So fragmented is the transmission, the way things are handed down, that the institute of the family must be refounded each time from scratch, but not from zero, because it will inevitably make use of the legacy of the previous generations, inheriting from them not the best traditions but only the best-preserved ones, or those that are least difficult to adapt to the changed circumstances of the present day. If you’re moving into a smaller house, you move in the more modest pieces of furniture. You don’t choose your inheritance, but you can pick and choose among the things that you inherit.
. . . THEY HAD HALF PRESERVED and half forgotten the old way of life, and what they had preserved they hadn’t necessarily understood. It is easier, in fact, to understand what you abandon and you betray than it is to understand what you remain faithful to: faithfulness is always blind, you perform acts and rituals whose meaning you’ve long since lost track of, whose source has run dry, or the rope to the bucket has been lost down the well, but you certainly can’t call everything into question and start over from scratch. You receive the rule and you don’t argue about it, you understand it only once you’ve broken it. When you obey, you never understand exactly what it is you’re obeying, much less why. The whys are assigned in hindsight, as a consolation prize, a pat on the cheek of the child who gave the correct answer.
THE FAMILY IS BY DEFINITION the place of compromises, since it is, first and foremost, a territory of exchange and interaction among different sexes and ages.
For some time now, an absolutely strict upbringing has been unthinkable, but the thought is almost never abandoned entirely. In order to be able to conceive of the thing, you have to be able to think of it as inconceivable. Parents are sometimes tempted by the idea of a counterreformation, they threaten to go back in time, decades if not centuries, restoring chastisements, very stern reprimands, etc.
Screen and filter of disturbing experiences, point of encounter with the real, place where the benefits received are reciprocated, a compensation chamber to transition from one age to another, crossroads between sexes and generations, the family is also a warehouse for all the family models from the past: each one recapitulates all the families of all time, both in handing down and roundly reviling their customs. The models of bygone eras supply the contemporary family with limbs and organs: a bourgeois head, a romantic heart, a medieval stomach all animate a body that walks on the legs of archaic respect for one’s parents. Those legs often wobble.
The ethico-practical collage includes an array of rules, from how to sit at the table, to how you appear in public, to the acceptable or most effective ways of advancing your career, to how many times a day you should wash your hands or brush your teeth, to exactly how you should tear off and fold the toilet paper before using it to wipe your ass, to the political party you should vote for, what god to pray to and which to make fun of. Some of them are rules dictated by frequency, others by a moral imperative that may be applied a couple of times in your whole life or else, in concrete terms, never. It turns out that the former are more important than the latter, because they’re put into practice on a daily basis—the precept “Thou shalt not kill,” for instance, is rarely needed, while “Thou shalt chew thoroughly before swallowing” often is.
Equally obligatory are those things that are usually done and those that entail a punishment if they are not done. Which is followed by the chapter of chastisements. Of punishments. It’s already hard to establish which ones are fair, much less implement them.
THE DECLINE OF FAMILY AUTHORITY, which had certainly begun well before the time in which this story is set, but which had just then begun to become obvious, did not by any means produce more autonomous and independent people. If before, minors were subjected to the laws laid down by their parents, afterward they found themselves forced to obey the certainly no-less-ironbound laws of the market, of fashion, the suffocating obligations of belonging to their generation and social sharing. Capillary laws that penetrate every aspect of life and even dictate the way you breathe, the way you lick an ice cream cone or take a picture, the things you must and the things you absolutely, at all costs, must not do. Young people are anything but free, they move through an air that is solid, so dense is it with prescriptions. By eluding parental control, at least in part, they’ve handed themselves over entirely to community control. Before they had one master and now they have many, as deviously authoritarian as the one master was openly authoritarian. Especially in Italy: where the idealization of the institution of the family was so pervasive and detached from reality as to produce the paradoxical effect whereby the family, considered invincible, could be abandoned in all tranquillity to its fate . . . The decline in fact is all the more catastrophic when it occurs to the detriment of something that had been deemed all-powerful and is still considered as such: for a certain period its ghost hovers on the stage, and that is the moment of the gravest misunderstandings, when the supporters deny its unmistakable deterioration and the protesters become increasingly vociferous even as the target of their outrage dwindles and wanes.
What runs along this ridgeline is the battle between tradition and innovation in the field of ethics; a field in which the arguments themselves count less than who proffers them: if I absolutely have to say that someone is right, if I am going to pay heed to the voice of an authority in the realm of morality, what do you think, am I better off agreeing with the pope or Sabrina Ferilli?
Who will wander farthest from the truth? Who offers the most persuasive testimonial?
Who is most authoritative? Who could I trust?
When I was a boy, who were the modern parents and what it did mean to be one? A good question.
AND NOW WE COME to the bourgeois family that this book is about: challenged ideologically or devastated practically speaking, loosened, expanded, decimated demographically, deprived of its canonical appendages (servants, summer holidays, socializing with visiting extended family, inititiation ceremonies).
