Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  “For you lot everything is a bordello. In this house you make a bordello out of everything,” my grandmother always said, meaning that for us nothing was sacred. The saying became famous in our family and we used to repeat it every time we found ourselves laughing over a death or a funeral. My grandmother had a profound revulsion for animals and went into a frenzy whenever she saw us playing with a cat, saying that we would catch diseases and then infect her with them. “That dreadful creature,” she would say, stamping her feet and jabbing the tip of her umbrella into the ground. She had an aversion to everything and a terror of disease. She was, however, incredibly healthy and in fact lived to be over eighty without ever needing a doctor or a dentist. She was always afraid that one of us might trick her into being baptized, since one of my brothers once jokingly pretended to baptize her. She said her prayers daily in Hebrew without understanding a word since she didn’t know Hebrew. For those who weren’t Jewish, as she was, she had a horror similar to the one she had for cats. My mother was the sole exception, the only non-Jew for whom she ever had any fondness. My mother returned her affection and said of her that in her utter self-absorption she was as innocent and naive as a newborn baby.

  According to my grandmother she was very beautiful when she was young, the second-most beautiful girl in Pisa. The first was her friend Virginia Del Vecchio. A man named Signor Segrè arrived one day and asked to meet the most beautiful girl in Pisa so that he could ask for her hand in marriage. Virginia turned down the proposal. He then introduced himself to my grandmother. She also refused him, saying that she didn’t want “Virginia’s leftovers.”

  She then married my grandfather, Michele, a man who must have been very sweet and gentle. She became a widow very young. We once asked why she didn’t remarry. With a strident laugh and a brutal frankness that we never expected from that querulous and plaintive old lady, she responded, “Come now! And have him eat me out of house and home?”

  •

  My siblings and my mother sometimes complained of boredom while on those mountain holidays, staying in isolated houses where there was nothing to do, no social life. Being the youngest, I amused myself with very little and at the time had yet to experience the boredom of those holidays.

  “You lot get bored,” my father said, “because you don’t have inner lives.”

  One year when we were particularly short of money it looked as if we were going to have to remain in the city for the summer, but at the last minute we rented an inexpensive house with no electricity, only oil lamps, in a village hamlet called Saint-Jacques-d’Ajas. The house must have been very small and very uncomfortable because the whole summer all my mother could say was, “What a dump of a house! How vile a place is Saint-Jacques-d’Ajas!” Our only source of entertainment was eight or ten leather-bound books containing back issues of I’m not sure which weekly magazine with riddles, puzzles, and horror stories. They had been leant to my brother Alberto by his friend Frinco. We lived on Frinco’s books throughout that entire summer. Then my mother struck up a friendship with the woman next door. They chatted when my father wasn’t around. He said talking with one’s neighbors was “a negro thing to do.” It turned out, however, that this woman, Signora Ghiran, lived in the same building as Frances in Turin and knew her slightly, making an introduction to my father possible. He was then very kind to her. The fact was that when it came to strangers my father was always wary and suspicious, fearing they might be of “questionable character,” but as soon as he discovered even a tenuous connection he was immediately reassured.

  My mother could speak of nothing else but Signora Ghiran, and at mealtimes we ate dishes from recipes Signora Ghiran had taught us. “New star rising,” my father said every time Signora Ghiran’s name was mentioned. “New star rising,” or simply “new star,” was how my father ironically greeted our every new infatuation. “I don’t know what we would have done without Frinco’s books or Signora Ghiran,” my mother said at the end of the summer. Our return to the city that year was marked by the following incident: After two hours on a bus, we arrived at the train station and took our seats on the train. We suddenly realized that all of our luggage was still on the platform. Raising the flag, the conductor cried out, “The train is departing!” To which my father responded “The hell it is!” with a shout that echoed throughout the entire carriage. The train didn’t budge an inch until every last one of our suitcases had been loaded aboard.

