Saradha’s Story

Venice. That’s where Luigi took her. That was where her youngest child was born. Where she herself was reborn, taking into her wide embrace more than the Italian ship’s captain. She had taken into her very being a whole alien culture and a civilization in her attempt to know herself as a woman. But to know it to its fullest she had to metamorphose into a different being, learn the cadences of a new language, change her tastes in food—here she drank much wine, Chianti, sweet muscats and lay with her lover in a room in one of those ancient Renaissance buildings, shutting out of her mind the past which had given her no role as an individual. She had been married like all the others after a formal proposal in which she had no say. She had brought her virginity with her, together with her dowry. Then she had escaped …. Luigi was her lover. She did not think of him as a husband. There had been no divorce. The passion that had been denied her flesh in that distant alliance that had wedded her to all the tradition and ritual of her inheritance was now realized to its fullest. Her body, her mind, her soul—all was now Venezia.

They lived in one of those buildings overlooking the Ponte Dei Sospiri with the gondolas passing beneath those high arched windows. She could cross those bridges on foot or sail in the gondolas—she knew every bridge, every canal, every church and palazzo through the long years she lived there. That entire panorama was hers to view. She, Luigi and the little girl, Lucia, would walk to the Facciata Chiesa S. Marco et Piccione where they would feed the pigeons. They would enter the great church of St. Marco with its enormous chandeliers and pillars and crosses. ‘Will God forgive me? But then what is sin? What sin have I committed? Luigi kneels and prays at the altars in churches. Does he regret anything? His passion for me … has he any feelings of guilt at having taken me away from my husband and my children? There are priests at the confessionals who listen to him. As for myself, there is no turning back. I cannot have regrets. Tradition had shackled me, I had to break away. I had to know before I died what it meant to step out of my prison and into freedom …’