GOING, GOING......

Plaque on Salvatore Quasimodo's birthplace in Modica

A little piece of Sicily is to go on sale next week in the form of the Nobel Prize medal awarded to one of Modica's most famous sons, the poet Salvatore Quasimodo, in 1959.  This will be the first sale of a Nobel medal in Italy.

The lot, to be auctioned by Bolaffi of Turin, consists of the medal, the diploma, the original photos of the ceremony and a DVD of it [although the latter is available online anyway].  The starting price is €50,000 but it is estimated that the collection will sell for €100,000 - €150,000.

Bolaffi have decided to set aside €20,000 of their commission to create a scholarship which will enable a student from the Istituto A.M. Jaci, the Messina high school which Quasimodo attended, to study in Milan, the city where the poet lived from 1934 and in which he is buried.

It remains to be seen whether a Sicilian cultural association or other entity will bid for the lot but the Bolaffi decision does mean that Sicily will derive some benefit from the sale. Who knows where the lucky student's Milan experience will lead him or her and what ideas he or she might bring back to Sicily?

THE BEST BOOK I'VE READ - A "LET'S BLOG OFF" POST

I was delighted to be invited by Paul to participate in the fortnightly Let's Blog Off  event and, first of all,  I'll let him explain the concept here:

"Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something called a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is 'What's the best book you ever read?' "

Now, I'm the woman who brought 6,000 books to Sicily so an excuse to write about some of them is always welcome. But the best book I've ever read?  How was I going to choose?

Well, I suppose a lot depends on how you define "best":  if the book I'm reading at any given moment is unputdownable, I'm likely to think it's the best I've read - until I start the next one!  I read a lot of biography and among the most interesting I've read in recent years are:  Maria Fairweather's superb account of the life of one of my heroines, Madame de Stael;   the aptly entitled Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes;  An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina;  and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders.

But wait a minute:  what if I define "best" in terms of books that have influenced me?  My studies have led me to read in three languages other than my own so I must admit that my literary influences are many and diverse.  Coincidentally, the other day I took part in a vote in which people selected their favourite authors from Nobel Prize in Literature laureates: after much deliberation I chose Albert Camus, not for L'Etranger [The Outsider] but for La Peste [The Plague] which I read in French at school and which challenged and changed my thinking more than any other book.  Then there is Voltaire who taught me tolerance, Balzac - so little read these days but a must for anyone interested in human nature - and my beloved Simone de Beauvoir. Lorca's poetry sustained my late teens, Gramsci's Letters from Prison my extreme leftie phase and I must not forget, among the poets, Modica's own Salvatore Quasimodo;  little did I imagine, all those years ago as I burned the midnight oil writing essays on his work, that I would one day come to live in his town.

Suppose, though, I take "best" to mean the book I would most like to take with me to get me through a  period of enforced solitude - on that mythical desert island, perhaps?   This, I've concluded, is the "best" definition of "best", when it comes to books!  At first I thought I would take something long and easy to dip into, such as the Larousse Gastronomique, but then I realised that such a volume might actually cause me distress if I only had berries to eat.  My next idea was to fall back on poetry and, having narrowed my poets down to Verlaine and Burns, I decided that Burns [with a glossary] just had the edge.

And then I remembered something else:  some years back, when I had to go into hospital, I took along Pages  from the Goncourt Journal to pass the time and I forgot all indignities, pain and discomfort as the nineteenth century French authors I'd studied so long ago passed through the volume like friends.  I even said "Hello" out loud to some of them.  In my life, friendship has been very important so a book full of "old friends" such as these is - for the moment - the best book I have ever read.

Below is the full list of contributors to this Blog Off theme:

MUM - 3

For those of you who can bear it, this is the continuing story of my mother's last illness and the way it all connects to my life in Sicily now.

This is pieced together from my diary:

9.6.93
I did not get home till around 0800. After I called school I called the hospital again. They said that Mum was even more confused and they did not know the cause. I went there in the afternoon, spoke to the doctors, who were at a total loss to explain what was happening, then saw Mum. She was still talking about all this money she thought she had won.

