Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Then July 25 arrived and Leone left for Rome. I stayed on in the village. There was a field that my mother called “the field of the dead horse,” because one morning we’d found a dead horse there. I would go to that field every day with the children. I missed Leone and my mother, and I was overwhelmed with sorrow by that field where I’d been so many times with them. My heart was heavy with the saddest premonitions. Along the dusty road, surrounded by hills burned by the summer sun, Skinny Shins, in her rapid, awkward gait, walked up and down, up and down, wearing a straw hat. And so did the brothers Bernardo and Villi, dressed in long half-belted coats, given to them by that Jewish society, which they wore even at the height of summer since their clothes were torn. Except for Leone, the internees had all remained in the village because they didn’t know where to go.

  The armistice came, the brief and delirious exultation of the armistice. Then, two days later, the Germans. German trucks ran up and down the road; the hills and village were crawling with soldiers. There were soldiers in the hotel, on the terrace, under the arbor, and in the kitchen. The village was paralyzed with fear. I kept on taking the children to the field of the dead horse, and whenever the airplanes passed over we threw ourselves down into the grass. When I ran into other internees on the street we looked at each other questioningly, silently asking each other where we should go and what we should do.

  I received a letter from my mother. She, too, was frightened and didn’t know how to help me. For the first time in my life I realized that there was no one who could protect me and that I’d have to manage on my own. I now understood that bound up with my love for my mother was the belief that she would protect and defend me from tragedy. Now all that remained was my love for her, my expectation of protection no longer part of my love. In fact, it was likely that from then on I would be the one to protect and defend my mother because by then she had become quite old, despondent, and helpless.

  I left the village on the first of November. I’d received a letter from Leone, brought to me by hand by someone who came from Rome. In it, he told me to leave the village immediately because it was difficult to hide there and the Germans would identify and deport us. The other internees were by now hiding in places scattered about the countryside or in nearby towns.

  The people of the village came to my rescue. They all coordinated among themselves and helped me. The owner of the hotel, who had the Germans occupying her few rooms, Germans sitting in the kitchen around the fire where so often we’d sat quietly, she told those soldiers that I was a relative of hers, a refugee from Naples, that I had lost my papers during the air raids, and that I had to get to Rome. German trucks went to Rome every day, so one morning I climbed onto one of those trucks and the villagers came to kiss my children, whom they’d watched grow up, goodbye.

  Arriving in Rome, I breathed a sigh of relief believing that a happy period was about to begin for us. I didn’t have any good reason to believe this, but I did. We had a place to stay near the Piazza Bologna. Leone was the editor of a clandestine newspaper and was never home. They arrested him twenty days after our arrival and I never saw him again.

  I found myself back with my mother in Florence. Tragedy always made her feel terribly cold and she’d wrapped herself up in her shawl. We didn’t talk much about Leone’s death. She’d loved him very much but didn’t like to talk of the dead. Her constant preoccupation was washing the children, brushing their hair, and keeping them warm.

  “Do you remember Skinny Shins? Villi?” she said. “I wonder what happened to them.”

  Skinny Shins, we later learned, died of pneumonia in a peasants’ farmstead. The Amodajes, Bernardo, and Villi had hidden in L’Aquila. But other internees had been arrested, handcuffed, and put on a truck, disappearing into the dust on the road.

  •

  By the end of the war, my father and mother had both aged considerably. The terror and tragedy caused my mother to age suddenly, overnight. In those days she always wore a violet angora wool shawl that she’d bought from Parisini and she wrapped herself up in it. She was always cold because of her fears and sorrows, and she became pale with large dark circles under her eyes. Tragedy had beaten her down and made her despondent, made her walk slowly, mortifying her once triumphant step, and carved two deep hollows into her cheeks.

  They went back to Turin, to the apartment on via Pallamaglio, now called via Morgari. The paint factory on the square had burned down during an air raid and so had the public baths. But the church had only been slightly damaged and was still there, supported now by iron scaffolding.

  “What a shame!” my mother said. “It should have collapsed. It’s so ugly! But no, by God, it’s still standing!”

  Our apartment was repaired and put in order. Broken glass had been replaced by boards and my father had stoves put in the rooms because the radiators didn’t work. My mother immediately called Tersilla and once Tersilla was installed in the ironing room in front of the sewing machine, my mother breathed a sigh of relief and felt that life could go on as it once had. She bought floral fabric to recover the armchairs that had been stored in the cellar and were stained here and there with mold. Finally, the portrait of Aunt Regina was re-hung over the couch in the dining room and once again she looked down at us from on high with her limpid round eyes, her gloves, her double chin, and her fan.

  “An apple for the little ones and a devil to peel them for the big ones,” my mother continued to say at the end of a meal. But then she stopped saying this because there were, once again, apples for everyone. “These apples have no taste!” my father said. And my mother said, “But Beppino, they’re carpandues!”

  •

  My father informed Chèvremont that he intended to donate to the University of Liège his library, which had remained there, in gratitude because they had hosted him during the racial campaign in Italy. He’d stayed very much in touch with Chèvremont. They wrote regularly to each other and Chèvremont sent him copies of his publications.

