light. Lale—April 23rd. Easter Sunday—Muriel came to pick me up in her car and drove me here, where the earth is gray and the grass is blue. There are some white, dried-up oranges on the tree branches. Muriel looks like she’s made of glass, and her voice is piercing like an alarm bell. Her husband, who doesn’t value women but likes women, keeps her in the most rarefied laziness and takes care of everything himself, both house and property, and every night he reviews the cook’s menu for the following day. Muriel still hasn’t figured out the role of a cook in a household, or the way food materializes before her on the bed in the morning and on the table during the day. She says: “Is someone making it? I thought it came down from trees.” Monday, May 1st.—I’m still in Lale because in this place our Lord fortifies me with examples. During the past few days, despite the fact that they were holy days, the Baron of Lale has been making passes at me more and more insistently in the presence of his wife who wouldn’t stop talking with her piercing voice. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do when someone is making passes at you, and it appears that my not knowing has turned his infatuation into love, at least according to Lale. Finally, because my plan was to leave this morning, yesterday after dinner he convinced me to take a late-night walk under countless stars and robust desires. For her part, Muriel came and went on the terrace of the farmhouse whispering poems. Muriel knows an astonishing number of poems in every language, but she never recites them to anybody. She just murmurs them to herself when she needs to recharge her alarm bell. Lale and I started walking around the house, and every time, he would take the turn wider and wider and lure me further away by mentioning some sound in the countryside, the chance to contemplate nature better when another creature is next to you, etc. By the fourth or fifth lap we were far enough from the farmhouse, so he carefully found a spot where the road was somewhat shielded by a flower shrub, threw himself on the ground, and clasped my knees repeating that he loved me. The first time something like this happens to you, it’s funny to stand back and see how it all works out just the way it takes place in certain books you once read. Now it was my turn to push his head away from my legs, and that’s precisely what I did, grabbing him by the hair. At last he got up and tried to squeeze me but I,

112 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

still following the memory of past readings, headed quickly back toward the farmhouse, repeating, “Shame on you! If Muriel knew. . . .” He chased me, squeezing me so tight that in the end he forced me to stop, putting me in a very difficult position because at this point books say you should yield to the irresistible desire and abandon yourself tremblingly, which just didn’t convince me. However, Lale must have thought I was following this version because he grabbed me in a dangerous hold and had already started kissing my neck when all of a sudden I felt his lips suspended, his breathing more and more regular, his hands gentle, then polite, and finally oblivious of my body, although he was still holding me. I looked at him: everything about him looked like it was falling asleep, as if he had already entered another atmosphere, but then his eyes turned from blank to piercing and fixed themselves on a point behind me. Slowly, I turned around inside the distracted circle of his arms. From the back of the alley under the white stars, a little shadowy man was coming toward us with a large bundle in his hands. He was advancing more and more cautiously as he drew nearer and recognized us. If he had had the chance, he certainly would have hidden or escaped, but he looked hypnotized at the sight of my companion, and my companion in turn at his sight. I had never seen him before. Lale’s stare was becoming colder and colder, and now he was frowning. Meanwhile, the other fellow seemed to be losing his balance. He tried to find the edge of the field as he squeezed the bundle under his arm and quickened his step. When he was in front of us, he took off his hat unctuously, then dashed down the first side path and disappeared. Lale was tightening his lips and no longer remembered I was there. He started striding off toward the house and as I hastened to follow, I could hear him grinding his teeth. At a certain point he turned and grabbed me by the collar, shaking me. He must have thought he was shaking the man with the bundle, and he hissed in my face: “What a crook, he steals everything from me, everything. That’s where my chickens end up, my vegetables, my butter, my oil, my rice, now that we’re at war. He must be taking them to some hussy, that’s for sure. Jailbirds, that’s what cooks are. And just because they know how to stuff a pheasant, you’ll take any abuse.” I felt so sorry for him. Much loftier matters than amorous desire have been diverted from me by cooks and maids and damned butlers. At home, he even forgot to wish me good night. He immediately went to the pantry to check the supplies. I think he must have stayed there until dawn

Chapter 6 — 113

because this morning he got up very late looking fatigued and with purplish circles under his eyes. He looked at me, forgetting that he was supposed to drive me back to the city and showing no recollection of his advances from the previous night. He had round eyes like a chicken’s, his nose looked like a large pear, and his mouth like a pike’s. In his buttonhole, instead of the usual carnation, he had a tuft of parsley, and everything about him smelled of garlic. Muriel’s alarm-clock voice, on the other hand, was ringing very sweetly this morning after last night’s poetry gargle, and in the bat of an eye she drove me back here. Farewell, Lale. Tuesday, May 2nd. The Capital.—I sent Zefirina to clean the windowsills that face the front of the house over the courtyard. But apparently the tenant of the apartment with those windows got very offended when she saw Zefirina with a rag in her hand and ordered her to say certain words to me that Zefirina refused to repeat. Unfortunately, Zefirina has grown fond of me, but not like a human as I wanted: like a dog, a slave. And so I’ll have to fire her. Wednesday, May 3rd.—I thought it over. I’ll fire myself. I’m the one who doesn’t know how to be either a companion or a house mistress. Friday, May 12th.—What shall I write? Sunday, May 21st.—A long time ago, on this day, I was born. My planets were Jupiter and Saturn. Tuesday, June 1st.—I still don’t understand how one gets used to it, and how I can do my duty scrupulously when I haven’t even accepted that this is my duty. Thursday, June 8th.—What am I doing still? I’m even forgetting what it is I’m trying to accomplish. I’m moving inside of what? And to grasp what? Tuesday, June 20th.—It’ll be six months tomorrow. And still nothing done. I’m going to reread all this. Wednesday, June 21st.—Darn it. With these words, the Housewife put an end to her memories and her city life. She sealed her notebook, called Zefirina, handed her the keys to the apartment and the one-year lease, gave her everything that was there—furniture, linen, clothes, kitchenware, silverware, artwork and all the money she had—and resolved to leave. But even after closing the door behind her, she could still hear Zefirina howling in terror and wishing to God that the Signora

114 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

would soon come to her senses because no one would ever believe she had been given such a gift, and she would be put in jail for blackmail or fraud. It’s true, thought the Housewife, I always do things wrong. She went back up and ordered Zefirina to follow her to an attorney’s office. There, she signed a regular deed of gift and this time, as she walked down the stairs to leave, only sweet auguries of sanctity and eternal glory poured over her head. Outside, she was confronted with the dark streets of war. She had not realized that the legal procedures had taken up her whole afternoon. She did not know at what time she could catch a train to her town, nor was she concerned about arriving earlier or later. “I’ll just take a leisurely stroll to the railway station,” she told herself, “and once there, I’ll inquire.” The air was warm and dusty, and the blue lights did not make the neighborhood any more familiar. She walked along an avenue lined with sycamore trees, while buses and streetcars sped by. A trolley passed on the tracks she was walking on, bearing the sign, “East Station.” Since she had been looking precisely for that, she now placidly followed the tracks. She was not hungry, sleepy, or thirsty, and she did not feel tired. She had neither forebodings, which are an animal’s strength, nor regrets, which form the substance of many women, and not even hopes, which are the supreme illusions of life. She felt fulfilled within the limbs she had been assigned, without ambiguities or uncertainties. If anything, every now and then she would stare in amazement at her soul, which was miraculously clear and filled with tranquility. She ate a slice of watermelon because she saw some children eating it; she stole some flowers on a gate and hid them inside her dress between her naked breasts, and felt fulfilled. Then she started singing, but her song was out of tune. Perhaps perfect nature has neither voice nor movement. Songs are for humans, while movements are for animals, and animals are but poorly accomplished efforts. In the meantime, the sycamore avenue had come to an end. The Housewife had obviously taken the wrong direction, and now two roads opened up before her toward the countryside. She took one at random, one that wound between buildings from the previous century, old taverns, washhouses with dilapidated roofs, barns with tall, dark vaults. And she was neither afraid nor tired. She only felt that her usual warmth, which was already scant, was dissipating into a vigorous lightness, a primordial oblivion that was making her a shadow of herself. She passed a waterfall fountain along a wall encrusted with seashells and dolphins, and then stumbled on two bicycles and a wagon.

Chapter 6 — 115

A cat crossed the road in front of her, a star fell from the sky, and the moon rose, drenched from the shadow of a hill, becoming clearer and purer as it traveled up the sky. The Housewife walked on. Some crickets chirped for a while, a water snake hissed in a puddle, fireflies lit up around her head, but immediately, like stars in the celestial fields, they faded before the all-too-powerful moonlight. Then the paved road ended; the borders of the countryside crouched down; the edges disappeared, and the whole landscape looked alike, mixed in with stones and thin weeds. It was an area with neither paths nor shadows. The woman closed her eyes for a moment to shield them from all the glow. When she reopened them, before her was again a wide, well-trodden road with posts and milestones on both sides. The Housewife stopped. She looked to the right, to the left, ahead of her toward the horizon, but did not look back to see where she had come from. Then she took her first step along that road. The blue road stretched endlessly into the moonlit night among gray fields. At times the air was cut through by cold drafts, other times it stagnated in warm pools. The woman went in and out of these areas by pushing with her shoulders and head and making wide movements with her arms almost as if she were swimming. She would rush forward or let herself go for no other reason than because of the air pressing against her. The road ran straight through the most varied landscapes. Here it pushed its way through a riverbank among trickles of black water and blue sands; further ahead it seemed to be climbing up toward the rocky clumps that choked the horizon, but all of a sudden it led you down to the seashore and the rocks were now behind you. Or as it ran along to the right of the city walls, the city suddenly drifted away to the left, while a lake stretched out in its place. Then the lake gleamed at the end of the road and a forest rose up to the right. The scenery reeled around the woman and the motionless road, but she was not aware of it because it was all happening with no screeching sound, no squeaking hinges, no springing mechanisms, no vibrations of the surface. Silence rested on things like a veil behind which everything blended together into a single substance. The woman’s steps made no noise on the ground, and to be sure of it, she began stamping her heels energetically, looking at her feet. She could hear no noise at all, and yet a man’s face appeared from behind a bush, motioning her to be quiet and pointing to the top of a tree, probably to a bird’s nest.

116 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“Don’t kill them!” screamed the Housewife. “Am I the keeper of their lives?” replied the man, his whole body now emerging from the depth of the thornbush. At the same time, several starlings that had been hiding among the leaves rose up in flight and disappeared, stretching along the horizon like a tattered cloud. The man moved by the woman’s side. He was dressed in a dark velvet suit with thigh-high boots and hawk feathers on his cap. He walked sideways, with quick, uncertain steps, like a bird’s. All of a sudden he jumped, and after a short run along the side of the road, he hid behind a mound of flint stones and peeked out. While the man was running in front of her, she noticed that, from the back, his body had no outline: no hollow behind the knees, no round shape at the hips, no tips on his heels and elbows, and that his suit, boots, and cap could not be distinguished from his body. Everything was the same pale grayish white, the same texture as the back of his head, neck, and hands, so much so that determining whether he was completely naked or made all of rags was impossible. When the Housewife reached the mound of flint stones, the poacher called her to show her a figure lying on the edge of the fields. It was a very old woman, dressed in black, sprawled out on the ground with her head on a rock. She was certainly asleep, yet copious tears streamed down from her closed eyelids. The two of them bent over her and gently shook her. The old woman opened her eyes right away. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” she lashed out, “so that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” Her tears became even more abundant and she beat her chest. Once the man and the Housewife had helped her up, it became clear that the side she had been lying on had the same color and appearance as the man’s back, and so did the rock and the stretch of ground she had pressed with her body. “What did they do to you and who did it?” the Housewife asked her, trying to hold her up. But because the old woman had her shapeless side toward her, she did not know where to grab her, and the woman risked falling back down, decrepit as she was. The poacher came over to help her and, bending one knee to the ground, let the old lady sit on his shoulder.

Chapter 6 — 117

“Whom am I railing against? Against my daughter who, since her father died and her husband went off to war, has been committing adultery with her servants. And, because I reproached her, she chased me out of the house in front of her mocking servants and their bastard children. Then let her be driven from the face of the earth.” “You’re pretty quick to curse people,” said the poacher, getting up again and propping her up by his neck with quick movements of his back. “That’s always a disproportionate punishment. No one should use it, I’m telling you.” “Then take me to my daughter and see if she can be forgiven.” The old woman pointed to a light very far off in the distance. “One can always forgive, and someone should do it,” replied the poacher with the same tone as before. “But let’s go.” The moon had moved toward the east. The air around it had turned pale and empty, as the stars clustered around the tall sky or migrated west, where the still pristine night allowed them to glimmer. They walked for a while, but at a certain point the Housewife realized she was exhausted. She stopped and turned to the poacher, “Can you carry me on your other shoulder? I can’t walk anymore.” “The stranger’s feet go down to death,” the old woman hastened to admonish, leaning against the man’s ear. “And ours take hold on Sheol,” he retorted. “My feet or hers—it makes no difference, this is no path to tread.” While he said that, he stopped and helped the young woman climb up on his arm. As soon as she sat down, the Housewife felt more rested, but immediately the torment that had chased her out of her house and that had subsided as she walked reawakened inside of her with a sharper pang. “How long have I been away from home? Where did I come from? Who are these two people? It’s not proper to sit on the shoulders of strangers. Maybe this fellow has lice and they’ll get on me.” Very stealthily, she pulled his hat down over his head, bent her arm over the hat, lay her head against her arm, and dozed off. During her sleep, which must have lasted a while, she seemed to hear every now and then the old woman lashing out against her, “Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands,” and the poacher retorting, “What profit hath man of all his labor? One generation goeth, and another generation cometh; but that which God hath decided abideth for ever.”

118 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“They must be Quakers,” she told herself in her sleep, “going over verses from the Holy Bible. But they’re so boring; I wish they would stop and let me sleep.” She woke up and opened her mouth slightly to ask them to be quiet, but instead she felt the air pushing her very violently from behind and slamming her forward, to the point that she almost fell. The poacher had just enough time to jump over to the side of the road before a car, dashing toward them at full speed, came to a sudden halt right over their last footsteps. “Hail, new Trinity, mother, daughter, and cursed spirit. Is the border far?” It was a mocking but passionate voice, and the Housewife tremblingly recognized it as that of the dark man with the blue face who had insulted her and kissed her at her first dance. She felt like everything around her was starting to sway and that his arrival was an ambush, but she resolved to be brave. She ran her hand through her hair, smoothed her dress over her legs, and turned around to answer, “What border? What do you want with the border?” “I’m thinking of crossing it,” sneered the young man, “borders are usually either defended or crossed.” “Cowards,” she said, sticking her chin up, “cross them to escape.” “And courageous ones?” “Courageous ones go to the border to fight.” “And without realizing it, they find themselves on the other side, right? Is that what you are trying to tell me?—That you didn’t escape, that yours is just a travel adventure?” “But I don’t even know if there are any borders here, near or far. Whose idea was it that a place must have borders? One place is born one out of another, just like days.” “And so,” interrupted the young man, looking into her eyes with a hard, cruel stare, “what one does with places on earth, one can do with days, right, dear Signora? Cross them back and forth, right or left, and ignore the one-way sign with no concern about the confusion one causes to other passersby? But I,” and by now he was screaming and shaking his fist at her, “as a car driver and as a pedestrian, I object. You must stay in your lane and keep going in the same direction, do you understand? If not, you’re just an ordinary privileged individual, a—” “The border,” the poacher intervened, “is long gone, sir. This is a deserted area, already too devastated by fighting. An empty zone. In times of war, borders are much farther back for sure, and perhaps much farther ahead.”

Chapter 6 — 119

“Thank you. Then this means I, too, was wrong. I didn’t really want to escape. I was declared medically unfit for service, but I thought that by coming to a war zone I might still be useful for something. I didn’t know that this area had been abandoned.” “Stop apologizing,” said the Housewife out of spite, “just accept that you, too, are guilty.” The young man tightened his lips and did not answer. His cheeks caved in, he bent violently over the dashboard and started meddling with it. The Housewife jumped to the ground and leaned against the car door, next to him. “Do you see that light over there?” she asked him. “Do you see it? You’ve gone the wrong way, like me,” she added after a pause, laying her hand on his arm. “It takes no more than ten minutes to get there by car, and we’re so tired, three people and only one pair of legs. Can you give us a ride?” The young man suddenly lifted his head up and looked straight at her. She saw that his eyes were red with desperation. “But you, my creature,” he begged with a misty voice, “why are you going there? What do you have to do with these people? You don’t even know them.” “I must not be called creature, I must be called Signora,” said the Housewife quickly. “I’m married now.” “Yes, of course,” his voice became dull again, “of course, Madame, if I call you ‘my creature,’ I end up scratching the smooth face of your master. And that won’t do: it lacks order, it lacks decorum. Just put a sign on your house, that says, “Here live polite heroes, elegant saints, tactful prophets, decorous excrements.” The Housewife did not seem to hear: “So, can you give us a ride?” “Naturally!” He jumped out of his car and, gesticulating elaborately, bowing and genuflecting, he opened the door for her and the other two, ushered them inside, and sat down behind the wheel again. “You’re welcome, your Highness, I’m at your service. Do you want to walk on my chest? |Do you want me to carry you about on my nose all around our great and historic nation? Shall I wash your companions’ feet? Provide a back to this young improvident one who left home without molding a hip for this onesided Fate?” In the meantime, he had started the car and finally, with a jolt, he was quiet. Everybody was quiet.

120 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

It was almost dawn, the sky had taken on a meadow-green hue, the road was the color of milk, and Venus was already leaving its regions. Trees stretched out their foliage, and a breeze passed sighing through the branches and rustled like a stream among the rocks. The car raced by noiselessly, but it left behind, in midair, a visible black trail. It was only by that trail that the passengers could tell they were moving because the silence had become tight again, and the landscapes arbitrary. They entered a valley full of statues. These looked like portraits, although some of them were very tall and with indefinite shapes. Others, smaller ones, represented human figures, but with rays, wings, and haloes around their heads and shoulders. Some of them were animals crying or smiling, then a series of quartz blocks that looked like waves, very thin slabs meant to reproduce the sky, and rocks on the street that looked like stars, suns, and moons. The young man, who had suddenly become restless, crashed the car against those simulacra, not to knock them down, but to be absorbed by them in bloody communion, while the old woman, with apocalyptic warnings, urged the others to follow her example and cover their faces. Only the poacher paid no attention to what was happening. In fact, the Housewife had the impression that it was the statues that tried to recoil and hide their faces when he looked at them. At the same time, they suffered the impact of the car steered by that madman with such indulgence that, although the car bounced from one block of marble to the other, it did not get a single scratch. The four travelers were still driving around the stony population of the valley when dawn cracked open, dripping red light from the face of the sky onto those of the statues, which let out a moan. Right at that moment, the young man stopped the car and covered his ears with his hands. He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, said “I’m sleepy,” and was already snoring away. The Housewife turned to the other two people who, sprawled out on the back of their seat with their black mouths open, were also sleeping. She opened the door quietly and got out. Now, which way to go? Their guiding light had vanished into the thick dawn to which the sky was giving birth. However, the woman could still remember the direction and started following it. She soon reached the end of the area crowded by statues and found herself in a desert where the ground was more careless than desolate, and the dominant questions that had besieged her just a short while earlier among the sculptures crumbled. Here the journey

Chapter 6 — 121

became enjoyable again. She liked to pretend she was continuing on arm in arm with the dark man, talking about pleasant things: the name of this seedling, the color of that stone, the first time they met. She would confess to him that his voice was just as she had always imagined it, then they would look up together and say, in unison, “The sky is so beautiful, so pure.” But as she thought about it, she did look up and let out a scream. The sky was not beautiful, it was not pure, it was not morning-like. In fact, the sun that had just emerged, by the same motion through which it had come out and risen in the air, was already going down in a sinister sunset that stirred putrid flares. For a while, the woman stood looking up in horror. Then she screamed again and ran away, keeping her head down. She could see nothing except the ground before her feet. Little by little, the ground became a paved road, which she would have found reassuring if the light of the setting sun, casting increasing glows and dark prophesies around her, did not force her to run faster and faster until she tripped over a rock and fell, facedown. Once she managed to get up again, she caught a glimpse of a dark splotch not very far away. It was a large factory, and it was from there that many of the rays she had thought came from the sun really originated. These rays illuminated everything, and from her position the woman could see every detail of the building. It looked like the grand hotel of an industrial city: throngs of people came and went, mechanisms crawled up walls, fires lit up porches, waters flowed along the foundations. Moving a little closer, the woman realized that she was standing before the most bizarre structure she had ever seen, a hodgepodge of styles and materials almost like a warehouse containing the building blocks of a city: here rose a skyscraper, over there a pillar was being knocked down, on the right a dome jutted upward, on the left tunnels burrowed their way through the ground. Bell towers swung to and fro, while igloos with their dwellers still inside them hung from hooks or rested on windowsills like birdcages; the worm-eaten bottom of a scow lay on its side while a truncated, crumbling tower soared like a spiral. Up and down the tower, in and out of the ship, along the gutters and cornices swarmed people of every age and race, one dislodging stones from the structure his neighbor was setting up, another demolishing what was being built, another one redoing the work he had just finished. The result was a clashing of voices, hammers, bricks, a restless hustle and bustle like a beehive. And candlelights, lighthouse beams, fires, gas

122 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

flames, and flashes from mysterious substances popped up from all sides and illuminated the scene. When the Housewife arrived among that extraordinary population, she noticed that each person, while doing his work, cursed and threatened the others, or lay in ambush to rob them and then blame some innocent, calling God as a witness. If a woman passed by, they would copulate with her in public, in front of the children she was leading by the hand, and the children would sit and stare at them maliciously, and even cheer them on and clap their hands, or hiss like people do at soccer games. The spectacle produced an insolent, cruel tumult, a vigorous wickedness. The Housewife searched for the sky. The sky had retreated far up, and it was so white that it did not even look like it was made of air. It emitted a piercing light that hurt her eyes, forcing her to look again at the brightness of dawn through the constructions. “How can it be? Am I dreaming? Didn’t the sun set just a moment ago? Where did this new day come from?” But the light from the sky comforted her, telling her unpretentious things. It suggested, “Over there it’s Sunday.” Over there where? Past the construction? The construction work ended at a certain point, and the back of it looked like a colorless cloud. Shielded by the scaffolding on the lower part and by the glare of the fires on top was a lovely space filled with the light that the Zenith had promised. It was sound and forgetfulness, a broad light illuminating no landscape, and in the light was fulfillment; in the light were the reason for and forgiveness of human life. The woman sat in the fervent brightness and remained like that for a while, curled up with her arms around her knees, her eyes staring at the unchanging sky and then back from the horizon to her feet. It was certainly not an hour of the day: nothing, not even death could take place in it, only contemplation. And that was the day of God. The Housewife felt she should run and warn the people on the other side that over here it was Sunday, that over here they had the right to a time without punishment, a life without deadlines. But she found them even more immersed in their machinations. She approached several of them and screamed in their ears many times, “It’s Sunday, celebrate God; it’s Sunday, leave your speculations until tomorrow,” and then she grabbed others by the arms, insisting, “Come with me to welcome the holiday, rejoice now that Sunday is right behind your houses.” Finally, the whole crowd answered her with vulgar noises and screams, “And in the meantime my neighbor’s house prospers off of my own?”

