Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Mario left his job in Genoa, made a deal with Adriano, and was hired by Olivetti. At heart, my father was happy but before being happy he got angry fearing that Mario had been hired because he was Adriano’s brother-in-law and not on his own merits. Paola now lived in Milan. She’d learned to drive a car and went back and forth among Turin, Milan, and Ivrea. My father disapproved of her never staying in one place for very long. None of the Olivettis, for that matter, ever stayed still in one place. They were always in their cars—and my father disapproved.

  Mario went to live in Ivrea. He rented a room there and spent his evenings with Gino discussing the factory’s problems. Mario’s relationship with Gino had always been distant but in that period a friendship grew between them. Still, Mario was bored to death in Ivrea. In the summer Mario had gone to Paris. He’d gone to visit Rosselli and had asked to be put in contact with the Justice and Liberty group in Turin. He had suddenly decided to become a conspirator.

  Mario came to Turin on Saturdays. He was the same: mysterious, meticulous in hanging up his clothes inside the dresser, in placing his pajamas and silk shirts in the drawers. He didn’t stay long at home. He put on his raincoat in a decisive and determined manner and went out, and we knew nothing about him. My father ran into him one day on the Corso Re Umberto along with someone he recognized, a man named Ginzburg.

  “What’s Mario doing with that Ginzburg?” he asked my mother.

  My mother had taken it upon herself, for some time, to learn Russian in order “not to be bored.” She and Frances took lessons from Ginzburg’s sister.

  “He is someone,” my mother said, “who is very sophisticated, intelligent, translates from Russian, and does beautiful translations.”

  “But,” my father said, “he is very ugly. Jews are notoriously ugly.”

  “And you?” said my mother. “You’re not Jewish?”

  “I am, in fact, ugly too,” my father said.

  Alberto and Mario’s relationship had always been very cold. They no longer fell into those savage and violent wrestling matches of old. Still, they never exchanged a word and when they met in the hall they didn’t greet each other. Whenever Alberto’s name was mentioned Mario’s lip curled with disdain. Mario, however, also knew Alberto’s friend Vittorio, and when Mario and Alberto happened to run into each other on the Corso with Ginzburg and Vittorio, who also knew each other well, Mario took the opportunity to invite both Ginzburg and Vittorio home for a cup of tea.

  My mother was very happy that day they all came home for a cup of tea because she saw Alberto and Mario together, saw that they shared the same friends, and to her it felt like they’d returned to the era of via Pastrengo when Gino’s friends used to come over and the apartment was always full of people.

  In addition to her Russian lessons, my mother also took piano lessons. She took her piano lessons from a teacher recommended by Signora Donati, a woman who had also taken up playing the piano at a mature age. Signora Donati, who had white hair, was tall, robust, and beautiful. Signora Donati also studied painting in Casorati’s studio. She liked to paint even more than she liked to play the piano. She idolized painting, Casorati, his studio, Casorati’s wife and child, and Casorati’s apartment where she was sometimes invited to lunch. She tried to convince my mother to also take painting lessons from Casorati. My mother, however, resisted. Signora Donati called her every day and told her how much fun she’d had painting.

  “But you,” Signora Donati said to my mother, “do you have a sense of color?”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “I believe I do have a sense of color.”

  “And volume?” Signora Donati continued. “Do you have a sense of volume?”

  “No, I don’t have a sense of volume,” my mother responded.

  You don’t have a sense of volume?”

  “No.”

  “But color! You have a sense of color!”

  Now that there was some money around, my mother had clothes made for herself. Besides piano and Russian, this was her constant occupation and really just another way for her “to not be bored,” because my mother never knew when to wear those clothes she had made for herself since she never wanted to go see anyone other than Frances or Paola Carrara, people whom she could easily visit wearing the clothes she already owned. My mother had her clothes made either “at Signor Belom’s,” an old tailor who had, when he was young, courted my grandmother in Pisa when she was looking for a husband but hadn’t wanted “Virginia’s leftovers”; otherwise she had them made at home by a seamstress called Tersilla. Rina didn’t come to our apartment anymore having disappeared into the mists of time, but my father, whenever he ran into Tersilla in the hall, became furious just as he had, in the past, become furious with Rina. Tersilla was, however, braver than Rina and she greeted my father as she passed him with her scissors stuck into her belt and a polite smile on her small, flushed, Piedmontese face. My father responded with a cold nod.

