This is the Arcanum of Force. What, therefore, does the eleventh Arcanum of the Tarot teach? Through the very tableau that it represents, it says: the Virgin tames the lion and thereby invites us to leave the plane of quantity—for the Virgin is evidently weaker than the lion concerning the quantity of physical force—and to raise ourselves to the plane of quality, for it is evidently there that the superiority of the Virgin over the lion is to be found.
For their farewell to 1908 in the devastated city, the sisters had prepared a dinner with what they could scrape together, bread and dried fish but also unknown sweets, from Sicilian cities where I had never been. They had received a makeshift kitchen, but it would not be functional until the new year, so in the meantime we made do by mixing food that was already cooked. They told us that in Catania and Palermo grand carts filed by, collecting donations for the poor evacuees of Messina. The donors were exaggeratedly generous in wishing for themselves a clean conscience and for us a less miserable palate.
That night we ate rice crepes and cucuzzata, a sweet jam made with long green squash. I tasted a spoonful, but it had gone bad: someone had put in some leftovers, taking advantage of the charity convoys to empty the pantry. The gelatin burned my tongue, the saliva reacted, producing a taste so acidic that I had to spit it all out. My stomach cramped, and I preferred to be alone; the nuns were used to the furtive melancholy that often drove me into a corner, and wouldn’t try to intrude on a silence that was comfortable for me and off-putting to others. They wouldn’t judge me. They had asked about my family, I had said they were all dead, and they hadn’t questioned me further. They had welcomed Jutta and me as sisters in the shelters set up like a replica of the convent, and even if I didn’t join the prayers they didn’t exclude me from the services. Ever since I’d left the torpedo boat Morgana, god had lost the capital letter.
In the morning I waited for the nuns to finish washing so that I could spend a long time at it without pressure to give someone my place. Because the layers of filth were so thick that the normal amount of time wasn’t enough. While I scrubbed my arms and legs I let myself cry, releasing the pent-up tears; then I felt observed by a child’s eyes, eyes I didn’t recognize: they stared at me unmoving, with their long black lashes, and slowly soothed me. My tears were used up, and, emptied, I could return to the sisters.
In those days, King Vittorio Emanuele III and Queen Elena were in the city, having sailed from Naples as soon as they learned of our disaster. They had descended from the royal ship amid applause and whistles from the Messinese, and the mayor had been at the forefront to welcome them.
“At least he reproached the sovereign for the fact that help arrived from abroad long before it came from the Italians,” commented Mother Fortunata, the superior, defending the mayor. Rosalba had a different idea: “In fact it was the king who reminded him that he had fled for almost two days, abandoning us to our fate.”
I admired Rosalba’s ability always to say what she thought, and yet I couldn’t be on her side, either. In neither version did I feel the truth, only the need to sanctify one man in order to sully another. The protagonists of that scene were two men, in uniform and protected by an institutional responsibility, just like the sailor from the Morgana: who was right and who was wrong didn’t interest me. Who had played the part of the hero and who the enemy was a secondary detail, and reversible.
“Best is the queen, who boarded the Campania, where they set up a hospital for the youngest children,” Sister Velia concluded, pragmatic, and they all agreed.
I, thinking of the scene of a woman who by herself captured a ship of men, couldn’t say a word.
At night I began staring at a pile of toys. Donations arrived continuously for the children who had survived the earthquake, and many of them came through the sisters, who distributed them. I was hypnotized by those toys. A doll with hair of an artificial blond frightened me, and I was saddened by a toy version of the locomotive of the last train I had taken in my old life, on the night of December 27th, when I had stubbornly left Scaletta to go to the theater in Messina. Those objects recounted a world forbidden to me. I had grown up among adults who treated me like an equal, and I didn’t remember playing with my contemporaries; as a child I read or studied, or learned to take care of the house, because that’s what my father wanted. Childhood for me was a distant and imprecise place, and yet in the past two days a detail insisted on emerging, eyes with long lashes appeared by surprise, and interrogated me in a nervous and agitated darkness. Were they watching over me or abandoning me, I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t distinguish between the two verbs. Was it a memory? A dream? The manifestation of that gaze was painful, and I didn’t want to sustain it, but the effort of erasing it wore me out, and I struggled to keep my eyes open. Sleep came long before a midnight when I had nothing to celebrate anyway.
