Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  And what was it?

  Almost Christmas and Father injured.

  What had happened?

  To this day, what the doctors said about the paralysis is choked back and denied by Mother. He had a seizure driving while they were on vacation in New Orleans. Mother kicked his foot off the accelerator and stopped the speeding car, bouncing it on the island between the lanes. It was not the first time she had saved a life. She had given me her blood. She had dived in off the end of the pier to save my younger brother. She rescued Dad too.

  Father dropped into a deep coma for four days. Mother said two things. He bit her, and in the coma he talked about money—how he could make it, how he could buy and sell stocks, how he was worth more than just about anyone. Those two uncharacteristic details appeared like frigid underground springs, escaping his censorship and his control.

  Father was afraid of flying. He had never been in a plane. In the end, the side was taken off a railroad car and he was lifted in and settled on an angle since he was long. He was tied, with broken shoulders and neck, on his stretcher from New Orleans to Chicago. Mother went to sleep in her own sleeping car and I sat up with him. The feelings were all new. The worry, his worry, and a dependence that he for the first few seconds was openly forced to admit joggled between us. I asked over and over about pain and his discomfort, but he didn’t complain. I read short stories to him that I had begun to write at the university. I imagined, then, as he nodded and smiled, that he could see I would attempt the life of an artist. I thought that by reading to him I announced what I was discovering at school—I had the strength and the will to write.

  I had no knowledge of how he couldn’t listen, how his mind raced from one numb end of his body to the other, how feeling stopped at the waist, how his toes didn’t move. A few months later when I asked him about that night, he didn’t remember a thing.

  Shock and all the responsibility he carried covered him with icy sweat. He started to die. At age nineteen, I simply believed he was a victim of the system. He had become a businessman and community leader and absolutely cut off art. He lived a split that was easy to feel. His anger and frustration boiled nearly everywhere, and an exquisite sensitivity and originality prowled in the house like a wounded cat. He never even took us to museums, he who had given up a chance to work at the Met, who had turned down an offer to work with Frank Lloyd Wright. Watching him, I deduced I was lucky to be a woman. I would never endure the absolute pressure not only to support but to succeed that was asked of American men. My father slowly extinguished his desires under terrible impersonal loads. He always said art was a luxury he couldn’t consider. For me, then and for years afterward, it was his life as he should have lived it.

  Where were your brothers and sister?

  At home.

  What were they thinking?

  I don’t know. But they were around and upset. In Chicago, an ambulance waited for Mother and me. The snow kept falling, falling until the vehicle was going so slowly we could have been walking in eerie silence. The lights of Milwaukee finally came up. It was Christmas Eve when we reached the emergency entrance of the red-brick hospital.

  Where was your mother?

  Making small talk with the driver.

  What was she thinking?

  I don’t know. But I remember her cheerful front. She assured the driver that Dad would make it, even if it meant taking up a new life.

  What was your father thinking?

  I don’t know. But I can still see the fear, the physical pain, a shaken pride trying to gleam out in his wan smile.

  What were you thinking?

  I lightly brushed my father’s thinning hair.

  Can you remember that?

  No, only snow and the anguish of watching the interns take him up in an elevator. The doors closed. Now there would be only visitors’ hours, a few formal visits, going back to college after the vacation.

  And when you asked to quit school and come home, to be in the family in this moment?

  That I remember. Mother said, “If you don’t want to cause problems for us, stay there, get on with your life.”

  The Romanesque animals peer down, out of present shadows

  [12]

  BASEMENT

  Down across the torrente, in the popolare part, where barricate were erected as a permanent method of riot control at the time of Fascism, the electric company is digging up the Via D’Azeglio. Once again remains are coming to light. The Via D’Azeglio is a long road leading into what was the Via Emilia, a Roman road that ran parallel to the Po River and eventually reached the sea near Rimini. A Roman villa will be backfilled. Nothing exceptional; there is no real reason to save the modest two-thousand-year-old evidence. The stones and bricks will recede into soil shoveled over them and go back to sleep. Finds are always a conflict. If the installation of the electric wires had been stalled too much longer, the drivers on the surface would have revolted. This time, the new wires will prevail.

  The discovery of a Longobard tomb, though, tempts fate. So much less is known about the northern barbarians who left imprintings and ideas, even some that were worked into the Duomo stones, of a contrasting, untamed strain. The burial will be studied. In the Duomo, a distinct Romanesque figure, a man whose legs split apart (like a woman giving birth) into two wolves, has always caught my eye. In the carvings around the cathedral and on the columns inside, these earlier symbols obviously spoke to the artisans of nearly a thousand years ago. Their energies were borrowed as a contrast to Christian themes. The Romanesque animals howl and grin. They peer down, out of present shadows, from the darkness of the cathedral columns—vital, animistic visions.

  As one stares through the modern maze of pipes to see the signs of the Roman villa in the Via D’Azeglio, any grand preconception of archaeology gets adjusted by the reality of the broken, reduced rubble and bare stone outlines. Excavation is painstaking, physically tough, and usually undramatic. Digging up the past is an art, deliberate training in inference and linkage. The handling, processing, and conservation of any material creates months of toil. The results, the facts learned, can usually be summed up in a page. Occasionally, in the dust, the thrill of life appears: the head of a young Roman girl found in Velleia that now sits in the Parma Museum. Looking at her impertinent bronze features, you know she lived.

