Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  He didn’t have any particular motive for killing himself. However, he’d put together various motives, adding them up with lightning precision, combining them this way and that, proving to himself that from any angle the result was the same and therefore definitive, a decision he confirmed wearing his wicked smile. He also gazed beyond his own life into the future to see how people would behave with respect to his books and his memory. Like those who love life and don’t know how to detach themselves from it, he looked beyond death and imagined death to the point where it was no longer death he imagined but life. In any case, he didn’t love life, and his gaze beyond his own death was not out of a love of life but was a shrewd calculation of circumstances so that nothing, even after he was dead, could take him by surprise.

  •

  Balbo left the publishing house and went to live in Rome. He floundered between crazy projects and erroneous endeavors for years. Finally he got a real job and learned to work like other people, but as he had done at the publishing house, he forgot to go to lunch and to leave the office at the end of the day when everyone else did. Without realizing it, he ended up working harder than any of his colleagues and was astonished by how exhausted he was in the evening.

  The Balbos had three children by then and though they tried to become regular parents they were incapable, which made them feel guilty. They would accuse each other daily of this inadequacy. Neither one of them claimed to know how to bring up children, but each asked from the other to be something he or she was not. Balbo did his best to teach his children geography, a subject he knew well, but he couldn’t remember a thing about any of the other subjects taught at school even though, according to him, he’d been a stellar student.

  He never broached historical subjects with his children; for one thing he knew very little history, but he also was afraid that his own political opinions and judgments would insinuate themselves into any historical discussion he had with his kids and he didn’t want them fed already formed opinions. He believed they should make their own judgments and form their own opinions. This seemed strange in someone who for so long had been quite aggressive and intrusive when imparting his judgments and opinions to his friends; he’d also been aggressive and intrusive in terms of appropriating others’ opinions and judgments, which he pulled apart, reassembled, then imprinted with the stamp of his own way of thinking. He proved to be unusually reticent when serving the food of his thought to his children.

  Lola and her husband, therefore, never discussed politics in the presence of their children—she, because she hated sectarianism; he, because he believed one should abstain from involving children in complex topics. And since both of them feared muddling their children’s minds and causing them to be wary and suspicious of established authority, Lola’s prison experience was never mentioned.

  As for Lola, she created an idealized version of children which clashed considerably with the reality of her children, and she was always comparing the ideal children with her own lazy, messy, and absentminded ones. The result was that all she did was scold them in her gruff and random manner, which didn’t frighten them, but the combination of the noise, the chaos, and the dissonance made for a discombobulated atmosphere in their home. She also created an ideal husband and father entirely opposed to the man Balbo was or ever could be. Occasionally she would hurl in the direction of her husband and children a long, guttural, exasperated cry, like the ones she used to hurl at the random people who roamed her apartment.

  In their Rome apartment people didn’t come and go as they had at their place on the Corso Re Umberto in Turin. In fact, they now had only a few friends who came to visit at reasonable hours. They were people to whom Balbo had nothing particular to say so he would either engage with them in silly banter or remain silent. His former penchant for elevated and aggressive conversation had subsided. Nowadays, he called up his intelligence only for precise goals involving specific people at specific times of the day, after which he would close himself off in silence, as one closes the shutters at the end of the day.

  Occasionally, when the children were away on holiday or when Balbo and his wife were traveling alone, they still enjoyed their days and evenings as they once had: sleeping whenever they felt like it, wandering the streets to buy dresses and shoes for her that pleased him, or dancing at nightclubs.

  Lola finally got a job. She didn’t find it but rather it fell into her lap when she was least expecting it. If she could have chosen any job, it probably wouldn’t have been that one, and it didn’t remotely resemble her jail experience, which she considered the best and noblest time of her life. Nevertheless, she was good at her job and brought to it a modicum of her intelligence. She also brought to it disorderliness, impatience, anxiety, and her tendency to pick a fight. Her love of a fight revealed itself most often at the post office, where she sometimes went as part of her job to mail brochures and parcels.

  She worked for some magistrates. She usually worked from home while shouting out commands to her maid and children, telephoning her mother-in-law and her friends, and being fitted for clothes. Her job added chaos to chaos. She sometimes had to wrap up parcels and would suddenly decide that this was something she could have her children do, suddenly imagining that her children were experts at wrapping parcels. So she would shout “Luucaaa!” and Luca, a large boy, would appear covered in ink stains and lost in a fog of indolence, as idle and indifferent as a prince. She ordered him to wrap up twenty or so parcels immediately, though Luca had never wrapped a parcel in his life. She placed in his hands a sheaf of packing paper and a roll of string. Luca wandered through the apartment holding the roll of string, preoccupied, forgetful, and sluggish, moving slowly and aimlessly until Lola suddenly smothered him in shouts and ripped the string from his hands while he stared out at her from his regal and silent remove through proud and stagnant green eyes.