Chapter 6 — 123

“And his wife spawns more children?” “And his fields fill up with corn?” “I’m going to take his.” “I’m going to destroy his.” “I’m . . . I’m going to outdo them all!” and they went on insulting her and cursing. “Don’t be blasphemous,” the Housewife tried to say, although she felt rather like an imbecile. “Why do you want to steal and damage other people’s things? Why do you commit perjury and degrade love?” At that point the whole swarming crowd, both males and females, burst out laughing, which was an even more frightening spectacle than seeing them copulate because they made a gloomy, irreparable sound. The woman sought safety inside the factories. There was a gas station by the main door, with an attendant sitting on a stool; along the sidewalk, among many others, was the dark man’s car. “Excuse me, has this car been here long?” “Since yesterday, Signora. They arrived last night at sunset. There were three of them: two are from around here, I know them. They came in looking for someone, but they haven’t been back yet. Many people ask me to watch their vehicles for a few minutes, and then never come back.” “Since yesterday? But what day is today, please?” “Who knows?” “What do you mean, who knows?” “Here we count twilights. It’s always either sunset or sunrise. We would have to go through the night to find the entire circle, but who wants to do that? We look at the horizons: sunrise and sunset are the same color. You can tell them apart because one leans to the right and the other to the left of the sky. That’s how we go about it.” “And how many twilights have gone by since the world was created?” (She felt astute.) “Why, doll, do you know when the world began? Then tell me about it, gorgeous.” “What disrespect!” exclaimed the Housewife, and sticking up her chin she walked in. Inside, it was all a maze of stairs, courtyards, halls, corridors, and doormen’s lodges. Some of them looked grim, with neither plaster nor floors, while others were covered with marble and suffused with light. And then there were

124 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

doors, gates, elevators. The Housewife walked through a lobby, a garden, the rotten deck of a ship and, still feeling offended, she could not help muttering, “What a way of keeping the fleet!” She climbed a staircase, walked down a long colonnade, and all the while she pondered, “That fellow at the gas station was making fun of me: I must have been traveling for one night and one day because a sunrise plus a sunset is one day, even if they don’t know it here. Yesterday, from the Capital, I wrote to the upholsterer asking him to be at the villa in two days, which means tomorrow. Tomorrow I need to be home. I must find a whole day right away, and not just twilights patched together with scraps of other twilights. Such a foolish way of saving. There’s so much confusion in this company, so much bad management! To the terrace, please!” The last four words were addressed with a certain haughtiness to the elevator boy who was standing at the end of the colonnade. The boy bowed and locked himself in the elevator with her. As they went up with a starlike buzz, the Housewife kept musing: “Now I’m going to find the night and go back home, but first I want to take a look at this town from above and find out what it was about my face that made the fellow at the gas station take so many liberties.” She said aloud, “Is the terrace very high up?” “It depends, Signora. We were quite a bit below ground level when you got on, but we have already reached and gone past that passage by twenty floors. Guessing from the speed we are traveling, we should arrive at the thirtieth floor. If the elevator stops, I can’t push it any further. But let me tell you,” and he lowered his voice, leaning toward her, “we have a terrace on every floor, designed to give the illusion of height. In this way, no matter where the machine stops, our valued customers are satisfied. But this time, and all thanks to you, Signora, we’re really there.” Indeed, with a slight start just like an angel bouncing on the tips of its bare feet as it descends to earth from high spheres, the elevator stopped and the boy, with another, lower bow, opened the door between the Housewife and the night-filled terrace. Another person was already on the terrace, a woman with her back to the elevator, leaning against the railing with her head in her hands. She was very slender: at first the Housewife mistook her for a little girl. She did not approach her, even though she wanted to see her face, which she pictured as tiny and transparent. She moved away discreetly, watched the stars in the

Chapter 6 — 125

sky, and greeted the Southern Cross. When she reached the other end of the terrace and leaned in turn against the railing with her head in her hands, she heard a vigorous voice addressing her: “Signora, leave me alone, please. Go away.” The lady did not move. The other one must not have moved, either. The Housewife looked at the ground below the tall tower and thought of her own white, transparent body, her light bones. Where did that body come from? Certainly not from her mother, nor from the trunk, and not even from her own will. Hers was no longer a body, but a representation, a suggestion, a sample of the necessary attributes. Where were her real bones, her nerves, hairs, nails, all of the semisolid substances that should be part of her body? Someone must have stolen them when, to please her family, she had deposited them at the bottom of the trunk with the rotten blankets and the bread crumbs. She just wished she could have them back, recover them, put them on whenever she wanted, be able to keep them in the closet together with the other clothes. “For pity’s sake, Signora, leave me alone. Don’t steal this night from me. This night is mine, have mercy. I’m so ugly, I have nothing but nights to talk about him without shame. I’m content talking to myself, but I need a little moon, a mysterious, wandering, pale moon that will reflect its opaque light on me. Take the sun for yourself, take the Earth, take a seat at the right hand of the Father, but leave the gleam of this remembrance to me.” “To remember whom? He doesn’t need to be remembered now. He’s here.” “He is? How do you know?” At last the other figure moved away from the parapet and went to stand next to the Housewife. The Housewife turned as if she knew what she was about to see: before her were two intense eyes, the face of a defeated warrior, large, flushed with a hidden devouring passion, and thick hands with short nails that could be seen even at night, as if they were made of cardboard. She had a high breast bone, no visible chest, short legs, and poorly shaped feet. But despite these armorlike limbs, she was weak and overwhelmed with emotion. She was not weeping; inside of her were much hate and immense fear. Very quickly, the Housewife, too, was filled with a malicious hatred that convinced her to speak the way she did when she was sitting in a parlor with the archon’s wife or some other gentlewoman. “Signorina, you’re in love. That’s fine. But it’s not fine to monopolize the moon just because of your condition. The moon is necessary to seeding,

126 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

tides, flows, enchantments, and also to lovers’ sighs. Also, not exclusively. What right do you have to want it all for yourself?” “But you don’t need it.” “Why don’t I need it? What do you know? Can’t I be in love, too? Can’t I have lands that need to be fertilized? Can’t I be studying the best times to scatter the seeds on the soil?” “Oh, you know how to talk,” moaned the girl, overpowered. “How can I tell you what a little blue light is to me, and how, when I’m soaked in that light, it feels like the voice of my dear love? His face is very dark, like the sky without lights, but as soon as he speaks, dawn radiates all around him. Hearing that voice, his blue hair takes on the color of silver, his cloudy eyes become clear and he doesn’t appear to see me anymore, but like a sky, he contains me and loves me even though he doesn’t even know me, ugly as I am. Because if he saw me, he would leave.” “This man wears a deep blue suit and speaks in blunt words. He gave me a ride in his car, but after a while I got out. Now his car is downstairs in front of the entrance.” “How do you know it’s him? How did you guess? Tell me: what’s his name?” “I don’t know, but he kissed me once, and maybe he loves me.” “And you? You don’t love him?” “Who, me? I’m married, dear, and I cannot answer certain questions.” The other one shook her arms desolately. “Signora, have mercy. You could help me, explain things to me, tell me what I must do, but you refuse. You have a husband, you’re accomplished, you have received the reward for all your merits, and now you don’t want to help poor little me. Tell me, Signora, am I ugly?” “How would I know? The moonlight changes perspectives.” “Then let’s go down, Signora, let’s go down and I’ll stand under the other light. Look at me, teach me how to be like you, so clear, so fulfilled.” The Signora started to strut down the stairs. She felt powerful and was reveling in the stormy pleasure of what she was about to do to this creature: reduce her, as she had been reduced, to an appearance. Barely turning toward her, she asked, “Where do you reside?” “I don’t reside. I’m too poor.” The Housewife stopped in her tracks. “This one is not as helpless as I thought. She has pride, she has will, and the same exasperation that I used to

Chapter 6 — 127

have back then. It’ll make for a good war.” She blurted out, “Do you want to come to my place? I have a big house with many windows that let the sun and the moon in. We’ll talk about him.” The other one remained silent for a while, her mouth and eyes semiclosed, lost in blissful fantasies. The Housewife examined with disgust those minuscule teeth encased in purplish gums, that fuzzy forehead covered with rubbery matted hair, those hands with square, soft nails: how was one to reduce her, unravel her, and make her understandable to man? “I’ll come,” she said finally, “but let’s not talk about him, please.” From that moment on, the Housewife moved at great speed. She went into the doorman’s lodge and called for a taxicab, dictated a telegram to her husband, and asked at what time the next train would depart. When the cab arrived, she got in with her companion and in no time they were at the station. The station was deserted. After some time, a porter came, “Luggage?” “No.” “For tickets, this way.” He accompanied them to a window and left. The window was closed and the Housewife had to knock on it for a long time. Finally, the window slid open and a hand appeared holding two ticket stubs. Because she hesitated to take them, the same hand put them in her purse and disappeared, while the affable voice of the clerk said, “Take advantage of this, it’s a coincidence. Normally, trains that pass through here ride in only one direction: the opposite of yours.” The two women sat down on a bench with the tickets in their hands, waiting. Dawn was coming, and the nightly plain was brightening up. One could see the train tracks coming together on the horizon, and the Housewife thought about her childhood. She said: “Two intersecting lines form a plane. A plane divides space into two parts.” But the switch bell started to ring in her ears and interrupted her. “How will we know if it’s our train?” asked the girl, agitated. “There’s nobody here.” “Please, ladies, stand back. This stop is a mistake, do you want to take advantage of it? Get ready. Watch out. Here we go!” The stationmaster had appeared and the train had arrived. They were lifted by their hips and flung into one of the cars, then a door slammed, a whistle was blown, and the train resumed its journey. When the Housewife got up from the seat where they had thrown her, hardly an instant had gone

128 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

by. She immediately leaned out of the window and looked for the name of the station, but the station was already far away, all alone in the empty countryside, a point under the blazing dawn that was rising from the stationmaster’s cap. “A point is everything that has no dimension,” the woman remembered again instinctively, then she sat back and turned to her companion, who was curled up in a corner, a heap of bones, strands of hair covering her face. In her open mouth one could glimpse her dark, animal-like tongue. Her hands, knees, and feet weighed her down and dragged her crumbling body toward the floor. The only living things within that mass were her eyelashes, which kept quivering over her concealed eyes. The Housewife put up her hands against the light: her fingers formed an embroidery. She lifted her skirt and started examining her knees: they looked pure, pale, and well-polished, almost like river pebbles. Everything about was tender, quivering, and seemed eager to stir in the early breeze with new sprouts. She whispered, Soon, you’ll have to resemble me.” “How?” “By learning how to live.” “Won’t I lose myself?” “Do you feel so precious?” The other one made an obscenely broad smile, and with an idiotic look she nodded yes, she was content with herself. They were interrupted by the ticket inspector. This time, the Housewife jumped to her feet and was about to inundate him with questions, when the man forestalled her and accosted her. “You’re riding for free and you still have the nerve to ask questions? You’re not even riding by yourself, but with a double. You reroute a train, you use it as it suits you, and then you lunge at people!” The woman bowed her head. It especially bothered her to be humiliated in front of the girl. “Still . . . what extraordinary hair you have, Signora. I love white, red, brown, and black hair. But I find yours particularly arousing because it’s already gray even before being blond. If you let me have a strand of your hair, I’ll take care of things with the management and I won’t report you.” The ticket inspector had one of those voices we all know, persuasive and final. She had no choice but to place her head in his hands. He parted her hair, slowly ran his fingers through it as he searched between one strand and

Chapter 6 — 129

another, his humid breath against her skin. She felt as if a spider, with its streaming drool, were running along her spine. She clenched her fists and teeth to withstand it, and saw again the nightly spider webs of her childhood. “Thank you,” said the ticket inspector at last. In his hands were two light strands of hair that trembled slightly, as if the woman’s disgust were still agitating them. Her hair now looked more sparse and whitish, drained of blood, and the skin at its root was sore. With a military salute, the man left. The Housewife sat down and tried to sleep, but she kept stirring, and every now and then fragments of family life enwrapped her. She looked at the sky to gauge time, and anxiously watched the day advance. They still had not reached the town she knew. Now, when she happened to gaze on her companion, in addition to shame she felt an exasperating strain, as if some memory were tormenting her, but the memory of what, she did not know. She went out into the corridor, walked up and down, and looked at her hair reflected in one of the windows. When she returned to her seat, the girl was eating. She was breaking a piece of bread into crumbs. Other pieces bulged from her pocket. She shifted the bread crumbs from one hand to the other, then collected them in her right palm and put them in her mouth. Her mouth chewed slowly. The seat around her was covered with minuscule bits; so was the floor, and soon also the Housewife’s dress because the Housewife had meanwhile gone to sit next to the girl. “You don’t eat bread?” the girl asked, offering her a crust. “I did eat it, thank you,” she heard herself answer, and at that same moment she saw herself sitting at the bottom of the trunk, with dusty crumbs in her hands, and her mold-covered mouth craving for blood. And so she threw herself at the girl, grabbed her by the shoulders, and with her face against hers she sniffed her and shook her, “What’s your name? Who are you? What do you know?” The other one made her usual, indolent smile, her mouth full. She was about to open it and answer when the train stopped with a violent jerk and screeched so loudly that the Housewife covered her ears to avoid the shrieking sound. In the meantime, all the doors were thrown open and a voice drew closer yelling out the name of the town. When it reached the compartment where the two travelers were, it sounded pleasantly surprised. Assuming a mellifluous tone, the voice put itself, together with its body—that of the local stationmaster—at the service of the Signora who, for so long, had deprived the town of her presence.

130 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The lady was forced to smile and, as customary, welcome the man’s homage, which for once was spontaneous. However, inside her chest she felt hard blows, as if someone were crushing the images of the night’s journey with a stone and sticking price lists in their place, or invitations to ceremonies and manuals of courtly etiquette and titles. As if that had not been enough, immediately outside the station she saw her personal driver, who had come to fetch her in the official car, followed by her husband’s personal driver in the marital car. The housekeeper emerged from it to pay respects to her and to present her with a bouquet of house flowers from her husband, who sent his apologies but was housebound with the aftereffects of a cold. All of this made her nauseous, and therefore, with no more smiles, she curled up in the back of her car, closed her eyes, and covered her ears again. But she could still feel a sizzling sound behind her temples, almost like a gramophone record spinning around and repeating, at times with the maid’s voice, other times the butler’s, the gardener’s, or the cook’s, “—an extraordinary soufflé—rotten seeds, believe me—Signora, I recommend—if the Signora allows it . . .” “Stop it!” she finally screamed, shaking her head vigorously, but right then she realized that what was happening to her was out of place, and she swallowed her screams. The car had already done its usual circle around the front of the villa and stopped, so she got out. After turning graciously left and right to greet servants, gardeners, dogs, parrots, cats, deer, peacocks, farmers, horses, and beggars who had come from every corner of her domain to pay homage to her, she started climbing the stairway that led to the villa. There, her husband was waiting for her. Stretching his arms paternally toward her in a forgiving and blessing gesture appropriate for elderly, provident husbands, he addressed her with provident and elderly words. “I received your telegram and I want to thank you for it, my dearest. But why didn’t you specify the time of your arrival? We ran the risk of rushing to the station for nothing. Anyhow, I’m glad you’re back. The house without you . . .” “Had lost all of its fragrance,” recited the maids in unison. “It was missing ‘that touch,’ ” trilled the butler. And the servants, “The gracefulness of command.” “How beautiful!” exclaimed the girl, who was still following the lady. “Is this a performance?” “I wish to God,” moaned the woman. “Pay attention. There are no intermissions to allow for commentary.”

Chapter 6 — 131

Meanwhile, her husband had taken her hand and was kissing it. “Generous hand,” a beggar called out immediately from below, “give something to a poor wretch!” And so, the servants started chasing away the beggars, the dogs barked at them, the horses pawed the ground, and the canaries fluttered restlessly. The Housewife was shocked to see how the poor were mistreated, and she started tossing coins toward them. The beggar picked up the coins, the husband consoled the wife, and everyone moved gracefully up and down the stairway. It looked like a ballet. The girl had never seen anything so lovely, and began to cheer, “Long live servitude! Long live beggary! How beautiful a civilized life is! Hurry up and wash me, feed me, give me some money, teach me how to scream, and get me some slaves who’ll applaud me. I want applauses. I want gratitude! I want to feel like an important benefactress!” “Give it a day,” said the Housewife, “then we’ll talk about it again.” She clapped her hands and everybody fell silent. The only sound, coming from a secluded corner, was the clicking of a typewriter: the mansion secretary was typing a column to be sent to the local paper about the Signora’s arrival and munificence. At the Housewife’s signal, everyone went back to their places, bowed their heads, and resumed their work: some in the cattle shed, some in the cages, others at the intersections, while the husband accompanied the lady through flights of stairs and salons to her quarters. When they arrived, she suddenly asked him, “Where did I send you the telegram from?” “What do you mean where from? You don’t know where you were?” “Of course I know. But I would like to see it written. Seeing the name of a place printed is sometimes like looking at a picture again.” “Actually, the funny thing is,” he answered, taking the telegram out of his pocket and handing it to her, “they forgot to write down the place of origin. It’s a curious coincidence.” “Right,” she said, blushing, and quickly added: “You didn’t get upset because I left the Capital out of the blue, did you?” “A getaway!” he declared, pleased with his own indulgence. “A model wife indulges in a little getaway, and a wise husband can do nothing but smile at it.” You’re such a fool, thought the model wife. “Actually, you must excuse me if I didn’t join you. I had repeatedly promised that we would go back together and that I would show you to your old friends (lowering his voice), those from the trunk days, those who could

132 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

not appreciate you. Did they recognize you now that you’ve become a real woman, a bride, a citizen, and—why not—a representative of our healthy family tradition? A prodigal daughter of society?” All the while he had been stroking her hair, unaware of her uneasiness every time his hands brushed her temples. A few times she drew away from him and tried to cover herself so that he would not notice the missing strands. She also feared that the girl would mention it. Instead, the girl said, “This scene is too long, it bores me, and everything is empty. Earlier on they were at least making noise.” The Housewife had no choice but to introduce her to her husband. She called her “a friend of mine,” but the husband wanted to know her name. The girl did not want to say it, protesting that it was a ridiculous name. To get it over with, the Housewife made one up, but the girl shouted that it was not her own. The husband began to lose his patience and showed clear signs of disapproval. The girl turned to leave, because that was an injustice, she said, no one had ever forced her to pronounce syllables she did not like. At that, the husband blocked her way and, with a hand over his heart and a stern look, he spoke: “My guest, I won’t allow it. As for your remaining in our house without a name, I won’t allow that either. It’s an abuse of power without precedent, and here at our place, everything has a precedent. Furthermore, civil status is a serious reality for everybody, and it must always be respected. As long as you’re under this roof, you will be so kind as to share my wife’s name. If I understood correctly, you’re a damsel, and since my wife’s a dame, there will be no confusion. My wife’s name, I dare hope, won’t sound ridiculous to you. I won’t accept any more objections. And now that everything is sorted out, my dearest ones, I ask your permission not to join you for lunch, but to retire to my quarters and inhale menthol and vapor since I have a rather bad cold.” “This character is unbearable,” said the girl as soon as they were alone. “What’s his name?” “Husband. Or better still, model husband. Man who follows the rules. Self-made man. Man of sterling character. There are many epithets, depending on the role he’s playing. Luckily, like all precision tools, he is weather-sensitive and breaks down easily; that is, he catches a cold, as he did today. We’ll take advantage of that to change scenes and have a pleasant lunch.” Arm in arm, and with the same name, they headed to the dining room, where a small table loaded with shiny, transparent objects, flowers, lace, and ice was waiting for them.

Chapter 6 — 133

Two servants moved swiftly around, offering trays of fragrant and colorful substances that the Housewife identified as macaroni, pheasant, string beans, purée, cream, peaches, muscatel, and candied fruit, but the girl turned everything down with obstinacy and uneasiness, while becoming increasingly pale with hunger and flushed with exasperation. Now the Housewife was washing her hands in warm rose water. Once her own hunger was satiated, she started to worry about the girl’s. “Anything you want,” she said, “just ask for it. I won’t let you get up from the table unless you’ve eaten. If not, I’ll call my husband, who knows every trick to drive anyone to normality.” At this threat, the girl said, “Bread crumbs.” “In the name of God,” screamed the Housewife, jumping to her feet, “are you doing it on purpose?” They were now face to face, and they hated each other. “Bread C–R–U–M–B–S,” the girl spelled out. The Housewife buried her face in her hands and started to cry. “Bread crumbs,” she heard for the third time. “Bring pieces of stale bread,” yelled the Housewife to the servants in exasperation. “A lot of stale bread. All the stale bread in the house.” A bewildered silence filled the room. Then, the butler stepped forward, “Excuse me, Signora, but there is no stale bread in the house.” “There’s no stale bread in the house?” No one had ever seen the Signora look so agitated. “The distribution of bread is regulated not to have any leftovers and to avoid waste.” “But I want some stale bread. Have someone make it right away. Send for the cook.” “Stale bread cannot be made, Signora.” “What about buying it? Can someone buy it? Go downtown and buy it. Knock at some neighbor’s door and ask to have some, borrow some, at any price,” and she banged her fists violently on the table. “Maybe,” the girl suggested, “the poor who were cheering in the garden have some.” “Excuse me, Signorina,” said the butler, bowing, “but those poor people depend on our master, who has congregated them and who, twice a day, feeds them a rational and substantial meal that does not include stale bread.” “And in the chicken coop? Don’t you feed stale bread to your chickens?”

134 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The butler made a vague gesture with his hand and smiled, “Our chickens, again by the master’s orders, receive, like the poor, a board suitable to their development, which aims at improving their race. Stale bread, if the Signorina will allow me, is but old sentimentality.” “In that case,” said the girl, “I’ll starve to death.” “That, too, is sentimentality.” “But,” said the girl, “I like it, it nourishes me, while your young food has a lot of clashing colors but no substance.” “Go,” commanded the Housewife suddenly, “a real butler doesn’t know the word ‘impossible’ when his master commands. I expect stale bread.” The butler and the servants edged out of the room, humiliated; the Housewife began pacing up and down, while the girl drew up close to the wall and watched the microscopic motion of mortar particles on the plaster. A short while later, the butler and the servants reappeared carrying large silver trays on each of which lay a moldy crust of bread. They set them down on the table and disappeared. The Housewife moved closer to take a look and immediately realized they were made of colored cardboard. She bounced them a bit on the palm of her hand, then put them in her pocket. As far as maintaining my image as house mistress, these work just as well, she thought. I’ve been obeyed. But it’s better if she doesn’t see them, or else she might say it aloud, that they’re fake. She still doesn’t understand that the only thing worth saying aloud is that which increases an individual’s prestige, even if it’s untrue. But what is true and unpleasant must not only be left unsaid: it must be denied and countered. Now I’m going to leave her alone here. With all of these leftovers, she’ll certainly find something to feed on. She must be used to making do and starving, but she won’t let others see her, just like I used to be when I was still a true, modest soul. And so, without turning to the girl, who was still standing with her forehead against the wall listening to the crumbling of matter, the Housewife left, locking the doors of the dining room. She ordered the servants who wanted to enter and clean up to wait in silence, “This is a difficult moment for the Signorina. Don’t disturb her.” That same night, sitting at the table between husband and wife, the Signorina ate the cream of asparagus with relish and asked twice for pheasant, but they were having lobster instead, and she was happy to try it. She also stuffed her pockets with breadsticks, so she would have enough to chew on until the next day.

