Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  “How I would like a beautiful silk dress!” my sister said to my mother when they were chatting in the living room.

  “Me too,” my mother said, flipping through the pages of fashion magazines. “I would like a beautiful princess-line dress made of pure silk!”

  And my sister said, “Me too!”

  But they could never afford to buy pure silk and, in any case, the seamstress Alice would have ruined the fabric as soon as she took her scissors to it.

  Paola wanted to cut her hair and to wear high heels instead of those sturdy masculine shoes made by “Signor Castagneri.” She wanted to go dancing at her girlfriends’ homes and to play tennis. She wasn’t allowed to do any of these things. Furthermore, she was practically forced to go to the mountains with Gino and my father on Saturday and Sunday. Paola thought Gino was boring, Rasetti boring, Gino’s friends in general all very boring, and the mountains unbearable. Nevertheless, she skied very well, without particular style, they said, but with great courage and determination, attacking the slopes with the vehemence of a lioness. Based on the vehemence and zeal with which she attacked the slopes, I presume she did like to ski and took the utmost pleasure in it despite the fact that she insisted she had the most profound contempt for the mountains, claiming she loathed the spiked shoes, the thick woolen socks, and the little freckles the sun caused to appear on her delicate nose. When she returned from the mountains, in order to make those little freckles disappear she would cover her face with white powder. She wished she’d had a fragile constitution, delicate health, and a lunar complexion like the women in Casorati’s paintings. She became terribly irritated whenever she was told she looked “fresh as a rose.” When my father saw her white face, having no idea that she’d covered herself in powder, he said she was anemic and made her take iron pills.

  Waking in the middle of the night, my father said to my mother, “What moon faces Mario and Paola have. Those two have become thick as thieves. I’m sure that nitwit Terni has turned them against me.”

  I never did know what it was Terni, Paola, and Mario whispered about to one another on the couch in the living room, but sometimes they spoke of Proust, and then my mother would join their conversations. “La petite phrase!” she’d say. “How wonderful it is when he discusses the petite phrase! How much Silvio would have liked it too!” Terni would remove his monocle and polish it with his handkerchief in the manner of Swann, while making the sound “Ssst! Ssst!”

  “What a great book! What beautiful writing!” Terni would often say, and Paola and my mother would mock him by repeating his words throughout the remainder of the day.

  “Nonsense!” my father said, whenever he overheard them as he passed by. “I’m sick of your nonsense!” he repeated, heading for his study, and once he’d arrived there he yelled, “Terni! You still haven’t finished your work on tissue pathology! You waste all of your time on nitwitteries! You’re lazy and don’t work enough. You’re a great slouch!”

  Paola was in love with one of her university classmates. He was young, small, delicate, courteous, and had a mellifluous voice. They took walks together along the Po and in the Parco del Valentino. He was a passionate Proustian, so they spoke often about Proust, and he, in fact, would be the first to write about Proust in Italy. Debenedetti wrote short stories and literary criticism. I think Paola was in love with him because he was the exact opposite of my father: He was very small and very courteous with a sweet and mellifluous voice, didn’t know a thing about tissue pathology, and had never set a foot on a ski slope. When my father learned of their walks he became furious: First, because any daughter of his should not be going on walks with men; and second, because for him a literary man, a critic, a writer, represented the contemptible, the frivolous, even the louche. It was a world he loathed. The walks were banned, but despite the prohibition Paola continued to go on them. Sometimes the Lopezes or other friends of my parents ran into them and, knowing about the ban, told my father they’d seen her. As for Terni, if he ran into her, he certainly never said anything about it to my father because Paola had confided in him on the couch in secret whispers.

  My father yelled at my mother, “Don’t let her go out! Forbid her to leave!”

