TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY BRENDA PORSTER

 

 

(Continued from earlier)

 

I stepped from plank to plank
  So slow and cautiously;
  The stars about my head I felt,
  About my feet the sea.

  I knew not but the next
  Would be my final inch,–
  This gave me that precarious gait
  Some call experience.

 

Emily Dickinson

 

For some years around the age of thirty I was afraid of walking. It felt like a conviction, or even retaliation. For me walking had always been vital, almost as much as breathing. Moving around the city day and night, on foot or on my bike, was a measure of my capacity to be in the world, to choose where and how to live. But at that time, which seems very long and painful when I think back to it, I was afraid to walk, to ride a bicycle, even to get on a bus or drive a car. I was afraid of falling, of fainting on the sidewalk, of collapsing in the middle of the crowd. I was terrified of losing control of my body, but what frightened me most of all was the idea of leaving a familiar place where in case my weakness made me lose consciousness, someone would find me and help me sooner or later.

I detested the anxiety that gripped me from my throat down to my legs whenever I forced myself to go out and try to walk around the city as I’d always done or when, full of apprehension, I dared to get on a train to go farther away. I couldn’t define this uneasiness clearly — it was a sort of dizziness, and doubtlessly it also depended on the fragility like a cyst embedded in my body, caused by anemia and semi-fasting –, but the sensation was an inner chasm, like falling into a void inside, a visceral eddy whirling from my unsteady steps up to my head and making me lose my balance.

I tried hard to fight against this anxiety, inventing rituals to exorcise it with childish formulas: keeping the house keys in my pocket so they’d be ready for a sudden, hurried return home; breaking up a long route into the number of stations that would allow me to go from one “safe” place to another, like stones to cross a stream; going out with someone who reassured me. But for the last of these exorcisms, no one felt right: it didn’t matter who I was with, I was afraid of collapsing while the person or friend accompanying me was by my side, and I preferred not to go out rather than trust myself to someone who might be alarmed by my crises. Only my partner and my mother had the doubtful privilege of accompanying me, though I didn’t reveal just how precarious, frightened and insecure I felt even to them.

With him next to me I felt calmer. Day by day, slowly, I went a bit further, and it felt like I was on the road to rehabilitation after an accident that had kept me from using my legs. With her, on the contrary, something made me nervous: I didn’t like needing my mother as if I were a child again, I felt insecure in a way I don’t remember ever having felt. Needing her presence to take up a normal life after months of extreme weakness and long bed stays; needing her presence – it was enough for her to be where I was – to risk doing things as simple as taking a shower or a bath, to calm the obsessive fear of not being able to do things on my own. It annoyed me, this regaining the capacity to move around only at the price of staying within clearly defined boundaries, “shut up in the prose” of a daily life totally different from the one I’d only recently led, from the life I desired.

And then, to complicate everything, fears also crept around the house where I was trying hard to find peace. I had to admit the plain and simple truth: I was afraid of being alone, of being abandoned … I wasn’t sufficient to myself — I, who had wanted to make independence the cornerstone of my existence. If I’d been complete in myself I could have gone anywhere without losing the thread of my wanderings. Instead, there I was with my head empty, unsteady on an insecure body.

It took me years to recover, to inhabit the indoors and outdoors again. In those tremulous days I scattered words like crumbs that could keep me from getting lost while I explored the vertigo. Along the way there were no dragons or witches, but myriads of mirrors, living pictures I entered with soul and body, confronting those who inhabited them, talking about them and with them.

Since then I’ve slowly and patiently woven an imaginary dialogue with my mother, without her knowing anything about it. Even now, talking with her is the heart of a perennial agitation, at times as light as a quiver in gesture or voice, at other times as devastating as an earthquake, and frightening. A dialogue never interrupted, even when I began to walk more steadily again. A dialogue always enriched, becoming a well-guarded instrument for dealing with all my other relationships with women. A dialogue never, however, made explicit to her, though our co-presence in life has remained intense and our everyday exchanges frequent.

