Autobiography

11. “... Of which only he who has certain faith in Christ is sure.”

At my boarding school, like a flower in a propitious flowerbed, like a plant taken from the shade into the sun, like a shrub which has grown wild and feels the gardener’s hand upon it, I blossomed in height, intelligence, and knowledge. But, above all, I blossomed in Christ.

As I told you at the beginning of this narration, the first encounter took place while I was still a child, in the Ursulines’ Chapel, where, with all the innocent confidence of girlhood, I loved Jesus, who for my sake had died in such pain. Afterwards—I had lost sight of my God. The contact had been severed, just like a wire that breaks under the excessive weight of useless things.

The Adorers of the Most Holy Sacrament had joined the two extremes of the broken wire, but, certainly as a result of my incapacity, the current had not been established. Too many years of spiritual inertia had elapsed, and my soul had fallen into a lethargy it found it hard to come out of. Jesus did not force me. He could have given me a rough shake through some pain or anything else chosen by his Will. But He did not do so. He waited. He only loved me, my dear Jesus.... Now it is just for me to love Him, even without feeling his caresses, for I was so apathetic, so dazed for so long that I did not feel his.

After arriving at boarding school, from the first days I felt that my soul was again turning to Him. The tree in springtime must not feel any different when emerging from its lethargic winter sleep. Up from the roots, buried in the soil, sap—which is nothing but a molecule of sun descending into the sod, shortly before cold and now lukewarm with golden beams—rises through the bare trunk, sends a thrill through the rough bark, blood into the solid wood, life into the half-dead pith, pushes forward through the branches, towards the treetop, swells the gemmae which have just been outlined, inflates and opens them in the miracle of a new leafy branch, scatters buds and corollas, enlivens the ovaries and makes them fruitful, provokes vegetable unions between flower and flower, sets fertilizing pollen in motion, creates the triumph of early fruit, and makes the tree, not long ago sad and skeleton-like, a wonder of useful, fecund life.

I, too, felt something descend into me, melt the ice in my heart, and give me a movement, thrill, and light where before there had been death and darkness.... St. Joseph, the one who, holding me on his fatherly knees, had been the first to wash me in the Blood of Christ, now took me by the hand and led me to Jesus. I had barely been at school for six days when the beloved novena to St. Joseph began, and I had been there for fifteen when the Solemn Mass took place in honor of the saint, who was also the saint of my Superior. Christ’s sun was rising over my night....

I have always liked solemn liturgical functions very much. That display around the Holy of Holies, that sacred music, sweet and sublime, that aroma of incense being burned before the altar, in fragrance and fire, and that praise of God and his saints framed in splendor have always touched my heart. And they have given me an infinitesimal measure of what is and forever and ever will be the eternal ceremony of hosanna to the Lamb in the blessed heavens of God. And since then they have placed in me a yearning for the celestial hymns, a longing to go to heaven to join my voice to those of the blessed hosts whose life is to adore the Holy Trinity and lose themselves in the joy of such worship.

At my school religion filled the whole day. But it was a luminous, open, confident religion. Not long, exhausting prayers, but the constant, brief call to God; not trembling before his judgment, but trust in the goodness of the Father was inculcated in us. Religion was never imposed, but we were brought to desire it without even realizing—so pleasant was the practice of it, so sweet was the manner of the teachers, who lived on that religion, such great attraction did the pious life they had us live hold.

The day began with Holy Mass, which was for everyone, but if anyone did not wish to receive Holy Communion, she was perfectly free not to. No one would question her or say anything in that regard. The Sisters’ behavior did not change in the face of the spiritual inertia of one of their daughters. They would certainly redouble their prayers for that drowsy soul, but said nothing to her directly.

I think this is the best way—indeed, the only method to be followed in such a delicate matter as is the life of the soul. Prayer and penance to obtain light for souls that have grown dark, but no more than this. Religiosity is nothing but a life of love, and loves, to be true, must be spontaneous. If imposed, they automatically cease to be love and become a heavy, unpleasant burden. It is necessary to know how to lead hearts to love without this industry’s being manifest.

