Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  By the time Mother Tongue appeared in 1997, my sense of responsibility had been greatly pushed by writing it. It was difficult enough to explore truths about myself, but I wondered what my interiority allowed to others.

  Jorge Luis Borges chided writers in the New World: “The writer who was born in a big country is always in danger of believing that the culture of his native country encompasses all his needs.” Who was I to pretend I could put myself in Italian shoes, beautiful ones, if I did not narrate authentic feelings from both sides?

  Mother Tongue is not just a memoir about an American expat in Italy. The book shows fractures in a single mind and identity when diversity in culture and history converge. The fractures extend to language, memory, the mystery of dreams and visions. The fractures are openings to risks and to growth. Some happen when cultures in families are challenged. My inherited Italian family was deeply challenged by my interloping presence. The stories, mostly untold, are women’s. My story grasps at displacement and tries to find ways to tell its transforming effects.

  “Why are you going back to Italy?’

  The soft voice belongs to our six-year-old granddaughter, as Paolo and I reach up to kiss her in the high top bunk of her bed. Her newborn sister is asleep. Behind us are Manhattan skyscrapers, thousands of windows glowing. Beyond them, the East River, a gleam of black silk.

  It’s assumed that we shall come back: we have passports, the means to buy tickets. But the six-year-old will not let go. Neither can we. Our dilemma is obvious to anyone who has permanently left her country and acknowledged the unrepairable tear in family roots.

  The young girl with long golden hair stands up and nearly bumps her head against the ceiling. She opens her arms in consoling wonder, because she is that kind of child. “Grandma, the stars are infinity. There are more than three hundred. There are more than three hundred thousand.” The rectangles of color in the buildings outside jive. The six-year-old is right to embrace a universe that has no limits. She is also right to bring feeling to the issue. Why are we leaving her if family means staying together?

  Her question cuts close to the pain central to this century.

  “I’ll be teaching in Rome in a few weeks. I’ll be with African doctors, priests, nurses, people who want to help others. We’ll be learning how stories open doors. The world needs them. Does that sound good?”

  That is my answer for now. I have new work to do.

  Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  There is life, art, and life beyond art

  [1]

  LANDING

  Not so many years ago …

  Are you sure about that? Didn’t that lightning strike nearly twenty-five years back? Isn’t time one of the most difficult stories to tell straight? Can you really remember when you were standing near that tree outside Parma, ten years before you would move to that very city with your second husband?

  Yes, I can. I can see how the branches were sheared off and the tree whacked in two near the bottom. I remember the smell of smoke and how fast the lightning came and went. I remember the thunder all around and how my mind joined it to the crack of the tree splitting. I remember the smell but I can’t describe it or the dead percussion of the earth as the tree hit the ground. More than anything I remember how close the force came, how I was a few feet away, and how in that moment I stood outside the circle of fire.

  And now? Why are you searching those details?

  I suppose I like the vulnerability, the coincidence, the cosmic power, the truth: it happened. I’m quite a private person. From the time I was asked to write a book about Parma, I began to realize that by telling stories about a real place, I was going to change my life. A silence would open. The lightning was not going to miss me.

  I moved to Parma, Italy, from Palo Alto, California, in October 1981, ten months after my marriage to Paolo Menozzi. My husband, an Italian population biologist, was offered a chance at the most coveted of prizes, a university chair in his hometown. I, an American, a writer, with my six-year-old daughter, Clare, adopted by Paolo, left Stanford University in order to follow him.

  Those two words, follow him, burn on the page and soon kindle into flame. The words are a past, fastened in Parma, one place, happened and happening, day in and day out. The words link me to all the Ruths that ever were. They press down hard on the writer and freedom seeker whose search oscillates between open rebellion and inner contemplation. Haven’t I always known that there is no one and nothing to follow except my soul’s quick motions?

