A Place to Live

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by Natalia Ginzburg


  Once in the mountains, I pretended I had been born and raised there and would remain forever. I strove to erase all memories of our city house. I had no other children to play with, and I wandered through the fields alone, hunting for frogs and grasshoppers. I had no inkling of boredom then, or if I felt it at all, it was fleeting—I would sulk around the house for a while, only to be promptly scolded. For my father, boredom was always a crime, but especially so in the mountains. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to think only she and my brothers were entitled to be bored. I was too young to have any such right. My mother thought children should never sulk or loiter idly. She told me to wash my face and do my summer homework assignments. I paid no attention, well aware that doing summer assignments was one of the worst possible ways to combat boredom.

  Anyway, I could shake off my boredom quite easily. Every afternoon might hold the promise of something extraordinary. I could go to the fields and find a huge toad. There were squirrels in the woods, and I never gave up the hope of catching one and bringing it home. Or I might try writing a novel or baking a cake or might even, out of the blue, make some great scientific discovery. My parents and my brothers would be amazed. I was always longing to amaze them, because I found it hard to get their attention. No matter what I did, no matter how amazing, they were never amazed.

  The day we left the mountains was almost more wonderful, even, than the day we arrived. The excitement of leaving, first boarding a bus and then a train, was enhanced by the subtle, delectable sadness of bidding farewell to summer—sadness, for me, being something so slight and unaccustomed back then that it lent charm to happiness. Sadly, I took leave of those places I might never see again. My father said that next year we would go someplace else, someplace cheaper. In addition, at the end of every vacation and over the course of the winter, my father would say that we wouldn’t be taking any more vacations because we could no longer afford them. This threat left my brothers and my mother utterly indifferent; they didn’t believe it and in any case, they would have liked nothing better than a summer in the city. As for me, I was both thrilled and terrified at the prospect of being so poor, since I feared and longed to be living in dramatic circumstances. Nevertheless, those long months in the country that my mother and brothers grumbled over would recur punctually and inexorably each year, at my father’s orders.

  At some point I realized that the vacations in the mountains had become an intolerable bore for me as well. I knew then that my childhood was over. I no longer cared about grasshoppers and toads, and in the space of a few days I had read and reread the books I’d brought along. Besides, it was mortifying to sit alone and read. I thought I should have friends, but I had none. I had absolutely no idea how to pass the time. All at once I’d become a pessimist: the long empty afternoons promised nothing.

  To make matters worse, I had to endure my boredom in isolation: my brothers had grown up and no longer came to the mountains with us, and my mother, oddly enough, no longer grumbled. She accompanied my father on his walks and joined him in extolling the beauties of nature and the purity of the air. I saw my parents as very old now. I felt a nameless boredom emanating from this contented old couple strolling side by side along the paths. I was invited to join them but didn’t; to stroll in their company would have been embarrassing—clear and evident proof that I had no friends to take a walk with.

  Every day I hoped it would rain, for if it rained I could stay inside, hidden from view. If it didn’t rain, I was under orders to “go out in the fresh air,” and I obeyed my parents out of time-honored submission. I would read in the fields. I would read, but with no pleasure. I listened to the crickets chirping; the dazzling, infinite peace of the summer afternoon was deafening. It seemed to promise something, but that promise was mysteriously meant for everyone except me.

  Groups of boys and girls would pass by, wearing sneakers and carrying tennis rackets. I didn’t know them, and couldn’t join them because I was incapable of addressing a single word to them. They inspired a mortal envy. They enjoyed the supreme privilege of not having my parents, of being totally unlike me, not having the most remote connection to me. They enjoyed the supreme privilege of being other. Moreover they were going to play tennis and I didn’t know how to play tennis. Tennis was a sport my father disdained. He considered it elitist. He approved only of challenging and risky sports like mountain climbing.

