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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia's mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn't be more different; they can't even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving. Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she's not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock – and a tumultuous relationship – begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life. Kinetic, formally daring, and strikingly original, Strangers I Know is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.
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‘Formally innovative and emotionally complex, this novel explores themes of communication, family, and belonging with exceptional insight. Durastanti, celebrated in Italy for her intelligent voice and her hybrid perspective, speaks to all who are outside and in-between. Strangers I Know, in a bracing translation by Elizabeth Harris, is stunning.’
— Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Whereabouts
‘Brave and deeply felt… Here the novel is not only a medium of illumination, but also a buoy cast into the dark waters of memory, imagination, and boldly embodied questions. In other words, it is my favourite kind of writing, the kind that not only tells of the world – but burrows through it, alive.’
— Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
‘Claudia Durastanti’s writing is lyrical and sharp, underpinned with a searching gaze that turns the everyday into something darkly beautiful. Every page feels totally, absorbingly alive.’
— Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
‘A fluid meditation on the instability of the linguistic and cultural myths we build our identities around. I loved the language; I loved the tenor of it. It captivated me.’
— Jo Hamya, author of Three Rooms
‘The complex, overflowing, intelligent self of Durastanti collects the fragments of that family life that has moved in sparks between Italy and the United States and makes it a new mythology, a new, daring and dazzling look at what has been.’
— Giulia Caminito, Corriere Della Sera
‘Fans of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk will enjoy this unusual work of personal mythology.’
— Kirkus Reviews
STRANGERS I KNOW
CLAUDIA DURASTANTI
Translated by
ELIZABETH HARRIS
straniera
s.f. (m.-o) 1. foreigner; alien
2. stranger; outsider
3. enemy
CONTENTS
I. FAMILY
‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes –’
— Emily Dickinson
MYTHOLOGY
My mother and father met the day he tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere. It was a good place to jump – he was a fine swimmer, but once he hit the water, he’d be paralyzed, and the Tiber back then was already toxic and green.
My mother always walked liked it was raining, head down, shoulders hunched, especially when she was alone, but that day she stopped on the bridge, and saw a boy straddling the parapet wall. She came closer, laid her hand on his shoulder, to pull him back; maybe they scuffled. She persuaded him to calm down, breathe slowly, then they took a walk through the city, got drunk, and wound up at a hotel with stiff sheets that stank of ammonia. Before dawn, my mother put her clothes on and left. She had to get back to her boarding school and my father seemed so restless; she didn’t even shake his shoulder to let him know she was going.
The next day, she stepped outside the school with her girlfriends and saw him leaning against a car, his arms crossed, and right then, she knew she was doomed. I’ve always envied her mystical, woeful expression when she speaks of him at that moment; I’ve always been jealous of that apocalypse.
That day in front of her school, my father wore tapered jeans, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was smoking a Marlboro Red – he smoked two packs a day.
He’d come to pick her up in front of the state institute on Via Nomentana, and that’s when their life together began.
‘How did he manage to find me?’ she’d say. When I was little and she told me this story, she transformed my father into a mysterious wizard who could capture us anytime, anywhere, and I hugged her tight and didn’t answer and wondered what it was like to be desired that way by a man.
Then I grew up and started pointing out the obvious: ‘There was only one school for people like you in Rome. It couldn’t have been all that hard.’ She’d nod, then shake her head: he found her because he had to. Though their marriage ended, she never regretted pulling him off that bridge: he was deaf, like her, and their relationship held something closer, something deeper, than love.
◆
My father and mother met the day he tried to save her from an assault in front of the Trastevere station.
He’d stopped to buy cigarettes and was about to get back in his car when he noticed the sudden, erratic movements of two thieves; they were kicking a girl, trying to yank away her purse. After he threatened them and scared them off, he stopped to help my mother and persuaded her to go back home with him to wash up. He was still living with his parents: when they saw this girl – barely out of her teens, her dark skin, her hair wet from the shower – they thought she was an orphan.
At age twenty, my mother had a wide, bawdy smile, smoker’s teeth, straight black hair to her shoulders, not a good look on anyone; sometimes she pulled her hair back with a tortoiseshell barrette. She lived at boarding school but often stayed out at night; she studied sporadically. She took small jobs to supplement what her parents sent from America, but she rarely showed up to work on time.
