A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Actually my French wasn’t even very good. Nor had my youth been especially “folle,” only idle and confused.

  In the morning I arrived at what would be my office: the ground floor of a small house surrounded by a garden. There was my friend, along with the girl with the red cheeks, seated in front of a calculator, and two typists. My friend had me sit at a table and handed me a sheet of paper that said, “typographic rules.” And thus I learned that perché and affinché had acute accents, but tè and caffè lacchè had grave accents. He then gave me a manuscript, a translation of Gösta Berling. I was to proofread it and put in the accent marks. As he bounced around the room like a ball, he informed me that I needn’t worry about not having a degree—our mutual boss could hardly scorn me on that account since he didn’t have one himself. I asked what my next assignment would be, after Gösta Berling, and was appalled to realize that he hadn’t any idea.

  I had such dread of falling into laziness that I threw myself into the revision and finished in three days. My friend proceeded to give me a copy of Lenin’s wife’s memoirs, in French. I hurriedly translated about thirty pages, at which point he said he had changed his mind, they wouldn’t be doing that book after all. He gave me a translation of Homo Ludens.

  One day, just at the entrance to the office, I found myself face to face with the publisher. Though I had known him for quite a while, we had barely exchanged more than two words. Now so much had happened since we had last been face to face that it was like meeting him for the first time. I felt as if he were at once a friend and a total stranger. And mingled with those feelings was the thought that he was now my boss, that is, someone who could turn me out of the office at any moment. He embraced me and blushed, because he was shy; he seemed pleased and not too amazed to find me working there, and said he looked forward to hearing my ideas and suggestions. Choked with emotion and timidity, I said perhaps they might translate and bring out Jeunesse sans Dieu. He didn’t know the book, so I hastily told him the story of the movie house and the falling tree. He was very busy and dashed off. I didn’t see him again over the next few days, but the girl with the red cheeks came to tell me that I had been hired full-time. She and I never spoke, but when we met in the corridor we smiled, linked by common memories and expectations of ringing bells and broccoli.

  One day I learned that we were moving to new offices. That was too bad, for I had grown fond of the office, especially of the mandarin orange tree outside my window. The new office was downtown and had huge rooms with rugs and armchairs. I chose a small room at the end of the hall, where I could be alone and could learn to work, for I was still obsessed by feelings of inadequacy. My friend also took refuge in a room of his own. Gradually the larger rooms filled up with new typists and other staff, who would pace feverishly back and forth across the rugs, dictating endless pages to the typists. I would overhear snatches in passing, but understood none of it. Or they would hold lengthy, mysterious meetings with visitors in the conference room. My friend said that he found all these new employees and new typists quite pointless. He found the rugs, the visitors and the meetings pointless as well. I grasped that the new people’s politics were different from his own. He seemed depressed and didn’t bounce anymore, but sat apart and inert at his desk, his face no longer crinkling up in smiles but sad and wan, like the moon. And seeing him grown so discouraged and limp, it suddenly struck me that he might be just like me and maybe even more so—sick with a boundless passivity.

  I felt very alone in that office. I never said a word to anyone, and I worried constantly about being found out: my vast ignorance and laziness, my absolute dearth of ideas. By the time I got around to asking about the rights to Jeunesse sans Dieu, I found they had already been bought by another firm. That was my only idea and it vanished into thin air. To guard against my laziness I worked furiously, dizzily, immersed in total isolation and utter silence. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder, all the while, how and if my work was connected to the intense and, to me, incomprehensible life swarming and filling the other rooms. I had a key made and went to the office even on Sundays.

