Anny Ballardini
from Half of a Full Life
Chapter 2:
The Return
*
Anny Ballardini lives and teaches in Bolzano, Italy. Her work appears on several online sites and her poetry was recently collected in Opening and Closing Numbers, published by Moria Editions, 2005. She is the curator/editor of the Poets’ Corner on the Fieralingue.it site. Among her many translations from and into English and Italian, see the Poets’ Corner; on paper: In RI by Henry Gould published by H. Gould, ’06; Smokestacks Allegro by R. Cominolli, Centro Studi Judicaria, ‘98; still to be published The Renaissance of the Self by Arturo Onofri. Her blog can be found under Narcissus Works.
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Chapter 2:
The Return
It was round six in the evening that I left my parents’ home forever. My sister hadn’t come back yet, but it was dinner time for the baby and my parents were sure she was going to arrive within minutes with Daniel and Kim. My father, once a tall and a beautiful man, was almost bent in two. I repeatedly asked him if he had back problems, if he was not feeling well.
“No, I am fine,” was the answer I got from him. I also noticed that he had watery eyes and kept on closing them as if he was going to fall asleep while sitting, even while walking.
“Papy, papy,” that is how I still called my father.
“Yes,” he would wake up and stare around.
“Didn’t you sleep last night?” I asked him.
“No, I slept all right,” was his reassuring answer.
“Are you taking some special medicine, did the doctor give you a new prescription?” I tried to mask my anguish fearing the worst, the idea that my sister was poisoning him got the better of me. I was at this point ready to face disaster in its full magnitude.
“I take the usual pills to keep blood pressure down, that’s all,” he answered with a visible effort to keep his eyes open.
*
The conversation I had had with my father after lunch was quite strange and it had sort of freaked me out. He had inquired if when I died my inheritance would go to my niece. I’d explained him the Italian law on inheritance, the little I knew, by underlining that blood ties came first and if at the time of my death my niece was still my closest relative, she would indeed inherit her share. My mother had been listening all the time. Even if she was not in perfect health she had been shrewd enough not to show too much interest in the matter.
Something that had bothered me, as soon as Ivy and Kim had disappeared upstairs, was a story my brother-in-law, Daniel, had come up with. While sipping coffee in an attempt to put together a small chat that went beyond Ivy’s mean comments, Daniel had started talking to my father about the local characters. He’d mentioned Pietro, whom he had met the previous week with his family, his son doing so well in Padua with his new job. And by association my father had asked of Peter Martins, if Daniel had seen him lately. To which I’d chirped in asking whom he was.
“You don’t know him? But yes, you do. He’s the one who has that tiny house right above the sharp turn between Verrand and Prè-St.-Didier,” explained my father.
At that point my mother had rushed in to explain:
“You know where… you were the one who said that you wanted to live in the small village that overlooked the entire valley, the one far off the main road, up there, ‘lost in the clouds’ as you liked to say…”
“Yes, I remember,” a light had struck my mind, how many years had passed since then…
“He is the one who built an airplane in his yard,” Daniel had continued, pushed by his sort of childish way of interacting with us, his in-laws. Also visible was his awkward attempt to sweep off the sense of guilt he had been feeling all the time. His long awaited opportunity to justify himself had finally showed up.
“Filthy rich, he inherited a fortune and was going to squander it around, nuts, out of his brains. His relatives sued him, and now he receives just an alimony to live by,” he had stood up from his chair and had started mimicking a mad person.
“How could he be mad if he built a plane? I wouldn’t be able to put together a car…” I had asked, quite puzzled.
This went on for a while with my father and mother listening attentively. Daniel went deeper into the matter and repeated what he had heard. Peter Martins had been found drinking at night in a local bar. His relatives had thought that the best they could do for him was to manage his fortune. Their lawyers had found that he had not been in full possession of his mental faculties: “You know, a genius, extremely intelligent, but as mad as a hatter, …” Daniel added.
These words had switched on another light in my mind. An occult side of my sister’s machinery was further unveiled. “Was she maybe thinking of getting rid of me after my parents’ death to take away what was mine? Was she already preparing this other mean and pompous scene by planning it way ahead of time?,” was the terrifying thought that crossed my mind and had given me a frozen chill along my arms.
*
Anyhow, it was time for me to go. I felt as heavy as the mountains that surrounded me, and the darkness that had already eaten down the day was what I had in front of my eyes. Not only had Ivy psychologically murdered me, she had also stabbed my family away from me. Now I was worried for my father, rather than for my mother, as well as for my future, having intuited her devious psychology in a broader context. Was she already seeing me in a nuts’ home to get her dirty hands on my life?
