Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  My ears and heart don’t drown at the airport, but they reconnoiter, introspect, withdraw inside. Parma has emphasized an awareness in me of distance, of differences between any two people. I followed him. The commitment to stay here caused such major alterations that I’m not sure a pledge of such a deep nature should be made to any source but God.

  Misha is Clare’s cat. The way he has developed, as well as what happened to our other two pets, is emblematic of our lives’ lighter collisions. Without touching anything essential, they show how frail and flighty, how hard to pin down, normality is. The pets, like mischief, create a set of frictions where there are no victors. They may be a part of multicultured existences.

  The lawyer who lives behind us noticed Misha some months back. He wanted him because of his eleganza. The lawyer’s cat, Dick (pronounced Deek), receives regular scrubs in the tub and has his white fur gathered by little rubber bands to make ringlets. The lawyer prods him continuously, the way children are badgered to behave here. He is an animal, and therefore needs to be domato, trained, stood to attention. He must reflect well on his padrone. As I was taught to expect as a child growing up in Wisconsin, having been raised in such a heavy-handed way, the lawyer’s cat scratches, bites, and is without pity. So Misha’s blissful character was extolled. We were objects of envy. And his coat of fur … “Bello, bello, bello. Davvero. I mean it,” the lawyer said.

  The next acts were simple Machiavellian corruption on the lawyer’s part. The minute, prune-faced man enticed Misha with meat, tinned fancier food than the dry health stuff we offered. The lawyer wanted what was ours. With this crude but effective tool he successfully lured him into their far less intellectually stimulating household. Misha began to live there on and off. After inspecting what was featured at our house, the cat would make a flying, awkward leap out a rear window, back to the world of Parma grassa. This phrase literally means fat Parma, the Parma of excess, decadent, indulgent Parma, of rumored orgies, highly paid mistresses, gambling away family fortunes, and its tamer version, rich banquets that end after eight or nine courses in a humid dawn. The lawyer, as do most Parma households, offered lovely food.

  Reasoning that we must interrupt the miseducative cycle, we chose the fairly bland and not too hopeful course of polite exchange. We cornered the lawyer at the newsstand one morning and explained how the cat was Clare’s, how the lawyer must desist from feeding Misha and keeping him hostage in his house. The hopeless logic of asking for normal limits reminded me of Licio Gelli’s internment in Parma not that long ago. Gelli is a businessman indicted in the fall of the Banco Ambrosiano (a collapse that in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought on murders and suicides, as well as rumors leading to the highest socialist and Vatican circles). He was detained for trial by being kept in a specially refurbished prison cell outside the jail in Parma. The facts were well known. Gelli’s “cell” had a new tile bathroom, decorator couches, and a spanking modern kitchen. After fifty days, health reasons sent him home. Indulgence is a kind of slipperiness that soon becomes a slimy slope that honest citizens accept with nearly good-hearted resignation. Power moves are assumed to be corrupt and corrupting. If one is caught and is powerful enough, it is assumed, too, that punishment will not be commensurate with the crime. Pleasure, in these ambiguous situations, is hardly a source of shame or contrition: it’s always happened.

  In the end, to get Misha back, we switched foods and entered into a competition to seduce Clare’s cat into staying home. We succeeded in creating an obese gourmet.

  “You must stop feeding our cat,” we said, aggressively raising our voices over the back fence. “He’s more than eighteen pounds.”

  “I don’t mind,” the lawyer said. “I don’t mind at all. We give him good food, happily. Misha’s so cute and my granddaughter loves him. She likes to take him into the bathroom and sit him in the bidet when she washes for school.” (Ugh, we thought to ourselves.) “Of course,” we said, “but you understand, Mr. Lawyer, he’s Clare’s cat. You mustn’t encourage him with food.” Then we lowered our brows into belligerent scowls. “You understand, don’t you?”

  Nothing changed. Misha began looking like a Botero statue. One rainy overcast night, we received a telephone call about ten o’clock. Unashamed, in a complicated admission of how things lay, exposing his untenable position, the lawyer confessed. “You know how cats are, they don’t like to go out in rain, so don’t worry. He’s in front of the TV and in his box. He’ll just stay with us. I would hate it if we were responsible for his catching cold.”