  It suddenly seemed I was the only person in the world, apart from my parents, who had never set foot on a tennis court, and this absence of tennis in my life was a grotesque humiliation. I went down the list of the girls I knew in the city. They all knew how to play tennis or else they were learning from a “trainer,” a professional coach. Once in a while my mother would absentmindedly say, “It would be good for you to play tennis.” And yet it never even crossed her mind to find a “trainer” for me. My father would have found it an absurd notion as well as an unnecessary expense. Whenever I passed a tennis court with my mother, I blushed and looked away. To ask for lessons was beyond me, since I had abruptly immured my most painful longings in silence. So my mother never knew that what I wanted most in the world was to stand on a tennis court in a white pleated skirt, holding a racket and saying the words “play” and “ready.” I used to murmur those words to myself in secret, convinced they were the keys to happiness.

  Later on, in high school, I did play tennis with my schoolmates. I had an old racket dug up out of the cellar and a skirt that was neither white nor pleated; everything was all wrong. I played maybe a dozen times, not very well, and the thrill of saying “play” and “ready” proved flimsy indeed.

  It was then, on those lonely vacations, that I began to hate the summer. My presence in the fields, on those brilliant afternoons, felt like a dark stain defiling the earth’s felicity. I didn’t find the world sad, I found it very beautiful, except that for some obscure reason I was forbidden to join in the celebration of its radiant days. And so I could only seek to love autumn, winter, twilight, rain, and night.

  I discovered, later on, that I wasn’t the only one to feel this way: it was a feeling shared by many. Many people, at some point in their lives, have felt as alienated and mortified by summer as I did, judged forever unworthy of reaping the harvest of the universe. Many, like me, have hated the brilliance of the sky glaring over woods and fields. Many, like me, feel a sense of anguish at the first signs of summer, as if at news of disaster, for once again they are infused with the dread of being judged and condemned.

  We find ourselves rooted in place, with no means of escape. If alone, we instantly grasp the precise measure of our alone-ness. The usual rhythm of our days is broken. Our usual sufferings, relentlessly clarified by the sun’s ruthless glare, become unbearable. Our life lies splintered at our feet. We feel driven to enumerate our every grief and failing. Summer’s light, showing no mercy, illuminates our silence, our inert self amid its catastrophes old and new.

  Before we know it we are sitting in the prisoner’s dock—immobilized, annihilated, devastated, as if subjected to the third degree. No way to hide from ourselves or anyone else. No way to raise an arm to shield our face. We cannot answer any of the questions that are posed, we cannot perform any of the acts that are commanded. To be who we are is a crime worse than murder, and all the world proclaims that for such a crime, there can be no absolution. The old adolescent despair surges up again, that sudden sense of being called upon to be different, to be happy, but we are unable to heed the call.

  We know from long experience that after the fifteenth of August the trial will be over. Gradually we’ll slip back into a tranquil, shaded light, where we can murmur our own private, individual pardon. Patiently, we’ll piece together our scattered ruins.

  The days until the fifteenth seem endless. We loathe the empty city under the blinding sun, the empty movie houses showing horror films. We watch them unmoved, either because they’re awful, or because as far as we’re concerned we’re already gripped by horror. Bu
t we loathe the crowded trains even more. Everyone is leaving town, everyone asks if we’ll be leaving too. What to say? We are one of those who haven’t the will either to leave or to stay.

  August, 1971

  misery in the beautiful, horrible city

  For a few moments last Sunday, our first “austerity Sunday,”10 it felt wonderful to walk lightheartedly down Via Quattro Fontane under the night sky, with no automobiles around. The city was all wind and stone and the air was frigid and odorless, as it is high up in the mountains.

  But I couldn’t quite experience a stroll in a city without cars as a legitimate, guiltless pleasure. One of the worst curses to have befallen us is that we cannot, for a single instant of our lives, feel ourselves to be legitimate and guiltless.

