Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  In our apartment, another trace of Silvio was his unfinished opera of Peer Gynt stored high up at the very top of a cupboard in large booklets inside folders tied with ribbons. “How witty Silvio was!” my mother often said. “How charming he was! And his Peer Gynt was an opera of great merit.”

  My mother always hoped that at least one of her children would become, like Silvio, a musician. It was a hope that remained unfulfilled because each one of us proved to be entirely tone-deaf when it came to music and whenever we tried to sing we were always entirely out of tune. Yet all of us wanted to try to sing and Paola, while cleaning up her room in the morning, would repeat in a sad catlike voice snatches from operas and songs she’d heard my mother sing. In order to assert her love of music, Paola sometimes went to concerts with my mother, but my brothers said she was just faking it and that she didn’t care about music at all. As for me and my brothers, we were occasionally taken to concerts, but we always fell asleep, and when taken to the opera we complained about “all that music that got in the way of the words.” Once my mother took me to Madama Butterfly. I brought with me the Children’s Journal and read it throughout the entire performance, trying to make out the words using the light from the stage and covering my ears with my hands so as not to hear the din.

  Still, whenever my mother sang we all listened with our jaws dropped. Once Gino was asked if he was familiar with Wagner’s operas. “Of course,” he said, “I’ve heard Lohengrin sung by my mother.”

  My father didn’t simply dislike music, he actively loathed it. He loathed any kind of instrument that produced music, whether a piano, an accordion, or a tambourine. Once, just after the war, I was in a restaurant with him in Rome. A woman came in begging for money. The waiter chased her off. My father became furious with the waiter, shouting, “I forbid you to chase off that poor woman! Let her be!” He then gave her some money. The waiter, offended and angry, withdrew into a corner with his napkin draped over his arm. The woman then pulled out from beneath her overcoat a guitar and began to play. My father, after a little while, exhibited signs of impatience, the same signs he would show at the dinner table at home: he fidgeted with a glass, the bread, the utensils, he slapped his napkin across his lap. The woman continued to play, leaning over him with her guitar, grateful to him for having protected her, while long melancholic moans issued forth from the guitar. Suddenly my father exploded. “Enough of this music! Get out of here! I can’t stand to hear that sound!” But she continued to play and the triumphant waiter remained quietly in the corner, immobile, contemplating the scene.

  Besides Silvio’s suicide, there was something else in our family that always remained tinged with a vague mystery, even if it concerned people we were constantly talking about. It was the fact that Turati and Kuliscioff lived together even though they weren’t married. I recognize even in this particular mystery my father’s way of thinking and his prudishness because if it had been left up to my mother she probably wouldn’t have given it much thought. It would have been simpler if they’d lied and told us they were husband and wife. Instead they concealed from us, or at least from me since I was still a child, the fact that they did live together. Hearing their names always mentioned together as a couple, I asked if they were husband and wife, or sister and brother, or what. I always got a confusing answer. Furthermore, I didn’t understand where Andreina, my mother’s childhood friend and Kuliscioff’s daughter, had come from and why her surname was Costa, and I didn’t understand what she had to do with Andrea Costa, who was long dead but was nevertheless often mentioned in the same breath with these people.

  Turati and Kuliscioff were ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences. I knew they were both still alive and living in Milan (perhaps together, perhaps in two different apartments) and that they were still involved in politics and the fight against fascism. Nevertheless, in my imagination, they had become tangled up with other figures who were also ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences: her parents, Silvio, the Lunatic, Barbison. People who were either dead or, if still alive, very old and belonging to a distant time, to far-off events when my mother was a child and heard someone or another say, “It’s my bitch’s sister!” and “Sulfuric acid stinks of fart.” These were people impossible to meet now, impossible to touch, and even if I were to meet them and touch them they were not the same as the people I imagined, and even if they were still alive, they were in any case tainted by their proximity to the dead with whom they dwelled in my soul; and they had assumed the step of the dead, light and elusive.

