The Price of Dreams E-Book

Margherita Giacobino

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe 2020
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 456

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Margherita Giacobino's book is a fictionalised biography/autobiography of Patricia Highsmith. A lesbian in an era when to be homosexual was to be reviled and discriminated against, and made to feel guilty and ashamed, Patricia Highsmith struggled with her sexual identity in this social context, and the book fruitfully explores how this might have contributed to her creative output. The title is a reference to Patricia Highsmith's second novel The Price of Salt, a lesbian romance originally published under a pseudonym after it was rejected by the publisher of her first novel. It was not until 1990 that she agreed to its reissue under her own name with the new title Carol.

Leseprobe

Contents

The Author

The Translator

Dedication

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Dedalus Celebrating Women’s Literature 2018–2028

Copyright

The Author

Margherita Giacobino, born in 1952, lives in Turin. She is a writer, journalist and translator. She has translated, among others, Emily Bronte, Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison and Audre Lorde.

She made her debut in 1993 with the novel Un’Americana a Parigi written under the pseudonym of Elinor Rigby. Her latest novel, L’Età ridicola, was published in 2018.

Her novel Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter was published in English by Dedalus in 2017, to great acclaim.

The Translator

Christine Donougher was born in England in 1954. She read English and French at Cambridge and after a career in publishing is now a freelance translator and editor.

Her translation of The Book of Nights won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize. Her translations from French for Dedalus are seven novels by Sylvie Germain: The Book of Nights, Night of Amber, Days of Anger, The Book of Tobias, Invitation to a Journey, The Song of False Lovers and Magnus, Enigma by Rezvani, The Experience of the Night by Marcel Bealu, Le Calvaire by Octave Mirbeau, Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, The Land of Darkness by Daniel Arsand and Paris Noir by Jacques Yonnet. Her translations from Italian for Dedalus are Senso (and other stories) by Camillo Boito, Sparrow (and other stories) by Giovanni Verga, The Price of Dreams by Margherita Giacobino and Cleopatra goes to Prison by Claudia Durastanti.

to Claudia

If I took life seriously,

I would have killed myself long ago.

What wakes her is the apprehension of death, pouncing on her like a predator, crushing her thin bones on the bed, forcing itself into her eyes, her mouth. Death has been with her for a while, but now it is right here, breathing in her face.

Then, with one leap across the room, it returns to crouch in the shadows.

This is not the first time she has experienced this: all sensations have an intermittent rhythm. Even the fiercest pain, the darkest angst come and go in waves – otherwise we would probably be unable to bear them. The awareness of death closes in and draws away again, getting closer for a little longer each time, and the distance when it draws away ever lesser – until eventually there will be no more time and no more distance.

The intervals, when the wave withdraws, are life. What is left of it.

The patient wipes a hand across her face, or perhaps only thinks she does, there is no difference now between real gestures and only imagined ones.

She remembers: she is in hospital. They brought her here yesterday evening. The transfusion. She moves an arm, braces herself, scarcely manages to move her body on the mattress. She slowly turns her head towards the door under which a strip of pale light filters in. The raspy breathing that was the background to her sleep resumes, and it is her breathing, she listens to it, amazed at that alien sound that comes from her.

She remembers what she thought just before waking, or rather: it is not what she thought, it is what she clearly heard a voice say, so it is what she dreamt. For her, dreaming and thinking have always been two contiguous states of mind, inseparable from each other, even if often conflicting.

The voice in her head said: “Death has always been my profession.”

Is that true? Was that her profession? To kill, to free herself of ghosts, to ward off the fear of death? Nonsense. Her profession was to write. To leave ajar the doors of reverie and capture the voices.

But writing, this continuous anxiety for which it is itself the only remedy, is a perpetual flight onwards, to the limit and beyond – and now the limit is here, the dark wall there is no way to get past.

Art is a dance with death. But an artist – is that what she is? Is that what she was?

Years ago she wrote a silly little ditty: “I dabble in all the arts and make a mess of each, I’m a person of many parts, with a goal beyond my reach.”

That is exactly how it went. The joy of being able to say something true, however slight and silly. And immediately afterwards, having only just said it, the dissatisfaction. No, that won’t do. Let’s try again.

That has been her life. Death ought to be calmness, rest. But evidently it is not so, no rest at all, only the last surge before nothingness.

With death, you do not get bored.

Time goes quickly when you are together, death is a demanding companion. It absorbs you. It is never out of your thoughts. How can you think of anything else when death is there?

The last lover.

She has just turned seventy-four. There are people her age who keep fit, go to the gym, jog, all things that are not for her, too much effort to stay young, who are they trying to kid?

She has had a lot of love affairs during her life, a lot of friendships. People have said that she is a misanthrope, antisocial, but also that she is a good listener, that when she looks at you, you have the sense of being seen, seen within, swallowed up… now she looks on death without batting her eyelids, meeting death’s slit-eyed feline gaze with her own.

It is a challenge, a declaration of love, a fight to the bitter end. Every breath costs her effort, the disparity between her and her adversary is overwhelming. Ridiculous.

And that is why, when the girl comes bursting into the room, switching on the light, pushing her rattling trolley – she stops dead in her tracks, shocked.

The patient’s gaze is a mirror in which death is reflected, at half past six in the morning, eyes black, with no iris or pupil, nothing but black.