Enveloped in thick nightmares, I greeted my father, kissed my mother, and left their home. A home I had left so many times in a very different mood, with them waving good-bye, to which they used to scream out: “Till next month! Come back soon! Drive slowly! Call as soon as you arrive!” My father used to add in the midst of the many voices: “Eat!” which had always made me smile.
*
The car was frozen, and this made me think that misery was going to have the better of me. I pulled up the heater, switched on the radio to bring some rattling into my head, and ventured out onto the dark mountain roads that had by now lost all their original enchantment, an enchantment that somehow seized me again while driving through the many tiny villages that were scattered like handfuls of stars, one after the other, their neat churches and belfries dominating in the middle with open main squares. This country is made of a natural beauty: the crests of the mountains indenting the sky, black against black, two distinct kinds of darkness, a moonless sky but without clouds to let the stars pierce it with what seemed to me simple hope, the one granted to those who were lost by catching their sight with mere wonder. This is a land similar to the one Jean Giono described when talking of Provence, the southern region in France, just on the other side of the chain of the Alps. Less than a century ago it was inhabited by reclusive people who, because of poverty and isolation, were similar to primitive men. Women that stirred hatred, violent men who were murderous, their suicide rate ranked high. If I remember right, he talked not only of virtues clashing against vices, but vices against vices, and virtues competing against virtues. In the midst of what could be defined as the desert of human beings that still persisted in the elderly people I had come in contact with, I had often asked myself why my parents had decided to come to this place after having lived in California. It had been my father’s dream to get back to the original place of his grandfather, a dream I had so often found illogical, and that had given what I had always thought to be an unlucky twist to my fate. At the time I was barely a teenager, so I couldn’t have offered any opposition, not knowing what was ahead of me. It was to a place like this that I had gone back for years, nourishing myself on the beauty of nature and the hope the sky seemed to offer. It was this fragile hope that had kept me fighting against adverse situations, and that was able to bring me to the present moment, a hope by now broken in two like a too old bridge, the one I was crossing on my own, between what I thought I knew and what I couldn’t hide from myself any more. In my daily life, the one I had to clench on firmly, I had to start over again with a new knowledge, find protection, build up solid friendships, find a new family, references, a harbor that could protect me from the manipulative actions of my sister who seemed to go beyond all rules. I was at war, whether I liked it or not, and I had to take action. A grip seized my stomach and I started shivering. I was wearing a woolen turtleneck and a warm cardigan, the heater was set at its maximum, the car was like an oven, and I was shivering!
I lit a cigarette and glimpsed at my watch, still about half an hour to reach Turin, the main town in the Piedmont region. It was about 9 pm and I wanted to be at home by midnight. I decided I would stop there to have a coffee to keep me going. As soon as I entered the city, I was surprised that the streets were so empty. It was very cold, but on a Saturday evening kids usually colored the streets in their showy punk-like ways. Even if this winter was mild, as people used to say, this night, stuck down the gorge of an inclement January was not auspicious, and had probably diverted any party-like idea young people might have had on their minds. I cut through the center of town looking for a sign of life, and I noticed that the café at the corner was open, a meeting place during my university days. A rush of memories filled my head like the wind scattering the dead leaves on the sidewalk. I was lucky to find a parking place right there, switched off the car, picked up my jacket and my bag and got out. It was difficult to struggle through the intense cold to the bar, hands in my pockets, chin buried inside the collar of the thick winter jacket.
The café was one of those old meeting places of the decadent local bourgeoisie, with an enormous glassed and wooden door, and a huge Liberty style handle against which I used to lean to open it. That is what I did this time to be enveloped by the warm light, surrounded by classical music, the reflection of crystals and the closeness of human beings who were sharing an aperitif before dinner, or a coffee after a frugal supper, before venturing into other spaces for the night: a theater, or a cinema. I found a table close to the window that looked onto the garden that I remembered was full of daisies and roses in spring. Now almost invisible, blinded as I was by the atmosphere I was gulping in deep breaths. “A cappuccino,” I told the waiter as soon as he arrived, without looking at the list he was going to give me. It was in this moment that I heard my name called out loud:
“Nancy, is it you? Nancy!”
I felt pulled down to earth again, and turned around to see Janet leaving a group of elegant people standing at the bar. The expatriate, that is how we liked to define one another. An American like me, she too had been strayed by destiny to the European continent, and we had met at university. She was a great friend I had lost because of the tunnels I had to excavate under the pressure to get through. We hugged, and she started asking me one question after the other without letting me answer, so thrilled she was to see me again.
