Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  Parmigianino painted his work on a convex piece of wood he fashioned himself. The surface represents the mirror. The shape of the mirror may also stand for the eye. Painting on a curved surface was a tour de force, a beginning for his revelation. In some ways such symbolism can be read as games like motti. The painter, following his own metaphor, must present the hand using it as distorted by the mirror. That’s how it would have been, had the mirror been real. The hand stretches like a strange ghostly presence across the front of the painting. It sensuously bars, ever so mysteriously, the spectator and the painter from going further. Its distortion, unavoidable, has a life of its own.

  The painting then adds implausibility as a limit. As Parmigianino has painted it, the only place the picture could be seen as it is represented is from inside the painter’s mind. Now we might ask: Why is he canceling out the real room as it would have been visible in any mirror? Since we are in Parmigianino’s mind, staring into the mirror, we too feel the defining powers of that tentacle limb. His gaze’s admission and his wish to visualize the distortion synthesizes the suffering and the stopping. He is not portraying a Hamlet. This face knows, in an absolute sense, who he is and what the constraints consist of. He paints a viewpoint about realism as much as about reality. By showing that the deforming curve needed to paint the picture is necessary, he reveals that he accepts reality. He is unable to change its laws and consequences. He will paint them in. He will express a sweet sadness in which art and the individual are confined by reality. He will say, with poignancy: I am not a god.

  The other great painter from Parma, Correggio, whom Vasari ranks in the highest circle, gives us a vision of sensuous elegance and vigor, prodigious energies and joys, motions that never seem to falter or question their right to be. His earthy confidence, love of things, and assertive energy still make up part of this place. In his work we see a dramatic vigor that in different ways opens in the pageantry of Verdi and Bernardo Bertolucci. Correggio can’t stop building up surfaces: marble in all its variations, the remarkable tones of bronze and copper, tarnished and untarnished, the surfaces of alabaster, rough and polished, the color of persimmons and nuts in the summer and fall, the clouds swirling until they are nearly turbines leading to the heavens.

  Correggio, even in his tenderness, has little room for doubts. Parmigianino, too, expresses certainty: a certainty that Correggio’s energy will end if one is realistic about life. Just as particular faces in the streets today, in their oval and rather angular appearances, seem as if they had just come out of works by these two painters, the artists’ images still mysteriously reveal attitudes in this place. Correggio expresses a sensuous, sprawling vitality, whereas Parmigianino shows a sophisticated, suffered sense of inevitable and accepted limits—a realism that will guide how decisions are made. My educated language strikes me as very far from these views.

  What is that pile on the lawn? Those odd chairs with musical staffs as backs, the Sears washing machine, a greenish-brown sofa with so many spots that it had a vague horsey appearance and smell. There is your bed. Children’s toys. A mixer. Everything that wouldn’t work on the 220 current. A stereo as big as a 1950s car. Plank boards and bricks for bookcases. Nothing is very shiny. You’d already given away the dining-room set, the credenza, the redwood table carved by a friend. A bicycle a French Canadian had sold to you. It rolled away with Clare’s yellow child seat fastened behind.

  I couldn’t bear to sell those things or any of the rest.

  Books, whose weight has broken the backs of all your suitcases, were the main physical objects carried across. You kept most of them. They are the unavoidable Sisyphean premise to any suitcase you pack. Their numbers and variety—The Sea and the Poison, The Conscience of Words, Dreams and the Underworld, The Map-Makers, Stealing the Language—are an awareness that you question but cannot imagine living without. Paid for in calluses, regrets, an itinerant attitude toward any possession except those arranged in hard-won patterns of discovered orders—you never leave a place without an intense load. In honoring books, you feel you are what you contain and carry and hope to keep alive.