  Back in the city we had to wrench ourselves away from Frinco’s books because Frinco wanted them back. And as for Signora Ghiran, we never saw her again. “We have to invite Signora Ghiran over! How rude we are!” my father would say every so often. But my mother’s affections were as erratic as ever, her relationships inconstant. Either she saw someone every day or she never wanted to see them. She was incapable of cultivating acquaintances just to be polite. She always had a crazy fear of becoming “bored,” and she was afraid visitors would come to see her just when she wanted to go out.

  The friends my mother did see were always the same ones. With the exception of Frances and a few of my father’s friends’ wives, my mother’s friends were young, a good deal younger than she—young women who were newly married and poor. She could give them advice, suggest seamstresses. She had a horror of “old biddies,” as she called them, alluding to women who were more or less her age. She had a horror of entertaining. If one of her old acquaintances sent word that she would like to pay her a visit, my mother went into a panic. “That means today I won’t be able to go out!” she said in despair. On the other hand, she could take her young friends out with her or to the cinema. They were easy to manage, amenable, and more than willing to maintain a casual relationship with her. If they had small children better yet, because she loved children very much. Sometimes, in the afternoon, these friends would come all together to see her. In my father’s language my mother’s friends were called the “gabblers.” When dinnertime approached, my father would shout from his office, “Lidia! Lidia, have the gabblers all gone home?” At which point a last terrified gabbler could be seen slinking down the hallway and slipping out the front door. My mother’s young friends were all very afraid of my father. At dinner my father would say to my mother, “Aren’t you tired of gabbling? Aren’t you tired of chitchat?”

  Sometimes in the evening my father’s friends came to our apartment. Like him, they were university professors, biologists, and scientists. On the evenings his friends were coming over, at dinner he would ask my mother, “Have you prepared some refreshments?” Refreshments meant tea and biscuits. Alcoholic beverages were never allowed in our home. Sometimes my mother hadn’t prepared anything and my father got angry. “What do you mean there are no refreshments? You can’t have people over without offering refreshments! One cannot commit such negroisms!”

  The Lopezes—Frances and her husband—and the Ternis were among my parents’ closest friends. Frances’s husband’s name was Amedeo but he was nicknamed “Lopez” from the time he and my father were students together. As a student my father’s nickname was “Pom,” short for pomodoro, a tomato, due to his red hair, but whenever anyone called him Pom he got very angry and only ever allowed my mother to call him that. Nevertheless, when the Lopezes mentioned our family among themselves they referred to us as “the Poms” just as we called them “the Lopezes.” No one has ever been able to explain to me why Amedeo was given his nickname, its origin no doubt lost in the mists of time. Amedeo was fat, his head covered in tufts of fine silken white hair; he spoke with the soft r as did his wife and their three boys who were our friends. The Lopezes were much more elegant, refined, and modern than we were: their building had an elevator, their apartment was nicer than ours, and they had a telephone, which in those days hardly anyone had yet. Frances, who went frequently to Paris, brought back with her the latest fashions and fads. One year she brought back a Chinese game, in a box with dragons painted on it, called “mah-jongg.” They had all learned to play this mah-jongg and
Lucio, the youngest Lopez, who was my age, often boasted about this mah-jongg to me but never wanted to teach me how to play: he said it was too complicated and his mother wouldn’t let anyone touch the box. Whenever I went over to their apartment, I was consumed with envy at the sight of that exquisite, forbidden box full of mystery.

  After an evening spent with the Lopezes, my father would come home exalting to the high heavens their apartment, their furniture, the tea served in beautiful porcelain cups from a trolley. He would say Frances was “in the know,” meaning she knew where to find nice furniture and beautiful cups, she knew how to decorate a home and how to serve tea.

  It was hard to tell if the Lopezes were richer or poorer than us. My mother said they were much richer. My father said that no, like us, they didn’t have a lot of money, it was just that Frances was “in the know” and “not a lummox like you lot.” My father, however, felt himself to be extremely poor, especially early in the morning when he first awoke; he awakened my mother as well and said to her, “I don’t know how we’re going to keep going. Have you seen that the property shares have gone down?” The property shares were always down, they never went up.

