Another book but this time a collection of photography Nothing Obvious.
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Translator's Note: Ornela Vorpsi left Albania for Italy when she was 22 years old, and moved to Paris six years later. She chose Italian as the language in which to write what she calls her "autobiography of Albania."
It’s the land where no one ever dies. Here, a person’s body is strengthened by endless meals, and is drenched in raki, and is disinfected by the pepper in the oily, ever-present olives: the body is so tough that it can withstand anything.
The spine is iron. You can do whatever you like with it. If it ever gets damaged, you can make do somehow. As for the heart—well, it can get fatty, and the valves can atrophy, and the cells can die off . . . it can suffer thrombosis and infarction and I don’t know what else, and still sail magnificently on.
This is Albania; it’s not a trifling place.
This country is made of dust and mud; the sun burns so hot that sometimes the leaves rust on the grapevines and your thinking starts to liquefy. This causes a secondary effect (which I fear is irreparable): a megalomaniacal delirium that sprouts uncontrollably, like weeds. It also causes an absence of fear—although this might be due to the people’s flattened and crooked craniums, which serve as the royal residence of the local impatience, or downright lack of conscience.
When you walk down the street, their gaze penetrates right down to your bones, so deep that your very being turns transparent.
Once it gets inside you, this peering becomes a meticulous art form.
Fear is a meaningless word. You can see immediately from their eyes that they’re immortal creatures.
Death is an alien process.
In summer, dawn raises its head around five in the morning. At seven comes the first cup of coffee, for older people. The young sleep until noon. The good lord has decided that, in this country, time has to pass as gently as possible, like a sip of fine coffee that you savor on the terrace of the bar next door while languidly watching the fine legs of a girl who surely won’t even deign to look at you.
The boiling hot coffee runs slowly down your esophagus, warming your tongue and your heart and your innards. Life isn’t so bad after all. You luxuriate in the bitter black liquid under the angry glare of the bar’s proprietress, who has just argued with her husband.
It’s eleven-thirty. You have the whole day ahead of you, thank God, and endless time. You could do a thousand things, a thousand.
Twilight is still a long way off.
After a while, Xifo comes in; scratching the chapped skin of the untreated eczema on her hands, she starts telling you for the umpteenth time about her wrecked heart and her wrecked liver, as if she’s talking about some saga that has nothing to do with her. Important, but distant. Everything is twisted and exaggerated. Then she says, in a conspiratorial undertone:
“Did you hear? Our neighbor, you know—Suzi’s dad—he died in the shower last night. He came home from work, he ate, he went into the shower, and he died.”
“How can that be?! The poor guy was so young!”
“What can I say, Doll? Life is unpredictable. He came home from work, he ate, and he got into the shower and died.”
That’s how other people die.
This is the way life runs along in the land where everything is eternal (except for the things that happened to others). But there are some things that belong, even more than death, to the houses of these people. One of those things was—without exaggeration—almost the center of their lives.
It was the issue of sluttiness.
They were crazy on the subject! It made them feverish, delirious! It set their hearts aflame (hearts that ignited very easily).
It was the most vital issue, and it concerned the old and the young, the cultivated as well as the illiterate.
There are certain rules that grow in a community’s spirit quite naturally, like the leaves on a plant. These rules rest on a single theory: that a pretty girl is a slut, and an ugly girl—poor thing!—is not a slut.
In this country a girl has to watch out for her “immaculate flower,” because “a man can wash himself with a bar of soap and he’s as good as new, but not even a whole ocean can wash a girl clean.”
The whole ocean.
If a husband went away on business, or to prison, people would tell his wife that she’d be wise to stitch herself up Down There, to prove to him that she had awaited him and only him, and that his painful absence had narrowed the space between her thighs. (In this country husbands are extremely jealous, with a highly developed sense of private property.)
Sometimes, when a pretty girl passed by the bar terrace where people were slowly drinking in the day, they’d let out a foggy sigh even hotter than the coffee:
“Take a look at who’s going by!”
“I hope you’re joking: haven’t you heard how many times she’s gotten stitched and unstitched?”
Then, with worn-down hearts, they’d press on:
“Oh, Ingrid, Ingrid! What smooth white thighs you have! Who unstitched them last night? Come here, gorgeous; come here, and later I’ll give you money, too, to have yourself stitched up again.”
At home it was always the same conversation:
“Don’t worry,” my mother said, “I’ll send you to the doctor to see whether you’re a virgin or not.”
She cut into me with her threatening stare, muttering between clenched teeth, and even though I’m only thirteen and I haven’t yet seen what it is that men have in their trousers (it’s a mystery that has something to do with sluttiness), I already feel like a complete slut. My mother’s stare dishonors me.
