Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  The renting woman, Romina, rode on a bike (no one had a car), leaving the house before eight to sell woolen rags that would be undone and rewoven into cloth on the outskirts of town. Her son set up a machine parts business, sending the hot smell of sparks and metal noise up from the basement. The tenants, an industrious familial hive, scrambled to rebuild their lives after terrible years. The husband in the family, who carried a gun and had a scar on his face, played cards with my husband as a young boy. His weapon put a scary shadow on winning.

  The undeclared civil war in the north between the Communists and the Fascists had ceased completely by the early 1950s. The last cold-blooded reprisals and killings, where men were intercepted on lonely roads as they walked home, had become fading memories in cities like Modena and Reggio Emilia. The universal desire to crawl onto ground where progress could begin dictated that these terrible events were deliberately swept under the rug. The wounds were still fresh in people’s memories, but they did not act on them other than to cling with visceral loyalty to their political ideologies.

  For the first two years in the new house, Alba still taught in the Apennine Mountains, three hours away by sooty, crowded bus. She came to Parma only on weekends, and occasionally midweek. After the fatherless family left the large red house that Alba and Libero, her husband, had rented together, they moved into a smaller apartment overlooking a square where Garibaldi spoke. In that place of a sadly changed life, the children meticulously filled out in black ink, with no smudges or mistakes, three hundred and sixty-five requests for a teaching position closer to Parma for their mother. They knew they would soon be moving down to that city. They covered every existing elementary school in the district.

  Paperwork is a vestige that runs deep in Italian culture. It is nineteenth-century work. Each paper requires a tax stamp that makes it official. Hand-copied records, often in triplicate, are not only inefficient; they are employment for those who file them and rerecord their messages. It took the children more than a month of evenings to fill out Alba’s application forms. My husband, the youngest and the most precise, checked each one to see that all the blanks had been filled in. He was a veteran troubleshooter and expert keeper of tight purse strings at eight years old. He, most of all, wanted to make sure there were no slipups; he wanted his mother nearby. In the first year the regional superintendent did not find Alba’s pleas convincing; in the second she moved closer but still worked more than several hours away from her young, strenuous children.

  When Alba appeared at home in Parma, she encountered all the work and trouble that had gathered in her absence. The strains in that space were enormous and sometimes of hurricane force. Imagine the worry on all sides. Multiply it by an anxious perfectionist nature, by generosity and guilt, by intelligence and inexpungible anger, by homework, cleaning, debt, and fear of death. Add in kids’ conflicts, religious pressures, an unending sense of fantasy—of indulgence, projects, finding ways to do what would have been done had their father lived. The explosive energies wound and scream and set the nerves on edge.

  I can picture Alba, the young widow, leaving the house to go to work, since I’ve seen her so often in the last ten years in her fixed rituals. She is rising, always rising, on tiptoe and in deep darkness. The heavy shutters are still down. The frost is a companion in winter, as is a chill damp in the cool of spring. She washes briskly in cold water, brushing her short hair, and prepares to put the outside world on her shoulders. The other worries always flock like unfair nimbuses over her head. She wears pants when it is cold. She likes them. A wary or wordless prayer is on her lips, a dialogue with herself, a stern or humorous push through fear, an admonition. She is a thrasher, beating herself with a standard, or, since she is shrewd, issuing an ironic complaint to Il Signore, God himself, asking for some peace. And she has lots of ambitious dreams. How the children will see museums. How they will learn to ski, to play the piano. How they will swim in the Ligurian Sea that frightens her. How they will be intelligent, responsible, good.

  Yogis believe that we each need 340 cubic feet of air each day. That is our space. With regard to herself—not her monumental plans, her utopian schemes, her strict Christianity, her modesty—this stoic approach to needs fits Alba without her knowing. Her body, the way she carefully uses anything of value, the last almond, an odd button, a book’s words, has an intelligent, tireless reverence about it. She uses resources in a way that is religious, radical, and makes her a human being not part of the capitalist world. Waste not, want not, is marrow in her bones.