Today, touched by the passing of the years, by my aging and hers, I find gestures and habits that belong both to her and to me, like a tendency to fall down in the street. This happens to both of us, to me because I still run around ceaselessly, to her for the same reason but aggravated by fragility and greater distraction.

And I now calmly accept an inter-dependence I’ll never unwind, based on differences that are increasingly clearer to me and similarities that surprise me less and less. In writing they are easier to confess, for something flows more fluently, because it is free of an imperative that was (and still is?) both visceral and political, that of being – or in any case becoming – different from my mother.

But the challenge isn’t so much confession — we are all too used to that. Instead, it’s a question of succeeding in “grasping what lies quiet in my inmost self, the living thing which, if captured, spreads over all these pages and gives them soul”.¹ I couldn’t say it better, and I am grateful to the woman who wrote these and so many other words.

 

****

 

A hairdresser’s mistake, and here I am with a head of red hair. My own, until now a mix of blond and white against a brown background, has disappeared under an artificial copper tone with highlights, like my mother’s natural color. It feels like a predestined mistake — or better, a Freudian slip, considering that I was the one who asked for copper highlights –, just when I am starting to write about her, or rather about us and the way we swing back and forth between agreement and detachment, solidarity and contrast.

No relationship in my life is as complicated as the one between my mother and me. It’s always been like this, from when as a child I would follow her around with a cloth in my hand to help her with the housework or inexpertly snip off a sleeve of her new coat to “disjust” it.

Eager to help, taking pains so that I’d feel indispensable, almost never doubting that my being near was precious and even essential for her, I followed behind and learned from her. But from a certain point on — and when? maybe already with my sister’s birth, with the precocious detachment from the position of being the pampered one to that of caregiver — I tried to anticipate her, to imagine her needs and satisfy them. Hers, and afterwards those of others.

I understood years later that it was from her I’d learned all this solicitude, with its sometimes perverse effects. With the perennial willingness to help and dependence on the rhythms and interests of others that were the dowry of the Good Girl, Good Daughter, Goody Good. The deviations and rebellions that have followed have only chipped the surface, without ever shattering, this little person set on pleasing and obliging. And the primary referent, modestly hidden behind few demands and many expectations, was always the same: my mother.

She, seemingly tame but actually harboring the spirit of a wildcat. Even her name evoked a flaming potency that could perhaps be seen in the many colors of her face and the red of her hair, or in the passion that would unexpectedly break out, a magmatic energy that troubled me. I suspected it was latent even when composure, serenity or gaiety prevailed, and to me it seemed that it was hard for her to find a form for those household cataclysms.

I was alarmed, quietly: where should I find refuge in the moments when family harmony was shattered? Too close and I’d burn my wings; too far and I’d be out in the cold, in a bloodless but intelligent light. The only solution was to swing back and forth, pushing the pendulum more violently in order to glimpse other horizons and then come back to find her again, before once more pushing myself further away, strengthened by the exercise by also afraid of the risk of pulling too hard at the cord.

Yet I pulled at the cord continually, a cord made elastic with constant, stubborn exercise: I want to go forward, farther than her, but pulling her along with me. Or was she the one who didn’t want to free me from our cord, and maybe already harbored the suspicion that I would leave? So much the more as in later years, almost resigned, she was to express the doubt that she had “lost me”. This I took badly, as an unfair lack of appreciation of the constant loyalty I’d shown her, invigorated by criticism but always able to overcome our differences.

I often wonder if we all recognize this pendular motion, all the daughters of our century of emancipation, all the mothers we wish were more mobile. I imagined myself to be a traveler rather than a custodian. I was to be a woman who would travel many roads without bothering too much about returning to the base. I claimed that I’d never really grow attached or rooted in one place, I’d be able to transplant myself anywhere and everywhere.

