Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  •

  When Gino finished at the Polytechnic, two choices were available to him: either he could go work with Mauro, the one with the company in Argentina whom, imitating the Lopez children, we familiarly called “Uncle Mauro” and with whom my father had been carrying on a diligent correspondence for months regarding Gino’s future; or he could work at the Olivetti factory in Ivrea. Gino chose the latter option.

  So Gino left our home and went to live in Ivrea. A few months later he announced to my father that he’d met a girl there and had become engaged to marry her. My father was seized by a terrifying fury. Whenever one of us announced to him that we planned to get married, he was seized by a terrifying fury, no matter who the chosen person might be. He always found some pretext for his wrath. Either he questioned our chosen one’s health or claimed the person had too little or too much money. My father forbade us to marry every time, but to no avail since we married all the same.

  Gino was sent to Germany to study German and to forget. My mother urged him to go see Signora Grassi in Freiburg. Signora Grassi was my mother’s childhood friend, the one who said, “All wool, Lidia! The violets, Lidia!” In Florence, Signora Grassi had met a bookseller from Freiburg and married him. He read Heine to her and she taught him to love violets, and she had also taught him to love “all wool” fabric, having brought some with her to Germany after the First World War when pure wool was not to be found.

  Returning to Freiburg after the war, the bookseller had exclaimed, “I don’t recognize my Germany anymore!”

  It was a saying that remained famous in our family and every time my mother didn’t recognize someone or something she would repeat it.

  That summer my father kept up a considerable correspondence with Gino in Germany, and with the Lopezes, the Ternis, and Signor Olivetti, mostly regarding Gino’s marriage. To the Ternis, the Lopezes, and Signor Olivetti my father wrote that they should do all they could to dissuade Gino from getting married at twenty-five, his career hardly begun.

  “I wonder if he’s gone to see Signora Grassi,” my mother would say that summer whenever she thought of Gino, and my father would become furious.

  “Signora Grassi! I couldn’t care less if he’s seen Signora Grassi! You’d think all Germany had to offer was Signora Grassi! I will not let Gino get married under any circumstances whatsoever!”

  Gino, however, did get married as soon as he returned from Germany just as he had said he would. My father and my mother went to the wedding. But my father, waking in the middle of the night, would say, “If only I’d sent him to Mauro in Argentina instead of to Ivrea! Who knows, perhaps in Argentina he wouldn’t have married!”

  We moved and my mother who had always complained about the apartment on via Pastrengo now complained about the new one. The new apartment was on via Pallamaglio.

  “What an ugly name!” my mother would say. “What an ugly street! I can’t abide these streets—via Campana, via Saluzzo! At least on via Pastrengo we had a garden!”

  The new apartment was on the top floor overlooking a square where there was a big ugly church, a paint factory, and public baths. Nothing seemed more squalid to my mother than looking out her window and seeing men with a towel under their arms on their way to the public baths. My father had actually bought the apartment because he said it had cost little and, though unattractive, had some advantages: it was big, had many rooms, and was very near to the train station.

  My mother said, “What does it matter if we’re near the station? We never go anywhere.”

  Something must have improved in our economic situation because money receded as a topic of conversation. To listen to my father, the property share prices continued to go down and by this point I thought they must have been swallowed into the depths of the earth. Nevertheless, my mother and my sister increased the number of outfits they had made for them. We now had a telephone like the Lopezes. The phrases “high cost of living” and “rising food prices” were never mentioned anymore. Gino lived with his wife in Ivrea. Mario had a job in Genoa and only came home on Saturdays.

  After much discussion and indecision, Alberto had been sent away to boarding school. My father had hoped he would take this severe punishment badly, repent, and change his ways. My mother, however, said, “You’ll see how much you’ll love it! You’ll see how much fun you’ll have! You’ll see how much you’ll love boarding school. I loved my boarding school and had so much fun there!”

