A Farewell to Arms

This is the paper I am handing in at 3:20. I edited it to post.

A Farewell to Arms Diary
13 June 2006

"I don't enjoy being a mother". Her words grated on me. It was late and I was sitting with my feet up underneath me on the living room couch. Ana was sitting on the opposite end. It was very hot. We were both nursing half-empty glasses of vinegary wine and enjoying the coolness of the night air coming in through the screen door. The children were upstairs asleep where I had tucked them in. They liked me to bring them to bed. Alessandra would climb on my back as we went up the ceramic stairs and I'd hum to her going up and then sing a lullaby in English as I helped her into her pajamas. Massy, her brother, gave me much trouble during the day but at night he was sweet. Tonight, he wanted to sing to me. I sat him on my lap and he wrapped his pale arms around my neck and rubbed his cheek against mine as he sang me a song I had been teaching him. He had very pretty blue eyes and I wished he didn't have a temper. His childish Italian accent made me smile and soon he was asleep, too. I forgave him silently for what he had done that afternoon and went downstairs. Ana and I liked to stay up late and speak American English. She grew up between Texas and Italy. She was a military child. Her mother was from Brindisi and her father a state like Indiana or Nebraska. She married an white-haired Italian man from the north who was sixteen years her senior and she was a career woman at heart. She loved her job. Once I visited the building where she worked. It was an old building with high arches and a courtyard with no fountain. In ten minutes you could walk to Piazza Navona. In twenty minutes you could be at the Vatican listening to the pope give a Wednesday mass. It was a lovely city and I understood why she was fond of it. We got along well and she paid me well to look after her children so that she didn't have to be bothered.

Tonight I was feeling less friendly toward Ana. Massy had scared me that afternoon. He had been difficult all morning so I wouldn't allow him to have an ice-pop after lunch. He refused to eat his lunch and demanded his cherry ice-pop. His pale, freckled face was flustered a rosy red as he ran over to the kitchen sink and pulled out a thick glass cup. He pulled it back like a pitcher winding up for a fastball. He could have thrown it. I was standing directly in front of him. We both froze. When I regained my composure I pried the glass from his clenched little fist, chided him, and sat him on the couch with a warning to stay put so I could clean up the kitchen and think of how to handle the situation. When Ana and her husband came home I told them what had happened. Massy was punished and as he was being punished I heard him calling out "Mamina! Mamina!". Ana and I were cleaning off the dinner table at the time. She heard it too. Mamina means "little mother" in Italian. He was calling for me.

I had been living with the Valitutto family since the beginning of summer and had plans to leave in mid-August. I spent twelve full hours a day caring for the children while Ana and her husband worked. It was obvious that the children were becoming attached to me. I never knew if it bothered Ana. Her husband was happy about the kids; however, I think he enjoyed being a father more than he enjoyed having children. He spoke about their futures often but couldn't attend the mostra at their school, the end-of-year event where parents go to oogle over their children's spelling tests and crayola artwork. I went. Ana was always very tired after work and hardly spoke about them at all. Then that evening, she said it and I understood. "I never wanted to have children" she said, "but when I got married it seemed like the right thing to do. I don't enjoy being a mother." She went on to explain how she didn't feel "cut out" for motherhood and I thought of when I was fourteen and working at an ice-cream parlor and my boss pulled me aside and said "I don't think you're cut out for ice cream" and fired me. Maybe I wasn't cut out for ice cream. Are some women not "cut out" to be mothers? I thought she was very cold and thought of Alessandra on my back and Massy singing and the stressful but rewarding days. You are lucky to be a mother, I thought. If you didn't want to be a mother then why did you have children?

Perhaps I was too harsh in my judgement of Ana. Just because I have a positive idea of motherhood doesn't mean everyone has to feel the same. Her feelings were legitimate. She loved her career and was happy in her marriage. She had no desire to have children. The social and familial pressure was against her. She gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, and she felt she had done her duty as a wife and human being and that her responsibility ended there. Now she could return to her career and hire girls like me to move in and become surrogate parents to her attention-starved children for months at a time. Alessandra cried when they left me at the airport. I cried, myself, as I wondered to how many other mamina's she would have to say good-bye as she grew up.

