Mother Tongue
Page 12
She looked behind her and then sipped her wine in silence. Her lips trembled. “It’s so beautiful being among others. What I mean to say is that I love being here. The faces and sounds. Normal life. Eating, heat, even the pettiness of people feels completely different when the heart is not a prisoner, under siege. I’ve read the paper and it seems to me the bickering and struggle have changed. And not changed. In this city, I mean. Even my mother’s surname, Bergonzi; it’s right here on the front page. It belongs to a lawyer.” She stopped and looked at me. “Do you like living here? It’s small. It could be dull and hypocritical. But it is a perfect little theater of life.”
Without thinking, I said “yes” to the theater idea.
“Would you do it again?” I asked, not wanting to drift toward the present. I sensed she was willing to reminisce.
“It’s not what you think,” she said straight out. “I loved my life. I was headstrong, egotistical. I couldn’t save my order, but I still defended myself. I had such richness. My father used his influence, but my mother’s family shilly-shallied. He had fewer connections. There were so many forces moving against me. I was caught and that was unbearable. I had counsel, but my fight was from my heart. I believed in justice. I didn’t want the world to be snatched—the golden rings of open afternoons and nights. The men, the pope, the bishop—in the end, no one listened to me.
“I imagined no other world than the life I had. My strength was that.” She frowned at me, and her expression might have been a smile or pain. “I had liberty and power, everything one could want.”
Then she looked me in the eye.
“There are nearly five hundred years between us. We might be two women—more separate by our characters than because of time or space. Or we might be two feisty peas from the same pod. Appearances are just a first step. From the little I know, I understood that what I called me suffered greatly as time went on. By being myself, I became someone else. Those locked hands and feet were the only choice. I used to think they were not me. I used to be amazed and devastated to feel myself pacing, as rage stripped my body of any feelings of pity or grace.”
The image was there, opening that invisible communion with the imagination
[8]
PAPER
This morning again Paolo reaches up from a bulky ladder and strokes the walls of our bedroom white. The ceilings are nearly twelve feet, built with the idea of relief from the heat in summer. The art deco furniture from his parents’ bedroom set is wrapped and bound in plastic the color of squid blades. The twenty-kilo pail of paint that he bought for the job is the brand he used as a child. This repetition from the past delights Paolo. He is painting white on white. The persistent grays on the walls make it hard to know if what he sees is shadow or a skipped patch. Parma fog, on the menu for the next week, adds to tricks of light originating outside the open windows.
He covered the green carpet with plastic too. Half a day passed taping on this transparent shell and covering over the furniture that stayed in the room. Opaque, the shapes are now obsessive. Suggestive of Christo, the sculptor whose wrappings build new meanings, the shell has given material shape to long boatlike barriers.
Paolo meticulously scraped the walls. It is a messy, unpleasant job. He wouldn’t hear of paying someone when he could do it himself. Now, like piles of oily snow, the old white paint lurks loose. The undulating meters of plastic are covered with a film of white dust. Something desperate and noble, a grief absolutely unstated, passes in this touching of the walls. By painting them, time, neglect, memory become hazards. The past is being disturbed and cannot be reset in place in the old way. Life ebbs in silent reckoning. This task is not being done in Alba’s style. This is the new republic. Nothing in our house will ever be as polished, as full of anxiety, as desperately clean as Alba made it.
Paolo stands down from the ladder every so often to check his work. He sees where white is missing. Back, high up on the ten-foot structure, heading for an underpainted spot, he loses his place. Near the ceiling the wall turns into a devilish continuum, a sheer surface where gradations disappear. It is not peaceful or a unity, this searching for what’s missing. It’s like chasing mercury with your fingers, trying to pick it up. The room has grown as bright as it can. A terrible patch in the southeast corner bleeds through with some yellowish mineral salts. After four coats, it still has not been solved. Uneven, it nags him. The whole room is a semantic field of meanings and memories.
It became our bedroom thirteen years ago. But before, Paolo slept in this room with his grandmother. And then it became his mother’s room before she gave the house to us. I bond to the new paint and breathe a sigh of relief. Its clean blankness is freedom and a step forward. The room’s refurbishing was postponed by inertia and then Alba’s dying. The snail’s pace for action inches through much of our daily life. Emerson courses in my veins and often boils over. He said, remonstrating with us for overlooking vast potentials, “No one suspects the days to be gods.”
I change all the pictures on the walls. One thing leads to the next. I pull out nails left by his mother’s places for things I took down. The heavy wooden cross, the rosary, the cheerless saints were put in a drawer years ago. I insist on moving the bed, turning it all the way around, putting it on the southern wall. Clare brings in some bright paintings, lemons, a blue Chagall angel. Paolo is uneasy with the energies released. For him, it feels as if the whitewashing is not enough. Or too much.
Now the slate-white color, instead of an indeterminate state in the bedroom, has become a riot of change. He feels unnerved, as if he has wiped something off that he hoped he could delicately sneak by. He has touched early ground. Without Alba’s dictation of the rules, her blunt ego and raw unconsciousness, the entire room has been renewed and she is not here to pass judgment on it. The suffering and grief over her loss are troubled by a sense of relief that is unbearable. The rough patterns, deep and significant, have been stirred up by the whitening of the room.
