“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone mention this Poussin,” my mother said.
In Paris, Mario had become friends with a fellow named Cafi and could talk about nothing else.
“New star rising,” said my father.
Cafi was half Russian and half Italian. He’d emigrated to Paris years ago and was very poor and quite sick. He’d filled up reams of paper that he gave to his friends to read but never bothered to publish. He said that when someone had written something there was no need to publish it. To have written it and to read it to your friends was enough. There was no need for it to be preserved for posterity, because posterity didn’t matter at all. What was actually written on those pages, Mario couldn’t explain very well. Everything was written there, everything.
Cafi didn’t eat. He lived on nothing, he lived on a tangerine, and his clothes were in rags, his shoes full of holes. If he ever had a little money, he bought delicacies and champagne.
“How intolerant that Mario is!” my mother and father said later. “He criticizes everyone, no one is good enough for him! Only this Cafi!”
“He thinks he’s the first one to discover that Carducci is boring. I’ve known that for quite a while,” my mother said.
My father and mother were also offended that Mario didn’t seem to miss Italy in the slightest. He was in love with France and with Paris. He continually mixed French words into his speech. He spoke of Italy only with his lip curled in deep disdain.
My father and mother were never nationalists. In fact, they loathed nationalism in all its manifestations. But Mario’s disdain for Italy seemed to include them, and all of us, and our way of life, our entire lives.
My father was also unhappy that Mario had broken all ties with the Justice and Liberty movement. The leader of the Justice and Liberty movement was Carlo Rosselli, and when Mario had arrived in Paris, Rosselli had given him money and put him up. My father and mother had known the Rossellis for many years and were friends with his mother, Signora Amelia, who lived in Florence.
“There will be hell to pay if you’re rude to Rosselli!” my father told Mario.
Besides Cafi, Mario had two other friends. One was Renzo Giua, the son of Professor Giua who was in prison. He was a pale youth with bright eyes and a lock of hair that fell over his forehead. He’d fled Italy, crossing the mountains alone. The other friend was Chiaromonte, whom my mother had met years ago one summer while at Paola’s house in Forte dei Marmi. Chiaromonte was big and burly with curly black hair. Both of these friends of Mario’s had broken off with Justice and Liberty, and both were friends of Cafi, and they spent their days listening to him when he read those pages written in pencil that would never become books because he disdained published books.
Chiaromonte had a wife who was very sick and he was very poor. Nevertheless, he helped Cafi whenever he could. Mario also helped him. They lived like this, close friends, dividing up whatever they had, without depending on any group, without making plans for the future, because no future was possible. War would probably break out and the idiots would win, because the idiots, Mario said, always win.
“That Cafi,” my father said to my mother, “must be an anarchist! Mario is an anarchist too! At heart, he always was an anarchist!”
After Paris, my father and mother went to Brussels where there was a biology conference. They met up with Terni and other friends of my father’s as well as his students and assistants, and my father felt relieved because being around Mario exhausted him.
“He thinks everyone is wrong!” he said about Mario. “As soon as I open my mouth he tells me I’ve said something wrong!”
My father loved to go on those trips whenever there were conferences. He loved meeting up with biologists and having discussions while he scratched his head and his back. He loved dragging my mother along, always being in a hurry, and never letting her stop and see the galleries and museums. He also liked to stay in hotels; except for the fact that he got up very early in the morning and was always starving. Until he’d had his breakfast, he was in a ferocious mood. He roamed around the room looking out the window trying to discern dawn’s first light. When five o’clock finally arrived he picked up the telephone and shouted out his breakfast order: “Deux thés! Deux thés complet! Avec de l’eau chaude!” The waiters, being at that hour still half asleep, generally didn’t remember to bring him the “eau chaude” or the jam. Finally, when he had gotten everything he wanted, he devoured his breakfast of croissants and jam, and then woke my mother. “Lidia, let’s go, it’s late. Let’s go see the city.”
