Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  My father said Turati was naive and my mother, who didn’t think there was anything wrong with naiveté, would nod and sigh and say, “My poor Filippetto.” During that period, Turati once came to our apartment when he was passing through Turin. I remember him in the living room, as big as a bear with a round gray beard. I saw him twice: that time and later on, when he had to flee Italy and stayed in hiding with us for a week. I can’t remember, however, even one word he said that day in our living room. All I remember is a lot of arguing and debate.

  My father always came home enraged whenever he ran into Blackshirts parading in the street or when he’d discovered new fascists among his colleagues at department meetings. “Buffoons! Thugs! What a joke!” he’d say, sitting down at the table. He slammed down his napkin, slammed down his plate, slammed down his glass, and snorted in disgust. He’d express his opinion in a loud voice on the street to some acquaintances who happened to be walking home with him and they’d look around terrified. “Cowards! Negroes!” my father thundered later at home, describing his acquaintances’ fear. I think he enjoyed terrifying them by speaking in a loud voice on the street when he was with them. Partly he enjoyed himself, and partly he didn’t know how to control the volume of his voice, which always sounded very loud, even when he thought he was whispering.

  Regarding my father’s inability to control the volume of his voice, Terni and my mother would tell the story of how one day during a reception for professors while they were all assembled in the halls of the university my mother asked my father in a whisper the name of someone nearby.

  “Who’s that?” my father had yelled so loudly that everyone turned to stare at them. “Who’s that? I’ll tell you who he is! He’s a perfect imbecile!”

  In general, my father had no tolerance for jokes, those told either by us or by my mother. In our family jokes were called “little gags,” and we loved to both tell and hear them. But my father would get angry. The only little gags he had any tolerance for were the antifascist ones, and then a few from his era that both he and my mother knew and that he sometimes recollected on those evenings with the Lopezes who, of course, by then had heard his little gags many times. My father deemed some of those little gags lewd, even if I’m sure they were very innocent, and whenever we children were present he would only whisper them. His voice would become a loud hum but we could still make out many of the words, one of which was coquette, a term often featured in those nineteenth-century gags and which he, while endeavoring to whisper, pronounced louder than the other words and with a special mingling of malice and pleasure.

  •

  My father always woke up at four o’clock in the morning. After getting out of bed, his first concern was to go and see if the mezzorado had turned out well. Mezzorado was a kind of sour milk he’d been taught how to make by shepherds in Sardinia. It was actually just yogurt. Yogurt wasn’t yet fashionable then. You couldn’t buy it in dairies and snack bars as you do nowadays. In making his own yogurt my father was, like in so many things, a pioneer. Winter sports weren’t fashionable at the time either, and my father might have been the only one in Turin to engage in them. As soon as snow fell, no matter how light, on Saturday evening he took off for Claviere with his skis on his shoulder. Neither Sestriere nor the hotels in Cervinia existed then. My father regularly slept in a mountain hut above Claviere called the Mautino Hut. He sometimes dragged along with him my siblings or a few of his assistants who shared his passion for the mountains. He used the English pronunciation “ski.” He had learned to ski as a youth while on a trip to Norway. On Sunday night when he came home he would always claim that the snow had been terrible. Snow for him was always too wet or too dry, like the mezzorado, which never turned out just as it should. It always seemed to him either too watery or too thick.

  “Lidia! The mezzorado didn’t set,” he would thunder down the hall. The mezzorado was in a bowl in the kitchen covered by a plate and wrapped in an old salmon-colored shawl of my mother’s. Sometimes it really didn’t set and the result was a greenish trickle with marble-white lumps that had to be thrown away. Making mezzorado was an extremely delicate process and the slightest thing would spoil it—for example, if the shawl slipped even slightly out of place and a sliver of air seeped in.

  “It didn’t set again today and it’s entirely your Natalina’s fault!” my father thundered down the hall at my mother who was still half asleep, her response to him garbled.

