Thoreau defines honesty’s importance in handling money and in civic consciousness. Emerson holds open all possible distances in reality and defines them as essentially open to individual souls. These two rather eccentric written sources compose my inner understanding of America. Those books and the Bill of Rights.
A Japanese poet told me that what the Japanese know of Greek thought came down through Japanese translations of modern Chinese versions. “That’s why,” he said, “these ideas are so unclear in our minds. They didn’t come from the Greek to us.” Heidegger pointed out that what we know of the ancients depends on the quality of the translations. Our ideas were pulled from Greek through a few English and German minds. Where does history reside? Part of it is always new, being discovered, rewritten, and dug up. That is the archaeology of history and sometimes its deconstruction. But part of it cannot be changed. Part is kept alive and reflected in texts and internalized as such. An Irishman who is on the microbiological side of studying trees is working on a definition of what trees are. He told me two things that stayed in my mind. Trees are only 2 percent living; the rest has died and is there holding the living part together. This struck me as important. But 2 percent is always alive. From a certain microbiological standpoint, trees are immortal. I think history is like this. We cannot capture much more than the trees do of what is living about history. The rest is solid cortex. It stands and is of use to the living part.
Alba is being brought home today. Angela will be the one to have her, even though she’s nearly exhausted. Everyone wants to help, but the politics of helping are a complicated reckoning. Alba now looks truly sick, her worn, emaciated face seems an ancient Mycenaean mask. Her body resists like a piece of bark. She walks with halting steps. We have won a battle by freeing her from the hospital. Although people always used to die at home here, in Italy, too, this has now ceased to be. This private space for dissolution—this marshaling of the time and compassion and courage necessary to go through the personal depths of a death—had to be rewon. In secretive Parma we learn that our ninety-year-old neighbor has recently died at home. But his daughter, at the saying of the rosary, explained to us how tough his last days in the hospital were. She went out of her way to create an official version of his death. Someone in the apartment below theirs complained to my husband about how much noise the undertakers made taking away his body in the middle of the night.
Alba’s shoes are in the mountains. They are in Castelnovo, her husband’s village, in the small house she built after we came to Parma. They are special orthopedic shoes. She has a low-cut leather pair—cut just below her ankles—that lace up, and they are for the summer. The part holding the toes is shaped like a wide webbed fist. The shoemaker in the village made them by hand especially for her. They cost about five hundred dollars. There were nine or ten fittings, special lasts, restitched and pitched arches. They never cradled her feet. Her big toes some years ago began arthritically crossing over until they had surmounted their neighboring digits. Alba refused surgery; shoes became the only balm. The winter boots strap halfway up her leg. They fit better. But both pairs hurt. She always wished they were more handsome, not so clumpy and awkward. Even more, she wished that they didn’t rub.
Those two pairs of shoes walked five or six kilometers most days. They went to daily mass. They went to the house of Lianna, who went crazy after her mother died. They went two villages beyond to visit the widow whose son never married. They went to Signora P.’s, whose boy hanged himself in the barn. They stopped in to see Susanna, who had a child with a married man. They stumped door to door for a Demochristian representative who got five hundred votes thanks to her brokering. They knelt at least once a week in the quiet of the village cemetery, where she scrubbed the gray-black marble of her husband’s tombstone. There she talked to Libero and the clouds. She never limped, although the pain was raw. Occasionally, she jumped in them, touching her heels together, when a detail, like the last piece in a puzzle, proved her right.
Now her feet are exposed. They are swollen because her heart is not pumping well. They are shapeless and deformed. This seems an awful vulnerability. They are difficult feet to wash and massage. What pain and contortion they reveal. They are martyr’s feet. A Tibetan hermit, Milarepa, who died in 1143, said, “Do what you like that may seem sinful, but help living beings, because that is truly pious work.” Her feet have a tormented, lonely disregard for self. They have no grandeur. They are battered, punished, and weary. I worry about them. They hurt and have suffered. I want them to be hermit’s feet. She helped so many. But they go on swelling.
Today, Gabriele Cagliari, the head of the state-owned chemical company, commits suicide in prison after waiting for his hearing on illicit use of company funds. He had been held in jail for over one hundred days. Frustrated and frightened, he kills himself and triggers a ripple of suicide attempts in the prison. In Italy you can be arrested and jailed until trial. A few years back, a senator who heads the Radical Party, Marco Pannella, made an issue of this. Thousands of Italians lived behind bars for years waiting to be judged innocent or guilty. The law prescribes that after seven years without trial, you can be released. I have read that more than four thousand people left jail this way.
Alba, sitting up straight in her daughter’s living room, says that she knew Cagliari as she was growing up in her mother’s village. He was one of six children; his family’s meager house rested below the level where the Po commonly flooded. “He was poorer than we were,” she said. “Poveretto. Imagine killing himself just for taking money.” People in Italy traveled enormous social distances in the last fifty years. And that often meant not saying no to villas, huge cars, and bribes.
