Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  As for her father, he’d also become a member of parliament and commuted between Rome and Turin. Her mother, Signora Giua, still came to visit my mother but they fought because my mother thought her too left-wing. They argued over where the borders were in Asia, and Signora Giua brought over her De Agostini mini-atlas in order to prove with documentary evidence that my mother was wrong. Signora Giua took care of Lisetta’s little girl because Lisetta, who was still very young, didn’t much want to be a mother to that child who was born almost without her noticing it. Lisetta had been thrust from a life still full of childish fantasies into the life of an adult without having had a moment to stop and think.

  Lisetta was a communist and she saw in everyone and everything the dangerous remnants of the Action Party, which no longer existed. She called it the “AP” and saw its influence in the shadows of every corner. “You belong to the AP! You have the incurable mentality of the AP!” she’d say to Alberto and Miranda. Her husband, Vittorio, would look at her as if she were a kitten playing with a ball of string and laugh, his arrogant chin jutting out and his large shoulders shaking.

  “It’s impossible to live in Turin anymore! It’s such a boring city!” Lisetta would say. “It’s such an AP city! I can’t live here anymore!”

  “You’re absolutely right!” Alberto said. “Everyone’s bored to death here! Always the same faces!”

  “What an idiot this Lisetta is!” Miranda said. “As if there were a place where anyone could have fun anymore! No one has fun anymore!”

  “Let’s go eat snails!” Alberto said, rubbing his hands together. And they would go out, crossing the Piazza Carlo Felice, the arcades dimly lit and nearly deserted at ten o’clock in the evening. They went into a nearly empty restaurant. There were no snails. Alberto ordered a plate of pasta.

  “Weren’t you on a diet?” Miranda said, and Alberto responded, “Shut up. You’re such a killjoy!”

  “What a pain Alberto is!” Miranda would complain to my mother in the mornings. “He’s always restless, he always wants to do something! He always wants to eat something or drink something or go somewhere! He’s always hoping to have fun!”

  “He’s like me,” my mother said. “I always want to have fun too! I’d like to go on a beautiful trip somewhere!”

  “Whatever for!” Miranda said. “We’re so comfortable at home! Maybe I’ll go visit Elena in San Remo for Christmas. But what’ll I do when I actually get there? I might as well stay here!”

  “Did you know I gambled at the San Remo casino?” she told my mother when she returned from her visit. “I lost! And that idiot Alberto lost too! We lost ten thousand lire!”

  “Miranda,” my mother told my father, “gambled at the San Remo casino. They lost ten thousand lire.”

  “Ten thousand lire!” my father thundered. “See what complete imbeciles they are! Tell them not to gamble ever again! Tell them I absolutely forbid it!”

  He wrote to Gino: “That idiot Alberto lost a large sum at the San Remo casino.”

  My father’s ideas about money became even more cloudy and confused after the war. Once, during the war, he asked Alberto to buy him ten cases of condensed milk. Alberto got them on the black market, paying more than a hundred lire each. My father asked him how much he owed.

  “Nothing,” Alberto said, “don’t worry about it.”

  My father put forty lire into his hand and said, “Keep the change.”

  “You know my Incet stock has plummeted,” Miranda told my mother. “Maybe I’ll sell!” And she smiled the way she did whenever she spoke of money, won or lost—a joyful, shrewd, and mischievous smile.

  “Did you know that Miranda is going to sell her Incet stock?” my mother told my father. “And she said we’d also do well to sell our property shares!”

  “What do you think that nitwit Miranda knows about anything!” my father shouted.

  Nevertheless, he thought it over. He asked Gino, “Do you think I should sell the property shares? Miranda said we should. You know Miranda understands the stock market. She’s got great instincts. Her father, poor man, was a broker.”

  Gino said, “I don’t understand a thing about the stock market!”

  “That’s right, of course, you wouldn’t understand a thing about it! In our family we have no instinct for business matters!”

  “When it comes to money, all we’re good at is spending it,” my mother said.