I could not stop it, my muscles were fighting desperately against it, my body, my mind, but I broke down, tears streaming, my voice sobbing in the vain attempt to utter an “Excuse me, I’m sorry”. I felt out of place. The people in the café stopped chatting and I perceived that everybody was staring at me, but I couldn’t stop it. The levee that had kept my tension under control had crashed, and my fears, loneliness, desperation, were getting the better of me in front of the sincere affection Janet was showing. She made me sit down again and pulled a chair close to mine to sit facing the garden window in order to grant us a sort of intimacy. A sense of guilt invaded me, shame for my incapacity of being able to behave in a different way, as if I was naked in that crowded café, dressed only by Janet’s pity and the other customers’ concern for a matter that was not their own. Blowing of my nose seemed out of place, as much as those tears that wetted my face, my hands, and the painful expression I knew had turned my face into an image of sufferance. I was fighting with all my energies against it.
Janet had not been a friend because there were no people around, and she knew right there how to get me to the knot of my outburst.
“It’s because of my sister, her manipulations, I didn’t realize she had gotten so far,” I tried to explain. “My mother might be involved, too”.
She improvised the best words she could find, and made me remember my successes, how important I was and had been for her. “Can your remember…?” she kept on repeating. At each new twist, her thoughts brought her to give me comfort. And comfort I received. I slowly stopped trembling and was able to collect myself again into a sort of respectable posture.
That is how I left her, together with the promise we would soon meet again. I would come from Milan to Turin, or she from Turin to Milan, or even meet half-way at one of those “trattorie” that offered some special homemade dishes of the best Italian cuisine in one of the villages just off the highway. Maybe even take a day off and walk all the way up to one of the many mountain huts from which you could dominate the world. I was able to show her that I was okay, and that it was just a momentary collapse due to my being tired and stressed. Anyhow, she wouldn’t have accepted any other solution. This was Janet, one of my dearest friends, maybe I wasn’t so disarmed in what was my war if people like Janet were there to help me get along. Her sunny smile, beautiful face with its remarkable profile, and her slightly differently colored eyes, one green and the other brown. Her warmth stayed with me on the highway with the cars flashing by and the low outlines of the buildings that like ghosts stood out in the Padana Plain drawn by the River Pò. The land of Alessandro Manzoni who fought through ‘The Betrothed’ to pay his bills, with his sons squandering more than what he had.
“No, I am fine,” was the answer I got from him. I also noticed that he had watery eyes and kept on closing them as if he was going to fall asleep while sitting, even while walking.
“Papy, papy,” that is how I still called my father.
“Yes,” he would wake up and stare around.
“Didn’t you sleep last night?” I asked him.
“No, I slept all right,” was his reassuring answer.
“Are you taking some special medicine, did the doctor give you a new prescription?” I tried to mask my anguish fearing the worst, the idea that my sister was poisoning him got the better of me. I was at this point ready to face disaster in its full magnitude.
“I take the usual pills to keep blood pressure down, that’s all,” he answered with a visible effort to keep his eyes open.
The conversation I had had with my father after lunch was quite strange and it had sort of freaked me out. He had inquired if when I died my inheritance would go to my niece. I’d explained him the Italian law on inheritance, the little I knew, by underlining that blood ties came first and if at the time of my death my niece was still my closest relative, she would indeed inherit her share. My mother had been listening all the time. Even if she was not in perfect health she had been shrewd enough not to show too much interest in the matter.
Something that had bothered me, as soon as Ivy and Kim had disappeared upstairs, was a story my brother-in-law, Daniel, had come up with. While sipping coffee in an attempt to put together a small chat that went beyond Ivy’s mean comments, Daniel had started talking to my father about the local characters. He’d mentioned Pietro, whom he had met the previous week with his family, his son doing so well in Padua with his new job. And by association my father had asked of Peter Martins, if Daniel had seen him lately. To which I’d chirped in asking whom he was.
“You don’t know him? But yes, you do. He’s the one who has that tiny house right above the sharp turn between Verrand and Prè-St.-Didier,” explained my father.
At that point my mother had rushed in to explain:
“You know where… you were the one who said that you wanted to live in the small village that overlooked the entire valley, the one far off the main road, up there, ‘lost in the clouds’ as you liked to say…”
“Yes, I remember,” a light had struck my mind, how many years had passed since then…
“He is the one who built an airplane in his yard,” Daniel had continued, pushed by his sort of childish way of interacting with us, his in-laws. Also visible was his awkward attempt to sweep off the sense of guilt he had been feeling all the time. His long awaited opportunity to justify himself had finally showed up.