7 The next day, the dame said to the damsel, “Now, if you’ll be so kind as to stay with us, you’ll need some clothes to dress up according to our customs.” “Which would be?” asked the damsel, squashing a mosquito on her face. “A young woman should wear a woolen or light linen dress with no frills in the morning, a woolen or dark silk dress with a few sober trimmings in the afternoon, and a voile or tulle dress in the evening, with a few flowers.” “I only want one,” answered the damsel, “but golden, with an ermine cape. I’ve been waiting a long time for it.” “It’s not appropriate for a young girl. That’s for a queen on a throne.” “I can become queen.” The Housewife got frightened, “Don’t say it out loud, for pity’s sake. They’ll think that you’re either plotting a murder or that you’re mad.” “Or I can wear it to think of my dear love,” whispered the damsel and, already lost in her baroque fantasy, she took a breadstick from her pocket, reduced it to crumbs, and filled her mouth. Knowing by now that when the girl started musing like that restraining her imagination or steering her reasoning was no longer possible, the Housewife acted as if the girl had accepted all of her suggestions. She summoned shoemakers, hat designers, dressmakers, embroiderers, and hairdressers, and ordered them to take her measurements, try clothes on her, and think up hairstyles for her. For some time they sewed yards of fabric on the girl, covered her head with felt hats, straw hats, and feathers; they wrapped jewels around her neck, stuffed her feet in leathers of every color. Finally the girl rubbed her hands together to shake off the last crumbs, stopped chewing, closed her mouth, and seemed to awaken. She looked at the shoemakers kneeling at her feet, the seamstresses closing in at her sides, the furriers hanging from her arms and, — 135 —

136 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

around her forehead, birds fluttering by the hat designer’s magic touch. Rousing herself, she screamed, “Who stuffed these colorful creatures? Who slaughtered the soft animals you’re trapping my arms in? Who killed the playful chamois to sheath my feet?” and she started shedding tears. “Who,” retorted the Housewife, motioning to the suppliers to withdraw, “who, then, boiled alive the lobster we ate yesterday? Who squashed the mosquito as it followed the laws of nature and sought nourishment in your blood? And the taxidermist who stuffed those lovely little birds, where did he toss the worms, the insects, the defenseless larvae that filled their entrails?” “And so,” asked the girl, drying her eyes, “does that mean we must kill?” “And so,” answered the Housewife, “it means we must not fear death.” And after a pause, “Why do you fear it?” “I fear.” “Wherever your death is, that’s where your whole life will always be.” “My life is seeing with my eyes and feeling with my senses, and in death there’s nothing more to see, no more senses to use.” “Perhaps,” the Housewife thought aloud, “that ‘nothing’ can be penetrated without any means, and it might be everything.” “What does that mean?” “I don’t know. I was trying to put together fragments of thought, words that knock on my forehead if I think about death.” “Don’t they make you scared?” “I think they made me so scared when I was little that, not knowing how to hide from them, I convinced myself that I loved them, and by now I think of them with every single breath, not as a nightmare, but as a fixed idea of love.” “And so love might be an extreme fear and an extreme defense?” “What might love not be?” “Everything that is not my dark man with blue skin and a mysterious voice. My crazy, wrong, wandering man.” “We’ll talk about it again in a few years,” concluded the Housewife, suddenly feeling mature and obnoxious, but she immediately regretted saying it and invited the girl for a walk around the villa and the estate. While they were visiting the antique and modern rooms, the Housewife noticed that her guest was walking with her head down, without seeing anything.

Chapter 7 — 137

“Why don’t you take a look?” “What I make up in my mind is certainly more beautiful.” Hearing these words, the Housewife was piqued once again, and viewed the girl in the same way as her own mother must have viewed her when she would throw cold words into her trunk. “Do you think you’re inventing what you make up? If our intelligence is nothing but memory, the more you see, the more you learn, and the more capable you become.” “I don’t care. I’m enough in and of myself.” For the second time during that short period, the Housewife felt like she was playing the part of her mother who, after receiving such an answer from her, used to slam the lid of the trunk and leave her locked in there as punishment. Her equivalent of slamming the trunk was shutting up stubbornly, but the girl did not notice, or perhaps she did not care about that either. And so, little by little, the woman forced herself to become polite and understanding again. She said, “I was like you, until not too long ago.” “Until my beloved kissed you?” “Oh, you did hear that?” “Because it hurt me.” “Your imagination hadn’t prepared you for it?” “It hurt in a different way. I should have been spared that, out of pity. I have a right to be pitied.” “Not at all. I don’t, you don’t, and no one does. By being pitied all the time, man has become the most miserable animal ever created. Besides, it’s not common to pity intelligence.” “Not even to pity him, if he were intelligent? Is he?” “Don’t you know it?” “I never spoke to him.” “Then why, how can you love him?” “He’s handsome.” “He’s hairy,” said the Housewife, who realized only at that moment that she was jealous. The girl blushed and looked down. “I don’t know,” she continued after a pause, “I only saw his face and hand.” Now it was the Housewife’s turn to blush. “I did, too,” she said quickly. “His hands are in fact hairy, and his face is blue from the hasty obstinacy with which his beard keeps growing back. But where did you meet him?”

138 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“I never met him.” “Who told you about him?” “Just you, Signora, on top of the tower, to tell me that he had kissed you and that he had accompanied you there.” “Have you ever seen his picture?” The girl shook her head. “Did you dream about him? How did you invent him?” “Here’s how: I often thought about Love and the way it would come to me. I thought of a young man who would sometimes be in one place, sometimes in another, ready to welcome me no matter where I ended up with my thoughts. And that man had a beautiful, long figure like certain noble animals, and the colors of feathers on his face. I remembered ravens, with their black, blue, steel, and purple backs, and created his hair. Then I thought of the neck of jays, which is the color of the morning sky and turns pale on their breast until it resembles the evening sky, and I said, ‘that’s how his eyes and his misty brow shall be.’ The last thing I saw was a swallow flying before my window as I was stretched languidly over the windowsill sighing, and it looked to me like the color of a moonlit night. Right away, I molded his eyelids and orbs with the same shadowy substance. And his mouth was a black slit.” “We felt shame,” whispered the Housewife, lost in her reveries, “shame at thinking of a man’s mouth being red. We thought of a mouth that would only let out breath, like a trail of smoke that filled the lips with mist. Isn’t that so?” “It is,” admitted the girl. “That’s why, when I saw in one of those hallways a hand grasping the edge of a wall, even though the body to which it belonged was concealed behind the corner, I knew it was his. I just kept staring at it, until suddenly the hand let go of the wall and disappeared. Later on, as I was going up the skyscraper (I had taken the stairs, and it was going to take many hours), every now and then I looked up to see how many flights I still had to climb, and twice his face appeared to me, looking down from above. He seemed to be waiting or looking for somebody, and he was suffering. I realized that I was also looking for somebody (him?), and that I, too, was suffering. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the spot where he had first appeared to me, so when he leaned out again, his eyes immediately met mine, and he was certainly disappointed, because he didn’t lean out anymore. I was hoping I would find him out on the terrace when I reached it much later, but he wasn’t there. Perhaps he had already taken the elevator down.”

Chapter 7 — 139

“Do you want us to invite him to spend a few days here? I can do it,” boasted the Housewife, even though she knew neither his name nor his address. “Signora,” screamed the girl, “Signora, what sort of creature are you? A sorceress? A creature almighty by your great virtue? By divine selection?” and she hugged her and kissed her, taking her hands into hers even though the Housewife was annoyed by it and kept pushing her off. “But no,” the girl screamed again, her exaltation suddenly turning into anger, “I don’t want it. Then you would just stand there and watch me suffer while the two of you loved each other; you would feel my hatred as you two tortured me. No. You promised you would no longer talk to me about him. I’m leaving, I’m leaving now!” She burst into tears and ran through the string of rooms until she reached the area in front of the villa. There she stopped and leaned against the door frame, sobbing. A short while later, gliding gently on the resplendently polished floors, the Housewife started out to reach her. But as she glided and swayed with her beautiful white skirts fluttering about like a sail (it was the first of July and, like the woman on earth, Cancer glided on the shiny surface of the sky among snow-white shadows), every now and then she would kneel down and brush the cold marble of the floor with her fingertips. And every time she lifted her hand again, she would almost furtively sneak a peek at it, but her fingertips shone without the faintest trace of dust. She tried again with her whole palm. It remained as unsoiled and rosy as Venus’s heels on the seashore. But unfortunately, the woman was not thinking of Venus: she was thinking that servants neglect their duties whenever they can and, just to catch them on the wrong foot, she went down on her hands and knees and, two or three times, scrupulously licked the floor. Her tongue lapped up and down the polished marble and a sparkling, almost musty taste oozed from the slit between the slabs. It was an algid ferment, a vapor of mineral death, a swarm of star germs, the presage of mummified universes. The tip of her tongue froze and got stuck to the floor, but the woman just stayed there, face down, sniffing and inhaling the breath of the stone. Her mouth was open, her lips pressed against the black veins of the marble; she did not even realize she was moving them rhythmically. Her nostrils quivered as her breathing became more and more urgent, and she kept drinking, drinking, drinking in those vapors of subaqueous regions that, from the most remote ages of the world, still yield their moisture into the air through exhalations and ferment. The woman swallowed

.

140 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

them, gulped them down, chewed them, unaware that she was whimpering. A spasm in her womb forced her to lie down on her stomach and press against the floor. She banged her knees and her hardened nipples felt sore. With a horribly queasy sensation, she realized that drops of saliva were running down her chin, and she knew then that she was intoxicated. She rolled over onto her back with great effort, hoping she would be able to get up, but she could not, and instead she hit her head violently on the floor. Only when she heard the thud did it occur to her that one of the servants might hear it, rush over and find her lying there. She felt so ashamed at such a thought that she reverted at once to her watchful, infallible, and categorical role as house mistress. She was already standing up even before she was conscious of it. She ran her hand up and down her body, almost as though she were a roused dog that needs to be calmed down. She wiped her mouth, squeezed her nostrils tight between her fingers until they stopped quivering, and having straightened herself up, she reached the girl. In the meantime, the latter had stopped weeping and had started chewing bread again. “Let’s look at the park,” said the Housewife, making her climb on a buggy that was waiting for them in front of the stairway, with its lackey standing stock-still next to it. The buggy was made of white wicker: white were the bridles adorned with golden bells, white was the whip with silk tassels, and white was the pony, which had a panache of snow-white feathers on its head and a golden bit in its mouth. “Here we go,” said the Housewife, sitting next to her companion, and before she even touched the reins, the little horse started trotting resonantly. “I’m afraid of horses,” said the girl. “As a child, I thought about horses so often that I became ill, and I kept dreaming about them, all black, running at sunrise against the green sky. They would lift their muzzles, open their mouths, which were the color of fire, and call out to me. Every night they looked bigger, and every night they would lose a part of their body. At first they appeared to me as if from a distance, in their entirety, with slender legs and silver hooves. The second time they came closer, so I could see their bellies pulsing between their thighs, but the line of my eyes cut them off at the hocks. The following night they were so close to me that I could only see them from the knees up, and their immobile pupils sparkled. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth dream, they lost more and more of their hips, backs, shoulders, and necks, while their muzzles and manes became enormous. The

Chapter 7 — 141

last time they came they had but eyebrows and nostrils pointing toward the Zenith, which resounded with the echo of my name as they bellowed it. Then I waited for them for months, but they didn’t come back anymore. In the anxiety of waiting, I lay in bed night and day. I lost weight and fell prey to a vicious illness, but I recovered, and after about a year, at last I was able to go out in the sun. One day at noon, mom took me to the meadows where, not far from us, I saw a group of certain animals I didn’t know existed. To me, they looked no bigger than a sheep. I had never seen images of them, nor had anyone ever told me about them. I’ve never seen a gorilla, either, but if I met one, I would recognize it. These beasts, instead, were completely unknown to me, and yet neither mom nor the other people who passed by were surprised to see them. The animals didn’t become frightened at seeing humans; it was as if they knew them. They kept on grazing, ran around, jumped on top of each other, bit each other, and uttered long, jerky cries, almost like a laugh. In fact, I’m certain they were laughing at me as they watched me sideways with their immobile eyes. I said, ‘What funny animals! What could they be?’ Then mom, too, like those beasts, laughed at me and exclaimed, ‘Don’t you recognize horses, silly?’ ‘But no,’ I insisted, pointing at them, ‘I mean those small animals over there. Do you think I don’t know a horse? A whole horse wouldn’t fit in one field.’ At those words, my mom moaned, ‘You’re still sick, you’re raving, my child!’ She took me in her arms and ran home immediately to put me in bed. Later on, to calm her down, I confessed that I had been joking and that I knew perfectly well they were horses. But it wasn’t true. Even now I don’t know what those animals are that you all call, using some other creatures’ name, horses. Perhaps it’s because of this misunderstanding that humans think horses are crazy.” “The colt that used to come and visit me in my trunk,” said the Housewife in turn, “wasn’t crazy at all. It was incredibly smart. To protect its own freedom, it had made itself poisonous by drinking vitriol, and it could kill with a bite. It had a beautiful reddish orange color and white spots, like a mushroom, because of the poison it had swallowed.” “I,” continued the girl, “used to have a statue that would often come to visit me. Actually, it was not a single statue, but a couple, husband and wife. The husband was standing and holding a dagger against the throat of his kneeling wife so that the enemies wouldn’t capture her alive. I was glad that the wife had a blade at her throat and that she couldn’t talk, because I don’t like women’s conversation. Unfortunately, the husband didn’t talk much, either,

142 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

what with the effort of holding his dying wife, but he couldn’t let go of her, or else the whole would fall apart. And so he would talk to me sideways, just like your horses, and look at me askance. Also, one end of his mustache hung down his lip, and I found it inappropriate for someone naked (because they were naked) to have a mustache. So, in the end, whenever he came I made sure he wouldn’t find me at home, until he stopped looking for me.” “Was this a long time ago?” “A long time. It was when I was ill. I saw the portrait of this friend on a postcard and insisted on meeting him, but as soon as I got better, I abandoned him. Now, for over two years I’ve been traveling around the world on the doctors’ advice, and here I am.” “It seems that friends like these tend to make young people ill. At least that’s what they say. If one finds the strength to leave them, one recovers right away. Later on in life one meets others like those, and without common sense it’s difficult to avoid them. But you haven’t recovered yet.” Somewhat maliciously, the girl inquired, “What about you?” “Me? I’m married, and I cannot answer certain questions.” Already for the second time in one week she was hiding behind those words. “Let’s not start again. It’s useless for me to ask you for help as someone who knows things if you don’t want to help me.” “That’s right.” Both felt offended and became quiet. The jangling sound of the pony’s golden bells could be heard more loudly. They were riding past foggy greenhouses in which lonely flowers fluttered about. They passed through tree-lined roads where white deities perched on tall pedestals enjoyed the fresh air. The month of July—stone: onyx; lucky flower: iris—had found its home in that marvelous retreat, and adorned it with lights, zephyrs, and scents that made it rather phony. The Housewife would have gladly done without the sparkling grass, the translucent sky, the fragrant breeze, and the chirping birds. The girl, instead, seemed mesmerized by all that, and as usual, her mouth was hanging, while the thin air seeped down her dark throat like a rivulet into a cave. Now, thought the Housewife, maidenhair will start growing between her teeth, and water will spurt out of her throat. “So good, so good,” murmured the girl with her eyes closed as she swallowed the air. I wonder why, thought the Housewife, rousing herself, when I’m next to her my mind cannot help straying and I cannot sit straight for a single

Chapter 7 — 143

minute. Come now, woman, remember your husband, your duties, and the required virtues: normality and common sense. Right at that moment, for no apparent reason, the pony lifted its white tail. Entering the park, they came upon a shady valley carpeted with soft grass and jonquils. In the middle of it sparkled a round lake with swans and water lilies. Renewal, thought the Housewife, pulling the reins. Time to change the upholstery: I’ll have the King of Egypt ship me a hippo that will flip the lake upside down and cover the shores with mud so they won’t be infested with swarms of mosquito-like harpists. Exactly then, a motor truck stopped on the opposite bank and the butler came out, followed by porters carrying heavy bundles on their shoulders, and maidens wearing long veils. The maidens ran around the lake and each sat on a flowery sod that had been artfully arranged. They held out their arms simultaneously and the porters laid on them those heavy bundles that, once opened, turned out to be harps. While all this was happening, the butler, looking dejected, went over to his mistress and tried to apologize. “The Master wanted to surprise the Signora with a lakeside concert while the ladies enjoyed their tea, which will arrive momentarily. The Signora must forgive me, it’s just a quarter to five, and if the Signora hadn’t been early, everything would have been set. The lackey informed me too late of the direction the Signora had taken, otherwise we would have been on time.” “I’ve already told you many times, Araceli, that when the master wants to surprise me, I need to be informed in advance so I can act on it, otherwise it won’t work out. Don’t you know that the spirit of the house is a woman, and that only a woman is the keeper of the hearth? How many years have you been working as a butler?” “Thirty years, Signora.” “After thirty years, you should have learnt about these things.” “Yes, Signora,” the poor fellow was perspiring with humiliation, but would not dare wipe himself in front of the Signora. The Signora showed mercy. “Give me a hand,” and she jumped down from the buggy. She immediately stopped two servants who had emerged from another motor truck carrying a raft on which a small tea table had been set. “Place my image and that of my young friend face-to-face,” she ordered, “and feed them well. Make sure there are enough muffins, not too much butter

144 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

on the scones, and that the Neapolitan-style miniature pizzas are warm enough. And follow our conversation: keep it pleasant and proper. In the meantime, we’ll go and take care of some business.” She took the girl by the arm. “And don’t forget to make us clap our hands when those distinguished harpists have finished playing. It might be appropriate to request Handel’s Largo as an encore because Handel’s largo is in the program, right Araceli? Can I see it?” The butler handed it to her. “Here, Araceli. I’m going to scratch a mark next to it. When they reach this piece, we request the encore. Understood?” She lifted her chin and turned around, dragging along her companion, who looked flabbergasted. “Why didn’t we stay?” the girl asked her as soon as they were in the woods and the first sounds of the harps reached them. “It was so beautiful. It felt like the lyrics of an aria coming out of a tenor’s mouth in the middle of a blue-winged stage.” “Don’t you feel sick picturing things like that?” The Housewife pressed her little handkerchief against her lips. The woods were real woods, with woodcutters felling ancient trees, and with huts and charcoal fires, crumbling temples, wandering game, grim bird cries, and spots of sunshine like glimmering coins on the moss- and shrub-covered soil. “Are there any wolves?’ “No wolves, but a few knights errant,” and they both laughed at the thought. “Now,” continued the Housewife, “we’ll go and have a glass of wine at a tavern I know. We just need to get out of the woods on the western side, but let’s make sure we don’t walk too deep into the thick, or we’ll be walking for hours before we find the countryside again. Here’s the path.” They turned right down a sandy trail hollowed out by the rain along crisscrossing tree roots that had turned the soil into a skeleton on which it was hard to walk. The two women kept slipping but enjoyed themselves. They were scared and laughed out loud. The Housewife was actually happy when wild animal calls resounded among the tree trunks and the girl stopped dead, her face ashen with terror. Then the Housewife would taunt her and harass her, while inside she was dying to hold on to her companion and call for help, and be outside of those woods with Araceli who flattened himself against the walls whenever she passed. By deceiving the girl, she felt like she was deceiving God himself and the whole of mankind He had created. She felt cursed, sneaky, and yet rather powerful, like Satan; and like him she dripped

Chapter 7 — 145

evil delight, forgetting that Satan is naked and handsome, and that around his forehead he wears an iron halo that says, “Sad until the final day.” They soon reached the tavern, which had all the characteristics that would appeal to those two loonies: darkness, clay in place of a floor, holes in place of windows, a fat tavern-keeper, his bucktooth wife, a squeaking spit before the fire, and ugly thugs sitting at tables. The ugly thugs were actually honest and reputable artisans and peasants who lived on the Housewife’s estate, and many of them, seeing her come in, jumped to their feet and took off their caps. Some of them, however, did not move, and the Housewife, although she responded politely to those who rushed to welcome her, looked at the others with surprise. And she was even more surprised when, after she and the girl sat down at a table and had a few sips of a special wine, she noticed a stranger come in, and saw those men who had remained in their seats when she had arrived now jump to their feet and greet him politely. The tavern-keeper and his wife also rushed toward the stranger, accompanied him to a table, and poured him the special wine. The Housewife raised an eyebrow. As he walked past her to take his seat, the newcomer looked at her insistently. Even after sitting down, he must still have been watching her because she felt something on the back of her neck and twisted, as if trying to chase a bug. Besides, she could hear him and the tavern-keeper’s wife whispering, and she was curious, but the arrival of two guards distracted her. The guards, too, must have been new in town because they greeted the stranger respectfully, but scrutinized the two women with suspicion. They were about to walk over and ask them who they were when the tavern-keeper dashed forward holding out his arms to stop them, repeating: “It’s the Signora, the Mistress. Everything is hers from here down to the sea and up to the mountain. She’s a most excellent Dame. Even the land of operations is—or rather, was—hers. She’s the distinguished bride of our Signor, the Master.” Even though the tavern-keeper was speaking rapidly and in a low voice, the Housewife overheard him. She raised the other eyebrow, so now her face was such that the good man was all discombobulated and abandoned the guards to rush to her: “You must excuse them, Signora; it’s their duty. They’re new; they were transferred here while you were away, and they couldn’t possibly know you. Their duty is to always be suspicious, so they can better supervise the operations.” He then leaned over and whispered in her ear: “Anyone might be a spy in times of war, and an ammunition point is a State secret, almost.” “An ammunition point?”

146 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“Well, yes. An ammunition point, God bless it, an ammunition point that brought us a lot of profit, thanks to the Signor, your husband, who gave us the land. There’s the engineer,” and he pointed to the stranger. The man got up from his chair and bowed, “Signor Oeneas, engineer,” he said. “My pleasure,” said the Signora casually. “Signor Oeneas, engineer,” repeated the man, this time bowing slightly toward the girl. “My pleasure,” muttered the girl. “Please,” said the Housewife, indicating a seat at her table. “Thank you,” answered the engineer, approaching. “Would you like to sit down?” smiled the Signora. “You’re too kind,” mumbled the engineer. “Oh, please don’t be shy,” said the lady, and finally the engineer slowly lowered himself onto the edge of the bench across from her. The tavern-keeper left. “Now,” said the woman, her face beaming with a secret hope, “please, tell me everything.” Very quietly, the girl sneaked away, too. “I’ll tell you what I can, Signora, but it’s not much. The edge of your woods was going to be bought by the government to build an ammunition point in it. Your husband graciously gave it for free, and now we are working on it. This is what everybody knows and can see, and what I’m allowed to tell you. I thought your husband had already informed you.” “I was away,” said the woman in a mellifluous voice, resting her head on the palm of her hand and gazing at Signor Oeneas with glassy eyes. She was thinking: if the ammunition point explodes, bye-bye, villa; bye-bye, Araceli; bye-bye, Leonardo the Gardener; bye-bye, army of pale liveried ghosts that will blow up in the air. I’ll be free. Then she asked, “What if the ammunition point explodes?” “There’s no danger. I mean, there’s no danger that it might explode.” “But many ammunition points have exploded. When that happens, what is the radius of the destruction?” “This ammunition point is being built according to modern, well-tested criteria, and a good portion of it is underground. . . .” He stopped and looked around the tavern at his workers and the guards.

