[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_53

Envy, a sad passion, Elena Pulcini, 2011

One day, an elderly lady knocked on a family's door to tell them that the child they were expecting had been cursed and would have a life of extreme suffering.

It seems like the beginning of an Andersen fairy tale, but it is the story of my coming into this world: I am the cursed kid in the belly.

My mother met my father at her ex-boyfriend's funeral. I know, sometimes fate is creepy. Years later, when my parents came out as engaged, the mother of the deceased began to think that my mother had had an affair with my father while her son was still alive. So her family started a hellish crusade against my mother (I have received stories of smashed windows and destroyed cars, not to mention all the verbal abuses that usually follow situations in which there is a “sinful” woman). Here, I want to point out that no one got angry with my father, who, by the way, was the dead man's cousin.

At the end of this escalation of blind violence, the ex-boyfriend's mother decides on the most refined, cruel action: the curse of the innocent unborn child. I imagine she must have been a great fan of stories from the Old Testament.

“I went to see powerful people who live in the mountains,” the old woman began to tell my mother the day she knocked on her door, not to offer an olive branch but to play the last tricks up her sleeve. I have heard this story so many times that I almost feel like I have witnessed it: “And I cursed the daughter you carry in your womb so that she will have no peace. She will suffer terribly, and you will be unable to do anything to help her. Her fate is sealed for her 30th birthday."

The oracles of Delphi and Pythia would not have had much to teach.

Everyone interpreted the curse as my violent death at the age of 30; no one took into consideration that in the nineties, curses were a bit old-fashioned, and above all, no one decided to denounce those who were people in need of help. Besides the fact that I'm over 30 and still alive, what's interesting here is the reason for the curse: the older woman said she couldn't bear to see my mother happy when she was so unhappy. Thistragicomic situation was not built on a fascinating and terrible desire for revenge but banal envy.

The theme of envy remained very strong within my family. Envy was feared, and women used to protect themselves from its evil by wearing eye-shaped amulets or practicing magical rituals. For example, I spent endless hours of childhood carrying a plate on my head containing oil and water. Depending on the oil's form, it was possible to understand if the curse had eased or worsened, like checking the amount of pus in a pimple.

Elena Pulcini, in her precious work on envy, explains very well the mechanisms of this feeling, which she calls "democratic passion." Envy is possible only between peers in a democratic context, leading to the belief that everyone is equal: if we are all the same, it is unfair that someone has something more than me. For instance, an office employee does not envy the agency owner they work for because they are too distant. Theyenvy a colleague who, having no children, can save more money and buy a more excellent car than theirs. What is fascinating about Pulcini's essay is that she highlights how envy is attributed, especially to women. For the philosopher, women, being relegated to the home and unable to deal with different worlds, ended up looking at each other, considering themselves all on the same level, and thus becoming the only recipients of all those passions that could not be expressed. For Pulcini, women's space was the place of "oblique passions," born and consumed in the shadow of the four domestic walls. And, perhaps, within those four walls, they found their way of resolving themselves between one magical ritual and another. For the female world, bound for millennia to domestic imprisonment and civil invisibility, magic has long represented something neither law nor religion could provide: a meta-space without abstract rules, where everything could be resolved with a clear and effective practice. And, I add, where women could finally have agency, doing harm or protecting themself from it.

It is interesting to note how believing prophecies can make them come true: the curse I received was, in a certain sense, successful.

I had a difficult life—not tragic, but theatrical and far from my family's understanding. My fate was indeed"sealed" around 30, but not in the way the old witch had hoped for or how my family had interpreted it.

At thirty, I met the person I love, with whom I was able to rebuild my entire life, leaving behind many sufferings and all the curses.