Autobiography

13. Florence

The liturgical prayers for today, March 18, include the following words in the Introit of the Mass: “It is beautiful to give praise to the Lord and to sing hymns to your name, Most High.”

Praise can be given to the Lord in many ways, for, as in heaven there are many mansions of the Father, and the degrees of glory of the blessed differ therein, so on earth the ways of serving and praising God are different, however much the end and the reward of eternal life are the same.

It is beautiful to give praise to the Lord with the purity and obedience of an irreproachable life which has known no pause in going towards God. But it is also beautiful to give Him praise with the reparation of a life which, convinced of its error, humbles itself beneath the dust it is less worthy than, because, in being endowed with reason, it has failed God more than brute matter does if it disobeys the order willed by the Divine Maker for an instant.

It is beautiful because witness is thus borne for the rest of our lives to our being nothing, as proved by our falling miserably as soon as God leaves us to ourselves, and to our acknowledging that it is God’s voice in our resurrection—commanding us, poor Lazaruses dead to grace, buried in darkness, fetid with sin, corrupted in the decay of death—that effects his imperative of power and compassion: “Lazarus, come out.”

Then we, poor Lazaruses, go out of the prison of the moral tomb, and with our arms, legs, and body still wrapped and impeded by mortal nooses, filthy with the sweat of moral illnesses, and with our faces still covered by the shroud and our tongues numbed by the paralysis of death, take our first uncertain steps, stammer our first words of praise until Jesus, “with his heart still throbbing” on observing the death of this creature, bought back by his Blood and snatched away by Him, with his Weeping, in mortal straits, commands a second time: “Unbind him and let him go.” Then, completely free of all the funeral display, having risen again, we sing, together with Jesus, the Son of God, our hymn to the Father who is in heaven: “Father, I thank You!”

Personally, I feel that if he whom God’s goodness has always preserved from evil should be grateful to Him, even more grateful to Him is one who sees himself saved by God.

I disagree with St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus on this question. At one point in her Story of a Soul she states that the maximum gratitude must be felt by the soul God, as a most loving father, has always swerved all dangers away from.

I affirm it is not that way. After all, hasn’t God given us intelligence and thus the ability to guide ourselves? Hasn’t God, after all, given us a heart capable of loving? Now then, since God has created us with the capacity to guide ourselves morally and has given us a Law in order to know how to guide ourselves, our duty is to live in moral uprightness, according to his Law and also the invitation of love.

Man knows that God loves him. And how could he doubt it when He has loved us so much that He sent his Son to die for us? Man knows that his rebellions, his falls, and his persistence in evil cause God pain. Mind you, I don’t take the offense into account. I am concerned only with love. The offense presupposes a future punishment. It is fitting. But by this punishment the score between the Judge and the culprit, between the Law and the transgressor of the law, is thoroughly liquidated. But the pain we bring to the Heart of our God by our lack of love is not at all liquidated. A hundred hells would not suffice to destroy this pain—nothing can make amends for it, nothing which is punishment. Only our return to love, to loving obedience, only our loving repentance which is deeply sorry, not because of the punishment deserved, but over having grieved God, can bring back the smile to the eyes of Him who has created us, loving us to the point of immolating Himself for us.

When a soul, then, realizes that God’s forbearance has been so great, his patience, so sublime, his fatherhood, so loving that He has given it all the time, all the means to go back to living in the law, not only this, but as soon as the creature—from its mire, where it has blasphemed, vilified itself, created in the image and likeness of God—raises its gaze to heaven in a longing for redemption, and sees God descending to raise it up again, to clasp it to his heart, to comfort it to hope in its being healed, to assure it that, as far as He is concerned, it is already forgiven and doubly loved, precisely because it is a poor, sick soul, weakened by the infection suffered, how can this creature fail to feel a gratitude still greater than that of one who, never having deserved censure, is justly loved?

You will say, “But the latter should be grateful to God precisely because He has preserved it.” But, I reply, won’t the soul seeing itself loved with a twofold love which not only loves, but loves to the point of forgiving the offense received be extremely grateful?

The Master has so stated: “He who is forgiven less loves less.” Now, those who have slightly, only slightly displeased God, more by imperfections than real faults, naturally receive a lesser forgiveness, but those who have seriously, obstinately sinned must necessarily benefit from a much, much greater forgiveness. And they thus have the obligation—the most agreeable obligation—of boundless gratitude towards the divine Forgiver.

“Your faith has saved you. Go in peace,” says the Savior to the soul stained with sin which turns to Him, the only one who can cleanse it. How great is the faith in Him of this soul, which has grasped where the medicine for its leprosy is to be found! Great, as a result, is the compassion of the divine Physician, who bends to heal its wounds. It is an ebb and flow of generosity between the soul and God. The soul gives itself unconditionally, generously, under the goad of repentance and thankfulness. God, the Perfect One in all things, cannot be less than the human creature and thus gives his perfect generosity in forgiveness, which is the highest form of love.

But, you’re tremendous, Maria! Look where you’ve ended up! Preaching from a pulpit—you, who aren’t even worthy to be under a pulpit! Forgive me, Father.

Grateful love is like a wind transporting one far away and high up.... When the Holy Spirit—I think it is the Paraclete who generates such forces in hearts—infuses his divine breath into us, it assails us and bears us off in a supernatural eddy towards the heights where God lives and from which the splendors illuminating the poor soul oppressed by the mortal sheath proceed. The soul must sing, at certain moments, so as not to explode under the pressure and incandescence of love. And if the poor human word is always insufficient to express the divine, it is still always an outlet for the extreme ardor setting us aflame more than a fever.... It is, indeed, a spiritual fever, no less consuming than a physical one.

Until we reach the perfect age, in lovely Paradise, we are little children intent on muttering our first words. If only we were children for the life of faith as well...! But we manage to remain in childhood only in goodness. In evil, however, we immediately become adults—unfortunately, I would say perfect graduates in evil. And we thus render ourselves unworthy of entering the kingdom of heaven, where only those who are without malice, like innocent children, enter.

But let us come to my story.

We arrived in Florence on the morning of March 1, 1913. On March 4 we took possession of the new apartment.

