Autobiography

25. My Father’s Death

Marta came to us on May 24, 1935. Immediately thereafter my father began to feel not very well continually.

Poor Father said nothing, for he was stoic about suffering pain. He said nothing so as not to grieve me, so as not to provoke grumbling from his wife, for my mother has this specialty: when one feels ill, instead of being sweeter she is harsher than ever.... And he said nothing because I think he was also so tired of living in the power of a madwoman—this word must be used in order not to say she was wicked; “madwoman” is always better than “wicked” because madness is a disease, and wickedness is malice—he was so tired, I was saying, that he looked to death as a great liberation.

He had lived as a just man. Nothing disturbed his soul on thinking of his passing. He had lived benefiting many, beginning with his wife, and including relatives, friends, and strangers. He had brought up the young people entrusted to him with goodness. He had always done his duty as a son, husband, father, soldier, citizen, and man among men. He had done so with patience, gentleness, and charity at all times, forgiving offenses, returning good for evil, and overcoming his disgust over the one who disregarded and wounded him at every instant.... How much faithful, constant, and long-suffering love he had given to my mother! And how unrewarded he had been by her...!

Ah, I must not think of it, must not recall, O my God! Make me forget certain things—otherwise all my blood boils...! Let me see You on your cross, where You are able to forgive those torturing you; let me see your Mother, who, at the foot of the same cross, forgives twice over: for your sake and for hers, absolute forgiveness because nothing costs us so much as to forgive whoever inundated with pain the ones we love most.... Caress me, Jesus, to heal this wound, which, when barely grazed, hurts in a superhuman manner.

Oh, my Dad, poor Dad, who had only me to love you and did not have me near in your last days and at the extreme hour!

Mother saw nothing of the very swift decline of my dad, a decline everyone saw, not just me, with my anxious heart of a daughter.... My mother now says, “It came like a lightning bolt! He departed in three days, and he was so well.” No, it was not a lightning bolt. It was a gradually swelling flood, and it takes months for the water to rise up to the banks before overflowing. Even if she had not wanted to believe my dream of November 19, she should have believed the first symptoms, appearing a few days later, with the vesical hemorrhage and the discovery of stones in the bladder....

She had run to me then, for when there is something which agitates, vexes, or frightens her, then she, who is never with me except to watch over visitors, comes running at once. And, with my hospital experience, I had told her, “It’s serious. Generally, vesical calculosis, especially in a man and particularly when it is already so far advanced as to produce hemorrhages, is soon followed by death, within a year. Great care must be given Dad, in any case, to avoid moments of anger, fatigue, and food not suitable for his condition, and also have him treated by the doctor.” Words cast to the wind...!

Afterwards there was the slight embolism involving a blood clot entering his circulation.... Not even this served to impede her. According to her, it was all over. In fact, in January, February, March, and April Father seemed to be better. But I insisted on what I had said and continued to bear off the label of “lunatic.” She did not start believing even when, with the arrival of May, Father began to take on a feeble appearance, with a shuffling gait, a yellowish color, and cyanotic lips and cheekbones, and she did not look after him at all. It was a stranger who noticed Father was losing blood—and she told Marta, who told me, and I informed Mother. This happened at the end of May.

Precisely in those days I had intercepted a letter addressed to my father which would have grieved him very deeply and, if read by my mother, would have rendered him a complete martyr. I am quite happy about having done so and taken care of setting everything in order myself. I still keep that letter—and if Mother were to see it, she would not say, “You acted rightly in sparing Father this worry,” but would inundate me with insults and accusations. I am not concerned. I spared my father the final sorrow.

June came. I then had the first attacks of chronic peritonitis, with the onset of volvulus. Among other things, I was so agitated by numerous internal examinations, which had had to be undergone to no avail, that I was beside myself. I shall always remember that one day I repelled even Father, who wanted to calm me down.... I can still see his painfully surprised look—and I would not have wanted to deserve that look....