Certainly this seems at first glance to be a venue of conservation rather than one of renewal. Suffice it to think of the implacable monotony upon which the routines of Sunday hinge and pivot.
Something that becomes a law by the simple fact that it is replicated, invariably unchanging. The doubt arises that rules, and I mean all of them, literally all rules, even the wisest and most sacrosanct rules, consist of nothing more than those things that we lack the strength or the imagination to change. Encrusted sediments of habits, such as drinking our espresso without sugar, or leaving the sheet folded over the top of the blankets in a single width, exactly a hand’s width, on a precise line with the pillow. There isn’t a single family on earth that doesn’t complain, for example, about the unchanging sameness of the meals, “No, but really, we always eat the same stuff!” (that complaint itself is a ritual that can be counted on to repeat, unvarying . . . just the same as the way we once used to cross ourselves before each meal), and frequently the first to complain about it are the very same women who established that menu over time with their own grocery shopping and a well-tested but not limitless ability to cook it. In other words, the “house specialties.” Let’s say, meat loaf. Stuffed zucchini. Baked tomato with rice. Spaghetti with butter and parmesan cheese. Vegetable casseroles soaked in béchamel sauce. Steak pizzaiola. Potato timbale. Baked pasta. Consummate skill, sheer boredom, lack of time, relying on a sure thing, “I don’t want to have to think about it,” depression—it all dissolves into a profound indifference that might itself be the solution. The frenzy for change can ruin lives every bit as much as the rat race of routine, the humdrum existence, the dull snore, the tra-la-la. Even if magazines and TV shows overflow with glorious recipes in which every ingredient is photographed in the most sexual manner imaginable, thighs and breasts, musky grottoes damp with liqueur, glistening mucus and quivering cones, glazes and custards—at home you almost always wind up eating pasta with meat sauce, a can of peeled tomatoes, an onion, and you’re done.
FOR INSTANCE, I cl
early remember dinners that consisted of a Galbanino cheese. It loomed on a platter in the middle of the table. Solitary. It stood, in fact, alone. Its oblong shape, like that of a large yellow salami, and the wax crust that encased the Galbanino, were for many years, until the attainment of the age of reason, and beyond, the only physical context with which I associate the noun “cheese.” Unmistakable flavor and shape. The modest alternative that the Galbanino offered was the choice of whether to peel off the wax casing for a certain distance, or else slice it whole for the fun of then peeling off the wax rings one by one. The first approach might be the more civilized one, but certainly less gratifying. In any case, at the end you had the heel of the Galbanino, which you could pop whole into your mouth.
Round slices of Galbanino, fresh from the refrigerator, were the communion wafers of my childhood and adolescence.
The groceries were ordered over the phone by the maid, in a particular language. It was already a miracle that she and the deli man could understand each other at all. She used words that had only the faintest resemblance to the words usually used in Italian.
“Cripiera” meant “groviera,” or Gruyère.
“Salamelle de iusti” were “wurstel,” or frankfurters.
“Chittà” stood for Kitekat for cats; but it also meant Tic Tac mints.
Maybe that was why Galbanino was always present, there was no debate or misunderstanding about its name, at least. There was no possible error and so, bring on the Galbanino, for years and years.
And when she had to pick up the phone and order sunflower seeds for the hamster, in Italian, criceto, she referred to it as the “griscile.”
“. . . Da magna’ pel griscile.”
THE FAMILY SETTING has the character of a container, a warehouse in which objects and experiences are stored, memorable phrases and photographs, all those things that pop up when you move house, stirring deep emotions, annoyance, regret, and astonishment at the unbelievable and largely useless baggage that we haul along behind us over time. The motto, “Never throw anything away”: carved marble fruit covered by a glass bell. And life observed in transparency.
What we preserve in particular is inequality, and where inequality is lost, once parity has been attained, the family ends and dissolves like a successful game of solitaire, where each and every card goes back to its place and the king at that point counts every bit as much as the jack or the two. The most conservative of us all, in any case, are children, opposed on general principle to any changes. It’s extraordinary how attached they can be to the family home, or the vacation house, or certain objects that, when they become adults, they’ll be all too eager to get rid of.
IT IS THE FAMILY that secretes the adhesive capable of joining together the discontinuities of life; it provides identity and succor; it merges past and future with the generations; it transcends the individual. Its metabolism is the transformation of the unfamiliar into the familiar. That which is experienced outside of the home is relived, processed, and allowed to decant. Just as you prepare food, cleaning dicing and cooking it and then serving it on a plate, the same happens for everything else. When you make fun of a friend because at age forty he still “goes to his mother’s for lunch,” you aren’t considering how profound and grateful a thing it is to entrust yourself to someone who is willing to take on the task of feeding us. There seems to be no appreciation of the gratitude that we should always and invariably feel toward anyone who makes us a meal, and shops transports peels dices slices fries sauces and garnishes. To say nothing of the catabolic phase, the clearing up, the destruction of the leftovers, washing up . . .
