Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  After boarding school, my mother left Milan and went to live in Florence. She enrolled at the university to study medicine but never finished her degree because she met my father and married him. My grandmother on my father’s side was opposed to the marriage because my mother wasn’t Jewish and someone had told her that my mother was a devout Catholic and that every time she saw a church she bowed low and made the sign of the cross several times. This was entirely untrue. No one in my mother’s family went to church or crossed themselves. So for a while my grandmother was opposed to the marriage, but then she agreed to try to get to know my mother. They met one evening at the theater and watched a play in which a white woman ended up among black Africans and a black woman who was jealous of her, gnashed her teeth and, glaring at her with terrible eyes, said, “White lady cutlet! White lady cutlet!”

  “White lady cutlet,” my mother would always say whenever she ate a cutlet.

  They’d been given complimentary seats for that play because my father’s brother, Uncle Cesare, was a theater critic. He was, this uncle Cesare, completely different from my father—calm, fat, and always cheerful. As a theater critic he was not at all caustic and never wanted to say anything bad about a play, finding something positive about each production. When my mother told him that a play seemed stupid to her, he would get mad and say, “Why don’t you try to write one yourself.” Later Uncle Cesare married an actress, a great tragedy for my grandmother; for many years she didn’t want to be introduced to Uncle Cesare’s wife because in my grandmother’s opinion an actress was even worse than a woman who made the sign of the cross.

  At the time he got married my father was working in Florence in a clinic run by one of my mother’s uncles, nicknamed the “Lunatic” because he was a doctor who treated the insane. The Lunatic was, in fact, a man of great intelligence, cultivated and wry. I’m not sure if he ever knew what our family called him. In my paternal grandmother’s house my mother encountered a retinue of various Margheritas and Reginas who were either my father’s cousins or aunts, and she also met the renowned La Vendée who was still alive in those days. As for my great grandfather Parente, he’d been dead for some time as was his wife, my great grandmother Dolcetta, and their servant known as Bepo, the porter. It was known that my great grandmother Dolcetta was small and round like a ball and always had indigestion because she ate too much. She felt sick, vomited, then went to bed, but after a little while they would find her eating an egg. “It’s so fresh,” she’d say by way of justification.

  Great Grandfather Parente and Great Grandmother Dolcetta had a daughter called Rosina. Rosina’s husband died leaving her with small children and little money so she moved back into her father’s house. The day after she returned, while everyone was at the dinner table, Great Grandmother Dolcetta stared at her and said, “What’s wrong with our Rosina today? She’s not her usual self.”

  My mother used to tell us, and at some length, the stories about “our Rosina” and Great Grandmother Dolcetta and the egg because my father wasn’t any good at telling stories, always confusing the facts and details, and interrupting himself with his thunderous and prolonged laughter—because memories of his family and his childhood delighted him—making it hard for us to follow him.

  Enjoying the sheer pleasure of storytelling, my mother was always greatly cheered up whenever she told a story. She would turn to one of us at the dinner table and begin telling a story, and whether she was telling one about my father’s family or about her own, she lit up with joy. It was as if she were telling the story for the first time, telling it to fresh ears. “I had an uncle,” she would begin, “whom they called Barbison.”

  And if one of us said, “I know that story! I’ve already heard it a thousand times!” she would turn to another one of us and in a lowered voice continue on with her story.

  “I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve heard this story,” my father would shout, overhearing a word or two as he passed by.

  My mother, her voice lowered, would continue on with the story.

  The Lunatic had a madman in his clinic who believed he was God. Every morning the Lunatic said to him, “Good morning, most eminent Signor Lipmann.” And the madman responded, “Most eminent, perhaps yes, Lipmann, probably not!” because he believed he was God.

  And then there was the famous line from the orchestra conductor, an acquaintance of Silvio’s, who while on tour in Bergamo said to his restless or undisciplined singers, “We haven’t come to Bergamo on a military campaign but to conduct Carmen, Bizet’s masterpiece.”

  My parents had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don’t write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say “We haven’t come to Bergamo on a military campaign,” or “Sulfuric acid stinks of fart,” and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, “Most eminent Signor Lipmann,” and we immediately hear my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears: “Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!”