Never mind! Even this serves to give me a comparison regarding the way Jesus must look at us when we repel Him and accuse Him of not loving us.... It’s a look of boundless pain—it contains discouragement, astonishment, resignation, and affliction, affliction, affliction.... And it also provides me with the measure of the way our Heavenly Father loves us, not sulking over our fits, due to moments of mental turmoil—rather, He feels sorry for us and loves us, his poor creatures disturbed by so many things, as before!

My father did not bear a grudge, and, as soon as my fury had passed, he was good to me as previously. I was his Maria, not without defects, but who loved him with all her strength and loved him alone.

Isn’t my position the same with respect to the good Lord? I am his Maria, not without defects, but who loves Him with all her strength and loves Him alone. Oh, this thought and this recollection of my father on earth comforts me to have great hope regarding the way my Father in heaven will judge me. Our Father cannot be inferior in magnanimity to his servant Giuseppe, who was able to understand the reasons for his daughter’s fit and forgive with a twofold love: as a father and as a just man.... Now Father is in heaven and sees that his Maria has not stopped loving him and tends towards him with all her affection....

Father managed to understand me to such a degree that he came to tell me around the middle of June, “Maria, this time I’m done for!” What agony! I felt my heart capsizing, as if a brutal hand were turning it upside down, like a glove roughly pulled off the hand it clothes.

I prayed with such faith, with such pressing insistence, that I really believed God would hear me.... At times, amidst the tears which cannot fail to fall when I recall certain things, I still say to myself, “But why has God not left me my father? If a parent had to be taken from me, why did He not take my mother?” My poor dad would at least have lived out his final years in peace, for there were never disagreements between him and me. At thecost of a thousand sacrifices, I refilled the excessively meager purse—I would pay his fines without Mother’s realizing, repair what he ripped or stained to keep him from being harshly reproached, and content him in his greediness as a big baby.... Poor Dad, who no longer had even the joy of going out with me for those lovely strolls which at one time had been our delight, for Mother kept me on a chain and I got worse and worse....”

I say this to myself in the hours of most acute longing for caresses—and I call him, call him.... I believe my cry penetrates into the heavens....

Now, though, since everything in Italy has been going from bad to worse, I tell myself, “It is well that Father died. He thus does not have this sorrow—he who was such a soldier and patriot!” I say so amidst tears, but I say so and add, “Thank You, O God, for having spared that faithful servant of yours this bitterness!”

And the days passed.... The 15th, the 16th, and so on.... Increasingly ill, he still dragged himself along—going as far as St. Paolino’s, to the pinewood and back.... He must have suffered terribly. I know what it’s like to suffer from calculosis, cystitis, and vesical hemorrhages.... It’s like being full of sulphuric acid.

I suffered seeing him suffer and from my ever more spasmodic pain. They had been giving me morphine for months. But with the sole benefit of relaxing my nerves, stiff from tetanic contractions. The pain was not reduced at all, but, on the contrary, my sensitivity became sharpened. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. I mean that sense, always drowsy in me, underwent a revival produced by the drug. I saw only monsters, had only intense nausea and deliriums proper to someone poisoned with narcotics, and morbid sensitiveness.

Who are the ones asserting that opium, morphine, and similar substances give one sweet visions, calm frenzies, and appease the hyperexcitability of sense? How deceitful! They must be depraved to like that paradise of monsters and strange faces...! I have never felt anything but painful effects from morphine, to the extent that, taking it day after day, after two years of struggle between the doctor, who wanted to administer it, and me, who did not want it, I won and never again wished for it. And here I was more successful than the subdeacon Girard!  After two years of shots—including double ones—of morphine, I prohibited them for myself and felt no craving. The pains, I repeat, remained just the same, my heart became weaker, and my mind was altered with pernicious forms of sensuality. Here as well, who says that morphine cannot be taken away when one is habituated to it? What lies! It sufficed to want to eliminate it. If it were no longer found in pharmacies, people would still get along, don’t you think? It’s all a matter of wanting to.

On the evening of June 26th, Father had to yield. I was half dazed from the sopor and unable to come out of it even to say a word to him. Oh, how convinced I am the devil exerted an influence to increase my future cross!

