Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  •

  My father, like others, lost his position at the university. He was offered a position at an institute in Liège and my mother went with him. My mother stayed in Belgium for a few months. She was, however, very depressed and wrote desperate letters home. In Liège it rained all the time. “What an accursed place Liège is!” my mother said. “Accursed Belgium!”

  Mario wrote to her from Paris saying that Baudelaire couldn’t stand Belgium either. My mother didn’t much like Baudelaire—her favorite poet was Paul Verlaine—but suddenly she was a great fan of Baudelaire. My father, however, liked his job in Liège and he’d even taken on a student there, a young man named Chèvremont.

  “Besides Chèvremont and our landlord, I don’t like the Belgians,” my mother said when she returned to Italy.

  She resumed her usual life; she came over to visit me, went to see Miranda and Paola Carrara, and went to the cinema. Paola, my sister, had taken an apartment in Paris and was spending the winter there.

  “Now that Beppino isn’t here and I’m alone, I’ll economize,” my mother, feeling herself poor, declared around-the-clock. “I’ll eat very little. A soup, a chop, one piece of fruit.”

  Every day she recited this menu. I think she liked to say “one piece of fruit” because it gave her a sense of frugality. As for fruit, she used to always buy a certain kind of apple, which in Turin was called carpandue. She’d say, “They’re carpandues!” just as she said, “It’s from Neuberg’s!” when speaking about a sweater, and “It’s made by Signor Belom!” when speaking about a coat. Whenever my father would complain that the apples brought to the table were bad, my mother, shocked, would say, “Bad? They’re carpandues!”

  “Who knows why I like to spend money so much,” my mother said occasionally with a sigh. In fact, she never was able to stick to the austerity regime she’d imposed on herself. In the morning, in the dining room, after her games of solitaire, she’d go over the accounts with Natalina. And they fought, Natalina and my mother, because Natalina also liked to spend money, money also slipped through her fingers. Whenever Natalina cooked, she cooked enough, my mother said, for all the poor of the entire parish.

  “Yesterday, you made a meat dish and there was enough for all the poor of the parish!” she said to her.

  “If I make too little he yells at me, if I make too much he screams at me, yesterday he said that Tersilla was coming too,” Natalina said, moving her thick lips and gesticulating excitedly.

  “Stay still! Don’t wring your hands! You have a dirty apron. Why don’t you change it? I’ve bought you so many aprons, by now you have enough for all the poor of the entire parish.”

  “Oh, poor Lidia,” my mother said, sighing, while shuffling the cards and pouring herself more coffee. “This is dishwater not coffee. Couldn’t you make it a little stronger?”

  “It’s the coffee maker that’s no good. If he would buy me a better coffee maker, I’ve told him a hundred thousand times, this one has holes in the filter that are too big, the water passes through too quickly, instead she should go slowly. Coffee, she is very delicate.”

  “How I’d like to be a boy king,” my mother said with a sigh and a smile, because the things she found most seductive in the world were childhood and power. She loved the combination of the two, as if the charm of the former would mitigate the latter, and the autonomy and prestige of the latter would enrich the former.

  “Will you look at what an ugly hag I’ve become!” she’d say, putting on a hat in front of the mirror. She was putting on the hat simply because she’d bought it and it had cost a lot, but she would take it off before she reached the end of the block. “To think how much I liked being young! Today, I feel forty!” she said to Natalina at the door.

  “He is older than forty, he is almost sixty, because he is six years older than I am,” Natalina said, brandishing the broom threateningly. She always spoke in an excited tone and with a threatening expression on her face.

  “With that kerchief around your head,” my mother said to her, “you don’t look like Louis XI, you look like Marat,” and she left the apartment.

  She went by Miranda’s. Miranda was wandering about the apartment, tired, pale, with her blond hair drooping over her cheeks. She looked as if she’d escaped from a sinking ship.

  “Wash your face with cold water! Come out with me!” my mother said to her.