  With that testimony, the lawyer flummoxed me. “You know,” I said, “that the cat mustn’t be encouraged to stay. Will you be fair? Have you ever heard of King Solomon, or Lovelace, ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, lov’d I not honor more’? You’ve got to be joking, Mr. Lawyer. You’re killing him, you’re wrecking his nature, confusing him, and breaking Clare’s heart. He’s not yours.”

  “For heaven’s sake, signora, it doesn’t hurt. He’s Clare’s cat. I know that. But I’m old. There’s not that much pleasure to life. If you could only see how much my granddaughter loves him.”

  Paolo came down halfway on the lawyer’s side. “At least you know where Misha is. Otherwise he’d be on the street and probably killed on the busy Viale Duca Alessandro. The drivers are crazy,” he said, reversing himself, using the finely sharpened tools of compromise that replicate the jungle in petty bourgeois HO-gauge versions. “And it’s for a kid he’s doing all this.” “And ours?” I ask, upset by the omnipresent logic of the bella figura.

  When Clare comes back some nights, if Misha is not home, she telephones the lawyer. There is no scene over the wires. There is utter civility and no guilt or nastiness, as if no rule had been broken. Everything has been wrenched into a place where words have little meaning, and if used aggressively, the fight will only be stubbornly refought—uselessly, because we have no power to control Misha’s movements.

  “Of course I’ll send him home,” Mr. Lawyer says pleasantly. “He’s here at my feet, just resting in his box.”

  Clare, passionate in her feelings when she can get them out, after putting down the receiver and waiting for the cat to reappear, often shouts, “I hate the lawyer.”

  Some evenings after dinner, I go into the backyard, looking for justice or revenge. I try to inspire the lawyer to release the cat by lifting my voice in a high-pitched approximation of an unabashed Appalachian pig call. “Here, Mee-shee, Mee-shee, Mee-shee,” I boomerang around the apartment walls. I enjoy the shattering seconds of exposure. Often all the lights go out in the lawyer’s house, as if the chilling sound has reached their hearts. The shutters instantly drop in a whir of clicks. I persist with the high, embarrassing call. This public pressure produces some effects. In the dark, usually, from a crack in the ever so slightly lifted shutter over the stairs, a fat shadow squeezes through.

  Recently Misha has taken up sex. He leaves our house after trying to spruce up the corners of the living room with his new scent. He returns home with bloody nicks, crusted with mud, giving off the strong reek of his animal life. This morning he came in the front door wafting of lemons. His fur had no oil. It fluffed. “That goddamn lawyer,” Clare shouted. “Shampooing him. It’s not fair. I hate the lawyer.”

  Our dog, Lulu, was acquired because of a series of misunderstandings and misread signals—not really intercultural misreadings. Lulu (pronounced LooĹoo) was a misplaced translation of what was needed for Clare. Clare wanted a dog, a noble dog, and we, finding a frantic, abandoned one in need of rescue, forced Lulu upon her, as a lesson. Lulu never discovered a streak of heroism in herself. The poor animal is as far from nobility as a carp is from a blue heron. Insecure, self-protecting, she, like most dogs, sought out the woman in the house for affection. She became mine.

  Lulu, too, leads a grassa life, marked by food, power struggles, and messy borders. She has a round of eternal feeders and no clear sense of loyalty. The worst enabler from our vantage point is Sign
ora Biocchi, who splats down whole chicken parts from her second-story window. Lulu stands pointing in her direction each morning, after Paolo leaves. She demolishes the evidence quickly, knowing that she has broken the rules. She shamelessly fawns. Signora Biocchi lets us know at high volume that the dog loves her more than anyone else. “They,” she mutters to her grandchild, Antonio, “are calling the dog back because they are jealous that she loves me more.” This monstrous observation is usually put forward in an operatic sotto voce. Words are inflated, idle, and unbearably empty.

