Autobiography

2. “... I therefore tell you that her many sins are forgiven, for she has loved much. He who is forgiven little loves little.”

I do not begin to narrate my life with my own words, but with those of Jesus. This is in obedience to a wish expressed by you, a wish I do not challenge, although, as I see it, this story is not very useful or, most of all, very pleasant for either me or you. You are a master of the spirit; if, therefore, you feel it is right for me to make my life known to you, it is a sign that it is right. Let us go forward, then, with sincerity, humility, and patience....

Disentangling the thread of my life—and disentangling it backwards—will be a comfort and a sorrow for me because along the thread, like beads on a rosary, I shall find joy, pain, guilt, forgiveness, hope; and the black stones of sorrow will be much more numerous than the golden ones of joy, just as the gray stones of failings will be much more abundant than the white ones of goodness. Never mind, I repeat. Thus, taking stock of my existence, I shall utterly destroy that residue of human pride which is so slow to die in hearts—worse than a weed—and always tries to regain a foothold for its roots and stems.

You can be sure, though, that the stocktaking will be sincere, as ruthless towards myself as a surgeon’s knife on diseased flesh, and I trust in your goodness that you will not cast me from your sight, but repeat to me the words of the divine Forgiver, noting that I, too, have loved much, without ever measuring how much sacrifice my loving might require of me, and thus, for my generosity, which trampled on everything out of love, including itself and its human welfare, God will forgive me much.

“In guilt I was born, and in sin my mother conceived me,” states the psalm. This is the lot of all born of woman, and the guilt, though cleansed by baptism, remains hidden within us, prompting the return of evil as long as life is in us. Like certain horrible diseases overcome by successful treatment, but never completely wiped out and always quick to re-emerge if not continually held in check with a thousand attentions.

I was born on March 14, 1897 in Caserta. A strongly-opposed birth from the outset, and my father had already resigned himself to weep over my little dead body, condemned before seeing the light. My poor father! I never deliberately caused him sorrow, and this is my comfort, the comfort which makes me lift my eyes on high, seeking my dear father in the peace of God. But I cost him tears at my arrival and at his departure. Then I was to have died, and he wept, whereas, when he was close to death, I was already so ill that I distressed him to the point of hastening his death!

I was to have died at birth, according to the doctors. However, although left without care as an already lifeless being, I recovered strength and breath on my own and cast forth my first wail.

I was not looked after by Mother. No, life in common between my mother and me ended the moment I was born. It was not perpetuated in successive months through the sweet bond of food which is milk, which is blood, which is life transfused from mother to child. My wet nurse was a hireling.

Some physiologists say that the suckling creature, just as he absorbs illnesses through the wet nurse’s milk, can also take on moral tendencies. It is an opinion accepted by many and rejected by others, as the view that the land in which we are born impresses upon us an indelible character is alternately accepted and rejected.

I won’t go into the pros and cons of this. I shall say only that, as far as I’m concerned, it is not indifferent that I was born of Lombard parents, in Terra di Lavoro, in sunny, festive, fertile Campania, rich in virtues and defects like few other lands, and even less indifferent is the fact that, if only for a few months, I sucked the milk of a woman from down there and, into the bargain, a woman who was the very image of those lands in everything regarding wild, unbridled passionateness.

A tiny thing, just a chick with her eyes newly opened, I had to suck, digest, sleep to the sound, rhythm, and smashing of the wildest tarantellas, accompanied by castanets and tambourine.... And my mother, in spite of her authoritarianism, had to keep silent and let her go on, for Teresa, my wet nurse, said that if she did not sing, play, and dance, she got gloomy, and her milk suffered as a result. I believe Teresa was the only person who managed to assert herself with my mother!

And there would hardly have been a problem if all had been limited to dancing and playing. A poor chick, I was by then accustomed to that perpetual fair. But there were the walks—always for the milk, naturally! And they were not Platonic walks, unfortunately.

