A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  “Hello! This is Commander Piave! When are you coming to see my apartment in Piazza della Balduina? It’s so fantastic! There’s an intercom! The doorman lets you know your husband is on his way, you throw the spaghetti in the pot, he puts the car in the garage, rides up in the elevator, and lunch is on the table! There’s a black alabaster column in the bathroom with mosaics of fish. All the windowsills are onyx! All you have to do is call, you’ll have tea with my wife, I’ll come and take you right there, you can rest a while on the belvedere, what a great view of Rome, the whole panorama, we’ll have a drink, I’ll drive you back in no time at all! I have a Spider!”

  October, 1965

  clueless travelers

  There are people who know how to travel, and others who don’t. There are people for whom the slightest trip, or prospect of a trip, means anxiety and fatigue, an exhausting project. For others, it’s as simple as blowing their nose.

  Not that those who can’t travel may not find some subtle pleasure in their rare trips, but it is a pleasure so blanketed in mist that they don’t even notice it; only later, in retrospect, do they glimpse its shadow. Nor is it a pleasure that springs from discovering or having discovered new places; these clumsy travelers are sedentary creatures who don’t feel any genuine, tranquil curiosity about new places. What they seek from a new place is solely the opportunity to live there as though it might be forever, to transform the new place into a permanent abode. The pleasure of traveling, for them, consists simply of the pungent, dizzying sensation of imagining their life taking place somewhere other than its usual setting.

  It is hard to enumerate the anxieties of those who don’t know how to travel, anxieties that keep them in a state of alarm for days on end, and come swooping down at the moment of departure. First of all, they’re afraid of missing the train or the plane—a fear they find strange, since it is in direct contrast to their deep desire, which is to stay at home. Then, they’re afraid of getting on the wrong train or plane and ending up God knows where; of having left behind some essential item; of having brought the wrong clothes and packed the suitcases all wrong; of having locked the suitcases and lost the key. Finally, they’re afraid the suitcases will get lost. Recalling what was in them, they’re surprised to be fearing their loss, since the contents seem nothing but a wretched jumble of wrong choices.

  In a flash of lucidity, they realize that all their fears are merely clouds gathering in a sky emptied of thought. They have in fact suddenly lost every faculty of coherent thought. They don’t remember what on earth might have driven them to go away, yet they no longer wonder why they’re going, since by this point they are incapable of posing sensible questions or addressing themselves in a human tongue. Their head holds nothing but a clutter of chaotic words—advertising slogans and the refrains of songs that echo insistently in a mental vacuum, whirling and bouncing around mockingly in the void.

  Once they arrive in the foreign city, these clueless travelers take refuge in a hotel, this hotel signifying not a point from which to set out and see the city, but truly a refuge in which to hide and cower, the way cats or mice cower under a sofa. The hotel room, for them, is no simple hotel room, temporary and of no intrinsic interest, but a real residence, at once reassuring and hostile, protective and repugnant. Like a stepmother’s lap, it is loveless—yet all the same it provides the only warmth life can offer. They pass long hours there, unable to tear themselves away. As if poised at the edge of an abyss, they gaze down with a fascinated dread at the hotel courtyards, gloomy and dark as wells, with snaking black iron stairs and gutter pipes. They are quite aware that beyond those courtyards lies the lovely city, graced by boulevards, trees, museums, and theaters, the city which others in their place would be rushing out to explore without wasting a single instant. They’re quite aware of that, and yet they can’t manage to tear themselves away from their bleak contemplation of those gutter pipes. Now and then they remind themselves that they supposedly made this trip for pleasure.

  When they get thirsty they drink lukewarm tap water, so as not to bother the hotel by asking for mineral water or ice, just in case the hotel might be unable to provide this and would suffer embarrassment. Clueless travelers can’t seem to grasp that the hotel is different from a home. They can’t see it as an automatic, impersonal world. It is very hard for them to keep in mind that they have to pay for staying there. When it does come to mind, that too is a source of anxiety, for they’re never sure if they brought along enough money.

  Besides, in foreign countries, clueless travelers have the sense that they couldn’t possibly use that unfamiliar money. It doesn’t seem like real money. Similarly, the newspapers don’t seem real either. They spend hours stretched out on the bed leafing through these unreal newspapers; in the entertainment section they may even find films or plays they’ve wanted to see for years. But here in this unknown city, they’re not sure they still want to—all their curiosity, intelligence, and eagerness to learn new things have glazed over and stultified.

  What finally induces them to go out is not the eagerness of discovery but the idea that the hotel staff must be astonished that they never leave their room. With a smile, they consult the concierge. They ask directions and even accept a street map, not that they have any hope of finding their way around—these sedentary creatures have no sense of direction whatsoever and maps mean nothing to them—but so that the concierge who presides over a switchboard and rows of keys hanging alongside him will think they are real tourists who have come to explore the city.