  •

  “Oh, poor Lidia,” my mother would sigh now and again. This was how she bemoaned her troubles: the lack of money, my father’s outbursts, the constant fights between Alberto and Mario, Alberto’s insistence on playing soccer instead of studying, her children’s sulking and Natalina’s too.

  I also sulked or threw tantrums. I was, however, still little and my sulking and tantrums didn’t bother my mother very much at the time.

  “It’s itchy. It’s itchy!” I’d say in the mornings when my mother was dressing me in those wool sweaters that irritated my skin.

  “But these are good-quality sweaters!” my mother said. “They’re from Neuberg’s. You can’t possibly expect me to throw them away!”

  Our mother bought our sweaters “from Neuberg’s”; a sweater from Neuberg’s meant it was of the finest quality and couldn’t possibly irritate the skin. Sweaters were bought at Neuberg’s. Overcoats were made by the tailor Maccheroni. As for our winter shoes, they were my father’s responsibility and he ordered them from a shoemaker named Signor Castagneri who had a shop in via Saluzzo.

  I came into the dining room, still sulking over the sweater from Neuberg’s. Seeing me sullen and under a dark cloud, my mother said, “Here comes Hurricane Maria!”

  My mother hated the cold and this was why she bought all those sweaters from Neuberg’s. She hated the cold even though she loved to take that freezing shower every morning. Still, she loathed the cold, that constant penetrating cold of winter days.

  “How cold it is!” she’d repeat, putting another sweater over the one she had on and pulling the sleeves down over her hands. “How cold it is! I can’t stand the cold!” And she pulled the sweater from Neuberg’s down over my hips while I tried to wiggle out of it. “All wool, Lidia!” she said, mimicking the way an old school friend used to speak to her. And then she said, “Just seeing you in that beautiful warm wool sweater cheers me up considerably.”

  She also, however, hated the heat. When it was hot she would begin to pant and pull at the collar of her dress. “How hot it is! I can’t stand the heat!” she’d say. And my father would respond, “How intolerant you are! All of you are so intolerant!”

  When she went away with my father on a trip, my mother brought with her a great quantity of sweaters and dresses made from an extensive variety of fabrics, heavy to light, and with the slightest alteration in temperature she’d change her outfit.

  “I can never find just the right temperature,” she’d say.

  And my father would say, “How boring you are with your heat and your cold! You always find something to complain about!”

  In the mornings, I never wanted to eat breakfast. I detested milk and found the mezzorado even more disgusting. My mother, however, knew that when I was at Frances’s apartment I would drink a full glass of milk at snack time, and the same when I was at the Terni’s. Actually, I drank that milk when I was at the Terni’s or at Frances’s with extreme repugnance; I only drank it out of obedience and timidity because I wasn’t at my own home. My mother was convinced that since I liked to drink milk at Frances’s, I therefore liked milk, resulting in my being given a glass of milk in the mornings, which I regularly refused to go near.

  “But it’s milk from Frances’s home!” my mother would say. “It’s Lucio’s milk. It’s from Lucio’s cow!”

  She tried to make me believe that they’d gone to get the milk from Frances’s apartment, that Lucio
and Frances had their own personal cow, and that the milk at their apartment wasn’t bought from the milkman but was delivered every day from land they owned in Normandy, in a rural region called Gruchet.

  “It’s milk from Gruchet! It’s Lucio’s milk!” my mother would insist, but since I absolutely refused to drink it, Natalina in the end made me a broth.

  I didn’t go to school even though I was old enough because my father said that at school one catches germs. All of my siblings had been homeschooled by tutors for their first years of elementary school for the same reason. My mother gave me my lessons. I didn’t understand arithmetic and I was incapable of learning the multiplication tables. My mother made herself hoarse trying to teach me. She would take pebbles from the garden and line them up on the table, or she’d use candies. In our family, we weren’t allowed to eat sweets because my father said it would ruin our teeth. At home, there were never any chocolates or cakes or cookies because it was forbidden to eat “between meals.” The only dessert we ate, and only ever at the dinner table, was a kind of pancake called smarren that was introduced to us by I can’t remember which German cook. It seemed they were cheap to make and we ate them so often we couldn’t stand them. Then there was the dessert that Natalina knew how to make called Gressoney cake, no doubt because she learned to make it when we were in the mountains at Gressoney.

