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RECOLLECTIONS
OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN (Chapter 1) by Diane di Prima My
earliest sense of what it means to be woman was learned from my grandmother,
Antoinette Mallozzi, and at her knee. It was a house of dark and mellow light,
almost as if there were fire and kerosene lamps, but to my recollection there
was electric light, the same as everywhere else. It is just that the rooms
were so very dark, light filtering as it did through paper shades and lace
curtains, and falling then on dark heavy furniture (mahogany and walnut) and
onto floors and surfaces yellowed with many layers of wax, layers of lemon
oil. The light in the room fell as if on old oil paintings, those glazes,
that veneer. Sepia portraits: Dante, Emma Goldman. There was a subtle air of
mystery. The light fell on my grandmother’s hands as she sat rocking, saying
her rosary. She smelled of lemons and olive oil, garlic and waxes and
mysterious herbs. I loved to touch her skin. There
was this mystery: she sat, saying her
beads, but the beads and her hand never completely left her apron pocket. My
grandfather was an atheist, and if she heard his step on the stair she would
slip the beads out of sight and take up some work. They had lived thus for
forty years, and the mystery was how much they loved each other. To my
child’s senses, already sharpened to conflict, there was no conflict in that
house. He was an atheist, she a devout Catholic, and for all intents and
purposes they were one. It would never do to argue with him about god, and so
when he came into the room she slipped the beads away. As
for him, he never seemed to inquire. Though those clear blue eyes saw
everywhere. The I Ching has the
phrase: “He let many things pass without being duped.” My
grandmother’s Catholicism was of the distinctive Mediterranean variety:
tolerant and full of humor. When I was a little older, I would frequently
hear her remark, at some tale of transgression, sins of the flesh reported by
a neighbor in hushed Neapolitan–“Eh!” (an exclamation whose inflection
communicated humor and seriousness, and a peculiar, almost French,
irony)–“Eh!” my grandmother would say, “The Virgin Mary is a woman, she’ll
explain it to God.” This
response to the vagaries of human existence, the weaknesses of the flesh,
especially female flesh, gave me much pause for thought. It indicated on the
one hand, that the Virgin Mary knew much better than God the ins and outs so
to speak of human nature, what we were up to, that she had a tolerance and
intelligence and humor that was perhaps missing from the male godhead. * * * * * It
was at my grandmother’s side, in that scrubbed and waxed apartment, that I
received my first communications about the specialness and the relative uselessness
of men, in this case my grandfather. There was no doubt that he was the
excitement of our days, the fire and light of our lives, and that one of his
most endearing qualities was that we had no idea what he was going to do
next. But it was the women, and there were many of them, who attended on all
the practical aspects of life. In the view that Antoinette Mallozzi
communicated, there was nothing wrong or strange about this. We women had the
babies, after all, and it was enormously more interesting to us than to any
man to know that there would be food on the table. Not
that I wish in any way to denigrate my grandfather: he worked enormously hard
for his family–but he would at any time
throw everything over for an ideal.
There were many stories of his quitting an otherwise OK job to protest
some injustice to a fellow worker. At which point, the stories went, he would
arrive home with the fellow-worker and his entire family, at the very least
for dinner. Often they stayed for weeks. My grandmother would set the table
for that many more, and if a solution was not rapidly forthcoming she and the
six girls would take in crochet bead work to keep cash coming in until my
grandfather found another, less unjust position. Now,
this sort of thing was not still going on when I was little–by then my
grandfather was no longer working for others as a custom tailor–but the
stories and the memory of it were in the air. My grandfather was regarded
somewhat as the family treasure: a powerful and erratic kind of lightning
generator, a kind of Tesla experiment, we for some reason kept in the house. It
was clear to me that he was as good as it got. My father, a sullen man with a
smoldering temper, was easily as demanding as Grandpa, but did not bring
these endearing qualities of excitement and idealism, this demand for
something more than we already had or knew, into our lives. It was like
tending a furnace in which the fire had gone out. Antoinette
was always busy, but there was a way in which she communicated the basic all-rightness
of things. I loved to watch her hands. As I think about it now, I realize
that as a little person, I was not separated from the old: the sight and feel
of soft, dry wrinkled skin was associated with the sight and feel of love. Of
those who had the time to listen, to tell a story. I learned to love the
smells and feel of old flesh–I loved to put my round child’s cheek up against
her wrinkled one. Her
hands always smelled of garlic and onions, beeswax and lemons and a thousand
herbs. There was that sense of cleanness and the good smells of the world. A
sense of the things that went on. In the turbulent 1930’s into which I was
born, my grandmother taught me that the things of woman go on: that they are
the very basis and ground of human life. Babies are born and raised, the food
is cooked. The world is cleaned and mended and kept in order. Kept sane. That
one could live with dignity and joy even in poverty. That even tragedy and
shock and loss require this basis of loving attendance. And
that men were peripheral to all this. They were dear, they brought
excitement, they sought to bring change. Printed newspapers, made speeches,
tried to bring that taste of sanity and order into the larger world. But they
were fragile somehow. In their excitement they would forget to watch the
clock and turn the oven off. I grew up thinking them a luxury. * * * * * A Letter to My Therapist, and Friend September, 1986 Dear
______ ,
I passionately long to make something
more of all this than myself, or my needs.
