Fase 2: Diagnóstico Financiero:

A second group of children which stands out in Masino‘s fiction is that of visionary children, such as a young Paola Masino in ‗Paura‘474

and Barbara in Monte Ignoso. Their visions are extremely vivid and real and the narrator never questions their veracity. Unlike divine children, visionary children are very much part of this world even though their intelligence would belie their young age.

In ‗Paura‘ a girl, whom the narrator reveals later in the story to be young Paola Masino (talking about herself in the third person), awakes from a deep sleep on a hot August afternoon and finds herself at home alone. As she wanders through the house calling for her mother, she has a series of different nightmarish visions which make

472 _{Jung and Kerényi, p. 97.}

473

See Mangano: ‗La Storia ovvero il mondo salvato da un ragazzino‘, Narrativa, 17 (2000), 101-

116, p. 111: ‗potrebbe essere il ―fanciullo divino‖ di stampo junghiano che porta dentro di sé il destino collettivo del mondo. Come si sa, il fanciullo divino è sempre frutto di una nascita straordinaria e quando appare, possiede già la totalità delle caratteristiche che formano la sua personalità. Come in tutti i miti di questo genere (basti pensare a Zeus assente mentre Dionisio viene catturato e sbranato dai Titani), il padre è sempre assente nei momenti importanti (era già il

caso ne L‟Isola diArturo e sarà vero anche in Aracoeli, romanzo nel quale il padre è spesso in

viaggio e non può abitare subito con i suoi). La morte di Useppe non è una vera morte, non è un annientamento; richiama piuttosto il motto, ripetuto a caratteri uguali senza virgole né punti,

stampato lungo il cerchio di una ruota ne La serata a Colono: E MORTE E NASCITA E MORTE E

NASCITA E MORTE E NASCITA‘.

160 her feel scared and increasingly desperate. The light coming through the blinds seems to her to be a blade:

Le parve che quella lama oscillando a un tratto si allungasse e aprisse

verso di lei due enormi mascelle di lupo a ghermirla. Allora scoppiò in

un urlo deforme mentre un sudore bavoso le scendeva dalle ascelle sul

piccolo grembo. (Colloquio di notte, p. 105).

That her vision appears very real is emphasised by the use of a tragic tone with an almost Gothic flavour: ‗un urlo deforme‘, ‗un sudore bavoso‘. The suffused light in the corridor resembles the light inside a grave and she feels as if she had been buried alive.475 Later, wrapped up in a curtain, she sees her own image detached from herself. The fourth and last vision is the most relevant one:

il sole filtrando nel tessuto le mostrò che proprio contro il suo petto

stava accovacciato un frate cappuccino, il terreo volto pieno di fosse

scure, le labbra appena mosse in una preghiera. [...] Ma ora ella è

sicura di essere già sotto terra e quel frate, fatto d‘ossa e cappuccio, le

annuncia: Paola, tu sei... (Colloquio di notte, pp. 106-107).

The visions affect Paola deeply and only her mother‘s arrival will calm her. However, the vividness of the picture will stay with her long enough to come back in her adult life at the sight of a Capuchin friar. The short story is, in fact, divided into two parts, the first concerns young Paola‘s visions and her resulting fears, the second recounts the episode when Paola was stopped by a German patrol and risked execution. On that occasion, the sight of a Capuchin friar brought back her childhood fears: once again the ‗sudore bavoso mi scendeva dalle ascelle sul grembo‘.476

The

475 _{See Masino, Colloquio di notte, p. 106: ‗Ella ebbe davvero la certezza di essere sepolta viva;}

sepolta, ma viva ancora perché qualche cosa le picchiava pugni forti nella nuca e alle tempie. Tac tac tac‘.

476 _{See Masino, Colloquio di notte, p. 108: ‗mi misi col pensiero a correre [...] fino a che mi ritrovai}

161 comparison between the fear caused by childish visions and the terror brought about by war has a double effect: on the one hand, it emphasises the absurdity of war since the adult/protagonist is as scared as she used to be when she was a child, on the other hand, young Paola‘s visions are not dismissed as the sheer product of childish fantasies, but they are shown to be the consequence of the shocking impact of war.

The second visionary child is Barbara, in Monte Ignoso. Barbara‘s mother, is haunted by the characters depicted in paintings of biblical scenes hung in her house and by a portrait of an ancestor-priest, Federico Vaira, all of whom lead her to a loss of dignity (she commits adultery) and to self-torture.477 The priest first appears to Barbara one afternoon while she is eating in the garden:

A un tratto Barbara si volse appunto a quella porta al suo fianco e

sorrideva e faceva gesti e un poco arrossiva, come quando deve

entrare in salotto a salutare le visite. (Barbara ha sei anni). Non aveva

parlato, pure Emma le domandò:

 Con chi parlavi, Barbara?

 Con un prete. Va a trovare babbo.

 Monsignore?

 No. Uno vestito buffo.

 Come vestito buffo?

 Con tanti capelli bianchi, tutt‘intorno, come farina. E calze lunghe

lunghe fino qui, e due fibbie sulle scarpe. Guarda: grosse così. Molto

belle. Troppo. Bellissime. Avrei voluto giocarci un bel po‘. Se me le

mettevo in testa sarei sembrata una fata. (Monte Ignoso, pp. 14-15)

me stessa, una paura sempre più vile mi prendeva le viscere, un sudore bavoso mi scendeva dalle ascelle sul grembo‘.