“What a jackass that Mario is!” he said every once in a while. “He’s always been a jackass. He’s always been intolerant! I’ll be very angry if he’s rude to Rosselli!”
“Always with that Cafi! Cafi! Cafi!” my mother said when they were home again and she was telling me and Paola about Mario. She said “with Cafi” in the same way she’d once said “with Pajetta” when complaining about Alberto. And she asked Paola about Poussin, “Is this Poussin really that great?”
•
Paola also went to visit Mario. They fought and didn’t like each other anymore. They no longer played the mineral and vegetable game together. They didn’t agree on anything anymore. They had differing opinions about everything. In Paris, Paola bought herself a dress. Mario had always thought she was elegant, he’d always praised her clothes, her taste, and between the two of them it had generally been Paola who made judgments and Mario who agreed with them. Mario did not like the dress that Paola bought in Paris. He said that the dress made her look like “a prefect’s wife.” Paola was deeply offended. She no longer even liked Chiaromonte, whom she used to get together with at the seaside in Forte Dei Marmi. She no longer recognized Chiaromonte in his new guise of penniless political exile with a very sick wife, and Cafi’s good friend, as the guy who used to come visit her at the seaside, who rowed and swam, flirted with her friends, made fun of everything, and went dancing in the evenings at the Capannina.
Mario told her she was bourgeois.
“Yes, I’m bourgeois,” Paola said, “and I don’t care in the least.”
She went to see Proust’s grave. Mario had never been. “He doesn’t care a thing about Proust!” Paola told my mother when she came home. “He remembers nothing about him. He doesn’t like him anymore. He only likes Herodotus!”
Seeing that he didn’t have one, she bought him a beautiful raincoat. Mario immediately gave it to Cafi because he said that Cafi shouldn’t get wet when it rained since he had a bad heart.
“Cafi! Cafi! Cafi!” Paola also said, disgusted, and she agreed with my father that Mario had made a grave mistake by distancing himself from Rosselli’s group, and she said that Mario and Chiaromonte were two lonely men in Paris who had lost their grip on reality.
•
Alberto had returned from exile, finished his degree, and gotten married. Contrary to all of my father’s predictions, he became a doctor and started to treat people. He now had a consulting room. He got angry with his wife, Miranda, if the consulting room wasn’t neat and if newspapers were left strewn about. He got angry if there weren’t any ashtrays because he chain-smoked and couldn’t throw the butts on the ground anymore.
Patients came and he examined them and they told him things about themselves. He listened because he loved to hear things about people’s lives. Then, in his white coat with his stethoscope dangling around his neck, he would go into the next room where Miranda was stretched out in an armchair, wrapped in a blanket with a hot-water bottle because she was always cold and lazy. He made her make him some coffee. He was always agitated, just as he’d been as a kid, and he drank coffee continually. He smoked continually without inhaling, taking sips off his cigarette as if he were drinking it.
His friends came to see him and he took their blood pressure and gave them free medicine samples. He found something wrong with everyone. Only with his wife could he find nothing wrong.
She would s
ay to him, “Give me a tonic! I must be ill! I always have a headache. I feel so tired!”
And he would respond, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just made of second-rate material.”
Miranda was small, thin, blond, and blue-eyed. She would stay at home for hours on end, never going out, wearing one of Alberto’s bathrobes and wrapped in a blanket.
She’d say, “I think I might go to visit Elena in Ospedaletti!”
She was always dreaming of going to Ospedaletti where her sister, Elena, spent the winter months. Her sister, blond and petite like her but with a little more energy, was at the time in Ospedaletti on a deck chair in the sun wearing dark glasses with a blanket wrapped around her legs. Or perhaps she was playing bridge. Miranda and her sister were excellent bridge players. They had won tournaments. Miranda’s home was full of ashtrays she’d won at those tournaments. Whenever she played bridge, Miranda emerged from her torpor. Her expression became lively and devilish, and her eyes shone as she leaned her curved little nose over her cards. Still, rarely was she able to separate herself from her armchair and her blanket. Towards evening she would get up, go into the kitchen, and peer into a pot where a chicken was cooking.