  January, 1969

  my psychoanalysis

  I once resorted to psychoanalysis. It was the summer just after the war, a sweltering, dusty summer, and I was living in Rome. My analyst’s apartment was downtown. I saw him every day at three o’clock. He would let me in himself (he had a wife, but I never saw her). His office was dim and cool. Dr. B. was a tall, elderly man with a little crown of silver curls, a small gray mustache, and narrow, slightly hunched shoulders. His shirts, always immaculate, were unbuttoned at the collar. He had an ironic smile and a German accent. He wore a large brass ring with engraved initials, and his hands were white and delicate, his eyes ironic, his glasses rimmed with gold. He had me sit at a table and he sat opposite me. There was always a tall glass of water for me on the table, with an ice cube and a twist of lemon. At that time nobody in Rome had a refrigerator; if you wanted ice you had to order it from the local dairy and pound it to pieces with a hammer. How he managed to procure those smooth, clear ice cubes every day has remained a mystery. Maybe I should have asked him, but I never did. I felt that beyond the office and the little hall leading to it, the rest of the house was, of necessity, shrouded in mystery. The water and ice came from the kitchen, where perhaps the invisible wife had prepared it for me.

  The friend who had recommended Dr. B., and who was also seeing him herself, hadn’t told me much about him. She said he was Jewish, German, and a Jungian. The fact that he was a Jungian seemed a good sign to her, but to me was immaterial since I had confused notions about the difference between Jung and Freud. In fact one day I asked Dr. B. to explain this difference to me. He spun out an elaborate explanation and at some point I lost the thread and got distracted gazing at his brass ring, the little silver curls over his ears, and his wrinkled brow, which he wiped with a white linen handkerchief. I felt like I was in school, where I used to ask for explanations and then get lost thinking of other things.

  This feeling of being in school and in the presence of a teacher was one of my many errors in the course of the analysis. Dr. B. had told me I should write my dreams in a notebook, and so before going to see him I would sit down in a café and hurriedly scribble out my dreams, with the breathless anxiety of a student who has to hand in homework. I should have felt like a sick person with a doctor, but I didn’t feel sick, only full of obscure guilt and confusion. And he didn’t seem to be a real doctor, either. I would sometimes study him through the eyes of my parents, who were far away up north, and I imagined that they wouldn’t have liked him at all. He was nothing like the sort of people they associated with. They would have found his brass ring ridiculous and his curls frivolous, and they would have been suspicious of the peacock feathers and velvets decorating his office. Besides, my parents had the firmly rooted idea that analysts weren’t real doctors and at times could even be “shady characters.” In their judgment, that office would be the setting of foolishness and danger. The idea that I was doing something that would have alarmed my parents made the analysis both alluring and repugnant. I didn’t know at the time that Dr. B. was quite a well-known analyst and that influential people whom my parents respected also respected him and even knew him quite well. I thought he was obscure and totally unknown, someone my friend and I had accidentally come upon in the shadows.

  The moment I arrived I would start talking in a great rush, for I thought that was what he expected. I thought if I remained silent, he would remain silent too, and then my presence in the office would be totally meaningless. He would listen and smoke, using an ivory cigarette holder, his ironic, profoundly attentive gaze never faltering. I didn’t wonder then whether he was intelligent or stupid, but I realize now that the light of his intelligence shone acutely on me. It was his radiant intelligence that lit my way through that black summer.

  I loved talking with him. The word “love” may sound foolish, applied to analysis, which in itself is unlo
vable, bitter, and painful. And yet I never could see this painful aspect of analysis which others later spoke of. Possibly my analysis was flawed. Without a doubt it was flawed. Now that I recall my impetuous talking, I tend to think I couldn’t have been laboriously wrenching secrets out of my soul. Instead I was darting about chaotically, at random, on the trail of some remote point I hadn’t yet located. Always I had the feeling that the essential thing still remained to be uttered. I talked so much, yet I never succeeded in telling the whole truth about myself.

