by Anna Banti
But I didn’t see the tree again. Instead, here I was at Porta Venezia, and then Viale Vittorio Veneto, and the high embankment at the edge of the park, and my hotel.
This large, modern building, eighteen storeys tall, its walls wounded by over a thousand windows, stood before me, and I stopped. I exclaimed, “At last!” but with a voice that was broken by regret and by a longing for a truth from which I had subtracted myself, fearing to look it in the face; and simultaneously I was struck by something extraordinary.
To the front of the hotel atrium, where a little elevator ordinarily runs and where friends are always coming and going, to the front of this atrium now brightly lit but totally empty, two goldfinches of precisely the size of a human form were roosted on a branch covered with snow, a branch that issued from the wall above the glass door, almost as though the wall itself were earth and the hotel a forgotten garden.
Their small, round eyes, round and black, were fixed, bright, and melancholic; and a song both acute and I couldn’t say if more sweet or full of desperation, a song that spoke of tenderness and farewell, of the hope of regaining the woods, and the doubt, and of a joy besieged by cold and nothingness, issued from their unmoving beaks. These birds were dead. With their fiery foreheads and black and yellow wings, and perched on delicate legs of a material that seemed to be gold, they were dead and already cold beneath their silken plumage. Their song, a memory. Faced with their gracefulness and their death, I then suddenly understood why the city was dark, why the mouse had gnawed at my heart, why the tree laden with ice had pulled itself up from the ground to come and offer me company, singing songs about the past. I understood who I had accompanied to the station, and who these two marvelous shadows of birds had to be. I understood as well that my youth, which I had attempted to forget with all my phrases saying “fine...let’s see...the bills...fine...tomorrow,...” I understood that my youth, and everything else that you too will have lost, had everywhere, that night, returned; frightened and full of sobs, it had run like a girl along this pitiful earth.
Translated by Henry Martin
* * *
Perfetta’s Day
by
Fabrizia Ramondino
Nonna will never go to heaven. Even if she dies, she won’t be able to leave this room, this house, and this world.
She’s here, sitting at the dining room table drinking coffee. For a week now she’s given up dunking her biscuit in hot milk as she’s always done. So much the better. This way she doesn’t think of me and say: “Eat! Eat!” Who knows why milk and biscuits make her feel like bothering about me. Now she’s drinking her coffee and, instead of looking at me, she’s staring into space. If she were to stare more into space perhaps she could go to heaven. At least a good part of her could go. Nonna is so big.
Never did a wild rabbit come out from under her skirt the way it did with Signora Cianfrusaglia in the book Masquerade, which was given to us because the TV talked about it and which I’m looking at now. Never anything that could escape and go far away. Nothing of Nonna’s has ever escaped from this house. And nothing can ever escape from this house, because nothing escapes Nonna.
I’ve finished the book and would like to stare into space, but I can’t. If I do, Nonna, in a sing-song and fretful voice, says: “What are you doing? Why aren’t you playing?” Besides, I can’t even leave the room, Nonna doesn’t want me to, she’s afraid something will happen to me. Nothing must happen to me.
Here I am sitting on the floor on a scatter rug so she can’t see much of me. The dining room table has legs, which are bulgy at the top and then straight and thin, like Nonna’s legs. It’s made of a strange wood, sick-looking, with light and dark spots, which are supposed to imitate marble. It reminds me of ice cream shaped like fried eggs and like spaghetti with tomato sauce, creations of a famous confectioner to whose shop I was once taken. Just looking at them repulsed me. The sideboard, the china closet, and the buffet are of the same wood; only two of the chairs are alike; over fifty years the other four got broken. Nonna always marvels that everything wasn’t broken.
On the floor there’s always a mess of things. Giulia says: “There are so many of us! I can never keep things clean and tidy!” We all came from Nonna. I call her Nonna but she’s not my grandmother but my great-grandmother. Only Giulia the maid didn’t come from Nonna. She’s pale and thin, maybe she came from Nonna’s shadow. Zio Augusto’s wife didn’t come from her either, but as she’s always stuck to Zio Augusto, it seems as if she came from him, like Eve from Adam’s rib, when they still weren’t quite two people.