  The wife in me (and this was Ruth’s story) questions but does not halt in front of the words. The mother in me trembles at the responsibility of having altered a child’s roots by changing countries, but each part, since a life rarely finds instant and obvious unity, subscribes to the move: the following because of him. Following him was a felt, necessary decision. To become a family we needed to stay together. From the beginning, within the choice grew an ideal of equality, a nearly untranslatable concept given the extent of our different assumptions about its meaning. It is true that if we had moved to another Italian city, if we had defined ourselves outside of Paolo’s family and customs, this whole book would be different. That fact, as strong as it is, can be said about the effects of any major action.

  Italy has drawn centuries of pilgrims and pillagers through its unbearable and unconquerable beauty. Samuel Johnson observed—his statement corrected to include the female half of humanity—“A person who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from not having seen what it is expected a person should see.” I loved Italy from earlier experience of living in Europe, writing, teaching, and doing archaeology. I was anxious to absorb its artistic stimulation as someone who belonged. Waking every morning as a permanent resident of an ancient land suggested much to me as a writer, but the idea of fitting was wrong.

  Not getting a job in the university—open competition is not a usual practice—was painfully difficult. It took disciplined acceptance to see that the near-vacuum I chose offered me, in time, a gain. Saying no to the medieval patronage system created free, if rocky, ground around my life. This specific quality of going no further, of drawing lines that then make fitting in an obstacle, is a darker or lighter gift often bestowed on poets. It leaves irreversible, at first cranky and then guiding, grooves in the wheel of self.

  In spite of my conscious choice, I complained and thrashed. I had no regular job: no independence, no formal contact with others, no salary. In Parma, my life as a writer washed out into an undefined isolation. I hated what I professed to want: solitude offering me time to explore my own heaven and hell. I wrote in the house. Its oppressive cowl covered up my life. I had few friends. Literature was a far-off country to my daily life. It was as if my whole struggle for independence as a woman had folded back upon itself. Writing prose placed me against the other and otherness—Italian society, its nuts and bolts—in a concrete, factual way. Italy was my country—not just its beauty but its uglinesses—and I couldn’t identify with it as mine—perhaps because in Parma the pressure to conform excluded so much difference. Poetry, with its focus on mind and voice, witnessing and memory, rhythm and sound, contained infinitely greater possibilities for survival and lyrical discovery, especially since I had to stay put. I would write with my life. Italy, beginning with its physical marvels, would work its way in.

  I followed him. It was Paolo who so often reminded me that poetry gestates in loneliness and deepening, not just space and stimulation. Had I forgotten that most poets die undiscovered? Paolo was quite surprised by my restless American impatience, my optimistic hoping to arrive, my belief that art makes flying leaps. How had I come to imagine the life of poetry as being in touch? I balked at fixed, repressive definitions thrown out by provincial Italian lives around me. I didn’t want fame, but I would not give up touch—touch with substantial experiences, with others who were creative and searching, touch inside words so that they launched back, newly defined, into art.

  Af
ter three years of sending out work, finally a sign came. The letter with a blue prioritaire sticker arrived from Switzerland.

  James Gill, a publisher and writer, who lived in the worlds and bookshelves of Russian, French, and English, became an inestimable friend. Unpaid, I joined his magazine. A nearly seamless border opened between us. Often a few words over “the gray receiver” would lift my day into sharing life in its fullest sense. We met often and, to great advantage, in extraterritorial places. Connections grew deep along a vast American prairie (or was it a snow-glittering Russian steppe?) of poetry, music, philosophy, and feelings. Generous, vulnerable, brilliant James had another aspect: he lived with a fatal disease. Though he had mastered many branches of knowledge, his most impressive study involved steadying himself like a large, newly winged bird over a stony cliff.

  But before and after James’s first letter, writing in Parma went on as slow fighting for air. For Paolo resistance was the nature of life. One didn’t ask or expect, except within the family. Struggle was how Paolo had grown up. He resumed that history by returning home. His grandmother’s favorite saying was “La vita è affanno.” “Life is troubling.” The translation implies searching. Rosalia, who was the eldest of seventeen children, might have preferred “trouble.”