Chapter 7 — 147

“In any case,” retorted the Housewife, “even if the ammunition point doesn’t explode, the enemy will soon find out about it, and they’ll send planes to bomb it.” The engineer started to feel confused. “One must not be pessimistic, Signora.” “It’s not pessimism, it’s a wish to . . . ,” she corrected herself, “a wish for truth, a wish to confront things face-to-face.” “None of us who are working there has ever come up with such catastrophic hypotheses,” said the engineer, making a vague gesture to indicate the men sitting in the tavern. “Are they your workers?” asked the Housewife, scrutinizing them one by one. “We have three hundred of them. They’ve built an actual village at the edge of the woods, with shacks, stores, cafés. This tavern is their upscale meeting place.” He made a silly smile. “In fact, you came here.” “It was luck that led me here.” The Housewife cast a coy glance at him. The engineer fumbled with his tie, rested his elbow on the table and muttered, “Thank you!” (Careful, Oeneas!) “So, why isn’t anyone allowed to see the operations?” For some mysterious reason, the engineer glanced about the dive for the guards before answering. “You need special permission, Signora. Permission from the prefect or the military authorities.” “Will you get it for me?” “Who, me?” “You.” “Did you say me?” “Not me, Signor Oeneas, you,” she laughed out loud, got up from her chair, and felt curvy and snakelike. Good job, she told herself, good job. Now shake his hand a bit, but only lightly, just to leave your perfume between his fingers. She did exactly that: she did not hold out her hand, but laid it on top of his, exerting a slight pressure with her fingertips. She felt the engineer’s sweaty skin under her fingers, but forced herself to keep them there until he had kissed them. Then, withdrawing them and wiping them furtively on her skirt, she whispered, to distract him, “Will we have the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight?”

148 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“Tonight?” Judging by his astonishment, the engineer must have been wondering whether he had heard well. She took advantage of it to make her invitation even more surprising, “No? Then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, in the morning, in the evening, any time you want, even in your work clothes, informally. Tell me, when?” Signor Oeneas tried to control himself and give an appropriate answer, but it was not so easy. Finally, the words came out of his mouth, “The day after tomorrow would be fine.” “Agreed. Then I’ll certainly be waiting for you at eight the day after tomorrow.” This time she held out her hand in a businesslike fashion to seal the agreement. But for the second time he bowed down to kiss it. The Housewife stared at the top of his head which, to tell the truth, was not of any particular interest, and thought, Perhaps it’s better if I suddenly remember that I’ve made another commitment. That’ll make him stretch out his neck a little, dear Signor Oeneas who thinks he’s already in my good graces. Just look at the way he’s kissing me. But first it’s better to cast him another glance. . . . “Signora,” the engineer said when he was done caressing her fingertips and brushing his head to cast away an unpleasant feeling, “this is a great honor for me. The day after tomorrow, yes.” “Alas, what a mishap,” trilled the lady, “I just now remembered that the day after tomorrow I’ve been invited out. Forgive me, Oeneas, I’ll call you,” and she left the tavern. She took a few quick steps down the steep path, trying to walk lightly because she could sense that the engineer was now standing at the door watching her, but pebbles were getting into her open sandals and grating her feet, so she decided to stop rather than keep walking unsteadily, and after all she had the excuse of having left her companion behind. From the door, Oeneas waved at her one last time, ceremoniously, but the Housewife did not feel like playing the seductress anymore, and yelled at him to go and look for the girl and send her out. The engineer rushed into the tavern and the girl emerged. “Where the hell were you?” “In the kitchen.” “Doing what?” “Talking with the maid.” “With the maid? In the name of God, even in a tavern like that there’s a maid? And what is a maid doing there? Where was she? How come she didn’t end up pestering me?”

Chapter 7 — 149

“She was afraid of you, Signora. When she heard you were there, she came out and stood by the kitchen door to see you, but she didn’t dare come forward. Then the tavern-keeper’s wife chased her away, so I sneaked out to console her. It was hard. You really disappointed her, Signora. She kept saying, ‘Why isn’t her hair golden? Why is her hair the color of ashes, as if she spent her time among pots and pans? Why isn’t she wearing a pink gown with a train? Why does she wear short skirts, like us farm girls? That’s not right. And with her bare legs? And without a hat? She should be wearing hats with lots of feathers, or at least a few strings of pearls. Also, I wanted to hear her voice, but she speaks too softly. I wanted to see her hands, but she doesn’t make any gestures. Is it true that her hands are transparent and white like ice? Is her whole body so still and washed out? All the time?’ And she asked me why I’m so different, and whether I do it on purpose. She said I reminded her of when a clog sinks in the mud and leaves a print that fills up right away with murky water: I’m your print in the mud. And she kept taking my hands into hers: ‘these are wide,’ she said, ‘they’re good for something, but that lady over there, how would she manage washing dishes, sweeping, doing laundry? That’s why we serve them. On her own, what would she be able to do? She would die. Even her eyes, do they really look like eyes? What do they see? These, instead,’ and she would point to mine, ‘they’re so deep, it’s obvious that if things get in there they stay in there as if they’d fallen into a well. And her hair? This hair, yes,’ she meant mine again, ‘this hair is like a roof over your head, it keeps the heat in winter and gives shade in the summer.’ ” “And you, what did you answer?” “I said, ‘The Signora is so still because she has accomplished everything, she’s perfect. Hair, eyes, hands, what need does she have of them, when she has everything inside herself? I, on the other hand, have everything outside of myself, and in the effort of grabbing it, I make myself larger, that’s why you can see me.’ ” “And the maid?” “She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Maybe. But do men even like her, perfect as she is?’ And so I told her about ‘our’ man.” “No!” exclaimed the Housewife, stopping dead in her tracks and trembling with anger. “You didn’t tell that dishwasher such a thing, did you? You’re just saying it to be funny, to sound interesting. You cannot possibly have said anything about ‘my’ man.”

150 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“I said he was mine,” and she bowed her head. “Did you tell her how you love him and how you saw him? Everything? About your pain, about your hopes?” “Yes,” nodded the girl, her face hidden beneath the mass of her hair. “That’s what your hair is for,” blurted the Housewife, grabbing her by her mane and pulling it back to look her in the eyes, “that’s what it’s for, tell it to your dishwasher: to give you a false modesty. That’s what your whole body is for: to play out fantasies, bravados, endeavors, performances, blackmailing, theft. Tell it to the one in the tavern, maybe you two can understand each other. Poverty comes handy to the likes of you because it frees you of all responsibilities; bleakness makes you quick to bond; ugliness gives you the arrogance that authorizes you to be shameless; and this vice may look like a defense. But in spite of all this I’ve figured you out, and I won’t allow you, I absolutely won’t allow you to place yourself naked in the hands of those who have plotted my undoing. They demanded that I be dressed, primped, adorned with their traditions, shod in clichés before I moved my first steps in life by their side, crowned with prejudice and wrapped up in misunderstanding. But you and your beloved must not, you must not throw yourselves under this grindstone and come out of it crushed like me, for them to munch on.” “That dishwasher has a soul like mine and yours, Signora, and she won’t say anything to anyone.” “No,” screamed the Housewife, growing more and more exasperated, “no, she doesn’t have a soul like mine, nor like yours. She has a much better one, if you will, but that’s not what concerns me. It’s the course, the direction; hers is the opposite of yours. What is vital to you is of no interest to her. Your love? You’ll find it glorified and cursed all over the trees in the woods, on the panes of the greenhouse, on the waters of the lake. Hoorays and boos everywhere. How will you be able to keep walking around these places? You’ll be an item, an example. Save yourself, I’m telling you this as if I were telling myself,” and all of a sudden, while she was still grabbing her by the hair and bending her head back, she kissed her fervently on the forehead. “Poor creature,” she murmured, letting her go and resuming her walk, “you should leave, but to go where?” “Signora, are you chasing me away? Do you want me to leave? Are you so upset with me? Forgive me, Signora, be kind, keep me with you. Your house is so beautiful, there’s cool air and good food, and so much light and shade,

Chapter 7 — 151

and hours elapse in keeping with time, and they always report their events like the revolutions of the planet. There’s so much harmony next to you, Signora. Let me stay.” And she followed her around, her hands in supplication. This is the place of my eternal perdition, thought the Housewife. Everybody’s against me, everybody begs me not to be true to myself. Not even she understands me anymore when I talk to her in earnest, and everything should be explained, explained, and explained again to everybody. Who could stand it? My beloved says I must be brave. I would like to see him try. I would like to see him here for a few hours. You, too, would break, my love. You, too, would end up talking with your hands just to be understood. You, too, would eat their food because starving to death, believe me, is such a long endeavor that, before you succeed in it, you have too many opportunities to regret it. “Signora, Signora, do you hear me? I promise you I won’t talk with anybody anymore, I’ll dress any way you like tonight, and I’ll stop stuffing my pockets with bread. Tell me, are you happy, Signora?” (A few years earlier, another voice had said, with the same tone, “Just tell me what I must do to please you. I can’t imagine what or how, but I’ll do it.” Housewife, why don’t you remember that voice and show some mercy?) But the Housewife answered, distractedly, “Yes. And now enough about this. Here’s the buggy, and here’s Araceli the butler, who saw us from a distance and is already handing me the reins. Now you’ll see: even though he’s on foot and we’re riding in the buggy, he’ll be waiting for us by the staircase of the villa to welcome us and announce any orders, any countermands, any laws enacted and repealed, any changes in the calendar, cyclones, epidemics, happy events that came to be during my absence from the marital abode.” She drew a heavy sigh. The girl put her hand on her shoulder to give her some comfort, but the Housewife was already resigned. She climbed onto the buggy and took the reins from Araceli, inquiring, “Was the concert beautiful? Did you take care of the harpists when it was over?” And out of the blue, “Araceli, get on the buggy with us. I’ll take you home.” (If you say yes, Araceli, I’ll give you a thousand lire. If you say yes, you’ll help me give a little shake to this damn society so full of inequalities. Say yes, Araceli: a little scandal would benefit you, too.) “The Signora must excuse me,” answered Araceli, deeply offended and standing to attention. “I know my duty. The Signora is too good, but that’s not acceptable, and in any case I must not accept.”

152 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“What if I was ordering you, slave? Forget it, it’s not worth it. You all are born not to understand anything.” She furiously whipped the pony, which galloped away. “But,” asked the girl, “if he had accepted, would you have let him get on?” “Araceli has no delusions of grandeur, I know him. He doesn’t even consider himself physically fit to sit with us. It’s true that, the more someone is a slave, the more he feels entitled to any splendor or power heaven might send him by accident or as a test. But Araceli is a good man, and not enough of a slave to aspire to the position of his superiors. Do you know who Caliban is? Caliban is not foul because of his bristly hair, but because he wants to subjugate. He’s not infamous because of his wicked mouth, but because he craves other people’s goods. He’s not revolting because of his sly stare, but because he yearns to get revenge. Ariel passes for a noble creature, but he’s not noble, he’s a slave. That is, he’s cowardly and not very bright; he obeys, trembles, begs, rejoices with his master. Not once does he disobey out of his own fancy, never does he make a mistake out of selfishness. Essentially, he’s one of those slaves you would like to have at home. In short, he’s Araceli. Always ready everywhere, looking like the place where he materializes; he wants freedom, but he doesn’t dare ask for it, and lest he be unhappy or annoying to his masters, he has lost the habit of wanting it. By inviting him to get on, I was the one who transgressed my role as mistress, and he was quite irritated by it. If he could, he would fire me. But he can’t. Do you see how he’s already standing immobile over there, waiting for us? What did I tell you? When I walk by him, he won’t even look at me.” “Then,” said the girl, “we’ll go in from the back door.” “Hooray!” exclaimed the Housewife and she pulled the reins, making the pony do a nice little turn before Araceli’s frozen eyes. The back door was located at some distance from the manor wing, between two long white walls with many square windows. As they approached it, the Housewife noticed a small child, certainly some servant’s son, who was writing on the wall with a blackened cork. As soon as he saw her, the boy ran away and the Housewife read what he had written: THE SIGNORINA MAKES LOVE. “Did you see?” she said. “That dear fledgling already knows. The dishwasher was faster than both of us and Araceli.”

Chapter 7 — 153

“Who knows which Signorina he means; there are many of them here.” “Let’s hope so,” said the Housewife, entering the corridor that led through the warehouses. “But look at that over there.” Still with a blackened cork, someone had made a caricature of the girl and of a man’s face with dark shadows over his brow, and underneath it read: DOWN WITH THE SIGNORINA, LONG LIVE THE DARK MAN. And a little further down: THE SIGNORINA IS IN LOVE, BUT THE DARK MAN DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN. And under that: THE SIGNORINA IS UGLY. DUMP HER, DARK MAN. “What do you think? Are you still convinced they mean someone else?” But as she turned to ask this question, she saw that the girl was clenching her teeth and shaking violently, and that she could not walk or move anymore. The Housewife was instantly filled with rage against the scum that would torment a poor creature just for fun, and she threw every door open, screaming at the servants—men, women, children, old people she would run into, “Get out of here, get out, out! I’ll chase you out, out, get out!” She was screaming so loudly that the husband heard her from his rooms, and after sending first his valet, then Araceli, and then his secretary to find out what was happening, he finally went down himself. He found the girl still petrified and shaking, and his young wife screaming, screaming and pushing anyone who got in her way out of the door.

This page intentionally left blank.

8 That same night, the girl vanished. They had put her to bed, called a famous doctor, and asked two sister nurses to keep watch over her. Shortly after the break of dawn, however, the girl asked to be left alone so that she could sleep and pulled the blankets over her head. The nuns left quietly, and sat in the adjoining lounge, waiting to be called. They were not called. At ten in the morning the Signora came to visit her young friend. The three of them headed to the bedroom, but already at the door they realized the girl was no longer there. The bed was neatly made, with the pillows hidden under the sheets to simulate a body. None of them lifted the blankets to verify the trick, none of them checked the bathroom in the hope of finding the patient, but all three of them looked simultaneously toward the open window, and turned pale. After a while, one of the nuns leaned out the window and turned even paler. “It’s so high,” she murmured. Another long silence followed, then the other nun disappeared into the changing room and reemerged holding the fugitive’s clothes and blushing maliciously. “She left naked,” she murmured in turn, expecting the Housewife to react with shock. But the Housewife, standing with her forehead against the wall as she had seen the girl do, was staring at the specks of mortar moving very slowly, shifting places, merging and falling. As they fell they made a faint, remote thud, that thud, of childhood years peeling off one by one and falling like onion layers (Ibsen). All of a sudden she thought: like artichoke leaves. The nuns saw her tear away from the wall, run to the intercom, call the cook, and yell at him in a high-pitched, querulous, and insistent voice they did not recognize, “Cook, tell your scullery boys not to snap off the artichoke leaves right at this moment. I need to think. Clean them some other time!” From the other end, the cook started to apologize and to explain that—“I don’t want to hear anything,” broke in the Signora, her voice more and more piercing, “we’ll eat something else, but I

— 155 —

156 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

don’t want to hear that, cook, do you understand? I don’t want them to snap off the artichoke leaves right now and make such a racket. The whole house reverberates, and I’m getting a migraine!” She banged down the receiver and turned to the nuns. “And as for the two of you, the Mother Superior will be informed of your negligence, and you’ll get what you deserve.” She stuck up her chin (never did this gesture fit her better) and, without even responding to their timorous regards, she left. From that morning on, it was clear that the Housewife had changed. Immediately after leaving her friend’s room, she inspected the villa and gave new orders. Once the linen closets were emptied out and the stacks of sheets, tablecloths, and towels were arranged in a long line, she personally checked the fabric of every rag against the light to make sure it had no worn patches or mendings. She selected the rags and divided them into piles, the way one does with potatoes: on one side the good ones, on the other side the blemished ones. Then she called two bookkeepers and had them draw up a list. The linen maids were so scared that they took turns asking for permission to go and recover at a health resort. From the linen warehouse the Housewife swooped onto the kitchen. There, she penetrated into every cloud of steam, picked up the skins from the garbage cans, weighed the beans and vegetables that had been mutilated, measured the swamps of fat at the bottom of the pans, and after assessing the theft and the waste, she guarded the numbers inside her heart, where modest men guard the memory of their first love. She opened the pantries overflowing with groceries, but when she inspected them one by one and noticed that there were no eggs, the immense mound of provisions that lay before her eyes seemed insufficient. The cooks tried to explain to her that, to always have fresh eggs—or “new-laid,” as the term goes—they must be replaced every day; and all of the day’s eggs, dozens and dozens of them, the Signora could see it for herself, were currently on the large pastry board being whipped by the confectioners. Nevertheless, the fact that there were no extra eggs, not even one, was to the Housewife a presage of famine, exodus, and pillage. The cooks tried in vain to assuage her anxiety, reassuring her that the pantries were loaded with cheese, ham, cake, chicken, fruit, and cans of succulent concoctions. But after looking them in the eyes one by one she repeated: “Pillage, pillage, pillage,” and left with her distress. Now, she kept thinking as she hurried down the maze of corridors pressing both of her hands against her heart, which had started to hurt slightly,

Chapter 8 — 157

what shall I do? How do mothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, and women friends spend their days so carefreely? “On the phone,” suggested her guardian angel, starting to nourish some hope for the fate of her protégée. “On the phone,” repeated the Housewife aloud, and she rushed to pick up the receiver. But when she stood in front of it, her perplexity returned: to talk about what? And with whom? “Call the ones you dislike the most, and offer them assistance and friendship,” suggested the divine envoy again. “The greater your effort, the greater your merit.” The Housewife, her heart feeling heavier and heavier, called the gentlewoman Catamantalède to ask her to please, please, come to dinner the day after the next. As soon as the gentlewoman Catamantalède accepted, the Housewife felt as though her heart were rejoicing and becoming lighter. Calling Lady Governor Blamblan was an easy, almost pleasant task. The Lady Governor accepted the invitation also on behalf of her distinguished husband. Once the customary niceties died off in the receiver, the Housewife realized that expressing and hearing trite thoughts did her good: it helped her weary soul to project itself into the future, lending her that whispering voice, that semblance of urgency that revealed to her the progress of mankind on the surface of the earth. It was a series of stale gestures and feeble voices, but she had already heard them floating over her head when she was in the trunk; and later on, when she had agreed to come out and attend the ball, she had found them by her side like unctuous neighbors; and ever since her marriage and her first marital reception, they had accompanied her, until they had finally succeeded in coming in handy and making themselves seem indispensable. In a sort of frantic eagerness like that of a girl who discovers dance, the Housewife called Signora Lulli to tell her that she had changed her mind and that Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, was indeed a noble example. Then she called the wife of the clerk who did not like codfish and gave her another recipe. She called the ousted Queen and wished her a speedy return to the throne. She called the National Lady and all the ladies she knew, even those to whom she had only spoken once and those who had sent her notes asking her for the honor of being received. To each one of them she promised a visit, on each one of them she lavished vapid pleasantries, until she exhausted all of the telephone resources in town. At that point, she asked the long-distance receptionist for the number of Muriel’s castle, in the Barony of Lale.

158 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“Muriel is trilling poems. It’s me. How fortunate,” answered the Baron. “Dear friend, how are you? You and Muriel must come and spend a few days at our place. I still haven’t thanked you for your warm hospitality this spring.” “Certainly, we’ll come. When?” “Tonight, even. Our home is your home.” “You deserve a kiss,” whispered the angel, brushing her with his wing, “for those words, ‘our home is your home.’ ” That was it, everything had come to a closure and recovered its balance and celestial approval ever since the woman had persuaded herself to play the part she had been assigned. Later on that night, the butler insisted on being received by the Signora to deliver an urgent message. “Perhaps, the Signor and the Signora are not aware that three of their servants are liable for military service. The very same ones who served dinner tonight. They’ve been drafted; here are their papers—we just received them. They must leave tomorrow. I need to ask the Signor and the Signora for a few days to replace them.” “Don’t replace them,” said the Signora. “In this time of war we’ll tighten our belt.” The husband clapped his hands approvingly, the butler withdrew, and the night resumed its course down the vast salons of the palace. “I met the engineer who’s working at the ammunition point,” said the wife all of a sudden. “Why didn’t you tell me you had given away the land? I would have been pleased.” “Really, my dear? I thought you would have been disappointed. Women are very fond of parks, just as they are of jewels: they serve to frame their beauty.” “What would someone not renounce with joy for the sake of the homeland?” The husband stood up and went over to kiss her hand. My goodness, thought the wife, it’s incredibly easy. You find expressions already assembled, they flow perfectly, so your brain rests and you’re rewarded with kisses.

