[T]he eighteenth Arcanum of the Tarot invites us to a spiritual exercise—to a meditation on that which arrests evolutionary movement and tends to give it a direction in an inverse sense. And just as the dominant and principal theme of the seventeenth Arcanum is the agent of growth, so is it a matter in the eighteenth Arcanum of the special agent of diminution—the principle of the eclipse.
All the doors of childhood had been loose on their hinges, so whenever one started banging I felt it as familiar; its closing and not closing was simply life. On the last night of my being twenty, the door of a railway carriage swayed and grated, its swaying and grating superimposed on the clanking of the wheels and the irritated exchanges of the two other travelers: my contemporaries, yet already husband and wife, quarreling next to me about the education of their daughter and the hand-painting of the china. I didn’t care a thing about conjugal affairs; I endured my captivity on the train that would bring us to Messina Centrale, counting backward the time that separated me from the city, the theater, and my grandmother. She—I was sure—would help me find a way out of the trouble I’d brought on myself, choosing to rebel against my father that very afternoon and leave with my heart stirred up and a desire never to return. Meanwhile I shuddered: I couldn’t bear my intimacy with the couple, an intimacy made more acute by seats that were too close together. Keys had never functioned for me, I had never enjoyed the privacy of a place that was exclusively mine. The keys of the house in Scaletta Zanclea were all disobedient: in summer they refused to adhere to locks that expanded in the heat; in winter they rusted in the dampness and the salt air; then, when the northeast wind shook doors and shutters, the muggy heat deformed the bolts, the chains sweated, and opposing currents swelled them excessively, the doors of the rooms slammed and, in the in-between seasons, broke.
On the train, the din of the broken door muffled half the sentences, and the dialogue between my seat neighbors assumed the air of a just interrupted or just resumed exchange. I reconstructed the missing words by writing in the white space between answer and question: she, sharp chin and untidy hair, noticed a milk stain on her bust only after the train had departed, and blamed the child’s throwing up; he kept on about his wife’s faults, accusing her of having chosen the wrong dishes, and of not being the mother their daughter deserved. I hoped that the two would give themselves time to change the fate of that acrimony, that they wouldn’t let it fester: like me they were fleeing the towns of the coast for the worldly festivities of the city, and perhaps they would rise above their small miseries and return with their hearts refreshed. Yes, the new year would be a new beginning. Certainly hoping so for them was easier than hoping so for myself.
We were escaping the provinces in the same way, despite the fact that we weren’t the same: they had a favorable wind of proper choices, they had been joined before God, had reproduced, hadn’t disregarded social and familial expectations, and even their stubborn unhappiness was perfect; that marriage functioned and didn’t function, in the manner of all marriages. An unsteady door separated us and, swaying, marked the division of the two worlds: they could talk and expose themselves, I was shy and couldn’t even read, and yet we were making the same journey and shared its origin, the winter of marginal creatures. In order to survive, they had chosen marriage and I books, so it would always be like that: I was forced to listen to them and they were not compelled even to see me, even at the moment when we were fleeing together to the city to nourish ourselves on its mirages. I hoped that in Messina, amid the lights of the port, they would regain their lost compassion, the mercy necessary to tolerate each other for the rest of their lives, but ultimately it didn’t concern me; I concentrated on my own trouble. I turned my eyes away from the door and my ears from the sounds to give my senses to the sea outside the window: the waves muffled voices and jangling, and the memory of what I had just done, of the strength I had managed to find, emerged clearly.
My father had come with me to the station and, walking beside him, I had told him that I wouldn’t marry the man he had chosen for me. He didn’t answer. My steps became violent, my wait crushing: I wished to be seen, to hear myself shout that I was depraved and corrupted. If he had ordered me to throw away the novel I had in my bag, at least he would have given a shape to who I was: a girl who had learned courage from books and, seeing herself in the women recounted by women, had chosen to resemble certain rebel heroines who avoided the fate written for them. Instinctively I clutched the handles of my bag to indicate to my father the hiding place of my desire. But his expression didn’t change, it was as if no one had spoken. I was no one, not a body or a voice, only baggage to be taken to the station, deposited on a train, sent to Messina, and sent back the next day. That in the depths of that bag there was a book, and in the depths of my body the desire for another life, mattered only to me.
On the platform, before letting me go, my father had made sure that no one entered the car who might have been able to annoy or distract me. His eyes had constructed around my body a cage to keep away frivolous men or women; finally he had approved the harmless young couple who were climbing up the step. It had seemed to me then that my father, simply by his presence, had the power to control what happened to me, and the rage of the invisible mounted in me. That was the only family I felt I belonged to, the family of people who can’t choose for themselves because they don’t have a platform or even a prayer stool, but are placed forcibly in a gilded chair by a god they haven’t chosen. My father was my God and I didn’t adore him. I had taken out Maria Landini and had put it in his hands: read it, I’d said, read it and you’ll see me. He stepped aside, and Letteria Montoro’s book ended up on the sidewalk; we were left facing each other with the novel between us. The one who bent down to pick it up would be declared the loser, and my father didn’t want to lose; he didn’t want to play or even sanction the competition.
