The Silent Duchess (36 page)

Montesquieu with his Persian letters a gossip? And what about those missives that drip with humour and malice? Is not our own Signor Dante

Alighieri a gossip? Who more than he amuses himself relating all the secret vices and weaknesses of friends and acquaintances? ... Humour, on which writers slake their thirst with such grace, somehow emerges second-hand from the capacity of writers to throw light on the defects of others and make them seem gross and unredeemable, while they themselves nonchalantly overlook the beam that sails in their own dreamy eyes. Do you not agree, even you?

Here I am as usual trying to justify myself. Is it that I am trying to stir you by using my own self-deprecation as a bait to pull you from the still waters of your silence? I am even more perverse than you think. Of a selfishness that is at times repellent. But the fact that I exhibit my selfishness may mean that it is not the whole truth. I am a deliberate liar. But, as you know, Solon said that at Agira they were all liars--and he himself was from Agira! So was what he said the truth or was it a lie? Or was it a trick to keep you in suspense? Turn over the page, my dear dumb one, and you will find something else to chew on. Perhaps another request for love, perhaps some precious information, or perhaps only another exhibition of vanity. My sensibilities are too crippled, suffocated by the commonplaceness of the world. And yet the world is the only place I would agree to be in. I do not believe I would willingly go to paradise even if the streets were clean, with no intolerable stinks, no stabbings, hangings, extortions, rapes, thieving, adultery or prostitution. What on earth would one do all day? Only go for walks and play faraone and biribissi.

Know that I await you with a calm mind, trusting your head with its long-sighted vision. I do not say trusting your body because it is as obstinate as a mule, but I turn towards those open spaces in your head where the sea air glides, where you are the most communicative, the most inclined to curiosity, to love; or so I flatter myself to believe. ... You know, it is often the love of

others that causes us to fall in love with them: we see a person only when they invite us to see them.

With all my most tender devotion and the wish that you may return soon. I am lost without you.

Giacomo Camal@eo

Marianna gazes down at the sheets of paper that lie untidily on her striped skirt. The letter aroused in her a feeling of weariness, but now makes her smile. Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking in the sun. So many rides with Saro towards the Aspra promontory, where intoxicating smells and tastes would overcome them with delight. Dismounting, they would sit down on domes of seaweed out of which swarmed crowds of sea-lice, and would let themselves be brushed by a gentle breeze from Africa. Their hands, groping backwards like crabs, would search blindly, holding each other until their wrists hurt. There would be a long interweaving of arms, of fingers ... and then, then, where to put her tongue in a kiss that knocks her in the face with the thrill and daring of its novelty? What to do with her teeth that crave to bite? Eyes dissolving into eyes, heart turning somersaults, hours stopping in mid-air ... and the intense smell of salt seaweed. The hard round pebbles against her back became feather cushions while they held each other in the shelter of an acacia tree, its branches swaying over the water. How has she been able to survive since the moment those embraces were forbidden by her cruel and indomitable will? But she cannot prevent them rising up again like restless corpses that refuse to sink out of sight.

Since Fila has got married to Ciccio

Massa, she is finding it difficult to remain at the inn. In spite of Fila saying how she wants to continue serving her, in spite of the way both of them fill her up with food and look after her as if she were a child, she wakes up every morning with the idea of leaving. To return to her children, to the villa, to Saro, to the chimeras? Or to stay? To escape from all those so familiar habits that make up the routine of her life or to take heed of those wings that have sprouted from both sides of her

ankles?

Marianna crumples the ten small pages into her skirt pocket and looks round her, seeking some reply to her mute question. There is the sun. There is the river Tiber flowing at her feet, viscous, streaked with yellow. A tuft of reeds of the clearest pale green is bent by the current towards the shore, flattened by the water until it is submerged. Then it lifts itself up again in all its brightness. A myriad of tiny silver fish dart upstream to where the water is almost still, forming a lake between tufts of nettles and spikes of thistles. A succulent smell rises from the water, wet earth, mint, elder. A little further up, the prow of a flat-bottomed boat slips along a taut rope that holds it moored to the bank. Still further away, washerwomen kneel on the stones and rinse their washing in the water. Another boat, or rather a raft, with two oarsmen standing up, moves slowly from one side of the river to the other, transporting cinnamon-coloured sacks and cartwheels.

Higher up, the port of Ripetta opens like a fan with its stone steps, its iron bollards, its low walls of unplastered brick, its seats of white marble, its bustle of longshoremen. In that tranquil noonday Marianna asks herself if she could ever possess this landscape, make a home for herself, a refuge. Now everything is strange to her and therefore valued. But for how long can she expect things around her to remain foreign, perfectly intelligible, yet far away and impossible to decipher?

This withdrawal from the future that is sealing her fate, will it be too great a challenge for her strength? This wish to wander, to meet different kinds of people, is there something arrogant about it, something a little frivolous and perverse? Where will she go to make a home for herself when every home seems too sunk in its roots, too predictable? She would like to be able to carry her home on her back like a snail and go off into the unknown. To suppress the remembrance of those ardent embraces that she so longs for will not be easy. The sluice-gate is there to intercept every drop of memory, every crumb of happiness. But there must also be something else, something that belongs to the world of wisdom and contemplation, something that deflects the mind from its foolish preoccupation with the senses.

It is disgraceful for a well-born woman

to drift restlessly, aimlessly from one inn to another, from one city to another, her son Mariano would say, and perhaps he would be right. This rushing from here to there, setting off, stopping, waiting, wandering, is it not a premonition of her end? To walk straight into the waters of the river, first the tips of her shoes, then up to her ankles, then gradually up to her knees, her chest, her throat. The water is not cold. It would not be difficult to let herself be swallowed by those eddying currents with their smell of decaying leaves.