The girl briefly raises a hand to her throat, catching her breath. In a voice none the less full of life, she says: “Good morning! How are you feeling? I’ve brought you some breakfast.”

The patient does not respond. Not a muscle moves in that blade-edged, thin, lined face contracted in a grimace of impotent rage. The girl hesitates, feels threatened, reproached, and even – absurdly, in the face of such a weak creature – scared. But she is a good nurse, with steady nerves and has already seen more than one patient die. She takes a deep breath and proficiently, decisively, brimming with the firm compassion of her youth, she advances towards the old lady, smiling.

The girl quickly gets used to the wrinkled face, to those fleshy and pendulous lips – as if they had not the strength any more to remain tightened – to the bags under the red-circled eyes. The old lady has a yellowish pallor, the colour of those who are anemic. With difficulty, she gulps down a bit of biscuit, drinks a few sips of tea. She is so light, the girl thinks, that instead of slipping the bedpan under the dry nest of her pelvis, she could pick her up in her arms and carry her to the bathroom. But she is afraid of breaking her.

The formidable old lady leaves herself entirely in the nurse’s hands, this is not a surrender, it is an acknowledgement of reality.

Two doctors arrive. They feel her, observe her. Another transfusion. She knows it is pointless, she has had so many in recent months, now they are not enough any more.

However, the blood helps, especially in the absence of alcohol.

The fresh new blood gives energy and lucidity, like the first martini of the evening when she was young.

The doctors adopt a light playful tone, which is presumed to help the seriously ill. They check her pulse, ask her how she is.

“Reasonably well,” she says. “I’m not in any discomfort, apart from the pain in my legs.”

“Very good,” the older of the two says jovially.

“I’m dying,” she says.

“Don’t say that! What gives you that idea?” the younger one scolds her.

“It’s true,” she says, suddenly infuriated by his stupidity and lack of respect for the truth. Her anger provokes a fit of coughing, she spits blood on the clean sheet.

Great agitation all around her. They change her, put her on a drip. The nurse has trouble getting the drip needle into her arm, the thin veins might rupture.

The old lady, who is no lady, would like to send them away, they are disturbing her. These are her last hours of life, why spend them amid this commotion? But she has not the strength to protest.

And anyway, what does it matter? Inside her, death is making a great deal of noise, pulsing with the blood in her veins, rasping in time with her breathing. Dilating and contracting, like the chambers of her heart.

How foolish, to think that death comes from the outside. It comes from within, from deep inside the body.

It entered her some time ago. Now they are inseparable.

They have been left alone together, the dying old woman and the girl. The nurse bends over her, adjusts the sheet, little routine gestures, not really necessary.

She asks her if she is cold. She is so thin.

The old lady does not reply. Then in a rasping voice, the fragile wraith, the shattered frame of what must have been the deep gravelly voice of a smoker, asks her what her name is.

“Maria.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

The hand, large and frail, with swollen knuckles and soft empty pads at the fingertips, makes a movement on the bed cover, signifying: “Sit here, stay with me for a while.”

The girl sits down. She tells her story. She is the third of four children, lives in Ascona, beneath Monte Verità. A little apartment all of her own. She comes on the bus. She does not mind getting up early in the morning, on the contrary: it is a pleasure to walk through the empty streets before the town awakens.

She likes her job, and what else? Reading, travel. Marriage? Maybe some day… a wave of the hand. But travel first.

She speaks schoolgirl English. The patient listens, never taking those incredible eyes off her.

On impulse, not out of pity but out of some obscure attraction towards the woman in her nearness to death, the girl takes the cold and desiccated hand lying on the bed.

The patient lets her hold it for a few moments, then slowly withdraws it.

“Now try to get a little sleep, Miss Highsmith,” the nurse says, walking away quietly in her soft-soled shoes.

“Call me Pat,” says the patient in a surprisingly clear voice.

Highsmith, Patricia: nationality, American, resident in Tegna, Switzerland. Age, seventy-four. Height, five foot nine. Weight, six stone. Smoker. Drinker. In September 1993 underwent surgery in Locarno hospital for the removal from the large intestine of a polyp. Medical record: nose bleeds and haemorrhaging, nausea, immune deficiencies, removal of tumour from the right lung (London, 1986), loss of weight, frequent blood transfusions. Suspected metastases but chemotherapy not possible because of deleterious effects on other pathologies (aplastic anemia).

The girl closes the file. She dutifully writes down the doctor’s prescriptions, the times when she will administer the medication, the examinations scheduled for tomorrow morning.

If there is one – a tomorrow morning – for the old lady. For Pat.

The girl’s face is smooth-skinned, with hazel eyes like hers, and beautiful, the way young people are, as she herself was fifty years ago. Pat closes her eyes and for a moment a story begins: early morning in winter, patches of snow among the trees emanate a pale glimmer, the wet road is black and gleaming. A girl comes walking down the hill with her hands in her pockets, whistling. The bag she is carrying on her shoulder bumps against her hip. Someone is walking behind her, a harmless passer-by or someone who is following her, does the girl, Maria, know that life is dangerous, that you need to watch your back always? The dull rumble of the early-morning bus can be heard, lower down, round the bend. The girl starts to run.

The vision lasts only a moment, is lost in the indistinct blur of possible lives, of stories not yet told.