  In the winter the Balbos always took their children skiing in the mountains. They insisted on going to the north since the low, windswept, crowded mountains near Rome weren’t good enough for them. They went to Sestriere or to Switzerland, and there on the snow-covered slopes Lola was free. She forgot about her magistrates; she forgot about her children’s studies; she forgot about her maid who perhaps consumed too much olive oil; she forgot about her bad moods and her eternal resentments. But in order to reach that freedom, she first had to endure several days in Rome of complete and invincible chaos—suitcases were packed and unpacked, sweaters lost and found, errands run breathlessly throughout the city. There was constant shouting, orders given then repealed, telephones ringing, last-minute appointments with the magistrates—all while her bewildered maid and the impenetrable Luca stained with black ink looked on.

  In the summers, Lola went to the seaside in Ostia. She went alone because her husband didn’t much like the sea and during those years her children would go away to a Boy Scout camp. She usually went with anyone she could find who was willing to drive her there and bring her home. The conversations she had with these acquaintances neither bored nor amused her since there was a worldly part of her nature unaffected by boredom or amusement but rather driven by some immediate interest such as being given a ride somewhere or finding the address of an upholsterer. Her practical life was thus further complicated by her search for an upholsterer on the far side of the city, or an inexpensive carpenter who didn’t have a telephone, or a remote fabric shop where, because of some acquaintance, she would be given a small discount. She loved to go to Ostia by herself, taking long swims in the sea, then drying herself in the sun. She became absurdly tan even though her doctor had told her not to get too much sun on account of that illness she’d once had and which she was terrified of having a recurrence, but not terrified enough to keep her away from the sea, the sun, and the sand. She would come home around four o’clock to eat lunch, hurling that tender, guttural cry of hers at her husband and feeling pacified by that morning of freedom and holiday, loving the summer, the heat, that her children we
re away at camp, and that she could roam around the apartment in her bathing suit and bare feet.

  •

  I was still living in Turin but I often went to Rome and was preparing to move there permanently. I had remarried, my husband taught in Rome, and we were looking for an apartment there. Soon the children and I would install ourselves down there for good.

  I went to visit the Balbos. We were still friends and we spoke about the old days. I said to Balbo, “Do you remember when we used to do self-criticism?”

  During the postwar years, self-criticism was a popular practice. Whenever one of us made a mistake, we would analyze it and pull it apart out loud to the point where the mistake became confused with and inextricable from the self-criticism—a bit like when the music in an opera engulfs the libretto so that the meaning of the words is lost, carried away by the music’s glorious rhythm.

  I said, “Do you remember when we used to hold those political rallies?”

  Lola let out an anguished moan at the recollection of her husband’s political rallies, imagining his diminished figure up on the wooden platform among waving banners, picturing him looking out over a square packed with people while he spun out sentences in his indecisive voice, occasionally scratching the crown of his head with his forefinger. The dark, cold night would begin to settle in and he’d still be up there spinning out his sentences, lost in trying to follow his own tortuous and quibbling reasoning, convinced that those listening were following him along the winding, stony, blind path down which he was leading them. The people waited in vain to hear slogans that would resonate and chime clear as bells, the kind they were used to hearing and applauding. But they applauded anyway, perhaps out of sympathy and blind trust, or perhaps they applauded so that he would finally shut up.

  My father also once held a political rally during those years. He had been asked to put his name on the list of candidates running for the Popular Front. The Popular Front was the name of the coalition party formed by the communists and the socialists. He accepted. He was told he would have to lead one political rally, only one. They told him he could say whatever he liked. They brought him into a theater, got him onstage, and my father began his rally with these words: “Science is the pursuit of truth.”

  He spoke exclusively about science for nearly twenty minutes as people silently looked on, stupefied. At a certain point, he said that scientific research was far more advanced in America than in Russia. The people, even more confused, remained silent. He then unexpectedly happened to mention Mussolini and the fact that he usually referred to him as the “Jackass from Predappio.” The audience erupted into resounding applause and my father looked around him, now stupefied himself. This was my father’s political rally.

  Balbo, who had been present at that rally, laughed at the recollection of it. He had liked my father very much and was the only professor Balbo remembered from his two years of medical school. At the start of the scholastic year, the freshmen would form an unruly throng outside the institute entrance and my father, Balbo recounted, threw himself into the middle of that mob with his head down, like a buffalo charging into a herd, in order to clear a path for himself through the crowd.

  I remembered my father running like a buffalo with his head down through the streets during the war whenever there was an air raid. My father wouldn’t go down into the shelters and whenever the sirens sounded he started to run, not to a shelter but towards home. Under the roar and whistle of planes, he ran hugging the walls with his head down, happy to be in danger because danger was something he loved.

  “Nitwitteries!” he’d say afterward. “No way I’d ever go into a shelter! What do I care if I die!”

  •

  When I told my mother that I would be leaving Turin and going to live in Rome she was terribly upset.

  “You’re taking my children away!” she said. “What a shrew you are!”

  “She’ll let them go around in rags,” she told Miranda. “She’ll let them go around without buttons! With nothing to cover their bottoms!”

  She was remembering when she came to visit me in exile and in the kitchen there was a box full of mending because I never did the mending. I would begin to sew something, then put it down and say, “I can’t sew anymore. I lost the needle.”