  Alberto went to boarding school very happily, as he did everything. When he came home for holidays he would tell us how at his school while they were sitting at the table eating an omelet, suddenly a bell would ring and the headmaster would come into the dining hall and say, “I am here to inform you that one does not cut an omelet with a knife.” The bell then rang again and the headmaster disappeared.

  My father no longer went skiing, though he continued to use the English spelling of the word. He said he was too old. My mother, who didn’t ski and stayed at home, had always said, “Abominable mountains!” But now she regretted that my father didn’t ski anymore.

  Anna Kuliscioff died. My mother hadn’t seen her for many years, but she’d been happy to know she was still around. She went to Milan to attend the funeral with her friend Paola Carrara who, as a young women, had often gone to Kuliscioff’s place as well. My mother brought back a black-bordered book containing homages to Kuliscioff along with pictures of her.

  After many years, my mother had the opportunity to visit Milan once again, but no one she knew lived there anymore and her relatives were all dead by then. She found the city greatly changed for the worse, even ugly. She said, “I don’t recognize my Germany anymore!”

  The Ternis had to leave Turin and went to live in Florence. Mary left first with the children. Terni stayed on for a few months. “What a shame you’re leaving Turin!” my mother said to Terni. “What a shame Mary has left! And I won’t see the children anymore. Do you remember the garden at via Pastrengo when you played ball with Cucco? And Gino’s friends came over and they played Steps? It was wonderful!” Steps was a game in which one person stood facing the trunk of a tree and would turn around suddenly. The others had to take steps towards him only when he wasn’t looking or they were out of the game.

  “I don’t like this apartment!” my mother said. “I don’t like via Pallamaglio! I liked having a garden!”

  But her melancholic mood quickly passed. She got up in the mornings singing and went to order the day’s groceries. She then got on the number seven tram and rode it to the end of the line and back again without ever getting off.

  “How nice it is to ride the tram!” she’d say. “It’s much nicer than riding in an automobile!”

  “Why don’t you come too?” she said to me in the morning. “Let’s go to Pozzo Strada!”

  Pozzo Strada was the terminus for the number seven tram where there was an open space with an ice-cream kiosk, a few apartment houses on the city’s periphery, and, in the distance, wheat and poppy fields.

  In the afternoon she read the newspaper while lying on the couch. She said to me, “If you’re good I’ll take you to the cinema. Let’s see if there’s a film ‘suited’ for you.” It was she who wanted to go to the cinema, however, and, in fact, she went anyway, either alone or with her girlfriends, even if I had schoolwork to do. She rushed home afterwards because my father came back from the laboratory at half past seven and she wanted him to find her at home when he returned. If she wasn’t at home he would wait for her on the balcony until she came back out of breath and holding her hat.

  “Where the hell have you been?” my father shouted. “I’ve been worried. I bet you’ve been to the cinema again today! You spend your life at the cinema!”

  “Have you written to Mary?” he asked her. Now that Mary had gone to live in Florence letters from her periodically arrived at the apartment and my mother never remembered to write back. She loved Mary very much but she never liked to write letters. She didn’t even w
rite to her children.

  “Have you written to Gino?” my father yelled at her. “Write to Gino! Shame on you if you don’t write to Gino!”

  I came down with something and was ill for most of the winter. I had an ear infection and then a sinus infection. For the first few days I was ill, my father took care of me.

  In his study he had a small cabinet he called “the pharmacy” where he kept a few medicines and instruments he used to treat his children, or friends, or his friends’ children. These included tincture of iodine for cuts and scrapes, methylene blue for sore throats, a bir for whitlows and felons. A bir was a rubber tourniquet that was tied tightly around the afflicted finger until it turned a turquoise color. The bir, however, was always missing from the “pharmacy” whenever it was needed and my father would shout throughout the apartment, “Where is the bir! Where have you put the bir!”

  He’d say, “What slobs you lot are! I’ve never seen anyone as slobbish as you are!”