Alberto said, “Why in this family do we only ever eat boiled chicken?”
Alberto also played bridge, only he always lost.
Miranda knew everything about the stock market since her father was a stockbroker. She said to my mother, “You know I’m thinking of selling my Incet stock.” And then she added, “You should sell your property shares. Why wait to sell them?”
My mother went to my father and said, “We must sell our property shares! Miranda said so!”
My father said, “Miranda! What does Miranda know about anything!”
But then when he next saw Miranda, he said, “You understand the stock market. Do you really think that I should sell my property shares?”
He then said to my mother, “What a lummox that Miranda is! She always has a headache. But she understands the stock market. She has a great business sense!”
When Alberto announced that he was getting married my father flew into one of his rages. He then resigned himself to it. But waking up in the middle of the night, he said, “What will they do? Neither of them has a penny. And Miranda is such a lummox.”
They didn’t, in fact, have much money but Alberto soon began to earn some. Well-to-do ladies of a certain age came to be examined and told him all their worries. He listened to them with rapt attention. He was blessed with curiosity and patience. And what he loved most about people was their worries and their diseases.
He no longer read anything but medical journals. He didn’t read Pitigrilli’s novels anymore. He’d already read all of them and Pitigrilli hadn’t written any new ones since he’d disappeared, no one knowing where he’d gone. Alberto no longer strolled up and down the Corso Re Umberto. His friend Vittorio was in prison and only very rarely did he hear from him, like the time when Vittorio’s parents had bronchitis and asked him to telephone for them.
Alberto had his clothes made by a tailor called Vittorio Foa. While he was being measured for a suit, Alberto said, “I come to you because of your name.” The tailor was pleased and thanked him. Vittorio’s name was in fact Foa, just like the tailor’s.
Alberto said to Miranda, “It’s always bronchitis! Always stupid illnesses! I never get the chance to treat some wonderful and strange disease that’s a bit complicated, a bit strange. I’m bored! I’m profoundly bored! I don’t have any fun!” Actually, he was having a lot of fun being a doctor but didn’t want to admit it.
My mother said, “Alberto has a great passion for medicine!”
She said, “I want to go to be examined by Alberto. Today I have a bit of a stomach ache.”
And my father said, “Sure! Do you think that klutz Alberto knows anything? You have a stomach ache because yesterday you ate too much! Take a pill! I’ll give you a pill!”
Alberto lived near my parents and every day my mother went by to see him. She found Miranda sitting in her armchair as usual. Alberto came out of his consulting room for a minute in his white coat with his stethoscope dangling against his chest and warmed himself by the radiator. He and my mother had the same habit of always warming themselves by radiators. Miranda was wrapped up in her blanket. My mother said, “Get up! Wash your face in cold water! Let’s go out. I’ll take you to the cinema!”
Miranda said, “I can’t. I have to stay home. I’m waiting for my cousin. And I have too much of a headache anyway.”
Alberto said, “Miranda is bloodless. She’s lazy. She’s made of second-rate material.”
Miranda was always waiting for her cousins. She had a lot of cousins.
Alberto said, “I’m sick of treating your cousins!” And he said, “What a boring city Turin is! How bored we are here! Nothing ever happens! At least they used to arrest us! Now they don’t arrest us anymore. They’ve forgotten about us. I feel forgotten, abandoned in the shadows!”
•
Paola came back to live in Turin. She lived in a big white house in the hills with a circular terrace overlooking the Po. Paola loved the Po, the streets and the hills of Turin, and the paths in Parco del Valentino where she used to go on walks with her small young man. She had always missed these things a great deal. But even to her, Turin now seemed more gray, boring, and sad than ever. So many people, so many friends were either far away or in prison. Paola no longer recognized the streets of her youth when she had only a few dresses and read Proust.
