Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  “In cahoots!” my mother repeated in distress. My mother heard all sorts of dark threats resonating in that expression “in cahoots.” She cried in the living room, surrounded by her friends Paola Carrara, Frances, Signora Donati, and the other, younger ones whom she protected, helped, and consoled whenever they were out of money or their husbands yelled at them. Now it was they who helped and consoled her. Paola Carrara said that a letter should be sent to the “Zurnàl de Zenève.”

  “I wrote right away about this to Gina!” she said. “Soon you’ll see a protest published in the Zurnàl de Zenève!”

  “It’s like the Dreyfus Affair!” my mother said repeatedly. “It’s like the Dreyfus Affair!”

  In our apartment there was a great coming and going of people, among them Paola, Adriano, Terni, who’d come from Florence as soon as he’d heard the news, Frances, and Paola Carrara. Piera, who was in mourning for her own father’s death and was pregnant, came to live with us. Natalina ran between the kitchen and the living room carrying coffee cups. She was excited and happy as she always was whenever there was any kind of tumult: people in the apartment, noise, dramatic days, incessant ringing of the doorbell, and many beds to make.

  Then my mother went to Rome with Adriano because he’d discovered that in Rome Mussolini’s personal physician, Dr. Veratti, an antifascist himself, was disposed to helping other antifascists. It was, however, difficult to get into contact with him and Adriano had found two people, Ambrosini and Silvestri, who knew him. It was his hope that Dr. Veratti might be contacted through them.

  Piera and I stayed home alone with Natalina. One night we were awakened by the sound of the doorbell and, scared out of our wits, got up to answer the door. Military officers had come looking for Alberto who was registered as a cadet in Cuneo. He hadn’t returned to the barracks and no one knew where he was. Piera said he could be tried for desertion. We speculated all night long as to where he might have gone. Piera thought he must have gotten scared and had probably escaped to France. But the following day, Vittorio told us that Alberto had simply gone to meet a girl in the mountains. He’d been happily skiing with her and had forgotten to return to the barracks. By that point, he’d already returned to Cuneo and was under arrest.

  My mother returned from Rome more terrified than ever. She’d nevertheless had a good time in Rome because she always liked to travel. She and Adriano had been guests of Signora Bondi, my father’s cousin. In addition to Dr. Veratti, they’d tried to contact Margherita. Margherita was one of the many Margheritas and Reginas that comprised a part of my father’s ancestry. But this particular Margherita was famous for her close friendship with Mussolini. However, my parents hadn’t seen her for many years. In the end, my mother never did see Margherita because she wasn’t in Rome at the time. And neither was my mother able to talk to Dr. Veratti. Still, Silvestri and Ambrosini had raised their hopes, and another of Adriano’s informers—“one of my informers,” he always said—had told him that both my father and Gino would soon be released. Among all those who’d been arrested, it was said that Sion Segre and Ginzburg were the two most seriously in trouble and would certainly be sent to trial.

  My mother continued to repeat, “It’s like the Dreyfus Affair!”

  Then one evening my father came home. He wasn’t wearing a tie and he had no shoelaces because in prison they took those things away. Under his arm he had a bundle of dirty laundry wrapped up in a piece of newspaper. His beard was long and he seemed happy to have been to prison.

  Gino, however, stayed in prison for another two months. One day my mother and Piera’s mother went in a taxi to the prison to bring him clean clothes and some food and the taxi crashed into another car. Neither my mother nor Piera’s mother suffered a scratch but they found themselves sitting in a smashed taxi with their bundles on their laps, the taxi driver swearing, a crowd gathering around them, including prison guards. They were just a few meters from the prison and my mother’s only worry was that people would think that since they were going to the prison with all those packages, they must be relatives of a murderer. When Adriano heard the story he said that my mother’s stars weren’t quite aligned at the moment and this was why she was experiencing a period of such dangerous adventures.