“Filthy rich, he inherited a fortune and was going to squander it around, nuts, out of his brains. His relatives sued him, and now he receives just an alimony to live by,” he had stood up from his chair and had started mimicking a mad person.
“How could he be mad if he built a plane? I wouldn’t be able to put together a car…” I had asked, quite puzzled.
This went on for a while with my father and mother listening attentively. Daniel went deeper into the matter and repeated what he had heard. Peter Martins had been found drinking at night in a local bar. His relatives had thought that the best they could do for him was to manage his fortune. Their lawyers had found that he had not been in full possession of his mental faculties: “You know, a genius, extremely intelligent, but as mad as a hatter, …” Daniel added.
These words had switched on another light in my mind. An occult side of my sister’s machinery was further unveiled. “Was she maybe thinking of getting rid of me after my parents’ death to take away what was mine? Was she already preparing this other mean and pompous scene by planning it way ahead of time?,” was the terrifying thought that crossed my mind and had given me a frozen chill along my arms.
Anyhow, it was time for me to go. I felt as heavy as the mountains that surrounded me, and the darkness that had already eaten down the day was what I had in front of my eyes. Not only had Ivy psychologically murdered me, she had also stabbed my family away from me. Now I was worried for my father, rather than for my mother, as well as for my future, having intuited her devious psychology in a broader context. Was she already seeing me in a nuts’ home to get her dirty hands on my life?
Enveloped in thick nightmares, I greeted my father, kissed my mother, and left their home. A home I had left so many times in a very different mood, with them waving good-bye, to which they used to scream out: “Till next month! Come back soon! Drive slowly! Call as soon as you arrive!” My father used to add in the midst of the many voices: “Eat!” which had always made me smile.
The car was frozen, and this made me think that misery was going to have the better of me. I pulled up the heater, switched on the radio to bring some rattling into my head, and ventured out onto the dark mountain roads that had by now lost all their original enchantment, an enchantment that somehow seized me again while driving through the many tiny villages that were scattered like handfuls of stars, one after the other, their neat churches and belfries dominating in the middle with open main squares. This country is made of a natural beauty: the crests of the mountains indenting the sky, black against black, two distinct kinds of darkness, a moonless sky but without clouds to let the stars pierce it with what seemed to me simple hope, the one granted to those who were lost by catching their sight with mere wonder. This is a land similar to the one Jean Giono described when talking of Provence, the southern region in France, just on the other side of the chain of the Alps. Less than a century ago it was inhabited by reclusive people who, because of poverty and isolation, were similar to primitive men. Women that stirred hatred, violent men who were murderous, their suicide rate ranked high. If I remember right, he talked not only of virtues clashing against vices, but vices against vices, and virtues competing against virtues. In the midst of what could be defined as the desert of human beings that still persisted in the elderly people I had come in contact with, I had often asked myself why my parents had decided to come to this place after having lived in California. It had been my father’s dream to get back to the original place of his grandfather, a dream I had so often found illogical, and that had given what I had always thought to be an unlucky twist to my fate. At the time I was barely a teenager, so I couldn’t have offered any opposition, not knowing what was ahead of me. It was to a place like this that I had gone back for years, nourishing myself on the beauty of nature and the hope the sky seemed to offer. It was this fragile hope that had kept me fighting against adverse situations, and that was able to bring me to the present moment, a hope by now broken in two like a too old bridge, the one I was crossing on my own, between what I thought I knew and what I couldn’t hide from myself any more. In my daily life, the one I had to clench on firmly, I had to start over again with a new knowledge, find protection, build up solid friendships, find a new family, references, a harbor that could protect me from the manipulative actions of my sister who seemed to go beyond all rules. I was at war, whether I liked it or not, and I had to take action. A grip seized my stomach and I started shivering. I was wearing a woolen turtleneck and a warm cardigan, the heater was set at its maximum, the car was like an oven, and I was shivering!
I lit a cigarette and glimpsed at my watch, still about half an hour to reach Turin, the main town in the Piedmont region. It was about 9 pm and I wanted to be at home by midnight. I decided I would stop there to have a coffee to keep me going. As soon as I entered the city, I was surprised that the streets were so empty. It was very cold, but on a Saturday evening kids usually colored the streets in their showy punk-like ways. Even if this winter was mild, as people used to say, this night, stuck down the gorge of an inclement January was not auspicious, and had probably diverted any party-like idea young people might have had on their minds. I cut through the center of town looking for a sign of life, and I noticed that the café at the corner was open, a meeting place during my university days. A rush of memories filled my head like the wind scattering the dead leaves on the sidewalk. I was lucky to find a parking place right there, switched off the car, picked up my jacket and my bag and got out. It was difficult to struggle through the intense cold to the bar, hands in my pockets, chin buried inside the collar of the thick winter jacket.