Now she had many dresses. She had them made for her by tailors in their shops but she also had Tersilla come to her house. Paola and my mother fought over her. Paola said Tersilla gave her a sense of security, a sense of life’s continuity. Sometimes Paola invited Alberto and Miranda to lunch along with Sion Segre who had returned from prison. Sion Segre had a sister, Ilda, who normally lived with her husband and children in Palestine but came to Turin every so often. Paola and Ilda had become friends. Ilda was beautiful, tall, and blond, and she and Paola would go out for long walks around the town. Ilda’s children were named Ben and Ariel and they went to school in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, Ilda led an austere life and discussed only Jewish problems, but when she came to Turin to stay for a while with her brother, she also liked to talk about clothes and to walk around the town.
My mother was always a little jealous of Paola’s friends and whenever Paola had a new friend my mother, feeling neglected, would become glum. She would get up in the morning, her face wan, her eyelids puffy, and say, “I have the mulligrubs.” The combination of gloom and a sense of solitude usually compounded by indigestion was called “the mulligrubs” by my mother. Whenever she had “the mulligrubs” she holed herself up in the living room and, feeling cold, wrapped herself in woolen shawls, thinking Paola no longer loved her, never came to see her, was going about the city with her friends instead of her.
“I’m bored!” my mother said. “I have no fun! I’m bored! There’s nothing worse than being bored! If only I would come down with some nice illness!”
Sometimes she got the flu. She was happy then because the flu seemed to her to be a nobler illness than her usual indigestion. She would take her temperature—99.3°F.
“Do you realize I’m sick?” she contentedly told my father. “I have a temperature of ninety-nine point three.”
“Ninety-nine point three? That’s hardly anything!” my father said. “I still go to the laboratory even when I have a fever of one hundred and two.”
My mother said, “Let’s hope it goes that high by tonight!” But she didn’t wait for the evening. She took her temperature every minute. “It’s still only ninety-nine point three! And yet I feel ill!”
For her part, Paola was also jealous of my mother’s friends. Not of Frances or Paola Carrara. She was jealous of my mother’s young friends, the ones she protected and helped, and whom she took with her on walks around the city and to the cinema. Paola came over to see my mot
her and was frequently told that she was out with one of her young friends. Paola got angry. “She’s always out and about! She’s never at home!”
Paola also got mad when my mother sent Tersilla to one of her young friends. “You shouldn’t lend Tersilla like that!” she said. “I needed her to alter the children’s coats!”
“Our mother is too young!” Paola sometimes complained to me. “I would like an old, fat mother with white hair. One who’s always at home embroidering tablecloths, like Adriano’s mother. It would make me feel so secure to have a mother who was very old and calm, a mother who wasn’t so jealous of my friends. I would come to see her and she would always be there, serenely embroidering, dressed all in black, and she would give me good advice!”
She would say to my mother, “If you’re so bored why don’t you learn embroidery? My mother-in-law embroiders! She spends entire days embroidering!”
My mother would say, “But your mother-in-law is deaf! I can’t help it if I’m not deaf like your mother-in-law! I would be very bored always staying at home! I like to go out and about!”
She said, “There’s no way I’m learning to embroider! I’m no good at that kind of thing! I can’t stitch a thing! When I try to darn your father’s socks, I make a mess of it and Natalina has to pull out the stitching!”
She had taken up Russian again, teaching it to herself this time, and she sat on the couch dividing Russian words into syllables. And when Paola came over to see her, my mother would read out sentences from the grammar book, syllable by syllable.
Paola said, “Ugh! What a bore Mama is with this Russian!”
Paola was also jealous of Miranda. She said, “You’re always going to Miranda’s! You never come to my house!”
Miranda had given birth to a baby boy and they’d named him Vittorio. At about the same time, Paola had given birth to a baby girl. Paola said that Miranda’s baby was ugly. “He has ugly, brutish features,” she said. “He looks like the son of a railwayman!”
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