Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  We were intense, frustrated innocents—types that remain a mystery to Europeans

  I surprise myself thinking of the contrast with Paolo’s Italian upbringing. His house boiled over with real life. Alba, as long as she was alive, offered certainty that she would take responsibility for anything she considered right for her children. But the house, with its other added elements, was always chaotic and traveling at many levels toward an invaded, unprivate reality. It was a place of extreme constraints and virtually no limits. The physical structure always retained an epic plasticity. Alba lived without a roof, for example, for nine months when Pietro returned and built a second floor. Like Atlas, she held the dripping-wet walls and children together. And the church added intellectual support and debate as well as social structure, which extended very far in those days. In the mountains, on vacation, for example, when Paolo’s mother had spent her closely calculated funds and her stipend had not arrived, she thought first of borrowing from the local priest. The priest gave her a small sum, smaller than what a friend offered, but it helped. The church, too, told you how to vote, openly, from the pulpit. I remember my own grandfather telling me that one must always vote his conscience. “I don’t need your vote,” the senator said, “I need you as my granddaughter, someone who thinks and does what she believes is right.” That kind of sentence is why my mother loved that man, her father. Yet it was he who wiped the lipstick off her mouth.

  In my parents’ house, in its most hopeless corners, we never lived pain the way it was lived here. Having two parents, some money, no war, no church in the basement, no mad grandmother—objectively our life had much more space. But we suffered from having only unrealistic, far-off glimpses of the world. Action remained an abstract idea of following rules of conscience and reasonableness, with no way to verify it with real actions. Both parents had terrible views on girls. Mother thought they should never appear smarter than men; they should never show their physical hand to the man until he had declared himself; women who reacted strongly could castrate men; and women’s working was entirely a question of social class. Father believed that no man would marry an argumentative woman like me, and if no one did, he was more than happy to have me stay around. Russian novels in their extraordinary ways of expressing conflict and identity as emotional and intellectual bombshells became for me, as an adolescent, the lost world I was looking for. More than Anna Karenina, I thought of myself as Raskolnikov.

  Father was pushed by Mom into a rare family trip in 1955. Executives in those years had only two meager weeks of vacation, and he resisted spending them in travel or with the hassle of kids. I was thirteen when my brothers and baby sister and I saw New York City for the first time. Safe and conservative Father had chosen a hotel on Fifth Avenue. What he didn’t realize was that it was on Fifth Avenue just above Greenwich Village. To me every sight and smell was like a sensation reaching a person who had never tasted salt. Each street possessed a wonderful match-striking friction that filled us with a sense of transgression as we galloped off like horses hearing a starting gun. My brothers wanted to see the Polo Grounds. I wanted to see museums (and we never did go, not even to one), but it didn’t matter, because the city’s rich variety exploded beyond my fondest dreams. I saw interracial couples holding hands. We saw lovers necking on benches. We stared with hot, bulging eyes—at all the different kinds of sex out in the open. As if a cleansing wind had swept out all the shame of our father’s fear and admonitions, I reveled in the mingling races. I found a bookstore with the Beat poets. We saw elegantly dressed grown-ups whom I knew must be talking about painting and politics in Israel and Adlai Stevenson. They were not like us, these New York human beings walking up and down the streets. We saw shoeless, drunken people living in the mouths of subway stairs and propped against trash cans. One had skin opening at his ankles, in flaps and sores. I had always known our country was not white and rich, reasonable, boring, and clean. Our focus was sharpened forever in just a few days. My sources for authority swung open, free of those limits stated so firmly in the house. Father, after carefully discarding plays he considered inappropriate, bought matinee tickets for George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. For its shattering effects, he might as well have taken us to see a bumpy line of strippers. Besides viewing an argumentative woman debating with her father, I can still feel the shock of experiencing a play which ends without a positive resolution and in favor of the lords of war. So it’s true, I thought to myself, neither sad nor happy, but rather awed. The world is really true.