The house, quite beautiful and airy, overlooked St. Gallo Parterre, not yet disfigured by that ugly building constructed there many years later for the Craftsmen’s Exhibition. On the inside it overlooked a good many gardens extending as far as Queen Victoria Avenue. I am using the names proper to the period, for now, with the aversion for everything English, they have introduced other names I am not familiar with. Among these gardens there was the one belonging to the Jesuits’ convent, which included a church. We would see the Fathers strolling there inside or playing with the boys from the holiday recreation room.

At that street location, near as we were to the corner of Pancani and Madonna della Tosse, we were quite close to the old church bearing the latter name. From our windows one could see inside. I recall that in the months of May and June I would set myself at the window and attend the Eucharistic Benediction. I would see the monstrance being raised in blessing, with its sacred Host—a snow-white sun in the midst of the rays of gold—over the devout throng, and the smell of the incense and words of the hymns reached me.... From the Jesuits’ church, dedicated as well to Mary, Mother of Good Counsel, if I am not mistaken, there also came hymns and effluvia of incense. I was on this mystical line between two churches dedicated to Mary.

From the windows—we lived on the fourth floor—I saw all the hills of Fiesole, Vincigliata, and Mount Morello, on the one hand, and Casentino, on the other, faded on the horizon with its soft curves, its wooded ridges, which changed color under the different phases of the sunlight. They told me that Verna lay in a certain direction. Already in love with the Seraphic Father and his doctrine, I always looked there, and a great peace came to me.

An artistic and sensitive spirit, I immediately liked Florence very much. Its churches and buildings, its museums, its gardens, its Hills that were so—allow me to use this adjective—so spiritual winding down from St. Miniato, black and white like a Dominican cowl, speaking of God and recalling, with the Holy Gates near, that we are dust, a chrysalis from which “the angelical butterfly,” which should “fly unshielded to Justice,” is to be born, unless we slay it by sin—they wind down, down to Porta Romana, amidst the Franciscan olive trees with the rustling conversation of the green-silver foliage with the winds bearing the scent of Apennine forests or the wet fragrance of woods along the river, ever wider in its course towards the sea. The Hills having the bronze plumes of the cypresses for milestones—the Tuscan plant par excellence, the plant that seems to pray and ascend, in prayerful longing, with the pointed arrow of its foliage gathered around the upright trunk. The lovely Hills with gardens overflowing with corollas, slopes filled with thrush’s whistles, chirps, warbles, pretty villas immersed in the greenery and flowers, and the Cascine singing with a thousand age-old plants, and the river with its voice now full-throated, from an influx of water, and now barely gurgling like a brook among the stones on the pebbly shore in the months of low water. And Boboli and the Park of what was the Stibbert Museum—so many green oases where I loved to walk with my father.

I liked the inhabitants less—too different from the Lombards among whom I had lived; I got disoriented by their way of acting. But I had so little contact with them that it was quite relative.

I would often go out with my father. They were the beautiful months of spring, so festive in Florence, and we took advantage of it to go together to the places we liked best. I had a great need for distraction in order to feel less longing for my boarding-school, which was really intense. Father felt the need for distraction to feel less pain over being a pensioner.... And so, joining our two sorrows, we tried to help each other in adapting to the new life.

As for the rest, I continued to live more or less as at boarding school. I got up early, prayed, went to church on Sunday, and also received Holy Communion. I would have liked to receive it more often, but Mother had immediately initiated a real theoretical-practical course entirely aimed at demonstrating the extent to which there was no need for frequent Confession and Communion and that whoever often had recourse to such things was nothing but a hypocrite, worse than the others who did not go, and so on and so forth. How often, during the twenty years extending from 1913, when I returned to my family, to 1933, when I was secluded on account of my present infirmity, I heard those gratuitous lessons on religious indifference booming in my head!

If it is true that it is sign of love for God not to have human respect, I must say that, at that time, even in the worst moments and most desolate periods, I was always a great lover of God, for I never yielded to human respect. Mocked, disputed, and offended because I was faithful to my religious practices, I continued with them, overlooking the smirks, irony, and reproaches which my faithfulness drew down upon me. Later on, in an act of holy freedom, I also managed to go to church throughout the months of May and June, for the loveliest novenas, and receive Communion every morning during such periods. But at the outset I obeyed sorrowfully and received Communion only on Sunday and the first Friday of each month, in addition to the main feasts.

The first Friday of the month! You will see that I had moments of rebellion and moral obscurity. However, not even at the very peak of those periods did I fail to honor the first Friday of the month. From 1909, when I entered boarding school and learned of this devout practice, on, I never interrupted it except on account of illness. And it had to be a very serious illness which really kept me from leaving the house.... And to keep me from leaving—I circulated undaunted even with fevers of 39 or 40 degrees and took care of the house, the Hospital, and the Catholic Action Association, just as if I were perfectly well, in spite of the high fevers—it really had to be a serious malady....

I think that if, everything notwithstanding, I have saved my soul, it is because of this fidelity to the first Friday of the month. Did not Jesus say to St. Mary Margaret that sinners will find in his Heart an ocean of mercy and that his love will grant final contrition to those who have been faithful to this atoning practice? I was faithful to it even at times of unfaithfulness in many respects, and the infinite mercy of Jesus has healed me of spiritual illnesses: He has given back the soul’s sight in order to see his Way, the soul’s hearing in order to hear his Word, and the soul’s movement in order to go to Him; He has healed and cleansed me of the leprosies, the fevers, the humiliating infirmities of the spirit; He has ordered the Evil One to leave me alone. I have received Life by means of his Heart, and shouldn’t I now give Him my life to say “thank you” to his Heart?

But let us go back to my day....

I would get up early, then, pray, tidy up my room and the parlor—that was my share of housework—help in the kitchen; I worked, not so much at that time, studied a great deal, played the piano, read a lot, went for walks with Father, sometimes to movies with him and also with Mother, rarely to the theater in the cold months and often in the summer, and went to bed rather early at night when we were without conversation, for frequently either we went or others came to spend the evening in friendly talk.

In Florence we had many old and new friends. One family, whose head was, like Father, a technical officer in the Army, was made up of the husband, a saint in the truest sense of the word; his wife, scatter-brained and unfortunate, whom only that saint could bear and forgive; and an eleven-year-old daughter. Later a son was born....

