Prisca “the innocent scapegoat”

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Voce narrante Giuliana Poleggi Quaranta 

“In my opinion, next summer I’ll wear my bikini … you can’t see anything …”

The girl talking to us is beautiful, of a particular beauty: tall, slender, long wavy brown hair, a very interesting face.

It’s winter season. Even if in Rome, the temperature is at least three, four degrees higher than that of the place I come from, we are still towards the end of December… thinking of the sea on a like this day…

“Would it make you sick if I show you?” I instinctively say no even though I don’t even know what she’s talking about. My daughter remains silent.

She pulls down her pajama pants and panties showing us her belly. A shiver of cold runs down along my spine. “I underwent a serious colostomy operation… but by well arranging the panty of my swimming costume, the pouch shouldn’t be noticed.” “No, no, don’t worry, you’re right, you don’t notice it at all … believe me, if you hadn’t told me, I swear I wouldn’t have taken account of it… don’t worry, go to the beach and have fun!” The words come out of my mouth but it is as if another person was saying them. I was so impressed that, for a moment, I even find hard to think. Such a young girl… such a severe disease!

“But the doctors told me that, in a little while, my intestines will be recanalized …”

The girl speaks quickly, loudly. I have a clear perception of the nervousness she wants to hide behind a bold security, which is not there.

Edvard Munch, Modella accanto alla sedia di vimini  (1919-1921)

We talk about something else. My daughter corrects the subjunctives and the conditionals she regularly mistakes. Quite amazed by her unusual, bizarre attitude, I reprimand her and I apologize to the girl who, in return, replies that it was she herself who asked her to do it, indeed, she turns to her asking her to continue doing so because, she says, she absolutely wants to improve his Italian. In addition, she also begs me to be so kind as correcting any her spelling errors.

I am perplexed learning she attended the Upper Classes at school and that, from the following school year, she will be a teacher in an elementary school of her country.

I am happy to hear her making plans, especially talking about holidays, after having seen her ill, lying motionless and suffering on a hospital bed.

The thing that struck me most in this department is the average age of the patients. One expects to find sickly elderly people, people at the end of their life journey who struggle, despite everything, clinging to that thin thread of wool, which could break at any moment. And instead young people, many young people, both males and females… I am impressed.

Beyond the young age of the girl, a lady, from other times and other places standing next to her bed, had attracted my attention, and a man wearing a black suit and a white shirt kneeling on the opposite side … it looked like the frame of the scene, in black and white, of a fifties drama film…

The woman, whose age I couldn’t have defined, but who, I presume, between forty and fifty years, like the man, was completely dressed in black: she wore a long dress, a kind of cape bordered with small fringes of a more shiny black, which completely covered her head, falling softly on her shoulders and a masculine shape pair of shoes. Tall, a beautiful face, eyes and hair, at least those that could be seen under that sort of veil, of an intense black. She looked like the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows that, in my village, is carried in procession, behind the Dead Christ’s coffin, on the Good Friday evening, every year.

Edvard Munch, Il bacio alla finestra (1892)

At first I hadn’t noticed another man, thin, of medium height, who stayed more outside the door, along the corridor, than inside the room. A brown jacket, but not a dark shade, black trousers and, he too, wearing a white cotton shirt.

I don’t know why I instinctively associated him with a pastor. Who knows  the reason I didn’t think about the most obvious thing for me, coming from an agricultural country, that is, that he was a farmer or a bricklayer. I think it was his jacket style reminding me the great D’Annunzio’s “The Shepherds of Abruzzo” and the illustrations accompanying his wonderful poetry in my school books. He was not old, his face was marked by an outdoor life under the sun or at the mercy of the weather, but he too must have been more or less the black dressed woman’s age. Looking at him from close up, he was not ugly, far from it, surely he must have been a handsome young man.

When the kneeling man got up, I noticed he was quite short in stature, stocky in build, massive but not fat, in his sixties, with very smooth, greasy black hair … or perhaps, more likely, shining with grease. I was struck by the large gold ring he wore on the ring finger of his right hand. In my part of the country, men don’t wear rings, apart from the wedding band.

He, she, the other one … and a very sick girl.

