Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  Then there is the infinitely transparent sentence that once was above the door connecting her room with that painted by Araldi. “To each her own according to her merit.” Its independence hardly recalls prayer. Identified by scholars as taken from an ode to Priapus by Tibullus, the poem ends: “My door is always open to everyone.” That a mother superior would have cited this god and defended freedom if not license shows perhaps how far she had strayed from the reality of religious convention. “My door is always open to everyone.” In that echo, she could hear the large doors of the convent unlocking each morning, insisting on the welcome promised when women pledged to enter this religious order. We also hear echoes of classicism and the revival of its study.

  Some phrases are without sources. “To each his own (rights), to me, mine.” That motto sweeps close to the certainty and anger of her stand. “Confusion and error are being spread everywhere.” This, too, shows her intellectual repugnance at the repression. She had three hundred years of precedence on her side granting nuns autonomy. There is another line calling on her own resources. “Don’t look for help outside yourself.” The admonition remains, but we want to know: When did she think that? Is the tone cautious, or is it one of sarcastic bitterness? Is she surrounded by betraying enemies or has she reached the desert and is walking without God?

  What was the order of her thinking? How does the progression work? The line “Either everything is granted to me or I’ll give everything up”: Was this absolute position defined at the outset when she believed the cloistering impossible, or was it scratched out at the end, when she was ready to die? Are the words about power or faith? Winds stir inside words’ transparent jars.

  From Virgil: “Everything is full of Jove,” meaning a non-Christian god is everywhere, not confined to man’s realm. In her servant’s room, near the room where she bathed: “Gird yourself against pride.” In gird the religious sound of battle rustles. She cites Ovid: “Thus was destiny.” Carmenta, mother of Evander, is consoling her little son about the need to escape from the place where he was born in Arcadia. Carmenta tells him he is paying the price not of sin but of divine anger.

  “The gods can make things turn out for the best.” Was this her final acceptance or a hope along the way? The gods have taken God’s place. “With virtue everything is granted.” Her exclamations and assertions are immediate and clear, and yet mysteriously elusive, each holding to a shadow. Those without sources show personal defiance. Together, torment and resistance face painful acceptance. In her conscious words she expresses an overriding objection to human whim. Limpid and sober, she considers the exacting power of divine laws. Rebelliously, perhaps as a confession of conscience, she cites not one word from the New Testament. Correggio’s shaded ceiling rises over and above the new, hostile weather and climate like an imaginary merry-go-round. Did the putti with their rolling rocks haunt her?

  One supposed physical image of Giovanna is that of Diana over the fireplace. The frank, superior, open-faced goddess is blond with brown eyes. Her eyes diverge with different levels of awareness. Thoughtful, vulnerable, and, yes, distantly sad, her left eye sagely looks out at the world with consciousness and existence. It is a strongly intelligent face. Her right eye, governing her own self, ego, that—perhaps because the restorer’s swab dimmed it—seems slightly blank. This lovely open-bosomed creature, with her arms lifted toward the ready horses, will hold out. She is not cast in the role of selfless love or motherhood. She’s active, refined, and soliciting dialogue. The bishop’s accusation of licentiousness, which I have no way of verifying, cannot be deduced from Correggio’s portrait. And the hobbyhorse put forward by a local scholar that her audacious determination shows that she was a transvestite finds not one breath of support in Correggio’s image or in Affò’s report of her as proving herself in the motti as a “superior soul,” not of her sex but in matters of her “profession.”

  Listen to the horrible, faithless banging of the doors closing. Listen to Giovanna’s silencing. She and the other women had stood in the doorway listening. For three hundred years they had been listening. They heard and followed the flow of human requests and ministering, a high-pitched chatter, thought as well as graceful exchange, healing, praying, ideas, visits with friends and perhaps lovers. They managed lands as well as moved closer to markets and economic independence. The doors closed and speech stopped. Giovanna was forced to stay on, inside, where she could only move about in her rooms. In a recognizable Parma note, she insisted upon and was allowed to keep her wine cellar and her fine food. But her order’s freedom was lost. The power they had was taken away. Listen to the fear of those on the outside and those on the inside as the world is redefined by repression. The initiates must enter accepting obedience and limits. She died. Giovanna had seven months under the sentence and she died soon after the doors were finally shut. The doors were locked. After her death, the mothers superior were forced to preside for short terms of a year, so they could never mount or presume to mount a resistance. The convent remained cloistered for nearly three hundred years. Its women, behind barred doors, listened to winds, trees’ creaking branches, and each other. They had stood at the edge of a liberty. Forcibly removed from the world—Renaissance life so powerfully tempting and hypnotic and pain-filled—they returned obediently, like daughters, to probing forced, confined, and abstract borders of the dark and the light.

  Only two blocks away, no more than five hundred steps from the convent, in the church of San Giovanni, on the day the locks were fixed and the doors clattered shut, the Benedictine friars walked in their arcades, looked up at the open sky framed by the monastery, and then walked outside. They reached others in the piazza through open doors. They walked out among people of the city on that day and in the centuries that followed. They dined with nobles, dressed the wounds of the sick, read the latest acceptable treatises on knowledge, and made decisions about money. In and out of their doors the priests walked, touching both worlds, giving the sacraments, and reaching ahead. Touching and being touched, that watery movement working into a large flow of larger and larger circles, that life-giving force was denied the women.