  •

  I don’t know how my father and his brother Cesare, both devoid of all business sense, could have emerged from that long line of bankers who were my father’s ancestors and relatives. My father spent his life immersed in scientific research, a profession that didn’t yield much money; in any case, money for him was a vague and confused concept dominated by an essential indifference. The result was that whenever he had to deal with money in any practical way, he nearly always lost it or, at least, conducted himself in such a way that he should have lost it, and if he didn’t lose it, and all went smoothly, it was only by pure chance. All his life he was plagued with the anxiety that from one moment to the next he might find himself on the street. It was an irrational worry that dwelled within him along with other dark moods and forebodings, like his foreboding about the future success and fortune of his children. His fear of homelessness weighed on him like a dark mass of black clouds hovering over rocky mountains, yet it never managed to penetrate the depths of his spirit and his essential, absolute, and intimate indifference to money. He would say “a considerable sum” when speaking of fifty lire, or he would say “fifty francs” since his preferred unit of monetary measurement was the franc not the lira. In the evenings, he would go from room to room shouting at us for leaving the lights on but then would go and lose millions of lire, almost without noticing, by casually buying or selling stocks, or by handing over his work to publishers then neglecting to ask for proper compensation.

  After Florence, my parents went to Sardinia because my father was appointed to a professorship in Sassari, and for a few years they lived there. They then moved to Palermo, where I was born, the last of the five children. During the war, my father was a medical officer on the Karst Plateau. Finally, we came to live in Turin.

  •

  Those first years in Turin were difficult for my mother. The First World War was just over, the postwar cost of living was high, and we had little money. It was cold in Turin and my mother complained about that and about the dark, damp apartment that my father had found for us before we arrived, without having consulted anyone. My mother, according to my father, complained in Paler
mo, and she complained in Sassari. She always found something to grumble about. Now she spoke of Palermo and Sassari as if they were paradise on earth. In both places she had made many friends, however she never wrote to them because she was incapable of maintaining friendships with anyone at a distance. She’d had beautiful sun-drenched apartments, a comfortable and easy life, and wonderful housemaids. In Turin, at first she couldn’t find a housemaid; then one day, I don’t know how, Natalina turned up at our apartment and stayed for thirty years. The truth was, even if my mother grumbled and complained in Sassari and Palermo, she’d been very happy there because she had a joyful nature, and no matter where she was she found people to love and to love her. Wherever she was she always found a way to enjoy the places and things around her and to be happy. She was even happy during those uncomfortable, if not actually difficult, first years in Turin in which she often cried because of my father’s bad moods, because of the cold, because she missed those other places, because her children were growing up and needed books, coats, shoes, and there wasn’t much money. Still, she was happy because as soon as she stopped crying she’d become very joyful, and at home she would sing Lohengrin, The Slipper Lost in the Snow, and Don Carlos Tadrid at the top of her lungs. And later, recalling those years when she still had all her children at home and there wasn’t any money, and the price of the property shares was always going down, and the apartment was damp and dark, she always spoke of that time as beautiful and very happy. “The era of via Pastrengo,” she would say later to describe those years. Via Pastrengo was the street where we lived then.

  •

  The apartment on via Pastrengo was very big. There were ten or twelve rooms, a courtyard, a garden, and a glass-enclosed veranda looking onto the garden. It was, however, very dark and certainly damp because in the bathroom one winter two or three mushrooms sprouted. Those mushrooms were a great topic of conversation in the family. My brothers told my paternal grandmother, who was staying with us at the time, that we had cooked them up and eaten them. My grandmother, even if incredulous, was nevertheless alarmed and disgusted and said, “In this house you make a bordello out of everything.”

  I was a small girl then and I had only the vaguest memory of Palermo, the city where I was born and then left when I was three years old. I believed, however, that just like my mother and sister, I too missed Palermo terribly. I missed the beach at Mondello where we would go swimming, and I missed Signora Messina, a friend of my mother’s, and a little girl called Olga, a friend of my sister’s, whom I called “Live Olga” in order to distinguish her from my doll called Olga. Every time we saw her on the beach I would say, “Live Olga makes me blush.” These were the people we knew in Palermo and Mondello. Nurturing my nostalgia, or feigning nostalgia, I wrote the first poem of my life, comprised of only two lines:

  Palermino Palermino,

  You’re more beautiful than Torino.

  This poem was hailed in our family as a sign of my precocious vocation for poetry, and encouraged by my success, I immediately composed two more very short poems about mountains I’d heard mentioned by my siblings:

  Long live Grivola mountain,

  If ever you slide down one.

  Long live Mont Blanc,

  If ever you’re zonked.

  Of course, in our family writing poetry was a common practice. My brother Mario wrote a poem about the Tosi boys, playmates from Mondello whom he couldn’t stand:

  And then the Tosi boys came,

  All nasty, boring, and lame.

  But the best and most celebrated poem of all was by my brother Alberto, written when he was ten or eleven and not based on any real event but created from nothing, the product of undiluted poetic invention:

  The old maid

  With no titties

  Had a babe

  She was pretty.

  We often recited from The Daughter of Iorio at home. But mostly in the evenings, sitting around the table, we recited a poem my mother had taught us, having heard it when she was a child at a charity performance put on for refugees from the Po Valley flooding:

  For many days everyone trembled where they stood!