My Sisters excelled in this sublime art. They educated us in the life of faith so gently, with such light, nearly imperceptible touches, that we found ourselves permeated with religiosity without even realizing that continuous work in this sense was being done.

Just as they did not force piety, so they did not spur us on to the exaltation of piety. Here as well they had a very upright guide, who limited herself to watching over the tendencies of our youthful souls without doing anything to arouse in us those ephemeral mystical fevers proper to the age of puberty which, after having taken hearts to a delirium of religious sentimentalism, afterwards leave them to fall, like a fleeting blaze of straw, covered with ashes and cold, cold for life, having consumed in an hour—and not in true love, but in a chimera of love, in a deceitful mirage—all the limited sense of piety of which they were capable. Like certain plants forced by the gardener against nature which develop precociously, cover themselves with an unnatural luxuriance of leafy branches and corollas appearing before their time, and then—die. Poor, ephemeral plants which man’s caprice leads to a premature end, when on their own they could have brought joy for so many years....

None of this occurred at my school. Faith was everywhere, the sun giving true Life, but just as happens with the stars, which are always in the heavens and under whose revolving man spends his days and takes his rest without thinking of them, so we, too, lived, regulated by the sun of faith, but without considering that the Good we felt growing in us came from that sun penetrating us little by little and becoming blood of our souls, flesh of our spirits. But precisely because it was like that, slow, constant work, it has remained permanently in us.

When the clouds open and water pelts down from them upon the earth, spread out to receive it like an enormous cloth, the reactions it produces are varied. An alluvial downpour strikes, flattens, uproots, and removes branches, fruit, steles, and seeds; a yellowish, muddy ruin is left as a memorial to the meteorological fury. But if a soft drizzle, practically April dew, slowly descends from the barely misty sky, cleansing the leafy branches of dust, swelling buds and ovaries, falling upon the sod like a caress, filtering down to the hidden seeds to nourish them with gases snatched from the air, with astonished eyes of joy man sees the earth become more beautiful and fertile and teem with life from all its pores, which exude steles and crown themselves with flowers that, in a clearer and purer atmosphere, offer the hope of the harvest close at hand.

Religion at my school was gentle water penetrating to the very depth, bringing with it healthy juices of life.

The reactions of souls were different as the souls themselves were different. Some of us ascended quite far into the supernatural; others remained as they were; and still others were wretchedly ruined. But these uneven results were due to individual and family factors, for the work of education by the Sisters was the same for and upon all of us.

Probably because I was not very happy, I yielded to grace with greater ease.

It should not be like that, should it? One would say that those whom God’s goodness preserves from pain ought to be the happiest, loving Him and clinging to Him with gratitude and affection. In reality, however, the opposite usually takes place. I am referring only to hearts that are not utterly wicked, for in that case good and evil, joy and pain leave the same sacrilegious indifference to the Giver of all things, when they do not drive people outright to an even more sacrilegious rebellion. But in hearts that are not perfectly wicked pain is a bell reminding the soul of God; in hearts lacking affection it is a benefactor giving the bread of love in the name of God; in beings who are alone, in a life which does not love them, more than for a creature lost in the desert, it is an encounter with the only One who does not betray, disenchant, or abandon.

“Those who weep are those who know” not only how to understand other hearts, but also how to find the Heart of hearts, on which to lay the sorrowful brow, the bleeding heart, on which to shed the tears that overwhelm and blind us, on which to place our love that no one wants and that still asks to be donated so as not to become a harsh, prostrating torture....

Maria, the little Maria who had already wept so, and wept alone, who had already loved so, and loved alone, in the luminous spring of 1909, while wandering lost in a new little world, heard a voice sound in her heart and call her: “Maria!” And little Maria, lifting her youthful eyes, already excessively serious on account of the abundant pain they had had to absorb, encountered a very sweet face turned towards her with love and compassion. But Maria did not recognize Him immediately—she only felt attracted by the One who gazed at her with such love and stretched out his hands, anxious to caress her, and she smiled at Him.... Then light was shed, and Maria knew, recognized Jesus, the Master, and prostrated herself at his feet with a desire for love.

