Frantumaglia by Elena Ferrante & Ann Goldstein

Author:Elena Ferrante & Ann Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

NOTE

Unpublished, dated October 10, 2005.

6.

WHAT AN UGLY CHILD SHE IS

France for me—long, long before Paris—was Yonville-l’Abbaye, eight leagues from Rouen. I remember crouching inside that place-name one afternoon, when I was barely fourteen, traveling through the pages of Madame Bovary. Slowly, over the years, thousands of other names of cities and towns followed, some near Yonville, others far away. But France remained essentially Yonville, as I discovered it one afternoon decades ago, and it seemed to me that at the same time I came upon the craft of making metaphors and upon myself.

I certainly saw myself in Berthe Bovary, Emma and Charles’s daughter, and felt a jolt. I knew that I had my eyes on a page, I could see the words clearly, yet it seemed to me that I had approached my mother just as Berthe tried to approach Emma, catching hold of her par le bout, les rubans de son tablier (“the ends of her apron strings”). I heard clearly the voice of Madame Bovary saying, with increasing annoyance, “Laisse-moi! Laisse-moi! Eh! Laisse-moi donc!” (“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Won’t you leave me alone!”), and it was like the voice of my mother when she was lost in her tasks or her thoughts, and I didn’t want to leave her, I didn’t want her to leave me. That cry of irritation of a woman dragged away from her own bouleversements, like a leaf on a rainy day toward the black mouth of a manhole, made a deep impression on me. The blow arrived right afterward, with her elbow. Berthe—I—alla tomber au pied de la comode, contre la patère de cuivre; elle s’y coupa la joue, le sang sortit (“fell at the foot of the chest of drawers, against the brass fittings; she cut her cheek, it began to bleed”).

I read Madame Bovary in the city of my birth, Naples. I read it laboriously, in the original, on the orders of a cold, brilliant teacher. My native language, Neapolitan, has layers of Greek, Latin, Arabic, German, Spanish, English, and French—a lot of French. Laisse-moi (“leave me alone”) in Neapolitan is làssame and sang (“blood”) is ’o sanghe. It’s not so surprising if the language of Madame Bovary seemed to me, at times, my own language, the language in which my mother appeared to be Emma and said laisse-moi. She also said le sparadrap (but she pronounced it ’o sparatràp), the adhesive plaster that had to be put on the cut I’d gotten—while I read and was Berthe—when I fell contre la patère de cuivre.

I understood then, for the first time, that geography, language, society, politics, the whole history of a people were for me in the books that I loved and which I could enter as if I were writing them. France was near, Yonville not that far from Naples, the wound dripped blood, the sparatràp, stuck to my cheek, pulled the stretched skin to one side. Madame Bovary struck with swift punches, leaving bruises that haven’t faded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.