  Parma, where Paolo had a job and his family, was a place for me to sit still and write. I was upset and often lived in my head. How could I ever find my subject? Sharp, defining instants—slow-motion openings of grace—kept me from sinking. Often they were seemingly as casual as a butterfly landing on my shoulder. Then, in a moment, the world fluttered into another level of order. Although they were difficult to believe, these intense meaningful feelings were more difficult not to believe. Their depths helped me to grapple with my own poverty and suggested experience I could never exhaust.

  Equally challenging and painfully uncharted was the adjustment required as a mother, trying to live a family life in another culture. Clare, because she was six, had no choice about following. She was carried. We moved. The phrases break up, except that the choice was wanted. I will never know how much of her basic sense of identity was diverted. Nor perhaps will she. Her American father has evaded the responsibilities and joys of her life. My family, often absent, began to spread out thirty years ago, after my father’s sudden death. She has put down European roots. She has an Italian family. She’s shy about America.

  In considering Clare’s life, we knew that Parma was a quiet, culturally rich city for a child. Paolo’s family would reach out. Six-year-old marvelous Clare would unbuckle her squat California sneakers and exchange them for little Italian leather shoes and socks. She would learn to be a Carthaginian who battled the Roman army. I would read her books about George Washington and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle and track the redoubtable creatures from Oz. Fortuna, Clare’s Palo Alto cat, would live in the house. Step by step, we would all learn to sit still in Parma.

  The pressure on those optimistic words pushes inside almost like the 35,000 feet of atmosphere that in a few minutes stands between an airplane and the ground. Don’t thinly about it. How can you understand the cold on the other side of the plastic window? How can you explain the wonder of seeing vast dissolving white clouds nearly rub on your palms? What does it feel like to look straight down above the onyx, mountainous surface of the ocean? If you fell now, it would be very cruel. Going on, you will land.

  To become a family we needed to stay together

  The flight is not an odyssey. I’m not on a journey to Ithaca. I am moving east toward our home. A pilot is taking me to Milan, back from my yearly visit to the States. Clare didn’t want to return this time. Paolo hasn’t come for years. He’s in Brussels. I wriggle in my seat and drowse, cramping my long legs and arms for a sleepless night as my language idles and then disappears, like the seven hours that are wiped from my watch in one swift twiddle.

  In the night sky, while the flickering lights of Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh sweep up and fade out, my language thins and leaves the ground and becomes unbearably, and at the same time interestingly, private, internal, not spoken. Morning: a nubby fog that will burn off wraps the ground. Italian customs men with their yellow trimmings arrive. I start speaking a language I can speak and like to speak, although Clare tells me—perhaps hyperbolically or perhaps because hers is that of a native speaker—that my Italian is half invented. (Paolo rarely corrects my twirling sentences.) Voices in the airport begin to sound frantic and men’s voices seemingly grow an eighth of an octave deeper. I am living in Parma, two hours further south. The journey isn’t over.

  Parma is a provincial city of fewer than 200,000 people, in a region which produced miraculous music, art, and writing that affected the entire world in the last two centuries. Among the strong talents: Giuseppe Verdi, Arturo Toscanini, Renata Tebaldi, soprano, Giovanni Guareschi, who wrote the Don Camillo stories, Attilio Bertolucci, poet, and recently his son, the filmmaker Bernardo. Each left his or her native ground. Some were persecuted for political reasons; most sought cities with greater opportunities. But many in old age returned to settle in the foothills or on the flat farmlands banking the city. Or they rejoined their birth villages along the twists and turns of the Po River.

  The younger Bertolucci, while making a film in Tibet a few years ago, stood where two strong rivers converged. He asked their names and was told they were called the Mo and the Po. “I knew then that I had to go home, back to Parma. When I admitted to myself that I couldn’t even remember the word in dialect for plowed-up clods, I knew that I had lost a sense of who I was.” As rhetorical as this sounds, it contains truth.