I leaned over to get the book and my fingers touched the station dust. He reproached me for saying foolish things, and his words were inscribed on my curved back, finally crushing it.
My father did not hesitate to rebuff me. He didn’t know that escapes to the city and into books had allowed me to survive my childhood, my mother’s death, and the cold winters. In Messina, at my grandmother’s house and in her company, I became a little older each time, while everywhere, even in the solitude of Scaletta, novels were mother and knife, caress and weapon, unexpected pathways, the only keys that had ever opened doors. Maria Landini, the protagonist of the book he had refused even to touch, didn’t marry the cruel baron Summacola for whom she was destined, and, to avoid that marriage, ran away from her family. If he had read about her he would have seen my desertion; instead, to his eyes I remained a blur. My father arranged women in the display case of functions: wife, mother, daughter, old maid; position and lineage counted, being humble and careful to move aside at the proper moment. As for love, either it was productive or it wasn’t. He had promised me to an ugly, stupid man, who would have kept me sealed in a house not mine where I would have grown gracefully like mold on a wall, concerning myself with sofas, china cupboards, and children. The protagonists of the novels I loved rejected that fate with acts of heroism, paying the consequences, while I was unable even to make my voice heard. Now that I had had the courage to do it, my voice wasn’t listened to.
“Tell my mother that I’ll come and visit next week, and that tonight, after the theater, I would prefer that she bring you home right away. You have enough entertainments; you should begin to take a little responsibility.”
They were my father’s last words. It was pointless to add more: I confined myself to saying goodbye obediently and thanking him for allowing me this evening’s pleasure, then I took my place on the train with the idea of never returning to his house and his control.
The train arrived on time at Messina Centrale.
The couple passed by in front of me without having acknowledged me for the whole journey, too absorbed in their shared unhappiness to make room for my existence; if those were the looks from which, according to my father, I should have felt protected, it wasn’t surprising that I had learned quickly to get along by myself. I crossed the station hall and was outside.
High in the sky, a sliver of crescent moon lit up the Hills of Neptune and extended over the remains of the Royal Palace, easing my fatigue. The silver rays loosened the knot that weighed in my heart, urging me to rebirth as I advanced amid carriages and lamp-lighters, the clatter of horses’ hooves and the magic of the lights coming on. With every step I imagined the girl I wanted to become, I sought the courage to plant my eyes in those of others, not only my father’s but also my grandmother’s; to her I would unburden myself, asking her advice. I dreamed of forcibly rejecting the man whose surname I didn’t even want to utter; in any case it would never be mine. I walked, head high, in the Messina evening, the voice inside me growing always louder, firmer, my breast more prominent: I was transformed into rock, into one of the cliffs of the crescent-shaped part of the city, I would hold back the winds and stop the waters, conquering the opposing currents.
My father, born in one of the most beautiful houses of the Palazzata—the huge, majestic baroque structure on the harbor that welcomed sailors from the Strait—had chosen to move away from urbanity and establish himself in Scaletta Zanclea, a town on the coast, at the proper distance. As for me, he tolerated my going to the city only because it meant that I would spend time with my grandmother, who would also be a mother to me, as I no longer had a mother. Principally, he had to safeguard me at all costs. After the death of his wife, after her illness had defeated him, because he had been unable to keep her alive, his guardianship of me had become the measure of his existence. But for me going to Messina meant something else: I tore a hole in a dull barricade of days that were all the same. In the town I had only the company of books and the sea, while in the city there was a celebration at every moment: theater, ocean liners, libraries, stores, professors, students, the university I imagined attending. Some mornings I went there secretly, slipping into the last rows of the literature classes in the room where, a few years earlier, the poet Giovanni Pascoli had taught: my grandmother had known him and had his books in her house. I opened them, read the dedications, and dreamed of one day signing the title page of a novel. Unfortunately the university wasn’t a place for girls, and if my father had known that I went there, not to mention with the complicity of his mother, no young couple would have been enough to persuade him to let me get on a train for Messina. My grandmother, however, had a different idea about the need for my education, and knew what was best not to mention to her son.
Beside the port a sailor in uniform looked at me as if he wanted to eat me.