  Perhaps we had some of the sensitivities and the rational minds of Henry James’s characters—but what he called “the beautifully unsaid” was often taken over by Father’s articulation of a Germanic, dualistic sense of the world. There was a strain of dark fatality and moralism that stripped deeds of their emotional push and pulse to become. Feelings were choked. We were encouraged to find formal, external, responsible positions. Yet this description remains paltry and insufficient. These years have been pulled out and superseded. There on the ground, what can be seen in the plain snaky mass? Certainly not the life: the caring and love, the dialectic on morality, the innocence and egocentric views that were curses and, in some ways, the greatest blessings of this elusive beginning.

  [13]

  THE BLACK DREAMS

  I have had a series of black dreams. They awaken me and remain obsessive. They started when we were in Prague at a conference on ostracods a month ago. In the first, I opened a piece of fruit and it was full of black matter. There were two shades of black and the texture was of tiny seeds. The fruit was not wonderful and not awful. The next morning, in real life, at breakfast, the woman from whom we rented a bed-sitter offered me a specialty of Prague—a sweet with a center of dark poppy seeds. A magazine was open on the kitchen table: it was open to a photo of the universe. It looked like a black, seedy soup. I noted and was amused by the conjunction between my night dream and the daytime world. Paolo didn’t have time to listen. He was late. One order of ostracods, in existence for at least 200 million years, supposedly have no males in their way of reproducing. Paolo is beginning to believe that might not be so.

  The next night, Paolo is dead in my dream. Then he comes alive and I give him some fine green plants. He bunches them together, cuts off all the green, and starts digging in the ground. He gouges and digs and says with conviction that the roots must go down. They are long and black and out of the soil. A few weeks later, in Parma, in real life, Clare decides to paint a tree. She paints it as if she were looking up from underneath its black roots, which cover the first plane in the painting. It is dark and the blue sky is tiny triangles seen through the leaves. Both Clare and Paolo are struggling with feelings about roots. Clare would seem to be the most vulnerable, and yet she is pretty strong. Both she and Paolo, but I as well, are searching. The action going on is nearly negligible from the outside. But we are exploding. Without even understanding, we are looking at new ways.

  Still in Prague, I dream of a black bronze soldier whom I lay out on the lawn. Then I take outside a real dead man, who is also black, and after a great struggle I lay them both peacefully under a huge black tree. The man is James Gill, my publisher.

  In Parma, I then dream that I am happily naked with another person. It is the old woman, that mother who often comes to me. The water is clear and I see treasures to dive for. They are archaic animals with crests and tails. I go down to catch them and the waters muddy and swirl. I have something in my hand. I pull it out and hold it up. It is a black scallop shell. I am a new Venus rising. A few nights on, I dream that I have splinters in my arms. I work very hard at taking one out. It is a black seed—shiny and shaped like an almond. Another dream, and my mother is asking me to catch a black widow spider.

  The actual black butterfly in the mirror, rising over my shoulder, comes next in real life and plays heavily on this sense of dream and waking. I am dressing and it appears. I see it above me, and it is indeed a black butterfly. It frightens me, near
ly as much as the scorpion, in that I respond to it beyond rational thoughts. It seems another physical confirmation of something I perceive in my own life. This black in my own life is bringing me into a more complete picture of myself, a transformation in my awareness and my fullness as a woman.

  I don’t know how to give more space to dreams as long as I am writing. Dreams need full devotion. They are not art. Their messages shoot out of a brain that has evolved as Homo sapiens, creaturely, bound to ways common to all humans on the earth. In town, as I walk early in the morning, I see someone has thrown black paint on the side of the completely pink, newly cleaned marble baptistery. It is a desecration that will be removed. The newspapers don’t comment on it. It is part of life, like tangenti, that comes and goes but cannot be eliminated. Instead, perhaps the black trick or desecration should be left on, until we know what it means.