 

It was during the period of my fears when, jolted by a first experience of psychoanalysis in which stormy dreams and lapidary phrases piled up, I was startled one night by the vision of a nest of rather repellent creatures — worm-shaped whitish Mennottoli. Men-not-to-leave, as I pronounced it to the analyst. Men go away, when on the contrary they shouldn’t leave, even less so abandon. Sometime later it occurred to me that this cryptic word could have sounded like a death warrant, Men-not-to-live, rather than an entreaty or hope. What was certain was that in my eyes the women who had gone before me in my family lived a contradictory life, identified in relationships they appeared to support with all their might, but in fact waiting for something else. Impatient and resigned. Their protests and proposals to husbands and children always seemed to bounce off walls that were still solid, though cracked, or else to fall into a vacuum of distraction. In the best of cases (like mine in adolescence) there were interminable discussions or complicated clashes, when straining the perimeters of bourgeois good manners pushed a little farther back the boundaries of what was permitted.

Years later, my mother said quite candidly that she’d learned a lot from her daughters. Now I ask myself what our reciprocal gain really was. We swapped clothes, mother and two daughters, we exchanged ideas — but already as a teen I’d have liked my footsteps to reach places where she’d never arrived, and I didn’t want her in those territories, where the risk of being lost was mingled with the pleasure of growing up different. Different from her, as perhaps every daughter wants to see herself when she tries to give herself a woman’s shape … but why, then, the unease, the sense of betrayal towards her, as if I had abandoned her in a No Man’s Land? Did the compensations, almost like a corvée, patch things up and keep open a channel where she and I could live peacefully without shattering the aquarium?

In a kitchen I remember better than any other room in the house where I lived from about the age of thirteen, I started to accumulate recipes, passing quickly from egg custard and a well-prepared afternoon tea to succulent full-course meals. Discriminating purchases were followed by filets in piecrust, raspberry charlottes, flans and soufflés for dinners prepared for my parents’ friends. Who knows how I managed to combine all those deliciously harmonious dishes with a growing perception of bitterness, of anxious nausea provoked by the inconsistencies that could be seen clearly in our common gestures, despite all our efforts.

From books and glossy magazines, and not from my mother, I tried to learn the very bourgeois art of gilding the pill. From her, instead, I sensed a deep-seated apathy about performing everyday tasks, a sudden detachment from her role, a half-hidden distraction below her slightly agitated industriousness. Her throbbing restlessness, along with the disappointed fatigue that sometimes seized her, was an involuntary but highly potent magnet that called me back “home”.

So I would leave and then come back to reassure – reassure myself.

To patch things up, or break away?

She rebelled, but only to a certain point. I delved, but also only to a certain point.

I saw myself as resilient, capable of extraordinary feats. Gradually, piece by piece, I composed a bizarre projection: from my thin body, lit up by a beacon of tension and wishful thinking, emanated a small heroic figure that would not have to retreat. She, my mother, still seemed young to me and still beautiful, yet marred and marked by subtle cracks that were not wrinkles, but traces of uncertainty.

Back there, in the presumptuous age of adolescence, there originated a misunderstanding I didn’t manage to clear up until only a few years ago: the idea that I had become stronger and she weaker. Many years and many mistakes later, I understand that she had her maternal strength, her courageous positivity, while I had my weakness and fear pressing on me to slow me down and reattach my head to my neck. And, above all, I know better than before that her courage never failed. Hers was a dignity without rhetoric, and over the years it grew even more tenacious instead of fading with the frailties of old age — a moral and physical courage beneath which I can spy an ancient, earthy root, with no frills about it.

Fragile as we both know we are now, can we help one another without being frightened by our mutual dependence?

 

****

 

My mother’s legacy is generosity. Or better, a mixture of kindness and caring that even today leads her to give unstintingly of herself. An expenditure of time and energy, money and material goods that she offers to others without hesitation, as she always has, independently of age or any personal advantage. The best definition of this gift is abnegation: that noblest of feminine gifts, which in my fifties childhood was emphasized everywhere we turned, at school and in narratives. To young women like us it seemed a millstone around our necks, obliging us to deny ourselves in the name of the common good (meaning, obviously, others).

