Autobiography

6. Friendly Things

We read in Genesis that God made the animals to serve man. And also to comfort him, I add.

Yes, the more man, by God’s will, possesses a soul which leaves behind the mediocrity of the mass—which seems to be composed mainly of amorphous, dull beings, something resembling a glutted animal or an insect in a cocoon, beings satisfied with their daily routine that ask and strive only to live it out with no shocks or effort either— the more he is destined to suffer the incomprehension of his fellows. And then he takes refuge in the beasts, as regards this world, and in God, as regards the other, and between these two apexes he weaves his cloth, which he passes and passes again amidst all the rest—which is more bristly, a greater torture than the carding thistle weavers make use of in their patient toil!

One’s fellow man.... What a thistle bristling with spines he always is, and all the more so the more our being is by nature affectionate, humble, and sensitive. He derides and tramples upon us and lowers his shoulder to drive us to the fringes of life; humanly speaking, this is the main path for the overbearing, the coldhearted, the thoughtless, the deceitful.

On the supernatural side, no. We—the apparently defeated in life because we are unable to be the egocentric people life requires one to be in order to succeed—are the real winners. For we conquer, at the price of ourselves, not the small, limited life in time, but the Life which is perpetual dawn, perpetual noonday—indeed, full, beatific noonday flowing on forever and ever in the orbit and light of the eternal Sun.

But how much pain to get there! How much cold! How much solitude! How much bitterness! How many tears! How much dying, hour by hour, in a thousand ways: killed by ourselves for our good, killed by others through their wicked impulse! To die by a moral death compared to which the death of God, physical death, Adam’s punishment, is much, much less!

And then we look around with heavy hearts and faces bathed in tears—and instead of the absent or hostile gazes of our fellows encounter the faithful glances of the lesser creatures. And then in place of the kiss denied us or given us treacherously by our neighbor we encounter the sincere greeting of the animal, and then our hands, which uselessly reached out to embrace and caress and were rejected, bend to caress the beasts, which never reject one who loves them and repay him with purity of affection.

One who is happy does not know.... But one who has never been happy knows what comfort an animal means for a person alone in the worst solitude—that of the heart.

I have greatly loved animals as the work of God and as a comfort in my life, which has never been happy—in human terms, of course. The prisoner of too many things, for one can be a prisoner though outside a material jail, I share with all prisoners a love for the animals who have been my companions and comforters in so many, in all my years of imprisonment. And don’t think I’m exaggerating. I have suffered very, very much and hope to be able to give you a description, though brief, through these pages, which you have asked me to write.

I have suffered much. It would initially appear impossible: an only daughter, rather well-off, healthy up to age twenty, with my parents living and—seemingly living in full harmony; on the surface, what did I lack? Nothing. What did I lack in reality? Everything. That everything which was necessary for me—that is, a great, great, great maternal love.

What did I care about toys, sweets, amusements, when these were given to me with advance fanfare and an eventual gallop of glacial severity or, worse, accompanied by disgusting scenes within the family? How I envied the poor children whom I saw eating their pieces of bread in their mothers’ arms, whom I saw playing with the rag dolls that motherly love had designed for them, whom I saw growing up as happy chicks on a sunny threshing floor, in a home where the love of both spouses shone like a sun streaming forth in torrents upon their children!

“No one envied her palace provided she had a quivering cradle beside the spent fire,” says Pascoli, if I am not mistaken in repeating the verse after so many years since studying it. For my part, I can say, “No one would envy my life, apparently endowed with good, if, while having love in his poor home, he had been able to see the reality of my home.”

It should thus cause no amazement that I became so passionately attached to animals. Birds, dogs, turtles, chickens, pigeons, rabbits.... My companions at play and in solitude, companions that gave me more joy than dolls because they were “alive,” and more sorrow because—they died. Every death was a tragedy....

My mother, the “ruler” of the house, the “dictator,” decreed each time, “I’ll be furious if any other dog or bird appears.” But then I got attached to pullets, doves, bunnies.... Twice the tears, as a result, for—they were foredoomed to the spit or the saucepan...!