  Gino was finally set free and my mother said, “Now we shall return to our boring life!”

  When he learned that Alberto was under arrest and at risk of having to go before a military tribunal, my father became furious. “Scoundrel!” he said. “While his family was locked up he went off with girls skiing!” He pronounced this last word in the English fashion.

  “I’m worried about Alberto!” he said waking up in the night. “It’s no joke if he has to go before the military tribunal!”

  “I’m very worried about Mario!” he said. “I’m very worried about Mario! What will he do?”

  My father was, however, thrilled to have a conspirator for a son. He hadn’t expected it. He’d never thought of Mario as an antifascist. Mario used to constantly contradict him in all their arguments and he used to speak badly of the socialists once so beloved by my mother and father. He used to say that Turati was hugely naive and made mistake after mistake. And whenever my father heard him say this, even though he said it himself, he was mortally offended.

  “He’s a fascist!” my father would say to my mother. “At heart, he’s a fascist!”

  Now he could no longer say this. Now Mario had become famous for his political exile. Still, my father was unhappy that his arrest and flight had happened while Mario was an employee at Olivetti’s factory. My father was afraid that Mario might have compromised the factory, Adriano, and the old engineer.

  “I always said he shouldn’t work for Olivetti!” he shouted at my mother. “He has now compromised the factory!”

  “What a good man Adriano is!” he said. “He’s really put himself out for me. He’s a very good man! All of the Olivettis are good people!”

  Paola received, through I don’t know which Olivetti affiliate, a note in Mario’s minuscule and nearly illegible handwriting. The note said, “To my friends, both vegetable and mineral, I’m fine and don’t need anything.”

  Sion Segre and Ginzburg were tried by the special tribunal and condemned—one for two years, the other for four—but the sentence was halved due to an amnesty. Ginzburg was sent to the prison in Civitavecchia.

  Alberto did not have to go before the war tribunal and returned home from his military service. He once again began strolling up and down the Corso with Vittorio.

  “Thug! Delinquent!” my father shouted, out of habit, whenever he heard him come in no matter what time it happened to be.

  My mother started her piano lessons again. Her teacher, a man with a black mustache, was terribly afraid of my father and would sneak down the hall on tiptoe with his sheet music.

  “I can’t stand your piano teacher!” my father shouted. “There’s something shady about him.”

  “But no, Beppino, he’s a very good man! He loves his little daughter!” my mother would say. “He loves his little daughter very much and he teaches her Latin! He’s poor!”

  My mother had given up Russian since she couldn’t take lessons from Ginzburg’s sister anymore because it would have been compromising. Some new words had entered our family. We’d say, “We can’t invite Salvatorelli over! It’s compromising!” and “We can’t keep this book in the apartment! It could be compromising. They might search the place again!” And Paola said the entrance to our building was “under surveillance,” that there was someone always lurking out there wearing a raincoat and that she felt she was being “tailed” whenever she went out.

  •

  Our “boring life,” however, didn’t last long. A year later they came to our apartment to arrest Alberto and we learned they’d also arrested Vittorio and many other people. They came early in the morning—maybe it was six in the morning. They began their search, Alberto in his pajamas between two agents who were guarding him while
the others leafed through his medical books, his issues of Literary Lions, and his detective novels. The agents gave me permission to go to school and my mother, on the threshold of the door, slipped into my school bag envelopes containing her bills and receipts because she was afraid that during the search my father might discover them and scream at her for spending too much.

  “Alberto! They’ve locked up Alberto! But Alberto has never had any interest in politics!” my mother said, stunned.

  “They’ve locked him up because he’s Mario’s brother, because he’s my son, not because he’s himself!” my father said.

  My mother started to take clean clothes to the prison again and there she met Vittorio’s parents and other relatives of the inmates.

  “Such respectable people!” she said about Vittorio’s parents. “Such a respectable family! And they said that Vittorio is such a fine young man. He’s just done very well on his law school exams. Alberto has always chosen such respectable friends!”