  “Those vile property shares,” my mother would always say and complain that my father hadn’t the slightest business sense and as soon as there was a rotten stock, he bought it. She often begged him to consult a stockbroker but this only infuriated him because he wanted, as in all things, to do it his own way.

  As for the Ternis, they were very rich. Even so Mary, Terni’s wife, was a woman of simple tastes and didn’t go out much, spending her days in contemplation of her two children and their nanny, Assunta, who dressed entirely in white. Both Mary and the nanny, who imitated her, made an ecstatic whispering sound: “Ssst! Ssst!” Even Terni made this same sound “ssst, ssst” whenever in contemplation of his children. Actually, he made this sound “ssst, ssst” about everything, about our maid Natalina who was no beauty, and he made the noise whenever he saw my sister and my mother wearing old dresses. He said of every woman he laid eyes on that she had “an interesting face” and that she resembled someone or other in a famous painting. He remained in contemplation of her for a few minutes more, then removed his monocle from his eye and cleaned it with an impeccable white handkerchief. Terni was a biologist and my father greatly respected his work, but he would call him “that moron Terni” because he believed he was a poseur in his personal life. “Terni’s a poseur,” he would say after every time they met up. He would then repeat, “I think he’s a poseur.” When Terni came over he would usually come into the garden to discuss novels. He was very cultured, had read all the modern novels, and was the first to introduce us to À la recherche du temps perdu. Now that I think about it, I believe he was actually trying to resemble Swann with that monocle and his affectation of discovering in each of us an ancestral link to a famous painting. From his study my father would call out loudly for him to come inside so they could discuss tissue cells. “Terni,” he yelled, “come here! Don’t be such a moron!” Whenever Terni, making his ecstatic whispering sounds, stuck his nose into the dusty, threadbare curtains in our dining room and asked if they were new, my father would yell, “Don’t be such a buffoon!”

  •

  The things my father appreciated and respected were socialism, England, Zola’s novels, the Rockefeller Foundation, mountains, Val d’Aosta Alpine guides. The things my mother loved were socialism, Paul Verlaine’s poetry, music, in particular Lohengrin, which she used to sing for us in the evenings after dinner.

  My mother was Milanese but her family, like my father’s, was originally from Trieste. In marrying my father she’d also married his many Triestine expressions. Whenever she recounted her childhood memories, Milanese dialect mixed into her speech.

  Once when she was a small girl walking down the street in Milan she’d seen a man standing rigid and immobile in front of a hairdresser’s window staring at a mannequin’s head. He was muttering to himself, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Too long in the neck.”

  A lot of her memories were like this: simple phrases that she overheard. One day she was out for a walk with her boarding-school classmates and teachers. Suddenly one of the girls broke rank and ran to embrace a passing dog. She hugged it and in Milanese dialect said, “It’s her, it’s her, it’s her, it’s my bitch’s sister!”

  My mother attended boarding school for many years. She had a grand old time at that boarding school.

  She acted, sang, and danced in the school productions; she performed in a comedy dressed up as a monkey; she sang in a light opera entitled The Slipper Lost in the Snow.

  She wrote the libretto and music for an opera. Her opera began like this:

  I am Don Carlos Tadrid

  And I’m a student in Madrid!

  While strolling down via Berzuellina,

  I stopped in my tracks for I’d seen a

  Window in which I spied quite a creature,

  A young and most beautiful teacher!

  And she wrote a poem that went:

  Ignorance I thee hail,

  You’re my holy grail!

  Happiness is your realm so please

  Let’s leave studying to the Maccabees!

  Let’s drink, dance, and avoid debate,

  C’mon let’s celebrate!

  Now Muse inspire you must,

  What is in my heart do say,

  Tell me the philosopher is bust,

  True love the ignoramus’s way.

  And she parodied Metastasio:

  If each man’s inner stress

  His forehead did express

  How many who by foot travel far

  Would appear to rather go by car.