  I realized, then, that my sense of well-being, walking in a city without traffic, was merely a physical well-being. It didn’t yield any peace or tranquillity. Possibly never before had it been so clear as in last Sunday’s silence, that peace and tranquillity, for us, are unattainable blessings. We are forever in a state of alarm, both for ourselves and for others. And the worst of it is that our fear on behalf of others springs not from some vital and generous part of our spirit, but from a quite cold, enervated, and ungenerous part. We remain fiercely self-involved in body and in spirit, and our fear for others is part and parcel of our self-involvement, becoming simply one more facet of it.

  Last Sunday I thought, and maybe others did too, that it’s not the cars that make our streets impassable, but something else. What that something else might be comprised of is hard to say. What our misery might be comprised of is hard to say. It has dwelt in us for years on end, yet we don’t know what it is made up of. What we do know is that it sullies and pervades the streets even when the cars are absent.

  Some people don’t own cars and don’t know how to drive. Generally they don’t go about in Rome on Sundays. Those people thought, selfishly, that the Sunday without cars was a gift from the gods. Then they immediately felt guilty for having thought it. Needless to say, there is no thought that doesn’t arouse some sense of guilt, either unconscious or explicit.

  Other people, those who do drive cars, also have occasion to loathe them. No one can love cars when the city is full of them; everyone loathes them. We’ve inundated the streets with something it is impossible not to loathe.

  To the avowed enemies of automobiles, those who don’t own them or would be unfit to drive them in any case, the momentary physical well-being brought about by their absence suddenly seemed tremendously obtuse. We all realized we had expected that that single day could cure us of our malaise. That was an extremely short-sighted hope: the cars were with us in spirit just the same. Present or absent, they were indestructible. And in the end everyone felt a strange nostalgia for the city with its traffic: it was a truer reflection of our inner confusion.

  Without cars, the city seemed naked. Naked, it was beautiful and appalling. We felt we could touch it. Some said it felt like a return to the postwar days. That wasn’t so. In fact the city felt very different from the postwar days. At night, in the postwar era, every neighborhood in Rome took on the feel of a village, so that the whole city was like an enormous cluster of villages gathered together, each one curled up in a domestic, creaturely slumber, like the slumber of herds and poultry.

  Today, nothing seems as distant and remote from Rome as the countryside, and in no way does the city evoke poultry or herds. No traces of stillness or animal life remain. Today the city is everywhere huge, everywhere mineral, and seems never to sleep; when it’s empty, it feels dead. Last Sunday, stripped of automobiles, Rome by night was solemn and desolate, as spectral and inanimate as the craters of the moon.

  We realized, moreover, how hard it is to recall postwar Rome in any detail. We realized how hard it is to recall the cities of our childhood, as they used to be. We automatically fill them with cars, even if back then the streets were vast and empty. To envision cities that are happily and peacefully empty, we have to envision ourselves as having been born and passing our lives in long-gone eras. And when fantasy transports us to those ancient, long-gone eras, we feel a sense of respite and liberation. Which means that only in fantasy can we conceive of tranquillity. Our memory cannot call forth tranquillity. Wherever it alights, in whatever segment of our lives, it drags along our selves as we are today, burdened with trailing anxieties.

  Walking through the city stupefied by traffic, we can neither think nor look at our surroundings. Our relationship to the city is totally destroyed. What is curious and paradoxical is that we cannot reconstruct this relationship when the cars are gone. The city no longer weaves any connections with us. Even though we can finally see it and touch it, it just sits there: solitary, un-welcoming, impregnable.

  Last Sunday we walked around thinking either of ourselves or of others. There was no way to forge a relationship with the city. We felt it as alien, unknown. We were in direct contact with our misery.