  It bothered me no end to think that I had to pay him. If my father had known, not only about my analysis but about all the money I was spending on Dr. B., he would have screamed to high heaven. Still, it wasn’t so much the idea of my father’s screaming that distressed me. It was the idea that I had to pay money for the attention Dr. B. devoted to my words. I was paying for his patience with me. (Although I knew I was the patient, I found him very patient with me.) I was paying for his irony and his smile, for the silence and dimness of his office, for the water and the ice; nothing was given for nothing, and this I found intolerable. I told him so, and he said it was to be expected. He always anticipated everything—I could never take him by surprise. Everything I ever told him about myself he had known for ages, because others had suffered and thought the same things. This was irritating, yet at the same time a great relief, for in my own private thoughts, I sometimes imagined I must be too weird and solitary to have any right to live.

  There was another thing, too, that struck me as absurd between me and Dr. B., and that was the unilateral nature of our relationship. The matter of money might make me angry, but this one-sidedness seemed to create a profound and irrevocable discomfort between us. I was obliged to talk about myself, but it would hardly have been appropriate for me to start asking questions about him in turn. I didn’t question him because at the moment it didn’t occur to me to do so, and also because I felt I had to be as discreet and circumspect as possible about his private life. But as I left his house I used to try to conjure up his wife, the other rooms of his apartment, his life outside of analysis. I felt that something crucial was excluded from our relationship, namely, mutual sympathy. Even the water he gave me each day was not intended for my thirst, but was part of a ritual established God knows where or by whom, and from which neither of us could escape. And this ritual allowed no space for compassion. I wasn’t supposed to find out anything about his thoughts or his life. And even if he, scrutinizing my soul and my life, might have felt some compassion, it was the sort of one-sided compassion that receives nothing in return but money, and so cannot in any way resemble true compassion, which always includes the possibility of mutual commitment and response. True, we were patient and doctor. But my illness, if it existed, was an illness of the soul; the words that passed between us every day were words about my soul, and it seemed to me that such a relationship could not do without reciprocal friendship and sympathy. And still I felt that sympathy and friendship were inadmissible in that office, and that even if a pale ghost of them should appear, it would be only fitting to banish it from our dialogue.

  Once he was offended by me, which I found comical. I had met a girl I knew on the street, who was also seeing him (little by little I discovered that lots of people I knew were seeing him). This girl told me that as a writer I was making a mistake undergoing analysis, because though it would heal my spirit, it would kill off every creative faculty. I told this to Dr. B. and he became very red and angry. I had never seen him angry—all I had ever seen in his gaze were the irony and the smile. Pounding his fine white-ringed hand on the table, he told me that it was untrue and the girl was a fool. If I were being analyzed by a Freudian, he said, I might possibly lose the desire to write, but since he was a Jungian this would not happen. Indeed I would write better books if I came to know myself better. He spun out an elaborate explanation of the difference between Jung and Freud. I lost the thread and got distracted, and to this day I don’t exactly know what is the real difference between Jung and Freud.

  One day I told him that I could never manage to fold blankets symmetrically, which gave me a feeling of inferiority. He left the office for a moment and returned with a blanket, which he folded, holding it under his chin. He wanted me to try to fold it too. I did, and to be obliging I said that I had mastered it, but it wasn’t true, because even now I find it difficult to fold blankets evenly.

  One night I dreamed that my daughter was drowning and I was saving her. It was a very colorful dream, full of precise details: the lake or sea was a violent blue, and my mother was on the shore wearing a big straw hat. Dr. B. said that in the dream my mother represented my past femininity and my daughter my future femininity. I had always accepted his explanations of my dreams, but this time I rebelled and said that surely dreams didn’t always have to be symbolic: I had really dreamed about my daughter and my mother and they didn’t symbolize anything at all. I simply missed them, especially my daughter, whom I hadn’t seen in months. I think I showed some impatience in contradicting him. That may have been the first sign that my involvement in psychoanalysis was wavering and that I needed to invest my energies elsewhere.