  For my mother, cold water was the surest remedy for laziness, depression, and bad moods. She herself washed her face “with cold water” several times a day.

  “I spend very little. Natalina and I, all alone, we spend very little. A broth, a chop, one piece of fruit,” my mother recited.

  “Sure! You hardly spend a thing! You, the great spendthrift!” Miranda said. And then she said, “Today I’ve bought a chicken. I find chicken easy.” Miranda said “chicken” with an odd intonation, a nasally, singsong drawl that she put on whenever her household habits were compared to ours, and whenever she felt a sense of superiority over us.

  “It’s something to be alone as you are, it’s another thing to have Alberto who’s never satisfied,” Miranda went on. Whenever comparing two situations, she always said “It’s something” when she meant “It’s one thing.”

  •

  My father stayed in Belgium for two years. Many things happened during those two years. My mother, as a matter of principle, went to visit him every so often, but aside from the fact that Belgium made her depressed, she was also afraid that international events would “cut her off” from Italy and from me. My mother felt a sense of protectiveness over me that she didn’t feel for her other children, perhaps because I was the youngest. And when my children were born, she extended this sense of protection over them as well. Besides, she always seemed to think that I was in danger because Leone was arrested now and again. They arrested him as a precautionary measure every time some notable politician or the king visited Turin. They kept him in jail for three or four days, letting him go as soon as the political figure had left. Leone would then come home, a black beard covering his cheeks and a bundle of laundry under his arm.

  “Accursed king! If only he’d stay at home!” my mother said.

  She didn’t dislike the king and he often made her smile. She liked it that he had those short, crooked legs and that he was so irritable. But it annoyed her that they were always arresting Leone “because of that nitwit.” As for Queen Elena, she couldn’t stand her. “A great beauty,” she’d say, using what was for her a disparaging expression. “A peasant! An idiot!”

  During the time my father was in Belgium, my first two children were born a year apart. My mother left her place to come stay with me and brought Natalina along.

  “I’m back living on via Pallamaglio!” my mother said. “But it now seems a little less ugly, perhaps because I’m comparing it with Belgium! Liège is worse than via Pallamaglio!”

  She liked my two children a lot. “I like them both so much I wouldn’t know which to choose,” she said, as if she’d been forced to make a choice between the two. “Today, he’s gorgeous!” she’d say and I’d ask her, “Which one?”

  “Which one? Mine!” my mother would say and I still wouldn’t know which one she was talking about because she changed her preference continually. As for Natalina, whenever she spoke about either of the children she referred to them as “she” since they were both male.

  She’d say, “You mustn’t wake her up. She’ll be fussy if you wake her up and she’ll have to be taken for a two-hour walk because she’s fussy.”

  Because I was exhausted by those two small children, and Natalina was too distracted and agitated to look after them, my mother suggested I hire a nanny. She wrote to some of her former nannies in Tuscany with whom she’d stayed in touch. The nanny arrived just as the Germans invaded Belgium. We were all so upset that we had little patience with the nanny’s demands for embroidered aprons and bell-shaped skirts. Nevertheless, my mother, even though very worried about my fathe
r from whom she hadn’t heard a word, found a way to buy her the aprons and was cheered at the sight of the robust Tuscan nanny wearing a wide, rustling skirt as she bustled about the apartment. I, on the other hand, felt profoundly uncomfortable with that nanny and missed old Martina who’d gone home to her village in Liguria because she couldn’t get along with Natalina. I felt uncomfortable because I was constantly afraid of losing that nanny, afraid of her judging us unworthy of her because of our simple ways. Furthermore, that nanny, a large woman, with her embroidered aprons and her puffed sleeves, reminded me of the precariousness of my situation, that I was poor, and that without the help of my mother I never would have been able to have a nanny. I felt as if I were Nancy in The Devourers when she looks out of the window at her little girl walking hand in hand down the boulevard with her magnificent nanny, knowing that all their money had been lost at the casino.

