I said, ‘I feel I’ve done them all a terrible injustice.’ I remember Davide’s coin, its sides struck with a different die to produce the same image inside out on one side, in relief on the other: my die had been cast to resemble your story, and the story of your father, but I’d all unwittingly punched out a different picture. And when I stopped to consider why, I think I knew. And I didn’t much like the reasons.
The needles clicked softly, a sound of childhood. When I first began cataloguing the archive on the computer, the keys reminded me of you, knitting, and had helped me discover in the machine an animate and kindly spirit. You said, looking at me, ‘I don’t think you need start again, darling. Not a bit. I like it the way it is.’
‘But I don’t believe it’s true any more. And I want it to be true. I don’t want to write operetta. You might as well accept Cavalleria Rusticana as history.’
‘You take things too seriously. You always have done, it’s your nature, so I suppose we can’t change it. But it’s an old story. Old stories change, you know. You’re not in the driver’s seat where they’re concerned. I’m not either. No one is. It’s beyond us.’ You gave your soft laugh.
‘But where did the duel idea come from in the first place? I thought it was true. I took it as something that had happened. God, I’ve been trying to write a memoir, based on fact, not a teen romance.’
You looked up at me and smiled, tolerantly, the expression you used to put on on school speech days when I had to perform something and did it as well as I could, but not that well. ‘Darling, I believe in the duel. My father was wounded when he was a young man …we always used to talk about how much he’d changed afterwards, how he couldn’t settle down to anything, anywhere. That was why he died young, most probably.
‘Though in fact,’ you added, almost talking to yourself, ‘he might have had a stroke anyway. I know lots of people who’ve just died, all of a sudden, for no reason. It’s so sad, when that happens.’
You caught my eye again, and went on, ‘But as a family, we never knew what had taken place, not exactly. I expect, now I see what that paper says, that they were scared he was mixed up in politics at all. We were always little people, and little people have to take care. And then, in America, you know, that was the Italian reputation – troublemakers, anarchists, traitors. You know – there was a famous case, they killed two Italians. They accused them of something terrible. Even I know the one thing the Americans are frightened of is bolshies. What is it they say, reds in the cupboard?’
‘Yes, yes.’ I clenched my knees, trying to contain my impatience. My God, mothers can be trying.
‘Well there were no flies on Mamma, she knew how to survive. That’s how we survived. When there was nothing and we had no money either, she managed. And she never refused to do a kindness – she’d even give away our food! – when there were others on the street who were hoarding, waiting for the prices to soar. But she knew how to keep quiet. It’s important, you know. People forget, these days, when everyone wants to be on The Price is Right and have their instant fame and shout their piece. Sometimes silence is the only way. If you have others who depend on you.’ You found another coloured ball of wool and began another vertical band of green on Nicholas’s jersey. ‘For heavensake’s, not everyone can be a hero. And I don’t have to tell you about the Fascists… perhaps we were cowards. Ostriches. Snails, hiding in our shells. But we were on our own, and we were women. And that…’
I heard my Fantina in your words, and for a moment I was able to recognise the secluded young woman again of the Via Calefati before the war, making do. But I pressed on, ‘And the duel, where did the idea of an actual duel come from? I can see it so clearly, you must have told me. Back to back, three paces, turn, aim, shoot, the whole caboodle.’
‘You think I led you up the garden? Not at all. There had been some trouble with one of the sisters. Certo. Such matters were settled by duels. That kind of thing went on in the south – that’s why I like what you’ve written. It’s all true. It was like that. We were old-fashioned people. As I say, my father liked music, and clothes, and good manners. What else could we be but old-fashioned?’
For a moment, I thought you were going to cry. You used to cry much more, I remember, when my father was alive, than you do now.
‘I’d leave it the way it is, if I were you.’ You flipped the jumper to start a new row. ‘Have you considered that he might have been on the other side?’
I turned away from the screen, where a sunset over the desert was now blazing, and looked at you. ‘What?’
‘Yes. Think of it. Just for a moment.’
There was a pause. In the moonlight, a rat scampered among tinfoil scrub and then halted, a seed between its tiny paws. ‘Look, Mum, Ricky!’ cried Nicholas.
‘But your father wouldn’t have emigrated if he’d been on the side of the padroni. He wouldn’t have had to. He’d have had a cosy berth.’
‘I don’t know.’ You sighed.
‘I don’t think I can cope with that, quite,’ I said. I picked up the cutting again. ‘It says here …’
‘He probably wasn’t even there, when those riots happened. He could have been away at the university, studying. We don’t know when the duel was fought – oh, all right, exactly what month he was wounded. Only the year. Rosa could have kept the newspaper for some other reason. Stick to what you’ve already written, darling. Ever since you were a little girl you liked the idea of your grandfather fighting a duel. You were always a bookworm, just like now, you used to fall asleep over a book and I’d find you with the light on still in bed, fast asleep. You liked the idea of a grandfather who fought a duel – he was just like someone you’d find in a book. That’s what you always said.’
‘I wasn’t always asleep, actually. I was pretending.’