Immediately after baptism—which took place with great pomp and ceremony I don’t remember exactly how many days following my birth, though certainly not too quickly, for we were waiting for mother to get better—Teresa had undertaken her strolls with the “little one,” for the health of the “little one.” Poor little one! If she had been able to speak, she would have said some rather strange things!

Teresa would go down Giovan Battista Vico Street in grand style with me in her arms, passing in front of the Royal Palace, speeding along St. Nicholas Road on down towards the country. In search of air and sun? No, of much more illicit things. Sure that Mother would not surprise her because she did not pay so much attention, sure that Father would not find her out because he was busy with the regiment, Teresa abandoned herself to her instincts as a rustic Eve.

And here, if I had been born in the Middle Ages, legend could be interwoven. I was laid down amidst the furrows of the rustling grain, on the ground now utterly ablaze, under the torrid sun of Terra di Lavoro; and there I remained one or two hours, accompanied only by the green lizards, bees, butterflies, and birds, which, along with the rustling grain, would sing me a lullaby. Vipers, stray dogs, and other beasts might come to harm me; the blazing sun might kill me—such a tender thing was I. But nothing ever happened to me. The angel of God was keeping watch over me, veiling me from an excess of sunlight with his heavenly wings and putting everything harmful to flight with his appearance. Only an immense hunger remained, for the milk, with that life and its consequences, had disappeared, and I was fattened like a chicken with boiled corn, crushed fruit, and similar delicacies which would horrify a pediatrician. I would return home screaming just the same, but, when all was said and done, I was not dying of hunger.

That went on for four months, from April to the end of July; then Mother was finally placed on her guard by a good coachman who had heard my desperate cries and discovered me in the middle of a field of tomatoes. Maternal rage, the wet nurse’s rage, and the rage of the doctor, who found the woman to be close to giving birth to an illegitimate child. And I, starving and howling, was entrusted to two little she-goats, much more maternal towards me than Teresa.

At times I think the few drops of milk sucked from that lustful woman left their mark of passionateness upon me. And it’s a good thing I sucked just a few drops! It’s true that I, having been born of the most placid among men and the most frigid of women, have quite a different psyche, and if the goodness of God and the religious education received in one of the best schools had not served to modify my nature, I might have been an unbridled wretch. But it is likewise true that this passionateness, deposited in me by fortuitous coincidences such as the land where I was born and the woman who fed me so badly or reaching me from remote origins by descent from some ancestor of mine endowed with the same character as I have, was and is the cause of not a few struggles and sufferings for me.

The two natures, shall we say, were in me: the one inherited from my parents—a measured, placid, methodical nature, entirely Lombard—came up against the one absorbed from the southern sun, air, and milk. The one was chilly and closed; the other, ardent and expansive—always struggling against each other, for the former held sway over the mind and was domineering (increasingly domineering because it was supported and continually augmented by family training), and the latter exerted pressure on the heart and was a real hunger, thirst, nostalgia for affection and love, a need to love and be loved with passion, faithfulness, and dedication. I could say I was like a volcano with its slopes covered with snow which conceals its sides seething with fire under a layer of ice. Sometimes, at intervals, the heart’s fire, excessively repressed, exploded in sudden, uncontainable eruptions which shook, reddened, and melted the icy external snow. But then the iron hand of upbringing and a natural shyness, an inborn bashfulness, and embarrassment over my tendency covered me with circumspection once again to the point of appearing chilly, indifferent, calm. Calm!

But let us go back to childhood.

It is said that characters are outlined from the very first days of life. Well, I immediately displayed one side—I might say the most essential one—of my character: faithfulness to all that I love.