10.6.93
Mum was in bed. She was hallucinating and kept talking about the sixty cars she was going to buy. She was aggressive and demanding with me and the staff.

11.6.93
She was sitting in the chair, wearing the pretty dress and was still confused. But she had stopped talking about the money.

Weekend:
She was sitting in the chair. She was confused but could chat. She was much quieter. She’d put her hair up and her skin was clear. She looked almost young.

14.6.93
Sue, my nursing tutor friend, came to the hospital with me. Mum had tried to get up that morning but could not walk. She was very nostalgic and kept crying about Dad and telling Sue about the time I took her to Italy. There was some confusion but her long-term memory seemed OK. I actually dared to hope that day. I saw the registrar, who told me that they still had no idea what was wrong.

15.6.93
This day was a terrible shock. Mum’s complexion was a reddish-yellow colour [which I was to see again early on the day of her death]. She was very cantankerous with me. Sue had gone over to see Mum earlier in the day and was worried by her colour. When I passed Sue’s house on the way home, she called me in and gently told me that, in her opinion, Mum wasn’t going to recover. “I don’t think she’s going to ‘do’, love” were her words. I cried all that night.

16.6.93
A Wednesday. The first shock was that they had moved Mum to a side-ward, on her own. Her cantankerousness and ranting had begun to upset the other patients. By the time I got there, she was sitting in the chair, wearing the pretty dress. She didn’t even recognise me or acknowledge my presence. There was a bit of birdshit on the outside of the window and all she would do was try to scratch at it. She looked about 90. A nurse had told Sue that she’d been shocked by Mum’s appearance when she came back on duty. Apparently Sue had said, “What do you think it was like for her daughter?”

17.6.93
This was a terrible day. Mum could not speak and it seemed that her sight was affected - she seemed to be focussing on light and then dark areas of the room. I left mid-afternoon to get a few toiletries for Mum from Safeway’s. As I approached the checkout, they closed it and I went bezerk. [They reopened it!] This shows how a little thing can make you snap in such a situation. How on earth could I have coped with 32 aggressive children at a time?! When I got back, Mum was crying and distressed but as she could not tell me why I didn’t know how to help her - that was the worst of it. All I could do was hold her and I didn’t even know if she was aware of me. They performed a lumbar puncture that evening; it took 3 doctors 3 hours to do it because Mum was fighting them. Afterwards she looked at me as if it was my fault , as if I’d let them hurt her. She didn’t look like my mother at all. At some point during that night she had a fit.

18.6.93
They tested for encephalitis. I was praying [yes, praying] that it would be something like this so that they would at least be able to treat it. She could not speak. She did draw me to her twice. It was as if she was saying goodbye. I wrote in my diary, “The pain of it is unimaginable”.

19.6.93
The test was negative. Back to square one. Mum could just about utter “yes” and “no” She was gazing at me with so much love and we actually had a peaceful, loving day, to the extent that I told Sue that if she died that night at least she would have had that lull in the suffering. I had to feed her: the hospital staff thought I liked doing it, that it made me feel involved, but I hated it as I knew how demeaning Mum would have found it had she understood what was going on.

20.6.93
Mum was in much distress and obvious pain. She managed one sentence. It was “I love you”. What it must have cost her to utter those words I’ll never know.

21.6.93
By now I had told the medical team, “I can cope with you telling me bad news; I can cope with you telling me that you don’t know what it is; but I can’t cope with you telling me nothing.” So they were being straight with me and realised that I did actually understand what they were talking about.

Mum had gone into a deep sleep. The senior registrar warned me that she might not come out of it. There was a tremendous lot of blood in her urine.

I came home at 2230 to feed my dog, freshen up and force myself to eat. The phone rang and my heart missed a beat. It was a male colleague who wanted to discuss a power struggle at school. As if I could have cared less! Then my neighbour Katie drove me back to the Heath and stayed with us a while.

22.6.93
This was the first day that I saw Dr S… at the Careline offices. I was explaining to him how I felt “torn” because of work and he said something which has always remained with me: “ In this situation every moment of lucidity is a gift and you cannot afford to miss one.”