I did not see my father again. He took to his bed on Wednesday evening and until Friday at dawn remained stationary. At nine he began to be unable to reason clearly. He got up and came downstairs. He wanted to come into my room and lie down on the other bed.... His reason was in disorder, but his subconscious still guided him to his Maria, the only one who loved him. From my bed, for his good I ordered him to go back to his bed at once.... It would have been better if I had let him come! He would have died with me close by, and I would have had the comfort of assisting him. He went back upstairs without our even seeing each other’s faces.... For me, Father is always halfway down the stairs, about to come.... He will move from that point to meet me when I expire.

He immediately got worse after getting up. The doctor used sleight-of-hand to steal from me phials of digalin, sparteine, and so on. But I saw and understood. I was completely intent on the effort to understand. I asked the doctor for the truth, but it was denied me. I asked to be carried upstairs to Dad in someone’s arms, and it was denied me. I prayed until it hurt in order to wrest from heaven the grace of Father’s remaining with me, and it was denied me.

Saturday came. During the night Father had been delirious. Poor Father! Septicaemia from vesical calculosis had presented itself towards Friday evening. In the night he had risen and gone towards the balcony. He was hot and did not know what he was doing. Mother had him go back to bed with her usual system: by scolding him. Until the end...! She herself declared in the morning, “I said such a mouthful to him that he no longer dared move and I was able to sleep.” I have no trouble believing she said a mouthful to him. She had been doing so for forty-one years—poor Father!

The doctor came at eight and did not conceal the fact that he was very seriously ill even from me. “He’s dying,” I said. “Go right ahead and say so sincerely, and tell Mother, who understands nothing.” And he, the doctor, told Mother. And then there were the usual nervous outbursts, which are inevitable in my mother at certain moments.

I did not lose my head. I had already told Mother, for, after the great agitation, the calmness of Dad, whom I no longer heard tossing himself about in the room over mine, informed me that the coma was setting in. I had not been a nurse for nothing. But I had not been believed.

I again started insisting on being taken upstairs. But the doctor refused to give Father and me this consolation. We would have been so happy! Then I sent word to the telegraph office to inform our friends and relatives and also sent for the priest. But the parish priest was ill and did not come. In the afternoon a priest who said he was a military chaplain came instead. I didn’t like him very much, though. At noon I had tried to get up and, dragging myself along, had reached the foot of the stairs.... But I could go no further....

A dear Sister from the Barbantines acted as a daughter for my father. She was quite good and affectionate. As long as I live and afterwards, I shall always keep her in my heart. This good creature assured me that Father had received the priest well and made his confession. He received nothing else, though. Neither Viaticum nor Anointing of the Sick. I don’t know why.

The catastrophe was approaching.

Since the Sister sleeping in was not there, an acquaintance referred to us a young man who accompanied patients at night. Mother went to bed. She went to bed, do you understand? To bed. With my dad in agony, a stranger stayed. And he understood everything. He never lost his clearness of mind.

I prayed and prayed and prayed. At times, then, not even the most ardent prayer perforates the vault of the firmament to rise up to God? It seems not. Mine did not rise up, and it really was my very heart which bore it up there....

With us there were also two young ladies who took turns sleeping in when I was ill. That night both had come because they knew Father was dying.

At 2 a.m. on June 30, a loud cry cast forth by Father—“Mother!”—made everyone give a start. And that was the end. He felt it coming and called his wife; he always called her “Mother.” And she wasn’t there.

Ah, my God! My God, who today have given me a real day of passion, You should hear me in my desire, in my needs, only on account of what it costs me to forgive, in your name, my mother for having left my father to die so alone...!

I was seized by a heart crisis which took me right to the threshold of the hereafter. Why did I not die together with Dad? Why? The doctor, rushing in, kept me alive by dint of injections. I am not grateful to him for it, as I am not grateful to him for not having let me see Father either alive or dead, with the excuse that I might have died. I always reproach him for having failed to keep his word, since he had promised me he would do so. I believed him until the moment, two days later, when the coffin was sealed.

I hovered between life and death all through June 30. I made all the funeral arrangements, though. Mother could do nothing but make silly scenes of belated love. But I don’t know what happened in me. I certainly bordered on madness and remained in that state for months. My parish priest always says so.