  And the elders said, “Mary, Mother of God, this flood is rising hour upon hour!

  Listen to us children; take your things and leave evermore!

  What’s that! Depart and abandon the dear old poor!”

  The father wouldn’t hear of it; and the father was young and bold and was not one to be told

  That such an aberration should ever again appear;

  And that night he said to the mother, “Rosa, my dear,

  Put the children to bed and have a peaceful repose,

  The Po, a tired-out giant, is calm and in need of a doze.

  In his great earth-bed carved by God does he now lie,

  So go to sleep; there are many brave spirits such as I,

  Many here with strong shoulders who will swiftly rally

  To guard the banks and defend all in this poor valley.”

  My mother had forgotten the rest of it but I don’t think her memory of the first part was totally accurate either since in some places, for example, where it goes “and the father was young and bold,” the line gets longer without any regard for the meter. But she made up for her memory’s imprecision with the emphasis she placed on the words.

  Many here with strong shoulders who will swiftly rally

  To guard the banks and defend all in this poor valley!

  My father couldn’t bear this poem, and whenever he heard us reciting it with my mother, he would get angry and say that we were putting on “puppet shows” and incapable of ever doing anything serious.

  Almost every evening Terni and some friends of my brother Gino came over. Gino, the eldest, went to the Polytechnic then. We sat around the table and recited poetry or sang

  I am Don Carlos Tadrid

  And I’m a student in Madrid!

  My mother would sing. And my father, who’d stayed in his study reading, would show up every so often at the dining-room door, suspicious, scowling, his pipe in hand.

  “Still saying your nitwitteries! Still putting on your puppet shows!”

  The only subjects my father tolerated were either scientific, political, or changes “in the department,” which meant some professor or other was appointed a post in Turin, unjustly according to my father, since the man was “a dim-wit,” or another was not appointed a post in Turin unjustly because he was a man “of great importance.” In any case, he deemed scientific subjects, and what went on “in the department,” matters beyond our capacity for understanding. At the table, however, he would report daily to my mother about the situation “in the department,” and about the progress of his various tissue cultures in petri dishes in the laboratory, and he’d get angry if she demonstrated even the slightest lack of attention. At mealtimes my father ate a lot, but always in such a hurry that it seemed like he ate nothing because his plate was almost immediately empty again. He was actually convinced that he hardly ate anything and had transmitted this belief to my mother who was always pleading with him to eat. He, on the other hand, was always yelling at my mother because he thought she ate too much.

  “Don’t eat too much! You’ll get indigestion!”

  “Don’t pick at your cuticles!” he would thunder at her periodically. My mother did, in fact, have the habit of picking at her cuticles ever since, as a girl at boarding school, she’d developed a whitlow on her finger that then peeled.

  All of us, in my father’s opinion, ate too much and would have indigestion. Any dish he didn’t like he claimed was unhealthy and indigestible. Dishes he liked he claimed to be healthy and said they “stimulated peristalsis.”

  If a dish he didn’t like arrived at the table he would become infuriated. “Why do you cook the meat like this! You know that I don’t like it this way!” If a dish he liked was prepared only for him he got angry all the same. “I don’t want things made specially for me! Don’t make anything specia
l for me!”

  “I eat everything,” he said. “I’m not picky like you lot. I don’t care in the least about food!”

  “One shouldn’t talk all the time about eating! It’s vulgar!” he would thunder if he heard us talking about one dish or another.

  “How I do love cheese,” my mother invariably would say whenever cheese was served.

  And my father would say, “How monotonous you are! All you do is repeat yourself!”

  My father liked his fruit very ripe, so whenever one of us came across an overripe pear we gave it to him.

  “Ah, so you give me your rotten pears! What real jackasses you are!” he’d say with a hearty laugh that reverberated throughout the apartment, then he’d eat the pear in two bites.

  “Walnuts,” he’d say as he cracked them open, “are good for you. They stimulate peristalsis.”

  “You’re monotonous too,” my mother would say. “You repeat yourself too.”

  My father would then take offense. “What a jackass!” he’d say. “You tell me I’m monotonous! What a real jackass you are!”

  At home we had ferocious arguments over politics, which ended in tantrums, napkins hurled into the air, and doors slammed so hard the whole apartment shook. That was during the early years of fascism. I still can’t understand what they were arguing about so vehemently since my father and siblings were all against fascism. I asked my siblings recently and none of them could enlighten me on the subject, yet they all remembered those fierce fights. It seems to me that my brother Mario, playing devil’s advocate with my parents, would defend Mussolini in some way, and this certainly would have enraged my father. Mario and my father always argued because Mario’s opinions were consistently at odds with my father’s.