Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Whenever my mother went to see Miranda’s baby she would say, “I’m off to see how the railwayman is doing!”

  My mother adored all little babies. She also adored their nannies. Nannies reminded her of the time when her children were small. She’d had a whole collection of nannies, wet nurses, and dry nurses, and they’d taught her songs. She would go about the apartment singing those songs and say, “This one’s from Mario’s nurse! And this one’s from Gino’s!”

  Gino’s son, Arturo, born the year my father was arrested, used to come with us during the summer holidays along with his nanny. Whenever Arturo’s nanny was around my mother was always chatting with her.

  My father said, “You’re always with the servants! You say you’re looking after the children but really you’re just chatting away with the servants!”

  “But she’s such a nice woman, Beppino! She’s an antifascist! She thinks like we do!”

  “I forbid you to discuss politics with the servants!”

  Roberto was the only one of all his grandchildren whom my father liked. Whenever he was introduced to a new grandchild, he said, “Roberto, however, is more beautiful!”

  Since Roberto was his first grandchild it might have been the case that he was the only one my father had ever cared to look at closely.

  When the summer holidays came around, my father always rented the same house. For years now he hadn’t wanted to make a change. It was a big, gray stone house looking out onto a pasture. It was near Gressoney, in the hamlet of Perlotoa. Paola’s children came with us and Gino’s boy too, but Alberto’s boy, the railwayman, was taken to Bardonecchia because Elena, Miranda’s sister, had a house there.

  I’m not sure why, but my mother and father had a very low opinion of Bardonecchia. They said that it was a horrible place where the sun never shone. To hear them talk about it, one would think it was a cesspool.

  My father said, “That Miranda is a colossal nitwit! She could have come here. The boy would be much better off here than in Bardonecchia, that’s for sure.”

  And my mother said, “Poor railwayman!”

  When the child came back from Bardonecchia he was obviously thriving. He was a beautiful child, blond and rosy-cheeked. He didn’t look at all like a railwayman.

  My father said, “He’s in pretty good shape though it’s odd Bardonecchia didn’t ruin him.”

  For a few years we’d spent the summer holidays at Forte dei Marmi because Roberto needed sea air. My father went very reluctantly to the seaside. He would sit under a beach umbrella, dressed for the city, angry because he disliked seeing people in bathing suits. My mother, she would go into the water, but she’d stay very close to the shore since she didn’t know how to swim. While she was in the water she enjoyed herself, rolling in the waves, but when she returned to sit next to my father, she also sulked. She was jealous of Paola who would go far out to sea in a pedal boat and not come back in for ages.

  In the evenings, Paola went dancing at the Capannina. And my father said, “She goes dancing every single night? What a jackass!”

  Instead, when we went to the house in the mountains in Perlotoa my father was always happy and so, therefore, was my mother. Neither Paola or Piera would come, or if they did they stayed a short time. Only the little children came. My mother was very happy when she was with the little children, Natalina, and the nannies. I was there too, bored to death during those vacations. And Lucio and Frances were in the house next to ours. Dressed all in white, they went to the village to play tennis.

  Adele Rasetti was also there staying at a hotel in the village. She looked exactly the same: small and thin with a pointy nose and a drawn, greenish face and pinhead eyes. She looked exactly like her son. She gathered insects in her handkerchief and put them, along with a clump of moss, on her windowsill.

  My mother said, “How much I like Adele!”

  Her son now worked in Rome with Fermi and was a famous physicist.

  My father said, “I always said Rasetti was very intelligent. But he’s aloof! Very aloof!”

  Frances came to sit in the pasture on a bench next to my mother, her hair pulled back by a white headband, her racket still in its cover. She was talking about her sister-in-law who was in Argentina, Uncle Mauro’s wife, mimicking the way she spoke Spanish, “Commo no!”

  My father said to her, “Do you remember when we were young and we went hiking with Paola Carrara, and Paola Carrara would call the crevasses ‘those holes you fall into’?”