She closes her eyes. How long does a dream last? A fraction of a second…

The clock is turned back. The girl within her, the one who sometimes appears in the fierce and furrowed face, surprising those speaking to her, rends the mask of old age and shines forth in the hospital room.

There is no one to see her, except death. The old lady, who is no lady, offers to her last lover the smooth-skinned luminous face of her tumultous twenty-five-year-old self, full of frustration and hope, of happiness and despair.

I

A toast!

To strange passions!

It is June 1946, America has won the war, America is the centre of the world and New York the beating heart of that vast and strange country that is hers. Pat wanders through the city in a state of almost terrifying euphoria. Around her, like a tangible reality, is the presence of the woman she met only a short while ago and who already means everything to her. Carol. The streets still resonate with the echo of her footsteps, the air in the summer twilight is imbued with her light fragrance, all the women who pass by are imperfect copies of her, oblique mirrors that momentarily afford a glimpse of that unique, perfect image.

Carol is New York and New York has meaning only because it is constructed around Carol and for Carol, it is her abode, the labyrinthine shell with the promise of her splendour round every corner.

Pat wanders the streets of the New York that she has known for years, where she was brought as a child, plucked from the protective presence of her grandmother and from the confines of the domestic spaces of the small town in Texas where she was born. The city that has never become her own, the exciting and frightening metropolis she loves and hates, which will never offer her a place where she might feel safe, a home where she might leave her fears and anxieties at the threshold, a temple where she might celebrate the only rite capable of purifying and elevating her, the rite of productive work.

But in that late afternoon in June, New York has reached the apogee of its beauty, the peak in which opposites join together in harmonious embrace, day and night, pain and joy, cruelty and tenderness, the city is her very self, and she a small thing contained within it, they are a single resplendent mystery, and the key to that mystery is Carol.

If God is the unity of the cosmos, the greater harmony of the elements that from our narrow point of view we see only as war and chaos, the sole thought capable of raising us out of the misery of our fragmented existence – then Carol is God.

This is what Pat thinks, wordlessly, with her head upturned to the sky and pervaded by silent explosions of jubilance as she wanders through New York at sunset. And as happens to her in the very best moments, in those unrepeatable instants of beatitude, time disintegrates and she holds within all her selves at every age, she is a child, an adolescent, a girl and also the woman that she will be, a writer, in command of her life and of a profession. An artist. Capable of creating something out of nothing, of giving form to that which previously did not exist.

This would be a terrifying thought were it not that she knew that whatever is created is always very far from the hoped-for perfection. It is only continual failure that makes the divine act of creation endurable.

She saunters along the pavements of New York, beneath the sunset-red clouds, and the energy within her superabounds, the future opens up before her, limitless.

Today, every single day of her life shines clean and bright, as though recently washed, redeemed by the dawning light of her new love.

There have been days of passion, rage and hate.

Mary, her beautiful and impossible mother, loved and feared, who gave so little of herself, who had married her stepfather Stanley just to have a man to argue with, it seemed.

How she had hated him as a child! In her little room, in the evenings that went on too long, in the apartment that was too small and cramped to allow her the comfort of solitude, forced to listen to raised voices, the incessant accusations and threats, her sole consolation and entertainment was to imagine the possible deaths of her stepfather, in a providential accident or at the hand of a ruthless assassin.

Die, Stanley – you are the first of my characters, killing you is my writing exercise in the evening. One night a stranger, infuriated by his domestic unhappiness, will run into you in the street on your way home, and without thinking, driven by an irresistible impulse, he will grab you by the collar, give you a pounding, leave your lifeless body in a dark alleyway and go on his way feeling better…

Poor old Stanley. He was like one of those dummies used to simulate car crashes: he died a hundred times and did not even know it.

Useful fantasies. Nothing in life goes to waste.

As, for example, when she dashes off with scrupulous diligence one story after another for Mushroom Man, the name she gives, because of the bizarre hat he wears, to the hero of one of the series of comic strips for which she writes storylines. Stories that will later be illustrated, often hurriedly, by another assembly line worker like herself, and that will appear sprinkled with interjections such as “Argh!”, “Sob!” and “Crash!”, which sometimes still make her laugh and at other times fill her with a desolate boredom.

But work is work. The superhero flattens his adversaries with a single blow, immolates the bad guys with a mere glance, throws himself off New York’s tallest skyscraper and does not go crashing to the ground. Just like someone who is love-struck. The superhero is vulgar, grotesque, often stupid. The love-struck person is vulnerable, at once happy and desperate, almost always stupid. Both are human in the extreme and superhuman. Jumping off the tallest skyscraper, the love-struck will not end up splattered on the ground either, but will fall directly, eternally, into the arms of the beloved.

Also of great usefulness has been what she read as a child, the book by that psychiatrist Karl Menninger, who under the title The Human Mind collected true stories of kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, psychopaths of all kinds. People who believe they are someone else, or think they are being spied on by Russian secret agents, a spurned lover who cannot accept rejection and barricades himself in a world of his own, a man who assumes the identity of another and steals his life, a falsifier who invents the thing he falsifies… it was all there, even if she did not yet know it.