  Whenever we went on our summer holiday we had to remember to bring the mezzorado yeast base, or “mother,” which was kept in a small cup, securely wrapped and tied up with string. “Where is the mother? Did you bring the mother?” my father would ask on the train, rummaging through a rucksack. “It’s not here! I can’t find it!” he’d shout. Sometimes the mother really had been forgotten and he’d have to make it again from scratch with brewer’s yeast.

  In the morning my father always took a cold shower. Under the water’s lash, he’d let out a long roar, then he’d get dressed and, after stirring in many spoonfuls of sugar, he’d gobble down great cupfuls of that cold mezzorado. By the time he left the apartment, the streets were still dark and mostly deserted. He’d set out into the cold fog of those Turin dawns wearing a large beret that formed a kind of visor over his brow and a great big raincoat full of pockets and with many leather buttons. He’d go out with his hands clasped behind his back, his pipe in his mouth, his stride lopsided because one shoulder was higher than the other. Almost no one was on the street yet but he still managed to bump into whoever happened to be out then. Scowling, he’d continue on his way with his head lowered.

  At that hour no one was at the laboratory yet, with the exception of maybe Conti, his attendant, who was a short, calm, mild- mannered little man wearing a gray lab coat; he was very fond of my father and my father was very fond of him. He sometimes came over to our apartment when a cupboard needed fixing, or a fuse needed replacing, or our trunks needed cording. After years at the laboratory, Conti had learned a great deal about anatomy and during the exams he would drop helpful hints to the pupils and my father would get angry. But later at home my father would proudly tell my mother that Conti knew anatomy better than the students. At the laboratory, my father wore a gray lab coat identical to Conti’s and he yelled down the halls just like he did at home.

  I am Don Carlos Tadrid

  And I’m a student in Madrid!

  My mother sang this at the top of her lungs in the mornings while she brushed out her drenched hair. Like my father, she too took a cold shower and she and my father had these spiny gloves that they rubbed themselves down with to warm up after their showers.

  “I’m freezing!” my mother would say joyfully because she loved the cold water. “I’m still freezing! How cold it is!”

  She’d wrap herself up snugly in her bathrobe and with a coffee cup in hand she’d take a spin around the garden. My siblings were all at school and there was a little peace in the house then. My mother sang while shaking out her wet hair in the morning air. She’d then go to the ironing room to chat with Natalina and Rina.

  The ironing room was also called “the wardrobe room.” The sewing machine was in there and it was where Rina spent her days sewing. Rina was a home seamstress of sorts. She was good but only for things like turning out our coats and patching our trousers. She didn’t make clothes. When she wasn’t at our apartment she was at the Lopezes. My mother and Frances passed her back and forth like a juggling ball between hands. She was teeny tiny, almost a dwarf. She called my mother “Signora Maman” and when she ran into my father in the hallway she scampered away like a mouse because he couldn’t tolerate her.

  “Rina! Rina’s here again today!” he’d say, infuriated. “I can’t stand her. She’s a gossip! And she’s entirely useless!”

  “But the Lopezes always have her come too,” my mother would say as justification.

  Rina was moody. When she came to our house after a period of being away, she was very friendly a
nd devoted herself to a thousand tasks—she would plan to refurbish all of our mattresses and pillows, clean the curtains, remove stains from the carpets using coffee grounds as she’d seen done at Frances’s house. But she soon got bored. She became sullen and irritated with me and Lucio for hanging around her after she’d earlier promised to take us out for a walk or to give us sweets. Lucio, Frances’s youngest son, came nearly every day to our apartment to play.

  “Leave me in peace! I have to work!” Rina would say sulkily while she worked the sewing machine and then she’d bicker with Natalina.

  “That wicked Rina!” my mother would say on the morning Rina, without warning, didn’t show up and no one knew where she’d disappeared to because even Frances hadn’t seen her. At Rina’s instigation there were mattresses and pillows all undone, their wool stuffing heaped in the wardrobe room, and yellow smears were all over the carpets from coffee grounds.

