Listen to My Voice

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Susanna Tamaro

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Genealogies

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Roots

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Marta is raised by her grandmother in her house in Trieste, a safe haven of stories, books and enchantment. She knows that her mother died when she was young, and she believes that her father is a Turkish prince. But as she grows older and this fairy tale disintegrates, Marta feels only anger towards her grandmother for withholding information about her parents.

  When her grandmother dies, Marta is alone in the world. One day, in the dusty attic, she finds a box belonging to her mother which may help to uncover her own past. With clues found in her mother’s journal and a worn photograph, Marta decides to track down her father, who she believes may still be alive. Feeling the need to escape her grandmother’s house, which is populated by secrets, Marta embarks on a journey to Israel, seeking what is left of her mother’s family in an attempt to make sense of where she came from.

  Written as a young woman’s narrative addressed to the memory of her grandmother, Listen to my Voice is a poignant coming of age story, and a beautifully crafted meditation on the importance of history and belonging.

  About the Author

  Susanna Tamaro was born in Trieste in 1957 and is the author of eight adult books and four children’s books. She established the Tamaro Foundation, dedicated to humanitarian causes, with the royalties from her literary work. Susanna Tamaro lives in Umbria.

  Also by Susanna Tamaro

  Susanna Tamaro

  Follow Your Heart

  For Solo Voice

  Answer Me

  To Daisy Nathan

  and to her questions a century long

  Return unto me, and I will return unto you.

  MALACHI 3:7

  Prelude

  1

  MAYBE IT ALL started when you had the tree cut down.

  You hadn’t told me a thing about it – such matters didn’t concern children – and so, one winter morning, while I was sitting in a classroom, listening with a profound sense of alienation as the teacher extolled the virtues of the lowest common multiple, a saw bit into the silvery-white bark; while I was dragging my feet in the corridor at break, chips of the tree’s life rained down on the ants.

  The devastation landed on me when I came home from school. In the yard, in the place where the walnut tree had stood, there was a black chasm; the lopped-off branches and the trunk, already sawed into three segments, lay dead on the ground; and a purple-faced man enveloped in the dirty smoke of diesel fuel was manoeuvring an excavator, whose huge jaws tore at the roots. The machine barked, snorted, reversed, and reared up, urged on by the curses of its operator. The damned roots didn’t want to loosen their hold on the earth. They were deeper than anticipated, and much more stubborn.

  For years and years, season after season, those roots had spread out silently, gaining ground little by little, entwining themselves with the roots of the oak and the cedar and the apple tree, even gathering into their inextricable embrace the gas and water mains. That’s the reason why trees must be cut down: they work deviously in darkness, thwarting the labour of man, and man, faced with such pigheadedness, is forced to deploy technology.

  All at once, under a cold winter sun, the tree’s majestic umbrella of roots, with a constellation of little clods still clinging to them, rose up before my eyes – like a roof ripped off a house, or like the vault of the universe at the first blast of the Last Trump – leaving the deepest part of the taproot still buried in the ground.

  Then – and only then – the man in the digger raised his fist skyward in a sign of victory, and you, already wearing your apron, applauded briefly.

  Then – and only then – I, who hadn’t opened my mouth or taken a step, felt my spine radiate into all things. My vertebrae and my marrow were no longer my own; they were part of an old, exposed wire, and its sparks flew in dissimulated delight from side to side, with cold, fierce energy. They spread out everywhere, like invisible spikes of ice with razor-sharp points, invading my bowels, piercing my heart, exploding in my brain, dancing suspended in its fluids; white slivers, dead man’s bones, no dance but the dance of death; energy but not fire, not light, energy for some unforeseen, violent act; livid, scalding energy.

  And after the lightning bolt, the darkness of deep night, the unquiet quiet of too much: of having seen too much, suffered too much, known too much. The quiet not of sleep, but of a brief death: when pain is too great, you have to die a little in order to be able to go on.

  My tree – the tree I’d grown up with, the tree I’d been convinced would accompany me as the years passed, the tree under whose branches I’d believed I would raise my children – had been uprooted. Its fall had dragged many things down to ruin: my sleep, my happiness, my ostensibly carefree spirit. When the root finally cracked, the sound was an explosion; time was divided into before and after; light was different, shrouded in intermittent darkness. Daytime darkness, night-time darkness, midsummer darkness. And, out of the darkness, a certainty: grief was the swamp I was condemned to wander through.

  The tiniest things are the greatest mystery of all. Protected by invisibility, the secret world explodes. A rock’s a rock, before and after; it never stops being a rock. But a tree, before it’s a tree, is a seed; man, before he’s man, is a morula.

  The greatest projects lie dozing in what’s limited, in what’s circumscribed.

  When I understood this, all at once, I understood that small things have to be taken care of.

