A Life Apart

A LIFE APART

MARIAPIA VELADIANO

Translated from the Italian by Cristina Viti

An imprint of Quercus
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© 2011 by Mariapia Veladiano

Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A., Torino, 2011
English translation copyright © 2013 by Cristina Viti

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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A LIFE APART

An ugly woman has no vantage point from which to tell her story. No overall perspective. No objectivity. It is a story told from the corner in which life has pushed us, through the crack left open by fear and shame just enough for us to breathe, just enough for us not to die.

An ugly woman cannot voice her desires. She only knows those she can afford. She honestly does not know whether a tight-fitting crimson dress trimmed with velvet at the low-cut neckline would be more to her taste than the classic, entirely anonymous blue one she usually wears to the theatre, where she always sits in the back row and always arrives at the last minute, just before the lights go out, and always in winter, all the better for her scarf and hat to hide her. Nor does she know whether she would like to eat out or go to the match or walk to Santiago de Compostela or swim in the pool or the sea. An ugly woman's field of possibilities is so restricted that all desire is squeezed out. Because it is not just a matter of being aware of time or the weather or money, just like anyone else has to be: it is about existing all the time on tiptoe, on the far margin of the world.

I am ugly. I mean really ugly.

I am not crippled, and so cannot even be pitied.

I have every piece in its place – only just a little too far to one side, or shorter, or longer, or bigger than might be expected. No point making a list, it would give no idea. Yet sometimes, when in
the mood for hurting myself, I stand in front of the mirror and survey a few of these pieces: the hair coarse and black like certain dolls used to have long ago, the snub big toe bent into a squiggle by age, the thin mouth drooping to the left into a sorry grimace each time I attempt a smile. And then my sense of smell. I can smell each and every smell, like an animal.

I was born like this. Pretty as babies, they say. But no, not me. I am an insult to the species, and above all to my gender.

“If she were a man at least,” my mother says one day in a whisper, speaking from behind me and startling me. She hardly spoke more than once or twice in a week, quite unexpectedly and never addressing anyone in particular.

She certainly never spoke to my father. He on the other hand would try to talk to her: he told her about his work, about me, about life in town, and brought regards from their friends, for as long as they had friends.

When I was born, my mother began to dress in mourning: her femininity withered away at a stroke, as cruelly and abruptly as Jonah's gourd.

After coming back from hospital she never left the house – never again. In the early days, she would receive many visitors: some came out of friendship, some out of a sense of courtesy magnified by a sort of superstitious and gossipy curiosity: God she's ugly, may it happen to you and not to me. Swathed in dark colours, she remained seated on the white sofa in the salon. No-one knows how she found all those black skirts and blouses, she who had dressed in green and sky-blue since childhood.

Guests were always asked to close the door behind them when they came into my bedroom, where I lay in the cradle. My mother was shielding herself from their comments: “Poor thing! Such misfortune!” “Well, what do you expect, it's the taint!” “Yes, but that was different!” “Mmm! Who knows if she told him the whole story!” “She's from the country, isn't she! They were peasants, and in those parts there's always a way to hush up that sort of thing. Blood is not water!” “Will she be right in the head at least?” “And to think the two of them are so beautiful!”

My father is outstandingly handsome: tall, with dark hair and complexion, and black eyes of such intensity as might draw anyone to yield their soul to him. As for my mother, I do not know. They say she was most beautiful, before. I would only steal a glance at her now and again, when I was sure she could not see me. I was frightened of her hollow expression. Neither did she look at me, and heaven only knows how much I feared and at the same time desired her to do so, and not just to check whether anything might have changed, whether the desperate pleas she had at first addressed to an ever more distant God had somehow worked the miracle.

In truth, though, she did not really believe in the miracle, because her family carried the taint. I know now that it is only a small taint. A minor taint, leaving one's mind, face, beauty and life untouched. But back then, people talked about it as if it were a tragedy. Now and again, an unfortunate child – as they said – would be born. At random, wherever it may be, just like God's grace, like a stone slipped from the hand of a juggler in the highest heavens, amen.