‘Anyhow, it appealed to you, the story of the duel. It was romantic. It made sense.’ You brushed aside my scowl. ‘Oh, I know the world has changed, and you young women lead very different lives – in some ways, darling, I think your lives are harder, you have so many choices to make on your own – but love and jealousy, they don’t change that much. In the final count, when you look back you remember those things, not the fights for bread in the queues in the war or the woman who hoarded rations and sold them like daylight robbery when nobody else had anything. It’s the people you loved you remember.’ You sighed as you knitted. ‘You think I’m talking rubbish, I know…’
I stared at the television. I did not want to hear this. I did not want my life to be made up of love ties. I told myself that the things I wanted were more important: justice and education and sexual equality. I would write about Rosa, a heroic Rosa, a fighter who had broken free. I would inhabit her in a different way, she was a different Rosa now. I didn’t want to think about my marriage to Nicholas’s father, or why it went wrong or why it was important to think about why it went wrong. I pushed away the thought that it would always be there, in my memory, posing the question. Then, as I stared at the impossibly beautiful American high desert under a harvest moon, the touch of Mr Van Mond’s skin, oddly satiny, like a good bookbinding, came back to me so vividly I thought I was blushing, and I could feel his licking inside me, and his words, when I squirmed. ‘Let me, Anna. Like a mother cat, with her kittens.’ I wanted the one-night stand to be just that, a takeaway meal, an airport thriller, passing by. But the quiver of pleasure I remembered, and remembered so sharply that it passed through me again demanded that I own up: through all the discussions of the archive’s future and the possible new wing, I would always be thinking of Mr Van Mond in a particular way. And I found I was wringing my hands, and stopped, and let them fall loosely in my lap, trying to feel calm.
In the lens’s eye on the screen in front of us, the glistening white wings of a moth were unfurling slowly from a cocoon. Then, drawing away still slowly, the camera revealed twisted cactus trees silhouetted like giant plumbers’ brushes against the pink and gold roundness of the desert rocks
. The bright voice of the wonderstruck commentator broke in, ‘Without this little moth, unique to this ecology, the Joshua trees of the desert of southern California would die.’
‘California!’ called out Nicholas.
The white moth dived headfirst into the cup of a white flower at the branching tips of the contorted cactus and struggled out, rear wiggling, and, as the camera searched out the saffron sac of pollen under the insect’s abdomen, the voice went on, ‘Yucca cacti, like the Spanish dagger and the Joshua tree you see here, would not be able to reproduce without the pollination of this small creature.’ It blew away, against the clear light of the desert, as a shining parachute of dandelion spores floats up and away. Enthusiastically, the commentator continued, ‘It’s a rare example of exclusive mutual dependence in sexual reproduction in the natural kingdom.’
I sighed, you joined me: we envied the moth, we envied the tree.
Then Nicholas pointed out crossly that when he was in Parnassus, they had cartoons on the telly at breakfast, and he thought that the same thing should happen in London. He twisted to his grandmother, and asked her if she had some chocolate biscuits in her usual place.
‘Yes, but not for us, it’s too late for tea. Time for a drink, I think? Darling? What about you? Have some sherry. Or a vermouth. There are some lemons in the bottom drawer of the fridge.’ You beckoned Nicholas over; his face was already moustachioed with chocolate digestives. You held up your knitting against his shoulders. ‘Not far to go. I hope you like it, darling.’
Nicholas looked at it vaguely. I prodded him. He nodded, and another biscuit disappeared into his mouth.
‘I shouldn’t let you give him all these biscuits, I really shouldn’t,’ I said, irritably. ‘He’ll never eat any supper.’
‘For once, it doesn’t matter. He can eat properly all next week. Promise me you will, now.’ Nicholas nodded, with conviction.
You caught my expression, the exasperation I was desperately squashing, and you said, carefully, ‘You know, I prefer the idea of the duel myself.’ You cast a look around the room. ‘We’re sitting in the dark. Nicholas! Turn on some more lights for your Nonna, darling, please. So that we don’t make it seem even more wintry than it is.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities for its patronage while I was finishing this book, and the staff of the Center for their generous help.
I am grateful to Czeslaw Milosz and The Paris Review for permission to quote verses from ‘My Faithful Mother Tongue’ which first appeared, in The Paris Review, No. 87, Spring 1983.
The lines from ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ by Donaldson and Kahn © 1928 Bregman Vocco & Conn Inc., USA, are reproduced by permission of Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co. Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H OLD, and of Bregman Vocco & Conn Inc., Los Angeles, CA 90069, USA. The lines from ‘Stormy Weather’ by Arlen and Koehler © 1935 Mills Music Inc., USA, are reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H OLD, and of Mills Music Inc., Belwin Music Corporation, Burbank, CA 91505. USA.
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Copyright © Marina Warner 1988
‘My Faithful Mother Tongue’ copyright © 1988 by Czelaw
Milosz Royalties, Inc. From The Collected Poems, 1931–1987
first published by The Ecco Press in 1988.
Reprinted by permission
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