Chapter 8 — 159

“Anyway,” she continued, “I met the engineer at the tavern in the woods. I would like to see the operations at the ammunition point, and so I invited him to come over to our house one of these nights. Please call him and invite him to dinner the day after tomorrow with the Governor, his wife, and the gentlewoman Catamantalède.” While her husband obliged, the wife complimented herself: good job, you’re getting yourself sorted out. You no longer want the villa to blow up and the troops of servants to be routed with machine guns. Now, get ready to erase any trace of coquetry with the One when you see him again. You gained a bonus point for inspecting the kitchen and the linen closets. Tomorrow we’ll check the greenhouses and the stables. The husband hung up the phone and announced that Signor Oeneas had accepted. “So, you’ll take care of the Governor’s wife,” said the wife, “Signor Oeneas will take care of the gentlewoman Catamantalède, and I’ll take care of the Governor. What do you think, husband? Will the dinner be boring enough to be called intimate? The Lales might show up. In that case I’ll be busy taking care of the Baron, as well, who, I forgot to tell you, made passes at me.” “I hope you were able to keep them within the limits.” “Perhaps I wasn’t, but the cook was . . .” “The cook, precisely,” moaned Araceli, bursting in and looking so distraught he did not realize he had interrupted her. “The cook, precisely! He was drafted a month ago, but never showed up at the recruiting center. The military police just came and took him away.” “We’ll do without a cook,” she said aloud; and to herself, I’ve barely started my war and my army is already falling apart. But I’ll emerge victorious all the same. Many women who had no army and one grenade at the most were able to crush entire centuries of vexation and lead their families to victory. Won’t I succeed by sheer will to sacrifice? But enough musings, or else bye-bye faith, bye-bye ideals, bye-bye courage. We either go over to the enemy, or we escape, which is worse than being tortured. Standing up and assuming an imperious position with one arm outstretched as if brandishing a sword and the other one bent as if holding a scale, she kicked an imaginary peplos and, pushing her foot forward in an inescapable step, she spoke as the Goddess of Justice, “Since the guards have come, let us hand the assistant

160 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

cook, the confectioner, and the head dishwasher over to them, as well, since today I ascertained their robberies, which are considerable. From now on, I’ll personally take care of the kitchen.” “Signora, let me take the liberty to inform you,” said the butler, “that letting oneself be robbed is part of a house mistress’s wisdom.” “Yes, letting oneself be robbed of a fair amount. But here, any fair or unfair amount has been exceeded. It would be hyperbole, a bad example, a solicitation if I, although fully aware, allowed them to go unpunished. Let them be handed over to justice,” she said and sat down again, covering her knees as best as she could with her short skirt, so as not to lose the authority she had felt invested with up to that point. In the meantime, Araceli had disappeared and, immediately later, the sound of prisoners moaning and shaking their chains could be heard coming closer and then fading away in the distance. “Beautiful, excellent,” rejoiced the Housewife. “I love this role: you believe you’re somebody, you distribute rewards and punishments, you think you have vileness under your heel, and instead you’re soaking in it. You receive evil and do evil, you always stand on guard among your own people, and your own people stand on guard before you. What now?” she asked, hearing hurried footsteps in the hallway. “The mender, the embroiderer, the knitter, and the stocking darner, who are, respectively, the head cook’s girlfriend, the confectioner’s fiancée, the assistant cook’s cousin, and the head dishwasher’s wife, are quitting to protest the way their men were treated.” “I’ll make note of that,” said the Housewife. “And you, Araceli, take note that from tomorrow on I’ll embroider, I’ll mend, I’ll knit, and I’ll darn the stockings.” “Wife,” ventured her husband after the butler was gone, “don’t you think you’re overestimating your strength? I admire you, and I know that a woman’s heart can work miracles, but here, besides a heart, one needs hands and practice. Will you have enough?” “The house, like the homeland, must be defended in the face of any logic and eventuality.” “May you be blessed,” said the husband, kissing her again, “O you, savior of moral principles, salutary manna, sower of generosity and consolation.” The salutary manna squirmed away from his kisses and said, “Don’t make me waste time. Here come the bookkeepers bringing me the yearly records. I must look them over right now, before going to bed.”

Chapter 8 — 161

“Can’t you do it tomorrow? It’s already late tonight. It’s our time.” “Right now,” said the wife, looking scathingly at him, wild-eyed. “You, drone, go on to bed. The work of men allows for sleep. Not so our own, which is to keep watch every minute over what belongs to you all. When the day’s work is done, a male laborer can go to the tavern or rest by the door of his house. Not so his wife, who must take care of dinner, the children, the washing, and sewing. A middle-class man who comes home from the office can put on his slippers and listen to the radio. Not so his wife, who must make sure the children do their homework, and who must clean and iron the suit her husband will wear the next day for his meeting with the Director. Even an artist can put down his brush, his pen, or his lute and demand that his female partner utter sublime words and make incomparable moves. But up to that point his female partner had been posing for him, or copying for him, or . . .” Quietly, her husband had sneaked out. The rest tomorrow, said the Housewife to herself, burying herself in the yearly records. “Speaking of drones, . . .” her husband began to say the next day, when he came into the room. But seeing her face gray with exhaustion, still buried under piles of digits, he had mercy and told himself he would talk to her at lunch. At lunch, the Housewife arrived late, drying her sauce-smelling hands on the oversized white apron that covered her. “Strange outfit,” observed her husband. Immediately, in a shrill voice, she retorted, “Please don’t mock my war uniform. I’m coming from the kitchen, where I had to grapple with pots and pans. Let’s see what came out of it.” At Araceli’s signal, there was a rolling of drums, and a tray of ravioli was brought to the table. “They’re excellent,” said her husband. “Not enough nutmeg,” said his wife. “Speaking of drones . . .” “Don’t you want some grated cheese on them?” Cheese was added. “My dear, can you tell me why, last night—” “You don’t want any more ravioli? You didn’t like them?” The husband helped himself to more ravioli. He helped himself to everything twice, even though he was not hungry, just to show gratitude for

162 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

her efforts. And throughout the lunch he had to listen to her talk about the price of what they were eating, learn how much can be saved by doing one’s own cooking, and how it’s really true that taking care of things personally gets more accomplished. To the point that, in the end, for the first time since he had been married, he got up from the table without waiting for his wife, and looked for shelter in his study, but was followed even there and interrogated, “Don’t you think that even water tasted better today?” At that point, he suggested, “What about eating out tonight, so you won’t get too tired?” “Ah no!” screamed the Housewife. “No! Now that I’ve found my way, the right way of every woman, you want to tear me away from it? No, no, you won’t succeed!” (See how coherent human matters are: you choose a part, and you immediately find in yourself the language for it. You use a language, and you conjure up, within yourself, the individual to whom that language belongs.) The Housewife would not listen to reason and refused to rest either that day or the next, which was the day of the famous dinner. Ever since the early morning, she studied complicated recipes in one of her books. She learned them by heart and would not stop muttering them even while she arranged flowers and plants around the house with Leonardo the Gardener. When she entered her parlor and saw the cluster of azaleas—the first stop in her journey to perdition—she felt so uncomfortable that she gave orders for the azaleas to be taken immediately to the most secluded park. Then, with golden scissors she went around the garden cutting flowers that she picked with a newfound wisdom. No exotic flowers, no flowers with an overbearing smell, absolutely no red or purple flowers, which symbolize passion. Instead, in the style of church bouquets, she arranged pale roses, lame hydrangeas, and lilies, almost as if the house represented the altar on which she was about to sacrifice herself. Afternoon came along and the Housewife was still muttering, “Four egg yolks, 500 grams of parrot tongues, 50 grams of Mount Hymettos’s honey” as she went to the closet to select the table linen for the evening. It was a silvery-white tablecloth that, when laid out over the table, shone like the moon. The Housewife smoothed it by running her hands over it two or three times with a blessing gesture. Then she insisted on setting it herself. She arranged the candelabra, the flower garland, the dishes, and the glasses in a circle. As she laid them down, she appeared to caress them in the same way as she did

Chapter 8 — 163

with the bread when she picked it up with her light fingers and to draw magic signs around the seat of every guest when she set the silverware and napkins. With devotion, she strove to make those inert objects friendly toward the guests. For the same reason, she asked that the overly brilliant lights in the dining room be dimmed, blended with warmer rays and mixed in with tiny loose flames. She made sure the scent of the flowers was subdued and the night outside the window brightened by the nightingale’s song. And truthfully, on the said evening, the little round table was surrounded by a suffused air that hung, immobile, within the distracted and carefree immensity of the room. The only flaw was that six heavy adults were about to sit around it instead of six timorous children. But the Housewife had no control over this, even though she would have liked to. Instead, she ordered, “Most important, Araceli, make sure some little thing is missing, something that will make me blush. Guests enjoy having to be indulgent with the hostess.” The afternoon pressed on and it was getting late. Let us head to the kitchen. The kitchen was sparkling clean and immense. The Housewife quickly reviewed its layout: to the right, the stove; in the corner, the oven; right in front of it, the sink; next to it, the trout tank; to the left, the refrigerator, the spice cabinet, and many appliances the use of which was a mystery to her: Grinders? Mixers? Blenders? Never mind, let’s go forward, always forward! And she marched toward one of the tables, around which all the servants had gathered. “Honey, eggs, flour, hurry up!” said the Housewife, who suddenly realized with horror that she had forgotten all the recipes: “four parrot tongues, 500 grams of eggs. No, the other way round. Don’t make so much noise. Who’s getting me mixed up? You, pass me the flour; you, weigh this; you, wash, clean, slice, grind. You, take the vegetables; you, the meat; you, the desserts.” She realized that the group of servants did not understand anything, but they would not dare confess it. Instead, they just sat there with their mouths open and arms dangling, staring at her. The Housewife had to start all over again, and it took a long time. She had to repeat the recipes that kept escaping her and make the first move to get the servants to do the same, breaking the spell that kept their bodies and her own mind transfixed. She had to mix the flour, smell the thick vapors that came out of the oven, keep an eye on the pots to

164 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

make sure they were well-balanced and evenly distributed on the stove, catch any jarring sizzle, any milk boiling over, any cream sputtering too quickly, any corn on the cob popping. She felt compelled to supervise everything, and tried to do so meticulously: she stirred, crossed, ordered, and directed without break, her forehead tense with concentration, like a conductor who tangles, disentangles, and pulls the orchestra along. And she came to know the sweat of her brow. The clock struck half past seven: the guests would be there in an hour. For the third time, the maid came to inform the Signora that her bath was ready; the male servants promised they would watch over the final cooking phase; the female servants swore they knew how to prepare the trays, and so the lady abandoned her role as cook and headed to her quarters to change outfits. Once there, a new difficulty arose. “These clothes are no longer suitable for me,” said the Housewife, looking at them. “This is a time of war, and I want to adapt to the climate. What’s that?” She pointed to a dark piece of fabric hanging from a hook. “It’s the sack that covered your feather shawl, Signora. I’ve already laid out the shawl in case you want to take a walk in the park tonight after dinner.” “Give me the sack.” The maid handed it to her, and the Housewife measured its length while the maid waited cluelessly. The Housewife concluded, “I’ll wear this sack. Starting from today, I’m a penitent, and this sack suits me.” “But Signora—” The Signora could not be persuaded to change her mind. She sent for a needle, thread, and scissors, had the maid cut one hole on the bottom of the sack, one on each side, fold them and adjust the size, and as soon as the girl was done sewing a rough trim, she put it on. It was not at all a pretty sight, and the maid covered her eyes, moaning. “Don’t be silly,” said the Signora, “it’ll be a success. But let me have a piece of string, too. Have you found it? Here,” and she wrapped it around her waist. She chose a pair of plain sandals and wore them over her bare feet. Then, without even looking in the mirror, she smoothed her hair over her head with a wet brush, and walked into the parlor, where her husband and Signor Oeneas were already waiting for her. On seeing her, the two men were flabbergasted, and began to talk to each other at great speed and without much coherence, careful not to address

Chapter 8 — 165

her, look at her, or mention topics where she might intervene. The Housewife noticed their uneasiness before her supposed folly and sat down comfortably in an armchair, awaiting her upcoming triumph like a heroine who is already aware of herself even while she is still a stranger to mortals. Indeed, as soon as the governor, his wife, and the gentlewoman Catamantalède walked in, exclamations of surprise and approval filled the room, and the most honorable Governor Blamblan uttered the following lapidary words to the Housewife, “Radiant example of sacrifice, symbol of the unflinching modernity of our country’s Fashion, unsurpassed for tradition and popularity in the whole world: we shall present you with a National Certificate of Merit, and hold up your brilliant sack to be honored with public applause.” Much of that applause was immediately granted to her by those present; her husband shed tears of consolation; Oeneas realized with horror that he had fallen in love with the honoree; the lady guests fretted, “How stupid of me not to have come up with it first!” and everyone went off to eat. From this point on, the sorrows of the real Housewife began. Shall we recount them? No, we shall not. We want to have mercy on that ephemeral and stubborn army of women who establish and perpetuate these tortures. We will not confront them with what they have just suffered and are about to suffer again. All the dishes had come out terrible, despite the woman’s efforts. She kept apologizing in vain, saying that the head cook had left, the confectioner had been imprisoned, the main servant was on trial. The Governor’s wife and the gentlewoman Catamantalède were thrilled. The engineer, the Governor, and the husband felt miserable. As for the Housewife, between one apology and another she kept giving the butler imploring looks that said, “Araceli, don’t laugh at me just because I ordered you to make sure I would forget something and thereby amuse the ladies. I contributed to their triumph with my own hands, and only your prestigious intervention can contain the vicious course of this evening.” Araceli bowed his head modestly before her mistress’s glassy eyes, and his hands trembled with devotion. Because the dinner was a true defeat for the Housewife, when coffee was served the Governor’s wife and the gentlewoman Catamantalède insisted even more on complimenting her on the success of her new outfit, and promised her that, starting the following day, they would dress like her and have their employees and friends do the same. In this way, they planned to spread the

166 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

rumor of her defeat without being accused of backbiting. And while they thought they had crushed their rival and were already celebrating their victory, they failed to realize how quickly she had shot to the top of her career as housewife. Indeed, she was just thinking the same things and, instead of brushing them aside as she would have done the previous day, she felt distressed to the point that she almost forgot about the Certificate of Merit. Oeneas saw her looking dejected and became even more unhappy: when he took leave of her, he held her hand between his for some time and kissed it as if it were a relic. But the Housewife had completely forgotten her past coquetry; she was trying to pinpoint the mistakes of that horrible dinner, and her fingers smelled of eggs and cinnamon. Oeneas felt useless to the world; that same night he wrote to the Ministry of War asking to be replaced at the ammunition point and when he left a month later, he bought, in her memory, one of those cloth tunics that she had launched and that had by then become, by order of the Governor, the official uniform for women. During that month, the Housewife dedicated her life to domestic and social business: bizarre errands, scoldings, foolish conversations, readings without insight, and then obsessions, obsessions, obsessions. Now that she had fewer servants and was directly supervising the house, occasionally she found herself completely absorbed by the thought that the next day she was expecting ten people for a chess game, or thirty celebrities for a game of blind man’s bluff in the park, or the children from the orphanage for milk-and-coffee. Right at that moment, she would receive, for instance, a letter saying that one of her brothers had been injured in the latest battle. Immediately, she would do her best to sob and moan, “Poor brother, my dear, dear brother,” but then, straight like a stone launched with a sling, a doubt would hit her on the forehead. I’m saying milk-and-coffee, but what if the orphans prefer hot chocolate? “Shame on you!” she would then yell at herself, “cry, you despicable one, wail, you fool, over your bleeding brother!” And yet, her demon insisted, and yet, what prize should you give to the winner of the chess game? Yes, of course you have a devastated look, a blank stare, and a melancholy expression; and you sigh, “My poor brother has been injured,” but you must still make plans for the dinner to offer those celebrities when they finish their game of blind man’s bluff because they might elect your husband Governor. Other times, the Housewife would wander around the immense rooms shaking with desperation, or she would bang her head against the well-polished

Chapter 8 — 167

walls and scream, “For whom? To what end?” And every now and then she thought she could hear the buzzing of humanity around the house, knocking on the walls. With such diligence, which we highly praise even though we find it degrading, the Housewife’s soul had come to crave every female activity: from running the house to organizing charity events; from launching a crusade for the extermination of bugs in the local prisons to helping a woman in labor; from condemning vain women to falling to pieces if her new hat was not ready in time for the inauguration of the theater season. The Certificate of Merit had afforded her a privileged position, and she had willingly accepted the honor as well as the onus, so to speak. Furthermore, every lady in town recognized her as the wealthiest, and therefore as the best public figure, and turned to her for advice or patronage. The Housewife offered both advice and patronage but, as happens to every generous person, she was overwhelmed by her own zeal. A dreadful responsibility fell on her shoulders, and she was nominated National Example. By then she had come to supervise, assist, judge, dictate, establish, suggest, applaud, censure, take orders from the Supreme God, and redistribute them among her mortal associates. She smiled, wept, adorned her chest with decorations or wore sackcloths and ashes, and all of her followers adorned themselves, wore sackcloths and ashes, wept, or smiled accordingly. Those who did not do so were considered contemptible and cast out by their fellow citizens, or even expelled from the province. An actual cult soon formed, every member of which donned a piece of rope and kept a portrait of the Housewife in her home. To be fair, the Housewife endured her formidable task with immense regret crushed inside her heart, which was becoming heavier and heavier as days went by. Let us not forget that the embroiderer, the mender, the knitter, and the stocking darner had resigned to protest the imprisonment of their men and that the Housewife had taken on their responsibilities. Can a gentlewoman go back on her word? Can she make a display of laziness before her servants? Let them see her resting while she is asking them to toil? Therefore, she spent the dawn mending basketfuls of linen, and the evening embroidering placidly by the window, giving her husband an opportunity to exalt her. The sixty minutes that were previously dedicated to the conjugal tête-à- têtes she now spent choosing among an infinite number of good intentions. She would then take the selected one with her to bed, let it ripen during the night, and

168 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

the following morning, when she announced the daily agenda, offer it, now in full bloom, to her fellow lady citizens. And with regard to her fellow lady citizens, to handle them more rapidly and profitably, the Housewife had taken the following notes: FAT, STRICT WOMEN WITH A HAIRY MOLE: They duly slap their children, feed them regularly, and weep sincerely if they’re sick. They talk to her servants staring straight at the bridge of their noses and are always obeyed until the day the maid goes out to buy cigarettes for the Signor and later telephones asking to have someone send the suitcase she left packed in her room because she found another job. To be used in situations where a lot of energy is needed and strictness is a virtue. WIVES OF ARTISTS WHO DON’T MAKE ANY MONEY: Thin, black hair, dark skin, fake Renaissance rings. Often ugly, they look as if they had been embalmed, and behind their eyes they carry a skepticism about timeless maxims. When they go out with a group of people, they hang from their man’s arm and take every opportunity to tell you that they never talk about life’s little predicaments and daily troubles with their beloved lest they might fetter him in his ascent toward the sublime. On the contrary, when he comes home or emerges from his study, they make sure he finds them with Plato in hand and affectionate serenity in their heart. These women come in two varieties: those who insist on dying their hair and pretend to be (or are, although it makes no difference) dissolute; and those who take pride in looking unkempt, with long hair and clipped nails, and who lie in wait for sacrifices. Both varieties rarely have children. When they have servants, they don’t know how to befriend them or intimidate them. To be used in delicate and entangled situations, but only when they don’t have to give anything of themselves, not even in a moral sense. To them, the hours of the whole planet are but the hours in which their partner sleeps, is inspired, works, steps out, or rests. RICH, MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN: They say “the male domestic,” “the male personnel,” “the male servant,” insisting heavily on the male gender of their slaves because they think the male gender brings prestige to the house. They waste their days with “excellent relations,” “highborn people,” etc. They seem to be protected by destiny, but perhaps they have only been forgotten by God. One needs to be kind to them and call on them when it is necessary to soothe some heavy torment because God despises them so much that he never sends them any deep sorrows or irrevocable disasters.

Chapter 8 — 169

ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN: In terms of servants, they represent a unique phenomenon. A servant who can answer the phone saying, for example, “The Marquise is resting” feels much more advanced in his conquest of the world than one who can merely say, “The Signora is resting.” To utter, day after day, the words “Count,” “Princess,” “His Highness,” and the like without being accused of megalomania is a spiritual heritage, a title these servants own. The coat of arms protects them, the rigidity of movement to which they are forced by etiquette convinces them of the nobility of their own sentiment. They know how a duke snores, what purgatives a patrician matron takes. They live the life their fellow creatures only see at the movie theater. Use their mistresses to name a chairmanship or a vice chairmanship. The notes continued, but we shall stop here because these have already provided a rough idea. And that was all we needed to declare that the Housewife, even though she retained some intelligence, had nevertheless fallen into the dangerous spiral of loving her own despair, crystallizing her world around her servants. In a similar way, a man who is tortured becomes crazy and makes the instrument that was used to torture him—water, fire, or iron—the center of his madness. In the Housewife’s case, the process of crystallization was taking place at a moderate pace that gave her that appearance of blessed lethargy typical of almost all women and much praised by men, although the Housewife had not had the opportunity to enjoy it thus far. Therefore, nobody around her was worried by or curious about this change. On the contrary, they all admired her even more and saw her more clearly, as if she had taken a step forward on the stage. At last they saw in her the femina of Homo Sapiens reproduced full-scale for anyone to examine, even her most minute details, without a magnifying lens. Only her womb, in comparison to other women’s, remained hollow and frozen, almost as if it did not deserve to express life. Could it be that the Housewife’s days were so perfectly planned that there could not possibly be any extra room for conceiving or giving birth? After all, perfect organizations do not allow for accidents of any kind. That is why, in the vast arteries of orphanages, schools, barracks, prisons, ministries and such, one never sees any flow of innocence, love, enthusiasm or any such feelings that might bring about uncontainable events. The Housewife was even better equipped than those institutions, and in the immense organization that she had founded within herself she had gone as far as to discipline her dreams, something yet

170 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

unheard of. Those dreams she used to have in her youth, as we pointed out earlier, had a character that was not at all suitable to a young girl. They were so outlandishly abstract and anonymous, so disconnected from their origins, that they had led her adolescent mind to believe, erroneously, that all of earth was one homeland. In contrast, now, as soon as the Housewife reached her bedroom, exhausted from her industrious day, she did not waste any time with arbitrary musings or deleterious readings. Instead, she closed her eyes, floated cautiously from one daily image to another, and led herself to sleep, landing on the banks of her licit dreams, dreams that would benefit her, fortify her, and still provide her with honest delight. If occasionally she happened to wander among futile dreams, she immediately woke herself up, rose from bed, and ran her soft fingers up and down the walls to make sure the night shadows had not fogged them up. She let some fresh air in, and pushing lightly with her hands, she urged the old air to leave because it had already performed its duty. With this change of air she renewed herself too: she scrutinized and explored the skin on her face to clear it of every wrinkle, dusted her pores, washed and smoothed her chin and cheeks, and wet her eyes and ears with rainwater to cleanse them from her nocturnal ravings. And yet, she fell one last time for the wicked prank of a dream, although it was a dream she had already approved of and regarded as suitable to her goals. From then on she vowed never to dream again, and maintained her vow until her death. The dream went like this: the Housewife, dressed in her fragrant nightgown, was resting between crisp sheets, although not in her bed but in an invisible space that was stretching wider and wider around her and slowly becoming taller, deeper, and filled with dismay. It was an air that devoured what to us is already air: the sky vaults in the universe outside our planet. The Housewife, who was the center of all space, suddenly realized that the stretching movement was also digging into time: her supine body was reached by a vibration and a sizzle like those of a flame running along a surface and burning everything in its course: hours, seasons, star cycles, and crystalline, ecstatic skies. And the Housewife knew that it was the infinite and eternal void. At that thought she became frightened and stretched out her arms looking for support. Immediately, from the remote lips of the void that were busy sucking nothingness, threads of drool streamed out to her. They crisscrossed over her head in every direction and kept her fastened to time and space, in