The café was one of those old meeting places of the decadent local bourgeoisie, with an enormous glassed and wooden door, and a huge Liberty style handle against which I used to lean to open it. That is what I did this time to be enveloped by the warm light, surrounded by classical music, the reflection of crystals and the closeness of human beings who were sharing an aperitif before dinner, or a coffee after a frugal supper, before venturing into other spaces for the night: a theater, or a cinema. I found a table close to the window that looked onto the garden that I remembered was full of daisies and roses in spring. Now almost invisible, blinded as I was by the atmosphere I was gulping in deep breaths. “A cappuccino,” I told the waiter as soon as he arrived, without looking at the list he was going to give me. It was in this moment that I heard my name called out loud:
“Nancy, is it you? Nancy!”
I felt pulled down to earth again, and turned around to see Janet leaving a group of elegant people standing at the bar. The expatriate, that is how we liked to define one another. An American like me, she too had been strayed by destiny to the European continent, and we had met at university. She was a great friend I had lost because of the tunnels I had to excavate under the pressure to get through. We hugged, and she started asking me one question after the other without letting me answer, so thrilled she was to see me again.
I could not stop it, my muscles were fighting desperately against it, my body, my mind, but I broke down, tears streaming, my voice sobbing in the vain attempt to utter an “Excuse me, I’m sorry”. I felt out of place. The people in the café stopped chatting and I perceived that everybody was staring at me, but I couldn’t stop it. The levee that had kept my tension under control had crashed, and my fears, loneliness, desperation, were getting the better of me in front of the sincere affection Janet was showing. She made me sit down again and pulled a chair close to mine to sit facing the garden window in order to grant us a sort of intimacy. A sense of guilt invaded me, shame for my incapacity of being able to behave in a different way, as if I was naked in that crowded café, dressed only by Janet’s pity and the other customers’ concern for a matter that was not their own. Blowing of my nose seemed out of place, as much as those tears that wetted my face, my hands, and the painful expression I knew had turned my face into an image of sufferance. I was fighting with all my energies against it.
Janet had not been a friend because there were no people around, and she knew right there how to get me to the knot of my outburst.
“It’s because of my sister, her manipulations, I didn’t realize she had gotten so far,” I tried to explain. “My mother might be involved, too”.
She improvised the best words she could find, and made me remember my successes, how important I was and had been for her. “Can your remember…?” she kept on repeating. At each new twist, her thoughts brought her to give me comfort. And comfort I received. I slowly stopped trembling and was able to collect myself again into a sort of respectable posture.
That is how I left her, together with the promise we would soon meet again. I would come from Milan to Turin, or she from Turin to Milan, or even meet half-way at one of those “trattorie” that offered some special homemade dishes of the best Italian cuisine in one of the villages just off the highway. Maybe even take a day off and walk all the way up to one of the many mountain huts from which you could dominate the world. I was able to show her that I was okay, and that it was just a momentary collapse due to my being tired and stressed. Anyhow, she wouldn’t have accepted any other solution. This was Janet, one of my dearest friends, maybe I wasn’t so disarmed in what was my war if people like Janet were there to help me get along. Her sunny smile, beautiful face with its remarkable profile, and her slightly differently colored eyes, one green and the other brown. Her warmth stayed with me on the highway with the cars flashing by and the low outlines of the buildings that like ghosts stood out in the Padana Plain drawn by the River Pò. The land of Alessandro Manzoni who fought through ‘The Betrothed’ to pay his bills, with his sons squandering more than what he had.
Anny Ballardini lives and teaches in Bolzano, Italy. Her work appears on several online sites and her poetry was recently collected in Opening and Closing Numbers, published by Moria Editions, 2005. She is the curator/editor of the Poets’ Corner on the Fieralingue.it site. Among her many translations from and into English and Italian, see the Poets’ Corner; on paper: In RI by Henry Gould published by H. Gould, ’06; Smokestacks Allegro by R. Cominolli, Centro Studi Judicaria, ‘98; still to be published The Renaissance of the Self by Arturo Onofri. Her blog can be found under Narcissus Works.
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