  My mother thought of places only in regard to the people she knew who lived there. For her, in all of Belgium only Chèvremont existed. Whenever anything happened in Belgium—floods or a change in government—my mother would say, “I wonder what Chèvremont thinks!”

  Before Mario went to France, the only person who existed there for her was a man called Signor Polikar, whom my father and she had met at a conference. She’d always say, “I wonder how Polikar is!”

  In Spain, she knew someone named Di Castro. If she read about thunderstorms or sea squalls in Spain, she’d say, “I wonder how Di Castro is!”

  During one of his visits to Turin, this Di Castro fell ill and it wasn’t clear what was the matter with him. My father checked him into a clinic and called in a posse of doctors to examine him. Someone said it was possibly heart disease. Di Castro had a high fever, was delirious, and didn’t recognize a soul. His wife, who’d come from Madrid, kept repeating, “It’s not his corazon! It’s his cabezza!”

  Once cured, Di Castro returned to Spain, then came Franco’s government and the world war, and we didn’t hear anything more from him.

  My mother, however, evoking Spain and Signora Di Castro, continued to say, “It’s not his corazon! It’s his cabezza!” The war also swallowed up Signor Polikar. Nor did we have any news about Signora Grassi who lived in Freiburg, Germany. My mother mentioned her often. She’d say, “Who knows what Signora Grassi is doing right now?” Or she’d sometimes say, “She’s dead! Oh, I have the feeling Signora Grassi might be dead!”

  After the war, my mother’s geography was all mixed up. She could no longer speak of Signora Grassi or Signor Polikar without becoming agitated. They’d once been able to transform distant and unknown countries into something domestic, familiar, and happy for my mother. They transformed the world into a neighborhood or a street that she could, in her mind, swiftly roam along, as if in the shoes of those few familiar and reassuring names.

  By contrast, after the war the world seemed eno
rmous, unknowable, and without end. Nevertheless, my mother tried to live in it again as best she could. She inhabited the world again with joy because her temperament was joyful. Her spirit was incapable of growing old and she never understood old people who retreated from life, bemoaning the desolation of the past. My mother looked dry-eyed upon the past’s desolation and didn’t mourn for it. Besides, she didn’t much like mourning clothes. She was in Palermo when her mother died in Florence, suddenly and alone. She went to Florence and it was very painful to see her mother dead. She then went out to buy herself a mourning outfit, but instead of buying a black dress, as she was supposed to, she bought herself a red dress and went back to Palermo with that red dress in her suitcase. She said to Paola, “What should I have done? My mother couldn’t stand black clothes and she would have been so happy if she could have seen me in this beautiful red dress!”

  •

  One day Cía’s foot began to hurt,

  In the evening, puss oozed from it,

  So the Health Service sent her to Vercelli.

  Young poets wrote, and submitted to the publishing house, verse of this sort. This particular tercet about Cía was part of a long poem describing the women who worked in the rice fields. The postwar period was a time when everyone believed himself to be a poet and a politician. Everyone thought he could, or rather should, write poetry about any and all subjects since for so many years the world had been silenced and paralyzed, reality being something stuck behind glass—vitreous, crystalline, mute, and immobile. Novelists and poets had been starved of words during the fascist years. So many had been forbidden to use words, and the few who’d been able to use them were forced to choose them very carefully from the slim pickings that remained. During fascism, poets found themselves expressing only an arid, shut-off, cryptic dream world. Now, once more, many words were in circulation and reality appeared to be at everyone’s fingertips. So those who had been starved dedicated themselves to harvesting the words with delight. And the harvest was ubiquitous because everyone wanted to take part in it. The result was a confused mixing up of the languages of poetry and politics. Reality revealed itself to be complex and enigmatic, as indecipherable and obscure as the world of dreams. And it revealed itself to still be behind glass—the illusion that the glass had been broken, ephemeral. Dejected and disheartened, many soon retreated, sank back into a bitter starvation and profound silence. The postwar period, then, was very sad and full of dejection after the joyful harvest of its early days. Many pulled away and isolated themselves again, either within their dream worlds or in whatever random job they’d taken in a hurry in order to earn a living, jobs that seemed insignificant and dreary after so much hullabaloo. In any case, everyone soon forgot that brief, illusory moment of shared existence. Certainly, for many years, no one worked at the job he’d planned on and trained for, everyone believing that they could and must do a thousand jobs all at once. And much time passed before everyone took back upon his shoulders his profession and accepted the burden, the exhaustion, and the loneliness of the daily grind, which is the only way we have of participating in each other’s lives, each of us lost and trapped in our own parallel solitude.