  I brought books to Italy. Some pictures. Records. Clare’s toys. The rest stayed behind and was given away. The idea of dispersal, of setting a price—a nickel, a quarter, seven-fifty—for the intimate rubbed objects, the things hidden in drawers, the use of cups and saucers, nauseated me and made me nervous. I didn’t want to see people snooping and bargaining over my things. I gave them away. The morning that Goodwill scheduled the pickup, I left the house, as if I could put a bandage on those years. The Goodwill truck came and, like a hurricane, sucked up our things.

  Did you hear it or see any of it?

  No. Only the flattened grass suggested the reality. They took the old newspapers, the pair of used rubbers, a fondue set I got from my first mother-in-law. Nearly everything from the first marriage went. I kept one clay bowl with circles around it. I had sold my thin wedding band, for the complex ripping feeling of the few dollars it brought. Within the truck’s rattling maw, our things left for some center in San Francisco, where the blind and the handicapped would make some sense of them. The workers would glue and repair. They would put prices on things and the bad times would not show. In those enormous warehouses homeless people or bargain hunters would wander through. Their lives, dragging in circles they were trying to get out of, might take pleasure in nursing these not completely dead ends. My treasures were too personal except for initiates. How often I, too, had been without money and had browsed and found marvels that had been thrown away.

  And when you came that day to Parma, with your daughter, age six, what did you think? What were your thoughts?

  Mother. I was a mother and a new wife. More than a wife, I was a lover and a mother. Like a big brown bird with protective covering, I held the hand of a child who was as bright and sensitive, as reflective and physically strong, as a child could be. It was she who said, “Here we are in Parma with the man who has married ‘us.’ ” I didn’t want anything to hurt her.

  Six years before, at five in the morning, a July dawn, I drove out to Redwood City, where she was born. From the first day, when she was put in a crib that slid between the hospital room and the nursery, I never left her alone. I slept with her on my chest, a damp, sour, perspiring sleep, and opened my own eyes no further than her face and the milk wetting my dresses. As I fed and rocked her, singing her name, night and day joined their burning wicks. I gripped at and accepted a gorgeous, stifling sense of life’s extreme changes—a new being. The narrowest news bands reached into those days and were deflected. Patricia Hearst had just been captured. I was thinking ahead to when I would have to start work. I pulled into the wordless joy and fatigue of my life. I had worked up until three days before Clare was born, and the publishing company where I was an editor would give me only two weeks at home. I was forced to quit. I held my daughter as tightly as a mother can.

  Her muscles were strong. Her impatient little hammy legs pushed hard and squirmed. She smiled, not just once or twice, but over and over on day three. Smiled and looked as if she had put behind her all her nine months in the dark waters. She smiled. She saw a lot, her gaze never an empty stare. And she got frustrated easily. I kept her on my body, always held, until she passed the day when her infant brother had died in his sleep.

  I didn’t want her to pull away from me. The thought of her sleeping alone brought back the first terrifying scene of dying. But I knew I must not forge a bond that was crippling. So on day twenty-six, I put her to sleep in her perfect white crib near my bed. The unrepeatable uniqueness of time fell like a veil I could only hope would be gentle.

  Five weeks later her father, an archaeologist, left. He left to do a survey, sending me no money. I found work at home: papers to grade, a reading series to write. She and I kept each other company, and I loved her life. A few days before she was ten months old, she walked across the length of the shag carpet in the living room without wanting interim finger
s. I have a book, since memory is so strangely fixed, in which I jotted down changes and characteristics. “What’s that?” was her first complete sentence. She was seven and a half months old.

  Each day I took as new.

  That day, coming to Parma, what was it like?

  It seems impossible that I couldn’t react. My new sister-in-law came down into what is now our house, hours before we landed in Milan. She accused my mother-in-law, Alba, of spoiling her two-year-old son, who had been left with Alba six days a week—from eight to four—since his birth. She told Alba that the bright, squirming little boy that Alba had taught to walk and to say ciao and to eat with a fork and spoon, the child she had toilet-trained and nursed through fevers, who visited all the shops and got his little taste of bread or cheese, would never stay with her again. The knife could not have plunged in deeper.