Gradually as the house fills up with people (I think we are fourteen now) the disorder grows, so Giulia says. “Now I’m at the end of my tether,” she goes on. Or else she says, “But perhaps it’s better this way. At this point it’s definitely futile to begin putting things in order.” Then she says, “Look how fate works.... I’ve been in this house for forty years and what was once an upper-class home with bedrooms, study, entrance hall, salon, dining room now seems a basso.... I clean and clean and it just gets dirtier. Just like the rest of the world. Too many people...you can’t imagine the lines in the shops and crowded streets at all hours...if you didn’t know that people always come out from the same place, you’d ask, where do they all come from?... I’ve stayed just the way Mamma made me. One I was and one I’ve stayed....”
All over the floor, then, are all our toys, always all broken because they’re in a jumble and everyone breaks everybody else’s. Newspapers...Zio Eugenio reads the paper and leaves it on the floor. Sometimes he takes it into the toilet and then brings it back all wet. Once I went in after he came out; it stank of cigarettes and shit. He hadn’t even pulled the chain and, since the toilet paper always runs out and often nobody put in a new roll for two days, the bowl was full of pieces of newspaper. Ever since then newspapers have that smell for me. Besides, that odor reaches here from the bathroom, which is next to this room. Not only do they not flush, but they leave the door open, too.
On the floor are two cheese rinds. Massimo hides them behind the broken leg of the china closet for the mouse. He has a passion for mice, wants to start breeding white ones. But this mouse is no thoroughbred mouse. We can’t figure out where he comes in. Once he climbed up on the window and my uncle tried to crush him with the shutter but didn’t succeed.
Also on the floor are my cousins’ schoolbooks. Before coming to this house, they lived in a foreign country and they learned to study stretched out on their stomachs. It seems that for them there’s no difference between tables, chairs, beds. When they’re studying, they get up to go make popcorn in the kitchen, leaving books and notebooks behind. “Come say your verbs with me,” says Nonna.
The cousins come back with a bowl of popcorn, lean over to pick up a book and some popcorn spills out on the floor. They hand the book to Nonna who begins to query them on the verbs. Trying to peek at the page over Nonna’s shoulders, they get distracted and tip the bowl, spilling the popcorn on the floor again. But there’s never any popcorn on the floor because they pick it right up and eat it. Massimo picks it up with his thumb, squashing it a little.
Nonna knows all the verbs by heart. My cousins recite them sing-song, but Nonna always uses a solemn voice as if she were praying. It seems that if there weren’t any verbs, the entire castle of words would crumble. When it comes to Latin verbs, Nonna’s voice becomes even more solemn. Then she lifts her chin and gravely nods her head as she pronounces them. The true bones that hold up Nonna’s great mass are verbs. It’s as if she puts on a mask for their recitation and when she’s got this mask on, it seems to me that finally she has definite contours, that she’s not all gelatin. In that moment she is detached from all the things she was hideously stuck to. But this happens rarely. My cousins flee verbs like the enemy. They’re big kids and they escape to the street.
Now Nonna has finished her coffee and calls, “Giulia! Giulia!” in a worn-out voice. As usual, Giulia answers, “I’m coming! I’
m coming!” and she doesn’t come. Giulia likes to stay in the kitchen, like a snail in its shell. This is the most dangerous moment for me. Waiting for Giulia, Nonna might look at me and if she notices that I’m doing nothing, she’ll feel obliged to busy herself with me. That’s why I’m pretending to be absorbed in my doll play, though I haven’t played with dolls for a year. Not since I decided that I didn’t ever want a daughter so that I couldn’t become like Nonna. I don’t want to become anything more than what I am.