  “Tersilla’s here! What is this? Tersilla is here again today!” he’d shout at my mother.

  “She’s come,” my mother said, “to turn out an old coat of mine. A coat made by Signor Belom.”

  When my father heard Belom’s name he was reassured and stopped his objections because he respected Signor Belom, who had courted his mother. He didn’t know, however, that Signor Belom was one of the most expensive tailors in Turin. My mother swung between Signor Belom and Tersilla, sometimes favoring one, sometimes the other. When she had Signor Belom make her a dress and found that it wasn’t cut very well because it “fit her badly in the shoulders,” she would call Tersilla and have her take it apart and put it back together again.

  “I’ll never go back to Signor Belom! I’ll have everything made by Tersilla from now on!” she declared in front of the mirror while trying on the unsewn and resewn dress.

  Some dresses she had made she never liked, ones that had “something not quite right” about them, so she gave them to Natalina. Natalina by this point also had a lot of clothes. She went out on Sunday with a long black coat with many buttons made by Signor Belom. She went out looking like a parish priest.

  Paola also had many dresses made for herself. Between Paola and my mother, there was frequently tension over clothes. Paola said that my mother always had the wrong clothes made for her, that she had too many made that were exactly alike, and that she had a Signor Belom dress copied by Tersilla a hundred times over to the point of making everyone thoroughly sick at the sight of it. But my mother liked it this way. My mother said that when she had small children she always had many identical pinafores made for them and now she wanted, as her children had had, both for summer and for winter, many identical pinafores. Paola did not approve in the slightest of the concept of clothes as pinafores.

  If Paola came from Milan wearing a new dress, my mother would kiss her and say, “When my children wear a new outfit I love them even more.” But then she was immediately afflicted by the desire to have a new dress made for herself as well—not the same dress because Paola’s clothes always seemed too complicated to her. She would have her dress made “more in the pinafore style.” The same thing happened with me. When she had a dress made for me, she immediately wanted one made for her too, but she didn’t tell me this, nor did she tell Paola because Paola and I used to tell her that she had too many dresses made. She would put away some new fabric, neatly folded, in her dresser. Then one morning not long afterwards we would see that fabric in Tersilla’s hands.

  She also liked to have Tersilla around the apartment because she loved her company.

  “Lidia, Lidia, where are you?” my father thundered as he came home. My mother was usually in the ironing room chatting with Natalina and Tersilla.

  “You’re always with the servants!” my father shouted. “Tersilla is here again today!”

  Every so often my father said, “What is Mario up to always hanging about with that Russian?”

  “New star rising,” he said after running into Mario with Gi
nzburg on the Corso. But he was no longer suspicious of Ginzburg, seeing him in a new light after having come across him once in Paola Carrara’s living room along with Salvatorelli. He couldn’t understand, however, what it was he and Mario had in common. “What is he doing with that Ginzburg?” he would say. “What the hell do they talk about?”

  “He’s ugly,” he’d say to my mother, meaning Ginzburg, “because he’s a Sephardic Jew. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew and so not as ugly.”

  My father always spoke relatively favorably about Ashkenazi Jews. Adriano, on the other hand, used to speak well of half-bloods saying they were the best people. Among these half-bloods, the ones he liked best were the children of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, just as he happened to be.

  During that period, we played a game at home. The game had been invented by Paola and it was mostly played by her and Mario, but my mother sometimes participated too. The game consisted of dividing up the people they knew into animals, minerals, and vegetables. Adriano was a mineral-vegetable. Paola was an animal-vegetable. Gino was a mineral-vegetable. Rasetti, whom by the way we hadn’t seen in many years, was pure mineral and so was Frances.