But the will to resume her journey is stronger. Marianna fixes her gaze on the gurgling yellow water. She questions her silences. But the only answer she receives is another question. And it is mute.

Afterword

There is a silence where there hath been no sound; there is a silence where no sound may be in the cold grave under the deep sea.

--The Piano *1

In the landscape of contemporary Italian literature, Dacia Maraini's novel The Silent Duchess, published in Italy in

1990, constitutes a masterpiece. *2 The Italian literary community was unanimously enthusiastic and considered the novel one of Maraini's greatest and most mature works. Positive reviews appeared everywhere, from popular newspapers and magazines to literary journals, and everyone welcomed Maraini's new book, even those critics who in the past had been hostile toward her feminist positions. Already famous, she became the most popular writer in Italy. In the year it was published, the novel received the Premio Campiello--comparable to the National Book Award in the United States or the Booker Prize in Great Britain--and was nominated for book of the year. Subsequently, it

was translated into more than a dozen languages, adapted into a play, and in 1996, made into a film. *3

The main character of Maraini's book is a Sicilian woman from an aristocratic family who lived in the early eighteenth century. *bled Deaf and mute, Marianna Ucr@ia is unable to communicate with the rest of the world, literally and literarily--unable to make her voice heard. Many critics greeted the novel as the culmination of a long journey which began for Maraini in 1962 with her first published work, and this assessment is true in terms of her thematic development as well as her literary development. Throughout the years of her long and productive career, Maraini's attention has always been concentrated on women's enforced silence in society as well as in literature, and on the alternative ways in which a female voice can manifest itself. Maraini's protagonist, Marianna, represents--in flesh and blood, as well as figuratively--the often insurmountable obstacles women face in seeking to express themselves. Marianna, however, overcomes her handicap by finding an autonomous space in which to make her own words heard: the space of writing. In fact, Marianna must write in order to communicate with the rest of the world. But writing, for her, serves more than a purely pragmatic purpose. During the course of the novel her body, forgotten and mortified by a terrible violence, comes back to life, opening the door of self-expression to a woman who bears the scars of her own story but who also discovers with joy her own gendered voice--and reveals it through writing. Marianna's journey becomes a metaphor for the act of writing by women, who are denied any place in the male-dominated discourse but finally find ways to express themselves. It describes a transition from a patriarchal world where women are silenced and silent to a female symbolic order in which women are finally able to speak with their own language. It marks a passage for women, as Maraini describes, from a "prehistoric" to a "historic" state--from a place where women did not treasure their own memory to a place where they start to reflect upon their past and finally find the words to describe it. *5 This is a passage experienced, historically, by women writers in general, and, on a personal level, by many

individual writers, including Dacia Maraini herself.

Dacia Maraini is one of the most distinguished writers in Italy today, male or female. She has written more than fifty books, including novels, plays, collections of poetry, and critical essays. She has directed movies and plays and has contributed articles on social injustice and the condition of women to several Italian newspapers and magazines.

Born in Florence in 1936, the daughter of the distinguished anthropologist Fosco Maraini and the Sicilian princess Topazia Alliata,

Maraini left Italy with her parents when she was a year old. Her parents decided to leave Italy for two reasons: the first was her father's anthropological interest in a certain population in northern Japan, and the second was the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, under which her family, committed antifascists, found it increasingly difficult to live. They moved to Japan, where Dacia's two sisters, Yuki and Toni, were born. In 1943, because of the World War II alliance between Japan, Italy, and Germany, her parents were asked to sign a petition in favor of the Republic of Salo, the Italian fascist government in its most cruel and extreme phase. They refused, and the entire Maraini family was deported to a concentration camp in Nagoya and then to one in Kobe, where they remained until the end of the war in 1945. Dacia, who was seven to nine years old during that time, experienced cruelty and deprivation. "I have dreadful memories of that country," she said in an interview nearly forty years later. "I remember the bombs, the hunger, and the sadistic pleasure of our jailers. Occasionally, in my dreams, those images still hunt me down. At that time, I remember, we ate everything: lizards, ants, acorns, and roots--a frightening torture to which daily earthquakes added even more fear." *6

This traumatic experience shaped Maraini's personality, her reluctance to communicate through the spoken language, and her preference for expressing herself through writing. In a 1993 interview she states: "For many years after the immense pain of the concentration camp I was almost

without words. I found myself in a deep state of silent solitude. I was so shy that communicating with another speaking face was almost impossible. Talking to other people was a torture for me. Writing became an alternative. I felt safe only in front of a white sheet of paper. Since that time, for me, writing has always been more important than speaking." *7

After the war Maraini and her family moved back to Italy. They lived in Bagheria, Sicily, where they stayed with her mother's relatives. The family was quite poor, despite its aristocratic origins. But Maraini remembers those years as a period of freedom. Her parents were young, and she perceived them more as friends than as adult authority figures: "They were very active physically and mentally: they practiced numerous sports; they read, painted, and played music. In my eyes they represented the joy of living. With them I had fun." *8 This sensation of freedom was interrupted only by the limitations of Sicilian society, which soon made

Maraini particularly aware of the sexual and psychological repression of women. *9 In addition, the structured and coercive regimen of the school system conflicted with her desire to learn:

I did not do very well in school because I was always intolerant of any kind of imposition, and school, at that time, with its rigidly structured programs, which required that time be shared among different subjects, made me feel very uncomfortable and incapable of respecting the form of discipline it demanded. I liked learning, but at my own pace. I was a voracious reader to the point that I could even read when I went sailing with my father, careless of sunburns. I read everything I could possibly find, and I was lucky enough to have in my own home the right books. When I was very young I was fond of Stevenson, Melville,