  Usually the bir was found in his desk drawer.

  He would, on the other hand, get angry if anyone asked him for health advice. He would take offense and say, “I’m not a doctor!”

  He wanted to treat people but only on the condition that they didn’t ask to be treated.

  One day at lunch he said, “That nitwit Terni has the flu. He’s in bed. Damn. I’m sure it’s nothing, but I’ll have to pay him a visit.”

  “How Terni exaggerates!” he said that evening. “He’s fine. He’s in bed wearing a woolen vest. I never wear woolen vests!”

  “I’m worried about Terni,” he said a few days later. “His fever won’t go away. I’m afraid he has a pleural effusion. I want Stroppeni to examine him.”

  “He has a pleural effusion!” he shouted out one evening as he searched every room in the apartment for my mother. “Lidia, what do you know, Terni has a pleural effusion!”

  He had brought Stroppeni and all the doctors he knew to Terni’s bedside.

  “Don’t smoke!” he yelled at Terni who was by then on the mend and getting a bit of sun on the balcony at his apartment. “Listen, you mustn’t smoke! You smoke too much, you’ve always smoked too much! You’ve ruined your health by smoking like a fiend!”

  My father himself smoked like a Turk, but he didn’t want others to smoke.

  During the time his friends or his children were ill my father became very mild-mannered and kind, but as soon as they were well again he resumed his bullying.

  My illness was serious and my father stopped treating me immediately, calling in all of his trusted doctors. In the end, I was taken to the hospital.

  So that I wouldn’t be frightened, my mother tried to convince me that the hospital was the doctor’s home and that the other patients were his children, or cousins, nieces, and nephews. Out of obedience I believed her, but at the same time I knew that it was a hospital, and on that occasion as on many others in the future, truth and lies became all mixed up for me.

  “Your legs are skinnier than Lucio’s,” my mother said. “Now Frances will be happy!”

  Frances, in fact, used to compare my legs to Lucio’s and fret over how thin and pale his legs looked in his white socks held up by black velvet garters.

  •

  One evening, I heard my mother talking with someone in the front hall and then heard her open the linen closet. Shadows flitted across my glass-paneled door. During the night, I heard coughing in the room next to mine, the room Mario slept in when he came home on Saturdays, but it couldn’t have been Mario because it wasn’t Saturday, and it sounded like the cough of an old, fat man. When my mother came into my room the following morning she told me that a man called Signor Paolo Ferrari had slept in the next room and that he was old, tired, sick, had a cough, and I was not to ask him too many questions.

  Signor Paolo Ferrari was in the dining room drinking tea and when I saw him I immediately recognized Turati who had once come to visit us while we were living on via Pastrengo. But since they told me his name was Paolo Ferrari, I obediently believed he was both Ferrari and Turati; once again truth and lies were mixed up for me.

  Ferrari was old and big as a bear with a trimmed gray beard; his shirt collar was very wide and he knotted his tie as if it were a piece of string. His small white hands were leafing through a volume, bound in red, of Carducci’s poetry when suddenly he did something odd. He picked up the book made in Kuliscioff’s memory and wrote a long dedication in it to my mother, then signed it “Anna and Filippo.” I was more confused than ever; I didn’t understand how he could be Anna, not to mention Filippo, if he was, as they said, Paolo Ferrari.

  My mother and father seemed very happy he was staying with us; my father didn’t fly into his rages and we all spoke in lowered voices. Whenever the doorbell rang, Paolo Ferrari rushed down the hall and closed himself into a room at the back of the apartment. It was usually either Lucio or the milkman at the door because during that period people we didn’t know rarely came to our apartment. Signor Paolo Ferrari rushed down the hall as best he could on his tiptoes, his great bear shadow traveling along the walls.

  Paola said to me, “His name isn’t Ferrari; it’s Turati. He has to flee Italy. He’s in hiding. Don’t tell anyone, not even Lucio.”