I was now alone, alone. Do you understand? Alone. There was no longer anyone on earth. In heaven, God and Father. But heaven seemed to me so deaf and distant! My faith, which had so trustingly taken flight in asking for Father’s life to be spared, had fallen back to the ground with its wings broken. It had broken them by crashing into a wall of bronze which my prayer could not penetrate.

I lived through tremendous days. At times I was myself, lucid and balanced, capable of giving instructions, dictating epigraphs, and so on. At times I was a madwoman. I seemed to have two bodies, two minds in a single body. And I no longer knew which was mine.

My father! Perhaps if I had seen him, I would have taken stock of the situation better. But that way.... Woe to me if I heard movement in Dad’s room!

I lived without eating. Two or three plums and a phial of physiological serum were my daily meal. And, unfortunately, they served to keep me alive.

They told me that Father, after death, had recovered all his former manly handsomeness, for my father was handsome. They told me that, even forty-eight hours later, he was free from every sign of being a corpse. I believe it. He was a just man. And whoever lives as a just person in death recovers beauty and a special, majestic immunity.

But I did not see him! It is a sword rending my heart. I have cared for a thousand dying people and have laid them out in death—but not my father. The two of us in the same house, and I did not say goodbye to him either alive or dead. Enough! Enough! If I go on any further, I’ll go mad again.

You have taken everything from me, O God! You have wanted to reign as an absolute sovereign and have made yourself a throne over my pierced heart. You have laid out this poor heart of mine, adorned with so many—too many—wounds, at your feet.... A poor heart never finding any peace on earth.... How much sacrifice you cost me, O love for my God! But none equals this sacrifice of having had to lose my Dad that way....

Almost eight years have passed, but my pain is the same—and I cannot hear someone call out “Father” or see a child in his father’s arms without feeling my heart being crushed under the weight of longing for my father....

How well I understand Thérèse when she speaks of her dad! For me, too, Dad was everything—he was the “king.” A just and loving king who knew everything and provided consolation for everything.... And for him I was the little queen, or, rather, an empress, and quite despotic, since with him I made up for what I could not have elsewhere. For me he represented all the perfections of beauty, goodness, intelligence, and love....

Even though the illness of 1910 had impaired his intelligence, to me he was always everything. The only affliction he occasioned me was his being pitied by many and derided by the less good for having regressed somewhat to childishness, prone to weeping and forgetfulness. When he died, I should have thought that he would no longer be tortured and scorned. But one does not think of certain things when one’s heart is a big wound!

My mother did not and does not acknowledge that I loved Father in such fashion as to suffer over his death. She even accused me, just a few days ago, of having made him worse by having had oil given to him.... The only thing able to soothe the inflammation of the urinary ducts and favor the expulsion of the stone, assisting the decongestion brought about by urotropine. Heaven knows!

With Father dead, my mother, now the complete mistress, became utterly despotic.

Father did little. He had been deprived of authority for years. But when he could not take it any longer, a thundering “That’s enough! You know where you can get off!” would silence Mother. Or an even more effective “You’re neurotic” scourged her more than a lash. They were Father’s only weapons when he was exasperated by fierce periods of Mother’s paranoia. And they were checked a bit.

Now there was no more check, and Mother hurled herself without restraint at Marta, me, and everyone.... A real lunatic! She has performed more cruel and foolish acts by herself over the past eight years than a whole psychiatric hospital. Even the good Sister who looked after my father and me had to intervene because my mother cuffed me continually with the insult that I had not suffered over Father’s death...! And I was nearly mad with sorrow!

I assure you that Marta and I were quite tormented. The doctor even had to give her bromides because she could not bear it. Being the absolute mistress. It had unsettled her brain.

She immediately wrote to her brother, with whom she had been on bad terms since 1917, leading him to believe that Father had been the one who had kept her from doing so.... Instead, it had always been she who had not wanted to make peace. Even after his death she offended him by causing him to be thought of as wicked! After eighteen years, just after Dad died, there were immense acts of tenderness towards her ungrateful brother; and they still last, with considerable monthly expenditures.... She deprived me of woollen sweaters which belonged to Dad, but which, new as they were, for I had made them in my bed for the following winter, could have been remade for me, and sent them to her dear brother, who did not even say “Thanks” and has not had them for years, and so on endlessly.... But helping him is nothing. He doesn’t deserve it, but anyway.... What I can’t overcome is my disgust over her having people believe that Father had been the one who had wanted to hold on to a grudge for so many years....