The same door where I “let the cat
out”? I can only go one step at a time. * * * * * Antoinette
Rossi and Domenico Mallozzi met in their hometown in Italy, a town whose name
translates as Saints Cosimo and Demiano. Antoinette’s family was the
aristocracy of the town (hence, perhaps, her French first name–French was
still to some extent the language of the upper classes) though how
aristocratic or wealthy the aristocracy of this small town was, I can only
guess. I do know that later in my life, when Antoinette undertook to improve
my education, she taught me the fine arts of embroidery and hemstitching in
linen–a delicate process in which you pull out the threads of the linen weft
and rework the warp into intricate geometric patterns. Though I remember her
hands endlessly darning old clothes and making practical pieces of
clothing–skirts, aprons–when it came time to teach sewing to her
granddaughter she went back to the work she’d been taught, and no doubt the
only work it had been expected she would ever do: fine embroidery, working in
linen, and crocheting lace. I
am not sure how, or under what circumstances, Antoinette met Domenico: he was
of a much poorer family. I imagine, though, that in a town the size of Saints
Cosimo and Demiano, everyone more or less knew everyone else. One of the
things we grandchildren were frequently told about Domenico was that he had
had to quit school in the third grade to help support his family. He had
learned the trade of custom tailoring, and become a fine tailor, and it was
with this profession that he supported his numerous family later in America.
Domenico was of a fierce and fiery disposition, and seems to have had a
certain difficulty in getting along with folks in his native part of the
world. He was for one thing, then as later, an atheist, and–fairly common in
the Italy of that period, and not at all as far-out as it sounds to us now–an
anarchist. The combination, together with a burning curiosity and
intellectual zeal, and a love of argument for its own sake and as a tool to
uncover Truth, whatever that might be, didn’t make him a popular guy. Or
that’s the impression I get. At some point, he and Antoinette encountered each other and fell in
love. For all her wealth, she was in a state of serious servitude. Seems my
grandmother had six brothers and a father, and her mother had died, and
nobody in the family had any intention of letting her marry at all–she was
living, it was quite apparent to the men of the household, for the sole
purpose of keeping house for them and providing the womanly comforts, however
they might have been conceived back then. (We are talking the last decade or
two of the nineteenth century here.) Keeping house in her situation didn’t
have the onerous overtones it has for us–she mostly had to oversee the
servants and make sure things were done right. Probably plan the menus and
things like that. Though she was a very skilled cook and may well have done a
bunch of the work herself, I don’t have the sense that she had to. Or that
any really grubby or depressing tasks fell her way. Still, servitude isn’t in the quality or quantity of the work, but simply
in performing tasks that your heart isn’t in. Where the True Will, to use a
magical term, isn’t engaged. I am not sure how many servants the Rossi household employed, but
there were enough so that Antoinette had her own personal maid. This is
crucial to the tale. When her brothers (and presumably her father–though my
mother and aunts never mentioned him) found out that she was being
courted–and by such a low-class type as Domenico!–they locked her up in her
room. She was their property, clearly, and they weren’t about to let the only
woman in the house go anywhere. If there were going to be a marriage at
all–which was unlikely–it would have been “arranged” for the family
convenience. In any case, Antoinette’s maid, who remains nameless in these
stories, smuggled letters from Domenico to Antoinette and back again for some
time, while Antoinette remained behind a locked door, refusing to yield. The
maid eventually helped her to escape. She eloped with Domenico, and for a
time the couple lived at Domenico’s house–probably quite a change for her. It
must have been crowded there, and clearly uncomfortable to remain in the town
after such an outre move.