Teresa had given me very little! Miserly, poisonous drops of a milk that was no longer such, dangerous neglect on the clods of country earth—she had upset my organs, psyche, sleep, and digestion with her restless frenzy as an immodest woman ever perturbed by her thirst for illicit loves and by the fear of being surprised by her husband or employers. And yet I, with my little newborn heart, felt love for her—a rudimentary love like that of a puppy towards the female providing him with food and warmth, but still a love. And I was faithful to that first love of mine. With Teresa driven away, I refused every other human breast and was close to death by starvation because of this stubborn rejection with desperate wrath.... I preferred to surrender to the labored bleating of the two she-goats.... Did I perhaps already sense that in my sad life I would be comforted by God alone and, after God, by animals and things created by eternal God? Who knows! It is certain that, if there were very few decent contacts between me and my fellow men and I had much to suffer at the hands of my peers and little from which to draw comfort, from the humble lesser creatures, from the flowers, from the grass, from the sun, from the stars, from the sea, God’s testimony, from nature, His poem, I have always drawn strength and peace.

I remained at Caserta until my eighteenth month; my father was then transferred with the regiment to which he belonged to Faenza. From the southern sun to the ice of the Romagnas! I, who had, I may say, always drawn life in my first four months from the sun, which swaddled me in splendors and kept me alive, from the sun, which was my wet nurse.... At one and the same time I lost that sun and my two little she-goats, and they say my grief-stricken search for them all was truly moving.

I here offered the second proof of faithfulness in my affections. I drank no more milk. My little stomach no longer wanted to digest milk which did not come from a goat, and since there was not a trace of a goat in Faenza, no more milk. Punishments, allurements—all was useless, for this was not a caprice of mine. It was a physical need which prevented me from digesting heavy cow’s milk.

I languished on account of the cold.... I always suffered from it, to the point of being stunted in my growth. I languished over the loss of my favorite food. And I languished because of an excessively rigid upbringing which was already hovering over me at such a tender age.

My grandmother—my mother’s mother, my angel—had left us to return to her husband, brokenhearted over the loss of a favorite son slain by meningitis in forty-eight hours. And I remained with Father and Mother.

My father was my protector, my sweetheart, the one who understood me and made me happy. But my father, amidst the maneuvers, exercises, and duties of the barracks, was away nearly the whole day. I would see him a few short moments at noon, for in the morning, when he went to work, I was still asleep; in the evening, when he finally came back home and I might have enjoyed his company, I had to be in bed. Only on Sunday was Father mine for the whole afternoon, and Sundays were thus always sunny for me, even if water or snow turned Faenza into a Nordic country.

My mother, however, was always home. Already with a liver ailment, she was like the great majority of liver patients.... A teacher before getting married, she had remained the teacher, with all the discipline, authoritarianism, and pedantry this profession possesses. A perfect woman in everything regarding her duties as a wife and homemaker, and even as woman of society, she did not soften her perfection in duty with that sweetness in love which makes living together so pleasurable. She was and is duty.

I believe all those to whom she has done good—for she has certainly done good—her husband, myself, her mother, her surviving brother, her in-laws, her employees, and friends, would have preferred to receive from her much less of all that she has given us out of duty, if only she had supplemented it with a bit of loving indulgence. Indulgence and she are, however, two irreconcilable terms, two perpetual enemies. I believe she feels diminished by loving and being indulgent, I mean by loving openly without being tormented or tormenting by placing hateful, repellent gags upon her charity as a daughter, mother, wife, relative, friend, and employer. To such a character you should add the irritability proper to victims of liver disease, then quite serious, and estimate the precise magnitude of my mother’s manner of behavior with all.

I have known teachers who were indulgent, as I have known people with serious liver ailments who were gentle—but they are exceptions. The rule is quite different, and Mother came within the rule. I hardly managed to distinguish objects, could barely toddle on my baby legs, and with difficulty pronounced my first words, but everything was already regulated with a discipline in comparison to which that of my boarding school struck me as—a carnival. And yet it was a strict school. I had to distinguish between good and evil—and I was not even two! I always seemed to be on the point of plunging into an abyss, and I trembled and trembled and trembled. Woe betide you if you make a mistake!

