Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Occasionally she left her son with her mother or mother-in-law and enjoyed dressing up very elegantly, putting on pearls and jewels, and going out for a walk on the Corso Re Umberto, as she had long ago, her stride slow, her eyes half closed, her aquiline profile slicing the air. When she came home and found everyone just as she’d left them, sitting around arguing on the box seat in the front hall or perched on tables, she let out a long, guttural cry of exasperation to which no one paid any attention.

  Whenever her husband was away she used endearing nicknames for him and lamented his temporary absence with a long, guttural but affectionate cry, like a dove calling to its mate. But then as soon as she saw him again she immediately reproached him, either because he always arrived late to lunch or because he’d left her without a penny for food or because of that door that was always open and those people who were always coming and going. So they fought, he armed with his fine-tuned quibbling, she with nothing but her fury; and the rights and wrongs committed by each became hopelessly entangled. Moreover, they were never alone, not even when they fought, and she would randomly insult any friend who happened to be nearby, yelling at him to get out. But the friend would never dream of doing so, and would wait, calm and amused, until the storm had passed.

  Balbo always ate the same thing at lunch: rice with butter, a steak, a potato, an apple. Ever since he’d had parasites during the war, this was all he’d been able to eat. “Is there any steak?” he’d ask anxiously, sitting down at the table. As soon as he was reassured on this front, he ate distractedly as he continued to talk with his friends who were always there even during his meals, and to fight with his wife, his arguments rife with his fine-tuned quibbles.

  “He’s boring!” Lola would say to his friends. “I find him so boring! Yes, there’s steak. How boring he is always carrying on about his steak! If only for once he’d eat a fried egg!” And she would recall the time in Rome during the Resistance when they were in hiding and penniless and she’d run all over the city trying to buy butter, steak, and rice on the black market. Balbo paused to explain that he couldn’t eat fried eggs because they made him sick, then solemnly and distractedly went on eating, indifferent to what kind of steak he was consuming just as long as it was a bona fide grilled steak.

  “I don’t like these friends of yours!” Lola complained. “They don’t have any kind of private life. They don’t have wives or children, or if they do, they neglect them! They’re always here!”

  On Saturday and Sunday the place became deserted. Lola left her child with her mother-in-law and they went, she and her husband, skiing.

  “How sweet he was yesterday,” Lola would say about her husband to the friends who were once again in her place on Monday morning. “He was so sweet, if only you could have seen him. He knows how to ski like an instructor! He looks like ballet dancer! He wasn’t at all boring anymore. We had so much fun! But now he’s become boring again!”

  Sometimes they went, she and her husband, to a nightclub to dance. They danced, the two of them, until late into the night. “We had so much fun!” Lola would say afterwards. “He is so good at waltzing! He’s got such a light step!” And as she hung up her evening gown in the closet she would aim that guttural and affectionate dove cry of hers in the direction of her husband who was just then at the office.

  Every so often Balbo would say to his wife, “Buy yourself a new evening gown. It would please me.”

  To please him, she bought a dress and then was unhappy, realizing the dress was ridiculous and she’d never wear it. “That idiot!” she’d say. “To please him, I bought a dress that makes no sense!”

  Lola never worked again after her brief stint as a secretary at the publishing house. She and her husband were in agreement over the fact that she had been a dreadful secretary. But they both also agreed that the right job for her did exist, though precisely what job had yet to be discovered. Balbo even asked me to search among the thousands of jobs that existed on the planet for one that truly suited Lola.

  Lola used to remember with great longing the time she spent in prison. “When I was in jail,” she’d often say. She would recount how in jail she finally felt tremendously at ease, finally at home and at peace with herself, finally free of her complexes and inhibitions. She’d made friends there with some young women from Yugoslavia who’d been arrested for political reasons and she also made friends with some of the ordinary prisoners. She knew how to talk to them, how to earn their trust, and was often surrounded by other prisoners seeking her help and advice. The conversations that Balbo and his wife had about a possible job for her always wound up back “in jail” and they both concluded that they should find a job for her in which she felt, as she had in jail, entirely at ease, free, without any inhibitions, and fully in control of her powers. Such a job, however, was not so easy to find. She then got sick and had to stay for a short time in the hospital, and in the hospital among the sick young women she rediscovered some of her leadership powers; evidently they came alive in dramatic situations involving extreme tension, risk, and urgency.

  In Rome, Lisetta found a job as an employee of the Italy-USSR Association. She’d learned to speak Russian. She began to study it right after the war with Lola and me. She, however, had gone on to learn the language properly while we’d stopped somewhere along the way. So Lisetta went to the office every day and somehow managed to run her household and bring up her children, though she pretended not to bother much about the children, pretended that even though they were very small, they were entirely independent. She still came to Turin for holidays and brought the children with her. Whenever we asked her where the children were she became distracted and vague and said she couldn’t remember exactly where she’d left them. She liked to give off the idea that she’d sent them alone to play in the street. Her children would actually be in the park, looked after by their grandmother and their nanny, and she’d go get them as soon as it got dark, bringing their scarves and hats; without noticing, and without admitting it to herself or to anyone else, she’d become an affectionate, scrupulous, and anxious mother.