For me, the angel of the hearth was a ghost who went before me, inviting me to take responsibility for everything and everyone — as she did, I learned later. A disturbing presence, pointing to a dangerous road.

Because the care my mother gave to the world had repercussions I could sense with twofold apprehension, for her and for myself. The first and most obvious was the deep-seated fatigue that from a certain point on during my childhood she began showing in indirect ways that made them even more disturbing for me, who, like all daughters, never missed all the innuendos of a maternal gesture or word. This was an abnormal tiredness, because it was deeper than what I could see in other adults busy with their daily affairs, and above all it was more corrosive. When I think about it today, I’d say it held almost lethal doses of discontent, even if the antibodies of her upbringing and social conditioning allowed her to carry on without poisoning her blood fatally.

On the contrary, the context apparently gratified her role of patching up and supporting. Self-renunciation did not mean self-denial, maternal rhetoric still seemed to say in the mid-1900s. Then came the feminist shake-up — and with it the mass culture that demanded emancipation and individual gratification, encouraging women to satisfy ambitions beyond the domestic threshold and carve out a place for themselves in the world without bothering too much about mending the rips – that singed the wings of the angel of the hearth.

But she had shown me, in so many ways that made up everyday life and without any complacent heroism, how precious her caring was: with the old people in the family, with her gaiety in the company of children, with the beauty of the homes she enjoyed decorating — even if we weren’t moving, she kept us busy shoving furniture around to create frequent changes of scene, to make the house more beautiful. And there is no doubt that all this had a cost for her, because she wavered between playing the part well, being a convinced interpreter of that music, and the false notes caused by irritability. She wanted her music to be a shared song, like those sung by the whole family on our car trips, but in everyday life she was more and more alone.

Recognition for all her exertions should have produced gratitude in the family circle. But from a certain point on her continual activity began to meet with indifference and in some of us even impatience. Hypersensitive as I was, I sensed these feelings with great alarm, because their echo was repeated inside me.

Her generosity, her unstinted giving of herself, held a disruptive element, deeply buried but infiltrated everywhere in the ground she walked on with me by her side: a sense of self so desperately tied to relationship, to the way others responded to her actions and desires, that any denial or distraction on the other’s part caused a small landslide in the construction of her existence, or a large tear in the constantly re-mended fabric of the family and the surrounding environment.

Intuiting these risks thanks to antennas grown sensitive to any interruption in the transmission between her and all the others, I had convinced myself that various ingredients had to be added to the food that could make us grow: mouthfuls that would please everyone, flavors that blended the traditional and the exotic. No more bitter mouthfuls for women and daughters. We would spit out anything that went to our stomach, whatever we were supposed to digest and chew up to offer to the others, the little ones we raised.

And proudly, “Don’t be like pelicans!” she told us, impatient with all rhetoric, even and especially if it involved maternal sacrifice.

Altruism plus evasion, that was my magic potion for keeping the invasion of the maternal at arm’s length, for freeing myself without betraying. But the potion led to a dangerous sensation of omnipotence: being untiring and limitless meant being like her and better than her in the domestic world, like him and better than him in the wilderness. But in later years all of us who fell into that trap realized that this omnipotence was a ridiculous band-aid over the age-old female fatigue, passed down from hand to hand, with the added weight of walking in the male world. With footsteps made to the rhythm of the same old song – “mine” always comes after all the rest, made perhaps even more toxic by the perverse idea that it was freely given and not extorted, and just for that reason we should feel gratified.

 

                                                                                                   ****

 

Thinking back, I see that adolescence was an exercise in disappointment. Though I wasn’t brought up according to the rhetoric of the ‘good family’, as a child mine seemed to represent a positive sharing of affection and projects, an expansive nucleus that attracted others less fortunate than we into the warmth of its orbit. When the centrifugal movement started — a movement I created without meeting strong opposition, though I was wrapped in covert parental fears for my endangered virtue — the tensions were amassing on the horizon.