Chapter 8 — 171

accordance to the desire of every living creature. The threads kept passing before her eyes as they spun back and forth, becoming tauter and faster each time as they lifted the rapacious edges of the void and led them back to her. They could barely pick them up and flip them around. The edges curled up, trying to break the threads, which vibrated and became very thin, but managed to stretch the edges toward the Housewife. Moving round and round ever more rapidly, they forced the edges to form a circle above and beneath her, making the void in the middle temporarily thicker. The woman felt like a ball shrinking at great speed, and was afraid of remaining stuck inside of it. The threads that spun before her eyes seemed more and more distant and higher. For sure they would soon close in the void above her head and leave her imprisoned down there, knocking in vain on the curved walls for someone to let her back into the world. Instead, all of a sudden she realized that the void itself was leaving her out: grabbing her by the shoulders, it forced her to get up, and slipped away from her sides. It was now right in front of her, well defined, its edges increasingly rounder and thicker behind the threads that would not stop crisscrossing above it, tighter and tighter. The Housewife could now get a clear glimpse of the poor void, which had been reduced to a puny little thing in the pinkish-gray air of the human night, all tied up in those ever-spinning ropes. She felt pity for it and picked it up: she was glad to be able to contain all of God’s void in her gaze. She bounced it on her palm, flipped it over, and looked at it. Lifting her right arm very slowly, she noticed that one of the threads was stuck between her fingers and that it connected her to the sphere she was holding. She lowered her arm and placed the thread on that void, then lifted it again and lowered it: the thread kept running, although it was becoming shorter and shorter; the void kept shrinking and fading until everything vanished into its color. Snapping it with her teeth, the woman detached the thread from her mended stocking. She pinned the needle to her chest and looked at the dark wooden ball that had fallen on her lap. The Housewife woke up and deplored God for creating the infinite universe and putting its notion into the human mind. The Housewife said to the Supreme Being, “Why do you send your sign to upset me? What sort of wickedness is this? All it does is keep me going back and having to start all over. I want to do my job as a woman, but to do it I need to forget about your presence, and you know very well that when your presence becomes manifest it absorbs everything. So now I want to be alone with you and forget about

172 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

mankind, but instead I’ve promised them my collaboration. Even lingering here with you seems a betrayal, and feeling your breath doesn’t give me joy anymore because those threads tie me up and drag me back down to earth. How can I forsake those whom I have promised to help? To do something useful (and you’ve been looking at humanity for so long you must have noticed it), an individual needs to rush headlong into one thing and cannot achieve two things at the same time. Wicked dream, you disobeyed me: you were supposed to show me that even in mending a stocking one could find a universe, not that I left the universe just to mend stockings. Get away from me, then, evil dreams. I’ll be alone, without your help, without your predictions, empty of all hope. But what will become of me, you immovable, blind God?” There goes that doubt again. It would seem we were back where we started, but we are not. Unfortunately, every time we stop to look back, our stop becomes shorter and our glance more careless, until we just continue on, which is the most presumptuous and erroneous attitude of the human soul. However, the Housewife stopped long enough to look back at what she had left: she sensed that perhaps it was going to be for the last time. Someone stronger than she (that same God she had called immovable and blind?) dragged her along in spite of herself. Even if the woman had kept looking back at her very first day as it receded farther and farther back in time, she would have eventually realized there was nothing left except what she imagined, but in the meantime her body would have been dragged through the human ocean toward its preordained destination. In any case, she was not going to arrive there alive. Her form of looking back, at that moment, was to pick up the Bible and open it to a random page. She recalled that, when the world was first created, humans used to speak directly to Yahweh and receive an answer. She had spoken, too, but no voice had resounded inside of her from above. Now she was hoping to find an answer in the sacred text: she read the verse her finger had landed on. The verse said, “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun.” She was still determined to hope. She kept reading for many hours, and night turned into dawn; she reread, meditated, and went on reading as dawn broke and faded into the new day; the new day ripened and traveled higher and higher. It had almost reached the middle of its course when the husband stepped timidly into

Chapter 8 — 173

the room to check if his wife, who had recently become such an early riser, might be ill. Behind the half-opened door, the whole house was waiting in shock and fear. Everything lay suspended, and the domestic balance wavered in the absence of its mistress. Suddenly, the husband saw her again as he had not seen her in many months: beautiful but removed, mournful and bold, gentle and stubborn. Her head, sunk among the pillows, had a pale glow, and her hazy eyes gazed into the distance. As he watched her, who knows why, her husband remembered the words with which that wife he now saw mixed with the new one had turned from larva to butterfly, from carefree dragonfly to judicious, industrious bee in its hive. Or was it perhaps this zoological comparison that made him recall it? At any rate, he could not help asking her, for no apparent reason, “Speaking of drones, did you call me that to reproach me for not having children?” “Let’s talk about it,” answered the Housewife, while a vertical line burrowed its way between her eyes. “Dear husband, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time: was it you or God who willed me to remain barren?” “How can I answer you, my child?” (Sometimes her husband had a tender, demure way of talking that filled the Housewife with devotion. She saw in him her kind uncle, and through the uncle she caught a glimpse of her father, who had undoubtedly been her first love as a little girl. Why can’t men always be tender and demure?) The husband continued, “Maybe it was God himself who denied you children; or maybe he did it through me. In that case, don’t be sad. Remember, I’m old,” and he paused, “you’ll be very rich and still young. . . .” “Oh, oh, oh!” interjected the wife, slapping her hands together in annoyance, “don’t ascribe those words or thoughts to me, dear man, please. I was talking about my heart, my soul, which during my childhood and adolescence awaited, invoked, and hailed motherhood, but as soon as I became a woman they chased that desire away from me as it would the worst of brutalities. Just thinking about it became a torment, as if they had told me that my heart, my mind, my body, would be crushed into tiny pieces and distributed to unknown creatures, my yet unborn children. The punishment for the original sin is not the pain of childbirth: the punishment is this fragmentation of the individual, this forced communion, this self-oblivion and search for purpose outside of one’s own reason into that of another being, rather than in all beings indiscriminately. If only I could be a mother to everyone in the same

174 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

way as I would feel like a mother to my own child! And if that cannot be, then I want nothing at all. Even love, if you share it with the person you love, becomes divided.” “Satan,” said her husband, “if I were a priest I would call you Satan because of your pride and desperation, my wife. But don’t be so distraught: a child can still be born of you and show you that life is simpler and motherhood more natural.” “My man,” said the woman with utmost sweetness, putting her hands on his shoulders, “isn’t desperation natural? Isn’t pride natural, if it’s true that I’m desperate and proud? Can’t you accept, you who know me, that seeing how human life goes by, how it’s nothing but makeshift, compromise, struggle, and abuse, I refuse to participate in this punishment? Can’t you accept that I know I’ve already paid some of my dues with my wretched childhood, so that my punishment, if there has to be a punishment for every human being, may come in a different form and not in the fragmentation of everything I’ve conquered in God’s free thought?” “Pride, outrageous pride, spiritual and social anarchy, O wife, and even atheism.” “And yet I know of many men and women who, in the name of God, refuse to procreate and are hailed as blessed, saints, and wondrous examples of the renunciation of sensual pleasures. Or do you call them Satan, too?” “See how much damage books can do when they’re misunderstood?” said the husband, simmering with anger. He picked up the book that the woman had laid on her chest, ready to hurl it across the room, but as soon as he saw the title, he slammed it shut and put it on the table. His face became more and more somber, and he concluded, “Forget it. Anyone who wants to know something from you is always put on trial, and you end up not answering the question anyway. But right now I want you to tell me whether you’ve fulfilled all of your wartime duties.” “Let’s see if I know what they are, first,” said the wife, gracefully. “I’ve carefully watched what other women do, and I hope I’ve learned the rules of civil behavior. But what do you mean by wartime duties? Preparing care packages for the soldiers? (Her husband nodded.) Knitting woolen clothes for the families of those who’ve been drafted? (Her husband nodded again.) Visiting the hospitals? (Third nod.) Nursing the sick? (Yes, yes.) Hosting balls, tea parties,

Chapter 8 — 175

charity events? (Excellent.) Gathering lady friends to talk about our good deeds (no, no) while making balaclavas for the soldiers? (In that case, yes, of course.) Writing heroic-sentimental letters to some young lieutenant who has no wife, fiancée, or girlfriend? You see I know everything, my dear naive husband who doesn’t trust me and who’s not aware of what goes on before his eyes. But if you care to follow me, you’ll get to see more than you can imagine.” She got up, put on a dressing gown, took him by the hand and led him out of the room. They crossed her quarters, entered her husband’s, passed through parlors and hallways, went down flights of stairs, up more flights, along the servants’ quarters, and found themselves in an old antechamber that led to some storage rooms. From behind the walls came an insistent buzz, a metallic beat, outbursts of laughter and voices and hushed songs. The husband looked at the wife. The wife had resumed her most recent appearance: she looked taller, more erect, her features had magically regained their composure and firmness, as if she knew that her body alone contained everything necessary to her own existence and that of others. Without letting go of her husband’s hand, with the tip of her foot she pushed open the door from which the mixture of sounds originated, and then stepped aside to let the man get a good view of what lay before him. It was a series of rooms crowded with women and girls from the estate, young middle-class ladies, and the owners of nearby villas. They were sitting in groups or alone, some before a loom, others before a sewing machine, others before an enormous spool winding many yarns of wool into a ball with a single push of the pedal. Some were cutting fabric, others were ironing among pungent fumes and squeaking sounds. Every group was supervised by a renowned lady of the town who would raise her voice to give orders and advice among the rustling spools, humming wheels, and clacking pedals. Right at that moment the clock struck twelve; as if by magic all the machines stopped, the workers slipped away, and the supervising ladies slowly came to line up dignifiedly before the Housewife, who was now poking her head over her husband’s shoulders. They did not even seem to notice his presence, and began reporting to her about the morning’s work. The Housewife thanked them and moved on, still holding her husband by the hand. They walked all through the house and, going from one hallway to another, they finally stood before a series of rooms parallel to the one they

176 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

had left. Here, cans of white paint were scattered on the floor, mosquito nets and lights dangled from the ceiling, and small unassembled beds leaned against the walls. “Wife, what is this?” “What is this, husband? Can’t you guess? It’s a dormitory for the children of the combatants. As soon as it’s ready, the children will come and stay here while their mothers do the work of their men who are far away.” The husband clasped her to his heart and started to kiss the top of her head despite the fact that it was not even the appointed time for conjugal effusions. “Why didn’t you tell me, my beloved wife? Why did you do all this on your own, with your feeble strength? How did you manage to take care of everything?” “I was able to do it because you stand behind me, my man. In order to do all this, I sold the hill by the seashore, the one you had given me as a present.” “Apud Hill? The hill you loved more than any other place on earth’s crust?” “Earth’s crust is not so vast that we need to have such a large portion of it. I sold it for little to the Archon, who deems it important to profit from this opportunity. He says that every Archon gets no more than one war during his term and that he needs to take advantage of it right away, or else he’s a good-for-nothing.” She giggled softly to herself. “I think that, if we do our duty for real, we’ll end up being poor. Do you want to?” The husband pulled away from her, “What kind of question are you asking me? What do you want me to answer? Of course we must do our duty, but our duty also means providing in such a way that our family won’t suffer any privation we aren’t accustomed to.” “As far as I’m concerned,” giggled the Housewife again, “a trunk and a few bread crumbs will do.” “Nonsense. Fortunately, those times are over now. Now you’re a prominent figure, a figure who, more than any other, does her best for the homeland, and who, more than any other, deserves to be praised for it. I’ll invite the President of the Republic to see what you’ve achieved.” “Oh no,” she exclaimed modestly, “just this morning, in that book I was reading, I saw these words: ‘Even so ye also, when ye shall have done all the

Chapter 8 — 177

things that are commanded you, say, we are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.’ ” “That’s not right. It’s not at all common for people to do their duty, and so, when they do, they need to be praised. You’re too inflexible, my dear. I’m not an expert at it, but I think that, in that book, that same person preached forgiveness and tolerance.” “To others, yes, but not to oneself. And instead man has the bad habit of being tolerant with himself and uncompromising with others.” “Enough,” commanded the husband, “enough, wife, don’t become polemical as usual. Don’t you want me to praise you for what you did?” “No, I don’t think so. It’s not these material things that are difficult to accomplish when one is very wealthy, but it’s the life of the soul that becomes an ongoing flight. It’s the constant terror of having lost the most unique joy we were given to carry in our bosom the day we were born.” “But why do you love the soul so much?” asked the husband after a pause. “Because it’s the only certainty we have.” “Certainty? What about the body?” “The body is loaned to us, and it immediately falls to rags, just like a dress, whereas the soul doesn’t fear wear and tear, even if it’s a soul of the poorest quality.” “This,” said her husband turning his back on her and started to head back, “is mysticism of the worst sort. Romanticism.” “Oh, then it was from you that Araceli, the rigid butler, learned it?” “Araceli wouldn’t dare learn anything from me. Araceli knows his place and he knows decency.” “Then it means the two of you have the same ideas and the same way of thinking. I don’t know if that’s any more decent.” “That’s not possible. Araceli is a butler.” “And so everything falls back into place, categories are reestablished and scruples abolished. Those on top make no mistakes and need not be monitored; those at the bottom are oppressed, but they’re still given the hope that, by stealing, betraying, and assassinating, they’ll manage to get to the top. As a result, collaboration never exists between them: to be obeyed, those on top need to make sure their subjects live off them and take advantage of them. They need to make their servants feel worthier than those of their poor neighbor,

178 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

taking their abuse so the servants may feel stronger. This is necessary to ensure that the servants will carry out any order: light the fire when it’s cold, provide shade when it’s hot. And yet, neither the masters’ nor the servants’ diligence will help either of them rise a single inch above their stature.” “Instead of thinking left and right,” said the husband as he walked faster and faster, almost as if he were trying to lose her, “you’d better do some knitting.” “I do that, too, but I happen to think while I’m doing it. Thinking is a bad habit, isn’t it?” “Especially when one doesn’t know what to do with it.” “That’s right,” conceded the Housewife gladly, looking with amusement at the large male back that preceded her. But there was so much primordial ignorance and obtuseness in his male head that she felt pity for him and, laying her hand on his shoulder, she made him stop. “Forgive me,” she pleaded, leaning against him. The man felt imperious and magnanimous as he said, “I’ll take note of your apology.” That was the last day in which the Housewife happened to pick up her old language again; from then on, every time she wanted to find a key to a difficult thought, she would resort to the Holy Bible. She would open it at random and always find words that fit, or even if they did not, she knew how to interpret them in a way that suited morality and the society she lived in. For example, if she happened to read about some city being attacked, she would wonder, “But why, then? To what end should one feed life? Why not let everyone build a temple inside oneself so that it cannot be destroyed? Useless, like that of the Danaides, is the labor of women who must raise, piece by piece, a homegrown humanity that gets scattered every few years.” But the answer in the Book did not allow for any contention. It said, “Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” And so she would resume working like a mule and no longer contend with that axiomatic God. Later on, she would be seized by the anger of not being a male and being instead banned from that military death that everyone regards as an act of will rather than an abstruse mechanism. The Book would push her back to her corner once again, putting the following words before her eyes, “A man that is laden with the blood of any person shall flee unto the pit; let no man stay him.” The woman pretended not to notice that those verses, apparently settled and stable, are in fact open to any interpretation, and that

Chapter 8 — 179

is how they sustain your heart with hope like a card in a game of luck. You do not know the value of the card yet, but it affords you the greatest chance for victory for half a turn. The woman was satisfied with those verses and, now appeased, she started waiting for peace, but with no rush, because she had just read, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. . . . A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” Here she had finally found the security of a rigorous game: accepting every good and evil throughout the immense stretch of time seemed to her, in its supreme indifference, the ultimate wisdom. And peace came. It broke out, suddenly, after two years of brutal fighting. People marched down the streets; parades and gatherings were organized. Parents took their children to kiss the hand of the President of the Republic. Food and wine were distributed in every city and in the countryside, and tournaments, bullfights, horse parades were promoted for the delight of the common people. But when all the stadiums were packed and the shows were about to begin, an immense silence fell everywhere, and everyone felt that the light of day had turned livid. Very quietly, people tiptoed out of the arenas and theaters, hurried home speaking under their breaths, and hid the few leftovers from the celebrations in the pantries, while children huddled on their mothers’ laps. The men went out again, started running like mad, arrived in front of the Grand Presidential Palace in the Capital, or in the main square of other cities, and waited. In the dead of night, floodlights switched on at the top of towers, churches started ringing the alarm, and megaphones announced: “At this very moment we have declared war against the Eastern powers, our ancestral enemies. The ancient worlds shall give way to us young people; oceans shall turn into paved roads at our will, and whirlwinds shall carry our heroes on to crush that crumbling world.” The men in the square howled, the women at home wept, the children ran around the rooms shouting: “Hail to Jesus: we’re going to Bethlehem to get our own nativity scene!” And the Housewife said to her husband, “How many wars are there, on average, during a man’s life?” The husband answered, “As many as he deserves.” To which she retorted, “So does he also deserve peace in the same amount?” “People make peace only to declare more wars. War is ongoing, but when something is ongoing, like life, for instance, one easily loses the initial

180 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

enthusiasm and violence. That’s why governments make peace, so populations can recharge their batteries for the next war.” “And every time,” said the wife, “war becomes more widespread and malicious, and it draws in all sorts of people. Soon we’ll have conquered the highest peak of civilization, and then we can disappear from the face of the earth. Because it’s with wars that one conquers civilization, isn’t it? And when the highest peak of civilization is conquered, there’s nothing left to do but to die, right?” Besides the death of many men, the new plan required more sacrifices from the women of that country, and the Housewife doubled the efforts she had already made during the previous war, divesting herself more and more of her material belongings and spiritual potential to distribute them to those more in need. During this war, the gentlewoman Catamantalède, who had become the widow of an important general, married the President of the Republic. The ousted Queen was confined to a castle until the fate of her lost kingdom became clear. The Cardinal left for Rome to deliver a message to the Pope, in which the warriors, confident that the Holy Pontiff and infallible King shared their reasons for revenge, humbly asked for a special blessing and mediation with God to attain a speedy victory. The Warrant Officer, whom we met before leading the troops of guests at the Housewife’s reception, assumed control of the fleet and descended with a thousand ships below the Ocean to take the infidels by surprise. In the general tumult, every woman in every home clung to her hearth, big or small, and gleaned every piece of bread from her cupboard to feed her children, every scrap of paper from every nook to warm them up, every gentle fantasy from her memory to distract them from fear. Since the Housewife had no children and her man was too old to be at the front with the others, she gathered around her the peasant women from her few remaining fields, the wives of her gardeners and servants, her destitute friends, her own sisters whose husbands were fighting in the war, her old mother and father, the widowed wife of her brother who had died in the previous conflict, the wife of the other brother who had just left with the Warrant Officer, and all their children. The more the Housewife’s immeasurable means decreased, the more she felt pressure to take care personally of that large phalanstery of people she had welcomed to her house. She did not care one bit, except for the human lives involved, if

Chapter 8 — 181

they informed her that a ship she had rigged and stowed at her own expense with care packages had been torpedoed, or if an airplane carrying the bags of sweaters and shoes she had prepared had crashed. Those millions sinking slowly into the sea and her own late hours of hard work going up in flames seemed to her a necessary return to the basic elements from which, with labor and intelligence, that gold had been mined. Only mankind with its scarred body devastated her, and to that she could find no remedy within herself nor justification in the purpose of human life. Her father and mother, especially her mother, were proud of her and boasted of having such a daughter. Her mother, patting her gnarled hand on her chest, would not stop declaring: “I was the one who created her for the Homeland and for the world! Twice I made her, even against her own will. Thank me, daughter!” The daughter thanked her, not for creating her the way she was, but for renouncing a death by heartbreak, and for taking nothing more than her soul in exchange. Her father would say, “My child, aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest? I’m ashamed of being old and having to sit comfortably in a chair while you run back and forth and bend over backward for so many people. I wish I could give you one day of your childhood in the mold.” Hearing that, the Housewife would have liked to cry if the thought that separations much more irreparable than her own from herself were taking place for many souls right at that moment. And by separation she did not mean death. In the meantime, she had begun to notice something that quite surprised her. As her parents sat side by side on two golden chairs as if on two thrones, her sisters would periodically come to visit them, and so did her sisters-in-law, the children of both, and occasionally, when they were on leave, her brother and her brothers-in-law. They would always come without bringing anything for the elderly couple, neither in their hands, nor in their hearts. They would go in and out of the room, walk around and play loudly, interrupting the two old people if they started to speak with their cracked voices. They would eat their food, laugh and climb on the back of their armchairs, making them tilt dangerously. The old couple would look at all of them good-naturedly and try to caress them; they would always say “yes” and clap their hands at every word they said, while the others kept asking, “Granny, will you give me your brooch?”

182 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“Dad, what need do you have of a watch? I’ll take it.” “Dear father-in-law, please solve the math problem for the little one; he doesn’t know how to do it, and now he’s crying.” “Mother-in-law, here’s the wool; make me a scarf to go skiing.” “Grandpa, what are the dates of the Civil War?” “Grandma, give me some money.” And Grandma would offer the money, knit the scarf, give the brooch, while Grandpa would hand over his watch, solve the problem, rack his old brain for the dates of the national wars, and both of them would give thanks and smile and be moved to tears. Then, when they remained alone, they would take each other’s hands and, looking at each other in the eyes and shaking their heads, they would say, over and over, “What a beautiful, loving family we’ve created. They love us so much, they can’t live without us.” But as soon as the Housewife came in, carrying armfuls of rare things she had specially invented for Dad and specially ordered for Mom, the two parents would look puzzled and defeated and, shaking their heads in the opposite way as they had done earlier, they would say, “Our dear daughter, she troubles herself so much for us. But we’re old, it’s time for us to die. What a weight on our hearts, what a thorn in our side.” “Mommy, Daddy,” the Housewife would whisper as if in a prayer, “I brought you a nice book to read, my favorite book. When you’re done with it, we can talk about it together.” “And who will read it, my child?” sighed her mother. “What can I do with these eyes? At the most, I can knit a scarf for my little granddaughters who need one so much, poor things.” “Why poor things, Mommy?” asked the Housewife. “Do they lack anything? I can do more.” “This is what they lack,” said her father, tapping his temple, “and that’s why we need to pity them.” “This is what they lack,” said her mother, touching her heart, “and that’s why we need to love them. They’re poor, so poor.” “I’m poor like that, too,” the Housewife tried to say once, “I’m a fool in that sense, too. Give me something, too, even if I have no need for it, because I, too, deserve some of your love.” But they saw her fulfilled, and they did not think they could be useful to her. As soon as she came into the room they felt that their life was spent, that they might as well die. A sadness that almost felt like resentment for their daughter forced them to deny her their cooperation. The Housewife would

Chapter 8 — 183

leave the room quietly and walk over to the opposite side of the house as if to another country. Once there, all alone she would start pulling the strings again and moving all those characters who understood each other so well and helped each other wonderfully. I can die, then, if I don’t need anyone anymore, she would repeat to herself. They’re wrong. They’re not the ones who have to disappear because they’re no longer useful to anyone: I’m the one because people die when they don’t need human cooperation anymore. And so, she thought, sitting beside her parents with her tired hands on her lap, now that you yourselves have said you can no longer do anything for me, and certainly not prepare me for death—which is the only thing I need—at least allow me not to wait for yours. And be glad that, as far as I can, I’ll be able to get a little rest.

This page intentionally left blank.

