Autobiography

9. Voghera

In September 1907 we went to Voghera. The regiment had been transferred there. I lost the Sisters and my companions again and shifted to the public schools, as there was no private girls’ school in that town—at that time, at any rate.

At the new school I was quite well off, though. I was the uncontested number one, for I was the only daughter of well-to-do parents and, above all, not from the town. The mere fact of my spontaneous use of the Italian language thus set me far above the local girls. And then I read a lot because Mother did not skimp on books and magazines for me. I thereby continuously increased my spontaneous gift as a little writer. I had an excellent teacher, a real mother, whose memory is luminous in me.

My companions were good. There was one, my favorite, totally crippled, a sweet creature with an angelic face above a Rigoletto body, with whom I got on very well. She was quite good. I have always loved her and even when at boarding school always went to see her over vacations.

The town was ugly and poor then. It had narrow streets paved with certain sharp stones which tortured one’s soles. But to make up for it there were lovely avenues ringing it: a green, shady belt, filled with trills and flights. And then the countryside was nearby, just a stone’s throw away, for the town was quite small at that time. Pretty rural villages abounding in food and vineyards completely surrounded it, and a stream, the Staffora, which gave you the feeling it was a great river with its foaming floods or blocks of ice bursting during the thaw and little groves of acacias in flower covered with nests and song.

How lovely to go with Father along the banks close to the hawthorn hedges which served to divide plots of land and were thoroughly white in the spring from the millions of petals covering them and ruby red in the fall from the tufts of tiny red pommels decorating them which were so sweet for birds and children!

How lovely, when the snow still held out in the cradles of shade, to go in search of violets—there were so many of them—hidden under the layer of leaves having fallen in the autumn—the sweet violets so humble and chaste...!

How lovely to go through the fields starting to turn green with newborn wheat or with a waving motion when the full-grown ears said yes and no to the winds and the poppies introduced drops of blood between the green and the bluebottles, sky-colored confetti...!

How lovely to walk along the chattering stream under the snow-white corymbs perfumed by the locust trees in flower, amidst the ever-rustling cane thickets, the inexhaustibly trembling saplings, alongside the rows of vines launching out in festoons with their green garlands and bunches of grapes turning into topaz or rubies in the sun...!

What beauty! What beauty! What beauty, for one who feels you, O God, You have placed everywhere around us!

Without the family unhappiness, I would have been even happier, for I was not keen on extravagance, visits, or city life and preferred to live in the midst of God’s nature.

I had been in Voghera for a few months when—I don’t know exactly how—it came to my mother’s knowledge that every Thursday from nearby Casteggio a small group of French sisters, the Adorers of the Most Holy Sacrament, who were from Orléans and had taken refuge in Italy after the expulsion of religious houses by the Combes Law, came to Voghera to give French lessons. My mother decided to have me attend those lessons. I had no need to because I was taking the fourth school-leaving examination and was already well advanced. But the fact is.... I think it was Jesus who wanted it that way.

In Voghera it was harder for Father to take me to Mass. I was thus growing up as a little heathen and was already ten years old. An age was beginning, then, in which the aid of religion is more necessary than ever. My mother did not attend to it. It seemed to her that I knew enough about the subject....

So I went every Thursday to the Sisters Adorers for the French lesson. But if in terms of study I remained where I was—for, I repeat, I was already well advanced, and my classmates were far behind—to make up for it my soul was again placed in— communication with God. The thread lay, if not broken, certainly covered with incrustations since I had lost “my dead Jesus” at the Ursulines.

The dear Sisters Adorers got that thread in working order again—changing, so to speak, the point of arrival. Not Jesus crucified, but Jesus-Eucharist, which at bottom is still Jesus-Blood. With much insistence they persuaded my mother to let them prepare me for my First Communion.

In September 1908, cutting short my summer vacation at Viareggio by a month, I entered their little school in Casteggio to prepare myself to receive Jesus.

There were five sisters: the Superior, Sister Joan of the Cross, a very good French noblewoman; the Assistant Superior, Sister Joan (simply); my special sister, the one who instructed me for Communion, as well as in French, was named Sister Marie. Tall, very lovely, with the face of an angel that seemed to flash heavenly lightning. And she also was an angel. When about a month ago the Catholic Patients’ Union sent me the prayer card of Sister Maria-Gabriella, the Trappist saint, I was left sweetly moved, for that face resembles the one of the angelical Adorer who prepared me to receive Jesus.

