Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  She went to visit Paola Carrara, who was still in her small, dark living room packed with artificial little birds, postcards, and dolls. Paola was also glum because she didn’t like the communists either and was afraid they’d take over Italy. Her sister and her brother-in-law had died and she no longer had any reason to go to Geneva or to read the “Zurnàl de Zenève.” Nor did she have to wait any longer for the end of fascism or the death of Mussolini, both having disappeared some time ago. She therefore cultivated an active dislike for communism and a regret that the work of Guglielmo Ferrero, her brother-in-law, hadn’t been appreciated in Italy to the degree it deserved after the end of fascism and the death of Mussolini. She no longer invited people over in the evenings to her small living room. Those who used to frequent her small living room, the antifascists of the day, had gone to live in Rome after having been given jobs in the government. Only my parents and a few others stayed behind and occasionally she invited them over in the evening, but without the same enthusiasm she’d once had. She found everyone “too far to the left,” with the exception of my mother, and so she wound up in a sulk, falling asleep in her gray silk dress, her hands enfolded in her crocheted gray shawl.

  “You let Paola Carrara turn you against the communists!” my father said to my mother.

  “I don’t like the communists!” my mother said. “Paola Carrara has nothing to do with it. I don’t like them! I love freedom! In Russia there is no freedom!”

  My father admitted that in Russia there wasn’t, perhaps, much freedom. He was, however, attracted by the left wing. Olivo, his longtime assistant, who now had a position in Modena, was a left-winger.

  “Even Olivo is a left-winger!” my father said to my mother.

  And my mother said, “You see, you’re the one who’s under Olivo’s influence!”

  My father and mother had returned, after the war, to the apartment in via Pallamaglio, now called via Morgari. My children and I lived with them. Natalina wasn’t with us any longer because right after the war she’d set herself up in an attic room with some furniture my mother had given her and now worked by the hour.

  “I don’t want to be a slave any longer,” Natalina had said. “I want my freedom!”

  “What an idiot you are!” my mother told her. “Imagine me keeping a slave! You have more freedom than I do!”

  “I’m a slave. I’m a slave!” Natalina said, in her threatening and excited tone, brandishing the broom.

  As my mother left the apartment, she said, “I’m going out because I can’t bear to look at you! You’ve become very unpleasant!”

  And she went to blow off steam at the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s. “At my place she’s always warm and has everything she could possibly want!” she explained. “She’s really an idiot.”

  She went to visit Alberto and Miranda who lived nearby on the Corso Valentino and blew off steam with them as well. “Doesn’t she have all the freedom she could possibly want? I’d never enslave anyone!” she said.

  And she said, “But how will I ever cope without Natalina?”

  Natalina had moved into her attic room but she always came over to visit my mother, who in the beginning hoped Natalina would regret her decision and return to live with her. Eventually my mother resigned herself to the situation and got a new maid.

  “Goodbye, Louis XI,” she said to Natalina, who left to go back to the attic room she described as “splendid” and where she invited Tersilla and her husband over in the evening for coffee.

  “Goodbye, Louis XI! Goodbye, Marat!”

  Many of my father’s and mother’s friends were dead. Paola Carrara’s husband had already died before the war. Carrara had been a tall, thin man with a white toothbrush mustache who always rode his bicycle around, his black cape flapping about him. My mother thought him very respectable. “Respectable like Carrara,” she’d say whenever she wanted to suggest the pinnacle of rectitude. She continued to say so even after he was dead. Adriano’s parents, the old engineer Olivetti and his wife, were both dead too. They died—first he and then she a little while later—during the months after the armistice in the countryside near Ivrea where they’d been in hiding. Lopez returned from Argentina at the end of the war and died soon after. And even Terni had died in Florence. My father kept in touch with his wife, Mary, but he hadn’t seen her for several years.

  “Have you written to Mary?” he’d say to my mother. “You must write to Mary! Remember to write to Mary!”

  “Have you been to visit Frances?” he’d say. “Go visit Frances! Today you must go visit Frances!”

  “Write to Mario!” he’d say to her. “God help you if you don’t write to Mario today!”