  “That’s certainly true for you,” my father said. “But I wouldn’t say that I spend too much! I’ve been wearing this same suit for seven years.”

  “In fact, it shows, Beppino!” my mother said. “It’s all worn out and threadbare! You should get another one made!”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it! Not a chance. This is still a very good suit. How dare you tell me to get a new one!”

  “Gino too,” my father said, “he’s not remotely a spendthrift. He’s very moderate! He has moderate habits! Paola spends too much. All of you let money slip through your fingers, except Gino! The rest of you are megalomaniacs!”

  “Gino,” he said, “is very generous with others but with himself he’s moderate. Gino, he’s better than the lot of you!”

  Occasionally Paola came from Florence to visit. She came alone by car.

  “You came alone? By car?” my father said to her. “You shouldn’t have. It’s dangerous. What would you do if you had a flat tire? You should have come with Roberto! Roberto knows a lot about cars. He’s been obsessed with cars since he was little. I remember he could talk about nothing else!”

  He then said, “Tell me about Roberto!”

  By now Roberto was grown up and going to university.

  “I like Roberto very much. He’s so good-natured!” my father said, then added, “But he likes women too much. Make sure he doesn’t get married! Make sure he doesn’t get it into his head to marry anyone!”

  Roberto had a motorboat and he used to ride around in it during the summer with his friend Pier Mario. Once the motor broke down and the sea was very rough and things hadn’t looked so good.

  “Don’t allow him to go in the motorboat alone with Pier Mario! It’s dangerous!” my father said to Paola. “You must put your foot down! You have no authority!”

  “Paola doesn’t know how to bring up her children,” my father said to my mother in the middle of the night. “She spoils them too much and they do whatever they like! They spend too much money! They’re megalomaniacs!”

  “Tersilla is here!” Paola said, entering the ironing room. “How marvelous to see Tersilla!”

  Tersilla stood up, her smile revealing her gums, and asked Paola about her children: Lidia, Anna, and Roberto. Tersilla was making trousers for my children. My mother was always afraid that they would run out of trousers. “If they don’t have trousers, they’ll have nothing to cover their bottoms!” she said. She was so afraid that they would have “nothing to cover their bottoms” that she had five or six pairs made for them at a time. My mother and I fought over this issue of the trousers. “It’s useless to make them so many pairs!” I’d say.

  And she’d say, “All right, I understand you’re a Soviet! You’re for austerity! But I want to see the children properly dressed! I don’t want them going around with nothing to cover their bottoms!”

  Whenever Paola came to Turin my mother went out with her, arm in arm, strolling along the arcades, chatting, and window- shopping. She complained to Paola about me. “She never lends me her gear!” she’d say. “She doesn’t talk. And then she’s too much of a communist! She’s a true Soviet! Luckily, I have my children!” she’d say, meaning my children. “They’re so adorable! How I love them! I love all three of them and I wouldn’t know which one to choose!”

  “Luckily, I have my children so I don’t get too bored. If it were left to Natalia, she’d send them out without covering their bottoms, but I wouldn’t do that, I dress them properly! I have Tersilla come!”

  The old tailor Belom had died some time ago. Now m
y mother had her clothes made in one of the arcade shops called Maria Cristina. For sweaters and blouses she went to Parisini.

  “It’s a Parisini!” she’d say, showing Paola the blouse she’d just bought. She spoke of it in the same way she spoke of the apples when they came to the table: “They’re carpandues!”

  “Come,” she said to Paola, “let’s go to Maria Cristina’s! I want to have her make me a beautiful tailleur!”

  “Don’t get another tailleur made,” Paola said, “you already have so many. Don’t dress so much like the Swiss! Have her make you an elegant black coat instead, something distinguished that you can wear in the evenings when you go to visit Frances!”

  My mother ordered the black coat. She then found that it didn’t fit her very well in the shoulders. She had Tersilla adjust it for her at home, but still she never wore it. “It’s too grande dame!” she said. “Perhaps I’ll give it to Natalina!”

