But often Goliarda and Pilù would join a group of friends who lived on nearby Via Paolo Frisi and would end the evening there, drinking wine after having gone out to dinner together. The following morning, after the inevitable black coffee on an empty stomach favoured by Sicilians, Goliarda would go back upstairs, high up amid the sky and clouds — a curious attic room converted from a space for drying clothes, with a huge window overlooking Villa Glori’s expanse of wistful pines. There she would sit in a low baroque armchair, place an empty cardboard box on her knees as a desk — the box had contained old 33 rpm records, Bach’s Fantasias performed by Gieseking, I think — and resume her writing, surrounded by a sea of notes scattered all over the floor.
She always wrote on ordinary sheets of typing paper — folded in two because, she said, the reduced format gave her a sense of moderation, though I think it had to do with nostalgia, a need to reproduce the dimensions of her old childhood notebook — on which the words were inscribed in a rather minute handwriting, each line gradually more indented until it was reduced to one or two words, then she would start all over again with a complete line. The result was a curious design, a kind of electrocardiogram of words, indeed, a writing of the heart.
Goliarda always wrote by hand, using a simple fine-tip black Bic; she said she needed to feel the emotion throbbing in her pulse. She consumed dozens of pens, mainly because she left them scattered everywhere, then couldn’t find them again.
And so the days, months and years passed, with nothing out of the ordinary happening, aside from a trip to the eastern borders of Turkey (but Goliarda was never a stalwart traveller in a geographic sense) and the publication of the first two novels. Meanwhile paintings, drawings and sculptures by many fine artists went away, while bailiffs, property seizures and eviction notices arrived. Until I came along. I remember that on one of the first days that I lived on Via Denza, as I was climbing the stairs I ran into an eighteenth-century Austrian chest that was being hauled off to auction, confiscated following a labour dispute with a maid who had gone unpaid for too long: the nonetheless adored Argia, to whom Goliarda remained forever grateful for the help her much-appreciated domestic services afforded her during the years she was taken up with writing The Art of Joy.
Subsequent to the time of our meeting, Goliarda wrote the entire fourth and final part of the novel, which was completed in my own house at Gaeta on 21 October 1976. I myself affixed the date to the manuscript, and together we began its revision, which after a few months I continued on my own. The editing was completed by mid-1978, the year we left for China after sending the novel out, through a well-known critic, to be read by one of the major publishers. When we returned, at the end of that year, we found the first of what would be a long series of negative responses. Then life became more and more pressing. The Art of Joy was put aside; other works were urgently calling Goliarda. And so we come to 1994, the year in which I oversaw the publication of the first part of the novel by Stampa Alternativa, a publishing house that was not new to courageous ventures. It was then that they decided to proceed with publishing the entire work. Goliarda’s sudden death meant that it was once again I who would prepare the novel for publication in its complete edition.
* * *
Goliarda will not see her Modesta in bookstores. But I know that the sorrow is no longer hers; it’s all mine for her. Goliarda is no longer with us. But Modesta exists. The joy of a writer, we know, is her work itself, seeing her characters and their stories grow page after page in the tenuous strokes of the written words, seeing them come alive and take shape, ready to go out into the world. The rest, the volume on the bookseller’s shelf, is satisfying — and also cause for anxiety — but has nothing to do with that joy.
I can still see Goliarda climbing the stairs to the attic in the morning with a pot of tea and her inevitable cigarettes. I recall perfectly how she would come down a few hours later, in a breathless state of joyful apprehension, sometimes weeping without sobbing. She seemed to slowly re-emerge into the light from an abysmal pit, whose depths housed the dense colony of her creations, the numerous characters of the novel. Figures who were in large part herself, with stories that belonged to others. Goliarda did not identify with Modesta to any great extent — after all, The Art of Joy is not an autobiographical novel. She always replied a little uneasily that Modesta was better than her, an indication that — at least insofar as an author may be her own character — Modesta may be said to be Goliarda, but summed up in a blend of Beatrice, Carlo, Bambù, Nina, Mattia, and even Nonna Gaia. Whereas there is almost nothing of Joyce, Carmine, Pietro, Prando and Stella in Goliarda, nor anything of Jacopo or Carluzzu. Those who knew her well can in part confirm it.
I am sure that readers will see the abundance of life contained in this novel, as if Goliarda were getting even with fate that had not let her have children — she who’d wanted as many as her mother, who had borne eight young ones. I will never forget the dedication that the poet Ignazio Buttitta penned in a volume of poems that he gave her: ‘A G. ca è matri di tutti e un havi figghi’: To G. who is a mother to all yet has no children.
So yes, the countless characters in The Art of Joy are Goliarda herself, manifested in numerous offspring, Modesta first of all.
Over time, the more judicious critics will draw attention to the stylistic and structural aspects of the novel. Maybe they will end up confirming that Mody is the most vivid female protagonist in our twentieth century, despite being born between avant-gardism and minimalism — which rejected the traditional form of the novel and its strong character development — and that Goliarda’s fusion of cinema and psychoanalysis restored the novel’s natural tempo, ending the era of the antinovel, though without turning the narrative into pure cinema or television. But all of that, though she was far from being unaware of it, was of little interest to Goliarda. She wrote the way she read, as a reader. She wrote for pure, unbiased readers who were far away, with lucid yet passionate abandon, tender and sensuous, attentive to the work’s heartbeats, rather than to types and forms.
But ideas were a different matter. She was very attentive to ideas. In fact, she described herself as an ideological writer, clearly doing herself an injustice. Yes, the heart and ideas were her sole source of literary nourishment. For the rest she truly wrote for sincere, distant readers, the only ones to whom she felt fraternally close.
Angelo Pellegrino
May 1997 — January 2006
PART ONE
1
I’m four or five years old, in a muddy place, dragging a huge piece of wood. There are no trees or houses around. Only me, sweating, as I struggle to drag that rough log, my palms burning, scraped raw by the wood. I sink into the mud up to my ankles but I have to keep tugging. I don’t know why, but I have to. Let’s leave this early memory of mine just as it is: I don’t want to correct or invent things. I want to tell you how it was without changing anything.
So, I was dragging that piece of wood. And after hiding it or leaving it behind, I entered a large opening in the wall, closed off only by a black curtain swarming with flies. Now I’m in the dark room where we slept and where we ate bread and olives, bread and onions. We cooked only on Sundays. My mother is sewing in a corner, her eyes wide in silence. She never speaks, my mother. She either shouts or keeps quiet. Her heavy fall of black hair is matted with flies. My sister, sitting on the ground, stares at her from two dark slits buried in folds of fat. All her life, at least as long as their lives lasted, my sister tracked her constantly, staring at her that way. And if my mother went out — which happened rarely — she had to lock her in the toilet, because my sister wouldn’t hear of being separated from her. Locked in that little room my sister would scream, tear her hair and bang her head against the wall until my mother came back, took her in her arms and silently stroked her.