  Mario no longer worked with the Frenchman. He now had a job on the radio. He’d remarried and obtained French citizenship. When he’d let it be known that he’d married again, this time my father became angry. But not too angry. He and my mother went to Paris to meet his new wife. Mario lived in an apartment near the Seine. It was rather dark and my father wasn’t able to see Mario’s wife too well. He only saw that she was tiny and had bangs over her eyes. During a moment when she wasn’t there, he asked Mario, “Why did you marry a woman so much older than you?”

  Actually, Mario’s wife wasn’t even twenty years old and by then Mario was forty.

  They had a baby. My father and mother went back to Paris for the birth of the little girl. Mario went crazy for his daughter and would walk around with her cradled in his arms from room to room. “Elle pleure, il faut lui donner sa tétée!” he’d say excitedly to his wife.

  And my mother would say, “How French he’s become!”

  During this visit my father became furious one day when he discovered Mario’s other wife, Jeanne, whom he’d divorced and with whom he was still friends, in the apartment with Mario and his baby daughter. My father didn’t like that apartment on the Seine. It was dark, he said, and must be humid. As for Mario’s wife, she seemed too small to him.

  “She’s too small!” he would repeat.

  My mother said, “She’s small but elegant! Her feet are a bit too small. I don’t like tiny feet.”

  My father didn’t agree. His mother’s feet had been small. “You’re wrong! Small feet on a woman are extremely beautiful! My mother, poor thing, always boasted about her small feet!”

  “They talk about eating too much!” my father said about Mario and his wife. “Their place is too humid! Tell them they should move!”

  “But you’re crazy, Beppino! They really like living there!” my mother said. “This job at the radio, though, I’m afraid it’s not serious.”

  And my father said, “What a shame! With his intelligence! He could have had a wonderful career!”

  Cafi had died in Bordeaux. Mario and Chiaromonte had collected all of his disparate papers, written in pencil, and tried to decipher them. While Chiaromonte had been in America he’d remarried. He left Paris and came back to live in Italy with his wife. Mario thought this was stupid, that he couldn’t do a stupider thing. They nevertheless stayed close friends and met up every summer in Bocca di Magra. They played chess. Mario by then had two children and worked at UNESCO. My father wrote to Chiaromonte to ask him what kind of job Mario had and if it was financially secure.

  “Perhaps this one isn’t some meaningless little job! Perhaps it’s a good job!” my mother said.

  Even though he’d received reassuring tidings from Chiaromonte, my father shook his head in disappointment. He was very stubborn and incapable of budging from his first impressions. He remained convinced that Mario had missed out on a brilliant and prosperous career.

  He was still very proud of having in Mario a conspirator for a son who’d crossed the border many times carrying clandestine pamphlets, and he was proud Mario had been arrested and then made a dramatic escape, but he also held on to his regret that Mario had put the Olivettis at risk and compromised the factory. So when Adriano died a few years later and Mario sent a telegram from Paris to
my father saying, “Tell me if my presence at Adriano’s funeral is appropriate,” my father responded right away with an equally terse telegram: “Your presence inappropriate at funeral.”

  My father was, after all, perpetually quite anxious about each one of his sons. He woke up in the middle of the night and ruminated over Gino. Having left Olivetti, Gino went to Milan where he’d become a manager and consultant for large companies.

  “The last time he came home he seemed depressed,” my father said of Gino. “I hope there’s nothing wrong! You know he’s got significant responsibilities!”

  Of all of us, Gino was the most faithful to our old family customs. He continued to go every Sunday to the mountains in both winter and summer. He still went sometimes with Franco Rasetti who lived in America now but occasionally showed up in Italy.

  “Gino is such an excellent mountaineer!” my father said. “He does extraordinarily well on hikes! And he’s a great skier too!”

  “No,” Gino said, “I’m actually a terrible skier. I ski in the old way. The younger generation now skis much better!”

  “You’re always modest!” my father said, and after Gino left he’d repeat, “How modest Gino is!”

  “How intolerant Mario is!” he said every time Mario visited from Paris. “He never likes anyone! He only likes Chiaromonte!”