  My father was animal-vegetable and so was my mother.

  “Nonsense!” my father said, overhearing a word or two as he passed by. “Always this nonsense of yours!”

  As for pure vegetables—the purely imaginative—there were very few of them in the world. Perhaps a handful of great poets were pure vegetables. As hard as we looked, we never found even one pure vegetable among the people we knew.

  Paola claimed to have invented the game but someone then told her that a sorting of this nature had already been done by Dante in “De vulgari eloquentia.” I don’t know if this is true.

  Alberto went to Cuneo to do his military service. Vittorio strolled alone on the Corso because he’d already done his military service.

  My father came home to find my mother intently dividing Russian words into syllables. “Ugh, this Russian,” he said. Even at the dinner table, my mother continued to divide Russian words into syllables and to recite little Russian limericks she’d learned. “Stop it with this Russian!” my father thundered.

  “But I like it so much, Beppino!” my mother said. “It’s so beautiful! Frances studies it too!”

  •

  One Saturday, Mario didn’t come home from Ivrea as he usually did, and neither did he show up on Sunday. My mother, however, wasn’t worried because there had been other times when he hadn’t come home. She thought he’d probably gone to visit his very thin lover in Switzerland.

  On Monday morning Gino and Piera came to tell us that Mario and a friend had been arrested on the Swiss border. The place where they’d arrested him was called Ponte Tresa, and that was all they knew. Gino had heard about it from someone who worked for Olivetti in Lugano. My father wasn’t in Turin that day. He came home the next morning and my mother barely had time to tell him what had happened before the apartment filled with police agents who’d come to search the place.

  They didn’t find anything. The day before, with Gino, we’d looked through all of Mario’s drawers to see if there was something we should burn, but we didn’t find anything other than his many shirts and “his little things,” as my aunt Drusilla called them. The police agents left after telling my father he would have to follow them to the police station for questioning. By the evening, when my father still hadn’t returned home, we realized he’d been put in prison. Gino, having returned to Ivrea, was arrested there before being transferred to the prison in Turin. Adriano then came to tell us that Mario had been passing through Ponte Tresa in an automobile with a friend when they were stopped by customs officers looking for contraband cigarettes. While searching the automobile they’d found antifascist pamphlets. Mario and his friend were told to get out of the car. The customs officers were accompanying them by the side of the river to the police station when Mario suddenly broke free, threw himself fully dressed into the river, and swam towards the Swiss side. The Swiss guard finally came out in a boat to get him. Mario was now safe in Switzerland.

  Adriano wore that same expression he’d had when Turati fled, an expression that revealed both his terror and his excitement in those dangerous times. He placed at my mother’s disposition a car and driver but my mother, not knowing where to go, had no idea what to do with them.

  My mother was constantly wringing her hands and saying in a tone of combined happiness, pride, and terror, “In the water with his overcoat on!”

  The friend with Mario in Ponte Tresa, who was the owner of the automobile—Mario didn’t own a car or know how to drive—was named Sion Segre. We had seen him a few times at our apartment with Alberto and Vittorio. He was a young man, blond, slightly hunched, with a mild-mannered, lazy way about him. He was friends with both Vittorio and Alberto but we hadn’t known that he and Mario were also friends. Paola, who’d immediately driven home from Milan, told us that actually she’d known all about it. Mario had confided in her that he and Sion Segre had made several of these trips between Italy and Switzerland carrying pamphlets and each one had always come off without a hitch. Mario had become increasingly bold, packing the car with more and more pamphlets and newspapers, throwing caution to the wind. When he tossed himself into the river, a guard had pulled out his pistol, but the other guard had yelled at him not to shoot. Mario owed his life to the guard who had yelled like that. The water in the river was very turbulent, but Mario was a good swimmer and used to icy-cold water because, as my mother recalled, during one of his cruises he’d gone for a swim in the North Sea with the ship’s cook, and the other passengers, watching him from the deck, had applauded. And when they’d learned that Mario was Italian, they’d shouted, “Long live Mussolini!” In any case, while swimming in the Tresa River, he’d been running out of strength, weighed down as he was by his clothes and perhaps also by his emotions, when the Swiss guard had sent a boat out to get him.