But on some days in June, in New York, it is easy to think of life, of the future, as a host of ideas still in embryo, in bud. Keim, that German word adopted by her in honour of the origins of a father practically unknown to her. The germ, the seed, the kernel of the story. The fertile idea from which one day, if the ground is suitable, if the weather is encouraging, if it is sufficiently nurtured, a story will grow.

A writing space begins to extend behind her, around her. The only true reality, the only real truth in this world where the true and the real are at war with each other. The seedbed of her mind.

The time will come when she will no longer need to write for comic strips, when she will escape the treadmill. And she will dedicate herself solely to cultivating the countless germs of ideas that she has gathered and put aside.

In New York one day, when she was twelve years old, when she was not entirely a child any more but nor was she quite old enough to cotton on to the tricks of adults, Mary told her that she had got divorced from Stanley. The two of them were to go back to Texas to stay with her grandmother Willie Mae.

With what fervent trust, with what gratitude, she had gone with her mother, although it was of course a wrench to move away from the city it had taken her years to settle down in, to leave behind such hard-won friendships when at last they had stopped making fun of her accent and her Texan ways. However, for Mary, with Mary, she would have gone to the North Pole, barefoot, in the middle of winter.

But after only a few days Stanley had rejoined them, or rather, he had rejoined his wife. He and Mary shut themselves away in the bedroom to talk.

She, shut out, excluded, dismayed, despairing.

A few hours later Mary left, returned to New York with him, leaving her there.

No explanation, not a word, nothing. Only the anguish and the slow, crushing certainty of betrayal. How grotesque it all was, her mother had made her believe the two of them were escaping to go back to their Texan paradise, to her grandmother’s house where they would live together for ever without her stepfather, and instead it turned out to be a ploy to get rid of her, the unwanted encumbrance, and return to New York with that man.

For Mary, she was the intruder, not Stanley!

From paradise, the childhood home was transformed into limbo.

The silent stern love of Willie Mae was no longer enough for her, she no longer enjoyed playing with the little black kids in the alley behind the house.

Abandonment taught her an important and terrible lesson about life.

Mary had lied to her. She should have expected it, knowing what her mother was like. Even a cruel truth would have been better than a lie that in any case was bound to be exposed. But Mary lied constantly, often for no reason, without even admitting it to herself.

Mary the self-centred, the bully, the lunatic. You never know what to expect of her. Gentleness and fury, seduction and betrayal. She is a dangerous woman, her mother. Loving her means walking on shifting sands, on the rim of a volcano.

This is what she has learned about love, ever since babyhood.

But today, a summer’s day in her twenty-fifth year, Pat can forgive her, can accept her coldness and her fickleness, because every event in her own life is taking on new meaning. She has survived, she is strong, and for this she can thank her mother, because with her it is a question of be strong or die. Over time she has even got used to Stanley, has come to sympathise with him, to see him in his true light as redoubtable Mary’s chosen victim.

Abandonment, rage, the constant terrifying sense of inadequacy, her forbidden and concealed sexual desires: everything made sense, having served to make her what she is and what she will become.

All the pain has been redeemed now that Carol lights up the skies of New York.

The secret that others regard as her doom pulsates within her, radiating life and warmth.

There was that day when she saw the two little girls.

They were sitting on the steps in front of a doorway, close together, conspiratorially. The sound of her footsteps had surprised them. An abruptly interrupted gesture as she came by – a hand withdrawn, the hem of a chequered dress hastily pulled down over the knees – was the sign that something had happened between them, something secret and mysterious and illicit.

Pat had hurried past them. Only after a few steps had she turned round to steal one last image of the two little figures in front of the doorway. She carried away with her a vision of those guilty, radiant, wondering eyes. She was certain the two little girls would have remembered, maybe for ever, that moment when discovery and pleasure, mystery and guilt, were combined in a single heartbeat. The same had happened to her as a child, at certain moments that she recalls even today; hidden convulsions of the heart.

Those two were like her, as she was then and as she was now: a child frightened by her own audacity, torn between flight and defiance. Committed to the terrifying beauty of forbidden desire.

But how wonderful that desire now seemed to her and she knew for certain it was worth the price of fear and guilt.

Those two little figures sitting close together were as though fused into a single being, emblem of a fulfilment beyond words.

The day it appears in Vanity Fair – the story of which she is so proud, the only thing of real value to have come from her pen so far.

It is entitled “The Heroine” and it has taken her years to get it published. She has been told that it is strange, no one knows how to define it. That her protagonist is mad and unlikeable.

“The Heroine” is the story of a young girl who is alone in the world, the orphaned child of a mother with psychological problems, and she too if truth be told is a bit bizarre, but then not so different from many others, someone who, if you met her in the street, you might mistake for normal, someone who has learned to hide her little tics, but don’t pretty much all of us do the same? The girl is taken on as a governess by a wealthy family. Her employers are kind, the children are lovely, polite, well behaved and affectionate. They all like her, they make her feel one of the family, they treat her with every kindness. An ideal situation, a dream come true. Impossible not to feel love and gratitude. Impossible not to want to give back something in exchange. But what? She has nothing, they have everything. Her love is boundless, she would like to offer them life, salvation, then she would be loved for ever, and never be at risk of losing them. If something terrible happened, some catastrophe, she would do everything to save them… this too is a common desire: who has not fantasised about saving a woman in danger or distinguishing oneself by some noble act? So that people can say, “Look, that’s the guy or the girl who did that heroic deed, look how self-effacing they are, what a good-natured and modest person!” But since nothing happens and the opportunity does not arise of its own accord, the girl herself sets fire to the house so as to be able to rescue the occupants – or perish with them, as the ending, which her friends have described as “disconcerting”, perhaps suggests.