  “I hope they don’t fire him from UNESCO,” he’d say. “The political situation in France is hardly stable! I’m very worried! What an idiot he was to get French citizenship! Chiaromonte didn’t get it! Mario was a real idiot!”

  Nevertheless, my mother was touched by Mario’s children whenever he brought them to see her. “How sweet Mario is with his children,” she’d say. “How much he loves them!”

  “Sa tétée! Il faut lui donner sa tétée!” she’d say. “They’re so French!”

  “The little girl is gorgeous,” she’d say, “but out of control! She really is a little devil!”

  “They don’t know how to raise them,” my father said. “They’re too spoiled.”

  “Why have kids if you can’t spoil them?” my mother said.

  “He told me I was bourgeois!” my mother said when Mario had left. “I seem bourgeois to him because I keep the closets neat. Their place is a huge mess. And Mario was so meticulous, so precise! He was the one like Silvio! Now he’s entirely different. But he’s happy!”

  “Idiot! He told me I was too right-wing! He treated me as if I were a Christian Democrat!”

  “But it’s true you’re right-wing,” my father said. “You’re afraid of communism. You let yourself be influenced by Paola Carrara!”

  “I don’t like the communists,” my mother said. “I used to like the socialists, the old ones. Turati! Bissolati! How nice Bissolati was! I went to listen to him with my father on Sundays. Maybe this Saragat isn’t so bad. It’s a shame he has such a dull face!” my mother said.

  And my father thundered, “Don’t say such nitwitteries! You don’t really think Saragat is a socialist! Saragat is a right-winger! The true socialism is Nenni’s, not Saragat’s!”

  “I don’t like Nenni! Nenni might as well be a communist! He always thinks Togliatti is right. I can’t stand that Togliatti!”

  “Because you’re right-wing!”

  “I’m not right-wing or left-wing! I’m for peace!” And she’d go out, her stride once again young, smooth, and glorious, her hat in hand, her by now white hair blowing in the wind.

  She always stopped by Miranda’s apartment for a little while in the mornings when she went shopping or in the afternoons on her way to the cinema.

  “You’re afraid of communists,” Miranda told her, “because you’re afraid they’ll take away your maid.”

  “It’s true. If Stalin came to take away my maid, I’d kill him,” my mother said. “What would I do without my maid? I, who don’t know how to do a thing?”

  Miranda was always there, leaning back in her armchair with her blanket and her hot-water bottle, her blond hair drooping over her cheeks, speaking in her high-pitched, singsong, childish voice. Her parents had been taken by the Germans. They’d been taken like so many unfortunate Jews who didn’t believe the persecution would really happen. They found they were too cold in Turin so they moved to Bordighera in order to be a little warmer. Bordighera was a small place and everyone knew them. Someone denounced them to the Germans and the Germans took them away.

  When Miranda heard that they’d decided to move to Bordighera, she wrote begging them not to go because everyone there would know who they were. Big cities were safer. But they’d written back telling her not to be so silly. “We’re peaceful people! Nothing happens to peaceful people!”

  They wouldn’t hear of false names, false papers. It seemed rude to them. They said, “Who will bother us? We’re peaceful people!”

  So the candid, cheerful little mother with heart trouble and the big, heavy, peaceful father were taken away by the Germans. Miranda heard that they were in prison in Milan so she and Alberto went there bringing letters, clothes, and food. They didn’t manage to talk to anyone inside the prison and later learned that all the Jews from San Vittore Prison had been forced to leave for unknown destinations.

  Miranda, Alberto, and their son went to Florence under false names. They had two rooms near the Campo di Marte. The boy came down with typhoid and during an air raid they had to carry him with a high fever wrapped in a blanket to a shelter.

  After the war, they came back to Turin. Alberto reopened his doctor’s office. In his waiting room there were always many sick people, and he, in his white coat, his stethoscope dangling over his chest, escaped occasionally to his living room to warm himself against the radiator or to drink a cup of coffee.