  This morning I thought I would look at Giovanna’s room again and feel its amazing contents. It is so small, yet its various themes are enormous. It’s across from the yellow Liberty-style post office in the medieval heart of town. Having a few letters to post, I entered it first. While standing in line, I started thinking of the watery glue pots with sticky paintbrushes that I would soon use. They are furnished by the state to add grip to stamps that don’t stick. The very wet mixture invariably wrinkles the paper, as the stamps slip on the ineffective composition. Letters then, if stacked, begin attaching one to the other. It’s usually an empathic moment of frowning, wiping fingers, and then surrender: clerk and customer usually dimly acknowledge that something insignificant is a mess.

  A plump woman with a red woolen hat is absorbing lots of time drawing out her pension. Her fingers, stiff little stumps crippled by the common penetrating damp humidity of the Po plain, fumble with the money until the clerk offers her another envelope for its safekeeping. A man with glasses and wearing a blue jacket stands next to me. He is edging like a car, ready to pass on the right. So often people jump lines. That negative energy comes across in his position. I ask him if he is next. “No,” he says. In a minute, before my business is concluded, the old woman returns, her arms lifted in despair. The man who had glanced at me followed her and reached into her pocket as she pushed through the double doors. The money to live on for a month has been stolen.

  Long, sleepy lines of people drawing pensions and paying bills pass the word along. The light dropping down from the glass ceiling adds to the sensation of theater. Opinions fly and settle like birds getting on with their pecking. Tall carabinieri waving radios and guns enter and sit the unhappy woman down at a desk. The drama is quickly absorbed in the ordinary life taking place in the post office. The man was not a teenage drug addict; nor was he a fo
reigner. He was a local, someone driven to commit a crime that would not have occurred a few years ago. Disintegration, a profound sense that a center does not exist, is beginning to reach people’s consciousness. Yesterday a large bank was robbed. An unreal flow of money has dried up.

  Outside in the wind, I hurry down the path to the cloister. Inside, as my eyes adjust to the dim light, I walk closer to my subject. I look up at the portrait of Diana. The golden-haired image of a refined woman full of determined hope anticipates none of Giovanna’s torment or defeat, or centuries lost. Its sheer imaginative thrust is invigorating. In this room, women stood close to the center of learning and exchange. Her far-out vision is exciting. The Correggio ceiling burns with a wonderful fever. It contrasts with several other fevers in the room. They feel like night fevers that reoccur and persist in announcing a sickness. Where is the room’s center? I take one step closer to the image of Giovanna and am annoyed by the artificial light that creates a heavy, inescapable glare.

  Did the putti with their rolling rocks haunt her?

  [7]

  SECOND THOUGHTS

  The way I was raised, manners were a large part of life inside and outside the house. When I was a girl, there were rules for crossing the ankles gracefully and then, as I grew older, the knees. My father turned choleric one day when I was about twelve. “Never,” he emphasized by looking fierce, “never use the word clap again when talking about appreciating a performance. Applaud is the word girls should use.” Of course, he stimulated my curiosity and the dictionary led me to venereal disease—a phrase that led to slut and whore, each a sobering, new worldly acquisition in our bodiless suburb. The confining daughter vocabulary was written day by day. Minnie Mouse gloves that in their whiteness repelled the idea of grime and work, as if girls were always clean and good, were prerequisites for teas, for Sunday church. Straw hats and Easter suits of bright strawberry red or baby blue were ritual uniforms confirming a formal order. One absorbed lots of rules for guests and being a good guest. Not only did you strip your bed and fold your towels and write bread-and-butter letters, but you smiled and thanked and realized that others’ rules must be followed when there was a conflict. Good guests concede, and good manners belong to good girls and good families.

  This ingrained politeness, a no-man’s-land where an innate superiority reigned, was catastrophic training for living in another country. I’d felt like a free agent in Italy during the years I lived in Rome, but as a married woman with a child trying to integrate, I felt boxed in by barriers I imagined I had no right to question openly. Of the myriad versions of Giovanna, I identified one who became spiritual. When I discovered her as the cloistered abbess of a local nunnery, I imagined her solitude and religion as quite apart from the political and, certainly, the economic realm. In the same way that many writers today are confused about their authority and cross, without perhaps even an awareness of borders, between art, politics, history, religion and the subjective pronoun I, it took me a while to see her faith as almost a secular one. The silence and silencing I felt so keenly were surely as much a residue of my life, quite different in the world of writing poetry from that of the fiery and active non-Puritan fighter. The lady who was not afraid of pointing a finger, a remarkable in-the-world creature, who held literary meetings, wielded political power, was a patron of one of the great painters of all time, and a woman fearless enough to challenge the highest political powers—resorting to the law and her own words—that woman was a protagonist in the most active senses. She lived in a culture that she apparently understood. She was rooted. She was used to asserting her power for material ends. She was quite different from the displaced American Midwesterner, with no income to speak of, and a literary circle that was composed not of living exchanges but of the few books she was able to bring back on her yearly trips. Across five hundred years of distance, Giovanna almost laughed.