Though as innocent as a babe, I had realized that this woman was unworthy and did not hesitate—before the eyes of her husband, her daughter, and ourselves—to exchange love notes, with the waiters’ complicity, with her—admirers, while we were at that meeting place. I informed Mother, saying I did not feel like acting as a—folding screen for certain underhand intrigues. I was bitterly reproached because Mother—who, as I have already told you, sees everything to be just the opposite of what it really is—judged and viewed her friend as a masterpiece of feminine honesty!

The daughter of—this lady (!) was—a worthy pupil of her mother. She prepared for her First Communion in that school and with those tendencies.... Bear in mind that one day my waitress, though a country girl and, therefore, not overly scrupulous, felt the need to impose silence on her, saying, “Not a word more. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I won’t let you teach this young lady certain things and make certain comments!” I was sixteen, and she—the poor thing—only eleven.

I felt diminished and profaned when I was with those two wretches. But Mother admitted nothing, and I had to go. Afterwards, in 1915 and successive years, when the scandal became so evident that it was public, Mother was forced to admit that I was right.... Of course! But do you realize, Father, how that contact disturbed me? The evil grazing us never leaves us completely immune to its contagion. Something penetrates, and if it does not go so far as to take thorough possession of us—by God’s grace, first of all, and then on account of our nature—it always disturbs us, especially when we are still young girls.

Another family was headed by a lieutenant colonel, separated from his wife because of incompatibility in character. With the colonel father was his son, a young person of my age; with the mother, who had gone back to Rome to stay with her mother, was the daughter, younger than the boy. In the summer the daughter came to stay with her father, and the son went to visit his mother. A miserable family and most miserable children!

This colonel lived on the second floor of our building and had a huge garden entirely his own, while another, smaller garden belonged to the tenants on the land, an elderly married couple, one of whom, the husband, was blind: good and always afflicted on account of the many unruly or poor grandchildren who came to take refuge with them. On the third floor there were a husband and wife alone, and they rented half of their apartment to officers or gentlemen who came to spend the winter in Florence. I have offered you this description because it is necessary to my story.

I often went down to the colonel’s place to walk in his lovely garden and also because the colonel found that I was the only one capable of making his son—intelligent, indeed, but absent-minded, like the vast majority of boys—study. A poor creature who had lacked maternal care! A poor lad ever at the mercy of maids, who, according to their female nerves, spoiled him or treated him harshly and even had him punished by his father for trifles!

Mario, the boy, had immediately grown fond of us, and when he could come up to our floor and be cuddled by Mother, he was thoroughly happy. He was also happy if we went down to see him. Then he studied and was good. Poor Mario, who paid for his family’s selfishness in his own flesh, needed love...!

Ah! How much should be said in this regard! Children have duties towards their parents, it is true. But these esteemed parents have duties towards their children.... If thought were given to the consequences of certain incompatibilities which are nothing but selfishness, consequences whose victims are innocent children, people would never reach the point of separation. But this has nothing to do with my story.

Now that I have introduced to you the main characters of that time, I shall go forward and tell you about the one who most influenced me then.

I told you that on the third floor the married couple living there rented half their apartment. That year they had rented it to a young man. He was from Bari. He was handsome, rich, and cultured—a degree in letters which he did not, however, use professionally because he had no need to, having come to Florence to do research at the city’s libraries for a work on early Italian writers. He was also very good, serious, and calm.

One of the first days I spent at that house we met on the stairs. He was completely dark in his hair, face, and suit, and I, completely rosy and fair, made to look even younger by the pinafore thoroughly covering me.

We looked at each other and took an immediate liking to one another. I later learned that he had at once informed himself about who I was. But my shyness and my opinion that I was an ogre—for one of my mother’s specialties was to make me think I was ugly, not very intelligent, and unpleasant so forcefully that I really regarded myself as deformed, semi-cretinous, and repugnant—all of this, I say, and my upbringing both in the family and at boarding school naturally prevented me from showing my fondness.

In 1913, if they had even the slightest bit of brains in their head, women knew how to keep their place with that restraint which is one of the loveliest feminine gifts and which has now—been reduced to a mere—memory.

He, in turn, with the southerners’ respect for woman, a respect which to some from other regions seems a remnant of barbarism left by the Arab dominations, but is nevertheless so beautiful to observe, and with his noble upbringing, knew how to conceal his evident liking under a veneer of simple correctness. I say “evident liking” because, if no words were exchanged beyond laconic greetings and neighborly phrases, and glances were the only thing which added emphasis to the most banal words and made them rise to a higher meaning, I would be lying if I said I had not understood.

A woman always understand certain things. Even if she is a simpleton. She pretends not to understand them because good manners and modesty so counsel us, but they are understood. Those who say, “Oh, I didn’t notice anything! I didn’t know that fellow had a fondness for me” are lying shamelessly. A sixth sense proper to someone in love, and much sharper in woman as a more sensitive being, always notices when two souls or two bodies are attracted to each other.

I say “two souls or two bodies” because in affections there are those who love exclusively with their carnal selves and those who know how to love with the spiritual part as well or with the spiritual part alone. And these ought to be the longest-lasting affections because they are felt and sent forth by the better, eternal part. In practice, however, just the opposite takes place. As it is difficult to find an equally elevated soul that knows how to prevail over sense and love the soul alone, the end result is that through our affection free of sensuality boredom is arrived at and we are found to be abandoned as frigid creatures incapable of loving in the manner in which most understand love. The ideal would be to love spiritually and materially in the same measure. We would then love perfectly. But when are we creatures ever perfect?

In short, the two of us loved each other. A mute, patient, respectful love. He saw me as being so young—I looked like a child—that he managed to reign in his feelings so as not to disturb my youthfulness, proposing to speak at a better time. Having understood perfectly, I waited patiently, erecting an altar to my chaste love.

Months passed that way and summer came.

We had to come to Viareggio for a course of baths always lasting three months. I liked my little house on Umberto I Street, with its garden containing the green orange tree, the peach tree laden with fruit, the cedar, the arbor....