  He’d gained weight and was almost totally bald but still had a bit of soft, blond, disheveled plumage on the crown of his head. Every so often, he decided to lose weight. He went on a diet taking special diet pills that he’d been given as samples. But during the night he got hungry and went to the kitchen to forage in the refrigerator for leftovers.

  They had a gorgeous big refrigerator that Adriano had given them one time after Alberto had cured him from an illness. And Miranda, who was always complaining, also complained about that gift. “It’s too big!” she said. “What will I put in it? I only buy a stick of butter at a time.”

  They were always reminiscing about the years they spent in exile in the Abruzzi. They were always pining for those years.

  “How happy we were in exile in Rocca di Mezzo!” Alberto would say.

  “We really were happy! I wasn’t lazy. I went skiing,” Miranda said, pronouncing the word “ski” in the English way like my father. “I took my little boy skiing. I got out of bed early in the morning and lit the stove. I never had a headache. Now I’m always tired again!”

  “You didn’t get up early,” Alberto said. “Let’s not romanticize! You didn’t light the stove. The maid came in and did it!”

  “What maid? How could she do it if we didn’t have a maid!”

  The boy, the old railwayman, was by now a teenager. He often played soccer with my children in Parco del Valentino. He was big and blond, and had a deep voice. In that deep voice, however, was the echo of his mother’s singsong voice.

  “Mama,” he’d say, “can I go to the park with my cousins?”

  “Don’t get hurt!” my mother would tell him.

  Miranda would say, “Don’t worry. They’re as cunning as serpents!”

  “He’s quite well-behaved,” Alberto and Miranda would say about their son. “Who knows who brought him up to be so well-behaved. Certainly not us! He must have taught himself!”

  “Perhaps I’ll go to the mountains on Sunday,” Alberto said, rubbing his hands together.

  Alberto, like Gino, continued to go to the mountains but he didn’t go in the same manner as Gino, the way my father had taught us. Gino went to the mountains by himself, or occasionally with his friend Rasetti. What he liked about going to the mountains w
as the cold, the wind, the fatigue, the discomfort, sleeping little and badly, eating little and in a hurry. Instead, Alberto went with a group of friends. He got out of bed late and stayed for hours in the hotel lounge, chatting and smoking. He had delicious warm meals in warm restaurants, lounged about for a while in his slippers, then finally went skiing. When he skied, he flung himself furiously into the sport just as he’d learned to do as a child. Not knowing how to pace himself or to judge his own stamina, he came home to Turin exhausted and jittery, with dark circles under his eyes.

  Miranda wanted nothing to do with the mountains because she despised the cold and snow, with the exception of the nostalgia-tinged snow of Rocca di Mezzo on which she claimed to have skied so happily and which she missed so terribly.

  “What an idiot Alberto is!” she’d say. “He always goes to the mountains hoping to have fun, and instead he never has fun, he just gets tired. What kind of fun is that? And why does he want to have fun now! When we were young we had fun going skiing or doing anything! We’re not so young now and we don’t have fun anymore!”

  “It’s something to do activities when you’re young, it’s another thing to do them now!”

  “How depressing Miranda is!” Alberto said. “You depress me! You’re a killjoy!”

  Vittorio sometimes went over to their place in the evening when he was passing through Turin. Vittorio had been released from prison under Badoglio’s government, then became one of the leaders of the Resistance in Piedmont. He was a member of the Action Party. He’d married Lisetta, Giua’s daughter. After the demise of the Action Party, he became a socialist. He’d been elected to the Chamber of Deputies. He lived in Rome.

  Lisetta hadn’t changed much from the time years ago when we used to ride our bikes and she’d tell me the plots of Salgari’s novels. She was still thin and pale, and stood tall with bright eyes and a tuft of hair that fell across her forehead. At fourteen, she’d dreamed of having adventurous escapades and she’d had a taste of what she’d dreamed of during the Resistance. She’d been arrested in Milan and imprisoned at the Villa Triste. She’d been interrogated by Ferida. Friends disguised as nurses helped her escape. She then bleached her hair so she wouldn’t be recognized. Between her escapes and disguises, she had a baby girl. For a long time after the war, her short brown hair was streaked with blond.