Two days later Raul Gardini puts a pistol to his head after eating his usual breakfast. He was the head of Enimont, an energy conglomerate with enormous tentacles, which was both private and state-owned. The stock plunges to a value of a few pennies. The feeling of disintegration spreads around us. A bomb explodes in Milan, and two go off in Rome. The terrible false spaces in the system are falling apart. The Minister of the Interior explains that the terrorism is partially driven from the outside—a nexus of drugs, weapons, and old Mafia. The fact leaks out that the government in Rome had no telephone links with the outside after the bombing until someone found a cellular phone. This is denied and then confirmed. The government is a conundrum that must hold or there will be a coup, some insist. Newspapers do not furnish facts so much as offer positions, which are often innuendos meant to support certain views. What does all this feel like? Nothing like an American assassination. Nothing like the tense minute-by-minute suspense as a U.S. newscaster relays his own real or simulated anguish until we empathize. In Italy the chaos is frightening, but seems to well up from a feeling of inescapable darkness in the world, different from Alba’s sickness. The disintegration is deep and partly rooted in a world of books—of myth and ideological panels—as if Kant and Hegel and Marx and Christ could steer countries’ destinies. It is hard to get at but it creates no visible signs of panic or real disruption. Everything goes on being analyzed and reanalyzed.
Alba sits up slowly, so that one wants to rush over with arms open to her. She hunches her birdlike shoulders and rises alone. She still possesses a luminous smile—a look of hope that has softened to gratitude. She can also darken into a concentrated focus of pure courage. She rises, taking my husband’s arm, and goes gently into her daughter’s small living room. She speaks with a rasp. Her daughter is sleeping. Alba is worried about her. Their relationship is a tangle between strong forces of love trying to accept difference. Alba momentarily gets a second wind. For some reason she is willing to talk. It’s about her own mother, Rosalia. “What can you expect?” she asks, studying my face. “She was a victim herself. But having an unhappy mother, I know now, I could never be happy myself. I could never be normal, I could never accept things as they were, I could never be at peace.” She is trying to understand why she could not settle into an easy
rapport with her sensitive, brilliant, unmarried daughter. Her revelation grows. She’s bringing words to a new level. No conversation remains in the days ahead. Words will only be used to strike balances, to leave final observations, or to ask for relief from pain. Words have become stark and authentic. They are weighty in the true sense of the word. They follow silences and silences follow them.
I dare to ask her if she can remember anything positive about her mother, her mother who beat her when she returned after marrying Libero, the woman who sent her an anonymous telegram cursing her marriage. Her husband begged her not to return to her mother’s house since her mother had refused to attend the wedding. “Wait,” he told her. “Stay with my family until we rent some rooms.” She couldn’t listen to that. Riding in a sidecar of a motorcycle, sick from the bumpy ride, she defied her husband and asked to receive her mother’s blows. Alba couldn’t let Rosalia go.
“Yes,” Alba said with a pitying smile, “she did do some nice things.” She sighed. Her brain took its time to look through unanswered memories. “She used to make me ask my father for money. There was no court settlement then. You know he was the big landowner. At age four I was sent to knock on the door of the villa and ask for money. In the village even the priest refused to acknowledge me. My father would look down and scowl, chastise me for being a spendthrift and for my mother’s awful extravagant ways. I dreaded his words. I felt we were wrong.
“One time my mother made an appointment at night to meet him down by the river. She hid in some bushes and made me cross the field in the dark. I wasn’t even six. Wind and shadows moved across the grass. She always pushed me toward him when he set the prices in the market on Saturdays. He never looked at me. ‘Call him Papa,’ she’d say. That night, I don’t know what she had in mind, but she made me cry out, ‘Papà, Papà,’ as I ran in the dark toward him. I touched his pant leg, I even threw myself around his leg, and then he pushed me down, pushed me off, and walked away.
“I used to dread asking him for money. I used to beg my mother to be more careful. One time he gave me five thousand lire, a sum on which poor families could live for a year. My mother took it, went to Reggio, bought leather suitcases, a hatbox, bolts of silk. She had dresses made. She was generous that way. I had a new hat, new shoes, a new coat. She hired a chauffeur, and then that foolish woman had us driven to the mountains, where we stayed in a grand hotel. We boarded for an entire month. We ate a la carte. Officers in full military dress stayed there and ate prezzo fisso, and here were the two starry-eyed idiots from Guastalla. When we came back to the village, one month later, as I knew and feared, I was sent back to my father’s front door.
“Poverina. I remember her being kind to me in that she shared the money. When I came back with small amounts, she used to send me into the square to see if a film would be shown that night. If there was to be a film, the cinema would put a record on and music would spill out into the village. That was a happy feeling. When there was money for a film, she would send me out for a bag of sweets before we bought the tickets. I always thought the sweets were too much. I thought she should be more careful with money. But I remember liking the sweets. Poor, poor Mother. She loved licorice. I didn’t. She always made me buy something different for myself.”
Having told this story, having relieved its pressures and terrors, she asked to be taken back to bed. She walked so slowly she could have been a tree trunk moving. Seventy-six years stretched skintight over her bones, she lay down without another word. Sleep instantly covered her.