Another cruel and foolish act: Mario reappeared on the horizon, or, rather, Mario’s ghost. Judge for yourself whether I was right or wrong.

The two young ladies who came to sleep in were very curious to know the details about the relationship between Mario and me. A stupid curiosity, and quite indiscreet as well, for it sought to delve into matters that are so personal as to be almost sacred. But, in short, they had this curiosity. Not evil-minded, but extremely romantic, they needed to fill their idle moments with real-life novels and attempted to know mine so as to have another one for their series. To them it was a novel; to me it is a tragedy. And I would not like to touch on it ever.

I have written no more since Sunday. I suffered so on speaking of my Dad that I have been ill for these last sixty hours. Only this evening—it’s Wednesday evening—am I beginning to recover a bit of strength and shall resume the account. Let’s hope I won’t feel ill all over again. Even to speak of Mario is acute suffering.

These two young ladies, then, who, furthermore, had undeniably been good to me, displeased me a bit on account of certain acts of indiscretion and thoughtlessness too foreign to my way of thinking and acting.

They joked too much about what was for me very acute moral suffering—that is, certain medical examinations which caused me the utmost repugnance. They joked too much concerning my relations as a patient with the doctor, attributing to me the sentiments they had towards him, hot-headed feelings going beyond the licitness of a simple friendship to move into the illicitness of an excessively intense, and openly demonstrated, attraction. I had had to call one of them to order because I understood that the doctor was annoyed by overly explicit wooing. And this had been grasped in a way different from what was intended. That is, it was thought to be my jealousy. Dear me! I have never suffered from jealousy, even in regard to those who meant something to me. Just imagine in connection with someone I am fond of only as a patient in relation to the person treating her, and that’s all! I believe I acted as a serious person in calling to order a young lady who was going too far, and demonstrated it openly, with someone bound by a solemn pledge to another woman.

Finally, they joked too much at the sad moment of my father’s death.

At times I was beside myself; but in the moments when I had settled down, I understood with a keenness which was agonizing. I believe, indeed, that with my senses sharpened in that way, I understood even when I seemed not to, and this served to bring my mind—wandering in pain—back to a precise evaluation of what was happening around me. As a flame hit by a gust of wind flickers and soars up more brightly, consuming itself more rapidly the more the storm wind agitates it, so I was consuming myself in all my strength, but was more agile than ever in understanding everything. I have a kind of impression that a vision was unfolding before my eyes in which a sixth sense clearly read what in my inner storm the other common forms of consciousness no longer comprehended as before.

I can’t explain.... In short, I grasped that those two were turning my real pain and Mother’s more or less eccentric manifestations into revelry. And with my veneration for everything connected with my dad, I suffered greatly on this account. I had also called them to order on June 30 itself, unable to stand for their trying to get Marta intoxicated so as to laugh at her afterwards while Father was downstairs, laid out in death. I told Mother as well to call them to order.... But when I ask Mother for something, I am sure to obtain quite the opposite...! This time, too, I was reproached by Mother as as visionary and a pessimist.

August came, and with August the Navy Squadron came to Viareggio. The two young ladies, in spite of the fact that the doctor and Marta had told them to say nothing to me about it so as not to disturb my mind even more, which really seemed to be in the process of going off the deep end, hastened to inform me that the entire Upper Tyrrhene Squadron was in Viareggio and made my head roar by saying, “Who knows if your fiancé’s here! If he were to pass by and you saw him!” And so on. They even asked me for his first and last names to make inquiries about him. I replied that, as I had never made inquiries myself, for obvious considerations of dignity, I thus wanted no one to do any searching at all.

I die of love, but never lose my head to the point of not respecting myself. And I think this meant not respecting myself. I entreat God alone; I love creatures, but am able to remain in my place. Always and with everyone; with Mario as well, then. Indeed, with him more than anyone else. I give my suffering for his soul, but I do not ask his flesh to love me. For goodness’ sake!