DOMESTIC MORALITY is the very essence of the family, there is no way to describe family life other than through the rules that punctuate it. Stereotypes, rituals, formulas, locutions, interjections, detailed lists of things that ought to be done or ought not to be done, do’s and don’ts, threats, sermons, sanctions. Even the proper place to put things, pliers, passports, knee pads, talcum powder, “In the usual place . . .,” “In the third drawer from the top . . .,” “. . . Certainly, unless someone’s taken it and left it somewhere it doesn’t belong . . .!” The mystical principle upon which a family is founded is nothing more than a certain custom, a way of doing things, people venerate the way people do things (all things considered, negligible details) as if they dated back thousands of years, and the fundamental offset is the fact that they really don’t. These family customs are balanced precariously on nothing, they are formed and then they are forgotten, but for the brief instant in which they apply, they appear to be extremely rigorous, inappellable, for those who dictate them and those who respect them. To put on makeup and brush your hair before going out, always, no matter what (the way my grandmother did). A kiss under the mistletoe, the little mouse that brings a coin in exchange for the baby tooth in the box under the pillow. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, much less, and far more important, their property. Always give your guests clean towels. Morality as a domestic art is, in fact, an invention—a bourgeois contrivance, something that came in handy—the defenseless mollusk of the conscience that finally found a hard shell it could scoot its flaccid body into. The bourgeois family, entirely deboned, invertebrate, is able to hold itself erect thanks to this exoskeleton, and secrete an ever-flowing gluey stream of rules to strengthen it, endowing it with a rigid, solid configuration, at least in appearance, and a renewed justification. To expect moral reasonings and demeanors from the aristocracy or from the plebs is a sheer waste of time. That is why they have practically gone extinct, and meanwhile the shelled mollusk has become universal. It has spread over the face of the earth and it now rules unopposed.
A WOMAN I WORK WITH, laughing in embarrassment, told me something that she’d been meaning to confess for some time, namely that at her house the cash was hidden between the pages of one of my books. My book about prison. Like in a safe, the cash is concealed in those pages: and when she needs money, to give some to her children, for example, she’ll go to the bookshelf, open the book, and get the cash. I keep my money in an anthology of German Romantic poets, but as soon as this book is published, I’ll change my hiding place. In my parents’ home, instead, the cash was hidden in Trevelyan’s History of England, so in response to the question: “Mamma, can I have two thousand lire?” the answer was: “Get it yourself.”
“Where?”
“In England.”
For brevity’s sake, England was our family’s bank.
THE ONLY THING A FAMILY can’t protect itself against is itself. When within it the unfamiliar manifests itself.
2
THE FAMILY WAS BORN in the groove of abandonment. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother” (Genesis 2:24). In order to form a new family, members must be subtracted from two already existing families (which are thinned out, dismantled . . .). More than originating under the sign of a new union, therefore, the new nuclear family is developed under the sign of subtraction, the symbolic space, and often the actual concrete space as well, is obtained by cutting it out of older nuclear families that are, as often as not, better formed.
THE UNDERLYING PARADOX of the family is that it originates from sexuality but is destined to become an institution. It springs from a seething desire that brings together but, at the same time, destroys, burns, consumes, erodes, so that in the end the marriage is charred, or the bride and groom are, or just one of them. Perhaps out of these ashes, from the gray and now-sterile panorama of the morning after the blaze, a further cycle of cohabitation can emerge, or the preceding one can be extended in the burnt cradle of love. What gives origin to cohesion can also undermine that pact and make it crumble, either with its dissolution or else with its excessive and scandalous duration. A husband who still loves his wife twenty years later is almost a suspicious figure, like the Japanese soldier who wanders through the jungles of a desert island, twenty years after the war is over.
The one who first f
ails to understand him is his wife . . .
And so love is at the same time the promoter and the saboteur of modern marriage. Incompatible with each other are the visions that call love necessary to marriage and claim durability as its principal objective.
Like in an opera, the theme of sentiment is emphasized. That which by its very nature is intolerant of all bonds has been turned into a single and unique bond. “Do you love him? Do you really love him? Then marry him!”
Procreation would be the one sure way of disarming and defusing sexuality by giving it an objective, an end. A sexuality that is not procreative by principle allows the destructive components of eros to dominate. The full deployment of sexuality leads to limits beyond which there is nothing but its own nullification. The erotic potential has a vast array of implementations, which can by equal rights claim to form part of a single horizon that ranges from mere promiscuity to platonic love, from rape to bringing children into the world, from incest to masturbation to becoming mothers or grandmothers with grandchildren on your knee and bedtime fairy tales—all of them phenomena belonging to the same universe. Forget about S&M games: the most perverse game of them all, but at the same time the only one that conducts its practitioners to a subsequent stage, is procreation. Fertilization-conception-pregnancy-birth, that is the chain of events that radically transforms individuals, and shelters us from one form of uneasiness (engendering another . . .) that lovers perceive even in the throes of their intercourse, as if they are somehow aware of the destructive element that lies in the depths of the amorous impulse, and were hoping to find a remedy for it.
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