9 From that moment on, the need for rest took the shape of a final departure that made her loathe every minute of the day. She stubbornly craved annihilation, to the point that, if they had come to tell her that all the children in her dormitories had died in the collapse of a building, she would have commented, “Lucky them.” To be eternally on the verge of death, she wished, so that no one comes to ask you what you are going to eat tomorrow or tries to talk you into buying a supply of sheets. To lie low watching other people bustling about you and taking care of your foulest needs, while you give no orders and know nothing. To leave, to leave without knowing where to, how, or when. Thus, because she could not take her own life, she became fond of impromptu trips. Here, she would tell herself sneering as soon as she was curled up in an airplane, a train, a ferry, or a bus, here Araceli cannot reach me, here the phone is silent, here I can sleep without having the machinery stop and wait for my orders. Her trips had no destination. She would travel from one city to another, as far away from her town as possible. Wherever she arrived, she would stop for just a few hours, pay no attention to the places and ignore any inconvenience she might encounter. Her only concern was to escape, and while escaping, concentrate on the great joy of being chauffeured around, fed, and woken up without giving any orders. In reality, she never moved away from herself and her own house. Right now I would be inspecting the workshops, she thought. Who knows what the cook made for breakfast? Will they remember to give milk to the hummingbirds? Broth to the orchids? She thought herself happy just because she had no means of running to the greenhouses, the kitchens, the aviary. She just sat motionless with her hands on her lap, palms up, her fingers curled like the claws of a stone-dead bird.

— 185 —

186 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

Some of her fellow travelers tried to talk to her, but she could not pull away from herself and follow them along the ephemeral paths of conversation. She would look at them and see them performing their roles as husbands, fathers, brothers, and therefore as women’s tyrants, who reduce young girls into housewives, men who wear shirts the buttons of which do not just hold two ends of fabric together, but also lock up their wives’ minds forever. As for their wives, she found them even more repulsive, both the pretty and the ugly ones, girdled in elastic waistbands, their bellies and hips ready to burst, always sweaty and moody and unashamed of their animality; triumphant, or rather, conceited, every one of them certain of being irreplaceable in her brutalizing task, the seductress and the victim, the dreamer and the schemer. And yet, out of gender solidarity, she would have wanted to save the females, to warn them, “Don’t identify your fulfillment with a man; have some decency, overcome your loneliness: our only goal should be to go back and turn against Adam, he who gave us the first shelter and the first bed to defend for his sake.” But she kept quiet because she was a sensible woman. Yet, she was so wrapped up in her musings that she did not even see the wide rivers between the valleys, the fields lined up beneath the arched sky, the sea, the mountains, the forests, the deserts, the clouds through which she traveled, which might have given her some solace from the materiality of life. One day, while she was riding on a train, a telegram reached her. She was hoping it would inform her of a catastrophe, a sudden utter annihilation of her whole race, a collapse of the entire nation, some crack in the air around her estate that would make it hazardous to live there and force everyone to move; anything, as long as it did not have to do with domestic needs. Instead, the telegram said, “Urgent: Lunch tomorrow, Archon and authorities. Please return or phone menu.” The Housewife pulled the alarm bell, opened the window even before the train stopped, and hurled her suitcases onto the railway tracks. The other people in her compartment, three men, had gotten up and extended their arms toward the luggage rack to help her, but she had given each one of them such a scorching stare that they did not dare come near her anymore. Instead, a conductor approached her, shouting, “Who rang the alarm bell?” “I did. I need to get off immediately. If I don’t, I’ll kill one of these males. Feel free to think I’m crazy, give me a ticket, or sell me the train. Just don’t try to stop me. How much money will it take?”

Chapter 9 — 187

The telegram was still lying on the seat, open. The conductor picked it up and started to read it. When he reached the word “Archon,” he made a low bow, then another one, less low, when he reached the word “authorities,” and finally a third one, just hinted, to the Housewife, “You can’t go back from here, there’s no station, and getting off wouldn’t do you any good, Signora. I understand you’re in a hurry, but we need to get to the next city. There they’ll arrange for a special convoy, Most Illustrious Signora. Don’t get off: our train is proud of carrying you.” “Farewell,” she answered, and jumped out. Then, without turning or paying any more attention to the conductor’s supplications, she waited for the train to move and take away the telegram. “I,” she told herself meanwhile, trying to sound convincing, “I don’t know anything. I didn’t receive anything, I had already gotten off before they gave it to me. They made a mistake, they delivered it to another passenger.” When the train finally left, rocking the thousand pale faces that were leaning out of the windows looking at her, she dragged her suitcases to a small hut not far away. With the money she had, she was confident she would be able to persuade the residents to put her up for a few days and let her rest, hidden from everybody and especially from herself. But as soon as she convinced the owners of the hut to accommodate her, she started to feel guilty about what she had done, an increasing anxiety, the need to send a telegram home right away and inform them of her whereabouts, and the need to make the necessary arrangements for the next day with Araceli. She struggled to concentrate on picking potatoes with the peasant woman, and instructed her at the same time, “The potato, scientifically known as solanum, is a protean tuber. This tuber and syphilis are original products of ours, and because all the other continents have pilfered them for centuries, it’s in order to regain the sole rights to them that we have waged war against the ancient world.” But in the meantime she kept thinking: Should we start off with a turtle stock or a rose mousse? Since neither she, by talking about them, nor the peasant woman, by picking them, were paying any attention to the protean tubers that had caused the current world war, the Housewife looked for a more exciting occupation: that of spoon-feeding the infant heir of the hut. Very soon, however, the baby made a mess of his own while she was busy asking herself more agonizing questions: Will they lay out the spun glass tablecloth? Will they remember that the Archon likes to be served by maids and not by male servants? Then she

188 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

realized that the heir had been grabbing food by the handful and spreading it diligently on the little table. She felt guilty about her own ineptitude and asked if she could go and lie down. Yes, she could. But the corn-leaf mattress made crunching noises every time she moved; it popped and sizzled in a way that reminded her of roasting chestnuts and of the flame that Araceli would light on liquor-soaked desserts. “No, not that gas-flavored dessert!” screamed the Housewife, waking up with a start. “Away,” she admitted then, “I need to go away. This torment is worse than the old one.” She woke up the peasant and had him take her by horse, under the light of a full moon, to a nearby town, where she requested an airplane. A few hours later she landed again on the field of her daily battles. As soon as she touched ground she felt appeased, and her thoughts no longer clashed with her actions. Immediately caught up again in the motion of the old machinery, she realized that there was no possibility of escape, that it was easier to give up. She surrendered, or so she thought. In fact, inside of her the death wish kept growing out of all proportion. She plunged frantically into her social life, increasing the number of relationships and duties to convince herself of the importance of her role in this world. She would do to herself what parents do with daughters who aspire to take the veil: she would dive into an active life full of commitments. And in the same way that virgins who have been barred from their divine love wear hair shirts under their ball gowns and starve themselves, between one task and another the Housewife would force herself to spend a few moments in absolute stillness. She would seal her eyes and mouth, clasp her hands over her chest, and enjoy the illusion of a make-believe death. All she gained from this exercise was a more frustrated, almost physical desire for death. And so she would act like a mother who tries to promote her daughter’s marriage, arranging things to make sure the girl finds herself alone with some good match; distracting her if an unsuitable love made its way into her soul; putting together the dowry in a wise manner; and of course never mentioning the one indecorous desire that forms the foundation of the entire construction, keeping it artfully hidden just as the Church and the State recommend. Similarly, the Housewife repressed any wildness or weakness of the senses and prepared methodically for her possible death. She joined a humanitarian society that insisted on tracking down poor people in need of a funeral and organized it for them. By doing that, she could cast loving glances at one dying person after another without

Chapter 9 — 189

creating a scandal and pay close attention to them to study every death rattle, every final gaze. When she had her fill of funereal science, she would go home and organize her personal memories, the very few she had: the two parts of her notebook, letters from dad and mom, and a matchbox containing a moldy lump she had snuck out of the trunk when she had left it for good. She made a list of those things and planned to leave them to someone in her will, but when she drew it up, it sounded like an insult to her heirs, and so one day, the Housewife, who seriously believed in death and wanted to retain the illusion that she was not just fiddling around, burned it all up. Another day, the gentlewoman Catamantalède convinced her to accompany her to a fortune teller. The fortune teller asked the Housewife to choose her cards and laid them out in front of her. The Housewife herself appeared among them, portrayed as a girl in a red skirt sitting under a tree and over a scroll that said: LOVER. Around her—who was the LOVER—the other cards showed the following: another girl in a red skirt standing with a basket under her arm, and under her feet the word MAID; a young man in a gray livery with a red vest presented as a SERVANT; the façade of a palace with a blue balcony and pink walls that represented the HOUSE; and finally, a room with green curtains on the window and a little round table, labeled the ROOM. “Your future,” said the man, “is in the house. Your house will prosper, even though you’re going to have trouble with the servants. Maybe you’ll fire the maid and hire a male servant, which signifies the increasing comfort of your situation, a situation you created and wanted.” “The hell I did!” said the Housewife, with very little elegance. “Love,” whispered the gentlewoman Catamantalède, “tell us something about love.” “That’s right: love. Take a look to see if there’s a man in my life. Make sure it’s not the male servant if possible.” “Alas, alas,” moaned the fortune teller after laying out the cards again. “Alas, alas. There’s a man, yes. But what do I see? He’s in mourning.” (The Housewife noticed that even the man in mourning among cypresses and graves was wearing a red vest, like the servant before.) “This man is the WIDOWER” (as in fact was written on the margin of the card), “and next to him is FAITHFULNESS”—(a setter dog near a top hat and a tent)—and next to faithfulness, with which this man watches over you, there’s you, ill. Alas, alas. Let’s stop here, I feel it’s better this way.”

190 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“On the contrary,” commanded the Housewife, who was starting to get excited. “Continue.” “I obey. Here you are. Do you see yourself? You’re in bed and the doctor is checking your pulse.” “What a pretty purple blanket they put over me,” exclaimed the Housewife with delight. “And the doctor looks like he has no more hope.” “Don’t lose heart, my hapless client. Let’s look at one more card. Maybe that widower is anticipating the events, maybe your illness is not fatal.” Very cautiously, the fortune teller pulled another image from the deck. “Here,” he rejoiced, “I knew it. Here are the CONVERSATION and the RANTERS. Here you are, now healed, welcoming friends in your parlor, and here are your servants dancing in the courtyard and drinking your wine to celebrate your recovery. The wine intoxicates them and makes them rant.” The Housewife had risen and tightened her lips, “Let me pick one last one,” she said, “if it’s the one I want, this purse full of gold coins is yours.” The fortune teller fanned the deck out before her and the Housewife picked her fate. It was a coffin resting on two kitchen chairs: a torch illuminated it, spreading white smoke and fire. Over it were three numbers: 13, 37, 90, and under it the word DEATH. The Housewife stared at it for a long time, then laid it down on the table by her purse and walked out. The fortune teller remained sitting in front of that card and that purse without daring to touch them. As soon as she was outside, a strange rush overtook the Housewife, an urge to move, to run, to act; she could not wait any longer. She might have quivered in the same way had she been preparing for an amorous rendezvous, but the Housewife could not draw a comparison because she had never been to an amorous rendezvous. It was certainly the first time she felt that frantic spasm around her loins, her hands were shaking, and a thick, icy sweat soaked her armpits and wrists. The gentlewoman Catamantalède saw her soul twisting inside of her and thought it was out of fear. She urged her not to believe the fortune teller: he must have been having a bad day and she was a difficult type. The Housewife asked her to please leave her alone, but she said it in such a hoarse voice that the other woman thought she was really off to an amorous rendezvous, and stared at her with her eyes wide open. (By now the Housewife was over forty years old, but she had not aged: she had just faded. She looked like a wilted flower; if a few drops of chloro-

Chapter 9 — 191

phyll had been injected into her, she would have resumed her life from the first bloom, precisely from when, without mercy, they had plucked her and pressed her between the pages of her own life story.) The Housewife guessed what her friend was thinking and explained to her, still choked by that spasm she could no longer contain but thought shameful to show, “It’s not that. Let me go. I want to go and look for a grave.” “Come to your senses,” the gentlewoman Catamantalède started to scream right in her face, “think of your family.” “I’ll think about it. I’ll certainly request a mausoleum worthy of our lineage and social standing. But for now, farewell.” For the first time, she entered a graveyard. Before she reached the gate, she had been walking with a sense of intense fear in the back of her neck, her eyes downcast, her elbows glued tensely to her sides, her muscles contracted, hoping not to see or brush against any corner of the gloomy scene. As she walked, she reviewed what she considered gloomy: gloomy were wrought iron gates, red and blue glass vases half-filled with rank water, gloomy was the whistle of a still train echoing in the open countryside at night, and the sweat of churches when the sirocco is blowing. Not gloomy was a grave in the tender grass, a headstone without a picture; not gloomy were the dead innocently stored to await their time, like yeast in a kneading trough. Putrid, no less, was a funeral of this or that class: a mere classification, a competition, a petty remnant of great mysteries, a futile endeavor in contrast to what should be a sublime, disinterested ritual where the family disappears and human decorum consists in the surrender of self and speech. The stuff she was about to face for the so-called decorum of her family, one should never have to look at or touch. Never. As soon as she entered the monumental graveyard, she realized it was just another part of the city, similar to those districts with large barracks swarming with clerks, except that here the bureaucracy piled downward instead of upward. But there were still tacky and stuffy quarters, where every dead person thought of himself as someone important, or rather, every dead person thought himself more and better dead than his neighbor. And instead they had just randomly died, and it had taken so many clips on the ear to make them die, so many strings being pulled, so many recommendations, so many prayers to make God look the other way and let them pass even if they did not deserve it. When one reaches a certain age, it is a great shame for the whole string of relatives if he does not obtain this diploma of human creature, if he cannot manage to pass away.

192 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

For a moment she saw the churchyard she had pictured during her childhood, filled with sedentary, humid specters, one sitting on its broken pillar, another cleaning the headstone that ghosts hovering in midair had soiled with fluorescent debris. And there was always a king who would let the children play with his gold crown, children so poor they did not even have a bit of skeleton to rattle for fun, while eternally melancholic mothers fluttered around brushing the faces of visitors with the tips of their sagging wings. At last, for the first time in so long, the Housewife smiled. Civil and military authorities, be indulgent and let her find some amusement in herself. After walking for quite a while and often retracing her steps, the Housewife finally climbed a hillock that served as the chic meeting place for the opulent dead, and among porphyry urns and myrtle garlands she caught a glimpse of a green meadow at her feet. The meadow was dotted with iron crosses, a few marble slabs, wild rose shrubs, small evergreen plants, and pools of blue water where sparrows stopped to drink; but there was no sign of weeping men or women. The sky above the meadow had no opaque spots and on the horizon lilac-colored mountains made the grass pleasant and cool with their shade. The woman looked on with devotion; here she recognized her own place, and for a few moments she stopped thinking of family decorum and the needs of the chapel. It would be nice to lie on this meadow with a rusty cross on her heart, and poppies, nettles, or corn, according to the random way in which God entrusts seeds to the winds, sprouting all over her face. She laughed again: by now, easy thoughts like these or inept thoughts like that of the foulness of a furnished death led her to scoff at herself as soon as she formulated them. While she had lost the capacity to create new thoughts, she still retained the faculty to distinguish trite ones, and that was the cause of her weariness and disappointment. Death is neither here nor there: our body itself is the only coffin, the rest is but a human attribute for those who remain. The meadow was beautiful and round: the Housewife started climbing down the flower-lined spiral staircase that led to it. When she reached the bottom she noticed that in the center of the previously empty meadow was a group of people moving in a cluster. The group consisted of a man so fat he looked like three people tightly embracing. The man was sitting on the ground while pieces of his flesh came off and ran back and forth in the shape of children. The closer the Housewife got to him, the more a grievous foreboding pressed against her temples. She counted the children: ten. Maybe she had

Chapter 9 — 193

made a mistake, maybe it was always the same few ones coming and going. It had been ten years since the other one had left. “Oh . . . ,” a little boy bumped against her legs as he ran. He must have been eight years old, and it was with horror that she recognized in his expression the warlike face of the runaway girl. The boy knocked against the Housewife’s knees, fell to the ground and then, after staring at her face, he screamed to the group that had now stopped moving, “She’s here, she’s come!” All the children rushed to her, leaving the huge man exposed. She saw it was her beloved and felt herself turning pale. The fat man started to sneer, without moving. His hips occupied the whole space between two graves, his feet so big they surpassed the crosses, and his face so large that, in order to recognize him, the woman had to shift her stare from one side of it to the other to try to connect his eyes with his nose, his mouth with his chin. “Welcome, my lady,” said the man, bowing. As a child, the Housewife had found four lines: God, Let us go, you and I, hand in hand to one of your plains. Once there, judge me. She said, “One must not sit on the dead. It appears to make them suffer.” A widespread anger shook the man’s face. He pointed to the children, “And my kids run all over them. Wasn’t it by chance you who, as a little girl, thought that the dead carry us on their faces and that the living are the parasites of the dead?” (At the time, the Housewife had been a real creature and knew how to discover the integral aspects of phenomena; not so now; now she had given herself in to respect and digressions.) She changed the subject, “Are these children your own? All of them?” The man’s face was becoming crueler and crueler. “All of them, but only half of each. And that half that you should have contributed, the other one did instead. Do you know her?” He rummaged behind his back and threw the girl who had left ten years earlier at her feet. “Honey,” the Housewife called out impulsively, bending down to embrace her, but she immediately sensed that the other one hated her deeply. Her body

194 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

was reduced to a heap of bones in which two large, frightened eyes lay in ambush. She was nursing two babies. “She makes them two at a time,” sneered the man again. The Housewife counted the children. “They’re so many. So many names. What are their names?” “They’re named after you,” answered the mother. “All of them after you. There are twelve of them. That’s what he wanted.” “All of them? And how do they know when you’re calling one or the other?” “They don’t,” bellowed the father, “either they don’t come at all, or they come all together. Like we need them anyway! They’re patches of you, matter that you scorned. They’re your slice of life, and you didn’t even know you had deposited it with us. We picked it up, and now we’re bringing it to you to see if you have any use for it in death, or if you prefer to go on without it. Choose, go ahead. Tip, please,” and he held out his hand. “I,” said the Housewife, turning to the mother, “would never have had children as another woman’s last resort.” “We noticed,” hissed the man. Suddenly, the mother started to cry. She turned her head toward the ground, laid the children on the meadow, and now she was crying. She had become so gaunt that, if before the man’s back was hiding her completely, now that she was all curled up in such a small space, she looked tinier and remote, like some figure at the edge of a crumbling landscape. Seeing her cry, the man seemed to melt. He held out his arm and lay his hand on her head. The Housewife did the same: their hands lay side by side on the mother’s head, but they did not touch each other. “Precious, ruined soul,” the husband began to say softly, “are you tired? Don’t cry. After all, you knew from the start that it was painful, you knew it all along. But you didn’t lose, those who lost, see? are the two of us,” and with the other hand he pointed to himself and the Housewife. But who was he pointing them out to? The Housewife looked up to the sky and thought she saw a very deep light rotating. The sky is never empty, she thought, without feeling uplifted. Then she turned to the weeping woman, “Why did you run away from me?” The other one snapped, and she immediately corrected herself, “No, no, I know, don’t say anything. You see, I’m just rambling. You have to forgive me, after so many years I’ve lost the habit of speaking what is necessary.”

Chapter 9 — 195

“I’m the one,” said the fat man, gnarling his teeth, standing up at last and lifting his wife and the babies with him, “I’m the one who has to ask you why you didn’t run away.” He was so enormous and flabby that his stomach, chest, and arms trembled as he spoke, and the ground where he had been sitting had sunk. The Housewife felt a profound disgust and made an effort to unlock her teeth and answer, “Because,” she said, “I didn’t need to . . . to love you.” The man gave her a slap. A slap so hard she staggered; then another, and another. He was hitting her so hard she did not feel any pain. She was so stunned she did not realize that with the same violence he was now throwing the children to the ground and trampling his wife as she tried to defend her creatures. Finally, he fell to his knees beside a grave and started banging his head against the iron cross and the marble edges, while his wife pleaded in vain for him to stop. The Housewife stirred with difficulty, dragged herself near him, put her hand on his ankle, and called him by his name. It was the first time she had done it, and no one had ever told her that name. Hearing it, the man stopped, his head dripping sweat and blood and, still leaning against the top of the cross, he sullenly answered, “I was.” “We were,” said the Housewife, weeping at last. But the wife’s voice resounded, “Enough! Enough, now. Come on, come on, enough. I don’t want that. I don’t want that anymore. No, no. What about me? Because of you two, I have yet to be, and still you go on with your pathetic performance. Home, let’s just all go home, old flesh and young flesh yet unlabeled. Do I, with this body, have to be the one to give direction to you, you, sublime and powerless against life?” She looked at them both with contempt and ran from one child to the husband, and from the husband to the Housewife, trying to lift them up and pull them together. “Blow your nose,” she said to the man. And to the woman, picking up her hat, “Comb your hair. Home, everybody home. The show’s over,” she repeated, rounding up the children who kept turning to look at the father and at the Housewife. “Let’s go home, thank God we’ve reached the end.” She pushed them through the meadow toward the exit while the husband and the Housewife followed her, the one looking humble, the other feeling jealous. Once out, they got on a trolley. The Housewife paid for everybody, and the mother sat in the only empty seat with the babies on her lap, while the other children crowded around her and whined, “Bread crumbs, bread crumbs.”