And then, challenging his spouse’s wrath, there was Father, who would bring back the pup for me, a gift just for me from Officer Such and Such, or the little bird the Colonel begged me to rear. Poor Father, who, in loving sincerity so much—and he accustomed me to it so well—but also so loving his poor little daughter and conjugal peace, found this—channel to reconcile my thirst for loving, his joy in contenting me, and his wife’s will!

My mother would kick up a row, and her sulking would go on for an indefinite period; Father would suffer it calmly, and I would weep.... But I wept on the little head of a puppy or the tiny wing of a sparrow, and the tears were less bitter because the little animal would dry them with his tender tongue or imbibe the teardrops with the still soft beak of a fledgling.

One has to have experienced these things to be able to understand them without calling them “nonsense.”

After the beasts, the flowers. How fond I have always been of them! In a vase on my windowsill or plucked along the green country roads, they were my joy.

In this, too, my father had been my master. From him, who could not pass indifferently by a corolla and so admired both the humble daisy and the rare orchid, I learned love for flowers, these numberless masterworks of God covering our earthly mire with color and fragrance, just as the stars fill the firmament with gems: flowers in celestial gardens the stars, stars in terrestrial gardens the flowers.

When we would go out into the countryside, how many flowers my father would pick! He would crown me with them, fill my arms, explain their ever-new beauties, whether it was a still-closed bud, unprofaned by the touch of the bees and dews, or flowers now splendidly opened to receive the butterflies’ kisses, the sun’s caresses, the washing of the rains, or the stars’ bath of phosphoric light. And in all of this beauty which the hand of God has strewn around man, under the feet of man, the sovereign creature whom the Father has loved to the point of giving him his Son, and which so few see on the earth (for me, to see is to love), Dad made me see the work of the Creator. How often, in support of his words, and intuiting spontaneously my artistic nature, he would quote passages from prose and especially poetry which further expounded the beauty of creation and caused the imprint of the Divine Being who made all things to be noted therein!

Animals and plants, sunsets, dawns, such virginal, chaste moonlit nights, starry nights so full of thrills, and you, sea bells, that murmur with the lapping of the small waves, sigh wearily at dead of night, with howls and bursts of infernal laughter slap against the reefs, and you, azure lakes of Italy, and hills, and plains, and mountains—you, all beautiful because you were made by my God, you that I have loved and that have loved me and come to see me in my ten-year seclusion, for I greatly loved, observed, and studied you, and still see you with my mind’s eye—may you be blessed for the joy you have given me, may you blessed for the faith you have given me, may you be blessed for the hope of an eternal Beauty grander still of which you are a limited reflection and have infused into me, for the love that came to me from you and joined me to you, for the love with which my father loved you, with which my father made me love you, for the love with which God made you and conserves you—oh, may you be blessed!

And blessed be He Who for man’s comfort made you and to comfort me, his poor daughter, granted to my self the ability to see you as you are: the perfection and testimony of God, the word of God at all hours, a spur to obedience, beauty, usefulness....

I am more tired and ill than usual, and thought flees. But I am not inclined to write literature. I am only obeying a desire of yours, Father. I am thus little concerned with style. I am stating, insofar as my current weakness allows, my feeling regarding the things which have found an echo in me.

And beauty, the work of genius: Italian churches where the lives of Christ and Mary, of God’s saints, eternally palpitate in scenes of transmundane loveliness. And castles and palaces of Italy, monuments of secular art—their being now endangered or already destroyed causes my heart agony. And sumptuous museums with cloth, statues, and rare objects from the distant East—beloved things as long as I possessed you together with health, and now still beloved in memory and by memory, for you bring me the echo of days when I still did not know the complete bitterness of life, which would become sweet only after having crushed my self therein.... These are my friends in lesser things, the friends that did not betray me and, acting imperceptibly, performed in me a work of elevation to God, certainly foreordained by God, Who used all human things to cultivate my soul for eternity.