  I can’t imagine how this black will settle down. Will the black dreams end? They are catching my attention, not like a dead past, but present matter in our own lives. Jung would call black the material part of the alchemical process of change. We must go into darkness like growing plants, using our roots. We must find and admit the darkness in ourselves and then others. We must get in touch with the depths, where death brings on life. I am walking in the dark. I don’t know if I am waking up, but I am awake. Italy, too, is walking through its deadness, its abuses of power. Paolo is walking through his mother’s death. Clare is admitting her discomfiture and what it has cost. The uncertainties are dynamic: strange and hope-filled realizations of doubt. There is no getting out of humanness.

  I don’t know if Paolo should dig. But something unbearable and unstoppable is opening in me. This digging is no longer an intellectual choice, but an eruption, destroying distances and joins in consciousness. Black is not ideas but things everywhere, reaching me in my sleep and my waking hours. Black composes part of each of us and the world. It’s heavy and throws back light, as light must be faced and accepted. Black cannot be written out of life or books. We can’t just project. Black is: to understand it as matter takes a search for truth.

  It’s not that history has collapsed or ended

  [14]

  EDUCATION

  Why does the university give credence to anonymous letters? Charges of theft should be signed.

  You don’t understand, signora. Signing is dangerous. It’s impossible to sign.

  How do you know what I understand? You don’t even know me. It’s not impossible. You could refuse unsigned accusations. You could try to explain why you think that way.

  It’s impossible, signora. It’s not like that here.

  Some mornings, biking down the bumpy cobblestone streets composed out of river stones carried by hand from the riverbed, I fuss and fume, unable to get beyond a sense of devastating isolation. Like everyone who has lived any form of exile, I feel I fit nowhere. That is too banal, too complaining to bother with: I cannot live in a dimension of a continual comparison—as if there is a standard better than what I can find here. So I mentally move into my battle with the daily use of the word impossible. In that I can feel my belief in infinitude trampled and difference twirled into a language that objectively crushes. To me impossible should be looked at critically, often challenged as something we are afraid to do. In Parma I have taken this word like a slap in the face, a punch to the stomach, an insult that I am unable to blast in spite of my protests. For me it is so obvious we have enormous recuperative powers inside a spirit that is not simpleminded but nearly always working on becoming. Yet I have come to accept the size of the problem. In some moments impossible in Parma really means just that. Language conditions nearly everything we live.

  Why did you call me, Professor Dallini?

  Your daughter’s drawing is beyond anything I’ve seen in liceo. She must be lying. It’s impossible that she did it herself. Quality like this is impossible from a teenager’s hand.

  You discourage a student, Professor Dallini, when you humiliate her and reveal that you have no power, or worse, no faith to evaluate what she is capable of doing.

  I still don’t think she has done them herself. It’s impossible that a child could draw this well.

  Are you telling me that you think I’m lying?

  Impossible gets so bad some days that I think I will have to move. Destructive negativity prevails. Rather than argue, I need to remember that even the near-deaf can hear if we make ourselves clear enough. If I get on my bike and there’s a hard wind, it may push me to cheer up. Deep movement puts me back into the world and reorganizes my feelings of setback. I know that place is something bigger, more invisible than city. I have always hoped it would express an inner life.

  The lira has taken a beating again. The crisis is in its fourth year. I remember being shocked by President Scalfaro’s New Year’s message two years ago. As he signed off on television, he pointed his owlish face in our direction, took off his glasses, and said, “Many are saying that we will not remain a democracy. I say we must. I say we have the possibility to do it. We shall.” Even in the most chaotic years of the Vietnam protests, I never felt that the U.S. institutions were at stake—and democracy only a choice among others. Having two citizenships is not easy. One loves two countries and does not pretend that one can simply leave.