  “Carlo Levi is locked up as well!” my mother said with a mixture of fear, joy, and pride, because she was terrified by the fact that so many were now in prison, and that they were perhaps preparing a major trial, but the idea that so many were locked up also comforted her. She was flattered that Alberto was in the company of so many respectable and famous adults. “Professor Giua has been locked up too!”

  “But I don’t like Carlo Levi’s paintings!” my father said instantly, never missing the opportunity to declare his dislike for Carlo Levi’s paintings.

  “But no, Beppino! They’re beautiful!” my mother said. “His portrait of his mother is beautiful! You haven’t seen it!”

  “Dribbledrabs!” my father would say. “I can’t stand modern painting!

  “Ah, but they’ll surely let Giua out right away!” my father said. “He hasn’t been compromised!”

  My father never understood who were the real conspirators. After a few days we heard that in Giua’s place they’d found letters written in invisible ink and it turned out Giua was, of all of them, the one who was most in danger.

  “Invisible ink!” my father said. “Of course, he’s a chemist, he’d know how to make invisible ink!”

  My father was profoundly shocked, and perhaps even a little envious, because Giua, whom he used to see at Paola Carrara’s, had always appeared to him to be poised, calm, and thoughtful. Now Giua had suddenly moved to the center of that political affair. They said that Vittorio also was in an extremely dangerous position.

  “Rumors!” my father said. “All rumors! No one knows anything!”

  Giulio Einaudi and Pavese were also arrested. My father knew them either slightly or only by name. He, like my mother, however, felt proud that Alberto was among them because by being mixed up with that group—publishers of a journal called La Cultura—it appeared that Alberto had suddenly joined company with a more dignified crowd.

  “They’ve locked him up with the people from La Cultura! And he’s the one who only reads Le Grandi Firme!” my father said.

  “He was supposed to take the comparative biology exam! Now he’ll never take it. He’ll never get his degree!” he told my mother in the middle of the night.

  Alberto, Vittorio, and the others were then sent to Rome in handcuffs on a troop train. They were taken to the Regina Coeli prison. My mother had started to go again to the police station to see Finucci and Lutri. But Finucci and Lutri said that now the matter was in the hands of the police in Rome, and they knew nothing about it.

  Adriano had found out from his informer that all of Alberto’s and Vittorio’s telephone calls had been taped, each and every one. Vittorio and Alberto did, in fact, call each other constantly during the rare times they weren’t together strolling up and down the Corso.

  “Those stupid telephone calls!” my mother said. “Taping each one!”

  My mother had no idea what they talked about during those telephone calls because Alberto whispered whenever he spoke on the phone. Nevertheless, my mother was convinced, as was my father, that he only talked about useless things.

  “Alberto is such a useless fellow!” my father said. “They’ve imprisoned uselessness itself.”

  They began to speak again about Dr. Veratti and Margherita. My father, however, didn’t want to hear Margherita’s name mentioned.

  “There’s no way I’m going to see Margherita! I’m not going. I wouldn’t dream of it!”

  This Margherita had written, years ago, a biography of Mussolini. The fact that one of his cousins was Mussolini’s biographer was inconceivable.

  “Perhaps she wouldn’t even see me! There’s no way I’m going to Margherita to beg for favors!”

  My father went to the police headquarters in Rome to try to get some news. Since he completely lacked any sense of diplomacy and thundered at everyone in his strong, deep voice, I don’t believe he was very successful at gaining either information or meetings. He did meet with a man called De Stefani, and my father, who always got people’s names wrong, later told my mother this man’s name was Di Stefano. He described this “Di Stefano” to her.

  My mother said, “But that’s not De Stefani, Beppino! That’s Anchise! I was there too last year!”

  “What do you mean Anchise! He told me his name was Di Stefano! He couldn’t have given me false information!”