A few days before we left, he left to go back to his mother’s in Bari....

He was an only child, adored by his mother, who had very quickly been left a widow. I never heard him speak so much, and so loudly as in those days. His beautiful, dear voice rose up from his open window to my open window in such fashion that I knew he was leaving to come back, to the point of confirming the apartment for the following autumn from that moment on. And he left.

I suffered a great deal because I loved him, really loved him—“a childlike love fitting for me,” I might have said, with little Cho-Cho-San. For my love indeed had the purity and calmness of a girlish affection. Yet it was tenacious and profound in its purity....

I cried a lot in my little room when I saw him leave. It seemed that everything had faded and a great silence had fallen upon the world. I no longer heard his beautiful full-throated, virile voice, his perfect pronunciation, for, though from Bari, he had been educated at schools in central Italy and thus spoke an Italian perfect in form and accent.

You may be amazed at my having become so attached to someone who had given me only respectful greetings and affectionate glances. But remember what my life was like. With Father in that condition, Mother so harsh, without brothers, without sisters, with a heart like mine, anxious for affection.... How could I fail to grow fond of someone who showed he loved me with respect and seriousness? Nothing in him could disgust a woman. Neither his origin, nor his handsomeness, nor his wealth, nor his upbringing, nor his culture. He met all the requirements to be loved.

The vacation passed by. Though amidst distractions of the baths, I thought of him. He, as events later confirmed, thought of me.

We returned to Florence in the middle of October that year. The woman on the third floor, who must have intuited something, quite unexpectedly told me that he would be back towards the end of November. He had postponed his return because his mother had had a great deal of heart trouble. He loved his mother very much.

I continued to love him. But no one at home had understood my sentiment, which I cherished in the depths of my heart. And no one in the building, except for the landlady of the apartment he lived in. But she was a serious woman and never gossiped.

Not only November, but also December passed. I was calm, however, for I knew that the apartment was still rented by him.

January 5, 1914 came. That day Mother had gone out to make visits. With a bad cold, I had stayed home, quite happy to remain there because my dislike for the “visits” had continually grown over the course of the years. In order to feel the melancholy of the foggy, gray winter day less, I had turned to playing the piano. I was alone, for even the maid had gone out to make some small purchases of foodstuffs.

The doorbell rang. I went to open, putting the chain in place, however, for since the visit we had received from certain hooligans in Milan, the door had no longer been opened immediately, especially if we were alone.

He was there. Just to account for his ringing at my door he asked if I knew where his landlady had gone, for he could not get in since there was no one.

A little fib, as the woman on the third floor was home—I heard her moving downstairs.... But what else could he say in order not to state point-blank, “I have come to your door at once because I love you too much to wait a minute more”? So he told a little lie, but his face and eyes told the truth.

I replied that I did not know where his landlady was, but thought I could hear her moving. He then asked me how I was and how my family was. I asked him how his mother was, since I saw that he was just fine. And that was all.

He said goodbye, remaining extremely respectful, and went off. I closed the door again and ran to my room to thank God for the joy he was giving me.

The maid returned—she was a wonderful girl, devoted and faithful, who had been with us for years—and I told her. Father came back and I told him. Mother returned and I told Mother. Note carefully how I told everyone ingenuously, sincerely that he had come back.

The maid made no comment, and neither did Father. They limited themselves to saying, “Ah, is that so? His mother must certainly be better.” But my mother, who was getting undressed with my help, became furious. Mother’s bedroom was right above his, where he was busy opening his luggage. Unfortunately, a stove pipe placed in his room rose to the corner of my mother’s room, acting as a speaking tube....

My mother—oh, how hard I find it to have to reflect once more on how unmotherly she was to me at that time and how she showed me that she did not know her child.... I find it hard, and at the same time it gives me a measure of how I have grown in God. For, while for years every time I touched this subject I felt my heart rising up and a feeling of rancor joining itself to the pain, rancor towards my mother, who offended and wounded me so that day, now I realize that the rancor has collapsed, and only the pain remains.

Who has worked the miracle of removing from my heart that leaven of ill-will towards my mother? My God, my Father who is in heaven, my Jesus, who tells me, “Forgive and you will be like me,” the Divine Spirit, who gives me his gift of light and makes me see that all the sorrows in my life, all the collapses of my hopes, all the disappointments of my affections, all the solitude which has progressively grown ever vaster and more complete around me have been willed by a special love of my God, who has, so to speak, pruned all my foliage, cut all my branches to make me grow in height, vigorously, in his garden. It has been willed by an exclusive love of my God, who predestined me for Himself and has taken everything from me so that I will no longer have any choice but to seek comfort in Him alone.

My wings, which opened in longing for flight towards the happiness of human life, were thoroughly clipped so that I would not flee here and there, but grow accustomed to living in God’s aviary. Don’t we proceed this way with fledglings as well, with doves captured when adults, to force them to remain in our imprisonment, until time erases their memory of the sweet native nest, of the green forests, of the free flights, of love free amidst the pollinator foliage and under the beautiful sun of God or the trembling of the stars? Yes, we act that way.

But how much damage the mutilation suffered does! How long it takes for it to heal and hurt less! How many tears over the good lost! What a struggle before resigning oneself to the aviary’s bars! So many, many days have to pass spent reflecting and praying, after having cried out in rebellion and felt surges of despair, before grasping what a gift God has made us in taking away everything and before coming to love our human poverty, which is supernatural wealth, our human widowhood, which is betrothal to Christ, our torture, which is future blessedness!

Now I understand and say, “Thank you, my God, for having wanted me for Yourself!” But in the early years...! For nearly five years I experienced the hell of despair.... Enough! Let’s not speak about it any further.

My mother got furious. All the accusations and insolent remarks came forth in a stream directed at him, our maid, and myself. Ah, finally against me...!

He was a scoundrel, an opportunist, a good-for-nothing who seized the propitious moment to ruin the reputation of an honest family?! Our maid was a—I’ll spare you the term she used—who acted as a paranymph for the illicit relations?!