  The invasion of Belgium terrified us but we were still sure that the German advance would stop. In the evenings, we listened to the French radio in hopes of hearing some reassuring news. Our anguish grew as the Germans continued their advance. In the evenings, Pavese and Rognetta, a friend of ours in those days whom we saw a lot of, came over to our place. Rognetta was a tall, ruddy-faced young man who spoke with the soft r. He worked for I don’t know what industry and traveled often between Turin and Romania. We, who led a cloistered and sedentary life, admired the way he always seemed on the verge of jumping on a train or to have just leapt off of one. And whenever around us he, perhaps conscious of our admiration, emphasized this way of his and played up his importance as a businessman and world-class traveler. During his travels, Rognetta heard news. Up until the invasion of Belgium, the news he heard was always optimistic. After the invasion the news was tainted with a pessimism as black as ink.

  Rognetta said that Germany would soon be invading not only France and certainly Italy but the entire world and there wouldn’t be a foot of ground left to survive on. Before he went on his way, he would ask after the children, and I would tell him they were fine. Once my mother said to him, “What does it matter how they are if Hitler will soon be killing off everyone?” Rognetta was always very polite and used to kiss my mother’s hand before leaving. That evening, as he kissed her hand he said to her that it was, perhaps, still possible to go to Madagascar.

  “Why Madagascar of all places?” my mother asked.

  Rognetta replied that he would have to tell her another time because just then he had to catch a train. And my mother—who had great faith in him, and who, in that period when she was particularly anxious, hung on every word others said—that evening and the entire next day, repeated over and over again, “Who knows why Madagascar of all places!”

  •

  Rognetta never did have the time to explain to us why. I wouldn’t see him again until many years later and I don’t think Leone ever saw him again. As we’d been expecting for several days, Mussolini declared war. That same evening the nanny left, and I watched with great relief as her ample backside, no longer dressed in her nanny’s uniform but in black percale, disappeared down the stairs. Pavese came to see us. We said goodbye to him believing that we wouldn’t see him again for a while. Pavese hated goodbyes and when he left he said goodbye as he usually did, grumpily holding out only two of his fingers.

  That spring Pavese often arrived at our place eating cherries. He loved the first cherries, the ones that were small and watery, and he’d say they “tasted like heaven.” From the window, we’d see him appear at the end of the street, tall, with his swift stride, eating cherries and spitting the pits against the walls, his shots lightning-fast and exact. For me, the fall of France would forever be associated with those cherries which, when Pavese arrived, he made us all try, pulling them one by one from his pocket with his parsimonious and grumpy hand.

  •

  We thought the war would immediately turn everyone’s lives upside down. Instead, for years many people remained at home, unaffected, continuing to do what they’d always done. Then, just when everyone thought that they’d managed to survive with what little there was to go around, that there weren’t going to be all sorts of upheavals, that homes wouldn’t be destroyed and people wouldn’t have to flee or be persecuted, bombs and mines suddenly exploded everywhere, buildings collapsed, and the streets were full of rubble, soldiers, and refugees. Soon no one was left who could pretend it wasn’t happening, who could close their eyes, plug their ears, and hide their heads under a pillow; those people were all gone. This is what the war was like in Italy.

  Mario returned to Italy in ’45. He may have been upset and depressed, but he didn’t show it. His jaw and furrowed brow set in a wry expression, he leaned towards my mother for her to kiss his tanned face. By now he was entirely bald, his head, as if made of bronze, naked and shiny. He wore a tunic of sorts, clean but shabby, that appeared to be made from gray silk lining and resembled something you’d see in the movies worn by a Chinese shopkeeper.

  Whenever Mario wanted to show his approval of things he took seriously or his appreciation for new novelists and poets, he wrinkled his face into an expression of gravitas. He would say about a novel, “It’s good! Not bad at all. It’s really rather good!” (He always spoke as if he were translating what he was saying from the French.) He’d given up on Herodotus and the Greek classics, or in any case, he never mentioned them anymore. The novels he liked most were, in general, novels about the French Resistance. It seemed he’d become more restrained in his judgments, or at least more restrained about what he liked, and was no longer subject to sudden infatuations. He hadn’t, however, become more restrained in his tendency to disparage and condemn things, the hatred he’d always harbored was still conveyed by a reckless violence.