The deep sleep lasted until Friday 25.6. That was the day Mum started screaming - long, loud, shrill screams every minute or so. She was shouting about spiders [of which she had never been afraid]. This was one of the days on which they said they thought the condition might be mental. They let the screaming go on until the Sunday night. [They didn’t want to administer drugs because they still didn’t know what they were dealing with.] But they sedated Mum twice on the Sunday. It didn’t work.

That night I wrote in my diary:
“If you’ve never sat at a hospital bedside and watched a loved one die, you don’t know. I’ve done it twice now and it has not become easier with experience. If you have never watched the destruction and disintegration of the personality, you don’t know. If you’ve never dreaded walking onto a hospital ward, you don’t know. If you’ve never been afraid to answer the phone, you don’t know. If you’ve never called upon an unlistening god to end the suffering, you cannot know. If you’ve never watched a lovely, vibrant woman become a shell, you don’t know. If you’ve never grieved for one still there, you cannot know.”

I also wrote down the words of Salvatore Quasimodo’s poem that I love so much, Ed è subito sera [“And Suddenly it’s Evening”]:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

trafitto da un raggio di sole:

ed è subito sera.

Each one of us is alone on the heart of the earth

pierced by a ray of sun:

and suddenly it's evening.

2007 note: I’d known this poem since university but it was not until I came to Sicily that I visited Quasimodo's birthplace, here in Modica. It’s another of the strange ways in which what happened to Mum brought me back to Sicily.

28.6.93
Mum was sleeping. She looked like a young girl. They did an ultrasound scan.

29.6.93
Mum was delirious. She was talking about colours all the time. She was repeating, “In this grey house where I live..” [I guessed that her sight must have been affected again. Nobody knew.] Then she said, “All the colours in the world won’t save me now”. There was still blood in her urine - they did not know why - and she seemed very distressed. A drip was in but she was pulling it out all the time. A kind nurse kept bringing me tea and said to me, “It must be awful for you - it’s not even peaceful.” That started me off - you know how you can be strong until someone sympathises? In the late afternoon Mum suddenly said, “I’m going, I’m going.” - “Where are you going, Mum?” - “I’m going to a place called Syracuse.” - So somewhere in that confused mind she remembered me telling her about Syracuse, in Sicily . That is why I finally said goodbye to her there, in the port, that Christmas, and why, if ever I write a book about all this, the title will be A Place Called Syracuse.

30.6.93
The hospital rang in the morning and asked if I’d like to see the consultant again. So I prepared myself for more bad news. Mum had pulled the drip out again and was moving around in the bed following the direction of the light. Was she grasping at light?

1.7.93
The consultant said that he now thought that it was mental but that certain biochemical changes occur once a person is in hospital, particularly if they are elderly. So I started blaming myself again, wondering if it was my fault for having got her to hospital. He thought a mental recovery was very unlikely. He mentioned the possibility of another hospital [she was much too ill to go into a home]. I understood that he wanted me to tell him what to do should there be a chest infection or other deterioration. I told him calmly that I wanted no futile treatment and he said he very much appreciated this. I was able to do this because, years before, Mum and I had watched a programme about Alzheimer’s and she had asked me to not to let her linger if ever her mind “went”. But even though I knew that I was doing what she would have wanted, I still felt as if someone had opened a hole in my stomach. It was, I thought, the most difficult day of my life.

A kind colleague called Josie arrived at the hospital that evening and she had her 2 toddlers with her. Upon seeing them, Mum started making odd statements about not having had children [I had been adopted] and that upset me a lot. I suppose seeing Josie’s little ones had sparked off a memory of the 9 years during which Mum and Dad had tried for a child in vain. This person who was in the bed was and yet was not my gentle Mum, who had always said she felt as though she had given birth to me. Josie swept me away to her house for a blessed couple of hours of respite. Josie makes anywhere she lives a haven of peace and I sobbed my heart out in her garden.

TO BE CONTINUED