I have been convinced since 1932, however, that he is dead. Why? Because he himself came to tell me so in a dream, apologizing for his way of acting and saying that if he as a man had erred, his soul had remained faithful to me, and he had come to fetch me, now that he was dead, to be my spouse in the hereafter. In that dream I asked him to let me live—and he very dejectedly replied, “Then you don’t want to come? You don’t love me any more? You don’t forgive me? Must I remain alone?” And I answered, “A little longer, Mario, a bit more life, and then I’ll come with you.” He asked, “A year? Is that enough? I’ll come every year to call you.” And every year he comes, in November, to call me. He has told me so many things.... For years he seemed to need me as if to come out of an affliction and tried to show me why he had acted badly.... What accusations against my mother! When she herself said to that friend, “Ah, why did I ever write that letter!” I at once thought of Mario’s words and what he had me read.... For some years now he has seemed to me free and strong again—it is he who protects me and says, “Don’t be afraid. I am always close to you, and you must not be afraid with me. I defend you from everything.”

I am convinced he is dead and has finished expiating his guilt. For over ten years, moreover, his name has no longer appeared in the Navy’s Official Orders, which I always read. But even with this conviction I did not want anyone to direct inquiries at other officers, inquiries which might hardly be interpreted benevolently.

What did those two fools get organized for me? They set about stopping all the Squadron’s officers and asking if they knew So and So. They had dared to open the coffer where I keep my letters, taking advantage of my sopor, and had thus learned Mario’s first and last names.

Marta, who discovered them by chance in such an unauthorized occupation, called them to order. To no avail, though. Then Marta informed me. Quite offended by that scarcely honorable intrusion into such a delicate matter, I informed Mother. What could I do, being ill? I could do nothing. Mother alone could put an end to such a game. But once more Mother wounded me without understanding me. She railed at me, saying it was I who had charged those two with looking for Mario. If I had done so, I would not have told her to assert her authority so they would stop. Don’t you think? But Mother’s that way. Like a skittish horse, she shies at every chimera and disregards the real obstacles....

One of her usual wild scenes was then unleashed upon me. Neither Marta nor the nursing Sister availed to defend me and bring her to reason. There was enough for the three of us...! The cruelest insults and the most barbarous reproaches were leveled at me, and I was innocent of even the slightest blame. There was no mercy for my general and mental condition. No mercy at all.

After having given me a good scourging with her inhuman behavior, she finished venting her anger upon those two little fools.... They were finally thrown out, and forever. And a relationship thus ended which had initially stood the test, only to be canceled out by such shabby counterevidence consisting of gossip, curiosity, and thoughtlessness.

But the two banished ones took ample revenge. And on whom? On me. Of course! When have I ever not been the one to pay for all? How did they take revenge? By spreading hateful slander concerning me, causing me to be regarded as a debauchee with the worst, most degrading vices....

The doctor, one of many informed thereof, had me watched by the Sister. But she, in all conscience, told the doctor that not even in delirium did I commit indecent acts. And the doctor, already convinced in his own right that I was neither abnormal nor amoral, immediately believed it.

Then the two expelled ones went to the Mother Superior of the Barbantines and said—what they said. The outcome was that I was at once deprived of the Sisters’ care as if I were a corrupting influence for them....

Listen, Father. Marta has been living with me for eight years and sleeps in my room. She sees me in sleep, sopor, wakefulness, and so forth. Marta can state whether I have certain secret vices.... But I have had to drink even this chalice of calumny and sorrow.

Perhaps you will now ask, “But what are you telling me about? What interest does this gossip have for me?” Maybe it doesn’t interest you, but it does interest me. I think this is also necessary for the account. As loathsome for me to write about as it was to experience, it must, however, be known in order to see how many colors were used to paint my portrait. Luminous colors on God’s part; very black, dull, and dismal ones on the part of my neighbor. And, considering the differences between the colors, once again I say to my Lord, “You alone have loved me and have not given me disheartening sorrow. You have given me your regal Pain, but it is not a boulder crushing me down to the ground. It is a lodestone and a wing bearing me to heaven, to You. Thank You, my God!”