  Last night, Paolo knocked down a small glass jar from America that I used to hold spoons on the counter. Much to my dismay, he put his head on the table and cried. “Why does it always have to be me who breaks things of yours? I’ll mend it,” he said. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “It happens.” “No, I’ll mend it,” he said, gathering up the pieces. The little jar had transatlantic memories stuck to its sides. But it was never meant to outlast the world. It was glass, poured from sand and fire. He put the pieces on a high shelf. He seems to feel breaking all around.

  Paolo can be merciless with himself and, as a consequence, harsh on others. Often, during a day of hard physical fieldwork, with students, up in the mountains at the timberline, this pressure will blow away. He’ll feel renewed. “Just working against a blue sky, I come back into life.” Helping a student tie bags over pollen in pinecones, he loves hearing the wind rattle the papers. Paolo draws energy from nature, nearly any experience of it, preferably on land. Physically, he revives easily. But he gives himself no reprieves. Wearying grudges seem to be riding on his shoulders, hounding and snapping. He can’t let up on despising unpurposeful existence. His mother, being so powerful in life, has left her judgments on all of them. His rich nature seems to withdraw into duty, as if he has no right to an easier life.

  Last night, after the glass jar broke, I thought about the Longobard tomb, all that was buried and the little that can be retrieved. How separate and unique we are. How important and agonizing that is. I am worried by the depth of Paolo’s exhaustion. Unkind things that have never been said before are inching between us. There is so much feeling kept inside, eating at arrangements that have been distu
rbed—by his mother’s death and even by the politics that now tell everyone that what they mouthed is old, false, something that can no longer exist in the way they told it. Italy is in deep trouble. The crises in government seem large and frightening, but so do private issues. It’s been nearly two years since Paolo went up to Alba’s house. He can’t face the empty rooms.

  No one knows how much to dig up in a family and how much, like the daily traffic, is an inhibiting and even sane rush against excavation and dwelling in the past. Psychological discoveries might be commonplace, like the Roman villa that we assume we understand because so many have been recorded. Or like the Longobard tomb, they might be more creative, revealing a way into the blocked and unknown. Sometimes what needs to be found is there; and sometimes it’s completely lost. Our family now is buried under a kind of past that suddenly is over, and full of ghosts.

  Paolo believes he must work. Like his mother, he can barely turn over time without using it, filling it with tasks. This is disastrous because there is very little he cannot do—from science to writing, from cooking to gardening. There is little he cannot do except to trust a bit more and to rest.

  Our house remains permeated with internal walls, memories that only Paolo knows, like the crawl space under half of the house outside. Our house, too, embraces Italy in the 1950s, when morality was a living force. As a story, it fascinates me. After the renters, after the house was paid for, the basement was consecrated as a church and offered rent-free to the parish. Now the basement is in an upheaval. Two men with a cellular phone are here to redo all the wires. Every thread they touch is dead to me and alive, quick with memories, to Paolo.

  The parish used the cellar for six years, while the official church was being built. Marriages, funerals, and masses started belowground where the driveway leads. Pietro was married there, not far from the stone wall that he now scales to practice rock climbing. His fingers cling to the unmortared spaces between stones. Sometimes, flattened out, suspended against the wall like Batman, he scares me to death.

  When Alba’s house was turned into a church, with its daily masses and ordering of people’s lives, the cellar was a holy space. Having people come into the cellar seeking solace and community must have been inspiring. It must have also been inhibiting. All seasons fell within the Christian message, often full of heavy symbols. At Easter, the altar was draped in black for the last week of the Passion. Wheat, forced and grown in the dark, put up unearthly white stalks. Fasting was required. From Good Friday to Easter the clappers of bells were clamped and tied. Then, on Pasqua, the black covers and drapes were removed. Priests carried the wheat into the light, placing it on the altar. The muffled bells sounded, clear. The cellar, dug into an incline, is deep and rather dark. When it was the church, people came in every day. They were prepared for living, but I often wonder if joy was offered here.

  Before the church was settled in the basement, authentic capitalism expanded in that same space. The other day, La Gazzetta ran an article on Signor Rossi, who had started his electric engine parts business there. This year his company had receipts of more than $50 million. Paolo remembers the earsplitting whines and the hot smell of the saws’ cutting precision blades. He remembers how hard-driving, impatient Signor Rossi took off the red safety bars from the simple cutting machines in order to speed up work. The man’s mother lost a finger in the basement. His wife, later on, would lose one too. Ten workers eventually assembled in the basement every morning at eight, much to the neighbors’ dismay. Paolo studied the workers, as he watched projects on any type of site in the city, analyzing what the men did. What the men did, since there wasn’t one in his family, continued as an ongoing study. He catalogued every detail, so he would be capable of activating things in the world of gears, wires, and levers.