477

Barbara‘s mother, Emma, offers Masino two opportunities to establish links with nineteenth- century European literature. The protagonist‘s name clearly evokes that of the famous adulteress

Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary (1856), while the context of the affair recalls

162 The second and longest of Barbara‘s visions occurs during an afternoon out with the nuns and her school-friends. Among a group of children, she notices an old beggar, who reminds her of the priest she had seen and to whom she wants to give a letter for her mother:

I ragazzi lo seguivano cercando di trattenerlo per i lembi volanti del

mantello. Allora Barbara si alzò, e anche lei lo seguiva chiamando: 

Monsignore! Monsignore! [...] Il vecchio le sembrava grande come un

monte, il mantello una regione amica: Monte Ignoso con il suo

giardino. (Monte Ignoso, p. 118)

Despite the other children‘s laughter and mockery of the old man, Barbara is convinced she knows who he really is and keeps following him until he enters a house. A woman comes out and beats her cruelly for teasing the old man. Barbara faints and when she recovers consciousness, she feels so weak that she needs more rest and this is when she has her third vision. Here reality and unreality merge in a series of dreams within the dream. Barbara dreams of falling asleep and of telling her mother her adventure: she mistook an old beggar for the priest and only wanted to give him a letter for her. However, when Barbara actually reawakens, she finds, to her confusion, that she is surrounded by people asking her questions while she is convinced she has already told her story. When Emma arrives at her daughter‘s bedside at the hospital, she proves to be the only one who can understand what happened to Barbara: it is not a rational, earthly experience, but an extraordinary force, a destiny haunting both mother and daughter, in different ways, a fate which no one can alter. Considering the relationship between Emma and Barbara we could find a parallel to the myth of Persephone and Demetra as presented by Kerényi. According to Kerényi, Persephone is the Kore by definition; she differs from the

163 other two main Kore of Greek mythology, Athene and Artemis478 as she embodies the balance between two forms of existence: life when at her mother‘s side and death when at her man‘s side. Similarly, Barbara is alive when close to her mother Emma at Monte Ignoso, but steps towards death once she is away from her mother‘s side. In the words of Kerényi: ‗Mother and daughter form a living unity in a border-line situationa natural unit which, equally naturally, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction‘.479 Another analogy between the myth and the plot of Monte Ignoso is that Barbara‘s actual death occurs without Emma being present when Giovanni locks himself in his daughter‘s hospital room and forbids his wife to see her dying. This form of kidnapping, although on behalf of a father and not of a male partner, seems to recall Persephone‘s abduction to Hades. Emma, just like Demetra, does not exist without Barbara, Persephone, the Kore, who is sacrificed to her fate. This myth also seems to be transferred somehow to the infernal scenarios and gloomy atmospheres of parts of Monte Ignoso:

The Earth Mother is always chthonic and is occasionally related to the

moon, either through the blood-sacrifice already mentioned, or

through a child-sacrifice, or else because she is adorned with a sickle

moon.480

We know nothing about young Paola or Barbara‘s appearances. The only descriptive reference related to Barbara is that she is six years old and that, like her mother, she has red hair. In fact, what Paola Masino insists on is their powers rather than their appearance.

478

Athene is Kore as a complete negation of references to her maidenhood: she is detached from references to her mother on the one hand or a man on the other. She sprang from her father and there is no reference to a potential man at her side, she is pure spiritual force. Artemis is also a Kore, but in a very different way from Athene. She embodies untouched virginity and her femininity implies the possibility of falling into a male trap as well as the relationship with her mother, although a less strong one than that between Demeter and Persephone. See Jung and Kerényi, pp. 106-107.

479 _{Jung and Kerényi, p. 107.}

164 Visionary children are also present in Ortese‘s works. Particularly relevant is the example in the short story ‗Il continente sommerso‘.481

Through a recurrent dream, young Ortese encounters three sisters, her teenage friends, with their parents. In the dream, the three girls question Ortese about their existence, whether they are simply the result of her imagination. They seem to be trying to convince her that what she sees in her dreams is true, to encourage her to believe in her visions instead of dismissing them as pure imagination:

―Non ci sognasti?‖. ―Verità? Bontà?‖.

―Non tradirci mai, prego!‖ con tristezza si raccomandavano. (In sonno

e in veglia, p. 124).

Once again, the image of the three girls is used by Ortese for her programmatic discussion on reality and fiction, this time with the focus on dreams, which she does not see as mere illusions, but as a bridge with the past. She distinguishes two types of dreams: those that re-elaborate facts and events of the day and those that come ‗dall‘esterno, il perduto all‘uomo, cioè il suo passato, il tempo che non è più‘.482

As far as the latter are concerned, Ortese argues that, far from being illusions, they may exist in a reality or a place unknown to us:

Ma io, quando vedo in sogno le tre fanciulle, subito sento che non è un

sogno, cioè illusorio, che realmente qualcosa di me intravede un

tempo lontano, ma privato di materia, e tale tempo è lo spirare puro

del cuore verso le sue origini. Ah, quanto sconosciute, dilette. E

talvolta, sento che per esse la cosa è uguale: provengono da abissi (la

scia della nave) e m‘interrogano. (In sonno e in veglia, p. 125)

481 _{Ortese, In sonno e in veglia, pp. 111-128.}

165 The portrait Ortese draws of this gentle aristocratic family, noble at heart as well as in manners, clearly contains a biographical reference. It is meant to be a tribute to the Croce family who had been particularly kind to the author. The prince and the princess of the story are Benedetto Croce and his wife, and the three girls, their youngest daughters Lidia, Alda and Silvia. In the years 1941-1942, as explained by Lidia Croce,483 Ortese worked at their house for about six months, together with other young Neapolitan artists of limited means. She was particularly fragile and upset over the recent loss of her brother in Albania and it was Mrs Croce who gave her comfort and support.484 The memory of the generous hospitality was to stay with Ortese for a long time and many years later she dedicated this short story to the family.485