blog — July 29

That night I dreamed I was drowning

“Nadia Terranova’s narrative style captivates us with its precision and sensitivity.” —Annie Ernaux

Below, you'll find an excerpt from Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. The novel follows Ida, a married woman in her late thirties, living in Milan and working at a radio station, who returns to Sicily to help her mother clean out Ida’s childhood home. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return.

Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Farewell, Ghosts is a poetic and intimate novel about what it means to build one’s own identity while grappling with profound loss.

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Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

One morning in the middle of September my mother called to tell me that in a few days work would begin on the roof of our house. She said it just like that: “our.” But for some time I’d had another house to take care of, in another city, a house rented by me and another person. The house I would have called ours no longer existed, that label had been removed when I left, and in the following years I had wiped it from my memory with thorough violence. Yes, I knew that the roof was falling down—it had begun to fall down when I was born, and had been crumbling, raining down in the form of dust and flaking plaster, for all the life I had lived there—but I wasn’t in any way responsible, we can’t be blamed for the things we don’t want to inherit and have already disowned. I wrote fake true stories for the radio that had had an unexpected popularity; I had a man, a job, another city, new evenings, and a different time.

My mother said that she had had to deal with every problem by herself; she was tired now and the house was a burden to her. Redoing the roof, which was flat and tiled and functioned also as a terrace, would be her last act of generosity—because certainly she couldn’t put the house on the market with all that damage—before buying a smaller and more solid place. She said that a contractor would repair the holes caused by bad weather, poor insulation, and the neighbors’ old renovations, while in our house—she repeated: our—under the roof, under the feet and labor of the workmen, she and I would sift through furniture, utensils, and books to begin to empty it: she didn’t want me to be able to reproach her one day for giving away my things, and so I had to return and choose what to let go.

I thought it would be easy, because, apart from a red iron box kept at the bottom of a drawer, I didn’t care about anything.

I packed a suitcase with a few clothes and some underwear, and bought a train ticket on the Internet for the next day: I would look out the window for the long stretch of sea beside the Calabrian railroad all the way to Villa San Giovanni; from there I would take the ferry to Messina, bringing my mother the help she’d asked for.

That night I dreamed I was drowning.

My husband’s foot, propped against my ankle, warmed the bed, and at some point I began to move from the warmth under the sheet into the water.

I was walking as if I knew where to go, and the water cooled ankles, calves, knees, and then thighs, hips, belly, breast, and shoulders, and then chin and mouth, until I tried to speak and immediately disappeared, swallowed up by a wave. A moment before, I was walking; a moment after, I was drowning. My sight didn’t dim, and my strength didn’t evaporate, only this thing happened: I entered the sea and in an instant my body no longer existed.

I woke and sat up. In a whisper, I called to Pietro, my husband, not because I needed him but because I didn’t want to keep from him the fact that I was dying. It seemed important, dying, and I wanted him to witness it. My arms and armpits were sweaty, sweat dripped across my forehead and shoulders, he grabbed me by one elbow and, with an effort, opened his eyes and sat up next to me. There was nothing we could say to each other that would console me, and I felt unable to share either the burden or the fear of my dream.

Once, more than ten years before, when we’d been together only a few months, I reproached him for having so little interest in my nightmares; when I was a child my paternal grandmother urged me to tell them—if you don’t tell them you won’t be free of them, she said—and now that she was gone, if he didn’t ask I couldn’t tell, and wouldn’t be free of anything. So at night when I woke suddenly, and in the morning before going to work, Pietro had begun to ask how I was: Tell me what you dreamed, he insisted and insisted, and I tried to answer, but it didn’t work. Things never work when they’re transported from one era to another, they’re fine where they are, and there’s always a reason that memories should remain memories and not come to disturb the present. I had been wrong to tell him about my grandmother: in her big bed with its scent of fine old sheets, the account flowed naturally, whereas opening myself to him was an effort. It was the same that night, too, neither of us had a desire for words; it was an agreement we’d made long ago, as long ago as the times when we responded to fear with desire, to nightmares with sex.

I grabbed the plastic water bottle from the night table and took long swallows. My husband touched my back with the sort of love we had then, a weary love, made up of hands that, never too intimate, caressed the stomach around the belly button, desperate hands that gripped the edge of a T-shirt, the elastic of underpants, a love that seldom became something else and pushed beyond, spinning in circles of static affection and splitting in two by itself, withdrawing after a brief illusion and letting us return to being two very separate entities. I drank and swallowed and Pietro took my arm, I lay down, and he lay down, too, I turned onto one side and he turned first toward me, spoonlike, and then onto his opposite side, and finally we rubbed against each other, back to back, to rock ourselves and try to go to sleep again. Struggling to follow me, even sleepily, was his way of loving me, the way people can still love each other after ten years. At a certain point our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.