It had been necessary to know her paternity in order to cure her: the man on his knees, burying his head in the sheets, was her father, not her mother’s husband who always stood aside, at most at the door of the room, leaning against its jamb.

Apart from the rumors circulating in the ward, gossip to which we had not given any credit, it was she, the girl herself who told us her story. A story of which she, an innocent victim, had paid all the consequences.

Edvard Munch, La pubertà  (1895)

Confirming my intuition, her was actually a shepherds’ family coming from a remote village in the Abruzzo’s mountains.

The mother, as it often happens, had met the other man, the one who would become her father, a street vendor from a town on the Adriatic sea coast, who earned his living selling his goods door to door in the various inland villages at the foot or perched along the slopes of the mountains and an extra-marital love affair was born and, it gave birth to that daughter who, for many people, but not for all, was the shepherd’s daughter.

When the love affair came to be found out, a real scandal occurred and the lady’s husband, who had heard some rumors, had begun to doubt the paternity of the little girl who, he no longer including as his daughter, surely didn’t want to maintain any more. Following the arisen unfortunate situation, the real father was forced to admit his responsibility and an ordeal began for the little girl. At this point, her real father decided to take her away.

Everything solved? Yes, if it hadn’t been that the gentleman was married and had two other sons and that neither his wife nor his two children had certainly appreciated the presence of the child arbitrarily by the man imposed on them all of a sudden.

This new Calvary was even heavier than the first one …

The girl, to whom, without much compliment, the reason for her transfer had been clearly explained, arrived at her father’s house. If before the shepherd, went out in the morning returning in the evening and she stayed all day with her mother, during the transhumance period they remained alone, together even for days and days, now … also the seller went out in the morning coming back home at dusk, but the one with whom she was forced to stay with, was not her mother, and the boys were not, indeed, in part they were, but they did not feel like her brothers.

The abuses against her were continuous, violent, unpunished and of all kinds.

The injustices and harassment suffered and the resulting stress had taken the young woman seriously ill till she had been in danger of life.

At the hospital the story had become known because the doctors, given the type and severity of her disease, had also had to carry out analyzes on the parents and some nurses, not very discreet, had not resisted the temptation to disclose the story they told as a Boccaccio’s novella but which we judged only a squalid and very sad one.

In spite of everything, the father had demanded the girl to study. She had graduated from High School and got engaged to a wealthy, talented young man, owner of a fishing boat who was now only waiting her to recover from surgery to get married.

Edvard Munch, Ragazze sul ponte (1901)

Actually, she would have liked to be a model and in fact she had all the requisites, but such a competitive environment, where once she even found herself having to walk the catwalk barefoot because, at the last minute, some envious colleagues, to make her uncomfortable, had stolen her shoes, it wasn’t what it took for her body which only needed a quiet serenity.

Now she thinks about going to the beach, getting married, starting a career as a teacher. Thank God!

She is very fond of us, she tells my daughter she is lucky, that she too would have liked to have a mother like hers … My daughter, jokingly, replies: “Because now she is submissive … you should know her when she gets angry … “

The girl approaches me, first asks me, then hugs me affectionately, kisses me. I jeer at me while answering: “Because you don’t know me … my daughter is right … you can’t imagine how severe I am …”. She laughs and looks at me as she says: “I wish I had! …”. A lump closes my throat. I can only whisper to her: “Good luck!”

She left without us having had the opportunity to say goodbye. Unfortunately, hospital dynamics don’t take human relationships into account.

For short time, we stayed in touch.

She has returned to her father’s house from where she hopes to be able to leave as soon as possible to start a family with her deeply in love boyfriend. She had the recanalization intervention which, despite many difficulties, was ultimately decisive.

Then, the distance was the main cause we no longer kept in touch. Blessed cell phones … at that time, unfortunately, they weren’t so affordable as the costs of this convenience weren’t indifferent. In the entire department, we were the only people having one of them, kindly lent us by a good family friend.

Although physically distant, I like to think of her as a serene, fulfilled woman, wife and mother. She deserves to be happy.

Innocent, she has already paid too high a price for a “fault?” two adults, “in the name of love?”, even in full awareness of what they were doing, had no qualms about consuming. She, a child, the innocent scapegoat who paid the terrible consequences of other’s selfish unconsciousness.

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