  A set of Medean forces—competitive, buried feelings over the son and his father—vomited out as roles between women, exploded the minute we arrived. The two-year-old screamed from the balcony above ours, “Nonna, nonna,” until he was dragged inside. I had never heard such pain and anger vocalized outside a Verdi opera—where in Il Trovatore the child is tossed into the fire. We walked into screaming conflict that didn’t die. Fierce, visceral, unconscious, it poisoned parts of life. It made me a human buffer—sorting, listening—between forces that were repulsive to me. No one believed in space or the fact that each person might be right from her point of view.

  This horrible set of foreign pressures overtook me, putting our lives on edge. I had no way to back out, because we were a family, setting up our life as a threesome. I couldn’t imagine not hoping for better. I could not foresee how matter-of-fact and down-to-the-bone these conflicts were. The accusations continued for years: boiling anger, shouting, faultfinding, and guilt. To my child, as she remembered it about the age of twelve, I became a person whom she had to protect. She didn’t know that even in civil rights sit-ins, I was hard to drag off. She probably saw me as herself. I tried to go on in the part of life that pertained to us. I couldn’t imagine throwing gasoline on a fire that was consuming and had to burn itself out. I couldn’t find work. Often I said nothing, out of a sense of respect, of trying not to worsen things, of trying to stay on my own difficult path. Paolo was torn. He got pulled back into his own family—their troubles and their great bonds. I had none of the daily friendships that had always carried me through the spots when I felt everything was lost. My writing dug into a place where I might be myself.

  The mail, the envelope, the stamp, the journey out, became its own little world. The mailbox turned into an obsession. It had the oddity of the confessionals in the main church, with their faded velveteen movable curtains bearing the signs—“confession with or without a screen.” The scale of my hope, the sense of self-preservation, the silence of it all, made the lifesaving operation fairly disembodied. It was a struggle that corresponded to my deepest if greatly circumscribed feeling for life. I had always found a way to be free, to come and go. And yet I was tied down, more tied down than I had ever been to a house and a set of values that were hostile and alien. Every day I could feel that my child wanted me close; yet she desperately wanted to take root, alone as an Italian child.

  Lifting the mailbox lid was the quiet level of movement where I fanned in and out of the unknown. I loved opening it, even though it hurt. Through the emptiness and the waiting, the rejections that came one after another, I hung on to this metal hideout, expecting sooner or later someone would say “yes.” If nowhere else, this would be how the plot could change. From the mailbox, fastened to the stone column in front of the house, I would join with the rest of my life and become someone visible again.

  Sanator Wiley’s Daughter

  to Wed Milwaukee Man

  [10]

  SIGNS OF THE WOMEN

  When you came, did you bring, in the few boxes, pieces of family history for Clare? Did you have signs of the women?

  The main treasure was a patchwork quilt. It contains a date, 1896, and originates from my mother’s side of the family. My great-grandmother’s mother made four of them. Her name was Emiline and her son became a Wisconsin state supreme court justice. I discovered her name in a two-volume set of green leather books published by that son. He described his mother’s influence in his life, while also allowing her to speak for herself about her settler childhood. She wrote her observations in her old age, adding that “her words should be used in such a way as to make it plain that her relation was void of any thought but that of encouraging young girls to rescue themselves from seeming hopelessness and to make the best possible use of their time and opportunities.” She wrote of her childhood:

  “Father went to Winchendon so as to put his children into the mill to work. That ended my school days and a very sad time it was for me. In summer time I worked outdoors and in winter, I was obliged to put in my time, evenings, knitting. I plowed, hoed, raked hay, milked cows and did all kinds of farm work. The mill work in those days was from five o’clock in the morning until nine in the evening with a short interval for lunch. I used to get very tired. Father took all my wages and bought me just the bare necessities in the nature of clothing.”