“Heavenly Aida, divine form, Mystical garland of light and flowers,” he began singing, then broke off and laughed hard without touching me. He wanted to scare me, as men did with us women, so that we wouldn’t forget who was in charge, inside and outside the house. Even if we dared to go out alone, the streets were not to be ours even for a moment. “You are the queen of my thoughts, You are the splendor of my life”: I continued the interrupted lines in my head. I can’t sing in tune and was afraid of signaling availability, so my mouth didn’t move, but inside I sang, even though I never hit the right note and my rhythm was off, because I liked music and envied those who mastered it. To troublesome courtships, on the other hand, I was accustomed, and I kept going, trying to disappear into the crowd while Radamès’s song remained suspended, hovering between my silence and the voices of evening. Then it seemed to me that every passerby, every horse, every window was starting to sing the opera that was playing, a story of love, war, and betrayal, and I felt that that story of sacrifices might concern us all, in every epoch and every place, and that the woman determined not to retreat from her feelings could be, in a different way, another of my heroines. My grandmother had a family box at the Vittorio Emanuele theater, and that evening we would occupy it together; besides, we always went together, as my parents had never been interested in the theater, or in music or art, whereas I liked opera librettos, novels in miniature that populated my days. After I’d seen a performance, the actors would break up the isolation of my room in the town; they came to sing for me above the bed and the chest of drawers, among the chairs and the mirrors, rearranging the trinkets and the hairbrush, hiding in the closets, on the breakfast tray. When I returned from Messina after seeing an opera I was no longer alone, the men and women in costume continued to move around me on imaginary stages, for weeks and months and sometimes forever. And yet there had to be a way to live without being crushed into the corner where my father wanted to banish me, there had to be a way to make those characters true and concrete, transform them into people.
On the way to my grandmother’s house the passersby grazed me with their overcoats and smiled, I heard their voices, the excitement, the fragments of conversation, and I saw that I would be happy just to stay here, with Italy across the Strait, observing the traffic of the ferry boats that docked and departed; I would be free to go to the theater to see Aida, free to sing and be out of tune, to walk along the Palazzata and not be afraid of the arrogance of men.
My father’s mother had my name, Barbara, because of a legendary family story that I would have liked to make into a novel. That story, told countless times, began with a cruise ship that disembarked at Messina and an English noblewoman who, distracted by the beauties of the city and in particular by the bell tower of the Duomo, had by a miracle avoided being struck by a carriage. But her hem got caught under one of the wheels and dragged her toward the street. She nearly fell; then the dress tore and she remained standing. A rescuer suggested to the frightened visitor the address of the best seamstress of the two seas, who was known simply as ’a maestra, the master. When the noblewoman knocked at the door, she was greeted by a skinny young woman wearing a light-brown dress, a little lighter than her hair, which was gathered in a braid. It was a very plain dress, without frills or anything gaudy about it, and gave her a natural look. Everything about her shone with an unostentatious care. ’A maestra hadn’t wanted to neglect the talent she’d had since she was a girl: her fingers slid magically over silk and muslin, she seemed to be the interpreter of a superior will that enabled her to subjugate every fabric. In her hands, the Englishwoman’s dress was mended, as if the accident had never happened. Meanwhile, the two had begun speaking in a vocabulary of their own—one knew no foreign language, the other little Italian, and yet they entrusted to whispers and gestures a desire to know each other arising from the solitude of those who are used to keeping to themselves a lively intelligence, containing it in their own inner world. They mirrored each other in that particular form of love that is friendship and, when the noblewoman looked at the other’s belly, the seamstress confirmed that, yes, it was a five months’ belly, and since it was round it would be a female. She wouldn’t accept money for the mending; sewing for her was a passion and not a trade, and she didn’t need money. Helping women was her personal task, as well as her way of not letting her life be stolen by a marriage that otherwise could have nullified her. The foreigner had asked if she could repay her in hospitality, and invited her to England, but crossing the Strait was not in the maestra’s plans, journeys were not for her, she preferred to stay on her island, in her house, in the rooms where she welcomed her sisters. Rather, I’ll give the child your name, she said, so you’ll be here in Messina with me forever. And she kept the promise: four months later, my great-grandmother maestra gave birth to a healthy newborn who was given an odd English name. Thus began the lineage of Barbaras: my name was rooted in the Strait like an exotic plant.
Then, compared with the delicacy of that story, society must have closed up again, or maybe it was the Ruellos who turned in on themselves after the early death of my grandfather, because of my father’s anxiety to control everything, to occupy the vacant role of head of the family. In Scaletta I was called Rina, short for Barbarina: my mother, for the very few years she was with me, preferred it to differentiate me from her mother-in-law, my father to remind me that I was smaller than my name, not a complete Barbara. For him I would become whole after marriage: marrying, I would gain a new surname, and only then take possession of my name as well. As for my grandmother, she was the only one who called me Barbara, undaunted even in front of her son, who had once dared to correct her: we call her Rina. And she, immediately: I will call my granddaughter what I like, I’ll call her by my name. However, before she was Barbara Ruello, my grandmother had been Signorina Todaro, and, no matter how important she considered my wholeness in freedom, she didn’t forget that the double surname was the fate of every woman.
I, on the other hand, would have liked Ruello to be enough forever.