  My mother only bought candies in order to teach me arithmetic. But learning arithmetic by way of pebbles and candies only made me dislike the subject even more. My mother took out a subscription to a scholastic periodical called School Rights and Responsibilities so that she could learn modern didactic methods. I don’t know what she learned regarding pedagogical systems from that journal—perhaps nothing—but she did find a poem that she liked a lot and would recite to my siblings:

  Let’s all shout out to say:

  Long live the nobility

  Of a girl’s respectability

  When virtue is her way.

  While teaching me geography, my mother told me about all the countries my father had been to when he was young. He’d been to India, where he’d fallen ill with cholera and, I believe, yellow fever. He’d been to Germany and Holland. He was also in Spitzberg. In Spitzberg he had gone inside a whale’s cranium to look for cerebrospinal ganglia but couldn’t find them. He got covered in whale blood and the clothes he brought back home with him were stained and hardened with dried blood. In our apartment, there were many photographs of my father with whales and my mother would show them to me, but I was always a little disappointed because the photographs were blurry and my father appeared only in the background as a tiny shadow. Nor could you see the whale’s head or tail, just this gray and cloudy jagged hill and that was the whale.

  •

  In the spring many roses grew in our garden. How so many roses grew I don’t know, given that not one of us ever dreamed of watering or pruning them. A gardener came perhaps once a year and it seemed that was sufficient.

  “The roses, Lidia! The violets, Lidia!” my mother would say, mimicking her classmate while strolling in the garden.

  In the spring, the Terni children would come to play in our garden with their nanny, Assunta, who wore a white smock and white lisle stockings, and she’d take off her shoes and place them next to her on the lawn. Cucco and Lullina, the Terni children, also wore white outfits and my mother put my smocks on them so they could play without getting their clothes dirty.

  “Ssst, ssst! Look what Cucco is doing!” Terni would say, admiring his children while they played in the dirt. Terni also took off his shoes and jacket and laid them on the lawn while he kicked around a ball, but if he heard my father coming he put them back on immediately.

  In our garden we had a cherry tree and Alberto would climb the tree and eat cherries with his friends, Lucio’s brothers and Frinco, the one who leant us the books, an ominous figure in his peaked cap and wool jersey.

  Lucio came in the mornings and left in the evenings. In the warm seasons he would always come over to our place because there wasn’t a garden at his apartment building. Lucio was delicate and frail and was never hungry at mealtimes. He ate little, putting down his fork and sighing. “I’m tired of chewing,” he’d say, speaking with the soft r, like everyone in his family. Lucio was a fascist and my siblings made him angry by speaking ill of Mussolini. “Let’s not discuss politics,” Lucio would say as soon as he saw my siblings arrive. When he was small he had big black sausage curls that hung over his forehead. Eventually they cut his hair and he wore it combed straight back, glistening with brilliantine. He was always dressed like a little man wearing tight little jackets and little bow ties. He’d learned to read at the same time I did, but I’d read a ton of books while he’d read very few because he read slowly and became tired. Still, whenever he was at our place he read too because when I was tired of playing occasionally I would fling myself down on the lawn with a book. Lucio would then go boast to my siblings that he’d read an entire book since they were always teasing him because he read so little. “Today I read two lire,” he’d say proudly. “Today I read five lire,” and he’d show the price of the book printed on the title page. In the evenings his nanny, Maria Buoninsegni, would come fetch him. She was a wrinkled old woman who wore a mangy fox fur around her neck. She was very devout and she took me and Lucio to church and to religious processions. She was a friend of Father Semeria’s and she talked about him all the time. Once, during I can’t remember which religious ceremony, she introduced me and Lucio to Father Semeria, who patted our heads and asked if we were her children. “No, they’re a friend’s children,” Maria Buoninsegni responded.