After the two young ladies had disappeared, we were left alone. Our other acquaintances had all slunk away after Father’s death. As they were offended by my mother’s way of acting, now she reigned alone—they had gone away. Even some amply benefited by us had withdrawn. That Chinese proverb is right: “If you help a dog, he will be grateful to you and wag his tail; if you help a man, he will hate you and wag his mouth to bite and denigrate you.”

Only Mrs. Soldarelli was and has remained faithful—a dear creature who lacks the strength to impose herself, but who, by her affection, all the more intense the more it is directed towards one who suffers, tries to heal the moral wounds. But Mrs. Soldarelli is a special creature. If the world were made up entirely of creatures like her, it would not be “the world,” but paradise.

Just imagine my mother without any more witnesses of her paranoiac sense of authority...! She has not gone mad from the fever of self-praise by a real miracle and thanks to an intensive bromide treatment which the doctor had her take under another label.... When she later realized they were bromides, the poor doctor risked ending up like the mythical Orpheus, torn apart by the Furies...! And Marta and I nearly went mad, tortured—that’s the right word for it—by constant reproaches, accusations, bad moods, incivility....

There were no more set times for meals, sleep—nothing. Chaos. Everything depended on Mother’s whim and humor. One day we ate at ten, and another at three; one morning we would get up at four, and another at eight. One day we would eat three times, and another just once, perhaps without soup, only bread and a little cheese.... A real madhouse! And if there had been only eccentricities of that sort, who would have cared! But there were worse things. Every so often, for no reason, there were the long silences, as my father called them—that is, the tremendous dark moods in which she did not speak even if the house had caught fire. The beginning and end of these “long silences” were marked by unjust, violent scenes.... Just think what our life was like....

Mother has always suffered from a persecution mania: “He’s my enemy”; “She wants to kill me”; “Yes, they’re trying to make me fall, become ill, poison me [and so on] to kill me....” This mania, then, had now reached a fever pitch, and I was the Enemy par excellence (according to her).

Living for money, and for money alone, she trembled at the thought that I might require the execution of my father’s will, which names me his heir, leaving to his wife the legitime, and nothing more. I remember it quite well. It ends as follows: “To my daughter, whose heart I know, I entrust her mother. I shall bless her if she continues to be the loving and respectful daughter she has been until now.” My mother, out of fear that I might wish to take possession of what was mine, destroyed or hid the will. I saw it only when Father wrote it—that is, twenty years ago.

What concern would she have me show regarding the possession or lack of money? I have never had whims and have always been able to repress my desires; therefore.... Now that I’m in these conditions, what would she ever have me wish for? At most, a book, a flower.... It is enough that, in keeping with her strict obligation, my mother should give me only what is necessary to live; I ask for nothing else. Not even medicines capable of making me suffer less or examinations providing a clear insight into my collapse. You see that now, if I manage to be looked at by a specialist, it’s because my cousin has seen to it.

It is true that Mother continually reproaches me for what I cost. But what can I do about it? If God keeps me alive, I certainly cannot do away with myself so as not to use up her money. Besides, she ought to recall that I myself won that prize and thus consume what we did not have before, which the goodness of God has granted to me that I may be endured better by my mother.

I get less care that a Sister does from her superior, you can be sure. And yet I have diminished even my most pressing nutritional needs to such a minimum that I can state that I live in perpetual and strict, very strict penance, which increases my burden and does not make her happy, for Mother’s conscience reproaches her for her way of acting. A reproach which does not evolve into good, but increased harshness towards me. But all the same—when have I ever not been treated harshly? As long as I live, I shall be. Then, once I’m dead, I’ll have the maternal apotheosis: flowers, lamps, and so forth. That’s her method.

But let’s go back to the will. Since my father died on June 30, the difference in the pension between the 13th and 30th should have been given to his widow: about two hundred lire. But in order to get it the will had to be shown.