I lived for a month among these sisters. They loved me very much. It seemed to them that they had returned to their dear France, to the Monastery they had had to abandon so painfully, in the midst of their beloved students.... What care, what affection! If I did not reach ecstasy, it really depended entirely on me, who had been numbed with spiritual lethargy for years, and not on them, who could not have done more than they did.

They would also have wished to have things done with display.... But Mother decreed otherwise. I thus used the same dress and the same veil—both snow-white—as for Confirmation.

I received no souvenir from my mother on that day. No book, no rosary, no medal. Nothing. And she did not even let Father come. She judged Father to be “useless.” Only Jesus knows how this pained me...!

During the days preceding the event I made the “retreat.” Sister Maria and I walked about the little, joyful convent full of autumn flowers, observed with love and holy envy by the five sisters and five lay women.... I believe even the inhabitants of the hen-house gazed at me in veneration.... I wore a little garland of white roses on my head to symbolize my being la petite fiancée de Jésus....

On the eve of the ceremony I found my bed covered with little notes of love: “I sleep, but my heart keeps watch”; “My little one, I am Jesus and I await you”; “How long the night is while waiting for you, soul that I love!” Sister Maria spoke to me as a seraph might speak....

Then, at church in the morning—a graceful little church, white and gold like a jewel case—the ceremony. It was the first Sunday in October, Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. The reverend parish priest of Casteggio officiated.

The sisters sang with angelic voices, accompanied by the harmonium:

O saint autel qu’environnent les anges

...o jour heureux, jour céleste

et propice, à vous benir je consacre

ma voix....

And at the moment when Christ descended into me for the first time, amidst a great trembling in my soul and glistening of tears which are not weeping, but an outburst of joy, the sweet canticle:

Devant Jésus, ployant leurs blanches ailes

les chérubins s’inclinent à genoux

et Lui, le Roi des splendeurs éternelles

se fait petit pour venir jusqu’à nous.

Heureux enfant, allez manger le pain des anges

Tous les trésors d’en haut sont ouverts en ce jour

Unissons nous aux célestes phalanges

Chantons la foi, l’espérance et l’amour.

.............................

Au Golgotha, brisé par la fatigue,

votre Sauveur marcha sans s’arrêter,

de tout son Sang, pour vous, il fut prodigue

si vous l’aimez, vous devez l’imiter....

Mother received Communion with me because the sisters had asked her to.

Afterwards there was the “human” party, so to speak. The little gifts of the sisters, of the priest, so dear to me, the lunch, and finally, in the evening, before I left with Mother to return home, the consecration to Mary, at whose feet I deposited my garland of roses.

O Marie, o ma vie!

A ton coeur maternel

j’abandonne ma couronne.

Garde-la pour le ciel!

My garland of roses...!

Maria, the little sweetheart of Jesus Crucified, was no longer to wear crowns of roses. Her crown will always be of thorns, on earth, and on the thorns her blood, moaning from a thousand wounds, will form the roses coruscating with pain which only in eternity will change into eternal roses.

He, my Savior, had given all his Blood for me, as the Adorers’ Eucharistic hymn said. I, out of love for Him, had to give all my blood. I have given it. I am giving it.

But do not think that from that moment on it was a perfect fusion without further disturbance. Not at all! The formation of Maria-the-host-of-Jesus was long and laborious. Did I not tell you at the beginning of this story that God did not impose Himself on me, but waited for me to go to Him? His was a work of seduction, but not of imposition. He made me fall in love with Him and waited.

I think that every soul is like the Virgin before the Annunciation. Every soul being called to form Christ as a newlywed bride is to form her creature. The conception of Christ in us takes place when we declare our Ecce ancilla Domini. First there is only the Lord’s invitation, borne by his angel. His inspiration. But the event is not completed until a soul, in an outburst of love, responds, “Yes, I do.” Then the Spirit descends to overshadow the generous, loving soul; He descends with his fire, his light, his gifts, and the conception has its start. Christ is incarnated in us, not, of course, I well know, as in Mary, but He is incarnated and born spiritually; He grows, takes shape, and informs us with Himself; and the more the soul annihilates and destroys herself to make room for Him alone, the more He grows until, when the time comes for the maximum perfection granted to that soul, she gives birth to herself, having become one with Christ, who has so grown in her as to have annulled everything belonging to the beloved creature—only He, the Lover, remains.