Eventually the couple emigrated to America. I’m sure this was no fun either, though Grandma never complained, and
to my knowledge never regretted her move and her choice. When I knew them
after some forty years of marriage they were still in love, with all the
fierce clinging to their differences that creates such beautiful sparks in a
long-term love. That struggle for truth that lay between them. * * * * * DREAM:
I was climbing a hill in a white truck, but where? Inside the dustjacket of a book I am
reading there is a poem I wrote long ago, and
don’t remember:
It was singing. There were bugs in all the branches. Was this Africa? [part missing ] The silence stretched like a tall veil
of wax between the trees. It snapped as we walked through.”
* * * * * As I went into the kitchen this morning to make some tea, I saw
through the (intentionally?) open crack in her door, my beautiful young
daughter in the arms of a beautiful young black skateboarder, who had
evidently spent the night (skateboard propped against the wall in front of
her door, like an insignia.) As I went tranquilly into the kitchen and called
out to ask them if they wanted tea or coffee, I thought with deep gratitude
of some of the women I met when I first left home at the age of eighteen:
those beautiful, soft and strong women of middle age with their young
daughters who made me welcome in their various homes, where I could observe
on a given morning mom coming out of her bedroom with a lover, male or
female, and joining daughter and her
lover at the table for breakfast in naturalness and camaraderie. These women,
by now mostly dead I suppose, were great pioneers. They are nameless to me,
nameless and brief friends I encountered along the way who showed me
something else was possible besides what I had seen at home. Some trust and
mutual joy in transient or long-term mates possible between parents and kids.
(So that a mom myself, I have always felt the house is blessed by young love:
the bliss and softness it radiates to all corners of my flat: discovery, and
tenderness, like a new spring morning. Trust.) I think, too, of those other women who taught me other ways, when I
was much younger. They had the same strength but not always the same
softness. They were the “art teachers” and music teachers I encountered in
school, or the women of the arts who sometimes found their way into my
parent’s home, to be talked unkindly of later. They usually wore what my
mother considered too much make-up. They mostly had sad eyes, but they were
sensitive and alert to–well, to me among other things. They were single women
and that in itself was considered an anomaly. Single women who had given
themselves to the arts–though in fact none of them had achieved great
recognition in their loved field. They taught, and wore large jewelry, did
not hide behind aprons, were considered more than slightly non-respectable.
They showed me a way, and I loved the lines under their eyes their make-up
accented rather than hid. As I loved my cousin Liz, who would show up sometimes, cutting
classes. Her cropped hair, and soft, slightly chunky figure. Her
intelligence, and spirit. There was a rare day I was home from school when
she came by, and we sat together, she almost ten years my senior, and she
recited poetry to me. “If” by Rudyard
Kipling was her favorite, and I soon got it by heart. Liz was unique in my
world. No one sat with me, in that way, simply to share feeling. Some early
communion of spirit I had found with my grandparents, but with no one else.
Years later I learned from my mother’s grim remarks that Liz was gay. She was
gone by then, far from family judgments, living in Florida. And I had grown my
own program, my own ideas of human freedom, so that news made her something
of a hero. These styles, these possibilities of being, and being a woman, being
alive as a woman, have stayed with me. As I write now I see how each is still
with me, in the form I make for myself, my way of being in the world. * * * * * My grandfather and I had our secrets–as when we listened to Italian
opera together. Opera was forbidden Domenico because he had a bad heart–and
so moved was he by the vicissitudes and sorrows of Verdi’s heroes and
heroines that the doctor felt it to be a danger. We would slip away together
to listen–I was three or four–and he would explain all the events
extraordinaire that filled that world. All that madness seemed as natural as
anything else to my young mind. The madness in the air around me, I felt, was
no different. We would share forbidden cups of espresso, heavily sweetened. Drops of
the substance, like an elixir of life, were slipped into my small mouth on a
tiny silver spoon, while the eggshell china with its blue and gold border
gleamed iridescent in the lamplight. I remember that his hand shook slightly.