  Roaming through the streets, focusing on nothing in particular, their fingers crumpling the map they wouldn’t dream of consulting, they are seized by the urge to purchase every object displayed in the store windows. Only by means of these objects, they think, can they somehow take possession of the city. They envision furnishing a house with the old china and the enormous pendulum clocks they see in the antique shops, a house they happened upon while wandering down some side street. In fantasy, they buy heaps of blankets, refrigerators, whole kitchens; they dress up in shawls, furs, hats. They recall their own country as a wasteland, some remote province lacking warm clothes and real wool blankets.

  They feel a keen envy for all those people striding by with confidence, obviously knowing exactly where they’re going, while their own state of idleness is so humiliating that even their own country suddenly seems uninhabitable—after all, so many people don’t live there but here instead, resolute and masterful in this unfamiliar city.

  Possessing very slow reflexes, these sedentary creatures follow the tracks of habit, not sensation. They will be open to sensations only when they are no longer called upon to feel them, once the veil of habit has been spread over their surroundings. Born emigrés or refugees, perhaps, these inept travelers cannot transform themselves into tourists. And the strange thing is that though they didn’t wish to leave home, now they don’t want to return, for they have a faint suspicion that in their absence, something alien and unfriendly may have infiltrated their once familiar haunts.

  In the end, they go into a store and buy a dusty eggcup. They regret it at once, as they realize that every corner store in every out-of-the-way town or village in their own country sells identical dusty eggcups.

  November, 1969

  the baby who saw bears

  Three years ago I went to America for the first time in my life. One of my sons had been living there for a year and my grandson was born there. My son, his wife and the baby would be staying another year. The baby was already several months old and I had never seen him except in photographs. And so I was introduced to America and my grandson Simone at the same time. I can’t claim to have seen and understood much about America since my responses are slow and I’m not good at grasping new places quickly. What I recall of my trip is this: the afternoon was extremely prolonged, with the plane, apparently motionless, whirring above the white, rounded peaks of clouds in an intensely blue sky where the sun had no intention of sinking. The
n all at once came night and rain. That instant when the motionless, glorious afternoon was transformed into a nocturnal storm must have been very swift since I have no recollection of it. When we landed, the wind was raging and covered walkways had been set up on the landing field, the rain pelting down on their zinc roofs.

  The first things I saw were streets lashed by the thunderstorm and long, very brightly lit, rumbling underpasses. The city was Boston. Over the course of my life I had read a great many books that told of Boston, but for some unknown reason the only one that came to mind just then was a novel called The Lamplighter, which I had read and loved at the age of nine. It took place in Boston and was about a poor, wild, mistreated girl named Gertrude who was taken in and adopted by a very kind old man, a lamplighter by trade. I was promptly cheered to find myself in Gertrude’s city. However, there were no streetlamps around, and in those rumbling underpasses it was hard to find a trace of the serene and spacious images I had constructed around the name of Boston in my distant childhood. Nonetheless the memory of The Lamplighter stayed with me the whole time I was in Boston, and in the end, after close scrutiny I found that the city was not so unlike the one I had unearthed from the ashes of my childhood fantasies. What I recalled about Gertrude was that in her most impoverished state she used to eat garbage. So I carefully examined the huge cans of garbage stationed in front of the houses on the Boston streets. In the morning my son explained to me that there were two cans for garbage, one for organic and the other for inorganic. Therefore, whenever I threw something out I had to stop to consider whether it went in the organic can or the inorganic can. Later when I was back in Italy I would still ponder over organic and inorganic even while I was throwing everything into one pail as we do here.

  But to return to the evening of my arrival: my son and his wife immediately began discussing the long car trip through the Rocky Mountains that they were preparing to take with the baby. I had been aware of this plan for some time but in that violent thunderstorm the idea seemed crazy, and I said the baby would suffer from the cold. They pointed out that it was now May and the trip would take place in summer, so that the risk, if anything, was the sweltering heat. In any case, they added, they had shown the pediatrician their map and itinerary and he had given his approval. This pediatrician had his patients call him “Jerry.” To arrange an appointment, he would send a postcard inscribed: “Jerry will be delighted to see Simone on Thursday at three o’clock.” All the same, if Simone had had a fever of a hundred and four, Jerry would not have moved a millimeter, because he didn’t make house calls. This was the rule and no pediatrician in America ever violated it. On the subject of Jerry, I also learned that he found Simone in good health but a bit overweight. Jerry liked babies to be thin. I found America to be a land of thin babies indeed. Moreover, the children didn’t seem dressed warmly enough, and their hands were blue with cold because they didn’t wear gloves.

  When I first laid eyes on him, the evening of my arrival, Simone was wide awake in his crib, dressed in white cotton overalls and playing with a flat, plastic ginger cat. He was completely bald and had ironic black eyes, very keen and penetrating. If you looked quite carefully, you could make out a very fine blonde down on his bald head. His eyes were narrow and slanted toward his temples. He looked to me like Genghis Khan.