  The new technocratic government’s taxes on gasoline (nearly 30 cents, making a gallon cost almost $4.00), on property, on alcohol, a second surtax for one year only on income, on telephone calls (19 percent taxes, up from 13 percent), 30 cents a cubic meter on methane for heat, are already seen by international experts as too little. One team announced that we may be bankrupt by the summer. Each prognostication sends shudders of electronic speculation around the world. The mark has gained more than 10 percent against the lira in less than a month. Inflation is moving everywhere, as if merchants have unilaterally decided to look out for themselves. Steak that at Christmas cost nearly $10 a pound now costs more than $20. Cappuccinos have risen 25 percent. Newspapers went up 16 cents, train tickets 15 percent. Officially inflation is less than 4 percent a year. This time mere solutions on paper won’t work. Since the Bretton Woods gold standard was dropped, money implies an encroaching set of international interdependencies. It is good that all these false arrangements are coming to an end. Another several million dollars has been dug up in a garden in Lugano. Millions of dollars in jewels have been taken out in cardboard boxes, emptied from the cushions in Poggiolini’s house. He was a high-ranking bureaucrat in the health system.

  A more personal voice is needed in public. What could happen if one says what one really thinks? Fear of reprisals, of worsening the situation, grief, rage at injustices have collected after so many years of relative silence. There is skeptical faith in the power of an individual using words as an individual. Can it really be as a student of mine says, “You can’t speak up because it’s wrong. We are all full of sins.”

  Ideology, which gave one a sense of belonging to a group as well as pursuing coherent meaning in politics, has shattered. The Demochristians, in power for more than forty years, have finally split in two. It’s not that history has collapsed or ended, merely that self-delusion is going to have more obstacles. Pragmatism in solving problems is still looked at as shallow, as part of capitalist thought. It is a remarkably widespread conviction. Capitalism is perceived as individualism that supports imperfection and inequality. Where are the readers of Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt?

  Paolo often comes home from work with headaches that start from muscles in his upper back. The lack of rules in this transition period causes him to stay tense and clamp down. The government always set the rules for the university and now much is going to fall to local autonomous decisions. Paolo suffers from headaches—migraines that blind him and mark a few days a month with an unrelenting nausea. They are wounds from childhood; above all, the most unreachable loss, the death of his father. The migraines wrap him in pain so dark that he must lie down, unable to respond to duty.

/>   These new headaches are less profound. They come from pains in the neck or sticking his neck out. His pessimism and sense of urgency make him work even longer hours. The most obvious ideas from other educational systems such as the American one—written work, for example—are resisted in a wild shuffle of shifting power and value systems that have been under virtually no pressure or surveillance for accountability. Defining what is normal remains a perverse challenge. “If it weren’t for the science, I think I’d quit,” he often says to me.

  I remember an interview I had in Prague with the poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub, in which he told me how science kept him going in the dark years of Czechoslovakian Communism. As much as his poetry (one edition of which, after being printed, was burned), his interest in science, which was for many years more ongoing study than research, helped him feel a part of a community beyond the borders of politics. It helped him survive the siege of twisted repression. Immunology was a lifeline to a specific community working on objective truth concerning matters of life and death. Science involved a basic commitment to liberty for those brave enough to pursue it. Among the best scientists, doubt is always present. Good science is not monolithic; in its commitment to liberty and objective truth, it remains a deep rebellion against the appearances of things.

  Yesterday a box arrived from America for Paolo. It lifted our spirits. Everything about the box’s look was American. It was simple, even gross, like a half-pound hamburger, a single scoop of ice cream bigger than a baseball. The strength of the cardboard, the toughness of the tape, said that it could be thrown or bounced with immunity. When it was being cut open, the cardboard resisted like a carcass. Inside, an altar of more packing held fast a large object made of imitation mahogany. Paolo, along with two other Italians, one of whom, L. L. Cavalli Sforza, is a professor emeritus of genetics at Stanford University, had been given by the American Association of Publishers the award for the best book published in 1994 in the professional/scholarly field of science and technical work.