But the Master, who knew that little Maria would have to love Him in complete knowledge after so many, many misfortunes, said to her, as He had formerly said to Mary Magdalene on that radiant April morning: “Don’t touch Me. You must still accomplish a great deal first. Not I, but you must first ascend on the cross and place yourself as a host on the altar of pain, offer yourself to the justice of the Father, drink My chalice to the dregs, become familiar with the different faces of temptation, passion, and love, choose what is best, and renounce what is vain illusion. You must first disappear with your current personality and be reborn with a new soul. You must first pronounce your Fiat, your Ecce ancilla, and with all the pain which is the destiny of the children of Eve, conceive Me, generate Me, and nourish Me with yourself. When you have made yourself into a tabernacle to shelter my Humanity, tortured out of love for all of you, when you have rendered yourself a victim, a lesser host, then you shall touch Me, then I will be in you and you in Me, in a bond of love which will make you blessed even on earth, even on the cross, for I will be your strength, your joy, your all. For now I will simply be the Master, for you shall have no other master but Me, as no other can instruct you in the difficult way along which I wish to lead you to My Kingdom: the way of pain, so that you will know, O soul that I prefer, that only with the word and face of pain will I come to you to take you to joy.”

My sweet Jesus spoke in this way in his soundless voice to my soul, which found Him and recognized Him in that lovely spring. And my soul, with greater capacity for thought than that possessed in blessed girlhood, set about following the Master, from whom, she observed, every good would come to her in her life humanly bereft of every good.

From then on I knew the joy of the heart which is the companion of those who make God the center of their affections and the aim of their existence. That profound peace which exists and resists, even if the surface of our self is disturbed by the waves of a tempest. That sweetness which tempers the bitterness of the darkest hours and provides the strength to go on—bordering, it is true, on despair, but managing to overcome it on the way of the Cross and, therefore, of God.

How I loved Jesus in my early youth! And how He loved me!

I do not know whether the inner fire of my heart cast outward flares making its existence known to my Sisters. I was so reserved and knew how to watch over my truest and most secret life so attentively that I doubt it. At least at the start, I believe my mystical betrothal to Christ was unknown to all. But it was well known to me!

It was not an overlooked, natural love, like certain loves of which we become aware only if we are left without them. Ah, no! I knew I loved Him and knew I wanted to love Him more and more. This love was full of knowledge, clearly delineated in all its details. It gave me inward singing and inward weeping for love; it gave me lights and counsels; it gave me activity and willingness, and the deep, deep longing to love Him more and more and ever more perfectly, profoundly, and completely.

And Jesus instructed me with paternal sweetness. That’s right, Jesus, Jesus Himself. I did not become His little Maria-host through a human word, though holy words have been addressed to me from the altar. It was Jesus who instructed me, calling me sweetly in the hours in which He wanted the spiritual hearing of his little Maria to be closely attuned to words of life which He would later illuminate with divine light in me.

I remember.... I remember what a gentle tempest of love certain special lives of saints stirred up in me.

It was the custom at the school to offer readings in the refectory in particular periods, such as Advent and Lent. One of the “older girls” or a Sister would ascend to a kind of pulpit located at the center of the very long dining hall, and for a quarter of an hour at noon and a quarter of an hour in the evening they would read pages of the lives of saints.

The first one I heard was The Story of a Soul. At that time St. Theresa of the Child Jesus, who had died only eleven years before, was simply Sister Theresa.... But for me she was immediately the Friend.... Her doctrine of confident abandon, of generous love, her little great way of holiness imposed themselves upon me at once. I understood that along the same way I should walk to reach Jesus.... You will see, Father, that I was not mistaken and that many years later the sweet little saint was my “godmother” when I gave myself as a host to Jesus....