  She also frequently pretended to be in a fight with her husband over politics. In truth, she was, when it came to her husband, meek as a lamb and fundamentally incapable of having an opinion at odds with his. Besides, there was no real difference between them in terms of their political beliefs. The Action Party, the AP, had by now been lost to the mists of time and no traces of it were left anywhere. But Lisetta often declared that she saw its ghost appearing everywhere and especially within the walls of her own home. As soon as her children could think for themselves, she began to argue with them, above all with her eldest daughter, who was sententious and sarcastic and always ready with a barbed response. So mother and daughter would argue at length, a plate of meat in front of them, trotting out the poor and the rich, the left and the right, Stalin, the priests, and Jesus Christ, while eating their plate of meat.

  “Stop acting like such a countess!” Lisetta would say to her friend Lola whenever Lisetta saw Lola bedecking herself with jewels and painting her face in front of the mirror. Eventually Lisetta too would put on just a touch of black eyeliner and they would go out onto the Corso Re Umberto and walk along the boulevards: Lisetta wearing sandals over her childish bare feet, her raincoat open, Lola in her form-fitting black coat with large buttons, a brooch on the lapel, her prominent aquiline nose slicing through the air as she took up her old swaying and disdainful stride.

  They went to the publishing house where they found Balbo chatting in the hallway either with some priest or with Mottura or with one of his friends who’d followed him there from home.

  “He hangs around priests too much,” Lisetta said of Balbo. “He’s with them too often!” She never described him as having “an AP mentality”; in fact, he was one of the few people she didn’t describe this way. Balbo, though, sometimes accused her of being “a little AP” and accused her of perhaps being the last AP still in existence. She, on the
other hand, accused him of being too Catholic, but she was disposed to forgive him for it, even though this was something for which she wouldn’t forgive anyone else in the world. But she still remembered how, in her younger days, his eloquence had fascinated her whenever he came on Sundays to bring her books by Croce.

  “A count! At heart he is a count! At heart they are a count and a countess!” Lisetta would say whenever she thought of the Balbos when she was far away in Rome. She saw other friends in Rome but she didn’t like them as much. She agreed with these friends on most things but they didn’t share memory’s firm bonds so she was actually quite bored with them, though she’d never admit it to herself. The fact that Balbo was Catholic and came from a noble family seemed to her, especially from afar, to weaken all the arguments he’d made to her when they were together. Every time she came back to Turin, however, the Balbos’ home was an irresistible draw. Yet she could never admit the truth to herself and say, “They’re my friends and I love them and I don’t care a fig if their opinions are right or wrong, I don’t care a fig if he likes priests so much.” Because in her childish, affectionate, and naive nature her opinions and ideas, as well as those of others, took root and branched out like large leafy trees that obscured from her own eyes the clear reflection of her soul.

  Mottura chatted with Balbo so often and at such length that a new verb was coined at the publishing house: “to motturize.” “What’s Balbo doing? He’s motturizing! Of course, he’s motturizing!” we’d say. Balbo, after having had a conversation with Mottura, went to the publisher to pass on his friend’s suggestions regarding a series of science books Balbo had nothing to do with, but he liked to poke his nose into what was happening with the various series and to offer his two cents. Balbo had no scientific expertise even if, during his youthful confusion, before going to law school he’d spent two years in medical school. But he didn’t remember a thing from those two years. Mottura was the only scientist he knew aside from my father, who’d taught him in his anatomy course years ago. But Balbo was inspired by his conversations with Mottura to seek out science books that he never read but only dipped his red nose into here and there for a moment or two. After having discussed things with Mottura, Balbo was always very quick to offer his opinions and ideas on the subject. But just as he never had any specific agenda when talking to anybody, with Mottura he conversed for the sheer pleasure of it and was in no way motivated by trying to glean from him his ideas and opinions. And even if initially he may have had such an aim, he almost immediately forgot this intention. His conversations would follow a thread of disinterested inquiry, utterly devoid of purpose. And then, like someone who out of necessity takes a crap in a garden and realizes that in any case he was fertilizing it, Balbo would impart upon the publishing house some of what he’d learned. His concept of work would have been unthinkable, and certainly not tolerated, in any place other than that publishing house. Later on, at another job, he did, in fact, learn how to work differently, but at the time that was how he worked, never acknowledging that he was tired until the evening when he lay down and was overcome by exhaustion. He was also writing a book then, though when he found the time to write it no one could possibly imagine, but somehow he did find the time because at a certain point the book was ready to be published and he begged others to proofread the galleys for him because he didn’t know how. He could look at galleys for months and never see an error.

  I stayed at the Balbos’ home in the evenings until late. Three friends of the Balbos were permanent fixtures: a small man with a mustache, a tall man who had a striking resemblance to Gramsci, and another curly-haired man with a florid complexion who was always smiling. The one who was always smiling came to work at the publishing house on the science-books series, which was very strange since he didn’t appear to have had any experience whatsoever in the sciences, but he was evidently successful because he kept his job for years and, in fact, became the director of that series, always wearing his gentle, helpless, sad smile, always opening his arms wide while claiming he knew nothing about science. Eventually he left and opened his own publishing house specializing in scientific books.