The sovereigns were still in the city, and for the whole day we talked about Elena of Montenegro, glorified everywhere as the best queen in the history of Italy. Behind a language of false respect I noticed the sisters’ disapproval: Elena had given gold watches to the military men who guided and protected her during the rescues, and was so distressed by the fate of the orphans that she had decided to establish an entire institution devoted to them. The silent reproach was that she hadn’t deigned to go and see the nuns, to know from their living voices how many and what losses they’d had, what concrete help they were already giving the city. Between the waste of the jewelry, the echo of morbid compassion, and the halo of stubborn pride, the queen fell out of my heart. But the truth was different: it grieved me to think that the sailor from the Morgana might be among those rewarded.
I tossed and turned on the pile of clothes that served me as a bed, in the same room where the nuns ate, and I gave a sigh that must have resembled a lament. Jutta left the table and came to caress my hair. Her clothes gave off a citrus scent: the woman they’d belonged to must have been a fan of Fera bergamot, and its traces on her clothes remained recognizable for a long time. My mother had also used it, long before it became famous in the rest of Italy.
“You smell like the woods,” I said.
“You’re a hunting dog,” she laughed, and sniffed her arms in search of confirmation. “When I put on clothes that aren’t mine I always think of who’s looking for them and can no longer find them,” she continued, bringing a hem of the skirt to her nose. “The dead observe us. But I’m more afraid that the living will come looking for us.”
“The living are all dead.”
“Today I heard the story of a wife and husband who were reunited. Each thought the other was dead.”
“There are all kinds of stories like that.”
“You wouldn’t like to hug your father again?”
“If I could choose, I would feel my mother’s skin. I hardly remember her anymore.”
Jutta caressed my hair again, as she did whenever she felt I was in the grip of uncontrollable thoughts, and she stayed with me so that I wouldn’t be alone. The voices faded, and a last silvery sound remained of dishes cleared.
My sleep was agitated. The sailor’s body was above me, it became a fish and then a goat, it held me firm and stared at me. The animals entered my uterus and spread it to bursting. I woke sweaty and screaming, and I couldn’t get up because the room was spinning; along with Jutta, Sister Rosalba came to calm me.
From then on, every night had its nightmares. My darkness was populated with bright-colored chinchillas and ringing voices, wild boars, deformed whales. Once a fly aimed at my stomach and smashed it, I was thrown against the bottom of the bed while hands of gigantic beings twisted my head from my neck. Sister Rosalba confessed to me that this had happened to her, too, before entering the convent, and so her parents had been happy to get rid of that unquiet and disquieting daughter who wouldn’t let them sleep and frightened them. I had a great fear of being a burden to the sisters in difficult times, so I worked hard at keeping our encampment in order. I organized the food and washed and hung up the clothes, trying to be useful to the women, intent, in turn, on being useful to the world. I abandoned the streets until I forgot the city and annulled myself in the work; if in the nuns’ gaze I read assent or approval I felt reassured, they wouldn’t throw me out. Rosalba brought me the best present I could have wished for, a book, and one written by a woman. Someone had thrown in Matilde Serao’s Neapolitan Legends among the provisions and clothes in a charity package; I hid it among my few intimate possessions, along with the two fragments from the tombstone of Letteria Montoro and a diamond that Jutta had taken from her finger and wanted me to have at all costs.
“If we should lose each other and you need help, sell it,” she said.
“And if it were you who needed it?” I was distressed.
“I’ll manage,” she concluded.
For the sisters Jutta was invaluable. She served as an interpreter in the conversations with foreign soldiers and volunteers, translating from German, French, English. She was always outside, on the threshold, while I didn’t want to see anyone, and stayed shut up in the encampment, where men’s voices came to me muffled.
Every so often some women stopped by; I could tolerate speaking with them. One night Sister Rosalba introduced a Frenchwoman who wanted to meet the nuns of the monastery of Santa Teresa, now famous because they had not abandoned their places, more concerned with doing good for others than for themselves. She, too, was considered invaluable on both sides of the Strait, because she could sense the presence of the dead, and the soldiers brought her along to learn where to dig without wasting time. Thanks to Madame, said Sister Rosalba, many had been rescued still alive.
“Come, tell the story of Filippo,” she urged, with the excitement of one who has already heard the astonishing story and is eager to enjoy the reactions of others.