I was a—another epithet I’ll spare you; you can introduce some—who in the absence of her parents received her boyfriends at home?! I should state, confess—since I had betrayed myself—how far I had gone (?), what I had done in May of the preceding year when Father and she had returned to Voghera for fifteen days. I should state clearly what consequences had been reached by my welcoming the one I liked in secret rendezvous, for it was impossible that I had not gone to the limit of honesty and modesty, and so on and so forth.

The more I swore by all that was holy that not a word—aside from the greeting which is denied to no one—had been exchanged between us, the more I insisted that in her absence neither he nor even Mario, who was just a boy, had come up to see me and that while my parents were away, as had been agreed with Mother herself, I had, one might say, lived in the colonel’s garden—everyone could testify to the fact—the more she stubbornly persisted in an offensive, unjust fury.

The maid, who had rushed in on hearing her cries, after listening to what my mother was accusing her of, gave notice by walking out on the spot. She acted properly. A person does not remain where he or she is not esteemed if it is possible to go elsewhere.

I had no choice but to remain. I was her daughter and a minor. Where could I go? If I had been able to, I would have immediately left that house where I was being unjustly accused of unreal faults.

Unreal. Unreal. I don’t like to swear because I feel man ought to be believed on his word and also because Jesus says so. But I am prepared to swear to you, Father, that I am telling the truth and that events were as I describe.

My mother, together with the accusation, which slapped my soul and blood and completely closed my heart to confidence in her, brutally tore away the veil of my chaste innocence as a virginal, pure woman. I thus found out that evil can be done between man and woman. Until that evening of January 5 I had not known. And this laying bare the shameful parts of life with no pity for my ignorant age of sixteen was what most struck me and separated me forever, definitively, from the woman who had generated me.

I think a mother and daughter become separated when the daughter can no longer feel she will find understanding in her mother. Love remains, for it does. But it is an instinctive love, not unlike—and perhaps inferior to—that which unites a dog, a horse, or a pigeon to the master who provides it with lodging and care. Fusion is done with. There are two individuals living in proximity, but independent from one another. It is something like when the farmer, having made a layer of grapes, cuts the shoot, which can now live by itself, from the main trunk. They remain close together; having been one, they are now two entities independent from each other. And it is indeed an achievement if the younger plant does not take revenge by overpowering the older one.

I have not overpowered my mother. I have continued to serve her out of duty, for I love her, in spite of everything. But my heart closed like an oyster’s valve.... My mother was rejecting me with maledictions for a fault I had not committed. I withdrew in agony. But I withdrew forever.

And my father? Poor man! He consoled me by weeping.... He could not manage to do anything else.

And he? Having heard the whole scene, thanks to the stove pipe and my mother’s extra-shrill tone of voice, and grasping that no argument would make my mother yield to reason, just to persuade her that there was nothing true in her way of judging what had happened—all so honest and licit—which she even regarded as a demoniacal machination, he found no other recourse but to leave immediately, that very evening. I later learned from his former landlady that his idea had been to return many months after, when I had reached the age of eighteen, in the hope that in the meantime my mother would be convinced.... Poor lad! How deceived he was! My mother and persuasion are two opposite poles.

Just imagine, Father, what days I spent.

I was constantly driven away by my mother, in spite of the fact that two days after the hateful scene she had broken her arm on the street and thus needed help even more. My help, for the maid had left at once, and we therefore lacked a servant.

I was continually driven away, insulted, and humiliated, for, not content with all she had done in the family, Mother had initiated an “investigation,” shall we say; it would really be more accurate to say that she had started gossip, from which her daughter emerged impaired....

It is true that all the tenants—the colonel more than anyone else—asserted that during my family’s absence I had either remained at home or gone to the colonel’s garden. But it was licit to think that if my mother believed me to be capable of sinking so low on the scale of female seriousness, it was a sign she had the details needed to do so. After all, I had been there for only a few months. Who knew what I had done elsewhere! They could all think that in other places I had caused talk.

My mother, blinded by her egoism—I later understood that it was egoism, for, in order not to lose my assistance, which no maid could give her with the measure of affection and patience I gave her, she sent away all my suitors—did not even see that by her way of acting she was damaging my reputation....

Driven away, insulted, and humiliated, pained by the conviction that my dream had forever dissolved into nothingness. He was far away and no doubt mortified over having caused me such sorrow instead of the joy he had intended to bring me.

What is more, I did nothing but weep and meditate on all that Mother had brutally revealed to me in making me aware of life’s dark pages, which I had not even remotely thought could exist. I did not even grasp completely how foul and ugly they were.... There was, of course, someone who did take the trouble to do so—precisely the colonel’s housekeeper, who, well informed about everything by way of my mother’s tactless inquiry, and endowed as she was with a malign heart, took pleasure in blowing on the fire and instructing me about all the evil I could have done.

And yet, believe me, God’s goodness did not permit me to understand all the vulgarity of certain things. Almost out of mental deficiency, I did not understand a great many aspects. The good Jesus did not want my poor soul to be aware of all the evil of sensuality so soon, and not just the evil, but those animal laws which, though not an evil, because they are necessary for the continuation of the human race, are so disquieting when made known to us all at once.

God concealed from me much of the evil my mother and Mario’s housekeeper dissected under my nose—the former, out of imprudence; the latter, out of wickedness. May God forgive them—for it is He who can—contravening for once his word, which clearly foretells punishment for those who scandalize one of his little ones who believe in Him.

For the little I understood was enough to scandalize and disturb me. It was as if a brutal hand had kept me bent over a mofette, an abyss from which miasmas of fevers rose up. Even if you refuse to breathe, something penetrates just the same, causing harm to your constitution. And harm they caused me.

There is nothing worse for a young creature than knowing things by halves and being led by the ever-curious mind to reflect and ponder on what they have flashed in front of her halfway and, what is more, exhibiting the lower half, the one which, when presented with malice, can so agitate a young heart. Nor did the evil provoked by my mother with her intransigence and egoism stop there—all the troubles which have destroyed my life and nearly destroyed my soul as well have arisen therefrom.

I now understand, I repeat, that what for seven years seemed to me an unjust raging of destiny against me, what struck me for some seven years as undeserved abandonment on the part of God, was instead the fulfillment of God’s wish for me, even against my own will—it was not abandonment, but the jealous love of God, who wanted to be my All, the Only One for me, and thus had to act as He did to canalize my feeling, which tended to expand over creatures, exclusively into the channel which flowed into Him.

