Somebody with a Little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill

Author:Mary Gaitskill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

This is Leslie Fiedler, writing about Simone Weil. When I read it, I thought, Yes, that is me: deep in dreams of marbles, omens, and psychics, hoping that something will take pity on me and my cat. But can one always tell what is imaginary and what isn’t? To be sentimental is scorned by intelligent people as false, but the word is one short syllable away from sentiment—that is, feeling. False feeling is so blended with real feeling in human life, I wonder if anyone can always tell them apart, or know when one may be hiding in the other. When my father was dying, he cried out for people who were not there, in a voice that we did not recognize as his. One of these times he said, “I want my mama.” When we heard this, Jane and I froze; both of us were asking ourselves, Should we pretend to be his mother? It was Martha who knew what to do; she held his hand and sang to him. She sang him a lullaby, and he calmed. He thought his mother was there. Was this a dream, a self-deceit?

—

I called the three young men who had been at or near Santa Maddalena with me, to find out if any of them practiced magic. The first one I called was a medical student who had also written an internationally acclaimed book about a child soldier in West Africa. I had e-mailed him first and asked if we could talk on the phone. I wonder what he thought was coming. It could scarcely have been what came: “I know this is a peculiar question,” I said. “But do you practice anything that anyone could call magic?”

There was a long silence. “Do you mean literally?” he asked.

I thought about it. “Yes,” I said. “I think I do.”

The silence that followed was so baffled that I broke down and explained why I was asking.

“Well,” he said, “I pray. Do you think that counts?”

I said, “To me, it could. But I don’t think that’s what the lady meant.” He was very sympathetic about Gattino. He said he would pray for me to find him. I thanked him and called someone else.

—

When my father was alive, he and Martha were distant, uncomprehending, nearly hostile. He was cold to her, and she felt rejected by him. As he became more and more unhappy with age and was eventually rejected by my mother, he tried to reach out to Martha. But the pattern was too set. During one of our last Christmas visits to him, I saw my father and Martha act out a scene that looked like a strange imitation of a cruel game between a girl who is madly in love with an indifferent boy and the boy himself. She kept asking him over and over again whether he liked the present she had gotten him. Did he really, really like it? Would he use it? Did he want to try it out now? And he responded stiffly, irritably, with increasing distance.

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