So I pretend to put her little dress on, wash her, comb her hair. I am the youngest of this household and all these things that I am doing for my doll have been done for fourteen people, Giulia excluded, for whom no one ever did anything, according to her, not even those who are dead now. Nevertheless, they still live here in this house. Great-grandfather’s hat and cane are, in fact, still hanging on the coatrack in the hall, and in the bathroom the corner of the mirror is broken where Grandfather hit it with his razor by mistake. It’s not really broken, just cracked, and every once in a while a little piece of glass falls out. “That piece of glass must be removed,” someone always says, but nobody does it.
In the next room, on the other side of the wall that I’m leaning against now, Totó lived for several years. They called him Totó and not Antonio because when he was six months old he was so funny, making such weird faces that he made everyone laugh.
Actually, he was mentally retarded and nobody noticed right off. He died before I was born. He was the son of Zio Augusto. One of the reasons why Zio Augusto and his wife don’t leave this house is because it reminds them of Totó and they don’t want to forget him. “It seems to me,” says Zio Augusto’s wife, “that if we were to forget him, something really terrible could happen to us.”
No one can enter that room now because Zio Eugenio’s mastiff, Moby Dick, is shut up in there. After his wife died, this uncle moved here with his six kids so that Nonna could help him raise them. Moby Dick lived in a garden and he’s not used to being shut up inside – that’s why he has to stay in that little room.
When Zio comes home from work at night, he opens the door and takes the dog for a walk. He is enormous; at first he howled, now he only drools and licks Zio when he’s let out. He has a very soft stomach, which almost drags on the ground. Teresa, my oldest cousin, used to open the door and take the dog out but then she would forget to shut him up again or maybe she forgot on purpose. One time Nonna almost fainted from fright. Unless a strong man helps her, she isn’t able to move from her chair. Teresa and the others had gone out. Terrified, Giulia shut herself in the kitchen. The dog settled here by us, lying down next to Nonna, big and soft, just like her.
For three hours Nonna didn’t move or breathe, her face growing whiter and whiter. I just continued doing what I always do here on the floor. I even tiptoed to the bathroom. Nonna gave me a commanding glance, but I didn’t understand if she wanted me to remain in the bathroom or to return. Being irresistibly attracted to the dog and to Nonna, I didn’t want to stay in the bathroom at all.
Nonna couldn’t even prevent anything from happening to me. For a moment I thought about going out into the street with my cousins. Nobody could have stopped me, but the force that drew me to the room was like a strong magnet.
I remember sitting in my corner thinking about escaping but, as if bewitched, I couldn’t do it. The front door of frosted glass is embellished with my great-grandfather’s initials in clear glass. It appeared so far away to me, as if it were at the end of the earth, as if the world weren’t round but endless, long and narrow like the hallway, and beyond the door was the universal abyss one could fall into.
From that day on Zio has taken the keys to that room with him whenever he goes out. At first the dog would jump up against our wall for hours – perhaps he knew that we were here – or against the door. He doesn’t do that anymore, we don’t hear him the whole day. When Zio opens up for him in the evening, he doesn’t move. It’s Zio who makes him get up with fond words, though sometimes he has to pull him up.
Through the keyhole I can see his big, immobile buttocks. He’s stretched out with his face toward the little window. Sometimes from here I think I can hear him sob.
There are more and more things that Zio has to lock up before going out. He’s now put a padlock on his handkerchief and underwear drawer. All his sons and daughters were taking his handkerchiefs and his underdrawers. When he had to go out to the office he could never find any clean ones.
Since there’s already my Nonna, my real grandmother, Zio’s sister, is like an aunt to me. In fact, I call her Zia-Nonna. She takes care of all our dirty laundry when she gets home from the office. With a sweet and plaintive voice, she calls on one of the older nephews or nieces to help her. She smells very nice, even her voice has a scent of mint and whoever falls prey to that scented voice helps her empty the sack of dirty laundry and separate it into the whites and the coloreds.
She moans that today there’s no telling what color clothes can be because who ever heard of red underwear and white slacks for kids (one of my cousins likes white jeans, he’s nearly shaved his head and says that he wants to wear all white like an oriental monk) and navy blue and brown towels, which may or may not run. Perplexed, she stands for a while before the mountain of clothes and, finally dividing them up somehow, she does the first load.