  Neither Lopez nor Terni liked the mountains and so my father sometimes went on hikes and made ascents with his friend Galeotti.

  Galeotti lived with his sister and nephew in the countryside at a place called Pozzuolo. My mother once visited them there and had a great time. She spoke often of those days in Pozzuolo with the chickens and turkeys and the great meals they had. Adele Rasetti, Galeotti’s sister, took many walks with my mother and told her the names of herbs, plants, and insects because everyone in that family was an entomologist and a botanist. Adele gave my mother one of her paintings of an Alpine lake and we hung it in our dining room. In the morning, Adele got up early either to go over the accounts with the farmer, or to paint, or to roam the fields in order to “herbalize.” She was small and thin with a pointy nose and often wore a straw hat.

  “How good Adele is! She rises early and paints! She goes herbalizing!” my mother would say admiringly. She didn’t know how to paint and she couldn’t tell the difference between basil and chicory. My mother was lazy and always full of admiration for active people, and every time she saw Adele Rasetti she began to read science manuals in order to learn something about insects and botany herself, but she soon got bored and it ended there.

  In the summer, Galeotti visited us in the mountains with his nephew, Adele’s son, who was friends with my brother Gino. In the morning, my grandmother paced back and forth in her room anguishing over what to wear. “Why don’t you wear,” my mother suggested, “the gray dress with the tiny buttons?”

  “No, Galeotti’s already seen that one!” my grandmother said, wringing her hands with indecision.

  Galeotti barely noticed my grandmother since he was always off conferring with my father about upcoming hikes and ascents. Furthermore, my grandmother, despite her worry over the fact that Galeotti might have seen her wearing “yesterday’s dress,” couldn’t stand Galeotti, believing him to be crude and commonplace, and she was afraid he’d lead my father off some precipice.

  Galeotti’s nephew was called Franco Rasetti. He studied physics but he also had a mania for collecting insects and minerals, an obsession he passed on to Gino. They came back from hikes with clumps of moss in their handkerchiefs, dead beetles, and rucksacks full of crystals. At the dinner table, Franco Rasetti talked incessantly but always about physics or geology or coleoptera and while he
talked he pressed up with his finger all the crumbs on the tablecloth. He had a pointy nose, a sharp chin, a spiky mustache, and his coloring was always slightly lizard-green.

  “He’s very intelligent,” my father often said. “But he’s aloof! He’s very aloof!” Despite his aloofness, Franco Rasetti wrote a poem once on his way back from a hike with Gino while they were waiting in an abandoned hut for the rain to stop:

  Slow and steady falls the rain

  Over green pastures and black schists.

  Vague shapes appear and remain

  Veiled in the delicate mists.

  Gino didn’t write poetry and he didn’t much like poetry or novels. But this poem he liked a great deal and recited it often. It was long and, unfortunately, I only remember that one stanza.

  I, too, thought the poem with the black schists beautiful and was consumed with envy not to have written it myself. It was simple. Green pastures, black schists. I’d seen those things myself so many times in the mountains, but it had never occurred to me that I could do something with them. All I had done was observe them. That’s what poems were then, simple and made of nothing, made of things that you observed. I looked around me with watchful eyes. I looked for things that could be like those black schists, those green pastures, and made sure that this time no one would take them away from me.

  “Gino and Rasetti are good hikers!” my father would say. “They’ve climbed the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey! They do just fine. It’s too bad that Rasetti is so aloof. He doesn’t discuss politics. He’s not interested. He’s aloof!”

  “But Adele isn’t. She isn’t aloof,” my mother said. “She’s amazing. She gets up early. She paints! How I wish I were like Adele!”

  Galeotti was always cheerful. He was rather short and stout, and wore woolly gray suits. He had a trimmed white mustache, hair somewhere between white and blond, and a tanned face. All of us really loved him. But I don’t remember anything else about him.