  She stayed at boarding school until she was sixteen. Every Sunday she went to visit an uncle on her mother’s side who was nicknamed “Barbison.” Turkey was served; after they had eaten, Barbison pointed to the leftovers and said to his wife, “That’ll be our breakfast.”

  Barbison’s wife, Aunt Celestina, was nicknamed “Baryte.” Someone had told her that baryte was in everything, so she would, for example, point to the bread on the table and say, “See that bread there? It’s all baryte.”

  Barbison was a coarse man with a red nose. “A Barbison nose” my mother would say whenever she saw a red nose. After those turkey lunches Barbison would say in dialect to my mother, “Lidia, you and me, we know a thing or two about chemistry so what’s sulfuric acid stink of? It stinks of fart. Sulfuric acid stinks of fart.”

  Barbison’s real name was Perego. Some of his friends had made up this ditty for him:

  Night or day there’s no grander feller

  Than Perego and his wine cellar.

  Barbison’s sisters were nicknamed “the Blesseds” because of their sanctimoniousness.

  Another aunt of my mother’s, Aunt Cecilia, was famous in the family for a particular remark. My mother was telling her how they’d all been worried something terrible had happened to my grandfather when he’d been very late coming home for lunch. In dialect, Aunt Cecilia promptly asked her, “What did you serve for lunch, rice or pasta?”

  “Pasta,” my mother responded.

  “Good thing you didn’t serve rice or there’s no saying how long he would have been gone.”

  My maternal grandparents both died before I was born. Grandmother Pina, my mother’s mother, was from a modest family and had married a neighbor. Young, diminutive, and bespectacled, my grandfather was at the beginning of his career as a distinguished lawyer. Every day my grandmother heard him at the front entrance to the building asking the concierge, “Are there any let-ters for me?” My grandfather pronounced each t emphatically as if the one word were actually two. This pronunciation impressed my grandmother as a sign of great refinement. She married him because of his pronunciation, and because she wanted a black velvet coat for the winter. It was not a happy marriage.

  When she was young my grandmother Pina was blond and pretty. Once she performed in an am
ateur drama production. When the curtain rose my grandmother Pina was onstage with a paintbrush and easel. She said these words: “I cannot go on painting; my soul cannot be constrained by toil and art; it flies far from here and is nourished by painful thoughts.”

  My grandfather threw himself into socialism. He was friends with Bissolati, Turati, and Kuliscioff. My grandmother Pina stayed out of her husband’s political activities. Because he always packed the house full of socialists, my grandmother Pina used to say bitterly, in dialect, of their daughter, “That girl’s going to marry the gasman.” They ended up living separately. In the last years of his life, my grandfather gave up politics and resumed his practice as a lawyer, but he slept until five in the afternoon and when clients turned up he would say, “What are they doing here? Send them away!”

  At the end of her life, my grandmother Pina lived in Florence. Sometimes she went to visit my mother who was married by then and also living in Florence. My grandmother Pina, however, was terrified of my father. One day she came to visit my brother Gino—still a babe in arms—who was running a slight fever. My father was nevertheless very worried and in an effort to calm him down my grandmother suggested that the fever was due to teething. My father became furious, insisting that teething did not cause fevers. On her way out my grandmother Pina met my uncle Silvio, who was also coming to visit us. In dialect, she whispered to him on the steps, “Whatever you do, don’t say it’s the teeth.”

  Beyond “Don’t say it’s the teeth,” “That girl’s going to marry the gasman,” and “I cannot go on painting,” I don’t know anything about this grandmother of mine and no other words of hers came my way. I do remember, however, often hearing repeated in the family this phrase of hers, also in dialect: “Every day it’s something, every day something, and today Drusilla’s broken her specs.”

  She had three children, Silvio, my mother, and Drusilla, who was shortsighted and always breaking her eyeglasses. My grandmother died alone in Florence after a life full of sorrow: Her eldest child, Silvio, committed suicide when he was thirty by shooting himself in the temple one night in a public park in Milan.