“But of course there are precedents,” she retorted in reply to a drunken editor one evening at a bar in Manhattan, she too in her cups. “In Jane Eyre Rochester’s wife sets fire to the house, she’s insane, certainly, but she surely will have loved Rochester before going mad, and perhaps loves him still, and no one can tell us what the motive for her action was, maybe she…” And there she stopped, because she felt the sweaty hand of the editor on her neck and realised the guy was much more interested in going to bed with the young writer than listening to her literary theories.

She managed to escape from him only because he was really too drunk, and for months the story lay on her desk, like wreckage washed up by the waves. Then she plucked up courage again and sent it to other magazines. And now at last there it is, on the page, her story, her name, hot off the press. For the first time she has the feeling of having done something good. A sense of justification, such as a mother might feel when she has brought a child into the world, although looking at her married friends with children she has serious doubts about that, and her own mother seems to give the lie to this view.

No, what is created by the effort of writing is something different from giving birth: a story is a child only in the sense that you have to bring it into the world and help it to walk alone, but unlike a human being it does not betray you or let you down, it continues to be part of you. It proclaims to all: now look here, the modest existence of the woman who wrote me is meaningful, has its own significance, precisely because she has created me and I exist, a sliver of truth maybe invisible to most people, but precious to anyone who sees it glint and stoops to glean it.

And today, as sunset turns to dusk in the sky above New York, she knows that she will write again, she will always write. That is her true path, the only one possible. Drawing, music are only private passions, minor talents that will not take her anywhere. Writing is her destiny. She will carve out time for herself, from days that are overburdened with hack writing, she will write at night when the doors of reverie stand ajar, she will be organised, full of energy and determination. She will create something fine. She will write by the light of her new love for Carol.

Carol will be her own violation of the rule she has imposed on herself: never to write about women.

To inhabit a body that is not hers, an incorporeal body, that of a man, made of words, big hands, shirt sleeves, cigarettes, long strides in the dark.

Everything that a woman cannot be or do. Not because she lacks the capability, but because it not allowed.

Carol certainly is not the first – at twenty-five Pat is a veteran, having lived through a good number of passionate attachments and break-ups, and crumpled a good few sheets – but Carol is the crowning glory of this period of her life, the triumph and zenith of her headstrong awkward youth. Carol is a revelation. The Ideal Woman, the Absolute.

One day, years later, she will see the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, a winged figure of perfect proportions caught in mid-stride, in a strong and graceful pose. Nike. An eternal model carved in stone, she who guides you from the prow of a thousand ships, who inspires you on the field of battle, Nike the bold, the joyful, the fearless.

On more than one occasion she will tell journalists that the virtue she most admires in women is courage, and in men, gentleness.

Why? But that’s obvious, she will reply impatiently: women are physically weaker, less free to act, to take the initiative, while men are stronger by nature and accustomed to having the upper hand. A courageous woman, a gentle man: two more complete human beings. What is virtue if not the bright phantasm wrestling with the dark demon?

At the Louvre she will stop in front of the Nike as before the portrait of a long-lost love, with cynical nostalgia. Half-closing her eyes, she will picture the movements – the very breathing – of her own personal Nike from New Jersey, the loved and lost Mrs Caroline Seymour Clark.

What is more, the Victory of Samothrace is headless, and Carol too was prone to losing hers.

Carol is Virginia, Kathryn, Lil, Anne, Ginnie, Lyne and others besides, Carol is one and many, she is all the beautiful, elegant, reckless, daredevil and self-destructive women who shine like diamonds in New York display cases, who drink too much, who drive too fast, who try to fly with their wings of stone.

When she saw her, she was leaning against a door frame in Rosalind’s drawing room. The room was full of people, artists, art dealers, beautiful women and rich men, young talents anxious to be noticed and girls like herself, in their twenties, starting out in the world, still fresh and bright-eyed, in their thirties, having already lost their shine in the effort of forging their way every day through the anonymous crowd threatening to swallow them up.

And suddenly everyone else has faded into the background, the voices have become a distant murmur, and there remains before her only the woman leaning against the door frame, across the room.

She is wearing a green dress that sets off her mahogany-coloured, short, wavy hair, in one hand she holds a cigarette that every now and again she brings to her lips with a nervous and absent-minded gesture, the other hand resting as though forgotten on the back of an armchair. Long white fingers, an emerald ring. She has eyes that are so clear they seem to burn with pure colourless light. She is talking to another woman whose face Pat cannot see. Nor, of course, can she hear what they are saying amid the chatter in the room, but in that conversation – whispered, nonchalant, intermittent – she recognises the unmistakeable signs of a secret language with which she is now familiar. Then the woman in the green dress laughs, a brief, full-throated, slightly husky laugh, a sound that Pat would like to hear again and again. Now the woman looks round and lets her gaze wander over the small gathering, as if she has sensed Pat’s attention and is seeking her out. And all of a sudden she is near to Pat, coming across the room, and she passes by, almost brushing against her, their eyes meet for a moment and Pat feels overwhelmed with an intense uneasy pleasure, as if a velvet paw had caressed her in the dark.