And there, in those years of complication, I discovered how great and heavy with consequence could be the gap between illusion or appearance and shared truths. I was losing intimacy with both my parents because I had my secrets, but above all because I had discovered that they had secrets just as risky, secrets that weren’t to be examined or revealed.

It was impossible to avoid exploring them, not to go behind the wings of the stage-play: the subterranean alarm was perceptible, even inescapable, though at times I was restrained by the embarrassment of discovering the adults playing a part in an improbable performance. There were even moments when I felt ashamed in the face of clear evidence of bad faith.

And yet those exercises in disappointment — long before any critical reading about the death of the family, before any collective contestation, so that the reading and intellectual acquisitions that came along years later seemed mainly a confirmation of a vast, widespread disruption that underscored the impossibility of continuing to play the same parts — seem precious to me when I look back now. The whole family took part in the performance, with several generations of relatives and spouses. But if the roles were in crisis, if neither the leads nor the supporting actors believed in the play any longer (more than what they said, what counted were their gestures and tones, the absences, gaps and unmet expectations), then one could or, better, must experiment and forge ahead without any net, searching for the thread hung over the void, tying a rope around the waist of those behind us at the most challenging passes.

Reckless I certainly was, in the exchange of roles.

The most frequent exchange soon became the one between my mother and me, with my younger sister playing the third pole of the loving triangle that is still mobile and attractive to this day. We were favored by the wind that was blowing back then: after 1968 a young mother could dress like a girl in a way not possible before. And wearing the same short and colorful jersey dresses, the same longuette skirts, with long knit or leather coats instead of the furs sported by proper ladies, confused not only appearances. It revealed a profoundly shared desire to leave roles behind, and at the same time a deep-rooted uncertainty about how to play the traditional parts of mother and daughter.

This break-down of roles into more mobile parts, personifications always interchangeable, allowed me to pass without being overly obsessed — a little bit daughter but also mother, a bit father and also sister, and later companion and also lover and then a bit of everything and of feminine and masculine, old and young…

It might seem dangerous to family and psychotherapeutic orthodoxy, but today I’m convinced that it was on the whole a favorable opportunity. Demanding, like frequent flying in stormy skies, with temporary blackouts. Like tightrope walking, dizzying at times, but without foot-chains or trying on Cinderella shoes for fit.

Unfit, all of us were, a little. Our struggle, and at the same time our chance, was to escape — if we so desired — from the Great Fiction.

How much effort did it cost, that passage? How many of us, after years of the breathless delirium of omnipotence we inaugurated when we were young — and often already tired – are still haunted by it in our late middle age, close to the tiredness of old age?

 

And what life would my mother have led if she had been born twenty years later? This isn’t an idle question. It was posed far more dramatically by a woman born ten years after me, the director Alina Marazzi, in her documentary film Un’ora sola ti vorrei [For just one hour I’d like to have you]. Here, from the perspective of a troubled and loving daughter and using a disconcerting montage of audio-visual and written materials, she demystifies the story of the family of Liseli, a young mother in the early seventies who sacrifices her life because she is crushed by the contradictory desires of fulfillment through apparent domestic completion and the hunger for freedom that she feels inside and around her. Twenty years later Liseli might not have been so alone, so fragile: she could have shared with other women her feelings of inadequacy, of discontent, her uncertain but urgent instinct for forms of happiness not envisioned by middle-class codes.

My mother was still very young, beautiful and full of life when, unnerved by my own growth, I tried to orient myself in those years by following constellations outside the family. I saw Lucy and her diamonds in the sky and on earth my feet trod in crowded open spaces with others, where together we tried to prove ourselves, to demonstrate, to show that we were unfettered women who had escaped the order that had put irons, strings and nets around the women who came before us. And my mother was on the other side, even if we came from the same house. But that house was shaking and hers was the most uncomfortable position: guard and prisoner, guarantor without any power, Cinderella going from an anachronistic hearth to palace celebrations and then back to her confinement. She was uncomfortable, more hesitant than before. It seemed to me that she could feel the flimsiness and partiality of the evasions her social milieu offered.