  My mother, wringing her hands, said, “Who knows if that skinny friend of his in Switzerland will give him anything to eat.”

  Sion Segre was now imprisoned in Turin and they also arrested his brother. They arrested Ginzburg and many other people who had been associated with Mario in Turin. But Vittorio hadn’t been arrested and was shocked, his long face with its prominent chin was pale, tense, and perplexed, because, as he told my mother, he hung around all those same people. Alberto came home on leave for a few days and he and Vittorio went up and down the Corso Re Umberto together.

  My mother didn’t know how to get clean clothes and food to my father in prison and was very anxious to have some news from him. She told me to look in the telephone book for a number for Segre’s relatives. But Segre was an orphan and all alone in the world except for a brother who’d also been arrested. My mother knew the Segre boys were Pitigrilli’s cousins and she told me to call Pitigrilli and find out what was going on with him and if he’d found a way to take clean clothes and books to his cousins in prison. Pitigrilli said he would come over to our place.

  Pitigrilli was a novelist and Alberto was a big fan of his novels. Whenever my father saw one of his novels around the apartment it was as if he’d seen a snake. “Lidia! Put that book away!” he shouted. He was, in fact, very worried that I might read it. Pitigrilli’s novels were not at all “suited” for me. Pitigrilli was the founder of a literary magazine called Literary Lions, many issues of which could be found in Alberto’s room, tied up in great stacks on his shelf along with his medical books.

  Pitigrilli came over to our apartment. He was tall, large, and had long salt-and-pepper sideburns. He wore a big light-colored overcoat that he didn’t take off, sitting down gravely in the armchair and speaking to my mother in a somber tone tinged with subdued grief. He had been in prison once years ago and he explained everything to us: you were allowed to bring food to prisoners only on certain days of the week and you had to first, at home, remove the shells from all nuts, the peels from apples and oranges,
and cut bread into very thin slices because knives weren’t permitted in prison. He explained everything to us and then stayed on for a while to chat politely with my mother, his legs crossed, his big coat unbuttoned, his thick eyebrows knitted together across his brow. My mother told him that I wrote short stories and insisted I show him my little notebook in which I’d copied my three or four stories in very neat handwriting. Pitigrilli, in his usual mysterious, lofty, and mournful manner, briefly leafed through it.

  Alberto and Vittorio then arrived and my mother introduced them to Pitigrilli. Pitigrilli left with them, going out onto the Corso Re Umberto, with his heavy step, his lofty, mournful manner, his large, long coat draped over his shoulders.

  My father remained in jail, I think, fifteen or twenty days; Gino for two months. My mother went to the prison in the mornings with a bundle of clean clothes, and on the days she was allowed to bring food, she brought packages filled with peeled oranges and shelled nuts. She then went to the police station where she would meet either with a man named Finucci or with a man named Lutri. These two characters seemed all-powerful to her as if they had our family’s entire fate in their hands.

  “Today it was Finucci!” she said, returning home very happy because Finucci had reassured her, telling her that there was no evidence against my father or Gino and they would soon be released.

  “Today it was Lutri!” she said, equally happy, because Lutri had a rougher manner but, my mother believed, perhaps a more sincere heart. She was also flattered by the fact that both of those characters called us all by our first names and seemed to know us very well. They said “Gino,” “Mario,” “Piera,” “Paola.” They called my father “the professor” and when she explained that he was a man of science and had never been interested in politics, only ever thinking about his tissue cells, they nodded and told her she needn’t worry. My mother, however, little by little, began to get scared because my father didn’t come home and neither did Gino. And then one day an article appeared in the newspaper with this prominent headline: “Antifascist Group in Cahoots with Paris Exiles Exposed in Turin.”