Paolo has never made the house ours. Knowing it for so long, he doesn’t imagine it as a discovery. My words have been useless over the years. Now more than ever, the house threatens to remain an unrevised historical text, because disappearance is so cruel and threatening. Paolo takes his time painting, conquering the room’s dark tones soaked with dramas, until it is nearly perfect. His patience doesn’t fray. Yet our room will never, not even under optimal conditions, reach a white that would satisfy his naked eye. His own enormous goodness is partially hidden by the impossible expectations laid on him. When he puts the brushes away, he says sarcastically, “The room’s so white it looks like a mental institution.”
I fill the long black glass surface of the bureau with several vases of flowers brought from Florence by my oldest friend, Pips to me, Elisabetta to Italians. We were roommates and best friends at college, and both of us ended up married with children and living in Italy. Once we were sorority sisters. I resigned after the first year over issues of discrimination against blacks and Jews. I was two years younger and apparently the more rebellious. Yet she has never sat still for a minute and is always ready for change. Of the many twists and turns of our lives, nearly the most implausible is that our affinity began in a place designed to keep social class alive. The fresh red, orange, yellow lustrous begonias, like so many other flowers, are one of many passions she follows. They glow, floating in bowls in the room. They nearly kiss the eye with their fresh intensity.
This American friend came to bless the house. In recent years, when she arrives, it is often like having someone pull up the carpet and then arouse the life that was underneath. She has always been generous, like no one else. Pips believes in energy and can focus it. In the same way that she can stand on her head or bend her back to the ground, she has kneeled and moved and connected, becoming a yoga teacher, while keeping ten other balls in the air. Sometimes we understand each other perfectly. Sometimes we don’t. She was ready. I was not. She unleashed the conditions for us both.
In its odd mixture, though, in its dispossession, this ritual was powerful and human. I felt the black woman’s mind and heart pulling her feelings and memories together, through the root systems of Africa and Christianity. I felt her decision not to be passive. I felt fever and loss, helplessness, disenfranchisement. I felt the flat-out power of existence and her improvisation in taking it on, with her own power and authority. She sought and needed blessings. She might share them, sell them, or give them away. She was banishing the oppressor. She was active and helpless. She was willing to touch power and acknowledged that she needed angels to ground her. Although there was light, there was the darkness of every day, of being unrecognized and yet being certain that she was someone looking for the spirit. Flinging the water into the untouched corners, hearing Pips smash a dish, I began to feel better. Thirteen years in the house suddenly began to move.
I tried to imagine Pips, if she had remained an upper-middle-class white Protestant woman living in America, having ever arrived at doing this ceremony. Both of us, in different ways, had discovered in Italy that we were seeking what it had to give. Growing in its spaces of indulgence and tolerance, its beauty and art, its love of family, we had room to express parts of ourselves we would have been unlikely to have found in our own country, where we might have lived out our strong sense of discipline and place.
The act of opening the big heavy windows, asking and looking for the experience of opening, did its work. A different sort of glass ceiling cracked. Pips pushed me on. The candles burned down, stuck in bowls of dark earth. The friend who had written her thesis on Henry James cleaned up the little bowls, scraped up the wax. She was not an Isabel Archer, although she had a capacity to tumble into experiences. Henry James developed the interior worlds of character in his cross-cultural novels. His brother, William, and his minister father, who overcame the struggle with alcohol since a childhood amputation of a leg, were exponents of religion as experience. William James could imagine different selves linked to different social groups one cared about. So could Pips. We were all souls.
The next day something strange happened in the house that pointed me to an energy that Pips believes in. I heard a crash in the back room, and a red tin cup that Alba used for making tea was now lying upside down on the floor all the way across the room. The strange thing was that the red cup had been inside a pot and could not have fallen out. I still can’t reconstruct how or why it crossed the room with such force. But I was not of a mind to deal with such events. I called for help. “Just bury it,” Pips laughed. “Don’t fool around.”
The bedroom has moved. A page has turned. The begonias fill the bowls with color and serenity. My battered agenda has recorded a written note that says “Paper making.” It is time to get down to different work.
A month ago I saw paper made in the city of Fabriano. Since the mid-1200s, when a simple large wooden cog machine was invented there to crush rags into a pulp that then was used to make paper, the city has continuously produced writing stock. In the first centuries women sorted the rags to be used for the pulp, and women, once the paper had been dried and covered with a thin animal glue, smoothed each individual sheet by using glass weights.
The white cheesy pulp was boiled in a vat, and then a human hand swept a small frame through the emulsion. Pulp collected on the frame, which contained a gauze. A deckle—the frame with its removable gauze part—kept the substance contained. The contraption moved through the pulp in a slow, even movement. Then the steady hand lifted, tilting the frame slightly, but without breaking the motion so that the emulsion would settle smoothly and the excess liquid would drip through the gauze. Voilà! A sheet of paper.