And if, after having done me so much harm, after having shattered the road leading to marriage, Mother had at least been gentle—I would not have regretted greatly the good lost. I would have become attached to her and resigned myself. But by her increasingly intransigent, extravagant way of acting, her continually throwing in my face what I had not committed, her showing me a lack of esteem I did not deserve, and demonstrating it to me in a thousand ways going from tailing me in the street, as far as the church where I went to pray, to opening all my mail—including the letters from my boarding school containing abundant writing on the envelopes and serving as guidance for poor Maria, distant and unhappy, from my good Sisters—made me sadder and sadder.

Sometimes I managed to write the Sisters in secret and to mail the letters with great palpitation over being caught, but I had to beg them not to answer to the point, for Mother opened all my letters. It was certainly wartime censorship! And the good Sisters thus had to rest content with speaking in general terms. They gave me good advice, but of a broad nature, not that which I most needed in my special circumstances.

My health began to deteriorate. To the now chronic vertebral pain there was joined a heaviness in my limbs, a swelling of the carotid, and exhaustion on climbing the stairs. But, as usual, when I started to refer to these troubles, I received the answer that they represented imaginary fears, sentimentalism, an excessively soft life, and so on and so forth. So I remained silent and spoke no more about it. Besides, the idea of my death appealed to me. I thought it was the only way out of such an unhappy situation, which I understood would never change. I thus observed myself getting worse without fear, but rather, with joy.

As you see, Father, death has been a face familiar to me from the start of life. And if I so desired to find peace in the end, at bottom a human peace, wanting to escape from the war being waged on me by my mother, do you think that later, on understanding that immolation for a holy purpose opens the Kingdom of true Peace to us, I have hesitated to wish for a complete holocaust? And if, out of love for creatures that had been taken away from me, I wished to die, do you think I have not wished to die to go to my Jesus, who loves me as He alone can love and has granted me the grace to love Him above all things?

From now on you will see that this idea of death is the basic motif of my symphony, a symphony with pages of an extremely—indeed, completely—human humanity which later contains a long rise of harmonies going higher and higher into the reign of the supernatural.

Yes, the poor, thoroughly human Maria I was from age seventeen to twenty-four was gradually metamorphosed into a new creature replacing man, her first love, with God, and her thirst for human joy, with a thirst for superhuman immolation, and making Sorrow her Joy, for “he who loves wishes to become like his beloved,” and Maria’s Beloved was Jesus, the King of Sorrow.

During this tremendous period the only one who was very good to me, or, rather, the only ones besides my father, who was good, but unable to defend me, were the colonel and his son. The former loved me like a father; the latter, like a brother. They often wanted me with them, for strolls and at shows. Mother did not share their ideas—but she champed at the bit, for the colonel knew how to make her stand at attention. Perhaps he was the second, after my nurse, who managed to make head against my mother.

Mario, in addition, was filled with solicitude for his “dear little sister”—as he would say—who knew how to render him good and studious and thus enabled him to avoid his father’s punishments and also succeeded in stating the truth when the housekeeper wrongly accused him, out of ill will. The colonel had all the esteem for me which my mother lacked, believed what I said to him, and paid attention to me. I was, then, Mario’s good fairy, and just as he drew comfort from this, so I drew comfort from his fraternal friendship so devoid of ulterior motives. We were really like a brother and a sister.

But in September 1914 Mario entered the Naval Academy. I thus lost his brotherly company. We wrote to each other, though, in fulfillment of the wish of the colonel, who had grasped what a beneficial influence I exerted on his son.

Then, in May 1915, our war broke out, and the colonel also left. Only the housekeeper remained, who was happy when she could cause harm and did so with such consummate artistry that she managed to wound in such a way as not to attract reproaches. It was almost necessary to be grateful for the way she treated us...!

I was getting sadder and sicker, and Mother, increasingly overbearing. The only oases of serenity were the vacations of Mario, who then came to the house and showed interest in “his little sister.”

Mario gave Mother no cause for suspicion. He was so young—eighteen—and so boyish, in addition! Indeed, he was useful for her game, which was later discovered in all its Machiavellian refinement. Mother kept him close to me as the hunter does with the mirror decoy for luring skylarks. She thus dazed me and took my mind off seeing other young men. She had understood—the only thing she has understood about me—that when I am totally absorbed in a mission, I look only at this mission, which I carry out at all costs. And I had proposed to give Mario a bit of joy, this motherless boy whom his father loved, but with a man’s love, and that of a man who was rather nervous—that is, with brusqueness and painful changes in mood. Furthermore, I wanted to make Mario become a fine lad and a fine officer.

I have always had the vocation to be a “light,” a “guide,” a little “Beatrice” for those I love. I have made myself better, more serious, and more studious to induce others to become good, serious, and studious.

In New Life Dante writes (and this is the loveliest homage a man, a loving man, can pay to his lady), “As soon as she showed herself, a sudden flame of charity was lit in me and made me forgive the wrongs received and love my enemies,” and in the Comedy Dante makes this creature appear, who by her mere presence communicates to him the gift of gifts—that of charity so loftily exercised as to be capable of forgiving and loving one’s enemies—in the role of co-redemptrix, for she leads him to “love the Good.”

Since studying and meditating on these words, I had set myself the goal of becoming a “Beatrice” for my fellow man. This purpose forced me to remain good and improve myself so as to improve others, for I have always grasped instinctively that in the school of virtue the only teacher is example.

Didn’t I tell you in a letter that God has availed himself of everything in my case to instruct me in the Good? Even Dante’s New Life and Comedy have served this purpose. For it is not a small thing to propose with honesty of intention to lead others to the Good by our first of all becoming disciples of Goodness. It is a human end, but it predisposes us for ascesis on a superhuman level. We begin to be good through the law of human morality and are good in the end according to the dictates of Christian morality.

If this vocation had not been in me—certainly placed in my heart by God—with all that I underwent, I would undoubtedly have lost my way “in a wood” even darker than the one which enveloped the Poet before his Beatrice intervened in his favor. However, just as an asbestos suit protects one against the action of fire and a diving suit against the water and the bites of fish, the tendency towards being good so as to lead others to be so is the most effective barrier against the assaults of Evil.