  “That wicked Rina! I’ll never have her back!” After a few weeks Rina would come back, cheerful, kind, full of initiatives and promises. And my mother forgot all about her faults and perched herself in the wardrobe room to listen to Rina’s chatter as she rapidly worked the sewing machine, tapping the pedal with her dwarfish foot on which she wore a cloth slipper.

  Natalina, my mother said, resembled Louis XI. She was small and frail with a long face and her hair was sometimes combed straight and other times had been sumptuously curled with an iron. “My Louis XI,” my mother would say in the morning when Natalina would walk into the bedroom, glowering, with a kerchief on her head, carrying a mop and bucket. Natalina made a muddle of her feminine and masculine pronouns.

  “She went out this morning without a coat,” she’d announce to my mother.

  “And who is she?”

  “Master Mario. He should say something to him about it.”

  “He who?”

  “He, Signora Lidia, he,” Natalina said, pointing at my mother impatiently and rattling the bucket.

  Natalina, my mother told her friends, was “a lightning bolt” because she did the housework with extraordinary speed. And she was “an earthquake” because she did it all ferociously while making a racket. She had the look of a whipped dog because she’d had an unhappy childhood. She was an orphan who grew up in either orphanages or hospices and then in the service of merciless employers. She had for those old bosses—whom she would tell us used to slap her so hard her head would hurt for days—a profound nostalgia. At Christmas she would send them lavish gilded cards. She even sometimes sent them presents. She never had a cent in her pocket, being so generous and extravagant in her spending habits, and she was forever inclined to lend money to those friends with whom she went out on Sundays. She never lost that look of a whipped dog. Nevertheless, she took out on us, and in particular on my mother, her penchant for sarcastic, domineering, and stubborn behavior. With my mother, whom she loved tenderly and who tenderly loved her back, she maintained a surly, sarcastic, and in no way servile rapport.

  “It’s a good thing he is a woman because otherwise how would he earn a living? He who is good for nothing,” she’d say to my mother.

  “He who?”

  “He, she, you!”

  •

  At home, we lived in a recurring nightmare filled with my father’s sudden outbursts, exploding as he did often over the most trifling things—a pair of shoes he couldn’t find, a book put back on the wrong shelf, a blown-out lightbulb, a slight delay in a meal being served, an overcooked dish. We also lived in the nightmare of the fights between my brothers Alberto and Mario, which also exploded without warning; we would suddenly hear coming from their room the sound of chairs being overturned and banged against the walls, followed by piercing and savage shrieks. By then Alberto and Mario were big, strong teenagers who could do some real damage when punching each other; they came out of their scuffles with bloody noses, swollen lips, torn clothes.

  “They’re murdring each other!” my mother screamed, dropping the e in her fright. “Beppino, come quick, they’re murdring each other!” she screamed, calling my father.

  My father’s intervention, like all of his actions, was violent. He threw himself between the two locked in combat and smacked them head to toe. I was little and remember being terrified by those three men and their brutal fights. The trivial reasons over which Alberto and Mario frequently fought were much the same as the trivial reasons over which my father exploded in anger—a book or tie not found, wanting to be first in line when it was time to wash. Once when Alberto appeared at school with his head bandaged, a professor asked him what had happened. He stood up and said, “My brother and I wanted to take a bath.”

  Of the two, Mario was older and stronger. His hands were as hard as iron and when he was angry he went into a nervous frenzy that caused his muscles, tendons, and jaw to become rigid. As a child, he’d been a bit delicate, so my father had taken him hiking in the mountains to toughen him up, which, of course, he did with all of us. Mario had developed an unspoken hatred of the mountains, and as soon as he was able to escape my father’s will, he quit going entirely. But in those years he was still obligated to go. Alberto wasn’t always the object of Mario’s rage. Sometimes Mario’s anger was directed at things, especially things that didn’t obey the fury of his hands. Saturday afternoon he’d go to the basement to look for his skis and be overcome by an unspoken wrath either because he couldn’t find them or because no matter how hard he wrenched the ski bindings with his hands they wouldn’t open. Even if they were nowhere near him at the time, Alberto and my father were inescapably implicated in his wrath: Alberto for always using his things; my father for persisting in taking him to the mountains when he hated going, then making him wear old skis with rusty bindings. Sometimes Mario couldn’t get his ski boots on. He raised hell in that basement all by himself and from upstairs we heard a great racket. He knocked everyone’s skis to the ground, hurled bindings, boots, and sealskins, tore down ropes, smashed out the bottoms of drawers, kicked chairs, walls, and table legs. I remember seeing him one day in the living room sitting peacefully reading the newspaper. All of a sudden he was seized by one of his silent rages and began to furiously rip the paper to pieces. He gnashed his teeth, stamped his feet, and ripped up the paper. That time neither Alberto nor my father was to blame in the slightest. All that had happened was that the bells of a nearby church had begun to ring and their insistent peal had exasperated him.