In Rosalind’s elegant drawing room, nothing else exists for her now, apart from the exquisite torment of observing the unknown woman and knowing that she herself is being observed in return. Until the lady of the house comes up to her, enveloped in the scent of her discreet and expensive perfume and in the radiance conferred on her by a couple of martinis, and with her extraordinary intuition steers Pat towards the group of people surrounding the woman with mahogany hair and introduces her to Mrs Caroline Seymour Clark, who extends a soft and slender hand and says, “They usually call me Carol.”

Rosalind, her fairy godmother. Ever since Pat, aged just eighteen, happened to set foot in her art gallery, which she had dared to enter with a couple of fellow university students, naive and ignorant like herself, her life had changed.

Initially Pat was ridiculously intimidated by Rosalind, she seemed a kind of sophisticated and elegant goddess, whose every word, every gesture Pat soaked up, treasuring every bit of information about her that was given. Gradually they became friends, although friends is perhaps not the right word, Pat is naturally a little in love with her, how could she not be? Rosalind is forty, and the most interesting woman she has ever met, she has taste and experience and seems to be the repository of the measure of all things. Be it a painting, or a dinner, or a love affair, or a work appointment, Rosalind is acquainted with its secret, she knows what the right thing to do is.

At first Pat courted her with timid, dogged devotion. Which Rosalind graciously accepted as an almost inevitable tribute to her fascination, but conceding nothing. She has a stable relationship with another woman and a few other liaisons on the side. When Pat realised there was no hope for her, she tormented herself for a while, drank too much, talked too much, made scenes, behaved like a child that wants to be scolded. Then she consoled herself with other women, and indeed she certainly had no lack of lovers – “You fall in love every other day, it’s ridiculous,” Rosalind tells her, “you should calm down and take yourself and your work more seriously.” But basically perhaps Pat is still convinced that only Rosalind can save her – despite all the women she has met and loved and with whom she has dissipated her nights and her days.

Save her from what? Her mother’s disapproval. Total failure. Herself. The terrible anxiety of not being good enough. Of being for ever an outsider in this society she would like to be a part of, in which she would like to be appreciated and loved. While Rosalind is right at the centre of it like a queen bee in the hive.

But now, at the very moment when the lady of the house is introducing her to Carol, the scales of desire subtly and significantly shift and Pat realises that although Rosalind is and will always be her fairy godmother – or at least will be for as long as their very different personalities manage to tolerate each other – what she feels for her is not, and never has been, true desire. Because desire suddenly ignites around this woman with eyes the colour of light, who is completely different from Rosalind.

As she wanders the now almost dark streets of New York, recalling Carol’s vaguely sardonic gaze focused on her, her white neck thrown back when she drinks and when she laughs, the brusque, almost fierce gesture with which she pulled on a glove before leaving – Pat feels that with this woman the skies above the city grow loftier and the people become smaller.

The people she considered so important until a few hours ago now seem to her remote, engaged in activities that do not interest her, and even her own success, the struggle for existence, sending out her stories, hoping to meet someone who might put in a good word for her at a prestigious magazine, all this falls away from her, relieving her of a burden, making her feel light, free.

Carol is freedom, with her the confines of the city expand, New York becomes infinite and untamed, it extends the impalpable web of its unrest over the whole great continent of America.

“It’s not been easy for her,” says Rosalind, drinking her black sugarless coffee and nibbling the one sandwich she allows herself for lunch, because she is on a diet. They are in a cafeteria in Manhattan, outside on the pavement the women passers-by wear coloured dresses with short sleeves, their hair gleaming in the sunlight, and the men take off their jackets and dangle them on one finger over their shoulders. Pat is sober, so wonderfully sober it makes her head spin.

“She’s divorced,” says Rosalind, “he was rich, obviously she is too. Her people are the Seymours, the ones in the aviation industry. There was a trial. She had a girlfriend and it seems the husband had her followed by a private detective while they were somewhere in Maine, and he tried to blackmail her, either she agreed to forget about the divorce, and of course the girlfriend, or she would never see her daughter again. She didn’t agree. Carol’s like that, a rebel, intractable, and he accused her of you-know-what in front of the judges, obviously it wasn’t a public scandal but word got around, these things always do, and they took away the child from her, she doesn’t even get to see her any more. Now she devotes herself to the aircraft, apparently she’s got her pilot’s licence.”

Their first date. Carol drives fast but Pat is not afraid, she has absolute trust in her, her hands on the steering wheel are sure and steady, they make her heart flutter with joy.

Why not die like this? That would be the best way, she thinks, drunk with happiness, pushing her hair off her face to no avail because the wind immediately blows it back again, while her better judgement tells her they will not die, not now.

The car roof is down, their light scarves are flapping in the wind, and in order to talk to each other they have to shout, so they exchange only a few words. Carol is not the talkative type. When she is not concentrating on driving she becomes immersed in thoughts that make her knit her brow. Or else Pat catches her studying her intently, almost as if Carol had suddenly become aware of her presence and was asking herself questions about her.