  As soon as Paola had gone, my mother ordered her tailleur. She showed up at Miranda’s one morning wearing her new tailleur.

  “What’s this,” Miranda said, “you’ve had yourself another tailleur made!”

  And my mother said, “Many clothes, much honor!”

  Paola still had friends in Turin and sometimes she met up with them. And my mother was always a little jealous.

  “How come you’re not with Paola,” Miranda would ask her, seeing her come in.

  And my mother would say, “Today she went out with Ilda. I don’t like that Ilda very much. She’s not very pretty. She’s too tall! I don’t like women who are too tall. And she talks too much about Palestine.”

  Ilda had left Palestine by then but went on talking about it all the same. Her brother, Sion Segre, had a pharmaceutical company. He and Alberto were still friends.

  Alberto said to Paola, “Shall we go eat snails with Ilda and Sion tonight?”

  “I don’t like snails,” my mother said. And she stayed home to watch television. My father despised television saying it was nitwittery. At the same time he approved of my mother watching it because it had been a present from Gino. In fact, if she didn’t turn it on in the evening and instead sat in an armchair reading a book, my father would say, “How come you don’t turn on the television? Turn it on! Otherwise it’s useless to have one! Gino gave it to you and you don’t watch it! Since you’ve caused him to throw away his money, the least you could do is watch the thing!”

  During the evenings my father read in his study. My mother watched television with the maid. After Natalina, my mother’s maids always came from the Veneto. She got them from a town called Motta di Livenza. One of her maids started spitting up blood one evening. Everyone was terrified and we called Alberto to make an emergency visit. He told us to take her for an X-ray the following day. The woman was sobbing desperately. He said he didn’t think the blood was coming from her lungs but from a scratch in her throat. In fact, the X-ray showed nothing. It was a scratch in her throat. The woman nevertheless continued to cry desperately. And my father said, “These proletarians, they have such a fear of dying!”

  Before Paola’s departure, my mother would hug her and cry, “How sad I am that you’re leaving! Just when I’d gotten used to having you here!”

  And Paola would say, “Why don’t you come visit me for a while in Florence?”

  “I can’t,” my mother said, “Papa won’t let me. And besides Natalia goes off to that office of hers so I must look after my children.”

  Whenever Paola heard her say “my children,” she became a bit jealous and irritated. “They’re not your children! They’re your grandchildren. And my children are your grandchildren! Come be with my children for a while!”

  Sometimes my mother did go. “See Mary, too,” my father said to her. “Make sure you go right away to see Mary!”

  “Of course, I’ll go,” my mother said. “I very much want to see Mary! I like Mary!”

  “How nice Mary is,” she’d say when she came back. “She’s such a good person! I’ve never known anyone as good as Mary! I had a great time in Florence. I like Florence. And Paola has that beautiful house!”

  “I, on the other hand, can’t stand Florence. I can’t stand Tuscany,” my father said. During the war when olive oil was hard to come by, Paola sent him some because there were olive trees on her property in Fiesole, and my father got angry. “I don’t want olive oil. I can’t stand olive oil. I can’t stand the Tuscans! I don’t want any kindnesses!”

  “Paola didn’t act like a jackass with you did she?” my father asked my mother.

  “No! Poor Paola! She had breakfast brought to me in bed. I had a delicious breakfast while staying all warm in bed! I was very well taken care of!”

  “That’s good to hear! Because Paola can be a jackass!”

  “And who keeps you from having breakfast in bed here at home?” Miranda asked my mother.

  “Here, no, here I get up! I immediately take a nice cold shower. Then I wrap myself up well and play solitaire while I slowly warm up!”

  She was playing solitaire in the dining room when Alessandra, my daughter, came in. Alessandra was in a foul, belligerent mood because she didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, nor did she want to go to school. And my mother said to her, “Look, here comes Hurricane Maria!”

  “Let’s see if I’ll soon be going on a nice trip somewhere. Let’s see if someone is going to give me a lovely cottage. Let’s see if Gino will become famous. Let’s see if instead of that job at UNESCO Gino will get a better and more distinguished job.”