This wasn’t only a matter for bourgeois, well-to-do mothers and sulkily rebellious daughters, for in the novels of Elena Ferrante we find the same visceral struggle, as necessary as breath itself, in a working-class neighborhood of Naples from the Fifties to the Seventies. A presumptuous restlessness had convinced us baby boomers that we would interpret life better and more, far more lucidly than our parents. And above all better than mother, who seemed so full of contradictions in her willingness to recite a script she no longer believed in, but which the show of passing on a “proper upbringing” to her daughters was based on.

How angry it made us! Whether hidden or loudly proclaimed, our impatience was aimed at her, because that was the bond hardest to undo: she was the one whose job it was to sew our uniforms. And it was with her that the game between conformity and differentiation was played.

 

                                                                                                           ****

 

Attractive in her shy spontaneity, charming as a girl in full bloom, when mother dressed up and put on women’s make-up she seemed to acquire a darker, more definite outline, as if she was preparing for a masked ball, a costume party as we called it. It’s not by chance, then, that one of the fondest memories I have of her skill in cheerful mothering is the carnival costumes she made for us, different every year. Perhaps prophetic, and certainly perfectly fitting, was the Peter Pan costume she made me out of green felt. It had a top with fringes like leaves, boots, a feathered cap and brown tights. I even had a small knife tied to my belt, just like the Disney Peter. Thin as I was, with my mop of cropped blond hair, happy to impersonate the elusive Peter, I was a little girl dressed up as a magic boy, a being not clearly defined but wiser and braver than flesh and blood children. I could fly away and lead everyone behind me, into the distance.

A few years later this neutral magic seemed to me to represent a concrete way to escape the destiny of a female body that didn’t guarantee me a safe profile. I’d forgotten that Never-Never Land never existed: we can’t escape the crocodiles ticking away time, and malign hooks clutch at our flesh as well as our minds. Better to stay human, fragile in the flesh as in the spirit. Much better to fly in the imagination, to dust off desire and not try to perform risky exchanges in the body’s reality. I didn’t come to understand this easily — for a long time the ethereal call of the fairies was irresistible, while real women seemed prosaic. With their solid and liquid weight they were even untrustworthy: they passed themselves off as strong, but they couldn’t have been more vulnerable… why let yourself be fooled and lose your magic sparkle?

If a young daughter explored her new woman’s body with a group of friends, if she followed their naive advice in choosing a gynecologist, a contraceptive, a partner, and she kept all this scheming hidden from her mother, which of the two held the end of the tangled skein of the body’s first glimpse of adult passions, its fascinating and perilous stretching out to erotic exchange? To know as much or even more than one’s mother was becoming a common experience among the young women of the sixties.

For me, was it perhaps a strategy to protect us both from disappointment, from my challenge to grow beyond? And at the same time to know more, as much more as I could, about everything, seemed a resource for making my own way. Then I would turn around and draw her towards me, to lead her out of the house that in my eyes was becoming like quicksand. But at what price would I turn around? And from what, in the end, or from whom was I saving my mother? What presumption, to turn the myth upside down, inventing a Persephone who saved Demeter . . .

Over the course of time, above all the time spent in analysis, I learned that my strength lay in my tendency to stand outside myself and observe myself as object. Perhaps my mother lacked this double perspective, which might have worked as a small lever to pry open the locks and the things left unsaid? But you can’t give yourself this double perspective by yourself. It is the fruit of a way of relating that my generation has experienced from the time we were young, until it became a vitally essential organ for us.

This double perspective is what I wish I could have offered her when I was younger, and what I still hold out to her. For this reason I’ve written about her, and about us.