  After the death of the big walnut tree, I wept for days. At first you tried to console me – how could chopping down a plant devastate a girl so utterly? You loved trees, too; you would never have done a thing like that to spite me. You’d decided it had to go because it was causing problems; it was too close to the house, and also to the cedar tree. Trees need space, you kept telling me, and besides, who knows, one day a root might have thrust its way up into the toilet bowl like a nautilus’s tentacle, and surely I wouldn’t have wanted such a frightening thing to happen! You were trying to make me laugh, or at least smile, but with scant success.

  After the great eruption was over, I spent every day lying immobile on the floor of my room, staring at an obtuse, cement sky incapable of providing any clarification.

  Shortly before, in one of my illustrated books, I’d read a story about sea cucumbers. They’re harmless, faceless creatures that are nonetheless as stubbornly attached to life as any other living thing. When they’re attacked, they expel the entire tangled mass of their internal organs all at once – heart, intestine, lungs, liver, reproductive organs – immobilising their predator in something like a gladiator’s net and thus gaining enough time to reach safety, to take shelter in a forest of algae, where they can rest and allow their cells to aggregate and differentiate until they produce a perfect copy of the viscera they’ve discharged.

  You see, I found myself in the same condition as a sea cucumber after an attack: emptied out. I had no words to say. I answered none of your many questions. We lived i
n two different worlds; good sense prevailed, on the whole, in yours, while mine was a universe of threats and darkness, occasionally pierced by lightning. The relationship between our two worlds was unambiguous: I could see yours, but you weren’t capable of perceiving mine.

  And therefore, on the third day, after your good sense had been exhausted, your patience overcome, and maybe even the paediatrician consulted, you opened the door of my room and said, ‘Enough already! You’re throwing a genuine tantrum. A tree’s only a tree, and you can always plant another one.’ Then you started busying yourself with housework, the way you probably did in the mornings when I was in school.

  It’s never been in my character to fling recriminations in someone’s face. Nobody’s to blame for interplanetary distances; they’re due to various laws of gravitation. Everyone’s horizon is different. You knew that, too: you always used to read The Little Prince to me, so you knew that every asteroid has its own kind of inhabitant. I felt a little dazed by your failure to think about the baobab, because the walnut tree was exactly like the baobab. The rosebush you insisted on buying for me afterwards couldn’t take its place in any way.

  A rosebush makes a striking appearance and gives off a pleasant scent, but then the rose gets clipped and stuck in a vase and finally winds up in the bin. But a beloved tree puts down roots around your heart. When the tree dies, the roots dry up and fall away, leaving behind minute but indelible scars to remember it by.

  Anyone who imputes the bankruptcy of his own existence to another person – or to an event – is like a dog attached to a long chain that slides along a cable. Before long, the grass the dog walks on stops growing and the trodden earth turns dusty, strewn with bits of food and piles of excrement. When, worn out by endless pacing to nowhere, the dog eventually dies and his chain finally hangs down inert, all that remains of his anxious life is a sad rut in the ground.

  Events and people aren’t ballast, and they’re not alleyways that you don’t know the way out of; they’re more like mirrors: small, large, convex, concave, wavy, distorting, cracked, or clouded, yet still capable of giving back a reflection and introducing us to a part of ourselves we don’t yet know.

  I must have awakened out of my sea cucumber’s life on the fourth or fifth night. My room was invaded by the cold light of a full moon. The coat stand threw its sinister shadow on to the floor. Why must there be a shadow in darkness? What’s the point of it, if not to evoke the existence of everything that can’t be seized and held?

  Often, during the evenings of my childhood, you’d sit beside my bed and tell me a story. Out of all that welter of princesses, enchantments, monstrous animals, and amazing feats, only two images have remained fixed in my memory: the wolves’ yellow eyes, and the thudding, ungainly steps of the Golem. The wolves lay in ambush in the forest and along solitary roads, whereas the Golem could go anywhere; he knew how to open and close doors and climb stairs. He neither devoured children nor transformed them into monsters, but still he terrorised me more than any other creature. Whenever I recalled his name, the air I breathed turned to ice.

  One early autumn night, damp but not cold, I felt overwhelmed by those threatening shadows and decided to get up and go outside.

  The air wafted a perfume that evoked a flash of summer. Maybe the scent came from the apples, some of them still hanging from their branches, others already rotting on the ground, or maybe from the yellow, barely ripe plums. Since the temperature hadn’t yet gone below freezing, few leaves had fallen. The grass was still green, with a few wild cyclamens scattered here and there, as well as a couple of dandelions that had survived your resolute weeding.

  By then, I figured all my entrails were gone. I went to the place where the walnut tree had stood and fell to my knees. The soil was damp and covered with little branches and twigs that had broken off when the tree came crashing down.

  The air vibrated differently in the space where the tree used to be; for a moment, I had the impression that it was still there, its roots pumping sap up into the trunk and the dark fingers of the branches sending the sap back down. Not long before, nuts had dropped from that stream of energy anchored in the earth and outstretched toward the sky. The irregular symphony of their falling had accompanied every autumn of my young life; when I came home from school, I used to run to the tree and fill my pockets with them.