  My mother wasn’t very happy about those walks either, and she, too, was suspicious of the young man because my father had imbued her with his vague and murky repulsion for the world of letters, a world unknown in our family because only biologists, scientists, or engineers ever came over. Furthermore, my mother was very close to Paola and before she started seeing her young man, the two of them used to go out and roam the city for hours looking in shopwindows at the “dresses made of pure silk” that neither one of them could buy. Paola was now rarely free to go out with my mother. Whenever they did go out arm in arm, chatting away, they inevitably ended up talking about the young man and returning home furious with each other because my mother, though she hardly knew him, wasn’t as kind or welcoming towards him as Paola would have liked. My mother was totally incapable of forbidding anyone anything.

  “You have no authority!” my father yelled, waking her up in the middle of the night.

  In this matter, however, he’d shown he didn’t have much authority either because Paola continued to take walks with her small young man for years. She stopped only when the relationship ended of its own accord; slowly, as a candle burns out, and not because my father wanted it to, but for reasons entirely beyond his shouts and bans.

  My father’s rages erupted not only over Paola and her small young man but also over Alberto’s studies. Instead of doing his homework, Alberto was always playing soccer, and as far as my father was concerned only mountain sports qualified as legitimate sports. He considered all others, such as tennis, to be frivolous and insignificant or, as in the case of swimming, boring and stupid, especially since he hated the sea, beaches, and sand. As for soccer, he regarded it as a game played by street urchins and wouldn’t even call it a sport. Gino was a good student, as was Mario. Paola didn’t study but my father didn’t care. She was a girl and he believed it hardly mattered if girls didn’t study because eventually they would get married. In my case, he had no idea that I had trouble learning arithmetic; only my mother despaired since she was the one teaching it to me. Alberto didn’t study at all and my father, who was used to the success of his other sons, was seized by a frightful rage every time Alberto brought home a bad report card or was suspended from school for bad behavior. My father was concerned for the future of all his sons and waking up in the middle of the night, he would say to my mother, “What will become of Gino? What will become of Mario?” As for Alberto, who was still in middle school, my father wasn’t so much concerned as panic-stricken. “Alberto is a thug! What a delinquent he is!” He didn’t even say “what a jackass Alberto is” because Alberto was far worse than a jackass and his faults seemed to my father to be unprecedented and monstrous. Alberto spent his days on the soccer fields, returning home covered in dirt and occasionally with a bloody or bandaged head or knees. Otherwise, he roamed around with his friends and was always late coming home for lunch. My father sat down at the table and began to bang his glass, his fork, the bread, and we didn’t know if he was angry at Mussolini or Alberto who hadn’t yet returned home. “Thug! Delinquent!” he said, while Natalina came into the room with the soup. As the meal progressed so did his fury. By the time we were having our fruit, Alberto arrived fresh-faced, flushed, and smiling. Alberto was never moonish, always happy. “Thug!” my father thundered. “Where have you been?”

  “At school,” Alberto said coolly, “and then I walked my friend home a ways.”

  “Your friend! You’re nothing but a thug! It’s past the toll!” One o’clock was for my father “the toll,” and the fact that Alberto came home “past the toll” was an outrage.

  My mother also complained about Alberto. “He’s always filthy!” she said. “He goes around looking like a hooligan! He’s always asking me for money! He never studies!”
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  “I’m going for a minute over to my friend Pajetta’s place.” “I’m going for a minute over to my friend Pestelli’s.” “Mother, could you lend me two lire?” Whenever he was home, these were the things Alberto said and not much else. It wasn’t because he was uncommunicative. He was, in fact, the most communicative among us, expansive and cheerful. It was just that he was almost never home.

  “Always with Pajetta! With Pajetta! With Pajetta!” my mother said, pronouncing that name with a special furious rapidity, perhaps in order to indicate the rapidity with which Alberto fled our apartment. Two lire was a small sum even then, but Alberto asked for two lire many times during the course of the day. My mother, sighing, opened the drawer in her bedside table with a key. Alberto never had enough money. He got into the habit of selling books from the apartment and slowly our shelves began to empty. Every so often my father wouldn’t be able to find a book and, so that he wouldn’t get angry, my mother told him that she had leant it to Frances, but she well knew that the book had in fact wound up at some used-book stall. Alberto also sometimes took a piece of the family silver to the pawnbroker and my mother, not finding a coffeepot, would begin to cry.