  Balbo would take a momentary break from his discussions with his friends in order to expound to Pavese and to me on his ideas concerning our writing. Pavese listened to him with a wicked smile while sitting in an armchair beneath a lamp, smoking his pipe; he would reply to everything Balbo said that he was already aware of it and had been for a very long time.

  Nevertheless, he listened to Balbo with real pleasure. Pavese’s relationship with his friends always included an ironic banter that he called upon whenever he was talking with us or about us or getting to know us. This irony of his was perhaps one of his most wonderful qualities, but he never knew how to bring his sense of irony to bear upon those things most important to him; he didn’t bring it to his relationships with the women he fell in love with, nor did he bring it to his writing. He was able to bring it to his friendships because friendship came to him naturally and he was in some ways careless about his friendships in the sense that they were something he didn’t give excessive importance to. In love, and in his writing, he threw himself into such a state of feverish calculation that he no longer knew how to laugh or to ever be entirely himself. And sometimes when I think about him now, his sense of irony is the thing I remember best about him and I cry because it no longer exists. There’s no trace of it in his books and it’s nowhere else to be found except in that flash of his wicked smile.

  As for me, I was eager to hear someone talk about my books. Balbo’s words sometimes seemed dazzlingly incisive, but I was also well aware that he only ever read a few lines of any book. His days were such that there was neither the time nor the space for reading. But he made up for the lack of time and space with a very astute and sharp intuition that allowed him to form an opinion based on barely a few sentences. When he wasn’t around I would decide I hated his way of forming an opinion and accused him of being superficial. But I was wrong because he was anything but generic and superficial. Even from a prolonged and attentive reading he wouldn’t have reached a more thorough and profound opinion. What was generic and superficial, however, was the practical advice he gave regarding books or people. He didn’t know how to give practical advice to others or to himself. The practical advice he gave to me about my books, or when he saw that I was depressed, was to go more often to the cell and branch meetings of the Communist Party—I was a member then—and to become more involved. He seemed to think that this was the best way to get me back into the real world from which, he said, I’d become detached. During the postwar period, it was a widely held view that writers should, through participating in left-wing parties, come down out of their ivory towers and get a grip on the real world. I wasn’t able, at the time, to tell Balbo his advice was wrong, and simply became unhappier and even more confused. Instead of saying something to him about how I felt, I obeyed him and went to those meetings that I found profoundly sad and boring, though I was unable to admit it at the time.

  I understood only later that his practical advice shouldn’t be followed under any circumstances, that practical suggestions needed to be excised from his talk. When his words were stripped of any practical content they were informative and useful. But at the time I felt compelled to follow his every step and to make every mistake he did. As for Pavese, he didn’t make the mistakes we did; he made others of his own. He stumbled down other paths where he walked alone, his attitude contemptuous and stubborn, his gentle heart aching.

  Pavese’s mistakes were worse than ours. Our mistakes were born of impulsiveness, imprudence, stupidity, and naiveté. Instead, Pavese’s mistakes were the result of prudence, guile, calculation, and intelligence. Nothing is more dangerous than this sort of mistake, which can be, as it was for him, fatal. It’s difficult to recover from a mistake made through guile. Mistakes made through guile tie us up in tight knots. Guile puts down roots in us that are stronger than those put down by
recklessness or imprudence. How does one get rid of those tenacious, firm, profound roots? Prudence, calculation, guile have the face of reason, the bitter face and voice of reason, presenting infallible arguments to which there is no response, nothing to do but submit.

  Pavese killed himself one summer in Turin when none of us was there. He had contrived and calculated the circumstances regarding his death in the way he planned a walk or an evening out. On his walks or evenings out, he didn’t like to encounter anything unforeseen or surprising. Whenever the Balbos, the publisher, Pavese, and I went for a walk in the hills, he became very irritated if we strayed from the designated path or if someone arrived late to our meeting point, or if we suddenly changed plans, or if someone unexpectedly joined us, or if by some fortuitous circumstance, instead of going to eat in the restaurant he’d chosen, we ate at the home of an acquaintance we unexpectedly ran into along our way. The unforeseen made him anxious. He didn’t like to be taken by surprise.

  He had talked about killing himself for years. No one ever believed him. When he came over to my and Leone’s place eating his cherries while France was falling to the Germans, he was already talking about it—not because of France or the Germans, and not because of the war encroaching upon Italy. He was afraid of the war, but not enough to kill himself. Even so, for quite a while after the war was over, he continued to be afraid of the war, as, in fact, we all were. As soon as the war was over, we were immediately afraid that another war would start and we thought about it obsessively. He was more afraid than any of the rest of us, however, of another war. For him, fear was the vortex of the unknown and the unexpected, and horrendous to his clear thinking: dark poisoned waters swirling against the barren shores of his life.