Why am I telling this story? I am trying to understand Catherine and why she makes comments such as "Life would be much simpler" if she got hit in the stomach with an oar or why she refers to her unborn child as "a little brat". These statements leave me with the same cold feeling that Ana's did. How could these women not want children? Isn't motherhood wonderful?

I think we are missing a point. Having a child is no small life change. Catherine doesn't want the child but she doesn't have a choice. She isn't ready to be a mother. Maybe she never will be. Is there something wrong with that? Should we be angry with Catherine for her detachment? I try not to be. I imagine myself in love during wartime and that love being new. I would not be happy with an unplanned pregnancy. I would feel cheated out of time alone with my love and would feel trapped, as Henry feels, "biologically". I would be terrified. I'd worry about my love leaving me. I would worry about losing the freedom to travel where and when I wanted. I would worry about my body changing. Change is hard. I wonder if I don't see the fear behind Catherine's dark humor, the knowledge that life will never be the same and that her relationship with Frederick will never be the same.

Let us imagine the child had lived. I could see him at five years old as Massy, heavy glass in hand, screaming for attention. I could see him with his nurse praising him in a language he barely understood for the wonderful drawing he made at school as he stared blankly at the classroom door, wondering why Ma or Pop didn't walk through. I could imagine him with an endless line of loving nurses, caring for him, leaving one by one, breaking his heart over and over again. These images sadden me. I'm secretly (but not entirely) glad that the novel ended the way it did. I don't think Catherine and Frederick would have made good parents.
So why are we so hard on Cat and Frederick for not wanting this responsibility? Yes! Frederick, too. For the strangulated character we've pegged him as, his conduct towards Catherine is admirable. He loved her. He could have abandoned her when he went back to the front and therefore been free of the burden of caring for a child. He didn't. He wanted to be with her in the hospital room and only left because she made him. He tells her she is beautiful when she becomes insecure about her body and compares herself to a flour barrel. I think Professor Berman should ask the women in the class if they'd date Frederick Henry. I would. I envy his extreme devotion to Catherine.

I felt sad and faintly sick at the end of the novel when Catherine died. I didn't feel as bad when I found out the baby died. Just as Catherine and Frederick don't, I don't become attached to the unborn child that is rarely mentioned. I felt worse for Frederick when Catherine died. Reading the novel, I had become invested in their love and so felt its loss at the end. In class we discussed how their love was unhealthy, how giving up your identity is bad. I felt guilty as I thought, isn't that what love is? Love is sacrifice and compromise and losing yourself. I recall one night I was lying in bed next to my then-love and as we lie there wrapped up in each other I remember feeling a pulling inside. It hurt but the pain wasn't physical and it was familiar. I had felt it before and I knew it was because I was falling for him. It was more like an ache that existed somewhere you couldn't point to and I asked him, "Why does it hurt so much?". He understood. "Because you are giving up your self. It always hurts when you lose your self." He was right. For me, love has always been that way, about letting go of the self. It's like mourning the death of a self to which you can never go back. It hurts. I think Frederick felt that, too. Maybe he felt it during those nights, lying alone, when he went back to the front. Maybe he felt it lying in bed next to her. Without Catherine he had nothing; when she was gone there was nothing. He was happy with her. I don't know if Frederick was depressed. I just know that when he is with Catherine he sleeps well and says he is happy. At the end, I know he will never love again. When she dies, he dies. The novel ends and there is nothing left.

Maybe Hemingway couldn't imagine love and children in the same story. However, he could imagine love. That is enough. It is okay that he wasn't fond of children. Maybe Hemingway isn't "cut out" for fatherhood. I just enjoy the novel for what it represents for me: love. Love isn't perfect and doesn't always end prettily. Many times it ends terribly. When Catherine dies, the end becomes perfect. The love goes from being mortal and subject to the stresses of life, war, and children, to being immortal. We can assume that Frederick would have loved Catherine forever. We don't need to worry about whether they would have fought and parted, or whether the child would have ruined their relationship. This novel became for me the ending of The Sun Also Rises. When I finished The Sun Also Rises I felt transported back to the beginning of the novel, with Brett and Jake in the taxi and in each others arms. I got the feeling that it would go on forever in that way, in an endless loop. In A Farewell To Arms I see Jake and Brett's love reincarnated in Frederick and Catherine's love, with one exception. This time, the love can be consummated. When I closed the book last night I felt empty and knew that there was nothing left to be written; there was no more story to tell. I felt the nada.