  Signor Rossi’s parents had left their small house in the country and moved the family into Alba’s house, because their son had a dream of owning a business. When Signor Rossi stopped renting from Alba four years later, his dream of energetic basement capitalism, unstrangled by bureaucratic regulations and rules, had taken successful root. He had created a specialization and identified a market that steadily grew in other parts of Italy and then Europe.

  The old man is today an emblem of the entrepreneurial spirit of people on the Po plain. They have strong business instincts. The idea of niches and specialization developed an ingenious and widespread pattern in this area’s powerful and stable economy. In one village the economy is based on processing salami, another on prosciutto, another on tiles, and in the end, each of these specialties will be repeated by perhaps two, three, ten, or fifty or more different companies in the same locale. Co-ops, guilds, and consortiums then regulate prices, controls, marketing. The highly skilled workers are trained to perfection and form the basis for prosperity in the city or village. The food products, like prosciutto and Parmesan cheese, go back to the 1200s and have trademarks that can only be applied by specific cities. In northern Italy, even in these time-intensive jobs in which some products age for up to three years, speed (the verb is correre), running, rushing, a bottled-up pressure, is seen as part of business.

  Rossi’s spirit of entrepreneurial risk taking was in some ways similar to Alba’s buying properties with loans. Capitalism flourished in the basement: hard, teeth-grinding work, courage, and some vision. People were busy after the war, and what went on in the basement competed with the strong 1950s version of Communism, a different idea of how to liberate the majority of Italians from generations of poverty. The Communists, through cooperatives largely in the north, have also been highly successful in economic terms.

  Now this august cellar—full of sociological archaeology—is being rewired. Each and every wire and switch put in at the time the house was built is being changed, according to law. The European Community has legislated the change. Its laws cross frontiers and are, for me, a hope pulling Italy into Europe. The subtlety of the old wire is as eye-straining as fine black print. The new wiring, so much thicker and wrapped in bright tubes of colored plastic, is a relief. I want more light, more sources for it, more insulation, more safety, less tangle, a clearer sense of the system. The old wires—pinched, tenacious, visibly stretching resources in small low-watt bare bulbs—did the work required of them. Pulled out, their dangerous lack of insulation seems nearly a symbol of this strange phase of transition. They are as complex as the country and its unimaginable, twisted political figures like Giulio Andreotti, who are products of a very different set of assumptions. Now exposed, their intertwined, elaborate, makeshift workings must be thoroughly untangled and understood. Our cellar, that part of the house that once belonged not to the family but to society, is about to be strengthened by new, straightforward norms for safety.

  My own house while I was growing up was a bourgeois structure, dedicated completely to the private lives and invisible beliefs of its members. The wish for larger purposes and links was projected entirely into the sphere of adults. At our house, furniture arrangement, table manners, lawn cutting, and pool maintenance were part of the shell of the physical house’s routines and look. Events were few, because their real meanings never surfaced. Father changed jobs without ever sharing the dramas or his frustrations. Father succeeded in every executive job he held, but he never found an answer to his deep need for higher values and intellectual problem solving. His asthma, stoked by his chain smoking of cigars, grew progressively more choking. Unable to breathe, in later years, he often needed to put on an oxygen mask and suck its relief. This was lived without searching for causes or ways to change.

  My parents’ air-conditioned bedroom was at the dead end of a long corridor of closets, and we were forbidden even to knock if the door was closed. Our own narrations of our personalities, monitored and described by our parents’ perceptions of our flaws and characteristics, gestated in separate and yet interrelated rooms. We four children enjoyed immensely (and were not allowed to dislike) one another’s company. This narration seems fic
tive, but consistency, surely a great value in invented writing, was perpetuated on a daily basis as a measure for our actions. With that, our lives, since we didn’t want to slip from that standard, made our experiences remarkably close to introspection. Intention and interpretation, beliefs, were large components of even the simplest action. As children, we were isolated, as a consequence of our so-called social privilege, which in truth was our father’s antisocial nature and poor health and our mother’s inability to propose a more dynamic social life inside the house.

  The rules, to be followed literally and with strict obedience, were laid down by Father. We were not to lie, to cheat, not to thunder up the stairs and crack the plaster, not to forget to turn off the swimming pool pump, and not, when we grew up, to commit adultery. We were to be loyal, trustworthy, and Republican. In our rooms, behind closed doors, we talked to ourselves about contraventions and had lots of empty space to commit minor explorations. Above all, we began to read. From my window seat, instead of the Lutheran base for thought, Albert Camus and Baudelaire and Tolstoy came floating in.

  Growing up, we had scarce contact with the outside world. It didn’t reach into the suburb, which was segregated and private. Life was bland and boring, except for the close ties my brothers and I shared. My father called the house his castle, and surely did not mean to be ironic. He liked us around and no one else. We were never permitted to have one single friend to dinner as we grew up. Nor could we fill up our pool with friends, who would splash or might slip while roughhousing on the decks. The four of us, each excellent and busy at school, lived in suspension, thinking of how to get beyond the sense of how protected we were and how well behaved we had to become, not to mention isolated and unable to join in with our peers. We were intense, frustrated innocents, formed in spaces unfilled by our parents—types that remain a mystery to Europeans, who think of America as avantgarde.