  “Listen to what Alberto’s done!” she said to Paola. “Listen to what he’s done to me. I can’t tell your father. If I do, he’ll scream his head off!”

  She had such a terror of my father’s anger that she searched in Alberto’s drawers for the pawnbroker’s receipt and sent Rina to buy back her coffeepot in secret without telling my father.

  Alberto was no longer friends with Frinco, who disappeared into the mists of time along with his leather-bound books of horror stories, and he wasn’t friends anymore with Frances’s children either. Alberto’s friends at the time, his schoolmates Pajetta and Pestelli, were, in fact, studious. My mother always said that Alberto chose friends who were better than he was.

  “Pestelli,” my mother explained to my father, “is an exceptional boy. He comes from a very good family. His father is the Pestelli who writes for La Stampa. His mother is Carola Prosperi,” she said admiringly, trying to present Alberto in a positive light to my father. Carola Prosperi was a writer whom my mother liked. She was convinced Carola Prosperi couldn’t possibly belong to the treacherous literary world since she also wrote children’s books. Furthermore, her novels for adults were, my mother always claimed, “very well written.” My father, having never read Carola Prosperi’s books, shrugged.

  As for Pajetta, while still a boy in short pants at middle school, he was arrested for distributing antifascist pamphlets in the classrooms. Alberto, one of his closest friends, was summoned to the police station and interrogated. Pajetta was sent to a reformatory for minors, and my mother, admiringly, said to my father, “You see I always said so, Beppino. You see, Alberto has always chosen his friends well. They are inevitably more impressive and more serious than he is.”

  My father shrugged. He too, however, admired the fact that Alberto had been interrogated at the police station and for a few days refrained from calling him a thug.

  “A hooligan!” my mother said, when Alberto came home after playing soccer, dirty, his blond hair soaked in mud, his clothes ripped. “A hooligan!”

  “He smokes and drops his ashes on the floor!” she complained to her friends. “He lies on the bed without taking his shoes off and soils the bedcover! He asks for money and whatever I give him is never enough! He was so adorable when he was little!” she lamented. “He was so sweet and gentle! A lamb! I dressed him all in lace and he had those beautiful curls! Now look what’s become of him!”

  •

  Alberto’s and Mario’s friends made only rare appearances at our home. Gino, instead, was always having friends over in the evening. My father would ask them to stay to dinner. He was always inviting people to lunch or dinner even if there wasn’t enough food to go around. On the other hand, he was always afraid that we would “scrounge lunches” at other people’s homes. “You scrounged a lunch off Frances! I don’t like it!” And if one of us was invited over to someone else’s home for a meal, and complained the next day that this person was annoying or disagreeable, my father would immediately protest: “Disagreeable! But you scrounged a lunch off him!”

  Our dinners usually consisted of broth made from Liebig’s beef-stock cubes, which my mother adored but Natalina always made too watery, followed by an omelet. Gino’s friends shared these monotonous dinners with us while listening, as they sat around the table, to my mother’s stories and songs. One of these friends was named Adriano Olivetti, and I remember the first time he came over to our apartment he was wearing a soldier’s uniform because he was doing his military service then. Gino was also doing his military service and he and Adriano shared the same dormitory. At the time, Adriano had an unkempt and curly ginger-colored beard and tawny-blond hair that curled up at the nape of his neck. He was fat and pale and his uniform fit badly over his round, fat shoulders. I’ve never seen anyone wear that gray-green outfit with a pistol at the waist more awkwardly and less martially than him. He had a pronounced melancholic air about him, which was perhaps because he didn’t like being a soldier in the least. He was shy and quiet, but when he did speak he talked for a long time in a low voice and said confusing and enigmatic things while staring off into space with his small blue eyes, at once cold and dreamy. Adriano seemed the embodiment of what my father defined as a “lummox” and yet my father never called him a lummox, or a dolt, or a negro, never aimed in his direction any of these words. In wondering why, I suppose my father may have had a deeper psychological understanding than any of us suspected and was able to see in the guise of that clumsy boy the man who Adriano would later become. But my father also may have refrained from calling him a lummox because he was aware that Adriano liked to go to the mountains and because Gino had told my father that Adriano was an antifascist and that Adriano’s father was a socialist and also a friend of Turati’s.