  The young mother is thin from constant motion. She has a Katharine Hepburn look—high cheekbones, a mysterious distance. Apparently, in the years in which she taught, she wore lipstick. She bought an inexpensive face cream called Latte Carezza, made from whale oil in a health spa outside Parma. No other frills. She had one hat. Officially, women’s items cost too much, but underneath that rationalization her amputated married self took shelter. She had two of her husband’s woolen suits recut to her size. She still possesses a fur coat with large late-1930s shoulder pads bought at the most elegant store in Parma when she was about to become the doctor’s wife. It is now a blanket that lies as a throw on the bed in her own little house. The dull, split skins have a nonchalant defiance about them. The animals’ faces have disappeared, but the disintegrating pelts rub against you with a conscious statement.

  Alba’s blue eyes are smart; the color is pale, as if a mirror silvered them. She can look haunted, chased, even raving. Her eyes then look like those of a very smart mouse. Nervous, always running against the clock, she took a bus winding and twisting into the Apennine Mountains for those first two years after the house was built. Motion sick, she invariably stood, straight, solitary, touchingly determined, staring ahead up with the driver. In high snowbanks, she would jump and sink, walking the kilometers to the brick school. She gained permission to wear pants from the mayor of the city. She had loved Mussolini’s rules for fitness for girls when she was a child growing up. Besides urging women to raise babies, his doctrine of sports meant running, high jumping, getting out of her mother’s grip. She did love jumping into snowbanks. She did feel very free in pants.

  The one-room school in the mountains had five grades and a wood-burning stove with its miserable supply of counted logs. She swept out the grate in the morning and had everyone bend over their copybooks for sums and lines from Leopardi. Often the boys, who were farmers, towered above her; some, unable to pass the exam to leave elementary school, shaved full beards. She didn’t hesitate to remind the adolescents to wash. She pitied their lack of imagination but expressed no pity. They were slow. But sums, adding and subtracting—it wasn’t possible that their brains didn’t go that far. Human beings were on the earth to learn not to be completely thick, even if their horizons were no greater than a barn. She never gave up.

  Her children would be on their own from Monday to Saturday, except for an occasional midweek visit. She would have left the table set in the dawn of the morning she took the bus. Instructions were drummed into the children’s heads and trapped them in strict guilt when, alone, they hoped to stray into a trick or two. All three children cast about in this heavy net. The middle child, Pietro, most often broke ranks. He was an expert at exiting through the window or pelting a neighbor with buckshot from a concealed position. He had lots of friends. He popped open a bottle of spumante in school, defying anyone to rob him of a normal childhood. These minor rebellions entered into the family chronicle. Admired, these healthy moves were also seen as irresponsible, adding to the family’s burdens. In these days of Alba’s impending death, this sensitive man is unable to face the enormous fact frontally. Officially her doctor, Pietro expects himself to carry that heavy responsibility, but he’s gone now. It seems inhuman to be both a parent’s child and her doctor.

  The debt always assumed priority in the household budget. Treats were measured, but some exotic treasures appeared from patients remembering the children’s father. When Alba
came home on Saturday, there were hugs all around and a Sunday dinner of tortelli, with ricotta and Swiss chard filling, butter, and Parmesan cheese, which she prepared starting from the long rocking motion of kneading the flour for pasta. Errant friends of the kids might stay over, sleeping on couches in the living room. One had lived with them in the mountains, sleeping in my husband’s bedroom with him, for almost a year when the boy’s mother was sick. Paolo learned to kick then, kick in anger at the unwanted guest who was squeezed in because his need was as great as their own. Argumentative Communist relatives might descend for weeks on end in the new Parma house. One, Zia Maria, a Communist woman who lived by making pasta and building savings as quickly as she made huge piles of dough, often criticized Alba’s careful generosity. She expected largesse. More meat in the filling. Better wine. Didn’t Alba know that she, a poor worker, was on vacation! Although Alba was choking with debt, her stubborn project requiring continual sacrifice was unjustly regarded with envy that stung her to the quick.