By “not throwing off the wave,” the surface remaining on the gauze, the sheet of paper forms in the slow collecting sweep and in the knowing, correct, and subtle tilt. The movement is the key to paper making. It lies in the skill of the maker’s hand. The physically captured wave is paper. The phrase seems almost too good to be true. Water runs from the beginning to the end of the process of paper making. That, too, seems right.
Paolo and Clare and I detoured to Fabriano, in the Marches, after we had stopped at Monterchi to see Piero della Francesca’s unforgettable painting La Madonna del Parto. We all wanted to see the Piero and I wanted to see paper made. I thought I would get some inspiration and greater understanding from both, although not necessarily together. Paolo, as usual, gave me full support in my work.
How little we have celebrated emulsions, lesser fusions, of which paper is one. Perhaps it is because the concoction is basically mild. It is composed of rotting plants, soaked animal fiber, cottons, caustic sodas, water, and scum, further broken down by boiling, pounding, crushing, drying by sun, wind, and air.
We have the Gutenberg era, celebrating print itself, and the exponential growth of information and voices, but in the way we define an age as the Bronze Age and ours as Atomic, it is remarkable that paper didn’t get assigned a space in view of the revolutionary power it brought about. Yet as surely as women have been left out of history, paper, too, with its skin versions and plant origins, its cloth bases and forest sources, could be conceived of as the unsung shadow to all that its existence has facilitated.
Paper is the embodiment of the infrastructure between private and public; it visibly holds thought. It is the beginning of context that can be verified, contested, compared. Literally the more portable, pliable platform for all of civilization for two thousand years, in the last millennium, it has made possible more complex and interchangeable organization—bureaucracy, banking, official records, organizing and envisioning history, music as written composition, and literature. Paper has bred and nurtured the word, commerce, reality as it is conceptualized and proves itself to be. Paper has taken to its bosom the heart’s patterns and sounds, the carved letters of its ecstatic joy as well as its endless versions of hells of every sort, and the cold calculations of the universe’s expansion.
Paper’s durable existence is memory’s unsung chapter. Without it, so much less of the world we know would be retrievable for third parties, or have ever even been possible. No wonder in its sturdiness, its esoteric beauty, its itinerant capacities, its inconsequential thinness, its susceptibility to fire and worms, paper is moving.
I, for one, am an indentured servant. I stand a pauper in the face of paper’s riches. I wanted to follow paper’s trail to the guts and smell and texture of its pre-printing press origins. How did time work in a single sheet?
The banging noise of the old water-driven crushing machine in Fabriano was brutal. The pounding vibration of its weight shook the wooden floor. The vat was simple, the paper solution slightly slimy, like gelatinous biological broths where birth usually finds a home. The process was so utterly humble. It seemed amazing that this substance made possible countries’ maps and written histories, ideas’ elaborate profusion on thin, opaque, receptive surfaces that could be organized and shared, that suspended time, that stopped ideas and held them in place for examination and reference.
In present-day Fabriano, computer-driven machines create rolls that each weigh more than a ton. Paper now has a different value and place in the world. The paper produced here is often used for currency, the paper money of many countries. Paper certainly no longer nets and retains all words. Words, too, are speeding away from relationships in paper. Like fish that once lived in the waters, comfortable in a sphere that was not open to many or easy to get at, words are no longer bound in transmission to the silence of paper. Some of words’ paths are ev
olving. They are leaving the water for the sky. Lots of written words are flying faster around the world in electronic streams without ever sticking or stopping in paper.
The handmade paper made in the paper museum was attached sheet after sheet on lines to dry. They looked like weeks of tenement laundry. The handmade sheets, no longer a reality in commerce or literature today, were inhibiting, formidable, serious, dense. Each sheet buckled and curled. They needed to be pressed down and smoothed by weights preparing them for use.
I wanted to give them names. Each sheet was an individual effort. I wanted to try out some absurd number—an expansive Whitmanesque figure—eighteen sextillion—of sheets covered with notations and poems, letters and declarations in ten years of time, in India and China, in Brazil and Zaire, in the U.S. tax office, in Fabriano; no, I couldn’t see it. My closest relationship to paper was in letters from friends or in poems. There the density and intention, the resonance of imagination and recollection fit the medium—a swab of existence.
At the entrance to the museum, I bought several sheets of handmade paper—with filigrees. They cost less than a dollar. Two of the pages were smooth and had been treated with glue. Two were rough: their surface seemed like the crystal surfaces of new snow. The latter pages are delicate and appealing. Like snow, the untreated paper’s surface will not remain beautiful should anything touch it. Blotting and blotching would occur as it absorbed the ink.
I also chose a piece of paper made from 100 percent cotton. It was as large as a small pillowcase. It had a texture I felt honored to rub. Its substantial thickness, one that resisted and certainly didn’t bend, was white, the white of narcissus flowers. It was a decided white. In each sheet of paper with this rag content there was a structure, an inchoate set of imprints, or the remains of the material that went into it.