  ‘Don’t touch them, they’re dirty,’ you’d call from the kitchen window, but I wouldn’t obey you. I loved to open the walnuts delicately, taking care not to crush them. I wouldn’t eat them; instead, I’d hold them in the palm of my hand and look at them. For some mysterious reason, they were absolutely identical to the ones I’d seen in our textbooks. Our brains – the brains of all mammals and all birds – are made the same way: the skull, like a shell, is there to protect the more fragile parts, the dura mater, the pia mater, and, between the two hemispheres, the oddity of the hippocampus.

  Why did two things in nature resemble each other so strikingly? Why did one thing refer to another? Was this a universal law, or was it just an extravagance due to a moment of distraction?

  The ground around me was covered with walnuts. Heavy rains had transformed the green husks of June into a blackish mush; all you had to do was rub it with your thumb, and the shell would appear. Hard, but not hard enough to escape the squirrels’ pink paws and ivory teeth, or the beaks of the hooded crows, the ravens, the magpies, and the jays; hard, but not hard enough to avoid my questions.

  Because that walnut tree – which was there one day and gone the next – had been my mirror, the first mirror of my life. Kneeling on the wounded earth, looking down into that chasm, immersed in the sinister moonlight with a seed in my hand and my heart seemingly empty, I suddenly understood that I would never, in all my time on earth, build mansions or amass a fortune or even have a family. As a cedar cone loudly struck the ground near me, I saw clearly that the path opening before me was the impassable and perpetually solitary path of the questioner.

  2

  WHEN I RECALL our house, I see it suspended in the light of dawn. It’s still autumn, because the ground starts to smoke and fog rises in the warmth of the sun’s first rays. Like a bird in flight, I always look down at the house from above and far off; then I slowly draw nearer, observe the windows – how many are open, how many closed – and check the garden, the clothesline, the rust on the gate. I’m in no hurry to come down – it’s as if I want to make sure that the house is really my house and the story my story.

  It seems that migratory birds behave in the same way; they cover thousands of kilometres purposefully, yielding to no distraction, and then, when they reach the area where they were hatched the previous year, they start to check it out. Is the horse chestnut tree with the white flowers still there? And the green car? And the nice lady who always steps outside and shakes the crumbs off her tablecloth? They observe everything meticulously, because for months, in the African deserts, the images of that lady and that car have stayed in their minds. But there are plenty of nice ladies and green cars in the world, so what’s the determining factor?

  It’s not a sight, but a smell, the combination of the smells that filled the air in the vicinity of their nests: if the scents of the lilac and the linden overlap for an instant, there it is, that’s the house, we’ve come to the right place.

  On the other hand, the odour that assailed me upon my return from the States was the smell of wet leaves that wouldn’t burn; by then it was mid-morning, and our neighbour had made a big pile of them and was trying in vain to set it alight, filling the air with heavy white smoke.

  And then you emerged from the smoke, perhaps just a bit thinner than I remembered.

  Convinced that I’d be able to free myself from you if I put an ocean between us, I’d travelled for months, seen many things, and met many people, but all that distance had produced exactly the opposite effect.

  I still hated you as much as ever. I felt like a fox with a great bushy tail: I’d inadvertently brush
ed against the fire, and it followed me everywhere; wherever I was, rage was in my heart, and pain, and the desire to escape the flames, which were always burning behind me, always bigger and more destructive. When I put the key into the gate, my tail was ablaze, crackling and sparking like a sheaf of dry hay, its brisk burning punctuated by sinister flares.

  You were in the driveway, with a broom in your hands.

  ‘It’s you!’ you exclaimed, dropping the broom. The wooden handle struck the paving stone with a hard, sharp sound.

  ‘Obviously,’ I replied, and without saying anything else, I went to my room, followed by Buck, who was yelping with joy.

  In the course of the following weeks, our rituals of everyday ferocity went back into effect – I hated you, and you tried to avoid my hatred. On the days when you felt strong, you tried to blunt it, but your gestures were feeble, like an out-of-shape boxer’s, and they succeeded only in irritating me further. ‘What do you want?’ I’d scream at you. ‘Disappear!’ I called you ‘Old Woman’; I kicked doors while repeating, like a mantra, ‘Drop dead drop dead drop dead drop dead drop dead . . .’

  It’s hard to understand how such hatred had taken shape in me. As with all complex emotions, it wasn’t possible to attribute it to a single cause; it was due instead to a sequence of events that combined unfavourably with some innate predispositions.

  When the first flashes of adolescence appeared what had been a tranquil stream in my early girlhood started changing into a rain-swollen river; the water was no longer green, it was yellow, and it roared around every obstacle. All sorts of refuse washed up in its inlets – hunks of polystyrene, small plastic bags, punctured soccer balls, naked doll torsos, torn branches, dead cats with bloated bellies – and everything bobbed about and collided weakly with everything else, impotent, resentful, unable to free itself. Since childhood, so many things had accumulated under the surface that neither of us was capable of seeing them: as the years passed, a word said or unsaid, one glare too many, an omitted embrace – the normal misunderstandings that form a part of any mutual relationship – had turned into two stores of gunpowder, one inside each of us.