  As for the poem about Cía of the injured foot, at the time we didn’t think it was very good; in fact, it seemed very bad to us. Today, however, it seems poignant, whispered to us in the language of the era. At the time, there were two ways to write: one was a simple listing of facts outlining a dreary, foul, base reality seen through a lens that peered out over a bleak and mortified landscape; the other was a mixing of facts with violence and a delirium of tears, sobs, and sighs. In neither case did one choose his own words because in one case the words were inextricable from the dreariness, and in the other the words got lost among the groans and sighs. But the common error was to still believe that everything could be transformed into poetry and words. This resulted in a loathing for poetry and for words, which was so powerful it extended to true poetry and true words. In the end everyone kept quiet, paralyzed by boredom and nausea. It was necessary for writers to go back and choose their words, scrutinize them to see if they were false or real, if they had actual origins in our experience, or if instead they only had the ephemeral origins of a shared illusion. It was necessary, if one was a writer, to go back and find your true calling that had been forgotten in the general intoxication. What had followed was like a hangover: nausea, lethargy, tedium. In one way or another, everyone felt deceived and betrayed, both those who lived in reality and those who possessed or thought they possessed a means of describing it. And so everyone went their own way again, alone and dissatisfied.

  •

  Adriano occasionally stopped by the publishing house. He liked publishing houses and wanted to own one himself. But the publishing house he had in mind wouldn’t publish poetry or novels. In his youth, he had liked only one novel: Dreamers of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill. All of the novels he’d read subsequently hadn’t moved him in the slightest. He had enormous respect for novelists and poets, but he didn’t read them. Urban planning, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and religion were the only subjects he had any interest in.

  By then Adriano had become a great and famous industrialist, but he’d maintained something of the tramp about him and he moved in the shuffling, lonely gait of a vagabond as he had in his youth when he was a soldier. He was still shy and had no idea how to take advantage of his shyness, how to make it a strength the way the publisher did, so he tried to suppress it whenever he met someone for the first time, whether they were political figures or poor young men who’d come to the factory looking for a job. He would throw back his shoulders and stand tall, his eyes lit by a frozen glare, cold and pure.

  I met him on the street in Rome one day during the German occupation. He was on foot, alone, moving along in his tramp-like gait, his eyes veiled in the blue mists of his perennial daydreaming. He was dressed like everyone else in the crowd but to me he looked like both a beggar and a king: a king in exile, he seemed.

  Leone was arrested in a clandestine printer’s shop. We were living in the apartment near the Piazza Bologna and I was home alone with my children. I waited, and as the hours went by and he failed to come home, I slowly realized that he must have been arrested. The day passed, then the night, and the next morning Adriano came over and told me to leave the place immediately because Leone had, in fact, been arrested and the police might show up at any moment. He helped me pack the suitcases and dress the children and we hurried out of there. He took me to friends who’d agreed to put me up.

  For the rest of my life, I will never forget the immense solace I took in seeing Adriano’s very familiar figure, one I’d known since childhood, appear before me that morning after so many hours of being alone and afraid, hours in which I thought about my parents far away in the north and wondered if I’d ever see them again. I will always remember Adriano hunched over as he went from room to room, leaning down to pick up clothes and the children’s shoes, his movements full of kindness, compassion, humility, and patience. And when we fled from that place, he wore on his face the expression that he’d had when he came to our apartment for Turati; it was that breathless, terrified, excited expression he wore whenever he was helping someone to safety.

  When Adriano came to the publishing house, he’d always spend time talking with Balbo because Balbo was a philosopher and Adriano was fascinated by philosophers. Balbo, for his part, was fascinated by industrialists, engineers, factories, and all questions related to factories, machines, and engines. He boasted about this fascination, this passion of his to us, to Pavese and me, saying that we were intellectuals but that he was not; he said we didn’t understand a thing about factories or machines. It was a fascination and a passion that culminated in the contemplation, on his way home at night, of parked motorcycles.

  Adriano and Paola divorced after the war. She lived near Florence in the hills of Fiesole and he in Ivrea. Even so, he and Gino remained friends and saw each other often despite
the fact that Gino, after the war, had left Ivrea and the factory to work in Milan. In fact, Gino was, perhaps, one of Adriano’s few friends because he was loyal to the friends he’d known in his youth and the things he’d discovered then, just as he’d remained loyal in the depths of his soul to the novelist Israel Zangwill. His loyalty was, however, purely emotional and didn’t extend to the practical world where he was always ready to dismantle whatever he’d accomplished, always seeking new and more modern methods and techniques, those he’d just invented already obsolete in his view. In this way, he was much like the publisher who was also always ready to throw out whatever he’d chosen to work on the day before. Adriano was always anxious and restless in his quest to discover the new, a quest he deemed more important than everything else, and he would stop at nothing to achieve it: not at the notion that he owed his fortune to his previous inventions nor at the confusion and protests of those around him who’d become wedded to the old inventions and couldn’t understand why they should be tossed aside.

  By then, I was also working at the publishing house. My father looked upon the publishing house—and the fact that I worked there—with kindness and approval, my mother with suspicion and skepticism. My mother, in fact, believed that the atmosphere there was too left-wing because after the war she’d become afraid of communism, something she hadn’t really given any thought to before. She didn’t even like Nenni’s socialism, which she considered too similar to communism. She preferred Saragat’s followers, but she wasn’t thrilled with them either, and Saragat’s face seemed to her to be “far too insipid.”

  “Turati, Bissolati!” she’d say. “Kuliscioff! They were good people. I don’t like politics today!”