  In Milan, at its eastern airport, I am less than two hours from our home in Parma, the city of sweet, enveloping fogs and flat horizons marked by majestic poplars. Yet I immediately feel its dark superficiality. My elegant city is unforgiving, petty, busy, rich, and yet tolerant to the point of indulgence. It is a complicated city of masks and narcissistic poses, of caustic undermining irony, sophistication, epicurean appetites, and earthy realism. Its court-like beauty suggests nearly nothing of the pragmatic democracy that I know in my bones. The layered city has a relationship to time that stresses its diurnal rhythms and denies time’s rich uniqueness. As in most provinces, the work of censorship exists: one person on another. Conformity is a long black rope of indeterminate strength tying most people down. Parma’s heroes and heroines are strong, abrasive characters and often physically brave.

  Everyone says that Parma is an easy city to live in. Its physical charm is great. In vivibilità, a measure of livability that includes mean income, safety, culture, space, cuisine, Parma was recently voted the second most desirable city in Italy, after Bolzano. Yet as a merchant said to me: “Emptiness is our problem. We want nothing anymore. We go to church, but we go in at eleven, since we eat at one.”

  The city’s center, a mix of medieval, Baroque, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French-influenced palazzi and churches, nearly feels (except for the early medieval stone) like formal gardens. The streets curve in appealing human ways, and buildings follow the curves. The edifices are mainly painted in earthen colors and most are freshly plastered. The stronger golds reflect, not consciously, the deep amazing yellow of the region’s richly textured cheese, parmigiano, and the pale reds are the color of its famous, delicate ham. Some buildings venture into taupes, persimmons, willow greens. All in all, the city is gorgeous.

  If one looks up, not far above the medieval cathedral doors, a nine-hundred-year-old figure at the center of the arch smiles down. It is a benevolent sun, and next to it splay fat carved bunches of grapes on vines. A kerchiefed peasant with a basket is gathering them on her hands and knees. In the arch, chiseled in marble, are images of planting, threshing, slaughtering a pig, curing its plump oblong shape by hanging it upside down to weather. The blessings from the rich alluvial Po plain influenced and inspired worship and are announced as the basis of life in the powerful stone façade. Yet the land, usually parceled out among nobles and landlo
rds, produced centuries of bosses, starvation, bloody feuds, humiliation, and limits for the tenant farmers. Bertolucci made an epic, 1900, about the harshness of life in this region from a Communist point of view. He described as inevitable the peasants’ demands for social justice finally obtained by using violence. Ermanno Olmi told a similar story about Lombardy. In his film The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, which uses the lens of a Catholic faith, the sense of history turns to the individual’s learning acceptance. The five-story pink octagonal baptistery, begun in the late twelfth century at right angles to the cathedral and the Bishops’ Palace, seems a noble’s cake offered for consumption by the eyes of the people. Inside, the frescoes tell an encyclopedic version of the Bible. Today, too, the baptistery’s fantastic shape and magical pink color make tourists smile in amazement.

  My language, English, ends definitively at the airport. It stops as a given force that opens doors and creates exchange. Its space and assumptions disappear. I use the word “space” deliberately rather than “ground.” Space pertains to my history. It is an image of growing up in America’s physical enormity and its transcendental myths. I feel the reality of losing this space as if I am going underwater. Like Philomela, my tongue is cut out. My mother tongue, absolutely truncated, suddenly nearly replicates a dramatic experience of women’s traditional ground, a passive, acute sense of observation and inner, unspoken flow. All that is assumed by language, starting with culture, turns into another history. I, who trust words, often discover that language is a foreign land where I am trying to define and keep alive another existence. This strong, confusing sensation sometimes strikes when I am speaking aloud in Parma. I reach out and find myself being soundly remonstrated for what I have just said. People can be very practical here and existence is demonstrably concrete.