Then there were the women martyrs.... At work school as well one would read, above all to keep my restless and talkative companions calm and quiet. Very often that one was me, for I read well and with good pronunciation. Fabiola, The Last Vestal Virgin, Ben Hur, Under the Sign of Rome, and I don’t know how many more books on the early times of Christianity were thus read or heard by me. How many friends I then had among the purple and white ranks of the virgin martyrs! How many friends among the holy tribunes, the holy deacons, the humble slaves and plebeians in the Rome of the catacombs!

One always receives from the good Jesus what one asks for with purity of intention and when spurred by love. It seems to us at times that this is not so, that God does not pay attention. But He only makes us wait. Prayer offered with sincerity and for what will certainly be good for us is always heard by God.

Repeating thousands of times the prayer of Agnes, I asked that my body and my heart be kept pure so they would not be confounded in the presence of God; I asked a thousand times that it be granted me to love Him through the confession of martyrdom, because I could no longer separate myself from this Lover, to whom I was bound by such a sweet knot of charity.

Have I not received what I asked for? Yes, I have, and completely. If the necessities of illness have made the white corolla of virginal purity bow down, is this not, on the other hand, a martyr’s purple robe extending even more radiantly over all the sufferings of the flesh, for it is a martyrdom of the heart which sees the inviolate freshness of the virgins’ lily being torn? If in lovely Paradise I shall not be among the one hundred and forty-four thousand who follow the Lamb, the white host of those whose flesh has not known profanation of any kind, to make up for it will I not be among the blood-reddened ranks of those whom a very lofty and comprehensive love has spurred along the way of immolation, which is bloody, though in appearance it is not blood-soaked, but only marked by the crushing of all man’s truest riches, the first of which is health, life?

If people not very convinced about the fundamental truths of our religion knew that I, a poor feminine creature, at the dawn of life, when the experience of this life has not yet made known to us what immolation is, offered myself, they would say I was brainless, mad.

No, Lord. Your little violet in love was neither brainless nor mad, and not self-conceited either. The little violet born in Lent, the little violet that became beaded with her first tears of love for You, in the presence of your wounded face, the little violet that, having grown in shadow and darkness, in cold and solitude, yearned for your sun, your love to raise up her gloomy head and smile at your cross, knew that You would not disappoint her wish and would help her in suffering for You.

You had need of the Cyrenean to carry your cross, but for your little christs, who go up to their Calvary, carrying their cross out of love for You, out of love for their sisters and brothers, to complete and continue your Passion, it is You who become the Cyrenean, and when the creature staggers and falls because of human frailty and, suffering excessively, can no longer manage to drag the cross, You take his place and subject your divine shoulders to the weight of the wood, for You have mercy on the little hosts, You have a jealous love for them, a holy longing to lift them up with You to the summit, between earth and heaven, living altars and living thuribles on whom the Father’s eyes look down benignly and from whom issue rivulets of graces upon their fellow men, who pass by unaware....

I thus had a world all my own in which I took refuge to live my life of desire. A holy desire for identification with You, Christ, who are known by few and bear with You aromas of paradise!

My longing for the lovely months of May and June, in which the glories of Mary gave up their place to the glories of the divine Heart dates back to those times.... The perfume of those months has remained in me like an essence in a sealed vessel, a perfume not of this earth, but really of a celestial flowerbed, and all the roses, lilies, irises, carnations, and thousands and thousands of flowers of mild May and sunlit June gathered together could not attempt to—I don’t say equal—even imitate that heavenly perfume the angelic hosts brought into my heart during these beautiful months of Mary and her Son. When they ended, I was left like someone seeing his joy come to an end....

My becoming a Daughter of Mary goes back to this time. I would really have preferred to become a Daughter of Our Lady of Sorrows, for I was very devoted to this title. Hers was the church where, here, over vacation, I would go as my summer parish; hers was the first precious medallet I wore; hers, the image on my bedside table. Our Lady of Sorrows seems to continue to want me to be hers, for, even now, at life’s close, she has placed my soul in the hands of one of her Servants and gone so far as to introduce her jurisdiction over my work as well, which she wants for her altar. It is, moreover, just that it should be so. The little one in love with suffering, crucified Jesus can have only Our Lady of Sorrows for a Mother.