From the day he appeared, they started going out: they spoke the same language composed of gasps and words pronounced too loudly, but it was their behavior that drew looks on the street. They shoved past people as they walked, not turning to apologize, exuding difference: he had light brown hair, full lips, aristocratic features, she barely came to his shoulder and seemed to have stepped out of some guerrilla squad.
Back then, my father would pop up out of nowhere: often, when she’d be leaving to see her family in America or disappearing for a few days, or much later, when they’d separated, and he showed up at the departures terminal at the exact right moment, or else appeared behind a glass door, or stepped off an elevator, or slammed the car door so she’d look up a moment.
She recognized him from his slouched posture, the flicker of his cigarette. He’d find her like a wounded, bleeding hunter looking for his prey, when he has no other senses to rely on and must trust his own raging instincts. My father and mother divorced in 1990. They’ve seen each other only a few times since, but both will start their story off by saying they saved the other’s life.
CHILDHOOD
My mother was born at the end of 1956, on a farm along the Agri river, in Basilicata. During the winter my maternal grandparents usually lodged in town, not out on this half-ruined farm, but that day they were caught in an unexpected snowstorm and so my mother was born in a stall surrounded by cats and bony farm animals.
Her parents worked the fields and she spent a lot of time with her grandmothers. One of them was an accidental American, like me: she was born in Ohio, where her father was just passing through – we don’t know anything about this nomad or perhaps mercenary soldier, only that he sparked a series of thoughtless migrations – and then she’d moved to Basilicata with her mother, turning into a reverse immigrant who abandoned the future to disintegrate into the past. (At age six I did the same: I moved from Brooklyn to a Lucanian village with more livestock than people.) In town she was treated like a mysterious stranger: though she never used her English, she always had odd products, denim clothes that didn’t wear out and candles that burned for hours but never dripped.
My mother’s other grandmother was silent and vulnerable, her world defined by ashen ghosts in the sky, exorcisms performed with a silver spoon laid on a forehead; she walked barefoot in processions and was convinced she had special contact with the Madonna.
When I was little, my mother would take me for walks along the river near where she was born, and it was hard for me to envision this as the mythic rushing water she’d been immersed in to lower her fever from meningitis when she was four years old. As soon as they realized she had a high temperature, they ran to dip her in the river, but according to the doctors and neighbors, that impulsive remedy was useless. The infection could make her go blind, crazy, deaf, even kill her, and all the women watching over her existence, praying beside the cot where she lay twisted and lifeless, voted for deafness. It would be hard, but at least she’d see the world, and find a way to make herself understood.
My grandpa Vincenzo was short, dark, and a womanizer. When he and my grandma Maria immigrated to America in the sixties, they didn’t go because they were poor – which they were – or because they needed a better job – which they did; they went because he’d chased after all the women in town, and this was painful for my grandmother. He played the accordion at weddings and parties, wore dark pants and rolled his sleeves to his elbows; not a trace of gray showed in his slicked-back hair. Theirs was an arranged marriage: they were first cousins, and sometimes, hearing the village gossip, it was this evil mixing of blood that made my uncles turn out short and my mother eventually go deaf. My grandparents may have violated the laws of proximity and been punished for it, but my mother lost her hearing because she contracted an infectious disease, and my uncles were short like many other children in Southern Italy years ago. Aristocrats and vampires paired off to mate, to preserve the species, while unscrupulous anthropologists insisted that various African tribes did so to avoid being cursed, when actually these tribes had precise codes to prevent lovers from being too close in blood; sometimes a girl couldn’t even be promised to a boy with the same animal guide, and who knows, perhaps that’s why love ended badly in my family, because of this meeting of irreconcilable ghosts and totems.
My grandmother was a wife right out of a peasant novel, meek while he was dazzling, no-nonsense when he was evasive. She had pale skin, a wide mouth, thin lips. As a teenager, she was infatuated with another boy, shy like her, but my grandfather was the one all the girls wanted: she had no choice. Dismissing the jealousy of others – that’s the real taboo in a small town. If someone made a mean remark, she’d shake her head or else tap the per-son’s lips; she wasn’t often angry. She didn’t know how to defend her daughter when they called her ‘the mute’ or said she was a ‘poor thing’ and God should have paid closer attention.