I get into bed full of fear and think, “What if she really does send me to the doctor and they find out that I’m naturally not a virgin, like a kid born without a hand, or born deaf, or born blind, or—worst of all—born without love for the Motherland? What will I do? At that point, what will I do?”
Sleep overcame me while I was begging my mother, in my head, to accept the tragic fact that has befallen us: “I swear, Mom, I swear I didn't do anything! I was born this way! Believe me! I swear.”
In this land where no one ever dies, my mother is no exception: she doesn’t die either.
I had a recurring thought that I never told anyone about : with my eyes half shut, before falling asleep, I would dream of her funeral.
I see: a black scarf (I would have preferred a filmy lace one) pulled tight around my throat just as if I were Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina; I would certainly be pale, and I would have cried rivers because I loved her a lot, but my desire to be free of her—and all her fury, which she heaped on my shoulders alone—was too strong.
Because I was growing up without a father and I was apparently cute, the issue of sluttiness came up quite early.
“You’re going to turn out to be a big tramp, ehh. . . .” There was always a slight tremor in their voices when my mother or my grandmother spoke these words, as if to say, We know all about it; and they’d shake their heads a bit: “What can you do about it?—we’ll have to choke down the shame along with our daily bread. There’s nothing to be done; it’s not like we wanted you to be like this! We’ll have to choke down the shame along with our daily bread—that’s all we can do! Someday you’ll come home with a big belly!”
While my grandfather went on silently rolling his tobacco leaves—he simply participated in the general atmosphere—my Mom and Grandma would suffer terribly, as if they were actually choking down bread that was buttered with shame.
The big belly was the most terrifying image. Have you ever seen a Bosch painting? That anxious madness, and the swarms of people squeezed together like souls in hell? I could see the paintings concretely in my mind’s eye: all brown and dark red, full of tiny, crowded, living filth making its home inside me. You can’t hide a big belly anywhere; it’s not like you can leap away from yourself. You’re marked. A big belly said you got screwed in the bushes (for Mom and Grandma, screwing always happened in the bushes—apparently that was the ideal place for anonymous fucking). A big belly said you were feeding worms of shame, fostering an embryo that deformed your body, displaying the concrete evidence of the screwing.
Even today, I can’t help seeing it the same way: Pregnant Woman = Woman Who Got Screwed in the Bushes.
How they needed tragedy! My whole magnificent country is so thirsty for tragedy! It invents tragedy out of nothing, just as the Creator invented us out of a nothing bit of dust.
When I was ill, they lavished attention on me. They would come into my room whispering, “Sweetheart,” and they’d go out murmuring “My poor darling.”
They would prepare delicious dishes for me, without stopping to think that the illness might have robbed me of my appetite. (I always lost a few pounds during a week of illness.) My eyes would caress the jams on the night table, and I’d gaze lovingly at the meatballs; but my sick and nauseous stomach would force me to stop looking at the rich array of promising treats.
They turned into the most adorable Mom and Grandma in the whole world, and I was sure that I’d never die—not with these two by my side, not with their strong voices and the prophecies that they scattered over everything.
When I was ill, it was always a joyful time for me: there was no more scolding, and I didn’t have to come home from school and fry potatoes, and I could sleep as much as I wanted, and I didn’t have to clean the rice grain by grain, and there was no wood around for me to cut, and—oddly—I suddenly wasn’t a slut. This lasted until the day I got better; on that accursed day, the insults started up again, and I went back to being a slut, and the jam went off to be a consolation prize for other sick people; I was well and so I didn’t need it any more: jam can be eaten only when you have one foot in the grave.
In our dear country, where no one ever dies, where bodies are as strong as lead, we have a saying that’s very profound: “When you’re alive I hate you; when you’re dead I weep for you.”
This adage is the lifeblood of our country. Once you’re dead, there’s not another bad word said about you—I dare say that not even a bad thought is allowed. Death brings respect.
(One has to earn an Albanian’s respect: when you’re starting to die, you awaken respect, and once you’re dead, you get the respect in full.)
Suddenly men are blessed with all the best qualities, and women are blessed with all possible virtues.
People grieve over how marvelous you were. Rancor vanished, and I heard my Mom’s voice with the same conviction and tremor that heard when she spoke her prophecies, but this time it was full of emotion over the death of her beloved, and over the marvelous phenomenon by which your people, your blood relatives, eat your flesh, but they keep your bones.
I sensed the great truth about my country.
This sublime beauty was cloaked in my Mom’s voice.
“Mom,” I replied one day, “if they eat my flesh, they might as well throw away my bones . . . what would they keep them for?”
And here again was that look of hers that incinerated me—it covered me with filth; I understood that I wasn’t her purebred daughter but rather an accident that resembled him. Her look told me loud and clear:
“Shut up, you daughter of that man.”
And I shut up, looking forward to my next illness.