I don’t know if I have clearly expressed what I wanted to say.

On the day of my First Communion I resumed contact with Jesus, and He resumed his work of seducing my soul, which at that time hardly noticed it, just as the earth fails to notice the hidden work of the kernel of wheat immersed in the furrow, which nonetheless germinates and puts out roots until, one dawn, the astonished land sees the miracle of an emerald-green thread bursting forth from the dark sod.

I had been back home for a few days when my uncle—poor, ill, and atheist, my mother’s brother—arrived from France.

I loved him at once because he aroused my pity. But I don’t think he was fond of me, or at least he loved me in a very strange way. With that brain which is still and always was eccentric.

I must provide a bit of background on this wretch, who was his own ruin and the cause of so much pain.

Preeminently thickheaded, from the most tender age he was always the rebel of the family and did not submit under either his father’s severity or his mother’s care.

My grandfather—who belonged to the Magistracy and who for his strictly honest, severe, but also paternal conduct was nearly always proposed to be the guardian of under-age orphans and succeeded splendidly with his wards, whom he managed to guide with both firmness and great goodness, to whose words the amendment of many offenders is linked, for he spoke on behalf of not only the punitive Law, but also the Goodness that weeps on seeing itself scorned by men—never managed to put straight the soul of his last-born son, who was always a rebel.

Extremely intelligent, but indolent. Capable of succeeding in anything he applied himself to, but inconstant. A lover of luxury and amusement, to keep up with his rich friends, whom he always sought, he incurred debts whose payment was then left to my grandmother, my mother, and my other uncle, with sacrifice, so as not to grieve Grandfather and cause talk about the family.

How many nights spent copying legal proceedings (all the trial documents were then copied by hand) this daredevil cost his two siblings! How many lessons, given by my mother—private lessons whose proceeds she could have used for herself and which she was forced, instead, to devote to pay off the debts of her younger brother! My other uncle, on reaching the age of eighteen, entered the army as a volunteer and gained advancement. He thus escaped the plague. But my mother remained with the family and until she was thirty-two had to work for that ne’er-do-well.

After my mother married, he immediately began a relationship with a young woman.... There would have been nothing wrong with that if social difference had been the only thing posing a painful doubt about this relationship. The trouble was that the young lady was a compendium of vice.... He wanted to marry her just the same.... The union was as it had to be—a hell. As free as a beast, she returned to her loose living. Who knows if my cousin is really my uncle’s daughter....

There were family scenes because he did not permit that life of adultery and debts to pay, for the parties with different lovers while her husband was at his office as administrator of the State Railways required bottles of wine and liqueurs and sweets and choice meat.... She even went so far as to try to do away with her husband gradually by poisoning.... Found out and threatened with being denounced, just to free herself from the conjugal bond, which had become an obstacle to her life of lust, she slipped into her husband’s study and stole several thousand lire. He should have denounced her—it was the only thing to do.... However, in spite of his cuckhold’s horns outnumbering the antlers in a herd of deer, since he loved her, he preferred to flee from the country, causing shameful suspicions to pile up in his regard and leaving it to his father to prove his son’s innocence—which was achieved by a sheer miracle—and to my father to repay the thousands of lire stolen by that tart....

My father paid everything in haste out of love for his wife and respect for his father- and mother-in-law and then continued to assist his lunatic brother-in-law, who wandered around half of Europe, going from one job to another, earning and consuming heaps of money.... When he was well-off, he was silent, but when starving, he asked for money.... And my father looked after the daughter (?) of my uncle. He sent her to school, removing her from the vice-laden atmosphere of her mother’s house, where there was an aunt openly given to free love and her mother kept on having children with every Tom and Dick—all of them placed under the label of my uncle’s surname!

The life he led outside the country was certainly not such as to improve his condition, already damaged by the poison his dear wife had administered to him years before. He grew ill, then, consuming his last penny and last stitch of clothing, and once he had been reduced to absolute infirmity and indigence, he came back to his brother-in-law, who welcomed him with open arms, for my father was a good man.

It would have been little trouble to have him with us if he had been healthier in body and, especially, in soul. But my uncle is repugnant for his blasphemous atheism. I assure you that I must make an effort to speak of him, write to him from time to time, and pray for him—his soul is such a hellish den. He never opens his mouth except to insult God, religion, priests, and believers, whom he refers to as “bigoted, deceitful, depraved, and idiotic,” using other similar terms of description. And this man came to live with me just a few days after my First Communion!