“You can't escape the taint,” she says at lunchtime one day, addressing her snow-white dessert saucer. The teaspoon she is holding slams hard against the table and the strawberry jelly shakes, its disgusting smell hitting me like a blow.

In fact she had tried to escape the taint, marrying a handsome, young, healthy man from a family that had been untouched by it as far back as could be remembered, through the history of entire generations. No child with multiple fingers hidden away in the stables for a lifetime, entrusted to faithful servants and in the end mysteriously dead, to everyone's relief.

There was talk of six or seven fingers on both hands, and feet with even more toes. Children crossed with beasts, with the spiders that treacherously stalk around at night until you find them lurking silently next to you: our own fears, fashioned for our distress into animal bodies and legs.

That was how I was born: treacherously, after a charmed pregnancy without any sickness or undue weight gain. My mother had carried me as lightly as a game she could cherish, moving gracefully in her clothes of sky-blue and turquoise – the colour of her sea-wave eyes, as my father would say.

“What are the fingers like?” she asks after the delivery in which she has been breathing and pushing, breathing and pushing, holding on to my father's hand.

“The fingers? Oh the
fingers
are perfect,” says the midwife, bewildered that anyone could worry about the fingers in the face of such disaster.

“A girl?”

“A girl.”

“I want to see her,” my mother says as if barely holding on to the edge of happiness, still scared of falling off.

The midwife is at a loss, her hands full with that unsuitable candidate to the human species whose presence has stunted her thoughts.

“She's not crying,” she says quickly. “I'll take her through to the children's ward.”

And she runs off with the bare, sorry little squirt that is me wrapped up in the green sheet from the delivery room. My father runs after her: he has not seen me yet, because following my mother's wish he has been there for her as a husband, holding her hand the whole time, and not as a doctor – but he is a gynaecologist, and he knows something awful has happened.

I know all this, and much more, thanks to Aunt Erminia, father's twin sister.

“I'm a freak of nature too,” she says the day I ask her the reason for the hushed murmur that always seems to follow me.

“See? Totally identical to your father, but a woman. Doctors say that's impossible, that I only look like him, because for sure we must come from two separate eggs. But we have the same half-moon birthmark back here, see?”

And she bends her elegant long neck towards me, upturning her shock of black hair. “And three tiny moles clustered together right here,” and she lifts her T-shirt to show them, there to the side of her soft navel which has the scent of talcum powder and calendula. “We are one, only split into two.” And she laughs, a loud laugh that I like and fear.

My mother was allowed to see me on the following day. She did
not say a word. She stood looking at that mistake, at my skewed, crooked head, at the cruel traits she had brought forth. She did not take me in her arms. No-one dared to suggest that she breastfeed me.

When my mother decided to stop receiving visitors, my father took me into his practice rooms. For a few months I remained in the ladies' changing cubicle, in the golden yellow pram she had prepared in good time as she imagined our outings along the porticos of Corso Palladio and on to Piazza dei Signori, and perhaps on cooler days as far up as Monte Berico, to thank the seven founder saints and the Virgin for so much happiness.

Every four hours my father's nurse would give me the bottle, cuddling and stroking me on the head as one would a kitten or a pup. At first he would find fault with that gesture, remarking on it almost absent-mindedly, as he always does when trying to avoid hurting anyone. Then, after a while, he let it pass.

That was, in a way, a sheltered situation for me, because the only people to pass that spot were my father's patients. They all adored him, out of the mixture of closeness and complicity that arises from having to share a certain intimacy. For a while, thanks to a sort of transitive property, I also enjoyed some fragments of that adoration. But it did not last long: my father realised that he was losing his pregnant patients, who all saw in my beastly features the cruel personification of their own fears.

“I think she should go to nursery school,” Aunt Erminia suddenly says one evening at supper, some time around my third birthday.