  Put politely, Alba’s mother, Rosalia, was complicated and a complication. As a girl, she had been a servant in the house of the largest landowner in a village named Guastalla. When Lorenzini, the landowner, fathered Alba, Rosalia was seventeen. After Alba was born, the man, by then in his early fifties, did write Rosalia love letters, but she did not wish to marry him. The eldest daughter of a tenant farmer, Rosalia was one of seventeen children, who had grown up in a shack on Lorenzini’s estate. No one ever knew if she had been raped. She read books, torrid romances and gothic tales. Her tall, haughty, beautiful poses in photographs convey some of the wild and powerful energy of Verdi’s tragic heroines. Verdi, born fifteen kilometers from Parma, believed in the enormous drama of the enchained romantic heart.

  Rosalia represented the adult in the household while Alba worked. Dressed in floor-length heavy skirts and wearing a scarf over her wavy hair, she could not resist a fight. The tenants hid in their rooms when she started in with her complaining accusations. They reminded her that she was living beneath her imagined station. The second round of renters were from Sicily. The man, a carabiniere, chose a widow’s house because he didn’t want to leave his wife alone where there were grown men. Once firmly established, he brought his mother-in-law in as well. This older woman proved homesick for the palm trees and the sea of her native village. Rosalia’s tirades and attacks on her forced the tenants to leave. The final bellicose eruption occurred when the southerner mentioned to Rosalia that she disliked Parma’s sad, monotonous landscape and its depressing fog.

  Rosalia was a victim, and, as Italian males are apt to say, a rompicoglione—a ball breaker. She had marked agoraphobia. Someone always—often it was one of the children—had to be paid to keep her company. A believer in the evil eye, she kept a perpetual light to Sant’ Antonio near her bed; Pietro nearly electrocuted himself by cutting its seemingly insignificant wire. The woman, with one remaining tooth in front, couldn’t stay alone, but her harsh unhappiness made itself felt among others too. The agoraphobia that undoubtedly shimmered when she found herself pregnant with an illegitmate child grew murkier and more defining as time went on. Putting a little fox piece around her shoulders, she sometimes went out briefly at dusk and then, later, only after dark. But never without the accompanying hand of one of her grandchildren, and not without making sure that no one—especially an acquaintance like the elegant Signora NeNe—would cross their path. Suspicion and discontent were common walks for her mind. Her daughter, Alba, gifted, luminous, obedient, always actively radical, never did anything right. Rosalia never forgave her for being born.

  Translation is a strange vision. As a job it’s far different from simply reading in another langage. At his or her best, a translator is an egoless invisibility. All absolute attention and energy are paid to what someone else means. It’s like living in someone else’s life—different from a biographer’s symbiosis, for the decisions involve fewer value judgments. The text, in the end, is a set of rails. But there are ethics involved. And navigating the translation of words is a swim in denseness, where stroke by stroke one mysteriously moves without touching bottom. It involves empathy, so much empathy that one knows and feels lost when, if even for a flicker, one leaves the intent or the rhythm of the work. Sometimes repairs are required. Then it’s a cosmetologist’s task. You touch the writer’s flesh where he or she lost touch with the current. You touch abhorrent blah-blah, or panic, or sleep. And you must furnish some color or shadow. In the presence of a real writer, you barely hang on, so strong are the directions, so unrelenting. It’s awesome and awful living with the awareness that nothing is accidental. It is a mini-paradigm for why, if there is a God, He lets us find Him. Constrained by knowledge of a complete pattern, we would be insanely bound. This seems even more true of Italian literature, which pays conscious homage to all that has gone before.