  “Nonsense!” my father said, passing by. “Always this eternal nonsense!”

  He put on his raincoat to go to the laboratory. He never went to the laboratory before dawn anymore as he used to. Now he went at eight o’clock in the morning. At the door, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Who’s going to give you a cottage? You’re such a nitwit!”

  •

  I spent all my evenings at the Balbos’ place. Sometimes Lisetta was there, but not Vittorio because he rarely came to Turin, and when he did he preferred to see his old friend Alberto in the evening. Lisetta and Balbo’s wife were friends. Lola, Balbo’s wife, was that beautiful but detestable girl I once used to see out my window or walking down the Corso Re Umberto, her stride slow and disdainful. Lola and Lisetta had become friends during the years I was in exile. I don’t know at what point Lola had stopped being detestable. When she and I became friends, she explained to me that she was well aware that back in those days she’d been detestable and had, in fact, tried to seem as detestable as possible because deep down she was paralyzed by timidity, insecurity, and boredom. Throughout our friendship I would look back with sheer astonishment at the old image of her as arrogant and detestable—so detestable that under her gaze I’d felt like a worm and had despised her and myself because of it. I looked back upon that image and compared it to the effortless and sisterly one I had of my friend today, for me one of the most effortless and sisterly in all the world.

  While I was in exile, Lola had worked briefly as a secretary at the publishing house. She proved to be, however, a very absentminded and dreadful secretary. She was then arrested by the fascists and put in prison for two months. During the German occupation, between her escapes and disguises, she married Balbo. She was still very beautiful but she no longer had the neat, compact pageboy haircut that made her look as if she were wearing an iron helmet. Now she had disheveled hair that drooped over her cheeks; it was American Indian hair though not the hair of a squaw but the beaten-by-the-sun-and-the-rain hair of a chief. And her profile, once sharp and static, had transformed into a face that was anxious and lined, raw and weathered by the sun and the rain. Every so often for a moment or two, however, that old sharpened and disdainful profile of hers would reappear, as would her swaying and disdainful stride.

  Whenever someone mentioned her, my father would immediately rejoin with how beautiful she was: “She’s so beautiful that Lola Balbo! Ah, she is beautiful!”


  And he’d say, “I understand the Balbos are very good mountaineers. I understand they’re friends with Mottura.”

  Mottura was a biologist, whom my father respected. The fact that Balbo and Mottura were friends made him feel better about my evenings spent over there. Every time I went out in the evening, he’d say to my mother, “Where is she going. Is she going to Balbo’s place? The Balbos are very good friends with Mottura!”

  And he’d say, “How come they’re such good friends with Mottura? How do they know each other?”

  My father was always curious to know why someone was friends with someone else. “How does he know him? How did they meet?” he’d ask, insistently. “Ah, maybe they met in the mountains! Surely they met in the mountains!” And once the origin of the relationship between the two people was established he would relax, and if he respected either one of them, he was happy to give the other his kindly approval.

  “Is Lisetta also going to the Balbos’ place? How do they know Lisetta?”

  The Balbos lived on the Corso Re Umberto. They had a ground-floor apartment and the door was always open. People came and went continually: friends of Balbo’s who accompanied him to the publishing house followed him to the Café Platti where he always ordered a cappuccino, followed him home in the evening and talked with him there late into the night. If his friends came to the apartment and found he wasn’t there, they sat down in the living room anyway and spoke amongst themselves, or walked up and down the halls, or perched on the desk in his study, having learned from him to never keep a schedule, nor to remember a mealtime, and to argue incessantly.

  Lola was totally fed up with having so many people hanging around her place. All the same, she got on with whatever it was she had to do. She looked after her child with a mixture of apprehension and annoyance because, like Lisetta, she didn’t really know how to be a mother, her transition from the fog of adolescence to tempestuous adulthood having been abrupt and lacking in any sense of continuity.