  Our misery has a unique quality; we tend to think there has never been anything quite like it before. We tend to think the world has never known a misery of so general and universal a nature as ours. Our individual ills and sufferings breed within it and multiply, reaching dizzying, incalculable totals; there is hardly world enough and time to keep track of them in daily life. Our private misfortunes are not condemned or punished in the ordinary course of events; it is only we ourselves who judge them so severely. We have cluttered and enveloped our surroundings with engines and noise, a cunning way to avoid seeing how we live, or seeing too closely the distinct features, the colors and contours, of our misery. Then we promptly despised such cunning and mistook it for the misery itself.

  When a crack appears in the reality we ourselves have constructed and layered with noise and engines, when it is borne in on us that this reality might not be so solid after all, then it stands stripped before our gaze; we grasp that the noise and the engines are not the source or the cause of our misery at all but rather a superficial layer, a symptom or a sign, not an element to be considered in isolation.

  With this in mind, by the close of day last Sunday, our first “austerity Sunday,” the absence of automobiles felt salutary and validating. True, our well-being was merely physical and we were in no way happier by their absence but even more insecure, frightened, and miserable. But it was possible at last to recognize the misery we were dealing with, and maybe even to illuminate it with words. Something had happened: it wasn’t conducive to hope—hope doesn’t seem to thrive in our soil—but it was conducive to truth.

  December, 1973

  fantasy life

  When we have washed our words clean Of shame and pride. When the steps once dreamed of in sleep Spring to life in the light of the sun.

  FRANCO FORTINI

  In childhood and youth, as soon as we found ourselves alone and idle, we would start fashioning imaginary places, complete with stories and incidents in which we were the protagonists. We peopled these places and stories with characters, either invented or chosen from our daily life. In early childhood we favored invented people and felt we were constructing our scenarios for them. Real people, at that point, were of no importance.

  Time and again, we’ve rooted around in our distant childhood to discover when we first began to fantasize. But we can’t pinpoint the exact moment. As far back as we can recall, we find dreams.

  Probably every child has his own term for fantasy. I called it “night talk.” Actually I didn’t fantasize only at night but during the day as well. But the word “night” must have evoked for me the secret and nocturnal quality of fantasy.

  In my childhood fantasies, I was host to whole populations that swarmed through my solitary hours like an army of ants. They were partly my subjects, partly my accomplices in government conspiracies, partly my teasing, malevolent persecutors. I called them “the we’s,” since that was what they called themselves. They boasted shamelessly, flaunting their evil wishes in choruses of shrieks.
They were very tiny, a tribe of swarming, vainglorious black dwarves. They could make me rage, weep, whisper and argue, but most of all their deafening shrieks made me laugh. For reasons I couldn’t have explained, their existence could not be revealed to a soul.

  Sometimes, walking down the street with my mother, I would begin fantasizing as if I were alone in my room. The “we’s” would deafen me with their shrieking demands, and I would respond with gestures, grimaces, and whispers. When my mother asked why I was making such monkey faces, I was overwhelmed with shame. There was nothing I liked better than “night talk,” but to entertain the “we’s” on the street, in the presence of my mother, suddenly struck me as disgraceful and humiliating. I thought I was the only person in the world to harbor so peculiar, ridiculous, and humiliating a secret. I thought I was probably crazy.

  Later on, the “we’s” became tiresome: there were too many of them. I invented one person and gave him a very handsome face, thick, curly blond hair, and a Cossack-style shirt. I named him Prince Sergio. I gave him a sister, three brothers, a few bears, and a rather ferocious Alsatian dog. I also gave him several very sumptuous houses where he could hide out. He was very rich, but he was a refugee who had escaped from Russia with state secrets during the revolution. I loved his wandering, princely life. He was forever moving from one house to another, since he was being followed. I often phoned him the moment I was alone, pretending to hold a receiver in my hand. “Hello, is Prince Sergio there?” Sometimes he answered, and sometimes his sister, Vassilissa. Our romance lasted many years. To this day, I find myself recalling the words “Hello, is the prince there?” I seem to be wandering aimlessly through empty rooms, holding an old slipper in my hand.

 

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