  As one lives in another country for a long time, not only do connotations deepen and cross-references grow but a strong sense of currents, far from the other language, begins to ripple and play in the tones one chooses. Translating contemporary authors like Primo Levi or Natalia Ginzburg, one encounters something different from the activity of studying any English text. The mind meets words to translate as solid opaque objects while musically feeling their values and weighing them one by one.

  In two languages, any word—let us take mother, mom, or madre, mamma—has many levels to it. One is the direct equivalent. The others are not translatable but may be felt as completely as a landscape. The difference between the identical words can be analyzed sometimes. At other times a subtext as dense as history itself simply colors the feeling carrying one unthinkingly forward in the words. Having two languages forces one onto the ground between languages, where the reality resides outside both of them. Literary translation draws from a forest of literary precedent. It is a special world—a written world referring to past and present imagination and patterns. It is very different from translating in day-to-day living.

  In Italy, ever since movies were given sound, an industry outside of Rome has been devoted to dubbing. In the early days of this practice, many cinemagoers were illiterate. Dubbing, like little boxes of sweets, made things pleasant. Like the trompe l’oeil tricks in churches, the marble columns that seem convincing until touch reveals them to be mere plaster, dubbing was and is done with a visual goal in mind. The words put into a dubber’s voice fit Emma Thompson’s or John Wayne’s lips opening and closing perfectly. But the texts veer from the original and sometimes badly in order to make the scenes seem familiar. Implicit in changing is a sweeping away of fine context and a stronger sense of difference.

  People in Parma, especially when rationalizing about an obvious, threatening divergence, love to say, “Tutto il mondo è paese.” This means literally “All the world is like home, like us, like our country.” This truism branches into a complex root. In its paradox lies much that is religious. The statement can mean something human: people everywhere are the same. It can also be flat denial: a reference to the traditional and not letting difference in. It can be a warning that change is not welcome.

  In a dubbed film, we don’t hear the original pitch, the intonation of the actors, much less the words. We aren’t permitted the chance to remember that it came from another place by seeing the translated text hemming the bottom of the screen. Dubbing drowns out something authentic that we would register as separate if subtitles quietly reinforced this sense. The practice of dubbing is a subliminal form of censorship. Dubbing, as opposed to translation, is closer to what dialogue with others in Parma often feels like to me. Speaking out, I hear my words completely denied, by people who cannot imagine difference. Projection is a basic element in human relationships, but not sensing that difference may be normal and outside of what you know involves a kind of deprivation and tradition’s tight hold.

  Alba is in the hospital, forty minutes from our home. Pietro works there. The temperature today soars above ninety degrees by noon. The car
is scorching when we drive out to visit after lunch. My husband, who often sleeps nights sitting up in a taped plastic chair near her hospital bed, says that he never fails to see at least one accident coming or going. No one heeds the speed limits. There is no radar on the two-lane road heading toward Milan. Fifty people have been killed in these environs since the beginning of the year. Something in the reckless speed is lemminglike, irrational, and suicidal. The combined pressure of Alba’s illness, the political uncertainties, and the craziness of the drivers makes me feel as if my body has been invaded by warriors who beat on my stomach and shoulders once we are on the road.

  Yesterday, on local television, the mayor of Parma announced that 100,000-lira fines will be slapped on bicyclists who fail to walk their bikes in the city center, but cars are free to go on their hundred-mile-an-hour races down the main roads. Farcical cowardice and lack of direction leak from all public structures in the present climate. The deep uncertainties are too complex and frightening to be embraced by puppetlike minds. The former rector of the university was quietly arrested today; the announcement is made that he has been released under his own recognizance. He is accused of misusing government funds in a scheme that involved 100 million dollars’ worth of construction for a new campus. Many people feel that he should not be prosecuted. Strong feelings brew on both sides. Much public opinion holds that it is unfair to single out specific wrongdoing when the entire system is at fault. Here we go round the prickly pear … the prickly pear. This is the way the world ends … not with a … Not.