Read Online Listen to My Voice by Susanna Tamaro - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Susanna Tamaro
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seemed like a person suffering from vertigo and forced to walk along the edge of a cliff. The precipice was a choice: life or death.
While she was attending meetings or anxiously hurrying to class, while she was smoking or (probably) weeping in her bed, that brother or sister of mine kept taking shape in her body. With immense sagacity and an imperturbable rhythm, the cells were multiplying and arranging themselves to form what would have been its face one day. The baby was growing inside her, and she couldn’t decide whether to let it be born or not; her power over it was total. As I read those lines, I couldn’t feel any hostility or contempt toward her. My only instinct was to protect her, as if all her desperation, her solitude, and her laughable naivety had gone directly into my veins, coalescing into a sense of infinite pity.
By this time, the midday sun was unbearably hot; it even stunned the insects buzzing around the flowers. Just when I was about to close the diary, a bumblebee fell on the pages, its rear legs covered with pollen. Delicately, I helped it get airborne again.
On the spot where the bee had fallen, there was a sort of golden halo. I read the lines below it:
It’s decided
.
Three days from today, at B.’s house
.
From the heights of her medical studies, Tiziana said, ‘You’re crazy. They’ll kill you.’
I replied, ‘Maybe that would be even better.’
After this, two pages have been torn out. Then, with a nervous hand, she wrote these lines:
The night afterwards, suspended between relief and confusion, I had a dream. I’m not sure where I was in the dream – all I remember is that at one point I ate a piece of unbaked bread dough, which started to rise in my stomach. Everyone I came across said, ‘Are you expecting?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘It’s just the yeast, still working,’ but when I said that, I wasn’t so convinced I was right any more
.
When I woke up, I felt strange, so I called B. ‘Are you sure everything went OK?’ I asked her. She reassured me; the procedure had been perfectly executed. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I showed it to you in the basin, remember?’
She seemed vaguely offended at my having doubted her abilities, so to lighten things up, I made a joke: ‘But suppose you did what the Filipino healers do and showed me a couple of chicken livers?’ We laughed, and the tension was relieved
.
I felt I needed to extract myself from my mother’s life for a few days. I couldn’t bear the heaviness of those years any longer.
In order to get rid of the dross and the shadows, in order to purify myself, I took several long hikes across the plateau. Hidden in the bushes, the blackbirds and the blackcaps mingled their love songs, and the tender green of the recently-sprouted leaves lent splendour to the surrounding landscape. A giant cloud of busy pollinators buzzed above the upland meadows, which were dotted with dandelions, daisies, and crocuses.
Sometimes I stretched out in the damp depths of a sinkhole. From where I lay, I could admire the crown of bushes and trees around the rim, while backlit spiders climbed up and down invisible strands of silk, and beetles like violet jewels rumbled heavily through the air. At other times, however, I felt the need to climb higher, to reach a point from which I could gaze out to the far horizon and beyond.
As I walked between the sinkholes and the heights along the Slovenian border, I thought about my brother – or my sister – who was denied the possibility of being born. Would the child’s existence have saved my mother, or would it have accelerated her self-destructive decline? Would I be in the world, I wondered, if that older sibling had been here? Was his or her end also, somehow, the possibility of my beginning?
Beyond our will, our fragility, and our plans, however circumscribed, is there Someone or something that governs the great cycle of births? Why was I born, and not the other one? The abortion could
While she was attending meetings or anxiously hurrying to class, while she was smoking or (probably) weeping in her bed, that brother or sister of mine kept taking shape in her body. With immense sagacity and an imperturbable rhythm, the cells were multiplying and arranging themselves to form what would have been its face one day. The baby was growing inside her, and she couldn’t decide whether to let it be born or not; her power over it was total. As I read those lines, I couldn’t feel any hostility or contempt toward her. My only instinct was to protect her, as if all her desperation, her solitude, and her laughable naivety had gone directly into my veins, coalescing into a sense of infinite pity.
By this time, the midday sun was unbearably hot; it even stunned the insects buzzing around the flowers. Just when I was about to close the diary, a bumblebee fell on the pages, its rear legs covered with pollen. Delicately, I helped it get airborne again.
On the spot where the bee had fallen, there was a sort of golden halo. I read the lines below it:
It’s decided
.
Three days from today, at B.’s house
.
From the heights of her medical studies, Tiziana said, ‘You’re crazy. They’ll kill you.’
I replied, ‘Maybe that would be even better.’
After this, two pages have been torn out. Then, with a nervous hand, she wrote these lines:
The night afterwards, suspended between relief and confusion, I had a dream. I’m not sure where I was in the dream – all I remember is that at one point I ate a piece of unbaked bread dough, which started to rise in my stomach. Everyone I came across said, ‘Are you expecting?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘It’s just the yeast, still working,’ but when I said that, I wasn’t so convinced I was right any more
.
When I woke up, I felt strange, so I called B. ‘Are you sure everything went OK?’ I asked her. She reassured me; the procedure had been perfectly executed. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I showed it to you in the basin, remember?’
She seemed vaguely offended at my having doubted her abilities, so to lighten things up, I made a joke: ‘But suppose you did what the Filipino healers do and showed me a couple of chicken livers?’ We laughed, and the tension was relieved
.
I felt I needed to extract myself from my mother’s life for a few days. I couldn’t bear the heaviness of those years any longer.
In order to get rid of the dross and the shadows, in order to purify myself, I took several long hikes across the plateau. Hidden in the bushes, the blackbirds and the blackcaps mingled their love songs, and the tender green of the recently-sprouted leaves lent splendour to the surrounding landscape. A giant cloud of busy pollinators buzzed above the upland meadows, which were dotted with dandelions, daisies, and crocuses.
Sometimes I stretched out in the damp depths of a sinkhole. From where I lay, I could admire the crown of bushes and trees around the rim, while backlit spiders climbed up and down invisible strands of silk, and beetles like violet jewels rumbled heavily through the air. At other times, however, I felt the need to climb higher, to reach a point from which I could gaze out to the far horizon and beyond.
As I walked between the sinkholes and the heights along the Slovenian border, I thought about my brother – or my sister – who was denied the possibility of being born. Would the child’s existence have saved my mother, or would it have accelerated her self-destructive decline? Would I be in the world, I wondered, if that older sibling had been here? Was his or her end also, somehow, the possibility of my beginning?
Beyond our will, our fragility, and our plans, however circumscribed, is there Someone or something that governs the great cycle of births? Why was I born, and not the other one? The abortion could
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