Sex is a language, and many words had been uttered between Pietro and me in the early days of our relationship, when I was running away from Sicily and from a family that was maimed and full of silences, and he welcomed me in Rome, becoming companion, parent, brother. So, along with the city, I found a new self, and he was there, always there, and that availability was moving. In those first months we took off our clothes as soon as we could and after having desired each other to exhaustion we were happy, even though one detail might have warned us that it wouldn’t last: we never made love twice, the first time satisfied us, and immediately we began to separate and get dressed. Everything we sought we managed to give each other in a minimum time that never expanded, after which we reestablished our singularity, the separateness that had also been our rule of attraction. But soon—too soon for a romance that claimed to be the romance of a lifetime—that separateness became an enemy. The body stopped being the place of communication. The sweetness was poured out in daily rituals, in dialogues and kindnesses, and even if we fought during the day we never really hurt each other: we lived each in the shadow of the other, each watching over the other with a care I’d never known; after desire ended we had developed a ritual for giving each other pleasure anyway, then, after a time, that exchange, too, became unusable, like an old dictionary.

The fault, I knew, was mine. It must have been I who closed myself off first, unaccustomed as I was to openness, to sharing.

But to Pietro, and only to him, I had told the story of my father and he hadn’t raised questions, he had accepted the anomaly. We had known each other for three weeks and neither of us was much over twenty, when on our first real date he showed up with a package: inside was a blue skater’s T-shirt and a diary with a hard cover. At that moment I saw in him the man I was waiting for. He didn’t know that as a girl I had skated for long hours, he didn’t know that I had written a lot about myself in various diaries hidden in drawers. And yet he knew.

So I confessed to him that my father had disappeared when I was thirteen. Not died, just disappeared into nothing, I continued, waiting for the question I feared: Didn’t you and your mother do anything to keep him?

But Pietro never asked that question. He asked nothing, listening attentively to the few sentences I was willing to concede: my father, a high school teacher, had left the house one morning and hadn’t returned. And then he changed the subject. He said that the work I was looking for at a secondary school would be wrong for me: the lives of others, of students, parents, and colleagues, would overwhelm me, and I would soon find myself enslaved and unhappy. He didn’t say that lives don’t repeat and that it didn’t make sense to follow my father’s, to become a teacher like him: he had put the emphasis on something else. The crowding in classrooms and halls wouldn’t give me any respite; I should write, instead, and put into my stories the pain that couldn’t go elsewhere.

Until that moment Pietro and I had always met on happy occasions, and thus I discovered that my eyes exposed that pain, and I was convinced that his capacity to read it was outside the ordinary. On that conviction I had based our life. Day by day I relied on him, his seriousness was a rock and, like all rocks, had walls that could be difficult, hostile, to climb. Sometimes I said to myself that I wouldn’t know how to make an appointment with the dentist by myself and wouldn’t pay bills or taxes if I didn’t know that I would put the receipts in the folders he had organized for the apartment we rented. Being together every day, making every decision together, knowing by heart the smell, the sex, the character of the other: that was marriage. The rest was a stormy, unknown sea, and there was no point in crossing it.

I felt my husband rubbing against my back for five, ten minutes and then he fell asleep again, while I stayed curled up toward the wall, hoping not to have to confront the water again; the night hid weapons for my defense, but I had already used them up. I was becoming invisible again, while if I drowned, if I died, I would have wanted Pietro to see me.

The counterpart of the darkest fear is an unexpected lightness: I wanted to make love as if we could devour each other, as in the early days. I turned and began to caress him impetuously, but from him came a sound that interrupted the rhythm of his breathing, while his body contracted defensively. We could touch each other and cradle each other, but the possibility of making love made us retreat like terrified animals: it would mean having not more intimacy but less, losing that little physical closeness that with difficulty we had gained. We knew each other too well to challenge our reticence to see each other naked, a view that allowed neither of us to let go, not because we didn’t find the body of the other beautiful or attractive but because we would no longer know what to say or how to say it, now that that unused dictionary was sleeping between us.

I also withdrew, onto my other side, and again turned my back to him. I took his hand and put it on mine near my belly button, brooding with my eyes open. I thought I was grateful to him for that advice ten years earlier. In my fake true stories I put part of my pain and the water that overflowed from the past, and I hoped that writing would be enough to save me, but then came a murmur, a disruptive voice suggesting that gratitude wasn’t enough to keep a marriage from drowning.

So in the insomnia that had no end, between my sweat, Pietro’s regular breathing, and fear of a shipwreck, I waited for a dawn that would never arrive. But everything arrives, sooner or later, destroying the people we were or think we are: at the first light of the sun I got up silently, kissed him on the lips, and went to the station, leaving him asleep.