And only God knows if I needed a barrier! As I gradually found myself alone, isolated, with my memory of love and my memory of rancor, continually goaded by Mother (who as she little by little was left without witnesses in my favor, increased her illogical rigorism), I went further and further backwards, drifting away from that code of goodness and love which had been my norm in life for years.

You will ask, “But didn’t you tell me that you always remained faithful to your duties as a Christian?”

Yes, I was still a believer, still observant. Love for God, which had been my motive force for so long, continued to act without my knowledge and made me not want to cut all the bridges linking me to God. I continued to go to church and to receive Communion on the first Friday of every month. Of course! And where would I have wept if I had not gone to church? Where would I have felt a balm descend upon my agony, like a sedative in a decayed tooth, if I had not taken refuge near the Tabernacle and had not heard God in my poor heart in a storm?

But they were poor prayers and poor Communions. They were no longer the confident prayers in which one indeed asks for heavenly aid, but at the same time also says, “Yet, Lord, do what You think is right.” They were no longer the loving Communions, fusions of the soul with her Lord, during which one kisses his Divine Face, his Most Holy Hands, even if that Face has just pronounced a verdict of pain for us and those Hands have thrust a thorn, one of his thorns, into our heart. They were interrogations, inquisitions—I won’t say “disputes,” for Jesus never disputes, but—my acts of accusation against Him.

Don’t people usually act that way with the Good God? When, for a reason we shall know only in the other life, the Lord allows pain to seize us, we begin interminable discourses on the basis of “Why?” As long as we limit ourselves to asking about the reason for a pain, we are still going fairly straight. The trouble is that after the “why’s” there come the real charges, whereby we place the Good Lord in the dock and, situating ourselves in the role of public prosecutor, thunder our reproaches from our seat and pronounce our harangues against Jesus, who, as formerly before Pilate, does not respond, but only gazes at us with infinite compassion.

I thus slipped slowly down towards despair.

Like a bull in the ring—the comparison is rather out of place when speaking of a young woman, but renders the idea quite well—chased after, lashed, incited, derided, and wounded on all sides, I pawed the ground, shaking the ring of banderillas being driven into my flesh, and succeeded only in increasing the torment. A torment which came to me from outside and which rose to the surface from my interior.

I was in a sea of tortures. The external ones, from my dear fellows, headed by my mother, who alone was as good as ten, were leading me to despair in one way; the internal ones, which sprang from my heart, were leading me there in another. The former occasioned temptations to suicide to escape from that net of daily torments; the latter occasioned temptations of the flesh, for they had arisen from what Mother’s imprudent words had sown that evening and the colonel’s housekeeper’s malignant explanations had later cultivated.

Despair! How much I would have to say about it! About those who lead their fellow men to despair and are the most cynical murderers, for without materially striking and staining themselves with blood, they in fact kill in a refined way, both by the method achieving this end without incurring in the penalties of human justice and by the cruelty with which they carry out their work! They kill, and not just the body, but the soul, driving it to suicide, which is rebellion against God’s commandment.

And how much I would have to say about the despairing! The most wretched of the wretched! What are poverty, the most horrendous mutilations, the most tormenting illnesses, the most distressing losses, if hope continues to comfort man’s heart? As long as heavenly virtue remains as a supernal light to illuminate a heart and show it God’s Face and its neighbor, eternal goodness, poverty, mutilations, illnesses, and losses are sorrows which can be borne. But when hope dies and one hopes no more, when despair, that powerful leech, grips our souls, sucking up all our good energies and paralyzing all our movements towards goodness, when that monster draws us into the deep whirlpool, into the dreadful darkness of no longer believing in anything, then sorrows cannot be borne any longer: they crush us and we feel ourselves collapsing under their weight, and we fall, cursing life, and not only life....

Oh, I was able to understand my father’s sufferings quite well, sufferings which undermined him to the point of turning him into a poor child, by comparing them to my own...!

Despair kills even if we do not kill ourselves. It kills just by the effort we must make so that it will not prevail, leading us to suicide....

How we must pray for and love the despairing, these unfortunates led to moral madness, sometimes by events which cannot be avoided, but often, too often, by voluntary actions performed by one’s neighbor in full awareness which do one harm!

If the furniture in my room could speak, it could tell you of some of my hours of tremendous struggle against the temptation of despair pushing me to suicide. It could also say that, irate with myself, for I did not know how to die of sorrow or take my life (because I was afraid of not doing so properly and causing the world to laugh at me), I fiercely struck myself, with my fists transformed into a club, until falling to the ground in a daze.

As you see, I show no mercy in describing myself as I was.... But in such narratives one must be sincere. Always. In telling the good and the bad. If not, it is useless to write them. Don’t you think so?

I was violent and passionate. Don’t forget who I had sucked my milk from and the theory of certain scientists on the influence of milk on the future characters of those being fed. In those years, under the goad of external and internal forces, the psyche of my mad wet nurse popped out. I have already described the external ones to you and have mentioned the internal ones.

The Master says, “From the heart come evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander. These are the things that make a person unclean.”

From the depth of my heart, where with scant respect for my innocence a knowledge which I might have been spared on certain animal traits of our nature had been thrown, there arose temptations of desire.

One who has not experienced them cannot understand them and thus cannot judge. It is comfortable to thunder against one who falls, but the person thundering and judging should be stung, in turn, by temptation. Then he would understand. Ah, Jesus, what words are yours when you say, “Judge not!” Those whom eternal goodness has protected from certain struggles should limit themselves to praising and blessing God—and doing this alone—instead of consuming their tongues and breath in condemning their tempted brethren....

I have suffered greatly.

It was here that I had a dream which I feel was surely sent by God for my good.

Last night I stopped at this point because I was too unwell to continue, and in the long, painful hours of the night the thought came to me that I was omitting a detail capable of explaining my distressing state of mind described above. I shall now make up for the oversight, due to the continuous interruptions I must endure from family members, visitors, and my suffering, interruptions which sorely try my patience.