But truthfully, my mother could defend herself and had little tolerance for those who didn’t understand her when she spoke: not long after she lost her hearing, she poured a cauldron of boiling water on a neighbor who was gossiping about her – she could tell by the woman’s gestures and her pitying stare. Afterward, she stood at the window laughing, while her family secretly approved.
The only ones she got along with were her brothers and her grandmothers, who spoke in dialect, lips barely parted; their labial sounds were impossible to decipher but gesturing was natural to them and they always touched her, like my mother has always touched me. The truth is, her brothers didn’t believe she was deaf, and when they played hide-and-seek and counted out loud and left her all alone in the town’s alleys, they didn’t mean to exclude her; they just trusted she could find her way. To them, my mother wasn’t a victim – she’s never been special. Even now, with all of them living their separate lives, their Italian nearly forgotten after sixty years in the US, my uncles speak to her as if she can hear them, in the funny, out-of-sync exchanges typical of splintered families.
She was a little girl brimming with energy and hostility. Her parents decided she needed discipline, so they sent her to the nuns at the boarding school for the deaf in Potenza. The teachers grew to know her by her brilliant smile; when not in her uniform, she wore a striped jersey, and she almost never carried a doll.
At the boarding school, she was taught to express herself through torture. We never kept large kitchen knives at home because they reminded her of her years in school, when the nuns of the now closed Istituto Suore Maddalena di Canossa would hold a knife on her tongue and tell her to scream, to teach her how to draw sounds from her vocal cords, or made her touch live wires and told her to scream even louder. And so my mother came to recognize the sound of her voice.
She was able to speak better than the other girls because after the meningitis she had some residual hearing that faded, then disappeared forever. At first she didn’t live in a hyperbaric chamber of silence: her cochlea damage was irregular, so sounds came and went and the world was a place of nightmarish ghosts and sudden howls. She’ll sometimes try to describe the terror a person feels when she’s hard of hearing and suffers from constant headaches: it’s like she lived with someone behind her, always trying to scare her. When we were little, my brother and I actually did this – we’d pop into a room, jumping on her back to startle her, hoping she’d laugh, but our attacks only brought on long periods of silence, and we’d regret our cruelty, though not enough to stop. The potential for ambush had transformed her body for good: it curved her back, made her unable to look people in the eye.
At boarding school, my mother learned sign language. She used it with the nuns who were her teachers; with her deaf friends; later, with my father, though he detested signing; but she never used it with the hearing. She never asked her parents or her three brothers to learn it, and she never asked her children. For me, it’s not so difficult to understand why she refused to impose her private language on others – I, too, was afraid to speak up, to express myself, for a long while, sign language is theatrical, visible, and you’re always exposed. You’re immediately disabled. But if you’re not signing, you can just be a girl who’s a bit shy, a bit distracted. Reading others’ lips to decipher what they were saying until her eyes and nerves were shot, speaking loudly, her accent inconsistent, she just seemed like an immigrant with bad grammar, a foreigner. Sometimes when she took the bus and the driver asked if she was from Peru or Romania, she’d nod and provide no other explanation, almost flattered by this mistake.
Along with her hearing, my mother lost other things: at boarding school, a friend, in the water.
The girls had gone with the nuns to a summer camp by the sea; they wore emerald-green swimsuits and cloth swim caps tied under their chins. One girl went out too far, was unable to scream, and so she’d spun about in a silent spiral, swirling into the sea.
It was traumatic for all the girls of the school, and the horror stories they exchanged about how they might die only grew worse: they told these tales at bedtime, these young girls who were all inadvertent dancers, always unsettled by movements and inner torments, and their stories resembled those in nineteenth-century feuilletons, complete with illustrations of pregnant, dead wives giving birth in their coffins – tabloid pieces of another era – only now there was a deaf girl who couldn’t communicate and wound up buried because her heartbeat was so irregular, and when they reopened the coffin, her fingers were mangled from clawing at the wood, like Rosso Malpelo’s fingers in the red sand mine. My mother told me the story of her dead friend, down to the last awful detail, and to this day, that story is the reason why she’s afraid to get in an elevator alone and I’m afraid to go swimming.
