inspo/characterisation

I know. I could have told you and I didn't. But at some level I still see you as the person who broke my heart and left me unfit for normal relationships.

You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi's rich, Nick's a man, I can't hurt these people. If anything they're out to hurt me and I'm defending myself.

He wasn’t handsome. Big. Red-haired with sort of buckteeth and a weak chin, a jutting brow over piercing beady eyes. Thick glasses, potbelly, beautiful hands. He was the sexiest man I ever knew. Women fell for him in a second; he’d slept with the entire Art Department. It was power and energy and vision. Not like a forward-looking vision, although he had that too. He saw everything. Details, light on a bottle. He loved seeing things, looking. And he made you look, made you go see a painting, read a book. Made you touch the eggplant, warm in the sun. Well, of course I had a wild crush on him too, who didn’t?

Her mother was a fishwife at the market in Nantes. She’d rise in the blue night and drive to the city and come home midmorning with her hands chapped and glittering with scales, cold to the bone from contact with ice. Her face was delicate, but she had no education. Her husband had wooed her with his leather jacket, his pompadour, his motorcycle. Small things to trade for a life, but at the time they had seemed powerful. Aurélie’s father was a stonemason, and his family had lived in the same house in Notre-Dame-des-Landes for twelve generations. Aurélie was conceived during the revolution of May 1968; though her parents were far from radical, there was so much excitement in the air that they didn’t know how to express themselves except animally. When it was impossible for the girl’s mother to hide her pregnancy, they were married with orange blossoms in her hair, a slice of coconut cake in the freezer.

I caught Adam staring at me. He stared at me a lot lately, but he never asked questions. I had begun to go outside at night and lie on our hammock. Adam resented it. He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy. “But you hate going outside,” he’d say. And yet, there I was, outside, busting open the contract he held on me. He’d go back in and put the kids to bed and I would look up at the sky. You could see some stars where I lived. You could never see them in Manhattan. That was one advantage of this place, I guess.

At home Mirella, seeing that I was worried, drew me aside and asked, “Is it my fault, mamma?” I nodded yes. She added, in agitation, “It was Sandro who insisted on talking to you. I knew what that would mean for you.” We talked a little, but, ultimately, it didn’t matter to me. She confirmed what Cantoni had said, and I noticed that they used the same words. “I’ll talk to your father,” I said. “Today I don’t have the strength. He’ll decide. Maybe it will be good for you to go, later on. We’re used to living according to certain principles, they may be false and backward, as you say, but we can’t change.” Again I marveled at how coldly she acts, without apologizing and without invoking the blindness of passion as a pretext. When Michele and I were engaged, I sinned with him, but I pretended to do it reluctantly, swept away by him, without consenting. It was the same on our wedding night, and later, too, whenever Michele approached me at night. If I went to Venice, maybe I would arrive pretending not to know why I’m going or what would inevitably happen. That is the difference between Mirella and me; it seems to me that, accepting consciously certain situations, she is freed forever from sin. I would have liked to ask her if her conscience is at peace, her mind tranquil.

It never occurred to my mother that things could have been different for her. When she saw a problem, she thought only about how she could solve it herself, not whether she could appeal to others. The charisma she possessed, and the authority she commanded, made her independent from other people, sometimes too much. The only weapon she could offer to other women was her own strength. The only defence she passed on to me was her example. I grew up seeing how people were deferential to her, as if intimidated by her—not just the pupils in her class, the children in our neighbourhood, and us, her own children, but also quite a few adults, including men. I wondered where her power came from, and thought that perhaps she instilled fear in others because she was never scared of anything herself. But when I tried to be like her, and sought to control my fears, even dominate them, I struggled. I realized that she was an impossible model to follow. My mother did not fight and conquer her fears. She never knew fear in the first place.