Six months after the Italo-Austrian War had broken out, I was told that Roberto, my very respectful lover, had died in combat.... Death put an end, an end there was no escaping, to my dream of love, which hope and constancy had continuously nourished.

I suffered unspeakably and thought one could not suffer more! Years later I understood that one could suffer even more, because there are tragic resolutions in the nothingness of human affections even more painful to endure than the ones provoked by death. But I was not familiar with them then and thus suffered profoundly, saying to myself, “It is not possible to suffer more than this.”

I felt my life breaking, and in truth it broke forever. Afterwards—since I was so young, eighteen years old, when thus stricken—in the following years, I tried to revive, but my attempts were in vain. My broken wings could no longer keep me aloft in the sky of joy and human love. Only when I had turned my gaze and desire for flight towards the supernatural regions were my poor broken wings able to find the strength to move because they were assisted by those of the soul, because the atmosphere in which they moved was purer and lighter, in itself an aid to flight, and, above all, because the hand of the Eternal Physician had made up for their deficiencies by caressing them. Everything in the world faded for me, taking on a gloomy, grayish tone.

I was never again to know love, in its meaning of happiness. I later experienced an affection perhaps—indeed, there is no doubt about it—deeper than my first love, an affection which still lasts after so many years and will endure in me until my final hour. But it was more a friendly, fraternal, and maternal affection than an amorous one. The effervescence of love, the pleasure of love, in a human sense, had ended forever for me. Afterwards I was a soul that loved a man, and this probably contributed to sending him away from me, for a man wants a woman, flesh more than a soul.... But with the flesh I could no longer love. My youthful flesh died together with Roberto when I was eighteen.

You will perhaps be amazed that on the basis of the minimum contact I had had with him—glances, greetings, and very, very few words—I had been able to make such a vigorous love grow.

In solitary lands, where a bit of humus has accumulated over the centuries among the stones and crags of rocky coasts or along cliffs overhanging the sea, the agave sometimes appears, with a seven-armed flower like the sacred candelabrum in the Temple of Solomon. And the more solitary it is and the more its growth is opposed by the poorness of the soil available and inclement weather, the more vigorously it grows. The robust—I would say “metallic”—tuft of its leaves opening around the column of the flower straightens its fleshy, thorny gray-green lances; the flower’s candelabrum splendidly rises towards the sky with its seven arms, at whose apex, in place of the darting flame, there are yellow-red corollas of the lovely sweet-scented flower, which does not bend and die in the face of parching thirst in the sun, the whipping of winds, the cuffs of the waves, or the pelting of hail. Not even man, with his instruments of death, can uproot it from the clod where it has made its nest to grow and flourish. Only the lightning bolt can reduce it to ashes and destroy its tenacious vitality.

My love was like the solitary agave. Born to introduce the joy of a blooming where there was nothing but tears and loneliness, it had deeply taken root in me and had become my reason for existence. The opposition hurled against it had served only to force it to sink its roots in ever more profoundly and push its stem—protected in its flourishing by the bulwark of robust leaves—ever higher.

Everything had been a pronubus for its birth. Such sad family conditions, with a disabled father and a despotic mother, no brothers or sisters, deprived of the holy affections of my boarding school, for which I felt such acute nostalgia. My temperament desirous of love more than bread, clothing, and diversions; my reflecting that to get out of the hostile, oppressive atmosphere at home (such as my home was); and my looking towards the future and meditating on the fact that on the death of my loved ones I would be left alone in the world spurred me to love Love more than man in himself.

Roberto had everything to be loved: goodness, handsomeness, wealth, culture; but I think that if he had not been handsome and wealthy and had possessed only goodness and culture, I would have loved him just the same.

To me love was a binding condition to be able to live.

If from that point on I had known “what would have been of service to my peace,” I would have directed my need to love elsewhere and would not have been disappointed. But the good Lord wanted me to love Him by experience, shall we say, to love Him not by a grace granted gratuitously by Him, but through my own conviction, my own spontaneous will.

I had to go to Him after having seen how short-lived human affections were, after having tasted what bitterness was hidden under the fictitious sweetness of human joys; I had to seek repose in Him after having become convinced that in any other place where I might rest my flight I would find prickly thorns beneath false roses, after having observed that, instead of the sought-for company, there was a distressing void everywhere and that only He, He alone, could give me faithfulness, sweetness, repose, warmth, company, and comfort.

According to human logic, this would appear to be cruelty. However, now that I live on supernatural planes, I judge it to be proof of the esteem God has granted me and an utterly special predilection.

In the school of experience He has instructed me in the knowledge of Good and Evil; He has shown me, causing me to see with my own eyes, the difference between life’s ephemeral joys and the eternal joys of the spirit. At this moment I do not recall whose lips were purified of all human savors by a seraph with fire brought from heaven so that he might perfectly understand the food of God’s word and celebrate his splendors. But I find that God, substituting Himself for the seraph, also purified both my heart and my lips with the fire of pain to make them capable of tasting nonearthly things.

And I bless You, O Holy Father, for the heat of the burn, for the potency of your cauterization, for your operating upon me, in the capacity of a Physician who, to give life, destroys the parts invaded by destructive maladies. I bless You for your Love, which has saved me against my own will, for your Patience, which has waited for me, and for your indestructible Compassion, which no disavowal or fault by us breaks and which had such great mercy on me. I bless You for having evangelized me again, for having transfigured me in You as soon as I said, “I want to be yours!”

A life on my knees, with my arms upraised in a gesture of love and blessing, my whole life does not suffice to thank You for all You have given me—and all my pain, which I have asked You for and give to You—for in my weakness and wretchedness I cannot give You anything but my suffering—is a small offering, a quite insignificant tribute, an even more insignificant repayment in the light of all You have given to me.

O Lord, O Good Master, unwearying Compassion, for this nothingness of mine which I give You—and which is all I possess that is really my own and is not surplus, for I do not give You things left over, but the essential things to live on earth, the ones everybody seeks to conserve as the greatest treasure, because it is my health, my life, my sacrifice, my suffering—but for all this, Holy Trinity, for all this, my Jesus, You grant to others, to numberless others guilty as I once was, what You have given to me, to take them with You to heaven through conversion and love.