  He didn’t like Italy. Almost everything in Italy seemed to him to be ridiculous, fatuous, badly conceived, and badly built. “Education in Italy is pitiful! It’s much better in France! It’s not perfect in France, but it’s much better! Italy is notorious for having too many priests. Everything here is in the hands of the priests!”

  “There are so many priests here!” he said, every time he went out. “You have so many priests in Italy! In France we can go kilometers without seeing a priest!”

  My mother told him about something that had happened to the son of a friend of hers many years earlier, before the war and before the racial campaign. The boy was Jewish and his parents had put him in a state school but had asked his teacher to excuse him from religious instruction. One day his teacher was absent and there was a substitute teacher who hadn’t been told about the boy’s exemption and when the time for religion class came around, the teacher was surprised to see the child put away his notebook and prepare to leave the room.

  “You, why are you leaving?” she asked.

  “I’m leaving,” the boy answered, “because I always go home during religion class.”

  “And why is that?” asked the substitute teacher.

  “Because I,” the child responded, “don’t love the Madonna.”

  “You don’t love the Madonna!” the scandalized teacher yelled. “Did you all hear that children? He doesn’t love the Madonna!”

  The entire class joined in, yelling, “You don’t love the Madonna! You don’t love the Madonna!”

  His parents had no choice but to take him out of the school.

  Mario liked this story immensely. He couldn’t stop raving about it and asked if it was really true. “Unbelievable!” he said, slapping his knee. “It’s just unbelievable!”

  My mother was happy that her story pleased him so much, but she soon tired of hearing him repeat that teachers like the one in her story not only didn’t exist in France but weren’t even imaginable. She was fed up with hearing him say, “Back home in France, we. . . .” And she was fed up with hearing him speak disparagingly of the priests.

  “Better a government of priests than fascists,” my mother said.

  “It’s the same thing! Don’t you understand,
it’s the same thing! The exact same thing!” he said.

  During the war years when we didn’t see him, Mario had gotten married. The news of his marriage had reached my parents just a little before the end of the war; he’d married, someone told them, the daughter of the painter Amedeo Modigliani. For the first time, my father, upon hearing about one of us getting married, remained calm; this seemed to my mother and me very strange, inexplicable, and remains a mystery. Perhaps my father had been so afraid for Mario during those years, thinking he’d wind up a prisoner of the Germans, or dead, that his having simply gotten married was a minor mishap. My mother was very happy, and used to go into reveries about the marriage, and about Jeanne, whom she’d never met, but about whom it was said resembled one of Modigliani’s paintings, her hairstyle the same as the hairstyles on the women in his paintings. My father’s only observation was that Modigliani’s paintings were a horror: “Dribbledrabs! Doodledums!” And he said nothing else. But the way I saw it, he regarded that marriage with vague approval.

  When the war was over, a letter from Mario arrived containing a few short lines. He said he’d gotten married for reasons regarding his residency in France and was already divorced.

  “What a shame!” my mother said. “How sorry I am!”

  My father said nothing.

  When I saw him again, Mario did not seem disposed to talking about his marriage and divorce. He let it be understood that marriage and divorce had all been part of the plan from the beginning, and his whole attitude towards the subject indicated that he thought marriage and divorce the simplest, most natural things in the world. Moreover, he didn’t seem much disposed towards talking about anything that had happened to him during those years. If he’d experienced deprivation or terror, disappointment or mortification, he never said so. But sometimes when he was resting, as he used to do with his hands clasped between his knees, his bronzed head leaning against the back of the couch, his lips would curl into a ribbon of disappointment and a kind of embittered but good-natured smile would spread across that hardened face of his with its melancholic wrinkles.