Pat feels befuddled in her admiration, she wants more than anything to please Carol but she is unsure about her every gesture and her every word, as if the last years spent at Rosalind’s academy were nothing more than a thin veneer that is coming away, leaving her exposed in her foolishness and naivety, in her painful exclusion from every social group and milieu.

But then Carol turns and offers an outstretched hand to help her. They have left the car on the side of the road and are climbing up a dune along the shore, the sky is low and cloudy with bursts of sunshine. Carol’s high heels sink into the sand but she walks on briskly without ever losing her balance. They stand side by side, gazing at the sea in silence and Pat is filled with the sudden exhilarating certainty that Carol likes her.

In an unassuming little kiosk run by an old man wearing a sailor shirt they have a strong bitter coffee, one of the best ever in her life. And behind that kiosk Carol kisses her for the first time, as though on an unexpected and irresistible impulse, without worrying whether anyone might come along.

A moment after they have stopped kissing a family appears, father, mother and children, emerging from the path along the sand dune, heading towards the kiosk. Carol greets them gaily, keeping her arm around Pat’s waist, and with total self-confidence exchanges a few friendly words with the newcomers. Only Pat detects in her voice the reckless euphoria of risk-taking. She is proud of her.

They run down the dune, holding hands and laughing.

On their return to the city Carol grows sullen, one of her sudden mood changes that Pat will learn to get used to. This will not be too hard for her after what she has been through with her mother.

They will not spend that evening together, Carol is invited somewhere.

But now they know there will be other evenings, other nights.

They see each other irregularly, without fixed times or days. Carol has commitments, she has commitments – although even at the cost of running into trouble over work, she is nearly always ready to put hers off, if it means meeting up. But she is not complaining. The uncertainty increases the tension, every day holds out the magical possibility of seeing her, every day contains expectation and hope that extend, dwindling, until evening, and contract painfully within her breast if during the course of the day she does not receive a telephone call, or a telegram – and then at night, at a certain point, start to grow again before she goes to sleep, or in her sleep, when her desires and expectations bring on the dawn of another day in which they will surely see each other.

Pat does not want any other life, she cannot even imagine it.

This is how the girls and the woman around her live. They have clandestine love affairs, almost always short-lived, they are usually promiscuous. They meet in bars or better still in private houses where everything takes place in a discreet and sheltered way, where you know at first glance how things stand and who you are dealing with. You know that you are among people who are – well, like you, from that point of view.

They are independent women, who work as designers, models, secretaries, journalists, people who belong to a sparkling and exclusive world, or move on the fringes of it. Some are rich, others – like Pat – hide their poverty as best they can. But all of them know the meaning of the messages that are exchanged: looks, gestures, allusions, phrases that are not explicit but revealing.

Pat knows that, if she wants, she need never go home alone.

Sometimes it is exciting, at other times it is even too easy. It leaves you with a vague sense of disgust, like a hangover. Then there are the rivalries, the jealousies, the wretchedness of the les girls’ world, a closed universe in which sex and dalliance are common currency, but beware of forming any deep attachments because it is forbidden to cross the boundary, to let things filter into the other world, the one outside, the real world, among colleagues, friends and family, neighbours, respectable people.

After a while some get married, change their life, disappear. They are spoken of in an undertone, as if they were people who had died and ended up in the paradise, or hell, of normality.

It is not unusual for these married women to rejoin the milieu after a few years, returning to haunt the places they have known and which they cannot do without.

This is certainly what Carol did, even before the divorce.

Yes, there are some stable couples. Pat knows one couple who even live together, but they are the exception, they have money, they can afford to buy two adjoining apartments, they have no family to answer to, nor any need to work.

For those like her, who do not enjoy these privileges, living together is impossible but they can take a different girl to bed every night, or have relations with three or four women at the same time, provided that everything remains hidden and nothing gets out. The secretiveness intensifies firstly the lust, and afterwards the sense of satiation and nausea. Here, you love avidly, hurriedly, knowing you will part the next morning and may ignore each other within a week if by chance you were to meet.

In a way this suits her very well, because she knows how demanding a stable relationship would be, how much time and energy it would take away from work. But the drawback is knowing that it is not permissible to display your love with head held high, in the light of day. Obviously under these circumstances relationships are destined to be short-lived, because everything that keeps two people together for any length of time is forbidden to them.

It is the common view – and the novels that are sold in the railway stations and drugstores are convinced of it – that queers, perverts, les girls are not capable of any lasting and healthy relationship or true love. Even when they are in love they hate each other because they hate themselves. Ambivalence and contempt are the hallmark of their sentimental lives, and betrayal, if not violence and sadism, are the order of the day among them.

And what if all this was nonsense? But this nonsense is in the air we breathe. No one dares to contradict it out loud. Not even Pat contradicts it. Apart from anything else, it replicates exactly the same message she gets from her mother. This is what her mother makes her feel when she wants to punish her: different, ashamed, warped. Depressed and inept. Inadequate.

The truth must be kept hidden, always. You must always be ready to repudiate yourself, to pretend. In these circumstances who would not despise herself?

Other than an artist, or a criminal. A counterfeiter, who makes a profession of faking and thereby taking revenge.

But there is another side to her love for women, her love for Carol. A side that is wonderful, dazzling, divine.

Light and shadow, contempt and wonder, courage and shame. She lives a secret life, as an outlaw. Opprobrium is the price that has to be paid for her splendid freedom. As separation is the price of her meetings with Carol.

