The third Arcanum of the Tarot, being the arcanum of sacred magic, is by this very fact, the arcanum of generation. For generation is only an aspect of the sacred magic. If sacred magic is the union of two wills—human and divine—from which a miracle results, generation itself also presupposes the trinity of the generator, the generant and the generated.
The night Madame drew the Empress card for me I was visited not by nightmares but by a complete and transparent dream, studded with marvelous details. I was in a meadow without large buildings or houses, my eyes were lost in a green expanse, and a childish voice was calling me mamma. When it was silent, Jutta intervened, asking: So, isn’t it nice to be called that? Although I couldn’t see her, I felt that my friend was beside me, and her kind presence eased my astonishment. In fact it’s not bad, I replied, but I would like to know who it is, and whether male or female? Jutta asked me to turn, and in the middle of the meadow, behind me, a very tall stalk ended in a white flower, halfway between a camellia and an orchid. Its was the voice: I had a flower child.
I woke disturbed, and convinced myself that, if Madame’s words were true, to become a mother in the future wouldn’t be frightening. In recent days I had surprised myself thinking that to live beside a man didn’t necessarily have to be a torture, and the thought always returned to Vittorio Trimarchi. I had had no news of him, but I knew that Professor Gaetano Salvemini had remained buried under the ruins of the house he rented in Messina, along with his wife, his sister, and five children. And Vittorio? Since discovering that my father was alive I’d made no assumptions and stopped believing in presentiments; I resigned myself to waiting for the results of collisions and encounters with reality.
Sometime later, while I was organizing the donations, my breathing slowed down and then it stopped altogether. I couldn’t breathe, the air around me hid, fled. The lack of air forced me to sit down; gasping, I managed to call Rosalba, who in turn hurried to tell Jutta. My friends decided to give me a sedative, afraid I was no longer myself, but I didn’t want anything, my body was closed, armored, I shouted to protect myself, they mustn’t try to give me anything. I calmed down only out of fear that someone would hear me and take me away. The lunatics of the earthquake, as those who weren’t willing to be silent and submissive were called, were shut up in the Villa di Salute, the hospital for the mentally ill established by Dr. Lorenzo Mandalari. The doctor had died on the night of December 28th, but the structure had remained standing; it was said that many patients escaped, taking advantage of the confusion, while new guests had been interned against their will. Every time I was about to give in to anxiety and anger, I was afraid of being reported and taken there, so I held back tears and cries, suffocated my anger and swallowed the excess; that time, too, I pushed everything back inside, fear above all.
My shortness of breath didn’t go away. I was no longer efficient at organizing our camp; every so often lungs, heart, stomach rose into my throat begging me to spit them out, and I started panting again, moving to a corner so as not to be seen. While I cleaned I wasn’t able to speak, if Jutta asked me a question I had to stop and catch my breath. I blamed the negative feelings I lived with. The memory of the violence on the Morgana clung to me like a malignant vine. The earthquake no, I was used to it, we had all become used to it.
As soon as I woke I smelled bad odors from the kitchen, and for the entire day food disgusted me. The sisters put meat and fish on the table, the shopkeepers resumed their activities, huts rose on Viale San Martino that sold even imported foodstuffs: tripe, sturgeon, Gruyère, eggs. And meanwhile the soldiers continued to distribute the daily ration for the homeless, a hundred and fifty grams of pasta and, very occasionally, half a can of meat. The pantries filled up again, but I wasn’t hungry.
One morning Sister Velia, who had the best instinct for shopping, boasted of having acquired the finest cuts of meat, and at lunch prepared a great mixed platter: boiled beef, liver, prized fillet. The odor of the dried blood of dead creatures passed through clothes and stuck to the skin; I made an effort to repress my nausea, but when Rosalba filled my plate I had to run away and throw up.
“Does she know, our Barbara, that she’s spitting out food worth three lire a kilo?” Mother Fortunata was annoyed. “You know how many starving people would like to be in her place?”
Jutta came to me with a rag soaked in vinegar, she laid it on my forehead and the smell calmed me.
“You’re pregnant,” she said. “I’ve been watching, since the day of the torpedo boat, and I hoped to be wrong, but now we have to make a decision.”
So much noise in my ears, a cannon shot.
“How can you be sure? You don’t have children, you don’t know anything about pregnancy.”
“A few years ago I gave birth to a stillborn child. For nine months I held it in my belly, I know what it’s like, I look at you and see myself again. Don’t worry. It will go differently for you, your child will live if you want it.”
No, no, no. My head said: It’s not true. My body said: Yes, it is.
I saw my end and an oppressive weeping assailed me. Everyone would know what I had done with the sailor, the sisters wouldn’t believe me, they wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t wanted it, and maybe they were right, I hadn’t opposed him forcefully enough, I had provoked him, I had boarded the ship alone. I was afraid of being killed, I had been complicit—why, why had I not preferred to die? I wasn’t a saint, I was a coward, a worthless woman.
As long as there was no proof, I had deluded myself that in the future I would be able to live as if it hadn’t happened: Messina would rise again, and I, too, with it. In the wounds of the city I would hide my own. Then I would forget that man and the torpedo boat, there would remain only the nightmare of a girl devastated by a disaster.
Of course, a husband would have to accept me already used, but to a man like Vittorio I would open my heart, I would be liberated, and together we would abolish that terrible dream, maybe we wouldn’t have children or maybe we would; I would be free to go to the university, that promised desk had been waiting for me since December 27th, a desk of my own, where I could study and better myself. A rich drapery would be placed over my shoulders, like the Empress’s, and finally I would be master of my world.
You will be a mother, Madame had predicted. My belly was already full and I didn’t know it, no one knew it except the stranger who in a single encounter had brought me three items of news: my father was alive, I had an adopted brother, and an invisible creature was growing inside me.
Jutta repeated that I mustn’t worry, we would manage. I begged her to find one of those women who would help me go back to the way I was before. I was willing to leave just to hurry the abortion, I had heard talk of a tisane of parsley and douching with soap, my grandmother had told me what imprudent girls had to endure, and the risk didn’t matter to me, dying didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t make the same mistake of cowardice again. Anyway, with that sin, what life would I have?
Jutta let me vent. Then, delicately, she spoke: “Barbara,” she said. “Barbara, Barbara.” My name on her lips was a cradle rocking, a sedative. “Barbara,” she repeated again, and then, in her sharp accent and her perfect Italian: “It’s not the existence we had before, it’s another time. There’s no hope here, at most there are miracles. We have death around us and you have life inside.”
I didn’t know if Jutta convinced me, with her eyes like water in mine so earthly, or if her words, with the emphasis on “life,” simply encouraged the madness of paying attention to the creature nested inside me. Whatever its origin, from that moment it was no longer possible for me to ignore its presence. I began to imagine it.
It pushed its feet against my belly until I vomited, and slept on my diaphragm, making me sob or stopping my breath.
It came to me on the last day of 1908 and would be the first of all the New Years; it was the edge of the inferno and the leap into the void, the most mistaken choice and the only just destiny.