  Whenever Di Stefano and Anchise came up my mother and father would argue and my father would continue to call him Di Stefano even though my mother was certain beyond all doubt that he was Anchise.

  Alberto wrote from Rome saying he was disappointed not to be able to see the city. In fact, he had seen the city for half an hour when he was three years old. Once he wrote that he had washed his hair with milk and that afterwards his hair stank and the whole cell stank. The prison director detained that letter and informed Alberto that his letters shouldn’t contain so much twaddle. Alberto was exiled to a small town called Ferrandina in Lucania. As for Giua and Vittorio, they were tried and sentenced to fifteen years each.

  My father said, “If Mario returns to Italy, he’ll get fifteen years! Twenty!”

  •

  From Paris, Mario wrote brief, concise letters in his minuscule and illegible handwriting that my parents had to try to decipher. They went to visit him. In Paris, Mario lived in an attic room. He still wore the clothes—now ratty and faded—he’d been wearing when he threw himself into the water in Ponte Tresa. My mother wished he would buy himself a suit but he refused to give up those faded old clothes. He immediately asked for news of Sion Segre and Ginzburg, who were still in prison. He spoke about Ginzburg respectfully but distantly, as someone who, though he remained in his thoughts and affections, was no longer central to them. And as for his own adventure and escape, he seemed to have entirely forgotten about it.

  He did his own laundry; he had only two threadbare shirts and he washed them with great care, with the same meticulous attention he’d once devoted to folding his silk undergarments and placing them in drawers. He swept his attic room with similar meticulous attention. He was always well washed, clean shaven, and neat even in his threadbare clothes. My mother said he looked more Chinese than ever.

  He had a cat. In a corner of his attic room was a litter box with sawdust. It was a very clean cat, Mario said, and never went poo on the floor. My father said he was obsessed with the cat. He woke up early in the morning in order to go buy milk for the cat. My father, like my grandmother, couldn’t stand cats, and even my mother didn’t love cats, much preferring dogs.

  My mother said, “Why don’t you get a dog instead?”

  “What do you mean, a dog!” my father shouted. “Taking care of a dog right now is the last thing he needs!”

  In Paris, Mario had stopped having anything to do with the Justice and Liberty movement. He had gone to their meetings for a while and had contributed to their newspaper, but then he’d discovered that he didn’t like them very much. Mario was the one who, when he was little, had written the poem about the Tosi boys
, the ones he didn’t like to play with:

  And then the Tosi boys came,

  All nasty, boring, and lame.

  The Justice and Liberty movement was now the equivalent of the Tosi boys. All that they said, thought, and wrote irritated him. All he could do was criticize them. And he said,

  . . . Among bitter rowans

  It behooves not the sweet fig to ripen.

  The sweet fig was him and the bitter rowans were the Justice and Liberty people.

  “It’s really true!” he said. “It’s exactly like that!”

  . . . Among the bitter rowans

  It behooves not the sweet fig to ripen.

  He said this while laughing and stroking his jaw, just as he had once done while saying “The Brot shot in the pot.” He’d taken up reading Dante, having discovered how great he was. He’d also started to study Greek and was reading Herodotus and Homer. On the other hand, he couldn’t stand Pascoli or Carducci. Carducci actually sent him into a rage.

  “He was a monarchist!” Mario said. “At first he was a republican, and then he became a monarchist because he fell in love with that idiot Queen Margherita. And to think he was of the same era, the same century as Baudelaire! Leopardi, yes, he was a great poet. The only modern poets are Leopardi and Baudelaire! It’s ridiculous that in Italian schools we still study Carducci!”

  They went, my mother and my father, to the Louvre. Mario asked if they’d seen Poussin. They had not seen Poussin. They’d seen many other things.

  “What do you mean?” Mario said. “How could you not have seen Poussin! In that case it was useless for you to have gone to the Louvre. The only reason to go to the Louvre is to see Poussin!”