It was the world of the child–full of struggles larger than life, huge
shadows cast by the lamp, circumventing the grown-ups. It was a world of
enchantment, and passion. But then, he told me stories. Terrifying stories, fables whose morals
seemed to point to the horror of social custom, of emulation. Or he read me
Dante, or we would practice my bit of Italian together. Italian which was forbidden
me in my parent’s house, and which I quickly forgot when we were finally
separated. Italy was a part of that world of enchantment. Domenico would
describe the olive groves of the south, till I saw them blowing silver-green
in the wind. When I was seven he promised to take me there “after the war”,
but he died before the war was over. I grew up nostalgic for a land I’d never
seen. * * * * * He
read me Dante. Told me the book had gone around the world. A world I saw much
like the Bronx: tall apartment houses side by side. Marble and potted plants
in the lobbies. Linked hands of housewives, passing my grandfather’s book
from window to window. They would read that one copy and pass it along.
That’s why it looked so worn: crumbling cover, thumbprints, and dog-eared
corners. * * * * * Struggle
for truth bonded Domenico and Antoinette. Her rosary, his Giordano Bruno.
Fierce, luminous, and co-existent. As
how much else my child’s heart could only guess at. And in that struggle for
truth my grandmother had the last word. Domenico
died when I was eleven, of that same great heart they had tried to protect
him from. Antoinette survived him by eleven years. During that time she lived
with her various daughters: my aunts and my mother, and much to their annoyance
she conversed nightly with her husband. I still remember her in her room at
our brownstone house, in her cotton and lace nightgown, her luxuriant grey
hair brushed and ready for bed, talking to my grandfather’s picture, telling
him all the varied events of the day in the dim light. Her soft voice would
go from indignation to laughter or grief, as the story changed. She told him
everything. Those
years must have been hard and sad for her, but I don’t remember that she ever
complained. She threw herself into the life of whatever household: mending
our clothes, teaching me embroidery and linen working, rolling our endless
batches of egg noodles. When
Antoinette was on her deathbed, I was no longer living at home, and hence
barred from family life. The story of her passing came to me secondhand from
one of my aunts–one of the few who didn’t consider me too much of an outlaw
to speak to: When Antoinette knew she was dying, she
had a last request. She had all these eleven years worn only black, worn
mourning for Domenico, though he himself “didn’t believe in” wearing
mourning. But now that she was dying, she wanted to make sure that she was
buried in a bright-colored dress. It was a matter of deep concern; she was
restless and distressed till she was sure it was understood, and promises
were extracted. “Because,” she said, “when I meet your father in the next
world” (which world, of course, Domenico the atheist adamantly insisted did
not exist) “I don’t want him to scold me for wearing mourning.” Certain she was right–how could there not be an afterlife?–and fierce in her love
and her right to mourn her husband to the end, but not wanting him to scold
her. Like the rosary she slipped in and our of her apron all those years. She
was buried in light blue. * * * * * He
told me stories. There were many, and I remember that there were some that
made me joyous, but the one that has stayed with me all these years went
something like this: Once in a village far away,
there was to be a feast. The people of the town picked out a very fine
animal, and led it to the center of the square. And they decked it out with a
wreath of flowers around its neck, and praised it highly. And they played
music, and danced around it and killed it with great rejoicing. And the next
day the children of the village got together to play. They picked one of
their number, and put a wreath of flowers around his neck and another wreath
on his head. And they played their flutes, and danced around him and killed
him, rejoicing. It’s
hard to say now what I made of this then. Only that a sense of foreboding,
and of a huge responsibility of knowledge lay on me, age four or five. That this was the nature of the world, and
we shared this knowledge. If that was how it was I was willing to accept
it, only I wanted him not to suffer for it. How often I wanted to comfort
him–old man and child sharing an existential bewilderment. A willingness to
peer into darkness. Struggle for Truth. |