She did not live with us, but since the day I was born she had been coming every day, rushing back from the
conservatoire
where
she taught piano and taking over the house: organising work, that is, for the home help on duty that day or, more often than not, running things when the home help was absent.

In fact she seemed to spend most of her time interviewing and dismissing home help candidates: “This one's too young, she's come to make cow eyes at your father.” “Screechy voice: she lacks all harmony.” “Too strict – she'll treat us like so many soldiers.” She was demanding because of me, she said. She was looking for someone who could really love me. Sometimes she thought she had found her, and then formally and solemnly hired her. But that would not last: they all ran away on some excuse or other. Once, as she left, a girl who had stayed on a little longer than the others said something that came very close to the truth:

“There is too much sorrow in this house.”

The discussion about nursery school was, as I recall, exceedingly drawn out.

“There is time,” my father says.

“She needs to be with other children,” Aunt Erminia says, pressing him.

“Not yet.” My father looks at me: “She needs some extra … days. In a few years she'll have had enough days, and she can go to primary school.”

“Little ones are more welcoming, their souls are untrained, they see with fresh eyes. Any friends she might make will be her friends for ever.” Anxiety increases her need to emphasise words with slightly theatrical gestures.

I am following the discussion, my whole life on hold. I know about nursery school: Aunt Erminia has told me about that paradise
of fun and games and children, where you are free to run around and shout. I cannot understand what dark dangers my father might dread, but I don't care: I feel myself strong enough to face them.

“The child is staying at home,” my mother says, spelling out the words clearly and abruptly. And as we all turn to look at her, she flicks a fly away with her hand and carries on eating, her eyes on her plate.

There was never any talk of nursery school again.

As a matter of fact, when I was about one year old, a woman who could really love me had indeed been found – and it was my father who had found her.

Maddalena was one of his patients. She had been in his care through two pregnancies and the births of two lovely children with red hair and fair skin, both of whom she had lost in an accident together with her husband only a few years later.

“She's depressed like a sloth in a bath tub,” Aunt Erminia says in exasperation, spreading a hand out in front of herself as if to wave off some horrific vision. “She won't do.”

“We'll give it a try,” my father says calmly.

And Maddalena stayed.

I thought she was lovely. She trailed a light wake of scent, like mist from the plains. She too had red hair, and the tears that streamed down her face day and night mixed with the freckles on her skin.

“Dry these off as well,” I say to her one day as I touch those tiny brown spots. And she bursts out laughing in quick shudders that shake her whole body.

She loved me immediately, with the strength of a need that
must be fulfilled. My graceless nature awakened in her a sense of total protectiveness, the same as she would have lavished on the loved ones she had been unable to shelter from harm.

“She's gushing away like a severed artery,” Aunt Erminia says, seeking out extreme imagery to try and convince my father. “She will drain our poor child.” And with a wide sweeping gesture she describes an imaginary stream rushing down a valley.

“She loves the child as best she can. The child needs a … an affectionate figure.” My father is choosing his words carefully, not wanting to disrespect my mother even in her absence. “Actively affectionate, that's the word. And Maddalena is like that.”

Maddalena would hold me close and teach me to make cakes, to beat eggs with sugar until they were soft and white like whipped cream, to work the egg whites in a double boiler, puffing them up with a movement as round and smooth as a sea wave.

“Like a treble clef,” says Aunt Erminia, half glad, half jealous of this new closeness I am sharing. And she draws a clef in the air.

Aunt Erminia was not maternal, but she was a live wire, an artist. She was without a husband but did not seem to be without men.

“As many as the pilgrims at the
Festa degli Oto
would want to marry her,” Maddalena says with the freedom of one who has left that kind of pursuit behind for ever.

Aunt Erminia interrupts: “The only males who go up to Monte Berico for the
Festa degli Oto
are cheats and pimps who want their souls washed clean by the friars, just to be on the safe side. Is that the sort of man you want me to marry?” And she laughs, her head thrown back, her hair shaking like a vague promise.