And then, he was sick. The doctors, just to measure up to their insight (!), described him as a consumptive in the final stage. (Bang!) Where did he have the tuberculosis? In his lung, in his kidney, in his intestine? Certainly not. Thirty-five years have passed, and he is still alive, in spite of the fact that he is now seventy-five. He has got the microbe in his wicked heart and blasphemous brain. But not the TB microbe—rather, the microbe of wickedness, of the most Voltairian atheism that exists! He is sick. That’s true enough. His hard life and mistaken treatment have atrophied the movement of his legs. He thus walks very slowly with his legs stiffened, anchylosed, from his hips to his feet. He cannot, then, hold any public job, while handling private administration and that of charitable institutions quite well, for his head is clear and his hand does not tremble. Indeed, he has the gift of handwriting as perfect as a lithographic specimen.

But the fact is that the ever enlightened (!) doctors, never sufficiently praised for their enlightenment (!), decreed that Uncle was sick and dangerous for me at such a tender age. Either he was to stay at home or I was—not the two of us together. My life was in danger.

I had passed on to the subsidiary subjects that year because Mother dreamed of having me become a schoolteacher as the apex of cultural excellence.... A teacher, when I have always hated this profession! I would have been the laughingstock of my students as a teacher, for, out of fear that they would have to suffer what my teacher-mother had made me suffer, I would have granted and forgiven everything; afraid of becoming sour, authoritarian, and repugnant to children as my mother was, a perfect specimen of a teacher (in all the negative virtues which make a teacher a bogey); fearing this, I would have gone too far towards excessive indulgence, in blameworthy weakness.

In the subsidiary studies I had found a headmistress after the fashion of my mother. Impossible. She was a compendium of all the qualities which had made me suffer under the family scourge. Injustice, partisanship, authoritarianism, ruthless severity—she was the terror of the schoolgirls...! And the whole pre-teaching class followed behind her because the headmistress was powerful on account of high-level protection.

I, then, who did not take her presents—my mother did not yield to this racketeering imposition—was marked for all the acts of tyranny. My mother, who has certainly never been indulgent, had to intervene herself in my defense in the face of the hail of reproaches and zeros falling upon me every day and in every subject—and I went to school having been prepared by my mother! How I cried! I, who loved study as life itself and took refuge therein, a source of joys for me that I did not find elsewhere, in my sad home, had come to experience in study only the horror and fear we feel for things that always bring us pain.... Disheartened and crestfallen, I studied automatically without any more joy or purpose.... I was always scolded just the same.

Since the headmistress and her satellites were not, of course, enough, at home there was Uncle: sour, sneering, and unjust, who mocked my every word, who set me against my mother and even my French Sisters...! Only Father always remained good...! But he was almost never there.... I saw him only at dinner, for afterwards I had to go to bed to minimize contact with my uncle.

I had acquired a hypersensitivity which continually wrang tears from me—I was one big moral wound. My natural shyness, which had already grown steadily under Mother’s iron hand, had now reached the pitch of a real illness. It paralyzed me. If I think of myself then, I seem to be seeing one of those poor little stray dogs with no master, trembling with cold and fear, covered with sores, begging for a bare bone, a single hour of repose, a single caress that everyone kicks around, forces out, and torments. Poor pariahs expiating what sins...?

I was really like that. I would turn to the right—a scolding; to the left—derision. I wept and was punished. I kept silent and was scolded. I spoke and was rebuked. At home, out of the house. It was always like that. My mother was uneasy with the headmistress, who, in striking me with bad grades, indirectly struck the teacher Iside Valtorta. But she was vexed about the insult to Iside Valtorta, not about the wrong done to me. Indeed, she set about increasing that wrong. A hellish life.

My father held firmly to not having me leave home. My mother, caught between remorse over sacrificing her daughter and the longing to protect her brother, was at her wits’ end. A pretext was needed to persuade her that I was getting unruly and must be sent to boarding school as a punishment and for my good. The only excuse to cling to in order to justify to herself, Father, and everyone else the injustice of sacrificing me for a brother who, in addition, was not a model relative. This brother, as the sly rogue he is, succeeded in exploiting the situation quite well and turning it to his advantage.