  Once, at the dining table after one of my father’s outbursts—not even one of his worst—Mario picked up the bread knife and scraped the back of his own hand with it. Torrents of blood flowed and I remember the terror, the screams, my mother’s tears, and my father, who was also frightened and screaming, holding sterilized gauze and iodine.

  After he had argued with Alberto and they had come to blows, Mario went around for the next few days “in a pout,” or “with the moon,” as it was called in our family. He came to the table very pale, with swollen eyelids and teeny-tiny eyes. Mario always had small eyes, narrow and long like the Chinese. But during those “moon” days, his eyes were invisible, reduced to two slits. He didn’t say a word. He generally was in a pout because he was convinced that in our family Alberto was always believed to be in the right and he in the wrong. And he thought himself too grown up for my father to still have the right to smack him around.

  “Did you see that pout on Mario? Did you see that moon face?” my father would say to my mother as soon as Mario left the room. “What’s wrong with that moon face? He didn’t even say one word! What a jackass!”

  Then one morning Mario was no longer “with the moon.” He came into the living room, sat down on the couch, and began to stroke his cheeks with a rapt smile and narrowed eyes. He said, “The Brot shot in the pot.” It was one of his little jokes that he liked very much and repeated incessantly. “The Brot shot in the pot. The Brut shut in the put. The Bret shet in the pet. The Brit—”

  “Mario,” my father yelled, “don’t use bad words
!”

  “The worm squirms to confirm . . .” Mario began again as soon as my father had left the room. He stayed in the living room to chat with my mother and Terni who was his great friend.

  “How sweet Mario is when he’s in a good mood!” my mother would say. “How charming he is! He’s reminds me of Silvio!”

  Silvio was my mother’s brother, the one who killed himself. In our family, his death was shrouded in mystery. I now know that he killed himself but I still don’t really know why. I believe the air of mystery surrounding the figure of Silvio was perpetuated mostly by my father because he didn’t want us to know that there had been a suicide in our family, and perhaps for other reasons I’m unaware of. As for my mother, she always spoke joyfully of Silvio, since my mother by nature was happy. She perceived and accepted the good and joyfulness in everything, and elicited the same from everything and everyone, leaving sorrow and evil in the shadows, only scarcely and rarely acknowledging them with a brief sigh.

  Silvio had been a musician and a man of letters. He had put to music “Les feuilles mortes” and other Paul Verlaine poems. What little he could play, he played badly. He hissed his tunes while playing the piano with one finger. He’d say to my mother, “Listen, you fool, listen to how beautiful this is.” Even though he played so badly, and sang with such a reedy voice, it was nevertheless beautiful to listen to him, my mother said. Silvio was very elegant and dressed with great care. He’d complain vehemently if his trousers weren’t ironed properly with a straight crease. He had a beautiful walking stick with an ivory knob, and he went about Milan with his walking stick, wearing a boater and meeting with his friends in a café to discuss music. In those stories my mother told, Silvio was always a happy person. Unaware as I was of the details, his death seemed incomprehensible to me. On my mother’s bedside table was a small faded portrait of him wearing his boater and sporting a little mustache with ends that twirled upwards. It sat next to another photograph of my mother with Anna Kuliscioff, both of them wearing veiled hats with feathers and standing in the rain.