 

 

Postscript

 

“Under the Skin of the She-bear” and “That Precarious Gait” are meanderings that I’ve traced in the heavily mined but fertile field of autobiography. This is a field I explored over ten years ago when I wrote «La gente sottile», a piece I contributed to the four memoirs that make up Baby Boomers. Dagli anni Cinquanta ai cinquant’anni (Giunti, 2003), a book conceived as a group and written individually.

Ten years later I wrote “Under the Skin of the She-bear”, republished here after first coming out in the magazine «Lo Straniero» in May, 2014. Stimulated by a discussion with Bia Sarasini and Silvia Neonato about the many threads that connect women to beauty and its troublesome powers, I took up the idea for a sort of telltale game presented in the group show «In the Box»². The script was hidden in a box decorated with fur, flowers and eye powder, along with snapshots and objects that served as examples for an ironic display of the female “beautiful body”. The game aimed at hiding and at the same time highlighting the most dramatic and delicate experiences in the relationship between body and person, just as cosmetics serve to mask and at the same time to exhibit femininity, with all the ambiguities this definition holds for every woman.

This back-and-forth movement between modest reserve as a defense of intimacy and subversive laying bare – an oscillation that characterized the generations born in the middle of the twentieth century and that seems to me still to constitute a complicated blend of liberty and conformity –, led me directly to the question of how women observe each other, and from there to that first experience, the one between mother and daughter, when this self-mirroring takes shape and nestles into the folds of the psyche.

So the third autobiographical piece, “That Precarious Gait”, investigates the bond between mother and daughter as a necessary stage of an inquiry struggling up a ridge still — and maybe always – arduous, at the same time as it is unavoidable.

Like the two former ones, this more recent autobiographical piece was born as an open exchange, stimulated by intimate conversations as well as by more open political and literary ones. The idea of making it public came also and mainly from two much younger women, Laura Marzi and Alessandra Pigliaru, with whom in recent times, as with other women in the past, I have shared the need to talk and write about it frankly and truthfully, insofar as words on the page allow.

I recount the relationship between my mother and me, the two of us in flesh and bone and thought. I tell what we’ve given one another, how we’ve mirrored, attended to and ignored one another from the time I was born until today, when I am over sixty years old and she over eighty. Time is a fundamental variant in our relationship. I am happy that life has given us such a long course to travel together and still allows us to project it into the future, to shape and accept it, at times to endure it, as we’ve done up to now.To help myself I’ve sporadically reread the notes I took for a few years after sessions in analysis and I’ve pulled out family photographs, each time noting the gap between the ideal image I held in my memory and the strange, opaque and detailed truthfulness of those old photos. I’ve read essays and novels, both Italian and foreign, and particularly those by Elena Ferrante in which she writes about a mother and a daughter, that is, almost everywhere. The writer who publishes under the name of Elena Ferrante seems to be a few years older than I am and to come from a different social and geographical background. Yet the things we share are greater than our differences, important as they are. Writing about feelings between daughters and mothers, she has been able to examine in depth the loving pain, the mutual anxieties and almost unmentionable emotions women feel, but cannot always recognize and do not always want to tell.I am in debt to her, as I am for other reasons to Mara Selvini, Antonio Di Ciaccia and Lella Ravasi Bellocchio. They, too, have given me instruments in which words, emotions, evocation and intelligence combine to reach more light. The shadow of the maternal, as many women call it, remains treasured deep inside us; but every now and then it is good, and good for us, to explore it in bright light and with the right equipment.

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¹Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia, edizioni e/o, Rome, 2003-2007, p. 68.

²The show, held in May-June 2013 at the «Lanificio cucina» in Rome, presented twenty-five “creative boxes”, examples of micro-art and micro-publishing by the same number of artists, writers and photographers invited to participate by the Gallery/workshop “Margini e Segni” of Stefania Fabri and Maurizio Caminito.

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Also, read Under the Skin of the She-bear. The Ephemeral Gift of Beauty by Roberta Mazzanti, translated by Brenda Porster, and published in The Antonym.

Under the Skin of the She-bear. The Ephemeral Gift of Beauty — Roberta Mazzanti

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