I would, then, have wished to wear the violet ribbon of the Daughters of Our Lady of Sorrows I saw around the neck of the third day school students—from the lower classes, therefore—whom the Sisters gathered together to teach them work skills and keep them securely in the recreation room on Sunday. The third day school was at the very end of the enormous school building, which took up an entire street and which, appropriately divided into four unconnected parts, was composed of a real first-class boarding school, of the first day school, attended by the young ladies of Monza being educated, of the second day school for the lower middle class, where the students were exposed to a bit of general education and a lot of needlework, and of the third day school, where the girls were poor, poor and taken in out of charity from the morning to the afternoon, besides Sunday and holiday afternoons—these learned needlework.

They were good girls, devoted to the Sisters. They would invite us to their performances, and it seemed to us we were going to another world to arrive there, at the very end, after having traversed the entire building, some ten courtyards, the park, the enormous vegetable garden, the rustic yards, full of cockadoodledoos and cackles. And we invited them to our performances, and it probably gave them, too, the impression they were going to another world when coming to our beautiful school amidst gold plate, mosaics, floors which were mirrors, tapestries, chandeliers, and so on.

But, to go back to my desire, the Sisters did not let me become a daughter of Our Lady of Sorrows. I would have been the only one in the school, and peculiarities were always suppressed. I was, then, a Daughter of Mary.

My sleeping with the crucifix goes back to that time. We had large brass crucifixes over our beds. My crucifix prompted a real transport in me. I kept it as gleaming as gold by rubbing it energetically with my pencil eraser and pinafore of black wool, the only—instruments suitable for keeping metal polished which were within my reach. My Jesus shone like a gem from the head of my bed. I should say so! With such—deep rubbing! Those of my companions were dull, covered with verdigris, but mine was as beautiful as a cardinal’s cross.

But polishing it was not enough for me. I would always find a little flower, even in the coldest months, perhaps a small ivy leaf dug up from under the snow freezing my fingers.... Ah, a great love for Him was really needed in order for me to venture into the snow, which I could not bear, and dig under its crust to find a twig of ivy for his cross! I had found a way to keep those flowers and twigs fresh by tying a pen-nib holder with a layer of wadding inside to the bar of the bed, under the cross—how watchful I was so that it would not dry up...!

And then there was the night.... I could not see Jesus up there alone while I was warm under the covers and slept. So I would take Him down and place Him over my heart with lots of kisses and little words of love and fall asleep like that, happy to rest with Jesus over my heart and warm Him there.

I do not know whether the Sisters ever noticed. They never said anything to me in that regard, and I never said anything either.... They were my secret rendez-vous with Jesus....!

And that is how my days as a boarding school student passed by.

Do not think that my ever-increasing love for Jesus had extinguished the human part in me. No, for goodness’ sake! Our humanity, with all it possesses as an inheritance from Adam, truly dies, I believe, three days after we do. It is couchgrass which neither fire nor the hoe nor the sheep’s tooth ever roots out completely, and, when cut, it revives, when pulled up, it sprouts again, and when burned, it teems once more. Its greatest enemy is the love of God, but in spite of this love, humanity never dies completely; some root or taproot always remains to torment us and keep us down, in the dust, so that we will not get proud.

I still suffered a great deal from the behavior of my mother, who went on not understanding anything about me.

I suffered from being in a condition of inferiority with respect to my classmates, who had a private purse, kept, it is true, by the sister stewardess, but from which they could withdraw funds for little gifts of pretty images, keepsakes for sisters and companions, works of charity, and lotteries.

I suffered in not having those lovely illustrated postcards for our correspondence, those nice penholders and pencils and cases for study and work the others had. These are small things, but they occasion such suffering when one is at boarding school!