I pointed out to Mother—it was on December 2, “Personally, I would advise you not to do anything. The tax office has ten hands to take and not even one to give. Since I won that prize and it does not, therefore, appear in Dad’s capital, it’s better not to attract the Finance Ministry’s attention towards us. Otherwise a hornets’ nest will be stirred up in the end.” I feel that was in her interest as well. Don’t you think so?

Well, my mother assaulted me so violently that she pushed me to congestion and delirium for eight days, telling me that she was prepared to repudiate me and have papers drawn up denouncing me as an unworthy daughter who wanted to dispossess her mother, and so on, and that, besides, my dad, knowing what a hyena I was, had named her, his wife, to receive everything, disinheriting me. Everything, in short, belonged to Mother, and I lived on her charity. Then, after having cursed me, she went off, and in spite of the fact that the doctor and the priest informed her that I was wavering between life and death, did not come to see me for eight days.

On December 10 I was seized by such a delirium that four people could not manage to hold me down.... And then—that brought her downstairs. But the straitjacket should have been placed on her, I assure you. That day my blood, compressed for too long in my heart, overflowed into my lungs with such violence that a blood sac formed in my right lung. It took months to reabsorb it.

And this was my mother after Dad’s death. Like this. Do you know how often I have heard her say, “Ah, if I were free! Ah, if only this story would come to an end! Away with Marta, away with everyone! Leaving me alone to do as I please!” Yes, I am a burden to her. And my love for Jesus is needed to make me love her, in spite of the fact that she tells me straight out how much of a burden I am to her. They are moral perversions which only someone observing them firsthand believes. That’s why I tremble on thinking of losing the doctor as well, who is now convinced about how we live at my house....

This is a calamity surpassed by no other, Father. Where we are loved, everything else is bearable, and a beloved ill person is never unfortunate. But I am unloved, rejected, and declared to be “a burden” by my mother.... “Look and see: Is any sorrow like the sorrow inflicted on me...?”

At that time, following expert counsel, I had set about writing a book which would have given me financial gain in addition to moral satisfactions. But can you believe it? All the sharpest criticism and the most Machiavellian obstacles were presented by Mother so that I could not. Now the work is almost finished, and now my mother would like me to finish it for money.... But she should have left me in peace when I was able to. Now it’s too late. I am sorry because it is an upright work. And there is a need for upright books.

My book could have done good, led people to God over paths they would have traveled without realizing it. That was my purpose. I have been kept from doing even this. I shall thus die without leaving anything of myself. Neither children, whom I would have loved so, or the book, the child of my thought, beloved as a child of living flesh.... Ah, I have had no satisfaction on earth. None. Ever. I have received all my joys from heaven and shall find them in heaven.

At that point Mother had started to administer to me some concoction or other behind the doctor’s back. I then ate on my own. So, when Marta went out to do the shopping, I heard Mother crushing something with a hammer every morning before bringing me the soup. And I would afterwards feel very ill. I would get chills all over, sweating profusely, with coma and vomiting, bordering on paralysis. The doctor went crazy looking into it without unraveling the mystery.

One day I did not want the soup, and Marta ate it. She got very ill. I repeated the attempt by having the dog eat it. He nearly died. Then I put Marta on the lookout. Some time passed, and she then brought me a fragment, like a white tablet, which she had found on the stove. It had a salty, bitter taste. I don’t know what it was.

I spoke to the doctor and my parish priest. The former said, “Have your mother eat what she has prepared for you.” The latter, “Eat the same meal as the others and at the same time. Never eat, never again, what is prepared for you alone.”

I did so. And immediately. Faking a whim as an ill person, I asked for Mother’s soup and gave her my rice. Then I did the same for the side dish. It was a disaster. In the afternoon Mother was so sick—with the same symptoms of cold, coma, vomiting, and so forth—that she nearly died. The doctor had to come running.

From that day on I wanted to eat the common meal. I no longer heard those famous tablets being crushed or felt those symptoms.

Only God knows what she was administering to me. It occurred to me that, believing as she does in witchcraft, by way of heaven knows who she had obtained some medicine from one of these mountebanks—and I don’t want to think of anything else.

I have told you this as well because I feel it forms part of the description....

Marta is still racking her brains to figure our what that substance might have been and who might have given it to her. I try to forget....