  We met in an imaginary conversation one Sunday afternoon, when Giovanna agreed to let herself be seen close up. She came to a bar on the Via Cavour, a picturesque street in central Parma turned into a pedestrian mall filled with swarms of teenagers licking rose-shaped ice-cream cones.

  She was quite tall, as many of the women are here. Thin, gnarled, and still coloring her hair blond with chamomile tea, she looked as if her resistance over the centuries had quieted down. We made our way to a square table in the smoking section, because she enjoyed being among the crowd. She ordered some wine and a whole bottle at that. It was bubbling, sweet malvasia, from the white grape that grows in the nearby terraced hills. As I looked at her, I couldn’t help being moved. Trembling and earthy, she was still imprinted with a dimension of thirst and a wish to grasp. She showed a powerful intelligence, pride, and a certain air of superiority.

  I could tell instantly, too, that Giovanna, like my mother-in-law, Alba, was a strong-minded presence to whom dictating or making her will felt was lived as a responsibility. I felt nostalgic for another kind of woman, less aggressive, more open about feelings. I often long for something more personal than the translation and weighing of values that goes on daily as I try to get the other person into context and place. This shifting process of questioning my own voice sometimes is unbearable. I felt slightly upset by this litany of complaint. I wanted to know Giovanna. My task as a writer in those few hours was not that of having her know me. I need not have worried about this rush of contradictions. The old lady was not aware of my ratiocination.

  Giovanna, her hair a scary mass that invited curious probing, was excited because she had seen on television the unveiling of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Its cleaning, a fourteen-year project paid for by the Japanese, had been revealed the day before our appointment.

  “Imagine,” she said in a voice that was perhaps overly loud due to deafness, “the blue turns out to be crushed lapis lazuli. I feel envious for that color. Nothing on that scale was possible in Parma. Not the grandness, either in materials or in spiritual vision. In my life, I’d only heard of the ceiling, Adam and God’s creation. The Last Judgment came twenty years later. It was commissioned by Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III. His son Pier Luigi was set up in our city as the first Farnese duke. I was long dead. It was no small feat to dodge the conservative forces of the Counter-Reformation. Diplomacy and power are necessary forces even in art. Otherwise, The Last Judgment might never have come into being. The religious pressures were hideous and repressive by then. Censorship had to do with shrinking all signs of human growth. Let’s not speak of what happened to women. They were forced back toward the Middle Ages. And by the time the church recovered from the Inquisitions these grand schemes for religious art were over; the nature of faith had changed. Thank God, Alessandro Farnese’s only concern was getting Michelangelo to do the work.”

  Her brown eyes rested. She was well informed. They signaled that even one word about her own plight was too much and too soon. Then her slightly hawkish eyes brightened. “The wicked old farts put forty-seven pairs of pants and drapes on his figures. Age after age fussed with those bodies, but never perhaps as completely as the initial censorship in the Counter-Reformation. They darkened Michelangelo’s openings toward man and the unknown, hoping to turn back what had been discovered. I mean, will there ever be a more important picture of who we as human beings really are?”

  Clare once mentioned a film by the Taviani brothers in which a kid stands up and shouts, “We’re all the children of the children of the children of Michelangelo.” Italian art offers an unshakable identity outlasting politics. The uncovering of the restored fresco was marked by a ceremony broadcast worldwide. It was celebrated for two straight afternoons on the first channel. Concerts were given, and prayers were said. The artistic event sent out a shiver of discovery all over the world. It managed to suspend the noise of car racing, stock prices, and the agony in Somalia. The clear, ringing white driven brightness of the colors was a shock. The restored blue deepened the pain of those creatures being cast back into hell. Its unbearable light
reinforced a sense that the world was not at fault, nor was God. The sky, changed from a crudded-over, bilious, toad-colored brown, lost a feeling of cosmic punishment. The sky was innocent; what it always had been. It was man who threw chances away. The cameras panned up and down, often stopping on Michelangelo’s portrait, a nearly empty skin, shriveled, and with his head hanging like a bat. “I never did enough,” he said, “to save my own soul.”

  Giovanna had other, more immediate concerns. “I myself can’t complain. Correggio was a genius. There always is that problem in a province, the problem of measuring greatness, where to go, whom to learn from. I must say, I admire my ceiling still. It is one of Correggio’s greatest works. I love its brocaded leaves. And he knew what to do to free the flesh. The flesh was just one part of a larger celebration. And it’s true, in my opinion, what they say—Correggio couldn’t read.”

  Giovanna suddenly glanced crossly at a younger woman who came in wearing a Trussardi suit. “Everyone looks rich. Most people wore rags when I lived. I’m amazed that appearance seems so exaggerated. There are poses in the clothes people wear. Oh, I was vain, but it was my due. I loved heavy silks. My purchases came from Prato, but the cloth they made here was excellent. As I look around, there’s something uncanny about how much people look like people I knew. It’s as if they’ve passed on from generation to generation.”