  Sometimes I run into Signora Biocchi at the corner. She has taken Lulu to the park and is sneaking back. She, Antonio, and the dog have been romping in the grass. About a year ago, little Antonio, upon seeing me, used to squeal how much fun Lulu was. Now his grandmother has taught him to dissemble. Signora Biocchi and Antonio usually fall into intense conversation. Lulu keeps jumping up on them. Their proximity to a triangle is unconvincingly orchestrated as sheer coincidence.

  Signora Biocchi has instigated the outing to the park because she is babysitting Antonio for the afternoon. Most likely her wish to appear more grand in his eyes and to offer him some special fun made it impossible for her to keep to the straight and narrow. If you explode, she will deny to your face that Lulu has ever spent a minute with her. An opera is being born. Unrepentant, she will wildly rattle the saber. In front of the child, who sees his grandmother heroically resisting the enemy with a lie, she might shout as she clutches him, “Your rules keep my little grandson from a dog whom he loves with all his heart.” “Bad signora,” Antonio says, shaking his mustard-colored, curly head at me, half menacing, half sad that our fat, friendly dog isn’t his.

  The final decision about Lulu was based on a hexagram I received after casting coins for the I Ching. The fatal line of emphasis said, “There is room in the world for everything.” Clare, much more than Paolo, questions how I ever interpreted that line as meaning that the dog should be hers. “Don’t you think it could have meant that the dog would have been fine, left abandoned?”

  Lulu in some way has fulfilled both Clare’s idea and mine of what the I Ching meant. Lulu uncovered propitious niches: people’s loneliness. She is a dog for all seasons. Sly and sensitive, she is called by many a cristiano. She becomes the object of a daily ritual in which a grandchildless man provides her with a cookie on a napkin. His offering is as neat as the tight wiping of the chalice in the mass by our local priest. Lulu so enthralled a woman on the block beyond ours that she prepares a steaming bowl of rice and vegetables for her each morning. We discovered this when the alarmed woman arrived at our gate in a faded yellow bathrobe and dirty padded slippers. “Has anything happened to Lulu? She usually eats at our house before nine. Is she sick?”

  Then, almost as if these pets reflect culture, we come to Fortuna (pronounced For-too-na, instead of For-tew-na, because she is American). She was acquired, for the cost of an inoculation, from a pet shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, now nearly nineteen years ago. She was alone, the last kitten, defined by undistinguished black and white archipelagoes of fur. She appeared wet and miserable as the sun beat down on the shopwindow. Black and white, she was like her name, Luck: dark and light, yin and yang, good and bad.

  She belongs to Clare and Paolo, and took her first eighteen-hour flight heroically, inoculated, accompanied by voluminous documentation. Italian customs officers never looked at her papers or into her box, where she sat, miserable and slick, in what was a sea of airsickness. She has lived here, gotten used to another garden, different trees, other cats, and for many years spent weeks in the summer, when the weather got ferociously hot and sticky, vacationing in the mountains in which Dante situated Purgatory, sleeping in the cool of Paolo’s mother’s house and its surrounding fields.

  The only time I took Fortuna to an Italian vet she proved her fierce sense of self and territory. Never one to spare the mere edge of a claw to express her need for space, she made the transition to Parma holding fast to a dignified perception of borders. She never bows or appeases. She has never been a feline actress.

  The visit was undoubtedly a shock for her, but it was one for me as well. Upon meeting Fortuna for the consultation, the vet, a professor at the veterinary school, of all inconceivable things, grabbed her by her nearly hairless, then thirteen-year-old tail and yanked her into empty space, while his obsequious students, encircling the metal examining table, took notes. Fortuna gyrated and wildly clawed at him. “Signora,” the obese and puffing man shouted as he forced her squat on the table, “you have a terrible cat.”

  “How would you feel?” I asked, with undisguised disbelief and disgust, quietly of course. He ignored me and went on with his recitation. The professor released our small feline from his heavy grip, and as she stirred, he unconscionably brought down his other thick, fat hand hard on her back, bare of all its fur—the original cause of the visit. Here was a dark soul used to kicking and prodding animals, to seeing them slaughtered. He hit her rippling spine as hard as a farmer knocking out a rabbit before skinning it. Fortuna screamed. She whipped around to bite him, but with none of the sadism in her response that was in his wicked blow. Fortuna’s black-and-white body flew off the table. Clumsy, he lifted his hand too late. She fled across the room and hunched down under a lab bench in the room’s far corner. The students continued taking notes. The vet, meanwhile, shouted theatrically at me.