My mother came home to San Martino for summer vacation until her parents went to America and left her behind, along with her older brother, who was also at boarding school in Italy. My grandparents were about to become immigrants and had to conquer another language without really speaking their own. My mother was studying at a good school; there were good reasons for her to stay in Italy. While she acted out daily, she’d also grown fond of the nuns and got high grades. Actually, my grandmother did try to take her daughter along, but when she met with the girl’s teachers, they said, ‘If she goes, she won’t learn how to speak again – is that what you want? For her to feel all alone in a strange place? Can’t she come later?’ And my grandmother had no answer for them, partly because she was worried about this move herself.
They left when my mother was twelve, but before going, they brought her a white dress and patent leather shoes that she was too old for. After they left, my mother became even more unpleasant, more hostile, but when I ask her if she ever felt abandoned, she says no. Her parents barely finished elementary school. They were good people, fun, a bit coarse; still, they sensed something that was key: they wouldn’t be around forever and they couldn’t protect her at every moment. My mother had to become independent, and so she did. My father’s life would go another way.
◆
My father’s mother was attractive, a seamstress, the daughter of a shepherd from Canale Monterano and a woman from Monteleone di Spoleto whom he met during the seasonal pasture change. She grew up in an Umbrian village with her mother and other siblings; the presence of the man of the family was irrelevant, only a summer occurrence. She always got along with her brothers but there were problems with her sisters, mistrust, jealousies.
She stole away her oldest sister’s boyfriend, the man who would be my grandfather.
During the Second World War, my grandma Rufina lived with a rich family and made their clothes. She was courted by a German soldier who’d taken away her younger brother, convinced he was a communist sympathizer. My grandmother went to get him, walking to the dairy farm outside the village where he was being held: her brother wasn’t a communist, he’d only been wandering around – I wasn’t privileged to have any partisans in my family, just people more or less willing to concede to power. In exchange for her brother, she promised to mend the soldiers’ shirts and socks. One day, the German soldier brought her a basket of laundry, and she overheard him saying: ‘If I having luck, returning for taking the blonde.’ My grandmother, in another room, head bent over her sewing, didn’t blush at what he’d said. When she was young, though, her hair was auburn, and to this day, she’s still offended by his mistake. My grandma Rufina hated fascists and communists alike but was friendly to the German soldiers: the young Nazis got pushed around just like everyone else, but at least they were strangers, and being killed by people you didn’t know was easier.
As a young woman, she was also courted by a photographer from another town. He sent her letters through a neighbor, and she’d open the envelopes to find boring pictures of sunsets, which made her uncomfortable; she always found art annoying.
The doctor in another village often came to the parties of the rich people she worked for as a seamstress, and he asked her to dance the tango, but she was too embarrassed. My grandmother really liked this doctor, but she knew she was ignorant. She didn’t read books, could barely write. She was beautiful, but how could she be the wife of a doctor? It would be awkward for him, and this was why she started seeing and then married the blacksmith instead, her older sister’s former boyfriend.
She didn’t feel guilty for stealing him: there was a war on, things had changed. As my grandmother liked to say, my grandfather had been ‘chased away from the door only to slip back in through a window,’ and had understood that this girl with her fancy hairdo might be vain, but she was also intensely thrifty and obsessed with money, like him.
They both had decent jobs and worked hard without complaining; when my grandmother was pregnant, she didn’t even realize her water had broken – she just concentrated on working her Singer, bought secondhand on installment when she was sixteen.
They had three children. The first died, and the last, my father, was born deaf.
The aunt I never met, Wanda, only lived to be three. My grandmother was dyeing cloth in the bathtub one day, using boiling water to fix the colors, and she’d gone to the stove, or maybe to answer the door. It’s a detail that changes every time she tells the story. When she returned to the bathroom, her little girl was in the tub. She changed the girl’s dressings for days, used oil to moisten her withered skin, as delicate as cobwebs, with the help of relatives and neighbors; days passed, and her daughter died. In the girl’s photo on the family burial niche, her skin’s been touched up according to the postproduction of the period, and she has ringlets and is wearing a pale blue dress. She was already a ghost.
My grandma Rufina is not very educated and hasn’t fully mastered Italian, but she does tend to be very specific when it comes to colors, relying on a nomenclature that’s practically obsolete; in her world blues don’t exist: sugar-paper and cornflower exist. I’ll come for a visit, and she’ll show me the leather gloves or the wool skirts she’s spread out on the bed, and if I ask for the ‘brown’ ones, she’ll say ‘umber,’ or correct my pink with cyclamen, or distinguish periwinkle from forget-me-not; she insists it’s important to use the right name for things, and all the while I’m thinking of her dead daughter, killed by color.