  After several stormy days, a torrid summer suddenly broke out. At that point I said that it was dangerous to travel in such heat. I would have given anything to take the baby home with me to Italy, to the country, under shady, leafy trees. But his parents were adamant. They thought he would have more fun in the Rocky Mountains. I retorted that a baby of a few months couldn’t tell the difference between the Rocky Mountains and a rabbit hutch. Sermons, complaints, and scoldings were my basic modes of expression during my stay in America. Mostly I couldn’t relax, knowing that for three months this fragile, helpless creature would have no home. As a matter of fact my son and his wife had sublet their house until the month of October. Simone would be sleeping in the car, or in motels, or in a tent, a tent that had already been bought and that my son used to practice setting up on a friend’s lawn. Until the beginning of October, Simone wouldn’t have a roof over his head. Still, they told me, he would always have his own bed. This bed could actually be taken apart and folded up very small, then set up inside the car. Numerous tests of this procedure had also been made. I don’t know if it was my son’s lack of skill, but the process of setting up the bed in the car was extremely slow, and no less laborious than setting up the tent on the lawn.

  I witnessed these preparations for the trip with mounting fear. Every day my son and his wife would come home with objects intended for the trip, huge plastic bottles for water and powders to prevent scorpion bites. They also bought an enormous plastic bag and tossed all the baby’s toys in it. I remarked that this was a needless encumbrance, but they had read in Dr. Spock that a baby had to travel accompanied by all his toys. Since they couldn’t always be consulting Jerry, they frequently sought answers and support in Dr. Spock.

  Unaware of the threat of the Rocky Mountains, the baby lived in the house as if it had been his since the dawn of time. He stayed in his carriage on the wooden porch in front of the house, shaking his ginger cat and perusing the world with his Genghis Khan eyes. He was a beautiful, strong, plump baby, evidently too plump for Jerry’s taste, and he gleefully gulped down bottles of milk but struggled fiercely against any other kind of food. I suggested giving him the renowned vegetable broth. In Italy babies are weaned on vegetable broth. But my son and his wife expressed great scorn for vegetable broth. And even I realized it was pointless to get the baby used to vegetable broth, which had to be boiled for hours and couldn’t possibly be prepared while traveling by car.

  Back home in Italy I was anxious all summer, notwithstanding the postcards and reassuring photos that arrived from the Rocky Mountains showing the baby, naked and suntanned, sitting on his parents’ shoulders. At the end of the summer, after they had returned home, I received a letter from my son telling me about the trip and relating, among other things, how one night bears had turned up at their campsite, probably attracted by the smell of syrup from a bottle that had broken on the roof of their car. Huddled in the tent with the baby in their arms, they had peered out at the bears rummaging around the car and raging over an ice chest. These were no cute little teddy bears but huge, heavy, menacing animals; to drive them away they had to bang pot covers together. At daybreak they had gone to the tourist office and asked them to recommend a campsite where bears never set foot.

  Even though the incident was long over, this terrifying news upset me, and I wrote letters lecturing and scolding them. They returned to Italy after one more winter and a summer in which they took yet another trip, this time to the “deep South,” a place I knew to be hot and perilous. I greeted the baby with the feeling that he had survived dangerous voyages. He was walking and talking now. He had very soft, fine blond hair on his long, delicate head. He had a few obsessions. He wouldn’t touch fresh fruit and insisted on pear nectar in a bottle. He wouldn’t wear wool sweaters because they had “hairs.” The only garment he would consent to put on in the cold was a faded old windbreaker. I thought his aversion to “hairs” might derive from an aversion to or fear of those bears he had seen. But maybe that was a foolish inference on my part, since he’d been too young at the time to be afraid. Little by little we persuaded him that the “hairs” of the sweater would go away if he rubbed them hard on his sleeve. Still, the windbreaker remained his favorite garment.

  One afternoon he was coming over to my house and I watched for him at the window. I spied him crossing the street with his father. He was walking along with a serious air, holding his father’s hand yet absorbed in himself as if he were alone, carrying a nylon bag where he kept his windbreaker. His sister had just been born, which might have accounted for his seriousness. In his pace, his long, austere, delicate head, his dark and deeply knowing gaze, I suddenly perceived somethi
ng Jewish that I had never seen before. He looked like a little immigrant. When he used to sit on the porch in Boston, he seemed to reign supreme over the world around him. He looked like Genghis Khan. Now he wasn’t Genghis Khan anymore; the world had shown itself to be changeable and unstable, and he seemed to have been struck by a precocious awareness of the menacing, unreliable nature of things, of how a human being must learn to be self-sufficient. He seemed to know there was nothing he could call his own except that faded nylon bag containing four little plastic figures, two chewed pencils and a faded windbreaker. Little wandering Jew, crossing the street with his bag in his hand.