I also suffered because I was not in conditions which imposed certain privations, but they were due only to the will of my mother, who did not think of how mortifying they were for her child.

I suffered because no one came to see me. None of the relatives in Milan on account of friction with Mother. None of the relatives further away from Milan. And no friend of the family, for Mother had said that “she did not like it.” So I would see the others going to the parlatory at all hours, and I never did. Only when my parents came. Every fifteen days until Dad’s illness, and afterwards as well every two months....

I suffered because I did not have the lovely linen the others had: because, because, because—so many little becauses which were like the prickles on a prickly pear. They are not even visible, but cause such torment!

And then—the great sorrow.

Ah, no. First there is another pain.

I had suffered unspeakably in comparing the unadorned day of my First Communion, alone with Mother, without Father’s presence, and the First Communion of my classmates at school,so beautiful and moving: the boarders dressed entirely in white among the others in gray, fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, so many gifts, and so many things.... How I had suffered on seeing, behind the lily-like row of communicants, the row of fathers who received Communion after their daughters.... Well, let’s leave it at that, or I’ll start crying again. It is too rough an arrow turning round in my heart....

And we come to the great sorrow.

I told you how my father had suffered over seeing himself deprived of his invention patent. I told you how he suffered from the family scenes, which led him to cry like a child—my dear father, so good and so manly in physical pain and in so many other things, in all things, except this.

But as long as his Maria was with him, a balm medicated that heart, so unjustly tormented by the woman who should have been so grateful to him. I, too, had been taken away from him. And out of love for my health, not having the strength to send away his brother-in-law, causing pain to his wife, he had yielded. But he had not yielded to the point of giving me up for summer vacations. And he had cleared the house of my sick uncle, sending him to Bergamo Hospital, where he could have care and at the same time a job as librarian and translator.

How many quarrels, reproaches, and acts of discourtesy and surliness must my father’s firmness have cost him in freeing the house from his brother-in-law so that in July 1909 I could go back to my home? Only God knows. I recall having found Father thin, weary, and run down.... But during the three summer months he recovered. I was his life and his comfort.

The 1909-1910 school year began. Christmas, Easter.... Father was very depressed. He cheered up only when I was with him. But, though scarcely more than a child, I knew that he was suffering greatly and also knew how to give the proper name to that suffering of his....

I had been back at school for a short time after Easter and was suffering on account of a fall during gymnastics in which I had been flung from the top of the suspension bars, too large for my little hand, and come away with a twisted ankle and, what is worse, a spinal contusion, the first in the series, when Father wrote me that he was leaving for Pinerolo for a training course in the machine gun, introduced into use by our Army precisely that year. And he promised me a visit on his return from Pinerolo.

I waited tranquilly. I knew the training course would last twenty days at most. I thus had an almost certain limit to my waiting. And I was calm. I was only amazed that Father did not send me even a picture postcard from Pinerolo. Mother wrote as usual.

More than a month passed, and I saw no one come. Neither Father nor Mother. I wrote to complain about being left so long without visits. Mother replied, reproaching me for my insistence. Not a word from Father. And it remained that way, whereas before he had added a few words to Mother’s letters.

I began to get anxious and sad. Something inside warned me that a disaster had befallen me.... I often cried. I no longer played. In truth, I always played very little. Those mad races, those frenetic games in which my companions gave vent to their exuberant vivacity had never pleased me very much. I preferred to stick close to the Sister stewardess and talk with her while strolling. But now I could no longer manage to play at all.

The Sisters were even nicer to me and told me to pray. A strange recommendation, for, as I told you, they never forced souls.

All of May and all of June passed by that way. The tenth of July came, the day to leave for summer vacation. At the closing entertainment, which was then held on that day (it was later shifted to another period), neither Mother nor Father came. My aunt Angela and her daughter came. I thus received at last the sad explanation for the way of acting which had vexed me so. Father had wavered between life and death for two months, and only a miracle of God had impeded his premature death, for he was then forty-seven. He was now starting to get better....