  The patchwork quilt had always attracted me. I loved its look and its portability. Parlor furniture, Steinway pianos, the concrete assemblages of family houses that couldn’t be divided up to go all the way around held expectations and bitterness that were heavy in my mother’s family, but heavy also in my father’s. What I didn’t know was that economic hardship and truncated beginnings, as well as strength and frustration, had been stitched into Emiline’s quilt. That came later, when I found the books of Judge Marshall’s life. Nor did I know until then that her daughter, Rosa, mother’s grandmother, was adopted.

  Mother always told the story of her family dramatically, underlining its social status. She emphasized that the quilt was rare because no calicos, no muslins, existed in its hundred patches. Under mother’s spell, the quilt’s remnants, velvet pieces, taffetas, and silks, rustled and curtsied. Long dresses swept across polished floors at parties and ceremonies for the state supreme court justice. In the beautiful colored threads that embroidered on stars and more stars and spinning wheels and thick-petaled anemones, I never imagined childhood fingers swollen and twisted from work in a mill.

  When I was a girl, the two patches with crooked and childish cross-stitched letters suggested something different from the sheens and elegance. One said, “Abed, April 3, 1896,” the other, “When this you see, remember me.” Now I realize that their irregularity reveals a woman who was forced to leave school, and they were stitched when she was old. Words of thread portrayed a determined, truncated groping. Emiline knew crookedness was a part of most stories. As a girl, I often had lain on my stomach on top of the quilt in the long boredom of a summer afternoon, searching for the two patches with writing. The one—“When this you see, remember me”—had the fascination of a well. I’d close my eyes, waiting for an echo.

  Judge Marshall in his autobiography says that Emiline “was one of the best spellers” he ever knew. She was “a good singer.” “Few persons had the knowledge of the Bible equal to hers. Many a sick bed was softened by her presence.” Emiline was never mentioned as a person by my mother. Before marrying, Emiline left home, supported herself, and became a forewoman in the cotton mill. The only story Mother told was of her Mayflower ancestry. Her fire never came alive. Like the other women in Mother’s realm, Emiline remained missing.

  When I brought the quilt across to Italy, I planned to frame it. I imagined its blacks, scarlets, and golds forming an exciting banner from my past. Hoisted on the family-room wall in Parma, its unpredictable beauty was an image of belief: an American flag of self-expression.

  I used to tell Clare stories about the yellow-and-white spinning wheels. The quilt took off in many directions. When I intoned “It’s from your great-great-great-grandmother,” it sounded heavy and important. I wanted Clare
to feel the quilt was a piece of flesh and land that was hers. Its self-reliance and its improvisation came from her line and her country. Designed from a life, its ironic rigor represents one way to survive. The manner in which the pieces were fitted together without an inhibition about the way things should be—even if society had granted or assigned quilting as an acceptable activity for ladies—gave birth to an irregular creative transcription.

  The quilt does not numb. Emiline embroidered on time and contemplation as she built order from a seeming random starting point. The painstaking markings on the crooked pieces seem to repeat the words every day, in various minute differences. How did Emiline give them so often that effortless feeling of spin?

  Nothing in Parma looks random. Nothing falls easily into the asymmetrical or the chance, spontaneous happening. In knitting and sewing, the ideas of perfection, repetition, and regularity prevail. In the first years, many people entering our house frowned at the wild cover. Alba freely lamented its existence. She’d mutter loudly as she dusted it, “Mah!” (This is a rhetorical sound for feigned perplexity.) Then another sigh. “Mah!” If Clare was passing, she’d take her aside. “A bedspread on the wall, you know, doesn’t reflect well on a full professor.” Someone from America studying the quilt called Emiline a genius. Someone from Parma called her mad.

  The crazy quilt on the wall is not an imaginary country and place, in spite of the leaps of fantasy surrounding it. The quilt is nineteenth-century American in its invention and making do. It is American, too, in its thumbing its nose at tradition. The sewing is about difficulty and pain but about reverie as well. There is humor in the quilt, duty, and a trying to get beyond. Clare knew what it felt like. I knew. Crazy meant going your own way and trying to spell this out in fragments on a two-dimensional space you took up as a challenge.