There are also, it is true, working-class women – but this is another world – who set up home together, in some suburb or other, confronting the world’s hostility and disapproval every day. Pat has seen them, women of this kind, in certain bars where on one or two nights a week different social strata take the risk of mixing with each other. In these couples there is always one of the two who acts as a man, and this type of woman inspires her with revulsion and fear. Often they are violent and belligerent, they are coarse in their ways and bullnecked.

Not that she is very feminine herself, in fact she likes to dress in a sporty and comfortable if not entirely masculine style and her mother has nagged her ever since her adolescence about her scruffy clothes and her awkwardness. But those women, who pose as men in such a literal way! She knows that she has masculine qualities, a spirit of adventure, determination, tenacity – if she only has faith in herself to meet the challenge the world presents to every one of us – but these qualities she will put to use in her work, not in her choice of shirt or the way her hair is cut. And certainly not in the way she walks, or picks a fight brandishing a beer bottle!

Years and years later, when she is mistaken for a man by a waiter or a beggar in the street, she will recall, not without wryness and curiosity, having seen certain women at that time in the bars of New York, and she will wonder how much she now ressembles them. Do they still exist? What has become of them? The world has changed in the meantime and when on a trip to the States she goes back to look for one of those bars, she will find a place full of uninhibited young black women who arouse in her once again, although in a different way, unease and fear.

An alternative to the life she leads does exist, and it is the one available to every woman, a door she too could pass through, if she wanted.

Marriage.

Whether rich or poor, happy or unhappy, marriage in all its forms is hellish. Or, in the best of cases, a bore.

(Yet think about it: once you go through that door, how many others will then open to you? You need not be afraid any more of being an outcast, of being jeered and censured, everything will fall into place automatically, you will be a married woman, a married writer, you will be set right.)

The young married women she knows do nothing but devote themselves to household chores, preparing meals and looking after children. Some work to support their husband financially while he pursues his studies. Many seem to have changed character, they have become slovenly and totally lacking in ambition, or domineering, domestic tyrants to whom the husbands subjugate themselves with more or less good grace, seeking consolation in their friends, in beer, in other women.

But worst of all are the so-called successful marriages, those in which the young couple are united in saving and setting up home together, and the spark of passion, if it ever existed, has given way to discussions about buying a dresser on an instalment plan.

Marriage is the end of the story. After that, for a woman, there can be nothing else.

Sometimes, when Carol is asleep, one hand lying carelessly on the sheets, Pat, while gazing at the russet reflections in her hair, catches herself imagining a big country house, a garden with lilac bushes, Carol’s favourite, and then she appears, her Carol, coming down the path, her cheeks gilded by the setting sun and walking with her, still unsteady on its feet, a child who looks like her. Mother and child wave happily, smiling, impatient: to someone arriving, someone they have been waiting for, and that someone is Pat herself.

She faithfully records these fantasies in her notebook. Honesty is the most important thing, especially in observing yourself. Do not be afraid even of banality.

Yet she knows, in the very same moment that she surrenders herself to it, that the American dream is false.

Occasionally it seems to her that the world in which she lives – the city of New York itself – is false, feigned. It does not exist in reality. It is a collective dream. Shimmering, stifling, hung round her neck.

The only thing that truly exists is Carol.

And also the books she reads, Gide, Camus, Kierkegaard, Kafka and Dostoevsky, who at this time is her favourite. Only some authors give her the necessary breath of air, with them she feels her chest and her mind expand. What she likes most of all about Dostoevsky is the constant overt attraction the characters feel towards sin, the forbidden. Transcending the so-called moral values imposed by society, man knows in his heart of hearts that he has need of something else, something just as vital as food and water.

To set his own rules, and submit to them – or transgress them: one thing invites the other, inevitably. What are good and evil, lawful and unlawful, if not conventions? We are born with the capacity to kill no less than the capacity to protect, to hate as well as to love.

And Carol, with her mood swings, with her now benign, now cruel power, seems to be the proof of it.

There are moments when she radiates a superhuman confidence, like the time she took Pat flying with her.

Going for a drive, on the face of it as on previous days to nowhere in particular – Carol with a cigarette clamped between her teeth while she rummages on top of the dashboard in search of her sunglasses and who seems by chance to take one turning rather than another – yet at a certain point Pat realises there is a particular destination.

After an abrupt turn they stop alongside a hangar on the edge of a grassy strip. “Go on, get out,” Carol tells her. “I want you to meet someone important.”

“Here he is,” she says, her eyes sparking with pride, but also with childlike mischievousness as she observes Pat’s reaction.

“He” is Richie III, a small light aircraft, grey with broad red stripes on the wings. A man in overalls, his hands dirty with grease, emerges from the hangar and comes towards them, greeting Carol respectfully. She addresses him in a friendly way – Carol can be pleasant and considerate with strangers just as she can be rude or distant with those she loves – they talk for a few minutes, and Pat is left out, excluded from a conversation she does not understand and cannot even hear very well because of an engine running in the hangar, which drowns out their voices. Then Carol says to her in the most casual way possible, “Well, are you coming or not?” And a moment later she is inside the plane and all Pat can do is follow her, putting on the leather helmet the man holds out to her as he helps her up the steep boarding ladder.