Madame told of a child saved eight days after the disaster. The soldiers wanted to set off a mine to destroy the remains of a dangerous building, but first, out of some scruple, they sent for her, to be sure that no one was buried in the ruins. Madame interrogated the air and the splintered beams with all five senses, and then she stopped the operation: yes, someone was there. The soldiers started digging at the point she indicated. I thought I had observed that scene, directed not by a diviner but by a mother, and yet, in fact, it was incredible that here the person who sensed a presence knew nothing about that house and had no blood ties to nourish the persistence. My admiration for Madame rose, clothing itself in reverence and fear. The Frenchwoman recounted that, once the child emerged, he said he had endured so long thanks to oranges given by his mother’s loving hands, and he wasn’t afraid because her voice continued to cradle him. No one had had the heart to contradict him, but Filippo’s mother had died three years earlier, as the inhabitants of Scaletta Zanclea had confirmed.
Hearing the name of my town I felt a pang.
“You were in Scaletta.” I started. “Do you have news of Giuseppe Ruello?”
Madame stared at me. “The merchant? He’s the one who took Filippo with him, he wants to adopt him. He said he’d always wanted a male heir, but his wife died shortly after giving him a girl. He came here to Messina to look for his daughter and his mother, but they’re both dead. Why do you ask specifically about him?”
Fear, dismay, an uncontrollable desire to hide: the storm that crashed down on me at those words was violent and unexpected. And then why in the world had my father chosen that particular boy, what was special about him, why had he impressed him. I tried to conceal my feelings, struggling between the desire to see him again and the anguish of losing the freedom that solitude gave me, a freedom I’d never had.
“He was a distant cousin of my grandmother’s,” I lied.
I had the sensation that some of the sisters read the lie in my face, but Jutta changed the subject and I took advantage of that to recover.
Although Sister Rosalba insisted that Madame was a Christian, the woman wore no crucifixes, she didn’t have the look of a saint, and she ignored things having to do with prayers, miracles, and divine intercessions. The older sisters were suspicious. Was she a witch? The number of the saved was undeniable, as was the gentleness of her manner and her usefulness, and yet if Madame had not taken out a good sum and given it into the hands of the superior, maybe she would not have been invited to spend the night. Only then, in fact, did Mother Fortunata set aside an ill-concealed distrust.
After we ate, we learned that among Madame’s gifts was the reading of the tarot. Murmurs and laughter broke out: Christians were not permitted to predict the future. Mother Fortunata recalled the biblical episode of the Witch of Endor.
“Saul bans necromancers and diviners from the kingdom,” she thundered.
“But he asks his ministers to find a palm reader, because the Lord doesn’t respond,” Sister Rosalba continued.
A discussion followed in which the Mother did not retract, but, when she took her leave, Sister Rosalba and others approached the clairvoyant, and Jutta followed them.
“Friends and sisters, I’m tired, and I have to conserve my energy for what there is still to do in these lands,” Madame began, “but I want to repay you for welcoming me, and I can grant one card to a single one of you. If I did more I would be cheating you: I don’t have sufficient strength.”
She asked us not to cross arms or legs, and to stay at a distance of a meter. Then she pulled the deck out of a white leather glove she had in her pocket. In a silence saturated with curiosity, we observed Madame while she shuffled the cards. None of us dared breathe. It was she who chose.
“You.” She raised her chin in my direction.
I didn’t answer. My heart was beating madly. I thought I was finished: the foreign fortune teller wanted to unmask me, she had understood that I was the living daughter of that Ruello in Scaletta and she would take me back to my father, she would spread in the city the rumor that I wasn’t dead at all. And that I was impure, broken. I wanted to escape, but she was faster, she cut the deck and showed me the card, naming it without need of verifying it.
“To the Empress.”
A blonde in the blue robe of a ruler, adorned with gold jewelry, wearing a crown, and sitting on a throne, stared at me with a compassionate expression. Her gaze was directed at me and, at the same time, elsewhere, as if the scepter that with her left hand she planted on her stomach were a magic door, contact with a universe familiar to her but invisible to us. Because of the ambiguous folds, the fabric behind her could be confused with a pair of wings, but her feet rested solid on the ground: the Empress belonged the sky and the earth. A lion was pictured on the shield clutched in her right hand. I was amazed to realize that the beast didn’t frighten me.
Jutta was the first to speak. “What does it mean?”
“You’ll be a mother,” Madame responded, not to her but to me.