Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante

Author:Elsa Morante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Midwife

This Fortunata had practiced her profession of midwife on Procida for more than thirty years; among the women in labor assisted by her was my mother. I blamed her for not having saved my mother for me, and I despised the opinion of the Procidans, among whom she enjoyed a reputation of great mastery in her art. Her enormous, dark hands seemed to me the hands of a murderer; and the knowledge that she had brought me into the light, and had, further, with timely instructions, guided my nurse Silvestro at first, wasn’t enough to reconcile me to her. She, among all the women of the island, was perhaps the only one who had never deigned to give any credence to the popular rumors, facing without fear the evil curse of the Gerace house. But not even that seemed to me a special proof of merit, because, although she wore women’s clothes, she couldn’t be properly numbered among women. To see her cross the town with her professional bag under her arm, with her long, wide-legged stride, military and yet slovenly, you would have said she was some petty soldier of the Turkish fleet, reincarnated as a midwife. Her figure was so tall and large (in some places angular, in others obese) that she had trouble getting through the small door of her house, and, near other women, she seemed a giantess. Her skin was quite dark; over her lip grew a small mustache, and on her chin some beard hairs. She had enormous feet and hands, long, irregular teeth, and an unpleasant voice, dark and rather hoarse. She wore glasses, and always the same dress of faded fustian, with a large flower pattern. In winter she covered this dress with a soot-colored duster coat. And on Sunday she wore on her head an embroidered veil, behind which she seemed even uglier.

Because of her ugliness, she had never found anyone to marry, and she lived alone in a one-room cottage. She used a rude, rough, and curt tone with others, always seeming distracted from their conversation, as if her mind were constantly occupied. And when she uttered some opinion of her own, she usually did so speaking not to any of those present but, rather, to herself, or to the air: in a dark, emphatic mumble, as if she were reciting obscure verses. Only with the newborns, or with her cat, did she at times talk more intimately and fondly. I knew the cat by sight: he was celebrated in the whole town as a kind of venerable centenarian, since he was already nineteen years old. And he was always sitting in the window of the cottage, like a sinister guardian. Often, passing by, I tried various ways of insulting him.

I think it didn’t take me more than ten minutes to get to Fortunata’s house (which usually is a journey of at least half an hour). I began beating on the door with my fists, and kicking, and the midwife was quick to look out the window, with a cloak thrown over her nightgown.

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