  For many years, I hadn’t had my own home, or a cupboard for sheets, or a box full of mending. For many years, I’d lived with my father and my mother, and my mother had taken care of everything.

  During the summer, it was they, my father and my mother, who organized taking the children to the mountains, usually to Perlotoa where they rented the same house they always rented with the meadow in front of it. I stayed behind alone in the city and only ever left for a few days when the publishing house closed.

  “Let’s go for a hike!” my father said in the mountains, early in the morning, dressed in his old rust-colored coat, thick socks, and hobnailed boots. “Rise and shine! We’re going for a hike! Stop being so lazy! You can’t just stay here in the meadow all day! I won’t have it!”

  They came home in September and my mother called Tersilla in to make trousers, school pinafores, pajamas, and coats.

  “I want them tidy. I like to keep children tidy. I like them to have all their little things organized. If I know they’re nice and warm I feel very consoled!”

  In the evenings my mother read Nobody’s Boy to them. “How wonderful Nobody’s Boy is!” she’d say. “It’s one of the most beautiful books ever written!

  “The Marchesa Colombi’s books are very lovely too,” she said. “It’s too bad you can’t find them anymore. You should tell your publisher,” she said to me, “to bring the Marchesa Colombi’s books back into print. They were so beautiful!”

  I had given the children Misunderstood. Paola had read it to me when I was a girl. At the time she’d loved stories that were very sad and moving, that made you cry and ended badly. My mother didn’t like Misunderstood. She thought it was too sad. “Nobody’s Boy is much better,” she said. “There’s no comparison. Misunderstood is too sentimental. I don’t like it very much at all. But Nobody’s Boy, now that’s something else! Capi! Signor Vitalis! The beautiful swaddling clothes lied! Honor your father and mother! The beautiful swaddling clothes told the truth!” And she would go on to list all the characters in Nobody’s Boy, followed by the chapter titles, which she knew by heart, having read the book innumerable times to her children and now to my children, a chapter a night, always falling under the spell of those exploits that might take a sudden dramatic turn but would never end badly. She also fell under the spell of Capi, the dog, for whom she had a particular liking since she loved dogs. “I would love to have a dog like him! But Papa would never let me have a dog!”

  “I would also love to have a beautiful lion! I love lions! I love all ferocious beasts!” she said. And whenever she could, she would run to the circus using the children as her excuse to go. “It’s such a shame Turin doesn’t have a zoo. I would go every day. I always have a burning desire to see the face of a ferocious beast!”

  “Misunderstood is not a good book,” she said. “Paola liked it when she was a teenager because Paola and Mario, at the time, had an obsession with sad things. Fortunately, they’ve outgrown that now!”

  “Mario and Paola were very close when they were children,” my father said. “Do you remember when they used to whisper all the time with poor Terni? They were obsessed with Proust and could talk about nothing else. Now Paola and Mario are so standoffish, they won’t even look each other in the eye anymore. He thinks she’s bourgeois. What jackasses!”

  “When is your translation of Proust coming out?” my mother asked me. “I haven’t read Proust in a long time. But I remember reading him. He writes so beautifully! I remember Madame Verdurin! Odette! Swann! Madame Verdurin must have been a bit like Drusilla!”

  •

  Sometime after I remarried I moved to Rome and my mother held a grudge against me for a little while. But her grudge ne
ver lodged very deeply or bitterly in her heart. At first, I went back and forth between Rome and Turin, preparing myself to leave Turin for good.

  I said goodbye in my heart to the publishing house, to the city. I thought about continuing to work for the publishing house in the Rome office, but I thought it would be too different from what I had known. The one I loved was the publishing house that opened onto the Corso Re Umberto only a few meters from the Café Platti, a few meters from where the Balbos used to live when they were still in Turin, and only a few meters from the hotel under the arcades where Pavese had died.

  I loved my colleagues at the publishing house, those particular colleagues, not any other ones. I believed I wouldn’t know how to work with other people. In fact, when I moved to Rome I did leave the publishing house for good, finding myself incapable of working without the publisher and my old colleagues.

  Gabriele, my husband, wrote to me from Rome and told me to hurry up and come down there with the children. He’d become friends with the Balbos and when he was alone he went to see them in the evenings.

  •

  “But in Rome you must learn to darn!” my mother said. “Or if you don’t, you must find yourself a maid who is good at darning! Find yourself a seamstress who will come to the apartment, a bit like Tersilla. Ask Lola. Lola will get you a seamstress in no time! Or ask Adele Rasetti. Go visit Adele Rasetti. She’s so nice! I really like Adele!”

  “Write down Adele Rasetti’s address,” my father said. “I’ll write it down for you! Don’t lose it! I’ll also write down for you the address of my cousin, the son of poor Ettore! He’s a very good doctor! You could call him!”

  “Make sure you go right away to visit Adele!” my father said. “If you don’t go, you’d better watch out! Don’t be a jackass with Adele! The whole lot of you are jackasses! With the exception of Gino, the whole lot of you are jackasses towards other people! Mario is a jackass. He must have been a grand jackass with Frances when she went to Paris to visit them! He must not have lent her much gear. And she indicated to me that their apartment was a wreck as usual!”