Later, after her rest, “a little nap” she calls it, she’s back in the kitchen doing another load of laundry with the help of another nephew. While she goes into the dining room to smoke a cigarette by Nonna, the nephew gets himself some bread spread with olive oil in the kitchen and disappears into the street. “Who’s going to hang out the clothes? Who is going to hang out the clothes?” reverberates the voice of Zia-Nonna from room to room. She goes on complaining a long time. But the cousins are all out in the street and the wet clothes sit there in the pail.
I don’t know what miracle happens sometimes. Sooner or later someone hangs out the clothes. Not always, though. Sometimes they stay in the pail till the next day. Then there’s no room for hanging out the next day’s loads, not in the bathroom on the drying rack nor on the kitchen balcony. With so many people, two loads of wash have to be done every day. Then there are two or three pails of clothes. Those of the day before have to be hung out first or they go sour. It’s the same thing with the bread, we have to eat the old first and never the fresh. Bread, in fact, is the only thing in the house that isn’t calculated, and too much always gets bought.
Giulia is here at last, standing next to Nonna, wiping her hands on her apron. She is so used to always doing something that she doesn’t know what to do with idle hands and she keeps wiping her hands long after they’re dry. Nonna writes out the shopping list, starting with bread. The bread calculations, however, depend on the rest of the list. Every morning Nonna starts by saying, “What do you think, Giulia, three or four kilos of bread?” And every morning Giulia invariably answers, “It depends, Signora.”
If we eat pasta or gattó or rice, we won’t need much bread. But if we have broccoli or sweet peppers, we’ll need lots of bread because my cousins don’t like vegetables much. To get them to eat them, the bread is split open and the vegetables stuffed inside. Sometimes we have milk for supper and this requires lots of bread, too. With so many people in the house, cookies are out of the question. Even if we have veal stew there has to be lots of bread, otherwise nobody’s hunger would be satisfied.
Now that there are more than fourteen of us, Giulia never suggests broccoli. Nonna does, though, because the doctor has told her to have a light supper: broccoli and mozzarella. When Nonna mentions broccoli, Giulia says it’s time to scrub the wall and floor tiles. In truth, they never get scrubbed though they need it. But Nonna sweetly insists we have broccoli. “Broccoli, Giulia, is good for you, it’s good for you. Especially good for you, Giulia, for your kidney stones.”
Giulia finally lets herself be convinced and smiles broadly. She’s like a lover protecting herself. The t
ruth is that she loves broccoli very much, loves to buy it, trim and wash it, eat it. She always says the only shopping she enjoys doing is at the vegetable stall. When she was a child, the only grocery shopping done was at the vegetable stall. Who ever went into the delicatessen? She did for the first time when she came to work for the Signora, my Nonna. All they ever ate at her house were broccoli and cabbage in the winter, fava beans and peas in the spring, tomatoes, sweet peppers and eggplant in the summer. And bread. Her mother used a lot of oil, as if it were, Giulia says, “the Extreme Unction of the queen.” Thus Nonna grumbles to Giulia, “Giulia, be sure not to put too much oil.” And Giulia always answers, “You are right, Signora. I forget that we’ve all become kings and queens and that we turn our noses up at abundance.”
It takes them an hour to decide the shopping to be done. Nonna has everything bought day by day, otherwise it all goes. For example, if she buys half a kilo of parmesan cheese, the next day it’s all gone. That’s why she orders only two hundred grams at a time. Nonna writes the list on a notebook using a carbon paper and another sheet underneath, which is for Giulia. Everything is divided by store because Giulia doesn’t know how to read. SALUMIERE, like the title of a fairy tale, is followed by a list of things to buy at the deli. Giulia can read SALUMIERE because she’s seen it written so many times along the street.
While Giulia is out shopping, there is no escape for me. Nonna wants me sitting right next to her and wants me to practice my penmanship by drawing little rods or a page of O’s. I know how to write whole words but Nonna makes me practice every day with rods and O’s until, she says, the rods are all straight and all the O’s, all of them, are round, like the O in Giotto.