  I swore not to say anything to anyone, not even to Lucio, but whenever he came over to play I had the overwhelming desire to tell him. Lucio, however, wasn’t even mildly curious. Whenever I asked him about things going on at his home, he inevitably told me that I was a “busybody.” The Lopezes were all very secretive; they didn’t like to talk about family matters, and this is why we never knew if they were rich or poor, or how old Frances was, or even things like what they’d eaten for lunch.

  Offhandedly, Lucio said to me, “There’s a man in your apartment with a beard who rushes out of the living room whenever I go in.”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s Paolo Ferrari!”

  I wanted him to ask me more questions but Lucio didn’t ask me anything else. He was using a hammer to hang up artwork he’d made and given to me as a present. It was a painting of a train. All his life Lucio had been passionate about trains. He always ran around the room making noises and whistling like a locomotive and at his place he had a huge electric train set his uncle Mauro had sent to him from Argentina.

  I said to him, “Don’t bang like that with the hammer! He’s old, sick, and in hiding! He mustn’t be disturbed!”

  “Who?”

  “Paolo Ferrari!”

  “Do you see the tender,” Lucio said. “Do you see that I also painted the tender?”

  Lucio was always talking about the tender. By this point in our lives, he bored me. We were the same age and yet he seemed so much younger. Nevertheless, I didn’t want him to leave. When Maria Buoninsegni came to take him home, I became desperate and begged that he be able to stay a little while longer.

  My mother arranged for me and Lucio to go down into the square with Natalina. She said, “So you can get a little air.” But I knew it was so that Maria Buoninsegni wouldn’t run into Paolo Ferrari in the hall.

  At the center of the square was a little patch of grass surrounded by a few benches. Natalina sat on a bench swinging her short legs and big feet. Lucio ran all around the square pretending to be a train making noises and whistling. When Maria Buoninsegni arrived wearing her fox, Natalina was all smiles and kindnesses. She held Maria Buoninsegni in the highest esteem though Maria Buoninsegni barely gave her the time of day. Maria Buoninsegni spoke to Lucio in her polished and prized Tuscan accent. Since he’d been perspiring she made him put on his sweater.

  Paolo Ferrari stayed at our place, I think, for eight or ten days. They were strangely calm days. I heard them talking often about a motorboat. One evening, we ate dinner early and I understood that Paolo Ferrari had to leave. During his stay he’d always been calm and cheerful, but that evening at dinner he seemed anxious and kept scratching his beard. Then two or three men wearing raincoats arrived. Adriano was the only one I reco
gnized. He’d started to lose his hair and now his square-shaped head was nearly bald except for a halo of blond curls. That evening his face and scant amount of hair looked as if they’d been whipped by a sudden wind. His eyes were fearful, resolute, and excited. I saw those eyes two or three times again in my life; his eyes took on that look whenever he was helping someone to escape, whenever there was danger, and whenever someone had to be transported to safety.

  Paolo Ferrari said to me in the hall while they were helping him to put on his coat, “Don’t ever tell anyone I was here.”

  He left with Adriano and the others wearing raincoats and I never saw him again because he died in Paris a few years later.

  The day after, Natalina asked my mother, “Do you think that boat has taken her all the way to Corsica by now?”

  Hearing what she said, my father flew into a rage at my mother. “You went and confided in that half-wit Natalina! She’s a half-wit! She’ll get us all locked up!”

  “But no, Beppino! Natalina knows she mustn’t say anything!”

  A postcard arrived sometime later from Corsica with greetings from Paolo Ferrari.

  Over the following months, I heard that Rosselli and Parri, the ones who had helped Turati escape, were arrested. Adriano was still free, but they said he was in danger and should come hide at our apartment. Adriano hid in our place for several months. He slept, as Paolo Ferrari had, in Mario’s room. Paolo Ferrari was safe in Paris but in our family everyone was tired of calling him Ferrari and called him by his real name.