The Mother Superior gave me lots of advice about being even more tranquil than usual and very, very good so as to help Father to recover.

I later learned, long after, that the Superior had asked Mother if she deemed it appropriate for a sister to accompany me home in the direst moments of the illness, when, according to the doctors, my father was nearing eternity. Since the malady was not contagious—an encephalitis brought on by an excess of mental effort, in the physicians’ words, but in fact there were many excesses which crushed that overly good man—I could very well have been kept alongside the patient. My mother alone—going against the opinion of everyone else—felt that I should not come back to the family.... God did not allow it, but my father could have died and been buried without my being present—his only daughter, now thirteen years old—or, worse still, even knowing about it. My mother, without reflecting that the death of a father is sacred to his children, took on such responsibility that I would never have forgiven her.

I was fated not to see my father at the hour of his death.... But it is just as well for me not to speak about this for now. It would be too painful, and what I am already referring to is so painful that it grips my heart in a vise.

On the train Aunt Angela and Aunt Emilia (she was my cousin, but since she was so much older than I, I had always called her “Aunt”) told me that my poor father had been very sick and that I would see he was quite changed.

In fact, at Easter I had left a man in the vigor of his handsome virility, in the charm of his fine intelligence, only a little tired, concerned, sad about the intimate sorrows which, in his goodness, he did not know how to cut away.... I saw a poor, greatly aged, gaunt being and, above all (I understood immediately), a broken mind. My father was now a wreck—a poor, grown-up child....

It was not that he had become an idiot. No, not this. But he had fallen back into a boy-like state.... Easy to dominate, quick to yield on everything, incapable of imposing himself to the minimum extent which even the best-natured display in the family. An ankylosed, sluggish, abulic brain. A ruin.

That is what my mother did by sending me to boarding school to make room for her brother, to keep me out of the way. She deprived me of the last intelligent caresses of my father....

From then on Father still loved me, but now I was the one who had to protect him, help him in his little pranks, which would have attracted Mother’s harshest reproaches, console him when he wept, and he wept so much, for he would say, “I am a broken man, and Mother points it out to me.”

Ah, Father, Father! Do you know what this means for a daughter? Do you know what a bitter chalice it is to be faced constantly with the vision of the ruin of one’s beloved father and be forced to say to oneself, “You no longer have anyone to confide in, to ask for help from. You are becoming a woman, but Father will not be able to counsel you in the anxious moments of your first love; you will have struggles to overcome against your mother’s selfishness, but Father won’t be able to defend you any more”? It was a bitterness which only God knew in its full force. To see Father observed by strangers for certain intellectual lacunae manifest in his acts. I would have wished to have the power of a god so that he would not be seen to be deficient.

We went to spend the vacation in northern Biellese, at Andorno, near Oropa. The places were lovely; though I prefer the sea, I liked them. But by then a veil of weeping and disheartenment had extended over everything for me, since seeing Father like that was an endless torture. A torture which, of course, Mother has always denied that I experienced, but God knows. And then I also realized that I was utterly at the mercy of my mother, and so....

I still remember the day when, slipping on the first step of a steep granite stairway, I fell to the bottom, bouncing my vertebras from one step to the next. After the fall at school I was left with weak legs; I was thus prone to fall. Perhaps from then on I should have received treatment for my spine. But who thought of that? I tumbled down an entire stairway, then, and suffered profound contusions on all the vertebras, half-exposed under the light summer dress. But I was thrashed because I had broken an object I was holding in my hands when I fell.

I was never thereafter free from spinal pains, and when I would bend over for any reason, I had to be helped to straighten myself up again. But my mother said it was all nonsense and exaggeration.

It was quite a dismal vacation. I went back to school prostrate. And it was also the year in which I had to do the technical subjects....

At that time, in addition, I began to suffer from the premonitions I informed you about orally. In sleep entire future events unfolded before my mind with a sharpness of detail which was an agony.