  We began to have disputes during the sessions, because I felt I ought to leave Rome and go back north. I thought my children would be better off in Turin where my parents lived and where we could have a home. According to Dr. B. I was mistaken: I should get myself settled in Rome with the children. I outlined all the problems of setting up house in Rome, but he shrugged his shoulders and said I was getting worked up over nothing and not facing my responsibilities. He said I was creating false obligations. Our first real disagreement arose over these true and false obligations. Meanwhile the weather turned cool, and one day I found him wearing a shirt buttoned to the neck and a little bowtie. That bowtie on his austere Jewish body struck me as inane, the most inane sign of frivolity. I didn’t even bother to tell him, so pointless had my relationship with him become. I abruptly quit going to him and sent the last payment along with a brief note. I’m sure he was not the least bit surprised and had anticipated it all. I left for Turin and never saw Dr. B. again.

  In Turin over the next few months, I would occasionally wake up at night with some nagging notion which might have been useful in analysis and which I had neglected to bring up. I even spoke to myself with a German accent once in a while. Years passed. When I chanced to think of my analysis, it was always as one of the numerous things I had started and not finished because of my disorganization, ineptitude, and confusion. Much later, I returned to Rome. I was living right near Dr. B.’s office and knew he was still there; a couple of times it occurred to me to drop in and say hello. But our relations had grown from such a peculiar root that an ordinary visit wouldn’t have made any sense. I felt that the old ritual would immediately begin all over again—the table, the glass of water, the smile. I couldn’t bring him friendship, I could only bring him the burden of my neuroses. I hadn’t freed myself of my neuroses; I had simply learned to tolerate them, or in the end, had forgotten them. Then one day I heard that Dr. B. was dead. That was when I regretted never having seen him again. If there is a place where the dead meet, surely I shall see Dr. B. there: our talk will be simple, heedless of analysis and neurosis, and maybe even cheerful, tranquil, and flawless.

  March, 1969

  the white mustache

  When I was eleven years old I learned that I would have to walk to school all by myself. I was plunged into depression by the news, but didn’t say a word about it and hid my desolation with a broad, fake smile; I had lately developed the habit of keeping silent and smiling whenever I felt ashamed of myself.

  I had never gone out alone and had never gone to school, having completed the elementary grades at home. Teachers came to give me my lessons, teachers my mother would frequently replace because I used to fall asleep: she was always hoping to find one who could keep me awake. The most recent was a young woman with a felt hat. When after a long hesitation I
came up with the right answer, she would say only, “Te deum.” She said it so fast that it sounded like “tedem,” and for a long time I couldn’t make out what this word “tedem,” whispered through her teeth, might mean. In any event, thanks to Miss Tedem I passed the exams for the elementary school diploma.

  My mother informed me that I was now enrolled at the “ginasio,” or junior high school. She pronounced “ginnasio” wrong, with only one “n.” The “ginasio” was where I had taken my exams, and as it was very near my house I would have to go there and return alone, because I had to stop being what I was, namely, “a hopeless case.”

  I was a “hopeless case” in various ways. I couldn’t dress myself or lace my shoes; I couldn’t make my bed or light the gas; I couldn’t knit, though the knitting needles had been placed in my hands many times; moreover I was very sloppy and left my things scattered around as if, my mother would say, we had “twenty servants.” Meanwhile other girls my age could do laundry, iron, and cook entire meals.

  I didn’t think that going to school by myself could cure me, at this point, of being “a hopeless case.” I would be a hopeless case forever. I’d heard my father declare that I would be a hopeless case forever, not through any fault of my own but because my mother had brought me up all wrong and spoiled me. I too believed it was my mother’s fault and not mine, but this was no consolation for not being like those clever, enviable girls who ironed and mended sheets, handled soap and money, locked and unlocked their front doors and took the trolley by themselves. We were and would remain worlds apart. Also, I had no specific talents: I wasn’t athletic, I wasn’t studious, I wasn’t anything. And though I had known this for some time, having heard it repeated often enough at home, it suddenly felt like a terrible misfortune.