  “Signora, your cat is a beast. I can’t handle her,” he said, waving his mildly injured hand like a prima donna. “Put her back in the cage. She deserves her fate. She’s been worked over by a lot of bad males.”

  “Like you?” I asked, surprised by my words and hoping that the passive students would puzzle the question into their notes. I still can conjure up their young faces, fixed in immobile helplessness. None of them felt moved to stand up to the authority figure who was licking his chubby wounded finger.

  Spinning in these minor events are different ways of playing games. They remind me of a nearly constant scramble inside words, their meanings and effects. Experience simply is what it is. Control is an illusion. Paolo usually asks that I sit back when contrasts arrive from the outside world. He didn’t want to hear about denouncing the vet, although now things have changed. Now there are good vets. At the time he said, “It’s a hassle. It won’t go anywhere. Vets are used to handling cows and horses. They have no tradition of little animals. It’s your mistake. You shouldn’t expect something.”

  “If you’d listened to me,” he usually remonstrates, insisting, often correctly, that he understands one level of the Parma surface better than I. This theme has also been part of Clare’s upbringing. The words and the tone are a trap. Clare has often dived through, played in, and been overwhelmed by energies lost in the tugs, pulls, and reversals.

  “I told you before you went to the vet that Fortuna needs grass. That’s all. You don’t have to pay someone to learn that. Either her coat will grow back in the spring or she has a disease too serious for anyone to save her.” Paolo reiterated his diagnosis in a didactic tone that seemed, as science is pledged to be, objective and slightly detached.

  In the spring, when the shoots returned along with the violets that name a wonderful old-fashioned perfume, Violetta di Parma, Fortuna’s coat became refulgent again. Its black and white patches worked down over her naked skin. She was well. She was so frisky that she returned to climbing trees and bagging fallen baby birds. Paolo was right and couldn’t resist a boast: “If only you would listen to me,” he said, probably wishing his own life ran closer to predictable, scientific guidelines.

  I felt the thousands of fractures along that needling phrase. They came in lightly, but not quite. In moments like this an introspective exhaustion invites the quiet words. I see T. S. Eliot’s exiled Prufrock turning toward the window. I hear his ineffective mumbling: “That is not it at all.” And his more terrible surrender: “That is not what I meant, at all.” Sometimes, another kind of exile pipes up and resists the tired di
scourse.

  The fire bites. The fire bites.

  Bites to the little death. Bites

  Till she comes to nothing. Bites

  on her own sweet tongue. She goes on. Biting.

  The anger is a woman’s voice, Olga Broumas’s, from a recent American book of contemporary poetry, bringing me news from another place.

  [2]

  ZEROES

  The coffee, hesitating, slowly rushing, bubbles up and bursts into its own noisy orgasm in the espresso pot. The kitchen grows lively with the incense of morning. It’s not James Joyce’s kidney sizzling, but the Italian pot’s powerful and tiny existence which releases present time and a room. Often a cup arrives for me in bed and we drink it there. Or Paolo brings it in and we traipse back to the kitchen, where last night’s supper dishes are condemned by the squinting eye of Signora Biocchi, leaning over her balcony taking her first reconnaissance smoke of the day.

  This morning, long before the paper collectors and their shredding machine clank down our neat, dead-end street, talk drifts from science to dreams. One slides out at the table. Paolo is in an elevator and he notices that a friend and colleague is caught. He wants his brother to help him but his brother steps out, seemingly unaffected. The fellow is being mutilated. Paolo opens his mouth to scream. He knows he should rescue him, but he pushes in another man, hoping he hasn’t seen the mess. “It’s nothing,” Paolo says as he rises to take a shower. He has a terrible week ahead of him. I can almost hear the ill-fitting armor for interdepartmental battle in the new Italian political climate dropping over his mind.