Asleep, she seems to be crossing ever more closely between the two worlds, the underworld of Hermes, of Orpheus, of Psyche, and the sleep of day. These are not dominant figures in American literature. There’s English Edwardian sleep, there is American Rip Van Winkle, but life as dream and death as dream don’t command much space. Future or present is our orientation. Alba sleeps more deeply—pulling away from what we know as sleep. She says to Paolo, “It’s very hard. I’m afraid, so afraid of my dreams.”
What is it like to write in Parma? I started making lists of writers who left America: Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Sylvia Plath. Then of those who stayed for some time: Laura Riding Jackson, Ernest Hemingway; then English-speaking visitors to Italy: Keats, Byron, Shelley, James Joyce, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Ann Evans, Kay Boyle, Katherine Mansfield. I looked for divisions—how many explore language breaking up? How many describe anything about Italy that is still the same? Joyce, in his letters of more than seventy years ago, laments the same difficulty in finding work, the same confusion and bureaucracy in the banks, the same passionate depth in people. Goethe. The list of observations of what this eternal country is like is endless in literature. Parma was mapped by Stendhal. He half invented the physical city in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma, but when it suited him he used the real place. Clare’s chorus sings in the building facing the garden where Fabrizio first declares his love for Clelia. Attilio Bertolucci, the father of the famous filmmaker, writes about Parma, his birthplace. Here is a verse:
The sky lark never saw copper
wheat more red, a more heavenly celeste
day in this plain
of plains that now paints
a sunset of rain and of clearing.
How far away those literary words are from the city, and yet how close he comes to exact colorings of this land where the Alps can be seen on a clear day and the ring of the Apennines and the hills shelter farmland that seems completely domestic. Nothing would make me write about Parma in those terms. I don’t have his knowledge of this earth.
I look at Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. When he takes up British citizenship, he’s punished for it by his family. I feel his pain; I feel many Americans judge me that way. I look at Plath’s letters from England: “No I couldn’t come home. In many ways it is much easier for me to be an artist here.” The topic is enormous. There is no mind-set as to what writing in Parma is similar to. Parma in no way compares with Chippewa Falls or Palo Alto or Ann Arbor or Oxford or Rome. I am over my head. I will need more space and time to work this description out.
Paolo and I are taking the train to Rome this morning. His brother and sister have urged him to go. The rubble from yesterday’s two bombs and the mental rubble all around are a mix that weighs less heavily on me, although no one seems to realize how much I care for Alba. I go to the scene of the bombs, always willing to collect impressions. The gaping hole in the fifteenth-century church is cordoned off. It hurts to look at the force that has blasted away the stone and a sense of order. Summer-clad, sober people crowd the ropes. We speculate. The building immediately to the left of the church, a Fascist 1930s building with darkened windows, belongs to the secret service. How could a bomb blow up literally at their doorstep? Among the bystanders, solidarity jollies us. The sky is blue and the Circus Maximus is grand to walk across stride by stride. Yet many times this summer things that seemed appealing have suddenly flipped.
I am driven often by strange moods, as if acting in response to an inner prod. I was recently drawn across a field toward what seemed like a gorgeous sculpture. As I got close, I looked up to see a hawk circling. I moved toward the sculpture and the high walls of it became insurmountable. Leading up to it were bronze shoes in a muddy metal river. It was an image of a gas chamber or something similar. Then I looked down into a shallow hole between the two walls. An awful pit with bronze shit piled up was at the bottom. I accepted it as a twentieth-century comment. Yet the way I felt, subjectively, I thought it was more than that. Clare returns from Alba’s house in the mountains. A snake has crossed in front of the door. She feels frightened. She sees Odino, an eighty-five-year-old man who is a friend of Alba’s, cutting the high grass. He is swinging a scythe in long, sure strokes. Lots of forces are moving. Dreams keep coming to us.
In Rome our hotel is across from the Protestant cemetery. Paolo and I go early on Saturday morning to visit Keats’s grave. He had wanted no na
me: here lies one whose name was writ in water. His own epitaph has been pushed to the bottom of the perpendicular stone. It rests under a flood of eulogistic words. His wishes were only partially respected. Joseph Severn and all the rest who saw his fame as important insisted on a laudatory comment.
How quiet and childlike his grave is. And Shelley’s ashes are there—his body burned on the shores of Viareggio. And cats sway, beautiful black, white, and tabby cats that leap out from behind the gravestones like healthy lives. A pyramid built by a Roman in 96 B.C. imposes his egomaniacal wish to be different on the cemetery’s northern border. Tombs of unknown Romans lie in the cemetery. Sailors drowned at sea. Goethe’s son. Shelley’s little boy. Many tombs, departing from the Catholic tradition of no individual, no written words, carry a personal touch. The messages are not always pathos. Often they mention dreams for a life. Dreams of being poets. Dreams of courage. These still reach out. The English cemetery has a sign to remind us not to tip the guards. They are salaried. The gardens being worked by them are flower-filled and infinitely quiet.
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