  And my mother said, “And do you remember when Lucio was little and we explained to him that on a hike you should never say you were thirsty and he’d say, ‘I’m thirsty but I’m not saying so’?”

  And Frances said, “Commo no!”

  “Lidia, stop picking at your cuticles!” my father thundered every so often. “It’s so crass!”

  “Between Frances and Adele Rasetti,” my mother said, “the days fly by!”

  When Paola came to see her children, however, my mother immediately became agitated and unhappy. She followed Paola everywhere and watched as she unpacked her pots of skin cream. My mother also had many skin creams, the same ones even, but she never remembered to use them.

  “Your skin is all cracked,” Paola said to her. “You should take care of your skin. Every night you should apply a good, nourishing cream.”

  My mother brought with her to the mountains thick wool skirts and Paola said to her, “You dress like the Swiss!”

  “How depressing these mountains are!” Paola said. “I can’t stand them!”

  “Everyone is mineral!” she said to me, recalling the game we used to play with Mario. “Adele Rasetti is truly pure mineral. I can’t stand to be around such mineral people anymore!”

  She left after a few days and my father said to her, “Why don’t you stay a little longer? What a jackass you are!”

  •

  In the autumn, I went with my mother to visit Mario, who was now living in a small town near Clermont-Ferrand. He was teaching in a boarding school. He had become great friends with the school’s headmaster and his wife. He said that they were extraordinary people, very sophisticated and honest, the kind of people you could only find in France. In his small room he had a coal stove. From his window you could see the countryside covered in snow. Mario wrote long letters to Chiaromonte and Cafi in Paris. He translated Herodotus and fiddled with the stove. Under his jacket, he wore a dark turtleneck sweater that the headmaster’s wife had made for him. To thank her, he’d given her a sewing basket. Everyone in the town knew him. He stopped and chatted with everyone and he was asked by all to come home with them and drink “le vin blanc.”

  My mother said, “How French he’s become!”

  In the evenings, he played cards with the headmaster and his wife. He listened to their conversations and discussed educational methods with them. They also spoke a long time about whether or not there had been enough onion in the soupe served at dinner.

  “How patient he’s become!” my mother said. “How patient he is with these people. With us he never had any patience. Whenever he was home, he thought we were all so boring. These people seem even more boring than we are!”

  And she said, “He’s patient with them only because they’re French!”

  •

  When winter was over, Leone Ginzburg returned to Turin from the Civitavecchia penitentiary where he’d served his time. His coat was too small and his tattered hat sat slightly askew on top of his black hair. He walked slowly with his hands in his pockets, his lips drawn, his brow knit, his dark tortoiseshell glasses resting halfway down his large nose, while he scrutinized everything around him with his black, penetrating eyes.

  He went to stay with his sister and mother in an apartment near the Corso Francia. He was under special surveillance, which meant he had to be back home by sundown and policemen would come check up on him. He spent his evenings with Pavese. They’d been friends for many years. Pavese had also just returned from exile and was
, at the time, very depressed after having suffered an amorous rejection. He went to Leone’s every evening, hung up his lilac- colored scarf and his half-belted overcoat on the coatrack, and sat down at the table. Leone sat on the couch, leaning his elbow against the wall.

  Pavese explained that he came over to Leone’s not because he was brave—he had no courage—and not because he was any kind of martyr. He came because he didn’t know how else to spend his evenings and couldn’t stand to be by himself. He also explained that he didn’t come in order to listen to political discussions because he “didn’t give a damn” about politics. Sometimes he sat silently smoking his pipe for the entire evening. Sometimes, twirling his hair around his finger, he talked about his problems. Leone’s capacity for listening was inestimable and inexhaustible. He knew how to devote his attention completely to another’s problems even when he was deeply preoccupied with his own. Leone’s sister would bring them tea. She and her mother had taught Pavese to say in Russian, “I love tea with sugar and lemon.” At midnight, Pavese grabbed his scarf from the coatrack and flung it around his neck, then grabbed his coat. He went down the Corso Francia, tall, pale, his stride broad and swift, his shoulders hunched, his collar turned up, his extinguished pipe gripped between his strong white teeth. Leone stayed up a while longer perusing his bookshelf, pulling out a book and glancing at it, sometimes reading it, as if randomly, for a long time, his eyebrows knitted together. He stayed like this, reading as if randomly, until three in the morning.

  Leone began to work with a friend who was a publisher. There was only him, the publisher, a warehouseman, and a typist named Signorina Coppa. The publisher was young, ruddy-cheeked, shy, and often blushed. When he called for the typist, however, he had a savage yell: “Coppaaa!” They tried to get Pavese to work with them. Pavese balked. He said, “I don’t give a damn.” He said, “I don’t need a salary. I don’t need to support anyone. All I need for myself is a bowl of soup and some tobacco.” He was a substitute teacher in a high school. He made very little money but it was enough for him.

  He also did translations from English. He’d translated Moby-Dick. He translated it, he said, purely for his own pleasure. They’d paid him to do it, sure, but he would have done it for free. Actually, he even would have paid for the opportunity to translate it.

  He wrote poetry. His poetry had a long, drawn-out, lazy pace, with a kind of cant to it. The world of his poetry was Turin, the Po, the hills, the fog, and the taverns of Barriera di Milano. In the end, he was persuaded to join Leone working for that small publisher. He became a conscientious and meticulous worker who scolded the others for arriving late and for going to lunch, say, at three o’clock in the afternoon. He urged them to adopt a schedule like his: he would come to work early and leave for lunch punctually at one o’clock because at one o’clock his sister, the one he lived with, would put the soup on the table.

  Every so often, Leone and the publisher fought. They wouldn’t speak afterwards for a few days. Then they would write long letters to each other and, in this manner, would be reconciled. Pavese, instead, “didn’t give a damn.” Leone’s true passion was politics. But besides this essential calling, he had other passions—poetry, philology, history. Having come to Italy as a child, he spoke Italian as well as he spoke Russian. He still spoke Russian at home with his sister and mother, who went out very little and never saw anyone. Leone would describe for them in great detail everything he did and everyone he met.

  Before he went to prison, he’d liked attending the salons. He was a brilliant conversationalist even though he spoke with a slight stammer. And though he was always deeply absorbed in thinking about and doing serious things, he was nevertheless open to engaging with people in the most frivolous gossip, especially since he was curious about people and was blessed with a huge memory that retained even the most superficial details.

  But when he came back from prison, he was no longer invited to the salons and, in fact, people avoided him because he was by then notorious throughout Turin as a dangerous conspirator. He didn’t care at all and seemed to have forgotten about those salons.

  We got married, Leone and I, and we went to live in the apartment on via Pallamaglio.

  When my mother told my father that Leone wanted to marry me, he flew into his usual rage that occurred whenever any of us intended to get married. This time he didn’t say that Leone was ugly. He said, “But he doesn’t have a secure position in life!”

  Leone, in fact, didn’t have a secure position in life. Indeed, his situation was more precarious than ever. They could arrest him and put him in jail again. They could, under any pretext, send him into exile. If, however, fascism were to end, my mother said, Leone would become a great political figure. Furthermore, the small publisher he worked for was, even if small and poor, bursting with promise and potential.

  My mother said, “They even publish books by Salvatorelli!”

  Salvatorelli’s name contained magical powers for my father and mother. At the mention of his name my father became kind and gentle.

  I got married. And right after I got married my father would say about me when talking to strangers, “My daughter Ginzburg.” My father was always ready to point out changes in any situation, and he would immediately assign husbands’ surnames to the women they married. He had two assistants, a man and a woman: he was called Olivo and she, Porta. Olivo and Porta eventually got married. We continued to call them “Olivo and Porta.” Every time he heard us say their names, my father got angry. “She’s not Porta anymore! Call her Signora Olivo!”

  •

  He died while fighting in Spain, Giua’s son, that pale youth with bright eyes who was always with Mario in Paris. His father, in prison in Civitavecchia, had contracted trachoma and was at risk of losing his eyesight. Signora Giua often came over to see my mother. They’d met at Paola Carrara’s place and had become friends. They spoke informally, addressing each other with the informal pronoun tu, but my mother continued to call her, as she always had, Signora Giua. She would say to her, “Tu, Signora Giua,” because she’d always called her that and found it hard to change.

  Signora Giua came over with her daughter, Lisetta, who was about seven years younger than I. Lisetta looked just like her brother, Renzo: tall, thin, pale, upright, with bright eyes and short hair, a tuft of it falling across her forehead. We rode bicycles together and she told me that she sometimes saw an old schoolmate of her brother’s at D’Azeglio high school, who was very intelligent. He’d sought her out and loaned her books by Croce. This was how I first heard of Balbo. He was a count, Lisetta told me. She pointed him out to me once on the Corso Re Umberto—a small man with a red nose. Balbo, many years later, would become my best friend, but at the time I certainly had no idea of this and looked upon him, that little count who loaned Croce’s books to Lisetta, with complete disinterest.

  On the Corso Re Umberto, I sometimes saw a young woman pass by whom I deemed both detestable and beautiful. She had a face that looked as if it had been sculpted in bronze, a small aquiline nose that sliced through the air, half-closed eyes, her stride slow and disdainful. I asked Lisetta if she knew her.

  “That,” Lisetta said to me, “is a D’Azeglio girl. She’s a good mountaineer and has a high opinion of herself. She’s detestable.”

  I said, “She’s detestable and very beautiful.”

  The detestable girl lived on the ground floor of a building on one of the streets off the Corso. I sometimes saw her in the summer at her window, her brown hair in a pageboy cut framing her bronzed cheeks. She watched me with her half-closed eyes, her mouth disdainful and disgusted, her expression bored and mysterious.

  I said to Lisetta, “She’s got a face asking to be slapped!”

  For many years, whenever I was far away from Turin, I carried with me an image of that “face asking to be slapped.” And later when they told me that the “face asking to be slapped” was employed by the publishing house and working with Pavese and the publisher,
I was shocked that a girl who was so superb and contemptuous deigned to mingle with people who were so lowly and close to me. I was even more shocked when I heard she’d been arrested with a group of conspirators. But several more years had to pass before she and I met up again and before she, the “face asking to be slapped,” became my dearest friend.

  When she wasn’t reading books by Croce, Lisetta read Salgari’s novels. At the time, she was about fourteen years old, an age at which one is perpetually slipping back and forth between adulthood and childhood. I had read Salgari’s novels and forgotten them. Resting our bicycles on the grass in the countryside, we sat down for a rest and Lisetta told me their plots. Her daydreams and conversations were a jumble of Indian maharajas, poisoned arrows, fascists, and that little count named Balbo who came to visit her on Sundays bringing her books by Croce. Sometimes I found her stories amusing, at other times distracting. As for me, the only thing I’d read by Croce was his La letteratura della nuova Italia or, to be more precise, in his La letteratura della nuova Italia. I’d read novel excerpts and synopses. Nevertheless, when I was thirteen I’d written a letter to Croce enclosing a few of my poems and he’d written back, politely and with great kindness, explaining that my poems weren’t very good.

  I didn’t dare confess to Lisetta that I hadn’t read Croce’s books because, since she held me in such high esteem, I didn’t want to disillusion her. I was comforted by the thought that even if I hadn’t read Croce, Leone would certainly have read all of his books from beginning to end.

  •

  Fascism didn’t appear to be ending anytime soon. Indeed, it appeared to be here to stay indefinitely.

  The Rosselli brothers had been killed at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne.

  For years now, Turin was full of German Jews who’d fled Germany. Some of them were even assistants in my father’s laboratory. They were people without a country. Maybe, soon, we too would be without a country, forced to move from one country to another, from one police station to the next, without work or roots or family or homes.