  The Olivettis had a factory that made typewriters in Ivrea. Until then, we’d never known any industrialists. The only industrialist ever mentioned in our family was Lopez’s brother Mauro who lived in Argentina and was very rich. My father had plans to send Gino to work for Mauro’s company. The Olivettis were the first industrialists that we saw up close and I was impressed by the idea that those advertisement posters I saw on the street depicting a typewriter on railroad tracks speeding past a locomotive, sheets of paper flying from its carriage, were directly linked to the Adriano in the gray-green uniform who shared our bland broths in the evenings.

  When his military service was finished, Adriano continued to come to our apartment in the evenings. He became ever-more melancholy, shy, and quiet because he was in love with my sister, Paola, who barely noticed him then. Adriano had an automobile. He was the only person we knew who had an automobile. Even Terni, who was so rich, didn’t have one. Whenever my father had to go out, Adriano immediately offered to accompany him in his automobile and my father became furious since he couldn’t stand automobiles and also because he couldn’t tolerate, as he often reminded us, acts of kindness.

  Adriano had many brothers and sisters, all of them with freckles and red hair, which might explain why my father, who also had freckles and red hair, felt such an affinity for them. It was well known that they were very rich but they nevertheless lived simply, dressed modestly, and brought old skis with them to the mountains just as we did. They did have, however, a lot of automobiles and they were always offering rides to this place or that. Whenever they were driving in the city and saw someone old walking with a tired gait, they would stop and ask if the person would like a lift. My mother was constantly saying how good and nice they were.

  Eventually we also met their father, who was a short, fat man with a white beard. Beneath that beard was a handsome face of fine and noble features lit up by blue eyes. While speaking, he would either play with his beard or with the buttons on his vest. He had a high-pitched voice, whiny and childish, almost a falsetto. Per
haps because of his white beard my father always called him “old Olivetti” even though he and my father were more or less the same age. They had socialism and their friendship with Turati in common, and they regarded each other with mutual esteem and respect. Nevertheless, whenever they met they both wanted to speak at the same time and so they shouted—one short and one tall, one with his falsetto voice and the other with his thunderous voice. Olivetti’s conversation was sprinkled with references to the Bible, psychoanalysis, and the sayings of the prophets, things that weren’t remotely a part of my father’s world and about which he hadn’t formed any particular or profound opinion. My father felt that old Olivetti was very intelligent but that his ideas were in a great muddle.

  The Olivettis lived in Ivrea in a house called the Cloister because in the past it had been a friars’ cloister. It had woods and vineyards, cows, and a stable. Every day they used cream from their cows to make cakes. Ever since our father wouldn’t allow us to stop and eat cream in the mountain chalets, we had developed a keen desire for it. We hadn’t been allowed to eat cream because my father was afraid of Malta fever. Since the Olivettis owned their own cows there was no risk of Malta fever, so whenever we visited them we gorged ourselves on cream.

  Still, my father told us, “You mustn’t always be getting yourselves invited to the Olivettis’! You mustn’t scrounge!”

  We subsequently became obsessed with not appearing to scrounge. Once when Gino and Paola had been invited to spend the day in Ivrea, despite the Olivettis’ insistence they refused to stay to dinner or to accept a ride home in their automobile and instead had to wait for the train in the dark and on empty stomachs. Another time, I took a trip in the car with the Olivettis and we stopped for lunch in a restaurant. While they all ordered tagliatelle and steaks, I ordered a soft-boiled egg and later told my sister that I’d ordered just the egg “because I didn’t want Mr. Olivetti to spend too much.” The old engineer heard about this and was very amused and would frequently laugh about it, and ringing in his laughter was all the joy of being very rich, knowing he was very rich, and discovering that there was still someone who didn’t know he was very rich.