She claims my father wound up deaf because of a scare she had while crossing the street when she was pregnant: a car burst out of nowhere, and she was left screaming in the middle of the road. At first she pretended it wasn’t true, that he could hear, and mother and son had never been so close as they were back then, both oblivious to the evidence. My grandfather didn’t talk much; it had to have been someone else who trespassed on their conversations, their muffled intimacy, and made her see that they needed to consult with doctors because the child wasn’t responding. After many pointless visits to clinics, their pilgrimages began: my grandparents didn’t have enough money for Lourdes, but they did get Padre Pio to touch my father, who awoke the next day still deaf, with no stigmata. He wasn’t particularly restless as a child; he only started to be a problem when they sent him off to study at a boarding school on Via Nomentana in Rome.
My grandmother picked him up every weekend, enduring hours on the bus from Monteleone di Spoleto to Rome, on roads winding through pine woods and past the wire-mesh fencing to protect from landslides, until there came a point when she and my grandfather decided to move to Rome, to make those visits easier. She had been one of the most beautiful girls in town, carrying herself so proudly, and yet as a mother, she’d gotten everything wrong.
In the city, she became a concierge, though it didn’t suit her; she washed the stairs and kept to herself. Her husband shoed horses in Testaccio, in an area where this no longer takes place, among the ruined arches and the shops, where Rome was leather and rust, before drowning in the Tiber.
ADOLESCENCE
‘You don’t always get to play the lead,’ her classmates shouted in sign language while the teacher was explaining something on the board; they were trying to get my mother’s attention, kicking her chair, making her pencils fall.
She didn’t look up and refused to respond, but when her classmates kept insisting, wanting to know why she always had to have the lead role in the Christmas and end-of-year plays, she’d repeat that she just had to – she was the best. She’d try to distract them, help them shorten their wool skirts by pulling out the hem with a pair of scissors. The boarding-school girls would walk down the halls unraveling more thread, every day showing a bit more skin, preparing to visit the boys’ school, which happened about once a month. At those gatherings, my mother would often see her brother Domenico, who was shy, a defeatist, and she’d try to find him a girlfriend. ‘Deaf girls are funny – they’re wild,’ she’d tell him. He was afraid they were all like her, so he didn’t try.
Her classmates were sure my mother would go for a career on the stage after she graduated – a deaf girl as an actress is so obvious, her whole life’s a performance – while her teachers wanted her to consider art school. She was good at drawing, filled notebooks with headless bodies and floating eyes, but when they praised her, she shrugged: she wasn’t stupid, it was easy to say she had talent, but only because she had nothing else.
The boarding school in Potenza could only provide lodging for girls up to a certain age, then they had to return to their families or transfer to a different school.
Her family was overseas, so my mother was forced to move from one boarding school to another, or to live in a house where they put up strays for money. My grandfather found her temporary lodging in Southern Italy (through a notary who served as her guardian), and he sent her a regular allowance and they often spoke on the phone. Whenever my mother felt her hatred rising for someone at her school, or a man would come into her room at night, certain she didn’t know how to scream, she’d run to a phone booth and tell the operator she wanted to make a collect call, then wait for that standard long ring that signaled the call was being placed to America, the one sound she truly understood, and it would swell in concentric circles, vibrations inside her ear, then burst through her entire body, as it turned into her father’s voice. She’d tell him about her days, not understanding, not hearing his responses, but able to tap into a current along the phone line, absolutely certain that anything she was saying, her father heard.
Sometimes he bought her a ticket to New York; they’d meet at JFK, and my grandfather would wince at the sight of his intelligent, wild daughter, more and more of a woman, but he’d scold her for swearing too much. The summer she was fourteen, he took her to a doctor in Manhattan he’d tracked down from a magazine article on a surgical procedure for acoustic implants to restore hearing. The doctor talked a long time with my mother, then said there was nothing he could do; my grandfather punched him in the hall. Afterward, they went to Soho to buy her a winter coat – she wanted a parka. My mother called it ‘So-hò.’ On a photo they took when they went to see the Statue of Liberty, one of them wrote, ‘Niù-Iore.’