But even if I did not err, there was always “woe.” Had Idropped a toy? Woe! Had I made noise moving a chair? Woe! Did I utter a little shriek as a jest? Woe! Did I want to go down to the garden to stretch my legs? Woe! Did I want to climb into the arms of Father, of the orderly who was so fond of me, of the serving woman who was an angel, so much of an angel that God wanted her in his paradise? Woe! Had I asked Mother for a kiss? Woe! Would I have preferred to get into Mother’s lap like all children and not remain in front of her like a pupil being punished, with difficulty repeating French words which I had to learn to mumble together with the Italian ones? Woe! Did I beg not to be given the milk that made me ill? Woe! Always woe! The doctor considered the milk and prohibited it. May God grant him peace for this compassionate intercession of his! But for all the rest the “woe” remained.

Fortunately, there was Father. As soon as he could, he took me with him to the barracks to see the big fine horses I liked so much, over the country roads, and opened my mind to beauty and to the praise of God, Who, he said, had made everything for our joy. Or he had me play in the garden.

I was crazy about my father. I told him everything and asked him everything, and he listened to it all. He would respond to all my “why’s” exhaustively and patiently, and that was no small affair, for from my first days on I was a sharp and pensive observer and would not remain at ease until I felt I had been answered with truthfulness and precision. I learned so much from my father that study was never wearisome for me later on. Everything: history, geography, botany, zoology, the laws regulating the movement of the stars and waters, the art embellishing our cities, our churches, and our galleries—I assimilated it all without effort, like a lovely fable, by way of my father’s words.

He never treated me like a child as regards intelligence, but was a supremely good master. I felt sure with him and trusted him, his words, his affection, his understanding.

As a little girl I began to understand clearly what “God is a Father” means just by looking at my father. I obtained the measure of the goodness, knowledge, and love of God the Father by comparing my earthly father to my Heavenly Father. And I have loved God because I have grasped what it means to be the Father.

My father never treated me like a child as regards intelligence, and this annoyed my mother, who had a different conception of education. But, vice versa, even when I had become a woman, and an adult woman, he always treated me like a child as regards purity. What respect for me! What care so that nothing might darken the soul of his Maria! My poor father! My first deep love!

I had an attachment to him superior to my tender age. I would always say to him, “I’ll always be with you!” and he would reply, “But you’ll get married and then go with your husband” (from the outset spouses represented something regal and celestial for me!). But I would respond, “No, I’ll marry you and be with you alone,” and he, alluding to his premature baldness, which was already thinning out his beautiful curly black hair, would laughingly say, “But when you’re old enough to marry, I’ll be bald and you won’t love me any more.” I would answer with a pirouette, a leap, a tighter hug: “As a wedding present I’ll give you a wig”—which I would pronounce “wih”—“and they won’t see your bald head any more.”

I was then less than three years old, but reasoned like that, and I remember because my memory emerged very early. Even recently I have reminded Mother of her dresses at that time, events of those days which she had forgotten on account of their insignificance. I clearly recall Faenza just as it was in September 1901, when we left it to go to Milan.

But before speaking of Milan I must mention that in December 1899 my maternal grandfather died of fulminant peritonitis. It was December 17, 1899. A day of snow worthy of Russia. Something like eighty centimeters of snow on the streets. The town was silent, deadened under the freezing snowstorm. And we went on foot to the station. I was in Father’s arms—the snow would otherwise have devoured me; my mother was weeping in the arms of her aunt, who was also in tears. A sad journey to Mantova, hoping to find Grandfather alive. Then at Codogno my great-aunt’s heart suddenly gave out.... We arrived with a dying person in the house where another had already died. Between the two sorrows my mother became ill with jaundice and was close to death. I was scared and bewildered in the midst of biers and agonies, tears and funerals; Father, always patient and loving, took care of everything.

There followed the return trip to Faenza with Grandmother, the angel who was coming back to stay with us until she died. And then I had two loves and two comforts until, in September 1901, I left my girlhood in Faenza and went to Milan.