196 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The mother opened a satchel she was carrying over her shoulder, took out some stale bread crusts, and distributed them among the children; she, too, started to nibble on one embroidered with mold. People were looking on and the Housewife felt embarrassed, while the man just stood on the platform, smoking. At the entrance of a squalid street, the mother, her extraordinary brood, and the Housewife got off. They turned and waited for the man, but the trolley had already started off again and was taking him away, shattered, behind the smoke that kept coming out of his mouth in thicker clouds. Keeping the children between them, the women walked down the street, entered a tenement building and the whole group climbed up to the sixth floor one after the other, in a long line. As soon as they opened the door of the apartment, the children rushed in, climbing one on top of the other, and before the ladies had even crossed the threshold, they had already disappeared, each one of them busy with his own game. The house mistress walked quickly down a hallway, stopped in front of a large trunk, and laid the two babies in it. “It’s their cradle. We’re really poor.” At the bottom of the trunk, on a dirty blanket and all around the little ones, were pieces of bread, that same bread the mother used to chew as a girl, along with rinds and chips of plaster from the ceiling, and remnants of furniture that the other children had thrown in while playing. The mother dragged the Housewife away and locked herself in the kitchen with her. “Yes,” she whispered, “it’s your own. I don’t know how or where my husband picked it up, but he demanded that all of our—our? your children grow in there. When you’re dead, he’ll make it into an altar and I, even I will think it’s right for it to be there, and I’ll lay it out with my own hands for him.” “But I might die after you both, perhaps.” “No. Because you have no altar to build, and you’ve finished destroying the one you used to carry in yourself and for yourself. Having seen us again, me and him, will only serve you for a few days. Even he, if I didn’t exist, would already be gone. The children have been useless attempts, even an insult. He feels it, he knows it. He has withdrawn into himself; he’s been sitting on his own aspirations. He has made a commemorative monument of himself for himself and his family. And thanks to all these ambitions, he’s now pilloried in his own body. At least you had the courage to renounce it

Chapter 9 — 197

all, even the experiments. You didn’t delude yourself in others; you lost all of yourself and you know it, down to your most remote memories; all you have left is the decorum of your physical demeanor. You can still be very beautiful at your age.” “When I came out of there,” she said, heading toward the door, “I was who I am today, forever; mummified inside.” “Are you leaving? Did you just want to check on your finished work?” “Since this will be for the last time, let me wait for him and bid him farewell.” “He’ll be back when he thinks it’s time to spawn more children. That’s when he returns. And before and after, he looks at the trunk as at a supreme womb, the only womb. May you be cursed.” “Amen.” Once again, the moment had come when the Housewife’s derelict sense of balance was forced to take her own uniqueness or that of others on its shoulders and carry it. She changed her tone of voice and appearance, making herself completely new and indispensable in order to lead the other one to common sense. “Then why don’t you burn it? Why don’t you get rid of it while he’s out?” The woman stared at her gapingly, her eyes wide open, “And with all of this courage, you only managed to age, just like any other woman?” she stammered. The Housewife shrugged. “Just turn away from intelligence for a moment and open the door for me.” The other one obeyed. The Housewife went over to the trunk, took the babies out, with the blankets she made a little bed for them in a quiet corner, laid them down on it, and went back to look at the large trunk. Not even with a hammer or pliers would she manage to break it into pieces. The wife stood next to her, trembling and repeating that no, no, she would never agree to help her, even though she had not even been asked. And so, the Housewife went to find each one of the children in their hiding places, since they would not dare come closer. Some of them even screamed at her with a malicious voice, “If he comes back, he’ll kill you,” or, imitating their father’s voice, “You’ll be covered with stink bugs, beautiful lady,” and as she got closer, they bombarded her with rubble, rotten fruit on her shoulders, even a muddy

198 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

shoe against her hand; and yet, she was able to dig them out. Now gathered around the trunk, they were paying attention to her every command. “Let’s take it to the stairs.” It was large, tall for the children, covered with leather, with many straps, bolts, and iron bars, very heavy. The Housewife hauled it, the children pushed it with their heads and hands. The bolts grated and scratched the floor where they passed. The mother moaned, plugging her ears with her fingers. When they reached the landing, the Housewife ordered, “One of you, go downstairs and make sure no one is crossing the hall. Tell them the top floor is about to collapse.” The oldest boy left the group and ran downstairs. The others remained drudging around the chest, some slipping underneath it and trying to hoist it on their backs, others climbing on the banister and pulling it by the straps. A little girl brought a knife and started to chip away at the leather; another held out a lit candle waiting for a corner to catch fire. At last they managed to lift it and balance it on the banister for a moment, and then, amidst their screams, it came down with a crash, nearly dragging them along with it. The booming sound was still echoing when a shrill little voice rose from downstairs, “It made it.” The Housewife wiped the sweat from her eyes and leaned out to take a look. It seemed intact. The booming sound was followed by the racket of doors opening all along the stairs, people running like mad and screaming, “They’re bombing!” and children who, shouting for joy and brandishing scissors, augers, kitchen knives, pliers, matches, and bags, rushed to put that ominous dwelling to fire and sword. When they reached it, each attacked a single piece like a hungry ant; they tore apart the leather, then patiently cut it, drilled it, bent it and singed it until a single shred remained in their hands. They did the same with the bolts, locks, and iron bars that had been twisted in the impact and could therefore be pulled apart easily. A little girl picked up the remains and put them in a basket she had specially brought, as if she were going shopping. Each came home loaded with pieces of wood and leather, feeling wicked and bold: they knew they had done a wrongful but courageous deed. They turned everything in to the Housewife. The mother refused to touch even a single nail. The Housewife locked herself in the kitchen and burnt the pieces, one by one, on the oil stove. The bolts and locks, which she had not been able to destroy she put in her bag, and left without saying goodbye to either the children, who had already vanished again into their closets, or to the mother,

Chapter 9 — 199

who was crouching in the empty corner where the trunk had been, and was howling softly with her face against the wall. Not for a single moment did she think of her beloved. For the first time, she walked the streets of the city the way she wanted. It made her feel somewhat light and distracted; she could not seem to recall what errand she had gone out to run. Every now and then she would throw a nail over her shoulder. Every one of us has walked, at least once, down the battered streets of one’s own city or neighborhood and suddenly seen them with a different state of mind: a girl as transparency and expectancy, a lover as assent, a man as fulfillment. Therefore, anyone could place the sensation he prefers into the Housewife’s heart and picture her walking down the streets with it. But the Housewife did not see anything and didn’t feel anything, which is much more difficult to imagine. She had not lost the sense of relationships, but the manner and time of relationships. She bought some flowers and carried them around zealously. “Who are they for, doll?” “For Ophelia’s grave,” she answered in tears. She walked a little further, entered a grocery store and asked for four coins’ worth of cobalt blue, for her lord and master’s beard. “Isn’t it poisonous?” she asked. Back on the streets, a hairy, bulky man bumped against her, “Oh, Granny, what long arms you have!” she exclaimed immediately, touching his shoulders as the man opened his mouth, flabbergasted. “What big teeth you have, Granny,” and she could not wait to be munched, but the man pushed her away and ran off. If the distance to her house had been longer, the Housewife would certainly have stumbled upon all those who, with her same madness of today, had somehow helped her when she was lying in pieces in the trunk. Today she was following their ghosts around the city that, as if by magic, had walls that could be walked through, rivers that left one dry, and people who knew the language of animals. The familiar city still lived in the emanation of this city, which was perceivable but not constructed, real and yet arbitrary. Not even the dark man’s face that, wavering between imagination and memory, had been guiding the Housewife until that moment, seemed necessary anymore. Not even once did she withdraw into herself to turn to him and whisper, “Dear, dear.”

200 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

“My dear, my dearest,” said her husband instead when he finally saw her come in with her eyes closed, a purple hue on her diaphanous face, her hands sagging. As soon as her husband called her and touched her, thought reassembled itself swiftly inside of her, opened her eyelids, reattached her hands to her wrists with iron hooks, and pushed a button in her chest that made her usual voice answer, “I went to the graveyard to pick a plot for our burial.” “Mulier providentialis!” he exclaimed, kissing her hands. “Tomorrow I’ll talk with the architect.” “Commendable, most commendable.” “Then with the typographer to order the paper for the obituary notice.” “Provident, most provident!” “You’re welcome, you’re most welcome,” she was about to blurt out, but instead, “Signor” (it was the servant), “the carpenter asks if you have any more orders for him.” “Certainly, most certainly,” she answered instead. “Have him come and take my measurements, and the Signor’s, too, if he wants, for our coffins. In time of war, it’s good to have what we need right at home.” “Wise, most wise,” said her husband approvingly, although he kept his fingers crossed behind his back. Once the Housewife had given orders for these things, the dressmakers started coming and going to fit the servants’ black liveries, while the decorators adorned the funeral parlor, the architects recommended more and more expensive marble for the mortuary chapel, and poets competed with each other to compose the obituaries. As all of this went on, the Housewife finally enjoyed a complacent, boastful rest, feeling that she was the center of that moving mechanism. While she sat motionless, the house fanned open all around her, the walls slid back like theater wings, the doors flew open, the drawers jutted out, and she could see shiny expanses of floors, piles of linen perfectly arranged, food cooking and giving off the correct aromas, women in the workshops pulling the thread on their stitches in synchrony. And in the souls of her subjects she even glimpsed the hope of being able, for once, to do things the opposite way to prove they were human. However, that perfection to which she had dedicated her life did not interest her anymore. Nothing interested her anymore. She felt increasingly lighter and distracted, with no more expectations, which are the weight and

Chapter 9 — 201

the supreme goals of life. At times it occurred to her that Jesus on the cross must have felt the same way, concentrated on the weight of his own body pulling him to the ground, the body that he had always denied for the soul of others and that was now taking its revenge, crushing him and bursting his heart with its own matter. “Sacrilegious,” she immediately told herself, “how dare you compare your sensations to God’s?” and she humbled herself, although she knew she had not tried to relate to Him out of pride, but out of hope, to receive comfort and to give Him thanks for teaching us to bear our own destruction for the sake of others. Months of inextinguishable languor went by for the Housewife, and during that time no one had any need for her. Peace and war alternated monotonously; she was monotonous in her lofty virtues, the others were monotonous in their vices. The servants had found a way to please the Signora; the maids, weak beings by birth, had actually grown fond of her; Araceli had become a robot that had to be polished twice a week like silverware; and the servants, the gardeners, and the others now refrained from stealing because they had realized they only managed to steal what the mistress herself had put within their reach to give them an illusion of free will and independence. In January, they announced to the Housewife that the chapel was ready. She sprang up from her corner by the fire, her voice and gestures regained their peremptoriness and, pushing the architect in front of her like a tired prisoner, she had him take her to the graveyard. The chapel was made of green marble and copper, with pinnacles of golden scales against a purple sky. But the Housewife was no longer permitted to enjoy aesthetic gratification: her task was now to weigh the slabs of malachite to make sure they were not veneer sheets glued to the walls, evaluate the quality of the mortar, check for humidity by resting her cheek against the walls, measure the width and depth of the urn, go down into the crypt, and lie down in the niches. “Everything looks fine,” she declared in the end, “except for this stone scroll. The curve is a little narrow. Have them redo it with more élan, more style.” You’re such a fool, thought the architect as he promised to comply with her request.

202 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

The Housewife read his mind and smiled, feeling utterly satisfied. This was truly the highest, most spontaneous praise she could receive from the free breed that had engendered her, that same breed she had so piercingly abandoned. For a moment she was taken back to the time when, from a wild region, she had watched those who inhabited the landscape of which she was now a part, thinking, They’re such fools! Back then, that place had seemed to her so remote and unreachable that she had never thought she would enter. What more could she want from life? At home, she described the new family building in copious detail to her parents, and concluded, “I’ll take you down to see it on the first sunny day, so you won’t catch a cold.” But before that sunny day came for her relatives, the final day came for her. A week earlier, while tidying up her husband’s drawers, the Housewife had found a set of rusty keys. She knew all the house keys and locks by heart, but she couldn’t figure out where these came from. She asked her husband. Her husband could not remember, either. He suggested many hypotheses that were systematically proven wrong, and the wife frowned. One day went by, then another. On the third day, in the middle of a conversation, the husband jumped to his feet and exclaimed, “Could they be the keys to the ancestors’ graves?” The Housewife immediately ran to the graveyard church where, according to old customs, the ancient cadavers were preserved, and started trying the keys on the painted wooden sarcophagi. The sarcophagi, all eleven of them, opened. Only two keys remained: they were different from the others and from each other, one larger and old-fashioned, the other one smaller and modern. She submitted them to her husband’s scrutiny once again, and he started sniveling, saying that he just could not remember where they were from and that he wanted to be left alone: he had not made them, he could swear to it, and he was sorry. The wife forced herself to wait a few more days: so much confusion in the house made her head spin. At the end of the week, she was distracted by her visit to the chapel, but the next morning, at breakfast, the husband found the two keys on his plate. The poor fellow started shaking and did not dare touch them. The wife’s eyebrows were becoming more threatening by the minute. All of a sudden, the old mother spoke in a shrill, chirping voice, “What

Chapter 9 — 203

are they?” and stretched out her neck to see. “What are they, son-in-law? Why are you afraid? Let me see, give them to me.” As soon as she held them in her hand, a wicked snicker traversed the many lines on her face like glimmering water through the cracks of a parched land, and lit her up. There’s mom, thought the daughter, but in the meantime the old lady was motioning toward her and winking, showing her the smaller key, “I know, I know, hee-hee-hee. But it’s not worth talking about it. Hee-hee-hee. Water under the bridge, thank God,” and she kept laughing more and more convulsively, while her face curled up with a soft squeak. “But I,” stammered her son-in-law, looking fearfully at his wife, “I’ve got nothing to do with it, right? It’s not my fault. I couldn’t possibly have known about it.” “Yes, yes, yes,” said the mother, still shaking the keys in the air and having the time of her life. “Trunk, son-in-law, trunk. Attic. Attic and trunk. Hee-hee-hee.” “Don’t laugh,” intervened the father, taking the keys from her and giving them to his daughter. “He did so out of love, dear. Your husband didn’t want the trunk where you made yourself so rich and precious to be destroyed. He brought it here and locked it away some place. It’s a sign of love, dear child, you must be grateful for it.” “Yes, yes, of love . . . ,” echoed her husband, still fearful. “Yes, yes, yes,” echoed her mother, squealing. “With the ancestors’ graves,” said the Housewife. She got up, left the room, and went off to look for that attic. How could she have missed it when she had spent so many years patrolling the house like a sentinel guards the bulwarks of a prison? What kind of house mistress had she been, then? On and on and on she walked, and got lost in a maze of closets and traps she did not know well. She retraced her steps, began her exploration again from the basement to the second floor, from the second floor to the third, then to the fourth, and to the attics. She was exhausted, and yet she would not stop prowling around and probing the walls and the floors for a secret that would open the invisible door right in front of her. But she was not dispirited, and when she was forced to stop peering at every beam on the ceiling because of a piercing pain in her puffy eyes, when she could no longer knock every inch

204 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

of wall with her bleeding hands, she still groped forward, confident that she would find it. And indeed she found it, thanks to a stubborn imagination she had not known in many years. She had already gone twice through an attic she knew well, without testing the partitions or searching among the bricks on the floor; she felt there could not be any trap doors there, even though she had no reason to believe it. And yet she could hardly leave that room, the rickety furniture of which had always attracted her despite the fact that it was of no interest or value, but just a series of ordinary unhinged doors, broken drawers, shattered sides, and wobbly feet. For some reason, the Housewife had never given orders for them to be taken away and destroyed. They’re there just to accumulate dust and block the light. As she thought that, all of a sudden she flung herself headlong against a tall armoire, smashing the frame that collapsed about her in tiny bits. She kicked the base and the armoire reeled, every joint squeaked, a piece of casing fell off, a door flew open and hit her on the chest, the beams came apart with sharp cracks and crashed one by one against the bottom, which was no more than a heap of splinters and fine debris. Behind that heap was a door with a forced lock. The Housewife lifted her chin, took a step among the wreckage and, because she was a woman of order, she put the ancient key into the open lock. She turned it with difficulty, using both hands and all the strength she had, and struggled to hold up the doors that flew open with a long moan. Beyond it was a small, dark, and empty room with no windows, a sort of false bottom to the attic. Its ceiling sloped downward following the roof. In a corner, on the brickwork covered with a thick layer of dust, a large, rectangular silhouette of a darker color emerged, and around it old moldy remains, footprints going in every direction, tattered spider webs, and a lump of soil from which a hoary blade of grass poked out. The grass stretched its arm through the dust in search of light, and with countless hairy fingers it clutched at and climbed on every ragged edge of soil in the hope of finding a bit of sky. A gaunt surviving spider, its legs forming a droopy rose, swung from the end of its web. The Housewife took a step into that room. She suddenly seemed to remember where and when she had picked up that lump of soil; she seemed to picture the dark man forcing the door and hauling the trunk away. She could see her husband coming here to spend hours of shady complacency,

Chapter 9 — 205

skulking around on those footprints. Perhaps those footprints had always been there and belonged to past generations; or they were already laid out for whomever had yet to walk on them; or perhaps they had appeared just for her, and belonged to the one who always stands by our side and accompanies us, inscrutable and useless. “Why,” sobbed the Housewife with dry eyes, “why?” She knelt beside those wrecks, lowered her forehead to the dust, with no more memories, past or present. She lay down next to the blade of grass and turned her face toward the spider that had suddenly resumed its task of weaving its useless web in the empty air. The Housewife dared it, “I want to see, spider, if your work will be wasted just like mine. Spider, do you want to bet that, when your work is done, you too will die of aridity?” She waited. The cell was already dark with the shadow of twilight. The Housewife thought she heard a booming sound far away. She was distracted by another sensation. She could feel the grass climbing warily up her arm in search of nourishment and tapping her pores to squeeze from them a few drops that would quench its thirst. Again, that booming sound reached her; this time it was closer, in fact it kept getting louder and was advancing at great speed. It was more than a subtle sound, perhaps she was imagining it; it was the wake of a whisper, a vibration that reached her through the air in slow spirals, pauses, rushes. To the woman it sounded like the roar of an airplane flying over the house and entering the attic through the windows with an ever louder scream. A high, black wind, heavy with clashing torments made it fall down, and its wings got entangled in the spider web. The bustle of a struggle immediately followed, the flapping of large metallic wings, a panting sound of pumps aspirating the air, cavernous thumps, shrill squeals, and then nothing but the contented, dull, heavy sound of air being sucked in a vortex. It was too dark for the Housewife to see what had happened, but her own horror and envy made it clear to her that a gnat had rushed straight from the other room into the web and now the spider was almost done squeezing it and feeding itself off it. She got up and stumbled away, covered in dust, grass wrapped around her arm and mold in her hair. When she went back into the parlor, everyone was alarmed at the sight of her greenish forehead and the fixity of her gaze. The doctor who came every hour to check her parents’ and her husband’s pulse saw her and humbly suggested she should lie down. The Signora followed

206 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

his suggestion. Malum signum, thought the doctor. When the house mistress agrees to lie down, it’s the end. It was the end. The Housewife died that same night, without uttering a single word or closing her eyes. She showed no symptoms of illness except for an extreme languor. “She seems to be fading away out of decrepitude,” said the doctor to the three octogenarians who had gathered around the bed. “As if she had lived many other lives and carried people on her shoulders.” Could it be that the Housewife heard those last words? What is certain is that her eyes, which had been staring straight ahead, turned to those present, and lingered to look at them one by one, almost as if she wanted to give back to each one his responsibility: when she got down to Araceli, who was standing by the doorway like a side post, her eyelids twitched imperceptibly. Araceli threw the doors open and the long line of servants appeared in the doorframe. They were stooping idly one on top of the other, because no one had wound them up since the house mistress had lost herself in the attic. Some still carried loaded trays in their hands, others repeated the gesture of dusting furniture or shaking cloths. The Housewife kept them hanging for a long time without issuing a command; then, all of a sudden, almost to spite them and ditch them right then and there, she quickly closed her eyes, lifted her chin in her usual gesture, opened her mouth wide, and passed away. And her mother, even though the Housewife had not ordered her to do so, screamed like the day her daughter was born.

Epilogue The funeral, for which the deceased herself had made arrangements about a month earlier, had an impressive turnout of people and authorities. The neighboring villas and the estate were raided of all their flowers, and trains arrived from faraway towns loaded with oak branches and laurel leaves: flowerbeds and woods traveled from the most remote corners of the homeland toward that exemplary woman. However, among the impeccable wreaths and flower expanses, people noticed a bunch of thornbush tied with a rope and a note on it that said, “A HEART.” Not without reason, many regarded it as whimsical and inappropriate, and out of respect for the deceased, no one made any mention of it afterward. Once the distinguished citizen was buried, everybody returned to their abodes, except for the three elderly people who, given their age, had not moved from their armchairs. For a few weeks they continued shedding tears more and more weakly until, overwhelmed by the humidity and shattered by their own sobbing, they all died simultaneously. Many years have gone by, but the fame of that provident and charitable lady lives on even now that her town, thanks to the wars, has become an important industrial center. The estate where votive temples were erected to peace is almost completely gone (the ammunition point still has not exploded), and all those who knew her have either died or disappeared. A piazza surrounded by the buildings that now occupy her old domain carries her name, the same name that the Housewife refused to have engraved on her funeral urn, having arranged for the following verse instead: That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Both the authorities and the plebeians were deeply offended by that request because they felt that, by making it, the Housewife showed no appreciation

— 207 —

208 — Birth and Death of the Housewife

for the glory of her homeland and preferred, out of a deplorable democratic instinct, to mix herself up with the common cadavers. On the contrary, regardless of her intentions in life, even in death the Housewife cannot detach herself from her name and the tasks and habits that, through her name, won her the fame that she appeared to scorn on the verge of death. Toward this, too, her fellow citizens show her a reverent condescendence because everybody knows with what appropriate contempt active people judge incommensurable or supernatural events. And yet, having noticed that the Housewife still enjoys taking occasional care of little daily needs, her fellow citizens let those who want to talk about her apparitions do so without mocking them or contradicting them; in fact, they take it as a duty to believe them. The first one to spread the news has been the special undertaker who, at nighttime, takes the bronze or stone animals sculpted on the tombstones for a walk; that way, the lion, the loyal dog, the doves, the swan, and other animals that serve as symbols during the day can relieve themselves. The man says he often sees the Housewife come out of her chapel and, after preparing a fluorescent mush with some water, soil, and bone dust, she spreads it over the studs, the letters, the handles, and all the brass ornaments in the mausoleum. She polishes them for hours on end with her little lace handkerchief, until they are more brilliant than the votive candles around them. When the cleaning is done, the Housewife washes the cloth with what little water there is in the flower holder, and hangs it over the mullein bush; then she sits by the entrance to the chapel, her hands hanging in her lap, waiting for the handkerchief to dry. At times she starts chatting with some neighbor who has just finished tidying up her husband’s grave. They always say the same things. “Ah, Signora,” they sigh in unison, “the work is never done. In a grave there’s always so much to do.” “Thank God it’s just me and my husband,” says the Housewife, “if we had children. . . .” “There just isn’t enough time,” says the other; and together they start commiserating again, or they discuss the effectiveness of their cleaning solutions, exchange them, and devise new concoctions. Almost always, the Housewife is the first one to stand up. “I have to go. Have a nice rest. My husband doesn’t like to come out, he’s very old, and doesn’t like it if I stay out late by myself.”

Epilogue — 209

Many times, the Housewife, who seems to have become a little absent-minded, forgets her handkerchief on the bush. And so, the next day, schoolteachers line up their pupils and take them to see it and pay homage to it. The caretaker makes sure no one touches it, just in case. He has been ordered to watch over it even after the graveyard has closed, until the Housewife comes out again and picks it up. One day he decided to give it back to her in person, perhaps out of kindness, or perhaps because he wanted a tip. At any rate, he picked it up from the bush and handed it to the woman, who was searching for it. The Housewife did not seem to notice him, and so he said, “Here it is, Most Illustrious Signora; I’ve got it.” But hearing that human voice, she let out a scream and ran into the chapel without daring to come out for several days. Because the dead do not see the living.

This page intentionally left blank.

Author’s Note This book, written between 1938 and 1939, was submitted, in its rough draft, to the censors of the time, who considered it defeatist and cynical. They did not ban its publication, but demanded that some sections, and all the quotations from the Old Testament, be eliminated; I was also to eliminate the words “Warrant Officer,” “Prefect,” “Homeland,” and “Nation,” which seemed to be contaminated by the overall disrespectful tone of the story. I was asked to make other changes, as well; for example I was not to mention lire or anything else that might indicate that the story was taking place in Italy. The corrections were made, the Housewife paid with gold coins, every Warrant Officer became a Commodore, an Archon appeared, and the country was transported to the other side of the ocean. An edition distorted in such manner was printed and was ready for distribution when a bombing (in Milan) destroyed the printing office and all the copies in it. Then one event followed another, and they were too serious for anyone to worry about the Housewife. At the publisher’s request, I resumed working on the novel six years later, and tried, on the basis of the proofs I still had, to restore it to its original concept. But I could not swear that, here and there, the old version and the new version were not getting mixed up. I decided not to insist too much on fixing everything: a few absurdities have cropped up; who knows, they might fatally and delightfully match the other original absurdities of this portrait of a woman, which already seems so distant from me that I can barely recognize it. P.M., 1945.

— 211 —

This page intentionally left blank.

LITERATURE

State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu