Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  •

  Alberto asked me after I’d been married for a while, “Do you feel richer or poorer now that you’re married?”

  “Richer,” I said.

  “Me too! And to think that we’re actually much poorer!”

  I bought food and found that it cost very little. I was surprised because I’d always heard that the prices were high. Sometimes, however, just before the end of the month I was penniless having spent everything I had, thirty centimes at a time.

  I was happy, now, whenever anyone invited us to lunch, even if they were people I didn’t like. I was happy to be able to occasionally eat food that was both unexpected and free, and that I didn’t have to think about, buy, or watch cook.

  I had a maid called Martina. I liked her a lot. However, I wondered, “Who knows if she cleans well? Who knows if she’s a good duster?”

  Given my total lack of experience, I had no idea if my home was clean or not.

  When I went to see Paola or my mother, in their homes I saw clothes hanging in the ironing room ready to be brushed or to have their stains removed with gasoline. I immediately became worried and wondered, “Who knows if Martina ever brushes our clothes or gets rid of the stains?” In our kitchen, yes, we did have a clothes brush and there was also a small bottle of gasoline plugged with a rag, but that little bottle was always full and I never saw Martina use it. Sometimes I wanted to tell Martina to do a deep cleaning of the apartment as I’d seen done in my mother’s place when Natalina, her head wrapped up in a turban like a pirate, overturned the furniture and whacked it with a carpet beater. But I never found the right moment to give Martina orders. I was shy with Martina, who was, for her part, very shy and meek herself.

  Whenever we passed each other in the hall, we exchanged long and affectionate smiles. But I put off from one day to the next the prospect of suggesting a deep clean to her. I didn’t dare give her any instructions even though as a girl in my mother’s home I gave orders indiscriminately and expressed my desires at every instant. I remember when we were on holiday in the mountains, I insisted that every day great jugs and pails full of hot water be brought to my room since there was no bath in the house. I then washed myself in my room in a kind of sitz bath. My father preached at us that we should wash with cold water but none of us, with the exception of my mother, was in the habit of washing ourselves with cold water. Indeed, all of us children from our earliest days and in the spirit of rebellion had a hatred of cold water. I was now amazed that I had been able to make Natalina heat water on the wood stove and then carry those huge pails up the stairs to me. With Martina, I wouldn’t even have dared to ask her to bring me a glass of water. Once married, I suddenly discovered what it meant to be exhausted and what it meant to work. I was seized by a laziness that weakened my will and paralyzed, in my imagination, the people around me and made me believe that I was enveloped in total inertia. I purposefully asked Martina to prepare, for lunch, dishes that could be cooked quickly and dirtied as few pans as possible. I had also discovered money. I hadn’t become stingy—as with my mother money tended to slip through my fingers like water—but I’d come to realize that lurking behind all things in the form of a tiresome and tortuous conundrum was the presence of money, and that on the wake of thirty centimes you could ride to who knows where, to some unknown destination. This discovery also introduced me to and filled me with a sense of exhaustion, laziness, and languor. Still, whenever I had money in my hands I spent it right away, regretting it immediately.

  During my adolescence, I had three friends. In my family my friends were called “the tootsies.” “Tootsies” meant, in my mother’s language, coquettes who dressed in frippery. Those friends of mine didn’t seem to me to be very coquettish, nor did they dress in frippery, but my mother called them this because she was thinking back to my childhood, and to some coquettish little girls dressed in frippery with whom I might once have played.

  “Where is Natalia?”

  “She’s with the tootsies!”

  This was often said in my family.

  During high school, those girls were my friends and before I got married I used to spend my days with them. They were poor. In fact, maybe one of the things that I liked about them was precisely their poverty. It was something I was unfamiliar with but which I found highly compelling and wanted to know more about. After I got married, I continued to see those three young women but a little less often, and then days and days would go by without my getting in touch with them, something they would scold me for while also understanding that it was inevitable. Seeing them every once in a while, however, lifted my spirits and momentarily restored to me my adolescence, which I felt was fast slipping away.

  All three of my friends, for various reasons, lived in open dissension with society. Society, in their eyes, consisted of an easy, organized, middle-class life, with a set schedule, regular health care, and habitual studies that one’s family kept an eye on. Before getting married, I had this kind of easy life and enjoyed its many privileges, but I didn’t like it and my ambition was to get out of it. I combed the city, along with those friends, for the most melancholy places—the most desolate parks, the most squalid milk bars, the filthiest cinemas, the loneliest and bleakest cafés—for us to hang out. And while immersed in these squalid, shadowy places, or sitting on those cold park benches, we felt as if we were on a ship, its moorings broken, adrift.

  Two of the tootsies were sisters and they lived alone with their old father who had once been very rich but had been ruined and was always meeting with lawyers about a lawsuit. He was so preoccupied with writing long memos, or shuttling back and forth between Turin and Sassi where he still owned a small property, or cooking complicated Jewish meals that his daughters didn’t like, that this old father hadn’t the slightest idea of what his daughters were up to. They weren’t, in fact, up to anything too outlandish, having created for themselves a code of living in which paternal authority, consisting of an occasional screech or grievance, held not the slightest weight. They were both tall, pretty, brunette, healthy, and thriving. One of them was lazy and always stretched out on the bed, the other was energetic and determined. The lazy one treated her father with good-natured impatience; the other one treated him with curt and contemptuous impatience.

  The lazy one had the almond-shaped eyes of an Arab, soft black curls, a tendency towards plumpness, and a great fondness for pendants and earrings. And though she claimed to abhor her plumpness, she did nothing about it and was, in her plumpness, profoundly contented and serene. And she used to say about herself, with a smile that revealed her big, white, protruding teeth, “Nigra sum, sed formosa.”

  The other one was thin and expressed a wish to be even thinner whenever she looked in the mirror at her legs which were strong as columns. Losing weight through sheer force of will, she had vanquished her large hips and solid, overbearing bone structure. If she had a rendezvous with a boy on whom she had a crush, she fasted at lunch, or ate only an apple, because she made her own clothes and she made them so that they fit her snugly, and she was afraid she’d burst her seams if she ate an entire meal. She sewed her clothes with a dedicated, meticulous, almost neurotic care, with her brow furrowed and her mouth full of pins. She wanted her clothes to be as simple and plain as possible since she despised both her sister’s plumpness and her penchant for dressing in gaudy silks.

  Every time he went out, their father would leave on the kitchen table long letters of complaint, written in a handwriting that was pointed and slanting like a notary public’s, either against the servant who’d “received her boyfriend into our home bestowing on him a gift of half a melon which, I have verified this evening, has disappeared,” or against a peasant woman from Sassi who had, due to negligence, let some of his “sweet little” rabbits die, or against a neighbor who’d offended him by borrowing a blanket and then returning it with the wool singed: “When reprimanded, she’d had nothing to say in her own defense.”

  The girls were f
riends with some German Jewish refugees with whom they shared some of those obscure meals their father would cook for them and leave in large black pots in the kitchen. At their place, I sometimes met those students who lived day to day not knowing what they would be doing the following month, if they would succeed in leaving for Palestine, or if they would be able to reach some unknown cousin in America. I was always profoundly fascinated by that place with its doors open to all, its narrow, dark hallway where you would stumble over the father’s bicycle, the small living room full of once lavish, now worn-out furniture, Jewish lamps, and small red apples from the property in Sassi spread across threadbare carpets on the floor. Sometimes I ran into the old father on the stairs or in the hallway. He was perpetually preoccupied with his dealings with lawyers and his legal documents, always busy carrying up and down the stairs baskets full of apples and peppers. In his Piedmontese dialect, he would tell us about his lawsuit while stroking his unkempt gray beard, or while wiping the sweat off his noble, ancient-prophet brow beneath his cap, his impatient daughters telling him to go to his room.

  In that place there was a constant coming and going of servant women who were skittish and feebleminded. They were never allowed to cook because the father wanted exclusive reign over his provender. And since they weren’t even allowed to dust in the living room because they might break those Jewish lamps or steal the apples, it wasn’t clear what they actually did. Inevitably, each one was fired after a few weeks and replaced by another, no less skittish or feebleminded.

  Their apartment building was in via Governolo. It was destroyed during the war and I went to see it when I came back to Turin after the war. All that was left was a pile of rubble in the old courtyard, and only the railing was left of the gutted stairs the old father used to go up and down with his bicycle or baskets. The old father had died sometime early in the war before the German occupation. He’d become ill and was taken to the Israelite hospital, bringing with him a live chicken he hoped they would let him cook. He died alone because one of his daughters was in Africa where she’d gotten married and the other, the determined one, was in Rome studying law.

  My other friend was called Marisa and she lived on the Corso Re Umberto, but at the end of it, at the tram’s terminus, where the Corso opened up into a grassy field and all the boulevards ended. She was small and pretty and did nothing but smoke and knit herself beautiful berets which she then wore at an appealing angle over her curly red hair. She also made sweaters.

  “I’ll make mythelf a nith thweta,” she’d say, lisping, and she had a great selection of these “nith thwetas” that had turtlenecks and roll-necks and which she wore under a camel-hair coat. She’d had a wealthy childhood, staying in health spas and luxury hotels, and dancing, even though she was still just a girl, at the clubs in seaside resorts. Her family then had an economic crisis. Her memories of her former but not so distant life were fond and lighthearted and in no way tinged with bitterness or regret. Hers was a lazy, trusting, and serene nature.

  During the German occupation Marisa was a partisan and demonstrated extraordinary bravery that no one ever suspected was within the lazy, delicate girl she’d always been before. She then became an official in the Communist Party and devoted her life to the party, but she never became a prominent figure within it because she was modest, humble, generous, and without the slightest ambition. She could talk only about party issues, and she said “potty” with her lisp, and she said it in the same serene and trusting manner she’d once said, “I’ll make mythelf a nith thweta.” She never wanted to get married because any man she met never seemed to live up to the ideal man she’d constructed for herself over time, a man she didn’t know how to describe but whose characteristics were, in her imagination, unmistakable.

  Those three friends of mine were Jewish. In Italy, the racial campaign had begun, but by having known those foreign Jews they’d unconsciously prepared themselves for an uncertain future. Furthermore, they were carefree enough to accept the situation without a trace of panic. We still went, they and I, to our classes at the university but, aside from the determined, energetic one, we approached our studies haphazardly and without much dedication.

  As for the old father of my two friends who lived in via Governolo, at the beginning of the racial campaign he received a questionnaire on which it was written: “Indicate honors and special merits.” He responded: “In 1911, I was a member of the rari nantes swimming club and I dove into the Po in the middle of winter. And on the occasion of some renovations done in my home, I was appointed foreman by the engineer Casella.”

  My mother wasn’t jealous of my friends in the way she was always jealous of Paola’s friends. When I got married, my mother didn’t suffer like she’d suffered and cried when Paola got married. My mother never had a relationship of equals with me but was, instead, maternal and protective. And she didn’t miss me when I left home, partly because, as she always said, I didn’t “lend my gear,” and partly because, being older, she had resigned herself to the emptiness she felt when her children left home, and had by then defended and cushioned her life in such a way as to not feel the impact of separation.

  •

  It seemed the only optimists left in the world were Adriano and my mother. Sulking in her small living room, Paola Carrara still invited Salvatorelli over in the evenings hoping, in vain, that he would offer encouraging words. But Salvatorelli would arrive in a dark mood; everyone was increasingly dark and gloomy, devoid of comforting words, enveloped by an oblique terror.

  From “one of his informers,” however, Adriano had learned that fascism’s days were numbered. Listening to him, my mother cheered up, clapping her hands, but sometimes she suspected that Adriano’s celebrated informer was, in reality, a fortune-teller. Adriano regularly consulted fortune-tellers and knew one in every city he went to; he said some of them were excellent and had revealed things about his past, others had even been able to “read his mind.” Adriano considered it normal for someone to “mind read.” When asked how his father had learned certain things about someone, Adriano would respond matter-of-factly, “He read his mind.” My mother always welcomed Adriano with the utmost delight, both because she loved him and because she could always count on him to feed her own optimism with his good news. Indeed, Adriano used to predict the grandest and most auspicious destinies for each of us. Leone would become, he said, a very great politician.

  “How wonderful!” my mother would say, clapping her hands as if it were already a fact. “He’ll become prime minister! And what about Mario?” she’d ask. “What will Mario become?”

  Adriano had more modest plans for Mario, whom he didn’t much like. He said Mario’s spirit was too critical and he was also of the opinion that Mario had made a mistake by detaching himself from Rosselli’s group. Perhaps, unconsciously, Adriano also held a grudge against Mario for being arrested and fleeing the country many years ago soon after joining the Olivetti company as an employee.

  “And Gino? And Alberto?” my mother persisted, and Adriano would patiently make his predictions.

  My mother didn’t believe in fortune-tellers but every morning while still in her bathrobe, drinking coffee in the dining room, she’d play several games of solitaire. She’d say, “Let’s see if Leone will become a great politician. Let’s see if Alberto will become a great doctor. Let’s see if someone will give me a lovely cottage.” It wasn’t exactly clear who was supposed to give her this lovely cottage. Certainly not my father, who was increasingly worried about money and seemed to have none again now that there was the racial campaign.

  “Let’s see if fascism will last for a while,” my mother said, shuffling the cards while pouring herself more coffee and tussling her gray hair, which was always drenched in the mornings.

  Early in the racial campaign, the Lopezes left for Argentina. All the Jews we knew had left or were preparing to leave. Nicola, Leone’s brother, had emigrated to America with his wife. They had an uncle there, Uncle Kahn,
an old uncle whom they had never actually met because he’d left Russia as a teenager. Leone and I sometimes spoke about also going “to America, to Uncle Kahn’s place.” But our passports had been taken away. Leone had lost his Italian citizenship and was stateless.

  “If only we had Nansen passports!” I said frequently. “If only we had Nansen passports!”

  A Nansen passport was a special passport given to certain important stateless people. Leone had once mentioned it to me. To have a Nansen passport seemed to me to be the most wonderful thing in the world, even though deep down neither of us would have wanted to leave Italy. When it had still been possible for Leone to leave, he’d been offered a job in Paris in the group Rosselli had been in. He turned it down. He didn’t want to become an émigré, an exile.

  We nevertheless thought of the Parisian exiles as wonderful, miraculous beings, and it seemed to us an extraordinary fact that in Paris you could run into them on the street, touch them, shake their hands. I hadn’t seen Mario, who was also part of that marvelous crowd, for years and I didn’t know when I would see him again. And then there was Garosci, Lussu, Chiaromonte, Cafi. Except for Chiaromonte, whom I’d met at Paola’s house at the seaside, I’d never seen the others. “What’s Garosci like?” I asked Leone. While walking along the Corso Francia, I thought Paris wasn’t very far away, perhaps right at the end of the Corso Francia, just over the mountains, in that veil of azure mists. Any yet we were separated from Paris by an abyss.

  Just as unreachable and miraculous were those in prison: Bauer, Rossi, Vinciguerra, Vittorio. They seemed ever-more distant from us. They seemed to be sinking farther and farther into a distant darkness that resembled the remoteness of the dead. Was it possible that in a not so distant past Vittorio, with his jutting chin, had strolled up and down the Corso Re Umberto? Was it possible that we’d played the vegetable and mineral game with him and Mario?