I recall one episode. It was the end of 1910. There was no war in the world, then, not even the Italo-Turkish war, the beginning, if one observes closely, of the whole succession of future wars which for over thirty years have been staining the earth with blood. I went on dreaming of war. I saw the battles, the smoke from the explosions, the man-to-man fighting, the people falling.... One night I clearly saw a charge of Austrian lancers through the streets of a town which I knew (in the dream) to be a secondary Venetian city. I saw the enemies from atop their mounts slash our soldiers, who sought to check their advance, and one of our young officers fall with his forehead cleft by a bullet.... I awoke with a shriek, and said to the sisters who came running: “War, war! The Austrians in Italy!”

As luck would have it, that same day, in Italian class, I myself was called to read a passage by G.C. Abba on the battle of Novara. That account, identical to what I had seen in the dream, shook me to the point that the words choked in my throat and made me utterly burst into tears.

I then knew that war would come and that my Italy would see the enemy’s heel on its territory.

And the same held true for many things.

I have often prayed that the good Lord take away this gift, which is a torment for me. But I have never been heard, and to all my other crosses this one has been joined as well. Never mind!

The 1910-1911 school year passed by, ending with that tremendous failure which I already described to you.

I suffered a great deal on account of my kidneys, which always hurt—I thought it was my kidneys, but it was my spinal column. And I also suffered morally. Very much. For the moral part, however, there was no remedy. It was my destiny to suffer. The physical sufferings could have been remedied. And my good Mother Superior, on seeing me so wasted when I went back to repeat examinations, suggested to my mother that I visit a doctor. We had the school doctor, who was very good. But Mother wanted me to be examined by the Superior’s cousin, the one who had decreed that my uncle was a consumptive (that’s right!). But to my mother he was a medical genius, for he had treated her during her liver ailment and cured her.

The Superior yielded to Mother’s wish, and this doctor came. Whether out of asininity or of set purpose to support my mother’s opinion, he said there was nothing wrong with me; if there had been, I would have been paler and thinner. After examining me and turning me in all directions, he said my only illness was unwillingness and that it was shameful for me to grieve my mother with imaginary maladies when the poor woman was already so worried about Father!

Very well! And some sisters thus felt I was lying or exaggerating. Unfortunately, it is now plain whether or not I was lying! There is still color on my cheeks after being bedridden for ten years with constant bitter suffering, without counting all the preceding years in which I dragged myself along with difficulty. I am not skinny even now, in spite of continual fevers, pain, little food, my five serious ailments, and the other less serious ones. If God wants to conserve me like this, what can I do? And should a doctor base himself on appearance—always misleading—and not the factual data resulting from an examination—if he is not a jackass?

But the fact is things turned out that way for me. Fortunately, the Superior was not only intelligent, but also familiar with patients and illnesses, since she had for many years directed Ciceri Hospital in Milan and had come to us only when she had developed heart disease in the enervating toil of managing that institution. She thus believed me more than her cousin and defended me before my mother. Not just this, but she gave me a great deal of care.

That should have been my last year at school, for I was now completing the final course. But the Sisters then succeeded in having me do the entire program of classical subjects. With the Sisters’ help I had begged Mother so much in that regard that she was forced to yield.

How happy I was to see my stay extended for a year! Study, whatever that doctor said, was my passion. They were most certainly imaginary ailments so as not to study! If anything, I would have invented them to go on studying. The worst of it was that the pain was real and tormenting. When I would bend over at the washbasins, I had to ask a companion to help me straighten up again, for I could not, with the pain I felt in the middle of my back.

Without the torment of Father in my heart—all the more because on October 5 the Italo-Turkish War had broken out, and I was always afraid Father would have to leave for Africa, a real danger in his state—and without that spinal pain, I would have been happy, for the satisfactions study offered me were continuous, and, as you know, there is always a bit of pride....

Meanwhile the 1911-1912 school year also ended, and the 1912-1913 year came on, which was to have been and, unfortunately, was my last year at boarding school. I feel the need to devote a special chapter to it, for that year another link in the chain joining me to Jesus was clinched into place by our mutual love.